A bit of free association, or rambling, as it is more widely known.

Yo, el vaquilla, quinqui cinema, and the usual political whining.

Or, the dangers of imbibing Coke in the long grass. Pay the musicians, sirrah.

Here. With 350 million illegal flicks downloaded in Spain last year, that horse has already bolted. So adieu cinemas, and adéu language, but more work for bureaucrats and lawyers, who will also thrive from the proposal to make it punishable for a spouse not to perform half the housework. Q: Who’s going to invest in [...]

Statues are designed to be bird-friendly on the orders of a mysterious avian deity, which may have held sway over Luis Buñuel.

Barcelona’s huge subsidy to Woody Allen may attract some tourists, but the film has not achieved the politicians’ goal of promoting the notion of a separate Catalan identity.

The Google Earth version of ancient Rome is a bit like a collection of faked-up trainspotters’ notebooks. Until they find some way of populating it with exfoliant opera, our best bet as responsible amateur social historians is the porn industry:
European production company Daring Media Group will release its first movie, Roma, in October at the [...]

JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes:
The stamps (29,800) [...]

“This incendiary message was broadcast from Berlin to hot-blooded Spain by dazzling, blonde Brita Brager. It had a coldblooded purpose: to persuade Spaniards that signing up for work in German munitions plants would be a short cut to a life of opulent lechery.” According to this Time story from 1943, Ms Brager was the 23-year-old [...]

Barcelona students are occupying universities and fighting with police in a titanic life and death struggle against the prostitution of universities to Capital. Meanwhile Google UK news produces only five ghits for “Bologna Declaration“, three of which are in English, one of which concerns the accord signed in 1999 and designed to make it easier [...]

CC says that Telva says that Jaume Plensa is simply panting to design some sets for Verdi’s Macbetch. I blame Telva’s legions of copy editors this time–they get Toulouse wrong too–but there’s no reason why not: “So this is the story of Lady Macbitch and her husband. The Queen stimulates herself with the props of [...]

Geo-sensitive porn chat ads cope as well with multi-key characters as the average wanker. I doubt not that Cornell University is a chattering of cheeky chicas, but at this time of year the weather’s rather better in Cornellá, Barcelona. Not that I’m in Cornellà, but you get the picture, and if you don’t then I [...]

Increasingly huge on the net, but whose script/voice is it? (Via Josep Tarrés. More on “Funiculì, funiculà” some other day.)

There are various explanations of Spanish anti-Americanism. The post-colonial hypothesis is popular: Spain is bitter about its loss of empire, its defeat in 1898, its not being invited to the G-whatever.
An alternative hypothesis is that anti-Americanism is frustration arising from the idea that an implicit bilateral dollars-for-favours deal has been violated.
In Luis Berlanga, [...]

Gerard Sety, via Raffaele de Ritis:

An extreme nationalist Basque group, ANV, was recently banned for being the latest in a succession of ETA front organisations. In Navarre their political representation promote Anschluss with the Basque Country proper, and in a small town called Villava their councillors hung the Basque flag (representing the race, the feudal laws, and the Catholic faith) [...]

Here. I was only on

Deogolwulf has translated the Grand Inquisitor’s Mein politisches Testament:
In the internal arrangement of the empire, the nationalities gained a position which was bound to be expressed by the selection and in the activity of public officials from the lowest rank to the highest. In a state thus arranged, it is for natural reasons difficult to [...]

This is the horrendously debt-ridden nationalist-whatever Catalan regional broadcaster, the “whatever” bit depending on the composition of the regional government. In five years it has halved its audience share, dropping from first to fourth place. “De hecho, toda la información es finalista, en el sentido de tener como objetivo prioritario la visión de extrema izquierda [...]

Hoy se hase e tra’isioná homenaje á pueblo que vivía aquí ante de que vinieron la’ italiana’, la’ andalusa’, y luego la’ sueca’. Un pueblo que, si bien sufría la dolorosa antisipasión de lanzamiento ‘n e 1970 de Ford Pinto, conosía también la eḥp·peranza que significaría la intro’ucsión pó la Iglesia ‘n e 1226 de [...]