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editor
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 Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 10:22 am Post subject: Gypsies |
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Gypsies:
Black Cat, White Cat
VHS
We're not sure where this one is filmed, though there is one reference in the movie to the village of Surduk. Some reviews say France, others Germany and still others Bosnia, the birthplace of director/writer Emir Kusturica, a wild card with an unhealthy affinity for the grotesque and whose son replaced his dad in the gypsy band behind the film's lively score.
In this scene, the master of ceremonies introduces gypsy revellers to a Leningrad cowgirl giantess of substantial hip whose real claim to fame is an unusual party trick. At about mid-song, she backs into a protruding railway spike nailed to a plank, extracting it from between those clever hips -- all without missing a note.
| Quote: | MC: Ladies and gentlemen, after a triumphant tour in North Africa, Asia and Australia, Black Obelisk is with us tonight, here on the peaceful banks of the Danube. This act is unique in the world. She'll pull a nail from a plank in a spectacular way! (Young Rambo pounds the nail into the plank, which is then carried to the stage). A sight that once seen is never forgotten. (Ida roams the waterside tavern taking bets).
Patron: I bet on the nail.
Ida: Your name? Anyone want to place a bet? (The crook, Dadan, puts some money down and gives Ida an unwelcome goose). Hands off! (She surveys the crowd for gamblers). Last chance! (The famous hips back up and quickly surround the ugly spike, then voila! Another triumph). I love your big ass! |
Black Cat, White Cat
Soundtrack
Audio CD
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editor
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| Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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Time of the Gypsies
DVD
An earlier, darker version of Black Cat, White Cat with much the same cast, geese, midgets and music. Do visit the deeply weird site devoted to director Emir Kusturica for an exhilarating lesson in gypsy symbolism. Discover the hidden meaning of weddings, the gift of Perhan's gentle turkey and all those noisy geese in the mud.
In the opening scene, four guys in hats sitting outside in a caravan compound overlooking a city, are bent thoughtfully over a couple of crates with a plank across them, rolling dice.
| Quote: | Fat guy: Roll for papa! (He rolls, he scores). Beat that!
Guy in the black hat: O God, help me, just this once. Do you even exist, God? I've lost everything. I wouldn't mind if I was losing to a man...but this is a pig I'm fattening. A hundred...He wins and laughs. All right, God! Let the filthy pig win! But let's make a deal you and me. You just let me win today...and I'll believe in You. Promise! I swear I'll believe in You. I'd bet my life to win from this pig! For once, do something for the Gypsies. Do that for me instead of helping this pig! Help me just this once!...Don't forget our deal, God. (The fat guy laughs after winning everything, including black hat's religious medallion. Black hat punches his palm in disgust). |
| Quote: | | Best line in the film: "When you find the money, I'll lower the house." Even these guys have nothing on gypsy home builders. |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:17 pm Post subject: |
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Ederlezi
CD Audio
By Goran Bregovic
(This one has both Perhan's accordion
song and the plaintiff chant from
the river scene - lovely!)
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 9:03 pm Post subject: |
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Carmen
Based on the opera by Georges Bizet
Directed by Francesco Rosi
DVD
This is the movie that would make an opera fan of even the most committed beer-snarfling yob. Spanish sets and costumes rival a perfect cast in this most satisfying performance that would have cheered its dejected composer considerably. Unbelievably, a discouraged Bizet died believing his timeless score celebrating the infamous wiles of a Gypsy feminist was a mediocre flop and best forgotten.
In this scene, a starry-eyed Carmen, who has been dancing most of the night on tables in the town watering hole with a rose between her teeth, mysteriously declines the advice of her Gypsy co-horts to call it a night and get some shut-eye before the caravan heads out in the morning for some serious mountain thievery. Party girl Carm is wide awake and ready for anything. "She's in love," sighs one of her pals.
| Quote: | Gypsy: In love? That's no reason.
Gypsy girl: I'm in love but I do my duty.
Carm's pal: I've never seen you like this. Who are you waiting for?
Carmen: A soldier who helped me.
Pal: The one who went to jail?
Gypsy: He'll be scared. I bet he won't come.
Carmen: Don't bet. You'd lose. |
By far and away, the best of many recorded versions, in our view. Still, while we know the fat man would have burst the buttons on Don Jose's tight jacket in this production, we cannot help but prefer Pavarotti's or Jussi Bjoerling's rendition of the soft lamenting Flower Song, the aria signalling the beginning of the end of this doomed love affair. Not that it goes much better for the bull in the opening sequence.
Other noteworthy adaptations of Bizet's famous score:
Carmen
The Ballet
DVD
Featuring Russian dance sensation, Spaghetti-arms Plisetskaya,
who plays the heroine as a taunting, somewhat vulgar
but nevertheless irresistible love interest in this modern
update of Roland Petit's interpretation.
Ballerina: Karen Kain
VHS
NFB documentary featuring excerpts of beautiful
Kain studying with Roland Petit and performing the role
with his troupe, Ballet National de Marseille, in the early '70s.
A clip from the Carmen footage is also included in
Denis Arcand's Barbarian Invasions.
Sadly, Canada failed to record even one performance of Kain as Carmen and, for this lapse of sanity, we wish them and their wilderness culture all the luck they deserve.
Black Tights
DVD
Featuring an excerpt of Carmen danced by choreographer Petit
and his wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, who partnered Mikhail Baryshnikov again in the title role
about 100 years later with alarmingly youthful vigor.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2195#2195
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| Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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Django
The Life and Music of a Gyspy Legend
Hardcover
By Michael Dregni
| Quote: | | Django likely spent his days with the other Manouche men, walking from their Le Bourget encampment to a nearby bar where they downed coffees through the morning, switching to cassis or red wine by noon. Someone would begin shuffling cards with exaggerated noise to draw players, then deal them out around the table. Bids would be made and a game of belote begun. The conversation, which might ramble from politics to gossip of Gypsy affairs, would now turn serious. Billiard balls would be racked up, then broken, another round of beer ordered. The Manouche women were the ones who typically found the money for the family to live. They were industrious, always cleaning, always cooking. In their caravans, they crafted lace or jewelry. They told fortunes, reading the mysteries in a passerby's hand. Or if times were bad, the Manouche women simply begged, their own hands held open at the mouths of the metro for spare sous. (From the chapter, A New Man 1951-1953, at p. 252) |
For more on the fascinating Gypsy culture in France, check out Temps Gitans, a gallery of photos, words and sound by Nigel Dickinson at the unaparallelled nationalgeographic.com..
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2243#2243
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 9:49 am Post subject: |
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Little Money Street
In Search of Gypsies and their Music in the South of France
Hardcover
By Fernanda Eberstadt
| Quote: | Cockfights are illegal in France. But there is a loophole, which reveals a softer aspect to those French passions both for regulation and for "tradition": practices which are illegal in the rest of France are permitted in areas in which they are an attested part of a people's local heritage.
Thus, in the south of France, certain Latinisms such as bullfights and cockfights are allowed although, since cockfights also involve gambling, they are in theory allowed, but in practice absolutely pain-of-death secret. There are Gypsy cockfights in Roussillon almost every weekend, although you will never see an advertisement for one, or meet a Gypsy who will tell you where they take place, or a paio who has been to one. (From Chapter Nine at p. 147) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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Blues Story
Audio CD
2 Disc Set
A classic!
| Quote: | I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man
By Willie Dixon
Recorded by Muddy Waters
View the YouTube.com video.
The gypsy woman told my mother
Before I was born
I got a boy child's comin'
He's gonna be a son of a gun
He gonna make pretty women's
Jump and shout
Then the world wanna know
What this all about
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Well you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him
I got a black cat bone
I got a mojo too
I got the Johnny Concheroo
I'm gonna mess with you
I'm gonna make you girls
Lead me by my hand
Then the world will know
The hoochie coochie man
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Oh you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him
On the seventh hours
On the seventh day
On the seventh month
The seven doctors say
He was born for good luck
And that you'll see
I got seven hundred dollars
Don't you mess with me
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Well you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him |
| Quote: | Walking Blues
By Eddie James House, Jr. (Son) House and Robert Johnson
View Son House on YouTube.com.
I woke up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
Know by that I got these old walkin' blues, well
Woke this mornin' feelin’ round for my shoes
But you know by that, I got these old walkin' blues
Lord I feel like blowin’ my old lonesome horn
Got up this mornin’, my little Bernice was gone, Lord
I feel like blowin’ my lonesome horn
Well I got up this mornin’, whoa all I had was gone
Well, leave this mornin' if I have to, ride the blinds
I feel mistreated, and I don't mind dyin'
Leavin’ this mornin', if I have to ride the blind
Babe, I’ve been mistreated, baby and I don't mind dyin'
Well, some people tell me that the worried blues ain't bad
Worst old feelin' I most ever had
Some people tell me that these old worried old blues ain't bad
It's the worst old feelin', I most ever had
She’s got a elgin movement from her head down to her toes
Break in on a dollar most anywhere she goes
Ooh, from her head down to her toes
Lord, she break in on a dollar, most anywhere she goes
... I'm going to see the gypsy
to get my fortune told
Yes, I'm going to see the gypsy
and get my fortune told
I think someone is trying
to steal my jellyroll ... |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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Goodbye Little Town
Sinners, saints, and chimney-watchers
in a small Ontario town
Hardcover
By Henry Gordon Green
| Quote: | Speaking of independent people and the kind of characters a story can use, I wonder whatever became of the gypsies. I am not referring to those members of that dark-skinned race who beckon at your pocket book from the flaps of fortune-telling tents at the fairs, but those mysterious individuals who frequented the side-roads of our rural countrysides some forty years ago. These were horse traders mainly although they could turn their hands to many another penny-catching skill, such as the concocting of herb medicines, the weaving of baskets, and the making of laces.
But it was the horse which was the real trademark of the gypsy of yesteryear... the gypsy camp was host to many a visitor, and many a horse changed hands before their evening campfire.
No farmer ever admitted going with the object of making a trade. He simply hitched up some doubtful horse belonging to his establishment and went over to see what was going on.
...The gypsy always seemed reluctant to sell such an animal. "Not that one," he would tell you, making a face as honest as it could get. "I keep that one for myself. She belongs to my wagon team."
But for enough "boot" money, the gypsy was sometimes induced to change his mind, and the horse which took a visitor back home was often a far different animal than the one which had brought him. Sometimes it didn't get him home. Sometimes such a horse simply went on strike after the first mile. Sometimes he leaned back on his shafts to recover from a bout of the heaves. Sometimes he just decided to kick out the dashboard of your buggy.
If so, you took your beating quietly and waited for the next gypsy caravan. It was a game which sometimes went on for several summers. (From Chapter Twenty-three, pgs. 119-120) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Yahoo News
Gypsy clans go public
By Gillian Flaccus,
The Associated Press
Dec. 5/07
| Quote: | NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - A dispute between two Gypsy clans over control of the fortune-telling trade in this Southern California city has spilled into court, offering a rare glimpse of an insular culture that has long settled scores according to its own Old World rules of honour. The turf war in well-to-do Orange County has unfolded like a gangster movie, with allegations of death threats, a graveside scuffle, and nicknames like "White Bob" and "Black Bob." The details can be found in a police report and requests for restraining orders.
"The older Gypsies are pulling out their hair, not wanting the courts in our business because they'll find out too much about us," said Tom Merino, who is distantly related to one of the clans but has spurned his heritage. "Ignorance is the Gypsies' weapon against the outside world."
The Stevens and Merino clans, like other Gypsy families, have run numerous fortune-telling businesses in Southern California for decades. The trouble started two years ago when Edward Merino and his wife, Sonia, opened fortune-telling parlours in two trendy resort sections of Newport Beach, not far from where the Stevenses did business. Members of the Stevens clan promptly broke in, stole a credit card machine and threatened to kill the Merinos if they didn't shut the places down, the Merinos claim in court papers. Since then, the bad blood has worsened. At the root of the conflict lies a delicate system of intermarriage and social customs that has defused tensions among Gypsy clans for generations, said Anne Sutherland, a University of California, Riverside anthropologist who has studied Gypsies.
Gypsies trace their origins to India more than 1,000 years ago. They migrated to Europe in the 1300s. For centuries, Gypsies were enslaved and persecuted in Europe, where they were scorned as nomadic thieves and con artists skilled primarily at palm reading. Gypsies, also known as Roma or Romany, began arriving in the United States from Romania toward the end of the 19th century. Experts believe there are now about one million in the country, one-fifth of them in California, where they dominate the fortune-telling and psychic shops] in funky beach communities and other neighbourhoods.
The Stevens and Merino clans adopted an Old World custom of uniting families through marriage to cope with intense competition, much as European nobility once did to avert war. A Merino married the Stevens patriarch, George Stevens. But the family bond did not prevent tensions from flaring when, the Merinos say, the Stevenses demanded they pay $500,000 up front and $5,000 a week to open their fortune-telling businesses in the Stevenses' back yard. The Merinos refused to pay, and went ahead and opened their parlours. The alleged break-in soon followed.
Gypsies have traditionally resolved disputes in front of a secret council of elders that can impose fines, make territorial decisions or order someone shunned. They don't like to involve non-Gypsies, who are considered impure. The Merinos, though, went to court after the alleged break-in and obtained a restraining order in 2006 requiring George Stevens to stay a safe distance away. That the dispute wound up in court reflects an erosion of tradition among the Gypsies, said Ian Hancock, an expert on Gypsy language and culture at the University of Texas. "It used to be that the Romany world was absolutely insulated from the outside world," said Hancock, a Gypsy himself. "But it's very hard to resist the pressures of MTV, and people are beginning to see alternatives." He cited cases in which Gypsy women in Houston hired lawyers to get their ex-husbands to pay child support, something previously unheard of.
Things were calm for months until the Stevens patriarch died of a heart attack at age 53 last May. Edward (Davie) Merino showed up at the funeral, pulling up at the cemetery in a limo with what was described as a menacingly burly chauffeur. Merino says members of the Stevens clan attacked him and screamed, "We will make your life a living hell!" But the Stevenses claim that Merino flashed a gun and threatened to "come back and kill all of you." Both sides agree that before speeding off, Merino shouted that he wanted to make sure "the mother-(expletive) was dead."
Merino declined repeated requests for an interview through his lawyer and calls to his home were not returned.
After the scrap, someone left ominous phone messages and threatened to kill Sonia Merino and the couple's children, ages nine and 11, Edward Merino claimed in court papers. Edward Merino filed for restraining orders against four Stevens men and two Stevens women. Over the summer, a judge granted such an order against just one person, the new Stevens patriarch, Ted Stevens. Stevens' nephew, the only Gypsy directly involved in the feud who spoke to The Associated Press, said the Merinos concocted the allegations and are using the courts to try to drive their rivals out of Newport Beach. "They beat themselves up and then they testify that we hired people to come to their house and beat them up," said Steve Stevens, who goes by the nickname "White Bob" to distinguish him from his swarthier cousin, "Black Bob." Stevens, who owns two fortune-telling parlours and a deli, added: "I feel like they've made me out like a character on 'The Sopranos.' I'm a businessman. I'm a family man. That's all I am." |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 12:03 pm Post subject: |
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Koba the Dread
Laughter and the 20 million
Hardcover
By Martin Amis
This book, published in 2002, represents the darkest and most terrifying account of Stalinist Russia we've come upon so far. It's written in the first person by Brit wit Amis, who augments recollections of conversations between the famous old man and his legendary cronies back when Martin was still the privileged and youthfully unconsciousness whelp - back before
with exhaustive footnotes revealing a whacking great Russian history blog.
| Quote: | It was on board the ships that the "politicals" -- a.k.a. "the 58s" (after Article 58 of the Ciminal Codex), "the counters" (counter-revolutionaries), and "the fascists" -- would usually receive their introduction to another integral feature of the archipelago: the urkas. Like so many elements in the story of the gulag, the urkas constituted a torment wthin a torment. Mrs. Ginzburg sits in the floating dungeon of the Dzhurma: "When it seemed as though there was no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings...[a] half-naked, tattoed, apelike horde..." And they were only the women. The urkas: this class, or caste, a highly developed underground culture, "had survived," writes Conquest, "with its own traditions and laws, since the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivation periods." Individually grotesque, and, en masse, an utterly lethal force, the urkas were circus cutthroats, devoted to gambling, plunder, mulilation and rape.
In the gulag, as a matter of policy, the urkas were accorded the status of trusties, and they had complete power over the politicals, the fascists -- always the most scornedand defenseless population in the camp system. The 58s were permanently exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain. And one can see, also, that the policy looked good ideologically. It would be very Leninist to have one class exterminating another, higher class. How Lenin had longed for the poorer peasants to start lynching all the kulaks...Imprisoned theirves were amnestied under Lenin, as part of his "loot the looters" campaign in the period of War Communism. As Solzhenitsyn says, the theft of state property became and remained a capital crime, while urka-bourgeois theft became and remained little more than a misdemeanor. Apart from the new privilegentsia and a few "hereditary proletarians," the urkas were the only class to benefit from Bolshevik policies. The urkas, who played cards for each other's eyes, who tattoed themselves with images of masturbating monkeys, who had their women assist them in their rapes of nuns and politicals. In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes almost casually of an urka "who had once knifed a family of six." The gulag officially designated the urkas as Socially Friendly Elements. (On Soviet slave ships, p. 67) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack
Hardcover
By Robertson Davies
| Quote: | My very dear Mrs. Morrigan:
Knowing how fond you have always been of gypsies, I write to tell you that yesterday I saw a tribe of them convergint the ancient and beautiful Shropshire town of Ludlow. As I drove along the road from Wales to Ludlow I passed ten gypsy coach vans - surely the most romantic dwellings in the world, shining with brass ornaments, and gay with shawls, quilts and bits of tinsel. Every caravan horse was led by a man, usually an old rascal, but sometimes a handsome, black-eyed lad: in front of the van would be a young woman, nursing a baby; in the back of the van other children tumbled, dirty, fat and lively. The women were all either young beauties or old hags: are there no middle-aged women among gypsies? And how the beauty of a gypsy woman surpasses that of the simpering lollipops of the films. How wondrously they dress, and how they make even their dirt become them!
A few days ago I was passing through the Welsh hamlet of Penegoes, where Richard Wilson was born. A group of gypsy children were playing around a fire there, outside a queer tent made of skins, and obviously half as old as time. How Wilson could have painted them! Do you suppose that he would have agreed with Augustus John that, "it is always worth half-a-crown to have a good look at a gypsy - front or back view?" I accepted the invitation of a gypsy girl to touch her baby for luck. One shilling. Cheap at double the money.
Your humble servant,
Samuel Marchbanks.
(-- p. 14) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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Wednesday Noon Hours
Jan. 21/09
UBC School of Music
Recital Hall
12 p.m.
Tickets $4 at the door
Featuring Van Django
| Quote: | Cameron Wilson - violin,
Budge Schachte guitar
Finn Manniche - guitar/cello
Laurence Mollerup - double bass
Van Django is an acoustic string ensemble made up of four extremely talented and eclectic musicians. Their music is well-rooted in the gypsy jazz of 1930s Paris, France but, beyond that, it's all pure blue skying: flights of dazzling fancy, driving rhythms and boundless creativity. Experience this foursome as they play their original compositions and quirky arrangements in an action packed musical universe they call acoustic string hot jazz. (From the Programme)
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Here's why the group sounds as good as the Programme promises:
| Quote: | Cameron Wilson was a member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the CBC Radio Orchestra. ...
Budge collaborates with a stellar cast of diverse artists, including playwrite Tompson Highway, Tango Paradiso, Victoria Symphony ...
Finn ... can be heard playing live and on CD with the Armadillo String Quartet, Ensemble Symposium, the Jazzmanian Devils, Soul Crib, the Paperboys ...
Laurence Mollerup ... also performs in musical theatre and records for radio, television and feature film soundtracks, including The French Guy, Emile, Live Bait and A Place Called Chiapas. (From the Programme) |
Here's what they played:
Link to this entry
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