Caganers

I am not a huge fan of the holidays. Particularly Catholic ones. In fact, due to my upbringing, the latter bring up a mild version of PTSD. Particularly, as I mentioned here before, those in Florida where you run into elderly but aggressively "friendly" Tea Party zealots who greet you at Target or Wal-Mart with a barrage of "MERRY CHRISTMAS" in response to the liberal ecumenical neutral milquetoast p.c. "happy holidays." (which however, may be of offense to atheists or agnostics such as myself)

My earlier post on Christmas in the Bible Belt here:
http://petitemaoiste.blogspot.com/2008/12/merry-christmas.html

There is one holiday custom that is making me reconsider going back to observing the tradition of displaying figurines depicting the scene at the manger with the Holy Family, Three Kings, animals etc. One of my grandfather's sisters (borderline Opus Dei but that is neither here nor there) is very artistic and used to organize a massive creche in her garage in Florida, with the mountainous Holy Land setting made of some kind of cardboard, spray paint, glitter etc. lights, and ceramic figures made by her. The gringos driving past would stop in astonishment (well except for the Italians I guess). In Catalonia, they populate the traditional scene of Christ after his birth with little figures called caganers or shitters to use the vernacular. The best part is that these crappers are usually just local peasants or whatever but at some point they began to make them in the guise of the rich and famous in a typically Spanish irreverent/politically incorrect/subversive/blasphemous manner. Love!

See a little summary in English here

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8142970/Caganers-figurines-of-defecating-world-leaders-in-Catalan-nativity-scenes.html

Enrique Morente

Here is his last performance, in honor of Picasso (video EL PAIS):

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Temporary Interruption

I have been distracted by a severe case of #academentia lately. This doesn't mean that I haven't forgotten my 6 readers, it just means that my inability to drag myself away from my "serious" (ie. money-making) writing has prevented me from having fun chatting here. I have however been collecting my usual bizarre selection of pop cultural artifacts to deconstruct here, so I hope you will be patient and I will be back soon. In the meantime, the 140-character Twitter format is about all I can manage. [twitter feed for @petitemaoiste is on the left of the blog page]

Julio Iglesias' Ex Tells All - For JZ

Más vídeos en Antena3

Last night Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias' ex Vaitiare appeared on my favorite muti-hour gossip chat show Donde estas, corazon? (DEC) to plug her new tell-all book. So I had to put down my HOLA! magazine where I'd been reading excerpts from the not so tell all sexual/spiritual memoir of dictator Francisco Franco's scandal-mongering granddaughter, Carmen, to watch. Carmen deserves her own entry, so I will leave it at that - for now. Vaitiare met Julio in the 1980s when he cast her in the Tahitian-themed video for "Tropeze de nuevo con la misma piedra" (below) which translates as, I tripped again on the same stone.

Which is amusing because like his ex wife, the eternally chic Filipina beauty, Isabel Preysler, Vaitiare was Asian, young and gorgeous when he met her. The latter was however, underage, 17 when they allegedly hooked up and from there according to the memoir she was a kind of sexual servant who traveled all over the world with him and took part in all kinds of unsavory activities. Of course the announcer had to refer to the Tahitian beauty as "EXOTIC" in typically Spanish fashion. And of course one of the commentators had to inquire about the pot smoking with Julio noting that naturally since Bob Marley enjoyed the drug she did too, coming from Haiti as she did. So not only did this idiot not get the difference between Tahiti and Haiti (pronounced similarly in Spanish) but he confused Jamaica with the latter.

Vaitiare tried to come across as gracious and complimented Julio every chance she got, all the while making all kinds of scandalous comments and innuendo. Using the now commonplace rhetoric for these shows she said she wrote the book as a kind of therapy for herself and that it was not so much about Julio but about "her truth." (Es MI verdad.) Now, when I see the word "truth" modified by anything, that sets off alarm bells. But maybe that's me. In any event, whenever she was pressed on the details about sex or drugs, she replied "It was the 80s." (Eran los ochentas, you know?)


The video itself is priceless, just a shot of him singing surrounded by "Tahitian" beauties right out of a hieratic Gauguin painting.

Fun with Academentia: Ph.D. Comics

I am headed to Europe for a nerdolicious conference so this refresher on academese is super helpful. Although I am already a model minority junior professor, the situations in this hilarious series of cartoons on the Ph.D. experience still ring true. There is always the hope that I might meet another equally nerdy colleague for some romance --especially since this conference is in a discipline not overwhelmingly populated with over-educated neurotic fashionista artsy females ie. NOT art history. Also, I am out of NY, that quagmire for single women of a certain age. Then I can emulate my friends who all have long-distance affairs/marriages with exotic foreign men, although my last attempt at this arrangement left me heart-broken but with greater insight into #gametheory. Looking on the bright side, such shandisimos are material for the eventual fictional chronicle or telenovela and I can #dreamon

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/aboutcomics.html

Lluis Companys President of Generalitat de Catalunya- Murdered by Franco Today 70 Years Ago