Category: Sounds

Biannual Roundup Time

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san-antonio-song

As 2016 begins, you, once again, have given me an excuse to write about whatever strikes me. Your favorite posts on this blog during the past six months are as random as the thought process of the writer pecking at the keyboard.

I have to admit I love it that you continue to let the ghost of Helen Madarasz haunt Brackenridge Park, care enough about the future of Alamo Plaza to go back to old rants and are still looking for the cowgirl’s “San Antonio Song.” You care about art and artists of San Antonio, even when the art is tiny, and cherish San Antonio’s Fiesta traditions, even when raucous. And you tolerate family stories and postcards from our travels. All of these are therapeutic breaks for the blogger struggling to complete the story of the Coker Settlement.

The numbers in parentheses represent the rankings from six months ago:

  1. The Madarasz Murder Mystery: Might Helen Haunt Brackenridge Park?, 2012 (1)
  2. Artist Foundation unleashes another round of creative fervor, 2015 (2)
  3. How would you feel about the Alamo with a crewcut?, 2011 (8)
  4. Weather Forecast: 11 Days of Confetti Ahead, 2015 (10)
  5. Please put this song on Tony’s pony and make it ride away, 2010 (7)
  6. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Favorites on the food front, 2015 (12)
  7. Take pleasure in little unauthorized treasures along the River Walk before they vanish, 2015
  8. Playspace of Yanaguana Garden bursts into bloom October 2, 2015
  9. Photographs from the 1800s place faces on the names in Zephaniah Conner’s Bible, 2014 (11)
  10. Cornyation strips down to bare kernels of comedy in current events, 2015
  11. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: More street art and signs of protests, 2015
  12. Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Tattooed Museum Walls, 2015

Thanks for dropping by every once in a while. Love hearing your feedback.

Traveling around the world via accordion….

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Started in San Antonio on the banks of the river with Santiago Jimenez, Jr. But then, only a short stroll away at the International Accordion Festival in La Villita, Mahala Nola transported us to Bulgaria and Serbia. Then we switched to music sounding as though it was being performed along the Seine by Musette Explosion, a trio based in New York City.

Paused between stages for a Pakistani kebab from Rickshaw Stop.

Mahala Nola
Mahala Nola
Mahala Nola
Musette Explosion
Mahala Nola
Buyebongo
Flying Balalaika Brothers
Flying Balalaika Brothers
Flying Balalaika Brothers
Musette Explosion

Then went back riverside for the ruckus-causing group Buyepongo from Los Angeles. And we ended up listening to Russian-Ukranian-conjunto(?) played by the Flying Balalaika Brothers.

And that was in only four hours. If you are reading this before 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 12, stop and zip over to La Villita before it’s too late. Incredible music rarely heard in one venue, and it’s admission-free.

Postcard from Madrid, Spain: Paradise found in parks

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Better to reign in Hell,

Than to serve in Heaven

Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

There he is, the fallen angel himself, painfully ensnared atop a beautiful fountain, guarded by gargoyles, in the heart of Madrid’s Retiro Park. John Milton’s Paradise Lost inspired sculptor Ricardo Bellver to create a monumental depiction of the devil in 1877. Both widely acclaimed and highly controversial, the statue is regarded as the only piece of major public art dedicated to the devil.

Anyone bedeviled by the artwork can easily avoid it, as Retiro Park is huge and is only one of many found in the capital city. Madrid has more parkland in its center than any other major European city, and Madrilenos take full advantage of them any time they are free.

These photos are from Retiro Park and the Jardin Botanico next to the Prado.

Totally swooned for the handsome tuxedoed birds. Exotic in my mind, but considered nuisances by many – common magpies. As with the storks earlier in our trip, never recalled setting eyes on them before, which might be lucky as a multitude of legends portray magpies as harbingers – or at least a single magpie – of ill will.

With his theft of glittering objects, the magpie envisioned by Gioachino Rossini in the plot of an 1815 opera almost caused an innocent maid to swing from the gallows. And the magpie’s reputation surely was not enhanced by the inclusion of the overture to signify impending over-the-top violence by Stanley Kubrick in his 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.