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Why would that bother anyone???? That's not what it is man.... I personally don't mind a little snoberry lol When I was in Sevilla I was talking with a bailaora after her tablao performance and asked her if she knew where I could see some bullfighting, she said "why would you want to see that?" looked at me like I was a monster and basically shut the conversation down at that point.... Point being not every Andalusian(she was Malaguena) flamenco is a fan.....
Since their are a bunch of linguists in the house anyone care to explain the lisp accent thing ? Is it predominantly a thing of Southern Spain or not really , why is that if someone could elaborate in English that would be cool.
Withinity: Yo no soy lingüísta, pero si un andaluz ceceador
Este es un mapa de la distribución ceceo vs seseo.
Aunque no se refleje bien en el mapa, es ceceo (lisp) es un fenómeno mas bien rural, mientras que el seseo lo es urbano.
Por ejemplo en mi zona (provincia de Cádiz) se cecea en los pueblos y en la capital y en grandes ciudades se tiende a sesear, y los que cecean tienden a ser considerados catetos (algo asi como rednecks).
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Al argentino decirle que no es esnobismo dar puntos de vista desde la perspectiva que da vivir en Andalucía y conocerla bien. Si este foro fuese sobre el Tango argentino, habría que deshechar las opiniones vertidas desde Buenos Aires por considerar que a los foristas que alli residen pecan de enterados?
Chester: claramente es un elogio para esos dos foristas, pero no un insulto para los demás.
Can anybody explain to me why gilipollas means as@@@hole in english and d@ck in dutch? What is it in spanish? I am getting terrible confused here......
Would you consider that I know and appreciate it better than a japanese person who loves it and knows everything about it?
Would you say that listening to your flamenco albums and playing your guitar inside your house in andaluzia makes it a fuller experience? How about flamencos living abroad, do they "lose it"?
What about people in andaluzia who don't care about flamenco? If any of these people love toros, are they having some sort of flamenco experience?
The surest sign that someone has exhausted all of his arguments and has run out of arrows in his intellectual quiver is when he resorts to epithets such as that cited above.
Having failed in his attempt to impress Foro members with his "deep and broad" knowledge of flamenco, and with his certainty that only those who speak Spanish and understand "toritos" (as his fellow confederate called the corrida) can appreciate and understand it, he finds that it was all an exercise in vanity and self-flattery.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
To understand Andalucía would take a lifetime. Speaking a little Spanish is nice. Bullfighting is controversial. However none are prerequisites to appreciating flamenco, ser un aficionado, to be a fan. If they were, this would be a very, very quiet forum and it would a dead art.
Escribano
Thankfully, we can now objectively quantify one's degree of flamenquismo by use of a recently invented tool, the Flamencometer (patent pending). I was able to obtain a reading on a prototype of the machine (it requires the usual sensors attached to various members of the body), under the supervision of a skilled operator, and obtained a score of 93.7 out of a possible 100. It would be useful to subject all Foro participants to interrogation on the instrument, as it becomes more widely available, and to deny access to anyone self-reporting a figure below, say, 75. We thus eliminate, through scientific rigor, the unsubstantiated "I am more flamenco than you are!" crowing that crops up all too frequently here on the Foro--now we will have a way of establishing a true hierarchy of the less and the more flamenco. I offer this modest proposal to Admin.
El flamenco es una cultura popular, no una ingeniería que se puede aprender con manuales desde cualquier parte del mundo.
Martins dice que el es portugués pero no le interesa el fado. Yo le digo que si yo quisiera aprender algo sobre el fado, el como portugués sería de mucha mas utilidad que un nerd del fado de Minneapolis que nunca ha pisado Lisboa, y que todo lo que sabe de Portugal lo sabe a través de Wikipedia, Youtube y libros.
Hay pormenores culturales que no aparecen reflejados en ningún libro.
If we turn the proposition around a little - the French (amongst many others) love the blues and sing it in their own language. They are not all black, certainly not from the Delta or Chicago and don't speak much English. I assume the Spanish sing the blues in Spanish too. I know the Mexicans do - as well as rock, jazz etc.
I have long since been thinking that it could be nice to hear some flamenco singing in English. With a typical voice and interesting lyrics why not. While it could not replace the original in any way, it might be valuable in pure musical terms and as a tribute to the original possibly even triggering people´s interest in flamenco.
Finding it ridiculous when German kids immitate music that emerged from very special cultural background, like say with rap, flamenco singing in German to me would differ as its background would just be too far for to be intended as musical metamorphosis. But that is a personal and subjective approach, I know.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Referring
... the bull stuff (in all senses of that term), sure the macho gallo cock fighting thing.
It is always annoying to me how short-sighted backwarded mentality is. How much grasp would it really take to understand the actual psychological contradiction between liking animal fighting and manly being?
Where ought there to be the heroism in watching third´s massacres? And is it really that challenging to figure the cowardice of spectators getting a kick of standing by and watching a torture happening to others?
Voyeuring (if that´s a term) and advocating animal fight in truth indicates just as much of manly being as jumping on chairs does when mice appear. No to mention the intellectual gap that it takes to celebrate sloughtering still in modern times and all the education it could had provided.
If that brute tradition is going to stay it should at least be considered effeminate, -with the -you bet- numbers of attendants then going down faster than the Niagara falls.
la lidia no consiste en entrar en extasis viendo como se masacra a un animal indefenso. No sabes nada del asunto.
Para empezar, hay que conocer la psicología del toro de lidia para buscar tu espacio y saber como lidiarlo.
I suggest you put yourself in place of the bull first, before we start out evaluating. It may take a year before you come out from hospital if at all, but we can wait until you tell us of your impression.
All this back and forth about language, culture and the like has finally reminded me of a story.
My English friend David J. and his wife Carol visited Austin. David had won an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for a paper he wrote. Part of the prize was a trip to New York to present the paper at the annual meeting. David was on the British side of a contract we had with the U.K. government, so they paid for the trip to Austin. He and his wife, my wife and I, all in our thirties had become good friends.
David wanted to see an American football game. The University of Texas puts on about as big a spectacle as there is in that line. But on the night of the game it was cold and raining hard. We sat around the house feeling sorry for ourselves and drinking whisky.
More in jest than in ernest, I said, "Well, Muddy Waters is playing Antone's tonight. We could go hear him."
To my surprise, Carol lit up and said, "Really! Muddy Waters is in town tonight? We could go see him?"
"Um, yes....to tell the truth, I didn't have you pegged as a Muddy Waters fan."
Carol, a beautiful blue eyed brunette in her early thirties, was a school teacher and the soul of proper English middle class decorum.
"Yes! When I was fourteen, after bedtime I would get under the covers with my torch and my little phonograph, listen to my Muddy Waters records and dream of running away to America. I loved Muddy Waters! Though perhaps I didn't completely understand all the songs."
"How about 'Louisiana Blues'?" I asked.
She quoted, "Going to Louisiana, behind the Sun....what does that mean?"
" 'Behind the Sun' means 'behind the sign of the Sun.' In New Orleans when the original city was laid out, most of the people were illiterate. Street signs and shop signs were symbols that were easy to recognize. In Merida, Yucatan the streets were all laid out on a grid and numbered rationally, but in the early sixties people still spoke of the calle del violín or la tienda de la oveja even though they could read the map perfectly. The shop behind the Sun in New Orleans sold voodoo articles and other magic paraphernalia."
"I see. Like the taverns called "The King's Head" or "Stonham Pie" with the magpie on the sign. So what's a mojo hand?"
"It's a little cloth bag containing magical objects. Spells are cast over it by a voodoo priest. It conveys occult powers to the owner."
We went to Antone's. Carol was one of the most ardent fans. When Muddy got the people up to dance, she was absolutely magnificent.
Now who was the greater aficionado? I, who understood the language and the cultural references, and who was surrounded by the blues from birth?
Or Carol, who may not have understood all the words, and who came to the music only as a teenager, but to whom the music spoke as a cry for freedom and rage against the perceived oppression of a proper middle class English girl during the beginning of the swinging sixties?
I don't mind a bit of elitism from Andalusians, be they gitano or not, after all these years I feel they've earned a bit of it. That's also why I don't mind bicharraco's comments as much.
But in the case of Morante, he's about as gitano (or even just Spanish) as the average beer-bellied UK tourist that comes to Andalusia every year to scorch themselves to a beautiful pink on the beaches. No amount of living with gitanos, commenting on foro members with thinly veiled condescension or boasting about having accompanied this or that cantaor (all in Spanish on an English-speaking forum of course, which really gives it the maximum cringe factor) is gonna change that.
His posts reek of deep insecurities harbored for decades. He spends a lot of energy pretending to be someone he is not and can never be. His frustrations of never being able to be perceived as or equal to a real Andalusian (socially as much as artistically)are then let out on the Foro.
Lots of people here have spent years or even decades in Spain. They are still level-headed and not arrogant when it comes to discussing flamenco. They didn't suddenly start acting like they were born into a gitano family and maintain their identity. It's perfectly fine to like, appreciate and perform flamenco as a a foreigner, even if you will never be one of them. Let it go, man.
To Morante's credit, he produced two excellent recordings of cante that I have in my possesion which, without him, I am sure would not even exist. I admit that his strong opinions can be annoying or even taken as an insult by some, but I don't feel it comes from insecurity so much as a deep frustration with the state of things in the flamenco world today vs years past. It is a normal thing that can happen to each of us in different ways so that it becomes difficult to embrace new things going on having had such amazing experiences in the past.
I for one look forward to his strong opinions if nothing more than the way they temper the opposite extreme we encounter on foro...postings from folks like hardboiled and his zombie rock menco with zero other contribution. Between the two extremes of embracing small details of andalucian life to superficial finger fumblings in phrygian lies a complete spectrum inside which we can each find ourselves understanding and appreciating the art form.
His posts reek of deep insecurities harbored for decades. He spends a lot of energy pretending to be someone he is not and can never be. His frustrations of never being able to be perceived as or equal to a real Andalusian (socially as much as artistically)are then let out on the Foro.
Falta de seguridad no es un problema de Morante.
Cuando salió de casa a la universidad formó un grupo de rock, lo que terminó tocando telonero a Cream.
Empezó a correr motos: en Irlanda los circuitos son carreteras normales, rodeadas de casas y arboles. Terminó corriendo en el Gran Premio de Dundrod, una ronda del Campeonato del Mundo, con una moto casera basada en Suzuki, contra la moto MV de fábrica de Giacomo Agostini.
Retirado, formó, con un amigo, La Peña Flamenca de Irlanda del Norte (http://www.paddyandersonflamenco.com/flamenco-factory/) la que sigue con mucho éxito.
También, estudiaba el arte de la pesca con Jack Martin, Campeon del Mundo, y consigió el diploma de Professor de la Pesca de Trucha y Salmón. Ha dado muchos cursos, incluso por la tele.
Entonces. decidió vivir en España donde ha producido 3 CDs y ha presentado el Jueves Flamencos de la Peña de Mellizo, el festival flamenco más importante del verano en Andalucía.
Falta de seguridad no es ningún problema de Morante, es un probléma de algunos socios de este foro de guitarra flamenca.