Skip to main content

SARDINE BURIED WITH FULL HONOURS WHILE PGO SWORDFISH SWIMS ON


SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Friday February 19 2010
CHICHARREROS filled the streets of Santa Cruz on Friday for the funeral of a giant sardine.
by JAMES TWEEDIE
The baroque funeral cort̬ge of the deceased 10-foot long oily fish wound its way through the narrow streets of the regional capital, accompanied by a phalanx of priests and hordes of lady mourners Рmost of them men.
One of the more unusual events of carnival calendar, the Sardine's Funeral symbolises the death of the past and the birth of the future.
The sardine has special significance in Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz. Residents bear the derogatory moniker of chicharrero from the time when the town was home to poor fishing folk, who could only afford to eat the worst of their catch – a small species of sardine called a chicharro.
In keeping with the spirit of irreverent political satire which pervades carnival, this year's funeral was turned into an impromptu protest against Santa Cruz council's controversial PGO by-law, which has place the upper floors of 30 per cent of the city's buildings 'fuera de ordenacíon' or outside of planning permission.
Campaigners call the PGO “illegal, irrational, illogical, corrupt and speculative,” alleging that it only benefits property developers close to the mayor and councillors.
The PGO was represented by a paper swordfish. Leaflets depicted the 'Pejo-O' sawing the top off an apartment building, along with leading proponents of the scheme caricatured as insultingly-named species of fish.

Comments

Philip Hall said…
I want to go to Tenerife. The tourist board should be paying you for this stuff James.
Sunday, 21 February, 2010
James Tweedie said…
Thanks! The tourist board's publicity is very bland and safe, even though the government partly funds the carnival, the murgas, the transvestite beauty pageant which I missed and all that.

Their last two press releases were one claiming they had got parts of 'Clash of the Titans' filmed here by staging a junket for the location company and another about their presence at a tourism fair in Israel, which I suppose says 'we're working to get you out of the crisis'.
Sunday, 21 February, 2010
James Tweedie said…
To be fair to the regional and island government, they organise a lot of arts events here and publicise them.
Sunday, 21 February, 2010
Philip Hall said…
Well it seems to me they need something a little edgier and you could provide it.

It looks and sounds like an amazing place to be.
Sunday, 21 February, 2010
Philip Hall said…
I saw Clash of the Titans. And ex-girlfriend sent me to see it as a joke when it first came out. Great movie she said. What I saw was a plastecine Cyclops throwing model ships against a cliff, smashing against it in unconvincing puffs of coloured celuloid.(Although the story line was a lot stronger than Avatar's). I suppose the cliff was a Canary Island cliff.

What can you say about Canary Island cliffs then. Are they craggy and yellowing?

A cause de cette famme I also went to see Gone with the Wind in a fit of nostalgia - her favourite film - and it wasn't playing; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was playing. So I watched that instead as Dad had made respectful references to Sam Peckinpath's work. Talk about aversion therapy. Now when I think of that girlfriens I think of a large man in an overall eating a human sausage.
Sunday, 21 February, 2010
James Tweedie said…
The Clash of the Titans that was filmed here was a re-make, which is coming out in April. It stars Sam Worthington from Avatar as Perseus and Liam Neeson as Zeus. I am guessing that the 1980 Ray Harryhausen version is far superior.
Monday, 22 February, 2010
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A warm welcome

. Why blog on ARS NOTORIA? I have set up this website,  ARS NOTORIA ,  (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog. . ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer. Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post. Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequentl...
6 comments
Read more

Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to t...
21 comments
Read more

Our Collective Caliban

At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me. According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read. I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you...
14 comments
Read more