The English Cemetery

Today, it's five years since the Spanish authorities closed Egunkaria, the 1st continuous Basque language newspaper of history. I've begun a Spanish-language blog about Egunkaria.

Donostia, this city I live, is a very provincian town, although some authorities think it's New York. Let's face it, it's not. However, there are some nice and somehow isolated spots of non-conformism in the social and cultural landscape of the city. Giorgio Bassmatti is one of them. One of the many incarnations of blogger Love of 74, Giorgio is a sui-generis musician, very able to compose an instant ode to the guy that made french bank Societe Generale lose zillions of euros.

There was a small concert by Giorgio near home the other day. It was in the branch offices of a bank! You see, good taste sometimes has to find refuge in the most unexpected places.

Giorgio began with one of my favorites. Morrissey. He chose Everyday is like sunday. So fitting words: This is the coastal town that they forgot to bomb, come, come, nuclear bomb... Everyday is like sunday, everyday is silent and grey. I would have suggested another song as well, Sheakespeare's sister, for its poignant lyrics: I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar that it meant that you were a protest singer ;-)

Another isolated spot of local excellence: Flickr user Yosigo. He's printed some of his works for a local exposition that opens today.

If there needs to be some Basque style definition, I wish it were more in the line of Yosigo than the Kelly Family kitsch. Pseudo-spamming chain-letters are crossing among Basque mailboxes these days referring to some Kelly familiy videos where they're signing in Basque. It seems that Maite Itoiz, one of the members of the extended family, is Basque. Anyway, look at their site and looks.

That horse lacks a horn, doesn't it?

Robert Capa's lost negatives have finally come to an institution, the ICP. Great report by the New York Times, including a pic of one of the cases full of negatives, complete with its numbered tags. Among those tags, my hometown Eibar (see how it ended after the war), Bilbao, Dolores Ibarruri Pasionaria...

The mention about Amorebieta close to a campaign mass makes me suspect that these particular photos are not by Capa himself, but by David Chim Seymour. That's how ICP itself describes Seymour's work in the Spanish Civil War: (...) Basque soldiers enjoying moral support from monks at the Monastery of Amorabita (sic) and attending an outdoor mass before going into battle. The Basque chaplain pictured by Seymour, that must be it.

Anyway, I hope the ICP follows into the steps of the Library of Congress and its usage of Flickr to document thousands of pictures. How will they tag and identify all the Capa negatives in ICP's Manhattan headquartes? Bring them all to the Internet! There's people alive around that suffered the Spanish Civil War in those scenarios. My father was in Elgeta, Eibar, and other places around that front, in the same republican side of the photographers. I can sit him in front of the screen and we'll tag the pictures gladly.

I've updated the image of the Cemetery. The Plone CSS templates are too complicated for me, so I've put just a header image. Two different headers, really, for the Basque and English versions. Those cemeteries are not English, really. They are military burial grounds that we visited last summer in Normandy. The one in the Basque side is the American cemetery of Normandy, in Omaha Beach, and this one at the English side is the nearby German cemetery of La Combe, an image that a co-worker, photographer and designer Zaloa Etxaniz adapted for the header. 

The title line of this blog refers to the English Cemetery of Donostia, the city in which I live. Donostia is a bilingual city, and has this English spot on it, a nice little historic cemetery for some forgotten war heroes of the 18th century. When my blog launched, this was a trilingual experiment, so I thought the English Cemetery was a fitting metaphore for it. Then El Cementerio de los Ingleses, the Spanish version, migrated to another site, the Mapamovil.

The original blog was orange, it had an image with the map location of the English Cemetery. Then in 2006 I changed to a black and white design, with some misterious girls in the header: some friends told me that header made me look like a pervert. Who cares? Anyway, now I finally show cemeteries.

The community site that hosts this Cemetery evolved to Plone recently. As a consequence of that, this blog no longer validates with my own old ukase for bilingual blogs It's supposed that in a perfect world, the bilingual blog's interface should be localised in the same language as content... Well, now eibar.org/blogak/luistxo is in Basque (both content and interface) and  eibar.org/blogak/luistxo/en is in English, but only the content.

So, I don't comply with that anymore, but I can proudly certify that this site and its underlying technology (Plone) are very much compatible with the XO computer. The OLPC XO is the so-called 100-dollar PC project to promote digital access to children in developing countries. A friend (Igor) has bought one and he came to the little collective blog-editing seminar of Eibar.org that we organised when the update was recently made.

Click to enlarge, and you'll see the Plone editing options tabs there. Visualization was fine, and all worked perfectly.

Regarding the fact that Plone is now being used in this blog, this looks like a positive step towards a more powerful platform, and that benefits the whole Eibar.org. As for the readers, I think that in those rare occasions in which someone feels prompted to reply, the reader will grasp the functions of the replying form. Rhys from Wales succeeded, for instance, although he thought Gaia meant website No, Rhys, it's subject or title, as replies now may have a distinct title from blog entries, a detail that I find useful but that is not present in many blogging platforms.

No competition at home as in the website of Pamplona: Olentzero came, and the Three Kings came as well. These three types brought a pink California model of the BH brand to my daughter Lili. Hey, that bike brand is from my hometown Eibar, I said. But upon careful inspection, I realized that, as expected, it was made far away: in Cambodia, to be precise.

There was a time in which several bike brands were produced in Eibar. BH (Beistegui Hermanos, the Beistegi Brothers), GAC (Garate, Anitua and Co.), Abelux, Orbea... Now none of these factories is in Eibar any more, and of those that remain active in the Basque Country, they probably assemble or import Asian goods, more than anything else.

BH was one of the first employers of my father. In the early 1940s, he worked there. They didn't make bicycles then, but bombs. There was a market, clearly. From my dad's bedroom, he can still see the old factory, with the old symbol of BH (recently painted) in a wall that faces home directly.



That's what is left of BH in Eibar. A sign. More or less what's left in the actual bikes, the BH sign is not even metal, just a sticker added to the Cambodian product.

Asia is big. They also produce terrific cinema. Danger, Lust, from Ang Lee. More sexual than Brokeback Mountain (particularly, more heterosexual, I may add), a must-see.