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Last posts

Bastille Day or Fête Nationale

Nancy Guzman Only-Be, Parisian, Practical Guide of Paris

June 14 is the Bastille Day or Fête Nationale and Paris dresses for the occasion. For those visiting the city this day becomes memorable because you may feel and experience the pride of the Parisians for its history, since it recalls the French Revolution and the end of the monarchy. July 14, like every year, Parisians gather to watch the parade live or on television. The parade led by the highest political authority, with foreign authorities invited, takes place during the morning at the Champs-Elysée. As every year, the show opens with the presentation of the cadets of the Ecole Polytechnique de Saint Cyr, École Navale. What is most striking is the overflight of aircraft of the Patrouille de France, leaving smoke trails in the air with the colors of the French flag. While this day is commemorated in a very political way, as the President may pardon convicts and meets with the press, in addition to a party in the gardens of the Palais de l´Elysée, the normal citizen participates in different festivals, decorating his home with tricolor banners and preparing to watch the fireworks. It´s called Bastille Day because July 14, 1789 the people of Paris over took the prison which was located in the Bastille, wich the symbol of the despotic reign of Louis XVI, marking the beginning of the French Revolution and of wishes fror Freedom , Equality and Fraternity which are symbolized in the three stripes of the French flag. On August 26, 1789 the Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Man, which defines the personal and collective rights as universal,... read more

The Cure concert in Rome

Mónica Boixeda Only-Be, Roman

The musical career of The Cure is one of the most unique and prolific in the history of rock and pop. The Cure is one of those bands that are essential to hear at some point in childhood, adolescence, and then as an adult, a bunch of different times, different musical styles combined in songs both happy with party mood but also dark and with introspection. At the time when we still heard the radio, The Cure was always on the top lists; this legendary British band has managed to cover in their songs so many emotions within the broad spectrum of the human psyche. All of course, thanks to the lyric of the charismatic Robert Smith, one of the best rock and pop composers of the last thirty years. The beginnings of The Cure are of course marked by “Three Imaginary Boys” (1979), their first album with a slight dark punk influence that was shown as a solid band but still with a lot to discover their full potential, both in the studio and on the new sounds composition. It is known that around 1979, The Cure was on tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees. Unexpectedly, the guitarist of the Banshees left the band and Robert Smith took his place during the rest of the tour, while still playing with The Cure. Based on this intense experience, Robert Smith got to know about the potential that his music could reach, a density much deeper and a new staging. As a result, the style of The Cure changed drastically, leading to their three classic albums of post punk: “Seventeen... read more

Regina Spektor Concert in Barcelona

Mónica Boixeda Barcelonian, Only-Be

Usually compared to ´War and Peace´, ´Life and Fate´ by Vassily Grossman (the first person to show the Nazi death camps to the world, an exhaustive catalogue of horrors that he chillingly documented in ´The Black Book´ along with Ilya Ehrenburg, a book banned by Stalin in order to avoid that the knowledge of the raging antisemitism got out together with the extent of his collaboration during the Jewish genocide) is considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. However, Grossman died in 1964 in Moscow without seeing it published. The Soviet authorities considered it so threatening for the regime that they even confiscated the tapes of the machine that it was written with and it wasn´t until 1980 that a copy of the manuscript finally managed to reach the printer. In it, in an admirable way characterized by a certain emphasis that can only be reached through the highest form of literature, Grossman denounced from left-wing positions the distortion of the communist revolution, which Stalin had turned, at least since the first political expulsions, into a regime along the lines of national-socialism. The Second World War was a turning point in this drift, strengthening Russian nationalism with a patriotism that had been despotically fomented and imposed by the government and, under Stalin´s supervision, increasing the persecution of Jewish citizens, millions of which were repressed in atrocious ways, ways which most of the time ended with their lives. That very same antisemitism, shown more subtly in the shape of quotas, which showed in the need to identify one self as Jewish and other types of restrictions of... read more