Street pianist plays on as Barcelona ignites with protests

[pesco]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/02/street-pianist-plays-on-as-barcelona-ignites-with-protests.html

…

[drinkingcoffee]

a video that is so 2020 it has a literal dumpster fire in it

[teknocholer]

Nearer My God To Thee - Titanic

[brokenwords]

Surreal

[gracchus]

The pianist = people living in not completely dysfunctional Western democracies.

The background action = the next several weeks in the U.S.

[belovedvillain]

I didn’t notice the pianist even flinch when a large bang hit. Dude must have spent time in a band with a drummer.

[RHK]

Gotta love musicians - the show must go on.

[sirdigbypollo]

The fire in the background provides a nice accompaniment to his musical choice.

[tyroney]

with no context it’s like a movie scene where you expect a mob or a police van to come barreling through at any moment

[Aleqi]

I miss Barcelona. I was very impressed by protests I saw when I stayed there. They have many street artists all over. The cops are scary there, jack boot thugs when orders dictate.

[politeruin]

I’ve picked my nomination for most 2020 moment i think.

Contest idea--what story is most representative of 2020?

i think this one is hard to beat–

[VeronicaConnor]

@Aleqi

The cops are scary there, jack boot thugs when orders dictate

Like many European countries, they were rather recently a brutal fascist state. People often forget that in a lot of these places that seem so progressive and enlightened.

[deltaecho]

@VeronicaConnor

Like many European countries, they were rather recently a brutal fascist state. People often forget that in a lot of these places that seem so progressive and enlightened.

Barcelona is the Austin/Boulder/San Francisco of Spain. Go out into the country (their Kansas, their Mississippi) and they still pine for the good old days of fascist Franco. Spanish nationalists literally want to Hacer España Grande Otra Vez

Spanish Vox party: Nationalists vow to 'make Spain great again'

[FGD135]

Just to avoid confusion, for which values of “many” and “recently”?

[Ron_Davidson]

Many: Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, (arguably) the former Soviet-bloc states, along with Albania, Yugoslavia.
Recently: Spain, 1975; Portugal, 1974(?); you might know about the others.

[jerwin]

Are you speaking of rural Catalonia, or one of the other rural regions of Spain?

[FGD135]

You forgot Austria, (arguably) San Marino and Greece.
Any country East of the Iron Curtain was under a dictatorship, but not a fascist one; same goes for Yugoslavia.
Leaving out Cyprus, that’s a ratio of 7 to 17. (Or 5 to 20 if we play fast and loose. And ignoring any country that wasn’t the USSR’s Sputnik before 1945 in both versions.)
With a value of > 45 years for “recent”, which I would round up to “roughly two generations”.

[Insert pointless quibble about semantics that goes nowhere.]