September 22, 2018
September 21, 2018
September 19, 2018
September 18, 2018
September 17, 2018
September 15, 2018
September 14, 2018
604 kilo bull from the Valdellan ranch
Fought bravely by Fernando Robleno in Madrid on September 9th, 2018.
September 12, 2018
September 11, 2018
Blue jeans and bullfighting
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| Juan Jose Padilla |
Every once in awhile you will see this, a matador has a close call with the bull's horn and it will rip the pants of the matador's traje de luces, but the horn does not gore the matador. (Such was the case with Juan Jose Padilla in Valladolid just 3 days ago on September 8th.)
The pants are so tight fitting and take such effort to get on there is no way the matador could just slip into another pair, so they have a pair of jeans handy that have been cut off and torn up the side a little bit, so the matador can just wear those over top of his torn costume and can continue with the corrida.
It can look a little strange but it is the next best thing they can do for the matador to continue.
It also always brings a smile to my face because it is a little contribution by the US to the Spanish bullfight seeing how blue jeans were pretty much invented in the US (in San Francisco during the gold rush days) and they are synonymous with US culture.
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History of Jeans: From Workpants to High Fashion
(by Yvette Mahe Ph.D. fashionintime.org 1-17-15)
Yves Saint-Laurent once stated that he wished he had invented blue jeans as jeans “are expressive and discreet, they have sex appeal and simplicity,-everything I could want for the clothes I design” (The Fashion Book, Levi Strauss Designer, 1998).
The purpose of this article is to examine the popularization of jeans since Levi Strauss invented the first blue jeans in the 1860s. A brief overview is provided to show how a garment that began as folk work clothes progressed over the years to become one of the most popular casual wear garb in modern society. What makes jeans so appealing is that they make no distinction between classes, sexes and age groups.
THE ORIGIN OF BLUE JEANS: LEVI STRAUSS
Levi Strauss, a pedlar who had immigrated to North America from Bavaria, followed the Gold Rush in California in the 1850s to sell his goods. The miners asked him for sturdy and durable work pants. With the help of a tailor, Strauss put together work pants that were supposedly made out of the canvas he had brought with him for the assembly of tents. In the 1860s, he began to fabricate pants made from heavyweight denim, and because the pants were dyed with indigo they were named “blue jeans”.
The original design of Levi Strauss blue jeans, Design 501, was influenced by the style of the loose trousers worn by Genoese sailors, a feature of which was the flared bottom to fit over work boots. Strauss selected a hardwearing fabric known as Serge de Nîmes (denim) which had gained popularity in France. Denim is heavy twill-woven cotton, a natural fiber that absorbs moisture quickly, dries quickly, and has a cooling effect when it is warm. Due to the expense of importing denim from France, Strauss likely obtained his supply from an American textile manufacturer (Dorner, 1974, p. 108-109; The Fashion Book, Levi Strauss Designer, 1998; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 356).
The Levi jeans were dyed with indigo as it was cheap and plentiful since Guimet, a Frenchmen, invented an artificial indigo in 1826, and a synthetic indigo became available in 1876. Indigo produces a dark blue color which is long-lasting and maintains its color fastness when laundered (Boucher, 1973, p. 388).
To make Levi jeans more durable, copper rivets were added to reinforce the points of stress in strategic places such as on the pocket corners. This innovation helped to stop the weight of the gold nuggets from tearing the pockets. In 1873, rivets were placed at the bottom of the button fly to prevent it from ripping. That same year, the back pockets of the jeans were reinforced by adding stitching in the shape of a double arc design using orange thread. On May 20, 1874, Levi Strauss and his partner, Jacob Davis, received U.S. Patent 139,121, for an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings” (Dorner, 1974, p. 108-109; Tortora & Eubanks, 2010, p. 356; Wikipedia, Jeans).
The original Levi Jeans Design 501 did not undergo too many changes over the years, with the exception of becoming tighter fitting. In the 1960s, preshrunk jeans known as Levi Design 505, a regular fit jean with a zipper fly opening rather than a button fly, became available. This design was followed by a slim boot- cut jean with a normal waistline known as Levi Design 517, and then a lower waistline jean referred to as Levi Design 527. Since the 1970s, Strauss & Co. have produced trendy styles such as the loose, comfort, relaxed, slim, and skinny jeans (Harris & Johnston, 1971, p. 221; Wikipedia, Jeans).
EARLY MANUFACTURERS OF JEANS: 1890-1950
Levi jeans were popular with the working folk such as miners, lumberjacks, cowboys, ranchers, farmers, factory workers and laborers as the pants were reputed to be tough, hardwearing, functional, comfortable and affordable. The increasing demand for hardwearing denim pants, or jeans, resulted in two other early companies wanting to capture a share of the working-folk market, namely, the H.D. Lee Mercantile Company, established in Kansas, USA in 1898, and the Western Garment Company (GWG), founded in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1911.
The Lee Company specialized in denim work wear, and by the 1950s they had expanded into casual wear. Since then, Lee Jeans have become popular worldwide (Lee Mercantile Company, 2014). The GWG Company originally started off by making hard-wearing clothing for the growing workforce. By the 1960s, GWG was producing casual denim clothing for the entire family. In 1963, Levis Strauss & Co. bought 75% of GWG (Cole, 2009; Wikipedia, GWG). Wrangler authentic western jeans appeared on the market in 1947, a brand that originated with Casey Jones who had acquired the Blue Bell Company a few years earlier. Wranglers were popular with the rodeo cowboys and cowgirls, and by 1996 one out of every five pairs of jeans sold in America featured a Wrangler label (Wrangler, 2014).
JEANS AS A LEVELER BETWEEN THE SEXES BEFORE 1960
Jeans had originally been designed as men’s work pants, but in the 1870s, Western women who worked along with men on ranches and farms began to wear men’s jeans. Savage (1996) refers to Willie Matthews, who in the 1870s outfitted herself in her brother’s clothes to get a job as a cowpuncher (p. 8). Laegreid (2006), who examined the gender role of women as cowgirls and rodeo royalty in the early 1900s, includes pictures in her book of cowgirls wearing jeans.
In 1930, Vogue magazine ran an advertisement depicting two society women in tight fitting jeans, a look that they called “Western chic.” By the mid-1930s, department stores were stocking Levis jeans and western boots in the women’s section. After World War II, jean manufacturers would offer a pant for women, similar to those of men, but with a side opening instead of a fly-front opening. It was not until 1958 that adjustments were made in the design of women’s jeans to account for the female shape, and in the 1960s, women’s jeans became available with the fly-front zipper opening (Dorner, 1974, p. 109; Lee Mercantile Company, 2014; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 476).
According to Anspach (1971), women started to appropriate themselves of men’s jeans, first as symbols of revolt to level off the effect between the sexes, then as sports clothes, and later on as casual wear (p. 332).
JEANS WORN BY CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS BEFORE 1960
As early as the 1930s, children’s blue jeans were in demand by parents who wanted hard wearing play clothes and every day wear. Some children wore jeans to school, but the teachers complained that the rivets on the back pockets made holes in the wooden school seats. As a result, manufacturers discontinued using rivets on children’s pants. Few schools allowed children to wear blue jeans, so to capture the school- aged market, GWG introduced coloured denim jeans in the 1940s (Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 488).
After WW II, jeans became the uniform of most adolescent males, and adolescent girls began to dress up in boy’s blue jeans for casual dress. To distinguish themselves from the males, the girls would roll up their jeans and some of them would add a leather patch on their derriere (Anspach, 1971, p. 315). Jeans became symbols of affiliation of the young through their similarity in dress, and of wanting more freedom from sexual stereotypes and the restrictions of parental and societal values (Harris & Johnston, 1971, p. 221; Sproles & Burns, 1994, p. 195).
JEANS AS A SYMBOL OF YOUTH REBELLION, 1950s-1960s
Jeans became a hot item with the youth in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the 1950s, jeans were popularized and glamorized by James Dean and Marlon Brando in movies such as Rebel without a Cause, and Blue Denim. These movies presented rebellious youth dressed up in blue jeans, black leather motorbike jackets and white T-shirts. In the 1960s, counter-culture youth protesting against the establishment wore jeans as a uniform of their connection, or to demonstrate their solidarity with the working class. Young people would embroider designs on their jeans, or add patches and paint messages on them showing their group slogan or association (Browning, 2000; Laver, 2002, p. 260; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 537).
JEANS AS MAINSTREAM CASUAL DRESS
In the 1960s, blue jeans were rare among adults and had not as yet been accepted in conventional places such as schools, restaurants, theaters, and offices. With improvements in the treatment of denim fabric by textile manufacturers over the years, and the creation of a number of jean styles to entice new customers, blue jeans would become a fashion staple in most people’s wardrobes by the 1980s. They also became a standard of casual and every day dress, even in offices. Jeans were generally worn with T-shirts or shirts, but for a dressier look men, for instance, would wear jeans with a sports jacket or a matching denim jacket, and with dressy shoes (Agins, 1999, p. 9; Browning, 2000; Laver, 2002, p. 47; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 576).
INNOVATIONS IN THE TREATMENT OF DENIM SINCE THE 1960s
For many years the denim used in the fabrication of blue jeans was rather coarse and susceptible to shrinking making the garment unappealing as casual wear dress until textile manufacturers invented new processes and techniques to improve the fabric. Since the 1960s, innovations in the production of denim have resulted in the availability of:
-Preshrunk or pre-washed jeans.
-Permanent pressed jeans that do not wrinkle, regardless of how they are worn, and never need ironing. The permanent-press process basically involves treating the fabric with resins, then using a special treatment known as “hot head press” to bake the finish into the garment after it is cut and manufactured (Anspach, 1971, p. 315; Harris & Johnston, 1971, p. 221).
-Stretch denim jeans which give a form fitting fit. Briefly, the process involves combining spun elastane fibers that are composed of polyurethane filaments with other yarns (The Indian Textile Journal, 2012).
-Distressed or worn looking jeans. Different chemicals and techniques called stone-wash or acid-wash give denim a used and soft look, and special dyeing and finishing methods produce a faded or streaked look in a wide variety of colors. By 2002, specialty manufacturers were making replicas of well-worn jeans, and to make them look authentic they added worn spots, stains, tears, and repairs to the jeans (Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 601, 606; Wikipedia, Jeans).
The technological advances in the treatment of denim resulted in companies using blue denim and colored denim to make jackets, suits, shirts, shorts, and hats for the whole family, and women’s skirts. Even haute couture designers will use denim fabric in their collections to create daring and avant-garde attire (Laver, 2002, p. 262; Stone, 2008, p. 560; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 606).
JEAN STYLES SINCE THE 1960s
After the 1960s, clothing manufacturers would introduce a variety of jean styles in retail stores to persuade the sexes and age groups to buy them (Harris & Johnston, 1971, p. 221; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 570). Beginning in the 1970s, designer jeans would make their appearance in high-end shops. In 1970, Calvin Klein promoted his designer jeans as refined sportswear. In the 1980s, designers such as Gloria Vanderbilt, Ralph Lauren, and Jean-Paul Gaultier marketed their brands. Guess Inc., Jordach, and others would also cash in on the designer jeans boom. Some designer jeans could be quite fanciful. For instance, in the late 1990s, the Milanese house of Gucci presented feather-trim and feather embroidered jeans (Agins, 1999, p. 85, 119-120, 209; Laver, 2002, 282-283; Lee, 2003, p. 123, 165-166; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 549).
There have been a number of notable jeans styles since the 1960s such as bell-bottom jeans, baggy jeans, distressed looking jeans, skin-tight jeans, and low-rise and peek-a-boo jeans, to name a few.
Bell-bottom Jeans. In 1969 bell-bottoms jeans were introduced on the market and became quite popular with men and women. However, the flared shape lost its appeal after a few years. This particular style made its reappearance in the 1990s for a short period of time (Browning, 2000; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 643).
Baggy Jeans. Baggy jeans or saggy jeans became stylish with subculture groups, the hip hop set in the 1990s, and even the skateboarders. These pants were overly large in size. They were worn low on the hips revealing much of the underwear, and they sagged at the crotch level. Tommy Jeans featured a number of baggy styles that were favored by the hip-hop set. The baggy look did not hit mainstream (Agins, 1999, p. 121; Laver, 2002, p. 262; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 608).
Distressed Jeans. Around the mid-1980s young people were dressing up as bohemians in beat-up looking jeans. They wore ripped jeans with leather jackets and T-shirts; they colored their hair in unusual colors and wore multiple earrings (The People History). Trend following clothing manufacturers noticed that young people were slashing their jeans themselves so they introduced jeans with a worn, torn, and faded look (Laver, 2001, p. 291; Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 606-607). But, the youth found the price of distressed jeans outrageous. The 1988 Lauren Double RL Jeans, for example, sold between $70 and $150, and as Agins (1999) points out young people could find worn and faded jeans at vintage clothing shops for a third of that price (p. 120). By 2002, companies were making authentic looking replicas of well-worn jeans with a price tag that ranged between $150 and $200, but retailers such as Gap would eventually offer distressed jeans for less than $50 (Tortora & Eubank, 2010, p. 601, 606; Wikipedia, Jeans).
Tight-fitting Jeans. Ralph Lauren tried to capture the western wear market in 1978 by offering an alternative design to the Wrangler and Lee jeans with his line of tight-fitting jeans. In 1979 the Buffalo label also came out with skin-tight jeans. Skin-tight jeans were sometimes worn at least two inches too small for a person’s waist, and getting into them was a struggle. Certain wearers would require assistance to get into them. The tightest fitting jeans in existence were referred to as French Jeans (Agins, 1999, p. 112, 119; Sproles & Burns, 1994, p. 155). In the early 1980s, the Gloria Vanderbuilt designer jeans that hugged a person’s derriere were the best-selling jeans in America (The Fashion Book, 1998, Gloria Vanderbuilt).
For men who wanted a bulging crotch to show underneath their skin-tight jeans, Lee Cooper released the Pack-it Jean in the 1970s. This trend was of a short duration, but the Pack-it Jean was re-released in 2001 (Lee, 2003, p. 166).
Low-rise and Peek-a-boo Jeans. In 1992 Alexander McQueen produced the Bumster jeans, tight-fitting pants with a waist that hung so low on the hips that the wearer’s rear cleavage was exposed. Baring the butt crack was a familiar sight in the 2000s. During that period of time Levis introduced its line of Dangerously Low jeans for women and men, and Old Navy was selling in its stores ultra-low-rise jeans. The lowest of the lows on the rise on a pair Frankie B. jeans was alleged to be just three inches whereas the regular cut Levi’s had a rise of ten inches. In the fall of 2001, Lee Cooper in the UK launched Butt Couture, a line of jeans made from lightweight denim designed intentionally with a gap between the waistband and the pants to create a peek-a-boo effect (Lee, 2003, p. 28-31).
Pop singers like Christian Aguilera, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Britney Spears are known for having worn jeans so low and snug while dancing that people were concerned that they would pop right out of their jeans or bust a seam (Lee, 2003, p. 28-31). Although some pop stars may look very sexy in their tight jeans, the consumer must be aware that not all jean styles and fads may compliment their figure.
Lee (2003) refers to medical evidence in her book that has led some doctors to conclude that tight-fitting jeans can create health problems. Doctors noticed, for example, that when the men who had complained of stomach problems, including heartburn and distension switched to baggy pants their symptoms disappeared. In the case of women, the wearing of tight pants can result in endometriosis, one of the top three causes of female infertility. In addition, tight waists may also cause a number of vascular problems. Lee concludes that, “It goes to show that Fashion Victims can fall for the most uncomfortable trends, like skintight jeans” (p, 224-225).
CONCLUSION
In the past, blue jeans were identified with the American folk culture, but since the 1970s they have become an increasingly popular article of casual dress around the world. They are worn in business, government, professional offices, educational institutions, and in most public places. Jeans are one of the most simple, versatile, and enduring garments in modern society because they make no distinction between classes, sexes, and age groups. But, as Sproles & Burns (1994) point out, social saturation sets in, and some fashions or styles fade in popularity and are usually replaced with new trends that encourage people to buy unnecessarily the new designs (p. 171).
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http://www.fashionintime.org/history-jeans/
September 10, 2018
Fernando Robleno in Madrid, September 9th, 2018
photos by Paloma Aguilar
"Navarro" from the Valdellan ranch
September 9, 2018
The "Goya" festivals
(photo by Elsa Vielzeuf)
more to come
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| Juan Bautista in Arles, France September, 2018 |
(mundotoro.com 9-8-18)
El público del anfiteatro de Arles acudió a la plaza aún conmocionado con la noticia de la retirada de Juan Bautista al final de temporada. El maestro anfitrión por la ocasión quiso devolverle el cariño a su público en lo que es su penúltima corrida goyesca. Puso el listón alto puesto que cuajó de principio a fin a un buen ejemplar de Victoriano Del Río. Embistió con clase el animal, y como no, permitió a Juan Bautista firmar una obra donde el temple y el regusto fueron las bases. Los despachó a recibir y cortó dos orejas.
El cuarto quiso bajar pronto la persiana, pero era sin contar con el acuerdo de Juan Bautista. Sin dejarle mas remedios, el torero de Arles se inventó una faena. Preciso en cada toque, consiguió algo impensable, firmar muletazos importantes. Interminables fueron los naturales arrancados con el pase del cartucho. ¿De verdad se va ir este torero? Una pena porque todavía hay torero para un rato… Logró una oreja.
Castella siempre respondió presente en los acontecimientos. Hoy tampoco defraudó y volvió a exhibir su mejor versión. Extraordinario fue el quinto, embistiendo con codicia y por abajo, Castella no lo dejó escapar. Inició su faena con los pendulos desde el centro del ruedo poniendo boca abajo a la plaza. Hubo ligazón en las tandas por ambos pitones. Lo toreó a placer y cortó dos orejas tras dos avisos mientras el toro dio una vuelta al ruedo.
Al segundo de la tarde no le sobró la fuerza y lo acusó en toda su lidia, pues perdió las manos en varias ocasiones. Castella estuvo firme con el logrando sacar tandas estimables. Desde luego la faena no pudo tomar vuelo. Palmas tras aviso.
José María Manzanares tuvo que componer con un astado que se entregó poco en tercer lugar. El alicantino dejó algunos detalles de buen gusto. Silencio tras aviso.
No tuvo suerte tampoco con el sexto Manzanares. Pues el animal se estrelló contra un burladero en el último par de banderillas. El alicantino lo pruebo pero el animal no pudo. Fue silenciado.
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| Juan Bautista in Arles, France September, 2013 |
(mundotoro.com 9-7-13)
Arles (Francia). El Juli hizo de su regreso a la plaza de toros de Arles un momento memorable: indultó al segundo de la tarde, un excelente toro de Domingo Hernández, de nombre 'Veronés' y se inventó una faena con el cuarto, con el que no acertó con la espada. Salió en hombros junto a Juan Bautista, que no se amilanó en ningún momento y firmó una actuación de alto nivel: cortó cuatro orejas. Gran espectáculo el que brindaron los dos toreros. Completaba el cartel Enrique Ponce, que nada pudo hacer con su lote salvo demostrar disposición. Se lidiaron toros de Domingo Hernández. Otra buena noticia, la entrada: lleno.
El Juli indultó al segundo toro de la tarde, un ejemplar de Domingo Hernández al que recibió por verónicas. El toro empujó en el caballo y el de Velilla hizo crujir el Coliseo con un quite por chicuelinas. Replicó Bautista por gaoneras. Ya con la muleta, tras brindar al público, se dobló con él hasta los medios para después, citándolo largo, lo toreó sobre el derecho con profundidad, largura y mano baja. El toro se arrancó con alegría y repitió, en otra tanda sobre esa mano. al natural, naturales muy templados y largos, y el toro embistiendo con clase. Regresó después a la derecha, para cerrar con muletazos de mano baja y molinetes. La plaza empezó a pedir el indulto, que finalmente le fue concedido, tras escuchar un aviso.
Enseñó a embestir al quinto de la tarde, con el que Bautista había firmado un quite por chicuelinas. El Juli lo sometió en los medios a base de muletazos poderosos, para embarcar las embestidas del toro. Acabó metido entre los pitones y cerró la faena, en la que lo puso todo él, con manoletias muy ceñidas. La espada no le acompañó y fue ovacionado.
Juan Bautista no se quiso dejar ganar la pelea en ningún momento y cortó las dos orejas del tercero, al que recibió de rodillas. El francés fue haciendo poco a poco a un toro noble de Domingo Hernández, en una faena de corte clásico, que contó con buenos derechazos y templados naturales. Para cerrar, pases en redondo, cambios de mano y muletazos sin ayuda. Tras un estoconazo fulminante, paseó las dos orejas. El sexto fue un buen toro de Domingo Hernández, al que Bautista lanceó a la verónica de recibo. Después, ya con la franela, lo toreó sobre la derecha y el toro repitió con codicia y haciendo el avión. Lo templó mucho y el temple se mantuvo en el toreo al natural, con dos buenas series. Tras un estoconazo, cortó las dos orejas.
Enrique Ponce trató con mucha suavidad al primero de la tarde, tanto en el recibimiento por verónicas como en la faena de muleta, que contó con pasajes de toreo despacioso sobre la mano derecha. Se demoró con la espada y todo quedó en silencio. Bajo la lluvia recibió Ponce al cuarto, un toro reservón, que protestó mucho y fue deslucido. El de Chiva trató de meterle en la canasta por la zurda, aunque su esfuerzo fue en vano. Cortó la faena, cobró media estocada y un golpe de verduguillo.
'Nuestros caminos volveran a cruzarse en torno a una plaza de toros'
(mundotoro.com 9-8-18)
Juan Bautista se retira de los ruedos al finalizar la temporada. El diestro de Arlés ha anunciado esta mañana en una comparecencia pública que ha decidido poner punto y final a su carrera tras la conclusión de la presente campaña. Su última corrida en España será el próximo 6 de octubre en la feria de El Pilar de Zaragoza.
El torero francés –que deja atrás una carrera brillante, con más de 700 corridas de toros y tres Puertas Grandes de Madrid– ha anunciado que la decisión sólo tendrá una excepción: Despedirse de la profesión en la Goyesca de Arles de 2019, única ocasión en la que toreará la próxima temporada, para celebrar sus 20 años de alternativa.
En un emotivo encuentro con los medios de comunicación y tras recibir tres galardones como triunfador de la pasada temporada en Francia, Juan Bautista ha leído un comunicado en el que ha expuesto los motivos que le han impulsado a tomar esta decisión.
“El fallecimiento de mi padre hace unos meses me cambio la vida. Ahora mismo tengo otras responsabilidades que me ocupan tiempo y no permiten estar al cien por cien con mi cabeza puesta en mi profesión como he estado siempre”, ha señalado un emocionado Juan Bautista quien subrayó: “Mi padre me inculcó siempre que para ser torero hay que estar al cien por cien metido en el toro. Siempre lo tuve muy claro y siempre lo lleve a cabo menos estos últimos meses, que no lo consigo completamente por todo lo que me ha tocado vivir”.
Juan Bautista admitió que la decisión “ha sido muy reflexionada” y que “lo tenía decidido desde hace unos meses”. Y aseguró que se va “satisfecho y orgulloso de haber dignificado mi profesión durante todos estos años”.
En el comunicado, el diestro francés afirma: “las grandes decisiones hay que tomarlas en el momento oportuno. Y mi momento es ahora. No quiero que sea el toro o el público el que me diga que es el momento de decir adiós, prefiero ser yo el que lo haga”.
En su intervención, Juan Bautista reveló que continuará vinculado a La Tauromaquia como responsable, junto con su hermana Lola, de la gestión de la plaza de toros de Arles y que tiene otros proyectos y objetivos, algunos de ellos ligados al mundo de los toros.
Juan Bautista tuvo palabras de agradecimiento para todos sus seguidores, para los ganaderos, empresarios, medios de comunicación, además de todas las cuadrillas y profesionales que han estado junto a él en estos años.
Admitió Juan Bautista que se va “feliz” y que a partir de ahora quiere aprender “a vivir una vida normal”. A modo de conclusión, un deseo: “Quisiera dejar en la profesión un bonito y buen recuerdo. De eso trata el toreo y de eso trata la vida”.
Todos los presentes rompieron en una fuerte e intensa ovación hacia el diestro que se dirigió a todos: “Esto es sólo un cambio de etapa, nuestros caminos volverán a cruzarse en torno a una plaza de toros. A nuestra pasión”.
September 8, 2018
Plaza de toros de Cehegin
(from the Twitter page of Paco Abril)
Que hermoso que está el pino! Plaza de toros de Cehegin, la única del mundo con un árbol dando sombra en el tendido.
September 7, 2018
The Other Runs...
First published in the New City Club Taurino magazine, summer issue 2018
https://thepamplonapost.com/2018/09/02/the-other-runs-from-the-new-york-city-club-taurino-magazine/
(by Alexander Fiske-Harrison thepamplonapost.com 9-2-18)
Last year there were 17,920 “spectacles or popular celebrations, in which they play or run cattle according to the traditional uses of the locality”, in the Ministry of Culture’s ever elegant phrasing. These ranged from the grand encierros – which count as 8 events in this type of census – of Pamplona in honour of San Fermín, to the little sueltas – release of three year old vacas, one at a time one, down the high street into a fenced circle where the local young braves practice their cortes and recortes – in the village of Funes, population 2,000, in honour of San Isidro.
(I visited there last year at the invitation of Matt Doswett and I elected to join the three or four people sprinting the ‘straight’ in the after-dinner suelta, each time letting the vaca – and one torito – get closer and closer to my coat-tails before I dived behind a burladero at full tilt. This culminated in the only time I’ve ever been – or ever seen – a runner summoned into the street to receive a round of applause, rotating on joined feet, hand half-raised al matador, from a particularly excitable post-prandial populace.)
Unlike every other number in the world of the bulls, the number of these festejos populares is growing, up every year from 13,815 in 2013 – when reliable records begin – onwards. For comparison the number of bullfights – of all varieties – was 1,553 last year, down from 3,651 ten years before, with a mere 387 corridas, down from 953 during the same period (although at least there was one more in 2017 than in 2016!)
What is also interesting is the distribution: almost 80% of bullfights were held in a mere four of Spain’s nineteen regions – the Community of Madrid, the two Castiles and in Andalusia – over 80% of these popular festivals are also held in four, although these are – also in order – the Community of Valencia, the two Castiles and Navarre (interestingly on an internal political note, Navarre has ten times the number of such festejos as the Basque Country, and double the number of corridas.)
These numbers are extraordinary, with El Pais estimating in an article last year that 1 in 4 of Spain’s towns and cities hold an event with a res brava, an example of ‘fierce cattle’, of some description.
While it is easy to see the empirical evidence, what is far harder to understand is why. What change has occurred among the peoples of the Spanish Kingdom that getting up close and personal with a wild horned thing, or watching some other amateur do it, has become so much more popular while paying to watch trained professionals do something far more interesting with the largest and most fierce examplars of the breed has become less so?
I remember reading one taurine critic at the beginning of the decade suggesting that the excess of cheap cattle of the fighting breed may have had something to do with it, the rise of the so-called “red-brick fincas”, ganaderias founded in an attempt to gentrify new money earned during the most recent economic bubble. However, while that may explain the initial upsurge, the growth since 2013 has been during a period which the number ganaderias has decreased each year (admittedly only by 12 in total, still leaving a vast oversupply at 1,329.)
Is it the fact that these events are mainly bloodless? Has the modern mind turned away from injury and death in front of an audience – whatever else the corrida contains, it undeniably contains that – so much so that it can no longer bear to witness it? Well, in a way yes, but the real answer is subtler and more profound than this.
Each person in the Western world is responsible for dealing out far more suffering – in the form of fear in the slaughterhouse – and death through their consumption of meat than any of their far cruder and coarser ancestors. They just don’t want to see it happen.
That said, a great deal of the arguments that are used against bullfighting are also used against bull-running by animal rights groups (although many explicitly say that on the grounds of pragmatism they will happily start by getting the corrida banned, and only then go to work on the encierro that leads to it – the slippery slope of illiberalism is steeper and better greased than many realise.)
However, there is also a social and generational shift going on which in some ways is eternal, but in others is a child of the 1960s. A decade that marked the rest of Europe and the US, but took Spain a while to catch up to and which is a rebellion of youth against the deference-requiring triumvirate of tradition, ritual and status.
And what could embody that these than the world of matador, their cuadrillas – teams – and their bulls: a world of of gold, silver and leather. It was Orson Welles who first saw it when describing El Cordobés to Kenneth Tynan as the ‘Beatnik bullfighter’, and that has happened with various toreros since.
The present example of this is José Tomás’s rebellions on all fronts – not only against the normal canons of a taurine career (see Michael Wigram’s excellent and surprisingly balanced essay Tirar Del Caro, ‘Pulling The Cart’, to feel his anger on this), but also bowing to either king, God, or even the people’s modern religion, television. His combination of these defiances with his extraordinarily moving toreo, and an utter contempt for risk, mean that he makes other matadors look like mere journeymen and their choices like a form of complicity with the something old school, aka The Establishment. This heady cocktail of greater ability with his own sense of his superiority to this highly structured institution runs the risk of not only not saving the modern bullfight, as many short-sighted commentators thought, but overseeing and even hastening its demise – he comes, without Mark Antony’s sarcasm, not to praise Caesar but to bury him.
However, even these sociological musings do not exhaustively explain the increase in bull-running. One wonders in more metaphysical moments if it was Spain’s reaction to modern thinking itself. The French and Germans answered the problems of a universe in which Death exists but God does not with Existentialism, with Sartre and Heidegger. Perhaps the Spanish answer is turn their backs on all temples, even the plaza, and invite Death directly into the streets in order to play with him themselves…
Whatever the reasons, a comprehensive afición, and thus a complete aficionado, should know something of the smaller runs, just as a true lover of horses will know not just the English Grand National and the American Kentucky Derby, but all races down to village point-to-points (as well as polo, dressage and show-jumping as well.)
And where better to start than Cuéllar, the oldest of them all – suitably set in Old Castile – whose Feria of Nuestra Señora del Rosario begins on the last Saturday of every August.
Now, there is a long-standing tradition that Cuéllar’s encierro existed before the letter from Pope Innocent III, dated 1215 A.D., banning priests from running. However, this was unlikely to be an encierro as we know them today, and the particular phrasing actually refers to something more like a capea, an informal bullfight, than an encierro.
That said, they do definitely predate those of Pamplona and may well have led to them, since the Dukes of Alberquerque – 3rd to 5th – whose castle and court were in Cuéllar, were made Viceroys of Navarre in the mid-16th century, and the first records of encierros in Pamplona were at the end of the 16th, which would indicate at least circumstantially that the Duke or his men brought the tradition with them.
I first arrived in Cuéllar in 2012 and have run every year since, usually taking part in – subject to the vagaries of mood, wine and broken ribs – between one and all of five of the encierros (three with three-year-old novillos, two with full toros of four to six.)
From a runner’s perspective, it is, in the words of Texan rodeo champion and 40-year veteran of the encierros of Pamplona, Larry Belcher, “a PhD in bull-running”, one with a thesis titled, ‘Surviving The Suelto’. [Note: A suelto is a loose bull outside the herd that reacts aggressively, charging everything, as in the ring, rather than calmly trying to stay with the herd – Ed.]
It is a rare enough thing that the bulls all enter the town – guided by the 300 horses, this run includes an encierro del campo – at the embudo as a herd, and even rarer that they make it round the various corners and slopes that comprise the encierro de la calle as one. On the Avenida Toros, the straight leading to the plaza, it is not at all rare to find oneself running one suelto up the street only to find another coming back in the opposite direction.
Of course, the most impressive spectacle of all is to run the embudo itself, facing not only whatever segment of the herd of toros and cabestros is coming first, but also the escorting brigade of lancers thundering alongside them. Many is the time I’ve stood there with Jordan Tipples, Angus Ritchie and Bill Hillmann, which has been fun given the vagaries of friendship among our group of elite egos (ahem.)
It is not hard to see why the bulls so often come out of this broken down (if not outright lost, as has happened more than once.) However, when they get it right, it can produce serviceable bulls in the ring.
In 2016 I sat with Jim Hollander in that plaza and saw his – and note not only are Jim’s 50 sanfermines being celebrated in Pamplona this year, but that he grew up in Spain – first indulto, ‘pardoned’ bull.
There is no denying the matador responsible, David Mora, performed excellently – as did Curro Diáz – but also the bulls were good. So good in fact, the head of the House of Domecq – in seniority if not profit margins – the former rejoneador Álvaro came and said hello. It turns out that the bulls were descended from his own ganadería of Torrestrella, a favourite of Pamplona. Such bulls took the encierro well within their stride, did not separate and thus could not be lured to exhaust themselves on the barriers, and so came back in to the ring that evening with sufficient spirit to dance and die well, albeit with fewer tandas, ‘series’, of passes than you would find in their home town of Jerez de la Frontera.
The finest corridas to be found after encierros are – from the point of view of bullfighting – in San Sebastián de los Reyes, ‘Sanse’, whose Feria de Cristo de los Remedios often partially overlaps with Cuéllar.
On the outskirts of Madrid, Sanse has long been a post-Pamplona favourite among the Anglo-American crowd. It even has its own Foreigner of the Year celebrations – last year it was our American friend Stephen Ibarra, this year our British friend Gareth Cooper – hosted by the ‘pastor’, herdsman, Paco Sanz, who is himself Personality of the Year this year, and whose bars and restaurants are the centre of the fiesta there, Taberna El Foro and El Foro Real 52. (The other great pastor there, and a great recortador is Miguel Ángel Castander, who went one further by actually putting on my jacket first. One day, he said, the jacket will run the encierros on its own.)
Sanse is a good fast encierro around the 800 yard mark, which, although crowded by other encierro’s standards, never reaches the crowds of Pamplona, and has two other great advantages: almost everyone knows how to run, and the bulls are not required to be Pamplona size. These two facts tend produce uninjured bulls of manageable size and charge for toreros like José Maria Manzanares to turn at command and die on request with something approaching the artistic merit and beauty of the Andalusian rings.
(Speaking of toreros de arte and Andalusia, the great matador José Antonio Morante de la Puebla’s town, La Puebla del Río – a satellite of Seville – has for four years now had an encierro of novillos on the feast of San Sebastían –January 20th – with a rocket lit by the Maestro himself, ending in a portatíl – temporary bull-ring – where later a novillada is held. Next year I shall be found there without fail.)
However, for those who think the encierro is synonymous with Navarran red and white and piping and drumming, there are the encierros of Tafalla a couple of weeks earlier. A peaceful little town 25 minutes by train down the line from Pamplona, I was first brought there – with Deirdre Carney – by Victor Lombardi and Erik Whiteway on their great trip around the smaller runs of 2013. (There’s a story involving the three of us, some cattle and a phone booth in a village called Santacara which I will recount another time – needless to say the advice is don’t hide from bulls in phone booths. They have no problem with ripping them out of the ground.)
Again, Tafalla is a simple tarmac affair comparable to Pamplona but with smaller toros, there are also far fewer people than in Sanse, and all know what they are doing. However, this dearth of people and Navarran location result in crowds turning up to see recortadores but not matadores, and the smaller box-office thus pulls smaller names, and I’ve never seen a corrida there worth a damn or a dime. (This year David Mora dropped out due to injury, and his replacement, Miguel Abellán and the other matador of some note, Daniel Luque, were described by one local taurine critic as looking as though they were on a visit to the dentist when they entered the ring.)
However, what it does have right next door is a second encierro which must have the highest ratio of spectators to runners I have ever witnessed. Falces is famous for having the “run of runs”, El Pilón, a mountain goat-path down which they stampede up to a dozen full grown vacas of the now relict Navarran encaste with their long twisting horns – including those of famed Pamplona pastor Miguel Reta – accompanied by a few dozen hardy runners.
This is a run which no one in the car in which I first travelled to it – at speed, directly following the encierro in Tafalla – was willing to run, neither were any of the noted runners whose hands I shook on my way up the goat-path. The very top is where a group of older runners – a dozen maybe – who have the marks of generations in this place written upon them run the flat, escaping up-slope.
The lower section is vertiginously steep and run mainly by men far younger than my own forty years when I last joined them, trusting to their ankles not their eyes on the steep slope, no more than fifty in total, with a sheer, broken glass-sharp stonewall on their right, a hundred foot drop down the gorge on their left, and hell-in-leather running hell-for-leather behind them. It remains the only encierro that makes me feel like I did on July 12th, 2009, on my first ever encierro (with my friends the Miuras, as it happens.)
There are many other runs: I could personally speak of Estella, the encierro I ran whilst not officially even being there (a story for another time), or Medina del Campo, which also has a horseback cross-country element, and is shaped like a horseshoe so you can cut across and run twice, where I ran with the great taurine journalist, Chapu Apalaoza, the voice of the Fundacíon Toro de Lidia, ‘Fighting Bull Foundation’, with whom I am currently working in an attempt to roll back the tide of anti-taurine propaganda which one day will not just take the corridas from us, but the encierros and eventually the toros themselves as well.
Soon, I hope, I will be able to invite people to join Foundation as a friend or members in support of the bulls, but in the meantime, I can only point you to buy a copy of The Bulls Of Pamplona the book I co-wrote and edited. My co-authors include the Mayor of Pamplona, John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson – great aficionados of both the bulls and the city – along with the great American runner Joe Distler who has run there since 1968, the Texan rodeo champion Larry Belcher who also ran there for forty years, a tactical and strategic breakdown of the run today by Captain Dennis Clancey of the 101st Airborne Division, as well as tips and pointers by the great Basque and Spanish runners like Julen Madina, Miguel Ángel Eguiluz and Jokin Zuasti, and photos by the European Pressphoto Agency – and before that Reuters – senior photographer Jim Hollander, who when not embedded in half the wars around the world ran the bulls in the ’60s and ’70s until he was put in hospital by two Miura bulls in 1977 and returned to photograph every Fiesta since.
https://thepamplonapost.com/2018/09/02/the-other-runs-from-the-new-york-city-club-taurino-magazine/
(by Alexander Fiske-Harrison thepamplonapost.com 9-2-18)
Last year there were 17,920 “spectacles or popular celebrations, in which they play or run cattle according to the traditional uses of the locality”, in the Ministry of Culture’s ever elegant phrasing. These ranged from the grand encierros – which count as 8 events in this type of census – of Pamplona in honour of San Fermín, to the little sueltas – release of three year old vacas, one at a time one, down the high street into a fenced circle where the local young braves practice their cortes and recortes – in the village of Funes, population 2,000, in honour of San Isidro.
(I visited there last year at the invitation of Matt Doswett and I elected to join the three or four people sprinting the ‘straight’ in the after-dinner suelta, each time letting the vaca – and one torito – get closer and closer to my coat-tails before I dived behind a burladero at full tilt. This culminated in the only time I’ve ever been – or ever seen – a runner summoned into the street to receive a round of applause, rotating on joined feet, hand half-raised al matador, from a particularly excitable post-prandial populace.)
Unlike every other number in the world of the bulls, the number of these festejos populares is growing, up every year from 13,815 in 2013 – when reliable records begin – onwards. For comparison the number of bullfights – of all varieties – was 1,553 last year, down from 3,651 ten years before, with a mere 387 corridas, down from 953 during the same period (although at least there was one more in 2017 than in 2016!)
What is also interesting is the distribution: almost 80% of bullfights were held in a mere four of Spain’s nineteen regions – the Community of Madrid, the two Castiles and in Andalusia – over 80% of these popular festivals are also held in four, although these are – also in order – the Community of Valencia, the two Castiles and Navarre (interestingly on an internal political note, Navarre has ten times the number of such festejos as the Basque Country, and double the number of corridas.)
These numbers are extraordinary, with El Pais estimating in an article last year that 1 in 4 of Spain’s towns and cities hold an event with a res brava, an example of ‘fierce cattle’, of some description.
While it is easy to see the empirical evidence, what is far harder to understand is why. What change has occurred among the peoples of the Spanish Kingdom that getting up close and personal with a wild horned thing, or watching some other amateur do it, has become so much more popular while paying to watch trained professionals do something far more interesting with the largest and most fierce examplars of the breed has become less so?
I remember reading one taurine critic at the beginning of the decade suggesting that the excess of cheap cattle of the fighting breed may have had something to do with it, the rise of the so-called “red-brick fincas”, ganaderias founded in an attempt to gentrify new money earned during the most recent economic bubble. However, while that may explain the initial upsurge, the growth since 2013 has been during a period which the number ganaderias has decreased each year (admittedly only by 12 in total, still leaving a vast oversupply at 1,329.)
Is it the fact that these events are mainly bloodless? Has the modern mind turned away from injury and death in front of an audience – whatever else the corrida contains, it undeniably contains that – so much so that it can no longer bear to witness it? Well, in a way yes, but the real answer is subtler and more profound than this.
Each person in the Western world is responsible for dealing out far more suffering – in the form of fear in the slaughterhouse – and death through their consumption of meat than any of their far cruder and coarser ancestors. They just don’t want to see it happen.
That said, a great deal of the arguments that are used against bullfighting are also used against bull-running by animal rights groups (although many explicitly say that on the grounds of pragmatism they will happily start by getting the corrida banned, and only then go to work on the encierro that leads to it – the slippery slope of illiberalism is steeper and better greased than many realise.)
However, there is also a social and generational shift going on which in some ways is eternal, but in others is a child of the 1960s. A decade that marked the rest of Europe and the US, but took Spain a while to catch up to and which is a rebellion of youth against the deference-requiring triumvirate of tradition, ritual and status.
And what could embody that these than the world of matador, their cuadrillas – teams – and their bulls: a world of of gold, silver and leather. It was Orson Welles who first saw it when describing El Cordobés to Kenneth Tynan as the ‘Beatnik bullfighter’, and that has happened with various toreros since.
The present example of this is José Tomás’s rebellions on all fronts – not only against the normal canons of a taurine career (see Michael Wigram’s excellent and surprisingly balanced essay Tirar Del Caro, ‘Pulling The Cart’, to feel his anger on this), but also bowing to either king, God, or even the people’s modern religion, television. His combination of these defiances with his extraordinarily moving toreo, and an utter contempt for risk, mean that he makes other matadors look like mere journeymen and their choices like a form of complicity with the something old school, aka The Establishment. This heady cocktail of greater ability with his own sense of his superiority to this highly structured institution runs the risk of not only not saving the modern bullfight, as many short-sighted commentators thought, but overseeing and even hastening its demise – he comes, without Mark Antony’s sarcasm, not to praise Caesar but to bury him.
However, even these sociological musings do not exhaustively explain the increase in bull-running. One wonders in more metaphysical moments if it was Spain’s reaction to modern thinking itself. The French and Germans answered the problems of a universe in which Death exists but God does not with Existentialism, with Sartre and Heidegger. Perhaps the Spanish answer is turn their backs on all temples, even the plaza, and invite Death directly into the streets in order to play with him themselves…
Whatever the reasons, a comprehensive afición, and thus a complete aficionado, should know something of the smaller runs, just as a true lover of horses will know not just the English Grand National and the American Kentucky Derby, but all races down to village point-to-points (as well as polo, dressage and show-jumping as well.)
And where better to start than Cuéllar, the oldest of them all – suitably set in Old Castile – whose Feria of Nuestra Señora del Rosario begins on the last Saturday of every August.
Now, there is a long-standing tradition that Cuéllar’s encierro existed before the letter from Pope Innocent III, dated 1215 A.D., banning priests from running. However, this was unlikely to be an encierro as we know them today, and the particular phrasing actually refers to something more like a capea, an informal bullfight, than an encierro.
That said, they do definitely predate those of Pamplona and may well have led to them, since the Dukes of Alberquerque – 3rd to 5th – whose castle and court were in Cuéllar, were made Viceroys of Navarre in the mid-16th century, and the first records of encierros in Pamplona were at the end of the 16th, which would indicate at least circumstantially that the Duke or his men brought the tradition with them.
I first arrived in Cuéllar in 2012 and have run every year since, usually taking part in – subject to the vagaries of mood, wine and broken ribs – between one and all of five of the encierros (three with three-year-old novillos, two with full toros of four to six.)
From a runner’s perspective, it is, in the words of Texan rodeo champion and 40-year veteran of the encierros of Pamplona, Larry Belcher, “a PhD in bull-running”, one with a thesis titled, ‘Surviving The Suelto’. [Note: A suelto is a loose bull outside the herd that reacts aggressively, charging everything, as in the ring, rather than calmly trying to stay with the herd – Ed.]
It is a rare enough thing that the bulls all enter the town – guided by the 300 horses, this run includes an encierro del campo – at the embudo as a herd, and even rarer that they make it round the various corners and slopes that comprise the encierro de la calle as one. On the Avenida Toros, the straight leading to the plaza, it is not at all rare to find oneself running one suelto up the street only to find another coming back in the opposite direction.
Of course, the most impressive spectacle of all is to run the embudo itself, facing not only whatever segment of the herd of toros and cabestros is coming first, but also the escorting brigade of lancers thundering alongside them. Many is the time I’ve stood there with Jordan Tipples, Angus Ritchie and Bill Hillmann, which has been fun given the vagaries of friendship among our group of elite egos (ahem.)
It is not hard to see why the bulls so often come out of this broken down (if not outright lost, as has happened more than once.) However, when they get it right, it can produce serviceable bulls in the ring.
In 2016 I sat with Jim Hollander in that plaza and saw his – and note not only are Jim’s 50 sanfermines being celebrated in Pamplona this year, but that he grew up in Spain – first indulto, ‘pardoned’ bull.
There is no denying the matador responsible, David Mora, performed excellently – as did Curro Diáz – but also the bulls were good. So good in fact, the head of the House of Domecq – in seniority if not profit margins – the former rejoneador Álvaro came and said hello. It turns out that the bulls were descended from his own ganadería of Torrestrella, a favourite of Pamplona. Such bulls took the encierro well within their stride, did not separate and thus could not be lured to exhaust themselves on the barriers, and so came back in to the ring that evening with sufficient spirit to dance and die well, albeit with fewer tandas, ‘series’, of passes than you would find in their home town of Jerez de la Frontera.
The finest corridas to be found after encierros are – from the point of view of bullfighting – in San Sebastián de los Reyes, ‘Sanse’, whose Feria de Cristo de los Remedios often partially overlaps with Cuéllar.
On the outskirts of Madrid, Sanse has long been a post-Pamplona favourite among the Anglo-American crowd. It even has its own Foreigner of the Year celebrations – last year it was our American friend Stephen Ibarra, this year our British friend Gareth Cooper – hosted by the ‘pastor’, herdsman, Paco Sanz, who is himself Personality of the Year this year, and whose bars and restaurants are the centre of the fiesta there, Taberna El Foro and El Foro Real 52. (The other great pastor there, and a great recortador is Miguel Ángel Castander, who went one further by actually putting on my jacket first. One day, he said, the jacket will run the encierros on its own.)
Sanse is a good fast encierro around the 800 yard mark, which, although crowded by other encierro’s standards, never reaches the crowds of Pamplona, and has two other great advantages: almost everyone knows how to run, and the bulls are not required to be Pamplona size. These two facts tend produce uninjured bulls of manageable size and charge for toreros like José Maria Manzanares to turn at command and die on request with something approaching the artistic merit and beauty of the Andalusian rings.
(Speaking of toreros de arte and Andalusia, the great matador José Antonio Morante de la Puebla’s town, La Puebla del Río – a satellite of Seville – has for four years now had an encierro of novillos on the feast of San Sebastían –January 20th – with a rocket lit by the Maestro himself, ending in a portatíl – temporary bull-ring – where later a novillada is held. Next year I shall be found there without fail.)
However, for those who think the encierro is synonymous with Navarran red and white and piping and drumming, there are the encierros of Tafalla a couple of weeks earlier. A peaceful little town 25 minutes by train down the line from Pamplona, I was first brought there – with Deirdre Carney – by Victor Lombardi and Erik Whiteway on their great trip around the smaller runs of 2013. (There’s a story involving the three of us, some cattle and a phone booth in a village called Santacara which I will recount another time – needless to say the advice is don’t hide from bulls in phone booths. They have no problem with ripping them out of the ground.)
Again, Tafalla is a simple tarmac affair comparable to Pamplona but with smaller toros, there are also far fewer people than in Sanse, and all know what they are doing. However, this dearth of people and Navarran location result in crowds turning up to see recortadores but not matadores, and the smaller box-office thus pulls smaller names, and I’ve never seen a corrida there worth a damn or a dime. (This year David Mora dropped out due to injury, and his replacement, Miguel Abellán and the other matador of some note, Daniel Luque, were described by one local taurine critic as looking as though they were on a visit to the dentist when they entered the ring.)
However, what it does have right next door is a second encierro which must have the highest ratio of spectators to runners I have ever witnessed. Falces is famous for having the “run of runs”, El Pilón, a mountain goat-path down which they stampede up to a dozen full grown vacas of the now relict Navarran encaste with their long twisting horns – including those of famed Pamplona pastor Miguel Reta – accompanied by a few dozen hardy runners.
This is a run which no one in the car in which I first travelled to it – at speed, directly following the encierro in Tafalla – was willing to run, neither were any of the noted runners whose hands I shook on my way up the goat-path. The very top is where a group of older runners – a dozen maybe – who have the marks of generations in this place written upon them run the flat, escaping up-slope.
The lower section is vertiginously steep and run mainly by men far younger than my own forty years when I last joined them, trusting to their ankles not their eyes on the steep slope, no more than fifty in total, with a sheer, broken glass-sharp stonewall on their right, a hundred foot drop down the gorge on their left, and hell-in-leather running hell-for-leather behind them. It remains the only encierro that makes me feel like I did on July 12th, 2009, on my first ever encierro (with my friends the Miuras, as it happens.)
There are many other runs: I could personally speak of Estella, the encierro I ran whilst not officially even being there (a story for another time), or Medina del Campo, which also has a horseback cross-country element, and is shaped like a horseshoe so you can cut across and run twice, where I ran with the great taurine journalist, Chapu Apalaoza, the voice of the Fundacíon Toro de Lidia, ‘Fighting Bull Foundation’, with whom I am currently working in an attempt to roll back the tide of anti-taurine propaganda which one day will not just take the corridas from us, but the encierros and eventually the toros themselves as well.
Soon, I hope, I will be able to invite people to join Foundation as a friend or members in support of the bulls, but in the meantime, I can only point you to buy a copy of The Bulls Of Pamplona the book I co-wrote and edited. My co-authors include the Mayor of Pamplona, John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson – great aficionados of both the bulls and the city – along with the great American runner Joe Distler who has run there since 1968, the Texan rodeo champion Larry Belcher who also ran there for forty years, a tactical and strategic breakdown of the run today by Captain Dennis Clancey of the 101st Airborne Division, as well as tips and pointers by the great Basque and Spanish runners like Julen Madina, Miguel Ángel Eguiluz and Jokin Zuasti, and photos by the European Pressphoto Agency – and before that Reuters – senior photographer Jim Hollander, who when not embedded in half the wars around the world ran the bulls in the ’60s and ’70s until he was put in hospital by two Miura bulls in 1977 and returned to photograph every Fiesta since.
September 6, 2018
Our history with bison
We may not have had many bullfights in the US, there have been some, but we certainly have had a history with another type of brave bull, that being the American Bison.
And we came dangerously close to killing every last one. In fact, in the late 1800's the number of bison left was estimated at 1000 from a population, before the western expansion of the white man, of around 30 million.
What ultimately saved the bison? (Even though in way bison are still in a difficult situation with a lack of wide open space left for them to roam.)
The government, native Americans, conservationists, and ranchers. The later raising the animal to sell for its prized meat.
What parallels are there between the American bison and the Spanish fighting bull? Many, but I will let you come to your own conclusions.
--------------------
What brought bison back from the brink of extinction?
(by Cristen Conger howstuffworks.com)
Two bison species are native to North America: plains bison and wood bison. Weighing nearly a ton, bison are the largest land mammals in the United States [source: Sample]. Despite their size, bison can sprint at speeds up to 35 mph (56 kph) [source: National Park Service]. Although they only feed on grass, bison are a keystone species in the Plains, meaning their influence in the environment affects the well-being of many other species.
But in the 1700s, the horse's arrival in the West sparked the bison's demise in North America. Riding horses and the invention of the .50-caliber rifle transformed buffalo hunting from low casualty affairs to all-out massacres [source: Cloud]. At the beginning of the 19th century, the market for buffalo hide boomed in the United States and Canada as well as Europe. The combination of efficient hunting methods and a growing demand set the stage for the period dating from roughly 1820 to 1880, known as "the Great Slaughter."
Hunters slaughtered bison across the Great Plains by the thousands, slicing the population from 30 million to just over 1,000 by 1890 [source: American Bison Society]. Because they became so scarce and bison extinction seemed imminent, Theodore Roosevelt, William Hornaday and other men formed the American Bison Society in 1905 to ensure the species' survival. By that point, the Bronx Zoo and Yellowstone National Park had also established bison preserves, and in 1908, the federal government created the National Bison Range in Montana. Ironically, these conservation efforts wouldn't become the driving force behind the bison population comeback.
Although their numbers shrank to a perilously small figure at the end of the 19th century due to overhunting, bison weren't federally classified as an endangered species in the United States. Instead, private and public conservation efforts gradually nudged their population upward, with the greatest increase occurring in the last 40 years.
Nevertheless, the U.S. wild bison population today is less than one percent of what it was in pre-colonial times, hovering at around 20,000 animals. North America is home to only five free-ranging plains bison herds and eight wood bison herds [source: World Conservation Union Bison Specialist Group]. But it isn't for lack of trying.
Public bison preservation efforts began in 1907 when 15 were relocated to New York's Bronx Zoo. Yellowstone National Park had only a few dozen bison roaming on its land at that time. Offspring from that initial group would later be relocated to protected areas in Oklahoma, Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska [source: Wildlife Conservation Society]. Native American tribes have also contributed to repopulation efforts in recent years. In 1990, tribes around South Dakota met to form the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, and today the group is comprised of 57 member tribes that oversee 15,000 heads of bison.
A handful of factors have inhibited more robust bison population growth. Perhaps most influential is the sheer lack of space. Bison are prairie grazers, and much of their native land has been developed. Because the existing bison herds have remained relatively small, that has also diminished the diversity of the bison gene pool. Once that happens, inbreeding can increase the rate of health problems in a herd.
Speaking of health problems, a virus called brucellosis plagues wild bison, particularly those in Yellowstone National Park. Brucellosis causes female bison to abort their babies and reduces fertility and milk production. In addition, people can catch it from eating tainted meat and develop prolonged flulike symptoms [source: USDA]. As a result of the virus and the animal's naturally unpredictable behavior, more than 3,700 bison that have wandered outside of Yellowstone in the past 20 years have been shot by state and federal wildlife officials [source: Martin]. Quarantine periods have delayed wild bison from being relocated to other areas in the West in order to expand the population, although the USDA plans to do so, possibly in Alaska, during winter 2008 [source: The Economist].
Ironically, commercial breeding has had a greater impact boosting bison numbers, and more than 95 percent of bison are privately owned. People began breeding herds of bison in captivity as early as 1870 [source: Lott and Greene]. Then, in the 1970s, ranchers started buying more bison to build up a niche meat market [source: Cloud]. From a financial standpoint, investing in bison is a thrifty move for ranchers since the grass grazers don't require costly feed and their meat is low in fat and cholesterol. According to the USDA, the bison market has gradually expanded in the United States, from less than 18,000 commercial bison slaughtered for sale in 2000 to around 50,000 in 2007. Thanks to the growing demand, there are around 400,000 commercial bison living in the United States.
Granted, commercial bison are raised in order to be killed later, so it doesn't exactly constitute a resurgence in pure conservationist terms. Nevertheless, it has raised the profile of the bison and triggered a newfound appreciation for the animal -- even if it is an appreciation for how it tastes.
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https://animals.howstuffworks.com/endangered-species/bison-extinction.htm
September 5, 2018
September 4, 2018
September 3, 2018
Rejoneo en Valencia
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| Sergio Galan, Lea Vicenas, and Andy Cartagena |
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| Andy Cartagena |
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| Andy Cartagena |
March 19th, 2018
photos by Alberto de Jesus
September 2, 2018
September 1, 2018
Who was Wyatt Earp?
Note: I am posting this article because the first bullfight in the US (excluding the bullfights that took place on a regular basis in Los Angeles) took place in Dodge City, Kansas, five years after Wyatt Earp left his job as a city marshal and headed to Tombstone to seek his fortune.
I've always found that rather interesting. What a wild town Dodge must have been!
Plus, I have had this article saved and sitting in a folder in my closet for 20 years now and I'm trying to clean out the closet so it is time I get this article posted.
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I've always found that rather interesting. What a wild town Dodge must have been!
Plus, I have had this article saved and sitting in a folder in my closet for 20 years now and I'm trying to clean out the closet so it is time I get this article posted.
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(Digitally re-mastered photo of the Earps in Vidal CA. with their dog "Earpie")
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