It has been the mystery that has kept Twitter Books entertained throughout the week. Rosalía posted on her Instagram a carousel of photos from the stop of her tour in Chile and in one of them, taken on a plane, you can see a book by Anagrama, from the Panorama de Narrativas collection (the famous "yellow plague" of Jorge Herralde) turned inside out. The question was there: what book does Rosalía read? Not even enlarging the photo to the maximum was it possible to read the back cover, so all the investigations had to be based on the stain of the text and the thickness of the book. Many users point to On Earth we are fleetingly great, by Ocean Vuong, an author that the composer has talked about, but it doesn't add up, because it is much shorter than the airplane book. From there, the possibilities multiply: A.M. Homes, Knausgard, Jonathan Coe, Houellebecq, Delphine de Vigan, who knows if a modern classic like Atonement by Ian McEwan, which has similar dimensions...
THEY HAVE IT ALL
The auction of the decade will be the one prepared by Christie's, which will take out almost the entire art collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. Allen owned more than a billion dollars worth of art and at home he had everything: canalettos, boticellis, paintings by Cézanne, Rothko, Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Renoir, Gauguin. Not even the auction of billionaires Harry and Linda Macklowe reached the numbers that Allen's is expected to achieve. The Macklowes also had their Rothko, and works by Giacometti, de Kooning, Picasso and Cy Twombly, and auctioned them off by court order, when he, a builder, left his wife in his eighties for a French woman almost 30 years his junior, Patricia Landeau. On the day of his second nuptials, he placed a giant advertisement in which he and his new wife appeared very smiling in his Park Avenue building, wherever his ex-wife, who lives in the legendary Plaza and is on the board of advisors, could see it. from the Guggenheim in New York.
A TEENAGE VETERAN
Unai Canela, 18 years old and until recently a student at a high school in Banyoles, is going to take to the San Sebastian Festival, in the Made in Spain section, her film Between Mountains, a documentary based on the material she shot during confinement, that happened in the Pyrenees, observing nature. Although it seems very precocious, it is not the first time that Canela lives an experience like this. When he was nine, his parents took him and his little sister Amaia on a trip around the world for a year and a half with the goal of seeing seven hard-to-find wild animals. They told about it in the documentary El viaje de Unai. Later, he and his father, photographer Andoni Canela, spent four years searching for the last big cats and they also told about it in the movie Panthers, which can be seen on YouTube.
DID FRIDA KALHO OR MY FRIEND BECKY SAY IT?
In this section we are very fond of following the path of apocryphal citations. Those phrases that are attributed to someone famous who never wrote or pronounced them and start to run on the internet. Although there are spaces like Quote Investigator trying to bring order to the chaos, it is usually almost impossible to stop a fake quote once it begins. This week, MoMA posted on its networks a painting of Frida Kahlo accompanied by this phrase: “I used to think that she was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought that there are so many people in the world, that there must be someone like me.” A Twitter user got the museum out of her mistake: “Frida Kahlo never said that. My friend Becky wrote this on a photo of Frida Kahlo and posted it on postsecret in 2008 and it has been attributed to the painter ever since."
CÉLINE DION, THE ULTIMATE 'CAMP' MUSE, ON FILM
There is something about Céline Dion that inspires the most insane creations. A few months ago, the film Aline swept France, an unauthorized recreation of the singer's life in which the actress Valérie Lemercier, also the director of the film, played the singer even in her childhood, using digital body reduction techniques. . Dion did not give up the rights to her songs or her story, but Lemercier got around the hurdle by calling her protagonist Aline Dieu and hiring a singer with a voice almost identical to that of the Quebecois. And one of the hits of underground theater this summer in New York is Titanique, a musical played on a tiny stage that starts from the premise that Céline Dion survived the Titanic. The work mixes pop references and 90s ballads (it ends with the entire audience singing My Heart Will Go On at the top of its voice) and has extended its performances until November thanks to word of mouth.
