The Backlisted podcast, a veteran space that dedicates each week to reading in depth a title that is neither remotely a literary novelty nor has any anniversary that justifies celebrating it in media terms, dedicated one of its latest programs to the book All My Pretty Ones, by Anne Sexton. And they took the opportunity to address a little-known facet of the poet, that of the leader of an experimental jazz-rock band, Anne Sexton And Her Kind. The poet founded the band in 1967, when she was teaching creative writing classes at an institute, and she got together with other teachers in the area to explore her musical side. The name came from one of her most famous poems and, in fact, the few recitals they gave were more of a poetic reading than a concert, with Sexton doing a kind of spoken word over the music. They rehearsed on Saturday afternoons at Sexton's own house and gave their first concert a few months after its founding, in 1968, in a bar that was raising funds for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. In 1971 they were offered to perform at the famous Newport festival, but Sexton herself, who committed suicide three years later, rejected the offer.
WALKING THROUGH CRYSTAL CLEAR WATERS
Cookie Mueller was so used to being the target of cameras that she was even photographed after death. In one of the most famous images that exist of her, she appears inside the coffin, at her funeral, held at St. Mark's Church in New York in November 1989, with flowers in her hair and dozens of bracelets. along the arm. It was taken by her friend, photographer Nan Goldin. Mueller, who appears in Pink Flamingos and other John Waters films, was a pivotal figure in the American counterculture during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and one of those accidental writers who was too busy living lavishly to sit down and compile their texts. Other people, including the writer Chris Kraus, took it upon themselves to do it for her many years after her death. Her collected texts, including some that never saw the light of day and were found on her diskettes by her friends, are now published in Spanish. In Walking Through Crystal Clear Waters in a Black Painted Pool (Los Tres Editores, translation by Rodrigo Olavarría), Mueller emerges as a vibrant and disarmingly funny literary voice even as she describes wild settings.
BURN EVERYTHING
Here we already explained a few weeks ago the controversy that is mounting in Italy around the exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi in the Doge's Palace of Genoa. One of the rooms houses an installation that recreates the rape that the Baroque painter suffered at the hands of the artist Agostino Tassi, which was settled in a very public trial. A few days ago, several activists from the Brucciamo Tutto (Let's Burn Everything) collective, which defines itself as a movement for liberation from the patriarchal system, organized a protest action in the Doge's Palace that consisted of covering with black sheets the Tassi painting that hangs in the exhibition and leaving red footprints, like blood, on the cartouches and puddles of red paint on the floor. In a statement, they denounced the idea of “spectacularizing” a rape as it has been done, with a bed on which bloody images are projected and audio in which screams can be heard.
THE PLANETS ON TV
In one of the first scenes of Second Prize, the film by Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez about the legend of Los Planetas, the group can be seen in a television program from the nineties that required them to play in playback, a request that the band It was taken with ridicule and classic indie indifference of the moment. After the performance, the presenter asks Jota (The Singer, in the film) what his favorite planet is, to which he had to answer “Saturn”, to give way to a hula hoop contest, but he says “Mercury”. The scene is almost carbon copy of one that actually occurred and that can be recovered on YouTube, when the group from Granada played their first hit, Qué puede do, at the Apaga y vámonos space in December 1995, with the instruments hanging and without make a lot of effort to make it look like they are touching something. “What's wrong with you guys? It seems like you are looking for something on the ground,” the presenter, the comedian Bermúdez, tells them. And the phrase also appears as is in Second Prize.
THE LEGEND OF 'MEGAPOLIS' CONTINUES
Few films are as epic as Megalopolis, the film that Francis Ford Coppola has managed to finish after decades of effort and a tortuous shoot (with a large part of the technical team leaving the recording flat) and that no studio wanted to pay him. Finally, the director of The Godfather had to sell one of his vineyards and paid for the film, which stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Giancarlo Esposito, with $120 million out of his own pocket. The distribution of the film remains unclear, especially after the first screening of the finished film, which was held for part of the team and the Coppola family a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. Journalist Matthew Belloni, who writes an insider information newsletter about the film industry, stood at the exit of the screening and asked the audience, who left shocked and horrified. “It has zero chance of commercial success,” said one. “Amazing how fucking crazy she is,” said another. A third defined it as a cross between Caligula, Metropolis and the work of Ayn Rand. The film is known to use virtual reality technology similar to that used in The Mandalorian series.
