Video-on-demand platforms jealously guard their audience figures and only make them public when they are interested, to promote depending on which title or drop others. Even so, in the United States, Nielsen does publish fairly reliable audience data on a weekly basis. And one of the constants of the last few weeks is that there, between the highly publicized premieres of the fantasy series, The Sandman, The power of the ring and The house of the dragon, and holding the type before Stranger Things is always Bluey, the Australian series of cartoons about a family of blue dogs (at least two of them) that Disney hosts. Its creator, Joe Brumm, was inspired by his own daughters to create the characters of Bingo and Bluey and the series, with episodes lasting just seven minutes, has illustrious fans (Ryan Gosling and Natalie Portman, who gives voice to a character in the season 3), an adult podcast dedicated to dissecting each episode, and many adult fans who feel a mixture of admiration and dislike for Bandit, the dog-father, who is the complete opposite of the well-intentioned but useless George Pig. Bandit is empathetic, creative, given to aphorisms and eternally patient. Did we say that Brumm based the series on his own experience as his father?
SMITH, THE WEIRD
The novel Les altures (Empúries), by Sebastià Portell, will undoubtedly return to arouse interest in the very peculiar figure of Ismael Smith, the noucentista, decadent and queer painter who died 50 years ago after having spent the last twelve years of his life admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The great exhibition dedicated to him at MNAC in 2017 brought together a large part of his work, but whoever wants to follow in his footsteps now will have to make a little more pilgrimage. You can start with the Lloret de Mar cemetery, where Smith made the sculpture that adorns the pantheon of the Camps i Nonell family at a very young age, continue with the Parlament de Catalunya, which has one of his busts on the façade, and end with the Museu de Cerdanyola, which received a donation of 200 pieces from Smith and has become the key place for the study of this artist who gives meaning to the word “rare”.
THE DIVORCE THAT PROPELLED A FILMOGRAPHY
Alfonso Cuarón (Roma) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza) did it at fifty and Kenneth Branagh (Belfast) at sixty. Steven Spielberg has waited until he was 75 to tell the story of his childhood. The director explained a few days ago at the Toronto festival, when he presented The Fablemans, that with Covid he was scared and thought that if something happened to him, he had to make this film first. Spielberg returns to the ground he already explored in E.T., Catch Me Your Can and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and places himself once again in the point of view of a son of divorce. The director has even found an actor Gabriel LaBelle, who looks a lot like him, to play him in his youth. Michelle Williams plays her mother, with an artistic temperament and who always supported her son's career, and Paul Dano plays her father, an engineer who communicated with him in mathematical language. The most applauded in Toronto was a cameo that makes David Lynch in the film. Lynch's childhood movie, I don't know if we'll see it.
THE TYPICAL BOOKSTORE 'TOTE BAG', WHICH COST YOU 3000 EUROS
All bookstores have their own cloth bags and other generic ones, with slogans like Reading is sexy. But few can say that they sell merchandising bags at a price of 3,130 euros, which is the cost of the most expensive of the three tote bags designed by Mathieu Blazy, the creative director of the discreet ultra-luxury brand Bottega Veneta, with the logo of The Strand, the famous New York bookstore that boasts of having “18 miles of books”. Blazy is a frequent visitor to the bookstore –once, he has explained, he fell asleep on the third floor floor reading a book that apparently wasn't exciting enough– and he wanted to pay this tribute. The other two models, which have smooth leather and not the famous intrecciato that characterizes the brand, cost 2,100 and 1,500 euros, respectively. For the launch, Blazy, who already made a capsule collection with Olivetti last year, commissioned five New Yorker-style graphic jokes. These types of operations between cultural institutions and ultra-luxury brands, which are needed to an unequal extent (more the latter than the former), are becoming more and more frequent. Ordinary customers can still choose from the bookstore's modest cloth bags. They have more than 40 models that range between 15 and 30 euros.
ECCE HOMOS WITH TIGHT SKINNY SKINS
In 2019, four guys from Birmingham put on their best clothes (extremely tight skinny pants, hyper-clean sneakers and short-sleeved shirts to show off tattoos) and went out to burn the night. They took a photo and posted it on Instagram, not suspecting that due to internet alchemy they were about to become a meme, a template image that was used on networks to project all kinds of jokes about lad culture, the "kid". Now a local artist, Tat Vision, has immortalized the four friends with a sculpture depicting them, which has been placed in the same spot where the photo was taken, as part of an arts festival in Birmingham. If the sculpture, which simulates a bronze but is made of papier-mâché, seems somewhat crooked, that also has an explanation. Vision, whose real name is Well Douglas, was inspired by the already famous bust of Cristiano Ronaldo at the Madeira airport, one of the contemporary ecce homos.
