There are few artefacts as mythologized in the fashion industry as the slide by artist Carsten Höller that Miuccia Prada has installed in her office on Via Bergamo in Milan. Designed to be used every day instead of stairs, the slide, which covers three floors, is similar to those that Höller has placed in museums and institutions around the world, from the Tate in London to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and even in a Miami mall. The founder of Prada and Miu Miu, an art collector since her youth and promoter of the Fondazione Prada also in Milan, arranged for it in 2011 but confesses in an interview with the US edition of Harper's Bazaar that she hasn't worn it for years. “I get bored very quickly of things. That's why I'm in fashion,” she told reporter Rachel Tashjian.
A CURIOUS EPILOGUE FOR NORMA DESMOND
Over time, Gloria Swanson's image has been diluted and confused with that of her most famous character, that of the elderly diva Norma Desmond in Twilight of the Gods. A documentary that premieres on the 21st in Filmin, entitled Boulevard! A Hollywood Story, serves both to encourage and deny that misunderstanding. The film tells a kind of epilogue to the Billy Wilder film. In the mid-1950s, Swanson wanted to capitalize on her newfound popularity by producing a musical based on the Desmond character. To do this, she hired two composers, who were themselves a couple, although armed, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley. The actress invited them both to live in her house and fell in love with Stapley, who was seen living a situation similar to that of William Holden in the film. According to the documentary's director, Twilight cemented the idea that Swanson was a dusty silent movie star, when in fact she retained a great business acumen in the 1950s.
THE BLACKBIRDS, JUNGLE PSYCHOCUMBIA
Psychotropic and bastard, chichadelia is a musical genre that emerged in Peru at the end of the 1960s and consisted of passing cumbiero sounds through a psychedelic filter, with a lot of percussion and powerful guitars. The main group that emerged from that scene, which was reborn when the indie of the first decade of the millennium began to look for rarities in the local scenes (in 2007 a compilation album called Chicha. Psychedelic cumbias from Peru was published) were Los Mirlos, a band from the city of Moyobamba who are considered the fathers of Amazonian cumbia and who remain active, despite the fact that several of their members have died. At the In-Edit festival, to be held in Barcelona at the beginning of December, it will be possible to see the documentary The Dance of the Blackbirds, which tells its story. It was possible to shoot thanks to the fact that the leader of the band, Jorge Rodríguez, devoted himself in those years to recording everything in Super8 and gave all the material to the director of the film, Álvaro Luque.
APOCALYPSE BARCELONA
“-Warning: they have very high-level thieves around here.
-Better than in Paris?
-Definitely. The vanguard of crime moves around these parts.”
This is what a character, known as the Hyena, says to another as soon as they arrive in Barcelona in Apocalypse Baby, the latest novel by Virginie Despentes. The author has lived for long periods in the city and places part of her latest novel in the Catalan capital. On the next page, the two of them turn on the faucet in a small, expensive hotel room, and the water smells bad. And she then reads herself: “Barcelona is the noisiest city in Europe. They destroy everything, all the time. You can see works at full throttle until midnight on a Saturday. There is nothing to stop them. The opium of the Catalan people is the crane”. Municipal bodies are not expected to use it in the city's promotional materials any time soon.
WITH LIVING WAGES, IT IS NOT SO EASY TO GO ON TOUR
Since streaming doesn't make money and physical record sales are no longer relevant, it's fully assumed that the only way for musicians to support themselves is by giving concerts, which are getting more and more expensive. But the new paradigm of the music industry is also failing. Recently, the American band Animal Collective announced that they were canceling their tour of the United Kingdom because inflation, transport costs and the fluctuation of some currencies (the very low level of the pound, in this case) no longer allow them to tour and profit if they want to continue paying a decent salary to all the necessary equipment for a tour of that magnitude. Recently, the singer Santigold also had to cancel for various reasons and hundreds of much less famous British bands and musicians will no longer get to know the initiation rite that toured Europe since the Beatles got their start in Hamburg, because Brexit turned that into something prohibitive and the necessary musical exception was never negotiated with the EU.
