When it opened in 1973, it represented the very idea of the future. The Nakagin Capsule Tower, the 13-storey building that the architect Kiro Kuroshawa built in the Ginza neighborhood in Tokyo, followed the precepts of the so-called "metabolic architecture". It was made up of 140 apartments, each a box the size of a shipping container, with custom-made furnishings, like some kind of retro sci-fi caravan. The metabolic thing is because Kuroshawa projected that each capsule could be extracted and renewed every 20 years, but that never happened. Now the Nakagin tower is about to be demolished. The artists and creative professionals who inhabit it today have made one last attempt to save it with a campaign that underlined its historical importance, but it has not been possible. The demolition will actually be a careful disassembly, as many of the capsules will end up in design and architecture museums around the world.
COMEDIES ABOUT COMICS
The comedy-on-humor subgenre has been exploring all its possibilities since Seinfeld. Right now there is a recent season (the third) of The Marvelous Mrs. Meisel on Amazon and the second of the fantastic Hacks is underway, which contrasts an old school comic, a kind of Joan Rivers who could have had her first late night and ended up making millions and vegetating in Las Vegas, and a young screenwriter seasoned in the current meritoriousness of comedy. In addition to those, and going a little more unnoticed, is the interesting Drôle, on Netfix, translated here as Comedians in Paris. Created by Fanny Herrero, the showrunner of the hit Call my agent!, which featured all the stars of French cinema doing sometimes unflattering versions of themselves, Comedians starts from many rungs down in the entertainment industry, with four comedians who cross paths in the same bar and who are at four different points in their career: starting, about to hit the pitch, coming back from a success that wasn't and realizing that success may never happen.
A VISCOELASTIC SHAFT
Alpha Decay covers are always among the most celebrated and commented on in the Spanish publishing market. Few people know that its author is the editor herself, Julia Echevarría, an example of how far multitasking goes in a small label. Sometimes, she commissions illustrations from artists who are friends of the house, such as Mathieu Borel (he is the author of the collage that illustrates the book The good sex tomorrow that gave them problems on networks: Instagram considered it offensive), but she usually looks for images herself free of rights in varied sites. For the cover of Raw, by Olivia Laing, she found an oyster on the menu of a Norman restaurant. And for the book Rare Dusts by Lynne Tillman, she took a photo of a viscoelastic-looking mattress from a catalog and made an enlargement of it that leaves it turned into a kind of hallucinogenic landscape. Among other favorites in her catalogue, there are also those of Florescencia and Algo temporal.
AT CASA EPHRON, ANYTHING GOES IF IT'S JUICY
June 26 marks the tenth anniversary of Nora Ephron's death and there will be multiple options to remember her. Libros del Asteroides and L'Altra release I don't remember anything, a collection of articles and short pieces that was published in the United States shortly before her death, and in which the author displays her mental agility on some of her favorite topics ( cooking, divorce, journalism, real estate). In addition, on TCM they broadcast several of the films of which she was director and screenwriter and on the same day 26 she will program a special with two films (You have an e-mail and Julie and Julia) and the documentary about Ephron directed by her son, Jacob Bernstein , in 2015. The funny thing is that they broadcast it as Everything is a copy. The original title is Everything is copy, but not in reference to the copy but to the "copy", to the wording (the term comes from advertising but has jumped to other areas). The phrase would actually translate to “anything goes” or “all material is good” and was an old saying from the Ephron family, teeming with writers and screenwriters, who believe there were no red lines. Everything that happens around you, including your family and friends, is likely to end up in writing, if it's juicy enough.
TYPES OF ARTISTS
The Anglo-Libyan writer Hisham Matar has come up with a good formula to divide almost all the artists he is interested in into two categories, and he explained it this way during his recent visit to Barcelona: those who say to the receiver “come, sit next to me, I'll tell you something", and those who say "this is how it is, listen to me". In the first group would be Dostoyevski, Beethoven and Caravaggio. In the second, Proust, Bach, Lorenzetti and the other painters of the Sienese school. The latter are the engine of A month in Siena (Salamandra), his latest book, an emotional and poignant autofiction that talks about the relationship with art, the unresolved duel – Matar's father was made to disappear by the Gaddafi regime and that shadow flies over almost all his books– and conjugal harmony.
