It happened with film scriptwriters as with computer programmers and with many other professions in fact: when they were not prestigious jobs, they were done by many women and when they became better paid and recognized, they became masculinized (and vice versa too, they began to be well seen because they were made men). That is one of the conclusions of an interesting cycle that the Filmoteca de Catalunya is programming this month, dedicated to women screenwriters in Hollywood in the silent era, in the twenties. Then, as the Italian specialist Giuliana Muscio has investigated, two thirds of the scriptwriters were women, a percentage similar to that of moviegoers at the time. Among them were pioneers such as France Marion, who signed more than 300 scripts, including those of the extremely popular films by Mary Pickford, Anita Loos or June Mathis, who discovered Rudolf Valentino. All of them are in the Filmoteca cycle.
NOW, SINGER
There have always been footballers with one foot in music. Jesé Rodríguez had a reggaeton duo, the Dutchman Ruud Gullit released a reggae album in the eighties and it is known that the rapper Dide, who always sings masked, is a Premier League player. Still, it's amazing what Eric Cantona just did. The former player turned actor (he has more than 30 titles to his name, including the documentary about him that he shot with Ken Loach, Looking for Eric) has turned to music at the age of 57, with a melancholic single, The Friends We Lost, which critics have compared to Nick Cave, Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen. Cantona, who has recorded four songs so far, has also directed the video for his first single.
THE NOBEL IS A BUBBLE
Ever since it became known that Sally Rooney and Annie Ernaux would hold a public talk at the Charleston literary festival in England, there was great expectation as to why she would come out of that meeting. What there was between them was mute admiration (the French woman said that she reads the Irish to understand a generation that is far away from her) and a headline: Ernaux is a little bit upset by her Nobel Prize. “She dropped on my life like a bomb,” she said. And also: "They have given me an award that I did not ask for." Since the Swedish Academy anointed her, the author of The Event hasn't been able to write a single line and that has her irritated and worried. Ernaux admitted, however, that the best thing that has happened to her since then are the conversations she has had with her avid readers.
HOUELLEBECQ Y SU 'HONEYTRIP'
The KIRAC collective, an acronym for Keeping it Real Art Critics (something like Art Critics that Speak Clear) usually makes videos that they post on YouTube analyzing the work of some figures (such as Rem Koolhas) and art world institutions exposing their contradictions. Actually, KIRAC has the ability to annoy both the left and the right, and one of his works, which questioned the attitude of the victims of Harvey Weinstein. Perhaps because of that ambivalent and provocative attitude, a few years ago they reached an artistic collaboration agreement with Michel Houellebecq for one of his videos and they recorded 600 hours of material with him. The central idea of the video was that the French author was preparing a trip to Morocco, a sexual honeytrip, for which his wife was hiring prostitutes for him from Paris, but that she finally canceled the trip for fear of an Islamist attack. Before the video was edited and posted, the author of Elementary Particles repented and decided to denounce the members of KIRAC, whom he has called "cockroaches" and worse. Now, Houellebecq and the members of KIRAC are publicly throwing their heads at each other and there are those who believe that it is a pact between them and that everything is part of the joint project.
PAYING, ALMOST EVERYONE SINGS
A recent article in The New Yorker about the private concerts offered by almost all artists for a lot (a lot) of money offers some fascinating facts: Aretha Franklin, cheated like many other black artists of her generation by con man middlemen, always demanded to be paid in cash and counting ticket by ticket before the concert (so did Etta James, Ray Charles and James Brown), the amount Beyoncé charged for her famous and highly criticized private concert in Dubai (her first performance in four years ) was 24 million dollars, Paul McCartney also plays at your birthday party if you pay him well, The Eagles charged six million dollars to play only Hotel California at a party, Jennifer Lopez has a habit of singing for despots and dictators of everyone and adds a Happy Birthday, Mr. President for an additional clause, folk legend Willie Nelson still does private concerts at 90 (same as Smokey Robinson at 83) and Andrea Bocelli specializes in weddings and birthday. As the article also points out, none of this is new. Tchaikovsky composed in the salary of a wealthy widow, Nadezhda Filaterovna, who gave him a villa in Florence and asked her in exchange to expand some of his pieces.
