When Jane Birkin died at the age of 76 in mid-July, the media and networks were filled, as was predictable and as often happens in these cases, with photos of the actress and singer taken when she was very young. She already saw all this coming, for she also knew that the news of her death would be illustrated by Je t'aime mais non plus. An alternative way of remembering her is to recover the mockumentary-portrait she shot with her friend Agnes Varda in 1988, Jane B. per Agnès V. The starting point was that Birkin was depressed because she was going to turn 40 and the filmmaker wanted to tell her No, the best was yet to come. “This very alive woman asked us to do the opposite of those tributes to dead actresses who show fragments of interviews and her films. I told him, we'll show movies you didn't make, made-up movies, and we'll set up some interviews." And that is what the film consists of, which they filmed living together in Birkin's house for a year and at the same time that they filmed their other collaboration, Kung Fu Master, in which the English actress played a woman who falls in love with a teenager, played by Mathieu Demy, the son of Varda and Jacques Demy.
EIVISSA AND THE PROPHECY OF IRENE POLO
In Estiu pasat (Comanegra), the book signed by the journalist Joan Safont collecting texts that he previously published in Núvol talks about the summer vacations of great figures in the history of Catalan culture. In numbers, the Costa Brava, the Selva and the Baix Empordà win by far –Pere Calders in Llançà, J.V. Foix in Port de la Selva, Carles Riba and Clementina Arderiu in Cadaqués, Rosa Leveroni in Portlligat– although there is also a good representation from Vallès when it was a summer resort and the known cases of Carlos Barral and his troupe in Calafell or Margarida Xirgu, who put house in Badalona and ended up settling down. The prophetic texts written by the journalist Irene Polo at the beginning of the 1930s from Eivissa, which she described as a colony of "artists, rich aristocrats, politicians and writers", "characters with shady lives coming from all corners of the earth” and “the most broken people on Earth: crazy, vicious, sick”. Polo also pointed out that soon it would be necessary to pay an entrance fee to enter the island and that the person who would charge it would surely be a German.
FROM POP TO BOOKS
In September, Joan Enric Barceló, a member of Els Amics de les Arts, will publish his first book of short stories, with Periscopi, entitled Morir sabent poques coses. Barceló thus joins the ranks of musicians who have turned to written fiction, such as Nick Cave, Colin Meloy from The Decemberists or John Darnielle, from The Mountain Goats. In addition to being the author of many of the band's lyrics and co-author of the booklet for the musical Pares normals, there were some indications of this facet of Barceló: in Relats en Català, a portal dedicated to fan fiction and stories written by non-professional authors , the singer has his own entry, with a single text, published in 2008, entitled L'home que feia cua, a story that takes place in Edinburgh.
RONALD REAGAN, UNION LEADER
The historic joint strike of Hollywood actors and screenwriters that is taking place this summer, and that has stopped filming and the premieres of hundreds of projects, only has one precedent. In 1960, it was the actors who started the strike and the scriptwriters joined later. In that case, the workhorse was, as now, the so-called residuals, the royalties that must be paid for the reissues of films and series and that the platforms have withheld from professionals. The slammer of SAG-Aftra, the majority union of actors, was Ronald Reagan, then associated with the Democratic party. The strike, which lasted a month and a half for the performers and 12 weeks for the writers, stopped the production of films such as A Scarred Woman, with Elizabeth Taylor and The Billionaire, with Marilyn Monroe. They and other stars like Jack Lemon, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire joined the strike and were very belligerent in negotiating their labor rights.
AROUND THE WORLD IN CLUBS
A podcast produced by Paris Hilton could at first raise suspicions of being something vacuous and superficial, but nothing further. In fact, Hilton has limited himself to putting the money and his name on the audio series The History of the World's Greatest Nightclubs, an interesting 12-part tour of some of the clubs around the world, taking into account the role they played in the creation of new scenes and the political content that dance music has often had. Chapters have already been broadcast dedicated to the Music Institute of Detroit, which is considered the birthplace of techno music, and to Danceteria, the mythical disco from which Madonna emerged and where the counterculture was cooked in New York in the eighties. An episode focused on Eivissa's Space has also been announced.
