The upcoming closure of the Milano Jazz Club is announced. If no one remedies it, it would be a new case of unfortunate disappearance that will impoverish the cultural fabric of Barcelona. As in Venice and other branches of Guirilandia (the global country of global tourists), rents are rising and the business of a pizzeria seems more profitable than an extraordinary and splendid jazz club that has offered memorable live concerts ( those of Ben Sidran, Scatter The Atoms That Remain and Avram Fefer are three of the recent ones). And Milano is considered, for the purposes of tax bureaucracy, as a place of leisure and not as what it really is: an essential place for a specific cultural sector and capable of bringing character and prestige to a city.
In recent decades, characterized by self-destructive superficiality –which has caused disastrous climate change, among other things–, Barcelona has suffered disappearances that have not always been compensated by appearances of the same level. The world of books has had more luck than others, because while the French bookstore, Áncora y Delfín, Collector and Kowasa closed, La Central, Finestres, La Llama, Animal Suspicoso, Free Time, Arkham and Fatbottom appeared, and Laie remained, Jaimes, Documenta y Seguirá, among others. Without bookstores like this, there is no city. But neither is there a city without good concert halls.
Barcelona is often self-destructive. He is not used to protecting the best. If someone wanted to visit the places that in the eighties gave character to that modern, fun and daring city that has not been surpassed since then, they could not do so. It would be a spooky excursion. There are no longer bars like the Zig Zag, the Metropol or the Astoria, nor discotheques like Bikini or Ébano, nor concert halls like Cibeles (where Tom Verlaine played) or 666 (there were downloads of Nick Cave and the Chameleons in their wilder phases), nor cocktail bars like the Bijou de Carlos Pazos, nor designer shops like Vinçon.
And a few years later, in addition, memory is also lost and history ends up being written by people who did not live through that time or who did so in a superficial way. These types of chroniclers tend to give a poor image of that and any period. For example, the Zeleste on Platería street is often unfairly reduced to a local and Layetana dimension, forgetting that in the eighties groups like Eyeless In Gaza played there, that the Durutti Column unleashed their dreams of paradises that could be lost or lost in two nights. consecutive, in 1985, that a sublime and crepuscular Chet Baker played his trumpet very close to his audience or that a strangely solar Jan Garbarek, similar to the desert wind, played his sax much better in a crowded Zeleste than in any other well-to-do venue for a larger audience. Nothing can replace places like the old Zeleste or like the still present Milano, Jamboree and Apolo.
La Virreina continues to offer good surprises. Until October 15 presents a great exhibition of John Berger. And until October 1, you can visit Miralda and Elle , which reveals a little-known facet of Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, 1942): his stage as a fashion photographer developed in Paris between 1964 and 1971. During those years he published in Elle magazine along with colleagues like Helmut Newton or David Bailey. The exhibition, short and well curated by Valentín Roma, includes photos starring Twiggy, the first iconic model. The way in which Miralda worked in relation to public, urban space is interesting, just as he did in his most personal and radical works. And the last room is a success, in which the projected images are accompanied by songs from the wonderful and forgotten French pop music of the sixties: Françoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc and other stars that occupied the pages of pop magazines such as Salut les copays. .
