While the personal mini-essays that reinterpret each of the ten commandments continue to be published in Fragmenta Editorial – No Roberàs, by David Fernàndez, will soon be published, which follows No Mataras by Bernat Dedéu and No Cometràs Adulteri, by Blanca Llum Vidal–, A British series called The Fifth Commandment also comes to Filmin. Curiously, the original title is The sixth commandment (that is, “thou shalt not kill”), because in the Anglican tradition, the ten sacred norms have a different formulation than the Catholic one. The series is based on a horrifying real case, the manipulation and subsequent poisoning and murder of a 69-year-old professor and religious at the hands of the young man who helped him in the chapel. Professor Farquhar is played by actor Timothy Spall, a veteran best known for the Mike Leigh titles and the kind of British actor who enhances any production. The role of the chapel is played by Éanna Hardwicke, an Irish actor reminiscent of the young Joaquin Phoenix.
639 YEARS OF ORGAN CONCERT
A couple of weeks ago, 500 lovers of avant-garde music crowded into an 11th century German church, that of Saint Burchardi in the city of Halberstad, to witness a singular act: how a D was added to the organ that plays, from 21 years ago the piece As Slow as Possible by composer John Cage. The concert, which is always kept going thanks to a small network of volunteer admirers of the musician, is scheduled to end in 2640, 616 years from now, if global warming allows it. Cage wrote the piece for piano in 1985 and it was adapted for piano two years later, but the tempo was never specified. In 1987, when it premiered in the city of Metz, the concert lasted only 29 minutes. In 1998, six years after the composer’s death, several musicians and philosophers organized a symposium on his work in the town of Trossingen, in the Black Forest, and proposed this other, more literal version of As Slow As Possible. There were those who proposed that it last a thousand years, but anything of a thousand years has sinister echoes in Germany, since it was the time that Hitler envisioned for his empire. The final duration came from the Halberstadt church, chosen as the site for the project because it apparently had the first known modern organ, in 1361. As the year 2000 was about to arrive, that figure was subtracted and the number of 639 as the years the concert was to last.
THE NEW RICH DO NOT BUY ART
The number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade and those who were already extremely wealthy have accumulated even more obscenely enormous amounts of money, and yet the number of art buyers has not grown and crowded art events like Frieze or Art Basel They are not translating into a new boom in collecting. Apparently, the new rich go to these places, let themselves be seen and leave without buying, like any other poor people. These are the conclusions of art market economist Magnus Ressch, who teaches art management at Yale and has carried out his second exhaustive study of the market (the first was eight years ago), collating data from galleries and collectors. for a book titled How to Collect Art. His conclusion is that there is more money in fewer hands, obviously, but those hands are not at all interested in collecting art and that leaves galleries competing for the same rich people.
ARE THERE NO PAPERS FOR YOUNG GIRLS?
Actress Phoebe Dyvenor, from the series Younger and The Bridgertons, has recently said that there are no roles for women her age. Her age? 28 years. Dyvenor said at the Sundance festival, where she presented the erotic thriller Fair Play, that now there is a great moment for older actresses and that that is fantastic, but that those in her segment have to fight to be in films in a way that it is not up to men. Dyvenor would thus be turning around the usual lament of actresses, that after 35 they only have to play mothers of teenagers and from then on, witches and nuns. Her studies do not agree with her. The Institute founded by Geena Davis, which is responsible for promoting very exhaustive studies that analyze the presence of women and minorities in audiovisual products, counted in 2019 how many women over 50 appeared in the 50 highest-grossing films in the United States, United Kingdom , Germany and France and the result was quite illuminating: none. The report that resulted from analyzing these numbers was titled Frail, Frumpy and Forgotten, that is, “fragile, unattractive and forgotten,” which is how women tend to be represented around menopause in series and movies.
SPOILED TITLES
Every day, 250 new books are published in Spain, some 92,000 titles registered in the IMDB, according to data from the Ministry of Culture. With this panorama, perhaps it is understandable why publishers rack their brains to make covers that attract attention. In the mass market dissemination segment, the trend in recent years is to place titles that are a bit out of the ordinary but that can be catchy. The queen of the question is nutritionist Sari Arponen, author of It’s the microbiota, idiot! and The immune system comes out of the closet, both published by Alienta. Thomas Erikson’s book Surrounded by Idiots (Planet) already arrived with that original title in English, which has been maintained in all its translations. It will compete for space in the piles of news with the new self-help book by psychologist Lorena Gascón, known on social media as @lapsicologajaputa, which is titled Stop Treating Yourself Like Ass (MR). Gascón already sold more than 50,000 copies of her previous volume, Dear Brain, What the Fuck Do You Want from Me?, published just last year.
