The new Notre Dame, restored and refinished after the fire that destroyed a large part of its structure in 2019, is scheduled to open in 2024. Among the craftsmen who are working on the work with all the complications derived from recreating a Gothic cathedral is a group of sculptors who are rebuilding the gargoyles and chimeras (the figures of fantastic animals that only decorate, do not serve to filter the water) that were lost in the fire. Anyone who thinks that the new gargoyles of 2023 will not have the charm and legend of the old ones can console themselves with the thought that most of them came from the 19th century remodeling and that even those that do date from the Middle Ages were often replaced, because the water the rain destroyed them.
JACQUETTA INACABADA
Some of the most impressive paintings in the exhibition dedicated to Lucian Freud at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid are those dedicated to one of his most significant lovers, Jacquetta Lampson Eliot. An aristocrat by birth and marriage, Lampson Eliot met the painter when she was only 24 years old, in the late 1960s, but she was already married to a Lord and lived in a castle in Cornwall where, as Freud said, “they he ate off solid silver plates, even Shepherd’s Pie.†He devoted himself fully, as he did with all his lovers, and she fell for his “bestial, animalistic” appearance, as she explained in an article in The Daily Telegraph in EL 2020. The relationship, of course, ended badly and produced a son, who grew up at the beginning of his life as if he were Lampson Eliot’s husband, and several paintings, among them a beautiful one that seems unfinished and another in which Freud also painted his mother, despite the fact that the two women they never matched.
WHEN THE REAL STAR IS A DINOSAUR
The very contemporary phenomenon of performers who deny the roles that made them famous continues. Newcomer actresses star in it, such as Jenna Ortega, who has made it clear in all of her interviews how much the initial script for Wednesday irritated her and everything she did to improve it, like veterans. In his newly released memoir, Sam Neill recounts how he chafed at having to put up with promoting Jurassic Park because the studio was stressing all the time that it was a “starless” blockbuster movie, in which the real stars were CGI dinosaurs and not Neill himself, Jeff Goldblum or Laura Dern.
ORGASM IN HIGH SCHOOL
Everyone who was lucky enough to see the opera Alexina B at the Liceu (for those who missed it: La2 will give it shortly) came away talking about one thing: the shocking scene of the lesbian orgasm starring Lidia Vinyes-Curtis and Alicia Amo. The composer Raquel GarcÃa Tomás has explained that this is the longest scene in the entire opera, a totally deliberate decision. On Twitter, music lover @InFernemLand likened it to two other operatic orgasms: the Prelude from Der Rosenkavalier and the love scene from Mtsenk’s Lady Macbeth. For him, she wrote, Alexina B’s is the most exciting and delicious of the three.
‘FLORAL GAMES’
All the schools, neighborhood associations and ‘ateneos’ that will (happily) celebrate the Floral Games this Sant Jordi have a soundtrack for the award ceremony: the song precisely called the Floral Games of Bons Nois, a quintet from Sant Feliu de Llobregat that says to do ” pop a la brasa” and has just released his first album, called Delta. The melancholic-poetic theme was just his first single and has a fantastic lyric: “I miss the stars on the roof / you miss the diacritics”. And also: “I write and take pain”.
