On the occasion of the publication in the United States of Barbra Streisand’s monumental memoirs (almost a thousand pages of memories of the artist), The New Yorker sent its subscribers the first short text that mentioned the singer in its pages. It is a short piece from the famous Talk of The Town section, it appeared in 1962, when the singer had just made her Broadway debut with I Can Get It For You Wholsale. Written by Geoffrey T. Hellman as a monologue by the emerging artist, there Streisand already shows signs of both her talent for comedy and her undisguised and undisguised ambition. She talks about her Jewish roots in Brooklyn, about her love of Chinese food, shopping at second-hand stores – Streisand likes shopping so much that she doesn’t even have to leave the house to do it, she had a large antique store built made to herself in the basement of her house in California. When Hellman asks her what she thinks she’s going to do next, Barbra answers without missing a beat: “I guess I’ll be famous.”
ACABAR CON ‘THE CROWN’
The sixth season of The Crown, the first part of which has just been released on Netflix, is the last of the series and the first batch of episodes to reach viewers after the death of its titular protagonist, Elizabeth II. The creator of the series, Peter Morgan, is at this point so tired of the controversy that The Crown raises in the United Kingdom that in the few interviews he has agreed to grant, he asks journalists to let him talk about anything other than his series. When he conceived the fiction, he planned to make only one film about the queen ascending to the throne at 25 years old and with Winston Churchill as prime minister, but things grew so much that by the time he had his sales meeting with Netflix he already asked them for a production agreement. 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars and an ultra-stellar cast. There was no problem. Ted Sarandos, the boss of Netflix, has assured Variety that he said yes to everything before leaving the room.
ECHOES OF ‘PAST LIVES’
In Past Lives, the romantic drama of the season that divides opinions among the public, the protagonist, the playwright Na Young / Nora allows herself to be rocked by the love that her husband, the novelist Arthur, professes for her and the idolatry that her husband feels for her. childhood love, Hae Sung. We know that Nora wants to succeed – as a child she wanted to win the Nobel, as a young woman the Pulitzer, as an adult the Tony – but the film does not give many clues about the style of her works. The same goes for her husband, Arthur. We do know that he is the author of a novel titled Boner (erection), perhaps an ironic choice for a guy who does not act as an alpha male in the film. It so happens that Celine Song, the director, who shares many biographical coordinates with Nora, is married to the playwright Justin Kuritzkes, and has a play titled Asshole, about a doctor obsessed with the smell of his own anus. Like Nora and Arthur in the film, Song and Kuritzkes met at a Montauk writers’ residency, which is located in the former home of Edward Albee, the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
¿JANET BEFORE JACKSON?
It is very likely that he was not the first painter to let the paint fall in a semi-anarchic manner in spurts on the canvas, but even so, Art History has agreed that it was Jackson Pollock who invented drip painting and that with that technique he plastered forever the avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century and gave rise to Abstract Expressionism. Well maybe not. A book titled Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art (Rowman
VISIT ISABEL SANTALÓ
Another story of a forgotten painter: at the Dart festival of art documentaries, which will be held in Barcelona starting November 29, you will be able to see again an atypical film that has made an interesting festival journey. In The Visit and a Secret Garden, the filmmaker Irene M. Borrego goes to see her great-aunt, the painter Isabel Santaló, several times in the residence where she lived before she died in 2017 and from those interviews, not always easy – There is a moment when Santaló locks himself in his room and stops filming – he begins to investigate not only the life of the artist but also the nature of success and oblivion in the world of art. The testimony of Antonio López, Santaló’s generation companion, who appears in the film and says that his painting was “luminous and dry, (…), a little rough, honest and authentic,” has been greatly highlighted.
