Above: Composition for Jazz, Albert Gleizes (1915), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Eskişehir, Türkiye
Wednesday 24 July 2024
Last Sunday evening at Starbucks with a new student after my classes at the school have ended.
He is an educated man, a well-seasoned man, despite being half my age.
Not that unusual.
But to my delight the young man is unusual, for he is a risk-taker of the mind.
He has made good on his impulse to make the joys of the intellect a significant part of his life.
He has nurtured and cultivated that impulse, refusing to work in a career that does not challenge him mentally.
He is a man with a real passion for knowledge.
Above: Kasaba shopping centre, Eskişehir
And as a teacher, I truly want to help him.
I want to tell him about beloved books that I have read.
I want to share the experience that those books have given me..
But then comes the lurking anxiety that the beloved books might not be returned.
The gradual depletion of a library of its most beloved tomes is a woeful thing.
I play with the notion of an “ex libris” label stuck inside each book I bravely lend out.
I restrain myself from giving careful instructions as to how to return a book once read.
I long to issue dire warnings about the consequences of late or non-return.
I have lost books before.
We know your type.
You love the look and feel of books so much that you yearn to possess them.
Just walking into a bookshop turns you on.
Your greatest pleasure in life is bringing the new books home and slipping them onto your immaculate shelves.
You stand back to admire them, wonder what it will like to have read them.
Then you go off and do something else instead.
“Common sense” advises that you invest in an e-reader.
By reducing a book to its words, so the argument goes, you will soon discover if you really want to read the book.
If it passes the test, wait until you are actually ready to read it before you press “download“.
And if you can read it electronically then what is the point of owning an actual book requiring a bookshelf?
The e-book advocate misses the point.
Yes, there are distinctions between bibliophiles and book collectors.
A book collector’s shelves are replete with pristine books that upon first glance impress the naive into thinking that here is a well-read intellectual.
But don’t be fooled.
His books are too pretty to have been perused.
Love what you see but don’t touch.
Show off what you have rather than actually become who you should be because you actually have absorbed the content of the books.
A bibliophile’s shelves look like the beloved books have been used, have been read and re-read, have been loved and embraced, dog-eared and battered, lived through and through.
A bibliophile knows his books and loves each book as if each one were his child.
You argue that you are too busy to read.
Your life is one big to-do list.
Living is about ticking things off.
You don’t even have time to phone your best friend.
Let alone to sit down with a book, but one thing we know you can do is multitask.
“Common sense” suggests audio books.
Order a set of comfortable headphones and keep busy while you listen to a novel.
Iron, garden, wash the dishes, pound the running machine, walk to work as you listen.
The argument goes that you can listen to a novel without the sacrifice of time and effort that reading an actual book demands.
The argument suggests that you use a different part of your brain to take in a story than you need for whatever task is at hand.
That suddenly the menial workaday aspect of your life will be transformed.
Soon you will be on the lookout for more chores to tackle, that any task will do, just as long as it earns you another half hour – and then another – with your audio book.
But to truly absorb a book demands your full attention.
Everything changes when we read.
People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate.
You find out something as you read that is vitally important for making your way in the world.
The world doesn’t have to be like this.
Things can be different.
A book builds empathy, built up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks.
And you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.
You become someone else.
And when you return to your own world, you will have changed.
There are books with ghosts and magic and rockets, vampires and wizards, witches and wonders.
A library is about freedom, the freedom to read, the freedom of ideas, the freedom of communication.
They are about education and entertainment, deeds of danger developed from deep inside a safe space.
A library is about access to information.
A book is tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated.
A book feels good in your hand.
Books are good at being books and there should always be a place for them.
A library is a place of pleasure, a haven of humanity, a legacy of love.
We need libraries.
We need books.
We need literate citizens whose libraries are larger than their TV sets.
Books are the way that the dead communicate with us, the way we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way humnaity has built itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental, rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.
To destroy a library is to silence the past and damage the future.
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.
It is easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that society is too damn big and the individual less than nothing, but the truth is individuals make the future.
They make the future by imagining that things can be different.
Albert Einstein was once asked how we could make our children intelligent.
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.“
Above: German theoretical physicist Alber Einstein (1879 – 1955)
To read is to imagine and understand.
Thus, for me, the destruction of my library represents a end to all I was and a commencement of despair for what I might have become.
Málaga, España
Tuesday 11 June 2024
Of the two weeks we will spend in Andalucia, the wife will later claim that we spent the first week arguing, that I was the unreasonable one, that I was the illogical irrational one.
The cause of the dissent?
The wife and I live apart.
She in Switzerland and I in Türkiye.
I have, at present, a residence permit for both, though I spend little time in the former and work in the latter.
We console ourselves with the mirage of my returning to live one day in Switzerland – a land as beautiful and unloveable as a supermodel.
She tells me that my books (and clothes and DVDs) have created a mausoleum of me out of “our” Swiss apartment.
She chose to work in this Swiss village because it is located by a lake.
At the time we moved from Germany to Switzerland all that could be afforded was an apartment on the village’s main street rather than overlooking the lake.
An opportunity presented itself to move beside the lake, but the new lodgings are smaller.
What was mine has now become clutter, unwelcome in a smaller flat.
My library must go.
Above: Landschlacht, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland
But a bibliophile never wants to reduce his collection but rather wishes to expand it.
I am in Spain, in Málaga.
I long to visit Mapas y Compañia with its maps and travel literature.
In gift shops of museums visited, I gravitate to the books on display.
I want to buy more books.
Not destroy the books I already have.
How many books have I actually read?
More than she thinks.
The furniture is hers.
The white goods belong to the flat.
All that I own, the only things I dare to describe as “mine” are my movies, my music and my books.
As for the latter, I have books here in Eskişehir, books in Switzerland and books back in Canada.
The hope is to one day bring the collection together.
A simple plan, a modest dream, an uncomplicated desire.
She cannot understand my passion for my possessions and, in truth, logically, I understand that possessions are not possessed by people but rather possessions possess the possessors.
The more you own, the more you must manage.
In my younger days I walked across Canada and hitchhiked around North America and parts of Europe with my sole possessions limited to what I could actually carry upon my shoulders.
Granted that it was a hand-to-mouth existence but it was at the same time it was one of the most liberating periods of my life.
I traded freedom for security and the promise of stability.
Above: Canada Slim
SUNSET
Why continue with the old deception?
Why say that the sun is a traveller?
Am I also lying when I think
That mother, sister, fiancée,
Youth and first ardors have gone?
Am I not the one who moves away from them?
I live, indeed, under the roof of a new home.
I live, indeed, under the canopy of a new home.
I live, indeed, under the imminence of a perpetual change.
I follow my orbit,
Fleeing from the affections that want to hold me.
We all live fleeing.
Life is the mask of fear.
Every hour is a new twilight.
Every man, every thing,
A traveller who, to save his orbit,
Flees triumphant or battered.
José Moreno Villa
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo puts these famous words into the mouth of Archdeacon Claude Frollo:
“The book will kill the building.
When you compare architecture to the idea, which needs only a sheet of paper, some ink and a pen, is it surprising that the human intellect should have deserted architecture for the printing press?“
Well, the cathedrals – those Bibles in stone – did not vanish, but the avalance of manuscripts and then printed text that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages did render them less important.
As culture changed, architecture lost its emblematic role.
So it is with the book.
There is no need to suppose that the electronic book will replace the printed version.
Has film killed painting?
Has television killed cinema or streaming television?
However, there is no doubt that the book is in the throes of a technological revolution that is changing our relationship to it profoundly.
The book represents a sort of unsurpassable perfection in the realm of the imagination.
It is a tool that has remained remarkably true to itself for a very long time, over and above changes in its form.
But what is a book?
And what will change if we read onscreen rather than turning the pages of a physical object?
What will we gain and, more importantly, what will we lose?
Old-fashioned habits, perhaps.
A certain sense of the sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilization that has made it our Holy of Holies.
A peculiar intimacy between the author and reader, which the concept of hypertextuality is bound to damage.
A sense of existing in a self-contained world that the book and, along with it, certain ways of reading used to represent it.
Books hold a mirror up to humanity.
Is the true function of books simply to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy?
Do books necessarily represent the progress that helps us forget the shadows we always think we have left behind?
How can we know that the books that have survived are a true reflection of what human creativity has produced?
One cannot help remembering all the fires in which so many books have burned and continue to burn.
The history of book production is thus indivisible from the history of a real and continuing bibliocaust.
Not only accidental fire, but censure, ignorance, stupidity, inquisition, auto-da-fé, negligence and distraction have all been stumbling blocks in the journey of the book.
What we call culture is in fact a lengthy process of selection and filtering.
Are the books that remain the best of the huge legacy of centuries gone by?
Or the worst?
Have we retained the golden nuggets or the mud in the various spheres of creative expression?
Contemporary civilization, armed with every conceivable kind of technology, is still attempting to conserve culture safely, without much lasting success.
However determined we are to learn from the past, our libraries, museums and film archives will only ever contain the works that time has not destroyed.
Now more than ever, we realize that culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.
Umberto Eco has built up a collection of extremely rare books on human error and fakery because, according to him, understanding these qualities is fundamental to any attempt to create a theory of truth.
“The human being is a truly remarkable creature.
He has discovered fire, built cities, written magnificent poems, interpreted the world and invented mythologies, but at the same time he has never ceased waging war on his fellow humans, being totally wrong and destroying his environment.
This mixture of great intellectual powers and base idiocy creates an approximately neutral outcome.
So when we decide to explore human stupidity, we are somehow paying tribute to this creature who is part genius and part fool.”
If we understand books as reflecting the human striving for self-improvement and transcedence, then we see that they express not only our great integrity but also our terrible baseness.
Above: Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016)
José Moreno Villa was a Spanish poet and member of the Generation of ’27.
He was a man of many talents:
Narrator, essayist, literary critic, artist, painter, columnist, researcher, archivist, librarian and archaeologist.
He also taught at universities in the United States and Mexico.
Above: Spanish poet José Moreno Villa (1877 – 1955)
THE MAN OF THE MOMENT
Strong boots, a heavy blanket,
A rifle, a pistol:
He is the man.
A shaggy beard, a thick beard,
Saliva and curses,
A hard step, a fixed gaze,
Sleeping dressed:
He is the man.
He is the man of the moment.
All you see is this man,
The street, trains, doorways,
Under the rain, under the sun,
Among fallen chairs and dead street lamps,
Among bloody papers that the winter wind blows.
The whole city is his,
And he cares nothing
About where he will lay his head,
Tired after ten nights.
It seems that he has had neither herds of sheep, nor work,
Nor a family to take care of him, nor women to enjoy.
He drinks, sings, quarrels and falls
(Because falling is for men).
He knows almost nothing
(But it is almost for men).
He wants to see himself
As the owner and
One with all the other men.
He wants a book, bread, respect,
A bed, work, entertainment
And all the things that man makes for man
Or that nature gives for man to take.
Under the winter rain and among the great canyons,
I see him in the devastated city,
Serious and noble,
Like a shoot seeking its roots.
This is the man.
Moreno Villa was born into a comfortable middle-class family in Málaga.
His father, José Moreno Castañeda, was a conservative politician and his grandfather, Miguel Moreno Mazón, had been a conservative mayor of Málaga.
Above: Málaga
After finishing high school when Moreno Villa was 17 years old, his parents sent him to Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany to read chemistry.
He didn’t complete his studies.
Above: Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Deutschland (Germany)
SONG
Something that doesn’t work,
That comes and goes,
What do I want with it?
Oh, sea!
Something that is tamed
Or irritated by chance,
What do I want with it?
Oh, sea!
Something that one cannot control…
Oh, lost force,
That of the sea!
Above: Port of Málaga
Moreno Villa returned to Málaga in 1910 and decided to settle in Madrid.
Above: Madrid, España
There Moreno Villa became familiar with personalities such as Ortega y Gasset, Enrique de Mesa, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Enrique Díez Canedo, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pío Baroja, among others.
Above: Spanish philosopher / essayist Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955)
Above: Spanish poet Enrique de Mesa (1878 – 1929)
Above: Spanish writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1880 – 1962)
Above: Spanish poet Enrique Díez Canedo (1879 – 1944)
Above: Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881 – 1958)
Above: Spanish writer Pío Baroja (1872 – 1956)
Moreno Villa was employed by Editorial Calleja from 1916 to 1921, on the recommendation of Juan Ramón Jiménez.
He wrote for magazines such as España, Revista de Occidente and El Sol.
Will the book disappear as a result of the Internet?
The Internet has returned us to the alphabet.
If we thought we had become a purely visual civilization, the computer returns us to Gutenberg’s galaxy.
From now on, everyone has to read.
In order to read, you need a medium.
This medium cannot simply be a computer screen.
Spend two hours reading a novel on your computer and your eyes turn into tennis balls.
And in any case, the computer depends on electricity and cannot be read in a bath or even lying on your side in bed.
One of two things will happen:
Either the book will continue to be the medium for reading or its replacement will resemble what the book has always been, even before the invention of the printing press.
Alterations to the book-as-object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years.
The book is like the spoon.
Once invented, it cannot be improved.
Above: Welsh love spoon
Hermann Hesse had some interesting things to say about the “re-legitimization” of the book that he thought would result from technical developments.
He was writing in the 1950s:
“The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority.
We have not yet reached the point where young competitors, such as radio and cinema have taken over functions from the book that it cannot afford to lose.“
Above: German writer Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)
At a certain point in time, man invented the written word.
We can think of writing as an extension of the hand and therefore as almost biological. It is the communication tool most closely linked to the body.
Once invented, it could never be given up.
We have never needed to read and write as much as we do today.
If you cannot read or write, then you cannot use a computer.
And you have to be able to read and write in a more complex way than ever before, because we have invented new characters and symbols.
Our alphabet has expanded.
It is becoming harder and harder to learn to read.
Moreno Villa lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid for nearly 20 years, during which he benefited both intellectually and socially.
Above: Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, España
With the emergence of the Second Spanish Republic (1931 – 1939), Moreno Villa was appointed Director of the Archives of the National Palace.
Above: Palacio Real de Madrid
In 1927, he published a series of essays titled Pruebas de Nueva York (Observations of New York), inspired by his stay in New York City with his then-fiancée, Florence Louchheim, whom he had met in Madrid at the Residencia.
I WILL DANCE WITH JACINTA THE REDHEAD
That’s it,
I’ll dance with her
The broken, black rhythm of jazz.
Europe for America.
But we must dance
If the wheel moves,
And when the blackbirds climb up the neighbour’s poplar
Because – this is true –
Ritual demands its chapel.
No, Jacinta?
Oh, Jacinta, redhead,
Red-haired red-haired red-haired red-haired.
How pretty, how pretty,
Oh, how pretty they are,
Yes, they are,
Your two, two, two,
Under the strips of sweet bone lace from Malinas.
Oh, Jacinta,
Good, great good, supreme good.
Now we have the blackbird up,
And the donkey’s wheel turns.
Florence became the protagonist of a book of poetry that Moreno Villa would also publish upon his return from the United States, called Jacinta la pelirroja (Jacinta the Redhead).
JACINTA IS NOT KNOWN FOR LOVE
That’s how Jacinta is,
Always the dictator of the world of her lines.
Never sentimental, never lapses,
Never inflated or blunt,
Heavy or captivating.
No one knows her love
Except those who share her warm darkness.
Everyone knows her elasticity,
Or her appearance of an elusive target.
Only one knows the decline
Of her soul when love visits her.
There are three things men need to understand if they are to get it right with women:
- “Standing up to” your wife or partner as an equal without intimidating her or being intimidated by her
- Knowing the essential differences in male and female sexuality and so mastering “the art of the chase“
- Realizing she is not your mother and so making it through “the long dark night”
Most modern men, when faced with their wife’s anger, complaints or general unhappiness, simply submit, mumble an apology and tiptoe away.
If they grumble, they do so into their beards.
For the most part they act conciliatory and apologize for being such dopes.
“I’m sorry, dear!“
The millions of men who adopt this stance find that it rarely, if ever, leads to happiness.
Women with dopey husbands are not happy – they actually become more dissatisfied, more complaining.
Often without realizing why, the henpecking behaviour escalates – for a simple reason.
Deep down, women want to be met by someone strong.
They want to be debated with, not just agreed with.
They hunger for men who can take the initiative sometimes, make some decisions, tell them when they are not making sense.
It is no fun being the only adult in the house.
How can a woman relax or feel safe when the man she is teamed with is so soft and weak?
In every relationship, something fierce is needed once in a while.
Sometimes a man needs to say what he wants and stick by it.
Above: Scene from Laws of Attraction
Women are only human.
This means they are sometimes dead right and sometimes completely wrong.
Women are neither devils nor angels.
They are normal fallible beings.
To be married to one you have to keep your head on straight.
You cannot just drift along and let them decide everything.
Marriage is not an excuse to stop thinking.
Not only can your wife be wrong or immature or perverse or prejudiced or competitive or bloody-minded, sometimes you and she just will see things differently because you are different.
What is right for her may often be wrong for her.
It is as simple as that.
Women often don’t understand men.
How can they unless we explain ourselves to them?
This does not mean you cannot get along.
Just that you have to keep negotiating.
Being falsely agreeable does not help either of you.
Prepare for many long patient debates.
Both partners can learn more respect for the other’s need for selfhood.
At times, there will be a real clash of realities.
More exploration will be needed.
Couples need to fight in order to root out fixed attitudes or longer term misunderstandings and pull them into the light of day.
A marriage is therapy, every living day.
Conscious fighting is needed.
When a man and a woman are standing toe-to-toe arguing, what is it that the man wants?
Often he doesn’t know.
He simply wants the conflict to end.
His boundaries are poorly maintained.
Every sword thrust penetrates the very centre of his being.
Men and women both have the capacity for blind rage which achieves nothing.
Arising out of centuries of two-way inter-gender abuse, there is within us a core of rage which, if we take it into our relationships, destroys all love and feeling.
It is the frustration of needing each other so much, but coming from a tradition of estrangement and misunderstanding millennia old.
There are two imperatives here.
We must fight, debate and be true to ourselves, otherwise our closeness is just an act.
But in fighting, we must show great restraint and always have respect.
Moreno Villa’s relationship with Florence, the future Jacinta la pelirroja developed into an impending marriage, but the girl’s parents demanded to meet the groom before the wedding.
Moreno Villa agreed, and they travelled together to New York, while their friends in Spain sent their congratulations and gifts.
Above: New York City, 1920s
Salvador Dalí, for example, gave them his painting Mujer sobre las rocas, that the couple collected in Barcelona and is now in the Salvador Dalí Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Above: Salvador Dalí, Mujer sobre las rocas
The visit to New York stirred a mixture of conflicting feelings for Moreno Villa.
Above: New York City, 1920s
CAUSE OF MY LONELINESS
It is not a desire to separate oneself
But rather an attention to the secret.
I am my fear.
It is not pride or disdain,
But a hunger to know.
I am a peak and a wall.
The solution of others is not enough for me.
Being astonishment.
I am my pilot.
I would like to die having been
A poet, a carpenter, a painter,
A philosopher, a lover and a bullfighter.
Oh!
And a black singer
Of a jazz that I feel.
On one hand, the most important one was the opposition of the girl’s parents to the marriage, and his realization that family pressures were persuading his girlfriend.
Moreno Villa decided to end their love story and returned alone to Spain.
Above: New York City Harbour, 1920s
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s busy
Too busy to come to the phone
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s trying to start a new life of her own
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s happy
So why don’t you leave her alone?
And the operator said 40 cents more for the next three minutes
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just want to tell her goodbye
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s packing
She’s gonna be leaving today
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s marrying a fella down Galveston way
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s happy
So why don’t you leave her alone?
And the operator said 40 cents more for the next three minutes
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just want to tell her goodbye
Sylvia’s mother said Sylvia’s hurrying
She’s catching the nine o’clock train
Sylvia’s mother said, Take your umbrella ’cause Sylvia, it’s starting to rain
And Sylvia’s mother said, Thank you for calling, and, sir, won’t you call back again?”
And the operator said 40 cents more for the next three minutes
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please, Mrs. Avery, I just want to tell her goodbye
Tell her goodbye
Tell her goodbye
Tell her goodbye
Please, tell her goodbye
I think that one of the reasons that 80% of divorces are initiated by women is that too many people are stuck in adolescent preconceptions of what a marriage should be.
I think of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Instead of the calm existence she discovers with a husband who adores her, she had expected love to be “a great bird with rose-coloured wings” hanging in the sky.
These absurd notions were picked up from literature, for she had swallowed down a great number of romantic novels riddled with tormented young ladies “fainting in lonely pavilions” and gentlemen “weeping like fountains“.
Too many harbour unrealistic ideas of romantic love and marriage.
Many need to dose themselves up with reality.
There is more to a man and a woman than their marriage.
The first thing is to establish is what you are both in the relationship for.
Sometimes the answers are clear.
Sometimes they aren’t.
Guess it’s over, call it a day
Sorry that it had to end this way
No reason to pretend
We knew it had to end some day, this way
Yes, it’s over, the kids are gone
What’s the use of tryin’ to hang on?
Somewhere we lost the key
So little left for you and me and it’s clear to see
Too much, too little, too late to lie again with you
Too much, too little, too late to try again with you
We’re in the middle of ending something that we knew
It’s over
Oh, it was over
Too much, too little, too late to ever try again
Too much, too little, too late, let’s end it being friends
Too much, too little, too late, we knew it had to end
Ah, it’s over
It’s over
Yes, it’s over, the chips are down (whoa)
Nearly all our bridges tumbled down
Whatever chance we try, let’s face it widened-eye
It’s over (It’s over)
It’s over
Too much, too little, too late to ever try again
Too much, too little, too late, let’s end it being friends
Too much, too little, too late, we knew it had to end
And it’s over
And it’s over
And it’s over
Too much, too little, too late to ever try again
Too much, too little, too late, let’s end it being friends
JACINTA ACCUSES ME OF SPENDING
Next to the miser, I feel like a spendthrift, Jacinta.
Birds were created at the sight of elephants,
And our land in view of the immense emptiness.
Open, Jacinta, your eyes to creation,
Your hands and your whole being.
Let the dollars fall and be lost.
There is a dollar of greater value,
The one that does not slip from the leather bag;
The one that is minted and comes out new every morning;
The one that travels without the compass rose;
The one that puts its will in the hidden Indies;
The one that agrees with the distant;
The one that clarifies the confusing;
The one that does not lie;
The one that does not descend;
The one that follows taut a line of solitude.
On the other hand, he discovered a city and a world radically different that he observed and described in a small series of charming articles later published as the book Pruebas de Nueva York.
Above: José Moreno Villa
Here you are.
On the scene.
You look around and wonder where to begin.
There is so much to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, know and enjoy.
I want to explore, to sample the action, to see for myself whether there is anything worth remembering.
You have to remain aware and alert, alive for the potential of a place.
Sometimes the biggest memories come from the little happenings.
Above: Málaga
Here you are.
On the scene.
You orient yourself to the important landmarks and obtain an overview of the topography.
You look for surface transportation.
You seek an offshore perspective.
But nothing beats shoe leather.
On your own two feet is the best way to catch the most intimate glimpses of everyday life.
See the city at different hours of the day.
Notice the names of their plazas and squares and streets to get the flavour of the community.
What the people of an area consider important can be found in their parks.
Cultivate the essence of existence here.
Notice with all your senses.
Record what you witnessed and felt.
Meet the locals.
Soak up local colour.
Join the congregation.
Welcome chance meetings.
The more people you talk to, the better feel you get for the place, the more you know about it and the better experience you will have.
Travelling with your partner is a bittersweet experience, for though your adventure is a compilation of moments shared, often the travel experience is blinkered by the self-imposed bubble created by the lack of interaction with others outside the relationship.
A case of not seeing the forest because of the trees you have chosen to focus on.
Above: Málaga
And the driver turned his face away
In that taxi, that night, and in that park,
Crying as if for real,
Your cold little nose and my shaved beard
Do you remember?
The driver, curious and furious,
Turned his face like an Apache.
(New York’s Central Park,
Five minutes across the night;
The venal redhead,
Crying on my shoulder,
And, in front of her,
The criminal hesitation of the driver).
Above: Opening credit of the sitcom Taxi (1978 – 1983)
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), Moreno Villa moved to Valencia for a short time….
Above: Valencia, España
Until he was exiled to the United States, where he was employed in various cultural and educational posts at Princeton University.
Above: The official armorial shield of Princeton University
Shortly afterwards he moved to Mexico, where he married, had a son and developed much of his work.
Above: Flag of Mexico
WHERE?
Perhaps there where the sea and the land?
Perhaps where the moors and the pine forests?
On the peak where the sky and the rock?
Or where the root and the fountain?
There where the stellar shadows draw the steps of a sleepwalker?
Or where the musical notes embark on the journey of no return?
Perhaps right here, where I have you,
Where I eat your eyes with the teeth of a heart,
To know what yours taste like?
Here, without a stage, without a ritual?
Yes!
Here, a cell detached from the city,
A cabin, a snail house, a magic breast,
A volume just right for two combatants.
In Málaga, the Municipal Public Library José Moreno Villa was erected in 1988 in his honour.
Above: Municipal Public Library José Moreno Villa, Málaga
I cannot think of a more fitting testimonial to the life of a man of letters.
The idea of collecting books goes back a very long way.
The cult of the written page and later of the book goes back as far as writing itself.
Even the Romans wanted to own and collect scrolls.
Above: The Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century AD, depicting Augustus, the first Roman emperor
The books we have lost have been lost for other reasons.
They have been destroyed through religious censorship and because libraries, rather like cathedrals, had a great tendency to burn down at the slightest provocation, chiefly because both were built mainly of wood.
Indeed, the fact that books were liable to be destroyed by fire was the reason people wanted to keep them safe and collected them.
This is the very basis of monasticism.
Above: The Monastery of Varlaam in Meteora, Thessaly, Greece
The repeated barbarian invasions of Rome and their habit of setting fire to the city before they left, seem to have led the Romans to seek out a safe place for their books.
And what safer place than a monastery to put books out of reach of the dangers that threatened the preservation of their history?
At the same time, this practice inevitably entailed saving certain books at the expense of others.
And so the filtering process was begun.
Above: Mont St. Michel, France
Emilio Prados was a Spanish poet and editor, a member of the Generation of ’27.
Above: Spanish poet Emilio Prados (1899 – 1962)
Sing sad
I didn’t want to,
I didn’t want to be born.
I sat by the fountain
looking at the new afternoon…
The water flowed slowly.
I didn’t want to be born.
I went under the avenue
to hide in her sadness.
The wind cried in her.
She did not want to be born.
I leaned on a rock,
to see the first star…
Beautiful tear of summer!
I didn’t want to have been born.
I fell asleep under the moon.
What a fine knife-like light!
I rose from my sorrow…
(I was already in a deep sleep.)
I didn’t want to,
I didn’t want to be born.
Above: Fountain of the Three Graces, Málaga
Born in Málaga, Prados was offered a place at Madrid’s famous Residencia de estudiantes in 1914 and moved into its university section in 1918.
He began to associate with the city’s artistic bohemian scene, which gathered at the Café Inglés on Calle Larios.
Above: Calle Larios, Málaga
Here he met poet Federico Garcia Lorca, artist Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and many other young people who were to become celebrated and influential figures in Spanish art and literature.
Above: Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 – 1936)
Above: Spanish artist Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989)
Above: Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983)
In 1921, a long-running lung complaint forced him to retire to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where he spent most of the year.
In this enforced seclusion from wider society he read widely in European literature and settled upon becoming a writer himself.
Above: Images of Davos, Canton Graubünden, Switzerland
I closed my door to the world
I closed my door to the world
My flesh was lost in sleep
I remained,
Internal, magical, invisible,
Naked like a blind man.
Filled to the very brim of my eyes,
I lit up from within.
Trembling, transparent,
I stood upon the wind,
Like a clean glass of pure water,
Like a glass angel in a mirror.
Emerging from the sanatorium in 1922, Prados resumed his academic training:
Taking courses at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin, visiting museums and art galleries across Germany, immersing himself in the artistic culture of Paris, and meeting, amongst others, artist Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973).
Above: Albert Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Above: Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany – the world’s first modern university is affiliated with 57 Nobel Prize winners
Even if visual and sound recordings were wiped out by a giantic electricity failure or for some other reason, we will always have the book.
We will always find ways of teaching a child to read.
The idea of culture being on the road to ruin, of memories being endangered, is of course as old as the hills.
Probably older than the written object itself.
All the great civilizations asked themselves the same question:
What to do with a culture under threat?
How to save it?
And what to save?
And when an evacuation does take place, when people do have time to carry the emblems of their civilization to safety, it is easier to save scrolls, codices, incunabula and books than sculpture or paintings.
Let us pose ourselves a classic dilemma:
The world is under threat and we can only safeguard a few cultural objects.
Civilization might be wiped out, perhaps by a massive environmental catastrophe.
We have to act fast.
We cannot protect or save everything.
So what would we choose?
And in which media?
Modern media formats quickly become obsolete.
Why run the risk of choosing objects that may become mute and indecipherable?
It is proven that books are superior to every other object that our cultural industries have put on the market in recent years.
So, wanting to choose something easily transportable and that has shown itself equal to the ravages of time, I choose the book.
Which books would I attempt to save in the event of a disaster?
The house is on fire.
What should be saved first?
I would try to save the books I love the most.
But how to choose what they are?
I am extremely attached to lots of them.
Each time that a new medium appears, it has to prove that it isn’t subject to the rules and constraints that have shaped every previous invention.
The new medium proudly considers itself unique.
As if it automatically brings with it a natural ability on the part of its new users that will spare them the need to learn how to use it.
An intrinsic talent.
As if it can sweep aside everything that has preceded it, suddenly rendering illiterate and backward anyone who dares reject it.
I have witnessed this ruse all my life.
The truth is very different.
Each new medium requires a long learning process, all the longer because our brains have been moulded by what preceded it.
Using new media formats has nothing to do with aptitude.
It is something you have to learn.
Adapting is incredibly difficult.
Future Shock is a 1970 book by American futurist Alvin Toffler, written together with his spouse Adelaide Farrell, in which the authors define the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies.
The shortest definition for the term in the book is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time“.
Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society“.
This change overwhelms people.
He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation“— future shocked.
Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock.
In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term “information overload“.
Alvin Toffler’s main thought centers on the idea that modern humans feel shock from rapid changes.
For example, Toffler’s daughter went to shop in New York City and she couldn’t find a shop in its previous location.
Thus New York has become a city without a history.
The overall production of goods and services doubles each 50 years in developed countries.
Society experiences an increasing number of changes with an increasing rapidity, while people are losing the familiarity that old institutions (religion, family, national identity, profession) once provided.
The “brain drain” – the emigration of European scientists to the United States – is both an indicator of the changes in society and also one of their causes.
Many goods have become disposable as the cost of manual repair or cleaning has become greater than the cost of making new goods due to mass production.
Examples of disposable goods include ballpoint pens, lighters, plastic bottles, and paper towels.
The design of goods becomes outdated quickly.
(And so, for example, a second generation of computers appears before the end of the expected period of usability of the first generation).
It is possible to rent almost everything (from a ladder to a wedding dress), thus eliminating the need for ownership.
Whole branches of industry die off and new branches of industry arise.
This affects unskilled workers who are compelled to change their residence to find new jobs.
The constant change in the market also poses a problem for advertisers who must deal with moving targets.
People of post-industrial society change their profession and their workplace often.
People have to change professions because professions quickly become outdated.
People of post-industrial society thus have many careers in a lifetime.
The knowledge of an engineer becomes outdated in ten years.
People look more and more for temporary jobs.
To follow transient jobs, people have become nomads.
For example, immigrants from Algeria, Turkey and other countries go to Europe to find work.
Transient people are forced to change residence, phone number, school, friends, car license and contact with family often.
As a result, relationships tend to be superficial with a large number of people, instead of being intimate or close relationships that are more stable.
Evidence for this is tourist travel and holiday romances.
The driver’s license, received at age 16, has become the teenager’s admission to the world of adults, because it symbolizes the ability to move independently.
It is the death of permanence.
The post industrial society will be marked by a transient culture where everything ranging from goods to human relationships will be temporary.
Today’s media formats are definitely more fragile and less long-lasting that our wonderfully tenacious incunabula.
And yet, whether we like it or not, these new tools are having a profound effect on our thought patterns, gradually altering them from those engendered by the book.
The speed with which technology reinvents itself has forced us into an unsustainably frequent reorganization of our mental habits.
We feel the need to buy a new computer every couple of years, precisely because they are designed to become obsolete after a certain time, to be more expensive to repair than replace.
We feel the need to buy a new model every year, because the new model is always better in terms of features, gadgets, bells and whistles….
And every new piece of technology requires the acquisition of a new system of reflexes, which in turn requires effort on our part, and all of this on a shorter and shorter cycle.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns regarding decreased pay for textile workers and a perceived reduction of output quality, and often destroyed the machines in organised raids.
Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of “Ned Ludd“, a mythical weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
The Luddite movement began in Nottingham, England, and spread to the North West and Yorkshire between 1811 and 1816.
Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.
Over time, the term has been used to refer to those opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies or even progress in general.
Baby, it’s a new age
You’re like my new craze
Let’s get together, maybe we can start a new phase
This smoke’s got the club all hazy
Spotlights don’t do you justice, baby
Why don’t you come over here?
You got me sayin’
Ayo, I’m tired of using technology
Why don’t you sit down on top of me?
Ayo, I’m tired of using technology
I need you right in front of me
It’s all about the Pentiums, baby
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
It’s all about the Pentiums, baby
It’s all about the Pentiums, baby
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
Yeah
What y’all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin’ time with all the chatroom yakkers?
Nine to five, chillin’ at Hewlett Packard?
Workin’ at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin’ the bills with my mad programming skills
Defraggin’ my hard drive for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don’t read spam
Installed a T1 line in my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin’ on my mizouse
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I’m strictly plug-and-play, I ain’t afraid of Y2K
I’m down with Bill Gates, I call him “Money” for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support
It’s all about the Pentiums, what?
You’ve gotta be the dumbest newbie I’ve ever seen
You’ve got white-out all over your screen
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You’re usin’ a 286? Don’t make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You’re the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster
You’re waxin’ your modem, tryin’ to make it go faster
Hey fella, I bet you’re still livin’ in your parents’ cellar
Downloadin’ pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And postin’ “Me too!” like some brain-dead AOL-er
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You’re just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
Now, what y’all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin’ time with all the chatroom yakkers?
Nine to five, chillin’ at Hewlett Packard?
Uh, uh, loggin’ in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the King of the Spreadsheets
Got ’em all printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer’s got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you’ve had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it’s an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that’s great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is right-protected
Every file inspected, no viruses detected
I beta tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed ’em
While your computer’s crashin’, mine’s multitaskin’
It does all my work without me even askin’
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide
I believe that yours says “Etch-A-Sketch” on the side
In a 32-bit world, you’re a 2-bit user
You’ve got your own newsgroup, alt.total-loser
Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax
Where’d you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?
Play me online? Well, you know that I’ll beat you
If I ever meet you I’ll control-alt-delete you
What? What? What? What? What?
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
It’s all about the Pentiums! (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby)
Now, what y’all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin’ time with all the chatroom yakkers?
Nive to five, chillin’ at Hewlett Packard?
What?
But is it even possible to adapt to a rhythm that is acclerating to this pointless degree?
There are areas of knowledge in which it is impossible to remain abreast of new developments for very long.
The world of knowledge is in constant flux.
We can only have a proper handle on it for a limited period of time.
But there are technical innovations that do not change, such as the book.
In the summer of 1924, Prados returned to Málaga, where he continued writing.
Together with poet Manuel Altolaguirre, he founded the magazine Litoral, one of the most influential literary and artistic publications of 1920s Spain.
Above: Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre (1905 – 1959)
In 1925 he became an editor for the Sur printing house, again working closely with Altolaguirre.
Sur was responsible for publishing most of the work of the Generation of ’27, and the quality of their editing brought Prados and Altolaguirre international prestige.
(The Generation of ’27 (Generación del 27) was an influential group of poets that arose in Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry.
Their first formal meeting took place in Seville in 1927 to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora.
Above: Spanish poet Luis de Góngora (1561 – 1627)
Writers and intellectuals paid homage at the Ateneo de Sevilla, which retrospectively became the foundational act of the movement.)
Above: Main façade of the Ateneo de Sevilla
At the same time as he was working in literature and pursuing his own creative talents, Prados took an increasing interest in social affairs and politics, particularly the marginalization of the poorest sectors of society.
The climate of violence in Málaga after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 led him to return to Madrid, where he joined the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas and began contributing enthusiastically to the intellectual side of the Republican cause.
As well as publishing his own works (his compilation of war poetry, Destino fiel, won the National Literature Prize in 1938), he edited various books including Homenaje al poeta Federico García Lorca and Romancero general de la guerra de España.
He moved to Barcelona in 1938 and took charge, again with Altolaguirre, of the publications of the Republican Ministry of Public Instruction.
However, as a prominent Republican he was soon forced to flee Spain altogether as the Nationalists won victory in the Civil War.
He escaped to Paris and then, early in July 1939, in the company of a variety of other intellectual Republican figures, to Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1962.
If the future is the future, it is always unexpected.
The future is always created from our current starting place, but the future is not a continuation of the present.
That being said, contemporary technologies are not likely to render the book obsolete.
For despite all our performance-enhancing technology, the modern man has less time than our predecessors to master it.
Lots of our contemporary inventions are manifestations of very ancient dreams.
It is not that the authors of the past could see into the future.
It is that the present has made real the dreams of the generations that have before us.
We cannot predict the future.
These days the present is constantly shedding its skin.
The past, supposed to provide a solid and comforting point of reference, has a tendency to slip out of view.
The future takes no account of the past, but none of the present, either.
We have poor long-term memories and the future is as uncertain as ever.
What has happened to the present – this wonderful moment we are experiencing, which all kinds of forces are constantly trying to take away from us?
Trends which once lasted 30 years now last 30 days.
The obsolence of objects.
The obsolence of the moment.
We spent a few hours of our lives learning to ride a bicycle, but once acquired, that knowledge lasted forever.
Now, we might spend two weeks learning some new computer programme, only for a new, seemingly indispensable version to come onto the market before we have even mastered the old one.
We no longer live calmly in the present, but instead we are continually striving to prepare ourselves for the future.
We are living in a changing, moving, renewable, ephemeral world, at exactly the same time that, paradoxically, we are living longer and longer lives.
The life expectancy of our grandparents was, of course, shorter than our own, but they were living in an unchanging present.
Last year was a solid basis on which to predict what the New Year would bring.
Things did not change.
It used to be the case that school students worked towards a final exam that punctuated a long period of learning.
After that your learning days were over, unless you happened to be one of the elite who went to university.
The world was unchanging.
You could use what you knew until the day you died.
These days, an employee of a company must constantly update his knowledge or risk losing his job.
We are doomed to be eternal students.
Early work, 1925 – 1928:
Prados’s poetry highlights in particular the relationship between the natural world and the otherness of being, mixing avant-garde and surrealist elements with his own Arabic / Andalusian roots.
The body at dawn
Now I can see you,
Sky, earth, sun, stone,
As if I were seeing my own flesh.
You were the only thing missing
In her for me to see myself complete,
A whole man in the world and
A seedless father of the beautiful presence of the future.
Before, I saw the soul being born and I went to save it,
A faithful guardian, persecuted and painful,
But always sure of my hand and its warning.
I helped beauty and its happiness,
Although I never doubted
That I was betraying the master, the disciple,
Especially if the former gave form
In his freedom to the thought of beauty.
And so my mature bone dressed its clothes,
As full of pain and darkness as a cloudy night
Without the scent of a flower,
Without rain and without silence…
Only fulfilling my step,
Even through such harsh ground,
Gave me light and strength in living.
But today you open your arms to me,
Sky, earth, sun, stone,
Just as I sensed as a child
That there would be truth beneath the eternal.
Today I feel that my tongue confuses
Its saliva with the most tender drop of dew
And prolongs its touches outside of me,
In the grass or in the dark,
Secret and humid root.
I watch my thoughts come to me slowly like water,
I don’t know from what rain or lake
Or deep sands of fountains
That beat under my heart
Already supported by the rock of the mountain.
Today, my skin exists,
But no longer as the limit that once haunted me,
But also as you yourselves,
Beautiful blue sky,
Stretched out earth…
I am already
Everything:
Unity of a true body.
Of that body that God called his body
And today begins to assent to,
Without death or life,
Like a rose in constant presence
Of his finished word and in oblivion
Of what he thought before
Even without calling it
And feared being:
Demon of Nothingness.
Political poetry, 1932 – 1938:
Prados devotes himself to outspokenly social and political poetry, developing these themes using surrealist language.
New love
This body that God puts in my arms
To teach me to walk through oblivion,
I don’t even know whose it is.
When I found him, a black angel
A giant shadow approached my eyes
And entered them silently and tenaciously like a river.
It destroyed everything with its current.
It visited the most hidden intimate places it stirred up;
It was lifted, violent, sweet, trampled and broken,
To another world on the edges of my kiss:
The only flower still alive in space,
Which changed absence into more fertile ardor.
Then in my flesh it opened its wide wings,
Sticking its feathers under my chest
Every tremor and announcement of other doubts…
I do not know what life, thus,
Could light the entrance of this angel for me.
I am a ruined temple, since he came to me:
An empty lantern
Like a closed door to the eternal…
And what I was I do not know:
Perhaps I will know,
When this body abandons me again
And I am reborn from my lips
Detached from the heat that conceived them…
But today, at last,
I have stopped the day,
I have destroyed the heart of time,
Although inside me like a dagger,
I feel the angel growing, tormenting me.
Poetry from exile, 1939 – 1962:
Prados’s later poetry carries a profound sense of rootlessness and solitude.
Thematically his work becomes much denser and more philosophical, addressing the complexity of concepts such as new life, solidarity and love.
Luminous Possession
Just like this wind, I want to be a figure of my heat and,
Slowly, enter where your summer body rests;
To approach it without it seeing me;
To arrive, like an open pulse beating in the air;
To be a figure of my thought of you, in its presence;
Open flesh of wind,
A dwelling place of love in the soul.
You –
Soft ivory of sleep, snow of flesh, stillness of palm, silent moon –
Sitting, asleep in the middle of your room.
And I entering like a calm water,
Flooding your whole body until I cover you,
And, whole, remaining inside like the air in a lantern,
Watching you tremble,
Shining, shining in the middle of me,
Lighting up my body, illuminating my flesh,
All already flesh of wind.
Manuel Altolaguirre (1905 – 1959) was a Spanish poet, an editor, publisher and printer of poetry, and a member of the Generation of ’27.
Above: Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre (1905 – 1959)
Born in Málaga, Altolaguirre’s collaborative poets included Emilio Prados, Vicente Aleixandre and Federico García Lorca.
Above: Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre (1898 – 1984)
After completing law studies in Granada, Altolaguirre founded the magazine Ambos and returned to Málaga to start the printing shop Imprenta Sur (‘Southern Press‘), where he drew together many of his friends, publishing most of their early verse.
In 1926 Altolaguirre published his first collection, Las islas invitadas y otros poemas, 24 mostly descriptive, soul-searching poems about love, nature, solitude and death.
Dark love
If for you I was a shadow when I covered your body,
if when I kissed you my eyes were blind,
let us continue to be night, like the immense night, with our dark love, limitless, eternal…
Because in the light of day our love is small.
Is the function of memory to retain everything and anything?
No.
Memory – whether it is our individual memory or the collective memory that is culture – has a double function.
On the one hand to preserve certain data and on the other to allow information that does not serve us and could pointlessly encumber our brains to sink into oblivion.
Midnight, not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone
In the lamplight, the withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan
Memory, all alone in the moonlight
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
Every street lamp seems to beat
A fatalistic warning
Someone mutters and the street lamp sputters
And soon it will be morning
Daylight, I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn’t give in
When the dawn comes, tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin
Burnt out ends of smoky days
The stale, cold smell of morning
A street lamp dies, another night is over
Another day is dawning
Touch me, it’s so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me, you’ll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has begun
Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and other lost objects.
Culture is a process of tactily abandoning certain relics of the past (filtering), while placing others in a kind of cold storage, for the future.
Archives and libraries are refrigerators in which we store what has come before, so that the cultural space is not cluttered, without having to relinquish those memories entirely.
We can always go back to them some day in the future, should the mood take us.
Culture, therefore, is the process of selection, but contemporary culture is quite the opposite.
The Internet drowns us in detail about everything.
How do we select for the generations to come?
Who will do the selection?
How are we to know what will interest our descendants – what will be necessary to them, or useful, or even entertaining?
How do we filter when our computers provide everything, without the slightest hierarchy, selection or structure?
How do we build a collective memory in these conditions, knowing as we do that this memory is a matter of choices, preferences, rejections and omissions both intentional and accidental?
And knowing also that the memory of our descendants won’t necessarily work in the same way as ours.
What exactly can we know, should we know?
In his second collection, Ejemplo, the poet Altolaguirre seemed to want to mould himself into the universe in search of harmony, revealing the influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Closing the eyes
I flee from the evil that angers me, seeking the good that I lack.
My hopes hurt me more than the sorrows I have.
Storms of desires break their waves against the walls of dawn.
I am blinded by the tumults they raise.
Nest in the sea.
Cradle afloat.
The flower that struggles in the water holds me out to sea and throws me out to sea.
I close my eyes and look at the inner time that sings.
In 1930 Altolaguirre began another literary magazine, Poesía, which he also printed and bound, and to which he contributed poems of love and solitude.
After a two-year stay to Paris with his portable printing press, Altolaguirre lived in Madrid, where he produced Soledades juntas, including love poems perhaps inspired by his fellow poet Concha Méndez, whom he married in 1932.
With you
You are not so alone without me.
My loneliness accompanies you.
I am exiled, you are absent.
Which of us has a homeland?
The sky and the sea unite us.
Thoughts and tears.
Islands and clouds of oblivion
separate you and me.
Does my light drive away your night?
Does your night extinguish my longings?
Does your voice penetrate my death?
Has my death gone and reached you?
Memories are on my lips.
Hope is in your eyes.
I am not so alone without you.
Your loneliness accompanies me.
Above: Spanish poet Concha Méndez (1898 – 1986)
With Méndez, Altolaguirre founded the publications Héroe (for which Juan Ramón Jiménez contributed lyrical character portraits of Spanish heroes) and 1616 (in England, to strengthen the literary relations between Spain and England through publication of poems in the original as well as in translation).
In 1616 – the name commemorates the year of the deaths of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare – he published poems by Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Pablo Neruda and Moreno Villa, among others.
Above: Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616)
Above: English poet / playwright William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
Above: Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902 – 1963)
Above: Spanish poet Jorge Guillén (1893 – 1984) statue, Plaza de Poniente, Valladolid, España
Above: Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)
He wrote a biography of soldier/poet Garcilaso de la Vega, edited the Antología de la poeśia romántica española, and translated Victor Hugo and other writers.
Above: Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega (1501 – 1563)
Above: French writer Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885)
What does memory mean, now that we can access anything about anything, totally unfiltered – an infinite amount of information at the click of a mouse?
What is the sense of the word “memory“?
With an electronic servant able to answer all our questions, including the ones we haven’t even formed, what will be left for us to know?
What will we need to learn?
The answer is the art of synthesis and the act of learning itself.
Learning to handle information we can no longer trust.
We use the Internet to search out the information we need, without knowing whether that information is accurate.
We rely on one preferred source of information rather than finding ten different sources of information on a certain subject and comparing them.
This requires us to exercise our critical faculties with regard to the Internet and to learn that we can’t take it all at face value.
Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.
One should not use information from the Internet without first checking the information’s reliability.
The Internet, this tool which is supposed to be comforting in its delivery of everything and anything, actually plunges us into great confusion.
We have now reached a stage in our history when we can delegate the task of remembering both the good and the bad to intelligent – or so we hope – machines.
If we no longer need to remember, then intelligence is all we have left.
This is not a new debate.
The invention of printing created the possibility of storing all the cultural information one does not wish to be burdened with “in the fridge” – in books – while knowing that the information can be found whenever it is needed.
Above: Recreated Gutenberg press at the International Printing Museum, Carson, California
Aspects of memory can be delegated to books and machines, but we still have to know how to use these tools to their maximum effect.
So we still need to keep our own minds and memories in good shape.
We cannot rely on electronic tools to keep things safe.
Anyone who has not been able to keep up to date with their data storage since the first computers in 1983, moving from floppy disks to mini disks to compact discs to memory sticks, will have lost some or all of their archive several times over.
None of our contemporary computers can read the first floppy disks.
They already belong to the prehistory of information technology.
But write a novel on a typewriter and you would still have it.
Published in 1936, Altolaguirre’s poetry collection, La lenta libertad, included many poems from previous volumes, the newer poems dealing with evil and social injustice.
I’m lost
Prophet of my ends,
I did not doubt the world that my fantasy painted
In the great invisible deserts.
Concentrated and penetrating,
Alone, mute, predestined, enlightened,
My profound isolation, my deep center,
My wandering dream and sunken solitude,
Expanded through the nonexistent,
Until I hesitated when doubt darkened my blindness from within.
A dark touch between my being and the world,
Between the two shadows,
Defined an unknown ardent youth.
Find me in the night.
I am lost.
In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Altolaguirre became a member of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and became the director of “La Barraca“, a classic theatre troupe that took Spanish theater to the countryside, after its leader Federico García Lorca was killed.
Altolaguirre enlisted with the Republican forces and involved himself in printing projects.
He printed Pablo Neruda’s España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart) (1938) on paper manufactured from old flags and uniforms of the enemy, the wet paper then hung with clothespins to dry.
In 1939, Altolaguirre suffered an emotional collapse.
There is perhaps something that doesn’t die and that is our memory of what we have been through at certain times in our lives.
Our precious, and sometimes deceptive, memories of feelings and emotions.
Our emotional memory.
Who would want to delegate that and why?
But our biological memory function has to be exercised on a daily basis.
We need to keep learning.
We need to exercise our memories and therefore our intelligence.
Memory – and possibly imagination – is in some sense a muscle that can be trained.
Perhaps it is no coincidence between the development of seemingly infinite artificial memories stored in our computers and the increasing prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.
Machines are supplanting humans, making our own memories seem pathetic and useless.
We no longer need to be our full selves.
It is extraordinary.
It is terrifying.
Later that year, Altolaguirre and his family traveled to Mexico City, stopping off in Cuba for five years.
In Cuba he founded more magazines, Atentamente and La Verónica, and completed Nube temporal, poems of war and human suffering.
He completed Nuevos poemas de las islas invitadas in 1946, poems revealing his increasing interest in mysticism.
In 1949, after leaving his wife for María Luisa Gómez-Mena y Vivanco (whom he later married), he published Fin de un amor, the poet seemingly torn between spiritual love inspired by Concha and the passion he felt for María Luisa.
I did well to hurt you
I did well to hurt you, unknown woman.
When we embraced you later in a different way,
What true love,
The only one, we felt,
And what electric kisses our clouds exchanged!
Like the furniture and the fabric,
Your nudity had no importance
Under the air, under the soul, under our souls.
We no longer understood that.
It was the ground of a celestial, imponderable realm.
We were very high, warm transparencies.
For the last years of his life, Altolaguirre was involved with the Mexican film industry, writing scripts, producing and directing.
In 1959, Altolaguirre returned to Spain to present El Cantar de los cantares at the San Sebastián Film Festival.
Above: San Sebastian, España
On 23 July, after the Festival, he had a car accident on his way to Madrid.
He died three days later in Burgos.
Above: Burgos, España
There is a distinction in the French language between learning (savoir) and knowledge (connaissance).
Learning is what we are burdened with and which may not always be useful to us.
Knowledge is the transformation of that learning into a life experience.
We can delegate this constantly renewed learning to machines and focus our energies on knowledge.
Our intelligence is all that is left to us.
“We must somehow figure out how to be a democracy of intellect.
Knowledge must sit in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.
Only if the adventure of knowing and understanding is shared as widely as possible will our scientific civilization remain viable.
In the end, it is not an aristocracy of experts, scientific or otherwise, on whom we must depend, but on them and ourselves.
The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made for our true progress as a species.
Every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Knowledge is our destiny.“
(Jacob Bronowski)
Above: Polish mathematician-philosopher Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1984)
But all this soul-searching about memory will seem utterly pompous and absurd should a major ecological crisis destroy humanity, wiping us out in a single event or simply because we are no longer able to survive.
And were as nothing.
Nothing is the last word.
Our last word.
Antonio Soler (born Málaga, 1956) is a Spanish novelist, screenwriter and journalist.
Above: Antonio Soler
In 1983, Soler won the Jauja prize for short stories with Muerte canina (A Dog’s Death).
His career as a writer was definitively launched in 1992 with the publication of Extranjeros en la noche (Strangers in the Night), a collection of short stories and a novella – La noche (The Night), which was later published as a separate book.
After a further two novels he published Las bailarinas muertas (The Dead Dancing Girls), winning the Premio Herralde and establishing his reputation as a key exponent of modern Spanish narrative.
What the Internet provides is gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy and with the sources unchecked.
So each of us needs not only to check facts, but also to create meaning, to organize and position our learning within an argument.
But according to what criteria?
We need an angle, or at least some reference points, to help us tackle this stormy sea of information.
Culture filters things, telling us what we should retain and what we should forget.
In this way it gives us some common ground, with regard to mistakes as well as truths.
Discussions between people can only take place on the basis of a shared encyclopedia.
Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come.”
Denis Diderot
Above: French philosopher-writer Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784)
This is what ensures that dialogue continues.
It is this intercourse that allows for dialogue, creativity and freedom.
The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains.
This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
There will always be factors encouraging people to subscribe to similar beliefs.
There will always be the acknowledged authority of the international scientific community, which is trusted because we see that it is able to critique and publicly correct itself on a daily basis.
Scientific truths will remain more or less universally accepted because if we didn’t share the same mathematical ideas, it would be impossible to build a house.
Having said that, you don’t have to surf the Internet for long to discover groups of people questioning ideas we might have thought were universally accepted.
So there is the danger of encountering lots of contradictory information.
We expected that globalization to make everyone start thinking alike.
What has actually happened is precisely the opposite:
Globalization has led to the parcelling up of common experience into different camps.
Each of us is forced to carve his own path through this profusion of ideas.
Above: The symbol of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations)
“I have one piece of advice for you – not just for success in this business, but personally.
Begin at once – not today or tomorrow or at some indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment – to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the worid’s supreme expert.
Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research and reflection.
I don’t mean the sort of expert who avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.
I mean one who has the most knowledge, the deepest insight and the most audacious willingness to break new ground.
Such a disciplined form of self-education will give you prestige, eminence and worldwide contacts.
You will enjoy correspondence and fellowship with other people interested in the same speciality.
It will add a new dimesnion and a new unity to your entire education.
It will give you a passionate sense of purpose.
The cross-fertization of ideas will become an exciting and unnending adventure that will add a new total perspective to your entire life.“
(Max Schuster)
Above: American publisher Max Lincoln Schuster (1897 – 1970)
Soler’s following novel, El nombre que ahora digo (Soldiers in the Fog), is considered by some as one of the best depictions of life in the Republican sector during the Spanish conflict.
In an article in El Pais in 2014, Professor Paul Preston is quoted as saying:
“I don’t like reading novels about the Civil War, but an exception was “Soldiers in the Fog”, written by Antonio Soler some twenty years ago, which blew me away.”
He has repeated the sentiment more recently in seminars at the Cañada Blanch Centre (LSE), commenting that it is one of the few novels to capture the sense of confusion and disorder prevailing during the siege of Madrid.
Our past is not set in stone.
Nothing is more alive than the past.
It is possible to resusciate the unjustly forgotten dead, if only for a moment.
If we become fascinated with their accomplishments, if we rediscover the past we can begin to see its significance in the present.
Filtering what is pertinent to the present and forgetting what is not, though cruel, is crucial.
And sometimes there is nothing and no one worth saving.
El camino de los Ingleses (Summer Rain), published in 2004, was made into a film in 2006 by Antonio Banderas using Soler’s own filmscript.
(More on Antonio Banderas later….)
Soler’s novel Sur (2018) describes one day in the life of the city of Málaga through a cast of some 250 characters, as they endure the oppressive heat of the terral wind.
It has been published under same title by Peter Owen Publishers / Pushkin Press (2023).
The principal narrative thread revolves around a moribund body discovered early in the morning on a patch of waste ground.
The body is being consumed by ants.
We learn that it belongs to a lawyer, Dionisio.
His story is related in a number of flashbacks, some from his own perspective and others from the perspective of his wife, Ana.
There are many more sub-threads and characters which combine to weave the social fabric of the city, but although their lives are intertwined in a complicated network, for the most part the characters are each wrapped up in their own separate worlds, isolated by their inability to communicate with each other.
This contrasts starkly with the world of the ants, working together in harmony in pursuit of a collective goal.
Literary and pictorial movements are created through imitation and influence.
For example, a certain author writes a rather good and successful novel.
He will immediately be plagiarized.
There will plenty of pretenders to the throne.
Creative trends often stem from small groups of people who know each other and share the same tastes at the same time.
Friends, almost.
Think of those drawn to Paris shortly after the end of the First World War.
From America, from Germany, from Spain, from Toulouse, all of them came to Paris to meet people like themselves, with whom they could create new images and language.
The same thing happened with the Beat Generation, the French New Wave, the Italian film-makers who gathered in Rome, the Iranian poets of the 12th and 13th centuries.
These individuals of these movements all knew each other and all acknowledged the importance of the frontrunner.
Above: Persian poet Rumi (1207 – 1273)
I long to learn of a new Paris where artists gather and writers weave their collective magic.
At present, I don’t think Eskişehir is that kind of gathering ground.
Above: Sazova Park, Eskişehir, Türkiye
Then suddenly conditions change.
Inspiration dries up.
The groups destroy themselves and go their separate ways.
The adventure comes to an end.
And were as nothing.
Nothing is the last word.
The last word.
Soler was writer in residence at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, and has given courses and lectures at numerous universities and cultural institutions in Europe, Latin America, the US and Canada.
Above: Official seal of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
He is a founder member of the Order of Finnegans, a literary group created in honour of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which takes its name from a pub in Dalkey, Ireland.
Above: Finnegan’s, Dalkey, Ireland
It is hard to believe in the myth of the isolated genius.
If an author wishes to avoid being filtered out, he is better off joining forces and becoming part of a group than going solo.
The mystery around Shakespeare stems from the fact that it is hard to understand how a simple actor could have given birth to such a superb body of work, but, in fact, Shakespeare was not isolated.
He was surrounded by educated people, among them other Elizabethan poets.
Above: Birthplace of William Shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon, England
“We have got to go beyond rugged individualism, if everyone is to have a fair chance to make their contribution.
We have got to invent colloborative organizations for the life of the mind, to give us the mutual support we need.
The universities have become intellectual museums.
Meanwhile, outside academe, networks in each new field are learning together what we need to know about everything and anything.
We need each other to do this kind of essential research and thinking.“
(Hazel Henderson)
Above: American activist Hazel Henderson (1933 – 2022)
Independence of mind and spirit may well depend on interdependence.
The nurturing of intellectual enterprise requires social support.
But we still await an era in which the personal aspirations of people begin to turn away from material acquisition and towards the cultivation of inner resources.
We aren’t there yet.
Not by a long shot.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
“I have always made a respectable living, but I have not been willing to give up my life to getting the kind of money with which you can buy the best things in life.
I am stuck in business and routine and tedium.
I must live as I can, but I give up only as much as I must.
For the rest, I have lived and will always live my life as it can be lived at its best with art, music, poetry, literature, science, philosophy and thought.
I shall know the keener people of this world, think the keener thoughts and taste the keener pleasures as long as I can and as much as I can.
That is the real practical use of self-education and self-culture.
It converts a world which is only a good world for those who can win at its ruthless game into a world good for all of us.
Your education is the only thing that nothing can take from you in this life.
You can lose your money, your wife, your children, your friends, your pride, your honour and your life, but while you live you cannot lose your culture, such as it is.“
(Cornelius Hirschberg)
Juan Madrid (born 1947, in Málaga) is a Spanish writer, journalist and script writer.
He studied in Madrid and gained a degree in Contemporary History from the University of Salamanca.
He has written for Cambio 16 since 1974, as an investigative reporter.
He has written novels, chronicles, tales, short stories, youth novels and scripts for comics, films and TV.
Above: Spanish writer Juan Madrid
Is it possible to imagine a culture that has never given birth to any form of art?
It is difficult to say.
We live in a time where some people love to boast that they don’t read.
So many of our contemporary (and contemptable) rulers are nostalgic for a time when impertinent voices could be silenced and power was straightforward.
As busy men, they cannot see the point of reading, preferring to condemn authors and artists with dissenting opinions to the long silence of the pointless.
In this single moment in the whole cultural history, what will remain for future generations?
Who will remember our names, quote from us, use us for examples as what was noteworthy in this age?
Or will we simply be forgotten as simply uncounted members of a mob of the invisible?
Will we be missed when we are gone?
Will our culture simply sag?
Will the scene suddenly die?
Where is the vitality that inspires?
Where is the innovation of imagination?
Will the laughter and excitement of this moment stand the test of time or merely become the distorted echo of a bittersweet symphony long forgotten?
We obsess over appearance and seek war over words, senselessly agitated over the unimportant and the impermanent.
Perhaps when power prevails, passion stagnates.
Perhaps only in a crisis is art free to say what it needs to express.
Perhaps freedom of expression has lost its flavour because it has been too heavily filtered, too censored, too politically correct.
In seeking to offend no one, there isn’t anyone pleased with the product that results.
It has lost the impurities that give ambrosia its particular flavour.
The literature of the day lacks the spice of impurity.
Henry Valentine Miller (1891 – 1980) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist.
Above: American writer Henry Miller
He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism.
What gives a book value comes not so much from the content or the rarity of the edition as the traces, the impact, made upon the reader who possesses the book.
There are two kinds of books:
The book an author writes and the one the reader owns.
Juan Madrid admits to having started writing whilst preparing propaganda leaflets for the Spanish Communist Party, an activity that was illegal at the time.
He became recognised as a noir novelist after the publication of the collection Círculo del Crimen (SEDEMAY Editions), and became finalist of this collection’s prize in 1980.
In the same year he also published his first novel, Un beso de amigo (A Friend’s Kiss), featuring the fictional character Toni Romano for the first time.
Romano is the main character, a skeptical former policeman, boxer and debt collector, archetypchal of the Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959) detective in the Madrid of the Transition (to democracy)(1975 – 1982)(a period of modern Spanish history encompassing the regime change that moved from the Francoist dictatorship to the consolidation of a parliamentary system, in the form of constitutional monarchy under Juan Carlos I).
Madrid faithfully follows the rules of the traditional noir novel, mainly focusing on the social aspects of the time he describes, not always peaceful, with its flagrant contradictions and characters sometimes bordering marginality.
The crumbling of values, power corruption and greed, and the circles of influence are commonplace in his novels.
Some of his works have been made into films (Días Contados, Tánger).
If your aim in reading is to profit from it – to grow somehow in mind or spirit – you have to keep awake.
That means reading as actively as possible.
Good books, fiction or nonfiction, deserve such reading.
The one simple prescription for active reading:
Ask questions while you read – questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.
Any questions?
No.
The art of reading on any level above the elementary consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the course of reading.
There are four main questions you must ask about any book:
- What is the book about as a whole?
You must try to discover the leading theme of the book and the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
2. What is being said in detail and how?
You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
3. Is the book true in whole or part?
You cannot answer #3 until you have answered #1 and #2.
You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not.
When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind.
Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.
4. What of it?
If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance.
Why does the author think it is important to know these things?
And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.
Reading a book on any level beyond the elementary is essentially an effort on your part to ask it questions (and to answer them to the best of your ability).
That should never be forgotten.
And that is why there is all the difference in the world between the demanding and the undemanding reader.
The latter asks no questions – and gets no answers.
The four questions summarize the whole obligation of a reader.
They apply to anything worth reading – a book or an article or even an advertisement.
Knowing what the four questions are is not enough.
You must remember to ask them as you read.
The habit of doing that is the mark of a demanding reader.
More than that, you must know how to answer them precisely and accurately.
The trained ability to do that is the art of reading.
If you have the habit of asking a book questions as you read, you are a better reader than if you do not, but merely asking questions is not enough.
You have to try to answer them.
It is much easier to do it with a pencil in your hand.
You have to “read between the lines” to get the most out of reading, but you should also “write between the lines” too.
Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, but the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession.
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself and the best way to make yourself a part of it – which comes to the same thing – is by writing in it.
Why is marking a book indispensible to reading it?
First, it keeps you awake – not merely conscious, but wide awake.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking.
Thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written.
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do.
If not, you probably should not be bothering with his book.
Good books are over your head.
They would not be good for you if they were not.
Understanding is a two-way operation.
The learner has to question himself and question the teacher.
He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher once he understands what the teacher is saying.
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author.
It is the highest respect you can pay him.
José Antonio Domínguez Bandera, better known as Antonio Banderas, is a Málaga-born Spanish actor and filmmaker.
Known for his work in films of several genres, he has received numerous accolades, including a Cannes Film Festival Award and a Goya Award, as well as nominations for an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award.
Above: Spanish actor Antonio Banderas
I like to think of acting like reading done aloud.
Until St. Ambrose, reading was always done aloud.
Above: Mosaic of Ambrose of Milan (339 – 397)
Words were read aloud because bad handwriting is often easier to decipher that way.
People have lost not only the habit of writing handwritten letters, but of reading them.
Whole professions will be lost if handwritten correspondence disappears.
Graphologists, public letter writers, collectors and sellers of autographs.
Since computers, rough drafts, especially for dialogue scenes, have become obsolete.
Gone are the mistakes, the words scribbled in the margin, the chaos, the arrows pointing all over the place.
Gone are all those signs of movement, of life, of unresolved searching.
Gone is the overview of the whole text.
Once the writing of a film scene would take six pages to unfold.
The six handwritten pages give the reader a sense of the rhythm of the story.
Any overlong passages are immediately visible.
You can’t do that on a computer.
Start with handwritten notes.
Sketches and diagrams are hard to do on a computer.
We use computers but we print like madmen.
Ten-page documents get printed 50 times and thus kill a dozen trees.
Before computers, perhaps ten trees died in the creation of a similarly sized document.
Once upon a time, the Italian philologist Gianfranco Contini practised the critique of scartafacci (variants), the study of different drafts of a work before it reached its definitive form.
Above: Italian philologist Gianfranco Contini (1912 – 1990)
How can we do this kind of variant research in this electronic age?
Type, print, edit by hand, type the corrections, print again, edit again, repeat as often as deemed necessary.
The edit is trashed and the thought process that led to the edit is lost with a click of the mouse and a push of the Delete key.
Two decades ago there was a movement of American writers who protested against the computer on the grounds that because early drafts of a text appeared onscreen already in typeface, they possessed an innate authority that made them harder to analyze or correct.
The screen gave them the premature dignity and status of a text that was already almost published.
On the opposing side, it was believed that the computer offers infinite possibilities for correction and improvement.
But the text you see on the computer screen is a stranger from the person who first typed his original thoughts.
And what makes it to the big screen is often a world apart from the imagination that first spawned a story worth reading aloud.
José Antonio Domínguez Bandera was born on 10 August 1960, in Málaga to Civil Guard gendarme officer José Domínguez Prieto (1920 – 2008) and schoolteacher Ana Bandera Gallego (1933 – 2017).
He has a younger brother named Francisco.
As a little boy, Banderas wanted to become a professional football player until a broken foot sidelined his dreams at the age of 15.
Above: Málaga Football Club logo and stadium
Banderas showed a strong interest in the performing arts and formed part of the ARA Theatre School run by Ángeles Rubio-Argüelles y Alessandri (wife of diplomat and filmmaker Edgar Neville) and the College of Dramatic Art, both in Málaga.
Above: Spanish playwright Edgar Neville (1899 – 1967)
Banderas’ work in the theatre and his performances on the streets eventually landed him a spot with the Spanish National Theatre in Madrid.
Banderas made his acting debut at a small theater in Málaga, where he caught the attention of director Pedro Almodóvar, who gave the actor his film debut in the screwball comedy Labyrinth of Passion (1982).
Labyrinth of Passion:
Sexilia (“Sexi“) is a pop star and sex addict.
Riza is the gay son of the Emperor of Tiran (a fictional Middle Eastern country).
Both are strolling around Madrid’s flea market, aiming to pick up lovers.
Sexilia takes two men for an orgy, where she is the only woman.
In the hope of curing her nymphomania and her fear of the sun, she is undergoing psychotherapy.
However, her psychoanalyst, Susana, is far more interested in sleeping with Sexila’s father, Doctor de la Peña, a gynecologist specializing in artificial insemination.
As the doctor is frigid, Susana does not have a chance with him.
One of Doctor de la Peña’s patients is Princess Toraya, the ex-wife of the former Emperor of Tiran.
Flicking through a magazine, Toraya discovers that her stepson Riza Nero is also in town.
Thanks to treatment by Sexilia’s father, Toraya is now fertile for the first time in her life.
Since the emperor’s sperm is currently unavailable to her, she will settle for that of his son, Riza, whom she attempts to track down.
In Madrid, Riza is living incognito, constantly wearing a wig and dark glasses.
He gets involved first with Fabio, a young junkie transvestite.
Later he meets Sadec on the street and the two go to Sadec’s place for a tryst.
Ironically, Sadec is a member of a group of terrorists looking for Riza, but fails to recognize him in disguise.
When Riza realizes that Sadec is also from Tiran, he decides to change his hair and clothes in order to protect his anonymity.
With Fabio’s help, Riza transforms his appearance to a punk.
Sexilia and Riza, who knew each other when they were children, meet again, when Riza, disguised as “Johnny“, is performing as the lead singer with a punk band in the absence of one of their regulars.
That night, they fall in love but do not sleep together.
The two opt for a chaste relationship since each wants this relationship to be “different“.
Making time in her busy schedule for her laundry, Sexilia meets Queti, a young woman who works in a dry-cleaner owned by her father.
Her mother skipped out on her father a few weeks earlier and the father, who takes Vitapens to stimulate his sex drive and potency, pretends to mistake Queti for her mother and binds her to the bed and rapes her on alternate days, despite the fact that Queti regularly laces his tea with a libido-suppressing chemical called Benzamuro.
In search of consolation, Queti dresses up in the clothes of her role model Sexilia.
One day Sexilia spots Queti in the street wearing one of her outfits and confronts her.
They become friends.
Queti tells Sexilia about the problem with her father and Sexilia tells her that she cannot stop thinking about Riza.
Sexilia and Riza mutual adoration has “cured” Riza’s compulsive homosexuality and Sexilia’s nymphomania.
Queti and Sexilia hatch a plan:
They agree to swap identities so that Queti can escape her father’s sexual abuse and take on the role of Sexilia for real.
This would allow Sexilia to escape with her lover Riza.
However, Toraya finally catches up with Riza and seduces him.
When Sexilia goes to Riza’s hotel, she finds Toraya and Riza together.
Riza tries to convince her that sex with Toraya was only practice for the real thing with her, but Sexilia is distraught.
The knowledge of Riza’s infidelity drives Sexilia to her psychoanalyst.
Under therapy, Sexilia discovers that Toraya was responsible for both her childhood traumas and her nymphomania in the same incident that made Riza gay.
Rejected by her father, she had had sex with a group of boys on the beach, while Riza looked on.
Sexilia meets up with Queti, who after plastic surgery has taken her place.
Queti persuades Sexilia to give Riza another chance.
Sadec, who has a highly developed sense of smell and has fallen head over heels in love with Riza, is looking for him everywhere.
Sadec’s roommates, Islamic extremists, plan to kidnap Riza.
Queti warns Sexilia and Riza of the danger and, when Toraya and the Islamic extremists arrive at the airport, Riza and Sexilia are already on the plane bound for Contadora, a tropical island.
Back in Madrid, Queti, now Sexilia’s look-alike, sleeps with the latter’s father, whom she has always fancied.
He, believing her to be Sexilia, achieves his aim of truly loving his daughter.
At the airport Sadec and his companions, having lost Riza, kidnap Toraya.
On the airplane Riza and Sexilia make love for the first time.
A strange story, a stranger film.
And it might have been even stranger still.
A fresh-faced Antonio Banderas (who starred in a number of Almodóvar’s subsequent films) made here his film debut as a gay terrorist, gifted with a hyper sense of smell that he uses it to track down a Prince with whom he has fallen in love.
The film is also notable for Almodóvar’s appearance in full drag as a nightclub compeer.
The director also plays himself at the beginning of the film in a short scene in which he directs a young transvestite junkie to butcher himself with a drill for a photo strip entitled Photo Porno Sexy Fever.
Writing the script, Almodóvar’s idea was to present Madrid as the world’s most important city, a city everyone came to and where anything could happen.
One draft of the script had Salvador Dalí and the Pope meeting and falling passionately in love.
That story was eventually cut, but it summed up the general idea.
Screenwriting can be lucrative.
An average television writer earns far more than all but the most famous and highly rewarded novelist.
İt is also a medium where talent, once spotted, can be promoted quickly into the mainstream.
Television treats writers rather better than the film industry does.
With film, the first question to be asked of any project is “Who’s the star?” – whereas with television they do at least ask “Who are the writers?”.
The most obvious difference between film and television is that television shrinks stories to less than life size and so perhaps makes more noise and melodrama to compensate.
Film, on the other hand , blows up characters and stories to many times human scale.
This means, paradoxically, that good film writing is about restraint and understatement.
Television is essentially a domestic, often solitary experience, while film is a communal event.
Films are rarely serials.
Films follow a three-act structure during which time we must get to know all the characters well and have an emotional investment in them.
“The theatre is like a faithful wife.
The film is the great adventure – the costly exacting mistress.”
(Ingmar Bergman)
Above: Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918 – 2007)
Almodovar and Banderas have since collaborated on many films, including Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), The Skin I Live In (2011), and Pain and Glory (2019), the latter of which earned him the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Above: Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar
Matador:
Diego Montes is a former bullfighter who was forced into early retirement after being gored.
He finds sexual gratification by viewing slasher films.
Among the students in his bullfighting class is Ángel, a diffident young man who suffers from vertigo.
During one episode of vertigo in the practice ring, Ángel has a vision of a woman killing a man with a hairpin during sex, in a manner similar to how a matador kills a bull.
After class, Diego asks Ángel if he is homosexual, noting that he is not experienced with women.
Ángel says he is not and vows to prove himself.
Later that day, Ángel rapes his neighbour Eva, who is Diego’s girlfriend, in a nearby alley.
As she leaves, she trips in the mud and gashes her cheek.
At the sight of her blood, Ángel faints.
The next day, Ángel’s strict mother insists that he go to church as a condition of living in her home.
After Mass, she insists that he go to confession.
He instead goes to the police station to confess to the rape.
When Eva is brought to the station, she says he ejaculated before penetrating her and declines to press charges.
Alone with the police detective, Ángel notices photos of dead men with the same wound administered by the woman seen during his earlier spell of vertigo.
He confesses to having killed them.
The detective then asks about two missing women, who were also students of Diego.
Ángel confesses to killing them as well.
Although Ángel manages to lead the police to the two women’s bodies buried outside Diego’s home, the detective is not convinced.
He questions how Ángel could have buried them there without Diego’s knowledge, finds that Ángel has an alibi for the murder of one of the men, and discovers that he faints at the sight of blood.
Meanwhile, Ángel’s lawyer, María Cardenal — the woman from Ángel’s vision — suspects that Diego killed the two women.
She takes him to a remote house where she has collected memorabilia related to Diego since she first saw him kill a bull.
At Diego’s home, Eva overhears the two and realizes that they are the killers.
When María leaves, Eva tells Diego he has to take her back since she knows everything.
Eva then goes to María to tell her to stay away from Diego, since Eva knows her secrets.
María scoffs at Eva’s threats.
Eva goes to the police.
While Eva is telling the detective what she has heard, Ángel’s psychiatrist calls the detective to tell him that Ángel has seen Diego and María in a vertigo trance, and that they are in danger.
Using his psychic powers, Ángel guides the others to María’s house.
Just as the police, Ángel, Eva, and the psychiatrist arrive, an eclipse begins and they hear a gunshot.
María has stabbed Diego between the shoulder blades and shot herself in the mouth as they were having sex.
Viewing the scene, Ángel laments that he could not save Diego, while the detective says that it is better this way and that he has never seen anyone happier.
The film producer Nik Powell (Scandal / The Crying Game) once gave a lecture where he said that his idea of a good script was “one that the talent likes“.
Above: British business entrepreneur Nik Powell (1950 – 2019)
If you can get big name talent attached, you are a lot further forward with your project, whether it is for film or television.
There is no mystery to how this done.
If you have a film script you are proud of, you can send it to the agent of your star and hope they love it enough to consider the role.
This in turn gives you some leverage with the various power brokers that put together film financing.
It helps if it is your agent punting the script towards the star’s agent, if only because it means that you have some track record within the industry, some clout.
The problem is, of course, that the “talent” has no more informed an idea of what constitutes a good script than anyone else.
Indeed, their judgment might be clouded by all sorts of random factrs such as “How long am I on screen for?“, “Will the script make me look ridiculous?“, “Who is my love interest?”
These questions might be very important to the star but getting the answers they want doesn’t mean that the script is a good one.
You may not ever get the star you dream of when writing a film, but it is worth at least having an actor in mind when writing it.
This can provide you with an important focus.
If you can’t think of an actor that might fit the film, then perhaps your characters are not as clearly defined as you had thought.
Or perhaps your film is out of step with the current marketplace.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that perhaps you should look at your characters again.
Law of Desire:
Pablo Quintero is a successful gay film and theatrical director whose latest work, The Paradigms of the Mussel, has just been released.
At the opening night party, he discusses with his much younger lover, Juan, their summer plans.
Pablo would stay in Madrid working on a new project, while Juan would leave for his hometown in the south to work in a bar and stay with his family.
Pablo is in love with Juan, but he realizes that his love is not returned with the intensity he desires.
Pablo is very close to his transgender (referred to as transsexual in the film) sister Tina, a struggling actress.
Tina has recently been abandoned by her lesbian lover, a model, who left her in charge of her ten-year-old daughter Ada.
Frustrated in her relationship with men, Tina dedicates her time to Ada, being a loving surrogate mother.
The precocious Ada does not miss her cold mother.
She is happier living with Tina and spending time with Pablo, on whom she has a crush.
Tina, Ada, and Pablo form an unusual family unit.
Pablo looks after them both.
For his next project, Pablo writes an adaptation of Cocteau’s monologue-play The Human Voice, to be performed by his sister.
At the play’s opening night, Pablo meets Antonio, a young man who has been obsessed with the director since he watched the gay theme film The Paradigms of the Mussel.
At the end of the evening, they go home together and have sex.
For Antonio this is his first homosexual experience, while Pablo considers it just a lusty episode.
Pablo is still in love with his long-time lover, Juan.
Antonio misunderstands Pablo’s intentions and takes their encounter as a relationship.
He soon reveals his possessive character as a lover.
Antonio comes across a love letter addressed to Pablo, signed by Juan, but which in fact was written by Pablo to himself.
The letter makes Antonio fall into a jealous rage, but he has to return to his native Andalusia, where he lives with his domineering German mother.
As he promised, Pablo sends Antonio a letter signed Laura P, the name of a character inspired by his sister in a script he is writing.
In his letter, Pablo tells Antonio that he loves Juan and intends to join him.
However, Antonio, who is jealous and wants to get rid of Juan, gets there first.
Antonio wants to possess everything that belongs to Pablo, and tries to have sex with Juan.
When Juan rebukes his advances, Antonio throws him off a cliff.
After killing his rival, Antonio quickly heads for his hometown.
Pablo becomes a suspect in the crime because the police have found in Juan’s fist a piece of clothing that matches a distinctive shirt owned by Pablo.
In fact, Antonio was wearing an exact replica when he killed Juan.
Pablo drives down to see his dead lover, realizes that Antonio is responsible for the murder, and confronts him about it.
They have an argument and Pablo drives off, pursued by the police.
Blinded by tears, he crashes his car injuring his head.
He awakes in a hospital, suffering from amnesia.
Antonio’s mother shows the police the letters her son received, signed Laura P.
The mysterious Laura P becomes the prime suspect, but the police cannot find her.
Antonio returns to Madrid and, in order to get closer to Pablo who is still in the hospital, seduces Tina who believes his love to be genuine.
To help her brother recover his memory, Tina tells him about their past.
Born as a boy, in her adolescence she began an affair with their father.
She ran away with him and had a sex change operation to please him, but he left her for another woman.
When her incestuous relationship ended, Tina returned to Madrid, coinciding with the death of their mother, and got reunited with Pablo.
Tina has been grateful with Pablo who did not judge her.
Tina also tells him that she has found a lover.
Pablo gradually begins to recover.
He realizes that Tina’s new love is Antonio and that she is in danger.
He goes with the police to Tina’s apartment where she is being held hostage by Antonio.
Antonio threatens a bloodbath unless he can have an hour alone with Pablo.
Pablo agrees and joins him.
They make love and Antonio then commits suicide.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown:
Television actress Pepa Marcos is depressed because her boyfriend Iván has left her.
They are voice actors who dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden.
Iván’s sweet-talking voice is the same one he uses in his work.
About to leave on a trip, he has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase he will pick up later.
Pepa returns home to find her answering machine filled with frantic messages from her friend, Candela.
She rips out the phone and throws it out the window onto the balcony.
Candela arrives.
Before she can explain her situation, Carlos (Iván’s son with Lucía, his previous lover) arrives with his snobbish fiancée Marisa.
They are apartment-hunting, and have chosen Pepa’s penthouse to tour.
Carlos and Pepa figure out each other’s relationship to Iván.
Pepa wants to know where Iván is, but Carlos does not know.
Candela tries to kill herself by jumping off the balcony.
A bored Marisa decides to drink gazpacho from the refrigerator, unaware that it has been spiked with sleeping pills.
Candela explains that she had an affair with an Arab man who later visited her with some friends.
Unbeknownst to her, they were a Shiite terrorist cell.
When the terrorists left, Candela fled to Pepa’s place.
She fears that the police are after her. Pepa goes to see a lawyer recommended by Carlos.
The lawyer, Paulina, behaves strangely and refuses to help Pepa.
She has plane tickets to Stockholm.
Candela tells Carlos that the Shiites plan to hijack a flight to Stockholm that evening and divert it to Beirut, where they have a friend who was arrested.
Carlos fixes the phone, calls the police, hangs up before (he believes) they can trace the call, and kisses Candela.
Pepa returns.
Lucía calls and says that she is coming over to confront her about Iván.
Carlos says that Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital.
Pepa, tired of Iván, throws his suitcase out (barely missing him).
He leaves Pepa a message.
Pepa returns to her apartment and hears Carlos playing Lola Beltrán’s “Soy infeliz“.
She throws the record out the window.
It hits Paulina.
Pepa hears Iván’s message, rips out the phone and throws the answering machine out of the window.
Lucía arrives with the telephone repairman and the police, who traced Carlos’ call.
Candela panics, but Carlos serves the spiked gazpacho.
The policemen and repairman are knocked out.
Carlos and Candela fall asleep on the sofa.
Lucía aims a policeman’s gun at Pepa, who figures out that Iván is going to Stockholm with Paulina and their flight is the one the terrorists are planning to hijack.
Lucía says that she faked being sane when she heard Iván’s voice dubbed on a foreign film.
She throws the gazpacho in Pepa’s face, and rushes to the airport to kill Iván.
Pepa chases her in a cab with her neighbour, Ana.
At the airport, Lucía sees Iván and Paulina at security and aims her gun at them.
Pepa thwarts the murder attempt by rolling a luggage cart at Lucía, before fainting.
As the police arrest Lucía, Iván rushes to Pepa’s aid and apologises for the way he has been treating her, offering to talk things out with her.
Pepa, however, declares it is now too late and leaves.
She returns to her home, which is a mess.
Pepa sits on her balcony, where Marisa has just awakened.
The women chat, sharing a moment of tranquility.
Pepa finally reveals what she wanted to tell Iván:
She is pregnant.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!:
Ricky, a 23-year-old psychiatric patient, has been deemed cured and is released from a mental institution.
Until then, he has been the lover of the woman director of the hospital.
An orphan, free, and alone, his goal is to have a normal life with Marina Osorio, an actress, former porn star, and recovering drug addict, whom he once slept with during an escape from the asylum.
Ricky discovers Marina’s whereabouts from a film journal announcement of the start of her next film.
He goes to the studio, where Marina is in her last day at work filming The Midnight Phantom, a Euro-horror film about a hideously mutilated, masked muscleman in love with Marina’s character.
The film is directed by Máximo Espejo, an old film director confined to a wheelchair after a stroke.
Máximo is a gentle mentor to Marina, and threatens to throw out a journalist who mentions the words “porn” and “junkie” in Marina’s presence.
His protection of the actress is not completely innocent, since he is sexually attracted to Marina, enjoying what could be his last experience of directing a sexy female lead.
When Ricky comes to the set, he steals a few necessary items including the keys to Marina’s apartment, and before long, he is an unwelcome presence in her life.
Ricky, with a long-haired wig, does a handstand to try to capture her attention, but Marina does not remember him and quickly dismisses him.
After filming the last scene, Marina goes home to change for the post-shoot party.
Ricky follows her to her apartment.
When she answers the door, Ricky forces his way in.
He grabs her and headbutts her to silence her when she screams.
He tapes her mouth and binds her with rope.
Marina wakes with a terrible toothache, which normal painkillers do not relieve, as she is addicted to stronger drugs.
Ricky explains that he has captured her, so that when she gets to know him better, she will fall in love and they will get married and have children.
Marina declares she will never love him, understandably enraged at being handcuffed, gagged and lashed to the bed.
However, Ricky remains determined to win her heart.
Marina is shocked and in pain, and eventually persuades Ricky to take her to a doctor who can give her the necessary painkillers.
Ricky barely leaves her alone with the doctor, and she is unable to communicate her plight.
They cannot obtain the drugs in the pharmacy, so Ricky goes off to buy them on the black market.
However, rather than paying the street price, he attacks the dealer to steal the tablets.
During the wrap party, Marina’s sister Lola, who is the assistant director of The Midnight Phantom, steals the show with a musical number.
Increasingly worried about her sister’s disappearance, Lola visits Marina’s apartment and leaves a note.
To avoid being discovered, Ricky moves Marina to her next door neighbor’s apartment, which is empty, but the owner has left his keys with Lola, so she can water his plants while he is away during the summer.
In the street again, Ricky is spotted by the dealer whom he had attacked.
Ricky is then seriously beaten, robbed and left unconscious.
During his absence, Marina makes a desperate but somewhat half-hearted attempt to escape from her captivity.
However, when Ricky returns covered with blood and cuts, she sees his vulnerability and devotion to her, no matter how misguided.
She cares for him, cleaning and sterilizing his wounds, and is suddenly struck by the realization that she has fallen in love with her captor.
They make love at length and Ricky seems to be on the verge of achieving his aim.
They decide to take a trip together to his native village.
When he is about to leave to steal a car for the trip, Marina, who still considers herself his prisoner, tells him to keep her tied up so that she will not try to escape.
However, in Ricky’s absence, Lola re-enters the apartment and discovers Marina tied up and rescues her.
Marina informs her sister that she is in love with her captor.
Lola is astonished to learn that Marina really no longer wants to be rescued, but once convinced, she agrees to drive Marina to Ricky’s birthplace.
They find him there in the ruins of his family house in a deserted village, then the three climb into Lola’s car to return to the city.
Lola promises Ricky she will find him a job within the week, Marina begins to cry, and they drive off together into the distance, singing like a normal family.)
The Skin I Live In:
Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard was successful in cultivating an artificial skin resistant to burns and insect bites, which he calls “GAL“, that he says he has been testing on athymic mice.
He presents his results in a medical symposium but when he privately discloses he has also conducted illegal transgenic experiments on humans, he is forbidden to continue with his research.
On his secluded estate, Ledgard is keeping a young woman named Vera captive, with the help of one of his servants, Marilia.
Due to the suspension of his official experiments, Ledgard asks Marilia to dismiss the other servants.
While Ledgard is out, Marilia’s estranged son Zeca, having committed a robbery, arrives in a tiger costume and asks his mother to hide him for a few days.
He sees Vera on Ledgard’s security camera screens and demands to see her in person.
When Marilia refuses to let him stay after she invites him in, he binds and gags her and then rapes Vera.
Ledgard arrives and kills Zeca.
While Ledgard disposes of Zeca’s body, Marilia tells Vera that she (Marilia) is the mother of both Zeca and Ledgard by different men, a fact she has not shared with them.
Ledgard was adopted by Marilia’s employers, but was ultimately raised by her.
Zeca later left to live in the streets and smuggle drugs, while Ledgard went to medical school and married a woman named Gal.
When Zeca returned years later, he and Gal ran off together.
They were involved in a terrible car crash in which Gal was badly burnt.
Zeca had left the scene assuming her to be dead, while Ledgard had taken her from the car (in the present, Zeca had mistaken Vera for Gal, something she did not deny).
Thereafter she lived in total darkness without any mirrors.
One day, while hearing her daughter Norma singing in the garden, Gal accidentally sees her own reflection in the window for the first time since the accident; traumatized by the sight, she jumps to her death in front of Norma.
In the present, Ledgard returns and spends the night with Vera.
During the night, he dreams of his past, specifically the night of a wedding six years earlier, where he finds Norma (his daughter) unconscious on the ground.
Norma, who had been taking medication for psychosis — having been rendered mentally unstable due to witnessing her mother’s suicide — comes to believe that Ledgard had raped her upon awakening with him above her; she subsequently develops a fear of all men and spends years in a mental health facility.
She eventually dies by suicide in the same manner that her mother did.
Vera, too, dreams about the same event:
Vicente, a young man who works in his mother’s dress shop, crashes the wedding and meets Norma.
Like others at the party, he is under the influence of drugs.
He walks with Norma into the garden.
She lists the psychiatric medications she has taken.
Norma begins to take off some of her clothes, stating she would be naked all the time if she could.
Vicente kisses her and compliments her.
While they are lying down with Vicente on top of her, she suddenly starts to have a frantic reaction to the music playing — the same song she was singing when her mother died by suicide — and starts screaming.
Vicente attempts to hush her screams, leading to her biting his hand.
He slaps her, knocking her unconscious.
He rearranges her clothes and flees the scene, looking around nervously for potential witnesses, just before Ledgard arrives
He is unaware that Ledgard notices him leaving on his motorbike.
Ledgard tracks down Vicente and while in disguise, knocks Vicente off his motorbike, kidnaps him, and holds him in captivity.
Vicente’s mother reports his disappearance to the police, but after they find his motorbike at the bottom of a cliff, they tell her he is likely dead and has been swept out to sea.
Although she believes her son is still alive, her search for him remains unsolved.
Meanwhile, Ledgard subjects him to a vaginoplasty and later instructs him how to slowly stretch his new vagina.
Over a period of six years, Ledgard physically transforms Vicente into a replica of his late wife, and renames him Vera.
During this period of time, Vicente struggles to keep himself sane and cling to the core of his true identity, seemingly drugged on opium by Ledgard.
After an absence of four years, Marilia returns to work in Ledgard’s house to look after Vera (Vicente).
In the present, Ledgard’s new relationship with Vera dismays Marilia, who does not trust Vera. Fulgencio, one of Ledgard’s colleagues, reads a news story about the missing Vicente and recognizes him as one of their sex change patients.
He accuses Ledgard of falsifying Vicente’s consent and of experimenting on him.
Vera, who overhears their conversation, tells Fulgencio that she is here by her own free will, denies being Vicente, and says that she always was a woman.
After Fulgencio leaves, Vera notices a photograph of himself as Vicente attached to the news story about missing persons.
During the night, Ledgard and Vera start having sex, but Vera tells him that it is still painful after Zeca’s rape.
Ostensibly going downstairs to find lubricant, Vera retrieves Ledgard’s gun and kills him.
Marilia, alerted by the sound of the shot, barges into the bedroom with her own pistol in hand and finds her son Ledgard dead on the bed.
Vera, who is hiding under the bed, shoots and kills Marilia.
With her final breath, Marilia says “I knew it.“
Freed from captivity and the need to play along with Ledgard’s whims, Vicente returns to his mother’s dress shop for the first time since being kidnapped.
Tearfully, he tells his lesbian ex-colleague Cristina (whom Vicente had loved six years prior) of his kidnapping, forced sex change, and the murders.
As his mother enters the room, Vicente quietly reveals his identity to them:
“I am Vicente.“
Pain and Glory:
Spanish film director Salvador Mallo is in decline, both physically and mentally, which has made him reflective.
His chronic back pain and headaches, in particular, have kept him from even considering trying to start a new project for several years, and recently he started to experience persistent and troubling dysphagia.
Flavor, one of Salvador’s old films, has just been restored, and he was asked to appear at a screening.
He has not seen Alberto Crespo, the lead actor of the film, in 32 years, but he decides to reach out and ask if Alberto will help present Flavor.
Their falling-out was centered around Alberto’s heroin use during filming, so Alberto, who still smokes heroin, is surprised when Salvador asks for some when he is getting ready to smoke.
Under the influence, Salvador remembers moving with his parents into a whitewashed cave-house in Paterna in the 1960s.
When Alberto arrives to take Salvador to the screening, Salvador decides not to go, but the moderator of the planned Q & A gets them to answer audience questions over the phone.
Several people ask about the argument between Salvador and Alberto.
Salvador ends up repeating his old criticisms and blurting out that Alberto took heroin during filming.
Although he says he now approves of Alberto’s performance, Alberto is enraged and leaves.
Salvador starts to regularly take heroin to manage his pain.
He remembers when, as a small boy, his mother arranged for him to teach a young man named Eduardo how to read, write, and do math in exchange for work on the cave, and then used this as evidence of his intelligence to gain him admittance to a seminary.
He did not want to leave home or become a priest, but because they were poor, his mother saw it as the only way for him to get an education.
To make amends, Salvador agrees to let Alberto stage, as a monologue, a story he wrote about a relationship he had in the early 1980s that fell apart due to his partner’s heroin use.
Coincidentally, Federico, who the story is about, goes to see the show.
Alberto gives Salvador’s contact information to him.
When the former lovers meet, Federico says he has been living in Argentina and this is the first time he has come back to Madrid in decades.
He reveals that he has a wife, from whom he is separated, and two sons, and he has not dated a man since he broke up with Salvador.
On his way out the door, Federico offers to stay the night, but Salvador says they should leave their romantic relationship in the past.
Federico insists Salvador come to Buenos Aires to meet his family.
Once he is alone, Salvador goes to take some heroin, but instead throws it all away.
He sees doctors about his pain and dysphagia and admits to his heroin use and that he still has not recovered from either the death of his mother four years earlier or a back surgery two years after that.
Salvador remembers when his mother lived with him near the end of her life and relates to his assistant, Mercedes, how she had told him she did not want him to write stories about her and thought he had always blamed her for sending him to the seminary.
Although, before his mother died, Salvador was able to apologize for not being the son she wanted, he feels guilty he was not able to take her to her village to die, like he had promised.
Mercedes shows Salvador an invitation to a small art gallery that has a portrait of a small boy on it.
He seems to recognize the painting, and, during a CT scan of his neck, remembers when Eduardo started it one day after working at the Mallos’ cave-house.
Eduardo cleaned himself up before leaving, and Salvador swooned when he went to bring the man a towel and saw Eduardo naked, marking his sexual awakening.
After being told his dysphagia is being caused by a calcified growth in his neck, which can be removed, Salvador goes to the art gallery and learns that the owner had found Eduardo’s portrait of him at a flea market.
Salvador buys the painting and discovers a letter written on the back in which Eduardo thanks him for his help with writing and math and gives him an updated address so they can stay in touch.
On the way to have his operation, Salvador muses to Mercedes that his mother must have received the portrait but never mentioned it to him at school.
Mercedes asks if he will try to find Eduardo, but he says too much time has passed and what matters is that the painting finally made its way to him.
Before Salvador loses consciousness from the anesthetic, he mentions to his doctor that he has started writing again.
He is then seen on a film set directing a scene from his childhood, in a meta-like ending with Penelope Cruz and Asier Flores.)
In 1992, Banderas made his American film debut with the musical drama The Mambo Kings (1992), followed by roles in Philadelphia (1993), Interview with the Vampire (1994), Assassins (1995), and Evita (1996).
The Mambo Kings:
It is the early 1950s.
Cuban brothers and musicians Cesar and Nestor Castillo flee from Havana, Cuba after getting into a violent dispute with the mobster owners of a club where they performed.
Eventually ending up in New York City, the brothers work at menial jobs while attempting to revive their musical careers.
At a nightclub where Cesar briefly crashes the act of mambo star Tito Puente, they make new friends and connections, as well as meeting cigarette girl Lanna Lake, who falls quickly into a love affair with Cesar.
Nestor, in the meantime, remains oblivious to other women while continually composing his ode to his lost Cuban love, Maria.
He writes version after version of the same ballad, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul“, until by chance one day he encounters Delores, a shy but attentive young woman who wishes to become a schoolteacher.
When she becomes pregnant, they decide to get married.
Fate intervenes one night at a club, where the Castillo brothers have a part-time job.
Nestor’s love ballad captures the interest of one of the customers, who turns out to be the Cuban bandleader and American television star Desi Arnaz.
After a pleasant evening in Nestor and Delores’s home, Arnaz invites the struggling Castillos to sing and act on an episode of his sitcom series, I Love Lucy.
Fame does not last, however.
Nestor is not as ambitious as his brother and desires nothing more than to own his own small club.
He is in love with Delores, but lacks the passion he felt for his beloved Maria back home.
Cesar suppresses his true feelings, believing that a woman like Delores would actually be perfect for him.
He reveals to Nestor that Maria left him for a Cuban mobster in exchange for cancelling a contract hit against Nestor.
One snowy night, the Castillo brothers’ car veers off the road and into a tree.
Cesar, in the back seat of the vehicle, is barely hurt, but Nestor, who was driving the vehicle, is killed.
To honour his brother’s memory, a devastated Cesar opens his own small club.
Delores pays him a visit and asks him to sing “Beautiful Maria of My Soul“.
Philadelphia:
Andrew Beckett is a senior associate at the largest corporate law firm in Philadelphia.
He conceals his homosexuality and his status as an AIDS patient from others in the office.
A partner in the firm notices a lesion on Beckett’s forehead.
Although Beckett attributes the lesion to a racquetball injury, it indicates Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-defining condition.
Beckett stays home from work for several days to try to find a way to hide his lesions.
He finishes the paperwork for a case he has been assigned and brings it to his office, leaving instructions for his assistants to file it the following day, which marks the end of the statute of limitations for the case.
The next day, he receives a call asking for the paperwork, as it cannot be found and there are no copies on the computer’s hard drive.
The paperwork is finally located in an alternative location and is filed with the court at the last moment.
Beckett is called to a meeting the morning afterwards where the firm’s partners dismiss him.
Beckett believes someone deliberately hid the paperwork to give the firm an excuse to fire him and that the termination is a result of his AIDS status and his sexuality.
He asks ten attorneys to take his case, the last of whom is African-American personal injury lawyer Joe Miller, whom Beckett previously opposed in a different case.
Miller appears uncomfortable that a man with AIDS is in his office.
After declining to take the case, Miller immediately visits his doctor to find out if he could have contracted the disease.
The doctor explains that the routes of HIV infection do not include casual contact.
Unable to find a lawyer willing to represent him, Beckett is compelled to act as his own attorney.
While conducting research at a law library, Miller sees Beckett at a nearby table.
A librarian approaches Beckett and says that he has found a case of AIDS discrimination for him.
As others in the library begin to stare uneasily, the librarian suggests Beckett go to a private room.
Seeing parallels in racial discrimination he has experienced, Miller approaches Beckett, reviews the material he has gathered, and agrees to take the case.
As the case goes to trial, the partners of the firm take the stand, each claiming that Beckett was incompetent and that he had deliberately tried to hide his condition.
The defense repeatedly point out Beckett brought AIDS upon himself via willing gay sex with strangers and is therefore not a victim.
It is revealed that the partner who noticed Beckett’s lesion, Walter Kenton, previously worked with a woman who contracted AIDS after a blood transfusion and thus he should have recognized the lesion as being a symptom of an AIDS-related illness.
According to Kenton, the woman was an innocent victim, unlike Beckett, and he further testifies that he did not recognize Beckett’s lesion.
To prove that the lesions would have been visible, Miller asks Beckett to unbutton his shirt while on the witness stand, revealing that his lesions are indeed visible and recognizable as such.
Throughout the trial, Miller’s homophobia slowly disappears as he and Beckett bond from working together.
Beckett collapses and is hospitalized after Charles Wheeler, the partner he most admired, testifies against him.
Another partner, Bob Seidman, confesses that he suspected Beckett had AIDS but never told anyone and refused to let him discuss it, which he deeply regrets.
During Beckett’s hospital stay, the jury votes in his favor, awarding him back pay, damages for pain and suffering, and punitive damages, totaling over $5 million.
Miller visits the visibly failing Beckett in the hospital after the verdict and overcomes his fear enough to touch Beckett’s face.
After the family leaves the room, Beckett tells his lover Miguel Alvarez that he is “ready“.
At the Miller home later that night, Miller and his wife are awakened by a phone call from Miguel, who tells them that Beckett has died.
A memorial is held at Beckett’s home, where many mourners, including Miller and his family, view home movies of Beckett as a happy child.)
Interview with the Vampire:
In late 20th century San Francisco, reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, who claims to be a vampire, to Molloy’s initial skepticism.
Louis describes his human life as a wealthy plantation owner in 1791 Louisiana.
Despondent following the death of his wife and unborn child, he drunkenly wanders the waterfront of New Orleans one night and is attacked by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt.
Lestat senses Louis’ dissatisfaction with life and offers to turn him into a vampire.
Louis accepts, but quickly comes to regret it.
While Lestat revels in the hunt and killing of humans, Louis resists his instinct to kill to Lestat’s annoyance, instead drinking animal blood to sustain himself.
Eventually, amid an outbreak of plague in New Orleans, Louis feeds on a little girl whose mother died in the plague.
To entice Louis to stay with him, Lestat turns the dying girl, Claudia, into a vampire.
Together, they raise her as a daughter.
Louis has a love for Claudia, while Lestat spoils and treats her more as a pupil, training her to become a merciless killer.
Thirty years pass.
Claudia matures psychologically but remains a little girl in appearance and continues to be treated as such by Lestat.
When she realizes that she will never grow older or become a mature woman, she is furious with Lestat and tells Louis that they should leave him.
She tricks Lestat into drinking the “dead blood” of twin boys whom she killed by overdose with laudanum, which weakens Lestat, and then she slits his throat.
Though Louis is shocked and upset, he helps Claudia dump Lestat’s body in a swamp.
They spend weeks planning a voyage to Europe to search for other vampires, but Lestat returns on the night of their departure, having survived on the blood of swamp creatures.
Lestat attacks them, but Louis sets him on fire, allowing them to escape to their ship and depart.
After travelling around Europe and the Mediterranean but finding no other vampires, Louis and Claudia settle in Paris in September 1870.
Louis encounters vampires Santiago and Armand by chance.
Armand invites Louis and Claudia to his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, where vampires stage theatrical horror shows for humans.
On their way out of the theater, Santiago reads Louis’ mind and suspects that Louis and Claudia murdered Lestat.
Armand warns Louis to send Claudia away for her own safety, and Louis stays with Armand to learn about the meaning of being a vampire.
Claudia demands that Louis turn a human woman, Madeleine, into a vampire to be her new protector and companion, and he reluctantly complies.
Shortly thereafter, the Parisian vampires abduct the three of them and punish them for Lestat’s murder, imprisoning Louis in an iron coffin to starve to death slowly and trapping Claudia and Madeleine in a chamber, where sunlight burns them to ash.
Armand does nothing to prevent this, but the next day he frees Louis.
Seeking revenge, Louis returns to the theater at dawn and sets it on fire, killing all the vampires including Santiago.
Armand arrives in time to help Louis escape the sunrise, and again offers him a place by his side.
Louis rejects Armand and leaves, unable to accept his way of life, knowing Armand had allowed Claudia’s murder.
As decades pass, Louis never recovers from the loss of Claudia and dejectedly explores the world alone.
He returns to New Orleans in 1988 and one night encounters a decayed, weakened Lestat, living as a recluse in an abandoned mansion and surviving on rat blood as Louis once had.
Lestat expresses regret for having turned Claudia into a vampire and asks Louis to rejoin him, but Louis declines and leaves.
Louis concludes his interview with Molloy, prompting Molloy to beseech Louis to make him his new vampire companion.
Louis is outraged that Molloy has not understood the tale of suffering he has related and attacks Molloy to scare him into abandoning the idea.
Molloy runs to his car and takes off while playing the cassette tapes of Louis’ interview.
On the Golden Gate Bridge, Lestat appears and attacks Molloy, taking control of the car.
Revived by Molloy’s blood, Lestat offers him the choice that Lestat “never had” — whether or not to become a vampire — and laughing, continues driving.)
Assassins:
Assassin Robert Rath plans to retire, haunted by the memory of murdering his mentor Nicolai several years ago.
While Rath is on an assignment, his target is eliminated by Miguel Bain, another assassin.
Bain greatly admires Rath but also wants to kill him to establish himself as the world’s greatest hitman.
As Rath tries to figure out who sent Bain, his contractor offers him a lucrative job that could allow him to retire:
Kill a notorious computer hacker named Electra along with four Dutch buyers of a computer disk she possesses, then retrieve the disk.
Electra has set up CCTV cameras and an elaborate mechanism for remotely moving items between rooms in the building where she is based.
At the designated location for the buy, Bain locates and eliminates the four Dutchmen, who turn out to be Interpol agents.
Realizing Bain is after the same target as he is once again, Rath spares Electra, and the two escape with the disk.
Scared by the whole situation, Electra runs away from Rath to her house.
Both Bain and Rath separately track her down.
During the ensuing fight, Bain kills Electra’s neighbors and is about to kill her when Rath intervenes.
Realizing Rath does not want to kill her, Electra decides to trust him.
Rath exchanges the disk for his fee, given to him in a briefcase.
However, the briefcase contains a bomb planted by his contractor.
After surviving the attempt on his life, Rath is told by Electra that she had swapped the disk, unsure if he would come back.
Rath demands a greatly increased fee from his contractor for the genuine disk, with the money to be wired to a bank in Puerto Rico.
The contractor agrees but also hires Bain to kill Rath.
Rath and Electra travel to the bank, where he concludes that Bain will use an adjacent abandoned hotel as a sniper post.
Fifteen years earlier, Rath had shot Nicolai from the same building.
Rath sets a trap, managing to both get the money and, with Electra’s help, engage Bain in a gunfight.
With Bain seemingly dead, Nicolai appears and reveals that he had worn a bulletproof vest when Rath shot him years earlier.
Recognizing Nicolai’s intention to kill them both, Rath and a surviving Bain both shoot him dead.
Despite their brief alliance, Bain draws a gun on Rath, whose back is turned.
Electra puts on her sunglasses, allowing Rath to use the reflection to aim a shot backwards through his own jacket, killing Bain.
After Bain’s death, Rath and Electra leave together and that their true names are Joseph and Anna.
Evita:
At a cinema in Buenos Aires on 26 July 1952, a film is interrupted when news breaks of the death of Eva Perón, Argentina’s First Lady, at the age of 33.
As the nation goes into public mourning, Ché, a member of the public, marvels at the spectacle and promises to show how Eva did “nothing for years“.
The rest of the film follows Eva (née Duarte) from her beginnings as an illegitimate child of a lower-class family to her rise to become First Lady.
Ché assumes many different guises throughout Eva’s story.
At the age of 15, Eva lives in the provincial town of Junín, and longs for a better life in Buenos Aires.
She persuades a tango singer, Agustín Magaldi, with whom she is having an affair, to take her to the city.
After Magaldi leaves her, she goes through several relationships with increasingly influential men, becoming a model, actress and radio personality.
She meets Colonel Juan Perón at a fundraiser following the 1944 San Juan earthquake.
Perón’s connection with Eva adds to his populist image, since they are both from the working class.
Eva has a radio show during Perón’s rise and uses all of her skills to promote him, even when the controlling administration has him jailed in an attempt to stunt his political momentum.
The groundswell of support that Eva generates forces the government to release Perón.
He finds the people enamored of him and Eva.
Perón wins election to the presidency and marries Eva, who promises that the new government will serve the descamisados.
At the start of the Perón government, Eva dresses glamorously, enjoying the privileges of being the First Lady.
Soon after, she embarks on what is called her “Rainbow Tour” of Europe.
While there, she receives a mixed reception.
The people of Spain adore her, the people of Italy call her a whore and throw things at her, and Pope Pius XII gives her a small, meager gift.
Upon returning to Argentina, Eva establishes a foundation to help the poor.
The film suggests the Perónists otherwise plunder the public treasury.
Eva is hospitalized and learns that she has terminal cancer.
She declines the position of Vice President due to her failing health, and makes one final broadcast to the people of Argentina.
She understands that her life was short because she shone like the “brightest fire“, and helps Perón prepare to go on without her.
A large crowd surrounds the Unzué Palace in a candlelight vigil praying for her recovery when the light of her room goes out, signifying her death.
At Eva’s funeral, Ché is seen at her coffin, marveling at the influence of her brief life.
He walks up to her glass coffin, kisses it and joins the crowd of passing mourners.
He portrayed Zorro in The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Legend of Zorro (2005).
The Mask of Zorro
In 1821, masked swordsman Zorro defends the commoners of Las Californias from Spain’s soldiers.
Don Rafael Montero, Las Californias’ corrupt governor, sets a trap for Zorro at the public execution of three peasants.
Zorro stops the execution.
Montero’s soldiers are thwarted by two young brothers, Alejandro and Joaquín Murrieta.
Zorro fights the remaining soldiers and thanks the brothers by giving Joaquín a medallion.
Don Rafael deduces that the nobleman Don Diego de la Vega is Zorro and attempts to arrest him at his home.
A swordfight begins, a fire breaks out, and de la Vega’s wife Esperanza, for whom Montero held a deep but unrequited love, dies as a result.
While the mansion burns, Montero takes Diego’s infant daughter, Elena, as his own before sending de la Vega to an underground prison and returning to Spain.
Twenty years later, in 1841, Alejandro and Joaquín are bandits, running a scam to collect the bounty on their heads and steal a strongbox.
They, however, are caught by Captain Harrison Love, Montero’s new American right-hand man.
Alejandro escapes, while Joaquín shoots himself to avoid being captured by Captain Harrison Love.
Meanwhile, Montero returns to California with the now-adult Elena.
Because of Montero, Elena believes that her mother died in childbirth and that he is her father.
Montero’s reappearance motivates Diego to escape captivity.
He encounters Alejandro getting drunk and recognizes the medallion.
He agrees to make Alejandro his protégé in order for them to battle their respective enemies, Montero and Love. Alejandro agrees to undergo Diego’s training regimen in Zorro’s secret cave underneath the ruins of his family estate to be able to take revenge.
In addition, Alejandro seeks to succeed Diego as Zorro.
While still being trained, Alejandro steals a stallion resembling Zorro’s steed Tornado from a garrison.
Diego scolds Alejandro, asserting that Zorro was a servant of the people, not a thief or seeker of fame.
He challenges Alejandro to gain Montero’s trust and acquire charm instead.
Alejandro poses as a visiting nobleman named Don Alejandro del Castillo y García, with Diego as his servant “Bernardo“, and attends a party at Montero’s hacienda.
There, he earns Elena’s admiration and enough of Montero’s trust to be invited to a secret meeting between noblemen.
Montero hints at a plan to retake California for the Dons and proclaim it as an independent republic by buying it from General Santa Anna, who needs money for the upcoming Mexican–American War.
Montero takes Alejandro and the noblemen to “El Dorado“, a secret gold mine where peasants and prisoners are used for slave labour.
The plan is to buy California from Santa Anna using gold which appears from Spain but is actually mined from his own land.
While walking in a market, Elena meets the woman who was her nanny.
She tells Elena her parents’ real identity.
Diego sends Alejandro, now Zorro, to steal Montero’s map leading to the gold mine.
Zorro duels Montero, Love, and their guards at the hacienda.
When he escapes, Elena chases him, attempting to retrieve Montero’s map.
After a sword duel, Zorro kisses her and flees.
Fearing Santa Anna could discover the scheme, Montero decides to destroy the mine and kill the workers.
Diego tells Alejandro to release the workers on his own so he can reclaim Elena.
Alejandro sets off, feeling betrayed by Diego’s vendetta.
Diego corners Montero at the hacienda and reveals his identity, demanding Elena be brought to them to hear the whole truth. Montero then arrests him.
While being taken away, Diego tells Elena the name of the flowers she recognized upon her arrival in California, convincing her that he is her real father.
She releases Diego from his cell.
They proceed to the mine, where Alejandro and Diego respectively defeat and kill Love and Montero, avenging Joaquín and Esperanza.
Elena and Alejandro free the workers before the explosives go off and find the mortally wounded Diego.
Before dying, he makes peace with the pair and gives his blessings for Alejandro to continue as Zorro and marry Elena.
Sometime later, Alejandro and Elena are married and have rebuilt Diego’s hacienda.
Alejandro tells his infant son Joaquín, whom they named after Alejandro’s brother, of Don Diego’s deeds as Zorro.)
The Legend of Zorro
(In 1850, California votes on whether to join the United States of America as a state.
Zorro, formerly Alejandro Murrieta, now known to the public as Don Alejandro De La Vega, foils a plot to steal the ballots.
During the fight, he loses his mask, and two Pinkerton agents see his face.
Alejandro’s marriage with his wife Elena becomes strained after he refuses to stop being Zorro when the election ends.
The couple fights and Alejandro moves out.
The following day, the Pinkertons confront Elena, who later divorces Alejandro.
The separation and the feeling the people no longer need Zorro take a toll on Alejandro.
His childhood guardian, Father Felipe, takes him to a party at the vineyard of French Count Armand.
Alejandro discovers Elena is dating Armand, an old friend from her time in Europe.
Leaving the party, Alejandro witnesses an explosion near the vineyard and becomes suspicious of Armand.
Gunman Jacob McGivens leads an attack on Guillermo, a farmer and friend of Alejandro, to seize his land.
Zorro rescues Guillermo’s wife and son, but Guillermo is killed.
While at Armand’s mansion for a date, Elena surreptitiously investigates his secret study, discovering information about a plot involving explosives and a group called Orbis Unum (One World in Latin).
Zorro sneaks into the mansion and overhears Armand discussing his plan to build a railroad through Cortez’s land with McGivens.
The next day, Alejandro’s son Joaquin sneaks out of a class field trip and hides on McGivens’s cart.
Joaquin is caught by McGivens’s bandits as they receive a shipment of cargo in a cove.
Zorro saves Joaquin from the bandits and sees the cargo consists of bars of soap, with the phrase Orbis Unum printed on the crates.
Father Felipe tells Alejandro it is the symbol of the Knights of Aragon, a secret society Armand is a member of, which has secretly ruled Europe for millennia.
The Knights have deemed the United States a threat and plan to destroy it.
Alejandro is captured and imprisoned by the Pinkertons.
They reveal they confronted Elena with knowledge of his identity as Zorro and blackmailed her into divorcing Alejandro and seducing Armand to learn of the Knights’ plans without the aid of Zorro.
Because California is not yet a US state, they cannot search Armand’s home themselves.
Joaquin frees Alejandro from captivity.
At Armand’s mansion, Zorro finds Elena.
They spy on Armand as he gives a speech to the Knights, revealing the soap bars contain an ingredient for nitroglycerin.
The vineyard is a cover for the production of the weapon, which will be given to the Confederate army, with the help of its colonel Beauregard, to launch a sneak attack on Washington DC, and destroy the Union.
Zorro and Elena reconcile while he prepares to destroy the train carrying the explosives.
McGivens arrives at Felipe’s church to look for Zorro.
Unable to find him, he shoots Felipe and kidnaps Joaquin.
Armand discovers Elena’s deception and takes her hostage with Joaquin.
Zorro is captured and unmasked in front of his son.
Armand takes Joaquin and Elena away on the train and orders McGivens to kill Alejandro. Felipe, saved from the bullet by the cross he wears, rescues Alejandro, who kills McGivens.
Zorro catches up with the train on horseback and fights Armand.
Elena helps Joaquin escape, then fights Armand’s henchman Ferroq and throws him from the train with a bottle of nitro near Beauregard at their prearranged meeting point, killing them all.
Further along the tracks, the governor prepares to sign the bill to make California a Union state.
Joaquin rides Tornado, Zorro’s horse, off the train and diverts it onto another track, away from the bill signing ceremony.
Zorro sees the track as a dead-end, ties Armand to the engine, and escapes with Elena.
The train crashes, setting off the nitroglycerin and killing Armand.
The governor signs the bill.
California becomes the 31st US state.
Alejandro remarries Elena and apologizes to Joaquin for his secrecy, recognizing Zorro’s identity should be a family secret.
With Elena’s support, Zorro rides off on Tornado to his next mission.)
Banderas made his directorial debut with the comedy film Crazy in Alabama (1999).
Crazy in Alabama
In 1965 Alabama, Peter Joseph “Peejoe” Bullis lives in a small town at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Peejoe’s eccentric Aunt Lucille Vinson kills her husband Chester with poison, after suffering years of domestic abuse.
She decapitates him and brings his severed head with her en route to Hollywood, where she is convinced that television stardom awaits her.
In New Orleans, Lucille buys a black hat box to store Chester’s head.
When a bartender on Bourbon Street insults her, she threatens him with a revolver, before stealing the money from the cash register and his car.
Back in Alabama, Peejoe’s uncle (Lucille’s brother), Dove, a local funeral director, is notified of the incident.
While travelling, Lucille becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced Chester’s ghost is haunting her.
Meanwhile, Peejoe becomes involved with a group of black students protesting the town’s racially segregated municipal swimming pool, leading to a violent protest.
A young black boy, Taylor Jackson, is killed by the town sheriff, John Doggett.
Peejoe, the only witness, is pressured by the sheriff to keep it quiet.
While mowing his lawn, Peejoe is struck in the eye with a rock.
The townspeople circulate a false story that he was shot in retaliation for Taylor’s death.
The black townspeople stage a protest honouring Taylor in which they enter the swimming pool.
Peejoe and his brother, Wiley, join them in support, but the protest is interrupted by police and white pro-Confederates.
Lucille wins $32,000 in Las Vegas while playing roulette at a casino, and subsequently pays for a personal driver, Norman, to bring her to Los Angeles.
She arrives in Hollywood, taking the stage name Carolyn Clay, and manages to land a minor role on Bewitched.
Back in Alabama, Peejoe and Wiley attend a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
Peejoe’s racist aunt Earline grows infuriated over the publicity involving the family.
While watching television one night, they are all surprised to see Lucille on television.
At an industry party in the Hollywood Hills, hostess Joan Blake discovers Chester’s severed head in Lucille’s hat box.
Lucille flees with Norman to San Francisco, and tries to get rid of the head by throwing it off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Two policemen, thinking she is attempting suicide, stop her and discover the head.
She is arrested and escorted back to Alabama for her trial, where she is met by a media circus.
In the local jail, Lucille is incarcerated in a cell next to Nehemiah Jackson, Taylor’s father who has been jailed over the protest.
After being convicted of first-degree murder, Lucille is sentenced to 20 years in prison.
However, the sentence is suspended when she earns the judge’s sympathies after testifying to the abuse she received.
She is put on a five-year probation with the condition that she seek psychiatric help.
Lucille, her children and all her friends joyfully exit the courtroom while the Sheriff (through Peejoe’s testimony) is put under arrest for Taylor’s murder.)
Banderas is a frequent collaborator with director Robert Rodriguez, having starred as El Mariachi in the Mexico Trilogy films Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003).
Above: American filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Desperado
At the Tarasco bar in Mexico, an American man named Buscemi tells the story of witnessing a massacre in another bar, committed by a Mexican who had a guitar case full of guns.
The bar’s patrons are uninterested until Buscemi mentions the name “Bucho“.
Meanwhile, El Mariachi has a dream of his encounter with Moco, Bucho’s underling, who killed his lover and shot his left hand, but Buscemi awakens him and tells him to continue searching for Bucho.
El Mariachi meets a child, whose father allegedly plays guitar for a living.
Having been a guitarist himself, he gives the boy some guitar lessons.
At the Tarasco bar, El Mariachi engages in a tense standoff with Bucho’s henchmen, followed by a massive gunfight.
El Mariachi kills everyone in the bar but Tavo, who was in a back room conducting illegal business.
Tavo survives and follows El Mariachi outside and wounds him, but is killed by El Mariachi.
Carolina, a woman whom El Mariachi shielded from Tavo’s bullets, takes him to her bookstore.
Bucho arrives at the bar to survey the carnage.
Threatened by the situation, Bucho orders his men to hunt down the man “dressed in black“.
At her bookstore, Carolina tends to El Mariachi’s wounds.
While he rests, she discovers the guns in his guitar case and deduces his identity, based on Buscemi’s story.
El Mariachi asks her to help him locate Bucho.
He goes to the town church and talks to Buscemi.
Upset by the massacre at the bar, Buscemi convinces El Mariachi to abandon his quest for revenge.
Outside the church, they are ambushed by a man armed with throwing knives, who kills Buscemi and severely wounds El Mariachi.
Bucho’s men arrive at the scene, and mistake the man (who dresses in black) for El Mariachi and kill him.
They take the body back to Bucho, who realizes they have killed the wrong person, a hitman named Navajas sent by the Colombians to kill El Mariachi.
As an injured El Mariachi wanders the streets he meets the kid with the guitar, once again.
He learns that the kid is being used by his father to mule drugs hidden in his guitar.
He angrily confronts the boy, who tells him most people in the town work for Bucho.
El Mariachi returns to Carolina and learns that Bucho financed her bookstore as an additional front for his drug dealing.
Bucho arrives, unexpectedly.
She hastily hides El Mariachi.
She feigns ignorance of the commotion in town.
Bucho leaves.
Carolina completes the suturing of El Mariachi’s wounds.
That evening, she gives El Mariachi a new guitar, which he plays for her before they make passionate love.
Meanwhile, Bucho realizes that Carolina lied to him.
In the morning, Bucho’s men arrive and attack them and set the bookstore ablaze.
The two fight their way out of the burning building and onto a local rooftop, where El Mariachi gets a clear shot at Bucho but inexplicably chooses not to attempt to kill him.
The two hide in a hotel room.
Angry about their failure to kill El Mariachi, Bucho gathers his men and says:
“You drive around town, you see someone you don’t know, you shoot them!
How hard is that, huh?”
He shoots one man and then fires at the others, as an example.
Realizing that Bucho will never stop hunting him, El Mariachi contacts his friends, Campa and Quino, for assistance.
The trio meets up on the edge of town and encounters Bucho’s henchmen.
A massive gun battle ensues.
Most of Bucho’s men, along with Campa and Quino, are killed.
El Mariachi discovers that the guitar-playing boy has been wounded in the crossfire and rushes him to a hospital.
El Mariachi and Carolina travel to Bucho’s compound intending to confront him.
It is then revealed that Bucho is El Mariachi’s older brother, Cesar.
El Mariachi was unaware of “Bucho‘s” identity, until he saw his brother’s face, from the rooftop, and refrained from shooting him.
Bucho offers to release El Mariachi if he allows Bucho to kill Carolina.
El Mariachi kills his brother, then shoots the remaining henchmen.
The two visit the boy in the hospital.
El Mariachi leaves alone.
Carolina catches up to him on the road and picks him up, with El Mariachi initially leaving his weapons on the side of the road.
The two drive away together, but shortly return and pick up the guitar case, full of guns, just to be safe.)
Once Upon a Time in Mexico:
El Mariachi is recruited by CIA officer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands to kill General Emiliano Marquez, a corrupt Mexican Army officer who has been hired by Mexican drug lord Armando Barillo to assassinate the President of Mexico and overthrow the government during a period of unrest in Culiacán (the capital of Sinaloa) testing the presidency.
Many years before, El Mariachi and his wife Carolina confronted Marquez in a shootout and wounded the General.
In retaliation, Marquez took the lives of Carolina and their daughter in an ambush.
In addition to El Mariachi, Sands persuades former FBI agent Jorge Ramírez to come out of retirement and kill Barillo, who had murdered his partner Archuleta in the past.
Furthermore, AFN operative Ajedrez is assigned by Sands to tail Barillo.
While monitoring Barillo’s activities, Ramírez meets Billy Chambers, an American fugitive who has been living under the protection of Barillo, but can no longer stomach the horrible tasks he has been forced to carry out for him.
Ramírez convinces Chambers he will provide him protection in exchange for getting closer to Barillo by tagging Chambers’s pet chihuahua with a hidden microphone.
Chambers agrees to complete the deal by surrendering to US authorities once Barillo has been taken down.
Sands’s agent, Cucuy, originally hired to keep an eye on El Mariachi, instead turns and tranquilizes El Mariachi and turns him over to Barillo, also offering to reveal the details of Sands’s plan.
Cucuy, however, is promptly killed by Chambers while El Mariachi escapes from captivity and calls his friends Lorenzo and Fideo to assist him in his mission.
While monitoring Barillo’s activity outside a hospital, Ramírez notices armed men storming the building and follows suit.
He discovers that a group of doctors has been gunned down and Barillo has bled to death as a result of a botched facial reconstruction but realizes that the corpse on the operating table is a body double before he is knocked out and kidnapped by the real Barillo and Ajedrez, who reveals herself to be Barillo’s daughter.
Sands realizes that his mission has been compromised but is too late, as he is captured by Barillo and Ajedrez — who drill out his eyes before sending him out.
Despite his blindness, he manages to gun down a hitman tailing him with the aid of a chicle boy.
As Culiacán celebrates the Day of the Dead during the President’s visit, Marquez and his army storm in and attack the Presidential Palace.
Marquez’s troops, however, are met with resistance from not only the President’s bodyguards but also the citizens of Culiacán and the Mariachis.
Sands had instructed El Mariachi to allow the President to be killed before attacking Marquez, but the Mariachis, concluding that the President is a good man, intervene early and protect him.
Marquez enters the Presidential Palace, only to once again confront El Mariachi, who shoots out his kneecaps before killing him with a headshot.
Ramírez, who was released from captivity by Chambers, faces Barillo.
After Barillo guns down Chambers, Ramírez and El Mariachi kill the drug lord.
Sands manages to shoot the sadistic Ajedrez dead outside the Presidential Palace.
Ultimately, Lorenzo and Fideo walk away with the cash that Barillo was using to pay Marquez and help the President safely escape the attempted coup.
Ramírez says goodbye to Sands and walks away, having avenged his partner’s death.
El Mariachi then gives his share of the cash to his home village before walking into the sunset.
Banderas has starred in franchise films, including as the patriarch in the Spy Kids series (2001 – 2003) and as the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek films (2004 – present).
Spy Kids is an American media franchise centered on a series of spy action comedy films created by Robert Rodriguez.
The plot follows various children, who discover that their respective parents are spies and become involved in an espionage organization when their parents go missing.
The films include Hispanic themes, as Rodriguez is of Mexican descent.
Puss in Boots, or simply Puss, is a main character in the Shrek franchise.
He made his first appearance in the film Shrek 2 (2004), soon becoming Shrek’s partner and helper (alongside Donkey).
In the film Shrek the Third (2007), Puss helps Shrek find the heir to the throne of the Far Far Away Kingdom.
The film Shrek Forever After (2010) is primarily set in an alternate universe, where Puss is Princess Fiona’s pet and has gained weight after his retirement.
He is portrayed as the title character and protagonist in the 2011 spin-off film Puss in Boots (in which his origins are described) and its 2022 sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (set sometime after Shrek Forever After).
Puss also appears in the Netflix television series centered on him, The Adventures of Puss in Boots (2015 – 2018).
Puss was loosely based on the title character of the fairy tale “Puss in Boots“.
His design, created by Tom Hester, was based on real cats.
Several characters were used as inspirations for Puss’s characterization, such as Zorro, James Bond and Indiana Jones.
The idea of Puss as the protagonist of a film was explored after his debut appearance.
Antonio Banderas voices Puss in the English, Spanish, and Italian dubs of the Shrek franchise.
While he initially tried a high-pitched voice for the character, he and the Shrek 2 filmmakers decided on a tone that was deeper than his normal voice.
Banderas said that voicing Puss was an important part of his career.
Eric Bauza provides Puss’s voice in The Adventures of Puss in Boots.
The character has received generally positive reviews, with critics praising his depiction and considering him a source of comic relief.
Reviewers have regarded Puss as a popular Shrek character.
Banderas’s voice acting has also been praised.
Above: Puss in Boots
On stage, Banderas made his Broadway debut as Guido Contini in Nine (2003), for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.
Nine:
Guido Contini, a famous Italian film director, has turned 40 and faces double crises:
He has to shoot a film for which he can’t write the script, and his wife of 20 years, the film star Luisa del Forno, may be about to leave him if he can’t pay more attention to the marriage.
As it turns out, it is the same crisis.
Luisa’s efforts to talk to him seem to be drowned out by voices in his head:
Voices of women in his life, speaking through the walls of his memory, insistent, flirtatious, irresistible, potent.
Women speaking beyond words (Overture delle Donne).
And these are the women Guido has loved, and from whom he has derived the entire vitality of a creative life, now as stalled as his marriage.
In an attempt to find some peace and save the marriage, they go to a spa near Venice (Spa Music), where they are immediately hunted down by the press with intrusive questions about the marriage and — something Guido had not told Luisa about — his imminent film project (Not Since Chaplin).
As Guido struggles to find a story for his film, he becomes increasingly preoccupied — his interior world sometimes becoming indistinguishable from the objective world (Guido’s Song).
His mistress Carla arrives in Venice, calling him from her lonely hotel room (A Call from the Vatican), his producer Liliane La Fleur, former vedette of the Folies Bergeres, insists he make a musical, an idea which itself veers off into a feminine fantasy of extraordinary vividness (The Script / Folies Bergeres).
And all the while, Luisa watches, the resilience of her love being consumed by anxiety for him and a gathering dismay for their lives together (My Husband Makes Movies / Only With You).
Guido’s fugitive imagination, clutching at women like straws, eventually plunges through the floor of the present and into his own past where he encounters his mother, bathing a nine-year-old boy —the young Guido himself (Nine).
The vision leads him to re-encounter a glorious moment on a beach with Saraghina, the prostitute and outcast to whom he went as a curious child, creeping out of his Catholic boarding school St. Sebastian, to ask her to tell him about love.
Her answer, be yourself (Ti Voglio Bene / Be Italian), and the dance she taught him on the sand echoes down to the 40-year-old Guido as a talisman and a terrible reminder of the consequences of that night — punishment by the nuns and rejection by his appalled mother (The Bells of St. Sebastian).
Unable to bear the incomprehensible dread of the adults, the little boy runs back to the beach to find nothing but the sand and the wind — an image of the vanishing nature of love, and the cause of Guido Contini’s artistry and unanchored peril:
A fugitive heart.
Back into the present, Guido is on a beach once more.
With him, Claudia Nardi, a film star, muse of his greatest successes, who has flown from Paris because he needs her, but this time she does not want the role.
He cannot fathom the rejection.
He is enraged.
He fails to understand that Claudia loves him, too, but wants him to love her as a woman ‘not a spirit‘ — and he realizes too late that this was the real reason that she came — in order to know, and now she does.
He cannot love her that way.
She is in some way released to love him for what he is, and never to hope for him again.
Wryly she calls him “My charming Casanova!“ thereby involuntarily giving Guido the very inspiration he needs and for which has always looked to her.
As Claudia lets him go with “Unusual Way“, Guido grasps the last straw of all — a desperate, inspired movie — a ‘spectacular in the vernacular‘— set on “The Grand Canal“ and cast with every woman in his life.
The improvised movie is a spectacular collision between his real life and his creative one — a film that is as self-lacerating as it is cruel, during which Carla races onto the set to announce her divorce and her delight that they can be married only to be brutally rejected by Guido in his desperate fixation with the next set-up, and which climaxes with Luisa, appalled and moved by his use of their intimacy— and even her words — as a source for the film, finally detonating with sadness and rage.
Guido keeps the cameras rolling, capturing a scene of utter desolation — the women he loves, and Luisa whom he loves above all, littered like smashed porcelain across the frame of his hopelessly beautiful failure of a film.
“Cut. Print!“
The film is dead.
The cast leaves.
They all leave.
Carla, with “Simple“ — words from the articulate broken heart, Claudia with a letter from Paris to say that she has married, and Luisa in a shattering exit from a marriage that has, as she says, been ‘all of me‘ (Be On Your Own).
Guido is alone.
“I Can’t Make This Movie“ ascends into the scream of “Guido out in space with no direction” and he contemplates suicide.
But, as the gun is at his head, there is a final life-saving interruption— from his nine-year-old self (Getting Tall), in which the young Guido points out it is time to move on.
To grow up.
And Guido surrenders the gun.
As the women return in a reprise of the Overture (Reprises), but this time to let him go, only one is absent:
Luisa.
Guido feels the aching void left by the only woman he will ever love.
In the 2003 Broadway production, as the boy led the women off into his own future to the strains of “Be Italian“, Luisa steps into the room on the final note, and Guido turned toward her — this time ready to listen.)
Banderas received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his roles as Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (1878 – 1923) in the HBO television film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2004) and Pablo Picasso in the anthology series Genius: Picasso (2018).
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself
The film opens in 1923 with studio executive Frank N. Thayer receiving a letter in the mail, alongside a medallion of the Virgin Mary.
The film then shifts to the height of the Mexican Revolution.
Pancho Villa finds himself without adequate funding to finance his war against the military-run government.
He also finds himself at odds with the Americans because of the Hearst media empire’s press campaign against him.
He has a Jewish – American lieutenant of his, Sam Dreben to send feelers to American film studios.
Villa’s plan is to convince them to send film crew to film his battles.
D.W. Griffith is immediately interested and convinces Mutual Film Studios boss Harry E. Aitkin to send a crew.
As Aitkin’s nephew, Thayer is initially assigned an errand boy for the studio, but he makes a good impression with Villa, who demands that Thayer be placed in charge of the project.
Thayer and a camera crew team film Villa leading his men to victory in battle.
Despite the failure of this initial footage (which draws derisive laughter from potential backers) Thayer convinces Aitkin to invest even more money in a second attempt, and also convinces Villa to participate in making a more narrative film.
Thayer returns to Mexico with a director, actors, producers, cameramen and screenwriters, and begin to film Villa’s previous exploits using a younger actor, future film director Raoul Walsh as Villa.
The filming goes well, although Villa becomes angry that the screenwriters and the director have decided to use creative license to enhance the film.
However, he agrees to do a cameo appearance as an older version of himself.
Meanwhile, Thayer begins a romance with actress Teddy Sampson.
He also is assigned two young child soldiers as editing assistants by Villa.
The next morning, Villa assembles his men to attack the Federal-held stronghold of Torreon.
Thayer and his team go in to film the battle.
A skirmish on the way to the fort occurs, with Villa’s army repelling the Federales, though one of Thayer’s assistants loses his life.
Villa’s army arrives at Torreon and lays siege.
Villa’s army is initially successful, but they suffer heavy casualties and are forced to withdraw.
That night, Villa orders his army to bombard Torreon into submission.
The next morning, Villa’s cavalry finishes off the last of Torreon’s Federal defenders.
However, Thayer and his camera crew team witness Villa personally shooting a Mexican widow in cold blood with his handgun during the aftermath of the battle.
Disgusted, the team leaves.
The Life of General Villa is shown in theatres in the US, and to great success, although Thayer and his crew end up regretting their participation.
Thayer is also dismayed to find out that Teddy, who is attending the premiere, has broken off their romance.
Nine years later, Thayer meets with Drebin in a restaurant.
Having lost an eye and arm during the Revolution, he laments at the current Mexican government being no better than Huerta’s.
He is equally displeased that Thayer did not gift Villa with a copy of the film as promised.
The movie then returns to Thayer in his office, where he reads the letter.
It is from his surviving assistant, who has since grown to manhood, married, and has a child with Villa as a godfather.
He also recounts that Villa had been assassinated en route, and that the people of Mexico have missed his absence.
The letter inspires Thayer to return to Mexico in order to screen the film, where it is met with a passionate audience who deliver a standing ovation Villa’s ending speech.
Thayer then goes on to narrate that Villa has since been reinterred in Mexico City to great fanfare, while the film has since become lost.
He also states that he has become a footnote in history, though he “does not mind being a footnote to a legend“.
A longtime supporter of Málaga CF, Banderas is also an officer (mayordomo de trono) of a Roman Catholic religious brotherhood in his hometown of Málaga and travels during Holy Week to take part in the processions.
Above: Málaga Football Club logo
In May 2010, Banderas received an honorary doctorate from the University of Málaga.
He received an honorary degree from Dickinson College in 2000.
In August 2015, Banderas enrolled in a fashion design course at Central Saint Martins.
Above: Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, King’s Cross, London
As of 2016, Banderas resides in the UK in Cobham, Surrey.
Above: High Street, Cobham, Surrey, England
Banderas married Ana Leza in 1987 and divorced her in 1996.
Above: Ana Leza and Antonio Banderas
He met and began a relationship with American actress Melanie Griffith in 1995 while shooting Two Much.
Two Much:
Former artist Art Dodge is struggling to keep his art gallery open, unable to pay bills, his assistant Gloria or his artist Manny.
To survive, he reads the obituaries and tries to convince the widows that the deceased purchased a painting shortly before dying.
When Art tries this scam with mobster Gene, whose father just died, he tries to have his henchmen beat him up.
Art barely escapes by hiding in Betty Kerner’s Rolls-Royce, Gene’s estranged two-time ex-wife and wealthy heiress.
Betty is excited to help the handsome stranger.
They end up making love.
Impulsive, she wants to marry Art in two weeks.
The tabloids immediately unearth the story.
Stuck between Betty who won’t budge and Gene who still loves her, although Art isn’t happy about it, he plays along.
One morning at Betty’s, Art surprises her in the shower, naked.
He sees it’s not Betty, but her sister Liz, an art professor.
He is attracted to her, but she is very cold and distant, seeing him as a gigolo.
He invents a fake twin brother Bart (who wears glasses and has his hair down instead of in a ponytail), a painter who just returned from Italy.
Bart and Liz instantly hit it off while Gene still tries to romance Betty.
They talk about everything, he plays with her dog and even invites her to Manny’s studio, pretending it is his.
When Liz’s favorite painting in the studio turns out to actually be Art’s (who gave it to Manny as an “advance” on what he owes him), he gives it to her.
Thanks to his imaginary twin brother, Art manages to romance both sisters.
As the “twin brothers” can’t be in the same place at the same time, it means a lot of running around, excuses and enlisting a very reluctant Gloria.
One evening he needs to be on two simultaneous dates.
At the restaurant with Betty, he drugs her wine to shorten the date and puts a very sleepy Betty to bed.
He then goes out with Liz (who chooses the same restaurant), also making love to her.
The next morning, Art / Bart has to run back and forth between the sisters’ bedrooms as he is supposed to be with them simultaneously.
The night before the wedding, Art spots Gene’s two henchmen near his house and escapes with his dad’s help.
He tries to spend the night at Gloria’s but Manny is there.
He gives him the studio’s keys to spend the night.
There, Art is painting again but is interrupted by the henchmen who start beating him up.
When Art proposes leaving town, Gene insists he go ahead with the wedding and threatens to break one bone for each tear Betty cries.
After they leave, Liz arrives to the studio, thinking Bart got beat up.
He tells her he is Art, that he fell in love when he saw her in the shower and tries to kiss her.
She thinks Art is trying to make a pass at her, not realizing Bart is Art.
On the wedding day, Liz tells Bart his “brother” tried to kiss her, so the wedding should be called off.
Bart needs to “confront” Art in a study alone, with Liz and Gene listening outside – and, unbeknownst to everyone, also by Betty through the phone.
When Gene enters the study, he confronts Art alone, and again threatens him if he doesn’t marry Betty.
He insists that they want is irrelevant and that the only thing that matters is Betty’s happiness.
During the wedding ceremony, Betty, shaken by Gene’s selfless devotion, calls the wedding off.
Falling into Gene’s arms, she admits she loves him too, and they elope.
In the general confusion, Liz sees her dog wanting to play with Art and realizes he and Bart are the same person.
Bart then gives Liz a fake excuse to “go back to Italy” (which she of course doesn’t buy), adding he is not worthy.
Months later, Art’s gallery is now very successful (Gloria owns and manages it, and Art is the artist).
At the inauguration of his work, he notices Liz, who has feelings for him but is unsure of who he really is.
Art convinces her he is the one she had feelings for.
The movie ends with them happily walking down the street, hand in hand.
Baderas and Griffith married on 14 May 1996, in London.
They have a daughter, Stella del Carmen Banderas (born 1996), who appeared onscreen with Griffith in Banderas’ directorial debut Crazy in Alabama (1999).
In 2002, the couple received the Stella Adler Angel Award for their extensive philanthropy.
Griffith had a tattoo of Banderas’ name on her right arm that has since been removed.
In June 2014, Banderas and Griffith released a statement announcing their intention to divorce “in a loving and friendly manner“.
According to the petition filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, the couple had “irreconcilable differences” that led to their separation.
The divorce became official in December 2015.
Despite being divorced, Banderas and Griffith remain close friends.
His former stepdaughter Dakota Johnson has stated she considers Banderas part of the family, calling him a “bonus dad“.
Above: Melanie and Antonio Banderas
As of November 2015, Banderas is dating Nicole Kimpel, a Dutch investment banker.
Above: Nicole Kemper and Antonio Banderas
In 2009, Banderas underwent surgery for a benign tumor in his back.
Speaking at the Málaga Film Festival in March 2017, Banderas revealed he had suffered a heart attack on 26 January 2017, but said it “wasn’t serious and hasn’t caused any damages“.
Following that incident, he underwent heart surgery to insert three stents into his arteries.
In a Fresh Air interview in September 2019, he recalled it as being life-changing.
He said:
“It just gave me a perspective of who I was.
It just made the important things go to the surface.
When I say this, people may just think that I’m crazy, but it is one of the best things that has ever happened in my life.“
In a way I think of my library, especially my collection of novels, like a medicine chest.
My medicine, the cures for the ills that ail me, whether emotional or physical pain, cannot not be found at the pharmacy / chemist’s, but in my library.
I believe in bibliotherapy, an apothecary contain Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets, Saramago salves and the purges of Proust.
Bibliotherapy is nothing new under the sun and has certainly been blatant in the form of the self-help book, but lovers of literature have been using novels as medicine – consciously or subconsciously – for centuries.
Sometimes it is the story that charms.
Sometimes it is the rhythm of the prose, of a jazz that I feel, that works on the psyche, stilling or stimulating.
Novels have the power to transport you into another existence and see the world from a different perspective, to see what others see, to touch what others touch, learn what a character learns.
You are here and yet you are not.
Your thoughts, your senses, your spirit are somewhere else.
“To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.“
André Gide
Above: French author André Gide
To watch Antonio Banderas in the role of Zorro, you believe he is Zorro.
To read Johnston McCulley’s Zorro works is to believe that you yourself are or could be Zorro.
“To avenge the helpless, to punish cruel politicians, to aid the oppressed” is our cry.
“The moment I donned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away.
My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my voice grew strong and firm, fire came to me!
And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again.
Is it not a peculiar thing?“
By donning cloak and mask…
“One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s memories, to be master of them.“
D.H. Lawrence
Above: English writer David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930)
We must find a solution to my wife’s move that doesn’t involve trashing my entire library.
I am willing to “lighten the load” and relegate to recycling those books I have never or rarely read.
But should she insist on the entire library being destroyed then she will be destroying a part of who I am.
To destroy a library is to silence the past and damage the future.
A home should be a place where you can be completely yourself.
Perhaps you truly can’t go home again.
The adventure comes to an end.
The music died, that of a jazz that I feel.
And were as nothing.
Nothing is the last word.
The last word.
Nothing.
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music
Used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
[Chorus]
So, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
And them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.”
[Verse 2]
Did you write the book of love?
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Now, do you believe in rock ‘n’ roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
Well, I know that you’re in love with him
‘Cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues
I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died
[Chorus]
I started singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.“
[Verse 3]
Now, for ten years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone
But that’s not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lennon read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died
[Chorus]
We were singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.“
[Verse 4]
Helter skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter
Eight miles high and fallin’ fast
It landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast
Now, the halftime air was sweet perfume
While sergeants played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
‘Cause the players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?
[Chorus]
We started singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.“
[Verse 5]
Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
So, come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the Devil’s only friend
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
[Chorus]
He was singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die…“
[Bridge]
I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play
And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died
[Deleted Verse]
And there I stood alone and afraid
I dropped to my knees and there I prayed
And I promised Him everything I could give
If only He would make the music live
And He promised it would live once more
But this time one would equal four
And in five years four had come to mourn
And the music was reborn
[Chorus]
And they were singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.”
[Outro]
They were singin’, Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.“
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Google Images
- Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, How to Read a Book
- Ella Berthould and Susan Elderkin, The Novel Cure
- Steve Biddulph, Manhood
- Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, This is not the end of the book
- Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook
- Dr. Hook, “Sylvia’s Mother“
- John Lennon, “Imagine“
- Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams, “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late“
- Stephen May, Get Started in Creative Writing
- Don McLean, “American Pie“
- Milow, “Ayo Technology“
- Barbara Streisand, “Memory“
- Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man
- “Weird” Al Yankovic, “It’s All About the Pentium“
- Louise Purwin Zobel, The Travel Writer’s Handbook
