Roll Over Beethoven

To promote the arrival of The Beatles, I Tunes is posting a video of their first live show in America (1964, Washington D.C.) No wonder the teenagers were hysterical, crying and screaming at the top of their heads: The Beatles were hot and rock was the wave of the future. Watching this film, 45 years later, one still feels the energy rush, the blood flowing to the head, a feeling of happiness, a great positive discharge of adolescent agression.

Keith Richard's Life (on drugs)

Keith Richard's memoirs are highly entertaining. One thing is clear: apart from music, there is nothing he likes better than drugs. His consumption is staggering: the carefully controlled doses of smack are mixed with gargantuan cocaine sniffs (the purest stuff, he emphasizes), a huge variety of pills (Tuinals, etc...) liberal doses of Jack Daniels, the whole taking place in a huge cloud of hash and spiff, not counting of course the cigarettes always dangling from his mouth and the occasional acid trip. How is this man alive? The music kept him going, the huge high of being on stage and playing these deeply satisfying, addictive, riffs which he describes in loving detail. The music: "what you are looking for is where the sounds just melt into one another and you've got that beat behind it, and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through. What you are looking for is power and force - without volume". (Above, the Stones in their prime, blasting their way through Bitch in Australia:) For him "the chicks" come fourth or fifth. Had she not been intent on outdoing Keith on drug taking and outrageous behaviour, he would still be married to Anita Pallenberg, that "tough bitch". The book reads as if Richards just decided to let go and tell his life in a fit of absentmindness, which he now probably (but secretly) regrets.

A Religiosa Portuguesa

"A Religiosa Portuguesa", with its postcard perfect photography of Lisbon, its tongue in cheek hieratic dialogues, its strange mix of allusions to portuguese mythology, its superb performances of fado by Camané and Aldina Duarte, is cool, entrancing, almost moving at times. It sometimes feels like a Manuel de Oliveira movie made good, a kind of savant reinterpretation of the slow ponderous style of portuguese art cinema, enlivened by dry wit, songs, mystery and just the right amount of storytelling. Eugene Green makes it come aaaliiiive, like that, in slow motion.

Stunning

Browsing through a back issue of Vogue at the doctor, I stumbled upon an article about British photographer Sam Taylor-Wood: her John Lennon biopic "Nowhere Boy" is about to be released in Spain; she is married to the actor who plays Lennon, 23 years her junior; they just had a child, her third; she has survived two cancers, including a full mastectomy. I felt an immediate electric kinship and could not wait until I checked her out on the internet. So there she is, on these stunning series of photographs, the Bram Stocker Chair series. Stunning.

Why is Literature Important?

"Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and the innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit

Lays its honours at their feet."

W.H.Auden

"In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. Jan 1939)

Mario Vargas Llosa

For once, everyone agrees. Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize is richly deserved. He is supremely accomplished as a novelist, literary critic and journalist. He is respected, well liked, generous to a fault to his fellow writers. His politics may not be to everyone's liking, but at least he stays clear of compromising friendships with the likes of Fidel Castro. He is is every sense a cosmopolitan writer. Strictly wedded to the realist novel, as practiced by the great XIXth century masters - Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, whom he worships - he is equally at home in Peru, in Paris or in the Congo, the scene of his latest novel, due in November. He writes a beautiful, limpid, compelling spanish. Once one starts reading, the precision and the musicality of his style, as well as his impeccable storytelling technique rarely fail to carry one through to the end. A literary genius? Perhaps not. But certainly a great writer and a highly respectable man.

Israeli novelists

On the strength of "The Liberated Bride", superbly translated into english, I would guess A. B. Yehoshua may be the best Israeli novelist on the market. Yes, better than Amos Oz - notwithstanding his wonderful memoir, "Tales of Love and Darkness" - not to mention David Grossman - whom I do not really know - or Aharon Appelfeld - who seems to write more about Europe than Israel. The hero of the book, Rivlin, is a fumbling orientalist deeply in love with his wife, a district court judge in Haifa. I do not recall a funnier, more perceptive account of a happy marriage as Yehoshua provides in this book. His dialogue is masterful, with a magnificent ability to convey subtle changes of mood and tone. Rivlin, the professor, is obsessed with piercing the secret of his son's divorce. This search drives the plot, but the book is really about relations between arabs and jews, love and marriage, life in the Holy Land circa 1999 and slight episodes of a humdrum middle class life which Yehoshua manages to capture through small details and to describe with a light touch and a great comical gift. Episode by episode, he manages to hold the reader's attention to a story which seems to be nothing at all. I wonder what an arab reader would make of his take on the arabs - mostly Israeli arabs, fluent in Hebrew. Would they find it patronizing or, on the contrary, humane?

The status of contemporary art

The buzz generated by contemporary art in the first decade of the XXIst century sometimes reminds me of the excitement generated by pop music in the 1960's. Something new is in the air — some new cultural trend, some new mass phenomenom of which everybody wants to be part of. Maybe what has happened is that there has been a profound change in the status of contemporary art: no longer an elitist pursuit, it has become part of popular culture. Just as happened with "classical" music, the cannon desintegrated — in the case of art, this desintegration meant the end of the idea of a "vanguard". In its place appeared a bewildering eclecticism, in which it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to distinguish"high" and "low" forms of art. Even though artistic schools produce every year an ever greater quantity of artists, it is no longer necessary to master every detail of the craft to qualify as an artist. You can be a visual artist without knowing how to draw, just as you can play lead guitar in a rock n' roll band without knowing how to read music.

Pietro Citati

Pietro Citati is a reader. He reads for us, voratiously, lovingly, attentively, and then recreates, in romantic and fluid prose, the great literary masterpieces of the western tradition, and the minor half forgotten pieces, the lives and temperament of their heroic authors, the cultural atmosphere in which they worked, their manias, obsessions and visions. He guides us through this labyrinth of words, through this mountain of pages, through this perpetually expanding literary universe and its innumerable bright stars: Daniel Defoe, Goethe, Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Manzoni, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Poe, Stevenson, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Fitzgerald... As we read on, we renew old loves, we reacquaint ourselves with friends we hadn't heard of in years and we discover infinite new reading possibilities. These are all the more alluring as most will never be more than that...

Antonio Pedro Vasconcelos

What little is known abroad about the cinema made in Portugal can be reduced to two names: Manuel de Oliveira, who nowadays seems to be celebrated more for the fact that he is 100 years old than for the films he is still making, and Pedro Costa, the new star of art cinema incensed by French critics. Maybe a little place should also be allotted to António Pedro Vasconcelos and his deliberately "commercial" cinema - filmmaking which is well crafted, fast paced, has good scripts and good actors, actually tells a story and even manages to be funny! If only for the sheer audacity of making a portuguese Hollywood style romantic comedy, and actually pulling it off in a very respectable manner ("A Bela e o Paparazzo", his latest movie) António Pedro Vasconcelos would deserve our gratitude. But that's not all: amazingly, his previous films, which always dealt with contemporary themes, actually stand the test of time. So when your hear about "Portuguese cinema" please bear in mind that this is not exactly the same as the cinema made in Portugal.

The joy of music

"The Making of West Side Story", which I picked up as a bargain offer at FNAC Lisbon, is a joyous and moving film of Bernstein's operatic recording of his great musical. Now I am caught: everyday I wake up singing those tunes in my head: "I feel pretty, oh so pretty...."; or "Maria.... Maria, Maria, Maria". Is West Side Story the great opera of the second half of the twentieth century? After all, when it was invented, opera was a popular genre. The day after Rigoletto's opening, people were whistling "La Donne e mobile" in the street. Here, as Bernstein himself remarks, everything still sounds fresh and bubbling. These tunes, sang with great gusto by Tatyana Troyanos, transformed into classical arias by Jose Carreras, or seamlessly delivered by Kiri te Kanawa, will remain with us forever.

Seu d'Urgell

Up in the Pyrenees, in a lush valley with the Segre flowing down from the high mountains, lays La Seu d'Urgell, a bishopric since the VIth century, with a magnificent romanesque cathedral dating from the XIIth century, solid, sober and imposing, the fourth to be built on the site. There, protected by these mountains, in these deep valleys, Christendom resisted the Arab onslaught. A string of romanesque churches, nestled in the mountain slopes, testify to the presence of these christian communities, who once belonged to the Carolingian empire. This is where modern Catalonia was born, close to France, far from Spain.