Composer, actress, director and supporter of pet cloning, Barbra Streisand, who recently turned 80 and is back in the news for the Broadway revival of Hello Dolly, is also an aficionado of interior design, to the point that in 2010 he published a 300-page, several-pound book—an entire coffee-table tome—about the process of building and decorating his Malibu home. The best-known fact about that house, which is made up of at least four buildings, is that one of them contains a mall, an underground shopping center made up of picturesque shops in which the only fictitious client (since she already owns everything they sell) is Barbra herself. In 2013, playwright Jonathan Tolie even wrote a play on that premise, Buyer.
WHEN HUSTVEDT WROTE TO BARNES
In a chapter of Madres, padrees y otros / Mares, pares i més (Seix Barral / Edicions 62), Siri Hustvedt addresses the always interesting question of literary mentors, the veteran authors that young authors choose to be their guide, sometimes with dire consequences (see Joyce / Beckett). She herself wrote a long, fiery letter to Djuna Barnes when she was a graduate student, after reading and being dazzled by The Forest of Night. The reply took two years to arrive, typed, and said little more than this: “Dear Miss Hustvedt, her tasting has created serious difficulties for me.” Miss Hustvedt explains that she didn’t take it as an insult. “I read it as a tribute to myself, the young letter writer who had disturbed the old hermit’s peace.” Barnes died shortly after, aged 90.
WHAT LE CORBUSIER DID NOT DO IN BUENOS AIRES
In 1929, the Association of Friends of Art, chaired by Victoria Ocampo in Argentina, invited Le Corbusier to give a series of lectures in Buenos Aires. The architect would stay for almost a month, establishing important links with people from the city and making proposals for each piece of land that they showed him, from Palermo to Mar del Plata. From that visit, which would never be repeated, the French architect was left with an obsession with the city, which he saw as a New York of the South. He spent decades developing an urban plan for Buenos Aires, which included a City of Business with five skyscrapers reclaimed from the Río de la Plata. His project never materialized because it lacked support, but the influence remained on various Argentine architects and on the figure of Antonio Bonet, a Barcelonan from GATPAC. BARQ, the architecture film festival taking place these days in Barcelona, with screenings at the DHUB and the Girona cinemas, screens Plan for Buenos Aires, a documentary by Gerardo Panero about the reform that was not.
REVENGE IS SERVED BY THE POOL
The swimming pool season begins and it is a good time to remember two of the best anecdotes about actors and their swimming pools:
1. Michael Caine was once asked about the sequel to Jaws, in which he participates, and which is considered one of the worst second parts of popular cinema. He replied, “I haven’t seen the movie. Everyone says it’s terrible. But I have seen the pool that I paid with it. Is fantastic”.
2. In 1995, Andrew Lloyd Webber fired Patti LuPone from the musical Sunset Boulevard just before it opened on Broadway. LuPone had played the role of Norma Desmond, at Lloyd Webber’s own request, in London and assumed she would continue to do so for the big New York premiere. The actress denounced him and the composer had to pay her a million dollars that she used to build a luxury pool in her country house in Connecticut. He called it “The Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.”
ICON FOR A PROTEST
Given the imminent and more than likely revocation of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, there is a well-known work by the artist Barbara Kruger that has emerged as the banner of protest against this historical setback and that is already on networks and banners . Kruger famously collaged her with the lyrics “your body is a battleground” in 1989, to donate as a poster for the Women’s March on Washington that year. There is another version that is part of the permanent collection of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. According to art critic Carolina A. Miranda, from the L.A. Times, the poster is the feminist response to another famous graphic piece that uses the second person, the 1917 poster in which Uncle Sam, dressed in stripes
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