The Rolling Stones have reached their fifteenth number 1 on the official UK albums chart with their new album, Foreign Tongues, thus matching an old record held by the Beatles.
I am in Ithaca! It seems absurd, but here I am. I think of the friends with whom I believe the Odyssey is the most beautiful book in the world.” In September 1927, Carles Riba writes euphorically to Josep Maria de Sagarra while visiting Greece. The patronage of the Fundació Bernat Metge by Francesc Cambó allows the Hellenist to travel through the landscapes of the authors he has translated. Like this last month, when La Casa dels Clàssics of the foundation presented Odissea, the recent translation into Catalan by Pau Sabaté.
For almost three thousand years, the Odyssey has been understood as the great tale of return. A hero who, after playing a decisive role in the Greek victory over Troy —thanks to his cunning and the deception of the horse that allowed the city to be conquered— sets out on the journey back to Ithaca and crosses impossible seas to reclaim his kingdom and reunite with Penelope. But Christopher Nolan proposes a different reading of Homer’s poem: one in which Odysseus’s true journey does not end when he sets foot in his homeland, but when he understands the human cost of the war he won and the debt he owes to those who could not return.
The new Sant Jordi Club already has a face and shape, that of an immense multipurpose box 65 meters wide and 27 high – twice the current size – with an aesthetic similar to the Palau Sant Jordi and an outdoor space redesigned to facilitate access and invite people to approach the Montjuïc mountain. These are the main coordinates of the winning project of the competition for the renovation of the old facility, which will be carried out by the architecture firms Jorge Vidal and the Parisian Bruther with a budget of 70 million euros funded by BSM, manager of the Anella Olímpica, and 2029 as the planned inauguration date.
Among the amalgam of festivals and digital centers such as Sónar+D, Mira, Offf, or Ideal, Barcelona is advancing towards becoming the capital of digital art. It is practically already so in Europe, but the ambition is to become a benchmark by crossing even more borders in the medium term. To achieve this latter goal, the Biennal d’Arts Digitals has been launched, with the essential support of public administrations: the City Council and the Generalitat Government, together with the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation and the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture. The platform aims to serve as an umbrella for all digital initiatives to, in addition to that primary goal, promote co-production between local and international agents and bring digital arts closer to the public.
“You told me I exaggerate / Because I cry in the coffee / That my doubts are a drama / That I tire you, that I annoyed you / You hid my notebooks / So that you stop writing / You cut off every story / You called me childish…”. The song is titled No Me Vas A Romper and in just a few verses…
Laura Autonell (Taradell, 1963) had been writing all her life, like many people, without many pretensions. But six years ago her husband passed away and her priorities changed: “The hours I would have spent with him I have dedicated to writing, I have filled his absence with stories. It’s as if I had remarried, but to literature,” she says, because from that loss first came a self-published novel, Un polsim de sal, and recently a novel that in a few weeks has established itself among the bestsellers thanks to word of mouth, La Llibreria de les Hores Mortes (Columna), alongside authors like Regina Rodríguez Sirvent, Gil Pratsobrerroca, Siri Hustvedt or even Homer himself with the new Catalan translation of his Odyssey.
As effective in front of a camera as behind it, and with enough years of experience to present a film in a way that does not go unnoticed, last Thursday Tom Cruise arrived in person at the main theater of the Warner Brothers studios in Los Angeles to share with the press the trailer of Digger. The film, which according to the studio has cost 125 million dollars but unofficial data assures has already reached 200, marks the return of Alejandro G. Iñárritu to the screens four years after Bardo, and promises an unusual combination of delirious comedy, science fiction, and political satire.
The passing of Luis Goytisolo (1935-2026) decisively closes a golden age of contemporary Spanish novel. Here we speak of a solid and profound narrative, full of expressive and intellectual boldness. Born into a well-off family, Luis and his other siblings had to overcome the foundational trauma of their mother’s death, which occurred during a bombing in the Civil War. Perhaps that was the driving force behind his later dedication to writing, where Luis stood out early with ‘Las afueras’ (1958), a book of stories that announced much of his world: postwar Barcelona, seen partly from the bourgeois elites.
Few terms are as terrifying in this country as that of the bubble, whether it be the dot-com, the real estate, or now the festival bubble in a time that boasts having a thousand of them spread across the entire geography. The trickle of cancellations in recent months, crowned by the disappearance of the massive Reggaeton Beach Festival, which gathered 600,000 people in 12 cities, has inflated the debate at the same time that solo artist tours are increasing and residencies are arriving, such as those of Shakira or Bad Bunny, both in Madrid.