Cultura

The French composer Alexandre Desplat (Paris, 1961), an essential figure in film music and winner of two Oscars for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water, last night put the finishing touch on the 16th edition of the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, the most attended in the history of the festival, with 53,500 spectators. The musician received from Queen Letizia, who presided over the ceremony, the Masters of Cinema award, with which the festival recognizes the career of great names in the seventh art, during a gala marked by the humid heat of the Mallorcan night in the Renaissance courtyard of La Misericòrdia. Hours earlier, Desplat gave a masterclass in which he showed his creative process based on his collaborations with filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, and Jacques Audiard.

“Habitar la belleza” is the proposal that in a turbulent and contradictory world the artistic director of Torroella, Montse Faura, makes to us for this edition of the Festival. Nothing less… And she opens the doors to it with a central program of 15 important concerts, some due to the quality of the work of our performers, like this inaugural Beethoven by the OBC and Josep Colom that we have just enjoyed. In it, the musicality and expressive strength of the Catalan pianist was well understood by the OBC and its conductor, the young Belarusian Vitali Alekseenok, current principal of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, who looks very promising in terms of understanding the language and clear gesturality.

And finally the night arrived. After the controversy over reposting a publication that offended Argentinians in the midst of World Cup fever, after the apologies that felt insufficient (“My bad,” she posted), Rosalía performed before the Buenos Aires audience at the Movistar Arena. And if there were ticket returns, it was not noticeable. The stadium looked full.

There was a time when eating some meatballs did not make you want to buy a Billy bookshelf. Thirty years, in fact. It was on May 6, 1996, when the Ikea mothership landed among us and the extraordinary shockwave did not take long to arrive. It was easy, clean, young, and cheap. And there were (in theory) many possibilities. Some people went, in those early days, to Ikea to get ideas. They entered the stores and left without buying anything, with their eyes and heads full of ideas. That leaving without buying didn’t last long. One fact. 6% of Catalans born in these three decades were conceived in Ikea beds. If that impresses you, and returning to the topic of the meatballs from the Swedish restaurant inside the facilities, you should also know that 8.7 million meatballs have been served and eaten, so that if you stacked one meatball on top of another (and on top of the other, the one) we could build a tower 60 kilometers high.

It increasingly seems evident that we have wasted time and energy asking the wrong question. Rather than questioning when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human knowledge, it seems more appropriate to place the question on the human part of…

Considered in the past one of the gods of hip hop and music in general, probably no one like Kanye West has done so much to undermine his prestige and personal credit as himself, even accused of apologism for Nazism, a baggage from which he now seems determined to detach with musical atonements like the one performed this Thursday in Madrid.

Everyone thought that this was just another room in an ancient Roman villa built in Fuente Álamo (Puente Genil, Córdoba). Some speculated that the room could even be a mithraeum, a temple dedicated to the Persian-origin god Mithras and built to imitate a cave. But the space was actually the oldest library on the Iberian Peninsula.

They are eight dolia or small containers that the Romans used to store products. They have just appeared on Hostal d’en Sol street, next to the historic headquarters of the Post Office on Via Laietana in Barcelona. The nearest ship is today – thanks to Google Maps – 310 meters away. Two millennia ago, when the Roman city was just founded, the sea must have been closer. Because those dolia are very likely used to store products ready to be shipped to the empire; the Roman one, of course. And because right behind is the wall that the city’s founders built to protect themselves.

La Torre Galatea of the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figueres became the painter’s last place of residence after the fire in Púbol. Salvador Dalí lived there from 1984 until his death in 1989, and experts on his work say that from his room he watched how the evening light transformed the textures of the stone into a play of shadows on the exterior walls of the museum. On these same walls, photographs and audiovisual fragments of Dalí and his complex universe are projected until August 23, in a play of lights, images, music, and sounds, including the voices of Dalí and a brief fragment of Gala, in the only sound document known to the foundation.

Manolo Solo came from rock, and it showed. Viewers will remember him singing on Late Motiv, by Andreu Buenafuente, the legendary Autosuficiencia, by Parálisis Permanente. It’s just one example, but it gives many clues. It is also known that he was a fan of the Kinks and that, on some occasions, he played I’m not like everybody else, and the anthem of the outsiders suited him perfectly, because, although he had the physique of an ordinary man, he didn’t look like anyone else. Before becoming one of the most beloved and admired actors in our cinema, Manuel Fernández Serrano, as his ID stated, devoted himself, for more than two decades, to the Seville underground scene, especially as the lead singer of Los Relicarios, a band in which Santi Amodeo also played guitar, who would end up directing him in films like Astronautas (2003), ¿Quién mató a Bambi? (2013) and El cielo de los animales (2025), one every ten years.