- Interview: "I have made Balenciaga a happy fagot like me"
- Stay at home: Jiménez Losantos' suggestions
A novel: 'White Death'
White Death (Eugenia Rico, Planeta, Azorín Award 2002) is a book about the death of a brother, of a very young brother. Fatality arrives without warning, from one day to the next, and that drama makes the narrator, her sister, examine her past and feel the need to know something more about herself and about the love that linked her to her brother. The first sense of the story, the most important, has to do with discovering the overcoming of pain, learning that even what hurts the most can be uprooted from oneself and that life always tends to stabilize. Everything ends up having a meaning , a point of light always ends up appearing at the end of the pain and that's why the title explains exactly what the novel is. The other meaning of White Death is to remember what the love of a family means. You can be separated by a long distance of age or by very different ways of seeing the world or you can be very far physically, that all the same. There comes a time when death comes and a part of the family is missing and then we all discover that there is a part of oneself that is gone, a part of the roots that is broken. White Death was the first book I read of Eugenia Rico. I did not know her at all and from that moment I turned her into an almost idealized figure. Later, I interviewed her as a journalist and since then we have become good friends.
A movie: 'My fair lady'
My relationship with My fair lady (George Cukor, 1964) also begins with my mother because she loved that movie and I always watched it with her. My mother died young, 54 years old. She died in a very short time, her appearance did not decline due to the disease, she never stopped being beautiful and I had no choice but to turn all her tastes into fetishes. It even occurs to me that if I think about my mother today, I see her a bit like Eliza Doolittle , the character of Audrey Hepburn because of that slightly pizpireta thing. But I also like the movie for what it is. The plastic and songs are wonderful, but the story of Pygmalion by Rex Harrison is also fascinating. We have seen My fair lady in color and in color but if they put it in black and white and silent I would also like it. Among the many treasures that the film has, among so many wonderful characters, I have special affection for the one with Eliza's, that tricky, drunk and lazy man who took the rooms of his poor flower girl daughter as well as the teachers who appeared for there so English and so formal. On his wedding day he sang "I'm going to get married this morning" and it ended like a vat. Among so many great actors, that father (played by Stanley Holloway) was a very powerful character. Deep down, he was good-natured like everyone in My fair lady .
An album: 'As we were', by Barbra Streissand
Like so many times, I have to search through my mother's memories to choose an album. Barbra Streisand fascinated my mother and I listened to her songs by her side. For many years now, his music has been a central part of gay culture around the world, it is a classic taste, but for me it is something even more intimate. This album is the soundtrack of one of those 1973 or 1974 films, ( As we were , directed by Sydney Pollack), from the time of Barefoot in the park. And the music perfectly recreates the fullness that the film portrays. Robert Redford young, very blond and full of self-confidence, at the height of his beauty and, at his side, Barbra, more idealistic and, at the same time, much more enigmatic and complex. The ballad called The way we were and which begins with Barbra saying " Memory " [the Oscar-winning song for the best musical theme in 1973] arouses exactly the kind of emotions I look for in music: the evocation, the memory that it activates ... A day in the park with a loved one, a tomenta who traps you in the park and you have to take refuge under an awning of those seen on the portals of New York. I know that they are a bit of a thing but they are the emotions that set in motion. Well, that is how we were.
Two series: 'Friends' and 'Sex in New York'
Somehow, now I see Friends and Sex in New York as a continuity, as if they complemented each other. When Friends appeared, I was like its protagonists, at that moment of prolonging adolescence and starting life as an adult. I saw how they lived and I was hooked on the freedom with which they lived. Not that we lived in the 90s in post-Francoism, but the relationships with the friends we saw in Friends were exactly what we longed for: spontaneity, optimism. Later, Sex in New York offered me the same for a later vital moment. The two series, basically, presented the same freer way of life that I associated with the United States. Later, the series became popular and fell on some topics, especially in its films, but it had a very inspiring moment at first. In Friends , my favorite character was Jennifer Aniston. I fell in love with her and for a long time I loved women who were like them and I was even married to a woman like this for many years: independent, educated, different. Later, in Sex in New York , I identified with Carrie because not even with the pamphleteer, neither with the mother nor the descocada are much like what I look like. Carie, on the other hand, is the nostalgic one of the group, the one that, basically, expects something in sex, a connection that resembles love ...
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