ONE DISC: Neil Young's Ragged Glory
That confinement was magnetic. A fish-eye photo shows four guys strapped to their instruments. Neither look at the camera; there are no smiles, only concentration. The chief looks at the neck of his guitar. He wears sunglasses. That cover of Ragged Glory said everything about the content: hardened musicians locked up in a hovel making frowning rock. Neil Young, 45, reunited with his Crazy Horse (Frank Poncho Sampedro on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums), riding an old sound (garage rock) that would constitute the birth of the penultimate great movement that gave rock, grunge . The eighties were a martyrdom for fans of the Canadian: electronic records, rockabilly , country pop ... It was his time with the Geffen company, which ended up suing him in one of the most surreal episodes in the history of music. The record company alleged for its complaint that Young was making "non-representative and deliberately non-commercial music." Maybe he was right, because it was changing the label and, after a few years, delivering this huge Ragged Glory , an album with ten songs, all good. Young's guitar swells to build monuments to raw rock, layers and layers of melodic solos that fall on the listener without leaving him breath. Ten-minute songs ( Over and Over , Love to Burn or Love and Only Love) , beautiful while being rude. The music the world was waiting for, the foundation of what would soon be grunge . All this musical demolition closes with a haven of peace, a beautiful ecological song called Mother Earth ( Natural Anthem) . Tears after the storm. Carlos Marcos
Ragged Glory . Neil Young. Reprise / Warner, 1990. The album is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
A BOOK: Immersion , by Lidia Chukóvskaia
“Every day I saw with greater clarity the terrible fate that awaited Lidia. It has a surprising noble character that, far from bending, can only be broken ”. Kornéi Chukovski, author of children's literature, wrote this impression about his daughter in his diary and was right. When Lidia's second husband was arrested during the Stalinist purges of 1937, no one told him that he had been executed. Without fainting, she queued daily before the police station to request information about the detainee. There he often met the poet Anna Ajmátova, whose son was in the same situation. Memoirs resulted from their conversations, which, like the rest of his work, Chukóvskaia was prohibited from publishing in the Soviet Union for his persistent public defense of dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Chukóvskaia (1907-1996) turned over part of his own biography in the novel Immersion , which narrates the stay of a translator and storyteller in a country house thanks to the privilege granted by the Union of Writers of the USSR. There he meets colleagues who are both a nuisance to his desires for isolation and a source of testimonies about a time when esthetes are attacked for decadent and Jews for participating in a global plot. A time when one could go to the Gulag without reason and return to it for having been the first time. "Pain has a name," he writes, "and if one is brave enough, he will find the strength to pronounce it. But what had happened to us could not have a name, because it made no sense. ” History of seclusion, love, motherhood, politics and ethics, Immersion begins as a book about the greatness of nature and ends up being one about the misery of human nature. It conveys such a sense of truth that it is one of those novels in which the protagonist walks, drinks tea or translates and the reader feels like walking and drinking tea. Even to translate. Javier Rodríguez Marcos
Immersion . Lidia Chukóvskaia. Translation by Marta Rebón. Errata Naturae. It is available in All your books, Fnac or Amazon.
A COMIC: The Phantom, the masked man
Superheroes were born with Superman, but they come from a rancid ancestry family that has its roots in classical mythology to begin to take shape in the heroes of pulp , the quintessential popular novel. If the Gladiator by Philip Wilye already defined a hero with super strength and super speed who gave immense leaps (remember, the most illustrious Kryptonian did not fly in the beginning, he gave jumps), La Sombra was a frivolous millionaire who became an implacable night watchman, while that Doc Savage, the bronze man, was a muscular and cerebral wonder. Almost all of them switched to the popular comics published by the American press of the 1930s, as an effective evasion of the crisis that engulfed the country after the stock market crash, but very soon the strips began to create their own heroes. Perhaps the first superhero avant la lettre is the powerful Popeye of Segar (who, incidentally, did not eat spinach to obtain his strength, but rubbed a magic chicken) but, if we focus on the most naturalistic graphic style adventure, Buck Rogers , Mandrake the Magician or Flash Gordon seem more obvious references.
However, the one that would really mark the line of the genre would be a creation of Lee Falk and Ray Moore: The Phantom. First published in 1936, The Masked Man , as it would be known in Spain, laid some of the foundations of the superhero: a tight mesh with the underpants on the outside, a mask and superhuman punches that left the mark of a skull on the jaws of villains. Adventure, mysteries and action made “the walking ghost” a brutal success and, until today, his adventures have continued to be published worldwide. Dolmen is recovering the adventures of this character, of which he has published the beginnings of Lee Falk and Ray Moore and the stage of cartoonist Sy Barry in the 1960s. Álvaro Pons
The Phantom. The masked man (1936-1938) . Lee Falk and Ray Moore. The comic can be read for free on the Dolmen Editorial website.
A MOVIE: The invitation , by Karyn Kusama
Oh, the exes. A whole world that these days lives muffled by the echoes of life before Covid-19. In The Invitation (2015), Kusama and her two co-writers, her husband Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, use all their experiences about those ghosts from the past and the pain of loss to develop one of the most scary films of the last decade. : because all of it is possible. Its protagonist, Will, agrees to have dinner one night with his girlfriend at the home of his ex-wife, Eden, also again paired. The divorce came after the death of her son, a death that both assumed in a very different way. At that dinner, Will is reunited with friends from his past life and with colleagues from Eden's support group. And in a spiral of pain, diners will share their past sufferings, while strange disruptions begin to happen.
The invitation was shot with just a million dollars, with absolute control of its creators and obtained a worldwide echo, winning, for example, deservedly, the Sitges Festival. When the viewer is immersed in a drama about the pain of loss, Kusama presses down on the gas, and in his final half hour of crescendo, guides the audience to the heart of darkness. The invitation turns and investigates how the human being has drowned his survival instinct in pursuit of the false image of good education, a mantra spurred by the sects, which often light the flame hooking their acolytes with a false message: no listen to civilization, listen to your instincts. Hence the topicality of The Invitation , and its echoes to films like Planet of the Apes - which is George Taylor (the astronaut who plays Charlton Heston) but another of the great survivors of film history, who refuses to accept the prevailing savagery. We cannot forget where we come from, but it is more important to be clear about where we are going. Gregorio Belinchón
The invitation. Karyn Kusama. 2015. The movie is available on Netflix.
ONE SERIES: Stories not to sleep
In 1955, and before the small screen became fashionable and the filmmakers began to make series, Alfred Hitchcock had already seen the possibilities of this short format to tell short stories and play with other narratives. He did it in Alfred HItchcock presents, one of the huge classics on television. A few years later, in 1966, the pioneer and revolutionary of national television, who was Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, took the baton on Spanish Television and started telling us stories not to sleep. He did it when he was 30 years old and before he revolutionized television again creating the mythical One, two, three. Chicho was inspired by the legendary HItchcock presentations from his series. The Uruguayan appeared on screen to address viewers with a mixture of black humor and a disturbing surrealism that advanced part of what came next. His words, along with the squeaky door and the scream of terror (and the two diamonds of the time) at the head, put the viewer in a situation and prepare him to face the unexpected.
"The most dangerous thing for a horror or suspense program is how close these topics are to ridicule," said Ibáñez Serrador in one of those presentations. On that thin wire walked a series that is already an imperishable classic of Spanish television, a genius that has endured the passage of time with great dignity and by which the great names of national performance parade. More than half a century has passed since those chapters, but watching The Asphalt, The Birthday, The TV, The Paw or The Doll still entertains and worries today. Natalia Marcos
Stories not to sleep. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. TVE, 1966. All 30 episodes can be seen on RTVE's A la carte service.
A VIDEO GAME: Fallout 3
Fallout 3 came in 2008 to mark a separate point in first-person action games. An immense game, both spatially and argumentatively, that warned against the dangers of war and the nuclear holocaust and at the same time constituted a formidable adventure not without humor. The player could use hundreds of weapons (some completely insane) to defend himself from a devastated and exceptionally well-defined wasteland world where he was attacked by all the threats that science fiction could imagine: zombies, mutants, killer robots, giant insects and, obviously cannibalistic humans worthy of Mad Max . The game designed by Bethesda found its personality, however, in an unexpected element: the influence of the 1950s American that was evident in the silly illustrations and in the music captured by our precarious radio: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Cole Porter or Roy Brown endowed the post apocalypse with an unmistakable flavor. A universe that continued its sequel: New Vegas , an equally recommendable game. Jorge Morla
Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks. The game is available for Windows, PS3, and Xbox 360.