1. Cellist: Pao Casals; see my comments under Puerto Rico.
2. Artist: Joan Miró, who remains underrated. Oddly many people do not see him as better than the guy who puts the squiggles on their design bags. Almost everything he did — across media — was phenomenal in terms of composition and textures. I am fond of Antoni Tapies, although his work does not reproduce well on-line. Aristide Maillol, who was French Catalan, did paintings and sketches. Dali is now so vilified by some intelligent people that he can rightly be considered underrated.
3. Novelist: Albert Sanchez Piñol's Cold Skin
4. Architect: I have mixed feelings about Gaudi; it feels to me like he is trying too hard. How about LluÃs Domènech i Montaner? Try this one too.
5. Composer: Isaac Albeniz, especially as played by Alicia de Larrocha. There is also Federico Mompou. I grew up playing the guitar music of Fernando Sor, though it is less fun to listen to.
6. Economist: Xavier Sala-i-Martin; his home page is full of interesting links.
7. Bandleader: Xavier Cugat. Wong Kar-Wai likes him but mostly he is forgotten. Here is a good video and you can hear his unusual Spanish accent as well.
8. Medieval theologian and memory expert: Ramon Llull. I am a big fan of Llull, a cosmopolitan polymath and early advocate of animal welfare. I wrote a part of my next book about him, although I ended up cutting it out of the final draft because it didn't quite fit.
9. Movie, set in: I've never seen Barcelona (is it good?), so I have to go with Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There's probably a better movie set in Barcelona, but offhand I don't know it.
10. Chess opening. Duh.
They have a bunch of opera singers too.
The bottom line: This is an impressive showing, yet what ties it all together remains elusive in my mind. Perhaps that is what makes the region so interesting.
Check on Antonioni’s The Passenger, which takes place largely in Barcelona and stars Jack Nicholson
L’auberge espagnole is a pretty good movie that’s set in Barcelona.
Whit Stillman’s /Barcelona/ is indeed an excellent movie, now (sadly) very difficult to obtain. I also recommend his other two, /Metropolitan/ and /The Last Days of Disco/.
Whit Stillman writes the films that Woody Allen would have written in his “funny” (Take The Money and Run, Sleeper, Bananas…) phase, if Woody Allen were a New York East Side WASP.
Robert Hughes’s book Barcelona is one of the best portraits of any city that I have ever read.
The national museum of Catalan Art is also (and Hughes agrees) a truly great museum that remains inexplicably unknown outside Catalunya.
Almodovar’s Todo Sobre mi Madre is a fine movie set in Barcelona – better than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is fun but more lightweight.
The Science museum run by the La Caixa foundation is a triumph of aesthetics and scientific pedagogy; the director is both a physicist and a poet, and it shows.
Can you do Manchester to cover both teams in the Champions’ League Final?
Whit Stillman’s movies are my favorite American comedies. The three use many of the same actors and also like Woody Allen’s films, they have a cumulative effect. So, I’d highly recommend seeing “Metropolitans” and then seeing “Barcelona”. My friends and I still drop quotes from these movies nearly 20 years later.
There’s a sweetness and innocence in his movies that I’ve never found elsewhere.
I really like Barcelona, it is a fun dialogue driven movie.
Thanks for letting us know your favorite Catalan things. By the way, what are your favourite fruits?
Yes, Barcelona is an excellent movie, Stillman’s best.
Jeff Westcott: Hey, no one is happier than I to see /Barcelona/ back in circulation. But there was a longish period when it wasn’t available except from–as Amazon so delicately likes to put it–”third-party vendors”. At that time people were selling copies for three-figure amounts.
A very good novel about Barcelona by the (in my opinion) best catalan writer: ‘La ciudad de los prodigios’, Eduardo Mendoza.
Another very good writer whose novels depict very particular time and places of Barcelona is Juan Marsé. Try ‘Últimas tardes con Teresa’.
You do not mention poets. Maybe you’d like Pere Gimferrer, who writes in catalan and spanish.
“Barcelona” is a great flick. Not as good as his first movie (“Metropolitan”), but very good and worth watching none the less. Stillman is a great director.
Another vote for “Barcelona” and the full Stillman oeuvre. I have that one and “Metropolitan” on DVD but cannot find “Last Days of Disco” anywhere. I’m talking to you, Criterion Collection!
And, if one knows where to shop in Barcelona, it’s possible to buy — admittedly rotgut — rum for about $0.25/liter.
I love Sala-i-Martin’s ELEMENTS OF THE CRITICAL-PARANOIC
SCHOOL OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/critical.htm
Gaudi wasn’t “trying too hard”, he was on drugs. (Probably internally produced by ecstatic states, but the effect is the same.) Domenech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch produced much more sensible and usable spaces, though at least Gaudi’s don’t leak, unlike Gehry’s.
Miro’s art is the scat singing of painting: it can be pretty, but it doesn’t have any deeper meaning or beauty.
There’s an excellent series of crime novels set in Barcelona by the late Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Not all have yet been translated into English so there may be some missing backstory to the main character, who was a Communist under Franco, then worked for the CIA and considers himself responsible for the death of JFK. He also makes fires in his appartment by burning books.
The books are so good that the brilliant Italian crime novelist Andrea Camilleri named his main character Montalbano in honour of Montalbán.
Whit Stillman is great, but I’d definitely recommend you see his “Metropolitan” over “Barcelona”. It is a far better movie.
“VCB is a mess”
Well, yes, but it’s a mess about two people whose lives are a mess, one of whom thinks it’s possible to marry her way out of the mess, the other of whom tries to embrace the mess.
Maybe it’s my affection for Bloomsbury, but I liked the characters and the situations in VCB. I just could’ve done without the godawful voiceover narration. SHOW DON’T TELL — Allen hasn’t heard that one before?
I agree with melpomene. Sure, Domenech is mighty good, and la Casa Musica is a real knockout. But putting him up after saying Gaudi was trying too hard? Sure, maybe Gaudi is so well known that he too overshadows people like Domenech. But, heck, one might as well declare that da Vinci was trying too hard and then pose Bellini as an alternative.
Oh, and Barcelona native Picasso does not count as Catalan? Is this because he did not hang out there later as did Miro and to a lesser degree Dali? Presumably you saw the spectacular Miro museum in Barcelona. Did you see the medieval Catalan paintings at the nearby National Museum? Very fine and distinctive.
Not Gaudi? Riiiiight. Knee-jerk contrarianism.
Rohöl deutlich teurer
In diesem Jahr fuhren bislang diejenigen Verbraucher am besten, die die extreme Niedrigpreisphase im März für Käufe ausgenutzt haben. Für weniger als 45 Cent war der Liter Heizöl zwischenzeitlich zu bekommen. Jetzt liegen die Kosten wieder bei 48 bis 50 Cent. Und trotz anhaltender Wirtschaftskrise raten die meisten Experten, mit der Bevorratung für den kommenden Winter nicht mehr lange zu warten. “Füllen Sie Ihren Tank noch vor den Sommerferien”, sagt etwa Oliver Klapschus von Heizöl24, einem der größten Verbraucherportale zum Thema.
Tatsächlich haben sich die Rohölpreise in den vergangenen zehn Wochen um mehr als die Hälfte verteuert. Ein Barrel kostete zuletzt mehr als 60 Dollar nach 35 Dollar Mitte Februar. Dieser Trend könnte weitergehen, sobald sich die Konjunktur etwas belebt. Hauptgrund der bisherigen Preissteigerungen war nach Ansicht von Experten die Angebotsverknappung von seiten der dominierenden Lieferanten aus dem Nahen Osten.
So hat die Vereinigung erdölexportierender Länder (Opec) seit September 2008 ihre Lieferungen um 3,5 Millionen Barrel pro Tag verringert. “Die weltweite Nachfrage reduzierte sich jedoch nur zwischen 1,6 und 2,6 Millionen Barrel, auf rund 83 Millionen Barrel was den Preisanstieg erklärbar macht”, findet Frank Schallenberger, Öl-Analyst bei der Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW).
Überzogene Ölpreisrally
Ob und in welchem Ausmaß die Preise im zweiten Halbjahr noch steigen werden, hängt von der Konjunktur als eben auch von der Opec ab, die immerhin für 40 Prozent des weltweiten Rohölangebots aufkommt. Kürzungen um weitere 700.000 Barrel pro Tag hat die Organisation laut Schallenberger bereits beschlossen.
Nur mit der Umsetzung hapert es noch, auch weil einige Mitgliedsländer wie Nigeria und Iran ihre Förderquoten nicht einhalten. Marktbeobachter wie Eugen Weinberg von der Commerzbank halten die jüngste Ölpreisrally vor diesem Hintergrund für überzogen und rechnen mit einer Preiskorrektur bis auf 55 Dollar je Barrel. Viel weiter nach unten wagt kaum jemand eine Prognose.
Whit Stillman’s Barcelona is a great movie. Watch it today!
You just talk about famous persons in Barcelona, but there are lots of places to visit there. You should also talk about that. I have been to Barcelona and I was surprised by the marvelous architectural design. Barcelona tickets
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