Band of Thebes

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the recent Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." The California native and current New Yorker Alexander Wang, 28, will replace Ghesquière as creative director, the company announced last month.

Despite his success and his peerless status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 82 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than 30 books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's 2005 novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest. His most recent book is Exiled from Almost Everywhere [Kindle]. Last year he was awarded the $65,000 Prix Formentor.

Born January 1: Forster, Hoover, Haines, Béjart, Hormel, Orton, De la Iglesia, Stefano

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) After you've finished the novels (Howards End, A Passage to India, A Room With a View, Maurice), and his openly gay story collection The Life To Come, your mandatory reading is Wendy K. Moffat's NYT notable A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [Kindle]. Biographer Tripp Evans wrote: "Not only is this a truly groundbreaking study of Forster's life and work -- and an eye-opening read for any student of twentieth-century gay social history -- but it's also beautifully written.  Moffat is one of those rare writers able to combine elegant prose with a style that engages the reader in an intimate conversation (she is, in other words, the very best sort of company).  By illuminating the previously underexamined terrain of Forster's private life, Moffat has restored an important figure, along with his era, to a deeply satisfying wholeness.  It is a remarkable achievement."

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) American FBI director and closet case of unsurpassed twistedness.

William Haines (1900-1973) Hollywood hero, one of the top five grossing movie stars annually from 1928 - 32 for charming films like The Smart Set, The Duke Steps Out, and Just a Gigolo. In 1933 he was busted for picking up a sailor and taking him to a YMCA, prompting his studio to demand a sham marriage to a woman. Haines refused to betray his partner of seven years Jimmie Shields that way, and quit films for a very successful career as an interior designer. Read William Mann's extraordinary biography, Wisecracker.

Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) French-Swiss choreographer who directed maverick ballets and all-male homoerotic dances long before Matthew Bourne. Watch this at least until 2:20.

James Hormel (1933 -) The grandson of SPAM, American philanthropist, ambassador, gay rights activist, and current political hot potato is 80 today. His partner Michael P. Nguyen graduated from Swarthmore in 2008.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) randy British playwright of explicitly gay hits like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw, murdered by his unstable lover. Subject of Stephen Frears' fine biopic Prick Up Your Ears starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave.

Eloy de la Iglesia (1944-2006) Spanish writer - director of the gay festival favorites like Bulgarian Lovers [right].

Joey Stefano (1968-1994) Porn superstar. After you've satisfied yourself with his film acting, read Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano.

Almodóvar's "I'm So Excited"

Oh, THANK GOD. The colors! The costumes. Those faces. Watch 45 seconds of Almodóvar's overdue return to funny, I'm So Excited, coming in 2013. Naturally, the bright comedy springs from dire circumstances as airline passengers and crew on a troubled flight from Spain to to Mexico City share candid confessions – and musical interludes –to ward off fears of imminent death.

For the obligatory real-life WTF moment, Almodóvar says he tried and failed to get the rights to The Silence of the Lambs, The Hours, The Human Stain, The Reader, and The Paperboy, for his English language debut. Aren't you glad he didn't? Look at Wong Kar-wai.

Jaime Manrique's Cervantes Street

Your wait is over. The eminent gay author Jaime Manrique's big new novel, his first in five and half years, is now on sale. The publisher is comparing Cervantes Street [Kindle] to Amadeus and Wolf Hall, for its dazzling recreation of a renowned life. It has already won kudos from Junot Díaz ("fantastically talented") and Esmeralda Santiago, but the reader whose opinion matters most in this case is Edith Grossman, the famed translator who published the definitive Don Quixote. She loved it: "Jaime Manrique has written an exceptional historical novel, recreating with imagination and detailed accuracy the world of Late Renaissance in Spain. Manrique's rendering of the life of Cervantes is brilliant, and his solution to the mystery of who wrote the false Quixote is fascinating, and very persuasive." 

One early review praised his telling of "the already larger than life true story of Miguel de Cervantes, who flees Madrid after a near-fatal duel, loses use of his left hand in battle, is kidnapped and sold into slavery by pirates, who believe he “will fetch a good ransom because he’s a war hero” and, finally, pens the masterwork Don Quixote. Too good a story to be true? Perhaps, but what Manrique is really interested in is not the sensationalism of Cervantes’s life but his star-crossed relationship with Luis de Lara, who lacks Cervantes’ talent and heart, but gets the money and the girl. Neither man is satisfied with his lot in life, and they compete and support each other in turn, both jealous of what the other man possesses (Manrique assumes both points of view)."

Manrique recently told PW: "Even though I had been an admirer of Don Quixote since I’d read it at 15 years old, I had no idea about Cervantes’ life. I started reading about him and traveling to places he’d lived. I learned where he was born, where his family lived; I learned about his time as a soldier and a slave. But many specifics of his life remained unknown. I wanted to fill in the emotional spaces between the highlights."

Spain's Firefighters Demonstrate Proper Way To Protest Austerity

 

Angry Greeks, take note. First in Bilbao, above. And last Thursday in Meires, Asturias, below, where their declining salary is 1,500 euros a month.

   

Philip Roth Wins Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature

More proof Spain is in trouble: The annual Prince of Asturias Award for Literature has been given to Philip Roth. Last year's winner was Leonard Cohen; previously the prize has gone to Margaret Atwood, Amos Oz, Paul Auster, Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing, Gunter Grass, and Carlos Fuentes, among others. An author who writes in Spanish has not won since 2000.

The awards, named for HRH Felipe de Borbón, are also given in seven other categories including Sports, International Cooperation, and Concord. The winner of the Social Sciences prize is Martha Nussbaum, author of the just published book The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.

Gideon and Tom Walk with Irony

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has Daddy issues because his father, a rabbi, ditched his family to go live with his gym bunny boyfriend Brett. Gideon was nineteen, which is a little old to be an abandoned child but a good age to worry that his very existence stems from a miserable lie. At twenty-seven, he's still drifting and invites a Big Bro figure, the writer Tom Bissell, to walk the 420-mile circuit of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. They use irony the way lame pilgrims used crutches -- constantly. And in place of Patrick Leigh Fermor's encyclopedic memory, they carry laptops. Endless emails ensue. Sometimes their new friendship falters. Critics say it's the best third of A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful [Kindle].

Later, Gideon makes a longer hike, alone, to the eighty-eight temples around the Japanese island Shikoku. The circuit is over 700 miles long and, apparently, this second section feels like it.

For the third part, Gideon invites his dad and his brother with him to make a Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the grave of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukraine. The WSJ claims "Gideon's father understands the symbolism but is ever on the lookout" for a gay hookup. 

Two years ago, Gideon sent one hundred pages about that trip to Choire Sicha for the gay seal of approval and now Choire weighs the whole endeavor for Slate. I don't see how the book could be as trenchant and entertaining as his review, one paragraph of which is:

"There is something quite disturbing in the way in which Gideon writes about his father, who is a bundle of secrets and half-muttered truths and glancing drive-bys of information. This is Gideon's chief complaint about his father's behavior — but also the way that he chooses to inform us about the man. Because of this delivery method, the picture of his father is looming and monstrous but vague. He sketches a menacing Big Dad figure: He threw things, was capricious and prone to rage, was eccentric and frightening, was charming and hilarious but moreover unknowable in the way of fathers. What's striking is that Gideon was unable to lay this out more directly: He cannot bring himself to sit down and write direct pages to relay what kind of menace his father was, and how that changed over time. In part this was likely to protect his father and/but also this is a 6-year-old's depiction of a parent. (Five cents please!)"

A Sense of Direction rides the current vogue for walking books, with Damon Galgut's Booker finalist In a Strange Room and Cheryl Strayed's NYT bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

400 Pages of Pedro

On the heels of the successes of The Stanley Kubrick Archives and The Ingmar Bergman Archives, the indispensible art publisher Taschen has now released their delayed project The Pedro Almodóvar Archives. Viva gorgeous. The oversized book maintains film's aspect ratio, and the 600 photos are a mix of movie stills, sketches, production shots from the set, and personal photos now made public for the first time. The eighteen chapters cover his complete oeuvre from Pepi, Luci, Bom through The Skin I Live In. It even includes a strip of film from Volver.

Especially today, fighting SOPA, the internet's magic feels stupfying. For proof, you can flip through the first 100 pages of this book by clicking under the pink cover "Leaf Through" and zooming in.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 81 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest.

The Nutty World of Book Awards

Thrice a Booker bridesmaid, Julian Barnes has finally captured the UK's biggest literary prize for his very short novel The Sense of an Ending. (Ian McEwan won the Booker for his flimsiest work, the little yellow faintly homophobic marshmallow Peep of a novella, Amsterdam.)

Smug you, thinking you already knew every possible mistake publishing could make, but the clogged-eared workers at the National Book Awards proved you wrong this week, admitting they mistakenly announced the anti-gay hate crime novel Shine as a finalist when it was supposed to be the teen witch novel Chime. Each category's chairperson conveys the winning decisions by telephone to avoid the embarrassment of leaks via email. The nominated, then un-nominated, then re-nominated, then re-un-nominated (yes, really) author Lauren Myracle took the vertigo ups and downs with grace and even had the good sense to get the National Buffoon Award Foundation to donate $5,000 to the Matthew Shepherd Foundation.

The Guardian considers the 184 names in nomination for the $750,000+ Astrid Lingren Award for Children's Literature its "shortlist." Click here for all 184 names which include Neil Gaiman, Peter Sis, Eric Carle, Quentin Blake, and Meg Rosoff. Nice to see 66 nations are represented.

With typically, terrificly terrible timing, the Galaxy British Books Awards announced their finalists yesterday, on the very eve of the Booker announcement. The name suggests sci-fi but in fact their books are the soul of England, including Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-snubbed The Stranger's Child up for the year's top prize against Booker winner Julian Barnes, Booker nominee Carol Birch, Orange of Oranges winner Andrea Levy, Anthony Horowitz, and out lesbian Carol Ann Duffy. Lesbian Jackie Kay is nominated in the biography category for her memoir Red Dust Road, where she faces Keith Richards, Bear Grylls, Christopher Hitchens, and the remarkable Claire Tomalin. Other categories celebrate the year's best popular fiction, popular nonfiction, paperback, thriller, food, and children's book, as well as new writer and international writer: Egan, Barry, Murakami, Morgenstern, Obreht, Nesbo.

Dissatisfied with Britain's book award culture, a new group has announced the coming debut of The Literature Prize to honor fiction of "unsurpassed quality and ambition." The group criticizes the Booker's new priority of "readability" over excellence, a charge the Booker head considers "tosh." Unlike the Booker, The Literature Prize will be open to any fiction in English published in the UK. Early supporters include John Banville, Pat Barker, Mark Haddon, Jackie Kay and David Mitchell.

Madrid's Javier Moro has won Spain's Planeta Prize for his novel El imperio eres tu, a "detailed chronicle of the life of Pedro I, who ruled Brazil in the first half of the 19th century." Who? you ask, The what? Wise up, people. It's the 60th annual award (compared to the Booker's 43rd) and it carries the world's second-highest purse for literature, worth $833,887, after the Nobel. Besting the 482 other submissions written in Spanish, even the Planeta's runner-up, Inma Chacón for her novel Tiempo de arena, took home $206,052.

La Piel Que Habito

There's no joy in reporting that to his dazzling aviary Almodóvar adds a turkey. I saw La Piel Que Habito at a multiplex in Nice and, alas, the highlight was that the emergency alarm went off and all seven theaters had to be evacuated. Milling around with the mixed-French/Italian crowd was more entertaining than returning for the final act of this leaden misfire. In the past, absurd plots have heightened the fun, but here the ridiculousness has no helium and the heavy story unfolds with maybe two laughs. Costars Antonio Banderas as a deranged plastic surgeon and Elena Anaya as the unwilling patient imprisoned in his mansion for six years vie to see who can deliver the more vacant performance, while wonderful Marisa Paredes overcompensates in an underwritten role. The very few powerful images are mainly repeats from earlier films and the new elements push the whole thing toward parody: the rapist with uncontrollable animal urges arrives in a tiger suit with a stuffed crotch. After the second-rate Broken Embraces, The Skin I Live In confirms that Almodóvar needs to leave the hollow rich to other directors and get back to the deeply textured working or middle class characters he does so well. You'll see the zest is gone from the very beginning -- no exuberant Juan Guatti title sequences (but, yes, a close-up of an Alice Munro paperback!); veteran Alberto Iglesias's lively score almost compensates. Only for die-hard fans who enjoy being disappointed.

Full Trailer for Almodóvar's "The Skin I Live In"

After 20 years, Antonio Banderas is back with Almodóvar in this creepy thriller as a (typically, strangely) sympathetic modern-day Dr. Frankenstein obsessed with creating synthetic super-skin, twelve years after his wife died from burns in a car crash. His beautiful young captive test case played by Penelope Cruz 2.0 newcomer Elena Anaya displays (typically bizarre) strong signs of Stockholm syndrome. Full review in English.

The movie is certain to be at the New York Film Festival, which opens September 30 with Roman Polanski's Carnage starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz.

Gay Spain: Balenciaga Museum and Almodóvar's Mapplethorpes

A favorite Spain-watcher tipped me to the grand opening of the Balenciaga Museum in the designer's tiny hometown of Getaria, a seaside village near the French border. The massive 54,000 square foot museum displays (only?) 90 dresses, including gowns worn by Princess Grace and Belgium's Queen Fabiola. A gala preview with Queen Sofia and Givenchy preceded the public opening on Friday. Worldly readers may be unsurprised to learn the museum's foundation is beset with financial irregularities and the original budget of 6 million euros somehow ballooned to 30 million euros. Difficult to imagine the master of the uninterrupted line loving this awkward mash-up building, but his art inside will more than compensate. Spanish Vogue offers some highlights of a magnificent career.

In Madrid on Wednesday the Galeria Elvira Gonzalez opened a show of twenty-eight Robert Mapplethorpe photographs curated by Pedro Almodóvar. It appears to be a cavalcade of strong men, delicate flowers, a kitten, and a young naked Patti Smith.

Three Tóibín Interviews: From Schubert to Bartok

Video proof of Colm Tóibín's endless charms. Chris Castellani interviewed him in Cambridge yesterday afternoon, prior to his evening reading of "Two Women." Discussing straight writers, Toibin says, "They mean no harm." (If the clip doesn't load properly, see it here.)

To watch an earlier interview by Paul Holdengraber at the NYPL, click here.

Or you can read this interview in which Tóibín compares his previous story collection Mothers and Sons [[Kindle]] to The Empty Family [[Kindle]]. "The tone is the first book is calmer, almost like Schubert's piano music. By the second book, Bartok has taken over. It's all edge and anger, or enough of it is to make a difference." He says "The Colour of Shadows" is his favorite story. Of his work overall he explains, "The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one. I do admire Josipovici. We should all be better than we are."

Best of 2011: The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family [[Kindle]] ranks with a handful of books (by Alice Munro, William Trevor, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tatyana Tolstaya, Mavis Gallant, Julie Hecht, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver) as one of the great story collections of the past quarter century. His stories are larger and recent high praise is insufficient for the power they achieve.

Often, the stories easily inhabit three settings. Always, the present moment is balanced by the weight of the past. A trio of themes -- loss, solitude, dislocation -- yield infinite brilliance. In a mere fifteen pages “One Minus One” covers Texas, New York, and Dublin; the narrator’s failed relationship with the man he’s addressing; and a lifetime of family strain resurfacing as his mother dies. My favorite, “Two Women,” conveys Dublin, Los Angeles, and Guatemala as a wonderfully brusque set dresser Frances Rossiter reluctantly returns to her native Ireland to work on a movie.

“The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better shops in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or twice, having pushed her way through a crowd of half-drunken men and women, she was proud of having lived most of her life away from such people and glad that the staff of the hotel, unfailingly polite and self-effacing, came from elsewhere.
        It struck her that she really would not come back, that she would work in future anywhere but here. Even Gabi’s efficiency and sweetness seemed complacent to her, and some of the men moving sets were too slow, almost openly lazy. She found it difficult, especially in the third and fourth weeks of filming, not to show her impatience. She loved intelligent, decisive people who did things briskly, and on a few occasions when she had to phone home and found herself speaking down the line to Rosario, she realized how much she missed Rosario’s intelligence, almost exquisite at times in its depth of perception, and her way of moving, so elegant and careful and poised.”

The nature of artifice is Frances’s life’s work – notice how she views even the real Dublin shops as “imitations” – and one sees how she's become its master:

“The director used to be young – she smiled at the thought as she opened the set drawings she had carried with her – but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub, you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.”

The story’s interest in the art of artifice expands, incorporating paintings at the National Gallery and how a movement by a guard there recalls the dead Irish actor (artifice personified) with whom she had a very long affair, the core romance of her life. Ultimately, a chance encounter on set in the burdensome pub penetrates Frances’s own carefully constructed facade, right down to her speech, which reverts to the softer, Irish cadences of her youth.

All the other stories are equally engaging, and their meticulous subtleties and intricate craft arrive almost hidden by compelling characers and compulsive plots. “The New Spain” unspools layers of ironies as Carme, a former radical communist who frittered away years of exile in London, returns to Barcelona then Menorca with drastically different standing in her uptight family now that she’s inherited half of her grandmother’s property. The novella “The Street” explores the loving, neutral, or brutal hierarchies among Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, where one character is wholly dependent physically and financially on his attacker.

Gay relationships are the core concern of five or six of the stories. Francine Prose considers the best in the collection to be “The Pearl Fishers” about a gay man’s meal with a bourgeois couple, reuniting him with his first lover from boarding school and that man’s wife who is gaining fame as a crusader against past abuse. Readers of Brooklyn’s detailed hetero sex scenes who thought Tóibín would never be so explicit with his gay characters will especially appreciate those teenage flashbacks as well as the many male couplings and orgy in “Barcelona, 1975.” Returning to more oblique times, the first story, “Silence,” sees the author of The Master again imagine Henry James as a character, now through the eyes of his widowed dinner partner, who carefully recasts her passionate adultery as a story idea for him. Again the source of art and the urge to remake the past propel this collection to astonishing heights.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 80 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 79 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. His most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts the ribald sexual antics of a priest in Goytisolo's typically subversive style.