Band of Thebes

John Banville Wins Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature

A peerless prose stylist, John Banville has won most of the major Irish and British book awards and many of the best international prizes, including the Lannan Literary Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and now the Prince of Asturias Prize. Of his sixteen novels, The Untouchable [and Kindle] is the only one with a gay protagonist, loosely based on Anthony Blunt. In his spare time Banville writes plays, stories, criticism, screenplays (including the queer Albert Nobbs), and, so far, eight mysteries under the name Benjamin Black. The most recent of those, The Black-Eyed Blonde, deftly channels Raymond Chandler and brings back Philip Marlowe. Listen to this:

"It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere.”

 

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." Last year Alexander Wang, 29, replaced Ghesquière as creative director.

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 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]. In 2012 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." Get ready for Damon Galgut's new novel, Arctic Summer, which reimagines Forster's first trip to India.

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.

Hombres by Juan Crisol

 

Today's big release: Juan Crisol's new photo book Hombres. 

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor, most recently to Kirby Dick's The Invisible War.

Spanish Fly: Almodóvar's Airplane Sex Romp

In 1990's Atame! Almodóvar took a typically tasteless premise about a deranged rapist holding a beautiful woman hostage and somehow made it a delightful farce that said something serious about male-female relations and also managed to critique, while perverting, typical screwball plotlines in which opposites attract. As it happens, his first comedy in the 23 years since then, Los Amantes Pasajeros / I'm So Exited, begins with a cameo from that movie's psycho, sexual star, Antonio Banderas, whose Hollywood success and overall decline might be a signal for the audience to lower their expectations for the movie at hand. It's slack, bright, enjoyable, and forgettable. A damaged plane circles endlessly (ahem) waiting for clearance to attempt a crash landing. The crew drugs economy class to sleep while seven familiar types in business class reveal themselves: the 40 year-old virgin (Lola Dueñas from Talk To Her), the corrupt banker, the lying lover, the hot newlyweds, the mysterious hit man, and the diva dominatrix (Cecilila Roth from All About My Mother) who looks and dresses like Anna Wintour. If there's anything new it's Almodóvar's belated openness with his gay characters. Always camp, he has put surprisingly few male-male relationships front and center in his films. Both of the pilots are bi, with each other and with two of the three gay stewards, who, like the three fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty, are the catalysts for all the action. Especially after they dose everyone's cocktails with mescaline and unleash a sonic boom of horny. You'll see loads of sucking and screwing but nothing as penetrating as gorgeous Paz Vega's face when the movie cuts back to Madrid, where she is about to throw herself off the viaduct. But her lying lover calls! But she drops her iPhone! And, of course, it falls in slow-motion into the bicycle basket of the lying lover's other lover, who immediately starts yelling at him. For one blessed moment I was so excited.

Almodóvar's Summer Camp

Opening today at three theaters in Manhattan and two in Los Angeles, Almodóvar's overdue return to comedy, Los amantes pasajeros (downgraded in English to "I'm So Excited!"), has garnered mixed reaction from twenty reviewers whose average rating on Metacritic is 61 of 100. The action unfolds on a troubled transatlantic flight, "which transforms the plane into a theater and its galley into a staging area for those three theatrical stewards." The 63 year-old director says it's his gayest film, yet I hear the sex scenes are only hetero. Happy to read his opening title sequence is once again a "candy-colored, Saul Bass–style" feast.

Variety: "...a hugely entertaining, feelgood celebration of human sexuality that unfolds as a cathartic experience for characters, audiences and helmer alike."

EW: "the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it."

Empire: "an unshakeable tolerance for high camp and lowbrow humour may be required to fully appreciate Almodóvar’s broad, bawdy comedy — even for fans of his early, funny films."

Indie Wire: "Scene after scene features a self-satisfied kookiness akin to spending time with a terrible comic unwilling to give up the mic."

Bizarrely, Sony Classics is rolling it out slowly. Next week the release expands in California and only adds Chicago and downtown DC. Two weeks from today, Florida, Scottsdale, Cambridge, Waltham, and suburban DC. See the full schedule.

Earlier this month Pedro and three of his actors discussed the film at Lincoln Center, below.

Prince of Asturias Prizes to Antonio Muñoz Molina, Leibovitz, Haneke

Following Philip Roth's win last year, today pro-gay hetero Antonio Muñoz Molina has won the Prince of Asturias prize for literature and, as previously announced, out lesbian Annie Leibovitz won the prize in humanities and director Michael Haneke won in arts for his "radical sincerity, keen observation and extreme subtlety." Each winner receives €50,000.

The jury praised Molina for "the depth and brilliance with which he has narrated relevant fragments of his country’s history, crucial episodes of the contemporary world and meaningful aspects of his personal experience. A body of work which admirably reveals his condition as an intellectual with a commitment to his time." He beat seventeen other unnamed finalists from eleven countries.

Four months ago Molina won the Jerusalem Prize. Among his most acclaimed novels are Winter in Lisbon, Sepharad [Kindle], A Manuscript of Ashes [Kindle], In Her Absence [Kindle], and In the Night of Time [Kindle], which last October won the Prix Jean Monnet de littérature européenne.

Antonio Muñoz Molina is married to fellow award-winning writer Elvira Lindo and his official website says, "Un progresista, aunque sea hombre, es feminista; aunque sea heterosexual, defiende con vigor el respeto a la condición y la igualdad jurídica de los homosexuales;" which, you know, you don't see on so many straight male writer's sites in the US or UK.

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.