What looks like a Lego brick is a walkway tile,
What looks like a holy shrine is a wooden hall,
What looks like red paint is a filtered light,
What looks like a child is indeed a child.
We all like to watch movies. And most of us, those I know at least, love Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino the film director, I mean. We've also had plenty of opportunities to enjoy his skills as a screenplay author, as basically all the movies he directed are based on his own scripts.
Few of us might actually know him as a full-fledged writer though. I mean fiction and non-fiction writer. However, he has already published at least two books. One is a novelization of his big hit "Once upon a time in Hollywood", which I haven't read yet. And the other is the subject of this post: a collection of "free-style" movie reviews, which might be better termed as essays.
Most people, including myself until recently, know Leonard Cohen as the deep&warm-voiced singer and songwriter of beautiful folk songs, the most famous one being "Hallelujah".
Before switching to music, though, he began his artistic career as a novel writer and poet (even after he started singing he remained horrified of performing in public for a long time).
Federico García Lorca died young, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, probably killed by the falangists, either for being homosexual or socialist or both, or else for more private reasons. Nobody knows for sure.
A few years earlier, between 1929 and 1930, he traveled to the American continent, spending time in New York, Vermont and finally in Cuba, before returning to Europe. He managed to witness the '29 Wall Street crisis, therefore experiencing both the excesses that predated it and the desperate times that followed it. He wrote this collection of poems during those months.
This collection of poems by the epitome of the Poètes Maudits has inspired generations. Baudelaire was the first great poet to make an extensive, almost morbid use of sex, alcohol, drugs and death as the main themes of his work.
Borges is an outstanding South American author. This is a collection of poems in praise of his hometown, the capital city of Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Unlike other works about the city, this doesn't deal with the usual (stereotypical) topics such as the port districts, tango, Italian and Spanish heritage.
