“I name my wife: Gala, Galushka, Gradiva; Oliva, for the oval shape of her face and the colour of her skin; Oliveta, diminutive for Olive; and its delirious derivatives Oliueta, Oriueta, Buribeta, Buriueteta, Suliueta, Solibubuleta, Oliburibuleta, Ciueta, Liueta. I also call her Lionette, because when she gets angry she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion”
WJM… I’ll have to do a little more research to see if there is any history of Dalí left in Monterey. Cheers dear, and welcome to Beguiling Hollywood!
Lovely footage, hadn’t seen that one before.
(now that I think about it, seems most footage I have seen of him came from the USA, cq the times he was there (not too many lengthy/verbal samples around anyway, and all in English, IIRC))
Btw, the creepy thing about Amanda Lear is that she too was an icon of mystery & sex-appeal for my generation (and that of my parents), yet while I spent nearly all my youth summer holidays in Rosas for 2-3 decades (and at that time only just vaguelly realising that Dali was working on the other side of that mountain (only Fiqueras had a museum at that time)), nobody around me ever knew Amanda (perhaps the even larger & more hip (pop)star in those days) was just as close as well.
(also Yul Brynner btw, another icon of that era….art, pop, movie….almost the center of the universe….:))
Also, another time-coinciding icon of fame, where quite a few of the high-society that surrounded Dali in Cadaques congregrated, or finished their business/contracts/purchases, is restaurant El Bulli; most of them arriving quite eloquently by boat (I think that place was (and is) easier/faster to reach by boat than by car)….but you wouldn’t have known that either, until this day, unless you start digging in the restaurant’s history, which the restaurant itself quite nicely put on their website a few years ago.
El Capitan, Dali’s chief sales agent, was a frequent visitor in those days, with all of his (commercial) entourage, of course.
(I didn’t see any mentioning of Dali being a frequent visitor there)
(I only fully understood the logic of these money-spending sprees when checking out the hotels where Dali lived in Paris and New York….you’d be challenged to find anything more expensive)
Amanda Lear certainly seems to have a long, interesting and sometimes evasive history.I just finished reading a rather sad old report about the loss of her husband in a house fire.I intend to read some more.
Her (semi-auto)biography, ’15 years with Dali’ is a must for anyone who is fascinated with either Dali or Amanda, not to mention when you are thrilled by both (at different periods of time; I never really imagined them coincide with eachother, not so much not just that way, but not at all, neither in time-line nor in art/culture/social-circles….but it is that latter environment/atmosphere in her book that suddenly opens up your eyes about a stunning part of European history, both music & contemporary art.
(if you hadn’t pay attention to Amanda since her pop-period, decades ago, you’d never guess that she was a not too bad paint-artist either….:))
Btw, another intriguing aspect in that book: how widespread is the fact/rumour that it was Dali who brought Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra together?
(or at least kept pushing them together)
(if I read this report, he wasn’t their initial trigger, but from what I remember fom Amanda, he sortof was)
Anyway, to put it short: for anyone not yet seeing the life of either Dali or Amanda as a modern fairytale (or a soap-opera of megalomanic proportions….:)), after reading her book you will.
(but do add the history of restaurant El Bully to it, another epic entity/institution, only a stone throw away from Cadaques)
(warning: you’d spend a weekend browsing the entire timeline-archive of El Bully)
Btw2, Amanda is about to launch a new album, release due in 2014; from what I saw (on Youtube, French interview), it seems some weird kind of retro-pop, but she deserves the benefit of the doubt of course….:))
Btw3: a song from her I only recently discovered….vocals are a bit clumsy & unpolished, but that dark voice keeps striking a nerve….seems a remix, but possibly a rather modern one (the original is boring & flat beyond belief, at least compared to this remix):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu1Y6wpYHp4
This seems to be the original, a duet with Manual Sanchez:
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