Mario Camus, the acclaimed Spanish writer-director behind La colmena, Young Sánchez, The Holy Innocents and more, died in his hometown of Santander on September 18. He was 86.

Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Goya Awards, confirmed the news with a post published on Saturday to their official Instagram page. “Filmmaker Mario Camus dies in Santander,” a spokesperson wrote in Spanish. “Author of classics of our cinema such as The Holy Innocents, The Beehive, The Days of the Past or That Woman.”

El director de cine Mario Camus ha fallecido este sábado a los 86 años en Santander. Con su muerte, se va un maestro del cine español, un creador que supo —sin imponer jamás su estilo, sin alardear de autorías— contar historias desde la sequedad del norte, una sobriedad a través de la cual narraba los sentimientos más profundos. Sin alharacas, probablemente en comunión en su fondo con la literatura española de sus contemporáneos, una inspiración que para un devorador de libros como fue Camus supuso un motor narrativo. Esa pulsión por desaparecer tras su obra devino en realidad en su marca. Y, a la vez, con su filmografía levantó testimonio de un lugar, España, a lo largo de distintas épocas. En eso coincidió con sus compañeros en la Escuela Oficial de Cine de Madrid: Carlos Saura, Basilio Martín Patino, José Luis Borau, y un más joven Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.

Almost everything Tom Wolfe wrote about the glitterati left in the late 60s has been recapitulated in subsequent decades, with the faux radicalism diminishing into hip liberalism and the artistic pretense inflating into camp couture for the one-percent. It’s beyond parody. In the 60s, the message wouldn’t have been “Tax the Rich” but “Fuck the Rich”, “Eat the Rich”, “Infect the Rich.” As a radical artistic statement, AOC’s catwalk at the Met Gala was pathetic, a commercial aimed at the most middlebrow donors to the DNC.

More than 1,000 years ago, Indigenous people journeyed into a dark cave on the land now called Missouri and painted nearly 300 detailed images on its walls.

The cave was a sacred space, where tribes performed ceremonies, made sense of the universe and buried their dead. A millennium later, the paintings contained within it continue to offer clues about how those civilizations lived and what they believed.

Donald Trump will likely go down in U.S. history as one of the worst, if not most corrupt, presidents. Sadly, his reactionary legacy will live on much, much longer than his one term in office. His three Supreme Court appointments – Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018) and Amy Coney Barrett (2020) – have joined with the Court’s two arch conservatives — Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – and one moderate — John Roberts – to forge the most conservative Court since the 1930s.

Congratulations to Daniil Medvedev for winning the Men’s US Open tennis championship last night. Novak Djokovic came within one match of repeating Rod Laver’s 1969 feat of winning the four major international tournaments in one calendar year, but his Russian opponent was simply too strong and too consistent. Djokovic had won his previous matches in this US Open without playing his very best tennis. To achieve his dream of equalling Laver’s feat and surpassing Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer in major tournament wins, he needed to significantly raise the level of his game against Medvedev. He was unable to do so, and was eventually reduced to destroying his racket on the hard court surface in one of his signature displays of pique. Medvedev’s control of the match was never really in doubt.

A loud minority of the spectators at the US Open are often disrespectful of the players and of the norms usually observed during professional tennis matches, but what happened during last night’s final was truly shameful. That a significant part of the public loudly booed Medvedev during and between points simply because he was convincingly beating Djokovic was disgraceful. It is a shame that nobody spoke about this problem firmly and directly at the awards ceremony. Medvedev made a veiled reference to the deplorable fan behaviour, but it was incumbent on the organisers to say something, which they did not. The chair umpire should have probably spoken clearly and firmly about it during the match as well. It would appear that if you have the money to buy a ticket to the US Open Final, you are allowed to act like a spoiled brat. Since no official criticism was heard, next year will likely see some fans behaving just as poorly.

VM