Since I could watch them on the Internet, I had as much complacency with the columns of Iñaki Berrio Beñat as when I found a series that I liked, which covered the hours of the solitary Saturday. Your reflections on the image would have been involuntarily in some accessible area of the brain and I have remained in a column on death, in a connection that is inevitable to me, from image to death. He was talking about the moment of death in the column, the choice of the moment, the preparations for when he died. I remembered Liz Taylor, who had asked for several things for her day of death, the way she had been dating for years, like being late for her funeral, “there are no stars like that,” and that lazy Saturday, I went to see De repente el último verano, “we still have her movies and all that.”

The one who appeared alive on the screen, however, is dead, and what I was seeing is dead on top of it from the moment the image was received; how many times has Liz Taylor died. It was as if all the photographs of the world, the stars and ours, were the testimony of one death, the record of what will no longer be (and that of Xabier Montoia a bet for the future, sacrificing quantitatively a little the present for sustainability; whoever has ever sought the photograph wants to capture the smallest prerogative that the present can give him, or to compensate in some way the editor, by extracting all the photographs that are obedient and demanded of him, the waste of money that the publication of his book has meant). In addition, Liz, I don’t know from what moment she was brutally killing her previous image as a star that has been twisted in constellation, out of time, as it happens in Spain with Sara Montiel, or as it happened in San Sebastian, for the last time, confirming the death of a form of star appearance, with Bette Davis who appeared as a ghost (now the actors, famous characters, “I am a supernormal person”, they remember their family when they have to swallow them, they don’t need to be bothered, they don’t cry loudly, and they don’t cry loudly. They don’t want to be above us, not even as images; they are no longer a dangerous temptation, but a consumer projection, something very boring that will not compromise the sensitivity/correctness of Catholic children).

I don’t know what has led me, images or death, to think of the cities of today, each one of them to be an image behind a Calatrava in the cameras of tourists, cities to be museums, to be seen, stars. And dead in the museum is the work, it is passive, not the recipient, the life that the work has is that of the one who looks at it (now sometimes I get the feeling that the work is agreed beforehand by all the interactive accounts with the viewer that they extract what they will steal and consume the criterium, and then impose the interpretation once the work is on the street, because the author wants to continue interacting without leaving the recipient alone). Amusement park, the only life that the city has would be that of the spectator, of the tourist, today marking the limit of all rights, (we start as soon as we call a strike, not the neighbors, what the tourists will say), and it is more and more common to hear that Seville will be given a series of giant mushrooms, citizen security, clothing impositions and all the cultures that we have invented, gastronomic above all; Bilbao, for example, is becoming the envy of all cities, more and more museums, I do not know where to go for the spectators.

I reached out to sleep and sought out the cat’s lively breath, free from photographs, on the museum’s vids.