“Although I no longer personally expect anything exhilarating” began the opening of a poem by Gabriel Celaya, a bard who does not excite me, but whom the immense Paco Ibáñez included in his legendary rescue of Spanish poets. I have long survived with that desolate conviction, but sometimes I manage to get excited. It happens to me in the weekly meeting with two creatures I have held in my arms since their birth. They are now older. They are 19 and 17 years old. But I have had a weekly commitment with them for a long time. They ask me to put on a movie for them. And sometimes it is an anguishing responsibility for me. But I always get it right. And in their laughter, in their fear, in their attraction, I manage to feel like a cultural patron.
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My kids (who are only so by their wonderful parents), now grown, awake, intelligent, sensitive, and vulnerable, have enjoyed for many years the movies I put on for them. A risky experience. They, raised like their entire generation in the dispensable universe of Marvel and in the eternal company of mobiles and social networks, feel very happy with the movies I put on for them. And my care requires a lot of tact and responsibility, but I have never been wrong. They even agreed to the very dangerous black and white. They laughed out loud watching Some Like It Hot. Now I even feel capable of offering them Buster Keaton, the most imaginative and funny individual in the entire history of cinema. And I also put on Basic Instinct. They logically tell me they have watched it again. I understand. What a joy to see such a perverse movie accompanied by the mythological leg crossing of Sharon Stone. I suspect they keep watching it.
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To the eldest, a member of a generation in which kids do not read, I asked him to do so with The Catcher in the Rye. He was fascinated, identified with that unforgettable kid. He is going to reread it. And in the height of my audacity from the hip-hop, reggaeton generation, I asked those teenagers to listen to Van Morrison. They keep doing it, I did not do badly. In the music of that devastated lion, there is something that connects with them. And I feel happy. They are fortunately very normal kids.
