On French TV series

For many years — decades, even — French writers and directors thought of television as the ugly stepchild of cinema. There were few connections between the two fields: No filmmaker would consider working for the small screen. Which isn't to say that there weren't good shows, but even the best were considered inferior to movies. This is pretty crazy, as we had some good home-grown TV. I remember avidly watching miniseries like La Poupée sanglante , Les Rois maudits (the original, not the remake), and series like Les Nouvelles aventures de Vidocq (ah, the saucy Danièle Lebrun, my childhood crush), Arsène Lupin and Chéri-Bibi.

Things began to change in the early 1990s, when the French-German ARTE channel started drawing film directors to work on miniseries and films that often also played in cinemas at the same time as they were broadcast. André Téchiné's Wild Reeds, for instance, started off as a 60-minute made-for-ARTE movie.

But this was all pretty arty. The latest development has been the marked improvement of commercial French series — especially the ones produced by Canal Plus — and most of them influenced by HBO. Thanks to my family's busy DVR recorder, I've been able to watch quite a few. My favorites so far have been Engrenages, a great procedural that wrapped its third season in June, and Pigalle, entirely shot docu-style on location. Appeal to IFC: Show them in the US!

I had mixed feelings about Braquo, about a cop with ethical issues played by Jean-Hughes Anglade, but watched the whole first season anyway. And I haven't been very far with Mafiosa, even though it takes place in Corsica.

Right now I'm in the middle of Maison close, which takes place in a high-end Parisian brothel in 1871, right after the Commune. It's pretty good so far, even though some of the aesthetic choices are slightly cheesy. Playing George Jackson's "If I Could Open Up My Heart" while two prostitutes put on a sapphic show for a client's benefit was the equivalent of a runny brie. Still, there's good stuff in there. I even like the sour lesbian madame hopelessly in love with her star employee. It's a cliché character straight out of the 1950s, and nobody in the US would dare show someone like this now. That's something I regret, in a twisted way, as it only adds to the pulpy ambiance. Here's the start of the first episode.

Tennis players in the NY marathon

Today, the Times ran a second article about tennis player Justin Gimelstob running the NY marathon for the first time. Apparently he signed up after a bet with his buddy Andy Roddick. Gimelstob finished in 4 hrs 10 mns.

The thing is, the Times didn't mention that another tennis player -- and a better one than Gimelstob -- also ran her first marathon this past Sunday. It was French champ Amélie Mauresmo, and she finished in 3 hrs 40 mns!

I was psyched to actually see Mauresmo on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, right around the Carroll St. intersection.

About Tristan Garcia's Hate

I just saw in the Times' Book Review that Tristan Garcia's debut novel has been translated under the title Hate (the original is La Meilleure part des hommes, ie The Best Side of Men). I happened to read the book when it came out a couple of years ago, and was a bit startled by Alexander Nazaryan's take.

Well, by one thing mainly: He doesn't mention that the novel, set in the Parisian gay milieu of the 1980s, is a roman à clef. The lead characters are inspired by easily recognizable people, with just enough changes to prevent lawsuits (or so I assume).

Wild boy William Miller, for instance, looks very much like novelist Guillaume Dustan, who made a name for himself by advocating bareback sex. His nemesis, journalist-turned-AIDS-advocate Dominique Rossi, shares quite a few traits with journalist-turned-AIDS-advocate Didier Lestrade. Rossi cofounds an activist group called Stand; Lestrade cofounded the Parisian branch of Act Up. And so on.

Meanwhile, real-life Jewish philosopher and public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut seems to be the model for the novel's Jewish philosopher and public intellectual, Jean-Michel Leibowitz. At least Finkielkraut thought so: When the book came out, he publicly protested "the way I was transparently used," adding, "It's depressing but what can I do? Duels are now illegal."

Come on, this is good stuff!

The novel is so poorly written that trying to figure out who is who and who really did what is the best part. Not mentioning that aspect in a review is like talking about The Devil Wears Prada without mentioning Anna Wintour.

The Paris Review online

I've become completely addicted to the Paris Review online offerings. My way in was Louisa Thomas' blogging about the US Open (tennis, of course, not golf). Simply some of the finest sports writing I've read in a long while. I hope she keeps it up somehow, somewhere.

Then this morning I discovered that Nelly Kaprièlian has begun keeping a "culture diary" for the same outlet. Her first two entries are rather long, and I really don't know where she finds the time. In addition to being an editor and writer at the French weekly Les Inrockuptibles (I'm a subscriber and actually contributed a handful of record reviews in the late '80s), she often pundits — she's a regular on the radio critics roundtable Le Masque et la plume, for instance, and I keep catching her on various public-radio outlets. Plus her first diary entry reveals an active social life.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with Kaprièlian. On the one hand, she's a tireless defender of American fiction in France, and I will always cherish her memorable tongue-lashing of Jean-Louis Ezine, a fellow Masque literary critic and serial interrupter. (He's so witty and charming, however, that he's my favorite on the show!) On the other hand, Kaprièlian is a remarkably humorless snob (very French, that) and she shares the inexplicable (to me) Gallic enthusiasm for Philip Roth — even his latest novels.

But back to the culture diary, which I can see myself becoming addicted to. The prize so far is Kaprièlian's account of her interview with Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel, La Carte et le territoire, is a critical and commercial hit in France. I've read and loved all his books, and can't wait to get my hands on this one. Susannah Hunnewell's new chat with him is a must, too.

The French farce

Another day, another catastrophe for the French team — and it didn't even play!

Let's recap the past few months, shall we? Because things actually started going wrong before the World Cup. First, we qualified in a shameful manner on a hand-assisted goal against Ireland. In April, three players were named in a prostitution scandal — and with an underage prostitute at that. One of them was Franck Ribéry, one of the team's leaders. Then secretary of state for sport Rama Yade accused Les Bleus of having picked a prohibitively expensive resort in South Africa, sending an obnoxious signal to French people hit by the recession back home.

The competition started, and we drew a 0-0 tie against Uruguay in the opening game. Then we lost 2-0 against Mexico in a display that can only be described as pathetic.

Yesterday, it surfaced that the reason Nicolas Anelka didn't play the second half against Mexico isn't that he sucked — which he did — but that he insulted coach Raymond Domenech at halftime, and Domenech pulled him out of the team. Anelka was put on the next plane back home. Right away, the players started a witch hunt to figure out who talked to the press about Anelka's outburst. Captain Evra said "The problem isn't Nicolas Anelka, it's the traitor among us. It's someone who wants to hurt the French team."

Today, that team went rogue.

The players picked their camp: They openly revolted against Domenech and refused to practice, in solidarity with Anelka! The fitness coach — who had heatedly denied being the traitor — got into a screaming match with Evra about the aborted practice, threw either his accreditation badge or his stopwatch (accounts diverge) on the ground and stormed off. The team's technical director, reportedly fighting back tears, quit and announced he was returning to France: "I'm ashamed. I'm sick, disgusted, I'm leaving my job, what happened here is a scandal."

What could possibly happen tomorrow?

It can always get worse

France's pathetic display against Mexico has provoked a huge uproar back home, as you can imagine. I listen to a lot of French radio live or on podcast, and the football shows are incredibly entertaining right now. Newspapers are mad as hell too, and I've never seen such an explosion of rage against our own, in any sport. It's so bad that many in France are now rooting for South Africa in our last game!

Adding insult to injury, it's now surfaced that at halftime of the Mexico match, coach Raymond Domenech told the inept Nicolas Anelka that he needed to play more at the front, and Anelka reportedly answered "Go get fucked, you son of a bitch." Domenech then pulled Anelka and replaced him with Gignac for the second half. Le Monde says that the team decided to ship Anelka back to France. Former coach Michel Hidalgo (who oversaw the golden age of Les Bleus in 1978-84) commented that "Anelka's insult is despicable. He can't wear the French jersey anymore. I think he won't wear that jersey ever again."

On the plus side, Australia tied against Ghana in a feisty match, despite having a player red-carded after 20 minutes or so. I don't think the scrappy Socceroos will make it to the next round — they'd have to beat Serbia — but they'll leave with their head high, unlike other teams I could name.

Oh, and England self-combusted against Algeria, losing 0-0 (to borrow a headline from the Post). Unlike France, which went into the Cup with few illusions, England thought themselves hot stuff, so it was particularly satisfying to see Algeria bring them back to reality.

Down we go

How bad did France do against Mexico today? So bad that by the end, the bartenders at the Irish pub where I was watching and my Italian neighbor were feeling sorry for me.

I had gone to a new pub — that's the thing about working in Midtown, lots of Irish pubs — and was enjoying a nice panini at the bar, and then those cretinous Bleus had to come and ruin my lunch! It's now several hours later and I still can't believe what happened today. Mexico did what it had to do with great spirit, and France just collapsed. It was worse than bad: It was mortifying.

We started okay, then in the second half everything went down the gurgler, as the Sheila says: no team spirit, no cohesion, stupid dribbling, aimless passes, constant fumbling. These guys play in some of the biggest European clubs and it was as if they had completely lost their technical skills. France got something like 7 or 8 free kicks and I stopped counting how many times they shot into the wall. Same for corners sailing wide or high. Just pathetic.

The French press is, of course, full of various theories about the vile mood within the team, in which there apparently are several warring factions. One of the most interesting theories is that valuable offensive midfielder Yoann Gourcuff has been ostracized by several of his teammates because he's mild-mannered, well-spoken and (implied) white. So those teammates have ganged up against Gourcuff and gained influence over coach Domenech, so much so that Gourcuff didn't play today. We ended up in a situation where Domenech kept Henry and Gourcuff on the bench but started the horrible Anelka and Govou, then brought in Valbuena and Gignac. Seriously: WTF???

Back to the factions. According to Le Monde, some of the faultlines also fall along whether the players are in French clubs or outside of France. Others depend on whether the players have roots in Africa or the French West Indies, the Maghreb or metropolitan France. Others are blunt: They depend on whether the player is black or white. No matter what, it's a nest of vipers in there. You'd think they'd overcome their petty rivalries because, you know, it's the fricking World Cup but no — today, they played like asses.

At this point, part of me hopes South Africa will finally get a win and France goes home early. That way I can relax and start rooting for, oh, I don't know, the Netherlands, Argentina or Germany. Yes, Germany! (Anybody but Brazil or Italy, really.)

Domenech was scheduled to leave at the end of the World Cup anyway, and coach-in-waiting Laurent Blanc played in the team that won the WC in 1998. Hopefully he'll clean house.

Let's pile on the French team again

The French press is having a field day with our team in South Africa. Rarely have I seen such an amount of loathing directed at a team and its coach, the hapless Raymond Domenech. Most recently, Domenech clashed with Florent Malouda and took him out of the starting lineup against Uruguay. More details here.

Of course, the animosity has spilled outside of the playing field. The latest attack came from Rama Yade, secretary of state for sports and one of the most popular political figures in France. A couple of weeks ago, she criticized Les Bleus, as the team is known, for staying in the most expensive hotel available to World Cup participants, the Pezula. She pointed out that in a time of recession, it didn't look good for those guys to stay in such an exclusive resort. (Many teams from developed countries chose more modest accommodations.)

To make amends, sort of, Les Bleus said they would visit a township. All right! The visit took place a couple of days ago, in Knysna, but even then, they refused to go with Yade (the Danes did a similar tour with their minister). And they stayed for a total of 29 minutes, according to a report in the French press.

My favorite take on the World Cup so far has been from Stéphane Guillon, who does daily editorials on public radio station France Inter. Below is an edited translation of this morning's intervention, which was read out in a voice dripping with sarcasm. (You can watch him here.)

Did you see the footage of our team's visit to the township of Dam Se Bos? It was moving to see all these children, barefoot in the rain, held behind security tape with their parents. (...) When the players' bus appeared, a great cheer erupted, accompanied by those vuvuzelas that are spoiling the World Cup for us. As soon as you turn on the TV, you feel as if there's a swarm of bees in the room. Apparently the players can't even hear their coach on the field. If our players don't hear Domenech, that's a good thing, maybe we'll win.

When the Bleus' bus stopped, the kids got even more excited. And then you had to wave a bit, turn off your iPod, get out in the rain during siesta time, when you could have been relaxing at the Pezula palace. 'Let's go guys, we'll stay 20 minutes, tops, you all smile for the cameras! Leave your iPhones on the seats, nothing of value outside, there have been thefts in the area -- and here we go!' The French staff gave umbrellas to the players -- no way should they get a cold before their next loss. (...)

Earlier, the players had decided to move their visit ahead so they wouldn't run into Rama Yade, who dared to criticize their hotel's splashy luxury, which stands in sharp contrast to the recession and their sorry performances on the field. The French football federation donated 100,000 euros to fix up the local stadium -- a drop in the water compared to the 240,000 euros it had paid a few days earlier to fly in the players' wives for a weekend. Just think: If the players had chosen not to get laid, we could have built a second stadium, with locker rooms, showers and maybe even cleats for each kid.

French Idol and philosophy

André Manoukian, the longest-serving judge on Nouvelle Star (ie French Idol) has a new book out. It's titled Deleuze, Sheila et moi. The first is the philosopher, the second the yé-yé star. Just this morning, I was listening to Manoukian being interviewed on French public radio and he was talking about what appeals to him in Deleuze's theory of deterritorialization. Note to Simon Cowell: Step up your game and write a book about your relationship with Zizek and Karen Carpenter.

He also said was that the candidates are now displaying a more varied musical knowledge than when he started the show, adding that while the Internet has been devastating for the music industry, it's also helped the French catch up with the Americans and the Brits when it comes to pop savvy.

As for Nouvelle Star, I've written about it here several times in the past (too many posts, so do a search if interested) and the new season has just started. I expect to go over the finalists once we're past the audition stage.

The one, the only Jeanne Balibar

I've written about Jeanne Balibar's idiosyncratic ways before (go here for some background) but she just topped herself — and that wasn't easy. At the recent Césars awards ceremony in Paris, she came in to announce the winner for best music. She started by saying "I'm really honored to announce the next César. I'll let you guess what it's for thanks to this short interlude."

And then she proceeded to sing a Baudelaire poem, augmented with pig noises. Make sure you watch the whole thing, as it gets crazier and crazier as it goes along. Hosts Valérie Lemercier and comedian Gad Elmaleh look startled, which of course adds to the scene's surreal tone. (The shots of the audience are choice as well.)

Spend the summer with Georges Simenon

I've mentioned before that I regularly listen to French public radio via podcast. Of the various units of Radio France, I'm partial to France Inter and to France Culture. The former has particularly good talk shows and political satirists during the year but I'm not so keen on its summer schedule. The latter, on the other hand, can be stuffy during the year but really comes alive in July and August.

Last year, I raved about that the 16 hours France Culture dedicated to François Truffaut. This year, they're doing the same thing to Georges Simenon, with five distinct parts, each one centered around a location important to the writer: Liège, Paris, France, America, Switzerland. The whole thing should run about 17 hours.

Go to this site, which lists all the France Culture podcasts, and scroll down to "Simenon" to subscribe.

And while you're there, you might also check out "Conversation avec Losey" (Positif boss Michel Ciment chats with Joseph Losey in the late ’70s) and "Paroles d'actrices" (hour-long interviews with contemporary French actresses).

Low-cost travels

Going from Paris to Corsica to visit my family, I had my first experience with a Euro low-cost airline, Easy Jet. The flight was almost six hours late but everybody waited in relative calm, a new concept in France. This of course had everything to do with the fact that said flight was more than a third cheaper than the same one on Air France, which until recently had a de facto monopoly on flights from the continent to Corsica. The thing is, it is harder to feel angry when you bought a cheap ticket; the anger was also diffused by the fact that there was nobody from Easy Jet on site, only Charles de Gaulle airport employees assigned to Easy Jet, and they had barely more of a clue than we did. Rage with no specific target is just a waste of time, as we all discovered.

Never mind: I eventually made it to the island, where I discovered snow-capped mountains and a cold wave. All the more reason to stay inside and watch the world championship in slalom, where a Frenchman got silver. Needless to say, Alpine skiing doesn't really shake TV ratings back in the U.S., whereas here it's quite popular.

Gay, buff and tattooed

I'm a big fan of Radio France, the public-radio network that's like a dream version of NPR—we're talking hour-long interviews with dancers and novelists here, along with excellent investigative journalism and audio docs. I subscribe to several podcasts from France Inter and France Culture, two of the several stations under the Radio France umbrella.

Anyway, imagine my delighted surprise when I learned that Jean-Paul Cluzel, the 60-year-old, openly gay president of Radio France, had recently posed in the 2009 calendar of Parisian tattoo artist Abraxas. Cluzel is barechested and wears a Mexican wrestler's mask. (The guy on the right is Cluzel's boyfriend.) I mean, can you imagine the president of NPR posing like this?

The French boards, part 2

And now, the present…

Le Monde just ran an interesting interview with director Luc Bondy. One of the things he talks about is the difference between public and private institutions in France. Here in New York, the scene is very roughly divided in three: Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway houses. In Paris, you have institutions that get public subsidies and those that rely more on box-office revenues; the former is meant to present fare that's more demanding (with lower ticket prices), while the latter is meant to be more commercial (and is more expensive).

The difference can get muddy, though, as a public institution like Chaillot has often presented accessible, popular shows by directors Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff, for instance, while private theaters can show fare that's much edgier than we get on the Off scene here.

The Swiss-born Bondy, who's worked a lot in German-speaking countries (he ran the Schaubühne in Berlin, and has been artistic director of the Vienna Festival for 20 years), says of French subsidized theater: "There's people with great potential, but the output is mediocre. First, because the French are very germanophile, they think everything that comes from Germany is great and they get very derivative. They need their own pride. It's true that it's more difficult to do theater in France than in Germany because the French are more extroverted than the German. In introverted countries, theater is the place where you're free. In extroverted countries such as France or Italy, it requires more effort to find a language." [I think he means a theatrical language here, obviously.]

Bondy on actors: "In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, actors work are hired in companies. They may be less afraid to act than French actors, because they have that safety net. But that sense of safety also sometimes makes them sure of themselves and less curious than French actors, who can get deeply involved in a project. The greatest issue in France is the ostracism between public and private theater. There are great actors working in the private sector that you'd dream of seeing in the public one. And vice versa. But the two areas are like two dogs barking at each other. It's true that when you see the price of tickets in private theaters, and those who can afford them, you don't necessarily want to work there. But without sounding populist, I find unbearable the idea that people can't go to a good boulevard play because it's too expensive. You can learn a lot from boulevard. There's a technique and actors that are marvelous. In England, they can take a tragedy by Eschylus and turn it into a play. They don't have that separation between pure and impure, which is false: a play is good or it isn't. One of the greatest conductors in the world for me was Bernstein, who led Beethoven's symphonies like no one else and wrote West Side Story. That culture is missing today."

Bondy is perceived as high-brow in France, but he's also doing quite well at the box office. Last time I was in Paris, for instance, I couldn't see his staging of Marivaux's La Seconde Surprise de l'Amour at the supposedly elite Bouffes du Nord (Peter Brook's former home, and the inspiration for BAM's Harvey Theater): it was such a big fat hit that there were no tickets to be found. When Marivaux sells out without the help of marquee-name stars, you know the director is doing something right.

Underground Paris

Paris in the 1970s is an object of endless fascination for me, particularly the punk, gay and clubbing factions: Le Palace, Bazooka, Mathématiques Modernes, Alain Pacadis, Jenny Bel Air—all names that set off a thousand fantasies for the provincial girl I was. That scene was in its death throes when I landed in the capital in 1982 to attend college, but the agony was still glamorous enough to project a mystical aura. A number of books by and about luminaries of that time have been published in France in the past half-decade, including a collection of Alain Pacadis's writing (he roughly was the Gallic version of Michael Musto), François Jonquet's lovely biography of Jenny Bel Air, and the reissue of NovöVision, Yves Adrien's new-wave cult classic. Music-wise, the compilation Des Jeunes Gens Modernes is absolutely essential.

For a thorough overview, however, check out a site created by a man named Bernard Bacos, who lived in that city—or perhaps I should say he lived that city—and celebrates it at Paris dans les années 70. If you don't read French, I suggest going randomly, as Bacos has unearthed a treasure trove of great photos and provides sound samples of several of the bands. And if you do read French, I guarantee hours of fascinated clicking.

Bacos starts off with the late ’60s and early ’70s, covering the "baba cool" (ie hippie) bands; check out, for instance, the page about the 30 ans d'agitation musical en France box set, complete with streams. (Here, Gilles Deleuze reads a Nietzsche poem, backed by a band called Schizo. An entire era is summoned…) But his coverage of is extensive, each section shooting out into numerous nooks and crannies. The page about Fabrice Emaer's Palace (Paris' answer to Studio 54, and newly reopened) is delicious, for instance, linking out to other classic clubs such as cold-wave temple Les Bains Douches, and the one about the punk art collective Bazooka reminded me of how brutally prescient they were. (Watch this TV doc on Bazooka.)

Bacos is straight so the gay underground doesn't get as much in-depth coverage as the hippie one, but he still has fascinating stuff about the likes of Les Gazolines, a gender-queer group that ran parallel to the radical-leftist FHAR, ie Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire. (See Le Rose et le noir, Frédéric Martel's page-turner about the history of contemporary homosexuality in France.) It would have been hard for Bacos not to deal with Les Gazolines anyway, since its members popped up at Le Palace, wrote for Libération, etc.

One for the road: Taxi Girl's stone-cold classic single "Cherchez le garçon," from 1980. The band released only one album, 1981's sepulchral Seppuku, produced by Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel. The lanky guitarist on the right in the video is Mirwais, who would go on to produce Madonna's Music. As for singer Daniel Darc, he of the bee-stung lips, his career was derailed by drugs but he resurfaced in 2004 with the rare superb album that also happens to be a commercial hit, Crève-coeur.

Burning up the French screens

Burning up the French television screens, that is—and it's philosophy we're talking about. If you live in France, this fall you can watch a new show that explores all kinds of topics in a philosophical light. This isn't new for the country: In my last year of high school there, I had eight hours of philosophy a week (I was in the so-called literary section, but still), and the popular monthly Philosophie Magazine has features like Manu Chao chatting with his old philosophy teacher.

Anyway, the format of the new TV show is really intriguing: In each installment, host Raphaël Enthoven discusses a single topic with a guest. The hook: It's all shot in a 26-minute-long single take! It doesn't hurt that Enthoven is a hottie who not only writes books about Kant and Montaigne, and contributes to the aforementioned mag, among other publications, but used to be married to Bernard-Henry Levy's daughter Justine, whom he left for…Carla Bruni. This collision of celeb-watching and matters of the mind makes me incredibly giddy for some reason.

How to not go crazy

Not to take away from the abyss that real madness is, but living in a city like New York one encounters plenty of spoiled neurotics making light of actual dysfunction. Here's a quote from Clara Malraux (wife of André Malraux) I'll have to remember next time I'm confronted to one of them.

She recalls reading a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald that said, "Because of those who surrounded her, because of a feeling of being crushed and of non-existence, Zelda simply went mad." Malraux's daughter, Florence, who had given her mother the book, told her, "Read it, there will certainly be things of particular interest to you." After finishing it, Clara replied: "Today I understand that if I didn't go mad, it's really because I didn't have the time. With all the catastrophes, all the difficulties I had to face: Indochina, poverty, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, being Jewish, Resistance, the hardship of making a living and raising a child—I really didn't have time to go mad."

France in the 1970s

France Culture, part of the French public-radio network, has been running great summer series. I mentioned the one about François Truffaut, but I've also been hooked to Les Années 70, which has been devoting two-hour shows of audio archives to each year of the 1970s. What's particularly inspired is that while the shows do mention big events, they also broadcast rather long, uninterrupted excerpts of less obvious but very 70s documents, like several minutes of Marguerite Duras explaining why it's okay to steal books (even if she herself doesn't have the guts to do it); Solzhenitsyn's appearance on the hit literary TV show Apostrophes; a report on Bertolucci filming Last Tango in Paris; the French Communist Party's head, Georges Marchais, interviewed about a strike; the mayor of a small town complaining about gay cruising; a news report a month after abortion was legalized; and so on.

And while I can't remember lyrics of the songs I hear now, even the ones I get obsessed with, lyrics from songs I heard when I was 10 or 12 are still crystal-clear in my memory, particularly Franco-Frenchy-French hits like Joe Dassin's hideous "L'été indien" (Joe was the son of director Jules Dassin), Johnny Halliday and Sylvie Vartan's "J'ai un problême" (I love the addition of vrooming sounds for the video) or Alain Souchon's "Bidon" (sensitive Alain was one of my mom's favorites and we listened to him a lot in the family Peugeot). Needless to say, none of these songs ever made it outside of France.

I was listening to the show about 1976 this morning, and they were playing excerpts from the very first Césars ceremony (France's answer to the Oscars). For Best Actress, the nominees were Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H, Delphine Seyrig in Duras' India Song, Catherine Deneuve in Rappeneau's Le Sauvage and Romy Schneider in Zulawski's L'Important c'est d'aimer. Schneider won and gave a speech magnificent in its economy and elegance. Here it is in its entirety: "Thank you very much. I'm very happy and very proud. And I'd like to tell you that tonight I'm especially thinking about one man who taught me my job, who was my master and my great friend. He'll be happy for me. It's Luchino Visconti."

A film that had a huge impact in 1976 France was Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos. Partly it was because of the stupendous acting by young Ana Torrent, but also because the film's song, Jeanette's "Porque te Vas," was a hit. It remains a personal favorite to this day.

MP3 Jeanette "Porque te Vas"

Philosophical musings

My review of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog is in the new Time Out New York.

That a novel in which an entire chapter is focused on dismissing phenomenology would be a best-seller in France isn't surprising: This is a country where every spring, the announcement of the philosophy questions at the baccalaureate exam makes the news. Samples from this year's crop:

- Can art transform our awareness of the real?
- analysis of an excerpt from Schopenhauer's The world as Will and Representation
- Is scientific knowledge of the living possible?
- Is it easier to know the other than yourself?
- Can one desire without suffering?

Talk amongst yourselves…

Karl Lagerfeld saves lives

In France, a new law, effective in October, makes it mandatory for drivers to carry a glow-in-the-dark vest and a reflective safety triangle in their cars at all time. If you break down and have to get out of the car, you're meant to put on the vest and position the triangle 30 meters from the vehicle. The fine if you don't is 135 euros (just over $200).

The best part is that the new campaign hangs around fashion maven Karl Lagerfeld sporting a spiffy vest, and still managing to look like a butler. The slogan: "It's yellow, it's ugly, it doesn't go with anything, but it can save your life."

Lagerfeld, who's also in the new Grand Theft Auto, doesn't have a license and is ferried around by a driver.