Le Sud de France 5.4 : She Sings Hard for Her Honey.

Carla at work at her last job.

It has been a good week. The worst of the  Japanese reactor leaks has been sealed and in the local Canton elections, the l'Herault stayed firmly on the left, voting for the Parti Socialiste. 

However, the best news of the week was the announcement that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s new album will not be issued this year.

Some commentators speculated that Carla’s disk was being held back so it could be released to coincide with the 2012 presidential election. Her husband’s center right party, the L’UMP (the acronym seems quite fitting--lump) didn’t do 

Vox Populi

well in the Canton elections, losing seats to the leftist Parti Socialiste (PS) and the far right National Front (FN). Some l’UMPers worry that in 2012, Sarkozy might not even make it into a second round runoff.

This concern explains in part France’s lead in creating a no-fly zone over Libya and sending troops to Ivory Coast. It is a George Bush moment that M Sarkozy wants to exploit, perhaps hoping to win reelection as a “wartime” President. However, as one opposition PS minister put it, Sarko’s domestic policies show that he has an “attitude d’autisme.” He is as politically tone deaf to his people as much as Ghaddifi and the other presidents-for-life he’s trying to oust from power.

The other reason Carla’s album may have been pulled from distribution is, well, Carla. To see what I mean, go to YouTube and search for Carla Bruni singing the Rolling Stones song “You’ve Got the Silver” (or try this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXQy8WoTyVw)

N'est pas Joan Baez

Before you go to YouTube though, why not make this viewing opportunity a fun party for friends? Invite folks over and mix up a big pitcher of “Pineapple TGV.” It’s easy and fun. Just peel a pineapple and cut it into ¾ inch chunks. Put these in a large pitcher with some ice. Next pour a bottle of vodka over the fruit. Serve cold.


The TGV is a great drink, fruity and smooth, that hits the nervous system like the bullet train it’s named after.

Now for the party game I'll call, “Oops. She did it again.” Have everybody sit around your laptop and watch Carla’s video. Each time she goes off key, misses the beat or simply loses her accompanist, take a big swig of TGV. By the end of the three minute and eight second video, no one will remain standing; she’s just that kind of an artist. 



If anyone survives “You’ve Got the Silver” move these hardy souls on to her brain damaging version of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” 


Oh, the irony. If anyone has a right to sing the blues, it certainly must be the daughter of rich Italian parents, who after a career as a highly paid “fashion” model, became France’s First Madame. This girl sings from her heart, wherever it is, and from that imaginary time when nobody knew her and she was down and out.

The Real Deal

Bruni calls herself a “folk singer” although from the photo above, you can see she looks nothing like Joan Baez or Big Mama Thornton. Paris Hilton styles herself as a “rapper” (and a movie star) and both these women are self-deluded rich girls who, thanks to their money and their willingness to remove their clothing, have reached similar heights of celebrity.  

This new disk was going to be Bruni’s fourth album--which tells you a lot about the state of French music--and it’s stirred up a lot of bad feelings. The disk contains Mme BS’s version of the beloved “Douce France” by the late Georges Brassens. 


Brassens was born here in the Herault in Sete and is held in reverential esteem by the local population. Trying to be a true folk singer, Bruni sings this French tune in her native Italian. The center of the controversy is that Brassens was a leftist who would never have voted for Sarkozy and wrote the song during WWII. It is about the occupation and it is an anti-fascist piece. For those of you too young to remember, fascism is an Italian creation, so you probably shouldn’t sing this song in Italian.

Perhaps, without irony, the Sarkozys think that Carla singing Brassens will be a political masterstroke that will win over the hearts of French voters. However, it is hard to imagine what positive effect Mme BS singing this song badly could have on the campaign.

The Le Pens Performing Political Karaoke

Perhaps what it will do is drive even more voters into the warm, waiting arms of Marine Le Pen of the FN. Marine (soft “a” if you please) is a smiling, twice divorced, blonde who’s trying to re-position the FN as something other than the neo-Fascist, immigrant bashing party of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. To the best of my knowledge, Marine hasn't  posed nude like the First Madame, and that alone should get her more votes than Le Petit Prez. Zut alors!

I raise the issue of singing because it’s spring and there’s a lot of singing around our village. Many residents here have "Midi" accents that make spoken French sound almost as though it is being sung. The accent involves lots of rolled r’s and a lot of inflection. A simple word like “merci” becomes “mer SEE,” with the voice rising merrily around the “see.” This Southern accent also adds the syllable “ah” to all sorts of words. My name becomes “Steve-Vah,” baguette, “baguette-TAH,” Pezenas, Pezenas-ZAH and so on.

Music 101

With the warm weather, more people are out and about in the village and you hear them singing a lot. Just the other day, I came around a corner and found a group of moms standing outside the door of our Ecole Danse, softly singing the words to the music their daughters were dancing to inside.

It is this kind of experience that makes me wish that Carla and Nikko would spend some time down here so they can learn how important singing is and how much it holds people together. The Sarkozys might even get to like actual French life (not Parisian) and end up a lot less tone deaf to the needs of the real folk.

Hey! Sarkozys! You're invited to shower at our place.

Note: You can hear some of "Dolce Franca" on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbYErGTB0cA



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Le Sud De France 5.0: Swallow The Toad

Nicolas de Chamfort‘s Dictum reads, “(one) must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

I agree and my preference is for the small European toads—the greenish ones with little warts--and I find that one is usually sufficient to get me through the day. It’s one of the reasons I fit into France so well.

A recent survey showed that the French are the most pessimistic people in Europe. That in part accounts for the high price and the regular shortages of toads here in the South.

It was particularly a bad toad day last week (mid-January) for the French who awoke to see a photo of their President, Nicholas Sarkozy, on a calendar published to raise funds for the blind--who luckily can’t see the photos or the calendar. There amidst photos of celebrities like Gérard Depardieu, was a shot of Sarko. He is in profile and wearing dark “blind” person’s glasses and holding a white cane. The irony of a “blind” president was only made worse by the presence of the Carla, Mme S, who is seen standing in front of him and staring at the camera. Her expression is saying nothing less than, “Help I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”

Montpellier is the center of the Languedoc region and like most big cities a hub of toad use by the population. A few weeks ago the papers were all abuzz about an announcement by the French rocker Johnny Hallyday. He had been ill and was now all better and had picked Montpellier for his triumphant return to performing. It was big news across France because he’s their biggest rock star ever, sort of like Bruce Springsteen and Elvis rolled into one. 

What you never heard of Johnny? He was part of the French Invasion that paralleled the British Invasion in the 1960s. The reason that you and the rest of the civilized world hasn’t heard of him is that to Americans and Brits he’s like Frankie Avalon with a mustache or Sonny Bono without Cher. Or to put it another way, a one toad pony.

Serge Gainsbourg on the other hand was a real French rock star whose songs have much in common with Bob Dylan. . His songs spoke of hypocrisy and pain. He knew about both having survived the Holocaust and an affair with Bridgette Bardot. Serge was a three toad a day man and it even that couldn’t keep him alive. 

Speaking of toad abuse, I upped my dosage the other week after passing a police “roadblock”. Roadblock is a loose term as the cops were simply standing by the side of the road blocking nothing. They just stood there hands behind their backs, appearing annoyed, like school marms waiting for kids to get back from recess. They were evidently looking for something specific—there’s a lot of drug traffic in the south--but what I really noticed were their uniforms. These Gendarmes are part of the French army and are dressed in what someone in Paris considers Haute Couture. Yet is that any excuse for dressing officers of the law in puffy blue jackets, black boots and matching black tights. Standing at the roundabout they exuded not nonchalance but “Mon dieu, what am I doing here freezing my ass off in these silly tights?” 

It gave me a week of nightmares about being chased by little blue triangles with thin black legs. 

One of my heroes is the French writer Gustave Flaubert. He hated France and he hated the middle class French the most, “There are gestures, sounds of people’s voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo…the bourgeois…is for me something unfathomable.”

That’s the voice of a man who knew his toads. Luckily, he died in the 19^th century and didn’t live to see Auchan and Castorama. These are the suppliers of middle class life in France. Castorama is a hardware store that is a lot larger than an American Home Depot and just a little smaller than Rhode Island. It contains everything you need to build a village from scratch. Auchan is a supermarket in the way Superman is a regular guy. You can literally get everything you need there to feed the village and decorate all the houses you’ve built.  

Large box stores, like the elephant and whale, like to live in herds. About 12 miles from us several dozen box stores have settled in a "zone industrielle" near Beziers. Last Saturday, we went on safari to hunt through the January sales for things for the house.

As we left home I popped a toad and stuck a spare one in my pocket just in case. A light rain was falling as we drove down the N9, our windshield wipers flapping and dark clouds massing above us. Three miles from the zone we began to see traffic, two miles from Auchan the traffic was crawling. I began to wonder if this was really such a good idea after all. 

Arriving at Auchan we joined a caravan line of cars circling through the parking garage. It was a bit like a game of musical chairs. Whenever a car left a space, three or four cars would descend upon it at top speed. The winner was not the one who got to the space first but the one who effective blocked the other cars from it. 

It is a game of “chicken” played out in slow motion in a crowded parking lot. While waiting my turn in this gladiatorial arena I watched an ancient, tiny Renault “Twingo” slide between two large Citroens SUVs and a half dozen children and mothers to get into a space. I was stunned by the driver’s daring and his disregard for bystanders. It could have been a very ugly scene except that when the Twingo door opened a cane popped out of the driver’s door followed by a shrunken old guy wearing the very same dark glasses as Sarkozy wore in the calendar for the blind photo. 

I pulled the spare toad out of my pocket, tore off its head and swallowed it in a single bite.

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