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 5.3: Home is Where They Break Your Heart.

Claude Michel is in his seventies, five feet tall and one of the few villagers who wears a jacket and tie when he goes out for a drink at our tiny bar. He is a sharp dressed man. He's also a former mayor of the village and a retired Captain in the French Foreign Legion where he received a Legion of Honor medal for his service in the brutal Algerian war. He came to the village thirty years ago.

He is a man out of another time and another world. When he meets a woman, he bows his head and kisses her hand. I'd never seen this done before and when he kissed my wife’s hand, I was startled. Then I watched him closely as he kissed another woman’s hand, and realized that the way he did made it a lovely gesture.

Today most women don’t expect to have their hands kissed, but Claude Michel’s method is as disarming as it is simple. He takes the woman’s hand, slowly lifts it up, so the woman has a moment to realize what is about to happen, and then he barely touches her hand with his lips. This gesture is an elegant sign of respect rather than of eroticism and most women seem comfortable with it.

Another one of the short men in the village is Liam Gonzales whose family, like half a million others, fled Franco’s Spain in 1939. They were the losers in the Spanish Civil War and they fled across the Pyrenees to seek asylum. Instead of sanctuary, the Vichy government put them in internment camps and then sent to the German ovens. A little over 100,000 avoided that fate by hiding in villages and in the hills. When WWII began many of them fought as part of the Maquis, the Spanish underground. The allies assured the Maquis that after Hitler they’d deal with Franco, but they broke that promise. Liam’s family and thousands of others were left stranded in the South of France. Many settled here in the Herault and I would guess that today about a third of our villagers have Spanish surnames.  

Liam’s first name is also the result of another war--the Napoleonic War of the 1800s-- when the British sent Irish troops to Spain as cannon fodder. Rather than face Bonaparte's cannons many deserted into the Pyrenees with Spanish ladies, the results were Spanish kids with names like Liam, Patrick, and Sean.

 

  The other night when we stopped at the bar for a drink, Claude Michel was there and after kissing my wife’s hand, he came over and shook mine vigorously. He held my hand with his right hand and my elbow with his left, which recognized immediately as the old politician’s hand-lock. 

I bought him a drink and he told me that he played piano and violin and that we should come over to his place for drinks one evening. I told him I played “American guitar” and he replied, “Ah, tu devr’apprendre à jouer de la guitare française, maintainent!” (Ah, you must learn to play French guitar, now.)


I struggle with my understanding of French but I realized that Claude Michel had just used the familiar “tu” for “you” instead of the formal “vous.” Tu is how family people and friends address each other. 

Paul has a guitar like mine

Just then, a big woman who had been talking to Liam, stood up and with a nod to Claude Michel, began to sing. She stood very straight and sang very slowly at first--and very loudly. The song she sang was about a terrible battle that took place near here in 1943 between resistance fighters and the Germans. It recalled the horror of the occupation and that dark night of the soul that the French bear for their collaboration with the Nazis. At this battle, the partisans were defeated, this is a song of loss and sorrow. Nonetheless, it is an uplifting song that urges listeners to carry on, to remember those who died, and to never give up hope. 

At its heart, it is an anti-war war song.  

As the woman sang the passion in the her voice grew and with each chorus, more people stood up and joined in; soon everyone was on their feet. Claude Michel was standing next to me, his back straight and stiff, his right arm waving in front of him. In the dim glow of the bar, I could that see his eyes were damp. Liam linked arms with him and the two rocked back and forth, and then Claude Michel reached out and took my arm and began rocking me in time to the music.

I stood there singing in French or at least trying to sound like I was singing in French, but I had no idea of the words I was singing. The music and the crowd just carried me along and soon enough I was singing at the top of my lungs. 

A strange thought struck me there as I sang. We Americans have no comparable songs of war, songs of remembrance with which to honor Americans who've died in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. Without songs of sacrifice and remembrance I thought, we numb ourselves to war's madness and that makes it too easy to go war and to do it without feeling a thing.

In our small village bar, the sorrow and the passion of that awful moment in 1943 was alive again. I stood next to Claude Michel and I was sobbing too, not for the partisan’s losses, but I think for my own.

But this was not what I came to France for, I came here to take pretty pictures, eat cheese, and write funny blogs- not to dredge up old memories and open old wounds. Certainly, I didn’t come here to have my heart turned inside out by a bunch of semi-sloshed town folk in some hole-in-the-wall bar in the middle of nowhere.

Later as we left the bar, Liam patted me on the shoulder and tapped his heart with the palm of his hand. 

Above us, a bright crescent moon floated in a star-filled sky, lighting our way.

"Yeah,” I thought as we walked off, “home is where they break your heart.”  

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Le Sud de France 5.1: Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye So Pass the Haggis M.Hallyday.

Burns Nite

“By the late 1870s the haggis had been hunted to extinction in Scotland, “said the kilted speaker his glass of whiskey raised high in praise of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, “but there is still the occasional haggis spotted in northern Italy where they are called “haggiolli.”

The dinner crowd roared with laughter at this fable.

“Bull” yelled a John Bull in the audience.

Okay, so what are haggis, Scots and the British doing in my blog about Le Sud De France? It’s a long story of an odd week that resembles a trip into Alice’s looking glass. 

It began when the village baker decided to celebrate his 39^th birthday and his eleventh year in business by throwing a party in his own honor in the town square--an idea that met with great general approval. He set his “fête” for the coming Sunday and invited a few of us to join him that Saturday evening for a few drinks and a rehearsal of the next day’s karaoke show.

Karaoke in the Herault? 

I hate karaoke because it makes people either think they can sing—when they can’t—or simply shames them for trying to sing. Well, that is not quite what karaoke is in France. 

Christian and Toons

Keep in mind, the Languedoc is the original land of the troubadours and singing is a natural part of life here. There’s a long tradition of people singing together and like a scene out of an old French movie, at the drop of a hat a group of people will burst out in song. Everyone knows the words and tunes and whether it’s an old folk tune or an Edith Piaf song, it is all about singing together and not who sings better. 

Our karaoke was to led by “Christian & Toons” a local couple, who perform karaoke around the region. They do a variety of French songs with a few American and British numbers for the expats. They sing rather well so just watching them perform was a pleasure. The difference though was when they pulled someone out of the audience; it was not to make fun of them but to have a song leader. 

The songs this Saturday evening were mostly by George Trent, Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg with a little modern rock thrown in—tunes by the ever-popular Johnny Hallyday whose imminent return to the stage in Montpellier in 2012 has the Languedoc abuzz. Hallyday aside these are those wonderful, passionate French songs, that swell with each refrain, and tug at your heart while lifting your spirits in the face of bitter sweetness of life.  

Our village is full of vineyard workers, plumbers, electricians and other laborers who are not your right-of-center Sarkozy supporters. By late in the evening, things got a bit rowdy and songs like Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” were sung, with special gusto for song lines like “the bourgeois sing like pigs.” It was, to say the least, refreshing.

The next day around 11 in the morning tables were set up in front of the bar the fête started with bottles of the local white wine, whiskey and pastis (anise liquor) set out along side several bowls of potato chips.

I decided to record the event for the town’s “historical record” and just for the fun of it. By noon, the crowd had grown to about fifty people. Bottles of wine were emptied, people chatted and sang, and occasionally a couple danced in the early spring sunshine. 

Then one of the neighbors drove up and unloaded a case of white wine and a couple of tubs of oysters he had just gotten from his oyster field fifteen minutes away on the Mediterranean coast. Several townsmen volunteered to shuck the oysters and after trying a few out themselves and began passing out the sparkling wet shells to whoever had their hand out.

Contented sighs followed.

Now even more food began to arrive. One neighbor rolled up with big pots of mussels in cream sauce, the bar owner added big trays of crispy frites--what we mistakenly call “French fries”— and small sausage and tomato sandwiches. More folks arrived and there was more singing. Several vignerons brought cases of their local red wine and these were consumed at a prodigious rate, disappearing almost as soon as they were opened.  

At this point, feeling happy and a little silly, I gave the baker a big hug and told him that he was the best baker in the world, perhaps the universe. I declared that his bread the best in all of France. He agreed and we ended up singing with the karaoke machine a tune that I didn’t know and can’t remember. It was a perfect moment.

Later in the afternoon as we were about to leave the party we were approached by a couple of Scots. They had come to the village to play rugby against the locals and they invited up to a Robert Burns Supper on Wednesday. The supper would be complete with haggis. We agreed and crawled home to recover. I remember wondering what this “haggis” thing was. I had a vague memory of it being some kind of sheep gut stuffed with offal.

Monday was quiet and my head cleared rather rapidly. Around mid-morning I drop a disc of photos at the bar and the owner invited us to come to the bar the next night. Christian and Toons had a digital projector and were going to show the fête videos and photographs—including many of mine.

A Scotsman after too many pastis.

Tuesday night rolled  around and we went to the bar to watch the videos of people eating, drinking and singing and pretty soon we are all eating, drinking and singing along with the images on the screen. Around some late hour or another we slid home.

Wednesday came and I was seriously partied out and we are still facing the Burns Supper. In a show of unity the local Scots, the Brits and Irish had planned a whiskey and haggis event that would be only six weeks later than the official Supper night of January 24^th.

The important thing that the Scots have smuggled several haggises (haggi??) down from Scotland, I suppose disguised as rugby balls. These were the real thing and so we HAD TO have a Burns Sipper no matter the time of year. Now it is Wednesday night and the formal ritual begins of praising the haggis and Scotland. Soon we are all singing Scottish songs—including some anti-British tunes about a free and independent Scotland. Aye, Scotland forever!  

The haggis was hardly awful but rather surprisingly bland, but the straight whiskey sauce sure helped.

And that’s how we found ourselves in the South of France standing up with a bunch of Brits, Scots and Irish, hands  and arms crossed and linked together singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of our voices celebrating the life of the Scottish poet Robbie Burns.

I had not sung so many songs in the last fifty years as I did in these four days and I came to realize that the best way to get to know a bunch of people is to stand with them and sing together at the top of your lungs.

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