Author: THE HOBBLEDEHOY

Michael Stevenson, aka Dai Bando, Johnny Foreigner, Monsieur Pas De Merde, is a blogger of French and British culture. His blogs "Pas De Merde" and "The Hobbledehoy" have been called "marvelous" by some, and "meh" by others.

Opinion | I’ve eaten at restaurants, gone to a mall and attended concerts. That is life in France

It’s time to follow Europe.

Timothy Searchinger is a research scholar at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs

Over the past six weeks, I’ve eaten out at restaurants five times, attended two concerts, visited a large, busy indoor mall three times, had two haircuts, and repeatedly watched school kids run around the schoolyard. But that’s all been responsible behavior — because instead of being locked down in my house in the D.C. area, I’ve been in France, where life and the economy are now carrying on close to normal.

What France, like virtually all of Europe, has shown is that following standard expert recommendations for dealing with covid-19 works. France had a massive outbreak of covid-19 in the spring, almost as soon as anyone realized the novel coronavirus had reached Europe. The deaths began occurring late March and reached more than 24,000 by the end of April — a higher death rate than even the United States at the time.

But while the outbreak occurred primarily in only two parts of France, French President Emmanuel Macron imposed a severe, nationwide lockdown on March 16. And during that lockdown, the government put extensive testing and contact tracing in place. Almost exactly two months later, France mostly reopened. And for the last two and a half months, the country has functioned in a primarily open status with around 500 new cases per day and only about 450 deaths in the last month.

The French lockdown was severe. People were only allowed out, after filling out a form, to take care of elderly relatives or to go grocery shopping. To buffer the economic impact, the government directly paid a portion of salaries for those who could not work. And, voila, it worked.

I’m in France because I was farsighted enough to marry a French woman 30 years ago, who was farsighted enough to save our marriage license, which let me fly to France with her in early June to visit her elderly parents even as other Americans are barred. For two weeks, we kept to ourselves, speaking to my in-laws only across a garden. With an easy-to-get doctor’s prescription, we were also able to get tested for covid-19 at a parking lot drive-up with no wait and received (negative) results in two days (now down to one day for others).

Continue reading “Opinion | I’ve eaten at restaurants, gone to a mall and attended concerts. That is life in France” →

Gauguin paintings at the National Gallery and MFA Boston may be fakes. Fabrice Fourmanoir is out to prove it

Meet the Gauguin obsessive who’s trying to prove that major art museums are showing fakes.

It’s the nude that bothers Fabrice Fourmanoir.

The way she’s painted is “unsightly” and “vulgar,” quite unlike the Polynesian women of his mind’s eye. Nor does he like the way she’s artificially inserted on the canvas, part of what he calls an “uninventive assemblage” with no coherent symbolism. Yet there she stands at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in a painting titled “The Invocation,” attributed to Paul Gauguin.

But Fourmanoir’s roving, inquisitorial eye doesn’t stop there. He’s similarly bothered by another painting, this one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, titled “Women and a White Horse.” Though it’s labeled as a Gauguin, its signature is “very weak,” he opines. And the background vegetation looks more like Tahiti than the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin was living when he was supposed to have painted it.

Fourmanoir isn’t your average weekend art sleuth. The life and works of Gauguin have consumed him for many decades. These two paintings make him suspicious, so much so that questioning their integrity has become a personal crusade. He thinks they’re impostors, and he won’t rest until there’s a full investigation.

Born in Calais, France, Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. Now, even as some of the most renowned art scholars continue to look with withering skepticism at Fourmanoir’s motives and credentials, he plans to make the most of his newfound status.

Continue reading “Gauguin paintings at the National Gallery and MFA Boston may be fakes. Fabrice Fourmanoir is out to prove it” →

Big Tech needs to step up. But instead we get “Mwa-Mwa-Mwa”

By Michael Stevenson, aka Monsieur Pas de Merde

The chief executive officers of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook sat before congress yesterday. Four white guys with unimaginable wealth. I wanted congress to inform them of the new “Big Tech Patriot Emergency Relief Bill” – informing them that, TFN, all their profits after 1 Billion will now be taxed at 99.5 percent. That revenue stream would EASILY replace the expiring Covid Relief package that we all pay for. But instead of my “Big Tech Patriot Emergency Relief Bill” – these creeps just blathered on like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. Cue the trombone: “Mwa-Mwa-Mwa”

French film favorite: “The Unknown Girl” (2016)

In the Dardenne brothers’ “The Unknown Girl”,  Adèle Haenel plays a doctor who investigates a possible murder

Adèle Haenel plays a doctor gets obsessed with the case of a dead woman after learning that the woman had died shortly after having rung her door for help. As Le Monde wrote “the Dardenne brothers have become the masters of a cinema humanist, naturalist, rebel, whose stories feed on the breeding ground of European social misery”

More about this film at IMDB website

Coronavirus: partial activity maintained until December in the tourism sector

“Professionals need long-term support,” said the Secretary of State for Tourism, announcing that recourse to partial unemployment, scheduled until September, would be extended.

In France, the epidemic Covid-19 has already killed 19,708 people in French hospitals, according to data provided by Public Health France. To which must be added the 10,515 deaths recorded in nursing homes and other medico-social centers, the data of which have been gradually raised since the beginning of April. The number of home deaths linked to this epidemic is difficult to calculate and is not yet known. But Olivier Véran, the Minister of Health, declared that this figure would be the subject of first estimates “in June” .

The number of recoveries displayed here corresponds to the returns home of people hospitalized for Covid-19. It does not include people who have been infected and who are cured at home, which is difficult to quantify.

The partial activity mechanism set up for the tourism sector will be extended until the end of 2020, announced Wednesday, July 29, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. Invited on France Info, the Secretary of State for Tourism indicated that the exact modalities of this four-month extension remained to be defined.

Introduced during confinement, this recourse to partial unemployment – both terms are used, but the partial activity does not imply registration with Pôle Emploi and is therefore not considered to be unemployment – had been put in place to help certain sectors to cope with the stoppage or decline in their activity [ . . . ]

Continue at Le MONDE: Coronavirus: partial activity maintained until December in the tourism sector

Brassens 1972

Now an iconic figure in France, Georges Brassens achieved fame through his elegant songs with their harmonically complex music for voice and guitar and articulate, diverse lyrics. He is considered one of France’s most accomplished postwar poets. He has also set to music poems by both well-known and relatively obscure poets, including Louis Aragon (Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux), Victor Hugo (La Légende de la Nonne, Gastibelza), Paul Verlaine, Jean Richepin, François Villon (La Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis), and Antoine Pol (Les Passantes). – Source: Wikipedia