Category: Culture

“The Incredible History of Sex”: a world tour of eroticism in comics

After “Sex Story” published in 2016, the psychiatrist Philippe Brenot and the designer Laetitia Coryn deliver “The Incredible history of sex”.

By Christophe Levent 

On January 3, 2021 at 15h13

They put the cover back. With “Sex Story”, in 2016 , Philippe Brenot – psychiatrist, anthropologist, couple therapist – and cartoonist Laetitia Corbyn signed the first history of sexuality in comics, from prehistory to the present day. A real success: the book has sold 80,000 copies and is the subject of 14 foreign translations, even entitled to the honors of the Wall Street Journal. They are back today with Volume II, “The Incredible History of Sex, from Africa to Asia”. A work that completes the previous one, devoted solely to the Western world.

“For me, it’s the same book actually. Initially, we wanted to do just one. But a 500-page comic, that’s a lot… The subject is so vast. What is certain is that the form of the graphic novel is perfect: an essay on the history of sexuality, that would be a bit annoying to read, ”said the sexologist. But make no mistake about it. If the images are explicit, although often enhanced with a touch of humor, the background is very serious, based on months and months of research and a dense bibliography.

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Call My Agent: the French comedy gem A-listers are desperate to star in

The sharp, hilarious look at the hell of being an agent already features everyone from Juliette Binoche to Isabelle Huppert sending themselves up. Now, Hollywood has come knocking

The pilot opens with an unannounced arrival (of ingénue Camille, aggro agent Mathias’s hidden daughter) and an untimely death (of founder Samuel Kerr, who swallows a wasp while on holiday in Brazil). Mathias and his colleagues, Andréa, Gabriel and Arlette, are thrown into a frenetic power struggle both among themselves and in the wider film industry. Stars threaten to leave ASK, Kerr’s widow and heir threatens to shut up shop, and private passions, usually held at bay, threaten to derail everything.

If the show’s premise is somewhat predictable, its handling of fame is altogether less so. Each episode features a titular guest star – BéatriceDalle, Cécile de France, Guy Marchand – but rather than being written as the focal point, the big name is instead that day’s worry to assuage, the problem to be fixed. Call My Agent does that rare thing that interviews often fail to achieve, and makes these people, who live decidedly abnormal lives, very normal.

There are administratively challenged actors who need help answering emails and vetting nannies, and matrimonially challenged stars who want help finding a date. There’s the actor who can’t drive, the actor who can’t swim and the actor who suddenly can’t act. There’s one who, as Andrea puts it, is “doing a Day Lewis”, and can’t stop acting, unable to come out of a very intense Revenant-style survival role. He ends up being dropped from his subsequent gig as a clean-shaven banker when he literally attacks the producer’s dog, with his teeth.

However, instead of ramping up the self-deprecation implicit in these big-screen stereotypes as Extras did, or as you can imagine a W1A-style British remake might, the talent here is treated with tenderness, and not a small amount of poetry. And by ‘talent’ I mean not just the people (actors and directors) but the artform itself: the show is an ode to cinema. It is French, after all.

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A Few Favorite French Christmas Traditions

By Catherine Rickman

Christmastime is all about pomp and circumstance and tradition, and who does tradition better than the meticulous French? In this video from France-based New Zealander Rosie (AKA Not Even French, currently back in NZ for quarantine), you’ll get to explore a few of the fun habits the French have picked up over several hundred Decembers.

Some things are similar, like Santa Claus or Père Noël, but did you know about his spooky brother, Père Fouettard? How about what a papillote is? Or what French children leave out for Santa instead of stockings? Rosie touches on things like the religious remnants of Catholic France, like the popularity of calendriers de l’avent or the handmade santons in a crèche, or nativity scene. She covers Réveillon, the great Christmas Eve feast (more on that here), and mentions the delicious Treize Desserts popular in Provence. And we’ll help fill in her gaps on knowledge of French Christmas songs in this list.

So whether you’re spending Christmas in France, or just dreaming of the vitrines at the Galeries Lafayette, enjoy this little sampler of French holiday customs this season.

Source: A Few Favorite French Christmas Traditions – Frenchly

Man of our times: Why Albert Camus matters today – The Debate

He’s been gone six decades but after 2020, it feels like French literary great Albert Camus matters more than ever. The year began with tributes for the 60th anniversary of the French existentialist icon’s premature death in a car crash. Then came Covid-19. And readers locked down the world over dusted off that go-to guide, “The Plague”, to make sense of the randomly unexpected. We ask our panel about the re-reading of a novel set in Camus’s native Algeria in the wake of World War II. But it’s not just “The Plague” that is timeless.

In all of the Nobel literature laureate’s plays, essays and novels, protagonists struggle to understand where they belong in times of upheaval. Just look at today. We live in an age of alienation, identity politics, the loss of a sense of self. A bit like in “The Stranger” – also set in colonial Algeria.

What would Camus have made of 2020 and the age of digital discourse, where powered by tribal echo chambers, we judge and sometimes sentence our peers? When Covid-19 is long behind us, “The Fall” will still be worth re-reading. We tell you why.

Produced by Alessandro Xenos, Juliette Laurain and Imen Melllaz

Source FRANCE 24: Man of our times: Why Albert Camus matters today – The Debate