“There is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it.”

Amanda Gorman at the Inauguration of President Biden 1/20/21

“The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.


And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.


Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded.


But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?


We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.


So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.

La Femme: the superchic French band who hoodwinked their way to the red carpet

What do you do if you’ve got the tunes and the look, but can’t get gigs? France’s hottest band relive their ingenious $3,000 gamble

By Michael Hann

It’s hard to imagine a more French version of a rock’n’roll band than La Femme. For all that their second album, Mystère, one of the year’s best, is wholly accessible and dripping with fantastic tunes, it exudes a sense of cool that indie bands rarely manage any more. It tries on a wardrobe of different clothes – psychedelia, surf rock, electronica, krautrock and more – and ends up looking fantastic in all of them. It sounds chic.

It’s also made La Femme proper pop stars in France. As their manager guides me into a brasserie in Strasbourg–Saint-Denis, their home turf in Paris, he’s clutching a copy of Les Inrockuptibles, France’s leading pop culture magazine, to hand to the band’s masterminds, Marlon Magnée and Sacha Got. La Femme are on the cover, although there’s a certain amount of eyebrow-raising about the fact that the only person pictured is their singer, Clémence Quélennec. “It’s like a Vogue cover,” Magnée observes.

Singer Clémence Quélennec.
Singer Clémence Quélennec. Photograph: David Wolff-Patrick/WireImage

At this point, a boiling day in early September, the album has been out a few days, and is No 3 in the midweek charts. When the band’s tour reaches Paris in February, they say, they’ll be headlining the 6,300-capacity Zénith. Proper pop stars, you see. Their increasing popularity, though, has meant they’ve attracted some curious fans. Take George, who is in his 50s and has the words La Femme tattooed across his throat.

“He likes to smoke crazy weed and take a bunch of drugs,” says Magnée. “Before the show begins, he listens to the album and dances everywhere.” At which point Magnée – in so far as he can while cramped into a tiny booth in a crowded brasserie, with his lunch in front of him and a bottle of red on the table – mimes someone dancing in the manner of a deranged ostrich. “Sometimes I have to speak to him. ‘Look, George, I know you’re very happy to be here, but people think you’re weird. And if you’re too weird, they’re going to kick you out.’”

Keyboard-player Magnée and guitarist Got met at secondary school in Biarritz, near the Spanish border, where summer is alive with holidaymakers – and winter is dead. There’s little in the way of live music and nothing much else to do. “There are four bars at a junction where everyone goes to drink,” Magnée says. “But we don’t like it too much, because if you are dressed too rock’n’roll or too hipster or too trendy they call you a fag. So it’s a bit hard to grow up in Biarritz if you are really different.”

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Pauline Croze  “Solution”

Dans « Solution », Pauline Croze continue de raconter et de suivre les mouvements de son époque.

2020 was, among other things, the year of Pauline Croze’s return . The artist had indeed followed his album Do nothing , released in 2018, and published three titles, “Humans”, “Kim” and “The world”.

A new clip completes the trilogy and takes a further step towards a new opus. In “Solution”, Pauline continues to tell and follow the movements of her time. His French song is thus dressed in a pop dress more rhythmic and more fashionable.

While her graceful voice recounts, with a touch of irony and subversion, the quest for ultimate happiness, the clip illustrates humans repeating the same gestures over and over. The superb drawings and paintings by Fabienne Wagenaar and Sandrine Stoïanov add character to an already successful piece.

What if mixing the arts was the “Solution” to save “The World” from “Humans” and “Kim” (Jong-Un)?

Source LE CARGO: Pauline Croze – Solution [videos> clips]

Call My Agent: the French TV hit that viewers and actors adore

The comedy, whose fourth series hits Netflix this week, shows France’s TV can match its film

Fast approaching 50 and fed up after two exhausting decades at Artmedia, the top talent agency in Paris, Dominique Besnehard decided, one day in 2005, that he would quite like to turn his hand to producing something of his own.

“At the time,” Besnehard told Le Monde, “Desperate Housewives was all over the telly, a huge success. I just thought, with a couple of colleagues, we could maybe make a series a bit like that, but about the job we do for a living.”

Call My Agent, whose fourth series starts on Netflix this week, is now a huge hit – and has, along with Spiral and The Bureau, two other acclaimed series, fully and perhaps finally disproved the dictum that France is as bad at TV drama as it is good at cinema.

“France is really benefiting from a global trend in TV series towards strong, original, local stories, anchored in their territory and free of American and British norms,” said Laurence Herszberg, director of the international Series Mania festival.

The show, she said, was so big because it was “set in a milieu we don’t know well but would like to; because the agents are sympathetic and passionate and people like them even more than the guest stars; because it’s very French – it’s in Paris, it has office love affairs … And because it’s on Netflix.”

Call My Agent, whose French title is Dix pour Cent (for the 10% fee French agents charge actors), draws between 3 and 4 million viewers on public broadcaster France 2 and is available around the world on the streaming service.

Continue reading “Call My Agent: the French TV hit that viewers and actors adore” →