The Best Defense for French Wine Growers? Bats!

Wine, for when you want to party but still feel classy about it. Like all edible alcohol, wine comes from fermentation, and for millennia artisans have honed their craft at turning humble grapes into the drink of the gods. So suffice it to say growing good grapes is crucial to making good wine.

That’s why French wine growers have such a beef with moths. These thirsty bootleg butterfly bugs love swooping down and eating grapes right off the vine. They have the nerve to get between us and our wine! But fear not, a recent wine industry study revealed that in the War For Wine we have an animal kingdom ally in the fight against moths, an animal we’re already used to associating with superheroics. It turns out bats are the best natural defense wine can get.

It’s really just the food cycle wine growers should be thankful for. Of the 22 local Bordeaux bat species, researchers observed that 19 of them specifically love to feast on moths that target wine grapes. Droppings analysis confirmed that it was these harmful moths being preyed on. Other insects were spared.

With this knowledge, wine growers could use these bats to their advantage. They could act like organic pesticides, clearing the fields of insects while not introducing harmful chemicals into the ecosystem. It would take some effort though. The bats instinctively hunt in wilder regions, so they would have to be somehow funneled towards these domesticated vineyards [ . . . ]

Read morea at GREEK.com: The Best Defense for French Wine Growers? Bats! – Geek.com

Isabelle Huppert, teacher transformed into “Madame Hyde”, inspired by Stevenson

Isabelle Huppert as a clumsy teacher, Romain Duris as headmaster

[Google Translation / CULTUREBOX]
This crazy movie far from realism, is the opportunity for a new meeting between Isabelle Huppert and Serge Bozon. The star, awarded in 2017 by a Golden Globe and a César for her role in “Elle” Paul Verhoeven, had already shot under the direction of the director five years ago in the highly unclassifiable “Tip Top”, in which she embodied an inspector of police with Sandrine Kiberlain.

This time, the French actress is Madame Géquil, bad teacher unsure of her in a suburban high school to the colorful headmaster (Romain Duris), married to a homemaker (José Garcia). One day, struck down during an experiment in her laboratory, she will feel a new energy in her, which will allow her to finally transmit her knowledge to her students, and especially to one of them.

“A film about education and the transmission of knowledge”, according to Bozon

The idea of ​​the film, which transposes Stevenson’s book into the feminine and into the world of school, was first born in the spirit of the co-writer of the film Axelle Ropert. “What seemed interesting to me was the film about education whose heroine is a teacher in check, and failed since the beginning of his career,” said Serge Bozon.
“We needed the fantastic to get it to something other than its eternal failure”, adds the director, for whom “the film is perhaps at the crossroads of different genres, but at the same time it is finally very focused on a only one question, that of education “and the transmission of knowledge.

The actress as we see it rarely, as a fearful woman

The 45-year-old director also said he found “interesting to look at Isabelle Huppert a dimension she had never explored”. “She usually plays strong, assertive characters, which goes with the question of authority, of violence.There is the opposite: she plays a very weak character at first, completely cowardly, fearful, who lives in the shadow of his permanent failure, “he analyzes.
The fantasy of the film, far from all realism and with stylized characters and outraged, also allows him to be “more frontal”, he analyzes. “The refusal of realism for me, it is what allows to go to the essential”.

Source: Isabelle Huppert, teacher transformed into “Madame Hyde”, inspired by Stevenson

Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid

The theater of Croix-Rousse in Lyon poses both feet in the legend of the American Great West with “Calamity / Billy”. Claron McFadden and Bertrand Belin form a terribly attractive duo. At the helm of this musical tale, Jean Lacornerie and Gérard Lecointe plunge into the scabrous universe of these two emblematic figures. After Lyon, the show will tour all over France.

A mother and a kid: Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid, two founding figures of the American myth. Two bad guys who are dear to us, desperados and so human. From her, we know the letters to her daughter, clumsy, loving … And apocryphal. From the terrible child, there remain documents, police reports, testimonies of which Michael Ondaatje drew a poetic work. It is for them, and around these writings, to tell their tragic destinies that meet some great figures of the music of today.

The Limiñanas: Shadow People

It’s easy to make The Limiñanas’ brand of rock ‘n’ roll sound cool.

Plug in some amps. Make ‘em buzz. Pound out an ominous, tom-heavy drumbeat. Play one note on the bass a hundred times. Write a cool guitar lick and repeat it. Get a dude or gal to lay down diabolically droning vocals. Cultivate a psychedelic vibe, man.

So yeah…it’s pretty easy to make that concoction sound cool. It’s much harder to make it sound interesting.

The Limiñanas have the cool part down. The French duo has been pumping out buzzy psych-rock with a shadowy vibe for a decade, consistently releasing their work via ultra-hip record labels (Hozac, Trouble in Mind, and now Because Music). Their music is the aural equivalent of a shapely cloud of cigarette smoke hanging elegantly in a ray of light…with sunglasses on.

The band’s new album Shadow People has its share of that stuff. Opener “Ouverture” pairs a steady, stomping beat with a guitar line that seems to be descending stairs that go down forever. The reverbed guitars and spoken French vocals of “Le Premier Jour” blend into something like Serge Gainsbourg doing slo-mo surf-rock.

“Dimanche” follows a slightly quicker pace and features windswept, high-pitched sounds for flavor. And closing track “De La Part Des Copains” pushes The Limiñanas through a cinematic filter; its mournful horns tell a vivid story without uttering a word. (Lionel and Marie Limiñana should do film scores, if they’re not already.)

Elsewhere, the band does explore other sonic ideas, too, often through the work of guests. Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe adds a little sizzle to “Istanbul is Sleepy” with his simmering vocal, and New Order bassist Peter Hook injects “The Gift” with a sense of swing and a bit of bounce that’s nowhere else to be found on Shadow People.

On “Motorizatti Marie,” The Limiñanas showcase their punk streak and lighten the mood with some piano. “Pink Flamingos” belongs on the soundtrack to a candy-coated, English-language dream. But the band’s most successful trip comes on the title track, which soars higher anything else on the album, thanks in part to the buoyant guest vocals of French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

There are truly transcendent moments on Shadow People, they’re just nestled in among the ones that never quite lift off. Add it all up and The Limiñanas remain a very cool band, which is a perfectly fine thing to be

Source: PASTE MAGAZINE The Limiñanas: Shadow People Review :: Music :: Reviews :: The Limiñanas :: Paste