Touching Base With France’s Former First Lady Carla Bruni

Carla Bruni
Carla Bruni “I don’t care – do you understand?”

Jeremy Allen interviews Carla Bruni in Paris about her new album French Touch, but politics is strictly interdict. “I wish good luck to Mr and Mrs Trump, I wish good luck to Mr and Mrs Macron, and I don’t care, do you understand?”

Listen: The Quietus | Features | A Quietus Interview | Touching Base With France’s Former First Lady: Carla Bruni Interviewed

Legendary Bordeaux Chateaux Are Now Open for Meals and Sleepovers

These days it’s the insider’s way to best understand the region’s famous wines.

The wine region of Bordeaux, long willfully fusty, is in the midst of a modern tourist boom. Last year saw the opening of the swirling aluminum-and-glass La Cité du Vin, a spectacular high-tech museum devoted to wine and culture. And this July brought a two-hour high-speed train link from Paris.

Now you’ll want to venture beyond town for the real fun: The appellation’s celebrated wine châteaux, whose doors were long shut to tourists, have unveiled dazzling wineries designed by big-name architects. And more than a dozen of them, including billionaire-owned Château Cos d’Estournel, have begun welcoming wine lovers for lunch, dinner, and even overnight stays in opulent rooms overlooking the vines.

In the city of Bordeaux proper, beautiful 18th century buildings have shed their soot to stand gleaming once again as part of a renewal project that helped the municipality gain Unesco World Heritage status in 2007. Jazzy wine bars and inventive chefs have swept in since, upending decades of heavy cuisine doused in buttery sauces. [ . . . ]

More: Legendary Bordeaux Chateaux Are Now Open for Meals and Sleepovers – Bloomberg

Review: “Rest” by Charlotte Gainsbourg

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first proper album since 2010, the upcoming Rest, doesn’t actually represent her first new music in that time—her 2011 set Stage Whisper included unreleased studio material from her sessions with Beck—but its first single builds enigmatically and beguilingly on the way her previous album, IRM, found romance in the void. “Rest” is also, fittingly, the first new Gainsbourg music since she starred in Lars Von Trier’s sensation-causing, sex-depicting 2013 film Nymphomaniac, for which she, with Beck again, breathily covered “Hey Joe.” There were hints of dance-tinged electro-pop on Stage Whisper numbers like “Terrible Angels” and “Paradisco,” so it makes sense that for this song she worked with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

As with Beck, Gainsbourg and Homem-Christo turn out to be stunningly complementary matches. “Rest,” which the two co-wrote and co-produced, doesn’t bring the club thump of French house to Gainsbourg’s arty eclecticism, so much as turn a robot-disco banger inside out to suit Gainsbourg’s ghostly preoccupations. The title phrase, it has been noted, doesn’t only have to refer to a quick breather or nap—it’s also the first word in “Rest in Peace,” and in French it means “stay.” Gainsbourg’s fluttery whisper vacillates between French and English here, entreating unspecified souls to stay while drawing allusions to a song from the 1982 animated film The Snowman, according to a press release (“We’re walking in the air,” she whispers, quoting a song from the soundtrack). That’s set to a muted, laid-back electronic accompaniment that gorgeously befits a more typical idea of “rest,” with a muffled low-end pulse and lithe bass line set amid sparse, elegiac synth-plinks. Gainsbourg’s other Rest collaborators range from Paul McCartney to Owen Pallett, and she’ll be in theaters next month in a mystery horror film called, what else, The Snowman. Her “dead sexy” vision, as a colleague once put it, remains intoxicatingly her own. – Pitchfork

Source: “Rest” by Charlotte Gainsbourg Review | Pitchfork

Kiri Te Kanawa retires

By Michael Stevenson

Bonjour mes amis!

I read this morning on the BBC that opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa says she will never sing in public again.  “I don’t want to hear my voice,” said the soprano, 71, whose career has spanned more than half a century.

“It is in the past. When I’m teaching young singers and hearing beautiful young fresh voices, I don’t want to put my voice next to theirs.”

I don’t listen to much opera, but I do love Kiri Te Kanawa, whom I became a fan of after being introduced to her voice in Merchant-Ivory’s brilliant A Room With A View.  Listen here to Dame Kiri singinging Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro” (“Oh My Beloved Father”), and Chi il Bel Sogno di Doretta.

Could anything be more beautiful? Thank you, Kiri Te Kanawa.