My New Favorite Singer

Are you kidding me?

Here is another version of the same song; if anything she is cuter in this one. She also has a great sweater on, as well as the same false eyelashes.

I have to give credit to this blog for leading me to Sylvie Vartan. I found it while doing a silly search to turn up any bloggers who happened to be Harriet Wheeler fans; her appeal it is easy to see has a strong overlap with 60s French ye-ye singers that I suspected vaguely to exist but had not been able to articulate in concrete terms.

Some other current blogs I think deserve some notice: The Criterion Contraption, in which the writer recounts his experience of watching every movie in the Criterion Collection. This guy seems to work in the film industry in some capacity, and his attention to the technical aspects and details of light, positioning and so on at work in these movies is especially interesting. Here is his essay on The Third Man (#64--I think I may have stolen one of his pictures), which I was recently writing about here, though he makes his points much more clearly than I do. I have always been sympathetic to the Joseph Cotten character, the naive, unsubtle, meddling American who is nonetheless not intimidated by the far more glib, worldly and danger-inured old-worlders he encountered--probably because this type of character seems to be increasingly replaced by a type of American equally naive and ignorant, but passive and overawed in human situations to boot. Holly Martins was not sophisticated or knowledgeable about the situation in which he found himself in the film, but he was also not stupid stupid in the sense of not being capable of responding to a situation at all the way that seems for most people to be the default position. His instinct was to involve himself in every way, which always strikes me as unrealistic but which I, who lack any such instinct, always found admirable. Anyway, this blogger makes a good case for why Graham Greene and the filmmakers definitely did not regard the matter in the same way I do, but regarded this American naivete as dangerous in a numbers of ways, and not just political. I am sure that they really did believe that too, and to an extent they were certainly right as far as Europe is concerned. But that naive Americans should stay home--well, isn't the point that they can't, and that the old world has to contend with them? that the matter can't be helped?

I don't know how I found this guy, or why I find him interesting. He's British, exactly my age, fat, underemployed, just off a nasty divorce, and frequently very angry at all manner of things, the British government, the rich, and everyone else in the establishment not least among them. He writes a ton, and he is quite good at it