...for operatic French pop.
It's getting late. A storm is brewing outside.
I know!
Johnny Hallyday!
My high school French is just up to figuring out that I don't need to know exactly what he's saying. "les gens qui cherchent la lumiere... les femmes qui pleurent..." (people who search for the light, women who cry...) Good enough for me.
He could definitely be singing about the painful transition from a centrally-planned Communist economy to a free market one.
Here's Johnny...
Yes, just right. The people in this video could be trapped in Soviet-era Slovakia... and he's exhorting them, "live for the best" (what's the English idiom for this?).
Fittingly for me, as more of a film person than a music person, I first became aware of Hallyday as an actor, in Man on a Train (2003, dir. Patrice LeConte). A huge star in France--"the French Elvis"--he is little known here in the US. I see on his Wikipedia entry, he's even nicknamed "the biggest rock star you've never heard of".
This is one of the weird things about being an American (something I've been thinking about that I'd like to write more about)--growing up with the assumption, held by everyone around you, that the world revolves around your culture and then discovering there are honking huge chunks of art, life, love that are fucking fantastic, that have nothing to do with the USA, and that nobody told you about. Heavens.
____________
I just finished Slovakia, more or less. So I'm in a weird mood. A dinner of Star Trek cereal and vodka and tonic didn't help me feeling all mopey and insufficient.
There're still lots of ragged ends, stuff I'll have to rework when it comes back from the editor. How do you explain the transition from a centrally planned Communist economy to a capitalist free market to eighth graders... especially when you barely understand it yourself? And it's all so desperately important and interesting.
Life seems so BIG... and impossible.
You know. The unbearable lightness of being...
Oh, dear.
Yes, definitely in the mood for Johnny Hallyday.
