Random French bits I picked up in the past week that don’t merit a post in and of themselves.
- I watched the first one and a half episodes of the Netflix series Marseille. It’s more or less the French equivalent of House of Cards, but with Gérard Depardieu taking the role of Kevin Spacey. It’s unclear to me how explicitly Netflix meant it to be a direct adaptation of the concept, but others have noticed the obvious parallels as well. One can only hope that Netflix didn’t mean to have their leading actor plagued by sexual assault scandals, but Depardieu seems to have that in common with Spacey as well. So far I’m willing to separate the art from the man and haven’t given up on watching Depardieu films. I’ll see if this TV series is worth watching more of.
- In this week’s French conversation lesson I found myself explaining how I met a French-teacher friend, and then I found myself explaining my mathematics graduate school career and why I left, and then I found myself explaining my advisor’s research, and next thing you know I’m explaining the five families of modern cryptography schemes and the corresponding hard math problem each one is based on. I was able to get across most of the ideas (and kudos to my teacher for sticking with me on this), but I lacked some of the technical terms in French for various mathematical objects. It’s times like these I wish I had reviewed Cryptographie sur les courbes elliptiques in advance of my lesson.
- Google News and YouTube keep feeding me various Georges Brassens materials, which are all the rage as we draw near the 100th anniversary of his birth in October 2021. This one is a particular gem. It’s an hour-long TV program from 1972 (Bienvenue à George Brassens) that has Brassens in a cozy setting surrounded by maybe 100 members of a television audience. The show interleaves performances with interviews, and many of Brassens collaborators are present and participate in the discussions. A large part of the charm of this particular video is the anonymous audience members in all their 1970’s glory. Look at the hair styles, what they are wearing, how and what they smoke, and their reactions to his sometimes ribald songs. I have some sense of what Americans in the 1970’s were like, as I lived through 90% of the seventies and watched plenty of movies and films from that time. But French styles in the 1970s were different, so this is a nifty look back through both time and space.
Brassens is also charming and disarming with his total lack of pretentiousness.
- I watched a couple more videos from Manon Bril’s channel C’est une autre histoire. I’m going through them chronologically just for the heck of it. She’s OK at the beginning but based on a few later ones I’ve seen she gets a good deal better as she goes. The one about Zeus, Sex, and Power was only OK. The one about Le jugement de Pâris was better.
- I finally got around to watching the final two episodes of the Netflix series Lupin. They were OK, but the plot holes were large enough to drive une fourgonne through. It’s better if you just enjoy the scenes and the acting and don’t worry too much about how it all fits together. I’ve read one Lupin short story long ago, but ordered from my local bookstore one of the re-issues that the success of the Netflix series has spawned. It’s taking a while to arrive, but I’ll read it someday …