Bright Song for a Dark Night

I posted something lighter-hearted earlier today; now that seems inappropriate. Maybe it will come back on a better day.

Tonight there can only be Piaf, the Little Sparrow and her "Hymne à l'amour."  I have to believe, no matter how the awful the moment may be, love will win. It seems a fine and correct coincidence that the film this is from is called Paris Still Sings.

Maybe not tonight, but it will again, and soon. Love wins.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: A Piece of Happiness...

It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides 

the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy. 

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Birthday Girl: No Regrets

Édith Givovanna Gassion was born 94 years ago, and after surviving a childhood of ultra-Dickensian horridness, she found a new name, Piaf, and international fame rivaled by few.

We see her here in 1962, at almost the end of her long, strange trip, singing a song that, although she debuted it only a year earlier and had less than one year left, has become one of the ones with which she is most closely identified.

If anyone on earth had cause to regrette beaucoup, it would have been she, but I dare anyone not to believe her...

Piaf

She's on my mind.

Diva 101

Take a tip from Mlle. Piaf: never underrate the power of gesture. Think sweeping, think drama, think raw emotion.

Too big is impossible. But: at all costs, avoid Jazz Hands (unless your last name is Minnelli; odds are, it isn't).

Milord

This is, I think, one of the most purely French moments ever caught on film, and a revelation if you have only ever heard the recording. Live, Piaf is like some kind of Gallic blues-shouter. She is sick, old, raddled, exhausted - and feral, terrifying, seductive, genius.

Her effect on the audience can be gauged by the storm of an ovation that ends the clip, all the more amazing when you see how she is literally holding herself up, clutching the stage curtain.

For the rather more sedate version peddled, a few years earlier, to American audiences on the Ed Sullivan show (and an example of Piaf's charming way with English), you might watch this clip. But here we see the real, untrammeled, tragic/triumphant thing.

Les Girls!

Since we seem to be on a kind of francophilic kick today, how about a flash mob of fierce Frenchosity? These ladies are formidable in more ways than one:

Mistinguett

de Beauvoir

Colette

Chanel

Moreau

...et bien sur, la Môme.

It must be something in the water...