#La Presse

[artzyleen]

✨ Owen Teague at the LA premiere for Kingdom of the Planet of the apes ✨

[eretzyisrael]

by Ben Cohen

One of Canada’s leading French-language news outlets abruptly removed a crudely antisemitic caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from its website on Wednesday morning following a storm of protest from Canadian politicians and Jewish advocates.

The image, drawn by veteran cartoonist Serge Chapleau — who has won several awards for his work and was honored with the Order of Canada medal in 2015 — was published by the Montreal-based newspaper La Presse and appeared on the front page of its print edition. It showed Netanyahu as Nosferatu, the titular character of a classic 1922 German Expressionist silent movie about a blood-sucking vampire, Count Orlok, who preys upon a real estate agent and his wife under the cover of purchasing a house and who, later in the film, unleashes a plague of rats onboard a ship on which he is traveling. The film is based on the famous 1897 novel Dracula, set in Romania.

Chapleau’s cartoon imposed Netanyahu’s features on that of a vampire wearing a grim, lifeless expression, with his hands replaced by long claws. An accompanying text displayed the word “Nosfenyahou” — a contraction of “Nosferatu” and the Francophone spelling of Netanyahu’s last name — dripping with blood. Another text beneath declared “On the way to Rafah,” the city in Gaza where Israeli troops have been battling Hamas terrorists.

Historically, antisemitic caricatures of Jews frequently depicted them as blood-suckers, building on earlier Christian libels that falsely accused Jews of using the blood of Christians in their religious rituals. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel, the same motif has appeared across the Arab world in relation to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, with news outlets in Morocco, Jordan, and Qatar all publishing cartoons of Netanyahu drinking the blood and consuming the flesh of Israel’s adversaries.

By the middle of Wednesday morning, La Presse had removed its contribution to the genre following widespread protests on social media. However, the paper has not apologized for the offending image nor offered an explanation as to why it was published to the 860,000 followers of its feed on X/Twitter.

“No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires,” David Frum — a Canadian-American writer and former speechwriter for US President George W. Bush — remarked in a post. Frum added: “That’s how antisemitism often works. A rich inventory of anti-Jewish images and themes pre-exists: the Jew as bloodsucker, the Jew as child-killer, the Jew as alien enemy. When a user wants to vent rage or dislike … the resource accumulated over centuries is waiting for him.”

Canadian politicians who condemned the cartoon included Quebec Senator Leo Housakos, who said he had been “appalled” by it.

“While Mr. Netanyahu, as with any politician, is not above criticism, this kind of antisemitic trope is reminiscent of the 1930s. I’m saddened for Jews across Canada for the level of hate to which we, as Canadians, have co-signed,” Housakos’ X/Twitter post continued.

[spockvarietyhour]

Le dossier témoigne de l'explosion survenue à la Gare Centrale de Montréal. Les documents montrent notamment une conférence de presse et le document envoyé par le suspect quelques jours avant l'attentat. 1984 [archives de la presse]

[by-ng]

La Presse...

[monsieurtranquille]

TRUMP & MUSK MEET

DJT: Was it as good for you as it was for me?

[primepaginequotidiani]

#lapresse https://www.primepaginequotidiani.com/quotidiano.php?id=60

[yesfesnews]

ملخص أخبار الجمعة ونهاية الأسبوع: أزمة اكتظاظ في السجون المغربية وفكّ لغز جريمة قتل مزدوجة مروّعة في تارودانت

أزمة اكتظاظ في السجون المغربية: يُعاني المغرب من اكتظاظٍ حادٍّ في السجون، حيث يفوق عدد السجناء 100 ألف سجين، بينما لا تتعدى الطاقة الاستيعابية 64 ألف سرير. يُعزى الاكتظاظ إلى ارتفاع نسبة الاعتقال الاحتياطي (38%) والمدد السجنية القصيرة. تُطالب الجهات المعنية بعقلنة الاعتقال الاحتياطي باعتباره إجراءً استثنائياً. فكّ لغز جريمة قتل مروّعة في تارودانت: تمكنت المصالح الدركية في تارودانت من توقيف…

[gael-garcia]

Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal with famous roommates Bert & Ernie

[wittysexology]

[mywifeleftme]

319: Gilbert Bécaud // Incroyablement

Incroyablement Gilbert Bécaud 1959, Pathé

The first clip that came up when I searched “Gilbert Bécaud 1950s” opens with the pomaded chanteur in the midst of hurling himself down a curved marble banister. He narrates the slide with a high-pitched grunt of exertion, like Mario nailing a wall jump, hits the floor, bounces, and trots without pause over to a piano in the adjoining room where he begins miming his motormouthed hit “Incroyablement.” It’s clear from the closeups that he really can play the hell out of a piano, but he also gets so caught up in mugging for the camera that he just starts gesticulating with both hands, leaving the instrument to fend for itself. The clip (from 1959’s Croquemitoufle) ends with Bécaud taking a blind leap backwards and landing in the arms of a puzzled dude in a pompous hat who’s walked in on the end of the performance. In the next one I clicked, Bécaud hurriedly tramps through the snow with the cadence of a vintage windup toy and jumps over a stone wall. In the next, he wanders on stage whipping his head worriedly left and right until he locks onto the camera and zooms toward it, a grin of dog-like relief splitting his face. I go on: Bécaud playing air-violin. Bécaud looking much more comfortable dancing like a marionette than embracing Brigitte Bardot.

When I asked girlfriend of the podcast and intrepid French-language correspondent Mea to give me one of her capsule reads on Bécaud (see my Félix Leclerc review), she demurred, saying she didn’t know enough about him, and that relative to contemporaries like Aznavour, Gainsbourg, Brel, et al he’d been “left behind in his era” as she put it. As to why that was, she didn’t exactly know either, but passed along a quote from a La Presse writeup on his career: “Next to tortured geniuses happy men look like imbeciles.” Elton John is proof enough that it doesn’t take an intellectual to write great tunes on the piano, but it must be said: for a man who seemed most comfortable playing the lovable goofball, Bécaud and his various lyricists composed a body of classic songs that compares well to that of any of his contemporaries, much of it imaginative, sophisticated, and touched with genuine poetry.

Incroyablement is a 1959 Canadian compilation that captures a young Bécaud already established as a reliable hitmaker and one of France’s premiere live attractions (hence his nickname, “Monsieur 100,000 volts”), yet still on the cusp of his greatest successes. In some ways Bécaud’s zany physicality anticipated the vibrant energy of rock music, but it also hearkened back to the way singers approached the stage before the advent of the electric microphone. In vaudeville and music hall performers were free to roam, but the microphone rooted them in place, forcing them to narrow the focus of their energy into the temperamental metal appliance mounted to its pole. To paraphrase the aforementioned La Presse article, other singers of Bécaud’s generation stood like trees, but he was a bird in constant motion. He was forever darting away from the mic, like a child who notices his guardian’s attention has wandered, to pound away at his piano or goof with the band or clasp hands with his audience.

I prefer Incroyablement to the later Bécaud compilation in my collection (1968’s Les titres d’or de Gilbert Bécaud) because youth suits him. On “La cruche” he raps about drunken scenes at a bar over zippy hot jazz chords; on “Alors raconte” (“So, Tell Me”) it’s Bécaud who sounds tipsy, telling a shaggy dog story about a woman to an impetuous chorus of whistling oglers; on “Marie, Marie,” a dreamy acoustic ballad, he plays the role of a nebbishy librarian pining over a girl among the stacks. And could he suffer? He could suffer! On “Les croix,” his first hit, he plucks at the heart strings like a master, enumerating the crosses of ruins, convents, and hope chests before revealing his own burden:

And me, poor me I have my cross in my head The immense lead cross Vast as love I hang the wind there I hold back the storm I spend the evening there And I hide the day there And me, poor me I have my cross in my head A word is engraved there Which sounds like “suffering” But this familiar word Let my lips repeat Is so heavy to carry That I think I'll die

Hell yeah man. All of these poses, the melodramatic and the comedic, are ones he’d continue to play till the very end, but it’s all a bit cuter before the cigarettes put a rasp in his voice and he gets that Engelbert Humperdinck bouffant thing going on that makes his head look as wide as it is tall.

If you’re an Anglophone like me, you’re not going to pick up these lyrical specifics without doing some research, but the thing about Bécaud is that he’s so expressive, an artist of such broad gesture, that you really can kinda get the gist of what he’s up on vibes alone. If you’ve any fondness for chanson, or even your Tony Bennett / Dean Martin / Sammy Davis Jr. type crooners, you’ll have a blast with this guy. To quote La Presse’s Stéphane Laporte one more time, “Suffering does not have a monopoly on life: happiness also has its share.” Gilbert had plenty of it on offer.

319/365

[il-predestinato]

"Then you get older, and you look back at moments that maybe you didn't enjoy at the time - that are very funny. Yeah, it was good times."

Charles Leclerc is asked about his karting days with Max Verstappen. 🎥: post-qualifying press conference, 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix

[spockvarietyhour]

Power outage at La Presse, 1998

[fabxpunk]

[primepaginequotidiani]

#lapresse https://www.primepaginequotidiani.com/quotidiano.php?id=60