Just over a week ago the Immigrant was in Recife, Brazil, where at five thirty a.m. the sun is so brilliant it gives you an ice-cream headache.  Not to be too reductive, but maybe this helps explain why despite hunger poverty and a violent-crime rate to rival downtown Detroit’s, Brazilians have forthright smiles and […]

PART ONE: PUTTING THE ‘SOCIAL’ BACK IN SOCIALISM Politics invites paradox.  In last year’s national election the French Socialist PS ran chic, upper-class candidate Segolene Royal against the right-wing UMP’s scrappy, Hungarian-immigrant boss, Nicholas Sarkozy.  Since then, despite Sarko’s grating excesses, the opposition Parti Socialiste has been looking more and more like PS, as in […]

While in the US last week I was often asked: how is the middle-class French person (Joe sixpack’s pal, ‘Jacques vin-ordinaire’) reacting to global economic bust?  Being then in the US, where the brownout on news from Europe dates back to 1620, I had no clue.  But now after a few days home in the […]

Reaching back to mid-December, for a moment worth noting. On a cold sunday afternoon, thanks to my writer-friend michel g. who had tix but a book-signing elsewhere, i found my way to an invite-only, free movie screening hosted by the mairie of the 11th arrondissement.  Out near pere lachaise cemetery, in a social center hidden […]

LA NOSTALGIE DU BOUT?  The municipal gardeners are hard at work trashing bedraggled remnants of the holidays, while the semi-annual sales hysteria has calmed down to a few pairs of outlandish shoes in barren shop windows.  Yesterday was Ash Wednesday: to dust we will return. Did President Sarkozy, recently on a campaign to return Catholicism […]