La France n'existe pas

[joanna bujes]

At 10:52 AM 02/22/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Doug is right on. Francs were broad, beautiful, and distinctly French.
>Guilders were a showcase of Dutch graphic design. The EU threw away the art
>on its banknotes for this faceless Euro paper, which is like eurocars, the
>Audiwagens that you can't tell apart without looking at the logo. It's a
>lowest-common-denominator committee creature and as such has been embraced
>wholeheartedly by the French almost on day 1. Abandoning their /terroir/
>where the roots of their culture once were, deserting their cafes and
>working-class musettes, swearing off the wine that cuts down their
>efficiency, reducing their /midi/ to a measly salad or - ugh - hamburger,
>and now chucking away Marianne, who adorned their coins, all that the French
>"exception culturelle" now amounts to really is sex.

Never had sex with a Frenchman/woman and I have never seen any other 
evidence for the "exception culturelle" having anything to do with sex...do 
enlighten me on this one if you can. But the last few times I was in 
France, the overwhelming feeling I got was that French "culture" is mostly 
for the tourists and it is ALL stuff that was created/built/painted a 
hundred years ago at the latest. Contemporary French culture is a 
laughable, anemic simulation of various world threads: rap, reggae, bad 
action movies, etc.

In short, agree wholeheartedly and can't tell how sex is an exception to 
the general trend.

Joanna