![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
2
January 10, 2008 at 5:00pm
by Mark Willis
French President Nicholas Sarkozy flew to Egypt with his girlfriend Carla Bruni. [Source: National Post/AFP]
No one tells me any good gossip. This juicy tidbit jumped the shark eons ago and I didn’t learn about it until I heard an angry French rapper on Global Hit while my head was submerged in Walter Benjamin’s theory about art and mechanical reproduction. Guess I need to get a life.
The juice? French President Nicolas Sarkozy is dropping sly hints that he might just marry supermodel Carla Bruni , his girlfriend of two months. Maybe as early as Feb. 9. “It’s serious,” Sarko admitted at a news conference, though he neither confirmed nor denied the date. “There is a strong chance that you’ll learn about it when it’s already happened,” he smirked.
The French media have dined out on this whirlwind romance ever since Sarko and Carla were photographed at Disneyland Paris last month. Sarko divorced Cecilia, his previous supermodel wife, in October.
The National Post reported on Jan. 8:
As in many other areas, the restless Mr. Sarkozy has broken firmly with the tradition by which politicians kept their private lives discreet and were left alone by the press.
But recent opinion polls, which have shown a drop in his approval ratings, have suggested that the public may be tiring of the heavy publicity surrounding the relationship.
A survey in the left-wing daily Liberation on Monday showed 63% of those questioned felt Mr. Sarkozy showed off his private life too much, but the president said it was not his fault that the media followed his every move.
Yep. “Sex, diamonds and rivalry, Reuters reported today, “swirl in the latest chapter of the soap opera gripping France ” Read more.
And that angry rapper?
He calls himself Poison. One of his recent songs contains the lyrics, “Anti-Sarko, anti-right, Nicolas can’t you hear. We’re anti-you.” (It must sound snappier in French above a hypnotic drum track.) Many French hip-hop artists feel this way, according to Global Hit, because Sarko “launched a crackdown against them in 2003 when he was Interior Minister. He accused them of using racist and anti-Semitic language.”
So Poison got even saltier when he learned he’d been working with a record producer, who calls himself DJ Mosey , who turns out to be Sarko’s son Pierre. Oops. It may be global, but it’s still a small world.
2 Comments
#1. a blind flaneur 01.11.2008
[...] Fashionista Street: Sarko & the Supermodel [...]
#2. a blind flaneur 02.02.2008
[...] shark when NPR does a think-piece about it. On The Media rehashed the Carla-Sarko high points (like “Sex, Diamonds, and Rivalry”) in an interview with Michael Young, opinion editor for The Daily Star in Lebanon. One quote [...]
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