"They just keep going. They don’t care about anyone.... They’re all French. The French mentality is that even if something is banned, you still do it and it doesn’t matter."

Said Chantal, 73, from the French city Nancy, quoted in "Why Parisians have declared war on reckless cyclists/Efforts to turn the French capital into a two-wheeled paradise are running into opposition from those who think riders are a 'symbol of aggression'" (London Times).

Closer to home, the London Times also has this, about bikes in Britain: "My day on the super e-bikes fuelling the phone-snatching epidemic/Small, speedy and silent, electric off-roaders are the criminals’ vehicle of choice and helping power an urban crime wave."

"This is not Poland or Lithuania or France, where the locals were only waiting for a Nazi invasion to sanction their existing dreams of domestic Jew-clearance. "

"This is London, where (I cannot speak of it without tears) the working people of the East End stood alongside their Jewish neighbours to fight off Mosley’s blackshirts — rather than, say, posting Instagram stories about how there are two sides to every story. Nor indeed can I pretend that I, fully secularised, church-married with a gentile wife and half-blood kids, would be in the front line, should antisemitic push (of the kind being seen in universities, at The Guardian, in graffiti on schools and Holocaust libraries, and at these almost daily demonstrations in London by the bourgeois jihaderati) come to genocidal shove. But the fact is that the world feels very dangerous at the moment. Very horrible. And in every Jewish family — every single one, mark you — there rumble tales of the prescient recent ancestor who had the sense to get out of wherever they were before it was too late, which is why we are all here, today. There are no good stories about the ones who said, 'meh, it’s all being overblown, that could never happen in Lodz, Kiev, Paris, Salonika.'..."

 
Writes Giles Coren, in "We talk about getting out — just not there/My ancestors fled rising antisemitism before it was too late but I really don’t want to end up in rainy New Zealand" (London Times).

"On Wednesday, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that tourists’ using the [Tate Museum's] viewing platform was 'a clear case of nuisance' even if ogling homeowners was not their purpose."

I'm reading "Tate Modern’s Viewing Platform Is a Nuisance, Top U.K. Court Says/For years, tourists could look from the top of London’s most popular art museum into the apartments opposite. Soon, they may be permanently stopped from doing so" (NYT).

For Saturday, take a journey through 12 TikToks, arranged meaningfully... or so some people think.

1. Maybe you'll say "I remember the old pole."

2. London women who don't like American women are not too likable themselves.

3. How you would love it if your candidate were this loved.

4. A vertiginous ride.

5. A vertiginous walk.

6. The workhouse museum.

7. The meaning of life in eating your toast.

8. The butter board?!

9. Oh, Wisconsin!

10. When Anne Bancroft met Mel Brooks.

11. Saving a seal.

12. A dog carps about the stuck traffic.

"The understanding is that the fourth plinth is being reserved for Queen Elizabeth II."

Said Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, back in 2013, quoted in "Queen Elizabeth II statue may ascend fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square" (London Times). 

We're told that the 4th plinth "has been deliberately kept vacant without a permanent memorial for the past 20 years." "Vacant," but filled with "a succession of temporary artwork installations."

Here's a London Times column by Jawad Iqbal — from last year — complaining about the quality of the temporary art that has occupied the plinth.

"He leaves Marseille. He steals a car. He wants to sleep with the girl again. She doesn’t. In the end, he either dies or leaves — to be decided."

That's what Jean-Luc Godard put on paper for Jean-Paul Belmondo for "Breathless," and the rest was improvisation, according to Belmondo, quoted in "Jean-Paul Belmondo, jaunty star of New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’ dies at 88" (WaPo).

He added that he was comfortable with a film almost wholly dependent on improvisation. “If I’m told exactly how to do everything,” he said, “I become stiff and uncomfortable.” He embraced Godard’s suggestion to “play around” with the character. 

Knowing that Mr. Belmondo liked to shadowbox in character, Godard filmed him boxing in front of a mirror as he experimented with his lines: “I’m not much of a looker, but I’m quite a boxer.” 

The film — sexy, witty, youthful and fatalistic — became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Belmondo became the subject of articles chronicling “le belmondisme,” his appealing air of insouciance.

AND: There's much to say about Jean-Paul Belmondo, but this is a blog, so I'll just say one thing that is important to me. He makes a prominent appearance in the Donovan song "Sunny South Kensington" — (on the delightful "Mellow Yellow" album). 

The chorus begins with the name Jean-Paul Belmondo:

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mary Quant got stoned to say the least 

Ginsberg, he ended up dry and so he took a trip out East

What's in the verses? We're invited to take a walk in the London neighborhood of South Kensington, "a groovy place to live." Donovan points out the various characters — girl in a silk blouse who "ain't no freak," "a fella with a cane umbrella" — and tells us how we might act: "flip out, skip out, trip out" and "spread your wings."

Ginsberg is presumably Allen Ginsberg, who was famously in London in 1965. The "Mellow Yellow" album came out in 1966. When did Ginsberg go to India and why? We could read this from an Indian website from 2019: "Disillusioned with America, did the poet Allen Ginsberg find an antidote to rationality in India?" ("India turned his attention 'away from his cosmic obsessions and toward the humanity around him in the swarming streets of Kolkata and Varanasi'"). 

As for Mary Quant, she was celebrated last year in at the V&A South Kensington Museum — South Kensington, the place where Donovan pictured her stoned in 1966 — and here's the museum's video, intended to capture that 60s vibe, half a century after the fact:

 

I can attest to the fact that the false eyelashes I'm wearing in that picture I used in the sidebar on my now defunct blog The Time That Blog Forgot were Mary Quant eyelashes. The photo was taken by my father in 1968, when I would have been thrilled to wear anything and everything Mary Quant, and my Aunt Dorothy, who lived in London, sent me those eyelashes.

Glimpsing The Beatles, Bill Maher, Margaret Thatcher, and — above all! — Craig Brown.

I read Craig Brown's "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" — as I noted here — so the minute I see that he's got a new book, "150 Glimpses of the Beatles," I put it in my Kindle. Nothing more is needed to get me. It's Craig Brown! And The Beatles.

But I'm interested to see what Bill Maher — of all people — has to say about it in the New York Times. Let's read this:

I like the old stories — frankly, if I wanted something challenging to read, I wouldn’t be reading “150 Glimpses of the Beatles.”... Glimpse No. 53 begins: “For Christmas 1964, when I was 7, my brothers and I were given Beatles wigs by our parents.” If you change 7 to 8 and brothers to sister, I could have written the exact same sentence. So I knew I was disposed to like this book — and I did....