Word: asts
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France's favorite comic-book character is Astérix, a diminutive Gaul who gets loaded on magic potion before beating the daylights out of Caesar's invading legions. In real life, Rome gave France the grape, whose sophisticated cultivation the French now claim as one of their crowning contributions to civilization. Recently, anti-globalization maestro José Bové has adopted Astérix's moustache along with his approach to foreign policy - with U.S. multinationals taking the place of the Roman army. That comic-book reading of 21st century economics prevailed last month in southern France, when Robert...
...churches, Gerard Houckgeest, whose beautifully bare Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent, 1650, is composed with fanatical, emphatic strictness and gave rise to a whole dynasty of memorial church interiors. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would have had to draw them...
...Astérix goes to Seattle. And Brazil...
...this particular Astérix was not content with having captured the French imagination. He quickly parlayed his McDonald's raid into a kind of radical celebrity that has made him the most recognizable global icon of the anti-globalization movement. And he didn't do it by staying on his sheep farm. Bove put in a star appearance at the trashing of the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle late in 1999, and last month helped a group of peasants wreck a Monsanto research farm in Brazil, to protest that company's promotion of genetically modified crops. Bove...
...claim to Astérix's peasant style, but in truth Bove is considerably more urbane. Although born in Bordeaux in 1953, he spent most of his first seven years living in Berkeley, California, where his parents studied biochemistry at the University of California. A college activist who came of age during the aftermath of France's May 1968 student uprising, he moved to the country in 1975 with his wife to join a small farmer movement against the planned expansion of a military base. In 1987, he launched his Confederation Paysanne organization, which organizes small farmers to take actions...