Balloons, Toothbrushes and Jetpacks

Another great gig at the cabaret of the Cartonnerie... Cultural activities are getting better and better in this city, I do think Reims is slowly waking up.

Libelul was an unoriginal but enjoyable indie pop duo from Brussels, which sounded a bit like Death Cab for Cutie or Jimmy Eat World with a hint of electronica.

Then came the main support act, the Swedish Thus:Owls, (pictured above) fronted by a girl who was sporting a Joni Mitchell-like dress and who sang like Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond. The band was obviously influenced by celtic music, but there was a heavy dose of psychedelia and quite a dark edge. It wasn't unlike what I imagine goth folk band Espers would sound like if they started covering the seventies psych folk band Trees...

Finally Patrick Watson (below) started playing... I love the indescribable form of baroque pop of his albums (in 2007 he won the Polaris Music Prize for best Canadian album, beating fellow nominees Feist and the Arcade Fire), but I was expecting Watson to be one of those pretentious singer/songwriters who stare at their piano keys during the whole concert.
But he actually turned out to be very charismatic, and great at engaging the audience. He kept cracking jokes with his bandmates and chatting away to us in his Quebecan French. He got everyone singing happy birthday for one of the sound technicians, and for the encore, he walked through the audience, singing into a strange Tim Burton-like contraption which was strapped on his back and that he called the "megasuit". It basically looked like a jetpack with half a dozen megaphones sticking out of it. His band made use of instruments in some of the most creative ways I've ever seen. The guitarist did things I've never seen anyone do with a guitar (he played it with a toothbrush at one point); the drummer/percussionist would often draw a bow against a saw; and there were also balloons, Fischer Price kiddies toys, toothpicks and countless other weird objects-turned-instruments... It was one of the most entertaining and "interactive" gigs I've ever been to. And it just shows you that you can make "serious" music without taking yourself seriously. Very refreshing.

Sixties Caesar

Thursday night I went to see Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, played by the American Repertory Theater company. I hadn't been to see a play in ages; the last one I'd seen was Othello at the Globe in London, a couple of years ago. I'd forgotten how much I loved the theatre!
I used to go quite often, when I lived in Château-Thierry. They had two small local theatres and they always had something interesting on. And my high school literature teachers often organised trips to Reims to see plays there.

The Comédie de Reims is a really good theatre. A great variety of plays are staged there, sometimes in French, sometimes in the play's original language. Most of those I saw there were really interesting; a few were pretty bad—the kind of plays where the director gets the female lead to show her tits, probably hoping that this will somehow compensate for the play's mediocrity.

I think I can safely say that the ART's Julias Caesar was one of the best plays I've ever seen. Several critics accused it of being too "facetious", or too difficult to understand, because of its style. But I think the director, Arthur Nauzyciel, really brought the characters—and the play itsel—to life, which is quite an achievement in itself: Julias Caesar is far from being one of Shakespeare's greatest plays (the plot is quite basic, the characters are very one-dimensional when compared to Hamlet, or MacBeth, or Lear). He stuck close to the text, but brought to it a depth which is lacking in the original.

It was full of surprises. The play was re-set in America in the 1960s, probably to draw parallels between Caesar and JFK's assassination. It was fun to hear Shakespeare played with an American accent, for a change! The actors were dressed in sixties-style suits, and surrounded by mod couches, lamps and armchairs. They often walked about with a glass of wine in their hands, as if they had walked out of some fancy cocktail-party.
The background was a huge, life-size photograph of an empty theatre (see below), which, as a classic postmodern device, kept reminding the spectators that what they were watching was fiction, not "real life". I'm sure Shakespare would have appreciated that, as he always liked to remind his audience that all the stage did was reflect the world. At the beginning of the play, the actors faced the audience, in front of huge white frames, which made them look like celebrities caught on one of Andy Warhol's prints.
The actors were quite talented, especially Mark Montgomery, in the role of Cassius. A lot of them had film/TV experience: one appeared in The Dead Poet Society, another in The Wire. One of the actors (who played Brutus's servant, Lucius) delivered all of his "lines" in sign language; his character was ever present on stage, most of the time sleeping, or looking at the other characters, as if he were in a dream. At one point of the play he disappeared, and walked back on stage dressed in a pair of Superman pyjamas and a cape. I'm not quite sure what the director was trying to get at there!
But the most surprising thing of all was that a jazz trio was present on the side of the stage during the whole play. From time to time the singer, in her black evening gown and covered in silver jewellery, would start crooning into a ribbon microphone, while two men in suits and bow tie suavely plucked the double bass and picked the guitar. The songs marked the end of scenes, or sometimes even interrupt scenes to ironically comment, in a way, what was happening (a few scenes before Brutus's suicide, she sang... "Suicide is Painless"); it had also had the effect of being a show within a show.

All in all, I had a great time. The only annoying thing is that, since I managed to get a good seat, I was surrounded by the Fur Squad—ie the bourgeoisie of Reims—who always show up at the theatre (or at the jazz festival), just because they hope to be seen, and they always end up sitting there bored to death, since they don't have the foggiest notion about art.

The French Connection #1

C'est décidé. I'm going to initiate myself to French culture—something I've managed to avoid for twenty years despite the fact that I've been living in the country for all that time.

But I don’t mean French high culture. I already enjoy French literature, French painting, French classical music, French kissing and French cancan. I mean French popular culture. It's something I've always snubbed.

I'm starting with cinema. I've always found modern French acting to be, well, frankly, terrible. And most of the French films I've seen (apart from a few exceptions) I didn't like, either because it wasn't my type of humour, either because they've been the kind of films with scenes where you see a close up of a man washing his hands in the sink for five minutes straight (as one friend from Norn Iron once put it). But I decided to give it another chance. I thought I'd start with the nouvelle vague, an influential movement in cinema which started in France in the 1960s.

So last week I watched Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville. I thought it would be an easy start, since it's science fiction: I wasn't disappointed. It was brilliant. It wasn't like the American sci-fi B-movies of the time. No airships, no spacesuits, nothing extra-terrestrial; the setting was a French city in a not too distant fascist future. (Everything was shot in real locations in Paris.) There were a lot of themes apparently inspired from 1984 and Brave New World, but with a distinctive French touch. It was exciting, and fun to watch, but there were some very interesting shots, which had an experimental feel to them that hasn't been lost, even when being viewed today. And the acting... well, I was expecting bad, affected acting. But the actors were really talented, especially Anna Karina (pictured left), a sort of French Diana Rigg or Audrey Hepburn. (I actually found out afterwards that she was Danish-born, and that the lead male actor, Eddie Constantine, was born in LA, but I don't know if that has anything to do with the acting style).

Anyway I think I'm a convert, and I'm ready to see my next 1960s French movie... Probably Godard's Breathless. I'll keep you posted!

By the way, here's the most famous scene from Alphaville:

Grapes and Virgins

At the end of last month I went to two gigs. One was by John Grape, a local indie folk band (and not a singer), which played for the "Noctambule", which is a night-time festival in Reims. Musicians, dancers, actors, artists etc come out in the streets. It's a great idea, it's just a pity that there aren't more people who come out for it.

A week later Lydia and I went to see the Virgins, a "dance-punk" band. They've only released one album so far, which is okay but not great. So I was impressed by their show: they're clearly far better live, and they've improved a lot since last year, when they released their album. It had been a while since I'd been to a gig with music you could dance to, and it was actually a lot of fun. The singer, Donald Cumming, also sang a couple of folk/blues ballads. It fitted his voice perfectly. It was a departure from their usual rock songs, which suggests that the band could come out with some surprises in the future... We'll see.

I was a bit bummed because I missed Shannon Wright and I won't be able to see Peter von Poehl, but I've got my ticket for Patrick Watson, who's coming later in the month.

"I've got nothing against Irish people, but..."

So I was in the Kilberry—one of Reims's "Irish pubs"—last week, like every week, for a well-deserved pint after hours of mind-numbing lessons. My mate introduces me to this guy who goes to our classes. I haven't even noticed him before. Anyway, before drinking his pint, this bloke raises his glass, and says—remember that we're in an Irish pub— "God save the Queen" (in a terrible French accent, incidentally). I tell the guy that, being Irish, I can't join him in a toast to the Queen—not that I have anything personal against old Lizzy; as far as monarchs go she's not too bad; I just don't give toasts to anyone in positions of power— and my mate and I laugh it off. I mean the guy is only joking after all, right? Right? A few moments later my mate goes out for a smoke, and I'm left alone with the royalist, who turns to me and says "You're Irish? Oh well could be worse". I stare at him blankly. "I'm joking", he says, "but I'm pro-British". I shrug, trying to indicate that I'm more interested in my glass of Belgian ale than in his political views. But he forces me into a monarchy vs republic debate, which turns out to be rather interesting. I'm starting to warm up to the guy—or at least I'm beginning to thaw—but then he says: "You know, I've got nothing against Irish people, but..." Of course this one of the phrases most used by bigots. (Take the similar phrase: "I'm not..., but I don't like...", fill the blanks with: racist/Blacks, homophobic/gays, anti-feminist/women, etc. and you get the same general effect). He then draws a list of all the traditional vices that Victorians liked to ascribe to Irish people. He was extremely anti-Catholic (although I later learnt that his girlfriend was Polish and Catholic), and I pointed this out to him, while telling him that I myself came from a Protestant background and that I was born in Northern Ireland. His face cleared and he said something like "Oh that's not so bad then". He didn't seem too happy when I told him that I wasn't a unionist. And he then went on to say how Irish Protestants are just the same as Irish Catholics (not in the sense that we should forget our differences because we have more in common than we think, but in the sense that all Irish people are obscurantist medieval monkeys), but I wasn't listening anymore because my glass was empty, and my mate was coming back from his smoke anyway.
But it was a strange experience. French people usually love the Irish as much as Americans do (and almost as much as the Irish do themselves) and although I'm used to hearing silly stereotypes repeated over and over again (sheep, leprechauns, Guinness, Bono) I know that those are meant as compliments. But this guy came out with things which were borderline racist, and were definitely anti-Irish. He told me his mum had English ancestors, so maybe old prejudices have been passed down to him that way? It's only the second time in my life that I've heard a French person talk like that (the other time was at a St Patrick's party six years ago, when a drunk French soldier told me that the British army should have wiped out all the Irish decades ago, and that basically Bloody Sunday must have been heaps of fun. Man I loooove the military). In any case it was very, very bizarre, and quite disturbing.