Tuesday, November 06, 2007 Keep your French to yourself I have to write fast because Blogger.com has a scheduled outage in 20 minutes, and I don't want to lose my NaBloPoMo credential already! (Though when I asked Joe who out of our group of friends would be the first to skip a day, he said, "You." And he's probably right.) On Sunday night, we went to the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco to see a double bill of guitar music from Mali, Vieux Farka Toure and Tinariwen. French is the musicians' native language and Vieux in particular was struggling with his English until he decided to just speak his mother tongue. I had a few years of high school French and was able to understand about half of what he said, but several members of the audience were obviously fluent in the language and wanted to make sure everybody knew it. Throughout both sets, between songs, people would just call out randomly in French -- banal stuff like "Thank you for coming out this evening" or "Bravo for the music of Mali!" The French ranged from excellent to something akin to Margo Martindale in "Paris Je T'aime" (the movie will be out on DVD next week, and is worth a rental -- you'll know what I mean after you've seen it). But it was thoroughly obnoxious and pretentious. I don't yell out Swedish phrases at Hives or Soundtrack of Our Lives gigs! posted by 125records @ 10:40 PM   0 Comments: Post a Comment << Home   About Me Name: Sue Home: San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States About Me: See my complete profile Previous Post Civic duty Control Ovenmania Raiders Nation Drawer built for a giant Boo Think before you toss See the movie, don't read the reviews Soft market = opportunity! The greenest library Archives Links Subscribe to RSS feed 125 Records Interbridge.com Blog archives, Jan. 2004-Oct. 2006 Search me! Powered by