By the way I recently started using Tumblr in French and I’d like to be the first to say that it’s really weird and doesn’t really make sense. The words are all correct but the whole concept doesn’t really work in French.

Anyway the sort of cool French kids that’d use Tumblr would be the same kids who are too cool to speak French and probably speak English one hundred percent fluently; I don’t know a single French person who uses facebook in French, for example.

The apprehension of languages other than English is well and truly dead, it’s a fact. This is a sad fact as it renders my whole degree, everything I’ve worked for in life this far and my entire skill-set (which consists solely of: speaking French) totally useless. Oh.

#existentialism

Mais imaginez, je vous prie, un homme dans la force de l’âge, de parfaite santé, généreusement doué, habile dans les exercices du corps comme dans ceux de l’intelligence, ni pauvre ni riche, dormant bien, et profondément content de lui-même sans le montrer autrement que par une sociabilité heureuse. Vous admettrez alors que je puisse parler, en toute modestie, d’une vie réussie.

I’m reading La Chute (Albert Camus) because I’m ‘intellectual’ (but mainly because I’m scared I will have forgotten all my French by the time I go back to Paris).

Mon accord avec la vie était total, j’adhérais à ce qu’elle était, du haut en bas, sans rien refuser de ses ironies, de sa grandeur, ni de ses servitudes. En particulier, la chair, la matière, le physique en un mot, qui déconcerte ou décourage tant d’hommes dans l’amour ou dans la solitude, m’apportait, sans m’asservir, des joies égales. J’étais fait pour avoir un corps.

squeakybrand:

LOVE THIS. French rap group brings facebook to life via music video! Awesome.

“The love that dare not speak its name is the unavowed adoration of the Anglo-Saxon.

[…] The French will spit upon the concept of fast food, but gobble hamburgers. They will turn their noses up at Hollywood ‘trash’ and flock to see Star Wars and Spiderman. They will wax lyrical about Dior fashions and dress themselves head to foot in Nike. They will lament the fact that English is killing off all the world’s other languages and be first in line to sign up for English lessons when their employer asks who wants to work in the international division.

And let’s face it, the same is true for us Anglos. We laugh at the French, but we love them really. They are arrogant, but we wish we had that much self-confidence. They’re old fashion, but we’d love to be that stylish. They’re hypocritical, but we envy their ability to get away with it every time.

This is why young French people want to go and live in London or New York, where they will be able to live this hipness for themselves and get a job as a shop assistant without first having to spend three years at the Ecole Nationale de Shop Assistants.

And all Anglos dream of buying a house in France and living the French lifestyle, devoting their whole existence to food, wine, sex and dangerous driiving.

But let’s not spoil the game of seduction by coming out and saying this. For the last thousand years or so we’ve both been playing hard to get, and by and large, apart from the wars, one burny French saint and a few port blockades, it’s been fun. If we give up the game now and declare our undying love, we’re heading for disaster - a quick, probably unsatisying, afternoon at a hotel, post-coital blues, and smoking in bed.

So let’s keep our love for each other secret. It would be a shame to spoil things after all these years, n’est-ce pas?”

Epilogue, Talk to the Snail - Stephen Clarke.

The French love English and they love wearing clothes with English writing on, even if it it makes little or no sense. I suppose it works the other way, too, but walking around Paris you notice a hell of a lot of ridiculous T-shirt slogans.

Yesterday a man got on the metro wearing a brightly coloured T-shirt with the words ‘BOYZ IN THE HOOD’ written across it. The word ‘hood’, though, had been blocked out and scribbled across to read ‘food’. How cool. And instead of ‘boyz’ (already notable in its attempts to be cool) the word actually read ‘POYZ’. Uhh.. what?

‘POYZ IN THE FOOD’, read the man’s T-shirt. Any ideas on what that could mean would be greatly appreciated. (I tried of course to take a picture of the man to facilitate further analysis of this formidable piece of rhetoric, but if growing up under Tony Blair’s New Labour government taught me anything at all, it’s that the Data Protection Act 1998 is God).

Other incidences of funny English slogans include a large-framed, well-built black man with a skin-tight white T-shirt with one word written across it in big, black font: ‘GHETTO’.

I rest my case.

An hilarious French song. Subtitled for your listening pleasure, though the translation is admittedly a bit clumsy - definitely not the best in the world. Bonne lecture, quand même.

I’m currently watching a film on the German channel I’m lucky enough to get on my television. It’s a French film dubbed into German, as is the standard across Europe.

I’ve seen the film before and I have blogged about it on this very site, but I can’t remember what it’s called. That’s where I need your help.

It’s about a man who’s a bit of a gangster, but he’s really into his music. He is learning piano with a Japanese teacher who doesn’t speak French (or in this case German) so he gets frustrated with her. His father is big in the music world and I think he does a few concerts or the main man does the concerts, I can’t remember. In the end I think the father dies.

I hope this is enough information for someone, anyone, to tell me the title of the film.

I know it’s a long shot, but thanks in advance.