Fans, rappers, termites, and the underworld

I saw a play tonight as part of the "cultural activities" section of the AYA program. It was Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan", performed in French as "L'eventail de Lady Windermere". (I think eventail sounds much more dignified than fan.) It was funny, and Wilde's digs on England, like "Does our fog cause people to be serious, or do our serious people cause the fog?" and "I need to leave England- the food is horrible.", gained new meaning when spoken by the French. A famous actress from the Comedie Francaise, Genevieve Casile, was guest starring in this production, and everyone applauded when she first appeared on stage in the middle of a scene, and gave her a huge ovation at the end. She was fantastic.

In general, I'm trying to get used to the work, and still switching around my classes a bit. In particular, I'm trying to learn the French system of taking notes, writing out "plans" of primary sources, and writing different types of essays and analyses. Everything has a very structured logic, which is nice because you know what's expected, but is also very rigid and a little hard to grasp at first. I've also been starting to run into the adult reality of bureaucracy and red tape. At least I know that if I can deal with this kind of junk in French, I'll be set when I get back to the U.S.

Last Sunday, after I updated, I went to a street culture festival called "Rue au Grand Palais". Rappers, graffiti artists, skateboarders, basketball players, and dancers filled a symbol of the old French monarchy. Ethnically, it was pretty diverse, including black people, arabs, and white people. I went with Alexia from AYA (who's black if it's relevant), and we saw a rap contest where the MC brought women up to sit on a throne on the stage and different rappers had to serenade them. Alexia raised her hand, and had a glowing rap devoted to her. I don't think I would have had the courage to do it, but it was great to see her up there. The best rappers, sadly not including Alexia's guy, got to advance to a rap battle, which was pretty furious. I have to say, rap can be hard for me to understand even in English, so I didn't get a lot of what was going on, but it was cool to see some of the "banlieue" culture in a positive way.

Other things: I saw three very good movies, each weird in its own way, this week: Miyazaki's "Nausicaa", an environmental parable with strange poisonous fungus forests and gigantic insects; The Besieged Citadel, a gripping nature movie with real footage of a termite colony defending itself against a carnivorous ant colony; and Jean Cocteau's "Le Sang d'un poete",
which I decided I liked after being at first thoroughly confused. I can't pass up anything that refers to Orpheus- ever since that fifth-grade Greek mythology report, I've felt like we've had a special connection.