De-Lovely: Every Song is a Weapon

For the most part, I hate musicals. It's funny, because films like The Sound of Music, The King and I, Singing in the Rain and My Fair Lady were staples of my childhood cinematic experience - and pleasant ones, too. But the shine wore off. At some point, I began to see through the veneer of their engaging numbers to the stale, even oppressive, narratives that they couched. I began to be irritated that the story would come to a halt just to have a character sing and dance, illustrating some idea that was terribly plain to see.

John Lasseter has it exactly right: "Story is king." Cinema is primarily a narrative medium, and that which does not serve the story does not make a good film. And most musicals are chock of time-wasters, from a narrative point of view. Worse, their spectacle is a distraction from a misogynistic message, despite the central presence of some dynamic female leads. Sound of Music? Daddy needs to be king. The King and I? The king is daddy "from bee to bee to bee." Singing in the Rain? Life is only good with the right man. My Fair Lady? Yeah...

So, it's rare that I like a musical of any kind, but when I do, I really, really love it. Irwin Winkler's 2004 De-Lovely is one of my rare treasures. It's self-aware but not insular; it's counter-cultural but doesn't alienate; it's clear without being facile and sharp but not smug. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack.

De-Lovely received a lot of mixed reviews, with only a 53% Metacritic rating and even worse on Rotten Tomatoes (only 48% fresh). Some of the more even-handed (but still mixed) reviews bemoan the lack of engaging characterization, its historical inaccuracies, or a incoherent, unsatisfying narrative. The individual elements are fantastic, they agree, especially the updated musical numbers (a gamut of Porter's hits sung by a cavalcade of contemporary stars like Elvis Costello, Alanis Morrisset and Robbie Williams). But each damns the film with faint praise like "But aside from the major annoyance that it is just plain hard to sit through,De-Lovely is a great movie."

There's something important to note about so many of the reviews: the authors can't help themselves from dropping references to Cole Porter and his songs. It's as if the postmodern aesthetic of bricolage and hypertextuality is catching. It seems to me that these reviewers are obtusely missing the point, griping about the very things that make De-Lovely great.

Unconventional narrative. The stories of De-Lovely (there are several) consist of frames within frames within frames. To begin, of course, the film itself is framed; a finger pointing to itself, holding itself up as an object of scrutiny and, as we will see, interaction. Within the cinematic frame, there is the central narrative frame of  Cole to reviewing his life as replayed on a musical stage. Within that frame exist the musical numbers themselves. Notably, these spiral back out as a commentary on Porter's life itself, and even further as commentary on the film and, by extension on cinema itself. Heady stuff, huh? And yet, this doesn't distract one iota from John Barrowman's and Kevin Kline's sexually-charged duet, "Night and Day."

Subject matter. I can count on one hand the number of mainstream films about a white marriage. De-Lovely is the only one that dares to talk about a heterosexual love story within a such an arrangement. and, contrary to what so many critics may think, it's the characters that really pull this off. Maybe it's just too much of a stretch to imagine someone as strong and self-possessed as Ashley Judd's Linda Lee Porter being so understanding, so clear-headed and yet so obviously conflicted about her marriage to - let's be frank - a ragingly promiscuous homosexual man. And while Kline plays Porter as a child-like epicurean, the shades of regret and doubt that slowly invade his demeanor are masterfully done. De-Lovely does a courageous job of telling the story of the Other - and moreover, letting the Other tell its own story.

Adaptation through transformation, not copying. The use of contemporary artists to re-interpret Cole Porter's hits did not sit well with some literal-minded critics. I think it's a master-stroke, because this is a movie. That is, this is a fictional recreation of a myth and not even necessarily the myth of Cole Porter. Indeed, you could say that the essential truth of Cole Porter is not to be found in this film. And this is a good thing. De-Lovely understands that "truth" is not found; it's made. It's a construct, and a complex, slippery one at that. This attitude is mirrored in the music production: Porter's songs are stripped bare of their original sound and rebuilt from the ground up. The result is universally fantastic: the lyrics and melody are still there, the traces of Porter's genius, but the surrounding sensibilities are refreshingly different.

Let's revisit my statement that Lasseter has it exactly right. Is story king anymore? Yes - and no. De-Lovely eschews the conventional narrative even of the biopic (which is usually a myth of redemption) for a much more complex and unstable collection of vignettes that nonetheless cohere breathlessly. It's one of those rare films that has faith that we can follow along while it plays fast and lose with time and even space. I love how Jonathan Pryce's character enters into the scene with Louis Meyer: he talks to the screen! And the screen talks back.

It's not just self-congratulatory, navel-gazing post-modernism here. It's an invitation, and incitement to action. Question. Meddle. Turn your constraints into tools. It's the essence of great cinema: an engaging story with a novel twist on old stories that tells us something about ourselves, then turns us around and sends out the theater door with a fire in our belly.

Read a great deconstruction of the film by Penny Spirou at Refractory

Watch De-Lovely on Netflix.

Buy the DVD from Amazon.

Echo Panacea

I've written a new song, "Echo Panacea," for Julia Sherred's Lupus Awareness Virtual Art Gallery.

Usually, I don't like to talk too much about my work. It can often remove a lot of the mystery and the ambiguity that I really prize. But Echo has a story that needs to be told.

Echo was something of a commisioned piece, I wrote it for Julia Sherred's virtual gallery dedicated to raising awareness for lupus. Julia Sherred has the disease, and so do about 5 million other people, including Maurissa Whedon. I'll let far more qualified and expert people explain in their own words, but in a nutshell, imagine your own body turning on itself: those wonderful bits of your anatomy that keep you healthy and hale, that fight off infections and flu, suddenly turn their great, big barrels on your very insides.

October is Lupus Awareness Month, and when Jules put out a general call for contributions earlier this year, I volunteered. And so I created a little file in my Evernote: "Lupus Song." I read through the Lupus Foundation website, took a look at what others had previously contributed, and poured over Jules' personal account, picking a few phrases that resonated with me.

Alpha

The project sat for a while. I knew I needed to do it by October and I knew what I needed to be writing about, but I had nothing.

Nothing.

So I gave up. I let it go. My creativity is like a cat: it really likes to play, but only when it's ready. So, you leave a few treats out and keep the laser pointer ready and you wait. My form of waiting was to get back to craft, to guitar basics. Lo and behold if a guitar methods activity did not make stop and go "Huh. That's pretty." The riff was in 6/8 time, a simple melody with alternating low note trikes on the C-chord. But, couple that with a chord progression from a previous exercise (D - A - F# - Bm) and voilà! Instant song! Four chords, even! "I might not even have to write a new chord progression for the chorus!" I said to myself, smugly.

Yeah, right. I kept flubbing the change from Bm back to D. My fingers wanted to go to the C chord; and this was enormously frustrating because if I couldn't play the basic riff in my sleep, a lyrical melody would not come. It took me a while to figure out that the shift from Bm to C (major) actually sounded pretty cool. And if I just applied the same pattern, I already had a whole new direction for the song. Gadzooks! Eight chords! A shift in key signature! This was already far more complex than the vast majority of my tunes. 

And so it was time to begin crafting some lyrics. I had this long, lilting phrase on the guitar, slow and pretty, in 6/8 time and so I wrote a long lyrical vocal phrase for it:

Bad news: a specter is haunting these glossy glee pages; bad news
Bad new: the phantom is you and none of your wrinkles; bad news

You'll note the heavy use of repetition. I generally like repetition and symmetry, and these phrases had lots of room. As I crafted three verses worth of lyrics and a story emerged, which remains intact in the final version, a hopeful journey from darkness into light. 

Metamorphosis

It's important to note at this point that while I call her "Echo" for the sake of convenience, this song still had no title beyond "Lupus Song." And maybe because she was still a unnamed Morphean thing, she started to slip about. I crafted a scratch percussion track, thinking of something Cohenesque, but the 6/8 riff and melody it required (88 bpm) made the tune something like 6 minutes long. I knew that I didn't have 6 minutes' worth of musical and melodic ideas.

Solution: fiddle. Instead of a finger-picked 6/8 plod, I found that a thumb-struck 4/4 strum, similar to what you hear in the final version, worked. Well, sort of. First, the new strumming pattern was so monotonous that it needed a break. Beyond Echo's story, the chorus you hear in the final version may be the single-most long-lived element of the song. Secondly, the new strumming pattern sped things up to the point that I had to spread the lyric phrase out over twice as much time. Result: a 5:30 tune at 132 bpm. For a radical change whose goal was to shorten and focus the song, this was a mixed success.

Solution: cut. Mercilessly. I slashed the 32-bar verses to 16, which meant tearing out all of my prized repetition and symmetry. It meant getting to the real heart of things. It meant, in the end, making the song better, forcing me to focus on the most important parts. Actually, I made something of a compromise with the tune, keeping a quarter of my verse repetition.

Recording

Trimmed, sleek and drum-tight, the composing was over and it was time to record this difficult child. For me, recording rarely changes things radically in a song; because I have to build and/or perform each section by myself individually, recording is the usually the most rigid part of my songwriting. Changes occur: slight variations in melody as I find something sounds better after playing it the Nth time, or finally discovering a hook. But these are rare and minor.

With Echo, I should have known better. Building the drum part wasn't too hard; I had been focusing on that aspect of my songwriting for most of my album, and after a long talk with a good friend, I had some interesting ideas to try out. They worked beautifully and, unlike most of my "first take is good enough" work for Song Fight, I had the time to really engineer the percussion, mixing and mastering each "drum" as a separate track and exporting that to rest of my mix-down. It sounds a hundred times better than what I've done in the past. So, on with the show!

Yeah, right. Obstacle the first: I wanted a piano part. I am not a pianist; I have a nice little MIDI VSTi and a basic grasp of music theory and composition. It took forever to find a good arrangement. I knew I wanted something tonally different, but it still had to blend with the acoustic guitar, both the soft rumble in the verse and the more kick-out chorus. Obstacle the second, the new melody, the result of so much hemming and hawing and hacking on my part, was a fickle little thing. So, the bones of the song, the acoustic guitar part were a difficult part to nail down - until I stretched out the first 8 bars to half-speed; so, 2 bars of D, 2 bars of A, etc.

And then the chorus. "This should hit pretty hard," I thought, "It should really step up the dynamics." So I chucked on a little over-driven guitar, slightly clean, hard panned to the left. It wasn't enough; I piled on more over-drive: panned right, messed up a bit more - and crank that volume knob while your at it. 

Mixing

What I ended up with was a terrible mess with a dozen parts competing violently and awkwardly with each other. Solution: cut mercilessly. The opening bars were too loud; I cut the gain on the vox and dealt away with a whole track of guitar. The piano wasn't coming through in the last half of the verse; I turned down the  gain on the over-drive vox and brought out the EQ scalpel. The chorus was a terrible muddle; I cut the acoustics gain by half and literally halved the piano part, letting it punch only on the end of each phrase.

"Well, hell," I finally said to myself, as the over-driven guitars poured through my headphones, "I've made a rock song." Echo had finally found her voice and spoke to me with a feral feline's spit and hiss. And from there on out we understood each other. The lead part was no clean BB King spank, it was as snarly, loud, and gritty a tone as I could muster. The third verse cool-down wasn't a sweet acoustic-guitar walk, it became an electric growl.

Omega Point

This entire process probably took more than three weeks. As a frequent participant in songwriting competitions where you're always on a deadline, this was a new experience to me. And Echo has taught me a few things:

1. I really understand my own creative process. Everyone's is different, so listen to yours, poke at it (gently, they're all wild, you know) and ask it questions. Some people have to go get theirs with a club; other's have to coax it out with sweets. Figure yours out.
2. Sometimes, even at the most inopportune moment, you have to go with the flow. It wasn't so much that Echo fought me, it's just that she kept slipping off in new directions. And I had to let her. Some of them were dead-ends (there was almost a horn part), but others were terrific ideas that would never had happened if I had been impatient.
3. Flow notwithstanding, sometimes you have to declare enough is enough. Vocals are not my strongest suit, and so they are the part of Echo that I am the least proud. I could have held the tune back, kept fiddling and honing, letting it explore new avenues forever. But I put my foot down; I wiped the sweat from my brow and when « ça suffira. » And so off it went.

You Should Be Listening To...

Three albums from a trifecta of women songwriters:


Björk: Biophilia 

I haven't downloaded the app yet, but you can listen to just the music and read a great review over at NPR. As always, Björk is an acquired taste but her songs reward patience. The lead tune, "Moon," starts off like some distracted chick in the corner of the coffee shop. (You know, that creepy one who's still kind of cute feral kitten kind of way). But then it finds its groove, the melody evolves and picks up the instrumentation and... wow. Haunting, sweet, rich and very, very different: everything I want from Björk album.


Marian Call: Something Fierce  

Marian was a Google Plus find for me, but I'm kind of astounded that I've never heard of her before now. She's a big geeky (feminist) songwriter, with a whole album of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica songs. (I only have one of those). The lead single from Something Fierce, "Dear Mister Darcy" is a slightly meandering thing at 5:34, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun:

Marian has the gift of a strong sense of melody, the craft to tell a good story and the courage to defy songwriting conventions. (A double album, half of which is devoted to Alaska? A nearly eight-minute epic called "Anchorage"?) To boot, she's got a sharp wit: "The Avocado Song" is one of most original metaphors for a break-up song I've ever heard.


Feist: Metals  

I'll be honest, I haven't had the time to give Feist's latest a really close listen. But the overall sparseness of it is powerful. I love the sense I get of sitting in some Paris loft listening to the musicians rehearse. Metals has that immediacy, along with the sharp, shimmering tonality of Feist's signature vocal. Forget about the run-away "1234," this is the girl from Let it Die all grown up.


To boot, Feist is playing the Tabernacle here in Atlanta on November 6. Who wants to go?

Learning to Learn

So, I'm applying for a promotion, hoping to move up from a yearly contract as an lecturer with a huge course-load but no expectations or either service or scholarship to a tenure-track position as a professor of Foreign Language Education where the service and scholarship that I'm doing anyway will be more rewarded. It's an equally exciting and daunting prospect as I put myself up for, effectively, judgment by my peers.

A part of any application for a position is academia is defining your "Philosophy of Teaching," those basic principles that guide the crafting of lesson plans and assessment tools. For many years, this was a constant preoccupation for me as I revisited the pros and cons of what I had been doing and seeing what worked and what didn't. But, after 11 years of foreign language instruction (wow, more than a decade now...), I've really established some comfortable parameters, to the point that I pretty much copy/paste the same paragraph whenever my work comes up for review:

My philosophy of teaching has three major tenants: 1) respect the free-will of the student, 2) serve as a guide and a facilitator, 3) adapt to the needs of the student. Respect for free will is paramount in avoiding the “Atlas Complex,” which engenders little more than the parroting of preprocessed information. It further helps to convince the student of his capacity to learn through exploration, creativity and personalization. This relates as well to the second tenant of my philosophy: that instructors are most effective not behind the lectern, but amidst the students. My primary role is to structure activities, not to directly transmit information. The former allows the student to explore the material and adapt it to his own needs and interests; the latter squelches these practices. Finally, the most effective structures are adapted to the constantly-shifting needs and capacities of the student. These three components coexist in a cycle of testing, correction, implementation and critical feedback.

As I was reading this over, the last phrase struck me, particularly the idea of critical feedback, that need for self-reflection. Because, while my three main principles are solid, there are some underlying counterpoints that I'd like to take the chance to nuance.

I've had teachers like this; it's how I learned what not to do.

Respect the Free Will of the Student
This is more than a pedagogical approach for me; it's a fundamental ideology in life. As simple as it may be to state, and as appealing as it is in the abstract, it's a difficult line to walk, especially for a teacher. Part of the teacher/learner binary is an assumption of superiority/inferiority. On a certain level, it's true: I have a mastery of the subject that my students lack; not just in knowledge, but in skills. It's tempting, seemingly efficient, to simply transmit this knowledge in a top-down fashion: lecture, drill and assess student retention of cultural and linguistic information. However, cognitive theory and many years of experience demonstrate that this doesn't work. Students may be able to, in the short term, perform well on a test, but they quickly lose the general skill-sets and specific knowledge that the instruction is supposed to instill.

Instead, the acquisition - and retention - of the knowledge and skill sets that define a skilled language user actually requires a bit of trickery on my part. And this is where my professed "respect" for students' free will can seem to become suspect. Rather than a direct transfer of data, it's more effective to establish a goal (the more realistic and authentic, the better), and then show students some tools helpful for accomplishing that goal. The precise method of getting there is up to the student. There's a certain level of frustration and uncertainty inherent to this method. Some students don't respond well to this, especially as first. Conditioned by more hierarchical and discrete teaching methods, they feel lost, splashing about in a seemingly-infinite sea of possibilities.

Yet, eventually, they start swimming. Some are faster than others. Some have already taken a few lessons at the local pool; others just have a talent for the best stroke; still others just barrel through with sheer stubborn determination. But the end result is the same: a finished product of which they can be proud (whether that be a letter, or an oral presentation based on independent research of Parisian cybercafés, or the ability to conduct a meaningful, unscripted conversation with the professor), and a set of skills and knowledge that they have accrued on their own.

Be a Guide (not a Demagogue)
As you can see, the solution to the paradox of my first tenant is my second principle. Yet, this gives rise to another contradiction. If building assessments in an open-ended but helpfully structured manner best aids learning, it is best conducted with a interactive style that many find uncomfortable, even confrontational or hostile.

It's called the Socratic method. In some ways, it's a microcosm of my assessment approach. (You might begin to see that I don't really differentiate instruction from assessment; more on that later.) I prefer to ask questions rather than make statements. Indeed, each session in the classroom begins with a question; I call them démarrer questions, from the French term "to start up." It's a verb used with machines like motors or computers; the connotation is that something gets revved up, starts turning over and conducting power. These questions aren't necessarily the central idea of the entire session, but they have several purposes. First, they are a capstone of the previous night's homework. The questions are published in the syllabus and I encourage my students to prepare their responses to the démarrer question at the end of their work at home. Secondly, they induce the students to begin thinking differently, to jump-start the French parts of their brains that they need to be developing: the different sounds of French phonetics, the unique manners of syntax and the different ways of thinking that speaking in another language not only implies but needs. Thirdly, it provides a moment for formative feedback. A successful, correct response by the student in turn prompts a meaningful, encouraging response from me; an unsuccessful response to the démarrer question is a "teachable moment," where we can collectively highlight a discrete difficulty or address a misunderstanding of the specific grammar or vocabulary at hand.

Finally, the démarrer question models my typical approach to the rest of lesson, wherein rather than drill students on verb conjugation or lead them in choral repetition of vocabulary, I prefer to pose questions: "What's this? What's a synonym for this term? How would you respond in this situation?" These questions are rarely posed to an individual student, but to the class as a whole and creates an context of collective problem-solving, where the stronger students can feel a sense of accomplishment by leading, and the weaker ones can learn by the examples of their peers rather than from me.

Adapt to the Needs of the Student
This last practice leads to my final tenant. Using questions as the basis for lessons and crafting assessments that are authentic but with open-ended methods of completion allows me to keep a quick, constant pulse on how well my students are doing. It not just a matter of "Is their pronunciation correct?" or "Did they conjugate that verb right?" or "Did they use the best word for that idea?" These are important; but other questions are equally pertinent: "Are they asking the right questions of themselves?" and "Do they demonstrate initiative to reference outside resources?" and "Do they make useful connections between the various parts of the curriculum? Between their native culture and those of French speakers? Between French and the other language(s) they speak?" These are forms of my own self-assessment.

When the answer is "yes," then things are going well; I keep at it. When it's "no," it's time to step back and re-examine. It's time to pose more questions. "Why did they have difficulty with that exercise?" or "How can I make this clearer?" or "How can I modify the goal to make it more authentic?" These are the things that drive a constant continuum of refinement in my lessons as well as assessments.

Continuum
This is the crux of effective teaching for me: reflect, employ, assess, reflect again. It's the same process for both me and my students. The result, for them, is more than the ability to speak French, it's learning how to learn. For me, it's a never-ending puzzle, a constant progression that is adaptive by intent. It's learning how to help people become learners.

Cold Burn

Welcome (Lioret, 2009)
There's something significant about the synopsis on the DVD jacket from Netflix for this film:

When authorities forbid young Kurdish refugee Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) from crossing the English Channel to reunite with this girlfriend, the 17-year old resolves to swim to his love - and finds an unlikely ally in the form of swim instructor Simon (Vincent Lindon). Facing an inevitable divorce from his wife (Audrey Dana), the middle-aged teahcer takes the resolute youth under his wing in this stirring, beautifully acted French film.

After watching this, I can hear my graduate adviser's voice in the back of my head: "What makes this movie French, anyway?" The question maybe a poor one, but its answers are illuminating. It's a poor question because it shouldn't really matter if this film is French or not. Indeed, in many ways, it's more than that. Take a look at the the nationalities and ethnicities involved in this production: a French film with and Kurdish protagonist headed for England. Nothing like this would ever be made by an American mainstream production company. In fact, I think it would be difficult for an independent filmmaker to do. This movie is an example of a growing new trend: transnational cinema. And Welcome wears is polycentric outlook and composition on its sleeve. The polyphony of languages alone used in the film is dizzying. Its very existence is already an socially and politically engaged statement: "We are not only French, or Kurds, or Europeans; firstly, we are all people. Humans, together."


And this movie is a slow, burning indictment of the horrible things we do to each other in the name of social order and economic stability. The synopsis above is vague about just who those forbidding "authorities" are, and the movie is pretty cagey about it, too. But the clues are present, dropped casually here and there: five seconds of a Nicolas Sarkozy press conference, the understated aggressiveness as of the Calais police barge into Simon's apartment, the purely-business attitude of a lead detective investigating Simon's involvement with those in "situation irrégulière." (No one can match the French in their use of euphemism; the term means "illegal immigrant," but literally translates into "those of unusual situation, those who are unregulated," and hence, unchecked, outlaws, dangerous.)

But this kind of understatement is precisely what makes this movie French. It takes part in a long line of films à thèse whose central focus is neither narrative twists nor fancy camerawork nor spectacular special effects, but using characters as manner of sociopolitical critique. Welcome is chock full of engaging people. There's self-assured Bilal, once a soccer star in his native land, now a desperate outsider with only a whiff of a plan. Marion, Simon's ex-wife, is tender, engaged, uncertain and defiant at turns. She wants to do what's right by the hundreds of immigrants flooding Calais, but she wants what's best for Simon, which means staying out of her humanitarian work. Simon is existentially lost, hunting desperately to... do what? He's never entirely sure. Win his ex-wife back? Give his life meaning through charity? Regain a sense of masculine bravado by defying the law? Just do the right thing? Their stories, as they weave together and apart, are filmed simply, in the most unassuming manner. Save for a few travelling shots and deliberate point-of-view takes, the camera is stable, at eye level, the narrator as invisible as possible. It reminds me of something Chabrol said about his 1984 Une affaire de femmes : "C'étaient des gens simples. Il fallait les filmer simplement." (These were simple people; they needed to be filmed simply.)

Welcome does take a while to get its feet under itself. It's twenty minutes into before we even see Simon, who eventually becomes the true protagonist, and it's a solid fifty minutes before I felt properly engrossed. But Lioret's work rewards patience, and attentiveness. Taking a card from Pierre Melville's deck, scenes often jump right to the heart of the important part; there is no exposition;  characters don't catch each other on what just happened. The film takes for granted that you were watching two minutes ago. I love this about French films, a quality that is so often missing in American ones.

Coupled with a clear, but never directly stated, agenda to indict the French crack down in illegal immigrants (including detention centers, police raid, tear-gassing French citizens and illegal search and seizure), this intelligence is what gives Welcome its cold burn: that slow, creeping, ironic sense of heat you get from swimming in cool water too long, from the Channel winds nipping at your exposed skin. It becomes sharp and hot, like the indignant rage you feel when a young man nearly accomplishes the nearly impossible, swimming alone across the Channel, only to drown 800 meters from shore, chased down by the coast guard.

IMDB | Movie Website | Interview with the director

Resurrection, Return, Reconnoiter.

I have a good friend with a very different view of the universe. (To be fair, I have many friends, each with their own engaging takes on things; but I digress). For this first friend, today is the New Year: 1 October. Forget all of that January nonsense; traditional New Year's resolutions all come unraveled and are not but dusty detritus by February. Now is a much better time to turn over new leaf as the old ones transform into a riot of color.

I've been plowing the same row in many ways for a while now. Life has been comfortable in its foreseeable patterns. And dust has collected on the shelves that once saw an ever-changing cavalcade of books from history to cinema to poetry and a few CDs to boot. Cobwebs have formed in my synapses, and I feel sometimes like I've reached that point where I need to let it ride or get off the boat and start swimming. (I like to mix metaphors).

That all sounds very dramatic. It's not so much. I just need a Swerve. So maybe I'll start with some Lucretius. What I am starting with this morning is Marian Calls' new album, Something Fierce. And it is fierce, and vulnerable and beautiful. (And I'm not a little glad to have finally found some music that my wife will like, too). It's everything good about music, being a geek and a feminist all in one place.

This place wants for a plan. I'm big about plans and to-do lists. Building this skill helped me survived grad school and makes sure that I can juggle 100-odd students plus lesson plans plus committee meetings plus research each semester. (The latter's been sliding lately; this little corner of the web is a small corrective to that.) So here's the plan and I want you all out there to hold me to it:

1. I'm going to write here three times a week. (That's a minimum, there may be more, but let's start small). Monday, Wednesday, Friday sounds nicely symmetrical. 
2. I'm going to write about movies and teaching and music and poetry. I know all of these things very well in different ways. You can see some of my older writings already lying about. 
3. I'm going to use this space to hone my writing towards concision and engagement. The subjects I write about will keep me current in a couple of fields that are important to me. 

Some things to know about me.

• I like big words. 
• I have a tendency towards prolixity.
• I like hyperlinks and the connections that they both literally and figuratively make. 
• I'm going to use the "f" word a lot. No, not that one. I am a  feminist. Third wave. Big fan of Ani DiFranco and Erin McKweon and Hélène Cixous.
• I might write about other things. Like the TV shows I love or the latest thing on NPR that strikes my fancy.

Ça suffira.

More French Class, s'il vous plaît

RE: Jim Motter's Guest Column in the Opinion Section of the July 6, 2009 Atlanta Journal Constitution

I fully sympathize with the plight of Jim Motter's son, and Mr. Motter's frustration with the state of foreign language instruction in today's public schools. However, Mr. Motter denigrates French as an “increasingly irrelevant,” while he gives Latin a pass because “this ancient language is an essential component of a 'classical' curriculum.” Without prioritizing French over Latin, let us note the double standard here: how is a dead langauge possibly more relevant than a tongue spoken today by more than 320 million people around the world?

Mr. Motter asks “What is the payback to Georgia from the study of French?” While French may no longer be the prestige language of the 19th and mid-20th centuries, it is still spoken today by peoples on 5 continents. A brief list: in North America, Québec, a province of the United States' number one trading partner; in South America, French Guyana; in Europe (beyond the obvious): Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium; in Asia: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; in Africa: Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Gabon, and Rwanda. Few of these may be considered economic powerhouses today – but thirty years ago, neither was China. So, to begin with, there is a tremendous pool of contacts across the world. 130 million people speak French as a primary language and fully 190 million more speak it as a fluent second language: 320 million Francophones is larger than the population of the U.S..

According to the Georgia Department of Economic development there 293 French businesses in Georgia, dealing with everything from telecommunications to cotton. More than 35 local Georgia businesses have operations in France, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Invesco. As a professional in the biosecurity field, perhaps Mr. Motter has heard of Louis Pasteur, and more importantly the Paris research institute that bears his name? The Atlanta Chapter of the French/American Chamber of Commerce was a partner of the recent Paris Air show.

This is merely the economic argument, and it seems that the “payback” to Georgia for students proficient in French is already quite substantial. Yet Mr. Motter's language casts the entire affair in a economic light. French is also a vibrant language of culture and artistic expression, far beyond the “art songs of Gabriel Fauré.” French and Francophone cinema is amongst the most accomplished in the world. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie and A Very Long Engagement were just as popular in America as in France; Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers was screened by the Pentagon to help assess new strategies in the Iraq war. French philosophers and novelists continue to inspire people on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

All of this to demonstrate the vitality of the French language today. However, Mr. Motter's letter reveals a much more systematic and indeed sinister problem in our public education system: our disregard for foreign languages and cultures creates a zero-sum game when it comes to funding. As a foreign language teacher, I am fully sympathetic to the plight of Mr. Motter's son. He should be able to take German in high school – but why must this be at the expense of the French program?

Beyond the zero-sum bind in which public schools find themselves (and which conversely, they sometimes embrace to safeguard their pet projects), Mr. Motter's argument relies upon the idea of utility, specifically the perceived economic usefulness of a language. But his specific case leads us to a more global scale – literally. Without a doubt, the world's economic centers have shifted since the 1960's when Mr. Motter was in high school – and they will undoubtedly continue to shift. This is a why a broad and robust foreign language program should be essential to our public education system. Language courses do more than give students tools to communicate, they provide invaluable perspectives on other ways of thinking, on a plethora of cultures and practices. These courses sensitize students to the diversity of the world today and give them a better chance to interact positively with its inhabitants, whether they be from Berlin, Shanghai, Atlanta or Paris.