-
Convincing a quiet class to communicate
How do you convince a class of 17-18 year-olds to speak when they prefer to stay quiet? Quite a challenge. A language class feeds on student participation and interaction. Welcome to the engine room of the good ship Teach English in a French secondary school. This is the story of a class of pleasant, intelligent students who are curiously quiet. Is it fear of making mistakes? Or that speaking requires something they can't give? It's up to the teacher to take the first step in trying to understand the situation. Wish me luck. I'll have to come up with something. But that's okay because I know that communication is constant…
-
Zappa remixed by Gotan Project
Chunga's Revenge may not be the most well-known track from Gotan Project's debut album, but its sung-spoken lyrics tells us a lot about the mix of influences behind Gotan Project. Chunga's Revenge has its origins a million miles from tango, because it is a cover version of a Frank Zappa jazz-rock tune. What? Zappa in a tango post? Yes, along with dubmasters King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry and Mad Professor. Want to know mor? Step this way.
-
David Bowie – Old song, new documentary
Today is David Bowie's birthday, which we still remember although, in a couple of days, it will actually be 10 years since he passed away. David Bowie Back In Berlin is a piece from 2024 about the song "Where are we now?" which I am reposting. this song announced the end of a strange searching period in Bowie's career after the massive success of "Let's Dance" in the mid-1980s. This transition is also the subject of a new documentary called "David Bowie - The Final Act".
-
Astor Piazzolla, Anibal Troilo and … Xavier Cugat in a Gotan Project remix
Anibal Troilo, Astor Piazzolla and Xavier Cugat make an unlikely trio. But they all get name-checks as inspirations and influences on Gotan Project in the song "Chunga's Revenge". When this track was released in 2001, tango dancers didn't immediately know what to make of Gotan Project. It was electro tango. But was it tango? This series of posts takes a look at the names behind this eclectic musical mix. What would you say to a little tango?
-
Meet & greet with Gotan Project
"La Revancha del Tango", the Gotan Project debut album, was released in October 2001. Even if the group had been around for 2 years,, for the general public Gotan Project was a new name which raised questions : Who are these people? Where does their music come from? Some say it's tango others say it's electro tango, but who's right? One song on that debut album, called "Chunga's Revenge", gave answers to all of these questions in a sort of meet & greet. For those with ears to hear, it presented all the members of Gotan Project by name. It takes two to tango so, if you're ready ...
-
Accepting the sweet song of a foreign language
This new Learner Tale begins with the imagined voice of a character in a photo by Robert Doisneau and wanders into the experience of a migrant learning a foreign language in the wild, far from a language classroom. How do we learn to accept the arrival of the foreign language without giving up the identity drawn from our mother tongue? A testimony based on true events from my own learning of French on moving to France.
-
Lend me your eyes so my ears can see
Audio description or AD is the oral narrative system used in film, and during certain live events such as theatre performances and sporting competitions, to compensate for the absence of images for the visually deficient. ADs of screenworks are pre-recorded, but for live events the description is spoken by the describer simultaneously with the event. In this post, beginning from the origins of AD, we'll visit the various stages involved in creating the audio description for a screen fiction by which an audio describer works to make the visual become verbal.
-
Come any closer and you’ll be in the movie
As a kid, I used to dream of sitting in the front row at the cinema, but you had to fight for a place. 60 years on, it's another story but, when it happened to me, I had an unexpected and unforgettable visual experience. I saw things you don't normally notice, and I heard others that you don't normally listen for.
-
The undertaker’s friend
This piece first came to life as a spontaneous oral story when talking casually with friends about how narrative could just come out of the air. The man and the horse walking together were suddenly there and I followed them to the bridge. Later I realised it was an echo of an anecdote I'd forgotten from my mother's family who raised horses in County Cork on her father's side, and I wrote it down.
-
Songsmith Bruce Springsteen tells dark bedtime stories – and the world wants more
The album "Nebraska" by Bruce Springsteen was first released in 1982. We'd listen to a tape of it on the battery cassette player we took in our car on long trips. "Nebraska" was a twilight choice. With each song we carried an extra passenger who would briefly be there, tell their tale, then vanish, leaving space for the next one.
