Mots Qui Vont Tres Bien Ensemble-ish

Les Sans Culottes and Life in a Blender rocked Joe's on Saturday. Ben is friends with the guitarist from the Brecht-Weil-Reed-Weimar-and-awesome-rock fuelled Life in a Blender, so we wandered over, climbed up into the booth, wondered briefly if there were any earplugs available and then decided rock and roll wasn't meant to be heard through the muffle of a plug. Also, we couldn't find any. Jeez, we're old.

Anyway, Les Sans Culottes is a Brooklyn band that plays super-edgy, awesome pop and they speak my kind of French--that is, completely made up. They're vaguely French--the attitude without the nit-picky grammar.

I was once on a train between Paris and Florence, a sleeping car. I was in grad-school and it was like a dream come true because there was this beautiful French girl in the same compartment. On all other sleeping-car rides previous, I had been stuck in a sleeping car with large hairy men or my brothers, so I sort of felt like God had smiled at me this once.

We got to talking and I started using my three years of high school French to explain to her that I was a Theatre History student wandering the European countryside in search of historical documents, not unlike Indiana Jones.

"L'histoire du theatre?" she asked, seeking clarification.

I explained to her about Cardinal Richelieu and the French Academy, trying to bring the whole thing home so that she could understand. Smooth, right?

"Qui?'" she kept asking.

Finally, when I had managed to convey to her who Richelieu was, she looked at me as I might look at someone pronouncing George Washington's name like "Yorg Warshbingbong" and said, "Don't speak French" and that dream was done.

Look, my point is Les Sans Culottes are playing Magnetic Fields--just down the street here--on August 10th and if you're in the area and have ever been shot down by a snobby French person and you like good music and attitude, you should go.