Two months into my year abroad in Paris and time is flying by. I’m spending five months here interning at an international property company before studying at the world-renowned University of Athens. So world-renowned in fact that my Erasmus coordinator wouldn’t give me official term dates when I met her at the end of Trinity “because we decide when to start the term depending on the strikes.” Awesome.

I have moved in with a twenty four year old French girl, which has not only allowed me to avoid the notoriously difficult Parisian landlords, but has also meant that I have some readymade friends in the city – or rather, I spend my days plying her friends with “British” things like Victoria sponge cake and scones, and last week I got the big invitation: an evening watching the rugby at the Stade de France next weekend. Progress, albeit slow.

As a Londoner, the transition to Paris has not been too difficult. Yes, the French are totally obsessed with all things administrative, but once the first few weeks of endless form-filling were over, I settled into Parisian life with relative ease. Highlights have included being interviewed for French television, winning big bucks at the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe races and using “I’m only in Paris for five months!” as an excuse to buy my local patisserie out of macaroons.

A slight hindrance did occur one week into my time here when the news reached me that the University of Athens had shut after a planned two-day strike just kept going. Panicking that half my year abroad might be in jeopardy, I decided to throw myself even more into Parisian life. I bought a stripy top and went for drinks with a few Parisians whom I’d met in a bar the night before. We talked about what the French think of the English and vice versa. While I was throwing around words such as “chic” and “sophisticated,” I was faced with a barrage of “binge drinking”, “sluts” and “pizza with pineapple on top”. I asked what the French word for “binge drinking” is. They don’t have one. Forced to admit that I come from a failed nation, I apologized on behalf of the other 63 million alcoholics, scuttled home and pondered on the truth behind these negative stereotypes (gin and tonic in hand).

Starting work wasn’t too troublesome; my colleagues are used to dealing with confused English people as they always have a British intern, however my lack of experience in the French workplace was pretty clear from the outset. The main problem was the big question, to vous or not to vous? The vouvoyer/tutoyer (formal/informal register) debate is complex, and to be honest it seems like even the French don’t know the rules, but here’s what I’ve gathered so far – vouvoyer a child and it’s about as ridiculous as communicating through interpretive dance, tutoyer your new boss and expect a glare so harsh that you might have to break into interpretive dance just to lighten the mood. I tend to avoid this one altogether by occupying an awkward middle-ground alternating between the two – I imagine the English equivalent must be something like “It’s terribly nice to meet you” followed by a fist bump.

Working at a property company when my knowledge of real estate was about as extensive as “pretty building”, “ugly building” was I’m now shameless when it comes to asking for help and spend most of my time with one hand in the air, hollering at my nearest colleague. Luckily the perks of working for a French company are numerous; every day I receive an €8 lunch voucher, the working day ends at 6.30pm for everyone from me, the lowly intern, right up to the MD, and the commute to work each morning is a joy. Boris Johnson take note – the metro is to the tube what the limo is to the skateboard: infinitely superior. Trains every two minutes, a stop every ten metres, no one eating the inevitable egg sandwich (or even worse, the Cornish pasty), but rather a group of well-dressed Parisians reading books!

All that’s left to say is the stereotypes are, for the most part, true; the food is good, the waiters rude, the culture rich, the women slim and the men bearded. Happy as I am, I haven’t quite cracked the Erasmus code yet, and there is one thing that still baffles me: How does one ever actually spend single centimes? Answers on a post card s’il vous plaît.

Love,

Theo xxxx

An air of authenticity surrounds this 19 year old Nottinghamian which seems to be constantly undrmined by a series of mediocre offerings intentionally designed to recall the past and shun the dominance of the X Factor top 40 teenybopper genre. Ironically, however, his recollection of 1963 becomes just as generic, just as mediated and just as boring.

Legendary producer Rick Rubin’s fingerprints litter the album, but not in a good way. Unlike another recent credit of the 50 year-old, the Avett Brothers’ Magpie and the Dandelion, which remains particularly earnest and pure in terms of production, Shangri La becomes cliched with the forced crackling effect and ‘vintage’ timbre of Jake Bugg’s vocals which is evidently forced.

Having ‘gone electric’ earlier this summer, Bugg recalled the Bob Dylan controversy at Newport in 1965 but without quite the same level of interest, hype or importance- a publicity stunt, perhaps? Definitely. The influence of Dylan continues on tracks like ‘Messed Up Kids’ which is half ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’ half Merseybeat but without the lyrical elegance of Dylan nor the energy, excitment and newly afforded freedoms of Beatlemania and Liverpool in 1964.

In an effort to retain his authentic ‘I’m just a boy with a guitar and some songs’ image, Bugg has pulled out all the stops, just look at the cover! Unfortunately this is without any substance, having not written any of his own material for either his debut or this follow-up which he defends, citing his age, even though Dylan was only 21 when he wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, without any bigwig artistic help or guidance.

Furthemore, the grit and reality of the Nottingham council estate that characterised Bugg’s debut is now gone, replaced by the sun and sea of the Malibu coastline where much of the recording process took place. The influence of Nashville is also felt on tracks such as ‘Storm Passes Away’, featuring the lyric “they keep telling me I’m older than I’m supposed to be”. This would be completely legitimate- if the album were to be an earnest and effective reflection of Bugg’s personality rather than merely his record company’s perception of what could feasibly sell. In a word, dull.

Rap music is minority music. It is the anger of marginalised youth. Yet it shits all over the LGBTQ community. This is largely the product of fear and suspicion in the ghettoised urban communities that were the crucible of hip-hop. Most homophobia is borne out of survival instincts in an atmosphere of violence where homosexuality is equated to weakness.

This is not an attempt to excuse the myriad snarls of “faggot” or the endless slurs and belittlement. In 2013, though, there is more reason than ever to hope that hip-hop’s attitude to the LGBTQ community will catch up with its approach to social justice in general.

Mainstream hip-hop is making moves in the right direction. Azealia Banks and Frank Ocean came out as bisexual and mercifully few people seemed to care. (Hip-hop behemoth Russell Simmons described Ocean as a “catalyst with courage”.) But like everything good that happens in rap music, LGBT hip-hop is primarily exploding on an underground level.

Y-Love, a rapper who hit a triple whammy of potential prejudice by being born black, homosexual and Orthodox Jewish, came out last year. “Stories like mine are happening in every club in every hood — that gay MC who walks in reluctantly, if he can hold it down on the mic, can get respect as much as his hetero counterpart,” he wrote on his blog. All positive change in hip-hop is enacted through grassroots battles and peformance, as when female rappers broke onto the scene. Hip-hop is a meritocratic culture of respect, and it is from this platform that LGBT rappers will change the culture.

Gay rappers are not a modern phenomenon. In Cali, Deep Dickollective held it down for homo hip-hop 20 years ago in the Bay Area, amongst a host of others. The PeaceOUT WorldHomo Hop Festival ran for years. But in 2013, gay rappers are not simply interacting with one another in insular communities. Social networking is facilitating far wider collusion. From the Floridian booty rap of Yo Majesty to the Canadian rap-Klezmer fusion of Socalled to Michigan’s pan-sexual prodigy Angel Haze, the scene is exploding.

Cultural interchange with the ‘ball community’, a platform for drag queens and other queer artists, is also providing a new platform for the experimental gay hip-hop scene. “Today’s queer mania for ghetto fabulousness and bling masks its elemental but silent relationship to even more queer impulses toward fabulousness in the 1960s and 1970s”, according to the excellent documentary Pick up the Mic.

A queer identity is being transformed from something to be hidden and mocked into a stimulus for creativity. Hip-hop is music for the margins, and it is from the margins that its most daring creativity bursts. LGBT rappers are not finding success as homosexual novelties, but because they are producing exceptionally experimental (and exceptionally queer) music.

Cuntry Living presents an evening of Ladies & LGBTQ hip-hop and rap this Monday at Babylove. 

The real Cyrano de Bergerac was famous in 17^th Century France for many things: his wit, his free-thinking, and his stubbornness. In the play his courtly enemies, stinging from his refusal to bend to them, are driven to picking on the one thing he cannot disguise with his swagger – his big nose.

Cyrano is a man who, when he is insulted in the lowest way possible, gives back his weight his witty, wordy, self-deprecating comedy. In one such scene, we are treated to a good few minutes of him listing all of the other possible creative insults his antagonist could have used instead of calling his nose ‘big’. Inspecting the noses of his peers and even of the audience, he diagnoses two chimneys with smoke puffing out of them, a writing desk, and even a couple of flats for rent sheltered in a pair of nostrils.

Just because Cyrano busies himself by larking around with wordplay, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have time for a love interest. However, Roxanne is also the object of Christian’s desires. Christian looks could kill as well as his sword-fighting, but he is sadly, well, stupid. He cannot even write a love letter to Roxanne – and that’s where Cyrano comes in.

Using his poetic mastery Cyrano crafts the courtship of Roxanne and Christian through his words, but is obviously made to face the crushing reality that he cannot have the girl so enchanted by his letters. Here is where the tragedy rears its head. Set against the background of war, the conflict of Cyrano’s and Christian’s love for Roxanne shakes out the deeper side to their human fragility: Christian is all pretty casing around a brain made of air, whereas Cyrano’s witty strength is punctuated by the physical protrusion in the centre of his face.

Although minimal props are used, the stage is usually either full of action – thanks to the wide cast of agile actors – or forgotten under the steady flow of fluent poetry. Anthony Burgess’s modern translation of Edmund Rostand’s play, selected by French director Callyane Desroches, preserves the elastic charm of the wordy original, and the St Hilda’s Drama Society give it a living spark.

Apart from the well-chosen help of live piano music, strobe lighting for the war scenes, and some real steel (yes, sword fights!), the evening of entertainment is mainly left up to the actors themselves, who slip in and out of the tragic and comic roles as effectively as a costume change. Go for the foils, stay for the lines.

Cyrano de Bergerac will be performed at 7:30pm in the St Hilda’s JDP on Weds 27th, Friday 29th and Saturday 30th of November. Tickets are available here

It’s fair to say that there are quite a few Shakespearean plays about travel. And about mistaken identity. And about family relations. And about dreams. But put these together in a new and surprisingly under-performed combination and the result is Pericles: the new production taking over the BT.

The play itself is no small undertaking; I’m reliably informed that this particular cast have managed to condense fifty-seven characters into just seven actors and actresses. But don’t worry – we won’t get confused because apparently they’re all very good at doing accents. Gender, age and nationality are no boundaries for this ambitious crew. Plus, every time an actor or actress changes character, they have a different accessory to wear over their all-black costumes: I’m particularly looking forward to what has been described as a “mouldy faux-fox-fur” which marks out the evil step-mother figure Dionyza.

Added to this audience-friendly use of props, the different countries of Pericles’ travel (and there are quite a few), are separated by their own colour palettes on stage. Antioche, for example, is red. That’s because it’s soon revealed to be the city of incest, lust, and love; complex and sensitive topics which are played out engagingly and thoughtfully by James Moore (Antiochus) and Connie Greenfield (Antiochus’ daughter).

Without giving too much away, I’d get ready for a historically apt use of mime and tableau in this production. Against this neat framework, which arranges an episodic play into something resembling a carefully ordered narrative, director Edwina Christie has interestingly chosen a setting of visual chaos.

The backdrop is a huge white canvas which the cast get to scribble on and graffiti throughout. The props are minimal but actively used: a set of sticks will morph from swords into fishing rods and from truncheons into walking sticks. But as the play progresses, the sticks are discarded by the actors on stage, the white canvas backdrop is covered over, and we are left with a physical and emotional accumulation of all that has gone before.

We are also left with Gower: that real-life pinnacle of English literature who narrates the play. I saw Ariel Levine act this important part only for the length of the Prologue, but even in these brief moments he leapt, Puck-like, around the stage, and with enough enthusiasm to sustain even the most packed auditorium at the Burton Taylor Studio.

If you’re a fan of the metatheatrical, this play certainly does not ever let its audience forget that it is a play. What it does let us forget is that it’s a student performance on a relatively small budget in an even smaller theatre — a combination of imagination and enthusiasm render all of this irrelevant. As Gower says, “New joy wait on you!” And it will, if only you head down to the BT in seventh week.

Pericles is on at the Burton Taylor Studio from 26th-30th November. Tickets are £5-6 and are available here