Dear listeners,
WHAT A MONTH. Here’s the chaos of May for this podcast host:
got vaccinated!!! 💉
reunited with my family for the first time in 1.5 years 😭
bought my first car, a teensy Smart Car that looks exactly like this: 🚗
moved to a new apartment for the first time in six years 📦
For those paying attention at home, I’ve been riding out this pandemic in <500 square feet with my partner while we both worked from home. When I wanted to take a meeting at the same time he wanted to take a meeting, one of us had to go in the closet. Or the bathtub. Y’all, it has been a journey. Now we’re busy unpacking in a beautiful new place - woohoo! However, this means I have a big quandary: where can I set up my new recording studio?
Some of you may have seen this picture before:
Yes, here is where the magic happened, folks! A tiny corner of a closet tucked away and muffled by a bunch of coats and shirts. I’m not sure where the new setup will be, and until I get that squared away (and unpack enough boxes to fit into whatever that space is) the podcast will have to be on hold for a little while. Frankly, my brain is operating at approximately 5% capacity anyway, heaven knows what kind of script it would produce right now.
Until then, here are some links to tide you over while I unpack more boxes:
The legacy of the Communards
The Barricade, Édouard Manet (1871). Learn more about his experiences during the Commune in “Manet & Morisot & Manet”.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the end of the Paris Commune. There are a million think pieces, but it feels most appropriate to link to this one from none other than Jacobin:
The ghosts of the Commune have resurfaced in the twenty-first century. We heard their echoes in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, then in 2011, first in Tunisia and Egypt, then in New York, with Occupy Wall Street, and in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, with the 15M. A few years later they came back to France, with the Nuit debout of spring 2017 in Paris and the ZAD (“zones to defend”) of Brittany. The Kurdish fighters of Rojava claimed the Commune’s legacy by creating an incredible experience of armed, egalitarian, feminist, direct democracy in a Middle East devastated by neocolonial, fascist, and fundamentalist wars. To all of them, the Commune was meaningful, the opposite of a dead realm of memory.
Photos: Bruno Braquehais documented in the Commune in real time
Oh man, I can’t express how excited I was to read about the ghost Métro station at Porte des Lilas. I nerded out a few years ago over historic British railway stations which get used in the same fashion and now this is me every time I watch an episode of Poirot. Can’t wait to do the same with all my French programming.
Time for a café en terrasse at last! Restrictions on cafés and museums finally lifted for the first time since October 2020. Here’s a livestream from earlier today if you’d like to celebrate digitally for a moment:
There’s one person especially excited about the reopening: the Louvre has her first female president in her 228 year history! Art historian Laurence des Cars has been president of the Musée d’Orsay and L’Orangerie since 2017, and considering the d’Orsay in particular has been killing. the. game. recently it sounds like she’s definitely qualified. Recently, she pushed for the Musée d’Orsay to return Klimt’s Rosiers sous les arbres, stolen by the Nazis in 1938, back to the family of its original owner. Former Orangerie/Louvre employee Rose Valland would be very proud, I imagine.
The museum reopening that I’m most excited about? The Musée Carnavalet is back, baby!!!!! It’s been closed in 2016 - meaning I could only stand outside and paw at the gates during my last trip in 2019 😭 - but it’s just undergone a massive renovation. The Carnavalet is honestly one of my favorite places to visit, and not just because it’s got the full-scale recreation of Proust’s bedroom. It’s a time traveling machine, one of the best ways to really see and feel the history of the erased Paris currently occupied by Haussmann apartment blocks. FRANCE24 got a sneak peek:
And the best news of all? The reason behind the loosened restrictions! France’s COVID numbers are still very serious, but falling dramatically thanks to the ramped up national vaccine program: vaccine appointments are available to anyone over 50. Spare doses are available to anyone over 18, after an enterprising engineer built a website (Vite Ma Dose - a.k.a. “find me the quickest shot!”) which revealed how many doses were getting wasted. More than 20 million French men and women have now received at least one COVID vaccine! <3
Alright my lovelies, thank you for your patience while I undergo my own extensive renovations here, but I look foward to bringing you a new episode soon from the next iteration of my recording studiocloset. Until then, au revoir!
Bisous,
Diana