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France

International reporting, Journalism

Letter from Paris: A Year After Charlie Hebdo, Adjusting to a New Normal

A mural beside Le Carillon depicts Robert Doisneau's famous couple with bullet wounds.

A mural beside Le Carillon depicts Robert Doisneau’s famous couple with bullet wounds.

At Paris’ five-star L’hôtel The Peninsula, a luxe Mongolian-style yurt currently occupies its sprawling Terrasse Kléber. Guests are invited to drink hot chocolate and nosh on tartines while lounging amid mattresses and fur throw rugs strewn beneath a chandelier made of antlers. On the garden patio of the equally swanky Hôtel du Collectionneur in the neighboring 8th Arrondissement, patrons can sip champagne and nibble canapés inside a large, transparent bubble festooned with elegant floral designs.

I can’t help but think that the yurt and the bubble signify something beyond the novelties of snacking in a rustic-chic tent and getting tipsy in an upmarket snow globe. A year after terrorist attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket killed 17, and less than two months after gunmen murdered 130 others on Nov. 13, these whimsical, cozy spaces seem to embody a collective desire to find refuge from the bad memories of a 2015 that a recent Agence France-Presse headline dubbed an “année de merde,” or,”a shit year.”

This past Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo released a special anniversary edition. The cover depicts an image of a God with splotches of blood on his robes and a Kalashnikov strapped to his back. Beneath the cartoon is the headline, “A year later the murderer is still on the loose” — another of the magazine’s signature jabs at religion. The first page contains a disturbing blow-by-blow account of what happened at the magazine’s editorial offices on Jan. 7, 2015, when the fanatical Kouachi brothers gunned down 12 people, including eight staff members.

“It was unthinkable that in 21st-century France journalists would be killed by religion,” cartoonist Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau writes in the magazine’s editorial. He continues: “We saw France as an island of secularism, where it was possible to tell jokes, draw, laugh, without worrying about dogma or fanatics.”

Read more at Bustle.

Postcards, travel

Postcard #7: Back in Paris

The Pantheon on a late-winter evening. © Erin Zaleski 2013

The Pantheon on a late-winter evening. © Erin Zaleski 2013

Once again, I’m here in a Paris beset with mood swings as the city transitions from one season to another. The days are getting longer though, and a few evenings ago the sky had a striking, Maxfield Parish-ness to it as the last of the light faded away.

travel

Postcard #6: In Paris

Autumn light in the Luxembourg Gardens on an October evening. © Erin Zaleski 2012

I finally made it back to Paris after nearly four years of being away.

If I had forgotten how bleak October in Paris can be, the past two weeks  have reminded me.

The morning sky is dark until 8 am and a thick canopy of clouds can linger for days, obscuring the sun and imparting a romantic, melancholy quality to the city the gradually becomes less romantic and more melancholy with each successive gray day. Fortunately, I was so caught up in the intensity of re-immersing myself in the city and reconnecting with old friends that the gloom became an afterthought.

On my last evening, still tipsy from a long, wine-soaked lunch, I stumbled (quite literally) into the Luxembourg Gardens, where the last moments of the day had given way to a blaze of light that was almost jarring.

It was a fitting conclusion to a trip during which dreary moments mingled side by side with florid, intense ones. It was also a reminder that more than two decades since my first trip and after nearly four years away, the city still has the ability to tantalize, seduce and surprise me.

I’ve booked a return trip for the spring. See you there?

Photography, Randomness

Pictures that Tell a Story: The Girl at the Creperie

Photo by Robert Redfield – http://www.redfieldpictures.com

A balmy afternoon during the last year of college. I had settled in at my favorite table by the window at my beloved crêperie in downtown Santa Barbara when I caught sight of one of the most striking young women I had ever seen.

She passed my table with a stack of menus and headed towards the kitchen only to reappear by the register. Trying not to stare, I instead risked a few furtive glances over the top of my menu.

Santa Barbara is known for pretty women; the genetically blessed are hardly a rarity there. Still, the girl possessed such a striking ethereal beauty that she would have stood out anywhere.

“Did you see her?” I asked my then boyfriend during our next lunchtime outing to the crêperie after she had glided past our table. “She is gorgeous.”

“You should go make friends with her,” he said, flashing a slightly lecherous smirk.

“Yeah, I’m sure you’d love that,” I responded in mock annoyance gently elbowing him.

Little did either of us realize that these initial sightings of the then-anonymous girl at the crêperie would develop into a decade-long friendship.

Her name was France (“like the country,” she always told smitten male admirers in her thick accent). She grew up in the small town of Vichy, and had come to Santa Barbara on a study-abroad program to learn English. Soon she had fallen in love with the sunshine, the beach and an American college student with whom she shared an apartment not far from the waterfront.

In the months that followed, we bonded over the typical post-college conundrums that befall any young woman trying to make her way: relationships gone awry, unsettled career plans, the reality that university was over and that bona fide adult life was fast encroaching.

We took evening walks to the Santa Barbara Mission, gorged ourselves on chocolate biscuits and tea, and stayed out too late drinking champagne. For her beach birthday party I came dressed as a Tiki God, much to the bewilderment of many French guests—“A what? A Gigi God? C’est quoi ça?”—and she braved long hours and multiple takes as an extra in one of my director boyfriend’s short films.

The summer after graduation I traveled to Europe with my sister, and met up with her in her home town, where she laid out croissants and jam for us each morning and encouraged us to “stay in the shadow” during sweltering afternoons.

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Friday photo, Literature, Photography

Friday Photo: Paris Ambiance

+ by Alex Grazioli
+ a photo by Alex Grazioli on Flickr.

Another jaw-dropping example of the exquisite use of natural light.

Alex Grazioli’s “C’etait un Rendez-Vous” evokes a scene from a Jean Rhys novel- Good Morning Midnight, perhaps?

There is also an undeniably cinematic quality to this shot that makes my inner ex-cinema student turn to mush. Not suprisingly, Alex has a film background.

In his flickr profile Alex says photography has “become the vehicle of his need to do something more personal and direct, the way to remember, narrate and fully experience the past and the present, and at the same time his link with the fascinating world of cinema.”

I am impressed, inspired and looking forward to seeing more of Alex’s work in the future.

Randomness, travel

Planning Stages

Courtesy of Richard Goerg, istock

My poor, neglected blog! Like so many other elements of my life, it has fallen victim to the almost perverse amount of work I have to do between now and late-summer.

So overwhelmed am I with the working, writing, editing, teaching, visa acquiring, ticket-purchasing, apartment hunting, proposal drafting, project completing, loose ends tying, and various day-to-day minutiae (minutiae-ing?), that even the idea of drafting a detailed to-do list is causing mild heart palpitations.

Not that that’s any excuse or anything, of course.

In the meantime, if anyone has any foolproof suggestions for conquering stress (that are somewhat legal and don’t involve copious a.m. Cab consumption), please send them my way.

Friday photo, Photography, travel

Friday Photo: Tuileries in Winter

Tuileries on a mid-December morning. © Erin Zaleski

Tuileries on a mid-December morning. © Erin Zaleski

I took this in mid-December in Paris several years ago. It was unusually sunny, but I was feeling melancholy for numerous reasons. Mostly because I had to fly back to the States the next day.

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