Construction Maison

There were nine of us living in my first flat in Paris. It was grand on the outside, with a trompe l’oeil and marble staircase in the entrance hall, but grimy and dark inside. Only three of my flatmates had full-time jobs, and they all smoked. All the lights in the hall were broken. I moved there from London nearly four years ago, during the gloomiest days of François Hollande’s presidency, long before the youthful reformer Emmanuel Macron took power this year. Economic growth at the time was weak, unemployment double that of the UK today, and polls showed two-thirds of French people thought the nation was in “decline”. My flatmates, who I found online, were all 25- to 35-year-olds from the provinces who had come to Paris to find work and, passing their days in our tiny kitchen, were victims of this faded France. Within rigid labour markets many struggled to find jobs, or the right jobs, and were frustrated and angry. They protested in the street, talked incessantly about politics a...

Water Management Awards gather following the awards ceremony with Mr. Randy Robinson, acting assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment (front row far left), and Ms. Carla Coulson, acting deputy assistant chief of staff for Installation Management (front row far right) during the Energy Exchange Symposium held in Tampa Florida. The Awards are presented in categories related to energy efficiency , energy management , and water conservation ." /> 1 / 1 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Many of the forty-nine recipients of 2017 Secretary of the Army Energy and Water Management Awards gather following the awards ceremony with Mr. Randy Robinson, acting assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment (front row far left), and Ms. Carla Coulson, acting deputy assistant chief of staff for Installation Management (front row far right) during the Energy Exchange Symposium held in Tampa Florida. The Awards are presen...

There’s been a lot happening this month.  I don’t have any great plans of action as to the way forward, but I have some knowledge of the background, in terms of how we got here, that seem worth sharing.  Basically I just need to process, and thought I’d do that out loud.  So here are a few reflections on the events of August, 2017, that may be intimately related to one another. Note:  any links that appear below will take you to songs on the subject, mostly written in the past few weeks… *     *     * The Spanish Civil War has been discussed in the media more in the past few weeks than I can remember in my lifetime.  The media has said more nice things about anarchists in the past few weeks than ever in my lifetime as well, and I’m pretty sure they have covered protests more lately than at any time since 1970 or so. At the beginning of the month I wrote a song, “Rojava,” after getting encrypted messages from the front lines of the war against Islamic State in Syria, sent by an anarchi...

Regeni was undeterred. Proficient in five languages, he was insatiably curious and exuded a low-intensity charm that attracted a wide circle of friends. From 12 to 14, he served as youth mayor of his hometown, Fiumicello. He prided himself on his ability to navigate different cultures, and he relished Cairo ’s unruly street life : the smoky cafes, the endless hustle, the candy- colored party boats that plied the Nile at night. He registered as a visiting scholar at American University in Cairo and found a room in Dokki, a traffic-choked neighborhood between the Pyramids and the Nile, where he shared an apartment with two young professionals : Juliane Schoki, who taught German, and Mohamed El Sayad , a lawyer at one of Cairo’s oldest law firms . Dokki was an unfashionable address, but it was just two subway stops from downtown Cairo with its maze of cheap hotels, dive bars and crumbling apartment blocks encircling Tahrir Square . Regeni soon befriended writers and artists and practi...