Yes, we did go to the Chateau de Versailles on Sunday, and we toured the gardens (which are IMMENSE!), and we saw the magnificent musical fountain display and had all the mythological significance of the gardens (as a mirror to the palace) and the fountains (as representations of the seasons and various warnings to the people about the power of the king and what will happen if one is not loyal to him), all centered around the sun-God Apollo, with whom Louis XIV insisted upon identifying himself--and of course no one was going to argue with him. It was a chilly and overcast day though, with a cold wind and a gray sky (though the sun broke through for a glorious few minutes during the fountain display, which made the fountains sparkle wonderfully), and I realized that, despite my particular interest in the countless Roman-style marble statues, many of the pictures I took would interest only me. I do include the picture I took of the Laocoon statue, only because I had to explain the story of Laocoon (as if I wasn't absolutely itching to do it...) to some very ignorant tourists who exclaimed "it's John the Baptist!" (a Jean-Baptiste was one of the artists). Also, I'll post a few snapshots of the palace, because it really is breathtakingly enormous, and the better pictures of the fountains (which, in retrospect, I realized all look very much the same). But Versailles is most certainly not the most interesting thing I have seen recently.
This morning--it would have been 9:30am, but for some reason (we found out later it was a museum meeting that ran over-time) there was an awful delay and we stood in line in the cold for about two hours--we went to the Musee d'Orsay and were given a guided tour by a woman who seemed absolutely obsessed by the topic of artistic scandals and took us from scandalous piece to scandalous piece, explaining exactly why they were scandalous and who was scandalized. It got a bit old. But we saw some lovely marble sculptures (sensual nudes, of course--we're talking scandal here...), some pre-impressionist paintings by Manet (who was apparently, according to our guide, not a very good painter at all) as well as some lovely Monets, and we did come away with some mildly interesting anecdotes. However, after the awful wait and the dull tour, we were too tired to trek up to the upper levels where the Impressionist galleries were (since we get in free we can always go back anyway) so we went for lunch. After a totally satisfying chevre, mozzarella, and tomato panini, I sat in a Japanese restaurant while the other girls got sushi (thank goodness I got the sandwich--this particular restaurant was not vegetarian-friendly in the least), then I went off on my own to the Galeries Lafayette to see the David Lynch exhibition that's running from September 8th to October 3rd and which I have been dying to see.
To make a long story short (and then I will probably make it long again), I will be returning to this exhibition. It was wonderful! It was horrible! It was horribly wonderful! In other words, it was David Lynch. The first part of the exhibition was the window-displays outside the Galeries. The theme was "Machines, Abstraction, and Women," and Lynch did a bang-up job. There was a window with the high-heeled foot and skirt of a woman looking down from a skyscraper onto city streets--we assume immediately before a suicidal dive--and a window with a woman's face projected in a small oval (like a moon), on which the facial elements--the nose, the two eyes, and the red lips--shifted constantly--how terrifically symbolic. Then there was a window which contained a woman's form in wire and metal, wearing a short yellow cocktail dress, standing on a warped stage behind a cartoonish microphone, with a woman's cartoon face projected through a hole in the back wall, with big red lips singing "baby, do me right." Yet another window had a huge spinning Twilight-Zone-esque spiral with little oval trap-doors all around it, through which objects of female desire--a purse, a scarf, a pair of shoes--would briefly appear. Another showed a kitchen scene, distorted as usual, with a dingy fridge, a sinkful of dirty dishes, and a sort of white, glowing oval rising out of the dishes, animated tears streaming down its front. The dark, stormy background outside the windows was reinforced by the sound of rain projected by speakers at the top of the window, with the added detail of a woman crying. Heavy, heavy. There was even a window with a red toy train whose track was set up to run through the eye and then the gaping mouth of a white ceramic woman's face, and one with some sort of life-sized arcade game around a woman's made-up, doll-like face. The one that caught my eye most, though, was the one in which a woman's white, nude body floats suspended over a bizarre sort of plane, broken up into four sections: a blackened, stunted forest that looks as if it's been burned, a brown plane with squiggly green shoots coming up, a green plane sprouting fruit and abstract objects reminiscent of fruit, and then a gray plane studded with cartoonish yellow and orange lightning bolts.
And that wasn't even the end of it! After looking at the window displays, I went inside to the Galerie des Galeries, through a little echoing, carpeted black tunnel, and into a gray gallery with Lynch's drawings (really a lot like ink-blots with line-drawing scattered throughout) hung up on the walls. They were characteristically disturbing and alarming, from "Jack Discovers Fire" to "Alice Thinks of Suicide" and "Man in a Room with a Knife," but some were simply strange--"Insect in a Chair," "Fire on Stage"--and others were even endearing and funny, in an odd sort of way, like "Family of Bugs," a sketch of a house with cute little names and lines drawn to each bug's room, "Smoking," an ironic skeletal face smoking a cigarette like a sort of tongue-in-cheek Public Service Ad (David Lynch says don't smoke!), and "Two Figures on a Bed," which was a bit sad and lonely but also a bit heartwarming.
And there was still more! After wandering in the gallery and taking pictures of literally every single sketch on the wall, I finally ducked into the pitch-dark little theatre in which a series of short films by David Lynch were being shown. I had been listening to the disturbing sounds and strange music the whole time I'd been inside the gallery, and I finally saw the images that went along with them. I was ushered into the experience by an uncharacteristically funny short, "The Cowboy and the Frenchman," in which a cowboy, Slim (who is nearly stone cold deaf on account of a .36 going off too close to his ear when he was thirteen and a half), sees an odd character stumbling down the mountain on his ranch with a large suitcase. "What the hell is that?!" he exclaims, and repeats a few times for good measure, and once his two lackeys have lassoed and bound the Frenchman (complete with thin mustache, black suit, and beret), he declares that he "might be some kind of Alien spy" and decides to go through his suitcase before killin' him. The lackeys pull out countless stereotypical French items--bottles of wine, whole baguettes, a book of poetry, French cheese, full plates of French food, a plate of snails--before finding a plate of French Fries and finally realizing that they have a Frenchman. Of course, there is a heart-warming cultural exchange, in which the cowboys drink wine and say "Ooh la la" and the Frenchman (Pierre, of course) drinks Budweiser and says "Yippie Kai-ai-yay" (no, I don't know how to spell that, and refuse to look it up), and they each woo one another's women in a night of guitar-playing, "home on the range" and general revelry. The next morning, over a pan of eggs and flap-jacks, Slim finds a snail in his pocket. C'est finis. And the end caption "The French, as seen by David Lynch." If you ever have a chance to see this short film, do so immediately. You will not regret it.
The cowboy short was followed be the requisite Lynchian squirm-inducing bizarre shorts of a pasty-faced girl doing various, somehow infinitely disturbing, mundane things, as well as awful wet sounds and weird music. Also, there was a short called "HollyShorts," which featured an adorable little man onstage who said things like "keep your eyes on donut, not on hole" and "be happy in work," and then some girls who came out and danced with paper cutouts of ducks. Then there was "The Grandmother," about a boy with truly horrid parents who plants a whistling seed, and grows an awful slimy-looking tree, from which emerges--or rather, the boy pulls, with much sucking and loud wet sounds--an old affectionate woman, with whom some eroticism is hinted at (this is David Lynch, after all), and who whistles to call him upstairs after his drunken parents abuse him horribly. The grandmother dies, of course, after waking up unable to breathe and whistling frantically for the boy, and the parents only laugh grotesquely when the boy asks for their help. Why is it that I enjoy this? Well, I am a lover of David Lynch and his appeal to the most instinctual of the sensations. Although some of his films make me squirm, I love that he can do that, just like Tarantino can make me laugh at and revel in gratuitous violence. Any filmmaker who can successfully manipulate the emotions and visceral feelings of his audience is an excellent filmmaker in my book, and David Lynch is just too marvelous for words. So I suppose I shall just stop using words at this point.
Enough grandeur for you?
A really cool modern art sculpture at Versailles (they do one every year) symbolizing the past moving into the future:
The veritable "Golden Gate":
The palace that we did not go inside:
The gardens were just enormous:
Enormous.
Awww...
The palace from the garden:
Laocoon:
Castor and Pollux! I couldn't stop thinking of my high school Latin teacher:
The gardens were beautiful, even in cloudy weather:
The fountain of Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana:
The fountains starting to flow:
Fountain symbolizing summer:
Fountain of Apollo before the deluge:
The fountain display continues, complete with opera music:
Some really nice arboreal architecture:
The Spring fountain, I think:
Versailles!
Van Gogh's Self-Portrait outside the Orsay Museum:
The elephant outside the Orsay Museum:
This was super-scandalous when it came out, for various reasons outlined by our scandal-obsessed guide:
Is this not, like, the same statue?
"Olymphia," a very controversial Manet painting:
Emile Zola!
A beautiful snowy landscape by Monet:
And some more elephants:
David Lynch in Paris!
The singer:
The crying dishwasher:
The shifting woman's face:
Galeries Lafayette + my reflection:
Isn't this terrifying?
The toy train display:
The floating woman:
The inside exhibition:
Man in the Rain:
Two Figures in Bed:
Family of Bugs in a House (I thought it was wicked cute): 
Man in a Room with a Knife. Eek.
A series of abstract plates:
David Lynch says: Don't Smoke!!! This is what will happen to you:
Two Figures:
Like no Beatles song I've ever heard...
Insect on Chair. Of course.
Goodness that was a massive post. Well, in any case, that's all for now. But when I go back to Orsay to see the Impressionists... well I daresay there will be more photos. Au revoir!
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