Parislog 21
May 15, 2006

A week ago Friday, I went to the church St. Sulpice, which is used as a setting in The Da Vinci Code. From the outside it is big but rather ordinary compared to some of the more elaborate gothic structures like Notre Dame but on the inside it is another story. The obelisk mentioned in the book is really there and was designed to give the priests a way to tell exactly when Easter should occur because Easter is based upon the moon cycles. They can tell by how far the light has traveled across the line on the floor and up the obelisk. The church also has a niche with paintings by Eugene Delacroix, which are huge. At the back is another niche with an amazing sculpture by Pigalle that juts from the wall. The boiling clouds below are really bizarre.

I have seen almost all the cow art in Paris now. Out of almost 200 cows, I couldn’t find 10. Not bad. Some are very creative and then they were others that looked like some artist either was a complete incompetent or just didn’t care enough to invest any time even though their work was on display for the world. To me that is stunning because it is really bad marketing for your self. Or maybe they just really think that it was good. Who knows. There were also a number of cows that suffered from vandalism. I saw graffiti, broken pieces, and one entire half-cow was gone. Now that takes some balls.

Okay, here is a little piece of absurdity, at least to me.
What do you think? I was flipping through channels and found a shopping show not that different from QVC or HSN but it was just for a time slot not a whole channel. The thing was though that you had to pay to call them to buy something. It costs you on your phone bill 22 cents a minute. Call me crazy but why would I want to pay to call you to buy something from them?

A* and I went to an exhibition called Paris in Cinema that weekend. It showed everything from the original French silent movies all the way up to current French cinema. My favorite part was at the end where they had 4 giant screens hanging at an angle from the ceiling and they showed little clips from hundreds of movies. There was a huge long cushioned bench that was reclined back so that you could comfortably watch the montage. It was so comfortable in fact that I noticed one gentleman had fallen asleep. Afterwards we went to a little bistro for lunch. It was very amusing to listen to the two ladies at the next table who were American and complaining about their order being wrong and not being understood.

The next day, Sunday, was the first Sunday of the month and therefore a number of museums are free. I went to the Picasso museum. It was quite something to see so many of his works together. He had a lot of anger is seemed both in general and towards women. That was what I felt when looking at the pieces. It comes from both the contorting of the women’s bodies and the choices of colors. Very somber or very acidic. I then went over to the Pompidou and looked at an exhibition of someone named Hans Bellmer. Again the art seemed to have a great hatred and sense of confusion aimed at women. I also noted that they were both painting about the same time period. Bellmer also took the female form and distorted it.

I decided to try the internet dating here and went out on a couple of dates. Both guys were gentlemen. One guy was easy to talk to but no chemistry. The other guy was not as easy to talk but a little chemistry. Sigh. Could I have both in the same guy?

On May 9th all the major monuments in the city had blue lights coloring them. It is a date to celebrate the European Union. I guess that explains the blue, the same color as the flag. Unfortunately, for me, I missed getting a shot of the Eiffel Tower. At midnight, they turned all the blue lights off and I got off the metro at a spot I knew I could get a great shot just a little to late. Oh well.




I finally went out to the business complex called La Defense. It is like walking into a movie that takes place in the distant future with all sorts of strange forms and shapes. It is a mix between the future through the eyes of the ‘60’s and the eyes of the ‘80’s. It is at times very colorful and at others very cold and sharp. It is truly an experience.

I decided to go up to the famous white church on the top of Montmartre called Sacre Coeur. I had been at the foot of the garden a dozen times and never gone up. This church is so over the top in decoration. It has mosaic pictures everywhere and many of the tile pieces are gold leaf. There are many different colors of marble in columns and in the inlay decorations on the railings of the niches. The dome above the apse, I think that is the right term, is an amazing display of a mosaic, primarily in blue with gold sparkling and of course a picture of Christ and the apostles.

When I came out the weather had changed into a little storm with dark clouds and thunder and lightning. How incredible to be standing on the top of the hill looking at the city under a storm.

I then walked around the corner to a church that was hardly even noticed by the tourists. It is the Church of Saint Pierre and has a beautiful little courtyard in front of it. The doors look very ancient, heavy with carvings, and inside I found some of the best stained glass yet. It is a little more modern but the colors are absolutely exquisite. There is also a pair of columns that are said to have been from before the time of the church and could even be Roman. They look it.

This Sunday, A* and I went to Yerres and visited the home of Caillebotte, an impressionist painter. He is most famous for his paintings of the wide Hausmann boulevards of Paris and also one called the Raboteurs that shows men at work sanding down wood floors by hand. We walked through the garden of his home and saw some of the sites that he had painted from. Afterwards we had dinner in her garden surrounded by flowers and stalking cats. It was great fun.