flying solo in Paris....

Tuesday...All alone. I honestly spoke a total of 5 sentences all day (in French I'll have you know) and instead I took a lot of pictures. Therefore, I will sum it up in images (in order of experience so you can live vicariously through the best day ever).




I love Paris.

Jeff Koons at Versailles

(show =brillant. artist= the bane of our post-modern existence)













Portrait of Louis XIV (L); Self-Portrait (R)
In a world full of upper-class Americanization and where Hollywoodisms have developed into household terms, who better than Jeff Koons to display artwork at Versailles? The ridiculous, captivating, and in-your-face exhibit becomes a modern commentary on materialism. Fittingly, the kitsch artwork sits in one of history's ultimate examples of materialism: Louis XIV's palace of Versailles.

Balloon Dog in the Hercules Room
The myelin balloon and highly-glossed porcelain sculptures outshine the gold gilding of the 17th- century rooms. So much so that one sees a self-reflection in nearly each monstrosity of a piece of "art." And so a new Hall of Mirrors is born. Cleverly cutting to the heart of contemporary art's "everything goes" philosophy, commercialization, and tourism, the tacky sculptures of Michael Jackson shock yet entertain the audience. Cameras constantly clicked in an attempt to capture the bizarre; because no one knew how to respond to the art but take a photo to say "I was there." Perhaps Koons comments on these swarms of tourists, who have degraded many French historical monuments into Disneylands, by producing reflections of pop culture defaming the site. Or perhaps he tries to rekindle the disgust of the wasteful frivolity that the French populace experienced 25o years ago (he did a good job at achieving disgust). Does the artist call for another guillotine? Or does he mock the complacency of the puzzled crowds which experience the show?Michael Jackson in the Venus Room

Either way, one thing is for sure: Jeff Koons at Versailles sets a precedent in today's art scene as a ground-breaking semi-installation exhibit. The tacky American moneymaker in France's most famous palace....it feels like eating a Big Mac rather than a baguette while on the Eiffel Tower. Both nauseatingly wrong and embarassingly amusing.The Hall of Mirrors with Blue Balloon

Milan Mission

This is my reaction to my mission call to Milan, Italy starting February 18th 2009...for the next 18 months! It felt so natural and familiar but still so exciting and foreign!

My Autumnal Child

Update: My baby is dying. I feel such loss whenever I pass by and more leaves have fallen.

I love the fall. And I have been following one tree's progress each day as I walk home from the train station. I have become very motherly about it (don't blog about any children because I don't have any...just trees.) In the past week:

Au lait? S'il vous plait?

Dear French people,
If you want me to be skinny like you.... WHY have you been SECRETLY been feeding me demi-ecreme instead of ecreme milk that makes me fatter? Why have you been allowing me to unknowingly partake of milk that sounds healthy BUT, in all actuality, contains qualifies as 4% milk? WHY have you been allowing me to drink 12 g of fat per serving without PLACING IT ON THE NUTRITIONAL FACTS?
Gluing my eyes to the sides of food packages and counting calories does not appeal to me. In fact, I love buttery, sugary, fatty, delicious French cooking that ignores any nutritional value. BUT I HATE the fat in the secretive, not-good-tasting, boxed, boring, luke-warm, milk. Play fair.

Merci Beaucoup,
Annie

why memory matters

Elie Wiesel said, "After all God is God because He remembers."

I started this entry weeks ago but seemed to chase words and ideas without catching them. I only felt them--and after more days in my European adventure I know them--and jotted down musings of excitement and "thank-you" notes to the past. Although my words feebly attempt to condense the entirety of every turn of the whole, 360-degree circles of the heart and mind, I write them with sincerity.
I have always loved history...to the point of chronic nostalgia; still, there is a difference between remembering and remembering. Walking away from one of the world's greatest museums with a Viennese sunset ahead of me and miles of cobblestone streets behind me, everything finally sunk in after weeks of travel. I think that was the moment that I cried my first Europe cry...because of how much our civilizations have gone through. How much individuals can achieve (that's why I love museums) countered by how many people have lived invisible lives without the voice of history to merely legitimize their existence. And the tears for how much we have put each other through.

You know that feeling where you feel humbled to be human? Someone blows you away or some story gives you the chills and you feel inadequate to stand in any square inch of the vast timeline of human history? Every couple of days at random moments--meeting a kind immigrant on the metro or standing on a gagillion-year-old bridge--I feel that. What do you do with that feeling but try to hold on to it....I just try to remember the times I truly remembered.

Whether spiritual reminders or personal stories or national sagas, reaching back and bringing the past to present changes everything. Folding it all into the "now" directs the future on toward progress. Remembering changes the daily floss-your-teeth and eat-your-vegetables habits and the more monumental happenings like repeated genocide or avoided economic disasters. We repeat history when we forget history. In remembering or re-remembering I have found that I understand events, politics, religion and cultures better; but, most importantly, I respect each person more. Perhaps for me it takes traveling to amazing places to learn lessons that others can understand in everyday life. I forget to remember until I go to places like the Louvre or see Auschwitz or read the Classics. However, if I hold onto history for the right reasons, I see the world in a new light and relate to others in a different way. I remember that--just like Caravaggio and Mozart and Marie de Medici and Hitler--we all have power for good or evil. We all hide histories of pain--both collective and individual pain--and each own unseen potentials to change the world. It may seem cliche and cheesy but I know it from experience. How can I know this? Because I study history and it boils down to millions struggling to make a mark on their "world"--however small that world may be. And I do the same thing. Oh, how history repeats itself. So I will try to remember that.

"After all God is God because He remembers..." I love that quote.