100 greatest albums of all time: My Favorite Things

 

Before today, I would not have chosen "My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane as the greatest album of all time.

But there are a lot of greatest albums of all time. More and more all the time. 

And anyway, this happened:

We decided to get a record player here in our new city in France. It suits the charms of our darling and cozy little attic apartment. We bought a really cheap one from a store called Darty. It's kind of a little suitcase record player and reminds me of one handed down to me from my sister almost 50 years ago. It fits beautifully on a narrow built-in media cabinet we have in our apartment until you open it to play a record. Then it doesn't fit anymore. So we bought a phillips head screwdriver from the hardware store more or less downstairs from us and unscrewed the lid hinges. It was perfect!

But we didn't have any albums.

So we went out to the local record stores on a rainy evening and were sad to find that... they aren't very good. And they're very expensive. The second one, called Yusumi, or something like that, was much better than the first, but very very expensive. However, we found a nice French copy of My Favorite Things by John Coltrane we wanted, but it cost the sun and the stars. So we looked at every other album in the Jazz section and nothing quite worked.

So, figuring just this once we could accept the whispers of fate, we bought My Favorite Things even though it was more expensive than our actual record player!

Which is kind of funny.

Today I made us some coffee as the sun was setting and we listened to it.

McCoy Tyner is the piano player and he is wonderful.

I mean, everyone is brilliant.

What am I supposed to say? All old Jazz albums sound like Christmas music, or maybe Christmas music from a perfect world. Maybe all the greatest albums of all time are recordings smuggled out of a perfect world.

Somewhere there is a perfect world.

And occasionally, rarely, if you look just so, it's right here.

Journey to the past

 

Japan felt like a world from the seventies to me, thus something out of my early childhood. It was a quality from before the glamorization, competition, fracturing, and corporatization of America. And though Japan was obviously denser and more wonderful than the suburban desolation I knew as a kid, it also shared in a feeling that was already disappearing as I became conscious of the world around me, a kind of human scaled world where everyone experienced the same institutions and schools and stores, and the distance between success and failure, while still tragic, was at least not so astronomical.

France is something else.

Living in this grand old city feels like something from well before I was born. It feels like something I imagined belonged to my parents or even more, my grandparents and great grandparents. It is a world of the fifties or, maybe better, the early nineteen hundreds. It is all my dreams of New York City. It is a much more wild sense of city.

We live now in a small attic apartment on what to you is probably the sixth floor, though here it is the fifth. And although it is a nice building in a frankly lovely and brilliantly situated area, it is also a small apartment in a building full of modest apartments that fill the place up, and it is sitting on a street and in a city among hundreds, no, thousands of more buildings much like it, all six and seven and eight stories high. The neighborhood teems with businesses, shops, bakeries, corner stores, cafes, all to serve the very, very many people who live here. And when I walk up and down the staircase of my building, which I so often do, well, that is what I wanted to tell you about.

I feel like I live in a tenement building. Maybe even, strictly speaking, I do. And though I don't at all mean to compare to the miserable side of tenement living; poverty, rats, poor ventilation, crowding, and discomfort, there is something. There is a sense of so much life here. Every flight of stairs I take has different smells, sometimes different sounds. A mere trip outside might include on our way down our single stairwell of solid stone, wrapping an ancient elevator, and leaning with age, the scent of burning rubber, sewage, herbs, mouth watering cooking, perfume, murmuring voices, smoke, raw onion, and more. I can hear children playing on the third floor. Outside the streets are always full of people, even as today in the rain and in Winter. It is all modern and full of modern things, but my god, it just seems like it has been like this forever.

Today we had some things delivered, including a turntable, and then waited for some item that never came. We went out finally, after giving up, in the early evening, to buy chocolate and a record album by John Coltrane. We walked down to the stones of the empty beach and watched the storm waves roll in. The ocean is all dark at night, but when there are waves and they crash, the foam of them is brilliantly illuminated.

I brought home an "Oaklahoma" burger from a great burger place run by an exhuberently manic man, but we ate the french fries from the brown paper bag while we walked, steaming hot out of its carton, finishing them at the top of the stairs and as we entered our apartment, and surely leaving our own smell for whoever would be coming home next.

 

Massena at night

 

As you might have seen here a couple of days ago, we visited the Massena Museum, a bright and lovely Belle Epoque mansion on the Cote D' Azur. It is full of history, though maybe it is not all the history, if you know what I mean. It's the sunny history. 

I didn't see any of the night history.

So I did a little reimagining...

The dream days

 

No matter what goes wrong, or even bearing in mind the imperfections of the day, today was pretty much the encapsulation of my fantasy of moving to France. And it could easily be expressed thusly:

I shopped in markets, fromageries, and boulangeries, all walking around in a beautiful city. I brought it all home. I cooked and ate it.

I am not bragging or gloating, or saying anything was perfect. Life goes on and is full of hardships that we bring with us and that visit us as well. But bearing all that in mind, this was what I comically aimed at, and it was pleasantly amusing to see it hit its target after so much... fuss.

"But what did you get?" You reasonably want to know.

At the Liberation Market I bought an eggplant, three tomatoes, a bundle of local herbs and the lady asked if I wanted some parsley at checkout so I said yes, a pomegranate from Espagne, a lemon with a lot of leaves still on it, a few misshapen kiwis, potatoes, and two onions. At the laterie, which was really a cheese shop, I bought some bleu d' auvergne, reserve comte, and very hard gouda that the lady used three knives and so much trouble to cut that I applauded when she managed it. I also got a quart of their milk, from Normandie, and a chunk of reduced fruit gel that tasted like a very good fruit roll up. At the boulangerie I got a baguette and an apple pastry just cause it looked good. At a corner store I picked up a bottle of champagne. 

I spent about 50 euros.

"Great, is clerkmanifesto now going to just devolve to being a bunch of shopping lists?" Someone asks.

I don't know.

Maybe. 

I'm trying to integrate with French Culture.

Oh, did you want a picture version?

Massena Museum

 

Today we went to the Massena Museum.

You know the Massena Museum, don't you?

Exactly, that Massena Museum, the one that is a museum of some rich people's very fancy house down on the ocean next door to the very famous Negresco Hotel. It is partly a museum of the time that was (mid to late 1800's up to the early 1900's) and also it sort of doubles as a museum of the history of the city.

It was fancy! But maybe I am not so interested in telling you all about it. It's more of a "I took a bunch of pictures of it!" kind of place.

When I got home I started doing all sorts of crazy twists on my pictures, because that's sort of my hobby.

What's that?

No. Clerkmanifesto is not my hobby. Clerkmanifesto is the organizing principle of the universe. But I appreciate the question.

Anyway, after making a collection of strange or fun or whatever versions of my pictures of the Massena Museum I realised: "Actually, the regular pictures I took are kind of pretty just all by themselves."

So here are some regular out of the camera box pictures of the Massena Museum. Think of them as the baseline. I'll show you weird versions later. We have all the time in the world.

Don't we have all the time in the world?

Let's pretend we have all the time in the world.

Protecting my images

 

I was out taking pictures of the old city today. And though I share my photographs freely, and with an open heart here on clerkmanifesto, I am, like any artist, terrified that someone may use one of my images without permission or without remunerating me to the tune of 1/1000th of a cent.

What if one of my pictures appears somewhere and no one knows I did it!!!!!

I mean, it could happen.

And though for 14 years now I have daily shared my life's work without anyone in particular passing it around, sharing it, or profiting on it, THE WORLD MAY COME TO ITS SENSES AT ANY MOMENT AND START SHARING AND STEALING MY WORK!

So I have decided to subtly encode my photos with my signature, er, copyright protecting watermark elements.

I hope it does not get in the way of your enjoyment of these lovely scenes from France.