I could work up some of these images, some altered, others right out of the camera (so to speak). And maybe I would in time, but... news!
We seem to be on the edge of finalizing a lease for an apartment.
We're moving to a big city!
These small and medium Cote D'Azur towns are lovely and charming and fun, but as people absolutely insistant on not owning a car, there is an element to them that is against the grain of that. While France is more agreeable to mass transit and... walking, that does not at all mean it is devoted to it. And it is very much a car centric and car designed world in France outside of the big cities (and even, sadly, to a degree inside them). Nevertheless a rich, eminently walkable, rich cityscape awaits us, and I can complain about cars later.
And so with our time in Theoule Sur Mer numbered I find myself doing strange things like waking in the middle of the night and taking strange, intentionally blurred photographs out the window of the lights in the darkness of the shore and ocean.
Exhausted at the end of a hopefully succesful day's apartment search on the Cote D'Azur, first we took a train, then we climbed on a bus to our not very distant, yet oddly slow to get to, temporary home. The bus traveled from day to night though it only went about eight miles.
There was no room for us to sit down, so we stood, hands welded to the nearest pole to keep us standing. It looks easier than it is. Out the window was the Mediterranean Sea, a big thing just absolutely full of water, and the sun going down cast oozing saturated colors rippling through the sky above it. It was so pretty that one lady crammed herself into a window to take pictures of it, leaning into quietly appalled French people. She didn't know what she was doing, though, and I could see on her phone that the picture would be no good. She could see it too.
I didn't take a picture of the sunset because I am sort of polite and because I know that trying to do so from a bus isn't likely to work out for anyone; the passengers, the photographer, or the sunset.
But I might have a sunset picture for you from a few days ago, when the moon was full, if I can find it.
Somewhere between vacationing and living, here we are on the Cote D'Azur, on the south coast of France.
It is very pretty.
No, no, I mean, it is wildly, madly pretty.
I grew up in Southern California, and I was a habitue of the canyons and oceans edging my faintly apalling suburb. It was very pretty, maybe even a little famously so. And when I saw pictures of where we are now, in this past year before we came, I thought a little bit: How strange that I am going back in my retirement to a land much like that of my youth.
There are similarities. But mostly it is incredibly different here. And oddly all the ways that it is different are as if one presented some version of youthful me the opportunity to make improvements on Southern California.
And because I am the way I am, I would have made a lot of improvements.
I would add more stone, climbing dramatically and mysteriously out of the wildland and oceans, in variegated cliffs and caves. I would make it a wetter, lusher, richer environment with real streams and a thousand shades of green. I would give it history and weave beautiful old stone buildings, passages, castles, and curiosities into the environment. And I would improve the culture with better food, and a more hands on personal approach to how people could live in it, walk in it, be in it.
All those improvements of my child's California are here, right here, out my door!
I have a new list of improvements now for here, equally dramatic, but we'll leave that for another day, because we are talking about how pretty it is!
It's really pretty.
So pretty that sometimes, in a very limited way, I have to stop and take some pictures. I keep this to a minimum, but the truth is that every glance, every walk, every stroll to my bayview apartment windows offers astonishments.
I should have a million pictures to show you of it all. But, still partly surprising to me, pictures don't work like that. They have a thousand of their own rules and limitations that the raw beauty of reality is not beholden to. So when I sit on the couch here and scroll through the 20 or 40 pictures I took back during the day, I am invariably let down.
But not for long.
Because though I am let down, I have planned for it.
Sure, I hoped for better, but I do expect it. And I know the work to build the pictures back up to a version of the place that was.
Though recognizable, it's never the same as the real place, but no picture is. Nevertheless, this is some of how it looks to me here:
For those of you remembering my analysis of the 100 greatest albums of all time yesterday, maybe today's title suggested I was going to do a study of "On the Beach" by Neil Young.
Welcome to my series of the hundred greatest albums of all time, with each album in the series being individually the single greatest album of all time despite the fact that there are a hundred of them (and surely far more), and despite the fact that that doesn't make any sense at all.
But it's nevertheless true!
And the greatest album of all time is Elephant, by The White Stripes!
I have not done one of these for a few years now. But The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and...
I WAS THERE!
What? No, not at the Hall of Fame induction. I was there during The White Stripes.
I was in a band at the time, with my dear wife, and our guitarist, who was a huge devotee of Elvis Costello, introduced us to the stripped down wonder of The White Stripes after practice one day at his house. He showed us video tapes of The White Stripes on Conan O'Brien.
Oh my.
They did a cover of "Jolene" that was electrifying, the greatest cover I'd ever heard (I mean, outside of Nirvana doing "In the Pines", but maybe let's not start this silly discussion about "the greatest" again). And soon I had all of The White Stripe's CD's just as they were peaking, and I knew them all backwards and forwards.
And, a fourth album was soon coming out!
(Sorry about all the exclamation marks, The White Stripes are still very exciting to me.)
As a great adorer of The Beatles I have heard tales of the time of their supremacy, and of the extraordinary event that was the release of Sgt Pepper's. I heard people talk about how the album upon its release existed everywhere all at once. That briefly it was the epicenter of the universe.
Being two years old at the time I sort of missed it.
Elephant was as close as I got.
I generally find albums years or even decades after their moment, but not Elephant. I awaited it breathlessly, and the moment I got my hands on a copy I raced it off to my basement lair (where great swaths of early clerkmanifesto was feverishly written, you should check it out! Or not.), and I put on my big headphones and sat and listened to it.
Of course you know Seven Nation Army, the last perfect rock song ever written, but my favorite song on the album was Ball and Biscuit. I can still place the ripple of thrill in hearing it for the first time. The astonishment bordering on disbelief when one encounters art of the absolute highest order. Anchored by Meg White's deep percussion, we have a heavy and rich blues song, with a hint of menace and the expectation of storm.
It takes its sweet little time about it. It is hypnotizing, rich, and deep, and very... heavy. It is a dark cloud coming up over the horizon, a pregnant wind, a strange color in the sky. You think you should go inside but you want to see what happens, and it doesn't seem dangerous yet. So you stand there in the quiet as heavy drops of water fall on your upturned face.
And then it explodes.
And then just as quickly it is simply rain again, heavy and dark, twenty degrees colder, leaving you wondering if it actually even happened. You really should go inside. You're soaking wet. You're shivering. The sky is green black. Thunder pulses as if far away, but powerful. Something terrible and awesome happened, you think, and you have to see if it is going to happen again.
Nothing is coming out quite right tonight for clerkmanifesto, but that doesn't mean I don't have anything to show you. Sometimes too many things come out right and I sock them away for another day and forget about them. So all I have to do is wander into one of my vast repositories of photographs and grab a few fancy ones that catch my attention and voila.
Did you know that "voila" is a French word? I mean, of course you knew. I knew it was french, I guess, sort of. But in french it's just a regular word to use. It means "There it is". Which in English is "Voila". In learning French I especially love any free pass word, things like "impossible" which you have to say with your best Frenchified imitation to make work, but nevertheless it's right there, spelled the same, but spoken: im po see blay. The whole of learning French is so full of words like this (restaurant, grand, petite, film) that learning the language almost feels like one is cheating one's way through it.
I mean, up until you have to speak or understand it, at which point one realizes that all those free passes don't really do very much.
Anyway, here are some pictures I took around here recently, where I currently live, and where everyone speaks French.
