You are probably a genius!

 

As we have dashed off across the country, on a laboriously long train ride, back to one of my favorite cities I have seen, to hopefully look at an apartment we may want to and even be able to rent, I am eager to stuff clerkmanifesto's cheeks full of food to delay the moment when I have to start posting from my phone. 

Posting from my phone is not easy and sometimes looks funny.

And so, what a fabulous time for a...

Clerkmanifesto Classic!

The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz

Are you a genius?

How can you trust your own highly invested self-assurance, or, conversely, that your noble humility won't muck up your scientific evaluation.

That's where this test comes into play.

Yes, you may have taken a genius test before. One of two things invariably happened: 

1. They said you were a genius because your qualities and abilities matched the ones that they themselves had and over-valued. Or

2. They said you weren't a genius because they were jealous, jealous of your genius.

Either way they had an axe to grind, a chip in the pot, a cliche nailed up on the metaphor for all souls to see. Oh how I hate them.

On the other hand I don't have an axe to grind. Except against Republicans. And fast food sandwich restaurants. And the rich. And most dog owners. And Kazuo Ishiguro. And the Internet. And Centrists. And the country of Poland. And managers. And the publishing industry. And all the people who don't read my blog. And God. 

And especially those bloody disingenuous people with their damn genius tests!

Oh how I hate them. I hate them more than anything in the whole world! I hate hate hate the genius test people!!!!!

Not for anything they ever did to me. And not really for anything they did to anyone else. But for, well, er, um, actually I can't think of anything right now. And, so, um, maybe I don't hate them all that much. Maybe I like them. I haven't worked that out yet. I have to think this over.

But that's not the point.

The point is, well, it's around here someplace. Hang on while I look.

Oh. I know what it was. It was that you should take my test. 

My god it's hard. Incredibly hard. Awe-inspiringly hard.

No, not the test. I'm referring to writing the introductory comments.

The test is actually pretty easy...

If you're a genius!

 The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz

1. The name of this test is:

     A. I'm going to have to think outside of the box for this one, aren't I? Clever!

     B. Ah, you no fool me. Trick question. You tell me what the name of this test is!

     C. The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz.

     D. I see, weeding out the weak on the first question.

     E. I'm supposed to expect a first answer to be a "C" or "D", but it's always "E" to throw people off.

2. The most common mistake the blog author makes in writing Clerkmanifesto is:

     A. Its for it's and it's for its.

     B. No, wait, it's it's for its and its for it's. Yes, that one.

     C. Functionally "A" and "B" are the same and so must be a set up for "C" to be correct.

     D. Mistake? But there's never been, oh, I see, wink's as good as a nod to a blind man. Mistake indeed!

     E. I hate to be the one to tell you, but just when Clerkmanifesto has the golden ring in its grasp it gets distracted by the meaning of the universe.

3. The meaning of the Universe is:

     A. Probably around here somewhere.

     B. I just pick whatever letter choice tells me which letter choice to pick. This question doesn't have one of those, but this one is at least closest in spirit.

     C. Oh man, do these get any harder? Who doesn't know this?

     D. People like the "Answer "C"" guy just drive me crazy. Fine, everyone knows, so just tell me for god's sake!

 
     E. Can everyone just settle down here? The answer is "Love", or sometimes "Revenge". Like 90% "Love", 10% "Revenge".

4. How many questions are in this test?

     A. Oh man, this is a mindbender. We, taking the test, can see how many questions there are, but you, still writing the test, cannot. How then will you fill out your multiple choice answers?
          a. Right, I didn't think of that!
          b. b.
          c. How many points do we get for answering the questions in the answers? I'm asking for a friend.
          d. It's not that big a deal, he merely needs to take a fair guess at what the answer will be and then stick to it as he completes writing the quiz.
          e. I'm a friend of "C". Did "C" leave me any messages?

 
     B. Three?

     C. On the 4th question it's almost always "all of the above" or "none of the above". Look for one of those to show up as a choice and choose that. Don't worry, they won't both be in there.

     D. It can't be many more now as most of the thematic and narrative elements have played through.

     E. I'm going to skip this one and come back to it later if there's still time left.

Scoring:


We have automatically scored your test. Well done. Your score is:

43



What your score means:


1-10:


Yes, congratulations! You are a genius. But more the garden variety type that hangs out in the four corners area of the U.S. mistaking train themed murals for the real thing and unsuccessfully hunting flightless birds.


11-20:


You are a hard core genius who, well, you've already deduced the rest of what I was going to say.


21-30:


Hello Albert Einstein!

(This zone range is reserved for Albert Einstein. If by error your test result fell into this range and you are not Albert Einstein please double check your results, resubmit or, if still in the 21-30 range, send an error documentation report to our trunk office. We apologize for any inconvenience).


31-40:

))(__+|\+?>>><&^^^%&$><.<.


41-50:

I'm kind of embarrassed you read my blog, but, like, honored.

Here it is called "citronnade"

 

Tomorrow we are off halfway across the country to look at an apartment we might move to. It is a very exciting place to move to. It is on a traffic restricted street crammed with boulangeries, across from a giant church, in a 230 year old building. Sure, the apartment may be too decrepit for us to move into, but I hope not.

Also, they may not want to rent it to us.

But at the drop of a hat, we are off via train tomorrow, and our lives may change again, which is sort of what lives do when you think about it.

Which can be very frustrating!

But it does turn out to be essential in producing material for me to write about. 

So lemonade, I guess?

The fauves

 

No, I'm not really going to tell you about the fauves. They were from the country I'm in now, France, and were an art movement characterized by intense colors and wild brush work. Matisse, whose apartment I can see in the hills out my window, is possibly the most famous of the fauves.

Oops, I wasn't going to tell you about the fauves! 

I don't even know if you can say fauves or if you have to always say "fauvism" or "fauvists". So who am I to be guiding you around this early 20th century art movement!

It's kind of neat though, like it goes pretty far into abstraction without quite getting there. It's like a godchild of Van Gogh.

Anyway, I was working on maybe the fourth of my Genoa paintings, today's subject was a scene looking out through the baroque palaces into the old city there. And when I finished my first layer I thought "Well, this is looking rather fauvist!"

But I build these images in multiple layers, so I still had a lot to do!

 After about five versions, a couple of hours, and quite a few layers, I was finished. I came over here to show you it. 

And then I started going on about the fauves!

The thing is, clerkmanifesto has a, let's call it a guiding principle, not a rule. And that guiding principle is that whatever our plans are here, we take the first exit, the first true ending we can get to. I don't always do it. And of course I sometimes have too strong an overall plan to give up on for it. But many, if not most posts come to a kind of surprise ending for me, like, I thought I was going... there, but here it is now. And I'm done.

I missed this opportunity with today's painting. I was really done after the first layer, but I labored on. Fortunately though, because each layer is preserved, I could finally see that and make my correction.

 And so, in one layer only, secretly fauvist inspired, is today's Genoa picture.

Sushi in France

 

I have had some grand plans for writing about food in France, but I keep shying away from it. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. And French food is both everything you would think and dream it would be, and yet it is as incredibly stupid and disappointing as everywhere else in the world too, both of them at the same time! Which makes for a mightier subject than I ever feel entirely ready to take on.

 So what if I start off small?

What if I start of with just a wee bit of sushi?

Who doesn't love sushi?

The French love sushi!

Oh my god the French love sushi so much! They love it almost as much as boulangeries, more than fromageries, and about equal with pizzerias.

Or, at least, one could conclude that by how very many many places sell sushi here. The cheap neighborhood grocery chains sell sushi here. And so do the big supermarkets. Small neighborhood sushi shops sell sushi here, and so do slightly bigger and nicer ones. There is a massive sushi chain devoted to only selling sushi here, with so many representative stores I couldn't begin to count them. And then there's the other sushi chain, equally big, exactly like the first one so that I can never remember which is which, equally devoted to selling sushi. And then there are equally as many poke bowl type restaurants on top of that, which are just a clever way to sell unassembled sushi in a bowl for the same price.

There is sushi everywhere here!

And every single place has the exact same sushi. 

And all of the sushi, grocery store and nice restaurant, is for pretty close to the same price. 

Tuna, Salmon, Dourade (a kind of sea bream), and maybe cooked shrimp, and then all of them in rolls with avocado maybe, or cream cheese (?). Maybe a cucumber makes an appearance. If there's a big menu a fifth seafood might appear, like scallop or fake crab.

It's a little disappointing. But honestly, I didn't have the easiest time finding good sushi in variety in Japan either. Though eventually I sussed it out. And at least their grocery store sushi was cheap and good.

I know this possibly makes me sound like a malcontent.

But that happens sometimes because I am a malcontent.

And I find myself constantly waxing nostalgic about the appearance of sushi in the U.S. in the nineteen eighties. What a revalation that was! If only they had a branch of L.A.'s "Somethings Fishy" here now (no, was that really the name?!). That typical early eighties sushi bar had no 20 dollar rolls of tuna, salmon and avocado smothered in various mayonaisses and fruits. No, it had 30 different kinds of fish! It was wild. I could get an oyster with a quail egg! They used crab! Unagi, hamachi, spanish mackeral, uni, oh lord, the uni!

Sorry. I got hungry and I have wandered off point.

Eh?

What was my point?

Of course I have a point!

Oh. Yes. It's a big one.

Are you sure you're ready for it? Can you handle it?

Okay.

The French are very, very, very good at their food.

But they're not so good at anyone elses.

And I'm not even mentioning the tacos.

How to look at a painting

 

Today's title is "How to look at a painting". You can see the title right up there ꜛꜛꜛꜛ.

And the answer is "Probably not like this".

We are on painting number three from my Genoa pictures. My first picture was decent. The second one went a bit off the rails, so I took a sabbatical to draw flowers in order to reorient my whole approach to the project. 

It was succesful!

Which is good, because picture three from Genoa was of a portrait by Durer, and the original was so good it was sick. The original painting that is. My photo of it was a bit over reflected. Still, it was better that I would have some idea of what I was doing when I went scribbling around and over Albrecht Durer.

Anyway, here's today's interpretation of a photograph from a palace in Genoa.

Back to Genoa!

 

Er, back to Genoa?

No, we're out of travel money for now, unless it pertains to apartment hunting. So, no, we aren't returning to Genoa. Plus, one might want to avoid Genoa in the general time period surrounding "Colombus Day" or one might receive an uncomfortable hectoring about "Indiginous Peoples' Day". 

Actually, I have no idea about that. I just made it up. They might hate Colombus now in Genoa, and good for them, although I will note that their giant statue of him outside the train station seems to be untouched.

Anyway, what is really happening is we are back to our pictures of Genoa. Finally we are on picture number three of our massive project of something like a hundred hand painted computery images of Genoa.

Or,

we would be.

Except, I accidentally on purpose opened another one of my new flower pictures and started etching away on that instead. But I swear it's just one drawing of a flower today only, a freak accident! Tomorrow I absolutely guarantee, I absolutely guarantee...

Actually I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Clerkmanifesto is a loose cannon these days!

Look ma, no hands!

 

I was out at my favorite park here, right by the water, in the open grounds of a villa turned museum. I love this park because really, as peaceful and parklike it is at first glance, at second glance it is an extraordinary garden, featuring without much fuss an exquisite assortment of flowers, succulents, and palms worthy of any botanical garden. The Meditterranean climate offers a hand up for this kind of a thing, but it's only a hand up. Some group is up to something amazingly clever behind the scenes there!

Anyway, things were looking particularly wonderful on the grounds, maybe even a bit better with the Autumn coming in, and I had the unusual opportunity to spend a real span of time taking pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely and I thought "I am just going to show these without any ai shenanagans, let everyone see what I can do with my eye and my phone and a bit of time!"

Plus, I'm really busy with my Genoa series and the administrative paperwork that is likely the bane of any emigree anywhere, but is definitely the case in France. So posting off twenty pictures or so without much fuss here sounded like a great idea!

And that's what I came here to do!

So I opened up my first picture and I thought "What if I just drew right over it instead?"

At least an hour later here I am, with one picture for you, hand drawn in two simple layers, the photo, and my drawing. I think this might change the direction of my Genoa pictures, or divert me into twenty flower pictures. I don't know, but I like this just fine. I am much more satisfied than with yesterdays gambit.

And now I can go do my daily tithe of French lessons!

"Wow, you do French every day?" You ask.

"Yes, yes I do." I answer warily.

"You must know a ton of French by now!"

One would think, wouldn't one?

So much to discuss

 

Oh my goodness, I have so much to discuss!!!

I have some important thoughts on French food that I am sure you have all been waiting for.

I wanted to tell you about how my biggest surprise after a full year in France is... how much it's just like America.

And finally, some notes on how I missed out on the Nobel Prize for Literature by a razor thin margin, really more of a weird fluke than anything else.

Interesting, no?

But alas it will have to wait because picture two from The Genoa Series is ready!

Do I like this one?

Great question!

I can't entirely tell. I may have overcomplicated it, though it was a bit of a tricky picture to begin with, of a kind of lovely grotto feature in one of the Baroque Palaces there that I wasn't able to get very close to.

Sheer cussed doggedness

 

For all the many trips we have been on since the start of August, each carefully documented in photographs, I have long since shown you whatever account or version of those photographs best expressed them. But at the start of all that traveling was Genoa. And Genoa's pictures were another story.

I have shown some pictures of Genoa, but my main idea with my Genoa pictures, influenced by a deep admiration for the city, the thrill of being in Italy, and the success of my photography there, was to make something more like hand-drawn, painted versions of my images.

This is a silly amount of work. An amount I hesitate to take on, but occasional do, and then usual give up on at some point.

I'm just saying I would think that I would have given up on this project at this point, but no, not yet.

Kind of like clerkmanifesto, eh?

We'll call it a hundred photos of Genoa, for simplicity's sake. Of course there was the taking them, and the choosing them. Then there was creating a half dozen or so layers for each of them, independent variations on them working with AI's. Then came the labeling and organizing those layer photos, 700 total pictures all to be renamed and filed appropriately. It turns out that was the shockingly laborious task that has taken most of the last two months.

But I finally finished! Yesterday evening I labeled and filed the last of the 600 layers.

And now the real work begins.

Here I assemble the images in layers, hand drawing/painting with my drawing tablet, erasing through sections, creating new layers, drawing some more, and assembling again, until it seems sort of... finished.

Today I present the first of these (though in August I may have shown a "proof of concept" version of one, I can't remember). Perhaps the next trick is figuring out what to say about any of these, since in all this elapsed time I have forgotten most of what these pictures are of, except the obvious, like here, that it is some kind of fancy lintel above a fancy doorway.

There should be plenty of varied versions of doorways coming up...

if I don't quit.

Here then, is the first:

I'm not bitter

 

Oh well, another Nobel Prize come and gone and nothing for clerkmanifesto. Not even the one for literature.

We were super close this time though! Not that I care. I do this for the glory of god.

Do you hear me God! I'm doing this for you!!!

So it's not my fault you come off looking so bad.

When the rain comes...

 

A couple of days ago I took a suite of random pictures around my city. There was no great motive or theme behind them, nor was it a feeling of capturing anything special. Maybe that kind of bewitchment is harder to find after living here for a year. I see the constant stream of tourists photographing like mad around my Belle Epoque city of legend and I think... 

"Do you know how many times all that has been photographed already?"

"By me." I add.

Really what I wanted is some pictures to experiment with new styles and visual ideas. I had come to the end of my series of color highlighting photos and thought maybe something else might appear to captivate me. I tried all kinds of things with these pictures, but nothing really made me feel anything, or really added much to the photographs. So I chucked it all aside. Instead I wrote you dark political pieces and tales of beggars, and we took a little break from the photos that have become so ubiquitous on clerkmanifesto.

Then today it finally rained. I think I have been wanting it to rain here for half a year, so one would think I would be happy. But I wasn't happy at all! Holed up inside, on an unbelievably dark day, my mood crashed. I looked out the window. Rain.

Aw, it's just a state of mind

Rain, rain, rain.

So I took all those random pictures and made them into rainy day views.

It's nothing special.

I can show you. It's just the views out of the fifteen different windows of our little apartment.

I can show you, the world is fine. 

But sometimes it's harder to show me.

Beggars

 

There are a lot of beggars in this city. Some wander around and ask people for money in direct ways, but most set up shop on the sidewalks. They have their little spot, and their sign, and their money receptacle of choice, maybe a cup or a flat plate, just so long as it doesn't look fancy. Sometimes it is a group operation, with a few, usually, men, hanging out socializing behind a towel or box for people to leave their cash, like maybe the people of the city just really enjoy having a group of rough looking men hanging out on the sidewalk all day, and want to show their appreciation. You know, like for buskers, if the buskers didn't ever do anything.

Actually, the begging around here looks an awful lot like just another job. Some beggars seem to work hard at it, greeting every single person with full interest, just like some of the sales people in stores here, or the waiters, and some really just want to sit there and be left alone, also just like some of the sales people in stores here, or the waiters.

The other day I walked by one of our regular beggars and noticed his sign: "No pennies". We have one penny coins, two-penny coins, and five-penny coins here. Did he really mean all of these? Even the beggars don't like penny coins around here!

This immediately made me want to look up how to say in French "Beggars can't be choosers."

But it doesn't really translate. It turns out the closest French Proverb is "Faute de grives, on mange des merles."

This roughly means "If there aren't any thrushes, we eat blackbirds."

What the fuck, France?

Sorry, right, no, this is France. I bet those thrushes of fucking delicious!

And fairly speaking, those blackbirds probably aren't half bad either.