Belle epoque in four colors

Love or hate this series of color reduction and mix-up pictures, I think we might be at the end of them now, at least for a little while. 

I shan't over-explain them anymore, but for those of you just popping back from a vacation from clerkmanifesto, I have been applying some randomized short lists of carefully defined colors to altered to black and white pictures I took with my trusty phone camera. Thus far I have covered the categories of flowers, Saint Minneapolis, my favorite French city where I started all this, and Japan. The last category of these pictures I have to share today are of my... home. 

This is where I live. And though we still are trying to move away from it, you can maybe see in these strange alterations, that are nevertheless hard rooted in reality,...

...it's not so bad here. 

Soccer in Europe

 

I don't think they call it soccer here. It's called something else, though I can't remember exactly what at the moment, and I'd rather not confuse anyone anyway. So soccer it is.

It is pretty popular where I live now. In fact, I consider it a tiny perk of moving to Europe that the main sport I have followed for a many years is the main sport of most people here. Rugby is kind of a big deal in some places around here, and major cycling events have already swept through my towns a couple of times. But I imagine few people reading this have heard of Antoine Dupont. I haven't, and yet he is French and probably the best rugby player in the world. And though I have heard quite a bit about the best cyclist in history, and currently, in Tadej Pogacar, I'm not sure how many of you have. Although, thinking of the small number of people I know to be reading this, I reckon most of you actually have. But soccer? Absolutely everyone, reading here, walking the streets below me, and out at the cafe this morning, has heard of Fermin Lopez.

No?

Pedri?

Then Rodri for sure.

Michael Olise? Dembele? Lamine? Harry Kane? Raphinha? Mbappe?

Whatever. The point is that soccer is a way of life here. 

Not long ago, by chance, we were out in one of the nether neighborhoods of my city. This is a big city. Like everywhere one travels to and moons over, the tourist city is but five or ten percent of the thing, and there are so very many of these kinds of urban unsorted places that we never go to usually. But there we were, waiting for a bus on a Sunday, and a Sunday league game was taking place on a tightly packed in pitch behind a fence in back of our unglamorous, non descript bus stop. This was a proper pitch, uniformed players, and no referees. The language on the field was Arabic mostly. The skill level was... not what I am used to, watching as I do the best teams and players in the world, but it was still impressive. Impressive because all these men had been playing this sport since they were two.

I played baseball since I was two. I suppose if you saw me in some kind of two on two baseball game in the eighties you could have easily seen the mastery of my vast thousands of hours of ball playing at work, the smoothly elegant way I could handle a baseball, at least before I let one ridiculously through my legs. 

These guys were sort of like that.

But it was just nice to have soccer around me.

My soccer team, which I fell into affection for, like so very many others, through coming upon a much younger Messi, was and remains Barcelona. Messi is long gone. But so far this year, quite early on, Barcelona are finally again the clear best team in the world, at least for a little while. In this international city their kit is everywhere, rivalled only by PSG, the wildly triumphant Paris team, and the local team of this city, but I would say with both of them still far behind Barcelona in representation. Unlike the, I suspect meaningless and ubiquitous NY Yankee baseball caps worn all over France for some bizarre reason, a Barcelona kit always fills me with joy, and I feel compelled to try to see the name of the player on the back and try to identify the vintage of the shirt and the level of devotion in the fan wearing it.

I am even inclined to smile at the person wearing the shirt!

But this is a big city, and that would be going too far.

 

Does Minnesota still exist

What a funny thing to be running through my color shake up pictures so excitedly. Today we are returning to Minnesota and grabbing from a vast catalog of seen and useen photographs mainly of the Mississippi Riverlands, and then changing them. And while this sort of color randomizing effect has captured my attention for now, it isn't the first time. 

Indeed, my first experiments of image witchery were along these same lines.

Long before AI and maybe even before photoshop existed, I started to have some access to color copiers. I took old photographs of mine, or new ones if I had any, and hand tinted black and white copies of my pictures. I then made color copies of them as overdialed and saturated as I could. The pictures you are seeing now are much the effect I was going for back then, but of a nature I was not technically capable enough to achieve.

Back then I think pictures like these would have amazed you, but you likely never would have had a chance to see them even if I could have created them. Now maybe, amid all the noise and magic of imagery that is created and tossed around the world like it is nothing, these are perhaps not so amazing as they would have been. But here they come, with ridiculous ease before your eyes on your magic device.

Minnesota. Saint Minneapolis?

Of course I miss it! I have a few delicate connections to the people I love most there. I am still made of a life there. And the river still runs through me and always will. I like this style of picture so much because this dreaminess and reality, fading and overclear, wrong and right, tells the story better than...

I don't know.

It just seems to tell the story of that world better. Instead of coming upon a picture and thinking "I remember that place" something else happens. I come upon the picture now and it is a dream I had instead, which really is more like it.

A belated introduction

 

Enter the raven.

This character has shown up in clerkmanifesto and has been bopping around it in all kinds of places for at least a few months. Scraggly feathers, large yellow beak, a team player. The raven is there in the studio, out on all the field trips, and features in the clerkmanifesto promotional footage. But who is this character? 

I don't know. 

So I made a cartoon to try and find out.

A brief revisit

 

This may not be the last time we trot out old pictures from Japan here at clerkmanifesto. There is still too much satisfaction in it because we loved it there. 

It is now a year since we were actually in Japan, but, and this one seems strange to me: We were nevertheless in Japan more recently than we were in the United States.

You know, of America.

"Ah! America!" As people say in France after we figure out they're asking us where we're from and we answer them. 

"Ah! America!" They say.

What do they mean by this?

That they've heard of it?

There is no level of French I can be at that will understand this response. But I accept it. Yes, America.

The important point though here is that I am fully obsessed with what I might fairly describe as a color shaker toy for my photos. You take your little magic can (TM) and load it with any three to five colors you want. Select your photo and mist it lightly with your Ansel Adams Solution, being careful not to saturate it. Then firmly close the top and shake it for 20 seconds or so, et voila! Remove the picture from the cannister and hang it to dry. 

In less than ten minutes: Color magic!

My best solution to what to do with all my color magic pictures is to group them up by category. Today is "Japan". I think I might still have a "Minnesota" group, and a "Belle Epoque City" one. After that maybe I'll be ready to try something else, you know, like writing one of those witty essays everyone is always pretending I write. "Thank you for your hallucinatory xray images of the oysters you ate, but what I really enjoy are those crazy little essays you write where you imagine the reader is saying stuff and then you respond to it but it's all in your own head!"

Wait, I don't do that, do I? 

The doubleheader

 

Today I have for you two new I E Skin cartoons. Two!

I could just show one, I know. It would be perfectly reasonable. Even employing as much AI as I do here, these still take tons of time to make, mostly with me yelling at and begging the AI to do what I want. But they make such a nice set about my life in France.

I don't know how to explain it, but the first one is a bit of how it feels trying to do the right thing in a slightly confusing other culture. The second one is probably my trying to make peace with the seedy life of the streets here.