Some cat

 

No, there is no picture of a cat today. I'm going to tell you a story.

In this busy city I see many people. They are very interesting. I like best when they are from everywhere and not just French, which is more true the closer one gets to the water here. Japanese American German Syrian Indian Senegalese Chinese, beggers, rich people, people falling apart in wheel chairs, young people, working people, old people, and people bursting with life! It is amazing.

I also see a lot of dogs, and they are largely well behaved and interesting too! I see pigeons, who I am very fond of, and seagulls, who are dazzling expressions of the wind. And less often, if I am very, very lucky, I run into a cat.

Today I saw a cat!

Yes yes yes yes, big deal, I saw a cat. There are lots of cats. And I would grudgingly accept your tepid, non cat obsessed view of the universe, and move on to complain about cars or something, but...

BUT

This was some cat.

If this cat knew a spider, the spider might weave a web that spelled out "Some Cat!".

But the literary spiderweb would have mostly been confusing because this cat was on the move! If you saw the web in the corner of a building saying "Some Cat!" you might look around and mutter "What cat?". 

Unless you read clerkmanifesto.

Which is why it is a good idea to read clerkmanifesto.

Tell your friends.

Let me set the scene:

My darling wife and I had morning business on the computer in our cozy little apartment. So we didn't get going until afternoon. We then had a few life supplies to pick up so we went and bought:

Toilet paper

Garbage bags

Sparkling water

Champagne

Tonic Water

A chocolate patisserie

These were heavy (well, not the patisserie, but it was delicate). So we decided we would stop home to drop them all off.

Also, and I'm sorry about this. It is crude. But I cannot hide it from you:

We had to pee.

But when we got home we were hungry, so we made lunch.

I had potatoes, onion, fennel, with very aged gouda. And then we were feeling very cozy indeed and not so keen to go out again. But we have an informal rule: go see the water every day! So we made a plan:

What if I took us out for a drink at the fabulous sidewalk cafe Verragno? And then we sat there drinking our drinks. Then we went to the water. Then we came home?

So we did.

Which sets our scene.

A table was available where we sit side by side on a short pedestrian street that goes but one block to the ocean. It is a pageant of humanity! We watched the people go by. We talked about stuff.

What stuff?

Wouldn't you like to know!

My darling wife had a rose'. I had a Campari Spritz. It was large and bitter. I like their strong spritzes at Verragno. They are seven euros during happy hour.

And then a pigeon landed in the road, or the pedestrian way. And we heard a great and terrible yowl.

What a yowl. I didn't think a pigeon could make such a noise, but it was definitely animal, not human.

The pigeon left hurriedly.

And that's when it happened.

The cat appeared.

With a terrible and discordant bellow, he strutted into view on the busy way, headed away from the ocean, into the city. He wore an astonishing necklace full of large diamonds. His coloring was unlike any I've ever seen on a housecat, more like that of a leopard, with sleek and dangerous brown ringed spots on a lighter fur background.

Some cat!

And he had business!

Without hesitating he walked on, ropey and sleek, yowling occasionally, never hesitating, and soon he was out of view, swallowed up in the crowds and noise and tumult of the Rue De France.

What on earth did we just see?

A cat.

We finished our drinks and walked to the ocean.

We came home and I told you about it.

Welcome to my web.

Je parle francais

 

Je parle francais.

Tu parles francais?

Don't worry, there are things on your phone or computer that can translate that for you.

I speak French!

But no one understands me when I do.

I understand French!

But not when other people speak it.

This creates some tricky situations. One of my favorites is the "everyone knows the easy part" conundrum. Like I'm talking with a French person who speaks as much English as I speak French. Maybe we're not understanding each other. I can say some part okay in French, but not enough to communicate the whole thing. They say a bunch of French, and then, seemingly triumphantly, they say the same thing I said in French, with great empahsis, in English.

Here. How about this to explain. Say the emergency room person is directing us to walk to another hospital. They'll say: 

"Vous devez aller bien au-dela de l'endroit ou la rue est defoncee, ignorer le mendiant agressif, puis tourner a droite."

I don't know about you, but I can understand way, way better reading French than hearing French, but either way this has too many odd words and I'd be lost even then. Spoken? I can only clearly understand the end of that where the person says "Then you go right" (puis tourner a droite). And so it is uniquely disappointing when the French person, as if they're super helpful, adds to their long incomprehensible string of French, a bit of slow English, "You... go... right... there."

Yes, that was the part I got.

But okay, they speak a bit of English. Maybe we can muddle through. So I ask, reaching deep "Ou je dois aller a droite?" Which means 'where do I go right?' except I think the syntax might be bad on that. And the person, now frustrated that after all their copious English I still don't understand, says in an irritated tone ""Vous devez aller bien au-dela de l'endroit ou la rue est defoncee, ignorer le mendiant agressif, then   you    go     right!" 

So we head off.

"Merci, au revoir. Bonne journee." We say.

"Goodbye." They respond. "Have a nice day!"

The lovely Chagall Museum cafe and I mean it this time!

 

I can't manage to go to the Chagall Museum near here without mentioning how pretty I find their garden cafe. But last time we went to it, and I tried to show you a picture of the cafe, I was distracted by a cat there, so I ended up showing you a picture I made of the cat, just emerging from behind a big tree in front of the cafe. 

I didn't show you the cafe at all.

Today we rectify that!

I have been working my little heart out with my layers of drawing and effects and I'm thinking I might buy a drawing tablet to make this easier, maybe, a little. Or I might buy one to at least give me a little more control since I am not great at drawing with a mouse!

Anyway...

Is today's picture every bit as good as those by Marc Chagall?

Hmmmm.

I guess I'm not as vain as I once was.

No.

No no no no no.

But you knew that.

Still, that doesn't mean that we might nevertheless like looking at it. 

And it even has the cat!

On the promenade at night

 

I don't know how you get to the secret city.

Down on the Promenade Anglais the sun is bright even in the pouring rain. This city is pretty with all its makeup and nice clothes. But it also smells like pee and cracks run through every inch of it. So I took a picture later in the night than we usually manage to be out. The Carnaval wall was still up along the beach, but it was a quiet night. It had the nice look of a wrong turn in Venice. I wanted to get a picture, but in the darkness it didn't seem likely.

I managed to smuggle this one out.

I think this place looks better just as it really is.

My favorite park

I'm afraid my Belle Epoque city lacks for parks. Maybe because it has wonderfully long, and sometimes astonishing promenades, like the famous one along the ocean, or the long parkway that covers over the Paillon River right through the heart of the city, and then as well because it has the lovely Castle Hill with its waterfall in the sky towering at its edge, maybe my city doesn't feel like much is required in the way of parks. But I do have a feeling of a lacking green space in this dense thrall of people and restaurants, bakeries and offices, grand buildings and gelaterias. This city is just so popular, and teeming with humanity, that when it finds space, it defaults to open places and wide paths, and they all quickly fill with people too. Aside from the ocean, glorious, but at a remove, this is a hard place to feel like one is walking through nature, or really even has much to do with it.

It is a mild complaint, and I have bigger ones, because... that's my nature, but after a few months of living here, I feel it. We have small parks here, gated, locked at night, on small single city blocks. The good ones have a fountain at the center, with a nice sculpture. A wide path circles around said sculpture a little as if it is meandering about through trees and greenery, but, let's face it, these places are never big enough for meandering. The path is short, wide, full of well used benches, and streets and people are always close by.

But even though this is all true, there is one park, not all that much bigger than the others I've declaimed, and not functionally so very different, that I am growing to love anyway.

But maybe I didn't have to start this post with a rundown about how there aren't enough parks I love here? I could have just said:

There is a delightful little park here, not far down the street from us. It has some grand old trees and a magnolia that is just finishing its blooming of pale violet and white flowers even as I write. And though this park has several different interesting large sculptures, its central fountain takes the prize. I don't know what prize that is, maybe one for serenity?  The sculpture sits in a large, lovely pool with a darling asymmetrical fall in it. Its central figure is a woman holding her knees, head bowed against them in sadness. 

Everytime I see this sculputre I think "That's exactly how I feel sometimes."

Occasionally I even think "That's how I feel now." 

I think I may eventually come to think of this city as one of impossibly lovely sadness.

I have taken a lot of pictures of this main fountain and now, over the last two days, I have made one of my sketches of it. I don't know if I've done it justice. I may even try again sometime.

City falling apart

 

This city is falling apart.

It's also a city in great shape.

Money pours through this city. Though as money does, it flows unevenly, surging through its open veins while other arteries are completely blocked. Grand and detailed, expensive repair jobs scramble to maintain buildings on every street. Meanwhile buildings in some of the most sought after locations in the country seem to be hanging on by a thread, with walls peeling and post apocalyptic shutters hanging outside of every crumbling window.

Which, by way of introduction, is a little of what I tried to photograph today. 

And though maybe these are merely an indulgence in abstract photography, some working better than others, they are also an opportunity taken from the old city here, where what sometimes looks perfectly and charmingly maintained is really built from 300 years of crude, but effective, patch jobs. And as I took these pictures, looking closely at window frames and walls, no new repair seemed to have ever entirely occluded the old ones, and most of the new ones had a clock already ticking on the due date for the next.

On the proximity of happiness and sadness

 

In the evening we had a drink at a favorite cafe of ours, on a street for only people to use, and where they stream by, to and from the beach. We sat side by side, facing the world and commenting on it together until one of us got cold enough for us to carry on in our evening in the city. I had a limoncello spritz, which is an odd spritz variation I had not tried. It was not bad, though I never love lemoncello as much as I think I would. But it was a very strong drink, and as we wandered away from the cafe to look for chocolate mousse I was almost drunk and a little happy.

I have not found the last month very easy. This is for a variety of reasons I mostly haven't gotten into here yet. Some I may not get into at all. But as I walked away from that cafe, I thought:

Happiness is best when it's close to sadness.

Sadness too is best when it's close to happiness, but only because it is less sad.

T Shirt designs

 

I have been working on t-shirt designs for some t-shirts I want to order and the process has become so involved that I have no recourse other than...

to show you them.

I don't make these in an attempt to sell them, though occasionally people have bought them and I get a tiny commission. I make them so I can buy my own designs on a site called Redbubble. And though I did not buy the t-shirts for all of these, I did get four!

These are all, or almost all designs from things that have at least partly appeared here in the past.

Distractions of the Chagall Museum

 

Because everytime we go to the Chagall Museum I end up talking about the pleasantness of the garden cafe there, I thought it would be nice to get a picture of it. It is both a nice place to be and very charming looking! So I took all my camera equiptment out of my pocket, walked to a suitable vantage point with the cafe entrance set off by an old tree, and...

there was a cat!

All my plans went out of the window.

I took pictures of the cat instead.

I'm like that about cats.

I made a drawing/painting out of one of the pictures of the cat, and this is it:

End of Carnaval

 

After the last parade of Carnaval, there were fireworks. Part of me doesn't like to miss out on fireworks. And I could have roused the household to wander down to the beach at around when we usually go to bed these days, but then I remembered I don't really like standing around in a crowd looking at fireworks.

I do however like seeing fireworks out my window!

At our old Saint Minneapolis apartment, also on the top floor, we had a glamorous view of the river and city and a golf course. Though we could see endless fireworks out broadly across the city, distance muted them a little. The golf course, though, a country club, had a spectacular show every year a day or two before July 4th and we would eagerly watch it from our balcony.

Still, I heard these end of Carnaval fireworks would be over the ocean, which seemed an amazing thing to see, and not something that we'd be able to spot from any of our windows.

But then it turned out that, despite what I read, the fireworks were not over the sea. They were over the Place Massena. And though buildings fully block anything remotely like a view of that heart of the city, it is nevertheless quite close to us as the seagull flies. So when the explosions started sounding out loudly in the city I went to my window, behind where I sit now, and I looked right.

We can't see Place Massena from here. Not even close. But...

BUT

We can see the sky above it.

Chagall, with the proper respect

 

Holy crap, that Chagall guy is a helluva painter!

Last time we talked about the Chagall Museum, right up near the end of last year, we gave the whole story; the way the museum works, the pleasant little walk there from our apartment, a bit of its history, its lovely garden cafe. Then with a little AI flummery I put myself in some of his paintings for fun, and with that another day at clerkmanifesto was taken care of. 

But with a "Free first Sunday of the Month" and a new show they had up at the local Chagall Museum, we went for another visit, and, well, check out my opening sentence. So I thought I'd take a more Chagall centric approach to this visit.

That said the first thing we did after going into the Chagall Museum was to go to the garden cafe. I love their garden cafe. My town has brilliant street cafes and even beach cafes, but is a bit lacking in its garden cafes.

I had a spritz.

After going through the security into the museum proper, we eschewed the permanent collection of biblical paintings. Brilliant as they are we have now seen them a few times, and we were excited about new stuff. 

The new stuff was work and preparatory work toward a production of a ballet of "The Firebird" in New York in the forties, around where he was living during the war. And then there was another smaller room showing his work for the ceiling of the Paris Opera, maybe from the sixties? I'd really like to get up to Paris to see that ceiling!

Picasso said of Chagall "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." It's a pretty nice compliment. Funnily enough up the street from the Chagall Museum is the Matisse Museum! And even more funny, I saw this same quote featured in the Firebird show, only in the Chagall Museum the Matisse part was omitted! It just said "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Which barely makes sense! Ha!

Either way, Picasso might have been right. Although I don't know who all the other painters were in the world in order to go that big. Wasn't Rothko alive? He might have had an inkling about what color really is.

But all that nonsense aside, the colors in these Chagalls are crazy good, with that curious quality in all great painting of magic, not flying goats magic, but magic leaving one wondering how strong colors like that could possibly work so clearly and richly together and alone! And yet, in this Firebird show I equally enjoyed something about Chagall's crazy drawing fecundity. I wish I could draw like that, that is, kind of terribly, but have it always work perfectly. He has all these mad lines like he can't decide on one, and he's not afraid of ridiculous cartoonishness of hands and feet and faces, but again, it weirdly comes together. Wasn't all this the stuff they warned me in art school drawing classes that we should never do?

Chagall had a pretty funny quote about Picasso. He said "What a genius that Picasso. It's a pity he doesn't paint." I like that quote. I too wish Picasso painted a bit more, you know, stuff. But what can you do, somewhere in the middle of that century painting started coming apart and it was so great at first, but then maybe it was impossible to put it back together again.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures of some Chagall Firebird works and, well, no reason to do anything to them but show you and let you have your own reaction. Here they are: