Genoa and what's next

 

Though you may not have noticed I was away, 

I AM BACK! 

My darling wife and I went to Genoa for a few days, and, um, Genoa is, um, I took a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures! Let's just start with that information and ease into all the emotional reactions to being able to saunter over to a city like Genoa after a few hours of trains and just, be there for four days. 

What is a city like Genoa like? You may wonder.

I promise that will all come into it over the next many days. But there is a bit of housekeeping with clerkmanifesto to take care of first, and I'm still setting things up so...

A few things come into it.

The first is that in preparing to be away I was going through a lot of old posts here and their attendant photography. Some of it was a bit silly, some old styles we're a bit rough, and some were probably more exciting to me when I was first making them. But the one general style of photography work up I liked consistently is the multi layered, hand drawn and erased style first expressed well in some pictures I made, curiously, the other time we left here for Italy, on a day trip to Ventimiglia (where we changed trains on this trip). 

Here is an example:

So somewhere along the way of taking hundreds and hundred of pictures in Genoa, I resolved to make finished pictures in a style related to this. But in calculating how long it will take to generate, organize, and hand craft each of about a hundred pictures, I decided it would take three billion hours.

That's why I'm here sort of stalling now.

I have three layers of each of a hundred or so pictures, and probably need a couple more, but I don't want to say too much about Genoa until I'm more ready to go with the pictures. But to set the stage I did do one mock up picture of one single picture from Genoa so you can see where we'll be going with this. I don't think this is a final iteration, just a taste...

The other thing is that, despite the terrible heat and the crowds and the back problems, we have been on quite the adventurers kick, having in addition to Genoa gone up the hill behind us to finally venture fully into the Roman ruins there and the archaeological museum that occupies the site, and today we took a climb out a mile or two west of us where a small wild area has broad views at the top of the hill and a more than 1000 year old olive tree.

All of this comes with photography too.

So I'm racing to get it all together, but would like to hold off a bit telling you about it all in detail until I can do it along with the pictures. Hopefully it won't be too long.

Magic boxes everywhere

 

Oh, I'm long back now from Genoa, technically speaking. But as I write this I am just finishing preparing posts for the time when we are gone. And yesterday, for the last of these, I decided that pulling up a classic from clerkmanifesto's history might be nice. I found one to make me feel a bit better about the world cup and soccer in general.

But while I was looking around for that I also found another really short post. And why not give myself one extra day to gather myself for the next, post Genoa, work of clerkmanifesto?

This short one still feels sort of personal to me and contemporary, though I can't say why without ruining it.

Anyway, I wanted to share it with you anew.

It's called:

Magic Box

Imagine if you will a box.

Every time you open the door of it something different is inside. Open it one time and there is a crumpled five dollar bill inside. Open it again and there is a silver ring with a Celtic design. Open it a third time to find an espresso cup, or a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano.

Now imagine that that box is so big that you can get inside of it. 

You walk in through the open door of it. You close the door. And when you open the door again you find that something entirely different is outside; a room with a table of flowers for instance, or a party. You close the door and open it again to find there is a bright hallway there that leads to where you live.

This is why I love elevators.

Revisited despite the h8ers

 

Sometimes I like to go back into the history of clerkmanifesto and share something again, feeling that given five or six years to marinate the right sort of clerkmanifesto essay might really be ripe for the world. I especially like to do this when I am going to be away for a bit and need to set up a lot of posts to play out while I am... busy gathering new material.

I also like it because it seems like it will be an easy way to come up with a really good post!

Ha!

First of all, I always end up involved in writing some elaborate introduction for the old post. Like, look at this. You've been reading for hours already. "I wasn't expecting a novel!" some of you may have already muttered while reading this, and we haven't even gotten to the previously written stuff yet. We are still on the fresh writing! Which I am writing right now! 

I thought it was all gonna be a bunch of copy and paste and gleeful chuckling pride in my rich history!

Not that I don't like fresh writing. It's just that I was thinking I would be onto other things like an hour ago.

Second of all, going on a treasure hunt through the history of clerkmanifesto can be a mixed bag for me.

Sometimes it's like: But I'm so delightful, how do I pick just one of these?

And sometimes it's like: No, no, no, no, no, super fast and uncomfortable no, no, no.

And often it's a weird mix of the two. Which is hard to explain.

And third of all even when I find a nice old gem from the past, and I'm all excited about it, it just doesn't seem relevent to anything recent in my life.

At which point I might be inclined to complain to myself: "By this time I could have written two new clerkmanifesto posts! Or, realistically speaking, watched a man eat a twelve pound hamburger with fries on youtube."

But, fortunately, I persevered, and found a soccer post.

I haven't been able to talk about soccer since we made it through the glorious semi finals of The World Cup. At which point everything that happened at the world cup just kind of depressed me, and I didn't want to talk about it. 

But this?

This is a delightful throwback to The Women's World Cup from seven years ago.

Maybe healing is coming?

It is called: 

Sam Kerr. 

And having read this post from seven years ago I thought I'd like to catch up on her career a bit, but only want to report this one thing I learned: 

Kerr has stated that she eats a pasta sandwich before every game.

Sam Kerr

We are holding a very fancy betting pool at my library to celebrate The Women's World Cup. Because $20 here bought a person a randomly selected team and an also random Golden Boot Player (that's the person who scores the most goals in the tournament), loyalties were widely distributed and the library fanbase was scattered across 24 teams.

That was until Australia's Sam Kerr was briefly interviewed following a dramatic come from behind victory against Brazil in game two. She said something to the effect of:

"We don't listen to the h8ers. Me an' the girls showed them and they can go suck on that one."

Perhaps curiously, we all became Sam Kerr fans.

Then, five days later, Sam Kerr scored four goals against Jamaica to propel Australia into the round of 16. At this point Sam Kerr hysteria seized the library staff. Yellow and green started showing up everywhere. People were drinking Fosters in the break room at all hours. Walking by any conversation between co-workers here, one could catch the tang of fake Australian accents, and it was a matter of course to hear the phrase "The h8ers can suck it."

Why Sam Kerr? What captured our imaginations?

We library employees are pretty civil people, not overly given to coarse language. And also we are in the USA where our team looks far more likely to triumph in this World Cup than a scrappy, mixed blessings Australian team with one great player instead of, let's see, seven, no, eight!

But here's the thing: These American women are great. They are admirable. They all seem like people who are going to do well in life. The look like they'd make good Vice Presidents, heads of marketing divisions, Directors of College Athletics Departments, big time Head Coaches. They seem like young, successful people, jocks, crisp and apple pie and strong and lean and off into the upper middle classes and beyond.

And good for them.

But Sam Kerr is easy to picture working at our library, angrily shelving away the afternoon, irritated beyond reason about misfiled items, muttering "h8ers!" to herself. One can naturally see her kicking our automated check in bins to get them working. It is no stretch to envision her here in our back room, grousing to her co-workers about some unpleasant patron, or the indignities of management, inappropriately uttering "they can suck it" as everyone awkwardly wanders away.

Media reviews are mixed at best about Sam Kerr's intemperate remarks. There were plenty of commentators ready to call her classless or claim she was distracting her team. But you gotta expect that kind of noise from the h8ers. We at the library take no particular stand on Sam's rustic expression. That's not the point. 

We simply recognize her somehow, for good or ill, as one of us.

Procrastination

I had one of those moments. I said "I better organize all my old pictures." So I opened up a random folder called "Dioramas new". Where all the old diorama pictures are I don't know. There is no "Diorama" folder, nor a "Dioramas old" folder. Just a single "Dioramas new" folder.

I started looking throught the folder.

Did I ever show you this one:

Maybe. I mean, why wouldn't I show you this? I still remember the place this diorama was built from, inside a kind of walled imperial park/city in the middle of Kyoto. So I definitely showed you this.

But probably not exactly this one, since there were like 25 assorted versions of it in that folder.

You know, maybe I'll just organize my pictures on another day?

 

Why Bob Dylan won't be performing in France

 

In October, health providing, 85 year old Bob Dylan will begin touring in Europe!!!!

He is going to:

Norway

Sweden

Denmark

Germany

Belgium

Luxembourg

Switzerland

Italy

Slovenia

Austria

and...

England.

Did you notice any big European Countries bordering most of these other countries that he is not coming to? Big, big country, plenty of cities, kinda tucked inbetween all these other countries? North of Italy, just across from England, right alongside Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland?

Maybe a country where I live?

Yep, he is not going to play any dates in France!

Does Bob Dylan hate France?

Oh, no. He has been here twice since we moved here. He had "reasons" for coming, but it might actually have been to visit me, though maybe I'm dreaming that. It's possible he does have some kind of business here though I don't know when he would have done it. He once said to me in passing while we were drinking spritzes made with green chartreuse at a rooftop bar (let's call it an emerald spritz) "I almost bought a villa here in the nineties."

Since I live here now in decidedly not a villa, I was very interested in this story. "Why didn't you?" I asked.

"It's too much like Malibu." He said. Which is at once completely insane and I can see his point.

 

I know for a fact he likes my pretty belle epoque city though, and he was sad to hear we might move. Both times we hung out together here, when I wandered off drunkenly to go home and go to sleep after our lengthy night of drinking, I am pretty sure he, an extremely famous 85 year old man, some time after midnight, went for a long aimless walk on the random streets of this large city. Maybe that was his business.

Don't forget to put your little hoody up, Bob.

He says he gets recognized less now that he is so old. "Being old hides you." He said with a mysterious glimmer.

I realize this doesn't explain his not playing any dates in France. 

Well, that was my fault.

We were drinking pastis at a kind of pastis bar. It's not really how a person is supposed to drink pastis, but Bob and I have our tasting thing. I got an awful headache later though. Always remember to drink too much water. Anyway, I said to Bob "I read somewhere that Leonard Cohen said that you said 'As far as I'm concerned, Leonard, you're number one, I'm number zero.' And then Leonard Cohen explained it: 'Meaning, as I understood it at the time- and I was not ready to dispute it- that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.'"

Bob suddenly looked very uninterested.

"From one Nobel Prize winner to another, what number am I, Bob?"

That made Bob laugh despite himself. Not only don't I have a Nobel Prize, but one day, surely far in the future, clerkmanifesto will be quietly landed without any number at all. Also Bob was a bit toasted.

"I'll tell you what." Bob croaked. "The next time I play a concert here in France I will announce what number I think you are live on stage."

I thought he was kidding, but I guess not. And so, apparently, his solution is to never play live in France again. 

Sorry France.

I gave Bob an obscure lyric just to see if he could pick it up. He's a genius you know. "It wasn't for nothing that they put me away." I said. "I fell with my angel down the chain of command."

I thought Bob might have nodded off, but he looked up at me through his one dying eye and quietly intoned: "There's a law, there's an arm, there's a hand." A bit of later career Leonard Cohen and one of Bob's favorites.

I almost said, but didn't: "Oh Bob.You'll always be number zero to me." I didn't want him to understand, or to not understand. 

One of the two.

Il Mondo, 35 years

 

There is a special delight to hearing a song one particularly loves in public, perhaps over a grocery store's speakers, or playing in a cafe, or maybe even walking down the street and hearing it from an indeterminate source. But this delight is doubly intensified when the adored song seems obscure enough, aged, forgotten, or so particularly idiosyncratic, that one would never imagine in a million years that it would be randomly playing in a mall or something.

And so what an exquisite little pleasure I had today!

Oh world! I don't know whether to tell you about the song first, or the hearing of it! Both seem important to go first, and both seem better going second.

And you thought these things just write themselves!

Well, not you, but some of the other people. The ones who aren't quite as good at clerkmanifesto as you are. No shade on them. It's a real skill. Look how hard this one is already!

One of my darling wife and I's favorite romantic comedies is only sort of a romantic comedy. Indeed, it might be the best not fully a romantic comedy romantic comedy: About Time. It is also a very poorly constructed time travel movie that nevertheless works beautifully. It may be the best time travel story that is so poorly constructed. 

Stories are mysterious. 

Anyway, in this movie Bill Nighy plays one of the nicest fathers ever put on screen and...

My darling wife and I were over in the Liberation neighborhood. We were having coffee at a volunteer run church courtyard cafe that was a delightful find. Pleasant courtyards are a bit rare here, and frankly so are the sort of smiley friendly people who might volunteer at a church cafe. We were heading over to check out a somewhat distant ceramics shop my wife was interested in. And after our incredibly reasonable cappuccinos and a bit of walking we were almost there when I noticed an Italian grocery store.

Yes, as you read this we will be in Genoa, Italy. But as of this story, and as I write it, we are still in France. I have seen (and shopped in!) quite a few Italian Delis here, but a full Italian grocery store? No no no. Or as the French say: Non non non! Grocery stores here are either:

a. Giant French/International chains

b. very very small possibly, hopefully independent French stores

c. small giant French chains

So seeing a rather full sized Italian grocery store seemed pretty novel in a number of different ways. Naturally I wanted to go in. So we did.

I could tell you about the product lines and differences of an Italian grocery store, how many more jars of pistacchio crema there was, for instance, but I would have to talk about what French grocery stores are like first. But what I should first talk about is...

In About Time, the lovely father and the main character, his son, are the two time travelers. But that's oddly not all that important because it is more a romantic comedy personal development movie. So they can travel in time but only back in their own lives, where they can change the past only in their own lives. But again, really, if you're interested, I highly recommend it, but there is no need for me to explain it here because the important thing is they love each other and like to play ping pong together. And in the delightful private world of their relationship they also share a love for a slightly eccentric, but fully passionate Italian song by...

And so there I am in the Italian grocery, examining the pocket espressos and gluten free beer that was unfortunately barley malt instead of rice malt. I don't know if there is such a thing as rice malt, but I was clearly mistranslating. They also had these kind of giant half wafer cookie candy bars that looked really interesting when the song playing over the loudspeakers of the grocery store suddenly seemed... familiar.

Oh  my god!

I am actually hearing, in an Italian grocery store in France, the immortal Jimmy Fontana singing

IL MONDO!

I raced all about the store looking for my beloved wife. Finding her I cried "Listen. Listen to this."

"Wait." She said. "I know this." 

And then a small glow of surprise and delight came over her face, the best face in the universe. 

The face I was born for.

Here I offer two ways for you to hear Il Mondo. This first is pretty straight up, Jimmy Fontana singing the song in 1965:

https://youtu.be/woIc2gS4JPQ?si=O4zxarQNKYWIfR0v

The second really is a masterful bit of filmmaking, a scene so complete it could stand for the whole of the movie, so many of the essential characters in the film are so briefly and beautifully sketched here in a few minutes, the music used perfectly and counterpointing the overall themes of the movie. It is wonderful. But it also serves as all kinds of spoilers for the movie About Time, so you might want to make sure you see the movie first, if for some reason you haven't.

Although on the other hand this is an amazing introduction.

https://youtu.be/8j4dMWY11y8?si=zI-APSByyddIRtYf

Fox and skunk take France!

 

In trying to clear out a backlog of assorted picture projects, many of which were semi abandoned as an inexplicable desire to convert flower close-ups to Dr. Seuss drawings overcame me, I may have come to my last coherent collection of recent unused material: pictures of fox and skunk. The most significant group of these have their origin in pictures of Villefranche Sur Mer wherein I flooded the city, probably as a response to how it has stopped raining here and most of France is burning. I set fox and skunk off on a rowboat and then might have aged some of the pictures as well.

Of course, going through these I couldn't resist making some more from various pictures I have taken around town.

I may have shown one or two of these in earlier versions or collections, but most should be wholly or partly new.

I think with these I'll probably be ready to take on whatever Genoa throws my way. 

Flowers, yes, but different

I may have tested the load carrying capacity on pictures of flowers here on clerkmanifesto.  But that was last month! I'm pretty sure it all resets at the start of the new month.

Yes, yes, this is August, very different than July. 

And if it doesn't reset? 

Fortunately, these are very different flower pictures. These are the kind where I layer and draw and erase them until I start to have back problems and need to go lie down for a bit. So even if you can hardly bear to look at another picture of flowers perhaps you'll still be able to enjoy the art here, which, you know, just coincidentally happens to be of flowers, but the flower part isn't very important.

Except maybe to the flowers.

 

Doris in proper perspective

 

A few days ago, after a particularly engaging story about French Banking (to readers especially eager for updates: no, we have not received our new bank cards yet. I will keep you posted with hourly updates), I posted a series of pictures featuring Doris the super intelligent alien in some old altered paintings and photographs.

You probably don't remember these pictures.

You were still thinking about the banking stuff. After the banking story it would make sense that everything else was just noise.

And why not? I mean, wow.

But also, I don't know, I liked a couple of the Doris pictures, but I don't think they were really the ones I meant to post. You see, I have these other Doris and or alien ruins around town pictures. I'm not entirely sure how compelling they are, but I think they might be more compelling at least than the ones I displayed here before. And they kind of show off my city, which is important. 

So I think today's pictures are the ones that I meant to post.

And if they aren't what I meant to post?

I'm sure I'll find something soon that I might have meant to post. At which point we'll post that, and then we'll see.

In my long experience here...

If you wait long enough everything is either forgotten or always meant to be.

Usually both.