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.

How WWII really ends

How long does it take to forget?

It takes 80 years to forget.

Nazis brought a kind of perfect horror to the world, a distilled and modern expression of evil. And though I was born after it by a fair couple of decades, there was a cry still echoing out of it:

Never Forget.

But in a reasonably long life now, with each bouncing echo, the sound grows softer:

NEVER FORGET

Never forget

Never forget

The city I live in now once twisted through these Fascist horrors in complex ways, but public tributes to resistance and suffering can still be found posted and plaqued about the buidings and streets here.

Never forget!

Once, on the arcade of our busiest shopping street, the Nazis hung resisters from the arches as examples and warnings to the population.

Never forget.

And then,

Eighty years later, the population elected a fascist to be the mayor of this city.

“Oh, he’s not really a Fascist,” I think most people around here would say.

But one can only hear that because the last soft echo is gone.

 

Tourist weather

 

As far as I can tell, tourist weather is HOT. I mean, that is the temperature when all the tourism peaks in this famous tourism city I am living in. And though things should be cooling down, both with the weather and with the tourists now that it's October, Autumn is slow in coming on. It is still warmer than I would like and than is normal, and there are still quite a few tourists around. But as I said, this is a famously touristic city, and so even though it may eventually grow too cold for anyone but masochists to swim in the ocean, and even my thin down jacket may not suffice against the winds of January, the tourists only ever wane to a certain degree. 

At best? I may walk through an uncrowded, half closed old city on a bitter day, or not have to dodge anyone strolling by the long walk along the ocean.

And yet, I don't know why I am telling you all of this because it is not what I meant by tourist weather.

 Not at all!

I meant something stranger.

Gusts of nationalities come sweeping through town like weather fronts. There is a weather to who is visiting this town at any given time. That is the Tourist Weather I meant! And though I love writing to you about things I have figured out, or showing you unusual phenomenon chock full of my theories, I'll admit I am baffled here. 

Two cases among many:

Last week we stopped for a drink between the old town and the sea on a large outdoor patio. Almost no one was seated there for happy hour when we arrived, but over the next couple of hours as we drew out our stay with a spontaneous treat of oysters and potatoes, the whole place slowly filled up with Chinese people. They were different ages, different kinds of groups, and yet no table knew any other table. But nearly every one of at least 20 tables was filled with Chinese people, Chinese people speaking Chinese! What was going on?

I don't know.

Today we climbed up out of the old town onto the hill where the city once started in Medieval times, though little remains of that history. There were few Chinese people there, maybe none. There were maybe a few Japanese visitors. I heard some Americans talking about our neighborhood, oddly. But that was an exception. This is, of course an entirely different country than where I come from, so people were all naturally speaking a different language than my own. 

And that language was...

Russian.

Russian!

I have walked along the ocean through storms of German. I have been on the golden square when it was blowing wild with Japanese. And I have wandered through the great shopping street of the city while all about me was a murmured Swedish, or Norwegian, or maybe Finnish. 

Sorry, I'm not so great at languages.

But this is what I mean by "Tourist Weather", unfathomable sudden congregations and sweeps of specific nationalities.

I have no idea what causes it. I follow the regular weather forecasts pretty closely, though they rarely seem to change much around here. But no one I know of runs Tourist Weather forecasts. I wish someone would do so in order to explain all this. I'd be fascinated. 

And I might even be swayed to plan my life around it a little. 

"I hear that up in the hills above the Chagall Museum there is going to be a beautiful squall of Scottish people pouring down the streets in the early afternoon."  I might say, adding "Let's go up there and see them. I love to hear them talk."

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.