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: