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.

Gathering for Genoa

We're not going to be in Genoa for a terribly long time, just a few nights. But it still behooves me to get ahead here on clerkmanifesto so your steady daily reading isn't interrupted for a single moment. For longer transitions than this I have come up with all kinds of solutions; for instance when we moved to France via a five week trip to Japan I made up almost a hundred posts ahead of time, and then when I was in Japan I added in content from my phone as I could. Once, on a month long trip to Rome for our 25th anniversary I posted fictional accounts of what I thought would be happening, but wrote them all before it happened. Unfortunately this was lost on some readers, and upon my return I found myself at work having to correct the record some. Although, and anyone who has ever been on some fabulous vacation knows, no one really cares very much.

I mean, other than you. Which does you credit.

Of course, a four day trip hardly merits all this fuss. I have often been many days out ahead in my clerkmanifesto postings. Just not lately. Lately I do my French practice every day and write my post. Which is maybe why I'm talking about this now.

Also, I mean, I have to talk about something. And as noted I'd like to do it five or six times today, if I could.

Fortunately too, to help it all along, I have various photography projects to pull from, so they might be able to come into it too. 

For instance, check out these flowers!