The hundred greatest albums of all time: Elephant

 

Welcome to my series of the hundred greatest albums of all time, with each album in the series being individually the single greatest album of all time despite the fact that there are a hundred of them (and surely far more), and despite the fact that that doesn't make any sense at all.

But it's nevertheless true!

And the greatest album of all time is Elephant, by The White Stripes!

I have not done one of these for a few years now. But The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and...

I WAS THERE!

What? No, not at the Hall of Fame induction. I was there during The White Stripes.

I was in a band at the time, with my dear wife, and our guitarist, who was a huge devotee of Elvis Costello, introduced us to the stripped down wonder of The White Stripes after practice one day at his house. He showed us video tapes of The White Stripes on Conan O'Brien.

Oh my.

They did a cover of "Jolene" that was electrifying, the greatest cover I'd ever heard (I mean, outside of Nirvana doing "In the Pines", but maybe let's not start this silly discussion about "the greatest" again). And soon I had all of The White Stripe's CD's just as they were peaking, and I knew them all backwards and forwards. 

And, a fourth album was soon coming out!

(Sorry about all the exclamation marks, The White Stripes are still very exciting to me.)

As a great adorer of The Beatles I have heard tales of the time of their supremacy, and of the extraordinary event that was the release of Sgt Pepper's. I heard people talk about how the album upon its release existed everywhere all at once. That briefly it was the epicenter of the universe. 

Being two years old at the time I sort of missed it.

Elephant was as close as I got.

I generally find albums years or even decades after their moment, but not Elephant. I awaited it breathlessly, and the moment I got my hands on a copy I raced it off to my basement lair (where great swaths of early clerkmanifesto was feverishly written, you should check it out! Or not.), and I put on my big headphones and sat and listened to it.

Of course you know Seven Nation Army, the last perfect rock song ever written, but my favorite song on the album was Ball and Biscuit. I can still place the ripple of thrill in hearing it for the first time. The astonishment bordering on disbelief when one encounters art of the absolute highest order. Anchored by Meg White's deep percussion, we have a heavy and rich blues song, with a hint of menace and the expectation of storm.

It takes its sweet little time about it. It is hypnotizing, rich, and deep, and very... heavy. It is a dark cloud coming up over the horizon, a pregnant wind, a strange color in the sky. You think you should go inside but you want to see what happens, and it doesn't seem dangerous yet. So you stand there in the quiet as heavy drops of water fall on your upturned face.

And then it explodes.

And then just as quickly it is simply rain again, heavy and dark, twenty degrees colder, leaving you wondering if it actually even happened. You really should go inside. You're soaking wet. You're shivering. The sky is green black. Thunder pulses as if far away, but powerful. Something terrible and awesome happened, you think, and you have to see if it is going to happen again.

And it does.

And it's even better.

Voila

Nothing is coming out quite right tonight for clerkmanifesto, but that doesn't mean I don't have anything to show you. Sometimes too many things come out right and I sock them away for another day and forget about them. So all I have to do is wander into one of my vast repositories of photographs and grab a few fancy ones that catch my attention and voila.

Did you know that "voila" is a French word? I mean, of course you knew. I knew it was french, I guess, sort of. But in french it's just a regular word to use. It means "There it is". Which in English is "Voila". In learning French I especially love any free pass word, things like "impossible" which you have to say with your best Frenchified imitation to make work, but nevertheless it's right there, spelled the same, but spoken: im po see blay. The whole of learning French is so full of words like this (restaurant, grand, petite, film) that learning the language almost feels like one is cheating one's way through it.

I mean, up until you have to speak or understand it, at which point one realizes that all those free passes don't really do very much.

Anyway,  here are some pictures I took around here recently, where I currently live, and where everyone speaks French.

 

Missing Japan

 

Here we are on the Cote D'Azur and it is amazing. The moon is shimmering off the bay of Cannes out our windows right now, and I can hear the waves breaking on the shore in the chilly, but never freezing, night. 

But we want to live here, and in this pursuit the seams start to show in the fabric of the magic of this place.

There are many stunning and enchanting places here in France, but it turns out there are even more people who want to live in and visit those places. And since nowhere near to everyone who wants to can, people live nearby the amazing places. One might think these nearby places would be nearly as amazing, but they aren't. Things take a sometimes hard drop off from the amazing places. The amazing places are the European wonderlands anyone might love. But the other part of France nextdoor is rather more American than we might have hoped, with its relentless car infrastructure, weird sprawl, and separation of vital and interesting shopping areas from the places people live.

It always confused me how, even in the USA, there could be areas of great population density, clusters of apartment buildings and packed in housing, that existed in areas with few shops or services. Occasionally we would run into these mystifying areas in Europe too, only briefly as we were on vacation, and perhaps I too easily dismissed them. Maybe I thought that was simply the way a city had to be. And though Europe had more of the wonderful, rich places of beauty, pedestrianization, and unique business and design that everyone wanted to be in, it was still true that places like Nice and Rome have neighborhood streets of thousands of people, in not inexpensive apartments eight stories high, hosting nothing along their long avenues but a couple boarded up businesses and a hairdresser or two.

There are always the hairdressers.

And then we went to Japan.

And it just wasn't like that.

And I miss Japan.

Bonnard museum view in a box

 

I've already given you the skinny on the Bonnard museum so I don't have much more to say about it. This is one of the boxes i've been working on, and it's of the striking view out the back windows of the museum. It was such a nice view of the church, but we didn't get a chance to venture over to it when we left the museum. 

We'll be back in the area tomorrow morning, but probably wont get all the way up in this neighborhood as it is pretty far up the hill from Cannes proper. 

Also the new Bonnard show doesn't open until later in November.

Our hill

 

Though we cannot seem to find a home here, we do have our pretty place to stay for another five or six weeks. A full moon rose over the Mediterranean tonight, causing those of us out by the boardwalk to inadvertantly gawk, even if we were just popping over to the market for champagne and toilet paper, but the town does feel just a little more shut down everyday. The boulangeries are now selling their baguettes out of the tabac with the mean lady, and the restaurants that haven't shut for the season seem to take any excuse to be closed.

I'm not complaining though. Not yet.

As promised I have been working on single image constructions a bit more thoroughly, and the one I have to show today is appropriately of the hill up above our apartment.

Retired

 

Apparently I'm not on vacation. I'm retired. And today I found out the hard way.

I got up early because as a person in my sixties I rarely sleep late even if I'd like to. It just doesn't usually... work.

I looked outside. It was windy, but the town beach is still in use and the sun was brilliant.

I had coffee with my lovely wife.

One of us suggested that we go for a walk and grab some things at one of our local markets. So we dressed appropriately, grabbed our things, and headed outside.

It seemed strangely shadowy out in the town.

"What time is it?" I asked.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon.

Up the hill

Last week we walked out of central Cannes and up a main street. 

Cannes, despite all its Cote d'Azur charms, surprisingly congenial and always thrumming tourist area, and elements of pure glitz, is surprisingly urban. It is a city of 75,000 people that oddly feels like New York or San Francisco at times, to give the U.S. frame of reference. The large avenue we walked up felt almost generically big city European, and I was interested that I found that mildly appealing. Maybe since our whole experience landing in France so far has been taken up in deleriously charming beach vacation towns, a little raw city life offered a nice counterpoint. That said, this street was not full of places I longed to visit, being more like an avenue of many usable services and shops, too many cars, and maybe a couple of secret gems.

The point of our climb up this hill, a longish one, was to visit the neighborhood of Le Cannet and, more specifically, The Bonnard Museum. Pierre Bonnard, in case you wondered, was a post impressionist painter who made his home in the neighborhood until he died in the mid twentieth century. His colorful, expressive work is right up my alley and I've always enjoyed it. The museum was stunning, with its back windows overlooking a half quaint, half grand church and the higher upper floors (the museum is spread over several tidy floors) looking out over a bit of Le Cannet and down to Cannes.  

While the museum clearly has a permanent collection it appears to present strictly in specific thematic shows built around Bonnard. I suspect, along with their curatorial staff's excellent taste, that this is a brilliant way to go about a museum like this, as the relationships around being able to loan many Bonnards out at any time allows one to borrow all kinds of interesting top quality work to create a themed show around. And since Bonnard's life and career spanned the latter part of the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's, the possibilities are nearly endless. The show we saw included Monet (it's uncanny how any Monet in a group show ends up being a signature highlight!), Picasso, Morisot, Seurat, Renoir, Corot, Matisse, and some curiously wonderful Giacomettis.

This last exhibit just closed and a new one, involving his studio with mimosa trees and loans from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, opens in a few weeks and I am deleriously excited. In our list of our wants and desires from the city we end up in, museums a little too easily sink down the list, but this place was a real reminder of how much they mean to us.

I made a small ai short of Bonnard paintings come to life. Remember how these work? Click to engage it. Enlarge in the bottom corner, and click again to play. There is a bit of ambient sound too!

Japan dream number nine

 

As my darling wife recently observed, we have been in France now for not much more than half the time we were in Japan. This is mind boggling because in some ways it feels like we have been in France forever now, whereas Japan seems like some kind of passing dream. 

But if I look back, Japan was complicated, and with the crushing heat of the first couple of weeks, the sheer bewilderment of the place, the urban intensity beyond anything I'd ever experienced,  it took some time to just find our feet there. The luxury of a month in Kyoto was the opportunity to fidget and suffer and seep into the place until we filled every coffee house and tea room in the city, to understand that just like everyone else in the world we are not like other people.

I am making my tenth attempt to put together a final folder of images from Japan, a diverse and finished series. And while I do this it is a good time to show some of these images here again, some for the first time, some slightly polished, and some probably largely as seen before, but all of them now with a few notes of context that perhaps can help them out, as they are all built off of real pictures.

While these are built off of real photographs, some, like this first one, travelled a long way from the original. There are too many additions and alterations to the image below for me to remember them all at this point, but these changes came from a desire to express how strongly I felt about this small garden that was part of a museum gallery in the Arashiyami area of Kyoto. Arashiyama, which we never returned to, was nevertheless a key turning point in our visit to Kyoto, where we finally started to blend into the city. We had come some way to visit a show of ceramics there featuring one of my wife's favorite artists, Lucie Rie, but the museum or gallery was as much like someone's beautiful, almost perfect Japanese home, and the area itself, famous for its bamboo groves, was a kind of relief from the relentlessness of the city we lived in.

I cannot begin to remember from where I took this next image, as these small charms were everywhere, and for a time I was taking endless pictures of building facades, which in Kyoto were ubiquitous, wildly diverse and charming. Houses in Japan are strikingly private and from the street I almost never caught a glimpse inside in any light. Perhaps this also allowed for the houses to present with such composure and completeness.

 Since most of these were from our quietly bustling, faded and rich, unfamous neighborhood, there is a good chance this picture is from there too.

And here we are in Tokyo, where I am endeavoring to give off the sheer urbanity of the city and its feeling of being different and full at every inch. I took this gritty view from the window of a glossy clothing store that I bought two brown shirts from.

Day off

 

Today we had a day off!

I don't know what it is a day off from, though.

We had no apartments to visit.

We didn't go on a trip to Cannes, or anywhere else. Perhaps it was a day off from vacation?

We were just home.

Except we don't have one.

But we live for this while against a cliff on the sea. 

It rained today. The water was very clear and I could count all the rocks in the Mediterranean from my balcony. For a short time it got so foggy we could not see the Islands in the Bay of Cannes. One of the Islands is where the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned. There's a tower out there. Is that where he was? Sometimes I take pictures of the tower, but they're not that good so I don't show you.

I guess I'm retired, though I still professionally write clerkmanifesto for you. Professionally in the sense that I'm serious about it, not in terms of commerce. Today I had this great idea about building more complicated pictures and just showing you them one at a time because they are made in layers and warrant much time and discussion. But somehow I lost half of what I was working on, and what I did make got a little confused in my files. I wasn't sure what layer I was on in building the pictures. I don't know if any are finished. 

I would like to show you my favorite one but I think it's lost for good.

I do have a couple pictures of Cannes for now. They might be finished.

The Snow

 

It snowed today here, well, near here, way up in the Mountains, which to my delight we can see. For us down on the coast, the day was full of heavy drizzles and driven light rains with temperatures in the very upper teens (readers from the USA, here is a helpful conversion guide for you. I invented it myself! Double your Celsius number and then subtract 10 percent. Then add 32 (the ice number!). Et voila! You have the big F. So, 19 degrees Celsius, doubled, is 38, minus, say, 4 (no need to get too fancy), 34, plus 32: 66!). This rain was a trial for us as we were off on a apartment visit that involved wandering outside for hours. But the ocean in the storm was mad with color, and incredible, and when the storm broke apart in the late afternoon the sky was dramatic and even gave us some rainbow.

Once we were safe at home I got a picture or two, which, converted to my current style of choice, the diorama, gives a feel for it. Because its name shows up below, Mandelieu la Napoule is the next town up from here on the way to Cannes, a bit bigger and sits on the sea, in below these mountains in our view.

We speak French!

 

The rhetoric, at least as I encountered it all my life, is that the French are horrible and cruel about people speaking their language, or trying to. 

They are, but they are everything else as well: kind, patient, irritated, confused, and really nice about it. They vary. And if I had to give an overall accounting, despite some bitter experiences with that famous French disdain, they are like people everywhere else we've travelled: touched and complimentary about our speaking their language, in this case, the awesome and mysterious French one.

And though one is supposed to hold tourists in general contempt in order to feel better about being a tourist (I'm an Emigre, dammit!), all these English speaking tourists flocking to the Cote D' Azur and speaking English like it's a divine right have set the stage for our flailing, toddler level, utterly confused French to look like graciousness itself to the beleaguered local inhabitants.

Going in I was inclined to think that many tourists have better French than we do, but I suspect now it is only the tiniest percentage that do. A couple days ago in a beach restaurant (that we can see from the window of where we're currently living), we got a slightly absurd compliment from the waiter we were chatting with that brought it all home.

"How did you come to learn French!" The waiter marvelled. "It is very unusual for Americans to know French." 

It should be noted this was spoken in English.

Although it is possible someone else has paid us this compliment in French in the past, but it would have blown by us by as we only understand maybe a quarter of what anyone says to us, and then only when it is slow, has a lot of context, and is being said the second time around.

Wednesdays

 

Today was Wednesday. 

I used to work on Wednesdays. I don't know why that occurred to me just now. Perhaps because I don't know what I do on Wednesdays at this point in my life. Take pictures and edit them? Watch it rain? Travel? The truth is that we haven't really settled into anything here yet, and the search for an apartment gets us out the door when sheer, avid interest doesn't.

On Wednesdays here everything closes, including both the bakeries, which I sort of knew, but forgot. So I had to spend an entire day without a baguette. It is one of those French things that this tiny village of few stores also has 20 restaurants and the two boulangeries. Both of which close on Wednesday, and both of which are closing at the end of this month until the New Year. I am not looking forward to this. One might think: Why doesn't one close for two months now and the other close for two months after the first one opens again?

I wouldn't advise thinking this.

It'll just slow you down.

The sea

 

I spent my birthday on the sea.

This is because my lovely wife and I are living... get this: on the sea!

Which is kind of neat.

We woke up in Cannes on my birthday in a glass penthouse on the roof of a hotel in a bizarrely affordable room that costs ten times as much during the film festival. Then we took a helicopter back to our long term airbnb.

Did I say helicopter?

I meant bus. But whatever, they both work.

Instead of my usual method of one minute of photography at a time, my birthday indulgence allowed for me to take eight million photographs.

A lot of these are of the sea, because, you know, it's right here.

I'm working on all these pictures and am a little overwhelmed by them, but today I started working with diorama versions of my pictures and am experiencing my usual "new thing" enthusiasm where I feel all geniusy and like I now need to take all 11,000 pictures from the past two months of traveling and convert them into this style. 

It'll pass.

But in the meantime I'd like to show you my most recent images in this style:

Marseille

 

On our slow way back to our temporary home, we had to change trains in Marseille. We had done this on the way out to Sète, but on the trip back we had some extra time, so we were able to wander outside the train station without many expectations.

It turned out to be an absolutely spectacular scene outside the less spectacular and extremely busy train station. I took about a minute’s worth of photographs of the commanding views over the giant city. Then we had some bad coffee, and we were on our way.