Monday, March 18, 2024

In the wind

 







Here are some pictures.


I continue to mess around with mostly these water abstractions, although my thoughts have begun to turn to ideas of a series of new pictures involving... snails? It's like peering into the fog. I can see the suggestion of shapes, but I don't have any pictures of snails yet. And I would say putting all these pictures here is cleaning house for the next thing, but I don't honestly don't know the next thing. I'm working on a wire lately.

If I were out ahead of my posts a few days this collection could work a treat because every time I reviewed this post pre publication I would maybe delete one photograph, and by that means we'd get down to just the good ones.

Instead, I have about 45 minutes before I go to bed. I'll try to check in every 15 minutes and see if there is anything to fix and delete.

I currently have eight pictures here for you to look at. 

I won't amend these comments, and you can do the count below to see what happened. For all I know I won't have deleted anything, or maybe I'll have raced off to try to make a picture of a snail! It's all in the wind now...




























































































































































































































Sunday, March 17, 2024

Wonka: The movie review after actually seeing it

 








There are a number of things I don't usually do here at clerkmanifesto:


1. Review movies


I might exult wildly over a movie, or conduct societal analysis with a movie, but just... review a movie? Not really my thing.


2. Talk about art I have mixed feelings about.


I am more inclined to exult wildly, or condemn bitterly, the complex middle ground isn't usually of great interest to me.



3. Open my comments with a list of things that I don't usually do here, but am proceeding to do anyway.


And yet here we are!





A few months ago I wrote a review of the movie Wonka, despite not having seen it. But now I've seen it. So I feel a kind of responsibility, a compulsion even, to set the record straight.


In my quite favorable review of the movie without having seen it here is what I really liked:


1. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa.

2. The casting in general, though aside from Hugh Grant, most notably Timothee Chalamet as a younger Willy Wonka.

3. The colorful setting and whimsey created by the brilliant director of the charming Paddington movies, Paul King.


Having seen the movie here is what I liked:


1. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa.

2. The casting in general, though aside from Hugh Grant, most notably Timothee Chalamet as a younger Willy Wonka.

3. The colorful setting and whimsey created by the brilliant director of the charming Paddington movies, Paul King.


So one would think we were all set and I'd be urging everyone to rush off to see the movie.


But it wasn't a very good movie despite all of the above. And this I would pin down to three basic reasons:


1. Fan fiction is not good fiction.

There is an old truism, I think reasonably now debunked, that the book is always better than the movie. Indeed great movies can be made from good books (The Godfather? Or how about Paddington!). But you know what is ruinously difficult, and so rare that no proper examples leap to my mind? 

Making a movie out of the world of a previous, fully completed work of art created by other people.

This is always a kind of fan fiction, no matter how much money or artistic power is put into it.

There is nothing wrong with fan fiction. If I want to write myself a new Pooh story, more power to me. But I am just doing it as a fan wanting more and ultimately trying to imitate or failing to capture. This is why fan fiction is not good fiction. Its power of creative invention is dampened. If one is truly faithful to the original it is stiff and repetitive in a new story, and if it is inventive and creative it too easily betrays the source material.


2. Too many villains.

The lovely Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (CCF) had, let's see, technically, zero villains. Oh, it had a bunch of bad kids. And I'm open to critiques about the virtues of all kinds of characters in that movie or book, but the one true, and rarely appearing, villain in the movie wasn't, late spoiler alert, actually a villain! He was testing Charlie's character. Zero villains! It is actually part of what is clever and great about that book and the movie. 

Wonka, on the other hand, has three, count them, three whole sets of villains. There are the boardinghouse villains, the chocolate cartel villains, and the police villain. There are seven distinctly drawn, unredeemed villains in this movie. 

It's a fucking fan fic movie that misses an essential point and beauty of its source inspiration!


3. It's magic is magic.

Magic is great. Though I'll note that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (CCF) didn't exactly have any real magic at all, it was science and advanced candy making. It was about the metaphorical magic of candy. But if one has actual magic, that magic has to have rules. Wonka violates this relentlessly. For instance, if Willy Wonka can produce something like endless chocolate from his lovely velvet frock with no access to kitchens, sugar, cocoa, time to work on it, or really anything other than a small steampunk case with delightful mechanisms and small vials of colorful liquid in it, why doesn't he just conjure up wads of banknotes to free himself and all his friends?

In fact, there are so many ridiculous examples along these lines where the impossible regularly becomes conveniently possible when required, that I'd instead like to compare and contrast in this section one notable thing that appears in the two movies (Wonka and CCF): 

Flying.

Chocolate that makes you fly is big in Wonka. It's used many times and at important points. It is the result of... a random magic liquid that exists somehow? Besides violating my "magic being magic" rule, it also betrays the later events of CCF. In CCF flying inducing candy is just then being developed and is in an experimental and tentative stage. It cleverly comes from a soda. So it doesn't make much sense that Wonka had an easy to use potion for flying when he was younger. Ingeniously in CCF the soda bubbles are lighter than air and they make a person float (wonderfully, burping is what gets a person down!). An act of careful story engineering in the book, treated with careful scientific trepidation, and an actual explanation of how it works, becomes, in the prequel: 

Roald Dahl had flying candy (soda), so we have flying chocolate!



Ah, so now I have worked myself up into a lather of fury towards Wonka

But you and I both know what that really is all about:

I just really, really wanted it to be good.


It so almost was, and,



It wasn't even close.




















Saturday, March 16, 2024

The lost treasures of early mid March

 








These aren't exactly outtakes, even though my first inclination was to call them that. They're more like pictures that might have gone in the posts from the last few days except there are so many things I'm working on all at once that things have gotten disorganized, and a few of the carefully revealed pearls got eaten with the oysters. So I just have to go and squeeze out...

You know what? This probably isn't an analogy I should pursue here.

But either way I'm pretty sure I have, mmmmm, let's say eight more pictures that are quite fit for publication that just need to be fished out of the...

Right. We weren't going there.


Let's call them lost treasures.

So now all I have to do is find them. But I think I know what I'm looking for. Wait here, would you?















We start with a couple from the Zoo series...



























































And then here are six more of the water pictures...




































































































































































































Friday, March 15, 2024

The circus pictures and lessons learned

 




While working on all those pictures of burbling streams, and finding ways to turn them into abstract masterpieces, I also started on what I am calling my "Zoo" pictures. These are calm scenes of the site of some kind of accident with a zoo boat, or a zoo truck, perhaps newly happened, or as the result of some past calamity. I had perhaps half a dozen of these scenes ticking along, and though I was satisfied enough with them, it dawned on me that I had new tools in my paintbox, or, I guess, my darkroom. Not only were these irresistible tools, but they might also justify my having spent 600,000 hours on pictures of stream water.

Not that I needed any justification or anything. After all, they were masterpieces.

And so then are these:



























































































































































Thursday, March 14, 2024

This time it's worth it, I swear

 






If you religiously follow clerkmanifesto, which, I mean, seriously, why wouldn't you, you will have certainly come across a pocket of my photography concerned with abstractions of the clear water streams of Saint Minneapolis. They come along with great fanfare and shy optimism, and then they slowly fade out as I feel I am not quite getting to exactly what I want.

What do I want?

Something a little like Kandinsky paintings, but in photography.

Why do I want them?

I love that you're so interested and asking all these questions!


Recently I have been self-consciously showing a new wave of these pictures, promising that it's almost over and just, bear with me. But then I go for a new walk to the streams, or find some new angle in my editing software suites, and we're right back at it. 

And so here we are back again.

You will note my optimistic title. I know that it will all come to tears, and that while I am thrilled with this set of new breakthroughs I will find down the line, in a day, or a month, or maybe in two years, the real breakthrough I had been looking for all along. And the cycle will start anew.

But just because we know the future does not mean we can't live in the present! And so I herald these pictures with the optimism that these, surely these, will capture your heart!

Swearing to this is maybe a small act of hubris, but it conceals an advantage for us. I had a dozen pictures here, but after swearing to you that it was going to be worth it, I could only bring myself to leave four, these golden four, here in this post for you to see.

And so here they are. It's worth it.

I swear.































































































































































































































Wednesday, March 13, 2024

There is someone for everyone

 







My very worst co-worker was not working today. But she leaves behind a long trail.

I was helping a library visitor at the front desk and found there was a note on the person's record left by my worst of all colleagues:

"REI invoice that patron left behind is in the lost and found"

I rolled my eyes. 

Not only was this invariably a scrap of used paper of no importance that should surely have been thrown away, but I am also certain that my co-worker managed to spend at least an absurd half hour on this task, endlessly composing the twelve-word note, staring blankly at the screen, putting another note on the invoice, and then likely filing it in some ridiculous place where no one will ever find it.

Still, I felt duty-bound after all of this to see if the library patron might want this dubious invoice.

"It says on your record that you left behind an invoice from REI a few months ago. Do you want it if I can still find it?"

"No, I don't need it." The patron replied. "But that is so incredibly kind of you all to put it aside! If you can find it I will take it and throw it away so you can clear it off my record." 

While I processed this strange solution, the person added: "This is so nice what you've done!" They opened up their wallet and removed a five-dollar bill. "Here, I'd like to donate this in thanks."

I tried to tell them how unnecessary that was, but the patron absolutely insisted, so I threw the money in the cash register and thanked the person. Then I went to look for the invoice.

I couldn't find it anywhere.

I didn't offer to return the five dollars.












Sneaking in another few new, especially psychedelic water pictures here just because I can:













































































Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The books tell the story

 






An old lady came to me at the front desk of the library.

That almost sounds like the start of a joke, or maybe the beginning of...

A blog post!


Yes, probably the blog post thing.

Anyway, she had a book on hold for her, but she couldn't find it.

I've dealt with this issue before.

Acquiring her library card I learned that this book came in three days ago. So it should be on the holds shelf. But it wasn't!

The name of the book:


Ill-Fated Fortune.


Oh, that can't be good.

That can't be good at all!



We could end the story there, but I don't want to make you sad about the library today, so we'll switch from a story about the library as a metaphysical harbinger of tiny, dark fates to a more functional account of "How a library works".

Ill-Fated Fortune is a paperback, and when I checked the shelves under the three-letter code where it should have been filed for the library patron, it definitely wasn't there. So I started looking anywhere in the H's in case it was misfiled. To my delight, after some time and a hint of despair, I actually found it! It had the wrong slip in it, but, in an act of random fortune, it by chance was alphabetically similar enough for me to find it still in the H's!

Triumphantly I checked out the book to the happy patron, a "fortune" after all!

Although the book looked absolutely awful, so maybe it was an ill-fated one.