Oh lord! Please god, not poetry!

 

Well, I mean, it's not poetry, exactly.

I wouldn't make you read poetry!

I mean, not unless it rhymes.

It's okay if it rhymes, isn't it?

These are actually lyrics anyway, not poetry. With these multi-part complicated projects that take days and days to complete, sometimes a person just has to show some of the building blocks along the way. The pictures yesterday, for instance, have already largely become ai video. And those pictures as videos relate to these lyrics. So slowly it all builds up, and if you want, you can be along for the ride the whole way!

I have written two Clerkmanifestoland, or Clerkmanifesto City songs so far.

Here is the first:

In Clerkmanifestoland,

We take the strangest,

Things for granted.

In Clerkmanifestoland,

It's not the seeds,

That are planted.

(Chorus)

Through the garbage,

And the weeds,

Through the garbage,

And dark deeds,

Clerkmanifesto,

Clerkmanifesto.

In Clerkmanifestoland,

A restless spirit,

Needs some drinking,

In Clerkmanifestoland,

A drunken people,

Are all thinking.

(Chorus)

Through the garbage,

And dark deeds,

Through the garbage,

Something feeds,

Clerkmanifesto,

Clerkmanifesto.

In Clerkmanifestoland,

Without the dark,

We can't see,

In Clerkmanifestoland,

It's not our fate,

To believe.

(Chorus)

Through the garbage,

Something feeds,

Through the garbage,

It's just me,

Clerkmanifesto,

Clerkmanifesto.

(Chorus)

Through the garbage,

And dark deeds,

Through the garbage,

It's just me,

Clerkmanifesto,

Clerkmanifesto,

Clerkmanifesto.

Sunday picture day!

 

Every Sunday is picture day at clerkmanifesto! 

It's not?

But

but,

I'm so touched you noticed.

But wow, it totally could be picture day on Sundays! And today is Sunday. And I have loads of pictures.

What kind of pictures? You ask warily.

Ah, I answer wisely.

This is where you get to use your eyes!

So that's pretty neat.

Where are these pictures of? You wonder.

Clerkmanifestoland. The seedier part.

Fox for Halloween

 

My music videos can take so long to put together that I was tempted to eschew comment here, and merely place the link, and thus the video, as today's post.

But I'm a talker, or, er, writer. And there is one aspect of today's video that I couldn't resist discussing.

I have been working on fox videos, though until today, I haven't shown any here. And in that process I have written lyrics for fox songs and set out to employ an extraordinary tool called "Udio" to make a suitable song out of what I wrote. I love the picture ai generators I use, and I love, though am often frustrated by, the video generators out there as well. But these music generators might be my favorite, because their surprises are the kind that can change everything.

Today's video is an excellent example of this. Coming up with a two minute song like this "fox is your heart" one can involve making dozens upon dozens of generations, maybe up to a hundred, carefully listened to, discarded, and altered. I may tweak my lyrics to nudge the results in a better direction. I don't know when to give up. And telling the computer what I want it to do with my song lyrics is an absolute crapshoot. I might have dozens of different ideas for where I want the song to go. Every rare and thrilling once in awhile I get just what I'm looking for. But also, rarely, and just as wonderfully, I get something that goes way out of what I was looking for, but is nevertheless so fantastic that it changes everything.

And that's how I got a Halloween song today!

Getting the song in this video caused me to spend hours redesigning all the footage I'd already worked on to make the whole thing come together properly. 

It was worth it.

(as ever, click the picture)

My masterpiece

 

My masterpiece?

Well, maybe I should walk that back a little.

I worked forever on this music video, or, in layman's terms, two days. And when I finished it before bed I felt a kind of elation. My masterpiece! I put it up on YouTube and went to bed, but it took awhile for me to fall asleep. I was fizzing. I mean, have you seen this thing?

Oh, right, this is the introduction, so you haven't yet.

Well, by introduction this is...

A music video of the creek and falls near my house. Yes, my dear wife and I live in the heart of the toddling city of Saint Minneapolis, but this almost secret place lies a short walk from our home and any reader of clerkmanifesto will have seen miles of pictures of this area. I wrote a song for all my footage and magicked in an animal here or there. I edited it all together and, voila.

In the morning I watched this music video without the sound to see what it might look like on YouTube. 

Maybe it's not a masterpiece after all then?

Maybe it needs the music to live and breathe?

Maybe I have lost all perspective.

But in the end it doesn't matter. I have had my fun, and now it is yours. It can be a masterpiece if you want it to be.

Instructions:

As ever, click through the picture. It really does need the sound I think. Also, I have cheated tradition here with the picture not being the first frame, rather from a few seconds in. But I will also include the first frame if you insist on that experience. Either picture will take you to the two minute video:

American kittens

Some of you may know that there is a much-talked-about election coming up in my country. But some of you are malignant foreign bots crawling through the Internet and so might not know about it yet. So let me explain. 

Hmm.

Where do I begin?

It's kind of hard to convey.

It's like an early Jerry Lewis movie, or maybe Mr. Bean if you're a younger bot, combined with someone mercilessly drowning a kitten? Does that help? And we're thinking of rescuing the kitten, but we're not sure if the kitten deserves to live?

I'm just trying to be neutral.

We talk in code a lot these days in my country. Someone got on the elevator with me where I live. After I responded to their pleasantry by saying that I was doing well, they said they were doing well too, or "as well as I could be in this stressful time". That was all they said, and yet I knew exactly what they were referring to, who they were voting for, and why it was all so stressful. 

They didn't want the cat to get drowned!

I said I didn't want the cat to get drowned either. In a way that felt like being some sort of spy, or possibly in a way that would protect us from being round up and put into a camp.

Not the fun kind of camp. 

The kitten drowning camp.

For pretty much the whole of my American life we were a frank people. Indeed, the only people who had to talk in code were the racists. Everyone would think they were scum if they said something directly racist, but if they said it in code they could thrive and prosper and secretly drown kittens.

But now, well, that cat's out of the bag.

Well, at least that's one cat.

We'll see about all the others in 19 days.

All been done before

 

As I wind down my library career (that sounds too fancy. How about "my library sojourn"?) I find that our staff suddenly consists of a cadre of young people, people much the age I was when I started here. Thirtyish. And some of these young people are lively, and come up with ideas for the library.

"I wish we had merch."

Or

"They should have interesting authors on In Service Day."

Or

"We should have a library team."

And as an elder of the library, I am here to meet their enthusiasm with the cold dose of history.

We have done everything already. We had merch, we had authors, and have you ever heard of "The Dewey Decimators?" And like the Ancient Mariner, I am here to tell them all about it. These are long, harrowing stories meant to curdle their bones.

But it's not like I'm all doom and gloom about their fresh new enthusiasms. Sure we have already done everything... 

But we didn't do any of it very well.

The voting public

 

I am on the phones for the first hour my library is open on Indigenous Peoples' Day. I receive 879 phone calls asking if we are open today.

Yes, we are.

For the next hour after that I am at the front desk of the library, so I walk out to replace the people who were already out there.

"It was wall-to-wall phone calls asking if we were open back there." I tell them. "At least you probably didn't have to answer that question from people at the front desk."

The desk people looked at each other a little sadly. "Actually, we kind of did."

Monday

 

Monday is busy at clerkmanifesto!

Over the weekend readers rest their eyes and turn their attention to simpler fair like 18th Century French Verse, but with renewed energy, they come here to clerkmanifesto on Monday morning, roll up their sleeves, and...

Well, you know the rest.

You're the one I'm referring to.

"Me?" You ask shyly, but a little bit cautiously proud.

Yes, you are the pride of clerkmanifesto!

You get a little embarrassed. 

You think to yourself "He's probably talking about some other reader."

No.

Don't get me wrong. I think the other readers are fantastic, but you are the pride of clerkmanifesto.

You are quiet for a long time.

"I've never read any 18th Century French Verse." You say in a small voice.

Oh, I was just being silly about that part.

Time crawls, but it accumulates

 

"Time crawls, but it accumulates." Said the nearly sixty year old man.

"That's me!" Cried the nearly sixty year old man excitedly, upon seeing himself in his own blog post.

Well, when I put it like that it's not as impressive.

Do I think too much about time? I fleetingly wonder.

If I consider the last couple of days it is merely a few minutes of consideration altogether. But over the course of a lifetime? 

Empires have fallen.

Time crawls, but it covers leagues. Why not consider time? Time has all the answers!

But it has way more questions.

Elephants remember

 

As I very nearly promised yesterday and the day before, here are my short elephant poems about elephants turned into videos!

I remembered, just like elephants, who are famous for it. 

I looked this up. Elephants really do have good memories. They use their brains to remember! They have ten and a half pound brains!

I think I might have a ten and a half pound brain too. It sure feels like it sometimes. It may contribute to my back and neck problems.

Anyway, click the pictures below, and have your little ear plugs in because, oh lord, boy oh boy, you are in for

for...

Something? 

I don't know. 

So many animals!

 

You might be surprised after all my elephant poems yesterday to find a very different song and video here, this one about there being a lot of animals. I wrote this song about so many animals, but I only kind of know what the song is about.

I'm pretty sure that's how songs are supposed to work. That's how they can get all stealthy and then, bam! Right to the heart!

Not that this one does that. I'm just laying out the principle.

Anyway, we have your picture ready for you and you just click on it to be taken away for one whole minute. And while you do that I'll work on my elephant short movies, unless I get distracted.

Elephants

 

I have been composing short poems about elephants today. They are inspired by the video clips I have been making of an elephant in the library. If I go home and find time to cut together movies and make songs for them, they will be posted as pictures below the poems. But if I don't, if I don't, here are simply some poems about elephants!

But maybe you were hoping for something different from today's post.

Maybe you are sad to see poetry.

Maybe you were thinking there would be something here for you today?

Yeah, I know that feeling...

"Elephant Robot"

We had no elephant,

In the library,

So we made one out of steel.

He looks like an elephant,

But doesn't have the feel.

"Crocheted Elephant"

My friend knitted an elephant,

With two small needles,

And all the wool,

He could wheedle.

It's so big it's scary,

The knitted elephant,

But don't worry,

It's benelevant.

"Autumn Elephant"

The Fall elephant,

Is finally here.

Rejoice my friend,

It's that time of year,

Leaves are falling,

On elephant ears.

"Green Elephant"

We put an elephant in charge,

But it made him saucy,

So we exiled him to the pond,

For being bossy.

And when we brought him back,

He was mossy.

Library marketing

 

While I don't like the fake leftist politics of In Service Day, where Inclusivity and Equity are grave issues worthy of millions of county dollars for well-heeled consultants and endless efforts on training and restructuring, just so long as nothing fundamental changes,  I realized that the hardest part for me about it all is the marketing. 

There is a kind of marketing that people at work always do, but I feel it has gotten worse in my library system. It is a marketing that suggests all day long that everyone is a conscientious, hard-working, and committed employee, endeavoring tirelessly to improve and provide.

I am not good at marketing. I am the black hole of marketing. But that doesn't mean that I am immune to marketing!

So occasionally I find myself, under this onslaught of mildly self aggrandizing rhetoric, slipping into a feeling of alienation: "Wow, all these people are doing so much for the library system all the time and are working so hard, and I'm just a cranky person looking for a few moments at work to make a cat into a cake!"

And then I remember.

All I have to do is look around.

The library is a pretty good place, but it generally totters on the brink of disaster. It is five percent creativity, five percent hard work, five percent evil, and 85 percent just showing up. If merely half of what people said at In Service Day was true I would have half as many problems with my library system than I do. 

It's like a day of people talking convincingly about what excellent shelvers they are, followed by a trip up to the stacks to shelve a cart of books and finding there are so many mistakes to correct I don't make much headway.

So I try to make a cat into cake.

But I would have done that anyway.

 

The last in service day

 

Today I was at what I presume will be my last In Service Day for the library. I have a medium long history of writing about them in this space, and usually my comments on them express very little affection.

 Today's feature presentation was on Inclusivity, which has been the general passion of all training and education from the county at my library for almost half a decade now. It feels all very, I don't know, Soviet? It's like we are being trained with fanatical zealousness at the behest of people who have never really thought much about any of this, or any of the hard things it would take to improve any of it, but really like the sound of it. It is from people who think they can order inclusivity.

It wasn't the worst day though. There are many people throughout my library system that I really like. And I spent as much of the day as I could at the Clerkmanifesto Cafe.

The Clerkmanifesto Cafe? Ah...

(Click through for song and tableau)

The pelican

I love pelicans, but, far from any ocean, I haven't seen one for many years. Below I outlandishly make do, and my pelican comes with a song and many guises. I love the odd angles and the outlandish beak of the pelican, but not in a way that precludes me from making them into robots and crochet and stained glass figurines.

If you would be so kind, click on the picture below and see what happens.

Or don't. I'm pretty sure it is not within my power to compel the peoples of the Internet.

 

In which I inflate my post

 

This is the greatest thing you will see on the Internet this year, maybe even in your whole life, unless you've been reading...

Clerkmanifesto!

Then it's kind of the usual thing.

But..

Nevertheless...

Tell your friends, alert your neighbors, scream it from your driveway, pick up a neighborhood cat, hold him to your face and...

come to your senses.

At which point the cat will likely float away.

This happens with cats in our library all the time. Like... all the time.

Click the picture....

Glowing movie review of a movie I haven't seen

 

It is certainly not most books, indeed it is the rare book that one picks up, starts reading, and in a few paragraphs, absolutely knows: I am going to love this book. It's a weird feeling, because almost always there is simply not enough to go on. Three paragraphs in and I'm sure I'll love it? That seems unlikely. But though I suppose I've been wrong, and a few books have broken my heart, or even just slowly disappointed, almost every time I've felt that way about a book, or a movie, or an album, a minute or two into it, it's been true all the way through.

It would be nice it this were based on a book I just started, but it isn't. For some reason I remember reading The Rook by Daniel O'Malley and feeling that near instant enthrallment, but that was years ago by now. I just reread it for probably the fifth or sixth time last month, but I do remember that initial thunderbolt. I'm currently reading the third book in The Children of the Fox series, or having it read to me brilliantly on Libby, and I think it's a fantastic book, but it's the third book, and though I did fully love the series at the first book, it took some time and is not an example of what I'm talking about here.

What actually made me think of all this was starting to watch a movie tonight with my dear wife. We just watched the first ten minutes and had to delay the rest, but after a minute into the movie I purely felt like I was going to love the whole thing. Now, telling you about it, and only having seen ten minutes, I doubt my feelings more, and am reluctant to go out on a limb putting it in this category with no verification of seeing the rest of the film. But the nature of this is it's not for me to say really. I'm not betting on anything, or even trying to prove a point. I merely thought of all this because that feeling, I don't know, of trust, or engagement, or full enjoyment, was there barely into the film, just as I'm talking about here. Whether it all ends justified or not is not the issue exactly. 

The movie I loved so much?

A documentary called Will and Harper.

Would you like to know more about it?

Me too! 

Any day now I'm going to watch it!

Raspberry picking

 

There might be some kind of secret wisdom here:

The morning looked promising, so my lovely wife and I raced off to go raspberry picking. I picked a pound of beautiful raspberries. They are in our refrigerator now, but I have hardly eaten any of them. They're fine, but they are not the same as the many I ate out in the field, the raspberries falling apart, partially dried out, and full of strange scars. Those were the ones that I did not want to infect all my carefully picked good ones with, or make my fine ones ugly by adding their strange shapes, and so instead merely saved from waste by eating them.

Those were the delicious ones.

The chaos of creation

Because I have so many video generators and picture generators at my disposal, and because these tools are powerful, fascinating, expensive, and time-limited, I have been working on a lot of projects.

There are more projects than I can think of or really keep track of!

And finishing them is hard. 

Or maybe it's not so hard, but it is valuable time away from making more, new, exciting generative video, which I soon have new grand plans for. So when I chose to turn clerkmanifesto's attention away from evil library patrons, or nice ones, and take a look instead at what is lying around in my magical studio, it is pure chaos. The tables are piled high with animal models, obscure ancient tomes, and jars of rare mushrooms. The shelves are crammed full of glowing bottles and whirring robots. Feathers spontaneously falling from the ceiling and looking through them sometimes one can see old black and white film footage from over a hundred years ago!

 And so even if I'm just wanting to show you a thing or two that I'm working on, what do I choose? And how do I pull it out without everything toppling over? And will it ruin the surprise when, maybe, at long last, it appears in a final project a month from now?

I don't know.

I'll just grab a few things at random.

I think I knocked something to the ground and striped smoke is coming out of it.

This one is live, so you can click on it:

 

The problem with polls

 

On my way to do some shelving in non fiction I walked by a display of books about voting and elections. We have a rather important election coming up in my country, so this is timely. On top of the display is an informal little poll on a white board. Seeking not to ignite the veritable powder keg of pre election tension, the poll merely asks a person to make a choice between three options:

They will be:

1. Voting in person.

2. Early voting.

3. Not voting at all.

There are an assortment of hashmarks for each of the first two options although I don't remember which one was in the lead.

But there was not a single vote for the third option.

Which makes perfect sense.

People who don't vote maybe...

don't vote.

The three hour tour

 

One day, a year or two or three ago, a man started coming to my library. At first he talked to me a lot. His parent died and left behind a house here, and that temporarily brought him back to the area. He himself had been working an interesting career in a more glamorous state. It wasn't much of a back and forth kind of talking. It was more like I'm-a-bartender kind of talking. I'm okay with that role.

He slowly faded away from talking to me, but he didn't fade away from the library. Pretty soon he was coming here religiously, waiting every morning for our gates to open and leaving every night promptly at closing, just ahead of the stragglers.

He has increasingly brought to our attention small problems in the library with a disproportionate amount of urgency- a water faucet leaking a tiny bit, or a slightly too loud patron presented as minor emergencies that he is keen to see acted upon promptly.

Now, in the last month of his decline, he has started getting in fights with other library patrons, culminating in what sounds like a very rude interaction with a woman over seating arrangements in our lobby before our opening. He may have ended by surreptitiously throwing some ink on her.

Sometimes I think our library is like a desert island. And though beautiful, sometimes library patrons wash up on our shores and find that they don't know how to get away. And though it seems like they are surrounded by company, they are all alone. And slowly, before our eyes, they start to go mad.

But who am I to leave you with such a sad tale. 

The library is not only a desert island that drives marooned people mad. 

Sometimes it's just a regular old island, full of coconut trees, parrots, monkeys, and pretty sunsets. And seven stranded castaways who make the best of it.