In the heat of the summer

 

Here's a repost for you, thrown out from a much too hot France that is tossing fitfully under a giant, continental heatwave, to remind me of... colder times. We do have air conditioning, which struggles a bit to keep up, but I'm not complaining.

Oh, wait, I am complaining. 

And reposting a years old Winter classic.

Nevertheless I appreciate the cool relief of our apartment, which is palpable when we walk in from the baking attic hallway. We recently found out from a neighbor that despite some far bigger and fancier apartments below us, we are the only ones in the building with air conditioning! I think it was put in around the edges of the permissions for the building, and perhaps by virtue of the persuasive charms of our young French/Italian landlord who lived here at the time.

But I'm just guessing.

The other reason I am reposting today is so I could watch the France vs. Norway match, but Norway, in what I consider to be an unwise move from their coach, and a bit cowardly, is "resting" their star player. It takes some of the fun out of it, but, so far the game is not without fun, so I'll head back to it, and leave you to this:

I wandered out into the gritty center of Winter. One might even say I trudged, as I soon found myself in a local, sidewalkless neighborhood, plodding in unplowed streets where the snow had turned to what my wife calls brown sugar and butter. It was a mild day, in the twenties (270 kelvins), and though I had two cameras I had walked a long way without feeling the slightest compulsion to photograph anything.

And then, down a long street, coming from the railroad track's dead end, there were the turkeys. 

It is, after all, the turkeys' neighborhood.

I took pictures of them, dark in the snow and under a dim, gray sky. I came close to them which always sets them on their slow way, though they never linger too much anyway. All day they make their long, stately rotation through the backyards and streets of the neighborhood. I love how it is all a world of humans, with grids and walks and straight ways, but the turkeys move through it as a wild world, a world of turkeys, hilly and flat, grass and snow and cement, but all of it open equally to them, none of it straight or for one place to another.

As I stood photographing, the turkeys strolled by me so close that I could not get a picture, partly from the movement, partly from the limitations of the lens, and partly from my beating heart, thrilling at being all among the wild turkeys.

I do my best not to impinge upon the hospitality of the turkeys. I'll linger with them where I first come upon them. Then sometimes I'll follow around to meet them on a second street. After that I get the sense that maybe they've had enough of me, even if I, not always, of them.

I have shown you many pictures these years of the turkeys, but rarely have I gotten ones of them so grouped together, and so I hope that a couple of those give a feel for the flock, and for being among them.

French adjacent comedy

 

Here's some French adjacent comedy pulled from real life discussions:

"I have to go to the bathroom and I don't even know how to say "pee" in French!"

"That would be a useful thing to know."

"Oui."

Portrait of my cousin

 

By one of those amazing congruences in life, when my darling wife and I were in Japan, on our way to moving to France, I heard from my cousin James, who I had not been in contact for some years. It turns out he was moving to France too. Congruence indeed, but my story going back to my earliest childhood with this cousin really was one of extraordinary congruence, for which I am immensely grateful.

May I just mushily mention here that I adore my cousin.

So here we are all in France!

But France is a bigger country than you think, unless you are very clear on the size of France, in which case: France sure is how big you think it is! So it's not like we just wander out our doors and pop over to each other's houses. 

Thus, as a solution, we contrived to meet somewhere.

That was in Montpellier, three to five hours train travel away from my wife and me, and James and his utterly charming dog, in different directions.

It was great fun, and, as a note to any random readers out there who I have invited to visit us in France way back when all this seemed an odd sort of dream: Oh my god are you missing out!

Anyway, you may remember me showing rather a lot of Montpellier pictures and talking about moving to Montpellier, which is still in play, but I also found my cousin agreeable to my taking his picture during that. So I did, and have long wanted to do some portraits of him. But between back problems and illness, it has taken me ages to be able to get to my drawing board again, where on my computer I do layers and layers of drawing, erasing, and drawing some more. 

And then I end up with a portrait.

Which is what I have for you today.

How these memoirs are made

 

Many people ask me:

"How on earth do you write these memoirs I read everyday?"

To which I say with excitement and skepticism, "Wait, so do you read these every day?"

To which many people reply "Well, every few weeks I'll drop in, and it always seems like I missed a bunch!"

Yeah, I guess it is kind of a lot.

I used to have to just type my posts in purely from my imagination every single day, working out of my dark studio in a cold Minnesota basement. It required a lot of fortitude and imagination!

Nowadays I simply keep my stenographer with me at all times. He jots down everything I say throughout the day and night. 

The real challenge at this point is in the editing, and in the restocking of my aperol spritzes.

Yearbook picture

 

I have been working on my Summer pictures for Clerkmanifesto, a little group shot of the cast of clerkmanifesto for this Summer. Just a moment for us to touch base here and gather ourselves at France's clerkmanifesto headquarters.

I don't have a definitive image yet. It eludes me, and also, there is a lot of soccer to watch.

Like, did you see Messi's brace?

I know that yesterday I said that trying to predict soccer is a fool's game. It doesn't exist until it happens. But then, to slap me down for my hubris, I had one of those moments of absolute conviction. Sometimes they are positive, sometimes negative. This was around Messi's penalty kick he missed. I knew he would miss it so completely that I hoped he would give the kick to the forward who was fouled, Lautaro Martinez.

He didn't and he missed the goal.

Luckily it didn't matter and the two goals? Well, you saw them.  And if you didn't. Thank you for your attention to this matter. But they were an expression of a treat I have been enjoying for 12 years. It's almost over now, but weird that it still isn't. Talk about unpredictable.

Meanwhile, I have these images in various odd states of completion. I offer them forward as the Summer cast of clerkmanifesto.

What goes around....

 

I don't want to hate so much in the world cup. But I can't help it. I get as invested negatively (Netherlands, Germany, Morocco, Ronaldo) as I do get invested positively (Spain, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cote D Ivoire until they broke my heart) and I barely even know why it happens most of the time. Seeing Germany's come from behind victory against Cote d Ivoire was miserable but also, due to my dark pessimism, it felt horrifically inevitable. And that's the thing I'm trying to shake off here in the second round; a miserable fatalism.

The things I liked happening, the ones that everyone treats as inevitable and permanent will turn on their heads. I've seen it all happen before. And the things I didn't like are indications of inevitability and the path forward, which I've also seen happen. So Messi, hailed as he is with three goals in the first game, just means, in my Eeyorish heart, that we will see nothing more from him and little more from Argentina now, whereas Mbappe's goals indicate an unstoppable nature and another unstoppable French World Cup.

But I can no more predict a dark future than a bright one. And something good or bad happening is only a Schrodinger's Cat. 

It wasn't there all along. I must reembrace this:

Each soccer match is invented at its inception.

And so now I turn to Spain's second match. Will it be the lucid ineffectiveness of round one, or pure Spanish magic? Both are entirely true and whole, until I open the box...

Trying to enjoy retirement

 

I was working on a kind of photographic idea today, all day, over the course of things; while the oatmeal was cooking, drinking a spritz at Parioliere, waiting in line for the bathroom. I'd take new background shots, add new elements, try new dynamics. And each time I'd get to a better picture until finally, well, I liked one picture so much I couldn't bother with any of the other ones, nor try any improvements.

Which was delightful. Success! But it was also a little sad.

I made a whole bunch of images, some I was really happy with, but now, I just have the one and don't want to muddy the waters, so to speak, so all the rest of my little triumphs are just dumped on the pile.

You should see my piles!

This isn't by way of saying anything regarding the content or meaning of this image I have for you today. 

That I'd rather just leave to itself.

Me, flying

 

On a warm day we went down to the ocean and had coffee on the beach, where they had raised their prices ten cents a drink!

Luckily I have a lot of loose change, piles of it. And, as an aside, not just the small stuff either. Ones and twos can accumulate in one's pocket if one is not careful to spend it. And oddly, shopkeepers will sometimes either:

A. Ask you for all kinds of specific change requests to help with the shortcomings at their registers, or

B. Apologetically give you 8.72 change for your 20 euro bill all in coins because five euro bills are strangely rare here sometimes.

"B" has been happening a lot to me lately.

But this is not the subject of today's post.

And don't worry. It is not the World Cup either.

After coffee we walked up the beach to old town and bought potatoes and arugula from our favorite seller there, who hates pennies of any kind. And we also went to the photography museum, which our city museum pass card gets us into for free!

This is the subject of today's post!

We counted it out and determined we were 60 percent successful with shows at the photography museum (it has no permanent collection). We loved the guy who did multi hour exposure photos of mostly landscapes for instance, but the woman exploring the "beauty" of "all kinds" of women felt a bit disingenous and didn't quite cut it with us. This new exhibition today was called "Levitation".

The photographer, an athlete and dancer, took pictures of himself mostly, but sometimes others, in carefully constructed moments at the height of elaborate leaps, giving him the look of someone suspended in the air in dramatic locations and in dramatic, space defying poses.

I didn't like them at first, but my negativity is often unnecessary and if I can get rid of it, I do my best to do so. They were often elegant and interesting in an instagram way, so it wasn't a big surprise that he has found much success first on Instagram and suchlike. There was a very pretty film of his work that seemed to include a lot of advertising work he had done as well, which was pretty too, but not the sort of thing to make one respect his work and vision more. But it was fun to look at.

I did feel like the information about the show wanted to make sure you knew these were real, unaltered photos of real scenes. And I can see their interest in that, in this day in age.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking mischievously and I took some pictures of the gallery and the show. And then I did the following.

 Are they homage? Affectionate teasing? Outright trolling?

Yeah, probably.