The roll of film from a fancy french garden estate

 

Yesterday we had all kinds of cutting commentary on the super rich and their fancy garden estates. We really zinged them!

Today we'll just go for the pretty pictures of one of those garden estates.

I hope no one will take it as a mixed message. In the anarchist utopia I advocate for the garden estates would be way, way better than this!

But these will have to do for now.

Today I have prepared for you a classic, old school film roll of twelve pictures. You know, because there was twelve pictures in a roll of film back in the olden days, unless it was 24, or 36. But I find when we get past twelve pictures in a single clerkmanifesto post everyone's eyes start glazing over. So twelve it is.

I wish I could just take twelve perfect pictures like this and that's it, but these are weeded and chiselled out of more like 300 pictures. 

And these aren't even just the twelve best. I have something more like 24 best and these are half of them. So we'll probably have to go through all of this tomorrow.

I wonder what I'll do for introductory comments.

I sure hope they're as good as these have been!

The mighty reach of clerkmanifesto

 

I spent my birthday in lush gardens surrounding a lovely ocean view villa built and lived in by a Rothschild a hundred years ago.

Pfft. Rich people.

I suppose this wasn't the worst sort of rich person, since she had the taste and desire to make some of the most graceful, well assembled and well maintained gardens I have yet seen and also had the decency to leave it to be viewed and visited by the public.

I'm part of the public! 

And what could be more modern than wandering around in the lovely leavings of the super rich?

But most of the twenty million euro estates around here, and there are plenty, one can't visit at all.

So I'll stick to picking on them for now.

I'll bet they're shaking in their boots!

Today's medicine

 

Today we'll be starting with some promotional material:

I've been trying to collect a file of all my favorite pictures I've taken or made for clerkmanifesto, which is a chunky job, but a bit more reasonable than when I try to organize ten thousand pictures into complicated categories. This job is more of a yes/no thing. The promotional picture above is sort of from that new file, but I decided to change its featured element from a little mini me into a bugheart.

These other pictures are a relatively tiny camera roll of various pictures from our past here. They all have their own little stories, but I think they'd rather try and tell them themselves.

A personal exploration of a famous person's birthday

 

Today is a very famous person's birthday!

Yep, Teddy Roosevelt.

I just thought it might be worth noting, I mean, in case anyone wanted to, uh, wish him, and only him, "Happy Birthday".

"Well that's odd" you comment instead of wishing Teddy Roosevelt a happy birthday, "You don't usually mention birthdays around here."

No. That's where I have to stop you. I just mentioned my friend Grape's birthday four days ago, so it could be said I mention birthdays every four days! And if I don't mention Teddy Roosevelt's birthday now, I have to wait 365 more days!

I'm not upset. 

Just so you know.

I appreciate the give and take.

"Okay," You say. "I'll bite then. What's so great about Teddy Roosevelt that we have to celebrate his birthday?"

I mean, nothing in particular really. It's also Dylan Thomas's birthday.

Just, you know, in case you were interested.

The mansion garden

 

I may have a few champagne problems living in this Belle Epoque town, but I could happily go take pictures in the mansion garden every day forever. And at the end of the picture taking, I can go down the almost secret path by the garbage, still surrounded by flowers, climb the almost secret stairs, and have the platform at the top of their property wall all to ourselves to gaze out at the ocean from.

Then I come home and sort through the pictures; little birds, blazing flowers, ancient sprawling trees, fat bumblebees, giant curling leaves, and the crows. Sometimes, as I have before, I show a pleasant roll of unedited pictures, and sometimes, like today, I spend hours doing all sorts of mad science on the pictures, unable to stop myself as I run one more pass or one more edit until I find it is quite late, and I need to put together the clerkmanifesto post for the morrow pretty quick, because the day is long gone and my time with you is nearly over.

So while in the future I may present my garden pictures here in a more orderly way, for this post I will just be running off to my file of new pictures from my work today and grabbing a few things that catch my eye.

Maybe they can catch your eye too?

Don't worry though, they'll probably give it back if they do.

Les flics

 

Hey, I have a real live french term today; Les Flics.

That's, like, French for "The Cops", man. And let me tell you, the cops seem to be the same everywhere!

Even in France.

I have come a long way from my old neighborhood where the cops were constantly strangling people to death. Okay, not constantly, sometimes they shot people in their cars too. But either way, protests seemed to result, and in the end shattered shop windows along my local streets ended up covered in boards and an occasionally building was burned to the ground. 

Just like where I am now!

Just exactly like where I fucking am now!

And I know to a distant viewer and to all the confidently confused people of, say, Reddit, or the Internet in general, or, like, The New York Times or Le Monde, there are a lot of different narratives flying around, all with very real accompanying video footage, and it seems really hard to suss out.

I am not here to suss it all out for you. I just want to point out the most absolutely obvious thing in the world:

The police, les flics, are not doing their job.

1. You have videos of les flics beating innocent people.

2. You have videos of les flics in great mobs facing off with protesters with things being hurled in both directions albeit with the things the police are hurling looking far more dangerous.

3. You have videos of people looting shops on extremely public main streets and there are no police around at all.

So, police beating innocent people. Not their job.

Police fighting protesters? How is this relevant? How is this a police job? They are in no way throwing their bodies on the line or standing desperately protecting anything but the street behind them. Why? It seems based on a theoretical prevention. But shouldn't someone commit a crime before the police start enforcing the law on them...

Like, maybe breaking into shops and wantonly stealing stuff?

I am pretty far on the left in any reasonable political spectrum, but even I could handle these two simple ostensibly conservative concepts:

1. People sitting, marching, even protesting? Not really that much of a police issue, but I can grudgingly accept their keeping an extremely tolerant eye on things.

2. People actually smashing shop windows, stealing from places, and burning things? Okay, reasonable for le flic, Monsieur Policier to intervene.

If only they would.

Fun and frolic with clerkmanifesto

 

I once embarked on a vast attempted migration of clerkmanifesto to my own fully hosted site called "Life is a fountain". This grandiose venture had something to do with problems with google's blogger (the hosting platform where we are now), and was also because I was struck with a wave of creative ambitions in response. Life is a Fountain was a very explorable site, with lots to look at, read, and even watch, but suffered from two problems that ultimately lead to its demise and to our retreat back here to the homely clerkmanifesto that is in your hands at this moment.

1. Packed to the gills with content, the whole Life is a Fountain site ran too slowly for the whipsnap patience of modern internet users.

2. No one actually reads clerkmanifesto, other than you (hi and thanks for coming by) and even fewer people read Life is a Fountain, which created a weird black hole in which it regularly received less than zero views, a minus number!, which was fascinating, but only for a little while, and started to upset math itself.

Math is more sensitive than one would think.

I can relate.

So back I came here, having kept it live and up to date the whole time of the experiment, much to math's enormous relief.

And here I still am years later, focussing on the main daily postings and leaving all that sidebar, interconnected stuff to itself.

Until now!

Now I decided to clean up these sidebar features and offer a few more gateways into the vast histories and content of clerkmanifesto. It is no great reworking, and I still refuse to change the now antiquated look of clerkmanifesto, but I have gotten rid of outdated elements on the sidebar that long ceased to be relevant. And I have added a few more usable features for the so inclined. Like, as I write we have a tribute to Grape for his birthday up top. I also now have some links to highlighted posts of the past. Even way down below I have a "picture of the day". A picture of the day! I wonder when I'll remember to change that? Because, after all, this is all meant to be changeable, and over the next while I am guessing there will be all sorts of shenanigans over on the sidebar to your right.

Even I can accept that clerkmanifesto isn't always "good". But it definitely is "always" which makes for a ton of it! So much that I have long since despaired of organizing it. But slowly I am leaning more into all that history, and trying to make tunnels and warrens and rooms in this colossal collection of clerkmanifesto content, connecting the past and present and letting it all run together and reemerge in new, hopefully distilled and more curated ways.

"Condeluded."? You say.

Yes, what a wonderful idea! Among the new features is an actual search box. If you aren't exhausted from today's information heavy post, try typing "condeluded" into that search box and see what you get!

Or not. I'll take care of math if this upsets it. I'll fix math a vermouth. Math loves vermouth and that usually calms them down.