Strawberries

 

The strawberries started showing up, and soon they were everywhere. I guess it is April. Where I lived for decades we were lucky if local strawberries came available while it was still May, but here? And Spain? And Italy, where Spring has been dancing around since February? These strawberries are ripening everywhere around here.

But let me just say first: Strawberries are the most disappointing fruit in the world. They so rarely seem to live up to their promise that I have more or less stopped believing in them. Is this from modern cultivation styles? Is this just the nature of strawberries? Do I have unrealistic expectations?

Once, many years ago in the Spring in Rome we found a cafe or bakery that had a tart made with fragolini, wee adorable tiny wild strawberries. These were a revelation! These tasted like I always thought strawberries should taste, soft and firm, juicy, sweet and tart and full of strawberry flavor.

Is this so hard for a strawberry?

But that was 15 or 20 years ago. Do you know how many strawberries have broken my heart since then?

So when I started seeing the strawberries show up at every market and every vendor stall around this Belle Epoque city, I said to myself "I'm not falling for that again."

And I didn't, for awhile. But here's the thing:

A lot of the fruits and vegetables have a kind of variation here, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes wild and dramatic. For instance one might see pale red tomatoes on the vine for something like a dollar a pound. They might even ripen into something good... eventually. Or one might see a string of deep red small tomatoes perfectly arrayed on their flower branch, laid out like some kind of exquisite jewelry and selling for something like 14 dollars a pound. Are those ones amazing? I don't know. That seems like a mad amount of money. But it seems like they must be brilliant, there just isn't any knowing here. After all, I will see expensive tomatoes here now seething with mold too, and cheap ones looking unusually nice.

But the variety sort of sucks one in.

And so it was with the strawberries. There are different colors and locations to these strawberries. There are molding boxes and pristine ones. Their prices, colors, shapes, and conditions are all over the place. And that's just it: With so many, something, some version of all these strawberries must be amazing!

So after a week or two I broke down. I bought a nearly perfect looking ruby red small box for seven or eight euros.

But to be safe I went to my local fromagerie and bought whipped cream.

I brought them home.

I tasted one.

I sprayed whipped cream all over them. And I ate all the strawberries, but honestly I think the whipped cream would have been better without them.

Ah well. I guess that's done for the year. 

Unless some tiny little ones show up here from Italy.

We're all just strangers here

 

Yesterday we went to the best place we have been to in all of France.

In all of France!

"Oh, this is why we moved to France." One of us even said.

This is not the tale of that trip, nor any pictures of it neither. Maybe that later.

Today I would just like to briefly talk about a single moment from that trip.

First, maybe you would you like to know where it is?

Perhaps you too would like to go to the best place in France, maybe on a little trip, eh?

Why not. I recommend it.

But keep in mind; best book, best meal, best place on the Internet, best cheese, best song, best river, best town and your experience may vary. We have to try everything for ourselves.

Ha! Just kidding. The best place on the Internet is...

Clerkmanifesto!

But for the rest of it I stand by the statement.

And so without further ado: 

We went to St. Paul de Vence. 

Sorry, it is properly written: Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And towards the end of our day there we wandered down through the back walls of the impossibly pretty hill town, into the cemetery, and visited the well marked, but simple tomb of the great painter Marc Chagall.

It was in a modest but utterly gorgeous small cemetery looking down to Cagnes Sur Mer, where Renoir spent his last years, and the ocean. The Cemetery was full of crosses and Christian graves. There was plain engraved stone on the tomb with Marc Chagall's name and dates, and a couple other people of his family. Visitors had piled small stones on the grave, some with tiny notes written on them.

To my absolute surprise I became emotional, and tears welled up in my eyes.

Here he was, after a long life of 97 years, dead another 41, and as far from his childhood and never forgotten home of Vitebsk as he could be.

I don't know why tears formed in my eyes.

I guess I'm pretty far from Vitebsk too.

Ballet at the Opera

 

The opera house here is a beautiful Belle Epoque building just across from the beach. I don't know if I've shown you pictures of it, though I've certainly taken some. Just... I've now been here so long and taken so many pictures that I don't know where most of them are anymore! So you'll just have to take it from me that it's a super pretty building. Once when we were on the beach in front of the opera we heard someone practicing their opera singing out one of its windows! It was great.

We have tickets in a month or two to see La Traviata there. But tonight we also had tickets for a dance from their ballet company, featuring music from Arvo Part and Philip Glass. The music was fantastic, with a great little orchestra in there. Maybe that bodes well for the opera? The dance was... not great, though the Philip Glass piece was way better, more fluid and danceable, and showed the quality of the dancers more clearly, or... at all. The choreography was tres mundane, seriously lacking in creativity. But I really like watching dance anyway, so it was an awfully good time.

The theater was beautiful in places, like, gorgeous, especially the intermission rooms, which were magical and glowing like a sunset, with ceiling paintings of putis from the early 1900's. Other things were full of peeling paint, worn carvings, and faded velvets. The design of the theater was ridiculous. We had a box along the side that fully faced at a right angle to the stage. Luckily it was all ours, and by the second act we worked out how to sit in it, which might have contributed too to our warmer feelings towards that second act!

I didn't get pictures of the beautiful intermission rooms, but I did get some of the main theater and present some of them here without embellishment. I can't promise I won't embellish or even make a painting of something here in the future. But for today I present these as part a more conventional post:

Here are the boxes, all facing each other across the theater floor, and not the stage:

This shows the back of the theater:

The huge and rather lovely chandelier close up, that you can glimpse in other pictures:

This is the mirror of our private box. By the second act we had fully redesigned it to our specifications:

The orchestra pit and stage before showtime:

The carvings of the dividers between the boxes:

Part of that chandelier again, with it's ceiling mural:

The only picture I have showing how worn the place was in parts. It was the drab areas and halls that were far worse than this, which is above the stage:

Pleasant observations and Russian stores

 

No, it's not all complaining here.

We just dip our toe in it.

And maybe sit and rest our feet in its cooling waters.

But there's so much to like here too! For instance we have been trying to pick up some packages being delivered to a nearby store here. It is a Russian store! The packages, though supposedly delivered, are mysteriously not there. But that is not the subject of this missive.

The subject of this missive is...

The Russian store!

My neighborhood has Russian stores and a Russian community of some kind. I don't really know that much about it, but it goes way back to the 1800's. There was even a direct train from here to Moscow, or something like that, 125 years ago. That's a long train. There is even a beautiful Russian Church just across the railroad tracks from where I live. I showed you pictures once. It is surrounded by rabbits! I showed you pictures of those once too.

But I would not go into this Russian Store if it weren't for the packages. I would have no reason to and too much shyness. It is crammed full of packaged goods of all kinds, and they are mind boggling. I am not interested in trying any of the things in the packages, but I like to look at them, with their mostly cyrillic script, and bizarre variety.

The first time we went today I looked at the fish snacks while waiting. There was a package of pacific cod, "salted, dried, sugared, and defrosted". Then there were like fifteen other dried fish packages. Most of them weren't entirely clear to me what they were.

The second time we went I stood by the herbs? I recognized some chamomile in a highly packaged bag like one might grab in a gas station convenience store. Like "Oh, I'll just grab this bag of chamomile to snack on until I get home."

These are very random and do not convey the fecundity of the Russian product lines. The whole thing is a bit of a weird twist on the ideas of Russia I grew up with: Soviet stores stocked with 14 different products total.

This was so not like that! There were hundreds, no, surely thousands of products, just jammed in. There were cases of mysterious beverages. There were freezers with packaged ice cream treats to give an ice cream truck a seizure. 

How old is some of this stuff, I wondered?

I don't know.

It might never go bad.

If the apocalypse comes, this is probably where my wife and I will get all our meals for the rest of our lives.

Bringing it down to earth

 

Readers are clamoring to know:

"What was up with yesterday's post. It seemed a little... sad.

You said:

"People. 

People are full of an infinite possibility.

But mostly, they don't."

It was about the new bakery, wasn't it?"

Maybe, a little.

It's just, down the street, straight down, a Japanese French bakery was preparing to open.

There are a lot of bakeries in this town. And I like some of them, and like them as a whole even better. But I would not describe them as, er, very creative.

Joni Mitchell's line regularly comes to mind here "Old and cold and settled in its ways."

But a Japanese French Boulangerie?

Interesting.

Will we see some of the creative fliers we stumbled upon in Kyoto as tiny businesses dared to experiment? I don't know. For weeks I peered through the paper covering their windows as they readied their place. I could see little.

Then their paper came down. Opening was within days. The first thrilling clues arrived!

A bakery case full of cans of sprite.

Oh, and a mundane drinks menu board with a Matcha Latte listed on it.

Thank god, now I have a 200th place in town to get a matcha latte. And for only 50 cents more than all the other places.

Sure, maybe you come here to dream at the wonders of the adventurous life in a glamorous foreign city. More power to you. 

But no light without shadows, eh?

The world so big, and so little

 

Travel expands the mind. Going different places shows you how much is possible. It expands one's vision of the world.

And then if you stick around a bit, it all contracts again.

I can look out my window right now and there are plenty of wonders; red tiled roofs, intricate decorations climbing into the hills where queens once wintered, frills and colors seemingly tossed around just for the joy of it. 

What investor would allow such madness now?

But that's just it really. These aren't the buildings they make now.

I don't mean to be sour.

I like most things better here.

It is a great and oft repeated truism that you can't leave yourself behind. If you go somewhere, or move somewhere, it's still just you. 

Or, wherever you go, there you are.

But it may be a bit less reported that wherever you go, people are there too.

People. 

People are full of an infinite possibility.

But mostly, they don't.

Clerkmanifesto bloodied and whimsical

 

An experiment of dubious value?

Perhaps.

But we like to run the gamut here on clerkmanifesto, and this has pieces of animated versions of my paintings, Bob Dylan singing my promotional lyrics, and a result that slots in somewhere between "Way too much effort" and "Not nearly enough effort", which is one of my common themes here, and might make a nice t-shirt.

Or even a blog motto!

Anyway...

No matter what I tried, Bob insisted on singing it as "Clark Manifesto" insisting it sounded better like that.

Well, he's the pro I guess.

This has a song that goes a couple of minutes but the visual goes to black after about a minute, largely because if it didn't the file would be too big to host here. This very much has sound, so headphones on, or volume up, click on the video, enlarge it, and hit play:

Beachcombing

 

Lately, especially when there are none of the famous blue chairs to sit in, we have taken to walking down to the beach here where we live, and... beachcombing.

We comb the beach looking for... stuff.

There are a lot of interesting rocks.

You should see my rock collection!

It is...

not very interesting.

I had this idea of taking close up pictures of rocks, some right there on the beach! I was thinking that like flowers, the minute attention might reveal wonders.

It didn't, in particular.

It's probably my fault. They are all very nice rocks!

Then, when all else had failed, I spindled and mutilated my pictures of rocks. I am back to my old ai photo manipulations on these, no drawing. And these are sort of the rocks, but more how they feel to me when I find them. 

The real ones look just like these, except a little plainer, less bejeweled, and, er, just a wee bit more like... rocks.

The Wave no. 2

 

Because these pictures are obsessively layered, erased, drawn, colored, layered and drawn on, etc, etc, I don't really come to the end of them. Instead, I come to the point where I may not be fully satisfied, but accept that it's more likely than not that no matter what I do I can't make it better, just different.

This has a nice quality of freeing me from responsiblility for it all.

Which is a relief.

This is my second official "Wave" picture. Thus my title.

The Goat cheese

 

Has there ever been a greater cheese than this goat cheese?

I guess not, I mean it's in the name: goat cheese.

If I were a fluent, speaking member of this culture, and I stopped at the goat cheese stand in the Liberation Market, I almost certainly would have joked with the cheese purveyor by asking "And what makes this cheese the "Greatest Of All Time?"

But all I could manage here in France was to point at the exquisitely plain looking round white cheese and say "Je voudrais..." and then point with my finger. And then add politely "S'il vous plait."

The French person, to be sure she understood, said something. I understood the word "frais", which means "fresh".

"Oui, Frais!" I mumbled excitedly. But I was too late and mumbly to communicate anything as she was already taking it from the case and wrapping it, so I might have just started murmuring "cheese" excitedly at that point for all it did.

She packed up my nice large fresh round cheese. Four euros.

If this had happened in the country I come from, where I speak the language very well, and I joked: "And what makes this cheese the "Greatest Of All Time?" I probably wouldn't have been understood anyway.

But it wouldn't have happened because they seriously do not have cheese like that where I come from, as simple as it was.

My god that cheese was good!

"Was it the "GOAT cheese?" You might like to ask, trying out the fun joke.

Oh.

Perhaps fortunately, how good it was cannot be said in the words of any language.

Seasons

 

Uh-oh.

You gotta watch out for retirement.

Time just drifts by!

The season is changing again.

Maybe it's not just retirement. There is an argument to be made that time is relentless.

Now it is busy changing the seasons.

There have been signs of this. But it happened so violently and magnificently in Minnesota that I lost some of my fine tuning on spotting the process. Seasons change here on the Cote D'azur in a more rolling, gentle way, like waves, and I don't know all the signs.

 Like, what's going to happen to all the oranges and lemons on the orange and lemon trees? Do they just fall off? And then it's summer?

So how do I know it's Spring then?

I look up into the hills and they're purple. Every single tree around here appears to be blooming in violet flowers!

Also, March is ending.

But it's not like I can see all the snow melting or anything. Really I'm just sort of making it up as I go along.

Baseball caps and tourists

 

Not long ago a friend from the library times asked me whether people here wear baseball caps.

It was a text. I answered, but not really. I find texting unnatural and brief. Of course twitter was bought by a Nazi.

Words have to breathe.

Lots of lots of lots of lots of words.

Words everywhere.

In a text one can only answer one way, one thing. But every answer has twenty versions.

I didn't get to this answer because one can only poke at one's phone for so long.

And it is this:

At first it would seem like only tourists wear baseball caps here, and this town is full of tourists. 

But tourists have more humility than anyone thinks.

The problem with cities are the locals.

Yes, French people wear baseball caps.

ONLY French people wear baseball caps!

And how can I tell?

Every baseball cap anyone wears here is a Yankee cap.

Only if those people went to New York would they behave properly.

The wave

 

I take a lot of pictures of the ocean here, though mostly I just sit there and look at it.

Whether I am going to find painting the ocean waves on my computer to be as rewarding as looking at it is an open question, but here's my start:

The smell of my city

 

This is a beautiful city.

But don't be too jealous. It's not all fairytales and rainbows here.

Today is a tale from our dark side.

Like every place I have ever been, they hate poor people here too! But in an unreciprocated way, poor people do seem to like it here anyway. They hang out on sidewalks begging, some quietly, sprawled sleeping, with maybe a little hat to collect for them and sometimes their friends.

There is collective begging here!

But mostly it is singular begging. I know many beggars by sight now. But mostly the theatrical ones, like the man with no arms walking ably along pushing his wheelchair all through the city, the old woman with a tiny cane bent so close to the ground that her head nearly touches it, or the guy who has taken posession of a bench on the promenade.

Actually I'm not sure I recognize the bench guy. I just recognize his bench.

There are a lot of beggars and homeless people.

Because homeless people and beggars like to use bathrooms, this city has come up with a clever solution.

Don't have any bathrooms!

Thus the smell of my city.

Green Chartreuse vs. St Germain

 

"Hey?" You ask. "I have been closely following clerkmanifesto's journey to France. And I've put up with stories about Japan. I've endured complicated, deceptive, and curious photography. I've worked my way through exhausting tales of urban design, making a life in another country, and endless discussions of cheese and baguettes. And I have done this because I felt at some point, eventually, you surely must discuss the liqueur situation!"

"It has been excruciating!" You exclaim. "But surely my pet subject will arrive. Won't it?" You ask in agony and desperation.

Yes.

It has arrived.

Today we will discuss the two giants of French Liqueurs: Green Chartreuse and St Germain.

There are other French Liqueurs. And if you continue to look at my new paintings, read about my hate of the medieval village of Eze and how it's emblematic of everything wrong with modern France, endure the opening of gelato season here, and suffer the agonies of reading about why the stroad running along the Promenade Des Anglais is an actual affront to God, I will eventually get to more stories of French Liqueurs.

I am thinking of going all in on the French Liqueurs.

And the astonishing two navigational directions of French Liqueurs are Green Chartreuse and St Germain.

I adore Green Chartreuse. It is an elixir, a toxic confection of life, a mystery made by monks for three hundred years. From a secret recipe, using hundreds of herbs, they have created the masterpiece of liqueuers.

Do you know what Green Chartreuse tastes like? It's lingering at the edge of my throat now. But I can no more tell you the taste than you could describe the secret fourth primary color. 

So I hope you've tried it. 

It's very strong. Take a small sip.

Several years ago the monks who make Green Chartreuse announced that they were going to kind of chill out on the chartreuse. They didn't want to make more and more chartreuse and be a chartreuse global powerhouse. They wanted to be monks who made some chartreuse on the side.

Good for them.

I guess. What do I know?

But that was around the time where one stopped being able to pop into a liquor store and buy a bottle of Green Chartreuse for $55. It just wasn't available anymore.

And then we moved to France. And suddenly, many places had it for sale! That makes sense. It's French. We're in France. This is the kind of sensibility I enjoy! It still has an appealingly uneven distribution and the price varies from maybe 55 euros, if you are very lucky, clear up to 85 euros and more.

I have a bottle.

It tastes worth it.

Come on by.

On the other hand we have St Germain. This is a gorgeous liqueur. It tastes of elderflowers picked in the mountains. It is simpler and lighter and very beautiful. It comes in a graceful, heavy art nouveau bottle. It looks like a classic drink that must have been around for a hundred years, but it is astonishingly less that twenty years old! It's impact was so great on the nascent world cocktail culture reemergence that it became known as "Bartenders' Ketchup" because it is so handy and good and goes so well with so many kinds of mixed drinks. Though I love the Aperol Spritz, a classic, the best spritz to me is the Hugo Spritz, made with St Germain, Prosecco, sparkling water, and mint, if you've got it. Sadly, St Germain was sold to an evil greedy giant Liquor corporation who ran the price up as much as they could and positioned it as a "Global Luxury" brand.

When I came here to France I thought excitedly: "Oh, how exciting! I'll be able to get nice cheap St Germain." Ha. Ha!!! When I saw that somehow it cost as much a 40 euros a bottle I researched the situation and learned all of this.

And I tried to hate St Germain.

Alas, I failed.

The two key liqueurs of France, one pure and noble, magnificent and spiritual. One corrupted and...

delicious.

And there you are.