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.

View at the mouth of the Paillon River

 

Here is the first fully completed drawing, or painting, I have made with my drawing pad. The Paillon River runs under a long park here through most of the city, but once was the butt of jokes for being such a dry river. Right now in the aftermath of late Winter Rains and maybe some snow run off it is going pretty good into the sea, which is where this view is from, looking up into the mysterious undercity river. The mouth here keeps shifting around both naturally and as a result of the city curiously stirring the famous stone beaches around with bulldozers and suchlike. This evening we were down at the Paillon again, and it is already configured differently than in this view from a week ago.

Clerkmanifesto goes to the library

 

I do try to add subject tags to my posts here. And looking into my statistics, I have now written 4,912 posts that include the tag "Libraries".

This sounds like the kind of confusingly exaggerated joke I occasionally make here, but I assure you, that is the number as I assume it is accurately reported in my blog statistics, with more than two thirds of my already copious missives from over 13 years of clerkmanifesto featuring libraries in some way.

And then I retired.

Libraries don't figure into clerkmanifesto quite so much anymore, though we have a long way to go before, say, "France" surpasses "Libraries" in the tags totals.

Nevertheless, I went to the library yesterday. A French library!

It's a slightly famous library because it has a giant head building that is currently the administrative offices for the library (and once was an active library that had shelves of books!). Here is a picture I took because I had a feeling you'd want to see that.

The path in front is the one heading to the entrance of the library. 

They have been doing updates and work on this library since we got here, and it just reopened. Years ago we went here and the entrance was far on the other side of the building/park, under a kind of fancy bridge/park complex that smells of pee and always had quite a few homeless people hanging about it. I think this is a universal library issue in the Western World, and I seriously suspect that more than half the motivation for moving the entire orientation of this library was to solve the unpleasant situation at the other entrance, which besides an everpresent homeless contingent, gloriously had a modern museum opposite it and stupidly ran a high traffic road through the center of it.

This new entrance is better; bright and sunny, and taking advantage of the elaborate gardens, paths, and parks that is functionally the library's roof. The downsides are that the entrance is now oriented away from the center of the city, and, as it is buried under a park, it is a little windowless and charmless inside the large library.

We didn't have a lot of time for this visit, which we snuck in while waiting for the bus to Eze, a medeival village nearby, which is a story for another time. My dear wife found the periodicals and a rather amazing looking ceramics magazine, while I checked out some very nice jazz albums and a rather tiny English Language section I would describe as vaguely random. We didn't have time to look into getting library cards or anything like that and went off in a bit of a hurry as our bus time precipitously approached.

Here are a few more pictures of the entrance area. I left them as is except for adding some cats, which improve them unreasonably. 

If you find yourself thinking "Hey, I've got to get to this library! It is the greatest thing I've ever seen!" that's mostly the cats.

Drawing tablets and other unfinished business

After a few more hilarious misadventures with my drawing tablet delivery, I finally have it!

First it was mysteriously destroyed in transit. Then today the delivery to the hair salon down the street somehow went awry, but fortunately it was delivered to another nearby hair salon (no city on earth has a shortage of hair salons). As the second hair salon looked frantically on their rack of deliveries I got a great sinking feeling, but they found it! It was delivered with one other item we ordered (a sound machine), and as we walked home we shed cardboard (I mean, not on the street or anything).

And it works great!

I suppose I have tons to learn about controls, that I may or may not learn, but fundamentally I can now draw on this pad with my stylus pen and have it show up one to one on my computer screen! It is even pressure sensitive, making stronger lines as I press harder.

Naturally I raced to work on one of my new picture studies to show you here. This is mainly pure drawing now (all the black) with a faintly layered background. I intend to make it a more finished drawing and to even try working in color, but time is up for tonight's posting, so here it is so far:

We won't mention the political message, as we are too busy with other business here at clerkmanifesto today.

For instance, yesterday I was excited to share a bit of video of how pretty the ocean was out beyond the port. Unfortunately I couldn't see how badly that video footage was compressed until it published, and I think it did a terrible job of representing the original scene and the unspectacular film of it which was still a hundred times better than what appeared here!

Je suis desole.

I am sorry.

So in recompense, and to set the world right, here are some of the regular pictures I took of the area to make sure you don't retain the wrong idea. To me they need a lot of work, and I wouldn't normally share these, but at least they are far closer to the color and look of that water for yesterday's missive:

We went to the beach!

 

Today we went to the beach!

There are a couple of things about that:

1. We go to the beach every day.

and

2. It still works out really well for us.

Today we wanted to get some of the Italian olive oil sold at the Liberation Market. But the people who sell that, and olives, and some other deli things, and who are always there when we go, weren't there!

But we were feeling adaptive. So we decided to abandon all of that and hop on the tram that is right there, and take it to near the port. We usually walk everywhere, so this seemed very cushy, riding in a tram to the Garibaldi Square. We thought we'd cut down on our walking a bit because we were thinking of taking the bus to the next town over, famous and picturesque Villefranche Sur Mer, where we might be in for even more walking. 

But then it turned out that that bus, which we so confidently thought went to Villefranche, doesn't, actually, go there at all. It only goes halfway!

But we were feeling adaptive. So we went to look at the ocean.

I love the ocean there past the port because it is all rocky and wild looking. Last time we went there it was windy and tempestuous out, still in the aftermath of Winter storms, with great waves smashing into the rocks and hurling great foams and dramatic fountains into the air. Today was pretty and calmer, revealing the colors of the sun and clear water, dancing fabulously among the rocks.

I took eight billion pictures that I may or may not find a use for, especially as I am still much occupied with my last suite of pictures. But I was so taken with the movement of the waves and water and light that I took a brief video clip too. And I will show you that here (remember, you have to click, enlarge, and click again):

From there we walked home, which as a mostly straight up walk. But having to round the port and stick to the ocean, it is a notable walk for us, maybe even a little long. 

Which is why we stopped at a cafe, sat for a long time, and had cappucinos.