The fauves

 

No, I'm not really going to tell you about the fauves. They were from the country I'm in now, France, and were an art movement characterized by intense colors and wild brush work. Matisse, whose apartment I can see in the hills out my window, is possibly the most famous of the fauves.

Oops, I wasn't going to tell you about the fauves! 

I don't even know if you can say fauves or if you have to always say "fauvism" or "fauvists". So who am I to be guiding you around this early 20th century art movement!

It's kind of neat though, like it goes pretty far into abstraction without quite getting there. It's like a godchild of Van Gogh.

Anyway, I was working on maybe the fourth of my Genoa paintings, today's subject was a scene looking out through the baroque palaces into the old city there. And when I finished my first layer I thought "Well, this is looking rather fauvist!"

But I build these images in multiple layers, so I still had a lot to do!

 After about five versions, a couple of hours, and quite a few layers, I was finished. I came over here to show you it. 

And then I started going on about the fauves!

The thing is, clerkmanifesto has a, let's call it a guiding principle, not a rule. And that guiding principle is that whatever our plans are here, we take the first exit, the first true ending we can get to. I don't always do it. And of course I sometimes have too strong an overall plan to give up on for it. But many, if not most posts come to a kind of surprise ending for me, like, I thought I was going... there, but here it is now. And I'm done.

I missed this opportunity with today's painting. I was really done after the first layer, but I labored on. Fortunately though, because each layer is preserved, I could finally see that and make my correction.

 And so, in one layer only, secretly fauvist inspired, is today's Genoa picture.

Sushi in France

 

I have had some grand plans for writing about food in France, but I keep shying away from it. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. And French food is both everything you would think and dream it would be, and yet it is as incredibly stupid and disappointing as everywhere else in the world too, both of them at the same time! Which makes for a mightier subject than I ever feel entirely ready to take on.

 So what if I start off small?

What if I start of with just a wee bit of sushi?

Who doesn't love sushi?

The French love sushi!

Oh my god the French love sushi so much! They love it almost as much as boulangeries, more than fromageries, and about equal with pizzerias.

Or, at least, one could conclude that by how very many many places sell sushi here. The cheap neighborhood grocery chains sell sushi here. And so do the big supermarkets. Small neighborhood sushi shops sell sushi here, and so do slightly bigger and nicer ones. There is a massive sushi chain devoted to only selling sushi here, with so many representative stores I couldn't begin to count them. And then there's the other sushi chain, equally big, exactly like the first one so that I can never remember which is which, equally devoted to selling sushi. And then there are equally as many poke bowl type restaurants on top of that, which are just a clever way to sell unassembled sushi in a bowl for the same price.

There is sushi everywhere here!

And every single place has the exact same sushi. 

And all of the sushi, grocery store and nice restaurant, is for pretty close to the same price. 

Tuna, Salmon, Dourade (a kind of sea bream), and maybe cooked shrimp, and then all of them in rolls with avocado maybe, or cream cheese (?). Maybe a cucumber makes an appearance. If there's a big menu a fifth seafood might appear, like scallop or fake crab.

It's a little disappointing. But honestly, I didn't have the easiest time finding good sushi in variety in Japan either. Though eventually I sussed it out. And at least their grocery store sushi was cheap and good.

I know this possibly makes me sound like a malcontent.

But that happens sometimes because I am a malcontent.

And I find myself constantly waxing nostalgic about the appearance of sushi in the U.S. in the nineteen eighties. What a revalation that was! If only they had a branch of L.A.'s "Somethings Fishy" here now (no, was that really the name?!). That typical early eighties sushi bar had no 20 dollar rolls of tuna, salmon and avocado smothered in various mayonaisses and fruits. No, it had 30 different kinds of fish! It was wild. I could get an oyster with a quail egg! They used crab! Unagi, hamachi, spanish mackeral, uni, oh lord, the uni!

Sorry. I got hungry and I have wandered off point.

Eh?

What was my point?

Of course I have a point!

Oh. Yes. It's a big one.

Are you sure you're ready for it? Can you handle it?

Okay.

The French are very, very, very good at their food.

But they're not so good at anyone elses.

And I'm not even mentioning the tacos.

How to look at a painting

 

Today's title is "How to look at a painting". You can see the title right up there ꜛꜛꜛꜛ.

And the answer is "Probably not like this".

We are on painting number three from my Genoa pictures. My first picture was decent. The second one went a bit off the rails, so I took a sabbatical to draw flowers in order to reorient my whole approach to the project. 

It was succesful!

Which is good, because picture three from Genoa was of a portrait by Durer, and the original was so good it was sick. The original painting that is. My photo of it was a bit over reflected. Still, it was better that I would have some idea of what I was doing when I went scribbling around and over Albrecht Durer.

Anyway, here's today's interpretation of a photograph from a palace in Genoa.

Back to Genoa!

 

Er, back to Genoa?

No, we're out of travel money for now, unless it pertains to apartment hunting. So, no, we aren't returning to Genoa. Plus, one might want to avoid Genoa in the general time period surrounding "Colombus Day" or one might receive an uncomfortable hectoring about "Indiginous Peoples' Day". 

Actually, I have no idea about that. I just made it up. They might hate Colombus now in Genoa, and good for them, although I will note that their giant statue of him outside the train station seems to be untouched.

Anyway, what is really happening is we are back to our pictures of Genoa. Finally we are on picture number three of our massive project of something like a hundred hand painted computery images of Genoa.

Or,

we would be.

Except, I accidentally on purpose opened another one of my new flower pictures and started etching away on that instead. But I swear it's just one drawing of a flower today only, a freak accident! Tomorrow I absolutely guarantee, I absolutely guarantee...

Actually I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Clerkmanifesto is a loose cannon these days!

Look ma, no hands!

 

I was out at my favorite park here, right by the water, in the open grounds of a villa turned museum. I love this park because really, as peaceful and parklike it is at first glance, at second glance it is an extraordinary garden, featuring without much fuss an exquisite assortment of flowers, succulents, and palms worthy of any botanical garden. The Meditterranean climate offers a hand up for this kind of a thing, but it's only a hand up. Some group is up to something amazingly clever behind the scenes there!

Anyway, things were looking particularly wonderful on the grounds, maybe even a bit better with the Autumn coming in, and I had the unusual opportunity to spend a real span of time taking pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely and I thought "I am just going to show these without any ai shenanagans, let everyone see what I can do with my eye and my phone and a bit of time!"

Plus, I'm really busy with my Genoa series and the administrative paperwork that is likely the bane of any emigree anywhere, but is definitely the case in France. So posting off twenty pictures or so without much fuss here sounded like a great idea!

And that's what I came here to do!

So I opened up my first picture and I thought "What if I just drew right over it instead?"

At least an hour later here I am, with one picture for you, hand drawn in two simple layers, the photo, and my drawing. I think this might change the direction of my Genoa pictures, or divert me into twenty flower pictures. I don't know, but I like this just fine. I am much more satisfied than with yesterdays gambit.

And now I can go do my daily tithe of French lessons!

"Wow, you do French every day?" You ask.

"Yes, yes I do." I answer warily.

"You must know a ton of French by now!"

One would think, wouldn't one?

So much to discuss

 

Oh my goodness, I have so much to discuss!!!

I have some important thoughts on French food that I am sure you have all been waiting for.

I wanted to tell you about how my biggest surprise after a full year in France is... how much it's just like America.

And finally, some notes on how I missed out on the Nobel Prize for Literature by a razor thin margin, really more of a weird fluke than anything else.

Interesting, no?

But alas it will have to wait because picture two from The Genoa Series is ready!

Do I like this one?

Great question!

I can't entirely tell. I may have overcomplicated it, though it was a bit of a tricky picture to begin with, of a kind of lovely grotto feature in one of the Baroque Palaces there that I wasn't able to get very close to.

Sheer cussed doggedness

 

For all the many trips we have been on since the start of August, each carefully documented in photographs, I have long since shown you whatever account or version of those photographs best expressed them. But at the start of all that traveling was Genoa. And Genoa's pictures were another story.

I have shown some pictures of Genoa, but my main idea with my Genoa pictures, influenced by a deep admiration for the city, the thrill of being in Italy, and the success of my photography there, was to make something more like hand-drawn, painted versions of my images.

This is a silly amount of work. An amount I hesitate to take on, but occasional do, and then usual give up on at some point.

I'm just saying I would think that I would have given up on this project at this point, but no, not yet.

Kind of like clerkmanifesto, eh?

We'll call it a hundred photos of Genoa, for simplicity's sake. Of course there was the taking them, and the choosing them. Then there was creating a half dozen or so layers for each of them, independent variations on them working with AI's. Then came the labeling and organizing those layer photos, 700 total pictures all to be renamed and filed appropriately. It turns out that was the shockingly laborious task that has taken most of the last two months.

But I finally finished! Yesterday evening I labeled and filed the last of the 600 layers.

And now the real work begins.

Here I assemble the images in layers, hand drawing/painting with my drawing tablet, erasing through sections, creating new layers, drawing some more, and assembling again, until it seems sort of... finished.

Today I present the first of these (though in August I may have shown a "proof of concept" version of one, I can't remember). Perhaps the next trick is figuring out what to say about any of these, since in all this elapsed time I have forgotten most of what these pictures are of, except the obvious, like here, that it is some kind of fancy lintel above a fancy doorway.

There should be plenty of varied versions of doorways coming up...

if I don't quit.

Here then, is the first:

I'm not bitter

 

Oh well, another Nobel Prize come and gone and nothing for clerkmanifesto. Not even the one for literature.

We were super close this time though! Not that I care. I do this for the glory of god.

Do you hear me God! I'm doing this for you!!!

So it's not my fault you come off looking so bad.

When the rain comes...

 

A couple of days ago I took a suite of random pictures around my city. There was no great motive or theme behind them, nor was it a feeling of capturing anything special. Maybe that kind of bewitchment is harder to find after living here for a year. I see the constant stream of tourists photographing like mad around my Belle Epoque city of legend and I think... 

"Do you know how many times all that has been photographed already?"

"By me." I add.

Really what I wanted is some pictures to experiment with new styles and visual ideas. I had come to the end of my series of color highlighting photos and thought maybe something else might appear to captivate me. I tried all kinds of things with these pictures, but nothing really made me feel anything, or really added much to the photographs. So I chucked it all aside. Instead I wrote you dark political pieces and tales of beggars, and we took a little break from the photos that have become so ubiquitous on clerkmanifesto.

Then today it finally rained. I think I have been wanting it to rain here for half a year, so one would think I would be happy. But I wasn't happy at all! Holed up inside, on an unbelievably dark day, my mood crashed. I looked out the window. Rain.

Aw, it's just a state of mind

Rain, rain, rain.

So I took all those random pictures and made them into rainy day views.

It's nothing special.

I can show you. It's just the views out of the fifteen different windows of our little apartment.

I can show you, the world is fine. 

But sometimes it's harder to show me.

Beggars

 

There are a lot of beggars in this city. Some wander around and ask people for money in direct ways, but most set up shop on the sidewalks. They have their little spot, and their sign, and their money receptacle of choice, maybe a cup or a flat plate, just so long as it doesn't look fancy. Sometimes it is a group operation, with a few, usually, men, hanging out socializing behind a towel or box for people to leave their cash, like maybe the people of the city just really enjoy having a group of rough looking men hanging out on the sidewalk all day, and want to show their appreciation. You know, like for buskers, if the buskers didn't ever do anything.

Actually, the begging around here looks an awful lot like just another job. Some beggars seem to work hard at it, greeting every single person with full interest, just like some of the sales people in stores here, or the waiters, and some really just want to sit there and be left alone, also just like some of the sales people in stores here, or the waiters.

The other day I walked by one of our regular beggars and noticed his sign: "No pennies". We have one penny coins, two-penny coins, and five-penny coins here. Did he really mean all of these? Even the beggars don't like penny coins around here!

This immediately made me want to look up how to say in French "Beggars can't be choosers."

But it doesn't really translate. It turns out the closest French Proverb is "Faute de grives, on mange des merles."

This roughly means "If there aren't any thrushes, we eat blackbirds."

What the fuck, France?

Sorry, right, no, this is France. I bet those thrushes of fucking delicious!

And fairly speaking, those blackbirds probably aren't half bad either.

How WWII really ends

How long does it take to forget?

It takes 80 years to forget.

Nazis brought a kind of perfect horror to the world, a distilled and modern expression of evil. And though I was born after it by a fair couple of decades, there was a cry still echoing out of it:

Never Forget.

But in a reasonably long life now, with each bouncing echo, the sound grows softer:

NEVER FORGET

Never forget

Never forget

The city I live in now once twisted through these Fascist horrors in complex ways, but public tributes to resistance and suffering can still be found posted and plaqued about the buidings and streets here.

Never forget!

Once, on the arcade of our busiest shopping street, the Nazis hung resisters from the arches as examples and warnings to the population.

Never forget.

And then,

Eighty years later, the population elected a fascist to be the mayor of this city.

“Oh, he’s not really a Fascist,” I think most people around here would say.

But one can only hear that because the last soft echo is gone.

 

Tourist weather

 

As far as I can tell, tourist weather is HOT. I mean, that is the temperature when all the tourism peaks in this famous tourism city I am living in. And though things should be cooling down, both with the weather and with the tourists now that it's October, Autumn is slow in coming on. It is still warmer than I would like and than is normal, and there are still quite a few tourists around. But as I said, this is a famously touristic city, and so even though it may eventually grow too cold for anyone but masochists to swim in the ocean, and even my thin down jacket may not suffice against the winds of January, the tourists only ever wane to a certain degree. 

At best? I may walk through an uncrowded, half closed old city on a bitter day, or not have to dodge anyone strolling by the long walk along the ocean.

And yet, I don't know why I am telling you all of this because it is not what I meant by tourist weather.

 Not at all!

I meant something stranger.

Gusts of nationalities come sweeping through town like weather fronts. There is a weather to who is visiting this town at any given time. That is the Tourist Weather I meant! And though I love writing to you about things I have figured out, or showing you unusual phenomenon chock full of my theories, I'll admit I am baffled here. 

Two cases among many:

Last week we stopped for a drink between the old town and the sea on a large outdoor patio. Almost no one was seated there for happy hour when we arrived, but over the next couple of hours as we drew out our stay with a spontaneous treat of oysters and potatoes, the whole place slowly filled up with Chinese people. They were different ages, different kinds of groups, and yet no table knew any other table. But nearly every one of at least 20 tables was filled with Chinese people, Chinese people speaking Chinese! What was going on?

I don't know.

Today we climbed up out of the old town onto the hill where the city once started in Medieval times, though little remains of that history. There were few Chinese people there, maybe none. There were maybe a few Japanese visitors. I heard some Americans talking about our neighborhood, oddly. But that was an exception. This is, of course an entirely different country than where I come from, so people were all naturally speaking a different language than my own. 

And that language was...

Russian.

Russian!

I have walked along the ocean through storms of German. I have been on the golden square when it was blowing wild with Japanese. And I have wandered through the great shopping street of the city while all about me was a murmured Swedish, or Norwegian, or maybe Finnish. 

Sorry, I'm not so great at languages.

But this is what I mean by "Tourist Weather", unfathomable sudden congregations and sweeps of specific nationalities.

I have no idea what causes it. I follow the regular weather forecasts pretty closely, though they rarely seem to change much around here. But no one I know of runs Tourist Weather forecasts. I wish someone would do so in order to explain all this. I'd be fascinated. 

And I might even be swayed to plan my life around it a little. 

"I hear that up in the hills above the Chagall Museum there is going to be a beautiful squall of Scottish people pouring down the streets in the early afternoon."  I might say, adding "Let's go up there and see them. I love to hear them talk."

Belle epoque in four colors

Love or hate this series of color reduction and mix-up pictures, I think we might be at the end of them now, at least for a little while. 

I shan't over-explain them anymore, but for those of you just popping back from a vacation from clerkmanifesto, I have been applying some randomized short lists of carefully defined colors to altered to black and white pictures I took with my trusty phone camera. Thus far I have covered the categories of flowers, Saint Minneapolis, my favorite French city where I started all this, and Japan. The last category of these pictures I have to share today are of my... home. 

This is where I live. And though we still are trying to move away from it, you can maybe see in these strange alterations, that are nevertheless hard rooted in reality,...

...it's not so bad here.