Catching some strays

 

As I sort through my travels, which, now that I've decided to consider myself wandering in general, don't particularly have an end, I invariably come across some stray pieces from projects you have seen while I was on the road.

To start with I have a few night pictures of one of these medeival cities one can find around here. I love them at their most flourishing, although they can be very stoney and hard too. For the first time, unbidden, thoughts of Paul Simon's song come to me: "And each town looks the same to me..."  This really could be any city from Genoa to Nantes, but it's not, and I'd like to keep that in mind even is I blur through that here. Maybe: it's all one world, and though one forest may look like another, every tiny bit is its own thing, never to be seen again, and never seen before. Why not?

As for these below, you may have seen the vanilla posters last week, but I am too fond of the alternates and outtakes to leave them in some forgotten folder on my desktop, so here is the rest of this suite. It expresses a sentiment I am much absorbed in, feeling a disenchantment with the country that can also be shockingly obliterated in its virtues. So, probably more on this feeling as we go forward.

And a word here on these characters I have been employing:

It is amazing how these fables and fairy tales seem to be seeping through the cracks of old France, like one can see witches and trolls in the shadows. I am just trying to let them through, and, with no better options, making them my friends.

Postcards of Western Europe

 

Yes, we have been getting around.

And of course everyone wants to send you greetings from their travels.

Keep in mind everyone is entitled to their own feelings.

So here you go:

The return

 

We have returned home from our wide and rambling travels in the world.

And what were we doing in our travels in this great big world?

Riding endless trains?

Well, there was that, but...

No. We were looking for a home, of course. 

Although, maybe there is no home for us. 

Maybe clerkmanifesto is my home.

And the places of the real world? 

Language. Letters. Numbers. The building blocks of matter. A way to talk about home and the glimpsed farther shore, shining like a dream, but ever out of reach.

To my surprise there is something about returning to our apartment and laboriously unpacking my vast swaths of stories and photographs, all in various stages of development, that says:

What is the difference between the half wild urban beach of the upper Mississippi River and a thousand year old town in Europe standing like a rock on the edge of the muddy Atlantic Ocean? The old man looking for his library book and the one at a cafe drinking his day's precious beer at a tabac? What is the difference between the white cows of Bretagne and the goats of Wisconsin?

I don't know. Let's just feed them all into clerkmanifesto and see what comes out?

Scattered pictures of France

Still on the road, working with an almost impossible interface on my phone, I present for today’s lottery of wonder a basically unedited sampling of photographs from the past week:

 

Pictures of oysters

 

In La Rochelle, I ate a dozen oysters at the exquisite market there. But before I ate them, I took some pictures. Then I did a lot of things to those pictures, and that’s what I have to show for today.

French promotional posters

As we make our way around the country we see these promotional posters everywhere. It must be some kind of big government campaign. Fair enough, but I’m not entirely sure what the point of it is.

France fires

Out where you are, you may have heard about the heat, drought, and attendant fires that swept across France this summer. This is especially true out where you are in France, but still likely true if you are considerably further away.

On our train travels all about France now, we are seeing some burned swaths, and as the charred blackness cozies up to small villages, it is hard not to imagine how frightening it all must have been in places.

Nevertheless, with a cursory first examination of this region now in place, I have some good news:

THE GRAPE HARVEST APPEARS TO BE UNHARMED!

The collected xrays

 

When I find a new way of working it is very exciting.

And then sometimes there sure is a lot of it!

But I'm all too aware that people tend to slip in and out of clerkmanifesto. After all, there is a lot of clerkmanifesto too. And so for today I will take heart in that. Because today I have what amounts to an assortment of outtakes and experiments with what I call my xray style. For a steady reader its been tons of xray style around here this week. And your results may vary on another round of it with a variety of old and new pictures. But if you just dropped in to see what happening?

Well,

Let me tell you.

We have gone off wandering in a low budget fashion into France to look about for a new apartment. As you read this I may very well be somewhere like Poitiers or Limoges! Who knows? In preparation for the vagaries of the clerkmanifesto posting life on the road, I have been clearing out my latest photo projects that have recently become obsessed with this xray style.

What is this xray style, you ask?

OHhhhhh, you are in for such a treat!

I mean, theoretically.