The other roll of film

I am not accustomed to voluable, passionate responses to clerkmanifesto posts, but yesterday's introductory comments to my photos of the Villa Ephrussi lit the Internet on fire!

This may or may not be why the Internet is now a burnt, smoking husk of itself.

But hey, I'm still here on my own Internet! And I am sorting through the thousands of comments on my piece "The roll of film from a fancy french garden estate". 

I am trying to respond to them all, but there are so many! 

Like, take a look at this:

"Hey Clerkmanifesto, new reader here. I just read your introductory comments to "The roll of film from a fancy french garden estate" and not only was I deeply moved by them, I also realized I had been on the wrong Internet for decades. Yours is the Internet I want to be on! I guess I got out just in time! I loved these introductory comments to your photos so much! God how I loved them. I loved them a lot. They inspired me to look at your photographs which I hope to do one day if I remember to. I am even making a note to myself: "don't forget to checkout that clerkmanifesto thing sometime next week and look at those pictures!" Unfortunately I lost the note though. Who are you again? Thanks for your time and attention to this matter."

So, that's cool. But how do I respond? They did not leave an address, and they actually only thought their comments quietly to themselves.

So maybe I should let that one go? I don't want to look like I want anyone to read clerkmanifesto. It just seems so... unseemly.

Anyway, here is the other roll of pictures of the fancy garden estate. I understand that all this fun we're having here in the introduction doesn't really apply to your looking at these pictures, and I'm only including them now because it was what I had originally planned for today's post.

I don't expect you to look at them. After all, you've got bigger fish to fry, what with the Internet being burnt to a crisp and your also having to worry about my ability to read your mind.

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.