Does Minnesota still exist

What a funny thing to be running through my color shake up pictures so excitedly. Today we are returning to Minnesota and grabbing from a vast catalog of seen and useen photographs mainly of the Mississippi Riverlands, and then changing them. And while this sort of color randomizing effect has captured my attention for now, it isn't the first time. 

Indeed, my first experiments of image witchery were along these same lines.

Long before AI and maybe even before photoshop existed, I started to have some access to color copiers. I took old photographs of mine, or new ones if I had any, and hand tinted black and white copies of my pictures. I then made color copies of them as overdialed and saturated as I could. The pictures you are seeing now are much the effect I was going for back then, but of a nature I was not technically capable enough to achieve.

Back then I think pictures like these would have amazed you, but you likely never would have had a chance to see them even if I could have created them. Now maybe, amid all the noise and magic of imagery that is created and tossed around the world like it is nothing, these are perhaps not so amazing as they would have been. But here they come, with ridiculous ease before your eyes on your magic device.

Minnesota. Saint Minneapolis?

Of course I miss it! I have a few delicate connections to the people I love most there. I am still made of a life there. And the river still runs through me and always will. I like this style of picture so much because this dreaminess and reality, fading and overclear, wrong and right, tells the story better than...

I don't know.

It just seems to tell the story of that world better. Instead of coming upon a picture and thinking "I remember that place" something else happens. I come upon the picture now and it is a dream I had instead, which really is more like it.

A belated introduction

 

Enter the raven.

This character has shown up in clerkmanifesto and has been bopping around it in all kinds of places for at least a few months. Scraggly feathers, large yellow beak, a team player. The raven is there in the studio, out on all the field trips, and features in the clerkmanifesto promotional footage. But who is this character? 

I don't know. 

So I made a cartoon to try and find out.

A brief revisit

 

This may not be the last time we trot out old pictures from Japan here at clerkmanifesto. There is still too much satisfaction in it because we loved it there. 

It is now a year since we were actually in Japan, but, and this one seems strange to me: We were nevertheless in Japan more recently than we were in the United States.

You know, of America.

"Ah! America!" As people say in France after we figure out they're asking us where we're from and we answer them. 

"Ah! America!" They say.

What do they mean by this?

That they've heard of it?

There is no level of French I can be at that will understand this response. But I accept it. Yes, America.

The important point though here is that I am fully obsessed with what I might fairly describe as a color shaker toy for my photos. You take your little magic can (TM) and load it with any three to five colors you want. Select your photo and mist it lightly with your Ansel Adams Solution, being careful not to saturate it. Then firmly close the top and shake it for 20 seconds or so, et voila! Remove the picture from the cannister and hang it to dry. 

In less than ten minutes: Color magic!

My best solution to what to do with all my color magic pictures is to group them up by category. Today is "Japan". I think I might still have a "Minnesota" group, and a "Belle Epoque City" one. After that maybe I'll be ready to try something else, you know, like writing one of those witty essays everyone is always pretending I write. "Thank you for your hallucinatory xray images of the oysters you ate, but what I really enjoy are those crazy little essays you write where you imagine the reader is saying stuff and then you respond to it but it's all in your own head!"

Wait, I don't do that, do I? 

The doubleheader

 

Today I have for you two new I E Skin cartoons. Two!

I could just show one, I know. It would be perfectly reasonable. Even employing as much AI as I do here, these still take tons of time to make, mostly with me yelling at and begging the AI to do what I want. But they make such a nice set about my life in France.

I don't know how to explain it, but the first one is a bit of how it feels trying to do the right thing in a slightly confusing other culture. The second one is probably my trying to make peace with the seedy life of the streets here.

The most beautiful flowers ever

 

Sorry about the hyperbole. 

These aren't the most beautiful flowers ever. Flowers aren't ranked. I know that this is hard to remember when one is on the Internet. In the real world nothing is ranked. This is sort of like how if you are dreaming you can try pinching yourself to see if you maybe are really not dreaming. If you are not sure if you're on the Internet ask yourself which song ranks higher: Weight of Love by the Black Keys or Candles in the Rain by Melanie. If an obvious answer occurs to you you are on the Internet!

There is nothing wrong with being on the Internet. It's the 43rd best thing to do on a thursday!

Er, anyway, I made these pictures of flowers for you. They are of course, unranked, because this isn't...

wait

now I'm all confused.