Two impressions of the city

 

Black and white, night and day, evil and good, pickled or candied, dead or alive.

There’s a lot going on in this city.

There are, every evening, folks staying in 30,000-euro-a-night hotel rooms directly over sidewalks people sleep and pee on.

But as the great Nicolas Cage said in Moonstruck, “I ain’t no monument to freaking justice.”

I just live here.

While living here, we both got something, maybe COVID, hopefully not whooping cough, whose main symptom, besides weariness and a bit of sore throat, is coughing.

So we’re lying around a lot lately, coughing, and two images from our city roaming keep playing out in my mind.

One:

We were in the port area looking for a butcher that might sell a lamb chop, but it was Victory in Europe Day, so it was closed.

We wandered to a main street, an intersection. A crowd silently gathered on the corner.

An accident had taken place.

A motorcycle sat in the middle of the street. A large pool of liquid was under it.

Was it gas? Oil? Or blood?

Ten meters beyond, two people inadequately held a blanket to shield the scene of a man sprawled face down on the road.

He was inert.

There was something unmistakably dead about him.

A woman turned away from him.

“C’est fini.” she said flatly and clearly.

“C’est fini.”

Two:

We are having coffee at a café next to the fish market part of the Liberation Market.

It is not a good café exactly, but it is lovely and charming.

My darling wife laughs and eagerly says, “Look up.”

A large, well-weathered, deeply stained canvas canopy covers us and the whole outdoor seating area of the café.

On top of it is a seagull walking around.

We cannot see the seagull, only his large, wonderfully comic orange feet appearing on the canvas as he takes each step.

In delight, we watch the colorful footsteps of the seagull appear and disappear above our heads.

French flowers redux

 

More flowers, because the French Spring here is turning out very pretty. Admittedly, these are mostly the same flower pictures as yesterday, but given an alternative treatment that I also liked a lot. This one involves seeds and painted sticks, making for something like detailed wicker models of these flowers.

Spring flowers in the belle epoque

 

It's not so bad here in this Belle Epoque city. While its temperate climate seems to produce flowers blooming all year round, we are definitely experiencing an especially abundant Spring peak of this behavior. Many flowers are going wild, especially along the long lovely park built over the old Paillon River, and most of all in the gardens built on top of, and that literally climb over, our main library here.

Today, with my usual more limited time for photography, I took as many pictures as I could just a small selection of the flowers there. My phone camera is quite good for this detail work, though not quite as precise and dazzling as my old full featured camera was. I try to make up for some of these small shortcomings in clarity and precision with my usual conversion tricks.

I have run two sets of faithful alterations of these flower images. Today's version is designed to be the exact flowers and photographs, but as if I have scrupulously sewn and crafted them out of felt and thread.

We look at some statues

 

I loved the statues in Montpellier! They weren't like Rome's in that sense of being the greatest statues in the history of mankind, but they were charming. Oh how charming they were! Putti riding lions and unicorns? I mean, seriously? And there were a lot of these sorts of statues. Most of the sweet little squares of Montpellier centered on or featured some kind of statue. It was delightful. Who doesn't want to see unicorns when wandering their city? And putti? And lions with putti?

Here are some unfiltered pictures of some of the statuary of Montpellier to show you what I'm talking about. After you acquaint yourself with these we'll procede to what I am up to today.

Inspired by these Montpellier statues I wanted to make some of my own statuary for the squares of Montpellier. No stranger to making fake statues, as those rare special few of you remembering my Clerkmanifestoland theme park pictures will be able to concur, I fortunately have some improved tools to work with.

This still took a hundred generations, redesigns, and reiterations to get to the vein of stuff I was looking for. But I now have a happy little handful of new statues for the squares of Montpellier. As a surprising bonus, after having now shown you all sorts of "real" pictures of Montpellier, I'm not sure these below don't capture best the spirit and the feel of the place to me.