The news from Cannes

 

We got off to a rough start in France. Probably two full days of travel, through Singapore and Switzerland and nearly any time zone you can think of (Look, we're over India! Look, we're over Bagdad!) made us crabby and unfit for new challenges. And Kyoto and Japan won us over in ways we didn't really know existed, so it was complicated. But a week into life here and we were dazzling the pharmacists at the village pharmacy with our french as we bought ourselves some flu ("grippe") and covid ("covid") shots as a treat. Well, maybe not dazzling them, but I don't think they hated us and that's a win you want to take in France, and maybe in the whole world when it comes down to it.

Anyway, with our feet under us we headed off to Cannes for the first time today.

Here's the thing:

We have already been to Antibes twice, and we really thought we'd love Antibes. The Internet's story of Antibes is that it is less glitzy,  with a more low key cote d'azur charm. And sure the large old city old parts of Antibes are about the cutest thing you can ever see, full of quintessential French alleyway fantasias that keep walking out of postcards into the real world. And not walking out of the cheap, bulk postcards, but walking out of the really amazing postcards you don't buy because 3 euros is ridiculously expensive for a postcard, but then you do buy it because if you're going to go to all the stupid trouble of sending a postcard you're not going to send some generic scene everyone back home already knows how to tune out, no! You want to send the kind of picture that says something about how amazing this place is!

Where were we?

Ah, yes, Antibes was pretty.

But between its picturesque alleys and squares, all turning slowly to Fall colors, and with heavy leaves crashing into the ground with hilarious thuds, there were mostly restaurants and tourists (like us! But we live here now so...) and it all felt a little show offy. Sure, that is a quality to be expected on the Cote D' Azur, but we thought if Antibes was full of it, Cannes would be twice as bad.

But Cannes was fun.

Yes there were rich people and tourists and close to enough the same amount of sheer beauty as Antibes, but it also didn't really seem to care so much about it all. It had tatty souvenir shops and toy stores and yes, the best crepes ever, but it was much more of a rambling mix of stuff.  It was oddly comfortable with itself, and we liked it a lot more.

Like, A LOT more.

Did I mention the crepes?

They were traditional buckwheat crepes. One had apples, goat cheese, and walnuts, the other ham, truffles, egg, cheese (I forget what kind).

We climbed up through some sort of park to a church fortress up on a hill where I took the only one minute session of pictures that I have of the city, so it's a bit of a narrow slice, but I include them so you can have something to work with. And while you mull them over I'll think about what I want to say next time about our bus ride home.

Je suis en France!

  

And with that clerkmanifesto is back in real time, composing on a proper keyboard in a kitchen across from the Mediterranean. I look to my right, across the hall, through the living room, over the balcony, and there are the lights of Cannes.

We are on the bay of Cannes and at night the lights twinkle all around! They really do twinkle! Sometimes the yachts park overnight in the sea here, but less and less in the week we've been here. Perhaps their season is ending and all the rich people are flying back to, um, St. Moritz? Barbados? Minsk?

It is all very pretty here. Impossibly so sometimes. One of the strangest things about the past month and a half is how we still live life, have problems, get miserable, and yet... it's all so extraordinary. I'm glad I could show you so many pictures of Kyoto and Tokyo as we went. That might be my best way of saying anything about it all here, but maybe later I can try in words to explain it all, in little ways.

Until then, I have more pictures.

In the shock of the loveliness of this coast I at first felt compelled to convert all my images into the style of Dr. Seuss. The water, architecture, steep terrain, and meandering, sometimes overzealous staircases here are extremely evocative of Dr Seuss and so I took comfort in changing everything I photographed here into a fantastical version of itself. Somehow leaning into it all made it made it briefly less fantastical and easier to see.

eighty-one

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I'm calling it at eighty-one!

As written above eighty times previously, I wanted to pre stock clerkmanifesto so it would run normally with newish content of some kind while my lovely wife and I prepared to leave Minnesota forever, travelled for 40 days in Japan, and landed and settled a bit in our small beach apartment in France. I randomly chose 100 days for this project, but I think 81 ought to do it. If I have managed to add contemporaneous bits from our travels into these pre prepared posts, then I have also likely managed to write posts beyond this date that don't need special introduction or explanation. And if I added in nothing, I think I can probably manage to get things going again since tomorrow will have seen us in France for almost a week. 

But the truth is that any regular reader would know more than this August 28 version of me.

I'm not sure the preamble and structure I used here was entirely necessary as it was an extremely rare thing that I left an unexplained, dashed off post in here, but maybe the license of being able to do so helped me get so much done ahead of time. And I'm sure the sheer volume of what I've come up with in the last few weeks has caused some of the revision and polish to run for cover, so hopefully my system offered some explanation for that. 

But however all that went, we're going back to standard clerkmanifesto rules tomorrow, whatever they are. 

I'll see you on the other side.

Feldenstein Calypso, August 28, 2025

eighty

   

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

On our last day in Minnesota we had cake.

seventy-nine

   

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

And how about one last view out our Saint Minneapolis window before we go...

seventy-eight

   

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I'd just like to point out that when you see something like this, you naturally are going to take a lot of pictures: