Shopping

 

Joyeaux Noel!

But we're not going to talk about that except to say: I love Christmas, but not Christmas. 

Hmm, I guess a tiny bit of talking is required.

I love Christmas Season, but Christmas itself is sort of the death of Christmas for me. It's not a day I do anything with, so it's kind of sad. It's just a big sad day where everything is closed and now it's no longer Christmas... it's Winter.

On the other hand, Winter is pretty nice here, 60 degrees F, a bit rainy, we'll see how it goes. Plus a lot of Christmas stuff seems to carry on a bit after the big day here. I don't know how I feel about that. But anyway, what with it being Christmas and all, and everything closed, I can talk instead today about...

Shopping. Food shopping.

We shop most days.

And I think that is not often enough. Because too frequently we seem to be lugging super heavy bags home through the streets of our Belle Epoque City. Can't we ever just get one thing, like a baguette? Or let's just add an eggplant? Or look, there's a nice bottle of prosecco? And don't we need toilet paper?

Maybe we can never shop enough to not be lugging home too much. Or maybe we're still stocking up a new place and a new way of life and we'll learn it all eventually. My life seasoned me to buy a weeks worth of potatoes on my weekly drive to the grocery store chore of a shopping trip. Learning to get a single potato because I am planning on eating a potato is a whole new skill! For instance, at the giant street market today I bought three potatoes. I didn't even need a potato! But they were super cheap and looked great. But they weigh a lot! And one potato really would have done for me, along with the extremely pretty spinach, the petite pois (shell peas), the pomegranite, the eggplant, the delicious little oranges from right around here, and a couple more lemons. Too much! And then off to the laterie (just a cheese shop I like) where in additon to a goat cheese, old gouda, and some roquefort, I simply had to get a liter of their lovely milk for my coffee.

What the hell?

I've got to figure this out. We had so much damned stuff we had to drop it off at home!

Before going out to the boulanger for more.

Me in the city just before Christmas

 

I have, as you have recently seen, been working on a new iteration of myself to put into pictures to reflect the recent, slightly more personal accounts of me in France. I made a fair struggle of aging myself properly and thinning my hair to the appropriate level, but the tool we call AI is very much a creature of the Internet, and as such, pulls from a flattering view of the world. That is, it does up until the sudden point that it becomes rather brutal and ugly. AI, like the Internet itself, doesn't exactly do "realism". It does worse than real, and prettier than real, and hopes you'll do the mixing to real in your own brain.

Good luck with that, world.

Ooops, drifted into a lecture there.

Anyway, here I am around town, looking just a bit better than I probably do, but hopefully close enough to be recognizable. The town is as I photographed for the most part, so the realism of it is wholly on me. 

Belle Epoque City

 

We live in The Belle Epoque City. 

The Belle Epoque City, my new city, is but a single city, and yet the very expression of an entire era!

Or so I've decided.

A dear friend of mine, Matthew, now dead for already an alarming amount of time (do people simply die and then stay dead forever? WTF), was my original introduction to the Belle Epoque. He was my first friend in art school, supremely talented, and posessed of a rich, florid aesthetic taste. And one of his main points of reference was the Belle Epoque. He had many other aesthetic points of reference, and I came to my own understanding of most of them, the Baroque, Rococo, Neo Classicism, as I studied and advanced my career into the world famous genius you see before you, but the Belle Epoque is the most important, and the last of them to click into place.

To be more specific, it clicked into place sometime yesterday, having taken just a smidge under 40 years to do so.

This is because The Belle Epoque is an invention and fabrication, named and made after its era was over, and perhaps with too much material to cover, it also suffered horribly from an immediate, glossy nostalgia. So even as it was named it was already lying about itself.

Which might cause one to think the whole "Belle Epoque" thing is useless.

But, strangely, no. 

Because despite all that, here it is, in my city, exactly the very definition of the thing. References to the Belle Epoque usually center on the bolder, grander city of Paris, but the Belle Epoque in Paris is a mere historical layer among dozens. It is swallowed up in Paris. Here it is the whole expression of the city, its heart and soul. It is in the old world cafes, the ornate and fanciful architecture, and in every of a million paintings by some of the best artists over 50 years all lionizing the place. It is in its famous buildings and dreams of beauty, the belle epoque! It is in the food and old candy shops, in the vibrant street life, in the grand old stores, and in the flood of tourism that, in strange contrast to other cities full of complaint about such things, curiously built this city. This isn't a city ruined or lessened by tourism. It is a city built by tourism!

Which is weird.

And, well, a bit Belle Epoque.

At this point you might want to know "What is The Belle Epoque then?"

Wikipedia doesn't know. I mean, their answer is basically: Late (very late) 1800's to WWI. A time of industrialization, stability, quality of life improvements for a new (not all that big) middle class, technological invention, and economic growth, but read between the lines a little and the answer is "We don't really know".

But I know! 

I know now. And I wish I could tell my friend Matthew. And I wish I could tell you. But I think you might have to come here. Cause you sort of have to see it to get it. And you'd probably get it right away.

But if not we could walk around and I could say "See all that building ornamentation." and "Let's have a coffee here at this cafe with a hundred fancy tables." and "Taste this pastry." and "That corner tower on that building" and "Note these colors, the pinks and oranges and brilliant umbers." and "See all these posters?" and "Check out all that marble" and  "Have a spritz, note the glassware." and before long you'd totally get it.

Or you'd feel nauseous and want to go home.

Trippin in Monaco

 

Yesterday I showed you one picture of Monaco's Teddy Bear themed Christmas Market and told you about our getting drunk on Vin Chaud in the ancient principality.

I did take other pictures of Monaco, and inspired by our drunken revels I made them into hallucinatory renderings. As your eye is assaulted by the sheer psychedelia of them try to keep in mind that the unaltered images didn't tell all that much about Monaco anyway. It's a bit of a tricky place to take in. This probably says it as well as anything.

Monaco

We woke up yesterday morning and decided to go to Monaco. So we walked through the city for a few minutes and took the train and in about 20 minutes we were in Monaco.

What?

Yes, an 800 year old city-state is about 15 miles from here.

Which is handy if you quickly need a city-state.

Which we did, largely because their Christmas Market has a teddy bear theme. We are very pro teddy bear!  And let me tell you (which I guess is what you're doing by reading clerkmanifesto), Monaco did not let down the teddy bear lovers of the world. 

 

I don't much do the more documentary style of photography because I rarely know what I'll be writing about and have limited photo taking windows, but I do a little regret I didn't get more pictures like this, because I could have had hundreds! In between the food stands and shops and amusement park rides of the Monaco Christmas Market, they had little buildings one could look in and see full sized animated teddy bear scenes! Teddy bears baking in the patisserie, teddy bears lolling about in the library (with real books. I saw a nice old Gerald Durrell in there!), teddy bears getting ready to open all their presents. Not to mention teddy bear rides, teddy bears sitting in giant Christmas wreaths, and teddy bears up on all the buildings. It was darling.

Also, and there is always the risk of alienating my audience here with too many too glorious to be true tales (I think is why the Peter Mayles of the world complain so much, to level things out), but I must mention the vin chaud.

The vin chaud. Oh the vin chaud.

I like a vin chaud. And in the days of yore, when I celebrated the christmas markets of Minnesota, as I passed by everything else, I often managed to get a cup of vin chaud. It was good, expensive, but good. And having a nice souvenir mug of spiced hot wine in a warming tent is a good time if one can manage it. But in Monaco, among the teddy bears, the billion dollar yachts, and the old city up above on the clifftop, the vin chaud was unbelievable.

First, I'd like to point out that it came in flavors because, why not, there's more than one way to cook a wine. We had a glass of the traditional and one of the daily special. One was more ginger based, one more lemony. The vin chaud also came in sizes and was not very expensive. Our cups of normal sized vin chaud made us drunk! The large size would have left us drooling on the cobblestones. Is this a good thing?

I believe in choice.

It was the best Christmas Market ever! And I could tell you more about Monaco, The slightly odd quality of the street life, the sheer amount of Winter construction work going on, and our climb up to the beautiful old city, but, why bother. 

I think we've covered the important things here.

The sidewalk problem

I may have suggested here yesterday a problem involving shit on the sidewalks. It is no secret that France has something of a problem when it comes to shit on its sidewalks. It is way too unpleasant to imagine any of these people or their dogs could be responsible for it. Surely these people are too civilised for such rude and barbaric behavior?

So I think I have figured it out.

It falls from the skies above.

Walking in a perfect France

 

It was the plan all along. Like all our vacations to places like this, it would just be natural to walk a lot living here. And as people in our sixties, walking five or ten or 15 miles a day is simply a good idea. But whereas an entire adulthood in Saint Minneapolis had walking as an ambition, exercise, or a thing to do, it already seems unimaginable here to say something like "Let's go for a walk." or even "Maybe we should take a walk and get a coffee?"

We say here "Let's go look at the water." or "I need some parmesean." or "We need a phillips head screwdriver." or "I want a better ice tray." or "I should get some purple artichokes." or "It's time for our appointment." or "We need chocolate." or even "Let's check out Monaco." And off we go.

With our feet.

We go down so many flights of stairs that one hopes one's mind wanders and one arrives at the ground floor only to think "Wow, here already?" instead of worrying about some pain in the knee the whole way down. And then it's out into the world. And we walk. Because everything we do is a walk, so it's not really of note.

And out in the world we walk and the light and air here, my god, and the life and the buildings, it's always a kind of shock and privelege in its loveliness. There is such a freedom to it. And then, invariably, one of us turns to the other and says "Watch out for that shit."