Big city

 

A few pictures of where we are off to today:

Late night hallucinations

 

I could work up some of these images, some altered, others right out of the camera (so to speak). And maybe I would in time, but... news! 

We seem to be on the edge of finalizing a lease for an apartment.

We're moving to a big city!

These small and medium Cote D'Azur towns are lovely and charming and fun, but as people absolutely insistant on not owning a car, there is an element to them that is against the grain of that. While France is more agreeable to mass transit and... walking, that does not at all mean it is devoted to it. And it is very much a car centric and car designed world in France outside of the big cities (and even, sadly, to a degree inside them). Nevertheless a rich, eminently walkable, rich cityscape awaits us, and I can complain about cars later.

And so with our time in Theoule Sur Mer numbered I find myself doing strange things like waking in the middle of the night and taking strange, intentionally blurred photographs out the window of the lights in the darkness of the shore and ocean.

Here is my collection of experiments then:

Sunset

 

Exhausted at the end of a hopefully succesful day's apartment search on the Cote D'Azur, first we took a train, then we climbed on a bus to our not very distant, yet oddly slow to get to, temporary home. The bus traveled from day to night though it only went about eight miles.

There was no room for us to sit down, so we stood, hands welded to the nearest pole to keep us standing. It looks easier than it is. Out the window was the Mediterranean Sea, a big thing just absolutely full of water, and the sun going down cast oozing saturated colors rippling through the sky above it. It was so pretty that one lady crammed herself into a window to take pictures of it, leaning into quietly appalled French people. She didn't know what she was doing, though, and I could see on her phone that the picture would be no good. She could see it too.

I didn't take a picture of the sunset because I am sort of polite and because I know that trying to do so from a bus isn't likely to work out for anyone; the passengers, the photographer, or the sunset.

But I might have a sunset picture for you from a few days ago, when the moon was full, if I can find it.

Tres jolie

 

Somewhere between vacationing and living, here we are on the Cote D'Azur, on the south coast of France.

It is very pretty.

No, no, I mean, it is wildly, madly pretty.

I grew up in Southern California, and I was a habitue of the canyons and oceans edging my faintly apalling suburb. It was very pretty, maybe even a little famously so. And when I saw pictures of where we are now, in this past year before we came, I thought a little bit: How strange that I am going back in my retirement to a land much like that of my youth.

There are similarities. But mostly it is incredibly different here. And oddly all the ways that it is different are as if one presented some version of youthful me the opportunity to make improvements on Southern California.

And because I am the way I am, I would have made a lot of improvements.

I would add more stone, climbing dramatically and mysteriously out of the wildland and oceans, in variegated cliffs and caves. I would make it a wetter, lusher, richer environment with real streams and a thousand shades of green. I would give it history and weave beautiful old stone buildings, passages, castles, and curiosities into the environment. And I would improve the culture with better food, and a more hands on personal approach to how people could live in it, walk in it, be in it. 

All those improvements of my child's California are here, right here, out my door!

I have a new list of improvements now for here, equally dramatic, but we'll leave that for another day, because we are talking about how pretty it is!

It's really pretty.

So pretty that sometimes, in a very limited way, I have to stop and take some pictures. I keep this to a minimum, but the truth is that every glance, every walk, every stroll to my bayview apartment windows offers astonishments.

I should have a million pictures to show you of it all. But, still partly surprising to me, pictures don't work like that. They have a thousand of their own rules and limitations that the raw beauty of reality is not beholden to. So when I sit on the couch here and scroll through the 20 or 40 pictures I took back during the day, I am invariably let down.

But not for long.

Because though I am let down, I have planned for it. 

Sure, I hoped for better, but I do expect it. And I know the work to build the pictures back up to a version of the place that was.

Though recognizable, it's never the same as the real place, but no picture is. Nevertheless, this is some of how it looks to me here:

On the beach

 

For those of you remembering my analysis of the 100 greatest albums of all time yesterday, maybe today's title suggested I was going to do a study of "On the Beach" by Neil Young.

But I am pretty sure I already did that album.

Yes, I did!

If you want it:

https://www.clerkmanifesto.com/2019/10/on-beach.html

But I am not here for all of that. I am here because I live on the beach.

You can take that how you like.

The world is turning.

I hope it don't turn away.

I took some pictures on the beach and then I spent some time this evening making them, well, into these: