fifty-five

 

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:

These should mostly finish off my revamping of old paintings of mine (very old!) that I found when I cleared out the library just before retirement. These have all been cleaned up a bit with an AI pass, varying from anywhere from two to four on a scale of ten in AI alteration. I think these are the last of my dug out old photos, though I can't promise that, and animated versions of any of these could still show up in the future. These being the (probably?) last of these watercolors it would go without saying that I like some better than others. But I said it anyway.

 This is Clerk Manifesto in Kyoto.

The other day I said that I miss nothing, but I suppose some things start to creep in around the edges. In Kyoto, coffee is apparently deeply revered, but more in the form of classic drip or filtered coffee, rather than the Italian drinks I so adore. So I guess I could say this is the longest I’ve gone in many years without what I would describe as a real cappuccino. I’ve seen a few pictures of them around town, but I haven’t managed to find one entirely matching the picture yet.

The regular coffee is very good,sometimes amazingly good, but I’m not sure that’s entirely my thing. In fact, the all the coffee ties into my whole conception of Japan as a kind of 1950s or 1970s version of where I come from, seen, of course, through a completely foreign filter. It’s like America as I imagine it in the ’50s, and in some ways as I remember it in the ’70s outside the suburbs, full of mass transit, coffee drinking, lively downtown cities, and a much more contained, orderly, polite, and well-dressed public.

One thing that particularly gets to me in this vein is how everything here feels like a diner. It’s very much a diner culture. Even the coffee shops and restaurants have this quality, places that function like sit-down diners, not designed to be luxurious or especially comfortable, but built for practicality. And yet the food is always really good, or almost always. Though the extreme peculiarities of how I eat here is a subject for another day.

And that’s today’s report from Kyoto.