sixty

 

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:

This is a prototype of some 3d animation versions I did of my (former!) co-workers and their spirit animals. I am not sure how far this has drifted from capturing the original librarian here. Of all these animations of portraits I find this one particularly charming, maybe because of the praying mantis in it, but it's just lively too. Some day, off in the French future, maybe I'll do something more complete with this series, and maybe not, but here's a glimpse of it. 

There is no sound here. As ever, click to engage, enlarge, and click again to play.

Yesterday, I shared a set of images that were a little closer to the natural Kyoto I’m seeing, and to the kinds of images I’ve been producing in that vein. Many of the pictures I’ve been making lately have invoked Japanese scroll work, along with more fanciful, folkloric additions drawn from my own iconography layered into Japan, and these new ones were more of an attempt at the picture postcard perfect.

The pictures today may not be quite as close to the natural born image as yesterday’s, but they still feel like a nod to the picture-perfect postcard version of Kyoto that we sometimes glimpse here and that I’ve lately been finding.

I suppose I’m inadvertently expressing that they don’t sell many postcards in Kyoto. I had thought I might send one or two back to the people who seem to be drifting further and further away in my life, but I’ve had trouble finding any. And if I do send postcards, I’ll probably end up resorting to the blander kinds that don’t really express what I feel about this city.

Hopefully, some of these pictures will capture it a little better. I’d be delighted if these could be the postcards I send back to the world I left behind. 

And that’s it from Kyoto for today.