Messi near the end

 

It's an old feeling, and one that always made the joy of Messi so special. I can remember many times over the years of watching Messi, thinking, well, maybe not today. Maybe this isn't his day. And then from out of nowhere he would kick a goal in from 175 yards away while being sat on by 14 players from the other team.

That may be an exaggeration, but I hope you'll take my point.

And back then, say ten years ago, I would sort of know in the back of my mind that he would do something magical or amazing even if it was hard to see it happening. It was too much the way it always went in those days. And those little glimmers of lightning infested rainbows flicking off him out of the corner of your eye were... suggestive.

But now he is 39 years old. And, watching it all not working, it really is easier to believe it is over. 

This time, really, surely, it is over. And so it is easier to believe this is the last time because on can look at him and say: he is slower, he is older, he is not the same. 

Because he is older, and slower, and not the same, mostly.

And one day the day will come. It has to. It may even be in the quarter finals, the next game, or the one after, or the one after that, that day where the kicks go wrong, the dribble fails, and the game just... ends. And the magic takes its last sleep.

But it hasn't happened yet.

We got just one more again, one more moment, after a thousand just one mores.

It was fun.

Bringing things into focus

 

Trying to bring things into focus here in our life in France is hard. I think everytime we start to get a rhythm or maybe a sense of what a regular life might be like here and how to manage it in the best way, there's some accident, illness, change of heart, or slew of immigrant paperwork to deal with. The last of these, having to do with an application for the French health system, is currently rearing its head, and I am neither stalwart or zen in the face of these complicated paperwork and bureaucratic issues. I'm bitter and eeyorish.

Plus I have soccer to watch!

But neither of these are our subject for today. This morning I was missing my zoom camera with which I used to like to take wildlife photography and nature images. But I did replace that camera with a pretty good phone camera that has a powerful zoom that I don't often fully take advantage of, probably because I am not much in the wilds here. Also, this phone camera needs a bit of AI help to get its zoom fully up to speed, not that I too much object to AI photography, as you probably know.

But today I was looking out our window as I often do, over the tiled rooftops and out to the hills ringing the city. There is a ton of interesting stuff out there! But it can be hard to see. So I decided to pull out my phone, pick a likely spot, and see what I could find out about one of these distant, history rich hilltops.

Here then are my results:

Sunday on the beach

 

I love the ocean here. The sparkling mediterranean is full of colors, moods, drama, and wilderness. Rivers run from out of secret tunnels beneath the city and spill out in ever changing ways, green and cool, through the beach into the giant sea. What a treat to be able to walk to the water in ten minutes!

Except in the Summer.

Then, as far as I'm concerned, who cares?

That was supposed to be rhetorical, but it turns out there is an answer to it, and it is "everyone!"

On these endless warm and sunny days the stupid road along that coast runs fat with cars as ever. The famous ocean walk, almost fully exposed to the sun in black asphalt, feels like it's melting my shoes. And down below the seawall the beach is a baking expanse of hot stones. The deadness of Summer has beaten the waves away leaving the Mediterranean with the dull flatness of a lake.

When we walk through the streets, keeping earnestly to the shade, on a Sunday, we wonder how in this mighty tourist town, at the height of the season, it can be relatively quiet, until we emerge on the shadeless shore.

Everyone is there.

Everyone.

In the whole world. 

The beach is piled with people. Umbrellas run as far down the coast as one can see. The water is a playground of people bobbing, boats motoring, and parachutes carrying little figures along over the water. For, I don't know, a hundred euros? a person can get pulled along on a parachute behind a boat so they can look down and see me walking along with my darling wife saying "Are you ready to leave the beach yet?"

And if she isn't that's okay too.

There's a nice ocean breeze.

Soccer is not justice

 

Some of my friends are watching the world cup. And some of them, unlike me, do not have tragic decades of obsessively watching and reading about soccer. So it's interesting to see their reaction to the sport, and particularly to the refereeing.

A lot of soccer comes down to the refereeing. 

This is because there are a ton of calls that can go either way. Most of them don't matter much. Some of them can decide the entire game. And there's everything inbetween. So naturally I want to help these friends with my wisdom. Maybe if I can find some it will help me too.

I came up with this:

Reality doesn't always necessarily determine the call, but the call always determines reality.

And if that's not clear, I am saying referees get it wrong sometimes. They might be unfair, misguided, too strict, too permissive, corrupt, or petty. A referee can be unfair by sticking ridiculously to a rule at the expense of the spirit of the rule, and they can be unfair by not enforcing the rules strictly and to the letter. And this I strongly believe is not like life; but once the referee has ruled and it's done, it is what happened.

The call determines reality.

One can be, for instance, to one's dying day, bitter about a clearly wrong call allowing a goal that cost their favorite team ever the world cup.

But it was a goal.

And that person's team lost the world cup.

Reality doesn't always necessarily determine the call, but the call always determines reality.

This is great! 

This is true!

This is wise!

Alas that I won't really be sharing this with anyone. 

It's not going to make anyone happy. 

And it will leave us all with nothing to talk about.

A thrilling trifling anecdote

 

Standing in a multi story clothing store above the main street here, looking out the window, I saw a tram go by. It was festooned with advertisements for a museum up in the hills just outside of this city, near the glorious Saint Paul de Vence, possibly the loveliest village edging along the entire Cote d'Azur. It was for the Maeght Foundation Museum, a lovely estate-like museum we went to a few months ago. And all these ads reminded me of a trifling anecdote from there that I wanted to share with you because you adore trifling anecdotes.

You don't adore trifling anecdotes?

I could have sworn you were really keen on trifling anecdotes. Let me check my notes.

Oh, I see what happened.

It turns out you like something around here, but it's unclear what, so I guessed "trifling anecdotes".

You know what? Why don't I share this trifling anecdote and see how you feel about it.

I mean, you'll see how you feel about it. And I'll make up in my head how you feel about it, and, spoiler alert, in my imagination you are going to love it!

So there we were at this pretty museum way up in the hills overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. The museum actually has gorgeous grounds and an amazing collection that oddly is just a bit less than the sum of its parts? Like, maybe if you took the best third of it, which would still be a lot, it would be the best modern collection in all of Southern France. But somehow it all seems a bit unfocused, and some of the lesser works can get a bit... off. 

Its curation is a bit funky.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. That's just me, er, judging the world around me with an implacable tiger-like ferocity.

Anyway, I'm walking around this museum in the hills near Saint Paul de Vence, and, this is important, so don't shut your eyes, I was wearing the same t-shirt I am wearing right now! It features this picture:

 

Now here comes the trifling anecdote.

Wearing this I started walking into a new room of the museum, and as I was walking in there was a woman walking out. She looked down at the picture on my shirt, and, in a knowing sort of way, she laughed!

She laughed!

"Hmm," I thought. "She must be a fan of Clerkmanifesto and an admirer of trifling anecdotes."

But no. I mean, probably not.

So I sort of shrugged my shoulders metaphorically, and I proceded into the new room of paintings. 

There were sixteen paintings on the pale ivory walls of this one big, but simple, room. Some of the paintings were quite large too.

And every last one of them was of tigers.

Fat greek weddings revisited

Finding some pictures I was working on for today's missive coming along rather slowly, and with A VERY IMPORTANT SPAIN WORLD CUP GAME ALMOST UPON US! (sorry, I don't know how my capital letters got activated), I thought it might be a nice day to take one of clerkmanifesto's treasures from out of our vast vaults.

So I went looking.

And I found a post from several years ago where I experimented with taking pictures of cheap crafts in Joanne Fabrics and having them recreated in AI to make them alive and magnificent, or something like that. So then I immediately started taking those pictures and doing the same thing again to mark the vast advancements in these last years. And as I was working on the first of these pictures I thought:

WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING?

I have a soccer match to watch.

So then I found another post from around that time called "Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love" and I thought, "that doesn't sound very interesting or good."

But it kind of was.

I'm sure any longtime reader will be aware of my passionate arguments on behalf of the romantic comedy, and this one kind of makes me want to write some more of those.

Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love

When talking about great romantic comedies it is easy to overlook My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Modern film culture has a long standing disdain for the romantic comedy, and much to my chagrin whenever they trot out a "respectable" example of the genre it's invariably When Harry Met Sally. I'm always wishing they would have the sense, knowledge, and brio to bring out instead one of the greatest movies of all time, Moonstruck, but I understand any anti romantic comedy bromide is going to be dead at the start if one goes in with Moonstruck.

But if they must bring out one romantic comedy as a poster child for their war, why not My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Star Wars of romantic comedies, landing in theaters and becoming an absolute sensation. (This isn't the flimsiest comparison: My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time, and it has spawned TV shows and sequels (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is coming out this fall!). Because unlike When Harry Met Sally, which appeals to non romantic comedy people by taking cues from more complex relationship movies to soften its romantic comediness, Wedding burrows into the deepest, most lovely heart of the romantic comedy, diffusing some classic elements of the romantic comedy to both invent something new, and yet emerging to capture the secret soul of the genre.

The romantic comedy is full of tropes. But they are just tropes, an assembly of rhythmic accents to the movie. The essentials of a romantic comedy are merely:

Two immensely charming and likeable people amusingly fall in love and get together. 

Nevertheless the traditional romantic comedy usually comes along with a variety of barriers to the love interests getting together. This creation of uncertainty, friction, dissolution, difficulty, and disappointment is not just widely considered essential to most narrative plotting in a romantic comedy, but is also generally considered so for all fiction everywhere. My Big Fat Greek Wedding largely eschews this convention. Our main characters, Toula and Ian, meet cute (sort of), experience love at first sight (sort of again, Ian might need the love to be at second sight), date, and get married. The main problem and impediment to their relationship is that they come from different cultures. This causes tension and comedy, but unlike the impediments of other romantic comedies it never keeps or drives them apart. This mildness and warmth of relationship is the secret success of the movie as a romantic comedy.

Of course, it's also wonderfully funny, possibly more so than almost any other romantic comedy. I didn't know this until recently, but apparently our star and screenplay writer, Nia Vardalos, wrote the screenplay, which no one was particularly interested in. So then she made it into a one woman show in L.A. which she performed to small, packed audiences for many months. This reminds me of how the Marx Brothers, before many of their best movies, took them on the road as theater, endlessly improvising and honing their material, testing what worked best and what got the best laughs, before coming back to film it as a movie. As I understand it, Nia Vardalos likewise tested her story over and over and brought out its best qualities. Not only did this provide a tighter and funnier screenplay, but it surely gave her the confidence to stick to her vision for the movie despite a gauntlet of attempts along the way to production to make it more conventional (which is just another word for marketable). Proposed, or even urged along the way, were different star actors, actresses, and ethnicity (let's make it Mexican American instead of Greek, and hire an Italian American star!). But the most telling changes requested were the ones demanding more problems between our main characters- a competing suitor to Ian, or an infidelity of some kind. The brilliant and revolutionary aspect of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the one where the movie has such confidence in its characters, comedy, and story, that it dares to get rid of nearly all of the usual narrative tensions in the romance genres. It gives the movie a warm, cozy, and open feel, and yet, despite all odds, leaves its romance every bit as satisfying, if not more so, than the romances built under the more standard "will they won't they" structure.

Plots of all kinds rely on narrative tension and conflict. The thriller is most slavishly devoted to this, and it is also why some of the most driven narratives can feel compulsive, addicting, and even manipulative. But the romantic comedy is no stranger to this structure. And yet its most appealing qualities, its warmth, characters, and rosy environments lie underneath that tumult. There is great craft in creating a narrative that is as little beholden to tensions as possible, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a great romantic comedy precisely because it does the unusual work of lessening the romantic narrative tension to give us more of the warmer, more loveable aspects that are at the heart of the romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally may be a nice reference point for a generic film fan for its filmic romantic comedy ambitions,  My Big Fat Greek Wedding would be a better example for real analysis precisely because it looks into to romantic comedy more than it looks out. It is, significantly, less about the catharsis of love, and more about, like in any good wedding, its celebration.

 

Super interesting notes on the weather, the world cup, and whatever else I think of

 

Hmmm....

Let's start with the weather. And I am not here to complain that it is hot.

Although, it is hot.

I really just want to tell you what I realized about the weather here on the Cote d'Azur.

It is not dynamic.

In fact, it's a bit boring.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I'd better explain:

The weather here will one day, just for example in the Fall, go to about 60 degrees, (or to almost 16 for my vast swath of new european readers. Bonjour, salaam, hei! cheers!), and then every single day for two months, with only the slightest variations, that will be the temperature. Then maybe some other time, like now, said local temperature will go to 90ish (or low thirties! Bonjour, howdy, konnichiwa!), and then the temperature just sits there for two or three months.

I still check the weather forecasts here, but more like an obsessive compulsive going home seven times to make sure the oven is off. Because, yes, for the eleventh time, the oven is off, and yes, it is still 91 degrees.

Now we will turn to the world cup!

I watch the world cup largely in replays. My one month canal plus bien sports subscription for 15 euros shows all the games, and then when they are done allows one to watch them when one wants to, in replay. This is very helpful as many games take place somewhere around midnight, or at three in the morning my time (for my european readers, that's just "three" because if it were the afternoon it would be "fifteen"! Buenos dias, shalom, mbote, ciao).

But these world cup games are not nearly as interesting if one knows the outcome, so until I can watch the games I have to be very careful not to find out what happened.

It is surprisingly easy to find out what happened!

The obvious way might, to use a recent example, be me seeing a text from an old friend saying "Wow, that French team looks unbeatable!" which pretty well assures that France has dismantled another lowly opponent and any feeble hope I might have had when watching the game that something even vaguely unexpected might have happened is now completely gone. But that really just spoiled what was a foregone conclusion. The worst real match spoiling I've experienced was the extremely interesting Netherlands vs. Morocco game. We had to do some morning shopping in the markets before I could see the previous night's game, and walking along in a city with not a completely insignificant Morroccan population, I suddenly started noticing an awful lot of Morocco team jersies being worn by all sorts of people.

A lot of Moroccan jersies.

On a lot of satisfied looking people.

"Uh-oh." I said.

I was right, though I'll admit my slight uncertainty helped as I watched.

And finally, could someone from the future come tell me that by some miracle France didn't win this World Cup? It is looking frighteningly inevitable.

Anyone?