Fun and frolic with clerkmanifesto

 

I once embarked on a vast attempted migration of clerkmanifesto to my own fully hosted site called "Life is a fountain". This grandiose venture had something to do with problems with google's blogger (the hosting platform where we are now), and was also because I was struck with a wave of creative ambitions in response. Life is a Fountain was a very explorable site, with lots to look at, read, and even watch, but suffered from two problems that ultimately lead to its demise and to our retreat back here to the homely clerkmanifesto that is in your hands at this moment.

1. Packed to the gills with content, the whole Life is a Fountain site ran too slowly for the whipsnap patience of modern internet users.

2. No one actually reads clerkmanifesto, other than you (hi and thanks for coming by) and even fewer people read Life is a Fountain, which created a weird black hole in which it regularly received less than zero views, a minus number!, which was fascinating, but only for a little while, and started to upset math itself.

Math is more sensitive than one would think.

I can relate.

So back I came here, having kept it live and up to date the whole time of the experiment, much to math's enormous relief.

And here I still am years later, focussing on the main daily postings and leaving all that sidebar, interconnected stuff to itself.

Until now!

Now I decided to clean up these sidebar features and offer a few more gateways into the vast histories and content of clerkmanifesto. It is no great reworking, and I still refuse to change the now antiquated look of clerkmanifesto, but I have gotten rid of outdated elements on the sidebar that long ceased to be relevant. And I have added a few more usable features for the so inclined. Like, as I write we have a tribute to Grape for his birthday up top. I also now have some links to highlighted posts of the past. Even way down below I have a "picture of the day". A picture of the day! I wonder when I'll remember to change that? Because, after all, this is all meant to be changeable, and over the next while I am guessing there will be all sorts of shenanigans over on the sidebar to your right.

Even I can accept that clerkmanifesto isn't always "good". But it definitely is "always" which makes for a ton of it! So much that I have long since despaired of organizing it. But slowly I am leaning more into all that history, and trying to make tunnels and warrens and rooms in this colossal collection of clerkmanifesto content, connecting the past and present and letting it all run together and reemerge in new, hopefully distilled and more curated ways.

"Condeluded."? You say.

Yes, what a wonderful idea! Among the new features is an actual search box. If you aren't exhausted from today's information heavy post, try typing "condeluded" into that search box and see what you get!

Or not. I'll take care of math if this upsets it. I'll fix math a vermouth. Math loves vermouth and that usually calms them down.

 

The most beautiful flowers ever

 

Sorry about the hyperbole. 

These aren't the most beautiful flowers ever. Flowers aren't ranked. I know that this is hard to remember when one is on the Internet. In the real world nothing is ranked. This is sort of like how if you are dreaming you can try pinching yourself to see if you maybe are really not dreaming. If you are not sure if you're on the Internet ask yourself which song ranks higher: Weight of Love by the Black Keys or Candles in the Rain by Melanie. If an obvious answer occurs to you you are on the Internet!

There is nothing wrong with being on the Internet. It's the 43rd best thing to do on a thursday!

Er, anyway, I made these pictures of flowers for you. They are of course, unranked, because this isn't...

wait

now I'm all confused.

The best new song

 

If someone wants to point me to new music I am ready to listen. I should be studying modern jazz or global fusion or something, instead of scrolling through my corporate Internet feeds, smeared as they are with the patina of real people to keep me hanging on in hope and addiction. 

THERE ARE NO REAL PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET!

Even here on a clerkmanifesto, I am just a figment of your imagination until you step away from your phone or your computer. Only then do I exist.

"Oh" You say. "I see. It's all there."

But only later, not now.

Sorry, I didn't mean to get all metadistential.

Whoa, metadistential.

I think I have a new word.

But we'll get to that later. Or not. 

My point is:

I have a hard time finding new music.

And I have a hard time having the attention span for new music. And if I expect some instagreddit feed to point me sagely in the right direction, it's not happening. They just keep showing me Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, which is comforting, but possibly a bit played out?

But then, today, by purest chance and scrolling I hit something absolutely electrifying!

Alas that it is from 1966.

A dead Lou Reed recommended it.

How did I miss this?

Well, I'll still take it, ancient as it is. And in case you somehow missed it (there was a ton of interesting music coming down the wires of 1966!) I hearby share it with you.

This is exactly the kind of song I like. And what an experience to hear it for the first time (at least that I'm aware of). Like, it's a nice mid sixties soul song, and the singer has an interesting clear voice, higher it seems than what I would usually hear here.

Here here!

And the lyrics have a good, heartfelt, heartache to them, and then,

Holy crap. The song is just ripped open. Completely unhinged with feeling.

I can't stop listening.

I have to go listen again. Join me if you like. But we are done with all art and creativity for the day. We are just living in shadows...

https://youtu.be/5TOaUxgkLSg?si=hPXXyO0dVS3l2r8W

At the speed of clouds

 

Since retiring I have been spending more time looking at clouds.

I recognize there may be something a bit cliched about that, or too quaint, but not wanting to go into these conditions wherein I look at clouds so much, I can say that said conditions are pretty bland. I am not lying in some magical grass meadow or anything. But there, nevertheless, I am, and there are the clouds, and sometimes I look at them a lot. That's just how it is.

So you may ask: Is this place I live in so particularly good at clouds?

Every place in the world, on the right day, is good at clouds. That's just how clouds are. So no, not in particular

But this place, the Cote d'Azur, seems to do particularly well at very volumetric, very clear, complicated, and grand clouds. More than once I have gotten all photography about them and served you up all sorts of pictures, mangled this way and that, to try to get the point of their sheer wonderfulness across to you. Whether I did or did not get that point across would be up to you and your long search through the clerkmanifesto archives. But this is not my mission today, and I have no new pictures.

I was really just watching the clouds.

And I noticed something about them. 

There is something miraculously pitched about the speed of clouds.

Clouds move at a speed just fast enough for us to notice, but one has to look for it. At first glance they seem to be stilled, a set tableau. And while one can see the movement and change with an applied concentration, each moment seems fixed, the scene casually appears to be a settled one, but the movement of the clouds nevertheless happens at the fastest possible speed for that fixed quality to still be true. As I watched the clouds I could see the movement, but the sky did not seem to be changing. Yet if I turned my attention, or looked away for even just a handful seconds, looking back to the sky I would find a very different scene.

What does this all mean? You might ask.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

But probably a bit more than most of things you might find here on the Internet today, which, come to think of it, might move at just about the same speed.

Looking for fun stuff on the Internet

In the half year since we left our home of more than 30 years, ventured across the world, and landed in France, we have seen a few things.

No, no, I'm not bragging. I know. So have you. You have seen tons of cool stuff.

Yes, I would love to hear about it!

In fact, I am simply dying to hear about it! All this social media stuff is poisonous. These horrible giant Internet mega sites are killing us. Put your blog address here and I am ready for the ride of my life!!!

You, you don't have a blog?

Sigh.

 

Clerkmanifesto goes analog!

 

Outtakes and forgotten delights

 

In the feverhouse of my photography endeavors, there are many things that have gone unseen here on clerkmanifesto. Some have gone unseen because alternate versions were published. Some have gone unseen because I lost them in the tumult and shuffle of making, showing, and organizing so many pictures. And some have gone unseen because they didn't fit in with any theme or group and so were set aside.

Over the next few days we rectify all this!

We will be showing pictures, which, is, um, something we do a lot. But the exciting thing about these pictures is that they have nothing to do with anything, have no theme, and are probably pretty random.

I'm not sure that's an exciting thing, actually.

But maybe all this excitement on the Internet hasn't been good for anyone!

Maybe it's made everyone drunk.

Oh.

Everyone on the Internet is drunk!

I think I have stumbled upon the very... well, nevermind.

Here is a cup of water, so to speak. It will help you not have a headache later:

How clerkmanifesto stays solvent

 

In the course of every reader's experience with clerkmanifesto, there comes a time where they wonder this:

"How is it possible that clerkmanifesto has no advertising?

It accepts no patrons or donations.

It has no visible means of financial support. 

It sells nothing. 

It is underwritten by no one.

And yet it is the fanciest, lushest, most glorious and expensive website on the entire Internet!

How is this possible?"

I understand.

People wonder.

I don't like to talk about it much. But I get questions about this so often that I feel it would not be fair to you wonderful readers to keep the truth from you.

And so here it is:

Clerkmanifesto is supported by its global produce supply wing.