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.

fifty-four

 

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:

We'll just let this one mostly speak for itself. It's a more than two minute music video of some of the muppets I worked with at the end of my time at the library.

To operate it, click once to engage the video player. Enlarge it by click down at the bottom of the player if you want the big screen version. And then click again to play it. 

It has music so be prepared for the listening part of it too.

From Kyoto:

twenty-nine

 

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:

Putting together posts like these weeks ahead of time, it occurred to me that I might like to find an old one that references all the many people I have just been saying goodbye to as I left my job of 31 years. So I went digging around in historical clerkmanifesto posts and found this slightly acid, but accurate as ever, post after only a few quick tries. 

"This will do." I thought. 

It was called (and so surely must still be) "Liking Everyone".

Given enough time I find I like all my co-workers. But even I blanch at the word "all". How can that be? And considering the many years I've worked here, that comes out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people (I can't quite believe it makes it to a thousand, but it comes close enough for me to keep saying "hundreds" over and over). This is a notable illustration of my character. For a cynical, embittered, angry misanthrope it turns out I like an astonishing number of people. I like a perverse amount of people. When you factor in the tens of thousands of library patrons who I also seem to like, despite every reason to encourage the contrary, it almost looks unsettling.

I suffer from a surfeit of empathy. I have a hard time keeping grudges. I can spot the charm of a person even as it's dissolved into a 99.99999 percent loathsome personality. Indeed, the very minute proportion of their virtues themselves makes them fascinating to me, like drinking a red wine with a hint of oregano so small that you keep sipping the wine delicately trying to detect it again, trying to let yourself know that you didn't merely imagine it.

So, as with any sensible person who is burdened with a personality trait that is so heavily skewed in one direction, I try hard to compensate. With co-workers for whom my disrespect is profound I keep my distance as much as possible. Proximity softens me. I harden my heart. For every coldness I want to set forth I have to plant my feet and concentrate. It does not come naturally. Over a long enough time, with enough familiarity, liking people comes completely unbidden to me. And so even if someone crosses the red line with me my default is to forget it over and over, like America with Republicans. Who wants to be like a Republican? Ick. So when peoples' toes slip past that horrible line of evil I do what I have to do. I try to memorize the transgression. I nurse it like a precious drink I cannot afford to finish and have no good way to replace.

It helps. But I am dealing with a deep seated handicap, and all I can do is try to manage it, which I must, day after day, with small triumph, endless struggle, and a casual affection for vastly too many, which has attracted the gods themselves to me, like fruit flies on a ripe peach.

The wall of Ting

 

One of the features of my show of pictures (my last show of pictures) at the library has been a wall of portraits that features just one of my colleagues. I started with an array of images of one person whose visage worked particularly well with all my iterations, but he felt a bit shy about his prominence in the show and asked for relief. This was a blessing in disguise because my seventy or so Plexiglas picture frames are insufficient for the quantity of my images and this problem suggested the idea of a rotating feature in the show. Every week or so I have been changing out this section (about a sixth of the total show), to concentrate on one co-worker at a time.

Today that co-worker is Ting!

Ting worked here a long time ago, but only for a brief period, and recently she has come back again to work here once more. She has a lot of energy, which is why for a couple of my images I made her into a superhero called "The Whirlwind". I picture her turning into a tornado to fight evil. Ting is nicely enthusiastic about all my pictures and art, and she comes out nicely in many of my iterations, so she was a natural choice for a stint on this wall of fame.

The following are not all of the pictures that are currently up in the show, but by the same token, not all of the pictures here are up in the show either!

This first image is of The Wall of Ting as it currently is. The rest are the portraits.

The last one is my favorite.

Variety pack, my co-workers

 

As so often has been happening in the current generation of photo generation and ai photo editors, I am chest deep in experiments. I am never entirely satisfied with how I end up showing these wide ranging collections to you, but I always love showing what I'm up to here, so I am ever fiddling with how to do it. I have a new idea for this go around: I will show you small related but more diverse groups of pictures. 

Today to start off, since it is what I started working with this round, I am going to show you a random selection of portraits of my co-workers done in various styles. I took some pictures of my co-workers to create some Moebius style sci fi versions of everybody, which seemed to go over well with everyone, and certainly pleased me. But I since branched out into a range of other styles, and while I might usually stick to a collection of the Moebius pictures in a first post like this, I will instead start with an assortment across various styles today to try and give you a taste of what the portrait range I'm working with is like.

I am also working with a lot of non portrait images. But we'll come to that later in addition to exploring these studies some more.

 

Portraits of Marcus

 

Here is a cartoon that I think best expresses my relationship with my friend Marcus:

You may note that I have turned him into a cartoon character, but that's not all. We have given him the full portrait treatment here today! He will be a muppet and Dr. Seuss illustrations as well.

And so with that here are some portraits of Marcus, including a few discussions related to yesterday's post: