Trying to enjoy retirement

 

I was working on a kind of photographic idea today, all day, over the course of things; while the oatmeal was cooking, drinking a spritz at Parioliere, waiting in line for the bathroom. I'd take new background shots, add new elements, try new dynamics. And each time I'd get to a better picture until finally, well, I liked one picture so much I couldn't bother with any of the other ones, nor try any improvements.

Which was delightful. Success! But it was also a little sad.

I made a whole bunch of images, some I was really happy with, but now, I just have the one and don't want to muddy the waters, so to speak, so all the rest of my little triumphs are just dumped on the pile.

You should see my piles!

This isn't by way of saying anything regarding the content or meaning of this image I have for you today. 

That I'd rather just leave to itself.

Events in France!

 

I meant to tell you all about this cheese I got this morning, a little round, self contained thing that was rich and tasted intensely of the grass the cows had clearly been feeding on. It was an amazing cheese, but alas, events in France overtook us!

French legend Brigitte Bardot is dead at the age of 91! 

She died near here, in the one famous town on the Cote D' Azur we may never get to because the train doesn't go there, Saint Tropez. She was a legendary actress you well know from seeing in the movies, er, um

In Case of Adversity

and

The Legend of Frenchie King

and

Viva Maria

All very fine movies, possibly. I don't know. I've never seen one. Maybe you have to be French?

But France took it hard. Hardly a French person I ran into here wasn't abuzz with this sad passing.

I mean, they might be. I wouldn't know. They don't really talk to me except to ask "What cheese would you like?"

To which I answer "That round pretty one made by cow."

Which, it turns out, was a brilliant choice!

It tasted of the very grass that the cows grew strong and healthy on!

We had it with a syrah wine. Oooh la la.

This all may sound a bit glib, but, alas, Brigitte Bardot was, well, a bit of a fascist.

I guess I can run, but I can't hide.

Yearbook photos

 

I have been working on these yearbook pages and they go just as I planned, until I look more closely and realise that there are just a few small problems that I can't seem to fix. So while I have nine or ten of these, full of interesting details, there's always some weak point that leaves me unsatisfied.

So I give up.

But I do kind of like this one Minnesota homage:

And again

I am currently in one of those phases where I am making things faster than I can name them, organize them, or, certainly, present them here. But while I could offer up dozens of pictures today, which may be its own kind of fun, I like them too much at this early stage for that. I am reluctant to cast away their preciousness to me. So I'd prefer to offer just a couple of new images today and let myself find my way through all this work over the next days. These days are complicated anyway by another transition trip to our new apartment to get our Internet in and hopefully get some way along with making our kitchen equipped.

I will then let these two pictures tell their own stories:

 

fifty-three

 

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:

An academic library journal wrote me. I think they were called Public Libraries Quarterly? I pretty sure that's the name. They were interested in my "King of the Library" series, and left me a comment under "The Second Decree". I wrote back to tell them that august and toney academic journals hound me like teeny boppers with a hot new boy band hitting it big, but that I remain humble and always willing to help in the advancement of human knowledge.

Or, at least, that's what I meant when I said, thank you. I told them that I'm leaving the country any second now (yes, I know, from your perspective I will have left almost three weeks ago!), but I said I'd be glad to help if I can.

I did check out the "King of the Library" that inspired the interest and found it... good. So I thought I would share it with you here in case you are not yet retired from a library, have oodles of power, and want to make yours better.

So here you go:

Now that the King (me) has solved the shelving issue (see the first "If I were King"), what about the fun? 

Fun goes to the passionate! Every quarter (that's 4 times a year!) we fund pet projects. Who can apply? Anyone who works there! Hell, longtime volunteers can apply too, and my blog readers! What do we fund it with? Time and money and space. Oh, then hmph, grumble, and how do we pay for this?

Aha. The king puts his money where his mouth is. All the other functions of the library are hereby stripped to the bare bones. Acquisitions are greatly reduced. Classes are reduced. Programming is reduced. The library is simplified and reduced to its basics, and everything that it loses there is filled back in by these pet projects. How do we choose these pet projects? We vote, everyone votes. Everyone has to read every proposal and everyone votes on every project. So, um, can we see an example? Yes. We will pick something simple and basic lest you think the whole thing will be too much of a carnival.

Sylvia is a kids librarian and she likes being a kids librarian, but she loves jazz. She can't stop thinking about jazz. She listens to it for hours and hours every night with her cat Thelonious. She wants a jazz corner at the library. As befits a library she believes it should be materials oriented. There will be a deep, deep master collection of CDs, the best of DVDs, books and even some long forgotten record albums. There will be a detailed and heavily stocked "Suggested" section as well. She wants a largish chunk of money and the equivalent of 2 hours a day to work on it. She also wants the maximum time for it. 2 years. After 2 years she would have to apply for some kind of renewal.

Okay, there's your example. Let's say there are not a lot of super great projects that quarter (or, heck, there are other great projects, but this one is still very popular and people trust Sylvia) and Sylvia gets fully funded. What really does the library end up with?

Instead of a mediocre CD collection (like nearly every public library I have ever been to), we get, well, a little bit more mediocre CD collection, and one, ferociously beautiful, destination Jazz collection. The kind that inspires people to explore Jazz by its own radiating conviction. We get a happy employee contributing their masterful knowledge and deep energy, and we get personality and depth. And oh yes, we wake up! I just went to three Minneapolis libraries. They were varying degrees of okay to a little bit lousy but not totally terrible. But they were mostly so absolutely asleep! The staff was asleep! The collection was asleep! The libraries were asleep. Just, wake up! Libraries can be beautiful. They can be adventures! They can be quiet and studious and calm and keenly awake. Yes, yes, they can be partly responsive to simple popularity, they should be, responsive to their statistical measures and the pull, and even the wonders of Big Media, but they can also be personally curated. Museums of art. Places of personal conviction and insider knowledge, of mercurial and fierce fandom!, where items are part of the collection because someone in the system unreservedly believes in it. Places where the forgotten that should not be forgotten is held on to, and places where the luminous depths of our culture can emerge out of the flotsam and resolve itself into the amazed and enlightened hands of its constituents. We need only be awake, and free, and care.

I can think of 20 more examples beyond Sylvia's Jazz without effort. And though tempted to run on endlessly with my visions I believe, reluctantly, especially reluctantly if I get to be King, in Democracy. So I think you should think of some of your own simple or mad ideas. I think you could, if you let yourself. Leave them here with me. When I am King we'll see about getting them funded. I think your project will win the votes necessary to get you going on your mad or simple dream, and our library will be magic.

So it is decreed, this day, etc. etc.

The King.

This is Clerk Manifesto, once again reporting from the present in Kyoto, Japan, where it’s hot and confusing, and everyone speaks a language I still understand fewer than ten words of. 

I miss nothing.

I saw Messi, or the more things change, the more they stay the same

 

I saw Messi and it was...

nice.

In the mid-1970s, when I was a child, I became obsessed with a baseball player named Rod Carew. He played for the Minnesota Twins and was eventually traded to a team not far from where I lived—the California Angels. With my parents, I had the chance to go see this legendary hitter in person, someone whose career I had been following closely. I remember bringing along my little Instamatic-style camera and taking a picture of Rod Carew as he walked toward the dugout.

I don’t have that picture anymore, but I’ve recreated a pretty good facsimile of it, and I’m going to show it to you here.

Curiously, something very similar happened decades later when I went to see another athlete I’d become fascinated with—Lionel Messi. Like Carew, I had followed Messi’s career closely. And when I saw him live in the stadium, I found myself—just like every other fan in the crowd—pulling out my phone and taking picture after picture of him. This is not a facsimile, but an unaltered picture I took of him that day.

The amazing thing is that, looking through those photos later, I realized that the best ones of Messi, as above, looked remarkably like that old picture I once took of Rod Carew nearly 50 years ago, or at least as I remember it. There’s something sweet about that—about not changing, about some thread from my childhood resonating all the way into the present.

I don’t remember whether I saw Rod Carew get a hit that day with the Angels. But I do know I saw Messi score a goal in a stadium in Minnesota—and I was lucky enough to be there because my friend Jim took me to the game.

Both players, I think, were past their peak when I saw them in person. That made the experience a little bittersweet, seeing them after their most brilliant moments had already passed. But it also felt like a kind of acknowledgment, a completion of something, to witness them with my own eyes. And for that, I’m grateful.

Good and evil on the internet

 

Popularity

 

Like a recurring condition, I have been worrying about popularity again. It flares up like a skin rash. I have made art my whole life, but I have never been very... popular. Every once in awhile I make something I expect to be popular, or I even take a stab at being popular, but I'm not. Sometimes I think this means a lot. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't.

A co-worker of mine started making portraits of famous people out of little bits of junk. I was encouraging about these because I thought they were just great. Then she had a show at the library like I did, and they are up in my library right now.

They are way more popular than my pictures were. Mine were mildly popular, certainly more popular than any other show we had. But these new ones by my co-worker are on a whole other level of popular. People love them. They pour over them. They constantly photograph them. They ask how long they'll be up for. As I said, I like these pictures too. But pretty quickly I felt a little funny about them, or maybe I just wondered if I felt funny about them. I wondered if I was jealous. 

I don't think I felt jealous, but I felt like I could feel jealous.

Today I was out at the front desk with another co-worker and I said "Aren't these portraits just great?" 

And my co-worker responded "Eh. They're really not my thing."

Wow.

I was so surprised.

But also relieved.

I didn't share the feeling, but it made me feel strangely better, calmer, not jealous. Maybe I never felt jealous. I just needed one person who didn't care, one variable, one thing that made it all a matter of taste and I felt...

fine.

Did you know (yes, you did) my whole damned country, hundreds of millions of people, held one of the most important popularity contests in the World, maybe ever, who knows? It was for the person to have the most power theoretically on Earth, or close to it.

And get this: Like 50 percent voted for a completely disgusting, notably stupid, asshole (and I'm kind of pulling punches here), which, fine, that's bad enough, but like 48 percent of the people, me included, voted for a person who, while perhaps nice enough in a personal context, I don't know, clearly lacked any fundamental wisdom, creativity, vision, moral courage, or personal integrity (again, pulling punches). The remaining stragglers and non voters functionally only voted to allow the horrible person to win.

Which is to say, and the reason I drag you through this bitter, bitter memory is to say:

We had a kind of high stakes popularity contest with hundreds of millions of people voting and precisely ZERO of us voted for a really good person.

Zero.

So there's that.

And yet Pride and Prejudice is intensely popular.

Poirot.

The Beatles.

Frida Kahlo is popular, and my co-worker made a junk portrait of her which is also popular.

Cathy's Song is popular.

And so is Moonstruck.

And why wouldn't they all be. Their popularity is justified.

And so in conclusion:

Popularity is very meaningful.

and

Popularity means nothing good at all.

But most of all:

Popularity...

Is popular.

Pablo Picasso (I'm not)

 

For possibly the first time in around 4,000 of these posts, I don't much want to say anything about what I have here. For whatever it is, working or not, it's all there as it is.

So

As ever, click through the picture:

Shirts

I have collected quite a few more celebrity portraits over the last few days. I've just been sort of throwing them on the pile here in this post. Now I am running out of time before it goes live to the world and I can't add anymore pictures of (mostly) dead famous people. I think they're all here advertising my new shirt collection, but I could see my eventually venturing into a whole new fashion line. And while a fashion line for dead people probably isn't a great idea from a marketing standpoint, it would probably work about as well for me as anything else I might venture in that regard. 

Though I might like to build up to my most sophisticated imagery, I can't seem to stop clerkmanifesto from loading my newest images first, so the first ones are the most accomplished, and then we devolve more to the silk shirts ones, which are a bit messier, and seem almost like prototypes to me now.