Out the front door again

 

With a mixture of avidity for the adventure, hope in finding the right place for us to settle, and sheer exhaustion from all our wandering the country, we are heading out again into the wine soaked, heat blasted remains of this country. So having hardly recovered from the last trip, expect more on the road clerkmanifesto posts, which means usually less text and less polish, as I will be engineering my missives from a phone.

In the meantime, as I prepare to set off, let's continue with these complicated pictures from the last journey, which is maybe all the same journey. Here we carry on from where we were yesterday:

Wandering a haunted world

 

I don't know what this photographic style I'm obsessively working with says exactly about all these things we're seeing wandering the Europelands of today, but I am not only developing a kind of commitment (though I am aware these are always temporary) to this view of the world, but I am also finding ways to push it to the brink. You have seen these lurid hyper psychadelic versions of my photos a lot lately, but I'm starting to push them closer to the world of my imagination. Yes, of course these are mainly real pictures of four or five different cities I have recently wandered through, but they are also... clerkmanifestoland.

There will probably be more of these, but this is a ruined and wonderful world, with death and history some of its best parts, and the present doing sometimes more to ruin it than make it better.

The fieldtrip

 

Here are some outtakes from my pictures of my clerkmanifesto field trip to the waterfall. I showed you the "normal" pictures of the outing up into the pretty hills around here, but I not only have these experimental shots lying around, but I am off traveling on short notice, so it might be a nice time to share a few of these with you.

My posts from on the road might be even less fancy than this.

Although these are kind of fancy.

The Bartleby homage

 

I do have in mind what readers like and don't like in clerkmanifesto. And it's not so much that I easily disregard what you out there might like to see or hear about on clerkmanifesto, as it is that I remember that my idea of what you like or dislike is almost entirely fictional.

So even though I might think you are least interested in developments in the powers of AI video, I don't actually know that.

Which is good because an annual subscription I have had, along with expiring credits, along with an astonishing burst in the capabilities of video generators, have all conspired to leave me with several new video clips that I'll be showing you.

Would I be showing these if I didn't think they were astonishing?

 Maybe. 

But for the best of these, that work cleanly, I stand pretty well amazed. Nevertheless, I like everyone am a little confused as to how much creative credit I get for something like these clips.

But in the end I think: Most of it. 

On the one hand these are vastly easier to make than seems possible. On the other, it's not exactly "easy".

But I can try to remain humble about it.

Here is the second of these clips then. Remember to click it to engage it. Enlarge it, which would be better for its effect. And then click again to play it. This is fully audio too.

Since it is all fiction in my head I am going to go with: you absolutely adore seeing stuff like this!

Fox and skunk hit the rooftops and I'm there to report it!

 

We haven't gone in for much video footage since fleeing America, but what with these guys showing up again on my rooftops and my mananging to capture them with my phone, I couldn't resist this clip for today. 

Assuming everything still works here like it did in the past, click to activate the video below, then enlarge it if you want, then click again to finally play it. It does have sound if you want to hear me talk, though the content shan't suffer terribly without sound if you're in a library or something.

Fox and skunk take France!

 

In trying to clear out a backlog of assorted picture projects, many of which were semi abandoned as an inexplicable desire to convert flower close-ups to Dr. Seuss drawings overcame me, I may have come to my last coherent collection of recent unused material: pictures of fox and skunk. The most significant group of these have their origin in pictures of Villefranche Sur Mer wherein I flooded the city, probably as a response to how it has stopped raining here and most of France is burning. I set fox and skunk off on a rowboat and then might have aged some of the pictures as well.

Of course, going through these I couldn't resist making some more from various pictures I have taken around town.

I may have shown one or two of these in earlier versions or collections, but most should be wholly or partly new.

I think with these I'll probably be ready to take on whatever Genoa throws my way. 

The hotel cafe

 

Sometimes I wish I knew what to say about this life.

Maybe it's just like regular life except fabulous vacation suddenly bursts out of it once or twice a day, like some massive flower bud you barely even knew was there, erupting into a brief and exotic bloom, and then falling away to a pile of petals in the wind.

We have started up an affection for hotel cafes for our afternoons. Here is today's: