Sheer cussed doggedness

 

For all the many trips we have been on since the start of August, each carefully documented in photographs, I have long since shown you whatever account or version of those photographs best expressed them. But at the start of all that traveling was Genoa. And Genoa's pictures were another story.

I have shown some pictures of Genoa, but my main idea with my Genoa pictures, influenced by a deep admiration for the city, the thrill of being in Italy, and the success of my photography there, was to make something more like hand-drawn, painted versions of my images.

This is a silly amount of work. An amount I hesitate to take on, but occasional do, and then usual give up on at some point.

I'm just saying I would think that I would have given up on this project at this point, but no, not yet.

Kind of like clerkmanifesto, eh?

We'll call it a hundred photos of Genoa, for simplicity's sake. Of course there was the taking them, and the choosing them. Then there was creating a half dozen or so layers for each of them, independent variations on them working with AI's. Then came the labeling and organizing those layer photos, 700 total pictures all to be renamed and filed appropriately. It turns out that was the shockingly laborious task that has taken most of the last two months.

But I finally finished! Yesterday evening I labeled and filed the last of the 600 layers.

And now the real work begins.

Here I assemble the images in layers, hand drawing/painting with my drawing tablet, erasing through sections, creating new layers, drawing some more, and assembling again, until it seems sort of... finished.

Today I present the first of these (though in August I may have shown a "proof of concept" version of one, I can't remember). Perhaps the next trick is figuring out what to say about any of these, since in all this elapsed time I have forgotten most of what these pictures are of, except the obvious, like here, that it is some kind of fancy lintel above a fancy doorway.

There should be plenty of varied versions of doorways coming up...

if I don't quit.

Here then, is the first:

Best painting in the palaces

 

While I muck about with the many pictures I took of Genoa, some of which maybe don't need any mucking about, it occurs to me I have a picture of the best painting in that city. And it might be nicer of me not to scribble all over it because it really knocked me out.

One of the reasons we wanted to go to Genoa was to see their Caravaggio. We did see it, The Ecce Homo, but that is not the painting I am here to talk about. It has a disputed provenance, basically meaning some people think it is by Caravaggio, and some don't. I lean towards it being a Caravaggio, and that's mostly down to some beautiful passages in how Caravaggio paints living flesh, nevertheless it's not one of the best Caravaggios. 

But unbeknownst to me, in one of the palaces, filled with many paintings, there were two paintings by Durer. 

Though I have of course seen pictures of his work, I have encountered very few actual Durers in my life in person, despite being an admirer. Paintings by 15th century geniuses aren't just floating around in every museum one wanders into. And before showing you this portrait that I liked so much I will give you my odd, offhand take on Durer:

Durer is the Western artist from the longest time ago whose work sometimes doesn't look like it's particularly old in any way at all (though here I'll grant the clothes give it away).

I hope I didn't build that up too much. Portraits aren't everyone's cup of tea. But it's just so interesting and fresh looking to me. I love that lower right eye, the clarity, and that beautiful green.

The other Durer is too full weird not too look old, but it's a great, unique fun kind of old. I wouldn't even begin to break down this painiting.

Durer has that composed, almost symbolic carefulness of the painting of the era he was born into (the 1400's Northern Renaissance), but sometimes there will be this lovely naturalism juxtaposed or appearing in his work, like you can see the future of art taking shape. One delightful aspect of Durer is just how all over the map he can be.

This wasn't in Genoa, but is a watercolor of a hare by Durer I always loved and maybe helps make my point a little:

There were some other wonderful paintings in the Genoa Palaces, and one in particular might come into things in the coming days. But for today I sign off as I am, ever your faithful correspondent.

f.

Focaccia

 

Obviously this is not a picture of focaccia:

But it might as well be, because it is a picture of Genoa, taken over the rooftops of the medieval city from a baroque palace. And Genoa is focaccia. It is everywhere. It's Italy, so they don't have boulangeries, they have focacciarias! Our hotel had piles of focaccia, homemade, in their breakfast buffet. The streets of Genoa are paved with focaccia.

Oh, wait, I have an idea.

But maybe don't eat the focaccia paving?

All the other focaccia is really good though.

Focaccia in Genoa is like the baguette of France, ubiquitous, cheap, and tasty. But, and this shocks me to say it, it might be better in an important way than the baguette, and that is simply because it is more complete in itself. Full of salt and olive oil, which are the ingredients that elevate the Genovese focaccia so consistantly above the others I've had, it's like if the baguette came with butter or cheese built in.

Maybe that's a croissant?

Whatever, just, the focaccia is delicious.

Questions you may have:

1. What, are you working for the Genovese Tourist Board now?

2. Are you sure about this? I mean, it's focaccia. It's... fine. I've had focaccia.

3. Are you moving to Genoa?

4. Do you know the best place to shop for reasonably priced socks in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area?

5. Does Genoa really rank third in the world for total tourist visitor satisfaction?

Answers I probably have:

1. My French visa specifically forbids me from doing such a thing, so "No, I am in no way engaged in employment or work of any kind in or for the European Union." That said, did you know that Genoa ranks third in the world for total tourist visitor satisfaction?

2. Yes. And, if you haven't been to Genoa you may have had focaccia, who am I to say? But it probably was improperly salted, had too little olive oil in it, and was made with inferior water. So the jury is out.

3. I mean... no. No. That would not be a good idea. There is no fiber in focaccia. And, with due apologies to the Genoa Tourist Board, the city looks like it has an unusual amount of muggers and prostitutes. Plus, like we moved to one place we liked already, France, and it was exhausting!

4. I don't, but I would love to!

5. It's possible, but I just made it up.

What makes a city great?

 

"What makes a city great?" The title of this post asks.

"Oh no!" You cry. "He's bitten off more than he can chew!"

You are right again. What was I thinking?

I love a lot of things about a lot of different cities, but when it comes to cities that really rip the heart right out of my chest I always end up thinking about one aspect.

No, it's not about the number of cars.

Wait, maybe it is about the number of cars

(everyone holds their breath for a second because cars really do fuck with cities!)

But...

No, it's not quite the car thing.

(breathing resumes)

It's the layer thing.

Wait, what layer thing? No one said anything about layers. Is this how he's introducing the layer thing?

Yes.

Layers make my favorite cities. Because while there can be a kind of harmony and beauty in an almost entirely Medieval city, for example, it ends up copying itself a little. As much as one might love the style there will always be better and worse examples, and seeing the worse ones might be a little fatiguing. All the copies of themselves can get a little disenchanting after ahwile.

But get this: What if the city knocked down the kind of crappy Medieval buildings and put up some Renaissance ones, once that fancy new style came along? And then what if they tore down some more of the not great medieval buildings, and some too of those Renaissance buildings that didn't work out quite like we hoped, and then they added Baroque buildings, which are beautiful! Maybe they'd even create a new neighborhood full of Baroque buidings because this city is kind of getting awesome, and its growing!

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Well that's sort of Genoa, Italy.

I mean, except half of the buildings are crumbling a bit, and its dark and full of trash and a bit of dangerous mystery. But, wow. It has layers.

Layers and layers and layers.

The Cathedral Lion of Genoa

Medieval Alleyway of Genoa

The White Palace, Genoa

Genoa and what's next

 

Though you may not have noticed I was away, 

I AM BACK! 

My darling wife and I went to Genoa for a few days, and, um, Genoa is, um, I took a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures! Let's just start with that information and ease into all the emotional reactions to being able to saunter over to a city like Genoa after a few hours of trains and just, be there for four days. 

What is a city like Genoa like? You may wonder.

I promise that will all come into it over the next many days. But there is a bit of housekeeping with clerkmanifesto to take care of first, and I'm still setting things up so...

A few things come into it.

The first is that in preparing to be away I was going through a lot of old posts here and their attendant photography. Some of it was a bit silly, some old styles we're a bit rough, and some were probably more exciting to me when I was first making them. But the one general style of photography work up I liked consistently is the multi layered, hand drawn and erased style first expressed well in some pictures I made, curiously, the other time we left here for Italy, on a day trip to Ventimiglia (where we changed trains on this trip). 

Here is an example:

So somewhere along the way of taking hundreds and hundred of pictures in Genoa, I resolved to make finished pictures in a style related to this. But in calculating how long it will take to generate, organize, and hand craft each of about a hundred pictures, I decided it would take three billion hours.

That's why I'm here sort of stalling now.

I have three layers of each of a hundred or so pictures, and probably need a couple more, but I don't want to say too much about Genoa until I'm more ready to go with the pictures. But to set the stage I did do one mock up picture of one single picture from Genoa so you can see where we'll be going with this. I don't think this is a final iteration, just a taste...

The other thing is that, despite the terrible heat and the crowds and the back problems, we have been on quite the adventurers kick, having in addition to Genoa gone up the hill behind us to finally venture fully into the Roman ruins there and the archaeological museum that occupies the site, and today we took a climb out a mile or two west of us where a small wild area has broad views at the top of the hill and a more than 1000 year old olive tree.

All of this comes with photography too.

So I'm racing to get it all together, but would like to hold off a bit telling you about it all in detail until I can do it along with the pictures. Hopefully it won't be too long.

Il Mondo, 35 years

 

There is a special delight to hearing a song one particularly loves in public, perhaps over a grocery store's speakers, or playing in a cafe, or maybe even walking down the street and hearing it from an indeterminate source. But this delight is doubly intensified when the adored song seems obscure enough, aged, forgotten, or so particularly idiosyncratic, that one would never imagine in a million years that it would be randomly playing in a mall or something.

And so what an exquisite little pleasure I had today!

Oh world! I don't know whether to tell you about the song first, or the hearing of it! Both seem important to go first, and both seem better going second.

And you thought these things just write themselves!

Well, not you, but some of the other people. The ones who aren't quite as good at clerkmanifesto as you are. No shade on them. It's a real skill. Look how hard this one is already!

One of my darling wife and I's favorite romantic comedies is only sort of a romantic comedy. Indeed, it might be the best not fully a romantic comedy romantic comedy: About Time. It is also a very poorly constructed time travel movie that nevertheless works beautifully. It may be the best time travel story that is so poorly constructed. 

Stories are mysterious. 

Anyway, in this movie Bill Nighy plays one of the nicest fathers ever put on screen and...

My darling wife and I were over in the Liberation neighborhood. We were having coffee at a volunteer run church courtyard cafe that was a delightful find. Pleasant courtyards are a bit rare here, and frankly so are the sort of smiley friendly people who might volunteer at a church cafe. We were heading over to check out a somewhat distant ceramics shop my wife was interested in. And after our incredibly reasonable cappuccinos and a bit of walking we were almost there when I noticed an Italian grocery store.

Yes, as you read this we will be in Genoa, Italy. But as of this story, and as I write it, we are still in France. I have seen (and shopped in!) quite a few Italian Delis here, but a full Italian grocery store? No no no. Or as the French say: Non non non! Grocery stores here are either:

a. Giant French/International chains

b. very very small possibly, hopefully independent French stores

c. small giant French chains

So seeing a rather full sized Italian grocery store seemed pretty novel in a number of different ways. Naturally I wanted to go in. So we did.

I could tell you about the product lines and differences of an Italian grocery store, how many more jars of pistacchio crema there was, for instance, but I would have to talk about what French grocery stores are like first. But what I should first talk about is...

In About Time, the lovely father and the main character, his son, are the two time travelers. But that's oddly not all that important because it is more a romantic comedy personal development movie. So they can travel in time but only back in their own lives, where they can change the past only in their own lives. But again, really, if you're interested, I highly recommend it, but there is no need for me to explain it here because the important thing is they love each other and like to play ping pong together. And in the delightful private world of their relationship they also share a love for a slightly eccentric, but fully passionate Italian song by...

And so there I am in the Italian grocery, examining the pocket espressos and gluten free beer that was unfortunately barley malt instead of rice malt. I don't know if there is such a thing as rice malt, but I was clearly mistranslating. They also had these kind of giant half wafer cookie candy bars that looked really interesting when the song playing over the loudspeakers of the grocery store suddenly seemed... familiar.

Oh  my god!

I am actually hearing, in an Italian grocery store in France, the immortal Jimmy Fontana singing

IL MONDO!

I raced all about the store looking for my beloved wife. Finding her I cried "Listen. Listen to this."

"Wait." She said. "I know this." 

And then a small glow of surprise and delight came over her face, the best face in the universe. 

The face I was born for.

Here I offer two ways for you to hear Il Mondo. This first is pretty straight up, Jimmy Fontana singing the song in 1965:

https://youtu.be/woIc2gS4JPQ?si=O4zxarQNKYWIfR0v

The second really is a masterful bit of filmmaking, a scene so complete it could stand for the whole of the movie, so many of the essential characters in the film are so briefly and beautifully sketched here in a few minutes, the music used perfectly and counterpointing the overall themes of the movie. It is wonderful. But it also serves as all kinds of spoilers for the movie About Time, so you might want to make sure you see the movie first, if for some reason you haven't.

Although on the other hand this is an amazing introduction.

https://youtu.be/8j4dMWY11y8?si=zI-APSByyddIRtYf

Going to Genoa!

 

After a lot of back and forth about it, we finally decided to go to Genoa, Italy for our anniversary.

We weren't sure, maybe because it sounds great but a bit skeevy.

Despite having been off on small and large trips to more than twenty cities or villages here in the south of France (and once to Monaco, and once just over the border to Ventimiglia, Italy), we do carry around a small sense of "Weren't we supposed to move to France and have all of Europe right at our fingertips?"

But at the risk of being on the one hand obvious, and on the other hand crass, Europe is big! And going places costs a lot of money! This trip going to the nearest big city in the absolute nearest country to us for a few nights is pretty reasonable, but we are old age pensioners now! Which means we could go on twenty trips a year timewise, but even modestly done those would add up to being a ton more expensive than one annual, lavish saved up trip of worker bees maximizing our precious days off.

So, there's some balance to it. And our best trick so far has been going for the low hanging fruit. Thus the day trips to everywhere interesting we can on the Cote d Azur, with an overnight here or there, scouting places to live, and even a little visit with the darling cousin and his darling dog in Montpellier.

 And now we stretch our legs just a tiny bit: Genoa.

But it's not much of a stretch being just round the coast from here. Our round trip trains for two come to about 120 euros and we can get there in a few hours.

Genoa is the type of city we never would have gone to. There would always have been something more appealing to people flying across the Atlantic. It might have caught our eye with its rich history, palaces, possible Caravaggio (its provenance is questioned) and saucy accolades of being the best rarely visited city in Italy. But still, Genoa?

And yet now it is the equivelent of our taking a nice trip to Des Moines, Iowa.

I love Des Moines. But isn't Genoa Italy more interesting and exciting than Des Moines?

Probably.

I guess we'll see.

After many fits and starts we finally booked this trip today. So I looked up some interesting things about Genoa to spark your interest:

It has a huge Medeival city center, possibly the largest in Italy. It is filled with fascinating winding streets, fecal matter, elaborate palaces, and drug addicts.

Blue jeans are from there! The very word "Jeans" comes from "Genoa"

Hmm.

That's about it.

It actually sort of reminds me of Des Moines, just a bit bigger, with more focaccia, and thousands of years older.

We'll probably manage to have some fun.

Rain on the roof

 

The rain is coming down tonight and I hear it on the roof. We are way up in the eaves of an old multi storied building and I like it this way. Cozy. The city seems quiet tonight, though I know it really never is, and counter to what seems normal to me, plenty of people are walking around out there. It is always a relative measure. On the promenade along the beach today, in the gray and the drizzle, it was what I probably would have considered thronging almost anywhere back in the USA. 

Here? 

It was so quiet! 

Look at all the (wet) chairs to sit in over the ocean! Hardly anyone is even swimming! And this group of 40 high school students isn't even in anybody's way.

And so I find it a good night to work on some pictures. These days, as you have seen, I am making them more like drawings or paintings, with etched in layers, causing me to be completely unable to keep up with working on the many pictures I take most days. 

These ones are from Italy still, Ventimiglia, mostly the old town over the river:

The Seussian scale

 

The twisting, vertical little towns around here, most with a medieval origin, but some forming the core of much grown cities, are somewhere a little bit better than amazing. And though European old towns have almost a postcard meaninglessness to them, too picturesque to suprise anyone, in person they are always a kind of visceral thrill, more like encountering a National Park than they are urban tourism. 

Given enough time, people and their works are just natural phenomenon like anything else. And after all the murders and opression dies down, the kings dead and all their children and vassels, our wonders rival the Grand Canyons and Half Domes. When the dust settles we don't compete with god, we're simply made of the same stuff.

Too much? 

No, really, some of these streets I walk feel every bit like the slot canyons of the American Southwest, and the wonder I feel is... awe.

So I've decided I need a rating system!

 Living in France now, encountering old city after old city, my head spinning, I needed to find some way to order them in myself. It is not judgement so much as a way for me to measure what is most important to me in the hundreds and hundreds of years old cities that I feel so lucky to live in and near.

And so I have developed the Seussian Scale to rate these thrilling old cities abounding here.

What is "The Seussian Scale"? It is a measure of the narrow intricate windings of old pre automobile stone villages and cities. It gives points for staircases, tunneling passages, and complicated bridges, routes, and overpasses. Rewarding steepness, complicated handmade construction interacting with outlandish natural features the Seussian Scale is a measure, from one to ten, of just how well a city would fit into a book by Dr. Seuss.

And I am just back from my highest scoring city yet! Achieving a whopping NINE on the Seussian Scale, Ventimiglia in Italy, built on the steepest cliffs over a river and the sea, cutting through tunnels and wandering over its tiny little passageways since, I don't know, the 900s?, was a marvel of Seussian complexity.

My pictures struggle to do it justice, but I have done my best.

Uh-oh

 

We popped over to Italy yesterday morning.

I wasn't thinking much of it. The idea itself was novel; that one could get on a train and go to a whole different country with an entirely different language and culture and come home at our leisure like we were going to a suburban mall for an afternoon. And yes, there was the largest market in Italy on Fridays in this Italian border town of Ventimiglia, but I know what those markets are like with their 90% women's fashion and assorted dubious "fell of the back of the truck" items. So while I was interested, my expectations were modest.

But after half an hour in the Riviera river city of Ventimiglia we were painfully wondering: Did we move to the wrong place?

Fortunately the answer to that is no. The density and grand beauty of our city, with its New York City intensity and density genetically spliced into a Cote D'Azur vacation beach town, is too perfect for us on a day to day level to dismiss like that. But oh Ventimiglia!

Do you know what France is like here? It is like Italy with a light washing and a coat of varnish. I think after almost four months in this country it was a bit of a relief to see a place with its guard down, having a little fun with it. 

Also the people are kind of nicer.

But crucially I just loved that city with a glorious river running through the center of it and spilling onto its wide open beaches. I love a river delta, with swans and glowing horizons. The modern town was good and not all that modern, though busy and active. The market was as I anticipated except in its magnitude. It was gigantic. The food market, a separate entity, was great too, and it felt real and rich with some actual local products and bargains, including curoiously massive piles of artichokes. The coffee, our one abiding reason for dreaming of the place, was a letdown, though there was much to choose from and perhaps we would have found our spots with better luck. And then across the river, steeply climbing the cliff, was the old town, scrappy, ancient, perhaps a bit too sleepy and without enough shops, it was nevertheless the most wonderful old town I have seen, with its endlessly winding and climbing paths too small for cars, and with its countless bridges and tunnels climbing up and through the rock.

I am working on the many pictures I took of this place, feeling that the out of the camera ones, while satisfying, deserve deeper layers of work and finishing to bring out my feelings on Ventimiglia. There will be more to show and talk about in the days to come. Also I am aware there is a thrill to the new and in the triumphs of risk in travel that is modified with familiarity.

But for now I will just say:

I got a chunk of good Parmesean the size of a cinder block.