Sushi in France

 

I have had some grand plans for writing about food in France, but I keep shying away from it. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. And French food is both everything you would think and dream it would be, and yet it is as incredibly stupid and disappointing as everywhere else in the world too, both of them at the same time! Which makes for a mightier subject than I ever feel entirely ready to take on.

 So what if I start off small?

What if I start of with just a wee bit of sushi?

Who doesn't love sushi?

The French love sushi!

Oh my god the French love sushi so much! They love it almost as much as boulangeries, more than fromageries, and about equal with pizzerias.

Or, at least, one could conclude that by how very many many places sell sushi here. The cheap neighborhood grocery chains sell sushi here. And so do the big supermarkets. Small neighborhood sushi shops sell sushi here, and so do slightly bigger and nicer ones. There is a massive sushi chain devoted to only selling sushi here, with so many representative stores I couldn't begin to count them. And then there's the other sushi chain, equally big, exactly like the first one so that I can never remember which is which, equally devoted to selling sushi. And then there are equally as many poke bowl type restaurants on top of that, which are just a clever way to sell unassembled sushi in a bowl for the same price.

There is sushi everywhere here!

And every single place has the exact same sushi. 

And all of the sushi, grocery store and nice restaurant, is for pretty close to the same price. 

Tuna, Salmon, Dourade (a kind of sea bream), and maybe cooked shrimp, and then all of them in rolls with avocado maybe, or cream cheese (?). Maybe a cucumber makes an appearance. If there's a big menu a fifth seafood might appear, like scallop or fake crab.

It's a little disappointing. But honestly, I didn't have the easiest time finding good sushi in variety in Japan either. Though eventually I sussed it out. And at least their grocery store sushi was cheap and good.

I know this possibly makes me sound like a malcontent.

But that happens sometimes because I am a malcontent.

And I find myself constantly waxing nostalgic about the appearance of sushi in the U.S. in the nineteen eighties. What a revalation that was! If only they had a branch of L.A.'s "Somethings Fishy" here now (no, was that really the name?!). That typical early eighties sushi bar had no 20 dollar rolls of tuna, salmon and avocado smothered in various mayonaisses and fruits. No, it had 30 different kinds of fish! It was wild. I could get an oyster with a quail egg! They used crab! Unagi, hamachi, spanish mackeral, uni, oh lord, the uni!

Sorry. I got hungry and I have wandered off point.

Eh?

What was my point?

Of course I have a point!

Oh. Yes. It's a big one.

Are you sure you're ready for it? Can you handle it?

Okay.

The French are very, very, very good at their food.

But they're not so good at anyone elses.

And I'm not even mentioning the tacos.

A brief revisit

 

This may not be the last time we trot out old pictures from Japan here at clerkmanifesto. There is still too much satisfaction in it because we loved it there. 

It is now a year since we were actually in Japan, but, and this one seems strange to me: We were nevertheless in Japan more recently than we were in the United States.

You know, of America.

"Ah! America!" As people say in France after we figure out they're asking us where we're from and we answer them. 

"Ah! America!" They say.

What do they mean by this?

That they've heard of it?

There is no level of French I can be at that will understand this response. But I accept it. Yes, America.

The important point though here is that I am fully obsessed with what I might fairly describe as a color shaker toy for my photos. You take your little magic can (TM) and load it with any three to five colors you want. Select your photo and mist it lightly with your Ansel Adams Solution, being careful not to saturate it. Then firmly close the top and shake it for 20 seconds or so, et voila! Remove the picture from the cannister and hang it to dry. 

In less than ten minutes: Color magic!

My best solution to what to do with all my color magic pictures is to group them up by category. Today is "Japan". I think I might still have a "Minnesota" group, and a "Belle Epoque City" one. After that maybe I'll be ready to try something else, you know, like writing one of those witty essays everyone is always pretending I write. "Thank you for your hallucinatory xray images of the oysters you ate, but what I really enjoy are those crazy little essays you write where you imagine the reader is saying stuff and then you respond to it but it's all in your own head!"

Wait, I don't do that, do I? 

The collected xrays

 

When I find a new way of working it is very exciting.

And then sometimes there sure is a lot of it!

But I'm all too aware that people tend to slip in and out of clerkmanifesto. After all, there is a lot of clerkmanifesto too. And so for today I will take heart in that. Because today I have what amounts to an assortment of outtakes and experiments with what I call my xray style. For a steady reader its been tons of xray style around here this week. And your results may vary on another round of it with a variety of old and new pictures. But if you just dropped in to see what happening?

Well,

Let me tell you.

We have gone off wandering in a low budget fashion into France to look about for a new apartment. As you read this I may very well be somewhere like Poitiers or Limoges! Who knows? In preparation for the vagaries of the clerkmanifesto posting life on the road, I have been clearing out my latest photo projects that have recently become obsessed with this xray style.

What is this xray style, you ask?

OHhhhhh, you are in for such a treat!

I mean, theoretically.

Procrastination

I had one of those moments. I said "I better organize all my old pictures." So I opened up a random folder called "Dioramas new". Where all the old diorama pictures are I don't know. There is no "Diorama" folder, nor a "Dioramas old" folder. Just a single "Dioramas new" folder.

I started looking throught the folder.

Did I ever show you this one:

Maybe. I mean, why wouldn't I show you this? I still remember the place this diorama was built from, inside a kind of walled imperial park/city in the middle of Kyoto. So I definitely showed you this.

But probably not exactly this one, since there were like 25 assorted versions of it in that folder.

You know, maybe I'll just organize my pictures on another day?

 

Memory boxes

 

While we wait for me to return from Montpellier and report on the vital issues of the day, we're mostly running through some photography experiments. These take in some photographs going back to Japan, though some, like of the fountain, are just from this past week or so.

Light of day

 

As I am doing a lot of drawing and layering of pictures, I am accumulating many images that haven't found a place here yet. But in looking them over I did come to the stunning realization that

NOT EVERYTHING I WORK ON HAS TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

So with that in mind, I'll leave off a few thousand things I was thinking of showing you and go with just these:

A few days ago I came up with a Tolstoy inspired title for my post and felt strongly enough about it to put it on my shirt, at least fictionally. Then I spent quite awhile making it into this self portrait drawing:

Here we have a picture from Tokyo, of a train crossing near the house we were staying at just beyond the edge of a fabulous park.

We loved that place we stayed at despite it being FILLED WITH SPIDERS! Which speaks to its other qualities. We often came home late at night (for us), down a canal path and across these train tracks. We were in the biggest city in the world, but it felt like a lonely country railroad crossing:

And finally (and with that word I will be axing hours of prepared material for you!), there is this drawing I made or worked up out of an already much worked up image from the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite places in Japan.