Some cat

 

No, there is no picture of a cat today. I'm going to tell you a story.

In this busy city I see many people. They are very interesting. I like best when they are from everywhere and not just French, which is more true the closer one gets to the water here. Japanese American German Syrian Indian Senegalese Chinese, beggers, rich people, people falling apart in wheel chairs, young people, working people, old people, and people bursting with life! It is amazing.

I also see a lot of dogs, and they are largely well behaved and interesting too! I see pigeons, who I am very fond of, and seagulls, who are dazzling expressions of the wind. And less often, if I am very, very lucky, I run into a cat.

Today I saw a cat!

Yes yes yes yes, big deal, I saw a cat. There are lots of cats. And I would grudgingly accept your tepid, non cat obsessed view of the universe, and move on to complain about cars or something, but...

BUT

This was some cat.

If this cat knew a spider, the spider might weave a web that spelled out "Some Cat!".

But the literary spiderweb would have mostly been confusing because this cat was on the move! If you saw the web in the corner of a building saying "Some Cat!" you might look around and mutter "What cat?". 

Unless you read clerkmanifesto.

Which is why it is a good idea to read clerkmanifesto.

Tell your friends.

Let me set the scene:

My darling wife and I had morning business on the computer in our cozy little apartment. So we didn't get going until afternoon. We then had a few life supplies to pick up so we went and bought:

Toilet paper

Garbage bags

Sparkling water

Champagne

Tonic Water

A chocolate patisserie

These were heavy (well, not the patisserie, but it was delicate). So we decided we would stop home to drop them all off.

Also, and I'm sorry about this. It is crude. But I cannot hide it from you:

We had to pee.

But when we got home we were hungry, so we made lunch.

I had potatoes, onion, fennel, with very aged gouda. And then we were feeling very cozy indeed and not so keen to go out again. But we have an informal rule: go see the water every day! So we made a plan:

What if I took us out for a drink at the fabulous sidewalk cafe Verragno? And then we sat there drinking our drinks. Then we went to the water. Then we came home?

So we did.

Which sets our scene.

A table was available where we sit side by side on a short pedestrian street that goes but one block to the ocean. It is a pageant of humanity! We watched the people go by. We talked about stuff.

What stuff?

Wouldn't you like to know!

My darling wife had a rose'. I had a Campari Spritz. It was large and bitter. I like their strong spritzes at Verragno. They are seven euros during happy hour.

And then a pigeon landed in the road, or the pedestrian way. And we heard a great and terrible yowl.

What a yowl. I didn't think a pigeon could make such a noise, but it was definitely animal, not human.

The pigeon left hurriedly.

And that's when it happened.

The cat appeared.

With a terrible and discordant bellow, he strutted into view on the busy way, headed away from the ocean, into the city. He wore an astonishing necklace full of large diamonds. His coloring was unlike any I've ever seen on a housecat, more like that of a leopard, with sleek and dangerous brown ringed spots on a lighter fur background.

Some cat!

And he had business!

Without hesitating he walked on, ropey and sleek, yowling occasionally, never hesitating, and soon he was out of view, swallowed up in the crowds and noise and tumult of the Rue De France.

What on earth did we just see?

A cat.

We finished our drinks and walked to the ocean.

We came home and I told you about it.

Welcome to my web.

Condeluded the greatest amusement park ride ever!

 

It has almost been a week since we visited our mythical amusement park Clerkmanifestoland.

That is too long! Or maybe it is exactly as long as it was destined to be.

I guess it depends on how you feel the Universe works.

But we are back today, visiting the most wonderful amusement park in the world, Clerkmanifestoland. To refresh your memory, Clerkmanifestoland is the gigantic amusement park based on clerkmanifesto, which is coincidentally what you are reading right now. The symbol of the Clerkmanifestoland Park is the ubiquitous bugheart symbol. It has fox, skunk, the King of the Schnorrers, and Doris the super intelligent alien as its delightful mascots.  And of course there are its famous five lands: 

We aren't featuring a first person account today of someone's personal experience in the park as we have done a couple of times in the past. Today is a simple presentation of a park ride that is located in Dreamland Rome, the land perhaps most famous for its mercurial Bernini Vs. Borromini Martin Buber Memorial Theater. 

Dreamland Rome has but one ride, The Condeluded Ride, but boy is it some ride!

I'm going to tell you about it today!

And show you a lot of pictures of it too.

Named for the famous word, coined years ago here in clerkmanifesto, "condeluded", which means to be confused in one's own favor,  this ride travels through what may be post apocalyptic industrial wastelands, but they could very well just be regular old industrial wastelands, it can be oddly hard to tell the difference.

 Known famously as "The Best Ride Ever" mostly due to the plethora of signs throughout the ride stating exactly that, Condeluded is a leisurely swan boat ride with a few highly touted "thrills", usually where the swan boats dump out of sewage channels.

The ride is crammed with signs about how great it is, all as your swan boat lazily drifts you through weirdly colored water, towering garbage heaps, and unwholesome smells. "Voila!" You will cry. "It is a critique of Capitalism itself!" 

But for all the money you paid to get in the park and go on the ride itself, fortunately, it is also rather a pleasant ride.

The exit of the ride does wander past a small gift shop, which is pretty damn ironic! You know what else is ironic? Sometimes you can see more people wearing the "Capitalism Sucks" shirts from this shop than you can see wearing the plain bugheart shirts which are sold everywhere!

As a final note: If you are a fan of park mascots and the like, you will find that Doris, the super intelligent alien who lives in the park (so we call her a mascot) is fairly obsessed with this ride. So if you want an autograph or selfie, it is never too hard to spot her on or near this ride.

Two-headed woman

 

This is one of clerkmanifesto's longest blogposts, so buckle up for the ride.

Why is it so long? You ask. Well, it's really two different blog posts that ended up sort of stuck together.

That's a joke that will make sense as you read on.

This is a true story. And if you have not heard of these people, you might find it implausible.

Because it is implausible.

Astonishing.

Unbelievable even. 

I, who knew of these people, and seen pictures of them in the past, still struggled to take it in in all its wonder and strangeness.

But I get ahead of myself. No pun intended.

My darling wife and I were in a pretty little Minnesota River Town out at the tail end of last year, which was also last week. It was a lovely weekend full of wine and coffees and rambling idleness. The little shops were full of nothing to buy but plenty to look at. It was warm for a Winter day, and there was no snow or ice to navigate. This is its own kind of bliss where I live when it's late in December. 

We were crossing the main street to head back towards a cozy and immaculate antiquarian bookshop called Black Letter Books. There was a group of five or six people on the sidewalk up ahead of us.

One of them had two heads.

ONE OF THEM HAD TWO HEADS!!!!

Or... two of them had one body?

There was a two-headed woman!

I'm not trying to be unseemly, although maybe simply talking about it can't help. 

Do you want me to not talk about it?

Oh, that's insightful, but, a two-headed woman?

I ask you: How does one address such a thing? It was as unmissable as a troop of mooses walking down the street, or possibly as unmissable as seeing a single unicorn, which might make a more accurate analogy. But I didn't stare, or gawk, or intrude upon them. I didn't ask for an autograph for god's sake.

And, composing this, I even wondered: Can I call them a two-headed woman? 

Probably not? 

But that is pretty much... what they are.

They are conjoined twins with two hearts, two stomachs (inside) but one belly button, two arms, two legs, two noses, and one job as a school teacher, although they both have to do it. They teach fifth grade in a school that's in the County I work in, so cheaping out on a salary for one of them checks out.  About a decade ago a TV show followed them around for a year, but then the twins apparently had enough of all that, and utterly dropped out of the public eye.

I mean except wherever they are, where they would be the main thing anyone will look at whether they want to or not. Even not looking is looking.

Which seems like it would have gotten pretty old for these conjoined twins a long, long time ago.

Which is why I did not approach them on the street and ask:

"Have you read my occasionally sensitive (and occasionally insensitive- but let's not focus on that) blogpost I wrote about you two?"

Also, fairly speaking, I hadn't written it yet.

How rare are conjoined twins? I have done some research on this, and I discovered that... I am not that great of a researcher.

I'm kind of a low-hanging fruit researcher, and, surprisingly, there isn't as much low-hanging fruit here as one would think. But here's what I learned:

Conjoined twins occur once every 50 to 60 to 180 thousand births. That seemed pretty frequent to me. So I ran some math on it. This means that there are roughly 800 to 2,000 conjoined twin births every year! 

But... about 40% are not alive when born. And 35% percent die the day after. So I guess we're down to 200 to 500 a year. Any conjoined twins that can be separated are, but I am coming up blanks on how many that is. Which leaves us with, each year, a total of I-have-no-idea how many conjoined twins trucking along together into life. 

So, since I wanted to know how many conjoined twins there are just sort of walking around the world like the ones I saw, I tried looking it up from the other side: Who are the conjoined twins of the world?

Of the listings for conjoined twins born in the twenty-first century, I counted five pairs still attached. And there are seven still conjoined pairs alive who were born in the twentieth century. This gives us a total of 12 pairs of living conjoined twins. A pretty rare group.

But!

This list from Wikipedia (I already confessed I'm not that great a researcher- Wikipedia is the ultimate low-hanging fruit) is a list of "notable" conjoined twins.

But!

What conjoined twins, still together and alive, would not be considered "notable"?

So I'm going with an overall count of twelve or so pairs of conjoined twins, which makes them as rare as someone who is nearly eight feet tall or taller.  

Here is some context: As a child I saw Kareem Abdul Jabbar in a stairwell once and still remember it. He is 7'2".

In short, there are not that many conjoined twins to run into around town.

Everyone I have talked to about these conjoined twins has said something along the lines of: "I have so many questions". And, of course they do.

I have found the answers to many of them, but I'm just going to share a kind of general answer to a question that's not exactly asked:

Of the small group of conjoined twins in the world, they all seem pretty okay. They all seem to be doing fine. Someone even did a study and determined that conjoined twins are... I don't know, pretty happy. I mean, they didn't wake up one day and find themselves awkwardly attached to someone else. That's probably where we come at it from, but not them. And of course they know that they are missing some things in life most people take for granted. But all the conjoined twins I've seen have carried on and live life with a reasonable measure of contentment.

I mean, what do you want them to say about it all? So maybe stop writing blog posts about them! It's just life. They're just people living life with some unusual circumstances!

Oh, you're still here?

Me too.

You want more?

Okay. 

The twins my wife and I saw did a kind of documentary show a decade or so ago and you can see some of that on YouTube. One can find other conjoined twins from the 12 pairs I found who talk about life. But also, oddly, there's a sometimes silly movie by the Farrelly Brothers about a pair of conjoined twins, called Stuck on You, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear. I've always loved that movie, but having learned a few things now about conjoined twins, I have to say, they actually kind of got it just right.

And one last thing.

You may or may not be amazed at the astonishing rarity and uniqueness of the phenomenon of conjoined twins that I witnessed on the streets of Minnesota the other day. It was amazing. But it is worth noting and remembering this:

You are even more rare.

So take care of yourself.

The Disneyfication of the city

 

It is strictly meant pejoratively when people talk about Disneyfication. And while I can see a little of what people are getting at- homogenized highly manufactured and controlled environments- I consider Disneyfication to be far closer to a model of what we need in a city than it is the thing our urban environments should fear.

Far, far, far, far, far closer.

And we don't have to even go farther than the car. Besides the Disney model being at a scale that makes it entirely walkable, it also provides as transit options: Trains, aerial tramways, monorails, people movers, horse drawn carriages, and boats. One of the only ways one doesn't get around in these parks is in a motor vehicle. This already puts the Disney model so far above any North American city I've ever been to that it can host half a dozen serious problem before it's brought down to the level of a San Francisco, let alone down to the freeway misery of some place like Phoenix. We are given here in Disney a head start of far better air quality, vastly safer streets, no relentless noise pollution, and healthier, more pleasant commuting. 

That's a major head start!

And when we do bring in the Disney problems nearly everyone of them is far more fixable than the bitter problem of car transportation that degrades almost every city in the world. Housing? There is no housing in Disney, but at least we don't have car centered housing sprawl of inappropriate single family homes that we have to work our density into, often against the will and economic interests of the home owners. We can just build four or five or six residential stories above the restaurants and shops, and most of them already have fake apartments above the stores anyway. We can simply make those real apartments. And as for all the corporate hegemony? I have my ideas, plenty of them, but honestly that problem has to be weeded out of everywhere and every city at this point.

Yesterday I watched an interesting video by RM Transit about aerial tramways. This is a person who makes excellent video essays about worldwide urban transit. And I was relieved to find he was positive about aerial tramways, saying their value depends upon their use and their situation, and that many cities have some wonderful tramways as part of their urban transit options. But I did feel that one important point about these cable cars, traveling on wires above the city, and crossing rivers and climbing steep hills, that was seriously undersold, is that they are charming.

They are a ride.

This is a point that new urbanists tend to undersell, possibly because their arguments are already so good to begin with, but making people-centered, engaging, practical, healthy urban environments can also be fun. Old and unusual transit can add profound charm to a city, whether it be the historic cable cars of San Francisco and Lisbon, the Vaporetti of Venice and Batobus of Paris, or the aerial trams of La Paz, Bolivia. And while I understand some of the economical practicality of busses, my heart rebels at their general joylessness. Just as we probably shouldn't have entirely impractical transit purely for charm's sake, neither should we have practical transit regardless of joy and aesthetics.

The truth is that charm is good for a city in every respect, not least quality of life, safety, and economic or productive vitality. The functional power of a city is essential, but it is only given meaning through the beauty and vitality that makes people want to be part of it. And so it is with transit as a subset of that. I happen to live in a city and in a situation where my journey to work, in a car, is largely full of personal convenience. But it is also bad for the environment, ugly, uninspiring, wildly expensive, unhealthy and dangerous. I'm not saying I have to be able to take a boat ride through a subterranean Pirate city to get to my work to be satisfied (though I would be!), but I am saying I want something better than a bus, even assuming we had nice enough ones that ran with a remotely acceptable frequency and directness.

I could sit here and tell you that we're all going to die from our cars and global warming, or that maybe soon my dear wife and I will be able to chuck it all for some distant city a hundred times more Disneyfied than anywhere in America, but with none of the downsides. But instead I stand here with my hat in hand, optimistic and hopeful:

I would like an aerial tramway please.

Thank you.

 

The greatest painting ever made!

 

The greatest painting ever made is...

Oh my god, this is so exciting!

I'm on the edge of my seat!

The greatest painting ever made is...

The Deposition from the Cross by Jacopo Pontormo!

Wait, why isn't everybody more amazed and excited? 

Oh, right, because this is the third part of our analysis of this painting.

 

You want to see the painting? 

Okay, here is a barely adequate reproduction to get us warmed up:

Now, even though we are on the third and final part of our review of this greatest painting, parts one and two have merely set the stage and provided the context for our discussion today. So finally there's going to be tons of stuff today actually about the Deposition!

But first let's review as briefly as possible so we're all set to discuss this masterpiece like we're all big time Art History Majors.

1. Deposition from the Cross is the greatest painting ever, better than any other, with the understanding that there are many other greatest ever paintings, also better than any others. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.

2. There were three sequential periods in art broadly around the time of this painting; Renaissance, then Mannerism, then Baroque. They are like an Oreo cookie. Renaissance is the first cookie and was about harmony, balance, developing naturalism, and the birth of individual celebrity genius. Baroque is the second cookie naturally progressing from the first, being about applying that mastery of naturalism to our own recognizable world and all its passionate, gritty reality. In between the two lay the strange and mercurial cream of the Oreo, Mannerism, the period which our painting by Pontormo occupies the very epicenter of.

3. Mannerism was the wild and crazy artistic answer to "What do you do when you've mastered naturalism and perfect anatomy and 3D rendering through linear perspective?" With the answer being: 

You mess with it. 

4. Michelangelo, genius of the Renaissance, kicked off Mannerism by getting so good at Renaissance art that he was bored of it (see hand, below, for example of perfected Renaissance naturalism).

So Michelangelo invented (sort of) Mannerism, taking complete command of the naturalism of Renaissance art and twisting it to the artist's vision, understanding, and expressions of heightened elegance. This, as seen below, in an example of his Sistine Ceiling, which is the first, great, and wildly influential, Mannerist work.

Now we're up to date!

Here is Jacopo Pontormo:

Hey, wait, we recognize this guy.

Where do we know him from?

Oh yeah, there he is. The figure on the far right in our painting, kind of in the back there.

Hi Jacopo! (One day maybe I'll tell you about his food journals!)

The best place I have ever been for looking at art, just wandering in someplace and looking at art, is Rome. It's not that there aren't dozens of places to pay to go see amazing art, or even legendary museums with blood curdlingly long lines and oppressive crowd control (hello Vatican Museum!), but you can also just wander into any number of mostly churches and see Raphael frescoes ignored in the corner, or a Michelangelo sculpture with a few velvet ropes protecting it, or countless Caravaggio paintings in dark side chapels that you will find pictures of in every reputable book on the history of art, and that are now just... sitting there, for you, in the dark.

But The Deposition (as we will henceforth call it) is in Florence. 

And Florence, while featuring nearly as great and vast a collection of art as Rome, does not have much one can just wander into, free and half ignored, and can have to yourself. Even though there is plenty of legendary Florence art socked away in churches and cloisters and side aspses and whatnot, they've done a fairly serious job of monetizing the lot of them, and making a little mini museum out of everything. 

But there is one exception.

The Deposition. 

By Pontormo. 

Yep this one, here it is, in situ:

Now, amazingly, this little chapel, the Capponi Chapel, was designed by one of the most important architects ever, Brunelleschi, the same guy who designed the Florence Cathedral Dome, one of the greatest feats in the entire history of Architecture! 

But we don't have time to go into all that. 

We'll just say Pontormo was asked (hired?) to decorate it.

This Capponi Chapel is in Santa Felicita, a modest church in (sort of) the heart of Florence. I say "sort of" because Santa Felicita really is pretty central, right near the Ponte Vecchio (the famous bridge) and just down the street from the Pitti Palace. 

But it is on the "wrong" side of the river, in the neighborhood called Oltrarno. So, "sort of".

Anyway, nice place, convenient location, free admission. I mean, one can just walk right into this church, Santa Felicita, and see the greatest painting ever made. That's how my wife and I saw it. It was crowded outside, but we were all alone with the painting. It's a pretty amazing thing. 

But you might be able to pick out a problem.

Yes, it's behind a cage. 

So that's kind of too bad.

Pontormo's Deposition is a picture of when Jesus's friends and family take him down from the cross after he's dead. That's why everyone looks pretty gobsmacked in the painting. Like:

I think that's Mary. And then there's this guy:

God I love their strange, almost elfen rounded faces, but I mustn't get sidetracked. Because my point is that even with all the weird, wild, Mannerist craziness in this painting, it is fair to start with this:

1. It is full of feeling. 

The Messiah guy, who was supposedly super nice and generous and wise, was institutionally murdered in an unbelievably brutal way, God on Earth was killed, and these people are brokenhearted! They are wandering, almost lost with grief, with his body, and with nowhere to go. It's terrible.

Remember how I said Mannerism came after The Renaissance and it was like they already mastered anatomy and naturalism and space and rendering in the Renaissance, so the Mannerists were like: 

Let's mess with it?

That doesn't mean they hadn't mastered all those things too. Remember Michelangelo's hand of David above as my example of perfecting representation? This painting is full of warped laws of physics, strange elongations, crazy colors, and twisting poses, but, check out, for example, this hand by Pontormo:

When Pontormo paints a pink lobster 9-foot crouching carrier of Christ it's not because he doesn't know how to do the perfect normal version at full on Rembrandt level. 

What I'm saying is: This painting is full astonishing rendering. 

It's just got some bigger fish to fry too.

Oh, and by the way. Do you know how many hands I counted in this painting? Eleven.

That's also the number of people in this painting.

It probably means something.

So what all is in this painting:

11 people with 11 hands visible

Some featureless ground that sort of disappears

A tiny cloud in the upper left

Enough pretty, colorful fabric that one could probably wrap up the moon in it.

That's all. 

No hill.

No strangers.

No cross.

Fun fact:

Brunelleschi, who designed this chapel, is generally credited as being the person who described and articulated the rules for linear perspective. This may have done more to change western painting than anything else ever. It ruled painting for 500 years and created the naturalism of space in painting according to scientific and mathematic principals.

But get this: Pontormo, painting said chapel many years later, fully versed in linear perspective, is nevertheless having none of that. Figures are floating in air, rising up (maybe that's why he put in a cloud, though it's a sad little gray one). There is no ground. No horizon. Not really even sky. And no linear perspective!

 Here, look at this guy again:

He's carrying the larger part of a dead Christ, crouched awkwardly, and it's like he's floating on his toes. Feet rise away from him on cloth, off the ground, into nothing.

He curves, he floats, he grieves. He's resplendent in gold and pewter and pink and sadness.

But look at it: everyone is floating, rising, lamenting, twirling, grieving, swirling. It's like a dance with everything curving and curling into everything else. The curve of the pink back. The curve of Christ's torso and thighs. The curve of Mary's head through her reaching arm, the curve of the leaning figure above her, and on and on.

Christ has died and they are lost, in space and time and purpose and grief.

It's pretty neat.

They are burdened with a dead god and it's beautiful and terrible.

It's a good painting.

What's so great about The Lorax

 

Only known historic picture of the now presumed extinct Truffula Tree (on left).

Among the remarkable and prescient work of Dr. Seuss nothing is quite as immortal as his nearly biblical classic The Lorax.

Or, as a regular human might put it: 

I really like The Lorax.

And it's not just for the purity and moralism of its storyline, which reaches so far into fable and fairytale that it ventures into the best of religious literature, nor is it just its astonishing politics that more than half a century later are more flatly and desperately essential than ever, but it's also in the small sweetnesses of its sketch of a storyline, the deep truth of its themes, and even in the touch of its own self chiding awareness.

But let's pull back a little.

The Lorax is a picture book, for little kids!, about a young person in something of an environmental wasteland, who is seeking the story of what happened.

Spoiler Alert!:

What happened is that Capitalism and self-justifying greed destroyed the world. 

It's a small scale post apocalyptic tale as essential and far seeing as 1984, Brave New World, or The Handmaid's Tale. only super short and, honestly, not as unnerving, which is just as well since seven year olds, its intended audience, are no more resilient now than they were when it was written. 

Anyway, a Capitalist, called The Once-ler, comes across an unspeakably beautiful forest which he then begins to cut down in order to create (and market very effectively) a clothing product, the Thneed. He, the Once-ler, is warned about the terrible damage he's doing multiple times by a hectoring mythical figure, The Lorax, who speaks for the trees and for all the animals made homeless by the relentless environmental degradation involved in the manufacture of Thneeds.

The Once-ler does not heed these warnings. Indeed his array of arguments and dismissals of the strident complaints of the Lorax are a pitch perfect representation of contemporary corporate, Republican, and Centrist Democrat ideology. It's more or less the neo-liberal playbook:

1. The Lorax is treated as annoying, moralistic, and a downer who needs to chill out. The Lorax is an SJW!

2. The Once-ler is a job creator!

3. People are crazy for Thneeds. What could be more democratic and right than providing what the people want?!

4. Obviously there are plenty of trees to go around! They're trees, for god's sake, they're everywhere!

5. If a few fish and birds have to pack it in sometimes there's just a cost that must be paid for progress.

6. The discussion is pointless anyway. The Once-ler is doing what it's his right to do; run a successful, tax-paying, people employing business.

The Lorax "speaks" for the trees, but while the very theme of The Lorax might be that seeing and speaking the truth and caring about it, is our only hope, it might be a questionable defense against Capitalism.

The end of the world is coming.

Keep a few seeds by to restart it later.

Care.

Here are a two touches I love about The Lorax:

1. The Lorax himself is not cute or eloquent or charming or smooth or persuasive. He's just this weird, small, cranky, middle-aged or older, slightly magical but not where it's important, speaker of truth. And he is naturally apoplectic to be saying "You're killing everything!" and to have the response be:

"Don't be such a nag."

and

"You've got to go along to get along."

and

"So what? Who cares anyway?"

The Lorax is Bernie Sanders, or most Americans at this moment, voting desperately for Joe Biden, or, probably, let's face it, and don't think he didn't know it, Dr. Seuss himself.

2. The Once-ler may be the ancient mariner of our story, doomed to tell the tale of his environmental crime and devastation, but he's not really reformed. Here's the telling thing about the Once-ler that I love:

 He still charges money for the story of how he broke the world in his pursuit of money!

Ha! Think of Bill Gates here, or any titan of Capitalism who retired to the lionized work of their Foundation.

And so in conclusion,

I didn't exactly notice this before, but,

wow,

The Lorax is a terrible, depressing book.

What was I thinking?

Jesus!

Terrible, terrible, bleak, miserable, depressing book.

But I guess it's good preparation for the reality of life in America. Go to it kids.