At the speed of clouds

 

Since retiring I have been spending more time looking at clouds.

I recognize there may be something a bit cliched about that, or too quaint, but not wanting to go into these conditions wherein I look at clouds so much, I can say that said conditions are pretty bland. I am not lying in some magical grass meadow or anything. But there, nevertheless, I am, and there are the clouds, and sometimes I look at them a lot. That's just how it is.

So you may ask: Is this place I live in so particularly good at clouds?

Every place in the world, on the right day, is good at clouds. That's just how clouds are. So no, not in particular

But this place, the Cote d'Azur, seems to do particularly well at very volumetric, very clear, complicated, and grand clouds. More than once I have gotten all photography about them and served you up all sorts of pictures, mangled this way and that, to try to get the point of their sheer wonderfulness across to you. Whether I did or did not get that point across would be up to you and your long search through the clerkmanifesto archives. But this is not my mission today, and I have no new pictures.

I was really just watching the clouds.

And I noticed something about them. 

There is something miraculously pitched about the speed of clouds.

Clouds move at a speed just fast enough for us to notice, but one has to look for it. At first glance they seem to be stilled, a set tableau. And while one can see the movement and change with an applied concentration, each moment seems fixed, the scene casually appears to be a settled one, but the movement of the clouds nevertheless happens at the fastest possible speed for that fixed quality to still be true. As I watched the clouds I could see the movement, but the sky did not seem to be changing. Yet if I turned my attention, or looked away for even just a handful seconds, looking back to the sky I would find a very different scene.

What does this all mean? You might ask.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

But probably a bit more than most of things you might find here on the Internet today, which, come to think of it, might move at just about the same speed.

Experiments

 

I saw a Gallup poll today that showed that Republicans are more Popular than Democrats this year in America.

I had a lot of thoughts on this. 

Maybe you have some too.

They are complicated thoughts, and dark. And they balled up in my fist. I looked down. And I thought "Open your fist."

I opened my fist and found I only had a hand and a moth flew out of it and went to a light and circled it forever.

I have so many beautiful speeches.

I don't mean to brag, but I am wonderful.

But I would never say that. Or write it down.

Of the 64 pictures I made this evening these are the ones I wanted to show you.

Electric bike

 

 

 

 

After 30 years of shopping for one I bought an electric bike.

That's a long time to shop. 

It built up a lot of feelings in me. 

Now I have the electric bike and I am a little overwhelmed. It's so big. 

Big in size, big in expectation, big in personality, big in personal mythology, big.

I have ridden it, but mostly so far I stare at it, warily, trying to work it out.

I haven't yet worked it out.

Thirty years ago they didn't really have electric bikes. That's when I started shopping.

 

It's pretty cold out and getting colder. When the snow comes again that should do it altogether and I'll put my bike in storage for four or five months having hardly used it. 

I would have loved having this bike best when I was 12, on the streets of the San Fernando Valley, where it was Summer most of the time and my neighborhood was 100 percent steep hills. My bike has a way of making hills like they're nothing. It's already my favorite thing about my bike.

I would also have loved having this bike when I was thirty, and my back didn't hurt most of the time, and I could bike through the Fairgrounds to my new job at the library.

I might also love having this bike next summer, when I can load my camera in the panniers and head to the wilder parks along the River that are too far to walk to and take pictures of bears and coyotes, bald eagles and raccoons, skunks and fossils and wildflowers and blue cheese caves.

I put a bell on my bike, an extra light, and a rear view mirror.

For some reason I wanted to say in here: "Everyone should have an electric bike."

But it turns out what I need to say is: "May you all get what you want in less than thirty years."

And:

"I think thirty years is better than never."

 

 

 

 

Futurist

Recently, just after I ordered an E-bike online, I had an epiphany.

I am a Futurist.

That was the epiphany. 

I have been shopping for an E-bike for thirty years. When I first started shopping for an E-bike they didn't exist. Then, slowly, they had some really crappy ones to lure in people like me who were dreaming so hungrily of them that they might make ill-advised purchases. Then they started having insanely expensive ones (they still have plenty of those) and I'm not rich. Finally in the past couple years they started having decent ones that seem to be affordable and reliable. So I socked money away until the time was right and I ordered one. 

The process took thirty years. I played the long game. 

I'm a futurist.

At least, I think I am.

The other thing that made me feel I must be a futurist is VR. I dreamed of VR before those headsets existed too. My whole relation to video games has been future oriented and VR was an extension of that. When Pong was around VR was an impossible dream, but that didn't mean a person couldn't dream it. A few years ago I was able to buy a VR headset. It was astonishing, a small miracle. I'd still have it but I sold it for an upgrade that didn't work out, and unfortunately the market is in a weird phase. I am hoping it will pull through it, but I'm kind of waiting it out for now. 

It's just around the corner.

I'm a futurist.

And then today I was out walking around with my astonishing super zoom camera that can take close up pictures of things hundreds of feet away. It can also take thousands of pictures and require no film or development. I don't think I even dreamed this one ahead of time. It just slowly came available and one day I was so gobsmacked that it existed that I bought it.

Anyway, I took a picture of a turkey,

 and I went down to the river, thinking of all these things.

And I had an epiphany:

I'm not a Futurist.

I just like magic.

Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But it's not just self powered bikes, time travel, and VR that I realized I'm interested in.

Any sufficiently excellent art is indistinguishable from magic.

Any wild animal you get a good look at is indistinguishable from magic.

Trees, for god's sake, are indistinguishable from magic.

And so is love.

It was a fun and a very sophisticated and scientific feeling to be a Futurist there for a week or so.

But I'm simpler than that. 

I just like magic.

Bleached

As winter has come rolling in I have found less to photograph. All the greyed grey light doesn't help. Color has been steadily slipping away everywhere; no flowers, no butterflies, no bees, and what leaves there are have exhausted every hue as they burned them up in October.

Snow is lovely, but so white and so hard for me to photograph.

Sometimes I feel as if I am just taking my camera for a walk, and often, instead of coming home with 200 pictures, I have only six, or 12, or none at all.

But still, every once in awhile I do come across something I find interesting (or, at least, my camera finds it so). This happened recently with a patch of old Hosta leaves, bleached to the bones of their leaf structure. Their season was over. Soon the snow would bury them and only naked ground will be seen there when that snow finally recedes again in the Spring.

But Spring is far away from us now. 

We just dream that it will come again. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. Only now is assured. And for now we have this.

 

Not writing

 

 

 

 

 I am out at the front desk of the library and though just four hours ago this spot was pure chaos, it is now unbelievably quiet. I yawn loudly. I spin in my chair back and forth like a little kid. Fifty years on from it and there sure is a lot of little kid left in me.

One patron comes into the library, and I direct them on their way. A minute later they leave with their three books and we are down to zero patrons.

I think:

"It would be nice to write a blog post now."

So I consider what to write for a long time, twirling and yawning and listening to the hum of the building. I can't think of anything to say, and all this nothingness is suddenly too lovely to touch. So I decide I won't write anything right now.

And I take up my pen.

And I do.

 

 

 

Is photography cheating?

I am terribly fond of the question "Is photography cheating?" 

But what is my answer?

In one of the top ten all time romantic comedies, Long Shot, Charlize Theron asks Seth Rogan if he wants the job of punching up her speeches to make them funnier.

"Yes, no, I don't know?" He answers. "Can I think about it?"

Yeah, that's my answer.

But I love the question!

I take hundreds of pictures during the week. When the weather is lovely like it has been this week I go out in my neighborhood in the morning for an hour long picture taking safari. And then at work, in the late afternoon, I go to the swamp and the prairie behind my library for a half hour more. Through the weekend I do my more and more involved editing and post processing of all those pictures. Making a blogpost of and around some of my pictures can happen at any time.

And yet to my surprise I remain uninvested.

There are tons of better photographers than me. A few are famous, some are professionals, but by far most are neither. I'm happy to have them there. I won't be challenging them. I just take pictures.

Did you know that Vermeer, one of the most revered painters of all time, used a kind of a camera, a camera obscura, to more or less trace his masterpieces?

It's true!

Was it cheating?

Yes!

Does it matter?

I'm pretty sure no.

Is it hard to take a good picture?

Yes, no, maybe? But it is definitely easier than painting a good painting.

Are Cindy Sherman's photographs art?

Of course! 

Is she cheating.

I don't know. I guess? Maybe art is full of cheating? But man, the art where you point a device at something and it makes an image magically, well, that might have a bit more cheating than most of the other ones. 

Maybe cheating is the wrong word?

In soccer there is a term for someone who doesn't care which team wins: A neutral. The soccer game in question might not involve a team one follows, or one might just like to watch good soccer, but a neutral is not emotionally invested in the outcome. They just are interested. 

I'm a neutral here.

And when I'm taking a picture with a modestly fancy camera of some amazing bird, or butterfly, or flower, and it comes out and it gets to be like I took a really good picture even though its mostly just that the bird or butterfly of flower is insanely beautiful, okay. But it might be cheating. And when I make the colors stronger with a few computer clicks, or even different than they really are, maybe that's a bit of cheating too? I think about it a lot when I'm doing it.

Yes, no, maybe.

But the best part is that, as a neutral, I like all the answers.

Favorite color

Because I sometimes write about the visual arts here on clerkmanifesto people are always asking me "What's your favorite color?"

That's nice.



 I like questions so much I sometimes make them up just so I can answer them.






My favorite color?



This, I guess:

Or sometimes this color. There's overlap.

A couple days ago one of my top five favorite YouTubers, or, wait, let me put that the right way:

The greatest YouTuber there is (with there being five greatest YouTubers of all time), Captain Disillusion, did a video about color.

I learned that color is a fiction. 

And that Isaac Newton was smarter than...

everyone ever?

And the rest of it I basically didn't understand.

But the main point is that this: 

Is all in our heads.

And this:

This:

And this too:

Are all in our heads.

But then, what isn't?

I guess I'm still trying to work that out. 

Some things are all in our heads. Some things aren't.

Sometimes that's an important question.

Sometimes it isn't.

Gifts of the Universe

I am not here today to discuss the advisability of taking everything that happens in the world personally. It's probably a bad idea, and the number of times I have found myself bitterly muttering "It's so unfair!" at the vagaries of life has undoubtedly worn some unpleasant grooves into my soul.

But that personalness also has its moments.

When I am walking along in the natural world and an animal blesses me with its presence, it feels not just like a gift, but it even feels a little like the glorious, resounding approval of the Universe.

Thank you Universe. I'm so glad you like me.

I like you too.






I have always felt some of this in my ambling through the natural world, but it has become even more pronounced now as I go out picture taking with my camera. This Summer when I saw my first Monarch Butterfly it remained tauntingly out of reach. I would follow the resplendent insects through the neighborhoods in pursuit of one elusive photograph, but ever would they fly on and on. So one day, when a monarch finally landed on some exquisite flower, my heart was as like to burst. Confetti flung from it. I took pictures and felt Royally endowed, complimented, and redeemed.

I soon found many Monarchs to photograph with my long distance, zoom lens. But venturing within 15 feet of any of these wonders would send the butterfly fluttering away into the air. I often wondered what it might be like to put on my macro lens attachment and take super close-up shots of a Monarch, but I figured that with my needing to be within a foot of my subject for such a thing to work out it probably wasn't in my future butterfly photography.

That is until today, when out photographing, a butterfly flew up to me, danced several seconds in the air a few inches from my face, and then plopped down to preen on the cool, petaless flower I'd just been photographing at my hip.

Okay.

Thank you.

I guess I've been good.

So have you.












After I finished taking ridiculously close pictures of a butterfly's wing, and some bees while I was at it, and a couple of flowers for good measure, I headed off towards home. As I walked I mused on all these things I've been telling you. 

And then all of the sudden there were turkeys all around me.

I am grateful.

And so, clearly, is the Universe.







Notes: