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.

Clouds in the South of France

 

I have been so taken in the past by various clouds here along the Mediterranean in the South of France that I've just started pointing my camera at the sky and shooting:

click click click click. 

Et voila! I'm done. 

Oh no! They moved and they're even better now! 

click click click click click click!

click click click click click click!

And there it is!

Oh, but now look at it!

click click click click click.

I will never ever miss film rolls in film cameras. I was never rich enough for it.

Nevertheless this is not the easiest way to get a good picture. 

Many months ago, in Theoule Sur Mer, I tried converting my images into something akin to Monet paintings, but the loss of reality was too much for the delicate French reality of the skies. Today, from our kitchen window and out over the hills above a hotel built for Queen Victoria to winter in, on a hot, not particularly clear day, there were the kind of astonishing clouds that had me at it again with my camera.

The same thing happened really, the clouds kept changing and getting better or stranger, the pictures seemed grand when I looked at them one way, and then they looked like I took some pictures of clouds when I looked at them another way.

Which, fairly speaking, is what they were.

But I think I've got a better editing routine this time.

And I like this little series, though your mileage may vary.

I do want to say though that I don't think the clouds here on the Cote d'Azur are better. Yes, there are some things that are better here, absolutely. But clouds? 

One of my favorite things about clouds as they seem to be able to pull it off anyhwere.

Fortunately that still includes here...

What these birds remind me of

 

Since we moved here I have been watching the seagulls flying outside our windows with great pleasure. This in addition to all the delightful and more comical encounters with them at the fish markets, along the boulevards, and of course at the beach. But from our windows they are at their most elegant, and to my great surprise remind me of the bald eagles we watched so eagerly from the windows of our Saint Minneapolis apartment.

Even to me it seems absurd that a seagull could remind me so regularly of a bald eagle. 

Check out this at least half fake picture I made:

Not much to it, eh? The eagle is surely twice the size. He is fearsome, dense, muscular, and imperious. Could there be two such different birds?

And yet maybe our way in is that dead fish they are both happily eating. These birds are, for all their vast differences, primarily waterside scavengers. And maybe that is what gives them some kind of similar quality out my windows across continents. The way they fly is astonishingly similar. Sure, in close quarters the seagull is far more active, ridiculous, and scrappy. The eagle is economical and careful about its energy. But out my window it is the same exact kind of imperious soaring they partake of, the same steady wings, and the same careful, slightly joyous use of the wind. And though in our picture here they look wildly different, in the air somehow they seem nearly the same size, with the smaller seagull's wings sprawling richly out, and its head and sometimes tail flashing white in the sky, dark and light, just like the eagle. They're both magnificent to watch as they glide with the barest touch of effort as they look about for...  nice... dead... things.

As we got towards Summer here another bird, apparently in for Spring and Summer from Africa, came to flood the skies. I don't think I saw a single one of them until maybe May? The air is rarely free of them now as, unlike the sometimes economical seagull, and the always careful eagle, these birds live most of their life on the wing. Their's is a life in the air nearly like fish in water. These are the swifts, and while I love watching them wheel about, they also evoke in me a strange analogy. These swifts curiously remind me of... mosquitoes.

Well, that seems even more inexplicable, but I have a guess for why they might seem alike. The swifts are feeding on insects in the air all day, and so why wouldn't they fly a bit like them, in their irregular patterns, in order to catch them? It at least seems possible to me. And maybe it's them we have to thank for how really minimal the irritating insects have been in this city.

But no matter, the truth is, mosquito-like or not, I am thankful to all these animals, nearly all birds, because this city life has its price to pay. The wilds can drift far away, and the rarity of the connection to that non anthropocene world becomes ever more precious. I am hardly likely to scoff at even the scrabbling pigeons here, where people seem to fill up every space in every way. Every single thing scudding across our hot skies is its own small piece of relief.

Even seeing a dead rat in the street, while evoking its touch of horror, also, like I would imagine it would for a seagull or an eagle, brings me a touch of delight. The world breathes in and out. I need every reminder I can get.

In the heat of the summer

 

Here's a repost for you, thrown out from a much too hot France that is tossing fitfully under a giant, continental heatwave, to remind me of... colder times. We do have air conditioning, which struggles a bit to keep up, but I'm not complaining.

Oh, wait, I am complaining. 

And reposting a years old Winter classic.

Nevertheless I appreciate the cool relief of our apartment, which is palpable when we walk in from the baking attic hallway. We recently found out from a neighbor that despite some far bigger and fancier apartments below us, we are the only ones in the building with air conditioning! I think it was put in around the edges of the permissions for the building, and perhaps by virtue of the persuasive charms of our young French/Italian landlord who lived here at the time.

But I'm just guessing.

The other reason I am reposting today is so I could watch the France vs. Norway match, but Norway, in what I consider to be an unwise move from their coach, and a bit cowardly, is "resting" their star player. It takes some of the fun out of it, but, so far the game is not without fun, so I'll head back to it, and leave you to this:

I wandered out into the gritty center of Winter. One might even say I trudged, as I soon found myself in a local, sidewalkless neighborhood, plodding in unplowed streets where the snow had turned to what my wife calls brown sugar and butter. It was a mild day, in the twenties (270 kelvins), and though I had two cameras I had walked a long way without feeling the slightest compulsion to photograph anything.

And then, down a long street, coming from the railroad track's dead end, there were the turkeys. 

It is, after all, the turkeys' neighborhood.

I took pictures of them, dark in the snow and under a dim, gray sky. I came close to them which always sets them on their slow way, though they never linger too much anyway. All day they make their long, stately rotation through the backyards and streets of the neighborhood. I love how it is all a world of humans, with grids and walks and straight ways, but the turkeys move through it as a wild world, a world of turkeys, hilly and flat, grass and snow and cement, but all of it open equally to them, none of it straight or for one place to another.

As I stood photographing, the turkeys strolled by me so close that I could not get a picture, partly from the movement, partly from the limitations of the lens, and partly from my beating heart, thrilling at being all among the wild turkeys.

I do my best not to impinge upon the hospitality of the turkeys. I'll linger with them where I first come upon them. Then sometimes I'll follow around to meet them on a second street. After that I get the sense that maybe they've had enough of me, even if I, not always, of them.

I have shown you many pictures these years of the turkeys, but rarely have I gotten ones of them so grouped together, and so I hope that a couple of those give a feel for the flock, and for being among them.

The sea again and again

 

I take a lot of pictures of the sea here. Some of them might be good, some not. But they're just the sea. They don't really say "France", or tell you about where I'm living, or illustrate the strangeness of a life here that's so different than the life that came before. It's the hardest thing to tell about because it's the most the same. You have the same thing wherever you are. It doesn't have to be the sea.

You have a sky and a moon and a tree or a cactus, a river, rain falling from the sky, or snow, and they're all as good as it gets.

I love this city, it is different and beautiful and usually so interesting. The cheese is good and the buildings are amazing. The streets are lively and full. There's music and history and pastry and the days go by very fast here.

But the sea, crashing into the rocks and the tiny stones of the shore, turns out to be the best part.

A nocturne

 

For a person who has never been able to handle well the stresses of life, and is prone to paroxysms of anxieties about everything from health issues to having to ask for something at a store, it may not have been the wisest thing to move to France. Every doctor, every interaction, every procedural requisite of life here is just a little, or a lot, more stressful. And though my interests in clerkmanifesto generally don't carry to a discussion of what we might or might not need in order to open a bank account, it would be disingenuous to go on about how good the cheese is everywhere without at least letting you know that all of this this this... paradise... 

is full of shadows. 

It is full of all the shadows I've carried in my life, and all the new ones that accelerate as I roll into my sixties. The sun is amazing here in this Belle Epoque fantasia of a city, but, you know,

shadows.

And so, when I tell you about tonight, with all my high falutin ecstacies, just, it's still life. And life, yours, or mine, is as good or as bad as it ever was.

But if you could come here, you should see it.

We went to the beach.

We went down to the vegetable and flower market at the old city, which, of course, was long finished and completely washed down, which workers do with great hoses every afternoon,  as sunset approached. Now it was a lovely place to stroll, lined with cafes and restaurants in various stages of opening. On a cool Sunday night the ever present buzz of people was there, even after the holidays in early January, and all those people were up to too many things to really account for here. The waterfall in the sky was maybe lit up in reddish lights, or perhaps that light was a quirk of the setting sun. The light is often strange and wonderful here, and this descending night was especially rich, seeming to fill up the lush Roman colors of the buildings with an illuminating power.

Through some columns were glimpses of the nearby beach, and as we had been stopped from our morning visit to the shore by what appeared to be a large marathon, we decided on a brief visit. Looking out at a particularly intense sunset, more down over the coastline than out over the horizon, we heard piano music and drifted over.

Along the large promenade someone had brought a piano. He had some system for pushing it on temporary wheels, and was now set up above the beach playing classical pieces. A crowd gathered, though not a huge one considering all the people about. The song ended and he started a new one, a particular favorite of ours, one of Chopin's Nocturnes, something we listen to at home as it is one of our very small new collection of record albums. In a state of unadulterated wonder, where all things are perfect, we gazed around us at everything that was beautifully dipped in dusk and sprinkled with night music. And as we acknowledged the unimprovable ecstacy of the moment, one by one, all the old streetlamps and strings of lights on the palm trees turned on, in a glorious, orderly, astonishing procession up the coast.

We sometimes talk about "plus one" here, where things that are complicatedly difficult always seem to have one more problem, one more layer to deal with. And just as you solve one issue it turns out there was one more thing in it, plus one. You get your medicine but they don't have the last one you need. They send you to the place that does. They have it, but not quite enough. Come back tomorrow.

But standing there listening to Chopin while the surf whispers in the background and palm trees light the way out into the Mediterranean, it must also be acknowleded that the "plus one" can work both ways, and sometimes you think things cannot get more lovely, but they do.

Colors of the Cote D'Azur

 

To keep things humming along here at clerkmanifesto while we are navigating a move to another city, and while we sort of hop between two homes for awhile trying to get everything sorted, I have a few scenic shots of the local area. The general subject matter is pretty strictly accurate to my phones plain photography, but the colors might be ever so slightly exaggerated in the post processing.

Slightly...