The canals of Paris

 

As I continue to prove my thesis that cities without cars, and where the roads are replaced by canals, are all improved, I find I may have wandered beyond my expiration date. While my demonstration yesterday of Venice with roads instead of canals was extremely convincing, I find in looking over my previous cities of Nice, Rome, and Kyoto, my argument is damaged by a few of my penchants.

1. The lack of people make the cities look like the victims of post apocalyptic floods more than the beneficiary of delightful urban renewal.

2. Lack of ground access to buildings makes it look challenging to get around.

3. Heavy focus on already charming alleys, some of which are almost car free anyway, soften my point.

So with all this in mind I am taking my campaign to Paris, France. I may still suffer some of the flaws from the list above, but I am improving.

Is Paris better with canals?

Do I just like canals?

Has my thesis wandered off the map?

These questions and more will surely be answered today and in the weeks to come!

Proof by the inverse

 

Many of my recent posts have been the piecemeal beginnings of a doctoral thesis on how any city is improved by getting rid of cars and replacing the roads with canals. It has been pretty convincing. But it has also been fun to do. So I have pretended that you are not yet convinced at all, and need every possible argument I can come up with.

So far I have put canals in Nice, France. I put some in Rome, Italy, stopping to install a few extra fountains there. And most recently I added extra canals to Kyoto, Japan, a place that has a canal or two, but clearly would not be too bad off with a few more.

These all came out quite nicely, if I do say so myself, which I find I usually have to. Nevertheless I found myself imagining the reader saying "Sure. Those particular cities did look a bit better with canals instead of streets, though they look a little post apocalyptic too. But what if you took a city of canals and instead replaced all the canals with streets?"

Ohhhhhh. What a good idea!

So I have taken Venice and put streets in over the canals. It does look worse! And it was quite the desecration, like scribbling over a Rembrandt.

But it was kind of devilishly fun doing it.

I may do Amsterdam or Bruges next!

Anyway, here is Venice, disimproved. Though, on the other hand, it probably won't flood so bad like this.

What about Kyoto?

 

If you will kindly refer to today's title, it posits the question: "What about Kyoto?".

This is in relation to my current project of exhaustively proving that even the most beautiful cities in the world would be improved by the removal of cars, and through the means of having the streets made into canals. Rome and Nice have been covered already. But Kyoto already has some canals. Well, as far as I can tell, it has one or two canals? I've never been to Kyoto, but there is one canal at least that comes from a lake, and there is also the Shirakawa River, which looks a lot like my pictures of cities where I put canals in them.

In short, like Venice, Kyoto already kind of proves my point as is. But since I am into proving my point exhaustively, I contend that Kyoto, beautiful as it seems to be, can definitely use quite a few more canals!

And so I have provided. 

I prove my point

 

Using the city of Nice, France, I posited the theory that all cities would be more beautiful with canals. My examples with Nice quickly proved the point. But I like proving my point! I can go for hours proving my point. One could argue that the whole of clerkmanifesto is just point proving over and over again!

What was the point again?

Paved streets are ugly. Cars are gruesome. And streets of water make everything better.

Today I make my point with Rome, Italy.

Wait a second! Rome is impossibly beautiful. How can you possibly make Rome more beautiful?!

Easy peasy: Remove all cars, add canals.

(And maybe a few other things)

The reimagination of a cracked rib

I have thus far resisted the decade old (at least) impulse to occasionally post repeats here. I seriously doubt that if while feeling too sick or injured to make something new I posted up a particularly winsome piece of writing from a post here from early 2016 there would be many among you who would cry out "Wait a second! This is super familiar!"

But as fond as I am of all you readers out there, that wouldn't be my reason anyway.

Keeping up with clerkmanifesto is a calling, and it's a practice. Making some kind of finished creative work every day (on average) is sustaining to my soul. So I do it. And I leave the rereading of clerkmanifesto to whoever wants it. It's all out there in the back floodwaters of the Internet.

So it's a little odd that I am here reintroducing a post I wrote a mere three days ago!

I woke one morning with a lot of discomfort and wrote "Cracked Rib". It was okay. It seemed a little like a poem. 

And you know what we do to poems around here?

Set them to music.

In the end my text was radically altered to work as lyrics. But I and my robot friends made a song out of it through many trials and errors. Then I pounded it into a music video with footage from a sixties Zen movie, a thirties flood movie, and some AI flotsam.

And so I brought my blogpost to life.

What's old (three days) is new again.

I am satisfied.

And my rib is cracked.

 

Venice, Ve-Nice, Very nice

 

Maybe I should test it out?

Maybe every city is improved by canals.

At the least we have here a new set of pictures of Nice as a foray into the theory. Once I realized that I am already removing every car I see in order to make the city more lovely, my momentum inevitably leads me down the slippery slope to inserting canals on all the streets. First you get rid of the cars, then you make it so they are impossible anyway.

Does this mean I think that Venice is the most beautiful city in the world?

No, but its canals sure don't hurt it in that regard.

Anyway then, here is more of Nice, with a bit of VE frontloaded on, and you may find a fox or skunk here or there as well...

More comfort food

 

Sitting around with a broken rib isn't the most fun I've ever had. So I am trying to comfort myself by putting fox and skunk into pictures of Nice, France. I would comfort myself by eating lots of ice cream mochis, which I have become inordinately fond of. These are the size of fat little cookies and are a wee dollop of ice cream wrapped in flavored mochi. But if I comforted myself with these delights too much it would not be good for me. So I prudently limit myself to one ice cream mochi a day.

But I can make as many fox and skunk pictures as I want. Sometimes in the night, with my rib hurting and my head full of anxious thoughts, it comforts me to think of the day when I can get up and put fox and skunk into pictures of Nice.

You may notice alterations of the streetscapes of Nice in these pictures, and you may not. I guess the most obvious parts are the various fox and skunk related street art and graffiti. You probably already know this, but in case you don't, "Renard" means "Fox". "Moufette" means "Skunk". How complex these pictures might become I can't predict, though they drift in that direction. I'd rather they not lose their natural appearance though, so my adornments may be self limiting.

And with that, here are today's pictures:

The only use for magic

 

As a reader of clerkmanifesto you will be well aware of my interest in AI. Although if this is your first time visiting clerkmanifesto, Oh my God!! 

Welcome! Come in. Come in! Can I get you something to drink? Gosh I hope you like it here! 

And to make your first experience here as smooth as possible, there is one thing you should know:

I have an interest in AI.

Oh, my interest is not so much in its technical capacity, or its implications to society, or in relation to its effect on the workplace, to its ethical dangers, or concerning its qualities as a tech bubble. My interest in it is strictly as an artistic tool. I can spend endless hours putting together dodgy music videos made out of old poems. I have painstakingly crafted pictures of my co-workers with their spirit animals. I make library theme songs. I am chasing after AI's magical wonders. And if endless experiments with the dozens of new tools popping up nearly every day end in disaster, or in the common stone walls of false promise, there is still always one thing there for me, one thing that always works out, one thing that will invariably make me happy about AI:

The ability to put a fox and a skunk in any picture I want.

I keep thinking "Surely I will get tired of this."

But no.

So here are a handful of new pictures of fox and skunk in one of my favorite cities, Nice, France.

Cracked rib

 

I have diagnosed that my rib is cracked. It's a little dented there too, but we won't worry about that.

Just kidding. We're going to worry about everything we can think of, but that's just the engine room of clerkmanifesto. You see an elegant schooner scudding beautifully along the surface of the ocean. It can't only be driven by wind, you think. You are right. Restlessness powers a 400,000 watt engine churning the sea beneath the surface, and that drives this ship through the waves on a voyage of discovery.

And what have we discovered today?

That the street outside is still surprisingly busy at three in the morning.

Comedy of excruciating errors

 

Towards the end of a lovely at home vacation, I went to sleep in the evening. I awoke to a violent foot cramp. I get these occasionally and they are horrible. I sprang out of bed and put my weight on my foot which helps straighten the contorting muscles. I put on slippers which can also help. Walking about the apartment the extreme pain subsided but was so strong it left me nauseous. I went into the bathroom and the nauseousness blossomed into a dizziness and, almost like passing out, I collapsed to the floor against the side of the bathtub, catching the corner of it with my ribs.

Stunned, but weirdly exhausted, I kind of wanted to go to sleep again right there against the tub.

But eventually I got up, bruised, and went to bed. Then my ribs started hurting more and more until I couldn't really move from a barely tolerable position lying on my back. Around seven in the morning everything was too uncomfortable and I hoisted myself up. I thought about all the simple things I wish I had done now that I know everything is going to be hard and deeply painful to do for several days.

I sat down amid a bevy of screaming twinges in the whole area of my left ribs. My back is tight everywhere. It is hard to take a breath. I opened my computer. I typed this.

I can still blog!

Though I'm not sure it's as funny as usual.

Ancient wisdom with Bob Dylan at the VFW

 

I was out having drinks with Bob Dylan at the VFW. Another guy was with us, but he spent the whole time quietly reading a blog on his phone. At one point later in the evening I said to Bob "I'm reading a book made up entirely of the accounts of people talking about what it's like to work with you."

Bob's head was over his whiskey and ginger and he didn't lift it up. He just eyed me sideways. He looked old and fey. Very old and very fey. "Why?" He croaked.

I took a sip of my whiskey and ginger, only to find it empty. "It's like that old Zen story where a bunch of blind men describe an elephant."

He gave me a slightly fuller look, no less fey, regarding me for a moment.

"Are you distant and aloof?" I explained. "Are you spontaneous and inspirational? Are you cold and selfish? Are you considerate and thoughtful? Are you wearied and cloistered? Are you whimsical and collaborative? Are you a tyrant? Are you a master?"

Bob said nothing.

"Maybe the secret of the story is that even if all the blind men could see perfectly, how could anyone ever describe an elephant?"

We were quiet for awhile. Then from out of nowhere Bob convincingly imitated the trumpeting of an elephant. 

The guy reading the blog, Neil, looked up a little crossly at us for a second. Then looked back down at his phone.

Bob and I burst into a fit of giggles.

Then we stopped ordering drinks and ordered some food instead.