Shirts

I have collected quite a few more celebrity portraits over the last few days. I've just been sort of throwing them on the pile here in this post. Now I am running out of time before it goes live to the world and I can't add anymore pictures of (mostly) dead famous people. I think they're all here advertising my new shirt collection, but I could see my eventually venturing into a whole new fashion line. And while a fashion line for dead people probably isn't a great idea from a marketing standpoint, it would probably work about as well for me as anything else I might venture in that regard. 

Though I might like to build up to my most sophisticated imagery, I can't seem to stop clerkmanifesto from loading my newest images first, so the first ones are the most accomplished, and then we devolve more to the silk shirts ones, which are a bit messier, and seem almost like prototypes to me now.

 

I'll see you a bit later

 

When one writes a blog post every day for over eleven years one occasionally finds oneself starting at the blank page, er, screen, at eleven at night.

This has happened to me!

It is not pretty!

But on these special occasions I always know what to do:

Wait until one in the morning.

Soy candles

 

We have been going to a lot of Christmas Markets this year.

Sometimes it's the festive spirit I like.

Sometimes it's the unique environments I enjoy; a large brewery, a City Hall, a whole city greenhouse, a plywood town festooned with lights, a grand old theater, a winding private Waldorf school, or the huge historic stone machine shop for Pillsbury in the old milling district.

Sometimes it's simply about the mulled wine or an available glass of micro brewed beer.

Sometimes it's the odd little puzzle of my darling wife and I finding them all, figuring out when to go, and checking them all off our list and checking it twice.

But so far it has never really been the crafts for sale that have made any of it worthwhile me.

Which is odd, because that is nearly all there is to most of these Christmas Markets. They are markets. And they have crafts for sale, usually by local people selling their crafts. I intend for it to be a crucial, salient feature. I hope to be enthralled by it all. I keep an open mind. I would love to find a festive hat, or a beautiful replacement for the cappuccino cup I smashed in a tragic and amusing chain of events that also involved a wine glass and a water glass and a great deal of sweeping and mopping. But there we are walking down every aisle and through every corridor, with a polite smile on our faces to keep the sellers from despair, and we see everything. We look at everyone's wares. We have a delightful time. And then we leave. 

And I only wonder:

What makes a person think:

"The world needs more soy candles just like all the other soy candles, and I am the one to provide them!"

But as my fit of pique passes, and perhaps after later going to work and giving three or four too many tart and too unkind rants to mostly tolerant people who say quietly:

"I kind of like soy candles"

I start to understand.

Here I am with my sprawling clerkmanifesto, but let's even just reduce it to this, this missive called "Soy Candles". While it is not, I am aware even as I write it, my most innovative, adventurous, wild and shining blog post, to me it is nevertheless inimitable in its small way. Who has had this to say about art and craft before? Who has turned this cultural criticism, valid as it may be, twisting into self reflection is such a way before? Show me this particular thought in the world, whatever you may think of it.

But maybe you can do just that. And that's the rub. 

Maybe this has all been said before. Maybe it is as obvious as the old paint on the wall and warrants no comment. Maybe this is the billionth slightest variation on a theme colored and poured out into a beautifully prepared mold a million times

But I chose and mixed the ingredients! I calibrated the careful color of these words! I heated them just so on my careful stove and poured it out here into this unique vessel, clerkmanifesto!

And though to me, knowing every feature of it, and with every detail of this essay, shining out in my own contained, secret, unique tiny flame of the world, this all seems unique and worthy of surely as much consideration as the other things I see considered so much in the world,

What do I know?

Maybe I'm just a person making another soy candle.

The inevitable occurs

 

After two days of posting pictures here of almost entirely legendary white men (yes, I'm aware) posing for promotional photographs for clerkmanifesto, it was never going to be completely satisfying without posting some random footage of the sessions, and maybe writing a song for it all edited together.

Maybe we were always heading here.

(Click through the picture)

Celebrity madness!

 

What started as a fun lark during a drunken poker game with Bob and Charlie has turned into a stampede of famous celebrities, both alive and dead, calling me to offer to "Help out". The troops have rallied round clerkmanifesto, and every famous celebrity you can shake a stick out wants "pose with a bugheart". 

It is very nice of them. But maybe they don't believe me when I tell them "The same eight readers who were here before you posed with a bugheart will be all that's left after you pose with the bugheart." Then I add: "Except maybe minus one."

"Minus one?" The celebrity asks worriedly.

"Don't worry. That won't be because of you. It's just how things work here at clerkmanifesto."

They are relieved, and they want to help out anyway. They simply don't understand obscurity, except maybe Van Gogh, but he's so quiet and hard to read.

So, sure, the celebrity comes over. We choose the heart. We carefully pick out the beetle, tamping down our squeamishness. We take a few dozen pictures under the lights. And then we choose the one or two best pictures from the group. Voila, Julia Child with a bugheart! 

I awkwardly say "Really the best way to help clerkmanifesto, if you want, is just by reading it."

They all look a little awkward and sheepish when I say that, and reply "I keep meaning to."

Celebrity supporters

During a recent night of poker with some of my friends, many of whom are dead, we drank a lot of Calvados, which I blame Bob Dylan for, as he brought way too many interesting bottles of the stuff.

 The drunkeness that ensued surely accounts for how we got involved in a Clerkmanifesto promotional photoshoot. Well, probably the alcohol and how they all felt sorry for me as Clerkmanifesto hasn't had the kind of popular success the rest of them gathered. It was all a bit embarassing, but kind of them, and I like the pictures.

I think I won some money playing poker, but the coins are all outdated and weird.

 

Shredder

 

Not for the first time a library patron came to the front desk with a small stack of what looked like insignificant documents and asked me if we had a shredder.

"No, I'm sorry. We don't have a public shredder here." I replied.

Oddly enough, we do have a small paper shredder in our "Library of things" collection, which she could request and then maybe get to check out in two or three months when it was her turn, but I felt it would profit no one to offer that option. We also have a staff shredder in the back for staff use. I've never done anything private enough here to warrant using it, but some of my colleagues are involved in spying and stuff, probably.

She was heartbroken that we didn't have a shredder.

So after setting the groundwork that we don't have a shredder for the public, and because she had a fairly minimal number of documents, I offered to temporarily suspend our protocol and shred her sensitive documents.

She was delighted and thankful and hopefully now not a person who would say to me or one of my colleagues in the future "But they shredded for me here before!" 

I suppose that was 50-50.

I walked away with her documents all the long way to the shredder. The shredder is pretty fun when it works! And on my way back to the library patron I wondered:

If her documents are sensitive, is it wiser to hand them over to a person who wanders away with them into some far back room, or would it be better to just anonymously rip them up into pieces and throw them in the trash?

Ah well, I didn't steal her medical information, so I guess it all worked out.

I still know what you're thinking

 

The first time, actually just last week, that I brought out one of my past blog posts that was written on exactly the same day, but in a different year, I went back to the first year of clerkmanifesto and shared the 11th birthday of one of my blogposts. But today, my second time in this venture of reposting, I decided to go back minimally, a mere two years, figuring that even my most engaged readers will have forgotten what I said two years ago as much as they, you, forgot what I said over a decade ago. And I mean this as no criticism of you. You should, for instance, see how many times I can read a book.

The answer to that is 17 times. 

Because of my capacity for forgetting, I can reread a book 16 times before I have to set it aside for the rest of my life. This means I start to get very careful about my rereading once I get to 13 or 14 read throughs. It all starts to get a little precious. But you? You will only be reading this for the second time so you are safe! You have so much enjoyable rereading of this post yet to come in your life!

When I decided to go back exactly two years I did not know what I would get, and I was slightly confused by this piece at first. Then I thought it was a pretty interesting idea about reading and writing and what is shared by the reader and writer. I think I might even change it a bit to make it clearer from the start.

I Know What You're Thinking

I know what you're thinking. Which is weird because it is my thought as well. This thought you are reading, these words, are in my mind just as they are also in yours.  I know what you're thinking because I am thinking and writing it for you.

But I don't know everything that you're thinking because while we can only really think one thing at a time, like we are thinking these words, we can also think with great speed. We can think faster and wider than words. We can think around the edges of things, and inside them as well. 

And so when we read, we think the thoughts of someone else, but our thinking is intoxicated and flooded and more elaborate than a through line of sentences. Our thoughts swirl around the narrations we think, like that line of narration is pouring off steam and light and smoke and spark, and it's running tendrils and weaving around and is surrounded by a whole forest. We may follow a path etched in words. But we're looking around and smelling and breathing and feeling the mist on our foreheads.

So I know what you're thinking, but you keep adding to it, all around it and inside it. You pack in the pauses. You put air into the slow places. You spin off in other directions.

I know what you're thinking, but I can't hold it. It flies out of my hands in every moment.

These are just the lines around its footprints.

The nature of lists

 

The Internet loves a list. After all, what does an Internet list offer?

I have created a list to answer this very question!

The ten functions of a list on the Internet!

10. It organizes all relevant information into easily digestible morsels.

9. It reduces complexity.

8. It loudly announces what the reader is in for.

7. It suggests completeness and comprehensiveness. After all, if there were more to tell, surely there would be another item on the list!

6. It affords simple comparatives for judgement. If, for instance, my item is not on the list I am reading, then I know that it is not a good list, and they shall hear of it vociferously in the comment section! Or, conversely, if number two on the list is my pet list item? Well and good, the list is surely a winner.

5. It is authoritative. Look at all these carefully numbered items. They must know what they're talking about to list it all so plainly.

4. Ranked, it allows for endless comparative musing, giving us the illusion of being thoughtful, ruminative people.

3. It creates tension. After all, if "creating tension" is number "three" on the list, what, by god, could number "one" be?

2. It dazzles with the promise of absolute truth and certainty, which we all long for. And if ultimately it cheats us and leaves us empty and hungry and unconvinced, well, too late, we have read it. We have engaged with it. And we are on to the next list somewhere else!

And so with all this in mind I have set down to rank, in a list, all of the Christmas Markets this year in The Twin Cities, or Saint Minneapolis. My lovely wife and I have been racing across Saint Minneapolis every weekend chasing down even the most obscure little Christmas Markets, and I am here to rank all 65 of them from worst to best!

Or I meant to, maybe I even mean to. We still have a couple of weekends to go, and we haven't yet seen them all.

But the truth is that none of them are all that great so they're all sort of roughly tied for first so far.

What to leave behind

 

People leave a lot of stuff behind at the library I work at. While occasionally there will be something bizarrely interesting, like the machete we had in our lost and found years ago, the usual suspects range from the endless unclaimed flash drives, to water bottles, which we accumulate a forest of on top of our lost and found shelving, to the endless items of mildly grubby clothing taking up an unreasonable amount of drawer space. Most of these are never claimed. Some are probably mourned by their owners, but I suspect most aren't, and sometimes I think losing something at my library is, for people, oftentimes merely an unconscious way to throw something away without having to commit to it.

I have been confounded by two kinds of things that people lose here. One is full sets of keys. If they lost their keys, how did they drive home? And if they defied the American Suburban rule and took a bus or walked, how did they unlock their door at home? And if they walked to the library and are homeless, why do they need a big keyring? 

The other thing we regularly get left behind are canes, and even occasionally a walker. If one relies upon such a device to walk, one would think that not having it and trying to walk would be a clear signal that, well, one doesn't have it. Upon returning a cane today, one that has been behind the front desk of my library for a few days, I reconsidered this situation. If one has to lose and leave behind something at my library, a cane is the best of them. After all, if one is hobbling with assistance into our library, but after a few hours of hanging out here feels so spry that they can blithely walk out completely unaided, who even needs a cane? Leaving a cane behind is a symbol of healing.

The library has healed them! Now if they could just find their damn keys.  

How to get to clerkmanifestoland

Naturally people see my glamorous tourist videos of Clerkmanifestoland and wonder:

"But hey, how do I get to Clerkmanifestoland?"

So I've included today an instructional video that will show you how.

Remember, you have to feel for the latch on the underside of the wood frame. Use your elephant paws.

If you still can't figure it out (after clicking the picture below and watching the instructional video over and over), just remember:

You're already in Clerkmanifestoland now.

 

Clerkmanifesto in a nutshell

 

Someone was teaching a class at my library and needed to talk to the librarian who set it up. I was pretty sure that librarian was in the teen room and so walked the teacher over there. 

"What's your class?" I asked.

"How to write for the Internet" the teacher answered.

"Oh." I responded. "That doesn't seem too tough. The hard part's getting anyone to read it."

Clerkmanifesto is currently receiving the Nobel Prize for literature

 

Because the outside book return portion of our automated check in machine has been broken for several days, I was wheeling an empty cart out through the snow to an inconveniently located exterior return box. And while I was pushing this bin, through an unplowed car return lane, I passed by our disabled return slot and read the sign we had posted over it. "Book Return is being serviced. Please advance to the manual return box"

Just because one anticipates something happening doesn't mean that it is happening!

Our book return is broken. It is not being serviced! We merely hope it will be serviced, much like we hope, say, Santa Clause will visit and give all the good boys and girls gifts.

It's December fourth! Santa is not currently dispensing gifts! One merely hopes he will in the near future.

But as much as I might enjoy continuing to harangue my library for its hideous use of language, the truth is less insidious, although possibly sadder.  The reason we did not have a sign that said something like "Our automated book return is not working. Please advance to the manual return box" is more likely because whoever put up the sign grabbed whatever they could find that was remotely applicable to the situation.

The truth is that so much is broken around my library these days we're probably out of "Broken" signs.

Ghosts walk among us and angels fall from the skies

 

I have decided to sometimes include here, or feature, past posts.

I have written over 5,000 and it's not like anyone memorized them. Some of them are so old that people died with them rattling in their heads! My blog posts do not belong rattling in the empty skull cases of buried corpses!

Ah, but where do they belong? You ask.

I don't know. You tell me.

For most of clerkmanifesto I was an absolute purist. I refused imagery. I did not cut corners. I simply wrote every single day, every year, a small essay. These were humorous, ranting, silly, insightful, or even a bit slight. On occasion, I would write something so brilliant that angels would fall dead from the sky like shot birds.

A few dozen people would read those. If I was lucky, as a tiny balm to my ego someone might write and say:

"Thank you. That was really good. But the corpse of an angel has crushed a section of lilies in my garden."

Somewhere just at the start of the pandemic I took up photography which, if you are even remotely a regular visitor here, you will know has blossomed into something akin to an exotic poisonous mushroom garden. This in the form of short AI films. Sometimes, even to me, it can seem like these are the main things around here, but it is not so. Clerkmanifesto is still almost entirely about the writing.

This is no real introduction to a repeat of a post I published here exactly eleven years ago to the day. I have decided, after being inspired by something my lovely wife is doing, to take the opportunity to see where I was at in a precisely marked past. I may go one year back, or I may go, as today, eleven years back. Because this is my first venture in this project I went back as far as I could.

Then, when I went back to read this piece from so long ago, I thought:

No, I don't want to tell you.

You go ahead and think it yourself:

Fell in Love with a Painting

On Friday, I fell in love with a painting.

I will resist comparing it, which is one of my weaknesses, as in, it is the seventh greatest painting ever, by the 43rd best painter. It is better than Caspar David Friedrich, but not so good as Caravaggio. It is the best painting of Mountains ever and the eighth best nature scene. Oh Bah! I say even as I attempt to place it somehow, shout its virtues, exult, advocate, justify, explain, place, convey, elevate. 

But maybe there is no more than this: 

I love this painting. 

Well, there is always a little more.

Very early in the morning I was walking through a temporary show of Japanese Art at my local museum. I had seen the show before, but this time it was so quiet, perhaps because it was dawn, of all strange and mysterious times to be in a museum, and I had seen the painting before and liked it very much, but this time was different. This time I looked at it. And then I kept looking at it. And then I looked at it some more. And the more I looked at the painting the better the painting seemed to get, the deeper I fell into it. The more I felt the air of it, cold and clear and slightly damp. The more real became the rising mist, the splash of water, the ragged stone and everlasting cliffs, the tiny great trees standing above an abyss of a mountain gorge falling forever below. I spied the rough little houses on the brief, high mountain plateau, bordering a fierce little stream, and I saw the path that climbed out of the plateau to disappear into the mysterious passes above. I walked the path.

What is the painting? 

South Mountain in China by Fukui Kotei. Oh, you have not heard of him? You have never heard of the great, immortal Fukui Kotei? Who has not heard of Fukui Kotei!? Whose education has been so neglected? What theft of spirit and magic, inspiration and illumination has been stolen so from those not hearing of Fukui Kotei and South Mountain in China? 

Don't worry. Or worry with me, for I hadn't heard of Fukui Kotei either, and still know little about him. And here I was thinking that we had heard of everyone great, knew all their stories, had our chance at them all. But it turns out the world is nothing like that. Another surprise for us both, forgotten delights everywhere. The painting is all ink, black, with two smaller areas splashed with white, both in the places where there are waterfalls. And all of it is on gold leaf. The painting is black ink over gold, and the gold has a way of being luxurious and dazzling in that way gold has, but it also has a fabulous way of receding, becoming even more tensionless behind and in the black than all the whites we are used to in this sort of work. And so the world it creates becomes somehow more present. Once you cross the border, the plane of the painting, and enter it, you are more fully in it. You are disappeared into gold itself. The whole thing is on two, continuous, six panel screens, almost six feet high and running right to left for well over 20 feet. Would you like to see it?

So would I. But I am not in the same room as it, and so we both must be deprived of that pleasure.

Oh you, me, with our fancy looking-glass internet, our books of all the art history, all our magical photography, and all the lies that everything is known. Here is one for us. This piece cannot be photographed, or, it can be, but little will be left of it. It must be seen, in body and space, and there is nothing else for it.

Maybe just shaking hands?

 

Recently, in showing you a couple of my latest Clerkmanifestoland videos, I referenced all the hugging. There's more hugging here, but we start out with an enthusiastic handshake involving what might be an enthusiastic Munchkin. The hugging only comes in with a surprise special guest at the end. But because this music video clocks in at under a minute long I think it might be better served if it isn't described in detail ahead of time. Perhaps then it's a little too late for that. I guess you'll just have to go in full of knowledge about what you'll be seeing, forcing you to admire the detailed nuance, or, conversely, leaving you notice all the weird artifacts, glitches, and bizarre peculiarities of AI.

Anyway, click on the picture, and your ride begins.

More journeys down dark streets where someone you are fond of may hug you warmly

 

As promised, warned?, I am here again with picture doorways to more of my video shorts.

I think my title says a lot about the vibe I am mostly going for in these films. I guess it varies a bit more than that, but I did eventually get to the point where if I ended up with two characters in the frame I'd have them hug warmly. The AI handles hugging a good deal better than punching, and it's nicer as well.

Here are a couple of pictures for you to click on your way through the looking glass.