forty-four

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

As I write this it is Tuesday, August 12, and I am sitting at the front desk of the Roseville Library, three days from retirement. But in real time, as you can read this, my wife and will have been in Japan for over a week! So one might say that I have largely succeeded in setting up clerkmanifesto to run for awhile. This is good. We are very busy as we completely dismantle our lives, live with almost no furniture, and continue the labors; bureaucratic, physical, financial, and linguistic, of moving to another country.

On the other hand, I have been making a lot of stuff here! And it's not like now that I am pretty well caught up I'm going to stop! And on top of that, while my wife and I will be busy getting ready, I will also be retired!

RETIRED.

I'm kind of thinking that will mean a bit MORE free time?

So I'll still want to put more things into clerkmanifesto, but I'll also want to keep space open to put in new things. Like what if I manage to have images from, or meditations on Kyoto? What if I want to tell you something from an airport we're trapped in somewhere. What if a fit of cartooning comes over me!!!!

Where will I put all of that if I've already booked out clerkmanifesto for two months before even leaving the country?

The answer to all this is... I guess I'll just cram it in. I think I'll prepare every day's post well ahead of time, and get as far ahead as I can. But also, if in my travels and relocation I have new things to add, it might just get crammed in as a bonus rider on the post of that day.

I like this plan. And I think you'll do okay with it too.

With that, here is the last of the portraits from our estate sale that were pulled out from the previous estate sale seven years ago. They are all gone now, but you can see one here, very slightly augmented and cleaned up with AI (we'll say a 2 on a scale of 10).

This is the same picture, as above, brought unnervingly to life. Click on it to engage, click again to enlarge if you like large things, then click a final time to play it...

We jump forward in time once again to bring you a live post, so to speak, from Clerk Manifesto. This one comes to you after my darling wife and I have been in Kyoto for about a week. It follows the pre-prepared posts you’re reading above, but this is something of a bonus, or extra content, or contemporary content, as added below this post above.

I’ve been taking a careful measure of photographs, usually allowing for a few brief sessions each day, a minute at a time, to take what pictures I can. So I haven’t been conducting anything like a comprehensive photographic study of the city. But I’ve taken what photos I’ve managed to shoot and added my usual frills and personalizations. It’s a good solution, because it allows me to quickly capture interesting places, while also accepting the hurried nature of those photographs, and the many ways they fall short of capturing what things are really like.

This is my way of giving you more of a sense of what Kyoto looks and feels like in a more spontaneous, natural, and candid, albeit slightly ridiculous way. I have a lot of pictures like this. This, we can just say, is another sample with more to come as the days go forward:

forty-three

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

As you read this I will have been retired for over three weeks. If all goes as planned my darling wife and I will be in Kyoto. Maybe the library will be a fading memory, maybe even a vague foggy lovely one. But as I actually write, I am entering into my last week of 31 years at the library. And while I am still at the library, library things still happen. So I try to appreciate them.

Sixteen years ago I tried to appreciate them, and with six days left I still try to appreciate them. 

I usually do. For the most part.

Today a longtime patron of the library, passing by the front desk, congratulated me on my retirement and then proclaimed how the Roseville Library really won't be the same without me.

"That's kind." I replied. "But there's always a new old-timer coming up the ranks."

Later I checked out a small stack of books to a woman. Apparently this was very quick process, because the women asked "That was so fast! How did you do that?"

For years I've answered that sort of question by talking about the RFID readers, pads that can pick up the signals from a stack of books. But not today. Today I answered "By using the skills built upon years and years of experience."

And for a now completely up to date post, we are in Kyoto and I have this:

Yesterday we went to the Modern Art Museum in Kyoto, just past a gigantic torii gate and over an extremely pretty canal full of herons, the kind I’ve only ever seen in ink scroll paintings. These herons were quiet and everywhere along the canal, and a joy to see.

The Modern Art Museum was a grab bag of delights and pleasures, which I’ve found to be true of modern art museums in various countries over the years. You never know whether you’ll see contemporary work, a focus on twentieth century pieces, a set collection, truly historical works belying the name of the institution, or some kind of random attention to local stalwarts from different movements that may not have reached worldwide notoriety. More than anything, it feels like a place where one might see anything.

My darling wife and I saw a collection, I’m not even sure what it was, a collective group of local contemporary artists. It was absolutely rich and delightful, diverse, and completely aligned with my tastes. It felt like the kind of art I was trying to make when I was younger, and here it was, everywhere.

The other exhibition featured Japanese ink kanji scrolls and porcelain over a thousand years old, along with some historic ink paintings. Some of the best scrolls were contemporary as well. The museum had a beautiful backyard pond with more herons, and a big, grand interior.

These are some random pictures of me from inside the Modern Art Museum of Kyoto:

forty-two

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Here is another old image made from the last item I had of a set of bugheart themed cards I made long ago for... something. I don't even know what, but I found the image as we cleaned out all of our possessions as part of leaving... everything.

This was a more simple design, and I decided to run it through the AI machine. It took more effort than I thought it would and eventually I worked it up into the faux museum poster design you see below. I think I would put the AI alteration level here at a 7 out of 10.

It turns out there are two slightly different versions of the design:

And then a couple iterations of the image:

Seeing as I’m not pulling out my computer—and finding any kind of typing on my phone to be laborious—let this serve as a reusable introduction for the photographs below.

As you can see, this content is being presented more or less in real time, making it a kind of bonus post for today. It actually follows me as I am here in Japan—specifically, in Kyoto.

I’d like to say that Kyoto is bewildering, sweltering, beautiful, and complicated. I’m on a strict routine of taking only a few photographs at specific times of day, then layering them with various edits when I’m lying around recovering at our house in a quiet Kyoto neighborhood.

So here are some of my recent pictures—with little or no commentary, because typing on this thing is too much. Let them stand in as my notes on my darling wife and me being in Kyoto.

forty-one

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Just a few days after leaving the Ramsey County Library in my retirement, the marks already start to fade...

But wait, there's more!

I'm still going through some of the old artwork and cleaning it up if I can with AI. These were from a series of bugheart small watercolors I painted some time in the 90's. They are about a two on the scale of one to ten, expressing how changed they are by the AI. 

So, not very.

I did a lot of paintings in this style back then. I wish I had more of them, but was glad to see these three...

forty

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

There's a lot of old, repurposed artwork of mine to show you, dug out from storage and discarded after a minute of photography (actually, some of it I left behind in back files of the Roseville Library). Some of these old pictures and paintings couldn't be improved with an AI gloss, but some of it was able to be shown more as it really was than any poor pictures I've ever had of it could. Today I get to show you a few pictures of one of these. 

At the end of my time in art schools I made a five foot tall, obsessively painted ceramic sculpture. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on this in a small apartment in San Francisco. The sculpture long gone, I came across two rough pictures of it. With a reasonable amount of effort I was able to get AI to make an almost proper picture or two of the piece almost as it was.

This sculpture was lambasted by a mean art teacher and shown in a shiny new art gallery in San Francisco by a nicer art teacher, an odd juxtaposition, or so it strikes me now.

And here is a detail from the above piece. If anything these underplay the number of dots:

thirty-nine

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Having unearthed something of a treasure trove of old artwork while cleaning out all my things at home and at the library in the days before I ceased to have a library or a home, you will in days to come see a great deal of my old artwork. Much of it dates back to the the 1990's, which may either seem ridiculously long ago or not that long ago depending upon your age and temperament. 

Today I am showing you a one-off picture.

Much like with my photos today, I often worked back then in groups, small and large, of related or themed works. You will see series like "Horses in Trouble", or a collection of related bugheart designs. But today I wanted to show you this picture that is a kind of false botanical illustration. I just made one like this. It's a good example of why I so greedily took to AI generation because with it I could articulate ideas like this so easily, and satisfy my desire to see them in a way that requires less investment of time and where the failures in expression weren't so costly in a way.

Once again I have refreshed the image through AI though, so count this as altered maybe to the amount of a two on a scale to ten.

thirty-eight

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Here is another old charcoal drawing study from a long past art show of mine featuring Jewish people who were 85 and older. I suppose I still had this last drawing because it was one of my favorites. I'm pretty sure this was a study for a four foot high by three foot wide painting of this man, but that one is probably lost to the world. This drawing is cleaned up in AI and I'll put its AI alteration level at 2 out of 10. 

Following the image is the moving version of it.

To watch the moving image version of the drawing, click on it below, enlarge it (if you like), than click again to play it.

Live Photo of Kyoto:

thirty-seven

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

An old charcoal drawing of mine:

And then a live version which, if I recall, you'll want to click, maximize (or not), then click again to play. There is no sound.

thirty-six

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I left this space open for me to write a post in case I had something significant to say on this momentous day, since as you read this it is the day my darling wife and I are landing in Japan, at the beginning of living out across the whole wide world. Two small people free and at large.

Farewell Saint Minneapolis.

So do I have something significant to say?

I always have something significant to say!!!!

In the end all of these postings made ahead of time, full of references to my future and to your past, create a kind of confusion about time. But I'm not going to fault it. Life is jumbled up. And retiring from a place I worked for 31 years has a touch of the quality of waking up from a dream. What just happened? Was it two days ago, or twenty years ago? At my retirement party scatterings of different co-workers from several different eras of the Roseville Library showed up. They gathered naturally into small groups of their time period. One could see the past hovering about them, but there they were, unmistakable in that exact moment.

As I write you now it is the first day of my retirement. I sit on a couch that we have already given away but that has not yet been picked up. Yesterday I was at one of the largest and most significant endings of my life. Today is one of the larger beginnings of my life, and that works whether you count my today or your today.

I take it back. I don't have anything significant to say today. I said it all here over the last dozen years. And I will say it all here in the next decades. And some of the things in the future I already said, and some in the past I have yet to say.

Welcome to my retirement.