c.c. o'hanlon

"As Groucho Marx put it: 'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.'"

What I Don’t Know About Politics (And Why It Might Not Matter) As scribes over here in the UK suddenly ask if the right-wing populist Reform party has peaked, I realise I know almost nothing about politics. Even more

"...it turns out that not knowing much about politics is sometimes indistinguishable from knowing a lot. Which is not to say we should opt out of politics. It’s just that our understanding of it is invariably limited."

A(nother) political perspective from Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social

"Wrack is a seaweed...that is uprooted by storm seas or strong currents and found washed up on beaches or entangled within tidal reefs. Wrack is also the scattered debris of a shipwreck.

"Wrack is defined by having been broken somehow and cast upon a shore."

'Looking further out' pretty much sums up what Given and I have been doing these past several days/weeks/months...

[sigh]

Bill Drummond's 10 Commandments of Art Artist provocateur Bill Drummond achieved success with the KLF. But ‘not resting on your laurels’ is one of his artistic creeds as he embarks on a 12-year world tour…

Pre-dating Gilbert and George's 10 Commandments, Bill Drummond, of KLF fame, offered his own 11 years ago to The Guardian newspaper:

No. 1 Don't make art for rich people.

Calendar

Facing water, days of fire.
Facing fire, days of water.

-Octavio Paz,
from “Object lesson”
(tr. Muriel Rukeyser)

Flashback to August: Given on deck, framed by the sprayhood, waiting for a breeze to set in on a windless Mediterranean between Ibiza and the Gulf of Teulada, in southern Sardinia.

Photo by Finn O'Hanlon.

“What an optimistic animal man is! Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years — as though people were as well-designed as turtles!”

– Winston Niles Rumfoord, in The Sirens of Titan, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)

#RIP British photographer Martin Parr, aged 73.

Gilbert and George: The Ten Commandments I  Thou shalt fight conformismII  Thou shalt be the messenger of freedomsIII  Thou shalt make use of sexIV Thou shalt reinvent lifeV  Thou shalt grab the soulVI  Thou shalt give thy loveVII  Thou s…

The Ten Commandments for artists:

I Thou shalt fight conformism

yeah, and...

IX Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it

X Thou shalt give something back

A hardcore mistral howls across the harbour this afternoon, thrashing the sea into a violent froth and shaking Wrack's bone-weary rig.

Manners matter. Not the snobbish, etiquette enforcement of hierarchy that some try to say is manners, but in a genuine, attitude of politeness. I wish I had learned that earlier, but I am glad the lesson became bone tattoo.

There was a time when I danced all the time...

Just saw a photo of Anselm Kiefer’s 2024 work >>Becoming the Sea "Missouri, Mississippi”<< and immediately had this gut-punch thought, „Damn, you know it’s bad when Kiefer starts painting shit about your own country.”

YouTube video by Scientific Arts, digital, art, photography Flamenco dancing Seville Fantastic

Three regrets: I abandoned a passion for gardening and small-scale cultivation when I sold the last house we owned (in France) that had a bit of land, back in 2014; I didn't take an opportunity to apprentice to a wooden boat-builder when I was in my late teens; and I never learned to dance flamenco.

Two months on from a heart attack in Rome, I find it hard to give a fuck. [sigh]

I am ill — serious flank pain, fever and nausea, blood pressure up to 160/88.

Given wants me to go to a hospital but I can't be arsed so I'm curled up on my bunk reading a biography of Lancelot Capability Brown.

YouTube video by Scientific Arts, digital, art, photography Flamenco dancing Seville Fantastic

Three regrets: I abandoned a passion for gardening and small-scale cultivation when I sold the last house with a garden I owned, twelve years ago; I didn't make time in my late teens to apprentice to a wooden boat-builder; and I never learned to dance flamenco.

Just what the world needs: another Irish writer.

Ah. Always wondered.

That'd make a refreshing chage from "Where do you get your ideas?"

Moon rising. Wooden telegraph pole, roofs, bare trees.

There she is

"Ireland is sheltered. And we revere writers. It helps to settle their nerves."

A line from @liznangel3.bsky.social during a whatsapp exchange this evening — cracked me up.

Given's Dj-ing an early '80s set for our below decks' soundtrack: The Strangler's Golden Brown, now Soft Cell's Say Hello, Wave Goodbye:

What about me? Well, I'll find someone
That's not going cheap in the sales
A nice little housewife who'll give me a steady life
And won't keep going off the rails

He taught me composition for a while.

An older composer/acquaintance from my youth in Rome, in the early '70s James Dashow, was very committed to his texts as sources of inspiration.

I was thinking more of Rexroth.

Did he ever know old men like us, whose 'wanderyears' took hold of them in their youth and never let go...?

Every musician, artist, writer and designer should be paid for their work and not have it stolen. If you don’t understand this, you have a moral deficiency and are clearly an absolute fuckwit. It really is this simple.

Small white building on pillars with steps. ‘Prompt This’ with an image of a middle finger sticking up is graffitied along the top.

Latest painting (acrylic on canvas)