c.c. o'hanlon

Today, Italy finally broke me.

From yesterday morning, we had no water for 24 hours in the apartment. This morning, when it finally returned, we lost the gas: no cooking or heating. It's still off.

No advance notice. No explanation. Nothing.

I left all as a draft… Eternity and a Day (1998)

“shattered words here and there”

“Piracy is the most effective form of artistic distribution these days. So be it.”

-Werner Herzog on NPR just now 🔥

Ulysses Jenkins, Los Angeles artist and pioneer of Black experimental video, dies at 79 Ulysses Jenkins, the L.A.-born artist who pioneered Black experimental video, has died at 79: 'A true video griot whose work and spirit touched many.'

Ulysses Jenkins, the pioneering Los Angeles-born video artist whose avant-garde compositions embodied Black experimentalism, has died. He was 79 #RIP

Mine too, once. Until I became old, too, and almost as dissolute.

I abandoned my dreams, along with my ambition, a decade ago.

I've always suspected as much.

Well, he's just the bloody writer.

Ah, the modest joys of the elderly: the delivery of a new Omron blood pressure/heart rate monitor, with an XL cuff.

It replaces another Omron that Given bought for me in Sydney, more than 30 years ago.

I sometimes imagine @citynightcap.bsky.social as the wheelchair-bound Switters, in Tom Robbins' comic novel, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (2000): a CIA agent who despised the government, a pacifist who carried a gun, in love with a 17-year-old stepsister and a 46-year-old nun.

For this week, we're at my son's in Rome. Next week, maybe the boat, although below decks things will be sodden and above deck, a splintered mess [sigh]. Ah, the dirtbag life.

de nada

One of my few friends in a cheerful, graveyard hour mood.

Wrack is a bit of a mess, post Cyclone Harry. Repairs are needed but our original plan was to sort an apartment then haul her out for a refit. There was a concern (my cardiologist's) that I might not be up to a long sea passage but I don't think of 500 miles to a boatyard I know as 'long' so...

Nope. [sigh]

I should've bloody known: no good news at all.

My wife and I are huddled, shell-shocked, in a caf' in Ostiense trying to come up with a workable 'plan B'.

"I still think about those selfishly gleeful departures from Kabul—the mountains rising beyond the runway as the aircraft climbed southwest towards the Gulf. Impending Dubai was always a place where the war could not quite reach you.

"In reality, it was only ever a missile away."

The Dubai Decompression Loop The mountains always felt close when the aircraft lifted out of Kabul. During the Afghanistan war, Dubai became a strange airlock between two worlds—where

"'...a place where the war couldn’t get at you for a while.'”

Peter Bach — @lyst.bsky.social — recalls his several furloughs to Dubai as "a one-person filmmaker with special access working out of Kabul" during Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie.

“With each passing year… death will creep into every single hour…”

Elias Canetti; tr. Peter Filkins

Sources Briefed on Iran War Say U.S. Has No Plans for What Comes Next “The administration doesn’t have a clue. They do not have an actual, real rationale, endgame, or plan for the aftermath of this.”

““There is no thought process into what any of this means long term..It’s not coordinated regime change. It’s just ‘bomb them until they’re less of a threat.’”

[via @theintercept.com]

Tomorrow is the start of a nerve-wracking week for Given and me. We're expecting news on a number of fronts and we need it all to be good — we have no 'plan B'.

Dio ti benedica!

My son's apartment has become a sick-bay, the four of us laid low with another flu-like virus: I managed to get through an hour-long call in Italian with a local lawyer, propped up with paracetamol and black tea.

A reflective moment in an ancient church, lighting candles for half a dozen friends, guardian angels, who whisper words of wisdom (which I heed):

@liznangel3.bsky.social, @catingrams.bsky.social, @yanina.bsky.social, @hystericalblkns.bsky.social, @kimcarsons4.bsky.social, @masakepic.bsky.social

Nothing in Italy moves in a straight line.

Tomorrow, we meet with a lawyer regarding the proposed lease contract for the apartment we want. There's a grey area in it that relates to our immigration status (isn't there always?) so we need advice.

Good news: we can stay another 10 days with our son.

#auspol if you actually want political change you have to behave in an unpredictable way.

Mine, too. A refurbed iPhone 11.

"The new calculations reveal that following a relative sea level rise of 1 metre, it is estimated that 37% more coastal areas will fall below sea level, affecting up to 132 million individuals."

Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific

"Globally, the research found ocean levels are an average of 30cm higher than previously believed, but in some areas of the global south, including south-east Asia and the Indo-Pacific, they may be 100-150cm higher than previously thought."

[sigh]