c.c. o'hanlon

@ccohanlon.bsky.social

2504 Followers 2835 Following

vagabond. mendicant. diarist. wreck. Un de ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds. "So here is us, on the raggedy edge..." (from the film 'Serenity', 2005)

A blue-hulled, sloop-rigged yacht named Wrack, lying on a narrow pontoon in a marina.
The Tara polar station silhouetted by the aurora borealis in Vassa, Finland. Photo by Maéva Bardy/Fondation Tara Ocean.
The port at dusk, in Palermo, Sicily.
An engraved 19th century nautical chart of the Bay of Palermo, on the north-west coast of Sicily..
The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the next great painting, successfully replacing human inventiveness: they never will. The greater danger is that they won’t need to create great writing or art. Because they cannot truly innovate, everything that predictive language and image models will produce will be a sequel to what came before: not an original idea, but a mash-up of our old tropes, repackaged for our consumption. This was already a dominant tendency in our commercial industries—to simply take what has been done before, tweak it a little, rebrand it, and call it new. As a result, AI will fill the world with grindingly average texts, passable but derivative illustration and video, and unoriginal but functional new product designs.
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
Portrait of an elderly couple, C.C. and Given, sitting in front of a frayed wall hanging in a Tangier café, 2023.
The heavily modified, psychedically painted school bus, named Further, with its perpex observation dome above the driver's seat and a roodtop sun deck.
An extraordinary view of a river port on the Congo, large riverine ships jammed in three or four deep, bow-first along the docks, the dark brown river itself so crowded it looks unnavigable.
Paul Bowles in a dressing gown, writing by hand, while sitting with his legs up on a daybed on the floor of his Tangier apartment.
In b&w: a growing thunderhead over a thin rocky spit guarded by a 2,000-year old, low, stone tower. A quiet anchorage at the northernmost end of the Gulf in all but southerly winds, it's well protected from the mistral. Wrack lay here happily for a week after a 328-mile passage from Ibiza.
Old man with long fingers, wearing a trench coat and fedora, in front of a high, sash window looking out on a New York street.
View over the foredeck of a small sailboat, as it motors towards a golden sunrise through oily, windless waters off a rocky shore.
A paste-up in an alcove of an old wall of a dark-haired woman in a black dress with the Superman logo emblazoned on her bare upper chest. Photo by C.C. O'Hanlon.
The interior of a small boat: through the portlight, an empty sea; a ray of light illuminates a wooden bulkhead with a large ship's clock and an emergency beacon.
A hyper-realistic painting of an abandoned, decaying high-rise building on waste ground at the edge of a dense urban area.
“Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo... at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street.... The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian -- races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market. Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle... A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games, Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at[…]”
A cluster of motorboats and sailboats on mirror-like water in front of the modern skyline of downtown Tangier. A Union Jack is in the foreground.
A monochrome self-portrait of black-clad mother and daughter.
A blonde-headed toddler standing on a chair doing the hair of her 20-something aunty.
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe. The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material— by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within. I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
Low cliffs topped by low green brush at the edge of a deep blue sea: the view from the deck of a small yacht sailing under a clear cerulean sky.
A garish, red and yellow sunset over low coastal hills, beneath low, grey clouds. The sea is red/orange too, but still. In the foreground, a small yacht, moored.