Ciarán Ryan notebook

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The first cartoon I’ve drawn in ages. I still have not thrown away all of my pieces of paper…

“Heine identified the precise origin of the British-oligarchical way of thinking in Lockean empiricism, and utilitarianism. In the Englischen Fragmenten, he warns: “But don’t send any poets to London. This naked [mere?] seriousness about everything, this colossal monotony, this machine-like movement, this sadness of joy itself, this exaggerated London, oppresses the imagination and tears the heart. And you must certainly not send a German poet there, a dreamer, who must pause for everything he sees, even for a ragged beggar woman, or a shiny plate made by a goldsmith — Oh! He’ll have a rough time soon enough, and he will be pushed around from all sides, or with a mild “God damn” be pushed down onto the ground.”

http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/heine.htm

“Everything you can imagine is real”

Pablo Picasso

Dripping with significance
Independent, The (London), Mar 9, 1999 by Tom Lubbock

The pros saw the pure, unmediated expressions of body or soul; a painting made in a trance state, with Pollock’s unconscious or impulses marked down on the canvas. Obviously, this was partly what Pollock wanted. He wanted a spontaneous painting that by-passed the turgid symbolism of his earlier psycho-dramas and came straight from the deep psyche. He wanted pictures that - like some decoration - looked unmade and unauthored, as if they had just developed of themselves. But the paradox of his achievement is that these things could only be done with a lot of artistry. Pollock’s act was a careful balancing act; a matter of holding things in tension, fine-tuning so as to keep all possibilities open. The classic paintings have multiple intimations, none of which is quite suppressed, none of which definitely arrives. There are - despite the “over all” talk - hints of an underlying structure, perhaps something quasi-figurative and deeply buried in all the business. There are hints, too, of infinitely complex patterning. There are hints of complete chaos and randomness. There’s finally a strong entropic tendency towards an absolutely inert homogeneity. And all these aspects shift one into another. The result is work that’s untraceable and ungraspable. It offers inexhaustible interest to the eye. It can be contemplated endlessly.

Pollock’s most memorable saying was his reply to being asked, why he didn’t work more from nature: “I am nature.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990309/ai_n14210492/pg_2

Evolutionary theory differs from behaviour genetics:

It’s unwise to deduce ethical premises from biology.

But you cannot understand ethics without looking to biology for explanations.

See:

Maths:
Robert Axelrod
John Maynard Smith
(Game theory illuminates why self-interested individual co-operate)

Evolutionary psychology:
Leda Cosmides (cheating causes)

Edward O’Wilson wrote Sociobiology: The new synthesis
Peter Singer attempted to refute in: The Expanding Circle (1979)

People are co-operative and competitive  - see:

Emile Durkheim’s ’social facts’ -  Customs, institutions, nations etc that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

The 2008 Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival will attract many top cartoonists to the Midlands in the UK for three days. Find out more here:

Shrewsbury cartoon festival 2008 preview - includes useful links

Also: there’s lots more information here:

The Bloghorn - The diary of the Professional Cartoonist’s Organisation.

Also: Thanks for leaving a comment Andy - I’ve admired your cartoons in Private Eye for many years.  I’d like to hold you to your offer of a caricature if I make it to Shrewsbury.

Find out more about Andy Davey’s cartoons here: http://www.andydavey.com

San paintings - Matopo hills of Zimbabwe. Dot patterns - cave art. San people were among the first humans - the oldest people in the world?

Dots are part of a complex system of markings that represent life force - potency. An attempt to represent the spiritual dimension - a mistrust of appearance. Religious iconography.

Also they used a long red line through their paintings on the cave wall - to divide the human from the spirit worlds? Arrrgh can’t remember. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmen

Alice Lok Cahana - look up her story. Her mother arranging violets - in the ghetto.

he wrote to Alfred Lord Tennyson:

“Sir: in your otherwise beautiful poem The Vision of Sin  There is a verse which reads: every moment dies a man/every moment one is born.

“It must be manifest that, if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill — I would suggest you have it read: every moment dies a man/every moment 1 1/16 is born.
“I am, Sir, yours etc, Charles Babbage”

See also: Ada Lovelace.  She tried to resolve the workings of the human heart through a programmable machine?

The Observer invited Hunter S Thompson to cover the Braemar Games in Scotland (Royals, whiskey and guns) in 1992. He never made it. He did visit London for three days though, as Robert Chalmers recounted in GQ magazine - 1999 - in an article called ‘Fear and loathing in the Edgware Road’.

My selection of what Robert wrote:

Friday September 4th, 1992. 8:25am: “Thompson has begun a commentary on the view from the rear window: ” Poor f***ing dingbats, slobbering idiots roaming in the streets, doom, death and decay.” (We have reached Clapham.)”

The gents toilet, the Fox and anchor, 10am: I am hailed by an animated, grey-haired man in a suit, standing on my right at the trough urinal. It’s only 10 o’clock he says, but by Christ, I’m pissed. He says he works for Dewhurst butchers, who are having a do in a function room upstairs; he looks like a regional manager, in town for the day and making the most of it. Behind him I can see Thompson (in the cubicle, but with the door wide open) vigorously snorting cocaine.

10:20 a.m..There follows a 10 minute gap in which Thompson is left upstairs unsupervised; in this time, which passes mercifully unrecorded, he appears to have wandered into the butcher’s convention and mingled. When he eventually reappears, Thompson is brandishing a battered hardback called The Games, a book which, he announces, is research material for his trip to Braemar, but which turns out to be a social history of bullfighting in Andalusia. He claims he was given it by one of the men from Dewhurst.

11 a.m., Hunter is rapidly descending into a amphetamine psychosis; rambling about not understanding his brief, not being taken care of, not knowing what he’s doing here. His conversation sounds like William Burroughs reading Finnegan’s Wake. I hail a black cab; Thompson emerges, snarling, from the fox and anchor. He is carrying a half pint glass full of neat whisky. As he sits down on the back, he turned to me and begins to speak. He says: I am a professional.

12.00pm, at his hotel:… Hunter is teetering on the balcony, peering out over the Edgware road with a pair of binoculars, muttering about dingbats in Canary Wharf. He is surprisingly keen on the Post Office Tower.

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Later, Robert found at the Metropole, a room service menu on which Thompson had written the nearest he had come to written reportage in the entire trip - on the cover was one word: Dorthe

see also:

Oscar Zeta Acosta - what happened to him? Thompson wrote about him in 1977

1981 film, where the Buffalo roam, based on the Oscar piece

the great shark Hunt — another book by Thompson

He did the missiles in Constable’s Haywain - photo montage

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

The ending is always negotiable.

I don’t know what this means - but I wrote it down 10 years ago - then put the scrap of paper in a box - and now I’ve typed it out and put it on here and it’s in your brain.

Good luck!

“Television has become a mirror in which the public likes to recognize itself,” Pivot said. “The public either likes to see itself, or it likes something very far away, exoticism. Culture is neither of those.” Even when programs feature “popular” culture, rap musicians from the Paris suburbs, for example, the emphasis is not so much on what they perform as on how they got there, Pivot says, how they “made” it, so that the viewer can relate and dream how he might “make” it and be a celebrity too.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/04/02/pivot.t.php

A Cultural Icon Slams the Poverty of French TV

By Katherine Knorr

Published: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1998

In ”Palimpsest,” Mr. Vidal endorses the passage in Plato’s ”Symposium” where Aristophanes tells his dinner companions that there were once three sexes, people shaped like globes: male, female and hermaphrodite; they were divided by the king of the gods for behaving offensively and have ever after sought reunion, to make themselves whole again.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2D61139F93AA25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all