2024-04-22 08:27
The tobacco smugglers of Cadaqués saved the village from poverty and abandonment after the wine louse phylloxera wiped out the vineyards.
Penelope Cruz
In the right circumstances, tob… Read More
Blog Directory > Arts & Entertainment Blogs > Clifford Thurlow arts-and-entertainment Blog >
Clifford Thurlow Blog
cliffordthurlow.com
Blogarama's Sponsor
Tags:
cadaquatildecopys
anaatildemacrs nin
book
dream
library
mail
thurlow
universidad
bell
tobacco smugglers
Personal blog, from Dylan to Dali, from psychology to politics.
2024-04-02 17:32
Lord Harmsworth with Adolf Hitler
There are many reasons why people hate the Daily Mail – reflecting the fact that the Daily Mail is itself filled with hate.
The Mail hates every… Read More
2024-03-26 15:52
We take flowers to the hospital when we visit the sick and dying without reflecting on the irony that cut flowers are already dead and their scent is to shield us from the smell of dead drea… Read More
2024-03-14 11:20
When Bob Dylan in 1967 recorded I Shall Be Released in the basement of the Big Pink, a house rented by Rick Danko close to Woodstock, the title was elegiac and had a double meaning, naturall… Read More
2024-03-09 19:17
Cadaqués Marxism began long before Karl Marx was born and lasted until the middle of the 19th century when Marx and Engels in 1848 published the Communist Manifesto.
The first settler… Read More
2024-02-23 12:10
What is the difference between erotic and pornographic?
Anaïs Nin
It is probably not a question I would ever have asked myself until I got a call from a photographer who ran a website … Read More
2024-01-15 15:22
How do you measure the distance between right and wrong? Does it vary like the moon’s distance from earth? Or is it exact like Einstein’s E = mc2?
Can you be a little bit wrong?… Read More
2024-01-11 10:29
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) – the Italian philosopher and novelist, author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum – had a personal library of 50,000 books. He tho… Read More
2024-01-08 15:55
We would all like to know how to be happier and the answer may be a lot more simple than we thought.
Flor, Marsha, Iris, Pilin and Lali – happy to be together.
I typed ‘how to be… Read More
2024-01-01 12:35
In my research into the name Thurlow, it occurred to me that your name becomes who you are and has a far stronger influence on our lives than we imagine.
One summer in Cadaqués.
An… Read More
2023-12-06 10:44
Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom had an assumed or telepathic pact. When she rode naked through Coventry in the 11th century, had the hot bloodied young Tom not taken a peep, her theatrics may ha… Read More
2023-12-01 10:46
Killing a swan was once considered an act of treason and still today you can end up with a large fine, even a prison sentence. I didn’t know that when I was 14 and didn’t know th… Read More
2023-11-21 09:32
With time running out for Rishi Sunak before the next general election, the Tories are frantically flipping through the playbook on how to steal an election.
Happy Days
Sunak’s first d… Read More
2023-11-06 17:40
Winston Churchill was piped aboard HMS Tyne and dad after hearing him nightly on the wireless got a glimpse of their wartime leader in person. It was September 1941, the days growing chilly… Read More
2023-11-02 18:29
A YouTube user calling himself BigDaddyAEL1964 saw the Dalí/Disney film Destino and what came to his mind was Time by Pink Floyd. It was a stroke of genius.
Salvador Dalí m… Read More
2023-10-21 10:14
The mystery of the Mona Lisa smile is that the mystery has finally been solved.
Lisa del Giocondo is amused watching Leonardo da Vinci’s head pop out from behind the easel as he paint… Read More
2023-09-16 17:36
Medusas in Cadaques – photo Clifford Thurlow
If someone shouts, ‘don’t look’ or ‘don’t look back,’ the natural instinct is to turn and have a good… Read More
2023-08-29 10:48
The other night we received a message from a cactus and I laid in bed unable to sleep thinking about.
The cactus stands in the narrow passage at the back of our house in Cadaqués in a… Read More
2023-07-23 14:28
Le Voyage dans la Lune
The first movie ever made was Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) by the French pioneer Georges Méliès in 1902. He had shot more than 100 short f… Read More
2023-05-14 14:53
In 1964 I was sixteen. I bought a black rollneck sweater and a pair of Cuban heeled boots from Anello & Davide in Coven Garden. I read The Outsider (L’Étranger) by Albert C… Read More
2023-05-10 14:57
Salvador Dalí and Raquel Welch – A Kiss is Just a Kiss.
Salvador Dalí and Raquel Welch had absolutely nothing in common. He admired beautiful women without wishing to own… Read More
2023-04-11 09:21
Offstage: Paul McCartney, Greg Allman and Bob Dylan.
When Paul McCartney was asked in HMV’s ‘My Inspiration’ campaign to name the songwriter who had most inspired him, he c… Read More
2023-04-07 08:07
Clifford Thurlow at the Galería Patrick Domken van Schendel
The incurious eye misses the obvious, the subtle, the subtext. The incurious eye is glazed in a cataract of ignor… Read More
2023-04-02 14:52
Will things go better with Rishi Sunak? Yes – but not for the poor.
What is capitalism? The corner shop baker selling his bread is capitalism. The rock singer uploading music to Spotif… Read More
2023-03-26 10:12
Millet’s painting of The Angelus.
In his essay The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet, Salvador Dalí interprets Jean-Francois Millet’s 1859 painting of a farmer in the f… Read More
2023-03-02 18:55
In the land of small minds and minor talent, Dalí and Picasso were giants. They were men with visions wider than the horizon and the stamp they left on the 20th century remains… Read More
2023-03-01 09:11
The Tory war on human rights will be raging across the tabloid press in the build up to the next general election. The Daily Mail and it’s partners in false news will be… Read More
2023-02-19 16:05
BB & Bobby. Artwork: Eduardo Skinner
Bob Dylan and Brigitte Bardot were outriders, rule breakers, iconoclasts who became icons of the sixties revolution.
When Dylan in 1965 played L… Read More
2023-02-14 11:19
Jacob Rees-Mogg – now on the telly with his ‘his eccentric anachronisms and far-right views.’
The Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive adopted by the European Union on 20 June 2016… Read More
2023-02-10 11:16
Jeremy Hunt – the man with the scalpel.
Jeremy Hunt has blood on his hands that will never come off and a look of anguish in his eyes as his lifetime goal slips into the abys… Read More
2023-02-04 09:35
Nadhim Zahawi and Rishi Sunak. Credit: Kim Mogg
There is a good reason why the rich always want more. Money provides status and connections. Big money makes you feel big, bigger than you are… Read More
2023-01-28 09:53
Hunt and Sunak with jackets off.
People in the United States are living in a parallel universe.
Half the population believes the last presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump throu… Read More
2023-01-18 12:04
Brigitte Bardot as a young girl was given twenty lashes from a whip by her father. The pain and embarrassment shaped her life, her career, her relationships with men and her desire to becom… Read More
2023-01-13 16:01
The day George Harrison climbed the wall at Salvador Dalí’s surreal summer house didn’t take place for another week and during those seven days a large number of red rose… Read More
2023-01-03 10:42
“That way!” Rishi Sunak and Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen know where we are going.
You. Me. Your neighbour. The postman. We don’t know who we are. You will never hear a Sco… Read More
2022-12-27 16:53
People may tell you to just be yourself, but what they usually mean is ‘just be like me.’
Dylan plays Newport, 1965
It is human nature to believe we have made good choices… Read More
2022-12-12 16:53
There is a very good reason why we must support striking nurses. They are striking in support of us all. They are striking against austerity, ‘stealth’ privatisation, inequality… Read More
2022-12-05 11:23
Was it Mrs Thatcher’s dream to see pretty English beaches caked in fetid lumps of human excrement and untreated chemical waste?
When she said there was no such thing as society, did M… Read More
2022-12-02 09:43
Dalí and Gala were a double act. She wasn’t his model or manager. He wasn’t her lover or provider. Gala was Gala, ruthless, implacable, that icy promiscuous fusion o… Read More
2022-11-29 16:11
Baroness Mone
Michelle Mone is a thief. She should be in prison. She’s not. She’s either swanning through the House of Lords in ermine or disported on a luxury yacht in a bathing… Read More
2022-11-25 14:41
Dalí beside André Breton with the Surrealists.
Salvador Dalí and religion never made a good fit. It is hardly surprising, then, that in 1935, aged thirty-one, Dalí&hell…Read More
2022-11-19 10:13
Bobby turned on the radio late one night in 1957 and the sound of Little Richard hammering out Tutti Frutti over over the airwaves changed his life.
Tutti frutti, oh rootie / &helli…Read More
2022-11-15 12:29
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life.
This line struck me like the unexpected blow with the cane Zen teachers use to spark fire in the souls of acolytes on the edge of Nirva… Read More
2022-11-10 10:56
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata – it’s just lovely being rich.
Social murder is a phrase applied to changes in government policy that lead to greater poverty and result in anxie… Read More
2022-11-08 10:02
The Casino, Cadaqués
1984. Late spring. Armed with a hand-drawn map, a bag of figs and some tangerines, we set out to climb what our friend Eloy Ferrer had called the hidden hills of… Read More
2022-11-04 15:26
The Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 claiming the country was part of greater China. Nomadic warriors called Khambas, armed with swords, fought a guerrilla war against the Chinese for a d… Read More
2022-10-19 10:10
HMS Eskimo
When dad took a second slice of cake or spent more time in the garden in the hot sun than mum thought wise, he would say: Don’t worry, Lily, you’re a long time dead.
M… Read More
2022-10-15 17:29
It was the day after Christmas in 1936 when George Orwell stepped off the train in Barcelona and followed his map to the recruiting office of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación… Read More
Subscribe to Clifford Thurlow
Get updates delivered right to your inbox!