Craigslist round up

Without wanting to disappear up my own arse about this topic, it is always tremendously reassuring to touch base with some of the other hacks for hire on craigslist, and to discover that they're selling themselves for $25 an hour and they haven't proofread their own ads properly. That's about a fair rate for that service.

And then you read through somebody's samples and they've got a portfolio of quite well written web copy and then you spot some glaring proofreading oversight. Jesus. Do these people not read the work they do forty five times before releasing it?

And then you have a look around at what's happening over in general community: A posting from a woman who's 25, feels she might be bipolar, and has no health insurance. What do you do when you're mentally ill and uninsured in America? Cry for help on craigslist, of course! Or buy a lottery ticket. Call yourself a high class companion and sell your body for $5000 a night to 'select discreet gentlemen' over in Casual Encounters.

Calling all black girls! There's a very discreet, sweet, dawn-to-earth (yes that's right ladies, dawn to earth) gentleman looking for a dinner-for-sex arrangement in the strictly platonic section. And if you strike it lucky, you'll get to do it again and again and again.

I wonder if Alanis Morissette knows that one of her lyrics has entered internet dating as a term for casual sex? I'm sure she'd be delighted. Lots of people seem to be looking for friends-with-benefits, or in the craiglist-nuanced usage, alive-human-to-fuck-tonight.

And then there's the whole genre of people who go into the toilet to take their dating profile picture. Clearly it's because there's a big mirror in there so they can check themselves out as they suck in and go click.

But the toilets and towels in the background and generally claustrophobic vibe, combined with the camera held out arm's length mid-picture really lets you know everything you could have hoped to ask them. And the poses. Ah the poses. Poses that suggest hidden, off- camera pep talks with acquaintances poised on the edge of the bath, rolling skunk spliffs: "What disemboweled body? Not in MY bathroom!" or "Hit me up again Mario, I feel like I'm gonna die, I KNOW one more hit will get me onto the next level", or "I'm gonna get REAL paid for this rack and all I have to do is arch and pout, arch and pout". It's not a pretty thing, the craigslist personals section. Not to mention the

"very successful plastic surgeon seeking a mutually beneficial relationship with a very special, very attractive and very, very sexy young woman" types,

and people interested in paying $1500 a month for GFE (girl-friend-experience, for hire, which seems to be simulated girlfriendness, without the commitment or reality).

This is the seamy side of the city, folks. They took down Times Square and built Craigslist. And how it rocks, oh how it rocks.

I have five words for you

Haagen Dazs Reserve Amazon Valley Chocolate. Okay, six. Icecream. Seven.

Fucking amazing. Nine.

Brief glimpses inside another human being

What is it that happens to a man or a woman who catches a bare glimpse of another, and without anything else to go on, feels their heart sing? Is it some kind of look in the eye that resonates somewhere? Is it purely energetic? Physical? The way she holds herself? The way he smiles? Some reminder of someone lost somewhere.. or an unexpected feeling of coming home, right there, across the room, with nobody saying anything?

Of course, it's only actually remarkable when it happens between two people who are not in a sexed-up or exotic landscape, who are fully clothed, and who are not flirting with each other. Sexual fantasies are like invisible mosquitoes in the air in new york city. The air is full of endless opportunity, like mirages made out of diesel dust on a hot humped road.

I opened the missed connections craigslist page yesterday, and typed in "Freddy's". A post came up for a night I had been there (like shooting fish in a waterless barrel, this past couple of weeks). Up came a mention of a woman who was actually sitting in front of me (there were less than 20 people in the backroom at the time). The post was written by a man "on the other side of the room, wearing a red shirt". He said:

"We spoke briefly while passing on the stairs, and I should have asked then. So, I'm asking now."

And I wonder if she'll ever see it. It's a peculiar thing, typing in some general information into the missed connections section to see if anyone has felt a connection with you, missed. And even when the room is narrowed down as far as 20 in Freddy's Backroom, it's still new york city.

Thousands of people come between one meaningful connection and the next friendly face, here. People get worn down by that, and retreat into their small worlds. Then suddenly they look out, and see something beautiful, and feel its loss when it goes. They also know that because it's new york, the odds on ever meeting that particular beauty again are staggeringly high against it. And yet it happens.

It can be a desert, sometimes. And then a flower pops up when you least expect it.

I got a guitar today! I've just been singing some tunes, trying out my 7th chords. Barres are next. Phew!

Hurrah! Hurrah!

Whippet Love, the Musical

There's a company accepting short scripts for a festival of erotica in early December, here in the city. I have just found myself actually wondering if they might be interested in a little tale of whippet erotica. More to the point, I have found myself wondering if I had what it took to write such a tale. And the third prong of my three pronged thought process this past few minutes, has been in wondering if such a tale could possibly be written as a stage play.

It's funny being away from Denmark

I've got a feeling I'm going to really love it when I'm next there. Denmark is in my heart, dude. I'm feeling a little integration of the Denmark vibe in my soul.
Hallelujah for that one.

Edie

This weekend, I watched some footage of Edie Sedgwick during the filming of Ciao Manhattan in 1965. The movie itself was rank, but hurrah that the camera was lit and rolling during that whole speed addled - max's - downtown scene in this town in the sixties. What was fabulous about it was that that was a time when you could be the strangest creature in the world and fall into living in some apartment in downtown Manhattan and not have to worry too hard about getting the rent paid. And there were plenty of other people like you to hang out with. The downside for me, though, would have been all the requisite drug addiction, and more to the point, the fact that everybody around you was fucked up.

So there was Edie and crew, Edie tanked up to the max in makeup and Dr. Robert's specials, eating in new york's very first sushi restaurant, back in '65.

You know, this was a landscape of amphetamine and cocaine and heroin and drinking all day long as the natural landscape of things. Everybody you knew for miles around was injecting themselves with speed several times a day. It was the norm. David Weisman describes the vibe: "this was the very first sushi restaurant in the city! We all thought we were on a health kick going in there.. and if you went to the gym aswell as eating sushi, well you HAD to be queer."

At any given time, a rotating 20 people lived in his 43rd st. duplex on an informal basis, and somebody had built a little cupboard for herself to live in, for privacy's sake. Fun. For a visit. Probably a total pain in the arse to be paying the rent on that flat. So what's the difference today?

All the artists are graphic designers, and everybody's in advertising or branding! Somebody mentioned that this was a time before marketing was invented. So Edie picked up whatever random garments lay on the floor of her Bentley and put them together and they became the look of the era. This was a time when people hadn't quite learned the skills of mass manipulation yet. They hadn't yet learned how to herd people into marketing pens, lock the door shut and sell to them.

So this is why people talk about that sixties era as having been "an innocent time". But to me, that's all kind of shot to shit by all the people who roll around in the glory of it, ever since. Whoever these middle aged farts are that talk about having been at Woodstock and lounged on the Silver Couch, it's all bollocks. They weren't anywhere in sight in that infra red-lit backroom at Max's Kansas City.

From the glimpses you get of that particular scene from this footage, it seems to me that what you're really seeing is boredom in motion in new york city, old style. Boredom has always had options in a town like this. There's plenty of trouble to get into. And if you throw some heiress' disposable cash and Warhol, the world's first artist marketeer, into the mix of heroin addicts, Vogue editors and drag queens, you've got a party.

I think then, as now, there was probably a multitude of new yorks, a multitude of scenes, and the ones with the sexiest pictures got made into posters. That's how we remember the sixties, through its iconography. The sixties are a bit like the effect Joyce had on Irish prose writing: it could take the culture a hundred years to get over it.

So this kind of new york came up and sank back. What kinds of new york are rising from the murk today? What are today's adventures in new york city?

Keep your lamplight trimmed and burning, baby.

Tonight's flavour

Half baked.
Packed full of gobs of every kind of chocolate bollocks you can imagine.
I'm waiting for it to melt to the right temperature.

Who says art ain't dangerous?

I got stabbed in the finger with the sharpened point of one of the pencils I walk around with in my bag. The lead tip chipped off and a good quarter inch of it settled deep under the skin like a tiny little bullet graze.

Pushing it out was the main event, though. That took a bit of work.

New Joni Record!

Joni Mitchell has a new album out tomorrow, released through Starbucks. First new record in a long time, and after she had apparently kicked the lid down on songwriting and told it never to come out again. Apparently you can hear it in any Starbucks store tomorrow from 11 am to 2 pm, if you can stomach the coffee and the weird service system.

I love that gal. I'll be there.

Latest news about the Park Slope Lunatic

He gave me a dirty look last night, and didn't even bother to shake his can at me. And definitely no comments about my outfit.

Open letter to a life in Denmark

I wrote a letter on pale blue post-its one evening a few weeks ago in a club on Avenue B. It's gotten moved around and the order messed up, and has been sitting on my desk ever since. Each little couplet is the contents of each post-it, and I typed it exactly as I found it on my desk.

It's addressed to a man who swings deep and breathes low, and often gets up late.

Hello ----
What's shakin', sugar?
God, I wish I could say that in Danish so it swung. I'd love

to be able to write love songs to you in Danish, but here I am, sitting in some supposedly hip east side bar writing to you on post-its that I may or

may not post.

I think of you so fondly, and I also get the blues when I think of you. I wonder what that's about? I wonder how you feel when

whom I feel a profound soulmate kind of vibe, and I felt that with you. If you don't feel the same way, I thank you for

the stub. I'm actually feeling really good, ----. Maybe I write to you because it is rare that I meet a man with

and sticking them one by one on the back of my notebook. It's so dark in here I can't see when my pencil's down to

though I sit here in this somewhat subterranean club in alphabet city, scrawling in the dark on some post its

happening inside me - some guessing game with a built in disappointment of the most crashing nature and

you know, it's a fucking load off to get out of that force field also. Because I feel like there was some game

to live there anymore. Not unless I was in love with someone who was also in love with me, and I suppose I felt that way about you, and

hard in the moment, especially when you really can't do anything about it. So I'm wary of Denmark now, because honestly I don't want

very valuable lesson to truly learn, I think. It's incredibly simple, of course, and obvious when you see it, but it can also be really

having some sort of purpose, and I can go with that. The point is that it happened. Not all of our lives are there to please us. That is a

long like that. No channels in the world much at all. Really difficult. But I remember something you said once about things

telling someone recently that I found it really hard to not have an anchor in life, in Denmark, and to be there for so

whip em from you in a flash, in a trumpet crash, in a heartbeat.

definitely a lot going on here.
It's an interesting place to be a human, alive. It pulls and pushes at you, dumps loads and

Americans are funny. They're interesting and the New York variety is incredibly diverse. There's a lot of money chasing here, but there's

the people who live in these places and pay that kind of rent aren't thinking like that at all. You know? It's a totally different thing going on there.

pay the rent alone, and it came to $70,000 a year. Just to pay the rent. And then of course there was food, etc. But

was advertising flats for $3900. So this chick had spent her time calculating how much money someone had to be earning just in order to

talking about how there was a new building over on St. Marks a block away from her place, between 1+2 ave. and it was called The Saint, and it

Francis, the bleeding Texan with chigger bites.
So he was out with some chick from 1st ave and she was

lived here, in 2003. He was the first person I've recognised on Avenue A since the old days, except for

some kind of invisible.
And tonight I met a photographer, longtime inhabitant of St. Marks, who I met the last time I

dropping coins into his cup. I mean, it wasn't subtle. You know? Wild-eyed, the whole bit. He's

But this man was psychotic of soul and body. And I don't think anyone sees him either, even when they've

on my street corner tonight. He was insane. You could say that many people here are insane, the way they live.

the poughkeepsie train. It must have taken 20 minutes for her to cross it. Nobody even saw her. I passed a boy-man

evening in the central concourse, and watched a hunched old woman make her way across this huge concourse on the way to

sorts of baby heart breaking kinds of ways. You know, stuff you see. I stood at Grand Central station one

Your graciousness in hearing me out. It feels good here, in New York. And it's also crazy. In all

I think that is about as far out as it gets.
I'm hungry, and waiting for this gig to kick off. When you're bored you're bored, whether you paid ten bucks

to get into a place, or not.

Sleep well, ----.

Whippet Love, 6

Whippet Love, 5

I heard a man talking on the phone in an Irish accent

along 5th avenue.

"Irish!" I called after him, the way I do here, sometimes.
He didn't turn around.

It's irresistible to me, when I hear it. It sounds so beautiful. I have had a number of conversations with people in the street purely on the basis of hearing my home accent. And it's interesting, because there is a relationship between the amount of time a person has been living away from their home country, and the strength of their desire to talk to another Irish person purely because of the resonant music of Irishness.

A thought struck me last night, walking home (from Freddy's: look, any time you see me writing about the thoughts I have on the way home, just know it happened after Freddy's, I think I'll have to make a new label: walking home from Freddy's) and it was very simple: love for one's country grows in exile. That has been my experience, and while exile is a grandiose kind of a word, I like it for what it signifies to me underneath and before the grandiosity.

And it's true in my case. I have found myself having a sense and feeling of Ireland that is entirely new, a love for the place that has actually only really come into existence since I moved away from it. It grows inside you. I think that's probably just the natural way of things. When you're in a place, the tendency is to take it for granted, and crib about the small stuff, and then when you're away from it, the broad strokes come into relief. I think age has a lot to do with it, aswell, though maturity and age do not often, actually, dovetail.

One of the things I love about new york city (and there are many, and I want to write about all of them, ultimately) is the ubiquity of the English language. It's just so easy to understand and be understood by people here. And you get to hear all kinds of interesting stuff, stuff you can understand. I only have this particular appreciation for the fact that I hear English everywhere because I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, and one of the things I missed very much about living there was that I felt so shut off from streetlife in that way, so shut off from the overheard joke, and the generalness of things.

Also, the more you speak English to people for whom it is not their native tongue - no matter how fluent they are - your own language skills start going down the toilet fast. You lose your slang, you lose your jive, you pick up bad habits in your own language that are prevalent in non-native speakers. And when you speak their language, you're only ever able to express yourself mediocrely, at best. However, despite all this, I had some profound and beautiful moments of connection with people through Danish. In particular, the old people I visited and cared for, during my last months there. That was where it all happened, with Danish, for me.

You can hear every language being spoken here in new york city. I have an appreciation for people who come to a strange place without knowing the language. I was stopped for directions on Prospect Park West by a middle aged man with almost no English, who I could just about make out was looking for Montgomery st., and he was rolling a delivery trolley. I didn't know where it was, but I shouted to the people behind, and they didn't know either. Anyway, I bade him good luck on his way. Jesus, though, I thought, and turned around to the people behind again, and said,

"Jesus. Imagine not being able to speak English and coming to new york city, and trying to survive?" That is just unfuckingfathomable. And it happens, thousands of times every day. Anyway, it turns out that the people behind were from Namibia and Germany, had been living in the city for a long time, and they had their own stories to share.

Learning a new language in situ is challenging, under any circumstances, especially if you have no choice but to speak it through the day, to be in that mode of trying to understand, all the time. It's like a switch that is permanently on, in your brain. You're reaching out, in some inexplicable way, constantly, to catch subtle inflections, throwaway vowel sounds, a look in the eye. You get used to spending entire years of your life catching 10, 15, 20% of conversations, of never getting the joke even when you understand it, of constantly being, to a greater or lesser extent, out of things, outside of the culture. Because you are. I think you need a very strong anchor to keep you in a monoculture that is not your own, and one that is so strongly based on its own traditions, like Denmark is.

And I've met people who have that anchor, they found it through love, through marriage and family. I didn't find anyone who was not Danish, who found that anchor through love of the place itself, there. But I'm sure there are people who have settled there, particularly along the west coast, who found that kind of love, that kind of devotion, to the place, the landscape. People find that feeling every day in Ireland. The place is jumping with every nationality in the world. It's like a mini-new york.

I find it here.

Whippet Love, 4

Whippet Love, 3

Email from my mum in Majorca

... I think she might be referring to my blog pics...

ur better looking than that love mum

Whippet Love, 2

Ode to a fire escape

I think there's a balancing point, in the life of a writer, where edge meets tightrope skills, where passion for place co-exists with thriving groove within its particular landscape, and where the flame of the word is burning in the heart, without resistance.

And I think that balancing point is where a writer must be, in order to be able to produce great work. It cannot be prescribed, but it can be recognized. I see it every time I read Martin Amis, for instance, even though he's probably an uptight rat-arse. I think the less petty life becomes, also, the more space becomes available for something beautiful to happen.

I am living in an overlooked apartment this week, and again a few weeks ago, for just about the first time in my life (!) and that includes elsewhere in new york city, new orleans, denmark and ireland. It's a great apartment, roomy and centrally located in Park Slope, utterly quiet and peaceful with a row of brownstone backyards opposite.

I love the space and the well equipped kitchen, and the rhythm of life here: writing, walking the whippets, writing, loading and unloading the dishwasher, thinking about dinner, making coffee, walking the whippets, writing... but the fact that I am visible when I walk around naked is a new one on me. However, I enjoy the kind of somewhat-intimacy that is part of this kind of landscape of facing windows. I think it's a duty of living in this kind of arrangement to be visible at least a part of the day. I try to keep this visibility clothed, at least, but it feels right to me that people can see me going about my day, and I glance in at their lives. The only one with full visibility though, at least with the lights on, is the fiddle player who lives opposite and down a floor, who has only one flimsy green see-through piece of cloth on one half of one of the windows, probably for decoration rather than privacy.

There is a neighbourhood budding horn player, who has been verbally instructed, via my next door neighbour's fire escape window, to discontinue any hopes of a career, and who seems, sadly, to have taken the advice, or perhaps found a practise room. There's a guitar player elsewhere whose sound is mute and pleasant enough to be able to survive such approbrium. I say it again, I have no such difficulty because I have no guitar here, though I sing sometimes, and I miss the bollocks out of the guitar I left behind in Copenhagen.

The fire escape here is gorgeous, and I have slept on it. But it has been thrilling to live in the flat I've subletted all summer long up in Prospect Heights.

The thrill is in its fire escape, with its view of Manhattan ( I saw the Chrysler building's wicked white witch hat of light get turned on one night last week, while eating my dinner out there!) and its tall trees and its huge huge sky and no one overlooking and the basketball court in the middle-near distance where men met to play late in the hot summer nights, and the children's playground with its distant daily bustle and the huge vista of flat, low rooftops all the way to manhattan. And the butterflies dancing and lovemaking together in twos all the livelong day, and the crickets and cicada have played a summer-long jam right outside my window. I have heard and seen birds outside my window this summer I do not recognise, whose sounds call to be heard. And the sufi man has sung every break of day into existence on the balcony of the penthouse on the corner.

I relish every moment there. Actually, I relish every moment. Here.

Sleeping with whippets

Lest there be any doubt about it, I am currently sharing my bed with a pair of whippets. Rather, they're sharing their bed with me. I'm the interloper. But we're really having a blast. They sleep under the blankets, resting their heads on my feet.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, with a whippet's head on the pillow beside me.

Right. It's-last-pee-of-the-night - time for the ladies. And so we to bed.

Tonight's flavour

Mint chip. Not the best.

Ambition

I had what struck me as an ambitious thought, this evening. I thought, I'd like to own a brownstone on a really great Brooklyn block, and live in it some of the year, offering it to sound people on some kind of a cheap basis in order to live and make interesting work in new york city without selling their arses, the rest of the time.

Gosh, that's quite ambitious, I thought.

And then I thought, yeah, to me it is. But that probably wouldn't necessarily strike somebody else as particularly ambitious, AT ALL. David and Victoria Beckham, for instance, I found myself thinking, would probably see no particular ambition there at all.

So you see, these things are all relative.

Prospect Heights News: two slugs were seen on 6th avenue moving slowly toward each other this evening

Stay tuned for updates as the story develops.

The park slope lunatic

Did I write about the lunatic I saw recently? An actual lunatic human being, out on the street, uncared for. He's a park slope regular, what we'd call a character, in Dublin. Well, I had a human, friendly interaction with him, yesterday. He shakes a starbucks carton out there on 7th ave, looking for change. He's got about 10 plastic bags with stuff in them, and each plastic bag is really more a of a unit of plastic bags, probably about 10 of them doubled up and frayed and filthy, forming each unit.

Anyway, last night we said howrya, and it was honest, low-key, casual and true. It was nice to see his human face. So this evening, I emptied out my loose change and dropped it in his can. "Them's really nice earrings" he says, dropping compliments for hopes of cash reward the way the guy who stands by the Flatbush 7th ave Q train entrance does.

That was such a fucking pity.

Cheap Psychic advice available on 7th avenue in Park Slope

There's a white camper van parked on 7th ave with a sign in the venetian blinded window saying "Psychic Advice, $2." I bet it's no phoney, neither.

I think I'd be spooked going to a psychic who advertised his services discreetly for $2, and who clearly lives in a camper van that he parks all over the gentrified areas of Brooklyn. He might just know what he's talking about.

She gazes through the window (late summer's evening)

Whippet Love

Mott shop

There's a shop on Mott St. in the centre of the Chinatown ant hill, called "Romantic Gift Shop Inc". Across the street is the "Romantic City Gift Inc." shop.

Competition in the neighbourhood. Clearly there is money to be made.

The Readers of Park Slope

Found and pocketed, last night, on the way home from Freddy's:

1 copy of Dante's Inferno, on a lamppost
1 copy of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, on a stoop

Seen and resisted:

The contents of a depressed intellectual's renounced life, in a cardboard box. Contents included Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann novels, and a single black eyepatch. Hurrah! The Wicked Witch is Dead!

Elsewhere, a brownstone homeowner on 6th avenue has clearly had the dream shattered. Her stash of Daphne Du Maurier novels (and it was exhaustive) lay on her stoop's second to last step, naked and offered to the world.

It's a neighbourhood of readers, reading and releasing, reading and releasing, furiously.

Me n Thea, 2

But my jaw really did drop open at the sight of this one

Writing Internship or Build Your Portfolio with Fear Driven Stories

---

Can you come up with fear driven stories worthy of a newspaper? Your story will be read by 20,000 people a day or more.

A High Tech NYC company seeks budding writer to assist in creating a multitude of stories relating to cheating, law enforcement, child endangerment, criminal activity and more.

If you would like to offer your talents to build up your portfolio and credit, then we would love to have you be a part of our team. This is a non-paid internship. You can come here for school credits or just for fun. Once you are finished with your stay here, we will be more than happy to offer phenomenal recommendations wherever you may go.

On a side note, we have tons of really cool high tech gadgets to play with every day, many you can take home. The skys the limit to showcase all your writing talents. We won’t hold you back.

Reply to this email and we will get back to you right away.

As if the ecosystem that is craigslist knew I was writing about its writers gigs section...

... it just posted this.

Dunkin Donuts for Creative Writing!

I have $200 worth of Gift Certificates for Dunkin Donuts in exchange for some creative writing. They have over 18 different types of coffees, lattes, as well as their donuts and breakfast sandwiches which make perfect writing companions!

Basically, I'm an artist/game designer who needs some characters and storylines fleshed out. I have the basic skeletal outlines but need someone to fill em in.

E-mail me for more details!

An "Everything but the Two Twisted" kind of posting

... that's a Ben and Jerry's flavour, folks in Europe! And my local Met store sells them for $2.50 a pop! And it's a bit of a pun, also. The themes will dovetail nicely, as you read on. Just like a tub of the good stuff.

Well I can't believe I've been blogging for a few weeks with almost no mention of craigslist. Let the silence be broken here, and now.

I advertise my writing and editing services on craigslist (hereafter known as cl). It's a pretty wide-ranging clientele, which keeps things interesting, and work does come in. There are of course many people on cl who are looking for people to write business proposals or do line-editing as some sort of charitable donation to the city of new york, but they don't get it from me.

I rarely look at other writers' ads, but I just spotted a guy who has advertised himself as

***THE VERY BEST EDITOR ON CRAIGSLIST IS HERE*** (Midtown)

which was welcome light relief. I always get a chuckle from the frustrations of those who use keyboard shouting to get heard on cl.

They punctuate V&RY L@*DLY ***** LIKE TH#S====++ AND CAPITALISE ALL THEIR SENTENCES, IN BOLD.

But the best bit is the (Midtown) bit. That's just a straightahead lie, to sound impressive and busy and scatter some shitkicking ballbreaking manhattan fairy dust over the proceedings. This guy is clearly living in Yonkers.

Oh sometimes you just need a hug from a whippet. And then you get one from a whippet who is skilled and talented in this area, and you know it's all going to be fine. This whippet's ear skin is so thin, the sun shines through it. Her fur is very fine, too, like a threadbare rug, and her skin is pink with black spots underneath. And she likes hiding under the duvet, where it's warm and nice.

I was doing my customary Haagen Dazs fridge groove last night, where I stand before the impressive supermarket cabinet, filled floor to ceiling only with Haagen Dazs, and I'm focussing, making mental judgments:
Sorbet, no.
Low fat, no.
Strawberry, no.
English toffee, mm..
Triple chocolate, uh, triple chocolate.. oh... Just what kind of triple chocolate IS it, anyway?

And a kindly elderly black hep-cat reached over me and opened the cabinet door, taking out a bucket of rum-raisin manfully, without deliberation. He turned to me and said, in his hep-cat harlem accent, "I've got it too, sugar. Don't feel bad!" And I reached in and pulled out that tub of triple chocolate without further ado, and marched to the counter.

Me

Whippet Central

Back in Whippet City

I'm whippet-sitting for the week.

God, it was such a gorgeous day today. It is definitely autumn, and though there are still a few valiant flip-floppers grooving around still, in their shorts, the time for the summer is past past past. The leaves are already crinkly and covering the ground.

I brought the ladies, as I call them, for a walk in the park and then up to my flat, and back home through the park. It's like walking around with a pair of supermodels, or mother teresa. They spread joy and happiness where e'er they go. Handsome men turn to smile fondly as they speed through the park on their high tech racing bikes; groups of 13 year old black children feel they can make contact. All sorts of people stop to marvel at the Amazing Whippets. Especially today, because they were out in their green sweatshirts, which make them look a bit like supermodels slumming it, or those incredibly rich old people you sometimes see wandering around the upper east side in their knickers with several nurses attending them. God save us from yes-men.

But with two sanguine whippets at hand, you get to talk to so many people you probably wouldn't otherwise. The funny thing is, most people say, knowingly, "Italian greyhounds, right?" with a little wink. They screw up their noses when they hear "Whippets, actually."

I've been through this drill so many times I should seriously consider making an application as some sort of tour guide to the International Whippet Association. People ask if they're friendly, as the ladies strain at the leash to get away. "Well, they're not really that bothered, as far as I can tell. They're not either friendly or unfriendly, most of the time. I think they usually don't notice other living things. Except squirrels. They are passionate about squirrels. They sort of do their own thing, you know?" I like to think I'm doing my bit for Global Whippet Consciousness Raising. Sometimes it Feels Good to Capitalise.

Overheard this evening, in the park:

Elderly Austro-German type, full white head of hair and full white beard, speaking in a thick Austrian accent, complete with the hugely enjoyable Germanic zz's. He's talking very quickly and very very enthusiastically to a delighted, giggling elderly lady.

Zo I vonder, what do zey vant viz me, vhen ze place eez zo full of zientists.. And zen I figured it out! I landed in August, and zix monthz later zey land on ze moon - ZAT is why zey vanted me! Of course!!

Some people you just want to make friends with on the spot. Even if just for a short while.

Tonight I am off to the great Entertainment Soup Kitchen that is Freddy's Backroom bar. This evening's sustainence is a comedy stew, with a light chat for afters.

It's not a night for sandals

It is amazing sometimes, the kind of rich soul-nourishment you can get from a cup of decent Irish tea and a sandwich of two easy single slices, on white toast, with butter, sometimes.

That's American cheese slices for the Americans, and the whole concept is just too difficult to translate for the Danes. It's the kind of comfort you get from a slice of rugbroed with leverpostej, I guess.

Of course, the cool thing is that you can get organic easy singles here. From a 24 hour supermarket a couple of blocks away.

It's a windy night, and the air is cold. Most of my clothes are summery so I've got to make a few visits to Beacon's Closet - a huge thrift store up in Billyburg and another branch down on the Slope - and have a look around for some warm stuff.

As I was walking along Flatbush tonight, I had some thoughts about being in new york on a saturday night and not feeling like rocking out, or travelling, but feeling like something human, and not having a lover, and not really having any friends here yet of the sort I could just call up and feel always welcome with. And not having a guitar. I suppose that's what I like about places like Freddy's. It's that kind of vibe, a regular spot, with friendly regulars. But even Freddy's gets busy on the weekend.

And that's just how it goes, you know? The rough with the smooth. That's just how it goes in new york city and anywhere else.

Hey, I saw an old interview of Tom Waits on Letterman, from 1984. Letterman asks him, "how would you describe new york?" And he says, "Well... it's like a big ship. (pauses) And the water's on fire."

The Pampas of Brooklyn, def.

Those little patches of wild, scrubby ungentrified green weedy ground it is still possible to find in areas of Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Bed Stuy. Some are sizable, and fill the area of a brownstone that is no longer there, or a sports arena that would raze all indigenous life varieties in the area, to be replaced largely by a single bud-lite mega-variety.

Trash treasure hunters, def.

Those of us who have half an eye cocked permanently on the kerbs (curb for the Americans, kantsten for Danes) of new york city for riches, especially on garbage days.

Seen on the street

I just saw a woman rolling a basset hound in a pram (stroller for the Americans; barnevogn for the Danes).

She did not look insane.

I am in the mood for rock and baby, I am in the mood for roll

I'm a-going dancin tonight! I don't feel good for much this weekend except dancing, having fun and hanging out on my fire escape.

Have a great weekend..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnY1hlI-olw&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Mw6b1T50U&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP1TC21QsnA&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzKiqk2iynY

Seal

Seekin' music, that's what it is. Fucking beautiful, passionate, living seeking music.

In Love

I feel so good today. I feel like I'm in love. I don't know who with, though. It's very exciting. All I know is that he's very sexy and his eyes are full of beauty. And he rocks.

Good Intentions

I found a page from a book sitting on the ground on my block two days ago. Just reached down and picked it up. You never know what might be incredibly interesting in this town, and where you might find it. Here's what it said:


HERE WE GO QUIETLY NUTS IN MAY

Do you hanker for April showers
Or a rarefied day in June?
Give me a grade-A May day,
And please deliver it soon.
I am weary of branches naked,
Creaking like lovelorn cats;
The earth underfoot half bak`ed
And the sun overhead ersatz.
Send me a balmy zephyr
To play me a rigadoon,
And I'll gulp of my grade-A May day
Till my hiccups hammer the moon.


On my big walk yesterday, I walked the block on the other side of the street, and spotted several more dogpissed-on and new york shoe'd on sheets of the same book, and my response was ecstatic. More book, more book! I left one page there, because it had fresh dogpiss on it, and that was just a step too far for me on that occasion. I will, however, have a look out there today, see if it's dried.

One of the pages is, luckily enough, a cover page, with the words Good Intentions written on it, so I'm guessing that's the name of the book.

So I'll be posting what I have of this anonymous book in intervals over the next while. I have five pages, printed on both sides.

Do the shimmer, do the shake shake with all of your might

I was walking through Prospect Heights toward Fort Greene/Bed Stuy this evening around 6, when I saw them. Five groups of white birds, each group maybe 200 birds, dancing in the sky. Weaving into and around each other, playing. They shimmered like the sun against a rippled river surface, continually as they danced, each group moving as one, and moving in and out of each other across the blue sky.

I think I'm in love.

It reminded me of a group of birds I watched one evening in the Amager Faelled wild park in Copenhagen, when I lived there (was it last year? yes, I believe it was last year, though it feels like a hundred years ago) one evening when I was still wearing shorts but the air was crisp and freezing, the way the air gets by September in Denmark.

I heard them first.

They made a huge chatter, getting their chirp on, a couple of hundred birds up the top of a very tall tree. They sat there, sang and chatted and chirped for a few minutes, then suddenly they all took off, as if the tree had run its fingers through its hair, and they moved around a bit like musical chairs, dancing, and then resettled at once in different parts of the tree, resuming their song, chats and chirps with fresh chicas and chicos.

This went on for about a half an hour, and the more they went on, the more birds came. It was like a nightclub by the end of it. About a thousand birds in the tops of three tall trees, and then when they were ready, it was like they just heard the opening bars of Dancing Queen, and instinct propelled them toward the dancefloor. The thousand birds took off at once, as one.

They moved across the great expanse of sky over the faelled, moving like a manatee. All I could do was stand there, and watch. Jump up and down occasionally when the cold got really intense. Because I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave.

As soon as they took off into the sky - a thousand birds gracefully moving as one, a thousand bird iceskaters skating a perfect dance - they were silent. Not a peep, not a chirp. Nothing. Just singular movement. After a while, a very small subgroup developed, of like-minded avant garde birds, clearly, who were in sympathy with the mainframe, but they needed to break away to express their own dance in a more intimate unit. They met the large group every few seconds like a pair of dishwashing bubbles gliding and bouncing off of each other and moving apart again.

This evening, there were five groups of birds, and they moved and weaved and danced too, and shimmered like the sea. I stood on the corner of Dean and Underhill and watched.

Prospect Heights can man

Hey Sweep, what cho doin?
Sweep, I'm yo mistress. I'm yo bride n I'm yo groom.
Whatcha know, Sweep?

I don't have no dollars.
I'm on social security.
I'm retired.

Stranger seen, unmet

I had a new york moment on the F train. I recognised a bloke sitting on the train and I had no idea where from, or what country, or context. Could have been anywhere. I just have a strong feeling that I've met and talked with him before. Young, college-looking, with wiry red hair and a wiry red beard, very American looking in a thin, malnourished kind of way, baseball cap.

And he got up to exit the train at Carroll Gardens. I wasn't in the mood to go and find out the scoop. And so he disappeared back into the new york ocean, teeming with every kind of sealife in its 300 square miles.

They have sealife in Freddy's, also. Underwater swimming toads in a water tank, with human arses. I freaked one out. He saw me and jumped. Underwater.

In the background, ladies sang arias and men sat at the bar, chugging whiskey.

Here come the hotstepper

My dad sent me some post that had come to their house for me since I've come here. One of the letters was an invitation to my cousin's wedding in October. I'm flying back to Ireland for it on the 8th. It was a sweet invitation, no doubt chosen with intense deliberation, and I have a feeling that they hired someone to write the names by hand in fancy calligraphy. There was also a handful of little shiny winged angels with bugels, confetti-style, scattered in the envelope. Anyway, somehow the angels have found their way all over the place. I'm stepping on angels as I move through the flat.

It makes it a bitch to hoover, though.

Fun with Photo Booth

Spam in Spanish

When my comments came back on, I had one comment. It was in Spanish, and it looked like spam. I deleted it.

Knock on wood, baby. oooh.

I've just been involved one of those conversations that felt like we were rollerblading at speed through the boroughs of new york city. One of those conversations that had us. Tonight, at Freddy's. We drank of that conversation like two thirsty feckers, jugs and jugs of it, half afraid to stop in case there mightn't be more of it for ages. Beautiful.

Here's something I started writing in the street earlier tonight, and finished it just before that conversation happened.

Did you ever get the feeling that nobody likes you? I mean, nobody. I've had the feeling that nobody likes me. Just now. It's kind of still sticking around a bit. Yes. It's still here. The more people I meet, the more unfriendly things seem to be getting.

People keep sending me away. I must have some strange magnetism this evening. Even the bartender told me to get served by somebody else.

Knock, knock, knock on wood.

That Kind of Day

I'm trying to think of a joke. This is the kind of evening that requires a joke and a bottle of beer. Of course I would ask you to kindly post jokes in the comments section, if I had a comments section. It disappeared in the night. There is some anti-Competition Olympics troll prowling around the internet, and I want to make it clear RIGHT NOW that YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE WRONG OLYMPIAN HERE, ye little fecker. Hmm.. a joke a joke my kingdom for a joke. Nothing comes to mind, except a bunch of very very very dodgy jokes I heard last night which are of the kind only repeatable in small hushed groups.

I do have some news about my parents' forthcoming Majorca holiday. Mum has bought some snorkel sets in Dunnes so they can put their heads in the water and still breathe and the fish apparently swim all around you. They are very excited about their holiday.

I am, too.

Anyone got a guitar? Lets have a sing-song. The wind is blowing and the night is cold and you can feel autumn in the air today.

Gremlins Begone!

Very very strange day.

So my comments section has vamoosed! I have no idea what happened, but am working on having it restored as soon as possible.

If anyone knows anything about how to get the comments feature back, please drop me a line.

Thanks.

Darkness at noon

It's pouring rain here. Hard rain.

It must be tough for the people standing in Zuccotti park, reading out names.

Competition Olympics Prizes for Winners

Ok, lets turn up the temperature a little on this one. There's gonna be prizes for the outright winner of each leg of the Inaugural Honorary LUCYTAKESOFF Competition Olympics 2007. I would like to clarify that these individual-round prizes will NOT be presented on a plinth with garlands and a cup to hold aloft in pride and achievement, but are merely teasers, you might call them, to string you along and get you entering. Good lord. Racy.

When we have completed all the legs of the Inaugural Honorary LUCYTAKESOFF Competition Olympics 2007, then and only then will all the names be put into a hat and drawn from a drum that goes round and round by an air hostess with a blindfold on, and the winning names read out over a microphone in some kind of a live webcast by a minor Irish rockstar. Flashing discolights might also feature. And the plinths, garlands, medals, bathing suit etc. bit you already know from previous posts.

This week's prize:

drumroll drumroll drumroll drumroll

A set of five vhs copies of Simpsons Featurettes, or perhaps they're Simpsons Thematic Treasuries, each about 88 minutes long, which I found on a stoop at 6th avenue and President Street in Park Slope, this evening. Here's the rub, though. You'll have to watch them with me, because I don't have a video player and I'd love to see them. But I'm saying it now, ladies and gentlemen, I will NOT be wearing a bathing suit for the screening.

So far, the lovely Constance is in Pole Position as the ONLY entrant in the competition. And for all of you who have recently started reading the blog, dig deep to at least a week ago, there's another competition, which was Leg One of this prestigious and highly unusual Olympic variety, which is still open, though another New Yorker, the lovely Chris, is in a similar Pole Position there.

I wish you the best of luck.

"LUCYTAKESOFF is the only blog for me at the end of a hard day, because ... " in words ten or less. Post in the comments section of the original post please.

I've heard ugly rumours that the comments section is a gmail or blogger account-only zone or someshit by Blogger. I do hope this ain't so, and will be investigating whatthefuck.

Good lord, I've got a dirty mouth this evening. Just come back from the spelling bee at Freddy's Backroom tonight.

It's got to be that.

that rocknroll feeling, which is not the same as that microsoft feeling

Last week was happily a rocknroll kind of week, what with the arctic monkeys in central park on wednesday, barband singing in chinatown on thursday, the brooklyn country music festival at southpaw on friday and uh, Shakespeare in the Park on saturday. Well you know, rocknroll is a feeling, my friends.

I would post the review I wrote of the arctics gig, but my microsoft word test drive has just expired today and it won't even open any of the documents I've written in it.

So this is a bit of a bollocks moment. If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can avoid paying microsoft four hundred bucks for access to the documents I wrote in word (and I have been writing like a pig in muck, ladies and gentlemen), please email me at herecomeslucy AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks.

Jiving on the connections between us

There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.

I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.

I was feeling kind of antsy.

Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.

The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.

And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.

Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.

When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..

The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.

I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.

And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.

Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.

I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.

The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.

The in-towner

My trip to Nola has been postponed. It looks like I'm in NYC the whole month through.

Queen of the Rock, Queen of the Roll

I saw a beautiful photograph today.

It was taken in CBGB's in 1975. Patti Smith is wearing a sleeveless Ronny Wood t-shirt and she's holding court, grooving, dancing. And Bob Dylan is standing beside her, watching her at the centre of things, with a huge warm smile of pure delight, looking healthy and bearded, his hands clasped together tightly at his chest. It is entirely unlike any photograph of the man that I have ever seen. Of course neither of them seem aware of the camera. And even if they were, it was probably taken by a friend.

I'm still thinking about this image. I can hear his laugh, her drawl.

The bounty hunters

The US senate has voted to raise the bounty on Osama Bin-Laden's head to $50 million. Well, lets hope it's not a Euro-zoner who finds him, because the exchange rate will be killing.

This is unbelievable. This is the most wanted man in the world since Adolf Hitler and the land of the moneymaking free's governing body is willing to give fifty million dollars to have his head carved and brought to their table on a plate? Who the hell do they think they're talking to?

This isn't a missing kitten poster, tacked to a tree.

They are demanding, in effect, that this man's closest associates betray their leader. The Senate is effectively requiring the creation of a whole Gethsemane scene that could well become the start of a new worldwide religion. This is the big time. Fifty million dollars may sound like a lot of money when you're trying to pay your rent in New York city, but it's probably not quite enough to give somebody who's looking for it, the life of an oil sheikh.

But surely anything that happens now in the bin Laden story is all gravy, as far as he's concerned. He's had his rockstar moment, he's made his impact, the world knows his name and quivers when it's mentioned. His big idea has been sent through the world, and it has reverberated.

Meanwhile the "9-11 was an inside job" campaigners were out in Union Square today, handing out dvds and flyers. Convincing conspiracy theories are still pistol hot in America. As is the "Impeach Cheney, Impeach Bush" movement.

I saw a touching documentary about Al Gore a couple of weeks ago, made by Spike Jonze before That Election. The documentary was never officially released. Gore seemed very possessed of a sense of civic duty, but more than that, he was human and sincere (and also half naked and bodysurfing). There is a huge desire in the hearts of many here, trying hard to convince him to run. You can find these people at draftgore DOT com.

Elsewhere on the planet, Bill Clinton is planning to fundraise in Ireland, for Hillary's campaign. That has got to be a first.

Competition Olympics, Leg 2

Do you remember the days when tayto crisp wrappers and teabag boxes had competitions on them? You'd answer some cryptic question about cheese and onion flavours and then you'd have to come up with a really good way to finish the sentence "I love Tayto Crisps because..." or "Lyons Blend is the only one for me because..." in less than ten words. Many of us tried, and just couldn't summon up the creative genius for the project. It was our Waterloo.

Some people were really good at it. They won cars and holidays in Majorca. Their children became copywriters.

Of course, at that time, there were no copywriters in Ireland. There were competitions for slogans on the back of Cornflake boxes. The whole country was full of amateur enthusiastic copywriters hoping to get a free car or holiday in a time when Ireland was not the fourth wealthiest country on the planet.

Others, and this flavour is definitely in the general air in Ireland, wrote any old shit in blue biro and saved their tokens, sending them in with the cheery expectation that "if you're not in, you can't win". I love this aspect of Irish consciousness. It really gives the country its character. It's the same kind of spirit that will see my parents donning their wings to go and swim in the hotel pool in Majorca later this month.

My mum is in her fifties and my dad is in his sixties and there they'll be, swimming around happy as larry in their wings. They're becoming stronger swimmers with each sun holiday they take, I think. And they didn't win their holiday from a teabag box. They paid good money to get out of the rainy Irish summer for a week or so. May it shine on the island of Majorca that week.

Clearly my opening competition was too much for you, because there has been only one guess posted in the tumbleweed zone that is my comments section. Well it's just a good job I'm not crippled by a need to be popular, is all I can say.

So here's another competition. It will be combined with the first and maybe further ones, and we're gonna have winners dammit! I repeat: there's going to be three plinths, one high one in the middle with the number ONE on it, and two lower down ones saying 2 and 3, like the trains that take me out of here. There will be flower garlands, medals and I may well don a bathing suit to present the thing, should such a need arise.

Drumroll drumroll drumroll drumroll

Complete the following sentence in ten words or less:

"Lucy Takes Off is the only blog for me at the end of a hard day, because..."

Bated breath. Arched toes.

The pipes, the pipes are calling

I've just scored a craigslist hook-up trade-off:

One ticket for tonight's penultimate performance of Joe's Pub's Shakespeare In The Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in exchange for singing Danny Boy down the ticket-offerer's iPhone.

Hurrah!

My Rate

I won't get out of bed for less than fifty bucks an hour, but I think shortly I'll increase that to seventy five. I'm really confident about this.

Of course it means a lot of sleeping late mornings.

One block west of Bedford

Mummy, I heard flames.
Mmm hmm?
When we get some money, I shall buy two cars. Two cars. Two cars.
Silence.
Two cars!

He is a young deeply conservative black man, aged six.

Toll the bell

I met Bob last weekend on avenue A, it was a nice surprise to see someone from the old days there. I haven't seen Greywolf since I got here.

Greywolf is an old Cherokee man, mixed with New York city blood and filth and piss and liquor. He lived in Alphabet city around Tompkins Square park for years, he was there back in the eighties, when everything was different around the neighbourhood.

I've heard stories of nightly gunshots, drug-gang snipers on the rooves of buildings, ready to pick off any cops who wandered past avenue A. Stories of fires being lit in storefronts, of fire on the streets, of transvestite prostitutes, of colour and of dilapidation. And cheap rent. And artists renting. A different time.

Greywolf had a flute he used to play on Avenue A. It was six hundred years old, he told me, passed down through the generations to him. He also told me of having composed the music for some Disney movie, and of having toured with Santana. I've heard some crazyassed stories on the streets of Manhattan, really nothing is unbelievable here.

Greywolf lived on the street in all weathers. I don't know what he did in the winter, but his home was avenue A, and Tompkins square park. And that's where he sat every night, half naked, and welcoming, and always up for a chat.

Greywolf has disappeared.

I've heard a story he's living in the projects on avenue d, but that was from Francis the Irish cowboy Texan, who may or may not know what the hell he's talking about.

Bob is a neighbourhood alphabet city photographer, been living there for thirty odd years, basically his whole adult life, used to have a storefront and just saw the neighbourhood get chipped away at gradually, over the years. There seem to be some mournful stories in Bob's face, all about gentrification and hard times and the neighbourhood changing.

He stands out there on Avenue A on mild evenings, hanging out and meeting people. It's like an elaborate mourning ritual, marking the passing of this incredibly colourful neighbourhood of New York city, the stomping ground of his youth. Mostly he's just hanging out, talking the talk of avenue A. It was good to see him again. I hope to see him this weekend, if I'm in alphabet city.

It's a popular topic in that part of NYC right now. Huge changes have happened in what is now called the East Village over the past 20 years since the Tompkins square riots, where the homeless derelicts and junkies and hippies and hangabouts on Tompkins square had their Stonewall moment and laid a tent over a part of the park and declared it their home in rebellion against the increased pressure from the police to up sticks and remove their filthy selves from the neighbourhood. There were riots for days. That was 20 years ago.

In the past year, a number of landmark Lower East Side clubs have closed. Sin-e is gone, Tonic is gone, CBGB's is gone, amazingly, a big hoarding all around it and a block of condos on the way up. It's really quite obnoxious what's happening to areas like the LES and Williamsburg/Greenpoint lately. The lower east side has become a kind of hip theme park, and the place the bankers pour into on the weekends, ordering $300 bottles of liquor and drinking until dawn.

The LES is so fucking over and it's a terrible pity. And in that sense, in that sort of Laurie Anderson or Velvet Underground or Blondie-CBGB's or Bowery or Washington Square Park or even MacDougal Street in the fifties and early sixties sort of way, in that downtown sort of way, New York IS over.

New York is brimming over with endless variations of life, and that reality is what I resonate to, what my body rhymes with every minute I'm here and feeling like a reservoir of devotion to her. It's the diversity of life, it's the living strangeness of it all, the endless opportunities, the thousands and thousands of strange strands of life happening and weaving across each other's paths with so little human warmth and kindness and yet a kind of white heat pulsing through it all every minute of every day.

But it's probably not a place to find a community of artists who couldn't be arsed with earning a living and don't have to care much about that, either, but work their arses off on their work, for the sheer love of it. There's a sense here that if you're not making a lot of money, that you're lazy. That if you're not selling what you do, that you're not successful. That's the set-up. It's pernicious. But very interesting.

I can't tell you how important the business of money is, here. Like nowhere else I have ever been or felt. Fortunes and potential fortunes are dealt in every day. Dreams, hopes and expectations are of dollars and fame and prestige and status. Wealth is the Shangri-la, the dance, the game, the hunt and the kill.

So the creative nutters and experimenters have been eased and kicked out, in large part. I mean the people who aren't just trying to create some sort of hip new underground market brand. It's a different place, you know those were different times. It is what it is, and what it is is thrilling and beautiful in its own peculiar condominiumized sort of way. Hail hail nyc, toll the bell for the changing neighbourhoods.

Greywolf is off the streets.

Music from a farther room

There's a musician living a couple of blocks down my street. I've passed him in his ground floor practice room a couple of times now, once playing percussion in the dark, and just this evening he was practising piano with the light on. I'd love to call out to him to play with me, but he's practising and I don't want to disturb him. But you know, my route to the subway has changed. It's the same distance, but these days I go right down my street to get to it.

Last night at Times square 2 train uptown platform, a dude stood playing a keyboard that was strapped around him like a guitar, and singing his heart out. I was busy dancing with my iPod along the downtown platform, when I saw him. An announcement came that the next downtown 2 train was coming in 10 minutes, so I skipped across to the uptown platform and listened a bit, danced a bit. People were listening and getting all earnest and then dropping in small change. I used to get that in the street in Copenhagen, too. People standing and listening for a full song, then doin the jingle jangle with some loose coppers. This is New York city, folks! Give a dollar at least, for Christ's sake. Keep your quarters for the laundry machine.

I'm singing in a bar in Chinatown on Thursday, just a back-up spot, singing some three part harmonies.. but it should be some good rocknroll fun! The band's called The Mercenaries, and the gig's at 9.30 in Bar 169, at 169 East Broadway. That's the F to East Broadway. See you there!

Prospect Heights News: free book offering riches unclaimed!

Book in cardboard box outside a Brooklyn brownstone:
"WEALTH, without risk, going out on a limb, or making any effort whatsoever"

It stuck around highly visible in the little box on the block for about sixteen hours yesterday.

The book was reported having disappeared finally, around 10. The nice bowling shoes are still there.

Hurry.

Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge

I just found a little smelly tealight on the shelf of this apartment I've been living in for nine days. It's the first I've seen of a candle in ages. I had forgotten all about candles. Denmark was all about candles. The whole country, all day, all night, everywhere, in the street, at least a hundred in every home, restaurants, my favourite dive bar and nightspot in Copenhagen: Kulkafeen (get there while you can, it's changing hands soon!) was lit ENTIRELY with candles.

Reminds me of Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge up on Oak Street in Nola. Just down the road from the Maple Leaf, though you'd only know if you had been told about it. It was a little shed of a place lit only with Christmas tree lights, and was by a long way, the most fundamentally hip bar I have ever been in. I shudder to think of Snake n Jake's fate since the waters came. The last time I was in Snake n Jake's was an afternoon one August. Outside it was sweltering, hot, humid. Inside, a/c kept its clients cool, it was utterly dark but for the fairy lights, and two enormous greyhounds wrestled each other silently on the floor.

Snake n Jake's was a kind of a typical Nola place, in that it was open all the time. It wasn't 24 hours like a lot of the other St. Charles bars, but they basically stayed open until the last drinker stumbled out the door into hot sweltering daylight, grabbing a couple of hours shuteye, before opening again for the first thirsty customer of the day banging on the door again.

I was brought there one night by a wild drunken chef I met while having a quiet beer in the Avenue bar, across the street from the flophouse on Prytania street where I was staying. A quiet beer, I thought, I'll write for a couple of hours and go home. Yeah. But this is New Orleans. Instead I met a wild drunken chef who whisked me off to the St. Charles Tavern, where he challenged me to a game of darts (at that time I was as passionate about darts as I currently am about iPod).

There was to be a challenge. If the wild chef won our game of 301, then he got to lick my armpit. If I won, it was something inane like a beer. Nothing I could think of could beat his bounty. I hit a couple of twenties, he hit the wall, what can I say. I got the beer, he hit the street.

But he was fun, and as much a gentleman as a wild drunken armpit licking chef could be, which was surprisingly considerable. And I never saw him after that 9am-finishing game of darts. I have a photograph somewhere, he's trying to lick my cheek. Or actually licking my neck, and I'm wincing and laughing at the same time, and trying to hold the camera up and press click.

Anyway, that was how I got to hear about Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge. He told me about it like it was the Shangri-La, like he was Cassandra about to usher me into the flame of immortal life. On wednesday nights, he says, if you take your top off and dance on the counter, you drink free for the night.

So one tuesday night after the Rebirth Brass Band's regular gig at the Maple Leaf, I met some ex-hippy couple out in the courtyard at the back, and I said

Hey! Lets go to Snake n Jakes! D'ya know it?

Sure!

(said the wife)

I haven't been there in years! Lets go!

And we all piled into her car, she put her go-cup of wine into the cupholder in her driver's seat, and off we roared.

Within about ten minutes of getting to Snake n Jake's, the couple offered to have me come and live at their home. I think I accepted their kind offer in principle, and told them I would call on their sofa, if ever the need arose. Later that night, a friend of the couple's was about to drive me home, when I crossed the street and saw that there was a Luau happening in a garden. So in we went, and joined the party.

Grass skirts, hula garlands, cookout, hawaiian music. White college boy types. One older dude. Ginger, small, crosseyed. I got talking to him. Turns out he was NOPD. He was also very taken with the fact that I was Irish. His guard went down a little.

You from Ireland? he asked me. You got bad people in Irelan', like we got here? BAD people you know? BLACK people? Like we got here?

He had the ring of someone who knows he can fuck someone up and get away with it, no questions asked.

And out it all came. His stories. I stood there, in a hula garland, getting the gist of this cop's vibe, and said whatever I was there to say, and then I said goodbye, and we left. Something dark was brewing with a group of men further down the street and we got out of there.

Ah, Snake n Jake's.

Or the night I gave my credit card to the bartender and left it there when I left. I think there were two drinks on the tab at the time - big spender, me - and discovered the absence of the card when I got back to Prytania street at 9.30 am. Bollocks, I thought. Classic tourist moment.

I went back there, later that day.
They gave me back the card, had torn up the tab.
Snake n Jake's had honour.

I really have no sense whatsoever of what shape nola is in, these days.
Just can't fathom it.

What we do to trees

I just read this on a flyer advertising a protest downtown:

Catalogue retailers send out 20 billion catalogues a year, and almost none of the paper contains any recycled content. Instead, over 8 million tonnes of trees a year go into catalogues alone - which means 8 million tonnes of trees are going from forests to the landfill, with a short appearance as junk mail in between. By increasing recycled content, cataloguers could greatly decrease their negative environmental impact, cut air and water pollution, and decrease the amount of paper filling up landfills.

I don't know what anybody else is supposed to do though, except maybe gasp.

Labour Day

I think I understand what this whole Labour day thing is about here in America. It's because it's one of the incredibly few days off that people get in this country, especially the workers of New York city.

We're so used to bank holidays and holy days here there and everywhere in Ireland. The Danes have holidays all over the place. They even had to combine about ten individual prayer days into one, and call it Big Prayer Day. It is not uncommon for shops and restaurants even in Copenhagen, to close for two full months of the year, while the proprieters go to their summer houses.

Here, there are no such benefits, even though they exist on paper. Here, they work like huskies until they drop dead. And what employers don't squeeze out of you, the city will eagerly drain. In New York city, Labour day is good news indeed.

It's also bad news. It means the end of the summer, to the American consciousness. After Labour day, fall begins. The weather begins to turn. People begin to anticipate the winter.

But Labour day is a day off, and in NYC, that is quite an extraordinary thing. Tonight, New York is partying hard, or trying to stop its nervous twitch, as it sits at home in front of Netflix, trying very hard to not do anything.

I got new boots tonight

They rock.

A different kind of Apple ad

It wasn't until I held my iPod in my own hands for the very first time this evening that I understood. Now I do. I understand the iPod craze. It has reached my fingertips and I am truly grooving with the whole Apple concept of living.

It is a magnificent object. I rarely actually fall in love with inanimate objects. I can get turbo fond of clothes and shoes, and find it difficult to give them away. I have a kind of a serious thing about this pendant I wear around my neck. There's a gold cross my mum gave me, and if I were ever to find that I was parted with it, that would surely hurt. But the arrival of this MacBook and iPod three weeks ago has totally rocked my world.

I am Mac'd.

I have been using Macs for twelve years now. I started out on a lover's dad's Performa, which I typed away at in a cold tunnel-shaped Dublin dive while playing Koji the Frog until 4 or 5 in the morning. My first very own Mac was also a Performa, which was brought to me on the very last day of a very unpleasant gig I had been working on for three months.

The big event of that Mac was a nine month-long daily email courtship with a man who had recently become a father for the first time, in Nashville Tennessee, and led right up to the morning my flight was about to take off for my very first trip to America to meet him. More recently, I got a second hand g4 desktop which was my first introduction to the new apple interface.

You've got to love interfaces. They're our little protecting veils between the technology that is finding increasing intimacy with us, to us, in us, and they can make things smoother, at one with us, or they can really be a pain in the arse and will always make it unpleasant to operate this kiss-close part of the ever-expanding-it-seems human consciousness.

Take Nokia for instance. They made the mobile phone system that just makes sense like your first night on crack makes sense. It just makes sense. I can't explain why. It's not that I like it, not that it's great, it's that it just makes sense.

That's all. And now I can't use anything else without getting tetchy.

I suppose that's what it's all about, creating addicts. Everything shouting and looking shiny and hotlipped and fuckable. Come purchase me. You whip out your wad or your plastic honey c'mon, we'll go places you never dreamed.

Yeah, so this is me tonight, on a saturday night in New York city, sitting in a room with two whippets I didn't know ten days ago and have subsequently fallen a bit in love with, working on my MacBook and listening to Seal on my iPod.

This is my crack.

How's that, Apple?

But why, though?

Little boy and his grandmother, on the train.
Where we going?
We're going to see mommy and auntie Jinny.
But why, though?
We're going to get out here at the next stop.
But WHY, though?
Because mommy is at Auntie Jinny's, and we're going to see them now.
But WHY, THOUGH? Huh?
Silence.
Huh? HUH?

Kiss-chase

A man in sunglasses is sitting upstairs in the foyer of the 7th avenue Q station, waiting to feel the wind blow, to hear the chug of the approaching train before he dives down into the heat, the humidity, the hot dirt sauna of the subway platform. Outside, the street is actually quite cool tonight. He's humming a tune. I try to catch it. He hums softly. It's so quiet in this station, even this sound has space. Cryin, by Roy Orbison. I catch it and now it's in me and my hum dives down into the platform and the hot dirt and the sweaty people waiting waiting waiting for the train.

I've been playing kiss-chase with the sounds of the city for a while now. It's a game of sonic tag, all over the city. She is so gentle sometimes. The voice of the lady announcing delays on the line can be unusually gentle and mild though her message is anti-New York. Time delays are anti-New York. Time is the most precious commodity here. Time and Money chase each other off the top spot in the precious New York commodities league like Celtic and Rangers.

I caught a beautiful tune yesterday on the air at Prospect Heights, just down my block, where I found myself sitting for an unexpected 20 minutes on a stoop, listening to a solitary drummer playing Arabic and Indian rhythms in his dark ac-free ground floor room. I sat and listened and when I passed later, he was still there, and that time, I caught a tune on the air, and sang it, grooved it, all the way to 2nd st.

The sounds and energy can be so hard in New York city, so you appreciate the gentle stuff when it comes.

I fell over in the street when my scooter hit a jutting footpath slab. Scooter did a 360 and caught my flipflop clad ankle full on. Scooter hit the deck and I had to sit down with the pain. Only thing available to rub on it was some beeswax lip balm. Sat there and soothed it until it was okay enough to get up again. Maybe five minutes. People passed, wordlessly. One guy looked back, giggly, like it was entertainment. A young couple passed, and the man said 'weird'. I sat there, with my scooter at my feet, soothing my ankle until it didn't hurt so much.

I got back on my scooter and rode into Chinatown, stinking of fish carcasses, spit and blood and filth and people paying $3000 for a studio.

happy whippet

What do you do if you're a writer and you want to work professionally in this town?

You take this internship, probably. Get in at coal bunker level, then spring.

But the best bit of all is that the site is horribly badly copywritten. And this is an online marketing company's website. I feel like craigslisting them and offering to edit their site for them. It might be fun.

Listen to these words: Organic Page One Listings, Organic Search Engine Optimization Experience, True Brand Advocacy, Online audience development, Viral Marketing Concept Development.

or this paragraph:
-----, which excels in online audience advocacy development, has teamed with ---, a full-service environmental consultancy online social responsibility programs to companies involved in the supply chain of developing any structures that may have environmental impact. These include such firms as global banks, construction companies, real estate developers and sellers and more.

These people help corporations navigate their way through the mazes of environmental protection regulations in order to keep pumping toxic materials into the ocean, and get away with it.

It's the devil, I tell you. It's the devil.
Awfully designed, bizarrely enough. Horribly horribly basic site for the kind of services offered, but the language is beautiful. Beautiful in the magnificence of its dirt, like the east river. This is one guy, I know it, with a load of talented interns. The web design house doesn't even have a site up yet. This guy must be on crack.

But surfing this site is hilarious. One of his clients found itself, as a result of this man's consulting expertise, hot on the pages of remarkablewomanmag.com. This is where it gets really interesting. So I surf, amazingly enough, from remarkable woman magazine to Rosie O'Donnell's blog. Well this is new on me. My first thought was that this woman is apparently living in a post-breakdown epiphany right now. But I've just seen this .. she's raw. I like her.

Clearly she shares the obsession with Photo Booth that has been going on here since I discovered it on day one of opening this computer.

I am loving loving loving having this computer, by the way. It's gorgeous. I am currently living a life of a professional (ie. hack for hire) writer and it's interesting. I am also at this point in up to my arse in love with New York city. It's far deeper than I had ANY IDEA the last time I lived here. It's a very different life, and in many ways exactly the same. But mark my words, very different.

Something beautiful happened last night

I met Sol, a 93 year old native lower east sider.

Sol's a tiny little man and I saw him walk along the street as I sat in the window of some hip lower east side bar. He walked incredibly slowly, leaning on a stick, and I began to write, sitting in the window. I looked up and he had moved a few feet. I looked up again, another few feet. Then I got on a roll of something and didn't look up for a while. I didn't see him. Ran out into the street, crossed the road, to the corner. Looked in all directions. No sign of the old man. Turned to go back to the bar. There was the old man. Propped up against a tiny windowsill, sitting on the bones of his arse.

He looks up.
I say, hello, sir.
He says, do you like humour?
I say, yes I do, sir.
He says, I got a joke for you. Listen to this.
And I sit down.

We chatted for a while. He told me some of the best ba-boom jokes heard since the glory days of radio. Here's one of them.

I met a woman in the launderette.
She says "you married?"
I says "no"
She says "you a bachelor?"
I says "yeah"
She says, "how comes a you don't ever get married?"
I says, "Because I believe marriage is a big step. And I don't wanna break my ankle."

Ninety three, and he sat there balanced on a five inch windowsill on Ludlow st.

He asked me what my hobbies were, and then he told me, "I got hobbies. I like to paint". I ask him, "what do you paint, Sol?" He says, "miniatures. I got these business cards.." and he's rooting in his pocket for his wallet. Out come these business card sized paintings, or rather, drawings, and he shows me one. There's a house, and some trees, and two little birds sitting watching the house on a fence. It's a simple scene, a bucolic vision executed with simple lines, and entirely unlike anywhere he would ever have been likely to have lived or maybe even been.

I ask him, "have you ever been out of New York, Sol?"
He says, "yes, I went on a cruise once. Ten days. The Virgin Islands. I had my own room, the meals were nice, there was music. You pay more the higher you go up the ship, you know. I had a nice room".

He asks if I like the little drawing. I say I do. "And see, I made a gilt frame and put it around it, too. I made that." he says, indicating the brassy border around the business card edges. "I like to keep busy. I'm interested in ceramics. There's a flea market on Avenue A I go to sometimes and if it's cheap enough, I buy somethin there and fix it up". He started to name the major ceramics houses in Ireland and Britain. He looks back at the drawing of the birds, says, "and that's the house the birds are going to get married in". I don't understand. He says, "see that's the punchline". It's all punchlines and any opportunity to see the funny side, for Sol.

He's been living alone almost all of his life and the only family he's got left are a niece in Brooklyn who bothers him about what he's eating, and a nephew in Yonkers. He talks to them on the phone, meets them rarely. The last time he met his niece, he was giving her a birthday gift. She wouldn't let him make a phone call. "I gave her a nice gift, thirty five dollars it's a lot of money.. it was just a local call.. she is mean!"

He went to the local old folks' community centre and got driven away because he didn't want to sit listening to people complain about their aches and pains.

So he meets people from time to time in the way that I met him, walking along the street, saying hello, and having a chat. He says he has always had a funny way with women: he prefers it when the woman makes the first move, so to speak, and approaches him, then he can open up and tell some jokes and share some life experiences. "Always been that way, I don't know why".

He was in McDonalds the other day, and somebody came up to him and gave him two bills, a ten and a five, just to be nice. He doesn't rely on people giving him money though, he's okay. He worked in the post office for a long time and they had good benefits there. That was the best job he had.

Back in the thirties he used to be a button salesman. He drove wholesale buttons to garment factories in the LES. Back then, the LES was a Jewish neighbourhood, a garment district. It was full of warehouses and sewing factories, with Jewish women working their fingers to the bone. Sol is a New York city native, a lower east side Jewish man who has lived through most of the last century and is still telling jokes in this one. And they want to push him out of his nice three room apartment. And he ain't goin' nowheres.

A taxi pulled up outside this pub I had left, before I found myself spending the evening chatting with Sol. The people I had gone to the bar to meet were standing by the cab. "I'd like to go over to these people and say hello, Sol. I've really enjoyed chatting with you", I say to him. And he says to me, "When you're looking for a husband, make sure he's not a drinker or a gambler or running around with women. Pick a good man, make sure of it. Do you hear me? I say this to you as a father to a daughter. You understand?"

I say yes, Sol, I do.
And turn to cross the street.

New York Monk

I visited the house of a New York monk the other day. Tambourine player, rhythmic devil. Probably introverted, but gets around a lot. And lives in a tiny little hole in the wall in alphabet city just big enough for his drums and a bed. He's studying, working, constantly. Like so many people here. Difference is he's living in a highly gentrified, highly 'hot' Manhattan neighbourhood for a fifth of the market price. He's taken over the lease of some dancer who has lived there since the seventies. The game is up in December, when the lease runs out. Then he leaves town, probably for Africa.

Anyway, the point about this guy is that this is some kind of a message about New York city that's been chewing at me for a while. Every time I walk along Delancey or Allen St. I've got to think about Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed and the days when there were 45 performance artists of serious mettle writing rock operas in downtown Manhattan. I heard Laurie Anderson talking about this once, in a big room out in IMMA, in Dublin.

So she'd walk down Canal st. from her loft in the the Bowery or SOHO or wherever it was back in the seventies, and she'd meet all her friends along the way.. and the conversation would go like this:

"Hey, howya doin?"
"Great. How's the opera goin'?"
"Great. How bout yours?"
"Great".

There was a time when these monks OWNED downtown Manhattan. At least, they were everywhere. They lived in the lower east side and chinatown and it didn't cost them ten thousand dollars a month. And they worked. And they worked. Because that's what's going on here. People are working in New York City. Still. But the monks don't live around Tompkins Square Park anymore.

Not after December, anyway.

Me n Thea

Part of an email to a friend

Well, you're one of my favourite people right now, so as horrible as that actually sounds to my ears it's true. Horrible because of the whole concept of favourite people, but the point of it is that I've come to value human contact and human honesty considerably, and I find it with you. You know, when I find a quality like that, simple human honesty, it's not hugely important what the person is actually like, in some ways. That honesty is always a welcome home. Warm your hands by the fire. I'll be posting this, by the way.

yeah, I'm definitely inside some kind of a working process right now i would say. rapture.

love,
Lucy

The Competitions Olympics Leg One

A very attractive prize and certificate of authenticity will be awarded in a public ceremony involving flowers, a medal, a plinth to stand on and a cup to hold aloft to the first one to guess the following song correctly.

Further plinths and garlands will be available for those who give the second and third best guesses.

All guesses are welcome, please post in the comments section.

Now listen carefully folks :

(intro) Doo be doo be doo be doo be doo be doo dee do
doo be doo be doo be doo be doo de doo de doo dedo

(main theme) Da da da da da daaaaaaaa
da da da da da daaaa dida da.
(boom schika ka boom schika ka)
Da da da da da daaaaaaaa
da da da da da daaaa dida da.

Shoo d'n doo da daaa da!
Shoo de dompety doo doo da doo d'n di'n da...
da dee da dee
da dee da da
shoopy doopy dada hehe wat'n wah wah

Shoo d'n doo da daaa da!
Shoo de dompety doo doo da doo d'n di'n da...
da dee da dee
da dee da da
shoopy doopy dada hehe wat'n wah wah

You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain

too much love drives a woman insane
i lost my will
oh what a thrill
goodness gracious great balls of fire

So I haven't been blogging much since I kicked it off... but I've been busy! All sorts of New York and computer-based concerns are whizzin' round my brain, sugar.

Speaking of sugar pies and fruit flies and all things nice and sowprisin' baby doll, it looks like I'm heading for New Orleans Louisiana within the next couple of weeks. I've got to say I'm really feeling quite apprehensive about this trip.

I mean, when I met Nola for the first time, it took four days but I fell in love. I slipped inside Nola's sheets and danced. She moved me. We grooved to each other's beat. I loved inside her, played inside her, cried inside her, was amazed inside her, I learned streetsmarts inside her, I met a black man called Elvis who played guitar inside her, I rode her streetcars dripping wet from the aftermath of some hurricane winds inside her, I listened inside her, I met Miss Rose inside her.

I do not expect to find this Nola when I return.