I had a couple of hula hoops in Copenhagen

and two pairs of fuckoff four wheeler rollerskates, one pair of which I sold to a Dutch couple in my short-lived clothes shop, for lots of kroner, the best sale I made in that place, except for the red leather stiletto heeled boots that got sold the first day I put them out. Amazing what women will buy, sometimes. Like me, for instance, who bought them in the first place. I wore them once, on a snowy day in Dublin, on the way to the Project Arts Centre, where I was working on some theatre experiment. I remember the challenge of the stiletto meeting slush, while looking elegant. Jesus.

I had exchanged the skates for a pair of bright orange Björn Borg puffa moon boots, with a chick who had a stall in the huge twice yearly loppemarked, or flea market, in Blågårdsplads, the same street where I had my shop a few months later. We were both happy with the trade. I had been looking for a pair of four wheeler rollerskates for months before that day, and then found two pairs on the same day, within minutes of each other.

I've just been reminded of the hula hoops by a cartoon in the New Yorker, on the same page as an article about Emily Dickinson's 24- year correspondence with a man she barely met in all that time. I'm still reading it, just broke away to write this.

One of the hula hoops was large and yellow: I gave this one to my friend Helle. I got a smaller green one at another loppemarked, one I was actually selling at also, up on Nørrebrogade, at Stefan's Kirke. At some point my friend Anders came along and was sent up to the bell tower of the church to blast his trumpet out onto the street. Unfortunately, the wind was not with him that day and no one could hear, but I'm sure he was paid anyway. They're good at that sort of thing in Denmark. It's really unheard of for people not to get paid for playing music there. A place like Kulkafeen of course, a great place run by two friends of mine, with a lovely little stage above a candlelit bar, is the kind of joint you can book informally for free, and if you get a crowd and charge a couple of bucks on the door that's your only way of making any money there. But kul kaf is just a great place to show some interesting stuff in an intimate setting. I loved that place. For the most part, when you play in Denmark, you're getting paid decently for it, whether it's your own stuff or standards.

Tangent. I can so easily go off on tangents about musicians and artists getting paid or not and how in various countries. Well, it's just so different in New York city... anyway, back to the loppemarked at Stefan's Kirke. The woman I bought the hula hoop from also had a really fucking ace kind of wine coloured jumpsuit, clearly from the actual seventies and thus really not very actually hip at all at the time, certainly. It was really clingy and made me giggle out loud when I tried it on in the church's loo. It was totally fabulous, but she was really pushing the price at 85 crowns (bit over a tenner: yeah the price bar at loppemarkeds is low), so I didn't buy it. But I bought the hula hoop from her. I think she made me pay 15 crowns, a princely sum. It was green and not so wide. Good for someone who hadn't hooped since she was 12 (tho a serious hooper at 12).

Later that year in the bloody cold of winter, I sang in the same church, at a funeral of a young man prematurely dead of boozing, to a small crowd of his family and a couple of friends. About 30 people saw him off the face of life. White coffin. I sang over it. We were told what to play: Tears from Heaven, the Eric Clapton song about his dead 2 year old son. Well, it was this man in the coffin's favourite song when he was alive, apparently. I kept the lyrics on a stand in front of me, kept my eyes closed as much as I could. Bloody hard gig. No applause that day. But we got paid. His sister said we did a nice job.

So I chucked everything I had when I left Copenhagen, more or less. Just brought what I could carry in a couple of suitcases. Chucked, sold and gave away. The hula hoops went, as did most of the stock left over from my shop, except the Christian Louboutin red suede stiletto pumps and the beaver hat from the 20's and a few things like that that I sold to another vintage shop owner who drove a brutally hard bargain. When you move around a lot, you learn to live lightly, in terms of luggage and possessions, and you learn to throw away too, because you have to. It's a good skill to learn, easily forgotten, too, if it's not used much. But that really is the luxury of having your own home: the facility of having unnecessary stuff hanging around, without needing to throw it away because you're moving country every couple of months, or because your space is so cramped you've got to. Still, all this moving around has been very interesting. And continues to be.

So in my first week in New York last summer I found a pair of fuckoff white four wheel roller skates with pastel rainbow laces and hubba-bubba pink wheels, in the window of a thrift store on McDougal street and went in and bought them, along with a pure silk blue layer-dress that I haven't worn yet, inexplicably, in the style that's all over the place like a rash this year (probably why). The nice chick behind the counter gave me the dress for free, and a cool pink shoulder bag too, that I use quite a bit lately.

I met a couple of gals last week, in the Plaça del Diamant in Gracia, one of whom had a pair of battered old leather fourwheelers she had had for 20 years, she said. She was taking her 4 year old son around, showing him the skatin' ropes. She didn't have any stoppers on them: I asked her how she stopped, she showed me. It's a spin, very delicately executed. I want to practise that, get ready for the inevitability of falling, train my body into relaxed falling. I still haven't taken the skates out, dude. They're still in Brooklyn, waiting for me. Unless of course they have been skated away by clutches of liberated cockroaches, experiencing brute natural joy for the first time in their species history because they have abandoned the rules.

And you know, I wish them the best of luck.

A bit too boy; a bit too girl, but mostly we have fun

A six year old takes a picture of how it is.

Daisy

It's the summer in Ireland, and it's raining

I'm here a day and enjoying the rain: the luxury of a summer spent in the sun. It's Irish summer rain: not cold, but mild, soft, relentless. Everything green here loves it (also my snot). The trees and grasses and hedges and wild things have grown so much this year. I took a walk by the bank of the canal, and skipped off by some horses coralled in a small strip of field. All ages, mares and foals. I sang to see if they'd be interested. They were. They ran up to listen. One of them, a chestnut brown mare, got into the groove, shook her mane around and edged away a white, smaller mare, who wanted to find out what was going on. Edged her away and came back to listen. Selfish bitch, but beautiful. I sang a few melodic lines and made my way off. Cows are also a good audience, though less discriminate.

There were some small waterfalls, gushing hard. The sounds and smells and pictures were intoxicating. This countryside makes me feel so good. Especially at the start of the walk, some pressing thoughts came to be worked out, insisting on themselves, eventually they just skulked off. Wild flowers got picked. These ones. I know, the horses would have been better, or the waterfalls, but I didn't bring my camera. I've been using digital for the past month or so. Digging it.

My parents are desperate for a holiday, out from under the wet sky. The thing about Irish weather is its changeability. Two fine days in the summer trigger hope, Irish people are amazing hopers, and then the rain comes again. Some people, like me, find this unpredictability exciting; some, like my friend Sile, just love the rain; and others (probably everybody else) long for the sun.

I remember when I used to live in Dublin, I'd look out the window and watch the weather change over and over in the space of an hour, wondering what to wear. Layers, we say in Ireland, confidently. My friend Caroline in Barcelona says that Ireland is the only place she has ever heard such wisdom. That surprised me. Maybe it's one of those cultural assumptions, like blackfaced minstrels or topless sunbathing, that isn't questioned much by members of the home culture. Either way, I've never been one for layers of clothes, except in Denmark or Norway or New York in the searing, bloodyminded cold. In that kind of weather, you just wear everything you can fit on.

There are different kinds of cold though, as there are different kinds of heat. Barcelona can get really very humid, which I found surprising, given its desert-like scrubby landscape, which of course you can barely see, so asphalted and intensely built is the city. You can see it in the parks, mostly, and in some deserted lots along the less touristy beaches: what grows naturally, what grows wild, what is local, are cactii and thick leaved creatures capable of holding water and surviving the hard sun.

Danish winter is humid, cold and goes on for many months. Norwegian winter is bone dry and cold and goes on for most of the year (depending on how far up you find yourself). I found the winter in New York to be cold and dry also, but I hear it gets much much colder than the one I experienced. I loved the availability of sky on the roof of the building where I lived in Brooklyn, I need that in a city. I loved the blueness of the sky, every other day. I went up there, to dance about in the freezing cold, the only time of the year I was interested in sunbathing.

I also had a roof terrace in Barcelona, it was surprisingly cool up there in the evenings and even during the day, much cooler than my room two floors below. I loved the street, the different languages I heard every day passing by my window, the way my friends there used to drop by unannounced, calling up to my window from the street, the scooters waking me up in the morning like they were driving through my room, the plaça life, the availability and visibility of human social life, the beat of the life in that city. I didn't write much there, mostly short clear ideas written on post-its. My thinking was mostly visual. I took a lot of pictures and video. I've been editing, working on something I'll be showing in the North in September. I'm nearly done: and going to post some samples on my site soon.

Irish weather is much milder than any of these places, at either end of the spectrum. But in Scandinavia they have saunas, some of the most beautiful rooms I have ever been in were art deco and modernist saunas in Copenhagen, and in Spain they have the siesta.

What do we have here? Lush, relentless green beauty. And chartered package holidays, to places of cheap heat, for a week or two.

Postcards and those who love them

Have you sent a postcard ?

The Curious Case of Lonesome George

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Shades

I fell into something of a trance last night, watching the ripples of pink and blue light dance over the gently undulating surface of the sea at dusk. The only thought that interrupted this was a brief consideration of possible technologies to record the movement. It rocks here. I will be sad to leave, next monday. Estoy mirados.

And today, I have found this.

Now I have the company of a bee, who has just flown in my window. He says bz.

Lego Stephen Hawking in space, anyone? Hurrah!

What is hip?

This.

So that video is useful because, as far as I'm concerned, it exemplifies a kind of hip: hip manifest, hip in motion. Hip alive and making sounds. And the little boy in red up on the fire escape? Yeah. He knows. That little boy in red KNOWS.

But then, though this is true hip and there's no two ways about it, it's a 35 year old example of it. It's an example that is readily understandable to most people I think, to varying degrees of complexity. Because what is hip about it to me is not the clothes and the look, but the manifestation of an inward beat. Duke Ellington's way with swing was also a pure manifestation of hip. The Bothy Band, to me, is an Irish example of hip from the seventies.

Of course all this stuff is deeply subjective. But it's a good topic, and good to treat in a way that is not just about looks. Because being hip, at the time when the word hip was hip, was never purely about a dress code anyway. Hip was distinct from square or straight, and yes of course, there were purely superficial signifiers for this stuff, used as any tribe uses costume to identify other members of a tribe, particularly in a mixed environment.

But hip would also have meant, at least in the sixties, social aspects like: interest in contemporary music forms, cannabis use, sexual easiness, laidback vibe, left-leaning politics. Getting deeper, hip would mean understanding slang, jive. Hip was understanding a social background and also being hip with it. Hip was street smart. Being able to survive. Being smart. Having a sense of humour, easily verbalised. That's hip, and still is. Having rhythm. Being able to turn the hip vibe into song. Yeah, that's hip.

I would strongly distinguish 'hip' from 'hippy', though. I would probably say that a fair whack of hippies weren't remotely hip at all. So you know, Joan Baez was clearly not hip, and Joni Mitchell - even though she seemed kind of angelic when she came out at the very start, with a similar repertoire to Baez - was utterly hip.

Hip to me isn't an outfit or a pose, it's not a lifestyle or a set of opinions. It's kind of a look in the eye, a vibe, a way of doing things, a kind of casual intelligence, a kind of life groove, and it can come through in a person's life or their work. Tom Waits, who has been here in Barcelona this past week, is a living exposition of the evolution of hip through time. He keeps getting deeper into his hip groove. But he's not hip because his style has been appropriated by certain style-makers, or deemed fashionable. He's hip because he's digging his own groove. And he's just hip.

So hip matters. Hip means something. Hip is not a piece of cheese. Hip is innate. Hip lives in your bones. Hip is not cool. This is a useful distinction. Hip is deeper than cool, and is not afraid to court uncoolness if its expression gets in the way of 'cool' rules (and by cool I do not mean in the 'birth of the cool' sense. That's hip).

Rain on the Carrer Verdi

It gets hairier and hairier

Solar flares. Beautiful pictures and video of their magnetic field movements re-enacted, recreated, in a laboratory in California.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, there is low thunder, lightning and rain. Smells of rain hitting warm pavement. The thunder is getting louder.

A cockroach cautionary

My boyfriend's house in Brooklyn has become a place of refuge for cockroaches on the verge of extinction, trying to evade the inevitable hand of evolution. While he was over here in Europe for the past month and a half, the roaches back in Brooklyn had no food or water around and most of the regular troupe fled, but a few have stuck around. The not-so-smart ones. They hang around, not really knowing what to do with themselves, not knowing the RULES of engagement between humans and cockroaches, the rules that other cockroaches happily seem to know innately, like

When the light goes on: scram, or there will be blood.
Keep it discreet.
Run fast.
Find a good hiding spot, and when it's discovered, flee.
Never go into areas of the house that don't contain food. It serves no purpose and raises alarm.
Never try to make friends with a human.

Last night he discovered a cockroach walking across his foot. I've never heard of a roach behaving like this. These are clearly either the ones who might not survive an atomic blast, or else they're the future. I think the ones hanging out in his house are trying to make friends, wondering why we can't all get along, trying to push the boundaries of integration in areas outside of the stereotypical kitchen option previously so favoured by cockroaches.

It can't last.

Beautiful scene on the Carrer de Verdi

The skinny swarthy dreadlocked man who works in my local supermarket, caressing his dog's head gently and reassuringly before leaving her attached to a lamp-post and going into his workplace. The look on her face as she accepted his love. The way she watched him go, her rump taking up half the footpath. How relaxed she was, with no anxious anticipation of anyone walking on her, as they crossed her path. But mostly her eyes, her face, as he cupped it in his hand, standing behind her, her sheer loving intelligence, and his, as they embraced before parting. Her eyes squeezed closed with delight, relaxed delight. He looked into my eyes as I approached them, protective of her.

It was the most beautiful thing I saw today, the most beautiful way I have seen two creatures being together, in some time. It is rare to see human lovers who love with such intimacy, such ease and casual joy in their loving.

The whole thing took about 3 seconds. I saw it happen. I only registered it mentally after I had seen it. I have been thinking about it ever since. A non- SLR/film camera will not capture this kind of moment.

Great Idea of the Day

I'm introducing a new post series here on LUCY TAKES OFF, from my adventures on the internet, called Great Idea of the Day. And we're introducing it in style. If you are not yet acquainted with the gorgeous concept of seed bombing, get ready to feel the revolution.

If this is sunday, it must be Dublin

I had a whole blog post paragraph written yesterday, and its topic was the American independence day. I didn't post it in time, and it's gone past its sell by date now, like an over-crispened trotter, or a squib left out in the overnight dew. God knows it's rare I write a blog post these days. I am drawn to capitalising, suddenly, BUT I KNOW IT MIGHT NOT COME TO ANY GOOD. OH. THAT FEELS GOOD. THAT'S SOME KIND OF A RELIEF. BUT IT PROBABLY MAKES ME LOOK HYSTERICAL. OH WELL. NOT THAT I MIND ABOUT THAT.

SO, NOW THAT I'M CAPITALISING HAPPILY, I NOTICE THAT CONTENT HAS DRIED UP ENTIRELY. I AM SATISFYING MY OWN SELFISH DESIRES AT THE EXPENSE OF ANY INTEREST TO MY LOYAL READERS WHO COME BY HERE DAILY, HOPING HOPING... AND THOSE OTHERS, WHO LATELY SEEM TO BE COMING IN ALARMING REGULARITY, IN SEARCH OF 'GAGGED LADIES'. LORD. OK, I THINK I AM now sated of capitals. not that i don't expect it to come flooding back again without so much as a by your leave. but for now, it seems that i've gotten capitalisation out of my system.

Yeah, that didn't last long. Ross is right now crossing Flatbush to Freddy's, where he will have a pint of Sierra Nevada, and chat with the regulars for an hour. I am a few thousand miles away, where it is LATE (yowza) and I must get up soonish to start my Big Trek To Dublin, and Back To Barcelona. I wonder how it will be when I return. I wonder what I will do there, this time. It's been a year of a lot of travelling. Ireland has functioned as a kind of return place this past year, for the first time since 2003. Over and back to New York, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Marseille, Milan, in various combinations, since last june. And I'm still on the move.

Short Shine

I'm not usually one for declaring favourites, but whenever anyone asks me what my favourite movie is, I began saying The Shining about 3 years ago, when I saw it for the first time. Channel 4 has just made a lovely promo for a bunch of Kubrick movies they're showing. It's like taking the nouns from an elegant poem and making the font nice, and laminating them. I quite like it.

For the New Yorkers

... there's this guy. For everybody else, go to New York, email that guy, he'll come and draw you.

Irish summer

We've just had a sudden downpour of hailstones and huge drops of rain, here in Clare. It lasted 15 minutes, now blue sky and sunny again. This is the Irish summer this year: showery, cold in the nights, grey clouds every day, bright spells, fresh. The growth is incredible this year! Everything green loves this weather of course, the whole natural landscape is full and vibrant.

People, however, are fleeing the country in droves, seeking heat. I feel the other way, I've been in Barcelona city heat for a month, and this is a welcome respite from hot concrete. The air smells so good to me.

This time last year I was also in Ireland for a short spell, on a journey that had brought me from Denmark to France and on to Clare, then forward to New York city in mid July. This time, I'm on my way back to Barcelona. Been there with Ross this past month. I'm returning alone, this time.

Want to hear the sound of a giggling rat being tickled?

Now's your chance.

oh alright, and

this

oh, and this

If this is friday, it must be Limerick

It's a sunny day in Limerick. That's all I'm saying.

Hello Philadelphia

... who googled gagged ladies and cat, and found their way here, somehow... oasis in the storm? Glad to have you, Philly.

Paean to these blogging tarts

Ok so there are fucking ten million places now on the internet where you can post your random passing thought of the moment, in pithy one liner fashion. I'm not starting this one pretty.

Facebook
One of the most beautiful things I have seen on the internet in quite some time
Twitter
Gmail Chat
All those postcard-your-feelings-into-our-website genre items
And while you're at it, have a look at Smithmag's six word memoirs

I've just discovered Spanish dippable digestive biscuits. They're extra hard so you can dunk them in your tea without disintegrating (and not as sweet as the exported version by mcvities) but not so hard that you can't nibble on them dry too.

And they make an excellent percussion instrument.

Oh this year I'm off to sunny Spain

AY veeeeeeva espanyaaaaaaaah...

We boogie whether weather

Milan rain. Barcelona rain. It's all wet. Art.

Lough Corrib

Stars fall apart

A supernova is born!

Introducing... the banana guard!

Just found an amazing product for people who like to casually sling a banana in their bag on the way out the door... only to find it at the bottom of your bag, mushed, a couple of hours later. I just wonder how they figured a standardised banana shape... I've heard stories about bananas' shapes being standardised according to EU regulations, dunno if they're just urban myths, but organic bananas always seem curvier to me. Also, I recall having heard once that 21% of the world's total pesticide output is sprayed on bananas alone. If you're going to reduce your organic greengrocery shopping to 2 products, make them bananas and lettuce, which is also highly sprayed, unless organic.

But this banana guard, though it will likely make people stare, and stare hard, looks like a fruit-packing revolution.

Generations of bullheaded bollocks

You couldn't make this stuff up. Especially with the grandson standing in the knesset giving speeches about naive American senators appeasing Hitler. On that note, this bollocks that's being touted all over American political life this week, that nobody in their right mind and ethics should be talking to terrorists... how the hell do you think the peace process in Northern Ireland was resolved? How the hell do you think the peace process in Israel/Palestine got the closest it ever got to being completed? What was the first thing that was initiated in South Africa, after apartheid was torn down, but an amnesty for people from ALL sides and experience of life under the system, to TALK?

Stay on your high horse if it makes you feel superior and you need that to survive, but you'll need to make sure the horse's legs are bullet proof.

How it is

I feel a bit like this today.

Boogie boogie boogie

Pretty cool event happening on the streets of new york citay tomorrow afternoon. Arresting to see a statement by Michael Bloomberg on the front page of the website, tho... (aren't these things in the life of New York city supposed to be heavily underground and utterly unsupported by any state or city office? Isn't that how it goes in New York?!)

This might be the opportunity to make like it's 1980, you're at the High School of the Performing Arts, your best friends are called Coco, Ralph and Leroy in those shiny blue shorts, and the streets are there for the taking (as long as you're tightly synchronised on those yellow cab roofs).

Missus

Interesting perspectives on New Orleans

Like any natural disaster brought to the peak of media attention for a period, you don't hear about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina very much. But this is a comic-style serialisation of the events of august, 2005 and what happened afterwards. The story of New Orleans exists now for most of the world in the realm of history and tv memory. Here's a little insight into some of the reconstruction that people are trying to do down there, on their own. Click on the neighbourhoods to see the videos.

Green and concrete

This article reminds me of when I first lived in New York city in 2003. I loved the little community gardens of the East Village, and subsequently discovered some in Brooklyn, too. Kind of mythical to hear of secret gardens in Guantanamo Bay, and of course this article was published at the height of that.

Oh this year I'm off to sunny Spain

Interesting story here about drought in Spain, and the revelation of a medieval village from the dry depths of an erstwhile reservoir. It's interesting to me because when I was in Spain in the last couple of weeks, I made a trip to Tortosa, a smallish town of 30,000 a couple of hours on the train south of Barcelona. There, I heard that their local reservoir was threatened with being pumped out north to Barcelona, to hydrate the city, leaving the Tortosans dry. The local community were up in arms, particularly when they heard that some of the designated uses were for a waterland theme park and hotel.

When I spent a couple of weeks at a renewable energy plant in west Denmark a few years ago, one of the engineers joked to me over dinner one evening that Ireland was soon going to be making a lot of money from exporting its rivers and lakes to countries that are drying up fast. We still complain endlessly about the rain here, and take to sunny Spain in droves, seeking heat, seeking sun.

Latest in: A lonely heart in Singapore, Singapore found Lucy Takes Off yesterday, upon googling 'discreet spanking'.

The mind does boggle, though.

Google search terms

Continuing one of my "occasional series", this time: How People Find Lucy Takes Off From The Great Unknown of Internet Chaos. Well, yesterday, the search term 'kind porno' brought someone from Hungary home to the sweet meadows of Lucy Takes Off, and today, someone from Hackensack New Jersey felt their heart beating to the drum of 'cats with small heads', and found sanctuary here. As always, a certain once-quoted Beatles tune (hint: from Revolver) seems to bring people here several times a week.

It's like a Brooklyn streetcorner around here sometimes (um, only with fewer people, and no bodegas, and only a couple of people picking up their dog's poo. Some similes fly, others drop out of the sky like crisp carbonny meteorites.. oh.)

Would anybody like to see a picture?

A coat that was killed because it was so alive

Have you heard about this?

(if you're not subscribed to the ny times, you'll have to join up to see this article, but it's free and quite fast..)

Review of two hours of this evening

The band gives the gig the same energy level as a bored cashier in a supermarket, scanning the songs perfunctorily, throwing in a few good-for-a-laugh basically unfunny jokes for the sexually nervous. And then they play some shit games and take 3 minutes between each heavily synthesised cover version to fart and bollock around, and noodle and just let the dead air tumble by. And mumble into the microphone to each other. Nothing they sing or say is actually audible, nor does anyone really care. Their audience is determined to have a good time regardless of the shitness of the surroundings, which is a very good strategy tonight.

A couple leaps up spontaneously, together, at once, when "easy like sunday morning" strikes up. They slowdance through the lot of it. They are in their forties, utterly enraptured in each other. The most inspiring thing I’ve seen in days. Intensely sweet. She is older than him by about 5 years; smiles shyly at him, utterly girlish. His hands move over the bottom of her back where her arse starts, like a too-early weaned kitten. The band stops after the song, the couple continues to move together, oblivious. The band strikes up some heavy metal song. The couple’s hips start to move faster, then they jive. This sweet thing just rocks harder all the time, then softer, then harder. Softer.

In this place where 20 year olds totter around in too-short skirts and silvery sandals in winter, parading for the sake of the parade, this couple is fucking REAL. He dances with her like he means it, like he’s trying to get her into his bed and make her fall in love with him all at the same time. She smiles shyly and responds to his moves. These people are my heroes tonight. I want to write love songs to them. I want to tell them how much I think they ROCK but I don’t want to freak them out, or disturb their intimacy. The band plays Shoot that poison arrow through my hea-aaa-aart. He strokes her arm and puts his other arm on her chair protectively as he leans toward her, like he expects every other man in the place to try to steal this 45 year old woman from him. Clearly he knows he’s got a treasure sitting beside him. They converse like grown ups. They drink a pot of tea.

Somebody just bought me a drink. The pretty Indian boy brings it over to my table, shyly. He doesn’t know how to present such a situation. I blush. The red lights flash, indicating last orders. I think, bollocks, there’s going to be a chatting up scene. Oh the hell with it. I’m a young woman in the prime of my sexiness and strength and about as bullshitless as I’ve ever been. This sort of shit is going to happen.

When it comes to being chatted up, however, I am a dilletante. Rather, I am not highly skilled at cooing fakely when a man comes over to try his luck, and I'd rather do without the intrusion a lot of the time. Luckily, the two men I chatted with tonight turned out to be friendly, and good fun. The couple danced, and finished their tea, and left.

Love came to my door with a sleeping roll

I've seen a lot of press for a new book about Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon, over the past couple of days. But this review was interesting, particularly this paragraph:

"Only in retrospect is it clear that the ultimate demise of traditional pop romanticism actually began later than is commonly thought. Today’s erotic pop ethos of cold heat didn’t begin to coalesce until the emergence of Madonna. Desire without passion and celebration of the body as a machine engaged in sexual competition replaced rapturous surrender in love songs. As melody, the primary vehicle for love songs, has diminished in importance, so have the number and intensity of those songs."

Nicely put. Pithy.

Uhm... (cough, shuffle, gaze at floor)

We humans sometimes can't look other people in the eye without words to push out our mouths at the same time. We like to have things to do.

(I recommend turning the sound off for this one)

Another kind of bike, another kind of rider

I want to link to this because it's so lovely. Also because when I was in Barcelona last week, I was sharing a flat with a motorcycle designer, who I'm sure would love to see this.

I think three and a half years in Denmark changed my relationship to design, by osmosis. Not in terms of a particular aesthetic, but to make me find something like this interesting at all.

This is a gorgeous photographic archive of a moment in time in the seventies in sarf London, and of course even the taking of such an archive would probably be subject to far higher scrutiny these days. This picture, for instance. Its pure brute beauty of a teenage black boy being photographed by a teacher would surely cause suspicion in the boy, his parents, the school governors, and anyone else who heard about a teacher taking pictures of his charges today?

I still feel that this kind of thing can get done, this guy was obviously very visible in the community as a photograph taker. The shift is obvious: now everyone has become 'the photograph taker' and yet somehow the kind of engagement and frank boldness implicit in the job of taking these particular pictures is still rare to meet. There's a lot more to taking this kind of photograph than getting the light and composition right, and even the gift of seeing the moment you're in. There's the business of being accepted as the photograph taker of intimate moments, by the subjects of the picture. THAT is a rare gift.

So we began the day with nature sex, we end it with nature war

Here's a highly improbably story of a plucky little baby buffalo having the worst day of his life, who, if he was human, would be turned into some kind of Che Guevara figure. Anyway, despite the fact that lions have to eat, and the fact that there's a kind of realness and honesty in the taking and eating of meat in the wild that you don't quite get in Fairway or Tesco or Netto, well just feel your heart surge in the last couple of minutes of this movie anyway. And for what it's worth, my money on the real nature documentary is (where it usually is) on the human narrative behind the camera ("you can probably sell this video for lots of money!" say the humans in the wild, witnessing a raw display of animal instinct).

Green porn(o)

This is the kind of porno we like around here, though this is pretty softcore compared to the real thing (though the real thing is slower, and without the affecting narrative). The good news is that actual insects have no inhibitions about being watched up close. Find some dirt! (You could also begin here)

Ba boom

Nice.

When Obama Wins (when the wicked witch melts...)

America on the internet is having a cultural beach boys moment... ie. nostalgia for the future, stretching the moment they're in out into an elongated Christmas eve. Cinderella is on the cusp of the neverending kiss, but he won't reach his goal until the wicked witch concedes defeat..

America's reinvented fairy tale: We could be married, and then we'd be happy... You know it seems the more we talk about it, it only makes it worse to live without it...

Right now, everyone's excited. But will the mirror start telling it like it is, once the pretty princess is looking into it? Or will it keep on lyin'?

Good night baby, sleep tight, baby...

Air punching dreams, or, I Love You Ireland

That Hillary Clinton's got balls, I'll give her that much. You've got to say something for a woman who can appear to spontaneously rock a line like "I'm with Harry Truman on this: if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I'm comfortable in the kitchen."

She is just so disliked, though. Just about anything you'll ever read about her anywhere is grudging, written through gritted typing fingers. I think this democrat race is all about good cop/bad cop. Obama is the black, sticky out eared, earnest naive. Hillary's the hard-bitten, ballsy professionally political one who could have him in a fist fight, no problem.

It's the classic bitchfight between the sweet young thing and the pro, the virgin and the whore. So everyone's getting their end away with the whore, but they're really rooting for the virgin for the four year long haul. Hillary's such an inveterate politician, it's hard to even look at her sometimes. The whole Obama showboat could easily go tits-up but you know, that version would probably be more interesting in the big picture of American evolution.

Sometimes metaphors run into each other like they're long lost lovers meeting unexpectedly in different cars at the bumpers. Let's move swiftly along.

Isn't it amazing when people of advanced age manage to carry around grudges, bitternesses and score settling? Takes a lot of very tight clutching to keep that dynamic going for so long. Anyway, here's a man who has sold a lot of records, made a lot of money, played a lot of tennis, and he's demanding trophies from the eurofuckingvision song contest 40 years ago.

This article reminded me of a Cliff Richard impersonator who approached me when I was singing and playing in the street in Copenhagen. I think he was trying to be some kind of impressario. He must have been in his mid fifties, but clearly Cliff, and reflected Cliff glory, were the dominating forces in his life. Beware of what you opportune for.

I'm always amazed by what people are willing to do to win the eurovision. Brian Kennedy, for instance (I can't even link to it, it's so terrible. 2006, it was). Somebody recently pointed out to me that it's all about money and exposure, naturally enough.

But not in some cases, clearly. Sometimes it's just about air punching in a white suit. Our Rocky Balboa. It's nine minutes, but worth it for the detail and the textures and the old style eurovision scoring board with less than 20 countries on it. Song starts 7 minutes in. It was 1980, right in the middle of a decades long recession in Ireland. This was glamour. Had U2 hit yet? This was perhaps our first taste of national fame and sexiness... Say what you want about the kitch and the glory, but the two Shay Healy/Johnny Logans were good quality eurovision songs, at a time in the life of Ireland when the Eurovision meant something more than turkeys and american idol-style competitions. It was the time of fizzle sticks and flogs and a 51% tax rate. Ah.

Ultimately, of course it turned into this. People have to earn a living, it's true, but it hurts to link to this. I add this link, purely in the interests of balance.

So now this brings me to the subject of the First Inaugural Competition Olympics 2008 (check out the label Competition Olympics to familiarise yourself with Olympian history). Beijing is a little controversial at the moment, but you know you can get your air punching kicks right here on Lucy Takes Off, and Be a Winner, have a garland put around your head by a smiling girl in a bikini, stand on a plinth marked 1, a little higher than the plinths marked 2 and 3 (though glory is also assured for first and second runners up also), and have your national anthem blasted from a ghetto blaster (on tape if you so choose) and your gold medal/cup presented to you by a minor Irish Rockstar of my choosing... This is the prize on offer in the Competition Olympics, my friends. So far there have been three legs of the competition, with three entrants in total. What we need here is exposure.

Maybe I need to take the Competition Olympics to the Eurovision. Where is it this year, anyway?

The sun and the mirror ball

It's a sunny day on the av Republica Argentina in Barcelona. The sun is shining in the window on the mirror ball, scattering disco glitters across the crazy floor tiles. Listening to The Atomic Grind show's Park Slope Mamma.. they know how to rock a line like

I'm gonna buy you a spirulina bagel

Yes they do.

I have not yet left the house and it is 8 minutes to four and sunny sunny warm outside, and in the sun room with the glitter ball in it. A number of possible explanations glide by my pretty vacant mind like passing pigeons dropping liquid poo on the washing line outside the window, then passing on. I need no explanations for sitting around, listening to

You're from New York city I'm from Rotherham

I used to listen to that first Arctic Monkeys record at high volume last autumn, walking through Park Slope, kicking the leaves, turning the Arctics off just as I reached the door of a couple of cats on 2nd street, who lounged around a heated-just-for-them heavily carpeted sedate, comfortable and dark apartment, fed and watered them, petted them as they went thunk and hit the deck, cleaned their litter, read another couple of pages of the Edward Gorey book I was falling in love with a little bit more every time I went there.

B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
B es por Basil atacado por osos.

I have a friend in New York who says the best way to learn a new language is in bed. She learned Pharsee and Hungarian that way. I learned Danish a little that way, but honestly, mostly hard fought in random conversations where the ball bearings were pulling the conversation always back into English, until I found the perfect forum for speaking only Danish, with 80 and 90 year olds who hardly, if ever, left their apartments in Nørrebro, many of whom were considered to be demented, but sometimes had plenty to say, that is, those ones who weren't just sitting cross legged in their smoke-oranged armchairs, holding themselves in ever tighter when I came in to clean, to make them lunch, to give them that afternoon's pill dosage, to say hello. Those ones were being kept alive, reluctantly hunched on the edge of life, smoking it away.

Then there were ones like Violet, a sprightly 96 year old who could not see very well and whose Danish was so playful and sophisticated I could hardly understand her, but she always seemed like the sort who was about to give you a wedgy at any moment, loved to chat, very cheery kind of woman. I helped her to bathe once. I always loved that. It was such a lovely, intimate thing to do, something that always made them feel good, and you know, it was also just very pragmatic. There was never any embarrassment with the Danes about being naked and 90 in front of a total stranger. I loved that about those people.

As I google randomly, everything I get is coming through google Spain. I've moved from the Beatles White album to Abbey Road to Beck Mutations to (now) Joni Mitchell Court and Spark. I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers...

F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.
F es por Fanny succionado hasta secarse por una sanguijuela.

Somehow the Spanish doesn't sound as rhythmical.

A pretty girl in your bathroom, checking out her sex appeal...

I feel like going outside. I have had two cafe con leches and the day is good and slinky.

It's four in the morning the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton street all through the evening

I have a friend from Raheny on the north side of Dublin, who I met in my very first week of college when I was 17 and he was a very old 19, and who seems to be the subject of two epic songs in my life... The last time I saw Richard, from Blue, and Famous Blue Raincoat. I can't put my finger on why, mentions of deserts and dive bars and New York and peculiar triangles cloudily alluded to...

Apparently there was an overdose by the Tompkins Square dog run, with a very dark, disturbing, sunny photograph by Bob Arihood, who has been taking photographs of life in the east village for 25 years or more now.

So, if you would like to brush up on your gothic spanish, perhaps you might want to check out this lovely little thing...

Meanwhile, I'm off to follow the Barcelona labyrinth of dreams...

Rockin' whippetude

You know, I 've just discovered what gives fizzy sweets (like fizzy kola lollies, fizzy kola bottles, sherbet dib dab) that kind of fabulous suck-your-face-off quality. Bicarbonate of soda. That's it! Easily purchased in any local shop. Must go and experiment shortly.

Meanwhile, I suck (fizzy kola lollies) and work on a whippet movie. Yes, folks. Whippet Love: The Movie is due for release summer '08!

Meanwhile, here's a small puppy moment for those of you who enjoy such things... and below it is a pic the small puppy took of me. I believe it's his first. I might sell it to one of those people who collects elephant art.

Sudden singing

I'm sitting in a bar in the University of Limerick, and some people have just showed up and started to sing (check out the mini-movie I've just made, scroll to the bottom).

It's kind of great, just wandering around all these buildings of activity, you never know what you might run into. They started to build a marquee in the front square a few days ago, a big production involving cement blocks, prefabricated sturdy walls and very carefully laid carpet (I watched him unroll it very carefully, today). Nobody seems to know what it's about. I've overheard conversations that go a bit like this:
"I wonder what it's for?"
"Probably some ball or something."
They peer in the window.
"It looks nice."
"Yeah."

I've wondered the same thing. My first guess was some kind of graduation ceremony, but they've probably got somewhere fancier for that. So it's a mystery. And we walk closer together now, as we navigate the small path around the large white marquee of mystery.

I haven't been to the Olympic-sized pool yet. Not since my first time there, about 2 years ago, when I wore goggles and got a fright when I actually looked through them. 50 metres can look more intimidating than the ocean, to me. But I love saunas, and steam baths, ever since I fell in love with the Scandinavian model of hot and cold, in Denmark. Of course it's the Finns that invented the sauna (cool fact: there are three million humans in Finland, and one and a half million saunas.. everyone's got a sauna in their house/flat/dorm). But there are some old institutions in Denmark, some old art deco places that I loved deeply, profoundly, as often as I could. The Badanstalt (a gender separated old bath house from the turn of the 19th century, featuring a gorgeous large old wooden sauna in three tiers, and a mint green tiled changing area, with little curtained cubicles, and shredded wood slivers to exfoliate, and always a thermos of tea for whoever is hanging out naked in the lounging area, all for 25 kroner, or a little over 3 euros) was my version of a local pub. People smoke very heavily still, in Denmark, and pubs are very smokey, so I didn't spend much time in bars while I lived there. But I did spend lots of time in the Badanstalt.

The Badanstalt reaches back into the time when private houses and flats (mostly flats in Copenhagen, industrial living goes back a long way there) didn't have any private bathrooms. A block of housing units inhabited by several hundred people might have had a couple of jacks round the back, in an outhouse (an enticing prospect, in the Danish winter) much as things were in many western european countries, except for the fact that as recently as the seventies, these outhouse toilets still existed. I have been in flats there that had a toilet, but no bath or shower. And Danish showers are of course, uber functional anyway, the shower is commonly taken on the bathroom floor itself, which is tiled, and excess water wiped away. New York city bathrooms, even with their expert compression, could learn something from the amazingly minuscule yet innately beautiful, Danish bathrooms.

So what did people do to bathe? Well, they went to their local badanstalt, where they bathed communally, men with men, women with women. Children probably went with women, but I would imagine small boys sneaking upstairs to the men's section at the earliest opportunity, only to be trying to sneak down to the women's just a few years later... oh the fickleness of the human organism. There was a badanstalt in each of the city's main neighbourhoods, or bydeler, as they're called over there. And people went to bathe, to use the sturdy lovely saunas, and to socialise. Well, all of Copenhagen's badanstalter are gone, except for the one on Sjællandsgade, in Nørrebro, traditionally the working class neighbourhood of Copenhagen, recently become trendified and gentrified, of course... and the badanstalt struggles to survive. Every two years or so, some government officials try to close it down. Its faithful clients battle back. I remember hearing about one such threat, there was some kind of an image that came to mind under a cold shower moment (which were always my favourite moments) to consider chaining myself to the door of the Badanstalt, naked, mud covered, Irish. Twas not to be. Not yet, anyway. But this week I have asked all the major institutions of official bureaucracy in Denmark, to recognise that I have truly and actually, left the building. Hurrah!

So yes, perhaps I'll make it to the swimming pool of scary bigness one of these days, while I'm on campus. Small sauna, mixed gender, considerably chattier, bathing suits required (it's just not the same). It had better be before monday, though. For on monday morning, I fly to Barcelona, for a week and a half.

Starved

But of course, this being Ireland, it's back to late autumn/early winter weather, this past few days. Especially at night, cycling home. Cold. Windy. But moonlight lighting the fields and narrow roads I ride through.

I've just been reading this article. Clearly a complex man. Endearing, also. It must be strange if you're sensitive, being a popstar from a very early age. You know, the beard would have been enough. He could just have gone off on his alien hunt and kept his little obsession private. But instead, he was compelled to call Jon Ronson and make a documentary out of it. Well...

Check out the ingredients in these recipes, folks (or folk, as it may turn out today). This is having a profound effect on me today, as I sit in the Hilton lobby, munching on Brazil nut special toffee...

The first day of summer

so this is what i did today
walked a lot, in the countryside
saved a bumble bee from a compromising and potentially tragic situation for which he was grateful
rubbed a horse's nose
exchanged eye contact with some white cows
saw a ladybird, realised it was summer, said hurrah!, then saw another ladybird
waded in a river with some small waterfalls and cold water and felt good
rubbed my feet on grass and felt good
took most of my clothes off on the walk through the countryside, it was so warm
got ideas for movie projects
had some good coffee, could have drunk coffee through the day just because it tasted so good
had no dinner
hungry now
got out of the way of a very brazen robin redbreast who you really wouldn't have wanted to mess with
went for another walk down by the river into the sunset
Here's a pic of my evening stroll...

The dog that ate my dinner

I went to get some dinner, in the student bar of this university that I'm spending my days hanging out in, lately, working on these projects I'm really excited about, these projects I'm busy breathing life into, lately.

So I'm feeling kind of antsy and I go to the student bar to get some food, and all they've got left is this stuff called "chicken goujons" and you know, these badly processed chip things, and I turn from the counter and realise that there are about six hundred eighteen year olds in flouncy dresses and suits, and the chip lady tells me that it's some kind of first year ball. There's nowhere for me to sit and eat my chicken goujons, so I go outside to the outdoor courtyard, and the rain is pelting down on the roof above where I sit, eat, and watch the parade of loud satin and umbrellas, running for cover and madly text messaging.

That's when the pooch shows up. The one pictured. He just showed up, quietly sat at my table, sat and looked at me. His eyes watery, sad looking, old, he looked dirty, neglected, not malnourished. Matter of fact begging. No bullshit about it. No tricks, no fancy stuff, no cuteness, no smooth moves. So I gave him some of my chips, the crispy ones, the ones I don't like. He ate them. I gave him more. I took pictures of the girls in their vehement coloured satin, some with quite elaborately positioned cleavage, some in frou frou meringue style, all with spindly heeled sandals and their toes squidging around in the rain, as they ran across the courtyard, through the downpour.

Later I got to thinking about the Trinity Ball, the satin-fest of my own extreme youth. I never wore satin: went only, I think, to two of them, though it could have been more, and I certainly have many vivid memories from them. To the first one I wore very short scarlet velvet, bought a ticket off someone on the day, having resisted the whole affair for a full year before that. And the second one I worked at, as hospitality chica. That night was notable for being offered a line of cocaine for the first time (aw..) and some London rapper tried to bribe my t-shirt from me (for the t-shirt's sake, I think, not the be-bra'd female underneath it). The Buzzcocks played that year, some reunion gig, I don't know if any of us youngsters really knew who they were. They seemed to have fun, though, and trashed the sound system, middle aged rebels that they were.

Back in the Stables courtyard, the pooch kept looking at me. He wasn't aggressive, but it was intense. I gave him more chips, then some chicken, then decided to buy him some kind of food in the shop. So off I went, and found a can of sardines, and got looked at sadly by the boy behind the counter with the large auburn eyes, and went out again in the rain, looking for sad pooch amongst the legs of the suited boys and the satinned girls, but sad pooch had disappeared. I felt wretched.

Reminded me of a horribly mangey, very sick and suspicious, terrified and starving dog I met in New Orleans one hot august evening. I followed him into some midtown ghettoes trying to give him some can of dog food I had bought in a petrol station. He didn't want it, kept running from me, suspicious of what I was up to. Followed him all the way to Basin street, or Perdido, some street once full of hookers, now famous from a song that came from that seething time in the life of that city. He fucked off, finally, after giving chase to me in a small park, and I walked back through those ghettoes, with street dudes sleeping on benches, and tears pouring down my face, all the way to the St. Charles streetcar, feeling a place in my heart that was sucking from the inside.

Sometimes your help is not wanted and that is hard.

A boy tried to say something witty and friendly to me last night. I responded with ueber-caginess. He apologised for freaking me out. I responded with polite ueber-caginess. Oh I prefer when life is not so serious.

These tiny stories are important. Important to tell, sometimes. I don't know why.

Lucy at Mamuska

It was the night of Mamuska on friday. Lucy made a performance, with performed poetic narrative, photographs and Ross' music. It is as truly a work in progress as that term has ever meant, but it was hugely hugely fun, and spirited, and people seemed to dig it. Got no pictures to show for it, for my laptop was employed the whole night in work and communication, but a lovely man called Conor took photographs, and we have made recordings, which I expect will show up some time very soon on my main website (which, lord knows, could do with a bit of updating... for it is spring!)

Mamuska's such a great platform. Daghdha's venue is fantastic: large but not cold, dense, full of potential, the venue equivalent of the sprung floor that supports it. And that goes for the spirit of the people who support it too, by being there, by staying there for the full evening, and the spirit of the performers, the contributers, who reveal their half-made work for to see what lies further inside it, and they can sometimes be rewarded with an inspiration of life, of breath, of ideas, and the energy of the return.

Mark Carberry made a pretty gorgeous little boxer/prom queen dance vignette, there were lots of dance experiments and celebrations, a piece for live and recorded harp, and some moving movement movies..

Fab fab fab and inspired, and inspired, and inspired...

Thick skinned beauty

So the topic of this post is the delicate rendering of this nuanced, sensitive portrait. I wonder if he was trained to do that? Even if he was though, I think it's the humans that come over like the ridiculous creatures we can be sometimes, with our cheap clapping and our tiny insights into the possibilities of internal life in another living being. I bet he's thinking, yeah, but just you wait until I write a novel about how I feel about The Way Life Is for we who are not human, living in a human dominated world.

Elephants are intelligent, feeling creatures, as far as I can tell. I saw a documentary a couple of years ago, some Richard Attenborough thing I think, and the film makers had made fake elephant dung shapes with cameras hidden inside them, and scattered the cameras all along a major African elephant trail. Of course the elephants got hip to the fake dung aspect pretty sharpish, and took to playing football with them.. but enough cameras remained to document their response upon finding a small elephant graveyard along their walk (some might call it a pilgrimage, much in the same way that you could call the salmon's journey to the source of its birth, in order to spawn, and die, also a pilgrimage). When they came upon the elephant bones, they stopped, and smelled and paid attention, and lingered, and gathered, and were quiet and paid attention to the bones for a while, much as we humans behave at graveyards (though of course we usually tidy up our dead, with lawned graves and headstones and flowers and candles. Of course, the presence of actual dead human bones found along the morning jog to the bakery would most likely not produce quite such a measured response in the normal human being...)

I have only met one elephant in the flesh, so to speak. This impromptu meeting happened outside a nightclub on a freezing cold Danish night at one in the morning a couple of years ago. I was cycling back to Island's Brygge in Copenhagen after a late night at the shop where I sold my vintage clothes, and I glanced across the bridge to my left. An elephant was standing outside a really tacky nightclub, posing for mobile phone camera portraits with danish hiphop wannabees in the street.. I stared, then cycled past, through two sets of traffic lights, hungry and tired, but I realised with a sober heart that I was going to have to turn around and go back, and meet the elephant, stand there like all the gals and guys pretending to be Eminem, no better I, and touch elephant skin, look in elephant eyes, say hello, meet the circus attraction.

He was in it for the bananas, clearly. He was docile, stood there, knew not to stamp all over these clueless humans, knew what his job was, but wanted payback. People came with fruit. That fruit disappeared fast. You should have seen that trunk WORK. There was a ruthless look in his eye. The same look I've seen in the eyes of hookers in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel. They ain't Eloise, sugar. I did take photographs, balancing my camera on the unexpectedly steady biceps of the ex-Levi's model cowboy who brought me there, until I was ordered to stop (by the bartender, not the cowboy).

I'm reading a novel by JM Coetzee right now, called Elizabeth Costello. It's quite a gorgeous novel, actually, his writing has a kind of low level blowtorch effect, I find. It's very gently warming until suddenly you're just scorched, eviscerated. The interesting thing about his work, for me, is that there's so much space in it, space of a kind that is rare in writing. The first Coetzee novel I read was Disgrace, a couple of months ago. It was an invitation into a mind, a quiet invitation to listen really really closely, but not dictating what you needed to listen out for.

It's my birthday today. It's my birthday today. It's my birthday today.

Beautiful rusted metal coils on grass

Somebody tried to burn them, they tried to burn metal, and they seem to have had some success. Peculiar thing, but very beautiful. I thought of Rapunzel, and this kind of thing. That's a bit of my own hair, blowing in the wind, on the right.

Daisies by the side of the road on the Clonlara bridge

The long distance blues

I've got the long distance blues
the iChat blues
the video skype blues
the gmail chat blues
the email blues
the snail mail blues
the mobile phone texting blues
the occasional phone conversation blues
the writing my next email to him in a text document because the house I'm living in doesn't have broadband yet blues
the seeing some small cows on the side of the road and stopping to take pictures so he can see what I see blues
the having profound feelings about what may and may not be possible and no good way to express these feelings blues
I've got the blues
I've got the long distance blues.
I've got the distance between county Clare and Brooklyn blues.
Here's a picture of those cows.

Some images of Ireland from this past week

I know of some Irish painters who have devoted most of their productive lives to painting Irish cloud formations. I don't expect you can see why, by this primitive photograph, but I've always found clouds in Ireland to exert tremendous influence on the mood of the people. I've heard my dad describe a sombre mood a number of times, by saying, the clouds are low in the sky today. It's something you'll recognise, if you live here, and are sensitive to these things.

A detail from the entry port of Glenstal Abbey, in county Limerick, where I went to witness the sung passion play the monks perform there every good friday. This is the first year for a while that I went there, with Dad, and probably the first time I've really paid attention to the text. The Abbey is a beautiful place, on many acres of lush, rich land, and as a child, I used to love the solitude and the freedom of running about and playing in the grounds, while all the adults were locked in the chapel, being very serious. This time I was one of the adults. The Jesus story at this easter week stage of the telling, is a devastating one. It's a terrible story, really, of injustice and fear and constricted hearts and treachery. The monks sing it so tenderly, in madrigals, with latin hymns sung at the end. The crescendo of the event itself happens after the story is sung, and left hanging, at the point where the man's body is taken down from the cross, and wrapped carefully in delicately scented cloths, and laid to rest in an unused tomb. The congregation files up to the simple wooden hand made cross that the monks have made, and wait in line, kissing the cross, each in turn, some symbolic gesture that struck me as deeply human, deeply animal. Profoundly moving.

A very modern bridge, in the University of Limerick campus. This is a somewhat winding, curved, foot and cycle bridge, with seated areas built into it, which I have seen used by students every time I've cycled over it. Under the bridge is a beautiful river, with trees growing in it, and small waterfalls, it's quite a gorgeous contrast, especially at night. Beyond the bridge on one side is one of the most dynamic, largely technological, campuses in Ireland, and on the other, tiny little country lanes with a pub nearby that has on most days got a big fire blazing in the hearth, and little formica tables and chairs, and you can get a large pot of tea there for two euro (about ten thousand dollars, granted) which will yield at least four and a dribble cups of decent and strongly brewed tea, and they'll put a fox's creme biscuit bar on the side of your cup too.

Head of a small cat in a garden where I once lived

The SoHo cat and his self-portrait

He took this picture himself, on my computer. He told me to splash it around the internet a little, raise his profile. Man, I'm stuck in this apartment the whole time, he said. How can I get famous when I spend all day indoors, right in the centre of the centre of the universe, here in SoHo? Man, the lousy ironies life throws at you sometimes.. I see it all from the window, and I want a part of it, man. I wanna get PAID..

What can I do but oblige a downtown cat?

Amoor

Maiden form

Don't honk on Sex st.

Insect love

These guys know how to rock.

Good evening. This is the news.

So.

The diners are trooping into the hotel restaurant for dinner and there's a solitary batchelor sitting in the opposite corner of the lobby from me, waiting for the other people he's about to dine with, his family by the sounds of things, who are late. He wandered into the middle of the lobby, trying to reach someone on his phone. The first thing he said was "So we're meeting here, aren't we?" muffle muffle muffle on the other end. "Ok, I'm in the reception. I'll wait in the reception for ye so". You can give these people all the money in the tiger's belly, but evolution just doesn't change as quickly as it takes to throw up a few five star hotels. And then he fell into an oversized Danish designed bright yellow seat, looking forlornly around at the foreign modernness of his surroundings, and waited, slumped in his boredom.

As I typed that sentence, he upped and left. I've noticed that people don't like to sit around being typed about. I've noticed because I have a tendency to sit around typing about people who are sitting around. They're much more comfortable about being written about, especially by fountain pen, but they're much more likely to look at you then, and even talk to you, ask you what you're writing about. Maybe the computer puts them off because it reminds them of work.

I've had people tell me I should close my laptop and "just relax and get drunk like everybody else".. people just aren't used to recreational laptop use in public, in this country. So you know, I tell them (sometimes) that I'm having fun, actually. That I have fun with this computer, that I like it. That it's not some drudge idea of work. That I may or may not be working, but that even when I am working, that that's fun too. Some people really don't understand that. So I sit alone in the lobby, and type.

Some questions.. Is the Irish Times the only newspaper in existence that is accessible on the internet only for paying readers? The New York Times is free, for Christ's sake. The Guardian, The English Times, The Irish Indo.. You can even get your page three tits for free over at The Sun. But for access to the Irish Times, who have patented the domain name Ireland dot com, you've got to pay them 2 euro for 24 hour access. They seem to believe in striptease journalism, though. They give you a glimpse of paragraph for free, then snap at you to subscribe before they'll reveal more. To hell with it, who needs the Irish news when Playboy's monthly rates are cheaper..

And is Ireland the only country that gives a central position in its news and current affairs programming to every little grisly detail of the murder trial du jour? I don't know if it's that there are more murders here than anywhere else or just that there's a national fascination with the detail here, but every time there's a good meaty murder trial over in the Central Criminal Court, we huddle around our tellies, watching the dailies being relayed to us every evening, by a tall man with a spitty kind of voice. Every time I see him on the telly, I think he must have been that boy in the nightclub who was somebody's younger brother, the go-between from the older boys and girls across the dancefloor, delivering yes's and no's and he-wantsta-dance-witya's and every little detail of the gossip of the moment with an intensity of moment, and he just never got over it. He seems to be a proper grown up man now, and a proper grown up journalist I'm sure, but he's still got that he-said-she-said voice, that delight in not being at the centre of the drama, but still having a dynamic function as the messenger boy as he delivers his blow-by-blow accounts of the day's proceedings.

Like food, music and attitudes to sex, each country has its own distinctive styles of news programming. The news in Denmark was classic coldblondenorthern fare. Political debate and talk. Nothing salacious whatsoever. Then some seventy year old codger who had been the Danish ambassador in Haiti wrote a book about his escapades rutting some fourteen year old high arsed impoverished black streetgirls and the whole country was incensed by it. Middle aged men and women piled onto the telly to condemn him. There was a token one very idiotic middle aged woman who was so lightweight they had to weigh her down with a sandbag to stop her from floating away into vagueness, said that she thought the old codger was sexy. To be honest, the story was a welcome relief of filth in a country that follows the royal family's frumpy fashions as the national tabloid excitement. And it was the only book in Danish I've ever read most of the way through (though there was a fair whack of flicking through, I have to say. But finding the sexy bits in a Danish novel is an art and a talent in itself). Of course, the old codger lost his job, and was last seen eyeing up an eighteen year old waitress in an effort to date older women with serious minds.

No, the Danes were not tremendously keen on interesting news, or making news interesting. But then, when the news is in Danish you're kind of halfway to oblivion as it is. And then of course, they hit the front pages internationally, with the whole Mohammed comics story. And lately there's another story that's emerging violently and fitfully in Danish life, which is the streetburning youth rebellion story.

And then of course there's the other extreme: the news from America. The everything's under control, clean, tidy and yet with a Rambo undercurrent style of news broadcasting, where the attitude seems to be that you'll only really believe this ridiculous shite when it's spoken by human beings who have had all the human stuff vacuumed out of them, leaving only pure white teeth and smiling dead fish eyes behind. I think the idea is that viewers will defer to the natural air of authority that such humans are supposed to exude. I think that actually, they probably just want a good spanking, and fortuitously enough, they are paid enough money by the network to source a good, thorough and discreet spanking after every show.

This new Ireland (which actually is about ten years old so it's not bloody new at all anymore, and calling it new is really fucking boring, but I've been away from it so it is new to me every time I come back here) is so contractual. We've adopted a kind of social awkwardness in the form of legal contract consciousness, because, I think, money has made us all a little more suspicious of each other than before, when nobody had any and you could spot a chancer a mile off. He was the fella throwing himself into a 2cm deep pothole in the middle of the road and claiming whiplash and compensation off the government, and disability benefit and free television licenses for the rest of his life, to ease his pain and suffering.

But everybody else got on with things with a nod and an understanding that things would get done and, for the most part, paid for, and that was about the extent of people's worry regarding all the relationships between us that are now governed and monitored with contracts. People make contracts to have conversations with each other, and sign waivers that anything they discuss they will not be held legally in obligation to, unless of course, they make another contract. Contracts are legally enforceable, and are an essential part of a world that runs on expectation and demand. I'm not complaining about Ireland having some harder edges in it these days, it's certainly a more energised kind of place, but you know, at this point in its evolution at least, you can really tell that we haven't always been like this. Something about the selfconsciousness and the inchage of make up on the new breed of homegrown celebutante, these new anonymous-modern hotels in the provinces, the newly botoxed attitudes of women, the sheer real estatisation of the Irish spirit.

Ah sure, feck it. That's just another day's work.

Thank you, and goodnight.

A swan by the river in Limerick city

Another one of that crow at Shannon airport

Pictures from the road

Cosy fireplace Ireland cliche to warm yourselves around

But it really does look like that over here..

A blatant ad for Tom Warnick

Have you ever heard Tom Warnick and the World's Fair? This man rocks. I found my way across the path of a Daniel Johnson record recently (gotta watch out for oncoming traffic going the wrong way down a one way road in this kind of situation) and I thought it must be an early or hairy TW record but with much more prozac and a higher nervous breakdown frequency ratio (and fewer instruments and generally less going on) but seriously, I wonder if he ever heard a Tom Warnick record. His voice and I suppose some aspect of the basic vibe is really strikingly similar. But I prefer Tom. More heart. More sweetness, smarter and generally more fun. Prettier too, and sexier, with better coffee and comfier sofas.

The crow at Shannon airport

He cawed "gimme some" at me while I waited for the bus, eating my Catch bar. It's been a while since I've been Taking Off online, I've been taking off on an amazing adventure around Ireland, happily bereft of internet thoughts, but having an occasional dream about a lost laptop, calling softly on the breeze for me to love it again. And so here we are, again..