You can take the fear out of the mouse but you can't take the mouse out of the cat's mouth

Very interesting video clip in an article from this morning's Guardian. Scientists in Japan have created a genetically modified mouse which has no fear of cats. They have eliminated the gene that recognises the smell of a cat as a source of danger, and thus something to be feared. So this piece is reported with a quite endearing little snippet of video of a curious mouse investigating this landscape of fur that really ought to send it shuddering to the nearest hole in the wall or deep deep behind the telly, and instead it goes running through the cat's legs, getting sat on by the cat, generally being very friendly and interested in the cat. Watch it, you'll probably enjoy it.

The cat, for her part, though the piece insists she has not been genetically modified to be friendly to mice, is preternaturally accommodating and courteous to the mouse, and it doesn't seem like the usual cat pretext of mouse-wooing prior to one of the slowest painfullest kills known to the animal kingdom (have you ever actually WATCHED the play of a cat and mouse as they dance their dance of death?). The cat in this clip, if anything, seems slightly concerned and embarrassed by the antics of her small sleek friend, electing to look tactfully away when the mouse gets particularly close and personal and probably provocative, because she's just not that sort of cat.

And then the confident, happy scientist shows up at the end to show us the unfortunate place that science and humanities can sometimes go when one of them takes the other roughly by the ears and makes it do something it doesn't really want to: he says, we can now genetically engineer other creatures in the animal kingdom to have no fear of their natural enemies. Punchline. Ba boom.

Well, congratulations. You've learned how to fast track the natural world to extinction. Things have NATURAL enemies for a reason. We eat each other in the natural world. That's just how things work. And that's why the mouse has an innate fear attached to the smell of the cat, because his ancestors have passed down that response as a common-sense gesture, to keep him safe, alive, to keep the mouse species on the planet. However, I have connections in cat circles who would be very keen to hear this kind of news.

I feel there is some kind of a super-sinister subtext in this little piece of scientific wizardry. Can you hear in the notion of genetically eliminating natural fear responses in "animals" , the suggestion that perhaps we can genetically modify ourselves, each other, or indeed, just herd up our enemies, once we've conquered them, and genetically modify them from their natural antipathy, to like us instead? Well now. This sounds like a VERY interesting potential solution to the thorny issues of terrorism, for instance. At any rate, that lab is sure to be given a few quid in sponsorship, to get a lot more adventurous.

But ultimately I suppose what I find most depressing is the implicit dilettantism in matters of elemental forces. There are different kinds of fear, and by far the most prevalent one on this planet is the natural kind, the kind of fear that is really a signpost for common sense and deep intuition; the fear that the healthy mouse experiences at the smell of the cat, the kind of animal fear that is also innate in humans, that gets triggered in situations that the human senses are dangerous or predatory. This is really common sense at work in its strongest physical expression. It's the death of naivete, it's evolution in motion, it's the natural world at work. Get rid of this stuff and the natural world won't know its arse from its elbow.

And then there are the kinds of fear that aren't based on the needs, tendencies and feeding appetites of the natural world. This kind of fear exists solely in the human realm. And it manifests in behavioural tics, that become encoded and enshrined in culture, becoming norms by consensus and wide practise. This is not the kind of fear that you can genetically modify out, quite so easily. And for the most part, it is totally and utterly useless. If anything, it inhibits life.

The video probably wouldn't have looked so cute with a normal cat, who would have dispatched the mouse with glee, of course. "We can make mice who get along with cats", says the scientist. Sweet. But can we make cats who get along with mice (without eating them)? Notice that it isn't the cat who is being genetically modified out of her predatory nature.

How far could this idea go? How about applying it to consumer markets, for instance? Genetically modify the herds of consumers as they are marketed to? This is also a cat and mouse game, a game of predator and prey. Marketing and advertising strategies have become incredibly sophisticated when you contrast them with the clunky ad strategies over the past fifty years, for instance, and the fact that marketing didn't even exist as a concept until relatively recently. But it's still a cat and mouse game, and the space left for its evolution is increasingly slight. It's the law of diminishing returns. Why keep mining that tiny tiny space that is the battleground of persuasion politics, when all you have to do is find a very pleasant, painless way to eliminate all resistance in the market altogether?

So here's my guess about how this kind of genetic interference is likely to impact on nature: the mouse is returned to a state of naivete, doesn't recognise the inherent danger in the cat, goes up to schmooze and make friends, cat goes hurrah, and begins the torture process, and how does the mouse respond at that point? My guess it would take at most a couple of generations for the mouse - returned to any natural environment even with this genetic modification- to spring back to its natural state again.

But this is the dynamic balance of the natural world that is being fucked with. My point is that once you start messing with one part of this dynamic balance, the whole thing gets thrown out of whack in ways that are probably exponential in proportion to the original interference. Just like the disappearing polar ice shelf, though let's keep our epic planetary themes to one at a time, today.

Romance

I ran into a pooch called Romance last night. He was very eager to get up close to a certain white whippet of my acquaintance. She sniffed, then turned her back. His owner pulled him away. I don't think he noticed me.

Why are you here? Why, really?

I had dinner in Marseille one evening this past June, with a Japanese woman and two French men. I had met the Japanese woman and one of the French men on the top of a hill, by the entrance to an old world war two bunker, as I contemplated sleeping there for the night. The view and the air were magnificent, I was fresh from a swim, but a cold breeze was blowing and I didn't have a sleeping bag or even any long sleeves. A couple of nights later I slept up those mountains, and discovered a more pressing and painful reason to stay indoors on Provençale evenings: mosquitoes that settled on my eyelids for a midnight snack, as I dozed amongst the wild thyme bushes, by the open bay, filled with the mediterranean sea.

Anyway, the couple invited me to dinner and so I found myself sitting in a car with them, snaking around the Marseille backstreets, looking for a parking space. They dropped me off on the corner where they had arranged to meet their friend, and I was given a description and instructed to wave. He found me first, he had apparently been instructed too. And we went to have crepes in a little Cuban place. The second French man - the one that found me in the street - had spent a year in Sweden some years previously, and so, over dinner, he and I conversed in languages that were not our first, he in Swedish, which amazingly, he remembered very well, and me in Danish. And for the most part, we understood each other. It was fun, being an Irish woman and a French man, sitting in a Marseille cafe, speaking Danish and Swedish together, and understanding each other.

I feel called upon to explain myself, sometimes. Do you know that feeling? But this is a BIG topic, and it's important to differentiate the various nuances of this kind of demand.

So, for example, I had an unsatisfactory exchange with an MTA official one afternoon, involving delayed Q trains and bus transfers and changed minds and unlimited cards that said no, no no... and we had something of a heated interaction that probably could have been abated had I EXPLAINED my actions clearly enough for her to understand that they were in perfect synch with her rules and to just press the beeper on that big beeping door that lets people through when there's been some sort of fuckup with the turnstiles, or they have big luggage or babies.

So there's that kind of explanation. The functional kind. The kind of explaining you do when you go to a fancy cheese shop and you need to communicate your desire for particularities.. or the kind of explaining you need to do when you go to a dentist with toothache and you want to give her more than a hunch about what ails you.

And then there's the kind of explaining yourself that your schoolmistress demanded of you when you rocked into school wearing contraband mascara and The Wrong Jumper.

And then there's the sort of explaining yourself that is demanded of you by a lover, when you've broken the invisible contract that he has in his head, because we have these invisible contracts floating around inside us, and we don't usually even know about their existence ourselves until they get broken, and suddenly we're upset.

Or the sort of explaining that some people feel some innate need to do, to EXPLAIN their existences altogether, and this can, sometimes, lead to the making of music, of paintings, of tall buildings, of businesses, of children, of novels, of poetry for some, or to the purchase of very large and unattractive cars, for others.

And then there's the sort of explaining that you can see being asked for in someone's eyes when they meet you for the first time in a context that they really don't expect to find you in, perhaps, and their eyes hold that demand for explanation from you, in a quizzical sort of way, without any overgroundness in it, and without any real expectation of being addressed or given. And the whole process is sort of inaccessible really, in these situations, because the following through of them demands some kind of social transgression in itself, some kind of breaking through of innocence that just isn't socially acceptable amongst adults, normally.

This happens sometimes, when I meet people. Often, the question doesn't get asked. Funnily enough, I was inundated by the question in Denmark. It was so much the only thing in the room there, when I met someone for the first time: why are you here?! Hvorfor er du i Danmark? Why are you here? In three and a half years I never had anything satisfactory to offer that one. Here, it seems to be more circumspect, tactful. But sometimes it gets asked, tactfully or not. And I still don't have an answer.

Nothing more than this,

today

The last time I looked at the telly

was sometime this summer, and there were ads on it for a kind of birth control pill that reduces a woman's periods to four times a year.

There were ads for viagra on mainstream tv, not just in your spam folder.

I was at a screening of old propaganda ads from the forties and beyond, at Barbes recently, a lot of fun-to-look-at images of bugs bunny and tap dancing starlets strongly selling war bonds during ww2, and there was one particularly memorable set of ads telling people what to do in the event of an atomic bomb blast. They should hide under the sofa, apparently, and put one hand over their eyes and the other over the back of the neck. So there were lots of images of people running into doorways in this recovery position, and leaping under beds, as the white heat of mushroom clouds ascended throughout the land. And the daddy of the family was always on hand to say, ok family, it's safe to go outside now. That radiation will have passed within ten minutes of the blast.

Yeah.

Well, this summer I saw an ad that seemed to be directed toward children, asking them what they would do in the event of a terrorist attack. And to the parents, have you educated your kids well enough? Does everybody know what to do? And it seemed to be left open ended, with overtones of guilt, that if you haven't instructed your children in the proper procedures for coping with a terrorist attack, that you were negligent as a parent, without actually giving any sense of the implications of what such an attack might entail. And truthfully, anything that any bureau of intelligence can come up with in this regard seems to be undermined with disturbing regularity, by somebody who's put a couple of cornflake boxes together and watched an episode of McGyver.

But the news is still the same: it's every man, every man for himself (and for his own family). Like the salt sprinkles out on the street. There are no city-sponsored common area trucks that go around sprinkling salt on the street, like they do in snowy weather in Denmark. This place is operating as a city of sole traders, functioning on its OWN. And it's ALIVE.

One from the afternoon

I was dreaming of a high sitting
blond haired make up man
who asked me how I coped with being so beautiful
when you came
and vibrated
on my coffee table
looking for a place that kills things cheap and happily.
It ain't me, babe. No, no no
it ain't me babe.
It ain't me you're looking for
babe.

A holiday medley, off key

There's an ad campaign for something or other, on several subway trains at the moment. It runs the entire carriage with ideas like "You didn't wait 12 months for a set of dishcloths", and "Visions of socks and underwear never danced in your head". Well if you're waiting for anything for 12 months the most you're likely to feel at the end of it is the kind of relief you get when you finally hit that porcelain after a long pee-holding-in stint... and actually I have had that vision of socks and dancing underwear. I testify.

I had a brief conversational interlude yesterday over breakfast with a pair of chess players and the topic of sentimentality arose. One of the chess players mentioned a Mariah Carey song (oh she who is so bountiful in this emotion) and how it was steaming with what he called "fake sentimentality". And I wondered aloud, "well, what is REAL sentimentality? Is sentimentality ever real? Isn't that an oxymoron?" I suppose an answer to that could be that actually, it's real sentimentality if the person feeling it is buying into it at the time, perhaps. But any definition of real that means authentic and actual (yeah, concepts galore, but maybe you know what I mean) to me, doesn't include sentimentality. But it's an interesting question.

And so, in this spirit, with this little question mark of sentimentality over my head as I step down into the spaghetti junction at Pacific street, I remember my iPod. And as the q train chugs out over the Manhattan bridge with a vibrant peach and rose sunset backlighting the Brooklyn Bridge, and the statue of liberty somewhere in between (can you believe I never noticed it in that picture before?) my fingers reach quite naturally for Rhapsody in Blue (the Previn version). Gosh, though. It really does mine that seam. If you're looking for exquisitely elegant sentimentality, Rhapsody in Blue is probably what you're looking for. 'Specially with that view. Woman can only take so much of this vibe, however elegantly drawn, and so I switch to New York Counterpoint as I emerge from the 6 at Lafayette street.

And go walking through Soho.

And this is some of what I see...

The skyline on a red label on a courier bag
A middle aged man sending an email on his Treo
A Grace's Market NY bag
A massive vinyl image of clueless beauty at East Houston and Lafayette
Tits in a car window on Lafayette
Some famous actor looking angry and withdrawn and cold
Very well made beautiful shoes
Exquisite long johns
An art deco parking garage
Midnight blue
Avoca wool
A woman surrendering to the image of one she believes to be more beautiful than her
A woman luring another in from the streetside of the window of her shop

As I skirt along Spring...

A well dressed woman pulling trash out of a clean, freshly painted dumpster
The waft of shish kebabs
Tall thin blonde women who might be German metal head boys
Five inch patent heels striding indifferently across the cobblestones
A chef smoking a fag watching me walk down the street
The man transfixed at the "Gifts for Reading" table at the MoMA design store
An image of Kate Moss airbrushed (for she looketh like this no longer, if she ever ever did) into an alluring vision of expensive sundrenched fuckability (with impeccable hygiene and no past)
The man on the phone
Woman in mink
Some photos that look like mine on the wall by the escalator in Bloomingdales
The cold street
The evenly scattered salt on the pavement
The expensive looking graffiti that makes expensive mouths water
Healthy dogs in jackets
Look up! Look up!
The sight of an imposing Soho loft at Broadway and Broome
He eyes my stripey tights with glee
A boy sitting crosslegged in the freezing street, tap tap tapping on his 17 inch laptop
The Housing Works bookstore on Crosby, as I enter
"Archipenko adheres to the limitations of the block, finding within its confines solutions at once simple and complex" on the first page of the first book I glance at: "Alexander Archipenko: Vision and Continuity", p. 120.
and I think of Dean street and 5th avenue
And I find a seat
and I sit
and type this from the notes in my small notebook.

They've discovered a void in the universe

and it's not just taking place in my Brooklyn afternoons. No, it's one billion light years in diameter. The mixing of space and time concepts alone is probably enough to make your brain synapses go gaga and span out for the remainder of the evening, but this is really very beautiful if you linger over it a little.

Void (not pigs) in SPACE!

Hurrah!

Caught in the act

I don't know about you, but these two look to me like they've been having just a little too much fun...

Oh sweet

Three cheers for the nose!
Hip hip hurrah!
Hip hip hurrah!
Hip hip..
Elephants on the bbc

Some days are just cold and you wish you were drunk the whole way through them. Today has been such a day. Hence the bliss of elephants. And good red wine.

All we are saying... is Give Rats a Chance...

There's a new generation of rats in New York City.

They are not ashamed of their forebears, they are in fact proud of the fact that the rats of New York City did so much to contribute to the lasting legacy of the image of The Big Apple. The rats of New York city are legendary. But they have had a bad rap. And they have never been pretty.

However, there is now a new generation with new concerns, and this generation is, in keeping with much of the city they hold so beloved, that has sustained and multiplied them, feeling comfortable enough with their new status that they are keen to launch a pr campaign, in order to revamp their public image. It's a branding thing. And I am one lucky lady today, because I have gotten the gig. It's the highest profile job of my career as a rat finker.

It's also, I'm happy to say, an easy job. Because the rats of New York City have become a species for the city to be proud of. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been having meetings with some high profile leaders of the rat community here in the Park Slope/ Prospect Heights neighbourhoods and I have seen how they live. They have respect in their communities, they provide for their families, they live off the pickings of very sanitary rubbish bins and the very fine restaurant kitchens of the area.

Their offspring - ratlets I've decided to call them for the ground we can cover with the cute factor - are educated, well integrated into the community, and have ambition that their grandparents simply couldn't have hoped to have. They know how far it is possible to travel in this town; some of them have indeed ascended Manhattan's dizzying heights: you may know many of their faces, they have become leaders of business and industry and are visible, speaking their truth nightly on CNN and Bloomberg TV.

There are a few key concerns emerging from my conversations with the various rat communities of the city (and just like the human communities, the rat communities are diverse, in economic realities, education and prospects) that the rats on the ground would like to have addressed in the wider community, and through their media representations. They are fully aware of the centrality of their role in the New York story, which is comparable with, though inherently different from, the centrality of the cockroach community in the life of the city. And it's time for payback, now. It's time for recognition. Language is an important issue.

They have been inspired by the efforts of many minority communities in reclaiming the slang epithets that have been for generations used abusively against them. Street rats in Washington Heights and Inwood, the as yet ungentrified parts of Manhattan, aswell as many areas of The Bronx, have, for a number of years now, been fondly, informally calling each other 'vermin' and this defiant act of empowerment has been read as threatening by the human communities there. They wonder what the rats are planning and what is possible from here.

Well, most rats in New York City are really just very pleased to be earning a good living and having a warm home in a safe neighbourhood, and that's what we're really keen to emphasise in our public relations efforts. This is all about understanding between the two principle species in the city. Again, I am aware that our cockroach friends share the city equally as the third dominant species here, but they haven't hired me. Yet.

We all just want what's good for the children. Rat and baby, standing shoulder to shoulder, eating from the same bowl. And maybe this vision seems mad to you, seems so visionary as to be such a long way off, that it could never happen, that we humans could never see rats as an equal species, but here's where the fight begins. The fight of the triumph of human and, yes, vermin, understanding.

Made in China

I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt printed up that says 'Made in China' and go around being a piece of shit technology for the day. Maybe Christmas.

Somebody has a brilliant idea in Murray Hill (Bensonhurst)

Something I happened upon over on craigslist...

Donate to me (Murray Hill)

---

I want a million dollars. I think this is what I really need to actually start a life here in Manhattan. Please let me know if you are willing to give.
I don't want to haggle or trade - there are just so many people here with more money than they could ever need, I was hoping one might read this and share their good fortune.

Nobilitas Whippitas

Bad memories

Memories can be great even when they weren't pleasant at the time that they happened. Have you noticed that? Bad memories can be wonderful. Just because they happened. Because they had life flowing through them. Often, it's my guess, it takes years to really appreciate that.

Whippet love, 7

Brute whippet beauty

The Whippets, today

I don't know about you, but I can feel Pink Floyd's Time running through this picture...

Winter in Manhattan; bucolia in Brooklyn

I was in Manhattan yesterday, for the first time in a couple of weeks. God, it's different over there. They give you less time to cross the streets. The streets are wider. And the traffic goes both ways! This is the kind of thing that can cause havoc in the life of a Park Sloper. Arse was kicked, fun was had, long-since met friend was reacquainted, and corn muffin was bought in Wholefoods at 11pm.

It's winter in Manhattan, folks. I've been gambolling around in the pastoral beauty of autumn in Brooklyn (I don't know when I've enjoyed an autumn this much) but one visit to the Lower East Side was enough to confirm that even the seasons move faster in Manhattan. No leaves on the trees, no leaves on the ground. I think it might even be colder there.

Getting mixed up with the boogie

I remember a moment from the short time I lived in New Orleans. It was early August in the French Quarter, a day or so after the hurricane winds brought all the hot torrents of rain to drench us. Those rains sent me into the Marriott Hotel on Canal street to get dry before getting soaked through again. I squelched across the lobby to the ladies, sat under a hand drier for half an hour, then met the rain again, walking almost the full length of Canal street to the St. Charles streetcar which carried me home to Prytania street, more soaking than I have ever been before or since, in clothes or out of them. An evening beer has rarely tasted so good.

By then, I had decided that I was pretty much living in New Orleans. I just couldn't imagine leaving. It was a common and pernicious kind of experience that happened to people when they spent more than a wild weekend in Nola. She sort of seeped into you. It was the magic and the sensuality and the earthy natural energy of the place, mixed with the boogie and the pollution and the swamp magnetism, that made it a very easy place to get stuck in, especially when the humidity was high. It was also incredibly easy to find your way through, once you actually slipped under the skin of Nola.

And right after the heavy rains, it was quiet in the quarter. Summertime was low season, anyway. Even at that, I never really spent much time in the French Quarter, I usually hung out over in the Marigny, or uptown altogether. But this evening I was strolling past Jackson square, along St. Ann street, and there was a man standing on the sidewalk, in under an awning to shelter from the rain, a dark figure on a dark and by then lightly rainy street, and he was singing a tune to the hot mist and the rain and the empty street as I walked through it. And I saw him and listened to his song, and he didn't have a go-cup sitting by his feet, or a cap upturned to catch passing falling change, and he was just standing there, eyes closed, enraptured, singing to the street, the sound of his heart calling out to the air in Nola to meet him there, the sound of the life of Nola meeting him there, the life of Nola inside him, where she dwelled, rightly. And I watched this man, and I felt it, I got it. This was really the only appropriate response to the question of New Orleans. To sing to her, to woo her, to love her in the way she likes, with softness on a hard day, with boogiesounds, with rhythm. And so she comes rushing in.

Cities live inside us, in ways we don't always recognise. Places do that, whether city or wild nature. And cities have character, have spirit, that magnetise us in different ways, bring out different aspects of us, depending on the particular vibe of the particular city. They bring out different activities, too.

I spent January of this year in Barcelona and Berlin. Barcelona was warm and sunny, and I swam in the sea and strolled around in my high heeled boots, wandering through the labyrinths, hanging out in the Plaças, kind of entranced, for the most part, and spending my days with a new friend I made on my first evening there. It's always fantastic when you meet a fun chica friend, and in Barcelona, that would be Tina.

And then I went to Berlin, and there was a hurricane on the second day, and it was dark and cold and I wandered the very wide streets and felt the blood of northern europe circulating in me again, and I found it hard to get talking to people and I felt kind of lonely so I bought a notebook and three crayons and made my fun inside that notebook wherever I wandered, in my Barcelona high heeled boots.

I snaked around Europe this year, ended up in New York city on what seemed like a whim that landed me home. That's what this place feels to me. Home. Home is, of course, a moveable feast, when you live the way I have these past few years. But home also feels like staying. Here.