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...