Sheep shit/ Thought shit

Dublin this past weekend was pouring pouring rain like a monsoon pours. It was kind of fun, taking pictures of people huddling together under umbrellas while running, like eager three legged race runners. There's a kind of pitch of excitement that happens when there's a real downpour, a gorgeous smell in the air, something about it I love.

You know, it's cold here in Ireland this past couple of days. Actually cold. Tights weather, boots weather, though I am holding off. There is constant and heavy rain. My mother speaks of Egypt like it's calling her to its heat. Only two weeks ago I was living in shorts.

Today on my wet walk through the local wilderness here in Clare, I met some wildish horses, some were mares suckling their foals, and there was a stallion who was sniffing deeply, savouring the aroma from a dusky mare's hind quarters as she carefully positioned her rump in front of him, and twitched her tail. God, the things women could do if we had tails.

I stopped to watch them. He sniffed at her, then rubbed his nose against the grass, against his legs, sniffed the air, she danced a couple of graceful paces ahead of him, twitching that tail, and stood before him once more. He followed, she led, thus. I wondered why he wasn't mounting her. I was standing what I considered to be a subtle distance away from them, but clearly it wasn't subtle enough: he craned his neck around and stared right at me for several seconds. I moved on, looking behind me every now and then, to see one or other of them looking behind them at me.

Then it was my turn with sheep, to get up close and proximate. A sheep's baa up close is a different thing altogether, you can feel the baa, rather than just hear it. There were lots of mothers calling to their smallish lambs, their teenaged lambs, and lots of smallish and teenaged lambs baaing back (different tones). Sheep tend to move in a flock, and they're not too keen on humans. Maybe this has something to do with humans' peculiarly keen appetite for eating sheep's babies, who knows, but they tend to run in a hobbledy kind of way when a human is in their path. And so I climbed a little down the hillside, and let them pass, baaing and hobbling and jogging with the bright blue and red splodges of spray paint decorating their backs.

My shoes were covered in shit when I got home. It occurred to me that sheep, goats, horses and cows, any animal that lives in fields principally, shits and eats in the same place, but they probably don't get sick because it's just grass, cycling itself. Sheep shit, horse shit, even cow shit, doesn't smell bad to me. It's rich with wildness. Sure I get thrills from big cities too, but these long walks I take around here are such pleasures.

I was plagued with intense thoughts of the kind that insist themselves but can never be resolved as thoughts. Maybe some day they'll just go away. I'll take sheep shit over thought shit any day.

Fleeing the past

I've just read a remarkable article about some children of nazis who have converted to Judaism and gone to live in Israel. It culminates in a frank conversation with a relative of Hitler, who is probably the only one of the converts who freely discusses his family's nazi past. He describes his feelings on arriving in Israel in the seventies:

"I felt at home. I was no longer living in a conflict. I didn't have to reject the older generation."

Interestingly enough, there is some suggestion that his family's past has taken on a different face, in the following generation:

"Two of my sons are chauvinists and one of them is even partially racist. I can't listen to fascistic discourse. I don't suffer that."

Read it here.

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.