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Ireland on the way down, freefalling

I feel like doing a Gerry Ryan- style review of the papers today. Maybe I'll start making podcasts to post on here. Anybody like to hear that? she asks the void. Don't all start running to the comments like lemmings over a cliff, now. I know your keyboard fingers get itchy when you click on Lucy Takes Off.

So, I take the Irish Independent, dear. It doesn't take me anywhere interesting, I might add, but it is the only source of Irish news that I can get for free over the internet, being as it is that the Times is a pay per view affair (is this even POSSIBLE in this day and age?) and I haven't found anything else national worth glancing at. Perhaps the Examiner? Haven't tried that. Again, suggestions welcome (the void says yawp yawp yawp).

This is on the front page of the Indo today:

The Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, in a breathtaking admission of complacency, has said that the Government only became aware of the economic "decline" in July, two years after slowdown indicators first became apparent and when the country was actually in the grip of a full-scale crisis.

The only thing surprising about this headline is that Lenihan actually said what was on his mind. Ireland has to be the last country in the free world whose politicians do this. Perhaps even that complacency will go, when the squeeze becomes a tighter fit. When I was living in Denmark, I heard stories about the boom in the Faroe Islands. It didn't just reach Iceland, apparently as soon as things got good, everyone in the Faroes had a swimming pool built in their back garden. Maybe they're growing vegetables in them now...

See, in Ireland, the Celtic Tiger boom was our very first boom ever. We never had a boom before. We never had money before, as a nation. We knew about famine, recession, poverty, survival, the life of the spirit. Every time I visited Ireland after I left in 2003, as the rich got richer and the poor learned to put their hands out a little farther, I was struck by the sheer savage materialism of the place. The women seemed to be putting more and more make-up on (I was living in Denmark for a lot of this time, where the women were uniformly clean scrubbed, blonde and sensible) and the heels got higher and spindlier, the dresses got sequinnier and the tits spilled out over the tiny pieces of fabric containing them. Everybody was slamming booze and the statistics about cocaine made it sound like it had replaced the spliff as the casual chemical of choice.

I always asked the same question: where is it coming from? Various people pointed to the activity, the buzz, the relentless energy of an economy in rude health, a landscape where a restaurant in Dublin city centre could not possibly fail, would in fact, be packed out from the first day it opened and every day thereafter, where everyone was going out all the time, where people got used to service largely given by the reams of Poles and other East Europs flowing into the country to do jobs we had never had before in Ireland, let alone do them ourselves.

It was a very strange place to visit. I hadn't noticed it being like that before I left.

Meanwhile, I was living in an incredibly sensible and stable country, with a social welfare system that astonishes me still in its humanity and consideration of the value of a decent life for all. This did not make me want to leave any less. I just didn't know where to. So I tried Berlin and Barcelona and ended up back here in New York. This feels like home now. It certainly isn't stable.

So now apparently Ireland is on her way back to recession. She knows it well, even if the 40% of people under 24 there, only know of such things from history books. It's not so long ago though. They date the Tiger years from 1996, but I don't recall things being much different then. Really, the mega boom was just for the last very few years, in my opinion. The palpable madness and relief of it. Ireland needed this frenzy of consumption. It was like a counter-famine.

And, you know, she wears it well. When I saw a clip of the Satanic Sluts on the Late Late show that a New York friend of mine who has recently moved to Dublin, had posted on facebook, well, you've got to know things are peaking. Actually it's the fast train down. Because things tend to pick up speed slowly, accelerate quickly toward the top, plateau and dance for a little bit, then full speed down. There is some kind of absolute gravity freewheel that can be reached when the height one is falling from is high enough. It's a state where maximum velocity is reached, and everything is just coasting. It's a bit like that line from La Haine, where the man is falling from the top of a building, and as he falls past each floor, hurtling toward the ground, he says to himself, jusqu'ici, tout est bien. Jusqu'ici, tout est bien. So far, so good.

C'est pas la tombe. C'est la terrisage.

It's not the falling, it's the landing. Or, to quote another song from hard-hit times,

Is that all there is, my friend? Then let's go dancing....

Frenchie

Remember when the most rude thing you could think of was the idea of somebody giving you a frenchie?

Pooch portraits

Close up shots of dogs in repose, looking directly into the camera. It's amazing how much we like dogs to perform for the camera. Cats, however, can perform all day, as far as I'm concerned.

Spam, continued

I just got an email from a person called Most Trusted Replica.

The Lonesome Boatman

A classic Irish air, played by a virtuoso tin whistle player. That's a TIN WHISTLE this man is playing. Watch those fingers fly. Reminds me of a bird.

Mystuff

A Chinese photographer exhibits his shit. It is pretty.

This is Where: Milla

Milla from THIS IS WHERE from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

This and yesterday's post are two parts of a project I made this year, called This is Where. It's composed of mostly film photographs but also some digital, spoken word and the music for both pieces is composed by Ross Bonadonna. It is made to be projected on large canvases in installation settings. This is Where was first seen at the Enniskillen Arts Festival, Sept/Oct 08.

This is Where: Rose

Rose from THIS IS WHERE from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

Easy pickings

I glance through the spam folder before trashing it, in case somebody's mass mailout opening invitation or party made it there instead of my inbox. Now, spam isn't what it used to be since they shut down that huge factory operation a few weeks ago. Apparently the pharmacological enticements that constitute 97% of my spam yield something like 27 sales per 5 million spams sent out, or something to that effect. Even at that ratio some of these megaspam operations can make thousands of dollars a day from this stuff.

There is also the kind of spam that makes suggestions such as: Make your Nomination Today for a Degree, or PhD in 5 Weeks: why spend 3 years writing your thesis when you can buy one today and have it delivered by UPS directly to your door? This kind of thing really does piss me off, because they wouldn't be doing it unless it sold to somebody, and really it's got to be the most vulnerable people who fall for this kind of shit.

Ireland has apparently seen a huge surge in cocaine use over the past few years. And Ireland is a small island nation, so the connections between things are really that much more apparent. When you know you're directly supporting the kind of thing that involves so much killing and brutality, not just in Columbia but in Limerick city, for instance, a town of 70,000 people that contains this phenomenon and leads to people being shot and neighbours terrorised with bomb threats in what is basically your neighbourhood, I would imagine it would kind of kill the fun, no? Cos that is what you're putting in your veins and up your nose. The white powder is just a metaphor.

Have I posted this before? Oh well. Watch it again, so.

Love this.

Sex for sanitary towels

The Guardian has this Katine project, where they are sponsoring various development projects in a Ugandan village, and reporting stories from the work that's going on there, and also stories from the lives of the villagers. This one: stories of teenage girls, sexuality and finance, struck me, today.

Rain on Flatbush

It's been raining for a half hour. Rain changes the soundscape reaching me here, at the nexus of three Brooklyn streets. The slosh softens things, makes everything sound more luxurious, generous. Though I seem to find the various alert sounds very appealing lately, with possible exception of fire truck when it makes its sonar spasticity as it heads the wrong way down Dean street. Houses catch fire and fires need to be quenched. Not a whole lot of that lately, maybe fires are going out of fashion. Maybe fire quenching is falling victim to the increasingly cautionary economic climate: people are being safe with their stuff. Anyway, often I find that the various alert sounds of cars, trucks, alarms and machines seem to syncopate melodically with whatever tune I'm humming. This is endearing.

I look out the window and see the street sellers with their huge line of $24.95 Christmas trees wrapped up in green bags. We saw a truck full of the things, billowing in the crisp clear night, as we drove home from Thanksgiving dinner in Westchester a week ago. That's the future, I said. Well, they're here. It's festive. They have lights and I'll bet it's cold out there. There's some kind of makeshift cabin but basically they've got to be around in case somebody has some kind of inane questions about Christmas trees they'll need to answer. Some people work hard for their $10 an hour.

Somebody's getting married in DUMBO and there are cocktails and cake. I may skip it. I'm listening to the slosh slosh slosh.

Prop 8: The Musical

Physicalising bits of the internet

I seem to be talking about Russell Davies a lot lately, specifically his Lyddle End 2050 project, his slow project attitude, and the general friendly contrariness of his jib. I have been talking a lot about his idea of physicalising the internet, I particularly like the notion of a ring binder with wikipedia bits in it, and an old shoe box of random flickr images. Our clusterflock meeting on saturday felt to me like the human version of this, as we had never met before, and our meeting was at the urging of another Clusterflocker none of us have ever met, the lovely Sheila Ryan, of the Driftless Region, Midwest of the Internet.

Brooklyn Clusterdrinks

The internet became physicalised in human form on saturday night, as four bloggers from Clusterflock met, drank, ate and drank together. Here is what it looked like.

Bock

This is one of the most satisfying reads I had today. I love this dude sometimes, and he is a native of my native birthplace, Limerick. Also on a similar theme, this.

Some hot number ones on google

Three trees on Fifth Avenue

Midtown.