Alternative Miss World

What a terribly lovely thing for a rainy saturday evening. (video)

Show tonight, Location one, Soho NYC

I have a photograph in a show *tonight, May 1* at Location One, Soho, NYC.

Open Call, curated by Brina Thurston, starts at *8pm*, Location One, 26 Greene St. DJ and light refreshments served. I believe there will be beer and I believe it will be free. Please go and spot my photograph: this is what you're looking for. A few ooh and aahs when beholding it would really send things where they need to go. Thanks.

OH YES ALSO: There's a Laurie Anderson show there at the moment, closes tomorrow. If you're in New York and you're reading this blog and you haven't seen her show yet, you might want to sort that out.

Considerate poo

This picture speaks 'considerateness' to me. It is dog poo, neatly sitting on top of a cigarette box. Whatever way you look at it, it's considerate. I would like to meet that dog someday and give him a chewstick.

UPDATE In case you didn't notice, the poo is rocking the health safety warning. Considerate!

I came across this on a green issues site, in the advertising space

I didn't cast a vote.

DubKbhBcnBknJoggingWhippet

I seem to have given up the visa quest. Or it has given me up. Or it has gone underground. I hope truly that Brooklyn is my home, deferred for now, but right now I am living in the moment with the nothingness from The Neverending Story eating all around the edges of the moment.

I have a habit it seems of living in cities that get abbreviated to three letters: Kbh (København = Copenhagen), Dub, Bcn, hmm, NY. Wow. Maybe that's it! NY is TWO LETTERS! That is the source of the difficulty. I might have to contact mayor Bloomberg now that he is in his untouchable third term and today, angry (you did hear about the fiasco airplane photo op farce that happened yesterday, didn't you? I mean, we all thought that if nothing else, the Obama administration was fucking smart) and suggest a New York NYN(y) appendage to the usual old NYNY set up. Then I can come, freely. Oh all things are possible.

I'm considering the possibilities of the potential relevance of jogging to my life. See, a jogger would never write a sentence like that. But maybe I'm learning. I am not completely inexperienced in this regard. I used to take off sometimes around a couple of the lakes of København and found it an intense exercise in discouragement and determination. Maybe that's what I need right now. It's also healthy.

I used to take care of a pair of whippets in Bkn (oh my god we've cracked it) and it was hilarious when I got the notion to bring them for a run. I would tear off as fast as I fucking could, and they'd be having a pleasant quick stroll. Sort of smiling up at me, warming up for the cheetah manoeuvres.

God

Omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. God dammit I loved those omni words I heard in college when they told me about what God was.

Dense murky chutney memory

This is more of a tweet than a blog post, but sometimes it's good not to have to try to eliminate punctuation marks in order to say what you've got to say in 140 characters. I had a conversation yesterday with the woman at the chutney stall in Temple Bar food market, and we were talking about how some chutneys are profoundly intense. I was complimenting them on making a hot sweet fruit chutney that I think is perfectly suited to the Irish palate, the perfect balance of hot and sweet. And how I had tasted some chutneys once from India, kept in the house of some ambassador or other who was away probably being an ambassador, while his teenage son had a few people over for a few days, of whom I was one. It was the summer I was 17 and just out of my first year of college, and I was just drifting around where the wind blew in Dublin.

So I went to Dublin yesterday, and wandered around for a few hours. I was a ghost, haunting the streets, mostly. I saw faces that I knew, it is always thus in Dublin, and this is the single reason I find Dublin an interesting city these days. I like to look at the faces. I suppose if I spent a couple of days wandering around København on my bike I would probably spot a couple of people I knew on the street, but nothing like Dublin. And I have run into people I know on the streets of New York, not just in the neighbourhood (it's not such a devastating experience in the neighbourhood, but when you meet someone you know on the subway or anywhere in Manhattan it feels fucking holy or something).

Yeah, faces I recognise, and some of them I have never even spoken to. There is a strong sense - whether you realise it or not of course is another matter - that the fact that you live in Dublin and walk on the street makes you a visible human being in Dublin. You are part of the Dublin landscape, another of the people that people recognise, whom they never ever actually engage with or speak to in any way. But these people make up the furniture of a small city. Recognisability is an invisible, implicit quality of Dublin life.

Of course it has changed. The woman who used to dance and play accordion on that little triangle at the top of Pearse street by Westmoreland street, she's gone. The woman who wandered around dancing and making ley lines energy gestures, she's gone. And me, I was the one racing through the streets at breakneck speed and making hair-raisingly close calls (but always polite when glancing past someone so close I could smell their perfume) on my little red scooter. And she, she too is gone.

So I was passing through Dublin yesterday and I get to talking with the chutney lady about other chutneys I have tasted, and I always remember these crazy salty off-your-arse-hot mango chutneys I tasted when I rocked in at this guy's house at 17, and stayed for a few days. He had red hair, brown eyes and pale skin and he seemed kind of withdrawn in that smart rich kid kind of way. Anyway I have always remembered his name, and I just googled him and discovered that he lives a few blocks from where I lived in Brooklyn.

And we talked about the quality of such chutneys, the chutney lady and I, yesterday. They are murky, she said. Yes, a kind of mud green, I agreed, generally joining in the friendly business of agreement. But those chutneys weren't murky at all. They were salty. And hot. And sweet. And I had never tasted anything like them ever before. And he, this probably 18 year old kid who was our host, was already weary and over everything. He probably grew out of that.

Tar wonders if there is any chance of A Great Adventure Of Doing Things

Octopus grass

More from the Bill and Lara story

These are again, from their first meeting. The original pic being this, of course, and click on it to see it larger. We need to talk about our feelings about these photographs, folks. Please feel free to share in the comments. I can't stop looking at the photo of these two holding each other. The sheer unmitigated joy. I am so happy they have found each other.

Meet the mandrill family.

16-year-old male mandrill "Pablo", 10-year-old "Zora" and their four-week-old baby play in their enclosure on March 20, 2009 at Munich's zoo Tierpark Hellabrunn.

Click on the picture to make it bigger.

Bill and Lara meet for the first time. Lara has been lonely.

Polar bears Bill, right, and Lara react during their first meeting, at the Zoom Erlebniswelt zoo, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Friday, April 17, 2009. Bill came from the zoo in Bruenn, Czech Republic, as a new partner for Lara.

Click on the picture to make it bigger. You can find these and more photographs of zoo animals in springtime over at the wonderful Big Picture.

Pagi and Palu, the sun bears

Pagi, right, a female Bornean sun bear cub whose name means "morning" in a Malayan dialect, licks her brother, Palu, who is named after a valley in Borneo, as they made their public debut at the San Diego Zoo on Monday, March 16, 2009. The twins are only the third Bornean sun bear litter to be born in North America, all of which have occurred at the San Diego Zoo, where researchers are studying reproductive biology and maternal care of the sun bear.

Click on the picture to make it bigger.

Fancy a tabby bengal?

Hep cats, of the four distinct types of Bengal tiger existent in the world. What a photo shoot.

MAKLAK

My favourite thing on the internet right now.

What excellent news

this is.

So there's more to it than that

You know it's true I do more stuff than I said a few days ago in a post about how I don't do much other than stare into space while "working on a song" and tend to the menagerie around here, lately. I mean, mostly I do those things. Those things take up most of my day. But also, I fuck around on the internet for 15 hours a day like everybody else, and that includes looking at some interesting stuff. So at the very least, I could hit you up with some of that stuff. But you know, I suppose I think if I post something here I want to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it, rather than, uh, not being wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. And yet...

Yesterday I discovered Jeffrey Lewis and Janelle Monae and returned again to Jamie Livingstone's daily polaroids. I can't describe what it is that I love about these pictures, so many of which are unremarkable, or badly exposed, polaroids, but the textures of them renew my love for film far more rawly than some gorgeous clean beautiful pictures I've also been looking at elsewhere. There is something so roughly gorgeous about Jamie Livingstone's lifelong daily shot project that takes my breath away.

Jeffrey Lewis? Sidewalk cafe guy, plays that folky sixties style guitar with a kind of maniacally dense lyrical style, ripped off melodies (Suzanne Vega's Luka for one, and a Blind Faith song, "You can all join in" -- though in fairness the BF song goes "Make up your own words up if you want to, any old words that you think will do" -- and somewhere else a paraphrased Leonard Cohen quote that is magnificent in its original), but he does it interestingly and he clearly loves music and it's playful and depending on your mood, listenable stuff. He's on tour right now, seems to spend a lot of time on tour generally. But basically, he's very new york, which is kind of comforting. You know? When what is considered new york these days is so fucking bland, it's nice to hear this and recognise it, to know that this is Typical L train Rider and hear his thoughts. Also makes comics.

The other gal? Kinda fun. Listen for yourself.

So here's a thing that bothers me intermittently, lately. This is the first time in popular music history when vast swathes of the people who are arriving on the scene and making music are largely rehashing-without-reinventing earlier periods of music, whipped entire from 1982 electronica or 1964 Motown, and literally just mimicked to the last detail with cut and pasted new lyrics onto them. This has never happened before in this way, and the entire music firmament from labels to magazines is lapping this shit up wholesale, and encouraging it, calling it genius. This bothers me.

It also bothers me to see people walking around in eighties drag. It's weird shit, man. Why would you want to do that? It's not everybody who is doing this of course, and there is interesting music being made nonetheless, and it isn't as if music has not historically been endlessly appropriated and appropriated again. But the history of pop and rock music has up until very recently, gotten forged by those who reinvent what came before, rather than literally literally mimic the exactly approximated and carefully studied mannerisms and tropes of what came before. This creeps me out. It's like music stalking. It's like identity theft. And it's being done by 20 year olds with talent. And it is what is, if anything, getting hoisted and Grammied™ and lauded and sold sold sold sold sold. And, of course, even more depressingly, bought bought bought bought bought.

I was also looking at some highly improbable, fun stuff yesterday.

Bright, pretty New Orleans-based Swedish one woman band.

We really have a lot of hissy fitters living in the house this week and it is beginning to get on my one remaining nerve.

Oh, and this is a wordcloud of my um, followers, over at twitter. It's clear and kinda nice.

West Side Story Drama in my kitchen

Koko, yes the Rita Hayworth one, has just come into season this past couple of days. Just in time for Monty, the suddenly Aflame and Renewed springer spaniel, who normally spends his days asleep, but now who is frantically in love. We have to keep them apart, so that Koko does not return to her owner having lost her honour. We will NOT be putting purity rings on them or playing Jonas Brothers pukesounds in their ears, but Monty IS pissing all over everything to let Koko know he is coming for her, calling out to his beloved to keep her faith, that he is on his way. They are making their bark-aria as I type.

This is likely to continue for some days. This may be like this for a week. Hey! We need some patience over here. Can whoever gives out the patience bring a truckfull of the stuff over here? Just dump it in the yard, we'll make light work of it.

Thanks.

Tar

A nice hedge

I think this is the lucytakesoff version of intermission muzak. But lush. It is spring!