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!

CD release party tonight, Paranoid Larry's latest record

CD release party at *6 pm* TONIGHT for a fantastic record I did backing vocals on:

Paranoid Larry & his Imaginary Band: The Struggle For Existence

68 Jay St Bar (at Water St.), DUMBO, Brooklyn. No cover, $10 for the CD. Larry's the one with the most serious beard in the room. Say I sentcha.

Paranoid Larry on Myspace (the current record isn't up there yet)
The Roches sing Paranoid Larry's No Shoes
The record on CD Baby

Meet Koko

She is our latest one.

It seems that all I can really write about in the public sphere at the moment is #mousenews, or #catnews, or #dognews. For ye of no twitter, the # is a shorthand way of indicating a topic, within the 140 character space restraint of the tweet form. (Favourite recent hashtag: #whencrackgetsintothecattery).

It also helps with @ replies, when someone responds to a particular tweet on a topic, so you know what the hell it is they're talking about. Some people don't use or get hashtags at all, some use them dilligently and very properly, and some have fun with it.

But just about everything I have to say about anything is getting sucked into my current project, a record I'm writing here in the hut, with only the local fauna spilling out onto the internet afterwards. So I imagine that a lot of internet folks think I am running a menagerie around here (not hugely far from the truth of my current circumstances) or that I am animal-obsessed. Fact is, there are not a lot of people around and the animals are almost always entertaining. And they have stuff to say. And I listen. I tweet for them sometimes. Clean up their pee. We form bonds.

So. Koko. Koko is one of these glamourous, pretty, troubled types. I'm thinking, Rita Hayworth. She's also playful (particular interest in ball games), likes to be given lots of attention and has hissy fits when she is not being attended to at all times. We like her very much and she sleeps in a bedroom at night, spends most of the afternoons in the kitchen.

It is time for my second coffee of the day, and another session assuring Koko that she is loved for her mind.

Mulligan's, Dublin with a guinness, detail

Taliwood: the future of disaster movie epics

Has anyone considered setting up the various Talibans with some 35 mm cameras and a special effects budget, some sound stages and Macbook Pros? The latest from the Pakistan Taliban (is that like Bjorn Again, or something? A tribute Taliban-d?) is that they intend to launch an attack on Washington that would "amaze everyone in the world". Ah, that's what they're after. They just want to amaze us. All too easily done with light and shadow, and the right budget.

Can somebody tweet Barack Obama with the idea?

Kim Deal pedalling.

Happy to be the cat who MEOWed

This is Where, screening at Beefstock Music Festival today

My This is Where project is screening in New York later today during the Beefstock Music Festival in the Catskills. Lots of friendly people and good music.

My Birthday Mouse

Small Deadmouse, and Missus from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

This is what I got.

#mousenews

Just met the mouse again. We meet every night, around this time. Slight mutual alarm. Though he is deeply cute, I will prob bring the cat.

The cats have disappeared into Mouseland. They are looking around with wonder, inhaling deeply, ecstatically alive and grateful. #mousenews

My plan: the cats will flush the mouse out, and then I jump in at the last minute of batbatbatting to cut a deal with him. #goodcop #mousenews

Plan was to play goodcop with the kitchen mice I have written about previously, once the cats had flushed them out. But now I'm watching Capote. Think I'll just interview the cats afterwards instead. #cruelbutsuccessful

I mean, I will spend time with the cats. I will gain the cats' confidence. I will bring the cat kittenfood when they have, um, starved themselves (albeit HIGHLY unlikely). I will share stories with the cats from my own difficult kittenhood even if it didn't happen. We will share. I will take their litter tray away and scrutinise it. I will write a great book. A great book. All the cats in apartment land will secretly read it, savouring every word, every batbatbat, every crunch. Vicarious.

Liveblogging #mousenews daily at twitter.com/herecomeslucy

Perplexed

God, look at this photograph. It was published in the Guardian last week, another of their series competitions under the theme of 'absorbed'. This is such a complex beauty. It's almost like a Raymond Carver short story. The tomato juice, the mirror frame and the ketchup bottle hold the image of the man with a kind of reassurance that he clearly has no access to. The ashtray keeps the letter pinned to the table, as if it will jump up and eat him otherwise. I get the impression he is probably reading the same sentence over and over and over, trying trying to understand it. This photograph, needless to say, didn't win the competition.

The fact is, of course, that this picture is exactly how I feel today.