Frank McCourt is unwell

I was born and reared in Limerick city. We have some good writers here, amongst them: Kate O'Brien, Michael Hartnett, and of course the one who travelled the furthest, Frank McCourt.

Frank McCourt had mixed experiences when he returned to Limerick after the book was published and had become such a runaway hit all over the world: a small but vocal number of people didn't like what he had been writing about and made it difficult for him to live in Limerick, but by far the majority of people in Limerick did what people do everywhere in small cities that suddenly find a hugely successful home grown writer in their midst: welcome and celebrate him. I have heard that whenever he came back to Limerick he could sometimes be found joining in the 'Angela's Ashes walking tour' here. Just wandered by, like another tourist. Signed books and chatted away, unassumingly.

I have heard that Frank McCourt is very unwell. I am sorry to hear that, and wish him well, really. There's something of the sheer eejitry about the way that some people in Limerick responded to that book, a very peculiar Limerick combination of snobbery and shame, and you know, it's not particularly my cup of tea either but it really touched a lot of people who read it, including people from Limerick who remembered that time in its history, who lived alongside him. That book succeeded mostly from word of mouth. And that's a real kind of success.

God bless you, sir.

Advice of the day

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.

oh, and this

If this is friday, it must be Limerick

It's a sunny day in Limerick. That's all I'm saying.

Lucy at Mamuska

It was the night of Mamuska on friday. Lucy made a performance, with performed poetic narrative, photographs and Ross' music. It is as truly a work in progress as that term has ever meant, but it was hugely hugely fun, and spirited, and people seemed to dig it. Got no pictures to show for it, for my laptop was employed the whole night in work and communication, but a lovely man called Conor took photographs, and we have made recordings, which I expect will show up some time very soon on my main website (which, lord knows, could do with a bit of updating... for it is spring!)

Mamuska's such a great platform. Daghdha's venue is fantastic: large but not cold, dense, full of potential, the venue equivalent of the sprung floor that supports it. And that goes for the spirit of the people who support it too, by being there, by staying there for the full evening, and the spirit of the performers, the contributers, who reveal their half-made work for to see what lies further inside it, and they can sometimes be rewarded with an inspiration of life, of breath, of ideas, and the energy of the return.

Mark Carberry made a pretty gorgeous little boxer/prom queen dance vignette, there were lots of dance experiments and celebrations, a piece for live and recorded harp, and some moving movement movies..

Fab fab fab and inspired, and inspired, and inspired...

Mamuska Night, Limerick

There was a gorgeous event last night in Daghdha Dance Space in Limerick city, called Mamuska. Apparently it's been happening there on a bi-monthly basis since last year, and it's a breath of fresh air on the Irish arts scene. I've been part of events of this sort before in different cities, and it's just so great to see one really working very well. The Daghdha space itself is amazing: housed in an old church up in St. John's square, surrounded by a graveyard, with apparently little changed except that they removed all the old fixtures and fittings of pews and altars and baptismal fonts and that kind of thing, and laid down a dancefloor.

Daghdha is a dance company and some kind of a powerhouse of ideas and collaborative activity pulling in all sorts of disciplines and artists from all over the world, and one of their spinoffs is Mamuska. The idea of Mamuska is to make a space every couple of months for people to socialise, for artists to air their sketches, ideas in progress and imperfections, and to keep the airways open for something magical and spontaneous to emerge, should the need arise. That's how I felt there, anyway, and it felt open and friendly and unpreoccupied with itself in a way that was incredibly refreshing for the Limerick, or just about any other arts scene.

There were installations, including a tent with a video piece inside it, a plinth with rows of buns stacked on top of it (for the purpose of eating) and video of bun making and bun arranging beside it, sofas, open seating, a bar, a large video screen that showed projected video and photographs, performance, sound scapes, and a small piece of theatre. I left a bit early, so I didn't catch the last couple of things. No piece was longer than 10 minutes, and everything had an unfinished, loose and open kind of feel to it. I wandered around, taking pictures on my laptop, and chatting to various people around the room. I found it really friendly and fun.

It reminded me a lot of the church on Møllegade, in Copenhagen, and the Meet Da Lama nights that Helle Thun used to run over there, on a total shoestring budget (quite unlike the budgets that Daghdha have at their disposal) and a lot of love and passion for exploration and improv. Each Meet Da Lama was an experiment without any firm conclusions, but it drew a lot of people, and for me, the combination of an open event of lots of artists of various disciplines that welcomed on the spot participation, and hugely importantly, that it took place in English, was about the friendliest hook-up I found in Copenhagen. Ultimately something like that needs more of an infrastructural grounding than Helle could possibly provide on her own, and so it burned itself out at some point of 2005, I think, but it was great to see the spirit of that alive and well in Limerick city last night.

Here are some pics from the event...

Empty space age hotel lobby zone

I'm lousy with jetlag, but alive and breathing in a new time zone. This is the view from here...

A memory from summertime, or, Friends you don't see anymore

In the summertime, a quarter block-long flower display at a New York bodega sometimes deposits its scent a little further down the block, in the interests of subtlety. So if you see the flowers coming a block away, and you're hurrying to meet them, to smell them, to play with pleasant scents, escape the usual dogpiss of Park Slope, just take it handy. The real smell may well be a little further down the street.

But it's wintertime now, though it's bright, and the cold air numbs some of these street nuances, might even be discouraging us from exploring the street at all (except with reliable thermal underwear) ...

Last night, I watched Angela's Ashes for the first time. Never read the book, never watched the movie, before. Pity that the only Limerick accents in the whole thing came from three Limerick actors who had small vignette scenes through it. One of them was a friend of mine - John - who, until last night on the screen, I hadn't seen since sometime around late 2002.

Apart from the usual drift of people into and out of life, people turning into friends turning into lovers turning into family turning themselves out on the street, or tumbling onto a different continent... Apart from that, the sound can sometimes be heard - really not very often, but when it comes it comes certainly - of a big creaky door making a resounding shutness. And the person behind the door becomes Here Be Dragons Land.

I fell out with John, somewhat bizarrely, over New York city. I miss him sometimes. His deep Limerick-accented voice, his sense of humour, his small few revelations over the course of a very long friendship, his basic decency, just the fact of him. And I see him in this movie, and this exhausts the supply of Very Famous Movies I know he's in, the other one, funnily enough, was Gangs of New York.

Angela's Ashes was a sentimental but ok enough movie, but this was my hometown they were depicting, and I didn't really feel it. Bits. References to Roches stores, the same cutaway of the castle about ten times over, but the way a place saturates the senses and the tongue and the mind goes so much deeper and wider than that. Plot and wet atmosphere are good broad structural strokes, but the joy is in the details, the nuances. I think that kind of sensitivity has really got to be the basis of any film or book of piece of music that's specific in its sense of place. Because every place is incredibly specific, though it may not be famous in the way that New York city is famous, is owned by so many people who think they know it, and so it's easier to get away with accents that run the gamut from Dublin to Belfast but never get anywhere near Limerick Junction.

Oh for a one and one from Donkey Ford's... but that kind of longing really grows with much longer exiles than mine..

I wish you well, John. I wish you a gorgeous woman who loves you. I wish you exciting films to work on. And I wish that if we were ever to cross paths on 14th or Bleecker street, that we would not hurry past each other. All love to you.

Some of the new folks on the block

I'm sitting in a brand new Turkish kebab house in Limerick city, staffed by Egyptians, and Irish and Polish waitresses. There's free wifi, hardwood furniture and paintings on the walls. In the past 24 hours, not counting family, I have spoken to more people from Bangladesh, Lithuania and Iraq, than Limerick, or even Ireland. I never quite grasped the extent of the change that has happened over the past few years until now, now that I'm spending most of my time here in public areas: hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, the streets. It's a really interesting time, a really interesting place.

There's a man in his sixties who has just come in, bought his kebab, then sat down and and ordered a cup of tea. The Irish waitress says, "sure, would you like to pay for that now, or later?" And he says, "do you think I'm going to get up and walk out for the price of a cup of tea, after paying for my food?" He's genuinely hurt. "I've never done that in my life before, and I'm not going to start now." Of course, she's just doing her job, and she's concerned she'll forget about the price of the tea, that she'll have other customers to attend to. But he's a man of a certain working class pride, and he has taken her question very personally.

Three nights ago, I was standing at the traffic lights between the Marriott and Dunnes stores, and the row of bus stops that go all the way out to Moyross housing estate. Two elderly women were standing in front of me, waiting for the lights to change. One of them turned around, and with a look on her face like she was a very small thing talking to a very big thing, and laying herself bare before its mercy, asked me for two euro for a cup of tea. This woman was from Limerick, was in her late sixties or early seventies, sober, and sane. I've been concerned about my financial situation lately, to say the least, and I told her no, ma'am, I'm sorry, I don't have it. And we crossed the road. And as soon as I hit the other side, I stopped. Rooted in my wallet, got the two feckin euro, and marched after them. My apologies, madam, I said to her, I believe this belongs to you. And handed her the two euro coin.

I was called a 'dirty cunt' before 2 o'clock this afternoon, by a tiny, frail little blonde girl in a tiny, frail little blonde girl voice, as she rolled her pram across the Athlunkard Bridge (yeah, it all seems to be going on on the Athlunkard Bridge lately). I was on my bike at the time, and we sort of met. Didn't collide or anywhere near it, but enough for her to get her words out. Totally matter of fact, her expression. Kind of blank.

Limerick, today.

Celtic Tiger lies slain in the grounds of Lisa Stansfield's stately Dalkey pile

Limerick today: the window cleaners are barking instructions at each other in Polish. Real estate agents meet their clients in the Hilton hotel before bringing them to see prospective one bedroom apartments in blocks A, B and F. Lithuanian call centre agents are talking rurally isolated emailers through the process of setting up their computers for dial-up. The wifi techocrats are in love with the products they sell. And they need to sell. It makes them feel alive.

Hey, I don't know if anyone has actually absorbed this information, but the bell has tolled for the Celtic Tiger. Word got out a few days ago. Some minister or other made the announcement. No women in gold bikinis advertised THAT one on Grafton st. Now, I know it's been splashed all over the headlines of the newspapers, but as long as you can get an Amaretto truffle with your to-go cappucino served to you by an Estonian waitress working for the second highest minimum wage in Europe, I guess you mightn't really notice. Keep making those trips to Brown Thomas, and ripping the heart out of Georgian Limerick in order to replace it with more gigantic 24 hour shopping malls. But the news is in: the good times are over, folks. And you'll probably still have to commute for two and a half hours every day, even when it all turns grey. You just probably won't be able to rely on cashing in on your real estate investment (what used to be called home) at the end of the day.

I had an inkling about it when I heard that Lisa Stansfield had put her house on the market a couple of weeks ago. That day was it for the Celtic Tiger, as far as I'm concerned. Lisa Stansfield is a minor British popstar from the eighties who came to Dublin and bought a big house in Dalkey some time in the early nineties. I don't know how much she paid for it, but now her house is on the market for 7 million euros. And if she gets that, it may well be one of the last big killings of the Celtic Tiger years. It'll take care of her retirement, anyway. She was probably holding out for a while, enjoying the amazing views over Dublin bay, knowing that one day she was going to have to cash in her chips before time ran out, and the market evaporated.

Well, guess what, folks?

Riding into Black

I have one thing to say to all car drivers, when driving along unlit night-time country roads (not that you'd notice, because your headlights always light up the roads, so you never have to face the fact that the roads are actually BLACK at night) wherever they and you may be:

When you meet a cyclist coming against you, DIM YOUR LIGHTS DUDE. Don't wait for her to put her arm in front of her face to try to block out the glare in her eyes as she steers her bike around that bend, with the other hand.

Cycling home along black country roads is really a piece of work. When cars come by, as they do often on these roads that lead to and from Limerick city, there are these surreally intense flashes of strong white light and visibility, then back to black immediately afterward. As a car passes, you watch his headlights illuminate the immediate path ahead of you, so you can see if there's a rock in your way, ready to send you flying under the tyres of an oncoming car. It's no joke. Potholes, hairpin bends, high speed cars, that lunatic who passed me so close he could have kissed me while he was doing it - THREE TIMES last night (how did he do it?), riding the loudest motorbike I have ever heard, and driving faster than Evel Knievel in a determined moment - stones, uneven road surfaces (what, in Ireland of the four billion pound roads? surely not!) sudden gaps in the road, as in, here's the road, and then suddenly, here is no road, all these things are leaps of faith into the pure unknown, on the cycle home.

And I love it. The wind rustles in the trees, the air smells so good, your senses are WIDE awake, you can hear the nocturnal animals moving around, responding to you, doing their do. Everything looks unfamiliar at night, cycling home. You can forget what country you're in, who you are, what you're doing, where you're even going to. There's just the focus on the road, the task of getting through it alive, and being exhilarated by the journey.

I had a moment some day last week, when I realised that there was so much interesting about this city and just about anywhere I could possibly be, and that I need to write about it. That the streets are FULL of stories, and moments. And I slipped inside that insight, somehow, and space expanded within it. I dunno, I just started having fun here. It helps to have your eyes open, and a sense of humour handy. It really helps to have loving people about. That's a huge blessing.

It's amazing the kinds of moments you can have in your long-left hometown. I roared down O' Connell street (Limerick's Broadway) yesterday, on the bike, belting out Mystery Train at the top and bottom of my voice. God I love that song. I can smell that song. I can smell the wet heat of it. People actually jumped in the air. I'm having fun here. The most fun I've had in years here, probably. It's not so serious as it used to be, here. At least, what I mean by that is that clearly, I'M not so serious as I used to be, here. There's still a fair whack of seriousness around the Limerick streets. But your hometown can so easily bring out the seriousness in you in a what-a-pity-that's-happening sort of way.

And shortly after that, I was cycling over the Athlunkard bridge, and I saw a man walking toward me, on the footpath. We looked right into each other, and I realised that we had been in the same class in school when we were about six years old, and I realised that he realised the same thing. There may or may not have been crushes involved. They may or may not have been mutual. They were certainly unrequited (requiting it meant holding hands in an intensely meaningful way, at six). We each may or may not have lived out the legacy of that maybe/maybe not crush for a number of subsequent crushes/relationships. Either of us may or may not be still living in the shadow of that maybe/maybe not relationship scenario.

And we looked into each other, and we were kind of amazed, and we smiled. And I cycled, and he walked, past. Over the bridge. In opposite directions.

From the mean streets of Manhattan to the Limerick Hilton

I love watching footage of Manhattan from the seventies. Back in the time when Manhattan had neighbourhoods, when it was LIVING. Even when it's just a movie, but shot on the streets. Have you seen a movie called Cool Breeze? Some minor blaxploitation movie, sort of Shaft-like, set on the wild west streets and formica diners of newyorkcityland when they were wild and the men wore tight blue jeans and slang was jiving. And when the lay of the land was being carved up between black brothers and Irish cops. Jesus, the history of the Irish in America is AMAZINGLY interesting to me. Anyway, this movie is fabulous. Classic Irish brute v Nigguh brute battles in wartorn new york city, when Sistah Giuliani wasn't even an evil glint in a poof-fro'd pimp's eye.

Got sorted out last night by Polly Harvey and Lenny Bruce. I no longer feel alone in the world. Oh, and an interview with an Irish novelist called Anne Enright, who is just clearly a ROCKA. I want to read her books now. Or chat with her. Something. Felt like I was losing my soul yesterday. My sense of humour drained away like the colour from my cheeks. My cough is getting stronger. It feels like something pretty big is making its way into the world through my heaving chest.

I'm writing this in the Hilton. A little girl and a little boy have just passed where I'm sitting in the lobby. They are about eight years old. The little girl is in charge. She says to the little boy: "This I have to show you, just this and one more thing. This is my secret passage." And she shows him, and the little boy says, "cool". And then they have a very involved conversation in the secret passage. He asks her all sorts of questions about it. He seems to be particularly interested in the geography of the area, and the logistics of how to drive a car through it. She is more than adept to show him around, and orientate him. She sings as she shows. Then they have a conversation about the night he spent in Ennis, and she does a little step dancing.

And then off they go so she can show him the one more thing.

Pretty Limerick

Notes from the old town

It's rare that I go back to the streets I grew up on. This time I visited a long stretch near my old house. It's by this bare green space they called a park, where we used to heave ourselves over the wall and find particular places on the other side of the wall where it's steep, to lower ourselves down. They've ripped up all the grass, have covered the whole space over with gravel and sand, apparently they're building tracks and draining the fields. The foot-holes we hacked out of the wall are still there. The wall and the nettley wild space between the back gardens and the wall of the park was, this morning, still intact, still wild. Walking down there, even in my fancy high heeled newyorkcity boots, was a thrill.

Limerick city has changed probably as much as Dubai has changed, over the past fifteen years. New streets where there were no streets before, old streets rebuilt, new bridges, roundabouts (a hot fave here), new building constantly everywhere, a new street pedestrianised every year, old elegant theatres, cinemas and hotels TORN DOWN, to be replaced with names like Hilton and Marriott. I am not taking the piss, Limerick city has a Hilton hotel. I'm sitting in it now. It's quite nice, actually. Free wifi.

But the notion of a listed building seems to be limited to safe old stately Georgian houses in private hands, in Limerick.

Houses have been recently torn down to make way for an expansion in a rugby stadium.. hmmm, it's beginning to sound like Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the radio pumps out stories of multi-shootouts on housing estates and stabbings in hotel rooms and paedophilia rings in well-to-do neighbourhoods and drugs and stranglings.

And on the women and the men go. Shopping. Shopping. Shopping.

Jiving on the connections between us

There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.

I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.

I was feeling kind of antsy.

Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.

The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.

And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.

Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.

When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..

The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.

I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.

And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.

Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.

I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.

The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.