Wombat Recording Company

Jesus this place has become a bit of a youtube zone of late. I'm going to spend the next while posting links to work by friends of mine, stuff I find inspiring, fun, interesting, good. Let's start with Wombat Recording Company.

This is the home of Ross Bonadonna, owner and operator of Wombat, which is a recording studio and creative production studio in Brooklyn, New York. I've been making my record there with Ross, who has also produced the entire thing. You will be hearing what we've done there over the past year really soon (mwahaha).

Meanwhile, Ross has recently launched a site for his Wombat Music Workshop, currently a place of crazy and unusual compositions which are gorgeous and tender, after you've gotten over the initial shock of the new. The first release from the Workshop is called "A Perfect Day", an album-in-progress which you can download free on Bandcamp! You can hear me singing on "Ladybug".



Ross is on Twitter, though you wouldn't know it most of the time. He's a studio guy, who burrows underground and does excellent work there. It's up to the people who surface with their shiny, golden records to be the proof of that.

Freddy's is fighting back and they're doing it on Fox News, baby

When I'm in Brooklyn, my local bar is Freddy's. Freddy's is a bar where you can walk in the door and meet friendly faces, have a pint and a chat, listen to a band play, watch Donald's all day long art video installations made of heavily edited film and tv archive footage, sit in peace and read, and talk to at least a dozen people you are likely to know there. Freddy's is the heart and soul of the neighbourhood of Prospect Heights. Freddy's is under threat from some louse called Ratner who wants to shit on everyone's parade and take everyone's home away and put up a large piece of concrete junk instead and the supreme court of the United States has put their judgements behind him. It's disgusting.

I posted a piece on Clusterflock today about it.

The man in the blue suit; the man in the white suit

So the security queue at JFK was a nightmare of inefficiency and chaos, with a guy in a blue suit and blue latex gloves in a desk in the middle of it all, looking around at anyone who sniffed and took everybody's passports and put a little mark on them. I suppose they had to give him something to do. His job was to look out for sniffles. Seriously.

It's not going to be so easy to get rid of swine flu but they have to look like officialty is making its moves to get the situation under control or some other suitable platitude. The lousy news is that swine flu is expected to run riot this winter. The good news is that fatalities are commensurate with any other normal flu, which is to say, very very few.

I cannot believe I am blogging about swine flu. It is so hard to care. It was the guy in the blue suit in the madly inefficient JFK queues what made me do it. Here's a picture of David Byrne's gig at the Prospect Park Bandshell a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I know you can't see David Byrne. He was wearing white. He's in the middle.

Keep left

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.

I am a Brooklyn-bound L train

You know, I was never one for either The Smiths or Radiohead, though I have had my moments with Radiohead, but this song is captivating. Anyone know what it's called?

Bizarrely enough, the very first song I ever busked was Creep, belting it out on the Bedford L platform while my guitar-playing French dude friend did his best to be heard above all the machine noise. Waves and waves of indifference. It kind of rocked, in a very weird way. So it was Creep and there was one other song I can't remember right now, this was 5 years ago in new york, and the other song I only knew one verse of, but it rocked, and I figured that people would be gone by the time the verse was over. Those L trains were sparse though, so pretty fast we moved into town. We'd start playing on the beat of the doors opening. I can't remember what that one-verse song was, now. Dude.

I bought my ticket last night. I fly to New York on the 17th.

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.

Time lags

Sometimes it's hard when you're living five or six hours behind most people you know. Especially when it's nine o'clock at night and you feel like a chat. And then you remember Freddy's. But you don't always remember to go.

The sad bits

Yeah, and then I heard a Tommy Tiernan interview on RTE radio a haon, with the professionally bored Eamon Dunphy, who made sure to skirt the chat away from anything that might have been remotely interesting. Keep it light, keep it daytime. Tommy T was talking a bit about loneliness and regret and the pain of his separation from his children, and it was a bit of a breath of fresh air to hear these topics being addressed, though he didn't get very far in Dunphy's hands.

It reminded me of a conversation we were having last night, about this American tradition of sending out letters at Christmas with messages of the triumph of the family this past year, its successes and achievements and the brilliance of its teeth. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if one of those letters said, well, I experienced sadness profoundly this year, and it was a difficult journey through the darker parts of the human soul, but I seem to have learned something from it, and I certainly hope it has made me kinder and able to hear more of life, to smell more of life, to feel more of life.

But that would probably constitute something of a revolution. And not make you liked, at all.

It's still belting rain out, and I have only conversed with cats all day. And though Freddy's is just half a block away, and will almost certainly be some kind of friendly, I will still probably not go.

The Brooklyn Bunker

Epithalamion for a pair of Brooklyn whippets

One from the afternoon

I was dreaming of a high sitting
blond haired make up man
who asked me how I coped with being so beautiful
when you came
and vibrated
on my coffee table
looking for a place that kills things cheap and happily.
It ain't me, babe. No, no no
it ain't me babe.
It ain't me you're looking for
babe.

Winter in Manhattan; bucolia in Brooklyn

I was in Manhattan yesterday, for the first time in a couple of weeks. God, it's different over there. They give you less time to cross the streets. The streets are wider. And the traffic goes both ways! This is the kind of thing that can cause havoc in the life of a Park Sloper. Arse was kicked, fun was had, long-since met friend was reacquainted, and corn muffin was bought in Wholefoods at 11pm.

It's winter in Manhattan, folks. I've been gambolling around in the pastoral beauty of autumn in Brooklyn (I don't know when I've enjoyed an autumn this much) but one visit to the Lower East Side was enough to confirm that even the seasons move faster in Manhattan. No leaves on the trees, no leaves on the ground. I think it might even be colder there.

Getting mixed up with the boogie

I remember a moment from the short time I lived in New Orleans. It was early August in the French Quarter, a day or so after the hurricane winds brought all the hot torrents of rain to drench us. Those rains sent me into the Marriott Hotel on Canal street to get dry before getting soaked through again. I squelched across the lobby to the ladies, sat under a hand drier for half an hour, then met the rain again, walking almost the full length of Canal street to the St. Charles streetcar which carried me home to Prytania street, more soaking than I have ever been before or since, in clothes or out of them. An evening beer has rarely tasted so good.

By then, I had decided that I was pretty much living in New Orleans. I just couldn't imagine leaving. It was a common and pernicious kind of experience that happened to people when they spent more than a wild weekend in Nola. She sort of seeped into you. It was the magic and the sensuality and the earthy natural energy of the place, mixed with the boogie and the pollution and the swamp magnetism, that made it a very easy place to get stuck in, especially when the humidity was high. It was also incredibly easy to find your way through, once you actually slipped under the skin of Nola.

And right after the heavy rains, it was quiet in the quarter. Summertime was low season, anyway. Even at that, I never really spent much time in the French Quarter, I usually hung out over in the Marigny, or uptown altogether. But this evening I was strolling past Jackson square, along St. Ann street, and there was a man standing on the sidewalk, in under an awning to shelter from the rain, a dark figure on a dark and by then lightly rainy street, and he was singing a tune to the hot mist and the rain and the empty street as I walked through it. And I saw him and listened to his song, and he didn't have a go-cup sitting by his feet, or a cap upturned to catch passing falling change, and he was just standing there, eyes closed, enraptured, singing to the street, the sound of his heart calling out to the air in Nola to meet him there, the sound of the life of Nola meeting him there, the life of Nola inside him, where she dwelled, rightly. And I watched this man, and I felt it, I got it. This was really the only appropriate response to the question of New Orleans. To sing to her, to woo her, to love her in the way she likes, with softness on a hard day, with boogiesounds, with rhythm. And so she comes rushing in.

Cities live inside us, in ways we don't always recognise. Places do that, whether city or wild nature. And cities have character, have spirit, that magnetise us in different ways, bring out different aspects of us, depending on the particular vibe of the particular city. They bring out different activities, too.

I spent January of this year in Barcelona and Berlin. Barcelona was warm and sunny, and I swam in the sea and strolled around in my high heeled boots, wandering through the labyrinths, hanging out in the Plaças, kind of entranced, for the most part, and spending my days with a new friend I made on my first evening there. It's always fantastic when you meet a fun chica friend, and in Barcelona, that would be Tina.

And then I went to Berlin, and there was a hurricane on the second day, and it was dark and cold and I wandered the very wide streets and felt the blood of northern europe circulating in me again, and I found it hard to get talking to people and I felt kind of lonely so I bought a notebook and three crayons and made my fun inside that notebook wherever I wandered, in my Barcelona high heeled boots.

I snaked around Europe this year, ended up in New York city on what seemed like a whim that landed me home. That's what this place feels to me. Home. Home is, of course, a moveable feast, when you live the way I have these past few years. But home also feels like staying. Here.

This bright morning

There's a car on seventh avenue that's covered in yellow confetti from the falling leaves of an overhead ginkgo biloba tree.

A black tomcat lies in a fenced off corner lot off 5th, cross-pawed and seething.

Leaves are getting kicked around by Lucy.

The Beatles are singing
because the world is round
it turns me on....

Lots of coffee is being made in the big jug.

When I lived in Denmark, every now and then, I would meet a woman in a burka while strolling on Nørrebrogade, my local big street in Copenhagen. She was young, dressed in a full length light black burka. The only part of her that was visible was her eyes, which were very heavily made up with black eye liner and mascara and heavy toned eyeshadow. Many layers of mask. She reminded me of pictures of elaborately made up Sicilian widows I've seen in the National Geographic. I always looked her in the eye, though, and she did the same with me. We didn't see each other a whole lot, but when we did, we always greeted each other. It was kind of an unusual arrangement: her burka rendered her both recognisable and unrecognisable. I knew her, principally, by her make up. She was a friendly face on my beat in København. Back to Brooklyn.

A woman is rolling a basset hound in a pram along 7th ave. She does not look insane or out of place.

A tiny little old lady is gathering up leaves on St. Marks ave.

Billy Bragg doesn't want to change the world. He's just looking for another girl.

A pair of skinny whippets are shivering in the cold as they pee on leaves.

A brown tortoiseshell cat is rolling around on a basement carpet in anticipation of her only chance at a bit of human contact today, from the woman who is coming to feed her and change her litter tray.

There's a carpet of leaves of different colours all the way along 3rd ave. and a Dominican woman is blissed out as she walks along it, dressed snugly in her winter coat.

A piano technician is fixing a pair of keys on Dean street, which were whacked out of shape by a fiercely improvising French pianist.

A woman is addressing strangers on 7th ave with the question, "Do you have a minute to stop global warming?"

I wonder what's happening in Red Hook. I wonder what's happening in Dumbo. I wonder what's happening down by the sea.

My favourite things

"Not so much dead as a prisoner", is the report from the kitchen. He's trapped a fully grown cockroach under the can of Trader Joe's fairtrade French roast. I hear a crash.

"He's dead now, right?"
"Yeah, I think so. I'm agin 'em but I can't get as upset as you do about 'em" he says, in his old timey way.

We've got roaches. I'm having the full new york experience this time. I spent a half hour killing them with my bare hands last night. I found where they live.

Up until then, there was just the occasional one or two crawling across the kitchen butcher block, they sent out their babies as scouts ahead of them, to retrieve information and food discreetly, using the cute factor for their reconaissance missions. But last night I found the hive. The boiler room. They lie in the door jamb, keeping warm, and alert for slim pickings from the kitchen table. The sight of them brought out the murder in me. Hands flew and bits of cardboard and roaches got squashed. Then I got the hoover out. Hoovered another twenty of them. Had to put gaffer tape over the nozzle so they wouldn't crawl out. There had been a band rehearsal downstairs and the drummer suggested I hoover up some raid after them, that's roach killer to you and a very good idea to me.

The hoover sits in the middle of the room, containing live roaches.

The Seven Buck Butter Blues

The blank page. And not much to say.

Hm.

Continue like this and I'll soon have a masterpiece of the ilk that Jack Nicholson produced, in The Shining. All work
and no play
makes
Lucy a dull girl.

All play makes
Lucy's
work dull.

Apparently. What a pity. Though I could just hang on in here and see if something comes along sometime soon. You know, I've done that at plenty of buses that never came, so why not a blog post?

It's a rainy dark day in Brooklyn and new york. Blowing hot and cold. Wine is getting poured. Elvis and Nick Drake are getting listened to. Lips are getting kissed.

So I'm here on Dean street, listening to Nick Drake, sipping a glass of red wine on a sofa, next to this bloke I've sort of fallen in love with. And this is where I am. And this is how it is.

Yeah, of course there's more texture than that. Stevie Ray Vaughan is playing now, for instance. And I've just been out to the place on St. Mark's and 5th av for organic butter, and come home with none, because I didn't bring any money out with me. So he's gone, now. To get us seven buck butter. We're cooking dinner of chicken sausages, sweet potatoes and spinach yummy shit.

See ya.

You know it's gonna be alright

I woke up in Denmark this morning. In a little loft in Valby, København.

She was a daytripper
one way ticket, yeah
it took me so long to find out
and I found out

I came to Denmark in December 2003 on a one way ticket, and left with another one, three and a half years later. The first thing I noticed about Denmark was actually in Sweden, where I flew into. There were photographs everywhere of Naomi Campbell in her knickers, looking Christmassy, faking happy-in-her-knickers bliss. She was everywhere in København too, when I got there. I stopped noticing her after a day or so.

My first impression of new york this July, after a three and a half year absence, was the train, as it roared into Howard Beach station. It took my breath away, every bit of it. It got me right in the centre. And in the midst of that gorgeous chaos, I had the strong thought, that within a few days, even this was going to be absolutely familiar to me. I knew it. I was wrong about that. It never got familiar. It got more breathtaking.

I was in love with the subway the way I am in love with Dean street now, when I lived in Manhattan in 2003. I've never slipped out of that love; it's just evolved, the way it evolved from a room of maroon paintings in a London gallery into the new york city subway, from a grand old velvet curtained theatre into a room of maroon paintings... The lover changes form.

If this post is a little avant garde for you, hold your horses. Rocknroll is never far from the surface.

So I'm here again, in København. Just arrived yesterday. It feels good to get into Danish again, and to find myself jivin' in Danish feels GOOD indeed. But this ain't no one way ticket, yeah.

This time I've got a ticket to ride back to Brooklyn.

Oh Dean street, I love the arse off of you

newyork newyork
brooklyn to me
newyork newyork
is brooklyn to me

and brooklyn to me
is a pair of small shacks
with a length of twine between them and a metal can either end.

Reaching right over Flatbush
sometimes the yellowcab drivers have to pass the intersection of Dean and F
with their hands raised aloft
out the window
so they don't drive right through
the delicate connection.

Such a flimsy piece of string
and so well taken care of.
he walks the line.

did something happen? fuck,
i think i fell into a pit of scorching hot love
this afternoon.
And I'm being eaten alive by these tongues of flame.

This thick pit
and nobody owns it.

Two funny things I've just discovered

1. Freddy's was recommended in Cara, the aer lingus (national Irish airline) in-flight magazine, which is just HILARIOUS. You'd have to see both Cara and Freddy's to truly appreciate the beauty of this one.

2. Somebody in Seoul googled or bloggered "armpit lick" and got through to my blog. Bliss.