Eamon

There is another reason for turning the volume down on one of your facebook friends. It is because their status updates and comments and links and posts drive you crazy and you don't understand it but they make you feel tired, just to read them.

One such is a man I met in a garden in New York, on my last day in the city in 2003, until I returned almost four years later. He turned out to be my third cousin. Pretty remarkably closely related, his father and my grandmother were first cousins. This kind of detail matters to me, a lot. I have found a long-lost cousin in remarkable circumstances, in every place I have lived in, now.

My cousin in Denmark I had not met since we were both 2, in Limerick. I met him again when I performed at an arts festival in Denmark. As I left the stage, and the venue, he came running after me, shouting, "Lucy come back! It's your cousin, Brian!" He said I hadn't changed much since I was 2. He recognised me. Fucking Nora (Nora was the name of a grandaunt to both of us).

And this one in New York, we met in a garden, as I said, in the east village. He started talking to me, asking about where in Ireland I was from. His surname and my grandmother's were the same, and they came from the same place. That was an epiphany, a kinship made in the city, a sign to return. I have made some overtures toward contact, facebook being one of them. But he doesn't seem able to say hello. It is easier, I suppose, to click 'confirm' on a friend request in your inbox, from the safety of the distance of your familiar computer, than to meet the unknown yet blood related, in another human being.

He is a rocknroll musician and I think he is probably very lonely.

I had a couple of hula hoops in Copenhagen

and two pairs of fuckoff four wheeler rollerskates, one pair of which I sold to a Dutch couple in my short-lived clothes shop, for lots of kroner, the best sale I made in that place, except for the red leather stiletto heeled boots that got sold the first day I put them out. Amazing what women will buy, sometimes. Like me, for instance, who bought them in the first place. I wore them once, on a snowy day in Dublin, on the way to the Project Arts Centre, where I was working on some theatre experiment. I remember the challenge of the stiletto meeting slush, while looking elegant. Jesus.

I had exchanged the skates for a pair of bright orange Björn Borg puffa moon boots, with a chick who had a stall in the huge twice yearly loppemarked, or flea market, in Blågårdsplads, the same street where I had my shop a few months later. We were both happy with the trade. I had been looking for a pair of four wheeler rollerskates for months before that day, and then found two pairs on the same day, within minutes of each other.

I've just been reminded of the hula hoops by a cartoon in the New Yorker, on the same page as an article about Emily Dickinson's 24- year correspondence with a man she barely met in all that time. I'm still reading it, just broke away to write this.

One of the hula hoops was large and yellow: I gave this one to my friend Helle. I got a smaller green one at another loppemarked, one I was actually selling at also, up on Nørrebrogade, at Stefan's Kirke. At some point my friend Anders came along and was sent up to the bell tower of the church to blast his trumpet out onto the street. Unfortunately, the wind was not with him that day and no one could hear, but I'm sure he was paid anyway. They're good at that sort of thing in Denmark. It's really unheard of for people not to get paid for playing music there. A place like Kulkafeen of course, a great place run by two friends of mine, with a lovely little stage above a candlelit bar, is the kind of joint you can book informally for free, and if you get a crowd and charge a couple of bucks on the door that's your only way of making any money there. But kul kaf is just a great place to show some interesting stuff in an intimate setting. I loved that place. For the most part, when you play in Denmark, you're getting paid decently for it, whether it's your own stuff or standards.

Tangent. I can so easily go off on tangents about musicians and artists getting paid or not and how in various countries. Well, it's just so different in New York city... anyway, back to the loppemarked at Stefan's Kirke. The woman I bought the hula hoop from also had a really fucking ace kind of wine coloured jumpsuit, clearly from the actual seventies and thus really not very actually hip at all at the time, certainly. It was really clingy and made me giggle out loud when I tried it on in the church's loo. It was totally fabulous, but she was really pushing the price at 85 crowns (bit over a tenner: yeah the price bar at loppemarkeds is low), so I didn't buy it. But I bought the hula hoop from her. I think she made me pay 15 crowns, a princely sum. It was green and not so wide. Good for someone who hadn't hooped since she was 12 (tho a serious hooper at 12).

Later that year in the bloody cold of winter, I sang in the same church, at a funeral of a young man prematurely dead of boozing, to a small crowd of his family and a couple of friends. About 30 people saw him off the face of life. White coffin. I sang over it. We were told what to play: Tears from Heaven, the Eric Clapton song about his dead 2 year old son. Well, it was this man in the coffin's favourite song when he was alive, apparently. I kept the lyrics on a stand in front of me, kept my eyes closed as much as I could. Bloody hard gig. No applause that day. But we got paid. His sister said we did a nice job.

So I chucked everything I had when I left Copenhagen, more or less. Just brought what I could carry in a couple of suitcases. Chucked, sold and gave away. The hula hoops went, as did most of the stock left over from my shop, except the Christian Louboutin red suede stiletto pumps and the beaver hat from the 20's and a few things like that that I sold to another vintage shop owner who drove a brutally hard bargain. When you move around a lot, you learn to live lightly, in terms of luggage and possessions, and you learn to throw away too, because you have to. It's a good skill to learn, easily forgotten, too, if it's not used much. But that really is the luxury of having your own home: the facility of having unnecessary stuff hanging around, without needing to throw it away because you're moving country every couple of months, or because your space is so cramped you've got to. Still, all this moving around has been very interesting. And continues to be.

So in my first week in New York last summer I found a pair of fuckoff white four wheel roller skates with pastel rainbow laces and hubba-bubba pink wheels, in the window of a thrift store on McDougal street and went in and bought them, along with a pure silk blue layer-dress that I haven't worn yet, inexplicably, in the style that's all over the place like a rash this year (probably why). The nice chick behind the counter gave me the dress for free, and a cool pink shoulder bag too, that I use quite a bit lately.

I met a couple of gals last week, in the Plaça del Diamant in Gracia, one of whom had a pair of battered old leather fourwheelers she had had for 20 years, she said. She was taking her 4 year old son around, showing him the skatin' ropes. She didn't have any stoppers on them: I asked her how she stopped, she showed me. It's a spin, very delicately executed. I want to practise that, get ready for the inevitability of falling, train my body into relaxed falling. I still haven't taken the skates out, dude. They're still in Brooklyn, waiting for me. Unless of course they have been skated away by clutches of liberated cockroaches, experiencing brute natural joy for the first time in their species history because they have abandoned the rules.

And you know, I wish them the best of luck.

It's the summer in Ireland, and it's raining

I'm here a day and enjoying the rain: the luxury of a summer spent in the sun. It's Irish summer rain: not cold, but mild, soft, relentless. Everything green here loves it (also my snot). The trees and grasses and hedges and wild things have grown so much this year. I took a walk by the bank of the canal, and skipped off by some horses coralled in a small strip of field. All ages, mares and foals. I sang to see if they'd be interested. They were. They ran up to listen. One of them, a chestnut brown mare, got into the groove, shook her mane around and edged away a white, smaller mare, who wanted to find out what was going on. Edged her away and came back to listen. Selfish bitch, but beautiful. I sang a few melodic lines and made my way off. Cows are also a good audience, though less discriminate.

There were some small waterfalls, gushing hard. The sounds and smells and pictures were intoxicating. This countryside makes me feel so good. Especially at the start of the walk, some pressing thoughts came to be worked out, insisting on themselves, eventually they just skulked off. Wild flowers got picked. These ones. I know, the horses would have been better, or the waterfalls, but I didn't bring my camera. I've been using digital for the past month or so. Digging it.

My parents are desperate for a holiday, out from under the wet sky. The thing about Irish weather is its changeability. Two fine days in the summer trigger hope, Irish people are amazing hopers, and then the rain comes again. Some people, like me, find this unpredictability exciting; some, like my friend Sile, just love the rain; and others (probably everybody else) long for the sun.

I remember when I used to live in Dublin, I'd look out the window and watch the weather change over and over in the space of an hour, wondering what to wear. Layers, we say in Ireland, confidently. My friend Caroline in Barcelona says that Ireland is the only place she has ever heard such wisdom. That surprised me. Maybe it's one of those cultural assumptions, like blackfaced minstrels or topless sunbathing, that isn't questioned much by members of the home culture. Either way, I've never been one for layers of clothes, except in Denmark or Norway or New York in the searing, bloodyminded cold. In that kind of weather, you just wear everything you can fit on.

There are different kinds of cold though, as there are different kinds of heat. Barcelona can get really very humid, which I found surprising, given its desert-like scrubby landscape, which of course you can barely see, so asphalted and intensely built is the city. You can see it in the parks, mostly, and in some deserted lots along the less touristy beaches: what grows naturally, what grows wild, what is local, are cactii and thick leaved creatures capable of holding water and surviving the hard sun.

Danish winter is humid, cold and goes on for many months. Norwegian winter is bone dry and cold and goes on for most of the year (depending on how far up you find yourself). I found the winter in New York to be cold and dry also, but I hear it gets much much colder than the one I experienced. I loved the availability of sky on the roof of the building where I lived in Brooklyn, I need that in a city. I loved the blueness of the sky, every other day. I went up there, to dance about in the freezing cold, the only time of the year I was interested in sunbathing.

I also had a roof terrace in Barcelona, it was surprisingly cool up there in the evenings and even during the day, much cooler than my room two floors below. I loved the street, the different languages I heard every day passing by my window, the way my friends there used to drop by unannounced, calling up to my window from the street, the scooters waking me up in the morning like they were driving through my room, the plaça life, the availability and visibility of human social life, the beat of the life in that city. I didn't write much there, mostly short clear ideas written on post-its. My thinking was mostly visual. I took a lot of pictures and video. I've been editing, working on something I'll be showing in the North in September. I'm nearly done: and going to post some samples on my site soon.

Irish weather is much milder than any of these places, at either end of the spectrum. But in Scandinavia they have saunas, some of the most beautiful rooms I have ever been in were art deco and modernist saunas in Copenhagen, and in Spain they have the siesta.

What do we have here? Lush, relentless green beauty. And chartered package holidays, to places of cheap heat, for a week or two.

The sun and the mirror ball

It's a sunny day on the av Republica Argentina in Barcelona. The sun is shining in the window on the mirror ball, scattering disco glitters across the crazy floor tiles. Listening to The Atomic Grind show's Park Slope Mamma.. they know how to rock a line like

I'm gonna buy you a spirulina bagel

Yes they do.

I have not yet left the house and it is 8 minutes to four and sunny sunny warm outside, and in the sun room with the glitter ball in it. A number of possible explanations glide by my pretty vacant mind like passing pigeons dropping liquid poo on the washing line outside the window, then passing on. I need no explanations for sitting around, listening to

You're from New York city I'm from Rotherham

I used to listen to that first Arctic Monkeys record at high volume last autumn, walking through Park Slope, kicking the leaves, turning the Arctics off just as I reached the door of a couple of cats on 2nd street, who lounged around a heated-just-for-them heavily carpeted sedate, comfortable and dark apartment, fed and watered them, petted them as they went thunk and hit the deck, cleaned their litter, read another couple of pages of the Edward Gorey book I was falling in love with a little bit more every time I went there.

B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
B es por Basil atacado por osos.

I have a friend in New York who says the best way to learn a new language is in bed. She learned Pharsee and Hungarian that way. I learned Danish a little that way, but honestly, mostly hard fought in random conversations where the ball bearings were pulling the conversation always back into English, until I found the perfect forum for speaking only Danish, with 80 and 90 year olds who hardly, if ever, left their apartments in Nørrebro, many of whom were considered to be demented, but sometimes had plenty to say, that is, those ones who weren't just sitting cross legged in their smoke-oranged armchairs, holding themselves in ever tighter when I came in to clean, to make them lunch, to give them that afternoon's pill dosage, to say hello. Those ones were being kept alive, reluctantly hunched on the edge of life, smoking it away.

Then there were ones like Violet, a sprightly 96 year old who could not see very well and whose Danish was so playful and sophisticated I could hardly understand her, but she always seemed like the sort who was about to give you a wedgy at any moment, loved to chat, very cheery kind of woman. I helped her to bathe once. I always loved that. It was such a lovely, intimate thing to do, something that always made them feel good, and you know, it was also just very pragmatic. There was never any embarrassment with the Danes about being naked and 90 in front of a total stranger. I loved that about those people.

As I google randomly, everything I get is coming through google Spain. I've moved from the Beatles White album to Abbey Road to Beck Mutations to (now) Joni Mitchell Court and Spark. I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers...

F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.
F es por Fanny succionado hasta secarse por una sanguijuela.

Somehow the Spanish doesn't sound as rhythmical.

A pretty girl in your bathroom, checking out her sex appeal...

I feel like going outside. I have had two cafe con leches and the day is good and slinky.

It's four in the morning the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton street all through the evening

I have a friend from Raheny on the north side of Dublin, who I met in my very first week of college when I was 17 and he was a very old 19, and who seems to be the subject of two epic songs in my life... The last time I saw Richard, from Blue, and Famous Blue Raincoat. I can't put my finger on why, mentions of deserts and dive bars and New York and peculiar triangles cloudily alluded to...

Apparently there was an overdose by the Tompkins Square dog run, with a very dark, disturbing, sunny photograph by Bob Arihood, who has been taking photographs of life in the east village for 25 years or more now.

So, if you would like to brush up on your gothic spanish, perhaps you might want to check out this lovely little thing...

Meanwhile, I'm off to follow the Barcelona labyrinth of dreams...

Sudden singing

I'm sitting in a bar in the University of Limerick, and some people have just showed up and started to sing (check out the mini-movie I've just made, scroll to the bottom).

It's kind of great, just wandering around all these buildings of activity, you never know what you might run into. They started to build a marquee in the front square a few days ago, a big production involving cement blocks, prefabricated sturdy walls and very carefully laid carpet (I watched him unroll it very carefully, today). Nobody seems to know what it's about. I've overheard conversations that go a bit like this:
"I wonder what it's for?"
"Probably some ball or something."
They peer in the window.
"It looks nice."
"Yeah."

I've wondered the same thing. My first guess was some kind of graduation ceremony, but they've probably got somewhere fancier for that. So it's a mystery. And we walk closer together now, as we navigate the small path around the large white marquee of mystery.

I haven't been to the Olympic-sized pool yet. Not since my first time there, about 2 years ago, when I wore goggles and got a fright when I actually looked through them. 50 metres can look more intimidating than the ocean, to me. But I love saunas, and steam baths, ever since I fell in love with the Scandinavian model of hot and cold, in Denmark. Of course it's the Finns that invented the sauna (cool fact: there are three million humans in Finland, and one and a half million saunas.. everyone's got a sauna in their house/flat/dorm). But there are some old institutions in Denmark, some old art deco places that I loved deeply, profoundly, as often as I could. The Badanstalt (a gender separated old bath house from the turn of the 19th century, featuring a gorgeous large old wooden sauna in three tiers, and a mint green tiled changing area, with little curtained cubicles, and shredded wood slivers to exfoliate, and always a thermos of tea for whoever is hanging out naked in the lounging area, all for 25 kroner, or a little over 3 euros) was my version of a local pub. People smoke very heavily still, in Denmark, and pubs are very smokey, so I didn't spend much time in bars while I lived there. But I did spend lots of time in the Badanstalt.

The Badanstalt reaches back into the time when private houses and flats (mostly flats in Copenhagen, industrial living goes back a long way there) didn't have any private bathrooms. A block of housing units inhabited by several hundred people might have had a couple of jacks round the back, in an outhouse (an enticing prospect, in the Danish winter) much as things were in many western european countries, except for the fact that as recently as the seventies, these outhouse toilets still existed. I have been in flats there that had a toilet, but no bath or shower. And Danish showers are of course, uber functional anyway, the shower is commonly taken on the bathroom floor itself, which is tiled, and excess water wiped away. New York city bathrooms, even with their expert compression, could learn something from the amazingly minuscule yet innately beautiful, Danish bathrooms.

So what did people do to bathe? Well, they went to their local badanstalt, where they bathed communally, men with men, women with women. Children probably went with women, but I would imagine small boys sneaking upstairs to the men's section at the earliest opportunity, only to be trying to sneak down to the women's just a few years later... oh the fickleness of the human organism. There was a badanstalt in each of the city's main neighbourhoods, or bydeler, as they're called over there. And people went to bathe, to use the sturdy lovely saunas, and to socialise. Well, all of Copenhagen's badanstalter are gone, except for the one on Sjællandsgade, in Nørrebro, traditionally the working class neighbourhood of Copenhagen, recently become trendified and gentrified, of course... and the badanstalt struggles to survive. Every two years or so, some government officials try to close it down. Its faithful clients battle back. I remember hearing about one such threat, there was some kind of an image that came to mind under a cold shower moment (which were always my favourite moments) to consider chaining myself to the door of the Badanstalt, naked, mud covered, Irish. Twas not to be. Not yet, anyway. But this week I have asked all the major institutions of official bureaucracy in Denmark, to recognise that I have truly and actually, left the building. Hurrah!

So yes, perhaps I'll make it to the swimming pool of scary bigness one of these days, while I'm on campus. Small sauna, mixed gender, considerably chattier, bathing suits required (it's just not the same). It had better be before monday, though. For on monday morning, I fly to Barcelona, for a week and a half.

Amoor

Efter julefrokosten

Vi har spist. Vi har snakkede om Vester havet, med dens store bøljer, og limfjorden, som kan være skated across om vinteren, i en lille håndlavede båd med et sejl. Vi snakkede om det Sud Bronx og chip vans på McClaine Boulevard, og Westchester, og hvordan man kan tjen penge i New York City, og vi drak pissemasser af gløgg, og hjemelavede pebernødder.

Nu er jeg fuld.

En lille Dansk jule

Idag skal jeg til en julefrokost, hos et par Dansk venner her i Brooklyn. Vi skal drikke gløgg, og spise æbleskiver, og snakker Dansk.

Hurra!

Why are you here? Why, really?

I had dinner in Marseille one evening this past June, with a Japanese woman and two French men. I had met the Japanese woman and one of the French men on the top of a hill, by the entrance to an old world war two bunker, as I contemplated sleeping there for the night. The view and the air were magnificent, I was fresh from a swim, but a cold breeze was blowing and I didn't have a sleeping bag or even any long sleeves. A couple of nights later I slept up those mountains, and discovered a more pressing and painful reason to stay indoors on Provençale evenings: mosquitoes that settled on my eyelids for a midnight snack, as I dozed amongst the wild thyme bushes, by the open bay, filled with the mediterranean sea.

Anyway, the couple invited me to dinner and so I found myself sitting in a car with them, snaking around the Marseille backstreets, looking for a parking space. They dropped me off on the corner where they had arranged to meet their friend, and I was given a description and instructed to wave. He found me first, he had apparently been instructed too. And we went to have crepes in a little Cuban place. The second French man - the one that found me in the street - had spent a year in Sweden some years previously, and so, over dinner, he and I conversed in languages that were not our first, he in Swedish, which amazingly, he remembered very well, and me in Danish. And for the most part, we understood each other. It was fun, being an Irish woman and a French man, sitting in a Marseille cafe, speaking Danish and Swedish together, and understanding each other.

I feel called upon to explain myself, sometimes. Do you know that feeling? But this is a BIG topic, and it's important to differentiate the various nuances of this kind of demand.

So, for example, I had an unsatisfactory exchange with an MTA official one afternoon, involving delayed Q trains and bus transfers and changed minds and unlimited cards that said no, no no... and we had something of a heated interaction that probably could have been abated had I EXPLAINED my actions clearly enough for her to understand that they were in perfect synch with her rules and to just press the beeper on that big beeping door that lets people through when there's been some sort of fuckup with the turnstiles, or they have big luggage or babies.

So there's that kind of explanation. The functional kind. The kind of explaining you do when you go to a fancy cheese shop and you need to communicate your desire for particularities.. or the kind of explaining you need to do when you go to a dentist with toothache and you want to give her more than a hunch about what ails you.

And then there's the kind of explaining yourself that your schoolmistress demanded of you when you rocked into school wearing contraband mascara and The Wrong Jumper.

And then there's the sort of explaining yourself that is demanded of you by a lover, when you've broken the invisible contract that he has in his head, because we have these invisible contracts floating around inside us, and we don't usually even know about their existence ourselves until they get broken, and suddenly we're upset.

Or the sort of explaining that some people feel some innate need to do, to EXPLAIN their existences altogether, and this can, sometimes, lead to the making of music, of paintings, of tall buildings, of businesses, of children, of novels, of poetry for some, or to the purchase of very large and unattractive cars, for others.

And then there's the sort of explaining that you can see being asked for in someone's eyes when they meet you for the first time in a context that they really don't expect to find you in, perhaps, and their eyes hold that demand for explanation from you, in a quizzical sort of way, without any overgroundness in it, and without any real expectation of being addressed or given. And the whole process is sort of inaccessible really, in these situations, because the following through of them demands some kind of social transgression in itself, some kind of breaking through of innocence that just isn't socially acceptable amongst adults, normally.

This happens sometimes, when I meet people. Often, the question doesn't get asked. Funnily enough, I was inundated by the question in Denmark. It was so much the only thing in the room there, when I met someone for the first time: why are you here?! Hvorfor er du i Danmark? Why are you here? In three and a half years I never had anything satisfactory to offer that one. Here, it seems to be more circumspect, tactful. But sometimes it gets asked, tactfully or not. And I still don't have an answer.

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.

All that's left of this life I had here

So I've blogged very little about this country that I've come to, to clear what's left of my three and a half year life away, scatter it to the winds. That's probably because I've been busy clearing away what's left of my three and a half year life, and tonight it gets scattered to the winds. I've been preoccupied to some degree, with the 20 kg hold-baggage allowance aer lingus allows me to take out of here, and the prospects of selling the contents of the vintage clothes shop I had here.

Well, tonight, most of it is done. All that's left is to bag it up and drop it off at the charity shop on the corner. And I had packed, and wondered about orange curtains and gorgeous throws, and Louboutin shoes and notebooks full of writing, tapes full of talking and music, bags full of photographs, winter clothes, coats, guitar, g4 computer, atlas bike, bodhran, old diaries, old birthday cards, old tax receipts, the jomi massage musculator, the light box, books, eighty year old top hat, hula hoop, ice skates, bauer roller skates...

The Aeg Chair was already thrown out in the trash back last December, along with most of the rest of my furniture.

So what's done is done. I leave in the morning. I've just made a pile of all my everything stuff and it's a big mountain in the middle of the room. A couple of friends are coming over and they might find something in it of value. I'm just feeling like picking out the little vintage fifties samsonite overnight case and the gig bag I bought yesterday, my guitar, a few selected notebooks, jeans, jumpers and my laptop, and rocking into Kastrup airport tomorrow morning with that. The hell with all of it, you know? Walk away. Walk away.

Just walk away.

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.

In a mellow mood

I listen to wnyc every "morning" for a couple of hours. On sundays you get the sunday show with Jonathan Schwartz. He's just played Mel Torme singing a gorgeous love-fansong medley to Fred Astaire. Now it's Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in a tribute to black women jazz singers in "Can't we be friends" in which you can hear the edge racial tensions of America getting a little more familiar, but it's still an awkward match. A bit earlier, he played Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins on "In a mellow mood". Jesus, I love listening to Ben Webster. He just loves that horn like a brother. And that low laughing fat vibrato and intelligent sound he makes...

Ben Webster rounded his life off in Koebenhavn, you know. I used to live right by the graveyard where he's buried. It was like my backyard, like living right on Prospect Park West. I was living in a very beautiful, roomy, high ceilinged two bedroom apartment with a 58 year old Romanian woman, a former actress who had lived in new york for 11 years of her youth, but had by that time (spring of this year) been living in Koebenhavn, mostly in the same building, for 23 years. She was planning another move, this time to Italy, to kick some sass into her sixties. She was having a hard time in Koebenhavn, felt herself to be isolated and alone and without much fun or friendship at all, so slowly she was taking the rope a little more firmly and finding herself pulled toward something hopeful in Umbria.

Koebenhavn was being gentrified like everywhere else it seems that I live, but the real estate market there is not broker-owned and developer-dominated like it is here, and I think this particular block I lived on is still quite undiscovered. See, when people buy property in Koebenhavn, generally they're looking for a place to live, rather than trying to feed their real estate billionaire habit, though that also exists, and therein lay the fate of A-huset. But that's another story for another time. And there's a more compelling version of that story living here, in Prospect Heights.

I can't believe I haven't written about Atlantic Yards yet. But it's really just lit up inside me in the past couple of weeks, so I think it's just lying low, gathering energy before it whips up and out. Lets go back to the story of the Romanian actress in Koebenhavn, and Ben Webster's grave.

The actress rented me one of her rooms. It was gorgeous. I took daily walks and cycles through the graveyard, which had been designed as a place for people to hang out. Assistens Kierkegaard, that's what it's called. Soeren Kierkegaard, the philosopher writer, is buried there, and Hans Christian Andersen, whom the Danes endearingly abbreviate to H.C. Andersen, pronounced a lot like Jose, which added a little kick to my first year in the town.

Assistens is right in the heart of Noerrebro, which is the Brooklyn, if you like, of Koebenhavn, though Island's Brygge is the DUMBO. You've got to be excited by a neighbourhood that demands capitalisation and brings images of Disney elephants and heartbreak stories as you walk through its big gorgeous industrial lines.

And each of these places is a state of mind.

There's something to be said about jazz musicians who understand how to take their time, and do. I love to listen to people who have gone through the whole arc of their journey and have come to a point where it's easy when it's fast, and deeply punctuated when it's slow. You've got to love Ben Webster. I think if you don't love Ben Webster, you know, you're missing out on something really joyful in the human experience. And it's not just Ben Webster, of course. It's the Ben Webster state of mind.

I used to cycle past his grave quite a bit, on my zigzag route through Assistens. I usually found myself stopping, tipping my cap (and you always needed to wear a cap in Koebenhavn), before moving on again. I always wondered about it, why the hell he found himself there and what it was that he found and loved there enough to keep him living happily in Koebenhavn for the rest of his life. I was there for three and a half years and it wasn't a cosy and warm set of experiences, except sometimes. It was a rich time, though, and I can see that now, thank God. But you know, Ben Webster's Koebenhavn state of mind and Lucy Foley's Koebenhavn state of mind are probably two entirely different states of mind, and even as I write that, I dig that these things are dynamically subject to change.

I'd like to have my own radio show on national public radio. LUCY TAKES OFF live on wnyc. Can't you hear it already?

The Irish accent, and all the performance bits that you just can't get in a blog. Not to mention the special guest stars, the on-street conversations. The word from the bar. The view on the street. The explosions under the bridge. Right from the beginning of this blog I've wanted to make video and audio posts. I'd like to add that feature soon.

It's funny being away from Denmark

I've got a feeling I'm going to really love it when I'm next there. Denmark is in my heart, dude. I'm feeling a little integration of the Denmark vibe in my soul.
Hallelujah for that one.

Open letter to a life in Denmark

I wrote a letter on pale blue post-its one evening a few weeks ago in a club on Avenue B. It's gotten moved around and the order messed up, and has been sitting on my desk ever since. Each little couplet is the contents of each post-it, and I typed it exactly as I found it on my desk.

It's addressed to a man who swings deep and breathes low, and often gets up late.

Hello ----
What's shakin', sugar?
God, I wish I could say that in Danish so it swung. I'd love

to be able to write love songs to you in Danish, but here I am, sitting in some supposedly hip east side bar writing to you on post-its that I may or

may not post.

I think of you so fondly, and I also get the blues when I think of you. I wonder what that's about? I wonder how you feel when

whom I feel a profound soulmate kind of vibe, and I felt that with you. If you don't feel the same way, I thank you for

the stub. I'm actually feeling really good, ----. Maybe I write to you because it is rare that I meet a man with

and sticking them one by one on the back of my notebook. It's so dark in here I can't see when my pencil's down to

though I sit here in this somewhat subterranean club in alphabet city, scrawling in the dark on some post its

happening inside me - some guessing game with a built in disappointment of the most crashing nature and

you know, it's a fucking load off to get out of that force field also. Because I feel like there was some game

to live there anymore. Not unless I was in love with someone who was also in love with me, and I suppose I felt that way about you, and

hard in the moment, especially when you really can't do anything about it. So I'm wary of Denmark now, because honestly I don't want

very valuable lesson to truly learn, I think. It's incredibly simple, of course, and obvious when you see it, but it can also be really

having some sort of purpose, and I can go with that. The point is that it happened. Not all of our lives are there to please us. That is a

long like that. No channels in the world much at all. Really difficult. But I remember something you said once about things

telling someone recently that I found it really hard to not have an anchor in life, in Denmark, and to be there for so

whip em from you in a flash, in a trumpet crash, in a heartbeat.

definitely a lot going on here.
It's an interesting place to be a human, alive. It pulls and pushes at you, dumps loads and

Americans are funny. They're interesting and the New York variety is incredibly diverse. There's a lot of money chasing here, but there's

the people who live in these places and pay that kind of rent aren't thinking like that at all. You know? It's a totally different thing going on there.

pay the rent alone, and it came to $70,000 a year. Just to pay the rent. And then of course there was food, etc. But

was advertising flats for $3900. So this chick had spent her time calculating how much money someone had to be earning just in order to

talking about how there was a new building over on St. Marks a block away from her place, between 1+2 ave. and it was called The Saint, and it

Francis, the bleeding Texan with chigger bites.
So he was out with some chick from 1st ave and she was

lived here, in 2003. He was the first person I've recognised on Avenue A since the old days, except for

some kind of invisible.
And tonight I met a photographer, longtime inhabitant of St. Marks, who I met the last time I

dropping coins into his cup. I mean, it wasn't subtle. You know? Wild-eyed, the whole bit. He's

But this man was psychotic of soul and body. And I don't think anyone sees him either, even when they've

on my street corner tonight. He was insane. You could say that many people here are insane, the way they live.

the poughkeepsie train. It must have taken 20 minutes for her to cross it. Nobody even saw her. I passed a boy-man

evening in the central concourse, and watched a hunched old woman make her way across this huge concourse on the way to

sorts of baby heart breaking kinds of ways. You know, stuff you see. I stood at Grand Central station one

Your graciousness in hearing me out. It feels good here, in New York. And it's also crazy. In all

I think that is about as far out as it gets.
I'm hungry, and waiting for this gig to kick off. When you're bored you're bored, whether you paid ten bucks

to get into a place, or not.

Sleep well, ----.

I heard a man talking on the phone in an Irish accent

along 5th avenue.

"Irish!" I called after him, the way I do here, sometimes.
He didn't turn around.

It's irresistible to me, when I hear it. It sounds so beautiful. I have had a number of conversations with people in the street purely on the basis of hearing my home accent. And it's interesting, because there is a relationship between the amount of time a person has been living away from their home country, and the strength of their desire to talk to another Irish person purely because of the resonant music of Irishness.

A thought struck me last night, walking home (from Freddy's: look, any time you see me writing about the thoughts I have on the way home, just know it happened after Freddy's, I think I'll have to make a new label: walking home from Freddy's) and it was very simple: love for one's country grows in exile. That has been my experience, and while exile is a grandiose kind of a word, I like it for what it signifies to me underneath and before the grandiosity.

And it's true in my case. I have found myself having a sense and feeling of Ireland that is entirely new, a love for the place that has actually only really come into existence since I moved away from it. It grows inside you. I think that's probably just the natural way of things. When you're in a place, the tendency is to take it for granted, and crib about the small stuff, and then when you're away from it, the broad strokes come into relief. I think age has a lot to do with it, aswell, though maturity and age do not often, actually, dovetail.

One of the things I love about new york city (and there are many, and I want to write about all of them, ultimately) is the ubiquity of the English language. It's just so easy to understand and be understood by people here. And you get to hear all kinds of interesting stuff, stuff you can understand. I only have this particular appreciation for the fact that I hear English everywhere because I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, and one of the things I missed very much about living there was that I felt so shut off from streetlife in that way, so shut off from the overheard joke, and the generalness of things.

Also, the more you speak English to people for whom it is not their native tongue - no matter how fluent they are - your own language skills start going down the toilet fast. You lose your slang, you lose your jive, you pick up bad habits in your own language that are prevalent in non-native speakers. And when you speak their language, you're only ever able to express yourself mediocrely, at best. However, despite all this, I had some profound and beautiful moments of connection with people through Danish. In particular, the old people I visited and cared for, during my last months there. That was where it all happened, with Danish, for me.

You can hear every language being spoken here in new york city. I have an appreciation for people who come to a strange place without knowing the language. I was stopped for directions on Prospect Park West by a middle aged man with almost no English, who I could just about make out was looking for Montgomery st., and he was rolling a delivery trolley. I didn't know where it was, but I shouted to the people behind, and they didn't know either. Anyway, I bade him good luck on his way. Jesus, though, I thought, and turned around to the people behind again, and said,

"Jesus. Imagine not being able to speak English and coming to new york city, and trying to survive?" That is just unfuckingfathomable. And it happens, thousands of times every day. Anyway, it turns out that the people behind were from Namibia and Germany, had been living in the city for a long time, and they had their own stories to share.

Learning a new language in situ is challenging, under any circumstances, especially if you have no choice but to speak it through the day, to be in that mode of trying to understand, all the time. It's like a switch that is permanently on, in your brain. You're reaching out, in some inexplicable way, constantly, to catch subtle inflections, throwaway vowel sounds, a look in the eye. You get used to spending entire years of your life catching 10, 15, 20% of conversations, of never getting the joke even when you understand it, of constantly being, to a greater or lesser extent, out of things, outside of the culture. Because you are. I think you need a very strong anchor to keep you in a monoculture that is not your own, and one that is so strongly based on its own traditions, like Denmark is.

And I've met people who have that anchor, they found it through love, through marriage and family. I didn't find anyone who was not Danish, who found that anchor through love of the place itself, there. But I'm sure there are people who have settled there, particularly along the west coast, who found that kind of love, that kind of devotion, to the place, the landscape. People find that feeling every day in Ireland. The place is jumping with every nationality in the world. It's like a mini-new york.

I find it here.

Do the shimmer, do the shake shake with all of your might

I was walking through Prospect Heights toward Fort Greene/Bed Stuy this evening around 6, when I saw them. Five groups of white birds, each group maybe 200 birds, dancing in the sky. Weaving into and around each other, playing. They shimmered like the sun against a rippled river surface, continually as they danced, each group moving as one, and moving in and out of each other across the blue sky.

I think I'm in love.

It reminded me of a group of birds I watched one evening in the Amager Faelled wild park in Copenhagen, when I lived there (was it last year? yes, I believe it was last year, though it feels like a hundred years ago) one evening when I was still wearing shorts but the air was crisp and freezing, the way the air gets by September in Denmark.

I heard them first.

They made a huge chatter, getting their chirp on, a couple of hundred birds up the top of a very tall tree. They sat there, sang and chatted and chirped for a few minutes, then suddenly they all took off, as if the tree had run its fingers through its hair, and they moved around a bit like musical chairs, dancing, and then resettled at once in different parts of the tree, resuming their song, chats and chirps with fresh chicas and chicos.

This went on for about a half an hour, and the more they went on, the more birds came. It was like a nightclub by the end of it. About a thousand birds in the tops of three tall trees, and then when they were ready, it was like they just heard the opening bars of Dancing Queen, and instinct propelled them toward the dancefloor. The thousand birds took off at once, as one.

They moved across the great expanse of sky over the faelled, moving like a manatee. All I could do was stand there, and watch. Jump up and down occasionally when the cold got really intense. Because I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave.

As soon as they took off into the sky - a thousand birds gracefully moving as one, a thousand bird iceskaters skating a perfect dance - they were silent. Not a peep, not a chirp. Nothing. Just singular movement. After a while, a very small subgroup developed, of like-minded avant garde birds, clearly, who were in sympathy with the mainframe, but they needed to break away to express their own dance in a more intimate unit. They met the large group every few seconds like a pair of dishwashing bubbles gliding and bouncing off of each other and moving apart again.

This evening, there were five groups of birds, and they moved and weaved and danced too, and shimmered like the sea. I stood on the corner of Dean and Underhill and watched.