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.

Visit from a friend, long time not seen

I'm having a new lease of life with an old friend I haven't seen in some time. It's happening in my dreams. I just dreamt of a man I used to be friends with for a few years, from when I was sixteen. He was quite a bit older than me and was one of my closest friends, until, just before I came to live in New York for the first time, our friendship somewhat suddenly, stopped. Just a few hours ago he was in my dream again, it was the second time in a couple of weeks.

Literally the only times I have seen this man in five years are in a couple of movies I knew he had acted in, which I saw recently for the first time, and then two weeks ago, when he showed up in my dream. In that dream we met in some kind of office, like the front office of a bank, and we went down to the bottom of it and he was so thrilled to see me, and we just greeted each other, hugging and delighted. I was slightly wary, I anticipated some kind of cold shoulder or accusation, but he seemed genuinely warm and friendly. It was cool to get that dream.

Last night was somewhat more elaborate. He was living in some very strange place, kind of a Sam Beckett kind of landscape, mixture of Happy Days and Godot. He was really very happy, as in the first dream. He was living on a hillock above this little set of cubicles, the principle of them being one that housed a woman, who was a local prostitute, kind of in the manner of Dogville, without actually being chained to anything. He introduced her to me, and clearly she had rocked his world and opened it up, made it lighter. But I was concerned about her. She was living in this little two doored cubicle, and people would come and have sex with her in it, as she described it.

So I was just hanging out with her and him and whoever else was around. There was a party, more prostitutes, of the kindly world war one "cheery oh, dearie" type.

It was good to see John in such good spirits. I miss him sometimes, and talk about him often.

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.

Tear down your auld life, here comes your new

I met Ian through Ann.

Ann was a native New Yorker I met one evening in a house in Carrickmines, south dublin, a week away from its demolishing by order of Dublin County Council. It was a house that had been constructed from the rubble of Blackrock castle. Dublin County Council was a week away from sending in their demolition trucks to tear the house down to make way for a motorway that was going to solve Dublin's traffic problems. Dublin's traffic problems have only thrived since then, of course.

Over the course of the building of that motorway, a number of public forests were threatened with destruction, and ultimately destroyed, and people went to live in those forests, up the trees, as a protest against their destruction, and really the only way they could be sure of saving the trees. they lived their for years. A community was built in those trees. They were not forcibly removed by the authorities, but negotiated with. As cars passed them from the road below, they tooted their solidarity, a somewhat ironic gesture maybe, but fuck it you know, life isn't perfect and consistent. This Carrickmines house was old school, old style, old money. They weren't about to squat. The house was large and solid, in the Georgian style, 250 years old. Orchards and wildish woods all around. Classic, magnificent Georgian country house.

It was mid September, 2001. I was at the house at the invitation of a minor Dublin rockstar producer who I had met at a gallery opening in the Guinness Storehouse the night before. He was making some folk song recording for a charity record, and I had just come back from a big trip through America, full of stories. I told him I was a singer and he asked me to come and record some stuff the next day. So I did. He had his studio in the attic of this Georgian house in Carrickmines, so he, his girlfriend, and me went out there on the bus that sunday morning, and I spent the day there, making take after take of an English folk song, and riffing around it, and playing with it, until he had about ten tracks of my voice singing the same melody in slight and somewhat variations.

The people who owned the house had moved out weeks prior to the demolition deadline, to avoid the chaos. The house had been in their family since it had been built, and they were not happy about moving. The woods were older than the house, and left wildish, you could feel their ancience. The house itself was just magnificently built on four floors in a circular Georgian style, with a library, high ceilings, wooden floors, and an old range that heated the whole house through. Gorgeous. The house itself was 250 years old, but it had been made with bricks that were triple that in age. The atmosphere in the house, even at that empty, doomed stage of its existence, was potent.

So the only person that was left living in the house was the youngest son, who was the rockstar's engineer, and somewhat peculiarly, a kind of errand-boy in his own house, to this man who acted as though he was the Lord of the manor. Strange old coot, that rockstar. Tried to molest me down in the woods by the light of the silvery moon, but I ran and ran and ran away from his weirdy advances. We made some very beautiful recordings, though, as I recall, which he replayed to me all at once, all the tracks laid on top of each other, my voice in ten parts. Babel, he murmered. And then we went downstairs. Turns out it was the engineer's birthday, and this would probably be the last party that this house would ever see, and the party was the rockstar, the rockstar's girlfriend, the engineer and me. And there was Ann.

Ann was from Staten Island. She was so New York it was incredibly exotic to find her in Dublin. She came from New York Irish working class stock: her uncles had all made a killing (financially) in the unions. When we met, that evening in Carrickmines, the fires were still raging in downtown Manhattan, and her father, a lawyer, had an office that was visible in the photographs of the site after the towers fell. She had studied in some Ivy League business school, worked for a hugely high profile charity in Manhattan, and a bank, and then decided the whole thing was a load of bollocks and she needed to just pack it all in and go and study English in Trinity College, Dublin. After that, she got a job working as a project manager for a multimedia company, where Ian was the set designer.

She was the engineer's date for his birthday and sort of surprised by that, she told me later. She had assumed that it was going to be a bigger party. It was an odd little gathering in the midst of this lovely old doomed house. I had fallen in love with New York just a couple of weeks earlier, at the end of a long trip through the jazz cities of America, and I knew I needed to go back.

This was the trip that began in Nashville, Tennessee, continued on to Memphis, before plunging south in the depths of summer to the depths of the swamp magnetism of New Orleans, where I stuck around sticking around for a while longer than I had planned. I was there over a month, and had sort of pleasurably surrendered any notion of going anywhere else (ie. north) when I watched a Jimi Hendrix documentary one evening, in the house on Prytania street where I was living.

In one scene, there were two high fro'd dudes in kaftans, sitting in some park, who had been friends of Jimi before he died, and they were riffing about alpha waves and how Jimi was still around, man. And as their fros leaned gently forward in the breeze, my friend Kerry turned to me and said, "Oh! That's Washington Square Park, Lucy! That place you're always talking about.." and I looked at Kerry, and I looked at the brothers, and I took a deep breath, and said, shite lads, that's it. I've got to go to New York city. I can't get out of this country without having gone to New York city. Blast. I'm heading north. How the hell am I going to do that?" And my friend Nicholle said, "I'm going to St. Louis on Tuesday. Wanna come with me?"

Nicholle had been living in Florida and one day she and her little gay boyfriend Chad woke up and decided that it was time for them to fulfil their dreams and take their stationwagon to California, where Nicholle would be an actress and the sun would bleach their lives golden. The car busted out in Baton Rouge, and they got towed into New Orleans, where they both spent a year bartending and saving their tips. They were part of the scene in the house on Prytania street when I met them. Nicholle had family in St. Louis and there was a wedding, so she was going north for that. And that was how I left New Orleans.

When I got back to Dublin after St. Louis and Chicago and New York and Memphis again and Nashville again, I was looking around for interesting people to spend some time with, and really very open to spending time with just about whoever I met, and so it was probably inevitable that I would run into Ian sooner or later. I'm glad I did. In some ways, Ian was instrumental in a hugely key moment in my life, on the phone while I was in New York, a couple of years after I first met him. He could be a right selfish pain in the arse but I'd still relish the prospect of a chat around the fire with him.

Ian looked a lot older than his age and acted a lot younger, which could get him into bizarre situations. He was combustible and flexible, which made him a lot of fun to hang out with but kind of shite to live with, as I discovered later on an extended weekend that turned into two months living on Church Avenue. He had these epic parties, around the time he turned forty. Burning stuff off. He lived in a Georgian townhouse on Church Avenue in Rathmines, in Dublin, and he attracted exotica of every Dublin variety there. His company was somehow electric. A couple of years after I met him for the first time, I lived in the house on Church avenue for a couple of months, with Emma, an amazing woman who lived in the house for a while, while Ian was off fucking around in Connemara with his spooky gothic French girlfriend who had worked with Madonna and had just turned down a million euros to work with Levi's, in favour of arsing around the Irish countryside with Ian.

At one of Ian's parties, I met a brother of a boy I had felt oppressed and dismissed by in college, and this dude looked so much like him and acted so much like him I said to him, "man, you look exactly like a bloke I used to know in college". He said, "what was his name?" I said, "Tom F-". He said, "That's my brother". And we were both a bit wowed out by the connection, and spent about an hour chatting in each other's company and it was kind of soothing actually, in a strange kind of way.

The brother had felt oppressed and dismissed by Tom F aswell. In fairness, it turns out that the brother is definitely the wild one of the family, being, as he was, a fancy people's drug dealer and general misfit, while his brother had developed some kind of a successful acting career in Britain. But he said that he had never in his life been told that he had anything in common with his brother before, so to have this connection drawn so randomly, in a party on Church Avenue, well, that was kind of amazing. It was nice for us to chat about how we felt about this guy, and actually what came out was not all about what a lousy bastard his brother was, by a long shot. I know it sounds new agey, but it felt kind of healing, actually, to share what we felt.

Anyway, that was my first party at Ian's. I also learned something pretty crucial about Sicilians at that party, which was to give as good as you get (in THEIR way of giving it) IF you want them to respect you.

Ann hated that party, the first one she brought me to. She was really looking to make much more intimate connections with people than were really accommodated in a setting like that. And she was looking for a soulmate, and she was finding Ireland to be unhinged in that regard. What she was finding was men who were willing to get drunk and fall into bed with her but scared shitless about anything more real than that. Disturbing and depressing, but true. And she was probably just experiencing what was going around, and what has probably only gotten worse. But one evening after we had had a guinness in Mulligans, she popped into Hogans and I scootered home, and the second she walked in the door, she found herself locked into the gaze of a man at the bar, and together they fell into some kind of instantaneous rapture. The last I heard, they were still in it, but I haven't heard from Ann in a while.

The last time I saw the rockstar was at another free booze shindig, and he was rat-arsed drunk and unpleasant, but that was a long time ago now. Nicholle got to California, a couple of years after she first set out on that exodus from Florida, and the last I heard, she was working in a car dealership, making good money. Chad, the sweetheart, was working the long morning shift in a disco gaybar in the Quarter, and had recently become the first person in his family ever to have health insurance. When I was last talking with Nicholle, she hadn't heard from him in a while, either.

And the last time I saw Ian was three years ago in the house on Church Avenue, right after a kind of epic showdown there at the end of a couple of months I had been living in the house. More to tell about that, for sure. He had just kitted out a minivan as a living space, with the idea to fart around France for an indefinite period, with his chick. Ian re-introduced me to the simple concept of white toast with butter and honey. The revolution was really the re-introduction of butter into my life, and that revolution is still rocking my world, right now as I make toast to go with my soup. He was on a kind of spiritual adventure at that period of his life, and at some bend in the road, we met, had a boogie, lit a fire, and parted ways.

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.

Betrayal and the moment in the door

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently, on the tricky personal topic of betrayal, specifically betraying oneself. We had been caught up in a strange moment together, and by some stroke of grace, happened to be both willing to talk about it, even though it was the kind of thing people so easily dismiss and often don't readily address with each other, especially two people who don't know each other tremendously well. But we were willing, and we did talk about it, and I think we learned a lot about each other from that chat.

But the topic was not easy, and was revealing. The event happened a week ago. This friend, we'll call him Eric, happens to live a block and a half away from me. One evening last week I was going for an evening stroll and I found myself ringing on his and his boyfriend's doorbell to see if he'd like to come too. And his boyfriend - let's call him Klaus - Klaus' eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of me standing outside in the hallway. I was feeling very strange vibes and feeling like an intruder, and a foolish one at that. I hit the sidewalk fast.

So we met and had a drink about a week later and talked about it. Turns out that Klaus is the type that does not like having people just drop by, considers calling unannounced to be a horrible thing.

Eric, on the other hand, is in love with the San Francisco model of living, and "wouldn't discourage it" (he can also be quite circumspect). And so, by not inviting me in that day, he felt that he was betraying himself in some way. And it led to a fiesty conversation with his newly-moved-in-with lover.

This has happened before, with a new male friend and his boyfriend. The first time it happened was with a friend of mine in Dublin, an artist, lets call him Egon. We hung out a bit together a few years ago, I wrote an essay for a catalogue of his. The specific boyfriend-tension event happened when his boyfriend attacked me verbally like a starving rottweiler at the opening of a show of Egon's, and I was literally energetically propelled out of the building.

Egon and I also had a moment in the door, at the opening of that show. We stood there, Egon at the door, and me out on the street, shaken and clutching my scooter. Egon felt desperately badly about it, apologising on behalf of his 'psychotic boyfriend' but I was just so shocked and I didn't have the courage to stand up and tell him how I felt about it, and be willing to hear how he truly felt about the whole thing. I hopped on my scooter and propelled myself away from that doorway, up Eustace street, as fast as I could get out of there. We didn't really talk about it again. There wasn't really any way into the subject. We have drifted out of touch, though I think Egon rocks and I am very fond of him, and his work.

So this chat with Eric was a little bit different.

That moment in the door is an interesting one. What is done, where each person stands and steps, how events play out, what feelings arise, and what place those feelings are given, subsequently.

And then, once it's done, what happens next: do you ignore it, silently denying that it happened, and forge alternative allegiances to compensate, or do you face the elephant in the room, like Eric did, and start talking about it?

I think what happens in these door moments can change the course of a person's life. These are the essential, easily compromised aspects of our lives, and the whole deal is done and dusted in a heartbeat, before we've even really noticed anything has happened, at all.