more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.Look at these pictures. Found here, original post here.
Janis Joplin and Gloria Swanson meet on Dick Cavett. Hilarity ensues inside a minute.
Do you sometimes write poems? Do you harbour a secret desire to one day hear them set to music, sung by a silky smooth crooner, or just someone who can sing? Well, for the small price of $99, you can have somebody spend 48 minutes 15 seconds with your song on Protools and have a real genuine actual CD made of your song-poem.
It's an industry, and though one of the operators in this documentary is quite young and is making a living from it, it's got to be a dying business these days. This is a 54 minute documentary I discovered on clicker. If you're interested in the lives of people who oneday wandered down a cul-de-sac of some faraway part of life, met some other people there, commerce was traded and nobody ever returned, then you will probably find something terribly compelling about this documentary.
Watch out for the writer of the song, "The Thing". His face upon listening to the work of the studio guy is priceless. These guys have skills, no question. You can see the onetime Grammy winning, Elvis backup singer sighing in sheer desperation, but it is entirely inaudible on the recording. That's gifted.
Also viewable larger, here.
UPDATE: I've just been looking through old archives, and look what I found. Think this might be a candidate for the song-poem industry makeover?
I was born and reared in Limerick city. We have some good writers here, amongst them: Kate O'Brien, Michael Hartnett, and of course the one who travelled the furthest, Frank McCourt.
Frank McCourt had mixed experiences when he returned to Limerick after the book was published and had become such a runaway hit all over the world: a small but vocal number of people didn't like what he had been writing about and made it difficult for him to live in Limerick, but by far the majority of people in Limerick did what people do everywhere in small cities that suddenly find a hugely successful home grown writer in their midst: welcome and celebrate him. I have heard that whenever he came back to Limerick he could sometimes be found joining in the 'Angela's Ashes walking tour' here. Just wandered by, like another tourist. Signed books and chatted away, unassumingly.
I have heard that Frank McCourt is very unwell. I am sorry to hear that, and wish him well, really. There's something of the sheer eejitry about the way that some people in Limerick responded to that book, a very peculiar Limerick combination of snobbery and shame, and you know, it's not particularly my cup of tea either but it really touched a lot of people who read it, including people from Limerick who remembered that time in its history, who lived alongside him. That book succeeded mostly from word of mouth. And that's a real kind of success.
God bless you, sir.
This guy made a tumblr and postered downtown Manhattan with these posters and postcards, apparently in the hope that he would find some chick he walked a couple of blocks home one evening. This is the kind of madness that New York sets off every minute of every day.
Actually, the site and postering campaign seems to be to publicise this internet tv series. It's pretty grim. For the real deal, go to the Craigslist missed connections page.
So we were supposed to be the smart, cool ones, right? New theories circulating in fossil circles suggest that we hunted, killed, ate, and made jewelry out of the Neanderthals.
Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.For added colour to the evolution topic, see also here and here.
"We do need more evidence, but this could indicate modern humans and Neanderthals were living in the same area of Europe at the same time, that they were interacting, and that some of these interactions may have been hostile."This does not prove we systematically eradicated the Neanderthals or that we regularly ate their flesh. But it does add to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction."
We have had a Scientific Discussion over on Clusterflock, to debate the issue of why it might be, that humans evolved to a state of furlessness.
On a perhaps related topic of humans gathering at some ungodly hour before noon to go on some shared quest, though they don't perhaps understand why the hell they're doing it, I recall a fire alarm going off in an apartment I found myself staying in, in Memphis Tennessee, one August. Within 24 hours I was staying unexpectedly in an apartment there, hanging out with a bunch of local artists, and was getting woken up by a mandatory fire alarm pretendy drill thing early in the morning.
I had to climb down 10 flights of stairs to the street, with absolutely no idea of whether the whole fucking place was on fire or what the hell was happening. It was a time of ridiculous things happening. Everything was intensely calm. I would have been chill if Chicken Licken had come running up to me that very minute. Out on the street, the alarm stopped, I sniffed the air, got the notion that nothing was on fire after all, figured they'd probably wake me again if it was, went back upstairs and slept for another hour.
You know it's true I do more stuff than I said a few days ago in a post about how I don't do much other than stare into space while "working on a song" and tend to the menagerie around here, lately. I mean, mostly I do those things. Those things take up most of my day. But also, I fuck around on the internet for 15 hours a day like everybody else, and that includes looking at some interesting stuff. So at the very least, I could hit you up with some of that stuff. But you know, I suppose I think if I post something here I want to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it, rather than, uh, not being wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. And yet...
Yesterday I discovered Jeffrey Lewis and Janelle Monae and returned again to Jamie Livingstone's daily polaroids. I can't describe what it is that I love about these pictures, so many of which are unremarkable, or badly exposed, polaroids, but the textures of them renew my love for film far more rawly than some gorgeous clean beautiful pictures I've also been looking at elsewhere. There is something so roughly gorgeous about Jamie Livingstone's lifelong daily shot project that takes my breath away.
Jeffrey Lewis? Sidewalk cafe guy, plays that folky sixties style guitar with a kind of maniacally dense lyrical style, ripped off melodies (Suzanne Vega's Luka for one, and a Blind Faith song, "You can all join in" -- though in fairness the BF song goes "Make up your own words up if you want to, any old words that you think will do" -- and somewhere else a paraphrased Leonard Cohen quote that is magnificent in its original), but he does it interestingly and he clearly loves music and it's playful and depending on your mood, listenable stuff. He's on tour right now, seems to spend a lot of time on tour generally. But basically, he's very new york, which is kind of comforting. You know? When what is considered new york these days is so fucking bland, it's nice to hear this and recognise it, to know that this is Typical L train Rider and hear his thoughts. Also makes comics.
The other gal? Kinda fun. Listen for yourself.
So here's a thing that bothers me intermittently, lately. This is the first time in popular music history when vast swathes of the people who are arriving on the scene and making music are largely rehashing-without-reinventing earlier periods of music, whipped entire from 1982 electronica or 1964 Motown, and literally just mimicked to the last detail with cut and pasted new lyrics onto them. This has never happened before in this way, and the entire music firmament from labels to magazines is lapping this shit up wholesale, and encouraging it, calling it genius. This bothers me.
It also bothers me to see people walking around in eighties drag. It's weird shit, man. Why would you want to do that? It's not everybody who is doing this of course, and there is interesting music being made nonetheless, and it isn't as if music has not historically been endlessly appropriated and appropriated again. But the history of pop and rock music has up until very recently, gotten forged by those who reinvent what came before, rather than literally literally mimic the exactly approximated and carefully studied mannerisms and tropes of what came before. This creeps me out. It's like music stalking. It's like identity theft. And it's being done by 20 year olds with talent. And it is what is, if anything, getting hoisted and Grammied™ and lauded and sold sold sold sold sold. And, of course, even more depressingly, bought bought bought bought bought.
I was also looking at some highly improbable, fun stuff yesterday.
Bright, pretty New Orleans-based Swedish one woman band.
We really have a lot of hissy fitters living in the house this week and it is beginning to get on my one remaining nerve.
Oh, and this is a wordcloud of my um, followers, over at twitter. It's clear and kinda nice.
Just met the mouse again. We meet every night, around this time. Slight mutual alarm. Though he is deeply cute, I will prob bring the cat.
The cats have disappeared into Mouseland. They are looking around with wonder, inhaling deeply, ecstatically alive and grateful. #mousenews
My plan: the cats will flush the mouse out, and then I jump in at the last minute of batbatbatting to cut a deal with him. #goodcop #mousenews
Plan was to play goodcop with the kitchen mice I have written about previously, once the cats had flushed them out. But now I'm watching Capote. Think I'll just interview the cats afterwards instead. #cruelbutsuccessful
I mean, I will spend time with the cats. I will gain the cats' confidence. I will bring the cat kittenfood when they have, um, starved themselves (albeit HIGHLY unlikely). I will share stories with the cats from my own difficult kittenhood even if it didn't happen. We will share. I will take their litter tray away and scrutinise it. I will write a great book. A great book. All the cats in apartment land will secretly read it, savouring every word, every batbatbat, every crunch. Vicarious.
Liveblogging #mousenews daily at twitter.com/herecomeslucy
God, look at this photograph. It was published in the Guardian last week, another of their series competitions under the theme of 'absorbed'. This is such a complex beauty. It's almost like a Raymond Carver short story. The tomato juice, the mirror frame and the ketchup bottle hold the image of the man with a kind of reassurance that he clearly has no access to. The ashtray keeps the letter pinned to the table, as if it will jump up and eat him otherwise. I get the impression he is probably reading the same sentence over and over and over, trying trying to understand it. This photograph, needless to say, didn't win the competition.
The fact is, of course, that this picture is exactly how I feel today.
So they've discovered a 'bright side' gene, which, if plentiful, ie. 2 are present, can lead to a life of greater wellbeing. The presence or absence of this gene is being attributed as a key factor in "resilience to general life stress", deciding whether a person is "neurotic and anxious" or able to take things as they come and not worry too much about the future.
Genetic tests on the participants showed that a tendency to ignore negative images and dwell on the positive ones was strongly linked to a variation in a gene that controls serotonin, the brain's main feelgood chemical.
Each of us inherits two versions of the gene, either two short ones, two long ones, or one of each. People who had two longs versions were most likely to focus on the positives, according to the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Clusterbook #1 from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.
This is a project I have going on over at my other home, Clusterflock, where I have made a bookclub, and the first book we are discussing is one written by another of our tribe, Daryl Scroggins. A bunch of us have read it, talked about it, and are now opening the floor to anyone who has read it and wants to talk about it, to come and talk about it some more in the comments area.
We're going to make the post a feature on sunday, so if you have read Daryl Scroggins' book This Is Not The Way We Came In, then you might want to come on over and chat on sunday. We'd be delighted to have you.
This song was roaring through the charts at the brutal height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, by a band originally from Monsterrat and Jamaica, who were then based in West Germany. It would be easy to wonder how this didn't actually end the troubles once and for all in a rainbow coalition of glitter and sequins, but really, the mind boggles at how a 15 year old living on either side of the Peace Line would have processed the information on their tellies, watching this video in Belfast in 1977.
And weird too, because this band came from West Germany, which had its own Wall at the time. I suppose it was easier for them to sing about Belfast than Berlin, but only goes to show that disco and raw politics don't blend incredibly well. I do think they meant well and their outfits - not to mention lipgloss - are fucking incredible.
The song was originally called "Londonderry". I guess they chose "Belfast" because it was less partisan, but you know, Londonderry probably had more of a ring to it, rhyming wise.
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.
A brief story of two people who found love together late in life.
Within a week he made the 245-mile round trip from his home in Perth up to me in the Highlands for our first date. He's such a romantic that he'd arranged for a big bouquet of flowers to arrive before him. When I saw him I felt I'd known him all my life. He had lost an eye and part of his leg in the Korean war, but he's a fine man. Instead, I was worried he wouldn't find me attractive. As soon as I opened the door to him, I said, "If you don't like me, I'd rather you just said so now and turned away", but he didn't. As we talked, we knew we were meant for each other.
Stuart's very different from my first husband - he's half bald, but he reminds me that he once was a young thing with a full head of hair. It's strange looking at pictures of each other when we were younger. We wish we'd met earlier, but at least we've met each other now.
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