Ireland has run out of salt

(From my Facebook page)

Lucy Foley   Ireland has run out of salt.

Michael  i heard about this...don't go outside.

about an hour ago

Kelsey I heard that the Netherlands have resorted to using fragrant bath salts on their roads.

about an hour ago

Lucy Foley All the supermarkets are even out of domestic salt(If you've lived anywhere actually cold, you'll recognise that -4 is not even all that freakily cold, actually) and the whole country is throwing up its hands and running around doing the funky chicken. But slipping and falling over, because there is no salt down.

5 mins ago

Lucy Foley  Kelsey: The Dutch probably do that anyway. Feckin' hippies.

about a minute ago

Been off

cycling in the rain through the countryside of Cork. I had no idea that getting soaked for hours on end, monsoon soaked, tropically soaked, can be having the time of your life. I am very happy to have made this discovery.

A nice hedge

I think this is the lucytakesoff version of intermission muzak. But lush. It is spring!

St. Patrick's expose

Stay tuned around st. patrick's day by the way. I'm hoping Lucy Takes Off can bring you some interesting photos from the Limerick festivities.
UPDATE: we stayed at home and played music, and got loved at by the dogs. Sorry.

What has happened to Katie Shea?

This post is a special request from my budding flea fanbase in Oahu, Hawaii (hi guys! squeak squeak squeak squeeeeeak!! Hurrah!). They wanted something they could read.

For the humans, this is an excerpt from my lovingly tended, daily fed spam folder, which reassures me: "you will become popular among the hottest women" (phew, eh?) and then proceeds somewhat cryptically, "Show off with your power and star". I guess it's time to finally do something with that Betelgeuse I've had tucked away in storage in my parents garage for a while.

This urging was sent to me by Katie Shea.

Katie used to be such a lovely robust, salt of the earth Irish woman. Now, she has become a soothsayer of sex. I admire her versatility in this celtic rodent economy, and wish her all the best with her future career.

Ireland on the way down, freefalling

I feel like doing a Gerry Ryan- style review of the papers today. Maybe I'll start making podcasts to post on here. Anybody like to hear that? she asks the void. Don't all start running to the comments like lemmings over a cliff, now. I know your keyboard fingers get itchy when you click on Lucy Takes Off.

So, I take the Irish Independent, dear. It doesn't take me anywhere interesting, I might add, but it is the only source of Irish news that I can get for free over the internet, being as it is that the Times is a pay per view affair (is this even POSSIBLE in this day and age?) and I haven't found anything else national worth glancing at. Perhaps the Examiner? Haven't tried that. Again, suggestions welcome (the void says yawp yawp yawp).

This is on the front page of the Indo today:

The Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, in a breathtaking admission of complacency, has said that the Government only became aware of the economic "decline" in July, two years after slowdown indicators first became apparent and when the country was actually in the grip of a full-scale crisis.

The only thing surprising about this headline is that Lenihan actually said what was on his mind. Ireland has to be the last country in the free world whose politicians do this. Perhaps even that complacency will go, when the squeeze becomes a tighter fit. When I was living in Denmark, I heard stories about the boom in the Faroe Islands. It didn't just reach Iceland, apparently as soon as things got good, everyone in the Faroes had a swimming pool built in their back garden. Maybe they're growing vegetables in them now...

See, in Ireland, the Celtic Tiger boom was our very first boom ever. We never had a boom before. We never had money before, as a nation. We knew about famine, recession, poverty, survival, the life of the spirit. Every time I visited Ireland after I left in 2003, as the rich got richer and the poor learned to put their hands out a little farther, I was struck by the sheer savage materialism of the place. The women seemed to be putting more and more make-up on (I was living in Denmark for a lot of this time, where the women were uniformly clean scrubbed, blonde and sensible) and the heels got higher and spindlier, the dresses got sequinnier and the tits spilled out over the tiny pieces of fabric containing them. Everybody was slamming booze and the statistics about cocaine made it sound like it had replaced the spliff as the casual chemical of choice.

I always asked the same question: where is it coming from? Various people pointed to the activity, the buzz, the relentless energy of an economy in rude health, a landscape where a restaurant in Dublin city centre could not possibly fail, would in fact, be packed out from the first day it opened and every day thereafter, where everyone was going out all the time, where people got used to service largely given by the reams of Poles and other East Europs flowing into the country to do jobs we had never had before in Ireland, let alone do them ourselves.

It was a very strange place to visit. I hadn't noticed it being like that before I left.

Meanwhile, I was living in an incredibly sensible and stable country, with a social welfare system that astonishes me still in its humanity and consideration of the value of a decent life for all. This did not make me want to leave any less. I just didn't know where to. So I tried Berlin and Barcelona and ended up back here in New York. This feels like home now. It certainly isn't stable.

So now apparently Ireland is on her way back to recession. She knows it well, even if the 40% of people under 24 there, only know of such things from history books. It's not so long ago though. They date the Tiger years from 1996, but I don't recall things being much different then. Really, the mega boom was just for the last very few years, in my opinion. The palpable madness and relief of it. Ireland needed this frenzy of consumption. It was like a counter-famine.

And, you know, she wears it well. When I saw a clip of the Satanic Sluts on the Late Late show that a New York friend of mine who has recently moved to Dublin, had posted on facebook, well, you've got to know things are peaking. Actually it's the fast train down. Because things tend to pick up speed slowly, accelerate quickly toward the top, plateau and dance for a little bit, then full speed down. There is some kind of absolute gravity freewheel that can be reached when the height one is falling from is high enough. It's a state where maximum velocity is reached, and everything is just coasting. It's a bit like that line from La Haine, where the man is falling from the top of a building, and as he falls past each floor, hurtling toward the ground, he says to himself, jusqu'ici, tout est bien. Jusqu'ici, tout est bien. So far, so good.

C'est pas la tombe. C'est la terrisage.

It's not the falling, it's the landing. Or, to quote another song from hard-hit times,

Is that all there is, my friend? Then let's go dancing....

Slice o' life

So I find myself in a village where the local small shop is dying slowly from a trade that has turned away from shopping local (what's that?) to once a week car treks to the 24 hour Dunnes Stores, where they buy Everything. The local small shop used to be run exclusively by a single old dude, but he seems to have mostly retired now, and a female relative runs the shop.

But she's not there all the time because the sheer living reality of operating a slowly dying business is probably squeezing the life out of her, and so she hires this teenager to take care of things on the weekends. This teenager is cool you know, we have a chat of some sort whenever I go in, it's part of the appeal of nipping down to the shop, the whole casual blah blah of it all.

So I bring Stinky Yappy (what a charmer) for a walk down to get some Donegal Catch haddock fillets, and while I'm there, the old man comes into the shop and is kind of spruced up and cheery and he makes a bee line for the teenager. As my attention is drawn to the cola bottles it seems to me that dude is pretty delighted that teenager is around and wants to ask her questions and you know, be around her. Now, dude is like, 85 years old. Teenager is like, oh I suppose 19. She responds by shutting down and shutting up. It's a really common Irish teenaged response to weirdy old men. I did it myself sister, exactly the same way. And you know, he's never going to try to do something physically to her, and he probably won't even say anything explicitly freaky to her, but it's just all about the way he vibes in her presence, and the way she is clearly wondering why the fuck she has to cope with this shit for ten euros an hour.

Brought me back.

Clonlara landscape, summer

The rain and the fever

So here's another perspective on this rainy miserable Irish summer: enjoy it while you can. Because very soon it might just be shorts all year round, and waves and waves of climate refugees fleeing their burning lands. According to Gaia theorist, and legendary climate scientist James Lovelock, Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia will be some of the few places left on the planet that will be habitable, when the fever starts.

How do you think the Irish economy would respond to that one? Do you think we'd let waves of refugees from Spain, Germany, France in, let alone Africans? Do you think it'll all turn into a huge money-fest, with property values REALLY soaring, as Ireland turns out to be actually one of the few habitable places left on the planet? Or will humanity step in and turn the mansions of Ailesbury road, Dalkey and the green fields of the west into refugee camps for fleeing Europeans? On what criteria would we allow them to enter: their professions? Or a demonstrated intuitive sense of understanding of nature, of the earth? How do we measure these things? I think we will all have to learn on the hoof as this episode of human history unfolds.

If you've ever seen James Lovelock being interviewed, you will know that he is a very mild mannered, practical and pleasant Englishman, and the original environmental scientist. His Gaia theory was treated with severe scepticism when he started talking about it back in the sixties (he's a feisty 88 now), and he's been warning about climate change for forty years or more:

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

Mister, please don't put your tarmac over our wild green shit

Woke up this morning in the cold water...

The New York Times gets hip to Donegal surfing.

Hm, you might need to have a log-in to read this article... but it's free to join the New York Times Effect on Man.

Tall man/ short woman on Grafton Street

Get your wet Irish summer pictures here, folks!

It appears that just living in a drenched out summer reality is not enough for some of you... at least the ones in Ireland, who are the ones getting drenched! So, I'm getting some google traffic from people in search of pictures of our wet Irish summer, and most of this traffic is coming from within Ireland itself... well I have plenty, and am happy to oblige this particular special interest group. Pictures are fuzzy because of the meeting of a digital non-SLR interface with rapidly moving rain-sodden humans.

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.

Air punching dreams, or, I Love You Ireland

That Hillary Clinton's got balls, I'll give her that much. You've got to say something for a woman who can appear to spontaneously rock a line like "I'm with Harry Truman on this: if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I'm comfortable in the kitchen."

She is just so disliked, though. Just about anything you'll ever read about her anywhere is grudging, written through gritted typing fingers. I think this democrat race is all about good cop/bad cop. Obama is the black, sticky out eared, earnest naive. Hillary's the hard-bitten, ballsy professionally political one who could have him in a fist fight, no problem.

It's the classic bitchfight between the sweet young thing and the pro, the virgin and the whore. So everyone's getting their end away with the whore, but they're really rooting for the virgin for the four year long haul. Hillary's such an inveterate politician, it's hard to even look at her sometimes. The whole Obama showboat could easily go tits-up but you know, that version would probably be more interesting in the big picture of American evolution.

Sometimes metaphors run into each other like they're long lost lovers meeting unexpectedly in different cars at the bumpers. Let's move swiftly along.

Isn't it amazing when people of advanced age manage to carry around grudges, bitternesses and score settling? Takes a lot of very tight clutching to keep that dynamic going for so long. Anyway, here's a man who has sold a lot of records, made a lot of money, played a lot of tennis, and he's demanding trophies from the eurofuckingvision song contest 40 years ago.

This article reminded me of a Cliff Richard impersonator who approached me when I was singing and playing in the street in Copenhagen. I think he was trying to be some kind of impressario. He must have been in his mid fifties, but clearly Cliff, and reflected Cliff glory, were the dominating forces in his life. Beware of what you opportune for.

I'm always amazed by what people are willing to do to win the eurovision. Brian Kennedy, for instance (I can't even link to it, it's so terrible. 2006, it was). Somebody recently pointed out to me that it's all about money and exposure, naturally enough.

But not in some cases, clearly. Sometimes it's just about air punching in a white suit. Our Rocky Balboa. It's nine minutes, but worth it for the detail and the textures and the old style eurovision scoring board with less than 20 countries on it. Song starts 7 minutes in. It was 1980, right in the middle of a decades long recession in Ireland. This was glamour. Had U2 hit yet? This was perhaps our first taste of national fame and sexiness... Say what you want about the kitch and the glory, but the two Shay Healy/Johnny Logans were good quality eurovision songs, at a time in the life of Ireland when the Eurovision meant something more than turkeys and american idol-style competitions. It was the time of fizzle sticks and flogs and a 51% tax rate. Ah.

Ultimately, of course it turned into this. People have to earn a living, it's true, but it hurts to link to this. I add this link, purely in the interests of balance.

So now this brings me to the subject of the First Inaugural Competition Olympics 2008 (check out the label Competition Olympics to familiarise yourself with Olympian history). Beijing is a little controversial at the moment, but you know you can get your air punching kicks right here on Lucy Takes Off, and Be a Winner, have a garland put around your head by a smiling girl in a bikini, stand on a plinth marked 1, a little higher than the plinths marked 2 and 3 (though glory is also assured for first and second runners up also), and have your national anthem blasted from a ghetto blaster (on tape if you so choose) and your gold medal/cup presented to you by a minor Irish Rockstar of my choosing... This is the prize on offer in the Competition Olympics, my friends. So far there have been three legs of the competition, with three entrants in total. What we need here is exposure.

Maybe I need to take the Competition Olympics to the Eurovision. Where is it this year, anyway?

The first day of summer

so this is what i did today
walked a lot, in the countryside
saved a bumble bee from a compromising and potentially tragic situation for which he was grateful
rubbed a horse's nose
exchanged eye contact with some white cows
saw a ladybird, realised it was summer, said hurrah!, then saw another ladybird
waded in a river with some small waterfalls and cold water and felt good
rubbed my feet on grass and felt good
took most of my clothes off on the walk through the countryside, it was so warm
got ideas for movie projects
had some good coffee, could have drunk coffee through the day just because it tasted so good
had no dinner
hungry now
got out of the way of a very brazen robin redbreast who you really wouldn't have wanted to mess with
went for another walk down by the river into the sunset
Here's a pic of my evening stroll...

Pictures from the road

Cosy fireplace Ireland cliche to warm yourselves around

But it really does look like that over here..

In Dublin

I'm writing this from a room on the third floor of the Harcourt Hotel in Dublin. I used to live around the corner from this place, on Synge street, for most of the time I lived in this town. It's slightly odd to be staying here at a hotel, but only slightly. It's been almost five years now since I left Dublin, and my relationship to it lies somewhere in the mix of tourist and native, the classic ex-pat condition.

I remember an evening I spent in the company of an Irish friend of mine from Raheny, and his Arizona-born wife, in their hotel room in Jury's, up on Christchurch, about six years ago. They had been living in Phoenix for a while, where they both became lawyers, then they moved back to Dublin to try to make a life here, but the ground kept shifting from under their feet, and they found the ways of Dublin and the legal trade here too stiff and unwelcoming to the skills and qualifications of outsiders, so ultimately they found their way back to the desert, to Tucson, where the the climate suited their new skin.

Last night I heard about another friend, from Germany, who tried to move here with his wife and children, after a life-long passionate love affair with Dublin and many years of living here, but again, even in this celtic tiger economy and with sophisticated skills and experience, his wife couldn't get a job, so they've moved back to Germany. It's interesting to look at some of the choices made in this self-selecting culture.

Who and what thrives here, and what is left out in the cold to find its own way elsewhere? There's so much talked about this economy and how everybody's making so much money and how rich everybody is, talk about kings and tribe and millionaires and the great Irish entrepreneurial spirit, but that's the story written by those who succeeded on the terms of this newly made world, not those who had to leave it, or those who are being forced out of their homes because of climbing interest rates on their 100% mortgages.

There are even smaller, more specific stories, the kind of stories that are like the face of one of the new breed of celebutante spokesmodel sunday indo darlings when she's alone at night, and stripped of all that mascara and make up, and fearing to glance at her naked reflection in her bathroom mirror, stories that are naked and rarely seen, rarely heard of, stories that are so easily eclipsed by the noise of the glory and the bling bling.

Yikes, it's a tiger in sequins and fake tan (and she's forgotten her tablets)!

Here's the first line from an article in today's Irish Independent.

Irish women are slowly drinking themselves to death in the comfort of their own homes -- sipping bottles of extra-strong wines as they sit in front of the television.

I was in a large suburban pub last night. The age range was very wide, from 18 to 75, and thoroughly mixed. The bizarre thing was that there were a few groups of young women dressed in tiny sparkly dresses and spindly sparkly sandally stilettoes, tremendous quantities of cleavage on display, bare legs, mucho make up, and there was even one gal who seemed to be inspired by the Pussycat Dolls' dominatrix routine, but with Irish Dancing style dyed black ringlets. She got 'em going on the dancefloor, I can tell you. But I was making my escape when that got started.

There's something really odd to me about dressing up like a drag queen to go to your local pub on a saturday night. But this is part of the Tiger legacy over here. The above mentioned newspaper is always going on about how rich the Irish are, and certainly, there's employment, and drinking money, and houses being built and extensions on houses being built. And there's money, there's no doubt about that. But I think that for most people, it's about dressing up like you're expecting the paparazzi to show up and snap you as you fall out of the pub/your dress/your mind at 3 am. There seems to be a lot of hope in it. Hope with boom, despair with bust, of course. But everybody's trying really hard to be sexy in Ireland, at the moment. They'll do just about anything to be sexy. And in Ireland, at the moment, sexy is defined in streetwalkin' drag queen terms.

I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, where of course everybody looks like a supermodel and nobody wears make up (except the actual drag queens, because SOMEBODY has to have glamour). They're not outrageously rich over there, but the minimum wage is twice what it is in Ireland, and they have a decent health, education and social welfare system for their extra 10% tax. Of course they're all suffocated by their comfortableness, so that's another story.

There was a Mr. and Mrs. style quiz on The Late Late Show on friday night. Three couples answered questions like "What do you think your girfriend would name a baby, if it was a boy: Evan, Sean, or Justin?" in order to win a customised marquee wedding and honeymoon in Capetown, to the value of €35,000. This is what people are paying for their pageboy-scattering-organic-rose-petals weddings these days. And that's just the cheap, common or garden variety version. People save up for years so they can afford to get married. Just to have the day.

As I write, an old woman has been carried out of her jazz brunch in this fancy hotel, to languish on the couch in the lobby. She has forgotten to to take her pills this morning. The French Maitre D' has brought her a glass of water. They're calling her doctor.