I watched A Ma Soeur last night

Have any of you seen it? God I would love to discuss this movie with someone. Maybe we could have a skype-in or something. Thoughts?

When life is like a movie (set)

So there was this film set at JFK when I arrived there last month. It was very strange after spending 7 and a half hours in an airplane and walking through JFK the airport, and then JFK the movie set, with literally nothing but these weird signs (no contact info, barely the name production company indicated on the first sign but not the second one, no right of reply, the 'area' indicated by the first sign is literally the entire front and inside of the main foyer of terminal 4 of JFK international airport) and a couple of arri film lights to indicate the difference.

Taliwood: the future of disaster movie epics

Has anyone considered setting up the various Talibans with some 35 mm cameras and a special effects budget, some sound stages and Macbook Pros? The latest from the Pakistan Taliban (is that like Bjorn Again, or something? A tribute Taliban-d?) is that they intend to launch an attack on Washington that would "amaze everyone in the world". Ah, that's what they're after. They just want to amaze us. All too easily done with light and shadow, and the right budget.

Can somebody tweet Barack Obama with the idea?

Sita sings the blues

I watched this a couple of days ago and it soothed my soul and the world caught fire. It's a full length animated film available in full, for free, here. It has been created from the mind and heart of Nina Paley, and she has woven some profound human archetypes, stories that resonate again and again in our lives, into this fabric of her own story, using the songs of Annette Hanshaw and the classic Hindu story of the Ramayana. It is wonderful, and profound and funny and gorgeous. It made me cry and it made me hot.

Nina moved from San Francisco to India to follow her husband, who had taken a job there. What she found when she went after him was coldness and withdrawal, leading to him dumping her by email while she was in New York for a meeting. Unable to move back to San Francisco, and with her marriage in tatters, she took a flat in Brooklyn and grieved. And five years later, she gave us this.

She has released it openly, on a creative commons license, available for anyone who wants to download it, and it is also streaming freely online. She has written about how important it is to her that stories and music that she found in the public domain be released back to that domain without restriction. And so she is now in a position of having to buy herself 'out of copyright prison', in other words pay the holders of the copyright to the songs used in the movie, $50,000 for their use, even though the songs were written over 80 years ago. If you are moved, this is how you can help her on her way.

This movie tells Sita's story so beautifully and elegantly and with such truth, accuracy and insight. What a gift.

Enniskillen: initial thoughts

I wrote this the day after the show opened, a few days ago...

So the show has opened in Enniskillen, at the old Portora Royal School, a 400 year old shindig that once educated the teenaged Sam Beckett and Oscar Wilde. It has been fun seeing today's teenaged boys - and a smattering of girls - interacting with the new rolling, low humming beast in their foyer. It is running there right now, and up to the 5th October, so if you happen to be in the viscinity, or feel like making a trip up there, Fermanagh is gorgeous, I recommend it, and Portora is a very special place.

And for what is basically a simple set-up of video projector and audio system, it's really been a lot of work, in fact three full days of work. I feel like I'm leaving it in good hands, to wend its way in this border town. There will be gigs in the evening, so adult humans will be exposed to it, too. But you know, I could really just hang out there chatting with the fourteen year olds like Ryan today, who is studying art, and who doesn't have exams this year, they just put him in a room, "say a word and we have to draw a picture. It's alright, like", and who hung around to watch the show, and dug the story. Or the two older boys who were vibrating with excitement at the whole thing, and who really dug the soundtrack with its purely analogue instrumentation and electronic feel. Or the very small kid who stormed into the middle of the foyer, hands on hips, and shouted, "What is THIS?" with some consternation. Or the boy who shouted to me, "did someone paint in the water?"

Or the teacher who asked, "can't it stay forever? I love it! I love that it can just be around, slowly infiltrating the boys' senses".

This is pretty far out stuff for kids of that age, so it's thrilling to see the few that seem to be inspired by it.

Generally, I found things friendly out there. Teachers have been keen to get involved and help out with turning the project on every day, and I have been made tea the last couple of days. I'd be into doing this kind of thing again, with perhaps even more interactivity between myself and the kids. This particular school is of course interesting to me, because when I was the age of these kids, I was reading about Oscar Wilde going to that school, about Sam Beckett who went there too, and kind of rocking out to the whole notion of wild creativity. I had no idea of what this arcane 400 year old institution, at that time for boarding boys, the children of the ruling and well to do classes really meant, or signified, or was ACTUALLY, or any of that shit.

And then I went to Trinity, where both of them went after that (am I right about that? I know Beckett went there, maybe Wilde went to Oxford?) and you know, when I made my application for rooms in college as I was entering my fourth year, I scrawled all over the pink application sheet all about the specific room, on the specific floor, in the specific location, as if they didn't already know that that had been Beckett's room when he was there. As it happened, it would have been very handy, because it was right by the college theatre, which I was very into at the time. But I didn't get rooms, that one or any other. But today, my work and Ross' soundtrack is being projected where those boys spent their teens a hundred years ago, and I see them running through the flickering light of the projector rays reaching across the foyer.

I have fallen in love with my work again. I have fallen in love with the business of bringing it from that endlessly in-love first process of pressing pen to paper watching the ink flowing until it is done, of taking the photograph, of receiving the idea - those sensual moments of happeningness - and now, through a five month process of moving shyly and excitedly toward each other, as I construct, edit, reconstruct, collaborate (with Ross Bonadonna, Brooklyn composer, producer and my squeeze) and make these things available for other people to see and interact with.

It has been fun.

They will be showing up on Here Comes Lucy very soon.

UPDATE: Lovely Clusterflocker Sheila has written a lovely note about this post here. Thanks, Sheila!

Show news!

I have a number of posts in various states of undress, but today I am up to my goolies in trying to find a dvd burner that is compatible with apple, and that can also be shipped to me by tuesday (or in-person pickupable in Dublin or London over the next couple of weeks. This is proving more tricky than you might think.)

Meanwhile, show news! I will be performing my one minute one woman show, Ode to a Daisy, as part of the Project Brand New's Magic Moments series in the Dublin Fringe Festival on Wednesday, September 17th! The time is 3 pm, the place is the Fringe Festival Offices, on Sackville Place. I would be delighted to see you, and have you see me.

Other show news: I have a couple of still movies showing at the Enniskillen Arts Festival, from the 26th September to the 5th October in the foyer of the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. My movies are Rose and Milla from my "This is Where" series of still live movies. They will be live on my site within the next couple of weeks. I'm really excited to be showing at the Portora school: it is an old private boys school that is celebrating its quatercentenary this year (ie. 400 years old!). Oscar Wilde and Sam Beckett both went there. My work will be projected in the foyer! This is seriously thrilling. There are lots of cool gigs and stuff happening in Portora over the course of the festival, Eliza Carthy and Andy Irvine are both playing there, so lots of people will be milling through. Come on up!

Short Shine

I'm not usually one for declaring favourites, but whenever anyone asks me what my favourite movie is, I began saying The Shining about 3 years ago, when I saw it for the first time. Channel 4 has just made a lovely promo for a bunch of Kubrick movies they're showing. It's like taking the nouns from an elegant poem and making the font nice, and laminating them. I quite like it.

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.