Nabokov
F Scott Fitzgerald
Dead Flies Art
The NYT looks at the Donmar
On ne parle que d'eux
Alan's show at IMMA
Brioche buns not yet made
A tab I have had up on my browser for about 2 months, task unfulfilled
The U2 concert
The black panthers
UPDATE: A really good, plain speaking article from the murky realities of juvenile rape (thanks, Stan)
... there's this guy. For everybody else, go to New York, email that guy, he'll come and draw you.
He's got a red plastic badge on his lapel. It reads, "Drug Free". He's about 75, black, wearing a faded suit. He walks through the subway car with some bright green sheets of A4 paper, placing one carefully beside each seated passenger, like a schoolteacher dispersing handouts through a classroom. No one moves, responds, or says a word.
As he reaches the other end of the car, he turns and returns down the car, picking the sheets up again. He passes me without collecting the sheet beside me, he notices that I'm reading, and so leaves me be until the very end, and mine is the last sheet to be collected. I'm probably the only one who has shown any interest in even glancing at his tale of woe, his interface with the world. There's a handful of sentences written in black biro, badly photocopied. He had probably sat down at his kitchen table with someone who could write and spell good, to work out what he could possibly say to explain himself in words.
In the short letter, he describes how he was "pushed from a high porch" sometime in his childhood, and some years later began to get epileptic fits and blackouts. "From 1952 - 62 I was strong and healthy", it said. "I am also a James Brown imitator. I consider myself to be a good artist. Please help as much as you can. Yours sincerely, --- ----". Underneath, a black thumb-sized smudge that has the silhouette of a passport photo, and a photocopy of some rubberstamped, slightly official looking text that said "James Brown" in heavy typeset, probably some fan club membership letter that he was sent back in the sixties, maybe during that golden period of his life.
Finally, he comes to me. "Are you finished?", he asks me. "Yes", I answer, "thanks very much". "You're welcome", he replies. And he picks up the lime green sheet, replaces it to the pile in his hand, and falls back into the orange bucket seat, with a sigh.
And the train goes across the bridge, and Manhattan's twinkling nightlights get closer, and soon our D train is sucked in, sucked in... The doors open at Grand street. He heaves himself up out of his seat, out of the train, and across the platform.
A human and an interesting cockroach met, a couple of days ago, in Brooklyn, New York. The human was female and a notorious cockroach-hater; the cockroach was a fella who could actually make himself look squashed, in order to save his own life.
This cockroach could sense human attention on him, much in the same way that humans can sense attention from other humans. However, this particular cockroach had evolved a new way to make human attention go away, and in this way he demonstrated a quality quite unlike humans, who are doing very well at successfully evolving new ways of drawing attention to themselves, even when the attention concerned is likely to bring them to freshly heightened states of squashedness.
But this time, the human called the cockroach's bluff. She examined him closely, saw that he was not actually squashed but faking, and promptly made his faking true. However, in the second or two just before the pretence became real, there was a flicker of human to cockroach to human consciousness, during which the roach realised that the game was up, and the human realised yet again, that roaches are far smarter than they look.
And, as is often the case when a human squashes a roach with her bare fingers, the roach didn't die all at once, but slowly, his hairy left leg waving a little bit at the end, and there was, in fact, in the human female, a moment of genuine affection.
Oh it's raining horribly outside, said the man beside me as I left MoMA yesterday, with the rain belting down on 53rd street. Sometimes that's what you get, he sighed. Yes indeed, I said back. And he looked at me. Like I had just entered his apartment without pressing the doorbell. There was a line around his words with a red rope and a large black man in a suit and a headpiece, carrying a list. I hadn't used the VIP entrance. That was what his eyes said. You just don't do this. You just don't respond to a stranger's casual throwaway cliche in midtown Manhattan.
So I went walking. Through it. In the rain. Down 5th avenue to Union Square. Caught a glimpse of one of the Protected Ones, in the back of his chauffeur-driven Very Expensive Blackened Windowed Car, perusing a newspaper. It felt like it might be like a confessional in that little backseat room, kind of airless and costumed and expectant. But expensive, unlike any confessional I've been in (only Irish ones, only Limerick ones, actually).
A thin, mousy girl approaches me in the middle of the traffic at Flatiron. "Hi, I'm Annie", she says at me, laughing like she's just seen some special friend of hers. She juts her hand out stiffly to me, perpendicular to her body, from the elbow. "We save children". I search her face, her jacket, for some ID. Nothing. "Njeah, thanks", I say, and continue to walk across the street before the bus gets me.
Pity. Annie is sure this way of living her life is a failsafe way to get people to feed her cause, to feed her longings, to feed her. She's saving children for Christ's sake: how could anyone say no to Annie? Let me count the ways...
There's a boy on 21st street, sitting on a beer crate, pausing with a pen as he tries to figure out how to explain himself in the medium of cardboard sign in the street. I stop to take out my notebook, and look back at him. He's still hesitant.
There's an interesting quality to midtown. Indifference. Such a big place with so many shrunken people busily shrinking farther, hurrying to get to where they mightn't have to shrink anymore.
And then the N. Sitting opposite a man with bags, in one of those two abreast orange plastic areas. He takes a gulp, a large nip of whiskey, in view of the other apparently indifferent subway riders. He feels the exposure, anyway. Most of them don't actually even see him. I do, though, and that's enough. For what it's worth, if I'm thinking anything, I'm thinking that that's not a bad idea, keeping a flask of hot whiskey about your person for winter subway trips. But he's gone into that defensive face mode, you know it? With the chin up and the eyes and mouth corners that say "not me! I didn't do ANYTHING!".
The sign on the wall hisses, "if you see something, say something", as the train chugs into Pacific street.
I ran into a pooch called Romance last night. He was very eager to get up close to a certain white whippet of my acquaintance. She sniffed, then turned her back. His owner pulled him away. I don't think he noticed me.
I'm sitting in a brand new Turkish kebab house in Limerick city, staffed by Egyptians, and Irish and Polish waitresses. There's free wifi, hardwood furniture and paintings on the walls. In the past 24 hours, not counting family, I have spoken to more people from Bangladesh, Lithuania and Iraq, than Limerick, or even Ireland. I never quite grasped the extent of the change that has happened over the past few years until now, now that I'm spending most of my time here in public areas: hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, the streets. It's a really interesting time, a really interesting place.
There's a man in his sixties who has just come in, bought his kebab, then sat down and and ordered a cup of tea. The Irish waitress says, "sure, would you like to pay for that now, or later?" And he says, "do you think I'm going to get up and walk out for the price of a cup of tea, after paying for my food?" He's genuinely hurt. "I've never done that in my life before, and I'm not going to start now." Of course, she's just doing her job, and she's concerned she'll forget about the price of the tea, that she'll have other customers to attend to. But he's a man of a certain working class pride, and he has taken her question very personally.
Three nights ago, I was standing at the traffic lights between the Marriott and Dunnes stores, and the row of bus stops that go all the way out to Moyross housing estate. Two elderly women were standing in front of me, waiting for the lights to change. One of them turned around, and with a look on her face like she was a very small thing talking to a very big thing, and laying herself bare before its mercy, asked me for two euro for a cup of tea. This woman was from Limerick, was in her late sixties or early seventies, sober, and sane. I've been concerned about my financial situation lately, to say the least, and I told her no, ma'am, I'm sorry, I don't have it. And we crossed the road. And as soon as I hit the other side, I stopped. Rooted in my wallet, got the two feckin euro, and marched after them. My apologies, madam, I said to her, I believe this belongs to you. And handed her the two euro coin.
I was called a 'dirty cunt' before 2 o'clock this afternoon, by a tiny, frail little blonde girl in a tiny, frail little blonde girl voice, as she rolled her pram across the Athlunkard Bridge (yeah, it all seems to be going on on the Athlunkard Bridge lately). I was on my bike at the time, and we sort of met. Didn't collide or anywhere near it, but enough for her to get her words out. Totally matter of fact, her expression. Kind of blank.
Limerick, today.
What is it that happens to a man or a woman who catches a bare glimpse of another, and without anything else to go on, feels their heart sing? Is it some kind of look in the eye that resonates somewhere? Is it purely energetic? Physical? The way she holds herself? The way he smiles? Some reminder of someone lost somewhere.. or an unexpected feeling of coming home, right there, across the room, with nobody saying anything?
Of course, it's only actually remarkable when it happens between two people who are not in a sexed-up or exotic landscape, who are fully clothed, and who are not flirting with each other. Sexual fantasies are like invisible mosquitoes in the air in new york city. The air is full of endless opportunity, like mirages made out of diesel dust on a hot humped road.
I opened the missed connections craigslist page yesterday, and typed in "Freddy's". A post came up for a night I had been there (like shooting fish in a waterless barrel, this past couple of weeks). Up came a mention of a woman who was actually sitting in front of me (there were less than 20 people in the backroom at the time). The post was written by a man "on the other side of the room, wearing a red shirt". He said:
"We spoke briefly while passing on the stairs, and I should have asked then. So, I'm asking now."
And I wonder if she'll ever see it. It's a peculiar thing, typing in some general information into the missed connections section to see if anyone has felt a connection with you, missed. And even when the room is narrowed down as far as 20 in Freddy's Backroom, it's still new york city.
Thousands of people come between one meaningful connection and the next friendly face, here. People get worn down by that, and retreat into their small worlds. Then suddenly they look out, and see something beautiful, and feel its loss when it goes. They also know that because it's new york, the odds on ever meeting that particular beauty again are staggeringly high against it. And yet it happens.
It can be a desert, sometimes. And then a flower pops up when you least expect it.
I got a guitar today! I've just been singing some tunes, trying out my 7th chords. Barres are next. Phew!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
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, ----.
There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.
I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.
I was feeling kind of antsy.
Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.
The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.
And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.
Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.
When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..
The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.
I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.
And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.
Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.
I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.
The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.
There's a musician living a couple of blocks down my street. I've passed him in his ground floor practice room a couple of times now, once playing percussion in the dark, and just this evening he was practising piano with the light on. I'd love to call out to him to play with me, but he's practising and I don't want to disturb him. But you know, my route to the subway has changed. It's the same distance, but these days I go right down my street to get to it.
Last night at Times square 2 train uptown platform, a dude stood playing a keyboard that was strapped around him like a guitar, and singing his heart out. I was busy dancing with my iPod along the downtown platform, when I saw him. An announcement came that the next downtown 2 train was coming in 10 minutes, so I skipped across to the uptown platform and listened a bit, danced a bit. People were listening and getting all earnest and then dropping in small change. I used to get that in the street in Copenhagen, too. People standing and listening for a full song, then doin the jingle jangle with some loose coppers. This is New York city, folks! Give a dollar at least, for Christ's sake. Keep your quarters for the laundry machine.
I'm singing in a bar in Chinatown on Thursday, just a back-up spot, singing some three part harmonies.. but it should be some good rocknroll fun! The band's called The Mercenaries, and the gig's at 9.30 in Bar 169, at 169 East Broadway. That's the F to East Broadway. See you there!
A man in sunglasses is sitting upstairs in the foyer of the 7th avenue Q station, waiting to feel the wind blow, to hear the chug of the approaching train before he dives down into the heat, the humidity, the hot dirt sauna of the subway platform. Outside, the street is actually quite cool tonight. He's humming a tune. I try to catch it. He hums softly. It's so quiet in this station, even this sound has space. Cryin, by Roy Orbison. I catch it and now it's in me and my hum dives down into the platform and the hot dirt and the sweaty people waiting waiting waiting for the train.
I've been playing kiss-chase with the sounds of the city for a while now. It's a game of sonic tag, all over the city. She is so gentle sometimes. The voice of the lady announcing delays on the line can be unusually gentle and mild though her message is anti-New York. Time delays are anti-New York. Time is the most precious commodity here. Time and Money chase each other off the top spot in the precious New York commodities league like Celtic and Rangers.
I caught a beautiful tune yesterday on the air at Prospect Heights, just down my block, where I found myself sitting for an unexpected 20 minutes on a stoop, listening to a solitary drummer playing Arabic and Indian rhythms in his dark ac-free ground floor room. I sat and listened and when I passed later, he was still there, and that time, I caught a tune on the air, and sang it, grooved it, all the way to 2nd st.
The sounds and energy can be so hard in New York city, so you appreciate the gentle stuff when it comes.
I fell over in the street when my scooter hit a jutting footpath slab. Scooter did a 360 and caught my flipflop clad ankle full on. Scooter hit the deck and I had to sit down with the pain. Only thing available to rub on it was some beeswax lip balm. Sat there and soothed it until it was okay enough to get up again. Maybe five minutes. People passed, wordlessly. One guy looked back, giggly, like it was entertainment. A young couple passed, and the man said 'weird'. I sat there, with my scooter at my feet, soothing my ankle until it didn't hurt so much.
I got back on my scooter and rode into Chinatown, stinking of fish carcasses, spit and blood and filth and people paying $3000 for a studio.
I met Sol, a 93 year old native lower east sider.
Sol's a tiny little man and I saw him walk along the street as I sat in the window of some hip lower east side bar. He walked incredibly slowly, leaning on a stick, and I began to write, sitting in the window. I looked up and he had moved a few feet. I looked up again, another few feet. Then I got on a roll of something and didn't look up for a while. I didn't see him. Ran out into the street, crossed the road, to the corner. Looked in all directions. No sign of the old man. Turned to go back to the bar. There was the old man. Propped up against a tiny windowsill, sitting on the bones of his arse.
He looks up.
I say, hello, sir.
He says, do you like humour?
I say, yes I do, sir.
He says, I got a joke for you. Listen to this.
And I sit down.
We chatted for a while. He told me some of the best ba-boom jokes heard since the glory days of radio. Here's one of them.
I met a woman in the launderette.
She says "you married?"
I says "no"
She says "you a bachelor?"
I says "yeah"
She says, "how comes a you don't ever get married?"
I says, "Because I believe marriage is a big step. And I don't wanna break my ankle."
Ninety three, and he sat there balanced on a five inch windowsill on Ludlow st.
He asked me what my hobbies were, and then he told me, "I got hobbies. I like to paint". I ask him, "what do you paint, Sol?" He says, "miniatures. I got these business cards.." and he's rooting in his pocket for his wallet. Out come these business card sized paintings, or rather, drawings, and he shows me one. There's a house, and some trees, and two little birds sitting watching the house on a fence. It's a simple scene, a bucolic vision executed with simple lines, and entirely unlike anywhere he would ever have been likely to have lived or maybe even been.
I ask him, "have you ever been out of New York, Sol?"
He says, "yes, I went on a cruise once. Ten days. The Virgin Islands. I had my own room, the meals were nice, there was music. You pay more the higher you go up the ship, you know. I had a nice room".
He asks if I like the little drawing. I say I do. "And see, I made a gilt frame and put it around it, too. I made that." he says, indicating the brassy border around the business card edges. "I like to keep busy. I'm interested in ceramics. There's a flea market on Avenue A I go to sometimes and if it's cheap enough, I buy somethin there and fix it up". He started to name the major ceramics houses in Ireland and Britain. He looks back at the drawing of the birds, says, "and that's the house the birds are going to get married in". I don't understand. He says, "see that's the punchline". It's all punchlines and any opportunity to see the funny side, for Sol.
He's been living alone almost all of his life and the only family he's got left are a niece in Brooklyn who bothers him about what he's eating, and a nephew in Yonkers. He talks to them on the phone, meets them rarely. The last time he met his niece, he was giving her a birthday gift. She wouldn't let him make a phone call. "I gave her a nice gift, thirty five dollars it's a lot of money.. it was just a local call.. she is mean!"
He went to the local old folks' community centre and got driven away because he didn't want to sit listening to people complain about their aches and pains.
So he meets people from time to time in the way that I met him, walking along the street, saying hello, and having a chat. He says he has always had a funny way with women: he prefers it when the woman makes the first move, so to speak, and approaches him, then he can open up and tell some jokes and share some life experiences. "Always been that way, I don't know why".
He was in McDonalds the other day, and somebody came up to him and gave him two bills, a ten and a five, just to be nice. He doesn't rely on people giving him money though, he's okay. He worked in the post office for a long time and they had good benefits there. That was the best job he had.
Back in the thirties he used to be a button salesman. He drove wholesale buttons to garment factories in the LES. Back then, the LES was a Jewish neighbourhood, a garment district. It was full of warehouses and sewing factories, with Jewish women working their fingers to the bone. Sol is a New York city native, a lower east side Jewish man who has lived through most of the last century and is still telling jokes in this one. And they want to push him out of his nice three room apartment. And he ain't goin' nowheres.
A taxi pulled up outside this pub I had left, before I found myself spending the evening chatting with Sol. The people I had gone to the bar to meet were standing by the cab. "I'd like to go over to these people and say hello, Sol. I've really enjoyed chatting with you", I say to him. And he says to me, "When you're looking for a husband, make sure he's not a drinker or a gambler or running around with women. Pick a good man, make sure of it. Do you hear me? I say this to you as a father to a daughter. You understand?"
I say yes, Sol, I do.
And turn to cross the street.
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