Beautiful twitter numbers

This set of numbers showed up last night on my twitter profile. I haven't tweeted since, but I stopped following something so really, the numbers are out of whack now anyway. Still. I'm thinking I'll follow someone else, and then the numbers will be beautiful again! And then what... and then what...

So there's more to it than that

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.

Meet Koko

She is our latest one.

It seems that all I can really write about in the public sphere at the moment is #mousenews, or #catnews, or #dognews. For ye of no twitter, the # is a shorthand way of indicating a topic, within the 140 character space restraint of the tweet form. (Favourite recent hashtag: #whencrackgetsintothecattery).

It also helps with @ replies, when someone responds to a particular tweet on a topic, so you know what the hell it is they're talking about. Some people don't use or get hashtags at all, some use them dilligently and very properly, and some have fun with it.

But just about everything I have to say about anything is getting sucked into my current project, a record I'm writing here in the hut, with only the local fauna spilling out onto the internet afterwards. So I imagine that a lot of internet folks think I am running a menagerie around here (not hugely far from the truth of my current circumstances) or that I am animal-obsessed. Fact is, there are not a lot of people around and the animals are almost always entertaining. And they have stuff to say. And I listen. I tweet for them sometimes. Clean up their pee. We form bonds.

So. Koko. Koko is one of these glamourous, pretty, troubled types. I'm thinking, Rita Hayworth. She's also playful (particular interest in ball games), likes to be given lots of attention and has hissy fits when she is not being attended to at all times. We like her very much and she sleeps in a bedroom at night, spends most of the afternoons in the kitchen.

It is time for my second coffee of the day, and another session assuring Koko that she is loved for her mind.

#mousenews

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

Sayin it like it is, and spamming twitter with it

This is what a twitter spammer looks like. You can block them, and that is what I do, but you know, I paused at this guy's bio. I mean, he's getting at the core of the human condition in five words there.

Pithy.

The Facebook Post

I'm up to 15 people I've turned the volume down on, but do not want to unfriend, on facebook. I've muted them for different reasons. Some because I think it's just plain weird to be getting daily feeds about banalities from lives of people I don't know very well/am not hugely interested in, but there are also some I've detuned because they endlessly post soppy/sentimental status messages, and there are a couple of people I have initiated some kind of direct communication with, who haven't responded, so it seems weird to keep hearing about them in an exclusively passive way.

Kind of like that friend you had once with whom you used to have Very Long Phonecalls, where they talked Endlessly about their personal life, family, thoughts, random passing bullshit, and never really thought to ask you how you were, or allow any space between the inhalations to listen. But the cutesy messages probably bother me more. You know? It's like living in a world where people are really really tired all the time, but they think that if they are 'positive' about everything, that some of the bad shit will go away. I can't dig it.

And then there are the people who treat facebook like it is their personal sitcom and everybody is there to be their canned laughter. That's alright though, I mean facebook is not exactly Tolstoy.

I've only ever unfriended one person on facebook, in the 10 months I've had a profile on it. That was a dude who was always acting out his relationship on facebook. You know the sort of thing? Like the whole relationship was this fantasic fantasy of amazingness that had to be validated and posted about in a plethora of ways, daily. Mwa mwa my gorgeous darling girlfriend who I love love love mwa mwa so much every day I see you I think how gorgeous you are and you are the light of my life kind of thing. Nasty. I tried turning the volume down on him, but he still showed up in my feed. It was just a drag. It's also a lot to do with how many people you've friended. The fewer, the more they feature individually. You can also turn volume up on people. I haven't done that yet.

But the main thing about facebook is my vibe with it. I just can't seem to get enthusiastic about their status messages, which is reasonable enough when you get even slightly meta about it, but you know, I seem happy to ramble on on Twitter when the mood takes me. See, the thing is that the mood does take me on Twitter. It's just more of a conversation, an interaction. It's actually moderately interesting, sometimes. Though I'm still in Twitter for the potential rather than the actual yet, and I've been tweeting for a year now. But it's more chilled, more fun, less shouty.

But let's be honest. The whole thing is, of course, a load of bollocks.

Beep. Feathers.

I used to write long things here a lot more. And then I started pouring that energy into songwriting, Clusterflock comments and Twitter. It moves around. I'm in Ireland again for an as yet indeterminate time and I'm thinking vaguely in the direction of a writing project to do while I'm here.

Meanwhile I am freezing and feeling kind of vacuumed. It is pouring rain and I can't take Tar for a walk until there is a gap in it. I've just compiled a list of some rocking old posts, I hope you enjoy them...

Releasing the Monkey
Milk Cartons
A Cockroach Cautionary
Love on the Carrer de Verdi
You can take the fear out of the mouse but you can't take the mouse out of the cat's mouth
Stories on the Eve of Thanksgiving
Gonna kill you, mister mosquito man

Tweet me!

So I joined Twitter and Facebook as initiatives toward having a more interactive relationship with the internet, which takes up, as it is, so much of my day. Facebook is easy: so many people are on it. Twitter, for those of you who don't know it, is the "What are you doing right now?" question on Facebook, and that is the full extent of what it is. Twitter is exciting in terms of group communications and short burst information sharing. I love the idea of Twitter and the accessibility of it. I have, however, only got four contacts on it. It's on its way up of course, but for now, it's still a little underground compared to Facebook. And really, though I log into Facebook at least once a day lately, there is so much about it that is overly fussy, with an arseways sense of privacy, and heightened appetite for bollockry. Twitter is an open platform, with, as far as I can see, no bullshit applications, and no vampires sent to 'bite', courtesy of the more inane aspects of your friends and acquaintances...

So basically, I'm rooting for Twitter, but most of the internet's social traffic is currently on Facebook and Myspace. My Myspace profile is like some atoll in the middle of the Pacific: totally inaccessible to all but the very rich or adventurous, or those who are native to the atoll. I haven't even visited my own Myspace page in a Very Long Time. Well, I really just need to make another one, so, um, well, yeah.

So, currently, only one of my Twitter contacts is a regular Twitterer, and boy is she a regular Twitterer, so I'm getting a steady stream of what are basically diary entries from her. Now, she's an entertaining writer though a somewhat remote acquaintance, but what's really odd about it is that I get this steady feed from her, through Twitter. I feel like I'm finding out too much about her. This thing needs a little biodiversity... so, if you feel like doing so, you can join Twitter and find me there, under herecomeslucy. Lets broaden this ecosystem!