Mind the gaps

I haven't had anything to say. That's why I haven't blogged. It isn't as though I haven't had impressions or ideas, but it hasn't occurred to me to blog them. It's funny, you know, keeping a blog like this. There's some kind of implicit obligation when there are a few regulars coming around, and it's a bit like that moment in the conversation when the eyes are on you to say something funny and fabulous, to be entertaining and fascinating, and you really just feel like chilling out and being human, meeting each other somewhere in the middle of where you each might be.

Well, I can't sense where you might be out there in blogland, my dearies, but a couple of years ago I had a blog habit, three blogs I visited daily and which I read keenly in a dark room under the stairs in a dark country up northern europe way, and which I think I scanned daily for signs of something, much like shepherds in Iraq might have scanned the skies a couple of thousand years ago for weather patterns, and indications of possibility. Two of them were based in New York city, and one in Zambia. And it was always good news when there was some kind of a meaty post there to greet me when I called. Two of the three no longer exist, and the one remaining has become deeply dull. I think it's good to recognise when the time has come to de-blog oneself, and concentrate your energies elsewhere.

But I haven't reached that moment yet, you might be mildly interested to hear. Sometimes this is going to be a four times a day kind of shindig, and sometimes it'll be one time a week, much like other appetites that come and go and demand different frequencies of play at different times. And part of the whole enterprise is certainly the notional fact of people dropping by, checking out what's going on down Lucy Takes Off way. I've always enjoyed writing for an audience. Always relished the writing of emails, of plays, of sunday newspaper book reviews, of songs for singing out, of poems for the telling. So I like that people come visiting around here. It would be cool if you said hello, though..

Nothing more than this,

today

Out of the dirt springs a miracle

I remember when I first lived in new york four years ago, I heard all these stories about where the new downtown was. In one version, the new downtown was some town out in the middle of Jersey, but I couldn't really fly with that. The point of it all was where the artist-scenes were happening, and how. I was looking for something, you know, something specific, and it was that kind of scene/community thing I blog and talk about sometimes, where something gorgeous rises up from the dirt and dances.

In this town you can take your pick of historical scenes that have fostered everything in the avant garde and popular culture of the past hundred years or more, ever since Walt Whitman sat on a stoop in Fulton street, jiving about leaves of grass and calling to human beings to get off their arses and FEEL.

But that's all just a bunch of stories, and you can so easily miss the incredible fucking beauty of the moment in the search for something else. The moment itself IS the edge. The moment is also all there is, and everything is jiving in it.

Way back in 2001, when I came to this city for the very first time, on a six day fly-through, I found myself sitting at a gig in the Zinc bar with about a dozen other people in the house including the band, and Alex Blake, the shamanic upright bass player, was getting down with piano, drums and a saxophone. It was a beautiful gig, a holy and dirty gig. I was sitting right in front, a bashful spit away from him.

And they came to the last song and he began to play an African circle song. It sounded like a sing-song to me, I grew up on sing-songs in Ireland, where everybody sang the songs they had in common, and then somebody got up, usually a man actually, and sang some ballad with a tender tenor voice and everyone went quiet and listened and then roared at the end and off we went again on another song.

Everybody knows a good chorus when they hear one. And Alex was encouraging people to sing, at least that's how I heard it, so I found a place and filled out a three part harmony with the bass and the saxophone. And we sang the chorus, over and over, until it was done. Until it was done.

My eyes were tight tight shut, but I remember his voice, hissing at me, "feel it! feel it!", making my heart soar for the next round. It felt so intimate in there, all I heard were the three voices and this flying free.

I was at another three part gig last night, in the Delacorte in Central Park, where I last went to see Shakespeare in the Park. Right in the middle of it was this shining vision of a woman singing her songs of beauty and hip, of sexy and sacred, speaking my tongue and the sound she made doing it felt like the most gorgeous vibration I have ever heard come out of a human being this side of Christy Moore. It's easy to get hyperbolic in new york city, but this gig felt like a homecoming. And there was singing-along, sugar. There was a sing-song in Central Park last night.

I love where I live. I have a strong desire to continue to live here and explore. I love the work I'm doing. I have a strong desire to keep exploring that, too. I am so utterly humbled by all this jivin' good stuff.

I'm feeling it, Alex. I'm feeling it, Walt. It's going on.

Ode to a fire escape

I think there's a balancing point, in the life of a writer, where edge meets tightrope skills, where passion for place co-exists with thriving groove within its particular landscape, and where the flame of the word is burning in the heart, without resistance.

And I think that balancing point is where a writer must be, in order to be able to produce great work. It cannot be prescribed, but it can be recognized. I see it every time I read Martin Amis, for instance, even though he's probably an uptight rat-arse. I think the less petty life becomes, also, the more space becomes available for something beautiful to happen.

I am living in an overlooked apartment this week, and again a few weeks ago, for just about the first time in my life (!) and that includes elsewhere in new york city, new orleans, denmark and ireland. It's a great apartment, roomy and centrally located in Park Slope, utterly quiet and peaceful with a row of brownstone backyards opposite.

I love the space and the well equipped kitchen, and the rhythm of life here: writing, walking the whippets, writing, loading and unloading the dishwasher, thinking about dinner, making coffee, walking the whippets, writing... but the fact that I am visible when I walk around naked is a new one on me. However, I enjoy the kind of somewhat-intimacy that is part of this kind of landscape of facing windows. I think it's a duty of living in this kind of arrangement to be visible at least a part of the day. I try to keep this visibility clothed, at least, but it feels right to me that people can see me going about my day, and I glance in at their lives. The only one with full visibility though, at least with the lights on, is the fiddle player who lives opposite and down a floor, who has only one flimsy green see-through piece of cloth on one half of one of the windows, probably for decoration rather than privacy.

There is a neighbourhood budding horn player, who has been verbally instructed, via my next door neighbour's fire escape window, to discontinue any hopes of a career, and who seems, sadly, to have taken the advice, or perhaps found a practise room. There's a guitar player elsewhere whose sound is mute and pleasant enough to be able to survive such approbrium. I say it again, I have no such difficulty because I have no guitar here, though I sing sometimes, and I miss the bollocks out of the guitar I left behind in Copenhagen.

The fire escape here is gorgeous, and I have slept on it. But it has been thrilling to live in the flat I've subletted all summer long up in Prospect Heights.

The thrill is in its fire escape, with its view of Manhattan ( I saw the Chrysler building's wicked white witch hat of light get turned on one night last week, while eating my dinner out there!) and its tall trees and its huge huge sky and no one overlooking and the basketball court in the middle-near distance where men met to play late in the hot summer nights, and the children's playground with its distant daily bustle and the huge vista of flat, low rooftops all the way to manhattan. And the butterflies dancing and lovemaking together in twos all the livelong day, and the crickets and cicada have played a summer-long jam right outside my window. I have heard and seen birds outside my window this summer I do not recognise, whose sounds call to be heard. And the sufi man has sung every break of day into existence on the balcony of the penthouse on the corner.

I relish every moment there. Actually, I relish every moment. Here.