Jetlag hell on wheels

I'm having the jetlag horrors. Have you ever had the jetlag horrors? Are you having the jetlag horrors somewhere in the world right now, dear reader, and sending out thoughtwaves that I am all too susceptible to picking up, strongly suggesting that LUCY TAKES OFF transforms your jetlag feelings into words, and liberates you from the pain of your jeglag aloneness? Well, I'll do my best, dear reader. And bookmark this page for future reference. I'd rather not have to go through this experience again.

I'm in Ireland, and my body is fully and entirely on new york time, while still being subject to the normal human daytime demands of this strange new timezone. There was no other option but sleep when my plane got in at 6 am, and when I heard my dad play the piano downstairs a hundred years later, it was 4.24 pm. Bollocks.

My folks are not much help, having had no experience of this phenomenon, and have been encouraging me to sleep the way my body longs to. I lay in bed awake last night for about five hours, until I finally got up and took my Paul Auster book downstairs to the kitchen to eat some leftover smoked salmon sandwiches and chocolate and tea at 6 am. Got to sleep finally, around 7.30. Mum woke me up this morning at 9 as I asked her to, and I told her, I've had an hour and a half sleep, mum. I'm still on new york time. Well stay there so, answered my accommodating mum; dad will drive you in later. That sounded good to my ears, which were looking for any kind of easy answer that means more sleep. Ten minutes later, she's back.

So, what do you want to do? Um, I say, searching.. I'm thinking of cycling in a bit later.. And when I hear myself saying that I've just got to laugh because although I sometimes expect myself to be capable of Big Things Regardless of Circumstance, the notion of cycling into the city from my folks' country place, and back again, inevitably, later this afternoon, is just a step too far into the lunatic zone. Anyway, I chuckled at the eejit making excuses, and dragged myself out of bed. It's not so bad actually, but it's not yet noon. Limerick city is moving, but subdued. I've been taking a walk.

Visited some backalley backyard parts of the neighbourhood I grew up in, here in Limerick. My folks moved out to South East Clare as soon as they had me reared, and I kicked my own arse off to college at 17 years of age, and so when I go back to Ireland, I tend to spend most of my time out in Clare, and with visits to my nana's house, which has traffic from all the rest of the family.

It's like a play set in nana's kitchen. People show up suddenly, after years of absence, and immediately get offered tea and cake. Since I've been living in fancy cities, surrounded by schedulers, I've developed a lingo. I asked dad last night, so, what's your schedule tomorrow? And caught myself. He said it's okay, I use that kind of language too, now. It's just the way things have turned. But to phone my nana in advance of showing up in her kitchen, through her ever-unlocked back door, would just be the most weird and unnecessary thing to do ever in the history of weird and unnecessary things. I will go there today, when I've finished my city stuff, and sit there in her kitchen, getting fed tea and brown bread, and chatting until somebody comes to take me away.

Right now, I'm sitting in the Marriot hotel, on the site of what was once one of the most beautiful, elegant theatres in Ireland. I was born next door to that theatre. It's been torn down now, to make way for a Marriot hotel and another shopping centre. However, it's a pretty ace spot to work in and I've been here all day with one pot of tea, a massive comfy sofa, relaxed environment and free wifi. Nice. I think I'll be coming back here.

Dad looking fierce

Self portrait with green tongue and Ross

I sing the city electric

Parp.

The Big Money

I've just heard about a painter-businessman in the city, who earns $150,000 in a weekend, from talking to business executives creatively. There is money to be made in this town, and the extent of it is really quite extraordinary. You can hit the big time in this place if you have AUDACITY.

I was in Tokyo Joe's, this horrible-vibed designer thrift store on 11th st. a few weeks ago, and this woman came in the door, and she was stressed and uptight and then she got her purse out and pulled out some cash and she exhaled, and said with a look of sheer earnest love on her face: "I love money! I don't care, I love it, I do. I LOVE money!" And the Japanese chicks nodded their heads, wisely.

Curious statcounter facts

I just got traffic to this blog from somebody in Brazil who was searching for "SEXY INDONESIAN CELEBRITY".

Somebody a few months ago was clutching their leg in Zaire, while googling help-i've-just-gotten-bitten-by-a-snake-and-it-hurts and they got smoothly through to my ode to Snake n Jake's Christmas Nola lounge..

But of course some of this stuff is dodgy human bot action.. The brothers of the Colombian Honorarios Concegales have recently visited LUCY TAKES OFF for 0 seconds. Nice seein' ya, boys.

Stoop sale scoop, or, All along the watchtower

And it happened right on my very own stoop, also. At least the stoop that is my very own until monday. There's a multi-block stoop sale happening today in Prospect Heights, and much of the proceeds are going toward the Develop, Don't Destroy Brooklyn fund, which is a VERY GOOD CAUSE INDEED, and is fighting off a major megadevelopment in this neighbourhood, which would threaten to change the living face of Brooklyn forever.

So.. the scoop. Well, right outside my current abode up here on Prospect place, amongst the second hand clothes, books and broken electronics, was a sign that read:

Tiffany
From Plaza Hotel Lobby ------->

Hurrah! Somebody in my house stole a bunch of Tiffany from the Plaza Hotel, stashed it in their one bedroom flat for a number of years, and finally purged it for ten bucks in a stoop sale! Fight billionaire development with nicked objets d'art! Hurrah!

Lets hurl Tiffany wares at the Atlantic Yards' "community liaison" building! This revolution has more options than two.

Further down the block, Emily was delighted at having found a wardrobe (a little miracle, she said) because she's been longing for a wardrobe for AGES now! Over the other side of Vanderbilt, Gloria from Jamaica is having a good day, selling her stuff for a dollar or two apiece, though she has to keep moving her chair to stay in the shade, because it is HOT today in new york city, folks. HOT! We sing the song of global warming as we celebrate our ability to streetjive in the heat this late in the season..

And further down Prospect again, by Flatbush, there are some dudes with a 78's record player, playing some Memphis Minnie records, and on the other side of the street there's a family man with a rare copy of the Peyote Awareness Journal, the inaugural edition. This little slender volume came out of a group based in Arizona back in '96, and they've got a Letter From The President and everything in there.. bankers on acid, clearly. Lets take minutes on our psychedelic journeys of revelation and grief! Have bi-monthly AGMs and conference tables and whiteboards as the tears of love flow down our cheeks and we vibrate to the beat of our internal atm machine..

I'm spreading the word, person by person, that I'm looking for a new place to live in this neighbourhood. And so far, each conversation is another reminder of why I want to live here. A weekend of jivin, dancin, rollerskatin, talkin and light aperitifs on the lawn, beckons.

Four sweet chords

Do you know about having the blues at the same time as feeling electric and alive and thrilled and excited by life and the texture of the moment? It's so strange. Been going on, on and off, for a few days now. I suppose I've just got to write about it.

It's funny, you know. The human desire for simple, uncomplicated happiness, is actually the death knell for vibrant living. Rather, the state of uncomplicated happy satiation is that. The desire for it can be interesting and vibrant. But often, the presence of the desire for uncomplicated human satiation eclipses the nuances of living, and that's just where the good stuff is, really. So I can feel in me a somewhat suspicion of this blues, the blues left out in the cold.

And then I think of a conversation I had a couple of nights ago, about old cold feelings and outsider, stranger qualities, and treating them like human beings out freezing - open the door, for christ's sake, and come in and warm yourself by the fire. Come on, now. Are you hungry? Do you need something to eat? Human, you know. Sometimes it's hard for things to melt.

I need something to eat, I haven't had breakfast yet. Getting picky about food, lately. Food shopping has been so random for me over the past few months. I find it difficult to make wholesome and sensible food shopping trips. I mean, I usually end up with reasonably wholesome food (and haagen d), but not in my usual way of food shopping. I buy a hell of a lot more put-together foods and sauces now than I think I ever have before. I suppose it's just easier. I'm living in a flat with a broken oven and one pot. I haven't had much interest in cooking since I got to new york. I seem to have lost my libido for cooking (but not eating) : it's gone somewhere else. It's gone into sitting by this computer, it's gone into sitting with the guitar that's popped a string, into other stuff besides.

Going to look at a flat today. Maybe a few more over the weekend, before I head off. Within a week, I'll be blogging from Ireland.

I met the whippets for the first time in a couple of weeks, this evening

It was so gorgeous to see them attempt, against their leads, to break into a full run to come to say hello. Gorgeous. I love those gals. Here's another whippet pic just to celebrate the fact of the existence of whippetness.

Hurrah!

Freddy's at 3.13 am

Folks, something strange happened yesterday

My stats went through the roof. Curious.

This is happening later this month

I would love to be there. I will most likely be in the bosom of my family, or out in the wilds of The Burren, crawling into hazel forests and singing ballads in county Clare pubs.

These are not bad problems to have.

Sunday Oct 21. 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM Can you prove you are human?

---

Reply to: gigs-439967075@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-10-04, 1:41PM EDT


Can you convince a judge that you are a human?
* Four participants are required to participate in the Loebner Prize computer contest. (google "Turing Test")
* You will be seated in front of a computer terminal in one room.
* Judges in another room will type in questions to you and a computer.
* The computer will respond, trying to fool the judge into thinking it is a human. You will be typing in responses trying to convince the judge that _you_ are really the human.
* Requirements:
1. You must be able to type.
2. You must attempt to convince the judge that you are a person.
3. You must sign a release allowing your image and your responses to be posted world wide on the internet
(your name/address will not be published without your permission.)

Lunch will be provided.

This is an internationally famous competition.

• Location: Upper West Side
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
• Compensation: $100 for 3 sessions of 30 minutest

Gonna kill you mister mosquito man

I've been feeling interesting combinations of feelings lately, sort of a bit like cornflake pizzas or jambalaya meringue, stuff that sounds impossible but works out kind of gorgeously in the moment. So today, it's sober and electric. Got the blues, and got electric. Yeah, I know. That makes me sound like Gary Moore. Well, so be it.

A mosquito slipped into my room while I was climbing back in from the fire escape. I said to him, "I feel like murdering you, little creature" and proceeded to interact with him in perfect consonance with my intention. The little creature had other ideas, however, and his DNA is clearly hip to this kind of jive, and how to deal with it. He's hiding out in my bedroom, taking his chances. I know the corner he's in. He's made himself invisible. Every now and then I feel his sting. That's my cue to not touch. All you can do when there's a mosquito in the room is kill, and not touch, and whip out the lavender oil. It's a pain in the arse, but that's alright.

Ah, a shift, over the course of this post, even. From sober and bluesy, to itchy and content. High and mighty and tired. Pointless and singing.

I love working with the dirty word

That feels good to say. I testify.

There's a lazy, slow vibe snakeing through the treetops up here on the fourth floor on Prospect, today. It's a day for the fire escape, I think. I feel so worded out right now, a shift feels like it's a-comin, or actually, a-happenin, into the music. Into the picture, into the song. I really enjoyed making my Wishing Well performance joint, last weekend, down in DUMBO. Some people took video and photographs, other people just jumped on in and hollered, others stood and smooched, clapped, made contact, and yet others walked on by. It was gorgeous! As soon as I see some of this video and photo stuff, you will too.

I feel at home here, in Brooklyn. Though I need to find a new place to live here, very soon (please send tips).

It is told in the toilets of Freddy's

Hear those engines soar above and
DANCE

AKA
Don't piss on the toilet seat. Fuckin' toddler.

Here's one I like

I think mum might like this one

Good morning PS 9

says the megaphone at the children's playground in the middle distance here in Prospect Heights every morning at 9:06 am.

The school principle gives a different sermon every morning. I can hear her voice well enough, but only a few words here and there come through clearly. As I type, she's saying

Always remember, da da da da da
Always remember, ka ka ka ka ka
Always remember, the choices you make today shape your world tomorrow.
(Yeah cripple them from the getgo, why don'tcha, lady?)

Then,
If all else fails, read read read.
(though I could be mishearing this)

I've been up the past couple of mornings, incredibly early. It's a totally different world.

In a mellow mood

I listen to wnyc every "morning" for a couple of hours. On sundays you get the sunday show with Jonathan Schwartz. He's just played Mel Torme singing a gorgeous love-fansong medley to Fred Astaire. Now it's Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in a tribute to black women jazz singers in "Can't we be friends" in which you can hear the edge racial tensions of America getting a little more familiar, but it's still an awkward match. A bit earlier, he played Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins on "In a mellow mood". Jesus, I love listening to Ben Webster. He just loves that horn like a brother. And that low laughing fat vibrato and intelligent sound he makes...

Ben Webster rounded his life off in Koebenhavn, you know. I used to live right by the graveyard where he's buried. It was like my backyard, like living right on Prospect Park West. I was living in a very beautiful, roomy, high ceilinged two bedroom apartment with a 58 year old Romanian woman, a former actress who had lived in new york for 11 years of her youth, but had by that time (spring of this year) been living in Koebenhavn, mostly in the same building, for 23 years. She was planning another move, this time to Italy, to kick some sass into her sixties. She was having a hard time in Koebenhavn, felt herself to be isolated and alone and without much fun or friendship at all, so slowly she was taking the rope a little more firmly and finding herself pulled toward something hopeful in Umbria.

Koebenhavn was being gentrified like everywhere else it seems that I live, but the real estate market there is not broker-owned and developer-dominated like it is here, and I think this particular block I lived on is still quite undiscovered. See, when people buy property in Koebenhavn, generally they're looking for a place to live, rather than trying to feed their real estate billionaire habit, though that also exists, and therein lay the fate of A-huset. But that's another story for another time. And there's a more compelling version of that story living here, in Prospect Heights.

I can't believe I haven't written about Atlantic Yards yet. But it's really just lit up inside me in the past couple of weeks, so I think it's just lying low, gathering energy before it whips up and out. Lets go back to the story of the Romanian actress in Koebenhavn, and Ben Webster's grave.

The actress rented me one of her rooms. It was gorgeous. I took daily walks and cycles through the graveyard, which had been designed as a place for people to hang out. Assistens Kierkegaard, that's what it's called. Soeren Kierkegaard, the philosopher writer, is buried there, and Hans Christian Andersen, whom the Danes endearingly abbreviate to H.C. Andersen, pronounced a lot like Jose, which added a little kick to my first year in the town.

Assistens is right in the heart of Noerrebro, which is the Brooklyn, if you like, of Koebenhavn, though Island's Brygge is the DUMBO. You've got to be excited by a neighbourhood that demands capitalisation and brings images of Disney elephants and heartbreak stories as you walk through its big gorgeous industrial lines.

And each of these places is a state of mind.

There's something to be said about jazz musicians who understand how to take their time, and do. I love to listen to people who have gone through the whole arc of their journey and have come to a point where it's easy when it's fast, and deeply punctuated when it's slow. You've got to love Ben Webster. I think if you don't love Ben Webster, you know, you're missing out on something really joyful in the human experience. And it's not just Ben Webster, of course. It's the Ben Webster state of mind.

I used to cycle past his grave quite a bit, on my zigzag route through Assistens. I usually found myself stopping, tipping my cap (and you always needed to wear a cap in Koebenhavn), before moving on again. I always wondered about it, why the hell he found himself there and what it was that he found and loved there enough to keep him living happily in Koebenhavn for the rest of his life. I was there for three and a half years and it wasn't a cosy and warm set of experiences, except sometimes. It was a rich time, though, and I can see that now, thank God. But you know, Ben Webster's Koebenhavn state of mind and Lucy Foley's Koebenhavn state of mind are probably two entirely different states of mind, and even as I write that, I dig that these things are dynamically subject to change.

I'd like to have my own radio show on national public radio. LUCY TAKES OFF live on wnyc. Can't you hear it already?

The Irish accent, and all the performance bits that you just can't get in a blog. Not to mention the special guest stars, the on-street conversations. The word from the bar. The view on the street. The explosions under the bridge. Right from the beginning of this blog I've wanted to make video and audio posts. I'd like to add that feature soon.

Friends in Paris

I have two friends in Paris this week. Johs from Roedby in Denmark and Constance from Washington Heights in New York City. Kisses and good wishes to musicians in Paris...

Deleting ignorance

I've just found myself editing a sentence out of a post, and saying out loud, I don't want to show my ignorance. Sigh. It might just be an interesting day.

Art Under the Bridge

I have just come back from Dumbo, hanging out on the street with whoever the hell I met, and making impromptu art installations on the hoof and having a gorgeous conversation at the end on a grassed-over sidewalk right on the edge of Brooklyn.

Dumbo is right up the arse of Manhattan. It's an interesting neighbourhood. This weekend is open house in all the studios. Art festival. You can feel the edge of money meeting art. Razor, that one. I wasn't long there but I found some amazing places, good places. I fell in love again, with a neighbourhood. Just hung out and goofed off, talkin, talkin, writin. I was off the train about five minutes and dancing to Stevie Wonder on my iPod at full tilt volume, when I got to the bridge.

Took out my earphones and felt the rhythm of the train screech sixty feet above. It's a magnificent architecture. The whole neighbourhood is magnificent looking, in a totally different style to Prospect Heights. I think that shift alone was really refreshing, but then suddenly I found myself upstairs in a loft grooving to some rocknroll for a tune, and then standing out in a vacant space that reminded me of A-huset, the multi-artist warehouse megablock I lived in for a year in Koebenhavn.

Three boys were standin there, smoking a grass joint rolled in a cigar tobacco leaf. They called me over and we jived for 20 minutes or so. It was intense. One of them did kung fu to show off a bit, and he was really very good at the kung fu, but it was also a bit bizarre. They were turbo-smart kinds of boys, artists, full of money and high ideas, highly testosterised and American and young. I haven't actually been around that kind of men in a long time. Or maybe ever, really. I've been hanging out with middle aged guys lately, actually. And enjoying it a lot. Not old farts, divorced from life, but relaxed people right in the groove of life, at a different stage of it to me. So this was a totally different energy. Incredibly intense. Wild horses of men, these young ones, using their concepts and their arguments like upscale cheap come-ons. Fun.

So I was on my way to a party I never got to. There was a Prospect Heights crowd having a party there, but I had my hands full on the street.

I found a gorgeous spot under one of the arches of the bridge, and a spontaneous wolf call came out of me really fast. It was gorgeous to hear that echo. It's all blocked off with hoardings so you've really got to shout up into it. Everything you've got, you can offer to the arch under the Manhattan bridge and get cleaned of your sins. It was like church. There were two totally hip gorgeous party kids pissing in a corner and when they heard me they just came running. We had such fun. Pigs in muck. Fab.

Their boyfriends came to piss in the corner of the arch and I took pictures. One of them ran away fast. He used to curate the Brooklyn Museum, apparently. Another one was an incredibly styled punk, with diamante studded belts and various shades of soft toned hair, a kind of rhinestone cowboy punk. These people were gorgeous.

If Gwen Stefani had any sense, she'd look like you, I told the Venezuelan gal. She was a lot in the Gwen Stefani look, but totally hip with it. The other one was a gorgeous little sailor boy with a silver heart on a chain who had rips in his black jeans right up his arse.

We were incandescent, stood there calling whatever the hell came to us. Some fun ones. You know the Scooby Doo - "ya da da da da daaa! Puppy Power!" ? Yeah. And The Police's Roxanne. We all joined in on that one. Confessions came out really fast, too.

I confessed that I had once lived in a tent with a woman for two years. This place was like a wishing well, it was like the porthole of the universe right there on the absolute borderline between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Then we did the can can and laughed our arses off. The little sailor boy kept jumping up and down saying "yay! we're liberated! we're liberated!". The more classy society folks standing around stared at us like crack had just hit the neighbourhood.

I gave them two of my new batch of visiting cards and we parted ways.. I think I'm going to hang out there tomorrow from late afternoon, with a notebook and a visitors' guest book and camera and make sounds and see what happens in that arch under the Manhattan bridge, so if you read this in time and you're nearby and you're in the mood for some fun, come by and hang out. Introduce yourself, if I don't know you already. I'd love to meet you if you're reading.

And then I met Luisa. She's a film artist who's showing her work projected out on the water in the Brooklyn Bridge Park between the two bridges, this weekend. We found a grassed over sidewalk, kicked our shoes off, hung out on the grass and talked our arses off. I've made a new friend. She rocks.

Anyway, everybody being beautiful and all, I spotted a group sitting out in front of a warehouse and something in the style of their pose reminded me of an ad campaign and I said to Luisa, Calvin Klein. And wondered out loud, I wonder if I'm going to move here and become an advertising whore? Who knows? I really don't think so, I've got other fish to fry, but things move fast over here. The borderlines between art and money felt much fuzzier there than anywhere else I've ever been.

There is interesting shit happening in Dumbo, folks. Art reviews on the way, for a quieter moment.

Local news: block party on Sterling

I went for a stroll through the 5th avenue neighbourhood between President and Dean, this evening.. Got a love hit while passing the deli counter of Key foods, on seeing the deli dude's fro in a hairnet.

There's a block party on tonight on Sterling between 5th and 6th, and it's already pretty hot (and loud). It's currently a bit like three block parties on the same block, a hispanic party, with djs decks and drinks, then a bit further up is the black version, and a little further up is the chilled older ladies with cocktails, salad and babies version. There's a six foot trophy sitting out in the middle of the street that looks a bit like a wedding cake with the world cup on the top of it. The street is blocked off with jeeps and trucks up by 6th ave and witches hats on 5th.

Just being the neighbourhood roadwatch this evening, for all you Park Slope drivers.
I'm off to Dumbo tonight.

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.

Betrayal and the moment in the door

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently, on the tricky personal topic of betrayal, specifically betraying oneself. We had been caught up in a strange moment together, and by some stroke of grace, happened to be both willing to talk about it, even though it was the kind of thing people so easily dismiss and often don't readily address with each other, especially two people who don't know each other tremendously well. But we were willing, and we did talk about it, and I think we learned a lot about each other from that chat.

But the topic was not easy, and was revealing. The event happened a week ago. This friend, we'll call him Eric, happens to live a block and a half away from me. One evening last week I was going for an evening stroll and I found myself ringing on his and his boyfriend's doorbell to see if he'd like to come too. And his boyfriend - let's call him Klaus - Klaus' eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of me standing outside in the hallway. I was feeling very strange vibes and feeling like an intruder, and a foolish one at that. I hit the sidewalk fast.

So we met and had a drink about a week later and talked about it. Turns out that Klaus is the type that does not like having people just drop by, considers calling unannounced to be a horrible thing.

Eric, on the other hand, is in love with the San Francisco model of living, and "wouldn't discourage it" (he can also be quite circumspect). And so, by not inviting me in that day, he felt that he was betraying himself in some way. And it led to a fiesty conversation with his newly-moved-in-with lover.

This has happened before, with a new male friend and his boyfriend. The first time it happened was with a friend of mine in Dublin, an artist, lets call him Egon. We hung out a bit together a few years ago, I wrote an essay for a catalogue of his. The specific boyfriend-tension event happened when his boyfriend attacked me verbally like a starving rottweiler at the opening of a show of Egon's, and I was literally energetically propelled out of the building.

Egon and I also had a moment in the door, at the opening of that show. We stood there, Egon at the door, and me out on the street, shaken and clutching my scooter. Egon felt desperately badly about it, apologising on behalf of his 'psychotic boyfriend' but I was just so shocked and I didn't have the courage to stand up and tell him how I felt about it, and be willing to hear how he truly felt about the whole thing. I hopped on my scooter and propelled myself away from that doorway, up Eustace street, as fast as I could get out of there. We didn't really talk about it again. There wasn't really any way into the subject. We have drifted out of touch, though I think Egon rocks and I am very fond of him, and his work.

So this chat with Eric was a little bit different.

That moment in the door is an interesting one. What is done, where each person stands and steps, how events play out, what feelings arise, and what place those feelings are given, subsequently.

And then, once it's done, what happens next: do you ignore it, silently denying that it happened, and forge alternative allegiances to compensate, or do you face the elephant in the room, like Eric did, and start talking about it?

I think what happens in these door moments can change the course of a person's life. These are the essential, easily compromised aspects of our lives, and the whole deal is done and dusted in a heartbeat, before we've even really noticed anything has happened, at all.

Craigslist round up

Without wanting to disappear up my own arse about this topic, it is always tremendously reassuring to touch base with some of the other hacks for hire on craigslist, and to discover that they're selling themselves for $25 an hour and they haven't proofread their own ads properly. That's about a fair rate for that service.

And then you read through somebody's samples and they've got a portfolio of quite well written web copy and then you spot some glaring proofreading oversight. Jesus. Do these people not read the work they do forty five times before releasing it?

And then you have a look around at what's happening over in general community: A posting from a woman who's 25, feels she might be bipolar, and has no health insurance. What do you do when you're mentally ill and uninsured in America? Cry for help on craigslist, of course! Or buy a lottery ticket. Call yourself a high class companion and sell your body for $5000 a night to 'select discreet gentlemen' over in Casual Encounters.

Calling all black girls! There's a very discreet, sweet, dawn-to-earth (yes that's right ladies, dawn to earth) gentleman looking for a dinner-for-sex arrangement in the strictly platonic section. And if you strike it lucky, you'll get to do it again and again and again.

I wonder if Alanis Morissette knows that one of her lyrics has entered internet dating as a term for casual sex? I'm sure she'd be delighted. Lots of people seem to be looking for friends-with-benefits, or in the craiglist-nuanced usage, alive-human-to-fuck-tonight.

And then there's the whole genre of people who go into the toilet to take their dating profile picture. Clearly it's because there's a big mirror in there so they can check themselves out as they suck in and go click.

But the toilets and towels in the background and generally claustrophobic vibe, combined with the camera held out arm's length mid-picture really lets you know everything you could have hoped to ask them. And the poses. Ah the poses. Poses that suggest hidden, off- camera pep talks with acquaintances poised on the edge of the bath, rolling skunk spliffs: "What disemboweled body? Not in MY bathroom!" or "Hit me up again Mario, I feel like I'm gonna die, I KNOW one more hit will get me onto the next level", or "I'm gonna get REAL paid for this rack and all I have to do is arch and pout, arch and pout". It's not a pretty thing, the craigslist personals section. Not to mention the

"very successful plastic surgeon seeking a mutually beneficial relationship with a very special, very attractive and very, very sexy young woman" types,

and people interested in paying $1500 a month for GFE (girl-friend-experience, for hire, which seems to be simulated girlfriendness, without the commitment or reality).

This is the seamy side of the city, folks. They took down Times Square and built Craigslist. And how it rocks, oh how it rocks.

I have five words for you

Haagen Dazs Reserve Amazon Valley Chocolate. Okay, six. Icecream. Seven.

Fucking amazing. Nine.

Brief glimpses inside another human being

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!

Whippet Love, the Musical

There's a company accepting short scripts for a festival of erotica in early December, here in the city. I have just found myself actually wondering if they might be interested in a little tale of whippet erotica. More to the point, I have found myself wondering if I had what it took to write such a tale. And the third prong of my three pronged thought process this past few minutes, has been in wondering if such a tale could possibly be written as a stage play.

It's funny being away from Denmark

I've got a feeling I'm going to really love it when I'm next there. Denmark is in my heart, dude. I'm feeling a little integration of the Denmark vibe in my soul.
Hallelujah for that one.

Edie

This weekend, I watched some footage of Edie Sedgwick during the filming of Ciao Manhattan in 1965. The movie itself was rank, but hurrah that the camera was lit and rolling during that whole speed addled - max's - downtown scene in this town in the sixties. What was fabulous about it was that that was a time when you could be the strangest creature in the world and fall into living in some apartment in downtown Manhattan and not have to worry too hard about getting the rent paid. And there were plenty of other people like you to hang out with. The downside for me, though, would have been all the requisite drug addiction, and more to the point, the fact that everybody around you was fucked up.

So there was Edie and crew, Edie tanked up to the max in makeup and Dr. Robert's specials, eating in new york's very first sushi restaurant, back in '65.

You know, this was a landscape of amphetamine and cocaine and heroin and drinking all day long as the natural landscape of things. Everybody you knew for miles around was injecting themselves with speed several times a day. It was the norm. David Weisman describes the vibe: "this was the very first sushi restaurant in the city! We all thought we were on a health kick going in there.. and if you went to the gym aswell as eating sushi, well you HAD to be queer."

At any given time, a rotating 20 people lived in his 43rd st. duplex on an informal basis, and somebody had built a little cupboard for herself to live in, for privacy's sake. Fun. For a visit. Probably a total pain in the arse to be paying the rent on that flat. So what's the difference today?

All the artists are graphic designers, and everybody's in advertising or branding! Somebody mentioned that this was a time before marketing was invented. So Edie picked up whatever random garments lay on the floor of her Bentley and put them together and they became the look of the era. This was a time when people hadn't quite learned the skills of mass manipulation yet. They hadn't yet learned how to herd people into marketing pens, lock the door shut and sell to them.

So this is why people talk about that sixties era as having been "an innocent time". But to me, that's all kind of shot to shit by all the people who roll around in the glory of it, ever since. Whoever these middle aged farts are that talk about having been at Woodstock and lounged on the Silver Couch, it's all bollocks. They weren't anywhere in sight in that infra red-lit backroom at Max's Kansas City.

From the glimpses you get of that particular scene from this footage, it seems to me that what you're really seeing is boredom in motion in new york city, old style. Boredom has always had options in a town like this. There's plenty of trouble to get into. And if you throw some heiress' disposable cash and Warhol, the world's first artist marketeer, into the mix of heroin addicts, Vogue editors and drag queens, you've got a party.

I think then, as now, there was probably a multitude of new yorks, a multitude of scenes, and the ones with the sexiest pictures got made into posters. That's how we remember the sixties, through its iconography. The sixties are a bit like the effect Joyce had on Irish prose writing: it could take the culture a hundred years to get over it.

So this kind of new york came up and sank back. What kinds of new york are rising from the murk today? What are today's adventures in new york city?

Keep your lamplight trimmed and burning, baby.

Tonight's flavour

Half baked.
Packed full of gobs of every kind of chocolate bollocks you can imagine.
I'm waiting for it to melt to the right temperature.

Who says art ain't dangerous?

I got stabbed in the finger with the sharpened point of one of the pencils I walk around with in my bag. The lead tip chipped off and a good quarter inch of it settled deep under the skin like a tiny little bullet graze.

Pushing it out was the main event, though. That took a bit of work.

New Joni Record!

Joni Mitchell has a new album out tomorrow, released through Starbucks. First new record in a long time, and after she had apparently kicked the lid down on songwriting and told it never to come out again. Apparently you can hear it in any Starbucks store tomorrow from 11 am to 2 pm, if you can stomach the coffee and the weird service system.

I love that gal. I'll be there.

Latest news about the Park Slope Lunatic

He gave me a dirty look last night, and didn't even bother to shake his can at me. And definitely no comments about my outfit.

Open letter to a life in Denmark

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, ----.

Whippet Love, 6

Whippet Love, 5

I heard a man talking on the phone in an Irish accent

along 5th avenue.

"Irish!" I called after him, the way I do here, sometimes.
He didn't turn around.

It's irresistible to me, when I hear it. It sounds so beautiful. I have had a number of conversations with people in the street purely on the basis of hearing my home accent. And it's interesting, because there is a relationship between the amount of time a person has been living away from their home country, and the strength of their desire to talk to another Irish person purely because of the resonant music of Irishness.

A thought struck me last night, walking home (from Freddy's: look, any time you see me writing about the thoughts I have on the way home, just know it happened after Freddy's, I think I'll have to make a new label: walking home from Freddy's) and it was very simple: love for one's country grows in exile. That has been my experience, and while exile is a grandiose kind of a word, I like it for what it signifies to me underneath and before the grandiosity.

And it's true in my case. I have found myself having a sense and feeling of Ireland that is entirely new, a love for the place that has actually only really come into existence since I moved away from it. It grows inside you. I think that's probably just the natural way of things. When you're in a place, the tendency is to take it for granted, and crib about the small stuff, and then when you're away from it, the broad strokes come into relief. I think age has a lot to do with it, aswell, though maturity and age do not often, actually, dovetail.

One of the things I love about new york city (and there are many, and I want to write about all of them, ultimately) is the ubiquity of the English language. It's just so easy to understand and be understood by people here. And you get to hear all kinds of interesting stuff, stuff you can understand. I only have this particular appreciation for the fact that I hear English everywhere because I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, and one of the things I missed very much about living there was that I felt so shut off from streetlife in that way, so shut off from the overheard joke, and the generalness of things.

Also, the more you speak English to people for whom it is not their native tongue - no matter how fluent they are - your own language skills start going down the toilet fast. You lose your slang, you lose your jive, you pick up bad habits in your own language that are prevalent in non-native speakers. And when you speak their language, you're only ever able to express yourself mediocrely, at best. However, despite all this, I had some profound and beautiful moments of connection with people through Danish. In particular, the old people I visited and cared for, during my last months there. That was where it all happened, with Danish, for me.

You can hear every language being spoken here in new york city. I have an appreciation for people who come to a strange place without knowing the language. I was stopped for directions on Prospect Park West by a middle aged man with almost no English, who I could just about make out was looking for Montgomery st., and he was rolling a delivery trolley. I didn't know where it was, but I shouted to the people behind, and they didn't know either. Anyway, I bade him good luck on his way. Jesus, though, I thought, and turned around to the people behind again, and said,

"Jesus. Imagine not being able to speak English and coming to new york city, and trying to survive?" That is just unfuckingfathomable. And it happens, thousands of times every day. Anyway, it turns out that the people behind were from Namibia and Germany, had been living in the city for a long time, and they had their own stories to share.

Learning a new language in situ is challenging, under any circumstances, especially if you have no choice but to speak it through the day, to be in that mode of trying to understand, all the time. It's like a switch that is permanently on, in your brain. You're reaching out, in some inexplicable way, constantly, to catch subtle inflections, throwaway vowel sounds, a look in the eye. You get used to spending entire years of your life catching 10, 15, 20% of conversations, of never getting the joke even when you understand it, of constantly being, to a greater or lesser extent, out of things, outside of the culture. Because you are. I think you need a very strong anchor to keep you in a monoculture that is not your own, and one that is so strongly based on its own traditions, like Denmark is.

And I've met people who have that anchor, they found it through love, through marriage and family. I didn't find anyone who was not Danish, who found that anchor through love of the place itself, there. But I'm sure there are people who have settled there, particularly along the west coast, who found that kind of love, that kind of devotion, to the place, the landscape. People find that feeling every day in Ireland. The place is jumping with every nationality in the world. It's like a mini-new york.

I find it here.

Whippet Love, 4

Whippet Love, 3

Email from my mum in Majorca

... I think she might be referring to my blog pics...

ur better looking than that love mum

Whippet Love, 2

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.

Sleeping with whippets

Lest there be any doubt about it, I am currently sharing my bed with a pair of whippets. Rather, they're sharing their bed with me. I'm the interloper. But we're really having a blast. They sleep under the blankets, resting their heads on my feet.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, with a whippet's head on the pillow beside me.

Right. It's-last-pee-of-the-night - time for the ladies. And so we to bed.

Tonight's flavour

Mint chip. Not the best.

Ambition

I had what struck me as an ambitious thought, this evening. I thought, I'd like to own a brownstone on a really great Brooklyn block, and live in it some of the year, offering it to sound people on some kind of a cheap basis in order to live and make interesting work in new york city without selling their arses, the rest of the time.

Gosh, that's quite ambitious, I thought.

And then I thought, yeah, to me it is. But that probably wouldn't necessarily strike somebody else as particularly ambitious, AT ALL. David and Victoria Beckham, for instance, I found myself thinking, would probably see no particular ambition there at all.

So you see, these things are all relative.

Prospect Heights News: two slugs were seen on 6th avenue moving slowly toward each other this evening

Stay tuned for updates as the story develops.

The park slope lunatic

Did I write about the lunatic I saw recently? An actual lunatic human being, out on the street, uncared for. He's a park slope regular, what we'd call a character, in Dublin. Well, I had a human, friendly interaction with him, yesterday. He shakes a starbucks carton out there on 7th ave, looking for change. He's got about 10 plastic bags with stuff in them, and each plastic bag is really more a of a unit of plastic bags, probably about 10 of them doubled up and frayed and filthy, forming each unit.

Anyway, last night we said howrya, and it was honest, low-key, casual and true. It was nice to see his human face. So this evening, I emptied out my loose change and dropped it in his can. "Them's really nice earrings" he says, dropping compliments for hopes of cash reward the way the guy who stands by the Flatbush 7th ave Q train entrance does.

That was such a fucking pity.

Cheap Psychic advice available on 7th avenue in Park Slope

There's a white camper van parked on 7th ave with a sign in the venetian blinded window saying "Psychic Advice, $2." I bet it's no phoney, neither.

I think I'd be spooked going to a psychic who advertised his services discreetly for $2, and who clearly lives in a camper van that he parks all over the gentrified areas of Brooklyn. He might just know what he's talking about.

She gazes through the window (late summer's evening)

Whippet Love

Mott shop

There's a shop on Mott St. in the centre of the Chinatown ant hill, called "Romantic Gift Shop Inc". Across the street is the "Romantic City Gift Inc." shop.

Competition in the neighbourhood. Clearly there is money to be made.

The Readers of Park Slope

Found and pocketed, last night, on the way home from Freddy's:

1 copy of Dante's Inferno, on a lamppost
1 copy of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, on a stoop

Seen and resisted:

The contents of a depressed intellectual's renounced life, in a cardboard box. Contents included Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann novels, and a single black eyepatch. Hurrah! The Wicked Witch is Dead!

Elsewhere, a brownstone homeowner on 6th avenue has clearly had the dream shattered. Her stash of Daphne Du Maurier novels (and it was exhaustive) lay on her stoop's second to last step, naked and offered to the world.

It's a neighbourhood of readers, reading and releasing, reading and releasing, furiously.

Me n Thea, 2

But my jaw really did drop open at the sight of this one

Writing Internship or Build Your Portfolio with Fear Driven Stories

---

Can you come up with fear driven stories worthy of a newspaper? Your story will be read by 20,000 people a day or more.

A High Tech NYC company seeks budding writer to assist in creating a multitude of stories relating to cheating, law enforcement, child endangerment, criminal activity and more.

If you would like to offer your talents to build up your portfolio and credit, then we would love to have you be a part of our team. This is a non-paid internship. You can come here for school credits or just for fun. Once you are finished with your stay here, we will be more than happy to offer phenomenal recommendations wherever you may go.

On a side note, we have tons of really cool high tech gadgets to play with every day, many you can take home. The skys the limit to showcase all your writing talents. We won’t hold you back.

Reply to this email and we will get back to you right away.

As if the ecosystem that is craigslist knew I was writing about its writers gigs section...

... it just posted this.

Dunkin Donuts for Creative Writing!

I have $200 worth of Gift Certificates for Dunkin Donuts in exchange for some creative writing. They have over 18 different types of coffees, lattes, as well as their donuts and breakfast sandwiches which make perfect writing companions!

Basically, I'm an artist/game designer who needs some characters and storylines fleshed out. I have the basic skeletal outlines but need someone to fill em in.

E-mail me for more details!

An "Everything but the Two Twisted" kind of posting

... that's a Ben and Jerry's flavour, folks in Europe! And my local Met store sells them for $2.50 a pop! And it's a bit of a pun, also. The themes will dovetail nicely, as you read on. Just like a tub of the good stuff.

Well I can't believe I've been blogging for a few weeks with almost no mention of craigslist. Let the silence be broken here, and now.

I advertise my writing and editing services on craigslist (hereafter known as cl). It's a pretty wide-ranging clientele, which keeps things interesting, and work does come in. There are of course many people on cl who are looking for people to write business proposals or do line-editing as some sort of charitable donation to the city of new york, but they don't get it from me.

I rarely look at other writers' ads, but I just spotted a guy who has advertised himself as

***THE VERY BEST EDITOR ON CRAIGSLIST IS HERE*** (Midtown)

which was welcome light relief. I always get a chuckle from the frustrations of those who use keyboard shouting to get heard on cl.

They punctuate V&RY L@*DLY ***** LIKE TH#S====++ AND CAPITALISE ALL THEIR SENTENCES, IN BOLD.

But the best bit is the (Midtown) bit. That's just a straightahead lie, to sound impressive and busy and scatter some shitkicking ballbreaking manhattan fairy dust over the proceedings. This guy is clearly living in Yonkers.

Oh sometimes you just need a hug from a whippet. And then you get one from a whippet who is skilled and talented in this area, and you know it's all going to be fine. This whippet's ear skin is so thin, the sun shines through it. Her fur is very fine, too, like a threadbare rug, and her skin is pink with black spots underneath. And she likes hiding under the duvet, where it's warm and nice.

I was doing my customary Haagen Dazs fridge groove last night, where I stand before the impressive supermarket cabinet, filled floor to ceiling only with Haagen Dazs, and I'm focussing, making mental judgments:
Sorbet, no.
Low fat, no.
Strawberry, no.
English toffee, mm..
Triple chocolate, uh, triple chocolate.. oh... Just what kind of triple chocolate IS it, anyway?

And a kindly elderly black hep-cat reached over me and opened the cabinet door, taking out a bucket of rum-raisin manfully, without deliberation. He turned to me and said, in his hep-cat harlem accent, "I've got it too, sugar. Don't feel bad!" And I reached in and pulled out that tub of triple chocolate without further ado, and marched to the counter.

Me

Whippet Central

Back in Whippet City

I'm whippet-sitting for the week.

God, it was such a gorgeous day today. It is definitely autumn, and though there are still a few valiant flip-floppers grooving around still, in their shorts, the time for the summer is past past past. The leaves are already crinkly and covering the ground.

I brought the ladies, as I call them, for a walk in the park and then up to my flat, and back home through the park. It's like walking around with a pair of supermodels, or mother teresa. They spread joy and happiness where e'er they go. Handsome men turn to smile fondly as they speed through the park on their high tech racing bikes; groups of 13 year old black children feel they can make contact. All sorts of people stop to marvel at the Amazing Whippets. Especially today, because they were out in their green sweatshirts, which make them look a bit like supermodels slumming it, or those incredibly rich old people you sometimes see wandering around the upper east side in their knickers with several nurses attending them. God save us from yes-men.

But with two sanguine whippets at hand, you get to talk to so many people you probably wouldn't otherwise. The funny thing is, most people say, knowingly, "Italian greyhounds, right?" with a little wink. They screw up their noses when they hear "Whippets, actually."

I've been through this drill so many times I should seriously consider making an application as some sort of tour guide to the International Whippet Association. People ask if they're friendly, as the ladies strain at the leash to get away. "Well, they're not really that bothered, as far as I can tell. They're not either friendly or unfriendly, most of the time. I think they usually don't notice other living things. Except squirrels. They are passionate about squirrels. They sort of do their own thing, you know?" I like to think I'm doing my bit for Global Whippet Consciousness Raising. Sometimes it Feels Good to Capitalise.

Overheard this evening, in the park:

Elderly Austro-German type, full white head of hair and full white beard, speaking in a thick Austrian accent, complete with the hugely enjoyable Germanic zz's. He's talking very quickly and very very enthusiastically to a delighted, giggling elderly lady.

Zo I vonder, what do zey vant viz me, vhen ze place eez zo full of zientists.. And zen I figured it out! I landed in August, and zix monthz later zey land on ze moon - ZAT is why zey vanted me! Of course!!

Some people you just want to make friends with on the spot. Even if just for a short while.

Tonight I am off to the great Entertainment Soup Kitchen that is Freddy's Backroom bar. This evening's sustainence is a comedy stew, with a light chat for afters.

It's not a night for sandals

It is amazing sometimes, the kind of rich soul-nourishment you can get from a cup of decent Irish tea and a sandwich of two easy single slices, on white toast, with butter, sometimes.

That's American cheese slices for the Americans, and the whole concept is just too difficult to translate for the Danes. It's the kind of comfort you get from a slice of rugbroed with leverpostej, I guess.

Of course, the cool thing is that you can get organic easy singles here. From a 24 hour supermarket a couple of blocks away.

It's a windy night, and the air is cold. Most of my clothes are summery so I've got to make a few visits to Beacon's Closet - a huge thrift store up in Billyburg and another branch down on the Slope - and have a look around for some warm stuff.

As I was walking along Flatbush tonight, I had some thoughts about being in new york on a saturday night and not feeling like rocking out, or travelling, but feeling like something human, and not having a lover, and not really having any friends here yet of the sort I could just call up and feel always welcome with. And not having a guitar. I suppose that's what I like about places like Freddy's. It's that kind of vibe, a regular spot, with friendly regulars. But even Freddy's gets busy on the weekend.

And that's just how it goes, you know? The rough with the smooth. That's just how it goes in new york city and anywhere else.

Hey, I saw an old interview of Tom Waits on Letterman, from 1984. Letterman asks him, "how would you describe new york?" And he says, "Well... it's like a big ship. (pauses) And the water's on fire."

The Pampas of Brooklyn, def.

Those little patches of wild, scrubby ungentrified green weedy ground it is still possible to find in areas of Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Bed Stuy. Some are sizable, and fill the area of a brownstone that is no longer there, or a sports arena that would raze all indigenous life varieties in the area, to be replaced largely by a single bud-lite mega-variety.

Trash treasure hunters, def.

Those of us who have half an eye cocked permanently on the kerbs (curb for the Americans, kantsten for Danes) of new york city for riches, especially on garbage days.

Seen on the street

I just saw a woman rolling a basset hound in a pram (stroller for the Americans; barnevogn for the Danes).

She did not look insane.

I am in the mood for rock and baby, I am in the mood for roll

I'm a-going dancin tonight! I don't feel good for much this weekend except dancing, having fun and hanging out on my fire escape.

Have a great weekend..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnY1hlI-olw&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Mw6b1T50U&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP1TC21QsnA&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzKiqk2iynY

Seal

Seekin' music, that's what it is. Fucking beautiful, passionate, living seeking music.

In Love

I feel so good today. I feel like I'm in love. I don't know who with, though. It's very exciting. All I know is that he's very sexy and his eyes are full of beauty. And he rocks.

Good Intentions

I found a page from a book sitting on the ground on my block two days ago. Just reached down and picked it up. You never know what might be incredibly interesting in this town, and where you might find it. Here's what it said:


HERE WE GO QUIETLY NUTS IN MAY

Do you hanker for April showers
Or a rarefied day in June?
Give me a grade-A May day,
And please deliver it soon.
I am weary of branches naked,
Creaking like lovelorn cats;
The earth underfoot half bak`ed
And the sun overhead ersatz.
Send me a balmy zephyr
To play me a rigadoon,
And I'll gulp of my grade-A May day
Till my hiccups hammer the moon.


On my big walk yesterday, I walked the block on the other side of the street, and spotted several more dogpissed-on and new york shoe'd on sheets of the same book, and my response was ecstatic. More book, more book! I left one page there, because it had fresh dogpiss on it, and that was just a step too far for me on that occasion. I will, however, have a look out there today, see if it's dried.

One of the pages is, luckily enough, a cover page, with the words Good Intentions written on it, so I'm guessing that's the name of the book.

So I'll be posting what I have of this anonymous book in intervals over the next while. I have five pages, printed on both sides.

Do the shimmer, do the shake shake with all of your might

I was walking through Prospect Heights toward Fort Greene/Bed Stuy this evening around 6, when I saw them. Five groups of white birds, each group maybe 200 birds, dancing in the sky. Weaving into and around each other, playing. They shimmered like the sun against a rippled river surface, continually as they danced, each group moving as one, and moving in and out of each other across the blue sky.

I think I'm in love.

It reminded me of a group of birds I watched one evening in the Amager Faelled wild park in Copenhagen, when I lived there (was it last year? yes, I believe it was last year, though it feels like a hundred years ago) one evening when I was still wearing shorts but the air was crisp and freezing, the way the air gets by September in Denmark.

I heard them first.

They made a huge chatter, getting their chirp on, a couple of hundred birds up the top of a very tall tree. They sat there, sang and chatted and chirped for a few minutes, then suddenly they all took off, as if the tree had run its fingers through its hair, and they moved around a bit like musical chairs, dancing, and then resettled at once in different parts of the tree, resuming their song, chats and chirps with fresh chicas and chicos.

This went on for about a half an hour, and the more they went on, the more birds came. It was like a nightclub by the end of it. About a thousand birds in the tops of three tall trees, and then when they were ready, it was like they just heard the opening bars of Dancing Queen, and instinct propelled them toward the dancefloor. The thousand birds took off at once, as one.

They moved across the great expanse of sky over the faelled, moving like a manatee. All I could do was stand there, and watch. Jump up and down occasionally when the cold got really intense. Because I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave.

As soon as they took off into the sky - a thousand birds gracefully moving as one, a thousand bird iceskaters skating a perfect dance - they were silent. Not a peep, not a chirp. Nothing. Just singular movement. After a while, a very small subgroup developed, of like-minded avant garde birds, clearly, who were in sympathy with the mainframe, but they needed to break away to express their own dance in a more intimate unit. They met the large group every few seconds like a pair of dishwashing bubbles gliding and bouncing off of each other and moving apart again.

This evening, there were five groups of birds, and they moved and weaved and danced too, and shimmered like the sea. I stood on the corner of Dean and Underhill and watched.

Prospect Heights can man

Hey Sweep, what cho doin?
Sweep, I'm yo mistress. I'm yo bride n I'm yo groom.
Whatcha know, Sweep?

I don't have no dollars.
I'm on social security.
I'm retired.

Stranger seen, unmet

I had a new york moment on the F train. I recognised a bloke sitting on the train and I had no idea where from, or what country, or context. Could have been anywhere. I just have a strong feeling that I've met and talked with him before. Young, college-looking, with wiry red hair and a wiry red beard, very American looking in a thin, malnourished kind of way, baseball cap.

And he got up to exit the train at Carroll Gardens. I wasn't in the mood to go and find out the scoop. And so he disappeared back into the new york ocean, teeming with every kind of sealife in its 300 square miles.

They have sealife in Freddy's, also. Underwater swimming toads in a water tank, with human arses. I freaked one out. He saw me and jumped. Underwater.

In the background, ladies sang arias and men sat at the bar, chugging whiskey.

Here come the hotstepper

My dad sent me some post that had come to their house for me since I've come here. One of the letters was an invitation to my cousin's wedding in October. I'm flying back to Ireland for it on the 8th. It was a sweet invitation, no doubt chosen with intense deliberation, and I have a feeling that they hired someone to write the names by hand in fancy calligraphy. There was also a handful of little shiny winged angels with bugels, confetti-style, scattered in the envelope. Anyway, somehow the angels have found their way all over the place. I'm stepping on angels as I move through the flat.

It makes it a bitch to hoover, though.

Fun with Photo Booth

Spam in Spanish

When my comments came back on, I had one comment. It was in Spanish, and it looked like spam. I deleted it.

Knock on wood, baby. oooh.

I've just been involved one of those conversations that felt like we were rollerblading at speed through the boroughs of new york city. One of those conversations that had us. Tonight, at Freddy's. We drank of that conversation like two thirsty feckers, jugs and jugs of it, half afraid to stop in case there mightn't be more of it for ages. Beautiful.

Here's something I started writing in the street earlier tonight, and finished it just before that conversation happened.

Did you ever get the feeling that nobody likes you? I mean, nobody. I've had the feeling that nobody likes me. Just now. It's kind of still sticking around a bit. Yes. It's still here. The more people I meet, the more unfriendly things seem to be getting.

People keep sending me away. I must have some strange magnetism this evening. Even the bartender told me to get served by somebody else.

Knock, knock, knock on wood.

That Kind of Day

I'm trying to think of a joke. This is the kind of evening that requires a joke and a bottle of beer. Of course I would ask you to kindly post jokes in the comments section, if I had a comments section. It disappeared in the night. There is some anti-Competition Olympics troll prowling around the internet, and I want to make it clear RIGHT NOW that YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE WRONG OLYMPIAN HERE, ye little fecker. Hmm.. a joke a joke my kingdom for a joke. Nothing comes to mind, except a bunch of very very very dodgy jokes I heard last night which are of the kind only repeatable in small hushed groups.

I do have some news about my parents' forthcoming Majorca holiday. Mum has bought some snorkel sets in Dunnes so they can put their heads in the water and still breathe and the fish apparently swim all around you. They are very excited about their holiday.

I am, too.

Anyone got a guitar? Lets have a sing-song. The wind is blowing and the night is cold and you can feel autumn in the air today.

Gremlins Begone!

Very very strange day.

So my comments section has vamoosed! I have no idea what happened, but am working on having it restored as soon as possible.

If anyone knows anything about how to get the comments feature back, please drop me a line.

Thanks.

Darkness at noon

It's pouring rain here. Hard rain.

It must be tough for the people standing in Zuccotti park, reading out names.

Competition Olympics Prizes for Winners

Ok, lets turn up the temperature a little on this one. There's gonna be prizes for the outright winner of each leg of the Inaugural Honorary LUCYTAKESOFF Competition Olympics 2007. I would like to clarify that these individual-round prizes will NOT be presented on a plinth with garlands and a cup to hold aloft in pride and achievement, but are merely teasers, you might call them, to string you along and get you entering. Good lord. Racy.

When we have completed all the legs of the Inaugural Honorary LUCYTAKESOFF Competition Olympics 2007, then and only then will all the names be put into a hat and drawn from a drum that goes round and round by an air hostess with a blindfold on, and the winning names read out over a microphone in some kind of a live webcast by a minor Irish rockstar. Flashing discolights might also feature. And the plinths, garlands, medals, bathing suit etc. bit you already know from previous posts.

This week's prize:

drumroll drumroll drumroll drumroll

A set of five vhs copies of Simpsons Featurettes, or perhaps they're Simpsons Thematic Treasuries, each about 88 minutes long, which I found on a stoop at 6th avenue and President Street in Park Slope, this evening. Here's the rub, though. You'll have to watch them with me, because I don't have a video player and I'd love to see them. But I'm saying it now, ladies and gentlemen, I will NOT be wearing a bathing suit for the screening.

So far, the lovely Constance is in Pole Position as the ONLY entrant in the competition. And for all of you who have recently started reading the blog, dig deep to at least a week ago, there's another competition, which was Leg One of this prestigious and highly unusual Olympic variety, which is still open, though another New Yorker, the lovely Chris, is in a similar Pole Position there.

I wish you the best of luck.

"LUCYTAKESOFF is the only blog for me at the end of a hard day, because ... " in words ten or less. Post in the comments section of the original post please.

I've heard ugly rumours that the comments section is a gmail or blogger account-only zone or someshit by Blogger. I do hope this ain't so, and will be investigating whatthefuck.

Good lord, I've got a dirty mouth this evening. Just come back from the spelling bee at Freddy's Backroom tonight.

It's got to be that.

that rocknroll feeling, which is not the same as that microsoft feeling

Last week was happily a rocknroll kind of week, what with the arctic monkeys in central park on wednesday, barband singing in chinatown on thursday, the brooklyn country music festival at southpaw on friday and uh, Shakespeare in the Park on saturday. Well you know, rocknroll is a feeling, my friends.

I would post the review I wrote of the arctics gig, but my microsoft word test drive has just expired today and it won't even open any of the documents I've written in it.

So this is a bit of a bollocks moment. If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can avoid paying microsoft four hundred bucks for access to the documents I wrote in word (and I have been writing like a pig in muck, ladies and gentlemen), please email me at herecomeslucy AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks.

Jiving on the connections between us

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.

The in-towner

My trip to Nola has been postponed. It looks like I'm in NYC the whole month through.

Queen of the Rock, Queen of the Roll

I saw a beautiful photograph today.

It was taken in CBGB's in 1975. Patti Smith is wearing a sleeveless Ronny Wood t-shirt and she's holding court, grooving, dancing. And Bob Dylan is standing beside her, watching her at the centre of things, with a huge warm smile of pure delight, looking healthy and bearded, his hands clasped together tightly at his chest. It is entirely unlike any photograph of the man that I have ever seen. Of course neither of them seem aware of the camera. And even if they were, it was probably taken by a friend.

I'm still thinking about this image. I can hear his laugh, her drawl.

The bounty hunters

The US senate has voted to raise the bounty on Osama Bin-Laden's head to $50 million. Well, lets hope it's not a Euro-zoner who finds him, because the exchange rate will be killing.

This is unbelievable. This is the most wanted man in the world since Adolf Hitler and the land of the moneymaking free's governing body is willing to give fifty million dollars to have his head carved and brought to their table on a plate? Who the hell do they think they're talking to?

This isn't a missing kitten poster, tacked to a tree.

They are demanding, in effect, that this man's closest associates betray their leader. The Senate is effectively requiring the creation of a whole Gethsemane scene that could well become the start of a new worldwide religion. This is the big time. Fifty million dollars may sound like a lot of money when you're trying to pay your rent in New York city, but it's probably not quite enough to give somebody who's looking for it, the life of an oil sheikh.

But surely anything that happens now in the bin Laden story is all gravy, as far as he's concerned. He's had his rockstar moment, he's made his impact, the world knows his name and quivers when it's mentioned. His big idea has been sent through the world, and it has reverberated.

Meanwhile the "9-11 was an inside job" campaigners were out in Union Square today, handing out dvds and flyers. Convincing conspiracy theories are still pistol hot in America. As is the "Impeach Cheney, Impeach Bush" movement.

I saw a touching documentary about Al Gore a couple of weeks ago, made by Spike Jonze before That Election. The documentary was never officially released. Gore seemed very possessed of a sense of civic duty, but more than that, he was human and sincere (and also half naked and bodysurfing). There is a huge desire in the hearts of many here, trying hard to convince him to run. You can find these people at draftgore DOT com.

Elsewhere on the planet, Bill Clinton is planning to fundraise in Ireland, for Hillary's campaign. That has got to be a first.