Mamuska night pics

What to do in the event of an atomic bomb

I’ve decided to keep an occasional series of posts under the label, Google Searches. People out there in internet land have a LOT of needs, and very often they confess all to Mother Google, in the form of a question, or a declaration of a problem, or something sought after. And sometimes, these searches send them in the way of Lucy Takes Off. I find out about them when I check my stats, and discover how people get here.

If you got spun out here today for the first time like a cow from the eye of a tornado, welcome to the pastures of Lucy Takes Off. If you’ve been hooked up to Lucy Takes Off for months like a bitch to a bag of crack, welcome. I can only hope that you find here a balm to soothe the worry from your brow, get a little kick to get you through the night. We do our best, here at Lucy Takes Off, and her sister site, Here Comes Lucy. Feel free to have a look around.

So this series starts here, with a question from Concerned from Portsmouth, whose issue with Google last night was “what to do in the event of an atomic bomb”. Naturally, Concerned was ushered at once into the safe waters of Lucy Takes Off. And the post he was directed to was this one from December of last year, but we’re an audience friendly kind of shindig around here, so I’d like to address his question more fully, directly.

Well, the first thing that I would imagine I would do if I saw a mushroom cloud in the sky, would be to be very surprised. You just don’t hear about atomic bombs anymore. They’ve just lost their popularity. Sure, there was some attempted resurgence in the last few years, but that all came to nothing more than accusations and threats and bombs dropped on countries who wouldn't play "bomb back".

What with the bubble skirts and big hair and loud patterns of the eighties coming back around recently, there’s been a fondness for all things of that era, and nuclear fright was all the rage back then too. So my best guess for that initial response, is that most people would be looking in the sky uttering variable involuntary invocations on the “what the fuck” theme, and if you’re in a car you might find yourself in a crash-type situation, so I would advise wearing a seat belt at all times, or if you’re a cyclist, a sturdy helmet. But I think you’ll manage that shock response all on your own.

The next thing to do would again be instinctual. Reach for your camera, your mobile phone, your mac with photo booth, and take a picture.

A few years ago in Ireland, there was some frenzy about what we would actually do about fall out, if it were ever to happen. I think it started on the Joe Duffy show, where many good national scares start, and we collectively realised that actually nobody had been talking much about nuclear bombs anymore and none of us knew what we’d do. So the minister who was supposed to know all about this stuff turned out not to know anything much about it at all but somebody whispered in his ear that they had heard a rumour on the internet that it would be a good idea to drop iodine tablets into drinking water, and that that would neutralise all the radiation in the fallout, and everything would be groovy. So everybody in Ireland who was registered to vote got sent a little package of iodine tablets. I don't think anyone wrote a song about that phenomenon, the iodine tablets and our salvation. Missed moment.

I read a lovely graphic novel when I was small. It was called “When the Wind Blows”, a story of two old people who had been young in London during world war two and how they tried to cope with a nuclear disaster in the same way as they did back then, which of course didn’t work out too well for them at all. But it’s a pretty gorgeous book, if you ever happen to come across it. You’ll probably have it read in a couple of hours, and it’s a good illustration of what happens when people try their best to apply what they’ve been told they should do in the event of a nuclear war to the reality of it.

So, Concerned, I hope this helps to round out your checklist and sense of preparedness for what to do In The Event Of A Bomb. Good luck. I hope you never have to pop those iodine tablets (available widely throughout Ireland in 2003 or perhaps in a chemist shop near you).

Guantanamo bay knickers

How about this for that special gift for that special lady on Valentine's day..

Yikes, it's a tiger in sequins and fake tan (and she's forgotten her tablets)!

Here's the first line from an article in today's Irish Independent.

Irish women are slowly drinking themselves to death in the comfort of their own homes -- sipping bottles of extra-strong wines as they sit in front of the television.

I was in a large suburban pub last night. The age range was very wide, from 18 to 75, and thoroughly mixed. The bizarre thing was that there were a few groups of young women dressed in tiny sparkly dresses and spindly sparkly sandally stilettoes, tremendous quantities of cleavage on display, bare legs, mucho make up, and there was even one gal who seemed to be inspired by the Pussycat Dolls' dominatrix routine, but with Irish Dancing style dyed black ringlets. She got 'em going on the dancefloor, I can tell you. But I was making my escape when that got started.

There's something really odd to me about dressing up like a drag queen to go to your local pub on a saturday night. But this is part of the Tiger legacy over here. The above mentioned newspaper is always going on about how rich the Irish are, and certainly, there's employment, and drinking money, and houses being built and extensions on houses being built. And there's money, there's no doubt about that. But I think that for most people, it's about dressing up like you're expecting the paparazzi to show up and snap you as you fall out of the pub/your dress/your mind at 3 am. There seems to be a lot of hope in it. Hope with boom, despair with bust, of course. But everybody's trying really hard to be sexy in Ireland, at the moment. They'll do just about anything to be sexy. And in Ireland, at the moment, sexy is defined in streetwalkin' drag queen terms.

I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, where of course everybody looks like a supermodel and nobody wears make up (except the actual drag queens, because SOMEBODY has to have glamour). They're not outrageously rich over there, but the minimum wage is twice what it is in Ireland, and they have a decent health, education and social welfare system for their extra 10% tax. Of course they're all suffocated by their comfortableness, so that's another story.

There was a Mr. and Mrs. style quiz on The Late Late Show on friday night. Three couples answered questions like "What do you think your girfriend would name a baby, if it was a boy: Evan, Sean, or Justin?" in order to win a customised marquee wedding and honeymoon in Capetown, to the value of €35,000. This is what people are paying for their pageboy-scattering-organic-rose-petals weddings these days. And that's just the cheap, common or garden variety version. People save up for years so they can afford to get married. Just to have the day.

As I write, an old woman has been carried out of her jazz brunch in this fancy hotel, to languish on the couch in the lobby. She has forgotten to to take her pills this morning. The French Maitre D' has brought her a glass of water. They're calling her doctor.

Pub telepathy

I drew a picture of the back of a man's head in a bar, last night. He immediately scratched his neck, and looked around vaguely, behind him. He's the guy in the bottom left of this picture.

Empty space age hotel lobby zone

I'm lousy with jetlag, but alive and breathing in a new time zone. This is the view from here...

Bringing it all back home

Making an orderly queue of himself

the slightly rhyming morning news

What a gorgeous day.. I'm going up on the roof to get some rays.. Ireland again, in three days.. hurrah hurrah hurrah.. but Brooklyn today, Brooklyn today, Brooklyn today...

Bollocks

Bollocks.

Those darts of social pain

Have I blogged this already? Just found it, recently written in a notebook, written during some recent social occasion. I don't know who I was writing it to. Maybe you.

It's a look in the eyes, in the face, straight at you. Dislike. Suspicion. Retreat. Social awkwardness. And when you realise that you are, despite your mortification and your burning cheeks, actually no more and no less than anyone else in any room you will ever enter, but human and human alone and having the human experience of life, then maybe you'll be blessed with the capacity to be content with being no more, and no less, than that. And probably drink a lot less.

Milk Cartons

A considerable quantity of hair went missing
from the head of a man known as Head
Head's hair was called Ralph
and Ralph snuck away in the night so stealthily
or was stealthily kidnapped
or wandered away
no one quite rightly knows
but it was done quietly, no cries were heard, no pleadings,
no arguments, no fights, no police were called
Ralph went without even a whimper

the only trace of anything having happened at all was a quiet panic that ascended from the belly of Head, one morning
weeks after the last follicle of Ralph had been stroked, or fondled, or even noticed
and lifted off right through
and away, away, never to be seen again

Truth be told, Head knew was only a matter of time before Ralph walked out of his life
How could he hope to keep such a good looking hair like Ralph interested in sticking around
his humdrum day to day
He could tell that Ralph had ambition he could never satisfy
so yes, there was a story. Yes, he knew.
Though he had never been able to face it.
So by the time Ralph had gone, gone fully
and regret had climbed all over him to claim the place where Ralph once laid
Head was wracked with doubt over whether it would ever
be possible to make amends
to welcome Ralph home
to a new life for them
a mutually loving life, together?

Head walked through the streets of Brooklyn calling out to his lost hair, his belatedly cherished hair
Ralph, Ralph, he called
Come home, you will be loved, Ralph
He went calling
through the streets in January

He put posters up around the neighbourhood
with a picture of Ralph on holiday in France
looking shiny and contented
people agreed he looked very well
looked like he and Head were very happy together
People stopped in the street to commiserate with him
tears were shared
and stories
Pated men began to knock on Head's door
to share their loss, their grief, their woes


But there were hints, clues
telltales and tip offs
eye witnesses
informers
rat finks and their hopeful misconceptions
the skinny, the low-down, a smoking gun or two
there were sightings, there were notions
leads, marks, the occasional follicular doppleganger
those desperate cul de sac wanderings that ended in disappointment and suspicion

So Head had slight inklings that Ralph was afoot
most of it rumours, whisperings and idle gossip
By the time this fever was through
the search for Ralph had borne fruit in Head
the fruit of a feverish and passionate life
a life that had woken up to its pate, its fate, a moment right now
to do something with
to dream and execute

It was around this time that I met Head
And one day I called to Head with two plastic cups of takeaway corner coffee
hot filth: one for him and one for me,
and when Head answered the door
there was some new gentleness around his eyes
some quality of surrender
some peace
What is it? I asked. What have you done?
There is word, he replied.
Someone had seen Ralph.
There were reported sightings of Ralph in bathtub drains across the borough
none of them in houses where Head had visited
on his occasional nocturnal prowls, those moments of serendipity when a pate-loving woman invited him into her bed, and her shower, the next day
No, it was other stranger drains
that contained the hair that would surely prove to be Ralph, Ralph truly
The actual Ralph
Surely...

Did you get a private eye to find him? I asked
No, I got a plumber, he replied
and sent him after
but even an expert plumber
couldn't find any real trace of the actual Ralph
and so Head took his plight above ground.
He made pleas across the borough, citywide, and ultimately across the nation
Ralph appeared on milk cartons for a week
ousting the missing children that usually dwelled there
everyone had enjoyed the pictures of the missing children
they usually looked so cheerful and pretty over morning coffee
the misslings, they called them

Seemed like they had always been around
a real part of the family those misslings
Lightening our coffee, moistening our cereal
Something to put our cocoa into
on those sleepless nights
We kind of liked having those misslings around
We want them back! they announced at once, of a piece, in a chorus
a chorus of families demanding the return of their misslings to the cartons on their breakfast tables

and so when the misslings went missing, there was a fandango, a quargo, quite a to-do
and people actually began to ask, for the first time,
WHERE DID THOSE CHILDREN GO MISSING TO, ANYWAY?
and seeing as they asked, they got answered, and
the children were found in the milk carton factory
pumping udders
in udder slavery
though they said they were quite content to stay there
and not go home to their families
so much time had passed and they had become quite adapted to their new circumstances
had quite a rapport with the various cows that came through the factory
had developed skills
were valued and appreciated
and you know, they heard they had become famous in their absence from The Real World, that other place
that they were household faces, in fact
that they graced the tables
of all the dysfunctional families
they could ever hope or expect
to be a part of.

I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there. Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there.

Ants won't cross a chalk line. If you see them coming in your window, you can draw a line in chalk through their march, and they won't cross it. You'll see their frustration and their intelligence put to work at that chalk line, but they will not cross it. I don't know why. If there is a line of ants walking through your house, you can draw patterns in chalk and get pools of them that are encircled in chalk and don't know what to do about it.

I was thinking about hunger yesterday, about how we're all really just open books of information, however much we'd like to disguise it. It seems incredibly obvious, but we all just actually are what we actually are, regardless of costume. I suppose it's only really remarkable because of the elaborate games of façade building that are so much a part of how human beings socialise. So I was walking along the street feeling kind of hungry for something I couldn't quite name, and got the sense that whatever it was was probably attracting some kind of resolution scenario, whether I was aware of what was going on, or not.

Do you ever do that thing of looking at some particular other people's lives and think about how their lives seem to make more sense than yours? That they seem to be less complicatedly complex and more straightforwardly simple and quietly, daily burning with some of the key elements of life that burn in a huge pyre in the middle of your dark winter's night, and then not come again for weeks or longer? I do, sometimes.

People are different to a really very limited extent, we have different variations of the exact same desires and experiences of life, and usually, I think, most human beings ricochet around exactly the same tin can of humanness, just finding themselves lying on its side or its lid at different times, and for longer or shorter periods. (If you don't get the tin can metaphor, it's slightly but not really oblique, so just take a deep breath and read that sentence one more time, and it'll crack open its rusty beans to you, I promise).

What distinguishes us is the way our lives look to other people, and of course the kinds of activities that happen, the kinds of activities that don't; temperament; and how a person has been shaped by their experiences. Even within that, I don't think the variation is so extreme. And yet we all act like it is, or actually, feel like it is: we get huffy or passionate with each other, we like and dislike each other intensely based purely on how we think we're being perceived or understood, we respond and don't respond to each other's descriptions of exactly the same experiences of living, depending on the language used. We're peculiar, I suppose. Tigers don't seem to be like this.

And then there's the whole sense of expectation of life, based on desires that may go deep or shallow, or just stick around for a long time. And so it's kind of easy to look at your life to see if it's fulfilling those desires, and so find fault or sorrow with it if it isn't. But human perception is a highly volatile thing. At least, mine is. My humanness is at the mercy of the wind and the sun and the moment and what's happening in my body at any given time. When people ask me what it is that I do (for a living, or passion, or whatever) I usually have to stop and think about it to figure out what it is this week. This is, at least, how I have been living for a few years, now. I feel very unknown to myself, in kind of a very fundamental sort of way. I am amazed and embarrassed and surprised by myself quite regularly (usually in different moments, though there are those crazy times when all those things come at once and usually it's hilarious, at least, when it does. Mercies.).

You know, people change their diets and their whole world changes. Moods, energy, thoughts, the lot. It's amazing what happens. Truly awe-inspiring, the diversity and unpredictability of this life.

I met this chick last night who kept touching my arm fondly, and saying things like "I'm so glad you're here", when she had just met me two minutes ago and those two minutes consisted entirely of her saying how fab I was, and this continued throughout our brief acquaintance. So maybe she blows some people's minds by doing that, it's an easy enough tactic to execute once you see it usually goes well, and you know, it's kind of cool to be someone who goes around blowing people's minds. Sometimes. When it actually happens, though, without any wile or guile or lipstick pouting, it's a real conversation stopper. And that can be a drag when you're just keen for a chat.

And blogging these thoughts does seem like a kind of insanity, especially when you're sober and it's four in the afternoon.

Time lags

Sometimes it's hard when you're living five or six hours behind most people you know. Especially when it's nine o'clock at night and you feel like a chat. And then you remember Freddy's. But you don't always remember to go.

Whorlywort

I heard the word whorlywort recently.
Interesting word.
Anyone know what it means?

Green on Orange

He's got a red plastic badge on his lapel. It reads, "Drug Free". He's about 75, black, wearing a faded suit. He walks through the subway car with some bright green sheets of A4 paper, placing one carefully beside each seated passenger, like a schoolteacher dispersing handouts through a classroom. No one moves, responds, or says a word.

As he reaches the other end of the car, he turns and returns down the car, picking the sheets up again. He passes me without collecting the sheet beside me, he notices that I'm reading, and so leaves me be until the very end, and mine is the last sheet to be collected. I'm probably the only one who has shown any interest in even glancing at his tale of woe, his interface with the world. There's a handful of sentences written in black biro, badly photocopied. He had probably sat down at his kitchen table with someone who could write and spell good, to work out what he could possibly say to explain himself in words.

In the short letter, he describes how he was "pushed from a high porch" sometime in his childhood, and some years later began to get epileptic fits and blackouts. "From 1952 - 62 I was strong and healthy", it said. "I am also a James Brown imitator. I consider myself to be a good artist. Please help as much as you can. Yours sincerely, --- ----". Underneath, a black thumb-sized smudge that has the silhouette of a passport photo, and a photocopy of some rubberstamped, slightly official looking text that said "James Brown" in heavy typeset, probably some fan club membership letter that he was sent back in the sixties, maybe during that golden period of his life.

Finally, he comes to me. "Are you finished?", he asks me. "Yes", I answer, "thanks very much". "You're welcome", he replies. And he picks up the lime green sheet, replaces it to the pile in his hand, and falls back into the orange bucket seat, with a sigh.

And the train goes across the bridge, and Manhattan's twinkling nightlights get closer, and soon our D train is sucked in, sucked in... The doors open at Grand street. He heaves himself up out of his seat, out of the train, and across the platform.

Heart of Chocolate

I've just been chocolated out of my MIND. I've been having chilli and cinnamon spicey chocolate soup with a dessert of flourless bittersweet chocolate cake with raspberry coulis, in the chocolate room on 5th ave and it's kind of a messiah moment.

The heart of chocolate beats in my belly. It makes a gloopy drum.

Liquidation in Blue, Williamsburg

Trash city

Soldiers strut along Columbus Circle

The long wait

Hazy bunker man

Too early for the circus

Under Union Square

The rain falls down on last year's man
That's a jew's harp on the table
that's a crayon in his hand
and the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rode
far past the stems of thumbtacks that still throw shadows on the wood

And the skylight is like skin
for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
on the works
of last year's man

I met a lady she was playing with her soldiers in the dark
oh one by one she had to tell them
that her name was Joan of Arc
I was in that army, yes I stayed a little while
I wanna thank you, Joan of Arc, for treating me so well
And though I wear a uniform
I was not born to fight
all these wounded boys you lie beside
Goodnight my friends, goodnight

I came upon a wedding that old families had contrived
Bethlehem the bridegroom
Babylon the bride
Great Babylon was naked, oh she stood there trembling for me
And bethlehem inflamed us both
like the shy one at some orgy
And when we fell together
All our flesh was like a veil
That I had to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail

Some women wait for Jesus and some women wait for Cain
So I hang upon my altar and I hoist my axe again
And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began
when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man
And we read from pleasant bibles that are bound in blood and skin
but the wildnerness is gathering all its children back again

The rain falls down on last year's man
An hour has gone by and he has not moved his hand
But everything will happen if he only gives the word
the lovers will rise up and the mountains touch the ground
but the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
on the works of last year's man

(leonard cohen, last year's man)

Releasing the monkey

So I have a topic today, after a few somewhat heated email exchanges on the topic of 'cute'. Cute, as in this kind of thing. You know, the tiny baby animal, helpless in human hands, abandoned by its mother, rare endangered species with spiral tail, almost-human-looking kind of cuteness, that reaches just about every human being with any kind of a heart at all. It's one of those aspects of human hard wiring that reaches in and goes click every time, in the normal, healthy human being, especially female ones, who want to take it home and nurture it to maturity, or knit it a jumper for wearing at the first suitable opportunity.

We were talking about pictures of puppies in the window of a pet store, and the similarity of the puppy factory system to a whorehouse. Except that the she-pooches that are kept pumping out puppies are more like sex slaves, and not for the he-dogs' exclusive pleasure either, but for the pleasure of the pimps who own them, to make cash by selling the infants that result from their mating. So you could say that in that sense, it's even more repulsive than a regular old east european-style sex slavery brothel. Because here, the prostitutes are expected to actually give birth to their clients' offspring, which are then sold to people who have either responded in their simple human hard wired way to small baby helpless things in a window, or have desires about saving things and being saved (yeah, ok, they might just want a puppy, also. But that's not so interesting).

I have a friend who has recently returned from Zambia, where she and her husband were running an NGO for a few years. She told me a story about a man who approached her husband with a baby monkey inside his jacket, and offered it to him in return for her husband handing over some cash (with sinister overtones of what might happen to cute baby monkey if he didn't). Ok, so this is a slightly more intense version of the topic at hand, including as it does, the fact of cute chattel in nefarious and perilous hands, but we're getting deeper into the topic.

My friend's husband did consider giving the man money on the condition that he release the animal back into the wild, but realised that he would, in all likelihood, just go and hunt it back again, and sell it to somebody else (for meat or companionship). And given his understanding of the complexities of living in rural Zambia, and the Way Things Are, he just hissed at the man, and walked sadly away. The best he could do under the circumstances. Life is tough, sometimes.

And then I read a story about a diplomat of some advanced middle age, who walked into a lap dancing club in Estonia and saw a 20 year old lapdancer, "whose body invited sex, but whose eyes screamed 'save me'" and so he left his wife and three children to do both those things to her. And six years later, they are living together in a little flat in London, and she is performing in a more upscale venue now, a theatre in the West End, in a show where she tells the stories of her terrible childhood, combined with a little belly dancing. There are rumours of Angelina Jolie playing her in a movie, but her lover considers Angelina Jolie to be "too old" for the part.

Sometimes there's just a magical hook-up between the damned and the saviour-in-waiting. And when that moment happens, wherever the rendezvous finds the people concerned, what happens can be electric and overwhelming, accessing our deepest instincts: sex, nurturing, needing and offering shelter and basic resources. Skip two meals and watch yourself be conquered by the desire for food. It can block out the light of the sun.

And so we can become starved in other ways, too. Starved of the sublime, for instance. Starved of joy. Starved of the decadence of love without agenda. Starved of places to play. Starved of productive, fulfilling work. Starved of meaning in life. Starved of opportunity to be creative. Starved of community, of companionship, of high level human interaction. And then you walk in the door of an arts centre, a slight sweat on your brow... and a curator sees the puppy in you... or you have a random conversation in a bar with somebody who seems to be having the human experience of life too, and the synapses click and click again and want some more.

When we're starved of things, we go around with that hungry look in our eyes. A gay friend of mine once talked about the amount of information that is routinely exchanged by the barest glancing eye contact, on an average night in a gay bar. Novels of information up- and downloaded in miliseconds, everybody scanning everybody else for signs of being exactly the right fit, the right combination of understandings, of longings, cravings, needs, and that exactly right balm to send the needs and the cravings away for the night. Keep the wolf from the door (or invite him in to savage you). Until the next night, at least.

And so we howl in the night. And we write. And we sing. And we paint. And we dance with the fever until our need is fully sweated out of our bodies. For the night.

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..

Like a pig in light and water

I went swimming this week, in the Atlantic: on the other side of it from Ireland. It was only the second time I had been in the Atlantic on this side. It's warm enough to go swimming in the sea, this week. GO!

This week last year, I was in Barcelona, and it was so warm and sunny and everyone was wandering around in their tshirts and hanging out in the parks doing capoeira and it was gorgeous. I swam in the mediterranean and hung out with my friend Tina. It's such a gorgeous thing when you find yourself in a warm spell right in the middle of winter. I think I'm really affected by the seasonal drop in light, and I'm only really properly recognising that now. Swimming this week, I felt like I was rolling around in the light and the ocean and the crazy intense waves that pounded you whatever way they wanted. It was THRILLING. I want to go AGAIN.

A heartwarming cockroach story

A human and an interesting cockroach met, a couple of days ago, in Brooklyn, New York. The human was female and a notorious cockroach-hater; the cockroach was a fella who could actually make himself look squashed, in order to save his own life.

This cockroach could sense human attention on him, much in the same way that humans can sense attention from other humans. However, this particular cockroach had evolved a new way to make human attention go away, and in this way he demonstrated a quality quite unlike humans, who are doing very well at successfully evolving new ways of drawing attention to themselves, even when the attention concerned is likely to bring them to freshly heightened states of squashedness.

But this time, the human called the cockroach's bluff. She examined him closely, saw that he was not actually squashed but faking, and promptly made his faking true. However, in the second or two just before the pretence became real, there was a flicker of human to cockroach to human consciousness, during which the roach realised that the game was up, and the human realised yet again, that roaches are far smarter than they look.

And, as is often the case when a human squashes a roach with her bare fingers, the roach didn't die all at once, but slowly, his hairy left leg waving a little bit at the end, and there was, in fact, in the human female, a moment of genuine affection.

Tear down your auld life, here comes your new

I met Ian through Ann.

Ann was a native New Yorker I met one evening in a house in Carrickmines, south dublin, a week away from its demolishing by order of Dublin County Council. It was a house that had been constructed from the rubble of Blackrock castle. Dublin County Council was a week away from sending in their demolition trucks to tear the house down to make way for a motorway that was going to solve Dublin's traffic problems. Dublin's traffic problems have only thrived since then, of course.

Over the course of the building of that motorway, a number of public forests were threatened with destruction, and ultimately destroyed, and people went to live in those forests, up the trees, as a protest against their destruction, and really the only way they could be sure of saving the trees. they lived their for years. A community was built in those trees. They were not forcibly removed by the authorities, but negotiated with. As cars passed them from the road below, they tooted their solidarity, a somewhat ironic gesture maybe, but fuck it you know, life isn't perfect and consistent. This Carrickmines house was old school, old style, old money. They weren't about to squat. The house was large and solid, in the Georgian style, 250 years old. Orchards and wildish woods all around. Classic, magnificent Georgian country house.

It was mid September, 2001. I was at the house at the invitation of a minor Dublin rockstar producer who I had met at a gallery opening in the Guinness Storehouse the night before. He was making some folk song recording for a charity record, and I had just come back from a big trip through America, full of stories. I told him I was a singer and he asked me to come and record some stuff the next day. So I did. He had his studio in the attic of this Georgian house in Carrickmines, so he, his girlfriend, and me went out there on the bus that sunday morning, and I spent the day there, making take after take of an English folk song, and riffing around it, and playing with it, until he had about ten tracks of my voice singing the same melody in slight and somewhat variations.

The people who owned the house had moved out weeks prior to the demolition deadline, to avoid the chaos. The house had been in their family since it had been built, and they were not happy about moving. The woods were older than the house, and left wildish, you could feel their ancience. The house itself was just magnificently built on four floors in a circular Georgian style, with a library, high ceilings, wooden floors, and an old range that heated the whole house through. Gorgeous. The house itself was 250 years old, but it had been made with bricks that were triple that in age. The atmosphere in the house, even at that empty, doomed stage of its existence, was potent.

So the only person that was left living in the house was the youngest son, who was the rockstar's engineer, and somewhat peculiarly, a kind of errand-boy in his own house, to this man who acted as though he was the Lord of the manor. Strange old coot, that rockstar. Tried to molest me down in the woods by the light of the silvery moon, but I ran and ran and ran away from his weirdy advances. We made some very beautiful recordings, though, as I recall, which he replayed to me all at once, all the tracks laid on top of each other, my voice in ten parts. Babel, he murmered. And then we went downstairs. Turns out it was the engineer's birthday, and this would probably be the last party that this house would ever see, and the party was the rockstar, the rockstar's girlfriend, the engineer and me. And there was Ann.

Ann was from Staten Island. She was so New York it was incredibly exotic to find her in Dublin. She came from New York Irish working class stock: her uncles had all made a killing (financially) in the unions. When we met, that evening in Carrickmines, the fires were still raging in downtown Manhattan, and her father, a lawyer, had an office that was visible in the photographs of the site after the towers fell. She had studied in some Ivy League business school, worked for a hugely high profile charity in Manhattan, and a bank, and then decided the whole thing was a load of bollocks and she needed to just pack it all in and go and study English in Trinity College, Dublin. After that, she got a job working as a project manager for a multimedia company, where Ian was the set designer.

She was the engineer's date for his birthday and sort of surprised by that, she told me later. She had assumed that it was going to be a bigger party. It was an odd little gathering in the midst of this lovely old doomed house. I had fallen in love with New York just a couple of weeks earlier, at the end of a long trip through the jazz cities of America, and I knew I needed to go back.

This was the trip that began in Nashville, Tennessee, continued on to Memphis, before plunging south in the depths of summer to the depths of the swamp magnetism of New Orleans, where I stuck around sticking around for a while longer than I had planned. I was there over a month, and had sort of pleasurably surrendered any notion of going anywhere else (ie. north) when I watched a Jimi Hendrix documentary one evening, in the house on Prytania street where I was living.

In one scene, there were two high fro'd dudes in kaftans, sitting in some park, who had been friends of Jimi before he died, and they were riffing about alpha waves and how Jimi was still around, man. And as their fros leaned gently forward in the breeze, my friend Kerry turned to me and said, "Oh! That's Washington Square Park, Lucy! That place you're always talking about.." and I looked at Kerry, and I looked at the brothers, and I took a deep breath, and said, shite lads, that's it. I've got to go to New York city. I can't get out of this country without having gone to New York city. Blast. I'm heading north. How the hell am I going to do that?" And my friend Nicholle said, "I'm going to St. Louis on Tuesday. Wanna come with me?"

Nicholle had been living in Florida and one day she and her little gay boyfriend Chad woke up and decided that it was time for them to fulfil their dreams and take their stationwagon to California, where Nicholle would be an actress and the sun would bleach their lives golden. The car busted out in Baton Rouge, and they got towed into New Orleans, where they both spent a year bartending and saving their tips. They were part of the scene in the house on Prytania street when I met them. Nicholle had family in St. Louis and there was a wedding, so she was going north for that. And that was how I left New Orleans.

When I got back to Dublin after St. Louis and Chicago and New York and Memphis again and Nashville again, I was looking around for interesting people to spend some time with, and really very open to spending time with just about whoever I met, and so it was probably inevitable that I would run into Ian sooner or later. I'm glad I did. In some ways, Ian was instrumental in a hugely key moment in my life, on the phone while I was in New York, a couple of years after I first met him. He could be a right selfish pain in the arse but I'd still relish the prospect of a chat around the fire with him.

Ian looked a lot older than his age and acted a lot younger, which could get him into bizarre situations. He was combustible and flexible, which made him a lot of fun to hang out with but kind of shite to live with, as I discovered later on an extended weekend that turned into two months living on Church Avenue. He had these epic parties, around the time he turned forty. Burning stuff off. He lived in a Georgian townhouse on Church Avenue in Rathmines, in Dublin, and he attracted exotica of every Dublin variety there. His company was somehow electric. A couple of years after I met him for the first time, I lived in the house on Church avenue for a couple of months, with Emma, an amazing woman who lived in the house for a while, while Ian was off fucking around in Connemara with his spooky gothic French girlfriend who had worked with Madonna and had just turned down a million euros to work with Levi's, in favour of arsing around the Irish countryside with Ian.

At one of Ian's parties, I met a brother of a boy I had felt oppressed and dismissed by in college, and this dude looked so much like him and acted so much like him I said to him, "man, you look exactly like a bloke I used to know in college". He said, "what was his name?" I said, "Tom F-". He said, "That's my brother". And we were both a bit wowed out by the connection, and spent about an hour chatting in each other's company and it was kind of soothing actually, in a strange kind of way.

The brother had felt oppressed and dismissed by Tom F aswell. In fairness, it turns out that the brother is definitely the wild one of the family, being, as he was, a fancy people's drug dealer and general misfit, while his brother had developed some kind of a successful acting career in Britain. But he said that he had never in his life been told that he had anything in common with his brother before, so to have this connection drawn so randomly, in a party on Church Avenue, well, that was kind of amazing. It was nice for us to chat about how we felt about this guy, and actually what came out was not all about what a lousy bastard his brother was, by a long shot. I know it sounds new agey, but it felt kind of healing, actually, to share what we felt.

Anyway, that was my first party at Ian's. I also learned something pretty crucial about Sicilians at that party, which was to give as good as you get (in THEIR way of giving it) IF you want them to respect you.

Ann hated that party, the first one she brought me to. She was really looking to make much more intimate connections with people than were really accommodated in a setting like that. And she was looking for a soulmate, and she was finding Ireland to be unhinged in that regard. What she was finding was men who were willing to get drunk and fall into bed with her but scared shitless about anything more real than that. Disturbing and depressing, but true. And she was probably just experiencing what was going around, and what has probably only gotten worse. But one evening after we had had a guinness in Mulligans, she popped into Hogans and I scootered home, and the second she walked in the door, she found herself locked into the gaze of a man at the bar, and together they fell into some kind of instantaneous rapture. The last I heard, they were still in it, but I haven't heard from Ann in a while.

The last time I saw the rockstar was at another free booze shindig, and he was rat-arsed drunk and unpleasant, but that was a long time ago now. Nicholle got to California, a couple of years after she first set out on that exodus from Florida, and the last I heard, she was working in a car dealership, making good money. Chad, the sweetheart, was working the long morning shift in a disco gaybar in the Quarter, and had recently become the first person in his family ever to have health insurance. When I was last talking with Nicholle, she hadn't heard from him in a while, either.

And the last time I saw Ian was three years ago in the house on Church Avenue, right after a kind of epic showdown there at the end of a couple of months I had been living in the house. More to tell about that, for sure. He had just kitted out a minivan as a living space, with the idea to fart around France for an indefinite period, with his chick. Ian re-introduced me to the simple concept of white toast with butter and honey. The revolution was really the re-introduction of butter into my life, and that revolution is still rocking my world, right now as I make toast to go with my soup. He was on a kind of spiritual adventure at that period of his life, and at some bend in the road, we met, had a boogie, lit a fire, and parted ways.

A memory from summertime, or, Friends you don't see anymore

In the summertime, a quarter block-long flower display at a New York bodega sometimes deposits its scent a little further down the block, in the interests of subtlety. So if you see the flowers coming a block away, and you're hurrying to meet them, to smell them, to play with pleasant scents, escape the usual dogpiss of Park Slope, just take it handy. The real smell may well be a little further down the street.

But it's wintertime now, though it's bright, and the cold air numbs some of these street nuances, might even be discouraging us from exploring the street at all (except with reliable thermal underwear) ...

Last night, I watched Angela's Ashes for the first time. Never read the book, never watched the movie, before. Pity that the only Limerick accents in the whole thing came from three Limerick actors who had small vignette scenes through it. One of them was a friend of mine - John - who, until last night on the screen, I hadn't seen since sometime around late 2002.

Apart from the usual drift of people into and out of life, people turning into friends turning into lovers turning into family turning themselves out on the street, or tumbling onto a different continent... Apart from that, the sound can sometimes be heard - really not very often, but when it comes it comes certainly - of a big creaky door making a resounding shutness. And the person behind the door becomes Here Be Dragons Land.

I fell out with John, somewhat bizarrely, over New York city. I miss him sometimes. His deep Limerick-accented voice, his sense of humour, his small few revelations over the course of a very long friendship, his basic decency, just the fact of him. And I see him in this movie, and this exhausts the supply of Very Famous Movies I know he's in, the other one, funnily enough, was Gangs of New York.

Angela's Ashes was a sentimental but ok enough movie, but this was my hometown they were depicting, and I didn't really feel it. Bits. References to Roches stores, the same cutaway of the castle about ten times over, but the way a place saturates the senses and the tongue and the mind goes so much deeper and wider than that. Plot and wet atmosphere are good broad structural strokes, but the joy is in the details, the nuances. I think that kind of sensitivity has really got to be the basis of any film or book of piece of music that's specific in its sense of place. Because every place is incredibly specific, though it may not be famous in the way that New York city is famous, is owned by so many people who think they know it, and so it's easier to get away with accents that run the gamut from Dublin to Belfast but never get anywhere near Limerick Junction.

Oh for a one and one from Donkey Ford's... but that kind of longing really grows with much longer exiles than mine..

I wish you well, John. I wish you a gorgeous woman who loves you. I wish you exciting films to work on. And I wish that if we were ever to cross paths on 14th or Bleecker street, that we would not hurry past each other. All love to you.

A love song to the old year

Many men have loved the bells
you fastened to the rein
And everyone who wanted you
they found what they will always want again
your beauty lost to you yourself
just as it was lost to them
ah take this longing from my tongue
whatever useless things these hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity until you cry
now you must try my greed
and everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me
just take this longing from my tongue
all the lonely things my hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

Hungry as an archway through which the troops have passed
I stand in ruins behind you with your winter clothes
your broken sandal strap
I love to see you naked over there
especially from the back
ah take this longing from my tongue
all the useless things my hands have done
untie for me your hired blue gown
like you would do for one you love

You're faithful to the better man
I'm afraid that he left
so let me judge your love affair
in this very room where I have sentenced mine to death
I'll even wear these old laurel leaves that he has shaken from his head
just take this longing from my tongue
all these useless things my hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

like you would do for one you love

(take this longing, by leonard cohen)

It pic'd itself

A bollocks anti-ode to Carolans liquer

Oh you horrible auld thing
Carolans Irish Cream
I will have to bury you under the ocean
to get rid of you
like nuclear waste
under Atlantic Avenue
in the middle of the night
when no-one is looking
but this is new york
and someone is always looking.

Vi mig fra livet med dit horrible auld følelse i min mave.

A word of winter advice for those fond of Baileys coffees in the wintertime

Don't ever buy Carolan's Irish Cream instead of Baileys because you think it's the same thing and you get to save ten dollars that way. Just don't do it. Yak. Bollocks.

The News on 6th ave.

There are five leaves left on a tree on 6th ave, between Union and President streets. They're hanging on, for all they're worth, and their friends are all sitting on the ground underneath them, shouting up, c'mon, c'mon! It's great down here! (Lie). Just let go! It'll be better in the long run! (Lie). You'll prefer it down here! (Lie). It's better for everybody if you just join us and stop holding out up there! (Lie). It's embarrassing! (True). It's like Donald Sutherland in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers over there.

Don't you just hate those lyin' leaves?

The sad bits

Yeah, and then I heard a Tommy Tiernan interview on RTE radio a haon, with the professionally bored Eamon Dunphy, who made sure to skirt the chat away from anything that might have been remotely interesting. Keep it light, keep it daytime. Tommy T was talking a bit about loneliness and regret and the pain of his separation from his children, and it was a bit of a breath of fresh air to hear these topics being addressed, though he didn't get very far in Dunphy's hands.

It reminded me of a conversation we were having last night, about this American tradition of sending out letters at Christmas with messages of the triumph of the family this past year, its successes and achievements and the brilliance of its teeth. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if one of those letters said, well, I experienced sadness profoundly this year, and it was a difficult journey through the darker parts of the human soul, but I seem to have learned something from it, and I certainly hope it has made me kinder and able to hear more of life, to smell more of life, to feel more of life.

But that would probably constitute something of a revolution. And not make you liked, at all.

It's still belting rain out, and I have only conversed with cats all day. And though Freddy's is just half a block away, and will almost certainly be some kind of friendly, I will still probably not go.

Off the Willie Wonka on St. Stephen's day

So I spent today visiting cats who are spending Christmas alone. Most of them are very large cats, massive purring machines that move slowly. The routine goes like this: as I'm putting the key in the lock, I hear the purring already on the other side of the door. Then I open the door, and immediately, it's THUNK as a large furry cat hits the deck, rolls over to expose its belly and purrs effusively. For those of you who don't know what effusively means, and couldn't be arsed googling it, think PURR PURR PURR kind of intensely, with meaning. Aggressive purring, the kind that says, "Rub me, rub me, make me want to bite you on the wrist the way I love to".

And so I have spent today giving a lot of belly rubs, and getting sat on. And I think this is my first Christmas working, and I sort of realise today that, however much I have loathed the arse out of it in the past, the Christmas rhythm is laid down in my DNA as a family time, a stretched out time, a kind of saturated fat of a time of year. And it's actually a bit unexpectedly sad to be away from Ireland right now. It's fleeting, but significant. Something about the way that everything in the whole of Ireland except the frenzied sale-shoppers, shuts down for the whole week from Christmas day to New Year's day. You send out your last batch of Christmas emails on Christmas eve and you get those automated officey bounced back emails, telling you they're out of the office, on the jar, the willie wonka and the selection box, for a good two weeks, so feck off and don't be expecting a reply before January 5th, AT THE EARLIEST.

Christmas day for me lasts a full week, AT LEAST. I turn into a slow moving, fat storing, hibernating creature who has a few chats with the family, a bath every day, and the odd phone call and that's about it. And I can feel how good it is for me.

Not this year. Rush hour on the train was rush hour on the train today, the day after Christmas or not. Rough. Millions of people all playing musical chairs and all of them a constantly renewing batch of fresh strangers. Feckin raining, too.

Get your transcendentally fabulous awfulness here!

It's Irishness exactly the way we live it, back in the Auld Sod.. God I love love love to see how this peculiar twisty thing of Irishness gets flipped and scrunched around on its journey through the world... the nuances, oh the nuances. Pig in muck.

Happy Christmas, lads! God Jule!

Hurrah!

Sad

I feel sad. It's a heaviness in my chest. I feel like going off to France and living in a small house for the rest of my life. Alone. There's not much more to it than that. No reason that I'm aware of. Just this.

Efter julefrokosten

Vi har spist. Vi har snakkede om Vester havet, med dens store bøljer, og limfjorden, som kan være skated across om vinteren, i en lille håndlavede båd med et sejl. Vi snakkede om det Sud Bronx og chip vans på McClaine Boulevard, og Westchester, og hvordan man kan tjen penge i New York City, og vi drak pissemasser af gløgg, og hjemelavede pebernødder.

Nu er jeg fuld.

En lille Dansk jule

Idag skal jeg til en julefrokost, hos et par Dansk venner her i Brooklyn. Vi skal drikke gløgg, og spise æbleskiver, og snakker Dansk.

Hurra!

What the hell is happening here?

Star wars are happening in two neighbouring galaxies, don't know if you've heard. One galaxy is blasting the bastard out of another galaxy with a big massive black hole, destroying everything in its path,sending planets and stars flying and colliding in all directions, creating new ones and generally spreading chaos throughout the universe.

Meanwhile, we sing jingle bells, down here on planet earth, and this is exactly what this part of the milky way looks like...

The midtown shrinkers

Oh it's raining horribly outside, said the man beside me as I left MoMA yesterday, with the rain belting down on 53rd street. Sometimes that's what you get, he sighed. Yes indeed, I said back. And he looked at me. Like I had just entered his apartment without pressing the doorbell. There was a line around his words with a red rope and a large black man in a suit and a headpiece, carrying a list. I hadn't used the VIP entrance. That was what his eyes said. You just don't do this. You just don't respond to a stranger's casual throwaway cliche in midtown Manhattan.

So I went walking. Through it. In the rain. Down 5th avenue to Union Square. Caught a glimpse of one of the Protected Ones, in the back of his chauffeur-driven Very Expensive Blackened Windowed Car, perusing a newspaper. It felt like it might be like a confessional in that little backseat room, kind of airless and costumed and expectant. But expensive, unlike any confessional I've been in (only Irish ones, only Limerick ones, actually).

A thin, mousy girl approaches me in the middle of the traffic at Flatiron. "Hi, I'm Annie", she says at me, laughing like she's just seen some special friend of hers. She juts her hand out stiffly to me, perpendicular to her body, from the elbow. "We save children". I search her face, her jacket, for some ID. Nothing. "Njeah, thanks", I say, and continue to walk across the street before the bus gets me.

Pity. Annie is sure this way of living her life is a failsafe way to get people to feed her cause, to feed her longings, to feed her. She's saving children for Christ's sake: how could anyone say no to Annie? Let me count the ways...

There's a boy on 21st street, sitting on a beer crate, pausing with a pen as he tries to figure out how to explain himself in the medium of cardboard sign in the street. I stop to take out my notebook, and look back at him. He's still hesitant.

There's an interesting quality to midtown. Indifference. Such a big place with so many shrunken people busily shrinking farther, hurrying to get to where they mightn't have to shrink anymore.

And then the N. Sitting opposite a man with bags, in one of those two abreast orange plastic areas. He takes a gulp, a large nip of whiskey, in view of the other apparently indifferent subway riders. He feels the exposure, anyway. Most of them don't actually even see him. I do, though, and that's enough. For what it's worth, if I'm thinking anything, I'm thinking that that's not a bad idea, keeping a flask of hot whiskey about your person for winter subway trips. But he's gone into that defensive face mode, you know it? With the chin up and the eyes and mouth corners that say "not me! I didn't do ANYTHING!".

The sign on the wall hisses, "if you see something, say something", as the train chugs into Pacific street.

A few unusual job opportunities

Somehow I'm hearing the first scene from Figaro in this first one. Perhaps this is a new opera?

Looking for a "bitch" assistant to help me around the house

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Reply to:

and carry out my orders. Artist, activist, busy person needs a hand to promote my works, ideas and just generally obey and carry out orders.
Males only.

Very Different situation wanted indeed...

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GET PAID TO WATCH SPORTS ON TV!! (Gramercy)

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Reply to:


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Beware the jabberwock, my son!

I'm thinking of forming a band to record this, for eighteen voices, a broom and a tuba. Any takers?

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Holiday hokum from the dictatorship HQ

I suppose the only interesting bit about this piece of revulsion is the fact that Tony Blair's delivery in speaking to Barney the White House dog is of exactly the same pitch of earnestness as his declarations as he led a strenously and vocally unwilling British nation into war against Iraq, insisting that it was all in the nation's good, and he simply knew stuff that everyone else didn't. The thing that is usually touted about Tony Blair these days is that he was just a good actor, a showman. This video kind of puts the lie to that. Too much mining the same seam has confined his skills to a single caricature. He's a one trick pony, it seems.

The Brooklyn Bunker

Beat Whippet

Epithalamion for a pair of Brooklyn whippets

You can take the fear out of the mouse but you can't take the mouse out of the cat's mouth

Very interesting video clip in an article from this morning's Guardian. Scientists in Japan have created a genetically modified mouse which has no fear of cats. They have eliminated the gene that recognises the smell of a cat as a source of danger, and thus something to be feared. So this piece is reported with a quite endearing little snippet of video of a curious mouse investigating this landscape of fur that really ought to send it shuddering to the nearest hole in the wall or deep deep behind the telly, and instead it goes running through the cat's legs, getting sat on by the cat, generally being very friendly and interested in the cat. Watch it, you'll probably enjoy it.

The cat, for her part, though the piece insists she has not been genetically modified to be friendly to mice, is preternaturally accommodating and courteous to the mouse, and it doesn't seem like the usual cat pretext of mouse-wooing prior to one of the slowest painfullest kills known to the animal kingdom (have you ever actually WATCHED the play of a cat and mouse as they dance their dance of death?). The cat in this clip, if anything, seems slightly concerned and embarrassed by the antics of her small sleek friend, electing to look tactfully away when the mouse gets particularly close and personal and probably provocative, because she's just not that sort of cat.

And then the confident, happy scientist shows up at the end to show us the unfortunate place that science and humanities can sometimes go when one of them takes the other roughly by the ears and makes it do something it doesn't really want to: he says, we can now genetically engineer other creatures in the animal kingdom to have no fear of their natural enemies. Punchline. Ba boom.

Well, congratulations. You've learned how to fast track the natural world to extinction. Things have NATURAL enemies for a reason. We eat each other in the natural world. That's just how things work. And that's why the mouse has an innate fear attached to the smell of the cat, because his ancestors have passed down that response as a common-sense gesture, to keep him safe, alive, to keep the mouse species on the planet. However, I have connections in cat circles who would be very keen to hear this kind of news.

I feel there is some kind of a super-sinister subtext in this little piece of scientific wizardry. Can you hear in the notion of genetically eliminating natural fear responses in "animals" , the suggestion that perhaps we can genetically modify ourselves, each other, or indeed, just herd up our enemies, once we've conquered them, and genetically modify them from their natural antipathy, to like us instead? Well now. This sounds like a VERY interesting potential solution to the thorny issues of terrorism, for instance. At any rate, that lab is sure to be given a few quid in sponsorship, to get a lot more adventurous.

But ultimately I suppose what I find most depressing is the implicit dilettantism in matters of elemental forces. There are different kinds of fear, and by far the most prevalent one on this planet is the natural kind, the kind of fear that is really a signpost for common sense and deep intuition; the fear that the healthy mouse experiences at the smell of the cat, the kind of animal fear that is also innate in humans, that gets triggered in situations that the human senses are dangerous or predatory. This is really common sense at work in its strongest physical expression. It's the death of naivete, it's evolution in motion, it's the natural world at work. Get rid of this stuff and the natural world won't know its arse from its elbow.

And then there are the kinds of fear that aren't based on the needs, tendencies and feeding appetites of the natural world. This kind of fear exists solely in the human realm. And it manifests in behavioural tics, that become encoded and enshrined in culture, becoming norms by consensus and wide practise. This is not the kind of fear that you can genetically modify out, quite so easily. And for the most part, it is totally and utterly useless. If anything, it inhibits life.

The video probably wouldn't have looked so cute with a normal cat, who would have dispatched the mouse with glee, of course. "We can make mice who get along with cats", says the scientist. Sweet. But can we make cats who get along with mice (without eating them)? Notice that it isn't the cat who is being genetically modified out of her predatory nature.

How far could this idea go? How about applying it to consumer markets, for instance? Genetically modify the herds of consumers as they are marketed to? This is also a cat and mouse game, a game of predator and prey. Marketing and advertising strategies have become incredibly sophisticated when you contrast them with the clunky ad strategies over the past fifty years, for instance, and the fact that marketing didn't even exist as a concept until relatively recently. But it's still a cat and mouse game, and the space left for its evolution is increasingly slight. It's the law of diminishing returns. Why keep mining that tiny tiny space that is the battleground of persuasion politics, when all you have to do is find a very pleasant, painless way to eliminate all resistance in the market altogether?

So here's my guess about how this kind of genetic interference is likely to impact on nature: the mouse is returned to a state of naivete, doesn't recognise the inherent danger in the cat, goes up to schmooze and make friends, cat goes hurrah, and begins the torture process, and how does the mouse respond at that point? My guess it would take at most a couple of generations for the mouse - returned to any natural environment even with this genetic modification- to spring back to its natural state again.

But this is the dynamic balance of the natural world that is being fucked with. My point is that once you start messing with one part of this dynamic balance, the whole thing gets thrown out of whack in ways that are probably exponential in proportion to the original interference. Just like the disappearing polar ice shelf, though let's keep our epic planetary themes to one at a time, today.

Romance

I ran into a pooch called Romance last night. He was very eager to get up close to a certain white whippet of my acquaintance. She sniffed, then turned her back. His owner pulled him away. I don't think he noticed me.

Why are you here? Why, really?

I had dinner in Marseille one evening this past June, with a Japanese woman and two French men. I had met the Japanese woman and one of the French men on the top of a hill, by the entrance to an old world war two bunker, as I contemplated sleeping there for the night. The view and the air were magnificent, I was fresh from a swim, but a cold breeze was blowing and I didn't have a sleeping bag or even any long sleeves. A couple of nights later I slept up those mountains, and discovered a more pressing and painful reason to stay indoors on Provençale evenings: mosquitoes that settled on my eyelids for a midnight snack, as I dozed amongst the wild thyme bushes, by the open bay, filled with the mediterranean sea.

Anyway, the couple invited me to dinner and so I found myself sitting in a car with them, snaking around the Marseille backstreets, looking for a parking space. They dropped me off on the corner where they had arranged to meet their friend, and I was given a description and instructed to wave. He found me first, he had apparently been instructed too. And we went to have crepes in a little Cuban place. The second French man - the one that found me in the street - had spent a year in Sweden some years previously, and so, over dinner, he and I conversed in languages that were not our first, he in Swedish, which amazingly, he remembered very well, and me in Danish. And for the most part, we understood each other. It was fun, being an Irish woman and a French man, sitting in a Marseille cafe, speaking Danish and Swedish together, and understanding each other.

I feel called upon to explain myself, sometimes. Do you know that feeling? But this is a BIG topic, and it's important to differentiate the various nuances of this kind of demand.

So, for example, I had an unsatisfactory exchange with an MTA official one afternoon, involving delayed Q trains and bus transfers and changed minds and unlimited cards that said no, no no... and we had something of a heated interaction that probably could have been abated had I EXPLAINED my actions clearly enough for her to understand that they were in perfect synch with her rules and to just press the beeper on that big beeping door that lets people through when there's been some sort of fuckup with the turnstiles, or they have big luggage or babies.

So there's that kind of explanation. The functional kind. The kind of explaining you do when you go to a fancy cheese shop and you need to communicate your desire for particularities.. or the kind of explaining you need to do when you go to a dentist with toothache and you want to give her more than a hunch about what ails you.

And then there's the kind of explaining yourself that your schoolmistress demanded of you when you rocked into school wearing contraband mascara and The Wrong Jumper.

And then there's the sort of explaining yourself that is demanded of you by a lover, when you've broken the invisible contract that he has in his head, because we have these invisible contracts floating around inside us, and we don't usually even know about their existence ourselves until they get broken, and suddenly we're upset.

Or the sort of explaining that some people feel some innate need to do, to EXPLAIN their existences altogether, and this can, sometimes, lead to the making of music, of paintings, of tall buildings, of businesses, of children, of novels, of poetry for some, or to the purchase of very large and unattractive cars, for others.

And then there's the sort of explaining that you can see being asked for in someone's eyes when they meet you for the first time in a context that they really don't expect to find you in, perhaps, and their eyes hold that demand for explanation from you, in a quizzical sort of way, without any overgroundness in it, and without any real expectation of being addressed or given. And the whole process is sort of inaccessible really, in these situations, because the following through of them demands some kind of social transgression in itself, some kind of breaking through of innocence that just isn't socially acceptable amongst adults, normally.

This happens sometimes, when I meet people. Often, the question doesn't get asked. Funnily enough, I was inundated by the question in Denmark. It was so much the only thing in the room there, when I met someone for the first time: why are you here?! Hvorfor er du i Danmark? Why are you here? In three and a half years I never had anything satisfactory to offer that one. Here, it seems to be more circumspect, tactful. But sometimes it gets asked, tactfully or not. And I still don't have an answer.