Pictures from the road

Cosy fireplace Ireland cliche to warm yourselves around

But it really does look like that over here..

A blatant ad for Tom Warnick

Have you ever heard Tom Warnick and the World's Fair? This man rocks. I found my way across the path of a Daniel Johnson record recently (gotta watch out for oncoming traffic going the wrong way down a one way road in this kind of situation) and I thought it must be an early or hairy TW record but with much more prozac and a higher nervous breakdown frequency ratio (and fewer instruments and generally less going on) but seriously, I wonder if he ever heard a Tom Warnick record. His voice and I suppose some aspect of the basic vibe is really strikingly similar. But I prefer Tom. More heart. More sweetness, smarter and generally more fun. Prettier too, and sexier, with better coffee and comfier sofas.

The crow at Shannon airport

He cawed "gimme some" at me while I waited for the bus, eating my Catch bar. It's been a while since I've been Taking Off online, I've been taking off on an amazing adventure around Ireland, happily bereft of internet thoughts, but having an occasional dream about a lost laptop, calling softly on the breeze for me to love it again. And so here we are, again..

In Dublin

I'm writing this from a room on the third floor of the Harcourt Hotel in Dublin. I used to live around the corner from this place, on Synge street, for most of the time I lived in this town. It's slightly odd to be staying here at a hotel, but only slightly. It's been almost five years now since I left Dublin, and my relationship to it lies somewhere in the mix of tourist and native, the classic ex-pat condition.

I remember an evening I spent in the company of an Irish friend of mine from Raheny, and his Arizona-born wife, in their hotel room in Jury's, up on Christchurch, about six years ago. They had been living in Phoenix for a while, where they both became lawyers, then they moved back to Dublin to try to make a life here, but the ground kept shifting from under their feet, and they found the ways of Dublin and the legal trade here too stiff and unwelcoming to the skills and qualifications of outsiders, so ultimately they found their way back to the desert, to Tucson, where the the climate suited their new skin.

Last night I heard about another friend, from Germany, who tried to move here with his wife and children, after a life-long passionate love affair with Dublin and many years of living here, but again, even in this celtic tiger economy and with sophisticated skills and experience, his wife couldn't get a job, so they've moved back to Germany. It's interesting to look at some of the choices made in this self-selecting culture.

Who and what thrives here, and what is left out in the cold to find its own way elsewhere? There's so much talked about this economy and how everybody's making so much money and how rich everybody is, talk about kings and tribe and millionaires and the great Irish entrepreneurial spirit, but that's the story written by those who succeeded on the terms of this newly made world, not those who had to leave it, or those who are being forced out of their homes because of climbing interest rates on their 100% mortgages.

There are even smaller, more specific stories, the kind of stories that are like the face of one of the new breed of celebutante spokesmodel sunday indo darlings when she's alone at night, and stripped of all that mascara and make up, and fearing to glance at her naked reflection in her bathroom mirror, stories that are naked and rarely seen, rarely heard of, stories that are so easily eclipsed by the noise of the glory and the bling bling.

The joy of text

These are some of the text messages I keep, looking at them over and over when I'm deleting my daily texts (the Irish replacement for evening prayers) and so far they have all escaped the delete button and they’ve been around for quite a while.. What text messages do you keep? Post some in comments..


My first and only text sent by dad from his phone:

Wh bns

From Ross:
(oops)

Johs:

Hey, kom lige til at tænke på dig, og om du fik min sms? - nå, men min mund er fuld af huller, morten, sigurd er kommet i kaninparadis på lolland, og du skal snart til new york! Savner dig lidt her i den kolde sommer! Johs.

English translation:
Hey, I've just thought of you, and if you got my sms? Yeah well my mouth is full of holes, morten, sigurd has gone to rabbbit paradise in Lolland, and you will soon be in new york! Miss you a bit here in the cold summer! Johs.

One from mum:

I.m on firefox

And one from dad sent by mum on her phone:
Thanks there are 3 sharps all through well done dad

One from an artist I met in Barcelona, in the street, an hour after getting into town, making an arrangement to meet later that week..

Meet me in cafe of escola hipica, avda muntanyans sun. 12 pm. It is behind poble espanol, metro placa espana. I will be on horse. Anne X

One from Melis:

Love ya Lucy. You rock like a train. Mmmmtch

Aer Lingus, minutes before I was interviewed by the immigration lady for a full hour:

Please proceed to US Immigration 90 minutes prior to departure. This may prevent you from missing your flight. Thank you

Ross:
Yes!

From a poet I spent a lovely afternoon with, once:
How about a walk - could meet @ The Lame Duck @ 3.45. They do a good cup of tea there & nice river walk? Jo

Ross: Is it goodnight ladies? Last dance? The party’s over?

Ross: I don’t know can u convert cockroaches

And my favourite one by a long way is one my mum sent me when I was in Barcelona last year, verbatim.

Yes i topped ur cred. U wont believe cats were in u. P. Room. Window alex open’snor felix no iis own mrs. And lady missing when dogs went out to do bugsness mrs. Onsn’so. Window later lady trying to get back to kennel when they got in they couldnu a happier.

The Lobby

Right now, there's nobody here in the lobby. There was a big group of people when I came in a few minutes ago, they've all petered off now, all Irish except for a single brassy blonde Aussie woman, clearly being brought into the family by one of the sons, and when I came in she was holding court about Australian wildlife.

So I think she was probably talking about kangaroos, but anyway she was talking about how everybody has a license to shoot them, that they breed in droves and they're a pest in Australia, and the family was asking questions and went all quiet in the face of her vehemence. I mean, when you've grown up watching Skippy (a kid's programme about a bush kangaroo, made in the sixties and repeated on Irish tv until the nineties), then your next actual connection with Skippyland is a big bottle-blonde woman saying how happy she is to shoot Skippy, something in you probably goes all quiet, alright.

And then they asked about snakes, and she said they were everywhere, under the floorboards, in the wheels of the car, in the letterbox, in the loo.. and they went all quiet again. "Thank God for St. Patrick", says the dad, and laughs, alone. "I think the Aboriginal people eat them", says the brassy lady, and and the dad gives a loud cough, and the brassy lady goes off to the loo. Nobody said very much after that, but everyone slowly moved away, in twos and threes.

Mamuska Night, Limerick

There was a gorgeous event last night in Daghdha Dance Space in Limerick city, called Mamuska. Apparently it's been happening there on a bi-monthly basis since last year, and it's a breath of fresh air on the Irish arts scene. I've been part of events of this sort before in different cities, and it's just so great to see one really working very well. The Daghdha space itself is amazing: housed in an old church up in St. John's square, surrounded by a graveyard, with apparently little changed except that they removed all the old fixtures and fittings of pews and altars and baptismal fonts and that kind of thing, and laid down a dancefloor.

Daghdha is a dance company and some kind of a powerhouse of ideas and collaborative activity pulling in all sorts of disciplines and artists from all over the world, and one of their spinoffs is Mamuska. The idea of Mamuska is to make a space every couple of months for people to socialise, for artists to air their sketches, ideas in progress and imperfections, and to keep the airways open for something magical and spontaneous to emerge, should the need arise. That's how I felt there, anyway, and it felt open and friendly and unpreoccupied with itself in a way that was incredibly refreshing for the Limerick, or just about any other arts scene.

There were installations, including a tent with a video piece inside it, a plinth with rows of buns stacked on top of it (for the purpose of eating) and video of bun making and bun arranging beside it, sofas, open seating, a bar, a large video screen that showed projected video and photographs, performance, sound scapes, and a small piece of theatre. I left a bit early, so I didn't catch the last couple of things. No piece was longer than 10 minutes, and everything had an unfinished, loose and open kind of feel to it. I wandered around, taking pictures on my laptop, and chatting to various people around the room. I found it really friendly and fun.

It reminded me a lot of the church on Møllegade, in Copenhagen, and the Meet Da Lama nights that Helle Thun used to run over there, on a total shoestring budget (quite unlike the budgets that Daghdha have at their disposal) and a lot of love and passion for exploration and improv. Each Meet Da Lama was an experiment without any firm conclusions, but it drew a lot of people, and for me, the combination of an open event of lots of artists of various disciplines that welcomed on the spot participation, and hugely importantly, that it took place in English, was about the friendliest hook-up I found in Copenhagen. Ultimately something like that needs more of an infrastructural grounding than Helle could possibly provide on her own, and so it burned itself out at some point of 2005, I think, but it was great to see the spirit of that alive and well in Limerick city last night.

Here are some pics from the event...

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

---

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...

---

Reply to:


Hello, How are you? I am looking for a sophisticated Older White Lady (29-60)who is interested in taking FULL advantage over me with Financial Humiliation.There are many terms used to describe it>>Money Slave, Money Servant, Money Pig, Financial Domination, Financial Humiliation, Etc... It basically works like this. I want to be a money Slave to you, and you enjoy taking the Money from the Slave who knows that he is very Lucky to even be considered for this treatment. I will let you in on a lot of personal info on me.You can exploit me, extort, Black Mail me, etc... You will recieve Guaranteed once a week financial payments from me either in person, via PayPal, Money Orders, etc.. I am able to do between $350.00- $700.00 a week if this works out. I am a really nice Guy who is into feeling humiliated by a self assured pretty Lady. Please be Intelligent,Pretty ,Classy, Strict, and self deserving. Please have some knowledge in gentle humiliation, and have a semi-cold heart. There really is nothing else to it. You can read , or research about this on the internet. The lists are endless. A lot of Guys want to give their Money away to you so they can experience what its like to take direction, and to empty their wallets so they feel useful to you. Strange, but true. Please inquire with in. Thanks KL

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

---

Reply to:


--- Research is looking for bright and energetic writers, with an interest in and knowledge of sports, to view primetime network and cable TV shows and write online surveys that will measure the effectiveness of any product placements that occurred during these programs.

Because --- measures evening programs, the hours can be late (often until midnight or later) so it is great for someone who wants their days free, but hard for anyone with a demanding morning schedule. The good news is that schedules are flexible and only require three shifts per week.

Help determine the future of TV advertising.
Be a self-starter.
Work in a fun, fast-paced environment.


Compensation: $16/hr

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