The CURE for monday morning (all twenty-odd minutes of it)

Rock your hearts out... apart from the pixillation, this is about as gorgeous as it gets. All dirty white brick, men in bowlers, orange raincoated Ringo, London black cabs, well behaved aback-taken "bit of an imposition to disrupt all the business in the area" humans on the street, the little twiddly fucking little microphones, the passion christ the passion, the beautiful fucking guitars held lovingly, bearded Paul, "everybody had a wet dream" John and fucking gorgeous sound of it all. Yeah, so they were bitching and falling apart at this stage. Who cares - look at them, they are having FUN. Oooooooh...

You know, I grew up at a time when John was dead, George - and indeed Bob Dylan, who I also only discovered a couple of years ago - had turned into a Travelling Wilbury, Ringo was a lardy old cigar smoker, and Paul was playing the pipes of peace, so I didn't get a Beatles infatuation until I lived with someone who had the White album. And then lived with my Brooklyn Lover last winter, who had the rest of them. I see footage like this and it makes my heart soar.

Must have also been such an antidote to all those early stadium gigs where they couldn't hear themselves play with all the screaming going on, to play a gig with such disappearing acoustics and bewildered onlookers. I am going to wear a miniskirt and boots tomorrow, mark my words. And play some guitar now.

And then along comes the fuzz. Boooooo!

Another kind of street photography

Beautiful example of what digital does brilliantly. The clarity is unbelievable. You can read the paint signs on the street.

The bear and the small squiggle

If you haven't seen this yet, and you're feeling even slightly poorly, then you need to have a look at this and all will be well.

You can kind of imagine what she's feeling, even if you are wildly far out in your impressions. It is an evocative scene. The gal was artificially inseminated, so she's probably a bit surprised by the sudden appearance of this squiggle creature. She looks a bit surprised, a bit like, oh for goodness sake, look at this squiggly little maggot, it has just appeared out of nowhere and it really is hopeless. I'd better take it in and sort it out before it squiggles itself out of existence.

More about home, and happiness

But happiness comes and goes, and when it's present there's nothing complicated about it at all. The only thing that's complicated about happiness is the search for it. I used to think that I needed to love everything about Denmark in order to be content living there, but that was never going to happen, because it just wasn't the right chemistry. So some people get a kick out of being stared at unselfconsciously by the local wildlife, and other people want nothing more than to feel entirely ordinary in the place that they live, not the weirdy one that lives on the corner. I think it is entirely dependent on the chemistry of the person in the place. When you find a place or a person that draws love out of you daily for it or him or her, then it's just a question of getting on with it. There is no more search, or expectation of finding happiness. There's just living.

Awake

It's 5:43 am in County Clare and I am awake.

I am not an early riser, nor am I still fucking around since yesterday. No, I have just been sleeping bollockily tonight. Fell asleep at something to ten, and woke up at four am. And here I am, blogging. This is No Way To Live, and I'm living it.

I feel like I've been in a kind of jetlag living freeflow since february, more or less, when I slipped from the influence of the steady circadian rhythms of my Brooklyn Lover. He came to Barcelona with me in June, and there was probably another steady period of sleeping and rising at Decent Hours, for that month. But these days, left to my own devices, I am sleeping arseways. I will probably try to get another few hours sleep before waking up again, and hopefully waking up again will happen before noon today.

I'm kind of living the endless day these days. The day as continuum of Not Getting Much Done, Spending Much Time Randomly Internetting and Taking Small Pooch For Mutually Satisfying Long Walks In This Fucking Beautiful Place.

A kind of floating.

Home

There was a post asking about 'home' on Clusterflock lately, and I found myself making a long comment reply. Here is the question, and this is what I wrote:

I've been living nomadically for a while. Right now I'm in the south east corner of Clare, Ireland. I am planning to travel to New York again soon. It's a question of layers of meaning, layers of what I could call 'reasons'. I overheard two people talking about where they lived a few days ago, and one of them said, "ah well, if it's home, it's home". I found this to be as wise and deep as anything I have ever heard on the subject.

Sometimes you just end up where you end up, and it doesn't feel like home at all. I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, feeling like that pretty much all the time. It was absolutely where I lived, and I learned the language, and made homes there, moved through the culture, but I was never settled there. Every flat I lived in had a quality of 'just for a couple of months' about it, often written into the contract. I worked on an entirely freelance basis. Having lived in a number of different cultures, I think that home for me will always be a multiple of places, that I return to, regularly.

What I've learned is that finding love and engagement in and for the place you live in is an important thing, and there is no 'perfect place'. If it's home, it's home, and you enjoy the good things and deal with the bad ones. When the bad ones overwhelm the good ones, you do everything you can do to move. Usually the blend is more nuanced than 'good' and 'bad'.

Sometimes you just can't leave a place until your time there is done. I am still living on a 'couple of months' kind of basis, whether here in Clare, or Barcelona where I spent most of the summer, or New York which I am electronically connected to daily, or Denmark which I have left but whose influence I can still feel, or Dublin where I lived for a long time and which is a rich seam of memory for me, or the internet where I spend so much of my time. It is not restlessness. It is the circumstances of my sense of home. It is a constantly evolving circumstance.

Pulp

My parents have just gotten a new juicer. They are very keen, and have been juicing fruit and veg for breakfast every day this week. I have just seen my dad go down the field with the leftover pulp, to leave down in the glade, for the foxes and badgers. Thrift and eco-friendliness in motion, my dad.

Mister, please don't put your tarmac over our wild green shit

I'm in love with a muon detector

Something exists on our planet, that "spends its time "silently counting cosmic flotsam called muons" – ghost particles that ceaselessly rain down from space".

This thought is very soothing right now. And not only that, but this silent muon counter is branching out beyond its principle astrophysics specialism. When repurposed, muon counters can see inside thick stone, can discern intricacies of structure inside an archaeological ruin that has long been reclaimed by the rainforest. So they're using it as a non-invasive archaeological tool to pick out detail of the interiors of mayan ruins that currently lie beneath thick green mounds throughout the Amazon rainforest, without tearing them apart. They just sit the muon detector by the side of the mound, and it quietly goes about listening, counting and mapping. Far out.

Here is another one of Hugh Crawford's photos of the day. It was taken in July 1982, but the theme is universal. It describes, with extraordinary accuracy, except that it is clearly warm in this picture and in Ireland it is cold, how I am feeling today.

Sleep, little baby whale creature

Baby whale creature was euthanised today.

She hadn't eaten in a week, and she needs 230 litres of milk a day. She did not give up. It's the passion of her that has struck me deeply. The sheer life force.

Some photos of that day

I'm treating this site as a blog. The photographer seems to be called Hugh Crawford, though it's not a big professional/ self-promotional joint. It's an archive of a man's daily adventures with Polaroid, and I'm really enjoying the old-school site layout. It's actually the best of what a basic website can be, no frills but also no bullshit. Beautifully curated and constructed. The pictures themselves are deeply evocative and rich of the life, the place, the time. So far I'm up to December 1983. It's gorgeous.

Parkour

I discovered a new concept today. Sometimes though, whether you have the concept in mind or not, your body just starts moving like this on its own...

From the site:

"Parkour is the art of moving through your environment using only your body and the surroundings to propel yourself. It can include running, jumping, climbing, even crawling, if that is the most suitable movement for the situation. Parkour could be grasped by imagining a race through an obstacle course, the goal is to overcome obstacles quickly and efficiently, without using extraneous movement. Apply this line of thought to an urban environment, or even a run through the woods, and you're on the right path. Because individual movements could vary so greatly by the situation, it is better to consider Parkour as defined by the intention instead of the movements themselves. If the intention is to get somewhere using the most effective movements with the least loss of momentum, then it could probably be considered Parkour."

Gorgeous woman in green

Beautiful.

Baby whale creature: end of the line

This is probably going to be the last update on this story. This part struck me as very sweet:

"One effort came from Aboriginal whale whisperer Bunna Lawrie, who visited the calf Thursday afternoon. Adorned with feathers on his head and white paint markings on his face, Lawrie reached into the water to stroke Colin [baby whale creature] while singing a humming, tongue-rolling tune.

But after a few minutes the whale swam away to nuzzle a nearby yacht."

I suppose part of what drives us crazy about this story is the relentless inevitability of it, the whole mistaken mother thing is just intensely sad, and the human quality of the persistence in a pointless strategy, despite the futile outcome, because there is just no better option available. We understand that kind of activity, that kind of impulse, all too well.

So it seems that baby whale creature was attacked by sharks before his abandoning, and that his mother probably reckoned his chances as being slim for survival. Life can be so strong sometimes, so determined to be.

Eye witness speaks about baby whale creature

Ok, I am glued to the baby whale story, like, um, a baby whale to a yacht. So there is no great rescue mission underway, all the people in the viscinity can do is wait. The only thing that will save baby whale creature is if another lactating whale mother is found in the area. Here's what a yachtsman from one of the boats said today:

"It sounded like a bit of a vacuum cleaner on the bottom of the boat. I finally got up and here's this whale suckling the side of the boat," Peter Lewis told Fairfax Radio Network. "It was a very, very sad sight. It did it for about an hour, going from side to side on the boat and at times blowing air under the boat, and it just seemed to give a sigh out at one stage as if, you know, 'this isn't working.'"

(from yahoo)

So why can't they just make a gigantic rubber whalemama-like nipple and whack it on the side of one of the yachts and get this kid weaned? Of course they've had that idea. And dismissed it:

"They suckle for 11 or 12 months, so it's a long time — we'd just agree it'd be very difficult," the environmental spokeswoman said. "We think it really needs to find its mother or foster mother and those are really the only chances."

A small baby whale creature really would need to learn a lot of stuff from his mum, she is not just a source of nutrition, but she would also teach him how to be a whale. Maybe she is swimming the ocean desperately trying to find him, or maybe she just had an instinct in her to be free. Whatever way, from whatever human perspective we can look at this, this story is heartbreaking. There will, most likely, be tears at the end of it. I will be very happy to post about something else.

Who is baby whale creature's mother?

So I'm inspired by the baby whale creature topic. Beware though, this post is not for the faint of heart.

It's interesting to me that when we are faced with something like this in the 'natural' world, ie. amongst other animals, that we tut tut, and say with sad wisdom, "yes, sometimes in the wild mothers abandon their young. We don't understand why but they do." And it's considered one of those difficult-to-deal-with anomalies of nature, just what happens 'in the wild'. Nobody thinks of making laws where we go after other species mothers who have abandoned their young, to prosecute them (tough love) or offer therapy (no one will think badly of you, just own up) or reconcile parent and child in a supportive community framework. I suppose it's a question of us governing our own species' behaviour in this respect, and having some sense that wild natural behaviour is far out of our ability to control.

But how are humans so different to animals in these biological ways of responding? Yes, humans are capable of art and culture and ideas and altruism and all kinds of refined applications of the human heart and mind. But in our animal, biological ways, how different are we from any other animal? When it comes to desiring sex, taking care of our young, how we respond when we're hungry, how we respond when we're physically threatened, we have animal responses for these things, and I wonder how much those core animal responses have really needed to evolve over the lifetime of the species? Animal responses, for what they are, are pretty effective mechanisms.

But we treat our own species differently, of course. We have rules, social and civic, legal and personal ones. We have standards and codes of behaviour, we approve of certain behaviours and disapprove of others, and there is generally quite a lot of individual variation in open cultures as to what is approved of and what disapproved. And generally, if you really want to get people tut tutting, just tell 'em a story about a mother who has abandoned her child, or has gotten an abortion, or even someone who has been unable to take care of her children, with the result that her children are either taken into care or grow up feral, neglected. That's one way to flush out people's disapproval. Usually, the most important consideration to us is actually the child's safety, which no sane person would argue with, but we tend to pathologise the mother.

But what about someone who has an abortion because she discovers that the child she is carrying has got some serious genetic problem? Is this also a natural response?

It seems so arbitrary when it happens in nature, but it does happen, and each mother is different in her response. Cats, dogs, tigers and lions all often reject a 'runt' and favour the strong ones. When the runt dies, she eats it and thereby gets nutrition for feeding the others. Motherhood in animals is remarkably bullshit free. I'm not recommending that we humans start eating our dead babies, or ignore the smallest because he or she is weak, my point is that in this animal zone of our own behaviour, we apply standards that we often just can't follow, because it is not how our instincts operate.

Why do we treat human females who abandon their young as having a problem to overcome, when it is evident everywhere else in nature, not that this is the norm by any means, but that it is, in fact, another aspect of nature?

So what about baby whale creature's mother, swimming out to sea? Do we think she's heartless? The baby whale story is terrible. Baby whale creature will probably die. It is awful and I will be cheering if they manage to find a way to save the baby whale creature.

But baby whale creature's mother has swum freely off into the ocean. Someone will see her again some day, in another yacht, blowing jets of air up into the sky, taking HD camcorder footage with glee and oohs and aahs, wondering at the beauty of the natural world, or maybe you'll happen upon some of that footage of whales tossing a baby seal between them, killing it with shock, playing with it before eating it, and flinch at the cruelty before moving swiftly along to another cute kitten video. It is hard, what happens sometimes in nature. And we are more a part of nature than we usually care to understand.

The shrubs are coming! (to Beijing)

So there's talk that beijing is to be converted into a jungle after the Olympics. A visionary plan for a modern city? Or a cynical attempt at some positive pr to counteract the relentless dodgy stories emerging from China during this Olympics? Hmm...

Update on baby whale creature story

There is video. It will rip your heart out.

This is a new video, it's better than the Guardian link, but you'll need to turn the sound OFF.

The baby whale who mistook a yacht for its mother

Ok, not the most cheery start to the day, but that's how it is sometimes. I just read this.
So sometimes, in the wild, a mother abandons her baby, who still seeks its mother, and decides that a yacht will be its mother instead. Hm. I'm imagining how the people on the yacht are feeling. They are most likely very rich, and on their holidays. Faced with a doomed baby creature of tremendous natural beauty, who is looking for its mum and thinks their yacht is her. They cannot help said doomed baby creature. There is nothing they can do, except watch, or leave their yacht, effectively re-abandoning the baby creature. Other rich holidaying people in the viscinity are encountering the same possibility, as doomed baby creature gets hungrier and circles them, trying to find its real mum.

I imagine lots of long distance emergency video conferencing with therapists; knuckles-full of diazepam and prozac getting knocked back; and a general panic as the waves of complicated emotion surge as the baby whale creature circles, crying out for its mum, wondering why its mum won't come and nuzzle baby reassuringly the way she always has, wondering why mum won't feed him the way she always has.

Need a lot of drugs to numb that. Need a lot of explanations to stop you from listening to the song of the baby whale creature surging within, making its last flailing dance of life inside you.

Fluff

This is probably only happening because I'm blogging late, but anyway... Not as good as Ernest Borgnine, but not too bad for twenty past midnight. What? You didn't see Ernest Borgnine? Hmm.

Woke up this morning in the cold water...

The New York Times gets hip to Donegal surfing.

Hm, you might need to have a log-in to read this article... but it's free to join the New York Times Effect on Man.

Bock's picks

Hey, just noticed that Lucy Takes Off is featured today on Bock The Robber as one of his picks of the day... nice.

For as long as it lasts...

It's a pretty cool resource. I'm currently reading articles from the National Geographic... yeah, probably with some trash to follow. This site's got em all, for now. Basically it's a joint where the members of the site - free to join, free to upload - can scan magazines and articles and people can read them online, for free (I'm reading them and I haven't joined). Hm, wonder who's gonna be irked by that?

Dublin city: detail

Dublin, rain, the street

I had a Dublin moment tonight, as I left the Luas station in Ranelagh. "How're you doing", asks the tall man to my left, quietly, on the street. "Grand, thanks", I reply. And we chat a bit, a few more sentences to the corner, where we part ways. "Lovely talking with you", he says. It is genuine and friendly. So nice, especially after a walk through the very weird parade that is Dublin's nightscape.

On Grafton street: a very old drunk man, stumbling down the street, a fresh gash across his forehead, yielding blood. At the top of Grafton street, several large bouncer-looking working class Dublin men held large yellow placards emblazoned with the legend, JOHN 3:7. Getting off the Luas, presumably to join them, was a very pious looking pale faced type, definitely more the 19 year old pioneer pin-wearing stereotype of fifties Ireland, but with a yellow tshirt on over his coat, again declaring, JOHN 3:7. This is a verse from the opium eater's gospel, the young one, and it has been showing up (some sort of cult seems to be emerging, on the face of tonight's attendance) for some years now just behind the goal posts at rugby and Gaelic matches, and, I suppose, has taken on a life of its own. My guess is that it preaches something about abstinence, maybe the guys holding the placards were fresh from some 12 step programme. I don't know.

I won't bother getting started with Temple Bar. As Friendly Ranelagh Man said, sure there's no one Irish in there at all. Truly. And for good reason.

I often encounter these random moments of friendliness, actually. They always come as a surprise. It's amazing how a momentary meeting with a stranger - nothing intense, nothing fancy, no big ideas - can feel very intimate. Some intimate part of you, touched. And then you say goodbye, and walk down the street. I remember a conversation I overheard on the bus from Girona airport to Barcelona, a month or so ago, between a girl from Texas and a softly spoken Spanish man. I sat behind them, it was a rainy night, they were speaking English, I am curious, I listened. It was largely chitchat, but you know, chitchat is some of the most interesting chat there is, really, especially when other people are having it. She was intelligent, independent, a 'good' girl, conditioned to be guarded with strange men. He seemed such a lovely sort. I sort of hoped they would exchange email addresses or facebook contacts or something. Afterwards, I saw her, on the train to Catalunya. She looked like she was thinking hard. Like the part of her that was forgotten from the thought, was suddenly sad.

Do you know the feeling of sudden sadness? The one that comes like a whirlwind, and tears through your body? The active sadness, the living sadness, that leaves space after it has gone, energy and joy the next day? Do you know that feeling, or anything like it?

So, according to my late night chat tonight, news from Roscommon is that apparently no one even says how-are-you-doing there anymore. What a pity. I'm glad they do in Dublin.

Pocket monster

This guy's physical and vocal resemblance to an android is, truly, remarkable. But his product seems to rock.


So I saw this yesterday.

I've had a three year old old-for-2005-got-it-cheap mobile phone that I have felt no need to upgrade because it's basic and simple, and doesn't try to pretend to look like a computer, like the current crop of mobile phones do, without doing much, if anything, else. They're trying to chase iPhone's arse, but they've just gotten wider and bigger and have more flashing colours and mimic the physical appearance of the iPhone, but basically all they do is transmit voice and short text information.

So far, my reluctance to hook up to an iPhone subscription is twofold: I am living rootlessly at the moment, and currently you have to subscribe for some lengthy period of time to a particular server, and this just doesn't rhyme with the way I live. And secondly, it's not cheap. I hardly ever use my mobile phone. But I use the internet constantly, and I spend hours every day on my laptop. And that's what the iPhone is talking about.

Ultimately, the iPhone is a small device, which is what is great about it, and also its limitation. I can't edit movies on an iPhone, I can't record songs, it's not really feasible to pore over a tiny screen to write anything for much time, without getting a headache. So it is what it is, and its scope as a work tool is limited. But in terms of a constant internet companion, now THAT is something I can understand. Maybe it'll mean I'll get out more!

Whether I get an iPhone, however, despite my affection for the Mac OS, is moot. Check this out: a Linux/Google version of iPhone is on the way by the end of this year, the Android platform, which, if you look at the video at the top of this post, seems to be really drawing together the various google applications into an open platform pocket internet device. I'm excited to find out how they release it.

The interesting thing about all this generation of device, of which the iPhone is clearly the first to emerge, is that they really make redundant the telecommunications industry standard of paying in terms of 'minutes' spent engaging with the network. There has been a revolution in my own life this past year since I got this laptop (a year old tomorrow!) and iPod and basically the software therein: the iLife suite, the iWork suite, and New York city's freely available wifi. Not every city has wifi running on tap in the same way, partly to do with the sheer density of New York and the way it runs, partly to do with the fact that networks in Ireland, at least, and Spain and Denmark I think also, embed a password as a requisite part of signing onto their broadband package. I have only found an open individual subscription in Ireland once: people seem to guard their wifi access as if throngs of laptop owners would be likely to flock to their doorstep and hang around in the rain, nudging ever closer to the wall, eagerly googling.

It is only when a city's culture understands the need for the internet to be like running water, freely available, run on individual subscriptions, but with an open sensibility so that if you find yourself out of range of your own house-based connection, then you'll always find a friendly port to give you access. It's an alternative community idea, it's about building internet infrastructure, understanding that people live mobile lives, and some live more mobile lives than others.

Less than a year ago, I found Dublin to be a very inhospitable place to wifi access. Everything was on a charge-basis, none of the hotels had open access, and cafes offered 'free' wifi in the form of a password that gave 20 minutes of access, presumably because of a fear that people would linger ever slightly over their coffee if the wifi was on tap. Well, it's a long way from Brooklyn's fields of white laptops, one to a table, that have colonised some of the city's hipper cafes, mini office spaces for cash strapped writers, developers, designers, students. Yeah, I don't know how these coffee shops pay their rent either, but it's a part of what makes New York so interesting: subcultures develop and teem over. Endlessly dancing circles.

Anyway, last weekend I found a few more Dublin hostelries advertisting 'free wifi' in their windows. I also got the impression that it had been a bad summer for the hospitality industry, so maybe they've got to work a little harder for that five euro skinny vanilla latte, but it seems like a step in the right direction, a necessary direction.

Tall man/ short woman on Grafton Street

Get your wet Irish summer pictures here, folks!

It appears that just living in a drenched out summer reality is not enough for some of you... at least the ones in Ireland, who are the ones getting drenched! So, I'm getting some google traffic from people in search of pictures of our wet Irish summer, and most of this traffic is coming from within Ireland itself... well I have plenty, and am happy to oblige this particular special interest group. Pictures are fuzzy because of the meeting of a digital non-SLR interface with rapidly moving rain-sodden humans.

Pretty enough

Thoroughly flawless girl (except perhaps for the fact that she has been made a fraud, but by the time this will show in her character she will be probably be already too old, ie. over 10, by then anyway)

Not thoroughly flawless girl.

So the stories are oozing out of China. One can only suck in for so long.

Big hooha as it is revealed that the little girl who was seen 'singing' at the Olympics opening ceremony was just lipsynching. "The child on the screen should be flawless in image, in her internal feelings, and in her expression. In the matter of her voice, Yang Peiyi [girl in the second picture] was flawless, in the unanimous opinion of all team". So says some spokesman, explaining the actions that led to Yang Peiyi standing behind a screen, singing into a microphone, while another girl mummed for the cameras out front.

The real singer was not used, in favour of the girl in the first picture, who was considered flawless, presumably, in her image, internal feelings and expression. The original child chosen to sing the song turned out, at 10, to be too old for the job. Ah. Dear.

I didn't see the opening ceremony, and I haven't been watching any of the events either, but this story caught my eye. There are a lot of stories coming out about western journalists being roughed up, and fake fireworks and such.

So here's the last word, from the girl behind the screen...

"Yang Peiyi is said to have reacted well to the disappointment. "I am proud to have been chosen to sing at all," she said. "

Sunset Motel

Just watched this. American passion. Bee you tee full.

Tweet me!

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

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

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

Sheep shit/ Thought shit

Dublin this past weekend was pouring pouring rain like a monsoon pours. It was kind of fun, taking pictures of people huddling together under umbrellas while running, like eager three legged race runners. There's a kind of pitch of excitement that happens when there's a real downpour, a gorgeous smell in the air, something about it I love.

You know, it's cold here in Ireland this past couple of days. Actually cold. Tights weather, boots weather, though I am holding off. There is constant and heavy rain. My mother speaks of Egypt like it's calling her to its heat. Only two weeks ago I was living in shorts.

Today on my wet walk through the local wilderness here in Clare, I met some wildish horses, some were mares suckling their foals, and there was a stallion who was sniffing deeply, savouring the aroma from a dusky mare's hind quarters as she carefully positioned her rump in front of him, and twitched her tail. God, the things women could do if we had tails.

I stopped to watch them. He sniffed at her, then rubbed his nose against the grass, against his legs, sniffed the air, she danced a couple of graceful paces ahead of him, twitching that tail, and stood before him once more. He followed, she led, thus. I wondered why he wasn't mounting her. I was standing what I considered to be a subtle distance away from them, but clearly it wasn't subtle enough: he craned his neck around and stared right at me for several seconds. I moved on, looking behind me every now and then, to see one or other of them looking behind them at me.

Then it was my turn with sheep, to get up close and proximate. A sheep's baa up close is a different thing altogether, you can feel the baa, rather than just hear it. There were lots of mothers calling to their smallish lambs, their teenaged lambs, and lots of smallish and teenaged lambs baaing back (different tones). Sheep tend to move in a flock, and they're not too keen on humans. Maybe this has something to do with humans' peculiarly keen appetite for eating sheep's babies, who knows, but they tend to run in a hobbledy kind of way when a human is in their path. And so I climbed a little down the hillside, and let them pass, baaing and hobbling and jogging with the bright blue and red splodges of spray paint decorating their backs.

My shoes were covered in shit when I got home. It occurred to me that sheep, goats, horses and cows, any animal that lives in fields principally, shits and eats in the same place, but they probably don't get sick because it's just grass, cycling itself. Sheep shit, horse shit, even cow shit, doesn't smell bad to me. It's rich with wildness. Sure I get thrills from big cities too, but these long walks I take around here are such pleasures.

I was plagued with intense thoughts of the kind that insist themselves but can never be resolved as thoughts. Maybe some day they'll just go away. I'll take sheep shit over thought shit any day.

Fleeing the past

I've just read a remarkable article about some children of nazis who have converted to Judaism and gone to live in Israel. It culminates in a frank conversation with a relative of Hitler, who is probably the only one of the converts who freely discusses his family's nazi past. He describes his feelings on arriving in Israel in the seventies:

"I felt at home. I was no longer living in a conflict. I didn't have to reject the older generation."

Interestingly enough, there is some suggestion that his family's past has taken on a different face, in the following generation:

"Two of my sons are chauvinists and one of them is even partially racist. I can't listen to fascistic discourse. I don't suffer that."

Read it here.

I had a couple of hula hoops in Copenhagen

and two pairs of fuckoff four wheeler rollerskates, one pair of which I sold to a Dutch couple in my short-lived clothes shop, for lots of kroner, the best sale I made in that place, except for the red leather stiletto heeled boots that got sold the first day I put them out. Amazing what women will buy, sometimes. Like me, for instance, who bought them in the first place. I wore them once, on a snowy day in Dublin, on the way to the Project Arts Centre, where I was working on some theatre experiment. I remember the challenge of the stiletto meeting slush, while looking elegant. Jesus.

I had exchanged the skates for a pair of bright orange Björn Borg puffa moon boots, with a chick who had a stall in the huge twice yearly loppemarked, or flea market, in Blågårdsplads, the same street where I had my shop a few months later. We were both happy with the trade. I had been looking for a pair of four wheeler rollerskates for months before that day, and then found two pairs on the same day, within minutes of each other.

I've just been reminded of the hula hoops by a cartoon in the New Yorker, on the same page as an article about Emily Dickinson's 24- year correspondence with a man she barely met in all that time. I'm still reading it, just broke away to write this.

One of the hula hoops was large and yellow: I gave this one to my friend Helle. I got a smaller green one at another loppemarked, one I was actually selling at also, up on Nørrebrogade, at Stefan's Kirke. At some point my friend Anders came along and was sent up to the bell tower of the church to blast his trumpet out onto the street. Unfortunately, the wind was not with him that day and no one could hear, but I'm sure he was paid anyway. They're good at that sort of thing in Denmark. It's really unheard of for people not to get paid for playing music there. A place like Kulkafeen of course, a great place run by two friends of mine, with a lovely little stage above a candlelit bar, is the kind of joint you can book informally for free, and if you get a crowd and charge a couple of bucks on the door that's your only way of making any money there. But kul kaf is just a great place to show some interesting stuff in an intimate setting. I loved that place. For the most part, when you play in Denmark, you're getting paid decently for it, whether it's your own stuff or standards.

Tangent. I can so easily go off on tangents about musicians and artists getting paid or not and how in various countries. Well, it's just so different in New York city... anyway, back to the loppemarked at Stefan's Kirke. The woman I bought the hula hoop from also had a really fucking ace kind of wine coloured jumpsuit, clearly from the actual seventies and thus really not very actually hip at all at the time, certainly. It was really clingy and made me giggle out loud when I tried it on in the church's loo. It was totally fabulous, but she was really pushing the price at 85 crowns (bit over a tenner: yeah the price bar at loppemarkeds is low), so I didn't buy it. But I bought the hula hoop from her. I think she made me pay 15 crowns, a princely sum. It was green and not so wide. Good for someone who hadn't hooped since she was 12 (tho a serious hooper at 12).

Later that year in the bloody cold of winter, I sang in the same church, at a funeral of a young man prematurely dead of boozing, to a small crowd of his family and a couple of friends. About 30 people saw him off the face of life. White coffin. I sang over it. We were told what to play: Tears from Heaven, the Eric Clapton song about his dead 2 year old son. Well, it was this man in the coffin's favourite song when he was alive, apparently. I kept the lyrics on a stand in front of me, kept my eyes closed as much as I could. Bloody hard gig. No applause that day. But we got paid. His sister said we did a nice job.

So I chucked everything I had when I left Copenhagen, more or less. Just brought what I could carry in a couple of suitcases. Chucked, sold and gave away. The hula hoops went, as did most of the stock left over from my shop, except the Christian Louboutin red suede stiletto pumps and the beaver hat from the 20's and a few things like that that I sold to another vintage shop owner who drove a brutally hard bargain. When you move around a lot, you learn to live lightly, in terms of luggage and possessions, and you learn to throw away too, because you have to. It's a good skill to learn, easily forgotten, too, if it's not used much. But that really is the luxury of having your own home: the facility of having unnecessary stuff hanging around, without needing to throw it away because you're moving country every couple of months, or because your space is so cramped you've got to. Still, all this moving around has been very interesting. And continues to be.

So in my first week in New York last summer I found a pair of fuckoff white four wheel roller skates with pastel rainbow laces and hubba-bubba pink wheels, in the window of a thrift store on McDougal street and went in and bought them, along with a pure silk blue layer-dress that I haven't worn yet, inexplicably, in the style that's all over the place like a rash this year (probably why). The nice chick behind the counter gave me the dress for free, and a cool pink shoulder bag too, that I use quite a bit lately.

I met a couple of gals last week, in the Plaça del Diamant in Gracia, one of whom had a pair of battered old leather fourwheelers she had had for 20 years, she said. She was taking her 4 year old son around, showing him the skatin' ropes. She didn't have any stoppers on them: I asked her how she stopped, she showed me. It's a spin, very delicately executed. I want to practise that, get ready for the inevitability of falling, train my body into relaxed falling. I still haven't taken the skates out, dude. They're still in Brooklyn, waiting for me. Unless of course they have been skated away by clutches of liberated cockroaches, experiencing brute natural joy for the first time in their species history because they have abandoned the rules.

And you know, I wish them the best of luck.

A bit too boy; a bit too girl, but mostly we have fun

A six year old takes a picture of how it is.

Daisy

It's the summer in Ireland, and it's raining

I'm here a day and enjoying the rain: the luxury of a summer spent in the sun. It's Irish summer rain: not cold, but mild, soft, relentless. Everything green here loves it (also my snot). The trees and grasses and hedges and wild things have grown so much this year. I took a walk by the bank of the canal, and skipped off by some horses coralled in a small strip of field. All ages, mares and foals. I sang to see if they'd be interested. They were. They ran up to listen. One of them, a chestnut brown mare, got into the groove, shook her mane around and edged away a white, smaller mare, who wanted to find out what was going on. Edged her away and came back to listen. Selfish bitch, but beautiful. I sang a few melodic lines and made my way off. Cows are also a good audience, though less discriminate.

There were some small waterfalls, gushing hard. The sounds and smells and pictures were intoxicating. This countryside makes me feel so good. Especially at the start of the walk, some pressing thoughts came to be worked out, insisting on themselves, eventually they just skulked off. Wild flowers got picked. These ones. I know, the horses would have been better, or the waterfalls, but I didn't bring my camera. I've been using digital for the past month or so. Digging it.

My parents are desperate for a holiday, out from under the wet sky. The thing about Irish weather is its changeability. Two fine days in the summer trigger hope, Irish people are amazing hopers, and then the rain comes again. Some people, like me, find this unpredictability exciting; some, like my friend Sile, just love the rain; and others (probably everybody else) long for the sun.

I remember when I used to live in Dublin, I'd look out the window and watch the weather change over and over in the space of an hour, wondering what to wear. Layers, we say in Ireland, confidently. My friend Caroline in Barcelona says that Ireland is the only place she has ever heard such wisdom. That surprised me. Maybe it's one of those cultural assumptions, like blackfaced minstrels or topless sunbathing, that isn't questioned much by members of the home culture. Either way, I've never been one for layers of clothes, except in Denmark or Norway or New York in the searing, bloodyminded cold. In that kind of weather, you just wear everything you can fit on.

There are different kinds of cold though, as there are different kinds of heat. Barcelona can get really very humid, which I found surprising, given its desert-like scrubby landscape, which of course you can barely see, so asphalted and intensely built is the city. You can see it in the parks, mostly, and in some deserted lots along the less touristy beaches: what grows naturally, what grows wild, what is local, are cactii and thick leaved creatures capable of holding water and surviving the hard sun.

Danish winter is humid, cold and goes on for many months. Norwegian winter is bone dry and cold and goes on for most of the year (depending on how far up you find yourself). I found the winter in New York to be cold and dry also, but I hear it gets much much colder than the one I experienced. I loved the availability of sky on the roof of the building where I lived in Brooklyn, I need that in a city. I loved the blueness of the sky, every other day. I went up there, to dance about in the freezing cold, the only time of the year I was interested in sunbathing.

I also had a roof terrace in Barcelona, it was surprisingly cool up there in the evenings and even during the day, much cooler than my room two floors below. I loved the street, the different languages I heard every day passing by my window, the way my friends there used to drop by unannounced, calling up to my window from the street, the scooters waking me up in the morning like they were driving through my room, the plaça life, the availability and visibility of human social life, the beat of the life in that city. I didn't write much there, mostly short clear ideas written on post-its. My thinking was mostly visual. I took a lot of pictures and video. I've been editing, working on something I'll be showing in the North in September. I'm nearly done: and going to post some samples on my site soon.

Irish weather is much milder than any of these places, at either end of the spectrum. But in Scandinavia they have saunas, some of the most beautiful rooms I have ever been in were art deco and modernist saunas in Copenhagen, and in Spain they have the siesta.

What do we have here? Lush, relentless green beauty. And chartered package holidays, to places of cheap heat, for a week or two.

Postcards and those who love them

Have you sent a postcard ?

The Curious Case of Lonesome George

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Shades

I fell into something of a trance last night, watching the ripples of pink and blue light dance over the gently undulating surface of the sea at dusk. The only thought that interrupted this was a brief consideration of possible technologies to record the movement. It rocks here. I will be sad to leave, next monday. Estoy mirados.

And today, I have found this.

Now I have the company of a bee, who has just flown in my window. He says bz.

Lego Stephen Hawking in space, anyone? Hurrah!

What is hip?

This.

So that video is useful because, as far as I'm concerned, it exemplifies a kind of hip: hip manifest, hip in motion. Hip alive and making sounds. And the little boy in red up on the fire escape? Yeah. He knows. That little boy in red KNOWS.

But then, though this is true hip and there's no two ways about it, it's a 35 year old example of it. It's an example that is readily understandable to most people I think, to varying degrees of complexity. Because what is hip about it to me is not the clothes and the look, but the manifestation of an inward beat. Duke Ellington's way with swing was also a pure manifestation of hip. The Bothy Band, to me, is an Irish example of hip from the seventies.

Of course all this stuff is deeply subjective. But it's a good topic, and good to treat in a way that is not just about looks. Because being hip, at the time when the word hip was hip, was never purely about a dress code anyway. Hip was distinct from square or straight, and yes of course, there were purely superficial signifiers for this stuff, used as any tribe uses costume to identify other members of a tribe, particularly in a mixed environment.

But hip would also have meant, at least in the sixties, social aspects like: interest in contemporary music forms, cannabis use, sexual easiness, laidback vibe, left-leaning politics. Getting deeper, hip would mean understanding slang, jive. Hip was understanding a social background and also being hip with it. Hip was street smart. Being able to survive. Being smart. Having a sense of humour, easily verbalised. That's hip, and still is. Having rhythm. Being able to turn the hip vibe into song. Yeah, that's hip.

I would strongly distinguish 'hip' from 'hippy', though. I would probably say that a fair whack of hippies weren't remotely hip at all. So you know, Joan Baez was clearly not hip, and Joni Mitchell - even though she seemed kind of angelic when she came out at the very start, with a similar repertoire to Baez - was utterly hip.

Hip to me isn't an outfit or a pose, it's not a lifestyle or a set of opinions. It's kind of a look in the eye, a vibe, a way of doing things, a kind of casual intelligence, a kind of life groove, and it can come through in a person's life or their work. Tom Waits, who has been here in Barcelona this past week, is a living exposition of the evolution of hip through time. He keeps getting deeper into his hip groove. But he's not hip because his style has been appropriated by certain style-makers, or deemed fashionable. He's hip because he's digging his own groove. And he's just hip.

So hip matters. Hip means something. Hip is not a piece of cheese. Hip is innate. Hip lives in your bones. Hip is not cool. This is a useful distinction. Hip is deeper than cool, and is not afraid to court uncoolness if its expression gets in the way of 'cool' rules (and by cool I do not mean in the 'birth of the cool' sense. That's hip).

Rain on the Carrer Verdi

It gets hairier and hairier

Solar flares. Beautiful pictures and video of their magnetic field movements re-enacted, recreated, in a laboratory in California.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, there is low thunder, lightning and rain. Smells of rain hitting warm pavement. The thunder is getting louder.

A cockroach cautionary

My boyfriend's house in Brooklyn has become a place of refuge for cockroaches on the verge of extinction, trying to evade the inevitable hand of evolution. While he was over here in Europe for the past month and a half, the roaches back in Brooklyn had no food or water around and most of the regular troupe fled, but a few have stuck around. The not-so-smart ones. They hang around, not really knowing what to do with themselves, not knowing the RULES of engagement between humans and cockroaches, the rules that other cockroaches happily seem to know innately, like

When the light goes on: scram, or there will be blood.
Keep it discreet.
Run fast.
Find a good hiding spot, and when it's discovered, flee.
Never go into areas of the house that don't contain food. It serves no purpose and raises alarm.
Never try to make friends with a human.

Last night he discovered a cockroach walking across his foot. I've never heard of a roach behaving like this. These are clearly either the ones who might not survive an atomic blast, or else they're the future. I think the ones hanging out in his house are trying to make friends, wondering why we can't all get along, trying to push the boundaries of integration in areas outside of the stereotypical kitchen option previously so favoured by cockroaches.

It can't last.

Beautiful scene on the Carrer de Verdi

The skinny swarthy dreadlocked man who works in my local supermarket, caressing his dog's head gently and reassuringly before leaving her attached to a lamp-post and going into his workplace. The look on her face as she accepted his love. The way she watched him go, her rump taking up half the footpath. How relaxed she was, with no anxious anticipation of anyone walking on her, as they crossed her path. But mostly her eyes, her face, as he cupped it in his hand, standing behind her, her sheer loving intelligence, and his, as they embraced before parting. Her eyes squeezed closed with delight, relaxed delight. He looked into my eyes as I approached them, protective of her.

It was the most beautiful thing I saw today, the most beautiful way I have seen two creatures being together, in some time. It is rare to see human lovers who love with such intimacy, such ease and casual joy in their loving.

The whole thing took about 3 seconds. I saw it happen. I only registered it mentally after I had seen it. I have been thinking about it ever since. A non- SLR/film camera will not capture this kind of moment.

Great Idea of the Day

I'm introducing a new post series here on LUCY TAKES OFF, from my adventures on the internet, called Great Idea of the Day. And we're introducing it in style. If you are not yet acquainted with the gorgeous concept of seed bombing, get ready to feel the revolution.

If this is sunday, it must be Dublin

I had a whole blog post paragraph written yesterday, and its topic was the American independence day. I didn't post it in time, and it's gone past its sell by date now, like an over-crispened trotter, or a squib left out in the overnight dew. God knows it's rare I write a blog post these days. I am drawn to capitalising, suddenly, BUT I KNOW IT MIGHT NOT COME TO ANY GOOD. OH. THAT FEELS GOOD. THAT'S SOME KIND OF A RELIEF. BUT IT PROBABLY MAKES ME LOOK HYSTERICAL. OH WELL. NOT THAT I MIND ABOUT THAT.

SO, NOW THAT I'M CAPITALISING HAPPILY, I NOTICE THAT CONTENT HAS DRIED UP ENTIRELY. I AM SATISFYING MY OWN SELFISH DESIRES AT THE EXPENSE OF ANY INTEREST TO MY LOYAL READERS WHO COME BY HERE DAILY, HOPING HOPING... AND THOSE OTHERS, WHO LATELY SEEM TO BE COMING IN ALARMING REGULARITY, IN SEARCH OF 'GAGGED LADIES'. LORD. OK, I THINK I AM now sated of capitals. not that i don't expect it to come flooding back again without so much as a by your leave. but for now, it seems that i've gotten capitalisation out of my system.

Yeah, that didn't last long. Ross is right now crossing Flatbush to Freddy's, where he will have a pint of Sierra Nevada, and chat with the regulars for an hour. I am a few thousand miles away, where it is LATE (yowza) and I must get up soonish to start my Big Trek To Dublin, and Back To Barcelona. I wonder how it will be when I return. I wonder what I will do there, this time. It's been a year of a lot of travelling. Ireland has functioned as a kind of return place this past year, for the first time since 2003. Over and back to New York, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Marseille, Milan, in various combinations, since last june. And I'm still on the move.

Short Shine

I'm not usually one for declaring favourites, but whenever anyone asks me what my favourite movie is, I began saying The Shining about 3 years ago, when I saw it for the first time. Channel 4 has just made a lovely promo for a bunch of Kubrick movies they're showing. It's like taking the nouns from an elegant poem and making the font nice, and laminating them. I quite like it.

For the New Yorkers

... there's this guy. For everybody else, go to New York, email that guy, he'll come and draw you.

Irish summer

We've just had a sudden downpour of hailstones and huge drops of rain, here in Clare. It lasted 15 minutes, now blue sky and sunny again. This is the Irish summer this year: showery, cold in the nights, grey clouds every day, bright spells, fresh. The growth is incredible this year! Everything green loves this weather of course, the whole natural landscape is full and vibrant.

People, however, are fleeing the country in droves, seeking heat. I feel the other way, I've been in Barcelona city heat for a month, and this is a welcome respite from hot concrete. The air smells so good to me.

This time last year I was also in Ireland for a short spell, on a journey that had brought me from Denmark to France and on to Clare, then forward to New York city in mid July. This time, I'm on my way back to Barcelona. Been there with Ross this past month. I'm returning alone, this time.

Want to hear the sound of a giggling rat being tickled?

Now's your chance.

oh alright, and

this

oh, and this

If this is friday, it must be Limerick

It's a sunny day in Limerick. That's all I'm saying.

Hello Philadelphia

... who googled gagged ladies and cat, and found their way here, somehow... oasis in the storm? Glad to have you, Philly.

Paean to these blogging tarts

Ok so there are fucking ten million places now on the internet where you can post your random passing thought of the moment, in pithy one liner fashion. I'm not starting this one pretty.

Facebook
One of the most beautiful things I have seen on the internet in quite some time
Twitter
Gmail Chat
All those postcard-your-feelings-into-our-website genre items
And while you're at it, have a look at Smithmag's six word memoirs

I've just discovered Spanish dippable digestive biscuits. They're extra hard so you can dunk them in your tea without disintegrating (and not as sweet as the exported version by mcvities) but not so hard that you can't nibble on them dry too.

And they make an excellent percussion instrument.

Oh this year I'm off to sunny Spain

AY veeeeeeva espanyaaaaaaaah...

We boogie whether weather

Milan rain. Barcelona rain. It's all wet. Art.

Lough Corrib

Stars fall apart

A supernova is born!

Introducing... the banana guard!

Just found an amazing product for people who like to casually sling a banana in their bag on the way out the door... only to find it at the bottom of your bag, mushed, a couple of hours later. I just wonder how they figured a standardised banana shape... I've heard stories about bananas' shapes being standardised according to EU regulations, dunno if they're just urban myths, but organic bananas always seem curvier to me. Also, I recall having heard once that 21% of the world's total pesticide output is sprayed on bananas alone. If you're going to reduce your organic greengrocery shopping to 2 products, make them bananas and lettuce, which is also highly sprayed, unless organic.

But this banana guard, though it will likely make people stare, and stare hard, looks like a fruit-packing revolution.

Generations of bullheaded bollocks

You couldn't make this stuff up. Especially with the grandson standing in the knesset giving speeches about naive American senators appeasing Hitler. On that note, this bollocks that's being touted all over American political life this week, that nobody in their right mind and ethics should be talking to terrorists... how the hell do you think the peace process in Northern Ireland was resolved? How the hell do you think the peace process in Israel/Palestine got the closest it ever got to being completed? What was the first thing that was initiated in South Africa, after apartheid was torn down, but an amnesty for people from ALL sides and experience of life under the system, to TALK?

Stay on your high horse if it makes you feel superior and you need that to survive, but you'll need to make sure the horse's legs are bullet proof.

How it is

I feel a bit like this today.

Boogie boogie boogie

Pretty cool event happening on the streets of new york citay tomorrow afternoon. Arresting to see a statement by Michael Bloomberg on the front page of the website, tho... (aren't these things in the life of New York city supposed to be heavily underground and utterly unsupported by any state or city office? Isn't that how it goes in New York?!)

This might be the opportunity to make like it's 1980, you're at the High School of the Performing Arts, your best friends are called Coco, Ralph and Leroy in those shiny blue shorts, and the streets are there for the taking (as long as you're tightly synchronised on those yellow cab roofs).

Missus

Interesting perspectives on New Orleans

Like any natural disaster brought to the peak of media attention for a period, you don't hear about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina very much. But this is a comic-style serialisation of the events of august, 2005 and what happened afterwards. The story of New Orleans exists now for most of the world in the realm of history and tv memory. Here's a little insight into some of the reconstruction that people are trying to do down there, on their own. Click on the neighbourhoods to see the videos.

Green and concrete

This article reminds me of when I first lived in New York city in 2003. I loved the little community gardens of the East Village, and subsequently discovered some in Brooklyn, too. Kind of mythical to hear of secret gardens in Guantanamo Bay, and of course this article was published at the height of that.

Oh this year I'm off to sunny Spain

Interesting story here about drought in Spain, and the revelation of a medieval village from the dry depths of an erstwhile reservoir. It's interesting to me because when I was in Spain in the last couple of weeks, I made a trip to Tortosa, a smallish town of 30,000 a couple of hours on the train south of Barcelona. There, I heard that their local reservoir was threatened with being pumped out north to Barcelona, to hydrate the city, leaving the Tortosans dry. The local community were up in arms, particularly when they heard that some of the designated uses were for a waterland theme park and hotel.

When I spent a couple of weeks at a renewable energy plant in west Denmark a few years ago, one of the engineers joked to me over dinner one evening that Ireland was soon going to be making a lot of money from exporting its rivers and lakes to countries that are drying up fast. We still complain endlessly about the rain here, and take to sunny Spain in droves, seeking heat, seeking sun.

Latest in: A lonely heart in Singapore, Singapore found Lucy Takes Off yesterday, upon googling 'discreet spanking'.

The mind does boggle, though.

Google search terms

Continuing one of my "occasional series", this time: How People Find Lucy Takes Off From The Great Unknown of Internet Chaos. Well, yesterday, the search term 'kind porno' brought someone from Hungary home to the sweet meadows of Lucy Takes Off, and today, someone from Hackensack New Jersey felt their heart beating to the drum of 'cats with small heads', and found sanctuary here. As always, a certain once-quoted Beatles tune (hint: from Revolver) seems to bring people here several times a week.

It's like a Brooklyn streetcorner around here sometimes (um, only with fewer people, and no bodegas, and only a couple of people picking up their dog's poo. Some similes fly, others drop out of the sky like crisp carbonny meteorites.. oh.)

Would anybody like to see a picture?

A coat that was killed because it was so alive

Have you heard about this?

(if you're not subscribed to the ny times, you'll have to join up to see this article, but it's free and quite fast..)

Review of two hours of this evening

The band gives the gig the same energy level as a bored cashier in a supermarket, scanning the songs perfunctorily, throwing in a few good-for-a-laugh basically unfunny jokes for the sexually nervous. And then they play some shit games and take 3 minutes between each heavily synthesised cover version to fart and bollock around, and noodle and just let the dead air tumble by. And mumble into the microphone to each other. Nothing they sing or say is actually audible, nor does anyone really care. Their audience is determined to have a good time regardless of the shitness of the surroundings, which is a very good strategy tonight.

A couple leaps up spontaneously, together, at once, when "easy like sunday morning" strikes up. They slowdance through the lot of it. They are in their forties, utterly enraptured in each other. The most inspiring thing I’ve seen in days. Intensely sweet. She is older than him by about 5 years; smiles shyly at him, utterly girlish. His hands move over the bottom of her back where her arse starts, like a too-early weaned kitten. The band stops after the song, the couple continues to move together, oblivious. The band strikes up some heavy metal song. The couple’s hips start to move faster, then they jive. This sweet thing just rocks harder all the time, then softer, then harder. Softer.

In this place where 20 year olds totter around in too-short skirts and silvery sandals in winter, parading for the sake of the parade, this couple is fucking REAL. He dances with her like he means it, like he’s trying to get her into his bed and make her fall in love with him all at the same time. She smiles shyly and responds to his moves. These people are my heroes tonight. I want to write love songs to them. I want to tell them how much I think they ROCK but I don’t want to freak them out, or disturb their intimacy. The band plays Shoot that poison arrow through my hea-aaa-aart. He strokes her arm and puts his other arm on her chair protectively as he leans toward her, like he expects every other man in the place to try to steal this 45 year old woman from him. Clearly he knows he’s got a treasure sitting beside him. They converse like grown ups. They drink a pot of tea.

Somebody just bought me a drink. The pretty Indian boy brings it over to my table, shyly. He doesn’t know how to present such a situation. I blush. The red lights flash, indicating last orders. I think, bollocks, there’s going to be a chatting up scene. Oh the hell with it. I’m a young woman in the prime of my sexiness and strength and about as bullshitless as I’ve ever been. This sort of shit is going to happen.

When it comes to being chatted up, however, I am a dilletante. Rather, I am not highly skilled at cooing fakely when a man comes over to try his luck, and I'd rather do without the intrusion a lot of the time. Luckily, the two men I chatted with tonight turned out to be friendly, and good fun. The couple danced, and finished their tea, and left.

Love came to my door with a sleeping roll

I've seen a lot of press for a new book about Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon, over the past couple of days. But this review was interesting, particularly this paragraph:

"Only in retrospect is it clear that the ultimate demise of traditional pop romanticism actually began later than is commonly thought. Today’s erotic pop ethos of cold heat didn’t begin to coalesce until the emergence of Madonna. Desire without passion and celebration of the body as a machine engaged in sexual competition replaced rapturous surrender in love songs. As melody, the primary vehicle for love songs, has diminished in importance, so have the number and intensity of those songs."

Nicely put. Pithy.

Uhm... (cough, shuffle, gaze at floor)

We humans sometimes can't look other people in the eye without words to push out our mouths at the same time. We like to have things to do.

(I recommend turning the sound off for this one)

Another kind of bike, another kind of rider

I want to link to this because it's so lovely. Also because when I was in Barcelona last week, I was sharing a flat with a motorcycle designer, who I'm sure would love to see this.

I think three and a half years in Denmark changed my relationship to design, by osmosis. Not in terms of a particular aesthetic, but to make me find something like this interesting at all.

This is a gorgeous photographic archive of a moment in time in the seventies in sarf London, and of course even the taking of such an archive would probably be subject to far higher scrutiny these days. This picture, for instance. Its pure brute beauty of a teenage black boy being photographed by a teacher would surely cause suspicion in the boy, his parents, the school governors, and anyone else who heard about a teacher taking pictures of his charges today?

I still feel that this kind of thing can get done, this guy was obviously very visible in the community as a photograph taker. The shift is obvious: now everyone has become 'the photograph taker' and yet somehow the kind of engagement and frank boldness implicit in the job of taking these particular pictures is still rare to meet. There's a lot more to taking this kind of photograph than getting the light and composition right, and even the gift of seeing the moment you're in. There's the business of being accepted as the photograph taker of intimate moments, by the subjects of the picture. THAT is a rare gift.

So we began the day with nature sex, we end it with nature war

Here's a highly improbably story of a plucky little baby buffalo having the worst day of his life, who, if he was human, would be turned into some kind of Che Guevara figure. Anyway, despite the fact that lions have to eat, and the fact that there's a kind of realness and honesty in the taking and eating of meat in the wild that you don't quite get in Fairway or Tesco or Netto, well just feel your heart surge in the last couple of minutes of this movie anyway. And for what it's worth, my money on the real nature documentary is (where it usually is) on the human narrative behind the camera ("you can probably sell this video for lots of money!" say the humans in the wild, witnessing a raw display of animal instinct).

Green porn(o)

This is the kind of porno we like around here, though this is pretty softcore compared to the real thing (though the real thing is slower, and without the affecting narrative). The good news is that actual insects have no inhibitions about being watched up close. Find some dirt! (You could also begin here)

Ba boom

Nice.

When Obama Wins (when the wicked witch melts...)

America on the internet is having a cultural beach boys moment... ie. nostalgia for the future, stretching the moment they're in out into an elongated Christmas eve. Cinderella is on the cusp of the neverending kiss, but he won't reach his goal until the wicked witch concedes defeat..

America's reinvented fairy tale: We could be married, and then we'd be happy... You know it seems the more we talk about it, it only makes it worse to live without it...

Right now, everyone's excited. But will the mirror start telling it like it is, once the pretty princess is looking into it? Or will it keep on lyin'?

Good night baby, sleep tight, baby...

Air punching dreams, or, I Love You Ireland

That Hillary Clinton's got balls, I'll give her that much. You've got to say something for a woman who can appear to spontaneously rock a line like "I'm with Harry Truman on this: if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I'm comfortable in the kitchen."

She is just so disliked, though. Just about anything you'll ever read about her anywhere is grudging, written through gritted typing fingers. I think this democrat race is all about good cop/bad cop. Obama is the black, sticky out eared, earnest naive. Hillary's the hard-bitten, ballsy professionally political one who could have him in a fist fight, no problem.

It's the classic bitchfight between the sweet young thing and the pro, the virgin and the whore. So everyone's getting their end away with the whore, but they're really rooting for the virgin for the four year long haul. Hillary's such an inveterate politician, it's hard to even look at her sometimes. The whole Obama showboat could easily go tits-up but you know, that version would probably be more interesting in the big picture of American evolution.

Sometimes metaphors run into each other like they're long lost lovers meeting unexpectedly in different cars at the bumpers. Let's move swiftly along.

Isn't it amazing when people of advanced age manage to carry around grudges, bitternesses and score settling? Takes a lot of very tight clutching to keep that dynamic going for so long. Anyway, here's a man who has sold a lot of records, made a lot of money, played a lot of tennis, and he's demanding trophies from the eurofuckingvision song contest 40 years ago.

This article reminded me of a Cliff Richard impersonator who approached me when I was singing and playing in the street in Copenhagen. I think he was trying to be some kind of impressario. He must have been in his mid fifties, but clearly Cliff, and reflected Cliff glory, were the dominating forces in his life. Beware of what you opportune for.

I'm always amazed by what people are willing to do to win the eurovision. Brian Kennedy, for instance (I can't even link to it, it's so terrible. 2006, it was). Somebody recently pointed out to me that it's all about money and exposure, naturally enough.

But not in some cases, clearly. Sometimes it's just about air punching in a white suit. Our Rocky Balboa. It's nine minutes, but worth it for the detail and the textures and the old style eurovision scoring board with less than 20 countries on it. Song starts 7 minutes in. It was 1980, right in the middle of a decades long recession in Ireland. This was glamour. Had U2 hit yet? This was perhaps our first taste of national fame and sexiness... Say what you want about the kitch and the glory, but the two Shay Healy/Johnny Logans were good quality eurovision songs, at a time in the life of Ireland when the Eurovision meant something more than turkeys and american idol-style competitions. It was the time of fizzle sticks and flogs and a 51% tax rate. Ah.

Ultimately, of course it turned into this. People have to earn a living, it's true, but it hurts to link to this. I add this link, purely in the interests of balance.

So now this brings me to the subject of the First Inaugural Competition Olympics 2008 (check out the label Competition Olympics to familiarise yourself with Olympian history). Beijing is a little controversial at the moment, but you know you can get your air punching kicks right here on Lucy Takes Off, and Be a Winner, have a garland put around your head by a smiling girl in a bikini, stand on a plinth marked 1, a little higher than the plinths marked 2 and 3 (though glory is also assured for first and second runners up also), and have your national anthem blasted from a ghetto blaster (on tape if you so choose) and your gold medal/cup presented to you by a minor Irish Rockstar of my choosing... This is the prize on offer in the Competition Olympics, my friends. So far there have been three legs of the competition, with three entrants in total. What we need here is exposure.

Maybe I need to take the Competition Olympics to the Eurovision. Where is it this year, anyway?

The sun and the mirror ball

It's a sunny day on the av Republica Argentina in Barcelona. The sun is shining in the window on the mirror ball, scattering disco glitters across the crazy floor tiles. Listening to The Atomic Grind show's Park Slope Mamma.. they know how to rock a line like

I'm gonna buy you a spirulina bagel

Yes they do.

I have not yet left the house and it is 8 minutes to four and sunny sunny warm outside, and in the sun room with the glitter ball in it. A number of possible explanations glide by my pretty vacant mind like passing pigeons dropping liquid poo on the washing line outside the window, then passing on. I need no explanations for sitting around, listening to

You're from New York city I'm from Rotherham

I used to listen to that first Arctic Monkeys record at high volume last autumn, walking through Park Slope, kicking the leaves, turning the Arctics off just as I reached the door of a couple of cats on 2nd street, who lounged around a heated-just-for-them heavily carpeted sedate, comfortable and dark apartment, fed and watered them, petted them as they went thunk and hit the deck, cleaned their litter, read another couple of pages of the Edward Gorey book I was falling in love with a little bit more every time I went there.

B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
B es por Basil atacado por osos.

I have a friend in New York who says the best way to learn a new language is in bed. She learned Pharsee and Hungarian that way. I learned Danish a little that way, but honestly, mostly hard fought in random conversations where the ball bearings were pulling the conversation always back into English, until I found the perfect forum for speaking only Danish, with 80 and 90 year olds who hardly, if ever, left their apartments in Nørrebro, many of whom were considered to be demented, but sometimes had plenty to say, that is, those ones who weren't just sitting cross legged in their smoke-oranged armchairs, holding themselves in ever tighter when I came in to clean, to make them lunch, to give them that afternoon's pill dosage, to say hello. Those ones were being kept alive, reluctantly hunched on the edge of life, smoking it away.

Then there were ones like Violet, a sprightly 96 year old who could not see very well and whose Danish was so playful and sophisticated I could hardly understand her, but she always seemed like the sort who was about to give you a wedgy at any moment, loved to chat, very cheery kind of woman. I helped her to bathe once. I always loved that. It was such a lovely, intimate thing to do, something that always made them feel good, and you know, it was also just very pragmatic. There was never any embarrassment with the Danes about being naked and 90 in front of a total stranger. I loved that about those people.

As I google randomly, everything I get is coming through google Spain. I've moved from the Beatles White album to Abbey Road to Beck Mutations to (now) Joni Mitchell Court and Spark. I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers...

F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.
F es por Fanny succionado hasta secarse por una sanguijuela.

Somehow the Spanish doesn't sound as rhythmical.

A pretty girl in your bathroom, checking out her sex appeal...

I feel like going outside. I have had two cafe con leches and the day is good and slinky.

It's four in the morning the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton street all through the evening

I have a friend from Raheny on the north side of Dublin, who I met in my very first week of college when I was 17 and he was a very old 19, and who seems to be the subject of two epic songs in my life... The last time I saw Richard, from Blue, and Famous Blue Raincoat. I can't put my finger on why, mentions of deserts and dive bars and New York and peculiar triangles cloudily alluded to...

Apparently there was an overdose by the Tompkins Square dog run, with a very dark, disturbing, sunny photograph by Bob Arihood, who has been taking photographs of life in the east village for 25 years or more now.

So, if you would like to brush up on your gothic spanish, perhaps you might want to check out this lovely little thing...

Meanwhile, I'm off to follow the Barcelona labyrinth of dreams...