Rain on Flatbush

It's been raining for a half hour. Rain changes the soundscape reaching me here, at the nexus of three Brooklyn streets. The slosh softens things, makes everything sound more luxurious, generous. Though I seem to find the various alert sounds very appealing lately, with possible exception of fire truck when it makes its sonar spasticity as it heads the wrong way down Dean street. Houses catch fire and fires need to be quenched. Not a whole lot of that lately, maybe fires are going out of fashion. Maybe fire quenching is falling victim to the increasingly cautionary economic climate: people are being safe with their stuff. Anyway, often I find that the various alert sounds of cars, trucks, alarms and machines seem to syncopate melodically with whatever tune I'm humming. This is endearing.

I look out the window and see the street sellers with their huge line of $24.95 Christmas trees wrapped up in green bags. We saw a truck full of the things, billowing in the crisp clear night, as we drove home from Thanksgiving dinner in Westchester a week ago. That's the future, I said. Well, they're here. It's festive. They have lights and I'll bet it's cold out there. There's some kind of makeshift cabin but basically they've got to be around in case somebody has some kind of inane questions about Christmas trees they'll need to answer. Some people work hard for their $10 an hour.

Somebody's getting married in DUMBO and there are cocktails and cake. I may skip it. I'm listening to the slosh slosh slosh.

Prop 8: The Musical

Physicalising bits of the internet

I seem to be talking about Russell Davies a lot lately, specifically his Lyddle End 2050 project, his slow project attitude, and the general friendly contrariness of his jib. I have been talking a lot about his idea of physicalising the internet, I particularly like the notion of a ring binder with wikipedia bits in it, and an old shoe box of random flickr images. Our clusterflock meeting on saturday felt to me like the human version of this, as we had never met before, and our meeting was at the urging of another Clusterflocker none of us have ever met, the lovely Sheila Ryan, of the Driftless Region, Midwest of the Internet.

Brooklyn Clusterdrinks

The internet became physicalised in human form on saturday night, as four bloggers from Clusterflock met, drank, ate and drank together. Here is what it looked like.

Bock

This is one of the most satisfying reads I had today. I love this dude sometimes, and he is a native of my native birthplace, Limerick. Also on a similar theme, this.

Some hot number ones on google

Three trees on Fifth Avenue

Midtown.

Hitting the walls and working the middle

So it's NSFW only in terms of a wordfest, but what a fest of words. And that means Not Safe For Work, folks. Happy Thanksgiving.

The Philoctetes Project

Interesting audio piece from NPR talking about a project that attempts to help veterans and their families rehabilitate from war, by immersion in ancient Greek tragedy. Philoctetes was very close to my heart at one point. I was talking about him recently. I think it's time to re-read the play.

Mouse armour

The perfect Christmas gift for the mouse you hear in your kitchen at night, the perfect foil for the cat who loves him, and if you can pull it off, hours and hours and hours of fun for you.

Where's the money?

Good point being made here by the Guardian. The post-election euphoria is still rebounding, but meanwhile money's too tight to mention. The last I heard, Cheney's 'approval' rating was at 2%, Bush's Texan charm taking him all the way up to 10%. It shows in this bizarre bizarre pantomime of a press conference.

It's clear that Bush really doesn't have a clue what's going on, doesn't have a clue how to address it, doesn't have any kind of minds around him who have a clue, now that the game of sucking the goodies out of the sucking tube is drying up, now that the sucking tube is blocked. Whatever you think of him, it's clear that he really doesn't have a clue, that he is totally and utterly without any understanding of this crisis, having left all the business of understanding economics to the Frat boys of Wall street, who 'got drunk' and made a balls of it. He's stuttering and floundering, having left all the business behind of being able to look your colleagues in the eye, of having colleagues who had any interest in looking back at you straight in the eye, without being on the make, without having something to hide.

The contrast between these two men seems to me to be a bit like the difference between a neglectful parent who really never noticed that they were neglectful, having no way of knowing or understanding any other reality, until one day the social services came in and took the child from their care, into the hands of a sober, kindly, capable foster parent. The depressing bit is that America needs the intellect and efficiency of an Obama right now, and there is still 60 days to go under the helm of an administration that hams things up with handshaking and shitscared cluelessless.

So, who is this band?

Oh, this is your blog.

Jethro Tull.. Must be a later record. I followed them quite a bit, for a little while. He chuckles. I like his chuckle a lot. It is one of his best qualities.

Oh, there's Traffic again. Don't be sad. I just want to see you get through.

When do we get the icecream?

Yikes. He gave up icecream for 25 years, until he met me. Now, it's icecream nightly. It's almost imperceptible, how it's happening, but it's happening.

Now, I reply. And dish out the Phish food.

I don't know if you're getting enough of the phishes, I say. I've got enough, he replies. I'm going to pause right there. That's more icecream than I've eaten in a long time.

It's happening. Slowly.

Visit from a friend, long time not seen

I'm having a new lease of life with an old friend I haven't seen in some time. It's happening in my dreams. I just dreamt of a man I used to be friends with for a few years, from when I was sixteen. He was quite a bit older than me and was one of my closest friends, until, just before I came to live in New York for the first time, our friendship somewhat suddenly, stopped. Just a few hours ago he was in my dream again, it was the second time in a couple of weeks.

Literally the only times I have seen this man in five years are in a couple of movies I knew he had acted in, which I saw recently for the first time, and then two weeks ago, when he showed up in my dream. In that dream we met in some kind of office, like the front office of a bank, and we went down to the bottom of it and he was so thrilled to see me, and we just greeted each other, hugging and delighted. I was slightly wary, I anticipated some kind of cold shoulder or accusation, but he seemed genuinely warm and friendly. It was cool to get that dream.

Last night was somewhat more elaborate. He was living in some very strange place, kind of a Sam Beckett kind of landscape, mixture of Happy Days and Godot. He was really very happy, as in the first dream. He was living on a hillock above this little set of cubicles, the principle of them being one that housed a woman, who was a local prostitute, kind of in the manner of Dogville, without actually being chained to anything. He introduced her to me, and clearly she had rocked his world and opened it up, made it lighter. But I was concerned about her. She was living in this little two doored cubicle, and people would come and have sex with her in it, as she described it.

So I was just hanging out with her and him and whoever else was around. There was a party, more prostitutes, of the kindly world war one "cheery oh, dearie" type.

It was good to see John in such good spirits. I miss him sometimes, and talk about him often.

Hey, you're ok, you'll be fine, just breathe

This is a song that was written to help a friend of the songwriter's to chill out when she got anxious. The man who wrote the song put the basic track on the internet and asked people to sing along with it, and send the recordings to him. He mixed the results, and got this.

The mouse who came in from the cold

We had a visit from a small mouse last night. I woke up several times, listening to him poke about in the house, wondering what he was doing, thinking of the piece of baklava I had bought from that lovely lovely Egyptian man who runs the falafel shop on Clark street. This morning I discovered my bag had been unlocked, opened, and there was an explosion of half-eaten baklava (that still looked deeply yummy) all over the bottom of it.

There were small mouse claw marks on my brown leather wallet. He had clearly used it as a perch from which to enjoy his baklava. It was a cold night last night. We had had some hot whiskeys, and I there was a little left in the bottom of one of the glasses on the counter, about half of that left this morning.

That mouse had a good time.

New look LTO

So it's three o'clock in the day and I have spent hours farting around with the Lucy takes off template. Godammit. And now for a meaningless meander into Manhattan.

I hope this enhances your viewing and reading pleasure around here. Dishes of cigarettes to be passed around shortly.

Road patterns, London

Chocolate torte update

There is no chocolate matter in the house that interests me. I have just eaten a banana. We also have apples. Revolution!

Ps. Please don't be scared off by the chocolate torte that tastes of meat. This is purely a subjective opinion, and I am quite sure that there are Trader Joe's afficionados out there who understand the chocolate torte aesthetic better than I ever could. If so, then write. Time is ticking on...

Pps. Heather, I know you want this cake. It is yours. Email me about it if you need to be discreet.

Giveaway: Chocolate Almond Torte

I have one of those Trader Joe's Chocolate Almond Tortes, just bought it this afternoon. Just took a slice. Yak. Not my thing, but it's got to be somebody's. So if it's yours, let me know, and if you live in Brooklyn or are willing to travel for your TJ's Choc Torte, come and get it.

We have earned the new puppy that is coming with us to the White House

It's worth watching all 3:35 of this.

Dublin to New York, via feral cats and Greek comedy

It started with one cat, in Dublin. She was feral, she lived in the alleyways behind the house I was living in on Synge street, and she was the mother of a colony of feral cats that I got mixed up with.

She was a grey tabby, with one eye missing, so I called her One Eye. She had clearly had been in human hands to some degree for the first weeks or months of her life, because she understood - and seemed to enjoy - the etiquette of rubbing her head against the windowsill, and purring as a human stroked her. None of her offspring would ever let me do that to them. You've got to get a cat socialised to human touch within the first 6 - 8 weeks of their lives, or else they're untouchable forever (though I have heard some amazing (and bloody) stories of rescue and trust between human and feral cat).

So One Eye scoped me out and sussed me pretty fast. I was living in the basement of this house on Synge street, right across from the boys' school, and she slunk into my life and I began to buy chicken necks to feed her. I bought this stuff from a lovely butcher on Grantham street, who had kept the butcher shop for 40 years with his wife. Before that, it had been a haberdashers. Soon after I began to buy chicken necks from the butcher to feed One Eye and whoever else would come around, he sold the shop and it became a faux-Cuban tapas bar.

The bar is still there, and there's another one of the same name on George's street, where it has taken the place of one of the last greasy spoon cheapy cafes to close in Dublin. I used to go there every day in my last year in the town. Three euro fifty got you scrambled eggs on toast and a pot of tea, and I usually had a bit of a chat with the dishwasher who would come out from the kitchen when he saw me there. It was like the kind of place Francis Bacon might have frequented, had it been in London, full of all kinds of every dreg of Dublin life. Flanagans, it was called. A great place. The last time I went to eat there it was early 2005. Now, there's the Cuban place, which of course is not actually Cuban, but a sort of Cuban tribute restaurant.

The first Cuban joint, on Grantham street, was one of Dublin's first tastes of the Celtic Tiger. People came there to dance over their shrimp tapas on the weekends, and African drummers were brought in to jam along to the CDs on saturday nights. I popped in there from time to time, usually to howl like a wolf, and leave again. That seemed to be an acceptable addition to the climate there on the weekends, so I kind of liked the place.

One Eye and her brood, the neighbourhood feral cats, lived in the alleys between my flat and the Cuban place. At some point, I realised that I had taken them on. Pretty quickly, it was clear that One Eye was with kitten. When the kittens were born, it was freezing and snowy and I used to go around the back alleys with this bag of chicken necks and stand there in the cold for over an hour feeding them to her. One Eye would come as soon as I called her, and rub her head against my legs, purring, and I would give her a chicken neck. Then she had to jump up on the wall surrounding a trashed-out backyard behind one of those Camden street townhouse hotels, then leap up on a higher wall above it, all this with chicken neck in mouth, and climb unsteadily across a galvanised icy snowy roof, after which she dropped out of sight to wherever she had stowed her babies. After some time, she would return, and we repeated the process. We did this every night until they were able to come and get food themselves.

By the spring (which is February in Ireland) she began to bring the brood over. They were three raving beauties, with very distinct personalities. One was tortoiseshell, we called her Yak. She was very dignified and good natured, though of course not amenable to any kind of physical contact. But she would happily sit on the ledge outside the window, and have eye contact conversations with us, and spend the whole day there, knowing that she would get fed when she was hungry. She became a kind of surrogate mother to One Eye's later broods, and was intensely social. Other cats, especially smaller ones, loved her.

The other two ended up being called Purpee and Silvee. Purp was a kind of Kerry Blue colour, on the colour frontier where smokey blue meets purple, and he was a bit of a pain in the arse, very suspicious, out for all he could get, opportunistic, moved through life alone. Nervous. Edgy.

Silv was more circumspect than Yak, but magnificent nonetheless. A big silver haired tom, with intelligence in his eyes, and a kindliness that is unusual to find in a feral tomcat.

In a later litter came Billie, who was constantly vocal. She was a bit of a gorgeous brat who demanded everything all the time. The last major cat character from that tribe was a sweet little mischievous black and white scruff we called Bogie. These guys hung off of Yak all day long. Others came and went, I remember some of them, not all.

Things escalated. I made trips up Clanbrassil street to a butcher there, with a big backpack, and bought a vast quantity of pork hearts once a week, which I filled the fridge and freezer with, and microwaved in the evenings. My kitchen was turned into a bloodhouse (I was vegetarian at the time) but the cats got fed well every evening. I learned something about anatomy and developed a strong stomach.

My landlord found out I was feeding the cats and threatened to throw me out unless I stopped having contact with them in his backyard. I stopped feeding them from my window and brought the hearts over to the back alleys every night. I heard rumours that the neighbours were threatening to put down poison to kill the cats off, they thought they were a nuisance. Then Yak got pregnant.

The weather was mild, soft, rainy. She brought her kittens around to the garden, and deposited them under a wallcreeper by my window. She took care of them there. I could see that they were not well. So, one day, on one of her brief sojourns away from them, I gathered the five fluffballs up and put them in a box and brought them to the local vet. He took one look at them and condemned them to death. They had cat leukemia, he said, and cat flu, and would only spread the disease along. They hadn't a hope, he said. It was better this way. I was distraught, and he suggested that I let him put them down, and I walked away, back home, without Yak's kittens.

I got home, and sat in the kitchen, and waited. Yak came back, called her babies, searched frantically for them, called and called them, searched my face for information, kept calling through the day. I was in agony. She kept calling. I kept crying, trying to tell her what had happened. We kept going for hours. I was wretched, distraught. And then I remembered a phone number that had been given to me by a woman who I met a few months previously when a dog had followed me home and I had kept it in the flat overnight and met her in the park the next day, and she had found it a home.

She was a well-to-do middle aged woman who lived in Foxrock - a bit like Hellerup or Westchester - and spent her life and a lot of her money rescuing animals, mostly dogs, and giving them medical attention, and caring for them, trying to find them homes, keeping a lot of them in her own home, devoting her life to the care of abandoned things. I was sobbing down the line in the phone box at the corner of Harrington and Camden and South Richmond streets, and she heard me, and offered to help the cats, by giving me a trap so I could catch them one by one and get them neutered. At least we could keep the remaining colony stable, rather than a constantly expanding number of animals fighting for diminishing resources. I would do the legwork and she would pay for the whole thing.

So, for the next six months, that's what I spent my nights doing. Putting the trap out, sometimes catching one, sometimes not. It took six months to do them all. I would keep them in my flat overnight, bring them to the vet, collect them the next day, keep them in the cage, inside my flat for a couple of days to recover, then release them. Rinse. Repeat.

And then one day, this pregnant kittenish creature came in my window, and sat on my bed, and gave birth to a single kitten on my bed, right before my eyes. She belonged to a woman who lived next door, who never seemed to be around to take care of her cats, and so one by one, her cats found me. And one by one, I brought the cats, now three, to my parents' place in Clare, where they live today.

I just found this story in my drafts, while I was cleaning up my labels. Feels like it needs some kind of spit and polish ending, some kind of bringing to life of the life in these cats, the life that I lived with them, the difficulty of leaving them, of just abandoning them one day, because I had to live, because caring for them was taking up so much of my mind and heart, though I didn't know how leave them at the mercy of the winds. I think I did it gradually, stopped going around with the meat, but kept something handy at the window for whoever would come, to hell with the landlord.

Then I got a job spending eight hours a day trying to keep sixteen year olds quiet, in a study room of one of those nasty intensive grind schools, the job lasted three months until I could pretend to silence teenagers no more, and I had written a play based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata, and there had passed some tortuous conversations with a friend listening to my heart craving New York and that was the way it was, and the decision was at hand. A week later I was in New York.

Bed on the street outside our building

Here comes Lucy the Muppet

Design your own muppet. If you want to have her shipped to you it will cost $90, or you could use the site as a design tool and make your own. Here's what mine looked like.

Calling all humans who have not yet been consumed whole and alive by a snake

Please contribute your opinions on a life-and-death dilemma I posted over on Clusterflock today.

Mermaid on a toilet roll dispenser

Help this man's need to have plastic cows filling his home

I think we should all probably support this.

Now we are one

This is a picture of a small penguin who waited for two weeks for his mate to return from the sea to share egg sitting duties with him. Finally, hunger and desperation took over and he abandoned his beloved egg and headed off to save himself. Thank you, Big Picture, God dammit.

Small hairless three legged one eyed dog, dies.

Gus, the world's ugliest dog, is dead after a battle with cancer. I catsat the cat version of this dog last year, in Prospect heights. This dog looks considerably more appealing. But the one-eyed aspect reminds me of a cat acquaintance of mine once, called, predictably enough, One Eye. She was the queen of the feral neighbourhood in Portobello, Dublin.

Rest in peace, Gus.

Mother and child, London

Away we go

The edge of Chelsea

Tiny man takes the train

One of those Freddy's moments

More tales from tuesday night

What Carrie Dashow found on the night of November 4th.

Some days

Everyone's terribly excited

A Guardian-run flickr stream where anyone is invited to contribute a message for Obama. Here is a small curated view.

Have you seen these?

Barack Obama's photostream on Flickr (thanks, Andrew). Some candid shots of the core team on election night. Notice the lack of people milling about. Notice the calm air. The lack of booze. A few bottles of water on the table. Muted.

The transitional government website is change.gov and it's an interesting spot to have a dig around.

Meanwhile it feels tribal around here. Obama! I call. Obama! they call back.

His journey here

This is a half hour documentary about Barack Obama's life, with interviews from school and collegemates, colleagues, family and friends. Some great pictures, too. There is an audio download option.

It's difficult not to love this guy.

Election night outside Freddy's

Hot damn

It was only about a half hour after Obama was elected that I noticed it. There was just sheer jubilant joy in Brooklyn last night. We just celebrated all night long. It was so beautiful. Every passing car, every passing person, cheered and beeped as we danced together. What a night to be in America.

We cheered the cabs, they cheered back. We cheered the people passing by the corner of Freddy's. They cheered back. They joined us. We danced. People swung from lampposts. We cheered the department of sanitation truck. They cheered back. We cheered the NYPD (well, I did). They ooh ooh ooh'd back. Every time anybody said yaaaaaaay, the room lit up, alive, yaaaaaaying back.

We sang, we danced, we played, we danced, it was a wreck of jubilation, I am covered in glitter dust today, we kissed and hugged strangers, no one was a stranger last night. Today I hear the same sounds of New York outside this corner house and they sound softer, chirpier. Of course, the jackhammers are back, across the street. This house is a confluence of streetcorners, one of them being one of the busiest thoroughfares in Brooklyn. There are always jackhammers around.

This was no mere Democrat victory, mark that. Last night, something reached deeply into people's hearts and set them free. Last night, the word OBAMA meant love. Something extraordinary happened in America's soul last night. This is how it was, here in Brooklyn, on Dean street.

OBAMA

YYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. Hallelujah. Sleep well, folks. You can, tonight.

Today

It's festive around here, there's no two ways about it.

Tick tick tick

It's november 4th. Good morning.

The Day After

But you know, it is highly unlikely that Obama will actually turn into the little baby Jesus on November 5th, so there is likely to be tears and disappointment regardless.

The Day Before

New York: good place to be if he wins.
New York: good place to be if he loses.

Black Watch review

We went to see Black Watch at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO on friday. Jesus I love DUMBO, my heart beats faster as I walk down Clark street. It was a crisp, clear afternoon, and we drank coffee as we walked under the Manhattan Bridge (the one I am in love with) and went to join the audience scene in the theatre.

It was quite a show. Very energetic, beautifully choreographed, and the first piece of theatre that I have seen that addresses the Iraq/Afghanistan conflict from the perspective of some of the soldiers from the Black Watch brigade, a 300 year old Scottish institution largely formed from Tayside working class men, who have fought "30 bloody Cullodens" in various warzones throughout the world, and how this one was different. The show was staged in traverse, ie. audience on either side of the performing area, which was a great idea for the dance sequences, but pretty terrible for the more intimate moments. They seemed to be using actual footage from the shock and awe raids, and at times the actors seemed tired, not surprisingly, given their extraordinary performance schedules on this show.

To be honest, the publicity for the show is a bit ridiculously heavy handed, but it is the kind of theatre that reconnects with one of theatre's lifeblood functions: to delve into the current affairs of our time, bring news stories to life, vividly, in ways that television or even film just cannot. There is a poetic licence available in theatre that is entirely particular to the stage, and a kind of language is created within the best productions, within which audience, actors and all can take off together and fly.

I am also some kind of a sucker for non-showyoffy men singing in groups, and there was plenty of singing in this show. The show has been running for two years all over the world, and this run in St. Ann's is being billed as the last New York city performances. If you care about theatre, you probably just have to go.

A subway serenade

Today I became a Clusterflocker

I wonder what comes next?

Turning beauty

McCain the slave legacy today

Here's the too short video.

These Absences

It has been so long since I have posted here regularly. There are endless things I can say. Lately it seems to be about this New York city reality that I have been living again this past 10 days. I have been busy with small things and thinking around the corners of big things. And real actual things getting done, also, which Takes Up Time. I do a lot of things, a lot of different stuff, and so sometimes this blog is a regular part of my routine, a regular mode of communication, and sometimes it is not. I still love it, though. And that has nothing to do with my stats, which vary wildly from time to time, depending on who is linking to me, and how often my regulars show up. This is not a one topic blog either, so it's a bit like showing up for coffee in your friend's flat, and having a chat, getting jiggy on a topic, around here, or getting outright talked at about something Lucy Feels Passionate About.

I hope you keep showing up. But whether you do or not, I am still here.

The last time I saw Richard

Richard I know you were here yesterday and I just want to tell you that well, goddammit.

My old man can turn on the stove

He has reinvented Prometheus for a new generation.

Insight

Here, 2

We're listening to Amy Winehouse Back to Black. The wine tastes of blackberries. It's the first freezing night since I got back to Brooklyn. This neighbourhood is familiar to me now, this house is familiar to me now, this man is familiar to me now, but there's an intimacy that is getting quieter, that seems to be wearing something in me out, slowly and quietly. New York still excites the living bollocks out of me but this time it is a low pulse, a far cry from the insatiable pull Manhattan had on me when I first came here.

You get what you get, even when what you get is not what your heart desires. Isn't that amazing?

With all of its complication

I am very happy to be here.

Immigration

I'm blogging from the boarding area of Shannon airport, after clearing immigration with a pretty cool South American woman officer. These things can, and have, in my experience, been intense. Last year I was interrogated for over an hour, before they let me through. This time, she asked some straight up questions, I gave her some straight up answers, she looked at my 'story' on her big database, stamped me up straight off, and vigorously. It's a nice sound, the stamping of a passport by immigration officials. But sitting in that little corridor for the second time, I really wasn't in the humour for all that bollocks all over again, so I'm really glad it was short and sweet.

I have had so many epiphanies in this departure lounge. It's a strange environment for an epiphany. A real, literal holding area. After last november's grilling, I sat here and vibrated until they opened the plane and I got into pretzel mode. This time, I've forgotten to order the Indian vegan option (apparently it's great) but otherwise the epiphany is muted. Thoughtful. This departure lounge needs an art project, something softening, engaging, drawing in. That corridor also needs an art project, to soothe freaked out people trying to get their story together.

So, it is going to be one of those long afternoons today. I love those. It's the best kind of jetlag.

Sheesh

Interactivity.

Here is ... This is Where

Finally, my two still movies, Milla and Rose from the This is Where series, are online.

This is what they look like.

(Also viewable on the vimeo page, where they are a bit larger. Bear in mind that these works are intended for large sized projected installations. Feel free to purchase a dvd where you can view them in the comfort of your own sofa, on your lovely flatscreen telly.)

My day

I got a filling today and the anaesthetic injection contained adrenaline. At least that's what they say, I don't know, it was intense. Also, I got a puncture in town and had to get a taxi home. Now it is 12:35 am and I am about to put the first undercoat (already primed, last night) of paint on the hallway walls. It's going to be a long night.

Get your arse in the kitchen

with this.

Please forgive this momentary need for endless repetition

but seriously, cloud cuckooland. Cloud cuckooland. Cloud Cuckooland.

How Sheep Shit Made My Blog Mega

Ok it is an attention-grabbing headline, but I have to say that google brings visitors from all over the world to LUCY TAKES OFF to read and understand sheep shit better. I would say that currently, 5 % of my traffic comes from this source. I will shortly dedicate a full and in-depth post to the topic.

New Projects

I am working on assembling a few new projects from the ideas files, that I'm interested in diving into over the next few weeks. Dude. I have 28 immediately pressing minimised files on my dock right now, and I've just started looking through a whole new place I've been keeping ideas lately. Lucy Inhales Deeply.

Pedro

When I was 18, part of my extended scene included a dude called Pedro. He was about our age, probably 20, and he was homeless, living by selling and taking drugs, knocking on his clients and friends’ doors at 2 in the morning, asking if he could sleep on the couch. He was a friend of Tadhg, who shared a flat with Caroline and me.

I remember him calling and asking me to just look at his eyes, as he looked up to the light, his pupils huge and wide and black. Six tabs, I’ve just taken six tabs of acid, he said. I kicked him out. He stayed for a game of Trivial Pursuit once and I remember being amazed by his ability to answer every question and take the game comfortably. I hope he got hip to "Who wants to be a millionaire?" when it came around. Pedro. I met him on Grafton Street, or maybe it was Camden street, about 3 years ago, in 2005. I was so surprised to see him, even more surprised that I recognised him, I hadn't thought of him even once since then. Pedro! I shouted, and went to greet him. He looked at me with horror. Don’t call me by that name. That’s not my name anymore. My name is Peter.

Slice o' life

So I find myself in a village where the local small shop is dying slowly from a trade that has turned away from shopping local (what's that?) to once a week car treks to the 24 hour Dunnes Stores, where they buy Everything. The local small shop used to be run exclusively by a single old dude, but he seems to have mostly retired now, and a female relative runs the shop.

But she's not there all the time because the sheer living reality of operating a slowly dying business is probably squeezing the life out of her, and so she hires this teenager to take care of things on the weekends. This teenager is cool you know, we have a chat of some sort whenever I go in, it's part of the appeal of nipping down to the shop, the whole casual blah blah of it all.

So I bring Stinky Yappy (what a charmer) for a walk down to get some Donegal Catch haddock fillets, and while I'm there, the old man comes into the shop and is kind of spruced up and cheery and he makes a bee line for the teenager. As my attention is drawn to the cola bottles it seems to me that dude is pretty delighted that teenager is around and wants to ask her questions and you know, be around her. Now, dude is like, 85 years old. Teenager is like, oh I suppose 19. She responds by shutting down and shutting up. It's a really common Irish teenaged response to weirdy old men. I did it myself sister, exactly the same way. And you know, he's never going to try to do something physically to her, and he probably won't even say anything explicitly freaky to her, but it's just all about the way he vibes in her presence, and the way she is clearly wondering why the fuck she has to cope with this shit for ten euros an hour.

Brought me back.

The beautiful beautiful Tube

Boots at Bacon

Here's Grace!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Alert

Anyone who hasn't yet taken the whippet tour, I strongly recommend it. Opportunities will be available after the tour, for forms to be filled in where you can testify to how the whippets have changed your life, etc. Please wait patiently while we process your testimony.

Loving Tar

I am currently in a deep quiet slow love with an old alpha male black german shepherd, called Tar. I've had a tough history with Tar. He tried to eat me the last time I was charged with taking care of him alone. There was no aggression in him, just simple desire to satisfy his appetite. So I carried this huge black wolf dog by the scruff of the neck an acre down the field, my heart beating intense and wide, and threw him into a kennel, where I more or less kept him for the rest of the week. That was 2 years ago.

Lately we've been having gentler times, I've been helping him with his ears. He has a tough time with his ears. I squirt some squirty stuff in there and get massaging. He makes these sounds. They reach into me. I feel the soothing. I feel it.

And this week, starting slowly, I've been taking him for walks, and playing with him, rubbing his head, getting friendly with him. The way he looks at me when I bring him for walks. He doesn't usually get out for long walks like this, not since they retired him in the police service, which is how he got back here. I love this dog. I love him. I am thrilled when I see his eyes light up. I love him.

£2 each person

Dude

Family picnic at Stansted airport, between the departure lounge and the gates, in the smoking cubicle

Oh. This

rocks.

Ok something keeps coming back to me since the debate

like a piece of undigested mouse viscerum. And it is Obama's answer to a question which quoted Ronald Reagan's framing of Russia as 'evil'. Do you think Russia is evil? he was asked. And he replied that no, he didn't think Russia was evil, but that it had done an evil behaviour. Jesus. Jesus.

Here

where I am alone, where it is pouring pouring rain, where the yappy one is quiet, where I have spent the day crying, where I don't know my own heart, where I am listening to Gillian Welch who can soothe the really out of the way bits like I can soothe Tar's ears just to hear the sounds of relief and bliss he makes when I do that, where I discover in a moment of crazy serendipity that this video was uploaded by Phil, the Clusterflocker, a blog I've been hanging around in lately, where I feel a flash of warmth that says hey, psst, it's here! It's here! It's here.

Self portrait in Hoxton Square

Where I fell in love again

Talkin, 2

So the biggest sleaze that McCain threw at Obama on tuesday was the $3 million overhead projector he tried to secure for a planetarium in Chicago, but apparently failed, depressingly. My ears perked up at the mention of this overhead projector. I've been using overhead projectors lately, and I would love to explore the possibilities afforded by one that cost 3 million dollars. I bet it rocks. I find it interesting that nobody in America seems to find it bizarre and disturbing that McCain would strip back all public funding except for the care of returned veterans. Seriously, do you not find this incredibly bizarre? From a European perspective, this is nuts. From a Scandinavian perspective, I think it is hardly comprehensible.

So this little weak bit of rhetoric exposed more about his own value system than Obama's. Overhead projector for kids and adults to learn about the cosmos in a planetarium? I certainly fucking hope so.

And while we're on the subject, all this talk about bringing soldiers home "in glory and not defeat" - does this not creep the fuck out of any human being who is not bloodthirsty? I mean, jesus.

I am a Brooklyn-bound L train

You know, I was never one for either The Smiths or Radiohead, though I have had my moments with Radiohead, but this song is captivating. Anyone know what it's called?

Bizarrely enough, the very first song I ever busked was Creep, belting it out on the Bedford L platform while my guitar-playing French dude friend did his best to be heard above all the machine noise. Waves and waves of indifference. It kind of rocked, in a very weird way. So it was Creep and there was one other song I can't remember right now, this was 5 years ago in new york, and the other song I only knew one verse of, but it rocked, and I figured that people would be gone by the time the verse was over. Those L trains were sparse though, so pretty fast we moved into town. We'd start playing on the beat of the doors opening. I can't remember what that one-verse song was, now. Dude.

I bought my ticket last night. I fly to New York on the 17th.

Talkin

Somebody needs to send an email to both teams in this election, explaining what the word 'oversight' actually means. Oh, and also if they could please finally drop the cute undergrad little 'wall street main street' thing, that would be cool. Thanks.

Dogherding update

We have been joined by another pigdog: pigdog 3. Pigdog 3 is yappy most of the time, unlike pigdogs 1 and 2, who are yappy only some of the time. It is an unfortunate turn of events.

Curated LUCY TAKES OFF whippet surf

For the casual visitor who has arrived at LUCY TAKES OFF today courtesy of a 'pumping udders' google search, or for those of you who have recently discovered this shindig, I highly recommend a peep through the LUCY TAKES OFF archives, beginning with a search for 'whippet'. You might want to look at, for instance...

Epithalamion for a pair of Brooklyn whippets

Romance

Ode to a fire escape

Whippet love: the musical

The whippet love series starts here, but you really don't want to miss any of it, there are lots.

There is a lot of posts devoted to the whippet in this blog.

Not to put too fine a point on it

Somebody just farted. I think it was pigdog number two. But then, you're on the internet. You can't tell if I'm lying.

First there are kisses, then there are sighs

Jesus, now I'm blogging lousy Boy George videos, but really, isn't this song amazing?

I really don't think very much about Boy George but

his just-flat voice is just-flat in a really haunting kind of way. Anyway, I saw a few minutes of the current incarnation of this dude in the 15 minutes of telly I watched here yesterday (what can I say, it's satellite tv, it's a novelty) and today every time I go into the kitchen and see Ivy and Daisy the pure-black sweet wide eyed german shepherds staring at me, I have been singing the chorus to this song. Nothing on youtube captures the gorgeousness of the single line I have been singing: it's the way he bends the note on the last "make me cryyyyyyyy".

It is rocking my mind right now.

Cool article on the Great American Election Chessboard

by Michael Tomasky, who is pretty much running the Guardian coverage of the US Presidential elections. It's short, it's straight, it's simple.

Poochie mama

This week, I am a dogherdess, an animal husband, poochiemama to 9 dogs and 3 cats, 5 of whom are big high energied german shepherds. I have a favourite, she sleeps with me in my bed at night, but she's leaving tomorrow. Last night, she laid in my arms, on her back, her short legs sort of dangling in the air, as she rested her head on my chest. She is playing me like a fool. Here she is. Meet Dolly.

The problem with Obama

The problem with Obama is that he might only last four years, if he does get in. Unless he starts turning water to wine PRETTY FUCKING FAST after getting into the Oval office, people are going to be very, very disappointed.

A curated youtube surf

So we start here,

then we take a left,

go straight up for a bit,

then stop

and mosh suddenly.

Stop, listen to the heart beating.

It says, fly.

And then suddenly, we fall into the sea.