First days in Nashville

The first place I landed in the United States, the first time I came here, in 2001, was Nashville, Tennessee. It was, and probably still is, one of the strangest places I have ever been, though that trip took in a lot of strangeness in Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago and New York city too.

Nashville was actually a good introduction to what's going on in America. Because what's going on in New York isn't it. What's really happening in America is actually what ISN'T happening here.

So in Nashville you could see the general trends of American civic planning (such as the concept can loosely be applied): stripmalls, sucked out downtown, suburban sprawl, car dependency, highways leading to picket fenced enclaves, hives of wooden houses, spaciously laid out, that looked like multiple zippers from the airplane. The house I stayed in for four days was one of the spokes off of one of those zippers.

I had come to Nashville in an act of pursuing the truth of things. The truth bit got sorted out pretty fast. In the airport, in fact.

I had fallen in love with a man I had met in Dublin while he was on tour, playing in Vicar Street, the large music venue where I worked in the evenings as an usher. I showed him a bit around Dublin, we laughed our arses off through the streets, and continued to stay in touch for another nine months after that. He had been based in Chicago, was a very successful sideman drummer, and then he got a woman pregnant kind of randomly, and she lived in Nashville, so he moved there. Left his life and the fundaments of his career in Chicago, and walked into some kind of a void where his son lived. He had no relationship with the mother of his son, except that she lived in a little town called Lebanon, outside of Nashville, and so they travelled over and back from Lebanon to Nashville, sharing the care of their son.

He lived on McGavock Pike, must have been thirty miles from downtown, with nothing but a Dollar General store, a Subway sandwich shop and a gas station nearby. And that was a LOT! He had the bottom floor of a house that he shared with the owners, who nominally lived upstairs, but who were regularly on tour, so they only touched base at home for a couple of months a year.

This was the house where he was falling in love with his child, and pouring his energy and vision into this small developing human. He was finding the music scene in Nashville a struggle: it's heavily studio based, and cliquey, and definitely un-idiosyncratic. His vibe was more live-led, making records to tour behind, and even after he moved to Nashville he found that his main source of income was going on the road. He was already finding it a struggle to be away from his child, even for short periods of time. So it was all new, and he was still trying to work it all out, when I arrived at Nashville airport, one afternoon in June, 2001.

A bit over nine months after the birth of his son, after daily emails and the occasional phone call, I had come to find out. As soon as I saw him in the airport, however, I found out. My heart sank. Why it sank, we can debate or wonder about, or guess at, but it will only be guessing. I don't really know the answer to most why questions, though sometimes I have strong hunches. This one was just a question of different realities unable to meet. I suppose I wasn't ready for the life of a Nashville housewife, and that was the position available in that particular household, however much fun this particular dude could be, to hang out with.

I didn't want to hang out with him, though. At all. The practical facts: we literally couldn't communicate, about the simplest things; he lived in the middle of stripmall-land out in the sticks of suburban Nashville; I couldn't drive; his days were spent in childcare. Four days of that and on the fourth day I moved into the Drake Inn Motel, on the Murfreesboro road, that had a big neon sign out the front saying, Where The Stars Stay.

Just banging tunes and DJ sets and dirty dance floors

I'm whippet sitting again this week. I get to see the whippets in their winter garb. Must post some pictures of these supermodels. So I'm sitting in sauna-intense heat here in Park Slope, because these gals don't like to be cold. And heat does funny things to me. I like to round off my showering experiences with a cold shower, for instance. I LOVE a cold shower after a hot one. Been doing this every day for a very long time. Like to swim in cold water too. It's interesting how the application of cold outside makes warm inside. Cold makes hot. Rough makes smooth. Untempered heat makes me woozy and sleepy. Immersion in a contrasting cold, makes life spring and dance and encourages lots of Arctic Monkeys on iPod moments on 7th ave.

So I've had an afternoon of sex and WC Fields movies and I'm having thoughts like, I wonder if I'll ever make something of my life. This sort of thought is not so long-lived, usually. But it's a fair question.

I was thinking about this sort of thing as I strolled through the park in my pyjamus yesterday afternoon. There are a lot of interesting and talented people in this town who are pushing middle age and just getting by, barely. They have skills that aren't in demand, that aren't particularly saleable, and even if they do have saleable skills, they probably don't have either inclination or suss to put it together in a money-magnetising way. Shagloads of talented people here are getting by on ten dollar an hour jobs, or jobs they hate but which have benefits, chief among these benefits being that they don't have to be there very often. People have to pay the rent. And what they do, what they consider themselves to 'be', doesn't pay it. And probably never will. So they play a gig a month and play in their friends' bands, and there's a scene, and it's interesting, but this is new york and no one is getting paid.

It's something I want to explore. Because in every other country I've lived in (hmmm... not so many, but I get around...) there exists a space in between the avant garde/outer periphery of music and art culture and the dead mainstream. In different countries, that space is of different sizes, but it exists. So in Denmark, for instance, there are a lot of musicians making a living, making music. Some of them are even making a living at making music of their own. Jazz musicians get paid decent money there. And there are gigs to be had, and they pay well. The system is unionised, and there is a union minimum that band members have to be paid. Of course there's a lot of un-unionised work that gets done, but by and large this stuff pays well too, AND it is out of the tax loop. The basic standard of living is very comfortable in Denmark, and being a musician is not something that anyone there seems to be expected to trade any of that comfort for, in order to pursue.

In Ireland, there isn't quite the Danish socialist welfare and benefits blanket at the base of society, waiting to catch anyone as they fall. If you fall in Ireland, you crash, it's true. But if you fall in America, you crash and you can burn too. But you can soar in Ireland, and you can soar here, above the clouds..

Music is not unionised in Ireland, though my dad was heavily involved in the musicians' union there when it had a heyday, and it wasn't pen-pushing work that those guys had to do in those days. Dad told me stories of having to show up at pubs that had refused to pay the band the night before, and argue rightness until the pub-owner coughed up. My dad was never any kind of a heavy handed intimidating type, but he was intense and earnest when it was called for. Anyway, now that there's money in the country, things are different. But the average pay for club-date type gigs there, is still about half of what it is in Denmark.

But people go out in Ireland. And they like to hear music. And they follow local bands. So actually, you can be in a band in Ireland, and have local popularity, and get by for as long as you're popular. Sure, things probably run out of steam in the mid-zone at some point, but my point is that I don't see very much of that mid-zone here in New York (granted I've not been seeing much outside of Dean street and 5th avenue here in New York this past couple of weeks, but I do have very good intentions of getting out more. Problem is that in is just so damned interesting).

Things are very splintered and niche-ised here. Everyone's a specialist. Everyone's catering to a very specific need. In many ways, it's like a city of phD's. How you fare financially depends very much on the demand and value placed on that particular niche. So if you're a burns litigation lawyer or an eyelid surgeon, you'll probably be earning quite a bit of cash, because everyone who needs their eyelid tending to or who wants to cash in on the pain and suffering caused by an over-hot McDonalds coffee, will hear about you and your intensity in the area, and away you go.

But if you're a rocknroll musician and you're really quite good, but you don't quite live the life and say what 20 million teenagers want to hear, well, chances are you'll be spending your middle age getting settled into your stable of cat and dogsitting clients, or putting up little signs in Key Foods, selling GUITAR LESSONS from a Juilliard trained professional of 20 years experience, to the local 4 year olds of Park Slope, whose parents are reaching for excellence, and demand Juilliard for their $40 an hour tutoring fee.

But New York city draws people like those squidgy sticky mats that everybody uses to catch their cockroaches and mice in their overheated New York city apartments. We all just NEED to be here. Of course, it's just because we're all here that we all need to be here. We need the proximity to each other. We're excited, stimulated, inflamed by that. And the rest of it. The mix. The low high and medium all jiving together in the space of a block. The crazy shit on the side of passing trucks. The endless relentlessness of it all. The energy tsunami, the suck of the best you have to give.

And you know, when you come and live in a place, and you've been there for ten years, and everybody you know, like, love and work with lives in that place, it just becomes your home and moving anywhere else is just absurd. So you take that shitty accounting job for two and a half days a week and grit your teeth and count the seconds.

One two three four...

This bright morning

There's a car on seventh avenue that's covered in yellow confetti from the falling leaves of an overhead ginkgo biloba tree.

A black tomcat lies in a fenced off corner lot off 5th, cross-pawed and seething.

Leaves are getting kicked around by Lucy.

The Beatles are singing
because the world is round
it turns me on....

Lots of coffee is being made in the big jug.

When I lived in Denmark, every now and then, I would meet a woman in a burka while strolling on Nørrebrogade, my local big street in Copenhagen. She was young, dressed in a full length light black burka. The only part of her that was visible was her eyes, which were very heavily made up with black eye liner and mascara and heavy toned eyeshadow. Many layers of mask. She reminded me of pictures of elaborately made up Sicilian widows I've seen in the National Geographic. I always looked her in the eye, though, and she did the same with me. We didn't see each other a whole lot, but when we did, we always greeted each other. It was kind of an unusual arrangement: her burka rendered her both recognisable and unrecognisable. I knew her, principally, by her make up. She was a friendly face on my beat in København. Back to Brooklyn.

A woman is rolling a basset hound in a pram along 7th ave. She does not look insane or out of place.

A tiny little old lady is gathering up leaves on St. Marks ave.

Billy Bragg doesn't want to change the world. He's just looking for another girl.

A pair of skinny whippets are shivering in the cold as they pee on leaves.

A brown tortoiseshell cat is rolling around on a basement carpet in anticipation of her only chance at a bit of human contact today, from the woman who is coming to feed her and change her litter tray.

There's a carpet of leaves of different colours all the way along 3rd ave. and a Dominican woman is blissed out as she walks along it, dressed snugly in her winter coat.

A piano technician is fixing a pair of keys on Dean street, which were whacked out of shape by a fiercely improvising French pianist.

A woman is addressing strangers on 7th ave with the question, "Do you have a minute to stop global warming?"

I wonder what's happening in Red Hook. I wonder what's happening in Dumbo. I wonder what's happening down by the sea.

Stories on the eve of Thanksgiving

Thirty million people in the United States of America didn't have enough food in 2006. One in six new yorkers cannot afford enough food, that's 1.3 million people in new york city, who can't afford to eat. But I bet most of them have their rent paid.

I heard about a farmer who was native to the swamps of the Mississippi delta of southern Louisiana, and who went out for a ride one day on his horse, and found himself swamp-bound and horseless, in crocodile alley. Crocs everywhere, he did all he could do, which was to scarper up the highest, nearest tree he could find. And wait it out. Sweating. He wasn't up there long, in the scheme of things. He was local, so his neighbours went out searching, when they didn't see him. It took them three days to find him. He had a sandwich to eat in that time. But what made it fun was that, in the evenings, three big bull crocodiles came to sit at the bottom of the tree, looking up at him, their eyes glinting in the fading evening light, just sitting there. Licking their lips, occasionally. Waiting.

Your lips distil nectar, my bride
honey and milk are under your tongue
the scent of your garments is like the scent of lebanon.
A garden locked is my sister, my bride,
a garden locked, a fountain sealed.
Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates
with all choicest fruits
henna with nard
nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon
with all trees of frankincense
myrrh and aloes
with all chief spices
a garden fountain, a well of living water
and flowing streams from Lebanon.

My favourite things

"Not so much dead as a prisoner", is the report from the kitchen. He's trapped a fully grown cockroach under the can of Trader Joe's fairtrade French roast. I hear a crash.

"He's dead now, right?"
"Yeah, I think so. I'm agin 'em but I can't get as upset as you do about 'em" he says, in his old timey way.

We've got roaches. I'm having the full new york experience this time. I spent a half hour killing them with my bare hands last night. I found where they live.

Up until then, there was just the occasional one or two crawling across the kitchen butcher block, they sent out their babies as scouts ahead of them, to retrieve information and food discreetly, using the cute factor for their reconaissance missions. But last night I found the hive. The boiler room. They lie in the door jamb, keeping warm, and alert for slim pickings from the kitchen table. The sight of them brought out the murder in me. Hands flew and bits of cardboard and roaches got squashed. Then I got the hoover out. Hoovered another twenty of them. Had to put gaffer tape over the nozzle so they wouldn't crawl out. There had been a band rehearsal downstairs and the drummer suggested I hoover up some raid after them, that's roach killer to you and a very good idea to me.

The hoover sits in the middle of the room, containing live roaches.

The Seven Buck Butter Blues

The blank page. And not much to say.

Hm.

Continue like this and I'll soon have a masterpiece of the ilk that Jack Nicholson produced, in The Shining. All work
and no play
makes
Lucy a dull girl.

All play makes
Lucy's
work dull.

Apparently. What a pity. Though I could just hang on in here and see if something comes along sometime soon. You know, I've done that at plenty of buses that never came, so why not a blog post?

It's a rainy dark day in Brooklyn and new york. Blowing hot and cold. Wine is getting poured. Elvis and Nick Drake are getting listened to. Lips are getting kissed.

So I'm here on Dean street, listening to Nick Drake, sipping a glass of red wine on a sofa, next to this bloke I've sort of fallen in love with. And this is where I am. And this is how it is.

Yeah, of course there's more texture than that. Stevie Ray Vaughan is playing now, for instance. And I've just been out to the place on St. Mark's and 5th av for organic butter, and come home with none, because I didn't bring any money out with me. So he's gone, now. To get us seven buck butter. We're cooking dinner of chicken sausages, sweet potatoes and spinach yummy shit.

See ya.

All that's left of this life I had here

So I've blogged very little about this country that I've come to, to clear what's left of my three and a half year life away, scatter it to the winds. That's probably because I've been busy clearing away what's left of my three and a half year life, and tonight it gets scattered to the winds. I've been preoccupied to some degree, with the 20 kg hold-baggage allowance aer lingus allows me to take out of here, and the prospects of selling the contents of the vintage clothes shop I had here.

Well, tonight, most of it is done. All that's left is to bag it up and drop it off at the charity shop on the corner. And I had packed, and wondered about orange curtains and gorgeous throws, and Louboutin shoes and notebooks full of writing, tapes full of talking and music, bags full of photographs, winter clothes, coats, guitar, g4 computer, atlas bike, bodhran, old diaries, old birthday cards, old tax receipts, the jomi massage musculator, the light box, books, eighty year old top hat, hula hoop, ice skates, bauer roller skates...

The Aeg Chair was already thrown out in the trash back last December, along with most of the rest of my furniture.

So what's done is done. I leave in the morning. I've just made a pile of all my everything stuff and it's a big mountain in the middle of the room. A couple of friends are coming over and they might find something in it of value. I'm just feeling like picking out the little vintage fifties samsonite overnight case and the gig bag I bought yesterday, my guitar, a few selected notebooks, jeans, jumpers and my laptop, and rocking into Kastrup airport tomorrow morning with that. The hell with all of it, you know? Walk away. Walk away.

Just walk away.

The Competition Olympics Leg Three

You might have lost faith in my ability to follow through on the promises of the Competition Olympics, fuelled also by the distinct lack of entrants. What could be the reason for the lack of forthcoming participants? Shyness? Indifference? Feeling that it couldn't possibly be YOU standing there on that plinth, having a garland placed around your neck by a lovely bikini clad lady, and given a cup to hold aloft in honour of your great triumphant fortune (with your preferred national anthem played on a very robust ghetto blaster in the background)? That that scenario is too delicious to be claimed by little old you? Is that what you think? Well, Little, let me tell you that your repressed fantasies are ripening.

Welcome to Competition Olympics, Leg Three.

I would like to clarify also that I do seem to be something of a Glamorous International Traveller, so this ceremony can really be conducted anywhere. The judge's decision is, however, Impartial and Final. She is kind, though. But a laugh is much more likely to sway her decision than a Really Profound Idea.

So, folks. Leg three. Here it is.. ya da da daa da daaa daaaaaaaaaaaa:

I can't seem to find my pink gingham Bathing Suit (Betty Grable style) nor my funky jazz chick scarlet velvet hat.. This is to be my costume for the Prize Giving Ceremony of The First Inaugural Competition Olympics. If you can guess where in the world they could possibly be, and I find them there, First Prize is yours. First and second runner-up prizes will also benefit from close proximity to the Bathing Suit, but will have medals and flower garlands, instead of The Cup of Glory (and only the winner of the First Prize will have their national anthem played, and know that all the canned applause and adoration is Only For Them.

Please be specific, and creative. Countries alone will simply not do (though you might have noticed that you have many to choose from. Even before I began blogging this summer, I have been travelling a LOT this year). We need a specific location, town or city at least, and preferably the way the Bathing Suit and Funky Hat are placed, if they're hiding, how they got there, details will be lovingly appreciated.

And remember, if you're not in, you can't win.

You know it's gonna be alright

I woke up in Denmark this morning. In a little loft in Valby, København.

She was a daytripper
one way ticket, yeah
it took me so long to find out
and I found out

I came to Denmark in December 2003 on a one way ticket, and left with another one, three and a half years later. The first thing I noticed about Denmark was actually in Sweden, where I flew into. There were photographs everywhere of Naomi Campbell in her knickers, looking Christmassy, faking happy-in-her-knickers bliss. She was everywhere in København too, when I got there. I stopped noticing her after a day or so.

My first impression of new york this July, after a three and a half year absence, was the train, as it roared into Howard Beach station. It took my breath away, every bit of it. It got me right in the centre. And in the midst of that gorgeous chaos, I had the strong thought, that within a few days, even this was going to be absolutely familiar to me. I knew it. I was wrong about that. It never got familiar. It got more breathtaking.

I was in love with the subway the way I am in love with Dean street now, when I lived in Manhattan in 2003. I've never slipped out of that love; it's just evolved, the way it evolved from a room of maroon paintings in a London gallery into the new york city subway, from a grand old velvet curtained theatre into a room of maroon paintings... The lover changes form.

If this post is a little avant garde for you, hold your horses. Rocknroll is never far from the surface.

So I'm here again, in København. Just arrived yesterday. It feels good to get into Danish again, and to find myself jivin' in Danish feels GOOD indeed. But this ain't no one way ticket, yeah.

This time I've got a ticket to ride back to Brooklyn.

The girl from Ipanema

Up the banner (Clare, I know, but close)

This blog is still parochial - undiscovered, actually - enough for me to notice that there have been a few visits lately from people in Sligo. So howsitgoin sligo! Nice to have you around...

How it rolled, through the AGES

So I'm youtubing bob dylan "like a rolling stone"
sixties seventies eighties nineties to last year

He never again hit that straight off the blocks peak that was so living in him in the mid sixties
the band's bobdylanband sound was just so good, innocent and shambolic, spacious...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xO0gSJGJ7Fs

but he definitely evolved
cept that he seems to be singing the same song with different lyrics in the same way, belting some country rock mantra over and over, in the seventies at least
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q9-FbvTJJLM
blood on the tracks to slow train coming, sounds like that the whole way through, to me, tho you can smell his sweat on slow train coming.

then there's this, unfortunate
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JVzRUFa5g04

or when he actually became his rolling stoner herself
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zZrdMPbfcSg

but for the SINISTER side of fame, here's an object lesson
http://youtube.com/watch?v=v5kAUw_euvo

until he's phoning it in, literally, and he's become a different species altogether
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gz9aXBnVkew

and just to round the whole thing into ultima-rockstar land, probably the last stop on the rolling stone train (the first stop was so much more interesting, probably like a shot of speed at doctor robert's), there's this
http://youtube.com/watch?v=URF0FNqTjhI

For the love of Iggy

Didya ever hear the story of China Girl? Iggy Pop wrote it with David Bowie, when they both lived in a black-painted ten room apartment in Berlin. Have you ever heard Iggy's version of it? It's about as FUCKEDUP a rocknroll song as has ever been writ and taped. Naked.

So Iggy spent all his money on getting FUCKEDUP and was being made bankrupt, when Bowie decided to record China Girl for his Lets Dance record, so that Iggy would get half the royalties and get his shit together a bit.

That's love, I think.

But I'm listening closely to Lust for Life right now, and I think I've just heard him singing about hypnotising chickens.

Oh Dean street, I love the arse off of you

newyork newyork
brooklyn to me
newyork newyork
is brooklyn to me

and brooklyn to me
is a pair of small shacks
with a length of twine between them and a metal can either end.

Reaching right over Flatbush
sometimes the yellowcab drivers have to pass the intersection of Dean and F
with their hands raised aloft
out the window
so they don't drive right through
the delicate connection.

Such a flimsy piece of string
and so well taken care of.
he walks the line.

did something happen? fuck,
i think i fell into a pit of scorching hot love
this afternoon.
And I'm being eaten alive by these tongues of flame.

This thick pit
and nobody owns it.

Just because it's so pretty...

A bit of green on a sunday evening

A frank exchange of views between two mac whores on either side of the Atlantic, in the middle of the night the Leopard sprang

Cool. commented on yer blog, just watchin' the leopard demo video, it looks pretty cool, I don't need it , but I'll probably get it...

now you've got me watching the fucking tour. At four minutes to four in the morning. After a fucking weird night watching a U2 tribute band and some 60 year old trying to pick me up and then a 16 year old trying to become my best friend.

someone said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" I'm still watching the video, and if you use it Time Machine looks pretty slick...

Jesus. John looks like a MacBook in human form. I get creeped out by too much mac. I'm not owned by them. John's already pissing me off. He looks too much like a penis. A macbook penis. A MacBook penis in a black turtleneck. I may have to blog this as a review of the leopard ad. It's not a turtleneck tho, but that sounds better. It's a long sleeved black tshirt, which is supposed to suggest anonymous creative productivity, I think. Maconformism.

Yeah he does have a funny perfect Mac rep look, I was sort of wondering at it myself, maybe he's a bot, all will be revealed (but probably not in this video, so don't watch it all the way to the end thinking something is gonna happen) (like it turns out that he's really part of leopard, like your own assistant bot...)

he's new feature number 267!

oh, poor John, imagine primary school, the taunts! the rhymes! the ridicule!

I don't like the dock's shiny floor. Overkill. Trying too hard. Like a puppy in a pound. Like a puppy in a pound with 1 day to go, and it's tuesday.

no I'm not crazy about that either, I don't like any of the purely visual gimmicks, but some of this stuff would end up being useful, you don't have to use all of it...

But can you choose? Don't you just get that shiny floor whether you like it or not?

I don't know, but you can probably make the whole thing disappear like I do now...

nah, i like that the dock is static, and that it doesn't change size or fuck around when you click on it. That's just the way I like it. I don't like too much of this bouncing around shit.

organising your recent work rocks. I will say that.

ichat looks pretty great too, just super smooth, smart, worked out.

they're also selling stuff that's already going on in tiger, like iDisk, but with a coverflow spin.

Oh man data detector is the shiiit! I'm buyin' it.

of course there HAD to be something in that 300 shiny list that was going to get you. Mac whore.

well hey, baby, you're still the one with the brand new mac around here!

time machine is a control freak's wet dream.

but the design of these things alone.. it's made for people who want to travel through space as if space was like it is on star trek next gen.

AAHHHHHH!! yeah, well they just said they have it in the online store and it's gonna take a lot to stop me buying it tonite.

spaces looks like a load of bollocks. all that 'to do' shit in Mail. bollocks. Mac junkie powder.

Yeah I don't know if I'd use spaces, I don't have a lot of separate multi-program activities, but... sometimes... yeah...maybe.

I have a trial of pages 08 by the way. I don't know if I gave it to you or brought it or where it is.. or even what it is, but it's only a 30 day trial.

i really don't dig the whole mac makes your life look great thing with templates.

Naw me neither, corny is what it is, but there are some good features

they do make designing incredibly easy. did i tell you about the website i made in about four minutes at the wedding? niall and noel dot com

No. Yeah, some stuff is working better, and some stuff needed to... I couldn't find the site, what are you doing awake?

oh, niall and noel? no, i made it in iWeb (yes of course i'm a Mac whore for fuck's sake, i bother to get the casing right in all their product names) but I have no dot mac so it's not live.. i think what i'm trying to say to myself is that i need to get a dot mac. which is slightly depressing right now.

oh god john just flashed up in my gmail. now there's nicolle.

It's really an impressive looking upgrade, I've been Mac'ing for quite a while, and well I ain't nevuh seen shit like this... I guess I know who my Mac daddy is...

alright alright alright, i surrender with iChat. We've been a salutary lesson in that over the past while. But you still need dot mac to do any of it. That's a drag.

Do you? yeah maybe, I'm not sure... I have it. I don't know if both people would have to, it doesn't seem like it...

ok the 'buddy list' leopard to leopard is sick, but useful. backdrops is retarded.

You know, for work, if you're in a hovel, you could dress it up for clients, I don't need it but...

You know you want it.

have you seen the shapes of some of these emails scrolled down? They're really beautiful looking. Tho for the full effect you need to get your arse out of Mail and into gmail. Seriously. Gmail is probably the best programme I have ever used on a computer.

The only thing out of all that that looks actually like something I'd want to use would be ichat. But it's hooked up with dot mac and I'm not there (right now or yet or something. it's a fucking drag to be paying mac a yearly subscription, what $75? too much like heroin.)

I don't remember how much, come on, not everything you spend money on is like heroin, ok, so maybe it is...

The only way of doing iChat right now is to sign up for a free 60 day trial of .mac (kiddy playground starter heroin) and you get an iChat signin name, and after the 60 day trial expires, you get to keep your iChat account. The only thing that bothers me about doing the 60 day .mac trial is that it probably means that I'll either go full tilt into .mac zone and start making a new website, or whatever, or else I just won't use it very much and blah blah blah on that side. Fuck it, I'll sign up for it.

Jesus, I've just seen the time. I've got to sleep some time tonight.

OK, jeez, go to sleep, I'm goin' to the bar for a beer before bed


http://www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour/

Some of the new folks on the block

I'm sitting in a brand new Turkish kebab house in Limerick city, staffed by Egyptians, and Irish and Polish waitresses. There's free wifi, hardwood furniture and paintings on the walls. In the past 24 hours, not counting family, I have spoken to more people from Bangladesh, Lithuania and Iraq, than Limerick, or even Ireland. I never quite grasped the extent of the change that has happened over the past few years until now, now that I'm spending most of my time here in public areas: hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, the streets. It's a really interesting time, a really interesting place.

There's a man in his sixties who has just come in, bought his kebab, then sat down and and ordered a cup of tea. The Irish waitress says, "sure, would you like to pay for that now, or later?" And he says, "do you think I'm going to get up and walk out for the price of a cup of tea, after paying for my food?" He's genuinely hurt. "I've never done that in my life before, and I'm not going to start now." Of course, she's just doing her job, and she's concerned she'll forget about the price of the tea, that she'll have other customers to attend to. But he's a man of a certain working class pride, and he has taken her question very personally.

Three nights ago, I was standing at the traffic lights between the Marriott and Dunnes stores, and the row of bus stops that go all the way out to Moyross housing estate. Two elderly women were standing in front of me, waiting for the lights to change. One of them turned around, and with a look on her face like she was a very small thing talking to a very big thing, and laying herself bare before its mercy, asked me for two euro for a cup of tea. This woman was from Limerick, was in her late sixties or early seventies, sober, and sane. I've been concerned about my financial situation lately, to say the least, and I told her no, ma'am, I'm sorry, I don't have it. And we crossed the road. And as soon as I hit the other side, I stopped. Rooted in my wallet, got the two feckin euro, and marched after them. My apologies, madam, I said to her, I believe this belongs to you. And handed her the two euro coin.

I was called a 'dirty cunt' before 2 o'clock this afternoon, by a tiny, frail little blonde girl in a tiny, frail little blonde girl voice, as she rolled her pram across the Athlunkard Bridge (yeah, it all seems to be going on on the Athlunkard Bridge lately). I was on my bike at the time, and we sort of met. Didn't collide or anywhere near it, but enough for her to get her words out. Totally matter of fact, her expression. Kind of blank.

Limerick, today.

Two funny things I've just discovered

1. Freddy's was recommended in Cara, the aer lingus (national Irish airline) in-flight magazine, which is just HILARIOUS. You'd have to see both Cara and Freddy's to truly appreciate the beauty of this one.

2. Somebody in Seoul googled or bloggered "armpit lick" and got through to my blog. Bliss.

On madness, intelligence and human kindness

It was Mental Health Week in Ireland, the week before I arrived. Just discovered this, written up on a billboard in some dank alleyway in Limerick city. I have something to say about mental health. An unusual slant, you might say. And I am deadly serious about this. Unkindness is a serious mental illness. Natural human intelligence is wildly kind. Where kindness is lacking, human intelligence is retarded, and just doesn't function right. Lack of intelligent compassion is serious mental illness. The inability to see the humanity in each human being you meet is highly socially dangerous behaviour.

Have a look around, folks. Where exactly are the sane people? Where is human intelligence? Is it in universities, in the bodies of professors spending their entire lives writing theses for 19 year olds to read in order to form an opinion so they can write an essay and get a degree so they can become somebody who writes essays for other 19 years olds to make opinions out of, and that no one else will ever ever ever read, including themselves? Is human intelligence in mensa? Is it making Manhattan go round? Is that human intelligence in motion? Do these words even resonate with you? I'm not fucking around here. Absence of kindness is a BLIGHT, a plague in the world. Funny how we're left to our own devices in addressing that one. No government grants or tax cuts on the kindness shortage.

The degree of our pleasure and pain in life is largely dependent on the way we respond to rolling with the punches. But some things wail like a siren in the soul.

We don't take pictures at funerals. We don't take pictures of our pain. We don't like to live through it and we don't like to be reminded of it. But this stuff is as much a part of life as laughing and joy and weddings. Death and pain and sadness and loneliness and hurt, these all sit at the wedding table too, though they are not given a place, and are usually invisible. Not so invisible, if you look a bit closely. For all the people up on the dancefloor giggling and having fun, there's often twice as many sitting around watching them, looking bored, unhappy, or just drinking themselves to oblivion.

It's interesting that the very people who make official power-wielding judgments about other people's mental health, I think, have their own damage, but have the distinction of being well attuned to living in the world, within world systems, keeping a job, paying the mortgage, maintaining the status quo, not rocking the boat, living a damp life.

It really takes a highly intuitive, instinctual intelligence, and a highly evolved, compassionate kind of understanding, in order to see into another human soul, and see what it is that's actually disturbed, or unaccepted, in that human life, and how to suggest ways of helping. We are not evolved as a species in many of the very basic ways. There isn't a richness of mental or physical sanity around, and human beings are very much copycats. Whatever the available model of living is, is generally what's followed.

People get shocked by a smile from a stranger, in some parts of the world. The thought that follows is, "What's that about? What does he want from me?" That gets called 'being sussed', and your other option in that zone is naivete. It's a vicious pit to live in. I'm talking about being a human being that likes yourself. Being truly friends with yourself. Having a loving air about life. Without that, I don't think we can really hear each other. Until then, we only hear some kind of a distortion. Of course all this is easy to say. Actually getting there is a journey of LIFE. And it's a rocking journey, a fantastic adventure.

This is why we listen to rocknroll. This is why we fucking LOVE rocknroll. When it's good, it's made from the place that the sane madness comes from, and it acts like a hole in the seamlessness of things, that offers a way to jump through into that sane madness of things.

True sanity is highly aberrant. If it's also smart, it probably knows how to keep its mouth shut. Unfortunately, I may be sane, but I'm not so smart.

Things are getting to the point where I NEED to make a rocknroll band.