The dog that ate my dinner

I went to get some dinner, in the student bar of this university that I'm spending my days hanging out in, lately, working on these projects I'm really excited about, these projects I'm busy breathing life into, lately.

So I'm feeling kind of antsy and I go to the student bar to get some food, and all they've got left is this stuff called "chicken goujons" and you know, these badly processed chip things, and I turn from the counter and realise that there are about six hundred eighteen year olds in flouncy dresses and suits, and the chip lady tells me that it's some kind of first year ball. There's nowhere for me to sit and eat my chicken goujons, so I go outside to the outdoor courtyard, and the rain is pelting down on the roof above where I sit, eat, and watch the parade of loud satin and umbrellas, running for cover and madly text messaging.

That's when the pooch shows up. The one pictured. He just showed up, quietly sat at my table, sat and looked at me. His eyes watery, sad looking, old, he looked dirty, neglected, not malnourished. Matter of fact begging. No bullshit about it. No tricks, no fancy stuff, no cuteness, no smooth moves. So I gave him some of my chips, the crispy ones, the ones I don't like. He ate them. I gave him more. I took pictures of the girls in their vehement coloured satin, some with quite elaborately positioned cleavage, some in frou frou meringue style, all with spindly heeled sandals and their toes squidging around in the rain, as they ran across the courtyard, through the downpour.

Later I got to thinking about the Trinity Ball, the satin-fest of my own extreme youth. I never wore satin: went only, I think, to two of them, though it could have been more, and I certainly have many vivid memories from them. To the first one I wore very short scarlet velvet, bought a ticket off someone on the day, having resisted the whole affair for a full year before that. And the second one I worked at, as hospitality chica. That night was notable for being offered a line of cocaine for the first time (aw..) and some London rapper tried to bribe my t-shirt from me (for the t-shirt's sake, I think, not the be-bra'd female underneath it). The Buzzcocks played that year, some reunion gig, I don't know if any of us youngsters really knew who they were. They seemed to have fun, though, and trashed the sound system, middle aged rebels that they were.

Back in the Stables courtyard, the pooch kept looking at me. He wasn't aggressive, but it was intense. I gave him more chips, then some chicken, then decided to buy him some kind of food in the shop. So off I went, and found a can of sardines, and got looked at sadly by the boy behind the counter with the large auburn eyes, and went out again in the rain, looking for sad pooch amongst the legs of the suited boys and the satinned girls, but sad pooch had disappeared. I felt wretched.

Reminded me of a horribly mangey, very sick and suspicious, terrified and starving dog I met in New Orleans one hot august evening. I followed him into some midtown ghettoes trying to give him some can of dog food I had bought in a petrol station. He didn't want it, kept running from me, suspicious of what I was up to. Followed him all the way to Basin street, or Perdido, some street once full of hookers, now famous from a song that came from that seething time in the life of that city. He fucked off, finally, after giving chase to me in a small park, and I walked back through those ghettoes, with street dudes sleeping on benches, and tears pouring down my face, all the way to the St. Charles streetcar, feeling a place in my heart that was sucking from the inside.

Sometimes your help is not wanted and that is hard.

A boy tried to say something witty and friendly to me last night. I responded with ueber-caginess. He apologised for freaking me out. I responded with polite ueber-caginess. Oh I prefer when life is not so serious.

These tiny stories are important. Important to tell, sometimes. I don't know why.

Lucy at Mamuska

It was the night of Mamuska on friday. Lucy made a performance, with performed poetic narrative, photographs and Ross' music. It is as truly a work in progress as that term has ever meant, but it was hugely hugely fun, and spirited, and people seemed to dig it. Got no pictures to show for it, for my laptop was employed the whole night in work and communication, but a lovely man called Conor took photographs, and we have made recordings, which I expect will show up some time very soon on my main website (which, lord knows, could do with a bit of updating... for it is spring!)

Mamuska's such a great platform. Daghdha's venue is fantastic: large but not cold, dense, full of potential, the venue equivalent of the sprung floor that supports it. And that goes for the spirit of the people who support it too, by being there, by staying there for the full evening, and the spirit of the performers, the contributers, who reveal their half-made work for to see what lies further inside it, and they can sometimes be rewarded with an inspiration of life, of breath, of ideas, and the energy of the return.

Mark Carberry made a pretty gorgeous little boxer/prom queen dance vignette, there were lots of dance experiments and celebrations, a piece for live and recorded harp, and some moving movement movies..

Fab fab fab and inspired, and inspired, and inspired...

Thick skinned beauty

So the topic of this post is the delicate rendering of this nuanced, sensitive portrait. I wonder if he was trained to do that? Even if he was though, I think it's the humans that come over like the ridiculous creatures we can be sometimes, with our cheap clapping and our tiny insights into the possibilities of internal life in another living being. I bet he's thinking, yeah, but just you wait until I write a novel about how I feel about The Way Life Is for we who are not human, living in a human dominated world.

Elephants are intelligent, feeling creatures, as far as I can tell. I saw a documentary a couple of years ago, some Richard Attenborough thing I think, and the film makers had made fake elephant dung shapes with cameras hidden inside them, and scattered the cameras all along a major African elephant trail. Of course the elephants got hip to the fake dung aspect pretty sharpish, and took to playing football with them.. but enough cameras remained to document their response upon finding a small elephant graveyard along their walk (some might call it a pilgrimage, much in the same way that you could call the salmon's journey to the source of its birth, in order to spawn, and die, also a pilgrimage). When they came upon the elephant bones, they stopped, and smelled and paid attention, and lingered, and gathered, and were quiet and paid attention to the bones for a while, much as we humans behave at graveyards (though of course we usually tidy up our dead, with lawned graves and headstones and flowers and candles. Of course, the presence of actual dead human bones found along the morning jog to the bakery would most likely not produce quite such a measured response in the normal human being...)

I have only met one elephant in the flesh, so to speak. This impromptu meeting happened outside a nightclub on a freezing cold Danish night at one in the morning a couple of years ago. I was cycling back to Island's Brygge in Copenhagen after a late night at the shop where I sold my vintage clothes, and I glanced across the bridge to my left. An elephant was standing outside a really tacky nightclub, posing for mobile phone camera portraits with danish hiphop wannabees in the street.. I stared, then cycled past, through two sets of traffic lights, hungry and tired, but I realised with a sober heart that I was going to have to turn around and go back, and meet the elephant, stand there like all the gals and guys pretending to be Eminem, no better I, and touch elephant skin, look in elephant eyes, say hello, meet the circus attraction.

He was in it for the bananas, clearly. He was docile, stood there, knew not to stamp all over these clueless humans, knew what his job was, but wanted payback. People came with fruit. That fruit disappeared fast. You should have seen that trunk WORK. There was a ruthless look in his eye. The same look I've seen in the eyes of hookers in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel. They ain't Eloise, sugar. I did take photographs, balancing my camera on the unexpectedly steady biceps of the ex-Levi's model cowboy who brought me there, until I was ordered to stop (by the bartender, not the cowboy).

I'm reading a novel by JM Coetzee right now, called Elizabeth Costello. It's quite a gorgeous novel, actually, his writing has a kind of low level blowtorch effect, I find. It's very gently warming until suddenly you're just scorched, eviscerated. The interesting thing about his work, for me, is that there's so much space in it, space of a kind that is rare in writing. The first Coetzee novel I read was Disgrace, a couple of months ago. It was an invitation into a mind, a quiet invitation to listen really really closely, but not dictating what you needed to listen out for.

It's my birthday today. It's my birthday today. It's my birthday today.

Beautiful rusted metal coils on grass

Somebody tried to burn them, they tried to burn metal, and they seem to have had some success. Peculiar thing, but very beautiful. I thought of Rapunzel, and this kind of thing. That's a bit of my own hair, blowing in the wind, on the right.

Daisies by the side of the road on the Clonlara bridge

The long distance blues

I've got the long distance blues
the iChat blues
the video skype blues
the gmail chat blues
the email blues
the snail mail blues
the mobile phone texting blues
the occasional phone conversation blues
the writing my next email to him in a text document because the house I'm living in doesn't have broadband yet blues
the seeing some small cows on the side of the road and stopping to take pictures so he can see what I see blues
the having profound feelings about what may and may not be possible and no good way to express these feelings blues
I've got the blues
I've got the long distance blues.
I've got the distance between county Clare and Brooklyn blues.
Here's a picture of those cows.

Some images of Ireland from this past week

I know of some Irish painters who have devoted most of their productive lives to painting Irish cloud formations. I don't expect you can see why, by this primitive photograph, but I've always found clouds in Ireland to exert tremendous influence on the mood of the people. I've heard my dad describe a sombre mood a number of times, by saying, the clouds are low in the sky today. It's something you'll recognise, if you live here, and are sensitive to these things.

A detail from the entry port of Glenstal Abbey, in county Limerick, where I went to witness the sung passion play the monks perform there every good friday. This is the first year for a while that I went there, with Dad, and probably the first time I've really paid attention to the text. The Abbey is a beautiful place, on many acres of lush, rich land, and as a child, I used to love the solitude and the freedom of running about and playing in the grounds, while all the adults were locked in the chapel, being very serious. This time I was one of the adults. The Jesus story at this easter week stage of the telling, is a devastating one. It's a terrible story, really, of injustice and fear and constricted hearts and treachery. The monks sing it so tenderly, in madrigals, with latin hymns sung at the end. The crescendo of the event itself happens after the story is sung, and left hanging, at the point where the man's body is taken down from the cross, and wrapped carefully in delicately scented cloths, and laid to rest in an unused tomb. The congregation files up to the simple wooden hand made cross that the monks have made, and wait in line, kissing the cross, each in turn, some symbolic gesture that struck me as deeply human, deeply animal. Profoundly moving.

A very modern bridge, in the University of Limerick campus. This is a somewhat winding, curved, foot and cycle bridge, with seated areas built into it, which I have seen used by students every time I've cycled over it. Under the bridge is a beautiful river, with trees growing in it, and small waterfalls, it's quite a gorgeous contrast, especially at night. Beyond the bridge on one side is one of the most dynamic, largely technological, campuses in Ireland, and on the other, tiny little country lanes with a pub nearby that has on most days got a big fire blazing in the hearth, and little formica tables and chairs, and you can get a large pot of tea there for two euro (about ten thousand dollars, granted) which will yield at least four and a dribble cups of decent and strongly brewed tea, and they'll put a fox's creme biscuit bar on the side of your cup too.

Head of a small cat in a garden where I once lived

The SoHo cat and his self-portrait

He took this picture himself, on my computer. He told me to splash it around the internet a little, raise his profile. Man, I'm stuck in this apartment the whole time, he said. How can I get famous when I spend all day indoors, right in the centre of the centre of the universe, here in SoHo? Man, the lousy ironies life throws at you sometimes.. I see it all from the window, and I want a part of it, man. I wanna get PAID..

What can I do but oblige a downtown cat?

Amoor

Maiden form

Don't honk on Sex st.

Insect love

These guys know how to rock.

Good evening. This is the news.

So.

The diners are trooping into the hotel restaurant for dinner and there's a solitary batchelor sitting in the opposite corner of the lobby from me, waiting for the other people he's about to dine with, his family by the sounds of things, who are late. He wandered into the middle of the lobby, trying to reach someone on his phone. The first thing he said was "So we're meeting here, aren't we?" muffle muffle muffle on the other end. "Ok, I'm in the reception. I'll wait in the reception for ye so". You can give these people all the money in the tiger's belly, but evolution just doesn't change as quickly as it takes to throw up a few five star hotels. And then he fell into an oversized Danish designed bright yellow seat, looking forlornly around at the foreign modernness of his surroundings, and waited, slumped in his boredom.

As I typed that sentence, he upped and left. I've noticed that people don't like to sit around being typed about. I've noticed because I have a tendency to sit around typing about people who are sitting around. They're much more comfortable about being written about, especially by fountain pen, but they're much more likely to look at you then, and even talk to you, ask you what you're writing about. Maybe the computer puts them off because it reminds them of work.

I've had people tell me I should close my laptop and "just relax and get drunk like everybody else".. people just aren't used to recreational laptop use in public, in this country. So you know, I tell them (sometimes) that I'm having fun, actually. That I have fun with this computer, that I like it. That it's not some drudge idea of work. That I may or may not be working, but that even when I am working, that that's fun too. Some people really don't understand that. So I sit alone in the lobby, and type.

Some questions.. Is the Irish Times the only newspaper in existence that is accessible on the internet only for paying readers? The New York Times is free, for Christ's sake. The Guardian, The English Times, The Irish Indo.. You can even get your page three tits for free over at The Sun. But for access to the Irish Times, who have patented the domain name Ireland dot com, you've got to pay them 2 euro for 24 hour access. They seem to believe in striptease journalism, though. They give you a glimpse of paragraph for free, then snap at you to subscribe before they'll reveal more. To hell with it, who needs the Irish news when Playboy's monthly rates are cheaper..

And is Ireland the only country that gives a central position in its news and current affairs programming to every little grisly detail of the murder trial du jour? I don't know if it's that there are more murders here than anywhere else or just that there's a national fascination with the detail here, but every time there's a good meaty murder trial over in the Central Criminal Court, we huddle around our tellies, watching the dailies being relayed to us every evening, by a tall man with a spitty kind of voice. Every time I see him on the telly, I think he must have been that boy in the nightclub who was somebody's younger brother, the go-between from the older boys and girls across the dancefloor, delivering yes's and no's and he-wantsta-dance-witya's and every little detail of the gossip of the moment with an intensity of moment, and he just never got over it. He seems to be a proper grown up man now, and a proper grown up journalist I'm sure, but he's still got that he-said-she-said voice, that delight in not being at the centre of the drama, but still having a dynamic function as the messenger boy as he delivers his blow-by-blow accounts of the day's proceedings.

Like food, music and attitudes to sex, each country has its own distinctive styles of news programming. The news in Denmark was classic coldblondenorthern fare. Political debate and talk. Nothing salacious whatsoever. Then some seventy year old codger who had been the Danish ambassador in Haiti wrote a book about his escapades rutting some fourteen year old high arsed impoverished black streetgirls and the whole country was incensed by it. Middle aged men and women piled onto the telly to condemn him. There was a token one very idiotic middle aged woman who was so lightweight they had to weigh her down with a sandbag to stop her from floating away into vagueness, said that she thought the old codger was sexy. To be honest, the story was a welcome relief of filth in a country that follows the royal family's frumpy fashions as the national tabloid excitement. And it was the only book in Danish I've ever read most of the way through (though there was a fair whack of flicking through, I have to say. But finding the sexy bits in a Danish novel is an art and a talent in itself). Of course, the old codger lost his job, and was last seen eyeing up an eighteen year old waitress in an effort to date older women with serious minds.

No, the Danes were not tremendously keen on interesting news, or making news interesting. But then, when the news is in Danish you're kind of halfway to oblivion as it is. And then of course, they hit the front pages internationally, with the whole Mohammed comics story. And lately there's another story that's emerging violently and fitfully in Danish life, which is the streetburning youth rebellion story.

And then of course there's the other extreme: the news from America. The everything's under control, clean, tidy and yet with a Rambo undercurrent style of news broadcasting, where the attitude seems to be that you'll only really believe this ridiculous shite when it's spoken by human beings who have had all the human stuff vacuumed out of them, leaving only pure white teeth and smiling dead fish eyes behind. I think the idea is that viewers will defer to the natural air of authority that such humans are supposed to exude. I think that actually, they probably just want a good spanking, and fortuitously enough, they are paid enough money by the network to source a good, thorough and discreet spanking after every show.

This new Ireland (which actually is about ten years old so it's not bloody new at all anymore, and calling it new is really fucking boring, but I've been away from it so it is new to me every time I come back here) is so contractual. We've adopted a kind of social awkwardness in the form of legal contract consciousness, because, I think, money has made us all a little more suspicious of each other than before, when nobody had any and you could spot a chancer a mile off. He was the fella throwing himself into a 2cm deep pothole in the middle of the road and claiming whiplash and compensation off the government, and disability benefit and free television licenses for the rest of his life, to ease his pain and suffering.

But everybody else got on with things with a nod and an understanding that things would get done and, for the most part, paid for, and that was about the extent of people's worry regarding all the relationships between us that are now governed and monitored with contracts. People make contracts to have conversations with each other, and sign waivers that anything they discuss they will not be held legally in obligation to, unless of course, they make another contract. Contracts are legally enforceable, and are an essential part of a world that runs on expectation and demand. I'm not complaining about Ireland having some harder edges in it these days, it's certainly a more energised kind of place, but you know, at this point in its evolution at least, you can really tell that we haven't always been like this. Something about the selfconsciousness and the inchage of make up on the new breed of homegrown celebutante, these new anonymous-modern hotels in the provinces, the newly botoxed attitudes of women, the sheer real estatisation of the Irish spirit.

Ah sure, feck it. That's just another day's work.

Thank you, and goodnight.

A swan by the river in Limerick city

Another one of that crow at Shannon airport

Pictures from the road

Cosy fireplace Ireland cliche to warm yourselves around

But it really does look like that over here..

A blatant ad for Tom Warnick

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

The crow at Shannon airport

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