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.

Last night as I lay dreaming...

So last night I dreamt of the Clintons. Bill AND Hillary.

Bill and I met somewhere, and ended up in his apartment suite in the basement of some large old house somewhere in New York. We talked a lot. I talked a lot with both Clintons. They did most of the talking. But with Bill, it was more like talking around. Specifically, around this incredible sexual chemistry that was happening in the room. God, I have rarely felt anything like this, and he was a figment of my imagination. Maybe that figures, really...

So it was intense, and his energy was intense, and I remember thinking that he was acting like a king who was used to his demands being satisfied by eager courtiers. I wasn't feeling like a courtier. I wanted to be woo'd. But the vibe was getting more and more intense, more and more difficult to resist. Fabulous. Eventually he had to leave to go somewhere, and I went to the bathroom.

Then Hillary showed up. She was totally unmoved by the presence of a young woman in her husband's New York apartment, and didn't ask for any explanations. I didn't really have any to give anyway, I didn't know why I was there, and thus far, nobody had had sex with anybody. I was hoping it wouldn't be with Hillary.

So Hillary and I went outside to a garden bench, and had a drink together, and chatted. She was good company, vivacious and mischievous. I wanted to tell her how great I thought she was, and it was a pity that this relaxed, funny side of her didn't come out much in the media. But there was an edge to it too, it was like a performance, a perfect performance. There was no way Hillary was thinking of this as a casual opportunity for friendliness and fun.

There is a website for this kind of stuff, you know. But BOTH Clintons? Have YOU ever dreamed of a Clinton?

Enniskillen: initial thoughts

I wrote this the day after the show opened, a few days ago...

So the show has opened in Enniskillen, at the old Portora Royal School, a 400 year old shindig that once educated the teenaged Sam Beckett and Oscar Wilde. It has been fun seeing today's teenaged boys - and a smattering of girls - interacting with the new rolling, low humming beast in their foyer. It is running there right now, and up to the 5th October, so if you happen to be in the viscinity, or feel like making a trip up there, Fermanagh is gorgeous, I recommend it, and Portora is a very special place.

And for what is basically a simple set-up of video projector and audio system, it's really been a lot of work, in fact three full days of work. I feel like I'm leaving it in good hands, to wend its way in this border town. There will be gigs in the evening, so adult humans will be exposed to it, too. But you know, I could really just hang out there chatting with the fourteen year olds like Ryan today, who is studying art, and who doesn't have exams this year, they just put him in a room, "say a word and we have to draw a picture. It's alright, like", and who hung around to watch the show, and dug the story. Or the two older boys who were vibrating with excitement at the whole thing, and who really dug the soundtrack with its purely analogue instrumentation and electronic feel. Or the very small kid who stormed into the middle of the foyer, hands on hips, and shouted, "What is THIS?" with some consternation. Or the boy who shouted to me, "did someone paint in the water?"

Or the teacher who asked, "can't it stay forever? I love it! I love that it can just be around, slowly infiltrating the boys' senses".

This is pretty far out stuff for kids of that age, so it's thrilling to see the few that seem to be inspired by it.

Generally, I found things friendly out there. Teachers have been keen to get involved and help out with turning the project on every day, and I have been made tea the last couple of days. I'd be into doing this kind of thing again, with perhaps even more interactivity between myself and the kids. This particular school is of course interesting to me, because when I was the age of these kids, I was reading about Oscar Wilde going to that school, about Sam Beckett who went there too, and kind of rocking out to the whole notion of wild creativity. I had no idea of what this arcane 400 year old institution, at that time for boarding boys, the children of the ruling and well to do classes really meant, or signified, or was ACTUALLY, or any of that shit.

And then I went to Trinity, where both of them went after that (am I right about that? I know Beckett went there, maybe Wilde went to Oxford?) and you know, when I made my application for rooms in college as I was entering my fourth year, I scrawled all over the pink application sheet all about the specific room, on the specific floor, in the specific location, as if they didn't already know that that had been Beckett's room when he was there. As it happened, it would have been very handy, because it was right by the college theatre, which I was very into at the time. But I didn't get rooms, that one or any other. But today, my work and Ross' soundtrack is being projected where those boys spent their teens a hundred years ago, and I see them running through the flickering light of the projector rays reaching across the foyer.

I have fallen in love with my work again. I have fallen in love with the business of bringing it from that endlessly in-love first process of pressing pen to paper watching the ink flowing until it is done, of taking the photograph, of receiving the idea - those sensual moments of happeningness - and now, through a five month process of moving shyly and excitedly toward each other, as I construct, edit, reconstruct, collaborate (with Ross Bonadonna, Brooklyn composer, producer and my squeeze) and make these things available for other people to see and interact with.

It has been fun.

They will be showing up on Here Comes Lucy very soon.

UPDATE: Lovely Clusterflocker Sheila has written a lovely note about this post here. Thanks, Sheila!

Dublin in shades of grey and blue

London

The very first crisp brown leaves were beginning to fall from the trees. Autumn was underway in London. In Enniskillen, the trees were just beginning to blush red and yellow. In Clare, the trees are still green.

Daisy: a true story with pictures

Daisy discovers the Spiegeltent...


Daisy meets her very first cocktail!


Daisy discovers some big city conundrums!


Daisy sees a little hint of home in the city


I have been taking pictures. They will be up soon. London rocks. In the meantime, have this...

In Dublin, I performed a little show in the Fringe Festival about a daisy's fantastic journey of living in some hard circumstances, and her plucky, inspiring attitude to life in the midst of what others might consider tragedy. To accompany my performance, I illustrated the journey with daisy herself, sitting in a plastic beer glass with a little water in the bottom of it. I brought daisy with me through the streets and interiors of Dublin I visited on friday, and took some photographs of what she saw there.

It is a long way from the train tracks of Ballybrophy, from where she was plucked.

Incidentally, my one woman one daisy rollercoaster of a show, the one minute love hit, is available for booking for our forthcoming world tour, which will be accompanied by a photo show, detailing her amazing journey from the Ballybrophy railway tracks. Queries from promoters, festivals, galleries and hosts are welcome at the email address on the right.

London girling

So I'm on the road until next weekend. Here in London until tuesday, then back to Dublin, then Enniskillen for the show, then back to Dublin, back to Clare. Posting will probably be thin, but juicy. Like a London girl.

At Hoxton Square

I am in a hotspot in Hoxton Square, London. London is very peopled. It feels denser than New York and I can't figure out how that could possibly be. Maybe they're just all out on the street or something. Anyway, it's fabulous. I'm totally entranced by the tube stations here. Jesus. I have always been a big subway fan, and thrill to experiencing different cities' subway systems. It's a way of getting to know a city intimately, even at first glance. Love the stuff. And I've been to London quite a few times before, it was my first ever subway system when I was 14 and wandering around on my own, and several times since then.

But this time it seems different, I've seen quite a few more subway systems since the last time I was in London but Jesus, the tube is so beautiful. It's really entrancing me. The stations themselves, architecturally, the sheer labyrinthine quality of them, the colours, the designs, are so different from station to station. Then there's the trains. The seating is all lengthways down the carriage, and the seats are much closer to each other than New York, for instance. And they're soft furnished! Oh. I love subway systems. People here are so interestingly dressed also.

I'm really very surprised by this city. Really enjoying it. Loving English people. Loving them. More when I have another minute to spare...

Stuff from the future, you can make (mostly)

How to make hover shoes so you can, you know, hover, above the ground

How to make a piss simple set of audio speakers, for about 3 cents

Small steps toward the realisation of our smellovision dreams

So if you have any other tips for making fab stuff easily, send a link or a comment...

Clonlara landscape, summer

Maybe this is the reason people come to my blog by googling 'sheep shit'?

The future of sex, caring, nursing, um... women?

Female robots.

"I see faces, understand voices and make facial expressions. At the moment I am just a machine, but someday I may be fully alive and aware."

Kiddy voice, looks a lot like daisy lowe

I kind of dig Eva

Sinister child woman

Conservative hockey mom

For the gentleman who likes his android in a plastic miniskirt

Ok. And there are some male versions too. Compare and contrast. Discuss. Comment!

Cycling robot

Village people go Michelin: I am not sure this is the future

Fiddlin bot

Show news!

I have a number of posts in various states of undress, but today I am up to my goolies in trying to find a dvd burner that is compatible with apple, and that can also be shipped to me by tuesday (or in-person pickupable in Dublin or London over the next couple of weeks. This is proving more tricky than you might think.)

Meanwhile, show news! I will be performing my one minute one woman show, Ode to a Daisy, as part of the Project Brand New's Magic Moments series in the Dublin Fringe Festival on Wednesday, September 17th! The time is 3 pm, the place is the Fringe Festival Offices, on Sackville Place. I would be delighted to see you, and have you see me.

Other show news: I have a couple of still movies showing at the Enniskillen Arts Festival, from the 26th September to the 5th October in the foyer of the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. My movies are Rose and Milla from my "This is Where" series of still live movies. They will be live on my site within the next couple of weeks. I'm really excited to be showing at the Portora school: it is an old private boys school that is celebrating its quatercentenary this year (ie. 400 years old!). Oscar Wilde and Sam Beckett both went there. My work will be projected in the foyer! This is seriously thrilling. There are lots of cool gigs and stuff happening in Portora over the course of the festival, Eliza Carthy and Andy Irvine are both playing there, so lots of people will be milling through. Come on up!

What is this love stuff? Or, jealousy makes for better sex.

It is official, Howard Jacobson says so. He says:

"People will tell you: "We've been together now for 40 years, never had a cross word, she's never looked at another man, I've never looked at another woman." And there's enough of Felix Quinn [the lead character in his new novel] in me to think: "well, that would be a bit dull".... Jealousy quickens. And to miss the quickening of jealousy, is to miss a big part of erotic life. I'm sure you can settle down and have a nice domestic life without jealousy.' A pause. A wicked smile. 'But - why would you want to?'"

He says that jealousy is the 'quickening' of love. The glue, the proton, the enzymes, the baking powder, the bit that makes the heart beat faster. I kind of have a soft spot for a species that needs things to kick its arse in gear and couple up. Here's Jacobson on desire:

"Intense desire is living in constant fear of loss. Can you love someone properly, without fearing that you'll lose them? I doubt it. I doubt it. With love grows this real sense of danger. The world will take it from you! And one way to lose someone you love, is to death, or an accident, or any kind of mishap. And the other, is to infidelity, which is another kind of mishap."

But what is the stuff that is getting quickened? What is this love stuff? So there's a moment when we recognise that we feel 'love' for somebody, the romantic version also, that really only occurs in moments. A minute after the fuzzy wuzzies and we're having a blazing row with that person, the flame of passion flickers with the wind. That's a different kind of love to the the love that finds the lover in a myriad of forms, whatever happens to be around.

Is the addict in love with his dealer? Is that love? Maybe it is... It's perceived need, it's a craving that flows through the body, and the perceived one who can soothe and supply what is craved. That's often how romantic love at least, is perceived, experienced. A feverish surge of drythroated desire. Most people would probably not think of it as love. Who is to say?

Matter. Anti-matter. Bang. Repeat.

When word started to filter out into science-ish blog land a few months ago, about the impending Large Hadron Collider deadline, the beginning of the experiments to generate little big bangs in a circular 17 mile long tube around Geneva, I was quite surprised. Because I had heard first about the LHC something like 15 years ago when I was piss young, and however I heard the news then, I just assumed that it was already happening. Of course I didn't call it the Large Hadron Collider, or even the LHC, and I didn't know the organisation organising it was called CERN, or any of that stuff that is so readily available to me online today, right now, as I type and fact-check and seek links to pepper through this post. Look at how beautiful it is.

Back then, and since I heard about it, CERN's Large Hadron Collider has been a part of my repertoire of conversational metaphors. I was deeply excited about it when I heard about it, and I have been talking about it ever since. A typical CERN moment might run something like this:

[time: 5.30 am, place: somebody's attic flat in Ranelagh or a shotgun house in Algiers Point, New Orleans, and the kind of 15 hour conversation that is a rolling stream of inspiration and widening energy]

Lucy: And that reminds me of this thing that they've built, somewhere in Switzerland, Zurich I think, and they have this machine that circles the city, way underground, and it recreates the big bang several times every hour! Imagine that! The origins of our existence, the moment of the birth of the whole manifest universe, happening quietly underground, in a lab in the middle of Europe...

The layers of the concept just kind of blew my mind every time I thought about it. I've even met Swiss people and talked about it to them, and they have all nodded and smiled sagely, yes, that's the LHC, yes, that's right, we are a very advanced people with our chocolate and our watches and NOW, OUR LHC!! But nobody mentioned the fact that it wasn't actually in operation yet.

So now it's really really happening, like, tomorrow. And actually, the fact that it hasn't been really really happening for the past 15 years has been kind of blowing my mind all over again, for the past couple of months.

One of the possible outcomes of these little hourly mini-recreations of the origin of the universe is that there might (tiny possibility, granted, but cool enough to mention) be created a tiny tiny baby black hole that will rapidly suck up all the spacetime around it, and thus gobble up the solar system, and god knows, maybe the galaxy in which we live. Wow. Awesome (in the biblical sense, not the californian surfer dude sense. Hm. Actually, both). This is how we would die. But can you imagine the moments just before? Seeing the black hole gulping up the galaxy from the inside around? Imagine how that would look? "A stream of atoms descending toward the abyss..." That ain't no pixillation, baby...

So they start sending particles around tomorrow in a clockwise direction, then the next week they'll send them anti-clockwise, just to get the Collider nice and warmed up. It'll be a few weeks before they start banging them together. First, some tests around the track. So. In a couple of weeks time, keep your eyes peeled. If you're gonna get spaghetticised, you'd probably want to at least catch a glimpse of the spectacular view.

Do something

We are a heaving house of hounds at the moment. Everybody is on their holidays and everybody has left their pooch with us, because we treat them nicely and let them stay in the house. We now have everybody's pooches in the house. The house is saturated of pooch.

I am getting ready to take Dolly, Smudge and Fluff out for a walk. Together. I have become each of their replacement 'go-to' person. They are each lovelorn and competitive for my affection. Particularly Dolly and Smudge. Dolly sniffs Smudge intently when I am stroking her, as if to find out what she has that Dolly doesn't.

Then Dolly makes her groovy twirling arse dance, and looks at me expectantly.

When I am cooking, one or other of them will come and sit by my ankles, facing out into the room, defying any other pooch to come near. Molly meanwhile is in full tilt nervous breakdown mode, very very dramatic. Tiny tiny pooch and her whole body heaving.

Molly, Dolly and I went running last night. Molly got very very excited and passionate and then it all got overwhelming for her and she started to snarl and nip at Dolly. Of course Dolly wasn't keen on any of this shit at all, and snarled back, and looked at me like, do something.

They all look at me like, do something. When somebody comes into the kitchen, there are usually 3 expectant dogs, staring at them, saying do something. When they hear a vehicle driving in, they all bark, do something.

So I am the one they have figured out is their best bet for long walks in the tall grassy wildish fields around here, and they are all keen to be my favourite. This morning, I felt that I had an inkling of what it might be like to be Hugh Hefner or somebody, with all these small pooches vying with each other for my affection and attention, sniffing each other's arses for hints and information, before nudging the other one out of the way and placing their head on my leg.

Insects Live Furiously

Today I am inspired by insects. It doesn't take much. But I am going to London soon and this is one place I think I will have to visit while I am there (except that it doesn't open until early next year... groo). One house. 17 million insects. Right in the middle of the city. This is very very exciting. This is the kind of thing that would make a gal move to London. Just to be close to them. Just to visit them every day. Just to be near humans who say things like, "The point is that I have a huge amount of admiration for these kinds of flies." The scientist in question is talking about maggots that go to live in human corpses that he then collects and investigates.

This article is so full of people who are passionate about insects. It makes me long for the tribe. There is a place there called the Insect Information Service and it is staffed by a man who is the " 'go to' man for the whole world's bugs." Hurrah! Here is what he says: "There are 23,500 insects and spiders in Britain and no one knows all of them, but I know most... My single mission in life is to make people more aware of the life around them. It mystifies me that people are interested in what's on Mars when all of this stuff is at their feet to be handled and touched." Swoon.

And there is a female mite specialist, who is married to the Curator of Cockroaches. This needs to be made into a movie.

So it is a long article. This is the anecdotal visceral emotional core of it:

"Hall is the country's leading forensic scientist, his speciality being the study of maggots in flesh wounds to discover the precise time of a murder.

He is a wry and engaging figure, a man who should be a TV drama series. He greets me with a selection of fattened maggots in pots, a kind of juju necklace of maggots removed from the rear end of a sheep, and a series of graphic photographs of wounds (mostly in live animals) in which maggots are making hay. In among the photographs are a couple of pictures of his own legs and arms with livid sores.

'I had a personal experience of some of this after I came back from Bolivia one time,' he explains matter of factly, 'along with the maggot of a botfly in my leg. They can eventually get quite large,' - he opens a 2in gap between thumb and forefinger - 'so I could feel this movement and I could see the tip of the maggot coming up to breathe and going back down.'

What did he do?

'Well you can't really squeeze them out, because they have these backward facing spines. You need surgery. I had a couple in my arm, too. I discovered if you put Vaseline over them they can't breathe and tend to back out of their own accord, eventually.' "

Ok, I've just realised that the insects will actually be dead, not living, and so, the whole heartbeatingly exciting spectacle of Lucy wandering blissfully through an eight storey cocoon of fucking and fighting insects has vanished in the space of a paragraph. London can breathe its smoggy air safely again. But I like this bit a lot:

"In the heart of the new building the Natural History Museum will also be putting its greatest living wonders on show: its staff of 220 scientists will be presented in full view of the public.

At intervals, along the winding descent through the dramatic cocoon, these rare creatures will be viewed behind glass at their work stations, preparing petri-dishes, peering through microscopes, eating lunch, perhaps grabbing an afternoon nap. At various points the public will have the opportunity to interact directly with them, to ask questions and to examine experiments."