The Lonesome Boatman

A classic Irish air, played by a virtuoso tin whistle player. That's a TIN WHISTLE this man is playing. Watch those fingers fly. Reminds me of a bird.

Mystuff

A Chinese photographer exhibits his shit. It is pretty.

This is Where: Milla

Milla from THIS IS WHERE from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

This and yesterday's post are two parts of a project I made this year, called This is Where. It's composed of mostly film photographs but also some digital, spoken word and the music for both pieces is composed by Ross Bonadonna. It is made to be projected on large canvases in installation settings. This is Where was first seen at the Enniskillen Arts Festival, Sept/Oct 08.

This is Where: Rose

Rose from THIS IS WHERE from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

Easy pickings

I glance through the spam folder before trashing it, in case somebody's mass mailout opening invitation or party made it there instead of my inbox. Now, spam isn't what it used to be since they shut down that huge factory operation a few weeks ago. Apparently the pharmacological enticements that constitute 97% of my spam yield something like 27 sales per 5 million spams sent out, or something to that effect. Even at that ratio some of these megaspam operations can make thousands of dollars a day from this stuff.

There is also the kind of spam that makes suggestions such as: Make your Nomination Today for a Degree, or PhD in 5 Weeks: why spend 3 years writing your thesis when you can buy one today and have it delivered by UPS directly to your door? This kind of thing really does piss me off, because they wouldn't be doing it unless it sold to somebody, and really it's got to be the most vulnerable people who fall for this kind of shit.

Ireland has apparently seen a huge surge in cocaine use over the past few years. And Ireland is a small island nation, so the connections between things are really that much more apparent. When you know you're directly supporting the kind of thing that involves so much killing and brutality, not just in Columbia but in Limerick city, for instance, a town of 70,000 people that contains this phenomenon and leads to people being shot and neighbours terrorised with bomb threats in what is basically your neighbourhood, I would imagine it would kind of kill the fun, no? Cos that is what you're putting in your veins and up your nose. The white powder is just a metaphor.

Have I posted this before? Oh well. Watch it again, so.

Love this.

Sex for sanitary towels

The Guardian has this Katine project, where they are sponsoring various development projects in a Ugandan village, and reporting stories from the work that's going on there, and also stories from the lives of the villagers. This one: stories of teenage girls, sexuality and finance, struck me, today.

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.