How sad, how lovely

Take an hour to listen to this hour long documentary about Connie Converse. Listen to the songs, and her voice. There's an uncanny quality in her. Her songs go on journeys into yearning, into the uncanny.

This is an incredible story. Connie Converse wrote songs on her guitar and sang them in the mid fifties: songs of such intimacy, wit, hip, poignancy and unconventionality that would not be really heard at all in the mainstream until Joni Mitchell came along, and that was just a totally different epoch later. Say what you like about Bob Dylan, intimacy was not his strong suit. This woman was writing these songs before any of these people showed up. Before the Beatles showed up, for Christ's sake. Before Elvis showed up. Before rocknroll showed up. Long before the lone human singing her own songs on a guitar showed up.

It's an hour long radio show, and there are also photographs of Connie from around the time the recordings were made, in Greenwich village in 1954. These songs have just emerged for the first time, a couple of months ago.

Connie Converse left New York, dispirited at lack of record industry interest in her songs, in 1960, right when Bob Dylan was arriving in town. She moved to some city beginning with M: somewhere she never really felt right in, though she had by the sound of it a very close supportive group of family and friends around her. One day in 1974, she packed up her volkswagen, dispatched a bunch of farewell letters, and headed off. She has not been heard of since.

She would be 85 now. I so much want to call out to her, to tell her that people are listening, that we love her songs, that there will be so many people who will listen to and love her songs now. That she was living out of time and place, that people care about her story. That I care about her story.

Connie Converse! I care about your story. I love your songs. You matter. You absolutely matter.


Connie Converse website
on myspace

Ok one more

Play him off, Keyboard cat!

You can get more here.

Health club type places, part 2

On a perhaps related topic of humans gathering at some ungodly hour before noon to go on some shared quest, though they don't perhaps understand why the hell they're doing it, I recall a fire alarm going off in an apartment I found myself staying in, in Memphis Tennessee, one August. Within 24 hours I was staying unexpectedly in an apartment there, hanging out with a bunch of local artists, and was getting woken up by a mandatory fire alarm pretendy drill thing early in the morning.

I had to climb down 10 flights of stairs to the street, with absolutely no idea of whether the whole fucking place was on fire or what the hell was happening. It was a time of ridiculous things happening. Everything was intensely calm. I would have been chill if Chicken Licken had come running up to me that very minute. Out on the street, the alarm stopped, I sniffed the air, got the notion that nothing was on fire after all, figured they'd probably wake me again if it was, went back upstairs and slept for another hour.

Health club type places

So I have just been to a health club type place in the basement of a hotel, where all hotels keep their health club type places, and I spent a couple of hours meandering between sauna, freezing cold plunge pool (coldest I have ever been in, other than winter ocean) and steam. The sauna and steam room were good and properly hot, and I now feel magnificent. It is as though there had been a layer of crud all around me, like in my aura or someshit, and it has now been cleaned away. And I only know this because I can feel the absence of the layer of crud from my aura. That is how I know. By tomorrow morning this feeling of the absence of the layer of crud will have vanished, and I will again no longer know whether I have a layer of crud building around me.

I've been trying out various health club type places, and this is the only one with a cold plunge pool, which really is an essential aspect of the whole thing for me. The cold plunge pool is where it all happens. It's the salt in the sea, the msg in the chop suey, it's the butter in the mash, the gravy on the roast. I feel intensely clean, relaxed, profoundly contented and very, very antisocial.

UPDATE: ok, as I was falling asleep for my nap directly after having written this, I found myself thinking: not antisocial, of course, but unsocial. Antisocial would be flinging peanuts at people having chats. Unsocial is crawling under your duvet for the winter, because you understand burrowing creatures' need to hibernate.

They do this only to get what they want

This is what we're up against. Try arguing with that.

How do they hold up? How do they survive?

Baby pandas milk it. Except for the general tone of playful friendliness, these guys remind me of Cartman.

A year on twitter

I recently passed 1000 updates on ze tveeter, and in a couple of days I will have been on twitter a year. I am recalling my first ever tweet. I remember thinking, this is fucking ridiculous. Has it really come to this? I'm sitting here, trying to think of something to put into this fucking box, for christsake, that is what I'm fucking doing right now. But if I was to be completely honest about what I'm doing when I write in this fucking box I will always be angsting over the whole fact of doing it, and that won't be fun at all. So how do I proceed? Am I to be dishonest in my dealings with this 'twitter'? And to what end? For what purpose? I only know about three people on this thing anyway. Okay, ten. But they're all fucking computer making people and designers kvetching about font details. I don't even understand them half the time. What the fuck am I doing here? This is very unpleasant and I need a cup of tea.

And then in my exasperation, I turned my head to the window. Some flies were standing on the glass, enjoying spring and clearly horny. My fingers flew.

So you think nature is fragile and cannot possibly withstand human whim?

I just noticed yesterday that there are some weeds here that have pushed their way right through the tarmacadam here. The weeds are poking right through it.

Whoever thinks that human activity will indeed blight the earth's surface irretrievably, has obviously never ever met a weed like the one growing through the tarmacadam in front of this house right now.

Black on black

Tar, the profoundly handsome pooch.

Alternative Miss World

What a terribly lovely thing for a rainy saturday evening. (video)

Show tonight, Location one, Soho NYC

I have a photograph in a show *tonight, May 1* at Location One, Soho, NYC.

Open Call, curated by Brina Thurston, starts at *8pm*, Location One, 26 Greene St. DJ and light refreshments served. I believe there will be beer and I believe it will be free. Please go and spot my photograph: this is what you're looking for. A few ooh and aahs when beholding it would really send things where they need to go. Thanks.

OH YES ALSO: There's a Laurie Anderson show there at the moment, closes tomorrow. If you're in New York and you're reading this blog and you haven't seen her show yet, you might want to sort that out.

Considerate poo

This picture speaks 'considerateness' to me. It is dog poo, neatly sitting on top of a cigarette box. Whatever way you look at it, it's considerate. I would like to meet that dog someday and give him a chewstick.

UPDATE In case you didn't notice, the poo is rocking the health safety warning. Considerate!

I came across this on a green issues site, in the advertising space

I didn't cast a vote.

DubKbhBcnBknJoggingWhippet

I seem to have given up the visa quest. Or it has given me up. Or it has gone underground. I hope truly that Brooklyn is my home, deferred for now, but right now I am living in the moment with the nothingness from The Neverending Story eating all around the edges of the moment.

I have a habit it seems of living in cities that get abbreviated to three letters: Kbh (København = Copenhagen), Dub, Bcn, hmm, NY. Wow. Maybe that's it! NY is TWO LETTERS! That is the source of the difficulty. I might have to contact mayor Bloomberg now that he is in his untouchable third term and today, angry (you did hear about the fiasco airplane photo op farce that happened yesterday, didn't you? I mean, we all thought that if nothing else, the Obama administration was fucking smart) and suggest a New York NYN(y) appendage to the usual old NYNY set up. Then I can come, freely. Oh all things are possible.

I'm considering the possibilities of the potential relevance of jogging to my life. See, a jogger would never write a sentence like that. But maybe I'm learning. I am not completely inexperienced in this regard. I used to take off sometimes around a couple of the lakes of København and found it an intense exercise in discouragement and determination. Maybe that's what I need right now. It's also healthy.

I used to take care of a pair of whippets in Bkn (oh my god we've cracked it) and it was hilarious when I got the notion to bring them for a run. I would tear off as fast as I fucking could, and they'd be having a pleasant quick stroll. Sort of smiling up at me, warming up for the cheetah manoeuvres.

God

Omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. God dammit I loved those omni words I heard in college when they told me about what God was.

Dense murky chutney memory

This is more of a tweet than a blog post, but sometimes it's good not to have to try to eliminate punctuation marks in order to say what you've got to say in 140 characters. I had a conversation yesterday with the woman at the chutney stall in Temple Bar food market, and we were talking about how some chutneys are profoundly intense. I was complimenting them on making a hot sweet fruit chutney that I think is perfectly suited to the Irish palate, the perfect balance of hot and sweet. And how I had tasted some chutneys once from India, kept in the house of some ambassador or other who was away probably being an ambassador, while his teenage son had a few people over for a few days, of whom I was one. It was the summer I was 17 and just out of my first year of college, and I was just drifting around where the wind blew in Dublin.

So I went to Dublin yesterday, and wandered around for a few hours. I was a ghost, haunting the streets, mostly. I saw faces that I knew, it is always thus in Dublin, and this is the single reason I find Dublin an interesting city these days. I like to look at the faces. I suppose if I spent a couple of days wandering around København on my bike I would probably spot a couple of people I knew on the street, but nothing like Dublin. And I have run into people I know on the streets of New York, not just in the neighbourhood (it's not such a devastating experience in the neighbourhood, but when you meet someone you know on the subway or anywhere in Manhattan it feels fucking holy or something).

Yeah, faces I recognise, and some of them I have never even spoken to. There is a strong sense - whether you realise it or not of course is another matter - that the fact that you live in Dublin and walk on the street makes you a visible human being in Dublin. You are part of the Dublin landscape, another of the people that people recognise, whom they never ever actually engage with or speak to in any way. But these people make up the furniture of a small city. Recognisability is an invisible, implicit quality of Dublin life.

Of course it has changed. The woman who used to dance and play accordion on that little triangle at the top of Pearse street by Westmoreland street, she's gone. The woman who wandered around dancing and making ley lines energy gestures, she's gone. And me, I was the one racing through the streets at breakneck speed and making hair-raisingly close calls (but always polite when glancing past someone so close I could smell their perfume) on my little red scooter. And she, she too is gone.

So I was passing through Dublin yesterday and I get to talking with the chutney lady about other chutneys I have tasted, and I always remember these crazy salty off-your-arse-hot mango chutneys I tasted when I rocked in at this guy's house at 17, and stayed for a few days. He had red hair, brown eyes and pale skin and he seemed kind of withdrawn in that smart rich kid kind of way. Anyway I have always remembered his name, and I just googled him and discovered that he lives a few blocks from where I lived in Brooklyn.

And we talked about the quality of such chutneys, the chutney lady and I, yesterday. They are murky, she said. Yes, a kind of mud green, I agreed, generally joining in the friendly business of agreement. But those chutneys weren't murky at all. They were salty. And hot. And sweet. And I had never tasted anything like them ever before. And he, this probably 18 year old kid who was our host, was already weary and over everything. He probably grew out of that.

Tar wonders if there is any chance of A Great Adventure Of Doing Things

Octopus grass

More from the Bill and Lara story

These are again, from their first meeting. The original pic being this, of course, and click on it to see it larger. We need to talk about our feelings about these photographs, folks. Please feel free to share in the comments. I can't stop looking at the photo of these two holding each other. The sheer unmitigated joy. I am so happy they have found each other.