A memory from summertime, or, Friends you don't see anymore

In the summertime, a quarter block-long flower display at a New York bodega sometimes deposits its scent a little further down the block, in the interests of subtlety. So if you see the flowers coming a block away, and you're hurrying to meet them, to smell them, to play with pleasant scents, escape the usual dogpiss of Park Slope, just take it handy. The real smell may well be a little further down the street.

But it's wintertime now, though it's bright, and the cold air numbs some of these street nuances, might even be discouraging us from exploring the street at all (except with reliable thermal underwear) ...

Last night, I watched Angela's Ashes for the first time. Never read the book, never watched the movie, before. Pity that the only Limerick accents in the whole thing came from three Limerick actors who had small vignette scenes through it. One of them was a friend of mine - John - who, until last night on the screen, I hadn't seen since sometime around late 2002.

Apart from the usual drift of people into and out of life, people turning into friends turning into lovers turning into family turning themselves out on the street, or tumbling onto a different continent... Apart from that, the sound can sometimes be heard - really not very often, but when it comes it comes certainly - of a big creaky door making a resounding shutness. And the person behind the door becomes Here Be Dragons Land.

I fell out with John, somewhat bizarrely, over New York city. I miss him sometimes. His deep Limerick-accented voice, his sense of humour, his small few revelations over the course of a very long friendship, his basic decency, just the fact of him. And I see him in this movie, and this exhausts the supply of Very Famous Movies I know he's in, the other one, funnily enough, was Gangs of New York.

Angela's Ashes was a sentimental but ok enough movie, but this was my hometown they were depicting, and I didn't really feel it. Bits. References to Roches stores, the same cutaway of the castle about ten times over, but the way a place saturates the senses and the tongue and the mind goes so much deeper and wider than that. Plot and wet atmosphere are good broad structural strokes, but the joy is in the details, the nuances. I think that kind of sensitivity has really got to be the basis of any film or book of piece of music that's specific in its sense of place. Because every place is incredibly specific, though it may not be famous in the way that New York city is famous, is owned by so many people who think they know it, and so it's easier to get away with accents that run the gamut from Dublin to Belfast but never get anywhere near Limerick Junction.

Oh for a one and one from Donkey Ford's... but that kind of longing really grows with much longer exiles than mine..

I wish you well, John. I wish you a gorgeous woman who loves you. I wish you exciting films to work on. And I wish that if we were ever to cross paths on 14th or Bleecker street, that we would not hurry past each other. All love to you.

A love song to the old year

Many men have loved the bells
you fastened to the rein
And everyone who wanted you
they found what they will always want again
your beauty lost to you yourself
just as it was lost to them
ah take this longing from my tongue
whatever useless things these hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity until you cry
now you must try my greed
and everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me
just take this longing from my tongue
all the lonely things my hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

Hungry as an archway through which the troops have passed
I stand in ruins behind you with your winter clothes
your broken sandal strap
I love to see you naked over there
especially from the back
ah take this longing from my tongue
all the useless things my hands have done
untie for me your hired blue gown
like you would do for one you love

You're faithful to the better man
I'm afraid that he left
so let me judge your love affair
in this very room where I have sentenced mine to death
I'll even wear these old laurel leaves that he has shaken from his head
just take this longing from my tongue
all these useless things my hands have done
let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love

like you would do for one you love

(take this longing, by leonard cohen)

It pic'd itself

A bollocks anti-ode to Carolans liquer

Oh you horrible auld thing
Carolans Irish Cream
I will have to bury you under the ocean
to get rid of you
like nuclear waste
under Atlantic Avenue
in the middle of the night
when no-one is looking
but this is new york
and someone is always looking.

Vi mig fra livet med dit horrible auld følelse i min mave.

A word of winter advice for those fond of Baileys coffees in the wintertime

Don't ever buy Carolan's Irish Cream instead of Baileys because you think it's the same thing and you get to save ten dollars that way. Just don't do it. Yak. Bollocks.

The News on 6th ave.

There are five leaves left on a tree on 6th ave, between Union and President streets. They're hanging on, for all they're worth, and their friends are all sitting on the ground underneath them, shouting up, c'mon, c'mon! It's great down here! (Lie). Just let go! It'll be better in the long run! (Lie). You'll prefer it down here! (Lie). It's better for everybody if you just join us and stop holding out up there! (Lie). It's embarrassing! (True). It's like Donald Sutherland in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers over there.

Don't you just hate those lyin' leaves?

The sad bits

Yeah, and then I heard a Tommy Tiernan interview on RTE radio a haon, with the professionally bored Eamon Dunphy, who made sure to skirt the chat away from anything that might have been remotely interesting. Keep it light, keep it daytime. Tommy T was talking a bit about loneliness and regret and the pain of his separation from his children, and it was a bit of a breath of fresh air to hear these topics being addressed, though he didn't get very far in Dunphy's hands.

It reminded me of a conversation we were having last night, about this American tradition of sending out letters at Christmas with messages of the triumph of the family this past year, its successes and achievements and the brilliance of its teeth. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if one of those letters said, well, I experienced sadness profoundly this year, and it was a difficult journey through the darker parts of the human soul, but I seem to have learned something from it, and I certainly hope it has made me kinder and able to hear more of life, to smell more of life, to feel more of life.

But that would probably constitute something of a revolution. And not make you liked, at all.

It's still belting rain out, and I have only conversed with cats all day. And though Freddy's is just half a block away, and will almost certainly be some kind of friendly, I will still probably not go.

Off the Willie Wonka on St. Stephen's day

So I spent today visiting cats who are spending Christmas alone. Most of them are very large cats, massive purring machines that move slowly. The routine goes like this: as I'm putting the key in the lock, I hear the purring already on the other side of the door. Then I open the door, and immediately, it's THUNK as a large furry cat hits the deck, rolls over to expose its belly and purrs effusively. For those of you who don't know what effusively means, and couldn't be arsed googling it, think PURR PURR PURR kind of intensely, with meaning. Aggressive purring, the kind that says, "Rub me, rub me, make me want to bite you on the wrist the way I love to".

And so I have spent today giving a lot of belly rubs, and getting sat on. And I think this is my first Christmas working, and I sort of realise today that, however much I have loathed the arse out of it in the past, the Christmas rhythm is laid down in my DNA as a family time, a stretched out time, a kind of saturated fat of a time of year. And it's actually a bit unexpectedly sad to be away from Ireland right now. It's fleeting, but significant. Something about the way that everything in the whole of Ireland except the frenzied sale-shoppers, shuts down for the whole week from Christmas day to New Year's day. You send out your last batch of Christmas emails on Christmas eve and you get those automated officey bounced back emails, telling you they're out of the office, on the jar, the willie wonka and the selection box, for a good two weeks, so feck off and don't be expecting a reply before January 5th, AT THE EARLIEST.

Christmas day for me lasts a full week, AT LEAST. I turn into a slow moving, fat storing, hibernating creature who has a few chats with the family, a bath every day, and the odd phone call and that's about it. And I can feel how good it is for me.

Not this year. Rush hour on the train was rush hour on the train today, the day after Christmas or not. Rough. Millions of people all playing musical chairs and all of them a constantly renewing batch of fresh strangers. Feckin raining, too.

Get your transcendentally fabulous awfulness here!

It's Irishness exactly the way we live it, back in the Auld Sod.. God I love love love to see how this peculiar twisty thing of Irishness gets flipped and scrunched around on its journey through the world... the nuances, oh the nuances. Pig in muck.

Happy Christmas, lads! God Jule!

Hurrah!

Sad

I feel sad. It's a heaviness in my chest. I feel like going off to France and living in a small house for the rest of my life. Alone. There's not much more to it than that. No reason that I'm aware of. Just this.

Efter julefrokosten

Vi har spist. Vi har snakkede om Vester havet, med dens store bøljer, og limfjorden, som kan være skated across om vinteren, i en lille håndlavede båd med et sejl. Vi snakkede om det Sud Bronx og chip vans på McClaine Boulevard, og Westchester, og hvordan man kan tjen penge i New York City, og vi drak pissemasser af gløgg, og hjemelavede pebernødder.

Nu er jeg fuld.

En lille Dansk jule

Idag skal jeg til en julefrokost, hos et par Dansk venner her i Brooklyn. Vi skal drikke gløgg, og spise æbleskiver, og snakker Dansk.

Hurra!

What the hell is happening here?

Star wars are happening in two neighbouring galaxies, don't know if you've heard. One galaxy is blasting the bastard out of another galaxy with a big massive black hole, destroying everything in its path,sending planets and stars flying and colliding in all directions, creating new ones and generally spreading chaos throughout the universe.

Meanwhile, we sing jingle bells, down here on planet earth, and this is exactly what this part of the milky way looks like...

The midtown shrinkers

Oh it's raining horribly outside, said the man beside me as I left MoMA yesterday, with the rain belting down on 53rd street. Sometimes that's what you get, he sighed. Yes indeed, I said back. And he looked at me. Like I had just entered his apartment without pressing the doorbell. There was a line around his words with a red rope and a large black man in a suit and a headpiece, carrying a list. I hadn't used the VIP entrance. That was what his eyes said. You just don't do this. You just don't respond to a stranger's casual throwaway cliche in midtown Manhattan.

So I went walking. Through it. In the rain. Down 5th avenue to Union Square. Caught a glimpse of one of the Protected Ones, in the back of his chauffeur-driven Very Expensive Blackened Windowed Car, perusing a newspaper. It felt like it might be like a confessional in that little backseat room, kind of airless and costumed and expectant. But expensive, unlike any confessional I've been in (only Irish ones, only Limerick ones, actually).

A thin, mousy girl approaches me in the middle of the traffic at Flatiron. "Hi, I'm Annie", she says at me, laughing like she's just seen some special friend of hers. She juts her hand out stiffly to me, perpendicular to her body, from the elbow. "We save children". I search her face, her jacket, for some ID. Nothing. "Njeah, thanks", I say, and continue to walk across the street before the bus gets me.

Pity. Annie is sure this way of living her life is a failsafe way to get people to feed her cause, to feed her longings, to feed her. She's saving children for Christ's sake: how could anyone say no to Annie? Let me count the ways...

There's a boy on 21st street, sitting on a beer crate, pausing with a pen as he tries to figure out how to explain himself in the medium of cardboard sign in the street. I stop to take out my notebook, and look back at him. He's still hesitant.

There's an interesting quality to midtown. Indifference. Such a big place with so many shrunken people busily shrinking farther, hurrying to get to where they mightn't have to shrink anymore.

And then the N. Sitting opposite a man with bags, in one of those two abreast orange plastic areas. He takes a gulp, a large nip of whiskey, in view of the other apparently indifferent subway riders. He feels the exposure, anyway. Most of them don't actually even see him. I do, though, and that's enough. For what it's worth, if I'm thinking anything, I'm thinking that that's not a bad idea, keeping a flask of hot whiskey about your person for winter subway trips. But he's gone into that defensive face mode, you know it? With the chin up and the eyes and mouth corners that say "not me! I didn't do ANYTHING!".

The sign on the wall hisses, "if you see something, say something", as the train chugs into Pacific street.

A few unusual job opportunities

Somehow I'm hearing the first scene from Figaro in this first one. Perhaps this is a new opera?

Looking for a "bitch" assistant to help me around the house

---

Reply to:

and carry out my orders. Artist, activist, busy person needs a hand to promote my works, ideas and just generally obey and carry out orders.
Males only.

Very Different situation wanted indeed...

---

Reply to:


Hello, How are you? I am looking for a sophisticated Older White Lady (29-60)who is interested in taking FULL advantage over me with Financial Humiliation.There are many terms used to describe it>>Money Slave, Money Servant, Money Pig, Financial Domination, Financial Humiliation, Etc... It basically works like this. I want to be a money Slave to you, and you enjoy taking the Money from the Slave who knows that he is very Lucky to even be considered for this treatment. I will let you in on a lot of personal info on me.You can exploit me, extort, Black Mail me, etc... You will recieve Guaranteed once a week financial payments from me either in person, via PayPal, Money Orders, etc.. I am able to do between $350.00- $700.00 a week if this works out. I am a really nice Guy who is into feeling humiliated by a self assured pretty Lady. Please be Intelligent,Pretty ,Classy, Strict, and self deserving. Please have some knowledge in gentle humiliation, and have a semi-cold heart. There really is nothing else to it. You can read , or research about this on the internet. The lists are endless. A lot of Guys want to give their Money away to you so they can experience what its like to take direction, and to empty their wallets so they feel useful to you. Strange, but true. Please inquire with in. Thanks KL

GET PAID TO WATCH SPORTS ON TV!! (Gramercy)

---

Reply to:


--- Research is looking for bright and energetic writers, with an interest in and knowledge of sports, to view primetime network and cable TV shows and write online surveys that will measure the effectiveness of any product placements that occurred during these programs.

Because --- measures evening programs, the hours can be late (often until midnight or later) so it is great for someone who wants their days free, but hard for anyone with a demanding morning schedule. The good news is that schedules are flexible and only require three shifts per week.

Help determine the future of TV advertising.
Be a self-starter.
Work in a fun, fast-paced environment.


Compensation: $16/hr

Beware the jabberwock, my son!

I'm thinking of forming a band to record this, for eighteen voices, a broom and a tuba. Any takers?

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Holiday hokum from the dictatorship HQ

I suppose the only interesting bit about this piece of revulsion is the fact that Tony Blair's delivery in speaking to Barney the White House dog is of exactly the same pitch of earnestness as his declarations as he led a strenously and vocally unwilling British nation into war against Iraq, insisting that it was all in the nation's good, and he simply knew stuff that everyone else didn't. The thing that is usually touted about Tony Blair these days is that he was just a good actor, a showman. This video kind of puts the lie to that. Too much mining the same seam has confined his skills to a single caricature. He's a one trick pony, it seems.

The Brooklyn Bunker

Beat Whippet

Epithalamion for a pair of Brooklyn whippets