Time lags

Sometimes it's hard when you're living five or six hours behind most people you know. Especially when it's nine o'clock at night and you feel like a chat. And then you remember Freddy's. But you don't always remember to go.

Whorlywort

I heard the word whorlywort recently.
Interesting word.
Anyone know what it means?

Green on Orange

He's got a red plastic badge on his lapel. It reads, "Drug Free". He's about 75, black, wearing a faded suit. He walks through the subway car with some bright green sheets of A4 paper, placing one carefully beside each seated passenger, like a schoolteacher dispersing handouts through a classroom. No one moves, responds, or says a word.

As he reaches the other end of the car, he turns and returns down the car, picking the sheets up again. He passes me without collecting the sheet beside me, he notices that I'm reading, and so leaves me be until the very end, and mine is the last sheet to be collected. I'm probably the only one who has shown any interest in even glancing at his tale of woe, his interface with the world. There's a handful of sentences written in black biro, badly photocopied. He had probably sat down at his kitchen table with someone who could write and spell good, to work out what he could possibly say to explain himself in words.

In the short letter, he describes how he was "pushed from a high porch" sometime in his childhood, and some years later began to get epileptic fits and blackouts. "From 1952 - 62 I was strong and healthy", it said. "I am also a James Brown imitator. I consider myself to be a good artist. Please help as much as you can. Yours sincerely, --- ----". Underneath, a black thumb-sized smudge that has the silhouette of a passport photo, and a photocopy of some rubberstamped, slightly official looking text that said "James Brown" in heavy typeset, probably some fan club membership letter that he was sent back in the sixties, maybe during that golden period of his life.

Finally, he comes to me. "Are you finished?", he asks me. "Yes", I answer, "thanks very much". "You're welcome", he replies. And he picks up the lime green sheet, replaces it to the pile in his hand, and falls back into the orange bucket seat, with a sigh.

And the train goes across the bridge, and Manhattan's twinkling nightlights get closer, and soon our D train is sucked in, sucked in... The doors open at Grand street. He heaves himself up out of his seat, out of the train, and across the platform.

Heart of Chocolate

I've just been chocolated out of my MIND. I've been having chilli and cinnamon spicey chocolate soup with a dessert of flourless bittersweet chocolate cake with raspberry coulis, in the chocolate room on 5th ave and it's kind of a messiah moment.

The heart of chocolate beats in my belly. It makes a gloopy drum.

Liquidation in Blue, Williamsburg

Trash city

Soldiers strut along Columbus Circle

The long wait

Hazy bunker man

Too early for the circus

Under Union Square

The rain falls down on last year's man
That's a jew's harp on the table
that's a crayon in his hand
and the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rode
far past the stems of thumbtacks that still throw shadows on the wood

And the skylight is like skin
for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
on the works
of last year's man

I met a lady she was playing with her soldiers in the dark
oh one by one she had to tell them
that her name was Joan of Arc
I was in that army, yes I stayed a little while
I wanna thank you, Joan of Arc, for treating me so well
And though I wear a uniform
I was not born to fight
all these wounded boys you lie beside
Goodnight my friends, goodnight

I came upon a wedding that old families had contrived
Bethlehem the bridegroom
Babylon the bride
Great Babylon was naked, oh she stood there trembling for me
And bethlehem inflamed us both
like the shy one at some orgy
And when we fell together
All our flesh was like a veil
That I had to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail

Some women wait for Jesus and some women wait for Cain
So I hang upon my altar and I hoist my axe again
And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began
when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man
And we read from pleasant bibles that are bound in blood and skin
but the wildnerness is gathering all its children back again

The rain falls down on last year's man
An hour has gone by and he has not moved his hand
But everything will happen if he only gives the word
the lovers will rise up and the mountains touch the ground
but the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
on the works of last year's man

(leonard cohen, last year's man)

Releasing the monkey

So I have a topic today, after a few somewhat heated email exchanges on the topic of 'cute'. Cute, as in this kind of thing. You know, the tiny baby animal, helpless in human hands, abandoned by its mother, rare endangered species with spiral tail, almost-human-looking kind of cuteness, that reaches just about every human being with any kind of a heart at all. It's one of those aspects of human hard wiring that reaches in and goes click every time, in the normal, healthy human being, especially female ones, who want to take it home and nurture it to maturity, or knit it a jumper for wearing at the first suitable opportunity.

We were talking about pictures of puppies in the window of a pet store, and the similarity of the puppy factory system to a whorehouse. Except that the she-pooches that are kept pumping out puppies are more like sex slaves, and not for the he-dogs' exclusive pleasure either, but for the pleasure of the pimps who own them, to make cash by selling the infants that result from their mating. So you could say that in that sense, it's even more repulsive than a regular old east european-style sex slavery brothel. Because here, the prostitutes are expected to actually give birth to their clients' offspring, which are then sold to people who have either responded in their simple human hard wired way to small baby helpless things in a window, or have desires about saving things and being saved (yeah, ok, they might just want a puppy, also. But that's not so interesting).

I have a friend who has recently returned from Zambia, where she and her husband were running an NGO for a few years. She told me a story about a man who approached her husband with a baby monkey inside his jacket, and offered it to him in return for her husband handing over some cash (with sinister overtones of what might happen to cute baby monkey if he didn't). Ok, so this is a slightly more intense version of the topic at hand, including as it does, the fact of cute chattel in nefarious and perilous hands, but we're getting deeper into the topic.

My friend's husband did consider giving the man money on the condition that he release the animal back into the wild, but realised that he would, in all likelihood, just go and hunt it back again, and sell it to somebody else (for meat or companionship). And given his understanding of the complexities of living in rural Zambia, and the Way Things Are, he just hissed at the man, and walked sadly away. The best he could do under the circumstances. Life is tough, sometimes.

And then I read a story about a diplomat of some advanced middle age, who walked into a lap dancing club in Estonia and saw a 20 year old lapdancer, "whose body invited sex, but whose eyes screamed 'save me'" and so he left his wife and three children to do both those things to her. And six years later, they are living together in a little flat in London, and she is performing in a more upscale venue now, a theatre in the West End, in a show where she tells the stories of her terrible childhood, combined with a little belly dancing. There are rumours of Angelina Jolie playing her in a movie, but her lover considers Angelina Jolie to be "too old" for the part.

Sometimes there's just a magical hook-up between the damned and the saviour-in-waiting. And when that moment happens, wherever the rendezvous finds the people concerned, what happens can be electric and overwhelming, accessing our deepest instincts: sex, nurturing, needing and offering shelter and basic resources. Skip two meals and watch yourself be conquered by the desire for food. It can block out the light of the sun.

And so we can become starved in other ways, too. Starved of the sublime, for instance. Starved of joy. Starved of the decadence of love without agenda. Starved of places to play. Starved of productive, fulfilling work. Starved of meaning in life. Starved of opportunity to be creative. Starved of community, of companionship, of high level human interaction. And then you walk in the door of an arts centre, a slight sweat on your brow... and a curator sees the puppy in you... or you have a random conversation in a bar with somebody who seems to be having the human experience of life too, and the synapses click and click again and want some more.

When we're starved of things, we go around with that hungry look in our eyes. A gay friend of mine once talked about the amount of information that is routinely exchanged by the barest glancing eye contact, on an average night in a gay bar. Novels of information up- and downloaded in miliseconds, everybody scanning everybody else for signs of being exactly the right fit, the right combination of understandings, of longings, cravings, needs, and that exactly right balm to send the needs and the cravings away for the night. Keep the wolf from the door (or invite him in to savage you). Until the next night, at least.

And so we howl in the night. And we write. And we sing. And we paint. And we dance with the fever until our need is fully sweated out of our bodies. For the night.

Mind the gaps

I haven't had anything to say. That's why I haven't blogged. It isn't as though I haven't had impressions or ideas, but it hasn't occurred to me to blog them. It's funny, you know, keeping a blog like this. There's some kind of implicit obligation when there are a few regulars coming around, and it's a bit like that moment in the conversation when the eyes are on you to say something funny and fabulous, to be entertaining and fascinating, and you really just feel like chilling out and being human, meeting each other somewhere in the middle of where you each might be.

Well, I can't sense where you might be out there in blogland, my dearies, but a couple of years ago I had a blog habit, three blogs I visited daily and which I read keenly in a dark room under the stairs in a dark country up northern europe way, and which I think I scanned daily for signs of something, much like shepherds in Iraq might have scanned the skies a couple of thousand years ago for weather patterns, and indications of possibility. Two of them were based in New York city, and one in Zambia. And it was always good news when there was some kind of a meaty post there to greet me when I called. Two of the three no longer exist, and the one remaining has become deeply dull. I think it's good to recognise when the time has come to de-blog oneself, and concentrate your energies elsewhere.

But I haven't reached that moment yet, you might be mildly interested to hear. Sometimes this is going to be a four times a day kind of shindig, and sometimes it'll be one time a week, much like other appetites that come and go and demand different frequencies of play at different times. And part of the whole enterprise is certainly the notional fact of people dropping by, checking out what's going on down Lucy Takes Off way. I've always enjoyed writing for an audience. Always relished the writing of emails, of plays, of sunday newspaper book reviews, of songs for singing out, of poems for the telling. So I like that people come visiting around here. It would be cool if you said hello, though..

Like a pig in light and water

I went swimming this week, in the Atlantic: on the other side of it from Ireland. It was only the second time I had been in the Atlantic on this side. It's warm enough to go swimming in the sea, this week. GO!

This week last year, I was in Barcelona, and it was so warm and sunny and everyone was wandering around in their tshirts and hanging out in the parks doing capoeira and it was gorgeous. I swam in the mediterranean and hung out with my friend Tina. It's such a gorgeous thing when you find yourself in a warm spell right in the middle of winter. I think I'm really affected by the seasonal drop in light, and I'm only really properly recognising that now. Swimming this week, I felt like I was rolling around in the light and the ocean and the crazy intense waves that pounded you whatever way they wanted. It was THRILLING. I want to go AGAIN.

A heartwarming cockroach story

A human and an interesting cockroach met, a couple of days ago, in Brooklyn, New York. The human was female and a notorious cockroach-hater; the cockroach was a fella who could actually make himself look squashed, in order to save his own life.

This cockroach could sense human attention on him, much in the same way that humans can sense attention from other humans. However, this particular cockroach had evolved a new way to make human attention go away, and in this way he demonstrated a quality quite unlike humans, who are doing very well at successfully evolving new ways of drawing attention to themselves, even when the attention concerned is likely to bring them to freshly heightened states of squashedness.

But this time, the human called the cockroach's bluff. She examined him closely, saw that he was not actually squashed but faking, and promptly made his faking true. However, in the second or two just before the pretence became real, there was a flicker of human to cockroach to human consciousness, during which the roach realised that the game was up, and the human realised yet again, that roaches are far smarter than they look.

And, as is often the case when a human squashes a roach with her bare fingers, the roach didn't die all at once, but slowly, his hairy left leg waving a little bit at the end, and there was, in fact, in the human female, a moment of genuine affection.

Tear down your auld life, here comes your new

I met Ian through Ann.

Ann was a native New Yorker I met one evening in a house in Carrickmines, south dublin, a week away from its demolishing by order of Dublin County Council. It was a house that had been constructed from the rubble of Blackrock castle. Dublin County Council was a week away from sending in their demolition trucks to tear the house down to make way for a motorway that was going to solve Dublin's traffic problems. Dublin's traffic problems have only thrived since then, of course.

Over the course of the building of that motorway, a number of public forests were threatened with destruction, and ultimately destroyed, and people went to live in those forests, up the trees, as a protest against their destruction, and really the only way they could be sure of saving the trees. they lived their for years. A community was built in those trees. They were not forcibly removed by the authorities, but negotiated with. As cars passed them from the road below, they tooted their solidarity, a somewhat ironic gesture maybe, but fuck it you know, life isn't perfect and consistent. This Carrickmines house was old school, old style, old money. They weren't about to squat. The house was large and solid, in the Georgian style, 250 years old. Orchards and wildish woods all around. Classic, magnificent Georgian country house.

It was mid September, 2001. I was at the house at the invitation of a minor Dublin rockstar producer who I had met at a gallery opening in the Guinness Storehouse the night before. He was making some folk song recording for a charity record, and I had just come back from a big trip through America, full of stories. I told him I was a singer and he asked me to come and record some stuff the next day. So I did. He had his studio in the attic of this Georgian house in Carrickmines, so he, his girlfriend, and me went out there on the bus that sunday morning, and I spent the day there, making take after take of an English folk song, and riffing around it, and playing with it, until he had about ten tracks of my voice singing the same melody in slight and somewhat variations.

The people who owned the house had moved out weeks prior to the demolition deadline, to avoid the chaos. The house had been in their family since it had been built, and they were not happy about moving. The woods were older than the house, and left wildish, you could feel their ancience. The house itself was just magnificently built on four floors in a circular Georgian style, with a library, high ceilings, wooden floors, and an old range that heated the whole house through. Gorgeous. The house itself was 250 years old, but it had been made with bricks that were triple that in age. The atmosphere in the house, even at that empty, doomed stage of its existence, was potent.

So the only person that was left living in the house was the youngest son, who was the rockstar's engineer, and somewhat peculiarly, a kind of errand-boy in his own house, to this man who acted as though he was the Lord of the manor. Strange old coot, that rockstar. Tried to molest me down in the woods by the light of the silvery moon, but I ran and ran and ran away from his weirdy advances. We made some very beautiful recordings, though, as I recall, which he replayed to me all at once, all the tracks laid on top of each other, my voice in ten parts. Babel, he murmered. And then we went downstairs. Turns out it was the engineer's birthday, and this would probably be the last party that this house would ever see, and the party was the rockstar, the rockstar's girlfriend, the engineer and me. And there was Ann.

Ann was from Staten Island. She was so New York it was incredibly exotic to find her in Dublin. She came from New York Irish working class stock: her uncles had all made a killing (financially) in the unions. When we met, that evening in Carrickmines, the fires were still raging in downtown Manhattan, and her father, a lawyer, had an office that was visible in the photographs of the site after the towers fell. She had studied in some Ivy League business school, worked for a hugely high profile charity in Manhattan, and a bank, and then decided the whole thing was a load of bollocks and she needed to just pack it all in and go and study English in Trinity College, Dublin. After that, she got a job working as a project manager for a multimedia company, where Ian was the set designer.

She was the engineer's date for his birthday and sort of surprised by that, she told me later. She had assumed that it was going to be a bigger party. It was an odd little gathering in the midst of this lovely old doomed house. I had fallen in love with New York just a couple of weeks earlier, at the end of a long trip through the jazz cities of America, and I knew I needed to go back.

This was the trip that began in Nashville, Tennessee, continued on to Memphis, before plunging south in the depths of summer to the depths of the swamp magnetism of New Orleans, where I stuck around sticking around for a while longer than I had planned. I was there over a month, and had sort of pleasurably surrendered any notion of going anywhere else (ie. north) when I watched a Jimi Hendrix documentary one evening, in the house on Prytania street where I was living.

In one scene, there were two high fro'd dudes in kaftans, sitting in some park, who had been friends of Jimi before he died, and they were riffing about alpha waves and how Jimi was still around, man. And as their fros leaned gently forward in the breeze, my friend Kerry turned to me and said, "Oh! That's Washington Square Park, Lucy! That place you're always talking about.." and I looked at Kerry, and I looked at the brothers, and I took a deep breath, and said, shite lads, that's it. I've got to go to New York city. I can't get out of this country without having gone to New York city. Blast. I'm heading north. How the hell am I going to do that?" And my friend Nicholle said, "I'm going to St. Louis on Tuesday. Wanna come with me?"

Nicholle had been living in Florida and one day she and her little gay boyfriend Chad woke up and decided that it was time for them to fulfil their dreams and take their stationwagon to California, where Nicholle would be an actress and the sun would bleach their lives golden. The car busted out in Baton Rouge, and they got towed into New Orleans, where they both spent a year bartending and saving their tips. They were part of the scene in the house on Prytania street when I met them. Nicholle had family in St. Louis and there was a wedding, so she was going north for that. And that was how I left New Orleans.

When I got back to Dublin after St. Louis and Chicago and New York and Memphis again and Nashville again, I was looking around for interesting people to spend some time with, and really very open to spending time with just about whoever I met, and so it was probably inevitable that I would run into Ian sooner or later. I'm glad I did. In some ways, Ian was instrumental in a hugely key moment in my life, on the phone while I was in New York, a couple of years after I first met him. He could be a right selfish pain in the arse but I'd still relish the prospect of a chat around the fire with him.

Ian looked a lot older than his age and acted a lot younger, which could get him into bizarre situations. He was combustible and flexible, which made him a lot of fun to hang out with but kind of shite to live with, as I discovered later on an extended weekend that turned into two months living on Church Avenue. He had these epic parties, around the time he turned forty. Burning stuff off. He lived in a Georgian townhouse on Church Avenue in Rathmines, in Dublin, and he attracted exotica of every Dublin variety there. His company was somehow electric. A couple of years after I met him for the first time, I lived in the house on Church avenue for a couple of months, with Emma, an amazing woman who lived in the house for a while, while Ian was off fucking around in Connemara with his spooky gothic French girlfriend who had worked with Madonna and had just turned down a million euros to work with Levi's, in favour of arsing around the Irish countryside with Ian.

At one of Ian's parties, I met a brother of a boy I had felt oppressed and dismissed by in college, and this dude looked so much like him and acted so much like him I said to him, "man, you look exactly like a bloke I used to know in college". He said, "what was his name?" I said, "Tom F-". He said, "That's my brother". And we were both a bit wowed out by the connection, and spent about an hour chatting in each other's company and it was kind of soothing actually, in a strange kind of way.

The brother had felt oppressed and dismissed by Tom F aswell. In fairness, it turns out that the brother is definitely the wild one of the family, being, as he was, a fancy people's drug dealer and general misfit, while his brother had developed some kind of a successful acting career in Britain. But he said that he had never in his life been told that he had anything in common with his brother before, so to have this connection drawn so randomly, in a party on Church Avenue, well, that was kind of amazing. It was nice for us to chat about how we felt about this guy, and actually what came out was not all about what a lousy bastard his brother was, by a long shot. I know it sounds new agey, but it felt kind of healing, actually, to share what we felt.

Anyway, that was my first party at Ian's. I also learned something pretty crucial about Sicilians at that party, which was to give as good as you get (in THEIR way of giving it) IF you want them to respect you.

Ann hated that party, the first one she brought me to. She was really looking to make much more intimate connections with people than were really accommodated in a setting like that. And she was looking for a soulmate, and she was finding Ireland to be unhinged in that regard. What she was finding was men who were willing to get drunk and fall into bed with her but scared shitless about anything more real than that. Disturbing and depressing, but true. And she was probably just experiencing what was going around, and what has probably only gotten worse. But one evening after we had had a guinness in Mulligans, she popped into Hogans and I scootered home, and the second she walked in the door, she found herself locked into the gaze of a man at the bar, and together they fell into some kind of instantaneous rapture. The last I heard, they were still in it, but I haven't heard from Ann in a while.

The last time I saw the rockstar was at another free booze shindig, and he was rat-arsed drunk and unpleasant, but that was a long time ago now. Nicholle got to California, a couple of years after she first set out on that exodus from Florida, and the last I heard, she was working in a car dealership, making good money. Chad, the sweetheart, was working the long morning shift in a disco gaybar in the Quarter, and had recently become the first person in his family ever to have health insurance. When I was last talking with Nicholle, she hadn't heard from him in a while, either.

And the last time I saw Ian was three years ago in the house on Church Avenue, right after a kind of epic showdown there at the end of a couple of months I had been living in the house. More to tell about that, for sure. He had just kitted out a minivan as a living space, with the idea to fart around France for an indefinite period, with his chick. Ian re-introduced me to the simple concept of white toast with butter and honey. The revolution was really the re-introduction of butter into my life, and that revolution is still rocking my world, right now as I make toast to go with my soup. He was on a kind of spiritual adventure at that period of his life, and at some bend in the road, we met, had a boogie, lit a fire, and parted ways.

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.