In Dublin

I'm writing this from a room on the third floor of the Harcourt Hotel in Dublin. I used to live around the corner from this place, on Synge street, for most of the time I lived in this town. It's slightly odd to be staying here at a hotel, but only slightly. It's been almost five years now since I left Dublin, and my relationship to it lies somewhere in the mix of tourist and native, the classic ex-pat condition.

I remember an evening I spent in the company of an Irish friend of mine from Raheny, and his Arizona-born wife, in their hotel room in Jury's, up on Christchurch, about six years ago. They had been living in Phoenix for a while, where they both became lawyers, then they moved back to Dublin to try to make a life here, but the ground kept shifting from under their feet, and they found the ways of Dublin and the legal trade here too stiff and unwelcoming to the skills and qualifications of outsiders, so ultimately they found their way back to the desert, to Tucson, where the the climate suited their new skin.

Last night I heard about another friend, from Germany, who tried to move here with his wife and children, after a life-long passionate love affair with Dublin and many years of living here, but again, even in this celtic tiger economy and with sophisticated skills and experience, his wife couldn't get a job, so they've moved back to Germany. It's interesting to look at some of the choices made in this self-selecting culture.

Who and what thrives here, and what is left out in the cold to find its own way elsewhere? There's so much talked about this economy and how everybody's making so much money and how rich everybody is, talk about kings and tribe and millionaires and the great Irish entrepreneurial spirit, but that's the story written by those who succeeded on the terms of this newly made world, not those who had to leave it, or those who are being forced out of their homes because of climbing interest rates on their 100% mortgages.

There are even smaller, more specific stories, the kind of stories that are like the face of one of the new breed of celebutante spokesmodel sunday indo darlings when she's alone at night, and stripped of all that mascara and make up, and fearing to glance at her naked reflection in her bathroom mirror, stories that are naked and rarely seen, rarely heard of, stories that are so easily eclipsed by the noise of the glory and the bling bling.

The joy of text

These are some of the text messages I keep, looking at them over and over when I'm deleting my daily texts (the Irish replacement for evening prayers) and so far they have all escaped the delete button and they’ve been around for quite a while.. What text messages do you keep? Post some in comments..


My first and only text sent by dad from his phone:

Wh bns

From Ross:
(oops)

Johs:

Hey, kom lige til at tænke på dig, og om du fik min sms? - nå, men min mund er fuld af huller, morten, sigurd er kommet i kaninparadis på lolland, og du skal snart til new york! Savner dig lidt her i den kolde sommer! Johs.

English translation:
Hey, I've just thought of you, and if you got my sms? Yeah well my mouth is full of holes, morten, sigurd has gone to rabbbit paradise in Lolland, and you will soon be in new york! Miss you a bit here in the cold summer! Johs.

One from mum:

I.m on firefox

And one from dad sent by mum on her phone:
Thanks there are 3 sharps all through well done dad

One from an artist I met in Barcelona, in the street, an hour after getting into town, making an arrangement to meet later that week..

Meet me in cafe of escola hipica, avda muntanyans sun. 12 pm. It is behind poble espanol, metro placa espana. I will be on horse. Anne X

One from Melis:

Love ya Lucy. You rock like a train. Mmmmtch

Aer Lingus, minutes before I was interviewed by the immigration lady for a full hour:

Please proceed to US Immigration 90 minutes prior to departure. This may prevent you from missing your flight. Thank you

Ross:
Yes!

From a poet I spent a lovely afternoon with, once:
How about a walk - could meet @ The Lame Duck @ 3.45. They do a good cup of tea there & nice river walk? Jo

Ross: Is it goodnight ladies? Last dance? The party’s over?

Ross: I don’t know can u convert cockroaches

And my favourite one by a long way is one my mum sent me when I was in Barcelona last year, verbatim.

Yes i topped ur cred. U wont believe cats were in u. P. Room. Window alex open’snor felix no iis own mrs. And lady missing when dogs went out to do bugsness mrs. Onsn’so. Window later lady trying to get back to kennel when they got in they couldnu a happier.

The Lobby

Right now, there's nobody here in the lobby. There was a big group of people when I came in a few minutes ago, they've all petered off now, all Irish except for a single brassy blonde Aussie woman, clearly being brought into the family by one of the sons, and when I came in she was holding court about Australian wildlife.

So I think she was probably talking about kangaroos, but anyway she was talking about how everybody has a license to shoot them, that they breed in droves and they're a pest in Australia, and the family was asking questions and went all quiet in the face of her vehemence. I mean, when you've grown up watching Skippy (a kid's programme about a bush kangaroo, made in the sixties and repeated on Irish tv until the nineties), then your next actual connection with Skippyland is a big bottle-blonde woman saying how happy she is to shoot Skippy, something in you probably goes all quiet, alright.

And then they asked about snakes, and she said they were everywhere, under the floorboards, in the wheels of the car, in the letterbox, in the loo.. and they went all quiet again. "Thank God for St. Patrick", says the dad, and laughs, alone. "I think the Aboriginal people eat them", says the brassy lady, and and the dad gives a loud cough, and the brassy lady goes off to the loo. Nobody said very much after that, but everyone slowly moved away, in twos and threes.

Mamuska Night, Limerick

There was a gorgeous event last night in Daghdha Dance Space in Limerick city, called Mamuska. Apparently it's been happening there on a bi-monthly basis since last year, and it's a breath of fresh air on the Irish arts scene. I've been part of events of this sort before in different cities, and it's just so great to see one really working very well. The Daghdha space itself is amazing: housed in an old church up in St. John's square, surrounded by a graveyard, with apparently little changed except that they removed all the old fixtures and fittings of pews and altars and baptismal fonts and that kind of thing, and laid down a dancefloor.

Daghdha is a dance company and some kind of a powerhouse of ideas and collaborative activity pulling in all sorts of disciplines and artists from all over the world, and one of their spinoffs is Mamuska. The idea of Mamuska is to make a space every couple of months for people to socialise, for artists to air their sketches, ideas in progress and imperfections, and to keep the airways open for something magical and spontaneous to emerge, should the need arise. That's how I felt there, anyway, and it felt open and friendly and unpreoccupied with itself in a way that was incredibly refreshing for the Limerick, or just about any other arts scene.

There were installations, including a tent with a video piece inside it, a plinth with rows of buns stacked on top of it (for the purpose of eating) and video of bun making and bun arranging beside it, sofas, open seating, a bar, a large video screen that showed projected video and photographs, performance, sound scapes, and a small piece of theatre. I left a bit early, so I didn't catch the last couple of things. No piece was longer than 10 minutes, and everything had an unfinished, loose and open kind of feel to it. I wandered around, taking pictures on my laptop, and chatting to various people around the room. I found it really friendly and fun.

It reminded me a lot of the church on Møllegade, in Copenhagen, and the Meet Da Lama nights that Helle Thun used to run over there, on a total shoestring budget (quite unlike the budgets that Daghdha have at their disposal) and a lot of love and passion for exploration and improv. Each Meet Da Lama was an experiment without any firm conclusions, but it drew a lot of people, and for me, the combination of an open event of lots of artists of various disciplines that welcomed on the spot participation, and hugely importantly, that it took place in English, was about the friendliest hook-up I found in Copenhagen. Ultimately something like that needs more of an infrastructural grounding than Helle could possibly provide on her own, and so it burned itself out at some point of 2005, I think, but it was great to see the spirit of that alive and well in Limerick city last night.

Here are some pics from the event...

Mamuska night pics

What to do in the event of an atomic bomb

I’ve decided to keep an occasional series of posts under the label, Google Searches. People out there in internet land have a LOT of needs, and very often they confess all to Mother Google, in the form of a question, or a declaration of a problem, or something sought after. And sometimes, these searches send them in the way of Lucy Takes Off. I find out about them when I check my stats, and discover how people get here.

If you got spun out here today for the first time like a cow from the eye of a tornado, welcome to the pastures of Lucy Takes Off. If you’ve been hooked up to Lucy Takes Off for months like a bitch to a bag of crack, welcome. I can only hope that you find here a balm to soothe the worry from your brow, get a little kick to get you through the night. We do our best, here at Lucy Takes Off, and her sister site, Here Comes Lucy. Feel free to have a look around.

So this series starts here, with a question from Concerned from Portsmouth, whose issue with Google last night was “what to do in the event of an atomic bomb”. Naturally, Concerned was ushered at once into the safe waters of Lucy Takes Off. And the post he was directed to was this one from December of last year, but we’re an audience friendly kind of shindig around here, so I’d like to address his question more fully, directly.

Well, the first thing that I would imagine I would do if I saw a mushroom cloud in the sky, would be to be very surprised. You just don’t hear about atomic bombs anymore. They’ve just lost their popularity. Sure, there was some attempted resurgence in the last few years, but that all came to nothing more than accusations and threats and bombs dropped on countries who wouldn't play "bomb back".

What with the bubble skirts and big hair and loud patterns of the eighties coming back around recently, there’s been a fondness for all things of that era, and nuclear fright was all the rage back then too. So my best guess for that initial response, is that most people would be looking in the sky uttering variable involuntary invocations on the “what the fuck” theme, and if you’re in a car you might find yourself in a crash-type situation, so I would advise wearing a seat belt at all times, or if you’re a cyclist, a sturdy helmet. But I think you’ll manage that shock response all on your own.

The next thing to do would again be instinctual. Reach for your camera, your mobile phone, your mac with photo booth, and take a picture.

A few years ago in Ireland, there was some frenzy about what we would actually do about fall out, if it were ever to happen. I think it started on the Joe Duffy show, where many good national scares start, and we collectively realised that actually nobody had been talking much about nuclear bombs anymore and none of us knew what we’d do. So the minister who was supposed to know all about this stuff turned out not to know anything much about it at all but somebody whispered in his ear that they had heard a rumour on the internet that it would be a good idea to drop iodine tablets into drinking water, and that that would neutralise all the radiation in the fallout, and everything would be groovy. So everybody in Ireland who was registered to vote got sent a little package of iodine tablets. I don't think anyone wrote a song about that phenomenon, the iodine tablets and our salvation. Missed moment.

I read a lovely graphic novel when I was small. It was called “When the Wind Blows”, a story of two old people who had been young in London during world war two and how they tried to cope with a nuclear disaster in the same way as they did back then, which of course didn’t work out too well for them at all. But it’s a pretty gorgeous book, if you ever happen to come across it. You’ll probably have it read in a couple of hours, and it’s a good illustration of what happens when people try their best to apply what they’ve been told they should do in the event of a nuclear war to the reality of it.

So, Concerned, I hope this helps to round out your checklist and sense of preparedness for what to do In The Event Of A Bomb. Good luck. I hope you never have to pop those iodine tablets (available widely throughout Ireland in 2003 or perhaps in a chemist shop near you).

Guantanamo bay knickers

How about this for that special gift for that special lady on Valentine's day..

Yikes, it's a tiger in sequins and fake tan (and she's forgotten her tablets)!

Here's the first line from an article in today's Irish Independent.

Irish women are slowly drinking themselves to death in the comfort of their own homes -- sipping bottles of extra-strong wines as they sit in front of the television.

I was in a large suburban pub last night. The age range was very wide, from 18 to 75, and thoroughly mixed. The bizarre thing was that there were a few groups of young women dressed in tiny sparkly dresses and spindly sparkly sandally stilettoes, tremendous quantities of cleavage on display, bare legs, mucho make up, and there was even one gal who seemed to be inspired by the Pussycat Dolls' dominatrix routine, but with Irish Dancing style dyed black ringlets. She got 'em going on the dancefloor, I can tell you. But I was making my escape when that got started.

There's something really odd to me about dressing up like a drag queen to go to your local pub on a saturday night. But this is part of the Tiger legacy over here. The above mentioned newspaper is always going on about how rich the Irish are, and certainly, there's employment, and drinking money, and houses being built and extensions on houses being built. And there's money, there's no doubt about that. But I think that for most people, it's about dressing up like you're expecting the paparazzi to show up and snap you as you fall out of the pub/your dress/your mind at 3 am. There seems to be a lot of hope in it. Hope with boom, despair with bust, of course. But everybody's trying really hard to be sexy in Ireland, at the moment. They'll do just about anything to be sexy. And in Ireland, at the moment, sexy is defined in streetwalkin' drag queen terms.

I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, where of course everybody looks like a supermodel and nobody wears make up (except the actual drag queens, because SOMEBODY has to have glamour). They're not outrageously rich over there, but the minimum wage is twice what it is in Ireland, and they have a decent health, education and social welfare system for their extra 10% tax. Of course they're all suffocated by their comfortableness, so that's another story.

There was a Mr. and Mrs. style quiz on The Late Late Show on friday night. Three couples answered questions like "What do you think your girfriend would name a baby, if it was a boy: Evan, Sean, or Justin?" in order to win a customised marquee wedding and honeymoon in Capetown, to the value of €35,000. This is what people are paying for their pageboy-scattering-organic-rose-petals weddings these days. And that's just the cheap, common or garden variety version. People save up for years so they can afford to get married. Just to have the day.

As I write, an old woman has been carried out of her jazz brunch in this fancy hotel, to languish on the couch in the lobby. She has forgotten to to take her pills this morning. The French Maitre D' has brought her a glass of water. They're calling her doctor.

Pub telepathy

I drew a picture of the back of a man's head in a bar, last night. He immediately scratched his neck, and looked around vaguely, behind him. He's the guy in the bottom left of this picture.

Empty space age hotel lobby zone

I'm lousy with jetlag, but alive and breathing in a new time zone. This is the view from here...

Bringing it all back home

Making an orderly queue of himself

the slightly rhyming morning news

What a gorgeous day.. I'm going up on the roof to get some rays.. Ireland again, in three days.. hurrah hurrah hurrah.. but Brooklyn today, Brooklyn today, Brooklyn today...

Bollocks

Bollocks.

Those darts of social pain

Have I blogged this already? Just found it, recently written in a notebook, written during some recent social occasion. I don't know who I was writing it to. Maybe you.

It's a look in the eyes, in the face, straight at you. Dislike. Suspicion. Retreat. Social awkwardness. And when you realise that you are, despite your mortification and your burning cheeks, actually no more and no less than anyone else in any room you will ever enter, but human and human alone and having the human experience of life, then maybe you'll be blessed with the capacity to be content with being no more, and no less, than that. And probably drink a lot less.

Milk Cartons

A considerable quantity of hair went missing
from the head of a man known as Head
Head's hair was called Ralph
and Ralph snuck away in the night so stealthily
or was stealthily kidnapped
or wandered away
no one quite rightly knows
but it was done quietly, no cries were heard, no pleadings,
no arguments, no fights, no police were called
Ralph went without even a whimper

the only trace of anything having happened at all was a quiet panic that ascended from the belly of Head, one morning
weeks after the last follicle of Ralph had been stroked, or fondled, or even noticed
and lifted off right through
and away, away, never to be seen again

Truth be told, Head knew was only a matter of time before Ralph walked out of his life
How could he hope to keep such a good looking hair like Ralph interested in sticking around
his humdrum day to day
He could tell that Ralph had ambition he could never satisfy
so yes, there was a story. Yes, he knew.
Though he had never been able to face it.
So by the time Ralph had gone, gone fully
and regret had climbed all over him to claim the place where Ralph once laid
Head was wracked with doubt over whether it would ever
be possible to make amends
to welcome Ralph home
to a new life for them
a mutually loving life, together?

Head walked through the streets of Brooklyn calling out to his lost hair, his belatedly cherished hair
Ralph, Ralph, he called
Come home, you will be loved, Ralph
He went calling
through the streets in January

He put posters up around the neighbourhood
with a picture of Ralph on holiday in France
looking shiny and contented
people agreed he looked very well
looked like he and Head were very happy together
People stopped in the street to commiserate with him
tears were shared
and stories
Pated men began to knock on Head's door
to share their loss, their grief, their woes


But there were hints, clues
telltales and tip offs
eye witnesses
informers
rat finks and their hopeful misconceptions
the skinny, the low-down, a smoking gun or two
there were sightings, there were notions
leads, marks, the occasional follicular doppleganger
those desperate cul de sac wanderings that ended in disappointment and suspicion

So Head had slight inklings that Ralph was afoot
most of it rumours, whisperings and idle gossip
By the time this fever was through
the search for Ralph had borne fruit in Head
the fruit of a feverish and passionate life
a life that had woken up to its pate, its fate, a moment right now
to do something with
to dream and execute

It was around this time that I met Head
And one day I called to Head with two plastic cups of takeaway corner coffee
hot filth: one for him and one for me,
and when Head answered the door
there was some new gentleness around his eyes
some quality of surrender
some peace
What is it? I asked. What have you done?
There is word, he replied.
Someone had seen Ralph.
There were reported sightings of Ralph in bathtub drains across the borough
none of them in houses where Head had visited
on his occasional nocturnal prowls, those moments of serendipity when a pate-loving woman invited him into her bed, and her shower, the next day
No, it was other stranger drains
that contained the hair that would surely prove to be Ralph, Ralph truly
The actual Ralph
Surely...

Did you get a private eye to find him? I asked
No, I got a plumber, he replied
and sent him after
but even an expert plumber
couldn't find any real trace of the actual Ralph
and so Head took his plight above ground.
He made pleas across the borough, citywide, and ultimately across the nation
Ralph appeared on milk cartons for a week
ousting the missing children that usually dwelled there
everyone had enjoyed the pictures of the missing children
they usually looked so cheerful and pretty over morning coffee
the misslings, they called them

Seemed like they had always been around
a real part of the family those misslings
Lightening our coffee, moistening our cereal
Something to put our cocoa into
on those sleepless nights
We kind of liked having those misslings around
We want them back! they announced at once, of a piece, in a chorus
a chorus of families demanding the return of their misslings to the cartons on their breakfast tables

and so when the misslings went missing, there was a fandango, a quargo, quite a to-do
and people actually began to ask, for the first time,
WHERE DID THOSE CHILDREN GO MISSING TO, ANYWAY?
and seeing as they asked, they got answered, and
the children were found in the milk carton factory
pumping udders
in udder slavery
though they said they were quite content to stay there
and not go home to their families
so much time had passed and they had become quite adapted to their new circumstances
had quite a rapport with the various cows that came through the factory
had developed skills
were valued and appreciated
and you know, they heard they had become famous in their absence from The Real World, that other place
that they were household faces, in fact
that they graced the tables
of all the dysfunctional families
they could ever hope or expect
to be a part of.

I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there. Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there.

Ants won't cross a chalk line. If you see them coming in your window, you can draw a line in chalk through their march, and they won't cross it. You'll see their frustration and their intelligence put to work at that chalk line, but they will not cross it. I don't know why. If there is a line of ants walking through your house, you can draw patterns in chalk and get pools of them that are encircled in chalk and don't know what to do about it.

I was thinking about hunger yesterday, about how we're all really just open books of information, however much we'd like to disguise it. It seems incredibly obvious, but we all just actually are what we actually are, regardless of costume. I suppose it's only really remarkable because of the elaborate games of façade building that are so much a part of how human beings socialise. So I was walking along the street feeling kind of hungry for something I couldn't quite name, and got the sense that whatever it was was probably attracting some kind of resolution scenario, whether I was aware of what was going on, or not.

Do you ever do that thing of looking at some particular other people's lives and think about how their lives seem to make more sense than yours? That they seem to be less complicatedly complex and more straightforwardly simple and quietly, daily burning with some of the key elements of life that burn in a huge pyre in the middle of your dark winter's night, and then not come again for weeks or longer? I do, sometimes.

People are different to a really very limited extent, we have different variations of the exact same desires and experiences of life, and usually, I think, most human beings ricochet around exactly the same tin can of humanness, just finding themselves lying on its side or its lid at different times, and for longer or shorter periods. (If you don't get the tin can metaphor, it's slightly but not really oblique, so just take a deep breath and read that sentence one more time, and it'll crack open its rusty beans to you, I promise).

What distinguishes us is the way our lives look to other people, and of course the kinds of activities that happen, the kinds of activities that don't; temperament; and how a person has been shaped by their experiences. Even within that, I don't think the variation is so extreme. And yet we all act like it is, or actually, feel like it is: we get huffy or passionate with each other, we like and dislike each other intensely based purely on how we think we're being perceived or understood, we respond and don't respond to each other's descriptions of exactly the same experiences of living, depending on the language used. We're peculiar, I suppose. Tigers don't seem to be like this.

And then there's the whole sense of expectation of life, based on desires that may go deep or shallow, or just stick around for a long time. And so it's kind of easy to look at your life to see if it's fulfilling those desires, and so find fault or sorrow with it if it isn't. But human perception is a highly volatile thing. At least, mine is. My humanness is at the mercy of the wind and the sun and the moment and what's happening in my body at any given time. When people ask me what it is that I do (for a living, or passion, or whatever) I usually have to stop and think about it to figure out what it is this week. This is, at least, how I have been living for a few years, now. I feel very unknown to myself, in kind of a very fundamental sort of way. I am amazed and embarrassed and surprised by myself quite regularly (usually in different moments, though there are those crazy times when all those things come at once and usually it's hilarious, at least, when it does. Mercies.).

You know, people change their diets and their whole world changes. Moods, energy, thoughts, the lot. It's amazing what happens. Truly awe-inspiring, the diversity and unpredictability of this life.

I met this chick last night who kept touching my arm fondly, and saying things like "I'm so glad you're here", when she had just met me two minutes ago and those two minutes consisted entirely of her saying how fab I was, and this continued throughout our brief acquaintance. So maybe she blows some people's minds by doing that, it's an easy enough tactic to execute once you see it usually goes well, and you know, it's kind of cool to be someone who goes around blowing people's minds. Sometimes. When it actually happens, though, without any wile or guile or lipstick pouting, it's a real conversation stopper. And that can be a drag when you're just keen for a chat.

And blogging these thoughts does seem like a kind of insanity, especially when you're sober and it's four in the afternoon.

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.