Daisy: a true story with pictures

Daisy discovers the Spiegeltent...


Daisy meets her very first cocktail!


Daisy discovers some big city conundrums!


Daisy sees a little hint of home in the city


I have been taking pictures. They will be up soon. London rocks. In the meantime, have this...

In Dublin, I performed a little show in the Fringe Festival about a daisy's fantastic journey of living in some hard circumstances, and her plucky, inspiring attitude to life in the midst of what others might consider tragedy. To accompany my performance, I illustrated the journey with daisy herself, sitting in a plastic beer glass with a little water in the bottom of it. I brought daisy with me through the streets and interiors of Dublin I visited on friday, and took some photographs of what she saw there.

It is a long way from the train tracks of Ballybrophy, from where she was plucked.

Incidentally, my one woman one daisy rollercoaster of a show, the one minute love hit, is available for booking for our forthcoming world tour, which will be accompanied by a photo show, detailing her amazing journey from the Ballybrophy railway tracks. Queries from promoters, festivals, galleries and hosts are welcome at the email address on the right.

London girling

So I'm on the road until next weekend. Here in London until tuesday, then back to Dublin, then Enniskillen for the show, then back to Dublin, back to Clare. Posting will probably be thin, but juicy. Like a London girl.

At Hoxton Square

I am in a hotspot in Hoxton Square, London. London is very peopled. It feels denser than New York and I can't figure out how that could possibly be. Maybe they're just all out on the street or something. Anyway, it's fabulous. I'm totally entranced by the tube stations here. Jesus. I have always been a big subway fan, and thrill to experiencing different cities' subway systems. It's a way of getting to know a city intimately, even at first glance. Love the stuff. And I've been to London quite a few times before, it was my first ever subway system when I was 14 and wandering around on my own, and several times since then.

But this time it seems different, I've seen quite a few more subway systems since the last time I was in London but Jesus, the tube is so beautiful. It's really entrancing me. The stations themselves, architecturally, the sheer labyrinthine quality of them, the colours, the designs, are so different from station to station. Then there's the trains. The seating is all lengthways down the carriage, and the seats are much closer to each other than New York, for instance. And they're soft furnished! Oh. I love subway systems. People here are so interestingly dressed also.

I'm really very surprised by this city. Really enjoying it. Loving English people. Loving them. More when I have another minute to spare...

Stuff from the future, you can make (mostly)

How to make hover shoes so you can, you know, hover, above the ground

How to make a piss simple set of audio speakers, for about 3 cents

Small steps toward the realisation of our smellovision dreams

So if you have any other tips for making fab stuff easily, send a link or a comment...

Clonlara landscape, summer

Maybe this is the reason people come to my blog by googling 'sheep shit'?

The future of sex, caring, nursing, um... women?

Female robots.

"I see faces, understand voices and make facial expressions. At the moment I am just a machine, but someday I may be fully alive and aware."

Kiddy voice, looks a lot like daisy lowe

I kind of dig Eva

Sinister child woman

Conservative hockey mom

For the gentleman who likes his android in a plastic miniskirt

Ok. And there are some male versions too. Compare and contrast. Discuss. Comment!

Cycling robot

Village people go Michelin: I am not sure this is the future

Fiddlin bot

Show news!

I have a number of posts in various states of undress, but today I am up to my goolies in trying to find a dvd burner that is compatible with apple, and that can also be shipped to me by tuesday (or in-person pickupable in Dublin or London over the next couple of weeks. This is proving more tricky than you might think.)

Meanwhile, show news! I will be performing my one minute one woman show, Ode to a Daisy, as part of the Project Brand New's Magic Moments series in the Dublin Fringe Festival on Wednesday, September 17th! The time is 3 pm, the place is the Fringe Festival Offices, on Sackville Place. I would be delighted to see you, and have you see me.

Other show news: I have a couple of still movies showing at the Enniskillen Arts Festival, from the 26th September to the 5th October in the foyer of the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. My movies are Rose and Milla from my "This is Where" series of still live movies. They will be live on my site within the next couple of weeks. I'm really excited to be showing at the Portora school: it is an old private boys school that is celebrating its quatercentenary this year (ie. 400 years old!). Oscar Wilde and Sam Beckett both went there. My work will be projected in the foyer! This is seriously thrilling. There are lots of cool gigs and stuff happening in Portora over the course of the festival, Eliza Carthy and Andy Irvine are both playing there, so lots of people will be milling through. Come on up!

What is this love stuff? Or, jealousy makes for better sex.

It is official, Howard Jacobson says so. He says:

"People will tell you: "We've been together now for 40 years, never had a cross word, she's never looked at another man, I've never looked at another woman." And there's enough of Felix Quinn [the lead character in his new novel] in me to think: "well, that would be a bit dull".... Jealousy quickens. And to miss the quickening of jealousy, is to miss a big part of erotic life. I'm sure you can settle down and have a nice domestic life without jealousy.' A pause. A wicked smile. 'But - why would you want to?'"

He says that jealousy is the 'quickening' of love. The glue, the proton, the enzymes, the baking powder, the bit that makes the heart beat faster. I kind of have a soft spot for a species that needs things to kick its arse in gear and couple up. Here's Jacobson on desire:

"Intense desire is living in constant fear of loss. Can you love someone properly, without fearing that you'll lose them? I doubt it. I doubt it. With love grows this real sense of danger. The world will take it from you! And one way to lose someone you love, is to death, or an accident, or any kind of mishap. And the other, is to infidelity, which is another kind of mishap."

But what is the stuff that is getting quickened? What is this love stuff? So there's a moment when we recognise that we feel 'love' for somebody, the romantic version also, that really only occurs in moments. A minute after the fuzzy wuzzies and we're having a blazing row with that person, the flame of passion flickers with the wind. That's a different kind of love to the the love that finds the lover in a myriad of forms, whatever happens to be around.

Is the addict in love with his dealer? Is that love? Maybe it is... It's perceived need, it's a craving that flows through the body, and the perceived one who can soothe and supply what is craved. That's often how romantic love at least, is perceived, experienced. A feverish surge of drythroated desire. Most people would probably not think of it as love. Who is to say?

Matter. Anti-matter. Bang. Repeat.

When word started to filter out into science-ish blog land a few months ago, about the impending Large Hadron Collider deadline, the beginning of the experiments to generate little big bangs in a circular 17 mile long tube around Geneva, I was quite surprised. Because I had heard first about the LHC something like 15 years ago when I was piss young, and however I heard the news then, I just assumed that it was already happening. Of course I didn't call it the Large Hadron Collider, or even the LHC, and I didn't know the organisation organising it was called CERN, or any of that stuff that is so readily available to me online today, right now, as I type and fact-check and seek links to pepper through this post. Look at how beautiful it is.

Back then, and since I heard about it, CERN's Large Hadron Collider has been a part of my repertoire of conversational metaphors. I was deeply excited about it when I heard about it, and I have been talking about it ever since. A typical CERN moment might run something like this:

[time: 5.30 am, place: somebody's attic flat in Ranelagh or a shotgun house in Algiers Point, New Orleans, and the kind of 15 hour conversation that is a rolling stream of inspiration and widening energy]

Lucy: And that reminds me of this thing that they've built, somewhere in Switzerland, Zurich I think, and they have this machine that circles the city, way underground, and it recreates the big bang several times every hour! Imagine that! The origins of our existence, the moment of the birth of the whole manifest universe, happening quietly underground, in a lab in the middle of Europe...

The layers of the concept just kind of blew my mind every time I thought about it. I've even met Swiss people and talked about it to them, and they have all nodded and smiled sagely, yes, that's the LHC, yes, that's right, we are a very advanced people with our chocolate and our watches and NOW, OUR LHC!! But nobody mentioned the fact that it wasn't actually in operation yet.

So now it's really really happening, like, tomorrow. And actually, the fact that it hasn't been really really happening for the past 15 years has been kind of blowing my mind all over again, for the past couple of months.

One of the possible outcomes of these little hourly mini-recreations of the origin of the universe is that there might (tiny possibility, granted, but cool enough to mention) be created a tiny tiny baby black hole that will rapidly suck up all the spacetime around it, and thus gobble up the solar system, and god knows, maybe the galaxy in which we live. Wow. Awesome (in the biblical sense, not the californian surfer dude sense. Hm. Actually, both). This is how we would die. But can you imagine the moments just before? Seeing the black hole gulping up the galaxy from the inside around? Imagine how that would look? "A stream of atoms descending toward the abyss..." That ain't no pixillation, baby...

So they start sending particles around tomorrow in a clockwise direction, then the next week they'll send them anti-clockwise, just to get the Collider nice and warmed up. It'll be a few weeks before they start banging them together. First, some tests around the track. So. In a couple of weeks time, keep your eyes peeled. If you're gonna get spaghetticised, you'd probably want to at least catch a glimpse of the spectacular view.

Do something

We are a heaving house of hounds at the moment. Everybody is on their holidays and everybody has left their pooch with us, because we treat them nicely and let them stay in the house. We now have everybody's pooches in the house. The house is saturated of pooch.

I am getting ready to take Dolly, Smudge and Fluff out for a walk. Together. I have become each of their replacement 'go-to' person. They are each lovelorn and competitive for my affection. Particularly Dolly and Smudge. Dolly sniffs Smudge intently when I am stroking her, as if to find out what she has that Dolly doesn't.

Then Dolly makes her groovy twirling arse dance, and looks at me expectantly.

When I am cooking, one or other of them will come and sit by my ankles, facing out into the room, defying any other pooch to come near. Molly meanwhile is in full tilt nervous breakdown mode, very very dramatic. Tiny tiny pooch and her whole body heaving.

Molly, Dolly and I went running last night. Molly got very very excited and passionate and then it all got overwhelming for her and she started to snarl and nip at Dolly. Of course Dolly wasn't keen on any of this shit at all, and snarled back, and looked at me like, do something.

They all look at me like, do something. When somebody comes into the kitchen, there are usually 3 expectant dogs, staring at them, saying do something. When they hear a vehicle driving in, they all bark, do something.

So I am the one they have figured out is their best bet for long walks in the tall grassy wildish fields around here, and they are all keen to be my favourite. This morning, I felt that I had an inkling of what it might be like to be Hugh Hefner or somebody, with all these small pooches vying with each other for my affection and attention, sniffing each other's arses for hints and information, before nudging the other one out of the way and placing their head on my leg.

Insects Live Furiously

Today I am inspired by insects. It doesn't take much. But I am going to London soon and this is one place I think I will have to visit while I am there (except that it doesn't open until early next year... groo). One house. 17 million insects. Right in the middle of the city. This is very very exciting. This is the kind of thing that would make a gal move to London. Just to be close to them. Just to visit them every day. Just to be near humans who say things like, "The point is that I have a huge amount of admiration for these kinds of flies." The scientist in question is talking about maggots that go to live in human corpses that he then collects and investigates.

This article is so full of people who are passionate about insects. It makes me long for the tribe. There is a place there called the Insect Information Service and it is staffed by a man who is the " 'go to' man for the whole world's bugs." Hurrah! Here is what he says: "There are 23,500 insects and spiders in Britain and no one knows all of them, but I know most... My single mission in life is to make people more aware of the life around them. It mystifies me that people are interested in what's on Mars when all of this stuff is at their feet to be handled and touched." Swoon.

And there is a female mite specialist, who is married to the Curator of Cockroaches. This needs to be made into a movie.

So it is a long article. This is the anecdotal visceral emotional core of it:

"Hall is the country's leading forensic scientist, his speciality being the study of maggots in flesh wounds to discover the precise time of a murder.

He is a wry and engaging figure, a man who should be a TV drama series. He greets me with a selection of fattened maggots in pots, a kind of juju necklace of maggots removed from the rear end of a sheep, and a series of graphic photographs of wounds (mostly in live animals) in which maggots are making hay. In among the photographs are a couple of pictures of his own legs and arms with livid sores.

'I had a personal experience of some of this after I came back from Bolivia one time,' he explains matter of factly, 'along with the maggot of a botfly in my leg. They can eventually get quite large,' - he opens a 2in gap between thumb and forefinger - 'so I could feel this movement and I could see the tip of the maggot coming up to breathe and going back down.'

What did he do?

'Well you can't really squeeze them out, because they have these backward facing spines. You need surgery. I had a couple in my arm, too. I discovered if you put Vaseline over them they can't breathe and tend to back out of their own accord, eventually.' "

Ok, I've just realised that the insects will actually be dead, not living, and so, the whole heartbeatingly exciting spectacle of Lucy wandering blissfully through an eight storey cocoon of fucking and fighting insects has vanished in the space of a paragraph. London can breathe its smoggy air safely again. But I like this bit a lot:

"In the heart of the new building the Natural History Museum will also be putting its greatest living wonders on show: its staff of 220 scientists will be presented in full view of the public.

At intervals, along the winding descent through the dramatic cocoon, these rare creatures will be viewed behind glass at their work stations, preparing petri-dishes, peering through microscopes, eating lunch, perhaps grabbing an afternoon nap. At various points the public will have the opportunity to interact directly with them, to ask questions and to examine experiments."

Timmy Thumbs

This is Timmy Thumbs. I met Timmy Thumbs in august 2003 when he was the resident cat in the tattoo parlour on St. Marks around 1st ave. I was taking pictures of the tattoo artists and generally shooting the shit in this incredible cave of images. Timmy had had some kind of a chequered history, I think. Kind of a rocknroll polydactl.

There were Timmy Thumbs posters on the wall of the waiting room part of the studio, next to an old fullsize pacman machine. Timmy spent a lot of time hanging out on this futon sofa, showing off his crazy paws. I made him a photoshoot.

Black republicans

Yes, folks, they exist. So 90% of black americans who vote, vote democrat. That leaves a lot of votes in the leftover 10%. I guess we're all human. Just goes to show, race is not a decider of the colour of greed. But best of all, this woman's comment that she doesn't want Obama to win because she "doesn't want to live under socialism". It's amazing, really. This kind of people just doesn't travel. Anywhere. They wouldn't know socialism if it bit them on the arse and gave them free healthcare.

Well...

John McCain: sheesh, this is a tough one. Singsong. Blinking a lot, especially when lying. Girlish. Approval-seeking toothy grins after every sentence, eyes scanning the nearby crowd for a friend. Jesus, I'm sorry to have to say this about a 72 year old, apparently heavily sedated man, but, impotent. It's really clear what the Republican end of this election is about now. Not surprising that none of the Republicans are addressing the economy, or you know, like, ideas. They, um, forgot to think about that stuff.

No wonder they need the lipsticked pitbull.

This is a particularly favourite thing

of Brooklyn Lover... and it's pretty hot stuff. But check out Elvin Jones, I mean, seriously. He is a living prayer: a human instrument of focussed, relaxed, polyrhythmic devotion. It is off the charts.

Just wondering

I've just seen footage of John McCain walking across a stage. I have never seen him move before. Has the man got whiplash?

Lucy Takes Off's word on This Election: Cloud Cuckoo People

Sarah Palin is Cloud Cuckoo People.

She's got a four month old infant with special needs (time and priorities are clearly elastic concepts for her), a 17 year old daughter who has just gotten pregnant, she believes in guns but not birth control, got her first passport a year or so ago for a quick tour of the Alaskan guard in Kuwait, and two and a half years ago she was a mayor of a town the size of Nenagh. And she thinks she's all set to step up in a crisis as president of the United States?

These people talk about family values as if the only family values were anti-abortion, anti-birth control, guns and anti-sex education. So, vice president of the united states: how many hours a day do you think that job entails? Twelve, at a conservative estimate? Always on call? How many weekends off scot-free do you think the job allows for? In terms of a constant presence in your life whether you're at your desk or not, in terms of your availability to the government machine, you are basically owned by the office. Does it really not matter if a mother does not see her children for most of their young lives? I mean, when your whole philosophical platform is family values, for instance?

Anti-sex, in all its myriad forms, is the only family value ever discussed by these people. What about the family value of legally supported decent wages, state healthcare for children, education, these basic infrastructural aspects of living that come up again and again in American general elections, but no one seems to associate them as being 'family values'?

You know, I think to be honest that Obama is also Cloud Cuckoo People, but I dig him anyway. At this point, he is speaking a tongue that is inspiring, quite possibly, a revolution in feeling in America, about what is possible. Sure, the system itself is the same corrupt lobby-ridden bureaucracy it has been for 232 years, but if you're a thinking feeling human being, your money has got to be on Obama. That said, the man is full of unattainable promises. He stops only slightly short of promising the manifestation of the lord jesus christ on the earth in the form of a wiggly piggly sexpot in a bikini and everybody to have cake every day and lullabies at bedtime.

But for the past day or so, GOP sympathy has gushed to this bear-shooting woman who has to cope with her white trash daughter's errant ways. Hurrah, another opportunity to entirely miss the point AGAIN.There are many points to be missed, they've really got to get to work on it. Only just over 2 months left to miss all of them. Christ, I seem to really CARE about this shit.

They are all Cloud Cuckoo People.

The rain and the fever

So here's another perspective on this rainy miserable Irish summer: enjoy it while you can. Because very soon it might just be shorts all year round, and waves and waves of climate refugees fleeing their burning lands. According to Gaia theorist, and legendary climate scientist James Lovelock, Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia will be some of the few places left on the planet that will be habitable, when the fever starts.

How do you think the Irish economy would respond to that one? Do you think we'd let waves of refugees from Spain, Germany, France in, let alone Africans? Do you think it'll all turn into a huge money-fest, with property values REALLY soaring, as Ireland turns out to be actually one of the few habitable places left on the planet? Or will humanity step in and turn the mansions of Ailesbury road, Dalkey and the green fields of the west into refugee camps for fleeing Europeans? On what criteria would we allow them to enter: their professions? Or a demonstrated intuitive sense of understanding of nature, of the earth? How do we measure these things? I think we will all have to learn on the hoof as this episode of human history unfolds.

If you've ever seen James Lovelock being interviewed, you will know that he is a very mild mannered, practical and pleasant Englishman, and the original environmental scientist. His Gaia theory was treated with severe scepticism when he started talking about it back in the sixties (he's a feisty 88 now), and he's been warning about climate change for forty years or more:

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

Dolly: nothing escapes from that Event Horizon