Freddy's is fighting back and they're doing it on Fox News, baby

When I'm in Brooklyn, my local bar is Freddy's. Freddy's is a bar where you can walk in the door and meet friendly faces, have a pint and a chat, listen to a band play, watch Donald's all day long art video installations made of heavily edited film and tv archive footage, sit in peace and read, and talk to at least a dozen people you are likely to know there. Freddy's is the heart and soul of the neighbourhood of Prospect Heights. Freddy's is under threat from some louse called Ratner who wants to shit on everyone's parade and take everyone's home away and put up a large piece of concrete junk instead and the supreme court of the United States has put their judgements behind him. It's disgusting.

I posted a piece on Clusterflock today about it.

Paula Carino, Open on Sunday

A friend of mine in Brooklyn has made a new album, and she's using kickstarter to help her fund CD manufacturing costs. If you click on the widget below, it will take you to a page full of links to some of her music and where you can support her for as little as $8, which will get you a free download of the album as soon as it's out!

Only three days to go before the funding deadline, so get busy, folks.

Ireland has run out of salt

(From my Facebook page)

Lucy Foley   Ireland has run out of salt.

Michael  i heard about this...don't go outside.

about an hour ago

Kelsey I heard that the Netherlands have resorted to using fragrant bath salts on their roads.

about an hour ago

Lucy Foley All the supermarkets are even out of domestic salt(If you've lived anywhere actually cold, you'll recognise that -4 is not even all that freakily cold, actually) and the whole country is throwing up its hands and running around doing the funky chicken. But slipping and falling over, because there is no salt down.

5 mins ago

Lucy Foley  Kelsey: The Dutch probably do that anyway. Feckin' hippies.

about a minute ago

Hut roof stalactites

Hut roof stalactites, originally uploaded by here comes lucy.

From a series of local pictues of the first snow wave of this winter, on my Flickr site.

Our palm tree in the freeze, 2

Our palm tree in the freeze, 2, originally uploaded by here comes lucy.

A glimpse of blue

A glimpse of blue, originally uploaded by here comes lucy.

Snow tree

Snow tree, originally uploaded by here comes lucy.

Or a green pyroclastic cloud.

I read a tirade against mulled wine a few days ago

About how it was cheap shit, heavily diluted, and harshed the writer's carefully tended ongoing Christmas buzz with its nasty germs and commonness.

However.

If you make it with a nice wine, and don't add water, add cointreau, nice spices and lemon juice, you end up with a kind of take-it-seriously mulled wine. Recommended.

I set up my flickr account to auto post my photos on this page, but it doesn't seem to have been working out. Anyway, you can go here and see them.

Happy Christmas!

Down under, at night

One of my favourite things: the London Underground. Getting worked on.

Hard not to like him

The Guardian published an interview with George Michael a few days ago. Got to love his frankness.

Eloquent woman alert

This woman is pretty cool. Her name is Diane Savino, and she's the Democratic senator for Staten Island, who made this speech on Wednesday for the state senate gay marriage bill, which went down 36-24. Though frankly, I think if you give it some time, you will also see endless tv series' where 30 gay men compete to become the husband of someone they have only previously seen in a sportswear catalogue.

Go Diane.



via the awl and Paula's facebook status.

See the Seams

This got voted #1 in The Guardian's Best-Of-Decade best-in-show album list, which I think says more about British broadsheet criticism than it does about albums that were made in the last 10 years. The criteria they used to decide this were also boringly fashion based. But the guy clearly has a playful and energetic way with words. I think I'm going to sit down and listen to this all in one go, because it describes a kind of journey through itself, though on first listen it's got similar qualities to what I found in Speech Debelle: musical mind-numbing monotony and a lot of earnestly over-worked lyrics. You know, you can see the seams, you can feel the effort.

So here's another journey I just took on the internet this past hour.
From Brian Eno, talking
to U2 at 19 years old.
to what Brian Eno did to U2

Dig that bridge on Unforgettable Fire. Fuck were they smart to get Eno in.

Once Eno is on your mind, he's on your mind.
And you have to end up here.
Every time I get there, I get the goosebumps.
Speaking of which, this is an interesting thing. So good you could listen to it twice, you say? Well... more than 20 years later, but you can really hear what it's made of.

And after all that, you end up inspired. Disclaimer: your results may vary.

This is a very moral story in pictures about what happens when you walk on people.

You get EATEN. Yes. By the cute docile guys. You get eaten.

"The hit song is hard to come by these days..."

Do you sometimes write poems? Do you harbour a secret desire to one day hear them set to music, sung by a silky smooth crooner, or just someone who can sing? Well, for the small price of $99, you can have somebody spend 48 minutes 15 seconds with your song on Protools and have a real genuine actual CD made of your song-poem.

It's an industry, and though one of the operators in this documentary is quite young and is making a living from it, it's got to be a dying business these days. This is a 54 minute documentary I discovered on clicker. If you're interested in the lives of people who oneday wandered down a cul-de-sac of some faraway part of life, met some other people there, commerce was traded and nobody ever returned, then you will probably find something terribly compelling about this documentary.

Watch out for the writer of the song, "The Thing". His face upon listening to the work of the studio guy is priceless. These guys have skills, no question. You can see the onetime Grammy winning, Elvis backup singer sighing in sheer desperation, but it is entirely inaudible on the recording. That's gifted.

Also viewable larger, here.

UPDATE: I've just been looking through old archives, and look what I found. Think this might be a candidate for the song-poem industry makeover?

James Lovelock goes to space

The Gaia Theory independent climate scientist is now past his ninetieth birthday (must be surely 91 at this point?) and he's as interesting as ever. In this video interview, he talks about his forthcoming trip into space. This was recorded back in April, so I wonder if he's gone yet?

UPDATE

I watched A Ma Soeur last night

Have any of you seen it? God I would love to discuss this movie with someone. Maybe we could have a skype-in or something. Thoughts?

Latest pics from the Hut Insulation Project

are now posted to my Flickr.

Drawmo!

November is Drawmo (Draw month, Draw More)! A bunch of internetistes will be drawing and posting every day for the month of November, and you're welcome to join us. There is also a flickr.

30 Days, 30 Days of Drawing.

You can come. We are friendly.

Detritus of the week

Nabokov
F Scott Fitzgerald
Dead Flies Art
The NYT looks at the Donmar
On ne parle que d'eux
Alan's show at IMMA
Brioche buns not yet made
A tab I have had up on my browser for about 2 months, task unfulfilled
The U2 concert
The black panthers
UPDATE: A really good, plain speaking article from the murky realities of juvenile rape (thanks, Stan)

Mad World

Usually when a pop or rock song is remade as an acoustic piece of melancholia, especially if it involves strings, it bores the crap out of me. But I have been mesmerised by this song, and go through bouts of listening to it over and over. It's gorgeous. It is like Gary Jules excavated the original Tears For Fears song and made it vibrant again. The piano riff is a very lovely thing, it really makes the song. There's not much to the song, really. But I love it. If you haven't heard this version before, you are in for a treat. But you probably have. It was the song over the credits of Donny Darko, and it elicits the mood of the movie so beautifully.