your heart is a strange little orange to peel

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I made a playlist called Sad Ladies Who Know What’s Up. They really do.

not always & not when you walk by

I don’t think anyone has even once tried to identify the songs from which my post titles are taken. You know what, guys? Poor show. I’m just saying it now: did I expect more? Yes, yes I did. Welcome back to blogging, you say? Thanks, but that doesn’t make up for anything.

Exam time is winding down now, but it brought with it the usual wave of seemingly unrelated, like definitely unrelated, like there is definitely an external and totally not-exam-related cause for this, emotional exhaustion. Strangers have walked into bathrooms to find me sitting meekly on the floor, to the left of the hand-dryer, with my face in my hands. This is an exam-time thing for me. I think it’s not, but it is. It probably doesn’t help that the night before some exams I saw fit to drink fairish quantities of red wine and talk about my feelings, but that’s not the problem. Exams are the problem, and now there’s only one problem left, and it’s on Thursday and then it will be done.

If there’s one thing we’re genuinely really shit at as human beings, I think it’s recognising why we have the feelings we have. I accept reluctantly that not everyone goes around bleeding feelings out of their eyeballs like I do, and I think they are probably upstanding and excellent human beings who are almost definitely more productive than self, but I also know for a fact there are other feelingsy type people around and we are all almost universally really horribly terrible and bad at diagnosing where these feelings come from.

What we’re really good at, is making up the best and most convenient reasons for how we feel. It’s like arts and crafts, but instead of glue, mental instability! We choose people to be in unrequited love with, and then we make all our feelings about unrequited love, like if this arbitrary person loved us, we would be happy, but they never will love us, because that is the reason that we chose such a person. Or we ascribe our feelings of dissatisfaction to our inadequate work ethic, like if we just worked harder, HAPPINESS, but we never will work harder, because we’re too unhappy. These are classics, but there are many more available to choose from. You can invent your own, as long as the cause of your sadness explains everything conveniently and is utterly beyond your control.

What you’re feeling is probably just a feeling. If that doesn’t make sense, it’s because we’re not supposed to.

so when’s it coming? this last new great movement that I can join?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about people and beautiful things and negative capability. If you’ll allow me a couple of minutes and perhaps the impression that I am anxiously smoking a chain of cigarettes speaking to someone who is lying on a couch reciting the Jesus Prayer, I’ll try and explain.

Let’s say you like John Keats. Or you like anything. Say you like Tom Waits or Virginia Woolf or movie posters or little kids who eat ice-cream, anything. Basically, it doesn’t matter what you like. I don’t know what I’m saying here. Let’s just say there’s something you like, or a lot of things. Say you go around all day liking things and seeing what’s fundamentally good about them — I mean fundamentally, objectively good, if there is any such thing. And you think these nice things are the only thing that’s really any good at all about the world and you’re the only one who is still interested in looking for them.

The narrator picks her cigarette from the ashtray and finds it has gone out. She searches her pocket for matches.

It’s like when you and your friends were fifteen and everyone was secretly, separately convinced that they were Holden Caulfield and nobody else really understood, and so there were whole classes and years of Holdens feeling crummy about everything and thinking nobody understood, while in fact if anything everybody was simply vibrating with understanding and being too shy to say anything. Therefore, you come to the conclusion that the world must be full of Holdens, and yet in your daily life you often feel there are too many small, mean things going on to really see who is Holden and who isn’t, and some days everyone is and on other days you’re the only one. And on those days, when you’re reading your Hemingway or the selected letters of John Keats, it seems that all the Holdens are dead, even Salinger is dead, and sometimes it can seem — sometimes it must seem — that you are alone in a world of dead friends and living strangers who don’t even see anything nice about a little kid eating ice-cream.

Cigarette lit, she exhales with the confidence of one who has not quite made any points, but sees one beginning to form in the distance.

The point is I guess that lately I’ve come to the dazzling, almost mystical idea lately that the person you are looking for, the person who can see beautiful things, one who sees so many beautiful things, in fact, that they sometimes get a little pain in their hearts just looking around them: there is no one who isn’t that person. Even awful people, even the ones who just want to sit around and throw their ego at you, even they know what that little pain is like.

Here the narrator puts out the cigarette in an ashtray, regarding with detached sympathy their sibling on the couch.

Maybe they’ll never show it to you and maybe you’ll never see it, but to know anything at all you have to know that. It’s just that sometimes it’s easier to see what’s beautiful about Holden Caulfield than that guy that comes into your work and gets mad when you make one tiny mistake even when you really didn’t mean to. So here’s the idea.

Imagine who in the world you would most like to be. It can be you. Then write a letter from that person to somebody imaginary and send it to this address and somebody imaginary will write back. Just so when we’re busy dying over little kids eating ice-cream at least we won’t be so goddam alone all the time.

some people think they’re always right

Yes, the tumbleweed has been blowing barren across the lands of the Other Scrapbook for some time now. For this, I apologise. Or do I? Not really.

Currently, I am storming up ideas for a low-budget-to-no-budget zine I’m producing with the enviably talented Saoirse of Swall. Meanwhile, here are some things I like. What do you like? I want to know.

This is Caroline Allison photographing Tennessee for the bewilderingly lovely 50 States Project.  While we’re on Tennessee and things that bewilder with their loveliness…

A very, very young Kings of Leon when they were still dingy and excellent.

And final item in my lookbook for the rest of June 2010:

The beautiful Glass siblings and their existentialist crises are just languid and distressing enough to set the summer tone. Franny and Zooey is the current frontrunner in the ongoing My Favourite Novel race, despite its questionable grounds for entry (Franny is a short story and Zooey a separate, though related, novella). Go forth and read, ducklings.

Soon to come: posts on summer soundtracks, the return of The Strokes, some letters from imaginary people, an elegy for the Kings of Leon and plenty more besides. That’s when I recover from the shock of coming top of my year in the exam results. Swoon.

just tell me when to come & knock down that door

Unable to choose which of my many admirers I should spend Valentine’s Day with, I instead sojourned to the Royal Hibernian Academy off Hume Street with my good friend Phoebe to look at some art. There we found a very nice room of self-portraits, a room of Róisín Lewis’s recent work, and a highly amusing and frankly psychotic room devoted to Nevan Lahert’s exhibition, A Lively Start to a Dead End.

We also found an exhibition curated by the Galway gallery 126, entitled Video Killed the Radio Star.  I link to the brief description on the RHA website, which also features one of the works from the exhibit, Padraig Robinson’s Coco Pop skull. It’s a skull covered in Coco Pops. I am moved to comment briefly on this exhibition just because guess what, art is good, and what is not good, is a skull covered in Coco Pops.

Video Killed the Radio Star is an exhibition which apparently speaks “of and to society, at a time of perceived change”. If, of course, that time was the year 1979, when that song was released and may possibly have been relevant. An exhibition explicitly and obviously concerned with modern life — a skull of Coco Pops! — takes its title from a song that was released twelve years before your blogmistress was born, and assumes that title to be part of modernity; assumes video is still killing the radio star, rather than TV killing the cinema star or YouTube killing the TV star or freedom of creative output paradoxically killing creative industries. Or whatever.

The exhibition itself is more showily of-the-minute, including a projected image of the White House and a tape playing the names of all the American Presidents — up to and, you bet, including Barack Obama — and another tape playing them backwards. Another projected video shows mashed-up images of mid-20th-century America and posters for General Motors with text superimposed underneath like (I paraphrase from memory) “they do not need to use force because we want to be dominated”. Oh, you mean if we buy stuff, we’re contributing to capitalism? SHOCK HORROR! I’ve totes never heard that one before, like in a book, like in a book written nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. Nope.

My favourite of the whole exhibit, though, has to be the small makeshift house constructed from scrap wood and Barack Obama election posters. It is a shanty of Barack! An Obama shanty! I think it may even be called something like “Obama Shanty”!

Edited to add: The artist Jim Ricks has let me know that the piece is entitled “A shanty we can believe in”; the rest of his comments are below, and the rest of this post is unmodified. Since no official listings for the exhibition appear to exist online, I can’t attribute the other pieces to their artists, though natch if they too want to pop by and let me know, I’d be only too happy to credit them.

“You may think he’s all hope and change,” it seems to say, “but people still live in shanties, don’t they?” And you are inevitably forced to admit that yes, people do. And since both of these things are happening at roughly the same time in history, they must inextricably be bound to one another by nefarious means.

This is the kind of art in which every facet of modern life is somehow responsible for every other facet, where Barack Obama makes people into shanty-dwellers and Coco Pops encrust your skeleton. There is no careful exploration, no subtle teasing out of connection and disconnection; everything is merely lumped together in a series of visual soundbites that barely conceal their hatred for the modern world.  The exhibition may as well have been called “The Festering Wound That is The 21st Century,” or maybe, “Back in My Day”. That is, if the curators hadn’t had such a crush on the Buggles.

This show has pretensions of addressing modernity, and yet seems to wholly endorse the idea that history and time are just a big old line along which everything progresses, so if something bad happens, it is progress’s fault. Hence we have blown-up pixellated images of X Factor rejects and a spray-painted inflatable tree. The pieces are not universally this terrible in and of themselves, but this selection is so stubbornly wrongheaded as to be amusing for anyone actually inhabiting the modern world.

We are living in an unprecedented age of creative and societal freedom. The art being produced today, by modern artists, working in the actual world, is innovative and exciting. The other rooms in the RHA itself bear fine testament to that. This exhibition is everything that makes people hate modern art. I just felt I needed to express that.

Also, it has a skull covered in Coco Pops.

please don’t lose your faith in the good earth

More poetry. I know, I know.

In other news, I have  a presentation to write on William Wordsworth and a meeting with the warden of Trinity Hall, both scheduled for tomorrow morning, what joy.

In better news, John and Edward are signing CDs in Dundrum on Friday. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Please suggest what I should say/do/wear/ask them in advance, as I don’t how likely I am to become starstruck in the presence of their hair. And cheekbones.

Now, to the poem.

What is Taken, What is Left Behind

  

You are the last of the old life.

You have seen me in school uniform

with middle-parted hair and sadness

and you see me now, emergent,

tacky with jewellery and velvet,

hairsprayed and sexy. 

There have been tennis courts at night

and phone calls in train stations,

glasses of wine in strange apartments.

We are the last of the old life and

know things the others cannot know.

I see you now across the Front Square

handsome, carrying a newspaper. I am thrilled

that we have fooled them; they will believe

that we have always been this way,

this unassailable, this sure.

collect her tears in thimbles for her to drink

As the Twitter bar to the right of this post should amply tell you, I’m a little under-the-weather at the moment. As a) my health is not a very interesting topic for a blog and b) it is somewhat preventing me from posting something more productive, my entire post shall today consist of this:

I have a very dear friend called Laurena. Laurena has a new blog called Racy Haze. Already boasting fans like Sky Ferreira and the Postelles, if you don’t read this blog now, you will end up pretending that you read it by this time next year. You can also follow Laurena on Twitter or on her Strokes fanpage. Do it.

the city is a fever dream

Elegy in Winter

Bareheaded in the evening sleet,

the city is a fever dream

an exotic alphabet of

lamps and faces.

I long for another summer

on blue-fronted beaches

and the fields of wild dry grass

around my father’s home.

don’t you think the joker laughs at you

This is supposed to my serious music post of the week, in which I prove my indie cred to all and sundry. Sadly, I have no indie cred, and sundry doesn’t read this blog. We’ll soldier on.

1. Vampire Weekend: “Cousins”

This shit is official right here, so don’t even feel guilty. Scrappy pop from everyone’s favourite New York hipsters. Wait, MGMT haven’t released Congratulations yet. Looks like VW will have to do. (I kid, I’m totally crushing on Ezra Koenig and their fabgasmic new album Contra).

2. Sky Ferreira: “Happy Dre”

This is available for your listening pleasure on Sky’s MySpace. Diamond-cut vocals and killer production make this possibly my favouritest Beatles cover in existence. Plus, she has offered to write a song for Jedward and has seemingly at least kind of been taken up on this offer. If this news does not make your entire life, get on meds.

3. Independent Wombats: “Part Two, So Crazy Right Now”

This had to be posted eventually. I don’t think I can even bring myself to embed it. What you are about to see, if you click this link, is a video of myself and my favourite bloggettes (and sometime modelettes) miming along to the Destiny’s Child track “Independent Women”. This video is JEDWARD APPROVED. It also features some awesome girls.

I would now like to leech your credibility by pretending to have heard of the bands you recommend in the comments.

we move like caged tigers (we couldn’t get closer than this)

I promised further instalments of my sort-of photo-shoot with the brilliant tweetettes Saoirse and Grace and today, readers, I am fulfilling that promise. Go team!

Saoirse is an exceptionally fun person to photograph.

She wears a vintage full-length black velvet dress belonging to Grace. And how. More after the jump.