I don't often write about fashion because a) its incredibly intimidating and a bit too easy to sound like a twat when postulating about the beauty of a shoe and b) paul says he won't read my blog if I do. But, I don't think he does anyway and I have a fashion crush. His name is Bernhard Willhelm, and we first met on Camden street on a rainy Monday afternoon in January (I can't remember if it really was a Monday, but dramatic effect etc). I was rifling through the contents of Debra, the new charity shop, when I found myself holding a new-looking dress I did not understand one bit and therefore instantly adored. It had a hood! Non sensical ribbons hanging off the back! Sold. When I got home I spent ages trying to figure out how its supposed to be worn, and finally decided to google the designer to see if there was maybe a picture somewhere. I came across http://www.bernhard-willhelm.com/ and after looking through various collections decided it was true love. Sadly, when I came to the prices section it became clear I would need to write several bestsellers before I can fill my wardrobe with delightfully confusing dresses and demented nun outfits
For now though I am very happy with my new favourite dress/puzzle and can't wait to wear it to breakfast in New York.
Just to reassure that I have not changed my fashion radar from 'shiny!/black' to 'label', my other current favourite dress is from Penneys. I bought a second one yesterday just in case the first one falls apart, which it is threatening to do all ready, and had a brief moment of panic that I was, in fact, a sensible old person. However, I then talked to my friend who I consider to be very cool and not sensible (compliment!) and she said she does the same thing. Phew.
Now all I need is some Jeffrey Cambell shoes. I mean, the curve of the sole really speaks of bygone days, yet the tough leather is a nod to futuristic styles... Time to stop apparently.
And so far, my strange feeling that its going to be a good one has proven itself...not so strange. After lots of playing in the snow with my far-flung friends home for Christmas, photo stories about my cats, missing of New York and reading of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, something truly great happened; I got an email from the director of the CUNY Writers Institute to say he loved my work and was awarding me this years Fiction scholarship. I actually nearly fell of the chair with shock and couldn't sleep for 2 nights afterwards. Then they made the announcement on their website and it suddenly became real. Other than being very very happy to go back to New York, it was incredible to have someone who is under no obligation towards you whatsoever say great things about your work. I had been having kind of a insecure moment about my abilities and what it actually means to be a writer but once I stopped dithering and sat down at my computer I felt a lot better and now with the scholarship I'm starting to believe that this might be something I can actually do.
Other than getting great news and not sleeping (I have some kind of weird morning insomnia where I wake up ridiculously early and get an adrenaline shot accompanied by twelve million insistent thoughts) I've been going to the cinema a lot which keeps me feeling sane (unexplainable) and brain-fed. I also went on a Dogme 95 binge and watched The Idiots and The Celebration, which left me feeling utterly disturbed in a good way. Dogme films have a way of grabbing you by the throat and making you feel incredibly uncomfortable, which is in turn strangely enjoyable in a film. I went to see Howl 2 days after I watched The Celebration and although it was good and I enjoyed it, it felt so polished and strange in comparison.
There was an election, which I chose not to involve myself in too much other than feeling grumpy with Enda Kenny for staring at me whilst I ate breakfast every day.
I've been trying to spend as much time outside the city as possible, and climbed Killiney Hill on a grey day to sit in the middle of a cloud.
Other than reading 9 Sookie Stackhouse novels in the space of a month (who can resist a vampire viking warlord with a sense of humour?), I picked up this book will save your life by A.M. Homes at the last flea market and think its great. She is very funny in a dark, satirical way and manages to create incredibly human characters. This book will save your life is about a forty something bussiness man in LA who has isolated himself from everyone except his housekeeper, personal trainer, nutritionist and Rothko and De Kooning paintings. And I swear I don't just like it because it features a horse at some stage.
And right now the sun is shining, the junkies are drinking cans by the canal and the trendy kids are sweating in their pleather as they walk-of-shame towards Rathmines. All is as it should be.
I will leave you with todays note of wisdom: Is there anything that can't be made better by the playing of Rihanna's S&M?
...I feel very sad. I dread the day when I wake up and won't be able to execute my perfected morning routine of:
wake up
dance to The White Stripes 'Elephant' in my pyjamas
climb onto the fire escape to check weather/take in amazingness of East Village
get dressed in some variety of 'out there' clothing
go to the cafe for hot chocolate, facebook and neighborly 'good mornings' with all the peeps from the area who I've got to know.
I'll be crying every time I hear Empire State of Mind again. This happens whenever I leave New York and is a clear indicator that I should NOT leave New York. But there's the little problem of a Visa, money and my life back home.
People have been asking me what's been the highlight of my stay in New York and I honestly don't know. One of them is definitely the trip I took to Rheinbeck with Lisa, who kindly has let me have her sofa bed for the duration of my New York stay and brought me to a vast array of events and places which I never would have seen otherwise. Taking Amtrak was an experience in itself, so comfortable and the views were great. When I stepped off the train at Rhinecliff and my lungs filled up with cold clean air that smelled vaguely of woodsmoke I knew I was going to love it there. Their house was beautiful, a white wood haven of warmth in the midst of rolling fields and forests which I explored shortly after arriving in my absolute favourite way; on horseback. Holly the Welsh pony took great care of me as we cantered through the yellow/gold/green of upstate New York, her breath and mine like clouds in the cold air.
I spent the rest of my trip eating amazing food, watching Harry Potter movies and exploring the lovely towns of Tivoli and Rheinbeck. It was pretty close to my idea of heaven.
Back in the city I've had some great days too; walking through the almost empty New York streets on Thanksgiving, followed by the true American dinner experience in Brooklyn; going to see a friends friend play in bar Williamsburg for the true indie experience and sitting in MoMa staring at my faves Pollock and 'smudgy squares' Rothko.
It blew my mind when I read that when MoMa bought their first Rothko in 1952 a trustee board member was so outraged he resigned.
My last week here is packed with internship stuff, seeing friends who I haven't seen yet, some parties and probably some Christmas shopping, and I'm terrified its gonna fly by and I'll be on a plane watching the Statue Of Liberty wave goodbye before I know it. I'd better find some time to sit in the Bean writing and people watching, which has for realz become my favourite thing to do in New York.
I got quite excited when I saw some snowflakes float by this morning. I finally have a chance to wear my sheepskin lined Docs that I got in T.K. Maxx during the summer! Though by the sounds of it I'll be living in them to conquer an Ireland covered in snow.
Until then...I'm gonna go take a lovely dog for a walk to distract me from the thoughts of leaving and maybe bottle some NY snow to bring home.
It's a beautiful sunny morning in New York City and its hard to believe that in Ireland its currently raining and economically imploding.
I've been in New York for almost 3 weeks now and am truly in love. I totally understand what that T-shirt is trying to say.
New York is beautiful and weird and there's a million different worlds depending on where you get off the subway, you can be whoever you want whenever you want , you can have have breakfast for dinner or dinner for breakfast, you can find your dream job or make a job of dreaming. Sometimes when I'm walking down the street, looking around me, this sense of happiness washer over me in a way I've never felt anywhere else. The sun shines almost every day, even when its cold, and I can spend whole days in cafe's reading and people watching to my hearts content. I eat breakfast on the fire escape watching the autumn leaves blow around the street and it feels like I'm in a film but in a great way. I wear whatever I want without being judged or put in a box, and even if I am its ok because the rest of the people in here are really cool and I don't mind being like them. I accesorize pretentiously with a hot chocolate and a book and take the subway in a nonchalant fashion. And in amongst all these people and buildings, I feel more alive than I ever have before.
Obviously, its not all cinematic moments of perfection. I find myself more alone than I have ever been before and though I'm enjoying the freedom it brings, New York can be a lonely place. When I'm feeling really lonely I go across the street to the animal shelter and take a dog for a long walk around the area.
I've got to know some lovely dogs and had some great chats with random people on the street. I fell a bit hopelessly in love with a pit bull puppy and even looked into how hard it would be to get her home but it would have been way too complicated and expensive. It all came about because I went in one day and there were no dogs to walk but the guy asked me to play with the puppy because it was sad about being away from its mother so I happily obliged and sat there for an hour happily cuddling and petting her. She's gone now (heartbreak) but he said there's were more puppies coming in today, so hopefully some of them will need cuddling too.
There's always something to do in this city, so when I'm not staying in to watch Mad Men or read I have been to some interesting stuff, including a back-room reading and the preview of Tiny Furniture in the Museum of Modern Art. Tiny Furniture is a film by a new up and coming writer/director/actress called Lena Durham.
She stars in the film, alongside her mum and her sister, and does a really good job of portraying whats its like to be released into the world after finishing a B.A. in Nothing Useful For a Job and feel lost. It's rare that I see something I find genuinely funny, and this was also clever and depressing in equal enjoyable measures.
Another interesting thing I went to was, you know *nonchalant*...Florence and The Machine!! Flo played up an absolute storm; it was the best show of hers that I've seen yet. Her voice sounded amazing soaring through the rafters of Terminal 5 and she twirled and danced around the stage like a leaf caught in a whirlwind of excitement. I always think seeing her play is like taking a Florence drug; you experience highs and lows and you get goosebumps and dance like crazy and afterwards you're exhausted but incredibly happy. She also looked like the High Priestess of Awesome.
As far as reading is concerned, I am lucky enough to be living close to The Strand which is only the best bookshop In The World.
I've just finished reading Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (which was great if even just for the fact that the whole book takes place within a 2 block radius of my apartment) and The Graduate, which was good at first but kind of degenerated into a farcical screen play meets Catcher In The Rye vibe in the end. I also read Clockwork Angel on the plane over, the prequel to the Mortal Instruments series I wrote about before. As someone who has never read Sci-Fi before and is slightly sceptical (I try not to lean towards scornful like most) about it, I really enjoy the whole vampires/demons/angelic descendant fighter world created in them.
Ok, I have been sitting here nursing a hot chocolate for about 3 hours now and the sound of the rustling leaves blowing along the pavement outisde in the sun is distracting me and making me want to go out for a wander. I'm always secretly hoping to bump into Garance Dore and Scott 'The Sartorialist' Schuman and become BFF's...but for now I'll have to make do with my ipod and some adventures.
'Thirty days and nights of literary abandon' November is officially National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) so I decided to take the plunge and signed up to www.nanowrimo.org . Basically the idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, which breaks down as about 1500 words a day. Some of the novels have been sold and published successfully, like NY Times Bestseller 'Water for Elephants'. Signing up means you make a profile and they send you encouraging emails with pep talks from the likes of Dave Eggers, as well as info about events going on near you where other NaNoWriMo people get together to write and probably give out about hard it is. Nothing like a bit of communal complaining. I'll be in New York for all of November so I'll have to find a nice local cafe to write in every day, and it would be nice to meet other people who are doing it too because I need NY friends! Preferably nice cool ones. If you're successful you get a CERTIFICATE. Thats right, a certificate with your name on it saying how awesome you are. Everyone likes those.
Only a few days to go now until I jet off to JFK, and I'm busy freaking out about flying, trying to find adaptors, figuring out what the weather in New York is like, filling in forms for the United States government, reading about Tea Partiers, and practising (or should I say 'practicing') my american by listening to The Notorious XX, specially this:
A few things happening/I've been thinking about/listening to:
1. I booked flights to become a New York City girl for almost 7 weeks at the end of October. My plans include wandering lonely as a cloud through the East Village, travelling to DC to see Obama's crib and generally soaking up all the awesomeness. Oh, and get working on my novel. And take lots of pictures. And hang around outside of Trash and Vaudeville (like the guy in the picture).
2. A major event in the world over the past few weeks was the release of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground since August. So many people all working together to save them was kind of amazing. I was home sick so tried to watch as much as I could live on Sky News; the Phoenix 2 coming out of the ground once or twice an hour to release a miner into the anxiously awaiting arms of friends or family managed to make me tear up literally every time. I'm a total sucker for real life drama. Oprah kills me. I definitely won't be able to watch the episode where Oprah has the Chilean miners on.
3. Columbine by Dave Cullen: I finished it a while ago, and literally couldn't stop thinking or talking about it. I tried to write a blog post about it just after I finished, but kept referring to the killer by their first names and rambling into details that wouldn't have made any sense had you not read the book. Having never read non-fiction before, it was weird and kind of difficult for me to deal with that towards the end I felt I really knew all the 'characters', including my favourite FBI negotiator Dr. Fuselier, and then realizing they were all real people. That this really happened. I would definitely recommend it to anyone and everyone who is in any way interested in what happened at Columbine. It doesn't just explain what actually happened, but also why, to whom and what happened next. I was surprised and a bit freaked out to find that nothing I had heard or known about it before was actually true; that they were Marilyn Manson fans, that they were loners, and most importantly that it was a high-school shooting. It was in fact an attempted bombing; their intention was to blow up hundreds of people and shoot the survivors as the ran to safety. The random shooting of students and teacher was a consolation act. The book didn't have any pictures, and I'm not going to put any up in this post, because frankly the smiling year book pictures of Eric and Dylan frighten me. The knowledge that out there on the internet I can watch CCTV footage of them wandering the halls, with all I know about them now, is, for want of a better word, very weird. It took 10 years to finish, and even Cullen says 'living for that long with a massacre isn't easy'. I really admire his strength. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is: read it because its interesting, well written and will make you think.
4. The Social Network. I went to see it last night at the Irish Film Institute which is my new favourite place. Great hot chocolate and films. Anyway, I thought The Social Network was great. It managed to grab my attention straight away and didn't even let me consider letting my mind wander until I walked out. Jesse Eisenberg was very good as Mark Zuckerberg, who came across as being a super smart kind-of-asshole with some social issues and a dry sense of humour. The rest of the cast were awesome as well, including Mr. Timberlake. I have been watching a lot of films lately, and therefore am beginning to really appreciate a film which is enjoyable and interesting, because they are apparently rarer than I though, and The Social Network was definitely both. Thought it did really make me want to check my Facebook and then feel kind of weird about it at the same time. That boy knew what he was doing.
5. I am loving this song.
I would like to dedicate it to someone, but that would be rude, and I'm a lady.
6. It's almost winter again! I'm unreasonably excited about this. Jumpers! Fur coats! Boots! Woolly socks! Yay! Winter is a time for being cosy, going for countryside walks, hugs, Christmas, all the good stuff.
With the dawning of September every years comes the rise of many tents being set up on the horizon in Stradbally, Co. Laois. I went to Electric Picnic for the first time when I was 18. We snook 3 people in on 1 band, camped beside the dance tent and had, like, the most AMAZING weekend ever yeah? Last year I went down for the day to see Florence. When I got a free weekend pass this year I considered the camping experience but then I remembered that rain exists and I hate crowds, so me and a friend drove down on Friday afternoon to catch some acts.
I was very excited about seeing Laura Marling and she WAS great, but sadly the tent was very loud and despite her repeated requests for people to keep it down because she had a cold and couldn't sing very loud, it was hard to hear her, specially during Blackberry Stone. I got her new album the other day and its, as expected, pretty close to perfect. Beautiful voice and poetic lyrics with just the right amount of reality.
We proceeded to go for a wander through the Body and Soul village, which even packed with people is kind of a magical personal experience. It makes you feel like a kid the way you walk around with widened eyes taking in everything that's been laid out like a feast for the imagination.
We crawled into a massive teepee tent with a fire in its centre and pillows all around and didn't move for several hours, only tearing ourselves away finally to go see Ms. Janelle Monae on the Body and Soul stage at around 10 o'clock at night. Three cloaked creatures danced onto the stage, hoods up, one of them rapping and turning around to reveal herself as the fabulously coiffed Janelle. Her show was electrifying. Even though I was standing on a slope and packed between two groups of drunk Irish LADS who didn't really know what was going on I managed to dance like crazy to Cold War, Tightrope and Wondaland. I love seeing bands when they are young and about to make it big because they have this ENERGY that they share readily with their audiences.
I took a time out from the Picnic on the Saturday to visit my friend and partake in some ritual burning, which we both agreed is good for the soul and should be done regularly. Also discovered this Unknown Fact: The National named their album High Violet after my friend Violet. FACT.
On Sunday I once again dug out my anorak (yeah, like I hadn't been wearing it every day anyway) and journeyed back to Loais to find my parents wandering around the Mindfield looking a bit dazed and some of my friends looking worse-for-wear but very happy. We all larked about like a big hippy commune for a while, then some of us went to hide beneath the covers of a giant Penguin paperback and I joined the rest ambling over to the Crawdaddy tent to see the Big Pink. They were definitely the loudest thing I've ever been to: the bass pushed down on your chest and threatened to take over your heart beat, the guitar rattled your bones and pressed your eardrums insistently. It was like being attacked by music, in a not entirely unpleasant way. Definite highlights of the sets were my friend rousing a sheepish smile with her manic waving from her step-brother the keyboard player, briefly cracking his image as super cool London INABAND, and their cover of Beyonce's Sweet Dreams.
After the Big Pink we wandered about; I jumped up and down to some Mumford and Sons, had an amazing burrito, and eventually ended up back in the fire teepee. At this stage the skies opened properly, soaking everything and anything and then some. I tore myself away from the cozy warmth of the fireside to go meet my parents in the guest area for a lift home, but finding them not ready to go yet ('we're just going to have ONE more drink darling') I climbed onto the guest areas raised stage which allowed me to see right across the crowds and watch Massive Attack do a beautiful show, made all the more poignant by the absolute pouring rain. It was lonely in a nice way.
After a long and quite strange bus journey on a gigantic coach carrying 5 of us back to Dublin I collapsed into bed freezing but happy after a lovely weekend.
