Gone to America

I have acquired a PSP. It’s research. For work. I actually have done some work for a forthcoming title, so I may get a free game, and it would be foolish not to be able to play it. Right? And I had to get it on the day of …

I have acquired a PSP. It’s research. For work. I actually have done some work for a forthcoming title, so I may get a free game, and it would be foolish not to be able to play it. Right? And I had to get it on the day of release, or else it might have sold out.

I didn’t stay up all night. I was in the city to collect a cheque from the NYFA, so I thought I’d pick one up. I got the last one in Circuit City on Union Square. They were gone from the shelves, but an assistant was wandering around with a plastic bag calling “PSP? PSP?”. I made sure I wasn’t being ripped off, and got it. “You’re a lucky man”, she said to me. I did feel slightly ripped off – the package included the three year extended warranty. I would like to feel that I got the last PSP in NYC, but I just came back from the Best Buy in Astoria and they still had a few.

It’s pretty amazing. I’ve been getting envious stares on the subway. It makes a nonsense of the commute. It came with the movie Spiderman 2, so I watched it. It’s just like watching a DVD in the palm of your hand! The speakers are pretty crappy, but it comes with headphones so that’s ok.

My only complaints would be that my hands hurt, and that it’s difficult to play under certain circumstances. You need two hands, so it’s difficult to play when standing on the subway when it’s crowded. You need to be able to hug the pole, a definite faux pas during rush hour. Also, it’s hard to play while walking, or eating, or working – this can only lead to a sedentary, hungry and increasingly unemployed lifestyle. I’m hopeful that Sony will fix these problems with some kind of downloadable software upgrade.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for me in terms of human contact or productivity for a while. It’s been fun.

I’ve won an award from NYU – “Best Sound Design in an Undergraduate Film” – for A Reasonable Hypothesis. I did this over a year ago, right when I was having my crisis. This is my first award. There’s a piece of paper, apparently. Jack (the director) accepted for me – I didn’t even know I was nominated. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it in case people were disappointed.

This is my first award. I’ve decided to put the phrase “The Award Winning…” in front of all references to myself. I am now Anthony Litton, The Award Winning sound editor. The Award Winning Anthony Litton. Anthony Litton, The Award Winning PSP owner. You get the idea. I trust that you all will follow suit.

I didn’t make it to the parade this year, either. Unlike last year, it wasn’t snowing. It was a nice day. I just didn’t find the idea that attractive. People walking.

And it was far away, all the way up 5th Avenue at 44th Street. I started the day …

I didn’t make it to the parade this year, either. Unlike last year, it wasn’t snowing. It was a nice day. I just didn’t find the idea that attractive. People walking.

And it was far away, all the way up 5th Avenue at 44th Street. I started the day down at Houston, at the R* offices. I just had a couple of hours work to do to finish something I had started the day before (work continues intermittently). I left there about 12:30, and headed to the Scratcher. I bought my camera with me, with every intention of creating some kind of rudimentary photo essay, but in fact I only took three photographs, and only two of them came out. This is the first one:

It’s of Anita in the Scratcher, just after she poured me my first pint of the day at about 1pm. I had half arranged to meet up with Helen McMahon and her New-York-resident friends Anne Marie and Ciara around lunch time or in the early afternoon, but they got bogged down in Queens doing women’s things so I just hung around the Scratcher chatting to Anita and various other people who wandered in and out.

Some were Scratcher regulars who I’d met before, like Laurent. It was his birthday. In France this had not been an issue, but since he’s moved to the US it has apparently tended to become a little lost. Another guy I ended up talking to for a while – indeed, having lunch with – was a random stranger called Matt. He’s hosts a TV show on the Discovery channel, which means it could well be poised to become the new American Chopper. He didn’t try and steal anything from me.

After a while Helen and her friends settled in a bar called Vertigo which Ciara designed up around 26th Street, so I staggered up to join them. I had a pint or two more there, but they were expensive ($7!) and the music was too loud (I’m getting old). Julian, Lisa and Anne showed up. The Irish girls headed to Lunasa. I vowed to join them later, and headed with Anne, Lisa and Julian to a new bar on 28th Street and Madison called Boston 212. It was during this short walk that I took the second of the day’s pictures.

The Empire State Building, all lit up green. Julian actually has a better picture of it at his site. In my defense, Julian had taken his earlier and wasn’t nearly as drunk as me.

This was the first night that Boston 212 had opened its doors and it wasn’t quite finished, although extremely presentable. The grand opening will be on April 1st. It’s part owned by a friend of Conor’s called Charley, hence the invite. This is pretty much where I finished off the evening. I hit the wall about midnight and just had to go home. Only eleven hours of drinking! It’s official – I’m not as young as I used to be.

The whole Paddy’s Day thing is interesting. When in Ireland, I don’t really celebrate it much. As a kid I used to be taken to the parade, but nowadays it just starts too early. It’s a day off, which is nice, but the following day isn’t so there’s no real incentive to drink much. I’ve really found that the most fun to be had in Dublin on Paddy’s Day is in hanging out with Americans, to whom it really means something. This year I decided to embrace the stereotype and spend the day drinking, but it was really just an excuse. I just haven’t done that for a while.

It seems to be much more signifigant to the diaspora. The first Paddy’s Day parades weren’t in Ireland at all, they were in the US. They served a very specific purpose. They said to the community at large “We’re here, and there are a lot of us”. By comparison the festival they recently started having in Dublin doesn’t have any such history, or message – it’s really a tourist thing.

As a young(ish) freshly arrived immigrant I really don’t feel that the parade as it exists in NYC really has anything to do with me. I actually feel the opposite – turned off, excluded. Old men marching sternly. It’s not a celebration, it’s a warning. It’s not about the Irish, it’s about the Irish-Americans – an ambivalent relationship to say the least.

Any Irish person who’s travelled at all, and even most of those who haven’t, will be familiar with the surreal experience of meeting people who claim to be Irish and clearly aren’t. Usually, they’re American. At first it can be a little disorientating, and a little irritating. But they usually buy drinks for Irish people, so that’s ok. Then you can start to feel a little superior, and wish to set them straight. “No, you’re not Irish”, you say. “You’re American. I’m Irish.”

This can actually get to be quite heated, particularly with all the free (to you) drinks. Passports are brandished, accents compared, histories related. In one extreme case in Paris in 1997 I actually saw one young American reduced to tears by an Irish girl who refused in the strongest possible terms to acknowledge any validity at all to his claims at an Irish identity. This was about 4am, mind you. I spent quite a while comforting him. Something he said to me then really pointed up the difference between Irish and Irish-American.

One of the ways this guy asserted his Irish identity was by financially supporting the “armed struggle” in the North. He assumed that this established his bona fides, and would endear him to any Irish person. This attitude is no longer the norm from what I can see, but it goes a long way to explaining why Irish people can sometimes feel a little bit resentful and embarrassed by the way we are claimed and represented by Irish-Americans, specifically those who have never been to Ireland. There’s an image they seem to have which really isn’t current, if it ever was. This is also part of the reason for the feeling of exclusion I and other young(-ish) Irish immigrants feel from the parade. It’s celebrating a very different, unfamiliar kind of Irishness. It hasn’t been Irishness as we understand it for a long time. It’s Irish-Americanness.

But that’s ok. Frankly, we owe the diaspora more than they owe us. Paddy’s Day is celebrated all over the world. Pretty much anywhere you go as an Irish person you can find an Irish bar and a welcome based on your accent. As was pointed out to me on Thursday, there’s one day a year when the most powerful man in the world, the US President, has to meet the Taoiseach, leader of a country with a population half that of Manhattan.

This is not because we are so inherently great. This is because so many left, and organised, and started having parades to show that they were here, and that there were a lot of them. I still don’t really have any desire to go see the parade, but it doesn’t matter – it’s really not for me.

I feel I have to apologise for that last post. I was really just phoning it in. A week had gone by and I felt I had to put something up, but I wasn’t really in the mood. It was a particularly dull recounting of the previous few days. On …

I feel I have to apologise for that last post. I was really just phoning it in. A week had gone by and I felt I had to put something up, but I wasn’t really in the mood. It was a particularly dull recounting of the previous few days. On some level, that’s all a blog like this can ever hope to be, but that one was really scraping the barrel. I had had an interesting and fun weekend, and there was some big news – Julian and Lisa’s apartment purchase – but somehow I failed to communicate any of that. I hope you like the little vids, although I’m concerned that they may eat into my bandwidth and prove hell for people on dial-up connections.

Anyway, this raises the question of “What is a good blog entry”? Disturbingly, and perhaps obviously, I don’t really know. It’s easier for people who have very focused blogs with a clearly defined point of view about politics or technology or web design or what have you; those of us who are just really writing about our lives will always be flirting with boredom. This list is so accurate and so familiar I nearly cried. Well, not literally. I don’t cry at media.

Why did I start blogging? I had been interested in web design for a while – more accurately, I had been interested in putting up pages on the internet for a while. I made a site for an annual party I used to co-organise which is now defunct (the site, not the party) and I really got carried away with it. All it really needed was a simple page with a time and a place on it, but I made little flash animations, cool animated javascript menus, a forum, a poll, and an incredibly garish colour scheme (red and green – it was Christmas!). It was extraordinarily bloated, but I really enjoyed adding to it. I made one for the party the following year, and the year after. I made a website for my sister’s wedding, also now defunct (again the site, not the marriage) and basically threw up random pages for anything that ocurred to me.

When I decided that I was going to move to New York, it was natural for me to want to put up a site about it. Initially it was just a stupidly bloated (animated gifs of fluttering Irish and American flags) page with a blurb and a link to the FAQ and Biographical Note. There was also a page about the party I was going to have, and possibly even some kind of poll.

There was also a link to the blog. It had occurred to me that a website would be a good place to put up emails. I had had various friends who had gone travelling around the world for whatever reason, and one thing they all did was write long emails about their latest activity and send them to everybody they knew. “Why not just put these things on the web page?” I thought to myself. “Then people can access them whenever they want, and nobody will feel offended that I forgot to CC them!” It didn’t take me long to find out that this wasn’t an entirely original idea, and that in fact there was a whole website specifically designed to make precisely this kind of thing extremely easy.

I still can’t dismiss a lingering feeling of superiority over other bloggers who blog just because services like blogger exist. I started using blogger because it exactly met my needs. If blogger hadn’t existed I would have done it anyway, albeit in a much crappier way. This feeling of superiority is somewhat diluted when I come across blogs that only exist because of services of like blogger but are still better than mine.

I decided very early on that I needed a policy on the kinds of things I would write about. My policy, essentially, is that I write as if everybody in the world was reading and make no secret of my identity. So I never write personal stuff about other people without asking them, I never make fun of anybody (well, maybe sometimes in a nice way) and I never write anything I wouldn’t want my parents to read. Sorry, everybody!

The only other options I’m aware of are to write commentary about news or social trends – impersonal stuff – or post completely anonymously and don’t tell anybody you wouldn’t want to know. The first is boring unless you really have an original point of view, and the second is dangerous because it’s easy to become lax and start giving away too much detail.

What amazes me is the people who write without any kind of policy. They make it clear who they are, and write stuff as if people will never find out about it. Google is strange and powerful, and I’m often surprised by people stumbling across this site searching for something quite innocuous and sending me emails like “Hey, I didn’t know you had a blog!”. If you’re not careful things like this or this can happen to you.

Unfortunately, my policy can make things a little dull. There’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t write about anyway because it’s personal, but occasionally there are things I’d love to blog about but can’t – or won’t. Particularly now, when I’m working for a company at the cutting edge of large scale games design and I have all sorts of access to all sorts of stuff. Last night I spent a while playing a game that isn’t released yet, but I won’t say what it is or what I thought of it. This kills me. I won’t even fully spell out the name of the company because I don’t want to start showing up in Google searches for it.

When I’m spending most of my time working it does tend to mean that the blog will become a little dry. It’s not so long ago that I was leaving stuff out because I thought the entries were getting too long – Doug’s visit, Nicola’s visit, the Gates… Mind you, I only worked a day and a half this week, and maybe only half the week next week – I guess there’s hope.

So what makes a good blog entry? Is it only worthwhile writing if I do something or go somewhere interesting? That could be a problem – nothing kills readership quicker than infrequent updates, and I’m right on the edge of that as it is. But does that matter? I only started this for friends originally. Why should I care if anybody else reads it? Ego, I guess. And it’s fun interacting with people you know only in the blogosphere.

Moving to New York and starting from scratch was inherently interesting for a while, I suppose, but it’s been a year and a half now. I’ve lived in the same apartment for nearly a full year. I have an income, although it remains to be seen how long that will last. I’m hopeful it won’t vanish too quickly. So whither the blog? Whither? Is this kind of thing an acceptable substitute for reportage? Should I stop feeling the need to update on a regular basis?

Oh, I also have a minor policy about spelling errors and egregiously bad writing (I’m ok with excess verbiage for some reason). If I notice it within ten minutes of putting it up, I’ll fix it. If not, it’s just out there and I let it go. I doubt I’ll be changing this policy, I just wanted to mention it for the sake of completeness.