It was interesting to watch International Women's Day play out today as a hashtag drama on Twitter. Many tweets were thought provoking and some were funny; yet, a freakish amount were flat-out sexist. People who moan about feminism being a redundant concept in contemporary society are wrong. Feminism is still needed, and it is needed to inform women as much as men. I work with many women (in fact I am one of two men in a workplace of 26 - a story of my professional and college life), and have stopped becoming surprised by the amount of female conversation [...]
So how nice was the weather today? I was on the phone to a friend looking for ways to describe how intensely Spring-like the day was. The only thing I could come up with was jigsaw puzzles. "You know how when you are making a one thousand piece jigsaw puzzle..." "ehh maybe" "well there is typically a big swathe of blue sky. It's to make jigsaw hard, like. Lots of similarly coloured pieces" "sort of" "you end up focusing really hard on blue sky, because there are so many pieces and it takes [...]
Here is something I wrote about TV for my brother's blog... a long long time ago...kinda edited to be relevant in 2k11...but not that much. My (ten-minute) older brother is losing his blog-grip as events in the real world catch up on him. He might have finally cottoned on to the fact that when you undertake a Ph.D, a certain amount of scientific research is involved and expected. So Ph.D is no longer Ph(eelin) (D)eadly, its Ph(uck) D(is). His last few days have been spent [...]
Gosh February, where have you gone? Not that I'm too bothered about seeing the back of you, but the month slipped by in such a fashion that I wonder if I might have early onset Alzheimer's. Spring can't come fast enough though. Maybe I'm willing it on. Yesterday, I watched some rooks go about building their nests. They use all sorts of mental shit. One of them had a piece of Pat Rabbitte's head in his beak (from an election poster, of course! - although the alternative would be funny), and another [...]
Temporary distractions from the endless churn of grim. It's always the little things that make life a pleasure. Golden Sun III: Dark Dawn Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) are catnip to me, and probably always will be - tragic as it is for man in his thirties to enjoy such cutesy stuff. But I love everything about them: the superdeformed graphic style, the endless grinding, the random battles, and the consistently fine incidental music. The [...]
Ah 2010, you are a foreign country - with your BP oil spills, your head-shops, your ghost estates, and your snoods. Let me try to reacquaint myself with the year that was. Cue Steely Dan: "oooh are you reeling in the yee-yars?" #5 Axel Boman - Purple Drank Purple drank is 'sizzurp' ya get me? As in 'lean'? As in 'Texas Tea'? Ah lads, get with the [...]
...go check out Dean Wareham play the songs of Galaxie 500 in the Workman's Club. 'Snowstorm', '4th of July', 'Tugboat' - all the (non) hits you love. Wear your best cardigan, fasten your top shirt button and, who knows, you might score a fellow indie drip just in time for valentines day. The gig is put on by Harmonic . It starts at 7pm and tix are 18 quid. Having second thoughts? Then listen to this... My recent interview with Dean can be read on State [...]
Wowsers. The RTE news sold a pretty grim slice of Kells life to the nation yesterday . Sure the town could do with a lick of paint and that, but it isn't quite eight-mile Detroit yet. Those fuckin' Christmas lights though, the town council really should have taken them down. Those lights were just asking for it, quivering and whistling in the wind and looking all poetically significant and shit - catnip for young TV producers in search of a killer shot. Anyway, let it be said that the smashed up crappy rot [...]
Yo readers, here is a quick reminder - the Digital Socket Awards are on in Dublin tomorrow. They will be held in the Grand Social which can be found here , with info about the awards too. Come along because it is going to be a really fun night and all of the profits are going to Aware - a charity close to my heart . The secret acts are going to be amazing. The judging panel is full of bloggers and journalists you probably read and respect; and, whatever else the night does, tomorrow will [...]
Coimetromania, hah? When it's at home, it's defined as a compulsion to lurk around graveyards. Last week, a touch (only a touch mind you) of coimetronmania compelled me to go poking around the graveyard in Kells monastery like a bit of a weirdo. The monastery church was burnt down at one point, rebuilt, used as a horse barracks by Cromwell, then extended to make our current church of Ireland. The round tower and a few high crosses are on the grounds, but there are also a bunch of graves dating back as far as the sixteenth century. [...]
Oh, how many lives there are. Did you ever think about it, how many lives, like yours, a night contains? I really thought about it once one night when I was a teenager in Canada. I sat on the bonnet of a car on a hot summer night and I saw all of Montreal spread out in front of me, racing down the mountain from my feet, towards sky scraper rectangles and the scattered cinders of outlying towns. All that life. All those humans. Each one alive like me. And above it all the moon arcing high, shining on how [...]
The brother once lived in Killarney y'know? I didn't. But I have no doubt you will fill in the gaps in my knowledge of your sibling and his erstwhile place of abode . He's a man of the world, is the brother. A cosmopolitan you might say. He's been all over - Australia, Galway, Ringsend, Yorkshire, and Killarney. And I'll tell you a good wan. It's on account of the sewerage. The shite. That's right, the brother travels the world and makes his fortune out of shite. [...]
I returned to work today. It was painful. One of my new year resolutions was to save money. Because returning to work was so painful, I broke this resolution at 5.14pm (according to my Tower Records receipt) when I bought a fuck-off pair of Sennheiser headphones. Were they worth the cash? Yup. My ears feel like were rinsed out with DMT. I am listening to the new James Blake album and I am falling in love with tiny pattering noises in the upper register which were probably accidentally recorded when a [...]
Do you live on an existential knife edge? Do things in your environment send you spinning into uncontrollably black moods that are difficult to manage? Then you probably feel the same way I do about the Northern Ireland football results on UTV. Enunciated monotonously into every wobbly weekend afternoon of the soul... "Glentoran..........one, Glenavady......null". You want to turn them off, but the remote is nowhere to be found and, like kryptonite, they have already sapped away too much of your life-force to turn the telly off anyway. "Ballymena ...............six,........... Cliftonville............null", every grim syllable falls a little heavier on your heart. You [...]
Here's another poop obsessed postcard from the past - AKA my sewage pumping twin brother's brown back pages. I think he wrote this in 2005. I'm reblogging it mostly for the poem at the end, which, as you will see, befits the time of year that's in it. The plague, pneumonia, pleurisy, tuberculosis, smallpox, scurvy, the black lung, the yeasty oesophagus, the mildewed mouth; call it what you want, just don't call it the common cold. Its time [...]
Here's another poop obsessed postcard from the past - AKA my sewage pumping twin brother's brown back pages. I think he wrote this in 2005. I'm reblogging it mostly for the poem at the end, which, as you will see, befits the time of year that's in it. The plague, pneumonia, pleurisy, tuberculosis, smallpox, scurvy, the black lung, the yeasty oesophagus, the mildewed mouth; call it what you want, just don't call it the common cold. It's time [...]
What would you call this time of the year? The tail end of the year? The scrag end of the year? The greasy cold leftover turkey skin and bone shop of the soul? The town is dull and lifeless (pubs in Kells only half-fill on New Year's Eve because everyone with sense cops on and gets the fuck out of dodge after Christmas) save for the odd shit splattered tractor rolling down a rain-slicked Farrell street, and the permanent hive of surly teenage activity around the doors of Xtravision (the only shop doing well in the current economic clusterfuck). Fuckin' [...]
You know when you start something fun, and it quickly becomes disgusting, yet some strange masochistic drive pushes you on? Like ordering, then eating, ten chicken balls dipped nuclear orange sweet and sour sauce, followed by a bag of chips? I'm at that point now. Up to my neck in another taxonomic shitheap of songs, and wondering why the eff I started? I'm afraid the albums may have to wait until the brain cools down. Maybe February. Regardless, there's no looking back now...time to grimace and suck the battered reconstituted muck out of that fifth chicken ball. [...]
"Wow this lad is some kind of creep..." "What sort of a sadcase spends the entire period between Christmas and the New Year blogging about songs?" "No friends, obviously..." "I can see him now, hunched over a laptop in a room that smells of fart, eating aldi peanuts, listening to some bet down MP3, and deluding himself that people care whether Avey Tare or some other lame-a-ZOID gets 17 or 18 in his piece of shit list..." "The lad's thirty for fuck sake..." Shoo, mental crow demons. Shoo! I am actually doing [...]
Let's see if I can get five of these out of the way before dinner (baked pork chops with apple topping and veg). my favourite chromosome is no.9 (left). It's a bit cheeky, no? #19 Avey Tare - Oliver Twist Pitchfork gave Avey Tare's solo album 'Down There' 7 point something in 2010. This made me a bit sad, because even [...]
Asleep on the compost heap
Bison - Quill
Neutral Milk Hotel- Aeroplane Over the Sea
Shinichi Osawa – Big Beach Mix 2012
