Be a Fan

Remember that movie Almost Famous? The one that made you think you were born 30 years too late to have any real chance at ever being cool? Who was your favourite character? The pimply kid who was given an opportunity to write for Rolling Stone magazine? The roguish rock star? No. You wanted to be Penny Lane didn't you? Of course you did. She was fucking awesome. She was also a hell of an adventurer. Not because she had any real ambition or thirst for experience, but those Band Aids saw most of America simply following a fad around. The reasoning might not be great, but in practice its a damn good way to see some stuff.

Last summer my friend Lili decided to follow Kila to Tory Island. Now at the time I couldn't have given a toss about Kila, I just thought "wa-hey camping trip!" Nobody wants to hear me go on about Tory Island again (best weekend of my life blah blah blah) but if Lili hadn't been a Kila fan, and I a willing accomplice, I'd never have seen this...

Or this.















Or THIS!







Last night I saw Wiggle play in Monroes. They're not the kind of band we would go see very often, usually opting instead for singer-songwriters in skinny jeans in the Roisin Dubh but ever since I first saw Wiggle in the Spiegeltent in Cork in 2005 I've been hooked. They are just so bloody infectious! You can't not wiggle at Wiggle. So what was so special about last night that it qualifies as an adventure? It was just... different. Wiggle's Band Aids are the lost children of West Cork hippies, and they dance barefoot in that distinctive hippy fashion; you know where they adopt a haka-like stance and slowly lift one naked little ankle-bracelet adorned foot, placing it gently back on the ground and then the other while their hands, grasped prayer like do elaborate figures of eight in the air in front of them, their lithe vegan bodies following their hands, like divers practicing on dry land, all in time to the less prevalent beats of the music so that when you look at the while crowd dancing like this it seems as though they are trying to slow the music with the force of their minds. They were awesome, I loved them.

A few friends were talking recently about the people who move to Galway (specifically from Dublin) because they think living in Galway secures their status as free spirits. Owen tried to argue that it wasn't unique to Dublin. "Put it this way" he said, "there are 14 million people in Spain, yet all the hippies are here."