Friday, November 12, 2010

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."

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Public Lectures: Adventuring while sitting down, learning.

Have you ever attended a lecture?



Not your own lectures for courses you're enrolled in. You're supposed to go to those, dumbass. I mean a public lecture hosted by an institution, academic or otherwise. Like these, or these, or any of thesethese, these, and these.


A composer with the most spectacularly bird-like hands named Robert Robertson (you couldn't make that up) presented a two part seminar entitled "Eisenstein and Synaesthesia" and "Eisenstein in the 21st Century" in the Huston Film School today.

Synesthesia as a concept has fascinated me for a long time now. The creative possibilities for interpretation are almost endless! Loosely defined, synesthesia is a confusion of the senses, so one would see music or hear a colour. Words become associated with visual representations of sounds, colours and images to the extent that it is difficult to reassociate the word with the intended meaning. As disabilities go it's bordering on super power. I mean how cool would that be?


Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Detours: Fort Hill Cemetery

I took my friend Arne Peters to Galway Bay Seafood's factory shop down on the docks for something fresh and stinky for dinner. I mean this fish is FRESH! As far as I can tell the boats pull up to the back of the factory, some gets smoked and/or packaged nicely then sent to the shops, some heads out to the restaurants, and some comes straight through the factory still wriggling and is plonked on a bed of ice and sold then and there. We got two beautiful hake fillets and plan to eat them with sun-dried tomatoes and spinach. Oh, and seaweed. Arne insisted on the seaweed. I think he has glamourised seaweed insofar as seaweed can be glamourised. Arne currently thinks seaweed is posh. Even the dulisk, which my father used to eat by the bag when quitting smoking, did not deter Arne the Seaweed Glamour Puss. Dulisk tastes like the sea weed... on your tongue. Salty. Bad.