Having narrowly escaped my trip into town

A super quickie blog here. Everyone should come check out Storkboy Choons and Colours Move bring their brilliant snowdrifts of 4/4 nostalgiatronica to the Boom Boom Room next Monday July 21st. They love the street they grew up on, Maple Drive. It's also the street I grew up on. In fact, I can smell Maple Drive right now through my perpetually open back window. It smells like leylandii trees and night. Maybe the Boom Boom Room will smell like leylandii trees and night too?



Support will be provided by eclectic Cork band 'The Civilians' and 'The Former Soviet Republic' who is one man, a lot of pedals and a nice line in looping lo-fi. Not bad for a fiver eh?

Here is an MP3 from an album I just rediscovered. When I think of Grandaddy I always think of the word 'chug'. Their best music chugs along in a sad, pretty way. If dying rusty combines could sing, their last splutterings would sound like Grandaddy. Fuck, but I love combines.

MP3: Grandaddy-Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance

Eddie Murphy.

I went to see Kung Fu Panda today with my girlfriend who is obsessed with pandas. We once visited Berlin Zoo. It was all I could do to stop her scaling the glass of the panda enclosure spiderman-style so she could get in to hug the panda. I don't know what full grown pandas do to mad humans who try to hug them, but I doubt it's hug them back. Anyway, unlike Adam who unequivocally advises against Kung Fu Panda, I liked it a lot. It is a Dreamworks animation and I half-expected their usual exhausting barrage of double entendres and gags that reference adult movies to keep older viewers happy (oh look, the panda is doing the bit out of the matrix, oh look the panda is doing the bit out of the sixth sense, oh look the panda just made an implicit joke about masturbation etc...). Instead, the film was closer in spirit to classic Pixar (Toy Story is one of my favourite films of all time), in that the gags were purely slapstick, often very imaginative, and worked on a level that both parents and kids could laugh at mutually. Shouldn't that be the hallmark of a good kid's film? I bet most twentysomething adults still cough back a tear at the exact moment in ET that they blubbed at when they were five years old. I'm delighted Dreamworks apparently copped on to this. Still not a patch on Toy Story though.

I used to joke that a nice measure of a film's awfulness is how many of its characters are played by Eddie Murphy. If there are three Eddie Murphys in a film, and one of them is a grotesque stereotype of an obese black woman you know that you have not just busted right through the bottom of the barrel, but are now deep-sea drilling for civilisation's very last reserve of pure shite, embedded in the earth's crust, some 600 miles below the barrel. A trailer containing the words "starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy" used to make my blood run cold. Tonight, I saw a trailer which incredibly went one step further. It was about a film called Dave. "Starring Eddie Murphy IN Eddie Murphy", it proudly proclaimed. Yes, I know. As if that was a selling point. Expecting a horrific comic porn flick where Eddie Murphy penetrates himself, I managed to make out through my tensely knotted fingers that this film contains a robotic Eddie Murphy controlled from the inside by a tiny Eddie Murphy (a bit like the real Eddie Murphy then). I wanted to vomit. I didn't ask for this eyeball shit-rinse when I paid for my Kung Fu Panda ticket. Also, has anybody else noticed that Eddie Murphy's face is becoming disturbingly more smooth, airbrushed and oval as he gets older? He now looks like someone pulled a rubber mask of 1980s Eddie Murphy over a rugby ball and polished the fuck out of it. Oh man, I want that movie to tank so bad. Eddie Murphy belongs in whatever sort of painful purgatory Rob Schneider is currently languishing in. Actually there's a movie idea..."starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy IN Rob Schneider who IS Eddie Murphy playing an obese black woman". A guaranteed 18 certificate if ever there was one. It would never get past the censors though, would it? If it did, there would be plenty of gibbering post-traumatic wrecks clogging the waiting rooms of our mental asylums.

After Kung Fu Panda, we thought our Eddie Murphy woes were over. Were they fuck. In Cineworld there is only one escalator running down from the third to the second floor. Unfortunately, to go down that escalator you now have to travel through a gigantic 3D Eddie Murphy head promoting his new stinking stool of a movie. With their heads bowed like docile cattle, all the other cinema-goers smoothly passed through his 7 foot cardboard cranium like vitalinea through your digestive transit. I bridled. I panicked. I turned to Loreana. I said "there is no fuckin way I am going through Eddie Murphy's head to get out of here". If it wasn't for Cineworld's fire escape the Gardai would have had to airlift us out of the place tonight, because I would rather eat human poop than go through a giant cardboard Eddie Murphy head. It felt like being forced to take part in some gimpy advertising stunt to promote his latest self-fellating shitefest. And so help me God I wasn't going to let that happen.



MP3 time. Here is another piece of music which reminds me of childhood; Caecilia, by Fennesz (an artist who I posted about not so long ago). The album it appears on is called Endless Summer. Very few album titles accurately represent their respective albums' contents. I can think of a few. Endless Summer is definitely one of them. It is a disorientating, languid and reminiscent meditation on the hazy nature of a hot, sensual season. Fennesz's technique is to often create a graceful (albeit simple) melody, mostly using acoustic guitar. He then identifies its disparate parts, completely dismantles it, and does strange glitchy things to it using laptop software. At some point in the resulting chaos he just about reassembles it again, making it sound alien and transfixing. Caecilia is pure childhood. It wavers like a tarmac haze, and ripples outwards like the enigmatic traces of a young swimmer diving deep beneath the surface of a lake on a sunny day, revealing little until just over 2 minutes in. Then, things just about, but not quite, mesh together in a lysergic carousel ride of see-sawing melody and wonder. It drops you back into the adult world all too soon. Headphones recommended.

MP3: Fennesz-Caecilia

I'm aware I posted music by Fennesz here before that might have been quite droney and repetitive to people who aren't fans of ambient music. If that put you off, give this one a chance all the same. It's far more dynamic and varied in its structure.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover- Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

My secondary school education was a potted history of instruction delivered by the brilliant, the banal and, well, the pure gobshites who I lump in my imagination in a box full of rusty sharp things, huge tropical beetles and rubbish teachers. Along with some of the best mates I ever made, there are things I carry from the leaving cert for life. These include a few poems from the English syllabus, particularly those by Kavanagh. Leaving Cert English, rather than stifling my love of the language (as it seems it did to many who were force fed dreaded 'standard answers' in those brutal hot-house schools), encouraged it. This was helped in no small part by a teacher who encouraged us to love the poems.



The title of this blog will be familiar to many, cribbed as it is from a poem on the leaving cert syllabus (well from the 1998 one, they could now be teaching scripts from channel 4's Skins for all I know). The poem is Kavanagh's Advent, and it's about how children find the sublime in ordinary things, before life experience comes along, opens a big door too wide and lets the light crowd those simple things out. I chose it because I want to do a thing about childhood, or more specifically the music that is steeped in the far-off emotional fragments of childhood memory. Now that I'm 27 my childhood memories are delicate yokes and hard to catch, like tiny floating dandelion burrs from things that were so pure and coloured with life once. They get fragmented too don't they? I think sometimes of a dust mote filled house, decorated by peeling wallpaper with a faded pattern of something beautiful. Yet, things come back sporadically to all of us from this halcyon time, whether spontaneously or evoked.

I say evoke, because, rather than deal with the sloppy quandaries of adult life, many musical artists mine the fertile seam of childhood to create songs that not only deal with this time of life, but, more importantly, evoke it in the listener. Indeed, Boards of Canada (to various levels of success) carved their entire career out of constructing a blurry world of bleached out sound from sampling old instructional TV shows for kids. I want to pick out a few songs that for me, not only describe childhood, but directly evoke it too. The scratched knees. The sunshine shattering to blinding pieces off the edge of a jam jar with a bug in it. Mud. Snow. Sour sweets. The endless late summer shadows and the microscopic thump of your own heart-beat through the glowing veins in your closed eyes as you lie in hay. Or, as old dead Irish dude Kavanagh puts it so much better himself:
'The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges.'

MP3: John Cale-Child's Christmas in Wales

This is inspired by a short story by Dylan Thomas, which in itself is a crystalline realisation of childhood memories. Cale's song bleeds similarly rich imagery. Musically, a steering piano melody melts into slow organ floes, evoking snow, the church, and surely a backwards drift through time itself to Cale's rural childhood. The organ line breaks my heart.

MP3: The Beatles-Penny Lane
MP3: The Beatles-Strawberry Fields Forever

The greatest double A Side of all time? On these two songs both McCartney and Lennon chose not to ride the psychedelic trip into outerspace like many of their stargazing American contemporaries. Instead, they retreated deep into a mental space that was a psychedelic re-contextualisation of their childhoods. Lennon always wanted to go back to the womb, to the innocence of when he was a lad, and Strawberry Fields is the most musically appealling realisation of his lad/womb wish. It's a perfect song. I'm including the Anthology demo, which, to me, is more welcoming, less complex, and therefore more childlike than the finished version with George Martin's sometimes spooksome orchestral overtones. What can I say about Penny Lane? Another strangely hallucinatory and freakishly deep reimagination of childhood by one of the two most talented popular musicians of all time. Both these songs are micro-universes. You can lose yourself in them completely. And all one single. Fuck me. But those Beatles eh?

Grab these Beatles MP3's while they're hot kids. Cos a dessicated purple-haired oldie who used to be one half of the above doesn't want people like me posting them on blogs.

I will post a few more childhood songs in the coming days. I can already think of a few less obvious ones. Any other ideas?

And now for something completely different...

Okay, I'm aware that the last post protrudes from my blog like a big bloodstained, septic toe from Amy Winehouse's shoe. So here's something a little different. I'm a big fan of Saturday Kitchen, especially the bit where there is a performance league rating guest chefs based on how quickly they can cook an omelet. I really like that. It's like a more gentle, environmentally friendly version of that bit in Top Gear where twerpy celebs spin fuck-off polluting cars around a track...actually Saturday Kitchen's motto should be 'destroy an egg: not the environment'.

I have a flatmate who can pretty much cook the perfect omelet. This is no mean feat. In fact, it's typically the standard trick an experienced chef will ask of a novice kitchen recruit in order to prove their culinary mettle. My admiration for my flatmate's skills, however, is somewhat tempered by his habit of calling his eggy creations phenomelets. Yes, that's right, phenomelets. A really bad omelet is a scromlet, because the eggs get scrambled as you furiously fiddle with them on the pan. The perfect omelet should be slightly golden on the underside, well seasoned, and slightly runny in the middle. Not easy. You need some good hot butter and a handy wrist...ugh doesn't that sound a bit like your average night in with Mario and Lisa from Big Brother? (digression: I capitulated and watched the odd episode because there was too much George Lee on the 9 o'clock news. It is completely rancid and not very compelling. If you are managing to avoid it let me describe Mario and Lisa. They are couple in their 40s who look like Xena warrior Princess and a swollen waxy version of Joey From friends. They sit in a bath together and apply fake tan on each other with some sort of huge applicator glove that was specially tailored to fit their mahogany tree-trunk arms. They have a lot of steroid addled sex in the house and tut-tut about the younger characters. They could be the two most awesomely disgusting creatures to enter that hell-hole house). Anyway, today, I made a borderline phenomlet. I called it a menomlet after the indie band menomona. It was yummy, a bit runny, but perhaps a tiny bit on the undercooked side.

MP3: Menomena-Evil Bee



I banged on a little bit about the Gift night on Thursdays in Spy in a previous post. I'd like to really give this a big up because it has some excellent DJs (Loreana, Jay and Frankie) and lots of seriously cheap booze. You're likely to hear mad psychedelic sounds, twisty indie, the odd 60s nugget and electro from Loreana. Her Lolomixes (which feature on the sidebar of this blog) give a good flavour of her musical tastes. Jay and Frankie play indie and new wavey stuff, also electro and basically shit to go mad to. Veritable menomelets of music. Its goes on all night and it's the type of night where people are encouraged to dance the bells off their shoes.

Oh and thanks to everyone who cheered me up in the last post. It's good to talk.

All is not so sweet on the compost heap...

In many posts here, I suppose I have flippantly dived into my personal life in an inconsequential way, picking out little details or observations to pad out my twitterings about music. I never spoke much about the more serious end of my personal life, because other blogs can walk that emotional tightrope, and do that well. I believe that if I tried to walk that rope, I would fall face-first into a pit navel-gazing mulch of no use to anyone coming here for a fix of MP3s and some random digressions. Also I get a bit embarrassed and feel like a sitting duck if I open up too much.

For one post only, however, I feel I should risk mentioning personal things in a wee bit more detail for two reasons. First, some of the regular readers here might have met me out and about the few times I ventured into town recently, and found me in odd form. Second, I want to provide a reason as to why I might not be posting up here as much as usual during the coming weeks. Without going into too many particulars, I have depression at the moment. This is why I am mostly at home in Kells. It's not something I am ashamed of, even though I think there is still a certain stigma associated with the illness in Ireland. It is affecting my life in different ways. Yet, I am on the path to wellbeing thanks to medicine and support. I would never want this to become a "depression" blog (even though, again, I am sure there are many good blogs out there dealing with that sort of thing). In fact that's entirely the opposite of what I typically do here. So I will only be writing when my humour and energy levels swing me into the comfort zone required for the usual ramblings.

My lovely girlfriend introduced me to a band called Galaxie 500 when we started going out 18 months ago. Some of their songs, and this one in particular, calm my mind when I feel troubled. It's that cathartic way that certain songs about being sad can paradoxically alleviate an upset head; simply because of their sheer, yearning, beauty. Thanks for this LoLo and for everything else too!

Business as usual will hopefully return to the compost heap sooner rather than later.

MP3: Galaxie 500-Snowstorm