What yall doing on Halloween night (well, the 30th to be precise)?

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This is a picture of St Christopher, who was the patron saint of travelers, carrying someone meek. Ham Sandwich's first album opened with a song called St Christopher which contained the lyric 'carry the meek'. I always liked that lyric, and here's a little known compost fact - I suggested the band call the album 'Carry The Meek' one afternoon when they were experiencing collective brain meltdown in their search for a title. How about that eh?

I also appeared floating on a flaming pie to John Lennon in a dream once and suggested he rename The Quarrymen...you know the rest. And Chris deBurgh's thrillingly titled new album Moonfleet and Other Stories, that was me too. Moonfleet, I thought, conjures up a great feeling of romantic mystery. What is Moonfleet? A ghostly horse? A beautiful faery? Chris's speedboat? As for the 'other stories' bit, well that was a stroke of raw genius. It alludes in a classy manner to the multi-faceted and literary nature of Chris's songwriting gift - he doesn't just sing songs, he spins mystic yarns; songwriter, storyteller, object of female admiration, litigant. What a man.

Enough of that. This post is really a plug for Ham Sandwich's White Fox album launch which will happen in Temple Bar's Button Factory on Saturday 30th at 8pm. Tickets are €15. Expect a carnival atmosphere, lots of special effects, fancy dress (advisable) and so on. Look out for me. I'll be dressed as a rubik's cube.

Crow returned charred black

Tweet The leaves are tumbling and sometimes you can smell turf burning on the breeze. I'm on mid-term break from my school job and forcing myself to find little things to enjoy during this steely grey October before the most grim and austere Christmas we will experience in a generation - what with that front-loaded budget of pain to pile-drive us all further into the murk. So, I try to look upwards. The ground is all mud anyway. And the fallen leaves in Kells are uniformly diseased. They mostly come off the trees green, which seems weird at this time of year. Until you look at them on the ground, that is, and notice that they are completely riddled with crap. Most are covered in what look like moles; they're pocked by raised black swellings, some sort of bubonic looking shit. Others curl nastily around shreds of green, seemingly burnt at edges that are brown and tracing paper thin. Hold these to the light and you will see tiny grubs within, mining through the leaf and feeding on its essence. Or don't. For your own sanity, like.



When I walked past the old Gaelic football grounds yesterday, I noticed crows (jackdaws) behaving strangely, and beautifully. The huge sheet of netting behind the goals, which was used to catch stray balls back in the day, was covered in perching crows, cut pure black against the hard sky, and assembled into two groups on either side of the net. Every few seconds or so, a crow on one side of the net would let go and swoop in a graceful inverted parabola toward the other side where it took up a new perch. As soon as it began doing this, all the crows on either side of the net followed suit, the ones on the left swooping right and the ones on the right swooping left - a synchronized show that resembled nothing less than trapeze artists swapping perches at a circus. Once the net stopped trembling another crow would decide to take a tumble and the whole process would begin again. It was mesmerising, yet odd. I stood watching this perpetual motion crow dance for a good fifteen minutes and as I left, it showed no sign of stopping. By then, I was no longer seeing crows, but their flight - perfect geometric curves described on the graphed science paper of the net.

Irish music round up part 1 - with a very short note on each group/ song. 
(This is the first part of a round-up of some of the fine Irish music I have on repeat.)

Thread Pulls
MP3: Thread Pulls-Weight

Thread Pulls are wizards of rhythm from Dublin. A duo with a sound that utilises a spare frame of drum and bass, they create songs that groove and slither like things underfoot. The most obvious comparison is kraut-rock, but there are hints of psychedelia here and stronger overtones of post-punk stuff like Gang of Four and The Fall. This is uneasy music for people who like to be challenged (e.g. fans of www.thequietus.com and people who take ferry trips to see industrial Japanese grindcore bands play run-down biscuit factories in the North of England). A nightmare before Christmas.

Porn on Vinyl
Porn on Vinyl is one of the aliases of the hyper-prolific young DIY factory Aidan Wall, who also records as Hipster Youth. His new album Old Folks' Home is a bewitching riddle of a thing altogether, and I want to get my hands on the lyric sheet so I can decipher more than the intriguing snippets of dissociated-identity-disorder poetry that have floated from its mournful ground-fog so far. It's music that will delight any fan of The Microphones/Mt. Eerie and, in spite of Wall's grasp of a lovely fragile aesthetic, it's another uneasy piece of work. Is it the time of year?

MP3: Porn on Vinyl-Song for a Dead Poet

Groom
'Marriage', Groom's new album, on Popical Island, is definitely NOT uneasy. It is a sparkling, trumpety, poppy (of course), shaggy dog ode to a life's love. The star single, 'the golden age' reminds me strongly of one of my favourite 90s bands the Boo Radleys with its trumpets and 60s indebted melodic pay-offs. The album continues along the same vein, wearing its heart on its sleeve and pushing big shiny buttons in a way that only someone in love with classic pop (nearly) as much as he is with his wife can do. Check it out.

This Golden Age by groomtheband





The Holy Roman Army
Speaking of The Boo Radleys, I knew The Holy Roman Army were a band after my own heart when I heard them play a familiar pretty song one night. It took me while to work out just what it was, but when I did I laughed out loud. It was a completely obscure Boo Radleys B-Side from the mid nineties that I am sure nobody else in the room might have known. Intuitive and unique cover versions are only one facet of The Holy Roman Army's talent. Their debut album, How The Light gets in was a winner, a mixture of nuanced songwriting with Bristol (via Dublin) trip-hop beats. And look! There's new stuff on the horizon. They provided the 'heap with an exclusive MP3, an instrumental demo of some new material that will have vocals added soon. It sounds great, full of hints of Massive Attack, shoegaze, and other lush stuff.

MP3: The Holy Roman Army-Capio Nightingale

Nelly's choco hoops

Tweet OK, remember I said Drimnagh was the twilight zone? Well I only half-believed it until yesterday evening but now I'm convinced. I was on my way back from college on the 121, weaving through the bowels of west Dublin's spooky semi-detached labyrinth when something brightly lit caught my eye. Then, a sound. Musical fragments whistling over the frigid breeze, through the cracked upper window. I looked out. It couldn't be? I rubbed my eyes to make sure...it fuckin was and all. An ice-cream van. All lit up pink, bobbing over speed bumps in the waning winter light and playing a rinky-dink rendition of how much is that doggy in the window. It stopped on a corner. As the bus swooped by, I could already discern one or two oldies toddling towards the van with their money pouches out.

Spooky. Who the fuck wanted ice cream in the middle of February? After dark? Was it really an ice cream van? Maybe it was some sort of roving alien vessel, filled with kindly aliens handing out eternal life elixirs in frosty cones; a secret that only the geriatrics knew about - like in Cocoon. Or maybe the grim reaper has a sense of humour? Maybe he likes to mix death with pleasure, swapping the souls of old people for cornettos, as he trawls through his richest picking ground, Drimnagh.

Coffin Dodgin' on the 123

Tweet This is something I wrote for my brother when I lived in Drimnagh a few years ago.



I currently live in a part of Dublin called Drimnagh. Drimnagh is Ireland's twilight zone. It's a dilapidated maze of pebbledashed semi-dees from the 50s and 60s populated by three large swathes of Dublin society, taxi-drivers, retired herion dealers (also known as taxi-drivers), and, most of all, the elderly - wait, scratch that. The elderly, you see, can be divided into a further three categories. First there are the slightly younger and more robust elderly women in their 60s. These muscular creatures with dyed perms, huge shopping baskets and credit union books always expect me to get out of my bus seat for them. This, even though they are obviously stronger than me; what with them being built of hard-wearing material (whatever 'brick shithouses' are made from) and well capable of beating the living fuck out of me if they felt like it. I call these the bruisers. They've been battle hardened by a life of cracking skulls in Michael Guiney's January sales in order to buy reduced argyle socks for their beta-oldie husbands.

Bruisers are as tight as fuck. For example, if they heard there was a mega two cent discount on Homestead marmalade on Mars, they'd try to phone the US president in order to find out if the upcoming Mars voyage accepted the Dublin Bus-pass. Their fave hobby is ringing in those ball-tighteningly awful radio talk shows and roaring at people in shrill Dublin accents about nothing in particular. If you're young and have a point to make, one of these battle axes is positively guaranteed to come on the air and rip you to shreds with the exact same argument, "I'm old, I have kids, and therefore I should fuckin know!!" Its brutal, punishing, and highly characteristic behaviour from these stubborn beasts. If Dublin was nuked tomorrow, only cockroaches and Bruisers would survive long into the holocaust and eventually, as nuclear sunset cast its last feeble ray of light over Dublin, the Bruisers would win, beating that last cockroach to a mouldy pot of marmalade in the dusty recesses of an abandoned Centra.

The second type of old people are still tough and wiry, but age is catching up and they've begun to smell. I call these ones 'the musties' because of their mothball aroma. Musties are a kinder and gentler breed of older person when compared to the Bruisers (but never doubt their toughness, they're often retired bruisers and like a retired boxer can still whip a killer jab out of leftfield in a January sale). If you can get past the old-person aroma, a Musty makes a great bus companion. They love to chat about the old days, and as you pass through the heroin-ravaged liberties area, they'll wax lyrical about old Dublin, bringing to mind the days of Joyce's short stories, a city full of flat-capped boys on rickety bikes, seafood, and rousing ballads drifting from the open windows of pubs - except not so clichéd because it's their own memories. Musties are often very open-minded (sometimes old age does that to a person I think) and will happily chat to a Nigerian immigrant about the rare oul times whereas a bruiser will mutter spite-filled oaths under their breath. Musties are the salt of Dublin and should be treated with the utmost respect. I always happily give up my seat for a Musty.

The final, and most terrifying, category of Drimagh's vast grey army is the Fossil. Fossils are terrifying because every time a rogue bus driver hits the brakes too hard you know hips might break, hearts might beat their last and wafer thin skulls might crumble. Fossils are the most ancient of the old, with pure bald heads, trembling frames, and faces that look like atlases made out of liver spots. They don't smell of wee because all moisture has long since left their dessicated bodies. They smell of the inside of the pyramids, of the inner chamber of newgrange. They are often carried onto the bus swaddled in blankets, and carefully placed onto seats by children who are already so old they are already themselves Bruisers or even Musties. Every time the bus rounds a bend, I pray silently for these living museum exhibits.

The 123 carries an alarmingly large Fossil cargo by virtue of the fact it stops in James's hospital. Every journey on that bus is like crossing the river styx. In my opinion, Dublin Bus should put a special bus on for the Fossils. I can't bear the tension in the mornings. It's like russian roulette on wheels.

Kells Speak 101: 'Wheel on' and the C word

Tweet By Gardenhead age 11 and a half 
  
Well, are yis well (hello) as they say in our neck of the woods. They also say wheel on! (get lost); wheel the biscuit (a creative variation on wheel on!); and wheel the mikado (a creative variation on wheel the biscuit). A mikado, my transatlantic chums, is not a famous opera but a disgusting and unique little pink coconut biscuit with a hemorrhage of jam in the middle. This makes it look frightfully like a little old lady's pink perm after someone split her skull with a lump hammer (interesting, considering the mikado is primarily eaten by little old ladies with pink perms - "aahhh yis'll have a mikado", to which the cheeky Kellz lad will reply "wheel de mikado, ye 'oul hoor").  

a little known page towards the back of the book of Kells describes in Latin how Jesus asked the traders would dey ever wheel on out of de temple

  
Down through the years the good folk of Kells managed to mangle English into something truly twisted and guttural. Not for us the gentle toora loora tones heard in west Clare or Donegal. No, we are the Germans of Ireland - with rasping magpie accents and a brutalized lexicon that can cause outsiders to break down in tears with sharp items dug deep into their bloodied ears to ensure they never hear someone in a Kepak jersey caw the word 'rubbidge' again. Enter a Kells pub and you enter the 7th circle of dialect hell - a cacophony of 'yises' and 'yissers', and, of course, our favourite word....'cunt', slicing casually through the chatter in all its cruel hardness. In Kells, and moreso in such surrounding Deliverance-style backwood parishes as Bohermeen and Carlanstown, we've taken the c word and made it our own. It's the nuclear weapon of swear words - guranteed to decimate a conversation with any polite american, leaving them standing slack-jawed in a radioactive silence. Yet see how quickly and nonchalantly it flies from our filthy Kells gobs. And how flexible the word becomes in our many uses of it. Sample conversation: 

"that cunt Logy is some cunt" (abusive) 
"shut up about Logy ye cunt, (playful) just because he broke the cuntin' (adjective) gear shift on your John Deere" 
"Ahh you've me well worked out. You're some cunt" (admiration) 

Well childer' (children) I bet yissers (you plural) are getting yisserselves (yourselves) confused by this stream of rubbidge (rubbish) I'm wriking (rhymes with viking, means writing). I'd better wheel de fuck on out of here.

Satan is real, working in spirit...

Tweet *update - this post has been edited slightly to remove a couple of errors.

Righteo, time to start farming the posts out. First, this is going to be a bit of a catch up on some records I've enjoyed over the past few weeks, a book or two I've read, and other lil things I've enjoyed. Let's start with Deerhunter's new album, Halcyon Digest.

The cover art comes first, as is usual on 'the heap. I am very fascinated by it and I have been unable to find out who took the photograph. It looks a lot like one of Diane Arbus's freak show images, but I am probably wrong. It also reminds me of an old interview with Bradford Cox that went up on Pitchfork when he was talking about how important certain iconic album sleeves were to him as a teenager, and how they added something quite specific to the allure of albums he loved. Of course, him being Bradford - and obsessed with sickness and all - he picked out David Bowie's big papery, yellow, sick head on the cover of 'Low' as his favourite cover, and, if I remember rightly, he said something along the lines of "I just connected with how fucking sick he looks on the cover of that record, like he has nuclear poisoning or something". 'Station to Station' got a look in too. Bradford, as we have seen from this and Atlas Sound's 'Logos' (a photograph of blistering light shining out of his concave chest - a side effect of his syndrome) is all about throwing sickness and disability out there as part of his aesthetic. And this is a good key to what early Deerhunter are about. 

They are about illness and disease, desperation, unrequited love, and all 'round feverish stuff. I said early Deerhunter, because 'Halcyon Digest', in spite of its arresting cover image, is not so much about these obsessions. Indeed, I think the album is less the invention of Bradford, and more the work of guitarist Lockett Pundt who has a syrupy, shoegazey bent - check out his Lotus Plaza stuff - and who generally writes songs that are innocent and awestruck as opposed to ill and clammy. 

I'm not sure if it is Deerhunter's best album, but Halcyon Digest is definitely their most accessible. It also has, in Helicopter, the single most beautiful song they ever wrote (narrowly pipping 'Strange Lights'). The song is a love letter of sorts to all their influences - shoegaze, the Velvets, '60s girl groups, Bowie, Animal Collective and on and on. They are musician's musicians, and never moreso than on this album. 

MP3: Deerhunter-Helicopter

Is your jury in or out when it comes to Ham Sandwich? If it is out, I suggest you should go to see them play live before making a final judgement. I have a complex and involved relationship with this band considering that Podge is my old school chum and has been, at so many times, a hero. Yet I would like to think, that regardless of all that, in some alternative universe I would love the band as much as I do had I never met any of them. It's hard to pin down what it is about them that is appealing at the atomic level, but I think Hardcorefornerds was in nail on the head territory describing Podge's lyrics in 'Animals'..."even if it is nonsense, it's beautiful nonsense"

“we could wake up the city, with pearls and waterfalls, and roll around on the carpet. And if it feels like I’ve left you, you could make a paper doll, and leave it lying there, or whatever makes you emotional.”

The bottom line with this lyric is that there isn't an inverted comma in sight. And so much of new Irish indie is framed by massive, neon, screaming inverted commas. Irony is all well and good in its place, but we are in the midst of an irony onslaught these days - and it is hard to listen to some (not all) of the popical island stuff, for example, without feeling a bit 'sheesh' this is just a bit too sickly sweet. Now, in saying that, I love a hot lot of Popical Island, such as Squarehead, No Monster Club, and So Cow, but the Yeah Deadlies? That's toothache inducing. The new Ham Sandwich record, White Fox, is a flat out joy...it's all receding, minor-key, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah melodies and cathartic emotional release. It has its heart on its sleeve, and it deserves every success. Beautiful nonsense. Which isn't really nonsense if you give it a bit of thought. Like Noel and Liam Gallagher's early, iconic lyrics before the coke kicked in. "You and I are gonna live forever.."

Some techno...I always have to youtube the techno, because there is a ferocious code of honour at work in the world of techno where you get shot down as 'a leech' if you post an MP3. Admirable, isn't it? Anyway, the track I am sharing is a remix of Walt J's 'Reborn' that's hung around the top of the Resident Advisor DJs' top tens for a while now, and for good reason. Ignore the utilitarian voice intoning "this is a preview" and listen to a properly pulsating slab of music that plumbs the sort of depths Chilean miners would be familiar with.



Books. I am really enjoying two books at the moment. The first is Jonathan Frantzen's 'Freedom' which lives up to the hype and then some. A social realist masterpiece full of characters that are so real you can smell their breakfasts off them. The other is a children's book called 'The Iron Giant' by Ted Hughes, which is spell-binding. It works perfectly for adults, but if you get the chance to do it, buy it, and read it to a child.

Other lil things I've enjoyed - there is a new shop at the front of O'Connell Street called 'The Candy Shop'. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Sweet factory overdrive

My favourite albums of the decade #3

Tweet A long time ago, in a post about Animal Collective, I said I wasn't a big man for lyrics. What I really should have said was that I am a slow learner. Lyrics come slowly to me, they have to percolate through my life experience first. Albums three and album two in my list are cases in point. I can't imagine any version of me younger than 22 or 23 years old appreciating them properly. Not that people under the age of 23 can't critically evaluate stuff. It's just that I was at least that age before I upgraded from mental duplo to mental lego when it came to song lyrics.

And the upgrading continues; it is one of the most lovely comforts of getting older. I turn 30 at Christmas, and I look forward to this because I know that if I spend 2011 reading the same great books I read during 2001, I will read them in an entirely different light. I think Harold Bloom (or some other fusty don) described a masterpiece as something dynamic that anticipates every angle of criticism and experience that comes into contact with it. Being possessed of relevance to any time in history, masterpieces are forever. That's why Shakespeare is constantly getting reinterpreted - set in Iraq, Wall Street, or in a one-man fringe production about Othello refracted through the lens of a tragically fumbled sexual encounter on the carpet behind the counter of Videobox in Kells.

Masterpieces from here on in, yall.

#3 Joanna Newsom - Ys (2006)

Where to begin? The cover? Look at her. Staring inscrutably out at us, surrounded by more symbolic bric-a-brac than ya'd find in the Dutch Renaissance section of a leaving cert art history reader. Because of that cover image, nobody will ever impulse-buy Ys, bring it home, pop it on the stereo, listen to Emily and think 'fuckin' swizz, where's the sick beatz?'. The painting, by an artist called Benjamen Vierling who worked closely with Newsom, clearly indicates that this is an album with a shitload of, like, meaningful stuff and things in it - or, to paraphrase one of the founders of the tradition to which her lyrics clearly belong, it's a work that contains multitudes. 

If the lyrics of Ys were laid out end-to-end, they would circumnavigate the earth three times over, with a bit left over for the moon. Apart from the Manic Street Preachers' Holy Bible, I don't think I have ever heard an album so incredibly text heavy. Over five lengthy songs, Newsom sings her way through huge encyclopaedic blocks of near-prose, giving a strong impression that the words came first; that they were spewed out in the raw and the music had to catch up later. Because of this approach, the melodies feel unruly and strange. But where the Manic Street Preachers tied jarring interpretations of hair rock and punk to the ballast of Richie Edwards' word vomit, Newsom's dense text is augmented (I really believe the lyrics came first) by her virtuoso harp playing, her indescribably unusual-yet-beautiful voice, and by Van Dykes Parks' chimerical arrangements which bestow an aura of intense otherness to songs that were weird enough to begin with. 

The oniony layers of depth in Newsom's lyrics on Ys would require a book to disseminate them properly (something sort of already done, funnily enough). They are knotted and fantastical, reference-heavy, allegorical, romantic, and sometimes delirious. Her subject matter is multifarious, veering from semantic riddles about the physical nature of meteorites to parables about animals (a monkey and a bear hang out in a song that starts out like a nursery rhyme but develops into a sophisticated tale of shifting sexual control between a male and a female). In fact, Joanna Newsom sings so much about animals on Ys that she's almost shamanistic, switching perspectives within a zooful of birds, bears, monkeys, butterflies and dogs. Inanimate objects get a look in too - "push me back into a tree", she sings on Sawdust and Diamonds. It's sensual and often rapturous stuff that takes delight in using the fruits of the North American landscape (did I mention Walt Whitman? We might as well throw in Emerson too) to drive narratives of erotic and fraternal love.

Fraternal love. That's where I'm going to end this. My favourite song on Ys is its opening track Emily, in which Joanna's love for her scientist sister is invoked through an ever-building momentum of rhapsodic imagery and vocal somersaults (Newsom reminds me of Van Morrison in how her vocal inflections draw you toward meanings beyond the face of a lyric). Possibly referring to her sister's academic colleagues, she sings

"I make this claim and I'm not ashamed to say I know you better/ What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter."

Of the many things I admire about Ys, I probably most like that Newsom's purest expression of devotion is to a sibling who taught her about astronomy as a child. There's an awestruck wonder in that song, wonder unchecked. And though I could go on like a verbally incontinent maniac, I'll leave us there; at 'awestruck wonder'.

MP3: Joanna Newsom-Emily

Joanna Newsom - Emily by asleepontheheap

Maxithermal's golden greats #2 (Dayshifts at the chocolate factory)

Tweet The compost heap will go back to its musical roots this weekend. Promise. In the meantime, enjoy another ancient post from my brother. He currently looks after Dublin's sewerage outlet in Ringsend. That's all the shit in Dublin, yo. To attain this wonderful job he served a hard apprenticeship doing PhD research on the deflocculation of Kerry people's hot excretions, which is possibly the most grim PhD ever undertaken.


factoid: some hipsters are able to poop out knitting

Dayshifts at the chocolate factory
‘Student of sludge’ says the tagline above, and indeed I am, indeed I am. Yet it is rare that the noble pursuit of what I like to call ‘brown science’ gets a mention on this page. The paucity of blogs in recent months is due to my ever increasing descent/ascent into the fundamentals of faeces. In light of this, I am not going to try and snap from my current mindset to write about Ryan Tubridy and The Rose of Tralee, much as I’d love to; God did you see the 28 escorts singing Greased Lightning? A blog all in itself that was. I also don’t have it in me to continue my piece on The Cabbage; that’s too close to the bone right now; though I promise it is coming. So instead I’ll talk a little literal 'shite'.

Have you ever seen a river of shit? I’m not describing the torrential turd-like typing of this website, but rather the peerless spectacle of a genuine shit-river? No? Well let me tell ye all about it. It was like a honeymoon in Bangladesh. Following a night of monsoon rain in Killarney last weekend, the influent to the chocolate factory (sewage works) already augmented by the seasonal influx of tourist-poo, increased to an overwhelming volume, to such a volume that even the backup overflow catchment of the overflow system overflowed.

I was sitting at my desk typing, oblivious, forgetting the delay between rain in the mountains and subsequent effects downstream. About midday I realised I’d left my ciggies in the canteen and made to move across the yard for them. I opened the door on an awesome sight. Manhole covers were bursting upwards all over the place, borne aloft frothy brown geysers. A platoon of squeaking rats fled past my portakabin office, a bad sign in any circumstance, and it later turned out that these were the lucky ones which weren’t drowned in the pipes. A low rumbling spooked the ground. Something was stirring.


ho-boy

Behold! The shit-river had burst forth in the week of the assumption! Just as it was prophesised in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci (they prophesise most things, get in the know, Da Davinci Code, $20 Amazon, wink wink) and more importantly, just as it was ominously foretold in the following stanza, which I penned the day after the events in question, and despite its post-dated nature it’s still admissible as evidence insofar as the prophecy maintains that “the future becomes the past”.

When Lunasa’s moon is full and the donkey mounts the bull,
When the Muckross beast awakes and Torc mountain gets the shakes,
When the entrails of the man become the entrails of the land,
When the condom and the tampon are swimming hand in hand,

Then first becomes last,
The future, the past.

It goes on you know, something about the Knights Templar and Elijah blah blah blah, but that’s all peripheral my friends, because what I am really trying to convey is what is like to sit in your office and forlornly watch a river of shit divide the no-man’s land between you and your cigarettes and coffee.

Could I run across the logs to get to the other side? Maybe, but what if I got a jellyfish sting off one of those evil looking latex-schiphozoans? Yep, there were all sorts in it, little white-tailed red-nosed submarines, false teeth, cocaine, carrots, doll’s heads, sticklebricks, a hairless dead rat walkin’ like lazarus with maggots. Basically all the clichéd bric a brac that gets flushed down the loo. Flush it. You’ll never see it again. But I will.

The magenta tide receded as quickly as it had formed, leaving a greasy flotsam studded with various objects stratified by density all the way to my office door. Sickly white bubbles spat weakly in the froth as the sun came out to egg on nature’s putrefiers, the bacteria. Digestion continues long after faeces leaves d’bowel.

‘Oh woe is me! What black pestilence is this that moves yonder?’
The bluebottles. Word had spread like Chinese whispers along the chain gangs of blue-bottles which normally cloak the jarvey-droppings in hideous squirming gloves.
“Hey Buzzo, have ye heard?”
“Heard what, Johnnny Sixleg III?”
“There’s an egglaying orgy goin’ on at the chocolate factory, the prophecy has been fulfilled, some hot broads are flootin’ eggs out a million a minute, some A1 eatin’ and infectin’ potential too”
“I’m there Buzz, tell the boys, I’m sick ‘o eatin’ this horse shite. Ye see, the human, on account of his omnivorous eating habits and taste for exotic pharmaceuticals makes for some freaky-deeky shit bro”.

Shiny assed fuckoff bluebottles gorged themselves on it for hours. Feeding fat on our expulsions, then mating, laying eggs, and dying. The circle of life or something.

I hiked my trousers up and legged it across to the canteen for my lunch. I’ve a friend working as a garbageman and he reckons that after a while you don’t notice the smell, and it’s true. I happily ate a chicken roll that day, surrounded by divebombing bluebottles, breathing in a noxious concoction of fruity faeces vapour and ammonial piss. You know, all the treated poo goes back on the land anyway. And that lovely Kerry beef and butter? Born and bred on fertile plains stimulated by shit. Like I said it’s the circle of life or something.

Honest work is sludge, tell a lot about a people from what they excrete, yesiree.

Bollocks, it’s just a smelly brown mess.

Aha.

"I've-got-a-gr't-family-vault-at-Kingsbere--and knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!"

Tweet My little sister is getting married in the morning. At present, she's sitting around with her bridesmaids, applying all sorts of weird shit to her feet and the house is suddenly full of so much chocolate, champagne, and Marks and Spencer's shit, that I'm experiencing an odd seasonal cognitive dissonance and half expect Fairytale of New York to start playing somewhere. Anyway, enough about my brain. Congrats Aisling and Martin!

Maxithermal's golden greats

Tweet Oh joy. I found my twin brother Ciarán's old blog archive. Here's one he wrote years back about the TV show Lost when it first started. How prescient he was.

The intense devotion and debate which surrounds current TV show of the moment Lost doesn’t surprise me at all. Lost appeals to the same demographic that the Bible Code, the Da Vinci Code, Donnie Darko and the X-Files appealed to, you know, the usual suspects who send out those emails outlining the profound coincidences between the death of Abe Lincoln and JFK, and who laughably thought that the Matrix had anything deeper to say other than that dressing all in black makes you look like a complete shithead unless you are Johnny Cash or Darth Vader.

What I am about to say may make me seem like an intellectual snob, and you may question my getting all worked up about a TV show which after all is just a TV show, but I am just sick to the back teeth of shit like Lost with its delusions of profundity.

Lost has the ever popular ability to make certain people feel clever when they notice things like the fact that the numbers on fat man’s lottery ticket correspond to the numbers on bald-man’s beloved bunker. Of course the observational skills you require for noticing such things need not be any more developed than those which helped you successfully complete the spot the difference in the Funday Times as a ten year old, but that’s not the point. Once the numbers have been spotted then comes the big question. Your beady observational skills have triumphed, and you’ve impressed all the other Lost fans by noticing that the fat hairy fucker’s trousers measure 42 inches, and now it is time to crank the old analytical skills into action. What is the significance of these numbers? Oh my! It’s fucking profound alright. And what can you do but let that deep question hang there in the air; let it crystallise with philosophical resonance, 42, deep deep shit man, and even deeper if you managed to get some crappy hash this week…the numbers..the numbers..they must mean something astonishing, mustn’t they? So brainiacs? WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN? Contemplate them enough and you might find nirvana like the monk who wondered what one hand clapping sounds like.

As a show Lost has already peaked. It really has only two options available now, to either a) start revealing the answers to its ‘mysteries’, the unapproachable prospect of which I believe leaves the writers sweating, or b) to become increasingly convoluted and inexplicable seeking a meaning in the absence of meaning in that most facetious and post-modern-well what is reality anyway?-manner. It was all a dream. Option A will disenchant its audience who crave questions rather than answers and, if things continue on the current track, Option B will twist the plot in a way that will make Twin Peaks look as straightforward as the instructions on a microwave dinner. I’m inclined to think Option B is the track the writers will take, and the executives will ensure that Lost will peter out in ignominy, scraped as thin as the butter on a Cavan man’s sandwich over at least eight seasons. The big question for all you TV philosophy majors out there is whether the future plot of Lost is already predetermined? Or do the writers have free-will?

What brought my attention to Lost this week is how it has now been linked to The Third Policeman which is one of my favourite novels. For those who don’t know of it, The Third Policeman is a by turns hilarious and nightmarish book by Flann O’Brien. In what I think is the cleverest thing the writers have done, they have turned their army of coincidence seeking conspiracy worms onto this delicious puzzle-box of a book, which unlike Lost, has some great things to say about regret, remorse, punishment, infinity, and the nature of matter; as well as having style, plot and structure. Most importantly The Third Policeman has humour, which is the one thing that Lost is completely devoid of, not unlike many of its fans I suspect. However having said that, I can actually see one way in which Flann’s great book may throw light onto the almost incomprehensible Lost. If the writers have the guns to stick by what I am almost certain their original intention with Lost actually was, i.e. the death of the characters in a plane-crash leading to the purgatory of the island where they relive difficult experiences over and over again then The Third Policeman does shed light on it. Just read what O’Brien himself said about the book:

... When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing ... It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever ... When you are writing about the world of the dead – and the damned – where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks..

I checked out the Lost messageboards to see what the fans thought. Shit book. Headfuck. Feel ripped off. Gave me a headache. Is it meant to be Irish or Scottish? What’s with the fucking bikes? Did the guy die at the end? Ahhhhh He died at the beginning you TV watching moron! Why do they feel cheated? Because The Third Policeman goes swoooshing so far over their heads that they can’t even begin to comprehend what it might be about, because reading a book is an involved experience while watching Lost and smoking a doob isn’t, and especially because those fucking lottery numbers didn’t pop up in it…to hang there all profound and pregnant with meaning. Meaning of what I hear you ask? What indeed.

42 42 42 42.


More of these to come...

Future Islands Winner

Tweet Sorry I didn't announce this during the Antiques Roadshow, I was too busy getting a pedicure - so I am announcing it now during Escape to the Country. Kevin Donnellan is our winner and has been notified via email.

Bzzzzz-zzzup w-w-w-w-w-w-ell done Kevin-in-in-in

Anyone else who still wants to go to this, really should. 15€ will see you into the Workman's Club on October 20th. Stay tuned for album of the decade #3. I shit not, I am nearly through the block.

Uh oh, cheeky bit of tumblr cross-pollination. Fixed now after brutal edit.

Tweet The following blog-post is technically the sort of cheat I wouldn't normally be caught dead doing - most of it was published on my tumblr earlier today. But what can I say? The country's going to fuck, standards are slipping everywhere. Anyway, it's about spiders; and to slightly ease the guilt of reposting something, I'm throwing in two spider-related songs for free. I also changed the text. Go me.

I’m a big fan of spiders, and this is a great time of year to see them in action. With the cooler mornings, droplets of dew and fog can highlight the incredibly complex webs created by the orb-weaver garden spiders that are common to Ireland (araneues diadematus). I’d happily watch a female patrol her web for half a morning and, from time to time, I’ve been a bit cruel and played God by placing flies into the web to see how quickly the spider responds to its prey.

A classic effort from a str8-edge orb weaver. However, these druggy beatnick spiders didn't do so well.

The other spider to look out for at this time of year is the one that everyone is complaining about on facebook; the giant house-spider, or funnel weaver. Indeed, there have been at least five ‘holy fuck I just saw a tarantula’ updates in my feed over the last two weeks. This spider (Tegenaria Domestica) is very active indoors at this time of year because lonely males tend to run around looking for females who don’t come into the open that often, and who are bigger still. They are very territorial and live for a long time, so you’d rarely have anymore than one or two in your house. Because of their size, the hair on their bodies, the speed at which they move, and the fact that they can cast large shadows, they understandably scare the living shite out of people who don’t like spiders. But they are brilliant pest controllers and could almost be looked upon as lil pets. Mr Paddy Landers, our third class teacher (RIP - you great Kerry man who fucked the syllabus out the window, and waxed lyrical to us about Tír na nÓg in such a way that I remember it still), he loved to tell us about a big pet spider that lived in his sitting room and stayed in the same corner for 6 years, looking at him.

Hi Kidz - I'm your friendly neighbourhood funnel weaver - don't be afraid. I'm sound. Promise.

Finally, if you go walking in early mornings you are likely to see hedgerows completely covered in a fine gauze of cobwebs. These are made by sheet-weavers or money spiders, which are the little ones that float across the air as babies on thousands of individual strands of silk. These are ‘lucky’ spiders, and to catch one on your body traditionally meant you were going to run into money. I used to take a shortcut to my secondary school across some lay pasture behind my housing estate, and I recall a burnished morning when the sun shone through an entire atmosphere filled with these little pilots, drifting on a barely-there breeze to colonise the hedgerows. By the time I got to school I looked like Mrs Havisham, covered in cobwebby shit. According to the money legend I should be a millionaire by now, yet the ATM in Centra tells me otherwise. Oh well.


Sheet weavers hard at work at some shit Lady Gaga is going to wear to the VMAs

Yakawowow* the country may have gone to fuck but look! A ray of hope in our darkest hour. Some spider MP3s to listen to. 

MP3: Swan Lake-Spider

Dan Bejar's voice wrecks a lot of peoples heads. A nasal, smug, Bowie-aping whinny that yodels elliptical lyrics and resorts a LOT to a standby trick of singing sorta meaningless vowel sounds - like a nasally congested mare. He also loves to bust out lots of "na-na-na-na-nas" or "la-la-la-las" when the self-referential poetry gets so heady that all he can do is close his eyes and ride hard on this sea-shanty gibberish that is presumably slyly crafted to imply mystic truths, real and elusive, like those Van Morrison chased as he breath-sang his path through the spiritual mists of Astral Weeks. In other words, he's a bit of a pretentious twat. But he goes into the box of lovable pretentious twats, which, as luck would have it, is one of my favourite boxes. Sure, sometimes I get told to sit in it myself.

Swan Lake is Bejar's three-headed indie super-group featuring two other overly-serious Canadians, Sir Spencer of Krugchester and Cap'n Casey Thingamijig from the HMS Frog Eyes. And, yes, I like the voice I, um, described in such detail above. Marmite, eh?

MP3: Mercury Rev-Spiders and Flies

What do people think of 'All is Dream?'. It was very nearly going to be one of my albums of the decade. I hated it when it first came out, thinking that the songs were too heavily produced, that there was too much emphasis on guitar lines, and that it was just very, very, fucking eerie. Lots of the album came over like the rabid imaginings of a shivering man with gollum eyes who did too many drugs, then took to hiding in the hollow bit under the stairs where his best friends are a talking spider, a fly, and a donkey jacket he believes is Abraham Lincoln. Now that I have listened to it a lot more, I can see the depth in it. It's actually an exceptionally great album about the rabid imaginings of a shivering man with gollum eyes who did too many drugs, then took to hiding in the hollow bit under the stairs where his best friends are a talking spider, a fly, and a donkey jacket he thinks is Abraham Lincoln. How could I have been so stupid?

*I will use the word Yakawowow only one more time again. Pinkie promise.