Story-lah?

Dublin, kippers, etc.

2010-11-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

Last week I was reading an article in the Indo's Life magazine during a crazy morning in work. Ignoring customers and leaning-with-intent on the bar, I read about a young fella living in Berlin. He told us how the city was recession-null, how cheap coffee and fags were, and essentially how bloody fantastic it was to be him, living in Berlin.
Surely if one was reading the article, the chances of actually ich bin-ing ein Berliner were slim. Being reminded how crap Dublin is in comparison was a bit like being slapped with a kipper at 5 in the morning. It's not necessary; I'd rather eat the slimy beggar, vomiting as I go, and call it envy.

A Lazy Post...Rooting Round My Gmail

2010-08-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

The other night I couldn't sleep. I got up at 4.30 a.m. and wrote to Donald Clarke. Yes, that lovely bespectacled chap off the Irish Times.

"Dear Mr. Clarke,

Bravo!

I am writing to convey my pleasure on reading your writing.

Every Friday morning on my coffee break, I root through the boring,
depressing parts of the Irish Times (where they tell you the world
is about to end...again) to ferret out your reviews on films
and all things cinematic.

I love going to the cinema, but maybe I like reading about them just as much. It's kind of like reading restaurant reviews and never eating out. A guilty pleasure, but one none the less.

I love your use of the English language, and find your sarcastic wit like a splash
of Old Spice on a new-shaven face. This morning, in fact, I was reading your review
of Marmaduke, and your comparison of the hypothetical progress of the
cartoon to primates and picking tics out of their rectums. Despite being caught halfway between toast and an unsavoury image, I laughed and laughed. It cheered me greatlyand I resolved to write to you to tell you.

I especially enjoy your reviews of crap films. Waiting for a Slating is something to savour :)

Keep it up!

Yours sincerely,

Sarah Gostrangely"

*******

Funnily enough, he hasn't replied. Maybe I should get one of those Gmail lock thingys.

Super Blog

2010-07-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

A lot of you bloggeurs and bloggeuses out there will already be familiar with The Anti Room, but just in case, I'm pumping it full steam here.

A feministish-approach blog on all good things, including literature, art, music and sex (there's mickeys!) among other things, this collective blog features strongly on my interweb reading list. It also stops me from blogging myself, which I haven't been able to do with much credibility in ages, or from facebooking, which, as we all know, is the beginning of the end of civilisation.

All in all, a brilliant place to knock over to when a good think is required.

Rarely Done, But "Untitled", Like Van Go

2010-07-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

Great. I've been compared to "The Terror Land", whatever that is...Rehrman on the last post seems to think so. Happy Days. It sounds too Saxon to be considered cute.

A night out with fellow Singaporeans and the ilk in a spectaculare display of diplomacy. Shake hands, drink wine. Actually drink wine was most of it to be honest....and meeting a mighty woman called Regina, who rocked seven shades of shit. A counsellor and a teacher from Bedok (former East Coast SG suburb-turned red light district) we chatted over mixed nuts and the openness of Irish teens.

I can't type tonight. Holy Moses I need to go to bed.

Sweary on a Wednesday

2010-06-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

Muttering, cursing, shouting under her breath, the waitress storms off into the kitchen. Slamming a greasy docket onto the clipboard and yelling "CUNTS, just fucking CUNTS, why can't you be normal humans and not dither at 7.30 in the morning about whether you want your fucking poached egg done medium or medium-well? Who the hell orders an egg medium-well, anyway? God damn fucking cuntish fucking eggs".

On the floor, front of house, the same surly matron is dispensing extortionate shot glasses of "freshly squeezed" (from a factory in Ballymun) orange juice onto the shining tables with what she hoped was a professional veneer. As her back turns to retrieve more slops from the bucket of life, the poor people sitting on table nineteen shudder and pray for the foreign girls next time they come back here, if they come back at all. That young one has one God damn fucking hell of an attitude, like.

One For Sorrow

2010-06-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

"...Two For Joy" is not just the name of a fantabulous book (thanks you Patty S), but is also quite a common phrase, regarding the sighting (or not) or magpies. Whatever baldy cunt made up this adage must have been a bitter pill. Rare is the time I see two, never mind three, of the thieving bastards on any given Sunday. If I'm lucky, I'll get a string of avian singletons five minutes apart, wishing me a lengthy and deplorable run of misery.

We should be shooting them and making mag-pies.

Ha.

Marry Your Cousins

2010-06-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

An Incestuous Love Song...Dropping Well

On The Road

2010-06-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Am on the hunt. For. New. Cycling. Pants.

This expedition warrants capitals because of its very nature. Having mercilessly mocked bipedal buddies about the need for spandex and padded crotches, I find myself in a postition of needing them. Spending prolonged amounts of time on the rothar has made my special place a rather sore place, where blood (circulatory, not periodical) will not go. A little like aid boats into the Gaza Strip, though obviously with a little less political attention.

In Cyclesuperstore (or, Supercyclestore, or indeed, Storecyclesuper) they had a baffling array of women's specific clothing, yet it rather seemed that I was the only woman in the place, since, oh...maybe since it opened. The Bicycle Boys buoying the desks ignored me pointedly and looked the other direction as I examined the stitching on unitards*. The little French boy I commandeered to find long ladies' tights brought me over to the Ridiculously Priced section, where long pants resided for a bargain of 174 euros. We both stood awkwardly examining the stitching and trying not to look at the garish go-faster stripes emblazoned on the crotch. The poor thing looked like he might die with mortification some time in the next twenty minutes. I was starting to feel the same so I donned my oversized Special Person's helmet and got the hell out of Dodge.

*University Retard?
** Cyclesuperstore is, in fact, a good place to go though...They've lots of fancy jerseys and shiny stuff. Cyclesuperstore:- If you're reading this, give us a discount for promotion ok?

Overheard In The Flatlakes Festival

2010-06-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

Grubby Man with Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: Yep, yep, Line One, at position 12, What's up?

Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: Bit of a problem, Line One. Need some help here.

Grubby Man with Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: What? What can be so important? That mad yoke with the jail-time accent from Dundalk is about to go on...

Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: We've got The Barry McGuigan Band here and well...em...

Grubby Man with Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: WHAT?! They finished an hour ago.

Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: Well, the thing is...

Grubby Man with Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: YES?!?! What is it?? I don't have time for this.

Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: Well, The Barry McGuigan Band is down here, and they're looking for cash...so...

Grubby Man with Radiophone Walkie-Talki Thing: K. Down to you in two.

SATC's Big, Steaming Pile of SHIT

2010-06-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

I'm doing it. I'm bringin up Sex and the City, Volume 2, in a vomitous stream of putrid chyme.

The tv programme is a guilty pleasure, a little like cans of Heinz Macaroni Cheese, the yellow variety that slides down the gullet with carbohydrated ease. The book was truly, actually, good, in that it seems like a foetus-ripping assault on the vacuous blondehole that is Carrie Bradshaw.

But the films...well what can I say that would top Lindy West's rampage in The Stranger, or outshout the delightful Mark Kermode's excellent bay?

Nothing, so I'll just suck it up (an expression borrowed from a wonderful United Stateswoman) and bitch about it to all I meet.

Passive?

Meet Agressive.

Sunday Strolly

2010-05-30T14:16:00.001-07:00

All these houses and gates I've never noticed before....when you climb off the bike and start walking the world around here appears like a trompe d'oeil, but greener and plusher because it's May.

I was jogging; the air closer than it seemed when I left the house. I ducked under the bridge and remembered the Luas voice saying "Charlemont". I love train voices; and hearing these places spoken aloud even though they never existed before. Like the other Luas stop "Museum". Like pretend we're in Paris on the Metro. Most Dubs wouldn't know what t'fuck which museem whas where, but anyway. It'll attract those bandanaed Euro-Svens and Brigitas and entice them with our EU ways.

Rant over and I crossed the road. Holy Mackerel, but there's a park I've never seen before. Wedged under the towering bridge and busting with chlorophyll, Ranelagh Gardens is open till 9.30, they say. I'll be back, I promise, less of a terminator and more likely with a screwtop bottle of Sauvignon Blanc under my oxter.

Flims and Schtuff

2010-05-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

Woop woop!! Can I get a woop woop!!

That's exactly what I'll be saying tomorrow night in Schull, no less, at the Fastnet Film Festival.

For years, my darling Human Search Engine has doggedly accompanied me to gigs and live sets and open mics and generally pissing in a corner, loudly clapping with the other two people in the bar, when I'm so nervous I can't hold it in (that's pee I'm referring to) and being an all round topper.

So tomorrow we swap roles, as his fancy animation thingy is part of this short film festival in Cork. I shall be the one shoving him in front of Gerry Stembridge and extolling his many virtues, a veritable muse, while he could just sit back and sip Pimms or whatever it is that film people do, but that he won't, because he's just not like that. Damn.

It feels odd to be out of the limelight, such a weak and wavering beam that is, but my fragile ego will surely cope with it. Nay, I'm bloody delighted for him.

And did I mention that Jeremy Irons will be there too?

Did I??

Cue redfaced, drunken approaches and "I loved you in Brideshead Revisited".

The Roster

2010-05-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

I have turned into that girl, at least a little bit. That girl who cleans ovens voraciously instead of going to the pub, that girl who has given up biting her nails only to discover the untold pleasures of a polished cistern. The girl who vacuums noisily under other's propped-up feet "to get the bacon off the sitting room floor".

My new flatmates are all boys, all younger, with shiny, duckling haircuts and stripy shirts and proper jobs. Hedge funds manager, yes! End-of-month accountanty person, yes! Pharmeceutical engineer, yes! What?! You left the womb when I was learning to write joined-up...

All this pulsing academia does not, unfortunately, stop them pissing on the toilet seat. Someone, someone, does this with clockwork regularity; a jaundiced blight on my otherwise perfect morn.

While hoovering the stairs (I know, I know, I thought only Mammies did that too, sigh), I wonder am I turning into their own personal bean an ti? The one who cleans the shower, and replaces the loo roll and, joy-of-joys, brushes up the pubic hairs from the floor under the sink.

Enough. I suggest we make a roster. A wild look of caged fear comes into their young eyes. Nothing crazy, I assure them, just a simple week-to-week notice of who cleans the bathroom, hooovers the floor and takes out the bin...

Ok, they agree to my surprise. Willingly. They are dotes really. And since they can use Excel, maybe one of them can make a spreadsheet for this document of organisational wonder?

A step too far, methinks.

Mozart Incarnate, innit

2010-05-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Some say reincarnation is true. I like to believe them; in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that I am Mozart reincarnated.

I sat down at the plastic ivories and prepared myself for the maelstrom of melody, the torrent of tunage, the latent genius that only my fingers could deliver unto this divine contraption.

Unfortunately, my reincarnation package didn't cover grinding hours of practice and, well, actual genius. So when I was presented with a flute last night at band practice ("in case you want to give it a go"), at least I was under no such grand pretensions.

That is a good thing, seeing as I'm now googling "beginners flute fingering for retards" and playing the damn thing at the same time, I'm really just releasing a maelstrom of saliva.

Nu Rum

2010-05-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

Nobody likes moving house, especially with a bag o' hangovers. But I did it; I'm so proud (was that an incorrect semi-colon use there? I'm not sure anymore).

Happily ensconced in my shiny new attic room with skylight windows, I can listen to the traffic outside, and still, still, I dream of faraway beaches, of adventures yet had, of awayness, when I think for this past while I've strived for hereness.

Human nature perhaps? Or a fickle Sagittarian urge? I'm not going anywhere, despite the book on Indonesia I've been poring through; I can't, I'm broke. And I don't really want to go anywhere now, I just want to think about it. For the moment.

On a less whimsical note, my new room smells of feet. I met my predecessor, her feet did not stench, I checked. So what could it be? I've mopped the maple-coloured boards and burned enough lavender to repel a coven, but still it lingers, like a bad date that seems to live in the dairy section of Tescos, or a fart on the DART when you thought it was Tara St, but really it was Pearse.

The Mighty Stef stays at Home

2010-04-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

Ooh la la, busy weekend.

The New Band, a.k.a. Disco on a Stick, were supporting The Gandhis in the Village on Saturday night. Got all dollied up in my best showband-era costume, only for the sound check to run late and have 20 measly minutes to play. But a good time, only fell over once.

Working on a Sunday with a hangover, on an empty stomach (apart from Tiger beer fizzy remains) generally alludes to be rude to hungry brunchers and wishing all manner of dastardly deeds onto the spawn of Satan, or the kids who play with their French Toast on the table.

Also came across The Most Unhappy Mother-and-Daughter-Combo in the World, who finished their late lunch of lettuce leaf with bluecheese dressing, to scowl at me with the disappointed moues of raped Madonnas. Piss off, ladies, and call your own damn taxi to Brown Thomas.

All to be done again tomorrow...but lest I have a chance to actually sleep sometime soon, The New Band will be standing in for the Mighty Stef in Whelans from 9-11pm (Monday), probably cos he's sick of gigging and fancies a bit of Corrie or Eastenders instead of the rock and the roll.

Enjoy the telly, Stef, tape the good parts for me.

French Women Get Fat, non? Surely non?

2010-04-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

French women don't get fat, eh?

Set free from work too early today and this is where I ended up, watching Trish's Paris Adventure, or more like another blonde, Oirish Nigella wit boobs cooking up a storm with a West Brit accent. She's no Rachel Allen, thanks Got; watching Rachel's Easy Entertaining is about as entertaining as eating my toenails: how the rich and priviledged promote gremolata and macaroons as effortless dinner party fare through their aquiline noses is somehow too depressing when you're eating cabbage soup (again) and have no friends to cook for.

Trish was a la cite with yummy mummy supreme, Anne-Charlotte, prettily chic in a pressed shirtwaister and obligatory patriotic manicure. How, Anne-Charlotte, do you keep so svelte when surrounded by patisseries and madeleines?

"Bien sur, Trish, we Parisiennes just don't eat. For petit dejeuner, un cafe et un Vogue cigarette...it is our duty to be presentable. It is our pride. I am in agreement with this maxim."

Fine. Bloody fine. This reminds me of that book, French Women Don't Get Fat which I read many moons ago. Obviously I did not heed the advice, or else I'd be sitting in Saint-Germain with my size four arse pertly wedged on my Gallic lover's lap and nibbling some green beans.

The book advises that one can have one's cake and eat it; just not all of the cake, nay, maybe only a thirtieth of the cake. The author suggests a lot of chewing and self-deprivation, but all in a worthwhile cause - to look good. But for whom? Yourself (hmm, ok). Your partner (hmm, yeah that'll work at 4 in the morning passing the chippers). For society in general, so we don't have to end up gazing at lumbering beauties on the Metro? It almost seemed to say that we, as women, must look good (read thin), as it's our only valued contribution to the world.

The most aggravating part of the book is where she suggests going to a dinner party and sipping one glass of bubbly all night. One. Glass. I'm sorry, was this book called How to Be a Complete Slobbering Bore?

If I go to a party I want to have fun. Same as life. This life, ladies, is the only one we have (well, until my reincarnation as a llama) so I say, Fuck the Rules, I'm breaking out and having my tiny cake and eating it.

Driving Miss Dora

2010-04-19T12:46:00.001-07:00

Last week I took my darling friend Dora for a drive. She's learning to push the pedals on her nifty Nissan Micra this summer, and I am chief passenger. As I got dizzy circumnavigating IADT's playground-like carpark, I reflected on my own learning experiences.

Mater Gostrangely, a.k.a. Ms GoMeekly, is not religious, least of all Catholic. However, as I careered and stalled my way around Wicklow circa 2000, she prayed the bejaysus out of her soulless alma. Clutching the carseat with all the might of the protaganist in "Not Without My Daughter" and glowing profusely (she's too ladylike to expire in any other way), poor mama was trying to be fair. "Em, Sarah, a little close to the curb, there," or "Watch it! That's a person, not a hedge."

Of course I took umbrage. Telling me not to do something is like inviting a donkey to ruminate in a bog: it's going nowhere fast. But ten years on and a couple of court cases/road deaths later, i may have to admit that M had a point.

Strangely, Dora is an excellent driver; not surprising, with tuition like yours truly *cue grande smugness. Perhaps it's her reticent nature: she's naturally shrewd and proceeds with caution most of the time. Learners are in fact the best drivers on the road, I reappraise. It's the ones that passed their test ten years ago and feel they can teach others to drive that we should worry about.

Tchuss, Berlin! Tchus!

2010-03-02T05:04:00.000-08:00

Leaving Berlin was a mixbag of beans. Sad to leave behind acquaintances that were like a pot of mouth-watering stew that you spent five hours over, and then dropped on the way to the table. Not enough time.

Happy to be out of the Big Brother art residency. Living with eight people is not this hermit's idea of happy days. Cleaning rota? My arse. Wanting to plant a paintbrush into someone's grey cells? Now that works.

Last kaffee, last Augustiner (the queen of beers, btw), last look out the window over the grey street. That transitory space between leaving and arriving makes me uncomfortable and wanting to pee.

Pints and shriek-laughter in Madame Claudes in Kreuzberg. Trying to sign up for open mic, being delighted when they said it was full, as the paradoxical realisation hits that you're too drunk to play, and too drunk to care what you sound like. An enforced no-show is best all round.

Horrible lurching through Schonefeld Flughafen (airport--he he! what a great word. I'm calling my first born that). Hungover, no sleep and three heavy bags full. Cue distractedly gliding through dutyfree with one eye open and shovelling Clinique moisturiser onto face, images of contact-spread disease relegated to the same dark corner of what time I had my last drink.

Home, finally. Walk around seafront. God I love the sea, I forgot how much I missed it. Counting the yummy-mummies that litter this village-cum-town-cum-wankstain-of-a-rich-surburban-nugget. Twenty one. All in ridiculous, enormous sunglasses and airs of blow-ins and faded, pre-recessionary glamour. The Queens of Greystones, come out of the woodwork in pairs, destined to powerwalk forever, eyes super-model straight ahead, and Roxy jackets to the ready.

Sinead the Schwizzle

2010-02-25T16:36:00.000-08:00

Sinead is that particularly annoying kind of person who seems like she's cutely in awe of you, and being all bashful and shy with her big brown eyes and sad-cow eyelashes, until she insults you as only one who has mastered the art of uber-bitchiness can, like a wooden pole up the proverbial ass, that you realise that she's just a sly schwizzle of a yoke and that you should really just give her a tongue lashing the next time her filthy shadow crosses your path.

And how.

Happy New Year, Berlin!

2010-02-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

Ugh. It's nearly twelve, and I've only started to feel normal again.

Hangovers definitely get worse with age. Where, after a night on the slippery slopes, once I would have woken up groggy, grumpy and feeling like a bag of nails, now I'm debilitated and bedridden for the whole of the next day. That, along with the permanency of cellulite despite brushing my arse with what can only be described as a horse's toothbrush (to no avail, I may add) are the biggest casualties of the ageing process.

Perhaps it's time I started a new year; a new me to bring home from Germany. I did not lose the stone that I had thought I might (How? How could I have thought that, given the proximity of cheap Weissbier and brot from a Polish bakers that would make Dr. Atkins lose his head and join the nearest fatcamp?) and so now I have a week to become pure and skinny, and rejuvenated, proving that my two month sabbatical was good and necessary for artistic existence.

So; new year's resolutions as of February the em...let me check..the twenty fourth, two thousand and ten:

1. No more mixing drinks. I mean in one night, not in a large jug labelled dolly mixture. Though, actually, that too.

2. Clean my contact lenses properly, for 15 seconds like the bottle says, and not peel them off eyelid and lob them into case. This is both manky and damaging. No wonder I can't see shit anymore,- there's probably layers of makeup and...and....proteins or something on those overworked babies.

3. Find a diet and stick to it. I don't mean in some faddish way, I mean just not having dinner at 11.30pm and remembering that standing by the fridge eating dry muesli does count as stupid calorific intake. Bollocks.

4. Refine my bullshit detector. I'm getting pretty good at it too. Being in a new city, meeting loads of new people, brings me into contact with the oddest people. Last Sunday I met Sam, hyperactive artist from well, he said he was a citizen of the world, that goes a long way in explaining his persona. Stupidly I asked what he was currently working on...half an hour later he was still talking, and making as much sense as a donkey presenting a dissertation at a neuroscience symposium. He actually has a wonderful skill there: to be able to talk about something so protractedly and make not one intelligent point. He should be an artist...oh wait.

5. Be confident, dazzling and a Fun, Fearless Female. I'm kidding about the Fun, Fearless Female thing (that is that arse-wipe of a women's magazine Cosmo's slogan. What fucking tripe; it assumes that women who don't subscribe to the Nab-Him-With-Your-Brains-(And Tits) ragology of the magazine are mopey drudges who eschew push-up bras and casual sex. Fun + Fearless + Female in a Cosmo sense = Capitalist Sluts on Speed).

But I would like to be confident and dazzling, and not so self critical. Perhaps it's an age thing: girlfriends in their thirties assure me they just "got to that age" and self-confidence wasn't really so bad anymore. That, and they're too bloody tired from working and baby-watching to give a care. *Note to self...have baby to save self-esteem? Nah...maybe not.

Sometimes I can't nearly get out of bed for fear of my inner voice telling me I'm crap, "go on, just try it, you're pretty rubbish at most things, why not this too? You'll probably fall over, you always do, you're fooling yourself that you even have legs..." etc.

Et.
Cet-
Era.

So yeah, come February 24 2011, I shall be a wunderkind of tiny proportions, shining like a witty, sassy rogue diamond in a mound of dung, sober as a judge and clean as a whistle.

And applying for my new passport...how can I keep the old photo though?

Bunnyman

2010-02-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

"What day is it?"

This is the foremost question in my mind at the moment, as I contemplate that little bunny drawing I did last week. I drew a rabbit with massive ears and extralong arms, because he scared the bejaysus out of me. He still does.

But what day is it? No idea, Mr. Bunny. None at all.

Sound Biter...A Tribute to Rave-Lite

2010-02-18T15:30:00.000-08:00

Not wanting to be every blog reader's nightmare and OVERSPILL, I shall confess: I get down sometimes.

Not in the giggedy-giggedy way, well actually I do that too, but only on birthdays and Christmas, but in the sad-dawg, even-chocolate-won't-fix-this-one-today way.

Not enough to warrant the Men in the Little White Coats (yet) or for a nice prescription of Happy Pills (though frustrated friends and family have suggested it in the past, if only to get me to shut the fuck up), but just in a routinely and predictable shit way, in that nothing seems good, I don't want to do anything, I can't be bothered, and what's the point of it all anyway?

My mum believes it is because I have the fortune (ha!) of being sensitive and perceptive (her words), that I "feel" a lot, and "analyse" those "feelings", summarising and internalising it into "theories on life and living".

Well. That is bloody marvellous but not at three in the afternoon when you are catatonic with snot and considering how to disappear into the Amazon jungle and live with the natives cos you really can't take this day anymore and hell! they get super fit from all that tree-climbing. Toned thighs here I come.

But that was yesterday, and as I passed from lobotomised to dopey to nearly ok again, I stuck on this song for a listen. It never fails to cheer me, especially if I dance like it's 1995 and in a gold mid-length dungaree dress from Miss S, a wine stripy body-top and knee high socks in Lautrex by the Sea.

Which I did. Obv.

Musical Youth

2010-02-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

Was listening to Joni Mitchell's amazing albumen, "Blue" today. I take it out every couple of years like a dodgy set of teeth, examine it and practically roll around on my back like an excited German shepherd on repeated listening. It's that good.

I'd never heard of Joni Mitchell, but I think it was the kind of relationship that needed a primer of two shitty jobs, one crap boyfriend, a summer working in Greece and a few bad haircuts to be ready. Once we met, it was love at first ear.

I was working on a Greek island in the summer of 2001, broke-ish and sleeping with my five girlfriends in a two bed room. I had drawn the short straw and had to sleep on the sofa bed with the girl with the unnaturally ill-smelling feet. We also shared with a beautiful, most lovely girl; she was supercool in so many ways, but lacking in one: she liked to break things like salad cream bottles by accident and NOT CLEAN UP (this may account for a certain anal retentivity on my behalf regarding the immediate vamoosing of jarred goods). All well and good in a manky flat on the quays, but in 40 degree Greece in July, all you can say is "cockroaches" and "infestation".

Anyway, along the way we met many people. I fell in love (for a week or two) with about half of them. The Italian students who didn't speak shagall English, and my Italian being of the Dolmio kind, i.e. insulting, bizarre, and ultimately non-sensical. Ariel, the Argentinian hairdresser, who was a foot shorter than me and a complete misogynist to boot. The odd German girl in the cafe on the beach who I tried to make friends with but just ended up scaring, so much so that I never went to that place again.

We also met Gav, who was from Palmerstown. Tall and gangly with too much teeth and red hair, a charmer all the same. He had a lispe and a Dub accent, and lots of freckles. He smoked pure grass joints (Wow! Like, O. M. God!) and talked with a passion usually reserved for page three girls about the ecstatic heights of Joni Mitchell. Big Yellow Taxi was his favourite. I'd never even heard of her, and unfortunately Gav's enthusiasm for her music didn't translate so well into actually playing it on the scratchy guitar Jon had brought along. But I loved her still, like a widow will love her children even more for the quiet reminders of what's been lost.

Drinking Wodka and smoking Silk Cut Yellow (don't ask) on the Wall by the pier, the breeze of the island sea doing nothing to abate that dry, intense heat smelling of chicken gyros and drunken northern Europeans. Instantly we all became friends and hung round like layabouts on the roasting sand, defining our first year experiences to shape and mould into the others', till our memories of the last year were one collective thought, to be picked at like candyfloss at the fair.

One day I was lying on my frankly disgusting towel and Gav's shadow leaned over me. "This is for you." He handed me, very carefully, a paper cup. Inside was a oatmeal grey, spiny thing that looked like a hedgehog in salt water. Cool.... What is it?

Turned out to be a sea urchin, plucked by Gav's large, pale hand from the obscurity of underwater Greece. Where it once nestled happily between German flipflops and a Dutch couple's underwear, it now lay dying in that crappy paper cup. I didn't realise it at the time, I was so delighted with my new friend and my new present, but I think about its last dying moments on that hot hot beach every time I hear Joni Mitchell.

Drawing Room

2010-02-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last six hours or so trying to resist the urge to throw my laptop out of the first story double glazed windows. I'm trying to make a stop animation, but for some reason Windows Movies Maker is a fucking wanker and keeps skipping when I lay the audio down. Now, I hear what you're saying: if you want to build a sixteen story high rise to mimic the Chrysler Building, don't use a hawk and a handsaw.

But it's easy. I did try using Premiere but after I'd lost the timeline thingy for the fourth time running and could recite those useless bloody tutorials like a Paddy K poem, I gave up and got my pencil out. Back to the drawing board, so to speak. Oh, and before anyone gives me any advice along the lines of "You should have used a Mac", thanks, I know and piss off with your Steve Gates lobbying.

So what I'm left with is so basic it's reassuring: a 6B (softness of choice) orange pancil, chewed at the end, smooth A3 paper from a pad that's like a slab of white chocolate, and my imagination. Now there's a turnip for the books.

Musical Experiment, Part II

2010-02-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

New work. Old pic. It's 3.25 mins long so have a listen if you're sticking the kettle on.

I Feel a Rant Coming On...

2010-02-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

As I get older I like most of the people I meet less and less; this brings me to the conclusion that either I am getting old and grumpy, or more selective (read snobbish) with age, or that the human race is becoming increasingly more boring and annoying, or that I am in fact very lucky to have such "gifts of life"* as the friends that I have already.

This year I have met one, no, make that four, girls that WRECK MY FUCKING HEAD. I can't actually bring myself to speak in front of them, choking on my tongue. Unhelpfully, I hold an internal dialogue answering all the stupid questions they pose, like "which way is north?", "what are we doing?" and "where are we going?".

Answers

a. Up your hole.
b. Trying to get away from you, you crazy nussball.
c. Into the nearest techno club where the possibility of hearing you will be greatly diminished, and although I may still have to see you, the flashing lights will hopefully induce a latent epilepsy in me and I'll die before you finish your story.

*I'm embracing my inner Born-Againer/Susan Jeffers here

Ein Noppelganger

2010-02-06T02:04:00.000-08:00

Turns out I have a name-doppelganger - a noppelganger, if you will. This girl has exactly the same name as me, which is quite an achievement, my name is not John Smith, after all. She lives in Georgia and likes music and writing and photography. We are myspace buddies, and we sporadically comment and catch up about bits and pieces of each other's lives.

This got me to thinking about doppelgangers. They say there is one person in the world that looks exactly like you, a carbon copy extraordinaire. Why not? When I left Singapore a friend asked me had I been in Blue Jazz last Friday night, he'd sworn he'd seen me there, knocking back a pint. And, like most Singers, he wears extra strength-supercool-Asian glasses, so clarity was not called into question.

Perhaps I have one wandering around the world...I very much like this idea. Apart from the general wisdom that one should never meet one's doppelganger, I say no harm!- bring her on, I'd love to have a chat with myself. Maybe we could solve the mystery of the universe and why when you're dying for a whizz in a public toilet and sit down without looking, then, and only then, do you realise that some fuckers gone and pissed on the seat.

Bagel Factory

2010-02-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

There is something about spending time with one's family that makes one want to consume all the carbs one can purchase at the bakery. Anything salty and crunchy, nutty and greasy, anything bad for one's normally yogi-like existence gets shoved in there and hopefully the stress will abait.

One is going to stop now, have a ciggie and go to the gym. Not ideal, but one could do worse.

E-Street

2010-02-01T15:27:00.000-08:00

After crisscrossing Berlin - west to east to west and back to east again - we settled in the Cominius Bar. Broad benches and dainty glasses of klein weissbier dominated, and the barman looked strangely like Right Said Fred with muscle waste and an apron. It seemed an appropriate place to bring my mum and her fella, and Sean Shean fed me stories of blueshirts, the RA in Roscommon and Eoin Russell, or whatever the rubberduck he's called. We fed him dainty glasses of non-chemically beer, served with pretzels sticks and listened to Bruce live in Dublin, 2007. Covers of records, including John Lee Hooker and some jovial chap with a flower betwixt his awesome teeth, plastered the walls and we swigged in familial delight.

We started at seven, and left at eleven; I wanted to get to Kaisers to buy some more beer and bread for the morning, setting off in the virgin snow less like Bambi, more like Thumper. I had said my last "Tchus!" to the barmen before I realised that Sean Shean had got me a support slot for the blues band that's playing there later in the month. I shook my head, wondering when exactly that had occured...somewhere between the 1798 rebellion in Wexford, involving John Rice, and the name of Die Haus Band auf Bruce Springsteen.

The E-Street Band is when it happened.

Beasties

2010-01-31T11:11:00.001-08:00

As I get longer in the tooth, and more cynicaller in the ear, a lot of contemporary art fails to engage me. I get conceptual art, I like the idea, but I'm of the very unfashionable opinion that the shit should look good too, make me go, "Woah, horsey, that's quite a number you got on your back!"

That rarely happens so much. I get it listening to good music or watching crackin films or reading an excellent book (Check out F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night, amazing) or finding a blasting blog, but a lot of the time art leaves me cold as a Eskimo's ass during mid-winter. Which is bad news for me, seeing as I have apparently decided somewhere along the line that that's what I want to do.

Now before I get too preachy and boring on you, I shall quit, but just give me berth to spiel a little about Walton Ford. His show Bestiarium is on at the Hamburger Bahnhof (big contemporary gallery in Berlin) and is fecking wunderschon. His watercolours and gouaches on massive sheets of paper illustrate animals doing odd things, thinkin' they is people. He references 19th century naturalist's and explorer's research and combines them with intriguing text about an era of history, painted in glorious colour and with a sense of grandeur and expansion that seems inherent in the colonial era.

I'm sure others can explain it better, or better still, have a look at his work and make up your own mind.

http://www.waltonford.org/de/home/

The Coot

2010-01-24T14:58:00.000-08:00

I feel a mute
Coot
Booted out in the minus twenty snow
Nothing to say to No One anymore
Don't want to be fantastic or great
Next ...year... is weighted on
The Grate, the Great, the Grated and More
Or Less I confess to No Thing Anymore.

The Party Line

2010-01-22T12:03:00.000-08:00

I can honestly say I'm not a fan of Organised Fun. Whenever there is a whisper of a party planned for weeks ahead, a super-duper gig that EVERYONE is going to, or some other occassion that has been lambasted into popular demand, I shrink like a deflating tuber and want to bury my head in a pile of Fair City.

I think it's because I'm not a fun kind of person. Dingbat constantly reminds me of this. "Would you not have a bit more craic, you know, enjoy yourself, once in a while?"

Indignant! Am! I! I do enjoy myself, just not when everyone else does, it seems. I like online magazines while eating cereal, I like picking spots, I like watching old people fumble for change. I enjoy myself plenty.

Furry Regions in the Schnee

2010-01-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

"Oh wow, it looks like you're growing a beard under your arm!"

Eh? A tuck of head and swoop of arm reveals, that yes, you're right, it does look like that. That was mein freund, and about a month ago. I haven't rectified the situation since, and don't really want to.

It disgusts me that a lot of reactions to body hair are along the disgusted lines. When did we start this fascination with baldness, this united clamouring for childhood states?

However, when you gaze post-coitally into your lover's eyes and wait for a reciprochal glimmer of adoration in those sad-dog pools, an observation of your furry regions is not very welcome. Not very welcome, at all.

A Thought, Too

2010-01-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

Since I've come here I feel mute, like my mouth has been sewn shut. Normally I am quite a chatty person, but here I keep my thoughts zippered like county fair goldfish procured in transparent plastic bags, dangling over the communal table.

I suppose it could be shock at being surrounded by eight other housemates; it's kind of like Big Brother, but in an artists commune. Now there's a thought: instead of footsey and midnight goings-on in bleached out dorms, we have group talks about the nature of painting or how the hell Shirley can photograph Niamh in her pink plastic stairs without breaking her neck.

I like the silence, I love the gaps. The things unsaid that can, and will, wait till morning, till the snow finally stops falling.

Eating Crayons (again)

2010-01-16T10:44:00.000-08:00

YOWSERS!

Felt like I haven't posted a long time. Well I probably haven't really, not anything of importance anyway.

I'm here wasting away in Berlin (in the monetary, not the physical, unfortunately, sense), eating crayons and pretending to speak German. Another residency, this one marginally better organised than the last one - there is a cooker - not making much art yet, to be honest but having a jolly good time doing it.

Man, but it's great to have time again. For the past 6 months or so I've been so busy my brain had started to eat itself in an effort to co-ordinate the work + life + worrying time balance. Now I have a couple of months in which to read, reflect and contemplate life's greater issues. Migration, feminism, cultural stereotypes and more are batting around this little poca of mine.

So far, living with the other 9 resident artists is good. We are eight girls with one lucky guy, a thoughful, quiet American who makes you want to be nice about things like cultural imperialism and McDonalds, if only to say, "Hey, I'm a non-judgemental European!"

I've noticed that when eight girls live with each other, the main topic of conversation is food and periods. One goes in, the other comes out, it seems. You'd think that men (or women! Wir sind berliners, after all) would dominate the kitchen table yaks, but perhaps we don't know each other too well yet to divulge too thoroughly about that really bad man. Also we are varying in ages, the mean being roughly 26, I'd say.

So far, I love it here. I'm made for a city where vintage is queen and beer is usually an anorexic two euros for 500 ml bottle. Missing the loved ones at home is part of the parcel of it all too.

Hopefully I can continue writing this blog; after my hiatus of not wanting to blog so much, I can happily say it may be time for me to spill my beans again, or something like that. I did start another blog which was supposed to hold my art stuff, but feck it I can't be arsed having two, I'd rather scratch my arse.

Hallo! Ich bin ein Kunstler

2010-01-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

'Allo 'allo...Happy New Year all.

I started 2010 in a freezing fog of cheap wine and dancing to Tiffany in Daz's bedroom. An excellent start.

I've started a new blog. Really so I can put my work up and it won't go back to here, just in case I've bitched about some of new readers inadvertently in Story-Lah? and they read it and I'm embarrassed etc...how do you pass the time of day with an acquaintance you've previously called a cunt?

Anyways, here's the link, Funky-ja, it'll have boring art stuff on it but come and visit all the same.

Happy blogging, Bloggenzies, und Auf Wiedersehen, Bitte!

Perve of the Week

2009-12-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

If only all artists I knew looked this attractive, instead of emotional retards covered in white spirits, combining the immiscable qualities of crippling self-confidence and enormous egos.

But Javi, oh yeah.

Oh. Yeah.

And that's all I have to say on the matter.

Supermarche

2009-12-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

Low-fat Bio. Organic Natural. Greek. Skimmed Goats. Rachel's. Dr. Oetker. Yoplait. I just wanted plain.

A song came on the tannoy...it's the Christmas song with the pan pipes that puts one in mind of fat snowmen blowing their icy lungs out, dressed in leiderhosen und majorettes garb. I hate that song, but had a little Xmas dance in the dairy aisle to celebrate anyway.

"God, it's confusing isn't it? So many different types of yoghurt these days."

I looked round; I thought I'd been caught rapid. I don't mind dancing in Superquinn but only if someone else joins in, or laughs, even.

The guy looked like a baby white duckling in a twenty year old's body.

Um, ha ha, yeah!

Please stop talking to me.

"I mean, I normally ring my mum to ask, and she just tells me. It's great."

Ok. Okay, he must be special. Poor lamb.

Um, ha ha. Yeah!

"I'll just get this one. Looks nice and, blue."

A last look at Duckboy, he's from another planet alright.

Um. Um... Hahaa. Ha. Yeah!

It struck me on the way out that I sounded like giggling simpleton. Ducky was probably saying a prayer for me onto his way to his 03 VW Golf.

--

On another note, Superquinn in Ranelagh has loads of stuff on tester trays. Shrimp, Cashel Blue (I'd sell my ma for that), mince pies. Think I'll go tomorrow with a foldaway chair and a plastic plate.

The Fragile Ego knows No Bounds

2009-12-10T02:30:00.000-08:00

I bit the Christmas bullet last night and braved the shops. Well, Dundrum shopping centre; it was raining...

Gone are the days when shopping at exmass time involved a 40 minute car journey in a Toyota Starlet to Nutgrove or Stillorgan. Oh Stillorgan shopping centre!- they had EVERYTHING. The very tip of the finger on the pulse. Dunnes, Golden Discs, the Toyshop that isn't Smiths, A-Wear, featuring very trendy John Rocha mustard culottes.

Dundrum was packed. Since I'm going to a wedding today I, to be true to my lastminute.com status, left it till last night to find something to wear. Wavering between my two usual styles of Waynetta Slob (I Love Trackies and Chip Stains) or Liz from Corrie ( I Love Leopardskin), I had to find something suitable for church and dressy enough for Rock the Boat later.

I cast off many shops in my lap around the centre. Obviously none my mother would venture into, like East, but I did stick my head into M&S. Places like Next put me in mind of office girls from Essex on the pull with a couple of bottles of West Coast Cooler, so no. I tried River Island but thought Junior Slut to be a little to the left of what one wears to mass.

In the end I returned to the first dress I saw in A-Wear, but three hours later, with a banging headache and a bottle of wine for later. Tis my birthday after all :)

(The fact I'm going to someone else's wedding on my birthday has not gone unnoticed by my inner child. I will, at some stage of the proceedings, be sneaking candles onto the wedding cake and demanding a song. The fragile ego knows no bounds)

2009-12-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

Tying ot saty osber and awathc Goks fshinog=n fix an ddrink tea. ( love goki. may or myat not bedrunk.

Open Milk Tray

2009-12-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

I'm very close to throwing my computer out the plate glass winders onto the buskers below. It's an icy December Friday night, I should be out boozing and telling people what to buy me for my birthday. Instead I'm am still jammed into a laptop, reading my last post with an embarrassed and disdainful snortle.

But lo!- tomorrow is an Open Day in the studio I rent, and I made the ridiculous promised to myself to have made an E.P. before the year's end. That is why my computer keeps crashing.

If I, or the pc, make it through the night, feel free to visit us from 12 to 5.30pm, where I'll be thrusting copies of my homemade nightmare into the hands of children.

***

On an unrelated note, I must remind myself not to buy jeans with shiny studs in the arse again. They may fulfill my yen for teenage slutduggery, but they give more dimples on the ass than a Milktray, and are darn uncomfortable too.

This Is Not A Serious Post, But a Postal Series

2009-12-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

My head has been stuck in my laptop for ages now, working, would you believe, not just googling "school boy rugby".

I'm working on a baby wee Extended Play c.d. for release on Saturday, featuring four sound drawings and songs. I'm getting so into it, they're all I can think of. I may have aural obsession and can't get that canon chorus from betwixt my ears.

That may or may not account for my lack of blog, lack of words, lack of interest in much else apart from 1 2 3 4 and skipping beats and atonal harmony.

--

It will all be over by Saturday, thanks God.

Hannah Hoch

2009-11-29T11:50:00.000-08:00

For some reason I agreed to teach a short college course on art history, which is patently ridiculous because I think I was asleep for that whole jazz during college. Time to Wiki-it up, copy and paste and Robert Delaunay's your uncle, I'm a genius.

On my internettical travels from Der Blaue Reiter to Surrealism, I rediscovered Hannah Hoch. Hoch was a member of the Berlin Dada group, a bisexual and an artist. As much as Dadaists and Surrealists ejaculated about equality and a level playing field in cultural life, of course they meant just for men. One of the members of the Cabaret Voltaire did remember Hoch, though, for the beer and sandwiches she always managed to provide despite the group having no money.

Well done Hannah. Her work rocks; por ejemplo-

Five UnEasy Pieces; Je Vous En Prie

2009-11-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

1. The days are sliding past like fit young men playing wartime baseball; lean calves slowing their gait and hands splayed to stop at base.

2. There's a piece of tape sticking like a tongue out of one of big, draw-down windows opposite. I wonder which Mauritian guy living in that tiny bedroom uses it to open the jammed window jambs when he gets hot, if he gets hot, on nights after work in the middle of town. It visually bothers me because it ruins the up-down lines of the rest of the windows, like a rogue white tampon string wriggling it's way out of a page three pair of fancy knickers. You don't want it there; it spoils the illusion.

3. Work is hard to do today. I feel the increase of stress and the decrease of time, sprinkled with a dash of crippling self-doubt. You'd think I'd have gotten used to that by now. My starsign said that I should get going with the work and action thing, cos of Mars and Venus being in my element, doncha know. I just feel worse and wasting and choc-full of spent potential, like a tired old clown. Even though I didn't even try.

4. I cried hot tears of self-pity yesterday on the couch. The catalyst was The Lost Prince, about George V's epileptic son. The fluffer was the dog bone on the furry carpet, its creamy and glistening knobs of shiny cartilage in opposition to the remnants of stringy scarlet flesh. Sitting on the wiry chenille rug, I felt sick and thought of cows.

5. This morning I was dreaming. There was a new road from Bray to Greystones over the hill, dangerously near to the cliff, and you had to trek with a guide. The guides were Victorian and West-Brit, and wore corsets, britches and crinolenes. How did I get here, and how can I get home?

He Moves Through the Fair (Like an Ass)

2009-11-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Oh my Holy Jesus. This has just completed my Friday.

Love the ginge. Love It.

The Condescending Waitress Has Her Say

2009-11-19T04:03:00.001-08:00

Dahling! Usual please, dahling, quick as you can.

Gail is a millionaire's brother who frequents the toilet basin I work in. If being sister to a millionaire is ever on the cards, I would recommend it. It seems to work for her, and she works for no one.

Her usual is at least three double vodkas a night, a double shot extra hot latte with no foam, dahling, the carbs, you see. Gambas a la pil pil is consumed without the bread, dahling, the carbs, and maybe a herb salad.

When others talk, she shouts. When others stroll to the loo, she runs. She is manic, hyper, crass, blasty and completely herself. The more middle class amongst us berate her for her total lack of nous, myself included, especially after she wandered up to the dessert counter and picked off a corner of one the meringues, declared it "not squashy enough", and spat it out. She carries on like a raving, unsocialised loon; there is no "class" enough for her LV festooned size 8 skinny arse.

But the tides of my opinion have turned and now I rather like her. She is oddly generous with things, money and chat. She never looks down on you, which I also rather like. She swears like a sailor after a bout of solitary confinement and is like no other person. Her whole being offends the petit-bourgeouis mentality of that damned restaurant, with their shopping trips to Harrods and little shacks in Saint Tropez, and waxed and untaxed wads of cash.

We ape her and fawn over her and roll our eyes up to heaven, declaring her Unbelievable. We bitch about her when she stays drinking with her hangers-on way past closing time, and threaten to disgrace those garlic prawns if she so much as dares to complain about them.

But on the whole she seems lonely, her children gone and her friends as vacuous and shorn of what was beautiful in the Eighties as she is. Why else would she sit day after day in the same seat and screaming obscenities at acquaintances who shrivel in embarrassment at her call? Don't get me wrong; I don't pity her, you couldn't, she's too hard, but...and this is a big thing for me to say about a rich, spoiled 50 year old toddler...I don't mind her.

What I Wouldn't Like to Meet

2009-11-17T07:26:00.001-08:00

Cool stuff on the DART.

Book Club; Buffalo, Bollicks

2009-11-11T03:07:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Room used to have a bookclub thingy on their blog, which I very much enjoyed reading about. I never got around to reading the books themselves because I have the attention span of a gnat, but I liked reading about reading clever things and good stories.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is a re-telling of American history from the other side, i.e. that of the native Americans. It was written in the 70's and was apparently quite popular (if you judge the book by the back page).

My interest in Native American culture and history stems from the fact that I really, really believe that I was one in a past life. I can see myself sitting proudly on a pony, pipe in hand, squaw at side, contemplating totonkas and The Great Spirit from my hilltop eyrie.

As books go, it's a bit of a chronological tome. It spans (so far) about sixty years of the Indian Wars, and it makes depressing reading. Greed for land, greed for gold, political parrying (the American Civil War was going on at the time), and general belief that the immigrant Americans were in every way superior, colours the background of multiple scenes of massacres, rape, concentration camps and driving of one people solidly and unrelentlessly from their home. White people do not come out so good in this one.

Manifest Destiny was a decree that the American government issued saying that the Indians, not being white, were inferior to the Europeans who landed in the place two hundred years ago, and therefore had no right to what they had lived on for thousands of years. The whites, being white, being better, more cultured, were morally obliged to subdue and take care of the savages. It boggles my mind that one set of people can just decide this as true and act accordingly. Obviously when you add gold, land and stuff like that to the equation, it all becomes a bit more potent.

I was chatting about this with my brother, who much better at reading than me, he finishes books. His reply to Manifest Destiny was succinct. Of course the whites thought they were better; all conquerers do. The climate in Europe at the time perhaps favoured wealth, expansion and power over all else.

These thoughts are unformed. I can't get my head around the whole thing. Is it human nature to want more, and never be happy with your lot? Maybe if you gave the native Americans a couple more years and a some gunpowder we'd all be saying "How?" and wearing feathers in our hair.

All meditations on this subject are welcome.

How.

An Ab Ex Moment

2009-11-04T08:06:00.001-08:00

Ah sure Jaysus, I wouldn't be half-Irish if I couldn't have a moan now and again, could I? The problem is me and what I do. Teetering on the brink of twenty-eight, I have no real idea what I want to do. Or scrap that, I have an idea, I'm just not sure if I have the temerity, thick skin, or blowing skills to make it happen.

If I wasn't an ortist, what would I be? Maybe a bricklayer, or Premiership footballer. I always wanted to be one of those. But here I am, prone like a limp fish in my borrowed studio, banging my fucking head off the wall cos I can't I just can't come up with something good enough. It all looks like shit, like a tube of Daler-Rowney leapt like a frog up on the canvas and shat, yes shat, on the unfortunate stretcher. What matter? the HSE* cries. No matter, I just have to look at it for the rest of the week. I think I may have an Abstract Expressionist moment soon and start tearing up and defecating my work.

In my head I'm saying, paint. Just. Paint. Anything. Doesn't matter what, just freaking do it. Ok. I will. I will create nothing out of nothing and chew the insides of my soft pink mouth off in the meantime. Flesh comes out; a passionate resurrection of the soul.

Knowing I won't feel like this in a day or two does not help. I want my tortured soul to be lifelong, committed, a in-it-for-the-long-haul kind of crisis, not some hormonal glitch because I've me flowers and the fridge smells like someone died in it.

*This refers to a person, not the Health Service Executive. Funnily enough.

A Rant on a Tangent: A Rangent

2009-11-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

Why do we blog? I'm assuming my audience are bloggers too, I don't think civvies read these things, do they?

Do I blog because I have aspirations to journalism? I recently told my mum that I "did a little writing" (little being the operative word) from time to time. Writing? You?! Yes, me. I loved it in primary school; it was up there in the top three of pastimes of choice (painting, writing, picking my nose). Anyway, Mum looked proud. You could almost hear her thoughts: Finally, my daughter does something I can tell my friends about. Painting herself with no clothes on and swearing into a video camera does not make polite dinnerparty fodder. Music reminds me of her father and, quite frankly, one lazyarse muso in the family is enough.

But writing. Personally it puts me in mind of suicidal lady poets, and perhaps that's where the girst lies for me. As I go on down the traintracks of life, books don't scare me so much. I still love a good oul' Patty (Scanlan) sex and riding and 80's career girls romp, but the spectre of critical thinking and writing and big words no longer makes me turn on LivingTV and grope desperately for America's Next Top Model.

I'm no dope, not totally anyway. Those big words are only words. In fact I'm coming to the conclusion that these writers, when they talk about MacMillan and hegemony (still no idea) and post-modern antiglobalist creationism, are really just talking about basic stuff. Basic stuff that has been trussed and trimmed and cosseted till it's head's up its arse and the view is more than a mite confusing.

Cardboard Life

2009-10-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

We used to guess about the other people in the pub. It was a game:

"See him, there, with the wonky glasses? Wannabe cross dresser. For sure."

"Oh yeah, and the lady with the briefcase behind him sells catfood out of a suitcase at the weekends, door to door, in full stockings."

"See that oul lad, he's...oh wait, that's your da."

I miss those cosy nights tucked away with a pint and a penchant for prose, and alliteration. Word games tame young dames out to graze among the grey.

I need time, people. Buckets of it, and a lack of self-pity and piety. And a two dimensional world where cardboard cutouts go to work and come home, and that's that.

The Turkey Diet, and How

2009-10-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Recently I've started jogging. This new pasttime has surprised me, of all people, trememdously. I don't jog, or run. Something about my genetic makeup and the positioning of my limbs has, until now, rendered it nigh-on impossible for me to go faster than a brisk trot.

But it seems that I am on the Turkey Diet since the frost vibes of mid-Autumn kicked in; as in the Fattening-up-for-Christmas Turkey Diet. This upsets me exponentially and rather more than any sane person should care to admit. I still have my eyes, health and lack of dignity - so what if I'm a couple of pounds closer to the earth? But logic is not my favourite bedfellow, and so I am more than completely freaking out about this heavy news.

Hence the running, or yeah, to be more precise, jogging. It's not that bad, mein volk. It might take a bit more practice not to look like an escapee from the friendly local asylum, arms akimbo (I love that word), tongue dragging the pavement and excess flesh making Mexican waves, but I'm getting there. Any reader's tips would be welcome, just so I don't have to do my daily exercise round Rathgar at one in the morning.

This is So Not Funny, Like

2009-10-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

As an immediate contradiction to my earlier bliss, I must give the telly a mention now. For some reason I am watching Gerry Ryan interviewing Conan O'Brien. Just to get it over with now, it completely sucks horrible crappy touching cloth ass. Conan O'Brien is funny, Gerry Ryan is...not. That's all I can say right now cos I have just set the TV on fire.

Dublin Six

2009-10-22T14:23:00.001-07:00

I skipped out of work this evening, at a mere half nine on the dot. Matsuki, my fastidious Mongol co-worker, had kindly let me go early as we were so quiet we were polishing the newspapers lined up on the bar and then polishing the customers, baldy bankers that they are.

The cycle home brought me on a mini-tour of English Dublin: Waterloo, Appian, Ranelagh, Cowper, Windsor, Palmerston, then home. On the corner of my road I noticed a massive fort atop a very redbrick D6 semi. How strange. The rest of the houses were cosily lit from the inside, revealing velvet curtains, dinners-at-table and two holidays a year. The Victorian lamp strung in the middle of the road burned wanly and the smell of the trees is earthy and homely and like a kiss from the auntie you secretly fancy.

I lock up at the hovel and head for the shower, taking a last breath of pre-Halloween air, happy to be done for the night.

A Date with Ironman

2009-10-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

My first date was a very exciting affair. Brian came from the hills, he was pure Wicklow, and a stunning two years older than me. I think he asked me out because I fancied his friend but his friend was having it off with my friend. Complicated business, first dates.

He collected me in his Honda Civic and took me to the Abbey. I can't for the life of me remember what we went to see; but I remember he was sweet and geeky and had massive glasses and a very good sense of humour. Then we drove back to Wicklow and went to the Forge. He had a pint (seasoned drinker that he was), and I had a snakebite (alcopop that I am).

While he was driving me back to Greystones (in the days before they invented drink-driving), he told me what he liked to do at the weekends. Himself and Big Ed took their pleasure racing the backroads and removing any signpost that thwarted their view. Then they went a-makin' some roadkill of farmyard animals.

The reason I bore you with this is, in a cold March in 1997, as I was anxiously brushing my hair and choosing which bootleg pants and Spicegirl boots to wear, I was listening to this song. Apparently the Cardigans dudes were pure heavy metal before they became Sweden's most chipper and delightful band (pre-Erase and Rewind). Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Cardigans' version of Ironman:

Djinko-yeh!

2009-10-14T07:09:00.001-07:00

Ange sounds like Pussy Go-Lightly's hotter, older, more Polish sister. Her voice is like grated chocolate, dark and raspy. Her highlighted bangs attempt to hide amazing Ayran eyes, and fail. She walks with the panache of a saucy Moulin-Rougette, and stands as proud as a pony, back straight and heavy breasts arched forward as if she'd never even heard of modesty.

She tells me my eyes look erotic with make-up. I take the mistranslation of her patchy spoken English delightedly - Thanks! The way she says erotic carries unimaginable weight; she told me she'd lived in Berlin for quite a number of years.

I imagine her partying in the dankest of clubs in the nineties, enjoying the free life in a thoroughly European way.

13.10.09

2009-10-13T04:38:00.000-07:00

I love this city, I love it. You forget just how pretty it is at night, the Hapenny lit up like a fleeting ghost in the back of the eye. How beautiful Irish men can be, dark brooding looks and a sense of humour and personality that no other nation can compete with. The crack of icy wind off the Liffey, lifting my too-short skirt in indecent haste to get me home, to bed.

It struck me as I threw a cup of tea down me this morning, smoke in the other hand, lost in a sandpit of memories of other Octobers, other lives, that the past doesn't really matter, really. You can remember and reflect till the cows come home, but eventually that's all they'll do. Come home. So I go out and forget, happy at last to be here, on October the thirteenth, two thousand and nine.

New Recording

2009-10-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

Between running to the toileh' (as they say in Bray), and running to work, I just about managed to upload this.

Play the song, not the interview, as it is old and embarrassing, but I can't unload it.

Don't ask why.

...

Thanks to fabulous Monsenior for deadly production and recording.

2009-10-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Click here to play music

Women Artists Are Cunts and Have No Sense of Humour

2009-10-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

I. Am. Raging.

I want to kick in the doors of every poxy room I come across, neatly mow down the elderly coming out of Poundwise on the Rathmines Road, and bludgeon the lithe, blonde, young ones to death that populate the 15b like a teeming squad of plebs.

I fantasise about boxing my boss's face in, while giving her what-for regarding her rubbish apron policy and smiles-all-round demeanour. I would enjoy gutting my fellow studio artists thoroughly with a blunt nub of an 8B pencil and a litre of white spirits. Friends and loved ones are history as I race through my phone and delete every single one, instantly annihilating any contact I ever could have with them, and relishing the existential lonliness of being a mean prick.

I also seem to be carrying a shocking amount of baby-weight; even though I have never given birth, been pregnant, or had sex. Why!?! I abhor the sight of "jeggings" (spit the word out, that's the only way) in Penneys, and even when I try to be fair minded and reason that at least I can do my slob impression in them because of vast amounts of lyric concealed in their soft folds, and try them on, the resulting car crash of my ass convinces me otherwise.

What's wrong with you Sarah? I hear you cry. What could possibly be so bad that this foulness has settled its grey self on your (meaty) shoulders?

Oh nothing. Nothing at all. The nothing at all that happens to women (the clearly superior race) once a month. I suppose one could say it was that.

...

Just don't get me started on men.

Bucket O' Cum For Table 7

2009-10-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

The lovely hostesses of RTE's flagship afternoon entertainment show came into the restaurant last week for a midweek supper.

They both had lambstew, and a glass of Rioja apiece. Blondie enjoyed her meal, like very much, but left the carbs, obv. Glamour-sis make healthy inroads into the accompanying sides of hummous and natural yoghurt.

Sharing a chocolate biscuit cake with fresh cream and dark ganache, they tipped and tripped out of the joint, high on life and being celebracious.

All I could think of, though, was how many posts there probably were on the net, detailing all manner of nasty things (mostly) young, male bloggers* would like to do with them and a bucket of cum.

*I'm more than likely thinking of the eloquent Maxi Cane or Radge, to be honest. They would do the girls justice.

Thems Folks

2009-10-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

People are funny creatures, innit? You think: we're all just buzzing around like flies round shit, or something, pitting ourselves against the other, or comparing our fly-holes with the other's, a mass of glowing and fucking energy.

But then you look at the dudes in Urban Outfitters, parading in their skinny jeans and sense of edginess, or the ladies what lunch doing their weekly in Donnybrook Fair, or the hot Chinese girl at the deli counter, and think, you go home at night and brush your teeth, just like I do. You sneak a squashy bag of rubbish into your neighbour's bin at midnight too, you take inordinate pleasure in squeezing the spots you may or may not get on the side of your nose. Just like I do.

I'm not really sure what this post is about, coherency and hangovers are not my forte. Just a wee thought for a blustery Saturday afternoon in the most exciting city in the universe.

A Temple, Bar None

2009-10-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

I held my coffee in one hand and fumbled for a lighter with the other, the chill of newborn October making it tricky. Four heroin addicts were drinking pale cans of something spiky in the corner of Meeting House Square, isolated in their attire and accents, not interested in me or anything else that might invade their quadrant.

I grip my soyamochawhat!uccino and dither. Is it safe to stay alone with these emigrants of decent society? Mentally I slap my hand: what am I thinking? That the junkies will track me down and make off with the seven euros in my fake plastic wallet? I am suffused with shame and detest my middle classness; this kind of thinking in others usually prompts derided snorts from yours truly. Truly.

I sat on the two-tier bench nearest the IFI and furthest from the group. Another girl my age sits at the bench next to me, engrossed in her Portuguese conversation with her phone. An Irish guy takes the bench after that, engrossed in his gourmet sandwich. How have we all got here? How have I got here?- identifying people through the kaleidescopic lenses of race and class?

But I feel safer now that I'm not alone in my petit-bourgeois pasttime of sitting in a square. Again I am lamped with shame and embarrassment that I can only try to rationalise out of, like a worm wriggling in the cloying earth.

A guy cycles in slow laps around the square. I think he's a young fella. He slows and asks me whether there was a girl with a pink pushchair sitting over there at two o' clock. I don't know, I just arrived. He's either late or early, he grins, with a shrug and I realise he's no young fella, noticing the grey tugs of age poking through his beanie. Young at heart, maybe, but longer in the tooth.

He resumes his circuit as I suggest he's been stood up.

Maybe, he says. Maybe.

Untitled 1

2009-09-22T03:27:00.000-07:00

At the moment I'm working on archetypes and stereotypes. Women. Asian women. Scary Asian women, like Lucy Liu's character in Kill Bill. The witch out of Hansel and Gretel. Maybe she was just lonely though? I think she's been villified unfairly; I'd do the same to some pesky Aryan brats, probably.

Queen Herod. I read that in the paper once. I think I'm Queen Herod: my un-fondness for sprogs is legend. But maybe she was misunderstood;- to rule a kingdom you have to keep the citizens in check, right? You can read all sorts of truths about me into this, but like history, it's just a story.

--

Queen Herod said
Be kind to those know you
Because they will judge in the end.

She stole my heart
A Very Long Time Ago
Buried it in the snow.

OFFWITHTHEIRHEADS
INATOWNOF
BROKENBEDS!!
OFFWITHTHEIRHEADS
INATOWNOF
BROKENBEDS!!

The Miracle of Expressionism

2009-09-13T05:11:00.000-07:00

I hate work with a passion I have not come across in a while. The last time I felt this loathing, was, em...let me think...when I was last in full-time employment.

I promised myself not to make this a post about how much I hate my job (I am actually grateful to have one), and most people don't want to hear the shit moans about something which is a necessary evil.

But forgive me a couple of lines.

GGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH IHATETHATMOTHERFUCKINGGODDAMNSHITHOLEOFARESTAURANTWITHAPSYCHOMAREFOROWNERANDTHOSEWANKBAGCUSTOMERSWHOWOULDBEBETTEROFFGOINGBACKTOTHEIRD4MANSIONSANDJERKINGEACHOTHERUPTHEIRCRANKYMOTHERFUCKINGHOLESWITHANIRONTOILETBRUSH
GGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.

Ah. That's better.

--

Now, onto a more quality topic.

--

Being sent home early used to piss me off no end, as I had to drive all the way back down the M11 and waste some ridiculously expensive petrol. But now that my dwelling-hut has changed, I can happily cycle into the studio where I can create masterpieces and play my guitar.

Happy days.

So that is why I am on the internet. Blogging. The correlation between Sarah Studiotime and Sarah Blogging has only just struck me. Art = Blogging? Perhaps.

Ah, sure it's cultural outpour, though. I can justify anything that way. Even thinking of cutting putdowns for my boss in work.

E.g.:

Antoinette, you have the integrity of this filthy J-cloth, and it would serve you better to wipe your dilapidated face with it, and get out of my hole.

Cult.
Ur.
Al.

Out.
Pour.

Oh yeah.

A Number of Expletives in the Middle of the Night

2009-09-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

"You're a fucking prick, you know that? Lying in bed wanting me to put your socks on. Bastard."

I scrabbled into Clothes Mountain, i.e. the Human Search Engine's cupboard, for a matching pair. Unable to see without my glasses I grabbed the closest things to resemble foot-warmers, and kicked the bed with passion.

Yanking the covers off his pale, warm, sleeping curve, I make for his left foot and sheath it in sportsocks.

"Sarah, what are you doing?"

You told me three times you wanted sock on your feet, and you were giving out shite cos I wouldn't get them for you, and now you ask what am I doing!?!?! Wanker!

"But it's half four in the morning, and I've been asleep. You were dreaming. Back to bed young lady."

Hmph. Dreaming?

Well, maybe.

Bigger than Picasso, and Twice as Clever

2009-09-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a fortnight of moving. Moving house and moving studio.

When the administrator showed me my new studio in Temple Bar Galleries, all I could think of was OH MY FUCKING GOD and YOU'VE CLEARLY MADE A MISTAKE.

I applied for this 3 month project studio about a million years ago when I was bored. The application process was incredibly complicated and laboursome; getting an audience with the Wizard of Oz would have been easier.

My "project"(ahem) was a hastily scrabbled-together treatise detailing how I would investigate the Asian community in Dublin, in context of em, Dublin, and explore notions of Orientalism, femininity and race through painting, drawing, and video/performance.

Ha! What a blowhole. What the hell was I thinking of?

However, it fooled the powers that be well enough, or as Clara suggested, someone put in a good word with me. I am on no good word with no body in art no, so I think they honestly believed all my propaganda. Perhaps describing yourself as "greater than Van Gogh could ever be, with or without the ear" and "Mark Rothko's wet dream" actually works.

So now I have a beautiful, massive space in which to create something Asian, something Irish, something that does not always involve depicting menstrual blood or vomit. Great.

I just keep expecting someone to knock on the door and tell me they've made a mistake: Dorothy Cross is like, totally pissed-off, so can you like, get out now, please?

Not So Picnic Now

2009-09-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Boo.

(insert sulk)

All my buddies, bloggers and non-bloggers, are going to Electric Picnic. I did write a curmudgeonly post a while ago about how I wasn't bovvered, but now, as Friday looms nigh, and Marcelo in work keeps showing me the line up (Lykke Li and Fleet Foxes being the axes of superjealous Sarah), now I'm a little peeved I'm not going.

It's Dingbat's birthday tonight -my baby is 27!- and we're going out for dinner. While they'll be discussing what to wear and how to unmelt their heads, myself and the other supercool losers (i.e. the Human Search Engine) shall contemplate higher things, like hairloss for apes under the age of 35, and look forward to our respective working weekends at The Factory of Television Gold (him), and Die Wankfactory (me).

So to all you lucky brigadiers heading for soggy fields and (sob!) Fleet Foxes, don't feel sorry for us...enjoy yourselves*, you ungrateful pricks, and have a blast for me :)

*If, like me, you like to read aloud, and are reading this post aloud, alone, in your room, please say this part with a martyred sigh. It sounds best.

This Is Not a Cappucino

2009-08-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

This is not a cappucino.

Ok. Sure I'll get you another one.

Round Two.

--

This is not a cappucino.

It looks like one to me, but.

Bill.

Wankbag.

I hate working.

Kitty Fiddler, part deux

2009-08-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Children are not my forte. I generally prefer most animals, including the dairy cows, to kiddies.

However, when called upon to do my god-motherly duty, I am up for the challenge. Sweating profusely and muttering, "I can do this, I can do this" under my breath, I collected the little sproglet and brought her round my gaff.

All in all, a great day was had. She ran round my house, investigating like Philip Marlowe on two chubby legs. Low points included asking her not to pound Mr. Pussycat's head in, (wailing followed), and The Changing of the Nappy, which I'd never done before. "You'll figure it out" was the advice her mother gave me that morning, which was slightly less than helpful.

High points were using the clingfilm roll as a trumpet, and butchering some cds (it's ok, they were rubbish). I was on some kind of high as she finally went home; I had to tell someone about my achievement of not annihilating the child during the six hour stint.

"Miriam, Miriam! You'll never guess what little F did...."

Thank god for friends. Mims reminded me I sounded like what I hate: an enthusiastic child-lover. Thoroughly chastened, I reassumed my trademark sneer:

"I love kids, but I couldn't eat a whole one."

Midnight in the Garden

2009-08-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

I think the world has gone crazy. I keep rubbing the grit out from behind my lenses and there's nothing, nothing there, but the same pictures of rope and long knives. This definitely calls for a cigarette.

Monkeys and Gold

2009-08-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Tio! This girl is on day release.

Story-lah? was away. En vacances, infacta, in sunny Lisboa. Apart from having not a fiddler's twiddle of the pronunciation of the Portuguese language, and embarrassing myself trying,

(ordering a coffee:

Doojsh mayjsszzhh cumm laiiighgght, favurzeeee?

does not seem to work. Spanish and English and jerking, caffeine-induced movement does).

It just so happens that my surname is Portuguese; I was delighted to find that it is as common as muck and plastered on every street, cervejaria and Mickey-Joe Homen that one could find.

I did, however, find one establishment of class toting the good Pear-tree name. A coffee and chocolate emporium, of course! My (slightly embarrassed) mam took a photo of me outside the shop, inside the shop, and practically hugging Surly Mc Fucker, the shop keeper, in my enthusiasm to bond with my brethren.

But on reflection, thinking about the kind of Portugueses who headed for Macau oh, about five hundred years ago, were maybe not the noble gents that I have always imagined myself to be bred from.

Chances are, in fact, that they were skanky sailors hellbent on raping and pillaging everything in sight, whilst digging up gold and monkeys and coffee and chocolate (it's making sense now!!), sending it all back to the king, and then settling their big, fat, white arses down in whatever burnt bit of jungle they could find, all so they could pass on their distinguished name to yours truly.

Eek! Where does my sense of heritage lie?

To be continued...

The Wedding, Bit 1

2009-08-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

"To absent friends!"

To absent friends.

I squinted sideways at the woman sitting opposite me at the ten-seater table, vital in a mini-dress and clutching a champagne toaster. Her eyes were vacuums and the stuff that used to float around that body was somewhere else entirely; she had a halo of aloneness that cut its way through the crowd.

How to Lose a Stone in 24 Hours

2009-08-13T09:59:00.001-07:00

After 27 years, I caved.

Determined as I was never to follow in Granny Gostrangely's leaden steps, I had always poured scorn onto the roll-on, girdle, or "waist-killers" (?) that promise to suck and hold parts of the body that rarely look enticing under a lycra dress.

These garments seemed too much like female oppression, I argued. Why should I have to pour myself into an elastic tube in order to be deemed acceptable and attractive to the opposite sex (or more like, the same sex)?

I've seen Brigid Jone's Diary, when Hugh Grant, being all swarthy and un-foppish, wriggles her dress up to unveil what looks like stretchy bandages holding the goods. I laughed, a slip of a nineteen year old, thinking, Jaysus, that'll never happen to me! When I go on a date with Hugh Grant I'll be wearing a black lacy thong, or some other such truffage suitable to a foxy thirty-three year old singleton.

But that naive oaf that pulls on my past-strings is not going to O and R's wedding tomorrow, does not seem to have expanded like a large, baked, doughnut-style doughnut in the last week, and does not want to wear a killer red dress that really needs a little help underneath.

Happy Birthday, Random Boy

2009-08-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

This couple came in on Saturday night. A young fella and his mam. The mother looked not a day over 40, hanging leggings and basketball boots and a careworn face on her gym-frame. He was all-American(-Irish, as in D4) hero, Ben Sherman checks struggling to overpower a handsome face, not a day passed 18, which reminded me I had to look for the candles for the crappy M&S cake she dropped in earlier.

I flirt with him, I flirt with her. Tell her I love the dress, it's so colourful, wish I had the legs to get away with it. She was anxious on the phone, her only baby's birthday and he's going out with the lads after, do you think there is steak on the menu? ...whispering...he's a steak and rugby kind of fella...pride and love mingling like the leftover jus in the pan.

I flirt with him. Not out of badness, but out of boredness;- it's Saturday night, wet, and pretty quiet. He's absolutely mortified by his rather flighty mother when she starts ordering for him like he's five years old and strapped to the high chair. I throw him a conspiratorial wink and leave this filial pastiche on table 11.

After dinner, we light the candles on the crappy M&S cake, and huddle it over to the table, before bursting in song. Well, I burst into song, thinking my wait-mates would join in, anytime, anytime you like lads, till suddenly I'm at the high part of Happy BIIRRTTHHday to Whatsyourname? and I've just finished my first unaccompanied, sean-nos style solo in a restaurant.

Happy days, he blows out the candles, and they cut the cake...but there's something missing, something not ordinary. She looks at him with the amount of love usually reserved for parting war lovers. I'm not suggesting incest, no. I think she's a single mother and has worked extra hard to get him to 18 with most bits working normally. Or maybe I'm projecting because she reminds me of my own.

But this love, this look, this soft length of fluffy cord, that stretches from her insides and wraps around his tiny, newborn body, is something that's been there for ever, since before he was born, she was born, since before anyone was born.

I don't know what it's called but it moved the world, just for a second.

Mustang Sallins

2009-08-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

I've played small gigs before, loadsa times. The ones where the coughing of the TB sufferer in the corner gets louder during the middle eight. Yeah, I know 'em.

The Railway Sessions in Sallins*, where I was supporting Lisa Cuthbert took the oatcake though. The audience consisted of the other musicians (4), the sound engineer (1), his girlfriend (1) and the Dutch barman (1). Oh, me too (1).

So the total eight of us jammed away into the darkening, full-moon night. I played like my lungs were coming out of my arse (they kind of are, too, I think I have swine flu:- Oink!), and pretended I was in Madison Square instead of Main St, Backarse, Co. Nowhere. Great practice and even better for the soul.

When the other guys were on I wanted to show I was listening, really listening, man. I tapped my heel and stomped by hip and slapped my thigh till the flesh ran red. My head was nodding in a musical way so voraciously it nearly came off the hinges.

All in the name of the arts, my boy. If only my head wasn't banging now.

*Sallins! Sallins! Where the fuck is Sallins!

**I know it's near Naas, by the way, I'm just being ironical.

The Bestival Time

2009-08-06T05:32:00.001-07:00

It's Picnic time soon. The Electric one, I mean.

You know it's coming up when people who normally spend their working week planning their meals and "researching" on Facebook, cast their grey slacks aside and spend their working week planning their drug intake and ringing up dodgy-sounding geezers called Baz from Cabra.

I used to love festivals. I still do love the idea of getting locked in a field and listening to good music. There's a simplicity in the trinity of booze, meadow and human that is almost divine. The mob mentality also often takes over, allowing you to shirk the shackles of respectability as you simultaneously chat up your little brother's mates and vomit in your rucksack.

I'm going to be crucified for saying this now, I know, but I don't really enjoy big music festivals anymore, and I don't really see the point.

Hands up! I admit it: I am a boring bastard. Dingbat constantly reminds me of this (I hold my tongue and choke back the childish, "Takes one to know one, wankface"). But I cannot see the appeal of an overpriced, yoked-up, badly organised moshpit with what seems to be the darker side of the human race, grappling for air and booze and each other like flies on a freshly-shat turd.

Am I getting old? Yes. Have I lost my sense of fun? Probably; it's been years since I was on a waltzer or played Twister. But still. Too much hype, too much money, too many wankers; they are pretty much my reasons for abstaining. It smacks of Organised Fun, something that was probably made up by Quakers or alcoholics in order to inflict their own personal pain on the rest of humanity.

I would much prefer to sit in a field by myself, drinking cans and playing cowboys and Indians this year, I think.

--

On the "bestival"* theme, what REALLY bothers me is people lampooning Oxegen, saying it is full of scumbags and knackers, comparing it unfavourably to Electric Picnic. Admittedly, Oxegen is a bit rough, but sure ain't that why one goes there? For a bit o' roughing it?

As for "scumbags and knackers" what the fuck? When did the Guardian-reading, left-of-centre, care-about-the-kiddies-in-Africa, twenty-somethings of today turn into a D4 housewives? Happy to study equality, semantics and social politics in UCD and then prick around with phrases like that.

Or maybe it's just the Finestisation (as in Tesco's Finest range of fancy-pants products) of festivals. When I was 15 there were no festivals, that was all I dreamed about coming back from the Point and wishing for a leaky tent and a diptheric portaloo. But now we have two major musical extravaganzas and a host of smaller fleadhs too. So much choice. But one needs standards. I cannot listen to my ever-obscurer music choices (that cleverly show how cool and alternative, nay, indie, I am) just anywhere. I need an upgrade. I want the best and most exclusive of festivals on offer. I want the circus-shimmering, Glastonbury-aping, MDF-rubbing Lecky Piccy.

And no scumbags or knacks, obv.

*I read the term "bestival friends" in the Indo the other day. Younger, or more hip, readers may be able to enlighten this old man. What does it mean? As a word, it too closely resembles "beastial" for any sense of comfort in terms of casual usage, for me.

Emo...What It Means To Me

2009-07-31T16:03:00.001-07:00

Is Story-Lah? running out of things to say?

It seems so...

Approaching the one year birthday I have time to take stock, and give a big internettal hug to the deadliest of bloggers I've found through this site.

Not to put too fine a point on it, you've saved my life, in one way or the other.

==

And I may be drunken too. But mean it.

Like, really.

I Heart HB

2009-07-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

I'm at another bloggery impasse: not much to say except mulch about work.

It's not so much the job, as the fact that I, and indeed most humans, have to work for a living.

I'm considering a communist state, but am not sure about the sartorial direction of the commune: one can only wear grey slacks so many times before one hankers after Jimmy Choos again.

And so, for inspiration, I turn to the Greats. Hieronymus Bosch is one of my favourite artists, and I marvel on a daily basis how the hell he came up with this shit. 1503-4 seemed to have been a racy, bluesy time.

Jock Dickhead gets his Just Desserts. Kind of.

2009-07-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Jock Dickhead strode in the door and puffed up his chest.

Um. Get me, a Um, Poached Egg and Bacon, wraugh wrrraugh.

I stared at him through disbelieving eyes.

No please? No, if you don't mind?

No.

I turned on my heel and put his order through. I cannot abide mannerless cunts.

(If I come across kids in face painting who demand service like Louis XVI, I will not even look at them till they say the magic words. I don't even tell them this is what I'm doing, I just wait till they figure it out. Most don't and then they either start crying or just leave. Meh. Either way they're out of my face)

I slopped his coffee (Americano, black. Americano means black you gormless twit) down on the table and aimed for his crotch. I missed and resigned myself to turning the other cheek, anticipating martyrdom and heavenly comeuppance instead.

Halfway through savaging his fucking poached eggs with his soft, cigar-dented teeth, Jock Dickhead dropped his fork on the carpet. Dropped it like the incontinent buffoon he is.

I was at his side in a flash.

Here you go, sir.

Oh the smarminess of my smile was a thing of beauty. Of beauty.

Get This for a Paradox

2009-07-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Oh god am I tired. For some reason I can only function as a living human being when I'm stupidly busy, so busy that I don't have time to do anything properly, but just think about the next thing while half-arsedly doing the first thing. Badly.

Not that I mind it too much. But when I've time weighing weighty on my hands, I get nothing done at all. Nada. Don't even want to. Want to stay in bed with the lights out reading trashy shite, high-sex, lo-thought chick lits.

My brain is heading for overload. I am heading for overload. No time even for cruising the internet and a daily read of my star sign, just to see what I'm going to do today. I've lists buzzing like flies round the carcass of my to-do-ness.

Content, nay, happy?

Probably :)

The Big Stuff

2009-07-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Hugging the door jambs, one apiece, like drowning kittens clanging in a soft tin bucket.

It's a year since he last saw me, and I attempted to joke,

"Jaysus, if I was on a chair when you walked into the gallery, I woulda' fallen off it!"

But then I forgot that I don't make jokes, and he knows that too. So the joke, such as it was, hung like the curtain of smoke that used to be there, all the time.

Skirting round the big stuff, the sorries (-is there any point?), and paddling round the shallow end of famili-ar wellbeing, we doggypaddled through this quite difficult of first re-meetings.

When he was walking away, after the hugs and takecares and mindyourselfs, I leaned back onto the peeling red doorframe, waiting for him to turn and wave, so's I could be nostalgic about things lost and time lost and Waste! and bawl and feel reborn.

But he didn't turn and wave. Instead he went on his way, down the schizophrenic-weathered road, and I didn't cry, not once.

The Grudge

2009-07-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

Mark was a very dutch Dutchman.

He sat opposite me in that formica'd classroom and, during the drilling of reflexive verbs (iCallate! -Huh?) I noticed his sandy hair and Sex-on-the-Beach eyes. His bronzed skin confused me: surely someone who lived in those northern climes reamed with smoked hams and fusty taches would be paler, whiter, a bit more Anglo-Saxon?

Most of the rest of the girls in the Spanish class were in love with him. He looked like a hot tennis player, had a hearty, yet flirty, sense of humour, and a nice bottom to boot. Didn't matter that he was as dull as a party thrown by Puritans, all blank faces and miss-the-boats. He was the Elementary 1 tio.

One day Carmen asked us draw a picture of someone in the class, but as a child, and then describe it using our recent vocabulary. This game is a fine art; obviously you want to win but must be diplomatic. No:

"Como se dice,

She kinda has a cuntface, if you know what I mean, and looks like a dyke.?"

Mark picked me and described me. People guessed. Noah from Sweden won. Hurrah. End of story. Great.

But Mark wasn't finished.

Hey, Sarah, would you like to um, see, your, um, pik-chur, like, you know?

For sure, Mark. For sure.

Top marks for trying buddy but you're shit. I looked like I had a lollipop for a head and was sucking on something vaguely familiar, but faintly sinister at the same time.

Ya, I bet when you were a little girl, you like lollipops, no?

To my paranoid self that was tantamount to calling me The Michelin Woman's chubbier sister (but with a good sense of humour):

He thinks I spent my childhood ingesting boiled sweets and lard, he must think I'm enormous now!! Oh! My! God! D-I-E-T!

On reflection, I may have overreacted, but I haven't forgiven him since.

Make Mine a High Horse

2009-07-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, I was sure of what I wanted.

A pony.

That is all. Just a little pony to ride around my estate on. I was mad about ponies of all kinds, the most accessible type being the My Little variety. Her Royal Horsiness, Majesty, was my fave. Light mauve-slash-purple and sporting pearlescent lilac fetlocks, Maj rocked the green felt gymkhana of my youth.

I could never understand why my mother was so reticent about buying me a horse. "Not enough room" seemed a little feeble: we had a garden, after all. "You'd have to clean up after it" was also a moot point; I mean, we had to clean up after Patrice the cat, and that wasn't so bad (Patrice the cat was an average sized cat, I realise now, not an equinicat - a lot less shit).

The top trump of Why You Cannot Get A Pony For Christmas Or Your Birthday was,

"Too bloody expensive".

Even if I made a contribution? I could have saved those 30ps I got for pocket money.

--

My point is, if ever I ever have a point to make, is that I haven't really longed for something since then. I haven't felt I wanted something so badly that I'd sell my granny, or a portion of my Sylvanian Families collection (the rabbits, they're boring and unglamourous compared to the badgers) to get it.

Of course I want things, I always do and always will. But to stretch dreadfully after something, and to feel it almost possible...if only.

It struck me on the N11 the other day, that sense of pining. I want it.

All.

Now.

Same Same but Different

2009-07-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

Getting ready for this at the moment...I'm dying to get rid of those bloody paintings languishing like rentboys in the spare room upstairs....

Opening Wednesday 15th July at 7pm.

Now, who's for tea?

Anniversary, of Sorts

2009-07-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

I pretend not to be so sentimental. Like shaving the legs and saying sorry, anniversaries seem to me to be futile, tokenry gestures of giving into alphamale society.

But don't think I've forgotten the lashing rain a year to this night, and soaking jeans and the first cup of tea. Watching the showreel perched on your single bed, with the missing years plastered onto the dimpled ceiling like an old black and white.

Citing exhaustion, independence and uber-busy-ness, I stay alone in my nest at home, and even though your phone rings out, maybe you know it's still you, and me, and that tiny bed, waiting for the rain to stop.

The Voices and the Bells

2009-07-01T09:42:00.001-07:00

Driving home on the N11, my cigarette fell out of my clumsy paw and skittered back to town.

The glen was hanging heady, swollen and ready
for entrance, drooping with midsummer lust.

My gran was in flying form:

"It's just the voices that bother me. The voices and the bells."

Red Flag Day

2009-06-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm so proud of him, my ginger buddy. He's gone halfway round the world on two wheels, and he's skinnier than I've ever seen him. He looks like Jesus with a red beard and a Dublin accent.

We sat and talked among friends and as I was filling him in on pregnancies and house-buyings and firsts (none of which were mine, bien sur), he told me of llamas and parillas and bizarre parasites which reside in the colon.

I'm so proud of him, my pre-school friend. Rare is the time when I feel like the things I smuggle in the back of my mind are attainable; yet drinking pints with him in the local is like opening the back door after a party, and finding a cracker of a day, and all the washing-up done.

This May or May Not Signal Me Flowers

2009-06-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

A couple in their late twenties in the Market Bar.
Sunday, p.m.
The girl is scowling and speaking in a dead-mongoose manner.

Girl: Yeah.

U-hmm.

Right.

Really?

God.

Fella: You're so fucked off with me it's unreal.

Girl: Me? Angry? Why on earth would I be pissed off with you?

Fella (cowers slightly and reassures himself of available exits): Dunno.

Girl (grabbing table in manner of possessed Anne Diamond and practically starting a world-war looking into Fella's eyes): It's ok for you...you...man. You're not bleeding from your Vag outwards and stemming the flow with poxy penis-shaped wads of cotton wool.

It's all about you, isn't it? All about the male. Male fucking tampon shit, I hate it.

Hate it!

Girl scowls some more and starts weeping into pint because of the ant she stepped on earlier in the garden, don't you REMEMBER??

Diana-Jean: Really Not My Lover, but Really Lovely

2009-06-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

Diana came to my house last March and we sat and drank tea. She is an American photography student who I met over Gumtree; her project was eerily similar to my next one: Asian people in Dublin.

Willowy, articulate and soft-spoken in the way only American Girls of a certain calibre can be, she wrangled her dad's ancient camera and patiently gauged light and tone while I made disgusting inroads on my pack of Silk Cut.

I spent about three very interesting hours in her company. She was lovely and I don't even know her surname.

She sent me gorgeous hand-printed photos of her end-of-year work last week. It's slightly odd to receive pix of yourself in the post, but black and white photography is thankfully flattering. I even love the scowl: anything that looks like JL Godard* fiddled with is happy days as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks Diana-Jean!

*I'm being sarcastic here, I don't really call the man J.L. I'm not that much of a cuntbucket.

This Rambling Thought Process Has No End

2009-06-25T05:41:00.001-07:00

It's my day off, and I'm not going to spend this sunny Thursday interbrowsing.

I could write a witty and interesting post, but I've shag-all to say.

Instead I will attempt to conquer the Clothes Mountain that is taking over one side of my room, rendering it impossible to find pants, and maybe take a stroll to see Sarah 1 and the baba.

Maybe she'll get sick on me again. I could write about that.

--

On a thoroughly unrelated note, I am in Love with Lady Gaga. Or rather, her stylists and producers. Music's shite, obv, but she looks so COOL. I'm all for uber-luxe and jumpcuts and bondage shit. Maybe I should make something similar myself...

--

Regular readers, please do not be alarmed at my lack of direction. I'm just typing now to stop picking at the open box of After Eights.

Saint Sarah

2009-06-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

Ireland does the oxymoron well. For instance:

Irish Supermodels

This has to be an oxymoron. Have you ever seen one? A Hibo-babe, I mean.

It's kind of like ordering Four Star Pizza. Who on earth sat down and came up with that name for a pizza establishment? Who said,

Jaysus but, I'm dying for an oul spongy pile of heart-attack-city, but I don't want to ruin myself with a five star creation. You know what? I'd love something ok, but a little bit crap. I'd love a four star pizza.

And so to the Irish supermodel. Not to be a bitch here (but if I don't, who will?), and I know I'm no Yvonne Keating myself, but come on. Personally, I think that the Irish are a very attractive race. Those pale, pale skins (I go mad for a white-boy) and dark hair, or becoming freckles and a shock of ginge. Beautiful.

However, the term "supermodel" kind of refers to some kind of Serbian gazelle-lady with a dozy face, who is roughly 15 feet tall, and exudes epherality out of her non-existent pores. You cannot apply this magnitude to our own fillies, no matter how much they pair up with Midlands property tycoons or lobotomised ruggerbuggers.

The Irish model is good at:

-tripping into Lillies on Manolos, the shoe of the terminally unoriginal
-charity swimwear shows in Arnotts (no nipples, please, there's oul wans having their morning coffee)
-any kind of PR. Just show them the product and they'll get snapped by the Herald licking it
-grouping together, borrowing a JCB off the boyf, and applying the MAC fake tan

But today I had something of a seachange. One Irish Supermodel came in to shoot some kind of interview thing with some kind of music journo (they were discussing Britney.

Yeah. I know)

for some kind of gossip magazine on TV3, the Quality Channel. While trying to bring people food and not get my arse on camera, I had a good earwigging session.

After reading Maxi Cane's waiterly post, I was feeling, well, if not sympathetic, but something, towards this bastion of glamour. She has to go everywhere knowing that most people think she's a knob and an airhead. Tenner bets if she was a bloke she'd get on ten times better. She's only human, and while I'm sure she's got a wardrobe full of flaws, I'm thinking to myself, Sarah, give her a break. It's not her fault she was born with orange skin and a Castlerock accent.
Ah, that's better. I feel sainthood coming on...

Wed-Sun: A Review in Bullet Form

2009-06-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'm completely unused to being busy, and it's only now, on Sunday night, that I check the internet and realise I haven't posted in a couple of days.

I could give you a rundown of the past 96 hours, but it would be pretty boring. I'll give you a point-to-point breakdown instead. Less grammar = happy Sarah.

My week/weekend involved (in no particular order):

-cans in Merrion square

-Searcing an upturned canoe for some medicinal herbs. They weren't there, but it was fun pretending to paddle on dry land.

-cleaning up after fat D4 bastard fatcats.

-kids

-a slow dance to "Close to You". Yeah, he probably wouldn't forgive me either, but let's hope he doesn't remember

-more kids

-"Looking for Eric". Great film. Found Eric, oh yeah. Also found a short goddam fuse gracias a Mr and Mrs Let's Chat Throughout the Whole Fucking Film.

-Catching Leo's (A Fairly Shitty character to the uncultured among you) eye ON THE SET, d'ye hear that, ON THE SET of Fair City. Extra work has never been so glam.

-getting shouted at by the socially retarded chef, and shouting back at her stupid fucking face.

-Eating the most amazing pizza Blondie made for us in her new abode in the hills. Also, did you ever notice that baa-ing lambs sound very like teenage punks?

-one shower (ugh, I know)

-Some very happy snuggling and making stag/doe noises

Janey Mac. That does seem quite a deal of stuff. Jaysus but.

I'm wrecked. I still have the novelty of saying, "I've got work in the morning," with a theatrical sigh, the weight of the world on my overworked shoulders. I've only been working a week.

But it's wearing off quicksmart, let me tell you.

Face for Radio

2009-06-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

'Members what I was saying bout never raining but it pours?

That's an un-exaggeration. I'm too tired to think about the opposite word. Slack, I know, but sorry.

Anyways, the point of this hard-to-read and, frankly, boring, post is that I'm very busy and singing on the radio tonight.

So if you want to hear me swear (possibly) and burp (probably) on The Sessions, tune into 103.2 Dublin City FM. Or listen online for those of you not sweating on Dublin shores (radio catchment of Dublin City is approximately 1 mile radius.

And so, fellow humans, I'm off to powder my face for radio.

Baked Alaska

2009-06-15T16:19:00.001-07:00

Louis Walsh was at Table 12, sipping a decaf demi cap, and fiddly with his blackberry. I so wanted to lay into him, heaping onto his shrunken head years of frustration and disappointment about the tripe he so mousily champions, and how he has sullied the term "pop music" into an unrecognisable pile o' shite.

But I didn't, such a yellowbellied wuss am I. I cleared his salad starter and got him more Acqua Panna. Boo.

--

An RTE actress was dining with her ma. She ordered Caesar salad with chicken (no croutons, obv) and ate about a sixth of it. Here too, I held my forked, bitchy tongue about the camera adding ten pounds and the starving babies in Africa.

--

An Indo journalist of some description was unbelievably pissed by 5 o'clock. She wore her polka-dress with the swaying conviction of a hangman. Solemnly, she handed me the ashtray like a sheik handing out johnnies in the harem.

Here you go, she blinked.

Who am I to judge though, right? If I wrote for the Indo I'd be baked alaska on a Monday afternoon too.

Sleepytalk Sleepytime

2009-06-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

Sarah, don't worry about the tiger; he's a couple of hundred years old anyway.

Ok.

Aha. It's sleepytime sleeptalk. Cool.

"So, dear, what colour is the tiger?"

He's black, and he only has a head.

"Really? That's great. What about a tail, does he have a tail?"

No, no. Told you. Only a head.

(Hee hee hee).

"Go back to sleep, my darling."

--

So cute, lah.

I'll Be Fine Once I Stop Retching

2009-06-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

Not content with emptying the contents of my winebag into the upstairs toilet, after a drunken, singalong, hot shower where I contemplated the possibility of drowning, Buckley-style, I felt a further need to christen the downstairs loo, before walking into the bedroom door and knocking myself out.

I awoke, anticipating imminent death, naked, and very glad there's no-one home.

Rainy Days

2009-06-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sarah, you'll have to clean that table again. It is FILTHY!

Blondie looked like she'd pass out with disgust at the offending table. It looked seriously clean to me, but I choked down suggestions that she remove whatever has been wedged up her arse for the last 25 years and replace it with something more suitable, like a jackhammer, or condom of coke, and take a well-deserved break to Ko Pha Nang, and headed for the table.

Why are restaurant owners generally dickheads? There's something about the service industry that attracts the most petty, scabby, vile mingebags in the country. This one looked like she last checked the papers circa 1998, complete with Gucci shoes and a Celtic Tiger hangover. I'd say she last ate a carbohydrate round that time too.

But apart from that run-in, the "trial" went well. I didn't spill Perrier on anyone, nor clock someone on the head with the pepper mill, nor set someone alight (it has been done, I'm not joking. Or safe, it seems).

And now that I may have a job, I get offered three more on the same bloody day.

...Rains but it pours, etc.

Xpresso Yourself

2009-06-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Espresso. What is it? It's a coffee. To be precise, a short, black, shit-strong motherfucker of a coffee.

How do you spell it? E-s-p-r-e-s-s-o. Yes. Essssspresso.

Is there an "x" involved? No. Clearly, no. The only time it is permittable to use the term "expresso" is when you're talking about that "Xpress" (ha!) Dublin Bus service to the boglands; the one that skips all the stops people are actually waiting at.

During my interview in an establishment that uses that hated term as part of its name, the can-do restaurant manager wondered did I have any questions?

Why would a cafe-bar (oh golly but I hate that phrase, cafe-bar. Wank me off right now, please) that has limos lolling outside, best describes itself as "opposite the Dylan" (Thomas? Bob? Moran?), and serves steak sangwiches for eighteen bucks, stick such a gross misnomer on their premises?

Have you no shame or literary chutzpah, restauranteurs of Dublin?

***

On an end note, I'm playing open mic in the Globe on Georges St. around 9ish if anyone's passing by. Cheeky ;)