Poifecto

How was the Christmas?

The weather’s fierce hah?

Jesus, these runners are shite in the snow and ice.

More importantly though, did you have that moment during Christmas where everyone else was in the other room; there’s a gentle murmur of conversation seeping under the door and you were sat in front of the fire with a massive gin & tonic in one of those heavy-based tumblers usually reserved for whiskey when featured in an episode of Columbo where he is chatting to the suspect in their apartment and they offer him a drink (which he declines) and they have one for themselves?

Have you seen the Columbo with Johnny Cash in it?

In that single moment, you forgot any distant problems you had. You were alone but not alone at all. You were drunk but not really that drunk. If you had to interact with shop-keepers or publicans you’d be fucked but you just feel like you’ve a warm glow to your pasty skin and could compete at a mediocre level in a game of Scrabble.

Trivial Pursuit might involve saying things like ‘Burkina Faso’ or ‘photosynthesis’ so best avoid that.

There’s a few days left, you’ve gotten books you like, you reckon you did a good job getting presents everyone else liked and you are not obliged to go anywhere or do anything you don’t want to do.

It’s snowing outside.

And now you’re singing that Martine McCutcheon ‘Perfect Moment’ song in your woozy mind.

It was going well until that, eh?

Return of the Redeye? Jed-eye? I’m back?

Thanks to events in the real world, I have been seriously lacking in effort with regard to these pages. Interviews, busy days, weddings, funerals. It’s all been going down. I suppose all bloggers are constantly looking at life as ‘content’ for their little online diary and for those who blog specifically on music or film, this stuff can spew forth at regular intervals.

The problems begin when one is not exactly a blogger of anything specific but rather someone who blogs on random odds and ends. And then when it becomes clear that one cannot blog on certain things (i.e. ALOT of things) without ‘giving the game away’, people reading who probably shouldn’t know certain things, that kind of piffle….forgive my cryptic ramble please. And apologies for the self-referential claptrap and for apologising for not blogging in the first place which I know can grate…erk….

So enough. I am in love with Chickatees again. Ah yes, Chickatees. How many do you think you actually swallow when you pop open a bag? Fuck all, I’d wager. They’re all in your teeth. For the diet-crazy amongst you, perhaps this heralds a new form of food non-ingestion therapy. I mean, you don’t ingest Chickatees really.You’ll eat a bag in a minute or two and then pick them all out of your teeth. The key could be to resist the urge to swallow this congealed ball of mulchy Chickatee and plop it in the bin. However, this is more difficult than you think; it tastes bloody great.

AND you can buy them in monstrous bags of 30 or 40 for a few squid too. That, combined with Spar meatballs (amazing) and some Pot Noodles – sure you’re essentially a thrifty Gordon Ramsay producing instant classics upon demand. True your salt intake would probably rival that of a large, floating whale gulping down huge waves by the hour but anyhoo.

I’m also currently sporting a rather fetching ‘tache as you may or may not know. Tis for Movember (donate here) but I can’t see myself getting rid of this badboy too quickly. The amount of action I am getting down darkened alleyways on Camden Street is outrageous. I’m raking it in. The binmen are mad for a bit of ‘tache loving. And I love the feel of their cold black jackets, the smell of Carrolls on their breath…ahhh yes…binmen….

Been busy enough beavering away for a few online publications you are probably familiar with and incoming is State mag’s top 20 albums of the decade…or is it top 100…or is it best albums of the decade in no particular order but with a non-specified number cap…jesus. Anyway, I know I’ve left Smog/Bill Callahan off one of these reeeeally difficult lists and I am going to make it up to him by doing my next post about him and most likely about A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, I think.

Also, Christmas is coming and I fucking love Christmas so, to quote a great man, BABY I’M BACK. I think I’m feeling motivated by R’n’B super-lech, R.Kelly’s banging new single

Actually banging. And without the use of contraception it would seem. Shuddering yet?

Alien vs Predator

It’s odd to come home and find everything exactly the way it was when I left.

The other half has been gone to the US since Sunday and so I have a 3-bedroom house all to myself for a few weeks. This leads to all sorts of problems, of course, but there are advantages.

Looking after the dog, by myself, is a distinct problem. He’s needy. I am too, but there’s not much he can do to appease me, if I’m honest. The neighbours, who are there all day, come and take him every so often, but in the evenings it’s a face-off.

“Dinner”, his eyes say. “Give me your dinner”

“I bloody fed you 2 minutes ago”, I snap.

“That wasn’t enough. I want more. I especially want that curry you are eating, not that stale Ryvita you just threw on the floor to try and distract me”, his eyes say.

“Jesus, I’m only in the door half an hour – let me relax”, I plead (yes, with the dog).

“Oh ho. Relax is it? ENTERTAIN ME”, his eyes say.

This can go on for hours.

A gentle reintroduction through the medium of summat new…

If there’s a blogeur equivalent of ‘doing a Pink at the VMAs’ and metaphorically dangling myself upside down from a buff acrobat, banging away on the keys of a keyboard thing to impress you, the agog reader, then this is it.

Shiny and new like the Ceann Comhairle’s expensed, and expensive,  Pringle jocks (no little holeage in the front to pee out of for FULL support and maximum expense…haven’t you ever had a pair?) this is There Will Be Blog 2.0…for the moment anyway.

I’m not sure what the advantages to the switch might be but I fancy a change and if it does go tits up I’ll scurry back over to Blogger like a crab seeking a latrine after a hot curry. I am reliably informed that ‘WordPress is better’ and ‘Blogger is balls’ by ‘culturally relevant internets people’ (I’ll stop doing that now).

I guess if I ever wanted to bag a heap of nominations for blog posts and consistency, well, I’ve blown it now.

If you are going/gone to the Jesus Lizard in the Button Factory then you are a lucky motherfucker – I just can’t stretch to it. At least they melted my face at Primavera this year and will most likely melt, or completely kick off, your face tonight. A tasty night of tunes awaits this Friday though when Nodzzz arrive in Whelans (with the wonderful So Cow in support), fuzzing up the night, and over at Twisted Pepper there’s a Richter Collective Singles night with Not Squares, Jogging and a DJ set from Jape himself. Bi-location will be a necessity.

Me? I’m trying to settle into a working week that now consists of four days and a smaller paypacket so the recession has landed home at last. The dog even bit me the other day. He must have felt I wasn’t quite bummed-out enough. It felt like the equivalent of your girlfriend inadvertently insulting you in front of your mates. It just wasn’t expected. Luckily he’s a Shih Tzu so my lengthy recovery took about 5 minutes of looking at my ‘wound’  and looking at him and looking at it and looking around the room. Thanks Chirpa. Thanks for hurting our friendship with your gnashers.

Anyway, the laptop’s back so it’s time to catch up on all things music, film, TV, blog and otherwise.

Hodge podge

I hate the fucking washing machine and to keep balance in the world, it hates me back.

I overstuff it with all kinds of crap, hoping it will wash everything I put in, whether that be one t-shirt or twenty.
I treat it like a slave and I am the master of the manor, expecting it to do what it’s told, to quiver before the orders I spit in its direction.
And it punishes me by dying my white Efterklang t-shirt grey, my beige Bonnie Prince Billy t-shirt blue and various other items a colour not too far away from the original but far enough away that it just looks a bit ‘off’.
Then when it begins to wash, it makes horrendous clunking and whirring noises like it’s blurting out, in a bastardised Johnny 5 voice, ‘Adam, come and look at me, I’m about to burst and spill your formerly-known-as-white t-shirts all over the floor‘.
Clunk, clunk, parp, toot, rattle and eventually crrrrash.
I do go and look and I stand like an idiot waiting for the fateful click so I can open the door and then see there is nothing wrong. It mocks me.
I hate you, washing machine.
I’ve also just discovered that the dog intensely dislikes me singing along to the new Antony and the Johnsons song, ‘Epilepsy is Dancing’, which I am singing alot at the moment.
It gives me a chance to do frighteningly warbly acrobatics with my vocal chords.
I put on a fabulous falsetto, a kind of English accent, a wobbly vocal effect and sing the already strange lyrics while prancing about the kitchen in a fey, highly questionable ballerina dance that I imagine Antony and his Johnsons might do if they were performing it in my house.
‘Caaaaaaht me eeeeeen quadraaaaantssss, leeeeeave me in da cwornnaaaaaahhhh’
Try it, it’s fun, I can assure you. Very liberating.
Finally, I saw a great headline (yes, being a sub ed makes me a headline nerd) the other day, from an American paper I think.
It was a picture of a forlorn looking 12 or 13 year-old boy, in black & white, and the headline was:
BULLY NOT SO TOUGH AFTER BEING MOLESTED
Methinks the sub editor was, possibly, bullied at some stage, no?
And lastly, it’s my birthday tomorrow so I shall leave you with the song I shall be listening to: Run DMC’s Peter Piper. Download it. It’s a classic.

Syriana’s script vs. The Script

So now in the middle of Syriana on RTE, I am subjected to an item on The Script recording their new video. Because they have the financial clout of Sony behind them, they warrant a place on the national news as they commit the video for their new heinous aural atrocity to film? As Eddie in Bottom once pointed out, I would rather have a pineapple inserted violently into my rectum.
What a load of cock. Yes, they are easy targets and slagging them off is as obvious as saying ‘red bull coke tastes like metal vomit’ or ‘the tyrannosaurus rex had small arms’ but why does this need to be on the news; even as a late night ‘squirrel in a miniature speedboat’ moment?
And in the middle of Syriana too? Clooney’s finest moment and a wonderful film that demands a second and third viewing. A film that never panders to the viewer, never spells things out and has Matt Damon explain, in one succinct delivery, the reason why war happens in the Middle East. Brilliant stuff.
In other news – and news that by now is old and boring – State mag is going free from next month. The blog buzz around this today has been interesting as people banged on about, among other things, journos at State having to take a possible paycut. Poor them. I work a day job for wages and do my Drop-d/Connected/and soon Analogue work for nada but the love and respeck, so I’m afraid I don’t have sympathy for any paycuts.
Yes, yes that’s bitterness, of course.
I dream of the day that hard cash is included as one of my motivations for doing all that writing.
Hard cash and love: two wonderful components vying for top spot…some day.
Actually Film Ireland pay me (God bless the movies) so there is a positive.

Sunshine

Does anybody get that ‘holiday’ air floating around today and yesterday?
It feels like we are all wrapping up on our last day at school and arranging that final game of football on the school grounds before we all split up for a few months….
Then I read Charlie Brooker’s piece in d’Guardian from yesterday and he makes sure I spend some time ruminating on the subject of our lives as zombies and our lack of action/motivation regarding the surrounding world and the inherent problems of it. He also makes me acutely aware of my tongue being in my mouth. It’s a really uncomfortable thing to suddenly be aware of your big, lolling tongue bouncing around in your gob and now I’m gonna spend the day with no mouth-comfort at all.
And there was me about to get all ‘Ron Manager’ on it. Small boys, jumpers for goalposts..
I’m gonna dig out a summer song and put it up here later on. Any suggestions?

Actually, I found one…