Ballyhaunis

The Vengaboys: a critical reappraisal

Attention wedding DJs, office party organisers and hack journalists. A Nineties revival as wearily predictable as day following night, or Mayo bricking it in Croke Park, is soon to be unleashed. The other day some radio station called to ask if I’d like to come in and reminisce about what a wild and crazy decade the Nineties were. Dear God, wouldn’t it be easier if we just slit our wrists now and were done with it?

This is The Nostalgia Treadmill. That is the phenomenon whereby popular culture constantly venerates the decade-before-last as some sort of lost golden age. Think about it. The sitcom Happy Days – which sentimentalised socially oppressive and conformity-obsessed 1950s – was made in the 1970s. That ‘70s Show debuted in the 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

Quadrivium (2010)

On Friday, Conor Walsh, a very talented minimalist/ambient piano composer from Swinford, Co. Mayo, will play Dubin as part of the Hard Working Class Heroes. When I knew Conor, through football, in our mid-teens, we were into Nirvana, ripped jeans, girls, Gaelic football and cider (in roughly that order.) It was far from Michael Nyman, in other words. He plays the Mercantile on Dame Street on Friday evening at 7.30pm.

What begins as a few isolated titters soon swells….

…with the help of a few nudges and discreet whispers, until soon the entire room is convulsed with laughter. Read the rest of this article here.

This one goes out to…

Saturday would have been my father’s 62nd birthday. I met my mother for lunch and pretended not to remember. My upset would only cause her upset. My pain would be her pain. You could fill Urlar Lake with our tears. (My mother doesn’t read this blog by the way.) Here’s something nice I once wrote about him. Here’s something else. And here’s something else.

“I bailed out and landed in the sea. The other pilot… didn’t make it”

Both aircraft were critically damaged. The Irishman managed to save himself by gaining enough altitude before his aircraft disintegrated to parachute safely. In dramatic footage that’s available to access on the internet, his parachute can be seen opening a split second before he hits the water. The Swede, meanwhile, plummeted to his death in the Mediterranean Sea. Read the rest of this article here.

The Fantastic Mr Dahl

Came across this article (and this one) yesterday morning. I met Roald Dahl once when I was a child. He was doing a book signing in Kenny’s bookshop in Galway and my parents brought us along. You had to buy a book if you wanted to meet him. I bought the only book by him in the shop that I’d hadn’t read already: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Read the rest of this entry »

Admin Blues

“Is anyone watching that Celebrity Farm?”

No takers, but she’s undeterred. The girl is a conversational terrorist. No topic too banal. Read the rest of this article here.

It’s closing time on Monday night and Aidan and I are sitting in front of at a pair of empty glasses.

For the last five minutes or so, he has been engaged in a freewheeling mobile phone conversation. I’m not quite sure with who.

“Ah, not a lot now” he’s saying. “Myself and Butler are finishin’ a pint in Grogans. Just scratching our balls to be honest. Probably head home after and see if herself is feeling frisky…”

Then person on the other end says something and Aidan makes a face.

“Sorry, who am I speaking to?” he inquires. Read the rest of this article here.

This is not a joke shop. This is an adult fetish shop. Serious shoppers only.

“One particular film has three words in its title: none of which can be repeated in a family newspaper. Sufficed to say it boasts an all-male cast. And given the pride these gentlemen take in one particular aspect of their respective anatomies, the film could be described as, quite literally, an orgy of self-congratulation…” Read the rest of this article here.

They call him Pothole

He’s the son of a well known Dublin businessman and he fancies himself something of a man about town. Read the rest of this article here.