If You Plan to Land In Barren Fields on the Arizona Plain, Could You Call First So We Remember To Bring a Camera?
Since the Chaos Thaoghaire website and blog are still not quite ready, I wanted to post this over here for now.
Dear Martians, Probably you are a little bit mad at us because we make movies about you where you’re not exactly dignified, but hear me out. We’ve been trying to contact you, but we don’t have your number. And so we’ve sort of been driving slowly by your house, hoping you’ll notice us, and still you seem to pretend we don’t even exist. All you ever seem to do is poke hillbillies in the nethers. What gives, Mars? What’s even going on up there? Signed, Earthlings.
A friend of mine pointed me to this blog, which you will probably be directed to frequently now that I know about it because it involves going through other people’s things and reading their mail, which we’re told we’re technically not supposed to do, but whatever, it’s not like we didn’t think about asking first, we just got distracted. Anyway, in 1924, when broadcast radio was still young and new, a few significant people thought we could use it to talk to Mars. Only they didn’t know how to reach them.
Prehistorians, you can keep your barrows and your passage tombs and your earthworks that look cool from above but which are excruciatingly (and foot-soakingly) boring to walk through, measure (why to the nearest centimetre? why am I measuring the grass? are you insane? am I stupid, or do I just not get this?), analyse, or otherwise endure in any format, especially when we have to hear it in real time, and can’t just skim over the introduction, pilfer your bibliography and glance at your conclusion. The only time I wish for a time machine is when I wish for one to take me back to a time before there were prehistorians. You could build an entire university out of unread journal articles on barrows. Indeed, one of the reasons it takes so long for an academic publication to go from draft to print is because the peer reviewers have fallen into a boredom-induced coma. Now that I’ve alienated all of my prehistorian friends, let’s move on. Love the sinner, hate the sin, as the evangelicals would say.
I swore I wouldn’t make this blog political. I wanted to make it all about material culture, and okay, maybe some of the cultural politics of stuff, but I said I wanted it to revolve around our relationship with objects, and I wanted to write about ephemera and maps and the little things that I find because I am a magpie.
But friends, we have a serious issue on our hands, and if we don’t take action now, it may be too late. I was up half the night, worrying myself nearly sick over what is happening to our precious douchebags. You know, the guys who refer to (the ever-elusive) sex with women as ‘closing the deal’, the ones who, to the untrained eye, have a straight white male chip on their shoulder but who, to the seasoned and truly concerned observer, are clearly bearing a mighty load. The douche for whom the only real man is the man who thinks date rape isn’t real rape, who thinks domestic violence is a feminist conspiracy, who rails against those men who would dare to make friends with women, or betray mankind by refusing to engage in homophobic bullying, or – god forbid – not watch sports. The kind of straight white douche who refers to advocates for equality as ‘victim’ or ’special interest groups’. Do you know any? It is likely that today’s normal and decent man and woman rarely encounter a douche except in captivity. Like a sad-faced white bear on a lonely ice floe, we must battle Social Climate Change before their once-privileged habitats have been all used up to build women’s refuges, nursery schools, playgrounds, gay parade floats, civic buildings named after civil rights activists, and stupid restaurants where the effeminate majority non-douche men and women go together to have pleasant conversation and even be non-sexy friends with each other. Where a man might go a whole day without gently correcting a woman. Nobody wants that.
read more…
Here’s another segment from Skint City, recorded at Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio in the Howth Martello Tower. If you click on the photos, there’s a flash slideshow that includes the parrot speakers he talks about in the segment. The intro and outro song is Moonlight In Mayo played on a gramophone, of which I’m not a little envious. When I have a proper house and space for a dog, I will have a gramophone and a really cool stereoscope with a big pile of cards, although in all likelihood, I will still spend much of my time yelling at minor celebrities on my television.
The radio museum. I am relentless and annoying in my zeal for this place, but it is indisputably the best museum I’ve been to in Ireland, and if I say much more about it, you’ll only think they’re paying me, which they’re not, or that I’ve taken some pills thinking they were candy, which I haven’t because I’m pretty sure that was actually candy.
There’s some dead air at the end, which I need to go back and take out, but it’s Friday and it’s supposed to rain all weekend, and I will hear no bitching about how there’s nothing to do in this town except go to the pub.
Not updating this blog is where. Another bit of dead air on the internet, for which I apologise. Since I’m still currently trying to get my work-life together, figure out what I want to be if I grow up, repatriate myself back to my home country (if it will have me) and/or orchestrate a career plan that will allow me to spend part of my life in Ireland but keep my home base in Boston, where I was born and where, after two decades of wanting to blow that town, I want to go back — wait, where did that sentence just go? Anyway, my thirteen-year old self sure has egg on her face now! But at least that’s something to hide the zits, the shame, the braces, the glasses and the fat that was neither glandular nor puberty-related. Anyway, the only thing more boring than a blog that’s never updated is a blog post that attempts to make excuses for never updating the blog.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve got these audio files from a radio series I did last year for Phantom 105.2, funded by the BCI’s Sound and Vision grant, and I figure that of the 12 I made, a few of them might actually be worth listening to. So over the next few days, I’m going to get out of actually composing proper blog posts and placate my, I dunno, three readers by drip-feeding you the few segments I made that are the least cringeworthy.
The series was called Skint City, and had two purposes (mistake number one), one of which was to give people some ideas about things that can be done in Dublin for five euros or less. I tried to stay away from the obvious things: the National Museum, the National Gallery, etc. The premise was really about how if you put your wallet away and start paying attention, stop using money as a substitute for imagination, you’ll find that there’s quite a lot of cheap and free stuff to do in this city. I wanted to focus on labours of love, good stories, and experiences.
It’s fair to say that some of the segments just plain didn’t work. I was trying to do too many things at once, but I like to think that I learned a lesson that I’ll never have to learn again.
Anyway, this first piece is about The Cle Club, a song club held every Wednesday night in Liberty Hall, which I cannot recommend more highly, and which I would attend more frequently only it doesn’t get started until about 9:30 at night, and I always have to plan ahead if I’m going to stay out past my bedtime.
My friend Neil pointed me to these nice people at Soundcloud. Thanks, Neil!
If you click on the link below here, it should play. Or maybe you need to download it. I will probably end up editing this post a thousand times before I figure out how you can stream it if you want, if you’re like me and hate waiting for downloads.
This sign is outside the ruined Kilmacurragh House in Wicklow, a nice enough gaff dating from the latter years of the 17th century all the way up to the mid-19th century, and, from some of the features, at least a little bit into the 20th. I’m ashamed to admit that I kind of find most of this whole date-range of formal architecture a bit boring, and I was more into the doctored sign than what it described.
There are pockets I find interesting — Georgian townhouses, grandiose Palladian piles, a lot of the vernacular stuff, and the now-mostly-gone Dutch Billies — but there’s something about this stuff that’s neither plain nor stately enough for me. I’d much rather an industrial building of similar age. But this is probably the medievalist in me, requiring some kind of clearly articulated decorative vocabulary to keep my interest. My attention span for the building would also have been affected by the presence of a quantity of baked treats, which made me far too hyper to stand still and pretend to indulge the historic buildings nerd in me for very long. Anyway, Kilmacurragh.
Our ever-changing vintage-retro aesthetic allows us to forget that not everything from the 50s and 60s was classy, cool, chic, or anything like a good idea. Drive in movies? Amazing. Testing dangerous pathogens on conscientious objectors? Not really sure how to accessorise that.
When it comes to style, some people just never got the news. We forgive a lot in retrospect, sometimes giving awful things a second chance: ponchos, slouch boots, anything with buckles, and NKOTB (sorry, fans) because their failure to survive longer than a few years has allowed them to become zeitgeisty icons. And yet, because sometimes the inside of my brain looks like a church bazaar, I’m pretty sure I must have burned that internal memo because I think I want some of the accessories from this book I dug out of that skip last weekend.
It was published in 1960 in Chicago as part of a long series on making the kinds of things that would fuel generations of bad yard-sale bric-a-brac judgment.
I saw this on Fade Street the other day.
Free Inside! Your Mortality!
There are a few of these great ESB box stickers around town, my favourite being this one (which no, I did not take, and am dying to know where it is). I know that Conorh has a photo of one of these in a different location, but Conor, can you post a link? More of this sort of thing that also gives me the opportunity to post a link to my favourite thing on the whole internet that is not a baby animal.
In the meantime, I am still trying to decide whether I should post the pictures of ‘fan mail’ that I got from someone who has offered to come and clean my house dressed as a maid. I guess with my earnest empathy for eccentrics, I’m okay with laughing at people’s weirdness as long as no one is mean. I’ve found myself defending this person more than I have laughing at them, not because I don’t think it’s funny, but because it’s not the fetish that makes me feel a little weird, it’s that this person looked up my address in the phone book and thought it was appropriate to send me a letter to my house.
Because really, I’d much rather live in a world full of oddballs with fetishes than a world full of assholes of any kind. It’s the lack of boundary is all. I just can’t figure out why my inner ethicist is telling me that to describe the fan mail is okay, but to post it is just kinda mean. Anyone know why this is?
I nearly didn’t bring a jacket with me on my run today, but I’m sure glad I did. Now I’m only disappointed that I didn’t bring a pack animal or a car or a large bag, or possibly a truck with a trailer hitch and some wheels to put under a skip. Good lord, though, am I ever glad that I had pockets. Outside a house on the N11 I passed the greatest skip I’ve ever seen, overflowing with the contents of what can only be the best haul of attic loot in the city, only that it was tragically being chucked out. The criminally unsentimental dump of such treasure made me want to knock on the door of the house and complain, but then I probably would not be allowed in the skip, which I wasn’t allowed in anyway, but since when has that ever stopped me? Now I wish I’d stayed a little longer to poke around some more. It started raining as soon as I got home, so I’d obviously caught the skip just before its contents got a soaking.
Suitcases, and not just suitcases, suitcases and boxes and bags full of old newspapers and magazines and books, and then I spotted evidence that the person whose attic this was had been/is/was into ham radio, and I think I nearly died of a nerdyeurism. Anyway, having only two small pockets in my running jacket, being a little worried that I’d be caught and yelled at and thus get away with no goodies, and still having about 6 kilometres to go, I grabbed the most intact-looking thing that would fit in my pocket, a Round The World Card Game that dates to the second half of the 1950s. I’ve done some Googling around and I’m guessing about late 1957 or sometime in 1958.
Round the World on the N11
I won’t do it again, I promise. But I lie.
ZOMG! Google Black Helicopters! (credit: CC Byrion)
Some residents in Broughton, an affluent Buckinghamshire village, want to live off the grid, it seems. They moved away so they wouldn’t have to look at poor people, and that means they don’t want poor people looking at them, either. The streetview team might as well have been the black helicopters for these folks. When one guy spotted the black Opel with a camera on its roof, he “rushed round banging on neighbours’ doors, and soon had a posse surrounding the driver”. And it seems that a number of people and places, including Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, have been removed from the service. Those poshies who were afraid of poors looking at their swimming pools and fantasising about filling them with scrumpy pee, they could merely have clicked some links and had their village removed, but at least the dramatics make a good story. Now, I’m not one to slam people for their privacy concerns, but it brings up a couple of interesting points about mapping.
