Did you see how TV3’s amazingly awful “Psychic Readings Live” reached the attention of leading cultural curiousity curator, Boing Boing? Not because the TV psychics are a bunch of lying charlatans taking advantage of the weak and ignorant – nothing new there – but because they aren’t even good at taking advantage of the weak and ignorant.
I think this show replaces the one where the woman pretends to be sexually aroused by drunk men on the phone. Maybe they got too many complaints about that. Superstition driving out sex – says a lot about this country really. Not that one is worse or better to my mind. It’s about the same level of sadness. Both consist of people willing to lie for money.
And of course it’s all OK, because it’s just entertainment. It says so clearly up there in the corner, just in case anyone should try to sue them for only pretending to have godlike supernatural powers.
Is it wrong? I’m not sure. But I wish I lived in a world where you couldn’t make a living by lying to people. Even – no, especially – when they want you to lie to them.
First I march in Germany, now I’ve helped organise an anti-capitalist comedy gig. I’ll be living in an Occupy tent next. If there are any left. As a cartoonist and columnist, I always felt that having political opinions was the day job and my spare time was my own. These days though I don’t know what the hell is happening.
Anyway, this looks like it’s going to be an excellent show. More than a show really, a kind of event. A tour of free gigs powered only by goodwill, cutting out the middle-oligarchy. Demonstrating that the way we’ve been doing things is not the only way.
3:00 this afternoon, at Kelly’s on Bridge St. It’s a great venue for comedy, they’re great comics, it’ll be a great gig. See you there I hope.
Only now can the story be told – because since I got back I’ve been too shagged. How did I become involved with the Ballyhea Burn The Bank Bondholders band? I have to be honest, I am not altogether sure. It sounded like a wild thing to do. It was a noble cause. It would mean spending time with one of my favouritest people. I had some time, flights were cheap, what the hell.
Our journey begins as it ends – in Knock. Knock is one of the world’s weirdest little airports. It has a runway long enough for 747s, but it is miles and miles away from anywhere almost anyone would want to go. The nearest cities are Galway, Limerick and Derry, but the closest of them is an hour away and they all have their own airports anyway.
Knock was the brainchild not of a planner or politician, but of a priest – who thought that the site of a minor and, it has to be said, suspect apparition could become a major destination for pilgrims, if there were only an airport to bring them. But the maxim “If you build it they will come” applies poorly to superfluous infrastructure. Knock had to wait for a new miracle and a new prophet – Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, who knew how to put unwanted airports to good use. So from Knock, an hour away from Galway, we can fly to Hahn, two hours away from Frankfurt. It’s a very useful service – and not only for us, as we were to find.
Knock though is well worth visiting for itself, if you enjoy mocking people’s beliefs. Perhaps I can find a better way to put that… It’s fascinating, because it displays religion at its most incredible. The town of Knock is more or less a religious strip mall, selling objects of veneration in boxes of a dozen beside charming isn’t-drunkenness-funny souvenirs. It’s hard to imagine how anyone’s faith could survive a pilgrimage here.
I would swear that religious art has just got more dumb-looking in recent decades. These figures seem actually to have concussion, the features weirdly cartoonish and toy-like. The 3D pictures of animals are… unexplained. Virgin Marys now come in Standard and Luminous. I resisted the desire to buy a luminous one.
I do not know what a Happy Death Cross is, or how it differs from the usual sad death type of crucifix. We speculate that if you look close, Jesus has a big smile.
So we tear ourselves away from the anthropology just in time to meet up with the Ballyhea folks at the airport, and board our flight. Though not before paying an extra €10, for Knock is a toll airport.
Aboard then, and of course the first thing that greets you is Ryanair’s extraordinary panoply of warnings, right in front of your face. They know that the usual safety cards are often damaged or taken as souvenirs (seriously, I have a friend who collects them), so to save a few cents every flight Ryanair plaster them to the back of the seat in front of you. You spend your entire journey being constantly reminded of the things that can go wrong with a plane.
And I ask you, if you didn’t know all the safety drills already, would you really be able to work them out from this? What the hell is that guy doing with the yellow vest – the hula? And look at the first panel of “Exit B Overwings”, the bottom row of the right side. The whole point of doing this in pictures is so you don’t need to read English to understand the drill. But without that caption, the picture seems to say “If you look out the window and see fire, stay in the plane”. That’s really only good advice if you’re flying through a fire.
Gotta say, plane wings are lovely things.
When we boarded though, someone noticed a thing that took us all by surprise. Among our fellow-passengers was one of the people we were hoping to meet in Frankfurt – Doctor Patrick Honohan, the governor of Ireland’s Central Bank, on his way to the very meeting we were going to picket. This, I admit, was troubling. Were we so broke that our Central Bank Governor had to fly Ryanair? It seems almost shameful. Of course to his credit, Honahan had recently turned down a pay rise in the hope, naive as it might seem, of business and public sector leaders following suit. So perhaps this was another example of economy.
Cat is sure that Tree didn’t use to be that colour
Good grief.
I’m being blinded by the light reflecting off my own skin. Thanks to last year’s wholly ineffective summer, I haven’t been struck by the cancer-particle for an age. What melanin I ever possessed is long gone, chopped up for firewood or something. I am now little more than a collection of human organs in a see-through bag.
But le soleil tapait dur, as they say in French lessons. I received more dangerous photons to my surfaces yesterday than I have in the last two years, and I include X-rays in that. So while some areas of me are transparent, others are luminous. First I was at a funeral, and so got basted in sunspit before I was even ready to contemplate the idea. Very few people pause at the graveside to apply sunscreen. Then driving home I had the windows down. Only a 100kph wind was sufficient to refresh me, and it was amazingly relaxing to be basking and buffeted at the same time. A thrillingly sensual experience, like bathing in a hot air jacuzzi. I arrived home scorched.
And now I lie on a lawn, hoping to make my other parts match. I am supposed to be composing my blog here but, though I try to write in a personal way, nearly everything that has happened in the last few days has been so intensely personal, either for me or for someone close to me, that there is little on my mind that I can fairly write about. I am emotionally drained and of little use today. And so I make myself useful.
Inside, ladies of the superior generation are discussing whatever it is they discuss when I’m not there. My mother and one of her sisters, visiting another sister at the house of a cousin who… You know I’m not even sure where I am. I just drive. I am the ferry of aunts. And happily so. In the sun, the world is made of simple things.
OK, barefaced misnomer. This is Romanesque architecture, older and more primitive than Gothic. In fact it is barely Romanesque, more Roman-ish; really just basic vernacular masonry with a little bit of decoration around the edges to classy it up. But it is a graveyard in the ruins of a monastery – Annaghdown Abbey, right next to the cathedral I spoke of – so the label is pretty inescapable.
There is something quiet primitive too about taking pictures. Like hunting or harvesting, if photograph weather comes along then you must take those photographs where you can. It’s just fortunate I was in a place like this on the first truly hot day of summer. Bagged me some nice wild images. A good photographer can make good images out of awful weather of course, but I’m not a photographer of any kind – I know because I tried to be once. I just want to take easy, pretty pictures.
All the ones in the last few months were taken on the Galaxy Note‘s 8 Mpx shooter. It’s very capable if not outstanding; I was more struck by the qualities of the images I got with the 5 Mpx one on my Nokia N900 – once you replaced its very basic default software with the custom FCamera drivers. But I think it’s made me take better pictures simply by virtue of its huge screen.
I always found composing through a viewfinder kind of awkward. I think I wasn’t able to take in the image as a whole when squinting at it one-eyed like that. I tried instead to fit points of interest into a frame. The big screen of the Note though, it’s… well it’s like it’s already a picture. I can just sort of wave it around until it’s a good picture. More than one nice shot I got was something I just noticed in my hand when I wasn’t aiming at anything. I guess it makes my composition less self-conscious – which in artistic terms translates almost directly to less crap.
Let’s have a break from the politics and return to the quiet beauty of the Claddagh, Galway’s historic fishing village.
Sunset in the Claddagh. The rightmost of the buildings we used to call the Claddagh Bank, back when it was a social welfare office. Before that it was the Piscatorial School, an institution for the education of fisher-folk.
Where there’s boats, there’s ropes. Or sheets, as sailors call them. In turn, sailors call sheets “sails”. This is where they get their name. I should get PhotoShopping on this to bring out the contrasts, but I’m really tired. This was at the start of a walk that ended up taking three hours.
A similar angle to one I took last time, but now the higher tide completes the illusion.
Well the last couple of days have been intense. So much so that I’m far too tired to tell stories now. Here then are some pictures, of Galway’s photogenic Claddagh. Where the rings come from.
Incidentally, a shout out to all the people who visited the blog from Switzerland today. I have no idea why you came, but I was very glad to see you.
