Break a high note on wine pastilles: the first of too many sweets. By the time we reach O�Connell Street they�re nearly all gone. I had forgotten the absurdity of buses that have refused to give change, but don�t refuse to take excess cash. Myles would have had a field day, possibly an anthology. The road through Drumcondra lined with takeaways and pubs, not much like a motorway. On O�Connell Street a top-deck Christian silently reminds me of Belle & Sebastian (Christians seem to begin to do this), then kindly gives me some directions I don�t need. � Thanks, mate, I say, as English as possible. I wonder how and why the ring of land around O�Connell Bridge is preserved as it is: coloured walls, perpetual adverts for Guinness and Bailey�s stretching beyond vision�s limits into past and future, like a couple of native firms have bought the place for ever. The Vicar reckons Paul Morley�s writing is grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre and unfortunate. St Michan�s 1000-year-old watchtower. In the quiet cemetery behind it something makes me think of U2, and what difference they brought to pop�s vision over 20 years ago: how unusual it was, for instance, to be photographed on the Dublin docks. Inside the Ten Commandments hang either side of the altar. These make me think. Some feel unfamiliar; and their wording is strongly rooted in 2000-year-old circumstances. Religion as a community talking to itself; the skyward appeal as a red herring. Collins Barracks. Swords to ploughshares and gunpowder to cappuccinos. Spanish Armada cannon, a Samurai�s armour, Atlantic cables, cream salvers, sugar bowls. Coins circulate, medals move only once. Black and Tan awards for veterans of the War of Independence. Internee camp tokens, coins stamped UVF or IRA a la Tristero. How WBY�s committee specified animals to be on the coins: different artists took up the challenge, one succeeded in all categories though the judges expected various names to win. Salmon, wolfhound, ox, horse. Lady Lavery as Cathleen ni Houlihan, ploughman and horses at sunset. Notes Kavanagh would have tendered in the Bailey. A reflection on acceleration: in modern human history inventions get perfected, then rapidly superseded. Banknotes are relatively recent in Ireland, but already, this exhibition tells us, much money is virtual. Rick�s Burgers are real and fresh � it�s true. A recurring type: the generic middle-aged working man in a shirt and tie, behind a museum desk or standing at an entrance, ready to advise on what to see and how to go places. This one tells me urgently to visit the military exhibit upstairs: the Wild Geese. Touched I ascend Portraits, costumes, an Austrian diaspora. In torchlight dun costumes, sabres glinting. With a goblet of wine he toasts foreign compeers. Even a thesaurus is scant help at this game. The Lord Edward feels like an old English pub, save that the barman says �Lovely� to a simple order and brings a pint over minutes later. Goodness, it�s a long time since I�ve talked about Tales From The Black Freighter. We can hardly remember what it all meant. Allegory�s starting to happen. Green quads and lawns, buildings� obscure and particular names, dripping trees, old and new libraries. But for once the real new thing: plastic floors, the scent of cheap coffee, a milling crowd for a scientific conference on The Tree of Life, a lecture theatre slowly casually starting to fill. It sweetly feels like 10 years ago. Up concrete stairs the edge of the English Department: between breeze-blocks, face to face doors behind which lurk imaginary growls and stale alcoholic smells. Rain falls on scuba-divers, absent cricketers, the natural history department with its turbine models and its great boneframe. How does the poem go? � They�ve taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate of air. In Nassau Street the Irish Tom Jones sings. It�s groovy, I admit. The rain grows farcical. The heavy, overripe Mars Bar: mystery of its hegemony. Over fried platters on a traffic island selected characters from �Manic Mungo� make a comeback in transient air. Chuck out the rhino. Lemon platt, sugarsticky strawberry books. The Burton is no longer visible, and I doubt that it became the Bailey as they vaguely claim. The first ten years� editions are surprisingly readable and elegant, spaciously printed between the blue covers. �1200. To you, a chara, �1600. Mutely crave to adore. In the pricey mall the way people waste money�s visible. Decorated cows, Irish bulls. George Street South: North to Dame Street, West again up Lord Edward Street, Christchurch, High Street, Thomas Street West: into an old Dublin of cheap shops, butchers, stallholders urging purchases on you, big fellows in footy colours. The Guinness Hopstore has improved beyond measure in a dozen years: discarding information and education and transforming itself to a high-rolling megastore, its vast lettering and bullish promotion of the brand is enough to persuade even a sceptic like me to try the stuff. One missing ingredient is in the air all around you: Arthur Guinness. It�s thrue what that man�s afther sayin. High air at Dublin bar: tourists sprawl across the crowded floor round the central ring which knocks out pint after pint from next door. All around through glass environs: from the Phoenix Park to the Pigeon House and the mountains, via Collins Barracks, the Spire, Customs House and Four Courts, distant blocks of flats, the real Barrytown. I don�t know why it moves me so. Grand Canal Dock the local Canary Wharf. Why always a dock or a wharf? Dun Laoghaire a dominion unto itself: the serenity of the sea, the motion of the roads. How Ireland never had� Indie. The Malaysians remind me of minimalist pop artists. Bells, drums, dancers; their final collective vocalisation is overwhelming. At the interval, a view of the changing dark blues of the evening over the sea, over Howth to which, to where, I did not yet make it. The Royal Marine Hotel swings at the heart of a labyrinth unsignalled on the blithely encouraging map. Inside a very merely average folk band plays. The best thing I can hear about them is the snare beat regularly laid by the drummer who looks like he hails from Roy Keane�s Cork estate or demesne. People should use that beat more, I think. Where have I heard it before? Oh: �Queen of the New Year�. Better fun though are the tough geezers of the audience. A fat fellow we imagine to be a Morris dancer groupie, his Umbro top seeming to proclaim Englishness, does the worst, perhaps the least energetic, dancing I have ever seen. � Duelling banjos! he cries. � Duelling banjos! A shudder of promise as he brushes insouciantly past a tough biker. The showdown shudderingly promised does not quite arrive. The Dublin Spire�s only feature is its great height. If hired for big bucks or exuberant euros to defend its virtues I�d struggle. At the world party Dublin Gurus loudly sing. I think of GLC festivals of twenty years ago. Immigrant children have captioned their pictures. � Brown is my favourite colour because I am brown. The best is a rockist 11-year-old: � My picture speaks. There are no words. It�s all about the music. The music is different wherever you go. Some busker plays simple variations on a D that catch me. Somehow we eschew the cr�pes of the French stalls. On the East Pier look south to Sandycove: a fellow in shades joins the debate about whether we�re looking at Dalkey. A familiar figure approaches. He doesn�t just dress like �Spider-Man� � he moves like �Spider-Man�. It can�t be � but� he *is* �Spider-Man�! He bids me strike a webcasting pose. � Thanks, �Spider-Man�! � No problem. The sea is blue: white yachts, a stationary tanker, the quickly turning sea-cat. How does the novella go? � A large quadruped had arisen and was now standing in the midst of the rocks, spewing showers of putrid stench around it. At first I thought that an exceedingly bulky seal stood before me but later the four feet denied this. Then, the dull sheen in the sky increased slightly and I saw that a great strong hairy object was in my company that night, grey-haired and with prickly red eyes, staring at me angrily. I think that was a different sea-cat. Like one-off performers from Robin of Sherwood, Morris dancers arrive from the Welsh border, masked in blackface, ribboned red and yellow, a different animal rampant on each one�s back. Rabbit, tiger, Nick Park�s sheep. The ringleader reminds me obscurely of Hopkins: perhaps I am imagining him drinking real ale in a pub over the eastern sea. A great black bull walks around the edge of the crowd, near-silent, lending enigmatic weight to the rest. The Vicar calls him �friendly / threatening�, covering most bases. In Pearse�s airy hall of orange brick and green metal the pink-numbered hen girls wait to move. The chime of the 6 o�clock city tolls down Dame Street, glimmering in the sun like a great avenue of Glasgow. Amid the central hotel�s books the birthday women wear boas. An English builder calls from his Chinese table to assure us that Cherie Blair�s Beatles performance was no figment of the media�s imagination. A bone of contention: Morrissey and Siouxsie�s �Interlude�. Like the incredulous Vicar, I think it a record so poor that I cannot even remember how it goes: but I give it a listen back home. I think the surprising problem is that after 10 or 15 years in pop to neither of them seems to come the great idea of � harmony. The Brazen Head reputed oldest pub in town beckons youth to its doors. Beyond the warm courtyard a girl looking like Britney Spears offers her friends� favours to reluctant Brits. I don�t fathom the reluctance. Under Robert Emmet one t only and other memorabilia we remember how the Mission�s �Butterfly on a Wheel� announced the tomorrow�s whirl of the 1990s. Time for the Dublin Guru. Birdland were big in Japan: Power of Dreams were more like the House of Love than I ever knew: Kylie Minogue has only had two good songs. I don�t know about that: I don�t even like all of �CGYOOMH�, after the first few instrumental bars are through. The mystery of the geezer: like Scotland Ireland lacks them, or will not divulge its own word for the phenomenon. I am reminded that most of the time I say Geezer I mean Geezthete, in the Nipper�s strict sense. In the Clarence multicoloured lights flash like the Edge is in town, or the original Dirty Vicar is jockeying for discs. In the Jervis Centre an inspiring pop record bids my blood take the plunge and buy a bag of pick & mix sweets. Fizzy cola bottles, sweet teeth, red lips, white mice. Yesterday�s goals sound unbelievable. Big Country get their first run-out in long years I�ll wager. This Sporting Life has the atmosphere and iconography, but its motivations are obscure; clouds across the moon. The tour guides drum into us the answer to Wilde�s favourite topics: �art and aesthetics�. I am surprised: I�d have expected some slack comic mileage in the cheap answer �himself�. White waves lap water�s edges; towns pass and I wonder if one is Skerries. The countryside beats England�s hands down, all fear and no favour. Dundalk: the text says avoid it, a Wild West town, dead when not deadly. The border nears, a strange buzz: this momentous little country of many names; going abroad, yet also coming back to my own� Kingdom. I will spare you excessive details of the public toilets of the station: their striking modernity and elegant blue tiles. How does the guidebook go? � To look at, it is a wholly English creation of the Victorian period � a parody, almost, of the great industrial cities of the English Midlands and North, and once their great rival. I marvel at that sentence: its compression, ambivalence, suggestiveness. The cashpoint feeds me Northern notes which silly London will not take. The mountains, like Sheffield�s, are visible beyond the streets. Victoria looking Northwest, the Titanic memorial. Grandeur, heavy stone building; local cult of strength. Further North a pub called the Hercules. No Antaeus. Provincial street furniture, Aberdeen to Bath: bus stops and bins, amid the old stone. Another genial generic mid-aged man gives interminable advice about the best way into the West. The religious d�cor reminds me again of Belle & Sebastian and their fascination with characters from the Bible. The Cornmarket shows no signs of the youth cults the guide predicts. Bandstand, telephone boxes, life going round. The Crown is maybe the most spectacular pub I have ever seen: gold, silver, many colours shining in and out. Into a booked snug drift the television�s football voices. The south is almost like Cambridge: brick buildings, leafy squares and roads, an anarchy symbol painted on the pillar outside Queens� granite outpost. The Botanic Gardens are worthy of a sinister picnic: in fact they put me in mind of Kelvingrove. The Ulster Museum weirdly bolts concrete on to granite: for a few yards it convinces. 30 minutes to see its impossible cornucopia: Belfast painters, Irish cretaceous dinosaurs. Outside a computer programmer reads me �The Song of Wandering Aengus�. Sandy Row�s kerbstones run red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red white blue white red, bunting flaps diagonals all down the street, union flags fly from pubs and in crude paint adorn the lids of bins. London�s Jubilees have nothing on, and little to do with, this. An old familiar irony: these colours mean so much more to them than to us. The road�s hyperbole bespeaks my nation, but leaves me an outsider. So much talk of union flags � from Townshend to Morrissey, Weller to Gallagher and even (I see on the Pops when I return) the feeble-sounding Libertines � has focused on London, on �Englishness�, on �racism�. To break open those debates, walk this pavement: the colours mean something different, and London is a long way away. We distant listeners never really understand what�s meant about these roads: how they relate, how a road itself can have such significance. As I near the Falls I feel the intensity of a geographical encounter finally about to happen. It�s traversed by the shared taxis but not the army patrols promised by the dated Guide; the tricolour flies from roofs, every other gable is painted with elaborate faces. I fear reprisals for no offence. At least if a republican pins me to a wall I can reel off the names of his people�s heroes: less conviction to offer the loyalists. Children play in green Irish footy shirts, throw stones at a young woman walking home from dull work. Around these few square miles so much energy and worry has been spent. Strange isolation of the place, a town to itself. On the walls IRA has been updated to CIRA. So much for taking the nationalist community with you. But then, for whom does the street art speak? There must be many who grow among it resenting and resisting. Above Milltown Cemetery the mountains brood. At the hill�s foot in a sporting cage women practice� football. Irish football. Through a window Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby plays on someone�s TV. British TV. Sky TV. Outside the takeaways boys wear red and white striped shirts. I can�t believe they�re all Sunderland fans. Outside a pub a crowd I can�t bypass. A crouching male waves something at me, crying: � Pot noodles! Pot noodles! The rest of the gang jeers and sneers as I pass. I am not even wearing my Arthur Griffith T-shirt. Returning to Connolly, west along streets that suddenly feel comically safe, seeing the silly Spire down the road, feels like a sort of homecoming. I pass Joyce, go up and touch him on the arm, like he�s after all a truer symbol of this place than many have reckoned or dared sentimentally admit. Camden Street: the Palace Ballroom. No, no, notorious. Synge Street: I see (where) Shaw�s framed letters, albeit uncleared by my office, have been after making a wall hilarious. � You have a right to public support, but not to steal another man�s job by offering to do it for nothing. If you do not realize this you are a fool, if you do and persist then you are a blackguard. Underused word blackguard is. The garden with its jakes puts me in mind of Eccles Street. Out the top floor window: the world, the tape says, that Shaw would take by storm. The Irish Jewish Museum�s garrulous staff, maybe annoyed that I�m not seeking my roots, chat in the hall, argue with a traffic warden. Howth�s harbour a picture: stunning sea, fishing fleet, smell of fresh herring, Ireland�s Eye offshore, the standard-issue Martello Tower up on the cliffs.
From Beshoff�s Italian girls buy chips for one cent less than advertised price, take them up the hill, marvelling at blue sea and white breakers. Inland, the hill seems to rise forever, like something from a fantasy game book. The rough guide is apt again:
- a sleepy, suburban place full of steep streets and sudden views. Back at the harbour Blue Sea ice cream like the cream sea that is blue in the harbour. The radio flicks on �Take It Easy�. It sounds more inspiring than it did in that Glasgow steakhouse on a rainy day. � It�s a girl! � my lord: with a flat-black Ford. I can�t believe how good it sounds; I can�t walk out of this place till the easily taken guitar solo�s through. Belle & Sebastian, yes, one more time. The B&S song challenge is fuelled by a dangerous few bottles. I don�t really buy the Vicar�s enthusiasm for �Jonathan David�, but it does have some kind of� growing urgency. �Middle Distance Runner�: their best song, says the Vicar, class of 99, even *this* version. I think the lead acoustic is mixed too prominently. But he has a point somewhere. I have never been quite sure what else is wrong with this version. �Modern Rock Song�: the folly continues. This was mediocre as a radio session, mediocre as a 45, is still mediocre a surprising five years on. �I�m Waking Up To Us� is probably their most underrated record: a record that shows that late B&S can be� good. The title track has such structure, drama, diversity, style, quality of arrangement, pacing; �Marx and Engels�� genius we already know. Its overlapping vocals do as much for me as almost anything else on any B&S record I can think of. Sun pours on a string quartet below Bewley�s. Grafton Street has such a range of busking quality: the real thing, like this, sounding so good I�d thought it was a record; but then also, sentries in alcoves up and down the road, the unbearable freckle-faced mugs of keening whining boys, an army of drownable chancers that replenishes itself year on year. In the Chester Beatty Library ponder again the history of world religion. Papyrus scraps of the Bible, tiny comic meditating figures from the Far East. In the curator�s prose all Buddhisms come to the same thing. � Through meditation, self-discipline and thoughtfulness for others, it is possible to reach Enlightenment. In a basement your man funds half my steak sandwich, an astoundingly substantial lunch. Debbie Gibson�s �Electric Youth� sounds so good I first think it must be a calculated retroaction. Your man recounts lengthily a weird plan to write an appreciative essay on Robbie Williams� desire to be a serious songwriter. � Son, I want to say kindly: don�t bother! Taxi past green fields rougher than Heathrow or Stansted�s modernized plains: within seconds of take-off the country recedes breathtakingly. The Pigeon House, the DART line past mud flats through Sutton: Howth an astounding model village, its fishy harbour and tower newly framed. Within 15 minutes the brown rocks of the coast of England. But England � who cares about England? __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+