All of You on the Good Earth

50 years ago, on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 were the first people to leave the Earth’s orbit, and the first to orbit the moon. To what was the largest TV audience in history, they read the opening passages of the book of Genesis. It remains a deeply beautiful moment.

Waiting For The Man

Mother Night

If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides.

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Introduction to Mother Night (1966)

Pyramid

This Song is an Exercise in Archaeology

Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, 'cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love, you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time - it's because these groups think there's something very special about it either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love.

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love - or so they would have you believe, anyway - but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality. I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (1979)

This is an archaeology exercise really, going back in time to figure out what these people were all about in '78 or whenever it was, at the time I was talking about the ubiquitous presence of the love song and why it was that people sang about falling in and out of love and anything else that loosely fell into the love bracket, or as Charles Aznavour may or may not have said, I don't think that what happens in people's romantic lives should be processed in language of mystification.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (2005)

Storm Emma

With spring looking like it's finally arrived in Ireland, I thought it was about time I put up these videos I took of Storm Emma back at the start of March.

Waiting for the Storm

The harbour at Dún Laoghaire, before Storm Emma arrives.

A New Career in a New Town