And After All This...

Sign at the exit to the display “The Clash: London Calling” at the Museum of London.

The Archaeology of Dealey Plaza

In 1991. I was in Dallas, at the plaza, and a few city workers were fixing some sprinklers and generel landscape maint.

I found my scribbled notes from then:

I ask one of the workers: "... Have you ever found anything interesting in the ground when you have been working and digging around the Plaza?..".

I got a laugh from two of the workers.

"...I found four 22 shells and five bullets all scattered around here over the years..". He motioned with his hands and laughed. 'Tim, here found two 50cal bullets burried in the ground over threre'. He pointed to the north Knoll. "..Jay caught a guy dropping lead fragments around the ground next to the curb. He ask him to leave. Just last week we found three shell casings near the fence.. they were from a 38. Seems people like to plant things here in the plaza.., maybe they want it to grow...". They all laughed and went back to work. I said "Crap", and went to Love Field.

- User "William Plumlee" on The Education Forum, 27 November 2004

Bad Film Night No.8: Double Down (2005)

Bad Film Night No.7: Dead Heat (1988)

You Can't Keep A Good Cop Dead.

Bad Film Night No.6: River of Death (1989)

Adventure, Mystery and Revenge.

St. Patrick's Day

Love Ireland! Yes, if by ‘Ireland’ you mean not only the earth and the waters, but the men and the women, the boys and the girls – the people of Ireland, in fact.

Ireland without her people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’, and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irishmen and women, without burning to end it, is, in my opinion, a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements which he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’.

- James Connolly The Coming Generation (1900)

I Am...

Q Train

Q Train, by Nigel Van Wieck (1990).

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

I Want to Hear Now, the Modern Sound/So I Won't Feel Alone at Night

I got a new stereo for Christmas. The old one is the one I've had since Christmas 1995, and is showing its age: there's no DAB, the CD player doesn't play all CDs, there's no way of attaching an MP3 player, and there's a twin tape deck of the kind no-one uses anymore. But this is the only stereo I've ever owned: I used it to hear most of the music I've ever heard for the first time, and it was with me from secondary school and 6th Form on to Nottingham, London, Liverpool, and then back here. It was, indeed, the radio on to help me from being lonely late at night.

It's wrong, of course, to feel emotions about mass-produced items of consumer electronics, but I don't think I'll be taking the stereo to the tip in the way that I did my old DVD player earlier in the year. It also seems unlikely that I'll ever have any kind of feelings about any other stereos.

Christmas at Song Be

At midnight, celebration was interrupted by the sound of machine gun fire in the distance. The revelers trooped outside to see if they were going to have to fight on Christmas Eve. There were hard words concerning the ancestry of the enemy. Across the wire, across the outpost line, across the valley of no-man’s land were the crests occupied habitually by the “opposition.” From these heights there rose a stream of green, Soviet made “tracer.” The celebrants contemplated this for a minute, and then Suarez suggested a reply. An M-60 machine gun emerged from the house, and while one man fired red tracer into the air, another held the bipod above his head and another fed the gun its belted ammunition. The streams of bullets crossed in the black, star-studded sky. The VC gun fell silent, as did the American. There was a hush as warriors waited for some sign that the hope of common humanity yet lived. The VC fire resumed. Now there were three guns shooting green stars into the blackness. The MI men’s gun chattered merrily, spilling a river of shell casings into the street. Red and green filled the night.

- W. Patrick Lang, The Huron Carol (2007)

An account of a small incident that took place in Vietnam at Christmas 1968. Like most stories of Christmas truces during wars, there's a sad epilogue.

New York Night

New York Night, No. 2 (1921) by George Ault

Keep Off the Grass