Quote of the day.

"If you do the essential thing, everything else will be one hundred times easier".

Flea said, while teaching acrobatic technique - although I think it's good advise to bear in mind for life in general. 

Quote of the Day.

I just picked up a neat book about the French Revolution. It's particularly interesting and also unsettling because I can draw similarities between pre-revolution 17th Century France and post-celtic tiger 21st Century Ireland. Today, I read a particularly gripping statement:

"The people's only means of political self-expression was force - hence the Revolution"
S. Reed Brett, Modern Europe 1789-1914 and After.

This wonderful video taken in Cork on Christmas Day provoked in me a similar feeling:

Quote of the day.

"You didn't need to be Bertram Mills or Billy Smart to have a circus. In fact all you needed to have was a single-decker bus and a lot of cheek. Both of which I reckoned could be picked up pretty cheap. Suddenly my dream of owning a circus seemed possible. I decided to start training seriously."

Confessions of a Showman: My Life in the Circus by Gerry Cottle

And an apt description of my daily psychological reasoning.

Quote of the day.

"I have always said there are more elephants in Ireland then there are in India"

- Karen Anderson on that which is unspoken in Irish families and more generally, the cultural denial of negative emotions, trauma, conflict and upset.

Quote of the day.

Violet from Worcester on 'Vajazzling':

"But darling that's not sprucing things up!

That's like having the Royal jewels of Persia on your fanny!"

More on Britain's Royal Wedding, uh, enthusiasts here.

via Panti's blog.

quote of the day.

Regarding Tilly Devine, "Rough, tough, tea-sipping, street fighting, madame"

"If Tilly didn't resort to open violence, she'd turn to profanity. She was regularly arrested for letting fly with torrents of abuse, and seemed to enjoy her position as the 'number one swearer in Sydney'. Hauled up in court on one occasion for hurling abuse at a fish seller who had sold her a bad oyster, the magistrate shook his head in amazement and remarked that they were the 'worst words he'd ever heard'!"

Bad Girls and Wicked Women by Jan Stradling (2010)

Quote of the day.

Fafa on Dress Making:

"My Feathermountain always awaits you my dear! ;-)"

Quote of the day.

'Miller once called Marilyn'

“a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

A quote within a quote from this article from the New York Times entitled 'Making Ignorance Chic' by Maureen Dowd

And another from Marilyn:

“I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”

Via Panti's blog

Quote of the day.

"One night I saw a dog in my apartment.
It was a big dog, tall and black and lean, with pointy ears and long taut slender legs. It had black eyes and auburn tips on its face and feet and it didn't move at all. I was afraid and held my breath and the dog did too."

Rebecca Brown, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary

Cixous is inspired.

Quote of the day.

While discussing the rejection of a proposal for an art installation by the Belgrade government early in her career, Marina Abramovic said:

"Their imagination is tiny; mine is big. I want always to shake everything up."

Read the full interview here.

Quote of the day.

Overheard on the street from my bedroom window:

Child (coming gradually closer, getting gradually louder):

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHDDDDAAAAADDDDDDDDDYYYYY!

Woman pushing the pram:

SSSsssssssssHHHHhhhhhhhh!

Child: No! AAAAAAHHHHhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Woman: Stop shouting!

Child: YYYYAAAAWWWWWWWNNN WWWEEeeeeeeeeeeeAAAAHHHhhhhhhDDDAAADDDD!!!

(Fade out.)

Quote of the day.

While discussing how humans resemble animals Séan said:

'Because primates are so closely related to humans, I feel a bit bad saying that someone looks like a monkey. It's like saying,
"you look under-evolved"'

(I'm a lemur apparently)

Quote of the day.

While reading aloud a passage from The Judgment of Tiresias (Ovid's Metamorphoses) to Mother...:

Me: Meanwhile, they say that in heaven Jove had put aside his weighty cares, and, drink in hand, was busy killing time in repartee with Juno: "Women get far more pleasure out of sex than men do," he said. And when she denied this, they both agreed to seek the arbitration of the transsexual sage, Tiresias, who, in a leafy forest, had once profaned the coupling of two enormous serpents, by giving them a blow with his walking stick..."

Mother: Sounds like a Galway Parish Priest.

Oh how we laughed.

Aside:
Actor Ned Dennehy played Tiresias in Gavin Quinn and Simon Doyle's play Oedipus Loves You and BLEW MY MIND. Best opening scene ever. Any movie, any play, any performance I've ever seen.

Quote of the day.

Fafa regarding her ambitious philosophy thesis:

"I thought I could circum-navigate Russel's paradox of definability... I was so fucking stupid!"

Dublin Peeple.

"I'll tell ya what you do. Don't pull her by the hair, hit her straight, right on the puss. That's what ya do. She'll be expectin' ya to pull her hair. Giv'er a smack on the nose, grab her down there and then ya bate her... but hopefully it won't come to that. So, any plans for the weekend?"

Dublin:



I'm very pleased with my city. The pleasure started at Bunny's Hutch - my new favourite place to go for the sights and sounds of cabaret - and continued to the nearest late night bar with a vase of peacock feathers (for I had the performative company of Lisa Donegal), where I spent too much money on Gin. No gluten for me no more, no siree, makes for expensive outings. Hiss! And so with gin flooding the gates of my personality, we stayed up too late squeeling over Beth Anderson and plotting the Beth Anderson experience and subsequently, the Beth Anderson cult following: "There was life before Beth Anderson and then, there is life after Beth Anderson... and what a life! What a world!". And after we did that we slept some, slanty ways and woke up to the shakes, not from Gin, but of the outside world and Board Gás being legally annoying at 8.30am.
On with the day and off to work with the bauld child Lisa (not bald... well, how would you spell that phonetic bold? First I wrote phrenetic... which is actually a word. I swear.).

First stop St. Vincent's near Mountjoy Square where I bought these for €1.


I should state at this point that when I'm hungover, I have much greater freedom in what I'd like to wear, and the habitually overwhelming neuosis of identity versus external expression via clothesz cease to bother me. And it just so happened that I was going fabric shopping with my friend and co-member of RAG magazine Angela who is making me a Nun costume (for my performance with the Pony Girls on the 8th of October in the Complex, oh yes).


If you are into dress making and don't already know about this place, or if you are into amazing buildings in your city that you don't already know about, then you should make a trip to T.W.I international on Mountjoy Square. Now, go! Angela was overwhelmed...


It was about time I actually spent some money in this place since I'd been there half a dozen times before trying to decide on a fabric for my Victorian Gentleman's suit. I found one! A gorgeous heavy (bad for spotlights, but good for Winter) daylight-grey wool. I say daylight-grey because you know those clouds that populate the Irish sky on most days? Yeah, pretty much that colour. It's Gawgeous and it will be mine:


(Tipping the Velvet fans PLEASE take a look at this blog)

Anyway, having stopped for some Chinese mange, I parted ways with my fabric fien-ed friend and pottered into Chapters to search out Angela Carter goodness, but ended up buying Germaine Greer's The Boy. Phew! What a collection of images! It was pricey, as Oort books tend to be, but the first page I opened to find a discussion of Narcissus and I was sold, or rather, the book was. It spurred me to seek out Ovid's original tale of Narcissus, which I found in - what the clerk told me was his most important book - Metamorphoses. I hadn't considered that the tale of Narcissus would be in print! It reads:

While he seeks to slake his thirst, another thirst springs up, and while he drinks he is smitten by the sight of the beautiful form he sees. He loves an insubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow... Unwittingly he desires himself; he praises and is himself what he praises; and while he seeks is sought; equally he kindles love and burns with love.

In the next episode of my life, I walk down Moore Street and fall in love...



She was playing the keyboard like a child. When I asked if I could take her picture, she fixed her hair and said "yes, you can do dis". Ping!

What happened after that? More suits...




And Dummies:


And then a quick visit to a new discovery of mine (yeah sometimes what ya don't see is right on yer front door step yadda yadda yadda) Sé Sí aka Lucy's. They take deposits... I'll be in there, a lot!


Maybe it was my hungover vibes, or styles, or maybe it was my decidedly 'day in town' attitudes, but many many strange and interesting people came into my life that day, the man quoted above, the beautiful pianist, the clerk with three fingers, the tuxedoed man gazing from his window and the woman who got away, for I didnea think to ask for a snap... but I do know she owns a shop on Dean Street and has no qualms about approaching a stranger in Spar and asking her to take off her jacket.

Funnily enough, I had noticed her on the way into the Spar. She was walking the other direction, saluted a slim girl on a squeaky bike and said in passing "...in a junkie's house". Just for the record she was talking to someone when she said that. Anyway, a slightly eccentric looking older woman wearing a wide brimmed hat saying "...in a junkie's house" is sure enough to get my attention. Next thing I know she's quizzing me about my jacket while I que to pay for eggs.
"Excuse me, where did you get that jacket?"
"Berlin"
"Where do you live? Are you local?"
"Yep, just down the road"
"Where abouts exactly do you live"
"Really, just down the road from here"
"Would you mind taking off your jacket?"
"Uh, I'm actually in a hurry to get home..."
"It's just because I own a shop"
"Oh yeah?"
"It's called... Bohemia!" (long pause)
"Cool..."
"On Dean Street"
...

I'm going there.

Quote of the day

When commenting on the nature of the 'full-stop', Jon said:

"Your brain doesn't have punctuation marks, that's why you get in so much trouble"