Smoke Alarm

When giving up smoking it is helpful to conjure up an image every time you feel tempted. It is the marketing meeting – the smug, suited corporate types with their white boards and their flip charts analyzing the demographics. And there you are, the centerpiece of the presentation, the schmuck who got hooked early and has been an unwavering customer ever since. The poster child, the loyal subject, the star of the show.

You don’t like these marketing types and their heathen gibberish. You have more going for you than they have – you know more about music, you have read more books, you have travelled more, you are a more rounded and decent person. You are their moral and intellectual superior and yet there they are chortling away at your expense in Meeting Room B.

Keep the image close, because if this doesn’t stop you nothing will.

Emmylou

First Aid Kit with their homage to some of the giants, living and dead, of American music

Emigration

All together now - emigration is bad, no good can ever come of emigration, everything about emigration is dreadful and detrimental. This is the narrative that our media have decided upon on our behalf. Any questioning of this definitive incontestable truth will be viewed in a very dim light.

It has been decided for us that we are not interested in hearing about the possible positive aspects of emigration. The enhancing of life experience, the broadening of cultural reference points, the opportunities to travel. It has been decided that our citizens would be diminished beyond repair by exposure to any cultural stimuli outside Celebrity Banisteoir, Operation Transformation or Don’t Tell the Bride.

You remember a few years ago when we were strutting around the place telling each other how much we loved tofu and Balinese hot stone therapy? Well all the positives from that era about having a global perspective have morphed into negatives. Now to express a fondness for anything beyond gazing into a slurry pit in Drumshanbo or watching Killinaskully on a loop is to commit high treason. Michael Noonan just found this out.

There was a picture of a woman on the paper yesterday with a mournful look holding aloft a photo of her son and daughter. At first glance I assumed it was some horrific fatal traffic accident but it turns out the kids have just moved to New York. You know the New York where we could all go for weekend frock buying trips there a few years ago. It’s an evil fuckin’ place altogether now evidently. It’s got nothing to offer, you’ll never be seen again and you’ll lose track of what’s happening on Fair City. Óchón, óchón.

January 17th. Later.

It's hard to keep pace with ye olde technology. We decry it as passive communication, as moving us all to a cold, clinical place but we actually can't get enough. We send an e mail rather than make a phone call whenever there’s the option. We embrace any facility whereby we can avoid spontaneous conversation.

These things take hold because there is a massive appetite for them. If nobody wanted to communicate like this all these innovations would just fade away. Think of the three page text that took ten minutes to compose you invariably got recently when a fifteen second call would have got the same job done.

Despite what they might say people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking to people with whom they are not closely acquainted. Friendship, like oil, has reached peak levels. Awkwardness and social ineptitude is where it's at. Just how the geeks who run everything now like it. Never let it be said.

January 17th 2012

On the radio this morning Simon Coveney said that “last year more than sixteen people were arrested for fuel laundering”. What did Simon Coveney mean by this? Did he mean that seventeen people were arrested or did he mean twelve thousand four hundred and forty two? Or perhaps eighty seven, or six hundred and twelve or one hundred and eleven thousand two hundred and three.

It is not clear. And I thought Simon Coveney was all about transparency.

One Part Lullaby

The Folk Implosion from I'd guess about twelve years ago

January 13th. Friday Incidentally.

Iceland is effortlessly cool. Bjork is from there. Sigur Rós are from there. The accent is beautiful. The landscape is beautiful. The people are beautiful. Their style is unique. The documentary Heiml on Sky Arts last night featured Sigur Rós’ homecoming tour of 2006 and is the most effective promotion of a place I have ever seen. Is there an Irish band that could make an equivalent programme, are there settings as inspiring in this country, are we as cool as the Icelanders? We think we are.

I’ve never been to Iceland but I know now that it’s the greatest place on earth.