Archive for February, 2008
Here is a short list of things which are awesome.
1) There Will Be Blood. In fact, it is hugely beyond awesome. I cannot remember the last time I had a cinematic expierence quite like that. I think I want to see it again this weekend.
2) Lost season 4 episode 5. I swear when they do a Desmond episode they almost, almost make quality of The Wire.
3) The new Iron Man trailer. Until now I did not care. I hoped for an acceptable if hokum superhero movie. Now I think it might actually not just be good but be really really good. Don’t break my heart Jon Favreau!
4) Gone Baby, Gone. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, I really like his Kenzie-Gennaro books so I have been wanting to see this movie for sometime. Due to the McCann case, the movie has been held back in Europe…a nice way to encourage piracy huh? Anyway excellent movie, hugely enjoyable and pretty true to the book. I’m not entirely sold on Affleck and Monaghan but at the least they did okay.
5) Leap years. Yay the 29th of February.
6) Sleeping in a bed…goodnight.
I’ve seen two movies in the past couple of days…it’s been quiet around here. First up was Jumper. I hadn’t intended to go and see this after hearing some poor to moderate reviews from friends but I had managed to get the wrong times for the movie I wanted to see and it was the only thing showing. So having said that, it was better than I expected. It was fun enough but with plot holes the size of Mars throughout. I think it’d probably work a little better as a TV show.
The second movie was Rambo. In a way it was just like Cloverfield, you get exactly what the trailer promises. No more and no less and that was just fine by me. It was stupidly over the top stupid carnage and I enjoyed it for just that. My only complaint was the obvious speeding up of some footage in the final battle scenes but the rest of it was perfect for what it was. Most enjoyable.
So after both movies I decided to walk home from Swords down along the waterfront. It’s a nice enough walk once you get about 10 minutes into it. Of course I was doing it at night so it was dark but with headphones on it was just fine. My soundtrack for the moment is Okkervil River’s The Stage Names. The walk is about 4 1/2 miles so an hour and a little bit door to door. Enough time to get a full rotation of the album in and then another couple of tracks. It’s good for thinking.
And I’ve been thinking about a lot…sometimes too much. I’m rereading the two phonebooks of Dave Sim’s Cerebus and there is a panel where Cerebus threatens to lobotomize his brain for thinking. I’ve had a little bit of that the past couple of nights.
Anyway some stuff I have been thinking about. It struck me in the past week…okay that’s a lie. It struck me while I was drunk on Saturday night. Lets back up a bit here. On Saturday I went to see Ireland play Scotland in the 6 Nations match in Croke Park. We won comfortably which was grand. I went with one of my uncles and his son. So after the match myself and my cousin both having folks to meet for drinks in town figured we may aswell team up to fight crime. Cue 3am in the basement of Hogans. At one point in the evening I had a complete brain to mouth failure (rare as that is!) and was unable to pronounce the word collaborate. I could barely get the “col” out. I gave up and said something else instead (it’s okay, I don’t think anyone noticed) but the next day I realised that I haven’t had any of the problems with loosing words that I was struggling with at the end of last year. So that’s obviously good news but a little bit of reinforcement of my internet diagnosis of stress!
Saturday night ended up fairly late and slightly messy as you may have gathered. I don’t think poor Sarah was quite longing for the days of V comic conversation but I’m sure the thought crossed her mind more than once. The night bus got me home safe in the end but of course this meant that most of Sunday became a write off. Oops.
Sunday evening saw more drinks in town along with a flying visit to Eddie Rockets and then a settling in the Bank for the rest of the night. Interesting evening for conversation. ‘Twas both very varied and at the same time not so. I had more on that but I don’t now. Hmm.
Alright I’m going to London in the morning and I have to be up earlyish. So I’m going to leave you with this gem from Reginald:
There’s no shame in holding onto grief, as long as you make room for other things, too.
I had been planning on doing a little typing this evening. I have been working through some thoughts and noted a few things to type about.
However I have just watched the second last episode of The Wire and now I’m just drained.
I’m somewhat hungover today. Last night was meant to be a quiet drink with a newly arrived V-ster (not that she’d be too happy to read that!) and it turned out to be lots of quiet drinks and another 1.30am finish in Messer Maguires. Oops. Still a good night out, it seemed to be 80’s night or that’s what the DJ was going for and so there was tons of classic Michael Jackson which is always a good thing. No whiskey this week which was perhaps a bonus.
Another taxi ride home and it was looking good but of course once we got to Malahide there was total cloud cover and no sign of the moon at all. So straight to bed somewhat disappointed, I had camera kit already and I was hoping to get something interesting from it. Oh well, I’ll be in Asia for one later in the year, hopefully I’ll get something then.
Other stuff recently, lets see. Had a pretty good day out on Sunday climbing Bray head and wandering for a bit with Trev. Good fun, it’s been a long time since I was out that way. Best I can recall it would have been with the girlfriend at the same in early 1999. A long long time ago. Not much in the way of photos, it was fairly foggy and a bit overclouded so not much at all. Oh well..again.
Another day headed out to Howth for lunch and some photos with my mother, neither were great. The food in the Wheelhouse seems to have taken a turn for the worse and again the weather wasn’t great, not much light, and so not many photos.
Quiet one today as you may have imagined. I have watched two movies, very different but both enjoyable. The first was Ed Wood which I have been wanting to see for a long time but just didn’t get around to it. The cast is, of course, superb and amazingly Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t annoying. That has to be a first! Second up was 28 Days Later which was good fun and again with a decent cast. Good to see Idris Elba doing something a little high profile.
I finished off the second and third seasons of Oz over the past week. It’s not as good viewing the second time around, the flaws with some of the acting really stand out. I’ll work through the fourth season before I go I think.
Speaking of going, I’m going to London next week. Just for two nights. One night is a party for some more leavers and I want to make that. I also need to get some visas in person so I’ll get them sorted. Hurrah. Then just trying to figure out how I fly out. I’m leaving on the 11th late at night from London and I have drinks on the 8th also in London. So I’m trying to figure out whether to stay on the floor in London with my sister for 9/10 or if it’s worth the 30 odd quid it’d cost to get back to Dublin. Will figure that one out soon.
I’m feeling more and more happy with myself with this trip. Having talked with Trev about it in a good bit of detail, one of my cousins who did similar twice in the past 10 years and then a lot of talk of travel with Sarah last night, I’m just a little more prepped in my head. This is of course a good thing, now I just need to get my bags all ready and I’ll be set. Getting there though.
I may, possibly…or perhaps almost certainly have gone over my budget for the year. It’s not that I’d forgotten but I just hadn’t really taken into account that I’ll have some payments to still be making in London while I’m away for things like storage and the contract that’ll still be on my phone. That’s going to add up to a little over 12 months plus and I guess I hadn’t thought about it like that. Still, will all be fine and having thought about it a little I have come to the consideration of fuck it, it’s all going to be worth it!
I’m way behind on emails and indeed other things like that. It’s one of the downsides of not having a job. One of the first things I’d do every morning was to check email and reply back to people or even send a mail. I haven’t done much of that in the past two months or so and I have such a backlog in my inbox that I just need to sit down and get into but really just haven’t been feeling like it.
So lets see. I dunno what else there is. It’s kinda quiet but at the same time not at the moment. I’m sleeping a lot. There have been nights recently where I’ve had 10-12 hours sleep which is nice.
Oh yeah that new Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles show is pretty good. I’ve enjoyed the first few episodes a good deal.
Now I’m going to fill out some visa paperwork and listen to the glory that is the Spree’s first album.
I finished off Love in the Time of Cholera a few days ago. I was flagging a bit at it and so decided to just power through. I enjoyed it but I am glad I’ve finished it! There is a lot that appeals about it and at the same time a lot that very much does not. I didn’t find the ending to work but I wonder if perhaps that’s just due to cynicism on my part?
I was meeting a friend for drinks in town the other day. It would turn out to be quite a drunk evening but anyway I was very early and went looking for a book to read. I came across Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan. I like to look through the Irish fiction sections in several bookshops when I’m in Dublin and so it jumped out. It’s very short and indeed quite easy reading. I finished it off in about 2 hours while killing time. I enjoyed it a great deal and I’ll be looking for more of his books.
Then on Thursday morning I stared into Iain M. Banks latest; Matter which I had been looking forward to. It’s an odd book and one that I must admit I wasn’t enjoying as much as his other books but damn if it didn’t have one of the best endings of anything I’ve read in a while. Exactly my kind of ending. It’s somewhat spoiled by the presence of an epilogue that seems very tacked on a few pages later. I’d much rather it had simply ended right then and there. Glorious to the point of redeeming everything that I didn’t like about the book till that point.
I also took a re-read of Ty Templeton’s Bigg Time which I recall enjoying a great deal when it came out…not so much this time. The art was still very pretty but I guess the jokes just don’t work a second time. Last night I finally read the first volume of Sandman Mystery Theatre which wasn’t bad but not the genius I had come to expect. The art seemed to vary from being all over the place to being really really nice. I did very much like the quick panel that just shows the shape of Morpheus’ mask. That was nice. Note to self, must make sure that someone snags a copy of Absolute Sandman III for me while I’m away. Though I have the full collection upstairs and I may very well have to take a re-read of some selected pieces soon. Ooh there is so much I’d love to take a re-read through. I may have to order some of those bookends too. I never did manage to get any Sandman busts from that release a few years ago.
Oh finally last night I was aimlessly wandering on the net and I ended up watching two clips from a amazing gig I went to back in November of last year. The evening was the Duke Special in Bush Hall and the two clips and indeed two highlights of the evening are a cover of Van Halen’s Jump and then a lovely cover of the already hauntingly lovely Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps. Today’s title comes from a song at the same gig and so closes off this entry very nicely.
Lotsa little things going on since I got into Dublin. This afternoon I headed into town to start the last course of shots for going away. So at the moment I have yellow fever, it’s a live virus so, as I understand it, I currently have yellow fever and my immune system is just getting use to it. I”m sure one of my medically minded friends will be along to correct me if I am wrong.
Now that’s a lead in and a half but I’ll just move swiftly along for now. I had just typed out “I’m feeling” but I”m actually not and that’s the key. I’m not feeling stressed which is the first time I’ve really been able to say that in well years. I twigged the other day that my memory was noticeably better, things were clearer not just from day to day but for events back a while ago. Now a good part of that could of course just be to be here in Dublin and to be looking through some old things and to be meeting up with old friends and talking about days gone past but while I’m sure there is a bit of that, I’m also sure it’s the lack of stress. So that’s good.
So I have indeed been clearing out some old stuff. I’m going through the crap I left when I moved out of Dublin going on eight years ago. I moved pretty quickly and so I didn’t have a huge amount of time to sort things before boxing them up and I have not spent much time here to sort things since then. So a little of that and I’ve been finding some odd bits and pieces. I’ve also been going through some stuff I shipped back here before going to the US so it’s nice to have a stock of books and DVD’s to live on for the next few weeks.
Speaking of things back then. I was out riding a bike on Saturday night. It could actually be eight years since I had done something as simple as that. It felt pretty good. Today I’ve dragged my old bike out of the shed here. It’s in fairly good condition. I think I’ll need some new tyres but the brakes, chain and gears all look pretty good and seem to be working well. I’m going to pump up the tyres in the morning and see how it runs. It’d be nice to have it for a few weeks to get out and about locally.
I saw Juno on Friday night and enjoyed it. It wasn’t as great as it had been made out to be but the cast were excellent and it was witty enough. It really fired me up for those latest rumours of an Arrested Development movie. I stupidly left the 3 seasons with my sister instead of bringing them to Dublin and I’m really in the mood to watch them again! I should figure out how to get some DVD’s stuck onto my laptop so that I have a small selection of stuff to watch on demand. Luckily I’ll be here in time for the end of The Wire but I’ll have to see how I can get some Lost along the way. For those of you not watching, the fourth season is awesome.
Speaking of awesome one of the first things I found when I opened up some boxes was the the four Barry Ween books. While I have recently come to the conclusion that there is a middle ground between the mad love and the complete disdain for Scott Pilgrim, it is by no means anywhere near as good as Barry Ween at it’s weakest. The last page of the last book remains one of my favourite pages of all time. Glorious work. It’s such a shame that DC came calling with the tall WFH dollar for Winick.
I’ve just been button bashing waiting for the nine o’clock news and come across the Welsh Open snooker and it reminded me that I was playing some snooker out with Trev on Sunday night and man we were appalling. It’s almost impossible to translate the scale that I’m use to for playing pool (even on a full size table) to a snooker table and it just throws me. Much less power and more finesse needed too which doesn’t really help too much. Still it was fun enough and a quiet evening given the amount of walking we did during the day.
My book reading has way dropped off. I’m still reading Love In The Time of Cholera after about 10 days. It’s really odd. I’m enjoying it a lot but I’m not sure I’m actually enjoying reading it. Very odd. I’m close to the end, I’m hoping to sit down and finish it tomorrow. I’ve got some more books lined up and I’m keen to get into some of them soon. It’d be good to get some books read. I’m hoping to get a book or two into a pocket and take a bike ride out somewhere to sit and take a few pages through. That would be good.
I also want to see a few things in the cinema in particular There Will Be Blood. I’d imagine I’ll see that this week. I have very little stuff booked in, it’s nice to have a bit of time here and not have to rush seeing everyone and getting stuff done. We’ll see how that changes!
That seems to be that, I don’t have much else right now.
So one thread on the V that I have been enjoying catching up on has been our latest “Advice for your younger self”
146 posts in and the entire thread can be summed up in this one post by Si.
It has come to my attention that almost all of the V has one of two complimentary regrets that haunt their lives:
1) I didn’t fuck that person
2) I did fuck that person
Works for me…
Note: From Wednesday February 6th.
I’m sat in the departure lounge in Heathrow waiting for my flight to Dublin to board. I have at least another 30 minutes to wait. I’m not really sure why I ended up at the airport so early but it had to be done, or at least I thought it did.
For the first time BMI are checking bag weights. Now in fairness to them I was 25% over but they just pointed out that now I can carry two pieces of hand luggage and there is no weight limit on them so why don’t I just do some repacking. So I did and it all worked out fine though I could do without having to carry so much shit. That’s going to come back to haunt me but more on that later.
So Dublin. I’ve been staying at my sisters a bit recently. It’s not been ideal (air mattress in a one bedroom studio) but it’s worked out much better than I expected it to. This last weekend though I was down in County Kerry for some music, drinking and of course some photos. It didn’t help that it lashed rain for most of the weekend but it wasn’t too bad and I ended up with a few shots I liked.
Now I’m not sure what I really wrote about Egypt, I’m not even sure I wrote anything. So lets go for a very quick recap on that. There isn’t really very much that I can add to the hundreds of thousands of people who have written or commented about seeing the temples at Karnak, Luxor, Philae, the jaw-dropping Abu Sembel or walking in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings or seeing the collection in the Cairo museum from Tutankhamun’s tomb. If you really want to know anything about these all I can actually tell you is that they are beyond amazing, the colours deserve to be seen and they look a thousand times better than any photo or video you have ever seen (yes even mine!).
Two things which I will single out, one because I don’t care how many people have talked about it, I did it and it was instantly one of the highlights of my life to date and I suspect will be one for the rest of my life too. I am, of course, talking about going into one of the Pyramids of Giza. Now as it happens, I have typed something out about this so I’m just going to paste that in here.
***
There is nothing inside but a simple stone sarcophagus and blank walls. There is no oxygen, it’s stupidly hot and the only way for someone of my size to get in and back out is to get down on hand and knee and crawl, sometimes in close to pitch black. It’s sore, I left several pieces of skin along the corridor (though thankfully I did not crack my head at any stage). The walls are blank save for a simple name and date from the early 1800’s in French. It is in fact nothing compared to the sights of the temples of Luxor or Kom-Ombo or Abu Simbel, just blank walls. It doesn’t matter, nothing at all matters but for the fact that you are standing inside one of the Pyramids of Giza. Nothing else matters. It’s beyond words how amazing an experience it is, how profound the feeling is as you scramble through the dark in a monument built (we don’t even know how it was built) over 4000 years ago. I was crawling from the very first metre of the passage way but way more importantly I was smiling (if not grinning like a loon) from the same point. Just amazing.
***
Now the second was a little more mundane but it was absolutely nothing like what I had expected and is now something I’m very keen to do again. I went on a hot air balloon ride over Luxor and the Nile (not the valleys of the Kings or Queens unfortunately) but still it was awesome. I didn’t take that many photos because I was simply there enjoying the ride. Great fun and I’m totally going to do one again the next time I get a chance.
Alright so that’s pretty much that on Egypt, you can take a look through the photos for more of the story.
So Dublin. Few reasons for heading there. The main one being the lack of a flat in London. I’m not doing anything until the second week of March and I’m not crashing around at people’s places for that long when I can just stay in my old room at my parents in a real bed. So that’s the big one. That really leads up to the second one which is that I’m going travelling in March for a while and I don’t really need to be paying rent into a flat and so my stuff is in storage.
While I was in Egypt I had some quiet time for thinking and I believe the correct term is self-reflection. I came to a few conclusions and I decided that while I didn’t know what I was going to do next but I was certain it wasn’t going to be a job (sorry mom, dad).
Most of the thoughts and conclusions and indeed realisations were about me and I’m going to take some time and work with them. I decided that I have a once in a lifetime chance to get out into the world and take a good look. I’m not going to have the money or the time off again so I need to do it now.
So in a fit of something that I’m not really sure is like me, or at least wasn’t like me but is now, I am going off around the world. I leave from London on March 10th and I’ll be back at some stage early next year. It’s all booked and paid for (my bank account isn’t looking as good as it was a couple of days ago!) and will take me through around 20 countries spread over 5 continents. I’ll put some more details up on that over the coming weeks and will probably switch over to some sort of travel blog assuming that I have time (read am bothered) to set something up and it’s of course based on the assumption that I’ll get online a bit while I’m away. One thing I have to be careful about is that some countries seem to have a nasty habit of canceling place tickets if they find out you have been to come places that they don’t like.
Anyway I’m pretty conflicted over the trip. I am extremely nervous about what it will all involve and what it all could bring (and how much it’ll cost when it’s done!!) and I’m so excited about heading out to see what there is to see and experience a little, or a lot more. As one close friend said to me when I told him the news “Man, that’ll change you!”.
Now I guess I should back up a little and spill some other news. Not the ideal way but I guess it’s now slowly doing the rounds but I’m back to the world of singledom. The travel plans above kinda become plans after that athough the travel was certainly a factor. Before anyone rushes to jump on that one, it wasn’t the only one and wasn’t really the important one. It brought some conversations forward and well those conversations went different ways. So that’s that and indeed probably more than I had intended to say. Oh well.
So yes around the world. Hurrah! I have two things to work through now (aside from mountains of preparation of course). The first being I need a laptop for travel. I think that my Macbook is too heavy. I am loving the idea of a Macbook Air but I need to get one into my hands for a good look first and I need to have a think about the cost. Several sorts of handhelds (Sony have a couple of nice Vaio’s) look like they might do the job for half the price. The next and this is the one that I’m more worried about is camera kit. I currently have 3 lenses that I would use for this covering 10-200mm between them for a total cost of about $2000. Now to get a single lens of better quality which would replace all three of them and do me 28-200 would cost me about $3000….hmmm
And that’s where they called my flight and I stopped typing.