Page 34 - the NOISE September 2012

ow soon is too soon to come to Ireland,” I ask sing- “Her/songwriter Sean O’Neill and long-time friend
of Tony Norris, as we talk via Skype.
“Any time,” he tells me. After relating my accounts of the
last two weeks, mostly staying on the farm, he was far from impressed by the way I travel.
I find myself on a train to Hollyhead, after a brief stint in Chester where I gave myself a warm bath and proper delousing, and re-familiarized myself with the luxuries of hot running water, washing machines, and flushing toilets.
I admit I am as ecstatic about leaving the UK as I first was about the notion of visiting there. The last 14 days have been cold and rainy, peppered with highlights. An inter- view with MSN news about my “welcome” to the UK, Strat- ford and walks along the river Avon, a ride on an old train up the green hills of Wales, seaside graveyards, churches hundreds of years old, and the satiation of my thirst for castles. At Conwy I rambled among the stony remains of a towering fortress in the rain. I finally saw the ocean after being on an island for two weeks.
The train takes me past farmlands and cows, castles and oceanside, and through Conwy Castle itself. I feel an over- whelming sense of relief as I press my face to the window and watch the bright greens and lush shrubbery flash by. I feel regret too, that I ended up seeing so little of this place I had romanticized all my life, but since I arrived I’ve been longing to leave. I felt horribly lost on this island. It had seemed so small on a map, but I kept getting turned around whenever I stepped out the front door of the farm- house.
Soon I am at the ferry station waiting to board, where the whole process goes by rather quickly. They look at my boarding pass, chuck my luggage on a belt and send me on my way, guitar in tow.
I feel more at ease when I get on the ferry, which I imag- ined to be some small, topsy-turvy kind of boat, but in re- ality is a mammoth machine much like a cruise ship that looks like a Las Vegas Casino on the inside, complete with slot machines, bars, and some sports playing on a gigantic screen. I take a seat at a tall table and try to balance on a stool as the giant ship rocks.
I finally notice people making their way out onto the open deck and follow them to freedom and the view of the ocean. I hang my head over the side of the boat like a dog sticking its head out a car window and stay fixed there for the remainder of the trip.
Ireland comes into view. It isn’t as green as it is rumored to be.
I walk off the ship and into another country and nobody even asks for my passport. A bus takes me into Dublin, I step onto a street alive with people shouting and cheering and arguing passionately.
I find Sean O’Neill straight away and follow him through the sidewalks crowded with people.
“You picked quite a day to come! This is the first time Ireland has won in years,” he tells me. Some sport. The one they call football, but isn’t. I’ve never really known my sports.
I follow him to a bar and in the middle of a cloud of smoke I sing some songs. After a while I follow him out of a bar down some streets and over a bridge to another bar where people are shouting and cheering, eat some fish and chips, get up on a stage and sing some more.
What a change. Banned in the UK one day, free from the UK and singing my heart out under the red lights of the Apollo the next.
My second day in Dublin I manage to explore without getting lost. Early in the day Sean shows me a park in the middle of a city, the only green part of Ireland I ever saw, complete with a river and a lake with swans and ducks.
That night Sean brings me to another singer/songwriter event and this one is more listening-oriented. I feel drunk on singing.
“She’s the worst traveler I’ve ever met,” Sean tells his friends. I throw him a bit of glare. “What?” He says to me, “You are! I asked her what she did today and she said she
went to Pennies and sat in a café all day and wrote.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do? It’s just build- ings,” I said. And in my nature-warped eyes that’s all I saw.
Miles and miles of sprawl, graffiti on every surface, trash on all the streets and people looking about as enthusiastic about life as I felt about the scenery.
On the way home that night I noticed something on the side of the road. As we sped passed it, I realized it was a man. A man whose head was bludgeoned and covered in blood. Sean spun the car around and called the police and moments later an ambulance was roaring onto the scene.
“That’s all we can do,”he said and we drove another block or so to his house. I got the feeling I ought not to tarry too long in Dublin.
I could feel the wear of my journey catching up with me and holed up in an expensive hotel for a couple of nights with the heat on high, ordering pizzas so I wouldn’t have to leave my room and baking in the sauna until my bones felt patched enough to get back on the ferry, come back to the UK (with no incident, thank you kindly), get on an- other train and find myself once again in the heart of my old nemesis, London.
It’s only for one night, I tell myself. Tomorrow, you’ll be in Amsterdam.
| Clair Anna Rose may know a de- cent Shepherd’s Pie when she sees it. clairannarose@gmail.com
Dear The No:
I truly believe that America’s problems could be fixed if we all just gave up the money system and just traded sexual favors. Of course, this rules out the uglies, but they didn’t count anyway.
Incredibly oversimplifiedally,
Nedwin F. Jinklemertz
Dear Nedwin: Well, banks and loans in general would certainly be more interesting.
Dear Noise:
With the elections just months away, isn’t it time you started interviewing the presidential candidates? Or aren’t you big enough for that? Tell you what — if I can get an interview with any of them in time for your Octo- ber issue, do you think it’d get me a date with one of your writers? They all have sexy names. Well, most of them. Some sound like dorks. But maybe they’d be okay to date.
Bertrand Piddleshortz
Dear Noise Editor:
A recent visit to my local library (where adventure awaits you!) taught me that books, when put on their side in a vertical fashion next to one another, can be stored in great numbers on shelves.
More importantly, however, I realized that there are some real weird ass people in town. And they all like to hang out in libraries, rec centers, and bus stops, or in front of gas stations. The rest go to upper Clarkdale. What do you suppose we can do about this?
Scared,
Hiram T. Kuttlebone
Dear Hiram: Stay away from all of those places. It is a plain reality that, in our modern, expanding, Hol- lywood-driven culture, we have no practical use for books, exercise, transportation, or upper Clarkdale. We have facebook, online gaming, and lower Clarkdale to keep us entertained.
Dear Noise readership:
In case you aren’t keeping every copy of this paper in plastic and locked away in a strongbox, I wanted to re- new my political endorsement from the April 2002 issue of “The Noise” — George Hamilton STILL has my vote in 2016.
As far as this upcoming election goes — have fun picking the lesser of two evils. By the way, how IS that
“choosing evil” going for you? Let’s see... Romney, a sixty- something dude with jet black hair — yeah right — and just enough gray at the temples to make his look wiz- ened, but by no means “old.” He’s as spry as three-week old pasta carbonara, but as long as you judge books by covers ... Or there’s the current office-holder, Barry O., whose greatest accomplishment so far is to flush out all the old racists and melodramatists from the backwoods to scream paranoid soundbites like “I want mah kuhntry back!” And then there’s Congress, a piss-pot full of barely animated corpses legislating for their personal interests. Don’t even get me started on the banks, the greatest criminals and ethical offenders of all.
George Hamilton will fix it all in 4 years, if he’s not dead by then. He’ll be tanned, rested, and ready. Don’t you doubt it. Unless he’s dead.
Buzzingly,
Sensationally again,
Benjamin F. Kirk
34 • SEPTEMBER 2012 • the NOISE arts & news magazine • thenoise.us