15 June
Day Two of the Guinness Fleadh:
Well, on Saturday they announced that you could enter the second day on the ticket stub of the first day, which I thought was a hearty "fuck you" to those of us who wanted to come on Sunday in the first place, but I decided not to try to sell my ticket.
I didn't need the aggravation.
Anyway, I got there around 2.30p, just in time to see something listed as "Larry Kirwen and Co." on the Irish Village stage. Larry Kirwen is the lead singer of Black 47, so I thought I'd check it out. Turned out to be this play he wrote about the formation of Black 47 when he first came to America as an illegal Irish immigrant, and it was called Rockin' the Bronx. The actors did it as a radio play, holding scripts and standing at microphones, and it was pretty good, but the clichés started abounding, and I suddenly realized exactly how much standing I would have to do all day, and that I didn't want to exhaust myself on a pretty okay radio play.
So I went to the main stage, because that's where you can sit if you've a mind to, and just sat on the wet concrete, being rained on and listening to Wilco, who were reasonably fine, but my ears were getting tired. You know, they had been hit by too many new sounds that weekend to possibly get excited by anything else that was unfamiliar. Or so I thought.
After Wilco was that famous Irish band Los Lobos, so I decided to go to the third stage and see Too Cynical to Cry, mostly because of their cool name, but it turned out to be the best idea of all! The grass was nearly entirely dry due to that tent having the least foot traffic, so I could sit on the grass and lean my back against a pole and not get rained on and bliss out. The music was okay, but see above about my tired ear.
The chemical toilets, the Porta-Potties, were really remarkably less than disgusting! I mean, no smell and fairly clean, even with everyone's muddy shoes tromping in and out. They ran out to toilet paper with monotonous regularity, of course, but I stuffed my pockets full of napkins in anticipation of just that eventuality. At one point I was in there and my bag almost tumbled down, upside-down and wide open, into The Pit of Ultimate Darkness, so to speak, which certainly would have been a Trainspotting moment. I wonder which of my belongings I would have considered to be really worth keeping after that?
At the Irish food stand, where I kept getting my sausage and chips and beans, there was a sign advertising "Blooming Onions" and I kept thinking that Ian should have been there.
Though perhaps the entrance fee would have been considered to be a trifle steep, just to get an onion.
No time for more, darlings, as I left this to this morning and I gotta get to work! Lots of cool stories tomorrow, same time, same URL!
One year ago today:
"I'm like Stan, and he's Laurel."
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Last Updated Mon 15 June 10:03:09 1998