perfect teeth and the rise and fall of language…

Wow, I’m just reading about the plans to get rid of the Irish Film board and Culture Ireland. Both of these have kept me alive in bleak times over the last few years and gave me a foothold to create and become self sustaining. Culture Ireland helped me with travel, the Filmboard funded some of my (and my sisters) animations and was to fund a film script i am co writing…now who knows. It will be a huge loss to Ireland if these organisations go. Dark days…no different than someone wondering if their tech or manufacturing job will go i suppose, except artists don’t get redundancy and have a hell of a time trying to get social assistance. The same goes for anyone who has the balls to be self employed, creative or not. Although to my mind starting any business and mkaing it work is creative.

You may see me back on grafton st busking! Nothing wrong with that. It fed me well.

Big Happy birthday to my friend Sile who used to run Banana Phoblacht in Galway, she hated me at first, confusing me with some other big shaven headed bastard ( her excuse not mine) and then we became the best of buds. She let me sit in the cafe all day when i was broke and write and i came up with some of my best material in there.  Sile also translated all my songs in Irish fro Clann zú and and my short animation an fiach dubh. What a great place, great food and bi lngual service, they acitvely encouraged my broken Irish and helped me overcome the terror of irish that the irish school system creates. Teaching people grammar before they can speak is not the best of ways to instill love of a language.

Now i happily chat away when i can with Sile or anyone who will listen to me murder tenses and drop in english when i’m stuck. And not just with Irish, now i jump right in with french and appalling spanish. I really don’t give a fuck that i am not fluent. It’s the only way to learn. And i love it, i love languages. I love that they exist and thrive despite the onslaught of the lingua franca,TV english. I am all for a univeral language that helps communication and understanding of eachother. That can only make us richer. But not where it means the death of another language.

Don’t get me wrong i am not a linguistic purist either, languages evolve or die. Hence Slaneens (goodbye from slan) and Ceard ever (what ever) in Irish, Ros na run Irish. Infact i love when people who are not fluent in a language come up with new ways of saying things. It might not be grammaticvally correct but it still makes sense. Protectionism and conservative puritism will kill any love and beauty in language faster than any oprresive power could. So onwards and upwards with the mutation of languages but a pox upon the genitals of the active surpressors of ‘non mainstream lanuages. Yo think a language has no relevance? Fine, leave it the fuck alone and see if it dies or not.

Did you know French  was only spoken by 20% of French people in the late 1800’s? Cest Vrai.

The rest spoke Basque, Breton, Occitane etc.

This morning i was in Banff in alberta canada, two cowboys walked by, the whole gear, the real deal. They were speaking english and casually switched to perfect french to help a tourist before continuing on in english as if it were nothing. There was something beautiful in that.

I’m typing this on a plane on the way to Toronto, aircanada is making up for pissing me off on the way here by having a power point and usb charger in the back of head rests. Genius. Canadian and American tv always reminds me i need to visit the dentist. See pic below…

 

As Tommy Tiernan once said, you can tell Americans by their big shiny perfect teeth while Irish people have teeth like iron filings on a magnet.#

*okay i’m back in my flat and this is what i feel like after 32 hrs and no sleep. a picture tells a thousand words…

 

hell at 20,000 feet…

I’m cruising at 20,000 feet on air canada flight AC 135 and watching ’shes just not that into you’… Ben Affleck or one of those perfect toothy fuckers has just asked Jennifer Aniston to marry him. The whole plane shuddered with sighs. The woman to the right of me is sobbing. I feel sick. It’s like watching a car crash. There is no way out and i can’t turn away. How did this happen, is my glucose low? I’m watching a romantic comedy. If the plane goes down now it might be less painful. The 8^th level of hell. At least Scarlett Johannson has a great set of hips and a grand arse.Yes I’m shallow, but i need something to get me through the next 20 minutes of this. And Scarlet’s ample arse is the only thing saving me from throwing up on the unfortunate next to me in 16 E. So there, have i ruined your image of me as a dark prince of indie folk? Excellent.

I complained on twitter this morn when my plane got delayed by two hours and i still don’t know if i am going to make it to Calgary today and i have a car hire to pick up and i don’t have the number blah blah blah but in reality i am one of the luckiest fuckers alive. I am on a plane travelling to another country to play at a festival that invited me to play to a lot of people, they invited me… How deadly is that. Getting invited because some one likes what you do enough to pay for you to fly half way around the world so they can see it. Fuck me. I really do need to pinch myself sometimes.

To be honest i keep expecting to get tapped on the shoulder by the music police.

‘Ahem Mr. De Barra?

‘Yes?’

‘Could you come with us please, we have reason to believe you have been impersonating a musician for the last 20 years.’

‘I knew this day would come…it was a good run fellahs!’

I know that is stupid, but i guarantee every musician artist and creative type feels the same way about what they do a LOT of the time. Especially when they are spewing out tons of shit to mine one diamond. You only ever see he diamond, the shiny song or painting or film. But there is so much failure involved in getting to that diamond. An album is 90% failure abandoned carcasses of songs, a graveyard of chords and mangled cliched lyrics. You hear the 10%. I am being generous with the percentages.

I posted in the last blog how hard what i do is. But i have to reiterate, i cannot change what i am doing and more importantly i don’t want to change. I love making music, it tears the living shit out of me, and exhausts me and leaves me a shell of incoherent self doubting insanity most days. But i love it.

The fact that i have been living off my music for the last 5 years is a complete surprise to me. I keep expecting it to end but it hasn’t. At the last minute something comes up and i stay afloat a little longer.

I follow Kirstin Hersh on twitter and she posted something casually about never having any cash to do things ( she has a son to support ) and my heart broke and i wanted to go and rob a bank and send her the cash. She is a genius.

I am a single male with no family to support. I feel for those who have to put bread on the table for others with their art. If i have to eat porridge for a month or sleep on a floor who gives a fuck, I chose it. But when you are responsible for someone else, a kid, a partner…then it is really beyond me how they do it. My hat goes off to people who pull it off. Truly you are amazing people.

~ oh christ , now they are showing that movie with the two brides fighting over having a wedding on the same day. (there are no good arses to save it…if the plane goes down i may not scream, my face is already frozen in horror.)

Anyway back to the verbal diarrhea, this post doesn’t really have a purpose. I am thinking out loud. I have been thinking all year and in fact for the last 5 years as i watched the music @industry’ collapse around its own ears. How will i survive? I am not radio head or trent reznor with a massive fanbase to support me no matter what i do. What i do has been growing slowly. At least i have very very loyal fans. Good people who have stood by me and supported me, coming to shows, buying  cds, feeding me housing me, encouraging me to keep going. And i am very very grateful. Because with out you i could not continue to create music the way i do. But to survive i need more people to listen.

So if you want to help me, tell one person today that you think might like what i do, send them a link, copy an album, point them to itunes or a bittorrent site. Tell them if the like it to pass on the music in the same way. Because this is why i am still here. Word of mouth.

I don’t have a huge team of publicity people or tons of record company money buying ads in magazines so they will interview me or review the album. I exist musically because of like you telling people.

Feel free to tell more than one.

Dec

the void and how to stab it in the face.

I have been practicing guitar all morning for the show in Canada, I played the same festival with clann zú a hundred years or so ago and I really enjoyed it. The people were fantastic and it was a great mix of rock, folk, first nation, art and interesting projects. This will be my last show until September.

When I’m touring I always daydream about having a long period of time at home to work on projects and actually finishing them. Unfinished projects  (of which i have about 32,000 ) wake me at 4 am with “the terror” and I go into panic meltdown, these thoughts usually join forces ten minutes later with thoughts of exes and upcoming rent and malevolent bills to totally skull fuck me. I will run through and mentally address all of these petty terrors for at least two hours before admitting sleep is off the menu.

Usually when I get back from tour I have a day of decompression , trying to find where things are in the flat,  processing utilitarian things like the “tour laundry of death” (normal laundry but biologically unstable – swine flu may have started in my tour bag) and laughing at my bills and threatening letters. Then I launch into tearing chunks off my projects.

But this time it was a no go. I achieved sweet fuck all in two and a half weeks. Project guilt built up exponentially and made it worse. These are the times where i think I am a lazy fuck. But then I realised I have been doing this with 20 years. I think I was exhausted. So I gave in and figured let it rest, I went and hung out with people I haven’t seen in a long time. I think it is called socializing. I am not very good at it. Normally when i am sitting opposite someone after an hour i start to think about projects, work, what i should be doing right now. I am terrible at sitting still and just enjoying someones company. Not out of selfishness but obsession with work. Then realised later in the week after meeting lots of people that i was treating socializing as a project, something i could analyze and improve my performance with. Turning it into a fucking project. Yes, this is disturbing. If it’s any consolation to my friends i am the same with myself. I can’t sit with myself in silence for more than 10 minutes before i want to carry out self inflicted blunt force trauma. This is why I am shit at yoga. I love the physical and am a fucktard when it comes to meditating. I have to make something or do something constructive to achieve any peace. The only time i can achieve zen is when surfing or fighting, fucking or singing. With all of these things my brain turns off and I just hum. The machine takes over.

People think you are an ego maniac for performing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as fucking vain and shallow as the next person and who the fuck wouldn’t enjoy getting applauded by a room full of happy people approving of your art. But i can honestly say that i make music, write, draw, paint etc because I have to. I would go insane if i didn’t.

And that’s where it all goes weird, because I can’t do anything else (mentally speaking) other than be creative, is where as a means to eat I have to make a living out my creativity. This is hard. It is the hardest thing I have ever known. It is not natural and it takes immense amounts of energy and planning and seeking of help from others (which i am shit at). So i am  trying to make that part as creative as possible.

I am looking at ways of re tweaking the machine i am in to survive so even the earning part becomes creative. Alternative venues, house shows, unscheduled performances, flash mobs…my brain is spinning trying to figure it out. Okay i will stop here and post the rest of my thoughts on the music “industry” and it’s dying breaths soon, enough for now. Go outside and get some air. We are both on this fucking net tit too much.

Conversations with ghosts.

Conversations with ghosts leave you husk dry and there’s not a touch of water. they have taken all the moisture in the air with them when they closed the conversation and left the room satisfied. Once they were flesh but now they are electric ons and offs and spits and spats of maybe it never happened. And their voices change in your head from the original you have long forgotten, caricatures replace truth and you weep a little more for their passing as you try to reawaken how they sounded when they laughed from seances you hold at 4 am in you head. But they are not coming back and they are not waiting for you to come back to them, you are a ghost that keeps annoying them with static. They do not want your conversation, they are happy you have faded and your voice they could not give a fuck for. Wake up, something is burning.