10 Questions About…

Last night Kate and I went out to Whelan’s Ones to Watch show, which would have been called best new bands in Minnesota. We saw three bands: Sheep, Peer Pleasure and Blue State. I loved Peer Pleasure – very punk. Fun to be at a local music event that’s not in Minnesota. Funny how quickly you can still appreciate the comradery and local support.

Today was a relaxed walking day. I started off before Kate. I thought I wanted to see Andy Warhol at the Hugh Lane Gallery but turns out I’m too cheap to get tickets, but I did see “Suzanne walking in leather skirt” by Julian Opie. I love that video; I remember when it was installed.

Roaming around between the gallery and EPIC HQ, The Irish Emigration Museum, I saw so many fun things. I walked by the Markievicz Swimming pool, where I swam daily for a summer many years ago. I saw a house where Bram Stoker lived when he was a kid. A huge nod to people who made the house so obvious, or I would have never known! I ended up walking down to the North Wall, where I saw an amazing sculpture of musician Luke Kelly. It’s huge and the hair is so perfect. Then I made my way to EPIC in time to see a gorgeous rainbow. A nod to the weather when the only rain I walked through led to the epic rainbow. To be fair, I think it rained every time I ducked into a shop and that rain made 35 degrees feel so cold but not as cold as if I had been out in it.

Kate and I went to the Emigration exhibit. It’s a full-on multimedia experience. With your ticket you can visit once again in the next 10 days, which would be helpful since there’s so much to see. Parts feel very historical, like the information on the famine and parts feel absolutely contemporary because emigration is still very much a part of the Irish experience. Also equal rights for women and everyone play highly in the exhibit, something we’ve been working in Minnesota for more than 100 years. And/or I realized, I must be getting old because especially when they talked about the music of the 1980’s I realized I had seen most of the bands and mourned the Mean Fiddler, a venue in London that closed years ago. My favorite section of the exhibit was They Gave the Walls a Talking, the story of Shane MacGowan.

Our post-museum plan was to check out a flea market in The Liberties and we did but it was more of an art market than the vintage clothes secret shop we were hoping for. But we had fun walking through the city. We popped into the National Gallery for a quick look. We were there last summer and it’s someplace we frequented when Kate was young but it’s always fun. Then a quick look at the Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square, one of my favorites. We saw fun things everywhere. I made a point to stop at several James Joyce/Ulysess landmarks because they are always fun to see and bring back completed and abandoned attempts of walking through Bloomsday (touring Dublin on June 16 in the path of Leopold Bloom, the main character). It made me think that I should write a St Paul (ok maybe Twin Cities) version of Ulysess to help celebrate and memorialize my home.