What a joy it is to dance and sing! So Angela Carter begins her theatrical, musical novel, Wise Children. But its rare enough we see music elevated to an art-form, something timeless and spirit-lifting. Not in the Snow Patrol piped in over X-Factor triumph sense, with the subsequent single piped in over a thousand shop sound systems. Genuinely moving. Stirring. Dramatic. Worth dressing up in a ballgown to go and watch.
I wish I could describe Dublin’s tattoo shops as dusty backstreet parlours populated by burly ex-sailors and gangsters forming queues, with rusty needles picked up off the floor. But Dublin’s tattoo artists are a disarmingly friendly lot. Their shops are meticulously clean and, most shocking of all, family friendly.
Tallaght is as good a place as any to get in a fight. The line of anxious under-twelves and overgrown fanboys outside the Basketball Arena don’t look like they’re out for a brawl, but that’s exactly what they’re here to see..
The film Mad Max presents a post-apocalyptic world populated by gangs of feral youths with strange clothes and dodgy haircuts. If currently Ireland is at economic Ground Zero, then our own road gangs stand around Temple Bar, showing off polished boots and standing around Heavenly Hotdogs.
Years ago in a previous incarnation of The Gloss, back when I was a 17-year-old, MAC makeup-ed young one, I wrote a piece beginning with the words ‘Its fabulous being a teenager’. Leaving Cert terror aside, I genuinely believed that I had learned all I needed to in life, and that I was ready to go out into the world, a fully-formed though thoroughly inexperienced Young Adult.
It’s fabulous being a teenager. Not at all the grungy, sturm und drang affair we have all come to expect. I should know: I’ve been one these last five years. The word ‘teenager’ is a label, a set of expectations, but also it affords us an incredible liberty.
