Read: Happy Birthday Mr Moo »

The schedule of performers of Irish music at the midtown Kansas City festival that is the 2009 Brownes Irish Street Fair has been announced.

It’s an all day Irish festival from 2pm to 11pm with Gaelic Football, a Children’s Area, and live Irish traditional music and Celtic Rock from 5pm.

See the page about the 2009 Brownes Irish Street festival for performers, times, and all the festival details.

Read: Browne’s Irish Street Fair 2009 Entertainment Schedule »

25 Years Later

-You still have long hair
-I still have hair

See More Irish Conversations:
   • An American Phone Call to an Irish Mother
   • Dublin Slanging Match
   • Cool Yoke
   • Leaves Changing Colour
   • All Irish Conversations

Read: Irish Conversation in a Dublin Pub #41 »

Here’s something I meant to share with you last month.

Local blogger, JJS in KCK, went to Ireland and blogged an account of his trip. However unlike most bloggers, JJS did not do a straight chronological journal but instead gave us a commentary split into 5 themes.

In a trip that included over 700 miles of driving, there’s a lot to say and, because of the way it’s broken up, it’s very readable. There’s also a fair smattering of photos as proof of getting around - including I notice one of the Great Sugar Loaf (you may recall I recently did a painting of the Sugar Loaf.

The series of posts, apart from being entertaining, struck me as quite perceptive - so I won’t pick them apart though as the word “myth” is a strong one I’ll step in just once:

Oh–and a couple people asked me if they serve beer at a warmer temp over there. This is a myth. The beers were consistently cooler than cool, which is to say “ice cold”.

It’s not a matter of myth so much as it is a matter of timing. 20 years earlier and the beers weren’t served so cold. Before they were consistently cold you left pubs because the pint was too cold. And 20 years before then they were warmer again. Even today you can, if you’re lucky, get some pints that aren’t ice cold.

I had some pints not cold a few weeks ago in Dublin. There was a moment when a fellow Guinness drinker looked at myself and another stout drinker and asked us what the pint was like. This is a stout thing - ale and lager drinkers in Ireland never ask about their pint. In unison we answered that it was good (huge praise from an Irish person, no praise at all from an American) and then added with a tinge of guilt, “it’s not cold”. The look of a true pint-drinker stared back at us, somewhere between dismissing the irrelevant “warning” of warmth, and finding out it’s Christmas.

But anyway, enjoy JJS in KCK, in Ireland:

    1 Flying
    2 Driving
    3 The Economy
    4 Cuisine
    5 Drinks

Other Bloggers Trips to Ireland:
   • A view of Ireland from the Kansas Lakes
   • Where is Wei?
   • Leaving Kansas And Learning Languages
   • KC Man Visits Ireland’s Fleadh Cheoil

Read: Ireland, by JJS in KCK »

Hunger, the film about the 1981 Hunger Strikes at the H-Blocks, gets a detailed, but negative, review from Loey Lockerby in the Kansas City Star

Rated R, and directed by the artist Steve McQueen, it has a running time of 1 hour 36 minutes, though the Star review makes it sound like it feels a lot longer - almost as if waiting for Bobby Sands to turn up is waiting for King Kong to appear, and that wait takes far too long because it uses the time:

to establish the cold brutality of the prison, as experienced by an emotionally numbed guard (Stuart Graham) and by other convicts who plan various acts of rebellion. These scenes are both unflinching and oddly poetic — they also go on forever.

At one point McQueen spends three full minutes showing a janitor mopping up a hallway, a move so boldly “artsy” it almost seems like a joke

The film received a far better review from Britain’s Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian last year, when he called it “icily brilliant”:

McQueen, screenwriter Enda Walsh and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt create a series of hard, spare scenes in which horrifyingly brutal action takes place: the compositions show how violence and hate and fear were inscribed into the very brickwork. As Sands, Fassbender gives another ferociously convincing performance and his emaciated appearance is, finally, almost unwatchable. He has a powerful scene opposite Liam Cunningham’s tough but impotently disapproving priest, which plays out in one, austerely continuous shot of the two men facing each other in profile. Stuart Graham is excellent as the Maze prison guard whose private loneliness McQueen shows, and whose fate actually makes the IRA leadership look as vengeful as gangsters.

Kansas City Irish film fans should remember Cunningham as the Dublin socialist in The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

Showtimes
Hunger is on at the Tivoli in what it terms a SPECIAL ENGAGEMENT - for This Week Only, from May 15 to May 21, 2009:
Fri - Sun: 4:45 & 7:30
Mon - Thu: 7:30

Location
The Tivoli is in Manor Square in Westport, in behind Kelly’s Westport Inn, at 4050 Pennsylvania.

Book Recommendation
If, like Lockerby, you feel you don’t know enough about the background to the hunger strikes to fully appreciate Hunger, the definitive book on this sad episode in British & Irish relations is Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Hunger Strike by David Beresford.

See Also:
   • The Wind That Shakes The Barley
   • Bobby Sands
   • The Greatest Day to be Irish in Kansas City

Read: Irish Movie “Hunger” in Kansas City »