Brendan Behan entered the world's stage on the 9th of February 1923. As the Irish Civil War was raging Behan was born in the heart of Dublin city to a family steeped in the Irish Republican tradition. Being born into a staunch family of…

I remember standing in Whelan’s on a hot August evening in 2014. Irish synth-metal outfit No Spill Blood had just performed leaving my sensitive eardrums ready for whatever punishing assault the Californian black metal, shoegaze outfit…

So Buttoned Up — After two opening lines in ‘For Love of You’ by US poet Stephen Bett  By Emma Neale First time in my god damned life I forgot my name and when you said it, it went sherbet-wise inside the tiny wires of each…

School is how we train our kids for what to expect from life when they reach adulthood. We should be concerned, then, about what exactly we’re teaching them. Between helicopter parenting, jarringly early starts to the school day, overloaded…

Say what you will about George Lucas and the Star Wars movies he both directed and created, but the one thing that ran through all six of them was a sense of direction; a sense of story; a sense that what we were watching was taking us to a…

Depending on how you look at it, the release of the empathetic, sometimes exquisite bio-doc McQueen has come along at either just the right time or at the most inopportune moment. Most coming into the film will be aware that it’s…

In which the author, drowning in his workplace, drowns his workplace in Phish music. The lift doors open, I step in, the lift doors close, I wait, the lift doors open, I step out. I key-card through my workplace’s outermost door, through…

Welcome back. As we approach the year's mid-point I think we should all focus on our own mid-points: the human navel. Gaze thoroughly and, when you're done, check out this week's digest for a bit of a Hey-Yay! 1. Kapowie Cabaret Hey-Yay!…