Special Moment in Workman's Club

There are moments that are so perfect that you are aware of them right in the middle of it. Those moments gently nudge at your conscious for a few seconds. Precious seconds that make everything slow down around you. If you have ever experienced one of those, it nearly is like an out of body experience. It makes you appreciate where you are and who you are right in that instance.
And when that moment is gone, it becomes a delicate capsule of time that you can keep and go back to for as long as you want it to.

I'll try to describe for you one of those moments.
It's Wednesday the 19th of September 2012. It's late night in Workman's Club,  Dublin's leading live entertainment venue, situated at 10 Wellington Quay. I've been to this venue before. It's not a great venue. The building is 160 years old and you can feel it in the floorboards and in the walls and basically in the decor. 
But I'm not feeling any of this at the moment.
I'm a little tipsy from the Guinness I'm drinking but not overly so. I'm right in the middle of the venue. There are not many people in. I can see a few shadows around me. Two girls are standing right in front of me. The lighting of the stage is outlining the contours of their heads.  One of the girls has curly hair and the other has long hair. Occasionally the head of the girl with curly hair bobbed as she danced to the song. 
She is right to dance to the song because it's good. It's very good. Not only does the singing is top notch quality but so is the performance. There's something about the way the singer Cat Dowling is singing and moving to her songs. It's like watching gentleness and energy fold and unfold simultaneously. One form of expression is diluted in the other like in a painting of David Salle. And you don't know where begins the gentleness and where ends the energy.

It's like her voice, hushed and raw at the same time. She is accompanied by a good male vocalist and Superman himself as a bass guitarist or so it looks like. I mean the man is huge, tall with large shoulders and does his job well ( at playing the guitar not at saving the world although i'm sure he must have saved a few pretty girl's worlds). The guitarist and drummer are excellent too (I'm guessing) but my music ear is not good enough to tell exactly how good they are.

All this description really doesn't matter because as soon as Cat Dowling starts "the well runs dry" everything disappears into that moment of happiness and all I'm aware is this melody, this song, this sultry haze of a voice,the lights on the stage, the beats of the drums which has the effect of an army marching over my heart, the shadows swaying back and forth before me, the red against the black of the walls, and the hand of the person next to me tightening his grasp in mine as he realised how much I'm enjoying this song.
Here's the song:

This was the last of her song. After this came a different band or singer should I say. Laura Sheeran's style wasn't as nice and I felt she was more concerned with her "Cleopatra" effect on the male crowd than her singing performance. Then came Ham Sandwich on stage. For a band name, you would expect a male to sing ( or maybe that's just me) but it wasn't the case. And they were good. This Irish indie rock band from County Cork indeed rocked. The vocals Niamh Farrell and Podge McNamee ( vocals and guitar) made my feet "antsy" with some of their songs. One of their songs " Ants" captured yet again a little capsule of time in me.

Overall it was a special nite and it was pretty cool that this was being broadcast live on the Paul Mcloone Show, on Today Fm. (and blatantly sponsored by Meteor: you couldn't miss the advertising panels behind the bands, even if you tried)

Have you ever felt this type of out of body/unique moment that stays with you long after that moment has expired?

Walking on "Ripper Street"

A "stranger than fiction" type of moment in Dublin

There are Mondays and there are Mondays. Some Mondays are more interesting than others. Nine weeks ago, I was walking through the Guinness Factory area as part of my “try-to-exercise-after-study” type of duty when I turned left into Rainsford Street and found myself traveling back in time.

I always enjoy walking the cobbled streets of Dublin. And I especially like the Dickensian atmosphere around the Guinness Factory. But this time it felt as if I had actually landed into the nineteenth century.  

Props of bales and crates were stacked on the side of Rainsford Street as if waiting to be carried away. 

Men dressed in Victorian clothes were casually smoking while others were reading from books. I stopped and looked back wondering if I had taken the wrong turn somewhere.

But apparently I hadn’t.

At least four very twenty first century cars were parked further down the road.

As puzzled as I still was, I gathered my wits and asked one of the authentic Victorian men with worn leather jackets and interesting mustaches what was going on.

Apparently I just ran into the last filming day of a new drama set in the East End of London in 1889 during the aftermath of Jack The Ripper murders. This series will be called "Ripper Street" and is scheduled for an autumn transmission.

The series will feature Matthew Macfadyen, Adam Rothenberg and Jerome Flynn as the main characters of the series. Matthew Macfadyen has been quite busy playing lately in Spooks and Pillars of the earth series and has just finished completing “Anna Karenina” the movie.

In this stranger than fiction moment, I felt lucky to be there and I even took a few pictures. 

Have you ever experienced a stranger than fiction moment and if so, how did it make you feel? 

More details on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2183641/