Footloose

Well, we’re back. Belatedly. Slinking our way in the side entrance to the blogosphere, wiping our mouths, brushing away the crumbs, blowing the dust off the keyboard and wondering if anybody (a) noticed we were gone; and more pertinently, (b) will anyone notice that we are back?
As to excuses? God, I don’t know. There are a myriad of them but they can be basically summed up in the phrase ‘willful neglect’. I hadn’t meant the gap to grow so long and silent, then again neither, presumably, had J.D. Salinger.
As you can see the interval hasn’t done anything for my modesty either.
And it’s not like I didn’t have anything to write about; we had Ireland, the weather, the weather in Ireland, the weather in Ireland on a Saturday in August atop of Croagh Patrick; counties Dublin, Down, Kilkenny, Kerry, Cavan and Mayo; an All-Ireland hurling semi-final; Edinburgh; some epic surfing; Joshua Ferris; Kevin Powers; Top of the Lake... the list could go on.
But priorities people, priorities. What has really motivated me back into blogging mode was Cian’s gakugeikai last weekend.
The gakugeikai is what you would call ‘the school festival’ in less civilized parts of the world. But the linguistic comparison doesn’t do it cultural justice. It would be like comparing  the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s revered New Year’s Concert (this year to be conducted by the inestimable Daniel Barenboim), with last Friday’s edition of the Ryan Turbidy show. 
There were weeks of preparation, ‘preparation’ being a synonym for blood, sweat, and tears. Showing my age here, but in the original Footloose movie, there is a montage of Kevin Bacon, to the sound of ‘Never’ by Moving Pictures (which, even after all these years, can still get my blood stirring, though I think that may be due more to nostalgia for my lost youth than any particular love for the song. I saw the film in Celle, a small town in then West Germany [yes, both the film and I are that old], when I was 14 and at my most musically impressionable), and he’s dancing and jumping and twirling and basically leaping about like a mad young thing off his head on too much Club Orange (as my innocent 14 year old self thought at the time). You can see the clip here.

Cian watched it and thought it pathetic. (Liked the music though). What he and the rest of the 1st grade had to endure for ‘showtime’ was akin to the physical torment of those ship wreckers in Bangladesh, but to a steady 3/4 beat.
The result though, I think you will agree, was spectacular. It can be experienced in its complete, surround-screen, technicolor Busby Berkeley like splendor here, complete with delirious hand shaking from the camera man, overcome as he was by the sheer awesomeness of the spectacle he was recording.