Soundtracks were, as a teenager in the nineties, a fantastic resource. Reservoir Dogs, Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine; even the Clueless soundtrack was worth a whirl and gave us No Doubt's Just A Girl before it charted. The Trainspotting soundtrack gave me Lou Reed, who evoked an America I had only read about in John Rechy and Hubert Selby Jr novels like "City of Night" and "Last Exit to Brooklyn". "Satellite of Love", "Perfect Day" and "Walk On The Wild Side" and others in

Photo credit: David Smith - "Time Travellers for Choice" The amendment to the Irish constitution which proscribes abortion was introduced a month after I was born, a few years after Roe v Wade decision in the U.S., the Pope's visit to Ireland and a failed Supreme Court of Ireland action by anti-abortion campaigners to block the sale of contraceptives. It is a historical anachronism. Sending Irish women who are seeking an abortion to England to get one is an ongoing and unne

An inspiring documentary by Patrick Keiller recently brought my attention to the work of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. “London”, which was shot over the course of 1992, is now a sort of social document. The fictional narrator ‘Robinson’ is our flâneur, in Baudelaire’s time a literary figure, and later urban explorer. Perhaps the flâneur has been such a successful archetype because he has so many sides to him. A product of the city, there is no word in English that