GUEST POST by our very own expert on all things Irish...

by Isabelle O'Keeffe

Last March I had a great time celebrating our patron saint, and our Irishness. I went to several good things last year for "St Patrick's Week" (as it's now known) and was totally blown away by the amount of organisation that went into all of the activities happening around the city. Normally, I go back home to Dublin for some or all of those days, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't need to travel far to get some flavours of home (in a nutshell: Guinness, the colour green and trad music).

On Calle Numancia (where Kitty's Pub is) they organised a giant Ceili dancing extravaganza (group "set dancing" to live traditional Irish music).

I dragged my (non-Irish) boyfriend to a fantastic concert by a famous piper near our place and, though he was wrecked from a long day, after the first half hour he was tapping his feet and clapping his hands. The music is contagious!

The local Barcelona Gaelic football team invited a couple of Irish teams over for a mini competition of some geilic games (Hurling and Gaelic football). However, by far the best event was the boat race down in front of Maremagnum. Several Irish pub owners raced against each other in Currachs, ancient wooden boats carved out of treetrunks.

This year things seem a little quieter. Some things, like the boat race, aren't happening, which is a pity, because I had a great time. Plus, there were tons of people gathered along the wooden drawbridge basking in the sunshine, so I am surprised to not see it mentioned this year!

I would definitely recommend the Street Party in Calle Numancia. Word of advice: get there early! We arrived at 5pm and everything was finished apart from a lonely Irish guy strumming away at the guitar.

I'm thinking of getting tickets (if it's not sold out) to our very own Irish rapper Rí Rá (imagine Colin Farrell singing a more recent Cypress Hill song), who will be performing with Method Man at the Sala Apolo tomorrow night. If you're into that kind of music, it could be a laugh.

I don't know much about the stand up comedian who'll be performing, but he's pretty famous in Ireland, and you know how us Irish are famous for our sardonic wit. The Gaelic games are fun and interesting to watch. If you've never seen Gaelic football before, it's like a mixture of rugby, football and basketball. And Barcelona has its very own team! The majority of well-known Irish pubs (Flaherty's, Michael Collins, George Payne, Ryan's, Kitty's) will undoubtedly have loads of drinks promotions (as if the Irish needed any encouragement!), those annoying oversized Guinness hats (I still have one from last year), various other freebies to give away, and live music sessions going on.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Check out these websites for more info:

www.barcelonagaels.com

www.elfeile.com

The first glimpse I ever got of Florence Welch was a pale redhead in white hotpants and sequins riding a silver moon through a sea of fog and singing You've Got The Love.

Just another popstress, I thought.

Then I saw the video for Dog Days Are Over and things got a whole lot weirder. Stomping drummers, harp-playing druids, Florence in war paint and a kimono, Florence in glitter and something that looked like Cate Blanchette's costume in Lord of the Rings. And lots of fog. I still couldn't put my finger on what kind of music this was. Her Myspace says "catastrophe choir crash," whatever that might mean. Some critics have compared her to Kate Bush. My boyfriend calls it "surreal voice-driven femme pop." On her album Lungs (winner of Best British Album of the Year at the Brit Awards 2010) you get epic vocals, a pinch of soul, harps, choirs, drums, metallic clanging, strings, stamping feet and beating fists, broken glass, even a lamb. And yet this cacophony blends together quite smoothly.

Florence has stated that she wants her music "to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree or off a tall building or as if you're being sucked down into the ocean and you can't breathe." It's dramatic, swelling, turbulent emotion. It's pop making love to a volume of gothic fairytales. It's girly and mainstream one moment, decidedly strange the next. Kind of like the white hotpants versus the harp-playing druids. "I feel that life's like a consistent acid trip, those times when things keep coming back," Florence says and I believe her.

Saturday, March 13th at 20:00h

Sala Bikini, Av. Diagonal 547 (Les Corts)

Tickets: apparently tickets are sold out, but where there's a will, there's always a way.

If you're wondering (like I was) what differentiates an atopia from a utopia or dystopia and go looking for it in the dictionary, you'll probably end up at atopy, which refers to a familial predisposition towards certain allergies. Although allergic might be a word that many of us find appropriate in describing our feelings towards city life, it is not what the CCCB exhibition Atopia: Art and City in the 21st Century has in mind. If you search a little further, you'll stumble upon a German sociologist by the name of Helmut Willke, who defines atopia as a "generalised Anywhere, a form of society in which place and places do not matter anymore." At first this might sound incredibly liberating, but upon closer examination, it produces a certain amount of anxiety in most people. Sure, we all love to travel and many of us like calling ourselves global citizens, but in the end most of us still consider ourselves as being from somewhere. Or have a deeply ingrained mental picture of a certain place we identify with. What happens when this imagined place and its real counterpart drift further and further apart? When a city ceases to be a place of human interaction and encounters? When a city loses the function it originally embodied for us as people? We enter a state of urban malaise, precisely the condition explored by the artists showing in the CCCB's exhibition.

Displaced, isolated people in crumbling concrete structures littered with the remnants of a more settled, comfortable past life. A chandelier, a table lamp, a globe - alien in an empty space of gray decay. Unsettling superimpositions of intimate, veiled scenes being sucked into vast cityscapes. Wastelands, empty streets, helpless shrinking figures. The vision these 41 artists have of our modern urban existence is disturbing, alienating, but not in a violent, visceral, Ballardian way. Something closer to a mute, inexplicable despair.

The exhibition is showing 168 pieces (painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation) by international artists like Sergio Belinchón, Hicham Benohoud, Nuno Cera, Oleg Dou, Andreas Gursky, David LaChapelle, Rogelio López Cuenca, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Thomas Ruff, Carey Young, and others.

Until May 24th

CCCB, Montalegre 5, 08001 Barcelona

Tickets: 4,50 EUR