Artists’ note: we set out to make a simple short film, with emphasis on strong storyboarding, design and animation. The idea had been brewing for about a year before we arrived at a story we were both happy with. We only had five months to produce the piece, and we agreed on a more visually economic aesthetic. We spent two months in pre-production – designing, storyboarding and doing technical research. We spent the following three months producing the film, spending as much time as possible on animation. The work throughout was divided equally between us, both taking responsibility for each of the characters and the direction of each shot.
In Korea I began to live my desires intensely. I drank too much, I ate too much, I whored around too much. After I met M, I was filled with a semi-demented desire for her.
One of my students in Korea remarked that, in comparison to the quiet, ordered streets of Europe, Seoul must, at first, seem like a kind of hell. She had travelled to Europe and liked it. But she had missed the chaos of Seoul.
Night comes, and the city fills with neon. An old woman chopped onions into irregular lumps and then fired them on to a hot pan in the middle of our table. With silver chopsticks we picked slivers of garlic and dropped them into the pan, watched them melt, and then we tossed in red peppers. The old woman held strips of meat up in the air with a tongs and cut the meat into smaller strips with a scissors. Pork fat sizzled in the pan; we picked out the cooked meat, dipped our pieces into bowls of hot sauce, then placed the meat on a leaf that was laid out flat in the palm of our free hand; we added rice and folded the leaf over, making a ball. The ball went into our mouths in one, and we chewed it down. The sauce was fiery; we washed the whole thing down with Soju. Soju is a strong, clear alcohol made from rice. It only costs a dollar a bottle.
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Perhaps it began with the trip to Kinsale in January of this year. I had been promising my friend Ulick I would visit him for several months. He was doing a course in permaculture at Kinsale College of Further Education. Permaculture is about practical sustainability, the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Every time I hear this word, self-sufficiency, I am drawn to the image of a dacha in the Russian taiga with the soil as black as crude oil and the crackling of a freshly shovelled wood-chip fire; images drawn from Tarkovsky’s films or perhaps, not so strangely, the paintings of Finnish mythology by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. A Finnish man once asked me about Irish nationalism and art; why, in the nineteenth century, architecture never played the same role here as in other emerging European nations. I suppose my answer was something about colonialism or religion, but I do not remember.
I did not decide to go to Kinsale until just before my journey. It was a week before university was to start. The weather was cold and grey but it was not raining. I got the train to Cork and slept. On arriving at Ceannt Station, I struggled onto the platform and from there to the bus depot. I was weighed down with my top-heavy rucksack. It was mostly full of new books I had received over Christmas.
I never wanted any job where a well-cut suit compensated for a lack of ability. But there were people rooting for me to go out into the world, further than already ventured.
The interview room was recently soundproofed, so the woman at the front desk said. The door swung open: my interviewers. They apologized for lateness, client lunch, and led the way, the tall elegant woman with black hair and Middle Eastern features striding out in front. The stocky, hunched man with badger grey hair followed behind me, closed the glass door and excused himself when he belched. Across the street a seagull stood on the parapet of a nine-storey building. On noticing I made a mental note not to look out the window again. It had been a bad habit in interviews before.
Artist’s note: I went away for a year, and apart from cycling countless solitary kilometers, I used this time to sketch ideas for stories and characters. One particular lonely figure popped up again and again. During this time, my girlfriend sent me a half-English, half-Spanish arrangement of “Moon River” that she and her brother had recorded. I listened to it a lot. Many months later, back at home, the piece of music and my lonely character came together. The story serves simply to explain how a piece of music can be a nice way of remembering home. The result is a romantic-monster-Latin-twist Flash short.
Dara Smith is currently studying for a MSc in Interactive Digital Media in Trinity College
I studied and worked as a structural engineer for fourteen years. It involves a way of thinking that is practical and safe. One considers an issue or problem and thinks it through, logically and deductively, to a conclusion. This conclusion must adhere to the laws of Nature, or more specifically, Physics, or more specifically again to the engineer’s Bible of empiricism – The British Standards. It is the practical application of Physics. It is a useful way of thinking; I was sick of it. Now I study fine art. I am interested in thinking in a different way.
Gilles Deleuze, in the 1960s, said: that it was important for an artist to become animal. Manuel De Landa – a Mexican artist and philosopher – examined this idea in a lecture he gave in 2006 to the European Graduate School, a lecture I watched, glamorously, on YouTube. I am no student of philosophy; I merely found this interpretation interesting. He looked at Deleuze’s notion of the artist becoming animal not in a metaphorical sense but from the point of view of the manner of thought being employed by physicists and mathematicians practising up to and around that time. He wanted to remove logic and language from his reckoning and embrace the purity of numbers and geometry – two geometries feature in this lecture in particular, Differential and Topological.*
Tim’s uncle Harold is as ribald as they come. What is so ribald about him? Well, he’s just a dirty old man, but he is also bald – so, ribald. You ask: Why not just call a spade a spade? Because sometimes spades get so polished by the earth they are digging through – by its abrasive nature – that they become silvery and almost soft to the touch. How can a spade be soft? Well not soft, as in yielding, but soft like a woman’s face. All women’s faces are soft – but you’d never say an old woman who’d been out in a gale for eighty years had a soft face, yet if you actually touched her face, of course it would be soft, as in yielding. But you wouldn’t say, My, what a soft face you’ve got there Mrs
Harold was touching Tim’s face one day because Tim had a hickey on his neck. He grabbed Tim by the face and twisted his head.
It was an early start for my day-trip to Albania in June 1991. I was lying on the back seat of the tour coach at 6 a.m. on a crisp blue morning reading War and Peace and waiting for stragglers to arrive. I was halfway through the book when I arrived in Corfu on holiday, but had decided to give it a break and spent the first week reading Zorba the Greek instead by Nikos Kazantzakis. I was finding his flowery, convoluted style deeply irritating, so it was a relief to return to the crystal clear prose of Tolstoy.
I was sharing a room with my dad on holiday, and we were not getting on well. He was pretty bad tempered most of the time, and I was feeling fairly hopeless about my life. I think my beard freaked him out even though he’d had one himself as long as I could remember. We had an argument one day that summed up the mood between us. I said that with all the bad in the world, the fact that it survived at all was amazing. He said quite the opposite was the case. The world continued because there was more good than bad.
A literary controversy nobody noticed – nobody ever notices literary controversies – took place in the Irish Times last month. An Irish writer and creative writing teacher wrote an oversweet, shallow, and rushed review of a book about the rise of creative writing programmes in the US. A few days later, a writer and creative writing teacher in Galway wrote an offended and feline response.
The controversy was: Can someone be taught to write creatively? Well, that was what it looked to be about, but of course that is an old and useless question. The reviewer dismissed the romantic notion that writing is “carried out in a vacuum” by “the solitary genius.” She said that x and x and x would probably never have become writers if it hadn’t been for creative writing programmes. The Galway teacher said, Aha! But X and X and X didn’t take creative writing courses! Which is a rather obvious thing to say, but is a noteworthy reminder.
About eight weeks ago we adopted a one-year-old Jack Russell. We named him after the writer Henry Miller. Over Easter, one of our American guests spent her time with us shouting, “Henry is violating the cushion, O my Gawd, he is trying to violate the cat.” Henry also rolls his body over any substance he thinks will enhance his attractiveness as a mate. I found it hard to agree to have him neutered, however the vet said it is advised for male dogs.
One day in the local park I noticed him rubbing his head and neck on a grassy patch under a large chestnut tree. Checking to see what he was rolling over, I spotted a sliver of silver; it was a three-inch-long fish. Its tail flipped up and down. A fish in a park is very odd, but the park is across the road from the sea. I often stand to watch the gulls dive bomb into the waves to grab a fish. If successful, they must avoid the rest of the flock who will try to steal their catch, so they need a safe position to eat.
Tom Service, a generally lucid and intelligent music critic for the Guardian, has lost his f*cking mind.
A column he wrote for the Guardian News Service, which appears in today’s Irish Times, argues that a collaboration between Elbow and the Hallé, Britain’s oldest symphony orchestra, “seems to be working.”
Here’s a video clip of a previous collaboration [...]
I came across this in the New York Times – an animated film by Jeff Scher, called “The Parade.” I thought it was visually powerful and had great music. The music is by Shay Lynch. The animator, Scher, says:
The street etiquette of avoiding eye contact lets us go about our business without the [...]
The Irish Times has already written a fair assessment of the meeting that took place on the future of the Irish Writers’ Centre. The article reflected the fact that the suggestions made by the public were largely expressions of frustration, or expressions of goodwill, and were not, in my opinion, things that the board could [...]
Step inside now step inside is a new work presented by Brian Duggan at the Hugh Lane Gallery. It is a site-specific installation for the Golden Bough Room; an oblong-shaped room on the ground floor of the gallery.
A few weeks ago, the night before the show opened, I noticed a poster for it on Camden [...]
“The moment when she took flight, if the man had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the little offences, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger ones to be counteracted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her own, the most magnificent of counterpoisons, prepared in advance for the ultimate emergencies. She was accumulating a supply of treacheries, so that when the shock came, she would be prepared.”
- Anaïs Nin
“The moment when she took flight, if the man had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the little offences, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger ones to be counteracted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her own, the most magnificent of counterpoisons, prepared in advance for the ultimate emergencies. She was accumulating a supply of treacheries, so that when the shock came, she would be prepared.”