Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Tea and biscuits with Tim Robinson

Mick Halloran
published in Essays
on June 22, 2009
.

Tea and biscuits with Tim Robinson
1
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.

Continue reading ‘Tea and biscuits with Tim Robinson’

A talk by writer and critic Brian Dillon on the painter Elizabeth Peyton: IMMA


published in From the Editor
on June 20, 2009
.

Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is a writer and critic worth the journey to a Sunday afternoon lecture, if you have the time. On Sunday 21 June 2009, he’ll speak on the last day of the Reading and Writing exhibition by American artist Elizabeth Peyton at IMMA. The talk begins at 3 p.m. An email alert told me that booking for this event is essential, but I received the alert on Friday, so maybe it’s not that essential. But probably a good idea to email talksandlectures [ at ] imma.ie.
Elizabeth Peyton
Here is one of Dillon’s reviews – of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, in the London Review of Books, from 2007.

Dillon is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review.

Librarians in San Francisco offer amnesty with creative writing contest


published in From the Editor
on June 20, 2009
.

Library Books
The San Francisco Public Library recently recovered nearly 30,000 books in an amnesty programme that saw fines waived on overdue books if the lenders could make up a good (written) excuse.

From SFGate:

A group of second-graders said they were too busy rescuing marine mammals.

Maximum fine for a book at the library is $5.

Dan Deacon, Andrews Lane Theatre


published in Column 2
on June 19, 2009
.

I missed Dan Deacon at last year’s Electric Picnic, where the human spiral he whipped the crowd into was a surprise hit of the festival. So when he returned to Ireland in Andrews Lane Theatre, I ignored the fact that I had a nasty chest infection and attended with two friends. I didn’t know a single Dan Deacon song, but that didn’t matter.

Deacon’s ensemble included fourteen musicians (three drummers, a host on keyboards, weird synthesizers and decks etc.), all uniformed in white jumpsuits, who stood facing different angles on the stage. Dan, who looks a bit like Comic Book Guy’s hipper, younger brother, stood in the center beside a strange tower of lights. A tune or two was played, then the first participation exercise took place.

Deacon instructed the audience to pretend to ride galloping, imaginary horses. Then we were instructed to neigh and halt, kill the horse, and devour the imaginary horse’s guts. He kicked in to a few more songs, all fast and moshy electronic. The energy was pretty high. When the music stopped, we all had to converge and touch a certain audience member’s bottle of beer held high above his head, which, on reflection, warmed us up nicely for participation exercise number three (a couple songs later): everyone again stood converged and turned to the centre of the room. We were asked to close our eyes and place each hand on a head in front of us, so the audience formed a sort of flat human cone. Then Deacon asked us to imagine we were floating down a river under pink clouds and through orange groves (…or something to that effect, I can’t quite remember). Everyone did it. Everybody did exactly what he said. When the music began again in earnest, everyone went crazy. A friend shouted to me – “This is how cults start!”

The exercises built in scale and extremity as the evening went on. For the next, the audience had to make a giant circle with one person in the middle, whose dance moves everyone was to copy from a kneeling position, till we gradually melted into each other. Next the audience was halved and two people, one from each side, had a dance-off. They tagged people in one-by-one until the floor was full.

It all led nicely to the climax. Again the audience was divided as Dan got down into the crowd. A few people formed a human tunnel with their arms and hands held high. The instruction was, when the music started, to go through the tunnel and add to it at the other end, till everyone apart from the band was outside. By the time I got to run under all the arms and come out the other end, I was outside the venue with several hundred others, all whooooing. A few people did wonder out loud – why did we all leave the venue? It makes one think hard about crowd psychology and prehistoric instincts.

Back inside, it was all rounded up with a very basic sing-along. The entire set of lyrics was – “silence like the wind overtakes me – oooooh ooh ooh ooh,” repeated over and over. Such was the atmosphere, that everyone got wrapped up in it. Members of the band took turns to crowd surf, and the song stretched out for a good ten minutes, until it all broke down with a hard punk finish. I left the gig entirely covered in sweat. -Bryan Butler

Tatyana Tolstaya (b. 1951), from “See the Other Side”


published in Plugs
on June 19, 2009
.

Tatyana TolstayaI’m suffocating and hot. I’m depressed. My father died, and I loved him so much! Once, long, long ago, almost forty years back, he passed through Ravenna and sent me a postcard of one of these famous mosaics. On the back—in pencil, for some reason; he must have been in a hurry—he wrote, “Sweetheart! I have never seen anything so sublime (see the other side) in my life! Makes you want to cry! Oh, if only you were here! Your Father!”
– Tatyana Tolstaya

The suit I bought in an alleyway for twenty pounds

Paul O'Sullivan
published in Essays
on June 18, 2009
.

The suit I bought in an alleyway, by Paul O'Sullivan
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.

Continue reading ‘The suit I bought in an alleyway for twenty pounds’

Looking For Eric (2009), directed by Ken Loach


published in Column 2
on June 17, 2009
.

Looking For Eric is lazy, condescending film making. And if it were not for Ken Loach’s convincing past record, with, for instance, My Name Is Joe, one might suspect that he secretly despises the working class.

Here we have another tired attempt to show that the English working class are the salt of the earth, and the only unexpected element comes in a reasonably convincing portrayal of Eric Cantona as a wise man. I never would have guessed that. I always thought that he was a bit thick. It is, of course, Cantona playing himself, and the film was his idea in the first place.

(Maybe it is just because Cantona is French. The film implies in a muddy kind of way that to be French is in itself to be special. There are lots of things muddily and unconvincingly implied in this film.)

Eric (the postman) seems powerless to prevent the disintegration of his life. After two failed marriages, he has been lumbered with two teenage stepsons in a shambles of a household when Eric (the ex-footballer) appears to him during an escapist cannabis binge. Together, they set out to repair his broken life and, along the way, take on the local snarling psycho drug baron.

The scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, must have been working on the assumption that he would be playing to an audience that had never seen any of his past collaborations with Loach. Ordinary Northern English “blokes” are sharp-tongued, but wholly well-intentioned and sound, and the bad men are really, really nasty but cave in as soon as they are put to the test by the communal strength of the good guys.

Loach is determined, in this film, to paint characters as caricatures, and it’s not a surprise. He has been getting away with this a bit too long.

In one scene, six white, middle-aged postmen are asked to close their eyes and imagine themselves as someone famous they would love to be. Two name black men – Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nelson Mandela – one says Fidel Castro, and the other three choose Frank Sinatra, Ghandi, and Eric Cantona. I seriously doubt this is representative of any normal bunch of Northern English working men, especially as the BNP returned two MEPs in northern constituencies in the UK European elections on June 5. It would be a conceivable scenario if these six men were playing the local cadre of the Socialist Workers Party, but they are not. They are meant to be ordinary postmen.

In the real world, normal people are not very politically aware. Maybe Loach is beginning to tire of fighting against that reality and is descending now into turning his heroes into pantomime figures as a kind of revenge.

There is one moment of real excitement when the law, heavy-handedly of course, breaks in on a family reunion. It is tedious film, though, in more places than it is enjoyable. The worst and best that can be said of it is that it is mostly harmless. The music written for this film is also horribly routine and very accurately reflects the pedestrian nature of the enterprise. – Joe McCarthy

Introducing Graphic/Visual at Some Blind Alleys


published in From the Editor
on June 16, 2009
.

Some Blind Alleys has added a new – a radically new – dimension: short film.

Filmmakers and animators from or living in Ireland – who want access to SBA’s growing audience, can submit short films and animation for consideration. To submit, use the Online Submissions form, or send a query to editor [ at ] someblindalleys.com.

The first film has gone up – Dara Smith’s animated short, “Moon River” – which he calls a “romantic-monster-Latin-twist Flash short.”

Dara made the film as a student in the MSc in Interactive Digital Media in Trinity College.

It is run on a custom-built video player that Bryan Butler, an SBA contributor, generously volunteered to build for the site.

I have always wanted to present graphic and visual art – the guiding principle behind that being, Why not? While Some Blind Alleys remains focused on – which is to say I am still most interested in – the personal essay, I would like, on whatever scale possible, to bring together an audience not so much concerned about forms of art, but about vitality and energy and restlessness in artists.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but – like everybody else – I know what I like, and I’d like to do what I can to support art that I like.

Graphic/Visual, as a category on Some Blind Alleys, includes film, but is not limited to film. I’m also looking for graphic essays and graphic stories. I think there are a lot of good graphic essayists and storytellers out there – but there are curiously few publications that provide an audience for them in Ireland.

I feel certain there must be quite a few filmmakers interested in making good short films, because every time I go to a party, I meet filmmakers. And now I know for a fact that animators are out there creating really weird and interesting art – because I’ve seen “Moon River.”

And I presume there are limitless new ways in which people, visually, can tell stories.

I haven’t made a huge push to request or commission any graphic work until now, because I wanted to get the site a bit more polished before I started trying to attract the attention of visual artists.

Moon River

Dara Smith
published in Visual Art
on June 16, 2009
.




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

Read at the Irish Writers’ Centre


published in From the Editor
on June 16, 2009
.

The Irish Writers’ Centre and the Stinging Fly – a fiction journal based in Dublin – are hosting a few readings this July at the Centre, and you can submit three pages of your best work to be part of that reading.

You’ve got about a week to polish up your three pages.

From the website of the Irish Writers’ Centre:

Wednesday 9, 16 & 23 July 2009
The Stinging Fly is organising three readings this July at the Irish Writers’ Centre. The final reading, on July 23, will feature six writers reading alongside Michael J. Farrell, author of the recently published story collection Life in the Universe.
We want you to be one of those six writers.
Please submit 3 pages of prose (double spaced) or 3 poems to: readings.stingingfly@gmail.com
Submissions will be accepted until 5 p.m. on Thursday 25 June.
Only e-mailed submissions will be accepted.
We will choose three poets and three prose writers, and notify them by 9 July.
Writers who have never before read in front of an audience are encouraged to submit.