Archive for the 'Column 2' Category

Extracts from a brochure for the 2010 Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival


published in Column 2
on January 13, 2010
.

Ice Fishing in Korea

Sancheoneo Ice Fishing (Spot/Reservation)

Fishing by breaking thick ice on Hwacheoneon (stream)
• Open hours: 9 a.m. ~ 6 p.m.
※ Providing PE bag to guest (carrying ice box prohibited)

[Order of Ice Fishing]
1. Reach to festival site and go to application place for ice fishing.
2. Tell the number of person and receive the ticket.
3. Go to fishing class or fishing shop for checking the day situation and move to fishing place.
4. Decide an ice hole and spread fishing rod.
5. Put a bait and then allure Sancheoneo flamboyant.
6. Catch Sancheoneo!
7. Go to baking place or sashimi center.
8. Eat fresh Sancheoneo

[Preparation for ice fishing]
• Ice chisel to punch ice hole (rent available)
• Ice net to take off ice pieces in ice hole
• Small chair or mattress for sitting and waiting in fishing
• Bamboo fishing frame and reel to adjust fishing string in accordance with water depth
• Fishing string, hook, and bait are essential!
• Cold resistant articles such as winter cloths and winter shoes

How about Sancheoneo flavor?
When visiting Sancheoneo festival, you should catch and eat Sancheoneo. It is not good just looking at Sancheoneo that you caught with hard work. It is a pleasure to taste fresh Sancheoneo right now.

You can eat Sancheoneo easily at the baking places in festival place or sashimi restaurant. Sancheoneo sashimi, showing pale pink and yellow, gives mild sweet flavor with chewing sense. Baked Sancheoneo shows steam gives simple but deep flavor.

The flavor of Sancheoneo, eating at festival place, is good also but the very baking Sancheoneo gives quite different taste.

※ Available to buy on the spot

-Mick Halloran

Swimming race with a Syrian


published in Column 2
on January 12, 2010
.

Revenge

STOCKHOLM I was swimming laps at Eriksdalsbadet one Friday afternoon when a pot-bellied Arab in a black Speedo hurled himself into the water in the lane beside me. “Who is this spastic?” I said to myself. He was joined in the pool by a friend and they raced each other. To my shock, the guy in the Speedo swam like Mark Spitz, leaving a trail of froth behind him. I stopped for a break beside him ten minutes later. He addressed me in Swedish, before switching to broken English. He wanted to race me.

There was no avoiding it.

“You’ll beat me,” I said.

“No, you are strong. I watch you swim. You are strong.”

I told him I was American when he inquired. He was Syrian and he said something in Arabic to his friend, who was Iraqi. I like to think he vowed to win this swimming race for every Iraqi killed by America.

And, surely, he did. I stayed on his heels though. We started chatting after the race. Sweden has taken in a large number of people from the Middle East in the last fifteen years – it admitted 8,700 Iraqi refugees in 2008 alone. But this guy wasn’t an asylum seeker. He said he’d been living in Sweden since the nineties and was one of 23,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in the country.

“It’s a very busy time for us,” he said. “We are nearing the end of days.”

I am never fully comfortable around Jehovah’s Witnesses. Express the slightest spiritual instinct and they mark you as ripe for conversion. Thankfully, the Syrian was more interested in my weight.

“You are only sixty-nine kilos?” he said. “I weigh more than ninety kilos and I still beat you.”

We didn’t say much more and I went back to swimming.

-Donald Mahoney

Sitcom pitch No. 1: FvK


published in Column 2
on January 11, 2010
.

FvK

Frank vs Keller (outline): Anne Frank and Helen Keller live in a New York loft apartment together. Anne is a paranoid teenager and Helen is a disabled lady. They don’t get out much. They bicker and boast about their misadventures with transient New Yorkers, such as merchant seamen, touring violinists, religious zealots and rowdy Irishmen (excellent cameo vehicle). Canned laughter ensues.

Episodes begin with a diary entry narrated by Anne from the hotpress under the stairs, generally lamenting her status as an illegal alien, and rueing Helen’s predatorial prowess with men. These introductions are also used to concisely recap what happened in the previous episode. Each episode typically ends with Helen tripping over something Anne has left lying around, which provides a sense of comic relief and poetic justice. Theme tune should be extremely jaunty.

Projected longevity: two seasons

-TC Harrington

Tears of Eros, Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid


published in Column 2
on December 13, 2009
.

Lágrimas De Eros (Tears of Eros) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, is an exhibition of the erotic in art spanning five centuries. The title comes from George Bataille’s eponymous book Les Larmes d’Éros, 1961, where Bataille argues for the petit mort of the orgasm, the foretaste of the erotic in death.

The exhibition moves you through stages of eroticism sequentially, as a narrative: “innocence to temptation, temptation to the torment of passion, ending in atonement and death.”

This sequence moves room by room through depictions of the birth of Venus; Eve; sirens, femme fatales and nymphets; the temptation of Saint Anthony; the agony of Saint Sebastian; Andromeda; the Kiss, then closes with three videos by Bill Viola which are a heavy handed attempt at “cleansing.” They portray naked couples either underwater or entering and exiting a cascade of water; think John and Yoko under a waterfall.

Room after room of naked women gaze at you – oils, sketches, pastels and prints of lips, teeth, breasts and thighs. The exhibition suggests that the gaze is the cohesion of the erotic and death. Many of the pieces are attempts at capturing just that gaze, which may be no more than an objectified male fantasy mythologized through Eros and reflected back to him.

Not for Picasso in this case at least. His sketch Painter in a Shawl Drawing his Model at the Maison Tellier (1970) shows a woman with legs parted, exposing her vagina for the many-headed man ogling her. It is full of eyes and cocks, phallic-knobbed walking sticks, bulging codpieces and straining groins.

Throughout are many revisitations to classic myths and paintings. Most successful among them is Tom Hunter’s Reservoir #1. Recalling JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, Hunter’s four bare-chested women stand in algae-covered water up to their hips. Behind is a low-slung red-bricked bridge, where you could imagine a canal barge puttering beneath through post-industrial England. One of them wears a nose ring; she has a decorated dreadlock. The women gaze at the man on the bank, whose back faces the camera. He is touching the hand of one of them, reaching out to her, or is she reaching out to him? Behind a clump of grass and wildflowers, a young cupid stares straight into the camera, at you.

The final painting of the exhibition is well placed. It is Margitte’s Les Amants. A couple, their heads side by side, are covered by individual white cloths. They are eyeless – starving you of the erotic gaze, of any gaze within which to locate yourself, yet beneath the cloth you know she is looking straight at you. Why are they cut off from us? Are they doomed to live out, alone, an existence that is ineffable? Or, united by concealment from us, perhaps it is the case as stated by the Gaughin woodcut in an earlier room, Be in Love and You’ll be Happy. -Keith Payne

Watch a virtual tour of the exhibitions.

Circa, Issue No. 130 (Redesign)


published in Column 2
on December 8, 2009
.

Circa, Ireland’s premier, independent contemporary art magazine has just published its Winter 2009 edition. It is the 130th issue of the magazine, which has been running since the early ‘eighties. They have an on-line version also.

For the last number of years the magazine was published quarterly in colour, however the current issue is black-and-white, A4 in size, and the cover design is effectively identical to the design of the first Circa, published 28 years ago.

On the front cover is an image of Amanda Coogan’s Cut Piece, which she performed in September of this year. She is draped in some material and looks as if she is falling backward, injured, almost as if shot. Coogan is Ireland’s most prominent performance artist. She was also on the board of The Darklight X Festival. She exhibits, or rather performs, internationally and has represented Ireland at the Venice Bienale 2003 and the Liverpool Bienale 2004. Coogan studied under the Serbian-born and internationally acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramovic and was also involved in a group show, curated by Abramovic, in IMMA a number of years back.

Inside, Circa is an excellent publication. It is edited by Peter Fitzgerald – along with a contributing board of contemporary art critics, writers, and practitioners. External contributors also submit reviews and articles.

The reviews cover exhibitions that have taken place over the previous months, with a focus on emerging and established artists in Ireland, North and South. Each year they cover a handful of students graduating from the various fine art undergraduate degree programmes around the Republic and the North of Ireland.

Featured articles can range from artist interview format to essay. They are almost always well written and very informative. After reading the magazine you have always learned something new about contemporary art, particularly Irish contemporary art.

Regarding the magazine design – despite the financial reasons that forced Circa into publishing the black-and-white issue – it remains a very attractive publication and the quality of the images inside is still excellent.

In the editorial of this issue, there is an explanation of the financial concerns that have brought Circa to this decision, namely that funding is not guaranteed for the coming year and that advertising revenue has dropped by 80 per cent over the last 18 months. However, he asks: “Can you help Circa at this time?”

His editorial strikes an ultimately defiant note by urging people to read the just-published Indecon report to the Arts Council – which “provides an invaluable overview of the financial importance of the arts to the economy of Ireland.” -Adrian Duncan

Hauschka, The Sugar Club


published in Column 2
on November 25, 2009
.

Last Thursday night, I had a ticket to go see Hauschka play at the Sugar Club. The ticket was free, and there was a piano involved, so I was more than happy to go along. On the way, I stopped in the Cobblestone in Smithfield to meet a friend. We sat at the bar as the place got busy. The Cobblestone has a sort of dingy and dirty interior that makes you want a shower. But it’s lively place and they pour a nice glass of Guinness. As soon as the trad music started to play in corner, however, we grabbed our umbrellas and left the bar.

When we got to the Sugar Club, late, Hauschka was just about to start, and the audience was quietly listening to him speak. Hauschka is the pseudonym of the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann. He trained in classical music for ten years, but was also apparently once a member of a hip-hop band. Luckily, the show had been delayed because the piano was caught in traffic from Galway to Dublin. I was told that Hauschka usually takes two hours to set up the piano for a show, but he had only twenty minutes that night.

On the stage was a grand piano. A video camera on a tripod stood behind, filming the strings and mechanics of the instrument, which was then projected onto a large screen behind. Hauschka – tall, lanky, with longish, unkempt hair and wearing a t-shirt and jeans – spoke in that slow, relaxed, German kind of way. His arms were covered in wide, wooly wrist bands that covered his forearms. He talked about his music, and his life before, when he was unhappy. He was funny. He sat down, adjusted his seat and started to play without any sheet music.

He began to play. Sometimes the piano sounded more like a harpsicord, and other times like electronic music. For one of the songs, there was what sounded like trumpets bleeping and the deep sound of a double bass. He tapped and drummed the inside of the piano, glided his fingers across strings, creating percussion noises and loose, atonal sounds.

Inside the body of the piano, placed on strings, were objects that tinkled. For one song, Hauschka stretched gaffer tape across them, which creatied the high-pitched sound of a toy piano. At one stage, he grabbed a plastic shopping bag that was filled with ping-pong balls and poured them into the body of the piano. When he began to play, the balls bounced high as they hit off strings. It looked like the piano was juggling.

Hauschka’s music seems to combine elements of pop, classical music and the atonal elegance of Satie. The music reminds me of Michael Nyman’s compositions and also shows influence from John Cage’s “chance music.” Cage used bolts and screws on top of the strings. Hauschka’s music is beautiful and unexpected.

Hauschka is a show man – albeit, a modest one. He amuses and entertains the audience, as well as himself, in a humble and graceful sort of way. He laughed while playing at times. He is more like a musician-magician, who reinvents the sounds of a piano through innovative and simple techniques with unlikely everyday objects. -Niamh Dunphy

Cold Souls (2009), directed by Sophie Barthes


published in Column 2
on November 22, 2009
.

The IFI recently opened a third screen. It is small, cosy and lit by about 60 low-wattage bulbs, which are pretty cool. In essence it’s what the IFI is all about – quality cinema delivered in comfort with a little touch of culture. I went to see Cold Souls there, a new comedy starring Paul Giamatti.

In Cold Souls, he plays a fictional version of himself, a New York actor who has trouble getting to grips with his role as Uncle Vanya. He lives in a contemporary Manhattan, but this one includes a company called Soul Storage. They disembody souls. Paul reads about them in a small New Yorker article and looks them up in the Yellow Pages. In order to neutralise his inner torment and perform well in the Chekhov play, he goes the rather excessive length of unburdening himself from his soul.

It irritated me throughout the movie how mild and inconsistent the symptoms of soul removal were. Giamatti says he feels “hollow.” His wife says he is distant, looks pale and has “scaly” skin. Unfortunate contradictions begin to emerge. Symptoms change to suit particular scenes, and when the technique of acting without a soul fails to help him understand the role of Uncle Vanya, Giamatti turns desperate, paranoid and back to where he started.

In place of his own soul, he buys a Russian poet’s. This, for some reason, gives him super acting abilities and he completes Uncle Vanya to a standing ovation. It also uncovers a sort of Russian mail order soul industry where peasants sell their souls to be illegally smuggled into America via soul mules. You’d think being a soul mule would have horrific consequences, but apart from the odd nose bleed, it also doesn’t seem that bad. Anyway, Giamatti sees the good in the Russian poet’s soul and is determined to return it to his owner, and so the movie continues to St Petersburg, where it becomes ever weaker and more convenient.

Although the premise had potential, there is nothing original about Cold Souls. I can think of a Simpson’s episode from fourteen years ago that dealt with soul removal in a far more humorous and imaginative way. The jokes are predictable. At one point, Giamatti loses it when he discovers his soul is being used by the actress of a Russian soap opera. The cheap shots at accountants and lawyers I’ve heard many times before. If it weren’t for the presence of Giamatti, watching this movie would be painful. However, he is also part of the problem. He is too fuzzy and harmless for this role. His inner turmoil only ever amounts to social insecurity. There are a few ugly dream sequences in a lazy attempt to convince us that he has dark thoughts, but in truth you never believe it. It needed someone with more demons and self hatred, like Steve Buscemi.

For a movie about souls, it’s quite ironic that it has none. –Bryan Butler

Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, Unitarian Church


published in Column 2
on November 12, 2009
.

Haxan is a 1922 silent masterpiece on witchcraft by Danish director Benjamin Christensen. It is based on the Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century guide for German inquisitors, and is a curious blend of historical fact, storytelling and surrealist dream sequence.

It was screened in the Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green. I suppose somebody thought it would be subversive to show a film about sorcery and Satanism there, but it was a terrible cinema venue. The pews filled up quickly and it was hard to see if there were any free spaces, because the interior was lit by candles. People who couldn’t find seats kept bumping into one another and knocking things over. It was freezing cold as churches tend to be. Many of us ended up sitting on the floor with our coats on.

Haxan was banned in the US and heavily censored elsewhere for scenes of nudity, torture and perversion. Although the scenes would not shock audiences today, there are still images I don’t think I’ll forget, including an orgy of witches kissing Satan’s ass, food prepared from the bodies of unbaptised children, and sexually hysterical nuns running around a chapel.

The film opens with a scholarly account of superstition and Christian cosmological beliefs before the narrative shifts into a central story about a family that is destroyed when the women are accused of witchcraft and are tortured and burned at the stake. There are several scenes of witches conducting ceremonies and black magic, most of them old women.

The film is centrally about the process of extracting confessions in torture chambers. It also jumps spasmodically into fantastic dream sequences, as creepy in parts as Nosferatu (also made in 1922) and as hallucinatory as the films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel.

It ends with the director’s attempt to show us how the persecution of women persists in modern times (1920s) based on ignorance and “naïve notions about the mystery of the universe.”

Women with mental health problems who had once been labelled a witch and burned at the stake are now labelled “hysterics” and sent to a sanitorium. Accompanying this argument is scene of a kleptomaniac and a somnambulist being carted off to hospital.

When Haxan was shown in Denmark it was accompanied by a score from the Czech film orchestra. In the Unitarian Chruch, the live music was off-kilter prog rock performed by 3ekapano. It wasn’t right. The music sometimes sounded as though it were being played in another room, and sometimes it rose to a bewildering crescendo when little was happening on screen.

I left the Unitarian church with a sore ass and the desire to see Haxan again in the comfort of my own home. It is an odd and brave film, and for fans of the genre it would be well worth combining with some of the German expressionist horror films such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It is available in its original version with the Czech film orchestra score. Another version was made in 1967 for the American audience narrated by William Burroughs with a jazz score. I have read that neither the score nor the narration works very well. -Allyson Dowling

Conversation with Robert Fisk, National Concert Hall


published in Column 2
on November 9, 2009
.

Fifteen minutes gone and I’m mortified. We are sitting halfway up the packed main auditorium at the end of a row of seats. Robert Fisk has barely started his evening talk. My father, after several large glasses of red wine, has wrestled the mic for audience questions from the plump, motherly, middle-aged, purple-uniformed attendant standing next to us. He declares his devotion to the writings of Fisk and, on behalf of us all, Ireland’s love for the man from the English Independent. Fisk quickly loses patience and breaks in on my father’s partly slurred ramblings, asking, “Where is the question?” The crowd titters. Dad, muttering, slumps back into the seat beside me.

Robert Fisk is a well-known Middle East correspondent. He has written several bestselling books of history and reportage. He is deeply respected for his willingness to criticize the Israeli government but also for his even-handed judgements on political events in that region and worldwide.

Fisk used to be Northern Ireland correspondent for the Times and ridicules an idea put forward by a member of the audience (and by among others John Hume in the past, he tells us) of transferring the lessons of the 1997 Northern Ireland peace treaty to the Middle East. He says you could only compare the Ulster of the seventeenth-century Protestant plantations with Catholics being thrown off their land to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of today. Would both sides have negotiated then? he asks.

Fisk reminds us that our view of war on the news is sanitized. We should see more dead bodies, so we know what we are voting for when we support “just” or “humanitarian” wars. A former Irish army officer in the audience apologetically admitted he turns away from the sight of blood on television. It strikes me as a brave and honest statement. Fisk tells us that in the recent Gaza conflict, when roughly 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of the thirteen Israeli victims, two were Arabs and three were killed by friendly fire.

There is a lot of activity in my row of seats. Most of the late arrivals seem inexplicably to be seated in my row. There are soon people going the other way too to the toilets and then returning. I have to keep standing up and squeezing myself against my seat to let people by. I begin to feel mildly paranoid that this is being done to me on purpose. All of the other rows are quiet.

Fisk calls himself pessimistic about the future: governments are about power, not morals, he says, and Obama, despite being very smart and a decent guy who “knows what is going on,” will do nothing for long-term peace in the Middle East. He is too much in the pockets of the Israelis. Fisk also says Osama Bin Laden is definitely still alive. He thinks he is the new Mohammed (hence his fondness for living in caves).

I find myself quite liking Robert Fisk. He has a youthful single-mindedness and doggedness, shown ironically in his intolerance of people in the audience that don’t automatically get what he is saying. It suggests to me a man who will never really give up hope. I think, like a true priest, he can’t help but care massively about people despite his self-avowed lack of optimism about the future. –Joe McCarthy

Sunday concert series, Hugh Lane, Fidelio Trio


published in Column 2
on October 30, 2009
.

I don’t know anything about classical music. But because I like what I’ve heard, I decided to attend a free Sunday noon concert at the Hugh Lane. I’d never heard of this series before, but it’s in its thirty-fourth year. The Sunday I was there featured performances by the Fidelio Trio of two pieces by Robert Schumann as well as a world premiere of a piece by Irish composer John McLachlan.

The Schumann pieces were Sonata for violin and piano in A minor, Op.105 and Piano trio No. 2 in F major, Op.80. I liked both of these, especially the first piece, as well as the musicians – Darragh Morgan, violin; Robin Michael, cello; and Mary Dullea, piano.

John McLachlan’s Natural Order was sandwiched between the Schumann pieces, and the Dublin-born composer was in attendance and gave a short introduction beforehand.

McLachlan studied music at the DIT Conservatory of Music, the Royal Irish Academy of Music and in Trinity College. A successful composer, he has received commissions from RTÉ, The Arts Council, Lyric FM, Music Network, The National Concert Hall, and his work has been performed all over the world.

I’ve never heard any of his other work, so I can’t say if Natural Order is a radical change of direction. But it was certainly not Schumann. According to McLachlan’s programme notes, the piece was written combining the usual aural imagining of sounds moving in time with the less common use of chance to generate the order of those sounds. He chose “twenty-seven contrasting and interesting sound objects (nine per player) and created conditions that were designed to make them succeed in an interesting and quasi-melodic way, by creating various types of repetition/development.”

McLachlan then used coin tosses and dice to generate the actual orderings of the piece and ensured maximum engagement from the musicians as they were responsible for choosing the page order of the piece in advance of the performance.

The contrasting and interesting sound objects consisted of Robin Michael playing slap bass on his cello and making strange popping sounds with his mouth while Mary Dullea lifted the lid of her piano and plucked away on the insides with what looked like a pencil. Darragh Morgan played sporadic violin with bow that sounded like barbed wire.

A beautiful melody would come up for air and almost instantly it was gone, buried beneath a barrage of sounds that sometimes resembled a couple of BBC sound effects compilations playing simultaneously. I happen to like music that conceals its melody almost to the point of obliteration, so it worked for me although it was still very frustrating at times. I don’t know what the general consensus was among the audience but, based on the expression on some faces afterwards, quite a few of them were inwardly asking themselves the same question a little boy said aloud to his father about halfway through: “Why are they making those weird noises?”

The Sundays at noon concert series at the Hugh Lane continues on November 1 with Aylish E. Kerrigan, mezzo-soprano and Dearbhla Collins on piano. Admission is free. – Patrick Gleeson