Dotsy's Complaint

At the Annual Trinity Book Sale

2009-04-25T12:34:00.005+01:00

I picked up the following books for a tenner at the Trinity book sale on Thursday.
1. An Apology for Roses by John Broderick: an Irish writer I read about recently. Blurb on the back is amusing - "Marie Fogarty is very much alive, very much aware of her need for men. In a small Irish village, Marie spurns guilt and gossip for the damp-warm odours of the flesh".
2.The Organization Man by William H Whyte: a study of the American white collar worker from the 1950's which was referred to in an article in the Atlantic Monthly I read about ten years ago called 'The Organization Kid', a survey of the conformist business like approach university students were then taking to their study and personal lives. 'Revolutionary Road' by Richard Yates is perhaps a fictional expression of the same subject.
3.Dam-Burst of Dreams by Christopher Nolan:As a thirteen year old in 1987, I vividly remember Nolan winning the Whitbread prize and from that point on developed the idea that his work was extremely complex, almost impenetrable and hence I never read it.
4.One-Dimensional Man by Hebert Marcuse : I watched the Baader Meinhof film last week and that no doubt influenced the purchase of this 1960's indictment of the repressive character of modern society by a Frankfurt School critical theorist. Apparently it was the book to have under one's oxter in the 60s and 70s but is now seen as somewhat dated by today's critics, none of whom of course I can identify.
5. Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse by Philip O'Ceallaigh: The first collection of short stories by this critically acclaimed Irish writer who lives in Bucharest, a fact that for some reason resonates.
6. Articles on Britain by Karl Marx and Friederick Engels: After this week's Budget in the UK, the right wing press claimed Labour had started a 'class war' against the rich, one paper superimposed Darling's head on Lenin's battlng the bourgeoise. Seemed like an apposite time to flick through these articles.

Books: The Colour of Blood by Declan Hughes

2008-05-08T20:40:00.003+01:00

I read this Ed Loy crime thriller for the following reasons:
1. I recall a trendy acquaintance going to see 'Digging for Fire', a play by the author, back in the early 90's. The title was taken from a Pixies song; the aura of cool has for me clung to Hughes ever since.
2. I like Hughes' contributions on 'The View' on RTE- he usually has something more considered to say than the other panellists.
3. The Irish Times carries a round up of crime fiction almost every week and even the 'great' John Banville has stooped to get in on the action. I was curious as to what all the fuss was about.
4. At €5.95 in Tesco it really was a bargain.
In the event, while still retaining respect for Hughes, 'The Colour of Blood' is an absurd book that left me at times utterly confused as to what the hell was going on. If about half the plot twists were excised, there was more of a focus on the vaguely Ballardian protagonist, and somehow the temptation to explain everything that happens in Ireland by reference to child abuse was avoided, then perhaps this novel would be more significant.

Books: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

2007-09-19T19:28:00.000+01:00

At a public interview in Vicar Street a few years ago, Ian McEwan said that he liked the idea that his fiction could be read in one, maybe two, sittings. Although the novel, Atonement, he was publicising at that time might be harder to digest so summarily, it is no doubt true that most of his other books are capable of being read in a couple of hours. McEwan's skill is to hit the ground running - the balloon falling to earth in 'Enduring Love', the kidnapping at the supermarket in 'The Child in Time' - establishing a pace to the narrative that holds the reader's interest until the close. But it's a sort of confidence trick because once you think more deeply about them, the books often seem contrived (I know it is fiction) and, well, ridiculous. 'On Chesil Beach' isn't any different: it's 166 pages long and opens with the proposition that it was impossible for young couples to discuss sex in England of the early 1960's, an idea based on the Philip Larkin poem about sex beginning sometime between the DH Lawrence trial and the first Beatles LP. From this starting point, the novel relates the disastrous wedding night of Edward and Florence, a pair of twenty-two year old university graduates who seem blessed with all the good fortune McEwan likes to give to his younger protagonists - think of the preternaturally gifted children of Henry Perowne in 'Saturday'. The problem centres on Edward's desire to fuck Florence and her wish to abstain. But what is intimated to be a sensitive rendering of the difficulties that the pre-hippy generation had with sex, is in reality a fairly crude clash between Nature and Culture. For how else could you account for Edward's unusual penchant for acts of casual violence, his love for the orgiastic sounds of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, his interest in the crazed millenarian cults that Norman Cohn wrote about in 'Roots of the Millennium' and his rather upfront behaviour in the cinema when he tries to put Florence's hand on his erect knob? And what of Florence? How are we to reconcile her hatred of the sexual act with an all-consuming passion for classical music and the reverence with which she treats Wigmore Hall, scene of her most heightened engagements with the great composers? She's Culture, calcifying, deadening and ultimately as Gide wrote in 'The Immoralist', a 'suffocating second skin'. When Edward provides her with an actual second skin - the drying semen he spurts over her stomach - the marriage finishes.
'On Chesil Beach' feels at times slightly deranged but McEwan, with his attention to detail, manages to keep these wilder aspects from capsizing the story at least for the duration of its reading and there are a few touching passages towards the end as an older Edward returns to his father's home but in the longer term, I can't help thinking this will be regarded as one of McEwan's more bizarre books.

Television: Prosperity

2007-09-04T18:57:00.001+01:00

'Prosperity', the new RTE drama series, which, given its theme of urban poverty and despair, is bizzarely bookended by glitzy sponsor ads for a car manufacturer, started last night with a day in the life of an unmarried mother as she drifted from B&B to the Welfare to the chipper to her sister's and eventually to the canal to booze. In between these destinations, Stacey hangs around a shopping centre with her child, looking to recharge her mobile, striking up an unlikely friendship with a gormless security guard and waiting for her shit of a boyfried to call her. To say it is boring and repetitive and exhausting is probably some kind of praise for the filmakers because no doubt the intention here is to show the mind-numbing routine of a life excluded from 'our' national narrative of success and, naturally, prosperity. Amidst all the tarmacadam, concrete, hedge funds and financial controlling, what does 'real life' amount to in Ireland today? 'Prosperity', in the first episode, doesn't really answer that instead it offers a gallery of monosyllabic victims all of whose sentences seem to end in 'anyways' and 'is all' while at the same time failing to resist stock types like the buffoon in the shopping centre, who could have been Freddie in 'The Dead' in another life. They are making a point about the invisibility of these lives but if Abrahamson et al wanted it to be realistic, why add an occasional soundtrack intended to heighten the viewer's sympathy for Stacey's plight? Perhaps some loss of nerve.
Dramas like this often end up condescending their subjects. It is always other people who live 'lives of quiet desperation' and they rarely make mainstream television programmes. It is fundamentally an issue of class and it is why I wouldn't watch 'Adam and Paul' and found the most affecting scenes in 'Prosperity' those in which the characters joked about babies being ugly and talking dirty. The rest skirted too close to handwringing.

Books: Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird

2007-08-22T18:35:00.000+01:00

'Utterly Monkey' is too long by about one hundred fifty pages, reads at times like Laird took pages out of his diary and reworked them into fiction (a Nordie solicitor working in a big London firm who decides to ditch the law for literature and falls in love with a beautiful coloured girl) and is politically so unlikely - a loyalist plot to blow up the Bank of England, which in the book happens exactly almost a year before the real terrorist attacks of 7th July 2005 - that I wondered what the point of it all was. No doubt Laird can write and I retained some 'local interest' because I have met similar types in college and work but it was slight. And completely lacking in humour.

Film: The War on Democracy & Queimada

2007-08-21T21:14:00.000+01:00

UTV screened John Pilger's documentary 'The War on Democracy' last night at eleven pm. I think the time is relevant because clearly the schedulers decided it would only appeal to a minority of viewers but this seemed to defeat the film's purpose. Even for someone like me who has at best a superficial knowledge of the subject, there was nothing new on offer - for example a lot of the Venezuela section was already dealt with in 'The revolution will not be televised', the Irish documentary that chronicled the failed 2002 coup - so I can only surmise Pilger in the style adopted intended an introduction to the widest possible audience. How strange, and how heartening and of course how unlikely, it would have been to see it put on three hours earlier after Coronation Street. As for the content, irrespective of his allegiance, as a journalist, Pilger should have given Chavez a harder time on the issue of poverty which he easily side-stepped with aspirational stuff about giving people dignified lives. And I was surprised that Pilger allowed himself to be bullied by the obnoxious retired CIA man, who came close as it was possible to get to a carciature. You could imagine him popping up in 'Dr Strangelove' screaming about the world needing to recognise that America was not going to take 'any messing.'
For a subtler dissection of imperialism, I would recommend Queimada, which was shown as part of the Marlon Brando season at the IFI last weekend. Directed by Gilles Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers), and set in the 19th century on a fictional Caribbean island, Brando plays Sir William Walker, an emissary of the British Crown, who has decided it is in its economic interest to foment a slave revolution on the island so as to undermine the Portuguese ruling class. Walker selects Jose Dolores, a street wastrel, to lead the charge but once the Portuguese are ousted, Walker persuades Dolores to throw down his arms and accept the rule of the businessmen who export fruit and sugar from the island. Dolores and his men are freed but they have to return to work on the plantation. Ten years later, Walker is back: this time, at the behest of the fruit company that controls the island, to stamp out another Dolores revolution. The slaves are free but as workers are treated like slaves and worse. The rising, which threatens the value of shares in the export company, is vanquished in the same way that the Portuguese initially wiped out the indigenous people - with a scorched earth policy. What I found remarkable about the film was the manner in which Walker instills ideas of freedom and dignity in Dolores in order to achieve an economic end. Dolores is dared to dream of the rights of man and civilisation while Walker is taking care of business, and when the economic rationale shifts, those dreams of freedom and equality are quickly jettisoned. Naturally there is a contemporary resonance to all this, as is witnessed in the fluctuating relationships between imperial powers and their client states. Ennio Morricone provides an unusual score for the film and Brando is excellent.

Books: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

2007-08-17T20:41:00.000+01:00

The only part of 'The Inheritance of Loss' by Kiran Desai that I liked or is likely to remain in the memory is the section when one of the characters, Biju, works for a time in a bakery on La Salle and Broadway on the upper west side of Manhattan, a place I went to a couple of times when I visited New York for a summer ten years ago. The bakery was just about to close when I was there but Desai, whose story is set in the mid-80's, describes it accurately, even down to the detail of its speciality apricot pastries, a delicacy I recall indulging in with pleasure. Another memory of that summer was coming out of the apartment late one Saturday evening to be told by our neighbours that 'Your Queen is dead' and then hearing on the taxi radio as we headed down to the Scratcher bar in the East Village the news that Diana Spencer had been killed in Paris. She wasn't our Queen but she was dead.

Film: Collateral Damage & Stepford Wives

2007-05-10T17:39:00.000+01:00

In an inspired piece of scheduling, TV3 and RTE contrived to allow hapless terrestial viewers to catch up with two real stinkers on Wednesday night. First up was Collateral Damage, which was quietly ditched in the aftermath of 9/11 on the basis that it would be insensitive to release a film dealing with a domestic (I mean the US of course) terror attack. Having seen the first hour of it, I can say it would have been insensitive to release it full stop given what ridiculous codswallop it is. Lacking any of the humour or operatic violence of his earlier efforts, Schwarzenegger, playing a fireman trying to avenge the death of his wife and son, is a spent force while John(s) Turturro and Leguizamo look like they have been forced to show up as payment for losing a large bet. The only thing worth noting is that in the wake of the attack by Colombian El Lobo, a representative from a Latin American solidarity group appears on TV to defend the right of Colombians to protect themselves against American influence in the region, a platform unlikely to have been afforded to an Islamic group after 9/11.
Tiring of Arnie's wholly unbelievable search for justice, I flicked over to Stepford Wives, which, despite my low expectations, was even worse. How to describe this bilge? It is more than just a leaden, consistently unfunny mix of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives; something darker is afoot. I started to think of Jacques Barzun and Allan Bloom, prophets of a doomed Western civilisation. I used to dismiss them as conservative snobs, elitists who refused to acknowledge the pleasures of popular entertainment.But maybe they were right after all, maybe cultural relativism and irony is junk and in reality all that is left of modern culture is this awful, trashy, dead film.

Talks: At the Franco-Irish Literary Festival in Dublin Castle

2007-04-28T17:14:00.001+01:00

I went along to the Franco-Irish Literary Festival in Dublin Castle yesterday to hear two panel discussions, one on the notion of islands as utopias, the other on islands as penitentiaries and places of exile. While both in theory sounded interesting, the latter debate never got going as the four writers on the panel - Liam O Muirthile, John F. Deane,Irene Frain and Gisele Pineau - first were asked at length about their own careers and then proceeded not to really talk about the topic at all except save for a brief mention by Deane of Heinrich Boll's life on Achill island. While all individually interesting (well Frain did drone on a bit), the moderator didn't manage to get them ever to actually discuss the idea of islands as prisons.
The other debate was more enjoyable, thanks in part to a fiery performance from poet Theo Dorgan (above) , who said that when he was asked in Japan to explain the Irish 'miracle', simply answered "Lie down and let them walk all over you." While noting the absurdity of a poet trying to account for economics, Dorgan warned of Ireland's 'colonisation by international capital' and the innate conservatism of the idea of utopia. Life in all its fizzing ferment can't be reduced to a map or plan or scheme. However, on the upside, Dorgan said that, because being born on an island inevitably makes you want to get off it, the Irish are a particularly well-travelled bunch with ninety six percent of us owning passports, a vastly higher percentage than those pesky Americans. Not only that but we get a lot of visitors too and the current influx of Poles, Russians, Africans and so on is just the latest chapter in our polyglot history. Dorgan counseled us to remember this if any huckster politician starts to harp on about a uniquely Irish identity.
Also on the panel was a Jean Raspail, a veteran travel writer who told an amusing story about a 19th century French explorer who declared himself the King of Patagonia. His reign was cut short by a deportation order from the Chilean government, meaning he sat out the remainder of days away from his people in exile. Anyway Raspail and a few pals revived the kingship in the late 1970's and proceeded to sail a boat to some uninhabited islands off the coast of Britain to claim it for themselves. Terse correspondence from the Foreign Office followed, which Raspail claimed, was recognition of his regal status.
The other speakers were Peter Sheridan who weighed in with a sea shanty and a fairly lame story about the Cuban owner of a downtown LA bar who - shock horror- didn't know Ireland was an island. Finally, poet (or file) Brid Ni Mhoran spoke interestingly about St. Brendan and his voyages and how they are described in his navigatio.

Book finds in Trinity

2007-04-20T10:25:00.000+01:00

I picked up a few curious books at the otherwise disappointing annual Trinity book sale last night. Despite being populated by the usual slightly aggressive, musty, mainly male crowd, there was no doubt a more limited range of books on offer this year than on previous occasions. Given that the organisers are dependent on donations, quality can never be guaranteed but it was hard work finding anything of great interest among the stacks of post- WWII macroeconomic textbooks or C.P. Snow novels. Pushed to categorise my buys (by of course a wholly imaginary entity - it's not a question I think I will have to field anytime in the near future), I would place 'Goodbye to the Hill' by Lee Dunne in the bawdy (this book also is a rare example of Irish erotic fiction, a genre whose history perhaps deserves more analysis if only to ask why there is so little of it), the letters of Simone Weil(above) the religious, S.J. Perleman essays the comic, 'The Man of Feelings' by Henry MacKenzie the sentimental and 'An Evil Cradling' by Brian Keenan the true.

Books: House of Meetings by Martin Amis

2007-03-22T19:47:00.000Z

House of Meetings, the latest novel by Martin Amis is definitely a return to form after the depressingly shit Yellow Dog, where it felt as if the author was fulfilling a hated contractual obligation rather than actually trying to write a memorable or enjoyable book. The lazy borrowing from his own journalism - an article he wrote on the porn scene in LA re-appears barely disguised - and the work of others - a biography of 'Mad Frankie Fraser'- highlighted the lack of interest Amis appeared to have in his own novel. Plot or character are never paramount in his work because the prose is so good but Yellow Dog was characterised by an enervated style that suggested a writer who had lost any sense of purpose.
Such lassitude was not in evidence a year before when 'Koba the Dread' was published. Both a wild, short survey of the crimes of Stalin and a series of reflections on his father and friend Christopher Hitchens' supposed fellow travelling, the book had many faults - comparing the cries of one of his children to the screams heard from the Butyrki prison in Moscow was one- but there was an undeniable energy in the prose and an engagement with the subject hardly seen in 'Yellow Dog'.
It is probably not a surprise then that Amis has returned to this terrain in 'House of Meetings', which relates the story of two brothers' love for the same woman as they try to survive life in a Siberian gulag. Framed as a letter to his American step-daughter long after these events have occurred, the unnamed narrator is now an old man who is making a final journey to the region where he and his brother were incarcerated. On the way, he not only reflects about life inside but also about Russia before the Second World War and the country now as it recovers from the Beslan school massacre but faces a seeming terminal decline in its population.
John Banville has written a comprehensive review of the novel in the New York Review of Books but he does leave out discussion of what I thought was a striking deficiency and that was the recurring references to English literature that are supposed to offer insights into the Russian experience. The narrator explains this away by mentioning a relationship with an English woman that caused him to develop a pedantic anglophilia - he says at one point 'I prefer the droller cultures, and the wizened ironists, to be found on the north western fringe of the Eurasian plain'- but I kept on thinking wouldn't a Russian use Pushkin or Tolstoy rather than Marvell? Perhaps I'm being parochial but I think it suggests that Amis, not a separate fictional narrator, is telling this story. When he writes about Beslan or other contemporary atrocities, you sense the same outrage witnessed in 'Koba the Dread'. But then what saves 'House of Meetings' from being another tirade is the prose, alive again and not palely loitering.
When the aged narrator arrives in Dudinka, 'the tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that's what the port looks like - a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettle-drum of the storage vats.' Or when his brother Lev is beaten in the prison camp, he lie on bed recovering with 'two worms of bloody phlegm coiling out of his head.' Or to the Russian experience;: 'the frequency of the total. The total state - the masterpiece of misery.'
There are many more such examples of fine prose in the novel and it is these rather than the subject matter, which somehow still doesn't convince, that make House of Meetings worth reading.

Cinema: Hidden Agenda

2007-03-17T20:15:00.000Z

By coincidence, given the last post on the conspiracy against Chavez, I saw Hidden Agenda (1986) last night on Channel 6. Directed by Ken Loach, I had thought it was about the the Stalker affair and the cover up of the shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland but while referring to that and being set in the North, it in fact was concerned with a bigger conspiracy - the overthrow of the Labour government of the 70's by a cabal of Conservative politicians, army and security services, both British and American. Shot in the familiar documentary style, the film featured Brian Cox as a policeman sent to Belfast to investigate the murder of an American civil rights lawyer, who had been given a tape recording of meeting discussing the plan to topple the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The cop, on discovering the existence of the tape, vows to track down the conspirators but soon he is being blackmailed and convinced by those involved of the futility of ever trying to bring the covert operation to light. The last scene sees him returning to London as the lawyer's widow, played by Frances McDormand, above, looks on in disbelief. Bleak stuff.

Cinema: Double Impact

2007-03-14T20:21:00.000Z

I watched the first twenty minutes of 'Double Impact' last night before thinking better of it and switching off. I have always been a big fan of Jean Claude Van Damme's quixotic career, though perhaps more in theory than in practice as I really couldn't justifiably have sat through the whole of this lummox of a movie, which relates the attempts of twins Alex and Chad Wagner, who were separated at birth, to avenge the murder of their parents in Hong Kong. Apart from a few ill-advised wardrobe decisions - Van Damme dons turquoise leotards and pink shorts in successive scenes- the most notable aspect of the film is it marks the first time the Belgian kick boxer utilised the 'double' device in his work. A quick glance at the Internet Movie Database shows he later again plays twins in Maximum Risk, a serial killer and his replicant in Replicant and modern and ancient versions of the same character in The Order. Whether the prevalence of the double in Van Damme marks a failure of the imagination or some deeper artistic impulse is a question I will leave to future analysts of popular culture.

Television: The Trap

2007-03-13T19:33:00.000Z

I watched ‘The Trap’,Adam Curtis' new documentary series on Sunday night on BBC 2 with great expectations, given that his previous efforts, The Century of the Self, which traced the part the Freud family played in the creation of the public relations industry, and The Power of Nightmares, an examination of the intellectual origins of both the Neo-Conservatives and Al-Qaeda, were startling pieces of television.
In this third series of films, Curtis seeks to analyse how the idea of freedom, officially at least, has become so prevalent in modern Western societies. The chief aim of governments in Britain and the United States now is not only to ensure freedom for their own citizens but also to promote the concept, by waging supposed wars of liberation, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, Curtis has identified that the foundation of this drive for freedom is premised on a deeply pessimistic view of human nature that assumes humans only ever act in their own self-interest, a theory posited by Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, above, as a refutation of the post-WWII consensus that governments had to play an active part in the economy for the common good.
From this point of departure, Curtis links the utilisation of game theory by Rand Corporation scientists during the Cold War to the attacks on the family made by psychiatrist R.D. Laing as instances of how the idea of the common or public good was chipped away at in favour of an individualist ethos that assumed people were always essentially ‘out for themselves’. But this championing of the individual did not usher in a new era of freedom, instead systems analysis, whether it was in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders or the operation of public institutions, became the dominant method of organising how the individual acted in society. The new emphasis in psychiatry on diagnosis by reference to lists of symptoms rather than specific treatment and the introduction of incentives and goals in the British health service were both examples of the contradictory nature of this pursuit of freedom which appeared to accept the ascendancy of the individual while at the same time putting in place ever more rigid systems in which people could live, work and think.
It is only fair to withhold judgement until the final two programmes are broadcast but I felt that Curtis was trying to draw too many disparate strands together and at times I longed for a more straightforward rendering of say the history of economic thought after the Second World War rather than these undoubtedly daring but you sense unsustainable intellectual leaps. Curtis has been praised in the past for his ability to unearth remarkable archive footage for his documentaries but this time the constant jumping from one image to another was distracting and I felt rarely added a whole lot to his thesis.

Cinema: Babel

2007-03-11T20:46:00.000Z

Before he went for Babel, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu toyed with the idea of 'Do Japanese tourists hunt in Morocco?' as the Philip K. Dickesque title for his epic meditation on chance and fate in a globalised world. Well actually, like the film, that's complete bollix. But the question did occur to me as I watched yet another close-up of Brad Pitt in anguish because whether the Japanese do go to Morocco to shoot animals or birds or both is the key to the whole farrago: how the disparate lives of a middle-aged Mexican woman working illegally in the States, an estranged American couple on a group tour holiday in north Africa, an unfortunate kid (and his family) who unintentionally shoots the female half of said couple and a deaf mute Toyko teenager are linked. The latter part of the film is reminiscent of Lost in Translation,the Morocco section is, at times, like Blackboards while the Mexico segment echoes The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which isn't much of a surprise because Guillermo Arriaga wrote the screenplay for both.
More surprising was Harriet Walter, a great Shakespearean actor, popping up in the tiniest of cameo roles as a disgruntled British tourist desperate to get out of the shitty village Pitt has lead them in search of treatment for his wife. Because of Walter's presence, I imagined that the whole tour bus was a group of English luvvies being brought reluctantly to perform at some far flung Moroccan outpost as part of a joint initiative to foster greater awareness of European culture sponsored by the British Council and the UN, represented on this occasion by Brad Pitt. I was that bored by this long, portentous, pretentious film.

Cinema: No Mercy

2007-03-10T11:06:00.000Z

I watched 'No Mercy' last night partly to remedy a historical wrong, namely that I wasn't able to see it when it came out in Dublin in the mid-80's because it was rated certificate 18 and partly because there was nothing else on. The highlight of an otherwise dour film was the memorably named cop Eddie Jillette, played by the pouty and thoroughly unlikely Richard Gere, being described as looking like stale piss by his captain,played by George Dzundza, above. Other than that I found myself speculating as to why bad guy Jeroen Krabbe wears the same buttoned-up overcoat throughout the film and how many times has the premise of a tough cop going to another city-this time from Chicago to New Orleans- to bust shit up being resorted to by Hollywood.

Jean Baudrillard est mort

2007-03-07T09:27:00.000Z

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died in France aged 77. Highly influenced by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard was famous for his book, 'The [First]Gulf War didn't happen', which argued that our (western) knowledge of that war was mediated to such extent that it was impossible to say what really occurred and what in fact reality was at all, instead we were left with the 'hyperreal', a reality only available to us through the media. He also wrote that the Disney sponsored town, Celebration, in Florida wasn't an idealised and artificial version of the American dream, it was the rest of the country that was fake; Celebration, with its white fences and Truman Show style community, was America!
As a mark of respect, here are some exhilarating opening lines from 'Simulations', published by Semiotext(e) in 1983:
"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA- it is the map that engenders the territory..."

Cinema: The Black Dahlia

2007-03-06T18:37:00.000Z

I was bored senseless by the utterly redundant 'Black Dahlia', which is notable only for the piss poor acting on show. You expect this from Josh Hartnett, whose ability to express emotions of any kind is virtually nil, or Scarlett Johansson, almost beyond parody as the vampy Kay Lake, but Aaron Eckhart? And worse still our very own John Kavanagh and Fiona Shaw, who in her closing scenes, seemed to be aping Norma Desmond's final exit from Sunset Boulevard. As for Kavanagh, the improbable Scottish accent really did him no favours and got me thinking about how well he played Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey in the Gate back in the mid-80's, which also featured Donal McCann as the Paycock and was the first play I saw in the theatre. At least in Alexander, he was allowed keep his Irish accent.

Cinema: The Dead

2007-02-26T09:29:00.000Z

I went to see The Dead yesterday afternoon in the IFI, which was being shown as part of a season of John Huston films. Adapted from the short story by James Joyce, it takes place over one evening, the 6th January 1904, at the home of the Morkham sisters, well-established members of the Dublin musical scene.
Played initially as an ensemble with a large cast of characters dancing, sharing memories, arguing, performing party pieces, getting pissed and eating, the closing stages of the film focus on the sisters' nephew Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta as she is overcome on hearing 'The Lass of Aughrim', sung by the tenor Bartell Darcy. It reminds her of Michael Furey, who loved her when she was a girl growing up in Galway and, on hearing she was to move to Dublin, died because, she says, he could not bear the prospect of life without her.
On hearing this in a bare room in the Gresham Hotel, Gabriel reflects on his own life and how he has never really experienced love or felt passion in that way. Earlier in the film we see that Gabriel is an 'empty shell', and attempts to construct an identity for himself by writing for the Daily Express and going on cycling holidays in Belgium. When pulled up on this by ardent nationalist Molly Ivors, who calls him a West Brit, Gabriel replies he is tired of 'his country' and rejects the notion that Irish is his language.
He also plays the role of dutiful nephew, giving a pompous speech about his aunts at the dinner and later imagining one of them dying and being unable to deliver any words of comfort. Language without feeling is a dessicated husk and Gabriel is only eloquent after realising the counterfeit nature of his own life, delivering the famous closing sentences of the snow falling on the 'dark mutinous Shannon waves' and 'like the descent of their last end, on all the living and the dead.'
I remember when the film came out first in 1987, I was going through a particularly pretentious phase, and went to see it twice, on the second occasion I brought along a few mates from school who were so bored with what was on offer that they decided to organise a 'pile-up' at the back of the cinema, a show of boisterousness that shocked my precious thirteen year old self. Curiously, a woman made a similar mistake at yesterday's screening by bringing her two young daughters along to what is really an adult film, given its themes of lost love, regret and death.

Cinema: Boy meets Girl meets Genre

2007-02-24T13:17:00.000Z

I had an interesting chat with film studies academic Tamar Jeffers McDonald on this week's Viewfinder, the cinema programme that broadcasts Thursday evenings on Dublin City Anna Livia FM.
McDonald has written an analytical history of the Hollywood romantic comedy, charting its development from the screwball comedies of the 30's and 40's to the sex comedies of the 50's and on to their radical 70's incarnation and finally the sanitised formulaic efforts that have dominated since the eighties.
At first blush, such films may not seem a 'proper subject of study' but then you need only recall the importance both the Soviet and the Nazi regimes (I'm not aligning them by the way) placed on popular cinema in the cultivation of mass feeling to accept their relevance.
Screwball comedies were characterised by pithy innuendo and sparkling dialogue between the likes of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in 'It happened one night'(pictured above) or Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in 'Bringing up Baby', creative responses to the repressive Hays Code, which censored any overt sexual reference in films made in post-Depression America. This reminded me of what Philip Roth said on returning to the States after visiting the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War: "There nothing goes and everything matters. Here everything goes and nothing matters."
Negotiating when the sexual act would occur, either before or after marriage, appears to have been the preoccupation of romantic comedies of the 50's when the optimism of the post-war generation ushered in a new candour while at the same time retaining a sense of propriety. Contrary to received opinion, McDonald pointed out that Doris Day, the doyenne of these movies, only once played a virgin in all of her thirty nine films, indicative of the fact that the era was not so sugar sweet as is usually assumed.
What changes in the 70's is the recognition that pursuit of love does not always end in happiness as a more cynical, or perhaps realistic, mood becomes apparent, notably in Woody Allen's Annie Hall where the couple finish apart, the last shot being of a busy street where we expect the pair to reunite but never do. However, with Annie Hall, Allen also bequeathed the standard 'framing shots' for every subsequent romantic comedy- New York streets and parks- which are to be seen in When Harry Met Sally, You've got Mail, Maid in Manhattan and on ad infinitum.
What McDonald dislikes about these films is that they lack invention or wit and instead have become mechanical product that verge on the puritanical. Indeed she has gone so far as to write a list of their recurring tropes such as the embarrassing public display of affection invariably made by the male lead or the inevitable 'spill scene' where the heroine splatters her hitherto pristine outfit with coffee or juice thus making her appear more vulnerable and to the audience more likeable(think Julia Roberts in Notting Hill).
Whether the form can be revived remains uncertain but McDonald has spotted some new directions like The 40 Year Old Virgin, a romantic comedy for men that combines gross out humour and the quest for love. But in the main contemporary romcoms, by sticking rigidly to formulae set down in the late Eighties, are failing to do what their predecessors managed, that is to accurately reflect social change. The consequence is that they are acquiring an eerie repetitive feel that lacks both romance or comedy.

Cinema: The Science of Sleep

2007-02-19T12:21:00.000Z

Despite its fantastical imagery and playful tendencies,'The Science of Sleep', the new film by Michel Gondry reminded me of one of Roman Polanski's early works, 'Repulsion', in which a young Belgian woman played by Catherine Deneuve, descends into madness cooped up in her London flat. Here, Stephane, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, is a Mexican artist cut adrift in Paris who becomes obsessed with his neighbour, Stephanie, who, he says, has a similar personality to his recently deceased father. What at first appears to be a love story, is in fact a disquieting study in grief and insanity.
It is clear from the outset that Stephan is simply unable to exist in what we could loosely call the 'real world'. He has come to Paris, after the death of his father in Mexico, in the mistaken belief his French mother has set him up as an illustrator in a calendar publishing company. It transpires that the position is more akin to that of dogsbody and Stephan's petulant response that he is an artist, one who specialises in disaster scenes, is an early sign of his revulsion at the fact that the world doesn't recognise his talents. Meanwhile, his fellow workers have long since taken on board the concept of 'absolute indifference' and are content to play out their days in name calling and pranks.
Back in the family's old apartment, where he sleeps in his childhood bed, Stephan retreats ever more into a dream world where he is sometimes the star of his own television show, other times the creator of new and improbable cities.
A girl, Stephanie (the name suggesting she is yet another figment of his imagination), played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, moves in across the hall and soon she becomes the focus of his obsessive personality.
If you get past the relentless visual invention, which is delivered at a frenetic pace, the film charts Stephan's mental decline triggered by the collapse of his family, the death of his father and his failure as an artist. Seeming at first to be an innocent abroad, Stephan's behaviour gets increasingly erratic and sinister; after cracking his head open against a door, he disinhibits, reflecting that a toothless mouth is better for a blow job, a fact he counsels Stephanie to consider before getting her cluttered teeth treated by a dentist. At the end, he lies curled in a foetal ball, dreaming of riding a horse across an open plain with the object of his affection.
Perhaps the absence of scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Gondry's last film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, explains the lack of an American feel-good finish or heart warming message to sign off with. Instead we are left with a bleaker,darker, more, dare I say, European ending as the real world is finally shut out, the descent into delusion complete.

Amis as Lucky Jim

2007-02-16T09:31:00.000Z

Imagine the scene: you've spent the last few months of your creative writing course slaving over the final draft of what you consider to be your magnum opus, a remarkable meditation on contemporary society that echoes Houllebecq, Jeliniek and Monzo, while owing an acknowledged debt to Nabokov, Bellow and Beckett. You await the reaction of the diminutive but haughty celebrity author turned creative writing professor who has seen fit to cast an eye over your work. Finally summoned to his office, he throws the manuscript at you and says, "On reading this effort, I first felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear."
At least Martin Amis is clear about why he is taking up a post as professor of creative writing at Manchester University: he is out of touch and needs new source material. In exchange, the students will be taught by the best prose writer of the last thirty years. It's a fair cop. But I wonder what Amis will teach them? Go west? Don't romanticise the Soviet Union, especially not Stalin? An awareness that they are writing in the age of horrorism? Interesting times ahead for the Mancunians.

Book finds at the Hodges Figges Sale

2007-01-30T19:52:00.000Z

Hodges Figgis always has a deadly sale in January but so far, because am utterly skint after the excesses of Christmas and am trying to spend fuck all even to the point that I tried to haggle with a vacant checkout assistant in BT2 over the price of a pair of jeans, I have not been able to pick anything up. There is a fine selection of books on offer, putting both Easons and Waterstones( even though it is owned by the same company) to shame. Anyway I succumbed to temptation yesterday evening after a particularly bleak day and bought Journey to the Orient by Gerard de Nerval and Les Onze Mille Verges by Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter title is untranslatable because 'verges' refers both to the male member and virgins. The English alternative cheerfully offered by publisher Peter Owen Modern Classics is 'The Amorous Adventures of Prince Mony Vibescu', which goes some way to catching the mood of this carry-on style pornographic romp from I would have thought the most unlikely of sources, a celebrated avant-garde poet. Written when Apollinaire was like me stony broke, the novel, if you can call it that, amounts to one improbable, comical sex scene after another as our hero, Prince Vibescu has his wicked way with the ladies of Paris while not forgetting in turn to be serviced by many of its male denizens. The repetitive task of describing shag after shag clearly got to Apollinaire because with each vignette the action becomes more fantastical, the sheer accumulation of bodies and positions a ruse to hide the mundane purpose of the exercise.
Meanwhile, de Nerval's book is about a trip he took to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in 1844 in search of hashish and Eastern women. Published five years later, it was only translated into English in the late 1990's but clearly pre-dates Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson similar narcotic inspired odysseys by a century. That's Apollinaire looking grumpy in the above image.

Cinema: Blood Diamond

2007-01-29T13:10:00.000Z

During one of many heated exchanges in ‘Blood Diamond‘, campaigning journalist Maddy Bowen, played by the surprisingly irritating Jennifer Connelly, says to remorseless smuggler and mercenary Danny Archer that if the American people knew where the diamonds they sport on their fingers came from, they would soon stop wearing them. Strange then that they knowingly guzzle on oil bought from totalitarian regimes. And at the film’s close, we are told that since the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone forty countries have agreed that a certificate as to the origin and sourcing of diamonds sold in their respective jurisdictions have to be made available to purchasers in a system called the Kimberley Process. On foot of its introduction, the filmmakers would have us believe that illegal diamond smuggling is a thing of the past, which reminded me, at least, of the final statements in the Veronica Guerin film where the viewer was informed that in the wake of her murder, the drugs problem in Dublin was all but eradicated. Both propositions are patent bollix and give an indication as to the level of analysis director Ed Zwick and his team bring to bear on the civil war that destroyed Sierra Leone in the 1990’s.
Zwick was a producer on ‘thirty something’, the creepy US drama series of the early 90’s that was so full of hugging and learning and one can see that impulse here as Archer, played by an improbably accented though rather good Leonardo Di Caprio, is transformed, while in pursuit of a particularly priceless diamond, from being an amoral war profiteer to, pace George Bush , a ‘loving guy’. The wretched suffering of the people - hundreds of thousands killed, more maimed, rape used as a weapon of war- are pushed to one side as Archer is slowly redeemed. This may make sense for a mainstream Hollywood film but I thought it veered on the offensive. So too did the plot which was essentially an action adventure chase movie weirdly reminiscent of the ‘Jewel of the Nile’, jarring somewhat with the setting of the story in a country devastated by war. Played as a conventional thriller, ‘Blood Diamond’ would have been enjoyable hokum but setting it in Sierra Leone and preaching to the audience about the ethical buying of diamonds was a mistake

Cinema: Regular Lovers

2007-01-09T12:18:00.000Z

On successive nights this weekend I fell asleep while attempting to watch Regular Lovers, a retort by French film maker Philip Garrel to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Both star Garrel’s son Louis and both concern the failed Paris uprising of students and workers in 1968. While Bertolucci’s film shows three lovers participating in sexual games oblivious to the fact that outside the city is burning, the protagonists of Regular Lovers are more engaged, throwing Molotov cocktails at les flics and doing their best to avoid military service. At three hours long, Garrel is in no hurry to tell the story (a word used advisedly given that the attempt to impose a narrative is of course a knee-jerk bourgeois desire for order), instead he lingers on empty streets and passive faces. While I admire the seriousness of the enterprise and the blunt refusal to pander to the stupid fucked up aesthetic of Hollywood cinema, I found it deathly dull, to such an extent that I dozed off not once but twice. I was left wondering whether there is space in contemporary culture for the type of young intellectual that populates the film. Does anybody sit around stoned talking about poetry and the working class anymore or is everyone too busy writing blogs and more generally becoming fodder for the information technology industry?

Talks: Sven Birkerts at the Royal Irish Academy

2006-12-19T09:21:00.000Z

Literary critic Sven Birkerts gave the final lecture in the Critical Voices series last Thursday night in the library of the Royal Irish Academy. I can't recall the exact title but it was something like 'the drowning signal', a reference to diminution of human presence in the digital age. From the outset, Birkerts acknowledged the provisional nature of his thoughts, remarking that what he had to say was 'a gamble with tendencies' rather than any prescriptive message. While it is difficult to accurately take the temperature of the times, Birkerts believes there is a desire, probably millenarian, for large-scale 'psychic events' that somehow encapsulate a particular era, generation or moment. Virginia Woolf's belief that human nature had changed in 1910 on foot of seeing a post-impressionist exhibition in London was not verifiable but evoked the colour and mood of that time.
For Birkerts, the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 was a defining moment, not only for the possibility of imminent nuclear destruction but also because the event, through media coverage, did away with his assumption of the sovereignty of place; the national, the global were now local concerns. Birkerts registered the same feeling in the wake of September 11 and like the cloud emanating from Three Mile Island, he argues that our experience of the world is now mediated through a culture that is systemic, invisible and dispersed.
Positing two figures, Adam and Zeno, the former living in the 1700's, the latter now, Birkerts suggested that human consciousness has been transformed, defined then by embodied physical reality and local concerns to now disembodied dataspace and a life of dreams.
The problem with this, according to Birkerts, is that people are becoming part of a network that increasingly denies the possibility of individual thought, citing plans for searchable digital libraries and online encyclopaedias as a move towards 'group think'. Such networks also fray actual human contact as people increasingly socialise and interact online. I couldn't help thinking here of a tram journey I took from Eindhoven airport last year through the outer suburbs of the city. I remember feeling that I was entering some well ordered machine where people had long since retreated from the outside world, content to live out their lives in the warm glow of the Internet, gaming console or television. That feeling came back a few weeks ago on the 46A bus as it made its way through the empty roads of south Dublin.
Birkerts then went on to address the position of art in this age of information overload and lamented the fact that this was a period without artistic force; what has happened to the imagination? It no longer seems possible for the individual to encapsulate the present moment because the world has overwhelmed it; there is now simply too much stuff.
Despite this bleak prognosis, Birkerts did finish on a positive note by discussing what works of art are, feats of concentration, the total immersion in a creative act, which has a power that mere information can never possess. Why? Because while information imposes shape, imagination creates shape. Birkerts seems to suggest that art is still possible, you just have to think harder about it and remove yourself from the constant hum of the digital age.
A lot of what Birkerts said struck a chord but at times he was too alarmist. There was something slightly jaded about his assertion that this was a period lacking in artistic force- wasn't it Virginia Woolf who dismissed Joyce as boring? Evidence that it is not always possible to identify great works of art at the time at which they appear. And I think it is also the case that there is a great appetite for literature now with book clubs and reading groups a fixture in many people's lives and any number of blogs reviewing and discussing books. Clearly people are still finding time to read books and it may be that the current moment is dominated by news of technological advancements because of an age-old deeply human desire for novelty.

Cinema: The Confederate States of America

2006-12-09T17:55:00.000Z

What if the South had won the Civil War? This is the premise of Kevin Wilmott's 'mockumentary', which is presented as a formerly censored work by a British media company that is being shown for the first time on American television. This conceit allows the filmmakers to insert racist ads promoting the likes of Sambo engine cleaner and Darky toothpaste. At the end of the film, we are told that these and other equally offensive products actually existed. The documentary relates the Confederacy's progress after the Civil War; how it expanded in Central and South America and how a cold war developed between it and Canada, instead of the Soviet Union. There are references to Kennedy's assassination and the red under the bed fear of the Fifties is replaced by the presence of clandestine abolitionists.
Backed by Spike Lee, I couldn't help feeling that this was a wholly pointless enterprise that did little to illuminate current race relations in America. The implications of a Confederate victory are so great and hard to 'map' imaginatively that this was probably always a doomed project. And the film-makers' greatest ire seems reserved for the above mentioned products. Surely it wouldn't have been more worthwhile to focus on what is happening now to African-Americans, a situation that sociologist Loic Wacquant has described as going from slavery to mass incarceration and sets out four 'peculiar institutions' (table above) under which they have been controlled. Much more chilling than racist cigarettes and restaurant chains.

Book finds in Madrid

2006-12-08T12:31:00.000Z

I did more than buy books in Madrid - it was wholly incidental to a rather enjoyable week - but the Pooter in me dictates that the purchase of these libros should be recorded. So in a cluttered second-hand bookshop in the La Latina neighbourhood, I came across three old Oxford University Press paperbacks all formerly owned by one Andres Ramiro, who bought them in 1971, probably in Lisbon. 'Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies' and 'Five Elizabeathan Tragedies' caught my eye because they contained some of the first plays I studied in the rather ambiguously titled and long since defunct 'Drama to Marlowe' course in Trinity. 'Ralph Roister Doister', 'Gammer Gurton's Needle', 'The Spanish Tragedy' and 'Arden of Faversham', which is reputed to be the first work of detective fiction in English literature, evoke a particular moment -namely the winter of 1993- even though I barely understood them at the time and would no doubt struggle with them again now. They do furnish a room though. As will 'The Italian' by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, picture above, whose 'Romance of the Forest' was featured in a course I studied on literary responses to the French Revolution.

Book finds on Wicklow Street

2006-11-28T10:36:00.000Z

I picked up three deadly second-hand books at the weekend in the Secret Book and Record Store on Wicklow Street. First up was a hardback copy of the second volume of Richard J. Evan's history of the Third Reich, which he is writing as a consequence of his involvement with the Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving libel trial, an experience he describes in Telling Lies about Hitler. I read the first installment last year and look forward to getting stuck into this one even though it weighs in at over seven hundred pages. Next was 'English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980' by Martin J. Wiener, which argues the disdain writers displayed for commerce in the period mentioned stymied British economic development. Written in the early 80's and clearly influenced by Thatcherism, it is something of a historical curiosity. Finally 'Aspects of the Novel' by EM Forster (pictured above), a collection of lectures the author gave in Cambridge in the late 1920's. The book was the subject of one of the first lectures I went to in Trinity, in which Forster's famous definition of the form as 'a prose fiction of a certain length' was held up as proof that trying to define a 'novel' is a fruitless task. I notice today the London Independent use a quote from the book as its thought for the day: "History develops, art stands still".

Cinema: Scenes from a Marriage

2006-11-27T15:30:00.000Z

Sunday nights are always fraught with a certain low-level anxiety, so what better time to watch a two and half hour portrait of the disintegration of a marriage? Despite its length and the fact for the most part there are only two actors on screen talking, 'Scenes from a Marriage',a film by Ingmar Bergman, is compelling. From the first scene where Johann and Marianne, an affluent middle-aged couple, are being interviewed for a lifestyle feature in a magazine to the last moments in a desolate cottage on an island off the Swedish coast when Marianne claims never to have loved or been loved, one's attention never waivers. That's probably something to do with the clinical but intimate style: the camera is rarely more than a recorder of what happens. The characters are all at once surprisingly formal and brimming with passion as their relationship goes down the pan. Johann tells Marianne at their summer home that he has decided to run off to Paris with a younger woman. She asks to see a photograph of his lover and then offers to pack his bags. They sleep together and he heads off the next morning. But some years later when their divorce is being finalised, Johann viciously beats Marianne and laments the redundancy of his life. "I'm 45 now and already a dead weight. I will probably live for another thirty years. To do what?," he reflects. Earlier we see Johann, who is a professor of pscychotechnology (not sure what that is, if anything), being ridiculed by a colleague to whom he has shown his poetry. The work is never published. Meanwhile, Marianne, a solicitor specialising in family law, can't feel anything and is trapped in a web of family commitments and expectations. How to break free from the strangehold of being a woman in a family, in a society that offers only limted opportunities to be oneself? But then what is the self? And could we really deal with absolute freedom if it was possible?
Thirty years later, in 2003, Bergman came out of retirement to make a loosely connected follow-up called 'Saraband', which is now something of a must-see.

Cinema: Pan's Labyrinth

2006-11-24T15:09:00.000Z

Fantasy and brute reality are mixed up in Guillermo del Toro's new film Pan's Labyrinth, which opens today in the IFI. I saw it at a preview about a week ago and can't concur with the overwhelming critical acclaim it has received; for Observer critic Mark Kermode,it is a masterpiece. Of course it is nothing of the sort. Instead 'Pan's Labyrinth' is an uncomfortable melange of brutal torture scenes and at times cheesy fantasy sequences that suggest the imagination is a sanctuary from fascism. Set in 1944, in the northern region of Spain, twelve year old Ofelia is travelling with her mother to join up with her nasty step-father, a Francoist captain who is mopping up the last of the Republican guerillas. The girl loves reading fairy tales and is soon imagining an alternate world of fauns, monsters and labryinths where she is to be anointed princess of the underworld on condition that she complete three tasks. Meanwhile, back on the ground, her stepdad is busily murdering and torturing anyone who comes across his path. It is an uncomfortable mix and I found the violence at times overwhelming: faces slashed, legs and fingers dismembered, noses smashed into brains. This relentless grind is only slightly leavened by fantasy, which at times is hard going too. I can't see how the film tells us much about the Spanish Civil War but more about Del Toro's aesthetic sensibility and obsessions. Fascinating for him. Not for us though.

You Tube's place in the history of art

2006-11-20T22:23:00.000Z

YouTube, phenomenon of our day, proof of the existence of Web 2.0, re-writing the way we consume media and all that, turns out not be such a new thing after all but merely the latest chapter in western bourgeois society's long-standing desire to see itself represented and to convey that image to others in its community. That's the line art historian and media mogul Hubert Burda is promoting here on the technology discussion forum Edge. The purpose of the article is to give YouTube's seeming novelty context and Burda, in broad brushstrokes, locates it first in 15th century Belgium among the emerging mercantile middle class, who had their portraits painted to display their claim to power and status, a means of scaling the social ladder and establishing their place in the community. The above portrait of the merchant Georg Gisze and his worldly goods by Hans Holbein is an example of this impulse.
Burda then vaults forward a couple of centuries to the invention of photography and the consequent decline of portraiture. People preferred the certainty of the camera to the ambiguity of paint. Artists like Picasso went their own way into more abstract forms.
Warhol reinvented the portrait genre later in the twentieth century: his works gave an icon-like aura to his subjects and became the authoritative portrait mode of celebrities.
Warhol's conviction was that in a mediatised society "images need to be shared". "The better known your face is in the new economy of attention seeking, the higher your market value and your personal rate of return," says Burda.
And of course this brings us neatly to YouTube, which enables a new community of people - the strictures of class have long since been dispensed with- armed with affordable recording technology and a broadband connection, to expose themselves in whatever way they choose. On this reading YouTube is simply a new way of expressing an old desire: to be known to other people. You could say the same thing about blogs.

Hidden Links: 'Casino Royale' and 'Hard Candy'

2006-11-20T14:22:00.000Z

I had the doubtful privilege of seeing two scenes of genital mutilation last week. The first was in the despicable 'Hard Candy', a deeply unpleasant film about a teenage girl who turns the tables on an Internet stalker and subjects him (or maybe not) to the unkindest cut of all. The three people behind this effort explained in the illuminating DVD extra 'Controversial Confection' that the plot is simply a gimmick to reel viewers in but then tried to suggest that it was supposed to question the audience's sense of right and wrong. Well, no it didn't, it just left me feeling profoundly depressed, especially given the fact that the director seemed to be labouring under the delusion that the female character he had created was in some way realistic. I think it is fair to surmise that most fourteen year olds don't speak like a hipster refugee from a Tarantino film while undertaking a DIY castration. I hope not anyway. Naturally, I have the burden of answering why I watched the damn thing in the first place, a task that is presently beyond my capabilities.
I would give less of a bollocking to the Bond movie, even though it was half an hour too long and felt slightly like a computer game tie-in. Ever since 'Our Friends in the North', I have thought highly of Daniel Craig and he is certainly an improvement on the oily Pierce Brosnan, who could surely never borne with such stoicism the punishment bestowed on the new Bond's knackers.
However, there does seem to be more and more films (not just horror) featuring torture scenes. These two, Syriana, The Wind that Shakes the Barley are some that spring to mind. I wonder is this a reflection of current events or a way to normalise the idea of torture in popular culture.

Table Quiz Blues

2006-11-17T10:30:00.000Z

Fuck, shit, piss. Nobody remembers who came second do they? Except the people who finish in this frustrating position. Like me and three mates last night at a table quiz. Supposedly all for a good cause and not to be taken too seriously, I find that table quizzes unlock some kind of primeval competitive streak that compels me to brand other contestants cheats, aresholes or worse. I hang my head in shame at not knowing who the previous artistic director of the Abbey was- Ben Barnes - and rail against our indecision about whether Clint Eastwood is allergic to horses - he is but we double bluffed ourselves. Then we bungle a question about the capital of Sierra Leone. The margin for error is slim because we lose by three points to a team who - oh the injustice, the sheer fucked up unfairness of it all - have five players. Next time, next time. Another well-worn cliche: no prizes for second place. Not true. For our travails, we depart with the Insider's Guide to Fair City, an indispensable reference work, various CD's including Def Leppard, Heading South and Dustin the Turkey as well as a meal for two in a trendy Thai restaurant. A fair cop, then. But I continue to lament not knowing where the Stone of Destiny is.

Hidden Links: Borat and Michel Houellebecq

2006-11-07T19:55:00.000Z

I saw Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat in a nearly full Savoy cinema on Sunday night and laughed at most of it, particularly his insane dancing and the naked wrestling. Afterwards I was trying to come up with some interesting 'take' on it in case I met anyone who wanted to talk about whether or not it was offensive. I couldn't but inspiration struck today while reading a review by James Wood, who in passing I see is married to Claire Messud, author of modish 'The Emperor's Children', of 'The Possibility of Island' by Michel Houellebecq . No need to rehearse Houllebecq's literary output here except to say that critics regarded his previous book, 'Platform', as prophetic given that it was published days before September 11 and imagined Islamic fundamentalists bombing a resort for Western sex tourists in Thailand. In 'The Possibility of an Island', which was released almost a year ago in Europe, Daniel, its protagonist, is an outrageous professional comedian, who likes to splatter his venom all over delicate topics like the Middle East: one of his best-known films is a parody of a porn film, and is called Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler). Now, who has just released a wildly successful film which revels in saying the unsayable and ridiculing subjects that hitherto were taboo? So the 'take' is to draw attention to the similarities between the Daniel character in Houllebecq's novel and Sacha Baron Cohen and to muse on the French writer's prescience. Will that do?

Erich Mendelsohn: the Irish connection

2006-11-07T09:55:00.000Z

In an earlier post on an exhibition of the work of German architect Erich Mendelsohn, I mentioned that an Irish architect had designed a bandstand which stands in front of the Mendelsohn performance centre in Bexhill. At the time I didn't know who that was but Niall McLAughlin, a graduate of UCD and a former employee of Scott Tallon Walker, who now has his own practice in London, has contacted the blog to say that he was responsible for it. An image of said bandstand is shown above.

Talks: Joe Higgins and David McWilliams debate the free market

2006-10-21T21:19:00.000+01:00

The Socialist Party held a debate between Joe Higgins and David McWilliams at a packed Teacher's Club in Parnell Square last Friday night on the topic of whether there is an alternative to the capitalist market.
Higgins kicked off proceedings with the proposition that politics now is still operating under the Thatcher dictum that 'there is no alternative to the market'. Not only that but politicians have sought to use the idea of the market as a mechanism on which to build a society, claiming that it promotes fairness through competition, making it seem "like a stroll down Moore Street". In reality, Higgins said, this is a ruthless system that has as its primary aim the maximisation of profits for a powerful minority contrary to the interests of a disenfranchised majority. He pointed to the example of the Irish housing market, which has seen the price of the average home increase by IR£30,000 every year for the last decade causing a generation of young people to be enslaved by debt. Meanwhile a 'golden circle' of developers, bankers and speculators are reaping untold profits from this obscene boom. Higgins singled out the sale of eleven acres of land in Stillorgan for €88 million in 2004. The sellers were a consortium of investors made up of various professionals who had bought the land in 2000 for €32 million and had done nothing with it. People buying apartments on this site will have to pay for these wildly excessive profits, Higgins said. Naturally the Goverment has done little to stop this profiteering and simultaneously failed to provide adequate infrastructure for the countless new homes springing up around the country.
Higgins went on to lambast the Government for its botched privatisations and identified them as part of a broader neo-liberal trend that treated the worker as a commodity and sought to undermine employment rights wherever possible. Gama and Irish Ferries were examples of 'a race to the bottom'. Higgins finished off by offering the socialist solution: a planned economy where public assets were left in state ownership in the interests of the people.
McWilliams, clearly on enemy ground, put his side of the argument by highlighting the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank,that provides credit for ordinary Bangladeshis, which has been a liberatory force for change in the country according to McWilliams who then went to say that the Higgins version of Ireland was little more than a carciature. As evidence, McWilliams noted that the recent census showed that 68% of people identified themselves as middle class. This indicated that the country wasn't divided between the super-rich and alienated poor but was populated by a relatively comfortable majority. It was also wrong to characterise the economy as a free-for-all, instead it is what it has always been: a mix of private and public enterprise.
However, McWilliams then departed from this moderate tone and began to talk what he felt were the main challenges facing the Irish economy. Of particular concern is that in reality there is nothing going on in Ireland except a housing boom. American multinationals account for 87% of exports and when you add a few percentage points for agriculture, it means the economy is actually producing fuck all. Instead, McWilliams said we are drawing on a huge overdraft and that the property market is a pyramid scheme of monumental proportions. He was in no doubt that this will cause a middle class crisis in the next decade leading to a radicalisation of politics towards nationalism and the right. Inevitably the victims of this would be immigrants because McWilliams believes Ireland is not a tolerant nation. The solution is for the state to draw back from the EU and assert greater independence over its fiscal policy in order to waylay the impact of the inevitable downturn.
Both seemed to agree that the housing front is a disaster but strangely, it was Higgins, whose politics are outside the mainstream, who ended up sounding the more positive note while McWilliams though beginning optimistically, finished on the brink of apocalypse.
After the speeches, questions were taken from the floor; in reality it was little more than an opportunity for the audience to make their own often lengthy and tedious speeches. I legged with N and went for a Chinese on Moore Street, which seemed apt.

Talks: Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray at the ATGWU

2006-10-11T12:10:00.000+01:00

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, spoke at a meeting organised by the Irish Anti-War Movement in the ATGWU building on Middle Abbey Street in Dublin last night.
Murray, a career diplomat who had served in the British Foreign Office for twenty years, was posted to Uzbekistan in 2002, apparently on the basis that he could speak Polish, which was so close to the Russian spoken by the Uzbekis that he would be able to manage. This seems wholly unlikely but Murray was highlighting in a comic way the level of ignorance in the Foreign Office about the country. At the time of his appointment, Uzbekistan was a close ally of the US, who had an air base there. It was part of what Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld described as the lily pad doctrine, which entailed the US having small air bases dotted all over Central Asian republics that could be quickly expanded in the event of a war from a standing level of 2000 soldiers to 40,000 within a month. Murray said that US sought to have bases all the way from Cyprus, where the British have a presence, to eastern Uzbekistan and believes that the intention is to control the supply of the massive oil and gas reserves in the region.
Soon after arriving to what was his first ambassadorial position, Murray decided to attend the trial of a 'dissident' charged with links to Al-Qaida and with the murder of a policeman, an offence for which the court had already convicted a number of people. The manner in which the trial was conducted - the absence of any fair procedures with an overtly anti-Islamic judge presiding - deeply worried Murray.
As he pointed out in his talk, Uzbekistan is run by dictator Islom Karimov whose totalitarian government incarcerates thousands of political prisoners and forces many of its people to work as virtual slaves in state cotton farms, earning around $2 a month. There is no freedom of speech, assembly, media or an opposition. Uzbekistan happens to be the second largest exporter of cotton in the world and much of the clothing Irish people wear is likely to include cotton picked by Uzbek slave workers.
Because of his presence at the trial, people started coming to Murray with stories of torture, some of which he described in gruesome detail. He decided to raise the issue with the Foreign Office but was told not to be 'over-focussed' on human rights. He later met representatives of the Foreign Office in 2003 and was told that information from tortured terrorist suspects was legal if the British did not actually torture and did not specifically request a particular person be tortured. Such information could be 'operationally useful'. In other words, Murray said, it didn't matter whether it was true as long as it could further the foreign policy of the goverment, which was always driven by commercial interests.
Because of his opposition to the Karimov regime, Murray resigned in 2004 and has since become an active campaigner against Western policy in the region and the 'war on terror' in general. Murray was highly sceptical about the heathrow plot uncovered in August and was critical of what he thinks is a rising tide of Islamophobia in Britain, witnessed by the near hysterical coverage of Muslim people in the press and the unnecessary coverage given to Jack Straw's ideas about how Muslim women should dress in his constituency office.
Interestingly, the US no longer has an air base in Uzbekistan with the country recently signing a deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom for access to its gas fields, which may reveal something about how politics is going in the region as Russia seeks to gain further control of energy supply.
Murray is speaking again tonight at a debate in Trinity College.

Cinema: The Departed

2006-10-10T15:06:00.000+01:00

Despite positive reviews in the press, I thought Martin Scorsese's new film The Departed was for the most part a tremendous bore and reminded me of what the music critic John Harris said about U2 - though in their mid-forties, they were still singing about neon skies and open roads, pedalling the same tired old wares to a seemingly grateful public. Harris argued that if Bono and the boys wanted to be compared to rock greats like Dylan and Young, they would have to describe something of their own lives, specifically getting older, instead of opting for hopeless generalities about getting 'stuck in moments you can't get out of.'
It seems apposite when considering Scorsese, who is still making films about extremely violent men, which while undoubtedly profesionally made and shot, are creativley moribund. Critics have described this is a return to form after the anaemic 'Aviator' but it feels to me more like an act of desperation, a tacit acknowledgement that Scorsese has nothing new to say. There is a curiously 'out of time, out of place' quality to 'The Departed' because of the absence of any references to contemporary America. What there is a lot of is people cursing at each other and casual violence as played out in a fairly leaden story about the thin line that separates the police and criminals.
Inevitably Jack Nicholson has been singled out by critics, from whom he appears to have immunity, as giving the lead performance for his portrayal of Boston Irish gang boss Frank Costelloe. It is in fact a ridiulous turn - essentially a reprise of his Joker in the first Batman - and prevents the film from having any real sense of menace.
In its defence, there is occasionally some fine dialogue with Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin in supporting roles having the best of the comic riffs. But these aren't enough to alleviate the tedium as you notice the clock hitting the two and half hour mark.
Scorsese's last project was No Direction Home, a documentary on Bob Dylan, which started promisingly but got fixated on Dylan's decision to go 'electric' for Blonde on Blonde. His supposed betrayal of the folk scene was examined and re-examined ad nauseam leaving little or no time to cover Dylan's later years. Scorsese got stuck in a moment he couldn't get out of, and with 'The Departed' he's doing it all over again. Why doesn't he simply ditch these lame gangster stories and go off on a mad tangent like Kundun for the remainder of his career? It may be more difficult to get films like this made but surely it is better to take risks than to play out the same move again and again. And anyway there is such a thing as late style after all.

Hidden Links: Agamben and Pasolini

2006-10-09T14:08:00.000+01:00

A surprising discovery last night while watching The Gospel according to St. Matthew:
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben plays Phillip, one of the amateur actors that director Pier Paolo Pasolini selected ahead of professionals for what is a harsh and admittedly hard going adaptation of Matthew's gospel.
Agamben is currently something of an academic star because of his belief, as outlined by Daniel Binswanger in Sign and Sight, that "the modern state is nothing other than a totalitarian organisation for the efficient administration of bare biological life." His refusal to be fingerprinted at JFK airport in New York and his subsequent ejection from the country have added further to his fame.
Daniel Morris, writing in Bookforum, believes that Agamben's participation in the film was critical to his development as a philosopher and political theorist - he published his first article the year the film was made(1964) and enjoyed something of intellectual flowering subsequent to it, the highlight being a two year stint with Heidegger in France between 66 and 68.
Not content with identifying oppressive character of the modern state, Agamben also has ideas about the gestural nature of cinema.

Cinema: Time to Leave

2006-10-04T09:11:00.000+01:00

Romain is a young successful fashion photographer who collapses during a shoot. After undergoing a series of tests, and at first believing he has AIDS, his doctor informs him that he has terminal cancer and has only perhaps a year to live. Refusing chemotherapy, seeing it as useless and painful, Romain tries to come to terms with his imminent death although he decides not to tell his parents, sister, or boyfriend. Instead he confides in his grandmother because as he observes to her, she will die soon as well. This gives an idea of the mood of the film: harsh, unsparing and unsentimental. The problem with this is that it is very hard to care about what happens to Romain. His character is barely sketched - we know there is some family history of infidelity but not much more is revealed and while we witness his decline, little is gleaned from the experience. Perhaps director Francois Ozon is indicating that to confer meaning is an attempt to avoid the reality of death, to skirt around its inevitablity. To say we can learn something from it is ridiculous - it is what it is. But then in the final scene, Romain appears at least to find peace as he lies on the beach and recalls summers as a boy, swimming in the sea and playing with other children, the adult world dispensed in all its superfluity, the sun shining in his eyes.

Talks: Erich Mendelsohn in Dublin

2006-10-03T18:59:00.000+01:00

An exhibition on German archictect Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) is currently running in three venues across Dublin. Well, to be accurate in and around Merrion Square and Stephen's Green in the offices of the OPW, the RIAI and at the Goethe Institut.
To put the exhibition in context, Regina Stephan, academic and author, recently gave a talk on his life and work at the National Gallery, which opened with the observation that though Mendelsohn lived through two world wars and was exiled three times, he managed to produce a vast body of work that remains one of the most impressive of all twentieth century architects.
Born to a middle-class Jewish family in northern Germany, and after studying economics in Berlin, Mendelsohn went to Munich in the early 1900's eager to become part of the expressionist art movement that was then flourishing in the city, in particular Der Blaue Reiter group, which included artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter.
Mendelsohn was an inveterate sketcher and also dabbled in costume design for theatre and the many balls held in the city. Sent to fight on the eastern front in the first world war, Mendelsohn spent most of the time sitting in the trenches making over fifteen hundred sketches, which he sent to his family and which are now stored in the KunstBibliothek in Berlin.
After the war ended, he managed to pick up the commission to design the 'Einstein house'in Potsdam, outside Berlin, a project intended to provide a laboratory in which the theory of relativity could be proven. Stephan noted that despite the severe post-war economic climate, there was a national 'Einsteinspend' to raise funds for the building so that the Americans wouldn't get there first.
From this project until the economic crash of 1929, Mendelsohn developed what was then the biggest architectural practice in Europe, designing department stores and cinemas around Germany. Particularly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mendelsohn visited America in the twenties and was overcome by the near carnivalesque nocturnal flood of light that greeted him in Times Square. It is hard to imagine now but European cities at the time were largely shrouded in dark at night and Mendelsohn proceeded to produce buildings that would replicate the American light, albeit in a more subtle integrated fashion.
Another pivotal journey was to England in the early thirties as the Nazis were on the brink of attaining power. Mendelsohn's modernist architecture was then falling out of favour as the 'Heimat stil', a more traditional, necessarily nationalistic form, was beginning to dominate. In London, he gave a lecture on modern architecture that amounts to his aesthetic manifesto and calls for the union of function and expressiveness in design. He and his family left Germany permanently in 1933, moving to London and setting up a practice there. Despite being a fixture on the social scene, Mendelsohn completed only one building there - the much praised performance centre in Bexhill (which featured in Children of Men) in the south of the country. In exile, he met Chaim Weizmann, later to become the first president of Israel, who invited him to work on a number of projects in Jerusalem. He moved there in the late thirties but was obliged to flee again in 1941 when the Germans were descending on the city. This time like many other Jewish emigres he headed for New York. Despite this being a spiritual home, Mendelsohn didn't work for many years and only managed a few more commissions before he died in 1953.
As well as sketching, Mendelsohn was a prodigious letter writer, in particular to his wife, to whom he wrote constantly. Unfortunately this correspondence is dispersed in various institutions in Germany and the US and if collected would no doubt give greater insight and detail into what appears to have been a remarkable life.
Token Irish reference: apparently there is a bandstand in Bexhill that is designed by an Irish architect. It stands in front of the performance centre looking out over the English channel.

Talks: Richard Ford at the Royal College of Surgeons

2006-09-25T23:25:00.000+01:00

American author Richard Ford gave a reading from his new book 'The Lay of the Land' at the Royal College of Surgeons tonight. The novel is the third outing for Frank Bascombe, the slightly aimless hero of 'The Sportswriter' and 'Independence Day' and finds him still living in New Jersey, married and preparing for Thanksgiving in the year 2000, a date chosen by Ford to avoid having to write about 9/11, the fact of which he believes fiction can't yet elaborate on or imaginatively explore. He also believes the fault lines in American society were already there before the terrorist attacks and thinks his latest offering reflects this.
The extract Ford read concerned the re-appearance of Bascombe's current wife's ex-husband, a Vietnam vet who vanished thirty years previously and had been pronounced legally dead at the request of his wife. Instead, he had decamped to Scotland to live in various hippie communes before ending up as a gardener for some landed gentry on one of the Hebrides islands. His return is prompted by a web site created by his family appealing for any information on their son; they never accepted his apparent death. Bascombe's reaction to this is to both rail at the absurdity of the situation and to muse on the implications it will have for a marriage that up to then had been lived out in splendid isolation.
There were moments of levity in this but also present was that bleak awareness that though we attempt to fashion, to construct something, underlying this is a fundamental lack of control, an exposure to events.
Ford was introduced by Roddy Doyle who made a tasteless joke about a lover of literature being delighted on hearing the news they had cancer so they could plan what last great book they would read before the end.
The questions after the reading were the usual mixed bag. An extraordinarily pompous American pleaded with Ford to return to the dirty realism of his Rock Springs days while another member of the audience seemed keen to tell Ford the plot of some his short stories. The latter is probably forgiveable as enthusiasm because Ford is a really fine writer; his long twisty sentences seem an accurately represent the ebb and flow of hope and despair that characterise so much of our thoughts

Cinema: Children of Men

2006-09-22T14:57:00.000+01:00

Conspiracy theories are characterised by their detractors as a consolation; they explain a world that in reality is resistant to neat explanation. Similarly you could say that dystopias, although depicting shattered worlds, are a symptom of the persistenc of hope, in this instance that something will happen at some stage in the future. In other words, life always won't be this boring,a change is gonna come.
But inevitably dystopias (and utopias) are also a working out of the consequences of the particular political, economic moment the writer finds him or herself in.
A fine example of this genre,'Children of Men', was released today in Dublin. It is adapted from a novel by PD James and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who previously lensed Amores Perros and 21 Grammes. Ok, and 'Arry bleeding Potter.
The film is set in 2027 in a world where all the women have been infertile for the last eighteen years and a fascist junta holds an iron grip on power in England, the only country that continues to have a functioning state apparatus. To continue its existence, the state has revived the idea of Britishness, which in turn gives them the excuse to wage a savage campaign against the many immigrants who come to the country in search of work. For those despairing in the face of inevitable extinction, the goverment helpfully provides a suicide kit called 'Quietus'.
Clive Owen, who I normally find irritating, delivers a good performance as a deadbeat bureaucrat, sloping around in a fug of alcohol and cigarettes. His only friend is the hippiesh Michael Caine, who lives in a secluded pastoral setting, far from the bleak future London, with its rickshaws and billboards encouraging people to inform on their neighbours if they suspect them of being illegal immigrants (which turns out to be topical in the week that British Home Secretary John Reid suggested that Muslim parents should keep an eye on their children for fear they may fall under the sway of extremists.)
Owen is contacted by a former lover, played by Julianne Moore, now involved in a resistance movement fighting on behalf of immigrants. It turns out that Owen once was a radical too but his life was destroyed when he and Moore's child died some twenty years previously. He to the bottle, she to the cause.
In any event, Moore tells Owen they have discovered a young pregnant woman and need his help to get her out of England. Initially cynical and solely interested in the money on offer, Owen is converted when he sees the pregnant woman and realises that both the resistance faction and the state are likely to exploit her and her child ruthlessly.
Despite some uncomfortable religious undertones, it is a compelling film full of references to current political events. Immigrants are housed in cages at train stations and on arrival at detention centres they are hooded and forced to crouch in a manner similar to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In fact, the detention centres are more accurately described as war-torn ghettoes, raising parallels to what happened in Lebanon in August and what is still going on in Gaza.
The film also expresses current fears in European countries about the dwindling birth rate, which has fallen below replacement levels in Spain, Italy and Germany. People are having fewer children later in life, the slack is being taken up by immigrants, which in turn is leading to an extremely disturbing revival in far right politics as witnessed in Mecklenburg last week.
Added to the topicality, is the direction, which Cuaron executes masterfully. The action is well paced, with explosions and gunfire visceral in the extreme, and though the film holds out hope of redemption - there are some problematic scenes - it ends ambiguously, the viewer left uncertain as to whether the first new child in twenty years will survive the next twenty minutes.

On the way to Rathmines

2006-09-08T10:56:00.000+01:00

Do you chat to taxi drivers? I take it on a ‘case by case’ basis. Sometimes you just couldn’t be arsed. Other times an opening conversational gambit is greeted with such lack of interest that the rest of the journey is silent. During the World Cup, I was surprised that on a number of occasions my attempts to engage in a chat about Spain’s lively campaign opening or the majesty of the Argentine demolition of Serbia were rebuffed. Then sometimes you deeply regret initiating a verbal exchange especially when you get onto subjects such as Dublin Airport, the Ryder Cup, property or worst of all immigrants. But amid all the dross, there are hidden gems. On the way to Rathmines last night, the cabbie told me how he had seen the Beatles five times in the sixties and had lost count of the number of times he had seen the Stones. He worked all over England – Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham- and took in as many gigs as possible – Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, Manfred Mann, Cilla Black even. “We were like the Poles then,” he said. “You had to go elsewhere for work.” And despite the ever-present racism towards Irish people in England at the time, he loved life there. “Later on, I was a mod and had a moped, parka, the whole thing. And we used to have scraps with the rockers. My girlfriend was a hippie, into flower power and free love. Those were the days, mad fuckin’ memories.” He came back to Dublin in the 80’s but goes back to England, particularly Blackpool all the time. “The working men’s clubs are the best. You pay nothing in and the pints are only two pounds. The comedians are great – they always rip the piss out of you if they know you are Irish and I love listening to the cabaret singers. The hotels are dead cheap and once the clubs close we usually head back there. There’s nothing like it in Dublin.”

Cinema: Gegen die Wand

2006-06-26T22:57:00.000+01:00

In ‘Gegen die Wand’ (Head-On), Sibel and Cahit meet in a Hamburg hospital, both are recovering from suicide attempts; he by driving his car head-on against a wall, she by slitting her wrists. The other thing they have in common is that both are from the immigrant Turkish community, whose values the twenty-something Sibel desperately wants to be free of. She sees Cahit, who is in his mid-forties and works as a glass collector in a nightclub, as an escape route and promptly asks him to marry her, an offer he begins to entertain when she promises him a night of drinking away from the hospital. But it is another suicide attempt by Sibel, and not beer, that compels Cahit to act and the pair go through with the marriage, which her parents agree to solely on the basis that he is Turkish, an indication of their desperation to cling on to some remnant of their culture. After the wedding, which is both traditional and cocaine-fuelled, Sibel makes good on her dream of dancing, drinking and fucking, all in the presence of an increasingly jealous Cahit, whose response is to booze more heavily than usual (which is saying a lot) and to attack one of Sibel’s lovers, inadvertently killing him. This causes the fiction of their marriage to be exposed in a tabloid newspaper and the pair are split up as Cahit is sent down and Sibel, ostracised by her family, heads to Istanbul.
The film seemed to lose its way at this point. The contingent, uprooted life Sibel and Cahit live is plausible and affecting, but the Istanbul segment is forced and too dramatic as the pair are briefly re-united.

Talks: John Carey at the Project Arts Centre

2006-06-15T19:35:00.000+01:00

Professor John Carey delivered the opening lecture of the Dublin Writer’s Festival at the Project Arts Centre last night, which summarised the questions he asked himself and the conclusions he reached when researching his book ‘What good are the arts?’. Carey believes that the arts do not civilise, that there is no criteria for establishing what is or isn’t a work of art - it is purely down to the preference of the individual - and that no category of the arts are superior to others, thus dispensing with the idea of high and low forms. He also argues that taste is a matter of social distinction, a means to distinguish ourselves from our supposed inferiors: I am a better person than you because I listen to Wagner and you like Atomic Kitten. Still despite these negative findings, Carey goes on to make the case, inevitably subjective, for the superiority of literature over the other arts. Literature is unique in that it can be self-critical - Wordsworth’s barren leaves- and it is indistinct or its meaning is ambiguous. I couldn’t help thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal - was that not visual art critiquing itself? And isn’t Carey, by stressing literature’s openness, making a call for good old fashioned close reading, a veiled swipe at all the trendy deconstructionists out there? In the question and answer session, I thought Carey reacted in a overly aggressive fashion to a query about the appropriateness of using the Nazi regime as an example of how art does not civilise; he seems too quick to make personal attacks, suggesting that one questioner was in favour of torture for daring to suggest that it was possible to know the consciousness of other people.

Exhibitions: Picasso, Tradition and Avant-Garde at the Prado

2006-06-07T19:13:00.000+01:00

The queue is too long for the Picasso Tradition and Avant-Garde exhibition at the Prado museum in Madrid so I decide to head for the permanent collection first, where in the first room San Miguel de Zafra can be seen slaying improbable beasts, an image more suggestive than the tableauxs of the Virgin Mary. Inevitably in musuems of this size, the sheer number of paintings makes it hard to develop a coherent narrative, instead you are left with fleeting impressions and in my case ridiculous associations that have nothing to do with art at all. So the audioguide tells me that Mantegna´s ´´Death of the Virgin Mary´ puts into practice Alberti´s theory on linear perspective but all I can think of is the revolutionary zeal of believers because the disembodied voice also mentions that Thomas, one of the twelve disciples, is late for her demise because he is off preaching in distant lands, which is perhaps something of an irony given he doubted most of all. Next to this is the Annunciation by Fra Angelico, which depicts Adam and Eve being turfed out of the Garden of Eden on one side and on the other the Virgin Mary receiving the Holy Spirt in the form of a dove that is being transported on some kind of golden ray from the hands of God. Again I´m not sure why but I wrote ´self-regulation and control of the body´when I saw this image.
In ´The Triumph of Death´by Pieter Breughel the Elder, death is coming to everyone, emperor and jester alike but why is the executioner carrying a cart of skeletal heads rather than fleshy human remains? His army after all is comprised solely of skeletons.
This is in the same room as Bosch´s Garden of Earthly Delights, with its high fantastical images of fornication and mortification but in his panel piece on the seven deadly sins I can´t make out the one for lust. I liked Él Cambista y su mujer in the same room with the pair greedily counting their money.
I was struck by the incredibly haughty and ugly third son of the Medici family by Bronzino and by the harshness of Las Edades y la Muerte by Hans Building Grien with its depiction of the transience of youth and beauty as against the certainty of decreptitude and death.
Across the way there was a self-portrait of Durer from 1498 who the audioguide explained was the third son of eighteen children and sought after a number of trips to Italy to convince his friends and society generally in Hannover, where he lived, that the artist was more than just a craftsman and was instead a liberal professional.
On the second floor, I thought El XI Marques de Villafranca by Goya bore a remarkable resemblance to the actor who played the nurse in Talk to Her, which I suppose is remarkably trite.
Also slightly perturbed by the off-putting doll-like quality of the children in Los Duques de Osuna y sus hijos, which is apparently one of the few family portraits in Spanish art of this period.
Even the skull seemed to be rotting in San Jeronimo by Antonio de Pereda (1643). The saint is thinking about the final judgement and was one of the most popular subjects for artists of the Spanish Baroque because he symbolised some of the dominant themes of the counter-reformation: repentance and penitence.
While San Jeronimo was ruminating on these lofty matters, across the room, San Bernado was getting a mouthful of milk from the breast of a statue of the Virgin Mary, which was considered a way to help one to remain virtuous.
Las Meninas by Velazquez drew attention to the conditions of production of painting and was clearly the centrepiece of the museum, our Mona Lisa as I overheard a guide saying.
At first, I wasn´t completely sure about the colours in El Greco´s paintings of the Virgin Mary, but they grew on me and I learnt his name was Domenicos Theotocopoulos ans he was born on the Cretan Island of Candia, which at the time - 1560- was under the control of the Republic of Venice.
Later in the afternoon, I managed to get into the Picasso exhibition and the first painting was Boy leading a horse (1906) which I saw in Berlin two years ago when the New York Museum of Modern Art loaned some of its collection to a gallery there.
I realise I know little about Picasso as I wander around even though I went to a museum dedicated to him in Malaga earlier this year because there is mention of a blue period between 1901 and 1904 and then a rose period later than that. In his self-portrait (1906), Picasso seems almost black, a fact explained by his then interest in Primitivist art.
Picasso´s obsession with Las Meninas was surprising to me because I realise I am still labouring under the illusion that great artists and writers somehow spring from the ether whereas imitation is in fact the condition precedent for all art. After this I didn´t feel so bad about being malleable.
Mujer sentada en un sillon (1936) is of his then lover and surrealist photographer Dora Maar. She is being torn apart as a response conscious or otherwise to a Europe in turmoil. Even if it is revolutionary, I still think there is too much violence in what Picasso does to women in his painting, reducing them to geometric shapes and lines of flight. Meanwhile in the later Rape of Sabines (1963), when the technique is dimming, women still get the same treatment. Amusingly it looks like he drew the knackers on one of the soldiers as an afterthought. When you look at la maja desnuda by Goya (1800), the difference is marked - the sensuality of it compared to Picasso´s grotesqueries.
The last of the paintings The Musketeer (1967) is appalling and as I leave I notice the side piece explaining Woman in a red Armchair (1932) states that Picasso has an ambiguous relationship with the feminine.