Eyes Up

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Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:33:00 +0000

““”

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“Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anyone but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company - in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window seat.”

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf.

Four More Years: Americans at Election Time This September I pitched a feature to Totally...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:45:35 +0000

Four More Years: Americans at Election Time

This September I pitched a feature to Totally Dublin based on a series of interviews with Americans. Media coverage of the election inevitably gives a macroscopic view of a country that suffers from generalizations more than most already, so it seemed worth attempting to re-humanize some of its citizens. Myself and Samuel Laurence, a photographer, tried to talk to as representative a mix as possible, though in New York it’s unsurprisingly difficult to find many of the 50,000,000+ Americans who voted Republican. The full article can be read here, or in its more handsome printed form at Issuu (p.27).

All photos by Samuel Laurence. Copyright Totally Dublin 2012.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Turkish, 150-minutes long and slow moving, you’d be forgiven for not...

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:05:10 +0100

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Turkish, 150-minutes long and slow moving, you’d be forgiven for not expecting much of a yarn from Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. But, as the title hints, you will get a yarn. That’s not to say you won’t also be shown a rigorously scientific report too, even an autopsy of events. You’ll curse director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for being so clever as to anticipate that your screen-battered attention span will probably miss a key detail, and definitely make you think you have. Like the film’s key suspect, who claims drunkenness at the time of the crime, you mightn’t remember things with complete accuracy. The night during which the film’s main action takes place is like a dream and a film, one you want to revisit as soon as you’re back in the light. If you have another 150 minutes lying around, you might even want to.
This was originally published in LeCool London, then republished in LeCool Dublin, surprisingly.

Lucien Freud: Drawings, at Blain SouthernThis show is for two people. One is that person, who, with...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:00:45 +0000

Lucien Freud: Drawings, at Blain Southern
This show is for two people. One is that person, who, with their ticket or stub from Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, sees a rare chance to experience the full scope of a modern master’s practice. The other is that person who isn’t arsed with the queues or is put off by the £14 tickets, and plumps instead for a quieter exhibition that’s arguably just as special. What it lacks in oomph it makes up for in revelations of a Freud we know less. The impact of his grotesquely honest nudes has been diminished by endless reproduction, but many of the 100+ drawings here are on display for the first time. They show a less daunting artist, often in experimental or personal mode. There are symbolic bits, sketches for canvas work and the cartoons of a young prodigy. There’s an inscription to an unnamed person too, reading simply “Hope to see you soon. Lucien.”

This appeared slightly abbreviated in Le Cool London this week.

Frank Stella at the Haunch of Venison Gallery Some of my earliest memories are of being brought...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 21:15:00 +0000

Frank Stella at the Haunch of Venison Gallery

Some of my earliest memories are of being brought around vast, white-walled gallery spaces. I remember antagonising my parents, because I couldn’t imagine anything possibly being more boring. At some stage in my teens I came to to take pleasure from these visits; one unmarked day roughly between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I must have even decided to go of my own free will. In hindsight, then, I came to appreciate my parents’ insistence that we went to see art whenever we travelled or had the opportunity. It felt like I had subconsciously absorbed something during the many hours spent with art works. The experiences having been gently ripening in a cellar of my brain, I was now primed for whatever modern abstractions or fusty figurations the white walls could throw at me. I would like to think that, more than being purely down to the wisdom of hindsight, this says something fundamental about the nature of viewing art. To butcher a line from Dylan, something is always happening, even if you don’t know, or can’t put into words, what it is.

At Haunch of Venison to see Frank Stella on the show’s closing day on Saturday, I knew something was happening. Through the short passage that leads into the first room, you could see only a segment of the immense Basra Gate I 1968. I held back to gain the full benefit of expectation. It was like walking into the room with Miro’s jaw-dropping triptych at the Tate this summer, without the element of surprise. I’m sure this argument has been hashed and re-hashed, but the experience of standing in front of such a monolithic object must have anthropological links with the most ancient religious experience. What are you going to say to this, spanning 6 by 3 metres in front of you?

If you want to follow suit with the art world (and judging by what I’ve read of him, Frank Stella himself), you could locate the meaning of the work in its originality, in its being an example of that persistent modernist psychology whose aim was to perform clever formal nutmegs of predeccessors or contemporaries. (In the competitive artistic ferment of New York in the early 60s, it’s easy to imagine the impish pleasure to be derived from saying, as Stella did, that a picture is “a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more”). Or you could see, as the show’s curators do, each work as an expression of themes that run and recur in hugely diverse ways throughout his career. But putting these perfectly valid avenues of interpretation aside so that I can make a virtue of my own ignorance, it is also worth noting that it is the sheerly inexpressible, inchoate power of these works that makes them universally, categorically, worthwhile.

I left the Haunch slightly dazed and aware of something approaching sensory over-capacitation, but clueless as to what I could say about the works when I went to write about them. It wasn’t until the next morning, after a night of intense dreams, that I knew at least I could say something – about their monolithic objectivity, their hypnotic rhythms, the way they both draw you in and repel you, the way following the gradient of Lettre Sur Les Aveugles II 1974 to the pale edges made me feel a vivid sense of visual nausea – but first and foremost, that not being able to immediately verbiate any response whatsoever to works of art isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your conscious brain mightn’t tell, but time will.

East London Photomonth More than a month long, not limited to East London, and without obvious...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:32:21 +0100

East London Photomonth

More than a month long, not limited to East London, and without obvious headliners, the East London Photomonth refuses to pander to expectations. Its website sticks two fingers up to the increasing trend for user-centricity by having all its information in long, A-Z lists. You trawl the lists haplessly, your brain shouting, “Just tell me what I should see!” It makes you realise how much our cultural to-do list is spoon-fed to us (rich coming from me, I know). Well, embracing hypocrisy, I advise you ditch the lists for the handy map, and let geography guide you. The east is flooded with images, enlisting spaces from cafes to studios in a vast survey of contemporary photography. This, rather than any big name show, is the state of the art today.

Originally published in Le Cool London on the 20th of October, 2011.

The Sandwich and the SpoonGiven that they’re absolutely everywhere, it’s amazing how few people do...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:17:00 +0100

The Sandwich and the Spoon
Given that they’re absolutely everywhere, it’s amazing how few people do anything interesting with chalkboards. Gavin Fernback, owner and barista of this recently opened coffee stall on the bridge by Primrose Hill village, is one of these few. While the boards are constantly changing, his most talked-about, smiled-at creation just read “Apparently really great coffee served here”. And it is great coffee: he is trained by a guy who has coached two baristas to world championships, and his super-smooth flat white is made from the finest St. Ali beans and Gloucestershire farm milk of unparalleled creaminess. Having spent years dreaming (and blogging) of setting up the café, it is nigh-on impossible not to feel the love after a visit.

Originally published in Le Cool London on September the 28th, 2011.

One for the Road and Victoria Station The Print Room is a theatre in deepest, quietest Notting Hill...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:05:06 +0100

One for the Road and Victoria Station

The Print Room is a theatre in deepest, quietest Notting Hill – you walk there from Royal Oak along what feels like the safest street in London. You are greeted by a friendly ticket girl who gives you your ticket and a discount for the zinc-clad, seafood-on-ice bar across the road. After a drink, you cross the road again and spend 50 minutes right up close to the actors, immersed in the intense rigour of Pinter’s mind. The first play is a funny, bewildering double-hander between a cabbie and his office manager, while the second is more harrowing, a state-vs-citizen torture where all the violence is linguistic, or implied. Flawlessly produced, and in walking distance from Pinter’s Holland Park home, it’s an exercise in cunning, and class.

Originally published in Le Cool London on September 22nd, 2011

Geoff Dyer on CamusMy theory on Geoff Dyer is that for a long time he was overly concerned with...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:48:00 +0100

Geoff Dyer on Camus
My theory on Geoff Dyer is that for a long time he was overly concerned with being cool. I mean, at the age of 45 he published a book about going places, taking drugs and having sex called Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it. His novels had similar themes. But since then he has written a brilliant book of essays on photography and an acclaimed novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He is stepping out of his own long, “slacker” shadow and approaching “national treasure” status. Here, he opens this season of French Passions at the Institute Francais by talking about a similarly “genre-defying” writer, the goalkeeping absurdist, Albert Camus. If his essay on Camus is anything to go on, it should demonstrate both their relevance.

Originally published in Le Cool London on September 14th, 2011.

Kind Hearts and CoronetsBack in a bygone age, when the success of a comedy wasn’t entirely...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:19:03 +0100

Kind Hearts and Coronets
Back in a bygone age, when the success of a comedy wasn’t entirely LOL-dependent, the Ealing studios made their fame in a prolific 10-year heyday that combined ensemble acting with a sly lampooning of post-war Britain. Kind Hearts and Coronets, long trumpeted as the best of the lot, is a subtle, charming film about a man flippantly murdering his way through an entire line of nobility. Imagine Great Expectations crossed with Richard III as written by Wilde and directed by Cleese, and you’ll have some idea of why classic doesn’t even begin to describe it. If you’re up for something more refined, witty, dark and biting than the British comedy breaking box office records this week, this is the Gin Martini to The Inbetweeners’ Jaegerbomb.

Originally published in Le Cool London, September 1, 2011.

Interviewing Enrique Juncosa In their least romantic manifestation, curators are pencil-pushers,...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:29:44 +0100

Interviewing Enrique Juncosa

In their least romantic manifestation, curators are pencil-pushers, trend-followers, and spouters of waffle to validate some inapparent artwork. In idealistic terms, they are authors of experience and directors of mass inspiration. Think about your most inspired moment in front of an artwork, and there’s a good chance that a curator had a large part to play in it.

I think I was 16 when I first went to a show in IMMA, on a school trip up from the country back in 2006. It was a Howard Hodgkin show, a painter who contrasts lurid splashes of colour into hypnotic forms with more than a little viewing value. In a way the digital image above cannot convey, their effect is visceral. I stood there as if drugged, eyes glazing in the messy brilliance. Some walls were pale blue, making the oranges, greens and electric blues shimmer all the more.

Five years later, I’m sitting in the office of the show’s joint-curator Enrique Juncosa, and wondering whether I don’t have him to thank for this memory.

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The other curator was Sir Nicholas Serota, the Director of the Tate since 1988, and the man who turned a power station by the Thames into a landmark of cool British culture so essential it has been immortalized in song by Art Brut. Albeit on a much smaller scale, Juncosa’s tenure as director at IMMA could be seen as analogous to Serota’s. While not exactly populist, he has managed to put the museum on the map with a series of high-profile exhibitions, from Hodgkin to The Moderns to, most recently, Frida Kahlo & Diego Riviera. A contemporary Dublin artist I talk to calls his style “a bit conservative”, which might be code for “too many big names”. Footfall has doubled in his time at IMMA. The key to his success is an unprecious, open-minded approach to art. With his polo shirt, jeans, and large silver watch, he doesn’t cultivate an image beyond honest comfort. He speaks with a strong physique and big hands. Juncosa tells me that from the earliest days of his career, he was never much bothered about the small-scale workings of local arts scenes:

“I was ambitious in a way - a lot of young people started to make group shows with very young artists, and that didn’t really work… I mean you could do that but you would never be paid, it would be very underground. So I went directly to big institutions”

Juncosa makes it sound easy - he graduated from a broad degree in English Philology, became an art critic for El Pais, started writing catalogues for some artist friends beginning to make waves in the art world, and from there went straight to pitching a Barry Flanagan show to the director of the Fundacion de la Caixa in Madrid. His second show was in the Whitechapel in London, which he admits, in his sibilant Spanish way, was “very unusual”. And though a cynic could cry ‘luck’, or ‘politics’, he clearly proved himself at every break.

Juncosa made the move from Madrid to Dublin in 2003, and quickly realised that not everywhere has the same deep respect for the visual arts as the homeland of Dali, Miro and Picasso. “When I first came to the museum on a Tuesday morning there was nobody. I was a bit scared, I thought, what have I done? I was working as the deputy director of the Reina Sofia and every morning there was a big queue, waiting for it to open. So here I just thought !! You go to the gallery on the weekends and there were some people, but on a morning on a Wednesday in winter…”

The revitalisation of IMMA, then, has been a slow process, with Juncosa’s boundless energy behind it. He works seven days a week, striving to make the somewhat isolated hilltop in Kilmainham a constant destination.

“I wanted to have better partners, better publications, I wanted to do lots of things, so people have an excuse to come all the time, and it becomes a lively place. I prefer to do smaller exhibitions and many than to do three very large ones. We tried to get big names as well, but its difficult because they’re more expensive and its harder to get the loans, but I think now people will come even if they don’t know the names. Sometimes you will not like what you see but you know that it will be serious.

“I don’t like the idea that we are a teacher, or a priest, I like the idea of the museum as a lover, someone you really have a good time with, or a friend, more than a priest or a teacher. But it depends, some people don’t need mediation, and other people are intimidated to come, so you have to help people to understand what you do.”

While the Pompidou and the Tate make use of comprehensive collections of modern art to draw in the crowds with permanently rotating, free exhibitions based around the big narratives (surrealism, cubism, futurism etc), IMMA’s collection is strongest in that awkward place after the narratives. Making it both unique and occasionally bewildering: “I saw the task of the museum of being instead of creating one narrative, to create a machine of narratives, that had many different stories that overlap. Its more tricky because the area is so vast.”

What Juncosa (and, he would hope, IMMA) highlights is all that is neither the well-trodden path of modernism to postmodernism nor the often-infuriating obsession with the conceptual in contemporary art.

“With modernism there was a kind of obsession to say that the best was the new. Or only the formal innovation. And then every two years there was a different new, and there was no time to assimilate so many inventions in the twentieth-century, so I think they invented so much in the first 60 years that there is three or four centuries of mileage to be had out of these inventions.”

I’m more critical than anyone of the overly-theorised, under-whelming exhibitions that populate five out of ten contemporary galleries, but when its done right, it has validity. Last year’s Francis Alys show at IMMA is a case in point: markedly conceptual, yet full of ideas, wit, and visual appeal. The work below is titled, ‘Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes doing something leads to nothing)’.

“I like work that has a striking visual power. I think for me art, even the conceptual art, has to be very direct like that.” According to Juncosa, the dominance of conceptual art in the average contemporary gallery is down to an elite level of taste-makers, coming from big biennials like Venice and academic journals like October. I try to rise him on the issue, to provoke a response, but he simply reassures me, with philosophical placidity, that its time will pass like everything else.

“I think, it’s also that because you’re much younger than me, and I think I have seen how things change, and when you’re young you haven’t and things that were really fashionable when I was twenty, they’re gone, and in terms of criticism, at a certain moment, everything was Marxist, then it was all psychoanalysis, then it was all structuralism and then, it was postcolonial, whatever, and then they change – this, will not last somehow.”

Like everything with Juncosa, it seems simple, straight-forward, and somehow beyond reproach. English is not his first language, and as ever this adds a level of care, and tension. At times I feel like the curator hovers far above the art in the gallery, in this office with very little art on the walls, paying for the power and privilege with hours of phone-calls, meetings and research. Bargaining international units of inspiration for the masses. But is that such a bad thing? Juncosa has been good for IMMA and Dublin, and will move to the Spanish countryside to concentrate on his poetry, and writing a novel he has always wanted to write.

The Moderns, IMMA This Sunday, IMMA will close its doors on one of the most ambitious exhibitions...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:00:00 +0100

The Moderns, IMMA

This Sunday, IMMA will close its doors on one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever curated in Ireland. The show reimagines Irish modernism from the postmodernist perspective, allowing books, music scores, postcards, amateur photography and documentary film to be considered alongside the usual high priests of the visual arts. Its ambition ultimately compromises its coherence: best to ignore chronology and embrace your inner cultural nerd, wandering from GB Shaw’s delightfully eccentric self-portraits to Eileen Gray’s giant architectural box into a dark room where men of Aran battle a whale; stop and listen to Sean O’ Riada’s Hercules Dux Ferrariae while reading the original score, and remember that all this will soon be divided up again into separate boxes and sent back to the altogether less interesting contexts of authorial estates, university archives and national libraries.

Originally published in Le Cool Dublin, May 2011

Rum & Vodka, The International. Walking past the regular drinkers outside the International and...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:00:00 +0100

Rum & Vodka, The International.

Walking past the regular drinkers outside the International and up into the dim upstairs barroom with its tiny stage, a table and a half drunk pint, it’s hard to know where the reality ends and the performance begins. Kieron Smith’s gripping one-hour monologue makes the journey in reverse, imaginatively taking us back out onto the streets, out to Raheny and across to Clontarf, stopping for a pint and a short at every pub in between. Most of them – The Flowing Tide, The Plough, The Stag’s Head – are all still going strong, like the drunkenness, spit and stagger that Smith brings so compellingly to life. All that has changed since Conor McPherson wrote the play in 1993, it seems, is the smoking ban and the currency. It’s a story so real that the streets look a bit uncanny afterwards, as you wonder whether it’s wrong to feel like a drink.

First published in Le Cool Dublin, May 2011

Building Blocks, Block T Popping up every couple of months to make your argument for moving to...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:00:00 +0100

Building Blocks, Block T

Popping up every couple of months to make your argument for moving to Berlin seem that bit thinner, Block T events are a refreshing recurrence in the calendar of Dublin’s nightlife. Music, art, poetry, dance and a bit of whatever you’re having yourself (usually in bottle/can form) come together in the three-storey shell of an unassuming former Asian market in Smithfield to draw one of the nicest crowds I’ve had the pleasure to share concrete with. It’s like being at a house party where the music’s great and you know your drink won’t get stolen. This week’s bumber lineup includes the ethereal magic of The Natural History Museum, the infectious honky-tonk of Pat Dam Smyth, Damien Rice on the turntables, bellydancing, Glór slam poetry, and some cool visuals from Slipdraft. Prenzlauerberg eat your heart out.

Originally published in Le Cool Dublin, May 2011.

No Romance, The Peacock Theatre Nancy Harris’ triptych of short plays delves into an ordinary set...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:00:00 +0100

No Romance, The Peacock Theatre

Nancy Harris’ triptych of short plays delves into an ordinary set of personal histories, in each case prodding beneath the surface at the sensitive tissue below. The 50-minute segments hinge on their setting, as circumstances draw characters out of their comfort zone and into self-revelation. The settings also account for the most of the play’s laugh-out-loud moments: final segment aside, the scenarios are prime sketch-show material.

The first is set after Laura has got in contact with an old schoolmate, “posh Gael”, now a photographer known for her portraits of prostitutes, eunuchs and hermaphrodites. Laura, who had always admired Gael’s don’t-give-a-shit attitude in school but been too “weak” to adopt it herself, has gotten in touch with an unusual favour to ask. Would Gael photograph her in sexy poses for an album she wants to make for her boyfriend?

It’s a premise so full of potential for awkwardness that you wonder why either of them would agree to it, but they’ve done so when the play starts, and it is this kind of Peep Show territory that makes the ensuing revelations so flinch-inducingly poignant.

Despite the open coffin that sits centre-stage, the second segment is lighter than the first, with the dead mother inside acting as a third character who may or may not be listening. This becomes a comic pivot for much of the action as Stephen Brennan’s solid middle-class Dub finds his wife an excessively zealous psychologist with reason to believe he’s hiding something.

Lastly, we find ourselves looking in on a West Cork cottage, as a son and grandson lower their ailing granny Peg into a wheelchair and coerce her towards a Dublin nursing home. Again, it’s morbid territory, but thankfully Peg is more than a match for her pigheaded son, and Stella McCusker’s effervescently sparky, endearing pensioner has the play’s last laugh.

What is most impressive about Harris’ first full-length production in Ireland is her ability to be funny and insightful about the darkest of subject matter, resisting the easy path of pessimism and choosing instead the thorny, uncomfortably human truth. From the most uncomfortable silences come the biggest laughs. The truths of cancer, parental cruelty and internet perversity are felt with as much force by the audience as they are by the characters, as if Harris herself is in the act of revelation, saying that these are real issues, so let’s have no romance.

Originally published in the Trinity News, March 2011.

Neil Carroll - Working Backwards When I walk into The Joinery on Arbour Hill, Carroll is, quite...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0100

Neil Carroll - Working Backwards

When I walk into The Joinery on Arbour Hill, Carroll is, quite literally, putting together his show. A couple of rough lengths of wood lie on the floor, potentially the final grace notes of the two large artworks that dominate the front room. Drawing on his experience in the construction industry as a woodworker and decorative painter, Carroll “builds paintings”, echoing the shapes and geometric lines of the canvas with angular constructions of wood, block and metal. In the back room, a shrouded mannequin is being watched by a similar figure within the painting, displaying a strange mirror to the real space of the room. Like with work by Oscar Tuazon, you walk in and around the spaces created by the piece: whether the piece ends up walking in and around your (head) space depends on how much you engage with it.

Originally published in Le Cool Dublin, February 2011

Good pint, bad pint, moot pint. It was supposed to be so easy. Touring Dublin’s city centre in...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:00:00 +0100

Good pint, bad pint, moot pint.

It was supposed to be so easy. Touring Dublin’s city centre in search of the best pint of Guinness isn’t exactly undercover investigative journalism. After asking around amongst the few passionate stout-drinkers I knew, a shortlist emerged, and off I went to cast a cold eye on the imperial measures. I should’ve known, however, that the mythical pint wouldn’t yield so easily to objectivity.

Grogan’s, situated on the corner of South William St. and Castle Street, is the obvious place to start. Long a favourite spot with artists and poets, it’s also a very comfortable bar turned living room, with big enough windows to allow for naturally lit daytime pints. At night, the barmen are lit-up from behind by white flourescence, serving €3.50 toasties from a stacked square fridge. The first pint, usually the best of the lot, is only good, tasting slightly warmer than would be my preference. Temperature is the first problematic in making any kind of assessment. On consulting one particular stout drinker on his choice for best pint, he cites the day Guinness began to be chilled as the end of bar-to-bar pint variation. Only at room temperature, the traditionalist argument goes, can stout truly be tasted.

Whether it’s the extra coldness or the extra hunger I have, pint number two at Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street is a highlight. Open since 1782, its two doors offer two approaches to tradition under the one roof. The left-hand bar is bare and wooden, looking largely unchanged for the pub’s long lifetime. The right-hand lounge is more irreverent – its walls holding illustrations of Shakespearean theatre alongside a giant inflatable pint of Guinness. My pint, cold but not icy, with more smoothness and cream-above-glass height than Grogan’s, is flawless. And though I get pints ticking these boxes in other pubs over the next few days (notably Neary’s of Chatham Street), this one stands out in the memory for some inexplicable, ungraspable reason.

The variability of the pint is a complex phenomenon: some have likened it to the French terroir in wine: the alchemy of weather, soil and grapes being replaced by pub, barman, pour and draw. To this you could add flow – the greater the demand, the fresher the Guinness. When I reach Kennedy’s of Tara Street, my group of friends are the only ones there, and this might be the reason the pint is a notch short of perfect. Probably the Dublin pub scene’s best-kept secret, arty types pack it out at weekends for its liberal approach to opening hours. When the shaggy-haired barman’s not taking meticulous care over every pint, he’s playing some brilliantly eccentric music (on the night we were there it was one of Tom Waits’ heavier albums followed by an Indian Tabla ensemble).

Hartigan’s on Leeson Street takes minimalist barscaping to new levels, with utterly moodless lighting and unadorned walls. Five taps of Guinness line up at the bar one after another, as if daring you to order something else. By this stage I’m starting to be a good deal less sure of my judgement, and the pint is really, just another good pint.

Looking around at the eight other customers in the pub, all male and all drinking Guinness like its 1959, I wonder if good pint pubs are more about connecting with the past than anything else.

These pubs and many other great locals around the city hark back to a time when Guinness was ubiquitous and didn’t need a name. Like in Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan and Sean O’Casey, stout or pint always means Guinness. I begin to realise that Guinness is a lot more about ideas and associations than alcoholic beverages. The more I discuss and dissect it, name it, the less attractive it becomes. The most successful marketing of Guinness tapped into this, most notably the iconic Surfer ad of 1999. With a mash-up of artistic influences from Coleridge to Melville to Leftfield, the ad mentions Guinness only once, relying on the viewer’s imagination to make connections to race memory, tribal spirit, ritual, excitement and performance. Without being named, the liquid could remain a tantalising idea, fluid and metaphysical, meaningful in some deeper, undefined way. And to be honest, that’s how I like my pint.

Originally appeared in the Trinity News, November 2010

The snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea He may have written the greatest novel of the 20th...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:00:00 +0100

The snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea

He may have written the greatest novel of the 20^th century, but James Joyce never swam in the forty foot. Despite living for three weeks in the Martello Tower that overlooks Sandycove harbour, he left it to housemate Oliver St. John Gogarty to sample the famous “snotgreen, scrotumtightening” waters that feature in the opening chapter of Ulysses. His reason for not going in was apparently that he didn’t want to be “rebaptised”, which seems a bit of a glib excuse to me, coming from a lapsed Catholic.

I hear this in a Youtube interview with Gary Coyle, a Dun Laoghire artist trained as a draughtsman who began swimming in the forty foot about 10 years ago. What began as a hobby quickly developed into an obsession, and he has since swam in the 40 foot over 3,000 times, scrupulously documenting everything in notebooks and in the films of underwater cameras, even taking seawater samples from each day. Coyle, whose 40 foot work was the subject of a 2009 exhibition in the RHA, sees the morning routine of the regular 40footer as a sort of primitive performance art. When you think that people were swimming in this exact spot long before the foundation of the Gentleman’s Swimming Club in 1880, coming down here with the early morning swimmers feels like maintaining an ancient pre-religious ritual, paying daily homage to the Irish sea.

When I first make it out to the forty foot, I’m every bit as reticent as Joyce; it’s a hungover Sunday in September and the concrete slab of the 40 foot is being pounded by angry 10 foot breakers. My jaw drops to see a white-haired man swimming in the swell, as Sunday visitors stand and watch, taking photos and shrieking at every crashing wave. Only when the man gets out and I talk to him do I realise, much to my relief, that dancing with death is not an everyday part of the 40 foot experience. I ask him if it’s safe enough to swim. “It’s rough enough now, I had a hard time getting out; I don’t think I’d go back in” he says, and I concede, equal parts disappointment and relief, that this isn’t the right day for my first time.

It’s much stiller when I do eventually get into the 40 foot at half eight on a cold October morning, and the few others dressing or undressing on the wet concrete have the same just-out-of-bed quietness about them. I get talking to Bob, a softly spoken American who has been in every day for the past few years, and he explains the timetable to me - “this is probably the second main batch; the hardcore 7 o clockers have been out before us and at 11 the big groups of women come and chat with flasks of tea and sandwiches.”

Luckily, the sun is streaming in to provide some comfort to the fact that I can see my breath as I change. Down the steps of the rail and into the Irish Sea I go, swimming out past Gladstone rock to where it’s sunny and back again, hyperventilating, bloodrushing and every pore zinging in the icy depths. As I change, cold but exhilarated, a bright chatty woman called, of all things, Joyce, starts to talk to me, clearly in love with her daily swim, “it’s that moment of weightlessness – if I can have that once a day I’m happy.” In my three mornings out at the forty foot, I too come to love the swim, and even long to be out there on the fourth day. James didn’t know what he was missing.

Originally published in the Trinity News, November 2010

Phaedre by Rough Magic Rough Magic’s latest play, directed by Lynne Parker, is an adaptation...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:00:00 +0100

Phaedre by Rough Magic

Rough Magic’s latest play, directed by Lynne Parker, is an adaptation of an adaptation. Not having seen either of the originals – Euripedes’ Hippolytus or Racine’s Phedre – I don’t know precisely how faithful this Hilary Fannin version is, but from the opening lines – in discussion of labioplasty (googling in public not advised) – it is made clear to the audience that this is not a word for word interpretation of the sources.

The eponymous lead is, in the words of Corkonian gossip queen Ismene, an “arctic bitch”, who celebrates her husband’s death by opening of a bottle of champagne and attempting to seduce his son, her hunky step-son Hippolytus. Fannin’s sharp, acidic script elaborates Greek immorality into cynical, bankrupt Ireland to ceaselessly entertaining effect. Spectacularly made up opera singers prowl the stage, somewhere between Gods and chorus members, accompanied by a 5-piece orchestra.

Yet despite all the sharp lines and dramatic effect, this is not a particularly dramatic play. The plotline feels abridged and the characters under-developed, lacking any of great tragedy’s doomed propulsion and satisfying final dip. Appropriately enough for a script ridden with lust, the play is somewhat like a great one-night stand: sexy, fun and happy to to let you go when it’s over.

Originally published on trinitynews.ie in October 2010.

Moore Street, Dublin 1. As a southside-residing Trinity student of three years, you become a bit...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0100

Moore Street, Dublin 1.

As a southside-residing Trinity student of three years, you become a bit overly familiar with the Grafton Street Area. I must have walked several marathons in the shadow of shopfronts from the top of Dawson Street to the bottom of George’s Street, where the easy window-shopping bubble ends. Obviously convenience has a lot to do with it, but its only when Google Maps informs me that Moore Street is the same distance away from Trinity’s Front Arch as St. Stephen’s Green that I begin to see my hesitancy to leave as a kind of psychological complex peculiar to the area. It’s a kind of goldfish-bowl syndrome: circling around endlessly with no particular purpose, yet mysteriously disinclined to leave. It would help explain why you occasionally hear Trinity students speaking about the Northside as if it was a distant foreign country. And why looking back I have so few standout memories, just one vague sense of comfortable repetition. Happily though, there is a cure: facing this lazy fear of leaving the pedestrian pavestones for the 8-lane highway on O’Connell Bridge and the draughty gape of O’ Connell Street and going grocery shopping on Moore Street, that most quintessentially Dublin institution.

On a sunny September morning over slabs of fish brought in that morning from Blanchardstown, I talk an entirely different kind of cod psychology with seller Moore Street committee member, Margaret Buckley. The reason the market stalls that make up Moore Street’s spine have remained popular since before even the 1916 Rising, Margaret tells me, is the simple fact that they’re “still the cheapest in the city, cheaper than any supermarket.” And I don’t doubt her; I remember going down Moore Street in first year with a 2-euro coin and returning with several kilos of fish. Known locally as “dealers”, the women today selling fresh fruit, vegetables, fish and flowers on Moore Street are living reminders of Dublin’s rich tradition of street trading. A stall on Moore Street is the birthright of a few Dublin families, whose women pass on the mantel from generation to generation: neither love nor money could get you a spot there today, so they’re rightfully proud of their ancient turf.

On either side of these historic stalls, a loud and colourful mix of African hair shops, Halal minimarkets and Chinese electronic shops has replaced the traditional butchers and bakers. But in talking to both shop-owners and street-traders I soon realise that the divide between old and new, local and global is largely superficial. The Moore Street business formula is a uniquely winning combination of keen competition and mutual benefits: everyone seems aware that their continued survival is reliant on the success of the Moore Street brand. As a butcher at Troy’s puts it, “when the street is busy, we’re busy”. Fruit and Veg seller Catherine Kennedy tells me that it was the immigrant shop-owners that revitalised the street in the 1990s when most of shops had been left to go derelict: “these people opened them up and brought people back into the street so it’s definitely a good thing, they’re just trying to earn a living like everybody else”.

This live-and-let live attitude is part of a general goodwill on Moore Street that surprises me: until I strike up a conversation everyone seems indifferent at best. But in that sense Moore Street exemplifies the paradoxes of city living, always changing yet remaining the same, simultaneously alienating and liberating, competitive yet cooperative, goldfish bowl and atlantic ocean, depending on how you look at it.

Originally published in the Trinity News, September 2010