TN2 Issue 7

Ladyhawke takes flight

Colm Tóibín Dolores O’Riordan Wayne Jordan God is an Astronaut Trinity Arts Festival 2009

Calendar of fun

tn2’s pick of the most exciting things to do in Dublin this coming fortnight

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

27 The Death of Harry Leon starts tonight and goes on for another three weeks.

Smock Alley, 7 pm, ¤20/15

28 Of Montreal are in town tonight. No doubt all sorts of mentalness will go down.

The Button Factory, 8 pm, ¤17

29 Amusement Parks on Fire are in Whelans tonight.

Whelans, 8 pm, ¤TBC

30 Revolutionary Road goes on general release today. See p 22 for a review.

Cinemas nationwide

31 Angel Pier are on in Whelans tonight with support from Autoban and the Ambience Affair.

Whelans, 8 pm, ¤5 w/ a student card

1 The Douglas Hyde’s latest exhibitions are of work by Mamma Anderson and Nina Canell.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery until 18 March

2 Crystal Antlers are getting themselves loads of attention these days.

Upstairs at Whelans, 8 pm, ¤14

3 Gary Coyle’s rather interesting piece, At Sea is only on for another four days.

Project Arts Centre, 8.15 pm, ¤15/12

4 If you ever wonder what happened to The Datsuns, then here’s your chance to find out.

ThinkTank, 8 pm, ¤15

5 Ladyhawke is playing tonight, see p 7 for an interview with Ms. Brown herself.

The Academy, 8 pm, ¤15

6 For all the folky pub rockery you’ll ever need, look no further than The Eskies.

Radio City, 8 pm, ¤10

7 God is an Astronaut, an interview with whom you can find in this very issue, can be found peddling their post-rock in this fair city tonight.

The Academy, 7 pm, ¤19.50

8 Today’s your last chance to check out Now’s The Time, an exhibition of work by artists who were cut down in their prime.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery

9 I have somehow managed to avoid Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip for quite some time now, however, I am assured they are entertaining.

And it’s a Monday.

Whelans, 8 pm, ¤16

xkcd.com

Win yourself a pair of tickets to Maiden Scotland Ledd Zepp Metallitia Stone Roses Experience Hells Bells

Photo: Nathan McClunie

20 February

27 February

7 March

13 March

8 May

To enter, e-mail tn2@trinitynews.ie with your name, the gig you’d like to go to and a contact phone number

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27 January – 9 February, 2009

tn2

Contents Colm Tóibín from the comfort of his own home

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Dolores O’Riordan at the Phil

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Issue

7

Photo: Dominique English

Ladyhawke: in no way like an actual hawk

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Angel Pier’s Darragh Nolan talks to tn2

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No countries for gold men?

9

Trinity Arts Festival-related excitement

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God is an Astronaut is a band

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Celebrities and fashion: together at last

14

Personal style

15

Wayne Jordan, director of La Dispute

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Theatre evaluations

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So, last issue, I had a bit of a go at the recession. It’s not actually real, you see; it’s just a slow news day at RTÉ that has gone wildly out of control, reinforced by goonish scaremongering – well, certainly for students like you and I, who (spoiler alert) don’t actually live in the real world. Then again, the other week something happened that made me reconsider my position on the recession: namely, the closure of Road Records on Fade Street.

Road, if you’ve never been, was Dublin city’s nicest independent record store. Nice, perhaps is a crap word, but just go with me. The staff/owners were lovely and, crucially, actually liked music. It was a place you could go and pick the brains of whoever was behind the counter about new music, upcoming gigs or whatever. In short, then, it was a proper record store.

The topic of Road came up last week when I was interviewing Darragh from Angel Pier for this issue. Unsurprisingly, he was similarly unhappy about the shop closing down. We started discussing where it all went wrong. The recession came up, of course, and I began to question my earlier position. But hasn’t HMV weathered the storm? In fact, any branch I was in over Christmas was mobbed with people. Shit, I got the first/only series of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace on DVD for about eight quid and some rather cheap CDs over the festive season, as I recall. In retrospect, maybe I should have forked out the extra few notes for said discs in Road. Er, anyway, I’m sure there was more to it than just that. Yes, indeed.

What about the rising popularity of digital music? It certainly is a lot easier to download an album than to bother leaving the cosy warmth of your own house and interacting with other human beings. I mean, I got about a dozen Neil Young albums in the same time it would take me to walk in to town the other day. His stuff is never that expensive in physical format, though, so I guess I could have just picked some of them up in Road. And in fairness, there’s absolutely no chance I’m actually going to get around to properly listening to all of that music if I’ve just downloaded ten hours’ worth in one go. Of course, something as complex as the closure of a business is a multi-factorial problem. There’s got to be a lot more going on there. Yes, undoubtedly.

If my poorly concealed/executed irony has been lost on you, then perhaps it’s better to spit it out: I haven’t bought music in Road Records since I bought a copy of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything a good five years ago. More than the recession, real or imagined, more than rising levels of digital downloading, legal or illegal, the reason that small, independent record stores like Road are closing down is because people like myself are too scabby to fork out ten or fifteen quid every week or two in exchange for some quality tunes and informed banter.

Let’s not let this happen again. Instead of buying that unnecessary pint at the end of the night or that packet of cigarettes, half of which your mates will scab anyway, buy a CD or a record in City Discs or Freebird or Borderline or Selectah or Spindizzy or any of Dublin’s indie shops. The city is strangled with lameness enough as it is without losing places like Road.

Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Yours somewhat hypocritically, Short stories: yay or nay?

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Rory O’Connor thinks / Shane Quinn drinks

19

Hugh

Reviews

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Editor tn2@trinitynews.ie

tn2

27 January – 9 February, 2009

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4

The art of fiction

Photo courtesy of the Arts Council

27 January – 9 February, 2009

tn2

A weather-beaten Rebecca Long dropped by renowned Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s house for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat

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he phone rings and I begin to wish fervently that it wasn’t drizzling in quite so insidious a manner. Turning up on his doorstep looking like a drowned rat doesn’t sound like the essence of professionalism. He answers.

“Hello Mr Tóibín? I think I’m outside…” I pause hopefully.

“Have you tried the bell?”

“Em I don’t think it’s working.”

“Ok, I’ll look out the window... no you’re not outside.”

“Oh, shitting fuck,” I mumble under my breath. He starts to giggle. “Give me a minute, I think I need to get a taxi...”

When I arrive at his house twenty minutes later than planned, Colm Tóibín answers the doorbell two seconds after I ring it. His doorbell does actually work, it turns out. His eyes take in my bedraggled appearance and he smiles one of the most genuine smiles I’ve ever seen – genuinely amused smiles, that is.

He welcomes me in and gestures me up the stairs. He lets me go first as though he thinks I know where I’m going, which given our recent conversation about the difference between a road and a street and the impact it can have on someone’s address is quite unlikely. I pass columns and columns of books that seem in imminent danger of toppling over should a slight breeze arise.

There are boxes everywhere and I’m inclined to ask him whether he’s just moved in. The house is literally full of books: it actually looks like a place where a writer might live. I find myself humming the theme tune of Through the Keyhole.

He installs me in a rocking chair that doesn’t rock anymore and settles himself.

Nervous and trying unsuccessfully not to show it, I launch right into the questions.

Luckily, my earlier doorbell faux pas seems to have broken the ice.

I ask him if he always wanted to be a writer and promptly shudder at how inane it sounds.

“I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in school and even in university.” He grins sheepishly. “But it didn’t really go anywhere, I got a lot of rejections. So I became a journalist and then a novel occurred to me.” I balk visibly at the idea of something as huge as a novel just occurring to someone. He smiles. “So I wrote the novel… very slowly.

But it wasn’t so much becoming a writer as just finishing that book and seeing someone publish it.”

I glance at the mountain of books behind him and ask if he would define himself as a writer.

“Yes, I mean there’s nothing else I can do now.” He laughs ruefully. “I mean it’s almost by default that I’m saying yes but at this stage, yes.”

I bring up the Wexford connection, eager to establish some kind of solidarity. He laughs and seems surprised and pleased that I’m from the same county as him. When talking about himself as a writer, though, does he refer to himself as a Wexford writer or an Irish writer?

He pauses and thinks for a moment and surprises me. “Or a gay writer? I suppose it doesn’t really come into it, on a normal day, wandering around, you just wouldn’t bother. Those labels mean nothing but also

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27 January – 9 February, 2009

don’t really arise because normally I’m just mooching around and nobody pays any attention to me. But honestly I’m all of those things. I mean there’s nobody going around saying I’m a European writer, that would just be pretentious and stupid.”

Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both of which were short listed for the Booker Prize. He’s been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction for The Master and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I ask him about the state of Irish fiction in general right now.

He pauses for a moment as though gathering his thoughts. The high-ceilinged room is still echoing with the cadences of his last answer.

“I think the Irish twentieth century in terms of fiction has been amazing.” He giggles quietly to himself. “Compared the Welsh twentieth century anyway. Or the North of England twentieth century. Even those people whose reputations have not really lasted are still there to be rediscovered.

“I mean, people like Mary Lavin, who’s probably not even on your course [he’s pleasantly surprised to learn that she is], someone like her is there to be found all over again. So there are traditions working,

much in it for you after a certain point and the only thing you must do then is work. If it’s a novel, that’s quite a lot of work.”

The Master is about Henry James, a real person as opposed to a fictional character.

I asked how he approached writing about James.

“Everything is different and James came to me very slowly and gradually, but I used certain things that were his and made them mine, you know I moved back and forth. It’s funny how you know a novel is composed of a thousand details or two thousand details and you tend to use what you know for the detail and therefore it sort of builds up into a secret history of yourself without really using anything that’s obviously or dramatically you. It’s just a curious mixture.”

He finishes his answer and looks at me expectantly for the next question. I belatedly realise that my mouth has been hanging open for most of his last answer and that I’m leaving a watermark on his floor. I clear my throat professionally and continue. I start thinking about a recent reading he did in Trinity and the story he performed during it.

I say “performed” because that is what the man does and what he seems to enjoy.

The story in question was one of the most sexually explicit I’ve ever heard and I try

I finish something and I have to do the opposite after. This novel that I’ve just finished is so unlike Henry James, it’s very gentle, it’s very 50s, it’s very old fashioned.

When I was finished [The Master], this story came really easily, very quickly not even against each other, but ignoring each other. Even just forgetting about the novels, just the poetry and the theatre, it’s been a pretty good time. You’re always alert to the fact that experience here is rendered immensely significant, thickened as it were, like putting corn into soup, by what writers do.” He draws out the last word of that sentence as though the longer it takes to say it, the more meaning it’ll have.

I decide to make the interview more about the subject himself and ask what inspires him to write.

He smiles as though he’s about to tell me a secret. “I think it comes and you don’t really often remember it or how it came because it comes like other ideas, in the normal business of how you think. And then one of those always gets isolated and grows and sometimes you don’t even recognize it when it’s there. And then eventually you get it, it moves from being an idea, if it ever was an actual idea to becoming a sentence, that moves from being an idea to a sound and often that can come quite easily and when you least expect it.

“But after that, you need work. In other words, you can call it inspiration, you can call it that funny business of where you’re here and suddenly you’re on your sentence, but you can’t go on like that, if you went on like that you’d never finish it. You’d never finish it partly because you know it or think you know it and therefore there’s nothing

not to giggle as I remember the relish with which he described each of the sex scenes.

Really this professionalism business is harder than it looks. I ask him whether he prefers the short story form to the novel, hoping he won’t wonder why I’m smiling in a slightly lewd manner.

“I found the short story very hard to write when I was starting and in fact I wrote a good number that didn’t get anywhere. It was only when I had the breadth of the novel that I felt I didn’t have to explain everything on the first page, which you often feel you have to do in the short story. So I came to short stories quite late. It’s interesting, there’s certain things that you think might work as a single instance, but I found it harder to do. I think a lot of it’s about confidence; that I never felt I was getting the images I had in my head, down as rhythm, into sentences without labour. And then they looked laboured and therefore they were clunky and the first page was a disaster.”

I give in and remind him about the reading and the content of the story which was, in his own words, full of utterly nasty, nasty people. He laughs and declares that he couldn’t have read that story anywhere else but Trinity. I put the implications of that aside to mull over later and ask him whether it’s funny to write and create truly nasty people.

He grins hugely and nods. “What happens is I finish something and I have to do

the opposite after. So this novel that I’ve just finished is so unlike Henry James, it’s very gentle, it’s very 50s, it’s very old fashioned.

So when I was finished, the story came really easily, very quickly. It’s almost like you keep going on opposites to yourself.

“It’s almost like a therapy but not exactly because it’s even more subconscious than a therapy, first of all it doesn’t do you any good but also it isn’t deliberately spelt out.

It’s just that often the opposite comes.”

I remember that he talked about Patrick McCabe’s showmanship on the reading tours they used to do together and ask him whether he feels pressure to be a great showman.

“I think it happened with us more than with other writers. There was a group of people starting at the same time and they included Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright and both of them were brilliant performers.

At one stage I remember Roddy Doyle falling around laughing at me, I was in America with Edna O’Brien and she would begin the reading as she was coming across the stage as though she was mesmerized by what she was doing and I started to learn off the last paragraph, so I’d close the book [he closes his hands very slowly] and do the last paragraph to the audience. I remember one night in the Abbey Theatre Roddy was there and I did it and he was just like, ‘you really are a ham’ but I had to do something, you know!? This reading out loud became popular in those years – and I think it’s quite a false business. You know some of the best writers are bad readers. It’s a fraudulent activity and no one should ever be praised for it.” He almost winks at me but decides to grin again.

“So do people expect eccentricities from writers?”

He shakes his head fervently as though he’s considered this before. “Ah no, not necessarily, I mean you had people at the top of that business in those years, people like John McGahern, who was certainly not an eccentric and would often read in a very businesslike way. But no, just on one of those nights when you’re here and you think the last thing I want to do is go out now and do anything, ‘oh fuck, I’ve to go out now to these fucking students,’ and you’re not being paid for it, for example and you think I’ll brighten up my evening by just amusing myself. So that might seem eccentric but really it’s just normal.”

I cast my mind back to the reading and wonder whether he was simply amusing himself. It certainly shocked some of the audience. As the interview progresses I’m becoming more and more convinced he got a kick out of that.

As my store of questions begins to dry up, I glance at my watch and realise I’ve taken up too much of the man’s time already. “Do you have any regrets that you didn’t write a certain thing at a certain time?”

“No. No regrets. What a curious question.”

The interview draws to a close. We stand up and shake hands and as he walks me to the door he gives me some directions in case I get lost on my way back to wherever I’m going. He whispers them almost, as though he doesn’t want to embarrass me. Much too late for that.

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Oh, Dolores Catriona Gray met Dolores O’Riordan after her recent appearance at the Phil and the singer discussed her past glories and future plans

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hey may have slipped off the radar, but back in the early Nineties, The Cranberries were one of the biggest bands on the planet. Shooting to success while still young, the Limerick band initially found it difficult to pursue their career. Dolores O’Riordan, in an interview at the Phil, said: “There was major pressure to go into a more of a business career – back in those days people weren’t really that open to the arts. I said to my parents that I’d give it a year and see if it caught on and it totally caught on, so that was it.”

Singing has been O’Riordan’s preoccupation from an early age: “I just always wanted to sing, honest to god. When I was five years old and starting out in primary school, my headmistress used to take me into sixth class and stand me on the table and singing was one thing that I knew I could do, and I could win people’s hearts with my voice, so that was the one thing I ever wanted to do with conviction and passion.”

Despite her outgoing personality, O’Riordan initially found it nerve-wracking performing on stage: “I always got a bit paranoid speaking in front of crowds, but I could sing in front of people because you don’t even have to think when you’re singing, there’s no thought process, there’s no self-awareness, you just go somewhere else.

Over the years I’ve been on stage for so long, I’ve spent half my life on stage, so you kind of get over it.”

After The Cranberries’ early success in America, it became apparent that the lives of all the band members had altered radically. O’Riordan said: “I thought that I’d go back to Limerick and everything would be hunky dory and the same. You think you can just walk back to your little town and everything’s going to be back to normal, and you can just go back to reality. It’s just coming to terms with the fact that you’ve decided to take this journey in your life and it changes how people perceive you and how you’re seen.”

“Linger” was the first song that O’Riordan wrote with The Cranberries. The song was included on their demo tape, and later released as a single from their first album, Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?. When asked about the inspiration for “Linger”, O’Riordan replied: “I had a broken heart at the time and I used the song to get that feeling of broken-heartedness out there, so I think it was something that a lot of people related to. When you really wear your heart on your sleeve and you use your own experiences and turn them into songs, people feel it. You can’t just make up that feeling.”

As a teenager, O’Riordan favoured a more alternative image: “I kind of went

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through a goth phase alright, where I used to dye my hair black and put talcum powder on my face and I’d get black nail varnish and put it on my nails and then go to school. We had gabardines and I remember there was a little place on the way to the bus stop where I used to dump my gabardine and pull out my black coat and put it on. I’d wear that on the bus and into school. And then when I came home I’d put the gabardine back on and go home and my mam didn’t know I was a goth.”

Dolores O’Riordan’s legendary voice won her the chance to sing a duet with Pavarotti.

Upon being asked about working with Pavarotti, she sighs nostalgically, saying, “Pav, my man, I miss him, don’t you? It was such a great experience duetting with him and I was so nervous when I met him. I remember going into his dressing room and he had a huge red bathrobe on, and I had a flash in my head of Santa Claus, except his beard was black and not white. So he was there in his red bathrobe and I was really nervous and he said [mimics Italian accent] ‘come on Dolores, sit on my lap, you are so small and lovely’ and I was like ‘Oh, I love you!’ and I jumped up on his lap and started hugging him and I was like, I’m over it now. When you’re singing with someone you have to get over the intimidation factor.”

Singing with Pavarotti for the Pope also meant that O’Riordan got to meet Lady Diana. “She was at that Pav gig, in the front row and I was singing the Ave Maria and I looked down and I could see her getting emotional.

And then afterwards, she was at the head of table at this dinner that we had; she was sitting next to Pav and I remember going to the bathroom at one point, when Pav goes to me ‘Did you meet Diana?’ and I was like, ‘er, no’ and he goes ‘this is Diana, this is Dolores.’

And she said; ‘When you sang that song, I loved it, my mother used to love that’. And I said, ‘Oh really, that’s cool. I’m going for a pee, do you want to come?’ And she said ‘I really would love to, but if I get up, they have to ring a bell and everyone has to stand up’.

So she couldn’t just get up and walk out, so I thought ‘it’s hard to be a princess.’”

No stranger to fame herself, O’Riordan had to deal with the hype that surrounded The Cranberries: “It’s like being a train and ripping down the train tracks for ages and ages and suddenly having a major crash and you’re suddenly a train wreck. When you realise that you’re so famous, that’s a bit freaky. And then, I suppose you just decide that that’s part of life. No matter what you do in life, there’s always challenges and ups and downs. Sometimes you fall but you get up and go again.”

Dolores O’Riordan’s second solo album, No Baggage? is due for release in May.

Photo: Dominique English

27 January – 9 February, 2009

tn2

Lady’s night

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ip Brown, better known as Ladyhawke, is finally getting some recognition for her self-titled debut, released September 2008 on Modular recordings. Calling her in her London office, I was delighted to find out more about this interesting artist bringing disco back to the masses.

The release last year of single “Paris is Burning” (Paris s’enflamme) brought Brown almost overnight success. “Well I’m amazed that it happened at all, it was really all of a sudden. I still feel relatively underground, although I can see the music getting more and more airplay from more mainstream radio and mentions in the magazines too.

Although to be honest I don’t really pay the media much attention, I can’t remember the last time I actually read a magazine, I’d get friends telling me about different bits and pieces they’ve seen though.”

Brown can thank the NME for such exposure, although with the magazine’s infamous tendency to build bands up only to tear them down, you can’t help but wonder will they turn on disco-pop’s newest savior? “Well as soon as the NME got involved and put their hand up as a supporter I was wary, I’ve seen it all happen a million times before, with bands I admire and even with friends of mine, so if it happens it wont be a surprise! Seriously though, the pressure tn2

27 January – 9 February, 2009

really will be on for the second album to try and stay on top.”

Recently it surfaced that Brown and Peaches had been recording together; I asked if anything had come of those sessions. “Yeah when I met Peaches we just kind of clicked so we played together a bit, it was really comical stuff, though, so I can’t really see those sessions going anywhere. I find that we really work well together so I’d love to give it a proper go, be it a single to-

Pip Brown aka Ladyhawke discusses hype, boys in bands and Courtney Love with Keith Grehan I’d have ideas that’d never go anywhere or be laughed at so I just wanted to be able to do what I want to do really, and have the time to develop my ideas.”

Just back from touring around Australia and her native New Zealand I ask how she’s finding it. “The tour has just been amazing from the word go, I’ve gotten to see so many places and meet loads of other musicians, the only downside is all the flying, I hate flying!”

When I met Peaches we just kind of clicked so we played together a bit. It was quite comical stuff though, so I can’t really see the sessions going anywhere gether or a collaborative track on the next album. We just have a really cool chemistry together.”

Before her current incarnation, Brown was in two bands, Two Lane Blacktop and the experimental project Teenagers with Nick Littlemore. Why the decision to go solo? “Well I’d been in bands all my life, since my early teens and I just wanted to have creative control and do something different. Like I was always in indie, underground bands with guys and a lot of the time

I ask the notoriously shy Brown how she feels about playing live with a band as opposed to recording by herself in her studio “Well as much as I love touring I always find it harder to play as part of a band, because some things are just out of your control. It’s great hearing you music being played live on stage, though, however I cant wait to get back to the studio.”

Courtney Love has recently given Ladyhawke her seal of approval, and rumours abound concerning a collaboration. I ask

if there is any truth to this. “No, not really!” she laughs, “Courtney has been leaving messages on Myspace recently and has mentioned my album in interviews, though we’re never met. Not yet anyway! I think it’s really cool, though. I was a massive fan growing up, both of Hole and of Love in general. I was really into the whole Love/Cobain thing, so it’s pretty amazing years later to be getting endorsements from a personal hero of mine! I’ve been getting the same kind of thing from Kylie Minogue, which the papers seem to have picked up on, I’d be really interested in doing a collaboration with either at some point, but as for now its mainly just rumours.”

There was one question I had to get out of the way: namely, how Brown feels about being portrayed as a massive style icon in the media?. At this, Brown emits something between a sigh and a laugh. As much as I regret asking the question I’m still intrigued to hear her response: “When I first heard that, I thought it was just ridiculous, I still do. I’m not exactly doing anything special. I think that when the media pick up on something a little bit different they just seem to run with it for a while, like I said, I don’t follow the media much. I just think the whole thing is quite funny.”

Ladyhawke plays the Academy on 5 February

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Pier pressure

Don’t let the tiresome Interpol comparisons put you off – on closer inspection, Angel Pier have a lot going on, as Hugh McCafferty found out

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here are certain people who, just by looking at them, you can tell are in a band. I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is. I mean, it’s not necessarily hair or clothes or any of the obvious stuff. Maybe it’s a very particular angle of slouch-age. Or a precise ratio of laissez-faire unkemptness to studied cool. Either way, as I look around Front Arch for Angel Pier’s guitarist/vocalist Darragh Nolan, I decide that the chap nearest to the gate on the right must be in some form of band. As it happens, I’m correct and Nolan turns out to be most amiable indeed. Needless to say, then, up until a few days ago, Angel Pier did not register on my musical radar. This is quite the failing on my part as, with slots at SXSW in Texas, CMJ in New York and Canadian Music Week, you might say that it’s been a successful two years or so for the band.

As we sit down in a nearby café, I ask Nolan how the band found playing such highprofile events as SXSW. “It was a bit of an eye-opener; you realise how small you are, y’know, because you have thousands of bands playing as well as you. It was amazing though; Irish people can be a bit apprehensive about new bands. Playing that and

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seeing the reactions from a completely new crowd of people was great.”

That’s not to say that Nolan isn’t keen on the home crowds, though. Despite recent interest shown in the band abroad, he doesn’t feel restricted in Dublin. “The Irish music scene is very healthy. We were getting quite a lot of interest in Canada and, y’know, people were saying that it’s a problem that

the whole boys-with-guitars thing has been done to death. “It did cross my mind. When we started the band we talked about what kind of sound we were going to go for, what instruments there were going to be, y’know, because you have to decide that before you begin. What I had done previously to this was quite ‘synthy.’ This time, we decided to stay away from synths and the reason was it’s been quite trendy in the last few years and once a trend like that passes, it dates quite quickly. I suppose it’s probably a bit harder because you have to sound different with exactly the same line-up as every other band – it means you have to work that bit harder. At the same time, that’s not to say

With slots at SXSW, CMJ and Canadian Music Week, you might say it’s been a fairly successful year or two for the band we’re not over there. But the thing is, if we’re going to be successful, we have to able to do what we do here as well as we would anywhere else.”

Like approximately 95% of bands based in Dublin, the core members met one night in Whelans. Lead guitarist Luke Paluch joined Nolan and drummer Mark Colbert soon after they replaced their old bassist with current member Vinny Redmond. So, a fairly typical drums/bass/lead/rhythm lineup, then. I ask Nolan if he ever worries that

that we won’t ever use synths, it’s just we haven’t so far.”

With two EPs out already, Bullet Holes & Broken Sectors and Sacrifice, the band are hoping to do some more recording in the summer. “We’re working up to an album now with the aim of recording in June or July, depending on when we feel we have the right songs. We’re looking at it with a view to writing an album as a coherent piece of work and not just a collection of singles,” he tells me, citing Animal Collective’s latest ef-

fort Merriweather Post Pavillion as an example of a record that has to be listened to in its entirety. Although sonically a million miles away from the pleasantly violent soundscapes of Avey Tare et al., Nolan doesn’t rule out a departure into experimentalism at some point down the line. “It’s really hard to tell, once you make the first album, you don’t want to repeat it.”

As we move on to discuss the causes and potential fallout of the closure of smaller record stores, such as Road Records here in Dublin, Nolan admits that it is not the most hopeful of times to be in a band. “The whole state of the industry is a bit scary at the moment, especially when you’re in a band that’s just starting out. There’s always been an element of piracy in music throughout the years, but I don’t think the big companies caught on to the whole MP3 thing quick enough.” With online sales rising every year, though, Nolan remains confident that in time, the industry will stabilise and musicians will once again be given the necessary time by labels to prove themselves. For Angel Pier, the coup of having already secured a distribution deal in Canada with Fontana, should also make the climb up the grimy ladder of the music industry a little bit easier.

Angel Pier play Whelans on 31 January with the Ambience Affair and Autoban.

Doors are at 8 pm and, if you have yourself a student card, the whole thing will set you back a very reasonable €5. myspace.com/angelpier 27 January – 9 February, 2009

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No countries for gold men?

In the wake of the recent announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, Michael Armstrong wonders if British or Irish nominees will be able to successfully play the Hollywood game

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or some, last Thursday was a day they will never forget. The Oscarnominated actors, directors and other leading lights in the film industry got that life-changing 5.30 am phone call from their agent, and were able to lie back in bed and drift off to sleep as Academy Award nominees. Talk about a dream come true.

For their agents, however, the day’s work had just begun, as to win an Oscar in the modern era, an actor must deliver not only a great performance, but must be seen by the academy as the right choice, the natural choice, for the award. And to do that requires political manoeuvres, backroom backstabbing and public campaigning. The general public remain mostly unaware, but behind closed doors the awards season contains enough intrigue and double-dealing to make the 2008 Presidential election look like a quaint village fête.

But just who will triumph this year? A look at the winners of this year’s Golden Globes seems to suggest that Slumdog Millionaire may have a fair chance in the Best Picture category. Whereas last year’s nominations were dominated by two brooding event-movies in No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, this year the academy has chosen a selection of intelligent and thought-provoking films such as The Reader, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While it is a fine film, I suspect Slumdog may unfortunately benefit from a sympathy vote in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where the film is set. And in spite of this attention, it remains the case that in the Best Film category there is a massive bias towards American movies, with great British or Irish films such as Steve McQueen’s Hunger not receiving any recognition, while In Bruges only received a Best Screenplay nomination.

Thankfully, this is not the case in the Best Actress category, with Golden Globe Winner Kate Winslet establishing a pre-eminence in the Oscar PR campaign. Many critics and media outlets believe this year to be “her year” as she has previously been nominated five times without a win. The other favourites, Angelina Jolie and Meryl Streep, have both won Oscars before, while Anne Hathaway and Melissa Leo seem like outside bets for their performances in Rachel Getting Married and Frozen River respectively.

Hollywood’s knack for creating narratives in their allocation of awards has skewed both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories in favour of tragic nominees in need of recognition or redemption. Sean Penn’s performance in Milk looks tn2

27 January – 9 February, 2009

unlikely to outshine the resurgent career of Mickey Rourke. After years on the outskirts of Hollywood, playing minor roles in indie gems such as Buffalo ’66 and Spun, Rourke has cast off his troubled past with a fantastic

Ledger picking up an Oscar for his careerdefining performance in The Dark Knight.

Not only would Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker be a worthy winner, after his tragic death this would represent the last oppor-

In the Best Film category, there remains a massive bias towards American movies physical and emotional performance in The Wrestler. If he picks up an Oscar come February, don’t be surprised if his own life story is adapted for film in a few years time.

As for the Best Supporting Actor category, only a fool would bet against Heath

tunity for the Academy to pay respect to his talents as an actor, after failing to reward him for his excellent performance in Brokeback Mountain. A posthumous Oscar win seems even more likely when we consider the competition, as in spite of how enjoya-

ble Tropic Thunder might have been, Robert Downey Jr.’s performance pales in comparison to the magnetic screen presence that had millions attempting “Why So Serious?” impressions throughout the summer and over Hallowe’en. As was the case last year with Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview, imitation is truly the highest form of flattery in the film world.

It must be remembered, however, that in Hollywood nothing is certain, as the 2006 Oscar ceremony demonstrated. Odds on favourite Brokeback Mountain was defeated by the interesting but forgettable Crash, so perhaps favourites such as Rourke and Winslet should be careful not to demand Oscarwinner salaries just yet. If Winslet fails to scoop Best Actress, she may wonder why her Golden Globe-winning performance in Revolutionary Road was not chosen, leaving her in contention for the Best Supporting Actress award for The Reader. Without Winslet, this category is the hardest to call, with no clear favourite among Amy Adams, Penelope Cruz and Marisa Tomei.

But if actor’s real-life storylines are used to sway academy voters, the competition for the Best Director award takes on an almost heroic dimension. For in an industry that glorifies “Great Directors” above all, what greater award could there be? The 2007 Academy Awards finally gave Martin Scorsese his first Oscar for The Departed, a solid but predictable remake of Internal Affairs. This film was no Raging Bull, Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, proving that all a Hollywood legend need do to get an Oscar is stick around long enough.

Slumdog Millionaire represents a rare chance for the Europe-based British director Danny Boyle to receive worthy praise.

But he is up against an awards culture that may decide David Fincher or Gus Van Sant have served long enough time in tinsel town without an Oscar.

Of course, the easiest story for the media to tell after an awards ceremony is when one film sweeps the boards, as the final part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy did in 2004.

The only film that looks likely to do so this year is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has been nominated for 13 awards in total. The film has yet to be released in Ireland and so it is difficult for us to judge whether it is a worthy candidate, but, of course, the unique qualities of a good film are only the beginning of its journey towards Oscar glory. Just don’t be surprised if when we discover who wins in a month’s time, a film boasting Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as its stars fares better than a Mumbai love story with the guy from Skins.

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Carnival Celebration for Trinity Arts Week With the help of Sorcha Richardson and Kerrie O’Brien, Caroline O’Leary investigates what the biggest ever Trinity Arts Festival has in store

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From 9th-13th of February, Trinity College will host its fourth annual Trinity Arts Festival (TAF). Unique to Trinity, the festival was initially established in 2006 by History of Art student Pearl O’Sullivan as the first entirely student-run celebration of the creative arts within the student community. This year’s carnival theme was chosen as the ideal fun concept to further the goal of the festival: to highlight and cultivate the creative dimension of the college, drawing on the talent already existent within the arts-based student societies and provide every student, regardless of academic background, the chance to participate in the week’s events. In doing so, it is hoped that students will be provided with the opportunity to explore their inner creativity.

TAF also quite uniquely encourages the amalgamation of college societies to provide a wider platform, greater resources and

bigger motivation to successfully undertake larger projects. It emphasises what these societies are all about – providing a medium for students to be involved and become active and participative figures in all elements of student life. The festival is for everyone, not just people with previous artistic interest, and with the majority of events free and held at accessible after-class or lunchtime

ensure that participants come away from the week feeling like they have really engaged with their college and fellow students beyond an academic level and discovered something more about themselves.

The events have been particularly organised to stress the goals for this year from the Carnival Catwalk concept for the fashion-focused, to the Pinhole Photography events hosted by DUPA and everything in between, including the Campus Canvas which urges students to instantly express themselves by making art and the 24hours which students will have to create their own film with Filmmakers using as little or as much pretension as they wish which will then be screened in the Sugar Club.

Also featured to spark student’s creativity are interactive talks with figures such as Robert Ballagh and

The festival is for everyone, not just people with previous artistic interest and with the majority of events free, it seems that this year’s TAF should not be missed

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hours, not to mention the dramatic and dynamic nights out, it seems that this TAF is a week that should not be missed.

The particular aims of this year’s festival are to inspire and encourage students to learn new skills, to create an awareness of the art that surrounds them in Trinity, to encourage interaction between students and leading figures of the arts world and to

David Norris, exhibitions and film screenings by the students themselves, tours of the sculpture, painting and architecture within the campus as well as tours of the major and minor galleries which are strewn all over the city, the Architecture Association of Ireland (AAI) exhibition, great nights out plus much more.

The week has been organised so that students are constantly creating, learning and interacting with others both within and outside the campus. So let your crazy (and often hidden) artistic side run wild and enjoy all that this year’s festival has to offer.

27 January – 9 February, 2009

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TAF (intop ten no particular order) Provost’s House Tour This presents a once-off opportunity for students and staff to view a large selection of the college’s very prestigious art collection, located within the impressive architectural surroundings of the Provost’s residence on campus. Dating from the 1760s, it was one of the most elaborately decorated houses of its time as architectural professor Dr. Christine Casey will discuss as you explore its splendours with her. Highlights of the painting collection include a number of works by Jack B Yeats, James Barry and Joshua Reynolds. This is one of the most outstanding events in the festival’s tradition that should not be missed.

Carnival Catwalk Twenty select students will work in pairs and have a mere four hours to design and create ten outfits made entirely from eco-friendly recyclable materials. All the creations will be showcased by models at our carnival night in Spy on the Wednesday of TAF week. The best ensemble will be judged by a leading figure of the Irish fashion world and a fabulous prize awarded. A brilliantly creative way for aspiring designers, or those who simply love fashion, to exhibit their talent and a unique event for Trinity.

Robert Ballagh One of Ireland’s most prestigious painters and designers will provide a slide show of his work and discuss what life is like as a contemporary artist in Ireland.

A question and answer panel will follow.

This is a rare opportunity for students to interact with such an influential and important Irish artist.

Pinhole Photography Students simply bring along a normal shoebox and DUPA will show them how to transform it into a working camera.

Participants will be lead around campus to take photographs which the society will then assist them in developing. All pictures taken will be exhibited at the end of the week – a brilliant way to showcase your talent and learn something new.

Curatorial Workshop Curatorial assistant Barry White from Douglas Hyde Gallery will provide an introduction to the mechanics of putting an art exhibition together. This would certainly be of interest to art history students, and others who might be considering a career in a gallery, but also to anyone who wants to know how to go about getting a show off the ground. This will be an informative and informal event which will provide a great insight into what goes on behind the scenes in the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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27 January – 9 February, 2009

Opening Night Each year the festival kicks off in style with an opening reception using all levels of the Atrium . This year will host a photography exhibition, sketches from our life-drawing marathon, a Jackson Pollock visual installation from Roberto Pugliese along with live Afro-Caribbean drumming, jugglers and scrumptious delights from the Food and Drink Society. Follow us to Dame Lane afterwards where there will be live jamming sessions with the Jazz Society to keep those creative juices flowing.

Clothes Swap Shop A must-have in a recession! Bring along up to three items and exchange them for whatever trendy garments take your fancy. Students can swap as many clothes as they bring. With music, treats and an intimate venue, this is set to be a fun afternoon and a cost-effective way to keep stylish.

Tour of the College Sculpture Collection The Curator of Trinity’s Art Collection, Catherine Giltrap, will take students on a tour of the modern sculptures around the campus. No better way to create an awareness of the art which surrounds us in college and gain an insight into the complexities of conserving these pieces, such as Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sphere Within Sphere, which rests outside the Berkely Library. Come along and discover some hidden gems.

Beatboxing Workshop with White Noise White noise is Ireland’s representative on the global scene and in under five years has performed at over 300 events. As you can see in his website at www.whitenoise. ie he uses live looping technology in his performances to make purely human music along with layers of beatboxing, singing and vocal effects and these collide to form an intense soundscape. Whether or not you have an interest in beatboxing his workshops are seriously impressive, providing a history of beatboxing and exploring the nature of the concept itself, and you will be dazzled at how he creates music with his mouth.

Talk with David Norris An outstanding representative and spokesperson for the arts, David Norris will host the first of our talks for the week with a discussion on the arts in Ireland today. Being one of the foremost Joycean scholars he will also incorporate the author in his broader analysis of all things cultural in Ireland. A question and answer session will follow and as ever with David Norris, it will be an entertaining affair.

Itinerary (provisional)

Monday

Day-time events: Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI) Awards 23 Exhibition – BLU Intersection.

All day : Campus Canvas in the Arts Block and Hamilton building.

11-12 pm : Pinhole Photography with DUPA in Front Square .

11-4 pm : Life-drawing marathon – 191 Pearse Street .

12-1 pm : Architectural tours of Front Square, New Square and the Museum building. Meet at the campanile in Front Square.

3-4pm : Dylan Haskins film screening and Q&A – venue TBC. 5-6pm : David Norris talk – GMB. 7-10pm : Opening night in the Atrium with the Juggling, Food and Drink and Afro-Caribbean societies. Visual installations by Roberto Puglieuse. Music by the Red Moon Quintet and the Music Society.

Night-time : After-party in 4 Dame Lane.

Tuesday

Day-time events : AAI Awards 23 Exhibition – BLU Intersection.

All day: Campus Canvas in the Arts Block and Hamilton building.

11-3pm : Carnival Catwalk – clothes design workshop using recyclable materials only. Designs to be showcased in SPY on Wednesday. Winners will have their outfit displayed in Urban Outfitters.

12-1pm : Architectural tours of the east end of campus.

1-2pm : Architectural tours of the Provost’s House with Dr. Christine Casey. Meet at the campanile.

3-4pm : Clothes Customising workshop with Liv Monaghan.

4-5pm : Curatorial workshop in the DHG with Barry White.

7pm : Debate in association with the Hist.

Wednesday

Day-time events: AAI Awards 23 Exhibition – BLU Intersection.

All day: Campus Canvas in the Arts Block and Hamilton building.

11-2 pm : Camera Obscura with DUPA – venue TBC. 12-1pm : Tour of the College Sculpture Collection with curator of the College Art Collection, Catherine Guiltrap. Meet at campanile.

1-2pm : Makeup for fashion workshop with Sinéad Egan.

3-4pm : Beatboxing with White Noise – venue TBC. 4-5pm : Tour of the Green on Red Gallery, Lombard Street.

5-6pm : Poetry reading with Brendan Kennelly – Arts Block 7pm : Performance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band with the Jazz, Orchestral and Visual Arts societies – Dining Hall Night-time : TAF @ SPY.

Thursday

Day-time events: AAI Awards 23 Exhibition – BLU Intersection All day : Campus Canvas in the Arts Block and Hamilton building 12-1pm : Jewellery-making workshop - venue TBC 1-2pm : Clothes Swap Shop -venue TBC 2-3pm : Makeup for film workshop with Sinéad Egan 3-4pm : Architectural Tour of the Provost’s House 4-5pm : Introductory talk in the DHG with Barry White 5-7pm : Gallery tour – RHA, NGI Night-time : TAF and DU Filmmakers @ the Sugar Club

Friday

Day-time events: AAI Awards 23 Exhibition – BLU Intersection All day : Campus Canvas in the Arts Block and Hamilton building 11-12pm : Balloon making workshop – venue TBC 12-1pm : Architectural tours of the college libraries from old to new. Meet at the campanile.

1-2pm : Dylan Haskins film screening and Q&A – venue TBC 2-3pm : Talk with Irish artist Robert Ballagh – Science Gallery 2-3pm : Talk with composer Kevin O’Connell – House 5 4-6pm : Evening exhibition of week’s work 6-7pm : Afro-Caribbean workshop – Regent House Night-time : Wrap-up party

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OMFG

God is an Astronaut’s Torsten Kinsella talked the press, the recession and the internet – Ciaran McCollum listened most attentively

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rguably, God has the honour of being one of the most widely portrayed beings in the history of humanity. This could be due to the lack (despite being famously ubiquitous) of any definite confirmed sightings or a defined corporeal form, facilitating an eclectic range of artistic interpretations. Previous civilisations narcissistically gifted their gods with relatively humanoid forms. During the relatively unimaginative days of the Renaissance, God was repetitively rendered as an especially brilliant beam of light, a solitary hand or, at best, a doddery old man who constantly forgot to shave or put on his clothes (perhaps an early indication of Alzheimer’s). But today, partly due to existential thinking and the increased popularity of secularism, permitting irreverent and humorous depictions without the prospect of being lightly toasted at the steak, we (in Christendom, at least) enjoy relative freedom to imagine God however the Hell we want. Thus, in South Park’s Y2K episode Are You There God? It’s Me, Jesus, God is a tiny, literally rat-arsed composite of various mammals. While in the mercifully short-lived Disney sitcom Teen Angel, He, although absent, is ably represented by His celestial cousin - Rod, “The Head” - a floating noggin. So, having awoken twenty minutes ago on an alien sofa to the scarily realistic explosions and death-cries of Call Of Duty 4, desperately hung over and having had no time for research or, for that matter, breakfast, I, at the suggestion of a friend, asked Torsten Kinsella of God is an Astronaut: on what evidence do the band base their claim that God is, in fact, an astronaut?

Kinsella, who plays guitar and keyboards

describe a sound that stands miles apart from anything else in Irish music, even worldwide. “We’ve even been described as spiritual,” Torsten adds, “and compared to Christian Rock bands.” The largely instrumental three-piece has been declared the “archetypal post-rock band,” seemingly fitting quite neatly into Mojo magazine’s definition of a group “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes.” They also bear similarities to the 70’s space-rock of bands like Pink Floyd with their celestial-sounding use of synth. “We got into electronic music in the late 90s. Massive Attack were a big influence.” And he admits to distinct “classical” touch to their sound, mentioning a recent inclination to odder Eastern instrumentation - sitars, weird Moroccan drums and such. As Torsten states, God is an Astronaut have the integrity to say: “fuck it. We do our own thing.”

The band has its unassuming origins in Wicklow’s Glen of the Downs. From here hail the brothers Kinsella, the aforementioned Torsten, and Niels who plays bass, guitar and arranges visuals for their songs.

They came from a musical family, their father was in a show-band, and the brothers have been in various groups since the 90s, glumly meeting with defeat and disappointment in their several early forays into rock and later electronic music. With the collapse of the live scene in the 90s, the move towards DJs and the gradual realisation that they were making music they didn’t even enjoy, they decided they needed a “new direction.” They weren’t attracted to the “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” end of the scene, Torsten tlls me. “Well, we could maybe do with a little more of that,” he jokes. But they

The media has its own agenda in Ireland.

Hot Press is bullshit. It’s ill-informed and they’ve blacklisted us. They’re bollocksed with the recession anyway for the group as well as fulfilling sparse vocal duties, laughs reservedly down the receiver, probably having heard the question hundreds of times. “It’s actually taken from a line in the film Nightbreed, written by Clive Barker.” He elaborates that the band felt it would represent the “apocalyptic” theme of the music. Certainly an apt description, generally, but it’s also difficult to concisely

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wanted to stay out of the “Whelans clique,” do something truly original and fulfilling, instead of imitating “the British sound.”

Eventually, with the sweeping, epic melodies of their 2002 release The End Of The Beginning, they found a distinctive style they were happy with, and God is an Astronaut began their musical odyssey. Actually, if you’re unfortunate enough to follow Irish

international rugby, you may recognise the track “Fall From The Stars” as it was played during the TV3 coverage of the World Cup. Occasionally on their songs, it’s possible to hear a sort of melodic wailing, sounding rather like the meaningless jibber-jaber, or “hopelandish” of Sigúr Ros’s Jónsi Birgisson’s ringing falsetto. Acting almost as an extra instrument, the vocals provide the “electronic pads and strings with a human emotion.” However, they chose to eschew lyrics in favour of psychedelic visuals, dealing with general world themes, admitting in an online interview that “lyrics were never [the band’s] strongest field.” They felt they could communicate emotions better through visuals than words. The “full audio show” instead provides “another creative dimension”, the visuals often filled with “funny stuff like spoof B-movies,” or if that doesn’t titillate your funny bone, “war, suicide and animal testing”.

The video for the single “Fragile” (viewable on YouTube) from their second album All Is Violent, All Is Bright, is a perfect example of the God is an Astronaut experience. It exhibits their grandiose, arching sound – beginning quietly with a tremulous synth wail,

while displaying a cloudy image of the heavens, and reaching a tumultuous crescendo replete with the crashing of fuzzy guitars, brash, booming drums and that keening melancholy howl – while an innocent and unwilling monkey is strapped into a crude looking contraption and shot at great speed across a vast and cruel desert plane, in some sort of early experiment in space travel.

Certainly, the title of the song takes on a new importance. There’s the obvious “fragility” of the subjects portrayed, the lonesome ape condemned to an icy cold death in space, even the ancient sepia-toned footage itself looks like it could unravel before your eyes. But it could also easily be used to describe the music, both in its timid introduction, and the unruliness of the violent conclusion, barely held in check by the frenetic drumming of Lloyd Hanney. He’s a story in himself, if I heard right, he’s been playing since the groovy and psychedelic era of the 60’s, trained by sadly deceased Dublin and international jazz legend Johnny Wadham.

Although they use rhythms, harmonies, melodies, timbre and chord progressions not normally found in the rock tradition, they stop short of the lavish, and sometimes 27 January – 9 February, 2009

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pretentious, experimentation of some better known “post-rock” groups such as Mogwai. “We don’t consider our music experimental or want to make our music experimental,” Torsten’s brother Niels stated resolutely in an Audiojunkies interview, “we’re only interested in entertaining and making fans.” It seems they’re having some success in that venture. “We sold out our gigs in London,” Torsten lists some of their achievements as I scribble madly, “we’ve been to America, Russia, Germany, Greece – eight hundred to nine hundred people in Berlin - sold out gigs in Boston and San Francisco. We played to 25,000 in Turkey”.

Headlining this “Rock for Peace” festival in Istanbul seems to be one of the band’s high points. I joke that maybe the band could relocate there, given the relatively small numbers at gigs here. “Well, only last November we sold out Cork,” he informs me, “but we’d probably rather go somewhere else anyway.

Somewhere hot. Like Spain.”

He admits it is difficult in Ireland, though. “The truth is”, he begins, as I imagine a wise, bearded face aged far beyond his years by various troublesome experiences at the other end of the line, “if you want to tn2

27 January – 9 February, 2009

do well, you gotta leave Ireland.” I concur.

“Yeah. We got the right idea and got out early.” It’s possible despite rave critical reviews, especially for the acclaimed likes of All Is Violent, All Is Bright (described as a “post-rock masterpiece” and awarded 9/10 by independent webzine Drowned In Sound), they’ve been treated as too much of a niche group in Ireland. “The media has its own agenda in Ireland,” Torsten continues,

for musicians as well. “Illegal downloading has helped,” he replies, surprising me, “we’ve had 20,000 downloads of our last album on RapidShare” and a similar amount of plays on Last.fm, it turns out. “The CD market has collapsed,” he explains, adding ominously that “by the end of this year, the market will be gone.” I argue that records are coming back into fashion, and that there’ll always be people who, like myself,

Illegal downloading has helped, we’ve had 20,000 downloads of our last album on RapidShare. The CD market has collapsed, by the end of the year, it will be gone “we don’t want to let the Irish media dictate our success”. I suggest that it’s perhaps that the media is limited in range in Ireland, Hot Press remaining the only real major publication. “Hot Press is bullshit.” Torsten cooly declares. “It’s ill-informed. And they’ve blacklisted us. They’re bollocksed with the recession anyway”.

It must difficult with the current market

prefer to have the admittedly cheap plastic of the CD to hold in their hand. And anyway, 20,000 albums, even if they’d been sold for a few euro each, surely that must rancour with the group? “There’s a recession,” he reasons, “people have no money but want music.” He then hesitates briefly, “you can’t really be too resentful.”

At a loss for anything to talk about, I fire

off a couple of stock questions, asking about their hobbies, how they’d spend their ideal Sunday. “Ah,” clearly caught off-guard by my insipid questioning Kinsella continues, “probably stay in bed till 2’o’clock, get something to eat, then maybe head to a party. Basically how we’d spend every day.”

Me too, I think, and then mentally progress to my poor suffering stomach. Although I’ve been greatly enjoying the conversation, I politely point out to him we’re ten minutes over the allotted time, and he reminds me to mention the gig on 7 February at The Academy. Highly recommended and to be accompanied by those stunning visuals – it will be worth the ticket price just to see the monkeys on the big screen. But I ask, what about God is an Astronaut’s eponymously titled latest album? Aren’t you going to promote that? He laughs. “Tell them to get it for nothing,” I think I can hear him smiling, only slightly though, and perhaps slightly grimly down the phone “just ask them to go to the gig and buy a T-shirt.”

God is an Astronaut play The Academy on 7 February. Their latest record, God is an Astronaut is out now on the band’s own label, Revive.

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Brought to you by celebrities Ana Kinsella looks at fashion lines brought to us by various celebrities, and wonders whether they should they just stick to the day job

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ake the celebrities most admired and envied for their fashion sense, hook them up with some talented designers who will help them to create their own line of clothes and voilà!

Surely, the result is a whole new wardrobe that perfectly emulates the styles of the celeb in question? Celebrity-designed fashion lines are certainly a strange phenomenon, and they have delivered triumphs and turkeys to the market in equal measure. For every Kate Moss for Topshop success story, there is a bellyflop of a collection from the likes of the stars of The Hills.

The most curious aspect of celeb-designed lines is that all kinds of celebrities are doing them these days, from A-listers like Victoria Beckham and Kanye West, to footballers like Cristiano Ronaldo, to Dlisters like Amanda Bynes or Whitney Port.

Victoria Beckham is a pretty polarising fashion icon, attracting praise and criticism in equal measure. However, like it or lump it, she definitely knows her stuff regarding high fashion, she knows what she likes and what suits her and, slowly, subtlely and surely, she does her bit to push the envelope just a little, championing tailoring from Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood, as well as arty pioneer Hussien Chalayan.

However, it was her own favourite designer, Roland Mouret, who mentored her through the process of creating her debut collection, which she claims was inspired by the “femininity and sophistication of the mid-century silhouette.” The collection sold out in record time in Selfridges late last year, which certainly proves what the shopping public thinks of her own style.

It seems that a line’s success is related to the level of personal style of the celebrity behind it. I don’t think anyone would argue that Gwen Stefani is a fair bit more innovative and experimental in what she wears than, say, Heidi Montag from the Hills, whose line Heidiwood – mostly teeny thin dresses and tanks built for showing off implants – bombed when launched. Stefani’s L.A.M.B. line, on the other hand, has won praise and accolades since being launched in 2004. There is a flip side to this, though, demonstrated in Beyoncé’s House of Dereon.

Beyoncé, who is styled chiefly by her mother, has a daring and somewhat fashion-forward look. Recently she’s been favouring cuttingedge industrial designs from Gareth Pugh and geometric prints by LA hipster Brian Lichtenberg for her stage and video performances, while sticking with conventional glam from Roberto Cavalli, Elie Saab and Badgely Mischka. House of Dereon, however, showcases something a little different, with its tagline “Where the sidewalk and the catwalk meet.” It’s based around clingy,

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Kate Moss’s collection for Topshop is one example of how to do celebrity fashion lines right

low-cut dresses in gaudy fabrics, as well as embroidered bum-hugging jeans and kneehigh leather boots, all of which represent the “hip-haute” style of the Knowles family and its three big fundamentals: couture, kick and soul. Whatever that means.

In the eyes of the fashion elite, the only celebrity line worth mentioning is The Row, from the Olsen twins, which draws on their obsession with European avant-garde fashion, from the likes of Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, Rick Owens, Azzedine Alaïa, Givenchy and Lanvin. Named for London’s Savile Row, international home of proper tailoring, it’s undoubtedly the most high-end of celebrity designed lines, with prices often hurtling towards four figures for a dress.

Its selling point is that the line employs couture techniques on knitted t-shirts and basic dresses, as well as tuxedo jackets in impeccable cashmere and floor-length cardigans. And indeed it does sell, stocked as it is in 29 of the finest, most innovative and highly-regarded fashion retailers around

the world (although none yet in Dublin). For those who lack the Olsens’ billionaire budget, they have a mid-range contemporary line called Elizabeth and James, named for their siblings. It’s vintage-inspired, stocked at many more locations than The Row, and no one piece exceeds $400. It’s been admittedly publicly that Ashley, the more classic and conservative twin, is the brains behind The Row, whereas boho party girl Mary-Kate is responsible for Elizabeth and James. Both lines have, however, worked their way onto many a fashionista, and have affirmed the twins’ credibility in the fashion industry.

There exists a curious subset of modeldesigned lines, many of which seem to do far better than their actress or TV personality-driven counterparts. Kate Moss is the obvious and notable figure here, with her line for Topshop proving to be a huge earner for the company. When launched in 2007, the line caused havoc amongst fashion-forward shoppers, many of whom were eager to emulate the model’s signature laidback

“folk-boho” style - she’s transformed leather jackets, denim hotpants, tank tops, faded skinny jeans and chiffon floral tea-dresses into staples for the starry-eyed teenager girl. It’s been said by some that Kate may not have actually been responsible for very much of the work designing the line but regardless of who designed what, the shoppers are snapping up Kate’s styles, and she’s been signed up for another three years of the collaboration.

Outside of the boho stylings of Miss Moss, original supermodel Elle Macpherson’s made a fortune from her Intimates range of lingerie over the past 18 years, which is now a leading name in boutique lingerie. Texan superstylish model Erin Wasson turned stylist for her friend Alexander Wang’s award-winning collections in 2007, after he cited her downtown, off-duty model style as one of his chief inspirations.

Since then, Wasson’s launched a jewellery line of her own, as well as a forthcoming womenswear collaboration with RVCA. But outside of fashion-conscious models, the lines between “exciting new stylish collection” and “blatant vanity project” begin to blur. Examples of these ego-trips include CR7, Cristiano Ronaldo’s line, Matthew McConaughey’s j.k. livin collection and the incredible steely determination of Kanye West to break into the industry. One has to wonder about West’s persistent attempts to involve himself in the world of fashion: a desire to intern at Vogue, attempts to launch his own line Past Tell without any financial backers or partners in the fashion industry and a forthcoming collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Yet he was refused an invitation to Balenciaga’s Fall ‘08 show, on the basis that they don’t really do celebs like Kanye, despite the fact that he described the brand as “one of the illest lines right now.” It’s hard to take his dedication to design all that seriously when his blog consists of stolen images from the Balenciaga runway, and information copied-and-pasted from Women’s Wear Daily. However, maybe his determination to be accepted by the fashion world will pay off once his LV shoe collection is released.

Overall, it looks like the realms of celebrity-designed fashion have varied results, both fashionably and financially, but all are born of simple ambition to break into markets unknown, and to succeed in a whole new sphere. I leave with you with LL Cool J’s hopes and dreams for his collection for Sears: “I would love to get a Council of the Fashion Designers of America Award. If I can take this Sears thing to another level... then you never know.”

Previous winners include Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, and Tom Ford. It’s good to have dreams.

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Personal style Why should we care how we dress? Aisling O’Gara states the case for individual style and putting in a bit of effort in your daily wardrobe.

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s Diane Vreeland said, “There is no such thing as unconscious dressing.” Regardless of whether it is unplanned or not, what you choose to wear sends a message to other people. But personal style isn’t just about your clothes – it’s how you decorate your room, what colour ink you write with, whether you like to sleep in flannel pyjamas or in the nip (unadvisable in this weather).

It’s about getting to know yourself better: about analysing why you like something, and what it says about you. Even if you don’t like to broadcast your exact personality with your clothes, you’re still going to make an impression with them.

Whether or not we intend to, we form opinions based on how people are dressed.

After all, we’re going to make completely different assumptions about someone wearing a check shirt and skinnies than someone with backcombed hair and tracksuit pants tucked into Ugg boots. What you choose to wear is a social shorthand (witness the hordes of emo kids hanging around Temple Bar).

But why should you dress to fit in with a crowd, when you can project your own unique style and self instead? I think the easiest way to do this is to look at the people whose style you admire.

For example, one of my personal style icons is Cassie from the show Skins. Now, I don’t really dress like Cassie. I’m a completely different shape from her and what she wears wouldn’t suit me (God knows I’ve tried, but I just can’t pull off socks with heels). But she’s a style icon for me nonetheless because her personality is reflected in her clothes. Her whimsical nature is reflected in her quirky style, and all of her outfits are pulled together perfectly but still retain a sense of playfulness. Like all of the Skins cast, her wardrobe is an extension of herself. It’s a form of self-expression, which is what personal style is all about.

Another of my style icons is Dita Von Teese, and while I also wouldn’t dress exactly like her I appreciate her strong aesthetic and the way that all of her outfits are part of a clear look. Her clothes, again, broadcast her personality – she may be a burlesque dancer and fetish model, but when off-duty she projects a retro-inspired and classy persona.

Style is about using clothes and your environment around you as an extension of yourself. While we all have days where we just want to lash on jeans and a hoodie, I always feel better if I make a little effort.

While it can be daunting to try and define your own style, I think it’s useful to make tn2

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a list of style icons. They don’t necessarily have to be fashionistas – it could be your favourite band, or that girl you see on the bus every morning. Don’t just think about what they’re wearing; think about why it works (or doesn’t!) and why you like it. When you figure it out, it will give you an idea of what clothes to look for. Then it’s time to figure out how to work it into your own wardrobe!

Maybe you’d never dream of going fullon 40s vintage like Dita Von Teese, but you appreciate her clean, elegant style. How could you appropriate that look for yourself? Try looking for a high-waisted skirt, or maybe try a dash of red lipstick. It’s not about copying someone’s exact clothing, but teasing out its components and making it work for you. Through examining the style-choices of lots of different people, you can find something that works for you.

Rather than just copying style choices piecemeal from different people, how do you define it into something that’s uniquely you? I’m personally inspired by TV shows, movies, and music.

The internet is also a great source as are blogs like Chictopia (www.chictopia.com), The Sartorialist (thesartorialist.blogspot. com), and Kirsty Lee’s blog That’s Just My Vibe, Really (thatsjustmyvibe.blospot.com).

I think it’s important to have inspiring things around you; Gala Darling(www. galadarling.com) suggests tearing out your favourite pictures from magazines and stringing them up around your room. She also suggests taking outfit photos every day.

While I can never be bothered to do this, it can be a valuable resource when you’re just beginning to explore your own tastes.

It’s important to keep an open mind, too.

Maybe you absolutely loathe leggings, but seeing the way that someone else works them could change your mind.

While this all seems like a lot of effort, I think it’s worth it. If you devote a little time to defining your taste, you’ll end up with a wardrobe full of clothes that make you feel fabulous about yourself, instead of clothes that leave you feeling uninspired and bored.

In exploring your style, you’ll get to know more about what suits you and what you feel good in. One person could feel polished and elegant in immaculate shirts and polished shoes, while another could feel the same way in ripped tights and a denim mini.

Because, at the end of the day, when you’re well-dressed you’ll look better, and when you look better you feel better about yourself, and it shows. It’s hard to be confident when your clothes make you feel boring.

And that’s why it’s important to have your own personal style.

Ana Kinsella wears cardigan, shirtand tie (as belt) from Urban Outfitters men’s department, Urban Outfitters vintage shoes, and her own tights and accessories. Photo: Rachel Kennedy

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Indisputably promising Kathy Clarke talked to Wayne Jordan, director of the current run of La Dispute at the Peacock about his national theatre debut

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itting in the foyer of The Abbey Theatre moments before my interview with Wayne Jordan, the director of La Dispute, the show currently beginning its run at The Peacock, I suddenly realise I know nothing about him — this should be interesting. When I finally do meet him, however, I find that despite my ignorance, I must have had expectations, because he defies all of them.

Bounding through the entrance wearing a distinctly blue tracksuit, he is definitely the most excitable director I have ever met, rushing over to greet me – the ignorant stranger – with a hug.

For a young director about to debut at our country’s national theatre, he seems remarkably sure of himself. When I ask if he’s starting to feel the pressure, he responds, “nervousness wouldn’t be my primary feeling at the moment.” After all, he reminds me, he has been working there since 2006 as a trainee (their word) or resident assistant director (his preferred title). Without that experience he says, and without the help and support of his colleagues and friends there, he would not be directing La Dispute now. In 2002, he

girls) have been raised in isolation; away from the world and from each other, as a strange social and scientific experiment.

Responding to their first loves, lusts and lies, they have to grow up all too quickly, a painful process by all accounts. I suggest that it sounds complicated he and replies “only so much as life is complicated.”

La Dispute is a glittering journey into the dark but prophetically modern imagination of Marivaux who, Jordan tells me, wished to expose “the artifice of love.” The French comedic playwright decided love was a farce when he apparently caught a young love interest preening herself for their later encounter. He was disgusted by the revelation, unlike Jordan who thinks that it’s common place nowadays for men and women both to stare at themselves in the mirror for a while before a date. He admits he does it himself.

A playwright not much written about, Marivaux had a relative popularity in France, considered fashionable for a while, and has enjoyed some recent revivals in the United States.

He remains little known in Ireland,

Double Inconstancy, renamed Everybody Loves Sylvia with his theatre company Randolf SD at The Project’s Cube Theatre – he then moved directly on to his project at The Abbey.

Is he finding it difficult to separate the two shows? It seems not: “They’re very different plays with completely different tones,” he says, “this one being much more concise and distilled. A later play, Marivaux seems like a very different playwright at this time of his life.” Having personally translated the first play from scratch with very little knowledge of French and a dictionary by his side, Jordan feels less

personally familiar with the original script in this production, which is a shame, but he is delighted to be working with a group of extremely talented actors, designers and technicians.

One thing you can’t deny about Wayne Jordan is that he is remarkably fearless, a quality that can only be a positive influence on his theatrical endeavours. He is willing to go the extra mile and enter risky territory for the sake of innovation – a necessary quality for a young Irish director.

Let’s hope the few closeted Marivaux fans who made their way out of the woodwork for Everybody Loves Sylvia do so again. If you are such a person, you can catch La Dispute until 7 February at The Peacock.

Bounding through the entrance wearing a blue tracksuit, he is definitely the most excitable director I have ever met, rushing over to greet me with a hug was just another Trinity graduate of the drama department, with a dream of directing. There is hope for the rest of us, then.

La Dispute, for those of us who are not in the know, is a French comedy written

by Pierre Marivaux, a man often described as the forgotten playwright. The basic premise: an aristocrat releases four human guinea pigs into a sinister “Garden of Eden” to consider the age old question: who is more faithful in love, man or woman? Conclusions are arrived at but Jordan will not disclose any information- “Let’s just say it doesn’t quite work out the way you think.” Four orphans (2 boys and 2

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though, and until recently could not have counted Wayne Jordan as one of his fans: “I never knew Marivaux so I couldn’t forget him.” Thus, while he cannot claim any responsibility for rediscovering the eighteenth century playwright, he has been spending a lot of time directing his work, this being his second Marivaux interpretation of late – only last month he directed Marivaux’s 1723 romantic comedy The

Photo courtesy of the Abbey Theatre

27 January – 9 February, 2009

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Une promesse de bonheur Rory O’Connor took a look at Wayne Jordan’s production of La Dispute and found it to be a satisfying departure into the absurd

Photo: Ros Kavanagh

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owerfully in contention for the silliest comments made about art in the last year are Ian McEwan’s on opera. The thrust of his argument is that operas are not enough like Ian McEwan novels: “I don’t like fairies and dwarfs cavorting around the stage… and I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the lack of psychological realism in opera.” Thus McEwan does away with Mozart’s Magic Flute, perhaps in favour of a McEwan-style Realist Flute. But the questions for McEwan are: who said anybody was supposed to really believe it in the first place? And even more: is it nevertheless not actually truer than your “heritage London” reasonableness?

One hour’s escape from such reasonableness is at the Peacock in Wayne Jordan’s production of Pierre Marivaux’s La Dispute, nicely translated by Neil Bartlett.

The play does in the end happily throw away the crutches of authority (the only form of authority that art ever has) on the question that it purports to settle: is it men or women who are first to be unfaithful in love? But even if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have believed it, and wouldn’t have minded either. The play spends most of its time confirming prejudices, tickling them, and adding a few we didn’t know about. The most outrageous of these, which is frankly weird to see on liberal Dublin stages, is the proposition, crucial to the working of the play, that black people are unattractive. The two black characters, Mesrou (played by Nicholas Beveney) and Cerise (Aïcha Kossoko) have raised the four young lovers who are going to settle the question, each separately, to the age of sixteen without any suggestion of desire coming into their minds.

But now they are to be released into an artificial Eden, to meet another young one

of the opposite sex and the same race. The two couples encounter each other, with ample opportunities for unfaithfulness in place of a snake. The rampant, tactile fancying that takes place is great to see. The couple we see first, Eglé (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and Azor (Barry Ward) instantly electrify each other with their touch. Throughout, there are limber dances of desire, and poses for the young posers. It puts one in mind of the definition of art of Marivaux’s fellow Frenchman Stendhal: une promesse de bonheur (a promise of happiness).

All this exciting unreasonableness makes up for conceptual silliness of the play. It is the girls, of course, who are jealous and vain, and the guys who just want to be friends, with the girls getting in the way. The play shaves another few threads off the dividing cord between laddishness and homoeroticism. The best line in this vein is when Azor, having met Mersin (Simon Boyle), explains to Eglé, “We just want to go off together… to talk about you”. This probably owes more to translation and sitcom than to Marivaux’s eighteenth century world; but it fits into that sophisticated world that liked shallowly (in the best sense) to laugh at innocents, especially jealous and vain innocents.

And the Eden is presided over by The Prince (Bosco Hogan), whose father planned the experiment, and is for the most of the play watching what’s going on like the audience. His wife Hermiane (Karen Ardiff ) doesn’t like what she sees, and calls a halt to the whole thing. The Prince simply says to Mesrou and Cerise, “Follow the instructions I have made for them.” This is the one worrying element in an otherwise knockabout play. Granted, the experiment is no longer amusing, but what happens to the unwitting actors of this play?

Telling tales

The Winter’s Tale at The Project is an efficient production, says Rory O’Connor

eading Shakespeare is infinitely different from seeing it in the flesh.

Consider this passage from The Winter’s Tale, currently playing at The Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. “Is whispering nothing?

Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?

Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh (a note infallible Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot?

Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?”

Read in a silent room, it becomes a little poem of rising intensity. Read out of context, as we are doing here, and I have a feeling Shakespeare wouldn’t mind it being so, it might be read as a happy definition of the weight of love, a way of saying “this has

are rich pickings for such a possibility, but Classic Stage Ireland. It is efficiently directed by Andy Hinds. The best piece of directorial perversion comes when it is comically suggested that in the end Paulina marries the wrong man in getting hitched to Camillo. With Paulina played like a battle-axe

by Lisa Thurman, and Camillo modestly played by Neil Hogan, it’s a good joke. The suspicion that it might be the Miami version of The Winter’s Tale is reinforced at the beginning with the set of three dim blue overhead lamps and some battered chairs and a table that came out of an interview room.

But the actors and actresses are dinner jacketed and evening dressed. A wise move, because although suits weren’t around in Shakespeare’s time, they do cross the ages, and create the right mood of indifference to period frills. The message communicated is: look at the acting.

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value”. Its way of extending a thought with a parenthesis and then going back to fivebeat questions sets up a tingle in the ear in the otherwise becalmed reader.

Naturally, when Leontes says it in this production, it is a snarl of jealousy at his wife’s alleged infatuation with Polixenes.

With him it is a definite assertion that life has no value at all. It is hoarsely barked. The magical fall of the foot is lost. But even if we might regret that, what cannot be lost is Leontes’ character, brilliantly and tirelessly acted by Chris JJ Heaney. What makes the character unusual is that these are beautiful images, as Leontes must in some way know.

He is with Macbeth as one of the great imaginers in Shakespeare. In Heaney’s portrayal this makes him even more batty with rage and envy.

The production is by CSI, who are not Crime Scene Investigation, though there

It is a massive cast for a small theatre, and they all do well. Shakespeare would give good lines to the taxi-man. What’s more rare is for the actors to take the hint. But they do here. The exception to the suit rule is Autolycus (Andy Blaikie), the rogue, who wears modern clothes and is cheaply played with an Australian accent: this will appeal only to those who think “antipodean” a long, hard, funny word. Andy Blaikie may actually be an Australian but this does not excuse it.

Shakespeare’s psychological depth gets talked about a lot, in blindness to the fact that Shakespeare is primarily a great poet and thinker. Hamlet, for example, doesn’t just “feel sad”; he thinks too well. But in Leontes, Shakespeare did powerfully link sexual jealousy and nihilistic abandon, and Heaney, in a commanding performance, thoroughly incarnates the role.

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Examining a literary dinosaur Jean Morley questions the unpopularity of the Irish short story by looking at the work of its most famous practitioners

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very once in a while the planets shift, and as Venus and Mars fly past one another, the dynamics of the universe are changed irrevocably.

Nothing else explains why the best things in life suddenly disappear. It’s the Tamagotchi mystery. You know, you bought this wonderful electronic device, fed it, kept it alive and planned its future before realising that a) it was an element of virtual reality and your imagination and b) due to aforementioned precarious existence, the manufacturers have stopped selling batteries and it will die.

This long-winded analogy helps us understand, not only the scars of a childhood misspent, but also the fate of the Irish short story. Despite the convenience of an abridged text, the beauty of simplified expression and a dash of Gaelic charm, it just doesn’t sell these days. Booksellers report watching customers pick up a book, realise its division into six separate episodes and the loud thud as it is fired back onto the shelf. But it’s time to give short story writers, the delinquents of the literary world, some due respect.

My Oedipus Complex and other Stories Frank O’Connor (Penguin, 2005) The church of Frank O’Connor has thousands of followers. Reading this selection from the short story master, it is easy to understand the reverence. Each of the thirty stories is written with the assurance of a writer who perfectly understood, even created, the genre in which he wrote. Eight pages of prose is enough to allow intimate knowledge of a character and sympathy for their predicament. Whether it is a small boy coming to grips with the irrefutable facts of life, a young man courting a promiscuous dame or more gravely, a girl experiencing civil war first-hand, it is never very long before we’re embroiled in their cause.

O’Connor has a perfect ear for dialogue; like a master musician transcribing a melody, he captures the rise and fall of people’s voices. At times the effect is hilarious, it is difficult to take the murderous threat seriously, articulated in the highest-pitched Cork accent. But for any local charm and vivid depiction of the backwater, it would be an insult to call O’Connor provincial.

Born to poverty in the slums of North Cork, never progressing past primary school, he wrote literary theory, directed at the Abbey Theatre and lectured in Harvard. Similarly in his writing, what begins as a farce, a clumsy card-game between English soldiers and republicans, becomes a meditation on the bloodiest loss of life. “The birds and the bloody stars were far away” he ends “Guests

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of the Nation,” summating the sectarian divide. Who knew that Neil Jordan, inspired by these words, would go on to direct The Crying Game? But equally, nobody could have predicted that one little fella from Cork would make such an indelible imprint on Irish culture.

Elizabeth Bowen: Irish Stories (Poolbeg, 1978) In his pivotal discussion, “The Lonely Voice,” Frank O’Connor argued that the short story was a form perfectly adapted to the submerged population group, the outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of any society. Interestingly, although mentioning the greatest Irish writers of his time, O’Connor conveniently omitted Bowen from his study. Clearly, she was this outsider, living in the “hyphen of Anglo-Irishness,” constantly journeying between Ireland and Britain and part of a rapidly tumbling ascendant class.

clothes. Without giving away the horrific ending, the reader is advised to think twice about extending their arm into somebody else’s wardrobe.

The Selected Stories of Seán Ó Faoláin (Constable and Co., 1978) Ah the innocent days of our grandparents’ time. When you were happy to cycle twelve miles to the local hop and “doing a line” meant courting at the crossroads, not snorting coke in a toilet cubicle. Unfortunately, reading Seán Ó Faoláin shatters our image of early twentieth century Ireland, as he obliterates any slightly repressed but naïve Eden.

From yearning adolescent boys in the hilarious “Talking Trees”, to steamy adultery in “The Faithless Wife” to a young couple cohabiting in “The Bosom of the Country”, Ó Faoláin’s Irish are undeniably lusty. “Or is it, dearest one, that all passion is an unhappiness? Are we always looking forward to our joy or thinking back on it, so drunk on it that we cannot realise it?” It’s a typical question from a writer for whom the short story meant a glimpse into human fervour. Ó Faoláin’s greatest ability is that of trapping characters, as every stock figure in Irish life is forced to squirm under his humorous

plest day-to-day tasks mask a murky pit of hope and fear. A man’s decision to drive his young family to his childhood home becomes a painful reverie on the passing of time. As two young boys working on the family farm calculate their earnings, we wonder whether there can be any compensation for the loss of their youth.

But the landscape is a further clue to the psyche. In the short story, it can be tempting to forget the backdrop, having a few short pages to outline events. Instead of summating the environment in a few paltry lines, Friel makes it key to the action. The lake in the title story of the collection, “The Diviner”, has more to say about an insular town than any of its gossiping inhabitants.

The outsider is drowned within its depths, taking with him the guilty secrets of the entire area. The truth might be uncovered by magic and miracle, but it’s tempting to allow it be washed away. It is Friel who will “divine” our innermost truths, by painfully squeezing our everyday lives.

Dublin 4 Maeve Binchy (Century, 1982) Sometimes a writer chooses a title too appropriately, as it takes on a life of its own.

It’s a bit of a Catch 22 if you like. By calling

From left to right: Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Friel, Frank O’Connor (photo: Paul Bishop), Maeve Binchy, all notable/successful short story writers These stories are riddled with more decay than the mouldiest pre-recession blue cheese. As we sweep past portraits, frequent glittering social events, life is an uncertain haze filtered with the vague feeling that the end is nigh. The precarious social position of the landed gentry is epitomised in “A Day in the Dark”, as an “oversized woman insulated in a little provincial town” alienates herself from her closest social peers.

As it is now well-known, Bowen spent time working undercover for the British Ministry of Information, researching Irish opinion between the wars. Although it certainly hindered her reputation, it established a most pernickety sense of detail. The tone of the wallpaper, stonework on an obsolete building, wrinkles in a dinner-jacket sleeve – nothing escapes the writer’s eye.

The stories have a subtlety setting them apart from the brash tones of other Irish writers, but this adds to their cascading drama. “Hand in Glove” is a gothic masterpiece, as a hysterical aunt avenges a niece with an unfortunate penchant for robbing her

lens. Forget an overly controlling Catholic hierarchy, years before the conception of Father Ted, priests are fun-loving, giggly inhabitants of the world. Who is gossiping about the local barman outside the pub, does the fervent Gaeilgeoir understand his own nationalist aims and who or what does a local philanthropist truly serve? The reader alone must question the characters and the value of their words. Very often the wisest words come from the mouths of fools.

“Did it ever strike you that every man… is his own potter?” one man asks. It’s either an earth shattering question or the idle talk of a leery drunk. Ó Faoláin will not help us to decide, but to see contradictions inherent in every Irish man.

The Diviner and other Stories Brian Friel (O’Brien’s Press, 1983) Brian Friel is usually discussed as a dramatist, but the short story is just as suited to the writer’s psychological ramblings. Friel uses the most banal incident to explore the imagination of his characters, as the sim-

her collection Dublin 4, Maeve Binchy could not have known that she was creating a concept. Her depiction of the postal code as a social milleu is still relevant 27 years later.

First published in 1982, these four short stories deal with hugely different circumstances in Southside Dublin. A housewife plans revenge for her cheating husband with a “Dinner in Donnybrook” while a country girl attempts to navigate the fumes of Dublin as she settles into her “Flat in Ringsend”.

There is a momentous “Decision in Belfield” as a student wonders how to couple an unplanned pregnancy with a dysfunctional family. Possibly the most difficult conundrum is told through the “Murmurs in Montrose”, as a wife gauges her husband’s effort to override alcoholism.

Times have changed since the collection was first published. Dublin’s Dandelion Market no longer embodies the epitome of cool. However, with recession lurking, the stories have an eerie resonance in 2009.

Themes might be serious but it will, surely, be easier if we laugh through it all.

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Keep dreaming

Rory O’Connor wonders whether or not there’s anywhere left in Europe that’s uncool

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urrently, I have a number of copies of The Irish Times travel supplement Go before me, and they lead to some idle calculations. Each issue features 2 or 3 think-pieces about European destinations, so that’s maybe 130 destinations a year. After two years, you’d think we’d have come to an end of the possibilities for a jaunt on the Ryanair bus. But most likely the merry-go-round simply takes another turn.

Sure enough, before the period around 1989-1991, the parts of Europe further to the east were under an iron grip of uncoolness.

This was often tragic for the people who lived there, but now things have been truly “normalised,” as the commissars of uncoolness wrongly claimed they were before. The extent of Go’s politics is something about “The Obama Effect,” Obama being a hot new destination in Kenya, it seems. These travel supplements are the propaganda of Really Existing Coolness, and so don’t tell the truth about why we read them. The secret is: travel supplements are very boring.

And the beauty is that nobody notices, because it’s not the reading, but the dreaming that it inspires that we enjoy.

The articles usually include some absurdly specific and short history about the place, that must appear arcane to anybody who doesn’t care, and unsatisfactory to anybody who does. But the dream’s the thing, and in fact the information is quite relaxing: I think, “Good, the place has history”. If you read the frankly irrelevant fact, about Marseilles, that “The Greeks arrived around 600 BC,” you’re not supposed to remember or process or panic about this, but just to continue to luxuriate for the second

Alluring Marseilles

it takes to read the sentence in the fact of Marseilles. Writers know they can mention almost anything and it won’t matter. An article about Eindhoven says in all seriousness: “in 2005 a full third of money devoted to research in The Netherlands was spent in or around Eindhoven.” If I hadn’t been writing an article about this, my reaction to this fact would have been my normal one to any travel article trouvaille: “Hmm.” Whether by vocation or lack of personality, travel supplement writers are in fact very self-effacing, with an artisan’s sense that it is the object – the city they’re writing about – that matters.

The negative proof of this is a Roisín Ingle article about India. It has no boring history.

It is full of her warm, bubbly, annoying personality, and creates a bit of a story, so that it’s like one of her columns, and there’s no space to do your own dreaming. It’s also no longer a true travel piece, which has all that boring history because it is centred around the void of an individual sensual experience. That’s the kind of thing that appears in novels, not newspapers.

This would require an artistry that would finally negate the whole point of the travel puff piece. With artistry, things would take on point and weight, whereas finally your sense impressions are as good as the guy who got the free tickets. To be true to a holiday, travel writers would say: “Then I had a coffee, and it tasted good. I was happy to get out a cúpla focail of the local language. The light hits the marble churches very nicely…”

But you can do all that yourself; instead the article, incanting names and dates and styles of architecture, by dancing around the experience, keeps you dreaming.

The grape guide

Shane Quinn on the once obscure Carmenère, which is currently experiencing a rejuvenation

hought to be lost, Carmenère is a fantastic red grape which has some surprisingly delicious qualities and is now experiencing a renaissance in the Chilean vineyards.

This grape, also known as Grande Vidure, was fashionable in Bordeaux until the 19th century where it produced some deep reds and was a favourite blending grape much like Petit Verdot.

In Chile, Carmenère was not extinct at all but being produced widely, though labelled incorrectly as Merlot. It wasn’t until 1998 that the Chilean government recognized it as a distinct variety of grape. Similarly, in Italy, the same grape was thought to be Cabernet Franc until recently.

The few differences between Carmenère and the other two grape varieties as plants resulted in this confusion. The difference on the palate, however, is not so

crimson. The wines have a very focussed nose (fancy speak for smell), plums and raspberries being dominant. These aromas carry through on the palate. Some savoury characters can also be found, among them grilled meat, coffee and even celery.

The Gorgonzola cheese, produced in Northern Italy, is superbly accompanied with a glass of Carmenère as is the French cheese Liavrot, which is produced in Normandy. The wine has enough character in its big fruity flavours to match the intense flavours of these cheeses. The grilled meat overtones in the wine make it a great companion for steak or BBQ dinners (not in this weather it must be admitted) and is an agreeable alternative to the Shiraz, or Syrah as it is known in France.

Above all, however, Carmenère is different. It makes such a change to those predictable labels that we all know so well.

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subtle, leading to its resurgent popularity among wine enthusiasts the world over.

It is now being planted once again in the Bordeaux region of St-Emilion. It is with an exciting mixture of curiosity and anticipation that many wait to see what the new Bordeaux age for the grape heralds.

Unfortunately, outside of Chile, Carmenère remains a blending component.

Small amounts are being tried out in California, Australia, New Zealand and even in China! The market for the grape, however, remains small and even in Italy, where it is produced quite a bit, it has not yet been allowed to be labelled on bottles as a distinct grape.

The rich, purple colour of Carmenère will be of no surprise to the budding etymologist who will know that the grape’s name derives from the old French carmin, borrowed from Arabic, which means

So many Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines were no doubt produced at dinners or soirées over the Christmas period that we are all sick of them. Chile often gets snubbed by wine snobs as having mainly mass produced wines of no character and low quality. The Carmenère from these vineyards will go some way in silencing Chile’s critics.

On the positive side of Carmenère’s relative obscurity is its cheap prices. The Ariki Carmenère 2006 from Chile is just €7.35 at O’Brien’s Off Licence. This is typical of the grape with its fruits and also with peppery flavours. O’Brien’s also recommend Andes Peaks Reserve Carmenère 2006 from Chile for the more blue-collar meal of bangers and mash. It is currently on offer at €8.49.

This is indeed a smooth and easy drinking wine. As with all Carmenère these wines are best drunk young.

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Restaurant reviews

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address

Capel Street, Dublin 1

phone

(01) 8749394

prettily displayed in a scallop dish and were a good size, but tasted bland and uninspired. There was no evidence of the aforementioned garlic and ginger in the breadcrumbs and they needed a generous amount of seasoning and a good squeeze of lemon to give them a bit of flavour.

For mains, we both decided to go for fusion pizzas. I ordered the Caribbean Jerk Prawn with a lime and coriander base (€19.30). The prawns were large and perfectly cooked, but the whole dish was a mass of conflicting flavours.

The pineapple clashed with the bell peppers, the basil battled it out with the chives and the middle of the pizza was a swamp of sauce whilst the rest was dry and bland.

My friend had the Citrus Chilli Duck (€9.85), which was tasty and less overpowering than the Jerk Prawn. The duck was still pink and the dish seemed fresher and better balanced than mine. Even so, as a bit of a regular she conceded that whilst the prices have recently inflated, the quality has declined since her last visit.

That said, there is still something attractive about Millers. The proximity of the tables and the friendliness of the waiters make it a pleasant way to spend the evening. My pizza may not have been perfection on a plate but I would give Millers another shot. Maybe next time I’ll become a pizza purist and have a classic. Besides, surely it’s gastronomic blasphemy to top a pizza with the likes of jerk prawns or wild boar? Gabrielle Hales

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Millers is probably the most infamous pizza restaurant in Dublin. Any pizza lover worth their dough has been. I heard myths of mountainous toppings, pizzas so enormous and glorious that those who conquered their proverbial pizza mountain were so full and fulfilled they were happy to spend Saturday night nursing their food baby in a dreamy state of repletion. Should you balk at such indulgence during the credit crunch, then do as my abstemious flatmate used to: taunt those around you by bringing half of your pizza back in one of the Millers delivery boxes, and eat it torturously slowly for lunch the next day.

So, I went along with a friend, with high expectations and a growling tummy. It’s a small and cosy restaurant on Upper Baggot Street that is so unimposing you could easily miss it. We checked the wine list, which seemed reasonable.

There were two choices of white and red at € 4.50 a glass. I went for the Australian Colombard Chardonnay, not normally my favoured choice, but surprisingly quaffable and true to its “spicy and nutty” description.

The food menu is impressively varied. The starters range from Thai Chilli Prawns to Beef Carpaccio, and there are plenty of meat-free options for vegetarians. Should pizza not be your thing, there are a plethora of salads and pasta to choose from; though it seems masochistic to go to Millers and order anything but a pizza.

For a starter, I chose Grilled New Zealand Mussels with garlic and ginger breadcrumbs (€9.75). They arrived

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Twenty bucks for three yummy courses and a big glass of wine, plus the smug feeling that you are a hip young twentysomething with their finger on the pulse of “Recessionista Dublin’s Melting Pot” or some similar Sunday supplement name for foreign things. Bargain!

Capel Street’s Gospoda Polska is just a few minutes away from college, and offers great value and a new experience without hitting the wallet too hard. Set all thoughts of overcooked cabbage and boiled sausages aside – this is an accessible menu with a fairly wide selection of dishes (4 starters, 4 mains and 2 desserts). The restaurant itself is modern yet cosy, with touches such as posters for Polish films and photos of Polish icons giving a personal touch to what is otherwise a pleasantly decorated modern restaurant. The Early Bird is on every day until 6.30 and I imagine it’s popular for lunch. We went for an early dinner at 6pm and suffered slightly from the curse of the Early Bird Menu – an empty restaurant – but since I was with Trinity College’s loudest man, after two minutes I didn’t notice.

For starters, The Historian had a very Eastern European looking dish: Bigos – a stew of meat, cabbage, onions and other unidentifiable vegetables. It sounds unappetising but it was a real winter warmer, hearty and surprisingly delicious. I had Vegetable Goulash – a ratatouillelike stew of peppers, courgettes and other not very Polish vegetables, which came in bowl made of naan-type bread.

We got a big glass of red wine, included in the Menu. Service was excellent; a jug

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of iced water was provided without even asking, as was bread.

For mains, I chose the fish of the day, which was Salmon; Himself had Dumplings. These came in a sauce of reduced onions – there were four dumplings, two meat filled and two with a mystery white filling. They had a silky texture and the meat dumplings were gorgeous, although the white ones were slightly bland. The generous portion of salmon came in a creamy sauce, with mashed potatoes and vegetables. It was a perfectly pleasant dish, nothing dramatically exciting, but tasty and there was plenty of it. I had hoped the fish of the day would be slightly more traditional, but it just goes to show you how unscary Gospoda Polska is if you want a cheap meal out that will cater to unadventurous Irish eaters, as well as the curious.

That said, there is still plenty of choice for an Early Bird menu.

There was a choice of two desserts, cheesecake or apple cake; we got one of each. These were the highlight for me, but then dessert always is. The cheesecake was vanilla, but for once the creamy topping actually tasted of vanilla, and the base was made of chocolate biscuitsDeeee-lightful. Applecake was warmed and cinnamony and came with a ball of vanilla ice cream.

To complete our Eastern European theme we took advantage of being on the Northside by paying a visit to Lidl and Aldi – what a thorougly enjoyable evening! I would recommend a visit, and it’s a low risk opportunity to try something new. Aislinn Lucheroni

13 January – 26 January, 2009

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CD Reviews

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Quietly Now! Midnight Organ Fight Live and Acoustic

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Only the jarring applause and wolf whistles stir you back to reality, reminding you that this is a live recording. A raw, heartfelt rendition of their critically acclaimed album Midnight Organ Fight, the Glaswegian band, Frightened Rabbit, aim to capture the essence of their much praised, spirited gigs. The waves of the strumming acoustics hits the wall of your ear, arching and reverberating back with a climatic capped celestial bell.

The changes, are mad yet strung together by the sowing twine of Scott Hutchinson’s vocals, a buffer between Gary Lightbody and Michael Stipefashioned Scottish. The album opens up with “The Modern Leper”, an unadulterated acoustic pop feat of excellence.

Dripping in sync, its honey highlights moonlight the lilting path of lyricism in “I Feel Better” too.

If there was a Hollywood take on Kerouac, “Good Arms vs Bad Arms” would feel right at home on its soundtrack. The guitar is employed in the place of drums.

Moving swiftly into the album, a foreign momentum manifests in “Fast Blood.”

It’s let down by the vocals, which are lost in between the sparse, drowned drums and guitar riff.

“The Twist” reminds me of new years in New York City (or how I’d imagine it). But in this song, it’s as though you’ve submerged yourself in drunken disorder and embarrassingly missed the midnight celebration boat. Light relief from the toothache of sentimental sweetness floats in the form of the pin-tinkling triangle.

“Head Rolls Off ” is oddly offset by the

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13 January – 26 January, 2009

ringing jagged strums, faux-kitsch beats with flat, strewn out bleating lyrics. For a minute, the start of “My Backwards Walk” echoes Muse’s stripped down “Soldier’s Poem.” But then the parallels start unmasking themselves. The problem is that, like many of the songs, it slips into cascading velocity accelerations.

The songs span a spectrum, from clap happy fried frenzy to earth beating trance to simmering slow ballads. At times, they are are so rich through overworking and egging that it overrides and indeed inverts the intention, turning your insides frictionally with the undulating octaves. It leaves no space in the song for you to think or breathe. Instead you’re caught up in a third dimension with the dynamics of the multitasking song which imparts no lasting impact, no hair prickling punctures which turn you to looking over old, sentimental scars.

However, trudging through the middrift of the album rewards you, the closing songs “Floating in the Forth” and “Who’d You Kill Now?” are a breath of fresh air as in the clear light of morning, after a night in a sweatbox club. The poetic lyricism unfurls origami beautiful, as the album bows out with a distilled carbon cut full stop.

Quietly Now! is an album that you can dance and sing blindly to, purging your heart as you sweat out emotions. Frightened Rabbit have achieved what they set out to create; the chemistry of the physicality of live music has been resurrected.

Aisling Deng

“It’s Britney…bitch…” she whispered at the start of her come-back track “Gimme More” and now she’s back again with another album. Like her last offering Black Out, Circus is hugely autobiographical and with its barbed lyrics Britney seems to be trying to get her message across – she’s not going anywhere.

It’s been a hell of a journey for old Britters over the last few years; two marriages, two kids, annulment, divorce, mental breakdown, paparazzi bashing and courting (see: her relationship with photographer Adnan Ghalib), custody battles and baldness but once again Britney returns to our airwaves to prove why she is still the Princess of Pop. I got quite a bit of heckling in the tn2 offices for wanting to review this CD (Ed. – not from me, you didn’t, Britney is class), it seems that despite my aforementioned declaration of her regal status in pop music Britney is still just not cool enough… for some. For me, she is, was and always has been the ultimate pop star. From her early days in the Mickey Mouse Club, back when she was sweet, virginal and waiting until marriage (believe what you want), Britney has had the best team of writers, producers, musicians and choreographers that the pop music business has to offer, and Circus shows that absolutely nothing has changed.

Opening with the new single “Womanizer,” Britney gets her own back on evil ex-hubbie K-Fed with this footstomping, sirens-blaring pop track that brings us back to the glory days of “Toxic” as she lampoons her ex’s wandering

eye. The unsubtly named title track “Circus” (the second single from the album) is equally dance-floor worthy and lyrically a similar reflection of her chaotic private life.

Taking a break from the dance-floor fillers, Britney showcases her talent as a broken-hearted balladeer as well as a pop princess with “Out From Under,” a delicately arranged track with a melodic chorus that remind us that behind all the layers of production, the girl can actually sing.

“If You Seek Amy” is one of the more original tracks on the album, unlike anything Britney has ever given us before, the song is power pop at its best, packed with aggressive electro beats and a rather saucy wordplay; it will definitely get the press talking about its ambiguous lyrics – say the title quickly and you’ll see why.

The whole album is littered with cunning lyrical jibes about various aspects of Britney’s life, “Kill the Lights,” which attacks the press (unsurprisingly a recurring theme in her newer work) satirically croons “is that money in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

At times, the whole thing can seem, rather sadly a little bit too bitter and aggressive, but she manages to pull it off by reminding us that it’s all just good fun with teen-pop tracks like the school yard sing-a-long-esque “Mmm Papi.” Rather appropriately, Britney’s own lyrics seem to sum up the album, as says in the title track she’s “a put-on-a-show type of girl” and with this album, she certainly does just that. Maeve Storey

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Film reviews

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Sam Mendes

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Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon

running time

119 minutes

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Based on Richard Yates’ celebrated novel about 1950’s American conformity, Revolutionary Road centres around young married couple, Jack and April Wheeler, documenting the inexorable unravelling of their marriage as the reality of suburban living becomes painfully apparent.

With Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet playing the leading roles, and five Bafta nominations as well as a Golden Globe for best actress, Sam Mendes’ adaptation sounds like it should be a sure thing, but somehow it doesn’t quite hit the spot.

The film opens with Jack and April’s first meeting at a party in New York; she’s an aspiring actress, and he’s destined for great things, a seemingly compatible couple brought magnetically together by their shared aspirations and hopes for the future. But as the next scene cuts forward seven years we see how things have begun to fall apart. April is shown as having become nothing more than a failing actress who has been forced to accept a minor role in an amateur play at the local school.

As the curtain falls and the reluctant audience applauds, she runs backstage sobbing with frustration which in turn causes her to violently argue with her unsympathetic husband, who rather unwisely confirms that “it wasn’t a triumph or anything was it.”

As the argument rapidly unfolds we realise that the play acts as a microcosm for April’s thwarted desires; she feels that not only her acting, but her whole existence is a failure, a failure which is perpetuated through the suffocating suburban life in which she feels entrapped. Although Jack is more reluctant to admit it, he feels the same; he too is trapped in a system which he can’t escape. This is poignantly illustrated in the stunning shots of him becoming immersed in a shoal of grey commuters on his way to work, where he is depicted as just another face in the crowd, another anonymous individual streaming through Grand Central station in the flow of men searching for success.

What Yates, and indeed Mendes, captures brilliantly is the feeling of disenchantment which fuelled 1950s America – the immense sense of disappointment felt by a post-war society as it came to slowly realise that the American Dream was in fact incongruous with reality. Jack and

April embody such a society, and at the heart of the film lies the tragic realisation that, through their submission to a suburban existence, one that is supposed to signify success, they have in fact sacrificed their ideals and in turn, each other.

As Jack traipses to his mindless job in the city, April is left at home to carry out her perfunctory duties as wife and mother. Trapped in the confines of domesticity we watch endless sequences of her shuffling around the house heaving baskets of laundry and dragging out the bins, or merely standing with hands on pinafored hips staring into space.

Possibly, Mendes over emphasises her dulling existence, dedicating too much time to Winslet’s endless suspirations and feelings of imprisonment, rather crudely connoted when she’s looking out of the latticed kitchen window, which as the camera slowly zooms out, symbolizes the prison in which she finds herself entrapped.

Realising that the distance between herself and her husband is forcing a wedge into their marriage, they come together once again in their shared dream of es-

caping their dreary day-to-day existence and moving to Paris. However, a series of events forces them to truncate their plans, creating a gap between them which can only get bigger as infidelities take place and ugly truths come to light. Their hope of “running from the hopeless emptiness” becomes no more than a vague fantasy, forcing them to conform once again to a life they resent in a world they find stifling, eventually leading to tragic consequences.

Essentially, the crux of the film is an incisive portrait of a marriage gone awry, and yet often the dialogues between the two main characters seem over-rehearsed, making their emotions seem staged and their acting forced. Certainly, Winslet’s questionable American accent doesn’t help, and even the usually remarkable DiCaprio struggles at times to take command of the script, seeming uncomfortable with the language and in turn making his monologues seem awkward if not improbable.

However, all is forgiven in the central fight scene when both actors quickly reassert themselves at the top of their game,

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saving themselves from any lasting opprobrium.

The film is well paced and beautifully shot, with Mendes taking a more realistic and less stylized approach than in earlier films such as American Beauty or Jarhead.

Similarly, the costumes are excellent, as are the sets where fastidious attention to detail recreates a past era to perfection.

Casting is also excellent, with Kathy Bates as the nosy neighbour almost stealing the show, and both David Harbour (Shep) and Kathryn Hahn (Milly) playing their roles superbly.

However, what the film lacks is subtlety.

Throughout, Mendes uses pellucid ploys in order to reinforce key ideas that don’t need reinforcing. The most unforgivable example of this is when a loquacious madman comes to the Wheeler’s house for tea and imparts truths that no one else is saying, an awkward device that falls flat on its face. Although already crudely placed within the context of the film, it becomes further unnecessarily signalled when April says to her husband, “he’s the first person who seemed to know what we were really talking about.” Although the scene is taken directly from the book, Mendes fails to insert it appropriately into his narrative.

This also occurs in an earlier scene when a neighbour comes “yoohoo-ing” through the back door in order to tell April that “you weren’t like my other clients, you just seemed special, you still are,” filling in apparent blanks for the audience that don’t need to be filled.

As the film comes to an end and the action truly begins to unfold, the crucial moment of calamity becomes interrupted by a number of unnecessary scenes, diluting any sense of drama whatsoever. What should be a poignant, moving ending leaves the audience cold. After two hours, we still feel no real proximity to the two main characters, meaning that we equally have no empathy for what happens to them. In truth, when tragedy rips through their lives, we don’t actually give a damn.

While the visuals are strong, and the film generally well executed, a combination of a poor script, over-played concepts and two unlikeable protagonists make it hard to truly get anything worthwhile out of Revolutionary Road. All in all, probably best to just stick to the book. Jo Monk

13 January – 26 January, 2009

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Film reviews

Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch

running time

128 minutes

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Director Gus Van Sant continues a string of highly artistic films with Milk, the energetic biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to prominent public office in the United States.

While the film lacks the lyricism of Van Sant’s more recent projects, which were uneventful and aimless though often strikingly beautiful (particularly last year’s unsettling Paranoid Park), it is not quite a return to the conventional fare with which he started the decade: films like the likable Good Will Hunting and the unlikable Finding Forrester.

The film is propulsive and urgent, populated with a slue of engaging characters and tumultuous events. Though the film dedicates considerable time outlining Milk’s arguments and political persuasions, it rarely comes off as oppressively didactic, and certainly not shrill or strident. Milk’s opinions are delivered in rousing and very entertaining platforms such as television talk shows, speeches at both organised rallies and disorganised demonstrations. These opinions are interwoven into the fabric of Milk’s character and they feel organic and natural; we get a sense that these are not mere political persuasions that become habitual through indoctrination, convenience or prejudice but, rather, something absolutely human. This is conveyed not through sentimental appeal, but through the essential likability and charisma of Harvey Milk’s character. This is perhaps the real achievement of the film and lends a sense of necessity and imminence to all of its scenes – the cumulative effect of which is something

quite powerful indeed.

The performances are remarkable, particularly Sean Penn’s (whose magnetic portrayal of Milk completely dispelled my reservations and prejudice about his previous work and overly earnest off-screen presence) but also Josh Brolin in the role of the creepy and awkward Dan White, and Diego Luna as the tragic Jack Lira. The direction throughout is restrained but equally impressive.

There is considerable suspense generated in a number of scenes by providing contrast to the scenes of infectious jubilance. While, as previously mentioned, it is less visually distinctive and audacious than his other efforts, the look and feel of 1970s San Francisco is confidently and idiosyncratically evoked without any excessive clichés. Particularly compelling to look at is the font Harvey Milk uses in his campaign for supervisor.

It is probable that the film’s relative conventional structure was chosen to appeal to a wider audience, but this structure doesn’t feel imposed but rather appropriate and comfortable.

The plot is not really that “conventional” anyway. While Milk can be recommended as a purely entertaining biopic alone, I suspect that Van Sant reaches further, particularly in its closing scenes, towards a piece of filmmaking that will actually change minds. Artists have been trying this for centuries with mixed results, and while a review cannot definitively categorise it as such, I really feel that Van Sant has been successful on this front; and indeed on every front, with this film. Eoin Rafferty

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Tokyo Sonata

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa

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Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Inowaki Kai

running time

119 minutes

Until recently, the problems of recession-hit Japan were seen by many as rooted in factors specific to that country’s economy, arousing little sympathy from the West. As we move into an unpredictable and possibly bleak future, however, Japan’s experience in coping with life after prosperity could have lessons for us all.

Tokyo Sonata, the 2008 uncertain regarde jury prize winner at Cannes, tells the human story of downsizing and cutbacks. Teruyuki Kagawa plays Ryuhei, an admin. manager of a Tokyo-based firm who loses his job. Faced with the shame and indignity of unemployment, Ryuhei decides to keep this secret from his family. This lack of communication, coupled with the pressures from a society that values honour and privacy above all, quickly leads to tragic consequences.

His wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) and two sons have no explanation for their father’s erratic, and often violent behaviour, in particular his vehement opposition to his youngest child Kenji (Inowaki Kai) taking piano lessons.

What could have been a turgid family drama is lifted by a finely balanced storyline that develops each of the characters and gives the actors a chance to shine, especially Inowaki Kai as the precocious and thoughtful Kenji. Kagawa’s performance allows us to sympathize with Ryuhei throughout, even when the pressures of lying to his family cause him to act out in brutal and hypocritical ways.

The film also features several great moments of black comedy, in particular

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a scene in which Ryuhei goes for dinner at the house of his friend and fellow faker Kurosu. In an effort to keep up the pretence of employment, Kurosu sets his phone to ring every fifteen minutes, and when this happens over dinner his somewhat awkward line “I can’t believe it’s another work-related call at this hour” clearly fails to convince his silent and troubled spouse.

The direction of Kiyoshi Kurosawa also deserves credit, as despite being unrelated to his namesake Akira, his subtle use of shots to inform the audience rather than dialogue or performance evokes the more meditative work of the Seven Samurai director. From the hypnotic opening image of rain spilling through an open door to the tragic sight of men in smart business attire queuing for free food, the best parts of the film are the little moments often removed from the main storyline.

In fact, when film attempts to exact real heart-wrenching drama through plot twists, it feels forced and unbelievable. The eventual breakdown of the family feels a little too orchestrated, with only the performances carrying you through a midsection that makes little sense. It recovers by the final scene, with a moving moment of parental pride in spite of personal shame. Avoiding gushing sentimentality, the film provides no easy answers to the family’s problems, but instead ends on a hopeful note: that even if we fail ourselves, we may yet help others. Given the world we’ll all soon be graduating into, it may be helpful to keep this in mind. Michael Armstrong

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