TN2 09-10 issue 1

TN2 Astronaut to artist: the life of Alan Bean

Music Femi Kuti

Books Claire Kilroy

TN2

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His and hers

tn2’s relationship advice column This week’s topic:

Casual Sex He says…

L

adies, you’ve all met the type. He’s sensitive, he’s actually read those books on his shelf, he’s really into Wes Anderson films, and you know, he’s just not that into casual sex. He wants a Proper Relationship. All the time. Hell, he might even be saving himself just for you.

Unless this guy is the Lord Mayor of Lame, don’t believe a word. We LOVE casual sex. It’s great fun, it beats the hell out of the gym, and it’s way more satisfying than a night on the razz with your mates. Plus, no hangover! While a regular arrangement generally leads to better sex, it’s a difficult feat to pull off, and the consequences for both partners of an ill-fated fling can be pretty catastrophic. Having got it disastrously wrong a fair few times, I suggest the following handy guidelines.

Firstly, set the right tone. There’s no harm in being unromantic if all you’re after is a shag. Some people are on the lookout for meaningful relationships, and fair play to them, but you shouldn’t feel guilty if you and your lady friend never get the urge to become a couple. This doesn’t mean if you do develop strong feelings for her you should hide them, and try to preserve the casual status quo for fear of scaring her off. She’ll know when you’re not being honest, Women Always Do. So just make the effort, whatever you’re after. Either show her you’d like what you two have to become something more, or make damn sure the sex is simply far too good to miss out on.

Secondly, avoid the date trap. This occurs after a few sessions, when one of you bows to convention and suggests dinner, meeting up for lunch, or worst of all, the ultimate date of death: the cinema. There’s no way you can win that one. Cinema seats are designed to make fun-in-the-dark as uncomfortable as possible, just take a look around the next time you’re at the movies. See all those guys with their arms around their sweethearts, smiling that little richtus grin every time she looks up?

They’re in agony, and are all secretly praying their dead arm will be worth it later on. For all of you looking to take the casual route, its even more of a disaster zone, as in addition to providing manpadding (or putting up with it), chances are the film will contain at least one scene of gushing emotionality, and it’ll make the two of you feel more fake and uncomfortable than any fumbled attempt at intermission intimacy ever could.

Finally, if there’s no way to avoid the date, make it foreplay. Invite her over, cook her a meal (freshers can just order something in, there’ll be less chance of your night of passion relying on a decent stock of Pepto-Bismol), stick on a DVD and cuddle up.

Choose wisely (Secretary is the mood you’re after, not American Psycho), be charming, and if after all that, your fuddybuddy still wants to have the Where Is This Going Chat, don’t be afraid to reply “Nowhere, thankfully” or a more diplomatic equivalent.

At least you’ll be honest, and can face them with a clear conscience next time you cross paths. Happy humping!

She says…

C

asual Sex? Without Complications? Ha! We all know about the college experience: getting out on your own in the world, discovering what you want to do with your life, meeting an unbelievable amount of people, getting a bit tipsy (a lot tipsy) and scoring the hottest guy in class or a complete random, and bringing him home… and then, of course, the casual sex.

There’s a lot to consider. Remembering condoms, knowing whereabouts you’ve ended up, ensuring that you’re not with a crazy psycho-killer, and that’s all before stumbling into bed and learning to really communicate: “Ooh I like that… no, no, not like that… down a bit… up a bit… um, can we do this?

Eh, I’m not doing that!”

It can be great fun with a stranger that you’re never going to see again, but it’s likely that they’re not going to be too bothered about making it the best night of your life. Much worse is the guy that you’re going to have to face the next day on the bus from Halls, or in class, or at every Society night out for the next four years. He’ll be under more pressure to make a good impression, but even with that there’s the issue of having to face him after seeing each other naked and, best case scenario, having had at least one round of scorching, screaming, sweaty sex.

Then there’s the guessing game of how interested is he in a repeat performance, or a date – and that’s combined with your own feelings on the matter – while all this time you’ll be plagued by doubts of your performance and wondering what he’s thinking about you.

Casual sex doesn’t seem so casual now, does it? It never is, because who wants to sleep with someone that they don’t even like? The likelihood is that you’re more likely to fall into bed with someone you find attractive, and can have a chat and a cig with afterwards. That’s when the feelings develop and someone gets set up for hurt, but with no comeback, because after all, you both knew it was just casual sex, right?

Say it does all work out though, you’re both being open and honest, and no-one is revealed as being secretly in love with/developing feelings for/wanting more from the other, and everything is going great. One day one of you is going to meet someone that they do like enough to date, and when that day comes, it’s a dead cert that the other will have base feelings of jealousy, attachment, anger and sadness when they’re told that well, frankly, there’s someone else who the other person would rather sleep with, thank you very much. And that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “and they lived happily ever after,” now does it?

Send your questions, comments and topic suggestions to hisandhers@trinitynews.ie

abstrusegoose.com

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TN2

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Niall O’Brien talks to Claire Kilroy Femi Kuti

Favourite albums

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Internet music

B-sides

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This year’s films

Profile: Maggie Gyllenhaal

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The recession

The Booker prize

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Irish art history

The Golden Ratio

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Graphic novels

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Theresa Ryan puts Alan Bean in perspective

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Anna Wintour

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Autumn/Winter ‘09

Fresher’s fashion

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Breathing Corpses reviewed Yeats on stage

The Rivals at the Abbey

Dublin food guide

Green eating

Reviews

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Friends, freshers, and the rest of ye, Hello and welcome to another year aboard the good ship TN2. With the ship’s last captain, Hughbeard the Pirate, stranded somewhere off the cost of Japan, I’ve taken the helm with salty vigour and a barrel load of other assorted nautical double entendres. Yo-ho!

Anyway, this year we’ve jettisoned that rubbish calendar thing with the names and whatnot, and sexed up our opening page with the His and Hers relationship advice column. Feel free to contact them about anything , they’ll keep everything they tackle this year, however dodgy, nice and anonymous.

Elsewhere in this fine edition, our in-house art expert Theresa Ryan had a chat with the only artist ever to transcend the boundaries of our world in a rocket ship (!): former astronaut Alan Bean. Meanwhile, supremo fashionistas Patrice Murphy and Ana Kinsella took a look at what will be big this season and where to shop as a poorly student to get stuff wot looks like it, while our Books Editor Niall O’Brien nabbed an interview with Claire Kilroy, whose new novel centers around a writing class in our very own Trinity College! I wonder if we get a mention…

For you first years out there, I congratulate you on being able to read at any stage during Freshers’ Week, and good luck grabbing all the freebies in front square. Once the Pot Noodles run out, our culinaire extraordinaire Kara Furr has a food reviews section tailored to fit your needs, focusing on excellent eateries near to Trinity Hall. With starvation averted, the rest of the wonderful TN2 staff have you covered from what to go see this fortnight to which new albums are worth checking out, and pretty much everything in between. So if I can offer a small piece of advice, it’s this: relax, have fun, try to remember names, and don’t worry. I’m here three years and I still feel new.

Oh and try not to trip on the cobblestones. It makes you look like a dick.

Love and muffins,

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Outside...

This Wednesday (the 23rd) Boy-and-girl duo Joe Gideon and the Shark bring their stomping blues to Crawdaddy. Just don’t mention the White Stripes.

This Thursday (the 24th) Guiness fans rejoice as Calvin Harris, The Kooks, Republic of Loose, Sugababes, Razorlight and many more acts come to town to celebrate Arthur’s Day. Next Saturday (the 3rd) Peter, Bjorn and John play Tripod. Apparently they have way better songs than that one with all the whistling.

TN2

Issue One

Inside...

Michael TN2 editor tn2@trinitynews.ie

Online... www.trinitynews.ie/tn2 Check out our website for our weekly blog, an exclusive look at the most fashion-conscious freshers, a look back on the summer in film, and our brand new podcast, Talking Eds, brought to you by the lovely people at Trinity FM 3

Local girl makes good In the run up to the recent Mountains to Sea literary festival, novelist and former Trinity student Claire Kilroy took some time out to chat to Niall O’Brien

T

he Duke pub is the haunt of many a Trinity student, graduate and occasional professor, but today, I’m not here to socialise. I’m here to meet novelist Claire Kilroy, but with only a google image to go on my initial search for the young author does not go well. I order a whiskey for something to do and grow a little nervous.

After checking upstairs, I descend once more to find her seated alone at one of the tables, carefully sipping the tea in front of her and looking every inch the dignified, relaxed and organised writer.

I must have walked right past her in my agitation. In contrast to Kilroy’s composure, I place my glass of whiskey down on the table, offer my hand by way of an awkward introduction and, once seated, begin fumbling through my notes. As I search for a pen, Kilroy smiles kindly and asks “Do you want me to speak slowly?”

Pen retrieved, I’m ready to listen, expecting to hear the life story of a young Irish novelist completely secure in her art and looking forward to future success. As it turns out I’m somewhat mistaken.

Born and raised in Howth, Dublin, Kilroy insists that she became a professional novelist very much by chance.

The author of three novels (her first, All Summer, was extremely well received and won the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), she took a FÁS course in Film after graduation, in lieu of embarking on 4

any pre-decided career. She then became a storywriter on the Irish televison drama Ballykissangel, nourishing a lifelong interest in writing. She maintains that she would have remained in this career had it not been for one particular co-worker.

She doesn’t dwell on this apart from musing that “it’s strange how the attitude of one person can push you to do something else completely”. Whatever the personal reasons that motivated her departure from writing for the small screen, Kilroy was spurred on to write her first draft of All Summer in a few months and, armed with this draft, left her job, bound for the Oscar Wilde Centre.

Indeed, not much time passes before we begin discussing our mutual alma mater, Trinity. Kilroy studied English at Trinity in 1991 and has fond memories of the college. Like many Freshmen, she remembers being absolutely overwhelmed by the college on arrival, but quickly fell in love with the place. She considers her time here to be one of the most (if not the most) formative experiences of her life.

Her latest novel, All Names Have Been Changed, centers on a creative writing class in Trinity in 1985. I enquired how she had gone about researching for the novel, expecting to hear stories of eavesdropping on the creative writing classes in the Oscar Wilde Centre, revisiting the lecture theatres to imbibe the atmosphere once again or walking around the environs of the college musing about lit-

erature and life with Brendan Kennelly.

In the event, none of the above proved to be the case. “I checked a few facts,” Kilroy responds, “[and] that was about it.” Of course, she was able to draw from real life experience for the creative writing classroom aspect of the novel. Kilroy began her M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity in 1999 and, while an undergraduate, participated in the English department’s Writer Fellow program. For the latter, her teacher was none other than poet Michael Longley. I ventured to ask whether the character of Patrick Glynn (her fictional, greatly revered, somewhat stereotypical alcoholic Irish writer) in All Names Have Been Changed was based on any particular Irish literary figure; many would match the description. “Partially

observed, partially imagined,” she replies good-humouredly. She does admit that she drew inspiration from the atmosphere and excitement of Michael Longley’s classes, something she has never forgotten.

All Names Have Been Changed has received mixed reviews from critics. While Kilroy’s previous two novels had more of a thriller or mystery aspect to them, her latest novel is lacking in this area. Some have even asserted that there is no distinct plot running through the novel at all. I was curious to know whether this was a conscious departure for Kilroy in her writing or was this novel intended as some sort of homage to Trinity itself.

“I suppose it was to some extent a deliberate move away from what I’d written before. I’ve never minded my novels being referred to as ‘literary thrillers’, but I was becoming worried about being labelled a crime writer. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it’s just not what I’m trying to do.” She pauses for a moment. “But more than paying an homage to Trinity, I would say that it is more

“This book is a move away from what I’ve written before. I’ve never minded my novels being referenced as ‘literary thrillers,’ but I was worried about being labelled a crime writer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not what I’m trying to do” TN2

an homage to the Irish literary tradition, of which Trinity of course is an intrinsic part.” The Irish literary tradition, I quickly learn, is something Kilroy feels very passionate about. She began All Names Have Been Changed in 2006 “when the boom appeared a permanent condition.” She seems to believes that in some ways economic success was to the detriment of Ireland’s literary tradition, a time when people only cared about wealth and superfluity. So, she began a work to venerate this apparently moribund tradition.

Kilroy set the book against the harsh backdrop of the 1980s because she felt that this was an economic climate she could better understand, one not as alien and chaotic to her as that of the Celtic Tiger era.

In the middle of our discussion, we are

“Something would come to me, an odd image, a sentence, even just a word.

Then it would all start coming.

Like a chemical burst” interrupted by another Irish writer; none other than John Boyne, award winning author of such books as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Boyne and Kilroy are good friends and had arranged to meet after the interview. His arrival fittingly sparks a discussion on the practice of novel writing, specifically Kilroy’s. It’s refreshing that in spite of Kilroy’s success as one of Ireland’s rising, young novelists, she remains humble and honest about her skills as a writer. She often alludes to feelings of insecurity, and times when she has felt that she just didn’t have it in her to write anymore.

“The whole thing about writing is doubt”, she explains. I am encouraged (as I’m sure other young writers will be) to hear such a frank expression of vulnerability from a writer who has found such success.

“I never just have a fully-formed idea to begin with like John.” For her, writing is all about exploration of one or more notions or impressions.

“Something would come to me, an odd image, a sentence, even just a word. Then it would all start coming. Like a chemical burst.” She begins to relate to me how she came upon the idea for her second novel, Tenderwire. She was very much surprised by the success of her debut, and was having a great amount of difficulty composing her follow-up novel.

After almost accepting that she didn’t have a second novel in her, Kilroy began to learn the violin. From this came the inspiration for Tenderwire, a novel about TN2

a violinist who suffers from an attack of nerves while she is performing. Few things seem to motivate Kilroy as much as art does and she eagerly relates to me how art and art forms are represented in all her novels.

Suitably for a writer who clings to such obscure and tenuous impressions as inspiration for her novels, Kilroy appears fascinated by the idea of chaos. She insists that all of her three novels have a common structure. “In all my novels, there is a sense of things building up and then... chaos!” Yet, from my initial observations of this calm and together writer, I would not have considered this to be the case. Like many, Kilroy seems to regard the modern world and today’s society as above all a chaotic place; a world hard to fathom and assess. She adds wistfully that she sees her role as a writer as “engaging directly with chaos.” There is something almost Miltonic about how much the idea of chaos appeals to her, she seems to almost lose herself completely in the concept. I feel sure that this is an idea that Kilroy is sure to return to and explore in subsequent novels.

Of the future, we don’t talk as much.

Possibly because we are both in agreement that it is all a voyage of discovery; of trial and error (Claire says that Beckett’s infamous phrase ‘Try again, fail again, fail better’ has become almost a daily maxim for her). Kilroy is presently writing her fourth novel, but has no idea what it’s all about or what form it will take. “Right now, it is about a man giving an account at the tribunals and looking back at the boom. That all I’ve got.” That’s certainly all she’s willing to give away. But having discussed so intricately her inspiration, her interests and her methods in writing, I’m very curious to know what’s behind this idea. Is this novel her quest to understand the boom period? Is she endeavouring to bring some order to the chaos Ireland now finds itself in? Or will Kilroy, as she has done before, change the focus of the novel completely between now and then? Unfortunately, I and everyone else has some time to wait before finding out. “I only publish one novel every three years,” Kilroy comments. I ask if that makes each one feel like an enormous feat. “Indeed, with the time frame and the amount I invest into them, it feels like each one is a university degree”. She pauses before adding jokingly, “A degree from UCD, that is.”

I leave the Duke with a positive impression of Claire Kilroy (before I do take my leave, she makes sure to ask me about myself and my own objectives, and offers some kind advice). A pleasant afternoon spent in the company of two great writers couldn’t help but make me feel less apprehensive about the future, especially when it’s clear that they both still encounter challenges and insecurity in what they do day-to-day.

Getting inspired by chaos, and working through doubt has clearly served Claire well in the past and there is every indication that it will serve her well in the future. Like anything that’s hard to do, writing requires perserverence as well as talent. Thankfully, for Claire Kilroy, all she needs to do is stick with it.

The books of Claire Kilroy All Summer (2004) Claire Kilroy’s debut novel All Summer is a literary thriller set in the outskirts of Dublin and the west of Ireland.Through a complex structure and engagingly adept character development, Kilroy’s intriguing novel explores themes of identity and appearance, engaging the reader while keeping them mystified as to how the story will resolve itself.

Tenderwire (2006) Her follow-up to All Summer tells the story of a young musician’s obsession with a mysterious old violin. Swapping continents to set the story in New York City, Tenderwire’s delicate heroine Eva collapses after her debut solo performance, igniting a haunting tale of love, paranoia and jealousy in a world where she is never quite sure who to trust.

All names have been changed (2006) Long before the Celtic Tiger began to roar, Dublin in the 1980s was a hotbed of heroin addictiction and crime.

Set against this bleak backdrop, Claire Kilroy’s latest novel explores the lives of a small group of mature students on a writing course at Trinity, who become dangerously obsessed with their tutor, a notorious writer.

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For The Record:

Like father, like son

Pink Moon Nick Drake Released in 1971, Pink Moon was Nick

Drake’s third and final album. It took only four hours to record, and the master tapes lay on a receptionist’s desk over a weekend before they were discovered. Drake had placed them on the desk and walked out of the Island Records offices without saying a word. Compared with the richly orchestrated Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1970) Pink Moon is sparse. It has Drake’s voice, his guitar, and some piano. It is also short: the eleven tracks run to under 28 minutes. None of Drake’s records sold well in his lifetime. Only when the title track of Pink Moon featured on a Volkswagen advert in the late 90s did his records shift in any great numbers. In fact, more sold in the month after the commercial’s release than in the previous thirty years. That track, the first on the album, with its sweet melody, warm guitar, and soft breathy voice, has the soothing quality of a lullaby.

But a pink moon – a blood red moon - is an omen of death: “None of you stand so tall, pink moon gonna get you all.” When certain death becomes a comfort, you know something is up. In 1974 Drake fatally overdosed on amitriptyline, a prescribed anti-depressant. What is clear is that the record is a distillation of sadness whose purity is unrivalled in all of popular music.

I last listened to Pink Moon over a year ago, during a time of personal upheaval, and because of this I was reluctant to listen to it again. It’s no secret that people write sad things to make other people feel the same, but the purpose of this music cannot be just to induce misery in others, or most people would avoid it.

Our searching teenage years give us a need to have our swooning melodramas explained by someone more intelligent and more talented, and that never fully goes away. Pink Moon provides that. You might feel bad immediately, but having felt low and understood why, you can better appreciate the fine things in life.

Matthew Dobson

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Fresh from his performance at the Galway Arts Festival, Femi Kuti took some time out to chat to Mark Dutchi Lye

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escribed by Rolling Stone magazine as a “maestro of dance, rhythm and melody,” Femi Kuti, son to Fela Kuti, has a lot to live up to. His father is credited as the creator of “AfroBeat”, a genre that has swept the globe, revolutionised musical structure and, in Fela’s case, provided a way to comment on the political context of his native Nigeria. Femi Kuti has followed in his father’s footsteps by showing a strong commitment to social and political causes through his career. Bearing this in mind, the organizers of this year’s Galway Arts festival had their eyes and ears open musically, artistically, and politically when they booked him to perform.

I found Mr. Femi Kuti pleasant, realistic and yet casual. “So…is that, your recorder, working properly? 1, 2, 1, 2,” and he bangs the ground, checking the sound levels. I reassure him that the levels are moving, and it’s working fine. But he’s still worried about it, and I’m suddenly struck by the genuine concern shown by Femi Kuti towards me. He speaks like an older brother or uncle.

Our conversation at this point moves swiftly to music. Kuti has undoubtedly inherited his father’s musical genius; I wanted to find out how his own music is influenced by his father, Fela.

“For me, growing up as a boy, his music was very unique. As a teenager, I listened to so many funk artists and music, pop, but my father’s music was always so different. I think it was because it was very truthful and it was really down to earth.”

Considering these influences, I probed him on his new album Day By Day, on its more varied sound and perhaps altered musical direction, and on why the message remains. When asked about the album’s title, he replied that “it seems to me that everyone wants peace; not only in the world, but also within themselves.

We struggle with it, we pray for it, we work hard for it, all this despite corruption, greed, war, world problems, and bad government. We work for it every day of our lives, day by day… every day.”

It was quite clear that this album takes a different direction musically, but one track in particular touches on the subject of the roots of Afro-Beat, namely “Do You Know”. I asked him what the thought behind this track was.

“A lot of the young people in Africa don’t seem to know much about people like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker and it’s a shame. If it weren’t for those people there, I would not be here today. I mean, my father listened to James Brown and Miles Davis; these people made Fela! In their later years, they in fact listened to my own father’s music!”

Since he’s brought up the subject, I comment on how easily some people forget where they come from. If these people hadn’t revolutionised music, if they hadn’t made a stand, despite all the problems they faced at that time, there wouldn’t have been a future for music. “There would be no Femi Kuti!” he exclaims.

I decided to get right to it, and discuss the socio-political messages which his

music carries. What about the current state of world affairs, financially, politically and morally? His verdict is simply that the world is corrupt, and this stems from colonisation by and integration with Europe and America. “They knew we would have a recession one day! Who suffers during the recession? It’s not the rich, it’s not the people who started the recession, it’s not the bankers who buy yachts and houses all over the world. It’s the ordinary person.”

It’s clear to me that his views on many subjects seem to be governed by a very simple “right and wrong” mentality. If something is wrong, it’s wrong, if it’s right, it’s right; a very logical, sensible thought process. I know Femi is a keen critic of African governments and has continued his family’s history of political activism in Nigeria. He laments that in a country like Nigeria, which has so much oil, good schools and healthcare can’t be provided. “We can provide nothing for our people. Common electricity! After 40 years they can’t give any part of the country electricity, and some places, not even water!”

After such socio-political discussions and consideration of roots and heritage, I wonder whether he has a message for the students of Trinity.

“It’s very important to be self aware and independent. Be original, but at the same time make sacrifices. Care for people within the community, share knowledge, set an example. Challenge the norm if it brings no peace, justice and equality; don’t follow blindly like an idiot, a moron.”

Before I leave, I give Femi Kuti something I’m sure he’s never come across before; it’s a flag of the four provinces of Ireland. As I unfold and present it to him, a remarkably humble and down to earth man, he smiles broadly and says “I will go and put it in my shrine, I will frame it.”

TN2

A brave new world Karl McDonald tells us how best to appreciate the vast panoply of music the Internet has to offer

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e’re not in Kansas anymore. The music industry as we know it is terminally ill and trundling awkwardly to its death, sitting in a nursing home filled with gold records for manufactured pop and recounting stories featuring words like “monetize” and “synergy” to anyone who’ll listen. Nobody’s listening though.

Just look around you. How far do you think you are from the nearest laptop? Is there wi-fi where you’re sitting? What’s on your iPod right now? Did you rip it from a CD, or did you get it from the Internet? If your friend recommends a band to you, how long do you think it will take you to find their music: minutes or hours? For better or worse, the Internet has utterly changed the way in which music is found, heard and shared. This is bad news for industry suits, and perhaps more depressingly, for bands itching to quit their day jobs, but it’s a fact of life. Here’s how to use it to your advantage.

Last.fm is a website that calculates the play count of music you listen to on your computer or on your iPod. Your profile page displays charts for various time periods, from a week to a year and beyond, to your most played artists of all-time. Apart from sating any desire you might have for hard data about what your

own habits are, it recommends music based on what you’ve listened to, and also notifies you of gigs in your area by your favourite artists.

Spotify is yet to be launched in Ireland, so finding a proxy site and signing up to it by back channels is of course wholly discouraged. However, for British, Spanish, French or Scandinavian natives amongst our readership, it is a quite genuinely revolutionary step in the history of music distribution. Acting as a sort of all-encompassing iTunes library, Spotify will (legally) stream almost four million tracks seamlessly without ever needing to download anything more than the application itself. Just search and click. You can share playlists, collaborate on them with friends and link other users to any song in the archive. But most importantly, with minimal effort, you can listen to anything, anywhere, at any time. You’ll get lazy, doubtless, but with a near complete archive of human musical endeavour at your fingertips, the biggest problem you’ll have is simply where to start.

That’s where blogs come in. The general consensus is that the rise of blogs democratised the taste-making process, taking the power away from traditional dinosaurs such as the NME and Rolling Stone and vesting it firmly in the hands

of the Average Music Fan. To a certain extent, that’s true, but in real terms, there are only a handful of sites and blogs from which coolness and hype flow. Most of the rest are small fry; that’s not to say that they’re not worth following, but in terms of heft, sheer weight in numbers means that not every blogger can be important.

Pitchfork.com is muchmaligned, but its writing is generally excellent and its influence in terms of making and breaking indie bands internationally is very real.

Other monolithic tastemakers include Stereogum and Gorilla vs.

Bear. In Ireland, Nialler9 champions new indie, electronica and hip-hop on a daily basis, and he also contributes to the now online-only State Magazine.

Jim Carroll’s “On The Record” on irishtimes.com provides the relevant news and a comments section where everyone from promoters and artists themselves to the internet’s most repugnant trolls have been spotted.

The Hype Machine aggregates the mp3s posted in hundreds of music blogs, and with its “Most Blogged Artists” tag cloud, it’s quick and easy to discover what others are talking about.

The internet being as vast and labyrin-

thine as it is, there’s no way this humble article could ever be comprehensive. In fact, with the speed that things are moving at these days, this article could be completely obsolete in a week’s time. But that’s the beauty of it. The physical music industry is ailing in the face of the unstoppable march of progress, and the ball’s back in our court.

The only issue we face now is too much choice. Sucks to be us, doesn’t it?

Take a walk on the B-side Verity Simpson looks back at B-sides, and ponders their future in a digital age

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ow I’ll admit, I used to think the B-side was dead, that the iTunes generation had rendered pointless the production of a single designed to provide more value for your money.

The singles I had experience of had provided scant material in the defence of B-sides, as they were more often than not just a poor remix of what you’d already bought.

You might think that the B-side belongs to the realm of the “muso”, those people so desperately cool it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they’ve memorised every B-side ever made, so that when some kooky DJ drops it into his latest mix, they can give you a knowing look and shout above the racket “well, this is old school!”

Put those thoughts aside. You probably don’t even realise that many of your favourite songs are B-sides. Let’s look back to the fifties. It seems an age ago, and may still belong to the realm of the TN2

“muso”, but it’s really where we have to start to get the point of the B-side at all.

With the commercial introduction of vinyl records, the concept of the “single” completely changed. Previously any doublesided record wouldn’t necessarily have an A-side that was more important than its B-side, it would merely be a record to play at random, if you will. Although double-sided “hits” continued into the fifties, the A-side soon became the track to be promoted. With the advent of albums and their increasing popularity, space and sales, the B-side became even less significant. Cassettes and CDs furthered the decline of the B-side, regressing towards bonus tracks, and the custom capability of the Internet severed the bundled collection of any release.

That’s the decline and fall; now for the empirical legacy. David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” obscured “Queen Bitch”, The Smiths only decided that “How Soon Is Now?” was worthy of a single release in its own right a year after it was made

to masquerade as a B-side. Kraftwerk’s number one single “The Model” was originally a B-side, though rarely can people remember what to. Oasis almost lost “Acquiesce”, but no band has run the risk as much as the Beatles. They really were the masters of B-sides, releasing “Rarities”, a collection of their best; but even that was only originally released in a box set, then re-released alone a year later. B-side albums are often equally, or even more, successful than mainstream releases, for example Oasis’ The Masterplan and Smashing Pumpkins’ Pisces Iscariot.

So why have a B-side at all if a band is just going to decide to re-release it as an A-side? The most obvious one is to make more money, enticing customers with more bang for their buck; but in less mercenary terms, one would hope that artistic intent plays its part, either because the band had a great track they wanted to release but which didn’t stylistically fit in with the rest of their album, or because they wanted to be able to perform something a bit different at their gigs.

While it is often their cult popularity that pushes them into the open, there are too many B-sides to mention that

shouldn’t have made even the second cut. How do we consider the value of the B-side when those that are acclaimed are subsequently co-opted to collective albums or re-released as singles or double A-sides? Can they survive on their own merit on the musical underside of history, or do they have to be corrected and claimed by the mainstream? Practically, they are a thing of the past now, as digial technology has wiped out their physical form. But whether their passing should be mourned or celebrated depends on the individual, and their own personal experience with the ones that didn’t make t h e f inal cut.

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One to watch Becky Long takes a look at what’s coming up this year in cinemas

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ilm, just like fashion trends and weather, is affected by the change of season, and autumn can be a strange time for movies. After the heady days of summer with its big budget blockbusters and sun-drenched coming of age flicks, autumn can seem a little dull. Has anyone ever heard of an autumn blockbuster?

And unless you’re American and get to enjoy the wonderful foody goodness of Thanksgiving it’s not the best season for holidays either. Even Halloween movies have lost their flare over the last few years. So now that autumn’s here - and really there’s no denying it anymore - is there anything for the discerning film buff to pin their cinematic hopes on? Of course there is! Because autumn is the season for adult movies, and by that I mean films designed to make you think, not the dodgy kind. The kids are back in school, the adults are busy daydreaming about next summer’s two weeks holidays and college students are collectively wondering why everyone isn’t a college student in these recessional times. Therefore, is this not the perfect time for the self-respecting cinephile to head to the cinema? Yes, yes it is because autumn this year is about to present us with some gems.

Like for example the new Pixar movie Up which is set to brighten up the rainy days of mid October. Ed Asner, Balloons, and Pixar? Honestly what more could you

want when it’s dark at 5 o’clock? It is important to keep smiling in October so one doesn’t depress oneself or those around you and Up looks set to keep those seasonal blues at bay.

From the director of the Ocean’s series comes The Informant, Matt Damon stars as an Ivy League professor who became the highest-ranking executive in U.S. history to turn whistleblower. Billed as a darkly comic mixture between A Beautiful Mind and The Insider the main thing that strikes you from the trailer is Damon’s hair. It is set in the 90’s after all.

Ricky Gervais decides honesty simply isn’t the best policy in The Invention of Lying, which hits screens on the 2nd of October. Trying his hand at a vaguely religious satire Gervais asks us to imagine a world where no one can lie and everyone is expected to be able to handle the truth.

Until his protagonist comes along that is. During the trailer he announces that this is the greatest movie ever made… although he could just be lying.

If tantric sex, firewalking and other equally esoteric experiences are your bag then you should check out Three Miles North of Molkom, where four unlikely heroes stumble towards enlightenment in the lakeside forests of Sweden.

An American hippy, a Swedish celebrity, a Finnish granny and a cynical Australian rugby coach who insists he’s stumbled on

the wrong party embark on an emotional roller coaster that promises some genuine laugh out loud moments.

But now for the serious films of which there will be many I assure you, not least the eagerly anticipated Peter Jackson take on Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones.

There is also the winner of the Audience Choice award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. An Education stars Carey Mulligan as a bright young thing who has her sights set on academic fulfillment in Oxford, only to be distracted by a whirlwind romance with the (much) older Peter Sarsgaard. A coming of age story which promises to be a cut above the rest, Lone Scherfig’s film features an allstar cast including Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson and Rosamund Pike. And you can’t get much more serious than a young schoolgirl’s journey from adolescence

to sophisticated young ladyhood.

One senses a tarnished reputation on the horizon.

In a similar vein Cracks (which sounds like a badly named porn film) explores themes such as teacher/pupil infatuation, adolescent bullying and emotional cruelty. I told you autumn was the season of serious movies. Starring Eva Green, the film focuses on the close-knit relationships between pupils in a strict boarding school in the 1930s and their swimming instructor, the mysterious yet alluring Miss G. Reading like the love child of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Mona Lisa Smile, Cracks (which still sounds distasteful no matter how many times I say it) explores the dangers of illicit fascination and the corruption of young female minds. Serious stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

All in all, autumn promises both comedy and drama in equal measure. Certainly enough to keep the bad-weather-andhuge-workload blues at bay.

CLOSE UP: Maggie Gyllenhall

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aggie Gyllenhaal’s desire for roles that challenge people to question their lives is certainly interesting when we look back at her early career: her first six movies (Waterland, A Dangerous Woman, Shattered Mind, The Patron Saint of Liar, Homegrown and Resurrection) were directed by her father, the Emmy award-winning Stephen Gyllenhaal. It seems that as Gyllenhaal attempted to make a name for herself in the early nineties, she lacked the confidence to progress beyond the closely-knit and relatively secure circle of her father’s world. Indeed, Gyllenhaal also starred alongside her younger brother, the more ubiquitous Jake Gyllenhaal, in Waterland and the aptly titled Homegrown, as well in the 2001 indie favourite Donnie Darko.

It wasn’t until Steven Shainberg’s risqué BDSM romantic comedy, Secretary, that Gyllenhaal started to take on more challenging projects; work, that as she

8

said, was transgressive and unconventional. Hesitant initially, she claimed that, as a self-professed feminist, she could not reconcile the fact that the part called for sexual submission and subservience to James Spader’s character, something she was just not prepared to do. After an intense discussion with Shainberg about the character, she eventually acquiesced – much to her good fortune, for she picked up the Best Actress accolade at several major American film awards.

Having avoided the heavy commercialism perhaps more obviously constitutive of “tinseltown”, Gyllenhaal is now best known for choosing provocative and quirky dramas, though she did take on Katie Holmes’ role for the second of Christopher Nolan’s hugely successful Batman franchise. Not afraid of grafting, however, she followed this up in early 2009 with a supporting role in the indie rom-com Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes.

Gyllenhaal certainly does embel-

lish her small role and makes use of her limited screen-timem, but her function within the film is obscure. Apart from her biting commentary on gender lines and sexual roles and expectations, she is merely a tool to bolster the structurally indispensable leads John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph.

This particular type of “wacky” character is non-relatable and reductive – for both male and female actors, but it is primarily the latter that are boxed off and characterised as the vacant and non-communicable “stupid hippies” of romantic comedies. Such roles hardly (in Gyllenhaal’s words) “move the world forward”, nor do they fit with her predilection for the transgressive.

This does suggest, however, that despite the naïve aspirations of young actors and actresses, success – or at least employment – often means distinguishing one’s ideologies from one’s expectations.

Ian Kinane

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After the Goldrush

Cillian Murphy delves into Charles R. Morris’ new book on the recession to discover where it all went wrong

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o quote Joan Didion: “Some real things have happened lately. For a while we felt rich and then we didn’t.”

She was writing about the 1983 American economy, but the sentiment could equally apply to Ireland’s current situation. This February, The New York Times published statistics that crystallized the scale of our part in the global recession. If someone had invested $100 into the stocks of leading market indexes of major countries at the end of 2007, they would have $53 if living in the United States. In Ireland, you’d be lucky to have retained a quarter. The stark reality of these statistics has become apparent to every Irish person over the past six months. Whether it arrived suddenly, as in the case of the unemployed (12.2% in July ‘09); or more obliquely, as in the case of this year’s college freshmen being warned that they may soon face the burden of university fees, everywhere there is discontent, unease, guilt and spendthrift. Things we took for granted are now perceived as elitist.

Blame, too, is ubiquitous. For some, the fault lies solely with the banks. For others, it’s a government failure. Tánaiste Mary Coughlan acknowledged this during the fall-out resulting from revelations at Anglo Irish Bank.

“People want heads on plates,” she said.

“But we have to be careful. We are a democracy, after all.” We have, in other words, to keep moving. But instead of

Paper Cuts The Booker Prize

High profile prizes awarded to individual

works in the arts are often met with the criticism of too readily rewarding innovation or eccentricity at the theoretical expense of more conventional offerings.

Happily, however, the Man Booker Prize TN2

looking forward, perhaps it is time to understand that this financial collapse has a context, a history owing to decisions made through our behaviour and the behaviour of our banks and governments.

As our newfound wealth began to unravel, calls to examine where it all went wrong quicky transformed into partisan rhetoric. Reading Central Bank’s 2008 annual report, Labour Party finance spokesperson Joan Burton could see only that it “highlights once again the depth of the economic hole that Fianna Fáil has gotten us into.”

She could not see, for instance, what George Soros could see early on in his investment career, as documented by Charles R. Morris in his new book called, The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets. Soros could see that it takes the wilful myopia of many to create a bubble: “Boom-and-bust cycles almost always involve credit, and normally don’t get underway in the absence of fundamental misperceptions about credit. Lenders misperceive the creditworthiness of borrowers, or the future value of assets like houses. As they increase their lending, asset prices rise, confirming their original conviction, so they increase their lending even further, even as their success draws in even more lenders, until a full boomand-bust cycle ensues.”

Everyone is complicit in this cycle.

Soros’ tremendous skill lies in his ability to predict when these markets are goremains unimpressed by this deluded mindset of encouraging progressive or creative thought in the arts. This year’s jurists, selected from diverse fields ranging from “terrible British journalism” to “terrible British historical journalism”, have ensured that the bovine, the painfully topical and the gloriously self-indulgent are all well represented in this year’s annual celebration of veiled anglocentrism.

Mercifully acknowledging the fact that most works of fiction published in the UK each year are written with an eye to negotiating a deal with the BBC to adapt their lazy works into unwatchable television, the increasingly ubiquitous “novel set in the sensationalised past” finds itself with a powerful presence on this year’s longlist. While some might suggest that rewarding the further proliferation of novels about, let’s say, deaf adolescent girls wearing uncomfortable footwear in rural sixteenth century Italy (books that primarily operate as lavishly decorated yet poorly-veiled post-feminist pornography) with nominations for

ing to collapse (Ten thousand dollars invested with Soros in 1969 would have risen to $43 million by 2000).

H o w e v e r, we cannot predicate the succes s and failure of the Irish economy on a successful and timely exit from the bubbles of the future. We have proven ourselves totally unable to fathom what the future might hold. As such, a new era of common sense and regulation must take hold. The possible disadvantages that a model like this could pose, such as inflation, have come to pass anyway as bailouts and VAT increases, brought in to save the monetarist model from collapse.

In The Sages, Buffett suggests that a stern real estate regulation which requires everyone to put down twenty percent and make sure that the payments are no more than a third of their income would have the disadvantage of denying the “guy with a five percent down payment” a house. Well, too bad.

Such measures would ensure that a real estate bust would never occur on this scale again.

Caution is a common theme in Paul Volcker’s speeches, which Morris gives in fastidious detail:

“ Watch out for imbalances. Choose moderate growth over fast growth – it lasts longer, and it doesn’t end in catastrophe. Beware of economists who believe in their models. Have faith in markets, but don’t trust Wall Street. Never rely on advice from people who get rich by risking other people’s money.”

Buffett practices something similar with his investments; he hates “window dressing” and believes you can only create wealth by building companies. He also dislikes PR of any sort. As Ireland struggle to emerge from economic disaster, one wonders whether minds are thinking about how to build a sustainable economy, or do we all just want to feel rich again?

enormously prestigious prizes is to the detriment of the medium. It behoves such critics to consider the other offerings this year’s longlist provides.

JM Coetzee is flying the “sort of ethnic sounding” flag yet again for this annual exercise in white middle class British stupor with the third part of his fictionalised memoir. More perambulatory than he has managed to be in quite some years, Summertime assaults the senses with an explosion of beige self-indulgence and unimaginative prose, akin to watching an accountant purposefully consume a bag of unsalted rice crackers.

Elsewhere, William Trevor has written the same novel he has been writ-

ing for the past two hundred years and may finally win a major prize for it. The remarkable absence of any substantive deviation from bourgeois convention in his prose over an extraordinarily lengthy career will probably stand to him.

Happily, however, the jury excluded him on the shortlist in favour of rewarding astonishingly less interesting British authors whose bland works will appear better when namedropped on English daytime television or topical news chat shows.

In any case, I can’t wait to buy whichever book wins and then not bother to read it, like everyone else.

Michael Healy

“Summertime assaults the senses with an explosion of selfindulgence,akin to watching an accountant purposefully consume a bag of unsalted rice crackers. “ 9

Past as Prologue

Today art has a key place in Ireland’s culture, but this was not always the case, as Theresa Ryan discovers in the first part of an investigation into Ireland’s art history Art in Ireland holds a curious position; in the past century, a rise in the interest of art has peaked and the future seems more promising for art than ever before.

But what about before the 20th century?

The Saorstat Eireann Official Handbook was published in 1932. Here’s what it had to say about Irish art up to that time: “The Free State has not yet been established for a sufficient time to redeem the promise of those Irish artists who, in the eighth century, won for their country a pre-eminence in illuminated manuscripts and precious metal work over all the other nations of Europe. The intervening dark ages of turmoil and misery effectively prevented the development of a distinctively Irish School of Fine Art.” Towards the close of the eighteenth century, a period of comparative social and economic liberty produced a brief spell of artistic endeavour. Fine private houses and public buildings were erected in profusion. Irish glass, silverware and cabinetwork of the time still excite the admiration and the cupidity of collectors. But they are valued more for their technical excellence and rarity than for their national character or their aesthetic charm. The models that inspired their makers were too often foreign to the traditions of the country and with the fall of the Irish Parliament, the opportunity to integrate foreign practices with national ideals faded away for more than a century. Pictorial art in Ireland suffered in the same way, and from the same causes. There were plenty of painters of Irish birth at the outset of the nineteenth century, whose talents were first discovered and fostered in their native land, but almost all of them were driven abroad in the endeavour to find adequate reward and reputation for their talent.

Such prominent ‘British’ artists include George Barrett, one of the founders of the Royal Academy and the most famous

A self-portrait of Sir William Orpen

landscape painter of his day, Nathaniel Hone, a well-known portrait artist, and James Barry, the first professor of Painting in the Royal Academy. Those who could afford to ply their trade in Dublin had usually achieved some degree of fame in England or Europe beforehand.

Included in this category was Hugh Douglas Hamilton and William Cuming, the first president of the Royal Hibernian Society.

The Saorstat Eireann handbook states

The Golden Ratio Juliette Aristides’ book Classical Paint-

ing Atelier discusses the discovery of the Golden Ratio by Pythagoras, who plucked a string tightened at both ends: “Yet in a few places a remarkable physical phenomenon occurred- the clear and pleasing ringing of a musical tone. The new tones were created at the one half, two thirds and three quarters divisions of the string when measuring the string from right to left. When meas10

that “The foundation of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1821 gave rise to hopes which have not yet come to fulfilment, though such brilliant painters as Nathaniel Hone the younger, Walter Osborne and William Orpen have more than justified its existence.” Today these artists remain well established in the foundry of Irish art.

Opened in 1864, The National Gallery contains Dutch and Flemish paintings, including Rembrandt, Hals, Steen, Ru-

uring the string from left to right, however, these tones are created at the one quarter, one third and one half divisions.

“These pleasing tones are called “harmonics” or “musicial root harmonies”.

They are the result of the string taking a new physical form called a sinusoidal wave when it is pressed at the one half, two thirds and three quarter division points.

“We now refer to these key positions along the string as the ‘octave’, the ‘perfect fifth’ and the ‘perfect fourth’ respectively.”

“Curiously, the same ratios that are

ysdael and Rubens. These were acquired primarily by Henry Doyle, the second Director of the Gallery who showed foresight at a time when such paintings were not held in as high a regard as they are today. It was he who bought, in 1883, for five hundred and fourteen pounds, the Rembrandt landscape ‘Shepherds reposing at night’ which attracted so much attention at the Dutch exhibition in Burlington house in 1929. Sir Hugh Lane, after whom Trinity’s very own Hugh Lane Gallery is named, was also the Director of the National Gallery. His office was brief, being only nine months before his unfortunate death aboard the Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1915. He obtained for the Gallery many French, Italian and Spanish paintings, including Titian, Goya and Poussin, some works by Monet, Renoir and Daumier, and English works by Gainsborough and Hogarth.

With the event of Lane’s death, however, a flaw in his will allowed many of these pieces to claimed by England.

The Tate gallery acquired Lane’s Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Daumier. The dispute was not resolved until 1959 but part of the collection is now on permanent loan to the Hugh Lane Gallery and other works rotate between London and Dublin every few years.

Our fine country sadly lacked the influence of pictorial arts on the general culture, but craftsmanship was more widely known and appreciated. The Misses Yeats (sisters of W.B and J.B Yeats) were a well known printing company. Also well known was the “Tower of Glass” (An Tur Gloine) about which every Leaving Certificate Art History student will have heard.

Purser and Hone were members of this guild, as was Harry Clarke, whose work is currently on show in the National Gallery.

Saorstat Eireann concludes; “Signs are not wanting to show that the Irish people recognise their backwardness in these respects and are resolved to advance.”

So how did Ireland’s relationship with art change after independence? This will be explored in the next issue, as we track the development of art from the 1930s to the present day.

pleasing to our ears provide pleasing intervals to our eyes. Throughout history, master artists have used the harmonic

“Throughout history, artists have used the harmonic ratios that were discovered by Pythagoras.”

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Don’t Call Them Comics Theresa Ryan investigates the world of graphic novels, and finds that the stories they tell are surprisingly profound

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he medium of graphic novels has changed a great deal in the past twenty years. Usually when one mentions graphic novels, the response classes graphic novels with Marvel comics or with the type of books classically associated with acne-ridden teenage boys. The aim of this article is to show that this certainly isn’t the case and also to convince you that graphic novels occupy a place worthy of being classified as literature.

Graphic novels aren’t syndicated comics, nor are they a collection of comics.

They are literary novels, albeit in a graphic format. They perform a function not unlike photojournalism - the artist/writer wants to put across a very specific vision which, while hinted at in literature, is more fully expressed through both written and visual media. The old cliché that “A picture is worth a thousand words” is nowhere truer than in the medium of the graphic novel. Here, we can see the world through the artists’ eyes as he or she shows us what they want us to see.

It’s as close as you can get to living their life while looking over their shoulder. For this reason the graphic novel is curiously suited to geopolitical novels, travelogues and historical comment, a trend we shall see as we take a look at the best graphic novelists of our time.

Guy Delisle Delisle is a French-Canadian animator who often travels to Asia for work His novels are fascinating in their mix between showing daily life in Asia, showing his experiences as a foreigner in a strange land, the customs and practices in the cities he visits and some thoughtful comments on the governmental regimes, particularly in Pyongyang. While reading his novels, there is a curious feeling of situational comedy, not unlike the film Lost in Translation. He shows little vignettes of life and doesn’t spare us the boring bits. The juxtaposition of the curious and

ratios discovered by Pythagoras.”

This ratio is also known as the Golden Ratio or pi (3.14 relates the radius of a circle to its perimeter) and was shown

by Leonardo da Vinci to relate the different parts of human anatomy in TN2

the menial bring us a more fully rounded vision of his experiences and makes us feel, in a way, that we are there beside him, thinking his thoughts and walking in his shoes. Delisle has written novels from Shenzhen, Pyongyang and, most recently, Myanmar (Burma).

Joe Sacco Sacco’s work is centred on modern warzones - Bosnia and Palestine. His work is extraordinary because he actually goes out there himself, talks to the people he meets there and records everything in the graphic novel format. You see what he sees and you can go where the cameras can’t. He meets people who are at the front line in these areas, people whose lives are risked on a daily basis and have very emotional and personal thoughts involving the wars which, for most people, are but a bare headline in the daily newspapers. Needless to say, it makes for a fascinating read, particularly for those of us who are interested in current affairs. Sacco’s select bibliography includes Palestine and Safe Area Goražde.

Art Spiegelman Spiegelman inhabits a bit of a grey area: probably the best known of the authors here, his books are the most hard-hitting, dealing as they do with the holocaust through the eyes of Spiegelman’s father.

Growing up as the son of a Holocaust survivor, Spiegelman lived with the ghosts of the concentration camps and, as an adult started to tell his father’s story through his pen. His book MAUS is divided into two, the first published in 1986 (”My Father Bleeds History”) with the second following in 1991 (”And Here My Troubles Began”).

It’s hard to describe the impact of the novel. Written as it is in a graphic format, we see the horrors first hand and in a much more personal way than through

the Vitruvian Man. The Golden Ratio has also been shown to hold true for the spacing of nodes along a tree branch and the curve of a snail’s shell. But if music can be described, even only in part, by mathematics and composition likewise, could we not do that

Hollywood films, which tend to rely on research separate from the filmmaker’s experience. Spiegelman’s novel is straight from the horse’s mouth.

His curious decision to represent the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice, nonNazi Germans as pigs (which can be either on your side or against, depending on the situation and the individual), beside the obvious meanings, also somewhat depersonalizes the story. This allows you to enter the shoes of the authors and live the story through the novel. While horrifying at times and somewhat sentimental at others, it never fails to hold your interest until the very end.

Spiegelman is widely regarded as the Dickens of the graphic novel world and has won the Pulitzer prize for MAUS. If you’re going to read it (and I recommend you do), get the 2-in-1 anthology.

Marjane Satrapi Satrapi is the author of Persepolis, an autobiography of growing up in Persia (Iran). While recently adapted into an animated feature, the novel is a thousand times better – the movie does not do it justice in the least.

The novel begins in a relatively peaceful Iran and chronicles its devolution into the maelstrom we know today. Satrapi moves from Iran to Switzerland where she feels homesick for her homeland and ends up walking the streets, then we follow her home to Iran, where she feels de-

with colour? Theoretically for the Golden Ratio to hold up, the colours should relate to each other along the electromagnetic spectrum in the same ratio - a whole, two thirds and one third.

Recently I tested this theory on two pieces, a work by Bouguereau, known for his mastery of colour, and another by Da Vinci, the most famous painting of all time, the Mona Lisa.

In the Mona Lisa, the main two colours picked from this painting were indeed at one and two thirds of the spectrum, and a similar pattern could be found in

tached and uncertain, having grown up between two cultures and unsure which she prefers. The regime shapes her life, even down to having her theme park proposals rejected because the goddesses are unveiled. Her adolescence is marked by having seen death at a young age and she grows up quickly, not having anyone to confide in. We see her tuberculosis in Vienna and her marriage back in Iran and the progress of the ‘revolution’ in Iran continually in the background. Readers come away understanding the culture and the regime in Iran much more having seen them through Satrapi’s eyes.

Simone Lia Lia is an upcoming author, publishing quirky books which, while not having the same tone as the others in this list, are a fun and fast read if you have a spare hour or so.

Her first novel, Fluffy follows a bachelor who has a ’son’ Fluffy, who happens to be a rabbit. He’s about three years old and the novel shows him finally understanding that he’s a rabbit (not a human). While it sounds like the stuff of candyfloss, it provides a front to explain his ‘daddy’s’ complex personal life as he goes to visit his own parents in Sicily.

The characters are so true to life, it makes Fluffy’s existence as a rabbit absurd and wonderful in a rather surreal way, which is as it should be. A wild card on this list, it certainly is a lot of fun.

Bouguereau’s The Birth of Venus.

Now, these are only two paintings and there are far, far more that we could analyze in the same way to see whether this holds true in general, but is interesting how we could use this result to find colours that “go” together, by simply picking two random colours to represent 0 and 1, and finding the colour that is two thirds along the spectrum between them.

The resulting colour combinations are so suited to one another that they have been used for centuries.

Theresa Ryan 11

The Man Who Saw The World

Former Astronaut Alan Bean spoke to Theresa Ryan about his life, his artwork and being one of the few people to step foot on the moon

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his year marks 40 years since the Apollo landings on the moon. While the world reeled from the great leap for mankind, Alan Bean was making his own unique mark upon the world.

Starting out as a navy test pilot, Bean was handpicked for the Apollo missions where he achieved his dream of putting foot upon the dusty lunar soil. After winning the accolade of being the fourth man on the moon on the Apollo 12 mission, Bean then went up for another 59-day stint in space on the Skylab. When he retired from NASA, Bean took up an unlikely second career; the fine arts.

His work boasts the unique position of being the only paintings in the world which include lunar dust and fragments of his spacesuit. They are currently being exhibited at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He’s also on the cutting edge of technology today with a website: www.alanbeangallery.com, as fascinating collection of artwork and personal stories about his time as an astronaut.

For the past twenty-eight years, Bean has been busy at work in his studio, but he very kindly took time out of his day to share his experiences with us as the first artist on another world. The phone rang in Houston, Texas on a warm summers’ day and Alan Bean betrayed his military training by complimenting me on my punctuality. We began by talking about his current projects.

“I’m working on a painting over here that’s called The Spirit of Apollo. There’s Neil and Buzz moving across the lunar surface towards the viewer, Neil is on the left and he’s carrying the American flag because that’s the country that got there. Buzz is on the right and he’s got a golden olive branch as a symbol saying we came in peace all that time and behind them there’s the Earth, very large, larger than it would really appear and I think its 12 gonna be a really nice painting when its

Alan Bean in his Houston home studio

finished. I’m looking at it now, thinking it needs work! But it’s gonna be pretty when it’s finished.”

He tells us he’s been working on it since last year - while working on a painting, one has to examine every last detail in the piece - the wrinkles in the suits, the positioning - and continually make decisions. He is adamant that his pieces aren’t meant to be like photos - they resemble what happened, but are heavily coloured by his experiences as a NASA astronaut. He starts out by building little models - as he talks to us, he is looking at an eleven-inch-high model of one of the old Apollos. He compares the models

with the sketches he makes, then compares the model against real life and his memory, modifies the model to improve it, makes more sketches. In this way it takes about three paintings to get it looking right. He says that’s the best way to get the shadows accurate.

“There are just too many parts to a spacesuit to try to imagine them all.

You really need a model and I can’t just go back to the moon! That would be the best thing, [but] you need a model and a light just like the moon that has the same shine, that’s what works for me, and I haven’t found any better way.”

Looking at Bean’s work, one of the

primary differences between ‘landscape painting’ on the moon and on earth is the unusual lighting conditions produced by the proximity of the moon to the sun.

How accurate is his memory of the light after all these years?

“I think it’s good enough. I look at the videos and photos all the time and I look at it and I’ll say “I remember it being lighter than that”. That’s never the problem, though. The problem is taking a white suit and making it look like Neil and Buzz are right there. It’s obviously a white suit but when I look at it, it has greens, reds, violets blues, purples. How do you do that? It’s very hard to TN2 do, I’m

telling you. I couldn’t do that when I first left NASA.” He chuckles when he tells us that you “gotta learn something in twenty-eight years”. His life has changed radically from being a navy test pilot, to a NASA astronaut to his current career as an artist.

How do these careers differ? “Art is different to engineering, if it looks right, it is right. Untrue for engineering for sure.”

That’s one of the luxuries of being an artist - you get to choose what to use, what to say with your work. ‘That’s exactly right! And you don’t have to convince anybody else either. You just have to say this is what I like and if people like it, then they do, and if they don’t then I guess they don’t.’

We ask him what the spirit is behind his work and, indirectly, the spirit behind the Apollo missions. “I could figure it out in words, because we said it all the time, but for the image of it - I couldn’t find a way, so that is one of the reasons it was difficult to do. But I think it’s good, it’s as good as I can do. Maybe some other artist will do it better some day, but I won’t.”

He gives credit to Professor Lotzmann, a friend from Germany, in helping him come up with concepts for his paintings.

After finishing each painting, he writes a short story to go with it. “Lots of the people on the earth now were not alive when we did this, so I’ve tried to preserve what we did in those paintings, because what we did is the same thing humans will do, when we go back or go to Mars. It was a case of ‘Go there, it’s a new world,’ go there and see what it can tell us about our world and see if there’s anything there that can improve life in our world. That’s what it’s all about, us humans here trying to make the world a better place for the future.” He wants to help future generations understand what they tried to do as astronauts, with this great adventure. Bean tells me what he wants to leave behind.

“It’s like leaving a hopefully, beautiful, digestible documentation of one of the great human inventions. I often say ‘Don’t we wish that Magellan had taken an artist with him around the world?’ Maybe it’s equally important or more important as the centuries unfold, with humans leaving the earth. They will look at this and read it and they can say ‘You know, when we go back to the moon or we go to Mars, those guys did pretty good, but we’re gonna do it even better,’ and that’s, I think, the story of history.”

Bean has broken new barriers with his double life. He tells of times when young people - or their mothers - told him that they too aspire to be both an astronaut TN2

and an artist.

“I think if this art is becomes known as I hope it will be, it will make people realise that you need both your left and right brain. You need both of those halves of yourself to have a really wonderful life.

I think one of the main reasons that my life is special is I have used a lot of my left brain, which kept me alive as a pilot

“It’s like leaving a hopefully beautiful, digestible documentation of one of the great human inventions.” and maybe a good astronaut.” Did he ever combine the two? As an astronaut in the Skylab for 59 days, did he make sketches for future reference?

“No, it was a good possibility, but I am a single minded person, one success I’ve had in my life, I get by that way. To be successful, I had to use all my brainpower on that one subject. When I was going to the moon, that was all I thought about, I never thought about my art one single time.

Or in the Sky lab I never thought of art. I never said ‘Gee, I wish I made a sketch of this’, or anything like that. My mind was on trying to be a great astronaut, and then it was only when I got back, well next I worked as a back up space craft commander, I spent my time trying to be a great astronaut for that. So, right now I’m trying to be a good artist. So I don’t think about being an astronaut much except for telling stories.”

When Bean was a test pilot in the Navy, he achieved his dream of flying all the airplanes the navy had. Having that dream satisfied, this other idea of being an artist just “popped up”. He tells us he was always more interested in the visual side of things than the other people he was with. This led to his being enrolled in night school while being in the Navy, in draughtsmanship and watercolour classes. He soon found out that it was “very difficult and in fact [he] could not do the things [he] wanted to do…[He] was not skilled enough.”

“For example, I was having difficulties with little astronauts in the background and things like that, so I went to a fellow that did fantasy art. He did a lot of

little fairies and gargoyles and animals and people, things like that. [The] little astronauts were so little and I was doing it with light brush strokes, you know. But no way, you still have to paint every part of that little astronaut with the same detail as you would the big one. Once I got that in my head, I quit taking shortcuts and hoping that if it’s one third the size, I can do one third the brush strokes.”

“There’s no training for artists where the path is laid out like when you want to learn to drive a car or an airplane. You can go to art school but when you graduate you’re gonna have a general education; that will not let you compete with the real world.”

“What happens is, when you first start out in art, anyone can teach you ‘cause you don’t know squat. Then after a number of years, longer than you’d think, you begin to say, I want to paint more like that guy…[in my case, it was] Howard Terpning, so I went to a couple of his workshops and tried to emulate him.”

Later, when he was painting in Nashville and wondering whether or not to leave NASA, “to leave the greatest job in the world, I thought, which has got me trained to use a space shuttle,” he realized that this was something that had been a part of him all along - he sewed the curtains in his first apartment and chose his first car for its beauty rather than for its engineering precision.

“Then I realised that there were a lot of young men or women who could fly a shuttle as good as I could or better, but there was none of the twelve of us who walked on the moon that was interested in doing these paintings and I said I could make a more valuable contribution to future generations doing this and if I hadn’t done this, these paintings wouldn’t exist and many of these stories wouldn’t exist.”

Who has inspired the only artist to walk on another world? He isn’t part of the big commercial art scene, because it just doesn’t fit what he does. “Well I’m a colour guy, so paintings that appeal to me have to have beautiful colour, Monet was and still is my favourite painter. Now, I couldn’t paint [like Monet] to tell stories, because most of Monet’s paintings do not tell stories. So I had to then look over to somebody like Remington and Russell that told the stories of the Old West.” Bean names Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church and Howard Terpning as inspirations in that they told people who couldn’t go there what the Old West was like. In a similar way, Bean is sharing the memories and feelings of the lunar surface with the earth-bound.

He tells us that he had to be more realistic than he initially wanted to be in order to tell the story behind the works without distracting the viewer with his technique. “That’s just part of anything when you start out, you’ve probably had to do a lot of things in your life that you didn’t want to do when you imagine what your life was like, I know I did. I am as impressionistic as I can be.”

Bean considers the colours to be the hardest part of painting. “If I look at an art book, I can tell the skill level of an artist really quickly by, not the drawing, cause everybody can pretty much draw, but how they harmonise the colours.”

We ask him what he thinks of the way NASA put forward the Apollo Missions as a piece of iconography which has influenced the culture of the times. He thinks they have done a very good job.

He acknowledges that his work couldn’t be used for NASA. “It just wouldn’t connect with the im-

“What happens is, when you first start out in art, anyone can teach you ‘cause you don’t know squat.” age of a government agency being precise and technical and all that, people like [my work], but I would never recommend that they use the Spirit of Apollo in a technical manner. It just doesn’t explain what NASA does.”

Bean has been painting for the past 28 years and has completed 170 paintings.

He used to wish that fairies would come in or elves (“You know, that old story?”) or maybe Monet would drop by to work on his paintings. Unfortunately, he jokes, Monet died in ’25 so he’s had to struggle along with all the other artists. Monet did 170 paintings or more in a year- “There’s a big different between Alan Bean and Monet or Terpning!”

As we finish our conversation and Bean goes back to his work, it’s tempting to wonder about his place in Art History.

One thing is for sure - there will never be anyone else who can challenge his place as the first artist to make the famous “giant leap.”

Alan Bean’s artwork, and the companion story pieces can be seen at www.alanbeangallery.com 13

An Icy Wintour?

Patrice Murphy wonders what the critically-acclaimed documentary The September Issue can tell us about the true nature of the queen of fashion

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ilm and television have for years been influenced by history, by novels, by inspirational artists and real life stories. Although the wardrobe department often plays a major role in the production, the world of fashion itself has remained largely secluded between the pages of select magazines, which vie only for the attentions of those who are concerned with fashion, leaving the rest of the world to their ignorance.

Strange then that this summer has seen the release of two films heavily influenced by fashion – Coco Avant Chanel and The September Issue. The former is a story based on the early life of designer Coco Chanel, and is criticised by fashion insiders for its lack of focus on the designer’s work; the simple chic style that has become synonymous with Chanel.

Contrarily, R.J Cutler’s The September Issue has been lapped up both by film critics and those within the fashion industry due to its unprecedented access to the most important woman, magazine and issue in fashion – Anna Wintour, Editor-inChief of U.S. Vogue and its historic 2007 September issue.

The documentary follows Ms. Wintour and her team over an eight-month period, taking in visits to Paris, Rome and 14

London as she oversees the production of US Vogue’s largest issue ever, which weighed in at 840 pages, 727 of them advertising pages, and an arm-wrenching four pounds and nine ounces.

Traditionally, the September issue is the year’s biggest fashion issue, nicknamed “the Bible” and containing “a

personal assistant to Wintour.

That power and influence is such that Vogue editors are able to convince Miuccia Prada to change fabrics, while Wintour herself witheringly informs celebrated designer Oscar de la Renta that one of his designs is “less exciting.”

She barely contains her contempt for a

“Surprisingly, many think that Wintour does come off as quite likeable – hardworking, diligent, nurturing - the kind of boss you’d actually want.” guide to all the trends, collections and must-haves for the coming season.”

Considering the influence of Vogue, this “guide” is more of an unequivocal statement of what the upcoming trends will be rather than a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Cutler has captured and focused on the power that Wintour herself yields (her and Vogue’s influence being effectively synonymous) – that same power which is widely believed to be the inspiration for the novel The Devil Wears Prada, written by Lauren Weisberger, a former

colourless Yves Saint Laurent collection, and is shown in the film as critiquing one of her own editors for the “sameness” of her ideas.

Surprisingly then, many think that Wintour does come off as quite likeable – hardworking, diligent, nurturing - the kind of boss you’d actually want, whilst others are more concerned with the relationship between Wintour and Vogue senior creative director, Grace Coddington, apparently the only individual with whom Wintour will, if not take criticism from, then at least bother to take the

time to argue with.

Indeed, a clash between the two over one photoshoot is described by The New York Post as one of the film’s choicest moments. The same article makes a final analysis that the all-powerful editor of Vogue may be just another girl with Daddy issues, after the film explores her relationship with her journalist father and her sibling’s opinions of her career.

The film’s director has said that his interest was “always in making a movie about Anna Wintour – no second choices or maybes” and in making The September Issue he was attracted to the scope of her influence and the sheer amount of work she gets done each and every day, always staying relevant, trusting her instincts and never looking back.

Yet Cutler has not only presented a psychological portrait of the Queen of Fashion, but a privileged guest-pass to scrutinize the inner workings of the single largest fashion magazine in the world, candid camera sightings of key figures in the world of fashion at their ‘ordinary’ day’s work, an astounding world where everything from Starbucks to limousines to bouquets of flowers and it-bags are written off as necessary expenses.

Whilst fashion enthusiasts and those in the industry will likely already have their film tickets booked and their outfits chosen, this real life story of an inspirational woman and magazine with unprecedented and global influence can be appreciated by anyone. Just don’t wear anything too “colourless” to the screening, will you?

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Fashions come and go, but style lasts forever With September marking the beginning of a new year in fashion, Patrice Murphy gives us her opinions on what’s essential for Autumn/Winter ‘09

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or all you fashion-conscious folks out there, if there is only one trend that you can afford to buy into this season, it must be exaggerated shoulders.

That which was introduced by Balmain in Spring/Summer 09 has been taken over by the extreme styles, such as those epitomised by Roksanda Illinic.

For a gentler take on this trend, try a structured trenchcoat, like those at Karen Walker, or opt for billowing sleeves, but wear with a sleek and fitted bottom, and a belted waist for extra emphasis.

You can also nod to this power-dressing trend by investing in a sharply tailored dinner jacket or blazer, a trend in its own right in the deep sexy blacks at Nina Ricci and Yves Saint Laurent.

And don’t worry boys, this is one trend that we can share together, with C’N’C Costume National sending out one tuxedo jacket, one pinstripe blazer and one leather jacket – just add to your daily jeans for either a hot fashion look, a semi-

Fashion

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Freshers, get out your pens and take note, because Ana Kinsella has all the tips you need to turn heads around college for all the right reasons

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smart, not-trying-too-hard outfit or for simple effortless cool.

Excessively balloon-y and voluminous harem pants take centre stage at Dior. Such perfect sheathes of material clenched at the ankle, which evoke images of lazing on chaises and breezily billowing through Egyptian palaces, are the inspiration for the more wearable styles shown elsewhere on the catwalks.

Noir showed simple black harems tucked into what appears to be black leather legwarmers, whilst Stella McCartney produced a classic black pair of pants, perfect for office-to-bar wear. Chloe’s collection provides gorgeous variations of harems in tweed, in neutral khakis and even in velvet and burnished metals to show a surprisingly pretty side to this baggy trend.

One more must-have for Autumn/ Winter ‘09 are ankle boots, which you probably already have in your closet, as they have been a top trend for at least two years now. Flat and slouchy is still

W

alking through Front Arch for the first time is a daunting experience.

University is an exciting step forward, regardless of whether or not you’re new to Dublin, living in Halls or at home, or if you’ve been in uniform for the last six years or not.

Throwing on something effortlessly stylish for a lecture at 9am on a rainy morning is easy, but it can be done, and over the past two years at Trinity, I’ve picked up a thing or two about getting dressed and shopping as a student in Dublin.

The first thing is to know where to go.

It should be said that Dublin doesn’t offer much in the way of exciting and dynamic fashion and shopping. We’ve got all of the standard high street shops, but outside of these, there are only limited options in terms of boutiques and vintage stores.

A few boutiques to visit near College are Circus, Smock, Indigo & Cloth and Costume, all of which are located around the South William St area.

For vintage, your best bets are Jenny Vander’s on Drury St and The Harlequin on Castle Market, or the plethora of charity shops from Georges St through to Portobello and Rathmines, as well as Capel St, for very cheap second-hand gems.

Dundrum Town Centre also has all the usual high street fare and a quite super Penneys, so it might be worth a trip if

hot, particularly when paired with tights and summer dresses in autumn. For this season, Balmain, Calvin Klein, Prada and Burberry Prorsum showed styles with suede, leather, straps, studs and high heels for a wholly fierce look.

However, for truly brave and dedicated fashion followers, the only height for boots is high – thigh-high.

See the waders at Hussein Chalayan, which will be perfect for that wild Winter weather you know is coming to Dublin.

For loose pirate-style in black, gold or red, see Vivienne Westwood Red Label, or channel Cheryl Tweedy in Roberto Cavalli’s spray-on are-they-boots-orare-they-tights.

The ever-reliable Topshop have covered both bases with the awesome “Ashish” animal-print ankle-boots-likehooves, and the “Britany2” thigh-high tight-fit boot which, in bright blue, scream Pretty Woman and whisper “buy me”.

Unfortunately, for now the blue Britany2s and all Ashish boots are sold out

online, averting a major “Is it too streetwalker?” conundrum but leaving me wistful with a n unfortunate bootshaped whole in this season’s wardrobe.

that’s your thing. A newer and more unusual development is the brilliant and eclectic monthly Dublin Flea Market held in Newmarket Co-op: check out dublinflea. blogspot.com for more details.

Next, you need to figure out what to buy in order to make getting dressed as easy and fun as possible. Personal style and individual taste play a major role here, but there are some essential pieces which will make getting dressed a whole lot easier. These include good-quality basics like tank tops, t-shirts, a simple black dress for going out, a cute blazer or oversized cardigan, leggings, boots, a good durable bag and a warm coat.

I love a well-cut trenchcoat with great big lapels, and these are generally ten-apenny in the likes of Topshop and Zara at this time of year. Bags can be trickier.

You need something big enough to carry books and perhaps a laptop, as well as essentials like a wallet, make-up, bottle of water and whatever else you like to cart around. Tote bags or stylish backpacks work great for this, Check out American Apparel for plain-coloured versions or Urban Outfitters for something a little funkier. Whatever you buy, make sure that it’s durable and that you like it, as a good bag will stand the test of time.

If you’re on a tight budget, it’s better to spend the cash on the right bag and coat instead of tons of jewellery and impracti-

cal shoes.

The trick to creating a wardrobe that ensures you’ll never have trouble putting an outfit together is to pack your wardrobe with these good-quality basics and then load up on bright and cheerful accessories such as belts, scarves, hairbands and jewellery. This will ensure that no matter how little time you have in the morning, you’ll be able to throw on a basic outfit, then accessorize to your heart’s content. The right-shaped scarf can be used as a belt, headband for bad hair days or a cute bag accessory. Statement jewellery is always in, especially chunky necklaces and bracelets which liven up the dullest outfit. Skinny belts can be worn at the waist with comfy oversized shirts and t-shirts for a more stylish alternative to hoodies and trackies. I’m fiercely against the wearing of pyjama-esque clothes to college, especially when there are easy ways to dress chic.

But regardless of any sets of rules, tips and dictums laid down by us here at TN2, it’s always important to remember your own personal style. College is a great time to experiment with fashion.

My own picks for the new academic year include plain hoodies from American Apparel, tights in bright colours, a pair of vintage lace-up boots, some cute casual dresses for daytime and some very short skirts for night. Good luck!

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Between life and death Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses tries to ask the big important questions, but Rachel Parker wonders if it succeeds

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safe haven for new writing feed off each other delightfully. Cleverly and experimentation, any- set against a backdrop of overwhelmthing goes in The Project ingly loud noise, murder almost seemed Arts Centre. The centre’s lat- like the favourable option. Although the est production is Breathing next pairing of actors captured well the Corpses, and with a title like that, belly regional and domestic humour of Northlaughter is never going to be an option. ern Ireland, at times I was left to wonder Yet Breathing Corpses not only blurs the whether the actress’s performance was distinction between life and death but intentionally flat, meant to demonstrate between comedy and tragedy, making some aspect of her character, or if it this a reasonably well-rounded and en- was simply poor acting. Unfortutertaining piece to watch despite the nately it was these mistimed heavy subject matter. climaxes and lulls that Written by Laura Wade and performed minimised the lastby The Crooked House Theatre company, ing impact of the final this play’s characters all live in a glorified scene, where death is state of dying. Each character’s death chillingly given a human is linked to the other creating a domino face. effect that gives the play its shape. UnWith its episodic strucnervingly as witnesses to their death the ture and lengthy psychologiaudience too are implicated as victims, cal expositions on the human highlighting that no one is immune to mind, Breathing Corpses does at death’s sting. Yet before their physi- times have the feel of a soap opcal death is actualised we quickly learn era. This is further heightened by the that their internal demise was well un- almost cycloramic movement of the derway. set, which produces a cinematic effect Stuck and stagnant in a dead end job that pushes the play dangerously close (no pun intended), Amy has only fragile to cliché territory. That said each scene pipedreams in her possession. Consumed was wonderfully threaded together and by depression, Ray occupies a space that succeeded in creating a sense of fluidity no one can gain access to despite disman- and shared suffering. Perhaps in trying to tling all of the doors in his house. Kate condense with words something which continuously dances with death as her often defies them, some scenes were fiery and tempestuous rage edges her simply flawed in their premise. Yet this ever closer to the act of murder. There- then begs the question, can you ever fore as the play explores the ripple ef- represent death on stage or should you fect of death on the lives of others it also somehow let death speak for itself? unpacks a range of various other issues As it deals with death in life and life along the way: domestic violence, men- in death, Breathing Corpses is a couratal health and loneliness to name but a geous offering that’s not afraid to ask hard questions: why do we die? And few.

Breathing Corpses is marked and more to the point, what are we living marred by contrast. Much like some of the for? Although as a performance it doesn’t actors’ accents it oscillated from strong generate too many extreme emotions, it to although still good, slightly weak. In a does however prompt thought and it is scene charged with passion and loaded this reflective quality that is one of the Mactivat trinity news ad.qxd 15/9/09 3:08 PM Page 1 with fury Jillian Bradbury and Steve Gunn play’s greatest triumphs.

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A man for our time?

Rachel Parker examines the new oneman production marking the 70th anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s death

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n actor. An audience. A story.

I am of Ireland is certainly not as decorative as its Georgian House setting but it is by no means an underwhelming watch. Presented by the Focus Theatre Company to mark the 70 th anniversary of the passing of W.B. Yeats, the writer and his poems are brought back from the grave in this one-man show featuring Bosco Hogan.

A chronological commentary of his life written and devised by Edward Callan, it easily fills in the gaps if your knowledge on Yeats is a little sketchy.

Casting a fresh and novel light on significant events and works, I am of Ireland enables audiences to “hear as if they have never heard them before” and this has been hailed by Joe Devlin, the artistic director of Focus as one of the winning qualities of this work. Dev-

lin claims that “Yeats has been forgotten but he’s coming back,” and apparently in more ways than one. A writer who once accurately professed the world to be in a state of perpetual flux, Yeats takes a more holistic approach in both his theories and work. On stage, Devlin believes this kind of approach promotes the “unity of being, space, visual, actor and audience that [with the recession], is going to have currency again.” Certainly this new take on Yeats is quite a feat for a figure so long established in the canon and Irish culture he could be mistaken to be as old as Ireland itself.

Amicable, charismatic, humble and candid; as the play progressed Hogan’s version of Yeats was beginning to resemble more and more the kindly old Grandad out of the Werther’s Original adverts. Anecdotes and incidents are recalled and recounted with such fond-

ness and sincerity it is almost impossible to dislike him. With his tender yet colourful approach, Bosco Hogan succeeds in lifting the life and poetry of W.B. Yeats from the page and levering them into the imagination. His delivery of the poetry was particularly masterful, making them comprehensible and most significantly, relevant.

In a sense Hogan’s talent mirrors that of the writer. His performance is poignant, accessible and engaging and he represents with energy and a sense of fun the collective voice, juggling various characters and gently parodying them.

Indeed his ability could almost be said to surpass that of the writer, who as one fellow audience member informed me was himself a terrible orator particularly when it came to reading aloud his own work!

Admittedly yes, I was one of the few members of the audience under the age of forty yet this should not suggest that the works of W.B. Yeats have become outdated or no longer have resonance but that perhaps the younger generation are simply too distracted or dismissive of the past to appreciate them. I am of

Ireland may or may not produce an entirely accurate portrait of this literary figure and it is perhaps a little sedate for younger audiences but this is a carefully crafted play executed with great style and elegance, making this version of history certainly one worth hearing.

I am of Ireland is completing a tour and returns to the Mill Theatre in Dublin on the 6th and 7th of November

with the furniture in the Abbey basement. The performance has the required misogynist Father figure and idiot Mother, with a fine smattering of jokes about how awful it is to be married. a fair rake of idiotic and unreliable servants, and of course a flamboyant closet-homosexual whose high-pitched voice and jolly hijinks tire after his first scene.

However, while I sat on the edge of my seat constantly in fear of the dreaded ‘misplaced letter/mistaken identity’ plot device, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Unlike The School for Scandal, Sheridan’s characters are refreshingly intelligent and direct. Often confronting complications with confidence and

resolve, the vibrant youth of some of the key players kept the scenes watchable, and the story interesting. While in places the piece struggles to get beyond the melodramatic nature of the text, the detached staging, complete with visible anachronisms & clothing rails, prevent the show from sliding into the horror that is ‘period comedy.’

Running until the 19th of September, there are certainly worse shows out there. That said, with the average cost of an Abbey ticket these days, and the up and coming theatre festivals, one can’t help but wonder if there might be performances more worthy of your hard earned pennies.

Reinventing Rivalry Dan Bergin investigates whether the Abbey Theatre’s latest producation is worth splashing out on

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enned by the same author who brought us the eye-gougingly mundane School For Scandal, R.B. Sheridan’s The Rivals is the production currently spending the Arts Council’s money on our National Stage. True to its title, the performance concerns a number of young suitors eagerly seeking the affections of a certain young lady.

Now, several long years of bitter disappointment and self-indulgent naysaying has led to my possessing good healthy hatred of the Abbey Theatre and its shows. Strangely, The Rivals managed to both surprise me and meet my expectations. Originally written in TN2

1775, the show opens with a newly written prologue as written by director Patrick Mason which asks the question “are Georgian plays relevant?” and in the same breath answers: “who cares? Let’s just enjoy the show!”

From that point on we are met with a fusion of Brecht and “by my faith kind sir, you do me a disservice.” The stage design speaks of a backstage space, complete with good-luck cards and make-up mirrors. The lighting gives us a sense of a wide-open studio rehearsal room, complete with iPod carrying disinterested actors. As a counterpoint to this the text presents us with stock characters so old, one can imagine them being stored away

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Snacks in the city Whether you’re new to Dublin or just looking for a new place to try out, Kara Furr takes a look at the best student dining options near College

The Avoca shop on Suffolk Street has both a nice sit-down cafe on the second floor and a food hall the basement. The café is great for a leisurely lunch if you want to have a chat with some friends.

They serve pies, fish, gourmet salads, and the usual cafe fare, but are best known for their afternoon tea, with a multitude of desserts, scones and biscuits to choose from.

The food hall in the basement is for take-away only, but is considerably cheaper than the cafe upstairs. The highlights are the wonderful and interesting sandwiches as well as a great selection of salads. Avoca is a bit pricey, but it is well worth every penny. On the way out don’t forget to grab a Mars Bar Rice Krispie Square; it’s every bit as good as it sounds.

The HalfMoon Crepe Company in Crown Alley, Temple Bar, offers a great alternative to the usual soup and sandwich lunch grind with a large selection of sweet and savoury crepes. While Lemon on Dawson Street also has great crepes and a cool vibe, a quick walk to HalfMoon will probably save you some cash. A tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, HalfMoon offers almost as much selection as Lemon but with a bit less of a strain on the budget. It’s almost never as packed as Lemon often gets, and the staff are quick and friendly. They also sometimes have incredible deals for Trinity Students only. Some favourite crepes are the Chicken Bacon, a massive crepe with chicken, streaky bacon, tomato, lettuce, and mayo; and the Apple Ice, a tasty concoction of spiced stewed apples sandwiched in a crepe and topped with vanilla ice-cream.

Trinity College

Just across the street from Avoca is Nude, a casual healthy restaurant where the food is hearty, simple and organic wherever possible. They have a very nice selection of soups, stews, pasta dishes, wraps, salads and sandwiches at very decent prices for the portions they serve. If you don’t have the time to sit and eat they have a cooler of food to take away such as sushi and pre-made lunch bags. The stews are the best value for what you get and include Beef and Guinness as well as Chicken and Chorizo, and are served with mash. They also have the best smoothies in the area, and while they are far from cheap at around €5, there is loveliness in every slurp. It’s often packed at lunchtime, and with the bench seating, prepare yourself to snug up with a stranger.

Eating green Any seasoned college student can tell you what happens to your body after eating beans on toast and beer for a few weeks. Beyond that, by now we all know about the global effects of our eating habits: unfair wages, deforestation, carbon emissions, and endangered species are just the tip of the rapidly shrinking iceberg.

Eating food that’s good for you and doesn’t exploit other people or the planet will make you feel (and look) better.

Here are the first two steps:

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1. Get down on the food chain Meat is energy inefficient, and the main reason for tropical deforestation worldwide, which contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than the entire international transport sector. It’s also really expensive, and excess consumption has been linked to a higher risk of many cancers. Leave meat out a few dinners a week, and instead try, for example, roast veg with quinoa, a nutty pseudo-grain from the Andes now widely available in Dublin’s health food stores. It’s very high in protein, iron and B-vitamins, and is cooked just like rice.

maps.google.com

The Brewbaker Coffee Shop is perfectly located pretty much equal distance from both the Arts Block and the Hamilton just off Nassau Street, at 22 South Frederick Street. Brewbaker is hugely popular with both students and the business set, which means that it’s consistently busy at lunchtime.

There is a sit-down coffee shop that serves food as well as a take-away option next door. They often have a deal on a soup/sandwich combo, but for speed and convenience you just cannot beat the sandwiches from the take-away area of the shop. The most popular sandwich is the Brewbaker – chicken breast, smoked salmon, iceberg lettuce, and garlic mayo for €4.50, but they also have a good selection of other sandwiches, most of which come in at under €5.

Cornucopia, a vegetarian restaurant located at 19 Wicklow Street, is the ideal lunch nook for a cold, windy day. A short stroll from college, Cornucopia is great for those looking for a healthy option. Their lunch/dinner menu is served from 12-9pm during the week and changes often according to the foods that are in season. While they have many excellent mains, they can be a bit pricier at between €11 and €13. The best meal for the cash-strapped student is without a doubt their soup, which changes daily. Whether it be parsnip and carrot, lentil, or tomato basil, it is always good, but get there fast, because they tend to run out. A small soup plus a slice of their homemade bread weighs in at under a fiver, and is enough to satisfy all but the rugby crowd.

Vegetarian chili, omelets, stir-fry and Mexican fajitas are other easy and filling vegetarian meals that will satisfy your taste buds and your nutrient requirements.

2. Put your money where your mouth is Yes, organic and local food is often more expensive. No, that’s no excuse not to do your best to buy it. And even if you’re pretty near skint, both Lidl and Aldi have organic food lines at very affordable prices, so skip the Button Factory one night a month to cover the extra. Your

dignity and the earth will thank you. For the real deal, though, nothing in Dublin beats the Dublin Food Co-op (off the Coombe, Thursdays noon to 8, Saturdays 9.30 to 4.30). You can be a member for an extra discount, or just walk in and buy produce, eggs and cheese direct from the farmers, while the dry goods section run by Co-op staff has all the staples, as well as beauty and cleaning products. Best of all, it’s run by a group of dedicated people who have already done all the research, while the Co-op model keeps the profit margin as slim as possible. Kasia Mychajlowycz

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Reviews nity New Tri s

am

ce ff

Food & Drink

Ex

I - Excellent II.1 - Good II.2 - Aver age III - Poor N/S - Terri ble

inations O

Name: Monsoon

I

Cuisine: Indian Address: 306 Lower Rathmines Road Phone: 01 491 1666

Located next to Insomnia and across the

street from Tesco is Monsoon, a classy, understated Indian restaurant with quality food. In terms of price and atmosphere, it’s not necessarily a place for dinner with friends, but it’s perfect for date night or the times parents come to visit.

The decoration is simple and elegant, and the colours provide a real suggestion of India, a pleasant change to the kitsch of other Indian restaurants.

Because I am extremely budgetconscious (read: cheap), I don’t usually

Name: Jo’ Burger

II .1

Cuisine: Burger Bar Address: 137 Lower Rathmines Road Phone: 01 491 3731

You cannot go ten paces in Dublin these

days before stubbing your toe against a new ‘posh’ burger place, but since opening, Jo’burger has earned a reputation as being one of the best. When we went it had poured with rain all day, but as the sun came out the window had been propped open, giving a welcoming preview of this restaurant’s easy temper. The atmosphere is vibrant and easy going; comic annuals adorn the shelves while diners sit on robust wooden benches, with trendy music playing into the night.

The menu operates on the choice of

Name: Sweet Basil II.1 Thai

Cuisine: Thai Address: 108 Lower Rathmines Road Phone: 01 497 0000

There’s little to recommend this restaurant at first glance: the sign above the door is written in the sort of “exotic” font that you might see in Sean O’Reilly’s Genuine Chinese Chipper, the large front room is cold and usually empty, and the owner greets you as though you were unwelcome guests tracking mud into his sitting room. But, oddly enough, beyond all these problems is one of the true gems of the Rathmines restaurant scene, where you can have an authentic, generous and above all cheap Thai meal.

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recommend appetizers, but here I would definitely suggest getting at least one to share, because they are in no rush to serve you your main course. This actually sets a great pace for dinner and conversation, and the extra time they take in preparation shows clearly in the quality and presentation of the meal. We decided to splash out and go for the combination appetizer platter for $18.95 with Kastoori Kebab, Potli Samosa, Kadak Sheek Kebab, and Kesari Jheenga. Everything was tasty, but if you are dining on a budget, I would recommend just going for the Kadak Sheek Kebab, a lovely pastry with lamb and peppers. It is tender, flaky and wonderfully flavorful.

For mains we both went with classic sauces. I decided on the Lamb Rogan Josh, a dish whose execution is often extremely variable. Unsurprisingly, here it was done very well. The lamb was so

tender it nearly fell apart on the fork, and the sauce was obviously made on the premises. My dining companion – a vegetarian – had the Saag Aloo, a classic Punjabi dish of potatoes covered in a creamy spinach sauce with a strong garlicky flavour. A quick taste made me envious of her choice of this simple but

remarkably tasty dish.

We blew our wine budget on appetisers, but with such an extensive wine list, a glass or two is certainly worth a try. Overall, Monsoon is without a doubt a good choice for a nice dinner, so much so that it’s worth saving for a truly special occasion. Kara Furr

different combinations, and as a carnivore not wanting to appear too partisan I went for the chickpea, coriander and red pepper veggie burger, compensating for the lack of meat with the ‘Moroka’ style of brie, bacon, and relish. We also chose a ‘Tladi’ beefburger, with smoked applewood cheese, sliced apple and more relish. To accompany we went for two sides: a ‘ruby’ coleslaw, and the obligatory portion of chips.

The beefburger was superb, and besides the pleasing complement of smoky cheese and pieces of apple, it was topped with tart slices of raw red onion and thick slabs of ripe tomato. The burgers were, of course, enormous, and from the other side of the table I can tell you the meat option looked a challenge. The veggie burger, however, was slightly disappointing. The flavors lacked distinction; the mellow starchiness of the chickpeas dominated and there was little of the co-

riander kick I was expecting. The chips were moreish but embarrassingly limp.

Desserts weren’t on offer, as they were changing the menu - probably good fortune, otherwise I would have been coming home in a wheelbarrow.

The few shortcomings in the meal were compensated by the feel of the

place, and on a midweek night we were happily allowed to linger. Our meal, plus two beers, set us back 45 euro. I’d recommend arriving before 6.30, as a burger and an alchoholic beverage or portion of chips costs only 10 euro. Skip the chips, and stick to the booze. It’s the burger you’re there for after all. Emily Odlum

Despite his surly demeanour, the owner was quick to serve us and attentive throughout the meal (although there was always a hint of menace when he approached our table). We ordered from the set menu that offers two courses for €12.50. This is available all the time, and has a remarkable number of choices.

Eventually I opted for the prawn tempura to start, and my companion had the chicken satay. Both were served promptly. My tempura was light and delicious, with the dipping sauce adding just a hint of sweetness. The satay sauce, meanwhile, was thick and aromatic, and lacked that layer of floating grease you’ll often find in Asian restaurants.

Afterwards, my roast duck with tamarind sauce did not disappoint: a generous portion of duck on a bed of pak choi, with the tangy, citrus sauce providing the perfect counterpoint to the richness of the meat. My companion’s red beef

curry looked fantastic, and his reddening face and increasing dependence on gulps of water was a testament to the complex array of spices in the dish. Both mains were served with generous portions of fried rice, and by the time we had finished our mains we had no room for a dessert - though several cheap options

are on offer, including the heart attack in a bowl that is deep fried ice-cream with honey sauce.

All in all, Sweet Basil Thai is a real find, with wonderful food for student-friendly prices. Ignore the decor and the hostility of the owner’s greeting, and you’ll have a great meal here. Kiera Healy 19

Reviews

Books

Name: Love and Summer

II .2

Author: William Trevor Genre: Romance Publisher: Viking

Four times has William Trevor been short-

listed for the Man Booker prize, the last being for The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002.

Recently his new novel Love and Summer failed to get past even the longlist stage, so is this book a step in the wrong direction?

Mrs. Connulty’s funeral welcomes us into the sleepy rural town of Rathmoye, a prominent woman in society who married into a family that “owned half of Rathmoye.” Florian Kilderry, a stranger in town, happens across her funeral and his curiosity leads him to photograph

Name: How To Save The Planet On A Student Budget

II .2

Author: Kate Aydin Genre: Environmental Publisher: Oneworld

I shudder to think what the Kate Aydin

would say as she looked around Freshers’ Week in Trinity. Over the course of these five days, students are likely to accumulate a greater amount of useless pamphlets than notes they will take over the course of the year. We are accosted at stalls with hoodied individuals forcefeeding us plastic pens and attempting to stick nauseatingly-coloured stickers to every visible item of clothing. It is exactly this type of behaviour that Kate Aydin is

Name: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

I

Author: Stieg Larsson Genre: Thriller Publisher: Quercus

When it comes to Sweden I’m fairly hazy.

I know that ABBA are Swedish and that the Swedes make affordable furniture available to all who want it. As a result of this lack of knowledge, any other interaction that I have with Sweden will inevitably draw comparisons either with ABBA or Ikea.

Luckily for me though, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lends itself to both comparisons in equal parts.

Both ABBA and Ikea are extremely suc20

the event, an act that doesn’t go unnoticed and ruffles the feathers of some, not least Mrs. Connulty’s own daughter, Miss Connulty.

Ellie Dillahan is one of those to notice him, but does so without pique. An orphan raised by nuns in Cloonhill, Ellie came to Rathmoye for a post as housekeeper to Mr Dillahan and ended up his wife in a marriage based not on love or land, but politeness. Never having felt real love, Ellie is also curious about the half-Italian Florian and when chance brings them together again, a romance sparks, one all too familiar to Miss Connulty. She seeks to protect Ellie from the dark fate that befell her years ago. So could Miss Connulty be justified in thinking history is repeating itself?

The plot, though compelling, is not without holes – one wonders how Florian, who lives within cycling distance of Rathmoye, is a complete stranger

to the townspeople– and the romance that flourishes between Florian and Ellie seems implausible and poorly developed.

With scant reason – mere sightings and a brief conversation – Ellie asserts she is in love, projecting onto Florian all her childhood fantasies of what love should be (half-Italian, it seems).

More impressive is the complex rapport between Ellie and her husband; their marriage seems to have never quite moved beyond their former relationship as housekeeper and master. Miss Connulty, too, is an intriguing presence in the novel. She wins favour and sympathy when we see her coolly examining her mother’s jewellery, recalling her mother’s cruelty, and later when she shares some hard-won wisdom with Ellie.

Overall, this gentle novel entertained but it failed to wow not only the Booker judges, but this reader as well.

Michael Garvey

hoping to curb with her guide to clean living for the eco-friendly Fresher.

How to Save the Planet on a Student Budget is certainly a well-meaning project. Aydin’s intentions are to change the basic attitudes of university students in order to have an immediate impact on environmental problems and also to foster a healthier relationship between the adults of tomorrow and the world around them. Aydin’s book is well-researched and is comprehensively organised, with her tips handily grouped into student-friendly and relevant chapters such as ‘Eating Out’, ‘Studying’ and ‘Shopping for Essentials’. However, since the book is aimed at the UK market, much of her information regarding government legislation and environmental bodies is irrelevant to any Irish student. Though her organisational skills make the book pleasant and easy reading, Aydin’s writing can be limp at times. The almost constant repetition of the same phrases, along with a generally

stale and outmoded manner of speaking to “average students” or “the youth of today” has the potential to make the guide rather tedious.

Aydin seems to be quite out of touch with how student life operates in reality, presenting some horrifically impractical suggestions, such as: “Ask your friends to only buy wine with real corks if they’re coming to your house for drinks and explain to them why. This will spread the word and hopefully increase the demand for real corks.” Behaving in this way, along with adopting Aydin’s policy of wrapping birthday and Christmas presents in reusable shopping bags in an attempt to convert your friends is an excellent tip for any Freshers wanting to ward off any potential friends. But even aside from that, her tips are mostly impractical and excessive. Aydin’s book provides the occasional valid and workable tip, but on the whole, it is a work best taken with a pinch of salt. Elizabeth Farrelly

cessful not only in their native Sweden but also around the world. So too is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book that has earned many awards and a place across numerous bestseller lists. Its success then is akin to its Swedish pop and furniture siblings.

As a group, ABBA was incredibly successful. The precise and formulated songwriter skills of Benny and Bjorn earned the band universal acclaim and a place in musical history. In many respects Larsson’s writing is similar to that of ABBA’s. His use of the economy of detective fiction allows his prose to be sparse and informative. No detail in the novel is cursory. In fact, the novel is plotted in such a way that each character and event is linked to another in some way.

The twists and turns are often surprising, not to mention delightful. The characters too are intriguing. Rather than relying on tried and true archetypes,

Larsson chooses to employ a rag-tag group of affected modern people as his cast of characters. Of particular interest is Lisbeth Salander, a punky computer hacker who speaks towards the state of Swedish youth and indeed the current state of Internet culture.

The novel thus has a distinct humanity to it, which saves the more grizzly sections from seeming excessive. Not much is left to the imagination as Larsson portrays the modern world as it is: a very scary place. Of particular significance is Larsson’s commitment to the notion that one evil can overcome another. Lisbeth Salander may act in a morally dubious manner, but it is through these actions that cases are solved and justice is done.

Larsson’s world view is fascinating, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo never ceases to amaze. Just like a well made pop song or piece of furniture, in fact.

Luke Maxwell TN2

Reviews

Music

Name: The Blueprint 3

II .2

Artist: Jay-Z Genre: Hip-hop Label: Roc Nation

Alarm

bells ring when any artist releases an album entitled The Blueprint.

It’s hubristic for a musician to set their music on a pedestal above others. But hubris is what hip-hop is all about, that and being the best, and that’s something that Jay-Z has held a solid claim to be for nearly a decade. After all, The Blueprint 3 is part of a series, the third in line after 2001’s triple-platinum-selling The Blueprint and its 2002 follow-up. Since then, Jay-Z has come in and out of retirement, headlined at Glastonbury and played at the inauguration concert of President Obama. It’s fair to say that if anyone can claim to know what the blueprint for a hip-hop album is, it’s Shawn Carter.

It’s a pity then that this album is so unsatisfying. With guests ranging from Rihanna to Luke Steele of electro-pop duo Empires of the Sun, Jay-Z has no material barriers to making whatever music he wants. However, fifteen years on from his debut, it’s not clear that he knows what he’s trying to say. Take the ham-fisted “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)” for example. The song sets its sights on the hip-hop zeitgeist, but with a staid guitar line and none of Jay-Z’s truly cutting lyrics, it comes off as calculated, and, let’s face it pop fans, not half the tune that some of T-Pain and Kanye West’s singles are.

Oh yes, Kanye West. A man whose last album consisted entirely of auto-tuned vocals but who features on The Blueprint 3, one whole song after “D.O.A.” Huh. “Run This Town”, the track with West and Rihanna, is actually quite good. So is much of the album. But the problem, as the man himself calls it on the opening track, is thus: “I don’t run rap no more, I run the map.” Jay-Z’s more important culturally now than he is musically relevant.

The question is whether he’s happy to be resting on his laurels. Karl McDonald

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Name: Humbug

II .2

Artist: Arctic Monkeys Genre: Indie Rock Label: Domino

One of the problems with being a realis-

tic, kitchen sink-style songwriter is that, if you become successful, you’re going to end up removed from the people and places you made your name describing.

This phenomenon scuppered Mike Skinner’s career, as each successive Streets album moved further away from the housing estate stories of his early work.

Morrissey did a little better, taking up character-based songs where personal tales of Mancunian teen woe once stood.

For Alex “you’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham” Turner (now resident in New York), there doesn’t seem to be a problem yet.

The vignettes of the everyday are fading, but you can’t suppress imagination.

From the psychedelic concept jumble of “Potion Approaching” to the hilariously heavy-handed sexual innuendo of “My Propeller“ (“Coax me out my love and have a spin of my propeller”), words are playthings for Turner. Three albums in, he’s earned a rightful place for himself in the pantheon of great British raised eyebrow lyricists.

Does that make Humbug a good album? Sort of. There’s a sense of unease about the music that’s sometimes disconcerting in a good way, but it gets tiring as the record wears on. Josh Homme, chief Queen of the Stone Age, co-produced the album, and though the thumping drums and driving guitars are definitely indigenous to Arctic Monkeys, there’s a sense that there’d be a more elegant album here if the desert rock knob wasn’t turned up so high.

When it works, it can be as immediate as anything the Arctic Monkeys have done before, but overall Humbug is a little too difficult to like. It feels like a stopgap, a signifier of their development as a band, but nothing special on its own.

Karl McDonald

Name: xx

Name: Get Colour

III

Artist: HEALTH Genre: Noise Rock Label: City Slang

Artist: The xx Genre: Indie Rock Label: Young Turks

Like last year’s darlings Glasvegas, the xx

are a couple of black-clad and bequiffed boys and girls whose mission is one of amalgamation – flicking some extra-generic sparks at poor old indie rock to see what lights. But while Glasvegas stuck howling guitars over a doo-wop beat, west Londoners the xx have a passion for contemporary R&B as much as they do The Kills. Other similarities abound, from urban themes to a shared weakness for layered soundscapes – like the Scots’ debut, xx is awash with guitar and synth drones.

Early singles “Basic Space” and “Crystallised” had me interested. There is an endearing naïveté on display, a sprightly two fingers to the more intellectual approach taken by west London contemporaries Burial and Four Tet with regard to sound layering and production. Coming from such a young band, this is not so surprising. The dubby drums and slurred, R&B-inflected vocals sound, at times, spine-tinglingly fresh. It is of such stuff that NME dreams are made. “Crystallised” is the most effective example of their sound the band’s best song. Singers Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim managed to worldly-wise whilst demonstrating a vulnerability that is surprisingly touching.

Unfortunately, the appeal of “Crystallised” is frustratingly unique when compared with the rest of xx, which is narrow musically and lyrically without much ambition. Hammy metaphors of drowning and suffocation abound. The former vulnerability is replaced by an unconvincing jadedness, dull rehashes of the same broken relationship/repressive city life parallel. Youth may well not be on the side of the xx – a little maturity could inject them with those vital ingredients that are sadly absent from this debut.

Darragh McCabe

I

It ’s

striking that a band making what is essentially loud, experimental music would decide to name their album Get Color. Colour is what you associate with pop music - catchy and accessible to everybody. HEALTH tick none of those boxes. They’re danceable, yes, but it’s the kind of post-apocalyptic dancing you do to music that uses peals of feedback as its melodic hook. So why Get Color? Why not Get Black? Get Dark? Darkness seems, on the surface, like HEALTH’s forte. Built over an intense drum beat, “Nice Girls” approximates a particularly dead-eyed version of Liars, and the robotic sound of “Death+” is as ear numbing as industrial noise can get.

The lyrics are never audible, But that’s part of the charm. Because the songs aren’t so much narratively about things as they are complete auditory experiences, as pretentious as that sounds. You can describe something to someone with as many words as can muster and they’ll still translate it back into a picture in their heads. It’s better to show them. That’s what HEALTH do. They take things like aggression, fear and joy and turn them into slabs of danceable noise.

The key is “Die Slow”, their best and most accessible song yet. Driven along by a continent-sized bassline and BJ Miller dominating his drum-kit, even the most close-minded club attendee is going to be sucked magnetically to the middle of the dancefloor when this one comes on.

That’s what Get Color means, then. Get Color in the sense of hewing pop music from pure noise, but also Get Color in the sense of bringing a whole new innovative palette into play. You won’t hear many albums as simultaneously abrasive and immediately appealing as this, so my advice is to put it on in the dark, as loud as it deserves, and get a little colour yourself. Karl McDonald

21

Reviews

Film

Name: The September II.1 Director: Starring: Running Time:

Issue

R.J. Cutler Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington 90 Minutes

The devil does indeed wear Prada, and Vera Wang too! Or so it seems according to

the newest venture into the deliciously exclusive world of haute couture.

The September Issue is the latest feature-length documentary by director R.J. Cutler, following the run up to the biggest issue of Vogue (2007) to date. In an increasingly health-conscious age in which the promotion of the size zero fashion model is a travesty of basic human rights, his latest work is a fresh insight into the industry. Cutler unobtrusively investigates a world never before revealed so openly on film. A voyeuristic documentary crew attempt to divulge the juicy controversies that surround this closed-door business for audiences that have always wondered what back-stage life at Vogue is really like.

Anna Wintour strikes awe into the hearts of those familiar with her work and infamous temperament. She is the terror-inducing tyrant that commands the central position of editor-in-chief of Vogue and supposed inspiration for the nightmare boss in The Devil Wears Prada. As a highly influential force to be reckoned with, Wintour herself is immediately intended as the indulgent source of exposure. Visual close-ups detailing her defensive posture - arms tightly folded, fidgety thumbs and sulky pout are what a fashionista audience will thrive upon. However, we glean from her personal life that Anna is as vulnerable as any sycophantic “Betty Suarez” assistant below her.

Beneath a frosty façade Wintour possesses weaknesses and self-doubt.

It is creative director Grace Coddington who steals the limelight in a documentary which is at once compellingly comic yet emotionally intense. Grace is revealed as a passionately focused creator and genius, appreciative of photographic and textile art. In contrast, the icy maiden of aloof disposition runs a business intent on reaching 13m people with its unprecedented 840-page tome, 727 pages of which are advertisements. So while those furs (which are so in right now) might not warm us to the iconic “bob and sunglasses” editor-in-chief, we develop an affinity with Coddington and designers like Thakoon and Stefano Pilati (YSL) who are working passionately at what they love. This is a shrewd and fearless business, requiring personnel of similar demeanor. They have no qualms about discussing the unkempt state of cover girl Sienna Miller’s tresses, celebrity or not, nor the protruding, bulbous belly of the cameraman to his face.

Surprising comedy arises as a result of viewing a world that is at once enviously inaccessible and yet so trivial in its very nature when scrutinised from a cinema seat.

One comedic highlight occurs when we get the chance to confirm our preconceptions of high fashion as an absurdity more functional as art than as practical clothing. When editor-at-large André Leon Talley attempts to play tennis (personally pressurised by Wintour) his Yves Saint Laurent travel cases become an unnecessary hindrance in his workout, much to our amusement. Charlotte Hughes 22

Name: Away We Go

II.2

Director:

Sam Mendes

Starring:

Maya Rudoplh, John Krazinski, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Running Time:

98 Minutes

Away We Go (directed by Sam Mendes, written by David Eggers and Vendela Vida) is

an interesting companion piece to the 2008 Oscar contender Revolutionary Road.

Though its rather mellow aesthetic seems a drastic departure from last year’s overwrought Yates adaptation, this film shares a number of its key concerns (conformity, marriage, child-rearing); reiterating some and revising others. It intentionally lacks the tension of Mendes’ previous film, however, and as a result is less immediately effecting.

The film proceeds episodically as Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) travel around America, visiting old friends, colleagues, family; each of whom, the film smugly makes clear, are either “secretly unhappy” (a well worn Mendes conceit) or desperately silly people who embrace an inappropriate, pretentious ideology. Verona is pregnant, and with nothing tying them to one place the couple are at something of a loss as to where, and in what manner, to raise their child; hence the road trip.

None of the environments sampled are deemed suitable to raise Verona and Burt’s child and the dismissal of each comes across as inarticulate and a little facetious. This is a pity, because the road trip structure may have been a pleasure to see unfold if the episodes were handled more thoughtfully.

Instead, we’re treated to caricatures of modern life. The attitude taken towards a gender studies professor (however amusingly played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is especially insufferable: the episode encapsulates how ill-defined the couple’s selfrighteous intransigence really is. One line of hers makes no sense whatsoever. Over dinner, she reclines in her seat and wonders aloud: “What was that Simone de Beauvoir quote? Something like ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’?”

I mean, really, for a gender studies professor this is a little too much- it would be like a physics professor musing: “What was that Einstein quote? Something like ‘E=mc2’ ?” That the film so brusquely rejects what is up to that point the most appealing lifestyle it portrays reminds us of what easy targets Eggers and Vida devise. That said, Maggie Gyllenhaal is great in the role and, despite the character’s flaws, she makes the confrontation between the vibrant academic and the insipid couple the most enjoyable episode in the whole film.

Structurally, the film feels like Little Miss Sunshine, if that film’s family observed substantial flaws in everyone they met rather than confronting their own. As you can imagine, this lends credence to claims by American critics that Burt and Verona come off as condescending. While there are some clever lines and some eloquent stuff about nostalgia and childhood, a lack of drama and depth makes the film seem insubstantial, and makes the protagonists’ self-satisfaction harder to warm to or reconcile. Eoin Rafferty TN2

Reviews

Film

Name: Mesrine: Public IIII..22 Enemy No.1

Director:

Jean-François Richet

Starring:

Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Almaric

Running Time:

135 Minutes

I could write a convoluted synopsis but I will forego that formality here. Suffice to say

that from the beginning of Mesrine: Killer Instinct to the end of Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, we follow the rise and fall of self-appointed Robin Hood style bank-robber, Jacques Mesrine. The second of the two films, Public Enemy No. 1 delivers what is promised at the beginning of the previous picture; the inevitable state assassination of France’s Public Enigma No. 1.

There are so many good things about this film. In many ways it is the perfect second half of an utterly compelling diptych. While Killer Instinct is the more swashbuckling of the two, Public Enemy No. 1 delves further into the personal. The result is that the two halves create a rounded whole, a more nuanced take on the romantic idea of the lone career criminal than one would expect from most attempts at the subject.

The title character is played fantastically by Vincent Cassel, who carries the narrative. Cassel, of La Haine fame and Irréversible infamy, is perfect for this role.

Through the course of the picture we see his unique ability to be both magnetic and repugnant at appropriate moments, often blurring the lines between the two and effectively bringing the different sides of his character’s personality to his face.

This ambiguity emphasises the disturbed sense of reality that the man submerged himself in, a reality where family, friends, lovers and foes are dispensable as long as he long as he prospers and his cult of personality flourishes.

I would love to dive further into the positives but I can’t. I can’t because there is something wrong. So what is the problem? What is wrong with this film?

The narrative structure of this film is fragmented. Like chapters in a book, distinct moments and periods of Mesrine’s life play out, separated from what went before and what is to come with indistinct gaps in between. The objective, I assume, is to disrupt our gaze, a gaze which demands a smooth classical narrative. The result of this structure is to allow a greater objective engagement with the subject matter, rather than complete immersion. The Mesrine films try to achieve that but, unfortunately, they fail. The moralistic pretensions here are merely moralistic pretensions.

The fragmented narrative will pacify the arthouse darlings; it will give them an excuse to love the film. More mainstream audiences can blame Mesrine’s father who, at the beginning of Killer Instinct, is heavy-handedly portrayed as a coward in a scene lifted from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. The truth a more perceptive cinemagoer may pick up on, however, is that the audience has simply been charmed and conned by Jacques Mesrine and his compelling story.

The first scenes of Killer Instinct and the final scenes of Public Enemy No. 1 show us the vanquished antihero. We feel sympathy for him, we feel he is the victim. What we don’t see are the dozens of victims that have been murdered along the way by that loveable rogue, and perhaps it’s this that marrs the experience. Cathal Wogan TN2

Name: Dorian Grey Director:

Oliver Parker

Starring:

Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Fiona Shaw

Running Time:

III

120 Minutes

The premise of Oscar Wilde’s most popular novel seems perfect material for today’s

culture: the desire the stay eternally young and good looking. All the ingredients for a modern film are present: sex, murder and even drugs. Unfortunately Oliver Parker’s film manages to fumble most of Wilde’s original themes to ensure another unsatisfactory cinematic adaptation of a classic novel.

Right from the off Parker expands on the drearier sections of the novel while clumsily speeds through the more fascinating elements, placing a heavy emphasis on the exposition of a naïve Dorian Grey’s (Ben Barnes) character. With the introduction of disparaging nobleman Harry (Colin Firth) and his associate, artist Basil (Ben Chaplin) the central conceit of the film emerges. Struck by Dorian’s beauty, Basil paints a stunning portrait of him, igniting a destructive narcissism in his subject who subsequently takes a vow that means the portrait ages while he remains young.

The story really doesn’t progress much more from this point. Though early on there is a light romance with an actress Sibyl Vane (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the film mostly follows Dorian as the charismatic Harry pushes him into indulgent hedonism. Dorian’s slide to immoral decadence seems to take up two thirds of the film, and for such an apparently damaging descent it’s surprsingly uninteresting. Only a sequence in which Dorian has tea with a circle of older women, while internally reliving the previous night’s seductions shows any flair. A convoluted third act brings the picture to a close.

In the central role of Dorian we are presented with the terminally good looking Ben Barnes. There are just two requirements for the role: good looks and acting ability and Barnes only posses the former. This may have been forgivable had the film not rested so entirely on his performance, but there is rarely a scene without him.

Barnes is simply not charismatic enough be sympathetic and this combined with his smugness means we don’t particularly care what happens to him.

The supporting cast fair slightly better. Fiona Shaw is typically haughty: all sinister smiles and pursed lips. Ben Chaplin however doesn’t convince as the supposedly lovestruck artist. The normally wooden Colin Firth plays Harry with surprising charisma and charm. Firth’s subdued portrayal of Harry is one of the films few redeeming features. He enlivens the first half of the film playing Harry as a bored Iago, spouting Wilde-isms and leading Dorian to the dark side. Unfortunately as the film progresses, Harry ages and embraces family life, ceasing to live vicariously through Dorian and ensuring that the film becomes exceptionally dull. However most frustrating of all is Parker’s inability to appreciate that a film about gothic beauty should strive to achieve some level of aesthetic splendor itself. but the film is drenched in pastels of blue and grey. Overall the film, like nearly all adaptations of classic novels, remains unnecessary. Alex Towers 23

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