TN2 Issue 3

Two Trinity News

Film

Music

Colm T贸ib铆n

by Kevin Breathnach

books

Fashion

Art

issue 3 2 Nov 2010

Food

&

Reviews

#3

pulling the ice-axe from my leg, i staggered on.

the snotgreen s

Karl McDonald

According to the old Celtic calendar, the year’s divided into two halves. As of Halloween, we’re in the dark half. The novelty of the new college year will probably have worn off, and if it hasn’t, the rain and gloom will have taken its toll anyway. It’s that annual Irish trudge through sodden, six month winter begun again. Still, we’ve done it before. Not even a thing to do it again. We wouldn’t have this much-treasured cynicism and resentment if we didn’t spent half a year huddled, complaining about the weather.

It hasn’t been scientifically proven, but reading TN2 is probably the most effective way to survive the dark season. Take heart as you read about the Forty-Foott swimmers, who splash around Joyce’s ‘scrotumtightening’ sea at 8.30 in the morning and still lose out on credibility because they’re not there with “the hardcore 7 o’clockers.” Browse Martin Maloney’s thoughts on his Hardy Bucks series as he stoically defends himself against charges of using “fucking terrible language” by invoking the classic “no worse than you’ll hear when any group of lads are hanging around together” argument. See author Colm Tóibín open his house and his thoughts to Kevin Breathnach. Learn a little about new music from post-Dilla beat-tweaker Meljoann, post-rock sky painters Halves and 19 year old Ohio flawed pop savant Cloud Nothings. Share in Oisín Murphy’s moment of glory as he knocks the haterade from the hands of the haters in his usual back page column.

When you’re done, look up from the paper. If you’ve done it right, you’ll have forgotten about the rain completely. Hope you enjoy.

keep sketch The highlight of your week, sketched.

Words by Jamie Leptien, Photos by Sam Cunnane e may have written the greatest novel of the 20th century, but James Joyce never swam in the Forty Foot.

Despite living for three weeks in the Martello Tower that overlooks Sandycove harbour, he left it to housemate Oliver St. John Gogarty to sample the famous “snotgreen, scrotumtightening” waters that feature in the opening chapter of Ulysses. His reason for not going in was apparently that he didn’t want to be “rebaptised” which seems a bit of a glib excuse to me, coming from a lapsed Catholic.

I hear this in a YouTube interview with Gary Coyle, a Dún Laoghaire artist trained as a draughtsman who began swimming in the Forty Foot about ten years ago.

He is a mine of Forty Foot information, like the fact that the place gets its name not from its heighth or depth but from the 40th British Foot Regiment that was stationed there. And that the granite excavated from this spot was used to build the embankment on the Thames in London. What began as a hobby quickly developed into an

2

sea, the scrotumtightening sea

obsession, and he has since swam in the Forty Foot over 3,000 times, scrupulously documenting everything in notebooks and in the films of underwater cameras, even taking seawater samples from each day. Coyle, whose Forty Foot work was the subject of a 2009 exhibition in the RHA, sees the morning routine of the regular as a sort of primitive performance art. When you think that people were swimming in this exact spot long before the foundation of the Gentleman’ s Swimming Club in 1880, coming down here with the early morning swimmers feels like maintaining an ancient pre-religious ritual, paying daily homage to the Irish Sea. When I first make it out, I’ m every bit as reticent as Joyce; it’ s a hungover Sunday in September and the concrete slab of the Forty Foot is being pounded by angry ten foot breakers. My jaw drops to see a white-haired man swimming in the angry swell, as Sunday visitors stand and watch, taking photos and shrieking at every crashing wave. Only when the man gets out and I talk to him do I realise, much to my relief, that dancing with death is not an everyday part of the experience. I ask him if it’s safe enough to swim. “It’s rough enough now, I had a hard time getting out. I don’ t think I’ d go back in,” he says, and I concede, equal parts disappointment

“Coming down here with the early morning swimmers feels like maintaining an ancient prereligious ritual.”

fe ature

and relief, that this isn’t the right day for my first time.

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

Luckily, the sun is streaming in to provide some comfort to the fact that I can see my breath as I change.

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

3

openers

Wanderlist #3 M usic Nintendo Entertainment System A quarter of a century ago, the most celebrated video game console was unleashed onto the world. The great American video game console crash of 1983 almost obliterated an industry saturated by countless consoles (anybody remember the Fairchild Channel F System II?) and poor quality games; in the face of this “Atari debacle” the NES stood for 8-bit innovation. Revolutionising gameplay with controllers, from joystick to D-pad, with historic game franchises, from Metroid to Zelda, the NES is the cornerstone of gaming culture, inciting in a generation immense joy and screamat-the-television frustration. Hank Harry - Donkey Kong Thrashing Party A Belgian experimental indie outfit sing about drinking limoncello and moshing whilst playing Donkey Kong. Logistically impossible. The Micropops - Zelda Their album’s called Nintendo or Devotion, the cover looks like Steps have been superimposed into a still from the Spice Girls’ Viva Forever video. The lyrics are about having a wet dream over Zelda. Final Fantasy - I’m Afraid of Japan But hopefully not Coneria! Odetta - Hogan’s Alley A sprightly 55 years old when the NES came out, she was probably too busy striving for equality to play video games, so this is all just a coincidence really. Vampire Weekend - I Think Ur A Contra Either an homage to the video game or Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. Sophie Elizabeth Smith

trinitynews.ie t wit ter Follow us on Twitter. We’ll follow you back and retweet the funny or interesting things you say, probably. Just last week we spuriously claimed to be 93% powered by the sound of the Viking Splash Tour shouting, and the Viking Splash Tour retweeted us. It’s a crazy world. @tn2magazine. p od cast Last time we said there would be a podcast on the subject of haters. This time, there is actually a podcast on the subject of haters, with Oisín Murphy, Cathal Wogan, Seán Mc Tiernan, Aoife Crowley and Aisling Deng all contributing valuable opinions of varying seriousness. facialhair Trinity News is getting on

board with this Movember thing, because we hate cancer and want to jump in on the fight against it. Find details of how to support us on the website, or go to ie.movember.com and contribute yourself.

M usic Online Music Editor Keith Grehan’ll be providing mixes and other content of his usual high standard over the course of the week.

4

paint a picture, it’ll ArT in c ollege

Portrait of John Joly (1933)

by Leo Whelan Museum Building There are loads of portraits dotted around the campus, celebrating the achievements of former Provosts, Professors, lecturers and graduates alike. One alumnus who stands out from the crowd is John Joly, not just for the sheer number and quality of his achievements, but also for his monumental moustache.

Hiding to the left of the stairs on the first floor of the Museum Building, the painting was executed by the eminent portrait artist Leo Whelan, whose other famous subjects include Michael Collins and Eamonn De Valera.

His portrait of Joly was one of a number of commissions he received from the college during this period, and follows the traditional, academic approach of Whelan’s teacher William Orpen.

Joly spent his entire professional career at TCD and was seen travelling across campus from lecture to lecture on his motorbike which he adorned with a multitude of homemade gadgets. He was a prolific inventor, developing a new process for colour photography in the 1890s and most famously devising a way of using radiotherapy to treat cancer patients. He was honoured for his contributions to science in 1973 when a crater on Mars was named after him, making him one of the coolest TCD professors in my book.

Jennifer Duignam

i’m the one man army ason FILM

Army of Darkness (1993) Japan Although we’ve featured selections from the weirdly wonderful world of Polish film poster art so far, this week it is time to give some much-needed kudos to the Japanese. In terms of sheer absurdity, the Japanese really have no competition, as is amply evidenced by this film poster. Even those who revere Sam Raimi’s 1993 cult horror-comedy Army of Darkness will probably barely recognise this as advertising it. Featuring the indomitable Bruce Campbell standing with shirt ripped and eyebrow raised on top of (what else?) enormous Campbells soup cans while dolphins jump through coat hangers between his legs, a bag of groceries hovers nearby and a green Marlon Brando screams “MOOOONN” in the background. Sure, it doesn’t tell you anything about the film, but who cares when it looks this fantastic? Alex Towers

#3

last longer

may contain traces of: 2 November 2010

2 forty shades of green Jamie Leptien and Sam Cunnane commune with the Forty Foot swimmers

6 sturdy reliable fellas James Kelly talks to Hardy Bucks creator and star Martin Moloney about high brow comedy and causing offence.

8 the passions enjoy themselves Need some new music? Meet Cloud Nothings, Meljoann and Halves.

10 thrill of the chase Mairéad Casey interviews acclaimed Iranian director Rafi Pitts about his new film The Hunter.

12 get right out of the bed Eat a proper breakfast. It is all kinds of good for you. No excuses.

13 spiced with pain and regret Kevin Breathnach visits Colm Tóibín at home to discuss his life and work to date.

16 change clothes and go Learn a little about customising your clothes from Aisling Deng.

18 reviews

bag it up Fashion Are you a male aged 18-24 who needs to transport your daily

books and various odds and ends to college each day but who detests the humble backpack sported by so many? Don’t worry because you’re not alone, and there are indeed several means of lugging your crap around campus that’ll keep you from looking like you’re off camping in the woods for the weekend.

Firstly, the satchel/messenger bag hybrid in any shiny leather material: useful because they fit big books and you can easily cycle with them. On the downside, if it’s the wrong length, the strap will make you look like a girl. Look in Urban Outfitters or Topman for these. Next: the handy hold-all, which can be found in American Apparel. Make sure you get a size that will indeed hold all. Finally the ever-elegant briefcase, for the more sophisticated (and important) gent. Look in Adamson’s on South King St, who have been rumoured to give €20 off one student’s first ever briefcase recently. Ana Kinsella

This issue we get introspective with a look at food in college, plus new stuff from Bob Dylan, Jonathan Franzen, Mike Leigh, Avey Tare and more.

25 guilty pleasures/how-to Fiona Hyde laughs mercilessly at the problem pages of Boards. ie while Seán Mc Tiernan returns with the unlikely but hilarious hillwalking-based follow-up to his music snob how-to.

26 Das Capo Oisín Murphy considers notional haters, hipsters and The Other College Newspaper from his usual perch.

Contributors Editor: Karl McDonald. Art: Jennifer Duignam, Catherine Gaffney. Books: Stuart Winchester, Kevin Breathnach. Fashion: Ana Kinsella, Aisling Deng. Film: Alex Towers, Mairéad Casey. Food: Sadhbh O’Brien, Rose Ponsonby. Games: Andy Kavanagh. Music: Sophie Elizabeth Smith, Gheorghe Rusu, Keith Grehan. Theatre: Jamie Leptien. TV: James Kelly, Michael Barry. Images: Eoin Beglin, Kathi Burke, Aoife Crowley, Sam Cunnane, Caoimhe Lavelle, Martin McKenna Design: Gearóid O’Rourke, Martin McKenna. General assistance: Aoife Crowley. Fuelled by: Burritos, Busdriver, Half Man Half Biscuit, Dame Lane, stuffed otters, personal ineptitude.

5

TV

stop your nonsense

by James Kelly

ardy Bucks is a unique phenomenon in Irish TV: a comedy show on RTÉ that has aroused positive critical reception and genuine anticipation from the public. As the show finishes up its first TV season, I catch up with Martin Maloney, co-creator of the show, as he makes his way to Dundalk. Despite a friendly, easy manner, it’s easy to hear that Mr. Maloney is tired . He’s in the middle of the Hardy Bucks’ tour of the media circuit, including various radio interviews and the already infamous Saturday Night Show appearance.

Hardy Bucks began as a short YouTube comedy show, a long-held mutual passion of Maloney and childhood friend and co-creator Chris Tordoff, and it wasn’ t long before they submitted the show into the RTÉ’s Storyland, gathering a huge amount of support online and eventually winning the competition.

The rest is, as they say, history. While talking about the origins of the show, Maloney lists off a string of influences: Father Ted, Brass Eye and I’m Alan Partridge were the shows they most tried to emulate. Interestingly he doesn’t mention Trailer Park Boys, despite the seemingly 6

obvious comparisons, and when quizzed it seemed to irk him. “The very first episode, there was definitely an influence from TPB, but I would say [Channel 4 cult meta-comedy] Darkplace was much more influential to us.

TPB moves into this surreal world, with guns and major drug deals – I don’t think we would ever see Eddie doing anything like that!”

A few other shows pop up during the interview, namely Shameless and The Inbetweeners. Maloney is pleasantly surprised with the comparison and likes the parallels between those shows and his. Each mirrors lad culture and appeals to a broad comedic base.

“I think Hardy Bucks, like those shows, has a genuine basis in real life, but much more exaggerated. Our characters are based on amalgamations of people we knew growing up.

There are ironic social undertones running through Hardy Bucks, which I think some people don’t get and the show gets misconstrued as a result. Recently, some people have accused Hardy Bucks of glamorising binge drinking and drugs, but they don’ t get the irony of it.”

Maloney brings up a humorous example of the misunderstanding of the show when he

tells me about his mother, a native church-going Mayo woman, (who for the record is embarrassed by the foul language of the show), and her elderly neighbour that laments the “fucking terrible language” the show uses.

Apparently, this kind of hypocrisy is common when people challenge the show. Maloney brushes it off.

“We didn’t set out to make some high-brow comedy show like Frasier or Black Books, talking about books and coffee shops and stuff like that. Hardy Bucks is a bit of a laugh, a bit of craic – we never thought we’d get this far, no way. I mean, we are still amateurs at this whole thing, but we have learned more in the process of making Hardy Bucks than we could have in college, at least that’s what I think.”

The amateur nature of the show is apparent in their casting techniques. There is no formal, professional casting done on the show.

It’s just a Facebook notice sent out looking for extras. Maloney mentions that it is particularly hard to find girls to cast, many conveniently sitting ‘exams’ the day of shooting. This is an aspect of Hardy Bucks that piques my interest.

The show is very much about lads and lad culture, but I ask if Maloney would ever consider

“we didn’t set out to make some highbrow comedy show, talking about books and coffee shops and stuff like that” exploring the girly side of townie culture?

“To be honest, it’ s not something I know a lot about, but it would be interesting. Actually, we are hoping to introduce a female character that is the anti-Eddie, an almost better female version of him., with a nicer car.” An interesting concept to be sure.

The show has come under fire lately, under the charge that it is impossible to relate to the setting if you’re not from rural Ireland.

Maloney blasts the criticism. “That’s like saying Friends is relatable to people who live in

cities. It’s about the characters, not the setting. It is geared towards everyone.” Maloney and co. made an effort to appeal beyond the core demographic of 15-25 year olds with the addition of his uncle Eugene as Big Mick, an older (but not necessarily more mature) voice added to the odd Hardy Bucks chorus.

There is an elephant in the room during our discussion: the controversy surrounding the Hardy Bucks’ appearance on The Saturday Night Show. To say they were not wellreceived may be an understatement. “I don’t think people really got our performance on the Saturday Night Show. We were in character and we wanted to be outrageous, so in a way we invited this controversy onto ourselves.

The people who would usually watch Hardy Bucks probably were not sitting in on a Saturday night watching this, so maybe we didn’t fit with the audience. We were unprepared and nervous, but it was a bit of a laugh and we were on in character, which was fun. I think the outrage following the appearance had more to do with our disregard of that fact that we were actually on TV than anything.”

“Looking at the controversy I think it was a good thing that RTÉ restricted us in terms of

language and some of our jokes. But honestly, what the lads on Hardy Bucks say is no worse than you’ll hear when any group of lads are hanging around together. I think people get annoyed if they see it on TV really.”

A third season of the show is in the works for next year as well as a Christmas episode.

In addition to these and their live shows, Maloney and Torduff are working on a new show as a kind of anti-Hardy Bucks, entitled Slave-Baby, chronically the lives of an indie rock band in Galway, whose first single is called Guantanamo Baby.

Any transition from a seven minute YouTube short to a proper half-hour comedy show is bound to be a huge leap for any production and probably even more so for a group of amateurs. Maloney echoes this sentiment while defending the show.

“For amateurs from Mayo, I am very proud of what we’ve achieved. Even if a show is the worst show in the world, there is still a lot of hard work that goes into it, and we did put in a lot of hard work.” And Hardy Bucks is far from the worst show, with huge audiences tuning for the first episode and solid critical reception for the new series as a whole.

7

kirby’s dreamband June 1979. Californian punk outfit Dead Kennedys self-produce and independently release their first single, using Alternative Tentacles as a label name - an allusion to the domineering tentacles of mainstream record companies. Many regarded the label as a self-indulgent vanity project for the Dead Kennedys, but after the release of the seminal hardcore compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans!, they began promoting material by other artists including Butthole Surfers, Bad Brains and TSOL. The label began to release music from a spectrum of genres, even putting out spoken word albums by the linguist & cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky as well as Dead Kennedy’s vocalist and label founder Jello Biafra.

Aged 21, Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco, lobbying for laws forcing businessmen to wear clown suits from the hours 9am-5pm,

The mother of an 11 year old Dead Kennedys fan objected to the artwork of the band’s third album, a painting called Penis Landscape and the abolition of cars. This tongue-incheek campaign caught the attention of the British press and made possible the Dead Kennedy’s first European tour.

In 1984, the label faced a criminal pornography charge after the mother of an 11 year old Dead Kennedys fan objected to the artwork of the band’s third album Frankenchrist, a graphic painting by H. R. Giger commonly referred to as Penis Landscape. Although later quashed, the legal costs nearly brought financial ruin upon the label, and the stress of the lawsuit contributed to the break-up of the Dead Kennedys in 1986.

Control of the label was granted to Biafra, who increased the wholesale price of the DKs back catalogue and failed to pay the band the excess royalties. The other members took Biafra to court and Alternative Tentacles was ordered to pay over $200,000 in damages.

Yet regardless of his crippling lack of business acumen, Jello Biafra has been Alternative Tentacles’ redeeming feature, the only reason the label can exist now according to employee Jesse Townley; “Jello Biafra has the final say over which bands we release so we’re recognised as an eclectic label that’s curated by a true music fan. When people buy an AT release, they know that Jello has put his stamp of approval on the record” Sophie Elizabeth Smith 8

hat’s in a name? Though Cloud Nothings may conjure connotations of insubstantiality and froth, it is more the band’s carefree baptism that’s infused in their achingly heartening lo-fi power pop.

What started with nineteen year old Dylan Baldi in his parents’ basement in Ohio with a four track has expanded to a full live band due to embark on their first cluster of European gigs. He explains: “the recordings are all just me because that’s what I do in my free time when I’m bored, but eventually I had to find a band so I just got some of my friends who play music around Cleveland and asked them if they wanted to be in a band.” To date, Baldi’s recordings include a 7” single, a very limited run of split cassettes with Campfires and an EP, Turning On, the tracks from which are being sold for a mere 80 cents each online.

A way to make available Cloud Nothings’ music to as many people as possible, or both? It turns out to be an awkward question; “I didn’t even know about that. That wasn’t any part of my plan, that was the label. The guy who runs it is definitely rooted in the DIY scene and I would love for as many people as possible to hear it because it’s a very limited vinyl release, so I think getting it out there digitally is the way to go” And the reason there wasn’t a CD release? “There’s nothing cool about a CD” Cloud Nothings’ first full length LP, also entitled Turning On, is an assemblage of Baldi’s previous recordings on Wichita. “Releasing the cassette, I sent the guy who wanted to put it out mp3s of the songs and he said ‘alright, you’ll have your tape in a week!’ With Wichita it felt like doing something real, I didn’t just send them low quality files of the songs.”

Baldi is being hailed by many as a precocious talent, his music coloured with flourishes of ‘60s psychedelia, ‘80s punk and ‘90s pop.

“That’s my main influence,” Baldi acknowledges, “the poppier elements of everything I listen to - I listen to the radio all the time.”

Yet despite Baldi’s endorsement of mainstream pop and the tongue-in-cheek anti-hipster stance on Cloud Nothings’ 7” single Hey Cool Kid, they have been adopted by the same ilk he light-heartedly lampoons: “my band’s not very big, you’d have to read Pitchfork or blogs to kind of know what’s going on, and the people who read those, you could describe as hipsters, so it kind of speaks to them.”

And at the contentious suggestion that said hipsters (at this stage an abstract appellation at best) have been saturating modern music with interchangeable simplistic fuzzy guitar pop and lyrics, Baldi is ever the diplomat, noting his friendships with Oberhofer and Beach Fossils, fledgling lo-fi outfits championed by Pitchfork and making reference to Christopher Owen of Girls; “If I grew up in a cult I would probably just want a pizza too, or if I was an orphan or whatever he was” In July Cloud Nothings travelled to Baltimore to record their first LP of entirely new material, working with producer Chester Gwazda (Dan Deacon, Future Islands). Baldi has spoken before of his desire to experiment with a less lo-fi sound. “It’s not super polished produced sounding, but it’s definitely cleaner. It ended up sounding a little bit different than how I had envisioned it but it still sounds good.” Is he worried that the fans he has gained off the back of his early, more rudimentary recordings will bristle at his latest, less raw studio effort?

“I think that’s pretty stupid. That isn’t really what I listen for. I think it’s good that bands are wanting to go get themselves produced, get their music out to more people; there’s too many niche markets. People are too into their own thing” Sophie Elizabeth Smith

no half measures he story of how Dublin-based Halves came to record their debut album It Goes, It Goes (Forever & Ever) is just as interesting as their self-professed “alternative and experimental sound.”

Brian Cash and Elis Czerniak who both alternate between playing drums and guitar explained that choosing to record their album in the legendary Hotel2Tango studios in Montreal was a crucial decision for the band (which also includes Czerinak’s older brother Tim on vocals). “We wanted the album to be special and recording the album in Temple Bar would not be special. And with it being our debut album, we had no guarantees of a follow up, so it could be a once in a lifetime experience.” Czerniak chipped in, “we decided to throw everything we have at it.”

The core trio of Rathmines native Cash and the Czerniak siblings from Walkinstown are joined live and recorded with extra musicians to help create their rich and ethereal sound.

They’ve impressed radio DJ John Kelly, with Cash emotionally admitting “it was the first time my dad was seriously impressed by the band.”

As well as being busy with recording and mixing this album, Czerniak was in the middle of completing a music degree in Trinity and he graduated in June after what he described as an “enjoyable but stressful” final year. Cash proudly interjects: “They gave him a medal! A composition prize for his composition portfolio!”

The bandmates like to see their music described as “odd” or “weird”. At one point Cash launches into a tirade against commercial daytime radio stations and says “we are really,

really proud of the fact we don’t get played on daytime radio like 98FM or Spin, and we really don’t care.” His fellow drummer-cumguitarist adds, “I do like it on Q102 when they play funky disco music in the middle of the night.” The pair then excitedly debate on the merits of 1970s disco, with Cash even confessing “listening to Abba would really cheer me

“Canadians are a bit more open-minded to our kind of experimentation.” up when I was working in a crappy office job.”

This way in which the two drive the conversation from the serious to the whimsical pervades throughout the interview and it is Cash who steps in as spokesman to make clear, “we take playing and writing our music extremely seriously and can sometimes come across as po-faced, but we are friends and there is nothing better than taking the piss out of each other, making music together and then getting drunk together.”

With pre-release orders for the album coming mainly from “Japan, Canada, Australia and America” Halves see themselves touring abroad and then hopefully spending a lot of time in Canada, with Cash saying, “I think the Canadians are bit more open-minded to our kind of experimentation.”

Kate Rowan

Meljoann is a Dublin-based electronica artist who has recently begun to attract attention, with influential blogger Nialler9 praising the uniqueness of her “Irish electro skweee funk.” Her debut album is due to be released on the 29th of October and her Tour Guide EP has been available as a free download at meljoann.com for months.

Talking to TN2 about the reasoning behind this, Mel explains that she “would rather someone have the thing than not have it because of money.” She does empathise with artists who have spoken out against illegal downloads, however, conceding that she is “sick of being broke.”

Nevertheless, she is committed to the free exchange the internet enables. She says, “I’ve benefitted from the open nature of the internet so much. It feels right to give back in that way. I’m excited by the community aspect - the global community, the immediacy of exchange of ideas... I love that.”

When asked about the multitude of confusing sub-genres within the electro world, and their potential to intimidate, she returns to the internet, this time noting its power as a tool for undermining elitism. “It’s so accessible to look something up on the internet, you immediately know what that genre sounds like. It’s not as elitist as it used to be - you used to have to either have friends into it, or be rich enough to buy the stuff.”

This engagement with issues of disseminating and accessing information also pervades her music. Songs persistently reference museum terminology, and she explains that this fixation pertains to“the eroticisation of knowledge, the fetishisation of categorising things…. the availability of all this knowledge, the internet plays into that. I’m interested in what it feels like to be in this situation at this particular point in time.” The word “feel” is particularly significant as Meljoann’s lyrics sometimes seem purposely obscure.

She concurs: “lyrically, a lot of it would be a very directly dreamy or subconscious description, very instinctive”. This explains the soft, sleepy atmosphere of much of her music - “I tried to comfort myself in the sounds,” she admits. Meljoann cites this “feel good” element as the main connection between electro and R&B, her other main influence.

Her music is “dealing with reality as well” though, and what she describes as a “darker side... a melancholic tinge” saturates the tracks.

James Hagan 9

hunt the hare

by Mairéad Casey

ranian actor and lauded director Rafi Pitts speaks to TN2 about Iranian cinema, censorship, and his new film, the Berlinale-nominated revenge drama The Hunter.

You’ve led a very interesting life.

Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood in Tehran?

I was born in North-East Iran in a place called Mashad. My mother was 17 when I was born and we lived underneath a post-production studio in Tehran. The editors of the Iranian 10

film industry were also partly my parents I guess because I grew up with them. The desire to be in cinema started from there. I started off acting when I was eight - a neo-realist film called The Nightingale in 1975. I lived in Iran during the revolution and then when the war broke out with Iraq, I came to Europe and lived between Paris and London back and forth. I went to film school in London.

I returned to Iran fifteen years later in 1996 to shoot my first feature and I’ve been going back ever since.

In February you expressed concern that

The Hunter would not get past the censors because of its relevance to the recent protests in Iran. Can you tell us a bit about the situation now?

It didn’t get past the censors. The shooting of the film was during the elections and we’d finished the shootings before the riots broke out. All the people who gave permission for the film to be made were all put out of power immediately after the elections. At the time when they gave us permission to shoot, the majority not only of the film industry but of the country thought that change was going

to come and that’s probably why they gave us permission to shoot. The strange thing about what happened was that you shoot an idea, you have a story and then reality becomes that story. With the new government we are nowhere near getting permission for the film to be seen. It’s been a real struggle and I’m still fighting for the film to be shown. For me it is only natural that the film that is made over there should be shown over there and I will fight for it. But it is highly unlikely that the film will be seen over there for quite some time.

DEDICATED TO BOZORG ALAVI I dedicated THE I’m sorry to hear that.Iranian You’ve actually been HUNTER to the celebrated writer and political before quoted saying with cenintellectual Bozorgas Alavi.

Alavi “Dealing was forced into political sorship is our art, how to after say the something exile and remained in East Berlin 1953 coup with rules.” d’etat certain in Iran which resulted in massive imprisonments.

He taught Persian Literature at Humboldt University Yes I alwayswidely say that because Iran as a cinema and lectured in Europe and North America.

Alavi industry has always had censorship.

We’ve remained in exile until his death in 1997 in Berlin, visitalways had briefly censorship butRevolution we’ve always ing Iran only after the in 1979had and filmmakers and filmmakers will say what 1980. I don’t believe in word for word adaptations of they Even if there isofcensorship you books think. into films, but impressions a book can inspire cannot stop athat filmmaker from what a film. A feeling isn’t dictated by saying traditional narrative. In this way, THE HUNTER is inspired by Alavi’s dicated THE sional actor in the film. The perfect choice to play Sara, Ali’s 1952 short story “Gileh Mard” (The Man from Gilan). and political ands by her husband throughout his prison time. Mitra’s perinto political oman. Her presence gives the feeling of a survivor. She also PLAYING ALI On the first shooting day, the actor that e 1953 my filmscoup because my characters are often survivors. You can I had originally cast for the role of Ali proved to be prisonments. woman. Mitra is a very popular star in Iran and she has had unreliable and unpredictable. He showed up 6 hours t University me acclaimed performances in films like BORN UNDER LIBRA late! I decided to play Ali myself in order to save the merica.

Alavi m Beyzai).

Berlin, visit- film. If we had continued with the original actor, the in 1979 and shoot would have surely come to a halt eventually. So aptations of suddenly on my first shooting day, I was also playing k can inspire the leading role. What I’m wearing in the film is what ditional nar- I happened to be wearing on that day. So in a way THE HUNTER alsoHe became film about a director whosayhas Ali’s ed

by Alavi’s he thinks. just afinds another way of his hands tied Ibecause perom Gilan). ing it. What meant he’s [by not theallowed quote]to is say thateveryour thing thatlanguage he wants to say in thestems film that he’sthe making. also cinema probably from fact The hunter of the title could actually be the filmmaker ecan actor that that we’re not allowed to say certain things in a himself, way. armedItwith his camera.

Actingcinegraphic and directing had to be certain roved creates an unusual BRA at the sameItime was very “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. up 6 hours language. abide by those rules. I submit my Playing Ali me toof a very dark place.because It was painto save the script to brought the board censorship I ful andmy notfilm easy to to be snap out of. I also realized that But what al actor, the want released in my country.

I love aboutmean being athat director is filming people. ventually. So it doesn’t I won’t fight other for my point also playing of view. Censorship in Iran within the last fifSENTIMENT THE HUNTER was inyears – OF up OPPRESSION until the elections at least, had film is what teen teresting to make I tried but to mix neo-realism a long way,because very slowly surely.

Until n a way THE come with formalism.

A neo-realist Western. tried to give Kiarostami made The TasteI of Cherries tor who has Abbas several layerstalk to the film, suicide. politics only one of them. couldn’t about Once that film o say every- we Moralawarded order alsoinfascinates me,were whether concerns Cannes we ableit address he’s making. was religion, social structureinorour values.

Independently or issue of suicide films.

So cinema e filmmaker the been a wayIof breaking down barriers but simultaneously. feel it strongly within me. Within nd directing has slowlyIran, we’ve been goingitsinsevere that direction. my country, that through borders of d Mr. Hyde”. very difficulty today is that the authorities religion and auto-censorship, imposes on each indi. It was pain- The it because it was in favour vidual to thedismantle need to search for understanding from ed that what want of the reforming movement. within, constantly forcing us to deal with our sentier people. ment of oppression. I hope that THE HUNTER will be would compare the moreconsiderrebelreleased in Iran,you but that might be difficult TER was in- How lious cinema to Iran’s commercial cinema? ing the current political climate. neo-realism tried to give ne of them. It’s very hard to make thought-provoking it concerns films anywhere in the world. I would say that pendently or there is a young movement in Iranian cinema. me. Within We are all practically the same age. There’s Jae borders of far Panahi who was in prison for an idea of n each indi- a film he wanted to make. We all know each other very well and we’re all somehow seen as anding from rebels because the authorities don’t want us to h our sentishow our ideas. I think we hold up a mirror NTER will be and it’s not our fault if what they see is ugly. lt considerThe commercial cinema however is different

film

because they are more in it for economical reasons. It’sTOprobably Bollywood DEDICATED BOZORG closer ALAVI Itodedicated THE without all the singing and dancing.

It’spolitical a cinHUNTER to the celebrated Iranian writer and ema that wants escape which is also intellectual Bozorg to Alavi.

Alavireality, was forced into political understandable because people need that, but exile and remained in East Berlin after the 1953 coup what I’ve tried to do in The Hunter is to create d’etat in Iran which resulted in massive imprisonments. enough tension and story for it to be accesHe taught Persian Literature at Humboldt University sible to both audiences whether they’re film and lectured widely in Europe and North America. Alavi buffs or not. remained in exile until his death in 1997 in Berlin, visiting Iran only briefly after the Revolution in 1979 and You play the protagonist of The Hunter, Ali. 1980. I don’t believe in word for word adaptations of Did you feel particularly strongly about books into films, butthat impressions of a book can inspire this character you had to play him ayourself? film. A feeling that isn’t dictated by traditional narrative. In this way, THE HUNTER is inspired by Alavi’s 1952 short story “Gileh Mard” (The Man Gilan). I I actually did not want to play the from character.

had an actor for the role but he was unreliable PLAYING On the first shooting day,we thego actor and veryALI complicated.

In Iran to that the Iboard had originally cast for the role of Ali proved to be of censorship and on their permit they unreliable and unpredictable.

He showed up 6 hours have the names of the director, the cinematoglate!

I decided to play Ali myself in order rapher and the leading actors and iftoI save had the to film.

If weone hadI’d continued the original actor, the change have to with go back to the board of shoot would have a halt eventually.

So censorship.

Yousurely can come only to imagine how diffisuddenly on my firstallowed shootingshoot day, I awas also playing cult it was to be film like The the leading What I’m wearing in theI film is what Hunter so Irole. couldn’t take that risk. realised I I happened to be wearing on that day. So in a way THE HUNTER also became a film about a director who has his hands tied because he’s not allowed to say everything that he wants to say in the film that he’s making.

The hunter of the title could actually be the filmmaker himself, armed with his camera. Acting and directing at the same time was very “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.

Playing Ali brought me to a very dark place. It was painful and not easy to snap out of. I also realized that what I love about being a director is filming other people.

SENTIMENT OF OPPRESSION THE HUNTER was interesting to make because I tried to mix neo-realism with formalism. A neo-realist Western. I tried to give several layers to the film, politics only one of them.

Moral order also fascinates me, whether it concerns religion, social structure or values. Independently or simultaneously. I feel it strongly within me. Within my country, Iran, that through its severe borders of religion and auto-censorship, imposes on each individual the need to search for understanding from within, constantly forcing us to deal with our sentiment of oppression. I hope that THE HUNTER will be released in Iran, but that might be difficult considering the current political climate.

“we hold up a mirror and it’s not our fault if what they see is ugly.”

didn’t have much choice but to go in front of the camera if I wanted the film to be made. So that’s how I ended up in front of the camera.

In fact how I’m dressed in that film was how I was dressed that first day of shooting. I didn’t really act in the film, I was just me.

Did you find the experience like method acting?

Definitely like method acting. You don’t have a choice. There is no filmmaker there to tell you if you are doing it right. The only thing you have to judge your acting by is the sincerity. You have to believe that what you did was real in order for it to be the right take. I ended up going to a very dark place and it took me a while to get out of character. I’d say I was only out of character on September 10th.

Who is this Bozorg Alavi to whom the film is dedicated?

Bozorg Alavi is a very important figure in Persian literature. One of our great writers.

There’s a story called The Man from Geland that inspired part of The Hunter. He was also a left-wing activist who spent time in prison during the Shah’s time and he wanted Iran to have a revolution. The opening image of the film is of the revolution. The great question in Iran today is ‘why did we have a revolution?’

70% of the country is under 30 so the younger people were only born when it took place. So to frame the film with the dedication to Bozorg Alavi and the opening image, there’s a reflection to Iranian society.

Your last film It’s Winter also had a lot to do with economic struggle and was also based on Iranian literature. Do you feel the two films are linked?

Yes I do think the two films are very much linked. For me It’s Winter had the point of view of the generation that took part in the revolution, the intellectuals of that time. It’s inspired by a book by Mahmood Dowlatabadi who I

dedicate the film to. What I wanted to do was to have real people re-enact that situation because those involved seem disappointed in the way the revolution turned out. The Hunter is much more the point of view of the 70% under 30 who are frustrated with the system and who want to fight back. So I’d say in It’s Winter the characters are being suppressed and in The Hunter the characters are hitting back.

How do you feel when you look back on your past films?

I never look at the films again. I say goodbye to the film at the official screening in the first festival it’s shown in because of course any filmmaker would want to chop and change each film all the time. We are perfectionists.

In Iran we say when you’re making your first feature, the crew calls you a “zero kilometre”.

If you look at a feature film, it’s five reels of 600 metres so that would be 3 kilometres. I’ve made five features so that’s 15 kilometres. That means I haven’t even left the city yet, so I’ve got a long way to go. I tend to think of films as those metres, that you have to keep going through. The landscape changes but you keep moving forward until you reach your destination, and who knows where that is or what it all looks like.

Have you any final words for us?

There’s a phrase by Frank Capra that is good to always remind people of, he says “Don’t follow trends, make them.”

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food

B

reakfast literally means to ‘break the fast.’ By morning, the brain and muscles require energy, and eating breakfast has been proven to improve mental performance and concentration during morning activities. This is because the brain requires a constant source of energy as it has no ability to store energy itself. Breakfast functions as “brain food”, refuelling the brain as well as the body. Students who deprive themselves of breakfast may be depriving themselves of the ability to learn. Research has shown that students who skip breakfast report tiredness, lethargy, irritability and have trouble concentrating on the morning’s lectures in addition to finding complex mental tasks difficult.

Breakfast is known to improve mood, alertness, concentration, mental performance and memory. For students, there is no doubt that breakfast is a must. People who eat breakfast tend to have a much healthier dietary intake and are more likely to consume their recommended intakes of key nutrients such as iron, calcium, B vitamins and fibre, and have a lower dietary intake of fat. People who skip breakfast tend not to make up the differences in some of these key nutrients at other meal times.

Will skipping breakfast help me to lose weight?

Many people believe that skipping breakfast will help them to lose weight. Skipping breakfast however means that people are more likely to overeat during the rest of the day.

Without breakfast, we are more likely to grab something that’s quick to hand such as a high fat, high sugar snack. This energy boost will quickly evaporate leaving you feeling hungrier and may cause you to overeat at lunch.

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Taking a few minutes to eat a bowl of cereal or toast and some fruit or fruit juice may prevent your subsequent binge. So no, breakfast won’t help you lose weight, so eat one.

What to eat for breakfast?

Unless you have a physically demanding job or play a lot of sport, a light cereal-and-toast style of breakfast is perfectly adequate and will meet many of your nutritional needs. Cereal based breakfasts are lower in fat and calories and higher in fibre and essential nutrients than other breakfasts such as cooked breakfasts, scrambled eggs or banana smoothies.

But aren’t cereals bad..?

The old saying “the cardboard box is more nutritious than what is in it” is often joked about when it comes to breakfast cereals. While not ideal in terms of fibre and wholegrain content, today’ s packets of breakfast cereals are often fortified with a range of vitamins and minerals and make a reasonable contribution to nutrient intake, especially when consumed with milk. It is generally better to consume a breakfast cereal than having nothing to eat at all – chocolate, sugar-coated cereals don’t count. Breakfast cereals are a good energy source for students doing sports and can also be eaten as a snack during the day.

But I never eat breakfast….

People miss breakfast a number of reasons lack of time, being too tired, or not feeling like eating in the morning. If this sounds like you and you need to rush out the door without eating, a breakfast bar to munch on the way to college, a glass of milk or a bought smoothie is preferable to starting the day with nothing to eat – it will still provide some carbohydrate, protein, vitamins and fibre. Eating breakfast

kick starts your metabolism and can actually help you wake up.

The professionals recommend...

The classic choice of porridge with milk, adding banana, sultanas, berries or grated apple for extra flavour and nutrition.

The hot option of scrambled or poached eggs, or baked beans, on toast. 3tbsp. of baked beans provide one of the five portions of fruit and vegetables you should eat daily.

The easy option of wholegrain or high fibre breakfast cereal, or any plain low-sugar cereal with low fat milk and sliced fresh fruit.

The quick option of wholegrain toast with sliced banana. Or toasted bagel with low-fat cream cheese.

The on-the-go option of a cereal bar with a yoghurt and a piece of fruit. Or fruit and muesli mixed into yoghurt. Or even a smoothie prepared with yoghurt, low-fat milk, fruit and honey. Yoghurt balances your stomach’ s acids and aids digestion.

Louise Herlihy, Dietitian, 2010 TCD graduate, BSc (Hons) Human Nutrition and Dietetics Dr Fiona Lithander, PhD, Registered Nutritionist, Lecturer in Human Nutrition, TCD

the page is blank

by Kevin Breathnach

13

books

Colm Tóibín

N

early five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.

What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.

It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.

After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of 14

no commercial value is actually very useful.

There’s a great purity about it.”

The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.

“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt,

“The page is blank.

It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one.

The page is blank.” has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.

Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I

visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín points out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.

“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it.

I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”

He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street.

You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”

The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies.

“There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”

Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail,

I cannot help but think of the half- lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.

“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it.

The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”

The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and halflight. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almostseen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work.

“It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”

“I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”

There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex. Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the halftruths in these stories.

For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book.

Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drunks than to

Cover illustration and details by Eoin Beglin

have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”

When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex.

“Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.”

By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”

“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”

“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”

“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”

“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”

When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I

ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically.

“It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.”

But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”

Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker.

“Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”

When the Paris Review came to Greene’s house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to them for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After over an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.

As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’” “Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”

15

fashion

if you want it done right...

Buttons Replace old tatty (and not so divine) buttons with the shiny allure that gold ones provide.

They’re an instant and easy way to update any item and handily go with most colours! This doesn’t just apply to casual wear, formal wear can be charmed into something special too. Be inspired by ball gowns such as Carey Mulligan’s Prada Oscars dress. The subtle glints of gunmetal provide a glamorous allure but on close inspection little trinkets lift what would have been a straightforward sombre dress into a gem. For a similar effect, gather an array of the oddest buttons you can find (I got doll/ scissors/bear ones from a haberdashery in Cork), nuts and bolts from your dad’s tool kit, spoons and forks (wooden cutlery from Carluccio’s) Drill (or get a sharp nail and screw) little holes into them. Spray paint them in the colour of your choice (for the Prada look go with gunmetal and bronze) sow them onto the bodice, concentrating detail at the very top, sporadically cascade the trinkets downwards. (see: Crown Jewels, 12 Castle Market, Dublin 2, Woodie’s D.I.Y, Sandyford Industrial Estate) Pins Having inspired the autumn/winter undercurrent Goth movement, add your own Victorian twist to a sharp’n’smart outfit by cheaply acquiring some (preferably broad grosgrain... .or else one from a discarded one from gift wrap or a chocolate box will more than suffice) ribbon. Wrap under the collar of a shirt (best paired with a round peter pan shirt), cross the two ends and fasten securely with a brooch or pin (for a ‘kookier’ look, why not use an old band badge) If you’re feeling fancy, Rubenesque in the Powerscourt Centre have fairytale reams of lace and ribbon to choose from.

(See: antique stalls in Georges Arcade, Toejam Carboot sale, last Saturday of each month at The Bernard Shaw) Lace Roaming around shops such as Urban Outfitters and Topshop with empty pockets can be pretty inspiring. The sheer amount of pretty posy dresses with scalloping which adds a ++$ to the retail price is starkly sobering. So why not do it yourself? Haberdasheries have a cheap and cheerful range of lace to offer a new lease of life to any limp hem. Sew along the edges of clothing to spruce them up or if you’re feeling artistic, drape in your desired shape and secure it in place (whether by thread or cheaters tip, fashion glue) Simple, clean cut silhouettes as seen in the 3.1 Philip Lim collection define detailing by overlapping sheer lace over fabric, e.g. black on top of camel, white over gray. The best way of effectively achieving this look is by getting cheap lace and isolating the main strands of the design or even going off the beaten track and using the basic lines of the pattern to suit your design.

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Once you have a (preferably symmetric pattern) mapped on top of the lace, use a needle and go over it with a bolder thread. For a Rodarte A/W ’10 turn, cut Baroque architecture inspired leaf motifs out of lace or velvet ribbon and stitch or glue onto sheer tops (American Apparel have a stellar collection) (See: Hickeys, 5 Henry Street, Dublin 1) Knitwear As the bitter winter wind creeps in, a woolly scarf and hat combo is the order of the day. In between lectures and seminars why not relax by doing a spot of knitting? And what better time to start than now, with the setting up of Trinity’s very own Knit Soc who run weekly Stitch’n’Bitches, craft-based sessions with copious amounts of tea and biscuits, a fun alternative to going to a pub or club. Switch between bands of black and acerbic acid colours for a Sonia Rykiel look or pull a fast one on the racy Mark Fast look by skipping stitches and leaving gaping holes in your knitting. He uses finer, more figure hugging material for his pieces, substitute this for a chunkier, hardier wool for autumn and winter (it’s also far quicker and versatile) If you’re looking for a more complex shape, how about hyperbolic knitwear? This approach to crochet recently featured in the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef exhibition at The Science Gallery and was seen down John Rocha’s runway as he veered away from lace simulating the illusion of it instead by connecting crocheted circles into darling shift dresses. Why not give it a spin?

(See: The Woollen Mills, 41-42 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1)

by Aisling Deng

A Pictorial Guide What you need: Old shirt (turn inside out if the collar is worn out- sew button back on), Fabric paint (in your colour of preference), Paintbrush, Pencil, Scissors, Starch (optional)

tv Diary #3

by James Kelly

get the sack or those of you who don’t know, LittleBigPlanet was the first PS3 exclusive title to really showcase the full potential of Sony’s monolithic horse-box. In addition to being one of the most spectacular platform games of the last decade, its trademark level design features opened up a whole new generation of gamers to the bare-basics of game design, created a consistently creative community, and with the option to post created levels online for everyone to play, it seemed as if LBP would be the game that would keep on giving. But like anything that rakes in enough money for its creators, a sequel was almost inevitable.

Which begs the question, how do you make a sequel to a game that is constantly being updated and enriched by its community and make it worth their hard earned cash? As you’re reading this new levels are being created and shared online to add to the millions of levels already there for public consumption in LBP. If LittleBigPlanet 2 is to win over fans of the original, it will need to improve on everything that came before it. Thankfully, from my experience with the current beta , I can say it’s shaping up to be the sequel its community deserves.

The basic set up hasn’t changed and Sackboy himself is still as ridiculously adorable as he was the last time around, even if he is now referred to as ‘Sack Thing’ for some inexplicable reason. The platforming is enjoyable as ever and the physics engine from the first game hasn’t lost its charm. In fact, one of the highlights of the beta was a section based inside a spaceship where the physics of gravity

were manipulated providing a whole new level of complexity to the puzzles. It’s nothing too sophisticated, but it’s exactly the type of clever touch that made the first game so special so it’s nice to see the Media Molecule team haven’t run out of ideas.

Possibly the most exciting aspect of LBP2 is unfortunately one of the few things absent from the beta; the ability to create mini games within the game itself. While we didn’t get an option to try work one in during our time with the level creator, there are examples in the story levels of where and how this ambitious idea will function. Littered throughout various levels are minuscule kiosks which prompt you to press something as you pass them. Accessing them allows you (via Sackboy) to play stripped down versions of arcade classics such as pong and wallball. Again, nothing too sophisticated and definitely not the full extent to which this create-a-game ability will be used in the final product, but it another nice touch that got a smile out of me for sure.

Another aspect in which LBP2 differs from its predecessor is the addition of Sackbots; bumbling (yet adorable), programmable nonplayer characters which can be instructed to behave certain ways and fulfill certain roles.

The only level in the beta which uses them is a level in which Sackboy must free Sackbots from little-hanging jail cells only to have them follow him around, turning the level into an extended escort mission, but again, their role in the game will be much more varied.

Andy Kavanagh LittleBigPlanet 2 is set for a January 2011 release for the Playstation 3.

One thing I said at the start of this year was that I wasn’ t going to write about Glee (Wed 8pm, TV3). I was finished with the show, over it. It was way too mainstream for me anyway.

Everyone loves it nowadays so it wasn’t even ironically funny to like it. Sure, I loved the first half of Season One, but the return after the four month hiatus was disappointing and then the first few episodes of the new season disappointed me too. No way was I writing about Glee.

But then something happened, something special. The fourth episode of the new season, Duets, was a revelation. It struck the perfect balance between the nonsensicality of the Britney episode and the po-faced seriousness of the Grilled Cheesus episode without the heavy-handed preaching or self-important smugness. Duets is Glee at its best – concentrating on characters, song choices appropriate to the tone and a lack of attention on the adult characters. For once, I wasn’t pining for a Sue interlude. I didn’t even notice her absence until I re-watched it. If that isn’t an endorsement of Duets I don’t know what is!

Chris Colfer gave a great turn as Kurt, redeeming the character entirely in my eyes.

And despite the huge main cast, ‘Duets’ was able to develop each and every character in some way, while majorly introducing a new character in Sam (Chord Overstreet), who initially struck a flat note in his introduction in the season premiere.

The song choices of the episode were nothing short of inspired, with Colfer’s Le Hot Jazz and his duet with Lea Michele on Happy Days Are Here/Get Happy standing out as two of my favourite performances of the entire series.

It was far and away the gayest episode of Glee, and possibly of any American primetime TV show, I have ever seen and maybe that’s why I liked it so much. And while Kurt’s struggle with loneliness will be familiar to any ‘bent bffs’ , his pining for someone who isn’t interested is a universal theme. Finally Glee is back, the Glee I fell in love with a year ago – with the relatable cast, fabulous song choices and that great balance between light-hearted fun and genuinely affecting issues. Whether this momentum can be kept up over the course of the season is another matter – the Rocky Horror episode can be horrific or amazing – but for at least one episode, Glee has lived up to its potential.

Oh and I bet that Sam kid is gay.

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SeX

recipe

all spud in the hood

an ill wind

Rose Ponsonby & Sadhbh O’Brien The culinary lothario

Monday Met a girl, and I seem to be with her now.

She’s lovely basically, and after scoring over the previous weeks, she comes over to my gaff on the Monday. Hungover, we head down the shop and get some chicken fillet rolls and coke. Back to the house and I had my jocks off faster than you’d know. It has been a while. I hadn’t prepared for this and only have a Freshers’ pack condom at hand, but desperate times. Despite feeling like I’ve got a couple of Tesco bags on my willy, I press on. Pretty sure she gets her bit before me. Success. We snuggle, she goes home, I fall asleep watching Hollyoaks.

Tu esday Not seeing her today, she’s got college and

“At one point she was on top, and I seriously considered putting my hands behind my head in the ultimate pose of relaxation.”

Potatoes are a bit of a wonder meal. They have less fat and calories than rice or pasta, have no cholesterol, and are jammed with vitamins and minerals. The skins are also a great source of fibre so in their jackets is the perfect way to serve them. Nutritionally, potatoes are only outranked by sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes have the lowest GI of any root, twice the daily guide for vitamin A and when eaten with the skin they provide more fibre than oatmeal. All this good means you really can afford to be a bit indulgent with your fillings. So, do you really need us to tell you how to bake a potato? No, maybe not. But we do have a few good ideas for dressing up your jackets. These ideas are simple ten minute meals that don’ t break the budget. And if these rouse dormant potato feelings why not explore lovepotatoes.co.uk – potato websites really don’ t get more exciting than this.

Sadhbh & Rose’s

Jacket potatoes

I’ve got work in the evening. I’m also not really arsed.

Anyway, get back from work, have a ham and cheese toastie and a wank and head to bed.

Wednesday Her parents were both working till late and it was daytime but she called for me to go round.

The spontaneity of the occasion caused me once again to rely on the dreaded Mojo johnny. Grabbed a couple lying around my room, probably from last year, and headed off. At one point she was on top, and I seriously considered putting my hands behind my head in the ultimate pose of relaxation. Immediately felt ashamed of myself after this thought. Finished, snuggled, kissed goodbye, I promise to make her dinner at mine the next day.

Th u rsday Got my shit together. Bought some brand

name prophylactics and some spices and chicken for the dinner and whip up a lovely curry (johnnies not included in recipe). She comes over, seemingly appreciates my culinary skills. After a few drinks, we head to bed. Riding away, she’s on top again. I get slightly hypnotised by her slow, fluid movements. She really is beautiful. She ups the tempo a bit. Up and down she goes, up, down, up, down and then.. oh jesus what was that sound? Did I just fart? I certainly hope I haven’t shit myself because that would be really embarrassing.

I look up, her face is bright red, she’s no longer moving.

Oh right... she just queefed. Our eyes meet, I smile, we both burst out laughing, our sexy moment has passed for now. We give it a few minutes and then get back to it.

She stays the night.

Friday Lovely parting of ways as she rushes off for

college. We kiss, all shameful moments from the night previous forgotten. I bet you anything it was the fucking curry that made her do a fanny fart. Next time I’ll stick with spag bol.

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cubed mozzarella, diced tomatoes, ripped basil leaves or streaky rashers, cream cheese, fresh chive or sweet potato, chopped chilli, chopped coriander, dash of lime juice, 25g butter Scrub and dry potato, or sweet potato, and prick several times with a fork (a crucial step to prevent explosion...).

Pop each potato into the microwave on high for 6-7 minutes, turning half way through. Microwave cooking has an unfair rep – it saves time, doesn’t damage nutrients that can otherwise lost by oven-cooking, and it’ s better for the environment!

Option one is a tricolour salad. Assemble mozzarella, tomato and basil in your spud. Option two is rasher and cream cheese, sprinkled with a dash of fresh chive. Option three is chilli, coriander and lime sweet potato. For this use very soft butter and mash the other ingredients in to taste. Apply very very liberally. And there you have it, (relatively) healthy comfort food.

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reviews Films

Books

Restaurants

Music

Guilty pleasures

Illustration by Kathi Burke 19

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food in college Trinity College, Dublin 2

think that I am compelled to begin this article by talking about myself, so that I may confess my ignorance of the topic at hand and my almost unforgiving bias. Firstly I am not, by any conceivable application of the words, a “foodie” or a “good cook”.

However, just as every arts student discovers that they are in fact a fantastic amateur photographer one shutter-snap after being handed a disposable, ask me to sample your soup or to poach an egg and I may suddenly turn pretentious, while really, I couldn’ t tell you a pinot from a grigio.

Victuals? Well, I’m not all that fussed about these astro-pubs with their their swan-egg omelettes. My idea of a fine meal is one apportioned so generously that you can’t even see the edgy quadrilateral plate it’s been spaded on to. The point to all this being that as an averagely kitchen-incapable student, I should not expect too much of the Buttery or Dining Hall, or catering in college generally.

Now we come to the second thing, my almost unforgiving bias. In my first and second years, though the Dining Hall seemed to me beautiful, the Buttery held a very angry place in my head. It was the staff of the “Sluttery” as it was known to giggling Freshmen, that dealt me my first financial battering in Dublin. Food costs next to nothing up North, you know. I don’t spend 15 minutes, as I do here, in Marks and Spark’ s working out which sandwich of 20

the same price is weightier and then stalking round the aisles, leering after those lovely big red 2-for-1 stickers on the pies.

I so very wanted to verbally demolish the Buttery, since to do so financially/physically would require either a concentrated boycott or expensive explosives – beyond my organisational talent. They’re very popular, these restaurant-bashing, career-crashing reviews.

I was looking forward to getting in on some furious catharsis: this pork is cretinously awful! It’s like chewing the front wheel off a Polo when I eat this bacon, It should be used in the production of bulletproof vests! And so on.

But what should we expect from Catering in Trinity? The main issue is the cost of food and so I phoned the head of catering, Moira O’ Brien. I had wanted to play the aggrieved student who’d had just about enough with authority, but she spoke at a polite volume and had a pretty timbre to her voice. Here’s some of the things she told me that I didn’t know: these guys aren’t subsidised – they’re self-financing. That means they have to make a profit and, like everyone else, they’ve had a downturn in customers. The ones who remain are spending less. If Catering go in the red, I don’t think the government will be fussed about bailing them out (may as well take a chance to have a go: “you wanker bankers!”). The overheads are high, competition in the centre of Dublin is as tough as that bacon I was writing about (she made the point that Catering in UCD, for example, have few competitors) and

there seems to be a frustrating amount of bureaucracy. Deals must be negotiated between their own Purchasing Department, the separate Procurements Department and with the suppliers. Not easy, I would assume.

The cold hard consensus is, however, that the Buttery, and also the Dining Hall, Hamilton Café etc, are too expensive and the quality too low. On Wednesday the 20th the student special in the Buttery was a beef casserole.

With vegetable and potatoes the deal came to €4.80. Evening meals cost around €5-7. The beef was nicely tender, but when consider the SU Deals of Week which offer, for example, two Cornish pasties for just €5. Or the braised sirloin the students of DCU are offered for the same price, or George’s fantastic early-bird deals just off of Kildare Street for €7. Then when you consider the breakfast fry in college – five “items” (five sausages, say, you fat muppet) for €6.15? It’s difficult not to feel shortchanged afterwards.

Most people seem to agree – it would be better to have low quality food for cheap, or high quality stuff for not so cheap. And pretending to myself it could ever be that simple, I said as much down the phone. Mrs. O’Brien said she found this “disheartening”. She said she realised that everything wasn’t perfect, that it’s all still a work in progress. There have been no price increases in the last few years, she pointed out, and the staff, some of whom I had met and were very friendly after they got over their initial suspicions, work hard.

I wanted to know if Catering had a “Mission Statement”, as it were, what they want to do for the students especially, above and beyond what any other restaurant could offer. After some thought she replied: “We want to be an important part of the social space in college,” and, not wanting to sound glib, I could hear pride in her voice.

There’ll be someone else who can mouthoff better than I can about how the Buttery space could have been better utilised or who

“My idea of a fine meal is one apportioned so generously that you can’t even see the edgy quadrilateral plate it’s been spaded on to.”

can better eulogise the undeniable scholarly ambience of the Dining Hall. What I heard over and over again was how Catering wanted to work with the students. It’s certainly to their benefit to increase the popularity of their eateries, but there exists also a genuine will to improve upon the wonderful feeling of community on campus in Trinity. Instead of bored students such as myself looking for easy targets to write bombastic critiques about, more students and the SU should take an interest in improving these spaces, whether by organising gigs or exhibitions, or by negotiating better deals on food and drink. There are good people waiting to work with you.

Ciarán McCollum

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down there

let me in

Avey Tare

m usic Down There is the first solo album

Director: Matt Reeves

film With cinemas filled with re-releases,

remakes and vampires it seems apt to paraphrase Gordon Gecko: truly, blood, for want of a better word, is good. Vampires are busy taking over the world and Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’ s Let Me In is the latest in this peculiar vein. However while the source novel’ s author wrote the screenplay for the Swedish original (ensuring any alterations had some legitimacy), Reeves adaptation only panders rather than amplifies. This means that while Let Me In is an enjoyable film, it’ s also an inferior remake of a masterpiece. But all great vampire films aren’t really about vampires.

They’ re about sexual abandonment, craven urges and addictions or in this case, a boy’s coming of age tale, steeped in morality. The film reinvigorates the genre by taking it back to its origins: here vampirism is a black mass of rebirth, salvation and renounced moral codes.

Based on the 2008 Swedish film, which in turn is based on the John Alvide Linqvist novel, Reeves’ s version tells the story of Owen (The Road’ s Kodi Smit McPhee) as he trudges through a bleak and snow-sodden existence in early 1980’ s New Mexico. Owen is a bullied and lonely voyeur with a penchant for knivesand therefore it’ s not surprising that a gang of menacing bullies soon target him. It’s this suffering however that means he latches on to a mysterious new arrival in his neighborhoodthe enigmatic and outwardly young Abbey (Chloë Moretz of Kick Ass).

As their young romance blossoms, Reeves crafts an expert juxtaposition of horror and friendship set within the daily squalor of life.

Characterisation beyond the two leads is intentionally minimalist and Reeves’ s use of aural and visual triggers to guide the audience is intriguing but also occasionally heavyhanded. However he also eliminates a crucial ambivalence from in Owen and Abbey’ s relationship in the original, which unfortunately simplifies this film beyond redemption.

But with Let Me In Reeves seems intent to puzzle the audience into an unnerving position. A scene is rarely presented clearly and instead is pieced together from close-ups of objects and an occasional landscape. This

means it is rarely smooth and this combined with its sparse dialogue means the film is often distorted. Action frequently occurs on and through glass; while Elias Koteas’s weary detective surveys an inexpiably horrific crime scene, Ronald Reagan gives a televised speech proclaiming America’s triumph over evil. However this also means that the actors are given a freedom to convey the thoughts of the characters through gestures or expressions rather than expositional dialogue. And while the film does have many flaws, its cast cannot be faulted. The two leads are beyond competent, as are the seasoned character actors Elias Koteas and Richard Jenkins.

While enjoyable and certainly worthy as a popular alternative to the Twilight movies, it remains highly derivative. It reproduces the best scenes exactly, adds one fantastic action sequence but loses humour, complexity and pathos. It proves that not all remakes are disasters - but also fails to prove itself necessary.

Sean Driver

proper of Animal Collective’s Avey Tare.

Communicated through the medium of string and can, messages spiral through the wire-y core with an added gasp and dash of breathless childhood wonder.

Following on from ODDSAC, the visual component is prevalent in this project.

Stemming from the sibling’ s fascination with the old, Tare reuses vocals on Oliver Twist and records film on VHS tape, adding an unheimlich dimension, highly reminiscent of Roger Corman B-movies, in order to instill a sound that’s ‘a little more alien, and a little less human.’ A stream of consciousness cultivated in Laughing Hieroglyphic unfurls the emotional waves and tides which have characterized Tare’s tumultuous past few years from the dissolution of his marriage to [ex-Múm member] Kría Brekkan, his partner-in-crime on the LP Pullhair Rubeye. to his sister’ cancer diagnosis and the death of his grandmother, with the most delicate of embraces.

The ecclesiastical chimes on 3 Umbrellas fall in between the ghostly echoes of Tare’s chants and child-like beats like summer rain.

Imagine a Vitamin C tablet dropping into a glass of water, effervescently diffusing into an orange glow now add an element of the psychedelic, replace that glass of water with the sea and the tablet with the sun only for the moon to rise with full nocturnal-rave luminosity and you’ve got a grasp on the album’s lever.

It is highly reminiscent of Animal Collective’s Water Curses E.P. And thus, it could be convincingly construed as a post-Merriweather Post-Pavilion/Fall Be Kind companion piece, a departure from the warmth womb of childhood towards the darker side of the moon: mortality. But that would merely diminish and tarnish a beautifully and intuitively hewn gem of an album. Ghosts of Books undulates in a plethora of rhythmical scales pseudo-reptilian in manner. Bubbling under the subterranean murkiness, it fades gently into Cemeteries. Tare claims that “one of the reasons I have this swamp vibe going is it’s about being stuck in a rut.”

The different stages within the process of saying goodbye to someone, that heartbreak provides an emotional lyrical grounding that goes AWOL in Animal Collective’s nebulous atmosphere. Like a nightmare near-death experience, this offering guides you from light to dark, waking you up with a stirring breath of joy-de-vivre. Aisling Deng 21

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II.2

Another year

freedom Jonathan Franzen

Director: Mike Leigh

film Another Year is Mike Leigh’s new film

about middle aged people’s sad and sorry existence. Exciting stuff I know, but let’s see whether it merits a trip to the cinema or not.

The film follows a couple played by Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent over the course of one year, and shows their waning kindness towards their friend Mary played by Lesley Manville. Mary just cannot get her life together and during the film seems to rot away right in front of us.

The plot however takes a back seat, as per euro-cine norm, so that there is a stronger focus on character development or rather the lack thereof. In that sense one could easily say that very little actually happens within this film, which for many may be unforgivable.

That said, what Another Year lacks in plot is definitely made up for in the exceptional performances of the actors. These people are realistic and more importantly believable. No one adheres to the polarities of completely good, or completely bad; each character has complexities to them which the audience is never outwardly told about.

The major problem this film will have with younger people is its relevance. To be frank students and young adults will probably find it difficult to relate to the characters on-screen simply because we have not yet experienced middle aged life. As a result parts of this film are unavoidably boring.

For some this film will be nothing more than another dull, pretentious arty film that does very little and says nothing. If however you prefer more socially engaging films that inspire discussion you may just get a kick or two out of it. However it is by no means masterpiece of this type of cinema. Another Year is a nice film to watch, but you shouldn’t expect much more than that.

If you’re interested in seeing this film I would certainly advise to give it a miss in the cinema and wait until it comes out for rent on DVD. Trust me you won’t lose anything in the conversion to the small-screen. In fact you may get more out of it by watching it at home with some older people who may be able to relate to the film’s themes more than you or I can. PJ Moloney

22

Books It took Jonathan Franzen nearly nine

years to publish a follow-up to his wildly successful third novel The Corrections. That may seem like a long time to some people, but don’t tell him that. At a recent book talk and signing in Dún Laoghaire, he was asked point-blank what he had been doing all that time and was quick, very quick, to point out that he had been up to quite a lot, thank you very much. Since The Corrections Franzen published one book of essays, one memoir, a translation of Spring Awakening and a series of articles for The New Yorker. And of course, he was also quietly working on one of the most impactful novels of the year: Freedom.

Freedom traces the relationships, and the associated fractures and anxieties, of the Berglund family. Set throughout the end of the twentieth century, but concluding before the start of the Obama administration, Freedom is much more than the political satire that Franzen pitched it as, so many years ago. It is an unflinching, but sensitive story of the nuclear family in America and the myriad consequences of too much, not enough and the wrong sort of love.

Franzen does not hold out his characters and pin out their arms and legs on an index card so we may examine them without compassion or fear. The Berglunds, and those that surround them, are graphic characters.

Franzen moves himself closer to Tolstoy (War and Peace figures prominently in Freedom) and away from Pynchon and Barth by populating his story with believably flawed characters.

The Berglunds are not a characterization of anyone or anything; rather, they are simply just characters, who feel and act in their own right and for their own reasons.

There’s a real beating heart in Freedom.

Franzen manages the crucial trick of expressing something universally human, while only writing intimately about a few. Freedom drives closer to a sympathetic tone then much other contemporary literature, while also remaining calculated and scientific enough to keep one from ever fully collapsing into the novel’ s arms. Little flourishes and embellishments remind the reader that the story is human, for example Patty Berglund assures

herself that she does love her husband in a parenthetical aside “(and does love him, does love him).” And then, with the same stylistic deftness, Franzen pushes the reader back with quick and cynical devices, such as the awkwardly capitalized phrase “ Young Black Youths.”

Franzen will not let you forget that you are reading a book and in that book there is contained a story that is expressed through a series of words, he’ s still got too much postmodernist in him to ever let go of that notion, but he also wants you to know that despite all of the semantic intrusion there are real human stories to be told. Freedom then is just that: a clever and quick-witted story that is cynical enough to keep the 21st century reader engaged, but loving enough to express something that is as close to true as a story can ever hope to get.

Stuart Winchester

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the moderns Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8

Art The Moderns, one of the IMMA’s most

II.1

the witmark demos: 1962-1964 Bob Dylan

m usic The Witmark Demos are the latest and

ninth instalment of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, but they are by no means the last of the dusty relics to be hauled up from his basement: Dylan looks set to become another one of those musical heavyweights who still release new old material well into senior age and long after their death. These new nuggets are hardly throwaways, and it’ s a surprise they have stayed unreleased for so long. They’re not gold, but Dylan can do worse. Let’s not forget Must be Santa.

As is obvious from the title, these 47 songs were taped between 1962 and 1964, originally for the Witmark label, and intended to showcase his work to other performers who might want to record them. Present are some of Dylan’s most popular songs from the most celebrated period in his career, along with the aforementioned rarities.

The recordings are stripped down, mostly made up of Dylan’s much-favoured guitar, vocals and sometimes harmonica arrangement, with occasional piano curveballs. Piano versions of The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Mr. Tambourine Man are a considerable find, even if they don’ t quite match up to the definitive album versions. That said, the wellknown renditions just aren’ t as much fun.

The charm of this compilation is in its informality. These playful, organic demos don’t take themselves too seriously. There is coughing and shuffling about, but it feels authentic, not unprofessional. Dylan jokes around and corrects his lyrics mid-song without a trace of

lost confidence. On no other recording is it so clear that he is relaxed and enjoying himself - simultaneously contagious and charismatic.

You’re in the Witmark studio, right there next to him in 1962.

The great thing about these demos (and demos in general) is that they were recorded so soon after the songs were written. They have more passion, more credibility, and more impact - both on Dylan and the listener.

His laughter is real on Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues and so is his anger on Masters of War. This classic protest anthem has all the fiery sadness that can come only with the songs being so fresh on his lips.

It’s quite exciting knowing that these songs are newer to him than to you. Not all of them, though. There are plenty of obscure traditional folk songs and rare originals to explore.

Long Ago Far Away harks back to the days of Dylan’s idol, Woody Guthrie (whose shadow he fledged in before eventually casting his own, bigger, shadow). Ballad for a Friend allows him to flex his famous poetic muscle.

The rest of the tracks (like Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright and Blowin’ in the Wind) fall into a kind of Greatest Hits category. For those without of one of Dylan’ s many Best Of releases, this has his trademark blues/ folk guitar work and unpretentious poetry.

For the hardcore Bob Dylan anorak, Witmark provides the priceless feeling of just hanging out with the man, while he flips through his own great American songbook.

David McLoughlin

ambitious and extensive exhibitions to date, recently opened at the museum’s Kilmainham Hospital site. The exhibition consumes the entire first floor of the building as well as a portion of the ground floor, and features Irish art from 1900-1970 in a variety of media including painting, sculpture and film. One of the main issues explored in the exhibition is that of Modernism in Ireland and it challenges the commonly held notion that Irish artists failed to capture and respond to this movement. It is a concept the visitor is encouraged to consider while exploring the exhibition.

There was a strong element of patriotism in the selection of paintings from the first quarter of the 20th century and Jack B. Yeats works from the 1910s-30s provide an visually arresting introduction to the exhibition.

Pieces such as The Small Ring (1930) show how he responded to the idea of a new cultural identity by depicting scenes of everyday life in the Irish town and country.

Some pieces that resonated particularly would be Phelan Gibb’s Paysage (1906) and Mainie Jellett’s Composition (1925), representing the artists’ response to the Fauvist and Cubist movements respectively. Although it’s interesting to see Irish artists engage with contemporary European artistic trends, Gibb’s piece was never exhibited in Ireland due to opposition from the Catholic Church and the relevance of its inclusion in this exhibition is questionable.

The show finishes on the ground floor with pieces that usher in the end of the Modernist era. A key piece from this period would be Robert Ballagh’s Liberty of the Barricades (After Delacroix) (1969-70). This image will be familiar to most as the inspiration for Coldplay’s 2008 album cover for Viva La Vida.

Like many of the artist’s works, it combines an engagement with the past with an interest in contemporary aesthetics, as Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 composition Liberty Leading the People is given a Pop Art makeover. Modern art can be quite difficult to engage with at times, but I think the large scale of The Moderns and the variety of different styles and media on display work well together to create a dynamic survey of the history of Modernist art in Ireland and a very successful exhibition.

Róisín Lacey-McCormack 23

II.2

it goes it goes (Forever & Ever) Halves

M usic The press release for this Dublin trio’s debut LP credits a lot of big names as locations, guests, and sound engineers. Most eye-catching are members of the Constellation Records collective (home to post-rock giants Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and the namedrop of Hotel2Tango, the studio where The Arcade Fire’s Funeral was recorded. So, before the play button is even touched, an expectation of slow-burning orchestral fanfare forms.

This is promptly delivered upon, with the opener sporting whispering violins and brass, with a spiderweb-thin shakiness soon joined by a male voice. A multitude of instruments are introduced in the later tracks, electronic and organic, from vocoder to stylophone to accordion, and they mesh together to weave a rather pretty cinematic composition.

Halves have said they set out, almost manifesto-like, to create music nobody in Ireland was creating. They’ve found that niche, but are they filling it adequately? It’s hard to put them down, their musicianship is undeniable.

Yet, they feel like an Yngwie Malmsteen or a Vanessa Mae. You can appreciate their skill and virtuosity but it’s a challenge to enjoy them beyond that. The title is ironically indicative. The album ends up where it started, and goes nowhere in-between, an all-too-long bumpless ride. Gheorghe Rusu

literary life of London for Seattle, “a city where everyone comes from somewhere else.”

“The immigrant needs to grow a memory, and grow it fast,” he writes. “He must learn to convert the uncanny into the homely, in order to find a stable footing in the new land.” Composed originally for outlets like Granta and the Atlantic Monthly, these insightful pieces on subjects as diverse as the history of the inaugural address, the natural history of the North-West and the life of Mark Twain are Raban’ s attempt at growing one such memory. In Julia’s City , he buys a box of old photographs for $15, growing not only a memory, but a history, too.

The trouble is that these pieces were not originally conceived as part of a book; by consequence the collection is subject to inevitable repetitions of both observation and imagery.

“The sea boiled around us like milk,” is a fine portrayal. But one begins to tire of it by the fifth airing. This collection is far less than the sum of its parts.

Kevin Breathnach

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6 Eustace St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

Adam Elliot

film Mary and Max is the first clay-mated

Characteristically well-wrought sentences, tightly-wound metaphors and thoughtful reflections mark Driving Home, a collection of essays spanning the twenty years since its author, Jonathan Raban, swapped

IFI Café bar

mary and max

driving home Books

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Jonathan Raban

page out of a New York phonebook in the local post office and randomly picks the name ‘Max Horovitz’ from the listings. Initially bonding over their mutual love of chocolate and their innocently questioning of the world, their friendship develops over a span of two decades. We watch as they swap chocolate recipes, send gifts, discuss where babies come from, disagree, fall out for years, reunite, and ultimately meet.

Once again Elliot skilfully portrays an emotionally charged story with fantastic humour and sensitivity. The simple animation and colour scheme add to the charm of this film and highlight the intricate and unusual characters. You cannot help but be sucked into the lives of Mary and Max and find yourself genuinely rooting for them. This is a film that men and women alike will leave the cinema feeling they were just witness to something very special, and very funny. Susan Gibson

feature-film from the Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet director Adam Elliot. It follows the unlikely pen-pal friendship between Mary (Toni Collette), a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl, and Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a 44-year-old, obese, Jewish New Yorker with Asperger’s Syndrome. Their correspondence first begins when Mary, fed up of being teased by the neighbourhood children, rips a

Food The IFI, which plays host to a myriad of arthouse cinema and foreign film festivals, is one of Dublin’ s gems, and a trip there is made all the more appealing by the fact that they boast a very decent café bar, the perfect place for a bit of post-viewing film dissecting.

The menu elicited much frenzied oohhing and ahhing from a hungry pack of students, and there was a great deal of agonized drooling going on over whether to opt for the 6oz open steak sandwich and onion rings, which at 11 was the only main course over a tenner, or the IFI burger complete with guacamole, melted cheddar, bacon and tomato relish (¤9.35), both of which are served with chunky homemade chips. The falafel pitta with aioli (¤7.95) added to the general hysteria, but sadly when it came down to it the food, while enjoyable, didn’ t quite live up to expectations.

The IFI Café Bar offers a good value menu, in smoldering arty surroundings, with quick efficient service, and while the food won’ t blow you away, the value, generous portions and relaxed atmosphere go a long way to making up for it. Rose Ponsonby

How to…

guilt y ple asures

go hillwalking without being a dick about it Seán Mc Tiernan

Clothes Dress sensibly. That doesn’t mean wrap a

couple of fucking mattresses around yourself. It means assess the conditions and dress accordingly. Guess what? Walking warms you up. Guess also what? There’s often cold fog on the top of mountains that’ll freeze your bollocks off. Consider this. You don’t want to freeze to death sure, but all those spare expensive fleeces won’t be as good to you as a cheap wind-cheater if it rains. You get what you pay for. Much as you’ll love yourself for getting a cheap top and giving the extra money to starving kids, you won’t be too pleased when you’re soaked to your skin with nipples like bullets in the pissing rain.

People who climb mountains in runners and tracksuit bottoms cos “no big deal” are idiots or tourists and neither deserve mountain rescue.

Safe t y You may have guessed, this is a big deal. I don’t care what kind of “back to nature” horseshit you think you’re pulling by walking up a hill but you should always bring a phone. Also it’s a good idea to bring a map and check your route before you set off, no matter how “minor” you think the mountain is. If there’s fog you’ll take a wrong turn and roll down a cliff face like the baffled dickhead you are till you get dismembered by a sheep skeleton.

Toile t Within reason you’re allowed go to the bathroom when walking, just go off behind a rock or something. Check if the area is safe first obviously. Since you are ostensibly an adult though, you may want to do your “wee-wees” and “poo-poos” before you set off, thus sparing the group you’re with the pain of having to sit around making awkward small talk while you dispose of yesterday’s Tesco Value Meal. Worse, you could be discovered by a small child. No small child wants to see you making your I’m-taking-a-vicious-shit-here-lads face, trust me.

Water Do bring water but don’t use it as a crutch.

Drink it sparingly enough. People who feel the pang you get when you start exercise and react by guzzling a litre of water get stitches, can’t go any further and are idiots who deserve to be headbutted in the dick by our lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Pace Being “mountain fit” is not the same as Iwalk-to-work-once-a-week-with-the-girls fit. You’re not going to be as fast as you think and uphill can be a nightmare.

This is okay, getting a pace going is the best but you should rest if you need to. Don’t overstress yourself and then make your group get a stretcher to carry your wheezy arse down the hill like you’re after dropping out of the Iron Man Triathlon in hour 9.

“No small child wants to see you making your I’m-taking-avicious-shithere-lads face, trust me.”

Personal Issues

by Fiona Hyde Let me preface this confession with a small but important disclaimer: I am not a monster. Secondly, I am also the kind of person that enjoys reading about other human beings in miserable situations, as long as their misery is presented to me through the wonderful medium of Boards.ie Personal Issues forum. Believe me when I say I do not laugh when old people fall in the street, and I take no pleasure in reading depressing human interest stories in newspapers. I repeat: I am not a monster.

But who among you can deny that an uncensored Irish problem page, riddled with marital indiscretions, advice on how to find a fuck buddy in Coppers and anagrams like SWS (sex while stupid), could truly be a thing of magic and beauty? Ask yourself, would you scroll past a post entitled ‘Diary of a Circumcision’?

While you hide your love for Dido and your midnight meal of brie coated in Nutella from the world, here I am sharing my disgusting mores with you. And, what sane yet sadistic person would blame me for loving Personal Issues? When men type posts safely under a blanket of anonymity, their confessions can reach the thrillingly hilarious heights of these below excerpts: “Still taking a salt bath every day and doing a good bit of naked strolling when I can,” and “So, I’ve been walking around the house all evening in just a t-shirt and sitting on the edge of chairs so my bits hang over,” or “Imagine me sitting in the bath seeing my bell end for the very first time at 24 years old” and Lord forgive me even this, “I haven’t smelled smegma for ten months and I don’t miss it.”

Ostensibly, this is a forum where the needy seek advice, and often it is as moving and affecting as it is hilarious. Not every post is a laugh a minute, and I have to dodge posts on crippling depression to find its counterpart, wherein a man seeks advice for cheating stressfree, or a women calling herself ‘MRS BOOBS’ seeks those with past experience with genital warts (although the creation of a slipstream ‘Bereavement’ forum has left Personal Issues free for more amusement and really evened up the miserable/hilarious ratio for creeps like me.) If you want to check out Personal Issues and reap the moist amusement within, I recommend you read the post titles very carefully. Avoid at all costs the post from sadguy entitled ‘Depressed Abroad’ and coast on over to ‘Girlfriend’s Plastic Mac Becoming A Problem’.

Trust me, at first you’ll feel morally dirty, but soon you’ll feel morally superior. You’ve had your fun, and that’s all that matters.

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Das Capo

don’t worry honey, haters gonna hate here is a certain, typically Irish tendency towards irrational, culturally-benign hatred which, by and large, goes unchecked, in the grand scheme of things.

In saying “typically Irish”, I am simply re-asserting that well-worn idea (not necessarily untrue) that we, as a population, have a tendency towards begrudgery. That said, begrudgery does not necessarily mean hatred, and our cultural auto-inclination towards antipathy, if we are to assume that it exists in the first place, must be multifarious to some degree, rather than a narrow bent on disliking others about whom we know relatively little. It’s easy to fall into a behavioral pattern of generally disapproving of someone, almost passively, seemingly due to simply knowing who they are. For example, as a student, I don’t think it’s uncommon for one to go through any college publication and scoff or fume or boil silently with rage at the things printed within and, indeed, at the people who wrote them. I used to do it all the time*, in fact. But at some point, the realisation came upon me that I was focusing more on having a go at the imagined personalities of the writers rather than any of the content for which I had developed such a distaste.

Indeed, it was probably as a result of my assumed hatred for these people that I developed a distaste of the things they had written. As long as I didn’t know any of them, it was easy for me to say or think unpleasant things about them, and the reasons for my enmity towards them became more and more ridiculous: “Look at the picture of Hugh McCafferty with his coffee-cup: what a wanker!” (I understand Hugh McCafferty is actually a lovely man), “That Cathal Wogan seriously needs to take a cold shower...” and so on. Basically, I had decided to dislike people purely because they were doing something I wasn’t, or because they were more heavily invested in doing something that I liked the idea of doing. Obviously, this was intensely stupid and immature and I’m ashamed of it now, having learned something, I think, from the entire debacle, temporally indistinct and largely inconsequential as it was.

But now, in post-Tiger Ireland, we’re experiencing an overwhelming amount of culturally-acceptable hatred, directed towards developers, bankers, hipsters, bureaucrats even (!) and it’s difficult for one not to be drawn in. While the comfort-blanket averment of: “It’s all the bankers’ fault!” has been trotted out in every single Irish newspaper, broad-sheeted or otherwise, without any inclination towards or endorsement of individual self-examination, its cultural step-brother, “Being a dickhead’s cool” (or “hipster-hate”) found a home in the UT Culture supplement (19th October, 2010) in a month where various more mainstream, real-world publications have been awoken, mystified, to the reality that hipsters exist (and both GQ and FHM provide readers with advice on how to seduce the females of the subspecies).

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“How can we condemn a culture on the grounds of submission to vanity and spectacle when using equally superficial means of culturalexamination? Is it meta-hipsterism?”

It may be trite to suggest that we see in ourselves the very same things for which we castigate bankers (greed, self-indulgence, irresponsibility) and, in turn, hipsters (insecurity manifested as social mobility, self-indulgence, pursuit of trends, status), but to me it seems selfevident from the nature of most commentary, in the UT or otherwise, that there is a certain element of preemptive defensiveness to all the “shower of bankers”/“antihipsterism” eyewash out there.

Indeed, it’s rather easy to slap a collective noun on a group of individual people to make disliking them easier, and all the better if it singles you out as eminentlynot-one. So borrowing beyond my means and defaulting on repayments is the bankers’ fault in the same way that I am individual, enlightened and alternative in a way which nobody with an undercut at this chiptunes gig could ever hope to be, despite the fact that, in both instances, I’m party to the exact same indulgences I claim to stand against.

If I’m dealing in stock cultural-commentary generalities, it’s only because the discourse has been so polluted as to require such folly. In the same breath that Rachael Shearer (in UT Culture) condemns Bad Kids’ elusive hipsters for failing to be individual in their allegedly superficial attempts at alternativeness, she bemoans the fact that they all look “exactly the same”. How can we condemn a culture on the grounds of submission to vanity and spectacle when using equally superficial means of cultural-examination? Is it meta-hipsterism? Does the very fact that such a phrase might be (I think) successfully invoked not make you feel a little sick?

So it’s come to the point where we can confidently air our status anxieties in the public discourse through the new rhetoric of cultural enlightenment, with the added bonus that we can freely oscillate between disliking tenuously constructed groups of socially/financially-privileged people as fashion dictates, without having to worry about allegations of racism, middle-class snobbery or homophobia (the bad kinds of prejudice) or indeed submit ourselves, as individuals, to the painful process of social categorisation which we force upon others. Trying not to see it as symptomatic of the very same schoolyard mentality wherein all behaviour/phraseology/clothing is coded within a rigorously enforced gay/not-gay taxonomy is perhaps the most difficult theoretical buttress for its acolytes to maintain. But as long it keeps The University Times from pursuing “harder” prejudices, I suppose it’s okay. Oh, wait - “...the one recession-proof accessory all women simply must have is a gay best friend...”

Bring back Emma Stokes. * “All the time” is, I can assure you, an exaggeration for rhetorical purposes.

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