TN2 Issue 5

Two Trinity News

Film

Music

books

Fashion

Art

issue 5 7 Dec 2010

Food

&

Reviews

#5

tell me that ain’t insecure Karl McDonald

S

o Dublin froze over. And then it melted a little. And then it froze again, in what seemed like an almost intentional move to make the snow icy and unusable while making paths even more treacherous to cross.

That’s definitely not the worst thing that happened, though. There’s no avoiding it.

It’s on TV, it’s on the internet, people won’t stop talking about it around you no matter how uninterested you declare yourself. It’s a national emergency of the gravest sort. We may never find a way back, and we need to come to terms with that.

Dani lost her internship at MCD. You knew that was what I was going to say, right? This issue’s Fade Street heavy, from the utterly inspired Kathi Burke illustration on the cover to James Kelly’s interviews with the three main characters, taking in the excellent Fake Street webcomic on the way. If you’re still on the fence about it, stop. Get off the fence. Watch it. You’re not cool for saying it’s a travesty and a waste of taxpayers’ money. You’re our generation’s whoever W.B. Yeats was giving out about when he was trying to get the Hugh Lane collection housed.

There are plenty of other things too.

Loose themes for this issue? Christmas, is one. We’re not immune to Christmas. Sadhbh and Rose even talked to Darina Allen and cohorts about it, finding out that even celebrity chefs have to have real, normal Christmas dinner or their family will riot.

Sneaking in is Samuel Beckett, through the Debut Directors shows in his theatre and the prints of him in the Art In College section. More prominent, though, is Kanye West, whose My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy I have been having mental arguments with myself using terms like “vexed critical discourse” and “you are a racist” about since it appeared a few weeks ago.

He also slipped into the How-To column alongside Taylor Swift. That wasn’t even planned, honestly.

This is the last issue of 2010 and the fifth of the year. In the first editorial I decided to promise “smart writing about stupid stuff and vice versa” and it hasn’t exactly turned out that way, but it’s been close. Enjoy the issue, enjoy the Christmas break and get a lot of rest, because I venture tentatively that the quality curve of these papers is inclining mildly upwards. We’re coming, 2011.

2

fe ature

Inscape by Cáit Fahey 3

openers

Wanderlist #5 M usic Odd Future It’s hard to describe exactly what Odd Future is. Founder/leader Tyler the Creator offered (to the NME) that they are “a herd of unicorns that don’t give a fuck, that’s talented.” Neutral observers might call them a rap crew, underage by American standards, who are obsessed with outrageous behaviour (rape and torture, not loitering) and capable of putting out upwards of five albums a year of incredibly fresh, innovative music. Where to start?

Most people meet Odd Future through the internet, often seeing the video for Earl Sweatshirt - Earl in which the eponymous star, at sixteen, flips a million internal rhymes from a barber’s seat, namechecking Asher Roth (masturbatorily) and Dizzee Rascal (in reference to hitting women) along the way. Earl is Tyler’s younger brother, and Tyler’s Bastard is possibly the best OF album so far. Tyler, the Creator - French is probably the closest thing to a club hit to date, even with socially conscious references to “fucking Goldilocks up in the forest” and evading R. Kelly. Tyler also features (as Wolf ) on Wolf Haley and Hodgy Beats - Sandwitches, opening with “Niggas had the nerve to say I was immature. What the fuck do you think I started Odd Future for? To wear suits and make good decision?” And yet again (it’s hard to avoid Tyler) he’s on Domo Genesis - Supermarket, pretending to be a yuppy getting mad at hungry stoner Domo for skipping the queue in a supermarket. Finally, Earl Sweatshirt Drop is just genius. Karl McDonald

trinitynews.ie

issueless predicament ArT in c ollege

Samuel Beckett Suite (1995-2000)

by Diarmuid Delargy Samuel Beckett Centre In 1987 Samuel Beckett, the great poet, playwright and former TCD student, granted Belfast born artist Diarmuid Delargy permission to create a number of etchings based on his writings, From an Abandoned Work. Written in 1956, the action centres on a three-day journey taken by the narrator during his youth, in which he muses on life and death, describes extraordinary encounters with mystical animals and experiences mood swings to rival those of any teenage girl.

Delargy creates a corresponding visual journey, incorporating key elements of the text into a series of images that evoke the character of the words. The monochrome colouring parallels the sparse language of Beckett’s literature, while pockets of deep shadow contrast sharply against spaces of bright white.

This print illustrates the narrator’s encounter with a pure white horse as his mother looks down on the scene from an upstairs window. Beckett, cast in the role of the protagonist, cuts a striking pose as the sharply defined lines around his face attempt to convey the tension he is feeling. The use of the aquatint process meanwhile, creates soft shadows and tonal variations across the print, as seen best in the horse’s body. Make sure you pop into the Samuel Beckett centre to check out more from the series.Jennifer Duignam

million dollar deals for breakfast

content Look for the full version of

Keith Grehan’s Alice Kona interview, a Goldfrapp review, some mixes and a promised piece on scratch DJing from Dublin’s best Trinity-based student newspaper-affiliated music blog. Michael Barry also has an excellent piece on lesbians in television, a group forgotten in the recent ruckus.

P od cast After the wild success of the last podcast, in which Fade Street, Kanye, student protesting, Christmas, French people and Old Etonians got what was coming to them, watch out for the third episode, swinging more swords and cutting more clowns.

T wit ter If you’d followed us on Twitter the last time we told you to follow us on Twitter, you’d have seen the cover on Saturday and would have known that Steven Gannon from Fade Street and Kid Karate thought it was awesome. You would also have encountered decontextualised shouts of “Wolf Gang” and stuff like that. @tn2magazine

4

FILM

Die Hard (1988) USA/Australia With Christmas upon us, it’s time once again to revisit classic yuletide films such as Home Alone and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But for this writer there is only ever going to be one film that recaptures all the childhood wonderment and excitement of Christmas time: Die Hard. Yes, the tale of John McClane’s holiday-set crusade against Alan Rickman’s gang of Euro-thugs will always be the quintessential film to celebrate Jesus’s birthday, so this week we’re featuring a specially commissioned poster for the 1988 action film. Created by Texan artist Tim Doyle for a special screening at Australia’s Astor Theatre, the poster captures one of the film’s best moments and is a striking example of how the simplest images are often the best. This poster is available at tommygood.com and nakatomiinc.com. Alex Towers

#5

of existence

may contain traces of: 7 December 2010

2 inscape A photo story by Cáit Fahey

6 turkey and ham Rose Ponsonby and Sadhbh O’Brien talk to some of Ireland’s most prominent foodies about their Christmas habits.

8 dyer maker Kevin Breathnach talks to rogue intellectual Geoff Dyer about his books and influences, but doesn’t ask him to be his protegé.

10 Wrapper’s delight Jennifer Duignam provides a history of wrapping paper.

12 drop science like girls be dropping babies Aisling Deng feels out We Are Scientists on their rise to prominence and their seeming stagnation since.

13 he doesn’t get mad, he gets even Alex Towers hunts down the creative forces behind one of movie history’s greatest guilty pleasures, Pierce Brosnan’s Taffin.

14 A friends are family sort of thing James Kelly talks to Dani, Vogue and Louise from Fade Street about the most important issues in our nation today - their own.

17 fresh blood Jamie Leptien investigates the Debut Directors shows in the Samuel Beckett Theatre.

shut up, that’s awesome comic Fade Street won the intense appreciation (if not the love) of a

student populace hypersensitive to irony and conflict between Wexford lads and Dublin hipsters. Unusually, though, nine out of every ten fans of the show would also confess to being fans of the glorious satirical webcomic dedicated to it, Fake Street. Deriving most of its humour from the fact that you can pretty much already see the strings yourself in the programme, Fake Street mercilessly lampoons the poor cast (and Brian Cowen) in several weekly strips. Our favourite? The Battle of Oxegen scene, where Paul turns into the Incredible Hulk and crushes poor Steven (‘Homewrecker Spice’) into a messy pulp, only to be told by the camera crew that his microphone pack is showing. Type Fake Street into Facebook. People you know are already fans. Karl McDonald

19 Reviews Kanye West, Girl Talk, Jay-Z (as an author), burritos, Rare Exports, Paul Auster and more wither under TN2’s scowl.

25 How To/Guilty Pleasures The former is about Kanye, the latter is about Taylor Swift.

Hope there’s no trouble.

26 Das Capo Oisín Murphy and Tim Smyth consider the value of satire and the University Times’ infamous gay bff piece.

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. Cover: Kathi Burke. Images: Stephen Byrne Cáit Fahey, Fuchsia Macaree, Martin McKenna. Design: Gearóid O’Rourke, Martin McKenna. General assistance: Aoife Crowley. Fuelled by: Snow, Coca Cola, Hypemen podcast.

Fuck SNL and the whole cast. Free Earl.

5

food

Christmas is coming...

the goose is getting fat ith food being (almost) as integral to Christmas as the presents, we’ve gathered some of Ireland’s top food personalities to share their thoughts on the festive season.

Do you have a favourite Christmas dish?

Darina: Oh my God, well there are lots and lots. In the end all I really want to have is a lovely roast stuffed turkey with a lovely buttery herby stuffing. Or a goose. I sort of alternate between goose and turkey. I go to quite a lot of trouble to find a really good goose or a really good turkey. You know an old Bronze turkey or a Norfolk Royal. It sounds boring, but if you’ve children coming home for Christmas dinner they very often just want it exactly as they remembered, because so many happy memories are connected to food, traditional food, sitting around the kitchen table or whatever. Nobody wants you to alter anything; they want exactly the same meal.

by Sadhbh O’Brien & Rose Ponsonby

John: I remember one year saying “why don’t we make parsnip cakes instead of roast parsnips?” and I nearly got my head eaten off. You know, “how could you? It’s like suggesting we have Christmas dinner naked!” Curiously enough everybody reverts to traditional types for Christmas.

Richard Olney’s Simple French Food is my all time favourite cookery book. Brussels sprouts gratin is one of those extraordinary recipes that people, if they closed their eyes, simply wouldn’t know what they were eating.

He managed to make the brussels sprouts sublime, and that of course is great cooking, to do something like that with the most humble ingredient.

“if you’ve children coming home for Christmas dinner they very often just want it exactly as they remembered.”

The other thing is we have wonderful farmers down here called Martin and Yvonne Flynn at Maughanasilly Farm. It’s a farm that if you said to every six year old “please draw a farm” they would actually draw Maughanasilly Farm. Before [Maughanasilly] I was used to doing what we all do, [worrying] about the bird, “this bird is going to be too dry, blah-blah-blah,” and when I cooked Martin and Yvonne’s turkey I actually didn’t have to do anything. The way in which turkeys have been bred to be these large animals with very expensive breast meat is giving us something that is all but impossible to cook because the legs and the thighs won’t cook in same length of time as the breast. It’s quite an endurance feat to actually get a commercial turkey

6

cooked to perfection.

Domini: Brussels sprouts! (laughs) Have to be eaten at Christmas time. We keep it very traditional, we do turkey and ham, bread sauce, pomme dauphinoise, brussels sprouts and carrots, and maybe some honey roast parsnips. We don’t go mad, maybe have some smoked salmon and brown bread to start with, dessert doesn’t tend to be a huge thing.

Do you have any tips for using up leftovers?

Domini: You can make a massive big quesadilla out of leftover ham and turkey. If you mix them up with loads of crème fraiche and Tabasco and loads of grated cheddar, and you put that in between two flour tortillas and fry it in some butter. It is absolutely evil, really tasty.

Darina: I take it on as a real personal challenge to use up all the little scraps. The best thing with turkey is to make sandwiches, and the challenge really is to have anything leftover after that to make a turkey and ham pie.

“Even though Phil Spector of course is ghastly now he was a genius when he was a kid.”

You can make a mushroomy kind of sauce, and then to that then you can add in any leftover bits of turkey, and don’t forget if you’ve got a good turkey to cut up the skin into lots of little bits as well because that has masses of flavour and add that in. I’ve been known to add in cold brussels sprouts to it as well, and then if you want to you can put a lovely mashed potato top on it as well or you can put a pastry lid on it and pop it into the oven. You know it’s the best thing.

Do you have any frugal Christmas tips?

Darina: Oh lots of them. Orange and lemon peels can be thrown into the bottom of the Aga and dried out and they make great Darina Allen (left) is the matriarch of Irish food. Darina remains the star of the Allen dynasty.

Domini Kemp (right) is the ever-popular food writer at The Irish Times. Domini, alongside her sister Peaches, operates the itsa bagel shops, restaurants and café at IMMA, the restaurants at Brown Thomas, and Feast Catering.

John McKenna (above) is the internationally extolled food critic who, with his partner Sally, publishes the wildly successful Bridgestone Irish Food Guides.

firelighters. Keep your stale bread and make that into your own breadcrumbs. And go along to the butcher and get free suet, beef suet from around the kidney, and you can use that to make your mince pies and plum pudding and so on. If you have a little bit of goose fat, that’s really fantastic. And if you’re buying a [bird] from a farmer, ask them to give you the wing and you can dry it out. People used to keep a wing and dry out around the bone in the back of the Aga or something, and it’s a fantastic duster for getting in behind radiators and all sorts of places no other dusters can reach.

Is there any foodie gift that you’re hoping to find under your tree this year?

John: For a cookery book, I’d have to say the Noma cookbook by René Redzepi. I think it is a groundbreaking piece of work in pretty much every way. Andrea Petrini says Redzepi is where Ferran Adria was in the early 1990s and Gagnaire was in the mid 1980s. Not easy to cook from of course but just to borrow ideas for ways of thinking about food.

Also, one of the nicest things I’ve come across this year is Highbank apple syrup from Rod and Julie Calder-Potts. It’s the most delicious viscous apple essence. I’d love a little bottle of that.

Darina: I think what I want is some native Irish oysters. That’s what I want, a couple of dozen of those. So I can have a big feast, because there’s absolutely nothing in the whole world as wonderful as the native Irish oysters and they’re quite rare now, they’re getting scarcer and scarcer.

Domini: I keep hoping for a Kitchen Aid, that someone will take pity on me and buy me one, but at about €600 a pop I don’t think I’m going to get it somehow! They’ve brought it out in some sort of hot pink, cranberry colour which looks brilliant. If you’re going to get one, you might as well not get something too subtle.

Do you have memories?

any

special

Domini: I do remember Mum used to really go to town on our Christmas tree and it was always fantastic. We were born out in the Bahamas so we always had a sort of tropical Christmas, but at the same time they were very traditional so there was always a great tree with loads of decorations on it.

John: If there’s one thing I can think of it’s probably the first year I heard the greatest record of Christmas music ever made (and there actually is such a single thing), the Phil Spector Christmas album. Even though Phil Spector of course is ghastly now he was a genius when he was a kid. The moment that first starts you know that it’s Christmas. It’s just magic.

Christmas

7

Books

Dyer Maker

by Kevin Breathnach

aced with an inability to remain focused on any one particular interest, I find some consolation for my consequent academic mediocrity in a line from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. “I love brief habits,” says Uncle Friedrich, “and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness.”

There can be few writers whose back-catalogue alone expresses this Nietzschean love of brief habits as clearly as Geoff Dyer’s. He has written a book about the First World War. He has written a book about DH Lawrence. He has written a book about jazz. He has written a book about photography. He has even written a book about fucking yoga. His success is an enormous source of encouragement to me.

Born in 1958, Dyer is a self-described intellectual gatecrasher. Typically, he develops an interest in a specialist subject, writes about to huge acclaim both within and without the milieu of the chosen subject, before quietly losing interest and moving on. (We will return to this, as Dyer so often parenthesises.) With a further four novels to his name, the only stains on his work are the ringing endorsements he 8

receives and reprints from the housewives’ favourite philosopher: Alain De Botton, Prince of Platitude.

Yet it is not his books, but his essays and reviews that he claims to be proudest of. In his first collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, he writes: “There were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing ‘proper’ books.” Ten years on from that, Dyer’s second collection, Working The Room, has just been published. Divided into four sections – Visuals, Verbals, Variables and Personals – the collection reigns in the disparate immensity of Dyer’s interests. “With all the books I’ve written, it’s quite difficult to know where to start. But I’d say the essays are a pretty good place to do so.” Dyer is not a writer who believes in the necessary superiority of the novel, steeped as he is the writing of Roland Barthes, John Berger and Milan Kundera.

It was a review of Kundera’s The Farewell Party, in fact, that marked his entry into the world of paid-for publication. The commission came following “a certain amount of subterfuge,” whereby Dyer lied about the amount of work he’d previously had published – none – to the person standing in for the holidaying

literary editor at City Limits.

“I wasn’t calling up out of the blue, of course. At Oxford, we stopped at Samuel Beckett. But I’d caught up on my reading in the few years after, and I’d begun to grow increasingly frustrated by reading book reviews. In that not untypical way, I thought: ‘Shit, I know as much as this guy. Why should I be sitting here reading his opinions, when he could be there reading mine?’”

He pauses for a second. I look down to read my next question, but hesitantly he recommences.

“There seems to me something here worth saying about ambition. We imagine it as operating on this rather grand level – ‘I want to be Prime Minister, ‘I want to play for Man Utd’ – but ambition is almost always manifested in these very actionable increments.”

This is typical of Dyer. Reading his work, one finds him analysing the efforts of a particular writer or photographer with an engagement that would allow it to stand alone as a fine piece of writing. Without ever expecting it, though, one notices Dyer very quietly drawing some more general truth from the particular topic at hand.

So, in ‘The Moral Art of War’, an appraisal of books of reportage on the Iraq War, Dyer

concludes that the history of storytelling is moving beyond even the non-fiction novel, towards “different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition.” Likewise, in a piece for Vogue about Paris Fashion Week, he wonders if, “the costumes with their amazing surfeit of plumage and jewels,” and “the models with their unnatural, clippy-cloppy, equine walk,” don’t play on some psychic residue left

“I thought: ‘Shit, I know as much as this guy. Why should I be sitting here reading his opinions, when he could be there reading mine?’”

over from ancient religious ceremonies.

“One principle of editing Working The Room was that every piece should have something in it that made it of more general interest than the thing it was ostensibly about. So I’d hope that, for example, each of the book reviews included either add up to an appraisal of the writer’s career or raise some more general point about writing and literature.”

It’s a trait he shares with his mentor John Berger, the art critic and novelist whose magisterial ‘Selected Essays’ (which Dyer edited and introduced as a good starting-point with Berger) was in fact my starting-point with Dyer. Berger is an intellectual giant whose influence on art criticism cannot be overstated. After university Dyer began reading his work, interviewed him for Marxism Today and eventually wrote a book about him entitled Ways of Telling. Somewhere along the way, Berger became his mentor, providing Dyer with much encouragement, which, says Dyer, “is often the most valuable thing a mentor can do.”

“I was so in awe of him,” he says. “But then there’s a long history of the disciple going to meet the idol, only for the idol to turn out to be self-important and disappointing. When I met Berger, though, he was perhaps even

greater than the books had led you to believe.

He has the most incredible reservoirs of kindness and generosity and thoughtfulness. Ordinary qualities like these are not generally the preserve of extraordinary people. To this day, he still seems to me the greatest person I have ever met.”

It would be a lie to say that, in asking him about his relationship with Berger, I wasn’t hoping on some level that Dyer would offer to be my mentor. I have read Dyer’s books. I’ve interviewed him, too. And, so far, he has been hugely encouraging about my questions. So I venture another one which, were it to appear in that scene in Annie Hall where subtitles spell out what the characters actually mean, would read: Geoff Dyer, will you be my mentor?

“Do you have an ideal reader?”

There follows a pause which seems to me pregnant with some beautiful future.

“No,” he replies. “Definitely not. Sorry.”

This comes as a crushing blow. But already my thoughts are of moving on from the brief habit of Dyer – and somehow this seems appropriate. I’ll return to read his next book on Tarkovsky, of course. For the moment, though, there’re plenty more fish in the sea.

Now, who has Alain De Botton’s number?

9

games

can elves make games?

L

ove it or loathe it, Christmas is upon us once again, as is the foreboding sense that our significant others are going to get us better gifts than we’re going to get them.

Well fear not, worried young, probably female reader, TN2 Games has you covered with our Christmas shopping guide for the gamer in your life.

Playstation 3 owners have slim-pickings this year it would seem. Aside from the recently released Playstation Move controller and its slew of flagship games, the only exclusive titles available for the holiday season are The Sly Collection and Gran Turismo 5. That said either (or both!) would see most playstation fans content and reclusive ‘til new years.

Those of us itching to get our hands on LittleBigPlanet 2 can take solace in the fact that

Sackboys Prehistoric Moves, a downloadable adventure designed for use with the PSMove, is coming to PSN December 15th to tide us over til LBP2 arrives in 2011.

Not to be outdone in the peripheral market, Xbox fans can get their motion-control fix from Kinect, Microsofts camera add-on that famously makes YOU the controller. Along with the standard adventure/sporting fare is Kinectimals, a game that gives you the chance to have your very own virtual pet wildcat, and also the ability to use said wildcat to melt the hearts of most females within viewing distance. It works, I have seen it. For the more hardened gamer however, Fable III and Halo: Reach fill out the Xbox360s holiday line up nicely.

For Nintendo this year it’s all about the games. Any self-respecting Nintendo fan will

probably remember the glorious days of Donkey Kong Country on the SNES. Well with your financial assistance they can relive those days with Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii, a re- imagining of the classic platformer from Metro Studios, the developer responsible for the much revered Metroid Prime series. Also available for the Wii this Christmas is Disney’s Epic Mickey, the first Mickey Mouse game to hit a home console in over five years. Designed by video game legend Warren Spector, Epic Mickey is definitely one to watch out for.

It’s not all about exclusives however, and with third-party titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Bulletstorm and more, Christmas 2010 is shaping up to be very merry indeed. Andy Kavanagh

The Coolest band in Belfast he Alice Kona band, hailing from Belfast, have been called “the coolest band in Belfast” by the PanicDots blog. They are known for their hectic live shows and general hell raising, but I decided to start with the basics, influences.

“Bands such as the Germs showed us that punk was a malleable genre, musically and philosophically. On the other hand we were obsessed a lot of different groups and artists whose songs managed to capture their era, for example girl groups and doo wop singers, country and soul, motown and gospel.

We were fascinated by the craftsmanship in the song writing, the attention to melody. The same went for hip hop in relation to lyric writing, we would study the meter and rhyme in a lot of rap and try and work out what these guys were doing..Not that we rap or anything, I should probably make that clear. Anyway, we were thieving our way through these influences in regards to songwriting, but our natural instinct with performance has always been to throw our songs down a flight of stairs. We could see a lot of contemporary bands utilising these ‘retro’ influences, but 10

very few were unhinged enough for us. They weren’t utilising the anger and rawness in the punk and garage we were listening to, so we figured we were on to something a different.”

It has been said that the band are not “drug addled disaffected gutter punks concerned with anti consumerism and social liberalism.”

“We believe you need to be 100% committed and informed if you’re going to open your mouth about politics and social issues. Otherwise you get called on it and end up looking like a moron. In any case, we’ve always believed that if you can accurately portray what’s going on around you in a song, it’s a much more effective social commentary than cramming rhetoric down someone’s throat.

It’s just we’ve always felt more comfortable writing about personal atrophy and the like.

I’ve personally always identified more with bands of that nature.”

The band follow the proud indie DIY tradition of impromptu gigs on the street and house parties, as well as larger offical gigs. Do larger gigs remove a degree of intimacy between audience and artist? “Well we haven’t done as much of that as we’d like. We’re far from guerrilla gig terrorists to be honest. We did it once

“We would study the rhyme and metre in a lot of rap and work out what these guys were doing” or twice when we started out, purely because very few promoters would book us. Audience intimacy is always going to fluctuate depending on your audience and their interaction.

Recently we’ve noticed a jump in the size of crowds we’re playing to, and regardless of the size of the venue you’re in, that’s always going to improve your performance. We’ve played gigs where we’ve been on the floor in the audience’s faces, but they’ve just been there for a quiet pint, which we proceeded to ruin. There’s nothing romantic about that, it just plain sucks.” Keith Grehan

tv Diary #5

the art of wrapping

by Jennifer Duignam

I

ts Christmas Eve, the tree lights are twinkling, I can smell mince-pies baking in the oven and Bing Crosby is singing on the television behind me.

Unfortunately, the majority of this Christmas magic is wasted on me, as I find myself surrounded by piles of unwrapped presents and mismatched piles of paper, bows and cards.

For the seventh year running, I am the last person to finish my shopping and thus, the last one to put her presents under the tree.

However, I’m not so worried about this. You see, it’s become something of a tradition, and if I’m honest, I’m more concerned by the fact that I’ve managed to sellotape my fingers together. As I attempt to separate them for the fourth time today I find myself asking how on earth this crazy tradition of wrapping Christmas presents got started, which leads me to Google, and to the history of wrapping paper.

Gift-wrapping presents has been a tradition since the Chinese invented paper in 105 AD, and the idea gradually spread to Europe over the course of the next few centuries. In the early 15th century, the Dutch used woodblock prints to cover boxes, with early designs favouring religious imagery. In the mid-19th century similar prints, made their way to Europe from Japan, also in the form of wrapping paper. They protected antiques and artefacts bought by European collectors and were soon recognised as an art form in themselves, with such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige becoming household names in the art world.

Wrapping paper as we know it today didn’t really take off until the Victorian age, where the decoration became just as important as the present itself. Gifts were wrapped in either tissue or sturdy brown paper, and adorned with huge, lacy bows and silk ribbon.

In America the Hall brothers, founders of the Hallmark brand, stumbled across the idea of

wrapping paper quite by chance. During the Christmas of 1917, their shop in Kansas City sold out of the traditional green, white and red tissue paper, leading the owners to order in some decorative French envelope lining as a replacement. Sold at 10c a sheet, the paper proved incredibly popular, and was re-ordered for the following year. They soon began manufacturing their own paper and are now the industry sales leader in wrapping paper.

The 1930’s and 40’s saw wrapping paper designs change, moving towards more ArtDeco stylized patterning. Popular choices included snowflakes, ice-skaters and Christmas trees, which gradually became more realistic through the 50’s and 60’s. The 70’s and 80’s saw the influx of character driven wrapping paper, where popular figures from film and television became the driving force behind design choices. Still a popular choice today, these characters face being overshadowed by a new wave of artist designed patterns and motifs on sale in numerous gallery shops

Gift-wrapping presents has been a tradition since the chinese invented paper in 105AD around the city. Designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh are available alongside Asian textile prints, giving you your own piece of beautiful art to fit around that oddly shaped cuddly-toy/hot water bottle hybrid thing you bought your sister.

by James Kelly Let’s get one thing straight right now: The Walking Dead is good. Very good. It is one of the most exciting shows on TV right now, with its amazing production, uniformly excellent cast and a genuinely interesting story, I think TWD is the best new show of the year.

So, yeah it’s good.

The basic premise is that the zombie apocalypse has happened and in its aftermath, the world is struggling to cope. The undead shuffle (or sometimes run) through the streets, nowhere is safe. Our protagonist, Rick, missed all of this world destruction stuff because he was in a coma and he awakens to an empty hospital with no idea of what has happened or where his family is. So, he goes in search of them and along the way joins together with a group of survivors. And that’s your lot. It may sound like your typical zombie movie fare, but Frank Darabont (director of Shawshank) provides so many twists and turns in each episode that you can never be sure what’s what. One thing that has always bothered me about zombie movies is that the characters are so incredibly irrational, but not so much here.

This has a lot longer than an hour and a half to tease out the intricacies of each character rather than just killing them off. Probably my favourite aspect of the show is the genuinely unsettling feeling – I honestly feel unnerved and a bit scared during certain scenes. Also, the zombies look awesome. Any show that had to fill Mad Men’s slot on AMC had to be brilliant, but I did not expect it to be this. Already renewed for a second season after the first two episodes had aired, this show will be around for a while to come.

Another show I have been watching lately is E4’s Misfits. Billed as Heroes meets Skins, this teen comedy/action type show is a lot of fun. Great praises had been sung for the first season last year, so I picked up the boxset and flew through it in no time. This BAFTA-winning show follows the a group of teenagers forced to work on community service because of misdemeanours, and they all have super powers after a freak electrical storm. So far, so predictable. What Misfits does very well is take a twist on the traditional superhero lore, and the writers of are perfectly happy to allow storylines to come to fruition across the span of a season, without having to explain everything.

Right, that’s it from me. Now I’mma go zombie-hunting.

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m usic

dropping science

by Aisling Deng

n the 1940s, Mufti, a secret society of punsters-as-social-commentators evolved from the outgrowth of an unhappy group of women students protesting on-campus policies in Pomona College, Claremont, California. Their sheets are glued to walls all over campus, with double-entendre comments on local goingson: when beloved century-old Holmes Hall was dynamited to make way for a new building in 1987, the tiny signs all over campus announced “BLAST OF A CENTURY LEAVES THOUSANDS HOLMESLESS.” Sixty years later, two boys from Poloma college, Keith Murray and Chris Cain, meet at a Dawson’s Creek party. They form a group of their own and in honour of the Cap’n Jazz song name it We Are Scientists.

The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once questioned the staunch singularity of his writing: “why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.” For all their carefully/carelessly construed bravado, WAS craft their songwriting with an air of seriousness.

“I think that the primary need I have is privacy. Even places like our practice space in Brooklyn, which is part of a honeycombed series of rooms that bands have rented and it’s not the most ideal place to write. I can hear other bands practice so I know other people can hear what I’m doing too.”

A shift in subject matter, lyrically, is one of the most noticeable differences discerned from the past few records, especially on Barbara. “The first album and most of the second record were essentially all auto-biographical stories. Whereas this record, was a little more 12

written in the first person as if these things happened to me, but we’re mostly stories about other people I knew. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that fiction plays into it. It’s more reportage, journalistic writing. Still in the first person so I don’t feel the style plays much in it, I think I’m a little less diary specific for fear of being too close to emo-woe-is-me-histrionics.”

When asked about the future of WAS, the immediate plan sees the band taking the year off. If luck will have it too, they might be formally initiating a new member into the fold.

“While we do consider ourselves just a duo, it’s largely because Andy [Burrows, former Razorlight drummer] has mostly been missing in touring as he’s just released a record and has been focusing on. We actually thought we’d want to be a three-piece band. Should he be able to take on full-time touring duties, we’ll start thinking of that as the band.”

One can’t help but wonder if the duo becoming a trio will give it a 3D effect so to

“radio Here was playing very different stuff than was being played int he U.S. and that was lucky for us”

speak. New blood could potentially steer them away from stagnancy and bolster their currently overstretched, compromised sound providing a dynamism which the band has lacked since the halcyon days of With Love and Squalor. With song titles such as The Great Escape and Incation the irony is quite literally inescapable, with tepid reviews of the last two albums the general consensus. Murray himself admits that “I don’t feel like the relationship between Chris and I has changed much at all. I think, probably unfortunately it’s essentially the same relationship it was about a year after we met. Once we got passed that nascent friendship stuff it was the exact same relationship.”

Murray accredits the popularity of what Drowned in Sound termed as “the second wave of Britpop”, a set into which they were adopted, with radio marketing. “I think especially when we first started coming here the commercial radio was playing very different music than was being played in the US and sort of luckily for us, was playing stuff that fit in with us like Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand.”

“So it sounds like that, there’s been a precedent set by Radio 1 that indie rock bands with tangible beats were well-liked and they could put on major commercial radio stations and people wouldn’t think that was strange.

In the U.S that was definitely not so. I mean Franz Ferdinand’s first single Take Me oOt got a lot of radio play in the U.S and The Killers got a lot of radio play. And that was pretty much it, everything else that was in the U.K charts never really got radio play, not even The Strokes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”

film

well maybe you shouldn’t be living here.

I

n 1988, a classic surrealist comedy was accidentally made in Wicklow. This film was based on a novel by Lyndon Mallet and directed by upcoming filmmaker Francis Megahy. The film starred Pierce Brosnan, who following the end of Remington Steele was looking to break into films before his tenure as Bond began.

Those involved presumed they were making a typical action-film, albeit set in small-town Ireland. However due to a rushed production, heedless producers and some questionable script and editing choices, the film didn’t come out as expected.

Instead of a conventional thriller, an extraordinarily bizarre masterpiece of kitsch emerged. This film is called Taffin and in an attempt to understand it, I interviewed its creators. On its face, Taffin is about a debt-collector named Mark Taffin (Brosnan) who is hired by a community group (led by Ray McNally) to bring down some malicious developers (headed by Alan Stanford, playing Hans Gruber crossed with Charles Haughey). The developers plan to build a noxious “chemical factory” in the locality. However anyone who watches Taffin will soon see it holds much more than its premise suggests. For Taffin is a flamboyant labyrinth of terrible accents, pointless scenes and unintentional hilarity.

Those who have seen Tommy Wiseau’s wonderfully appalling The Room will know the heights of atrociousness Taffin reaches.

Watching it, you can’t help but wonder at what point its creators stopped making conventional Hollywood fare and drifted into unintended surrealism. To illustrate: there is a scene where Taffin and his sidekick Ed (Gerald McSorley) blow up an outhouse to intimidate an irate farmer. In another, Taffin destroys a restaurant (and its staff ) for an unpaid butcher’ s bill. There is also one in which he threatens a counsellor with a combination of blackmail and sexual menace, before dismissing demands for evidence: “proof is for judges and good whiskey”. And this is all set

by Alex Towers to a vulgarly mawkish soundtrack conducted

by Hans Zimmer. As in The Dark Knight Hans Zimmer. Also, Dermot Morgan cameos as a strip-club compère.

The film’s strangeness is almost impossible to describe. It’s akin to watching your hammered culchie uncle doing De Niro impressions on Christmas morning – simultaneously endearing and cringe-inducing. As one fan explained, “there are many bad films, but none of them have the sheer depth of awfulness of Taffin.”

But how did this film come to exist? In 1980 former flying-circus manager Lyndon Mallet published the first in a series of novels about debt-collector Mark Taffin. “He existed between covers and in my head for several years before the film,” Lyndon Mallet explains.

“He has an elusive quality, a ‘ presence’ . He doesn’t have to do anything for you to know he’s there. He is not a mover. His very stillness is unnerving. He speaks seldom and very quietly. So quietly that you have to listen. For these reasons, my Taffin doesn’ t lend himself easily to film interpretation.”

However, while Mallet didn’t feel his creation was suited to film, MGM disagreed and began planning an adaptation, bringing Francis Megahy in to direct. “I read the script and didn’t like it,” Megahy recalls, “but there was time constraints and they couldn’t waste time looking for another director.” After signing on, Megahy soon found himself under strain.

“I started re-writing the script,” he recounts wearily, “but I’d be asked in production meetings about a scene and I’d answer, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t written that yet’ ...I never finished the script to my satisfaction, there was so much work to be done, but no time to do it” .

Brosnan’s casting was also problematic. His previous commitments meant the production

was rushed, as well as the fact that the actor barely resembled the overweight middle-aged traveller of the novels: “Pierce is everything Taffin isn’t,” Mallet acknowledges, “but I think he brought the necessary ‘presence’ to the character”.

However, both Mallet and Megahy are at a loss to explain the films inadvertent comicalness and newfound popularity. “I was, quite frankly, astonished…but also delighted,” Megahy admits while Mallet is less surprised. “ It’ s always a pleasure to hear that someone, somewhere is encountering Taffin”. Furthermore, although busy directing upcoming romantic-

“there are many bad films, but none of them have the sheer depth of awfulness of Taffin.” comedy Only in L.A as well as a number of political documentaries, Megahy reveals that he wouldn’ t be opposed to a sequel. “It would be interesting to re-visit the character and put him into current Irish context – have Taffin take down Polish plumbers who turned criminals to survive the recession.”

Taffin didn’t make much of an impact upon its release, and both men admit that the finished product was a disappointingly offbeat reflection of what was intended (Megahy counters, “Well Woody Allen said that only one of his films came out how he imagined”.).

But in my opinion this is more valuable. Taffin is cinematic penicillin: a happy accident of warped twee and action-film tropes that could never, even by the most skilled filmmaker, be imitated.

13

TV

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Fake Street is a webcomic by Stephen Byrne. Find it on Facebook and Twitter (@fakestreetcomic) Cover illustraton by Kathi Burke

Street Spirit

by James Kelly

I

n recent weeks, there are three things that people have been talking about: the IMF and the economy, the X Factor and Katie Wassiel, and Fade Street. In case you haven’t heard about it (although I don’t know how that’s possible) the show follows the trials and tribulations of four twentysomething young women living and working in Dublin.

In a similar mould to ‘The Hills’, Fade Street bills itself as reality-lite – it is unscripted, but scenarios are created in which the actors react. They are given direction as to how to react, but the dialogue and reactions are all them. I caught up with three of the stars, Dani, Louise and Vogue recently and got to play out my Fade Street fanboy dreams by bombarding them with questions.

wasn’t interested in. I went in for the first interview and the producers sold it to me.” Dani brings up an interesting point, saying that if she could, shewould definitely have put more thought into her decision to join the show, citing the fact that certain promises weren’t fulfilled.

“I didn’t realise we’d have to pay our own rent, and that it would be so hard – you look at everyone on TV and assume they are loaded, but it’s not true for me anyway.” In a reflective moment, Vogue says she knew people would take the piss out of her , and that she might be misrepresented on the show, but says that it hasn’t beenthe case yet at least.

How they got involved in the show:

Being constantly in front of the camera is a strange phenomenon and I asked each of the girls whether or not they felt that they felt pressured into changing their personalities to suit the show, and each responded differently.

The casting of the show, or at least of the three girls was interesting because each of them was approached by the show’s producers to attend a test shoot instead of the girls seeking the show out. Both Dani and Vogue, working as part time models, were found online, and Louise was approached when she worked as a hostess for Krystal. This was eighteen months ago, and the process took nearly a year, and extensive rounds of interviews and testing until the cast was chosen.

When asked if they had any reservations about joining the cast, Vogue and Dani said they jumped both feet in, saying that they knew they would regret it had they not signed up. But Louise was a bit more pragmatic, “Soco (as it was called at the time) had been in the papers and it was just something I

Compromised personality:

“The perception that we’re all loaded is just not true, I’m living month to month and I know most of the girls are too.”

Louise denied this, saying that the best thing about the show was that she could be herself and that how she is on the show is how she is in person.

“The way I react – what I say, the faces I pull – are exactly how most people would react, but it’s just that I got caught on camera.

I’m not on the show to make friends, so I’m not going to act differently.” Vogue said that because the show represents such a smallfraction of her personality, and all representations on the show so far have been true to life.

Dani, though seems to have had the toughest time adapting to life in front of the camera, and she mentions difficulties she faced making friends in Dublin and getting used to the different mannerisms of Dublin, compared to Wexford. “In the first few episodes I definitely think my awkwardness definitely comes across on camera and the amount of make-up I wear in it.. God! But after the sixth episode, I just said fuck it and thought I would be more respected for being myself than trying to fit the mould.”

Paul: Undoubtedly the break out star of Fade Street has to be Paul, Dani’s Wexford boyfriend. A tantalising introduction in the first episode laid the groundwork for his stunning performance in the already infamous Oxegen scene. Dani is reluctant to talk about it, but suffice to say that Paul’s reaction was one piece of semi-unscripted TV gold. Dani was told to ‘flirt and have fun’ with her costars before Paul arrived. The one thing that impresses most about Louise was that she doesn’t mince her words and Paul was a subject on which she does not hold back her opinions. Suffice to say, she’s not a fan.

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Ironic appreciation: For the first few weeks at least much of the reaction to the show has been of ironic appreciation more than anything else and I asked all of the girls about this. Vogue wasn’t put off in the slightest, and both her and Louise said if they weren’t on the show they would be jumping on the bandwagon too. Dani, who definitely emerges as the sensitive one of the group, took criticism and the reaction a lot harder than the others.

“Louise can definitely take things more on the chin, I just get more upset about things, and it’s hard when some forty year old man is making fun of you and doesn’t even know you.” She singles Louise out as ‘TV gold’ and is more than thankful that the internet memes and tweets centre more around the ‘Congratulations’ incident than ‘Fuck it, I’m going to Marbella’.

Close to others: I think the question people are most interested in hearing about, more than any other, is the relationship between the cast off screen.

Are Dani and Louise close? Does Vogue hang out with Cici? The traditional nosey Irish mentality shines through here, but upon being asked the question, all three hesitant somewhat. The stock ‘we’re all great friends’ line is trotted out by the girls, but tensions definitely exist between them. Louise singles out Cici as her closest friend on set, which is surprising as she hasn’t been seen much in the show so far, and she mentions her friendship with Vogue too. But, the stress of living with someone seems to have gotten to her – on Dani: “She just pisses me off.”

On screen, there is quite a bit of tension between these two housemates and Dani insists it’s all real. The fifth episode deals with this in a very real way, and Dani says that camera or no camera, both girls were going for each other the night they fell out about their living arrangements.

Although they insist they get on and they do still live together, both Louise and Dani did not know some pretty basic information about the other when I asked – I don’t know what that is a sign of, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Cici is again picked out as closest friend on set to Dani, saying they had mutual friends in Kid Karate. Popular girl, that Cici.

Vogue on the other hand, seems to be a bit outside the tension and her link with the

“I didn’t realise we’d have to pay our own rent, and that it would be so hard.”

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other cast members seems to be through Louise mainly. Her self-confessed party girl attitude doesn’t necessarily sit well with Louise’s sensible staying-in beliefs but all the same, they are close. She laughs off the tension between the other two, admitting that she didn’t realise it was still a problem. In general, Vogue has a very easy going attitude and sees the show as a bit of a laugh more than anything, choosing to ignore negative responses and she doesn’t really notice too much of a change in her day to day life since the show began.

paid internships and the perceived lack of work the girls are doing – in the words of a friend of mine, “When I was interning, I didn’t get paid and did twice the work they are doing.” They admit to having the internships set up through RTÉ, but insist that they got them because of the strength of their interviews, or in Louise’s case, her CV. Dani speaks about the bad reaction from RTÉ and her production company over losing the MCD internship and she says that she had to find her own job after, with the help of some of the girls.

Reasons for signing up:

“she just pisses me off” - Louise on Dani

Vogue responds to the question of why she signed up for the show with her characteristic unperturbed view – she didn’t sign up to get something out of it, she was booking DJing gigs regardless, but because she thought it would be a good laugh, and in her experience it has been, she has nothing but great things to say about the crew – “Working with the crew and all was deadly, sure it didn’t even feel like work really.” Dani was the same, not citing any particular reason for signing up, although the fact that both were part time models before the show, one can’t help but wonder if the publicity boost isn’t appreciated. Again Louise frankly answers that she is involved in the show for a reason and that she is using it as a vehicle to increase her profile and job prospects.

Financial troubles: A topic that has been the subject of intense media scrutiny was whether or not the financial troubles of the Fade Street girls accurately represent the public, and Dani had a strong reaction. “I think it would be highly hypocritical to not deal with the financial situation, but at the same time I think the producers didn’t want a depressing show. But I mean, it should have been stressed more in the show, and if there is a second season it will need to be covered then. I am embarrassed when people think I’m living the high life.”

Louise seems to agree in principle, and wishes filming was extended to cover some of the more harrowing economic problems of recent weeks and how it is affecting the girls.

Each of them stress that they live month-tomonth and Vogue worked two jobs on top of time on Fade Street. “The perception that we’re all loaded is just not true, I’m living month to month and I know most of the girls are too.”

One thing that irked a few people were the

Louise as main character: Dani, Vogue and in particular, Louise seem very controlled, rehearsed in the interview, they have obviously been through the circuit a few times, but a few times an interesting reaction comes out. Louise is stumped when I ask her why is she the lynchpin of the show – all the other girls are connected through her: she lives with Dani, works with Vogue and is friends with Cici. She was genuinely surprised by the question and didn’t know how to answer, only calling it “an indirect compliment.”

Second season: All three of the girls expressed interest in filming a second season, saying they were in the show for the long haul. In particular, Vogue wants to stick with the show for as long as possible. Rumours that MTV UK have looked into optioning the show is something that each of the girls were hesitantly hopeful for, but they mentioned the almost impossible chance of it coming to fruition. If it was picked up then the profile of these girls would increase infinitely, but they all say that they are ready to step up to the challenge.

Conclusion: All I know is that Fade Street is by far the most interesting show RTÉ has produced for young audiences in years, is quickly becoming the darling of the Irish TV-watching public and has gone beyond ironic appreciation to earn a funny kind of respect.

Backlash against the girls themselves seems to have dissipated completely, with the Fake Street parody being more about having the ‘craic’ more than anything else.

a new direction

S

tudents fighting the daily battle for productivity vs. procrastination could be forgiven for being jealous of the six drama students who make up this year’s Debut Directors Festival at the Samuel Beckett Theatre. In a sea of arts degrees that are un-vocational and largely self-motivated, these fourth years get the chance to put on a play in a professional theatre – a process that is a quarter of their final degree grade but also invaluable experience for their future careers.

This year’s group are the best six from what started out last year as an eighteen strong directing elective. Taught by jobbing director David Horan, the group is narrowed down to twelve after each directs a ten-minute monologue, then down to six after directing a twenty-minute piece. The remaining directors make up a festival programme that showcases six very distinct approaches to directing. As Rosemary McKenna, director of Enda Walsh’s Bedbound, says, “We are given complete creative control, from play choice, to casting, to staging and I think that is a massive part of what makes the Festival so exciting - six totally different imaginations, six totally different plays.”

Over the next week, directors Ed Smalley and Rosemary McKenna will close out the festival with Don Juan in Soho and Bedbound respectively. McKenna describes Enda Walsh’s darkly comic Bedbound as “a real-whisky shot of a play, sixty minutes of couldn’t-givea-bollix-me writing style that just leaps off the page.” McKenna owes a much of her involvement in directing to The Players theatre: Photo by Edward Smalley

by Jamie Leptien “The first show I ever did was an unmitigated disaster, but with hindsight it was important that I could do that in such a safe environment, I learned so much.” In Don Juan in Soho, a handsome lothario of the manor born wanders through one night indulging his sexual and narcotic appetites with gleeful abandon.

Smalley’s play choice was decided after seeing the show premiere in 2006 and feeling a certain identification with the protagonist.“The more I read and re-read the play the more I fell in love with it. The comedy, the distress, the dark episodes in Soho Square.”

Now in its penultimate week, the festival has seen two directors debut each week: in the first week it was Bryan Moriarty and Sara Joyce, putting the political dystopia of The Cut alongside the mad-hatter’ s dreamland of The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Joyce changed the format, cut bits of the original, and added a live drummer, a pianist and songs by Arcade Fire, The Beatles and MGMT to end up the play. “So often I go to the theatre and to be honest, the plays can be so grim and depressing. If I’m going to direct a play I at least want it to be entertaining.”

The sprawling set and cast of crazy characters in Dissocia allowed Joyce to make full use of the Samuel Beckett’s big stage and 200-seater auditorium. For Moriarty, the choice of play was more arbitrary. “I just picked it up at the start of the summer when I was looking for a play to direct, and it really

the atre

gripped me.” His style is about focussing on the moments of dramatic intensity within a script, the way three good scenes can make a production. This intensity is replicated in the rehearsal room, where Bryan thrives on the simple interaction of a small cast in a room, the strong relationships of trust that develops between cast and director.

Week Two saw Hugh Farrell and Caoimhe Clancy direct a double-bill of plays by Nobel Laureates – Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and The Open Couple by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Having had some work as an actor before arriving at Trinity, Farrell knew he wanted to direct when he chose to study English and Drama at TCD. Choosing a Pinter play was a natural progression from having done Beckett pieces for his third year performances: Farrell is clearly someone who is not afraid of testing his directorial mettle on the big playwrights, and is hoping to continue his development in the future with a Directorial Masters at Yale.

Clancy’s style is different, a tightly-wound physical theatre, interested in aspects of feminism and metatheatricality. Fo’s The Open Couple allowed her to explore these interests while remaining academically valid: “I mean, it’s judged academically, not artistically, so you can’ t just shit on the stage and call it performance.” Like Farrell, Clancy wanted to direct since before she came to college, but cites one of her big inspirations as going to see a Debut Director’s show, with (fellow debutant) Bryan in first year. With so much talent, energy and belief, this year’s festival should prove equally inspirational.

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SeX

recipe

chocolate etc etc etc etc etc

dry spell

Rose Ponsonby & Sadhbh O’Brien

The guy with nothing going on

“So... um... do you think maybe we... never mind.”

It’s all happening at the much-adored The Cake Café this Christmas. For those of you who haven’t already been lured in, you should know that The Cake Café is just downright lovely. If you have to wait outside for a table, they give you hot water bottles. Lovely. Ménage à Trois Fridays means 3 for the price of 2 on whole cakes or slices. Lovely. And if you’re looking for lovely gifts, you’re in luck. The café’s new organic cotton tea towels and bone china plates with a graphic illustration of Dublin city are now available. Vintage cake stands, with or without the cakes, are also on offer. Or for a more interactive gift, the café also offers mince pie gift kits and wine tasting classes. Here’s their take on chocolate roulade.

Michelle at The Cake Café’s

chocolate roulade 140g dark chocolate Juice and zest of 1 orange 2 eggs separated 70g caster sugar Orange curd Whipped fresh cream Lined Swiss roll tin 1. Melt the chocolate, the juice and the zest. Add half the sugar and the egg yolks.

2. Meanwhile beat the other half of the sugar with the egg whites. Whip until they form stiff white peaks. Both the bowl and whisk need to be very clean for this because if any fat or grease gets into the mixture the eggs will not fluff up too well. I wipe down the inside of the bowl with a bit of light vinegar to get rid of any residue of butter that may be there.

3. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate mixture making sure to preserve the bubbles.

4. Cook for 20 minutes at 180 (it is done when it starts cracking on the top).

5. Turn the roulade onto a clean damp tea towel and leave it to cool.

6. Spread with orange curd, or jam, and cream and roll while still in towel.

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Illustration by Fuchsia Macaree

&

reviews Films

Books

Restaurants

Music

Guilty pleasures

I’m livin’ in the twenty-first century doin’ somethin’ mean to it Do it better than anybody else you ever seen do it Screams from the haters got a nice ring to it I guess every Superhero need his theme music

No one man should have all that power 19

&

I

my beautiful dark twisted fantasy Kanye West

anye’s had a rough couple of years. Either you know the story or you don’t care, so I’ll skip it. There is only one important story now, and it has nothing to do with Rolling Stone’s confused 5/5 review, Pitchfork’s breathless 10.0 or the Guardian’s strange, condescending 2/5 that showed up at some point during the critical discourse.

Kanye West has a new album, and it is fucking amazing.

The first thing that’s striking is the scope. It opens with Nicki Minaj pulling a faux-British accent on a fairytale opening: “Gather round children, zip it, listen.” It’s not the first time Kanye’s crafted a little world in one of his albums, but that was not particularly funny humour, Bernie Mac asking him where his bookbag was on Late Registration. This is earnest stuff. Look at the title of the album.

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You have two options. You can stick with the Kanye Interrupts guy in your mind and find it funny, further evidence of insanity and hubris. If you do, stop reading, you’re excused.

Otherwise, take a deep breath. It’s a journey.

Thirty seconds from when Minaj stops, a RZA beat drops and, for the first time in too many years, Kanye the Rapper shows up.

He’s always been in the shadows as an MC, owing partly to his production genius on his and other people’s stuff and partly to the fact that he stands near erstwhile ‘Best Rapper Alive’ Jay-Z a lot, but he’s stepped up his game. And he’s not just rhyming either. He’s Saying Something.

In essence, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is two albums struggling with each other for precedence. The one we meet first is devoted to redressing Kanye’s grievances – the cast of Saturday Night Live can kiss his

asshole – and reminding the world that he is an abnormally talented man, capable of making incredible music and trying his hardest to do so. Call this half Power, after the most intense song, that one that commands immediate attention. It’s pure swagger, not the projected braggadocio of a Birdman or even a Jay-Z, but the strut of a man who knows that, regardless of bad PR, he’s on top of his game, and it’s a height rarely hit. By anyone. “I know damn well y’all feelin’ this shit,” he retorts to claims that he’s the “abomination of Obama’s nation.” But don’t forget the hook – “21st century schizoid man.” Well, whatever works, I guess.

It’s mostly like this up until So Appalled, halfway through the 68 minute runtime. Gorgeous in particular seems to wrestle with the ‘bigger’ implications of Kanye’s position.

“And what’s a black Beatle anyway, a fucking roach?” he asks. That’s a pretty loaded question. First, obviously, comparing yourself to the Beatles is pretty much equivalent to the Beatles comparing themselves to Jesus, especially if you’re coming from a ‘rock music’ background, where hip hop seems to exist in a vacuum if at all. Secondly – does Kanye think he’s hated for being black? Maybe. But he’s going to fight the course.

After the huff and puff of the guest-heavy drone So Appalled (easily the worst song on the album, and that is meant as a direct diss to both Swizz Beats and Cyhi the Prince), things change. There’s a slow soul loop and the second half of the album comes into focus with Devil In A New Dress. But it’s the next song that dominates. Runaway.

If you watched the video Kanye released to trail the album, you’ll know this side. It was thirty-five minutes long and featured a phoenix-woman who crashed from space and ended up becoming his girlfriend. That’s her on the cover, I guess. The pinnacle came with Kanye sitting down at a piano in a warehouse during a large dinner party and singing - yes, singing, even though he was Kanye The Rapper twenty-five minutes ago - mournfully over a driven beat.

It’s self-aggrandisement vs. self-doubt.

That’s Kanye’s dark fantasy, the conflict between two different people he wants to be. He wants to be the egoist, world-conquering musical genius, sure, and he plays it well. But he also wants to be less of a fuck up. “24-7, 365, pussy stays on my mind/I- I- I- did it. Alright, alright, I admit it,” he equivocates. Sums it up pretty well.

The interesting thing is that if you parse the album into its individual components - songs, loops, verses - you’ll find some flaws. So Appalled, Chris Rock’s weird skit about Kanye teaching his girl tricks, Jay-Z’s let down verse on Monster. You’ll also find some of the best most innovative pop music around today. The rip of All Of The Lights, the weird autotune spiritual hook of Lost In The World, Nicki Minaj’s scene-stealing verse on Monster. But that’s like reading chapters of a book you didn’t start at the beginning. This is a fairytale, remember? Nicki told you. It’s fascinating, huge and almost shockingly good. Millions of people are going to enjoy this, and VH1 are going to do documentaries on it some day. It deserves it. Karl McDonald

N/A

III

Sunset Park

burritos Dublin via Mexico

Fo o d Having celebrated Dia de los Muertos-

Day of the Dead I felt adequately prepared to take on another Mexican classic, the burrito.

And so in a blaze of glory I launched myself upon the Trinity of Burrito bars. First on my hit list was Burrito and Blues.

A favourite haunt for the living dead suffering from zombifying hangovers, it boasts a make-it-yourself range of, not only burritos, but the whole gamut of Mexican fast-food including Tacos, Nachos and Quesidillas proving especially appealing to vegetarians.

However the location, straddled between Stephen’s Green and Camden Street, is a little off putting as peak time traffic and dining coalesce in an angry cacophony. As I tucked into my burrito (The Silver Bullet a bonafided classic I’m told) it left me cold like the sterile decor and more importantly the burrito itself.

The dry minced beef felt like it had been grinded through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and seasoned with sawdust. Hopping across the river, I find my second destination, Boojum, in the straits of Millenium Way. A quiet affair, it’s markedly different from the harsh somewhat tacky plasticity of Burrito and Blues. It is this simplicity that’s the lynchpin this taqueria’s values: good, wholesome, honest food.

Waiting for my student meal (6e- any burrito or fajita with a bottle of water) I watched as the cook swiftly and skilfully tossed the steaming ingredients, folded it into a burrito.

A nice flourish came with the wrapper which was thoughtfully sealed with a sticker bearing a pictorial guide to the ‘art of eating a burrito’.

It was a perfectly formed bundle of joy. Reassuringly thick in all the right places, the reinforcing corner folds provided an envelope for the piping mix of tender chicken steeping in prickly salsa and crunchy vegetables.

To wrap up my search for the Holy Guacamole Grail I headed to Pablo Picante’s off Baggot Street. Strategically placed in the heart of the office district, within the radius of Dublin’s gastronomic elite (situated in between L’Ecrivain and Patrick Guilbaud) it could not have pitched its tent at a better spot or marketed it to a better clientele. It’s not surprising its owner is a former advertising guru.

This compact and innovative space oozes not with authenticity but more originality. The

sunny, surfer disposition of this CalifornianMexican joint is incredibly inviting. Unlike Burrito and Blues, Pablo Picante is restricted somewhat by the short set menu. Even though the average price is 5.95, paying extra for sour cream and guacamole means it doesn’t pander to the student population either.

However, the burritos are more flavoursome, like a luchador packing a punch to your tastebuds. I opted for the Sonny San Diego. It seemed as if the ingredients were engaged in a passionate and intricate tango, smoothly operating across your palate from the smoky salsa, warm refried beans to the spritely cilantro and lime rice and lightly grilled chicken.

With a swift wallop Pablo Picante K.Os the competition. Boojum, coming a close second, provides the best value for money but to be fair to Burrito and Blues there is something to be said for a fast and dirty one on a night out/ morning after. Aisling Deng

Paul Auster

Those who have never read Auster before ought to give this a look. It charts the lives of a group of misfits who, by chance and a host of bizarre coincidences, come into happy conjunction, squatting in a house in Sunset Park. There is a poignant account of bereavement, familial relations, and the joy of arcane movie trivia. Yet already, speaking as one who has followed this author’s output, it is a letdown (just more of the same), and I lie through gritted teeth in the false grin of a salesman.

Auster has never delivered on his promise, just as he can never bring a book to a satisfying conclusion – maybe a manifestation of that dreary modernist adage ‘there are no easy solutions’. Of course there aren’t – there’s also a difference between delivering a climax and a let-down. Like noted Joycean Anthony Burgess, Auster is the kind of piggybacking craftsman who latches onto a giant of old and never lets go. It’s no coincidence that his books always falter two-thirds of the way through, and never recover after they kill off the ‘mentor’ figure, be it Stillman in City of Glass, Yehudi in Mr. Vertigo, Barber in Moon Palace, or Mann in The Book of Illusions (the last partially redeemed by his constant indirect presence via flashbacks).

Auster is an admirer of Beckett, famous for confronting the void, writing on nothing.

Beckett wrote a Trilogy – Auster wrote The New York Trilogy, his very impressive debut. But I have lived with it long enough to be aware of its flaws. All are in ready view in Sunset Park, becoming more pronounced as Auster ages, and his output speeds up, matching the increasing attention he has recently received – matched by a corresponding decline in quality of the actual work produced.

He branches out – he’s discovered the value of long breathless rhapsodic sentences – and is attempting work of more panoramic scope, a cityscape. It’s a case of ‘too much, too late’.

He has been best under duress – his books are full of searching accounts of poverty, and I daresay he views the economic situation with a degree of benign resignation. He might improve if he were willing to play the waiting game again and practices artistic thrift, who knows. But if he has another book out next year, I’m not reading it. Samuel Coll Books

21

&

I

all day II.2

Girl Talk

miral Julian Schnabel

film Miral, from critically acclaimed director

of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, has courted much controversy owing to its sensitive subject matter and its apparently overly simplified approach to the biopic of Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal. The three minutes I gave to my friend from a ‘news family’ to enlighten me while we customized our coffees with milk and sugar at the condiment stand in the arts block was needless to say, insufficient for me to weigh in. Fortunately for me, this film had more to offer than a political message It opens in 1947, at the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and spans the next five decades. The most praiseworthy aspect of Schnabel’s adaptation is how Miral encapsulates the individual experiences of four different Palestinian women: Hind Husseini, Nadia, Fatima and Miral, to the military occupation of Jerusalem. The film opens and closes with Hind and is centered on Miral, while the characters of Nadia, Miral’s mother and Fatima, Nadia’s cellmate assume secondary but nonetheless significant roles.

All these characters are connected in one way or another but differentiated by their responses to their infuriating political situation, and Miral shines a light on how these responses and ideologies of the women come into conflict with one another. Take Hind and Miral as a case in point: Hind has devoted her life to the ‘Dar El Tifl,’ a home and school for orphaned Palestinian children and her goal is to educate them while instilling a sense of their Palestinian identity.

Miral grows up in this environment but develops a more active sense of her identity than Hind would have intended, and she expresses her identity as a Palestinian during the first intifada through her participation in protests and an association with the P.L.O, thus threatening the neutrality on which the ‘Dar El Tifl’ was dependent upon for its survival.

Although Miral encompassed both personal and political issues, it emphasized neither and perhaps Schnabel may have erred too prudently on the side of caution as a preemptive to the inevitable controversy a film of this kind would stir, which leaves Miral without any real conviction. Róisín Lacey-McCormac

22

M usic It was NME journalist David Quantick who proposed the theory that “Pop Will Eat Itself”; because music is postmodern in its propensity to recycle good ideas, the perfect song could be conceived by taking the best part of every pop opus and combining them in one track.

Greg Gillis isn’t the first person to play Dr. Frankenstein with music. From Frank Zappa’s xenochrony technique (the overdubbing of guitar solos into a completely incongruous track) to the cast of Glee, from Soulwax’s Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, contemporary popular culture is imbued with many paradigms of mashup music. What distinguishes Gillis (who creates and concocts under the moniker Girl Talk) from his bastard pop peers is his seemingly meticulous compulsion to create multifaceted, textured tracks with sonic subtleties, peaks and troughs that grip the listener. Simply put, Girl Talk has the ability to induce euphoria.

2008’s Feed the Animals was considered by myriad critics to be one of the standout albums of the year. An aural amphetamine and the prototypical party soundtrack, it is undeniably an exceedingly hard act to match let alone improve upon.

All Day is the longest and most intricate Girl Talk offering yet, as Gillis samples, splices, loops and blends at least twenty songs for every track on the album. Admittedly the LP, Girl Talk’s fifth full-length release, lacks the feverish excitement that permeates Feed the Animals, though it would be unmerited to suggest that Gillis’ formula is simply wearing

thin. Although they do bear frequently the Girl Talk hallmark of hip hop vocals over a classic rock melody, the tracks on All Day conjure a variety of moods and impressions that aren’t exhibited on their predecessors.

These self-described “sound collages” are much more dynamic in pace and tone.

There are still of course those instances of fast-paced frenzy, as Missy Elliot raps Get Ur Freak On over the guitar line to Blitzkrieg Bop and Three 6 Mafia are spliced with ELO’s Mr Bluesky, but the most emotive songs are derived from consummate combining rather than high energy. Can I Get A by Jay-Z blossoms with General Public’s Tenderness and U2 are rendered slightly less hateful with the guitar harmonics of With or Without You sounding positively poignant blended with the Twista song Wetter. Gillis’ personal highlight on the album is the ingenious use of Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker, whose transformative powers allow the listener to judge Soulja Boy’s Pretty Boy Swag without any sense of snobbery. Which is understandable, because he is responsible for Crank Dat Ultimately that is the beauty of Girl Talk.

This is not music to overanalyse or deconstruct, it is simply to be enjoyed. All Day’s success, like the albums that preceded it, lies in the immediacy of its carefully crafted hooks.

Preconceptions of musicians and genres are torn down, remoulded and melded, and each song serves as a gateway to a realm of possibility and musical discovery. Hyperbole aside, this album is essentially a reminder that it’s perfectly alright to listen to music just because it’s fun. Sophie Elizabeth Smith

II.2

decoded Jay-Z

III

rare exports: A Christmas Tale Director: Jalmari Helander

Based on writer/director Jalmari Helander’s award winning shorts, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, is the eagerly awaited feature length version of these cult internet clips. Set in the snowy, unforgiving expanses of Northern Finland, the story follows young Pietari (Omni Tommila), his widowed father (Jorma Tommila), and their traditional hunting community. But when a mysterious mining party from the United States (–employed by a stock megalomaniac) sets up camp on top of the local mountain and begins digging, they uncover a secret long buried by the ancient tribes of Lapland.

Santa and his elves are back, and they’re hungry. This time, mince pies and sherry really aren’t going to do the trick. Now, armed only with his father’s shotgun and a stuffed dog on a leash, it’s up to Pietari to lead the hunt.

Rare Exports has real potential, and is a pleasant change from the saccharine and cringe- worthy films of Christmas past. If the genre is a happy family, with eye-wateringly sweet siblings such as Fred Claus (2007) and Elf (2003), then Rare Exports is the drunken uncle who knocks over the tree and sets the turkey on fire. This year, I’d like my Christmas Rare, please.

With a stunning setting, and some seriously stark and disturbing scenes, there is no doubt that the film is visually impressive. The

film

premise is original and interesting, and the characters at the outset are touching and likeable. The mixture between Finnish and English alienates neither audience, and instead serves to draw the viewer into the film.

But what starts off as a genuinely creepy tale exposing the roots of our modern CocaCola Santa Claus, quickly descends into a farcical action movie. Machete-style one liners abound, although the blow is softened slightly when said by the adorable, apple-cheeked (and very talented) Omni Tommila.

Having said that, this macabre Christmas tale is definitely enjoyable. Combining gore and heart-pounding suspense with real humour, it teeters on the fence between genuine horror and black comedy. But it works. Hopefully, this heralds the end of the sugar-cookie Christmas films like Four Christmases (2008) and Deck the Halls (2006), which, as well as being patronising and painful, lack any sort of creativity. This highly original genre-splicing thriller/horror/fantasy/comedy literally ticks all the boxes and is both intelligent and entertaining.

But, in this age of morality and child protection, what is the resounding message of Rare Exports? Avoid naked old men masquerading as Santa. Seriously. They bite. A lesson which, no one can deny is one we all could do with learning. Ho, Ho, Ho, good will to all men and all that jazz. Sheila Armstrong

Books Decoded is a tough book to outright endorse. That is not to say it’s a bad book or anything, but it is definitely hard to definitely hard to categorise. Let me try to describe it through a few “if/then” equations. If you do like rap but don’t like books, then don’t read Decoded. If you don’t like rap, but you do like books, then again I must advise you to not read Decoded (but really that should be pretty obvious). However, if you are nestled into that sort of strange niche with the other literary rap-lovers, then you will love Decoded.

With chapters like White America, One Eye Open and Balling and Falling the book never travels far from it’s hip-hop origin, which is reassuring. Jay-Z has never been an overpowering lyricist, like his Bedford-Stuyvestant neighbors Mos Def and Talib Kweli; rather, his strong suits has been is candour, and it’s this that shines through.

Jay’s impeccable taste, the taste that helped discover powerhouse talents like Rihanna, has not failed him in the production of Decoded. The book’s presentation is beautiful.

Between the Andy Warhol print on the front cover and the art-quality photos of Bed-Stuy throughout, Decoded can sort of come across like a ghetto coffee-table book. It is full of elegant page layouts and large font rap-lyrics, which makes it a very easy book to casually flip through and really great book to indiscreetly leave out in front of your friends.

The actual prose is what pushes it into the hard to define, more-than-vanity, but lessthan-literature territory. With the help of his ghost-writer/collaborator Dream Hampton (the first female editor of The Source, American rap’s first periodical), the portions of biography and personal philosophy are sincere.

There isn’t too much bravado or chest thumping. It doesn’t alienate the reader.

It is a genre-bending book. It is an overwhelming surprise if you were expecting nothing more than the vapid musings of another successful hip-hop personality. Then again, if you were hoping to be floored by the newly revealed writing talents of Jay-Z you will probably be disappointed. If you are happy enough with something that comes down in between, then Decoded is certainly worth a look. Stuart Winchester

23

II.1

norwegian Wood OST Jonny Greenwood

M usic Following Radiohead’s prominence on the soundtrack to Tran Anh-Hung’s I Come With The Rain, Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has composed the soundtrack to the director’s upcoming adaption of Norwegian Wood (original novel by Haruki Murakami.)

Greenwood began his career as a film score composer with P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood but where that utilised the entire BBC Concert Orchestra, Greenwood’s latest opus is fundamentally composed of carefully arranged strings with sparse orchestral sections; this minimalist approach creates a strikingly haunting presence.

Mata Ai ni Kurukarane is particularly haunting in its simplicity, consisting of a sparse strings arrangement. Toki no Senrei wo Ukete Inai Mono wo Yomuna is one of the scores standout tracks, a beautifully narrated appeggi. Kraut-rockers CAN contribute four tracks to the soundtrack. At present the album is only available in Japan and looks to remain import only, the film itself has not yet been scheduled for European release. Overall the album is a hauntingly beautiful score, at times I found the gentle strings arrangement a little sparse, however, as a whole the score is beautiful in its simplicity. Keith Grehan

the myth that the Celtic Tiger brought prosperity to the island. Ignoring the burden of debt and the cost of living, Irish people were fooled by “the statistical quirks of GDP” into thinking ours was the richest nation on earth. It was never anything of the sort – something O’Toole is determined for us understand. “If we hold in our heads the idea of the boom years as a period of stunning prosperity, we will not understand why the boom failed. Moreover, we will be trying to ‘return’ to a place where we never really were.” Instead, O’Toole provides a series of steps we might take to form not a Second Republic, but the First Republic whose ideals were effectively forgotten after 1919. Though the IMF will be doing most of the navigating for the foreseeable future, whatever government we elect would be wise to keep O’Toole’s map close to hand.

Kevin Breathnach

Fintan O’Toole Books As comfortable discussing the implications of dull government reports as he is the work of the country’s dramatists, Fintan O’Toole is undoubtedly the most insightful commentator on Irish life. In Enough Is Enough, a book he describes as “a map that [...] might help us to get home”, O’Toole busts

24

II.2

Megamind Director: Tom McGrath

II.2

The Hungover Cookbook Milton Crawford

II.1

Enough Is Enough

Mash with Sausages and Onion Gravy’.

The author has taken his inspiration from P.G. Wodehouse who categorized the dreaded hangover into six different types, and Crawford has even gone so far as providing some self diagnosis questionnaires and visual tests to help you decide how ill you’re feeling, and then thoughtfully rated the recipes according to the reader’s level of hungover-ness. While the likelihood of anyone actually launching into preparing a ‘Traditional Japanese Breakfast’ while simultaneously trying not to throw up is about as likely as Fianna Fail winning the next election, The Hungover Cookbook is nonetheless a perfect stocking filler for any drunks with culinary ambitions.

Rose Ponsonby

Food For most of us hangovers usually end in copious amounts of gloriously greasy pig flesh being consumed, and the idea of anything more gourmet than that elicits groans of agonized protest. Not so for Milton Crawford, who looks at a hangover as “an opportunity to see and taste the world in a new way” and encourages us to try “enjoying your hangover rather than simply enduring it”. ‘Riiiigght’, I hear you say, but The Hungover Cookbook is meant to be a bit of fun, and contains some tempting sounding recipes such as ‘Huevos Rancheros’ and ‘Leek, Cheese and Mustard

film Coming soon after the enjoyable Despeciable Me is another Dreamworks Animation film about a villain who learns about the benefits of being good. However while Megamind is by no means original (The Incredibles is also a blatant influence), it’s certainly exciting and funny three-dimensional fun. Will Ferrell voices the eponymous lead, a diabolical alien super-villain with an enormous blue head whose life’s purpose is to eliminate his gloating rival Metro Man (Brad Pitt), the heroic protector of Metro City. But when one of his nefarious plots to defeat Metro Man actually works, Megamind finds himself suddenly at a loose end.

Although nowhere near the Pixar pedigree and often too similar to previous films (such as producer Ben Stiller’s own Mystery Men), Megamind is nevertheless an enjoyable, well-made visual feast. The voice talents are particularly enjoyable, especially Tina Fey as a peppy reporter, Jonah Hill as her creepy cameraman and David Cross (Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke) as Megamind’s best friend, Minion. Will Ferrell also gets room to show off- reprising the devious, highly strung voice he last used with Mugatu in Zoolander ten years ago. All of this means Megamind is a funny, but not hilarious, ninety-six minutes of glorious 3D visual distraction. Alex Towers

How to…

guilt y ple asures

review kanye

by Seán Mc Tiernan

one I don’t listen to rap music as it is bad and about hating

women but This Is Genius.

t wo I don’t listen to rap music because I am white but

THE TAYLOR SWIFT HOLIDAY COLLECTION

This Is Genius.

three Rap music is about shooting people, this isn’t. This

Is Genius. I somehow feel the need to feel guilty about this. fou r The only rap groups I know are Wu-Tang Clan and Public Enemy. I like Kanye’s record but mainly because I can use it as a prop for my generalisations and pseudery. five I hate Kanye but still manage to like this. I’m pretty cool for doing this. six I love Kanye and like this record. I then go on to prove I have no real idea about Kanye by dismissing 808s and Heartbreak offhand and not acknowledging the career in production which made him famous. se ven I love Kanye and realise it’s impossible to love this album without loving him as well. eight I like this album but all my compliments are really condescending and vaguely racist. I like it because I do not listen to rap and so find most of its basic attributes surprising. My favorite band are The Beatles. nine At some stage in my review I will tell you the Nicki Minaj verse in Monster is the best part of the album. I will tell you this as if I thought of it instead of it being the only point of consensus on which every who has heard the album can agree upon. I will also make no mention of her new album or if I do, I will not mention that it is unlistenable and awful. ten I like this album because it does not sound like how all other rap music sounds. I have made this sound up based on the brief time I spent watching MTV as a twelve year old. ele ven People say this album is good but it is not. It is the first rap album I’ve heard since my friend got an Eminem album when I was thirteen. My main problem is it doesn’t sound like Radiohead. I also do not understand sampling so will claim he “stole” the best bits. t welve I am not really reviewing the album at all but instead reviewing the score it got from Pitchfork. thirteen I am furious with the score this got on Pitchfork. How can people say this is as good as an Animal Collective album? My review will not mention the Animal Collective album has already aged less gracefully in the space of one year than The Wham Rap did in twenty. fou rteen I normally don’t like music by black people but I will make myself like this because the people who I copy everything from like it. fif teen I don’t have anything useful to say about this album but will review it using phrases like “cult of personality” in the hopes of justifying my meaningless degree in English Literature. sixteen I don’t actually have any emotional connection to music and just listen to things other people decide are “important” or ‘relevant’ (because my idea of humour is to copy Hipster Runoff ). Because this type of album does not sound like what is usually “important” I resent it and think I am kicking against some sort of system by not liking it.

by Ana Kinsella

My main problem is it doesn’t sound like Radiohead.

I also do not understand sampling so will claim he “stole” the best bits.

There are so many reasons why I shouldn’t enjoy listening to Taylor Swift. She sings about waiting by phones for boys who make you weep all over your guitar and hating on girls who wear short skirts and how losing your virginity in high school will leave you but a broken husk of a woman. She writes songs that are so full of hate towards other women (who may be guilty of stealing various Jonas Brothers from under Taylor’s very nose) that I burn with rage when I find myself singing along. And she’s a purveyor of American countrypop, a genre I can honestly say that outside of Miss Swift, I have never had so much as a morsel of interest in. But somehow, I know every word to Fearless, and early every December, I find myself bopping away to the Taylor Swift Holiday Collection EP. I can only explain this by saying that there’s something clearly wrong with my brain chemistry. But there’s something approaching genius in its idiosyncratic Swiftian Christmas spirit: not only does it feature covers of classics such as Last Christmas and Santa Baby, but also originals such as Christmases When You Were Mine and Christmas Must Be Something More, tracks which explore winter heartache and the birth of Jesus respectively. The covers remind us of the importance of classics and tradition at this festive season, but it’s the originals serve to reminds us that the true purpose of the festive season isn’t in presents and too much food, but in religion and in pining pathetically for your ex-boyfriend who’s probably moved on to a more mature and entertaining woman. I can kind of see why I so easily lose myself in what can only be described as Swift’s mindless, dulcet tones.

She’s not forcing me to have fun at Christmas, like your Slades, your Wizzards and your Paul McCartneys.

She acknowledges that Christmas, like high school, like living in a small town, like growing up a country-pop superstar and dating a Jonas, is a bit shit sometimes, and I like that. It feels real. It makes me want to reach out to Taylor - though she’d probably hate me for being a big-city girl with interests outside guitars and dating football players - and befriend her, go ice-skating and take her out for hot chocolate. I could help her put up the Christmas lights, and reassure her that all her festive wishes might, just might, come true this year.

25

Das Capo

no offense Oisín Murphy in conversation with Tim Smyth

“Dear students, readers, friends... I am taking this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the University Times Culture magazine and their editor, Michelle Doyle, over any offense caused (and perhaps intended) by the now-notorious ‘Gay Best Friend’ article in the 19th October 2010 issue.”

What do you think, Tim? Should I continue?

Didn’t they already make an apology of sorts?

“Of sorts”. It was a bit measured, I think. More of a “you shouldn’t have been offended” than “sorry for offending you” sort of apology, if you could call it that. The “my dad” school of apologies, if you will.

I remember those. “What do you mean I tackled you too hard? You’re a mammy’s boy, young Timlet.” But still, shouldn’t you leave it to them to apologise?

I don’t think it’s forthcoming, at this stage. Or I’d be surprised, anyway. What I’m planning is “wicked satire”, you see!

So you’d be apologising, but you wouldn’t really mean it?

Well, I believe the apology must be made. For the article, I’d continue in the same vein as what I’ve already written, making a sincere apology which acknowledges all of the insensitiveness and crudity which offended people in the first instance. So it would be satirical only insofar as it renders the University Times’ apology conspicuous through its manifest absence.

Surely they’ll say that they made an apology though?

Or hang a gay in retaliation?

It’s meta-satire. It’s a provocative act strained through a linguistic colander of utter sincerity. ...with only the Rice of Compassion remaining in the net, as the starchy, boiling water of fuck-knows-what rains down on their heads. ...predicated upon the notion, advocated by the UT (or at least the guy who wrote in defending the article), that satire holds its own position in the popular discourse, outside of criticism. So, by their own taxonomy of worth, what I’m writing would be bulletproof.

What about your own taxonomies?

That’s what’s “meta” about it, I suppose. Also, that’s why I’m asking you about it. I’m a bit reticent to write anything.

So you’re apologising for the article, but in the first place, isn’t satire supposed to offend people?

It ought to be provocative to some degree, but the article 26

“Dear students, readers, friends...

I am taking this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the University Times Culture magazine”

(I assume) was supposed to be satirising the rather nebulous “phenomenon” of women having gay, male best friends, thinking of them as status symbols of some kind, and in doing so offending the (perhaps imagined) shallow women of the text, rather than gay men, who were described in a variety of unpleasant ways.

I didn’t know women did that.

Nor did I. Isn’t satire supposed to achieve something moral?

Why question the validity of gay-straight friendships? It’s a bit like walking into HMV and burning Script albums because the cover’s got a white hand shaking a black hand on it, i.e. a bit fucking nasty.

Well, yeah. What I’d like to point out is how hollow the assertion that “satire plays by its own rules” is, to whatever degree it’s meant.

I think the most effective satire is the kind that has the most palpable moral pulse to it. Like Bret Easton Ellis, say, who is a self-determined “moralist”.

And in any case, satire can’t flourish on disregard for rules. It’s a fundamentally corrective genre rather than an iconoclastic one. Its most revolutionary, it’s also at its most conservative. Satire couldn’t exist without rules, even though it hates them.

I agree completely. The initial article itself was a trying read but it wasn’t until after I saw that no apology had been offered in response to the complaints that I was upset - I just saw it as a relatively careless piece of writing. Anomalous, certainly.

It probably won’t make a difference, no matter what you write. I wouldn’t worry. W.H. Auden says “poetry makes nothing happen”. So I suppose college journalism makes fuck-all happen.

It seems to be all I write about.

It’s a bit depressing that this is the largest moral hobbyhorse one can jump on and flog.

Well, I don’t want to offend anyone unnecessarily.

Though I think it ought to be said.

That’s the paradoxical hinge all satire pivots on.

You’re probably right. I’ll do it so.

And, letting that correspondence fade into the ether of sincere interpretation, I offer the reader my sincerest apologies, for everything: any article which may have caused offense or upset, for whatever reason, including this one. I don’t speak on behalf of the rest of the college’s writers, but nor do they speak on behalf of you. It’s not a meritocracy, you may have noticed.

and in conclusion...

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