tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7917559847255972742024-03-06T00:06:10.744-08:00Desmond TraynorDesmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.comBlogger213125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-25248802726220492452023-12-21T06:58:00.000-08:002023-12-21T06:58:54.535-08:00My Team / Your Team<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">I've got a Substack now.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I wrote about my enduring, lifelong Manchester City FC fandom, and our current owners’ wealth and investment vis-á-vis my left-wing politics. Includes a trenchant critique of the Irish soccer commentariat. Ideal after-Christmas dinner reading, if you ask me. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">This one’s for free. I'm ‘growing an audience’, apparently. Feel free to subscribe.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://desmondtraynor.substack.com/p/my-team-your-team">https://desmondtraynor.substack.com/p/my-team-your-team</a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisxwwsUmDdsEhMnKmKusy6jqF_0yWu6I7Xe60sFykNTvK_HTugye2ceHIaEo_RMtqg7vEFP7rBXIdCMUKOXryg-eBUCm9ZXQVUxw3vb5V_oXxdHd4azaQ5eN-WbOIe3evzTwvU-jNQLlAqgTrFSax_EHfpC7z0DNGoc-CH5_MhlActwpoe0zpBmuod_mS/s1080/DesManCity2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1080" height="570" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisxwwsUmDdsEhMnKmKusy6jqF_0yWu6I7Xe60sFykNTvK_HTugye2ceHIaEo_RMtqg7vEFP7rBXIdCMUKOXryg-eBUCm9ZXQVUxw3vb5V_oXxdHd4azaQ5eN-WbOIe3evzTwvU-jNQLlAqgTrFSax_EHfpC7z0DNGoc-CH5_MhlActwpoe0zpBmuod_mS/w640-h570/DesManCity2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-5428700922969376822023-11-26T08:04:00.000-08:002023-11-26T08:04:59.115-08:00Films about Warhol’s milieu<p>Finally, my <i>Film Ireland</i> reviews of a couple of films about Warhol’s milieu.</p><p>I Shot Andy Warhol Directed by Mary Harron</p><p>Nico Icon Directed by Susanne Ofteringer</p><p>New York in the mid to late sixties, and more particularly Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, was the centre of the universe, if that constantly transmigrating and transmogrifying concept can be said to exist at all, and if the two films under review can be lent credence. Both present portraits of independently minded, visionary women, who were drawn to that milieu.</p><p>Mary Harron’s biopic of Valerie Solanis, the militant lesbian feminist would-be playwright, founder and sole member of SCUM, (Society for Cutting Up Men), and author of the infamous SCUM Manifesto, is the less satisfying offering of the two. This has nothing to do with Harron’s direction, which although her debut, is very assured. It has more to do with the fact that she seeks to give us a balanced picture of an unbalanced individual, and so becomes an apologist for the psychopathology which leads to attempted murder. “I’m not justifying the shooting,” Harron has said in an interview, referring to Solanis’ gunning down of Warhol in his office in June 1968, but then goes on to defend her as a misunderstood, underprivileged woman who was ahead of her time. “Even as a celebrity assassin she was in the wrong time,” Harron concludes. What next? The Michael Chapman biopic, entitled I Shot John Lennon, a detailed account of how a deprived childhood and dysfunctional family background led another of life’s losers to take a pot shot at the former Beatle? Society’s to blame, as usual. Spare us.</p><p>Perhaps part of the reason for this kid-gloves feel is Harron’s choice of the soft-centred Lili Taylor to play the abrasive Solanis, which certainly isn’t type-casting. “But if you cast someone who was really grating, nobody could watch the movie,” offers Harron, by way of explanation. My point exactly. I rest my case. As it is, we get Solanis running around looking like a slightly more zany version of Janis Ian, a nicely neurotic Jewish girl you could take home to meet Mother, rather than the psychotic gun-toter she became. Most of the other central performances, most notably Jared Harris as Warhol, but also Lothaire Blutheau as publisher Maurice Girodias and Stephen Dorff as transvestite Candy Darling, are excellent. Harris, in particular, captures perfectly the jittery aloofness of Warhol, while also hinting at the essential benevolence one imagines it masked. John Cale’s score and a marvellous soundtrack contribute to a film well worth seeing for anyone interested in the period, but probably best taken with a pinch of salt.</p><p>Susanne Ofteringer’s Nico Icon is a different story, just as its subject was as different from Solanis as could be, and as a documentary composed entirely of interviews and archive footage, doesn’t have the tedious historical accuracy and consequent manipulation of sympathy question marks hanging over it which spoil I Shot Andy Warhol, or at least not to the same extent.</p><p>Nico was, as former keyboardist in her band James Young says early in the film, “the Chelsea girl peroxide blonde Marlene Dietrich moon goddess vamp creature who turned into a middle-aged junkie.” At the risk of sounding indulgently romantic, what is interesting about this trajectory is how much of it was volitional, to the extent that the life became part of the art. The daughter of a ‘good German’ killed by the Gestapo, she wanted to be ‘not German’. She became deracinated, and subsequently lived in France, America, Italy, England and Spain. A stunningly beautiful woman who hated being objectified, she gave up modelling to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter. Unlike a Twiggy or a Samantha Fox, she had the voice and the talent to do it. In the process she went from being blonde and wearing white to hennaing her hair and wearing black. Both Young and Paul Morrisey comment on how she started hating her good looks, and became proud of her rotting teeth, her bad skin, her needle tracks. “She was so happy to be called ugly,” says Morrisey. She wanted to be ‘not beautiful’. When asked if she has any regrets, she answers: “No regrets...Only one, that I was born a woman instead of a man.” She wanted to be ‘not woman’. She wanted to be her opposite. In the end, the journey was completed.</p><p>Introduced to Warhol by Bob Dylan, having already recorded a solo single, ‘I’m Not Sayin’’, she sang on the first Velvet Underground album, (because, according to Morrisey, Lou Reed was considered “too seedy, not a good singer, not a good personality.”) She went on to make a string of solo albums, of which Chelsea Girls is perhaps the best known. John Cale says that of all the work that came out of the Velvets, what he did with Nico is what he is most proud of, and calls The Marble Index, which he produced, “a contribution to European classical music.” The ever highly articulate and intelligent Cale sums up the Nico odyssey best: “It was a solitary dream where occasional friendships were struck and abandoned, and was so highly personal that it was very painful.”</p><p>The film is very well edited and cut, with much use of split screens, and even seems to go in for a bit of imitative form, as the straight linear interviews of the early part give way to more fragmented excerpts as the madness kicks in. One tiny criticism is that the whole would have been enhanced by contributions from both Nico’s mother and Lou Reed, but presumably they refused to give their consent.</p><p>It remains to tackle the question of Warhol’s culpability in the decline and demise of these two very different women, both of whom died in 1988, Solanis of pneumonia and emphysema in a welfare hotel in San Francisco, Nico of a brain haemorrhage in Ibiza. Sure, the casualty rate at The Factory was rather high, but as Billy Name says in Ofteringer’s film, “Anyone who had skills or talent was accepted”. Warhol wasn’t an exploiter, in that he made no money out of the projects other than his own work, but rather a facilitator who gave people the opportunity to do their own work. A line from ‘It Wasn’t Me’, a song from John Cale and Lou Reed’s tribute album to Warhol, Songs For Drella, where Reed sings as Andy, could be applied to Solanis: ‘It wasn’t me who hurt you, I showed you possibilities/The problems you had were there before you met me.’ Another line from the same song has equal force in the case of Nico: ‘I never said stick a needle in your arm and die.’ Of course Warhol was no moral philosopher, but he was a highly influential artist and patron. Without him it is unlikely that the greatest band in the history of rock music would have existed, or at least become so influential themselves. (“They didn’t have a lot of fans, but every one of them went out and formed his own band.” Brain Eno.) And far from being im- or a-moral, The Factory had the loose but highly evolved ethical system of a subculture. Warhol’s Catholic childhood always poked through. (Reed to Warhol: “That guy’s an ignorant fool.” Warhol: “Hey, what if he thinks that about you?”) He may have lived among messy people, but he wasn’t messy himself. Warhol was right: Solanis should have got a job. He even gave her one, acting in one of his films, ironically, I, A Man. It was her own increasingly erratic and alienating behaviour which led to her excommunication from Warhol’s circle. And if she was so independent and sure of her beliefs, why was she relying solely on Warhol and Girodias to produce her play and publish her Manifesto, and then turning against them? Nico had talent, and partially fulfilled her potential. Solanis, despite what Harron would have us believe, was an idiotic ideologue who hung around The Factory, the kind of talentless psychopath who hovers on the fringes of the avant-garde, and of whom one must beware if, like Warhol, one chooses to work there. </p><p>First published in <i>Film Ireland</i></p><div><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-27439250610854695862023-11-26T07:33:00.000-08:002023-11-26T07:33:29.814-08:00Andy Warhol's Films<p style="text-align: justify;">What was then the IFC (Irish Film Centre), now the IFI, had a season of Warhol’s films to coincide with the IMMA retrospective. I wrote about them too.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Taking Time, or Wasting It?</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">“I like boring things. When you just sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. It takes up time. Yeah. Really, you see people looking out of their windows all the time. I do. If you’re not looking out of a window, you’re sitting in a shop looking at the street. My films are just a way of taking up time.” So said Andy Warhol of his approach to film-making. And, of course, the time would have passed anyway, as Beckett remarked with reference to his many anti-heroes, whose major preoccupation is the filling in of passing time (which is the major preoccupation of all of us, it seems to me).</p><p style="text-align: justify;">At first sight it may seem that drawing any parallel between Beckett and Warhol is the ultimate in the yoking together by violence of heterogeneous ideas, as Samuel Johnson declared was the modus operandi of metaphysical poets, but they are similar enough in their exploration of extreme areas of consciousness, in their paring back to its essentials and refinement of a given style while simultaneously testing the boundaries of that style just as they strip it back, and in their obsessively monocular focus, through an aesthetic methodology of replication or repetition, on an idea or image.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This article was commissioned to coincide with the ‘Andy Warhol’s Cinema’ season currently running at the Irish Film Centre, with the goading challenge of being written from the perspective of, ‘Why should anyone bother going? It’s as interesting as watching paint dry’, thus inviting me to cast myself yet again in the role of apologist for Warhol. So what follows will necessarily consist of a few observations and pointers about the films, rather than being an in-depth discussion of any of them, partly because I haven’t seen them all, and partly because, to quote Warhol himself from the last interview of his life in 1987, “They’re better talked about than seen.”</p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is vaguely unsettling to think that Warhol lost faith in his films as films, that he was unaware that, as Amy Taubin wrote in her 1994 Sight and Sound article entitled ‘My Time Is Not Your Time’: ‘The intervention he had made in the society of the spectacle was as profound as what Godard had done in roughly the same extended 60’s moment. But if Godard framed his psychosexual obsessions within a political analysis of global economic power, Warhol, the American anti-intellectual, transformed his psychosexual identity into a world view.’</p><p style="text-align: justify;">There is undoubtedly a link between the eerie visual effect of Warhol’s 16mm films (achieved by their being shot at 24 fps but projected at 16 fps) and the hyper-reality of his paintings and silk-screen prints. As Dennis J Cipnic noted in his essay ‘Andy Warhol: Iconographer’:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"> Warhol casts to character and lets his performers make up their</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> own lines to fit basic story requirements. But it is his aim to</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> avoid wholly persons, and I think this has to do with his life-long</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> insistence on confronting reality. Just as he might have painted</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> fictitiously labelled cans, or anonymous bottles instead of Coke</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> bottles, Warhol could have used ordinary actors and given them</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> scripted dialogue. However, if his painted objects had been</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> entirely fictitious, they could not have been icons, and I believe</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> exactly the same principle applies to his films.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Warhol’s cinema is a response to the Hollywood films he grew up with, films that were available to every American, just like Campbell’s Soup and Coca Cola. Lou Reed and John Cale enlarge on Cipnic’s point in ‘Starlight’, a song from their 1990 Warhol tribute album, Songs for Drella: ‘You know that shooting up’s for real/That person who’s screaming, that’s the way he really feels/We’re all improvising, five movies in a week/If Hollywood doesn’t call us – we’ll be sick’. This verse neatly brings together the iconic quality mentioned above, and the fact that Warhol’s films were both a furious parody of Hollywood’s norms, and an attempt to seek its approval because, even though he criticised it, he also admired it. “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic.” But Warhol’s remit was larger still. He saw the beauty in the everyday, and in the ugly.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">He was an autodidact with a motion picture camera, and obviously regarded the camera exactly as he did the tools of a painter, as a mechanical means to an end, with certain contingent characteristics of its own, of which he could make use. He saw that with newsreels and documentaries, where the cameraman is concerned almost exclusively with content, these characteristics become very apparent: lenses go in and out of focus; exposure is not always precisely correct; framing wanders; shots may be held for too long or not long enough. Warhol and his assistant Paul Morrissey both felt that to retain this quality of technical improvisation greatly added to a film’s verisimilitude and believability. The more attention is drawn to the means of production, that we are made aware that it is not a transparent medium through which we view a given reality, paradoxically the more real what we view seems, while the supposedly transparent processes Hollywood uses in the service of realism actually give us pure fantasy.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">As for the subject matter, the ‘content’, the amount of space allotted here forbids lengthy consideration, but is worth quoting from Thomas Crow’s essay, ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’: </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"> Yet the quality of “dead-pan” is significantly different from the</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> passivity that Swenson (an interviewer) expected Warhol to endorse.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> It is a consciously maintained absence of expression intended to</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> disguise interest and engagement.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Warhol meant it, maaan. Personal statements can be made through the fissures inevitable in B-movie production, since they have low budgets and are largely free of high-level interference. If you had to reduce Warhol’s cinema to one theme, say what his films are about in one sentence, it would be that they are a camp send-up and full-frontal attack on the Hollywood myth of sexual normality. Sexual identity is problematised, constructed as a masquerade which is an imperfect shield for a terrible anxiety about sexual difference. So now you know.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> Of course, it is the absence of traditional narrative thrust that is so off-putting to an audience conditioned by Hollywood, and wherein lies a lot of the satiric comment which makes him the anti-Hollywood director par excellence, the prince in exile. The number of walkouts at the first evening of films in the IFC, Kiss, Haircut and Blow Job was gratifying, especially because the people who left were not leaving in chagrin due to being shocked, but because they were bored to death. But boredom is perhaps the most constant feature of life, and it is a wonder it faired so badly in the novels which are filed in the canon as nineteenth century realist fiction. Boredom, for Warhol, is both not boring at all, and more boring than you ever imagined.Watching paint dry? That’s what artists do all the time.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">First published in <i>Film Ireland</i> magazine</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKGTR_zl9Jbp8L2PCCorXIrPdyIzUplWStDDSZtZP2ifm1Q_TL8x5rjulDwmiDfLXA34zmLz5TcLDcFtBjcMdd7an12vT5V_QLCD465Cbzmz11HXYbmN7eypKashBCjZc2lbkqYIG6sqUy0RdTdZZupnGOpvtJZ3RE8VDMSTOF3n41_v8wjIlVZZwhC9rJ/s570/Warhol%20Film%201.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="570" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKGTR_zl9Jbp8L2PCCorXIrPdyIzUplWStDDSZtZP2ifm1Q_TL8x5rjulDwmiDfLXA34zmLz5TcLDcFtBjcMdd7an12vT5V_QLCD465Cbzmz11HXYbmN7eypKashBCjZc2lbkqYIG6sqUy0RdTdZZupnGOpvtJZ3RE8VDMSTOF3n41_v8wjIlVZZwhC9rJ/s320/Warhol%20Film%201.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCGdpbZtLXA6VArhvH8Y9oPTU_8mV_0bsWzQVBrhm52YFaCNbDuX1gpnQkm60wBEVuh1x3akgVwuKUE1Yejhc6yth-dTRx4kDpkNXR3nMHGHkPn0N5CKGhAGwctSGxAIREuxsMzsuwFQi1ChHokN1MRoIP2s0CVggcNyHfH4MlXdU0S_7ONhCGzz89euT4/s2048/Warhol%20Film%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1598" data-original-width="2048" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCGdpbZtLXA6VArhvH8Y9oPTU_8mV_0bsWzQVBrhm52YFaCNbDuX1gpnQkm60wBEVuh1x3akgVwuKUE1Yejhc6yth-dTRx4kDpkNXR3nMHGHkPn0N5CKGhAGwctSGxAIREuxsMzsuwFQi1ChHokN1MRoIP2s0CVggcNyHfH4MlXdU0S_7ONhCGzz89euT4/s320/Warhol%20Film%202.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_smrzRN4Ztt-_X_TKWjDIOPwO__uyHM_49ICjeAMFeWgRR7eIsLYj_yitSlRw4In5v4IPSJ4WenuW0RY2qSNFAwmV8gP-7f2dsUd9IybRCqIjoOisnz5EZsf0ke4lQ3P7geDJ-gOpylMsmJIl2CFkthFRnS0LBbp2GO5lP6sAzVBW3FCtgezuMCSsdD-O/s475/Warhol%20Film%203.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="475" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_smrzRN4Ztt-_X_TKWjDIOPwO__uyHM_49ICjeAMFeWgRR7eIsLYj_yitSlRw4In5v4IPSJ4WenuW0RY2qSNFAwmV8gP-7f2dsUd9IybRCqIjoOisnz5EZsf0ke4lQ3P7geDJ-gOpylMsmJIl2CFkthFRnS0LBbp2GO5lP6sAzVBW3FCtgezuMCSsdD-O/s320/Warhol%20Film%203.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-15285108304971621902023-11-26T06:48:00.000-08:002023-11-26T07:26:28.114-08:00Andy Warhol - After The Party: Works 1956-1986 - IMMA 1997-1998<p style="text-align: justify;">Apropos our visit to the 'Three Times Out' Andy Warhol exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery during the week, here's a review I remember writing of IMMA's 'After The Party' Warhol exhibition, which ran from 21 Nov 1997 to 22 Mar 1998. How Time doth fly.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">After The Party</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Andy Warhol Works 1956 - 1986</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Irish Museum of Modern Art</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">What can be added, in a short review of a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the work of one of the world’s most famous artists - one of whose overriding concerns was the nature of fame - to the unwieldy body of discourse and uneven attempts at exegesis that already exist and are growing exponentially, about that artist’s life and work? Space, in the form of column inches, may be filled, but does anything new or worthwhile get said? Maybe the reiteration of that hoary old maxim to the affect that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, that can be detected in and surmised from most of the criticism that is being written about this oeuvre is merely an eloquent testimony, intentionally or unintentionally on the part of its writers, to the force and potency, the truth and beauty, of the work it is written about. The ubiquity of the commodity that is Warhol’s work in our everyday lives is the fitting denouement to the critique of the ubiquity of commodities that takes place in that work, through seemingly effortless and endless repetition. So perhaps the greatest compliment anyone, including a critic, could pay the master of the deadpan is to engage in a species of ‘Blind and Dumb Criticism’, as Barthes called it in an essay in Mythologies, and simply say nothing, or nothing new, or as little that is new as it is polite and politic to do, and merely trot out what has been said before.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Barthes characterises ‘Blind and Dumb Criticism’ thus:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">'Critics (of books or drama) often use two rather singular arguments. The first consists in suddenly deciding that the true subject of criticism is ineffable, and criticism, as a consequence, unnecessary. The other, which also reappears periodically, consists in confessing that one is too stupid, too unenlightened to understand a book reputedly philosophical'.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">But however justifiable some of the accusations of the ‘King’s New Clothes’ may be when levelled at the effusive excesses or wilful obscurantism of much Warhol criticism, and criticism of modern art in general, taking fogeyish refuge in either of the fraudulent approaches against which Barthes directed his strictures will not suffice when dealing with what is on display here. For, if one is acknowledging an inability to understand merely to call into question the good faith of the artist and not one’s own, then one has no business being a critic. And Warhol’s art is neither so ineffable nor so philosophical as to preclude understanding (if only because no art is). Nor so disposable, inconsequential, stupid, trivial, and all the other meaningless, in this context, adjectives one constantly hears bandied about and around in relation to it.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Two quotes from Thomas Crow’s essay, ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’, reproduced in the excellent IMMA exhibition catalogue, are apposite. Firstly: ‘What has also gone unobserved is the contradiction at the core of the usual interpretation of Warhol’s work: that the authority for the supposed effacement of the author’s voice in Warhol’s pictures is none other than the author’s voice itself.’; and, secondly: ‘Yet the quality of “dead-pan” is significantly different from the passivity that Swenson (an interviewer) expected Warhol to endorse. It is a consciously maintained absence of expression intended to disguise interest and engagement.’</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Warhol was both a greater tragedian and a greater comedian than any of his contemporaries. Nominally a pop artist, he was by times and by turns, an expressionist, a minimalist and a conceptualist, but both much more serious and much more fun than any practitioners in these obviously reductive and ultimately arbitrary categories. Those broad brush strokes and bright colours are fairly expressionistic, but in a more channelled framework; those ‘Silver Clouds’ helium balloons share the preoccupations of minimalist sculptors, in drawing the viewer’s attention to the artificial nature of the gallery space, and the space occupied by the artwork itself; that ‘Last Supper’ reproduction, doubled as it is, asks just as many questions as the conceptualists about representation, and about the fate of what we have been taught to think of as the greatest historical works of art, if their ability to retain their uniqueness or mystique cannot stand up to mass production.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The IMMA exhibition is representative rather than inclusive, but most of the usual suspects are on show. The space is used exceptionally well, and the groupings of works in the many small, well-lit rooms is thoughtful and sensitive. I found especially moving and revealing the drawings done by the artist’s mother, Julia Warhola. If I had to select a favourite series, it would be ‘Myths’, because, well, I’m interested in myths. The ‘Disaster’ and ‘Gun’ series, and the ‘Chairman Mao’ portrait and ‘Hammer and Sickle’ still life, show that as a good American citizen Warhol was exercised by threats to the American way of life, both from the inside and the outside. They also exemplify his darker, more sombre and serious mode. The ‘Dollar Signs’ sketches refer to the idea of the artwork representing money above all else, both to producer and consumer, and link art directly to its monetary value. They also show his funnier, more frivolous and frolicsome side. Of course, like everything else in Warhol, these handy but crude divisions begin to blur and break down. If you can make what could be thought of as a joke out of something that could be thought of as serious, and make what could be thought of as a serious point through something that could be thought of as a joke, you’ve really got something. Nevertheless, the synthetic polymer paint and silk-screen on canvas works ‘Skull’, ‘Cross’ and ‘Self-Portrait’, are affecting intimations of mortality, inviting one to meditate, like Samuel Johnson did in his great poem, on the vanity of human wishes, when all is over, after the party.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Warhol’s interest in contemporary culture extended beyond the limits of conventional fine art to film making, record cover design and production, and the set design and promotion of multimedia events called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, featuring performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico. Indeed, it is via the latter activity that I was first introduced to his work. His art rejected distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, between fine art and commercial art, at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so. It may now reek of post-modern irony, perhaps chiefly because that is the lens through which it is presently viewed, but it was made long before such a way of seeing had become the dominant sensibility, the main means of apprehending and appreciating works of art. Antecedents of it can be found in the work of Oscar Wilde, of Ronald Firbank, of Cole Porter, and it was thoroughly delineated in Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on Camp’, but it had always been generally distrusted because of a supposed lack of deep feeling on the part of the artist, which resulted in a paucity of genuine profundity in the art. Insofar as this anti-romantic method has now gained such huge currency, Warhol could be said to have ironically followed the Wordsworthian dictum of creating the taste by which he is understood. There he is, a closet romantic all the time. Nor is it fair to saddle him with responsibility for the thousand and one pale imitators who have sprung up in his wake. Blaming Andy Warhol for Jeff Koons is like holding The Sex Pistols responsible for every third rate punk band you’ve ever heard.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">If you’re looking for social comment, reflected here through individual portraiture, consider J. G. Ballard’s remarks in the annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">'A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of the these desperate women, while his day-glow palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.’</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">What a pity Warhol isn’t around to do Diana, since he would undoubtedly provide a simultaneously more affectionate and more visceral memorial than a rehashed ballad which actually started life as a song about Marilyn Monroe. (Could one of his assistants or disciples give us one instead? After all, it is a commonplace among Warhol’s detractors that his helpers did most of the physical work involved in producing the art. As if Renaissance masters didn’t do the same thing, presiding over workshops akin to The Factory. Is a style more personal than a process, when it is inextricably bound up with that process?) Untempered, gushing praise may be just as reprehensible a critical strategy as the blind and dumb varieties, but when we recognise the range and depth of Warhol’s interests and his achievements, his ‘persona that has sanctioned a wide range of experiments in non-elite culture far beyond the world of art’ as Crow has it, we begin to realise what a true original Warhol really was, and remains, if the use of the word ‘original’ is not too much of an insult to his memory, his celebrity, his legacy.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Commissioned for <i>Circa</i> Magazine</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitM56kZjaqIN9us-Z0aIr0_SDKZo-1LUV0F2ZYzWEGGwQslRTKzKqKBKrdSJcuyXzHSOHGzyBW9JN1fg33YD__WAin-6hkTQ7uoh3ij8On7tPLqC9wJFmQw8qsAKIxMqqwF7gNc8dY-DZ3J1cPI7duw8UJ6duTM8zntqfQ3bGRlteTVu7P6a6bMUVHa0zo/s960/Warhol%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="951" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitM56kZjaqIN9us-Z0aIr0_SDKZo-1LUV0F2ZYzWEGGwQslRTKzKqKBKrdSJcuyXzHSOHGzyBW9JN1fg33YD__WAin-6hkTQ7uoh3ij8On7tPLqC9wJFmQw8qsAKIxMqqwF7gNc8dY-DZ3J1cPI7duw8UJ6duTM8zntqfQ3bGRlteTVu7P6a6bMUVHa0zo/s320/Warhol%201.jpg" width="317" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgefYKHpodVOqmjugsu3V_RawJsxX_KcqNNgFMKSD-kXvKhWdLDxR_iUdBAEcu38MOOHcmHWVZy6vU36eoayzU5Nb3z5dxAAs2QxfHp5CDGsKHXj9mnDb5Y7DBIPebi9Btb60EWD1sff19AbIfU_zOItniS2S_MiLFKOsIJyImhVRX7NT9lUR-jgw0ynh9T/s960/Warhol%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="951" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgefYKHpodVOqmjugsu3V_RawJsxX_KcqNNgFMKSD-kXvKhWdLDxR_iUdBAEcu38MOOHcmHWVZy6vU36eoayzU5Nb3z5dxAAs2QxfHp5CDGsKHXj9mnDb5Y7DBIPebi9Btb60EWD1sff19AbIfU_zOItniS2S_MiLFKOsIJyImhVRX7NT9lUR-jgw0ynh9T/s320/Warhol%202.jpg" width="317" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-22447432243325214872023-10-27T06:37:00.007-07:002023-10-27T06:37:52.728-07:00John Murry /Whelan's - July 19th, 2023<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Desmond Traynor John Murry / Whelan’s, July 16th, 2023</div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">It’s a decade since the release of John Murry’s breakthrough album, The Graceless Age, and the 10th anniversary is being celebrated with three band dates in Ireland – Galway, Limerick, and now Dublin (with a solo stop-off in Galway again, for the Film Fleadh – where Sarah Share’s film The Ballad of John Murry has just bagged the Best Documentary Award).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> With backing from three young, crack musicians, unsurprisingly the set features every song from that classic album, although not in the original running order. Murry can be an intimidating stage presence, and his between song patter isn’t always coherent, but he achieves many moments of intensity over the course of the evening. Not least among them is the record’s 10-minute+ centrepiece, ‘Little Coloured Balloons’. Like any artist required to play the same song every night, especially one as harrowingly autobiographical as this, Murry is not unaware of the freak show element of a piece in which he opens up and bleeds. Rather, he is conscious of the multiple ironies involved in re-enacting his own near-death experience – due to a drug overdose – and resuscitation, giving a performative display of his own internalised trauma time after time. Also, he has to keep it interesting for himself. To this end, he fairly deconstructs the song with an ongoing commentary while singing it (at one point he throws in a reference to its ‘emotional pornography’), without diminishing any of its inherent weight. Indeed, he brings it home with all its requisite heartrending power intact. There is even an improvisatory lyric change from ‘I took an ambulance ride/They said I nearly died’ to ‘I wish I’d died.’</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> The encore sees an airing of ‘I Refuse To Believe You Could Love Me’, from most recent album The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, plus a raucous rendition of Hank Williams’ ‘I Saw The Light’.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> As The Life Partner remarked to me afterwards, it’s like watching a beautiful car crash. Playing to an audience of devotees in Whelan’s on a Sunday night, it is interesting to speculate how many are there for the beauty, and how many for the car crash. But that is a risk any edgily spontaneous performer always takes. Besides, maybe the car crash is part of the beauty. Anyway you look at it, what a show – with entertaining support from Longford-based band Cronin.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-58313833987093825702023-10-27T06:35:00.001-07:002023-10-27T06:35:31.745-07:00Steve Earle / Vicar Street<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Desmond Traynor Steve Earle / Vicar Street, June 29th, 2023</div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">After an engaging supporting set from Edinburgh’s Roseanne Reid, the Hardcore Troubadour strolls out on to the Vicar Street stage for the concluding show of the European leg of his Alone Again Tour, kicking things off with a cover of The Pogues’ ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’, because ‘Shane McGowan is one of the best songwriters around.’ From then on it’s mostly a judicious selection of crowd favourites from his back catalogue, such as ‘The Devil’s Right Hand’, </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">‘My Old Friend The Blues’, ‘Guitar Town’ and ‘I Ain’t Ever Satisfied.’ The evening reaches an emotional crescendo with covers of Jerry Jeff Walker’s ‘Mr. Bojangles’, and his own deceased son Justin’s ‘Harlem River Blues’. Big hitters ‘Galway Girl’ and ‘Copperhead Road’ are saved until the end. It is hard to do the solo acoustic thing, and what you realise watch Earle is that you are in the hands of a master, who can read the room.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> The otherwise excellent set concludes on a somewhat jarring note, as during the encore Earle takes a rather gratuitous pop at Roger Waters for his promotion of the BDS campaign against apartheid Israel, while introducing his own plea for peace in the region, 2003’s ‘Jerusalem’. Earle visited Israel in 2013 to take part in David Broza’s ‘East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem’ bridge-building project. While one should respect the fact that Earle was acting in good faith, it is not unreasonable to ask, ‘Would you have played Sun City in apartheid South Africa, Steve, because you ‘don’t believe in hopeless cases or lost causes’?’ If not, why go against the wishes of the majority of the Palestinian people now? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> Otherwise, the veteran sails on, a consummate professional who, at this stage of the game, knows exactly what he’s doing, and how to do it. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Bad photos:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvVBOfFbG7u5LzjTphbleyI6lhUbnfkQF0mpbdwJV8Hkw3mIwjuOg3dWpxx5TDTtAUycvbGmpYIR9AQN1M3bRWAYt7l7E-ZLvK6JpYZ9mF7XFmhH7annJ10Fj5nfQdip54QCu5hJWWzXT9BFiM2VfkugFDRGlHR7-KbX8DtAs13kX9JuDUVqbmZ7TAf0eP/s2048/Steve%201.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvVBOfFbG7u5LzjTphbleyI6lhUbnfkQF0mpbdwJV8Hkw3mIwjuOg3dWpxx5TDTtAUycvbGmpYIR9AQN1M3bRWAYt7l7E-ZLvK6JpYZ9mF7XFmhH7annJ10Fj5nfQdip54QCu5hJWWzXT9BFiM2VfkugFDRGlHR7-KbX8DtAs13kX9JuDUVqbmZ7TAf0eP/w640-h480/Steve%201.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTEOwA4BUdD6v6s2tsPsUuxl0yiVc768q8oyqHyY-2ky5vB0qocRBusm2dl0A7FbSgP8-GAOjoiAAYVTjCsMgzebh7WX8oxLe7jrAsXQ10RNn7-xBjtZBRYlVtX68xIeJXLVaYVv279oICEMn6YCPjgE12DwrXpmJ41C4ZnFA2eG0JaPlYo4RskByL9e7n/s2048/Steve%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1326" data-original-width="2048" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTEOwA4BUdD6v6s2tsPsUuxl0yiVc768q8oyqHyY-2ky5vB0qocRBusm2dl0A7FbSgP8-GAOjoiAAYVTjCsMgzebh7WX8oxLe7jrAsXQ10RNn7-xBjtZBRYlVtX68xIeJXLVaYVv279oICEMn6YCPjgE12DwrXpmJ41C4ZnFA2eG0JaPlYo4RskByL9e7n/w640-h414/Steve%202.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-25730233170102157392023-05-22T11:20:00.002-07:002023-05-22T11:20:47.939-07:00Martin Amis R.I.P. <p>So, Martin Amis… </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Can’t say he was my favourite of the British batch which came to prominence in the 1980s: I’d rate Rushdie, Barnes, McEwan all higher. He certainly wasn’t in the same league as his avowed heroes and influences, Nabokov and Bellow. That was just trying to establish greatness by association. Literature isn’t just about knowing and deploying dictionary words, although it can help. But it was his snobby public schoolboy attitudes that marred much of his work, and was really off-putting. Working class characters (e.g. Keith Talent) exist only as figures of fun and the butt of jokes. Football fans at a match he attends ‘look like crisps’. Granted, aspirational middle class characters are satirised too – but with them, it’s an inside job, talking across rather than talking down, much less condescending and more 'empathetic' - as they say nowadays. But that’s the English class system for you. <i>Time’s Arrow</i> is the best of his novels of those I’ve read. However, as with many novelists, I much prefer reading his journalism and essays rather than his fiction. It is as a social commentator, and as an explorer of his own consciousness, that I would suggest he will be best remembered. R.I.P.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbXCrm_3sHGqkEMbNcOGhWT4KvZJtUb8IoMl4q7xcWEb9YFQw0aUXa5aoB4tva4-1G-5j_oCLjfzjM8y71-3Oa_8LtZsXqsZSgEDLSwQKHm9sjMlRdBN8N0fwHx9fCaoIxtL4dd68YZ2WFhdo0R1gPcT-p3CMNXaHaH7I8MzmthOfpM8ndrJf7wFp97g/s620/Amis.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="620" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbXCrm_3sHGqkEMbNcOGhWT4KvZJtUb8IoMl4q7xcWEb9YFQw0aUXa5aoB4tva4-1G-5j_oCLjfzjM8y71-3Oa_8LtZsXqsZSgEDLSwQKHm9sjMlRdBN8N0fwHx9fCaoIxtL4dd68YZ2WFhdo0R1gPcT-p3CMNXaHaH7I8MzmthOfpM8ndrJf7wFp97g/w640-h384/Amis.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-9203751955619916782023-03-19T17:51:00.005-07:002023-03-19T17:51:31.153-07:00Pelé, and the World’s Best Dad<div style="text-align: justify;">On March 5th last, I had a piece on RTE Radio 1's <i>Sunday Miscellany</i>. Here's a slightly fuller version of the text I read then. You can listen to the original broadcast by following the link below. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Pelé, and the World’s Best Dad
By
Desmond Traynor </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On February 26th, 1972, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known to the footballing world – and far beyond it – as Pelé, came to Dalymount Park in Phibsboro. He lined out in an exhibition match for his club side Santos against a combined Bohemians-Drumcondra XI Selection. This was quite a media event, as the Brazilian legend was then widely regarded as the greatest footballer the world had ever seen. In many circles in the game, despite tough contemporary competition, he remains so. But what makes this occasion resonant for me is that, aged eleven, I was there, brought by my often unavailable father. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> My Da worked long, unsociable hours as a bus conductor to keep us in the relatively frugal comforts his efforts had encouraged us – my mother and myself – to feel we were entitled, mainly through copious amounts of overtime. The Ma – often irritated by the last minute phone calls to inform her that he was doing a double day – complained that we never saw him, little realising that in his mind he was just keeping the show on the road. Providing for us was his way of showing his love. As he used to say, “I reared two gentlemen, and a lady” – these being my elder brother, my elder sister, and myself.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Pelé, from equally humble origins, through three marriages and several affairs, fathered seven children. Santos were a club of modest means and, realising they had a prize asset on their hands, began gruelling tours all over the world, arranging friendlies against any local team that would do a deal with them, in order to milk their cash cow. Santos rejected all transfer offers for their superstar, and the Brazilian government of the time even passed a bill declaring Pelé ‘a national treasure’, effectively blocking him from ever departing The Land of the Holy Cross for a more remunerative top-flight European side. Thus, his appearance with his teammates at Dalymount.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> As an indentured workhorse with an exhausting schedule, Pelé did not have a lot of spare time for family life with his kids. A son by his first marriage, Edinho, was jailed for thirty-three years in 2014 for laundering money from drug trafficking, reduced to twelve years on appeal (although his famous father always maintained that this was a miscarriage of justice). For most of his life, Pelé never acknowledged his eldest daughter, Sandra Machado, even after her death in 2006, nor her two children, Octavio and Gabriel. She was born of an affair the star player had in 1964 with a housemaid, Anizia Machado. However, shortly before he died, he requested to meet his grandsons, and he recognised all seven children in his will. Another of his affairs, from 1981 to 1986, was with Brazilian TV host Xuxa Meneghel, twenty-three years his junior, whom he began dating when he was forty and she was seventeen.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> My father did not go in for multiple marriages or, to the best of my knowledge, affairs – extramarital or otherwise. His staunch Roman Catholicism – which led to a growing distance between us during my teenage years – would have forbidden him from doing so. However Pelé, too, was a practicing Catholic, albeit evidently of the à la carte variety: he never let his religious beliefs stop him from getting around. He finally left Santos at the age of thirty-four, past his competitive prime, signing for the New York Cosmos, where he played from 1975 to 1977. In New York he enjoyed the high life, becoming a regular at Studio 54, and earning more during his three years with the Cosmos than he had in his entire career at Santos. My Dad, in contrast, didn’t get to kick back until he retired aged sixty-five, claiming the statutory old age pension, and a small annuity from C.I.E.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> The Dalymount match itself was, according to contemporaneous newspaper reports, no great spectacle, with the Sunday Independent headline dubbing the star attraction ‘the Phibsboro flop.’ The lethargic performance was due, no doubt, to Pelé and Co.’s fatigue from constant touring. My eleven-year-old self remembers it rather differently. The fulltime score was 3-2 to Santos, but two incidents stand out in my memory. The first was when a Santos defender, facing his own goal, chose to head the ball against the post, before turning to clear the rebound away. This was true exhibition stuff, worthy of the Harlem Globetrotters. No player would be trying such a move in a match with anything at stake. The other was when a shot wide wound up in our area of the stand behind the goal, and a dozen hands stretched out to touch the ball that Pelé had touched. Mine was one of them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> My father did bring me other places when I was a child: to <i>Tora, Tora, Tora</i>, an epic war film about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour; and on an annual busmen’s pilgrimage to Knock Shrine which he organised (that fervent Catholic devotion again!), where I was the only boy among a coachful of middle-aged men. My grandfatherly father was forty-six years old when I was born, causing a school friend to remark, “Your old man really is an old man”. However, when I challenged him much later – during my disaffected adolescence – about not seeing enough of him when I was growing up, his immediate response was, “Didn’t I bring you to see Pelé?”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Perhaps Pelé was and, arguably, remains the best footballer the world has ever seen, even if he was not always the World’s Best Dad. Maybe my father was the World’s Best Dad, despite his enforced absences, and even if there are millions of drinking mugs which proclaim this slogan for countless numbers of men. Like Pelé, my father worked hard and did his best. Within the boundaries of one’s allotted talents and the opportunities that present themselves, isn’t that all anyone can do, for their children?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Thanks Dad, for everything. Most of all, thanks for bringing me to see Pelé.
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22220779/" target="_blank">https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22220779/</a><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiYxW0JAOxv7AqAWlcJc_CYMMtkAn_CwG4bVC8wN1TYylSVZLMcghuiVbOde8wVemPXk5_MkN032d2K141FcvEfZCSBzOl4WUVBDCUhsID8BR9sPG_MvNs8HGf4l2xV-Ey4eqeBf4_JkZGck7VkihNKR0jX5xQtvliZPcccqtmYX8pApjJSSGV-Mx08A/s1280/Des%20on%20Sunday%20Misellany.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiYxW0JAOxv7AqAWlcJc_CYMMtkAn_CwG4bVC8wN1TYylSVZLMcghuiVbOde8wVemPXk5_MkN032d2K141FcvEfZCSBzOl4WUVBDCUhsID8BR9sPG_MvNs8HGf4l2xV-Ey4eqeBf4_JkZGck7VkihNKR0jX5xQtvliZPcccqtmYX8pApjJSSGV-Mx08A/w640-h480/Des%20on%20Sunday%20Misellany.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-63675241695665283842023-03-01T11:54:00.002-08:002023-03-01T11:59:59.217-08:00Song of the Faithful DepartedI recorded two versions of 'Song of the Faithful Departed' by Phil Chevron of The Radiators during lockdown, for a podcast Stefan Murphy was doing. The first song which 'got' post-independence in a nutshell, and the best.
Slow one:
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Fast one:
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Thanks.
Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-82050452241601030152023-01-27T09:06:00.003-08:002023-01-27T09:06:35.380-08:00The Banshees of Inisherin - The Debate Rages<p><span style="text-align: justify;">A debate seems to be brewing about the merits of Martin McDonagh's </span><i style="text-align: justify;">The Banshees of Inisherin.</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span>I got into a bit of a spat with someone on old codgers' FaceBook, who is insistent that Banshees is a masterpiece, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant of film studies. Here's an extract of my opinion, in response to that individual (who, let it be said, I otherwise admire).</p><p style="text-align: justify;">'Accolades and nominations mean very little, or mean precisely as much as people are prepared to invest in them. You, more than many people, should know how the PR machine works. I have worked as a film critic - not that I think that's what qualifies me to have an opinion on any film I see. I wrote on this forum at the time I saw <i>Banshees</i>: 'I enjoyed this, for the most part. Sparkling dialogue and great actorly performances. However, I prefer Martin McDonagh's non-Irish set movies - <i>Three Billboards</i> and <i>In Bruges</i> - to his typically 2nd generation London-Irish stage Irishry plays and films. To echo John Coltrane's remark to Miles Davis, I don't think he knew how to end it.' I've never fully bought into McDonagh's Western Gothic (the west of Ireland, that is), which lacks an emotional core. 'Let's laugh at the grotesques and their tragic lives.' <i>Banshees</i> will play well in the U.S. - thus the 'accolades and nominations'. Some Americans probably think that's exactly what Ireland was like. Like lots of films and TV shows I see now, production values and performances are impeccably high. It's the writing that leaves something to be desired.'</p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-57908726937771856482022-12-17T04:37:00.000-08:002022-12-17T04:37:08.394-08:00Pussy Riot: Riot Days / Cruel Sister - Opium Rooms - 15/11/2022<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Everyone is by now familiar with the history of punk activist collective Pussy Riot, formed in March 2011, whose most famous guerrilla socio-political intervention was their performance of ‘A Punk Prayer’ inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in August 2012. For their trouble, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, a portion of which was served in a Mordovian penal colony. This experience was recounted in Aloykhina’s memoir Riot Days (2018), and it forms the basis of this touring theatrical show. The fact that Nadezhda and Maria (Masha) now live on opposite sides of the Atlantic and perform separately – while both retain the original group name and accommodate a revolving door membership – only testifies to the truth of their slogan: ‘Anyone can be Pussy Riot.’ </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> This is a confrontational evening of well-choreographed, visceral physicality, underpinned by the throbbing electronica and percussion of Diana Burkot. Unfortunately, the video element was absent due to technical difficulties, but the English subtitles of the Russian text projected onscreen helped keep track of the protest poetry declaimed by Alyokhina, flautist Taso Pletner and documentarian Olga Borisova, which culminated in a vagina-baring pissing on a portrait of Vladimir Putin – a gesture guaranteeing that the participants won’t be going home to Russia anytime soon. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"> The encore, an ode to the bombing of Mariupol, brings us right up-to-date, and makes you realise how long these women have been campaigning against Putin’s authoritarian regime, with its brutality to dissidents and the LGBTQ+ community. You can’t say you weren’t warned. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"> A shout out too for appropriately chosen (she’s got the right attitude) support act Cruel Sister, who played material from the excellent Girls My Age EP. Faith Millar’s immaculately executed, hard-edged shoegaze recalls a young Kristin Hersh’s angular endeavours with Throwing Muses. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSLR_L4jQ14nqr4kj8nD1548pq_gUiG9TFSDuPYPiATZVevxaDB005JINVu7SXOCGl2cBPnKRUSLv7qVquF2YvFcm6Pw8cDE1tqyBbLA6uOV47LH6nuRRGxCxWRlsN3mQN_VDsxtSQ9WaJhYc3YErstYDtciJMTg737oFgSQ6bjpFYtZJpTQBk-QPWg/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="488" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSLR_L4jQ14nqr4kj8nD1548pq_gUiG9TFSDuPYPiATZVevxaDB005JINVu7SXOCGl2cBPnKRUSLv7qVquF2YvFcm6Pw8cDE1tqyBbLA6uOV47LH6nuRRGxCxWRlsN3mQN_VDsxtSQ9WaJhYc3YErstYDtciJMTg737oFgSQ6bjpFYtZJpTQBk-QPWg/w326-h640/Pussy%20Riot%2001.jpg" width="326" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzr-iK-AjaPxKJimasQcP6phEI_lY1tk_4X1EjxgEj5Nq_iyj1BEmzTyut4wLMv7sxzoPQ3elCY27rTFvvF-yEa4SHQlLklIgNFaXEBIrxSRzDox_dDY2pqM21AZ7S7DrnE938vsCnsLLVT7WelMjUR4Hv84IO7TfrU57PCjWfeCcUIsNIkTm0GQp7sQ/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzr-iK-AjaPxKJimasQcP6phEI_lY1tk_4X1EjxgEj5Nq_iyj1BEmzTyut4wLMv7sxzoPQ3elCY27rTFvvF-yEa4SHQlLklIgNFaXEBIrxSRzDox_dDY2pqM21AZ7S7DrnE938vsCnsLLVT7WelMjUR4Hv84IO7TfrU57PCjWfeCcUIsNIkTm0GQp7sQ/w640-h480/Pussy%20Riot%2002.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGYPMfk5MkHx5-7el7AIOsmJIKnBMpdDPQnACSYpHRBUMcnfBGmsStnpMWBMBRrXxR-xBbCVxH6zOilR2729Iono9odO1zVPemt_CfAtVHqsd8BK_KT17KvZhIDrHQwZv2OZpZOfGQEJC-Y0RUY5XM6fgmjWeFEliwNq1eqlNHyRNdqnbddR_W5GharA/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGYPMfk5MkHx5-7el7AIOsmJIKnBMpdDPQnACSYpHRBUMcnfBGmsStnpMWBMBRrXxR-xBbCVxH6zOilR2729Iono9odO1zVPemt_CfAtVHqsd8BK_KT17KvZhIDrHQwZv2OZpZOfGQEJC-Y0RUY5XM6fgmjWeFEliwNq1eqlNHyRNdqnbddR_W5GharA/w480-h640/Pussy%20Riot%2003.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LU7s-gH-T1057ZITVywahSrPJOGpdanAV7mAm7MZNi_w94KZ0Xu-32vIBs5ojLuKtx8Wskp9o3mc5EWihGaf1kR6GeT5YD_NRoBHWUb6tAHUDrAMxzQFMzCXhR5M2EdHVk_qBisPV2XKLFK9Si8WfhLzIIE6HnThL0u7nuTK33YY1rXfkLCHeHnQqw/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LU7s-gH-T1057ZITVywahSrPJOGpdanAV7mAm7MZNi_w94KZ0Xu-32vIBs5ojLuKtx8Wskp9o3mc5EWihGaf1kR6GeT5YD_NRoBHWUb6tAHUDrAMxzQFMzCXhR5M2EdHVk_qBisPV2XKLFK9Si8WfhLzIIE6HnThL0u7nuTK33YY1rXfkLCHeHnQqw/w480-h640/Pussy%20Riot%2004.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQubaSWjInxdF7f9XgxRgOX6xJcogWDrHrEHQQTSZLMmBEXXBi3IwEvn2qa4GqxlgYg_WSW9P7osmkn7zzKI_1bVyQ3ZDu1hqdkbl3L_h2Nx2MfAHZKHPcj-F4PPw-aASN972Gn5p7DKq8BqSrCCJ_mAq8W6lDGrAmyp35TEY4hw6skjpydQgq_ppmw/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="960" height="586" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQubaSWjInxdF7f9XgxRgOX6xJcogWDrHrEHQQTSZLMmBEXXBi3IwEvn2qa4GqxlgYg_WSW9P7osmkn7zzKI_1bVyQ3ZDu1hqdkbl3L_h2Nx2MfAHZKHPcj-F4PPw-aASN972Gn5p7DKq8BqSrCCJ_mAq8W6lDGrAmyp35TEY4hw6skjpydQgq_ppmw/w640-h586/Pussy%20Riot%2005.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMEBy3Q9EyHvNs9sh1Js9kKBU4YyW_mHGKMRWNDF66nAjl_EQoOTyzo8v7KqXKt94tz_P7ih5Se3Qx-9Bcxjd0W4vb-OF8rMKXhlrUzl_zRaz4eC6dYOQ73W8yxHv03Fxu3FAxYlqywZfNS38V7qGAhrcI-NxohlPw9QFsKKYQHXAOklFNOgTx0DFRdQ/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMEBy3Q9EyHvNs9sh1Js9kKBU4YyW_mHGKMRWNDF66nAjl_EQoOTyzo8v7KqXKt94tz_P7ih5Se3Qx-9Bcxjd0W4vb-OF8rMKXhlrUzl_zRaz4eC6dYOQ73W8yxHv03Fxu3FAxYlqywZfNS38V7qGAhrcI-NxohlPw9QFsKKYQHXAOklFNOgTx0DFRdQ/w480-h640/Pussy%20Riot%2006.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjknqdwZJNvmVFkaXU460G8rpIDBajOoLwWWM5vt1O3jfDirrsmHQjsJQ82j5NuLVWgQK4v4nvL6AfIWlWeJzZIUqTjAE72LxDZLw_LcXcR4jlkUTa5YtzjLKACKvbHD09W3dRkXxRqPK4I9pMIkvgBO7qpPD11g7VXbgagFK_M06jVMEGUUSzU5f2lQ/s960/Cruel%20Sister%2001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjknqdwZJNvmVFkaXU460G8rpIDBajOoLwWWM5vt1O3jfDirrsmHQjsJQ82j5NuLVWgQK4v4nvL6AfIWlWeJzZIUqTjAE72LxDZLw_LcXcR4jlkUTa5YtzjLKACKvbHD09W3dRkXxRqPK4I9pMIkvgBO7qpPD11g7VXbgagFK_M06jVMEGUUSzU5f2lQ/w640-h480/Cruel%20Sister%2001.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP5K-PuWzkLshhaHPY11AoPWpqhmUdg-g4WzOH1vSbuxNss78MtyJf-opaOpLGyQyRMiGd7SXaTI4qfc8ystV5loKWJTv_0Xnk04pDPrE-adB6aJludMpP4vIOy9pj4OnYFfb39G5RwPzQA4PzuOrnkhI3Jb9vGkRER1swYcIBagtx1Ech7ZwUt1b9Vg/s960/Cruel%20Sister%2002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP5K-PuWzkLshhaHPY11AoPWpqhmUdg-g4WzOH1vSbuxNss78MtyJf-opaOpLGyQyRMiGd7SXaTI4qfc8ystV5loKWJTv_0Xnk04pDPrE-adB6aJludMpP4vIOy9pj4OnYFfb39G5RwPzQA4PzuOrnkhI3Jb9vGkRER1swYcIBagtx1Ech7ZwUt1b9Vg/w480-h640/Cruel%20Sister%2002.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdux7E6MLJwvPwRzW4xGoIjixQSktYZvr1PYvt002PTZKjDV5hyv41wKAw5BkXGYTik9oZbzb5o5qw998isrVcCFsKuHUDfyWOF63yw-wSlAVpeU-KwuVKqRtLBMOBIKbp_S0nYui5qfx-WYZpz-mHFniypRUaKzbM1jV0eUe4ZkmWkoeNieeFfOkxPQ/s960/Pussy%20Riot%2006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-35634054001018241882022-12-06T16:31:00.002-08:002022-12-06T16:31:27.446-08:00Doctor Millar - Interview - September 2022<p style="text-align: justify;">Ace singer-songwriter Seán (Doctor) Millar has just released his sixth solo album, <i>Ruining Everything</i>, having endured not only pandemic lockdown, like the rest of us, but overcoming some personal health issues as well. Here he chats about the making of the record, his influences, and what else he has been up to.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>So Seán, congratulations. Nine years in the making?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Well, it wasn’t really nine years. It was it was two-and-a-half years, I suppose. I mean, I started demoing songs, and I’ve got a pile of songs ready to go. I would say I’ve got at least thirty songs that I’m happy with putting on a record. I mean, I’ve written hundreds over the last nine years, but I suppose I’ve just been doing loads of other stuff, the theatre stuff, and it’s the logistics of getting it together to do an album. It’s so difficult to balance the financials, and the time frame. Also, what happens is that it takes me so long to gather the wherewithal to record, in terms of my own time, energy, commitment, and money for studio time, that by the time we go to do it I’ve moved on myself personally. But with this one what was really good was I just I reached a point where I wanted to make something really raw and sort of acoustic and roots-based, and that’s relatively cheaper to do. And because of COVID I wasn’t doing anything else, so it meant this became my focus, and I got it done and got it out. I’m working on another one already. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>It was Les Keye, at Arad Studios?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">…as producer, yes, and he was much more ‘the producer’ on this. Like, normally when I make records, I’m co-producer. I generally work very closely on arrangements, you know, because that’s one of my skills, I guess. In fact, I’m much better at arranging music than I am at playing it. For this Les did a lot of donkey work, and he brought in Donal Lunny, and Bill Whelan the banjo player. There was a lot of his methods, no click tracks were used on the record, and huge amounts of them are single takes. So that was an attempt by Les to try and capture a sort of authentic Dr. Millar experience, and that kind of mixture of absurd post-punk and roots music that I am.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Some people are calling it your rootsiest, folkiest album. How intentional was that, or did you arrange songs to fit the concept? </b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">It’s very much intentional. I see this as me making a statement about who I am, or certainly who Dr. Millar is, anyway.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>He’s this rootsy, folksy guy?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Well, I suppose it’s because I came from that post-punk environment, there were certain ways of doing things that I always rejected. I always thought of myself as folk musician, but I never signalled that in an obvious way. I’ve always tried to sing in voices that would be natural to me, that wouldn't be too out of step with my spoken voice. But everything’s a choice, and you mediate yourself through those choices, the way you speak and the way you sing. Because I’ve never gone for an Irishy, tragic-folky way of singing, I think maybe I’ve never been really seen as that, even though that’s what I see myself as being.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>But you’re interested in all kinds of different genres of music. </b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Personally, I really am. I mean, The Velvet Underground are my favourite band. They’re not just my favourite band, it actually feels wrong to say that, because there are other bands I enjoy listening to as much or more than The Velvet Underground. But I think The Velvet Underground were the most important band in my life. And the reason for that is because I had to change in order to like The Velvet Underground, and that act of changing my thinking about what was good was so radicalising for me as a musician, and as an artist, that it has affected every single thing I’ve done ever since.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Ageing is a theme on the album?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">It’s very much the theme: ageing and dying. I’m always doing the same thing, I suppose. I’m always either talking about myself or telling stories, one or the other. ‘Communion Money’, for example, is just a song about family. It’s very simple, it’s just a dream that I had where I was floating in a boat out to sea with my siblings, and I felt really, really happy and safe and secure, and loved. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>A lot of the songs are very narrative driven. Stories, as you say, like ‘Danny McCoy’.</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yeah, I met a guy that I was in school with, I wouldn't have seen him for twenty-five years. Cool guy, very musical. Accidental meeting, I walked into a bar and he was having a chat with someone else I knew from school, and he told me about his life and I was going ‘Wow’ all the time, what a life you’ve had, his life was so strange and eventful, dramatic and full of adventure and incident and interest and love. Afterwards I was thinking – apart from how much I liked this person – how you kind of know people and don’t know them at all. If you’d asked me about that guy, I’d have told you that he lived in Bray, and it turns out he’s had this incredible epic life. So, it’s about assumptions, and the assumptions people make about me as well. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Could you could imagine any of these songs being done in radically different versions?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yeah, I could. I suppose what it is, is I’m so bored with contemporary music production. If you work at it, especially my other job in theatre, I get to explore different styles. But there’s so much ‘nothing’ in contemporary music production, and I listen to a lot of production. They’re being seduced by the software, essentially. I mean, I love electronic music, absolutely love it, but there’s an art to everything, there’s an art to folk and there’s an art to electronica and there’s an art to heavy metal, there’s an art to all these different genres. And right now what I feel is, if I’m making an album, I want to actually make an album that has something real in it, that has something that is a moment of my time, that is a genuine ‘something’, that’s a drop of my blood. I want to basically pour a cup of my fucking blood into this recording, so people get something when they buy it, they actually get ‘some thing’, not just me arseing around with keyboards and stuff like that. I had to try and do all those guitar tracks, and it took time to get some of them right. It was actually hard, you know, trying to get vocals that sound like they mean something, not just me singing. I mean, I sing all day, but a vocal that has some sort of integrity, some sort of expression. That’s what I was trying to do with this. So every time I play, everything sounds a little bit different. Because I don’t try and play the album live, ever. I just try and play the songs live with the musicians who are there, for the audience that’s there. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHk-P56maezU57C9PU1FoYsvDQm5t_uYUVH1wIAWFI0-hF3Ao7GMLj3LnNusJu7F4sAXGW7pBqtFsBIWdevtk36nI_hYzW0uRHBA-WRmNdxjtbcdA2SSzNOM8GTXFXUQRQFfiWFKkTbv1N8e_YAT1goaEUqA7l41HsU2wdfhCA_3tGIMpHD3CAjcar7w/s4032/IMG_3584.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHk-P56maezU57C9PU1FoYsvDQm5t_uYUVH1wIAWFI0-hF3Ao7GMLj3LnNusJu7F4sAXGW7pBqtFsBIWdevtk36nI_hYzW0uRHBA-WRmNdxjtbcdA2SSzNOM8GTXFXUQRQFfiWFKkTbv1N8e_YAT1goaEUqA7l41HsU2wdfhCA_3tGIMpHD3CAjcar7w/w640-h480/IMG_3584.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-69361081442200553592022-12-06T16:16:00.001-08:002022-12-06T16:24:05.029-08:00Garret “Jacknife” Lee - Telefís - Interview - August 2022<p style="text-align: justify;">Following the death of revered Irish singer-songwriter Cathal Coughlan on May 18th this year comes the release of the second album by Telefís, his groundbreaking collaboration with world-renowned producer Garret “Jacknife” Lee. The pair had completed “a Dó” earlier in 2022, with an album release planned for September. With the approval of Cathal’s family the album will now be available on October 7th. <b>Des Traynor</b> spent an hour-and-a-half on Zoom to Garret in L.A. recently, where the Dubliner now lives and works. From a wide-ranging, generous chat, here are the Telefísed highlights.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>You would have known Cathal when you were living in England in the 90s?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">No, I met Cathal once. I didn't remember it. In The Underworld in Camden in probably 1992. He remembers it. When we were talking before doing the album, I said I haven’t seen you since Ireland. And he said, ‘No, we met.’ We were all taking a lot of drink at the time. So I didn't remember Cathal. Once he said it, I vaguely remembered seeing him. I think he had just played a gig. I went up to him, and we talked for a while.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>But you knew him in Dublin in the ’80s. </b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yeah, we played gigs together.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>You reconnected through Luke Haines?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I was mixing a record for Luke. And he was with Cathal one day. And he said, ‘I’m with a friend of yours.’ So I said, ‘Introduce me.’ And Cathal said, ‘I hear you did a record with Luke, and he likes it, which is a first, ’cos he doesn’t like anything.’ And then I said, ‘Well, should we make a record?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Cathal said somewhere that it was beneficial that you were in different places, because you were out of each other’s way. But was it strange being on opposite sides of the world, bouncing audio files back and forth?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">No, I've worked this way for quite a while, since COVID, with different artists. You know, if an artist is on tour, they can’t come here. And then a lot of times people are doing extra tracks, or need a single edit done or are just recording a single. So I've been working this way anyway. And obviously working with U2, I can’t go over there every other weekend just to record a vocal, so I decided that a good way to be working was just to get my own space. And it means that I can work on a number of things in the one day. If I have an artist here it can get a bit ‘intense’. So for Telefís it was it was easier for both of us because I think Cathal had been working by himself for a long time. And I know from my own history, when you’re doing everything, it’s a lot of pressure and you don’t know when to let things go. So, Cathal doing music, and then the vocal production, the engineering that he had been doing, just took him a long time. So by me sending tracks, I think it was more fun for him. And also, you were coming at it from a different perspective. A lot of Cathal’s work is based on the drama in it. Aside from the lyric, it’s chord based, so we’re motoring along the verse, then we’ll have this chord and then it will force him to write from another perspective, or lyrically, there has been an event, or something. So without those things, he was forced to come at things in a different way. And I think he liked the challenge of it. So I’d send him a track that was mostly finished. And then he would send an idea back, and then I’d be working on that, and I’d send it back to him with his vocals manipulated in some way. Up to that point, a lot of the vocal manipulation had seemed gratuitous or gimmicky to him, when it had been done on other records, but this didn’t feel that way. So I think it excited him. So it was easier for him. And it was easier for me to work on music when somebody’s not here. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"> Like, I was doing a record with Open Mike Eagle, who’s a very respected rapper in LA. He asked me to work on his record. And I tried stuff out on his vocals, that if he was here, he wouldn’t have licenced it, because it can be time consuming. It can seem like a waste of time to try this dumb experiment. Also, he may not have liked it. But in context, it kind of works. And also, the way Cathal wrote his words, it took time. So had we been together, it would have been more musical – but this way, he was just given a set and asked to fill it, and it wouldn’t be a set that he would have designed himself. So there was a kind of thrill to it for him. I didn’t really get involved with words. He says I did – I mean, I would say things, or I’d sing something and then send it back, and I’d have crappy words – that I would have been happy with – but obviously, he’d say ‘I can’t sing that’, and he was right.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Did you know Cathal was seriously ill during the making of the first album, and how did you deal with it subsequently?</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Cathal’s dying was always a part of these songs. Not literally, but his reflections and explorations of where he came from examined from this perspective. After his death we could have waited to release the album, and I accepted that we might have to, but now I just want to celebrate Cathal. I want people to know that he was active and working up to the last few days of his life. We were working on more Telefís - writing and planning. I know that might have been something to just take his mind off his illness, but that was the way he dealt with the situation and I want to honour that. There are many layers to Cathal Coughlan. The mischief, the tenderness, and the profound melancholy. Such a sweet man. It’s all here, and it’s some of his best work. Writing these songs during his illness, knowing what lay ahead of him, shows his commitment to words and ideas. It’s his life.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVY1gWrj5oI5b9aOOP6fhDnXBwUsy2TkqQC-iOTE2ljfiCxAFAc5RdIgqr6KgRXoAzq__bZY5-A_1uDWA5cdw5Sj6QgEwarPrmYuNcnx_xmsH0l1IfECioyt5xMqajllUcPR_nCXf55JGlELGJRJmOJKZFeOnMIilK7qxwOn4x6RHMrYuZ2DBwVoLqiA/s1024/Telefis_-_a_Do.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVY1gWrj5oI5b9aOOP6fhDnXBwUsy2TkqQC-iOTE2ljfiCxAFAc5RdIgqr6KgRXoAzq__bZY5-A_1uDWA5cdw5Sj6QgEwarPrmYuNcnx_xmsH0l1IfECioyt5xMqajllUcPR_nCXf55JGlELGJRJmOJKZFeOnMIilK7qxwOn4x6RHMrYuZ2DBwVoLqiA/w640-h640/Telefis_-_a_Do.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-83293521887851113532022-12-06T15:50:00.000-08:002022-12-06T15:50:20.759-08:00Katie Kim - Interview - August 2022<p>‘Unassuming’ is an adjective that, at first nod, one might be tempted to reach for when trying to describe Katie Kim and her music, as they both tend to partake of tentativeness, reticence and nuance. But just as the musician’s shyness can shield a quietly stubborn commitment to her craft, so too her dreamy work contains relentlessly emotional swells with the power to leave the listener fundamentally changed, as is evident on her new release, <i>Hour of the Ox</i>. As if to exemplify this notion, she tells me that the title comes from a traditional Japanese cursing ritual, <i>Ushi-no-Toki-Mairi</i>, or ‘ox-hour shrine-visit’, so-called because it is conducted during the hours of the Ox (between 1 and 3am – a good time for listening to ethereal music). The practitioner – typically a scorned woman – hammers nails through a straw effigy of the victim impaling it to a sacred tree. The ritual must be repeated for seven consecutive nights, after which the curse supposedly causes the target’s death – but being witnessed in the act nullifies the spell. So don’t go taking anything for granted here.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>So, how are you? </b></p><p><br /></p><p>I'm good. I'm gonna say straight off the bat that this is probably the first in-person interview I’ve had in a good few years. So excuse my social anxiety and word soup – if that happens.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>No problem. I think a lot of people feel like that after the pandemic.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I had to go to this event in Universal a few days ago. I was just meeting someone for the first time, and it was one of the most difficult conversations to keep going. Because it’s like, how do I converse with people? Again.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>How did you get started in music? In Waterford, when you were in school, were you in bands?</b></p><p>I just listened to a lot of music, and my Mum bought me a guitar when I was 14, for my birthday. She taught me a few chords. So I just started. I mean, I’d always written words or poetry or prose or something like that, not poetry really, more prose in little notebooks when I was younger, but never was ever really able to turn it into music until I got my guitar. So then I started writing songs. As soon as I got the guitar, and was able to play like C, D G or something like that.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Was it always by yourself?</b></p><p> </p><p>Yeah, like a friend of mine I think maybe played guitar with me to begin with, and then with another friend we actually sang together. I would play guitar and she would sing harmonies with me. But mostly alone.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>So when you left school, were you just determined to do music? </b></p><p><br /></p><p>I escaped school at 16. Moved out of home. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>That was brave.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>It <i>was</i> brave. Fair play to my mother for letting me do it, but she just insisted that I do my Junior Cert and then she let me move out and get a job and try to start playing.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>So that was it. Your focus was all on music?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, it was, it’s what I was aiming towards doing: playing music for a living. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>And doing it solo?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I didn't know if it would turn into a band or solo. I mean, when I around 18, I met Terry Cullen of Ten Speed Racer, and he asked me to be in a band with him. So, then we were a band for a long time, and began touring and recording And so that took over. But I was still recording my own music in between.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>You moved to New York after the last record, <i>Salt</i>. Why?</b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I always wanted to move there. I loved it. I’d been there many times, and I had my friends there. There was a really great music scene happening when I was over there. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>You intended staying for longer, but were forced back here by the pandemic?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I was living with two girls, and we were kind of in denial for about two months about the virus. We didn’t have any television in the house or anything like that. So we decided to take out an old telly and plug it in, and we were watching CNN for a few hours. And then everybody decided to scatter and go back to their homes.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>You thought you might have been trapped there?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I wouldn't have been able to get any social security over there. So I thought I’d just come back for a while, but it lasted a lot longer than we thought it would. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>So did all this affect the composition of the songs on <i>Hour of the Ox</i>?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>No, because we had a lot of the album done by the time I was in New York. Coming home, we just added some extra flourishes to it. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>That was with John Murphy. </b></p><p><br /></p><p>Spud? Yeah.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>I like his work a lot, the stuff he’s done with Lankum especially – The Velvet Underground meets Planxty. </b></p><p><br /></p><p>He's fantastic. I'm just so happy because we’ve known each other for so long, like we were friends in Waterford, from when we were teenage kids. I'm just really, really happy for him that he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves because he’s worked really hard over the years.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>You were bouncing files back and forth to each other. </b></p><p><br /></p><p>That’s kind of the way we work. I would always write the stuff at home. And I always record the vocals at home as well, like I would never record in the studio with Spud, I would always record them at home, bring them in. But I would send him stuff every now and again, and at some stage in the year, we would decide that we should actually start putting the album together. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>I thought maybe <i>Hour of the Ox</i> is, musically, a bit more accessible than previous albums? Are you conscious of a difference?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I have no idea because the only people that have heard it have been people that are close to me. And I know they’re only going to say nice things mostly. So I have no idea how accessible it is, yet.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>So that wasn’t a conscious decision?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>No, I just thought that it would be nice to try and do something new every time instead of trying to go back to the old tropes all the time. I thought that it would be fun this time to get a live drummer in and play around with synthesisers because I've been listening to a lot of soundtracks over the last few years, and people like Clint Mansell, and a lot of stuff that Invada were putting out, a lot of Geoff Barrow’s soundtracks and things like that. So I was really starting to get into that kind of lush synthesiser kind of sound. I wanted to play around with that.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>So there is a process of continuing evolution going on?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Well, I haven't really played around with those kind of orchestrations together before, we’d had strings, but I thought synthesisers with strings would be a really nice thing to try and meld together. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Can you tell the difference between synthesised strings and live strings?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Well, now I can because we had live strings this time.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>You strike me as quite determined and single-minded. You’re not going to be side-tracked into doing other things. You’re quite focused.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Do you mean into doing mainstream music?</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Not necessarily, just that you’re determinedly sticking at it, doing your own thing.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Look, there’s definitely been times when I’ve just thought, you know, “Fuck this, it’s not going anywhere”, whatever. But that’s not the whole point about doing it. It’s actually quite a big part of what I feel is my identity. And when I have stopped playing or writing or recording for any amount of time, like two years sometimes I’ve gone without doing any of that, it becomes ‘a dark time’ – not a very nice place. Just for me personally – I’m not talking about anybody else’s life – just getting up in the morning and having your breakfast and going to do your job and having to do something else and coming home and going to sleep and repeat the process, it doesn’t really suit my personality very well, I kind of need something else creative happening. So look, even if I make stuff, and I see five plays on it after a year, I’ll still be happy that I made it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Katie Kim - <i>Hour Of The Ox </i>Album Launch is at The Button Factory, Saturday 10 September 2022</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAhX63y4OL78FFa-HB9dw7R45GYkMgQ5ULLJXByg5GZeF5yL7qhur74m8lKKLO3ZaKLyPKNb-iS2xP57dCUPawbrJ25lLXQkFCTpIUDmQApyJ09oUWkkXSNZUAWCJ3b_WkXNH8ckt57IYIUwJMFr-dGHysG6crfmoPXX4W9N1Uq9bfA4Qfm0L7KWorqQ/s4032/IMG_3455.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAhX63y4OL78FFa-HB9dw7R45GYkMgQ5ULLJXByg5GZeF5yL7qhur74m8lKKLO3ZaKLyPKNb-iS2xP57dCUPawbrJ25lLXQkFCTpIUDmQApyJ09oUWkkXSNZUAWCJ3b_WkXNH8ckt57IYIUwJMFr-dGHysG6crfmoPXX4W9N1Uq9bfA4Qfm0L7KWorqQ/w640-h480/IMG_3455.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrkOYWorSixT8TlVh4VK2Sx06MqCbmC_S3GfF--VA5stGKwEwJMKuvKIUeBwoYdo6mKmQPzJO7RrGcnQFljwmNS1LzpbVcAxqYsisN5nBBNVJzL6e-nLC0UuqFX6GV3Lcd6EdNiKQr8s6Rpyxpjsq3gp_TTSoDAIneRN8kUuwdEt39-jvkF4eEaH4Wgg/s1400/Year%20of%20the%20Ox%20-%20Cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrkOYWorSixT8TlVh4VK2Sx06MqCbmC_S3GfF--VA5stGKwEwJMKuvKIUeBwoYdo6mKmQPzJO7RrGcnQFljwmNS1LzpbVcAxqYsisN5nBBNVJzL6e-nLC0UuqFX6GV3Lcd6EdNiKQr8s6Rpyxpjsq3gp_TTSoDAIneRN8kUuwdEt39-jvkF4eEaH4Wgg/w640-h640/Year%20of%20the%20Ox%20-%20Cover.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-78763810880261482162022-12-06T06:20:00.003-08:002022-12-06T16:01:45.482-08:00Doctor Seán Millar - Ruining Everything <p>Seán Millar</p><p>Ruining Everything</p><p>(Gentlemen Records)</p><p>Desmond Traynor</p><p>Seán (aka Doctor) Millar’s sixth solo album finds him in rootsy mode and mood, as perhaps befits a suite of songs concerned with ageing, and the attendant weaving and unravelling of individual and collective destinies. This theme is nowhere more apparent than on album opener ‘Look What She Threw Away’ (featuring Donal Lunny) which visits a woman who is Miss Haversham-like ‘cobwebbed with regret’ for her lost youth, and also on near title track ‘You’re Ruining Everything’, which amid mournful, almost-flamenco-like guitar stylings recalls the singer’s own shame at past indiscretions. ‘Amateur Night’, with its clever, typically amateurish dropped beat in the chorus (imitative form!), focuses on an older guy hanging around with a younger crowd, ‘<i>like an ex-professional on amateur night</i>.’</p><p> Several story-songs feature: ‘Dublin Girl’, ‘Danny McCoy’, ‘Unhappy Woman’; but all is not autumnal gloom, as the pathos of happy memory ‘Communion Money’ and upbeat closing instrumental ‘Flow Sacred Magical’ attest. Liam O Maonlaí and Bill ‘Banjo’ Whelan also contribute, and the whole is deftly enhanced by Les Keye’s live-in-the-studio production.</p><p> As an artist who is on record as stating that his two all-time favourite bands are The Velvet Underground and Planxty, and also someone who was told by Irish industry gatekeepers in the 1990s that people like him should move to Berlin, Doctor Millar has by now acquired for my generation of homegrown music fans the status which Christy Moore holds for the one which precedes us - with a spicy soupçon of Lou Reed and John Cale thrown in. Essential. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5s7uC3qcobdnNzpJhmiVTKzGqQ1XBQWbxdAa3UoYPTNpzIK-AOLkOOvJzrBeGGvyMRsex1BQZQKM6jmYiFa1Qx9WoZMbx_fQyUhDYdX0N_zbcbVhte5MuuBFOJInZKAScjXuokidSF-W1rspquvZTImHgxGWHHjZ4mr5LL7B2D_ggn_n2Sq3Sm3QrnQ/s477/Screenshot%20-%20Sean%20Millar%20-%20Ruining%20Everything.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="271" data-original-width="477" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5s7uC3qcobdnNzpJhmiVTKzGqQ1XBQWbxdAa3UoYPTNpzIK-AOLkOOvJzrBeGGvyMRsex1BQZQKM6jmYiFa1Qx9WoZMbx_fQyUhDYdX0N_zbcbVhte5MuuBFOJInZKAScjXuokidSF-W1rspquvZTImHgxGWHHjZ4mr5LL7B2D_ggn_n2Sq3Sm3QrnQ/w640-h364/Screenshot%20-%20Sean%20Millar%20-%20Ruining%20Everything.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_mw2dQmg8Wrb84nM2aW8OhQM7-8PMZBNeR1M2osUY0J9Eujw9YoZqp0jle4F51j8B6qdCsiqv0UfJ0qbXYdkkk0SCs9U1nKtJYF0jd1k32UIbg6-hXUuveMXhkMjLc0UdMqXRNXePxfjaX3Xpk1jPiGCHnmDBanZFU36zoWDOdhm4raz02EeaXe2bUg/s1052/Ruining-Everything-Packshot.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1052" height="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_mw2dQmg8Wrb84nM2aW8OhQM7-8PMZBNeR1M2osUY0J9Eujw9YoZqp0jle4F51j8B6qdCsiqv0UfJ0qbXYdkkk0SCs9U1nKtJYF0jd1k32UIbg6-hXUuveMXhkMjLc0UdMqXRNXePxfjaX3Xpk1jPiGCHnmDBanZFU36zoWDOdhm4raz02EeaXe2bUg/w640-h584/Ruining-Everything-Packshot.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-14582315015091565212022-12-06T05:55:00.008-08:002022-12-06T16:05:33.560-08:00Caterina Barbieri - National Concert Hall - 1/10/2022<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Desmond Traynor Caterina Barbieri (Haunted Dancehall)/National Concert Hall </div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Readers of a certain vintage (that is, probably only me) may dimly remember a 24-hour non-stop music and film festival called Dark Space, which took place in the then Project Arts Centre on February 16th, 1979 (1000 tickets, £6 each.) Amid appearances from acts from across the water like The Mekons (Throbbing Gristle and Public Image Ltd were billed, but later pulled out, forcing the organisers to reduce admission to £4), and Rudi and Protex from north of the border, it also provided a showcase for emerging local talent, such as The Idiots, The Atrix, The Virgin Prunes, D C Nien, Revolver, and U2 (who, without a record release, were then still playing catch-up in the same aspiring league as contemporaneous hopefuls like Echo and The Bunnymen and Joy Division). Most importantly, it acted as a unifying catalyst for the local scene, where friendships were made, future collaborators were met, and networking (although we didn’t call it that back then) took place.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> Something similar, if decidedly more avant garde, appears to be taking shape courtesy of the National Concert Hall which, with the help of promoters Foggy Notions, threw its hallowed doors open for two late nights at the beginning of October for Haunted Dancehall, a celebration of Electronic/Experimental music including Oneohtrix Point Never, Caterina Barbieri, Blackhaine, Coby Sey, Sunil Sharpe, Roger Doyle, Debit, Elaine Howley, R. Kitt and more. What is interesting about this event is its bringing together artists from the intersecting worlds of electronic, contemporary classical, ambient, hauntology, noise and experimental music, who performed in five different rooms throughout the venue.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> Unfortunately, considerations of space preclude detailed reviews, but one of many highlights for me was Italian composer and musician Caterina Barbieri, who drew on compositions from her latest album <i>Spirit Exit</i>, 2019’s <i>Ecstatic Computation</i>, and 2017’s breakthrough <i>Patterns of Consciousness</i>, to create an eerie yet compelling demonstration of modular synth virtuosity. What is notable is how she <i>performs</i> her set, with graceful arm gestures and the part-android illusion created by a dress with silver filigree on one arm, which suggests a haunting humanity and emotional resonance animating the patterned electronic pulses.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> Haunted Dancehall is a project supporting the work of the Night-Time Economy Taskforce, which encourages national cultural institutions to collaborate with more diverse partners and open up their spaces to new artists. Let’s hope this massive initiative becomes a regular feature in the NCH’s annual calendar. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">First published in <i>The Goo</i>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzPKNXznOIchCTb4zbhfjuTUjUXUIAkHT5vGRs_hR-HWKCpiifujubCmE4uYZlMJS0x4aJeWwKz0IfXakNTHw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCM2NFGWGA06MsdC9e-iCqFks-aHEO5440pe6SyWOG5LgOku4RqYkqMDzIKySev8htsTgXQp478Kd5pComuYBu61TcgVYQ6tBHqAFLbvnX2ijx9dEsgzKc3s2UQcXrJ3mAmioDrwV-TCOz7N-wnGWE-Mij5yDxKjhMLz9iDCG9BPGAd9AVIC8I34nPHw/s3834/IMG_3587.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2606" data-original-width="3834" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCM2NFGWGA06MsdC9e-iCqFks-aHEO5440pe6SyWOG5LgOku4RqYkqMDzIKySev8htsTgXQp478Kd5pComuYBu61TcgVYQ6tBHqAFLbvnX2ijx9dEsgzKc3s2UQcXrJ3mAmioDrwV-TCOz7N-wnGWE-Mij5yDxKjhMLz9iDCG9BPGAd9AVIC8I34nPHw/w640-h436/IMG_3587.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdnAsgWTkAyIcB0SZX6A5gYVuCdtKAksD3tNHQ9r_KU_qSR5-WnU7nSoWOvrF9XzngKXxNnqXO0QajdndgUpHDRCWF3NRw2Z6ao_oo5ArNjRLjHmFZvXFmPer8g4ZLQ2WlVajKaIptowaPu2rY_MDSOGc8GzR9j245-ek28W06IDYAYAtCgwgRR3iLHw/s451/Screenshot%20-%20Caterina%20Barbieri%20-%20NCH.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="451" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdnAsgWTkAyIcB0SZX6A5gYVuCdtKAksD3tNHQ9r_KU_qSR5-WnU7nSoWOvrF9XzngKXxNnqXO0QajdndgUpHDRCWF3NRw2Z6ao_oo5ArNjRLjHmFZvXFmPer8g4ZLQ2WlVajKaIptowaPu2rY_MDSOGc8GzR9j245-ek28W06IDYAYAtCgwgRR3iLHw/w640-h400/Screenshot%20-%20Caterina%20Barbieri%20-%20NCH.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Images (C) Desmond Traynor </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-63614426510978706962022-12-06T04:54:00.005-08:002022-12-06T16:08:19.958-08:00The Felice Brothers - Whelan’s - 9/7/2022<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Desmond Traynor The Felice Brothers/Whelan’s </div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">It’s a Saturday night full house at Whelan’s for the return of The Felice Brothers, in the post-lockdown (or temporary respite) shaking off of the shackles of enforced non-socialising. I first saw the band at the same venue in October 2009, and they’ve been through quite a few changes since then. The current, slimmed down quartet of founding members, the eponymous Ian (guitar, vocals) and James (accordion, keyboards, second vocals), with the new-ish additions of Jesske Hume (bass) and Will Lawrence (drums) are now a settled, road-hardened unit.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> While the majority of the set is drawn from their most recent album, <i>From Dreams To Dust</i> – 'Jazz on the Autobahn', 'To-Do List', ‘All the Way Down’, ‘Valium’, ‘Inferno’, ‘Silverfish’ and ‘We Shall Live Again’ all get an airing – there is also room for firm old fan favourites like ‘Whiskey In My Whiskey’, ‘Love Me Tenderly’, and encores of ‘Frankies’s Gun’ and a requested ‘Rockefeller Druglaw Blues’.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> At times channeling Levon Helm (well, he looks a bit like a younger, frailer version of The Band’s charismatic drummer/singer), Ian commands the stage, while James always seems happily lost in the pleasure of playing this music.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> Ably supported by Stoneybatter new boy Lorkin O'Reilly, a Scotsman transplanted here via the Felices’ own Catskills, this was a rollicking weekend show at its best, equal parts profoundly emotional and great fun. Come back again soon. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Commissioned for <i>The Goo</i>. Photos (C) Desmond Traynor </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgn42gsHuhOG9hHjWfE_elQB8kf8uwEyo9RAx75kK3pFrAwMjBwQY249h37jg0UyHmLhUnOlVbrlcT3j2amXwE9y6YxQwG9cr7jPfH_tqreQMx3d62ZPyvI-a26SVD17olKl8AGLnjblNy33B4JbfTAQfplh7LjEtes9nrIdvVR7_rmy65J0Ak--BmTA/s4032/IMG_3246.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgn42gsHuhOG9hHjWfE_elQB8kf8uwEyo9RAx75kK3pFrAwMjBwQY249h37jg0UyHmLhUnOlVbrlcT3j2amXwE9y6YxQwG9cr7jPfH_tqreQMx3d62ZPyvI-a26SVD17olKl8AGLnjblNy33B4JbfTAQfplh7LjEtes9nrIdvVR7_rmy65J0Ak--BmTA/w640-h480/IMG_3246.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxbHRxautJquyj2acbYRDTBLTb89WVf0Y1lsw3ap3i-fRV4XI_POyIgENRZbISySEk7QVxwr6jWqac_NM0NyjA_bAoYhNFGCp3zvMHIMemWAr43yJtI7YRPGbCBWHZ9pm_b89ZR8XPwFBQnLE2PNie6cQKblfZiUHmLLuoNgPUgZThTn9S8eX8LUNpbA/s4032/IMG_3252.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxbHRxautJquyj2acbYRDTBLTb89WVf0Y1lsw3ap3i-fRV4XI_POyIgENRZbISySEk7QVxwr6jWqac_NM0NyjA_bAoYhNFGCp3zvMHIMemWAr43yJtI7YRPGbCBWHZ9pm_b89ZR8XPwFBQnLE2PNie6cQKblfZiUHmLLuoNgPUgZThTn9S8eX8LUNpbA/w640-h480/IMG_3252.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiHuWcvVRutRzUmmj2jJcIR3Rx2copjEdhK_owOk0by-qMx7SBai3j7mydGnP7NEULbwbjDbOOQzuqkj80jchBQgrRK46OPOqgzD-UMSVZfegh0mCNhKQM_MwN7CKW2cUnk0ly12kxAPHLa-Hiv_ClgKEooKRFsByEO175h0X8zKSVFReYGTBPcEBELA/s4032/IMG_3254.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiHuWcvVRutRzUmmj2jJcIR3Rx2copjEdhK_owOk0by-qMx7SBai3j7mydGnP7NEULbwbjDbOOQzuqkj80jchBQgrRK46OPOqgzD-UMSVZfegh0mCNhKQM_MwN7CKW2cUnk0ly12kxAPHLa-Hiv_ClgKEooKRFsByEO175h0X8zKSVFReYGTBPcEBELA/w480-h640/IMG_3254.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWgeErE1wwqpSVmfxs_lT0UsfTZZCzqpu4_NPDvSqfLLa-kvE8XmeZXP-QhIcMoo4CeSP2C6z4V2PsAetAmK0__cTMQNPHwBAK26VCzCzovlijejDgRWYmgQcZyhWcylOWABHglSb6qqfmQJ2Aabd2veiwVBv6PaS7OEXTWgZwkgb4acbvy49CUnU14w/s5184/IMG_9359.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="5184" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWgeErE1wwqpSVmfxs_lT0UsfTZZCzqpu4_NPDvSqfLLa-kvE8XmeZXP-QhIcMoo4CeSP2C6z4V2PsAetAmK0__cTMQNPHwBAK26VCzCzovlijejDgRWYmgQcZyhWcylOWABHglSb6qqfmQJ2Aabd2veiwVBv6PaS7OEXTWgZwkgb4acbvy49CUnU14w/w640-h426/IMG_9359.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoh7OdO94GFxJ4dtYnEWxc53n8dE5z2RNRZfygU88_iZ_r-R0RctO6r6xPN-xYPDqzfG3g0gzY36ZoiE4VTUSe6Yqx1l7xdhR_PaB7PMs8xoHy41swjkfi39j4n_09vGN8GGr_GV4Vc2R7cmOx2X8j7ejR-lnCHHMX7dhEccE18QhB0kDw9HdTGFYMtw/s4092/IMG_9363.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3449" data-original-width="4092" height="540" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoh7OdO94GFxJ4dtYnEWxc53n8dE5z2RNRZfygU88_iZ_r-R0RctO6r6xPN-xYPDqzfG3g0gzY36ZoiE4VTUSe6Yqx1l7xdhR_PaB7PMs8xoHy41swjkfi39j4n_09vGN8GGr_GV4Vc2R7cmOx2X8j7ejR-lnCHHMX7dhEccE18QhB0kDw9HdTGFYMtw/w640-h540/IMG_9363.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1oYpXztro4h_tN6GwdALxQB8NvJ88ryAsf_58NT9GZxjxEpze7BSUWOpO_C-kWJau9H7fE8AMbRsjey68sZ50PKWhSCHQKBkDbzwFC5O_0hWuSXllkoYh6ArnwtwctdQtzWOtDCXn9GmUGEWJVKDC1estF3gYjtKVNNacK0hpMAQVzLU_fe8TAqmiQ/s3636/IMG_9371.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3448" data-original-width="3636" height="606" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1oYpXztro4h_tN6GwdALxQB8NvJ88ryAsf_58NT9GZxjxEpze7BSUWOpO_C-kWJau9H7fE8AMbRsjey68sZ50PKWhSCHQKBkDbzwFC5O_0hWuSXllkoYh6ArnwtwctdQtzWOtDCXn9GmUGEWJVKDC1estF3gYjtKVNNacK0hpMAQVzLU_fe8TAqmiQ/w640-h606/IMG_9371.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-35370102546082349362022-11-25T17:28:00.005-08:002022-11-25T18:02:50.705-08:00Wilko Johnson R.I.P.<p>As a further tribute to the late great Wilko Johnson, here's a review of the Dr. Feelgood boxset <i>All Through The City</i>, which I wrote in 2012, for the now-defunct website, State.ie.</p><p>Dr. Feelgood</p><p><i>All Through The City (with Wilko 1974-1977)</i></p><p>(EMI)</p><p>Desmond Traynor</p><p>4/5</p><p>As the currently showing BBC 4 documentary series <i>Punk Britannia</i> persuasively hypothesises, the revolution of 1977 was the bastard offspring of the miscegenatious union of r’n’b and glam, when the pub rock and art college scenes met. From the former came most of the music, from the latter most of the look and attitude. Always somewhat Britcentric, the Beep elides the fact that as early as 1973 crazy Yanks like the New York Dolls were wearing women’s clothes while covering Sonny Boy Williamson and Bo Diddley songs. But then again, both Joe Strummer and Ian Dury attended art colleges and played in pub rock bands prior to New Wave apotheosis.</p><p> Around the same time the Dolls were first trying on their high-heeled platform boots, Canvey Island’s Dr. Feelgood were tearing up the London pub scene with incendiary live shows which many seasoned gig goers were saying they hadn’t seen the likes of since the early days of The Who or The Stones. While scruffy off-the-peg suits were favoured as stage wear over silk or satin dresses, the same musical spirit animated them as that of their transatlantic tranny contemporaries. A brief band interview for Finnish television, at the end of the collection of live performances included in this marvelous new 3 CD + 1 DVD boxset of the band’s first four albums, plus unreleased demos, alternative versions, out-takes and live tracks, features the taciturn rhythm section of drummer John ‘The Big Figure’ Martin and bassist John B. Sparks (both of whom looked like burly bouncers you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley), the grimly polite singer Lee Brilleaux, and cocky young guitarist Wilko Johnson, who helpfully explains the r’n’b ‘revival’ thus: ‘It’s the best music. People have had six years of synthesisers and songs about hobbits. That’s for girls. People want to have a good time.’ As someone with a degree in Medieval English from Newcastle University, which he shrewdly kept quiet about, as well as considerable musical knowledge and ability, perhaps he was better placed to diagnose the deleterious influence of Tolkien on popular music than many would have given him credit for at the time. </p><p> They had their precursors, and their peers (Eggs Over Easy, Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwarz, The Kursaal Flyers, Strummer’s 101ers, Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads – even early Boomtown Rats), but they were the best. This was largely, in my opinion, down to Wilko’s wildly idiosyncratic guitar playing, whose self-confessed primary influence was Mick Green of The Pirates. Yet, although he was operating in a genre which thrives on notions of ‘passion’ and ‘feeling’, Wilko played like a machine, producing a weird r’n’b/motorik hybrid. Like forebears Otis Rush and Albert King, and the closer-to-home Jeff Beck, he eschewed the plectrum, his right hand a freestyle of fingers’n’thumb, conjuring choppy insistent rhythms and angular staccato lead lines, sometimes seemingly simultaneously. There’s less that separates the Feelgoods from Neu than you might think. The Man Machine, indeed. One shouldn’t, of course, overlook the solidness of the rhythm section itself in this process. Razor-sharp time-keeping was still the preserve of human beings in those days. Add to that the pent-up anger and frustration of Brilleaux, a front man who looked like he might hit you as soon as sing to you, which made him the scariest stage presence yet encountered in British live music, and who remained so until a sneering Johnny Rotten swaggered into the spotlight to unbeknowingly inherit his mantle, and the package was complete.</p><p> What’s in the box? CD 1 has <i>Down By The Jetty</i> and <i>Malpractice</i>, both from 1975, the former the excellent re-master of the original mono mix released as a deluxe reissue in 2006 (thankfully still in mono), the latter, like the two albums on the succeeding CD, a new 2012 digital remaster. CD 2 contains the peak and the valley, 1976’s <i>Stupidity</i> and 1977’s <i>Sneakin’ Suspicion</i>. Produced, like the first two, by Vic Maile, who’d engineered The Who’s <i>Live At Leeds</i>, <i>Stupidity</i> is their masterpiece, one of the great live rock albums, made by a band who were always most at home in the live context. The rot set in with <i>Sneakin’ Suspicion</i>. Although signed to United Artists in Britain, they wound up on CBS in America, who felt their substantial promotional investment justified foisting their own choice of producer, studio veteran Bert De Coteaux, on the project. This resulted in an altogether too slick sheen to the sound, unsympathetic to a raw band like the Feelgoods. </p><p> There had been friction between Johnson and Brilleaux anyway. Wilko liked speed, and was partial to acid; the other three were serious drinkers (not that these recreational pursuits are necessarily mutually exclusive, but it proved so in this case). Jealously about ‘residuals’ may have also caused disputes, with Wilko doing the lion’s share of the songwriting. Whatever way you slice it, Johnson played on the album but never toured it, walking out of the sessions and subsequently forming the Solid Senders. As his replacement, the others drafted in John ‘Gypie’ Mayo, a perfectly adequate if rather more conventional r’n’b guitarist, who on later albums only served to illustrate how special Wilko had made Dr. Feelgood. Interestingly, some of the odds’n’sods on CD 3 are demos for Sneakin’ Suspicion, and tracks that were left off it, which show what a good album it could have been if the band had been left to its own devices. The DVD pulls together a variety of TV appearances (dig those cruel V-neck jumpers on <i>The Geordie Scene</i>’s audience) and live sets from shows at the Southend Kursaal (some of which wound up on <i>Stupidity</i>) and the Kuusrock festival in Finland. The package also includes a recent interview with Johnson, some natty comic strips and pics, plus a revelatory essay about their formative years, ‘The Breeding of Dr. Feelgood’, by poet Hugo Williams. (Another renowned poet, Tony Harrison, was apparently a huge mentor to Wilko at Newcastle, and later a close friend.)</p><p> I saw them once, at the National Stadium in 1976 (don’t worry, I hadn’t even done my Inter Cert, as it was then known, at that stage) unfortunately just after Wilko had left. I saw the Solid Senders some years later, and have seen Wilco several times since. He played Whelan’s not so long ago. Good shows all, but together they must have been somethin’ else.</p><p> The New York Dolls may have beaten their British counterparts to the punch by several years as progenitors of punk, but in this boxset you have a valuable document of one of the antecedents of British New Wave, the other strand of which was being provided by T Rex <i>et al</i>. The Feelgoods and Roxy Music? It’s a strange fusion, but that’s one of the great things about popular music: once you get beyond the fashion, it’s all there for you to choose your own particular pick’n’mix.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6ZGN7iv7kthrHLgX56m_UAPvvnERsPqG0CoimhjJFPe8Zi3P7nl1GV-S8K9oMghWYNgAvAnrxQtrgpM329lOzuRk1BNzO_N2JZT6MIBh7yhP8n0UJejKRZqB53Wt7t9ACYkY9k6HqTWWmRgRNJVS79ALpR3m7hBYfTbm9idLd8AMGQM6MrJo8L6Vl0g/s500/All%20Through%20The%20City.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6ZGN7iv7kthrHLgX56m_UAPvvnERsPqG0CoimhjJFPe8Zi3P7nl1GV-S8K9oMghWYNgAvAnrxQtrgpM329lOzuRk1BNzO_N2JZT6MIBh7yhP8n0UJejKRZqB53Wt7t9ACYkY9k6HqTWWmRgRNJVS79ALpR3m7hBYfTbm9idLd8AMGQM6MrJo8L6Vl0g/s16000/All%20Through%20The%20City.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-26460361139015442242022-05-29T15:25:00.001-07:002022-05-29T15:25:17.077-07:00Cathal Coughlan R.I.P.<p>Of a sudden, I recall that I did a phone interview with the great Cathal Coughlan in 2013, for the now defunct website State.ie, about his North Sea Scrolls project with Luke Haines and Andrew Mueller. Here be the text.</p><p><br /></p><p>Cathal Coughlan / North Sea Scrolls</p><p>What do you get when put Cathal Coughlan, of Microdisney, Fatima Mansions and solo fame, Luke Haines, formerly of Auteurs renown, and music journalist and travel writer Andrew Mueller together in one room? Why, three men in colonial hats and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum jungle suits, singing songs about an alternative history of Britain and Ireland. These gents are bringing their demented North Sea Scrolls show, which started life at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011 and was subsequently released as an album last year, to the National Concert Hall on November 2nd. Cathal Coughlan recently marked my cards as to what to expect, and we chewed over some other old stuff as well.</p><p> Just to fill the unsuspecting among you in, the North Sea Scrolls are ancient documents, long thought forever lost, which were presented to Coughlan and Haines by the actor Tony Allen, who found them in a bin outside Waitrose. They contain a proxy account of the recent past in these isles, demonstrating that pretty much everything you know and have ever learned about them is at best inaccurate, but more likely just downright wrong. </p><p> Who’d have thought, for example, that far from suffering 800 years of oppression under the English yoke, in reality the Irish invaded and conquered Britain in 1948, later dividing it into just two counties, Northshire and Southshire? Or that Oswald Mosley led two successive British governments in the 1960s, with Joe Meek as his Minister of Culture, while Enoch Powell was Poet Laureate? (Apropos, I’m surprised they didn’t shoehorn Eric Clapton’s once professed admiration for Powell, elucidated drunkenly from a Birmingham stage in 1974, in there somewhere) Or that the failed kidnapper of Princess Anne, Ian Ball, made a Robert Johnson-at-the-crossroads-like pact with the Devil – a gent who appears in a cloud of sulphurous cigar smoke, with a rattle of gold chains, wearing a shell suit – who ‘fixed it’ for the Broadmoor Psychiatric Prison resident to swap places with his guitar-wielding namesake in the ‘bewilderingly successful’ indie rock band, Gomez. (Considering this twist, it’s odd the boys didn’t conjure some similar case of mistaken identity between above-mention thespian Tony Allen, and the identically named great Afrobeat drummer.) </p><p> Another song, Coughlan's 'Mr Cynthia', puts the record straight on how Joe Meek put a radicalized John Lennon under house arrest in the mid-’60s, to curb the Mop Top’s influencing the country’s impressionable young folk toward dissent. In his absence from the public eye, Lennon’s then wife Cynthia immerged from the shadows into a proto-Thatcherite champion of ‘blank common sense.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jim Corr figures along the way too, persuading the retired IRA to dig up much of South Armagh because he believes that Shergar, the Twin Towers and many other things are buried there.</p><p> The eagle-eyed among you will doubtless have spotted that, unlike how their illustrious predecessors the Dead Sea Scrolls act as an adjunct to official Christianity, the flaw with the North Sea Scrolls is that most of the events recounted therein would still be within living memory. Consequently, feeling that there is little point in quizzing Cathal as to the veracity of these claims, I inquire instead as to how he views the revelations of the scrolls in relation to the rest of his fine body of work. C’mon, isn’t it all just a humorous diversion, a Flann O’Brienesque jeu d’esprit?</p><p> “It’s not just a bit of fun,” Cathal responds. “I like to think it’s visionary, but not very serious. It’s also not always necessarily me speaking with my own voice. I’m so distant from Ireland now, that my view of Ireland can be inaccurate anyway. But in the past I might have come over as too po-faced sometimes, so it’s nice to do something more tongue-in-cheek.”</p><p> Which does cast into question if there’s any sense on the part of the writers, on the one hand, directing their considerable ire at soft targets like Gomez or Chris Evans (who gets burned at the stake), or in the audience, on the other hand, getting hot under the collar about a universe where Gomez and Chris Evans come off worse than Mosley and Powell. We all have our pet hates – don’t get me started on The Killers – but there again, would I bother writing a song slagging them off? Are the fairly innocuous actually more reprehensible than the outright awful? And what happens when the former are lampooned more than the latter? </p><p> Of course, Cathal is not entirely responsible for this state of affairs, as he and Luke Haines divide the songwriting credits, and vocals, between them. So, how did he meet Luke Haines? How did he work with him? Do they have an affinity?</p><p> “Well, Luke has most of the punch lines. I’m a kind of foil to him. He supplied most of the English stuff, and I took care of the Irish angle. The songs were written over a nine month period, and it was nice to meet up every so often and just hatch songs. I’d bring what I had, he’d bring what he had. I’ve known him for seven or eight years. I’m certainly a fan of Luke’s, you’d have to ask Luke if he’s a fan of mine.”</p><p> They are both lyricists – why do they need Andrew Mueller’s input?</p><p> “He provides the narration, and some historical context. He brings a certain kind of Australian irreverence. He’s also an editor of sorts.”</p><p> In his younger days across the water, Cathal was known for his antipathy towards the raggle taggle brigade back home. In the nascent days of Fatima Mansions in the early ’90s, he was heard to ask and answer from a London stage, “Am I the only person here with an Irish passport who doesn’t think Van Morrison is a god-like genius? Transatlantic fraud.” This was in the wake of the huge success of the Morrison/Chieftains collaboration, <i>Irish Heartbeat</i>. Might his Van ‘Grumpy’ Morrison comments be seen as kicking against perceived regression after the advances of the punk wars had dissipated? Or against perceived misrepresentation of Ireland on the international stage?</p><p> “I hated that album, I hated it more than normal because I even paid for it with my own money. But I have to say I think <i>Astral Weeks</i> is a great album, particularly when you think how young he was when he did it. Looking back now, I think people find all kinds of reasons for why they don’t like something - the politics, the ideology, whatever - but there’s usually a more fundamental reason: they just don’t like listening to it.</p><p> “It’s funny, when I started listening to English folk music, and discovered it was much more acerbic than Irish folk music, which is much more lush. But I’ve always loved Christy Moore, one of my favourite singers.”</p><p> Would he ever come back to Ireland, or is he firmly ensconced in London now?</p><p> “I’m over four or five times a year. But materially, there’s no way someone of my resources could just walk back into it now. I was skint then back them, I’m not that much better off now.”</p><p> But London’s expensive.</p><p> “But I have a support system here. I know where to go, where things are cheaper.”</p><p> Any regrets about how he handled his earlier career? Would it have helped if he’d been less confrontational?</p><p> “A lot of the problems to do with Microdisney stemmed from insecurity, anxiety. By the time we got to the final album it didn’t seem to matter what we did, because the audience was well and truly alienated anyway.”</p><p> And his solo career?</p><p> “What I learned from making Black River Falls was ‘don’t waste time on little things’. I brought in people to get help with the strings on that, and it dictated the rest of the album.”</p><p> Has he anything in the pipeline now?</p><p> “If I do something, it’s going to be very different from what I’ve been doing recently, or even in the middle term. It won’t have a strong rhythm section, and will feature more string arrangements.”</p><p> Will he be recording?</p><p> “I’ve come to think that making a record is of questionable use, either as a means to playing in public, or for documentation. It doesn’t get you more gigs, at least not if you’ve being doing it as long as me. But we’ll see.”</p><p> Back to more immediate concerns, North Sea Scrolls has been recorded, but has divided opinion, with reviews ranging from ‘deeply engrossing and rings resoundingly with cultural and historical truth’ to ‘a discombulating listen, but also a daft, enjoyable one’ to ‘an in-joke gone horribly wrong.’ With a public interview before the show itself, you can get to explore how seriously or otherwise we should take these phantasmagorical tales, and make up your own mind this Saturday.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk4dLcW_y-0nvc9QTVEOG3Htr6ZFinWPhF91H1XnSSFM3Sj8ERgRTHx0f15NWB9EhC_zIZI6lgH3Avs-sEZUwU8-JLWplzQzRgDQcqhvz55kM-htWm-FYLqie17aXxH8mf1m_JVfsxChCZt2BA1gFtTVaMIRW5EAkUa-cQD_6_PKgfSURwXSO-wsn4ZQ/s640/North%20Sea%20Scrolls.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk4dLcW_y-0nvc9QTVEOG3Htr6ZFinWPhF91H1XnSSFM3Sj8ERgRTHx0f15NWB9EhC_zIZI6lgH3Avs-sEZUwU8-JLWplzQzRgDQcqhvz55kM-htWm-FYLqie17aXxH8mf1m_JVfsxChCZt2BA1gFtTVaMIRW5EAkUa-cQD_6_PKgfSURwXSO-wsn4ZQ/w640-h640/North%20Sea%20Scrolls.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-15642684796264150212022-01-20T08:49:00.003-08:002022-01-20T17:29:13.138-08:00Manchester City's Dominance<p>I composed the letter below in response to Ken Early's disparaging article about Manchester City (<i>The Irish Times</i>, 20/01/2022), and sent it to Letters to the Editor. Needless to say, it wasn't published, so I present it here.</p><p><a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/english-soccer/ken-early-manchester-city-s-dominance-a-reminder-the-rich-always-get-their-way-1.4778060">https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/english-soccer/ken-early-manchester-city-s-dominance-a-reminder-the-rich-always-get-their-way-1.4778060</a><br /></p><p>Sir,</p><p>As a lifelong Manchester City supporter, I feel it is incumbent on me to react to the clear biases on show in Ken Early's article, 'Manchester City’s dominance a reminder the rich always get their way' (Monday, January 17th, 2022). </p><p>His assertion that ‘Guardiola’s style lacks excitement that club’s fans – and players – seek’ is utterly risible, and certainly does not apply to Manchester City fans, much less discerning neutrals. It is equalled only by this ludicrous observation: ‘Look at the joy Manchester United have given the world these last several years. Lurching from crisis to crisis, they continue to be more watchable than City’s vastly superior team.’ The truth is that Manchester United have for some time been a laughing stock. While there may be considerable schadenfreude to be derived by fans of other clubs in watching United’s steady decline into a comedic soap opera, they are surely not heading to Old Trafford to witness object lessons in how The Beautiful Game should be played. That takes place in East Manchester.</p><p>It really is unconscionable that so-called football writers will not keep abreast of the tactical evolution of the game. Early contends that ‘Most of us don’t watch football for technical quality or tactical intrigue’ – an appalling admission from a supposed pundit. His naïve nostalgia for ‘the long-range screamer – arguably the most thrilling sight in football’ is, as he well knows from the statistical analyses he refers to, misplaced. In any case, for an example of the occasional judicious deployment of same, I would direct him to Vincent Kompany’s stunner v Leicester (May 6, 2019), which kept Liverpool in second place and helped secure City’s defence of the title that season. Indeed, one need go no further back than last Saturday’s 1 – 0 defeat of Chelsea, and point to Kevin De Bruyne’s match-winning strike from outside the penalty area, for evidence that the ball is not always ‘walked into the net’. (Cf. also: Rodri v Everton 19/11/2022; and Cancelo v Newcastle 20/12/2022.) Early also attempts to bolster his bizarre argument that City's playing style is boring by comparing a City match which he considers to have been 'dull and featureless' with another City match which he considers to have been exciting. Boring and exciting at the same time? He cannot have it both ways. As for Early’s disingenuous implication that City players are wanting to leave the club because they are supposedly so bored of the system, the reasons are more likely to hinge on personal issues (e.g. homesickness) or the brinkmanship involved in contractual negotiations, rather than discontent with playing style (and winning trophies). </p><p>Of course, Early inevitably arrives at the usual source of carping for opposition fans: the money. The fact is that Manchester United’s transfer spend has exceeded that of City’s over the past five years – and look at the shambles they are. Money does not guarantee success, unless it is invested wisely, and the players it attracts are developed to their full potential. As for the accusations of ‘sportswashing’ and human rights abuses in UAE, I confess I fail to see how this is more reprehensible than the naked greed of the profit motive which drives the owners of other high-profile clubs, and which acts only as an advertisement for the ideology of neo-liberalism (to the detriment of those clubs). Great art has always depended on patronage. The Medici and Borgia families, including the Popes they produced, were not famed for having ‘clean hands’, but without them there would have been no Italian Renaissance.</p><p>Put simply: the Irish media are dictated to by those who engage with it, and in this country the majority of soccer fans who follow the English Premiership are supporters of either Manchester United or Liverpool. Through their bitter fandom of Manchester City’s nearest ‘rivals’, expressed via prejudiced, envious pot-shots, Early and his ilk provide clickbait catnip for these hordes, at the expense of the offence caused to longstanding City fans. To criticise City’s current dominance in the Premiership, formerly held by the clubs they espouse, is to display scant knowledge of how La Liga or the Bundesliga operate. Early’s Parthian shot is: ‘there is one thing City are good at making you feel, and that is the helplessness that comes from knowing that you live in a world where the richest will always get their way.’ The richest do not always get their way; but City’s deserved contemporary dominance makes me and other City fans feel great. </p><p>Yours,</p><p>Desmond Traynor</p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-22601925399524382592021-12-18T05:15:00.002-08:002021-12-18T05:16:42.058-08:00Albums of the Year 2021<p><br /></p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders/The London Symphony Orchestra – Promises</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Can – Live In Stuttgart 1975</p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For Those I Love – For Those I Love</p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>black midi – Cavalcade</p><p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mogwai – As The Love Continues</p><p>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Low – Hey What</p><p>7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sarah Davachi – Antiphonals </p><p>8.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Arooj Aftab – Vulture Prince</p><p>9.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Various Artists – Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980–1988</p><p>10.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Joan As Police Woman, Tony Allen, Dave Okumu – The Solution is Restless</p><p>11.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz</p><p>12.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Lou Reed – Live At Alice Tully Hall (January 27, 1973 - 2nd Show)</p><p>13.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Jane Weaver – Flock </p><p>14.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>John Murry – The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes</p><p>15.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Cathal Coughlan – Song of Co Aklan</p><p>16.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy </p><p>17.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Butterfly 3000 </p><p>18.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>St. Vincent – Daddy’s Home </p><p>19.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ryley Walker – Course In Fable</p><p>20.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Valerie June – The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers </p><p>Bubbling Under:</p><p>Iceage – Seek Shelter; Deafheaven – Infinite Granite; Black Country, New Road – For The First Time; My Morning Jacket – My Morning Jacket; Rhiannon Giddens (with Francesco Turrisi) – They’re Calling Me Home; Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raise The Roof; The Weather Station – Ignorance </p><p>Reissues I’ve enjoyed, which are not merely remasterings of the old stuff, but rather feature lots of new material (which means they are mostly live, or the originals were never properly released in the first place), include: Bob Dylan – Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series, Volume 16 (1980-1985); The Knocking Shop – Half Orphan; John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle; and Alice Coltrane – Kirtan: Turiya Sings. </p><p>Music Book of the Year: Harry Sword – Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion – A virtual Bible, from which I’ve discovered so much good stuff I’d never heard of previously. </p><div><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-4312903901984015052021-11-13T13:23:00.000-08:002021-11-13T13:23:04.175-08:00Autobibliography by Rob Doyle <p>Autobibliography</p><p>By Rob Doyle</p><p>(Swift Press, £12.99 h/b)</p><p>Regular readers of these book pages will recall that throughout 2019 (aka ‘the before times’) Rob Doyle contributed a weekly column under the tag line ‘Old Favourites – A year of Rob Doyle’s best-loved books’, in which the acclaimed author of <i>Here Are The Young Men</i>, <i>This is The Ritual</i> and <i>Threshold</i> reread and wrote about some of the books which had meant most to him as formative influences. Well, here are all 52 entries collected under one roof, with added interpolated ‘memories and reflections on books, reading and writing, and the life through which they’ve flowed’ punctuating each entry, the latter born partly out of frustration with the original 340-word limit.</p><p>The result is a bracing smorgasbord of literary delights and oversharing, ranging from the oldest, first century B.C. Buddhist text <i>Dhammapada</i> (#33), to the most recently written, Emmanuel Carrère’s ‘post-fictional’ <i>The Adversary</i> (#35), by way of <i>The Tibetan Book of the Dead</i> (#11) and J.G. Ballard’s <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i> (#47).</p><p>Not all of the following additions relate directly to the preceding text, or only tangentially so: Susan Sontag’s <i>Against Interpretation</i> (#18) is followed by a summary of the London addresses at which Doyle has resided. Regarding his reading habits, Doyle’s preference is for ‘non-fiction, including criticism, philosophy, aphorisms, history and books about what the internet is doing to me...autobiographical writing of all sorts…novels that don’t act like novels’, explaining that ‘If all that’s going on is yarn-spinning, with narrative proffered as an end in itself, I’ll sit there thinking, ‘What’s the point of this?’ Incidents, setting, character – these are well and good, but if there are no ideas charging through them I get restless.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, Borges (#49) is nominated as ‘his century’s greatest writer.’</p><p>If this all sounds a little too heavy, be aware that humour is not least among the components in Doyle’s armoury. There is a riff on Schopenhauer’s (#5) ‘A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short’; a couple of forays into self-criticism where he finds himself on ‘the wrong side of history’; a skewering of the culture of literary prizes; a hilarious ahistorical interview between RD and La Rochefoucauld (#45); and an extended analogy between the Brazilian 1970 World Cup team and Latin American literature, in terms of ‘outrageous and ingenious embellishment.’</p><p>Because of his aesthetic judgements, and general worldview, Doyle is certainly the younger Irish male writer (younger than me, that is) with whom I feel most affinity. As he puts it in his after-the-fact rumination on Roberto Bolaño’s <i>Antwerp</i> (#2), in answer to the question ‘What is it we’re reading for?’: ‘…what I’m primarily in it for is friendship’, a fair proportion of which consists of like-mindedness, or as they say nowadays, empathy. </p><p>First published in <i>The Irish Times</i>, 6/11/2021</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu_zKUuuojXfFpbTyxAxT3HAbaLjEAoSq29Wqjkv6v4BXKdRENjKLgUn1A-q7loZuKYFJLA75bgUJsoTl7iPbOkX1JmK8tZt24QcerG4TR3LQBAvAV2-FOJZWOAxCJoQn1RMyscxDcFknU/s200/content.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="128" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu_zKUuuojXfFpbTyxAxT3HAbaLjEAoSq29Wqjkv6v4BXKdRENjKLgUn1A-q7loZuKYFJLA75bgUJsoTl7iPbOkX1JmK8tZt24QcerG4TR3LQBAvAV2-FOJZWOAxCJoQn1RMyscxDcFknU/w410-h640/content.jpeg" width="410" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-32520248320884423872021-06-18T09:31:00.001-07:002021-06-18T09:32:12.597-07:00The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin<p><i>The Night Always Comes</i></p><p>By Willy Vlautin</p><p>(Faber & Faber, £12.99stg original paperback)</p><p>Willy Vlautin’s protagonists have a harder time than most. Whether it’s the Flanagan brothers on the run in his 2006 debut <i>The Motel Life</i>, the vulnerable and abused Allison Johnson striking out in an attempt to make a new life for herself in 2008’s <i>Northline</i>, the always hungry 15-year-old orphan Charley Thompson’s struggle to escape his fate in 2010’s <i>Lean On Pete</i>, disabled Iraq war veteran Leroy Kervin and the overworked nurse and janitor at his group home, Pauline Hawkins and Freddie McCall, in 2014’s <i>The Free</i>, or lonely ranch hand-cum-aspirant boxer Horace Hopper in 2018’s <i>Don’t Skip Out On Me</i>, the world wasn’t exactly made for these marginalised characters.</p><p> Now we have Lynette, a pastry chef/bartender/escort/part-time Community College accountancy student from Portland, Oregon, who is cast from a similarly self-sabotaging mould, although it can easily be argued that it is a mercilessly acquisitive societal system which keeps all of them in an endless cycle of hand-to-mouth alienation as much as it is the consequence of personal misfortune or individual psychology. </p><p> Subjectively, 30-year-old Lynette has been saddled with: Doreen, her tired, defeated mother; a long departed, building contractor, alcoholic father who she only ever sees when he comes to cadge free drinks from her at the bar; and Kenny, her developmentally challenged brother, two years her senior, for whom she is the chief caregiver. She also has a history of abuse and trauma at the hands of Doreen’s former boyfriend, Randy, which caused her to run away from home when she was sixteen – the dark memories of which manifested even in the midst of happiness with her beautiful ex-boyfriend Jack Burns. Now Doreen has reneged on a plan for them to get a mortgage to buy the house they rent (by buying an expensive car), which amid rising astronomical rents and lack of credit, Lynette sees as their last chance to stay in the city before their landlord sells. So she embarks on a nighttown odyssey, featuring various lowlifes, in order to call in some longstanding debts, which imbues the novel with the noirish urgency of a page-turning thriller.</p><p> We may be suffering a housing crisis in this country, but the ideological disease of greed which sponsors it – where people no longer speak of ‘my house’, let alone ‘my home’, but instead ‘my property’, and the unattainability of home ownership and the rise in homelessness which follow the accumulation of ‘rental properties’ (Great Oxymorons of Our Time: Fair Rent), which are direct consequences of said property being promoted as a legitimate form of investment rather than as a roof over your head – is imported from that beacon of neo-liberal capitalism, the U.S.A.. Portland, like Dublin, due to incessant gentrification, is pushing its working class out to new estates in peripheral towns they’d never previously been to, or in all likelihood even heard of, resulting ultimately in the evisceration of a city. When Lynette says, “The whole city is starting to haunt me. All the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I’m nothing, that I’m nobody”, we can relate, as we walk by yet another new hotel or student accommodation, juxtaposed with tent dwellers along the canals, in our own capital.</p><p> Frank Kermode wrote of one of Vlautin’s avowed influences, Raymond Carver, ‘…(his) fiction is so spare in manner that it takes time before one realises how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch.’ It has become redundant to say that Vlautin is more well-known as a singer/songwriter, formerly with that alt. country band Richmond Fontaine and now with exceptional country soul outfit The Delines, as his reputation as a novelist has now exceeded that achieved in his initial creative outlet. But he brings the same eye for detail and knack for the telling phrase already displayed in his song lyrics to his prose fiction, where one seemingly innocuous line can reveal so much. That said, Doreen’s extended monologues, particularly the concluding one with its wholesale rubbishing of the myth of the American Dream (“Isn’t that the American dream? Fuck over whoever is in your way and get what you want”), ranks among the most direct, even didactic, writing Vlautin has ever produced. </p><p> His staked-out territory remains the hardscrabble lives of America’s underclass (or squeezed middles), those lost or lonely or rootlessly marginalized blue-collar folks whom college-educated, upper middle-class Americans typically dismiss as ‘losers’ or ‘white trash’, as he continues to mine the terse, laconic, Hemingwayesque tradition in American letters, a seam whose subsequent practitioners include Carver, Denis Johnson and Nelson Algren.</p><p> A late revelation from sympathetic co-worker Shirley about Doreen’s character reinforces our intuition that Lynette is better off cutting loose from her family and trying to make a life for herself, however painful it is for her to leave Kenny behind, even temporarily. It is not for nothing that Willy always signs his books ‘Good luck always’, in pointedly unironic contrast to that ominous admonition ‘May the odds be ever in your favor’. The odds are never in his characters’ favour (just as they never favour participants in <i>The Hunger Games</i>), but as she drives eastward out of town on the interstate at the conclusion of this harrowing tale, we are allowed to glimpse the hope that Lynette’s journey to the end of the night might just have led to a new dawn for her.</p><p><br /></p><p>First published in <i>The Irish Times</i>, 12/06/2021.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfz9cotdd_EpWvK9fvfHsk9JeLPgvexm6Pq4d2iOOHNS45g2pJAzDsV4nFV6InBPJU1KrPL5luDcusDkqYi4yw1lBTdC8Kkx54fZbBdmN2JLqLgw2ZCXbfa9x3Ay3ZnswUew0erZWn0HmQ/s2048/The+Night+Always+Comes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1278" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfz9cotdd_EpWvK9fvfHsk9JeLPgvexm6Pq4d2iOOHNS45g2pJAzDsV4nFV6InBPJU1KrPL5luDcusDkqYi4yw1lBTdC8Kkx54fZbBdmN2JLqLgw2ZCXbfa9x3Ay3ZnswUew0erZWn0HmQ/w400-h640/The+Night+Always+Comes.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-72315238262805445182021-05-13T11:31:00.003-07:002021-09-03T10:07:53.060-07:00Seamus Deane R.I.P. <p style="text-align: justify;">At U.C.D. in the '80s, I would learn more from him in 50 minutes than from everyone else in a year. His brilliant extemporary lectures were not rambling, but the verbal equivalent of improvisatory jazz, variations on a stated theme, weaving many strands until they arrived back where they started from in the finale, a couple of minutes before the tolling of the bell. But they could have gone on indefinitely. His books, equally, were something you broke your teeth on - you felt like more of a grown up after reading <i>Celtic Revivals</i> or <i>A Short History of Irish Literature</i>. Also, his novel <i>Reading In The Dark</i> is great, perhaps all the more so considering it is his only one. I admired him.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">My favourite Seamus Deane story. Seamus strides into a lecture theatre and begins a disquisition on <i>Middlemarch</i> by George Eliot. After about ten minutes a student in the front row holds up a foolscap page with the letters T.S. written on it, in reference to the noted Missourian modernist. Realising his mistake, but not missing a beat, the Prof continues, “Which brings me to the influence of the novels of George Eliot on the poetry of T.S. Eliot.’</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I find that I wrote a short review of <i>Reading In The Dark</i> on its publication in 1996, for <i>Image</i> magazine. Seamus' quip when I met him subsequently, after a reading: "You're marked for life."</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Reading In The Dark</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">By Seamus Deane</p><p style="text-align: justify;">(Jonathan Cape)</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Firstly, an interest must be declared. I am a former student of Seamus Deane’s, from when he was Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin. He has since moved on to the University of Notre Dame. This novel has been in gestation for almost as long as I have been aware of its author, and an extract appeared in <i>Granta</i> magazine as far back as 1986. Literary gossip has it that familial objections to certain skeletons in the cupboard revealed in this highly autobiographical work were responsible for the prolonged delay. So was it worth the wait? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> This is a <i>Bildungsroman</i>, a rites of passage novel which, in common with other recent Irish books in the same genre, Roddy Doyle’s <i>Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha</i> and Lia Mills’ <i>Another Alice</i>, follows the central character through their formative childhood and adolescent years. But <i>Reading In The Dark</i> goes further, in being the first Irish novel since Joyce’s <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> to give us a glimpse into the childhood of a genius.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> This is a surprisingly accessible read, considering it comes from someone whose critical work is often very prolix. The sectarian strife of Derry in the ‘40s and ‘50s is depicted well, but there is also a mythic quality present, provided by the nearby Sun-fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"> If one accepts William James’ distinction between the tough-minded and the tender-minded, Deane is very definitely tough, as is demonstrated by the scene in which the hero confronts his father by uprooting and destroying the roses in the backgarden, which shows his strength of character. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"> At the heart of the book is the family secret which the son knows, the mother learns, but the father remains ignorant of, and the consequent havoc this reeks in their interpersonal relationships. Deane may be telling stories out of school, but at least he has the necessary ‘ice in the heart’ which Graham Greene said was required by all great writers.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">First published in <i>Image.</i></p><p><a href="http://desmondtraynor.com/books/deane.html" target="_blank">http://desmondtraynor.com/books/deane.html</a><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmAv4SgNzjpa0gLsPVGFBh4o__lMOLdvz8Mm0PNjUkz5Wm-nJGzjsnoI7J4OVRHX5JjTLrkts9xOTW8XznXEjsRSIkbqxtivMKzvopP5s3Rs0dLQ9lgEjtLHxk8hCiOpx_hyZE9kesEl1/s1169/Reading+In+The+Dark.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1169" data-original-width="759" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmAv4SgNzjpa0gLsPVGFBh4o__lMOLdvz8Mm0PNjUkz5Wm-nJGzjsnoI7J4OVRHX5JjTLrkts9xOTW8XznXEjsRSIkbqxtivMKzvopP5s3Rs0dLQ9lgEjtLHxk8hCiOpx_hyZE9kesEl1/w416-h640/Reading+In+The+Dark.jpg" width="416" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-791755984725597274.post-50083014155006796602021-03-20T10:10:00.002-07:002021-03-20T10:10:57.620-07:00Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers<p><i>Come Join Our Disease</i></p><p>By Sam Byers</p><p>(Faber, £18.99 h/b)</p><p>Maya Devereaux has been homeless for over a year when the encampment where she has been living for a month is dawn raided and broken up. After being fingerprinted and photographed, she is interviewed by Seth and Ryan, a double act of vacuous corporate-speak, who ‘seemed to have attended a recent PowerPoint presentation on the projection of sincerity.’ This duo are ‘not the usual faces of officialdom’ – neither policemen nor council workers – but representatives of the Giving Department of Green (‘Tech solutions, communications, web content, search. Your basic highly disruptive global player.’). </p><p> Maya learns she has been selected for Green’s ‘opportunity programme’, the aim of which is ‘to humanize homelessness. Select a candidate, offer a comprehensive second chance, then make that second chance public and build a following. Payoff was an even split: a new life for the candidate, brand boost for the sponsors.’ Despite realising that for Seth and Ryan, like ‘the men who tried to slip into my tent at night…Empathy was just another tactic of manipulation’, she doubts her ability to survive on the streets for much longer, and so accepts their offer. They furnish her with an Instagram account called Maya’s Journey, and a job at Pict, where she ‘parses online content for suitability’ – which essentially means she does what lots of those employed by Google and Facebook in the Dublin Docklands do: make sure vile or potentially triggering images don’t find their way on to client websites. </p><p> At Pict there is also a Wellbeing Programme or, rather, ‘mandatory detoxes’: ‘You start work with them, and they start work on you.’ The whole experience of her first weekend retreat at BodyTemple (juice, yoga, meditation: the mindlessness of mindfulness, or, as an acquaintance of mine characterises it, ‘religion without the backbone’) makes Maya physically sick. While she continues with the classes back in London, she senses that they are just a thinly-veiled, extra-curricular forum for vaguely spiritual twenty-somethings, who work in PR, advertising or media, to network and swap information on clients.</p><p> The daily Overground commute is the main evocation of the alienation of urban nullity, coupled with the redundant nature of most work (before you are actually made redundant), and her inability to sustain it was one of the chief reasons Maya fell into homelessness initially. As we are frequently told, 60 to 70% of the populations of Britain and the U.S. live three pay cheques away from a similar fate. For the precariat, it’s a stark choice between the pointless mundanity of exploitative work or winding up on the streets – unless you’ve got parents wealthy enough to subsidise you, and your endless education and training and your unpaid internships. It all adds up to a thoroughgoing critique of the tyranny of work, for those who prefer a quieter lifestyle, and a good argument for the introduction of universal basic income.</p><p> However, though largely friendless (a bout of homelessness will do that to you) Maya chums up with an environmentally ill woman she meets in a doctor’s surgery, Zelma, who enjoys defacing magazine articles and advertising billboards with factual corrections of their fatuous claims. (For an excellent cinematic treatment of environmental or chemical disease, see Todd Haynes 1995 film, <i>Safe</i>, featuring a fledgling Julianne Moore.) The story becomes marginally less interesting, and much more repulsive, once Maya walks out of her office building for the last time, having posted a pic of her faeces on Maya’s Journey, fetches up in a disused warehouse on an industrial estate with Zemla, and the focus shifts from Maya’s uncomfortable negotiations with the corporate world to the dynamics and tensions between the two friends and the other women who, having been vetted, come to join them – additions which don’t always feel necessary. They engage in a dirty protest on a massive scale, defecating and urinating where and when the urge takes them, but their lack of any apparent agenda or ideological manifesto, other than ‘liberation through decay’, plus the support it garners in certain quarters, increasingly infuriates the wider community. It all gets rather messy.</p><p> All good things come to an end, and when the set up is broken up, mainly through two concerned parents’ media campaign to rescue their daughter from what they perceive as a ‘cult’, Maya finds herself interacting with social workers and shrinks in a psychiatric facility, where she is described as having a history of ‘self-neglect’. </p><p> Flaws? Alright: first-person Maya analyses society’s ills and her employer’s machinations with the acuity of a socio-economics PhD, and her own feelings and motivations with the insight of an unusually competent psychotherapist, and she writes like a…well, like a writer – all without any back story of significant study and/or academic achievement, which is not by any means unlikely, but still uncommon. Her previous job, before Pict, was also as an unfulfilled office drone, so we don’t know what exactly she ever wanted to be, if anything at all. Some will baulk at the obviousness of the extended scatological metaphor – society is shit, we produce shit, let’s celebrate the shit – although it does have precedents, for example in what Middleton Murry referred to as Swift’s ‘excremental vision’. But that objection rather depends on how valid you think the analogy is in the first place, which in turn depends on how well you think society is currently functioning. </p><p> Already the author of two previous broadly satirical novels, <i>Idiopathy </i>(2013) and <i>Perfidious Albion</i> (2018), Byers’ overriding target is the hollowing out of public discourse in the digital, online, social media age (and, in this case, self-help culture) which, to take the example of Charlie Brooker, can be played for comedic (<i>Nathan Barley</i>) or nightmarish (<i>Black Mirror</i>) effect. This considerably darker new work under review falls into the latter category. </p><p> Splendidly cynical, politically astute, endlessly quotable and highly visual (there is considerable filmic potential – at least for an audience with a strong stomach): the guy can write, is one smart cookie, and this book is quite outstanding.</p><p><i>The Irish Times</i>, 20/03/21</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIalEHOQCXQokX3rrpgvm7Yjj-fB7epTokXowgrr6idiaTwZAD9dWkzZIpiJXT5vKlSSJZ4-Op_-DCW88UZFAEKYOMna1xKYhMxyY_fiF257mUyX8qeowKHOkBqGiFdtHfutxKz_hImgc1/s1538/Come+Join+Our+Disease.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1538" data-original-width="1000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIalEHOQCXQokX3rrpgvm7Yjj-fB7epTokXowgrr6idiaTwZAD9dWkzZIpiJXT5vKlSSJZ4-Op_-DCW88UZFAEKYOMna1xKYhMxyY_fiF257mUyX8qeowKHOkBqGiFdtHfutxKz_hImgc1/w416-h640/Come+Join+Our+Disease.jpg" width="416" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Desmond Traynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00899183764640928005noreply@blogger.com0