MGMT at The Olympia, October 19, 2013

MGMT at The Olympia last night. Very cool CGI light show. Music wasn't bad either.

Eamon Dunphy is a clown

Since it seems everyone is writing Open Letters these days, here’s mine. It’s to Eamon Dunphy.

Eamon, last Tuesday, post Ireland’s victory over Kazakhstan, you called interim Irish manager Noel King a ‘bully’, and ‘immature, out of his depth, and a little bit unpleasant’, after his behavior in interview with reporter Tony O’Donoghue. You further stated that Noel King ‘attacked’ Tony O’Donoghue. When RTE panel presenter Darragh Maloney suggested that King had received ‘some fairly harsh criticism himself’, you sought to draw a distinction between the professional and private, becoming most barrister-like with Maloney in the process. It was ok for the panel to call King ‘tactically inept’, but not ok for King to respond by calling the panel ‘a comedy show’. ‘Tactically inept’ is professional, apparently, while ‘a comedy show’ is personal.

Eamon, earlier this year you publically, on RTE’s now-defunct Premiership Soccer Saturday, referred to former Manchester City Manager Roberto Mancini as ‘a clown’. Did you mean he is a professional clown, or a clown in his private life? If, giving you the benefit of the doubt, you really meant that Mancini is ‘tactically inept’, i.e. a professional clown, perhaps you can countenance that when Noel King called the RTE panel ‘a comedy show’, he was intimating that he perceives your punditry to be of a poor standard, and not to be taken seriously, rather than suggesting you are dimwitted in your personal life. How inept is Roberto Mancini in his personal life? You see, it’s a fine line, isn’t it Eamon, this professional/private divide?

Since we are being forensic about our arguments, you claim Noel King attacked Tony O’Donoghue because, according to you, King said: ‘You gotta do your homework, you don’t know what you’re talking about’ to O’Donoghue. Incorrect. If you take the trouble to listen back to the interview, King actually said: ‘…if anyone wants to do their homework.’

Furthermore, when you put Darragh Maloney on the spot, you claimed that when Maloney said that King had taken ‘some fairly harsh criticism himself’, implicit in that question/statement was that it was personal criticism of King. That was not ‘implicit’ at all, and Maloney should have defended himself in that regard. Leastways, no more personal than King’s criticism of the panel.

You see, you are criticising King professionally, just as he is criticising you professionally, whether the terminology is ‘tactically inept’, ‘comedy’ or clown’. Otherwise, all hell will just break loose into vulgar name-calling. Or, could it be that you really do have a personal grudge against King, against Mancini, and against Manchester City Football Club? How big a clown is Roberto Mancini in his personal life? How big a comedy show are you in yours?

Or maybe you’re just a professional, and maybe even personal, hypocrite.

Make up your own minds, folks:

http://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/eamon-dunphy-noel-kings-behaviour-last-night-was-stupid-29665320.html

Muscle Shoals Documentary

Just come from the press show of Greg 'Freddy' Camalier's documentary about Muscle Shoals' FAME Studios and Sound Studio. Essential viewing for anyone interested in some of the best R'n'B, Soul and Rock music of the past 50+ years (and this despite the presence of Bono - who never actually recorded there anyway). Yo, The Swampers...

Dr. Sean Millar at The Odessa Club

Great intimate gig by Dr. Sean Millar and band at The Odessa Club last night. Wonderful to hear so many of the old songs mixed with the new ones from C48, in a room like that.

A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing

By Eimear McBride

(Galley Beggar Press, £11.00 stg)

This debut novel by Liverpool born, west of Ireland raised, Norwich resident McBride, has been garlanded with glowing reviews in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. These notices tended to emphasise the book’s originality and experimentalism. However, what inventiveness or exploration there is resides in an obtuse use of language and idiosyncratic punctuation, which disdains the preposition, enjoys scrambled syntax, and fairly eschews the common comma (although I did spot a total of two in the course of the 203 pages). Beneath this enigmatic playfulness, the subject matter and narrative trajectory remain tediously conventional.

   The story, told in the first person singular and addressed to the second person singular, concerns an unnamed female narrator and her unnamed older brother (every character in this novel is unnamed). There are a couple of years between them, and the tale begins when she is two and he is four, ending when our girl is 20. There is a strong bond between them, oscillating from embarrassment to affection. He was born with a brain tumour which was removed, but is considered a ‘thicko’ at school. The reoccurrence of his illness, this time inoperable and so terminal, is the spur for the novel’s dramatic finale.

  It’s perhaps not surprising they are close: their father abandons the household when they are infants, and their tyrannically religious mother beats them, and tries to set them against each other. The brother also ‘plays’ the mother, in having her wait on him hand and foot. While our heroine is away at college (although it is deemed too trivial actually to tell us what she is studying), he stacks shelves in a local supermarket by day, and becomes a lazy, antisocial, nerdy computer gamer by night.

  In typical bildungsroman fashion, the story arc chronologically follows the narrator through school and its social jostling, adolescent rebellion and loss of virginity, that departure from messed up home to college and undergraduate shenanigans, a rejection of her mother’s fierce brand of evangelical religion, the temporary relief of sexual promiscuity (‘Saying yes the best of powers’ – presumably when boys expect you to say ‘no’), all culminating in a return to the family homestead for her brother’s last days and death. Along the way she is seduced by a visiting uncle from England when aged 13 and has an intermittent affair with him, and seeks out increasingly violent sexual encounters with strangers. She likes being beaten up.

  There is long and complex history of Irish writers making good in England by presenting versions of the Irish experience which merely cater to and reinforce English perceptions and prejudices of Irish stereotypes. When Joyce saw what happened to Wilde in London, it made him only more determined to flee Ireland to continental Europe, and strengthened his refusal to ‘play court jester to the English.’ In our own day, there is still no shortage of Irish writers queuing up to tell the Brits what they want to hear, in publications such as the London Review of Books, conscious no doubt of the worldwide publicity and distribution attendant on a lucrative London publishing deal. In falling over themselves to demonstrate how ‘over’ the postcolonial chip on the shoulder they are, they serve only to show how much it still weighs them down.

  One wonders where Eimear McBride situates herself in this scenario. Although, like everything else, the setting and timeline are frustratingly vague, passing references to Walkmen and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ song ‘Come On Eileen’ signal we are in the ’80s, that not so fondly remembered time of referenda civil wars. True, the death last year of Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital, because ‘this is a Catholic country’, proved Catholicism can still kill; while the subsequent debate around the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, with rosary sayers scattering holy water on unbelievers outside Dail Eireann, reminded us that these people never learn and the crazies haven’t gone away. But, as even church goers themselves would admit, Catholicism, extreme or otherwise, has become an increasingly peripheral part of contemporary Irish life. So why is a youngish writer like McBride writing about the past? It’s not exactly like Catholic totalitarianism isn’t a well covered topic in Irish literature. Could it be that she thinks this kind of account of Ireland still sits well with certain readers across the water?

  Lots of fundamentalist religion; lots of rough sex: unlike most ‘experimental’ fiction, it should sell well.

Also available here, with reference to Savita Halappanavar excised:

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/experimental-language-masks-what-is-quite-a-conventional-novel-29637412.html

No Age at The Grand Social

Caught No Age at The Grand Social tonight. Fun, while it lasted. Kind of...

Waiting For Godot at The Gaiety Theatre

Just saw the worst production of Waiting for Godot I've ever seen,

by the St. Lazare Players in The Gaiety Theatre last night. Even

all-female student productions at UCD Dramsoc back in the '80s

were better, while Barry McGovern at The Gate remains 

definitive. Conor Lovett should stick to one-man shows of the

prose. He can't interact with other actors, and lacks presence 

and projection. Poor Gogo, stuck with that Didi. It's supposed to be 

FUNNY, as well as sad, boys...