Pursued by a Bear »

  • If you only do one thing this weekend . . . eat some tiny birds

    February 9, 2012 @ 7:45 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    Listen: Music fans – if you’ve little to be at this weekend, you could decamp yourself to Cork and be spoilt for choice. This is largely down to cutting-edge label Popical Island, which is launching a mini Leeside invasion. On Saturday night, it is bringing Tieranniesaur, Squarehead and Land Lovers to the Pavilion for a (shock horror) free gig. And if that wasn’t enough, The Walpurgis Family will be pitching their wares on Sunday night (again for nowt).

    Elsewehere in the city, multigenre specialists Tarab are bringing their traditional, jazz and classcial vibes to UCC’s Aula Mxima tomorrow afternoon. One of the best double-headers in months is on in Dublin’s Sugar Club on Saturday night, but it’s sold out – lucky, then, for those in the south that Michael Kiwanuka and The Staves will be bringing their live show to Cyprus Avenue on Sunday.

    If they’re a bit stuck for cash, perhaps they could go sharesies with Ms Dynamite on car rental. The rapper and singer is reclaiming her place in the hip hop firmament with a gig in Twisted Pepper on Friday, before showing Cyprus Avenue who is boss on Saturday. And if you manage to get a good spot at the bar in Cyprus Avenue, you might as well stay where you are. Hotly tipped Nordie act Fighting with Wire are rocking into town on Monday.

    A rare embarassment of musical southern riches.

    Art: There’s something odd happening on the streets of Nenagh. Strange shifts of movement in the night, and odd sounds down nighttime streets. Do not be alarmed. This is art in action. Switch 2012 is currently in full swing, with projected film and video works being thrown on to the town’s shopfronts, with work from international artists including Sarah Buckius, Flatform, Paul Grimmer, Fergus Fullarton, Mark Neville, Lucie Kim and Felix von der Weppen, David Theobald and Nathalie Lavoie. There’s a twilight walking tour at 6.45pm on Sunday, which is your last opportunity to see this excellent project in action. Other towns would do well to follow suit.


    Nenagh by night. Exotic

    Eat: Tomorrow sees the opening of the Science Gallery’s latest exhibition, and today I managed to get a tasty sneak preview. Edible: The Taste of Things to Come, aims to probe “how our actions as eaters shape what is sown, grown, harvested and consumed”. As well as a selection of fascinating exhibits, including an enormous inflatable colon you can climb into and a kind of nebulised Bloody Mary you can suck through a glass straw, punters can sign up for their own little taste challenge. The gallery is holding two “feeding times” per day where you get the chance to sample dishes that relate directly to the show’s theme. Today, we got to munch on insects, seaweed-inspired creations, and a version of perhaps the cruellest dish in the world: Ortolan. This now-illegal French dish involves catching the tiny Ortolan birds, force feeding them, and then drowning them in Armagnac. Traditionally, they are eaten under a napkin to “hide your shame from God”. (Former French president Francois Mitterand had it for his last meal.) Our version was vegan – so no animals were killed – but it was a brilliant approach that gave a full palette of flavours and all the crunchy texture you would associate with chewing your way through a whole, tiny bird. Science with bite, then.


    A science experiment, earlier today. The beer was essential. The scientist said so

  • Culture Shots: Lewd Facebook pics worth millions, and Van Gogh’s letters

    February 6, 2012 @ 5:45 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    HERE IS an ambitious and odd art project that could build into something much more substantial than the sum of its part. The Core project is looking for one video entry for each country from around the world to build a single work of art that will be broadcast globally.

    It was devised by Irish artist Matthew Nevin, the co-curator of Mart Group. The idea is that 200-odd individuals will be chosen from around the world. They will be placed in front of a camera, and handed a question that they have two minutes to answer. It’s an interesting idea that could work out brilliantly or crash and burn like a half-baked viral ad. Watch this space.


    ANOTHER ARTISTIC     idea that is well worth checking out is the 24 Hour Play Project at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Six playwrights, six directors, and a cast of more than 20 will have 24 hours to write, rehearse and perform six plays. The event, in aid of Dublin Youth Theatre, will be anything but amateur, with the likes of Gary Duggan, Deirdre Kinahan, Pauline McLynn, Paul Meade, Elaine Murphy, Tom Swift, Veronica Coburn, Wayne Jordan, Annie Ryan, Alan Stanford, Willie White, Amy Conroy, Derbhla Crotty, Peter Daly, Maeve Fitzgerald, Philip Judge, Louis Lovett, Aonghus Óg McNally, Rory Nolan, Mark O’Halloran, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Paul Reid, Karl Shiels, Don Wycherley and more involved – and they’ve roped in New York’s 24 Hour Company to get the show on the road. Creative chaos ahoy. It takes place on February 19th.

    THE FACEBOOK IPO is set to make many millionaires in the coming months, but artist David Choe might be the most unlikely. He was employed by the company to paint sexually explicit murals at its head office in 2005 (your office doesn’t have some? How uncool.) Choe got paid in shares rather than cash, which at the time might have seemed like a typical fob-the-artist-off move by the fledging company. Now, though, Choe could make up to $200 million for his shares – making his murals (a sample of which are below) some of the most expensive works of art today, albeit in a very convoluted way.

    IT MIGHT not be in the millions, but the Sky Arts bursary could make a massive difference to any Irish artist. It is offering five young artists £30,000 each to fund their work for a year. It’s across all artforms, be it dance, theatre, music or modern interpretative mala sculpting, and the winners will also get mentoring. There are 18 days left on the current funding round, so click here for more information on how to get an application in.

    HERE IS something very special indeed. The Vincent Van Gogh Letters Project is a remarkable resource. It contains all Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, and to the artists Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, and much more besides. Many are richly illustrated and teem with information and insight. The book edition contains more than 4,300 illustrations, comes in six hardback volumes, and was designed by Wim Crouwel, one of the world’s best book designers. If you don’t have the £450 that Thames and Hudson are asking for it, you can search through the archive online here. An astonishing art history archive, that is freely available? It’s what the internet was built for. Well, that and amusing cat videos.

    ONE FOR all the actors out there: if you haven’t read the interview with Brad Pitt from last week’s Guardian, it’s well worth checking out. Short on celebrity, with little scandal, it reads more like an on-the-money analysis of his own performances throughout his career. Refreshing honesty.

    THIS ISa typically punchy, riveting bit of short fiction by Allegra Goodman in the New Yorker magazine. Barely a word is wasted.

    AND FINALLY: sometimes you watch music videos and think, that must have cost an awful lot of money. Secondly, you think, these people have way too much time on their hands to be devising nonsense like this, but I’m glad they are out there doing it. This video, from – who else? – OK Go, triggers all of these impulses. 1,000 instrument. Two miles of desert. Some not very subtle car product placement. Huzzah.

  • If you only do one thing this weekend: go Japanese

    February 2, 2012 @ 7:33 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    See: Kozo is the work of Richard Gorman, a Dublin-born artist who has spent long stints abroad in Milan and Japan, among other places. The latter has a major influence on this show. These are minimalist, delicate works, large elegant slices of colour that collide and complement with vibrant clarity. Gorman makes his own paper – a Japanese process known as washi – and mixes the dye directly into the pulp, which produces the resulting colours that seem to hum on the wall. Aidan Dunne describes the work as Gorman’s “characteristic grammar of just a few geometric motifs, typically circle, lozenge and triangle, arranged in interlocking patterns that have an almost mathematically quality, as though they are a personal species of Venn diagram”. The show is at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin.

    Listen: Two major pop acts will be ripping it up in Dublin this weekend. Factory Floor will be bringing their post-industrial dance tunes to Tripod this weekend in their first ever Irish show. Huzzah. Then on Monday, Whelans will be hosting the rather rude Azealia Banks, whose 212 track has seen her hailed as the next big thing. Whether this comes to pass remains to be seen, but given the swagger and attitude she has displayed in her videos and on record to date, this could be a very special show indeed. Assuming, of course, you can find a ticket. This one sold out in minutes.

    Trad: For music of an entirely different canon, and of an astonishingly high calibre, look no further than Triur, currently touring to promote their new album, which is reviewed in tomorrow’s Ticket. The all-star trio are Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and they play Cork School of Music tomorrow, Tulla Court House in Clare on Saturday and then head for Limerick’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance on Tuesday. Sure they could easily slip in a support slot with Azealia Banks on Monday. Now that would be worth seeing.

    Cabaret:     Nighthawks at the Cobalt is a consistently strong and eclectic offering in the classy surroundings of North Great George’s Street’s favourite cafe. This edition on Saturday night features standup comedy and performance poetry, with Q (aka Colm Quearney), Ben Reel and The Crayon Set sharing a stage. Click here for more information.

    Theatre: This week saw the opening of I Heart Alice Heart I, which created a major splash when it landed in the Absolut Fringe festival in 2010. It tells the story of two Alices in their 60s, played with heartbreaking effect by Amy Conroy and Clare Barrett, who toy with the audience’s emotions while demolishing a few theatrical tropes and creating something altogether different – a very rare thing in theatre indeed. It’s at the Peacock Theatre until February 18th, and you can read Peter Crawley’s full review in tomorrow’s Irish Times.

  • What we said: Best Actor, Irish Theatre Awards

    February 1, 2012 @ 7:22 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    In the run up to this year’s Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, we’ve been running a number of features incorporating this year’s nominees. As an extension of this, we’ll be taking a look at what the paper had to say about the productions and people involved in each category when the curtain went up.

    Brian O’Connell recently spoke to the four nominees in the best actor category. If you missed it, you can read what they had to say for themselves over here. (more…)

  • Culture Shots: Edible art, a roomful of city and some astonishing books

    January 30, 2012 @ 1:44 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    There is an intriguing interview with artist Jeremy Deller over on the Guardian website. The man is deep in the bowels of a Texas cave filmng the millions of bats that live there, as the 3D climax to his new show at the Hayward Gallery, called The Joy of People.

    Apart from the fact that he’s a fascinating artist, Deller has the habit of saying blatantly unartistic things (or to be precise, things you would not expect an artist to say). He has a pop at established Brits such as Tracey Emin (he has previous in this regard), and laughs about how the “crap under his bed” from when he was a kid is now considered a work of art. But perhaps the best part is his take on how artists aren’t special, and anyone has the potential to be an artist, in the same way that anyone could be an accoutant, say, if they took the notion.

    “Everyone has the potential to be creative. It’s just having the time and the space. I don’t think artists are special. A lot of people do. That’s the great product of marketing artists – ‘they are different and special’. I don’t believe that. You see as much creativity outside the art world as inside it. I mean, all children are creative.”

    Jeremy Deller is living proof of this.

    One of the people Deller namechecks in his interview is Chris Burden, who once had himself shot in the arm to make a film about it. I’ve mentioned his most recent project before, but it’s worth bringing up again – Metropolis II is a gigiantic model inspired by the city of Los Angeles that uses 1,200 cars and a lot of magnets to bring a teeming city into a warehouse. Burden has finished the sculpture after four years work and his team spent several months breaking it down so it could be transported to LACMA. It is now installed and open for business.

    Closer to home, the Science Gallery is also in the mood for small, perfectly formed items. As parts of its forthcoming show Edible, it wants your ideas for original and innovative recipes – one-bite wonders only please. Click here for details on where to send your perfect mouthfuls – the winner gets their dish served up, 20 VIP invites to the show, and a course at Cooks Academy. Mmmmm. Science.

    Meanwhile in London, the Photographers’ Gallery will reopen in May after a £8.9 million overhaul. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been scouring the globe for his series on the oil industry, and will open the gallery with what promises to be a spectacular show. Irish angle alert: the new building was designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey architects. The company is also responsible for the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and Temple Bar’s own Gallery of Photography.

    And for something completely different: may we present The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Everyone’s raving about how The Artist is reviving interest in silent film, and Martin Scorsese could well win best film for Hugo, his paean to the first film-makers. This silent film, though, blends the old and new, with stop motion, computer and traditional hand-drawn animation. It’s the first short by animation studio Moonbot and is up for Best Animated Short. Two of the other nominated films, Wild Life and Sunday, are well worth a look and you can see them both here. For the moment though, here is Mr Lessmore in all his bookish glory.

  • If you only do one thing this weekend . . . go traditional

    January 26, 2012 @ 4:12 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    Hoolies and hijinks: Every so often, Temple Bar does something to remind us that it was originally conceived as a cultural hub – it’s terrific new umbrellas at Meeting House Square, the atmosphere during Culture Night, or at the moment it’s alive to the sounds of the Temple Bar Trad Fest. For fans of all things jigged and reeled, this a mouthwatering line-up. Trad supergroup The Inisturkbeggers, with Kíla’s Lance Hogan leading the charge, will be ripping it up tomorrow night; The Dubliners (below) play two 50th-anniversary shows on Friday and Saturday. Frankie Gavin is putting in a rare appearance and there is a tribute to the mighty Pecker Dunne on Sunday (click here for Mick Heany’s piece on his life and work). Those of you who made it to the Afro-Cubism night earlier in the year at the NCH might remember support act Fidil with Senegalese Kora player Solo Cissokho – the pair are joining Tarab for an intriguing night of music. Are ye dancing? Are ye asking?


    We better finish this one quick: the park keeper is coming to kick us out (more…)

  • Nominate your next Laureate na nÓg

    @ 10:42 am | by Laurence Mackin

    Nominations are now open for the next Laureate na nÓg. Siobhan Parkinson, whose books include Sisters No Way!, Amelia and Kate, recently finished her tenure and now the search is on for the next author to hold the position.

    Nominees must be Irish and they should be an “internationally recognised author or illustrator who has made a significant contribution to the field of children’s literature in Ireland”. Sure we’ve heaps of those. Individuals or organisations can make nominations, and the deadline is February 24th 2012.

    For details click here. Laureate na nÓg is an Arts Council initiative with the support of the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Children’s Books Ireland and Poetry Ireland.

  • Live review: Tigran Hamasyan

    January 25, 2012 @ 3:52 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    John Field Room, National Concert Hall, Dublin

    Tigran Hamasyan cuts a slight figure on stage, looking barely his 24 years, but from the moment he first touches the keyboard, it’s clear he is built for bigger stages than this.

    I last saw Hamasyan play at the NattJazz Festival in Norway last year, and although he brought stunning fluency and technical ability to bear, it was a little lacking in lyricism. Perhaps the poetic aspects of his latest album A Fable are having more of an influence, or perhaps it’s playing to a more general audience than that of a jazz festival, but here, he rarely lets technical virtuosity drown out the beauty of his songwriting in a performance of rare intensity and effectiveness. (more…)

  • The astonishing story of Vivian Maier

    January 23, 2012 @ 4:21 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    RTE’s Arena arts show recently featured a piece about the extraordinary story of photographer Vivian Maier. She was one of the first street photographers, and created a remarkable, personal archive of images that she kept a secret, to the extent that they nearly went unseen altogether.

    Maier’s work was unknown in her own lifetime. She was born in New York City and moved between the US and Europe before settling in NYC in 1951 and then leaving for Chicago in 1956. She spent most of her life working as a nanny and carer, and used her spare time to build up a staggering photographic archive of more than 100,000 negatives, from the 1950s up until the 1990s. She scrupulously hid all of it in storage and her work was only discovered by chance after one of her storage lockers was auctioned off, due to delinquency payments. (In later life, Maier was poor, may have spent some time homeless, and was taken care of by three of the people she had cared for as a nanny.) (more…)

  • If you only do one thing this weekend, enter the dragon

    January 19, 2012 @ 7:43 pm | by Laurence Mackin

    Film: Huzzah! One of the downpoints of last year was the closure of the LightHouse cinema in Dublin, so we’re delighted to see it is re-opening its doors on Friday night, after Element Pictures was announced as its new operator earlier this week. Expect it to become the cultural centre it always had the potential to become and bring some life to the area. Plus it’s a damn fine excuse for a pint in the Dice Bar or dinner in L Mulligan grocer. The perfect night out? (more…)


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