Posted in great irish bands, Irish music, Irish social history, Art on Mar 5th, 2008 8 Comments »
The post below on snobbery, art, and Dvorák, got me thinking about an Irish composer who drew heavily from this country´s heritage - namely, Seán Ó Riada.
Born in Adare, Co. Limerick in 1931, Ó Riada studied music under Aloys Fleischmann at UCC, before getting a job in 1952 at Radio Éireann. In 1955 he […]
Posted in great irish bands, aesthetics, Art on Mar 4th, 2008 7 Comments »
There are people out there who do not see the three minute pop song as an art form. They need help. Now, there are thousands of pop songs to choose from, but here´s one that I find particularly wonderful.
The Divine Comedy will be a subject of our Great Irish Bands series soon, but for […]
Posted in Irish journalism, irishness, irish culture, Irish Middle Class, Art on Mar 2nd, 2008 9 Comments »
Karen Dervan is not well.
In today’s Sunday Tribune review section she tells us that her blood is boiling. The reason is simple: Glen Hansard and his “make art” speech at the Oscars.
There are Irish artists struggling to “make art” every day, artists who will most likely never earn any recognition for their efforts until, […]
Posted in Art on Feb 28th, 2008 No Comments »
This is well overdue but still, better late….
Bob Byrne of clamnuts fame has just launched his comic book Mister Amperduke - actually it was back on Valentine’s Day, but as I said better late…
It’s about how a mini-city of small lego people survive when their benign creator, a tic-tac dispensing granddad with tiny rabbit ears, […]
Posted in Middle East, Art on Sep 11th, 2007 No Comments »
Saifedean Ammous, writing in 3quarksdaily has a great piece on the Arabic TV show The Prince of Poets, which uses the same format as American Idol. Except instead of the competitors being wannabes popstars they’re young poets who recite their poetry before the Simon Cowells of the Arabic Verse world.
The judges are ‘5 […]
Posted in dublin, Art, Ireland on Sep 4th, 2007 4 Comments »
‘Well the plinth has arrived on O’Connell Street’, posted GrahamH on the Archiseek forum at the end of August, ‘it’s located to the northern end of the taxi rank, at the junction with Cathal Brugha Street.’
This created a certain amount of interest on the forum, as many were eager to discover what last minute addition […]
Posted in aesthetics, Spain, satire, Art on Aug 8th, 2007 4 Comments »
Satire is a funny old game.
A couple of weeks ago the Spanish government announced a new pregnancy incentive. It guaranteed a payment of 2,500 euro to the parents of every new child born in the country. The Barcelona-based satirical magazine El Jueves (Thursday in Spanish) decided to comment. The result was the above cartoon, which […]
Posted in cinema, Art on Aug 1st, 2007 No Comments »
I have to admit that reading the news today that the modernist Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died yesterday at the age of 94 shocked me.
Not because his death occurred within a few hours of the other great European film director Ingmar Bergman, but because I realized I’d never seen any of his films. […]
Posted in Art on Jul 13th, 2007 No Comments »
When Walter Benjamin was a child he came upon a poem in a children’s book that was to feature prominently in his understanding of the catastrophes surrounding in his own life. It was called Bucklicht Mannlein or The little hunchback.
When I go down to the cellar
There to draw some wine
A little hunchback who’s in […]
Posted in Art on Jun 28th, 2007 6 Comments »
A movie about typeface! Are you fucking serious? Apparently he was. We both have the same job, and some of that requires a working knowledge of different sorts of font. ‘Okay’, I said, ‘its one thing selecting the right font for a document that’ll be read by a maximum of 15 people in order to […]
