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June 2009
The Archives
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06.29.09A Wee Surrealist SymposiumSlicin' up eyeballs: AH-HA-HA-HO! Debaser Eraserhead Un Chien Andalou
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06.27.09Third starred US review for J the R…... in the June issue of Library Journal. "Beautifully humane and sometimes nightmarish, this incredible debut novel by a noted music and culture editor, journalist, and critic recounts the life and times of John Devine, a 15-year-old boy who lives in Kilcody, a village in southeastern Ireland, with his Bible-quoting, nicotine-addicted mother. He whiles away his days obsessing about worms, crows, and sin until he meets Jamey Corboy, a "posh boy" who reads the French decadents, swills booze, and indulges in petty graft with local thugs. After a heinous bender during which the boys vandalize a church, John sells out Jamey ...
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06.25.09We need to talk about Harry…Consider if you will the not-so-little miracle that is the National Gallery in Dublin. Here the footsore, the bewildered, the stray, the discombobulated and the plain strapped for the price of a pint can wander in off the street unchallenged and for nothing – that is, free gratis – perambulate at leisure through tall and hallowed halls and gaze upon images that'll put iron back in the blood until the next bus home. Alan Moore was right. Put a man in a shithole and he behaves like a rat. Put him in a palace and he feels like a king. Over ...
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06.25.09pages of the reconstructionSome folk crow about artistry, others are too busy doing to waste time talking. In conversation, Julie Feeney delivers a line from a one-man show about the Kerry-born Antarctic explorer Tom Crean who, suffering from frostbite, with bits of his body turning black and threatening to fall off, was compelled further into the icy wastes by a vision of his mother barking: “Get on with it!” This becomes a running joke and motif of our talk in the Odessa Club one Tuesday afternoon in May: ‘Get on with it!’ delivered up close and in your face, like a possessed Peig ...
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06.23.09Journey Through the PastNeil Young Archives Vol 1 (Reprise) Holy cow, it’s here at last: the first instalment of the decades-threatened box set of Neiler’s archives, spanning the years 1963 to 1972, from his earliest days with the Squires right up to the haymaking early 70s solo era. That’s 128 songs, 43 of them previously unreleased, in CD, DVD and Blu-Ray format – including archive photographs, timelines and bio material, plus the Antonioni-like stoner documentary Journey Through The Past. For the long-time Young devotee masquerading as reviewer, this is akin to having the Nag Hammadi scrolls, debriefed CIA files and unedited Zapruder footage delivered to ...
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06.23.09Emigrant’s SongColm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. The second youngest of five children, his family tree is thick with writers and Republicans – Tóibín’s father Micheal, a historian and secondary school teacher, founded the local museum in the town’s 13th century castle. Tóibín himself attended St Peter’s College in Wexford, and in 1972 went to study History and English in UCD. The day after taking his BA in 1975, he left for Barcelona, where he stayed for three years, an experience that informed his early books, including The South (his first novel, completed in 1986 but ...
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06.23.09A storm in the form of a girlNeko Case Middle Cyclone (Anti) 38-year-old Virginian Neko Case takes classic Americana trappings – the big sky and the wide open road, the hanging traffic lamps and neon diners – and infuses them with a wayward country soul that could only have been forged from blank generation disillusion. She sings songs of western ennui and dislocation (“I’ve lost my taste for home/And that’s a dirty fallow feeling”), a sense of being adrift in a country of infinite possibility but also infinite peril. If Ms Case is hell to be in love with, you might recover from the affair bearing a song like ‘This ...
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06.22.09Quadruple A Battery:Anhedonia, Addiction and AA in David Foster Wallace's work. 'Death Is Not The End', by Jon Baskin in The Point magazine. http://www.thepointmag.com/death1.html
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06.22.09Dignified and ancient…... and gracious as ever. Leonard speaks at length on Q TV. http://blip.tv/file/2000187
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06.20.09American CaesarWe're awaiting a copy of Iggy's new album Preliminaires. Meantime, here's a fine interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104735787 And while we're on the subject, here's a link to the rather fascinating short essay on Gibbon he contributed to Classics Ireland some 14 years ago. http://www.ucd.ie/cai/classics-ireland/1995/Pop95.html