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October 2010
The Archives
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10.31.10Happy Hallowe’en"Beware the autumn people... For some, autumn comes early, stays late, through life, where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring or revivifying summer. "For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No, the night wind. What ticks in their head? The ...
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10.31.10O’Connor and King at the PeacockWriter Joe O'Connor and filmmaker and musicologist Philip King will be appearing at the Peacock Theatre, November 15-20, for a week-long all-singing, all-talking exploration of the influence of Irish-American ballads on O'Connor's fiction. Joe phoned into the Revelatorium last week to tell us about it: "When I teach creative writing, which I've done a few times, I always work with ballads because it's a brilliant storytelling form. A Nick Cave song or 'Anachie Gordon' or any of those child ballads that were collected in the 19th century, or a song like 'In The Month of January' sung by June Tabor, they're ...
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10.26.10Runnin’ Down A DreamA few weeks ago a friend lent us a copy of Peter Bogdanovich's epic four-hour 2007 Tom Petty documentary Runnin' Down A Dream. Bogdanovich was one of the stars of the 1970s New Wave generation of filmmakers, best known for The Last Picture Show (you might also know his face from cameo appearances as Dr Melfi's shrink in The Sopranos). In recent years he has focused his energies on a parallel career as a film historian and documentarian. Runnin' Down A Dream deserves to be considered amongst his finest work, and is certainly one of the most compelling rock-docs we've ...
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10.24.10Hughie O’Donoghue’s Salt WaterWe were honoured to be asked to speak at the opening of Hughie O'Donoghue's exhibition 'Salt Water' at Greyfriars Gallery in Waterford last Friday, as part of the Imagine arts festival. The exhibition runs until October 31. http://www.imagineartsfestival.com/eventdetail.asp?EventID=42 http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/slideshows/hughie-o-donoghue// http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/archive/20090310.html
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10.21.10Monty Pynchon"Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations." Thomas Pynchon and the great Gravity's Rainbow National Book Award 1973 acceptance speech scam. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/I-NBPpM--pY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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10.20.10That naked lunch moment"For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do." - David Cronenberg [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/-zCZMjWuNY0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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10.17.10Sunday WorshipRoots 'n' culture, for your pleasure. Wingless Angels doing On Mount Zion. Keith Richards calls it marrow music. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pVq9GlwyFRY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/73HzLzW3iiA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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10.16.10We’re Not In Clones Now, Toto“I had a letter from a young guy who lives in Germany now,” says Pat McCabe on a Friday afternoon in the Stag's Head in Dublin. “He sent me this novel through a friend of a friend in Clones. There's a whole new generation now coming through who always see me as some sort of elder statesman or something – how it's fucking come to that I don't know! – but they do and that's alright, it amuses me, like. “So I read it and it was really great. It was naive, but it was a new voice. And he ...
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10.16.10Band of Holy JoyRobert Plant Band Of Joy (Universal) Time's a loop, not a line. Band of Joy takes its name from Robert Plant's first pre-Zep band with John Bonham, but it's no nostalgic attempt to recapture garage glory days. These 12 songs are a lesson in braiding Avalonian and backwoods folk, avant rock and the odd dash of soul or primal rockabilly. Like the lovely Raising Sand collaboration with Alison Krauss (on which Plant met current collaborator Buddy Miller), it's all in the songs and the sounds. The production on Band Of Joy is immaculate, a masterclass in electrified acoustic roots music that even T Bone ...
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10.12.10Coffee in Berlin“Drifting towards the light I realise I've been strangely relaxed in the capital of the world's third-largest economy, notwithstanding my mission. Despite its being a larger and healthier economy than Britain, I find that my guard is down, the perpetual buzz of fear and frustration is gone. Perhaps because no business I've entered has been founded on a need to expand to fifty outlets by next year. No staff member has been primed to manipulate more sales from me than I intended to give. No cameras suggest I might flee without paying... No unit of my space or time has ...