2008 June Archive at E. M. Esq.

Archive for June, 2008

A jolly good cause

Published

on 27 June, 2008

. 2 Comments

Saw this on le craic the other day: folk band Avoca have released a single called “Saving Lives” which is dedicated to the RNLI - that’s them who run the lifeboats - and all proceeds from the sale of the track are going straight to the charity. The download costs 99 cent and you can get it with a credit or laser card at downloadmusic.ie, while you can buy the CD single for €4.99. Or if that’s not super-handy enough for you, text music 1231 to 57501 and you’ll be sent a download code.

As AJ pointed out, the lifeboats are manned by volunteer crews, and 8,000 people were rescued last year. So, you know, that’s a little bit heroic right there.

George Carlin

Published

Colm

on 24 June, 2008

in Misc.

. 9 Comments

Rest in peace and all but… I don’t get it. I knew his reputation and I’d checked out a couple of clips, and now he’s being eulogised in all corners of the internet as a comedic and intellectual genius and I checked out a few more clips, and… I’m just not seeing what everyone else seems to be seeing.

There are very few jokes. I mean, punchlines, right? They’re a handy comedy tool. But as far as I can tell, your average George Carlin gig consisted of a bunch of obvious generalisations delivered in the form of slogans to an adoring audience who are just there to get their egos rubbed. Come on, like. Most of my friends have a fairly liberal, rational outlook on the world, but I don’t laugh and cheer every time they express an opinion.

Perhaps the point is that Carlin started expressing these opinions in a more hostile time. Well, all right, fair play to the man. But you watch a clip from a few years ago and he’s still pointing out that organised religion is hypocritical and conservatives are bastards, and maybe South Park and the like have spoiled me but that’s hardly the most edgy material you could break out.

This isn’t an attack. I’m genuinely puzzled. If someone feels they can explain the appeal to me, please leave a comment. Because at the moment it just looks to me like the Emperor’s new clothes.

I left a party early for this.

Published

Colm

on 22 June, 2008

in Misc.

. 5 Comments

So as I mentioned there was a second Spencer Tunick shoot in the city centre this morning. My excitement for it kind of waned throughout yesterday as the euphoria wore off and the sleep deprivation kicked in, but I have a pathological aversion to backing out of things so at 3am I made my way to Grand Canal Square.

Obviously, there were far far fewer people signed on for this one - somewhere between 75 and 100, at a guess - and we were all tired, so the atmosphere was much more muted than on Saturday morning. Once the crew arrived we were brought into a nearby hotel lobby (much more pleasant, in theory, than standing on a pier, but it felt like cheating) and briefed on what was going to happen. We were going to be lined up on balconies on a nearby (empty) apartment building, with the first shot consisting of couples only. That wasn’t great news for me, what with my girlfriend being at the arse end of another continent, but we were told that everyone would be brought out for the second shot. The third shot was to take place on the roof, but that one was just for the laydeez.

There’s one cardinal rule of any event like this: always push your way to the front. My diminished enthusiasm let me down here and I stupidly let myself get stuck at the back. After far too long of a wait we were split into groups of seven and each group was told to go to a certain apartment, with my group getting shunted into one at the back of the building. Our balcony was completely out of the camera’s line of sight, which didn’t bode well.

After yet more waiting in the apartment (which was very nice, incidentally, in an American Psycho, why-the-hell-is-there-a-photo-of-Steve-McQueen kind of way) a guy with a walkie asked three of us to move to the apartment across the hall. I jumped at the chance to actually do something and we went in to where two couples were already in the nip, having just finished the first shot. They seemed suitably embarrassed to see three fully clothed people walk in.

I was there for a grand total of three minutes when one of the other volunteers - a pregnant women - asked if I’d swap places with her husband (er, which is to say, her husband was still in the other apartment, and she was nervous and wanted to have him with her in the picture). Back I went.

Yet more sitting around… guy with walkie kept coming in and saying “five minutes, five minutes” while we wondered how the shoot was going to work given our position. This shortly gave way to wondering why the front balconies were filling up since we hadn’t even been given the go-ahead to strip. Ten minutes later and guy with walkie comes in looking sheepish: “Uh, it’s over.”

Six fucking am, I haven’t had so much as a shoe off, and we’re told it’s over. Second cardinal rule I broke: never be nice to a pregnant woman.

Ah, I can’t stay mad at her. She was very nice and hadn’t been at the South Wall shoot, so I’m glad she had the opportunity. Still, the concordance of piss-ups and breweries springs to mind.

At least I’ll always have the beach.

The nudd

Published

Colm

on 21 June, 2008

in Misc.

. 10 Comments

I managed to blag my way into the Spencer Tunick shoot at the Docklands this morning following rave reviews of the Cork event. Unfortunately the one person I knew was going pulled out shortly after getting me a release form. After taking to the mean streets of my phonebook and meeting a giant collective “Nuh-uh” I decided to go by myself, and I’m glad I did because cracking jokes with naked strangers on a wall jutting into the sea at five in the morning is about the most fun one can have with one’s clothes in a plastic bag several hundred yards away.

The actual stripping was not as weird as I expected. StereoTyping made it sound like a Village of the Damned kind of thing, like some kind of hive mind decision, but I guess that aspect of it was spoiled for me by the fact that I’d pushed up to within 20 feet of the guy with the megaphone. Maybe all the people at the back had a different time of it, I don’t know. It was a cool experience though - no nervousness whatsoever.

There followed a long walk to the end of the South Wall as everyone was asked to spread out. We were herded into staggered lines while the man himself nadged off in the other direction. There was a certain amount of waiting around here, although we were able to amuse ourselves by mooning the Stena Sealink and manically saluting the Irish Ferries boat (because English people are bad and Irish people are not, obviously).

After just long enough had passed for me to assume that he’d buggered off for a cuppa, there was muttering down the line about “Position A”. Position A consisted of everyone standing with their arms by their side and facing out to sea (well, there was sea on both sides of us so that’s not terribly specific… everyone facing in the same direction, is what you should be getting from this). At no point did I see any sort of camera so I don’t know if there was any good god damn reason to hold it for as long as we did, but any annoyance on this score was mitigated by the fact that Position B turned out to be A Nice Sit Down. This was shortly followed by everyone lying down in a foetal position, and… well, a piece of advice: if you ever find yourself in the nip on the South Wall at dawn on an overcast day, you might want to minimise the amount of skin you put in contact with the ground.

After the first shoot packed up there was a nice Schindler’s List-esque trudge back to the clothes, and of course I was one of the people who couldn’t find his… it’s amazing how standing around with a few hundred other naked people feels perfectly normal, but wandering lost among people who are tying their shoelaces and zipping up their hoodies just makes you feel like a crazy person. Fortunately my bag turned up in the hands of a lovely young gentlemen, who politely declined a hug.

We were told that another shoot would be kicking off in a while for anyone who wanted to stick around. Probably around two hundred people stayed, including yours truly, and after half an hour or so we all filed down to the beach, stripped off again and ran screaming into the sea. I should point out that it had started raining at this point, so the natural response was to start splashing each other, dancing reels and singing “Olé Olé”. Because we’re Irish and that’s how we fucking roll.

This last shoot was the highlight of the whole thing, hands down. The previous stuff had all been a lot of waiting around and pulling a pose and repeating, and it was cool but you weren’t necessarily that engaged. Whereas this was the 200 most euphoric and up-for-it people in the gaff standing shin deep in the sea and having a party. Even when it got to the posing, it was mostly about who could shout something to make the most people laugh. My personal favourite was ten seconds of silence followed by a lonely-sounding “I don’t know what a tracker mortgage is”. God bless you sir, you made my morning.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE. After the rather horrific experience of scrambling into soaking wet, sand-covered clothes (while using a bathtowel as an umbrella… not as ineffective as you might think), and while we were shuffling back towards the buses, Spence and some dude started handing out leaflets. One of these was an invite to a post-installation dinner on Sunday. The other was an invitation to a Super Extra Bonus Shoot that’s taking place on balconies in the city centre tonight.

Can’t fucking wait.

Sounds like a challenge

Published

Colm

on 18 June, 2008

in Writing

. 0 Comments

Neil Gaiman had this yesterday - from Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing:

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing — good writing — does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder — so eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably… the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying - and often drives us mad.

A cheerful fellow. From now on, if anyone asks me about how to be a writer I’ll just punch em in the face and be done with it.

Hilarity ensues

Published

Colm

on 17 June, 2008

in Writing

. 5 Comments

So despite being technically the first person to come to the fray (that’s right, scoop city), my weekend away has meant that I’m now more or less the last. So uh, apologies to the 80+ people who turned up yesterday expecting something actually interesting.

Handily, the gap does give me the opportunity to guage the general outlook on the thing, which outlook can be more or less summed up as “Yeah, cool”. The consensus seems to be that blogging is a personal thing, everyone does it for different reasons, and no one’s necessarily trying to beat on the walls of the literary and journalistic mainstream. Fine and dandy. There were some ill-advised, feet-first responses from the kind of people who use words like “blogosphere” without cracking a smile, but that’s just bruised idealism, and in all fairness the technology wouldn’t exist without the Interlifeweb Beta 2.0 Release Candidate 4 evangelists so I’m prepared to look the other way any time they start taking themselves a mite seriously.

Which is not to say that we should just buy into the sermons. We’re told that a plurality of voices and a free marketplace of ideas and all that assorted et ceteration is causing pure liquid democracy to ooze out of every cranny in the gaff, but the aggregate level of context-hatin’, knee-jerkin’ self-righteousness among Serious Bloggers is enough to make the Daily Mail blush. Online discussions aren’t about considered debate or meticulous research, they’re about grabbing four words out of the comment above you, inventing some random connections between them, and then taking this new and improved comment personally. It’s about taking the worst qualities of four year olds and brick walls and then beating people in the face with them.

Back to the post in question. Some people took issue with Rosie’s assertion that some of the Irish blogging A-list are “shit-awful writers,” insisting that this was just her being a snob and stuck-up and too impressed with her own subjective judgement. Fellas: no. You’re wrong, and I have the ivory tower education to prove it. Put it this way - by your logic, Cecelia Ahern and Dan Brown are the most awesome and great writers in the world. If they had babies, they’d be in the shape of Nobel prize medals. But objectively speaking, they are bad manipulators of language whose novels are a great big slapstick orgy of clichés and mixed metaphors and lazy plots, and sure their content might be tons of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind but please in the name of all that’s holy don’t try to pretend that their merit as writers is just a matter of opinion.

Well. I haven’t slept in five days so I’ll leave you with the charming spectacle of a murderous gimp doing the funky chicken. Good night e’body.

Quis critiquiet ipsos critiquies?

Published

Colm

on 13 June, 2008

in Links

. 4 Comments

Rosie has waxed critical-like on the Irish inter-blogging-o-sphere. I have some thoughts of my own but right now I have a bus to catch. I’m only posting this so that the lazy part of my brain can’t weasel out of posting a longer bit at some point over the next few days. Although now I kind of want to weasel out just to show that I’m not the boss of me.

Update: and away we go.