Barbara Ehrenreich's latest work is a series of meditations on the concept of what she calls 'collective joy', and while she aims “to speak seriously of the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation,” it is apparent that the lines cannot be so clearly drawn. Collective outpourings of emotion have been around for as long as the cultural mind remembers, but 'joy' is a slippery concept indeed.
She begins with ancient Classical rituals, then moves through early Christianity, medieval European carnivals, the effects of Calvinism on social life, non-European rituals in the New and Old Worlds, and then moves into fascism, the 'carnivalization of sports' and contemporary rock music.
This isn't the cultural history of the party buzz she promises, but her tangents are both necessary and interesting: a chapter on the rise of 'melancholy' and the roots of modern depression, the complicated questions about events like fascist spectacles (a Nazi rally wasn't so joyous to behold if you were a Jew), and the changing contextual meanings of carnivals and festivals.
It is unfortunate that she relies somewhat heavily on the idea of 'Dionysian rituals' and that some of the anthropological and archaeological evidence she uses in her earlier chapters is either outdated or haphazardly applied. But A History of Collective Joy is a mixed bag mainly because when a writer tries to stay too close to a single theme unified, not by historical or social realities but by a publisher's requirements, it's bound to fray at the edges.
We can't be sure past people experienced anything like 'joy' in its contemporary sense, and perhaps the idea doesn't come into its own until the rise in the melancholy which the repression of ecstatic rituals may have evoked. Even Renaissance depictions of saintly ecstasy were extremes of pleasure and pain. Is, then, the rise of 'joy' and concurrent rise of 'melancholy' a result, not so much of repression, but from the Enlightenment that forcibly divided them? Was
there joy before there was acute joylessness?
The 'authorities' have always feared the potential unruliness of a crowd, and perhaps the real fear is as much in these crowds' dissolution of the boundaries between celebration and unrest, protest and party, but in the way they expose the artificiality of that boundary. The 'sublime' these gatherings may have invoked was appropriate for contemplating nature, not a street party for the masses.
Ultimately, though, Ehrenreich is optimistic in the power for collective joy (whatever 'joy' even is) to be a force for positive change, and for all of its flaws in research and intellectual contradictions, this is a thoughtful narrative experiment, respectful to humans and relentlessly thought-provoking.
(From Totally Dublin, November 2007)
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Enthusiasts: Comics
A lot of collectors have an inclination toward a particular category, but they dabble in everything, sort of like drug addicts. And once upon a time, comics were seen as contributing to juvenile delinquency: Robin had bare legs, Wonder Woman sent dangerous messages about women's roles, and Superman defied the laws of physics with bedevilling impunity. There were mass burnings of comic books in the 1940s, and judges showed leniency to 'delinquents' who could show it was comics what did it.
But a comic collection is unlikely to destroy your family or make you a coke bore. It might turn you into the Comic Book Store Guy, but it didn't do that to Garrett Roche, a.k.a. Mr Barney, a.a.k.a. Mr Vintage Brown. He has almost every comic book a collector would want – two, three, four, five copies of some. So what happens when you've collected everything? You keep going. Or you think about opening a shop, if only to feed your inner comic monster.
It started in the mid-1980s. ”It was a comic called Screamer. It wouldn't be well-known, but it was the first that was sent to me, probably in 1985, by my brother who lived in New York. He continued sending me comics, and then when I moved over there I continued collecting.”
His wife Tracey list off some of the other things he collects: DVDs, movie posters, whiskey, antique medical supplies (and he and Tracey use an antique she-pee as a port decanter), and paintings by artist Graham Knuttel. And that's on top of 30,000-40,000 comics. Enough that his estimate has a margin of error of 10,000.
“You don't know you've got a collection until there's no more room to put anything. And then you're like, 'How did I end up with all this stuff?' Or you get married and your wife points out that you have no room to put anything else.” He turns to her, “No, actually, you're quite patient.”
Tracey has sufficient hoarder's instinct to be sympathetic to his collection. They are both 'junk junkies', and she is a second-hand and vintage shopper. “When we started going out first, I went into his room, and he had these toys – to the untrained eye they were toys. I went to go touch them, and he said, 'They're not toys.' It was a make or break moment. Looking back now, if I'd gone, 'Ah, they're only toys,' and pushed them off the shelf, I'd have been gone!'”
He admits sometimes he's sick of collecting, but knows he'll still find himself back in New York, spending three days looking through the same shop.
Tracey says, “When he goes on his comic book adventures -- I can't imagine what those explorers felt when they found the North Pole but by the look on his face, it's like that.”
Comics are about hunting and hoarding, and Tracey's North Pole quip seems resonant. Global exploration also deals with a finite space; there are only so many Incredible Hulk comics in the world. Maybe that's part of the reason why comics became collectible in the first place: the thrill of discovery, plus control over the small and measurable world of comics, making everything as it should be.
Everything is double-bagged with a backing board, arranged alphabetically and numerically. It's lucky that meticulousness and collecting seem to go together. I picture their house looking like the museum of some Victorian Royal Society: everything classified, ordered, numbered, and yet, this extreme order comes full circle into boggling chaos.
Comic book collecting as we know it is relatively recent, and like Victorian gentlemen with antiquities, butterflies, or geodes, some collectors have periodised the history of comics into neat(ish) boxes: the Victorian, Platinum, Atomic, and so on up to the Modern, post-1980 age, after which the comics produced are less collectible because by then people had started to keep them in 'collectible' condition.
“I know most of the stuff when I was a child got cut up, painted on the walls, buried in the back garden. A couple were fed to my dog. I wasn't that way inclined as a child,” says Garrett, “Things got destroyed. It was only in my early teens that I started collecting.”
Pre-1970s generations folded them, carried them around in pockets, and so where these survive, they are almost never mint. “That's why those comics are now worth like half a million dollars.” Garrett shows me a copy of one of the 'Holy Grails' of comics, a Hulk with a €1400 price tag. It's amazing to think he'd be willing to part with it. There's the explorer's instinct, yes, but it's also like a trap-and-release sort of hunting. The price tag may €1400, but the real value, the real thrill, is in passing it on to the next collector, then trying to find another one.
But a comic collection is unlikely to destroy your family or make you a coke bore. It might turn you into the Comic Book Store Guy, but it didn't do that to Garrett Roche, a.k.a. Mr Barney, a.a.k.a. Mr Vintage Brown. He has almost every comic book a collector would want – two, three, four, five copies of some. So what happens when you've collected everything? You keep going. Or you think about opening a shop, if only to feed your inner comic monster.
It started in the mid-1980s. ”It was a comic called Screamer. It wouldn't be well-known, but it was the first that was sent to me, probably in 1985, by my brother who lived in New York. He continued sending me comics, and then when I moved over there I continued collecting.”
His wife Tracey list off some of the other things he collects: DVDs, movie posters, whiskey, antique medical supplies (and he and Tracey use an antique she-pee as a port decanter), and paintings by artist Graham Knuttel. And that's on top of 30,000-40,000 comics. Enough that his estimate has a margin of error of 10,000.
“You don't know you've got a collection until there's no more room to put anything. And then you're like, 'How did I end up with all this stuff?' Or you get married and your wife points out that you have no room to put anything else.” He turns to her, “No, actually, you're quite patient.”
Tracey has sufficient hoarder's instinct to be sympathetic to his collection. They are both 'junk junkies', and she is a second-hand and vintage shopper. “When we started going out first, I went into his room, and he had these toys – to the untrained eye they were toys. I went to go touch them, and he said, 'They're not toys.' It was a make or break moment. Looking back now, if I'd gone, 'Ah, they're only toys,' and pushed them off the shelf, I'd have been gone!'”
He admits sometimes he's sick of collecting, but knows he'll still find himself back in New York, spending three days looking through the same shop.
Tracey says, “When he goes on his comic book adventures -- I can't imagine what those explorers felt when they found the North Pole but by the look on his face, it's like that.”
Comics are about hunting and hoarding, and Tracey's North Pole quip seems resonant. Global exploration also deals with a finite space; there are only so many Incredible Hulk comics in the world. Maybe that's part of the reason why comics became collectible in the first place: the thrill of discovery, plus control over the small and measurable world of comics, making everything as it should be.
Everything is double-bagged with a backing board, arranged alphabetically and numerically. It's lucky that meticulousness and collecting seem to go together. I picture their house looking like the museum of some Victorian Royal Society: everything classified, ordered, numbered, and yet, this extreme order comes full circle into boggling chaos.
Comic book collecting as we know it is relatively recent, and like Victorian gentlemen with antiquities, butterflies, or geodes, some collectors have periodised the history of comics into neat(ish) boxes: the Victorian, Platinum, Atomic, and so on up to the Modern, post-1980 age, after which the comics produced are less collectible because by then people had started to keep them in 'collectible' condition.
“I know most of the stuff when I was a child got cut up, painted on the walls, buried in the back garden. A couple were fed to my dog. I wasn't that way inclined as a child,” says Garrett, “Things got destroyed. It was only in my early teens that I started collecting.”
Pre-1970s generations folded them, carried them around in pockets, and so where these survive, they are almost never mint. “That's why those comics are now worth like half a million dollars.” Garrett shows me a copy of one of the 'Holy Grails' of comics, a Hulk with a €1400 price tag. It's amazing to think he'd be willing to part with it. There's the explorer's instinct, yes, but it's also like a trap-and-release sort of hunting. The price tag may €1400, but the real value, the real thrill, is in passing it on to the next collector, then trying to find another one.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Enthusiasts: The Dublin Doll Hospital
The Dolls' Hospital at the Dublin Doll Store
The Doll Hospital is what you think it is, but then again, it's not. Owner Melissa trained as a dollmaker, and now most of her time is spent fixing dolls and stuffed toys, and dealing in dollhouses and miniatures. The first Dublin doll hospital was opened by Jewish immigrants in the 1940s, and operated until the 1970s. It was elsewhere in the city, but the atmosphere here is evocative enough to convince people otherwise. “People come in and say 'I was in here as a child.'” She points to glass-fronted cabinets along the walls. “I don't remember going into the old dolls' hospital, but apparently it had brown cabinets, and they're convinced it was here. So we don't bother saying any more that it wasn't.”
The original Doll Hospital had legs, heads and arms hanging from the walls and ceiling, but Melissa's stock of disembodied doll parts is placed wisely out of view, as are the dolls they buy from charity shops, which they...well, which they harvest. It sounds a little macabre, but it isn't. Okay, there was that person who wanted Granddad's ashes put into a teddy bear. And sometimes particularly bad cases spend a few days in the freezer, to kill any flora and fauna.
People don't come just to buy. Sometimes they sit down, bring cakes. “It's not your ordinary kind of shop.” Melissa hands a key to the display cabinets to Thomas, a dollhouse enthusiast and shop regular.
We live in a culture where everything seems disposable, so it's nice that this shop survives. No matter how many people like to throw away money, the value of teddy bears and dolls is neither quantifiable nor material. Sometimes repairs mean replacing almost the entire toy, but it's not the authenticity of the doll, it's the sincerity of the attachment to it that matters. Toys are not just childish frivolities, they are monuments to childhood, beneficent guardians of memory, escapes into innocence.
A doll once came in covered with ink spots. “The girl had been a twin, and the other twin had died from the measles.” Melissa says. “When the twin was sick, the girl who was okay put spots all over this doll, and when she died, this became her sister.” The girl later decided she wanted the spots removed, but the best Melissa could do was get a similar face.
There is the biker couple who have their bears cleaned and re-stuffed (and, Melissa thinks, maybe babysat) every year when they go away. Sometimes they kiss their bears goodbye. There was the woman in Liverpool whose boyfriend cut the hands and feet off her teddy bear in a psychotic rage. Melissa fixed it and received a thank-you note reporting the bear's safe return and a good riddance to the boyfriend. There are no toy stories not replete with emotion because there are no well-loved toys devoid of it.
An elderly woman once brought a doll into the shop. “She was in the Jewish nursing home. She said, 'I know what happens when you die up there: everything is thrown out and the room is cleaned. I have no one to leave it to, so I want to sell now.'” Melissa wouldn't usually buy something like this, but she did, and assured her it wouldn't be thrown out. “The eyes were wild, it's as if it was shocked. I think at the time I gave her something like fifty pounds for it. I knew that it was a comfort to her even though I didn't know what I was going to do with it.”
The woman had been in Auschwitz as a child, and when she eventually arrived in London, she'd been given a doll. “She said that when she got it, she dropped it because she thought it was a dead baby. After that, she loved it.” Thinking about a childhood where toys are outside one's frame of reference, where a doll is alien, more likely to be a dead infant, puts things in perspective.
She eventually found a home for it when a man from the RTE orchestra came in to buy musical instrument miniatures.”I was chatting to him -- how it came up, I don't know, but his wife had been in a concentration camp. So I gave it to him because my heart said to me that this is where it should go. It's not the sort of doll you ever could have sold.”
The Doll Hospital, it's just what you think it is, and sure, they fix stuff, but when you think about what they really repair, it also might be the only hospital in town that manages to care for people. Eat that, Mary Harney.
(Originally published in Totally Dublin, October 2007)
The Doll Hospital is what you think it is, but then again, it's not. Owner Melissa trained as a dollmaker, and now most of her time is spent fixing dolls and stuffed toys, and dealing in dollhouses and miniatures. The first Dublin doll hospital was opened by Jewish immigrants in the 1940s, and operated until the 1970s. It was elsewhere in the city, but the atmosphere here is evocative enough to convince people otherwise. “People come in and say 'I was in here as a child.'” She points to glass-fronted cabinets along the walls. “I don't remember going into the old dolls' hospital, but apparently it had brown cabinets, and they're convinced it was here. So we don't bother saying any more that it wasn't.”
The original Doll Hospital had legs, heads and arms hanging from the walls and ceiling, but Melissa's stock of disembodied doll parts is placed wisely out of view, as are the dolls they buy from charity shops, which they...well, which they harvest. It sounds a little macabre, but it isn't. Okay, there was that person who wanted Granddad's ashes put into a teddy bear. And sometimes particularly bad cases spend a few days in the freezer, to kill any flora and fauna.
People don't come just to buy. Sometimes they sit down, bring cakes. “It's not your ordinary kind of shop.” Melissa hands a key to the display cabinets to Thomas, a dollhouse enthusiast and shop regular.
We live in a culture where everything seems disposable, so it's nice that this shop survives. No matter how many people like to throw away money, the value of teddy bears and dolls is neither quantifiable nor material. Sometimes repairs mean replacing almost the entire toy, but it's not the authenticity of the doll, it's the sincerity of the attachment to it that matters. Toys are not just childish frivolities, they are monuments to childhood, beneficent guardians of memory, escapes into innocence.
A doll once came in covered with ink spots. “The girl had been a twin, and the other twin had died from the measles.” Melissa says. “When the twin was sick, the girl who was okay put spots all over this doll, and when she died, this became her sister.” The girl later decided she wanted the spots removed, but the best Melissa could do was get a similar face.
There is the biker couple who have their bears cleaned and re-stuffed (and, Melissa thinks, maybe babysat) every year when they go away. Sometimes they kiss their bears goodbye. There was the woman in Liverpool whose boyfriend cut the hands and feet off her teddy bear in a psychotic rage. Melissa fixed it and received a thank-you note reporting the bear's safe return and a good riddance to the boyfriend. There are no toy stories not replete with emotion because there are no well-loved toys devoid of it.
An elderly woman once brought a doll into the shop. “She was in the Jewish nursing home. She said, 'I know what happens when you die up there: everything is thrown out and the room is cleaned. I have no one to leave it to, so I want to sell now.'” Melissa wouldn't usually buy something like this, but she did, and assured her it wouldn't be thrown out. “The eyes were wild, it's as if it was shocked. I think at the time I gave her something like fifty pounds for it. I knew that it was a comfort to her even though I didn't know what I was going to do with it.”
The woman had been in Auschwitz as a child, and when she eventually arrived in London, she'd been given a doll. “She said that when she got it, she dropped it because she thought it was a dead baby. After that, she loved it.” Thinking about a childhood where toys are outside one's frame of reference, where a doll is alien, more likely to be a dead infant, puts things in perspective.
She eventually found a home for it when a man from the RTE orchestra came in to buy musical instrument miniatures.”I was chatting to him -- how it came up, I don't know, but his wife had been in a concentration camp. So I gave it to him because my heart said to me that this is where it should go. It's not the sort of doll you ever could have sold.”
The Doll Hospital, it's just what you think it is, and sure, they fix stuff, but when you think about what they really repair, it also might be the only hospital in town that manages to care for people. Eat that, Mary Harney.
(Originally published in Totally Dublin, October 2007)
Album Review: Hybrasil
Hybrasil – The Monkey Pole (Manazo)
If it's possible to have a favourite mythical island, Hy Brasil is mine. Belief in its existence off the west coast of Ireland persisted until recently, enough to merit its inclusion on 19th-century maps, and some explorers (i.e. 'conquerors') tried in vain to find it. So, naturally, I would be protective of the name. The real-life Hybrasil plays what they describe as 'indietronic',a hybrid synthy-pop that is everywhere these days. Songs are well-constructed and thoughtfully done, nice little indie-rock tunes with requisite fuzz, synth and beats with nods to every decade they've lived through, all tied up in a neat package and lined up on a tidy assembly line, ready for their single release dates.
The first track, “We Got Music” was part of an EP released in September 2005 to minor independent success and applause from radio DJs, and this past June, they put out “God Bless the Devil”, also on the album. The problem is, like many bands of this ilk, it seems that an impressive list of sounds, instruments and effects has been used as a substitute for real energy, and there's not enough of any one ingredient to really make an impact. Most tracks have potential (“A Million Moments” coming closest), but ultimately remind me of bands that I'd rather be listening to. Maybe it's a bit overdone, maybe it's just me, or maybe they'll put away the recipe book and risk making a bit more of a mess, aim to live up to the mystique their name implies.
6/10
(Originally published in Hot Press)
If it's possible to have a favourite mythical island, Hy Brasil is mine. Belief in its existence off the west coast of Ireland persisted until recently, enough to merit its inclusion on 19th-century maps, and some explorers (i.e. 'conquerors') tried in vain to find it. So, naturally, I would be protective of the name. The real-life Hybrasil plays what they describe as 'indietronic',a hybrid synthy-pop that is everywhere these days. Songs are well-constructed and thoughtfully done, nice little indie-rock tunes with requisite fuzz, synth and beats with nods to every decade they've lived through, all tied up in a neat package and lined up on a tidy assembly line, ready for their single release dates.
The first track, “We Got Music” was part of an EP released in September 2005 to minor independent success and applause from radio DJs, and this past June, they put out “God Bless the Devil”, also on the album. The problem is, like many bands of this ilk, it seems that an impressive list of sounds, instruments and effects has been used as a substitute for real energy, and there's not enough of any one ingredient to really make an impact. Most tracks have potential (“A Million Moments” coming closest), but ultimately remind me of bands that I'd rather be listening to. Maybe it's a bit overdone, maybe it's just me, or maybe they'll put away the recipe book and risk making a bit more of a mess, aim to live up to the mystique their name implies.
6/10
(Originally published in Hot Press)
Live Review: Feist
Feist + Bob Wiseman
Tripod
25 September 2007
Poor Bob Wiseman. He plays films on a screen, scoring and sometimes narrating: it's funny in concept, but not in execution, something out of a small-town community talent show, and it doesn't help that the air conditioning is drowning him out. He seems like an affable, likeable chap, which is why I want him to get off the stage, go home, and throw out at least half of his McSweeney's anthologies. Later in the evening, we will learn there's a piano player inside him, but now I just want it to stop.
Then there's Leslie Feist, a charismatic song machine who flits between pop and folk and jazz and blues and whatever it takes to get the music out. There's a whiff of the unhinged and yet she always seems to be in total control, the tunes just sort of slide out of her, sometimes a storm, sometimes a gentle breeze, breaking every heart in the place with 'So Sorry' and then healing them in an instant with 'My Moon, My Man'. In another century, she might have been burned as a witch for what she's doing, and it might be cruel if it weren't so stunningly good. She asks the room what the 'funny letters' on the Irish road signs are, “Is it Gaelic or Celtic?” “It's Irish!” the room yells in unison, forgiving in the way Dublin crowds rarely are. After all, it's her first time in Ireland, and from the mesmeric response it's clear we're all thinking the same thing: can we keep her?
(Originally published in Hot Press)
Tripod
25 September 2007
Poor Bob Wiseman. He plays films on a screen, scoring and sometimes narrating: it's funny in concept, but not in execution, something out of a small-town community talent show, and it doesn't help that the air conditioning is drowning him out. He seems like an affable, likeable chap, which is why I want him to get off the stage, go home, and throw out at least half of his McSweeney's anthologies. Later in the evening, we will learn there's a piano player inside him, but now I just want it to stop.
Then there's Leslie Feist, a charismatic song machine who flits between pop and folk and jazz and blues and whatever it takes to get the music out. There's a whiff of the unhinged and yet she always seems to be in total control, the tunes just sort of slide out of her, sometimes a storm, sometimes a gentle breeze, breaking every heart in the place with 'So Sorry' and then healing them in an instant with 'My Moon, My Man'. In another century, she might have been burned as a witch for what she's doing, and it might be cruel if it weren't so stunningly good. She asks the room what the 'funny letters' on the Irish road signs are, “Is it Gaelic or Celtic?” “It's Irish!” the room yells in unison, forgiving in the way Dublin crowds rarely are. After all, it's her first time in Ireland, and from the mesmeric response it's clear we're all thinking the same thing: can we keep her?
(Originally published in Hot Press)
The Donnas – Bitchin' (Cooking Vinyl)
The Donnas emerged in the early 1990s, a teeny-bopping novelty act playing Ramones-inspired punk tunes, and it was kinda sweet: a little bit bad-ass, naughty in the most innocent of ways, funny kid-sister types. They were tentatively accepted on the margins of the punk scene because they weren't half-bad, but not fully embraced because, after all, they were 'discovered', and their songs were written by someone else. The Donnas can be credited with some decent tunes, and – maybe -- adding to the critical mass that made women's music more visible, but they were nothing more than a bit of fun. They were personae, but instead of evolving into a band with substance, they've just taken on a new guise.
The Donnas emphasise their enduring thick-and-thin friendship, and friendship's all very nice, but it doesn't make your music good. No matter how much talent you may or may not have, if you have a persona, it will always be bigger and badder and incredibly irritating. Go on, drink whiskey from the bottle, see if I care. But when you're done, don't jump around like gracelessly ageing Bratz dolls playing late-era Kiss and think you're a blistering she-Crue, write some songs. Show, don't tell. This croaks along, a slack journey from the innocuous pop-punk of the new Scooby Doo theme to boring, soulless, sub-cock-rock. That's not metal. That's not rock. Rock belts. Metal aches. This is just plain sore and is not at all bitchin'.
(Originally published in Hot Press)
The Donnas emerged in the early 1990s, a teeny-bopping novelty act playing Ramones-inspired punk tunes, and it was kinda sweet: a little bit bad-ass, naughty in the most innocent of ways, funny kid-sister types. They were tentatively accepted on the margins of the punk scene because they weren't half-bad, but not fully embraced because, after all, they were 'discovered', and their songs were written by someone else. The Donnas can be credited with some decent tunes, and – maybe -- adding to the critical mass that made women's music more visible, but they were nothing more than a bit of fun. They were personae, but instead of evolving into a band with substance, they've just taken on a new guise.
The Donnas emphasise their enduring thick-and-thin friendship, and friendship's all very nice, but it doesn't make your music good. No matter how much talent you may or may not have, if you have a persona, it will always be bigger and badder and incredibly irritating. Go on, drink whiskey from the bottle, see if I care. But when you're done, don't jump around like gracelessly ageing Bratz dolls playing late-era Kiss and think you're a blistering she-Crue, write some songs. Show, don't tell. This croaks along, a slack journey from the innocuous pop-punk of the new Scooby Doo theme to boring, soulless, sub-cock-rock. That's not metal. That's not rock. Rock belts. Metal aches. This is just plain sore and is not at all bitchin'.
(Originally published in Hot Press)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Review: When We Were Romans
When We Were Romans
Matthew Kneale
(Picador)
Hannah's estranged husband is giving her trouble, so she packs the car and heads off to hide out in Rome, where she lived as a young woman. Lawrence is the wilful nine-year old narrator and caretaker for his mother, sister, and his hamster, Hermann. In Rome there are at first boisterous dinner parties and happy reunions as they shuffle between the small apartments of Hannah's various friends there, but when they get their own quarters, the storm clouds roll in.
Lawrence develops a fascination with the most demented Roman emperors and most deluded Popes, intrigued by their paranoia . This fascination grows in tandem with his mother's worry that their father has followed them to Rome and is renting an apartment with a view into their own. A suspicious substance is found on the icing of a cake, knives appear in Lawrence's bed, and there is a mysterious white powder in the water.
Kneale has set himself some challenging tasks. Rome is a difficult place for fiction, writers often rely too heavily on it, burying plot and character in unnecessary image-noise. The child narrator, too, is frequently troublesome. When it's wrong, it's impossible to overcome, leaving otherwise good stories trapped inside unreadable novels. Finally, the stalker-ex-husband saga almost always reeks of Midweek Movie. The three in combination could have been lethal, but Kneale resists the temptation to dwell on the beauty of Rome, not reflecting an adult vision of the city, but a child's geography of it, as well as a child's perception of familial breakdown. The Piazza Navona is not notable for its fountain, but for the toy shop that sells the miniature Roman soldiers Lawrence covets. He never asks why their father would do this to them, but feels the effect when he learns there isn't enough money for him to have an army of Roman soldiers.
Lawrence defines his mother's friends and acquaintances by the animals they resemble, based on appearance and on how nice they are to him and Jemima. We meet her old friend 'Franseen nice cat', new acquaintance 'Janiss pretty pig' and the barrel-chested and bearded poet, 'Freddy Christmas bear'. The descriptive silhouette makes Lawrence's Roman landscape all the more colourful. A number of questions are left unanswered out of necessity: a nine-year old boy like Lawrence might not ask where his mother's money comes from, or why their father might do this to them, or successfully differentiate between imagination and reality. The narrative can become irritating (especially in the use of phonetic spellings), but rather than assign Lawrence a maturity that would undermine his voice, Kneale just lets it be, and it remains believable. I don't know how Matthew Kneale made this work, but he did, and it does.
(From Totally Dublin, July 2007)
Matthew Kneale
(Picador)
Hannah's estranged husband is giving her trouble, so she packs the car and heads off to hide out in Rome, where she lived as a young woman. Lawrence is the wilful nine-year old narrator and caretaker for his mother, sister, and his hamster, Hermann. In Rome there are at first boisterous dinner parties and happy reunions as they shuffle between the small apartments of Hannah's various friends there, but when they get their own quarters, the storm clouds roll in.
Lawrence develops a fascination with the most demented Roman emperors and most deluded Popes, intrigued by their paranoia . This fascination grows in tandem with his mother's worry that their father has followed them to Rome and is renting an apartment with a view into their own. A suspicious substance is found on the icing of a cake, knives appear in Lawrence's bed, and there is a mysterious white powder in the water.
Kneale has set himself some challenging tasks. Rome is a difficult place for fiction, writers often rely too heavily on it, burying plot and character in unnecessary image-noise. The child narrator, too, is frequently troublesome. When it's wrong, it's impossible to overcome, leaving otherwise good stories trapped inside unreadable novels. Finally, the stalker-ex-husband saga almost always reeks of Midweek Movie. The three in combination could have been lethal, but Kneale resists the temptation to dwell on the beauty of Rome, not reflecting an adult vision of the city, but a child's geography of it, as well as a child's perception of familial breakdown. The Piazza Navona is not notable for its fountain, but for the toy shop that sells the miniature Roman soldiers Lawrence covets. He never asks why their father would do this to them, but feels the effect when he learns there isn't enough money for him to have an army of Roman soldiers.
Lawrence defines his mother's friends and acquaintances by the animals they resemble, based on appearance and on how nice they are to him and Jemima. We meet her old friend 'Franseen nice cat', new acquaintance 'Janiss pretty pig' and the barrel-chested and bearded poet, 'Freddy Christmas bear'. The descriptive silhouette makes Lawrence's Roman landscape all the more colourful. A number of questions are left unanswered out of necessity: a nine-year old boy like Lawrence might not ask where his mother's money comes from, or why their father might do this to them, or successfully differentiate between imagination and reality. The narrative can become irritating (especially in the use of phonetic spellings), but rather than assign Lawrence a maturity that would undermine his voice, Kneale just lets it be, and it remains believable. I don't know how Matthew Kneale made this work, but he did, and it does.
(From Totally Dublin, July 2007)
Review: Deliver Us From Evil
Deliver us from Evil (Dir: Amy Berg)
Father Oliver O’Grady is a serial rapist who spent as much time planning and carrying out the rape of hundreds of children as he did on his clerical duties over twenty years in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Bishop Roger Mahony covered it up, moving him from parish to parish where he found new victims. In the early 1990s, faced with multiple charges, O’Grady cut a deal, served seven years on a contempt charge, and was deported to Ireland, where he lives freely on an annuity paid by the Church, seemingly incapable of remorse.
If you believe a word of this, you don’t need to see it, and if you do see it, it won’t be for entertainment. Amy Berg’s matter-of-fact documentary is built from interviews with O’Grady’s victims and their families, victim advocates, deposition footage and – surprisingly -- O’Grady himself. He blames his superiors for not delivering him from temptation, and says he would like to apologise to his victims in person. He has no idea what horror he hath wrought – and there are thousands more like him.
Worse, his superiors don’t care, which victim advocate Father Tom Doyle notes is the de facto strategy of a hierarchy that places more value on bishops than it does on children. In a deposition, Bishop Mahony is asked, “He had sexual urges toward a nine-year old. Is that cause to remove him from ministry?” Mahony says it isn’t.
Not sick yet? Try sitting still while O’Grady, one eye on the camera, the other on the playground in St Stephen’s Green, admits he is aroused by naked pre-adolescents. It is unfortunate and ethically questionable for a director who knows his past to film him near children, but more unfortunate is that Berg’s film won’t trouble those who most need to be wrenched out of denial.
(From Totally Dublin, June 2007)
Father Oliver O’Grady is a serial rapist who spent as much time planning and carrying out the rape of hundreds of children as he did on his clerical duties over twenty years in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Bishop Roger Mahony covered it up, moving him from parish to parish where he found new victims. In the early 1990s, faced with multiple charges, O’Grady cut a deal, served seven years on a contempt charge, and was deported to Ireland, where he lives freely on an annuity paid by the Church, seemingly incapable of remorse.
If you believe a word of this, you don’t need to see it, and if you do see it, it won’t be for entertainment. Amy Berg’s matter-of-fact documentary is built from interviews with O’Grady’s victims and their families, victim advocates, deposition footage and – surprisingly -- O’Grady himself. He blames his superiors for not delivering him from temptation, and says he would like to apologise to his victims in person. He has no idea what horror he hath wrought – and there are thousands more like him.
Worse, his superiors don’t care, which victim advocate Father Tom Doyle notes is the de facto strategy of a hierarchy that places more value on bishops than it does on children. In a deposition, Bishop Mahony is asked, “He had sexual urges toward a nine-year old. Is that cause to remove him from ministry?” Mahony says it isn’t.
Not sick yet? Try sitting still while O’Grady, one eye on the camera, the other on the playground in St Stephen’s Green, admits he is aroused by naked pre-adolescents. It is unfortunate and ethically questionable for a director who knows his past to film him near children, but more unfortunate is that Berg’s film won’t trouble those who most need to be wrenched out of denial.
(From Totally Dublin, June 2007)
Review: When to Walk
When to Walk
Rebecca Gowers
(Canongate )
All families are psychotic, it is true, but we spend so much time moving, keeping busy, seeking external stimulation, our heads so crowded with various noises that we don’t stop to notice it. Ramble doesn’t move very fast. She’s got a bad hip, a dodgy pelvis, and she’s partially hearing-impaired, so she can’t but notice the loopiness around her.
Ramble’s husband Constantine has disappeared, and according to her downstairs neighbour, Mrs Shaw (whose name conjures up an image that is deeply incongruous with her character), he’s tampering with electricity meters under the tutelage of Mr Shaw. Ramble isn’t sure she wants to deal with it, and anyway, she’s got an article on ice sculpture festivals due for a glossy in-house magazine, for whom she writes travel articles about places she’s never been. She doesn’t exactly want to care, preferring to follow more interesting tangents: unfunny Victorian humour, Browning and his detractors, nineteenth-century tabloids, and looking up word etymologies on the computers in the local library.
She is less interested in her husband’s location than she is in a story Mrs Shaw told her that ended with ‘a perfect lie’. She is curious about the neighbourhood oddballs, the number of apparently disabled pigeons, wonders if her grandfather Alphonso was actually a homosexual, and can’t figure out why her grandmother doesn’t appear concerned about what happened to a German Jewish family she lived with before the war. Ramble is obsessive, yes, but lacks determination about any one particular thing. She is, perhaps, as she describes, a sort of ‘autistic vampire’.
Her daily rambles are laboured and short: the pub, the library, demented chats with her ever-deteriorating grandmother, Stella, occasional visits with the generous-hearted Johnson Pike, and no-nonsense email exchanges with her so-straight-she’s-eccentric epigrapher friend Beata. Within this small circuit, Ramble finds herself, not exploring the big world out there, but waiting to see what happens next on the tiny map of her world. You can go out and look for the crazy in the world, but if you stay in one place for long enough, the crazy will always find you.
Rebecca Gowers has a twisted imagination, bolstered by a bout of total immersion in Victoriana. Sometimes, When To Walk feels like a brain dump for all the demented thoughts that may have come to her while writing The Swamp of Death, her previous book, a non-fiction work about Victorian criminals. Sometimes the story lacks strength, feels like a connect-the-dots picture for disconnected thoughts – but ultimately, that is its strength. Ramble’s inner universe, her obsessions, the complexity of her character, of her discontented sense of place and self makes her an unusually sympathetic narrator; it is in the contorted, perverted world of literary grotesques that we find our closest kin.
Rebecca Gowers
(Canongate )
All families are psychotic, it is true, but we spend so much time moving, keeping busy, seeking external stimulation, our heads so crowded with various noises that we don’t stop to notice it. Ramble doesn’t move very fast. She’s got a bad hip, a dodgy pelvis, and she’s partially hearing-impaired, so she can’t but notice the loopiness around her.
Ramble’s husband Constantine has disappeared, and according to her downstairs neighbour, Mrs Shaw (whose name conjures up an image that is deeply incongruous with her character), he’s tampering with electricity meters under the tutelage of Mr Shaw. Ramble isn’t sure she wants to deal with it, and anyway, she’s got an article on ice sculpture festivals due for a glossy in-house magazine, for whom she writes travel articles about places she’s never been. She doesn’t exactly want to care, preferring to follow more interesting tangents: unfunny Victorian humour, Browning and his detractors, nineteenth-century tabloids, and looking up word etymologies on the computers in the local library.
She is less interested in her husband’s location than she is in a story Mrs Shaw told her that ended with ‘a perfect lie’. She is curious about the neighbourhood oddballs, the number of apparently disabled pigeons, wonders if her grandfather Alphonso was actually a homosexual, and can’t figure out why her grandmother doesn’t appear concerned about what happened to a German Jewish family she lived with before the war. Ramble is obsessive, yes, but lacks determination about any one particular thing. She is, perhaps, as she describes, a sort of ‘autistic vampire’.
Her daily rambles are laboured and short: the pub, the library, demented chats with her ever-deteriorating grandmother, Stella, occasional visits with the generous-hearted Johnson Pike, and no-nonsense email exchanges with her so-straight-she’s-eccentric epigrapher friend Beata. Within this small circuit, Ramble finds herself, not exploring the big world out there, but waiting to see what happens next on the tiny map of her world. You can go out and look for the crazy in the world, but if you stay in one place for long enough, the crazy will always find you.
Rebecca Gowers has a twisted imagination, bolstered by a bout of total immersion in Victoriana. Sometimes, When To Walk feels like a brain dump for all the demented thoughts that may have come to her while writing The Swamp of Death, her previous book, a non-fiction work about Victorian criminals. Sometimes the story lacks strength, feels like a connect-the-dots picture for disconnected thoughts – but ultimately, that is its strength. Ramble’s inner universe, her obsessions, the complexity of her character, of her discontented sense of place and self makes her an unusually sympathetic narrator; it is in the contorted, perverted world of literary grotesques that we find our closest kin.
Review: Dublin Nazi No 1
Dublin Nazi No 1. The Life of Adolf Mahr – Gerry Mullins (Liberties Press)
When Adolf Mahr came to Ireland in 1927 to take up a post as Keeper in the National Museum of Ireland, he arrived in an institution that retained a British worldview. Archaeological and historical objects were, according to Mahr, ‘intermingled with the worst rubbish’, including a collection of dolls, one of which was ‘naked except for a banner across its stomach, which reads “USA”.’ He encouraged new acquisitions, and helped reorganise the collections to create a museum that reflected the ideals of a fledgling Irish nation. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and by the late 1930s, was the head of the Irish Nazi Party, had been promoted to Museum Director, and was a widely-respected prehistoric archaeologist. In 1939, Mahr and his family left Ireland. His wife Maria and their children, Hilde, Gustav, Brigit and Ingrid, were sent on holidays while Adolf attended a conference of prehistoric archaeology and the Nuremberg rally. War broke out before they could return.
During the war, the Mahrs were in Germany, unsure when they would be able to return to Dublin. Adolf got a job with the Foreign Office, eventually managing an English propaganda radio service, where his intimate knowledge of Ireland proved useful. By the end of war, Adolf and Maria Mahr’s marriage had broken down (her support for Nazism waned even before the war), and the family had been separated. He still held his Museum directorship, on leave of absence without pay, until he was pensioned off in 1949.
Author Gerry Mullins uses archival sources, interviews, and enthusiastic co-operation from the Mahr children. Equally interesting is the story of Hilde, the eldest Mahr daughter, whose experiences bring wartime suffering – which undoubtedly knew no ethnic or political boundaries – into sharp focus. Like many children of former Nazis, the younger generation of Mahrs have long ‘shunned the hatred and intolerance that the Nazi creed promoted’; they and their contemporaries remain anxious that the lessons of Nazi history be learned in earnest.
This is a well-researched document, and as engaging as a historical biography should be. It provides an important and long-overdue contribution to the understanding of the Second World War through an Irish lens. He acknowledges the difficulty of separating Mahr’s professional life as an archaeologist from his politics, but avoids delving into these connections, keeping his narrative at the personal level. While he does not shy away from highlighting Mahr’s vicious anti-Semitism, he sometimes has difficulty reconciling it with what allowed the Holocaust to happen. He insists that there is not enough evidence to say Mahr was informed was about such matters, or that his motives were in line with them. Here, it becomes problematic.
Ingrid Mahr returned to Dublin after the war. She retrieved some of her father’s books and papers from the National Museum, and as instructed by Dr Michael Quane, burned a proportion of them. If there was indeed evidence to mar what remained of his legacy, some of it may have gone up in smoke. But is such evidence even necessary?
Mahr may have been unaware of Hitler’s despotic and genocidal plans, but being in regular correspondence with people in Germany, he likely knew about ongoing persecution of the Jews. Mullins even cites evidence that Mahr may have been involved with monitoring Jews in Ireland. And even though he had individual Jewish friends, some of whom he helped escape certain death, the fate of the rest may not have bothered him. More importantly, it would be naïve to assume that people in Europe of the 1930s, especially those with an academic background like Mahr’s, were unable to understand the consequences of reducing the status an entire section of the population to that of sub-humans.
It is at the level of the individual, especially one as controversial as Mahr, that concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ disintegrate, and true motives are always matters of speculation, existing in the vague and muddled space between the words, objects and actions that are our only evidence. Under the microscope, history’s heroes don’t seem so dignified, and its villains emerge as complex social beings with redeeming human qualities that are equally unsettling. Perhaps such moral conflict indicates that history should make us very uncomfortable indeed.
Once Mahr is fleshed out into three dimensions, the image resembles that of a trapped civil servant in an itchy suit, a cog just doing his job in an unfortunate bureaucratic machine, who would rather be at home with his children. The machine of tyranny is driven, not by individual maniacs, but by those who are just doing a job within a climate of collective mania where seemingly ordinary humans are capable of unspeakable things. Rather than wonder about his motives, if there is a point to writing about the past, this is perhaps most important lesson of Nazi history. Mullins’s work is certainly food for thought.
(From Magill, March 2007)
When Adolf Mahr came to Ireland in 1927 to take up a post as Keeper in the National Museum of Ireland, he arrived in an institution that retained a British worldview. Archaeological and historical objects were, according to Mahr, ‘intermingled with the worst rubbish’, including a collection of dolls, one of which was ‘naked except for a banner across its stomach, which reads “USA”.’ He encouraged new acquisitions, and helped reorganise the collections to create a museum that reflected the ideals of a fledgling Irish nation. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and by the late 1930s, was the head of the Irish Nazi Party, had been promoted to Museum Director, and was a widely-respected prehistoric archaeologist. In 1939, Mahr and his family left Ireland. His wife Maria and their children, Hilde, Gustav, Brigit and Ingrid, were sent on holidays while Adolf attended a conference of prehistoric archaeology and the Nuremberg rally. War broke out before they could return.
During the war, the Mahrs were in Germany, unsure when they would be able to return to Dublin. Adolf got a job with the Foreign Office, eventually managing an English propaganda radio service, where his intimate knowledge of Ireland proved useful. By the end of war, Adolf and Maria Mahr’s marriage had broken down (her support for Nazism waned even before the war), and the family had been separated. He still held his Museum directorship, on leave of absence without pay, until he was pensioned off in 1949.
Author Gerry Mullins uses archival sources, interviews, and enthusiastic co-operation from the Mahr children. Equally interesting is the story of Hilde, the eldest Mahr daughter, whose experiences bring wartime suffering – which undoubtedly knew no ethnic or political boundaries – into sharp focus. Like many children of former Nazis, the younger generation of Mahrs have long ‘shunned the hatred and intolerance that the Nazi creed promoted’; they and their contemporaries remain anxious that the lessons of Nazi history be learned in earnest.
This is a well-researched document, and as engaging as a historical biography should be. It provides an important and long-overdue contribution to the understanding of the Second World War through an Irish lens. He acknowledges the difficulty of separating Mahr’s professional life as an archaeologist from his politics, but avoids delving into these connections, keeping his narrative at the personal level. While he does not shy away from highlighting Mahr’s vicious anti-Semitism, he sometimes has difficulty reconciling it with what allowed the Holocaust to happen. He insists that there is not enough evidence to say Mahr was informed was about such matters, or that his motives were in line with them. Here, it becomes problematic.
Ingrid Mahr returned to Dublin after the war. She retrieved some of her father’s books and papers from the National Museum, and as instructed by Dr Michael Quane, burned a proportion of them. If there was indeed evidence to mar what remained of his legacy, some of it may have gone up in smoke. But is such evidence even necessary?
Mahr may have been unaware of Hitler’s despotic and genocidal plans, but being in regular correspondence with people in Germany, he likely knew about ongoing persecution of the Jews. Mullins even cites evidence that Mahr may have been involved with monitoring Jews in Ireland. And even though he had individual Jewish friends, some of whom he helped escape certain death, the fate of the rest may not have bothered him. More importantly, it would be naïve to assume that people in Europe of the 1930s, especially those with an academic background like Mahr’s, were unable to understand the consequences of reducing the status an entire section of the population to that of sub-humans.
It is at the level of the individual, especially one as controversial as Mahr, that concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ disintegrate, and true motives are always matters of speculation, existing in the vague and muddled space between the words, objects and actions that are our only evidence. Under the microscope, history’s heroes don’t seem so dignified, and its villains emerge as complex social beings with redeeming human qualities that are equally unsettling. Perhaps such moral conflict indicates that history should make us very uncomfortable indeed.
Once Mahr is fleshed out into three dimensions, the image resembles that of a trapped civil servant in an itchy suit, a cog just doing his job in an unfortunate bureaucratic machine, who would rather be at home with his children. The machine of tyranny is driven, not by individual maniacs, but by those who are just doing a job within a climate of collective mania where seemingly ordinary humans are capable of unspeakable things. Rather than wonder about his motives, if there is a point to writing about the past, this is perhaps most important lesson of Nazi history. Mullins’s work is certainly food for thought.
(From Magill, March 2007)
Do Make Say Think: Seomra Spraoi, Dublin
Sunday afternoon, and the Seomra Spraoi (Irish for ‘room of play’) is living up to its name. There’s Brazilian music, capoeira, sunshine and palpable cameraderie. Polish anarchists occupy the couch, eating lunch before their scheduled meeting, and visiting French activist Sebastien browses the Forgotten Zine Archive in the corner. Collective members’ toddlers (it’s also Kids’ Day, even though children are generally welcome at daytime events or evening meetings) bang toy instruments or have used their infant charms to commandeer bongos. But the effect of the cacophony is a harmonious one. Seomra Spraoi began in late 2004, a collective brought together to provide an informal space for artists, activists, and just about anyone sympathetic to its DIY and pro-equality ethos.
I’m sitting on the floor chatting with Marianne. The music is lively, but we can still hear each other. “I hope the neighbours don’t complain,” she says. One of the problems with the Seomra Spraoi is that while most European social centres occupy entire buildings, Dublin’s has only a single room in a partly residential building. Noise isn’t the only issue. It’s also a constant struggle to maintain the sense that this is a community space, and not a service. Says Marianne, “We're brought up in a world where everything is a service. Here if you mess the place up it's other people around you who have to clean it up. People also still think there's some overlord or something, some unknown force that says what's ok and not ok, what is possible to do in the space and what isn't.”
It is the people who define the space, and everyone I talk to emphasises the value of the informality that feeds its creative and social potential. Marianne gets inspired, “When new projects come together because of it or even people just meet and hang out and talk to each other.”
It isn’t only a space, but a physical place allows its purpose to extend beyond the largely word-of-mouth network of people who simultaneously benefit from and contribute to its operation. “In a city with few common spaces, we wanted to replicate the autonomous social centres in Europe,” says collective member William Hederman, who also lectures at Dublin City University.
The pan-European trend for autonomous spaces grew out of a tradition of squatting, more common on the continent, where the productive use of abandoned spaces is often tolerated, if not legally provided for. In Dublin, it was more practical to rent: Irish property law means that a squatted space is by necessity a secretive one, and thus defeats the purpose of a centre that, as William emphasises, wants to “reach out of the activist ghetto and into communities.”
The rent is paid through fundraisers, donations and standing orders to the group’s credit union account. It may be only one room, but it is an oasis of practical idealism in a city full of greedy chrome bars and ham-fisted panini peddlers, where developers and the government happily conflate ‘society’ with ‘Irish economy’.
“We always wanted a non-commercial place for people to be, where you can go and sit and read a book without having to pay for the privilege, “says Marianne, “We wanted a place that would be a focal point for activity, politics, art, music, whatever.”
The Seomra began its search for a home in 2004, occasionally using the St Nicholas of Myra Hall before finding temporary shelter in the boisterously painted Middle Abbey Street dwelling of an artist from August 2005 until early 2006. In August of last year, they began renting this space on Ormond Quay, which they quickly made their own.
Every day is different. Monday evenings, the Radical Anarcha-Feminist Group (RAG) meets to discuss issues or work on the magazine it publishes, and Tuesday the space is used by Dublin Shell to Sea. Although the very nature of a collectively run space is a form of political action, it isn’t all explicit radical politics. There are also informal social gatherings, sometimes loosely themed, such as this afternoon’s Brazilian Day, or make-and-do coffee mornings, where you can come and work on your own creative projects. In addition to the zine archive, it houses the Revolt Video Collective, and you can also come on Saturdays or Sunday afternoon (the only days it is possible to have the centre open) and curl up in the corner with a volume from the Bad Books Community Library.
There’s no official joining process. “In fact if you start showing up on Thursdays at meetings and helping out you are one of the collective,” asserts Marianne. “New people always bring fresh enthusiasm and new ideas, which is great.”
From his involvement with Electronic Resistance, an organisation of politically-active producers and DJs, Fergal Scully was inspired to step up his involvement about four months ago. “Everyone was very welcoming. You really can come along and contribute as much as anyone else from the word go. The group accepts how little or how much you can contribute at any time, so you never feel like what you’re doing is a chore.”
Marianne is concerned but optimistic. “I was, and still am, always worried that it won't work. It's constant, it's never finished. Maybe that's what keeps us going, it never gets boring. We still think of the space we have as a stepping stone to a bigger better more accessible and workable Seomra.”
What would it look like in an ideal world? “[It] would be huge and have ground floor access so people could just walk in off the street without ringing the bell. It would be wheelchair accessible. It would have an outdoor area, room for a bike workshop and the libraries, a kitchen area, a large meeting room, space where bands could practice and play gigs, a dark room for photo developing and screen printing, I could go on and on. It would be in the city centre, the area we're in now is great, and the rent would be affordable.”
For now, at least, the Seomra has a home, but even this is temporary, a pity in a city where, as William points out, there are millions of square metres of empty space, mostly in private hands. Look at almost any city block, and you will notice a boom in activity, but look more closely and you will see terraces peppered with vacant or semi-abandoned buildings in even the most exclusive neighbourhoods.
Productive use of these spaces could provide a home for community activities, bring neighbourhoods to life in ways that wouldn’t be dominated by commercial interests. Ironically, though, the use of these spaces, even if only temporary, threatens not the preservation of buildings, but the dereliction that allows an otherwise historic structure to be demolished to make way for shiny minimalist luxury. In New York, it was the ‘broken window theory’ that allowed ‘decaying’ neighbourhoods to be gentrified (which brought its own problems of socio-economic exclusion), but Dublin has redefined it: to a developer hoping to demolish a building, each broken window might symbolise another step closer to its future as an ‘exclusive development’.
The Seomra’s floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Liffey is both a physical one onto a city hurried and worried by economic booms and potential busts, and a metaphorical one, into the kind of city the new Dublin could be. And there is an atmosphere of possibility, that with wider support and a more concerted vision, things might actually get better.
This building, like most of Ormond Quay, was developed in the 18th century as part of the Jervis estate, built to house the prosperous middle classes, fuelled by profits from trade as well as large-scale rural enclosure, where common lands were consumed by private landlords eager for landscape gardens and arable fields. It seems fitting, then, that it is one of these Georgian buildings that houses the Seomra, where it is a ‘room of play’ as well as one of rest and relief.
The roots of popular resistance stretch back much further than modern activism, and as I’m lounging on the sun-warmed carpet like a cat in repose, I can’t help but think of the 18th-century English protest rhyme:
They hang the man and flog the woman,
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
Contemporary collectives aren’t about a romanticised past (and indeed, the historical reality of the ‘commons’ was hardly egalitarian), they occupy a hopeful present, making their immediate surroundings more amenable to change. “When you see what can be achieved in this way and how easy and enjoyable it can be, it makes you try and bring this to other parts of your life,” says Fergal.
After my afternoon’s bask, I leave and walk down the puke-stained quays, past lifestyle shops in Georgian buildings ten-generations deep in conspicuous consumption, but I feel buttressed, my cynicism at least temporarily replaced with a defiant optimism. It might fade by morning, but right now, it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m actually smiling.
(From Totally Dublin, May 2007)
I’m sitting on the floor chatting with Marianne. The music is lively, but we can still hear each other. “I hope the neighbours don’t complain,” she says. One of the problems with the Seomra Spraoi is that while most European social centres occupy entire buildings, Dublin’s has only a single room in a partly residential building. Noise isn’t the only issue. It’s also a constant struggle to maintain the sense that this is a community space, and not a service. Says Marianne, “We're brought up in a world where everything is a service. Here if you mess the place up it's other people around you who have to clean it up. People also still think there's some overlord or something, some unknown force that says what's ok and not ok, what is possible to do in the space and what isn't.”
It is the people who define the space, and everyone I talk to emphasises the value of the informality that feeds its creative and social potential. Marianne gets inspired, “When new projects come together because of it or even people just meet and hang out and talk to each other.”
It isn’t only a space, but a physical place allows its purpose to extend beyond the largely word-of-mouth network of people who simultaneously benefit from and contribute to its operation. “In a city with few common spaces, we wanted to replicate the autonomous social centres in Europe,” says collective member William Hederman, who also lectures at Dublin City University.
The pan-European trend for autonomous spaces grew out of a tradition of squatting, more common on the continent, where the productive use of abandoned spaces is often tolerated, if not legally provided for. In Dublin, it was more practical to rent: Irish property law means that a squatted space is by necessity a secretive one, and thus defeats the purpose of a centre that, as William emphasises, wants to “reach out of the activist ghetto and into communities.”
The rent is paid through fundraisers, donations and standing orders to the group’s credit union account. It may be only one room, but it is an oasis of practical idealism in a city full of greedy chrome bars and ham-fisted panini peddlers, where developers and the government happily conflate ‘society’ with ‘Irish economy’.
“We always wanted a non-commercial place for people to be, where you can go and sit and read a book without having to pay for the privilege, “says Marianne, “We wanted a place that would be a focal point for activity, politics, art, music, whatever.”
The Seomra began its search for a home in 2004, occasionally using the St Nicholas of Myra Hall before finding temporary shelter in the boisterously painted Middle Abbey Street dwelling of an artist from August 2005 until early 2006. In August of last year, they began renting this space on Ormond Quay, which they quickly made their own.
Every day is different. Monday evenings, the Radical Anarcha-Feminist Group (RAG) meets to discuss issues or work on the magazine it publishes, and Tuesday the space is used by Dublin Shell to Sea. Although the very nature of a collectively run space is a form of political action, it isn’t all explicit radical politics. There are also informal social gatherings, sometimes loosely themed, such as this afternoon’s Brazilian Day, or make-and-do coffee mornings, where you can come and work on your own creative projects. In addition to the zine archive, it houses the Revolt Video Collective, and you can also come on Saturdays or Sunday afternoon (the only days it is possible to have the centre open) and curl up in the corner with a volume from the Bad Books Community Library.
There’s no official joining process. “In fact if you start showing up on Thursdays at meetings and helping out you are one of the collective,” asserts Marianne. “New people always bring fresh enthusiasm and new ideas, which is great.”
From his involvement with Electronic Resistance, an organisation of politically-active producers and DJs, Fergal Scully was inspired to step up his involvement about four months ago. “Everyone was very welcoming. You really can come along and contribute as much as anyone else from the word go. The group accepts how little or how much you can contribute at any time, so you never feel like what you’re doing is a chore.”
Marianne is concerned but optimistic. “I was, and still am, always worried that it won't work. It's constant, it's never finished. Maybe that's what keeps us going, it never gets boring. We still think of the space we have as a stepping stone to a bigger better more accessible and workable Seomra.”
What would it look like in an ideal world? “[It] would be huge and have ground floor access so people could just walk in off the street without ringing the bell. It would be wheelchair accessible. It would have an outdoor area, room for a bike workshop and the libraries, a kitchen area, a large meeting room, space where bands could practice and play gigs, a dark room for photo developing and screen printing, I could go on and on. It would be in the city centre, the area we're in now is great, and the rent would be affordable.”
For now, at least, the Seomra has a home, but even this is temporary, a pity in a city where, as William points out, there are millions of square metres of empty space, mostly in private hands. Look at almost any city block, and you will notice a boom in activity, but look more closely and you will see terraces peppered with vacant or semi-abandoned buildings in even the most exclusive neighbourhoods.
Productive use of these spaces could provide a home for community activities, bring neighbourhoods to life in ways that wouldn’t be dominated by commercial interests. Ironically, though, the use of these spaces, even if only temporary, threatens not the preservation of buildings, but the dereliction that allows an otherwise historic structure to be demolished to make way for shiny minimalist luxury. In New York, it was the ‘broken window theory’ that allowed ‘decaying’ neighbourhoods to be gentrified (which brought its own problems of socio-economic exclusion), but Dublin has redefined it: to a developer hoping to demolish a building, each broken window might symbolise another step closer to its future as an ‘exclusive development’.
The Seomra’s floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Liffey is both a physical one onto a city hurried and worried by economic booms and potential busts, and a metaphorical one, into the kind of city the new Dublin could be. And there is an atmosphere of possibility, that with wider support and a more concerted vision, things might actually get better.
This building, like most of Ormond Quay, was developed in the 18th century as part of the Jervis estate, built to house the prosperous middle classes, fuelled by profits from trade as well as large-scale rural enclosure, where common lands were consumed by private landlords eager for landscape gardens and arable fields. It seems fitting, then, that it is one of these Georgian buildings that houses the Seomra, where it is a ‘room of play’ as well as one of rest and relief.
The roots of popular resistance stretch back much further than modern activism, and as I’m lounging on the sun-warmed carpet like a cat in repose, I can’t help but think of the 18th-century English protest rhyme:
They hang the man and flog the woman,
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
Contemporary collectives aren’t about a romanticised past (and indeed, the historical reality of the ‘commons’ was hardly egalitarian), they occupy a hopeful present, making their immediate surroundings more amenable to change. “When you see what can be achieved in this way and how easy and enjoyable it can be, it makes you try and bring this to other parts of your life,” says Fergal.
After my afternoon’s bask, I leave and walk down the puke-stained quays, past lifestyle shops in Georgian buildings ten-generations deep in conspicuous consumption, but I feel buttressed, my cynicism at least temporarily replaced with a defiant optimism. It might fade by morning, but right now, it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m actually smiling.
(From Totally Dublin, May 2007)
Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio
The first time I met Pat Herbert, he asked if I was a collector. I told him no, just a hoarder without no sense of purpose, but he treated me like a kindred spirit. Pat’s private collection of radios makes up Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio, and his definition of radio memorabilia is loosely defined. Shelves heave with gramophones, old wooden transistors, crystal sets, and a real gem – in my eyes, anyway – two large blue china parrots, old radio speakers from 1927 that crown a stack of radios near the door. He spent forty years looking for them, and why not? They are magnificent.
A doohickey on a windowsill looks like a copper knapsack. It was used for spraying potatoes with copper sulfate to prevent blight. “But the little blue stone that the farmers used to get to spray the potatoes,” says Pat, “that made a great crystal for the radio. And I didn’t know that, but I had a guy in here one day and he told me”. It is a combination of Pat’s passion and his appreciation for even those things with an oblique relationship with radio that makes the museum one of the most entertaining in Dublin. And Pat, white haired and with an irrepressible grin, is a human museum of stories, and like his assemblage of artefacts, the past and the present collide.
He shows us a Morse lantern used in World War I. “I had a man in here two years ago and he was shipwrecked off Africa in the second world war and he had used them, and he broke down when he saw it.” The collection is an anthology of the self, but also a place where all experiences are welcome, whether they are the weighty recollections of a war veteran or the curious contemporary observations of a child.
He takes out an old seventy-eight, “My porcelain CD,” he calls it, in homage to a friend’s grandchild, who coined the term to describe her granddad’s old records as he played them for her on his old gramophone. “I heard it and I thought it was a beautiful name for them.”
The place is less a shrine to radio technology and more a three-dimensional map of the inside of Pat’s brain. Small museums want to preserve for posterity, sure, but they are as much about the people who run them as about the objects themselves. If the National Museum is a timeline with occasional tangents, the Museum of Vintage Radio is a starburst. Some objects are donated, but most he has collected himself. He used to frequent the market on Cumberland Street. “Twenty or thirty years ago, I’d be out there at three o’clock in the morning.”
Pat doesn’t limit his collection to the rarest or most arcane, and in cases and on shelves, antique crystal sets sit happily beside plastic novelty radios, as if they were always meant to be together. One of the most exciting pieces is not a gramophone nor a Marconi-era Morse contraption, but a green plastic toy in the shape of a Volkswagen bus with a needle underneath. He winds it and it drives in circles, playing a record about the history of RTE. It chronicles 1949, reporters at a country dance. A voice on the record, in halting speech, says, “What’s the name of that thing there?” “It’s a microphone,” says Seamus Ennis.
On the way into basement room, he points to two slips of paper. “Those are the rarest objects in the museum.” A dry pause. “Fianna Fail receipts for money. Have you any of those?” Pause again. “Neither does Bertie.” Pat’s museum is full to the brink of bleeding with radios, but there’s always room for objects placed only to set up a joke. This is the third time I’ve heard it.
The first radio came into Pat’s small Mayo town in 1947. “Neighbours of ours owned it. One of my earliest memories of it was when the all-Ireland of that year was played in the Polo Grounds in New York, and it was broadcast. Nine or ten o’clock that night and it was dark, and there were people crowded in and outside the house, listening to this from across the world. Somebody like me who was ten years old at the time, this did something to my brain which I haven’t recovered from.” With no electricity, the radio was pure magic. “A radio coming into the village, and it lit up the kitchen of the house. I thought this was a marvelous thing.”
Now he collects radios for the beauty of their design, sometimes for their rarity, or for small aspects that interest him. He speaks warmly of his children and grandchildren as he shows us objects they’ve given him. Memorabilia from his daughter, a postcard-sized modern crystal set from his nine-year old granddaughter. He is not fetishising radios as a way of escaping the world, rather radio is – fittingly – a conduit for his relationships with other people.
He points to a 1950s Pye radio, made out in Dundrum. “The valve radio. You get a great sound from it.” He raises the volume, and out screeches the ultimate destiny of the wireless, a sad reality to confront, “I’ll tell ye, I’m driving a taxi twenty years and yer man hasn’t a clue what he’s on about.” And lo, how far we have fallen.
(From August 2007, Totally Dublin)
A doohickey on a windowsill looks like a copper knapsack. It was used for spraying potatoes with copper sulfate to prevent blight. “But the little blue stone that the farmers used to get to spray the potatoes,” says Pat, “that made a great crystal for the radio. And I didn’t know that, but I had a guy in here one day and he told me”. It is a combination of Pat’s passion and his appreciation for even those things with an oblique relationship with radio that makes the museum one of the most entertaining in Dublin. And Pat, white haired and with an irrepressible grin, is a human museum of stories, and like his assemblage of artefacts, the past and the present collide.
He shows us a Morse lantern used in World War I. “I had a man in here two years ago and he was shipwrecked off Africa in the second world war and he had used them, and he broke down when he saw it.” The collection is an anthology of the self, but also a place where all experiences are welcome, whether they are the weighty recollections of a war veteran or the curious contemporary observations of a child.
He takes out an old seventy-eight, “My porcelain CD,” he calls it, in homage to a friend’s grandchild, who coined the term to describe her granddad’s old records as he played them for her on his old gramophone. “I heard it and I thought it was a beautiful name for them.”
The place is less a shrine to radio technology and more a three-dimensional map of the inside of Pat’s brain. Small museums want to preserve for posterity, sure, but they are as much about the people who run them as about the objects themselves. If the National Museum is a timeline with occasional tangents, the Museum of Vintage Radio is a starburst. Some objects are donated, but most he has collected himself. He used to frequent the market on Cumberland Street. “Twenty or thirty years ago, I’d be out there at three o’clock in the morning.”
Pat doesn’t limit his collection to the rarest or most arcane, and in cases and on shelves, antique crystal sets sit happily beside plastic novelty radios, as if they were always meant to be together. One of the most exciting pieces is not a gramophone nor a Marconi-era Morse contraption, but a green plastic toy in the shape of a Volkswagen bus with a needle underneath. He winds it and it drives in circles, playing a record about the history of RTE. It chronicles 1949, reporters at a country dance. A voice on the record, in halting speech, says, “What’s the name of that thing there?” “It’s a microphone,” says Seamus Ennis.
On the way into basement room, he points to two slips of paper. “Those are the rarest objects in the museum.” A dry pause. “Fianna Fail receipts for money. Have you any of those?” Pause again. “Neither does Bertie.” Pat’s museum is full to the brink of bleeding with radios, but there’s always room for objects placed only to set up a joke. This is the third time I’ve heard it.
The first radio came into Pat’s small Mayo town in 1947. “Neighbours of ours owned it. One of my earliest memories of it was when the all-Ireland of that year was played in the Polo Grounds in New York, and it was broadcast. Nine or ten o’clock that night and it was dark, and there were people crowded in and outside the house, listening to this from across the world. Somebody like me who was ten years old at the time, this did something to my brain which I haven’t recovered from.” With no electricity, the radio was pure magic. “A radio coming into the village, and it lit up the kitchen of the house. I thought this was a marvelous thing.”
Now he collects radios for the beauty of their design, sometimes for their rarity, or for small aspects that interest him. He speaks warmly of his children and grandchildren as he shows us objects they’ve given him. Memorabilia from his daughter, a postcard-sized modern crystal set from his nine-year old granddaughter. He is not fetishising radios as a way of escaping the world, rather radio is – fittingly – a conduit for his relationships with other people.
He points to a 1950s Pye radio, made out in Dundrum. “The valve radio. You get a great sound from it.” He raises the volume, and out screeches the ultimate destiny of the wireless, a sad reality to confront, “I’ll tell ye, I’m driving a taxi twenty years and yer man hasn’t a clue what he’s on about.” And lo, how far we have fallen.
(From August 2007, Totally Dublin)
The National Transport Museum, Howth
Jim Kilroy and I are strolling the grounds of Howth Castle, and he tells me of childhood memories, coming into Dublin from Artane on the bus with his parents. Really, though, it was the tram that did it. “I was absolutely fascinated by them. I looked upon a bus as a very frail cousin of a tram. Trams were more ponderous, and they were certainly a different animal. I liked the sounds of the tram, the trundly sounds, the sparks from the overhead cable, and there was a great sense of excitement.”
For most of the people I meet here, there was a moment, usually in early childhood, when they fell in love with a bus or a tram. As children, we are at our most eccentric, our most interesting, and then we are distracted by responsibilities that sabotage our innate fascination with the world and turn us into hairy hulking husks of our childhood selves. For these boys, now living in the bodies of the men (and one woman) who run the National Transport Museum, revisiting the fantastical creatures they admired in childhood did not reveal the banality of the bus, but confirmed that indeed, they were right all along.
Jim describes the day he discovered that the Hill of Howth tram had been dismantled. He was home from boarding school, 1959, and cycled out to Howth, stopping near Sutton Cross to catch a view of the tram. None appeared, so he cycled on. “All of a sudden it dawned on me. I saw the track broken up, the sleepers thrown aside, and I knew that my old friend had been murdered.” It was only years later that he would take on the task of raising these beautiful beasts from extinction.
It is not so much the mechanical that draws the members of the National Transport Museum Society here, but something organic, immaterial, sensory. David Blacoe, 15, and Feargal Craven, 25 love working with their hands. Both are members of Jim’s ‘tram team’.
Feargal is among the few mechanics here, and the museum allows him to indulge in the hands-on work he loves without the pressure he finds in his day job. For both Feargal and David, the allure of the old trams comes, not so much from age, but the number of people they have carried.
David got involved through Jim, whom he has known since he was about six. He’d read Jim’s books (Kilroy has written three) and liked them, but it wasn’t until he stopped up to visit one day that he felt any connection. But very quickly, it was both inexplicable and irresistible. “I don’t know really what it is,” he jokes, “maybe it was the fumes.”
But why transport? “It’s the most basic fabric in any country,” says Feargal, “It’s often the things you don’t notice until they’re gone.”
Tom Manning, the society archivist, treasurer, and postal vehicle enthusiast, preserves items from the past as well as the present: bus ledgers, equipment manuals, ticket machines, photographs, and small artefacts. “It’s the mundane that people don’t always think about.” It might seem odd today that he has detailed plans and colour schemes for the newest of Dublin buses, but in the future, someone will be grateful for his prudence.
Overall, it seems that community and camaraderie, not vehicles, are the glue that hold the Society together. And while they have in common a deep and human love for transport, their interests vary. Neither Liam Kelly, 75, or his colleague, 20-year old Joe Thorn, would regard the bus as anyone’s poor relation.
When he was very small, Joe watched the old green buses from the window of his house on the main street in Swords. “We never had a car, so any time we were on a bus there was an adventure. We were going to the beach, or into town. I got to know a few busmen when I got a bit older, around eight or nine. I used to go up and down on the bus with them. I was never interested in the mechanical side, I was just interested in seeing all the people getting on and off.”
When he was ten, he saved up 50 pounds and bought a broken tractor from his uncle, which they restored together. Joe, now twenty, has been involved here in the National Transport Museum for about four years, working with Michael Corcoran (who is nearly 80, but is too ill to be here today), whom he met four years ago.
“I came out here one day, just to have a look around. And the man I’m working with now, Michael, said, “Come here you, youngfella. Now hold that there.” So I went over and he wanted me to turn this handle for him. And he said, ‘Will you come back next week?’ So I did, and I’ve been here ever since.” It seems to be the way for many of the members.
In 1937, five-and-a-half-year old Liam Kelly had heard fantastical rumours of a thing called a double-decker bus. “There was great talk about the double deckers. One day I was in town with my mother at College Green, and my mother said, ‘Look, Liam, look at the double decker.’ And I saw this bus sailing around the Bank of Ireland, and I must have fallen in love.” I’m picturing, not a smelly bus packed with grumbly commuters, but a winged creature, descending through a backlit Sean Hillen-like Dublin. It’s fantastic.
There is a collision here of past, present and future, of real continuity, in the unexpected age profile, in the real love for the vehicles and the bond between members.
“In the years to come, it will be the likes of myself and David who will be doing this work,” says Feargal, “[Jim] is very keen on making sure we learn as many skills as possible because when all the old guard have gone, we’ll have to look after the place ourselves.”
This sprawl of old farm buildings that is now the National Transport Museum doesn’t feel mechanical or angular, but surprisingly warm and human. As I talk with the members, the place is transformed from an old cowshed full of broken buses into a refuge for endangered species whose habitats have been destroyed. They are gentle, benevolent giants, once spark-spitting and trundle-rumbling, creatures who were murdered – or at least cruelly made redundant – and are being hand-fed back to life.
Later, as I stand on the DART platform, I see it, not as a dirty Dublin train, but as a vehicle for adventure. All I need now are some caramels.
(July 2007, Totally Dublin)
For most of the people I meet here, there was a moment, usually in early childhood, when they fell in love with a bus or a tram. As children, we are at our most eccentric, our most interesting, and then we are distracted by responsibilities that sabotage our innate fascination with the world and turn us into hairy hulking husks of our childhood selves. For these boys, now living in the bodies of the men (and one woman) who run the National Transport Museum, revisiting the fantastical creatures they admired in childhood did not reveal the banality of the bus, but confirmed that indeed, they were right all along.
Jim describes the day he discovered that the Hill of Howth tram had been dismantled. He was home from boarding school, 1959, and cycled out to Howth, stopping near Sutton Cross to catch a view of the tram. None appeared, so he cycled on. “All of a sudden it dawned on me. I saw the track broken up, the sleepers thrown aside, and I knew that my old friend had been murdered.” It was only years later that he would take on the task of raising these beautiful beasts from extinction.
It is not so much the mechanical that draws the members of the National Transport Museum Society here, but something organic, immaterial, sensory. David Blacoe, 15, and Feargal Craven, 25 love working with their hands. Both are members of Jim’s ‘tram team’.
Feargal is among the few mechanics here, and the museum allows him to indulge in the hands-on work he loves without the pressure he finds in his day job. For both Feargal and David, the allure of the old trams comes, not so much from age, but the number of people they have carried.
David got involved through Jim, whom he has known since he was about six. He’d read Jim’s books (Kilroy has written three) and liked them, but it wasn’t until he stopped up to visit one day that he felt any connection. But very quickly, it was both inexplicable and irresistible. “I don’t know really what it is,” he jokes, “maybe it was the fumes.”
But why transport? “It’s the most basic fabric in any country,” says Feargal, “It’s often the things you don’t notice until they’re gone.”
Tom Manning, the society archivist, treasurer, and postal vehicle enthusiast, preserves items from the past as well as the present: bus ledgers, equipment manuals, ticket machines, photographs, and small artefacts. “It’s the mundane that people don’t always think about.” It might seem odd today that he has detailed plans and colour schemes for the newest of Dublin buses, but in the future, someone will be grateful for his prudence.
Overall, it seems that community and camaraderie, not vehicles, are the glue that hold the Society together. And while they have in common a deep and human love for transport, their interests vary. Neither Liam Kelly, 75, or his colleague, 20-year old Joe Thorn, would regard the bus as anyone’s poor relation.
When he was very small, Joe watched the old green buses from the window of his house on the main street in Swords. “We never had a car, so any time we were on a bus there was an adventure. We were going to the beach, or into town. I got to know a few busmen when I got a bit older, around eight or nine. I used to go up and down on the bus with them. I was never interested in the mechanical side, I was just interested in seeing all the people getting on and off.”
When he was ten, he saved up 50 pounds and bought a broken tractor from his uncle, which they restored together. Joe, now twenty, has been involved here in the National Transport Museum for about four years, working with Michael Corcoran (who is nearly 80, but is too ill to be here today), whom he met four years ago.
“I came out here one day, just to have a look around. And the man I’m working with now, Michael, said, “Come here you, youngfella. Now hold that there.” So I went over and he wanted me to turn this handle for him. And he said, ‘Will you come back next week?’ So I did, and I’ve been here ever since.” It seems to be the way for many of the members.
In 1937, five-and-a-half-year old Liam Kelly had heard fantastical rumours of a thing called a double-decker bus. “There was great talk about the double deckers. One day I was in town with my mother at College Green, and my mother said, ‘Look, Liam, look at the double decker.’ And I saw this bus sailing around the Bank of Ireland, and I must have fallen in love.” I’m picturing, not a smelly bus packed with grumbly commuters, but a winged creature, descending through a backlit Sean Hillen-like Dublin. It’s fantastic.
There is a collision here of past, present and future, of real continuity, in the unexpected age profile, in the real love for the vehicles and the bond between members.
“In the years to come, it will be the likes of myself and David who will be doing this work,” says Feargal, “[Jim] is very keen on making sure we learn as many skills as possible because when all the old guard have gone, we’ll have to look after the place ourselves.”
This sprawl of old farm buildings that is now the National Transport Museum doesn’t feel mechanical or angular, but surprisingly warm and human. As I talk with the members, the place is transformed from an old cowshed full of broken buses into a refuge for endangered species whose habitats have been destroyed. They are gentle, benevolent giants, once spark-spitting and trundle-rumbling, creatures who were murdered – or at least cruelly made redundant – and are being hand-fed back to life.
Later, as I stand on the DART platform, I see it, not as a dirty Dublin train, but as a vehicle for adventure. All I need now are some caramels.
(July 2007, Totally Dublin)
First Post.
The last time I kept a blog of any kind, I tired of my own righteous indignation.
So, here goes.
So, here goes.
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