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)
Thursday, October 11, 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)
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