Millicent, Heidi, Adrienne, me - when I said "our" radio show on Francis Street - these are the Fab Four I was referring to. Adrienne Joyce's interview with her family on their memories of their own "Myra Bakery" on Francis Street in the 1940's was particularly amazing. Also, as you can see I don't believe you should have to comb your hair (or even sit up straight), to do radio - but then again nobody told me to be ready for a close-up...
One more experimental podcast - this time with Peter Prendergast of Monster Truck Gallery and Studios (www.monstertruck.ie), at 73 Francis Street. This interview was broadcast on 94.3fm (www.digitalhubfm.com) on December 11th, as part of our radio show, "Life on Francis Street". Here's a link to the podcast:
It took me 7-ish years to get around to editing this "caravan session" down with Garage Band. It may not be perfect, and it may get a little mixed up towards the end, but still, Granny Rock, well - it rocks.
Tuesday 15 Dec | ||
| 5 00 AM | Radio Canada International (rcinet.ca) Radio Canada International (rcinet.ca) | |
| 6 00 AM | The World Today (BBC World Service) International news and current affairs programme from the BBC World Service. bbc.co.uk/worldservice | |
| 7 00 AM | Paths of Glory This series will visit selected graveyards around the country in the company of members of the local community, historians, archaeologists and people with a special interest in th | |
| 7 30 AM | Lances To Lasers (BBC) David Cook looks at the history and science of some of the most significant developments in medical technology. | |
| 7 45 AM | Molly I Hardly Knew Ya A series in which writers and poets focus on the subject of Molly Bloom - in particular their own fantasy view of who they think she really was. | |
| 8 00 AM | I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (BBC) BBC Comedy quiz hosted by the late Humphrey Lyttelton bbc.co.uk/comedy/clue/ | |
| 8 30 AM | Irish Whiskey A series, presented by Pat McGrath, which traces the history and traditions of Irish whiskey. www.rte.ie/radio1/irishwhiskey | |
| 8 55 AM | Radio Australia Headlines abc.au.net | |
| 9 05 AM | Documentary On One Documentaries from RTE Radio 1 first broadcast on Sunday nights at 7.02pm (rte.ie/radio1/doconone) | |
| 9 50 AM | World Report (rte.ie/news/worldreport) A look at events making news around the globe. | |
| 10 00 AM | Gone Fishin' with Fergal Keane and Eamon Keane (2003) | |
| 10 30 AM | Health Check (BBC World Service) The issues affecting the world of medicine and healthcare. (bbc.co.uk/worldservice) | |
| 11 00 AM | CountryWide Events, people and happenings that bring colour and life to communities, towns and villages across the country. (RTE Radio 1) | |
| 12 00 PM | "Morning Edition " (NPR) NPR's Morning Edition brings listeners up-to-the-minute news, background analysis, commentary, and coverage of arts and sports. npr.org | |
| 1 00 PM | The Poetry Programme Presenter: Gerald Dawe Producer: Seamus Hosey RTE Radio 1, Saturday 7.30pm | |
| 1 30 PM | Pulse (Deutsche Welle) Taking the Pulse of Youth Culture dw-world.de/dw | |
| 2 00 PM | "Shanks Mare" (rte.ie/radio1/shanksmare) In Shank's Mare, Ella McSweeney goes walking around the country and introduces us to the people, flora and fauna she meets along the way. From stunning Donegal to the rough edges | |
| 2 30 PM | Inside Sweden (Radio Sweden) "Inside Sweden" connects Sweden to the world and new immigrants to Sweden. www.sr.se/international | |
| 3 00 PM | Outside the Box A weekly radio magazine for and about people with disability | |
| 3 30 PM | The Strand (BBC World Service) The daily programme which takes you on a worldwide journey through arts, culture and entertainment. bbc.co.uk/worldservice | |
| 4 00 PM | IRELANDS SOCCER TOP 20 (RTE 2004) Profiles of Ireland's soccer legends. Presenter Producer: Colm Keane | |
| 4 30 PM | The State We're In (Radio Netherlands Worldwide) The State We're In (TSWI) brings you stories from all over the world, covering important global matters as well as seemingly small issues, because they too can have a big impact. | |
| 5 00 PM | "Europe Today" (BBC World Service) bbc.co.uk/worldservice A slice of life from European cities through the eyes of the BBC's contributors. Presented by Audrey Carville. | |
| 6 00 PM | World Football (BBC World Service) A hard hitting half hour bringing you up-to-date with the issues, the stories and the passion behind the World's most popular sport. Legendary British commentator and football exp | |
| 6 30 PM | Making Sense of It All 03.08.2008 This series looks at topics about which so much is written, that people don't know what to believe and what not to believe. Presenter: Pau ric DempseyProducer: Peter Mooney | |
| 7 00 PM | "Outlook" (BBC World Service) Human interest stories behind the headlines. | |
| 7 30 PM | Radio Netherlands Worldwide (radionetherlands.nl) | |
| 8 00 PM | Radio New Zealand International (rnzi.com) | |
| 8 15 PM | Korean Broadcasting Korean Broadcasting (http://english.kbs.co.kr/) | |
| 8 45 PM | Vatican Radio (radiovaticana.org) Vatican Radio (radiovaticana.org) | |
| 9 00 PM | Voice of Russia (ruvr.ru) Voice of Russia (ruvr.ru) | |
| 9 30 PM | Deutsche Welle dw-radio.de | |
| 10 00 PM | All Things Considered - NPR (US) The programme determines to get the day's big stories on the air, and to bring them alive through sound and voice. For two hours every weekday, "All Things Considered" hosts Ro | |
| 11 00 PM | Nice Moves (rte.ie/radio1/nicemoves) Nice Moves presented by Deirdre Mulrooney, is a new 5-part series which traces the history of the body on stage in Ireland. Irish people have always danced, but our first record | |
| 11 30 PM | Great Educators (1994) Presented by Frank Flanagan, Produced by John Quinn | |
Here's a little book review I wrote earlier, for The Drama Review (MIT Press) on The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, by Jacqueline Shea Murphy - a very interesting book of Native American Modern Dance Histories. Just received it, in the current Winter 2009 edition, in the post today.
A Day & a Half-ish in London: Hot off the Heathrow express (should have got the tube really - next time when I'm back to try on the dress, see left), we lounged around Harrod's for the afternoon, like two children in a toyshop. It was amazing! Dollhouse cafes, Egyptian Sphynx staircases, Willy Wonka-style yum yums, Sushi if you want it, basically - whatever your heart desires! The furniture, the anitiques, the grandfather clocks, the fashion! This incredible dress, which I think would be perfect for a Marina Carr play (plastic feathers, bird-like) is by a new Dutch designer Harrods are launching called Iris Van Herpen. It only costs £10,000. Another one was £15,000. I was so tempted to try it on, which the sales assistant was inviting me to do "Why don't you try it on?" she offered. But by that stage we had wiled away so much time in the other dimension known as "Harrods", that if we didn't leg it right away we risked missing the show we had come to London to see - Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre's breathtaking Rite of Spring at London's Coliseum. The old man I sat beside in the Upper Balcony (we were just 2 of a 2,700-strong audience) shared that the other 2,698 were a much younger audience than usual, which (according to him), is usually a sea of grey hair.
Here is a link to more info on Iris Van Herpen's "Radiation" philosophy of this dress:
http://www.ftape.com/shows/womenss10/_irisVanHerpen/
Here, I'll quote some:
Una & I stumbled upon these two dudes at the Pop Life exhibition, Daniel and Morgan John, and guess what, they were part of an art work! A talking, breathing, moving, living art work. Talk about interactive... They said the chairs are rather uncomfortable, but that's probably how Damian, who they haven't yet met, wants it. He cast them via photographs. This art piece is worth £1.2m?! I was wondering what it would be like having this art piece in my living room. Ha ha! I mean, you'd probably have to feed them and everything. It would be a little more work than a house-plant! Would you have to sing to them? (You know how some people sing to their plants). They were reading a hospital study about identical twins, which they were part of. One of them showed me the top sheet of his multiple-choice questionnaire twin study, but declared he didn't want me to see the page about bowel movements (!). I wouldn't blame him, neither would I. They didn't divulge what they do for a living, but they did tell us that another set of twins (they do 4-hour shifts), were both CEO's in an insurance company. They wore their own clothes - one of them had two identical suits, so they wore that "to keep costs down". I thought it would be rude to ask them how much they were getting paid for it, but look below, everything is a discreet google away these days. £7.60 per hour. They have to wear identical socks, shoes, everything. I didn't ask them about the undergarments, but you'd imagine that would be part of the overall aesthetic too. Ha ha it's brilliant! Una, very astutely, came up with the bright idea that Damien should now cast Jedward in the piece. Well, they're at a loose end, aren't they, and love the whole celebrity circus? Perfect synergy! Remember it was Una Kavanagh who came up with the idea though. This was a great exhibition. If you are in London - pop in.
Incidentally, don't miss the video of Hirst explaining what the job entails to The Guardian, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzxHeYHluZg and then, if you're not put off by his comment that "Identical twins are kind of like a crazy aberration," click over to the Tate website to apply. There's no mention of visa requirements, so presumably American twins could head to London and spend the winter earning a living as art."
(via ARTINFO)
& for more:
Click twice on the pages to enlarge them, (please bear with me while I figure out how to master the layout issue) and join me in mulling over what the sequel to this paper would be... 
E-ISSN: 1531-4715 Print ISSN: 1054-2043
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.
The poignant title of Jacqueline Shea Murphy's excellent and enlightening book refers to the notorious and controversial late-19th-century Ghost Dance phenomenon. Promising to invoke a peaceful end to white American expansion, the Ghost Dance, an apocryphal Christian/Native hybrid, was adapted in various guises among several Native tribes. Some Ghost dancers wore "ghost shirts" decorated with magic drawings purported to make them invulnerable to bullets—a notion of invincibility that contributed partly to the tragic death of 153 Lakota Sioux at the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Challenging what seemed like defeat, Shea Murphy sets up her framework by quoting "trickster lawyer" Wilson Weasel Tail's theory that "it was the Europeans, not the Native Americans that expected results overnight" (1). Shea Murphy thus initiates us into this alternative worldview of "complex understandings of time, causation, ancestral connection" (1), as opposed to the prevalent Eurocentric one of causality and finitude. By exposing them, she encourages the reader to shake off the orientalist tendencies that have gotten in the way of understanding Native American dance.
Tracing the link between government policies, anti-dance policies, and the acquisition of Indian land, Shea Murphy explores the complex role of religion in Native American dance. She alludes to transitional late-19th-century Delsartian theories—which advocated dance as a tool for accessing an inner truth, and hence de-demonizing Native dance: "movement and
Like the best of contemporary dance, Marty Kelly’s recent paintings exude a dreamy ambiguity – that stuff that exists in between the words. So it makes sense that he’s finding inspiration with a couple of contemporary dancers in Barcelona – bypassing the intellect to get straight to some visceral feeling and truth.
Far from his home on Donegal’s remote and windswept Inishowen peninsula, contemporary dance stopped wandering painter Marty Kelly in his tracks while he was travelling through Switzerland a few years back. Crossing paths with Quebec’s Dave St. Pierre Dancers was a revelation to him. “It was amazing to me. There was a connection between my work, our intentions, the common music we used and were inspired by, and the dancers”. Up until then Kelly had been travelling through places like Sarajevo in search of inspiration. After this serendipitous meeting, he began to find something matching “the incredible human spirit that lasts on and burns on in these conflicts” - the truth he wanted to paint - in dancers’ bodies.
Contemporary dance is all about getting back to a deep inner truth buried within the body. Was it the pure emotion of contemporary dance, unencumbered by words that drew him in? Had his eureka moment to do with the rawness, the strange, tough beauty which he felt, correctly, was “never allowing romance to fully overtake the reality, but elements of both”? For how can you do tutu’s after contemplating atrocities, and places of conflict as Kelly did in recent years? Far from the prettiness of Edward Degas’s limbering-up ballerinas, Kelly began to immerse himself in the more unlikely stuff that contemporary dance celebrates: “…the beauty in the awkward poses and the in-between. A moment before an action or a bowed head after a clatter of movement”.
Kelly began to work in his Barcelona studio with contemporary dancers Merryn Kritzinger, and Ygal Tsur – videoing them, photographing them, and painting them. They listened to his intentions, and to his music, and danced. (Kelly couldn’t imagine painting without music – at the moment it’s classical minimalists Max Richter, Johan Johansson, John Williams, and Nathan Larson).
It’s no surprise then that through that downright honesty of muscles, physical exertion, and the sweat of contemporary dance Kelly is right in there, into the non-verbal, and the eloquently visceral. Here, where there is no posing. Kelly rubs out faces, details, smudges them, and re-creates his models into floating, glunky, out-of-focus ethereal creatures. Essences. I imagine him distilling these essences out through their movement as if in some sort of alchemical filtering process. On his canvas then elphin and otherworldly presences emerge.
Just like the power of dance revealed itself to him in composer Johann Johansson’s collaborations with dancer Erna Omarsdottir, “exposed and raw and honest, sensitive and very real art”, this is beautiful work in flesh and blood from a sure hand and mind. Sure like the hand and mind of a dancer, perhaps.
So what do I see here of contemporary dance? The interiority of it; the “right now” of it; the velocity of it; the stubborn refusal to be just “pretty”; its contrary nature; its home in the ambiguous, fudged-up in-between; its dynamic energy - its vitality.
Like in contemporary dance, the vagueness, and the moments of emptiness in these paintings, add up to an enticing open invitation to the viewer to project him or herself into the work of art.
By-passing head-energy, the intellect, the blah blah blah/ parler pour rien dire of words, Marty Kelly gets right underneath misleading externals to plug in to the power of the unspoken. Accessing the raw, visceral emotion of alive, pulsating bodies Kelly unleashes that power through these floating bodies, submerged bodies, bodies in transit, bodies in motion, and bodies without background. Harnessing the anarchic energy of contemporary dance onto his canvas, in his latest work Kelly accesses and conveys a rich and yes, incredible human spirit. That sort of thing is elusive, but through his strategies Marty Kelly has caught us a beautiful glimpse of it here.
Seen as it is 09-09-09, and the launch date of the Beatles digitally re-mastered back-catalogue - here are some recent pix of the abandoned (except for the guy who opens the "No Entry" gate - for the modest sum of 50 rupees) Maharishi Mahesh (RIP) ashram in Rishikesh, India. Rishikesh, btw, is like India's answer to Lourdes, Fatima, and Knock. And it was to this very place that the Beatles came in 1969, did a meditation course, and dreamed up THE WHITE ALBUM. Seriously - this is the place! Look it up on Youtube! Mia Farrow, Donovan, and The Beach Boys were here too. Dig the "Meditation Eggs". And how about that post-box? We ran into a couple of German devotees of the guru, who reminded us that the entire New Age Movement started right here, forty years previously, with the Beatles 1969 sojourn. Too groovy! TTFN.
