Humble Serpent is a new record label launched at possibly the worst time you could pick to launch a record label. Sean Finnan caught up with one of the founders, vinny dermody, a 17 year veteran of Ireland’s independent scene with The Jimmy Cake to find out what kind of a contrary bastard starts a label at a time like this.
Suburban Super Cinemas!
The only indicator it was ever a cinema are its steeped motifs and the fading letters RIALT above the boarded windows and “SOLD” sign advertising its potential to investors. The “O” not being replaced is the final indignity for such a once-proud building. Even now, in its state of ruin, it looks utterly alien amidst a row of terraced redbrick houses, takeaways and phone repair shops. What must it have looked like when it opened on the 5th of November 1936 to great fanfare and the billing of “Dublin’s Suburban Super Cinema”?
Of Riots & Rituals.
Terry Dunne takes us back to look at the riotous popular culture behind the façade of Georgian Ireland and at how resistance was shaped by borrowing from festive life, folklore and recreation.
MAO 68!
This was not the first time barricades had dotted Parisian streets, but what was different about 1968 was the immediate international coverage of events. To students elsewhere, it showed the way. In Dublin, the ‘Internationalists’ of Trinity College Dublin, a small Maoist student body with influence beyond their numbers, disrupted the visit to the university by King Baudouin of Belgium.
BEEP BEEP!
The concept of public service broadcasting isn’t really a coherent blueprint for broadcasting practice. Rather is a rather vague concept based on a particular set of institutional arrangements and a particular coalition of class interests. In practical terms what it has meant is that the public interest has been defined largely by people drawn from the upper middle classes who operate in a subordinate relationship to the state.
Starring Dublin As Dublin.
Long-time readers of rabble will know we love to draw attention to Dublin’s architecture and great architects past and present. Therefore, when we found out that the IFI were running an event called Dublin Plays Itself alongside the Irish Architecture Foundation, we were definitely interested. Patrick McCusker caught up with Sunniva O’Flynn, one of the tour guides, to find out more.
Put It To The Testo.
There were splashes in the media last year about harm reduction advice being dispensed at Electric Picnic for the first time. Lazy hacks ushered a sigh of relief – here was a new element to add to well worn column inch filling codology about bog roll and fashionable wellies. Rashers Tierney looks at the need to encourage safer sessioning at festivals and chats to some pioneers in the field out foreign.
Connemara Cinema.
Bob Quinn is a filmmaker based in Connemara whose 1975 film Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire tells the story of a film shoot in a Gaeltacht where the actors rebel against their director. The original suggestion and support for making the film came from Eamonn Smullen, who was Director of Education, Sinn Féin The Workers Party.
Upon release, it was greeted as “the first completely native-produced movie that seems capable of holding its own with the best of the world’s new cinema.”.
After a long period during which the negative was feared lost, it was recovered and restored in 2010. Rabble caught up with Bob Quinn to talk about it.
The Social Fabric.
The banners represent key moments of change in history, from the evolution of the Women’s Workers Union in 1911 to recent responses to Brexit. They portray changing issues throughout Ireland and the UK including our present moments of Repeal the Eighth and wars in regions such as Palestine.
Get Into The Groove.
They say the past is another country, but in the case of Ireland – it’s probably more like a parallel fecking looniverse. Rashers Tierney caught up with John Byrne to talk about the strange land that gave birth to the utterly fantastic Quare Groove compilation.