Drums beat deeply all around me as people congregate for The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope. Face-painted and costume-clad performers run through carefully crafted renditions, eager children hold large replica tombstones above their heads bearing the names of the community projects they are defending. Julian Brophy reports from The Spectacle of Defiance.
Skating Down Hill Street.
Shot over the course of a year, this film has interviews with the most important Dublin skaters of the last two decades as well as previously unseen old home videos. To hear more about the background of the film, Jay Carax caught up with the producer Dave Leahy.
It’s a Dublin Thing.
A gritty, urban poetry shines through Products of the Environment, a compilation album on Working Class Records. Track after track documents growing up with little in the way of options and realities dominated by drug abuse, crime and paranoia. Accompanying videos capture blighted estates full of hooded youth, pushed to the margins by the city’s economic apartheid. The sort of places the rest of us just cycle through.
{Flash Fiction} Our Leading Poet
He was number one of ten thousand and had been tormented by unspeakable lusts all his life. His cock was like a black hole in his trousers. All of his thoughts got sucked down into it. Given the chance he’d have been a fulltime fucker, leaping from body to grasping body, composing verses on the hop. If the world had been logical from his point of view, he would have … Read More
{Music} End of Year Round Up 2011
It’s the season of stockings and lists. The natural occasion to ask this bunch of messers to scribble down their highlights.
{Look Up} The Liberties’ Heads.
The Liberties’ Heads tell us more about our recent past than any trawl through the newspapers or Reeling in the Years. So claims Anarchaeologist.
{Infographic} The Benefit of 100% Wealth Tax.
An infographic by Redmonk
Gombeen #2: He’s Not A Naasist, Swear.
When an Irish mayor is getting publicity from the Guardian, CNN and The Brisbane Times you know he must have done something special.
{Web} Black List The Bastards
A quick search on that old go-to Daft.ie turns up a couple of possibilities. But, before making a phone call, you yawn, scratch your bits, and open a new tab on your web browser. Click, clack, the search engine does the work and you feast your red-rimmed, half-crossed marbles on this beauty: RentedandRated.ie. Or LandlordsLaidBare.org.
So, What Happened The Three Fs?
The current mess we are in is often explained by an unusual obsession with bricks and mortar rooted in a colonial history. The Irish love to own their own home because those nasty Brits didn’t let us, it’s the spectre of the famine all over again. At best these myths obscure the true reasons behind Ireland’s current economic situation.