Garden-crisp human organs: get 'em while they've still got some shelf-life. When it comes to a freshly flayed skeleton or a nice plump duodenum, it's as much of a seller's market as it was in the late eighteenth century, when bloodhounds, perimeter wall watchtowers and armed guards policed the dead of Glasnevin Cemetery. As with hokey Irish bars, so too with our miscreants and villainy: we love exporting them here and there so that others may enjoy the fruits of our gene pool. With a little help from "those humble friends of science and humanity" (as Saunders' Newsletter snarkily titled the resurrection men) many Irish cadavers found their way to British medical schools, often in casks labelled "Irish Cheese". William Burke and William Hare, Edinburgh's most notorious medical suppliers – and their final victim Mary Docherty – all hailed from Ireland. Burke would have been pleased to know that following his 1829 execution by hanging, his body got divvied up by anatomy students who then set to making appropriately grisly tchotchkes like a wallet and a snuff box from his tanned skin – some of which are still on display at Edinburgh Medical College.
“I wanted to write something that was about power. About the powerlessness of childhood. It’s the fact that, as a child, you are living in somebody else’s country. You are a guerrilla force: there’s an army of occupation, they’re all giants and they’ve got some kind of baffling agenda.” Neil Gaiman’s account of the gulf between adult life and childhood – the one that would be perfectly bridged in adolescence if life, hormones and “icky things like kissing” didn’t get in the way first – is droll and sad in equal measures, particularly in the context of recent events in Soham.
The bitter irony – that Gaiman’s new novel Coraline, his first venture into children’s fiction, is about child abduction, parents stripped of their protective role and the fear of the familiar – is not lost on the author.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen turned up for an interview at RTE studios on Tuesday in a frilly bra and knickers, with an ill-fitting pair of suspenders halfway down his thighs, to tell the Irish public that he was confident of Ireland’s economic recovery.
When challenged about the three billion in cuts that Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said could be even higher in this year’s budget, the Taoiseach began to apply lipstick to his face.
“I think it’s important to recognise the strengths of the Irish economy as well as we try to ensure that we deal with the fiscal problem,” he explained, silently closing his large, unwieldy lips over a napkin to remove excess makeup.
“There’s no question but that any government in Ireland has to close the gap between what’s being spent and what’s coming in from taxpayers,” he explained, as he opened a mascara brush and delicately began to run it over his eyelashes. “But what I’ve been emphasising is the strengths of the Irish economy, what’s the basis on which we can grow and recover.”
While fiddling with an eyeliner pencil, the Taoiseach claimed that he realised that the Irish public were fully appreciative of the deficit. He put the eyeliner away before acknowledging that there was a need to balance the books, but he felt that economic growth had to be encouraged too. As he made these points, he rubbed first a foundation base, and then some blusher, into his cheeks to enhance what little definition he could in his bone structure.
Unlike other political leaders, who make themselves up before their interviews, Taoiseach Cowen isn’t interested in vanity and was more than happy to perform his ablutions in the studio.
When challenged about a possible increase in cuts, he claimed:
“The media are getting into word games.” There was, he explained, a “minimum of three billion euros” in cuts. He then produced a camping stove, and within a matter of seconds, he had begun to melt some wax in a pot atop the small cooker. Defending Brian Lenihan, Mr Cowen slathered some of the wax on his legs while he said:
“He’s setting out very clearly the seriousness of our intent and should there be any doubt – either at home or abroad – that this government is not committed to dealing with the plans it has agreed, he’s making it very clear that we will be dealing with them.”
By the end of the early morning ten minute interview, Mr Cowen was walking out the studio door in a navy blue business suit, his fat, now hairless legs covered in trousers.
Thankfully, people will never realise that this sterling multitasker with a great intellect, charged with leading our country out of recession, was – only a few hours earlier – three sheets to the wind at a Galway hotel, singing to the rafters and regaling party colleagues with interesting stories.
The new issue of Wallpaper with custom cover arrived today. The cover creation app - now open to all at http://www.wallpaper.com/custom-covers/app - was pretty handy, if a little limited. Disappointed in myself that I didn't manage to extract more profanity from the tools at hand.
The Rocky Horror Show meets Brechtian alienation in Rainer Fassbinder’s Garbage, the City and Death at Smock Alley. Director Jane Mulcahy injects some of today’s popular music, Depression era style songs and a little opera into a play that addresses German post-war anti-Semitism, the extremes of liberal guilt and political corruption during a building boom. Alongside this there are issues of sexual identity found here: Leather and whips, transvestism, latent homosexuality, masochism, prostitution, the nature of power in relationships and unconventional marriages all feature.
Mary Cate Smith plays Roma, grounding all the madness around her as a consumptive prostitute married to a violent Franz (Clive Brassington). She catches the eye of a successful Jewish businessman and takes a step up socially. Husband Franz isn’t pleased. Neither is Roma, who has trouble dealing with her newfound affluence. The Jewish businessman appears to be the only character thriving in the post war society, singing that he finds Hitler in his heart because “from the corpses, flowers grow.” Is he exploiting his Jewishness in this hypersensitive society? Ironically, wife-beater Franz discovers homosexuality, doing little to assuage Roma’s guilt as he no longer loves her (for “loves” read “punches”) given the attentions of the successful businessman. Where Franz’s fists kept Roma “awake”, her improvement in quality of life now makes her want to “renounce her role”. This is just part of one plotline in a play where a lot goes on.
The play could have done with a little less general social commentary – the audience could draw its own conclusions without much of the aphoristic dialogue and soliloquising, well written as it is. However, it’s a thought provoking and rich musical piece that features prochronistic Eighties costumes, nudity, cross-dressing, an eclectic range of songs and an impressive cast, all in fine voice (particularly Brendan Hickey as the Jewish businessman).
There is a very limited list of exceptional circumstances where you might find yourself in transit through Temple Bar, but none of them involve going anywhere near the place on a Saturday night, when the hell-cauldron boils over and large crowds gather from miles around to watch the fountains of shimmering Goldschlager vomit hurtling into the night sky. The general advice remains to stay well back: although it's pretty to look at from a distance, if you get it in your hair it burns horribly and you're obligated to visit a triage priest as soon as possible. It's worth making a Saturday visit once a year though, just to remind you – never you mind what your eyes, ears and most especially your nose are telling you – that being sloshed in public is a legal no-no. Now this either means that the Gardaí's threshold for drunkenness falls somewhere above shitting in a postbox while getting a cross-eyed reacharound from one-tenth of a hen party, or that it was a poorly-considered law made by somebody with a wicked hangover. If the cops ever prosecuted this seriously half the population would go straight to jail, leaving the rest to stagger around, kebab in one hand and a brick in the other, trying to build prisons for themselves. The closest we've come to proper enforcement in recent times was with the arrival of the Intoxicating Liquor Act 2008, which gave the boys in blue an excuse to show off their collection of "about €5,000" worth of alcoholic contraband seized from the trembling paws of public drinkers over three weekends. Safe at last! Although if you take into account the average 2007 turnover of the Capital Bars group (ex-owners of many of the largest drinking holes in the city including the barnlike Café En Seine on Dawson Street and George's Street's stalwart homosaloon The George), weighing in at around €165,000 daily, then that haul starts to seem like very small beer indeed, in terms of curbing Dublin's ravenous appetite for booze.
In reality you're free to enjoy the flouting of this law at any time of day, as long as you bear a few things in mind. First (with apologies for the repetition, but REALLY), don't go to Temple Bar. It's for amateur drinkers and the sort of person who loves tweezering glass out of their scalp. Secondly, make sure you're the sort of drunk who everybody gets on with. No fighting, no slurring, and no shouting. Maybe a little staggering, but be entertaining. Remain enlightened enough to remember that dancing on car bonnets doesn't qualify as entertainment. Never practice your jaywalking while you're having trouble maintaining a straight line. Above all make sure that you have at least one really good story to tell, and if you're tenacious enough you'll have an even better one by the time tomorrow rolls around, even if you have to spend the next five years explaining to customs officials why there are tiny claw marks all over your passport.
- literally 'the un-homely'; more often understood in English as the uncanny, this refers to any instance which seems familiar and strange simultaneously, and the unsettling effect that creates in the reader/viewer.
First coined by Ernst Jentsch in 1906:
In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.
It was popularised by - and is probably connected for all time in the popular consciousness with - Sigmund Freud, who expanded on Jentsch's idea to (typically, one supposes) bring in the maelstrom of emotions that arise from social taboo, such as disgust, prurience, envy, lust, fear, et al. For Freud, the uncanny is a representation/reminder of our id, of the baser feelings that drive us and hence our experience of it necessarily is both familiar & strange.
1. Wanted: Portmanteau wordsmith (trilinguists / quadulinguists only please) 2. Prototypists needed 3. Swimming coaches wanted (eunuchs only please) 4. Overgrowers / hypergrowers wanted for public flora project 5. Project manager needed to manage team in Asia / South America / Tonga (no travel required) 6. Calling all Marketing projectionists 7. Botulists: have you considered a career in the military? 8. Magicians needed for quarterly Corporate Earnings call 9. Children required for growing family 10. International Manhunt 2050: evasive, dextrous sprinters wanted 11. Director of Bartering for large multinational corporation 12. Sun miners needed (various equatorial locations) 13. Focus groupies: free beer & pasteballs! 14. Bait washers required to work on meat ships (discretion assured) 15. Wives urgently needed 16. Now recruiting Product Priests 17. Cosmetic surgery victims required for on-cloud projection exhibition 18. Tram pilots urgently needed 19. Experienced Bat whisperer / Barman required (for local drink-cave) 20. Fluffer sought (immediate start)
Just to note, the above is not a sample list. These will be the only jobs available. Apart from parenting & sports-related jobs, which will of course constitute 80% of all jobs worldwide.
He may not have seen the tabloids (or many of the broadsheets) lately, though:
I like…the calmness, the authority, the curation of a daily paper, where I know I’m not going to be sent into something totally trivial and non-germane
