Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

From the Irish Times.

The Lost boys, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, in their office, planning the final eps of the show. From Wired…

President Obama at the funeral of civil rights leader Dr Dorothy Height

Yes I’m excited. Read about it here.

Pictures from The Special Relationship, which is set to air here on May 7. It stars Dennis Quaid and Hope Davis as Bill n Hill, and Michael Sheen and Helen McCrory reprising their roles as Tony and Cherie from The Queen.

From Review in today’s Independent

As opening night pitches go, ‘come and sleep with us’ is certainly one to grab the attention. That’s exactly the proposition that the Model arts centre in Sligo is giving to the public during its official re-opening bash next weekend (May 1).

Having being closed for two years as part of an extensive renovation and extension, the newly re-opened Model kicks off its programme next Saturday with the start of the Dorm exhibit, which aims to be a sort-of parody of a commercial arts fair.

Essentially, 22 artist collectives will take residence in separate booths in the gallery. At the same time, the public are invited to take part in a sleepover in the Model on opening night, with design students from the local IT providing cheap, easily disposable beds for hardy culture vultures. One bed prototype is made entirely of balloons and cardboard.

“We’re opening on May Day and we expect it to be mayhem,” laughs Aoife Flynn, Music and Events Programmer. “We chose to start with Dorm because our programme is very contemporary and sometimes hard-hitting, and we want to keep it at that level, but help people to interpret and access it too.

“It really is about educating people a bit, but I think, more than ever before, people want the arts to be interactive. It’s a
conversation. We’re not putting on something for people to look at and then just walk away. We want to start a debate.

“This is a way to do that, and also through the website where people can leave comments and get into a discussion.”

The Model’s re-launch provides a rare glimmer of light in an arts world that has been cast more and more into the shade by a State deep in the (empty) pockets of a recession. Be that as it may, the centre’s ambitious and quirky programme aims to bring the arts directly into the lives of not just those in the region, but to extend its reach on a national and international scale too.

It’s an ambitious agenda at a difficult time for the Irish arts.Funding to the Arts Council was cut by 6pc for this year (dropping
from €73.35m in 2009 to €69.15m for 2010). As a result, all arts organisations are feeling the squeeze. Be that as it may, the
operators of the Model seem undeterred.

Now comprising a purpose-built performance space, a cinema, a gallery circuit and a suite of nine residential artist studios, the Model’s building – which dates originally from the 1860s – has almost become an exhibit object in itself.

It may be a regional arts centre, but that hasn’t put a limit on its head honchos’ ambitions. “A very big part of how we approach our programme is to make it both nationally and internationally relevant,” says Aoife. “It’s good not to have everything happening in Dublin, and to have that diversity.

‘The artists, especially, respond so much better if you say to them, ‘We have this fantastic gallery in a rural context, with a beach down the road, and the mountains behind you in a really unspoiled area with a huge amount of history’. For instance, in 2006 we had Patti Smith come to do a week-long exhibition, and performance, that she’d also brought to London, New York and Tokyo.

“She came to Sligo because of her love of Jack Yeats (the subject of his own Model exhibit from July onwards). She actually said she probably wouldn’t have responded to the same invitation to a show in Dublin because there’s a certain sameness to that city circuit. So I think Sligo’s location can be an advantage.”

Seamus Kealy, director of the Model, was born in Sligo but spent most of his life in Canada, so perhaps understandably has a vision for the centre that goes beyond the local and the national. “We’ll be bringing in international guests and a residency programme for international artists, and we’re also engaged in a global scholarship scheme,” he says.

“We’re already part of international exhibition tours. For example, last year we had a tour from Germany that was very critical of how religion represents itself today in new forms of media. It proved to be very topical around the time the Blasphemy Bill was being drawn up. It’s possible to use an arts programme to provide a commentary on the socio-economic and political situation in the country right now.”

The Model’s renovation was made possible by funding from Sligo County Council and from the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport, but, like every other arts organisation, cobbling together operational and programme funding is a constant struggle.

“We just fundraise like hell,” reveals Seamus. “It’s ongoing, and we also have self-generating forms of income, like the cinema, restaurant and the nine artists’ studios that we rent out.”

Aoife Flynn adds: “The programme funding has obviously had reductions, and that makes it difficult, but I find the very nature of working in the arts is to respond creatively to that challenge. If your ambition is high, you will find a way.

“We spend a lot of our time applying for funding. You really have to work with all sorts of organisations and sponsors, and it’s hard work, but very rewarding. We have a lot of funding that would come from local authority, the PEACE III programme (a cross-border initiative), and the International Fund for Ireland scheme.

“At the same time, for smaller amounts we can work with good cultural institutes like Alliance Francaise or Goethe Institut. We start with the ambition and then try match the funding to it.”

See www.themodel.ie. The public sleepover on May 1 requires advance registration.

Interview with Tim Brannigan in Weekend magazine in today’s Independent

Tim Brannigan likes to say that he was born on May 10, 1966, and that he died the same day too. Minutes after his birth, Tim was ferried away from his mother Peggy, who subsequently told her own parents, siblings and her three other children that her baby had died in childbirth.

For the next five days in Templemore Hospital in Belfast, Peggy Brannigan had one ashen-faced visitor after another express their deepest condolences for her loss while, just a few doors down, her baby gurgled and cooed away like any healthy newborn.

Continue here.

Feature from today’s Irish Examiner

When it comes to reality TV these days, it takes something special to leave viewers open-mouthed and at a loss for words, but MTV’s latest fly-on-the-wall docuseries Jersey Shore has more than accomplished that feat. Arriving on this side of the world at a time when the only signs of life coming from the reality format can be attributed to the final spasms of rigor mortis, Jersey Shore has managed to strike a chord to become the most talked-about reality breakthrough hit since The Hills – albeit for mostly the wrong reasons.

For the uninitiated (episode three just aired on MTV last weekend), Jersey Shore focuses on the jaw-dropping, yet morbidly compelling car-crash summer shenanigans of a group of eight young Italian-American guys and dolls with egos as big as their pecs and intellects as miniscule as their thongs living, working and sleeping together in the popular New Jersey resort of Seaside Heights.

This octet all proudly proclaim themselves to be ‘guidos’ and ‘guidettes’, which are class-based slang-terms to describe certain Italian-Americans that are embraced by the witless Jersey Shore gang to mean tanned, muscled, heavily-hair-gelled, fashion-savvy, lady-killing, high-fiving studs, and the orange-skinned, fake nail-sporting, hair-extension-sprouting gals who so willingly throw themselves at them.

However, the ‘guido’ term has long been fiercely denounced as a lazy ethnic slur by the majority of Americans of Italian descent. Indeed MTV kicked off a sandstorm of controversy when the show started lasted summer: several Italian-American organisations condemned the show, while Dominos Pizza pulled its advertising in protest.

The real-life residents of Jersey Shore have also slammed the show, and the region’s representatives have been at pains to point out that the people depicted in the programme represent the seasonal workers who come to the area, and not the ones who live there full-time. Elsewhere, Christian groups are speaking out against the debauched lifestyle portrayed in the show, and cancer groups are calling for the show to be cancelled for what it deems as its reckless encouragement of tanning booths.

So who’s who on Jersey Shore, and what is it about them that has so captured – and repulsed – the popular imagination? The hulking lunks of guys are made up of Pauly D, “a born and raised guido”, a self-styled womanizing DJ with a shelf-load of hair gel products and a tanning booth in his apartment.

Then there’s mama’s boy Vinny, who considers himself a genuine guido and a class above the others because he has a college degree. Fret not, however, as he assures viewers that he can fist-pump with the best of them. Next up is Ronnie who has come to the shore determined not to fall in love, saying that, ‘Jersey Shore is all about getting laid: just take your shirt off and they come to you like a fly to sh*t’ (incidentally, Ronnie is now working on a tell-all book entitled Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore).

The last male charmer is Mike, who goes by the nickname ‘The Situation’, referring to his insanely defined six-pack stomach abs that he says makes him look like Rambo when he removes his shirt.

Meanwhile, the “ladies” consist of Sammi, the ‘Sweetheart’ who lives life by a store of empowering statements that would make The Simpsons’ talking Malibu Stacy doll proud. For instance: “The smaller the shorts the better because all the guidos like them”.

Jenni, known affectionately as ‘JWoww’, describes herself as a “preying mantis that will rip the head off a guy once I have sex with him”. Elsewhere, Angelina tells us in the first episode that she has a boyfriend but that if he doesn’t trust her to behave herself at the Shore, then she’ll dump him. Last, and certainly not least, there’s pint-sized Nicole, aka ‘Snooki’, a self-proclaimed loudmouth so obnoxious that even her charmless housemates have trouble accepting her.

What’s the appeal of such a monstrous motley crew one might ask? The answer, it seems, is that they have no appeal. There’s nobody to root for. Each participant is more vile, and vain, and foul-mouthed than the next.

Jersey Shore channels the nastiest, most unpleasant elements of cruelty-and-humiliation-driven formats like I’m A Celebrity and The X Factor, and amps it up several notches. There isn’t even any fake heart or attempts to win our sympathy. We as viewers get to feel better (and not a little dirty) by watching these eight clowns at their worst (which is also, apparently, their best).

Scoff if you must – and most TV critics have – but Jersey Shore is doing serious business for MTV. Some 5m viewers tuned in for its season finale in the US. Last week The New York Times reported that the music channel has sold the show to 30 countries, and is the subject of a massive global advertising campaign trading on the show’s ability to entertain and appall in equal measure. A second season has been ordered, this time to be set in South Beach, Miami, with all the cast returning except Angelina.

As a measure of how the show is gaining traction despite or perhaps because of its controversies, the cast members were recently greeted with huge affection in an LA nightclub by non other than half-Italian actor Leonardo diCaprio. Love it and/or hate it, it looks like Jersey Shore is going to be holidaying around here for some time yet.

*Jersey Shore, MTV, Sunday 9pm

The universe, as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope

Feature from today’s Day and Night in the Irish Independent

A man lies on a bed of nails with two cement blocks resting on his stomach, which are subsequently cracked with mallets. Another is watching over proceedings while dressed as a delicate mermaid. Minutes later a woman is singing the blues. A comedy skit comes after, followed by maybe by a little rap.

No, these are not scenes from the night-bus rink at College Green at 3am on a Sunday, but rather an iPod shuffle-like look at what makes up the entertainment on the recently resurgent cabaret and burlesque scene in Dublin.

Continue here.