Wearing your heart on your sleeve is a cagey endevour, something which New Zealand’s indie deities The Clean go for broke with on Stars. For this cat it’s the most remarkable musical success of 2001, a year when indie took an ice cold shower and cured the jaded malady of the scurrying Brit Pop hangover. On […]
Watching cartoons the other night, I heard someone say to a schoolgirl “Welcome to the glamorous world of unpaid internships,” or words to that effect, before the glamorous world of exploitation and skivvydom was portrayed in primary colours. I don’t recall receiving such good career advice when I was in school. My generation had to […]
The plot thickens. Weeks ago the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay was pre-emptively blocked by the police division in charge of post and communications here in Italy. With a flick of the switch the site became inaccessible (despite the fact, as journalist Alessandro Longo points out that the Pirate Bay has yet to be […]
One of the pleasures of being a hypocrite is that Pete Townshend empathises completely. Not that one should go on any particular *ahem*, “nostalgia” trip, circa 2003. Instead, cast your attention upon “Quadrophenia”, Townshend’s emotional, sexual, primal, whatever you want to call it mindfuck from some 30 years previously. Laying down a sequence of particular character foibles […]
Harry Palmer has a lot to contend with. Unlike the suave and aesthetically pre-programmed 007, he tends to shed blood, and even if he does compete reasonably successfully with M15’s blue eyed boy in matters of a carnal persuasion, the chances of his hush puppies getting submerged in one of London’s overflowing drains tends to downgrade his face […]
The Corporate Takeover of Ireland, by UCD’s Kieran Allen, was published in 2007 by the Irish Academic Press, where he is joined by such as Bryan Fanning (also of UCD) and Diarmaid Ferriter. Heavyweights, in other words. A serious business. So why is the book so badly marred by typos and other errors? “complimentary” where […]
I can sympathise, to an extent, with DoveGreyReader who approached Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland with trepidation given the tag ‘post 9-11 masterpiece’ (the Observer) that has been widely used by enthusiastic reviewers. It’s a problematic tag for any novel, but particularly so in this case given that the novel scarcely concerns itself with the attacks or their aftermath. That’s […]
Back in Dublin again. While I was away the LUAS trams mysteriously filled up to standing room only. The antiseptic pre-recorded voice announcing the stops has, as a result, more to say for herself:
Newsweek, last week, carried a quite astonishing piece on Silvio Berlusconi’s first 100 days in office. The glowing tribute stopped short of suggesting that Trenitalia now runs on time, but only just (coincidentally, despite the fact that it was a major election issue, Alitalia crops up nowhere in the piece). Astonishing because it may well […]
