Declan Cashin

Onwards we go

2010-05-21T19:06:00.002+01:00

This blog is upping sticks - kind of like myself actually - and can now be followed at declancashin.com

25

2010-05-13T10:47:00.003+01:00

Feature from today's Independent to mark this wekeend's 25th anniversary celebrations in The George

As the country's longest-running and most famous gay establishment, The George occupies a special place in gay Irish life, and this weekend the Dublin bar and club is celebrating its 25th year in business.

And so it should. That The George opened at all -- and, what's more, survived -- is an achievement in itself, seeing as it was set up in the midst of a devastating recession, and when homosexuality was still a crime in Ireland (and remained so until decriminalisation in 1993).

Continue here.

David Cameron is Prime Minister

2010-05-11T22:02:00.001+01:00

The Cam and Sam show moves into No 10

Buh-bye Gordon

2010-05-11T07:54:00.001+01:00

Hung

2010-05-07T20:31:00.001+01:00

Pictures of the day from the aftermath of the inconclusive UK general election

Wheat from the chat

2010-05-07T10:25:00.001+01:00

Nightwatch column from Day and Night in today's Independent

Gather round dear Nightwatch readers, and let me spin you a tale of smoking hot passion and unbridled desire fresh from the coalface of 21st-century dating life. Set your faces to 'Envy' and/or 'Swoon' ... now!

Continue here

Camergeddon is looming...

2010-05-05T23:26:00.000+01:00

cough airbrush cough

2010-05-01T23:46:00.002+01:00

Sir Hugsalot

2010-05-01T11:53:00.001+01:00

My feature on Random Hugs Day in today's Examiner

What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Or at the very least, what we all need is a great, big hug. The news is so grim at the moment that word processing systems are automatically inserting sad faces at the end of headlines, we’re all NAMA’d out of it, and our climate – for want of a better word - is blowing so hot and cold that the time has surely come to sensitively suggest to Mother Nature to up her HRT prescription.

Seeing as the touring ‘Hugging Saint’ Amma isn’t due around these parts any time soon, I decided to step up to the plate to spread some comfort and joy to the harried citizens of Dublin.

This coincides with Random Huggers Day, which takes place this Sunday (May 2) in London, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong, South Africa and New Zealand. It’s the brainchild of UK-based life coach Mayella Johnstone, who was inspired to start the annual event in 2004 after hearing a radio DJ remark that, ‘It seems you can find random terrorists on the streets; why don't we find random huggers?’

Together with a group of friends, Mayella decided to start offering hugs to people on the street. By all accounts, the response from the public every year has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

But how would unsuspecting Irish people react? I admit that I was sceptical from the start. When my editor first suggested the idea, I felt I had to ask, only half-jokingly, whether the Examiner would foot my bail and/or pay my medical expenses.

I ploughed ahead regardless, choosing last Monday afternoon for my hugging mission. It seemed like a good choice: it was a Monday, which is bleurgh enough to begin with, but what’s more the previous weekend’s good weather had vanished, plus many people’s travel plans had fallen on their ash, I mean, ass, thanks to Eyjafjallajokull.

On the way down town, I stop in for a cup of coffee, and offer a hug to the barista to express my thanks. She looks wary. “Erm, I’ll have to ask my manager,” she replies. I’m not feeling the love.

Rather than risk arrest and/or a beating by ambushing people out of nowhere, I opt to make a sign to wear simply reading, ‘Free hugs’, and see if people are forthcoming.

The first location I decide to hit is Dail Eireann on Kildare Street, because the Lord Herself knows that our glorious political elite could do with some TLC right around now. Alas, I forgot that the Dail is still on Easter break (seriously guys, Easter break? I can’t even remember Easter; that’s how long ago it is).

That said, one car does emerge from the tumbleweeds carrying a figure I can just about make out as a well-known Fianna Fail senator. Momentarily catching his eye, I gesture to my sign, holding out my arms in a hugging motion. He was out of there faster than a politician on the last day before Easter break.

After that initial let down, I decide to target real people, and so I position myself in the midst of the busy pedestrian traffic on Grafton Street. I immediately start to get the uniquely Irish Non-Staring Stare™ that we traditionally give Bono or Fair City actors when we pass them in town. You know the drill: keep the gaze straight ahead, eyes darting sideways to take it all in; keep walking; immediately take out mobile phone to notify others about who/what you’ve just seen.

However, after a few minutes, the staring-outright has begun. I’m a little mortified, quite honestly. The looks on people’s faces veer from little smiles, to chuckles, to outright fear. “Are you that desperate?” a woman asks in passing, before bursting out laughing. Soon after, another lady inquires: “Not getting many, huh? Must be you.” Hmm, I say to myself, probably not going to be a fantastic self-esteem day.

A guy walks past with his arm around a girl. “Would you like a free hug?” I ask them. The guy replies: “No thanks buddy, I got much better off her earlier on.” Steady on now girls, this one lucky lady saw him first.

Luckily, the public reaction becomes more positive and I soon settle into the role. I get a few ‘weirdo’ comments (nothing I’m not used to already), but there are surprisingly few, if any, ‘eff offs’.

“Good for you son,” a woman calls out as she makes her way over for a hug. I’m suddenly mindful of Stranger Hugging Etiquette. Mainly, I make sure that the arms don’t go any lower than the back, otherwise this task and this article enters a whole new family newspaper-unfriendly territory.

A young man in a shirt and tie walks straight over to me. “I’m hungover and I need a hug,” he says. I oblige, like a walking, talking Solpedeine, only more effervescent.

“Are you the one giving out the hugs?” a man asks. “I thought you might have a bunch of girls with you”. He grudgingly takes what must be a hugely disappointing substitute embrace from me.

I can see a group of young girls standing close-by, looking rightly apprehensive and giving me the once-over with their in-built Stranger Danger scanners.

They all ambush me for hugs at the one time. They’re German students, stranded here by the volcano. One says something to another auf Deutsch, before looking at me in a panic. ‘You couldn’t understand me, yes?” she asks. I shake my head. “Oh thank God!” she exclaims.

Doing by bit for the Tourist Board, I also dispense some hug love to a Canadian tourist. “I can’t leave Ireland without one,” she says with a laugh.

Any self-consciousness on my part is now gone, and I find myself getting more into it. If nothing else, I’m giving people something to laugh about on a dreary Monday. Even better, the camera phones are now out. One guy actually recorded me, so who knows, I could be the next SuBo (DecCash?). A little later I find out that I was mentioned on Twitter (“can’t attest to the quality, but there’s a guy giving out free hugs”).

I’m feeling much braver, so I approach the people who are idling nearby, perhaps too afraid to approach. In nearly every instance, they take the hug and we have a laugh. “I’m going to text my friend and tell her to come down to you for a hug,” and elderly lady informs me. High praise indeed.

In total, I spend over an hour on Grafton Street. People are surprisingly responsive, much more so than I would have imagined. What’s wonderful is that while people seem bemused, nobody questions why I’m doing it. The general attitude seems to be, ‘Well, why the hell not?’

One of the last people I meet is another elderly woman, who asks me afterwards if I’ll be back every Monday offering hugs. There was something about that question that I found really sweet but kind of sad at the same time. I might not be back next Monday, but perhaps some more of you out there will embrace the task instead.

Gerry Ryan, 1956-2010

2010-04-30T17:53:00.000+01:00

From the Irish Times.

Picture of the day

2010-04-30T10:32:00.002+01:00

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

Picture of the day

2010-04-29T22:03:00.001+01:00

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

Eek

2010-04-29T16:02:00.002+01:00

Yes I'm excited. Read about it here.

Bubba and Blair

2010-04-28T22:08:00.002+01:00

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.

The very Model of a modern arts centre

2010-04-24T11:28:00.002+01:00

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.

Little white lies

2010-04-24T10:36:00.004+01:00

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.

So this is the Situation regarding Jersey Shore

2010-04-24T07:10:00.003+01:00

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 Final Frontier

2010-04-24T06:57:00.001+01:00

The universe, as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope

Life is a cabaret...

2010-04-23T12:13:00.003+01:00

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.

Top of the flops

2010-04-22T18:14:00.004+01:00

From today's Indo about Hollywood's latest trend of re-making one-time box office bombs.

There's only one thing that Hollywood movie studios are more terrified of than failure, and that's originality. It makes sense, therefore, that the hottest trend in creatively-challenged Tinseltown is to delve into its catalogue of big-budget film flops and remake -- or, to, use the term du jour, reboot -- box office duds of yore for modern audiences.

Continue here.

Comedy Giants in aid of Dublin Youth Theatre

2010-04-21T15:50:00.003+01:00

Next Thursday evening. It's a good cause. Do your bit.

The gay tour

2010-04-17T12:54:00.002+01:00

To mark the upcoming 25th anniversary of The George next month, I went on a tour of Dublin's historical gay social spots with the pretty fabulous Tonie Walsh. The piece ran into today's Weekend supplement in the Irish Examiner.

History doesn’t always have to be about fusty manuscripts, ancient buildings, and dusty door-stopping books. It can also be traced and documented through the evolution of its social outlets like pubs and clubs. Such is the case with the Irish gay community, and in particular its fledgling attempts at gay social visibility over the past four decades.

Next month, the city’s most famous gay bar and club, The George, will celebrate its quarter-life anniversary, having first opened its doors to an under-served and largely disenfranchised gay clientele in Easter 1985.
To mark the occasion, gay activist and archivist Tonie Walsh brought the Irish Examiner on a walking tour of gay Dublin to show how the struggles and successes of its social scene corresponded with, and indeed often directly supported, the wider emergence of the Irish gay rights movement.

Indeed, the mere act of socialising in itself was often seen as a public stance of defiance against Victorian legislation, censorship, and taboos around any discussion of homosexuality. “You need to time travel a bit and imagine the kind of environment that existed in the 1960s and 70s,” says Tonie.

“Up until the late 1960s there was very little mention of homosexuality in the Irish media. Normally any use of the word was the result of legal scandals, such as people being arrested for cruising. Gay social outlets were scarce on the ground, and bar culture, as we’d understand it today, was practically non-existent.”

We begin the tour – quite appropriately, as it turns out – at the gates of Dublin Castle. “The Crown Jewels disappeared from Bedford Tower in the castle just before the visit of King Edward in 1905,” explains Tonie. “It was a huge scandal at the time because Sir Arthur Vickers, the Chief Herald charged with looking after them, was the subject of intense rumours about his sexuality.

“It seems he was quite a bon viveur, and had contact with a lot of gay people, including Richard Shackleton [brother of Arctic explorer Ernest], who was described at the time as “extremely good looking and extremely depraved”. This cast Vickers in a very suspicious light, and he was scape-goated for the theft.”

From there, we move on towards Temple Bar, which was the location for two of the pivotal developments in modern Irish gay history. Stopping on Crow Street, Tonie points out the former site of the Women’s Centre, which, Tonie believes, doesn’t get enough credit for its role in gay liberation. “The establishment of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement in 1971 helped create a space for gay women and men to imagine new sexual identities and give expression to their desires and concerns,” he says.

Skipping over a few streets, we arrive at No 10 Fownes Street (now a footwear store), the one-time site of the Hirschfeld Centre, a community resource centre that opened on St Patrick’s Day 1979 and operated until 1987 when it burned down in suspicious circumstances (even murkier was the fact that a week later, the avowedly gay Sides dance club across the road on what is today the site of the Adams Trinity Hotel on Dame Lane, was also burned down).

“The newly-established National Gay and Lesbian Federation bought a warehouse building to house the centre for 60,000 punts which was a massive amount of money in 1978,” Tonie says. “Hirschfeld is fondly remembered today. You have to remember at the time that the social facilities for gay people were very thin on the ground.

“Homosexuality was still illegal: the same laws that had sent Oscar Wilde to penal servitude in the 1890s were still on the Irish statute books. Lesbians were, to all intents and purposes, invisible. You could get kicked out of a bar for simply being identified as gay.

“The Hirschfeld Centre provided a safe place for gay people simply to be themselves. What was unique was that it had a café and dance club called Flickers (the Dutch word for ‘faggots’), which proved to be a training ground for lots of future club DJs (amongst them the late Vincent Hanley, who was to become a popular RTE presenter).”

Tonie continues: “Hirschfeld also had a youth group, a women’s group, a cinema club called The Biograph, counseling facilities, the Gay Switchboard operated from here (and still exists now), and of course, offices for political and campaigning groups, particularly those set up to combat HIV and Aids in the 80s”

Strolling around the ‘Pink Triangle’ linking Temple Bar, South Great George’s Street and South William Street, Tonie identifies the one-time sites of Hooray Henry’s (now the site of the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre), Pgymalion (now The Hairy Lemon), and Bartley Dunnes (today it’s Bia Bar), all of which operated with varying degrees of success throughout the 1980s.

Looping back around to South George’s Street, our tour terminates back at The George, which was originally opened by Kerry businessman Cyril O’Brien. The building itself had been an ‘old man’s’ bar called The George, but it had no gay association.

Personally speaking, The George was the first gay bar I ever went to in Dublin, and apparently I’m not alone in that experience. “For most gay and lesbian people, it’s the first gay bar we ever walk into, which is a major moment in our journey towards self-acceptance,” says Brian Finnegan, editor of Gay Community News. “That’s a moment we remember for the rest of our lives because it showed us there was a big, exciting gay world that we could be part of.”

Tonie believes that The George’s commercial success served as a metaphor for how gay visibility increased, and the gay social scene expanded following decriminalisation in 1993. He says: “Once the aura of criminality was removed from homosexuality, it allowed mainstream society – the popular media, government, business, advertising – to engage with the gay community in a really powerful and meaningful way, probably for the first time in our history.”

COMING (OUT) OF AGE:

It’s now 17 years since homosexual decriminalisation in Ireland, meaning there’s a whole generation of young gay people coming of age today who were only babies – or not even born – at the time of the law reform. A new two-part documentary series, Growing Up Gay, which starts on RTE1 on Monday night, follows six such gay teenagers through the ups and downs of life at home and in school, as well as through more universal experiences like friendships and falling in love.

The key objective of the series, however, is to look at just how much Irish society has changed for gay people. Is it easier to be gay today than it was 17 years ago?

“It is vastly different for young people growing up now than it was even for the generation before them,” says Michael Barron, director of the gay youth service BelongTo. “The landscape has changed hugely.”

A clear sign of progress is how young people are coming out at a younger age than ever before, and at a time when there is a substantial gay presence in the media and everyday life.

That said, young gay people still face significant problems, namely bullying and homophobic violence. Last week, BelongTo launched Stand-Up, a campaign aimed at supporting friendships between gay and straight people, and to encourage all young people to stand up to homophobic bullying.

At the launch, Irish actor Colin Farrell wrote an eloquent personal testimony about his memories of the abuse suffered by his gay brother Eamon. “The thing I remember, quite literally, is blood on his school shirt when [Eamon] came home in the afternoon,” Farrell recalls. “The beatings and taunting were very frequent for him and a constant part of his school years.”

It would seem that, in this regard, not a lot has changed. “I think bullying is the biggest LGBT issue of all, even bigger than marriage,” says Michael Barron. “Bullying and harassment, and educational drop-out, are big issues for gay teens today.

“It seems like a huge contradiction: young people are coming out younger, in greater numbers, and there is greater acceptance among large numbers of the youth population, yet at the same time homophobic bullying seems to be more physical and violent than ever before. I don’t have the answer as to why that’s the case, but that broader acceptance certainly is not across the spectrum.”

The other issue that comes up in the RTE documentary is that of family relationships. “The young people in the series have received a lot of support from their families, and the relationship with their parents is key,” says Barron.

“Some young people were really nervous about coming out to their parents, and sometimes the parents were shocked and initially didn’t have a brilliant reaction. But once the mother and father come to terms with the news, it’s clear to see the positive effect it has on the confidence and the mental health of the gay person.”

*Growing Up Gay, Monday April 19, RTE 1, 9.35pm.

Making a Twit of myself

2010-04-16T10:53:00.003+01:00

Nightwatch column from Day and Night in today's Independent

I've never been particularly good with names. It seems the old grey matter simply can't master all those vowels and consonants, not to mention the intensive memory work required. I always believed that technology was invented for defective humanoid models like myself; a brave new innovative frontier to which I could outsource all those pesky operations like thinking and comprehending, and a handy way to assist my attempts at functioning socially in the real world.

Instead, technological progress is making matters worse. Owing to my (f)addictions to Facebook and Twitter, I now have a greatly expanded list of people that I speak to -- or, more accurately, speak @ -- online everyday.

Continue here

(House) Dr Phil

2010-04-16T10:44:00.004+01:00

Interview with Phil Spencer in today's Property supplement in the Irish Independent

It's afternoon tea rush hour on a busy Friday afternoon in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel, and an elderly lady interrupts Phil Spencer as he stirs his cup. "Sorry to bother you," she says shyly. "But I just wanted to say your show is fabulous."

Continue here.

True star

2010-04-15T13:59:00.001+01:00

Good NYT interview-profile with Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, that have inspired the massive hit HBO show True Blood.

Unplugged

2010-04-10T21:19:00.002+01:00

James Sturm at Slate is quitting the internet.
Read here.

How to influence friends...

2010-04-08T22:50:00.003+01:00

Interesting piece from last week's Sunday Times on stealth advertising on the back of the release of the new Demi Moore/David Duchovny movie The Joneses.

I'm walkin' here!

2010-04-08T22:17:00.002+01:00

Cool piece on the making of Midnight Cowboy over at Vanity Fair

Betty left me in bits

2010-04-08T20:03:00.002+01:00

The second last episode of the show, and it's certainly going out on a high. Last night's episode featured one of the most exquisitely beautiful treatments of a gay character that I've ever seen. Watch and weep here.

Worst Photoshopping. EVER.

2010-04-08T19:44:00.003+01:00

Give us Shelly O back!

Bye-bye Bebo

2010-04-08T14:55:00.002+01:00

My piece on the rumoured closure of Bebo in today's Independent

OMG! Just two years after it was sold for close to $1bn, social networking site Bebo looks set to log off for good following a catastrophic collapse in its membership in the face of competition from its more zeitgeisty rivals Facebook and Twitter.

Continue here.

Mr Saturday Night

2010-04-03T10:53:00.002+01:00

My interview with Craig Doyle in today's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

It’s 11am on a Thursday, and Craig Doyle is feeling dizzy and a tad unsteady on his feet. Knowing these showbiz types, Weekend greets this news with a cynical arched eyebrow, but, alas, it turns out that his condition this morning isn’t due to some heady rock and roll lifestyle. “I have vertigo,” the 39-year-old explains pouring out cups of coffee in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. “I woke up last weekend, got up out of bed, and fell straight down to the ground. I’m on medication for it, but just standing up is a weird sensation at the moment.”

That aside, as the dad-of-three points out, he’s the least likely person to be indulging in wild socialising anymore. “I was up at 6.30 this morning with the kids,” he laughs, referring to Quinn (7), Muireann (5) and Milo (2). What’s more, he seems more than content with this; he’s very much aware that being a father and husband (to Doon, since 2002) now informs every aspect of his life. He even half-jokingly asks if he can still pull off the look he’s working today – jeans, and a cardigan over a neat shirt and tie. “I’m doing this for thirty-something dads everywhere,” he quips as our photographer puts him through his paces.

The Dublin-born presenter is talking to Weekend in advance of the start of his eight-week run hosting The Saturday Night Show on RTE1, taking over from Brendan O’Connor who solidly anchored the slot for the last two months. Having spent the best part of the last decade working mainly in sport for BBC and later ITV, this new gig gives Irish viewers the chance to get reacquainted with Craig in a very different setting, though, as the man says himself, he won’t be attempting to reinvent the wheel during his tenure.

“I’ve never seen a very experimental chat show being commissioned,” he says. “I find that particularly in Ireland we’re an interested and astute nation, and we just like to hear people talk. That’s what a chat show is. You can dress it up, and ice the cake, but at the end of the day, you have to give people cake.”

The game plan for Craig’s show is to put the emphasis on entertainment, mainly music and comedy. “I’ve always felt like the Saturday night slot should complement the Friday night,” he says. “The Late Late Show is very much a forum for the country, and it should reflect what’s happened in the country and the world over the course of a week, but I think Saturday night should be pure, feel-good escapism.”

Of course, the age-old criticism of Irish television is that this is simply too small an island with too-limited access to major guests and stars to sustain two chat shows on consecutive nights. “It’s a fair shout isn’t it? But I think the success of The Late Late Show during Pat’s reign, and of Tubridy Tonight during Ryan’s shows that there is room for both.

“I do think you have to approach it from a slightly different angle though. If I were offered three movie stars as guests, I’d take one of them. There has to be Irish interest. It’s not solely because of availability that talk shows do that. And if it happens to be someone who is very familiar to people, maybe you want someone who isn’t as familiar. It’s a fine balance.”

Prepping for this chat show has meant that Craig has had an office desk in Dublin for the first time in his life. Born in Stillorgan in 1970, Craig was schooled in Blackrock College, which fuelled the crazed passion for sport on which he has built a broadcasting career.

After studying in Maynooth, Craig followed his journalist brother Keith to London to study broadcasting at the London College of Printing. Before he’d even graduated, Craig had secured a contract job with the BBC (after being refused a free work placement in RTE along the way).

Starting on BBC Radio Suffolk, Craig segued to TV as presenter on UTV’s Disney Club, and then on BBC’s Tomorrow’s World. Following Jill Dando’s murder in 1999, Craig was drafted in to take over her slot on the BBC’s long-running travel show Holiday, on which he became a popular fixture with his amiable manner, good looks, and, of course, his Irish accent.
Craig stayed in that job for almost six years, traveling 200 days a year, and visiting some 120 countries in total. In 2004 he moved full-time to the BBC sport department, working on its legendary jewel-in-the-sports-scheduling crown Grandstand.

That same year, Craig made his first venture into Irish TV presenting with The Craig Doyle Show, a part travelogue/part celeb talk show made by his own Boxer production company.

“That was shite,” he admits frankly. “I didn’t enjoy that experience. It came at a very bad time for me. I was really busy, and just wasn’t really in a good place. The show wasn’t what I wanted it to be, which is ridiculous because I made it, but it was very early days for us. It just wasn’t right, and I kind of knew at the time. I don’t think I watched any of it go out.”

On top of – if not at the root of - that unhappy period was the critical pummeling Craig received in his first few months at BBC sport co-hosting the 2004 Athens Olympics. One British paper blasted him for being ‘out of his depth’, while Labour MP Chris Bryant even felt moved to comment, ‘You get the experts who know everything about sport but can't put it into English, and then you get Craig Doyle’. That’s gotta hurt.

“That was awful,” he recalls. “I was learning how to do the job at that stage. That’s a really tough thing about this business. Most of this business isn’t tough: it’s a pretty sweet job and that’s why you have to take all that shit. I remember Gary Lineker telling me, ‘You’re going to get a hard time because it’s your rites of passage’. And it was.

“I was very down after that. It was a real low because I didn’t understand it. Now I understand it, and it doesn’t mean anything. I thought at the time it was largely unfair. But I’m a lot stronger from it. I copped on. I just grew up a bit, and parked the ego. I’m more comfortable in my own skin. I’m a hugely different bloke now.”

In early 2008, Craig left BBC television after 13 years to join ITV Sport. “It was a massive decision to make, but it wasn’t a quick one,” he says. “They made three approaches to me over the course of two years, and at the end of the day it came down to the money. The money is so much better, I can’t lie about it.

“I had been thinking for a while that I was in the wrong place, and it was just a better deal. I’m the rugby guy in ITV now. It’s pretty full on at the moment, as we’re in the middle of the domestic rugby season. But it’s not a chore, I love it.”

The nature of the work means Craig spends 2-3 days a week – mainly weekends - in London (alternating between staying in hotels and with his brother), and the rest of the time at home with Doon and the kids in Wicklow. Does he feel the guilt of being a working parent spending time away from home?

“I don’t ever want to ever leave them, but it’s not out of guilt: I just love being with them,” he replies. “I get homesick after a day now. I hate that I’m not there on weekends to take my son to rugby, which he loves.

“Doon and I share the parenting role. I’m around during the week so I do the collecting and dropping off. People are used to seeing me going around in my wellies in Enniskerry. My hands are torn to bits because I’m working in the garden a lot. I’m re-doing the vegetable patch at the moment. I love cleaning out the chicken coop. That’s a holiday for me now.”

It probably won’t come as surprise that Craig and Doon get little time to themselves. “We had a night out a Fridays ago – we went to Ikea,” he laughs. “We needed a new cheap sofa that the kids could destroy. It wasn’t even about us! But you give up that right when you have kids.”

For now, Craig has just about enough time to devote to work and his family, but he still finds that life has a way of reminding
him of his top priorities lest he ever forget. “I was determined to start training to do a triathalon this year,” he says. “So about three weeks ago I was on the way out to do a 2-3k swimming training night, and Quinn said to me, ‘Daddy do you want to play Star Wars?’

“He had all the stuff laid out. And I was like, ‘No, I have to go swimming’, and I got out to the car and thought, ‘What the f*ck am I doing?’ I chucked the bag in the boot and went back inside and said to myself, ‘That’s it; that’s the end of it. I’ll wait for another few years to do that stuff’. It really hit me that day: this life aint about me anymore.”

*The Saturday Night Show starts next Saturday, April 10, on RTE 1.

Psycho Good Friday

2010-04-02T13:14:00.001+01:00

Today in the Irish Film Institute

On festivals and growing up...sorta

2010-04-02T12:58:00.003+01:00

Two pieces in Day and Night in the Indo today:

Nightwatch column

Set visit and interview with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant for Cemetery Junction.

Nama-geddon

2010-03-30T22:33:00.002+01:00

Black Tuesday. The scale of this scam is staggering to behold. Amidst all this "horror" (as it was repeatedly called on Prime Time tonight), this picture started doing the rounds. Some (rare) light relief on a dark day in the history of this state.

Tara is back - with 75% more gay

2010-03-30T14:06:00.004+01:00

United States of Tara is back for its second season - and it's funnier, sharper and, more importantly, gayer than ever before. Toni Collette is as good as ever, while young actor Keir Gilchrist's Marshall (criminally robbed of an Emmy nomination last year) remains the best gay character on American television.

Salon has a good intro to and analysis of the show here.

Let the Right One Win

2010-03-30T08:51:00.003+01:00

Aw. Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson pose with the Empire Award for Best Horror movie for Let The Right One In. Kinda weird to see them as healthy, normal kids in contrast to their characters in the movie

Ricky Martin: I'm gay

2010-03-29T22:49:00.002+01:00

Read here

The Pope Delusion

2010-03-29T19:04:00.005+01:00

Richard Dawkins lets rip at Pope Benedictator

Oreagan

2010-03-29T18:54:00.004+01:00

Obama's newfound confidence on the back of HCR is marking him out as the "liberal Reagan", according to the Daily Beast

Sassy Gay Friend

2010-03-29T14:02:00.002+01:00

I love this series of skits.

If Othello's Desdemona had a sassy gay friend...

And Ophelia...

And Juliet...

Sinead, CNN and church abuse

2010-03-29T10:59:00.003+01:00

Sinead O'Connor talks about Catholic Church sex abuse with CNN's Andersoon Cooper.

The Daily Mail song

2010-03-29T10:08:00.002+01:00

Class.

Picture of the day

2010-03-29T08:51:00.001+01:00

Well, it's kinda picture of the day last week but it's a good'un. Hillary congrats the O.Bam over healthcare reform.

'Werner' Brothers presents...

2010-03-28T20:10:00.003+01:00

Werner Herzog narrates...a plastic bag. Seriously.

Must-C television

2010-03-28T19:03:00.003+01:00

Coming this summer...The Big C starring Laura Linney, Oliver Platt and Gabby Sidibe

Kicking Back

2010-03-26T16:30:00.003Z

My interview with Aaron Johnson, star of Kick-Ass, in Day and Night in today's Independent...

It has been hard to miss British actor Aaron Johnson in the massive ad campaigns for Kick-Ass, a darkly funny, ultra-violent, deliriously entertaining anti-hero superhero flick. There he is on the sides of buses and plastered on billboards, pictured in a deliberately underwhelming green and yellow costume, alongside sorta-Batman 'Big Daddy' (Nicholas Cage), Christopher 'McLovin' Mintz-Plasse's emo-haired Red Mist, and breakout teen star Chloe Moretz's pintsized, foul-mouthed, purple-coiffed assassin Hit Girl.

The only thing is, Johnson's face is hidden by a mask, with the effect of rendering him largely unrecognisable. "I'm actuallyvery happy about that," the 19-year-old tells Day & Night as he settles on a sofa in Dublin's Merrion Hotel. "I like doing those kinds of roles. That's the point of acting: it gives you the freedom to be everything but you."

Continue here.

Making his mark on history

2010-03-23T23:51:00.001Z

219 votes

2010-03-22T08:17:00.005Z

Health care reform is passed, extending insurance to 31 million Americans. A good day.

Move coverage from The Daily Beast

Time asks if Republicans can win by running against HCR?

TV theme song medley

2010-03-20T21:02:00.001Z

Fantastic stuff from TWO Fredriks. Watch here

Super Sunday!

2010-03-20T20:34:00.002Z

In the run-up to tomorrow's historic - and, if passed, momentous - vote on healthcare reform in the US, why not whet your appetite with two classic episodes of The West Wing, namely 'Five Votes Down' from season 1 and 'A Good Day' from season 6.

Pope grants...erm, I mean, asks for forgiveness

2010-03-20T17:37:00.002Z

An oldie from The Onion relevant to Ireland and the world today's following Pope Benedictator's miserable pastoral letter to Irish Catholics regarding the sexual abuse and torture of children by religious orders.

The Emergency also has its take on the matter...

Typo of the day

2010-03-20T17:35:00.001Z

Tee hee hee.

Appetite for life

2010-03-20T12:37:00.002Z

Interview with Jean-Christophe Novelli in today's Irish Examiner.

Jean-Christophe Novelli has a habit of running into Irish people in toilets around London. Pat Kenny, for instance, who asked him to be a guest on the Late Late Show as they shared space around the hand dryer. Then, of course, there was footballer Robbie Keane.

“It was in the restroom of a bar in London, and I recognised Robbie,” the soccer-mad celeb chef says in what is still an extremely thick Gallic accent. “I couldn’t shake his hand obviously, but I said to him, ‘Robbie, I’m so excited to meet you’. And Robbie replied, ‘I can tell you are because you just peed on your shoes’.”

This is just one of many anecdotes and tangential asides in which the 49-year-old indulges as Weekend chats with him in the L’atelier des Chefs in London’s West End. It’s St Patrick’s morning, and Jean-Christophe is reveling in his Irish-related memories, ranging from being invited by Bono to see U2 play in Croke Park last summer to his brief period in 2006 as chef de patron at Louis Murray’s La Stampa restaurant in Dublin’s Dawson Street.

That was a particularly strange time for the chef, who was criticised harshly in certain circles for the limited role he played in La Stampa’s kitchen. “There was some confusion over that,” he explains. “I told Louis I couldn’t be there every day, and he understood that. But the press didn’t take it that way. They thought I’d be in the kitchen every day. Things got out of control. But I loved the challenge.”

Jean-Christophe’s newest challenge comes from a collaboration with Flora’s ‘Heart Age’ campaign, where he has conjured up recipes (and will take part in a summer reality-cooking show on TV3) centred around the idea of substituting Flora for regular fatty butter in everyday cooking.

These days, this type of project suits him perfectly, as it involves teaching others and passing on his wisdom in a manner not too dissimilar to how he first developed his own understanding of and passion for food. “My mother gave me that passion, that sense of vocation for cooking,” he says. “I learned at her knee. I was always eating, always watching and tasting what she put in the pan.”

Indeed, Jean Christophe started off in the business at a very young age. Born and raised in Arras, northern France (Charles DeGaulle was a one-time neighbour), Jean-Christophe decided at age 14 that he wanted to be a baker and started work in a local kitchen. “I loved it so much,” he recalls. “I was bad at school. No teacher wanted me in their classes because I was so disruptive. They told me I had learning difficulties. When I started working, I did everything I could to make sure I wouldn’t have to go back to that.”

At age 20, he became private head chef to Parisian banker Elie de Rothschild, before moving to the UK in 1983 to serve as head chef in the late Keith Floyd’s pub, The Maltsters. From there, he moved to Le Provence (earning his first of four Michelin stars), followed by London’s Four Seasons, and branched out with his own restaurant, Maison Novelli.

As one point in the 90s, he was running seven restaurants between London, France and South Africa, However, having run up huge debts, Jean-Christophe lost his empire and declared bankruptcy at the turn of the millennium. With the help of pal Marco Pierre White, he delved back into the restaurant business again, and in 2005 became a TV sensation on Hell’s Kitchen.
Today, Jean-Christophe operates two British gastropubs (with plans to open more) and runs a cooking school from his farmhouse near Luton airport, where he lives with his fiancée Michelle Kennedy (33) and their 18-month-old son Jean (Jean-Christophe has a 21-year-old daughter from his previous marriage).

“About six years ago I decided I wanted out of the restaurant world,” Jean-Christophe admits. “I had done my time in the kitchen. I knew that I wanted to teach instead.

“I spent some time in LA last year filming my series Chef Academy, and I’m due to go back again in the next few weeks, and I love that. My little boy was born there – he’s an American. But I wouldn’t want to live there though. I love where I am. I’m situated near the airport so I can travel easily. I have a nice countryside kitchen. I can’t work against the clock now. It’s not me anymore.”

By his own admission, fatherhood this second time round has mellowed him profoundly. He certainly seems a far cry from the man once voted the world’s sexiest chef, and who entertained a string of celebrity girlfriends, Patsy Kensit amongst them.

“Michelle and my son have given me another life,” he admits. “I’ve been very fortunate, and I would do things exactly the same way, but I think I’m better now that I was before. I was out of control, perhaps too hard on myself. God knows how I did what I did. Time has mellowed me. I’m more creative, more versatile and thoughtful.

“Michelle is my best friend, and my partner in every way. We have everything in common, there are no secrets, and there’s nothing she doesn’t know about me. As for my son, I don’t want to miss out on anything with him. This is the most important thing in my life now – certainly more important than any Michelin star.”

*See www.floraheartage.com

JT, A1 and me

2010-03-20T12:27:00.002Z

My interview with Justin Timberlake in today's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

Justin Timberlake is having what can only be described as an Entourage moment. Weekend magazine is at the International Motor Show in Geneva, where Justin has flown in to launch the new A1 model for Audi, and he's buzzing around like a child who has just mixed Skittles and Coca-Cola.

Shortly before we spoke, the 29-year-old pop prince had driven the new car out on stage at the Audi stand to a throng of onlookers, expo staff and rubbernecking fans, who included Yves Leterme, the prime minister of Belgium.

Continue here

Matters of State

2010-03-19T11:14:00.001Z

Great piece on the evolving relationship between Obama and Hillary in today's New York Times.

Subbed par: Some great headlines...

2010-03-18T21:32:00.003Z

I just got my Ass Kicked!

2010-03-15T23:02:00.002Z

Saw this tonight. Not allowed say anything for now, but my oh my, are you all in for a treat.

Check out more artwork here.

Greatest Movie Scenes Ever

2010-03-14T15:21:00.002Z

From today's Observer

Need for speed

2010-03-12T15:17:00.003Z

My column on speed dating in today's Day and Night in the Irish Independent.

Hands up whoever has gone to a speed-dating night. Anyone? (A tumbleweed blows by.) Wait, is that a hand up at the back ... oh right, you're pointing and laughing at me. I can understand why many of you might be reluctant to admit it. More than one friend -- though that title is under review -- openly scoffed at my recent plans to go to a speed-dating event, but I persevered regardless.

Continue here.

See also romeoromeojulietjuliet.com

Enter the Dragon

2010-03-11T15:39:00.003Z

My interview with Niels Arden Oplev, director of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in today's Irish Examiner.

It’s been dubbed a Swedish Zodiac meets The Silence of the Lambs, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo needs little introduction to millions of readers across the world. Based on the first book in the late Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millenium’ trilogy – which have sold some 30m copies in 35 countries – Dragon Tattoo arrives on these shores having defied the pre-release grumbles and fears of its many fans to become the most successful movie in Swedish box office history, even sparking talk of an ominous Hollywood remake.

However, the movie’s director Niels Arden Oplev says he didn’t find signing onto the project at all intimidating - for one simple reason. “I’d never heard of the book before,” chuckles the genial 49-year-old Dane over the phone from New York.

“I was in Scandinavia absorbed in the making of a movie about Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then the three producers asked me about doing this thriller up in Sweden. My previous movies had all been dramas, and I wasn’t looking for thriller material, so I said no.

“They then came back with a new production schedule that suited me. I went home that night in Copenhagen, and mentioned it to my neighbour. She ran into another room like something was wrong, and came out with the book, saying she’d just read it and loved it. I took that as a good omen.”

Having started out making police-crime dramas for Danish TV (and winning two International Emmy awards for his efforts), Oplev had some background experience to tackle Larsson’s convoluted tale of disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist) who is hired by the head of an uber-wealthy family to investigate the still-unsolved 40-year mystery of his niece’s disappearance. Along the way, he finds himself teaming up with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a deliquent, anti-social, punk hacker with her own dark secrets to hide.

By now, Oplev is intimately acquainted with the work of Larsson (who died suddenly in 2004), and is well placed to suggest what it is about the books that has so captured the public imagination. “I think Larsson is a very entertaining writer, but he also has this passion, particularly in highlighting society’s violence against women,” he says.

“What’s more, Dragon Tattoo has an Agatha Christie-type plot so it’s a compelling mystery to boot. But I think the real success of the story is down to the character of Lisbeth.”

Indeed, 30-year-old Noomi Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth is electrifying (and in a just world would earn an Oscar nomination next year). It’s a role that has already drawn comparisons to Jodie Foster’s dogged-but-vulnerable agent in Silence of the Lambs, though Rapace infuses Lisbeth with a 21st century kick-ass sensibility.

“I think a better comparison is La Femme Nikita,” says Oplev. “Lisbeth is a female Charles Bronson. She’ll take the law into her own hands if she needs to. She has this remarkable thing in her that no matter how much she’s abused, she never becomes a victim. She always fights back.”

Oplev adds that casting the part was crucial to the success of the movie. “I had seen footage of Noomi and thought she was a strong actress but too goddamn beautiful,” he explains. “That was a worry because Lisbeth is not beautiful in the book, and I didn’t want to do the Hollywood thing of hiring a good-looking actress for such a beloved role.

“But when she came in to read the part, she must have known this would be a problem, because she looked as worn out as possible. Noomi changed her physical appearance totally, re-opening old piercings, adopting a more boyish look, and studying martial arts. In the end, I really fell for her strong, dark energy, and her unpredictability.”

As fans will know, Lisbeth is a character that goes to some very dark places, and the movie doesn’t shy away from the book’s at-times gruesome violence, in particular a harrowing rape scene that has become a major talking point of the movie’s release.

Oplev says that that to show the scene in an uncompromising way would have been “to betray women”. “Those scenes had to be horrific because a crime that serious should never be seen as entertainment,” he continues. “I don’t think it’s exploitative. With that scene it’s the preparation for the attack that takes up the most time, and that makes it scarier. There’s nothing sexual about it - just the pure horror. It’s important in regards to understanding Lisbeth’s character and what she does later in the story, and it also honours Larsson’s reasons for writing the book in the first place.”

Another controversy overshadowing the movie – and the entire Larsson empire – is a long-running and bitter dispute between Larsson’s surviving (unwed) partner and his family over the legal right to his now e22m fortune.

“That whole feud is a tragedy, but I think the media hasn’t helped,” Oplev states. “I mean, my God, the Swedish press has sold so many papers over the last few years on this story. It has a life of its own. Luckily I was able to just go in to make a film that was in the spirit of Larsson and one he’d be proud of that would travel outside Sweden. The rest of the mess I’d certainly prefer to avoid.”

*The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is released in selected cinemas tomorrow.

Need help understanding American politics?

2010-03-11T00:06:00.002Z

[stifle laughter]

2010-03-09T17:18:00.000Z

I'm a cruel, cruel man.

I'm so happy for you [grits teeth]

2010-03-08T19:24:00.003Z

Bullock retrospective

2010-03-08T18:31:00.004Z

Time to go through the back catalogue of this year's phenomenally popular Best Actress winner.

I'm starting with this - a Working Girl spinoff from 1990!!

Her short onscreen collaboration with Best Actor Jeff Bridges in The Vanishing.

K-Big rules the Oscars

2010-03-08T11:26:00.002Z

Full coverage here

A trailer for every Oscar winning movie ever

2010-03-06T18:11:00.000Z

For the weekend that's in it

Sheen/Spall

2010-03-05T12:07:00.003Z

My review of Neil Jordan's new movie Ondine from today's Day and Night...

My interview with Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall, two of the stars of Alice in Wonderland

Like his latest character of the White Rabbit in Tim Burton’s new interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, Michael Sheen is a man in a terrible hurry. The 41-year-old Welsh man has 20 minutes to chat with Day and Night in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, along with his Alice co-star and friend Timothy Spall, before he has to dash off to catch a flight to London and onwards to Los Angeles.

Happily, Sheen isn’t as flustered as the iconic McTwisp and there’s ne’er a hint of fretful pocket-watch checking. Instead, he and Spall are relaxed and chatty, cracking jokes and exchanging stories about the best places to live and socialise in LA.

Both men were in town as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which held the Irish premiere of this much-anticipated updating of Lewis Carroll’s classic fairytale. In typical Tim Burton fashion, this version of Alice is a visually sumptuous event, shot in 3D, and starring Aussie newcomer Mia Wasikowska as a now grown-up Alice, alongside Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, all of whom seem to be having a ball as the Mad Hatter, the divinely evil Red Queen and the dementedly saintly White Queen respectively.

Elsewhere, half of the card-carrying members of Equity provide voices for animal characters, including Sheen and Spall (as bloodhound Bayard), as well Stephen Fry, Barbara Windsor, Alan Rickman and Christopher Lee.

It’s an extraordinary cast by anyone’s standard, but the slightly less glamorous reality of making the movie for Sheen and 53-year-old Londoner Spall consisted of sitting in a recording studio laying down the voices for their characters.
“I met Johnny Depp for the first time on the red carpet,” laughs Sheen. “The first time all of us got together was at the premiere, so I didn’t get the ‘full’ Tim Burton experience. What was nice though is that when I did my work it was just the two of us, so in a way there was more time for chit-chat and small talk. So I did feel like I got to know him a little bit. We’re talking about hopefully doing something together again.
“What’s amazing is that Tim had to keep this whole movie in his head. I remember after doing my last voice session asking him, ‘So, how’s the film looking? How’s it going?’ And he replied, ‘ I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t seen a single frame of it yet’. You really have to trust his vision.”
“Tim is incredibly inclusive,” adds Spall, who previously worked with both Burton and Depp on Sweeney Todd. “He makes you feel like you’re involved in his dream. He doesn’t dictate to you, and you feel like a complete equal to him. He has the enthusiasm and energy to get a movie right.”
Acting against – and reacting to – blue-screens and sticks representing other characters was a refreshing change of tack for these two character actors. “It’s just like acting when you’re a kid,” says Sheen. “We don’t call it acting then – we call it pretending. You could be playing as a pirate or a soldier, and you don’t need a set or a script for that. It’s just the power of belief. So in a way it goes back to an earlier, purer form of acting.”
Adds Spall: “Acting in a film is always a leap of faith anyway. To be honest, I got so lost in the visuals that I forgot I was in it. I was watching it thinking, ‘God, that dog sounds a lot like me’.”

Both men signed up for the project without seeing the finished script. “I’d only do that with Tim and Mike Leigh,” says Spall. Sheen reveals that this is one of three movies he agreed to before reading the final draft. “The others were New Moon because my daughter loves Twilight so much, and Tron Legacy [out later this year] because I was a huge fan of the original as a kid. My agents hate me doing that. The whole point is to go, ‘Hmm I’m not sure, it all depends on how much money you give me’, whereas in all those cases I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely, I’ll do it!’”

Acting is in the blood for both of these actors. Spall’s own son Rafe is an established actor in his own right, starring in movies like Shaun of the Dead and Green Street. It turns out his dad had mixed feelings about him going into the business.

“When Rafe told me he wanted to be an actor at age 15, I was both flattered and horrified in equal measure because a) he wanted to do what his old dad does, and b) I knew he was going to get some stinking rotten knocks,” explains Spall. “Everyone gets kicked in the balls no matter how successful they are. But he’s doing really well, and he’s his own man. I still do deals with God though. I say, ‘Let Rafe get that part he wants; in exchange I don’t need this part.”

Sheen, meanwhile, has an 11-year-old daughter, Lily with his ex-partner Kate Beckinsale, and both mother and daughter can be currently be seen in the movie Everybody’s Fine (Lily plays her mum as a child). “Yes, Lily was acting with Robert de Niro, no less,” Sheen says proudly. “It gave her a taste for the business, frighteningly. But I don’t think she’ll want to carry on doing it. Ultimately, the one thing you want for your kid is for them to do something they love.”

As it turns out, Sheen’s own dad is somewhat of an actor too, and is a famed Jack Nicholson impersonator at home in Newport. “There’s a strange symmetry to it, because it was after Tim Burton made the first Batman that, overnight, people started coming up to my dad saying he looked like Jack Nicholson. All of the first jobs he did were as the Joker.

“Dad loves it. He was a frustrated actor: he loves performing but he’s not a very good actor so this was the perfect thing for him. He lives vicariously through me now!”
Oddly enough, both actors will soon be seen on screen playing British prime ministers: Spall as Churchill in The King’s Speech, while Sheen reprises his role as Tony Blair (opposite Dennis Quaid’s Bill Clinton) in The Special Relationship. “The last film I’ve ever going to make about Blair,” Sheen says with a smile.

Has he ever met the man himself? “I met him last year actually,” Sheen replies, pausing momentarily, face set in neutral. “He was very charming. Perfectly lovely.”

Key roles:

Timothy Spall:

*Auf Wiedersehen Pet: Spall played electrician Barry Taylor for four years in this classic TV show.

*Secrets and Lies: Spall is heartbreaking as Brenda Blethyn’s gentle brother in one of his four collaborations with Mike Leigh.

*All or Nothing: Another Leigh classic in which Spall plays a troubled London taxi driver.
Michael Sheen:

*The Queen: Sheen’s breakout role as a bright-eyed Tony Blair opposite Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth II.

*Frost/Nixon: Getting under the skin of legendary TV presenter David Frost in this 70s-based drama.

*The Damned United: Arguably Sheen’s finest screen performance to date as doomed Leeds manager Brian Clough.

**Alice in Wonderland is out today.

Retro posters for Best Picture nominees

2010-03-05T00:00:00.001Z

LOVE these

Lost...Simpsons-style

2010-03-04T11:24:00.001Z

LOVE it!
via Springfieldpunx

Paying for the sins of the fathers

2010-03-03T17:10:00.004Z

The peerless Mary Raftery once again nails the latest astonishing manoeuvres by the Catholic Church in its "response" to the child sex abuse criminal conspiracy within its ranks. This latest development is brazen and insulting even by the Church's standards.

For your consideration...

2010-03-03T00:19:00.002Z

...in the home stretch now: ballots are now in and being counted. AwardsDaily has a selection of FYC trade ads

Oscar predix

2010-02-27T11:45:00.003Z

The ballots for this years Oscars are due this coming Tuesday to be tabulated in time for next Sunday's Oscar ceremony. With that in mind, these are my final, cast-iron, full-proof* predictions for who or what will bag the main gold next weekend.

*Terms and conditions apply.

BEST PICTURE:
My bet: The Hurt Locker
Upset: Avatar

BEST DIRECTOR:
My bet: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Upset: James Cameron (Avatar)

BEST ACTOR:
My bet: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
Upset: Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

BEST ACTRESS:
The toughest race, and I'm defying/reversing the odds to say...
My bet: Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
Upset: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
My bet: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Upset: Nobody. But if I had to pick one Woody Harrelson (The Messenger)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
My bet: Mo'Nique (Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire)
Upset: Again, nobody, but perhaps Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) is the only one who could sneak through.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
My bet: The Hurt Locker
Upset: Inglourious Basterds

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
My bet: Up in the Air
Upset: Precious

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM:
My bet: A Prophet
Upset: The White Ribbon

BEST ANIMATED FILM:
My bet: Up
Upset: Secret of Kells

Chasing miracles

2010-02-27T10:06:00.004Z

My interview with John Crowley, whose family's story has been made into the new movie Extraordinary Measures, in today's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

John and Aileen Crowley sat dazed in the doctor’s office, struggling to comprehend what they were being told. It was a bright spring day in 1998, and just a week beforehand this young San Francisco-based couple had been celebrating the birth of their third child, Patrick.

On this day, however, March 13, the Crowleys were in hospital to hear the results of tests on their 15-month old daughter Megan, who had yet to start crawling or trying to speak. Their eldest son John Jnr, then aged three, was a slow starter and was later diagnosed with a learning disability, so at the very worst the Crowleys were expecting a similar prognosis for Megan.
Instead, they were told that the toddler was suffering from Pompe Disease, a genetic disorder so rare that fewer than 10,000 people in the world are born with it. The degenerative disease weakens the muscles of patients so they eventually can’t walk, talk or even breathe on their own.

John and Aileen were stunned, but the full horror of the diagnosis was yet to come: babies and young children diagnosed with Pompe usually don’t live past their second birthday. What’s more, seeing as the parents were likely recessive carriers of the gene, there was a strong chance that baby Patrick had the disease too. This was confirmed by tests a few months later.

Once the shock set aside, the Crowleys decided to get active. When the medical establishment failed to come up with a cure, John took matters into his own hands, quitting his $120,000-a-year job as a marketing director in a pharmaceutical firm to co-manage a tiny biotechnology company focused entirely on finding a cure for Pompe, a company that at one early stage had just $37,000 in the bank, but was sold for well over $100m a year later. The best part of all is that John ultimately found a treatment to save his children’s lives.

It’s an incredible story (first covered in Geeta Anand’s book The Cure) that has now been made into a new movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell as John and Aileen, as well as Harrison Ford, whose character is an amalgam of several doctors and biotechnological researchers the Crowleys dealt with.

To tie in with the release of the movie, John has written Chasing Miracles, his own personal account of their experiences since that fateful day Megan and Patrick were first diagnosed. “You go through every possible emotion when you hear news like that,” John explains to Weekend from the family’s current home in Princeton, New Jersey.

“You just hear the word ‘diagnosis’; then, ‘I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do’; and, ‘She’s only going to live to be two years of age’. But once we got past that shock and that fear, we grew determined to at least find out everything we could about this disease, and to try to live as normal and full and joyous a life as possible.”

In his book, John writes honestly about how difficult that first year was after both kids were diagnosed: the enormous adjustments that had to be made to accommodate hospital visits, live-in nurses, and the fact that two young children were now living hooked up to 40 pound ventilation machines.

In particular, he describes the perhaps inevitable strain it put on his marriage to Aileen, his high school sweetheart and now wife of 20 years. “We went through so much with Megan, and then three months later went through it all again with Patrick,” John says. “I thought at the time we were handling it well, but there were moments when it nearly broke us and nearly broke me.

“I think eventually we realised what we wanted in life, and what we wanted out of life, and that takes the strength of one another. Aileen and I have this one rule between us that’s evolved over time that neither of us can have a bad day at the same time. And that’s hard sometimes, but we just can’t. One has to be strong for the other, and that helped a great deal.

In retrospect, the Crowleys needed that arduous period to mourn the life that they thought they’d have and embrace the one that they’d been given. The mission now was to save their children. For starters, they founded a charity called the Children’s Pompe Foundation to fund research into clinical trials on young Pompe patients (raising $750,000 over the course of a year).

Through John’s research, he’d met a scientist named Dr William Canfield, who had just started his own small company, Novazyme, with the intention of researching Pompe. Megan and Patrick had defied the odds to live longer than expected, but their conditions were deteriorating at an alarming rate. They desperately needed a cure.

In April 2000, John quit his steady job to work with Canfield’s start-up, which employed just four people, and was already running perilously low on cash. For the next three years, John’s task was to raise money to fund research and clinical trials, as well as to help to navigate the choppy legal and ethical waters along the way.

It’s a process that he looks back on as “excruciating”. “Those couple of years were incredibly intense,” he says. “There were so many personal and professional risks. It wasn’t always easy, particularly in the fall of 2002 when we were told the kids didn’t have long to live. We’d done eight clinical studies by that point, and we were getting political pressure from some European countries to send drugs on a compassionate basis, which we did.”

Indeed, avoiding any kind of ethical and ‘conflict of interest’ charge proved to be amongst the hardest challenges for John. “I remember one day I had to instruct my team to pack up enzymes, put them on dry ice, and get them to a hospital in Italy - but I couldn’t get my own kids treated. That was very difficult.”

Despite being a tiny, fledgling company, the industry obviously saw potential in Novazyme’s work. In September 2001, John sold the company to a huge corporation, Genzyme, in a deal worth between $100-$137m (John’s share came to $5m).
It took another 15 months, however, for a real medical breakthrough to help Megan and Patrick, but on January 9, 2003, the two kids started receiving groundbreaking enzyme replacement therapy that their dad’s former company had helped to create.

The treatment saved their lives. “The children’s energy levels changed after the first night of transfusion,” John recalls. “Within 12 weeks, we got the first reports that their hearts, which had been two-three times the normal size, were shrinking. That was the first of many incredible moments. I remember the first day that we noticed Megan was smiling again.” John pauses, his voice faltering. “That was a beautiful day.”

However, it soon became apparent that the “special medicine” (as Megan called it) would only treat their illness, not cure it. “That was disappointing, but if nothing else it made me realise that we weren’t done,” John says. “That’s when I got back into biotechnology [John is currently CEO of Amicus Therapeutics]. This wasn’t the magic cure, but it was a good first step.”

Today, all of the Crowley family treats the kids’ condition with as much humour as possible. “What would we do otherwise, cry?” John says, chuckling. “We laugh at everything, including each other. Megan has an incredibly sarcastic wit. She describes her Pompe using air quotes as a “minor breathing problem”.

“Patrick is quieter than Megan, but he has a quiet strength. Pompe hit him a little bit harder, and he’d dealt with it differently to his sister.”

Meanwhile, the Crowleys’ eldest child, John, now aged 15, has had his own struggles to overcome. “John is a special needs kid with learning disabilities, but I don’t think that if Patrick and Megan were perfectly healthy that it would be any different for him,” John explains. “John just doesn’t know life any differently and he has dealt with it all remarkably well. That said, Aileen and I joke that it takes more effort to keep track of John that it does the other two!”

Megan and Patrick are now aged 15 and 11 respectively, and by all accounts they are extremely confident, ambitious kids. Patrick has told his parents that he wants to be a police officer when he grows up. “He went to a youth camp with [his brother] John run by the police department here in Princeton,” John recalls with a laugh. “I came home after their first day and I was like, ‘Hey buddy, how was police camp?’ Now this kid could barely move a muscle but he looked at me and said, ‘Freeze! Put your hands where I can see ‘em’.

“Megan, on the other hand, is torn between being a teacher or a fashion designer. She says she wants to go to Stanford University because the weather is nicer in California. Clever girl.”

As the Crowleys continue to make the very most of life, and press on for another medical miracle, John says his brave children are a constant source of inspiration. “They’ve never felt sorry for themselves, not once,” John says proudly.

“It takes Megan and Patrick two hours to get ready every morning, between taking their medicine, having their physiotherapy, and getting them in their wheelchairs. They do that every day: two hours just to get ready for three hours of school, and they never complain. My kids have taught me such a great lesson in life.”

*Extraordinary Measures is in cinemas now. Chasing Miracles: The Crowley Family Journey of Strength, Hope and Joy by John Crowley is published by Newmarket Press.

Parents Who Cure:

The Crowleys’ search for a cure for their children resembles the story of Augusto and Michaela Odone, whose son Lorenzo was diagnosed with the apparently untreatable nerve disease adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) in the early 1980s. Their case later formed the basis of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil starring Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon.

Ignoring the claims of medical experts that nothing could be done, the Odones persevered, recruiting researchers, visiting doctors all over the world and looking at animal experiments.

Eventually they discovered a therapy by which they added an oil made from olive oil and rapeseed oil to Lorenzo’s diet.

The oil helped to halt the progression of the disease, and Lorenzo regained his sight and started swallowing for himself. Sadly, Lorenzo died at home in Virginia in May 2008, one day after his 30th birthday, having come down with aspiration pneumonia. He had lived more than 20 years longer that doctors predicted, and is the oldest known survivor of ALD.

I'm a gay man but I can be cured. Apparently.

2010-02-27T09:57:00.002Z

My piece from today's News Review in the Irish Independent

My name is Declan and apparently I have a major emotional, possibly mental disorder: homosexuality. It would seem that I'm a gay man today either because I'm depressed and lonely, am 'wounded' from childhood, or because I'm simply missing God from my heart.

But help is at hand in the form of organisations that claim they can "cure" or "fix" homosexuality through a combination of psychotherapy and prayer. Last weekend, a conference took place in Belfast organised by Core Issues, an evangelical Northern Irish Christian group that promotes so-called "conversion" or "reparative therapy".

Continue here.

What being on American Idol is worth

2010-02-26T20:26:00.002Z

Good breakdown by the New York Times of the bucks earned by Idol contestants

Movie stuff

2010-02-26T11:22:00.002Z

My review of Capitalism: A Love Story, and Q&A with Kirk Jones, director of Everybody's Fine, from today's Day and Night in the Independent.

Capitalism: A Love Story (PG, general release)

Three stars
Having attacked gun culture, Dubya and the decrepit US health system, there probably was no other hot topic left for arch-provocateur Michael Moore to tackle than the whole capitalist system itself.

Like all of the big man’s work, Capitalism: A Love Story is an entertaining mixed bag with some unquestionably powerful and potent moments, but the unwieldy, all-encompassing nature of the subject matter deprives Capitalism of the kind of laser-like focus and rage that so ignited Bowling for Columbine and especially Fahrenheit 9/11.

Moore once again uses interviews, case studies, archival footage and cartoons to lay out his argument, mixing the sombre with the farcical, as he sets out to examine just how and why capitalist society, and by extension democracy, has become so corrupted.

He casts the net wide – too wide sometimes – to look at the subprime housing crisis, worker exploitation, and the parasitic influence of big business on ideas of fairness and equality.

As an investigative film-maker, Moore manages to unearth some truly shocking material: the example of a bank that cashes in on employees’ deaths by way of an underhand policy sensitively nicknamed the ‘Dead Peasants’ insurance should be enough to inspire a worker’s revolution all by itself.

Similarly, the latter section picking apart the causes, and effects, of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, is jaw-dropping and enraging to watch, while a sequence focusing on a never-realised Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin Roosevelt, is undoubtedly stirring.

But Moore also undermines his arguments with some bizarre errors in editorial judgement: namely relying on an actor to provide socio-economic context, and – without any hint of irony - allowing several members of the Catholic Church to condemn capitalism as a corrupt and immoral institution.

Of course, the main problem – and it’s a distracting one - is that Moore leaves himself open to all manner of hypocrisy charges, seeing as he has benefited extremely well from the very ideology and system that he’s indicting, inadvertently proving the point that capitalism only continues to thrive by assimilating its critics.

*****************

Kirk Jones – Q&A
*Your new movie Everybody’s Fine is about a lonely widower (played by Robert de Niro) crisscrossing America to visit his adult kids. Cheers for making us all feel guilty for not calling home more often.

I’m an only child, and I get on well with my own parents. I ring home as much as I can and I’ll give all the news to whoever answers, while the other one hovers in the background. I have three kids myself, and I never feel like I have enough time with them. My eldest son turns 19 next week. How’d that happen?!

*It really is a movie that makes you think – and for that audiences will never forgive you.

People have had amazing reactions to it. One guy came up to me and said that he’d worked with his dad, who’s a widower, every day for the past 10 years, but just realised that he doesn’t see him after work or at weekends. This guy then decided to bring his dad for a drink and a chat, just to see how he is.

*Aw, that’s very sweet. But how did an English man like yourself go about writing and directing an American road movie?

I did a road trip myself. I flew to New York and booked the flight home from Las Vegas. I traveled cross-country on bus and train. I took 2,000 photographs and interviewed 100 people along the way.

*You must have come across all sorts?

You certainly see and hear so many great things, and meet lots of different people. In one town I heard a man call out to another, ‘Hey Ed, where were you last week?’ And Ed replied, ‘Last week? Last week I was in pain’. What a brilliant line.

*Be honest: how scary is Robert De Niro?

I was nervous when I first met him – how couldn’t I be? But megastars like De Niro are usually pretty normal people. He knows the effect he’s had on cinema, but he doesn’t want to dwell on it. He’s very good at disarming people. He gave me a little hug after our first meeting. He’s an actor, and he needs to be connected to the real world in order to draw from it.

*You got greedy and nabbed a second legend for Everybody’s Fine: Paul McCartney wrote an original song for it.

I was crazy busy the first day I met Paul. I was running around the place and suddenly I was in his office, having a cup of tea with him. Like De Niro I think he’d hate the idea of people being scared of him. I was trying to be cool around him, but inside I was hopping up and down.

*Drew Barrymore and Kate Beckinsale also star in the movie. Not a bad way to spend a few months on a set I’d imagine?

All actors want to be challenged, and Drew, especially, has been doing that a lot lately. She’s doing some good stuff – you should check out Grey Gardens.

*I will. Your first movie was the Irish-based lottery comedy Waking Ned. How does it feel to be the man responsible for putting David Kelly’s naked arse up on the big screen?

Filming that naked motorcycle ride scene, David initially had a body stocking on, kind of like a pair of tights, to protect his modesty. But he kept sliding off the seat because they were so slippery. I said, ‘David, the only thing to do is to go totally naked’. He thought about it for a second and whipped the stocking off. That image stays with you.

*Riddle me this: why was the title changed to Waking Ned Devine in the US?

It was always called Waking Ned Devine, but halfway through the shoot it was changed because some people thought it had religious connotations. It was my first movie, and I didn’t want to hamper its release in anyway. But then when it was released in the US, they asked if they could call it Waking Ned Devine. I just said, ‘Wish I’d thought of that!’

*Everybody’s Fine is released nationwide today

Shakespeare's Hamlet was missing a certain something...

2010-02-26T11:21:00.003Z

If Ophelia had had a sassy gay friend...

The Karate Kid 2010...

2010-02-25T14:31:00.002Z

...is it just me or does this new version of The Karate Kid come across as some kind of metaphor for a weakened US trying to stand up to the might of China?

My So-Called Life...15 years later

2010-02-24T21:57:00.003Z

Remember Angela Chase and Jordan Catalano?

Look at them now...:)

Carey to win?

2010-02-24T13:45:00.003Z

The LA Times asks the question: can Carey Mulligan pull off an upset at the Oscars in two weeks time? Her BAFTA win comes at a crucial point in the Oscar voting, meaning the boost could push her, a la Adrien Brody, past the two heavy frontrunners, Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep. It would certainly inject some excitement in an other wise predictable awards year.

Jaws on the big screen

2010-02-24T13:06:00.003Z

Wanna see Jaws on the big screen in the Savoy Cinema on March 11? Well click here to find out - it's for a good cause.

Irish Oscar nominees @ IFI

2010-02-24T13:02:00.004Z

Next Wednesday, March 3, the IFI is screening this year's three Irish Oscar nominees - The Secret of Kells, Granny O Grimm, and The Door. Starts at 6.30pm, tickets can be bought here.

Bitch slap!

2010-02-21T20:09:00.000Z

We all have these kinda days... right?

Passion Cashin

2010-02-20T10:31:00.003Z

Apologies for the headline: I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one. My travel feature from today's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

It’s not everyday that you come across a mayoral decree ordering men not to cut their hair or trim their beards for 18 months. That said the German village of Oberammergau isn’t like everywhere else.

This is the scene of the world-famous Passion Play, which will be staged in a custom-built open-air theatre from May to October 2010. It’s an all-hands-on-deck type affair, and everyone in the locality takes it very seriously, right down to men looking suitably hirsute for their parts - ergo, the poster stuck up in the theatre foyer reminding men to avoid razors of all kinds from Ash Wednesday of this year until the end of the Passion Play next October.

The tradition of the Passion Play in the village stems from the 1630s when bubonic plague was laying claim to millions across the continent. The locals made a pact with God that if (S)He were to spare them the worst ravages of the disease, then they would repay the Almighty with a play every ten years depicting the trial, suffering and the death of Jesus Christ.

The first play was performed in 1634, after which not one person died from plague (down from an average of 20 per month the year previous). As a sign of their gratitude, the people of Oberammergau have performed the Play every decade.

I should state from the outset that I’m not religious in the slightest. In fact, whenever I walk into a church, the stained glass windows shatter and choirs begin screeching the music from The Omen. But even I was left in awe after taking in the scale of the preparations for the Passion Play while on a tour of the Oberammergau theatre.

That’s because, despite its content, the Passion Play isn’t really about religion. Faith plays its part, undoubtedly, but, as cheesy as it may sound, the play is about community. Out of a general population of 5,200, some 2,000 locals (including 500 children) are currently in prep mode for the event, ranging from acting roles, to music, to singing, and stage production.

The Passion Play performance starts on May 15, and it will take place over a course of seven hours a day (so bring a flask and a blanket), five times a week, for over five months. To be eligible to take part, cast members must have either been born in the village, lived there for 25 years, or married to a local. There will be no blow-ins here, thank you very much!

Our tour guide was able to identify all the leading players as we walked around town, be they a local publican, teacher, or the woodcarver who works from the beautifully restored Pilates House in the village (due to the aforementioned hair-and-beard decree, it’s easy to spot the male villagers taking part). One section of the play will involve a large crowd scene, so, for the five months of performances, the villagers will literally stop what they’re doing, down tools and head to the theatre to make up the numbers. It really is something else in terms of organisation and commitment.

As a measure of how seriously it’s taken, our guide seemed to be genuinely star-struck when we came across one of the two actors who will play Christ in next year’s Passion. Some roles are even passed on from one generation to the next within families.

If you’re visiting Oberammergau next year for the Play, the good news is that there is plenty more to see and do in the locality to round out any holiday. This part of Bavaria gets the best of both worlds: ideal skiing conditions in winter and glorious sun in summer. Oberammergau itself is like a scene out of an old Brothers Grimm fairytale book, bringing to mind words like ‘quaint’ and ‘charming’ without being patronising.

There’s even a wonderful Christmas store, Kathe Wohlfahrt, open all year round, meaning that you can stock up on exquisite baubles and festive gifts in the heart of summer, just like I (and many other visitors) did.

We also made the short journey to the Linderhof Palace, the ornate country hunting lodge of King Ludwig II, a real character known for his extravagant tastes. His legacy, therefore, is a 19th century castle with opulent interior design, avant-garde architecture and stunning landscaped gardens.

The tail-end of our trip featured a hop over to the village of St Johann in Tirol in Austria. We travelled through the Austrian Alps, via Innsbruck, stopping for a nose around the Swarovski Kristallwelten, a museum comprised of, and devoted to, the world famous crystals.

It houses a series of beguiling installations and exhibitions, including a mechanical theatre where clothes (encrusted with crystals, of course) come to life, a crystalline fairy world where the sun dances with the moon and a crystal devours a plant, and the decidedly trippy Crystal Dome, which gives the impression of stepping inside a crystal, a thousand beams of light refracting of the facetted walls to the music of Brian Eno.

We arrived in St Johann during the annual summer solstice fire festival, where flames and lights adorned the peaks of all the mountains nearby, observed, ideally, from the tip of the Kitzbuheler Horn mountain, which is accessed by cable car.

The village is a ski resort of some renown (or notoriety, depending on your behaviour!), but during spring and summer, you can avail of mountain walks (easy or difficult - the choice is yours) that will allow you to take in the Alpine scenery, breathe in that wonderful air, and work off the excesses of all those weisbiers and dumplings (kudos to our guide Georg Weihs for putting up with our lumbering posse). It was an enchanting end to a trip that certainly whetted my appetite to return next year to see the Passion Play go live. The orchestra might even play The Omen music to welcome me.

NEED TO KNOW:
GETTING THERE:

Topflight (www.topflight.ie or call 01 2401700) organises tailor-made holidays, using Aer Lingus flights from Dublin, Cork and Belfast to Oberammergau, with bolt-on holidays to the Austrian Tirol. The trip is particularly group-friendly - Topflight is offering one free place in 20 for all groups.

A short break to Oberammergau with category A tickets and transfers costs €1199 per person plus taxes. Topflight also offers a choice of one week holidays to Oberammergau, with two nights in Oberammergau area including category A tickets, and five nights in a choice of the Austrian Tirol or Lake Garda, Italy.

STAYING THERE:

In Oberammergau we stayed in the three-star Hotel Feldmeier (www.hotel-feldmeier.de, +49 (0) 88223011). It’s centrally located in the village, comprising of 17 double rooms and 6 single rooms. Throughout the winter, it will cost between e340-e360 per person for a double room (half board and breakfast) for seven nights. If travelling to the Passion Play next year, check website for deals closer to the date. Early booking would be advised.

In Tirol, we stayed in the four-star Sporthotel Austria (www.sporthotelaustria.at, +43/5352/62507). Rates at the Sporthotel range from e92-e117 per person (half board) for a double room. Special ski packages are also available for winter 2009/2010.

WHEN TO GO:

The Oberammergau Passion Play starts on May 15, 2010, and continues with daily performances until October 3, 2010. The Topflight brochure on Oberammergau 2010 is out now.

THREE GREAT THINGS TO DO:

*See the Passion Play at Oberammergau. It’s a once-in-a-decade opportunity to see this extraordinary community event. See www.passionsspiele2010.de for details

*Visit Castle Linderhof (www.schlosslinderhof.de), the exquisite country retreat of the 19th century King Ludwig II. The ornate design was ahead of its time - watch out for the optical trickery taking place in the Hall of Mirrors - and its landscaped garden is ideal for long strolls.

*In St Johann, take the funicular (cable car) to the top of the Kitzbuhler Horn and enjoy a traditional Austrian dinner in the Restaurant Adler Hutte (a personal favourite is Gröstl, a roasted mixture of potatoes, onions, and bacon, with a fried egg on top). Wait around for the last cable car, and fly down in pitch darkness for added effect.

Streeptastic

2010-02-19T21:24:00.002Z

From the New York Times...

Literary Death Match. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

2010-02-18T10:26:00.001Z

The details are here. Sounds really interesting.

I adore this woman. There are no words

2010-02-13T02:55:00.002Z

Meryl's tribute to Natasha Richardson at the amfAR Benefit in New York.

The United States of O-merica

2010-02-06T08:19:00.003Z

My interview with Robyn Okrant, author of Living Oprah, in today's Irish Examiner

When it comes to advocating lifestyle transformation, few public figures are as effusive in their encouragement than talk show titan Oprah Winfrey. For years, the Almighty O has embodied the modern belief in the power of perpetual reinvention and self-advancement, her philosophy encapsulated in her website and magazine mantra, ‘Live Your Best Life’.

This was enough to propel fellow Chicagoan Robyn Okrant to spend an entire year following Oprah’s recommendations and confident self-help tips to the letter in order to gauge if her life tangibly improved as a result.

Okrant, a performance artist and yoga teacher, made 2008 her Year of the O, and kept a blog for 365 days as she followed the advice the billionaire dispensed on television, in her magazine O, and on her website.

The deal was that Oprah had to specifically endorse the product, event or advice, rather than merely feature it or mention it in passing, but this was still enough to have Okrant spend 1,200 hours and $4,781 reading the books, buying the foods, clothes and furniture, and practising the spiritual exercises espoused by Oprah. The project even took over her marriage to the ever-patient Jim, as Okrant sought to follow Oprah’s sex tips in the bedroom.

Those experiences form the basis of Okrant’s new book Living Oprah: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk. “I had always questioned whether or not someone of Oprah’s economic status could possibly relate to ‘real’ woman,” the cheery author tells the Irish Examiner.

“I was a little bothered by the fact that she was giving so much advice, and that there were so many ‘must-haves’ and ‘gotta-dos’. I could see that the women in my life, whom I adore, were getting so stressed that they weren’t able to do all of this. I don’t think Oprah really wants us to do everything; however, she’s such a powerful force that there are women who blindly follow.”

Okrant’s tasks throughout the year ranged from the easy and fun (getting her clothes tailored so they fit properly; watching the TV show 30 Rock) to the downright mad (going on a 21-day ‘vegan cleansing’ diet). Then, of course, there was the marital advice and tips for greater romantic intimacy.

“The sex stuff was really not fun,” she says. “Towards the end of the year, Oprah said we had to shower before we had sex, so anytime things would get romantic between us, I’d say, ‘Hold on’ and I’d run and take a shower. By the time I got back, Jim was either asleep or fixing things around the house. He’s used to me taking part in crazy schemes, and he’s normally happy to come along for the ride, but usually it doesn’t take a full year. I think Jim’s patience was definitely tested towards the end.”

Of course, throughout 2008, Oprah became overtly political, publicly endorsing Barack Obama throughout the primary battle against Hillary Clinton. This posed a big philosophical problem for Okrant.

“I’m very respectful of my right to vote in this country which is why that was so uncomfortable for me,” she explains. “In one way, the point of this project was to show how celebrity forces our hands in this country, so it probably would have driven my point home even further if she’d, say, backed John McCain, and so then I’d have to vote for him. Would I have been able to do that? I don’t know. I’m from Chicago so I certainly would have voted for Obama in the general election; whether I would have voted for him in the primary is a different question.

“There were studies done here in the States that showed that Oprah garnered one million votes for Obama during the primaries which is what helped him to beat Hillary. But I think that political stance, along with the spiritual side of things she’s being pushing, has caused Oprah to lose a lot of support.”

Indeed, it’s a point not lost on the talk show queen herself: she announced before Christmas that she will end her show in 2011 to focus on other projects, namely her own channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). That aside, Okrant has found that Oprah is a much more divisive figure than one would think. “I’ve done some interviews recently where, off camera, people will say, ‘I think Oprah’s evil’ or ‘I think Oprah’s the devil’ or ‘You know what I hate about Oprah…’ It seems to be one way or the other with her.”

The experiment did reap some positives for Okrant, however. “The best advice I got from Oprah was about doing hands-on philanthropy,” she says. “So instead of just writing a cheque, I did a book drive for women in prison. Actually putting time and energy into something, even when it’s inconvenient, was a great lesson.

“Also I now find myself able to disconnect much more from the messages that I get via commercials, TV, and magazines. I’m 37 years old now; I don’t need to buy every magazine and watch every show that tells me things about my body and my sex life. I know enough. If I don’t know the information by now, then I’m in trouble.”

In that vein, Okrant dismisses the Oprah-mantra that inspired the experiment in the first place: ‘Live Your Best Life’. “I don’t believe in that language anymore,” she says. “I believe I’m a happy person; I believe I’m enough as I am; I believe I can still work towards goals and get better. But I’m done with using ‘best’ because the only thing you can do is fail. You can never reach ‘best’, so then you have to keep buying into the whole thing all over again.”

What everyone wants to know now is whether Oprah has read Okrant’s work. Is she expecting an invite on the show? “I know that her staff have my book, because they requested copies from my publisher,” she replies with a laugh. “One of her staffers gave a quote to The Today Show at the time saying that I was taking brand dedication to a new level! I’m just curious to know what her staff think. I haven’t heard from Oprah herself, but I’ll be waiting by the phone in my armor just in case.”

Panel:

Some of Oprah’s “must haves” and “must do’s” that will improve your life, according to Living Oprah:

-Only write one page notes to people in case they want to frame them (as recommended to Oprah by Bill Clinton)

-Buy sexy new underwear

-Buy a ‘weight vest’ to burn off more calories as you go about your business

- Eat a slice of whole grain bread with olive oil before dinner (so as not to overeat)

- Buy the Planet Earth DVD

-Use Donald Trump’s recipe for turkey burgers from the Oprah website

-Every woman “must” own a trenchcoat, white denim coat, white jeans and a crisp, white blouse.

-Make a “vision board”

-Declutter your home and go through old photos to remember what’s special to you.

*Living Oprah: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk by Robyn Okrant is out now published by Little, Brown Group.

Wedded blitz

2010-02-05T17:14:00.002Z

Nightwatch column from Day and Night in today's Independent

There comes a time in every adult's life when they have to ponder the Great Questions: Whatis my primary purpose? What's my place in the grand scheme of things? Where am I going? And, of course, there's the real clincher: what kind of wedding guest am I?

Continue here.

Land of the Lost

2010-02-03T21:44:00.005Z

The sixth and final season of Lost started in the US last night with a double episode that was just as awesome and infuriating and mad and daring and labyrinthine and head-wrecking as we fans expect and demand. As ever, EW's Doc Jensen is back with his peerless commentary and dissection of the new season. It's gonna be epic .

We Are Golden

2010-02-02T14:08:00.006Z

Serious congrats to Tomm Moore at Cartoon Saloon and Brownbag Films for their respective Oscar nominations for The Secret of Kells and Granny O'Grimm.

Also The Door, made by Octagan Films, is up for Best Live Action Short.

Full list of nominations here

In other Oscar news, a very predictable list, but still one or two surprises:

- The Blind Side gets a nod for Best Picture. Really??!

- In the Loop picks up Screenplay nom. That's just f*cking well f*cktastic isn't it? F*ckers

- Maggie Gyllenhaal shoves out Julianne Moore to get Supporting Actress nom for Crazy Heart

Kathryn Bigelow wins the DGA...

2010-01-31T22:10:00.002Z

...becoming the first woman to do so. The 58-year-old (58!) is now on course to become the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar in the 82 year history of the awards. I don't say this lightly, but you go girl!

Gift of Life

2010-01-30T12:23:00.001Z

Feature from today's Weekend magazine in the Independent.
Definitely one from the "I have nothing to complain about" file.

For Isabel Terry, this was the most important journey of her life. The Cork woman, who has lived her life with congenital heart disease, was being rushed by ambulance from Bishopstown to Dublin’s Mater hospital for a life-altering heart transplant operation.

Her ambulance had a Garda escort, and traffic was brought to a standstill in Cork, in order to allow Isabel to pass through as fast as possible. In the matter of organ transplantation, time is of the essence.

The ambulance had just reached Fermoy outside the city when Isabel’s mobile phone rang. It was the transplant co-ordinator. “They said the heart wasn’t suitable,” recalls Isabel. “It was too small. We had to turn the ambulance around and just go home.”

As if that disappointment wasn’t enough, Isabel has since been called three more times, making it to the hospital on each occasion, going through all the prep work, only to discover at the last minute that the heart wasn’t suitable after all. “It’s the way it works,” Isabel explains. “The minute an organ becomes available you have to come in, and just hope that it turns out to be useable. But it depends on tissue typing and other factors.
“It’s a horrible feeling, and it really affects so many people in my life besides me, like all my family and friends. I was very disappointed, and sad, and upset, and cross.

“The last time I was called was in January 2008. I was very frightened that time. I just had a feeling that it wasn’t going to happen. My parents were so disappointed that it didn’t go ahead. But I said to them, ‘Try not to be too upset. There are parents who have lost a son or a daughter in order for those organs to become available. I may be sick, and unable to do much, but at least you have me coming home’.”

Isabel’s remarkable and inspiring story is just one that features in a new three-part documentary that has just started airing on TV3. Now approaching her 35th birthday, Isabel has been on the heart transplant list for six years. She is living on oxygen 24 hours a day, and hasn’t been able to work in seven years because of her condition.

As a child, Isabel says she wasn’t overly aware that she was ill, and, apart from not being able to run around as much, was treated no differently to her brothers and sisters. She had her first bout of open-heart surgery at age 12, and from 18 on spent a great deal of time in Harefield hospital in the UK. In 2001, Isabel’s lung was reconstructed, and she had a shunt placed in her heart, which gave her a new, albeit short-lived, lease of life.
“I felt great for a year and half afterwards,” Isabel remembers. “I went on my first girls holiday, and then the year after I went to Turkey with my brother. The day we came back from that trip I fell ill, and developed pneumonia. I was in hospital for quite a long time, and was told soon after that I needed a heart transplant. That’s when I went on the list.”

The last two years have been particularly tough for Isabel. Her dad died suddenly from a heart attack in December 2008. “That made me realise that life is too short, and I decided that I’m going to try and do as much as I can,” Isabel says. “None of us knows what’s around the corner.”

Last summer, Isabel’s case became even more complicated. An angiogram test found that she needed to get a lung transplant too. The heart and lung transplants have to take place at the same time, but nevertheless Isabel is determined to keep fighting. “I’m not one for giving up. I’m a bit brazen. I normally get what I want. I’m stubborn and I wont give in.”

Next month, Isabel is temporarily taking her name off the transplant list so that she can visit her brother and his family in Philadelphia. “I’ve discussed this a lot with my surgeon, and he thinks it will do me the world of good in terms of boosting my morale,” Isabel says. “He knows how important family is to me, and how close we are. I’ll go back on the list when I return home.

“I’m not scared, I’m actually really looking forward to going. I’ll have oxygen on the flight, and my brother will organise oxygen for me over there. I won’t be doing anything crazy. He has a four-year-old girl, and I’m her godmother. I’ve met her and we talk all the time on the phone. But he also has two little boys aged two and one that I haven’t met yet.

“If something should happen, at least I’ll have met his two beautiful boys. It’ll be great to start back into the wait feeling positive and happy. It will give me strength to keep going.”

Another story featuring in the documentary series is that of Aidan and Noreen Mulligan, a newlywed couple who proved to be a perfect match in every sense of the word. Last year, the Mulligans became only the second husband and wife to take part in a living donor operation in this country when Noreen donated a kidney to Aidan.

Aidan, originally from Swords in Dublin, was born with polycystic kidneys in 1979, but defied medical opinion to survive and enjoy a life relatively unencumbered by his condition. “I was blessed as a baby by Pope John Paul in the Phoenix Park,” Aidan says with a smile. “If you watch the video of the Pope’s visit, you’ll see me in a yellow baby suit being lifted by a security guard to be blessed. My mother was convinced it was due to the Pope that I’m still here today.

“It never really affected me when I was younger. I was always told it would start deteriorating when I hit my 30s. Sure enough, a couple of months before my 30th birthday my blood levels went the wrong way. Last February I started on home dialysis. I’d be hooked up to the machine for eight hours at night, and work as a hospital porter during the day. But the tube didn’t work properly for me, and I was in and out of hospital a lot with it.”

At the same time as Aidan started home dialysis, his siblings started tests to see if they’d be potential matches for donation. Aidan and Noreen had gotten married in October 2008, and dated for four years before that. Noreen, a nurse originally from Kenmare in Kerry, knew they had the same blood type, and underwent tests also.

In June, Aidan was told that he’d have to begin haemodialysis in hospital, but just as that news was sinking in, Noreen found out that she was a match, and would the best option as hers was a living organ from a non-smoker.

“It took a few months for all the tests - I kept volunteering for the next one,” Noreen says. “You have to do it yourself; the doctors can’t be seen to be pressurising you into the decision. I didn’t give it a second thought. Honestly I never thought we’d be a match. I said I’ll just do it, and if it’s negative, at least I’d know I tried.”

Living donation is a relatively new option in Irish healthcare, and although Noreen and Aidan’s story seems incredibly romantic, the couple has a very grounded view of their experience.

“It’s very new here,” Noreen says. “The couple that did it before us pioneered the way because the woman in that case was a nurse too, she’d worked in America, and knew that a living donation from a non-blood related person could work. It’s not that we’re some unique match; it’s just that they’d never really tested spouses before now.”

Be that as it may, it was still a unique challenge for a young couple in the midst of their honeymoon period. For her part, Noreen didn’t give it a second thought. “We were just so happy it worked out that way,” she says. “I was driving when they called me with the news so I pulled over. The co-ordinator told me and I started crying because I was so happy. Then I called Aidan and he was crying because he was so happy. It was a big relief.”

Aidan adds: “We knew that we’d both have a better quality of life afterwards. Noreen would be awake through the night when I was on home dialysis. We couldn’t even go to the cinema because I’d have to be home at 9pm to be hooked up.”

The operation took place last July. Noreen was a textbook case and was released after a week. Aidan, however, experienced a lot of complications. “I ended up having three operations,” he says. “I had a few problems, the main one being that they found a clot in my kidney. We had to prepare ourselves for the possibility that the kidney was going to come out again.”
“That was the worst time of all,” Noreen says. “There was a week where we were just waiting to see if the kidney would start working. It was a real psychological blow. We were devastated. We tried to console ourselves by saying, ‘Ok it didn’t work, he’ll go back on dialysis, we’ll cope’. We were building ourselves up like that. The staff in Beaumont were fantastic too.”

Thankfully, Aidan’s new kidney kicked in. His blood pressure is under control, and he’s just started back at work. The young people can now enjoy the normal things in life. “For our first wedding anniversary, we booked a night in the Four Seasons,” Noreen says. “Aidan got out of hospital for one night, but he had to be back in the first thing the next morning. We’ll have to push the boat out this year.”

The stats:

According to the latest figures covering 2008, there were 81 cadaver donors in Ireland. That same year, the Mater Hospital conducted four heart transplant operations (three less than in 2007). Four lung transplants took place at the Mater in 2008, the same amount as in 2007.

St. Vincent’s Hospital conducted 58 liver transplants in 2008, while 136 deceased donor kidney transplants were performed at Beaumont Hospital. A record 12 of those transplants also included simultaneous transplant of a pancreas. Ten extra kidney transplants were conducted via living donors.

Figures for 2009 have yet to be confirmed, but it is believed that in the region of 18 living kidney donor transplants took place in Ireland, and some 150 cadaver kidney transplants.

For organ donor cards freetext the word DONOR to 50050. Organ Donor Awareness week runs from March 27 until April 3.

High Society?

2010-01-30T12:21:00.003Z

My news feature on head shops and legal highs from today's Review in the Independent

Head shops are just like any other retailers - except that their stock-in-trade comprises legal pills, powders and herbs that get you high. This week, John Curran, the Minister of State with responsibility for drugs, stated outright that he wants to ban the sale of products sold in headshops that simulate the effects of illegal drugs.

Speaking to the National Regional Drugs Task Forces in Mullingar, Mr Curran added that he would also examine issues around planning permission for head shops, public liability insurance, product liability insurance and consumer protection, all in a bid to close the shops down.

“The products that are being sold in head shops – I simply don’t want them sold in this country,” Mr Curran said. “My view is that they pose an unnecessary risk.”

It certainly seems as if the momentum is now here to confront the issue of head shops and legal highs: if there was anyone in the country who wasn’t aware of the topic before, they will be now due to coverage over the past fortnight on Prime Time, Liveline and The Last Word.

But as the debate about legislation rages on, a key question keeps getting overlooked: why are young people in Ireland continually looking for the kind of exhilarating buzz and high provided by legal drugs (and that can, and should, include alcohol)? Is it something particular to us as a nation?

Shane Dunphy is a child protection worker (and Irish Independent columnist) who has extensive experience in dealing with young people and drugs. “Having a good time used to be something that required you to be some way active: you went out and did something,” Dunphy explains. “You thought up of ways to entertain yourself and make yourself feel good.

“However, now we live in a world where having a good time is something that’s supposed to be passive: you sit down, play a games console, you watch a DVD or you take a pill, you smoke something, or you snort something. People don’t want to invest in having a good time; they want it to happen to them. To this younger generation, life isn’t something they do; life is something that is done to them. It’s that mentality that drives things like the demand for legal highs.

“I think this is a universal cultural experience, and not especially unique to Ireland. A lot of young people have intellectualised this, and can argue pretty firmly about why they consume what they consume. Legal highs are a way around laws set by what they see as the ‘Establishment’, and these places are directly marketing themselves at young people who think, ‘What’s the harm in this?’

Head shops have been open in Ireland for the best part of a decade. There are currently some 30 different outlets in Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Portlaoise, Kildare and Mullingar, amongst other places, having experienced something of a boom in the last 3-4 years.

And why wouldn’t there be a mushrooming of business when Irish Head Shop (HIS) Enterprises, which has an outlet in Dublin’s Temple Bar as well as several other locations, last year reported a profit of e1.68m? Head shops have proved to be a headache for legislators and anti-drug campaigners, because the drugs legally on sale in these shops are designed to give the same effects as cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD and hash. At the same time, as one head shop owner who declined to be named says, “we’re actively encouraging people not to break the law”.

Last week, I opted to check out one head shop in Dublin city centre to get some sense of how they operate. It’s a quiet midweek afternoon, and similar to other retail outlets, a young customer is returning a faulty product that he wants repaired - in this case it’s a hydroponic lamp (for growing certain plant life indoors). Display cases show off a range of hookah pipes, grinders and bongs.

There’s a rack of t-shirts for sale, and a shelf of books on New Age and drug-related topics. Chilled-out music pipes out of the sound system, and three customers - a man in his 30s and two women in their 20s - are looking around for their product of choice.

I approach a staff member, saying that I’m looking for a herbal alternative to hash. The assistant is knowledgeable and helpful, and suggests a resin costing e25 that’s become a big seller over the past year (according to the packaging, it has been used “for millennia in Shamanic rituals).
Meanwhile, a friend who has accompanied me asks about pills. They talk through the effect my friend is looking for (trippy, high energy and so on), and the assistant recommends two ‘smiley’ pills (costing e10 - roughly the same cost as their illegal equivalent) that are “empathetic to the feel from Ecstasy”.
Notably, the assistant seems to size me up pretty quickly. I had never even been in one of these shops before, and he can tell that I’m green. He spends time explaining to me how to take the resin safely, and in what quantities.
This gets to the heart of the problem with head shops: there is little or no regulation, meaning that there is an ongoing health and safety issue regarding their products. In 2006, Health Minister Mary Harney banned the sale of magic mushrooms in head shops in response to the death of a young man, Colm Hodkinson, the year beforehand who had taken mushrooms at a party. Colm’s brother, Paul, has since become a vocal opponent of headshops, and is running an online campaign on Facebook entitled ‘Petition Against Headshops in Ireland’ that now has almost 1,300 supporters.

Last March, the drug benzylpiperazine (BZP) - a key ingredient in certain ‘Party Pills’ - was declared illegal in this country. Minister of State Curran is looking to extend the ban on other substances with legislation akin to new laws in the UK that prohibits GBL (Gamma butyrolactone, which mimics the date rape drug GHB) and chemicals sprayed on herbal smoking products.

The Minister's comments this week about head shops chime perfectly with the long-time views held by medical experts who work in the field of drug management and rehabilitation. “They’re a real problem for us,” says Dr Brion Sweeney, consultant psychiatrist with the Drug Treatment Centre Board (DTCB).

“Yes, they are legal, but they breach the spirit of the law. Authorities can’t act against these drugs, and yet they can potentially cause some very serious problems for people. We are seeing patients presenting with problems from amphetamine-type substances that keep people awake and reduce their dietary intake. For some people who have grown dependent on them, it can become almost impossible to stop.”

Dr Sweeney says that head shops have grown in popularity over the last few years because they appeal to three distinct categories of customer. “They’re an option for drug users who don’t want substances to be detected in urine tests. Then there are the people who prefer to go the legal route to get high, and lastly young people who are not connected to drug networks, and maybe don’t want to be.

“We’re not fully clear on the extent of the use of these drugs, but our reports from clinics, needle exchanges and outreach workers indicate that there is considerable usage around the country.”

The key matter in the debate, according to Dr Sweeney, is that nobody, from the head shop salesperson to the medical community (at present), truly knows for sure what exactly these substances are comprised of. “I can’t see how head shops can give advice to customers about the safe way to take these drugs when they can’t identify what’s in them,” he says.
“There are very complex laboratory systems needed to identify certain substances in these drugs, and we are behind in that sense. But while we’re confining ourselves to defining the substance chemically, we’re open to being outflanked by the “chemists” who make these drugs.

“We banned BZP last year, but all they have to do is slightly alter the chemical structure of the compound and then it becomes legal again, and it will have very similar effects. In the US, the law has taken a more broad-stroke approach to this matter. For example, they’ve banned Ecstasy or substances that give an Ecstasy-like effect. That gives a broader remit to prosecute.”

PANEL:
Marie (not her real name) is a 29-year-old accountant, who has experimented with both legal highs and the real thing. She has been a regular customer in head shops around Dublin for the last six years. “When I first started going to the shops, I’d go in and just describe the feeling I was looking for,” she says. “They have substitutes for just about everything.

“I would usually get Party Pills. They don’t have BZP in them anymore, but there’s some other chemical used now instead. As for the type of pill I get, it depends on whether I want to be chatty, or take something high energy for lots of dancing, or something that’s going to keep me on a high for hours.

“I’ve also tried Smoke and Spice, which both give a marijuana effect, as well as Salvia, a smoke hallucinogen similar to LSD. Salvia is grown naturally, but it’s one of the strongest herbs in the world. People have gone on really mad trips, but they usually only last a few minutes.”

Marie says that she uses head shops “only as a last-resort”. “If we had a big party coming up and we wanted to take some pills, and couldn’t get our hands on real ones, then we’d go to a head shop,” she explains.

So how does she compare the experience of taking these legal drugs to the illegal ones? “The pills from head shops are definitely very chemically,” she replies. “The big difference is that they don’t give the same high; there’s no euphoria basically. Sometimes I think I’d be better off taking the real thing; at least that way I know what I’m going to get.”

What does she mean by that? “Most of these legal pills are laced with caffeine,” she answers. “You mightn’t sleep for two days. Your body is physically tired, but your mind just won’t shut down. I’ve had bad kidney infections because I get really dehydrated on nights out. Personally, it’s taken my body longer to recover from taking legal drugs than the real thing.

“The thing is that people keep taking the pills on a night out because they’re not reaching that high, that euphoria. I think people expect to get something else from it, especially if they’re coming from taking the real pills. They’re not the same, but many still substitute with them.”

About a boy

2010-01-29T16:14:00.003Z

My interview with Mika in Day and Night in today's Independent

We all know it's a small world, but it seems the world of pop is even smaller. Last October, Mika was sequestered in a hotel in Los Angeles, growing increasingly frustrated in his attempts to clear all the legal work for one of his new tracks to be signed over to Boyzone to record.

"For a lot of infuriating reasons, it was very complicated to get it all approved," the British-Lebanese-American-French pop wunderkind recalls. "So I decided to go downstairs for a coffee. The elevator doors opened and Ronan Keating was standing there holding a bag of groceries. I had never met him, or any of them, so we chatted for a few minutes, and then I turbo-charged and got the song approved by the next morning."

Continue here

Jerome David Salinger, 1919-2010

2010-01-28T19:47:00.002Z

Some of the coverage:

The Guardian.

New York Times.

Salon.

Oscar predix

2010-01-26T18:37:00.002Z

The nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards are announced next Tuesday, February 2. Here are my tips for the main nods...

Best Picture:

Avatar
An Education
District 9
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Invictus
Star Trek
Precious
Up
Up in the Air

Dark Horse: The Messenger

Best Director:
James Cameron (Avatar)
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
Lee Daniels (Precious)
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)

Dark Horse: Clint Eastwood (Invictus)

Best Actor:
Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
George Clooney (Up in the Air)
Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Morgan Freeman (Invictus)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

Dark Horse: Ben Foster (The Messenger)

Best Actress:
Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
Helen Mirren (The Last Station)
Carey Mulligan (An Education)
Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
Gabourey Sidibe (Precious)

Dark Horse: Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria)

Best Supporting Actor:
Matt Damon (Invictus)
Woody Harrelson (The Messenger)
Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones/Julie & Julia)
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station)
Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Dark Horse: Alec Baldwin (It's Complicated)

Best Supporting Actress:
Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air)
Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air)
Mo'Nique (Precious)
Julianne Moore (A Single Man)
Samantha Morton (The Messenger)

Dark Horse: Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds)

Best Original Screenplay:
500 Days of Summer
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man
Up

Best Adapted Screenplay:
An Education
Invictus
A Single Man
Precious
Up in the Air

Talkies festival

2010-01-26T16:16:00.004Z

This year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF) is launched on Thursday night in Tripod. Check back here or to their website for the programme on or after that date. Word has it that a few surprises and exclusives are in store...

Unbeatable?

2010-01-24T21:52:00.002Z

Sandra Bullock wins Lead Female Actor prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last night. She's now the frontrunner for the Best Actress Oscar, despite the fact that The Blind Side is a deeply average movie, and Sandy's performance in it is pretty unremarkable.

Declan Cashin

Onwards we go

25

David Cameron is Prime Minister

Buh-bye Gordon

Hung

Wheat from the chat

Camergeddon is looming...

*cough airbrush cough*

Sir Hugsalot

Gerry Ryan, 1956-2010

Picture of the day

Picture of the day

Eek

Bubba and Blair

The very Model of a modern arts centre

Little white lies

So this is the Situation regarding Jersey Shore

The Final Frontier

Life is a cabaret...

Top of the flops

Comedy Giants in aid of Dublin Youth Theatre

The gay tour

Making a Twit of myself

(House) Dr Phil

True star

Unplugged

How to influence friends...

I'm walkin' here!

Betty left me in bits

Worst Photoshopping. EVER.

Bye-bye Bebo

Mr Saturday Night

Psycho Good Friday

On festivals and growing up...sorta

Nama-geddon

Tara is back - with 75% more gay

Let the Right One Win

Ricky Martin: I'm gay

The Pope Delusion

Oreagan

Sassy Gay Friend

Sinead, CNN and church abuse

The Daily Mail song

Picture of the day

'Werner' Brothers presents...

Must-C television

Kicking Back

Making his mark on history

219 votes

TV theme song medley

Super Sunday!

Pope grants...erm, I mean, asks for forgiveness

Typo of the day

Appetite for life

JT, A1 and me

Matters of State

Subbed par: Some great headlines...

I just got my Ass Kicked!

Greatest Movie Scenes Ever

Need for speed

Enter the Dragon

Need help understanding American politics?

[stifle laughter]

I'm so happy for you [grits teeth]

Bullock retrospective

K-Big rules the Oscars

A trailer for every Oscar winning movie ever

Sheen/Spall

Retro posters for Best Picture nominees

Lost...Simpsons-style

Paying for the sins of the fathers

For your consideration...

Oscar predix

Chasing miracles

I'm a gay man but I can be cured. Apparently.

What being on American Idol is worth

Movie stuff

Shakespeare's Hamlet was missing a certain something...

The Karate Kid 2010...

cough airbrush cough