Category: Irish Independent Column

The clown’s pie, the zodiac killer, drunken foetuses, branson’s pickle

October 7th, 2017

Week 20 of the column.

My parents were strict. Products of the Forties and Fifties when Catholicism ruled supreme, they took a somewhat North Korean approach to cultural products they deemed unsuitable for me. I have fond memories of my father switching off an RTE matinee showing of Black Narcissus when I was ten (still one of my favourite films), banning heavy metal when I was 15 (I still love heavy metal), or refusing to get me a skateboard for Christmas because, they claimed, people were using them to worship the devil. Years later I realised that they were mixing skateboards up with ouija boards. One thing they never censored were books. They held the belief that reading could almost never be bad for you, and so it was that I found myself reading Stephen King’s IT aged 13.

The genius of King’s work lies not in making us scared of what we can see, as Lovecraft did, but in looking deep into the human soul and showing us the simple horrors of life on earth, such as family holidays (The Shining), figuring out how to work domestic appliances (Maximum Overdrive), the perils of cat ownership (Pet Semetery), the importance of a religious upbringing (Carrie) or American democracy (The Stand). But in IT he tapped into one of our most understandable fears – that of clowns. As another remake of King’s meisterwerk hits our screens, it would appear that one bunch of clowns aren’t going to take this pie in the face to their profession lying down. Two professional clowns appeared on the UK’s GMTV to point out that – spoiler alert – the Pennywise character from IT is only one of the many physical manifestations of the being, before going on to say the film was cheap, a low blow, even coming from a pair of men wearing clownpants and facepaint on live TV.

But perhaps the best protest of IT was in the US, where professional clowns though the best way to win back hearts and mind was to stage a protest outside cinemas screening the film. This resulted in members of the public, emerging blinking into the sunlight following two hours of clown-based horror, only to be confronted with a bunch of angry clowns. King must be delighted that his self fulfilling prophecy has come to pass. The clowning profession might do well to note that the only way back from this PR disaster is to kill the media circus – and the only way to kill a circus is to go for the juggler.

Speaking of sad horrors, spare a moment for depressed vampire Ted Cruz. After the ignominy of an presidential race that saw Trump repeatedly humiliate him, and an ongoing joke about him being the Zodiac killer (which he isn’t, by the way), the American Senator has now hit the headlines for his Twitter account liking a pornographic tweet. Were he a Democrat, it would be taken as a sign of the moral decay of liberals everywhere; sadly for Cruz, he is a member of the Republican Party, whose puritanical zeal means enjoying a bit of filth on Twitter is not ok. It seems that poor Cruz is doomed for humiliation no matter what he does, so perhaps he would be better embracing his own decline – and appearance – and star in an X-rated remake of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot titled Count Cuckula. It couldn’t suck worse than the last 12 months of his career.

Rejoice, pregnant ladies – or at least rejoice as much as you can whilst incubating a ten pound loaf of a child. A report this week in the BMJ Open has revealed that a glass of wine during pregnancy is not going to do major harm, and while total abstinence might be healthier, you don’t need to cause yourself anguish over a drop of chablis during a Narcos marathon. This is great news for the entire population of Ireland, whose entire lives from conception onward is fuelled by medicinal boozing. Frankly, how anyone gets through the various delights of pregnancy without a drink or two is a miracle in itself.

Finally, spare a moment for Richard Branson, the billionaire whose Caribbean island home was trashed by Hurricane Irma. Branson laid the blame for the hurricane squarely at the feet of man made climate change. Given that he owns a massive airline firm, whose planes presumably do not run on sunlight, it was a plot twist akin to the moment in horror films when you realise that the killer is inside the house. If there is a lesson for us all, it’s that those Euromillions ads that suggest we should buy an island are really quite misleading. That and the planet is dying.
ESRI, Chris Rock, iPhone, filth

September 10th, 2017

Week 19 of the column:

Signing our son up to the the Economic and Social Research Institute’s sprawling Growing Up In Ireland project seemed like a great idea when he was born back in 2008. As reasonably civic minded people – ie, not quite at the Tidy Towns level, but not fly tippers either – we thought it would be exciting to have his life tracked as part of a social document that could go on to influence Government policy. As part of the Infant Cohort – a wonderfully dystopian title for the phalanx of children born in 2008 – the ESRI call to us every couple of years and ask us a series of questions. Except, as the years have gone by, the visit has become a long dark night of the soul. They weigh and measure us to remind us that we are getting both wider and shorter, and then begins the survey. How much time do you spend playing sports with your son, how often do you read to him, do you bring him to art galleries or libraries, all are met with a resounding ‘not much’ or flat ‘no’. All it’s short is the survey taker pulling out an acoustic guitar and cracking out a heartbreaking rendition of Cats In The Cradle while you sob about all those lost moments.

Once you’re done feeling like an emotional failure – which seems to be about 95% of parenting generally – it’s time to move on the economics, where my repeated acts of professional harakiri are laid bare for all to see.

Then on to the truly awkward questions – the confidential ones you do on a laptop – where you are asked how often you fight in front of the kids, how often do you mention divorce, do you shout at each other. It’s like doing one of those multiple choice questionnaires in a magazine to determine which EastEnders character you are. But in the end, we are happy to take part. We see it as an important social document, even if our input skews the results downwards by several points. My only hope is that when the ESRI swing by in another four years or so, we are all still alive and well, still bickering about money and feeling like failures whilst trying our best.

Chris Rock’s decision to ban phones at his upcoming Dublin gig is a bold move, as it seems impossible to attend any event these days without some goon lofting a phablet in front of your face so that he can catch shaky footage of a solar eclipse, holy apparition or car crash.

Rock’s point was that the footage shot at his gigs ruins his punchlines, but it is the fact that they ruin them in such an atrocious manner that is so awful. Nobody engages in good quality piracy anymore. Back in the 1990s, bootleggers used to smuggle microdisk recorders into gigs and stand at just the right spot to capture the audio. Now, thanks to smartphones that we are never quite sure how to work, we have terrible audio, terrible footage, and terrible photos that make every event seem like we missed nothing. So if you want to share your gig experiences with friends and family – or complete strangers on the internet – please try to do it well, or not at all. If you want to share gigs, buy another ticket, as your Blair Witch style camera work makes everything look like you strapped a webcam to a small dog and sent it crowd surfing. Let’s just hope that Rock’s gig is one to remember and that he doesn’t just phone it in.

The ubiquitous iPhone is about to be born again, this time in its eighth iteration. Rumours abound as to the capabilities, but for non-techies – ie, most of us – it’s the name that is of interest: The iPhone X. This alleged title is to mark the fact that it is the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, rather than the fact that it has been the greatest conduit for pornography since those late night films on RTL in the 1990s.

Back in the days of yore, before the internet, one had to forage for tattered copies of H&E magazine across wasteland, or rely on a school chum whose dad had a dog eared collection of jazz mags that dated back to Famine times. Nowadays it’s all just there for the taking on your phone, rather than on a pack of playing cards someone brought back from a holiday in Greece in 1978, which you had to barter your Subbuteo set for. Spoiled is what ye are.

Congratulations to Hugh Maguire from Meath, whose entry to the 22nd Golden Fork Awards in the UK – a smoked black pudding – saw him take the top title of Great Taste Supreme Champion. Congratulations in a more general sense to whoever it was who realised that ‘black pudding’ is a fantastic rebrand for something that should really be known by the more accurate name of ‘blood sausage’, a terrible name that still manages to sound less weird than iPhone X.
Coffee, Uranus, gas, spoilers

September 10th, 2017

Because I like my coffee like I like my music – dark and full of ket. pic.twitter.com/AxNOkDcDhb

— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) July 2, 2017

‘Week 18 of my column’ – words I thought I would never write.

Finally science is starting to give us some good news. After a week of terrifying weather events, there were glad tidings for those of us who are unable to function without coffee – it may be helping us to live longer. A study of 20,000 men and women found that three to four cups a day may help us to live one third longer.

This is great news for the caffeine junkies among us, who are unable to have a civilised conversation in the morning before they have at least one pharmaceutical-grade coffee, and possibly two on Mondays. The lead researcher in the Spanish study said that it is the antioxidants in coffee that provide the benefits, which I – like all sensible people – take to mean that I should get dosed up to the gills on premium grade Java to the point where my heart is jackhammering and the veins at my temple bulging.

Of course the only problem is how to come down off this obvious health kick – well, science has done it again, this time via the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, which has published a study that says moderate drinking may be beneficial to us physically, apart from helping us unwind from a day of guzzling black gold until our eyes pop out of our heads.

Moderate alcohol use in this study was considered to be less than 14 drinks a week for men and seven for women, and was associated with a 25 percent lower risk of overall death. Our path to a longer, healthier life is clear – jugs of the strongest coffee available without prescription, and a healthy dose of grain alcohol to wind down of an evening. After all, having fallen from first place in the year 2000 to an embarrassing 12th in an EU survey on national alcohol consumption, it’s important that we all don the green jersey and start chucking down the Irish coffees. We need to stagger back up the rankings, otherwise the Public Health Alcohol Bill might seem a little unnecessary.

Our frenemy science also gave us a wonderful headline (or terrible chat-up line) this week with the revelation that Uranus is stuffed with diamonds. Perhaps you thought that the light emanating from it was the sun shining out of there, but no, it’s far more exciting than that.

Uranus, despite being the butt of jokes since German astronomer Johann Elert Bode named it after the Greek god of the sky, or possibly after a co-workers backside, is a massive gassy cloud, but one that produces huge diamonds in its interior which then sink to the centre. It was a nice moment for a mass that for centuries failed to be recognised as a planet as it was considered too dim and too slow. The upside of the planet’s goofy name is that people in the mainstream media actually like writing about it – perhaps if we had named all the other planets of the solar system in this manner we would pay more attention to them, and gaze up at the night sky sniggering about the beautiful brown rings of Shaturn.

Bathers along the Sussex coast at the weekend were hit with a mysterious cloud of noxious gas (not from Uranus this time). The occurrence had a slightly apocalyptic feel to it, coming as it did after another bi-annual ‘storm of the century’ pummelled the southern states of America into the mud, while a scaled down version tried to wipe Donegal off the map. A cloud of poisonous gas seems unlikely to be the result of anything other than human endeavour, you can’t help but worry that maybe the planet has really had enough of us trying to kill it.

Perhaps it had this secret defence mechanism all along, much like in the incredibly weak M Night Shyamalan film The Happening. Aside from the moment the credits roll, the high point of the film – an ecological scare story of a sudden wave of human self destruction sparked by nature itself – was Marky Mark Wahlberg pleading with a houseplant to give humanity a second chance. If the Sussex gas did happen to be belched out by an angry planet, I think I would rather smother in its noxious fumes than have to explain to my decrepit vicus about why watering it once a fortnight was too much hassle, or explain to my velociraptor-friendly lawn about how ‘work has just been really crazy recently’.

If you haven’t seen The Happening, firstly, lucky you, and secondly, sorry for not offering a spoiler alert. However, there is a Shyamalanesque plot twist here – a study published by the US Association for Psychological Science showed that people actually preferred watching films when they knew the twist was coming. Some 800 subjects were recruited by the University Of California, where they were read stories by authors like John Updike and Raymond Carver, some with the plot twist revealed beforehand and some without. It transpired that the listeners enjoyed the stories more when they knew what was coming, and could see the machinations of the writers, as they conspired to misdirect them and camouflage the looming reveal. Perhaps we can console ourselves with this when scientists the world over say ‘we told you so’ as the planet self-combusts.
Twitter, Caravaggio, eclipse, swearing kids

September 9th, 2017

Column week 17:

Twitter gets a lot of stick. In existence for eleven years, it has been accused of everything from facilitating Nazis to allowing anonymous abuse and harassment. But its enduring contribution to modern culture is the hashtag. Used as a means of linking discourses across the platform, the hashtag turned ten years old recently, but it was one this summer that showed how Twitter can be a force for good. #NoWrongPath allowed Twitter users around the world to share their stories of how they came to their current careers, with the vast majority showing that few school leavers have a clear idea of what they want to do with their lives. It was a hashtag I can relate to. All I wanted to do in college was art, but, after failing to get into art college, I did what many people did when they aren’t sure what they want to do, and committed to an arts degree. I dropped out after four weeks. I went back to college in my early 20s, got my masters and started working in the media. I wonder what path I would have taken if I had been accepted into art college, but that’s something I will never know, largely thanks to Caravaggio.

The Taking Of Christ had been hanging in the dining room of the Leeson Street Jesuit Community for decades. Considered a copy of the original, in the early Nineties it was discovered to be the actual work of the great master, and was handed over to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1993. Art was one of the few subjects I was good at (incredibly, English was the other), and we were guaranteed that Caravaggio was going to come up on the higher paper when we sat the Leaving Cert in the summer of 1994. We even went on a school trip to see the painting, staring in awe at its scene of chaos, betrayal and loss.

Caravaggio’s short life was easy to study – he was a drunkard, a violent thug, an outsider who seemed utterly at war with the world. In his paintings he used labourers and prostitutes as life models for religious figures, wrapping the divine in the pasty flesh of profane humanity. All his paintings remind us that we are just haunted meat, and everything passes.

Being typically difficult, Caravaggio didn’t come up on the Leaving Cert higher paper (he did on the ordinary level), and I failed to get the points to study art. I have no doubt that I am better off for not becoming an artist, not least because my arse is too big for skinny jeans. My career hasn’t been what I would call a success, yet here I am, writing for one of the biggest selling newspapers in the country. However, my favourite quote about success come from Dicky Fox, the sports agent mentor of Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire: “I don’t have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success.”

Our mortal enemy the moon also proved that there is #NoWrongPath by moving its enormous mass directly into the path of our sun, cutting off our meagre supply of Vitamin D and attempting to give us all rickets. The occasion provided for many stunning images, but few were as beautiful as the one of Donald Trump staring directly into into the eclipse, presumably because someone told him not to do that exact thing. Perhaps we should all start telling him that he is doing a great job and to stay there forever. Although something tells me that it won’t work like that, and that impeachment is the best way to drag the whole sorry mess of the White House into sunlight.

A study this year by Marist College examined the correlation between verbal fluency and swearing, with the result that those who were more adept at swearing had greater language skills. I tried to console myself with this thought on Monday night, when I happened upon my two and a half year old son shouting ‘f**king tractor’ over and over again. It’s one of those moments where you try to A) hide your laughter and B) try not to get too angry, before turning to your spouse and declaring ‘this is your f**king fault’, because clearly, swearing is an equal opportunities employer: This week the popular site Mumsnet has advertisers concerned over their ads appearing next to posts with snappy titles like ‘I can’t f**king do this anymore’ and other howls of despair from parents at their wits’ end.

Perhaps my son will decide he wants to go to college, and will eke out a career as a sweary, boozy artist like Caravaggio. Hopefully, he will be a more sane version, as, despite all his talent, Caravaggio killed someone over a game of tennis, went on the run and died from fever aged 38. So perhaps there is #AWrongPath after all.
Public transport, not driving, Nazis in America, Ed Norton

August 23rd, 2017

Column, week 16:

In 1988, the British director Tony Kaye made an advert for British Rail. Titled ‘Relax’, it showed a soft focus world of comfort aboard the train, where all the ills of the world whizzed by the window, and commuters drifted off into a peaceful slumber. Unsurprisingly, there were many complaints of how inaccurate it was in its portrayal of public transport, but the ad is still considered to be among Kaye’s best work.

It came to mind during the recent ad campaign by Irish Rail. It shows a family on a journey from hell, everyone stressed and bug eyed, dad white knuckling the wheel as the kids bicker, before someone tries to open a two litre bottle of lemonade in the back seat, and it explodes across the windscreen. It cuts then to the family relaxing on board an Irish Rail train, at peace with the world.

If I wasn’t a lifelong user of public transport, it might appeal. Sadly, I am one of those rare people who, for non-medical reasons, does not drive. This statement is usually greeted with ‘did you just never learn?’ I said I don’t drive, not I can’t drive. I did the lessons, drove very briefly a couple of times over the last two decades, but generally, I don’t drive. I can give you a list as long as my arm as to why this is, virtue signalling about a greener planet, and how I have the carbon footprint of an especially petite geisha. But really it is just that I don’t like it.

The next comment I get is ‘you don’t meet many men who don’t drive’. Actually, you do, they just don’t announce it as for some odd reason it is seen as the lynchpin of masculinity – get the car, get the girl, do donuts in a shopping centre car park, rule the world. Perhaps I am just missing the boy racer gene, or that passion for mechanical devices that some have. Either way, I spend a lot of time on buses, trains, footpaths and puddles. Public transport in this country isn’t great. This is why almost everyone drives. Which is why public transport isn’t great. The people who drove past the picketing bus drivers and beeped to show their support failed to see the irony of their actions – support them by using the service. I do, and it is inconvenient at best, because the real price of public transport is not a financial one, but of time. If I leave work and hop in a car, I will be home in half an hour, an hour on bad days. If I leave work and use the usual combinations of walking, bus and train, I get home almost two hours after I am done. I turned 42 last week, so the best case scenario is that I am halfway through my time on Earth. I just can’t waste any more time. So I got a car, or death machine as they could also be known. But however dangerous they are, anything is better than cycling.

Everytime I see someone on a bike in the city I think of the Italian Futurists, who fought in the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Automobilists in the First World War, making their stand in the alpine regions. Seeing a cyclist weaving through traffic is a harrowing thing. If it was a deer, people would show it more respect. And there is no point in saying ‘well, cyclists are a menace’, because so are motorists, so are pedestrians, so are kids in the back seat playing with fizzy pop. I don’t cycle (I am able to, as, much like riding a bike, you never forget how) because I don’t want to die. However twitchy I am in a car, the thought of trying to navigate a bike through the panzer division of the morning rush makes me sweat. I see people using City Bikes and want to scream at them to wear a helmet. Yes it will ruin your hair, but so will a massive head trauma. You are profoundly vulnerable and there are people at the wheel who do not see you as a human, they see you as an annoyance.

On public transport, people might annoy you, but you generally control yourself because that is what thousands of years of evolution does – it gave us a certain amount of self control when face to face with other human beings. But give us a little distance from each other, or a few barriers between us and we find is distressingly easy to stop caring.

The American alt-right – or fascists as they should really be known – are a generation that seems to have spent a little bit too much time online, who seem to have obtained their sense of history from video games and films. It seems unlikely that any of them have a true grasp on war in any form, and have become totally caught up in some odd role playing game where they are the heroes, or the stagers of an especially cruel prank. But what can the internet do? How do you reconcile the right to free speech with hosting the views of people who preach hate and murder? Well, it seems that even the internet has really had enough, as both Google and GoDaddy have both banned the Neo Nazi site The Daily Stormer. Naturally, it has now simply moved to the dark web, and the question is what will happen on that site now, with the lights completely out, and zero control. It’s hard to see how the situation in the US could get worse – and we have been saying that for months – but here it is, American Nazis in the land of the free, home of the brave. A nation of immigrants, pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war whilst preparing to eat itself alive. Every day brings a fresh hell, a torrent of awful news – so why not relax and unwind with a good film?

Back in the late Nineties, someone in Hollywood had the bright idea of getting ad director Tony Kaye to make a film. Titled American History X, it went down in the history of troubled productions as one of the greats, with the director falling out with the star, Edward Norton, the studio and seemingly much of Hollywood. The film itself was overshadowed by all the controversies, but is a beautiful if flawed portrait of an American Neo Nazi and his search for redemption. Whether it proves to be prophetic and there is some epiphany in the alt-right is unlikely, but let’s hope it paints a more realistic picture of the human ability to change – or at least that it’s closer to reality that Kaye’s depressingly inaccurate vision of public transport.