Flashback: Oscars coverage

I FILED this piece for the Liverpool ECHO TV column on March 25, 2002. It was written hurriedly after having been in the esteemed Crosby pub The Edinburgh the evening before with my mate Cormac Austin who had been visiting from Belfast.

When I say hurriedly, I mean (to use film parlance) it was one take right on deadline – in the old days a copy boy would have ripped it from the typewriter and ran like stink to the compositors rubbing sweat from his visor.

No rewrites and no self-analysis and still the favourite thing I ever wrote there because the emotions will be similar to those watching tonight’s schmooze fest. It shows that sometimes it’s better just to write what you think and be damned.

Oscar Special (BBC News 24) 
OKAY, okay, its not officially last night’s telly, but the early-morning Oscar coverage from LA got the hatred meter rising through the roof.
As the nation slept and young parents like me were blearily calming down hyper-active weeuns, the biggest shower of over-paid prima-donnas were praising and analysing more prima donnas giving wee gold statues to other more highly paid prima-donnas.
So as billions of dollars were wasted on analysing the classic simplicity of Sharon Stone’s dress, I was screaming at the telly: ‘Of course she looks good, she gets paid $20m a movie, she’s got people employed to make her look good.’ 
Then we were told it was a great night for the African-American actors; it was a triumph of the great American dream. Did Martin Luther King die just so we could get the chance to see Halle Berry ham it up like the hammiest pantomime dame?
‘This is for all the women of colour,’ she blubbed unconvincingly, while I was sat shouting ‘he’s behind you’ and waiting for Jim Davidson to come on as Buttons and start the song.
Even Sidney Poitier came on and made the sort of fawning, luvvie-speak acceptance speech that makes you want to kick in the TV.
The roll call of puffed-up luvvies in designer dress rolled on and on and on. By this stage steam was puffing out of my ears like a big old cartoon villain.
Leave it to the Brits: At least Jim Broadbent and Julian Fellowes looked as if they saw the ludicrousness of the whole thing and just pretended to be underwhelmed for a while.
Then as the parties started after the ceremony, Rosie Millard and some mad Yank woman with a big jaw from Vogue magazine started to analyse the couture, the haircuts and the shoes. Then I blew a gasket.
I began to shout: ‘There’s people dying of hunger in the world. Can’t you see this is wrong? That it’s immoral, that it’s ridiculous. Why aren’t you listening to me? Are you deaf? Argggghhh?’
And then I realised that sitting shouting about world hunger to the TV in the early hours of the morning is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of Oscar viewing. 

Poster Day 2                                                            

Poster Day

AS part of my PhD I have to complete a poster which advertises and explains my thesis.
Any excuse to mess about on Quark….

View this document on Scribd

The Mosquito Press in the Information Age

I wrote this piece of Jason Walsh’s brilliant Forth magazine

PS O’HEGARTY’s 1946 essay ‘The Mosquito Press’ in the The Bell declared that an interesting book could be written about the weekly and monthly journals which he says ‘festooned the Separatist, Sinn Féin and Irish Ireland’ movements since the days of Parnell. (1)

Much the same could be said for the modern multi-media era which has seen an explosion in new journals and websites dedicated to the cause of documenting the present and negotiating the future of republicanism in the age of the internet.
From traditional newspapers like Saoirse and An Phoblacht to magazines like Fourthwrite and The Hibernian, internet journals like The Blanket and blogs like Splintered Sunrise – it has been a golden age for Republican journalism and while this vibrant and sophisticated new media ecosphere has often slipped off the radar of the mainstream media, anyone making a concerted effort to nose around the Republican Sphere will know a more complete picture of Republicanism is available from the many and varied corners of the information super highway.
It is not in the council meetings or cummann gatherings that the next generation of Republican activists is going to come, but from the blogosphere and online media.
Mick Fealty, editor of Slugger O’Toole, esteemed political commentator and ringmaster general of the Irish political blogariat says it is interesting to note that the age of the Northern Ireland peace process has run concurrently with the age of internet and social media and that the two things may be inextricably linked (2), certainly the media in all its forms became a key terrain of political interaction from well before the signing of the Good Friday agreement.
From roots in the prison journalism of Long Kesh to the Bobby Sands Discussion Group, development in groups like the Irish Republican Writers Group and Fourthwrite through to the myriad of blogs, websites and YouTube Channels, a new republicanism has flourished in the modern age and provided a challenge to the official narratives of Sinn Féin.

Republicanism & journalism
My own interest in the Republican media sphere was first piqued as I started out three years ago on a part time PhD looking at the Framing of republicans in the media in the post-GFA era. With Holy Cross, the Northern Bank Robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney all fresh in the memory, I felt republicanism was at an interesting place in its own timeline and that for the first time in its modern history, it had some modicum of control in its relationships with the media. From the vantage point of Liverpool and a career in journalism, it appeared to me that with every day Sinn Féin’s journey from political pariahs to mainstream political players (3) represented a kind of political and media miracle those of us reading Liz Curtis in the 1990s could not have foretold.
It is also interesting to note that at the height of Sinn Féin’s 32 County Political arc (before Northern Bank and McCartney) and in the midst of this explosion in writing and comment, the Belfast Media Group thought it intellectually sustainable and economically viable to launch Daily Ireland at this time. It had many critics, but it did at least aim to give a voice to the many strands of republicanism.
However, the more I read the mainstream media the less I became interested in ‘Official Provisionalism’, with its attendant New Labour style affectations. Actually, that is terribly unfair to Sinn Féin which had barely put a foot wrong and which had embraced the possibilities of the internet and social media before other political parties – An Phoblacht was the first Irish Newspaper on the net.
Rather it was the ever developing sphere of Republican dissent that fascinated me – not the hammer throwers concerned with revisiting the tired rhetoric of armed struggle and the good old days of a triumphalist reading of War News in the Phoblacht. No, it was magazines like Fourthwrite and The Blanket which most interested me, thanks to the unusually high standard of journalism, comment and production values – three things that one cannot always count on in Irish Republican journalism.
It struck me that these magazines and a number of the early republican bloggers had become a new and logical progression of the Mosquito Press, buzzing around Sinn Féin, making pests of themselves and opening up the republican sphere again. I was also most interested in why republicans, in particular, consistently return to writing and journalism as a means of manifesting their politics.
O’Hegarty notes that ‘All movements, and all sections of movements, in a democratic age, appealing to ‘the people’, have found it necessary and advantageous to have a paper of some sort to put their points to the people.’ Borrowing the phrase ‘Mosquito Press’ from John Redmond, O’Hegarty’s contention is that the large number of often small circulation magazines buzzed around together in the cause of first Irish statehood and sovereignty in the face of the Home Rule movement. It also struck me that this new mix of old style magazines and newspapers, websites and bloggers was closer to the second wave of mosquito press which grew in the 20s and 30s after the establishment of the Free State and which was dominated by the Frank Ryan edited An Phoblacht. Caoilfhionn Ni Bheachain’s excellent 2007 journal article for Eire-Ireland ‘“The Mosquito Press”: Anti Imperialist Rhetoric in Republican Journalism,1926-39’ updates O’Hegarty and evokes the period quite beautifully for an academic journal. References to Saoirse, Wolfe Tone Weekly, An Phoblacht and Republican Review have clear parallels with the growth of activist journalism in Ireland today.

Activist Journalism
Fourthwrite, 10 years old and still covering Ireland and the world from the left, remains one of the best magazines of its kind in Britain and Ireland. Its world view is crucial to its success. Editor Tommy McKearney has left links forged across the world and as a result gets regular contributions coming from Nepal and Gaza. The magazine grew out of the Irish Republican Writers’ Group and despite allegations of intimidation from Sinn Féin (4) in the early days and a shift in emphasis after founder members Tommy Gorman and Anthony McIntyre left to start The Blanket, it has continued to plough a studious and honourable furrow. Academics have given much time and tortured deliberation to formulating definitions of citizen and activist journalism, in interviews, McKearney has given me a simple one. His writing is activism – he claims to have no literary intentions – and Fourthwrite is an extension of his political engagement.
Weekly internet magazine The Blanket, which began in 2001 under the editorship of Carrie Twomey, is a veritable treasure trove for modern day researchers and will doubtlessly become a valuable resource for historians in the future. Twomey’s husband Anthony McIntyre was lead writer on the The Blanket and his often provocative style saw his work get wider attention in the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times among others. The website ran for seven years and helped alter how modern, dissenting republicanism was perceived by the outside world. It felt it was important to give a voice to anyone who wanted to write for it – a stance born out of the intimidation Twomey, McIntyre and their friend Tommy Gorman received at the hands of Sinn Féin. By the end of its life it had Irish Daily Star columnist and committed evangelical Protestant John Coulter as an honourary blanket man. It could be said that the Blanket’s template was the irreverence and intelligence of The Bell as edited by Peadar O’Donnell rather than the dogmatism of the Provisional green book.
Twomey and McIntyre shut The Blanket in 2008, but McIntyre’s website The PensiveQuill, which he updates three times a week is the best site of its kind in Ireland or Britain. He has a talent for entertaining political commentary which would put many in the mainstream media to shame while his insider knowledge of the Republican movement makes him one of the most authoritative voices in opposition to Sinn Féin. His wicked sense of humour manifested itself wonderfully during the recent Iris Robinson affair with: “As for her young beau in all of this, in tackling Iris Robinson, Kirk McCambley might not have been imaginative but he was certainly courageous.”(5)
While Republican Sinn Féin’s Saoirse continues to land on the doormat once a month and the 32’s Sovereign Nation follows suit, the days of a party paper in those formats must soon be a thing of the past. With fixed costs of printing and distribution on the rise and dwindling numbers of activists to sell copies – the distribution model for the old activist paper must be under threat. Certainly éirígí made a conscious decision not to print a newspaper to sell at branch meetings because successive Sinn Féin ard fheiseanna made it apparent that papers are no longer self-financing and actually cost the party money.
Instead éirígí have made a conscious effort to be ‘more creative’ with the means of communicating with their public. Their website is excellent and it updated regularly with news and they have got a lot of respect for their ability to react quickly to events. They have also garnered headlines and made inroads into the Irish political life thanks to publicity stunts like the rebranding Starbucks and eye catching election material like the Sex Pistols-inspired Lisbon No vote poster from 2009.
Also on the Republican left are blogs like the 26 Counties-based Cedar Lounge Revolution and Sinn Féin Keep Left who have socialist republicanism at heart rather than the other way around. They are tremendously interesting sites as they really signpost the gap between both Sinn Féin in the South and the left and the overall gap between parties on both sides of the border.
Anyone wishing to waste several days looking at the artefacts of the Irish Left should get along to its Irish Left Online Document Archive. These are interesting sites because they evidence the split personality of Republicanism as Sinn Féin in the north drifts to the centre and slowly disintegrates in the south.
The peerless Spintered Sunrise, a Belfast-based left wing Republican blogger who manages to mix examinations of both identities with an occasional foray into the world’s of glamour models and pornography. What sets Splints aside is a brilliantly entertaining writing style and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the left and Republicanism. He (she?) is up for an Orwell Award at the minute, so get along and cast your vote.
In the blogosphere the myriad forms of republican Catholicism are given room to have their say. South Armagh man Chris Gaskin’s Balrog up until quite recently did a fine job of explaining the catholic Republican identity. And if I am positing the theory that the new media ecosphere allows for all voices marginalised to be heard, then special mention needs to be made at this point of the Hibernian Magazine edited by Gerry McGeough.
While republicanism was at the heart of the magazine’s ethos, it was more concerned with recovering a right wing, Catholic Ireland which McGeough felt had been lost with Sinn Féin’s embracement of the left and the growing secularism in the 32 Counties. It is true that The Hibernian did reflect a core older, grass roots Republicanism both in rural Ireland and in the emigrant communities of the USA, especially with the tagline ‘For Faith, Family and Country’. It ran until late 2008 for more than two years on an editorial diet of faith and new world order-style conspiracy theory which often saw it derided, but it was tremendously well designed for a Republican publication and perhaps the most professional of any of the hard copy formats available recently.
What would O’Hegarty make of all this? Well he makes mention of WP Ryan, editor of Peasant and Nation between 1907-1910, and describes the editor as having ‘in him a mixtre of Theosophy, Paganism, Celtic Mythology, Socialism and Modernistic Collectivisim,’ which looking back over the last 10 years is a mix that has yet to find foothold on the internet – who’s going to be the first?
—–

1. PS O’Hegarty, ‘The Mosquito Press’, The Bell, April 1946, Vol 12, No1
2. Mick Fealty, ‘Slugger O’Toole’: The New Media as Track Two Diplomacy’, Public Diplomacy, Cultural Interventions & the Peace Process in
Northern Ireland: Track Two to Peace?
3. Graham Spencer, ‘Sinn Féin and the Media in Northern Ireland: The New Terrain of Policy Articulation’, Irish Political Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, September 2006
4. Anthony McIntyre, ‘The Irish Republican Writers Group and the battle for new ideas’, HYPERLINK “http://www.socialistdemocracy.org” http://www.socialistdemocracy.org
5. The Pensive Quill, ‘The Iris Virus’, Jan 7, 2010

My Night with Mark Kermode

I wrote this for Jason Walsh’s brilliant online magazine Forth

IN an age of thumbs up/ thumbs down two word reviews and ‘all the news in one minute’, there is greater manifest need for a critic as preternaturally gifted as BBC film reviewer Dr Mark Kermode. (pictured right)

Having cut himself a sizeable niche in the world of film reviewing through his chart topping and recently expanded BBC Radio 5 Live podcast with Simon Mayo (left), his star has been on the rise recently thanks to a growing portfolio of regular gigs on News 24 and  BBC2’s The Culture Show. 

Now with almost all of the BBC’s film output annexed for himself, he has just embarked upon a tour of the art house cinemas of Britain to publicise his new book of cinematic memoirs, ‘It’s Only a Movie’.

For anyone who knows Kermode’s sincere, geeky fan boy style, the book is more of the same, in fact for those who have followed his work with Mayo, many of the stories have been heard more than once before. But it really doesn’t detract from a wonderful read.

This is because almost uniquely among modern reviewers, when interviewing the stars of films he doesn’t like he doesn’t hold back from telling them so. So, as result, in the book and on stage we get the story of how Helen Mirren hand bagged him at the BAFTAs for saying ‘The Queen’ was a TV film rather than a ‘real film’ and the hilarious spectacle of Kermode being forced to chase a huffing Nick Broomfield down the road with a portable mic after the documentarian stormed out of an interview promoting ‘Kurt & Courtney’ after the good doctor had told him it was ‘a horlicks of a film’. As he pointed out at his live performance in Liverpool’s FACT centre on Thursday, the whole episode was utterly ironic given the amount of time Broomfield had spent in his own career hounding people with recording equipment.

In the live environment an hour of his choicest yarns are enlivened by the fact that he has the genuine charisma of a great performer. Although essentially a superannuated signing session in front of confirmed fans for whom he didn’t have to work too hard to get laughs, Kermode had some great gags to go with his sardonic reflections.

He began with his filmed metallic thump-laden review of ‘Transformers 2’ – the first film review which doesn’t require words and ended with a tribute to Duncan Jones’ 2009 sci-fi film ‘Moon’ played on the Stylophone.

By far the funniest bits of the live show are his recounting of Werner Herzog being shot in LA while being interviewed on camera by Kermode, along with his recreation of mega blockbuster ‘Avatar’ with three Smurfs on a coat hanger and a big stick. Behind it all was Kermode’s disgust at the sanctimony of James Cameron’s script and the swindle that he believes 3D is.

Kermode is often at his most memorable when he is angry about the cinematic fayre he is served – in the books we get a full explanation of his now legendary 15 minute tirade against the second ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie which became a You Tube hit and just what he thinks about the films of Gore Verbinsky’s ‘Pirates’ franchise as a job lot: ‘They should be buried in a very deep hole where they can never bother anyone ever again’

When he doesn’t like something he really hates it – ‘Breaking the Waves’ and ‘The Big Lebowski’ are like finger nails on a blackboard, but when he loves something then it is heaped with praise – ‘Mary Poppins’ is transcendent and proof of God’s existence and has the best 28 frames of all cinema. ‘Planet of the Apes’ is a political tract by which Kermode says he has lived his life, ‘Shawshank Redemption’ is a religious document with clear biblical parallels that, as it turns out, not even the writer knew it had.

As ever ‘The Exorcist’, the movie which changed his life (and has almost been a life’s work for him) gets wonderful treatment on stage and in the book. His first full viewing of it five years after seeing the trailer really crackles in print: “The first viewing passed in an almost orgasmic whirl of fear, and remains one of the most genuinely transcendent   experiences of my life. Rarely have I been more aware of being alive and in the moment…’ Where else do you see that kind of enthusiasm in arts criticism?

In person and on radio or TV,  Kermode is witty man, a passionate critic and a tremendous raconteur ready with some of those often very poor impressions for which he is rightly upbraided by Mayo on a weekly basis (his Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen are almost indistinguishable). He gladly accepts charges of arrogance and sometimes of art house elitism, but what shines out is his commitment to promoting cinema as an art form and not simply as entertainment.

* Mark Kermode’s  ‘It’s Only a Movie’ is available from Random House Books

Podcast No 3: Kasabian, Lady Gaga and booting the life out of Peter Guy

On location in Holywood, County Down
ME, student journalist Rosanna Hynes and Word Magazine writer Jamie Bowman got together on Thursday afternoon to rebut some of the vicious tirades of fellow Liverpool music journalist Peter Guy about pop.
Peter says music magazines are dull because they don’t cover new female or black artists and we are square for reading them.
In fairness to Peter, he is one of the most enthusiastic music writers working anywhere and his blog, Get Into This, is a superb, vibrant and bloody well written one. And we are going to get him in a room to fight his own corner in a couple of weeks.
Still, didn’t stop us figuratively kicking the life out of him. See what you think.
We take in how Lady Gaga sounds like cheesy French Euro Pop, how Kasabian have been annointed as the Nuts magazine’s perfect version of laddishness and one panelist uses the words ‘My dad’s Dead Kennedy’s  records.’ Brilliant.
Next week, comedy great Gary Morris of the peerless surrealists Slaughterhouse Live.

Podcast No 2: Steve Gribbin on how to do comedy incredibly well

IN many ways the only reason I ever wanted to write comedy, or write about it, is because of Steve Gribbin.
When I first head or saw ‘alternative comedy’ on TV or on the radio it was people like Ben Elton or Will Durst who I was really into. They were political and funny and satiric and vitriolic and chimed with the kind of political atmosphere I lived in.
I bought Ben Elton albums from Golden Discs in Belfast and taped George Carlin and Richard Pryor records from the library in Craigavon and taped as much of Friday Night and Saturday Night Live as I could.
Soon after, during Rag Week 1991 ( I think), I bunked into a brilliant show at Queens University Students’ Union in Belfast with Mark Thomas, Brenda Gilhooley and Skint Video on the bill. I was solid gone to quote Balloo the bear.

Skint Video were Steve Gribbin and Brian Mulligan and they played musical parodies and political songs and I thought they were brilliant. They were on the Mary Whitehouse Experience on Radio 1 and popped up a bit on whatever wee bits of network radio and TV we got in Northern Ireland. I taped all of it, unfortunately in a frenzy of nest building 10 years ago, before the age of MP3 conversion,  most of the cassettes went into Sefton Meadows tip in Maghull.
Then about eight years ago I was the de facto comedy writer for the Liverpool ECHO and saw Steve again at the Best of Liverpool gala show which traditionally finishes the Liverpool Comedy Festival. And he blew me away again doing political comedy to an audience which would have settled for girls in pyjamas gags.
In a bid to raise the profile of the brilliant Liverpool comedy club, Rawhide, I interviewed Steve prior to one of his regular headline sets. We hit it off and have been mates since.
Despite the narrowing of the stand-up canon in the clubs where comics can get away with tawdry observationalism, Steve still batters away with his angry, musical satire – blowing the roofs off clubs all across Britain and Ireland.
We’ve co-written a couple of his shows since and in writing with him you get a sense of what really works in a club. In this podcast we have talked about the nature of doing comedy, Steve’s influences and why Elvis Costello and Alexei Sayle are his great idols.
It’s 54 minutes long – but I am not going to make it easy for you – but it’s all killer no filler and a couple of times it may be libellous.
Sorry about the levels on the songs, it distorts a bit, but this is a great insight into how a top comedian goes about his business.
Please leave a comment at the end tell us what you liked and disliked.

Sometimes words are not required

THE good doctor’s review of Transformers 2 is more eloquent and articulate than any of the thousands of words written about the Michael Bay blockbuster.
 

REVIEW: Steve Gribbin at The Slaughterhouse

Disclaimer: Both the comic and promoter of the gig are very good friends of mine. It doesn’t cloud my judgement.

SOMETIMES when you are as dull as me, having seen hundreds of live comedy shows, rather than concentrating solely on the stage it’s really more interesting to observe what a great comic on his game can do to a room of people.
Tonight Steve Gribbin (right), in just 25 minutes, ripped the roof off one of the best comedy clubs in the world – the Slaughterhouse in Liverpool – and he did so not with mainstream material but with a set chock full of satiric songs on politics and religion.
From the Westminster expenses scandal, to the Catholic Church’s Sex Guide to a very blue, but top class gag about Iris Robinson, it was an incredible illustration of how, if you challenge people to think about something other than banal observational rubbish, they can and will.
And he had people stomping and shouting. He had two glammed-up Scouse birds near the stage bouncing in their seats in something akin to ecstasy, holding their mouths to stop themselves spitting vodka and coke over the stage. One oul lad near me spewed beer over his mate and the hardest knock I’ve ever seen at a comedy gig was crying with laughter like a wee fella and bruising mates’ shoulders with punches signposting each punchline.
But the point is that no other art form, when done this well, has the same incendiary effect on a room full of people from  disparate backgrounds as great stand-up comedy in a club.
There may be mass hysteria at rock gigs, or even some touring comedy in theatres, but most of those people are there for the band they all like or the comedian they have seen on TV. A comic playing a four man bill, has to have the material, experience and chops to rip the roof off a club like Gribbin did tonight. To do it doing political comedy makes it all the more memorable.
Now, Merseysiders are more tribal than many other British city/ region states, but when Gribbin played what he bills as the ‘first ever authentic Scouse hip hop song’ ‘City of Culture’ the room went understandably nuts. The reaction to a verse which uses the shortened slang cozzy (swimming costume) mozzy (mosquito), gozzy (cross eyed) and hozzie (hospital) was ridiculous.
Just looking at what great comedy does to a room of people is tremendously heartening – I just wonder why more people don’t spend a tenner and do it more often. It really is the best night there is to be had anywhere in entertainment. You have booze (should you wish) in your hand and someone whose raison d’etre is to make you laugh your ass off – it’s a no brainer.
And special mention has to be made for the efforts of the compere Neil Fitzmaurice and promoter Paula Harrington. A small cellar room like the Slaughterhouse with low ceilings and the stage inches from the front row is tailor made for a good night. But, club comedy only works when genuine care is taken in choosing bills and making sure it is run properly.
Fitzmaurice, a Phoenix Nights star/ writer and Peep Show cast member, who came up back in the day in the recent late 1990s heyday of Manchester comedy (Peter Key, Dave Spikey and Daniel Kitson) is a great home town compere. He’s so charming and bullet proof as a compere he could have got the Davros economic summit rocking this weekend in Austria.
Harrington’s bills, which see comics able to double up with another night nearby in the Slug and Lettuce pub, see big name club comics coming to Liverpool again. She must take some credit for curating a tremendous club and I mean curating in the most pretentious way imaginable.
But, ultimately, it really was all about Gribbin. It takes years of experience and a real eye for what works in a club to make political material ‘kill’ in the age of mainstream mediocrities like Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr.
Tonight, I wish a Radio 4 or Mock the Week producer had been in the audience because this is how it really should be done. It was clever, savage political comedy, true to the roots of the modern movement and which moved people to question the powers of their own urinary tracts. i.e. They nearly pissed themselves.
Knowing Steve Gribbin has not clouded my judgement – it was heartening, tremendous fun. To hear more, come back to Gobshites this Thursday to hear a two part podcast with the man himself where he talks about the art of writing comedy and listen to him play a couple of exclusive songs.

The Trestles: Exclusive Tracks Part 2

THIS IS the second exclusive track from the forthcoming album from The Trestles, subject of our new weekly podcast on Thursday.
This track is called ‘The Civilised’ and don’t forget to get along to the Zanzibar tonight (Saturday, January 30) for their latest gig. £3 on the door – sweet, la.