Pseudo Cream

I have a couple of annoying pimples on the forehead and I am despairing as, for some reason, I am convinced that only Sudocrem can do the job of ridding them by morning. It must have something to do with an over-application of the stuff to treat nappy rash when I was a wee nipper. You can't get the stuff in France though. Always read the label.

Ulick My Arse and I'll...

The splendidly-named Ulick McEvaddy, director of Knock Airport, has declared himself willing to apply suitable salivary lubrication to the posterior of the Pentagon by allowing US planes to refuel (and presumably transit prisoners to torture centres elsewhere) at the airport. 'Whatever would benefit the people of Mayo' says McEvaddy, a good friend of Mary Harney. Somehow I doubt the people of Mayo will be polled on whatever decision is taken, and Knock may well be accommodating the latest 'surge' announced by President Bush that has even hardcore loony rightwingers such as Francis Fukuyama are railing against.

Fur and Further Afield

A few years back I had the misfortune to be stood up in New York by an awful Californian woman; I didn't know at the time quite how beastly she was though I should really have heeded the warning signs given off by the fact that she shared a birthday with Adolf Hitler. Thankfully there were a couple of friends of mine in the city at the time and they arranged alternative accommodation for me for the duration of my stay. The lodgings in question were with two women, one Canadian and one Japanese, who were subletting an apartment from a renowned Japanese artist in the Westbeth building in the West Village, just a stone's throw from the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas had his last twenty double whiskeys before keeling over dead. The Westbeth building houses an artists' colony, and among its past tenants have been Gil Evans, Merce Cunningham (his dance studio is still located on the ground floor) and, most famously Diane Arbus. This sparked an interest for me in Arbus' photography, and, as well as being one of the most significant American photographers of the past fifty years, she was also a fine writer on the subject. And so I was slightly intrigued by the prospect of Steven Shainberg's unconventional biopic of her entitled Fur: An Imaginary Biography of Diane Arbus. Despite the fact that biopics of artists are usually laughably clichéd and badly-made affairs, and also despite the fact that the lives of few photographers are in any way interesting. The photographer, is by his or her métier, part technician, part bureaucrat, and their work is given to drama and action about as much as that of an architect or an engineer is.

As the subtitle indicates, the film is not your run-of-the-mill biography and Shainberg, whose first film was the modest but diverting Secretary, makes little concession to biographical accuracy, most of the characters, including Arbus' own family, being completely fictionalised. The main invention is a character Lionel Sweeney, who moves in upstairs from the Arbus family and who is afflicted with a chronic hirsuteness, and with whom the as-yet-fledgling photographer Diane becomes first fascinated and then falls in love. He in turn introduces her to a whole cast of 'freaks', whom she was later to use as the subject of much of her work. There is a clear debt to Cocteau's La Belle et la bête here but Fur is strangely a lot duller than the magical love affair between Jean Marais and Josette Day. Indeed the opening title caption gives the game away immediately, telling us that the 'imaginary' retelling of her story serves to illuminate a few steps on Arbus' 'extraordinary journey'. So it is a clichéd, conservative biopic after all. There seems to be little way of assessing Arbus' work without viewing it in terms of a hackneyed epiphanic teleology; she feels such and such an empathy for freaks because of a subconscious experience that she has only partially felt. Artists, it seems in the movies, have those sort of things quite a lot, just as certain characters played by Christopher Walken and John Travolta do.

It is hard to tell if Fur is bad only in parts, completely bad or a decent enough film, which it might be if one can discount completely the significance of Arbus' presence, which one can well do, her character and her art being nothing more than peripheral in the film. Certainly there are some sequences that are both touching and entrancing, and Robert Downey Junior, whose jaded insouciance has saved many a worse film than Fur, is great as the slowly-expiring beast Sweeney. Nicole Kidman plays Arbus much as she has played every other type of emancipation-seeking housewife in recent years, in films such as The Hours, The Stepford Wives and Birth, sympathetically enough but without any real recourse to genuine emotional depth. Still, it is not her fault that so many directors that should know better choose to typecast her in such restrictive roles. And restrictive, and reductive, is the view the film takes of Arbus' art, which was more than a simple freakshow. The film is bookended by Arbus' visit to the nudist colony that was to provide her first show of prominence; the implication is that it was only by an imaginative orientation towards freaks that she could finally start on the project. A notion that is as depressingly familiar as it is simplistic.

There is no doubt however that The Fountain, the new film by Darren Aronofsky, who made the pretentious and overrated Pi and the very good Requiem for a Dream, is a very bad film, so bad in fact that I could not take my eyes off it. Hugh Jackman plays a loving viviesectionist who endeavours to find a cure for brain tumours in time to save her wife, played by Rachael Weisz, who is about to cop it any minute from one. You really can't make this stuff up, but someone evidently did. His wife manages to overcome the script's wilful casting of her as a wistful bimbo to pen a study of sorts on the Tree of Life (the same referred to in the Book of Genesis) which was guarded in a old Mayan kingdom and sought after by a Spanish queen eager for eternal life and thereby save Spain from the Grand Inquisitor. If you find that scenario of medieval Spain a bit fanciful, well let's just imagine it as Star Wars with auto da Ď. When Jackman and Weisz both pop up as a conquistador and the queen respectively the effect is rather like Blackadder, and that is in no way a compliment. The eternal life theme is further mined when Jackman decides to devote his experiments to eradicating death altogether; it is 'a disease like any other'. Weisz for her part wears Wynona Ryder-style cropped hair as if to emphasise her impending mortality. The whole film resists simple synopsis however, it is so bad. Aronofsky, a director not naturally given to subtlety, clunks along with a script of his making and the celestial, sepia-toned photography recalls Guinness ads from the mid-nineties. Clint Mansell, ex of Pop Will Eat Itself, is once again providing the music, all overblown, plangent strings. I liked him better when he was singing about being touched by the hand of Cicciolina.

What I Learned Today III

That far from being a minority activity, driving on the left is the convention in no less than seventy-four countries. The best-known, of course, are the UK, Ireland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, but there is also the entire Indian sub-continent, all other former British colonies and, strangely enough, former Dutch colonies, including Indonesia and Surinam. A full list is available here, along with an interesting potted history of why certain countries drive on the left. The idea Alan Partridge once had of a TV show called 'Around the World on the Left' now appears feasible.

The End Beckhams

Looks like I was wrong on that Beckham-going-to-Celtic post. Just as well I was otherwise detained when I intended writing the one hailing our new capture of Anthony Stokes...

End of Production for Carlo Ponti

I shall say nothing about the new iPhone, which almost everyone I know is yabbering on about, for what reason I cannot fathom, nor the news that traces of cocaine were found on 100% of 45 Irish banknotes (did anyone think of testing them for traces of beer or urine?) Instead I will salute the great Carlo Ponti, the Italian film producer, one of the best ever, and who was better known to most as the husband of Sofia Loren. While emabarking on my quest to watch every film ever made in my early twenties I noticed the name of Ponti pop up in the titles of a lot of disparate films by excellent directors and I have since retained a great deal of respect for him. Like the great Franco-Polish producer Anatole Dauman, who died almost ten years ago, he had an eye for talent and also for making money out of unusually challenging films. His roster included di Sica, Antonioni, Fellini, Godard, Melville, Lean and more; a full list is available on the IMDb. One wonders about the longevity of Italian film producers, Ponti lived till 94, while Dino de Laurentiis and Alberto Grimaldi are still going, and still working. Something in the water, or is it the lifestyle?

What I Learned Today II

That Oklahoma, an inland state, has more shoreline than any other American state, more even than Alaska, California or Florida. All this because of an immense amount of public works creating reservoirs carried out under Roosevelt's WPA programme. Read more here.

S.L.I.G.O.

At the risk of descending too far into an irrational obsession with the over-moneyed kip of an island he was born on, Seanachie tips his hat off to the good readers of Blogorrah for naming Sligo the shitest town in Ireland. There will be many in the town to take deep umbrage at this accolade but I find it refreshing that Sligo is finally getting recognised for something. Seeing as the Sligo card is usually only played by myself when challenged with talking to French people I couldn't be arsed humouring(once they hear a town that is not Dublin or Cork, their tap of patronising clichés about the hard-drinking, rugby-playing, English-hating [their words, not mine] Irish runs suddenly dry), a bit of a profile is no harm at all. I agree wholeheartedly with the assessement of the Sligo penchant for the rocker look, but, in fairness Sligo has always been a rocker town, the local Teds rioted at a screening of Rock Around the Clock in the Savoy in 1955, after all. If you want Mod culchie-chic, you'd be better off going to provincial hotspots such as Carlow or Castlebar.

Anyway the local chaws pride themselves on Sligo being a bit of rough, and yes, it is damn ugly, and it has got only uglier in the past ten years, with the advent of the new retail park, that has integrated Sligo into the United Kingdom better than 800 years of Imperialism ever managed, and also the appearance of Lidl and those shocking developments on Rockwood Parade (pictured). The snootier locals will point to the Niland Gallery extension by McCullough Mulvin and the gothic courthouse as evidence of grandeur but Sligo has always been an ugly little town surrounded by beautiful countryside. And it's all the better for that; Sligo townies are spiteful people with high cheekbones and low foreheads, and they tend to be a bit quick to have a go at innocent bystanders, but squeezed in in between those ugly, ramshackle Victorian buildings are some of the best pubs in Ireland and a surprising tolerance for 'aayrt', as the locals call anything that doesn't involve football or drinking. Now, Seanachie is set apart from all this by his Ballymote origins; as any Sligo person, townie or buff (that's a culchie within a culchie, if you must know) will tell you, there's a sight of a difference. So I have been spared that awful nasal accent and instead been given a pleasing lilt that unfortunately attracts all manner of idiots from Cork who think I'm from somewhere along de banks. Marya. And I believe Dundalk's not all as bad as it's cracked down to be. Have Blogorrah readers been to Athlone or Tullamore? Or Dún Laoighaire, for that matter? I bet not.

What I Learned Today

That Shaggy of Scooby Doo fame actually had a full name in the cartoon: he was christened Norville Rogers, which seems terribly appropriate as names go. Scooby Doo creator Iwao Takamoto died yesterday at the age of 81; we didn't get to you for the death of Saddam or James Brown but we delivered on the demise of Mr Takamoto (and we would have got away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky, meddling kids). Another one of Takamoto's canine creations was Dick Dastardly's resentful sidekick Muttley and apparently the name of Scooby Doo came from the forgotten last verse of Sinatra's 'Strangers in the Night'. Well, I didn't have a Scooby...

First Two Films of the Year

A short post on two not-unpleasing films I saw in the past few days. First there was Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Loft, the latest in a line of maddeningly oblique and opaque psychological thrillers by the Japanese director, who is no relation to his much better-known namesake. The tale of a female writer suffering from, yes, you've guessed it, writer's block, who holes up in the country, only to discover that the man next door is hoarding an 800-year old mummy, who was preserved in the same mud that the writer appears to be puking up every day. A film that can yield either no interpretation or dozens, depending on your disposition. Half the audience walked out (in my opinion not always a bad sign). If nothing else, I was interested to the end and the photography, low-lit, ethereal and misty like that of the great Kazuo Miyagawa, is stunning.

Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland suffers from the same problem as many other filmic tales of the history of American popular culture such as Quiz Show, The Aviator, and Gods and Monsters: it is really hard to care about the injustice that lies at the heart of it all, the distance in years being by now too great. But the film is enjoyable nonetheless with Ben Affleck worryingly convincing as the washed-up Saturday-morning-serial actor (and former Superman) George Reeves, and Adrien Brody as the gumshoe who tries to unravel the facts behind his suspicious suicide. The film plays on every hoary cliché known to viewers of films from Hollywood's golden era, down to the smug straightening of his suit by a beefy doorman as he is caught in the flash of a surreptitious lens, but I found myself strangely forgiving of this, even of Brody's character who is much too James Dean for a World War II veteran in 1959. But Allen Coulter's direction is assured and the film is entertaining enough to forget that it was based on a true story in the first place.

Where's Wally?

Rangers have definitively cemented their reputation as the most-hated club in Scotland with their poaching of Scotland manager Walter Smith to take over from poor old Paul Le Guen, who resigned last week when the Huns realised that Barry Ferguson had nowhere else to turn to to earn his absurdly inflated wages. Le Guen's brief tenure at Ibrox was a disaster, with the exception of the UEFA Cup win away to Livorno, but the Breton is a decent manager. It was he that built the force that Lyon have now become, though it is a lot easier to win championships when you have good players at your disposal, which was not the case in Glasgow. Rangers are, no doubt offering Smith a pay deal far in excess of what the SFA could though there is something distasteful at bailing out on your country at such a crucial time in a qualifying campaign. The Jocks are welcome to talk to Steve Staunton, if they want to replace them.

Underachievement Films of the Year

A bit late on this one; it was one of those posts that I had intended doing over the Christmas but I was stymied by the parlous state of Irish telecommunications and the parsimony of wi-fi suppliers in Dublin. But here it is late, and the lateness was a boon of some sort as I managed to see Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, his best film in years and a worthy entry in the top 1o. The year overall was not bad, though much of the better stuff I saw was from Europe and Asia. Big disappointments came in the shape of Terrence Malick's The New World, which was a brooding, navel-gazing piece of fluff and Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which, despite winning the Palme d'Or and doing great box-office in Ireland and France, was too much a dull retread of Land and Freedom for my tastes. Martin Scorsese, according to the critics, steamrolled back to form with The Departed; more discerning viewers have found it to be preposterously overrated but, no doubt a shoo-in for the Oscars. I have yet to see some of the year's more interesting films, such as Richard Linklater's brace of A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and Alphonso Cuaron's Children of Men. I look forward to seeing them soon. And there's Pan's Labyrinth too, though given my previous dislike of Guillermo del Toro's work I don't expect to be too bowled over. But then again, I thought the same of del Toro's compatriot Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu until I was pleasantly surprised by his brilliantly-mounted Babel. There were bad films along the way, quite a few (though I managed to avoid most of the more obviously bad ones), hang your heads in shame Lord of War, Transamerica, Walk the Line and, above all, Marie Antoinette, the year's biggest royal mess, in itself the greatest argument furnished in favour of the French revolution these past few years.

Anyway here goes, starting at 10.

10. Video for 'Here It Goes Again' (OK Go/Trish Sie)

It might seem a bit unorthodox to have a film that is just over three minutes long, and which has never been near a cinema in here but the by now celebrated choreographed video, shot in one take of the band strutting their stuff on eight treadmills is pure cinematic genius, throwaway and painstakingly crafted at the same time. It is also possessed of more wit and visual panache than the vast majority of theatrical releases anywhere in the world last year. It's even hard to begrudge the band the exposure they have generated for their so-so Indie rock. Charming stuff.

9. Oxhide (Jiayin Liu)

I don't expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner's workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director's family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu is only 25 and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family's quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.

8. Capote (Bennett Miller)

Biopics out of Hollywood are usually godawful, full of pious platitudes about journeys through harrowing adversity and the horrors overcome by people with the right can-do spirit. Bennett Miller's portrayal of Truman Capote's descent into terminal depression while writing In Cold Blood is a marvel however, beautifully shot and edited, perfectly scripted and a fine performance, just on the right side of mannered, by one of the finest American actors alive, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who deservedly picked up an Oscar for this. Mercifully a literary film that is neither vulgarly inane nor tweedy.

7. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parrano)

The prospect of a documentary filmed in real-time on one of the greatest footballers ever by two video artists renowned for their endurance-testing installations was not instantly appealing and, when I saw this in Paris just before the World Cup, half the audience walked out, probably a mix of arty types and football fans expecting something different. But Gordon and Parrano's film of Zidane playing for Real Madrid in a 2-1 win over Villareal in April 2005 is riveting stuff for the insight it gives both into the work of a modern footballer and the movements of the human anatomy. Sixteen cameras were trained on Zidane for the duration of the game, and the result is intriguing and boring in turns but one of the few great art/film crossovers. Zidane's surprisingly gnomic pronouncements about the game are interlaced with a soundtrack by Mogwai, and there is even drama, prophetic of the great man's eventual exit from the game: he gets sent off in the last minute after a mass brawl.

6. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)

After years of making brash thrillers in Hollywood that were always too clever for their own good and built of ambitions far exceeding their execution, Verhoeven returned to his native Holland where he made some of his greatest films in the seventies and early eighties. Black Book is a virtuoso old-fashioned thriller, set during the Nazi occupation of Holland and based on a true story, about a young Jewish woman named Rachael Stein who joins the Resistance in The Hague and goes undercover to seduce the local SS Captain. The film is a masterpiece of detail - cosmetic, historical and political - and it has a splendid twist about half and hour from the end that nobody will see coming. Best of all though, it is a refreshingly unsentimental and clear-headed drama about both the Holocaust and the local Resistance to Nazism.

5. Close to Home (Vardit Bilu & Dalia Hagar)

Two Israeli girls doing their national service patrolling West Jerusalem, hassling Arabs at random, and doing their utmost to shirk their duties, all the while maintaining a breezy indifference to the war on their doorstep. A cool examination of the demeaning nature of Israeli checkpoints that also manages to be funny and touchingly human. The latest in a line of great Israeli films.

4. Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold)

Another Dutch film, this time about a young mother who witnesses the suicide of a colleague while working as an engineer in Egypt and then tells nobody about it, allowing her marriage and her relationship with her widowed father and her desperately embittered sister unravel almost as an existential experiment. Leopold touches all the right buttons in the Antonioni fashion but her film has a bracing individuality and an almost-Protestant rigidity of economy in its editing and mise en scène. There is not a shot wasted and as well as featuring a great, haunting performance as the wife by Maria Kraakman, it has a cast of some of the finest buildings seen on film in many a year.

3. To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die (Jamshed Usmonov)

The world is not overrun with films from Tajikistan but Jamshed Usmonov has managed to carve out an international reputation with his understated, grimly comic cinema. Here he follows up the acclaimed The Angel on the Right with the tale of a teenage husband unable to consummate his marriage but, who, it appears is not any the less horny for all that. He takes a trip to the capital Dushanbe, tries his hand at following the city women around, with little success only to fall in with a small-time hood, who inveigles him into a dodgy heist. The film is one gripping episode after another, all imbued with a wonderful dramatic ambiguity, bestowed as much by the passivity of the actors as by Usmonov's clockwork-precise direction. And, like all the films in this list, brilliantly paced.

2. Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid)

Hans-Christian Schmid's harrowing account of the exorcism of a young German woman in the 1970s is both a masterful piece of kinetic cinema and an angry, if even-handed examination of faith and madness. The young woman, played by the amazing Sandra Hüller, is doomed from the start, as her epilepsy cuts her off from society and hampers her studies and her efforts to live an ordinary life. Her obsession with Catherine of Siena does not help, leading her to believe her illness is a messianic affliction thrust upon her by God. A perfect counterpart to Breaking the Waves and arguably more moving, Requiem is proof of the current rude health of German cinema.

1. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Christu Puiu)

I don't know what has suddenly got into Romanian cinema but all of a sudden it is a hot ticket internationally, after years of obscurity. This year there was Catalin Mitulescu's How I Celebrated the End of the World about the fall of Ceaucescu, and there is the forthcoming 12:08 East 0f Bucharest by Corneliu Porumboiu, winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes last year. The previous year at Cannes Christu Puiu took the Un Certain Regard sidebar award for this brilliant comic drama about an ailing sexagenarian alcoholic's passage from one Bucharest hospital to another one autumn night. The self-confessed hypochondriac Puiu used his experiences in the city's hospitals to create this drama in which the splendidly-named Dante Lazarescu undergoes a nightmarish journey, entirely beyond his control as he lies semi-conscious on a stretcher, aided only by a sympathetic brow-beaten female paramedic. The state of the Romanian health service is abysmal and Lazarescu is successively misdiagnosed, rediagnosed and at one point turned away by a megalomaniacal doctor intent on punishing him for his drinking. Mr Lazarescu is redolent of the 'little man' in many a Central European novel and even while prostrate for much of the film he is a beguiling presence. The final, protracted scene where his dead body is washed and dressed is almost unbearably moving. Puiu intends this to be the first of a sequence of six films, inspired by Éric Rohmer's Moral Tales; somebody ought to keep the chequebook open indefinitely for him if this stunning film is anything to go by.


Seanachie also liked:

• Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues)
• Flandres (Bruno Dumont)
• Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb)
• Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
• Munich (Steven Spielberg)
• Dans Paris (Christophe Honoré)
• The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
• A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
• A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)
• Sangre (Amat Escalante)
• L'Ivresse du pouvoir (Claude Chabrol)
• Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
• Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
• Lights in the Dusk (Aki Kaurismäki)
• Shanghai Dreams (Xiaoshuai Wang)
• Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu)
• Pavee Lackeen (Perry Ogden)
• Offside (Jafar Panahi)
• Lucy (Henning Winckler)
• La Pressentiment (Jean-Pierre Darroussin)
• Libero (Kim Rossi-Stuart)
• Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)
  
• Pork and Milk (Valérie Mréjen)
• Taxidermy (György Palfi)
• Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney)
• How I Celebrated the End of the World (Catalin Mitulescu)

Deglobalization?

Another thing that I fondly remember from Dublin, The Globe on South Great George's Street, changed hands on New Year's Day, having been sold by its founders Jay Bourke and Eoin Foyle to the Thomas Read group. I expect that Thomas Read will see sense and maintain it as before, in the same fashion as it has Hogan's - just up the street and which opened its doors in its present incarnation at roughly the same time in the early 90s as The Globe did. Many a fine afternoon have I whiled away reading and scribbling, drinking unspeakably bad coffee in the oaky gloom of The Globe; it's where I honed my underachieving, if you will. It has played host to a fine cast of characters: bar and restaurant folk, bicycle couriers, students with notions, hairdressers, artists, graphic designers, off-duty DJs and the usual crew of Dublin spoofers. Many are panicking at the prospect of having to pay in to Rí-Ra for the first time in years (for that is what The Globe turns into after regular closing time); about half of the customers in the place every night got in for free they came so often over the years. I'm sure though that it will have much the same type of clientèle next time I wander in.

The Civic Offices and their Uncivic Reception

The picture to the left was taken from the balcony of my dear old flat in Temple Bar that I vacated two years ago to move back to Paris; it is one of the few things I miss about living in Dublin, not least because it is about three times the size of my current domicile - which is very homely, all the same. Thankfully, as two friends of mine, including my former flatmate, still live there I get to crash whenever I land in town. The view, bathed in the fifteen minutes of daylight afforded by the gods to Dublin's old town in midwinter, features in the foreground the former penthouse of muppet comedian Brendan O'Carroll (Brendan is not, historically, an auspicious name for quality Irish stand-up comedy), and if you strain your eyes it looks a bit like the Wall of Death in the only Irish film of the 1980s, Eat the Peach (OK, there was Taffin as well). Beyond that is the familiar steeple of Christchurch and one of the Civic Offices' much-maligned bunkers, designed by Sam Stephenson and the subject of the greatest conservation drive in modern Irish history. The Wood Quay demonstrations in 1978 failed to prevent the construction of the two stubs (they really are like the truncated stubs of frighteningly gigantic towers) but they did manage to stop the projected third and fourth being put up, as it was claimed that the view of Christchurch from the quays would have been obstructed. Contrary to common opinion, I think that this was a decent settlement, for I have grown to love Stephenson's bunkers over the years, to the extent that seeing the tip of one of them from my living room every morning became a minor pleasure.

There are few in Ireland that agree with me (though I know one or two architects that do) because of the legacy of the Wood Quay protests (which were not entirely unreasonable) and the popular (or populist) prejudice against brutalist architecture (the term comes from béton brut - untreated or rough concrete - and not from 'brutal'). Alain de Botton's recent TV series and book The Architecture of Happiness feeds from this prejudice in typically slipshod, philistine fashion. The main architectural argument put forward at the time opposing the construction was that as well as being a blight on the cityscape, the bunkers would deface Christchurch by their proximity to it, an argument that greatly overestimates the architectural value of Christchurch, and which is ignorant of the horrendous eyesore that the cathedral was until its wholesale renovation in the late nineteenth century. St. Patrick's Cathedral is an architectural wonder; its neighbour at the top of Patrick Street is a minor ecclesiastical construction that happens to be big and very old.

I remember seeing on an Irish-language TV programme in the late eighties, Deko, the lead singer of Dublin punk legends Paranoid Visions, point at the Civic Offices and asking 'Cad é an monstrosity sin?' My Gaeltacht-born mother pointed at Deko's dayglo green coiffe and asked the very same question. Though I fully agreed with Deko's assessment at the time, I now find it amusing that an iconoclast that penned the classic 'F.O.A.D.' (Fuck off and die) about U2 should have been so conservative in his architectural taste. Stephenson's unloved blocks, as well as being wonderfully simple and possessed of a stern majesty similar to other blockhouses such as Soufflot's Pantheon or Louis Kahn's Capital Building in Dhaka, are also stylish, far more stylish than most Irish architecture of the past thirty years. If you don't believe me look at the drably unimaginative corporate and residential developments that scar Irish cities and towns these days. One might even say that the bunkers are the finest piece of Irish architecture of their time (though Michael Scott's Carroll's Cigarette Factory in Dundalk is also impressive) and they also bear an extra dignity earned through their years of ignominy. They were also years ahead of their time; their minimalist grey cubeness is now in vogue, in the form of buildings such as McCullough Mulvin's Ussher Library at Trinity College, albeit in a compromised, more user-friendly manner. The ever-so-tasteful newer Civic Offices building on Wood Quay, designed by Scott Tallon Walker in the mid-90s has its admirers but I have always found it an unnecessary apology, like that doled out by publicity-conscious celebrities after sex or drugs scandals. If ever a building has worn a scarlet letter it has been the original Civic Offices and it is unlikely to start picking up admirers soon but given the minimal stimulus architectural aesthetics have for most Irish people, I don't think this is that worrying.

Not that I had any great love for Stephenson himself, who passed away in November. His Central Bank building on Dame St is banal, kitsch and ugly in a way that the Civic Offices are not and his relationship with Charlie Haughey always seemed like a mutual massaging of deluded egos. He also popped up in recent years in the capacity as President of the James Joyce Museum boasting of having never read Ulysses, the latest to follow the current Irish fashion for kicking Joyce, promulgated by hacks such as Roddy Doyle. For a long time the Irish loved to praise Joyce wildly without ever having read him; now they condemn him as wildly overrated still without reading him. Books, who needs them? His architectural career was effectively ended by the Civic Offices farrago; afterwards he stuck to small commissions, though, to be honest, most architectural careers, even the most illustrious ones, have a very short public life. But the Civic Offices will outlast most of what has been built in Ireland since we started losing our way architecturally some time in the late 1960s.

All Sept

After about two years back in France, and almost seven after I came here for the first time, I have begun to cross my 7's, in the French fashion, something that I have long resisted, mainly because my 7's never look like they could be mistaken for 1's, despite the protests of many French people. I have always been irritated by French bank clerks crossing my 7's on lodgement dockets, as if they were making them presentable for French processing. When one looks at the absurd way many French people write 1's - often leaving hanging a stroke from the top of the figure so long that the 1 looks like a ski-jump - the possibility of getting the two figures getting confounded is even greater still. In Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Coleman Silk's persecutor, and would-be suitor, the French academic Delphine Roux, gives herself away by the crossed 7's à la francaise in her anonymous letter. The main reason I have started doing it is because many of my students, having difficulty comprehending anything that is not Gallic, cannot conceive of a 7 being sept without that bar running through it. But I may also be going native, finally.

Brought to Book

News here on the imminent RTÉ documentary on the Nazi past of educational publisher Albert Folens, whose books all Irish children of my age - and many other ages - will remember from their schooldays. Folens, who fled his native Belgium after the war fought with the Waffen SS (like the much younger Günther Grass) and later worked for the Gestapo as a translator. Folens never hid his past but he may have minimised the extent of his activities, and possibly, crimes.

Folens' schoolbooks, I seem to remember, were stuffier and more old-fashioned than those of C.J. Fallon's, their main competitor (I always found it strange how the names of the two companies were so similar), though I did like Folens' logo, a fly enclosed in a hexagon, which had a vaguely sinister air to it, now rendered all the more sinister by the news of his past. While home over the Christmas I found an old copy of the Folens history book From Grattan to Lemass, which was the book we used in fourth class (for non-Irish readers, that would be aged 10). The book dates from the 1970s, long before there were graphic designers lurking in the corner of every bar in Dublin, and in terms of layout and design it is a mess, all cheap reproductions of old woodcuts with gaudy plates of magenta or yellow bizarrely superimposed on them, the only gesture to colour photographs made. The content of the book however, even at this remove, is mild enough, considering the usual whines of revisionist historians about how a complaisant educational system fostered indulgence of IRA violence. Compared to the nonsense that French governments have tried to force down the throats of the nation's children, Folens' books - his Republican sympathies notwithstanding - were responsible enough.

Ryanair and French Law

Reported briefly in the Anglophone press over the past couple of days is the news that Ryanair and EasyJet are contesting a French government decree that forces them to obey French employment law for their staff that are based in France (16 pilots and 32 cabin crew in Marseilles). The BBC and RTÉ reports were tellingly vague, giving the impression that the French government are being unfairly - and as Ryanair claim, illegally - protectionist in applying this decree. For those that can read French however there is a more balanced and more nuanced piece on it in today's Libération, which explains the French goverment's stand and affirms, as the European Union has, that they are not flagrantly in breach of European law. The irony is that Air France has said that it may not look into applying the much laxer Irish labour laws for the employees of its subsidiary CityJet, based at Dublin airport.

Becks to Paradise?

A fellow Ballymote-man and regular reader of this blog informed me over Christmas that, as rumours a few months back had it, David Beckham will sign for Celtic during the transfer window later this month. An bare investment for the Bhoys, intended to sell millions of replica shirts in China, and which comes relatively cheap, Becks apparently having agreed to a £35,000 per week salary in exchange for exclusive control over image rights while at the club. While nobody can deny that even an under-performing Beckham will strengthen the current squad, it is not as if we really need him either. Most of his magic has been effected the past couple of years from dead-ball situations (so often that he puts his foot on a rolling ball in play in order to facilitate a strike) and with Shunsuke McNamara's current form, the Hoops will hardly be encouraging Becks to step up and take the free kicks. As for the fans, I cannot imagine them giving Beckham an overwhelmingly warm welcome, especially given the transparently mercenary nature of the possible transfer. Back in September Gordon Strachan laughed off media suggestions that Celtic were to make a move for Beckham, saying that it was news to him. Maybe it was and that Brian Quinn is telling him what to do on this one. Should the transfer go through it would be funny to see Posh hob-knobbing in the stands with Thomas Gravesen's pornstar girlfriend Kira Eggers. Posh is desperate to get her career going again, maybe a change of direction is all she needs...

Lift of Irish Laughter

This Christmas, for the second year running I had trouble with the lift that brings passengers from the Luas terminal at Connolly Station to the station itself one storey up. The classically bad design begins with the positioning of the door at the back of the lift, which, when you are carrying suitcases, rucksacks and carrier bags full of Christmas shopping is not terribly helpful. When I stepped in I noticed a couple with a baby carriage and I duly kept the doors open for them. We then stood waiting for the doors to close, which never happened, despite repeated attempts to press the appropriate button. The couple soon tired of waiting and stepped out of the lift, as did I. As soon as I turned away to take the stairs up, the doors shut behind me and the lift began its ascent to the upper level. There was a sadistic air to the shutting of the doors and the subsequent smooth kicking-in of the lift’s machinery. Still it was not near as bad as what happened at the same place and at the same time last year, when I gallantly reopened the doors just as they were folding to let two elderly ladies in. The doors’ recoil knocked over one of the ladies’ enormous rolling suitcase, which domino-like then sent the frail old dear to the floor. I was horrified and commenced apologising profusely, only to be told by the outraged septuagenarians to ‘go on up, yourself’. It was something to make Larry David blush. I was only trying to be nice.

Two Weeks Off

An enforced absence over the Christmas period, my Internet access hampered by the near impossibility to get free wi-fi in Dublin (and any wi-fi there is is prehistorically slow and temperamental). A stupid technical error on my part prevented me from being able to use dial-up on my laptop so a large number of posts, that might otherwise have been effected, such as a review of the years' films, have had to be either shelved or deferred. Some of them should appear in some form over the next week.

And so I missed the demises of James Brown, self-effacing Turkmen dictator Saparmurad Niyazov (who, with regard to the prevalence of his image everywhere in the country, on everything from vodka bottles to statues, said 'it embarrasses me seeing my image everywhere but that's what the people want') and, of course Saddam Hussein. The latter I will shed no tears for but it is interesting reading a statement by US Lieutenant-General William Caldwell, who insists that the US had no part in his execution. Well, he would, wouldn't he? Sounds like the words of an earlier occupying functionary in the region, Pontius Pilate. Not that I would dare to impute Christ-like status to Saddam. But the good people of Chile might be rueing the fact that they did not succeed in extraditing their own homegrown, and recently departed, despot Augusto Pinochet, to the new democratic Iraq, where the justice, and execution thereof has proven to be refreshingly summary and swift.

Slovenia, meanwhile, became the thirteenth country to adopt the Euro as its currency; when I was there last August, prices everywhere were already being displayed everywhere in both Tolars and Euros, a piece of organisation and economic transparency to shame bigger, more illustrious countries further to the west. Slovenia is cast-iron proof that countries with a communist past need not be free-market whores for global capital or economic basketcases riven by corruption and the shoring-up of the same vested interests as prevailed under the hammer and sickle. Two other former communist countries, Bulgaria and Romania, have joined the EU and the huge influx of migrant workers predicted by the British right-wing media has failed to materialise, mainly because the Romanians and Bulgarians are more attracted by the culture and lifestyle of southern European countries. Like the fat, sweaty homophobe that is convinced that every gay man he comes into contact with wants his botty, this rejection, for the Daily Mail et al must be devastating.

And, last but not least, Irish yesterday became the 23rd official language of the EU, albeit on a second-tier level, comparable to Catalan (a minority langauge that numbers more native speakers than either Danish, Norwegian or Finnish) or Basque. After the brouahaha of a couple of years back of Gaeilgeoirí campaigning for the elevation of Irish to official-language status, the news has been largely unreported in Ireland. I have to say I have a pragmatic stance on this issue: there is no need for Irish to be an official language and its being one is not going to do anything for the promotion for the language, which I fully support. It is typical of the Irish's fondness for pride in symbols without investing any real effort in turning those talisman into a thing of tangible cultural worth. Irish should remain a compulsory language at school (anything that makes a nation of spoilt brats miserable can only be a good thing in my book) but it should benefit from a more practical pedagogical agenda with its cultural importance emphasised. Some of the newer Gaelscoileanna are doing their best in this respect but they are still stymied by Department of Education guidelines (a body so ill-equipped to instruct in the teaching of the Irish language that its Irish name is the grammatically incorrect An Roinn Oideachais rather than Roinn an Oideachais). I could suggest that Dorothy Parker's quip that 'you can lead a horse to culture but you can't make it think' might be particularly pertinent to modern Ireland, but that might be a bit mean.

A Happy New Year to all.