The Pramsheds

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My photographic dyslexia means that I returned from a trip to the Balkans this summer with a gigabyte’s worth of blurry, impotent photographs of the stunning buildings I saw. I’m not going to burden some data centre’s real estate with extraneous bits, but I’ve stolen a shot of one of the most remarkable pieces of architecture I encounted from the hive mind.

Suspended in a more pristine moment than its current graffiti-sloshed state, this is Tirana’s Hoxha Pyramid (sadly, not named for the Albanian exchange student from season 1 of The Simpsons, but his namesake, the erstwhile communist dictator, Enver Hoxha). A true palimpsest, the pyramid’s architectural vestiges belie multiple existences: first as a museum serving Hoxha’s cult of personality, next a conference centre, then a NATO base. In its current life it is a playground for skaters and the gangs of teenagers who hike up its slopes to take in the Tirana skyline from its flat apex. 

The role of memory in public architecture is potent across Balkan states. Edificial war wounds are sported like emblems in cities like Sarajevo and Belgrade, where identities are still very much constructed by the vicissitudes of conflict, and historical narratives still jostle for dominance. Hoxha Pyramid may be demolished to make way for the new Albanian houses of parliament. This would be a pity - alongside the retrofitted nuclear bunkers that infamously dot the country’s roadsides, the civic occupation of this folly transforms it into a talisman of Tirana’s victory over authoritarianism. 

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One Day of Thinking Long and Hard About Every Space I Am In

Architecture Ireland commissioned a piece from me for its excellent Writing Space series. It’s a pleasure to join a canon that includes Rob Doyle and Karl Whitney. Read the piece in full here.

It goes like:

French writer Georges Perec once sat on a Parisian street corner for three days straight, pen and paper in hand, logging every single thing that happened around him. The hope was that a hyperawareness of human, natural and mechanical activity might lead to profound revelations – but what he saw in the quotidian was an interplay of seemingly pointless patterns and recurrences.

Perec had a lot more patience than I do (plus, he didn’t have a day job), so I decided to reverse his template: I would log everything about the fixed world as I moved throughout it over the course of a normal day. Here is an edited version of that diary.

8.30am Home John Dillon Street, Dublin 8

There is not much in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that endears itself to the idealist urbanist. Where we think of cities as abundant (socially, economically, culturally, gastronomically), our cheerful German frames the city as an allegory for an extreme loss of world.  

Whatever you might think about that, Nietzsche does hit a nail of truth square on the head when he writes about domesticity. He describes home as an essential closeness to the earth, a fixed point in the cosmic mulch. The home is the womb: the external world fades to dull noise, and reality is constricted to an enclosed, knowable space. Home is the one space that is navigable in complete darkness.

And thank goodness for that. Burglars find their way into my house more easily than the sunshine does. At its solstice angle, it peeks through my bedroom’s Venetian blinds timidly when I wake around 8.30am (on a good day). We go through bulbs and cheap Tiger candles like no man’s business. Coriander or cactus, all plants wither, starved of natural light.

I have led a migratory life. Living in 15 homes (and for a short spell as a child, being homeless), I have come to enjoy blank space and low maintenance....

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This week’s announcement of a TV adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle brought to mind one of my first attempts at home-recording, which, after some SD card scraping, I have an intact version of. Born from my first encounters with krautrock (via Julian Cope and a Wire magazine primer) and the Christmas present of a tiny digital Boss 4-track, I recorded this sketch in my East Wall teen pad before turning 19.

Aside from an Argos catalogue electric guitar, most of the equipment I used was either inherited or stolen. I hadn’t yet blown an ill-advised amount of money on a sampler, so I improvised by ramming a Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood 7″ through a borrowed loop pedal for a drum-beat.

My (one-thing-I’d-grab-if-my-house-was-on-fire) Casiotone, gifted to the 10-year-old me by my godfather, drones along the low end for most of the track, and I’ve triple layered guitar for the bit that’s supposed to be bass, the bit that’s supposed to be rhythm and the beat that’s supposed to be lead. The 4-track’s gammy on-board effects module is supposed to parse them out from each other. It doesn’t.

The vocal sample was gleaned from one of the treasury of BBC sound effects tapes my grandfather kept in a knackered brown leather suitcase. After reversing it through the loop pedal in an attempt to approximate Damo Suzuki’s absurdo yelps, I decided the clamour sounded like “Aspirin.... Bokumaru!”. It doesn’t. But I had just read Vonnegut’s novel for the first time, and I was an impressionable young thing.

I’d like to attribute the painfully overdriven mix to my utter greenness at production, but even after I learned the rudiments of equalising and compression pretty much everything I’ve ever recorded sounds like it’s being played out of shit-heap cassette player.

I rarely make music anymore. The recordings I have that don’t make my brain retch are those where a complete amateurishness dominates: my first time recording vocals, first drum machine beats, first forays into Ableton, initial encounters with new instruments and interfaces. As I became more furtive in my efforts and pissed away money on barely-used gear in my 20s, process became more plastic, studied, and making music became less like catharsis and more like filling out sudokus.

Whenever I do get around to dicking about with MIDI files or phone app synthesizers now, I try to return to that adolescent hyperreflexia. Perhaps I could just try re-reading Cat’s Cradle.

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We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

Ivan Chtcheglov, 'Formulary for a New Urbanism'

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Visual Verse is an anthology of sudden writing that has featured contributions from Deborah Levy, Andrew Motion and now me. 

Writers are allowed an hour to respond to each edition's image – this issue's photograph was selected by Dominic Goodman. I have eschewed pretty much every best practice for flash fiction writing in this piece on the death of holiday camps and pre-pubescent romance. 

Full issue available here: http://visualverse.org/

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Richard Proffitt's new exhibition features crisp packet etchings and a skull filled with Coke. Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, opens properly tomorrow night. Time to shrine.

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Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) was the only member of Animal Collective I hadn't interviewed, so I hunted him down like a shinigami for the most recent issue of Totally Dublin magazine. We talked a helluva lot about death and transformation.

'Young Prayer seemed to be dealing with death as an external force – is Grim Reaper more about a subjective death?

Young Prayer was certainly more literally about death than this one. The title of this album works on a whole bunch of different levels for me, but in terms of the metaphor of the Grim Reaper and how it works within these songs, it’s more about how times in our lives when really intense things happen to us. Whether it’s a death of a family member, moving to a new place, going through a break-up in a relationship, having children – during all these events that are extreme in a way, we’ll have an image of ourselves, an image of how we fit into our perception of the universe. That image can be forced to transform via these events. The Reaper is meant to invoke that sort of process – the event is the Reaper that forces that change within us. There was something about the title that felt light-hearted. All the times in my life I’ve tried to resist that transformation it’s been pretty painful.

That’s a recurring theme in folklore (also, Final Destination), the metaphor of the character trying to outrun their predestination.

Right: you can run, but you can’t hide. One of the songs is about disease, being empathetic towards disease, or at least trying to lose that sheen of anger about disease. Disease is trying to survive and to propagate, just like any being in the universe. I was talking to somebody recently and he was like, ‘Is that a reference to ebola?’ I don’t mean to suggest we should lose the sense of loss and suffering that’s going on in the world right now, but perhaps losing that resentment of disease could be a healthy thing.'

Full interview.

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I wrote a piece on city branding and the problem with the quartering craze for the second issue of We Are Dublin. Editor Conor Purcell is a wizard at distribution, so you can pick it up in the airport WH Smyth's and Foyles Bookstore in London as well as all the usual suspects. Also, here.

It goes like...

'...Now, betrayal is congenital in marketing, whatever the situation, but I was more than happy to learn the lingo of conversion-friendly content marketing, CTAs and influencer engagement for what, at its essence, was a good cause: the enshrinement of contemporary cultural life in the capital city that raised me, with a view to its future economic welfare. What’s wrong with a little deceit here and there? Dublin’s music scene, we decided, is enjoying a golden age. Its fashion scene is booming. It is a craft beer capital, a cocktail capital and a cycling capital all in one. If the campaign budget had allowed, I would have recommended investment in a Hollywood-scale sign to be hung from the mountains: “DUBLIN. IT’S THE NEW COPENHAGEN.” By no means is its youth culture, by and large, almost identical to yours, dear visitor from Leeds, Bristol, Glasgow...'

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La Jetée – Chris Marker [1962]

He recited his lesson: because humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its survival. This sophism was taken for Fate in disguise.

Full film.

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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually-shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye-to-eye, bayonet each other.

Milan Kundera – Immortality

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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea: the ultimate bad break-up movie.

We translated the Euripedes tragedy from start to finish in school, which would’ve been made so much more fun if we'd had Maria Callas in our lives. Reading Seneca recently got me back on the Anti-Jason buzz.

Full film.

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Islamic seals & folios from the Chester Beatty Library Arabic collection.

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A project to document ghostsigns in the UK & Ireland.

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Published in Totally Dublin #121, October 2014

Dome

Of all the stories in the Bird Flanagan mythos, Ulick O’Connor’s anecdote is a personal favourite. In the dark of night in 1907 the infamous Rialto prankster rides through the doors of the Gresham Hotel on horseback and asks for a drink. The non-plussed porter tell him: “It’s after hours, Sir”. Flanagan replies: “It’s not for me, you eejit, it’s for the horse.”

Gresham or no, we know that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In Rialto’s Flanagan’s Fields (named for the Bird’s father, alderman Michael Flanagan) a new installation with full local involvement aims to empower the community to grow its own organic vegetables while prototyping a technology that will have an impact far beyond Dublin 8. The project, Grow Dome, has installed Dublin’s first geodesic dome, an 11 metre wide, sustainable mini-farm which not only encourages skills exchange and alimentary self-sufficiency, but looks pretty swish in its own right.

Communal food production sites work as confluences between the diverse demographics that make up urban areas that are all too often fragmented. By creating a project where local youth, the established community and the more transitory enterprise sector (Diageo, in this case), the Grow Dome acts as a monument for integration. The structure is up-cycled, cost-effective and acts as a template for an endeavour that would be welcome in communities across the city.

Find out more at www.thegrowdomeproject.com

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We were never fortunate enough to have a Sky box when I was growing up. Thankfully one of my uncles had a dodgy decoder and would VHS tape Summerslams and King of the Rings for me to pore over for months afterwards. My favourite find is the high prince of rhinestone camp, Shawn Michaels, in full Heartbreak Kid regalia taking on Razor Ramon in a ladder match for the Intercontinental Championship. Includes some sweet telesales for the Shawn Michaels collection, so you too can own your own red-tinted shades. Being pre-Attitude era, Ramon offers Michaels the belt and a friendly handshake like a true gent at the close.

Side note: I thought Razor Ruddock and Razor Ramon were the same lad for years.

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[fuckyeahbrutalism]

Berkeley Library, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 1961-67

(Ahrends, Burton & Koralek)