Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Tunnel Vision in Chișinău, Moldova

    Gary Farrelly is an Irish visual and performance artist based in Brussels. Together with his German collaborator Chris Dreier, he works under the banner of Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. O.J.A.I. is a self-styled paraintelligence agency, conducting artistic research in the fields of institutional power, bureaucracy, erotic architecture, ritualistic magic and pedestrian tunnels. The following text is an account of how they fell in love with Chișinău, Europe’s least visited capital city. The author explicitly stipulates that these words are not intended as either a visitors guide to the city nor as a briefing on the current political situation.

    Bald and Bankrupt

    On April 19th 2019, a prominent Russophile YouTuber called Bald and Bankrupt uploaded a video about Moldova entitled Nobody Visits This Country…Find Out Why.

    Mr Bald aka Benjamin Rich, is niche-famous for his swashbuckling travel vlogs exploring obscure corners of the former Eastern Block, with an obsessive interest in the ex-Soviet republics. His videos focus on forgotten and defamed Communist-era architecture and monuments, always demonstrating seemingly genuine care towards the subject matter.

    For some unknown reason however – quite uncharacteristically – all his generosity evaporated the day he arrived in Chișinău, Moldova’s capital. In a very brutal fashion, that day’s upload catalogued a litany of the city’s most embarrassing post-independence scars: cracked pavements, abandoned mega-hotel, dried up fountains, dilapidated apartment blocks and a rusted wheelchair ramp.

    As he passes POV style through a ramshackle section of pedestrian tunnel, the video reaches its crescendo of defamatory impact, providing a scorching portrayal of the Moldovan capital as an obliterated void inhabited by corrupt elites and demoralized citizens.

    In a very real sense, Chișinău’s reputation was assassinated in the tunnel. As of now, the video has been watched over 11,000,000 times. This makes it by far the most viewed video about the city (or the country for that matter) anywhere on the internet.

    Screenshot of Bald and Bankrupt in Chișinău.

    Down a Rabbit Hole

    Myself and Chris came across this video at the exact moment we were devoting ourselves to a series of performances, musical scores, and radio broadcasts recasting neglected tunnels as sites for performative assembly.

    We were down a rabbit hole of defamatory material related to tunnels such as the infamous assault scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and other nerve shredding depictions from movies such as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, THX 1138, Possession, Men, IT, and Logan’s Run.

    We had a burning desire to visit the scene of the Chișinău assassination! So we got in touch with Oberliht, the Moldovan Young Artists Association who were taking submissions for their annual EDU-Art Conference. They accepted our proposal for a Musique Concrète workshop to take place inside the notorious tunnel, using the site-specific acoustics of the architecture to produce a collaborative sound piece with the participants.

    The conference took place in Autumn 2020 when Moldova’s borders were still closed to all but essential travellers due to the pandemic. We asked the organisers to furnish us with the most serious looking letter of invitation possible, completely steamed clean of any artistic flourishes. The word ‘artist’ was dropped from the text and replaced with ‘cultural researcher’ which we deemed much more likely to pass as ‘essential’.

    We arrived at Chișinău Airport at midnight. An intimidating ice maiden border guard in military uniform inspected our “essential traveller” documents for an unnervingly long time before rubber stamping our admission to the Republic of Moldova.

    Enjoying Chișinău with my friend, writer and filmmaker Roisin Agnew during our sloppy summer vacation to the city in 2021.

    First Impressions

    Chișinău is an attractive city, laid out on a compact human-friendly scale, it’s comparable in size to Antwerp, Reykjavik, Belfast or Wuppertal.

    Arriving downtown following the footsteps of Bald and Bankrupt we first encounter the abandoned National Hotel, an impressive Soviet-era behemoth with dried up fountain plaza at street level. Many say it mars the visitor’s first impression of the city. I disagree. I’m drawn to its sturdy, masculine structure.

    The downtown area features an attractive mix of historical architectural styles and luscious green public spaces.

    Typically, I’m not enamoured with ornate old buildings so I didn’t go out of my way to see those things. I was more intrigued by the presence of Soviet-era structures like the Moldtelecom Tower, National Opera & Ballet, Presidential Palace, national parliament and further afield, the State Circus and iconic Romashka ‘Ear of Corn’ residential tower.

    These are imposing, modernist fortresses, constructed in heavy cast concrete, shamelessly still reifying the power of the Soviet state into the public space.

    It was a pleasant surprise to find that there is more than one defamed subterranean passageway running under the central districts.

    We enlisted the help of a well-known local tour guide named Nikolai, who took us on a walking tour connecting all the known pedestrian tunnels and modern office blocks in the area (this was a customised trajectory especially for us). Nikolai was a generous guide, and as we spelunked our way across the city; he talked about the challenges of forging a new national identity in the ideological and spatial debris field left in the wake of the Soviet Union.

    The Soviets had all the resources and coercive power in the world to throw at substantiating and mythologizing their state institutions. Independent Moldova, on the other hand, is facing challenges as a small and fragile state with limited resources and influence on the global stage.

    According to United Nations data, an estimated 1.27 million people emigrated from Moldova between 1990 and 2020, which is rather a lot considering the current population is just under three million.

    This brain drain has had a significant impact on Moldova’s ability to develop and prosper, and many citizens are concerned about the future prospects of their young state.

    Chris Dreier at the State Circus, summer 2021.

    Tunnels Cannot be Avoided

    An ideal day in Chisinau involves lots of wandering and enjoying strange urbanism and generous public parks. Tunnels cannot be avoided due to the epic wide boulevards that crisscross the downtown.

    Due to a strategic location between Russian and European cultural and economic influences, most of the commercial and retail environment is unfamiliar to me. I don’t recognise these banks, clothing brands, billboard advertisements, travel agencies or supermarket chains. The unfamiliarity is pleasurable, I feel like I’ve really travelled somewhere.

    A highpoint is lunch at the performatively bureaucratic trade union cafeteria, introduced to us by our friends Clara and Ana. The subsidized restaurant is an unfashionable trace of post collective social organisation. Customers dine under harsh LED chandeliers at banquet tables with white doily-drape and bouquets of synthetic red roses.

    Moldova is a pretty religious place and the public morality and culture are perceptively conservative to someone coming from Western Europe. If there is an alternative scene, a counter-reaction to the conformist social body, it resides in the Zemstvei Building, a former museum now inhabited by cycling activists, a queer café and the Zpațiu / Zpace contemporary art project space.

    The highpoint is at the end of the hall at 3rd Space, an artist studio inhabited by the Drujba and Kolxoz (Collective Economy) art collectives. I’m particularly enamoured with Kolxoz. Their work revolving around DIY group publishing strikes me as being particularly radical. My last night in Chisinau (this January) was spent with Kolxoz drinking Transnistrian cognac and debating whether Lenin has been ‘cancelled’ in post Cold War Eastern Europe.

    Mixed apartment and retail block, downtown Chișinău, photo Roisin Agnew.

    Subsequent Visits

    We make several more trips to Chisinau over the next few years. On subsequent visits, it becomes clear that an ambitious municipal beautification scheme has kicked into gear. Pavements have been lavishly restored, buildings freshly painted, and there is fancy new street signage and flower arrangements.

    Interestingly, the pedestrian tunnel in Bald and Bankrupt’s video has been restored to its pristine state. There is a conspiracy theory floating around that the powers that be were so mortified by the video that heads rolled and a massive Tunnel Improvement plan was hastily brought into being.

    Some fine restaurants, fancy cafes, trendy bars and shops are popping up here and there. Chisinau is reinventing itself, with the clear ambition of someday being a mainstream tourist destination, a slightly cheaper, more parochial Bucharest or Cracow.

    It’s a long term plan though, and for the moment being here feels a million miles away from more banal, mediated tourist experiences further west; the city-break destinations characterised by lime scooters, QR code explanations, bubble tea, Van Gogh 3D and the big red fun bus tours.

    This city hasn’t figured out how to market itself to an external gaze. It’s just a medium-sized working city, with really good pedestrian tunnels and office blocks, where people live and go to work and worry about the future. It’s refreshingly dull and I like it.

    Kolxoz in their Headquarters at the former Zemstvei Museum. Copyright Kolxoz.

    Feature Image: Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence in front of National Hotel, Chișinău photo Victoria Tihonova

  • Poem: Hope in Despair

    Hope in Despair

    I have always loved museums, no doubt having a kind of prophetic disposition I realised the somewhat terrible and prodigious potency that was entombed in their almost sterile yet  paradoxically life-affirming grace. Loss, chronic loss, is the ultimate domain of all humans.

    It seems to me that the problems here below on Earth have reached such an escalatory saturation point that we have been probing space, and for quite some time now, in an almost frantic bid to escape, but, as William Shatner recently said, and I merely paraphrase, space is just full of more cold, dark and hostile matter.

    The tremor of the tympany, the delicate frisson which all ten digits can bring, the storm of sounds trembling just as you are standing alone, right there on the brink…

    Slow read. Be not fraught with the weight and trouble of your servitude, but rather cherish the day and be more aware of it harbouring amplitude.

    Feature Image: The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, Dublin, sometimes called the Dead Zoo.

  • Poetry: Marc Di Saverio

    SONNET XIV
    for Diane Windsor

    When I was still the husband of the wind —
    when I was Leopardi-sure I’d never
    know a woman’s body’s ways — when I
    was nineteen – when I was Prufrock-positive
    of mermaids never singing to me, either,
    of a life without betrothal or progeny –
    –             when I was one of the hideously-bodied —
    –             When I was still the husband of the wind,
    –             I would dream, like Pygmalion, of my donna perfetta,
    –             One whose soul was as beauteous as her body,
    –             One whose nature was sublime but unlikely,
    –             and I would dream that she would come to life,
    –             that she would meet me at the brow, and love me, and now,
    –             beside you, awake while you sleep, I see: she is you.

     

     

    FRAGMENT FOR A HEAVEN-FARER

    for Diane Windsor

    According to that Acolyte who some say saw the Second Coming —
    –           no greater love can a man have than this —
    –          than to lay down his life for his friend;
    According to that Acolyte who some say saw the Gallops of Glory —
    no greater love can a man have than mine –
    I’m warming outside James Street store-fronts where once
    –                    our sea-sky-lips would,
    stunning passers-by, horizon their romance-less eyes with
    –                                      each of our own perfect kisses;
    I’m slumming throughout air-stung hoar-frosts where once
    –                     our sea-sky lids would,
    shunning passers-by, thunderclap their romance-less hearts with
    –                                       each of our own perfect visions –
    Yet, take thought: the adversary’s maximum extensions are harpoons
    –                                  he swears are darts of amities knee-
    –                    jerkingly flung automatically as beams toward their
    –                                  midnight moons, or smiles of mothers
    –    whose conditionless love so helplessly blooms in the faces
    –            of red-eyed teens all synch-ly slouching at their court-hearing.
    I surmise The Devil has not heard, and I hope, Diane, you’ll finally know:
    –                     calm can only come by the one called
    –                     that violet-eye-light-beaming Jesus Christ –
    –         and, that, Lucifer, like a late autumn wasp with stinging wings
    –                        frosting in the twilight, KNOWS his death is near,
    –    so he quavers in fright, privately, yet, publicly,  like he does now,
    jabs a maximum of souls, which he considers his birthright;
    And, take thought: I often wonder if you,
    yes, Job-long-suffering you, weeping-willow-boughs
    -amid-the-winter-wind-unassuming you, ever
    –           owned the value to wonder: Might I be one to write as
    fast as the Almighty
    speaks, might I be the Stenographer of the Lord, never even needing
    any breaks (O Lucifer,  YOU believe
    –                                   that you will beat her hand at any sort
    –           of duel? Her hand is guided by the hand of God! O Lucifer,
    –                          she is ready!) So, Di, when you face him, Eastwood-easy,
    –                                                            DRAW!;
    And, take thought: the force that drives my spirit drives your own,
    yet the spirit of Satan dives
    like Iscariot dove from the rope-ripped-bough throughout the Hour
    –                                                           Of Shadows.  Remember,
    Satan, regardless of his wishes, despite being SMALL g god of this
    world, is merely the prop-foil-prelude
    secondary of so many myriad dualities created by
    The Trinity, his eventual Bermuda Triangle, until whose disappearance,
    –                                     is the mere adversary, the saw-weight
    –                     of the see-saw, the one alone the Lord esteems enough
    –         to consider the clearest, but maybe not His most fearsome opponent,
    –                                                who has darkness both behind and before
    –     him! So how, Diane, is he even a Light-Bearer,
    –                             since, wherefrom comes his light? He KNOWS
    –                         he is finite – he worships the finite, so how can he be
    –      bright — especially in the face of your light, woman-of-my-dreams-
    –                         and-of-the-the-dreams-within-my-dreams?

     

     

    SONNET XIII
    For Diane Windsor

    Even the time I spend apart from you
    is yours. Even scarcely tenable
    quavers of your smiles are seen to the
    whole world inside my electric soul,
    even the memory of your voice’s lower-
    most echo, blasts away any noises, accompan-
    ies me through the loneliest, hollow silences.
    Even your Galatean shadow is bodied – and souled —
    in my heart. Even the time I spend apart
    from you is yours.  Even others with
    your name, are more forgivable
    to me. Even Angels of the Light
    discuss us, I believe. Even
    awake beside you sleeping, I cannot dream.

     

    A SONNET ON EPHESIANS 5:25
    for Diane Windsor

    And how you modern readers wonder why I call her thee?
    It is because you’ve never seen or known her apogee.

    And at the crucifixion-slow-mo-mentioning
    of me and you, the lovers of future Valentine’s
    Days will wonder, Romeo and who? No greater
    love can a man have than this: than to lay down his life for his friend;
    No greater love can a man have than mine; for you I laid
    down my life, and for you I’d lay it again – able by
    the aegis of the Lord, without whom I would be gone…
    –           If I did not, if I do not, if I
    –           would not so strive to love you just as Jesus
    –           loves His Bride, I’d flee from thee as the Devil
    –           fled the moment after he thirdly sought
    –           to tempt I AM; Calvary’s my only
    –           guide to loving thee, so my heart beats
    –           Di-ane, Di-ane, Di-ane, Di-ane, Di-ane.

  • Musician of the Month: Magdalena Jacob

    My musical journey started with a lot of Church organ and Bohemian brass music in a tiny village in Bavaria –  and when I say village I really mean it.

    At the age of five I developed a desperate desire to learn the guitar, because my mum had one (for her kindergarten group and she knew about four chords). At the age of five I wanted to be exactly like my mum, a genius.

    After three years I hated the guitar because after too many odd versions of Beatles covers I was just really bored and annoyed. I quit because, in the mean time, I desperately wanted to learn a random brass instrument, which I never actually managed to do.

    This tiny village where I grew up in had an unwritten rule that every kid had to learn a brass instrument to later play in the local youth brass band, in order to be part of the game. I learned the guitar and later the bass, because my dad was desperately looking for a bass player for his church band, so I was rather out of the game (and it’s nice to be able to blame the string instruments for it instead of myself).

    As a child I didn’t really think about becoming a musician. I didn’t think it was a real job anyway. I wanted to become a vet, then a kindergarten teacher, then a writer – which somehow I considered a real job.

    That one person at the party nobody gets…

    As long as I can remember, I have always been that one person at the party nobody gets. According to certain rumours, some believed I was a genius. Others were convinced that I was just really high (yes, even as a child).

    Once I came dressed up to a costume party as a tasteless dressmaker. It was supposed to be funny, but in the end people just thought I was mental.

    If a costume is too close to reality, people tend to confuse it for reality. And then the costume fails and protects me at the same time. The perfect illusion is to create a mask that looks exactly like your real face. It’s still a mask then. But it’s also a protective shield. And it’s still you, right?

    At the age of eleven I re-discovered the guitar because we randomly founded a band at some children’s birthday party of a friend in order to be cool or something, and I started to compose a couple of love songs about a guy I was pretending to be in love with at the time.

    Ten years later I moved to Berlin to become a full-time musician. I married my band mate at the time and we moved into a tiny room in a flat share together. I was actually more like a half-time busker, half-time film student and the weekends we spent touring (mostly hitchhiking) around Germany, busking and playing in bars as a guitar-duo that played sad, experimental guitar music for two guitars.

    After three years we broke up and I became a full-time film student and started to produce electronic pop music with weird spoken word elements. I was twenty-five and I felt like starting a completely new life.

    The gay clown on the moon…

    I recently came out as a clown which is due to the fact that I can’t take myself seriously any longer. How could I write sad, dramatic poems and scream them into the world when everything my white privileged ass can possibly emotionally understand are luxury problems?

    I made myself comfortable with being ridiculous and it was quite a liberation to be stupid, and not to expect anyone to take myself seriously anymore.

    My music now is sad, but funny. It’s cute. Still a lot of people don’t get it and sometimes they leave the room during concerts because I’m making fun about stuff that isn’t funny to them.

    Sometimes they insult me because in their ears, I’m not doing music. Which is true, because what I’m actually doing is theatre, or some kind of performance art that people would watch at night time on Arte, and be like “what the hell made her become like that?”.

    I sometimes ask myself the same question. But I realized people are mostly not really interested in honest answers.

    Therapy

    Music is therapy and I will make the audience my therapists as long as someone is willing to listen to my random brainfarts. Sometimes I’m scared that if too many people start listening to me I will never shut the fuck up ever again. And I’m also scared they would all just stop listening completely at some point.

    Sometimes living in Berlin is scary. The city is so loud because everyone is trying to find someone to listen to them.  And nobody is possibly getting enough of the attention they deserve. And unlike the village: most people are not trying to hide their problems from anyone. I mean, why should they do so?

    Life makes no sense in a city like that and is beautiful and liberating (in summer), but it’s also random and scary (in winter).

    I’ve recently become a half-time film maker, a half-time musician and a babysitter and a cat and a dog sitter, and a clown.

    Sometimes I’m not sure if I can ever go back to a serious approach to making music. Parts of me just always want to remain a clown on a tiny stage that creates something weird and funny and magical in the moment.

    Parts of me want to be an accordion-playing clown with an orchestra on their back, performing slutty lyrics in a church and crying all the time on stage. Parts of me also just want to become insta-famous or a tik-tok-star or this weird actress that is doing kind of everything and nothing at the same time and no-one knows what she’s actually famous for.

    What I want to achieve next is to move to space and live-stream arthouse cinema from the moon. Make friends with many more cats. Grow my own potatoes and save the world by growing potatoes.

    Generally saving the world would be great actually. Maybe that’s also possible from my treehouse on the moon.

    www.solarpoweredmoontown.de

    https://www.instagram.com/solarpoweredmoontown/

  • Poetry: Rhys Mumford

    On Opening A Door

    When I left the cafe
    I planted my leading foot beside the door
    The front of my shoe just nudging the skirting
    And I reached for the handle
    with my opposite hand.
    I only mention this because
    (and eschewing false modesty)
    my positioning was perfect.
    It was perfect.
    My carriage optimally aligned,
    I was centred, in equilibrium,
    I was the Platonic ideal of a Archimedean lever.
    I pulled the door towards me
    with balance, fluidity and poise.
    In short I do not think
    I could have opened that door
    any better than I did.
    And if anybody were watching
    Perhaps they would have thought:
    We do not know the situation of this man
    His career-prospects
    Personality
    Or status of his soul
    But this we know:
    On one occasion
    Here, this day,
    he opened that door
    Magnificently.
    I wonder if
    anybody
    noticed.

  • Poetry: Gratitude

    Gratitude

    “Hate it here? But why?”
    I’m sick of your confounded cry.

    London is Open—
    But when is a kind word spoken
    At 8 AM when elbows stab your side,
    A slouching drunk swallows your Pride,
    And grinning altruists shiver and wait
    For you to blink and take their bait?
    And so we move in clogging thuds,
    Weave through drying gum and blood.

    London, what are you doing?
    Are you even awake?
    “City that never sleeps”? I’m suing.
    You plagiarize for tourism’s sake.

    London, you pander to the saints,
    Resign yourself as relatively quaint.
    You barely know where you end,
    You hardly care when around the bend
    The streets are piled with shoveled debris;
    You gentrify, refine, on your austerity spree.

    I want to love your complacency,
    That languid beauty in every face you see;
    You have extolled diversity.
    You lack sincerity.
    If Broadway bleeds, the West End is dry—
    Not “if”, that’s exactly what I mean by

    Passionless, reserved, ancient, tranquil;
    I repine, I whine, but still I’m thankful.
    As I dissociate on your timely Underground,
    Elton’s voice sings, “for the people I have found.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Commuting with Baudelaire

    Commuting with Baudelaire

    We are living in a time when there are no gentlemen.
    So, women stand for hours without being offered any seats.
    It’ s a privilege which they have laboured for and for centuries,
    It appears! Madness, I know, but you must respect them.

    As you watch their small fists tightening on the headrests,
    And the veins on their slight wrists seeming to almost split…
    That is just at the point when you must resist to offer them a seat
    And rather plant your own arse further into it!

    As I have said before, we are living in a time without any gentlemen
    And highly vocal women, who apparently know exactly what they want.
    The children are so dissolute you could be forgiven for not showing!

    Resist, resist, resist! Resistance, apparently is the source of all Art.
    Resist recapitulating altogether. And whatever you do,
    Don’t Fart!

  • Island State

    On 55th West between 8th and 9th Street I just miss getting mugged. I hear them coming up behind me, two street kids and I speed up. They hit the next guy, take his phone and break his arm. I back off, slipping between parked cars as they run away. He’s just sat there on the pavement in his neatly pressed suit, cradling his broken arm. This is a quiet street, neatly trimmed hedges, expensive apartments. I say something like “Can I help?”, but he doesn’t speak English. The cops arrive and I give them a vague, racist sounding description of ‘the perps’. Two days ago I would have helped.

    Two days ago I owned a can of pepper spray, picked up for fifteen bucks on Venice Beach because Inglewood felt dangerous. But they scan you and pat you now, before they let you board the ferry to Ellis Island, so I trashed it. I sit on a rock in Central Park and call friends in Ireland and Russia on the last of my credit. These calls last a surprisingly long time. I am completely alone.

    So I get a ticket for the Tonight Show. If Letterman looks a little orange on camera, then he’s ruddy as a horse under the lights. Tonight’s guests: Sean Lennon, Billy Bob Thornton and a girl who hypnotises lizards and poses them in hand sown outfits. I feel sorry for Lennon, this nerdy, yupster kid, born overshadowed. Billy Bob’s here promoting a movie. He’s brought along a picture of himself as a fat toddler. We laugh as instructed. ‘The CBS orchestra’ make a good house band, tight session musicians in loud ties and late 30’s paunch. I watch Dave’s hands shake during the ad break, as pages coo and pamper him. Is he still nervous after all this time? Is it Parkinsons, rattling through the L-dopa? Is it the DTs?

    Up and down the Upper East Side stalk little old ladies with pointed faces. Their midget pooches, humiliated in booties, snap against their leads like bobbinhead Johny Rottens in the CBGB’s gift shop. I pick up a naggin in 7-Eleven, mixing it with the too sweet remains of a Big Gulp. Tiny grocery stores are selling mountains of outsize pumpkins. Jews for Jesus thrust leaflets at passing Hasidim, angry under their beards. Columbia is a squall of grey bricked buildings splashed onto a sandstone thoroughfare. I don’t know if it’s a good school, but I’ve read about the naked campus parties. I am titillated and terrified in equal measure. The campus is quiet, and I potter about the swollen crypt of St Paul’s chapel, come to rest on the steps of the library and wish I went here.

    Laura and I are mid-conversation. One of those drunken transitions you can’t remember happening. I’m talking up the Aran Islands, staring at this fake pearl necklace on her tan wrist. She’s a senior, majoring in Neuropsych, and we talk about functional imaging and the new Girl Talk record. She hop skips and jumps before me down the steps, right out of the college and across to a red brick hall of residence and it’s happening finally, that manic pixie dream romance.

    At the party she tells me to wait. I stand in a dark room containing an actual keg that no one actually drinks from. Minutes go by and I think of leaving to buy condoms. I wonder how I’ll get back in. I worry about us finding a room, I wonder if I can sneak her back to my hostel, if I’ll have to bribe whoever’s on the desk. I wonder how long it’s been since I jerked off, and whether I’ll be able to last with a stranger. I lick my palm to check if my breath stinks.

    Laura is kissing a tall Indian kid in t-shirt that reads ‘Cover me in Chocolate and feed me to the Lesbians’. I am crammed on a couch, beside a heavy freshman with a dyed blonde goatee. He reads aloud from his first novel. No one is listening.

    Charles, Charlie, Chuck, had been dead for a very long time. Music had become little more than sound. He gathered and collected films that he did not watch. He purchased books that he never found the time to read. He feared the theft of these collections, though they gave him little pleasure. He carried paperbacks like stowaways in his leather satchel, wearing away the covers on unbroken spines. He had walked through pairs of shoes in the time between reading one book and the next. Periodically he would attempt to consume something; some item of narrative literature, some important work of cinema, some critically acclaimed contemporary composition. Books were too long. Songs were too kitsch or too sincere. Films simply frightened him. It was as though, long ago he had run out of a burning building and into the snow, and he could not remember how to return or find a place to escape the cold.

    In my mind the East Village is an all night street party, tuned in dropped out business men sleazing on boho bimbos in dyed pashminas and lambswool ponchos. I am disappointed. At 14th St, yuppies are replaced by respectable gay couples and hipsters. The air gets smoky, moleskins appear, even the homeless wear designer cast offs. Disneyland Manhattan. I watch a twenty something couple eat day old burgers from the twirling, spoiling windows of an Instamat. I puke in front of them on purpose.

    They show midget porn in the Double Down Saloon. We drink Coronas and the house cocktail, Ass Juice. The money shot in midget porn comes after the action, when the burley stud zips up his little person partner and fucks the suitcase out the window. I am flirting with a roller derby queen. We have consumed great quantities of some cheap imitation of falafel, which demands drink in its roiling savoury language, and on its own bowel wrenching terms. On the street her Disney princess miniskirt and whiffle bat get catcalls. I line up shots at the wing mirrors of parked cars and strike out.

    Rain falls my last morning in Manhattan. It drops in fat wet polyps that hit and burst as I drag my sodden case across Midtown, heart of a heartless empire.  I spend my last damp dollars on American candy for my Irish girlfriend. I take the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station, watching the neighbourhoods get shorter and poorer. These carts were once crewed by gangster taggers in matching costumes. They’d rob you and stick you and keep on walking. Eyes like scissors, riding high over the low down world. They’re gone now, civilised. I am fifteen hundred feet up in the air. Outside, the wingtips blink clouds purple, and the ice wind wracks this comfortable shell.

    * * *

    Feature Image: view of the stage with David Letterman’s desk and guest seats.

  • Poem: ‘Congratulations’ by Kevin Higgins

    Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.

    One key qualification for a poet becoming a pseudo-poetic decoration for the Regime – a quality much on display this week – is to know when not to say that a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way, is exactly as terrible as it is because he/she hopes to be published in the future (or again) in the same venue, suspecting, probably correctly, he/she would be less likely to achieve such publication if he/she doesn’t keep his or her beak strategically shut on such occasions.

    Indeed, indiscreet beak-opening might make an invitation to participate in an upscale literary cabaret or two less likely. This is what it has come down to.

    As I sit/lie on what might turn out to be my death bed – I am doing everything I can to survive and haven’t at all given up hope but really have no idea if I’ll be here this time next year – I find myself laughing at the Irish poetry world.

    The phenomenon is not unique to contemporary Ireland, though its Irish branch has particular characteristics, usually involving a special relationship with NATO and the sacred 12.5% corporate tax rate. But such tendencies are spreading like an international fungus. Every part of the English-speaking world has a local variant of concern.

     

    Congratulations
    after Zbigniew Herbert

    A few will be obliterated
    but in an nice way.
    We don’t like the word censorship,
    abolished it yonks ago.
    Certain word combinations must be
    nudged to the bottom of the basket
    until after we’ve all safely
    choked to death in our dressing gowns.
    Though, worryingly,
    they always find their way back out again.

    Others, we can leave optional.
    You know the drift:
    the suffering of academics, their divorces
    after the regrettable entanglement with the student;
    how it felt to phone the crematorium
    to book a spot for their ninety five year old father.

    But for having so successfully helped it
    deny its own existence
    the regime has made you
    compulsory.

    Your personage will be strapped
    into an airplane seat, exported
    to Asia and beyond,
    like a Bangladeshi made t-shirt in reverse.

    Your metaphors and similes will be at the service
    of the International Happiness Corporation –
    Diversity Department –
    currently headquartering here for tax purposes.
    You will walk through all the right doors
    secretly wearing their logo.

    Life will be mostly festivals
    of enforced grinning,
    during which you’ll pass the hours
    counting each others’ teeth.

  • Musician of the Month: Barry O’Halpin

    Wingform is an hour-long piece of music I composed for Crash Ensemble between 2017 and 2020. Scored for twelve musicians, it has four ensemble movements connected by my own solo electric guitar passages, which act as a kind of connective tissue for the whole body of the work. 

    Wingform – Barry O’Halpin & Crash Ensemble Bandcamp link

    In 2017 I was invited to join Crash as a Composer-in-Residence as well as an electric guitarist, after which Wingform was commissioned. Being embedded in the group and growing as a musician during that time has made it the largest and most personal piece of work I’ve ever put together. I’m fortunate to have been able to work so closely with a hugely talented, open-minded and creative ensemble of players, and to have the opportunity to push the boat out in my own approach to the electric guitar as a solo instrument and as voice within a modern chamber orchestra. 

    Beyond the raw sounds themselves, Wingform’s biggest influence is like that of a lot of art: that overwhelming feeling of awe that comes from being confronted with nature in all its beautiful and grotesque and serene and scary forms– especially from its more hidden corners – and wanting to somehow channel or rebuild those found natural sounds and structures through the medium of music. While this is destined to fail in any literal sense the moment it is mediated through humanity and technology, the hope is that some of that uncanny non-human musicality carries through into the final work, giving that mystic sense of having plugged into nature in some small way.

    The sonic seed of the piece is a short recording of a tiger mosquito swarm, stumbled upon at the beginning of the composition process. Putting aside initial preconceptions toward the sound and listening, you can hear in this mass of wing vibrations a strangely haunting, melancholy chord. Providing the root note is an electrical hum which in most situations would be unwelcome, but here it creates a striking quality of animal merged with machine that captured my imagination.

    I scored out this wave-like, gliding mosquito chord for the instrumentation of Crash, in an approach borrowed from French spectral composition. I then messed around with the orchestration, creating all kinds of variations and contortions: glacial subterranean groans; double-speed Doppler flashes; delicate shimmers; and vertical chords broken into horizontal melodies. After workshopping and recording these with the players of Crash, they became the sonic palette that I would use throughout the whole piece, like a sort of shape-shifting  mantra.

    The piece as a whole tries to feel like a living breathing organism, and the electric guitar runs through and between movements like connective tissue. I constantly asked myself how could I make the guitar behave and sound less like itself and more like a piano or a percussion instrument, and embraced alternate tunings and unusual techniques to help unlock this. This went on to influence the winds, string, piano and percussion, which interacted with the strange sounds of the guitar to form new kinds of flavour combinations.

    The opening movement is a slow-burn: it’s based on the idea of a slowly descending line, introduced via slide guitar, that gradually unspools from high shimmers into a really big snaking melody. Ebbing and flowing below this, like a tide, are the mosquito chords.

    Movement II feels like faulty machinery reclaimed by nature. A tense and glitchy groove, played amazingly by pianist Máire Carroll, holds together a lattice of sounds. There are a lot of loops on the verge of collapse, and a sense of windows opening briefly into parallel musical worlds only to be slammed shut.

    Movement III also plays with loops on the edge of stability, and constant forward motion with a rickety handmade feel. It combines some nods to the language of jazz and post minimal music with more hard-edged and sometimes grotesque sounds, often playing with the contrast between them as if turning a dial to a point of intensity.

    The fourth movement is glacially slow, with a floating sense of grief to it, like the end of a life cycle for the organic whole. It’s an emotional and structural climax, bringing us right back to the original mosquito chord and finishing out on that initial electrical hum, the whole ensemble droning along with two oscillators.

    Wingform really brought together the various threads of my musical life like nothing else I’ve done: the hands-on, aural approach to electric guitar as my native instrument; the traditional composer’s sketches with pencil and manuscript paper; audio and MIDI collage on Logic software; and a constant back and forth dialogue between all of these things before the final project was typeset in score for players to make a reality. Going hand-in-hand with this is the hybridity of the sound world, which absorbs elements of many musical languages I’ve worked in over the years.

    Composing a score like this is a long, solitary process, and by its very nature you often have to take a leap of faith in believing that what you have written down will sound as good as your inner ear did when you imagined it, and that some of that magic gets through to listeners on a visceral level at the other end. This kind of music can be dense with a lot of moving parts, but for the audience it’s really there to be felt and experienced, not over-analysed.

    In my other experience as part of a band, there is always a collaborative mixer where everyone ends up giving feedback and co-authoring in real time, regardless of whose original demo was brought in. It’s different with a score like Wingform, where you are the sole composer, and more needs to be decided and structured before you ever send it to players, with whom time is scarce. The development workshops I did have with Crash players, who were totally supportive and engaged, were crucial not only for test-driving bits of material but also for keeping my morale alive.

    Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 (Image: Simon Marshall).

    Wingform was completed at the beginning of 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning and the certainty over when it would see the light of day suddenly evaporated. It was cruel timing, but the gut punch was softened by the solidarity with every musician internationally experiencing something similar. It was all the more cathartic when we premiered it streaming at New Music Dublin 2021, and this year with a live audience for the first time at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 followed by Crash’s 25th birthday celebrations in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. It’s also toured as an installation, created by video artist Jack Phelan (pictured).

    Installation, created by Jack Phelan (Image: Charlie Joe Doherty).

    By the time we reached the end of each performance, the drones vibrating through our bodies, it felt as if we as an ensemble had been through a long, vivid and disarmingly emotional journey, in the work itself and beyond. I hope that Wingform evokes something similar in listeners.

    Feature Image: Barry O’Halpin by Robert Watson.