– A seasonal riff on the opening paragraph of Moby Dick – Call me Andy. Not long ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me amongst mortal company, I tended to sail about a little in Dublin City, brought hither and … Read more
With Christmas fast approaching, a familiar debate will resume in homes, offices and their Zoom equivalents as to what constitutes a legitimate Christmas movie. Much of the banter will centre on Die Hard as the preeminent example of an action movie which has legitimately crossed into the holiday season category. Some may even cite it … Read more
In search of the my favourite troubadour all roads lead to Flanders, Belgium, then on to France and French Polynesia. There, in the obscure cemetery of Atuona Hiva Oa – alongside the impressionist Paul Gaugin – rests the mortal remains of Jacques Brel. Aged just forty-seven, Brel had been under a settled expectation of death … Read more
Like most of us, I spent the past week in a state of deep reflection over our collective national fate. Like some of us, I mourned. The American political sphere seems to have reached an anti-zenith, one culminating in some dystopian rhetorical Babel tower built and sustained by hatred. What have I seen in my … Read more
The Oath The little hand he holds Is all they could find to give him: Wrapped in blue plastic, A hand once brown, now bloodied and black, The hand of one too young for school, The hand of his daughter, Riven in the charred rubble That had been her room, The hand he held so … Read more
On November 14th I am releasing my debut album Sea Salt & Turpentine on the Ergodos label with a launch concert at the National Concert Hall. The album is a collection of chamber and vocal works I composed over the past two and a half years for Ficino Ensemble and Michelle O’Rourke in rotating subsets. … Read more
This article is the first in a forthcoming three-part series by Cillian Doyle on the role of the state in a mixed economy. Last month there were two seemingly unrelated events which in an Irish context can be connected. On September 9th Mario Draghi’s published his 400-page report on improving E.U. competitiveness. The report provides … Read more
I was born in Dublin in 1987, and grew up 5 kilometres west of the city centre in a village called Inchicore. Since birth I’ve been completely enveloped by music and creativity. My father, Dave Clifford, was involved in the counterculture performance art scene of the late 70s / early 80s in Ireland. Additionally, he … Read more
The First of February Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow, Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue, Lava lurid as a toy volcano, Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue. The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum. A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee, And it looks like someone … Read more
One must begin by asking a begging question: is literary criticism, in Ireland, dead? Recently, reading Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, this reviewer noticed the absence of the pronoun ‘I’, which has become ingratiated in the ‘I’ singular, the most fantastic, the singular phenomenological self-view. The singular ‘I’ – the Me, Myself, and I … Read more