May 2012
1 post
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Why Karl Keeps His Shades On
Did I ever actually post the Slideshare of my panel at SXSW?
No. Better late than never, I guess… Enjoy:)
April 2012
2 posts
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
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A 100 word play: Reverse psychology telemarketing
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, I’m looking for Dooleybog Regional Insurance, the best service for equine and agricultural vehicle insurance in the Dooleyford region.’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Dooley Bog Regional Insurance. Tractor insurance.’
‘This is the wrong number.’
‘Oh, alright. I just wanted the best.’
‘Sorry?’
...
March 2012
2 posts
8 tags
5 tags
talking to strangers on the Central Line
So something deeply and amazingly strange happened to me this afternoon. I took the Central Line out to Notting Hill to give some books to the book exchange. It’s been really stormy outside, and I’ve been really busy and stressed, and I was all-round generally pissed off at the Tube and the weather and just about everything else.
I get to the steps, the ones from Notting Hill Gate...
September 2011
2 posts
Anonymous asked: Will you speak German for me?
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My Twitter Was Hacked. Sucks for Me.
It’s rather a retro experience. And a new one, for me. I’ve never been hacked before. It’s embarrassing and annoying, yes, but at least at the end you’ve learned something and you get a shiny new password.
Ever since I capitulated and bought my darling Macbook I’ve not given much thought to firewalls. But I fail to think about the most obvious things; hacking...
August 2011
3 posts
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Interview with the Horror: and interview with...
After the screeching psychedelia of 2007’s debut Strange House, the Horrors shocked listeners with a luscious and moody follow-up, Primary Colours. They still wore skinny jeans and sported teased hair like Helena Bonham-Carter, but they’d traded in camp organs and ghoulish lyrics for something more thoughtful. Now debuting a third album, the mysteriously-titled Skying, frontman...
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An interview with Mick Hoyle of F-Troupe shoes,...
‘F-Troop’ was, according to Wikipedia, a ‘satirical army sitcom set in Fort Courage, Kansas’. And though Sergeant Sylvester, Captain Wilton and co. sound like a hoot and a half, we’re far more interested in F-Troupe, the niche London shoemakers who create semi-retro, semi-ironic but wholeheartedly gorgeous designer footwear. Stocked worldwide by Opening Ceremony and Urban Outfitters, the...
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Baha’i and Conscious Bling: Fashion Wednesday...
If you’ve seen videos by Nicki Minaj, Keri Hilson or the new Rihanna video for ‘S&M’, then you’ve seen Melody Ehsani’s eye-poppingly fabulous work. Coveted by the hip-hop and high fashion worlds alike, her designs draw on religious iconry and hip-hop heritage, a dazzling, tongue-in-cheek mix of girly, Swarovski-studded detail and oversized Mr T excess. Law school nearly claimed her, but...
June 2011
2 posts
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All the Jewellery I Never Got: An interview with...
Not many people can claim to have designed clothes worn by Lily Allen. And even fewer people display this information on their website next to a framed image of severed plait of hair. That first introduction on Natalie B Coleman’s website serves as a statement of intent; the designer creates pieces out of the ordinary, meticulously crafted and made with off-beat humour.
Having studied at...
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Momsen's the Word: An Interview with Taylor Momsen
Let it be said, Taylor Momsen did not bring up Courtney Love. Nor did she have anything to say on Miley Cyrus. In interview, the panda-eyed Lost Girl and prolific wearer of over-the-knee socks comes across as disconcertingly sweet, hardworking and focused to a degree that would sicken her Leaving Cert-aged contemporaries.. The eighteen-year-old has racked up an impressive CV of acting work,...
May 2011
25 posts
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A Year Without TV (without even noticing)
It”s only in retrospect that I realize how hard it must be for school teachers to retain so completely the illusion of having no live outside of their jobs. They can’t give away any of their actual interests, the clothes they wear, the places they go at night, the people they spend their time with. Not only do various PC by-laws forbid them from acting too like genuine...
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A Night (in a barn) at the Opera
What a joy it is to dance and sing! So Angela Carter begins her theatrical, musical novel, Wise Children. But its rare enough we see music elevated to an art-form, something timeless and spirit-lifting. Not in the Snow Patrol piped in over X-Factor triumph sense, with the subsequent single piped in over a thousand shop sound systems. Genuinely moving. Stirring. Dramatic. Worth dressing up in a...
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Blue Valentine: A review
Please don’t consider going to see this with your spouse of ten years, the one with the crows feet, the stressful job and the flagging libido. Because this might just hammer the nail in your relationship. It’s a timeworn and cynical ploy, the dismembered-relationship film, complete with weddings scenes and fight scenes juxtaposed over a luscious, wrenchingly pensive Grizzly Bear...
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At Swim-Two-Birds at the Project Arts Centre: A...
How do you stage three plays at once? A company is faced with such a question adapting Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds for stage, a labyrinthine, some might say proto-postmodern work (though the renownedly no-Bullshit author might not have liked this name…) with as many levels of narrative disorder as it has unruly characters. Blue Raincoat’s production succeeds in...
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Bow Selecta: Beaux Bows boutique
The Georges Street Arcade has long been the domain of Dublin’s young folk, with stalls selling temporary green hair dye, Bettie Page postcards and rockabilly shoes. So it makes perfect sense as the site for a 24-year-old style queen and entrepreneur to open her very first shop. But how has Ailbhe Stafford, boutique Beaux Bows, pulled the whole thing off? The answer is a curious mix of...
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Cracked: A review of Crack magazine
God bless the guileless dreamers who buy British Lotto tickets, for their impulse-bought scratchcards fund the likes of Crack… A year-old freesheet for the city of Bristol, Crack has quietly persevered its combination of local and international art, scoring interviews with everyone from James Murphy to a deranged local agony aunt named Mavis (offering advice on ‘how to survive this...
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Catfish: A review
Tech-phobes left cold by The Social Network will find vindication in Catfish, a slow-burning documentary about the online friendship between a documentary filmmaker, Nev, and a young artist named Ali. Nev begins as flippant, smugly requesting art from the precocious nine-year-old who contacts him out of the blue as well as forging curiously close online ties with her family. If shooting a...
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Cave of Forgotten Dreams: A review
Granted unprecedented access to the oldest artworks on Earth, Herzog finds ample fuel for favourite themes- man amongst the elements, inhospitable landscapes and the odd close-up of a particularly photogenic reptile. The Chauvet Cave is explored, first from the outside with an extraordinary crane shot soaring along the mountain face, then later by handheld cameras inside the cave’s clammy...
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Dazed and Amazed: An interview with stylist...
This week, we begin what will (hopefully) be a series of interviews with Irish people who have impacted on fashion in some way. Our first is the marvellously-named Celestine Cooney, creative force behind Twin magazine and resident stylist for Dazed and Confused magazine. Cooney began in Dublin as fashion editor for The Dubliner and Mongrel magazine, and now works styling runway shows for...
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Goodone: Good-looking good-doing
Goodone make saving the world look easy. And stylish; the sustainable fashion brand has only been going since 2007, but already they’re well on their way to world domination. One year in the tiny brand was granted free exhibition space at London Fashion Week, where their delicious, planet friendly designs suddenly turned all the right heads, showing how sexy conscious fashion can be. Since...
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'A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a...
“I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes..” After a big sleep (most of the titles being first released in the 1940s), the cinematic works of crime author Raymond Chandler are being celebrated in a festival at the IFI this month. Alongside screenings of such classics as ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘The Big Sleep’, the IFI will host a...
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Mighty Meaty: An interview with Vera of Verameat
Hands up anyone who’s ever wanted to wear a tyrannosaurous eating a leg of fried chicken around their neck. A litter of gold-brass bulldogs spread across a knuckle-duster? A gold pendant in homage to the Viking god Woden? Now you can, thanks to a jewellery line based in Brooklyn. VeraMeat is the creation of Vera Balyura, a former model and consummate storyteller with a love of the macabre...
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I Like That. What Is It? Anthony Burrill...
Anthony Burrill’s art is a distinctly modern blend of brash and thoughtful, combining computer-generated art with old-fashioned methods such as wood-blocking. The results are deceptively simple slogan posters reminiscent of pop art and propaganda, but featuring messages such as ‘WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE’. Having worked with an endless list of companies, associations and bands such as...
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Get Your Tatts Out
I wish I could describe Dublin’s tattoo shops as dusty backstreet parlours populated by burly ex-sailors and gangsters forming queues, with rusty needles picked up off the floor. But Dublin’s tattoo artists are a disarmingly friendly lot. Their shops are meticulously clean and, most shocking of all, family friendly. In high profile, celeb-favoured studios like Dublin Art Tattoo,...
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Canned Heat and Tanned Meat: World Wrestling comes...
Tallaght is as good a place as any to get in a fight. The line of anxious under-twelves and overgrown fanboys outside the Basketball Arena don’t look like they’re out for a brawl, but that’s exactly what they’re here to see..
Any early nineties child with cable TV will know about professional wrestling. They’ll have watched shows like ‘Smackdown’ and ‘Raw is War’, have played with the action...
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This is Ireland: All About Irish Skinheads
The film Mad Max presents a post-apocalyptic world populated by gangs of feral youths with strange clothes and dodgy haircuts. If currently Ireland is at economic Ground Zero, then our own road gangs stand around Temple Bar, showing off polished boots and standing around Heavenly Hotdogs. The Goths and metalheads aim to scare, with their death-slogans tshirts and noserings, but the only...
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The Betrayal: A review
Having survived starvation and German invasion, Leningrad couple Andrei and Anna face one final, particularly nasty purge, that of the “saboteur” doctors. Picking up 10 years on from her work The Siege , Dunmore’s The Betrayal details the fragile inner life of the couple under Stalin’s regime in its dying days. In a society in thrall to poisoned party logic, doctor Andrei is faced with the...
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Private Life: A book review
It takes a lifetime to see a life wasted: beginning in 1883, Jane Smiley’s Private Life concerns that most commonplace of horrors, the loveless marriage. Recalling Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle – only from the perspective of the long-suffering female – Smiley’s heroine, Margaret, stumbles into a late marriage with Andrew, a sombre astronomer bent on securing his legacy and discrediting that...
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Mommy I'm Home: The return of the boomerang...
Years ago in a previous incarnation of The Gloss, back when I was a 17-year-old, MAC makeup-ed young one, I wrote a piece beginning with the words ‘Its fabulous being a teenager’. Leaving Cert terror aside, I genuinely believed that I had learned all I needed to in life, and that I was ready to go out into the world, a fully-formed though thoroughly inexperienced Young Adult....
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The Time of Our Lives (A really old piece for the...
It’s fabulous being a teenager. Not at all the grungy, sturm und drang affair we have all come to expect. I should know: I’ve been one these last five years. The word ‘teenager’ is a label, a set of expectations, but also it affords us an incredible liberty. It’s a shield, a layer of bubble-wrap between us and the world, allowing us to be forgiven for all kinds of incompetence and idiocy. And...
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Maeve Keenan of Caora Jewellery, an interview
It takes a foreign point of view to really celebrate our cultural heritage. Or in this case, an semi-foreign view. French-raised, half-Irish jewelry designer Maeve Keenan creates beguiling little wearable artworks in silver, gold and rose-gold, inspired in equal parts by Art Nouveau and imagery found in the Book of Kells.
Currently working on her own line, Coara, in Stillorgan-based jewelers...
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Submarine: An interview with Richard Ayoade and...
You will know him by his plaid shirt and supremely fuzzy hair. Familiar to most for his role as nerd icon Moss in The IT Crowd, Richard his first steps into comedy), the half-Norwegian, half-Nigerian actor/director has also directed videos for Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkeys, helped to create the late-night curiosity Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and once co-authored something called...
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Wake Wood: An interview with director David...
Hammer Horror gets a green makeover in this month’s film release Wake Wood, a low-budget but decidedly high-impact Irish horror with a plot that draws on everything from Polanski to Pet Sematary. A recently bereaved couple arrive in the friendly, oddly claustrophobic town of the title, where the locals offer solice but at a terrible price. You know what comes next. Gritty, grimy and...
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13 Assassins, a review
Suddenly the Wu-Tang’s Samurai leanings make more sense. Audience familiar with the work of Takeshi Miike (Audition and Ichi the Killer probably being among his best-known of his eighty-four-strong filmography) will come to 13 Assassins prepared for quick-fire violence, intermittent gore and an all-round twisted view of humanity. But the epic scale of this recent outing, the strange,...
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An incredibly lazy and satisfying way to learn...
Sometimes I’m at a loss what film to watch next. This is where the Crush of the Month method comes in. You might also call it the Fangirl Approach. Rather than think in terms of genre or director or overall ouevre, you just select one specific actor/actress to become obsessed with short term, go to IMDB and work your way through their filmography.
i used to be a dedicated film geek-ette,...
