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Be Part of It: Our Creative Tomorrow

Who We Are

We’re CúlCroÍ8@Beckett and we’re here to stay. Situated right across from Dublin’s iconic Beckett Bridge and right next door to the burgeoning and dynamic digital hub, we’re a team of seven engaged, motivated and positive individuals – from writers, advertisers, creatives, journalists and IT whizzes to business entrepreneurs – who are currently ripping up the cultural rulebook and striking out in a spirit of innovation, engagement and productivity. We’re seeking to open up a new kind of art to the community, an art that’s open and marked by the crossing of boundaries, whether they be between media, between modes of practice, between culture and business – or between each other as human beings. And now, we’re looking for a curator as our eighth member. Could that be YOU?

The Bins

The Bins

A Digital Age

I heard the phrase ‘positive peer pressure’ for the first time today, and when I heard it, I thought that the brave new digital age will mean the death of the soul. I thought of other humans not as friends, enemies or strangers, but as an undifferentiated ring of gravity pressing all around me. If we are all connected all the time we will tyrannise each other to the point of complete individual dissolution, I thought. The constant proximity of others will press all around us and lock us in place as though we were starlings within a murmuration.

Dinner, December 25th

The ‘boys’ (31, 33) are here and so are the parents: that was my first thought. The ages really did appear to me in brackets as they would in a newspaper. The single most disreputable trick of the newspapers, I thought, and here it is in my head, condemning me for still being here. For being back here again, only older, my external circumstances depressingly similar. Like all previous years, the four of us at the table in candlelight before various woebegotten relics, which I had to admit were also beloved relics: ‘the best cutlery’ – old, worn, iron-tasting, lined with tiny venerable creases like crumpled flattened tinfoil - and the best placemats with their Audubon birds and in the middle of it all the Christmas dinner, the breast of the turkey rising like some golden-domed unreachable mountain, a taunting anachronism seen through a crack in time. And then I remembered Mount Fuji.

Man and Beast: Young Philosophers on the Pull

In his battered black coat Macken stalks the bar, wilfully out of his element. “What a fucking meat market. Disgusting.” He glowers at the thighs and calves with hunger, the rims of the short skirts, the high heels. At times his gaze flickers up above the waists to take in the faces and check whether they complement the bodies or cancel them out. He disapproves of the lack of self-consciousness to be seen in them. Beasts. Mindless. Have they no shame? None. Envy soon gnaws through his satisfaction and lust returns. They live in a natural bliss that no religion nor vice could hope to impose on a man of his calibre. And he would never have anything imposed on him, nor compromise his bleak vision with a little metaphysical consolation. He is proud of what he lacks and proud to yearn and suffer. He bears his cross with a straight back. Macken is a man who stares into the abyss. That is not to say he is an ascetic. To resist is against his philosophy, it is egocentric, a sin. Better to succumb with a sense of disgust. That is the definition of decency. 

Dinner, September 23rd

Down the dark chute of the hall the dim gold kitchen light is on. She is alone, readying the dinner. She talks to herself now and then. Leonard Cohen, muffled and weary, softens the sound. It’s her music - a small, bold liberty. Being at that moment useful, doing something they can’t or won’t, she feels brave enough to add the spice of passive expression to her drudgery. Pots and pans lisp and clink, accompanying the heavy tread that has forgotten the finer points of being a woman. The dog licks the floor. She speaks to it, her grey head bowed over the steaming pot. The deep blue September evening blackens the trees outside where the birds she also feeds are roosting. Why should she remember? It has been so long since those days when she thought that it might have been possible for her to be appreciated.

An Interview with Seiji Ogawa, the 'Japanese Obama'

Nod.

Nod, nod, nodding nodding nodding, nod.

Stop. No more nodding. His chin's on his chest. Asleep. My chance. Leave the TV on, it'll wake him up if I. Gently, gently, don't creak, good. Softly. Now the handle. Don't creak, d-o-o-n't. Good, good. Out.

My room. Lie down, it's in the drawer beside the bed, quick get it. About half way through where the page is dog-eared. Shhht. Take it out and get going you've been waiting all day haven't you. Clutching it now ready to

Fuck the door turning under, under under the bed now!

“What? Whatareyou? Ah no! AH NOT AGAIN! At your age would you not have given it up? Ah for God's sake. Ah Screedeity for God's sake. Tom!? To-oom ?! TOM! HE'S BLOODY AT IT AGAIN”

*****

Yes! We Can Believe To The Change

An interview with Seiji Ogawa, the “Japanese Obama”.

Interview by Toshio Yoshida

Translated by Donald Keene

Golden spring sunlight pours through the window as I sit down in a quiet suburban teahouse to conduct the first ever interview with maverick LDP politician Seiji Ogawa. Mr.Ogawa's outspoken liberal views on such topics as immigration, the economy, and Japanese society, as well as rumours regarding his provenance, have led to him being dubbed the “Japanese Obama” - something hard to believe when I look at the meek, smiling face in front of me. Of course, the single greatest contributing factor to the Japanese Obama myth is 'That Rumour', namely that Ogawa's great-great-great-great-great grandfather may have been a Korean. To get it out of the way, I ask him about that first. “Completely without foundation.” Things go a little quiet. Outside the window three elderly dog walkers stand gathered in gossip. We begin our conversation again with some amicable smalltalk about the view in front of us.

Riding out the Recession

If you’re Irish and you’ve been to Chicago then you will know The Sodden Gael. You will remember the dark wooden furnishings, the treasured bric-a-brac from the Auld Country, the worn Guinness posters, the deluded menus with their Irish Car Bombs and Black and Tans. You will certainly remember all too well the limited and repetitious music, crowd pleasers from “Danny Boy” to “Christmas in New York” to “The Wild Rover” to “Whiskey in the Jar” and back to “Danny Boy”. You will know the kinds of people who frequent the place – long term ex-pats and grizzled Irish Americans clinging to the bar and to a romanticised notion of identity which makes their failure a form of authenticity, recent arrivals circling round them looking to ingratiate themselves in the hopes of getting work, and pockets of J1 visa types in GAA jerseys lowering pints and stoking their Irishness because they believe it is magnetically attractive to American women, and because no matter how much they stoke their courage it is never enough for them to make an advance before they have drunk themselves into a paralytic stupor. You will recognise instantly that tension in the air, and if you are sharp you will see that its cause is that people here feel a duty to be belligerent at all times because they are the Fighting Irish. Let the quick use their tongues and the dull their fists and may the best Irishman among them be master of both. So the legend goes.

J1: some Irishmen Come of Age in America

J1

In my cups I lay down on the conveyor belt to pass through with the baggage. I was warned. I asked why I could not travel that way for free as I weighed no more than “that rich cunt over there’s golf clubs”. Passage was more accommodating of a man’s means during the famine. They said it was dangerous down there without a seatbelt amongst the baggage which sometimes shifted in heavy turbulence and I replied that I was a grown man and they could let me worry about that. I asked them why the prejudice against living matter in favour of inanimate and whether they would allow me in the holds if I was a corpse, which they said they would. It was a price slightly too steep to pay and after berating them as savages, scalpers and butchers I reluctantly handed over the ticket which had cost me so many months of toil in the local newsagent’s, a heartless Centra, heartless like all the others, and full of Chinese now who don't celebrate Christmas and will work mad hours just to make the rest of us look bad, but that is another story. On board the plane there were many others who had gotten the visa like me, all ebullient and stoking their Irishness with hearty but tense renditions of “Athenry” to have it strong and ready upon arrival in that huge and uncaring land. The lights went out half way in a meek suggestion that perhaps it was time for us to sleep. The lad beside me was tossing his head from side to side, half conscious only, emotionally slurring the first line of “Fields of Athenry” again and again. After a few minutes the button for the hostess was jabbed impatiently and he cried out “Nurse, Nurse!” for her to bring him an umpteenth little whiskey in a plastic cup. Refreshed, he suggested to his friend they take out the hurleys and the sloitar and have a bit of a lash in the aisle. The friend said no, they’d kick us out. “They can’t fukken kick us out Mick we’re in a fukken plane.” “What do ye think the fukken parachutes are there for then?”