I’m very proud to be DJing this Sunday May 14th at Vinyl Love for Repeal, a charity gig with all proceeds going towards the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment.
The Vinyl Love collective has brought together DJs and music lovers to play eight of their favourite vinyl records in eight different cities on Sunday May 14th. The cities and venues are South William/Wah Wah Club in Dublin, 40ft Brewery in London, Gulp’d Cafe in Cork, Mojo Lounge in Waterford, Ormston House in Limerick, Roisin Dubh in Galway, Tricky’s McGarrigles in Sligo and Common Edge Street in Manchester.
There’s a suggested donation in each venue but you can donate whatever you can afford. It starts at 2pm and continues on until late. Hopefully the weather will be gorgeous and we can all enjoy a drink and great tunes in aid of a great cause.
Here’s Nialler9 explaining a bit more about the event.
A fellow bookworm and I were talking about books a few weeks ago. He said that one of his favourite things about reading is how it allows us to experience worlds we don’t inhabit and so contributes to our understanding of other people and their lives, something that I’ve also always loved about reading.
Then last week I read an article in the Guardian by Jessa Crispin which really resonated with me, about reading beyond our bubbles, in which she observes, ‘For a very long time, the literary gatekeepers pretended their taste was objective, not subjective. And because the traits of those gatekeepers, who were not just white men but Ivy League-educated, upper-middle-class white men located in cultural centres like New York and London, were predictably consistent, they often reached consensus. These are the books that are important. No really, just these ones. Those other writers are “minor”.’
I’m sick of books about straight white men finding themselves (SWMFT), i.e. the literary ‘canon’. Whether they find themselves in New York or London, or in college, or through drug experiences, or in a bad marriage, or through their work, is now beside the point. I can’t muster a fuck to give anymore. And so I have sought out books that are emblematic of my friend’s statement, about different lives, varied lives, protagonists from different countries and cultures and religions and races.
I heard about The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas a few months ago when it became a publishing sensation and topped the bestseller lists. As soon as I saw it in Hodges Figgis I flicked through it then bought it; reading random pages is always a great gauge for me.
The title comes from Thug Life by Tupac Shakur: ‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.’ The book is about sixteen-year-old Starr who witnesses the murder of her friend Khalil by a police officer. Starr and Khalil are unarmed and black. The cop is trigger happy and white. The story takes place in urban America and so The Hate U Give mirrors real life, and Khalil becomes synonymous with Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner and Mike Brown and Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland.
Starr is already conflicted, going to a private school and having a rich white boyfriend while she and her family live in the ghetto. When she was only twelve years old her parents told her how to behave if she was ever stopped by police; a conversation her white friends have almost certainly never had. And she has to think just as strategically when she is in school: ‘…I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude but not too much attitude, so I’m not a “sassy black girl.” I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound “white.”‘ Starr is ‘other’ no matter where she is.
After Kahlil’s murder Starr is called before a grand jury and her two lives collide. She wants to bear witness to her friend, to do right by her community, to speak the truth but nothing is straightforward in her world. Starr comes up against the gangs and violence in her neighbourhood and racism at school, all of which coalesce in a riot, bringing to mind Watts and Ferguson.
The book has been classified as Young Adult fiction but that’s a facile label. There aren’t many writers with the guts to take on such an emotionally charged topical subject, and Thomas writes with sensitivity, insight and grace. And amongst all the misery, there are genuinely funny moments, like Starr’s dad claiming that the Hogwarts Houses are really gangs: ‘They have their own colours, their own hideouts…Harry, Ron, and Hermione never snitch on one another, just like gangbangers. Death Eaters even have matching tattoos…’
The Hate U Give is an important book and Starr is a voice I won’t forget.
As a result of that article I started following the brilliant Twitter parody account Bored Elon Musk, ‘thoughts and inventions from Elon in his downtime’: ‘News app that connects to a blood pressure monitor and adjusts your feed accordingly.’ and ‘Podcast app that connects to Google Maps and finds you a perfectly timed episode based on your commute.’ have been two of my recent favourites.
I reviewed Big Little Lies on the blog yesterday and the always brilliant Anne Helen Petersen talks about Nicole Kidman and her performance in this article for Buzzfeed: ‘There’s a subtle implication that when a woman, especially a beautiful one, makes her way onscreen, it’s usually because of her looks or her body — not her talent. When a performance speaks truth to that lie, it’s a revelation.’
I adore stationery and collect notebooks, justifying it to myself because I need them for writing. I may also have to justify a couple of these sets of pencils from LZPENCILS on etsy. The sets are themed and each pencil has a different saying engraved on it. The Beyoncils are a great gift for any Beyonce fan but I want the Harry Potter and Heathers sets.
Colossal hits our screens in May. It’s a science fiction comedy whereby Anne Hathaway manifests as a giant monster terrorising South Korea. It sounds bonkers, it looks bonkers, and I can’t wait!
That’s all from me for April. For those of you in Ireland have a great Bank Holiday weekend!
So how many of you were gripped by Big Little Lies which finished up on TV last Monday? Everyone that I spoke to adored it as did I, and the performances were the best thing about it. The show focussed on a group of women in Monterey, mothers whose children go to the same school. An incident between two children kicks off the plot and for the next seven episodes the series explores the lives of the women: their relationships, their conflict about stay-at-home mothering versus careers, and their interactions with each other.
Manymalecritics dismissed Big Little Lies as high-end soap opera, a condescending view that entirely misses the point. Yes, the characters live in Pinterest-worthy opulent homes, yes, they are expensively dressed and yes, the show revolves around a murder mystery, but the show is, at its heart, a character study superbly acted by the female leads: Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Zoë Kravitz.
Kidman’s portrayal of Celeste, a woman locked in an abusive relationship, is a career best and it’s already generating award buzz. Her marriage isn’t a simplistic black and white ‘she’s good and he’s evil’ cliche, instead we see the intense love and passion between them intertwined with the extreme and frequent violence. Alexander Skarsgård’s performance as Kidman’s husband is so compelling that women may cross the street to avoid him for the rest of his life.
Reese Witherspoon decided to start her own production company, Pacific Standard, and develop her own projects because of a phenomenon she calls ‘Smurfette Syndrome’: being the only woman on a film set full of men. Her company has produced Big Little Lies, Wild, and Gone Girl, hugely successful projects with strong complex female characters which have challenged the notion that the film-going public aren’t interested in women’s stories. She’s admirable, a trailblazer within the industry.
Big Little Lies was originally conceived as a miniseries but due to its runaway popularity there is a rumour that it may be extended for a second series. As much as I loved it, I hope not, as the story was perfectly wrapped up and should stand alone. I can’t wait to see what Reese does next.
It’s no surprise that Ciarán McMenamin and Irvine Welsh have hit the book promotion circuit together in recent days. They seem like a natural fit as McMenamin’s debut, Skintown, is strongly reminiscent of Welsh’s debut Trainspotting. The focus of both books is disaffected young men who turn to drugs and violence to break up the monotony of their days in poverty stricken towns, and both understandably carry a strong anti-English sentiment.
McMenamin may be familiar to some of you as an actor with significant TV roles on his resumé. My first encounter with his work was a few weeks ago at Mountains to Sea Book Festival where he was joined by two other debut novelists, Rory Gleeson and Karl Geary, for a chat about their respective works. When each of the novelists read I was instantly interested in buying McMenamin’s book. His acting talent and considerable performance experience paid off and his reading was dynamic and very funny. (Which by the way is not as common as you might think. Having been to many similar events, writers who can successfully read their work aloud are a tiny minority.)
Skintown takes place in Enniskillen, McMenamin’s home town, in the early 1990s. Rave culture provides a much-needed escape from boredom and the threat of daily sectarian violence. Vinny works in a chip shop with his mate Jonty and dreams of escaping to Belfast for a better life, but instead of taking constructive steps towards it he meanders through his days in a haze of joints and pints. One evening while doing a good Samaritan gesture for a girl he knows, he ends up in a car crash with two Protestants, Kyle and Grant, who only moments earlier were preparing to kick his head in due to Vinny getting ‘the old ashes rubbed on my forehead six Wednesdays before Easter Sunday’. (A very convoluted way of saying he’s a Catholic, and this would be one of my few complaints about the book; the occasional tendency to overwrite and use many words where one simple one would be better.)
Kyle and Grant propose a business deal whereby Vinny and Jonty go to a nightclub called Ned’s (based on the infamous Kelly’s in Portrush) to sell a huge haul of ecstasy tablets on behalf of the other two, and collect a fee for doing so. With the prospect of cash Vinny’s Belfast dreams swim into reality and so he and Jonty readily agree. The novel’s best set piece occurs when Vinny gets high on ecstasy for the first time in the club. Having had some experience of this myself (cough) I can vouch for the authenticity of the whole thing and it’s not just accurate, it’s very funny and filled with razor-sharp detail.
Skintown occupies the same territory as Trainspotting and also Rob Doyle’s Here Are the Young Men and it is certainly an enjoyable read and an accomplished debut. Where it fell apart for me was the ending which I won’t reveal here but which was foreshadowed throughout the book. It didn’t ring true and felt a little forced, as if McMenamin was pushing for a definitive ending which the book didn’t really need. That being said, I’m really looking forward to reading whatever he produces next.
March was Women’s History Month, a concept I find kind of reductive because women are a part of and make history twelve months a year but moving on from that…here’s a list of groundbreaking female authors you should bookmark for your next book shop visit.
Royal Blood are releasing their second album later this year and they’re teasing us with this studio clip. Bring. It. On.
The upcoming documentary Kiki looks amazing, a new take drag ball culture which first reached mainstream popularity in Paris Is Burning.
Speaking of drag, Netflix has struck a deal whereby new episodes of Rupaul’s Drag Race are streamable the day after they’re broadcast in the US. Season 9 is two episodes in and Valentina’s my early favourite.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of horror films, so when I suggested to a friend of mine that we go see Get Out she was stunned. But the hype and rave reviews all mentioned that it was a lot more than just a simple horror movie so we went to see it on Tuesday, after I made her promise that if I got very very scared she would hold my hand.
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) has been going out with Rose Armitage (Alison Williams) for four months when she suggests a weekend visit to her parents’ house in the country. Chris agrees to go, but with some trepidation as Rose hasn’t told her white parents that he is black. Rose insists that her parents aren’t racist, that her father would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could, and Chris has no reason to worry.
When the two arrive at the Armitage’s large upmarket home Chris is a little disconcerted to see that the servants are black, but he is put at ease by Rose’s parents, Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford), both of whom are warm and welcoming. On the first night he sneaks outside for a cigarette and on his way back in is ambushed by Missy who gives out to him for smoking, saying that as she is a psychiatrist she could cure him of his addiction with hypnosis. She sits him down in her office and asks him questions about his mother’s death, hypnotising and then eventually paralysing Chris. He wakes up in bed with a start in the morning unsure whether the previous night’s events were real.
Later that day the Armitages have their annual garden party attended by their friends, all of whom are white. As Chris is introduced to them he becomes more and more disgusted by the racially insensitive comments they make and he eventually asks Rose if they can leave her parents’ house that night instead of staying over again as planned. But when they attempt to leave things get hellishly bizarre and even Chris’ worst fears are a day in the park in comparison to what the Armitages have in mind for him.
Get Out is more of a psychological thriller than a horror. There is no gore, nothing supernaturally freaky that makes you want to sleep with the lights on, and in fact there are several moments of real comedy throughout, many of which come from the character of Chris’ best friend Rod (Lil Rey Howery). Daily life in America for many black people is filled with a lot more real horror than anything this film has to offer.
Get Out is a brilliant satire of the ways in which white people who consider themselves liberals, who voted for Obama and are horrified by Trump, who condemn police brutality and consider themselves ‘woke’, can make life difficult and uncomfortable for black people. The film is a great commentary on race in America and thoroughly deserves the critical acclaim it has received. It’s in cinemas now – get on it!
