Last month, I had the good fortune to meet with Turkey’s best selling woman author, Elif Shafak in London. Author of 13 books (9 novels), please see my interview with her in the Irish Times HERE or click on the image below.
Sinead O’Connor
Pic: John Francis Bourke
Last week, as Uncle Boris Yeltsin posed for happy snaps on the lawn with George and Barbara at the Whitehouse, and Sarajevo shuddered under Serbian mortar fire, a whole microcosm of Western youth culture carried on regardless, at the popular music industry’s annual “New Music Seminar” in New York City.
Emerging from the subway in Manhattan’s Times Square, the brief stretch from the underground exit to the hotel hosting the seminar exposes the walker to the buzz of New York’s glitz and grime. To the backdrop of expensive Broadway theatres and department stores, yellow cabs jostle whizzing messenger-cyclists, teenage homeless pan-handle sullenly on corners and street hawkers flash fake Rolex watches at passers-by.
Once inside the Mariott Marquis, however, umbrage is assured. It is a standard-issue American luxury hotel, futuristic in form, efficient in its operation and designed to accomodate the comfort requisites of both tourist and convention-goer. Normally, family vacationers in pastel-casuals ride the elevator with gray-suited businessmen carrying briefcases. The latter might wear a badge that says “John Doe – National Insurance Representatives Convention”. For the week of the music seminar however, the Insurance reps are upstaged flamboyantly by Babylon’s most shameless upstart, Rock’n’roll. The seminar effectively provides a forum for the big business side of the music scene, becoming the hunting grounds of managers, publishers, promoters, lawyers and other sharks. But it is also an annual chance for performers of all shapes and hues to party and to be seen, as a brief stint of people-watching will prove. Post-punk Japanese Divas in day-glo mini-skirts and platform shoes ride the escalators. Pale Rock’n’roll animals from America’s East Coast contrast starkly with suntanned, muscular surf-babies from Northern California. Rap brothers in spandex and gold jewellery flank slick latino-beat masters from Miami or Seville.
77 Lucious Babes
The most interesting thing about the “New Music Seminar” is that its very concept is essentially a contradiction in terms: it is a Rock’n’roll Convention. While traditionally Rock’n’Roll claims to be the voice of youthful rebellion, and an alternative artistic force, it is also big business, so you have the rather hilarious situation where hip and trendy managers or members of bands like “The Toiling Midgets”, “Goober And The Peas” or “77 Lucious Babes” have to walk around the lobby of this conservative hotel (complete with Chanel/Waterford glass gift shops) wearing name-tagged convention badges!
The some 50 Irish delagates and musicians, coordinated by The Irish Export Board, convened on a stand among the hundreds of business “boothes” in a main exhibition hall. Most adopted a healthy attitude that combined the seminar’s business challenge with the more easy-going pace of the rock world. Deals would be initially instigated by a form of chat known as “schmoozing”, or initial contact-making, a process which has lead to a whole new vocabulary. For instance, the hotel’s lobby became the “schmoozatorium”, the bar was the “schmoozer”. A certain irrepressible band manager from Dublin earned the title “King Of Schmooze”, and since the field of operations was not confined to the convention hall, it was not unusual to hear one delegate ask another, at a late night rock gig, “will you have a drink or are you schmoozing?” The schmoozing, needless to say, got arguably better as the evenings went on, and indeed, it is not unheard of that a quick schmooze at the back of the hall has led to greater things. Like “doing lunch”, perhaps, another great New York convention.
If the seminar’s daylight ethic is taking care of business (as Elvis himself used to say), the night time idea is slightly different. With literally thousands of acts from all over the world performing in clubs around the city, the idea is basically to see who can who can catch the most gigs, who can meet the most people, who can drink the most alcohol, and who can remain coherently vertical the longest in any of the after-hours bashes that inevitably follow the night of serious music. It’s a serious rock’n’roll challenge, and one which frequently leads to a sorry malady known unofficially as “schmoozeritis”.
Symptoms include extreme fatigue, involuntary exclamations of epithets such as “Jayzus, I’m wrecked. Musicians suffer temporary lapses of memory: as they crawl offstage they will announce their immediate intention to withdraw to the hotel room, and yet will be spotted four hours later in an after-hours watering hole waxing lyrical on the glories of New York City.
Irish rock hounds tended to descend mainly on two venues for the post-seminar hanging out (“hanging out”, as opposed to schmoozing, involves no business element, and a deal more liquid refreshments). Brownies, once a notorious after-hours bar on Avenue A in the East Village, has become (along with Paddy Reilly’s bar on 28th), Manhattan’s home to the alternative Irish music scene, and it hosted several excellent gigs featuring Irish and Irish American musicians. For post-gig intimacy and atmosphere, however, Sine-é café on St. Mark’s Place probably topped the list, with one post-gig seisúin involving the impromptu talents of no less than The Four Of Us, Marianne Faithful, Sinead O’Connor and the erstwhile king of coffee house performance, Allan Ginsberg.
Yes, it was there in the dawn’s early hours that one and all miraculously forgot about six figure record company deals, national tours and music publishing contracts, and converged into a generous, universal musical community. Schmooze-free, timeless and often slightly out of tune, musicians would play with great abandon and without set lists in that great traditional seisúin spirit, and not a name-tag in sight. “Badges?” As one wit pronounced on the sidewalk outside Sin-é early Saturday morning, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!!”
And the party just went on.
The current crisis of refugees in the Mediterranean has crowded our screens over the last few weeks with heartbreaking press images of refugee families, children sodden with seawater, clamouring aboard rescue vessels, sitting in holding camps and worse.
Oxfam’s DONATE page gives an opportunity for Irish people to help out, but its outreach efforts recently took an new and innovative turn when they produced a handsome pamphlet featuring work by fifteen Irish writers, who were asked to each write a short piece inspired by an individual photograph depicting a refugee or refugees, taken by international field photographers.
Colum McCann, Ella Griffin, Eoin Macnamee, Kate Kerrigan, Belinda McKeon, Gerald Dawe, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Theo Dorgan, Rita Ann Higgins, Helen Falconer, Jan Carsen, Michael Harding, Bethany Dawson, Gavin Corbett and myself all contributed.
This project will be presented at a very special event on Culture Night, in Dublin’s Oxfam Bookshop on Parliament Street, with an exhibition of image by contributing photographers Kieran Doherty, Gabrielle Piquot, Pablo Tosco, Sam Tarling, Vincent Tremeau, MacKenzie Knowles and Oriol Gallard.
Please join us on Culture Night in Oxfam, Parliament Street for this event – and if you can’t go, be sure to check on as many of the links above as you can, to see the work of contributing writers and photographers. For those in Belfast, an exhibition of work by Kieran Doherty on the theme, “Make Them Visible” will take place on 12 November, at the Linen Hall in Belfast, for full details see here
And of course – don’t forget to donate to Oxfam’s crucial work HERE.
Kuir Mayem Atem (28), who lives at the Mingkaman refugee camp in South Sudan, as captured by Kieran Doherty for Oxfam
Click here for full Writing.ie article
In anticipation of the upcoming event in which I’ll be participating on Culture Night, 18 September 2015, I’ve written a piece for Writing.ie which discusses the idea of fiction that is inspired by reality, or in this particular case, by a photograph.
The photograph I received was a moving portrait of a South Sudanese refugee taken by conflict and field photographer Kieran Doherty, who was named earlier this year by TIME Magazine as “one of nine Irish photographers to look out for”.
Kuir Mayem Atem, who lives in a shelter in the Mingkaman refugee camp with her husband, their five childen her mother and other siblings, said, “Here we feel safe but it’s tough living like this.”
Since the outbreak of civil war in December 2013, Sudan remains one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises. Over 2 million people have fled their homes, of which over half a million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. To read the article, click here; for coverage in The Irish Times, click here; information on the event itself, you can read my previous blog post here.
Most of all – don’t forget to donate to Oxfam if you can, to actively support refugees like Kuir.
He pulls me out of the cabin near the beach, and tells me the tide is alive. He says that out in the blue night a million tiny vessels are flowing along the current off to somewhere else, and he wants us to go with them. I say no. The hut near the beach is all we have, where we can rest in relative safety, considering the times.
from Famine Fever, a short story
In November 1995, prompted by a significant historical anniversary, I wrote a short fiction piece on a big emotional issue: the Great Famine. This morning, I woke up and realised that this year was another anniversary, albeit not one people have tended to note. I’ve decided to re-post Famine Fever before the year is out, considering the times.
And since there are still people in crisis in our community and very close by, I thought I’d post these too:
Simon Community Concern ALONE De Paul Ireland Oxfam Focus Ireland
My great news this week is that the literary publishing house based in Galway, Doire Press, is to publish my first collection of short stories, Ferenji, in 2016.
DOIRE PRESS was founded in 2007 in Connemara by Lisa Frank and John Walsh, also both writers, who seek to publish new and emerging writers who give voice to what it means to be Irish in a changing Ireland.
Since then Doire Press has continued to blossom, publishing writers as diverse as Susan Millar DuMars, Miceál Kearney, Aileen Armstrong, Celeste Augé, Jim Mullarkey and Madeleine D’Arcy, whose collection Waiting for the Bullet won the Edge Hill Readers’ prize; and poets Kimberly Campanello, Kevin O’Shea, Paul O’Reilly, Susan Lindsay, Jo Hemmant, Dimitra Xidous and Adam White, whose book, Accurate Measurements was the only Irish publication to be shortlised for the prestigious Forward Prize in 2013.
Their anthologies include 30 under 30, chosen as a Top Ten Title of 2012 by Joseph O’Connor in The Irish Times, and Galway Stories, a collection of short stories set in neighbourhoods throughout the city and county of Galway by many of Ireland’s top writers, including Kevin Barry, Mary Costello, Mike McCormack, Nuala Ní Chonchuír, Olaf Tyaransen and Julian Gough.
I first met John and Lisa in December of 2013, when I was assigned to write a review for Hot Press of Eamon Carr’s first published play, Deirdre Unforgiven: A Journal of Sorrows (you can read that review here, BTW).
Eamonn’s book was beautifully produced, and featured a compelling cover with ink line drawing by John Devlin. The play itself is a fascinating exploration of the old Deirdre of the Sorrows legend. Since original drama is rarely given such handsome treatment, I looked up the Doire Press website and found more excellent new Irish writing there.
While – like every other contemporary writer of short stories and poetry – I had initially toyed with the idea of self-publishing, I made a submission of my work to Doire Press the following year when their annual open call for submissions came out, and while my 2014 proposal – a collection of stories on the theme of Irish emigrants abroad – wasn’t selected, my 2015 one – short stories set among peacekeepers, aid workers and press working in conflict and post-conflict zones – was. Happily, it will now be published as one of their 2016 titles.
The other titles writers to be published in the coming year by Doire Press are:
The Woman on the Other Side by Stephanie Conn
Jewtown by Simon Lewis
Hearing Voices / Seeing Things by William Wall
Peacekeeper by Michael J. Whelan
Proof of a Great Restlessness by Adam White
I’m very proud to be part of this great group of artists, and look forward to working with John and Lisa at Doire Press in 2016 for my debut collection of short stories, Ferenji.
So, now – back to the writing, but more anon!
