Latest news with #LustforLife
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Some of the world's best bands play Scotland in June: Here's our pick
But can we point you in the direction of this Glasgow gig by our favourite Fifer Jacob Alon? The singer-songwriter has often been called Scotland's next big thing (we said it ourselves in The Herald Magazine back in January), a debut album, the sublime In Limerence, out May 30, is the next step on the journey. Alon's delicate vocals and searingly honest lyrics have drawn comparisons to Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley. Heady company, but Alon doesn't sound out of place. This will probably be one of the quieter gigs this month, but it will possibly resonate the longest. Iggy Pop 02 Academy, Glasgow, June 3 Iggy Pop (Image: PA) Maybe the drugs do work. Or maybe he's indestructible. So many of his contemporaries are no longer with us, but Jim Osterberg's still around, still singing Lust for Life and The Passenger and showing off his aged torso as he reaches the fag end of his seventies. It really is quite something. Still a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, in other words. Spectacular Shostakovich: Royal Scottish National Orchestra Usher Hall, June 6; Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, June 7 Marking the 50th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death, the RSNO performs his epic 11th Symphony, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1905. Thomas Sondergard conducts and cellist Daniel Muller-Schott is the soloist. Pulp OVO Hydro, Glasgow, June 7 Getting the jump on Oasis, Britpop's finest (well, it's them or Suede) mark their first album - entitled More - in 24 years with another round of live gigs. Last seen in these parts ushering in 2024 at Edinburgh's Hogmanay, the band have had a new lease of life whilst mourning the loss of bass player Steve Mackey. Will the new album live up to its predecessors? That remains to be seen (the precursor single, Spike Island, is OK but maybe not much more). Still, any excuse to sing along to Do You Remember the First Time and Babies is always to be welcomed. Abbie Gordon The Poetry Club, Glasgow, June 19 New blood. Abbie Gordon is a teenage singer-songwriter from Irvine who was named Young Live Artist of the Year in December after headlining King Tut's. The future starts here. And while you're at it, maybe check out Theo Bleak (Canvas, Dundee, June 20), another fresh singer-songwriter with an ear for a tune. Diana Ross OVO Hydro, Glasgow, June 25 Diana Ross (Image: Newsquest) Yes, that Diana Ross. Now in the foothills of her ninth decade on the planet, Ross has a back catalogue that stretches back to her Motown pomp in The Supremes, and takes in her imperious disco era working with Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, her Bee Gees-fuelled Chain Reaction chart ascendancy and even collaborating with the name producer of the moment, Jack Antonoff, on 2021 album Thank You. Not sure she'll have any time for deep cuts. The question is, which of her 100 plus singles will she leave out? Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band Mono, Glasgow, June 25 The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band (Image: free) In the mood for some country blues? This might be the gig for you. Big voice, big beard and guitar picking. The good Reverend, who hails from Indiana, leads a trio including his wife Washboard Breezy (on washboard, you might not be surprised to hear) and Jacob Powell on percussion. Can't deny, they make a noise. Lana Del Rey Hampden Park, Glasgow, June 26 Lana Del Rey (Image: free) Gone are the days Lana used to hang out in Glasgow's south side, but she is back in the city for this arena gig towards the end of the month. Del Rey's shtick - established as early as her first single Video Games - is the society girl with an eye for bad boys, as played out in a Mogadon haze. On paper that doesn't sound like a recipe for filling arenas but it's turned out to be surprisingly moreish. Del Rey is currently the 25th most streamed artist in the world. Hopefully she will turn up on time this evening and not risk getting the power turned off as happened to her at Glastonbury in 2023. Simple Minds Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, June 27 Part of this year's Summer Sessions programme (preceded by the Sex Pistols and Sting on June 21 and June 25 respectively), Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill return for a hometown gig. We can argue over their back catalogue (my cut-off point is 1982; given the commercial success of what was to follow clearly few agree), but the truth is they remain a formidable live act. As frontman, Kerr both looks his age and acts like he's still in his twenties. It's quite the combination. Macy Gray Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, June 27 Macy Gray (Image: Newsquest) Want to feel old? It's now been 26 years - yes, 26 - since Macy Gray's breakthrough single, I Try, which introduced us to the gorgeous rasp of her voice. It remains her best known song, but she has never stopped making records. Quick question. Is her cover of Radiohead's Creep better than Billie Eilish's? Discuss. Kid Creole and the Coconuts Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, June 28; Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, June 29 To be honest, there is a corner of my head where it's always 1982. The year I left home, the year I started fending for myself, the year I fell in love. Kid Creole and the Coconuts were part of that year's soundtrack, a heady mix of disco, Latin rhythms and New Pop, amped up by August Darnell's larger-than-life ego and Zoot suits, and gilded by the Coconuts themselves, all backcombed blonde attitude and harmonies. It was pop panto back then, probably more so now, but, admit it, you're humming 'Ona-Ona-Onamatopea' even as you read this. (Who cares if that's not the real lyric? It's a better one.) Lucy Dacus Usher Hall, Edinburgh, June 30; Barrowland Ballroom, July 1 Fresh from her time as a member of Boygenius and being namechecked by Taylor Swift in her song The Tortured Poets Department, the American singer-songwriter is touring in support of her latest album Forever is a Feeling. It contains a track called Limerence, by the way, which takes us back to Jacob Alon and where we came in.
Atlantic
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How to Look at Paul Gauguin
The life of Paul Gauguin is the stuff of legend. Or several legends. There's the Romantic visionary invoked by his friend August Strindberg—'a child taking his toys to pieces to make new ones, rejecting and defying and preferring a red sky to everybody else's blue one.' There's the voracious malcontent whom Edgar Degas pegged as a 'hungry wolf without a collar.' There's the accomplished swordsman and brawny genius hammed up by Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life, who takes a break from bickering with Vincent van Gogh to growl, 'I'm talking about women, man, women. I like 'em fat and vicious and not too smart.' And there's the 21st-century trope of the paint-smattered, colonizing Humbert Humbert, bedding 13-year-old girls and sowing syphilis throughout the South Seas. This arc from rebel to swashbuckling art hero to repellent villain tells us less about the artist than it does about the audience (Quinn won an Oscar for that moody growling in 1957). Still, given the hand-wringing and self-righteous mudslinging that have accompanied recent Gauguin exhibitions, the time is ripe to ask what we actually know, and how that knowledge should impinge on our experience of art, if at all. Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux's new biography of Gauguin, aims 'not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.' Charting his life from birth (in Paris in 1848) to death (in French Polynesia in 1903), she makes use of the recently recovered manuscript of his stream-of-consciousness semi-memoir, Avant et après, as well as fresh conclusions about his sexual health suggested by his teeth. More broadly, she chooses to consider events in view of historical circumstance rather than moral dicta. (Prideaux, whose previous books have examined the lives of Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edvard Munch, has a gift for disrupting snap judgments about difficult men.) If the Gauguin who emerges here is not easy to love, he does seem of a piece with the willfully contradictory, persistently gripping art he left behind. The biographical facts are improbably cinematic. On his mother's side, he traced his ancestry back to the Borgias; the family tree included a pope, a saint, the viceroy of Peru, and his grandmother, the rabble-rousing feminist Flora Tristan. (Karl Marx was a fan.) Gauguin's childhood might have been dreamed up, tag team, by Gabriel García Márquez and Émile Zola. When he was an infant, his family set sail for Peru, where his journalist father planned to establish a left-wing newspaper and his mother hoped to reclaim an inheritance. His father dropped dead en route in Tierra del Fuego, but his mother continued on to Lima with her two small children, joining the palatial household of a great-uncle. She never got the money, but as one of the rare Europeans to take a serious interest in pre-Columbian art, she acquired a substantial collection of ancient Moche ceramics. Those animated dogs and portrait heads would burrow deep into her son's imagination. For his part, Gauguin recalled running free in the streets with the enslaved girl who was his closest companion and being visited in the night by a madman who lived on an adjacent roof. When he returned to France at the age of 7, he couldn't speak the language and understood none of the social codes. 'I am a savage from Peru' was the belligerent self-explanation he would use for the rest of his life. Boarding school provided a bit of classical education and a habit of skeptical inquiry, but he flunked out of higher education and, with no discernible skills, went to sea as a lowly ship's boy at 17. Returning six years later, he took up a position trading futures on the Paris Bourse arranged for him by Gustave Arosa, a financier, an art collector, and his de facto stepfather. (Arosa and Gauguin's mother had had a very French arrangement.) Improbably, Gauguin excelled. He disdained most of his colleagues—'prosperity did not make him clubbable,' Prideaux notes—but he made lots of money, fell in love, and married a Dane, Mette Gad, who shared his indifference to bourgeois convention. 'Carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,' Gauguin began, for the first time, to take an interest in art—initially as a collector of the new Impressionism and then dabbling on his own. He enlisted the help of Arosa's friend Camille Pissarro and began painting softly churning landscapes en plein air. Within a few years, he was showing with the Impressionists himself. Money continued to roll in from the Bourse and, Prideaux writes, 'delightful babies magically appeared at two-year intervals.' From the December 2024 issue: Susan Tallman on the exhibit that will change how you see Impressionism This halcyon bliss was too good to last. When the market crashed in December 1882, Gauguin was wiped out and lost his job. He and Gad had saved nothing, and Arosa, his safety net, died within months. In lieu of any new employment opportunities, Gauguin decided that he would support his wife and five children as an avant-garde painter. (Like many people who enjoy early success in the markets, he did a lot of magical thinking about money.) To economize, they moved to Copenhagen, but his painting stalled, so they decided that he should return to France and send for the family once he was again on a secure footing. Gad would stay in Copenhagen with the children, teaching French and sometimes selling things from his art collection to make ends meet. Prideaux depicts Gauguin's ensuing poverty without romance—the cold, the filth, the food insecurity. The son he briefly had charge of grew malnourished and contracted smallpox. The only job Gauguin managed to get was pasting up posters. As for the Paris art world, it was abuzz with Georges Seurat, color theory, and Pointillism. Gauguin, who never met a system he didn't despise, was exasperated. He decamped to Brittany, with its dramatic coast and folkloric peasants speaking their strange Celtic tongue, and there his art stopped looking like anybody else's. Where Impressionist landscapes had dissolved in light, Gauguin's grew solid. The brushwork flickered, but the edges were hard. Breton Women Chatting (1886) is packed with elbows and aprons and acrobatic headdresses. He cribbed its tipped-up perspective from Japanese woodcuts; the square-shouldered, profile posture from ancient Egypt; the girl fiddling with her shoe from Degas. This kind of appropriation and stitching-together had been practiced by Degas and Édouard Manet, but Gauguin's painting doesn't look like theirs either. The strange mix of naturalism and frozen poses, the lasso-like outlines, the marriage of the familiar and the otherworldly would become his brand. Gauguin's new mode attracted fervent acolytes among younger artists, but it produced nothing resembling an income stream, so he sailed to Panama with a friend in pursuit of a job through his sister's husband. He was again disappointed. From there he went to Martinique ('I have always had a fancy for running away,' he wrote), where he lived in a hut, contracted malaria, and painted dense landscapes that suggest the interlocking shapes and eventful surfaces of tapestries. Those paintings stunned Vincent van Gogh and his art-dealer brother, Theo, who proposed that the two painters spend some months together in Arles, living and working on Theo's dime. The experiment ended in a bloody spectacle, with a straight razor, a severed ear, and Gauguin briefly accused of murder when the police thought that the razor was his and that Van Gogh was dead. (The Van Gogh brothers held him blameless, but the experience was harrowing for everyone.) Soon afterward, the 1889 Exposition Universelle, with its unprecedented display of distant cultures, gave fresh fuel to Gauguin's wanderlust. He was far better traveled than most Europeans, but the Javanese dancers and the full-scale replica of a tower from Angkor Wat were revelations—alternative ways of conceptualizing narrative and space, of arranging figures, of living. He was now in his 40s and years had passed since he'd left Copenhagen, but he and Gad remained married and he continued to seek means of uniting his family. He began applying for jobs in French colonies, hoping for something in Tonkin (for its proximity to Angkor Wat) or perhaps Madagascar with a friend. In the end, he headed for Tahiti, without a job but with an agreement from the government to buy a painting produced there. Before leaving, he wrote Gad promising that they would all be together within three years. Papeete, the capital, was a disappointment: brick buildings laid out in a grid, populated by pompous Frenchmen and Native women cloaked in missionary-imposed smocks known as Mother Hubbards. It was, he wrote, 'the Europe which I had thought to shake off' only worse, given 'the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.' He alienated the officials who might have offered him work and washed out as a portrait painter. (Flattery was not in his wheelhouse.) So he went off to a remote village in search of the prelapsarian Tahiti of his imagination. Gauguin had little money, lacked the ability to fish or farm, and was bad at languages, yet the Tahitians accepted and assisted him. Somehow he soon became 'married' to a teenager named Teha'amana, or so the story goes; our key source of information about her and the relationship is Gauguin's romanticized account of his early Tahitian adventures, Noa Noa, written after the fact for a French audience to build a poetic context for his paintings. (Noa noa means 'fragrance.') In one passage, he writes about another woman in his village, calling her 'not at all handsome according to our aesthetic rules. She was beautiful.' The same might be said of the paintings that now poured forth, described by Prideaux as 'a collective hymn of love' for Teha'amana 'and, through her, for the place and its people.' In his extraordinary 1891 painting Ia Orana Maria ('Hail Mary'), an Indigenous Mary carries an Indigenous Christ child on one shoulder (both with halos), while Indigenous worshippers pray and a yellow-winged angel lurks in flowering bushes. (The nonwhite casting, Prideaux notes, was considered 'blasphemous for over half a century.') It's a mash-up of Renaissance iconography, Javanese postures, and the busy patterning of the Pre-Raphaelites, but everything fits together with the kind of breathless sublimity you see in Fra Angelico: a world that is both physical and metaphysical, intoxicating and inevitable. This idyll was interrupted by, of all things, success. Van Gogh had died in 1890, but in Copenhagen, the first joint exhibition of his work and Gauguin's, in 1893, had stirred great excitement. Urged to return to Europe, Gauguin made the 10-week voyage back. Remarkably, he still aimed to bring his European family to Tahiti, but once again, his sales proved insufficient. He took a studio in Paris, and then, on a trip to Brittany, he got into a row with some locals, who shattered his leg. Months in the hospital were followed by years of dependence on laudanum and morphine. The leg never fully healed, but by July 1895 he was well enough to re-embark for the South Seas. Though Papeete was even worse than he remembered, his need for medical attention kept him nearby. He built a hut in a village a few miles from the capital. Teha'amana came to visit for a few days, but in Gauguin's absence she had taken a Tahitian husband, to whom she returned. A new teenager, Pau'ura, filled her place, and Gauguin returned to his easel, painting dreamy narratives with mythological overtones, such as Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), but his life refused to settle into the old idyll. He lost his home, and even attempted suicide. Unable to pay his hospital bills, he was declared 'indigent.' Eventually Gauguin got a job as a draftsman for the department of public works and began writing political commentary for a local paper, but his sense of having betrayed his values and gifts in Tahiti's colonial milieu only grew. In 1901, he moved on to the remote island of Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas. Pau'ura chose to remain in Tahiti with their infant son. In Europe, his paintings began to turn a profit at long last, but two years later he was dead, at 54. Posthumous exhibitions cemented Gauguin's status as the most transformative of the post-Impressionist painters. His willingness to reimagine the visible world pointed the way to symbolism, expressionism, and abstraction. Meanwhile, the warmth and muscular grace of his Polynesian paintings made them perennially popular. For a time, this combination of wayward emotional expression and cultural openness, this embrace of other forms of beauty, seemed to embody a new, modern ideal. All of this got turned on its head beginning in the 1970s, as the art world became sensitized to the deep inequities between men and women, white and nonwhite, colonizer and colonized. Paintings whose reverence for Indigenous people had once shocked were now held in contempt, viewed as defiling those same people. Gauguin was castigated for failing to shake off European pictorial traditions, and for appropriating non-European traditions. The man who from the age of 7 had considered himself an outsider to Western civilization was now seen as the abusive beneficiary of its entitlements. Because political power was vested in European men, interpersonal relations were presumed to follow suit. A narrative of exploitation was inferred. A Gauguin retrospective last year occasioned the headline: 'Paul Gauguin Was a Violent Paedophile. Should the National Gallery of Australia Be Staging a Major Exhibition of His Work?' Its description of the artist as a 'serial rapist' has been widely repeated online. We have no testimony from Teha'amana, and other than Pau'ura's late-in-life recollections of a man she fondly referred to as a 'rascal,' none from his other partners, so this accusation presumably reflects current definitions of statutory rape. Prideaux sees Teha'amana as a victim of her own family, who apparently offered her up before Gauguin had asked, as well as of 'the lust of the much older European man.' She is also at pains to note that even in France itself the age of consent was then 13 (in most American states, it was even younger), and that sex between teenagers and adults was 'unremarkable.' People today may find this repugnant, but what Teha'amana felt about it all, we cannot know. From the May 2023 issue: It's okay to like good art by bad people New scientific evidence, however, sheds light on one charge. An excavation of Gauguin's Hiva Oa property in 2000 turned up four teeth whose DNA matched that of his father's remains and of living descendants in Europe and Polynesia. Tests run for cadmium, mercury, and arsenic—the standard treatments for syphilis—were negative. Absence of treatment is not absence of illness, of course, but given how much time Gauguin spent in hospitals, that such a familiar disease would have been missed seems unlikely. Actual evidence for his syphilitic status appears to be nonexistent. For a man whose sex life has attracted so much attention, Gauguin appears surprisingly circumspect in Prideaux's telling. Surrounded by randy young artists helping themselves to everything on offer in Brittany, he remained 'strait-laced about casual sex.' Of brothels, he commented to a friend: 'Not my cup of tea.' In art, he derided the pliant painted ladies who dotted the walls of the Paris Salon clad in nothing but allegorical pretense, calling them 'bordello art.' The women he depicted, by contrast, come across as individual, self-possessed people. They rarely smile and are never coy. The girls in his Tahitian village, he wrote, 'made me timid with their sure look, their dignity of bearing, and their pride of gait.' The one European nude he deeply admired was Manet's Olympia, with her hauteur, her calculating gaze, her hand clamped firmly over her crotch. He kept a reproduction with him throughout his adult life, along with the books of his radical-feminist grandmother. In a diatribe on the Catholic Church, he wrote that a woman 'has the right to love whomever she chooses' and 'to spit in the face of anyone who oppresses her.' One might be tempted to blame that 'fat and vicious and not too smart' line from Lust for Life on the macho art ethos of mid-century writers. But on page two of Avant et après, you can read in Gauguin's own hand, ' J'aime les femmes aussi quand elles sont vicieuses et qu'elles sont grasses ' ('I also like women when they're kinky and fat'). He might have been speaking from the heart, though his statement—as so often—has the ring of a provocation. Gauguin never outgrew the juvenile urge to scorn, shock, or just prank the elders. For his last home, he carved a horned portrait of the local monseigneur dubbed Father Lechery. And after all, contradiction was his stock-in-trade. Some pages further on in Avant et apr è s, he observed that 'precision often destroys the dream, takes all the life out of the Fable.' It was a sloppy life, full of colliding impulses, thwarted aspirations, and scattered commitments. But in his paintings, prints, and sculptures, he could make it right—building a world where unreasonable combinations contrive to make unexpected sense and things that don't belong nonetheless fit.
Sydney Morning Herald
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
My suburb is the beating cauliflower heart of Melbourne's gluten-free belt
Our south-and western border is the Merri Creek, and although Clifton Hill and Fitzroy North can claim to have prettier aspects, we get to enjoy it amidst the roar of trucks on Heidelberg Road. If the creek ever floods, it's the hardy folk of Westgarth who live on the flood plain. Is Westgarth part of Northcote? In the old Melway, Westgarth looked to be its own suburb. But over at Australia Post, they won't give Westgarth a postcode, smudging it into 3070. So as much as some renegade Westgarthians might want to secede, hogging the Bill Lawry Oval and the Merri footbridge for themselves, we keep Westgarth in the fold. Like Australia needs Western Australia for its iron ore, we need Westgarth for its cinema, which is a grand, art nouveau beauty at the base of Ruckers Hill. We also need it for its famous wholefoods store, Terra Madre, which is where I go to shop if I want to feel like a marble being tilted around a maze where the walls are made entirely of red lentils. There is a way out, I promise, and you can reward yourself at checkout with an impulse buy of Northcote's finest carob. We are famous for our cafe culture, think Vienna around the turn of the century, or Paris during the Enlightenment, except the talk around here is all about the design of the next tattoo sleeve, or Pokey Le Farge's tour dates. Pokey is a randomly selected, excellent but little-known touring artist who blew my mind with a show at the Northcote Social Club six years ago. That sort of thing happens in the live music hub that is 3070. It's even better now that the Northcote Theatre has been renovated. Every weekend, a queue snakes around the corner into Bastings Street, the ages and dress of the gig goers varying with the shades and genres of who's playing. For some decades, Northcote was thought of as a hotbed of creativity, a place for artists, musicians and writers. I do love that our local primary school, Westgarth Primary, has an 'Idol night' that is a no-kids-allowed karaoke fundraiser extravaganza at which parents sing along with a 10-piece band. In the first years I was involved, Ben Ely from Regurgitator was on bass. I dressed up as Piggy Pop (fat Iggy Pop) with drawn-on abs and sang Lust for Life. It was ridiculous, Ben and I collaborating on a musical performance. I wondered if it would happen in other suburbs of Melbourne. It felt very Northcote. Loading Is Northcote still a place for artists? Rising property prices have changed things considerably, although I'm pleased to report that I'm writing this article on an Olivetti typewriter at a High Street whiskey bar that also stocks the complete works of James Joyce. The clack of the keys is putting everybody off their $22 a pop whiskey mules. But there is still a community feel to the suburb, a sense that we can all come together in the car park of the new aquatic centre and circle unsuccessfully for a park together. Our street has a WhatsApp group, where we find out who has an overabundance of quinces or which neighbour had what car stolen overnight. We even have an Oxford Street Tree Art exhibition, organised by Matt at number 19, who gets us all to dress up our street trees. My best effort was to put a shopping trolley around a trunk, so it looked like the tree was growing through the middle of it. Thank you Martin, at number six, for your angle grinder. My favourite community activity is visiting Dog Park, which I can't talk too much about because our dog park is not actually a dog park, and I don't want to alert the rangers. We also have a dog called Ranger at Dog Park, so if a ranger actually comes, and someone yells 'Ranger!' — look it's all going to be very confusing. What we need at this point is some giant wooden dog, preferably with eyes that flash red when someone is coming.
The Age
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
My suburb is the beating cauliflower heart of Melbourne's gluten-free belt
Our south-and western border is the Merri Creek, and although Clifton Hill and Fitzroy North can claim to have prettier aspects, we get to enjoy it amidst the roar of trucks on Heidelberg Road. If the creek ever floods, it's the hardy folk of Westgarth who live on the flood plain. Is Westgarth part of Northcote? In the old Melway, Westgarth looked to be its own suburb. But over at Australia Post, they won't give Westgarth a postcode, smudging it into 3070. So as much as some renegade Westgarthians might want to secede, hogging the Bill Lawry Oval and the Merri footbridge for themselves, we keep Westgarth in the fold. Like Australia needs Western Australia for its iron ore, we need Westgarth for its cinema, which is a grand, art nouveau beauty at the base of Ruckers Hill. We also need it for its famous wholefoods store, Terra Madre, which is where I go to shop if I want to feel like a marble being tilted around a maze where the walls are made entirely of red lentils. There is a way out, I promise, and you can reward yourself at checkout with an impulse buy of Northcote's finest carob. We are famous for our cafe culture, think Vienna around the turn of the century, or Paris during the Enlightenment, except the talk around here is all about the design of the next tattoo sleeve, or Pokey Le Farge's tour dates. Pokey is a randomly selected, excellent but little-known touring artist who blew my mind with a show at the Northcote Social Club six years ago. That sort of thing happens in the live music hub that is 3070. It's even better now that the Northcote Theatre has been renovated. Every weekend, a queue snakes around the corner into Bastings Street, the ages and dress of the gig goers varying with the shades and genres of who's playing. For some decades, Northcote was thought of as a hotbed of creativity, a place for artists, musicians and writers. I do love that our local primary school, Westgarth Primary, has an 'Idol night' that is a no-kids-allowed karaoke fundraiser extravaganza at which parents sing along with a 10-piece band. In the first years I was involved, Ben Ely from Regurgitator was on bass. I dressed up as Piggy Pop (fat Iggy Pop) with drawn-on abs and sang Lust for Life. It was ridiculous, Ben and I collaborating on a musical performance. I wondered if it would happen in other suburbs of Melbourne. It felt very Northcote. Loading Is Northcote still a place for artists? Rising property prices have changed things considerably, although I'm pleased to report that I'm writing this article on an Olivetti typewriter at a High Street whiskey bar that also stocks the complete works of James Joyce. The clack of the keys is putting everybody off their $22 a pop whiskey mules. But there is still a community feel to the suburb, a sense that we can all come together in the car park of the new aquatic centre and circle unsuccessfully for a park together. Our street has a WhatsApp group, where we find out who has an overabundance of quinces or which neighbour had what car stolen overnight. We even have an Oxford Street Tree Art exhibition, organised by Matt at number 19, who gets us all to dress up our street trees. My best effort was to put a shopping trolley around a trunk, so it looked like the tree was growing through the middle of it. Thank you Martin, at number six, for your angle grinder. My favourite community activity is visiting Dog Park, which I can't talk too much about because our dog park is not actually a dog park, and I don't want to alert the rangers. We also have a dog called Ranger at Dog Park, so if a ranger actually comes, and someone yells 'Ranger!' — look it's all going to be very confusing. What we need at this point is some giant wooden dog, preferably with eyes that flash red when someone is coming.
Irish Independent
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Bealtaine Festival's film tour brings Italian classic to Wicklow
For over 20 years the resource organisation Access Cinema – whose mission is to provide all audiences throughout Ireland with access to the best of Irish, world and independent cinema, via a national network of non-profit and voluntary organisations – has partnered with the Irish Film Institute to organise a May film tour. The screenings happen in May to coincide with the Bealtaine Festival, where audiences over the age of 55 are actively encouraged to get involved with the Arts in their local areas. Film is one of the most accessible art forms and each year titles are chosen that it is hoped will appeal to the target audience. The film tour has struggled a little in the post-Covid landscape so this year the approach was changed a little, and organisers asked some of the cinema-loving audiences to help programme this year's tour. A call-out was arranged for volunteers to meet (in person and remotely) over a few months to work together to choose at least one of the titles. The group – comprising of volunteers from Droichead Art Centre, Dunamaise Art Centre and Mermaid Art Centre, along with the IFI's Wild Strawberry film club counterparts – attended meetings and programming workshops to work towards a title selection. Brigid O'Brien was Mermaid's representative. Part of what informed the selection was this year being Bealtaine's 30th Birthday and its continued theme of 'Lust for Life', based on Iggy Pop's iconic punk-era song celebrating life's dreams and ambitions. After much debate and discussion the title chosen for the tour was the classic Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore's loving homage to the cinema. A winner of awards across the world, the film tells the story of Salvatore, a successful film director, returning home for the funeral of Alfredo, his old friend who was the projectionist at the local cinema throughout his childhood. Soon, memories of his first love affair with the beautiful Elena and all the highs and lows that shaped his life come flooding back, as Salvatore reconnects with the community he left 30 years earlier. The Wicklow screening for Bealtaine's film selection of Cinema Paradiso takes place in Mermaid Arts Centre, on Monday, May 26, at 5.30pm. Tickets €3 includes tea/coffee.
