Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Pravda – The Wetherspoons Magazine

It is rather instructive to let one’s view stray when one stands in front of the yards and yards of magazines of a larger newsagent. The journals on woodturning, cross-stitching, long-wave radio and four-wheel drive cars are the manifestation of the multitude of interests that makes people’s lives worthwhile. And this is only the visible tip of the iceberg – if one considers the multitude of specialists’ journals available through subscription alone.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Pet Death

Pets have become honorary people. We talk to them, give them personal names, their own dishes and beds and buy them their own food and clothing. They may sleep on their owner’s bed and regularly sit with them. We have a great deal of contact with them, stroking and, as the word has it, ‘petting’ them. Pets become so important to some of us that when they die we feel bereaved. The gloom that descends upon a house and family can easily carry the shadow of the cloud brought when a human family member dies. The comfort and friendship brought by the pet, especially by dogs and cats, now becomes a notable absence. But is it really appropriate to talk of such feelings as grief? Some might say that we have become far too sentimental and take pets, especially dogs, far too much into our own lives. For others this bonding between human and animals is perfectly acceptable, reflecting as it does a relationship with roots deep in our prehistory. In many corners of western worlds is it appropriate to see pet death framed by a kind of bereavement and its experience of grief

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

The Agreement An Exhibition by Shane Cullen – Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast – 22nd of February to 23rd of March

Language – its mediation, distance, plurality, its uncertainty of meaning and its political implications have been exercised throughout the intellectual history of western civilisation. This examination has been done mainly by social theorists, philosophers and feminists but very rarely directly by an artist. The Agreement is an art work by Shane Cullen which in terms of scale and material is immediately impressive. The sculptural work installed at the Golden Thread Gallery is 67 metres in length presenting the 11,500 words of the British-Irish Peace Treaty of 1998 through digitally routing into 56 panels. With regard to scale the floor to ceiling panels brings to mind commemorative monuments such as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Replicate monuments through pre-existing text are recurrent in Cullen’s work such as Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, 1997 and it is a significant antecedent to this exhibition. It was a transcription of the written comms, messages written on cigarette papers by IRA prisoners which were smuggled through bodily orifices from the Maze prison during the hunger strikes of 1981. More importantly the work through presentation strategies gave the observer the opportunity to consider what is at stake in allowing these re-presentation to make itself present, allowing oneself to see the lack of fixity in the meaning of things, and it this lack of fixity which is a fundamental element of The Agreement.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

A Pint Of Plain – An Interview With Bar Owner Chris Roddy

It has been argued (Flynn 1943; O’Shaughnessy, deWitt et al. 1922; Ní Giolla Léith & Ramsbotham 1867) that the primary consideration in designing a bar is the ratio between the height of the bar stool and the height of the bar (the “Stag’s Head” ratio; the presence or absence of a brass footrail also inflects calculations, determining as it does the angle of the knee). Correct application of this ratio leads to what is known as an “inverse temporal” effect: a primitive form of time travel in which four pints appear to be one and three hours five minutes. This account is not itself necessarily flawed, but it is by no means exhaustive. What is required is a more idealist approach to the question, one that does not position itself in such a definitive and exclusive way in front of the bar. For the concept ‘bar’ is a dualism; one is either in front of or behind the bar. The privileging of either side of this binary leads to potentially unjustifiable conclusions.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Parks Review

Tree Score 1 tree = Desolate. Municipal. 2 trees = I can see the swings but there’s too much dog muck. 3 trees = Promising, offering some alternative vistas on the city. 4 trees = Good all-weather potential. Urban and ‘natural’ are conjoined with pleasing affectation. 5 trees = The city burgeons with new life. I can hear the grass growing.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Going West

J.M.: You didn’t set out to make a career in film but simply had these ideas for images which you wanted to put sound to, which ended up as finished film works.

J.T.: That was one of the things that drew me to using moving images, the fact that you could work with sound. The story was, my uncle died and one of the things he left me was his 8mm camera and that’s the one I made my first film ‘Transfer’ with. It was about cross-dressing and people’s sexuality; coupled with things you were into at the time, which was drug taking. This room that we’re in used to be my studio and still is in a way, there was a cutting room and editing bench right down one wall, with a big screen at the far end. There was also a section cordoned off and used as a projection booth and right down the bottom was a sound dubber with a little four track and mixing desk. ‘Shell Shock Rock’ was done in this room, by the time I got to make that, it was relatively sophisticated down here. Prior to that I had made loads and loads of little things, trying to learn how to do things, like holding something in sync. You would have a little L.E.D reader, which was hooked up to the pulse on the tape recorder, which flashed behind the perforations of the film going into the machine. The air raid shelter which is behind the house here was where I used to put people, God love them, to do voice-overs. People don’t believe how technically difficult it was, and that was only in the mid 1970s.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

The Vacuum Issue 15 – God – Contents

I Met God 1

I Peed in Church Ruth Graham

I Met God 2

He’s The Boss: On the Meaning of God’s Authority Colin Graham

The Man in the Desert Jonathan Olley

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

A Life In Banking – Interview with David Keith

I was born in Toronto, Canada, on the 22nd of June 1936. My parents emigrated in the 1920s, my father went to Toronto, and my mother went to Montreal. They met at a party, got married, and I was the firstborn. My father was from Aghoghill, and my mother from just outside Portadown. We were in Canada until August 1939, we came home for a holiday and we got caught on this side of the Atlantic when Britain declared war on Mr. Hitler, in September, and we never went back.

I remember my grandparents’ house, bi-planes flying overhead, just after the war started. We moved to Omagh when I was about five.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Bears Shit In The Woods

The following proverbs and expressions concerning members of the animal kingdom were mostly suggested by various people in a bar. There are the logical similes: “blind as a bat,” “busy as a bee,” “mad as a March hare” – these make sense. Someone can have “eyes like a hawk.” They can be “as stubborn as a mule,” “as fit as a flea” – which is more likely, anyway, than “fit as a fiddle” – “like a fish out of water” or “the cat that got the cream.” It is even possible to be “crazy like a fox,” though probably only if you’re from an American police show from the seventies, or jumpy as “a cat on a hot tin roof,” if you’re Tennessee Williams. The authenticity of the expressions “angry as an otter” (purportedly from the West Country) and “prickly as a pigeon” might be questionable.

Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr

Old Cinema Memories

The public art piece entitled ‘Omnibus Route 77’ took to the streets last May 2002, for five bus tours. The process of re-activating the 77 route was part of a larger public art event under the banner, Routes, which was an acknowledgement of the contributions from busworkers in keeping Belfast moving during its breakdown period. The Routes Project was set up and managed by Littoral Arts to record the history and experiences of the bus workers in a variety of art forms. Working in partnership with the Amalgamated Transport & General Workers Union, Translink and the local arts community (Flaxart Studios, Belfast Exposed, Banter Productions & An Crann), Routes aimed to put a spotlight on the bus workers and their stories, highlighting their success in maintaining an essential public service to all communities during the past 30 years of conflict.