Archives for April 2010

The Belfast born concert pianist Barry Douglas is 50 this Friday. When we spoke a few days ago for Sounds Classical, he was just relieved that he had made it across the Channel. He had taken the train from his Paris home earlier that day, missing the chaos in the sky, or rather the airports, due to the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland. So his concert in London's Barbican last night wasn't affected.

But this Tuesday the much anticipated visit to Belfast by the brilliant young American violinist Tai Murray with the Ulster Orchestra has been affected. She can't make it across from her New York home. The concert is going ahead though. Tai is just one of many musicians grounded around the globe. 

Finnish pianist Leif Ove Andsnes couldn't get to Barcelona to play Rach 4 with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra last night. Thankfully he shares an agent with the Russian pianist Nikolai Demindenko, no stranger to Belfast audiences, having played here with the Ulster Orchestra very recently. She got him on the Eurostar. The only thing is he had to stand from London to Paris. 

I hope Whitney Houston got a seat on the car ferry from Liverpool to Dublin at the weekend. Apparently the legendary diva made sure the show went on and her and entourage boarded a stenaline.

Anyhow, birthday wishes to Barry. He's got a not so secret celebration in Paris this Friday. Apparently the restaurant emailed him to confirm numbers!!! I hope the fifty candles on his cake don't put any more ash into the atmosphere! 

Spent part of today in Omagh, the Strule Arts Centre where they're showing work by the Belfast artist Jack Pakenham. I've recorded a half hour Artsextra special on him for next week. As we sit in the gallery space, all around us a selection of political paintings he did from 1975-2008. It's called "Here it is".

They're angry, violent, anguished works. Vivid reds and oranges slash across the canvases, there are dark areas, political slogans, balaclavas, black berets, grotesquely contorted bodies in the final agonies of death.

The painting shown is called "Ulster at the Crossroads".

He says he was angry painting them.

Angry at what was happening on his doorstep.

Angry that in the early sixties he had felt an uplift, exhilarated by Belfast's cultural vibrancy. It's 1963, the very first Belfast festival at Queens is on, he's in a flat with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon reading early poems in Philip Hobsbaum's famous group.

Then the landscape is devastated in 1969 and the start of The Troubles.

His anger continues. Angry that he and his wife were in the Abercorn restaurant 20 minutes before the bomb went off. What happened to the old lady they had shared a table with? Or the girls behind the counter he was joking with less than half an hour earlier? He and his wife vowed from that day on they would never go into town together again. Just in case anything happened, at least their boys would have one parent.

While he was doing these paintings, a "catharsis" he calls it, he was holding down a full time job. English teacher, later Head of Department, at Ashfield Boys High School in East Belfast.

Over lunch, he's full of anecdotes. He remembers one of his pupils, a certain Terri Hooley, trying to disrupt the class he was teaching and being told by his teacher that if he didn't quieten down, Mr Pakenham would insert his boot somewhere. I give you the abridged, cleaned up version. According to Jack, Terri's version of events is even more colourful!

He talks fondly of artist Gerard Dillon taking him under his wing to hearing Seamus Heaney read "Follower" for the first time.

His energy is infectious. This is the man who, at 71 years of age, still does cartwheels in the Empire music club. Somebody in the club one night, telling him he was a great dancer, went on to remark they had just heard he was a painter and that apparently he wasn't bad at it!!

We leave him on Market Street, heading off to see if any of his more recent work on show at the McKenna Gallery has sold. He looks like he could do his famous cartwheels but then he's just had lunch.

"Here it is" is on at the Strule Arts Centre, Omagh until 20th April. 

I've just started reading a proof copy of Joseph O'Connor's new book. "Ghost Light".

It's a press review book which isn't the final, final version. It's officially out in June.

The last time I saw Joseph was two years and 10 months ago. The date is exact cos I was 5 months pregnant, June 2007 and had gone down to his house outside Dublin to meet him for the radio show.

In a twist on men and their potting shed obsession, his office where he does all his writing is at the bottom of his garden. All mod cons, plug sockets, telephone, computer, printer, heating, this was a proper home from home. Rather than sink into the sofa and fear I would never be able to get up again, I sat at his desk on his chair (the exact same chair and desk at which he wrote his best selling Richard & Judy endorsed "Star of the Sea"). 

His computer was on. Of course I looked!!! It was just emails and no I didn't look any further. And no I didn't see if Richard and Judy were in his friends inbox!!! 

It's mad to think that the book I'm now reading was only being started. Probably on the hard drive of that exact same computer!

He sketched it out for me in general terms. After "Star of the Sea" and "Redemption Falls" it would be the third and final book in his fascination with history and Irish history in particular.

The two main characters are the Irish playwright Synge and an Irish actress Molly Allgood. He was engaged to her at the time of his death. Everyone disapproved of their love affair. She was still in her teens when the affair began. He was in his thirties.

We meet her in a lodging room house in London 27th October 1952. It's 6:43am. She is now an old woman, with only her memories and one letter from Synge remaining.

I'm only at page 51 and it's one of those books that I'm waiting for the hurry of the day to end so I can curl up with it. 

That's if the child, who was only in embryonic form when Joseph and I first talked about "Ghost Light", goes to her bed and sleeps and lets me have some down time to myself!

Tak Jest is Polish for That's How it is. How do I know? Cos its the title of a major exhibition of work by the young Polish visual artist Marcin Maciejowski. I saw it on Tuesday at the National Museum in Krakow. Well I was in the cultural capital of Poland so after I had done the Zoo, the acquarium and eaten my body weight in pierogi, I had to do something cultural!

It's the first time Maciejowski has ever had such a comprehensive show. And at 36 this seems to be his moment in the sun.

Before I walked into the museum gallery I had never heard of him. Now I am his biggest fan. But the zloti can only stretch to buying a couple of post cards of his work before I leave. I pick two. They couldn't be further apart but both bear his stamp.

The first is called VIP, dating from 2008, images of celebrity subverted. Newspaper or magazine photos of famous actresses posing on the red carpet should exude the glamour and glitz of the opening night, but the glamour becomes sinister as the women have all been painted minus their facial features. It's celebrity gossip magazine turned on its faceless head. 

The other one dates from 1999 and is called "Z prezydentem Aleksandrem Kwasniewskim i jego zona Jolanta""which translates as "With President Aleksander Kwasnieski and His wife Jolanta". The person the President of Poland and his wife are "with" isn't faceless like the VIP actresses. In fact he's so famous he doesn't need a namecheck. It's the late Pope John Paul the Second, the former Archbisop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla who famously played goal for Cracovia and who could be seen as the godfather of Krakow, his image everywhere from a lifesize statue in the grounds of the Wawel the city's castle to photos of him in every souvenir shop.

Tak Jest That's How it is. If you're in Krakow the exhibition is on until the 23rd May.

Hi

Just to let you know I won't be blogging for the next week. Back after Easter.

Marie-Louise

Henning Mankell asked me what the weather was like in Belfast today. We'd phoned him to do an interview for Arts Extra. The Swedish Wallander is running on BBC 4 at the moment. So how do I explain the past few days here? Monsoon floods, snow blizzards and now the sun splitting the stones, well there was sunshine at lunchtime today. 

"Ah snow in April" he said.

So what's it like where he is? 

"I'm in Gottenburg....it's raining....then not raining....it's 5 to 6 degrees celsius...fairly normal....and I'm watching the birds that migrated for the winter coming home". I stare out the window of Studio 8 and see the sun has gone.

We did talk about other things, not just the weather!

 He loves the British Wallander, Kenneth Branagh. He's delighted that Branagh has signed up to another series.

He says that the popularity in crime fiction in Scandanavia isn't a consequence of the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986. "That's mythology" he says. "it's more coincidental".

 But, coincidentally, he has just finished a play about Palme. He tells me it's called "Politics" and while there's no agreed date for its production he says it will be this year. And on the 22nd October another of his new plays "Darwin's Captain" opens at the Royal National Theatre in Stockholm. Oh, and he's going to be writing another Wallander. "One thing my critics can't accuse me of is being lazy" he says.

Twenty minutes later I say goodbye and he asks me another question. Do we celebrate Easter here? Easter starts today in Sweden he says. And just before he puts down the phone, he wishes us all a Happy Easter and says not to eat too many easter eggs.

Maybe an Easter Egg would be good for his depressed detective creation Wallander, lift his serotonin levels with a bit of chocolate!