Beer with subtitles

Lips of steel. The three guys on trumpet blast out top Cs for over 90 minutes, whipping the crowd into a happy frenzy as they do so. There’s also two percussionists, two trombones, a saxophonist and even a real-life genuine sousaphone.

Unfortunately, Whelan’s isn’t much of a venue: apparently “doors open at 8pm sharp” means the concert actually starts about 9.35pm and the sound is terrible. A brass band performing in such a small space does not need amplification and I’ve never seen so many appeals to the sound guy to please turn up the damn trumpets – why not just make the whole thing louder and let the musicians decide the mix? Or, if you have to mess with it, turn down the bass: this isn’t a rock concert.

However, quibbles aside, the night is still great fun. I’m not sure how well their music transfers to a recording but, live, they’re fantastic.

I’d resisted going to this film because I hadn’t read the book and had heard so many good things about it: the greatest short story in the English language, surely I should read it first? However, it isn’t re-released very often so when the offer came to go, I went. In a word, wonderful: a director of enormous experience and with complete mastery of every aspect of film making finally creates his passion project, a film of his favourite author’s greatest short story set in his ancestral homeland.

We follow Gabriel Conroy through the course of a New Year’s dinner party at the Morkan sisters’ house in central Dublin. His awkwardness, insecurities, likes and dislikes are revealed along the way: culture, pretensions (“Goloshes! said Mrs Conroy. That’s the latest”) and politics:

And haven’t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?

—O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!

—Why? asked Miss Ivors.

Gabriel did not answer for his retort had heated him.

Why is Gabriel unhappy – will we find out? Huston leads us towards the conclusion in a wonderful recreation of turn of the century Dublin (in fact, the set was a replica built in Los Angeles of the house still standing today on Usher Quay) and some stunning imagery: Gretta’s descent down the stairwell is a classic.

Big hands! He’s got very big hands: when he sits down at the piano, I swear fully half the keys are covered by those two hands. Boris Berezovsky – this one, not that one, which must be fun at the airport – is in town and, for perhaps the first time, we’ve a perfect view of the proceedings of a solo piano concert: cheapest tickets they may be but up here in the heavens of the National Concert Hall’s choir seats you can see (in the words and manner of Patrick Steward in “Extras”) everything.

I’d heard Berezosky’s live recording of the Godowsky Chopin transcriptions and – aside from the small revelation of encountering the default alarm clock ringtone of a former mobile phone – loved them. Take some of the hardest piano music ever written and…play it one hand. Reverse the left and right hands. Whatever tricks you can think of, he employed them.

After further research (a trip to Wikipedia), it turned out Godowsky was, in addition to a formidable pianist, a formidable personality: rehearsing once with amateur violinist Albert Einstein, Godowsky reputedly lost his patience with the greatest scientist of his time and exclaimed,

Oh Einstein, can’t you count?!

Needless to say, all of this was enough to make us swarm to the concert. It certainly didn’t disappoint although I would have loved a repeat of the Godowsky concert. The few pieces he did play were wonderful, however, as fingers rippling down the keyboard in semi-quavers suddenly reach the hard bit…and start to blur.

Is it music – or mere technical showmanship? Was it right to meddle with Chopin’s work? I can see the arguments and…no, I think it’s music and I don’t see the harm. I loved it – big hands!

Just before Christmas, I chanced upon a copy of the long out-of-print original soundtrack to the TV series “Bringing It All Back Home“. We still have most of the series lying around at home on video tape and, though I’ve yet to watch the complete series, I was keen to get one song in particular, Luka Bloom’s “You Couldn’t Have Come At A Better Time”, which is featured in the first episode.

Listening to the album, another song gradually got my attention: an epic tale of emigration, loneliness and despair, Paul Brady’s “Nothing But the Same Old Story” belongs, at first glance, to a different Ireland. Already, most Irish people have – thankfully – only faint memories of

Living under suspicion
Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes
You can see that you’re nothing but a murderer
In their eyes, we’re nothing but a bunch of murderers

For other reasons, however, the song seems strangely relevant. Just as in the 1980s when Brady’s “Hard Station” album was written, unemployment is high, the country broke and the callers to “Liveline” rage about their rising tax bills. Things were good for such a long time: wages were up, the city started to renew itself, people started returning for the first time since…ever.

However, for anybody with the slightest appreciation for what makes cities work, the problems were obvious. Dublin is a small city and it’s disgraceful how inadequate our transport system remains (five years to build two unconnected tram lines!); move outside the cosy bubble of the city centre and observe how the general lack of infrastructure has influenced a never-ending parade of housing estates, a shopping centre the only cultural advantage.

I used to work in the suburbs and the daily ritual of getting to work by public transport was like a window onto the problems of the city: board the bus at that paragon of Dublin architecture, the Department of Health, sit for 70 minutes to travel the 12 miles to work and witness first-hand the social problems of our city as the bus came under fire from rocks hurtled by disaffected youth at any of the many building sites surrounding the wild west that is Blanchardstown and its environs.

It was around then that I started to feel this was not perhaps the best way of life.

Out for a walk on a recent sunny spring evening on Dun Laoghaire pier – not incidentally, one of my favourite things about Dublin – I ran into an old music friend at the train station. We caught up and the conversation was pleasant but ended – as so many do these days – with the words,

“So, yeah, I’m fine. Oh, but, uh, I’m emigrating next week.”

All I could reply with was, “Oh, that’s funny…me too”. Not next week, of course. The arrangements are nowhere near complete. That’s the general plan, though, and it’s been a long time coming. I won’t pretend that the current economic climate has anything to do with those plans but it’s instructive to see how many others have the same plan now. Where did all the money go? We wasted our chance to improve things. There’s better places out there and I’m moving on.

I was just about nineteen
When I landed on their shore
With my eyes big as headlights
Like the thousands and thousands who came before
I was going to be something . . .
Smiled at the man scrutinising my face
As I stepped down off the gangway

Well, it’s no Squeezebox. That about sums it up for me…but I’ll elaborate just a little. Popcorn Hour is yet another little custom-built computer running Linux designed, this time, to play video. I’d heard it did it rather well, too: DIVX, Quicktime and even ripped DVD images (a.k.a. ISO images). That covers a multitude of ripped movies amassed in the era before DVD burners, the new-found joy of BBC iPlayer files and even hastily-ripped DVD images pending shrinkage.

ISO images were, in fact, the clincher, hinting at a level of openness rarely seen in “user friendly” consumer electronics so, for a measly $185, I couldn’t see the harm in smuggling one home when last visiting the states. The Squeezebox has allowed me get rid of CDs, the PVR (almost) rid of recording TV and now I want Popcorn Hour to get rid of DVDs.

Upon arrival home, setup began in earnest:

1. I’d forgotten Americans don’t have SCART so, since I don’t yet have HDMI, I settled on the s-video output. There was no further cross-continental issues since the box just magically knew to output PAL.
2. Searching for files to play, I realised I’d several options: the box can take a single hard-drive internally, it can read direct from USB keyrings and drives and, finally, it has a (wired) network port for reading from an SMB or NFS share. Not wanting to pollute the living room with yet more cables, I threw some files onto a 4GB keyring and had them playing them within moments.

Picture’s good, sound in sync…so far so good!

Now, the trouble began. I don’t want to have to shuffle files between keyrings for the rest of my life; neither do I want the expense, hassle and noise of inserting a drive into the Popcorn unit itself. Some sort of networked solution is clearly in order. However, there’s a minor dilemma in that I really don’t want to trail more cables across the living room floor but the Popcorn Hour doesn’t have wireless networking. Eventually, I remember that the Squeezebox – to whom the Popcorn Hour is closely situated – can also act as a wireless bridge. I connect a standard ethernet cable between the two and Popcorn Hour now finds and connects to my Samba share(s) with ease, playing iPlayer content with impunity.

Aside from the issues discussed later in this post and, above all else, this highlights, for me, the gulf between the two devices and the gap which Popcorn Hour has to bridge to even catch up level with the Squeezebox. Observe how not only has the Squeezebox both wired and wireless networking but how it can also perform bridging to “older” legacy devices without wi-fi – a function that even most high-end wireless routers can perform only with the installation of third-party, warranty-impairing firmware! 99% of users will never need to know what a wireless bridge is but it saved my skin (well, floor) in this situation.

Persevering with the Popcorn Hour, despite the iPlayer success, I was not expecting to stream uncompressed DVD images wirelessly; sure enough, I couldn’t. What I wasn’t expecting, however, were a number of crashes and hangs of the Popcorn unit itself due to slow network issues. It should have been a warning signal that the latest revision of the device sports a “front panel reset button” as a feature. Over the course of fewer than two hours, numerous resets ensued on my A-100 – a.k.a. pulling the plug.

Later, after reading that the bandwidth of DVD movies (a.k.a. 1x speed) is only about 1.3MB/sec, I experimented a little and discovered that I could indeed stream even un-reconstructed DVDs wirelessly: the trick in connecting the file server directly to one of the wireless router’s ethernet ports. Evidently there simply isn’t enough bandwidh to both send and receive the video stream. Stability issues with the Popcorn Hour now lurk in the background, only rarely striking.

That aside, stability is far from the only quibble with the Popcorn Hour. In no particular order:

• The remote control is ugly, large and bewilderingly badly laid out. “Stop” nestles unexpectedly between fast forward and rewind; some buttons click loudly, others slink silently into action.
• There is no web interface to speak of. There is some sort of almost-undocumented application called myiHome that supposedly affords some sort of control…however my brand new Aspire One with 512MB of RAM isn’t up to the task and, without any sort of DEB or RPM packages, I’m unlikely to go to the trouble of fiddling with it.
• Thanks to the remote control issues and lack of web interface, I’ve had to leave the internet features largely ignored (when I did try them sometime in the first few heady days of ownership they did, of course, manage to crash the unit).
• It won’t play Realmedia files.
• I have severe issues with letterboxed DVDs: Popcorn Hour doesn’t seem to know how to crop the image for my 16:9 TV. In fairness, there’s no issue with non-letterboxed formats like iPlayer videos but, since every DVD I’ve tried is letterboxed, this is a baffling omission.

All in all, a very underwhelming experience. It’s really perplexingly poor. The preceding bullet points are only the tip of the iceberg, too: take, for example, how the Popcorn Hour can display photographs. Fine. However, the slideshow viewer won’t traverse directories…so if you maintain separate folders for each day of a holiday then there is no easy way to view an entire holiday’s photographs. Also, opening an ISO image entails a long pause while what is clearly a separate application is booted on the device – while waiting, it tells you to “remember to always backup your hard disk”. I would indeed take care around software like this…if I had a disk installed.

Returning to the opening comparison, the Squeezebox is simply everything the Popcorn Hour is not: of elegant technical design, pretty and stable. The more I think about it, it’s the only serious open contender to Apple’s closed world. While Popcorn Hour proves handy in certain situations, it’s hard to think of it as anything better than a particularly good final year university project. Plays video…will probably crash at the project fair. Where’s the Squeezebox video?

Cloney Audio sell quality hi-fi equipment. Superior and tempting hifi equipment. Their absolute cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel (and I use that term in the loosest sense possible) CD player is priced at €629. Calling here is not a good idea for those planning an extra holiday or possibly even buying a car.

However, I’ve been in pursuit of a good amplifier for some time; my current system is a Denon MD30 micro-system along with a pair of B&W 602 S3 bookshelf speakers; two quality products but the Denon was only ever meant as a short-term solution until I found an amplifier worthy of the B&Ws. These speakers deserve:

• A decent amplifier. More than decent, perhaps; the speakers themselves are due an upgrade soon enough, so it might make sense to consider an amp that completely outclasses the B&Ws.
• A CD player. Not a great one because, eventually, I’ll get an audiophile-grade networked music device like the Transporter. The Squeezebox has changed my habits but, for now, I need a decent source.

Cloney were good enough to let me test a multitude of amps, CDs and speakers. In fact, this is why I come here: they’ll let you listen to your CDs on almost any combination of equipment they sell. I tested their sub-€1000 amps with a pair of B&W 685 speakers, the successor (and nearest match) to my current 603s.

Thanks to the salesman’s infinite patience, I eventually settled on a Primare I21. In an effort to relay to my future myself exactly why I chose this amp, I’m going to briefly describe the equipment I tested:

• Rotel RA04
  An entry-level amplifier, only briefly tested; I wasn’t overly interested and, bizarrely, there’s no remote.
• Arcam A70
  A league up from the RA04 and roughly twice the price. I also tested these – and every other amp – with a pair of B&W 685s. Detail is good – notably the drums in Lester Bowie – but, to be perfectly honest, I can’t detect €799-worth of difference from my present system. It fact, it seems less lively than what I’m used to.
• Rotel RA06
  I like this right away. Priced similarly to the A70, this is a totally different machine with a completely different feel: Joni Mitchell is with me in the room, as is Stacy Kent. The trumpet in Gershwin soars above the orchestra, just like you always wished it would. If I see nothing else today, I’m happy with this.
• Primare I21
  I’ve never heard of these guys (Scandinavian, it turns out). Certainly, it looks very nice and feels solid and reassuring. It’s in a different price league but why not try it while I’m here? Although Gershwin has about the same detail, the piano is very definitely tighter and better separated. The bass in Herbert is clearly more pronounced. In short, it seems this beast has all the detail and brightness of the RA06 along with a warmer sound.

Combined with a second-hand Primare D20 CD player going for a (relative) song – with which it handily shares a remote control – it’s a fairly easy decision.

Expensive taste is a curse; if the Primare was only cheaper, I’d take it. Lo and behold, they have an ex-demo model which works out at the same price as the RA06. My only reservation is that the warmer tone of the Primare may, in some way, neutralise its brightness. However, I eventually reason that it’s surely better to have warmth and brightness than brightness alone.

Having played with it for a few hours now, I’m happy. Almost-€1000-worth of happiness? Hard to tell just yet. It’s different, for sure: better detail in music, more realistic in almost everything. There’s a weird programme about harps on BBC4 right now and it sounds fantastic. It all sounds warm and fuzzy, like you remember an old valve radio. An interesting day, for sure; based on price lists and magazine reviews alone, I’d probably have opted for an Arcam. I’m very glad now I didn’t (and can’t see myself opting for hi-fi equipment blind in the future, plummeting sterling or not). Update on the Primare experience to follow after a few weeks’ listening…

Summertime, that is, not an inter-galactic battle spurred by the long-forgotten rivalries between two ancient races.

Yes, come this morning, I’m offcall; the sun comes out; stays out; it’s warm enough for wearing only a light jacket to work. A gentle breeze crossing MacMahon bridge. Same on the way home and, at 8pm, it’s still bright. Joy of joys! Looks like things are getting better: it’s officially summertime and summer is actually coming.

Then, when you thought things couldn’t improve, the New York Times reports on a new production of an almost-forgotten and never-recorded Leonard Bernstein musical. A new Bernstein musical?! How many days have that?!?! That’s a damn fine way to usher in summer.

…novelty of technique and radiance of form do not begin to compensate for unholy material. This holds true from “Birth of a Nation” to “Kill Bill”…

David Thomson, “The Whole Equation”

This dense, thorough and fascinating book is full of memorable quotes and passages (not the least of which is the brutally frank Nicole Kidman chapter) but the one above – which articulates perfectly my own feelings towards the “Kill Bill” movies, which I have liked less and less since first viewing – remains my favourite.

The Dublin Film Festival opened this weekend. Highlight of the opening night was surely a gala presentation in the Savoy of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”; a better name for this film might be “There Will Be A Release” since, despite rave reviews in the UK and Irish press over the past couple of weeks, it actually is not screening anywhere in Ireland until the 29th February. Having the foresight to book tickets early for this special screening would have been much appreciated.

Undaunted, today I checked out some of the less razzle-dazzly films and chose two back-to-back afternoon screenings in Cineworld:

• Margot at the Wedding
  The latest film from Noah Baumbach, director of “The Squid and the Whale”, my favourite film of 2006. Nicole Kidman portrays judgmental Margot, attending the wedding of estranged sister Jennifer Jason Leigh to unknown but instantly disappointing Jack Black. Returned to their childhood New England home for the occasion, Margot brings out the worst in everybody around her in a wonderful passive-aggressive performance from Kidman while Jack Black provides welcome comic relief in this complex, rewarding film. I liked it but, unlike his debut, I won’t be rushing out to buy the DVD.
• Late Bloomers (Der Herbstzeitlosen)
  Apparently a huge hit in its native Switzerland, “Late Bloomers” tells the tale of an elderly lady searching for a new reason to live; she rediscovers her love of sewing and – after a little persuasion – converts her late husband’s grocery shop into a lingerie boutigue, “Petit Paris”. Essentially “Brassed Off” and/or “The Full Monty” transferred to a small village in the Swiss mountains, “Late Bloomers” employs the same formula: in doing so, she forces her friends and family to re-examine their values and own reasons for living…well, you could guess that without seeing the film. However, it’s funny and never quite predictable; even the standard ending for these movies is just a little bit different here. Well worth a watch.

They’re all a celebration of how good it is to be alive, apart from the ones which are a lament about how bad it is being dead.

Shane MacGowan, discussing Irish music in a 1991 South Bank Show.

I rescued the show from our aging collection of slowly decaying video tapes (that said, they still play fine after 17 years which, for sure, is a damn sight longer than the DVD+R to which I transferred it will survive) and watched it again this morning.

It’s a beautifully researched and executed programme, the highlights of which are Bob Geldof interviewing Van Morrison and the talking (and, from time to time, singing) heads of Bono, Christy Moore and one Junior Crehan.

Crehan, an old-school traditional session musician and storyteller clearly represents the old Ireland in the face of young upstarts such as Bono, however, crucially, he’s clearly a predecessor rather than the last of his kind.

Subjects of all interviews – and the programme itself, much more so than Irish music per se – are why they write songs and what is Irishness? Answers to such a searching question are, of course, few and far between, however the exploration is wonderfully researched and includes a few key insights (or, at least, assertions) about Irish music:

• It never underwent a revival, simply because it never died out.
• Irish songs come from experience, rarely fiction.
• The words themselves are often less important than the sounds.

Such an exploration cannot help but include, along the way, various insights into Yeats, Joyce and Kavanagh and the distinctions between Irish literature and Irish music do, indeed, blur as Van Morrison launches into a unique version of Kavanagh’s “Raglan Road”.

UPDATE 6/1/2008:

• I found plenty of references to this show on the web. Directed by Peter Lydon, it’s entitled “Clear Cool Crystal Streams” and was first broadcast on ITV on 21st October 1991. It was entitled “Shamrock ‘n’ Roll” for broadcast in the USA and was reviewed in the New York Times. A 2002 article in Hotpress makes mention of Phil Lynott’s omission which, now I think about it, is a fairly glaring one.
• Perhaps surprisingly, I can’t find any clips on Youtube. It was definitely worth rescuing my ancient recording.