‘Grassroots’ culture in Ireland

In my very first post on this blog – a ramble on how urban planning could be made a lot more interesting – I said that my next post would look at how we can encourage the development of interesting cultural venues in our towns and cities. So apologies that I’m only getting ’round to it now.

By ‘interesting’ cultural venues, I essentially mean ‘grassroots’ venues – spaces run by artists devoted to the public display of music, fine art, theatre, photography or whatever-you’re-having. These spaces are probably small and run on a non-commercial basis. Some might be considered ‘underground’ venues, and they often rely more on word-of-mouth for promotion than direct advertising. However they operate, they certainly making urban spaces a heck of a lot more interesting. Dublin has a few that sort of bit the bill: Red Space,  The Joinery, Hideaway House, ThisIsNotAShop, The Shed.

Sophisticated anti terror measures at Blackrock station

Catching the Doirt from Blackrock last week, I noticed that CIE appear to have a very clever strategy to prevent terrorist attacks at the station. Look at the text at the very bottom of the sign:

However, after some intrepid investigation (I Googled ‘No bomb please’), it quickly became clear that, unfortunately, this wasn’t the work of everyone’s favourite semi-state. See other examples here and here. So I guess that it’s, like, street art, or maybe a culture-jam-of-sorts.

And that fairly tenuous reference gives me an excuse to post pics of some of my favourite street culture jams:

Can someone pass Chris Jericho a sense of humour?

On the SAG awards red carpet Mickey Rourke made the terrifying mistake of “offending Chris Jericho” by telling him he would be “coming” for him at the upcoming Wrestlemania event. Offending this particular WWE wrestler is apparently the “last thing you want to do”.

The professional wrestler, on top of his very ‘real’ game in the WWE at present was hilariously humourless on Larry King when he got a chance to confront Rourke. Rourke, thankfully, manages to maintain his composure in front of the stone-faced Jericho.

Those crazy wrestlers…

Ten things to love about Temple Bar

Temple Bar gets a hard time – from Lonely Planet, from Frank McDonald, probably from a lot of people living in Dublin. But for all its obvious problems, which I won’t bother with here, it’s got a lot going for it too. So here’s the obligatory top ten list – I have no idea if I can fill it.