Bellchamp Manor

schawalski | Short fiction and poetry | March 15, 2011

Rickety old house, worn but reliable, cobweb clustered, kinda like a ship in a storm. At least the mice are content little tenants. The house just needs a few repairs, a couple of windows, a lick of paint, but that stain. No matter how much I scrub it, it refuses to vanish. I give up ,I could swear the stain has grown, no really, it even started to leak through the bathroom floor.

Dripping, dripping, dripping, now the damn thing has spread. I’m convinced that it’s blood, why did I accept the house? Maybe because I thought I could fix it up and make some dough. Nobody tells me anything, maybe the house will, I searched the attic found some clues and bat droppings. Back from the library, the spiders, mice and bats can have the house, I’m going to a motel, I’m not staying there, the old papers said that my Aunt Dora died under mysterious circumstances. Going further back, my family has been plagued by bad luck. The Bellchamps were a once wealthy and respected family, who earned their fortune from a very popular brand of sneaker, created by Dora’s great, grandfather Wilson Bellchamp. Wilson came up with the ingenious idea of sneaking up on Indians, thus the shoes he invented became known as sneakers.

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Good auld Bacon and Cabbage

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | March 14, 2011

With the month thats in it our skills exchange foodie gives us a delicious bacon and cabbage recipe

Is it not wonderful to be alive just now? The days grow longer, some warmth has returned to the air, the daffodils are blooming, the birds are nesting and green shoots are to be seen everywhere in the garden. It is a particular joy for me to see those chives peeping through the soil in the raised bed outside the back door. Soon, all the herbs will be up in the garden and we shall be back to eating salads. I love the feeling of anticipation of what is to come. Will 2011 give us the summer that we have all been waiting for or, will we once again be disappointed? Somehow this year, my spring reveries are sharper and sweeter than usual, perhaps because of an exceptionally acute longing for what summer has in store, a longing which in turn has probably been engendered by the severity of our winter just past.
St Patrick’s Day is now around the corner and, not surprisingly, my thoughts also turn to traditional Irish fare. I am not talking here of Irish stew, which I have never much liked. Rather I wish to dwell on bacon and cabbage, even though many of my readers will be disappointed that I am devoting any time to such prosaic food. Commonplace it may well be, and despised by many, but this is largely because bacon and cabbage is often badly cooked. Give the preparation of this dish some time and attention and you will be richly rewarded.

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Therapy, tropical infestation and roadkill in Borneo

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 13, 2011

Saturday, 26 February, 2011

Therapy, tropical infestation, and lethargy

This is my first entry this week. I’ve been cleaning and washing all morning. Now, (10.20am) all the windows of my cabin are open; it’s been a beautiful, breezy Saturday so far; humidity is less than usual; the sun is out; there are generous patches of blue sky above, and the drifting, white cumulous are growing ever bigger; there may be rain by evening. For the moment, the currents of air are mingling through my living space, my washed clothes are flapping on the kitchen balcony. The thought that people on the roadside can cast a glance at my house and see washing hanging out, comforts me; it’s a warm gesture of home-making and occupancy; perhaps like a flag staked in some newly conquered ground.

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Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage

moray mair | Culture and politics | March 12, 2011

What We Hope For

On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first world war, the first terrible war in the modern sense — slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes — Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet? We talk about “what we hope for” in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it’s a more powerful and more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa?

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Daily life in Kabong, Borneo

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 11, 2011

Prophet’s birthday

Today is a national holiday. I think it’s the prophet Mohammed’s birthday. I was invited to lunch at Alan’s place. Alan has been one of my shepherds, since arriving here. He’s been teaching at primary level for 27 years. He’s deputy headmaster of the largest primary school in Kebong (over 800 pupils). He lives next door to the local police station which is the size of a luxury five-star hotel; a very new looking building. When I stepped inside his house, there were about 20 men sitting cross legged on the floor in two parallel rows, eating from dishes of food, laid out like a picnic. Most of them were using their right hand to eat; kneading little balls of rice into their mouths. On the right hand side of the expansive hard tiled floor space, there were two other little mats laid out with identical dishes of food, but no one sitting there. Everything was perfectly symmetrical.

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Rattling The Bones: a Bbeyond Performance workshop

hilary williams | Art and design | March 10, 2011

On Saturday 26th February 2011, I headed North by Bus to Lombard Street Belfast.
This time for a one day workshop with James King as part of the Bbeyond Performance Art Promotion groups 10 year celebrations. This workshop was to be the first in a series monthly events.
James King is from Derry, I first saw him repeating the word “bap, bap bap” in 2005 as part of the Bbeyond Performance tour, ‘In Place Of Passing’.
This use of words and sounds plus his ability to stay still balanced on a tiny edge of a plinth fascinated me.
The public reacted and a sort of interactive conversation occurred where a man was shouting about the needs of water in Africa, a subject totally unrelated to the saga of the feeding of the starving inside the city walls in the siege of Derry…but maybe there was a connection, anyway it was my first encounter with live art and its spontaneous combustion and weirdness yet near logicalness that I love.

474 total views, 1 today

What Am I doing in Borneo?

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 9, 2011

Friday, 11th January

I’m sitting on the verandah of a house which I’ll probably be living in for the next two years, or more. It’s a queer house in a queer place; everything is queer at the moment. It’s half past eight in the morning, and I’m still trying to find my bearings, since being dropped off here, yesterday evening. The temperature is pleasant. There’s a slight breeze; no foreseeable threat of rain; a thin shroud of pale, grey, sky sits above my queer situation.

I’m about to be interrupted. My landlord is arriving, along with his wife.

Continue reading »

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Student protesters violently evicted by university | anticutsspace

moray mair | Culture and politics | March 8, 2011

Got this in from a mutantspace member. Another example of whats going on in the UK at the moment – it seems in Ireland we just don’t stand up.

The Anti-Cuts Space was created as a resource and meeting-place for activists and anyone involved in new social movements to fight the Government’s austerity measures. It was opened on Friday 25th February in a large Georgian house. The space aimed to revivify the student movement by making connections with wider anti-cuts struggles across London. The group had been occupying a space in Bedford Square in London as a place to link up and share ideas and strategies on how to fight the cuts.

They’ve recenly been evicted…but are planning a large demonstration on Saturday 26th March

PRESS RELEASE: Student protesters violently evicted by university | anticutsspace.

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Experiencing Munster live in Musgrave Park

moray mair | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 7, 2011

I was at my first live Munster rugby match on Saturday night against the Newport Gwent Dragons in Musgrave Park, Cork. Myself and the brother went. Both of us new to it, both our first time in Musgrave Park. He had an excuse, he doesn’t live in Cork. I don’t. It was special. Through the gates was a floodlight, rugby Disneyland of vans selling curry chips, burgers, programmes and mementos, temporary bars selling crap beer in plastic glasses, lots of fathers with their sons and queues at smelly portaloos. All infected with a nervous, excited anticipation of the match ahead and we had touchline seats for it – fantastic!

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A travel diary: From Vietnam to Borneo

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 7, 2011

Having gone to bed quite early last night (10 pm), I awoke to a pressing bladder and a stream of barely audible Vietnamese commands burbbling out of a portable speaker at about quarter past five this morning. I think the commands constituted an aerobics lesson. It was still foggy, damp, chilly and dark. It seemed that light didn’t begin to spill through the blinds until about 6am. A short while after the aerobics burble, I couldn’t help hearing the patter of jogging feet, and a growing tide of middle-aged shufflers go by, under the window, as I lay in bed contemplating the indefatigable energy of these people.

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Marco owner in chief of a Hanoi delicatessen

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 6, 2011

He’s Italian, from I think – Perugia. He’s about a foot shorter than me, and I’m just short of six feet. He’s stout; strongly built like a barrel – a small bullock. He’s got good skin; smooth-olive; you know he’d take the sun really well. It wouldn’t take much for him to acquire a healthy outdoor look, but he doesn’t have this look. He clearly spends a lot of time indoors. For this reason, one could perhaps assume that he’s not vain when it comes to his appearance. A lot of energy sits behind his bright, intelligent eyes; perhaps even impatience. This would be unfortunate, if true, because in his job – you need a lot of patience. For this reason, perhaps he is persecuted daily; he gives that impression when you’re in his presence. He has thin wiry glasses that he wears around his neck, when not needed; he’s short-sighted. I’m guessing he’s in his fifties. His glasses and the clothes I’ve seen him wear; avuncular clothes that you imagine a hardware store owner in America would wear; simple checkered shirts, cardigan, chinos, or slacks, and loafers – all of good quality, of a ‘ Marks an Spencers’’ variety – give him the appearance of an interesting man; intelligent and solidly planted in the world. His name is Marco.

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I loved ‘What I loved’ by Siri Hustvedt

moray mair | Book reviews and writers | March 5, 2011

I’ve just finished reading Siri Hustvedt’s ‘What I loved’. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I ignored it. Studiously. When looking for something new to read I’d skip over it deliberately. It wasn’t that I had forgotten it, nor that I had misplaced it. Truth was that I saw it, ignored it, let it gather dust, all lonely, waiting, wanting to be loved. Don’t know why. Just did. Thinking about it now it’s quite possible I was prejudiced as Hustvedt is Paul Austers wife and as he’s one of my all time favourite authors I felt it was all just too much, too cosy. Silly stupid me. It is a wonderful book that speaks so deeply about loss, love, art and the relationships between people and how they deal with tragedy.

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Peter Bjorn & John do a small interview for mutantspace

moray mair | Everything about music | March 4, 2011

Peter Bjorn & John have a new album out this month: titled GIMME SOME, which is another triumphant POP gem of an album and is out on March 25th! We got a few minutes with the band and asked them to answer 5 questions for Mutantspace:

Q: Being consistently good at delivering quality edgy pop music must be hard or would you say a lot of hard work pays off when achieving such a balance in keeping up the collective good music within the band?

Thank you. I think we got a really great blend of personalities in the band. But the songs does not record themselves. A lot of work and thought are put in getting it right. Luckily we forget as soon as it’s done.

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About World Book Night

CUE | Life in a cultural petri dish | March 3, 2011

Green Tek – a mutantspace member – is giving away 48 copies of Seamus Heaneys poetry this Saturday 5th March on Grand Parade, Cork as part of World Book Night. So, head to the Central Library on Grand parade at 5pm and make a ruckus, a hoohah, alot of noise and get youself some beautiful art!

World Book Night represents the most ambitious and far-reaching celebration of adult books and reading ever attempted in the UK and Ireland. On Saturday, 5 March 2011, two days after World Book Day, with the full support of the Publishers Association, the Booksellers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Reading Agency with libraries, World Book Day, the BBC and RTE, one million books will be given away

via About World Book Night | World Book Night.

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Farewell Black Robots

moray mair | Everything about music | March 3, 2011

We got this in from Cork music blog wearenoise.com. Couldn’t believe what we read…this is ridiculous..read and weep. They want it sent around the net. They want it known so pass the link on. I personally don’t know the band but its outrageous. Whingy, whiney fuckers comes to mind!

Farewell Black Robots | Noise.

784 total views, 0 today

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