The Friday View 26/10
A lunchtime trad fix on the Northside, the festival inspired by Shandon's most famous emigrant, that planning application for the docklands and a MASSIVE cuteness overload....
Dear readers,
A very happy Friday to you too! Our print edition continues to fly off shelves citywide and since we made the list of outlets below, we’ve added O’Keeffe’s of St Luke’s and Myo Café on Pope’s Quay to our list of stockists. It’s been amazing to meet so many readers and introduce so many new people to what we do at markets the past two weekends. We also got some pretty sweet tip-offs on interesting stories that you’ll be seeing here in the coming weeks.
We’re experiencing a big increase in new subscriptions and so a very big thank you and welcome to new members of the Tripe + Drisheen family.
Editorial: It’s just a normal Friday, ok?
Ellie writes…..
No, here at Tripe + Drisheen we won’t be mentioning a certain funereal hue alongside the day of the week.
Because if we all pretend that the abominable day of consumer excess so recently inflicted on us by the US, and increasingly taken up by Irish retailers and businesses, doesn’t exist, maybe it can just disappear back to the howling pit of hell from whence it came, a pit conjured by the feverish, profit-hungry imaginings of marketeers and advertising people.
Ireland’s broadsheets are increasingly turning their attention to anxiety-inducing climate change coverage on the one hand, while on the other, promoting this new and utterly unnecessary sales day not only by running paid ads for it, but even by running special offers themselves that validate the existence of this fictional festival of obscene excess.
It’s a curious and contradictory duality, isn’t it? Make people really anxious about the state of our environment and then contribute to a mindset where people feel like they’ll miss out on magical bargains unless they spend, spend, spend on one particular day of the year. Either way, more anxiety for all.
And no, it’s not Green Friday either; the answer to the problem of consumerism is not more consumerism.
It’s just Friday.
Have a good one.
In other news:
Odlums building safe, but R&H Hall building earmarked for demolition in €350 million docklands development plan
The big news in the city this week is, of course, the announcement from developers O’Callaghan Properties that they intend to submit two planning applications for the €350 million docklands development to Cork City Council in the coming weeks.
Hopes that the much-loved red brick Odlums building could be put to public use as a gallery or arts venue, as expressed so elegantly by artist Eileen Healy in her Our Cork 2040 contribution, are not supported by the plan for the building, which includes a “food court,” cinema, apartments and office space.
Plans for the rest of the development include a private hospital to be operated by French healthcare group Orpea, who are also about to become the largest private nursing home provider in the country, 80 “build-to-rent” apartments, and, of course “office space.”
But O’Callaghan properties say that the R&H Hall building, a feature of the docklands skyscape since the 1940s, won’t form part of their finished plan and that they need to demolish the structure.
“I'd love to see R&H Hall remain as a significant Cork iconic building, and not being replaced by more glass boxes. It would be an amazing modern gallery, like The Docklands in Liverpool for example, and a huge tourist attraction,” Eileen Healy wrote for these pages in July, expressing concerns that arts would not be considered in the plans.
There have been no shortage of responses, both positive and negative, to the announcement.
Photo of the Week
Our youngest ever reader deep in contemplation over one of the articles in the print magazine. Is she wondering why UCC’s plans for a business school on the €17.25 million site they bought from Dairygold have been stalled for such a long time? Or is she reading about the history of street trading on Cornmarket St? We don’t know, but we like her very much. Thanks very much to Eilish and Emmett for the photo and congratulations to you both on the arrival of this beautiful little lady, who is one month old.
When she’s ready for her journalism internship, give us a shout.
Photo of the Week #2
The (Not a) Lost Cat poster is now on every continent. In August, after this quirky art project showed up in Cork city and Fermoy, Ellie interviewed Stevexoh, the instigator of this “gentle re-weirding” art project. It’s a lovely read and worth revisiting: a lot of it is about the inner critic we all carry around that stifles our creativity and ability to take risks. In the article, Steve imagined it would take a month for his poster to reach Antarctica, the final continent for the (Not a) Lost Cat to conquer.
It finally happened. Well done, Steve.
Out and about
🎬 Watch: Spirit of Mother Jones Festival online
Let’s be clear. Shandon’s most famous emigrant daughter, 19th and early 20th century US labour activist Mary Harris Jones, is our spirit animal.
What’s not to love about a sweet-looking little old lady who organised miner’s strikes and children’s marches and who was dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America” by a member of the judiciary and “the grandmother of all agitators” on the Senate floor?
The tenth annual Spirit of Mother Jones Festival began yesterday, Thursday November 25, and runs until Sunday November 28. Although this fascinating little festival of activism and ideas usually takes place in venues in Shandon close to where Mother Jones grew up, this year events are available to view on Cork Community TV or on Virgin Media Channel 803 all weekend.
We can’t find a full programme, but details of individual events are being posted to the Spirit of Mother Jones Facebook page.
🎧 Listen live: Celebrate traditional music
A lunchtime trad fix would be just the ticket to brighten up these dark winter days. Catch some live tunes and browse books on music from 1-2pm each Friday in Hollyhill Library as part of this inspired and inspiring new series.
📖 Poetry: get multilingual at the Winter Warmer festival
Ó Bhéal’s Winter Warmer poetry festival takes place this week and on Saturday, there’s a chance to bask in the toasty glow of multilingual verse with the Many Tongues of Cork event at Nano Nagle Place. With poets from Mexico, Zimbabwe, India and more, this lunchtime event, entitled An Earth Song, will also be translated into ISL (Irish Sign Language). Entry is free but there’s a suggested donation of €3. You can also watch the event online here.
Saturday November 27 from 1pm - 2.15pm at Nano Nagle Place and online.
🏛 Exhibitions: tackling domestic violence through art
The impacts of lockdowns on domestic violence was highlighted by many organisations and campaigners last year. The conditions of lockdown “created, unfortunately, a perfect environment for perpetrators to exert even greater control over their current and former partners,” according to Deborah O’Flynn, the co-ordinator with Cork’s Domestic Violence Resource Centre, who wrote for Tripe + Drisheen’s Our Cork 2040 series in September. Sadly, the surge in demand for support services for people experiencing domestic violence and coercive control has continued into 2021, Deborah and other workers providing support for families impacted by domestic abuse have noted.
It’s still not pretty is a two-part art exhibition by multimedia installation artist Sarah Jayne Booth and r.a.g.e feminist collective in association with Domestic Violence Network Cork, which can be viewed alongside a soundscape by Dr Honor Tuohy in the Triskel Arts Centre and as a window display at Cork City Council Civic Offices.
The exhibitions are part of 16 Days of Action Against Gender Based Violence, an annual international awareness campaign to combat violence against women.
Triskel Arts Centre and the window of Cork City Council Civic Offices until December 10.
🎬 Watch: This short film about a North Cork artist
Blending In is a beautiful and contemplative five minute film by photographer and Crawford College of Art and Design graduate Artem Trofimenko. It’s a study of the much over-looked North Cork portrait painter Pawel Wroblewski at work….or is it a study of Trofimenko himself?
By making himself Wroblewski’s subject, Trofimenko upends the documentary dynamic of filmmaker and subject. “I think about you as a chunk of data,” Wroblewski tells him during one part of the process.
This is worth a watch not only for the Pan-like beauty of the finished piece, but for Wroblewski’s commentary and meditations, not least of which: “the relationship between plants and humans feels like the most important relationship to investigate in recent years.”
This week’s Long Read on Tripe + Drisheen:
This week JJ lifts the lid on Cork’s sewage system with a personal visit, alongside Cork City Council engineers, to a city-centre pumping station where pumps are being erm, unclogged. This is essential reading, even if we might prefer to imagine that what we flush disappears to a magical land called “away.” Just don’t sink your teeth into this one over lunch….