Sean O’Reilly interview with The Parlour Review

Writing the city – Sean O’Reilly at The Stinging Fly

Sean O’Reilly at Faber

As energising and confrontational as the music it examined, Shell Shock Rock (1978), John T Davis’ first major film looked at the burgeoning northern punk music scene and introduced us to a documentary filmmaker unafraid to challenge the conventions of the genre.

Born in Belfast in 1947, Davis’s first experience of filmmaking came via a chance encounter with DA Pennebaker. In 1966 the legendary filmmaker was on a Belfast street, camera on shoulder, recording Bob Dylan for the seminal documentary Don’t Look Back, when a young Davis happened on the scene.

Instantly he knew that filmmaking ‘was such a cool thing to do. It was rock ‘n’ roll and it was for me’. However, unsure how to pursue his ambition Davis went off to study at art college.

After completing his studies at the Belfast College of Art, he half-heartedly considered a career as an art teacher. However, the death of his Uncle Jack in 1974 was to have a profound and lasting effect on his life.

Davis’ relative left his house, Ben Edar, in a trust for the young man but more importantly, also left an old 8mm camera. The camera drifted into Davis’ hands and gave him the means by which he could start to shoot his films and develop his vision.

Following the early trilogy of Shell Shock Rock, Protex Hurrah and Self-Conscious Over You in which he captured the attitude of northern punk exponents like Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones and The Outcasts, Davis began to focus on what was to be a recurring theme of his work, American culture and sub-cultures.

His work was also increasingly innovative as evidenced by the experimental Route 66 (1985). Bringing the viewer on a bizarre celluloid trip, Route 66 ‘exposed the lie of the American Dream’, the lens of Davis’ camera the instrument by which he unflinchingly documents the beauty and ugliness of American life in all its guises.

His experiences in America’s ‘Bible-Belt’ were to resonate in his encounters with fundamentalist religion in Northern Ireland with the films Dust On The Bible (1989) and Power In The Blood (1989).

Following country and western preacher Vernon Oxford (the self-proclaimed ‘love ambassador’ from Nashville, Tennessee) as he tries to bring Jesus Christ back to the people of Northern Ireland, Power In The Blood uses the figure of the outsider, as represented by the zealous missionary Oxford, to examine Northern Ireland from a new perspective.

Power In The Blood draws the viewers’ attention to the unsettling parallels between the redneck mentality of America’s deep south and attitudes displayed by religious fundamentalists in Northern Ireland.

In 1991, Davis made Hobo, generally considered to be his finest work. Certainly his most famous film, Hobo follows the exploits Beargrease – the hobo of the title – as he criss-crosses America, stowing away on freight trains and foraging for food in dump trucks.

Hobo is by turns tragic, farcical and downright bizarre. Davis first meets his subject at a hobo convention. Apparently, although America’s vagabonds refuse to be constrained by the structures of established society, they are more than happy to have formalised meetings.

For Davis the experience of making Hobo was not to be that of a mere spectator, passively recording the hardships of his subject’s life. For his film to display the veracity he desired would require the understanding that could only be attained by direct experience.

So for the duration of filming Davis too led the life of the hobo, jumping trains and scavenging for food. Parallels have been drawn between Davis’ work on Hobo and the earlier Route 66 and the American Beat movement’s obsession with the transitory life, with life lived on the road. However, what Davis shows us is that the Beat dream soured. He removes all the gloss and through the story of Beargrease, shows us the true price to be paid in attaining a life of ‘freedom’.

The Uncle Jack (1996) is Davis’ most autobiographical work to date. It is the fascinating story of Jack McBride Neill, the Ulster cinema architect who in the 1930s and 1940s was to design some 16 cinemas in Northern Ireland. McBride Neill was also Davis’s Uncle Jack and the man who was to rouse his passion for the art of film-making.

The Uncle Jack is much more than mere documentary. A touching portrait of and tribute to McBride Neill, the film also reveals much regarding Davis’s own life and is a meditation on the creative act. Building cinemas or making films involves the same process and requires people of an obsessive and passionate personality, people like McBride Neill, people like Davis.

During the making of The Uncle Jack one of the celebrated architect’s most beautiful buildings, Bangor’s Tonic Cinema, was to be destroyed in a blaze. In 1999 by a cruel and ironic twist of fate, Ben Edar, the house which McBride Neill had bequeathed to Davis, was also ravaged in a fire.

Although the house was rebuilt to stand proud once again on the shores of Belfast Lough some things proved irreplaceable. Ben Edar was also the home to Davis’s entire film archive, a repository for three decade’s work including the out-takes from all his films.

Little of the footage was saved. Davis spent the next two years concentrating on rebuilding his home and saving what he could from the carpet of ashes and celluloid that was left in the aftermath of the blaze.

Eschewing the formulaic plodding of contemporary documentary films with solemn presenters and enforced sense of drama, John T Davis has brings a natural, authentic approach to film-making.

Through his exploration of the very different and conversely very similar worlds of his subjects he reveals something of the human condition. It will be interesting to see where this most singular and idiosyncratic of film-makers takes us next.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Thanks to Culture Northern Ireland.org

John T. Davis at IMDb

COMMENT FROM OLD WEBSITE
One Response to John T Davis
Duke Daniels
December 8, 2011 at 3:45 pm

A nice article about John T Davis.

Her first novel Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year 1996 in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. Houghton Mifflin released Breakfast in Babylon in the U.S. in 1997.

She has just completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007

More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel was published internationally in 1999. Emer studied painting in New York and has had a sell-out solo show of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin. Her new book is Baby Zero, published March 07. She has just completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007.

Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives in what she refers to as the jungles of Co. Meath, Ireland.

interview with Emer Coming Soon

Emer Martin’s website

We only ever had classical music in the house, so I was a true novice when I made my first recordings at 15 or 16. They were mostly tape loops, echoes, and things. At the time, I’m sure I thought they were hit singles – and perhaps they would have been, on Neptune – but texture came to me before song structure.

I made my first song-based record between 2006 and 2008, and I named it *The Sweet Used-to-be*. It was mostly about unrequited love and sexual dysfunction. I think there may have been some religion in it too, and some anthropomorphism. I don’t really remember, and I ‘d be shy to listen to it now. It was a strange experience drawing attention for the record, and being called upon to explain it – and to perform it. I had made it in a vacuum, after all, and I hadn’t been aware that there was another way.

I decided, when it came to making a second record, that I would make one about the things that I really enjoyed, rather than the things that were a burden to me. So I made a record about ghosts, skeletons, animals, magic, and spectral landscapes. I called it *Haunted!* and I released it in October 2009. There is no carnality on the record. There are other kinds of love, of course – platonic, commemorative, and anthropomorphic – but I wanted to open imaginative doorways rather than poke at bruises. Making the record, I turned inward to my imagination, and I found it a profoundly liberating experience. I only had to invite myself to be free with my ideas. In so far as I’m able to be, I’m pleased with the result.

As somebody working with music, I’m often asked to name ‘influences’, and I find it difficult to respond. There are many people whose work I’m interested in – at the moment I would choose the music artists Laurie Anderson and Arthur Russell, the visual artists Franz Marc and Helen Chadwick, the writer Shirley Jackson, and the poet e. e. cummings – but I could never trace a precise trajectory from anybody else’s work to my own.

Performance at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (October 2009)

Because I also work in visual art, and because I write, I’m never sure of how to describe myself. When asked, I tend to glower at the ground and mutter something about being a ‘polymath’. I sometimes think the most difficult thing about my work – particularly *Haunted!* – is how un-difficult it is. When I work with music, I see myself fundamentally as a pop musician. I can’t help but feel that people would have a lot less trouble categorizing my work if they were less squeamish about using the word ‘pop’. Having said that, though, I don’t really mind being the ghost that comes tapping at the window. If they won’t let me in, I can just draw them out onto the moors with me.

*Portrait of David by Pauline Rowan

[url=src="http://theparlourreview.com/audio/davidturpin.mp3"]

Mark Granier is also a photographer and has done cover work for a number of publications, including his own books.

Mark Granier is also a photographer and has done cover work for a number of publications, including his own books.
One of his photographs was shortlisted for the Observer’s ‘Seeds of Change’ competition in 200

He was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2002. Prizes include the New Writer Poetry Prize in 1997 and a Vincent Buckley Fellowship in 2004.

Interview with Mark Granier

Mark Granier on Twitter

SKYROAD Photojournal

FLICKR Gallery

He has won several awards. He was given four at the Arnotts National Portrait Awards Exhibitions in 1985, 1989, 1993 and 1994. He was granted the K.M.P.G. award at the Annual Oireachtas Exhibition in 1992 and 1998. Other awards include a major Arts Council Bursary in 1986, a prize at the Claremorris Open Exhibition in 1990, an Art Flight to New York – as well as the E.S.B. Kearing McLoughlin Medal at the 1993 Annual Exhibition. He was elected an A.R.H.A. that same year. He received the Taylor De Vere Award for a Work of Distinction in any medium at the R.H.A. Annual Exhibition in 1995, and in 1996 he was elected an R.H.A. and a member of Aosdána.

Mick O’Dea has exhibited widely in Ireland, Latvia, the U.K. and the U.S.A., Spain and France. His work is included in a number of collections including The Arts Council of Ireland, The Royal Hibernian Academy, The National Gallery of Ireland, The Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Limerick, The National Self-Portrait Collection, The National Drawing Collection, Limerick City Gallery, Clare County Council, G.P.A. Shannon, The Office of Public Works, The Cesis Museum of Art, Latvia, Jurys Hotel Group, St. Patrick’s Hospital and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.

All his work is at once energetic and contemplative, multidirectional yet focused, coloured sparingly yet luxuriant.

His skill as a portrait painter has brought him many commissions, including ones from Hong Kong, Europe and the USA.

O’Dea is an artist with a vivid awareness of the roots of his painterly tradition , a natural observer with an essentially humanistic approach, firm in the academic tradition, but not in the classical sense.

All his work is at once energetic and contemplative, multidirectional yet focused, coloured sparingly yet luxuriant. He sees himself primarily as a draughtsman, regarding drawing as a gateway medium, enabling expression in other media. He works in pastel, acrylic and oil. His oil paintings are the result of multiple sketches leading to profound, dynamic work but he appreciates the quick drying properties of acrylic, comparable to the calligrapher’s ink.

He believes that the effort of harnessing this dynamic enables him to generate a sense of urgency which is translated and made manifest by the quality and the immediacy of his work.

Interview with Mick O’Dea

Mick O’Dea at Aosdána

Mick O’Dea at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Peter Murphy is a writer, spoken word performer, musician and journalist. His first novel John the Revelator was published in the UK and Ireland by Faber & Faber and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Fiction Prize in May 09, and longlisted for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize.

Of the novel, Roddy Doyle said, “Everything about John the Revelator excited me—I couldn’t wait to turn the page and keep on going. It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.” Colm Toibin commented, “an absolutely wonderful book… fresh and so contemporary, original and disturbing and brave.” James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers described it as, “Full of things I can remember but can’t imagine, a stunning debut novel.”

Shortly before the book’s publication, Murphy, together with the host of musicians who make up the Revelator Orchestra, began work on the spoken word/music album adaptation The Sounds of John the Revelator. Preview selections from the album are streamed at www.myspace.com/therevelatororchestra. A leaked copy of the album generated the following review from Jambands.com:

“Imagine, if you can, music that sounds like Tom Waits on drums and Lightnin’ Hopkins on a battered hollowbody thumping away down in the cellar while Murphy reads. (The) Sounds of John the Revelator is a neat piece of work that somehow combines the weirdness of Poe with the coolness of the Beats over a soundtrack that might’ve been created by the Velvet Underground … if they’d had Irish accents.”

Peter Murphy was born in November, 1968, in the town of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, in the south-east of Ireland, one of five children born to Peadar, a post office clerk and champion amateur boxer, and Betty, a telephonist. At the age of 17, he won the EU sponsored Michael Sweetman Award for Young Writers, taught himself to play drums, and over the next nine years toured and recorded with bands such as The Tulips and Grasshopper, sharing stages with The Cramps and Public Enemy.

Murphy moved to Dublin in 1991 and established himself as one of the country’s most prominent arts writers, interviewing hundreds of musicians, writers, filmmakers, war correspondents, human rights campaigners, and even the odd South African president in his capacity as contributing editor for Dublin’s Hot Press magazine.

“Imagine, if you can, music that sounds like Tom Waits on drums and Lightnin’ Hopkins on a battered hollowbody thumping away down in the cellar while Murphy reads.

In 2002, Murphy signed with the Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary agency and spent the next five years working on his debut novel. He was invited to contribute liner notes to the remastered edition of the Anthology of American Folk Music, and has also supplied sleevenotes for Garbage and Killdozer, as well as contributing to Rolling Stone, Music Week, the Irish Times and the Sunday Business Post, among others.

Murphy has been a regular panelist on RTE’s arts review show The View since 2001. He has given talks on the influence of Joyce on Irish music, (‘Nocturnal Emissions’, at the 2004 ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland) and the connection between Irish literature and punk rock (‘The Sick Bag of Cu Chulainn’, the Edge Festival Ballina, 2008), and has also appeared the Dublin Writer’s Festival, Listowel Writer’s Week, the Belfast Book Festival, the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Flatlake.

In May 2008, after 17 years in Dublin, he returned to Enniscorthy, where he now lives. He is currently at work on another novel.

Interview with Peter Murphy

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mr Peter Murphy on Facebook

Brian Turner has seen his poems published in poetry daily, the Atlantic Review and several other publications. From Fresno, California, his poems have also appeared in the voices in wartime anthology. Turner is an MFA graduate of the University of Oregon and a US army veteran.

“The poems on the pages of Here, Bullet, with their immediacy of impact, their universality of theme, their blend of cultural and historical insight, and their many tiered reverberations of the aftermath of gut wrenching violence, make for a powerful reading experience….The relationship Turner establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what precedes loss, in what is related to loss. There is no harm in such reflection, argues Here, Bullet, but, rather harm stems from the lack of it.” – The Franklin Journal

This interview took place at the House Hotel in Galway , April 2008. I had met Brian two weeks previously when he was reading at the Poetry Now festival in Dun Laoighaire. He returned to Galway as poet in residence for the Cuirt International Festival of Writing. In the course of this interview he speaks, among other things, about the duality of being a soldier and a poet and his experience of the Iraq war.

Brian Turner Interview with The Parlour Review

Iraq Soldier Describes War in Poetry: Brian Turner at NPR

Timothy O’Grady is the author of the prize-winning novel Motherland and co-author with Kenneth Griffith of Curious Journey: An Oral History of Irelands’s Unfinished Revolution.

His most recent work, I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O’Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. Pyke’s photographs–portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes– enhance the story of an Irish migrant worker who leaves Ireland for the promise of a better life in England. It tells the story of a his coming of age in the middle years of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields and on the building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind, and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the seascapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played and the woman he loved. In the books preface John Berger describes the synergism of the text and images: “The photographs are a reminder of everything which is beyond the power of words. . .And the words recall what can never be made visible in any photograph.”

The threnody of his days is also a succession of pictures and in their counterpoint – vivid, sensuous text and stark, harrowing, sometimes lovely images – I Could Read the Sky becomes a distillation of the experience of Irish emigration.

O’Grady was born and raised in Chicago and has spent many years living in Donegal and Dublin. He currently lives in London.

What I could do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof
Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds.
Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall.
Go three rounds with Joe in the ring
Da put up in the barn.
I could dance sets. Read the sky.

Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads.
Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal.
Make a field. Work the swarth
turner, the flout and the thresher.
I could read the sea. Shoot straight. Make a shoe.
Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes.
Plough and harrow. Read the wind. Tend bees.
Bind wyndes. Make a coffin. Take a drink.
I could frighten you with stories …

[photo and Text New York State Writers' Institute]

Listen to Timothy O’Grady on The Parlour Review

Timothy O’Grady (&Steve Pyke) at the New York State Writers Institute

Timothy O’Grady at Random House publishers

Breytenbach worked as political activist from the 1960s onwards, drawing international attention to the human rights violations and injustices of the Apartheid government, and collaborating closely with UNESCO and the ANC. In 1975, on an “illegal” visit to South Africa to make contacts with activists and trade unionists, he was arrested, charged under the Terrorism Act and jailed for seven years. Released from prison in 1982, due to massive international pressure, he left for Paris where he obtained French citizenship.

Breytenbach’s prison memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983), is widely recognized as a South African classic and has been translated into several other languages.

In 1987, he helped to organize the historic Dakar Conference in Senegal where exiled ANC members met with influential South Africans to pave the way towards a democratic South Africa . Breytenbach, who was part of the team that started the Centre for Creative Arts, has also held numerous visiting professor posts, including University of Natal, Princeton University, New York University and the University of Cape Town, and has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cape Town and the University of Natal .

He co-founded and is currently the director of the Goree Institute. The institute aims to strengthen democratic processes, the autonomy of civil societies and cultural research and expression in Africa .

Breytenbach’s prison memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983), is widely recognized as a South African classic and has been translated into several other languages.
[See post to watch Flash video]
Breyten Breytenbach reading New York September 12, 2001
© Breyten Breytenbach
Video © Marion Kelly

“Breytenbach’s writing… has always been marked by a combination of Kafkaesque scepticism and a celebration of life; images connect surreal worlds to the harsh and brutal realities of apartheid, magical realism to critical realism. His is not the direct ideological onslaught nor the quick and easy answer, but the delicate scalpel of a neurosurgeon constantly engaged in a search for the mad spots on the brain of the human species.” Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe

Breyten Breytenbach reads for The Parlour Review

Selected Bibliography

A Veil of Footsteps, Human and Rousseau, 2008

Intimate Stranger, A Writing Book (Intieme Vreemde), Podium, 2006

Le coeur-chien. A travel memoir, Actes Sud, 2005

Die Ongedanste Dans, Human and Rousseau, 2005

Cadavre Exquis, Rodopi, 2005

Word Work ( Woordwerk ), Human and Rousseau, 1999

Die Toneelstuk, Human and Rousseau, 1999

Dog Heart . A travel memoir, Faber and Faber, 1998

The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Harcourt,1996

Return to Paradise, Faber and Faber, 1992

All One Horse, Taurus,1989

Memory of Snow and of Dust, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1987

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

A Season in Paradise ( Een seizoen in het paradijs ), Perskor,1980

The Anthill Bloats… (Die miernes swel op…), Emmarentia, 1980

To Fly (Om te vlieg), Buren, 1971

Catastrophes (Katastrofes), Human and Rousseau,1964

Image and Text Time of the Writer Festival 2008