Commenting on Stormont Live about MP expenses, Sammy Wilson explained that he shares an apartment near Westminster with Jeffrey Donaldson. Which in my mind begs the question ...
Does Sammy leave lights on and the television sitting on standby, while Jeffrey goes around switching them all off?
If you’ve ploughed through the Report of the Consultative Group on the Past or wished that you had, you might be interested in the open event being run by the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland on Tuesday night.
In Conversation with Lesley Carroll discussing “A future facing the past?”
Tuesday 12 May at 7.30pm up on the 3rd Floor, 21 Ormeau Avenue, Belfast, BT2 8HD
A member of the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past, Lesley has seen and heard more from behind the scenes than most, and wrestles with our apparent political inability to deal with the report, let alone the past!
It’s the first in a series of conversations. Next month on June 9, In Conversation with Mike Wardlow will focus on “Education - a middle class value or a fundamental human need?” asking whether “the Christian church have anything distinctive to bring to current local education debates and institutions? A space to explore biblical values concerning education, and bringing them to bear on current local educational issues.”
My Thursday night arty activities as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival started with another architectural opportunity. Todd Architects practice, responsible for the Black Box’s design, was sponsoring a showing of Rem Koolhaas - A Kind of Architect. Such was the interest that the event outgrew the Black Box café and spilled over into the main performance area.
A lifestyle journalist who started to write screenplays, Rem Koolhaas helped made the most expensive film (at that time) in the Netherlands. It closed two weeks after its release! A fairly erotic art house film noire if the clips were representative of the while thing. But architecture ran in the family.
In the early 1970s as a student at architecture school in London, Koolhaas had to make a documentary about a building. He chose the Berlin wall. And the theme of walls dividing continued later when he investigated the potential effect of building an enormous enclosed area in the middle of a city. A walled garden that would become the cramped central space where people would flock to live in the fashionable place, emptying the no-longer fashionable suburbs and opening up their possible regeneration ... or “regurgitation” as Tuesday‘s Waiting for Ikea play might have put it!
As usual, sitting in the audience as an IT architect, my mind wanders to the parallels between built-environment and computer-based architecture.
The film brought out the idea of architecture being teamwork. Never alone in his OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) practice. Never quite clear where ideas came from or how options were refined. A multi-disciplinary pursuit, architects, graphic designers, technicians, all collaborating. No surprise that the best moments of IT architecture mirror this kind of group effort.
Koolhaas also viewed his architectural solutions as interventions to “fix the programming” of existing spaces: in other words, to improve their use and usability beyond baseline measurements and metrics taken before the start of the project. Sounds familiar too.
By spinning off AMO (OMA spelt backwards) as a think tank to inform their architecture, Koolhaas found a way to build in the thinking that is necessary for proper design.
Koolhaas aims to understand the client in their totality. It’s not just about the fancy HQ that they want designed and built, but for him it requires a wider appreciation of a client’s factories, stores, product lines, business, culture and processes.
A Koolhaas trait is that he favours multi-level constructions. Rarely skyscrapers - though circumference (2H+2W) of the Central China Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing does equal the height of New York’s old Twin Towers.
But getting away from isolated homes on flat streets to form covered communities, maximising the urban spaces and their usefulness. But fitting in with the surroundings, matching the existing architectural style of the area, isn’t a prime constraint.
From what I saw during the film, Koolhaas likes floating buildings, raised structures, rooms that stick out into the air several floors up the side of buildings, and ramps which can sometimes double as drawbridges.
“You rarely leave a building by Koolhaas without bruises”
said one commentator in the film, pointing to Koolhaas’ tendency to make floor lines disappear from under your feet, placing unexpected views and conceiving surprising revelations about the layout.
As well as “normal” building projects, Koolhaas has taken on less traditional creative missions. One such venture was the development of a visual language to better unite member EU countries than the EU flag with its fixed number of ten stars.
In its place he envisioned a barcode pattern - sometimes compared to pyjamas. It starts with the colours of the Irish flag (far west), and originally finished with those of the Greek flag (far east). It was later extended when the EU expanded.
On reflection, I found Sketches of Frank Gehry a much better film profiling another prolific architect, using the cinematic media to better effect to showcase the subject, his process and the built designs. And while there were moments of invention in Thursday night’s Rem Koolhaas film, personally, I felt it was more like a TV documentary. Though I’m still very glad I went along and learnt more.
Looks like the UUP Conservatives and Unionists are warming up their European Election campaign to get Jim Nicholson re-elected with a daily jab at the DUP on their new DUP Pants on Fire website and Twitter account.
Having attended a concert of Shaun Davey's music in the Waterfront on St Patrick's Day in 2008, I was fascinated to discover an extended interview with the composer on Arts Extra last Monday. The recording will expire on Listen Again on Monday evening, so you don't have long to catch it if you're interested.
Not classically trained in music, Davey brings a different set of rules to his music. Perhaps a greater understanding of drama and emotion than other who are more focussed on the layer complexity between the parts.
Brilliant, brilliant music ... and interesting commentary from Marie-Louise Muir in conversation with Shaun Davey.
Is all Dublin drama sweary? Two out of two that I’ve seen this year have been. And they’ve both been lunchtime plays. There’s something very unnatural about lots of swearing at lunchtime. If you turn on Channel 4 after ten o’clock (an hour after the UK TV watershed begins) then you half expect to find the odd F - and nowadays the occasional C - floating out towards your eardrums. But at lunchtime, it’s different.
Performing at the Out to Lunch festival in January, comedienne Shappi Khorsandi stopped at one point mid-joke to reconsider how she’d phrase something for a lunchtime audience. Society seems to adopt different rules at different times of the day.
Waiting for Ikea was written and performed by Georgina McKevitt and Jacinta Sheerin. It wowed the Dublin Fringe Festival back in 2007, and was sold out as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in the Black Box on Tuesday lunchtime.
Chrissie and Jade were childhood friends. They shared their big life experiences with each other: practicing dance routines and doing pregnancy tests together,
Chrissie: “Are they the same pyjamas you were wearing yesterday?”Jade: “No ... (pause) … I’ve got two pairs of these.”
Years later, still living in Pimlico, they are to Dublin what Millies are to Belfast: pyjamas are for living in! Community is tight and gossipy. Friendship involves as much crying and falling out as hugging and making up. Boyfriends can be recycled. There’s a lot of sitting, standing and talking in the street.
As one online review phrased it:
The Celtic tiger has been and gone and they never even stroked it.
But behind the friendship, there is pain. As a young mother, Chrissie needed help with baby Dean. And Jade dropped her plans for college and became a second parent. Eight year’s later, Jade still gives Chrissie’s son a goodnight kiss each evening, and has a better understanding of Dean’s problems and life than his mother. But it’s time for Jade to flee the nest she unexpectedly became trapped in. Time to live life for herself.
Waiting for Ikea is well named, in that you will spend much of the performance waiting for Ikea to be mentioned. It’s not a central plot point - but it must help tempt the audience to buy tickets to see the show!
With flashbacks and some rather professionally produced amateur video footage, the audience explore the friendship and the imminent transition. There’s a lot of humour. A lot of earthy language. And insights into sun beds, first communion and Dublin community that made for a lunchtime experience that won’t quickly be forgotten.
So I’ve been living with a little Flip Mono HD for the last week and a bit. It’s just the size of a candy bar phone, slips in your jacket pocket weighs only 3.3oz (around 95g) and can capture an hour of HD quality footage.
At the flick of a button on the side, the USB plug flips out from the top ready to download your video onto PC/Mac and recharge the built in battery. Being the latest model available in Europe (the US have just launched the Flip Ultra HD which I guess will hit these shores before Christmas) it comes with the latest simple editing software already on the internal drive – for both PC and Mac, so you can install without downloading.
Technically it’s capturing HD at 720p resolution, 30 frames per second, 16:9 widescreen (1280 x 720) onto it’s built in 4GB flash memory. The battery powers the unit for around two hours, and it takes three hours to fully recharge via USB.
I loved its handy form factor. It’s smaller and lighter than it’s main rival, the Kodak Zi6. From the point you hold in the power button, it’s ready to record inside a couple of seconds. The screen on the back is never going to be clear enough to check if an HD image is in focus! But it’s good enough to browse through clips and delete the dud ones.
Let’s look at a real life application. I used the Mino HD to capture footage at BarCamp Belfast.
Snippets of talks, voxpops with attendees and speakers, general background footage of the venue and surroundings. It coped well. It’s discrete enough that its presence isn’t as off-putting as a camcorder or professional broadcast camera.
I’d half expected that I'd be able to hook the Mino HD up to a computer with a USB extension lead to power it, and allow me to beat the two hour battery life. But no: once hooked up to a computer, it switches over to being a USB drive, and the camera function is disabled.
The audio it captured was of good quality (mono), but at a very low level. So you’ll have to boost the level in your editing software if combining with louder footage from other sources.
It’s a small, lightweight handheld (fingerheld) camera – so it wobbles. It doesn’t have built in image stabilisation, so unless you jam yourself against a wall, or mount the Mino HD on a camera tripod (it does have a standard tripod mount on the bottom) expect the pictures to be a little shaky. But packages like iMovie 09 can come to the rescue offering video stabilisation of imported clips.
The BarCamp Belfast video was shot entirely on the Flip Mino HD, and edited in the older iMovie HD. Nothing fancier required.
I was surprised when I paused the imported content just how sharp a still from a clip could be. I pointed the Flip out a train window on a sunny day in London and realised that I’d be able to use a still from the footage as a background image (at 1280 x 720 anyway). Good vibrant colour. If you pan around from a very bright scene to much darker scene, you’ll notice the white balance correcting and adjusting. And I was impressed with the quality of lower light shots.
To transfer the images off the camera and onto your computer, just plug it into a USB2 socket. The built in FlipShare software allows you transfer clips on and off the camera, trim clips and then sequence them, before adding a title and credit, and exporting the finished movie as a .MOV (H.264, AAC). It can upload directly to Youtube and MySpace, though doesn’t have the settings for Flickr yet! The software ran quite happily on my Atom-powered Dell Mini 9 (running XP) and Mac Mini. For more sophisticated productions, just import the clips into iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Pinnacle etc.
Part of me would love the Mino HD to boost its gain and capture audio at a louder level – or offer a jack to plug in an external mic. It takes a surprisingly long time to transfer footage off the Flip and onto your computer. Even using USB2, 1GB is a lot of storage to shift around. If pushed for time, popping out an SD card and replacing it with a fresh one would have been faster. Given that the camera recording HD, it’s a shame that the video out (cable supplied) is only a Component video feed.
But for most of the scenarios that you’d want to use a pocket sized HD camera ... you can live without those features.
It’s not really intended for shooting a feature film – though some enterprising filmmaker will try! It would be ideal for voxpopping – short head shots, no need for zoom and close enough to the subject to use the built-in mic and not get too much background nose. Would love to have a go in the summer with Tech Camp and send out one group with the normal shoulder-mounted DV camera, the other with a Flip, and then compare the results.
An hour of footage is normally plenty. And I quickly got used to the shake and the audio. Years ago, people took perfectly good photos with Kodak Brownie cameras. And today, it’s possible to capture excellent video footage with a Flip. While I found that it did reduce the number of photos I took, the size and usability of the Mino HD balanced out some of its constraints and downsides. Retailing for £169.99,
Any bigger or any heavier, and I don’t think I’d carry it around! So for me the Kodak Zi6 and even the promised Ultra HD (with its AA batteries, stereo mic and two hours recording) would be too big and heavy for my pocket.
But for now, the Flip Mino HD is back in its box, wrapped up, and speeding back to London in a padded envelope. I’ve never owned a camcorder – no embarrassing home movies for Littl’un to worry about! – but I’d seriously think about getting a Flip. It appealed to my (normally well hidden) inner filmmaker.
I've been listening to Radio 4's iPM for ages, and I usually resist the temptation to participate by commenting on their blog or emailing in a sentence to describe an event in my week. But their trail a couple of weeks ago for an upcoming piece on the demise of the local newspaper trade came right on the back of meeting Fiona Rutherford, editor of the recently launched East Belfast Herald (mentioned on AiB).
So I popped a comment on the iPM blog and thought nothing more about it until I listed to Saturday's podcast - and was ever so slightly disappointed that they hadn't picked up the story of a local paper launching in the face of an industry trend that favoured closure.
Then Fiona emailed this evening to say that she'd been interviewed on Saturday for iPM.
Did I sleep through that bit of the podcast?
No. Sure enough, on Listen Again/iPlayer (the one week catch up service for the radio programme) the interview is there just before the 8 minute mark, tucked in-between the end of the Andy Burnham interview and listeners' news. But because the item was overlaid with some scene-setting Van Morrison music, it had been stripped out of the podcast.
Unlike the Listen Again version, the podcast doesn't spontaneously combust after a week, but lives on on your hard drive until you delete it, so the rights payments for using the music would presumably be higher.
The upshot? BBC podcasts are usually shorter than the original radio programmes, with any significant music (and the words spoken over the music) removed. And in this case, about two minutes shorter: Fiona's interview - the one item in the programme I was looking out for was completely missing. Edited out.
Really just a quick reminder that while the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival is now in full swing, it's not too late to browse through the programme and secure some tickets. (Though the online booking page does suggest that around half the events have sold out!)
This afternoon, Zoë Conway wowed the packed crowd in The John Hewitt as she fiddled alongside accomplished guitarist and husband John McIntyre. Once again, their chemistry was on show as they worked through their impressive set. One friend in the audience described it as:
"Possibly most erotically charged and sweet performance I've heard. Her partner completely fixated on her. Beautiful voice."
Well worth going back to hear after her great performance in the January Out to Lunch festival. And a cultural first as it was Littl'un's inaugural attendance at a concert.
While waiting for Argos to rummage around their storeroom for some flat pack units yesterday lunchtime, I caught some of the Junior Circus from Belfast Community Circus School's performance in Arthur Street - part of the Festival of Fools that runs until Monday 4th. Excellent stuff.
I can no longer count on the fingers (and thumbs) of one hand the number of outlets in Victoria Square that have switched off their lights and locked their doors permanently. Every week, there seem to be more stories of well-known and respected brands and outlets facing financial trouble. Not to mention the continual shrinkage of Northern Ireland's remaining manufacturing industry.
Perhaps the biggest shock of the last week was the news that five of Northern Ireland's fourteen Pizza Hut franchises were closed with immediate effect on Friday morning: Coleraine, Dungannon as well as Belfast's Dublin Road, Connswater and Yorkgate outlets.
The Dublin Road branch has been there since my student days, outlasting the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory around the corner, and serving as a venue for QUB Radio Club (no, not the Queens Radio station ... way before that) Christmas Dinners that were rarely ever held in December! And I remember a run-in with the Yorkgate branch for its miserly Chicken Supreme which had a really meagre sprinkling of chicken bits spread thinly across the pizza. They'd apparently been told off for being too generous with the toppings.
While the administrator is confident that the four branches in Ballymena, Carrickfergus, Glengormley and Lisburn can stay open, the remaining five branches are trading with a cloud over their heads while more sums are done. Over the years, I've eaten in all five!
But sitting in the Connswater car park on Saturday lunchtime, it was still shocking to see the East Belfast branch - that had hosted memorable family lunches - closed for ever. Now just a perch for breathless sea gulls.
When Reverend Fun is on form, he's hard to beat!
(Copyright Gospel Communications International, Inc - www.reverendfun.com)
Back in November 2007, the steel squiggle Spirit of Belfast came top in the public poll to chose which piece of public art should adorn the space in Belfast’s Cornmarket Arthur Square.
Since the announcement, the pedestrian area has been paved, Victoria Square has opened, the pedestrian area has been thoroughly dug up … but another set of streets has commenced.
In front of Carphone Warehouse, in the spot where the bandstand used to be, they’re making preparations for Dan George’s sculpture to be erected. In case you’ve forgotten ...
Spirit of Belfast - four curved stainless steel squiggles, complete with “a ribbon of light provided by very energy-efficient light emitting diodes” whose “intensity, color [sic] and movement will be programmed as called for by events, the time of day ... or special celebrations within the city”. It intends to become “the hearth of our city centre”, drawing people to its interactivity as it weaves together steel and reminds of us of the fabric (linen) of our history.
Update - September 2009 - It's finally being installed.
Parking in Bachelors Walk for a birthday dinner in Uno's Italian Restaurant, I realised that there was another 45 minutes before the parking restrictions would end and the Traffic Wardens Attendants would go off duty.
Putting money into the nearby parking meter - it's marked #23 if DRD, Roads Service or NCP Services are reading - I suddenly noticed that the expiry time wasn't incrementing towards 6pm.
Instead, it thought the time was already the next morning ... no answer from the phone number marked on the ticket machine and the tickets. It just rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. Pity that NCP don't man their office to match the ticketing times.
You can catch a quick review of Uno's on Lookaly.
Update - turns out that if you overpay - which is inevitable as you pay in 15 minute increments, once the time goes beyond the 6pm cut off, the ticket and machine roll over and display the time that charging starts the next morning.
