The Kiosk this week on Phantom 105.2

Lots to come on the show this week. I’ll be talking to the award-winning writer Enda Walsh (Hunger, Disco Pigs, The New Electric Ballroom). In the Kiosk’s Back Track, Gavin Friday will be picking out a trune that has a lot of memories for him. Kiosk reviewers Peter Murphy of Hot Press and Andrew Lynch of The Sunday Business Post and The Evening Herald will be reviewing the new album from Primal Scream, new documentary A Complete History of My Sexual Failures and Brian Friel’s version of Three Sisters running at the Abbey. We’ll also be recommending the best books to take on holiday with you this summer. Tune in to The Kiosk tomorrow at 11am (repeated Sundays at 8am).

SBP Column 22/06/08

You’ll find them all over the web: sad little notes flashing up on your computer screen like crosses marking a new kind of grave. The notes will generally employ similar phrases, lines like: ‘‘for reasons of time’’; ‘‘want to do other things’’; ‘‘need to get my life back’’.

With words such as these, another web log will be put to sleep, ushered along to its final resting place with -if the blogger is lucky - flowers in the form of sad farewell notes from blog readers saying ‘thanks for the posts’ and hoping that, one day, perhaps, a resurrection might take place.

Almost as fast as blogs are springing up – there are reportedly over 100 million in existence - they are being abandoned by their once enthusiastic, but now exhausted, owners, concerned that the time they have spent entertaining their readers could and should be spent on other, more important endeavours.

In recent weeks, two high-profile Irish bloggers have hung retirement signs on their doors - Shane Hegarty of the Irish Times and Sinead Gleeson, winner of the best arts and culture blog for three years in a row at the Irish Blog Awards. Both bloggers cited lack of time as their reason for quitting, coupled with a desire to commit more seriously to other projects.

In truth, there was a certain inevitability to their decision. After all, books and articles don’t get written when you’re busy vetting your spam and examining your pingbacks. No matter how many people read your blog, blogging doesn’t pay the bills. The internet might well be the paradigm shift of our generation, but everyone is still struggling to figure out how to make money from it.

The Kiosk this week

Barcelona was so warm! Quite a shock to come back to Dublin — and discover the floods and the endless rain. Home sweet home, eh? Anyway, coming up on the show this week, I’ll be talking to Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes about his new second solo album (and of course asking him about the current state of play with the Strokes). Derek O’Connor from the Darklight film and art festival will be coming into the studio to talk about how the festival — which takes place in Dublin this weekend — is going. Our reviewers Johnnie Craig and Cillian McDonnell will be reviewing new albums from Beck, My Morning Jacket and Fleet Foxes. And Daragh from Dark Room Notes will be telling me about the track that means a lot to him — that’s coming up in The Kiosk’s Back Track. Tune in to the show at 11am Saturday on Phantom 105.2 (repeated at 8am on Sundays).

Seven days of a life…

Thursday 12th — go to my first IMPAC award dinner at the City Hall — mostly out of curiosity to know who goes to these things and also — in truth — because this is the first year they’ve invited me. Moment of mortification ensues when lady at reception looks completely blank after I say my name. “But I’ve confirmed,” I squeak. Jaysus, and I’ve got on my nice formal frock and everything.

(Side-note: this is actually the second time this has happened to me in a month — very nearly didn’t make it in to a Duke Special gig either- not pleasant. Happily, not wearing formal frock on that occasion, though. That would have been too much.)

Anyway, said lady tells us that we are fine to go in and we’re at table 21. Later, she runs up and says that she has found my name and we are actually at table 12. “Ah, we’re grand at table 21,” we say. “Table 21 is Siberia!” she hisses. Turns out we’d have been sitting by ourselves. Oh. Anyway, table 12 is Joe Duffy table — now, being honest, I’ve always wanted to, ahem, talk to Joe, but I’m on the wrong side of a ten-person table, so this isn’t going to happen. Joe looks very disgruntled with the whole evening, but I think — and not to be rude — that’s just the way his face is arranged.

Rawi Hage makes a good speech — although everyone else speechifies for far too long.

Friday 13th – good god, a haze of reading…

This Saturday I will be…

in Barcelona — yay! So the excellent Johnnie Craig of State magazine and The Sunday Business Post will be covering for me on The Kiosk. Do tune in to Phantom 105.2 on Saturday at 11am to check out what’s promising to be a fantastic show. Johnnie will be talking to the brilliant author Julia Leigh. He’ll also be reviewing new albums from Weezer, Dolly Parton and the Infadels alongside Neil Dunphy of The Sunday Tribune and Alan Corr of the RTE Guide. John Meagher of The Irish Independent will be in to talk culture — and, of course, there’ll be loads of great tunes. Check the show out online at www.phantom.ie. Btw this is the first show since we started the Kiosk in November 2006 that I’m officially taking off. Hard to believe, but it’s true

This week on The Kiosk

Lots to come on the show this week. In The Kiosk’s Back Track, Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes will be telling us about the track that means a lot to him. We’ll have a Dublin Writers Festival special — writers Damon Galgut and Philip Gourevitch will be stopping by the studio to talk about their latest books. Jim Carroll of The Irish Times will be giving us his assessment of the current state of the Irish music industry — what with the spate of gig cancellations and slow ticket sales. Dermod Moore and Sarah Anne Murphy will be reviewing both Mistresses, the new drama series on RTE 1, and Miriam O’Callaghan’s return to the chat show circuit. We’ll be playing great new tracks from The Subways and Get Well Soon — and, ahead of Bloomsday next week, I’ll be hearing from an actor who has reworked Molly Bloom’s famous words for the stage. Finally, we’ll have a fantastic competition for you — we’re giving two lucky people the chance to win a special USIT pass to go travelling through Europe. Tune in to Phantom 105.2 for The Kiosk on Saturdays at 11am (repeated Sundays at 8am).

Prince cancels concert

PRINCE CANCELS CONCERT -

- Full ticket refunds including booking fee from point of purchase from Friday -

Rebecca Miller SBP May 18th author/director interview

Debut novelist she might be, but - as befitting someone with her lineage - there is no trace of the naif about Rebecca Miller’s approach to the interviewing process. Before this interview takes place, certain ground rules have been specified. The publicist will sit with the door open in an adjoining room for the hour. There are to be no questions about Miller’s brother Daniel, who has Down syndrome, and his controversial upbringing. Queries about her husband, the Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis are discouraged.

Questions about her late father, legendary Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, once married to Marilyn Monroe, are, while not out of the question, also less than welcome. It’s a list of requirements that would make any journalist sniff into their notepad. ‘‘All the interesting stuff - just gone?’’ gasps a friend before the interview. But happily this isn’t quite true.

Strikingly beautiful at 45,with cheekbones sharper than Daniel’s, a ready laugh and a strong air of self-possession and independence, Miller makes for intriguing company whether she’s talking about her family or not. Besides, her novel is the kind of book that can generate attention all on its own.

Fashioned with assiduous care, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a compelling and ambitious work that examines what happens to women when their sense of identity and self becomes subsumed into the needs of their families.

At the beginning of the book, Pippa Lee is a 50-year-old woman who is described as being ‘‘a happily married, well off woman, a dedicated mother, generous hostess, a woman who seemed to those who knew her to be among the most gracious, the kindest, the loveliest, the most unpretentious and most reassuring ladies they had ever met.”

Pippa lives for ‘‘giving pleasure’’. So when her husband Herb, a renowned but physically frail publisher 30 years her senior, suggests they move into a gated retirement community, Pippa readily agrees, seeing it as no less than her duty. But shortly after she arrives, Pippa begins sleepwalking - and waking up to find that she has smoked cigarettes and scoffed scrambled eggs and chocolates.

While she wonders if she’s having a nervous breakdown, the novel flashes back to Pippa’s past, in the process providing a revelation. The youthful Pippa was a rebel who ran away from home, had an affair with one of her teachers and would happily say yes to just about anything that seemed dangerous. She might as well be a different person - which is exactly Miller’s point.

‘‘The book is about how changeable identity is and the extent to which anyone person is consistent,’’ Miller says, as she perches elegantly on the sofa of a private suite in a plush Dublin hotel. ‘‘The lead character, Pippa, is based on someone I met up with who I hadn’t met in a long time. She was a girl who was wild in her youth.

SBP Author interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri

When Jhumpa Lahiri was growing up in Massachusetts, her parents would often bring her back to their native India for holidays. Terrified at the prospect that relatives would consider their daughter an ‘‘American’’ child, in Calcutta, certain expectations were placed on Jhumpa.

‘‘It was very important to them that I was able to be in that world without drawing any attention to myself,” she says. Lahiri would speak only Bengali, wear traditional garb and erase any dimensions of herself that could be perceived as foreign.

But cloaking so much of herself - for two, even three months at a time - didn’t feel normal. ‘‘I felt very lost on the inside. Yes, I could play the part, but it wasn’t the whole picture of who I was. Then, in the United States, I also played a part around my peers - I kept the Bengali side of me very hidden because I was embarrassed and self-conscious.”

Lahiri grew up with an acute understanding of what it feels like to be an outsider - the classic condition for so many writers - and bearing with her a deep knowledge of the everyday trials of the first-generation immigrant.

‘‘As a child, I was always aware that my parents were struggling on some level: suffering, unhappy, out of place and out of sorts,” she says. ‘‘The two worlds of India and America seemed so uninterested in each other. When I began to write, I started to knit the two worlds together. I tried to confront in writing what I was afraid to do in real life.”

It’s an approach that has proven incredibly successful, with Lahiri quickly becoming a critical and commercial darling. Her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and became an international bestseller; it has since been translated into over 30 languages. Her 2003 debut novel, The Namesake, was turned into a successful film directed by Mira Nair.

Her brilliant new book, Unaccustomed Earth, meanwhile, has achieved the extremely rare feat for a collection of short stories (one of the least commercially lucrative literary genres) of hitting the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

It’s a trajectory that has left Lahiri, an extremely youthful-looking 40, shaking her head in surprise. ‘‘It’s been so unreal,” she says, in the tea room of a Dublin hotel, where she has flown in from New York to stay for one night before heading to the Hay literary festival in England the following day.

My SBP column 8/06/08

Halfway through music writer David Browne’s fascinating new book on Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century, he tells a story that neatly illustrates just how much the music industry has changed over the past two decades.

The year was 1994. It was six months after Sonic Youth had released their album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. The album hadn’t sold well - but then, Sonic Youth albums never sold particularly well.

That was hardly the point. As Sonic Youth producer Butch Vig put it: ‘‘Sonic Youth is the sound of rock music being destroyed.” In other words, they were the kind of band who would inspire other musicians rather than trouble cash registers overmuch.

When Sonic Youth’s lawyer, Richard Grabel, met with their record company Geffen, he put that argument to them in even more direct terms. Thanks to Sonic Youth, bands like Nirvana, Hole, Beck and Teenage Fan Club had signed with Geffen.

That alone, Grabel asserted confidently, meant that Sonic Youth deserved to have their contract renegotiated in favour of a deal for seven albums, substantial cash advances for each record and a signing bonus in the seven-figure range.

Although some of Geffen’s lawyers were horrified - this for a band that had sold barely more than a quarter of a million records? - the label agreed. Sonic Youth had won their deal, based not on the amount they sold, but on their influence.

It was a strikingly unusual situation, even back then. But now, it sounds like a deal drawn right from fantasy land. These days, with the influence of downloading casting a long shadow over the music industry, the notion of a record company championing a band not because of their sales capacity, but because they believed in them - or at least in the fact that other bands believed in them - seems unfathomable.

In this climate, the whole notion of so-called ‘prestige artists’ – artists who don’t sell albums, but who add credibility and definition to a roster - is gradually fading away.

There are many good things about the democratisation of the industry - for one thing,t he explosion of music available courtesy of YouTube and MySpace - but the diminishing of any kind of artist-motivated principles in music has troubling implications, not simply for the bank balance of the artists, but for the quality of music emerging.

Sure, you might argue that Sonic Youth, although often brilliant, have plenty of sounds that are torturous to listen to, and maybe didn’t deserve quite everything that they got, but one of the great things about them is how they force the listeners to readjust their expectations of what music is and can be.

As music critics are given to saying about commercially unviable, artistically significant bands such as My Bloody Valentine, about ten people might have bought the record, but every one of those people formed a band.

If the modern-day versions of artists like Sonic Youth aren’t cherished by record companies, then how will they survive? I’m guessing it’ll be mostly by doing other jobs in the day-time and making art in the nighttime.

That’s one way to continue along the artist’s path. But it’s not the best way; it’s almost certainly not the way in which those artists will make their best material. For music fans everywhere, this situation is to our detriment.