issue 4 may 25
Ella O’Brien
Cover Model
John Gunn
Sadbh Caulfield, Rowena Breen and Buster Whaley + Ciara Munnelly
Editors’ Note
A Reader, mo chara,
TN2 as you know it is over. Buster is waiting to have his breakfast but he can’t eat anything until TN2’s final issue is completed. What do you think he’ll have? Maybe granola and yogurt, maybe some eggs.
Whatever it is, it’s gonna be good. And so is your future. As TN2 for 2024/25 comes to a close, we congratulate James Grace and Tallulah Whaley on becoming our successors, and we are delighted to welcome them as the new kingpins of the TN2 family.
Hala Don Grace y Doña Whaley.
As for Buster and Ciara, they are walking into the sea. Their journey has come to an end.
Godspeed and safe readings. Buster & Ciara
TN2 Poetry
You
held me in a way I was never held before
Nadine Deehan
He placed a fingertip to the seam of my sleeve, beside the beetle crawling up my shoulder
Waited patiently, silent ease.
She traded the rough denim for smooth skin. He would have carried her all the way home, Built the poor bug a little forest in the houseplants he had carefully nurtured
And make her believe she created that safe haven herself.
His eyes traced the creature’s back like she was the most beautiful thing he has ever encountered
Not knowing that the black spots on her red dome evolved as a defense mechanism
But still his curiosity lingered, gentle, non-judging
His hands calm, anticipating her next move
As if just being near her
Helped him understand her better.
Silently hoping his calmness would become the bugs own’
as she sat, content for eight minutes
Scoping out the grooves of his fingertips
I almost confessed, they actually have quite ugly wings underneath that is when she flew away ladybirds love sunflowers
Was the only thing he said
It was only then I realisedI had always called them ladybugs.
Priya Evans
blooming time
christ, you can’t keep up. the days move in a stream of patchy sunlight and gentle showers and you think of a hundred ways to live in the moment as you watch it slip past. you plant your hope in the rose garden. when it’s over you wash dirt from your nails and you think of a single reason to rise from your knees until blooming time. be very gentle with the soft underbelly of the season. wait for the sunshine girl to dance through the city and think of a life beyond your clouded sky.
Peugeot
My father sits behind the wheel With feathered hair.
I am reminded of my existence Through the rocking motions Of our van Slowing, Accelerating, Stopping. Now what should I say? That I can see the dog With his greying hair At the wheel, Heading down to the lake.
Picturing fish on hooks, I let my hand fall freely out the window, Wet nose against my wrist. A sudden burst of love.
Talking
We are talking now, And so it doesn’t matter That if in ten days, A month, Three months, We are not. We have spent this time, Used it accordingly, Talking. Choosing to converse With perhaps little to no meaning, A very small glimpse into What could have been Our reality. If this is all that there is, Then let it be so. I will go back to my life, You to yours, Knowing that we have spent A small portion of our lives In each other’s.
ART Jessica Sharkey
Ellen O’Brien
Ellen O’Brien
The Commodification of Cowboy Culture
Cowboy glory is back and presenting in popular music, film, food, and fashion. As country music hits the heights of popularity, radio loops the voices of Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert, and randomly, Post Malone. You would have to be blind not to notice the rhinestones and fringe decorating these Nashville stars. Western films returned during the pandemic as people longed for the great outdoors. New television series like “Yellowstone” and “Longmire” are dethroning the 1980s classic “Dallas”, extending the archetype of stoic male protagonists. Carhartt WIP opened on Exchequer Street last summer and Masa stays dishing tacos and margaritas just around the corner. Western culture is everywhere.
As a Texas girl moving to Dublin in 2021, I figured my bandanas and love for Johnny Cash would stand out, but what I encountered did not seem far from home. Savvy arts block girls spotted the trend early, and I began noticing cowboy boots come fall of first year. Now I am in fourth year and the last house party I attended included a live, grungy rendition of Folsom Prison Blues (it rocked). During college years I was sometimes treated differently from other Americans. Everyone gets excited when I say I am from Texas. It’s distinct. It’s also trendy.
We use fashion to stand out, blend in, and connect with our roots. Wearing country clothes in Dublin seemed like a chance to be expressive without having to change my wardrobe too much. But Gen Z occupies a global, trend-based fashion economy, and I arrived in Dublin around the same time the cowboy got his grip on society. After making the move overseas, it felt peculiar to see the place I just left reduced to a symbol. It is fun to embrace Western style, and the clothes are objectively awesome; however, something real gets lost in the overwhelming popularity of a trend.
Western clothing comes from a few different cultures. Spanish conquistadors arrived at the shores of South and Central America in the 16th-Century. Elaborate Mesoamerican civilizations already existed in these regions. Pilgrims landed on the East Coast of the United States in the 17th-Century and began a slow, westward expansion. Indigenous
peoples had been roaming North America for 20,000 years; by the time pioneers arrived in the West, Comaches had solidified themselves as “Lords of the Plains.” 19th-Century Texas witnessed the confluence of American pioneers, Spanish Mesoamericans, Mexicans, and indigenous tribes. Mixing together in mostly unsettled territory, these groups formed the symbol of the American West: Cowboys.
Crucially, the cowboy is not defined by looks, but by attitude. Early cowboys settled from the piney woods of East Texas to the mountainous deserts of the West; dusty panhandle in the north, all the way down to the Rio Grande river beds which border Mexico. Remember the Alamo? Cowboys briefly declared the region independent from Mexico, forming the Republic of Texas in 1836. They were fantastic horsemen and marksmen. Later cowboys became local legends running amok through Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and the edges of Southern California. There exists a great musical and literary tradition around outlaw culture and everybody knows the legendary story of Bonnie & Clyde, whose crime spree spanned the Southwest. On my family farm sits a defunct gas station that the couple robbed in 1932.
Today, cowboys are getting more screen time than ever. The Dallas Cowboys NFL team rose to international fame after a Netflix documentary on DC Cheerleaders topped the charts. At the time, I was living in the Netherlands working for a Dutch record label specialising in country music catalogues. One Friday after leaving the office in Hilversum, I spied a group of teen girls dressed in sequin miniskirts and DCC crop tops waiting on the train platform, headed to Amsterdam. It was a funny moment. Back home we have a longstanding tradition of dressing up as Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders for Halloween. The white booty shorts and cowboy boots with teased-out southern hair is simply too good and recognizable of a look.
But as the trend spreads, tradition gets forgotten and commodified. Boots mass produced by fast fashion companies fail to meet quality standards. We can all remember when Garth Brooks played a weekend of shows in
Dublin and the streets were flooded with cheap, pink cowboy hats. True cowboy clothes endure. A quality vintage store in Dallas carries coveralls, straw hats, a plethora of leather boots and Levi jeans. Levi jeans are a good case study, produced by the Levi Strauss company in California. During Western expansion, American workers needed durable clothing. Levis Strauss combined copper rivet reinforcements with tough denim, leading to the first manufactured waist overalls in 1873. Workwear has been repopularized by Carhartt and Dickie’s, and I am here for it. Producing high-quality clothing that looks cool and lasts is always a good idea.
You don’t have to drive far from where I grew up to reach the Ft. Worth Stockyards, where rodeos still happen every Friday and Saturday night. After a night at the rodeo, we would stumble onto the Stockyards strip, wandering in and out of Honky Tonks where the main entertainment is line music and dancing. These are massive bars filled with young guys in bootcut Levis with big silver belt buckles. The girls wear bell bottoms or denim dresses, and they are some of the best dancers I have ever seen, having grown up learning the moves in school. It is mesmerizing watching them dance under neon lights - or maybe it’s the Jack Daniels. The crowd you would find on a weekend in the Ft. Worth Stockyards generally come from a blue-collar background. Workwear is the uniform, but it can be glamourised to suit a night out. Friday night football, line dancing, and trade associations are still a big part of high school life in rural Texas. When my father was in school, he learned how to fix cars, weld, and do carpentry. Others might have opted for agriculture or electrician apprenticeships.
My father is one of the greatest cowboys I know. He grew up on a ranch outside of Dallas, worked his way through a few trade jobs, then university and law school. Now he is a businessman in Dallas who travels to Asia for work. He wears black Luchesse boots with his suits. If he doesn’t have any meetings, he wears a sports coat and dark wash jeans with an alligator-
The thing is, everybody wants to dress like a cowboy, but nobody wants to act like one.
skin belt. Many of his clothes are passed down to my brothers. Dad does business like a cowboy too. In the courtroom or boardroom he is fearless, cunning, yet deeply personable. He lays everything out on the line all the time. He plays his hand like a man with nothing to lose. Everything in his office is well-crafted. Sometimes he sits with his feet up on his desk and smokes a cigar.
The thing is, everybody wants to dress like a cowboy, but nobody wants to act like one. Hopefully the reach for Western stories in popular music and film will bring back some of that raw wildness. By understanding where cowboy clothes come from, I reckon we can all wear them a bit better. The cowboy is a romantic figure, a self-starter, and often a troublemaker. Not too long ago they rode the Great Plains looking for places to settle and begin a new life. Now we live in a rapidly globalised world where cowboy culture is endlessly reproduced and remade. The popularity of Western clothing comes from its distinctiveness, so it is worth recognizing the history of the style as we continue to adapt it. Western clothing has many unique regional characteristics, and this is just my experience from growing up in Texas - I hope it can offer decent perspective.
Moving to Dublin in first-year, I felt shy and out of place. Eventually I realized you gotta ride the plains. If you are exploring uncharted territory, hang loose. Cause trouble where necessary. Wear your boots and bandanas. Wear the attitude too.
Iwanttopausetorecognizegenocideofindigenouspeoplesthatoccurred duringWesternexpansion.Thedestructionofthatcultureisoneofthe greatest tragedies in American history. Turquoise jewelry, woven tribal prints, and moccasins are all products of indigenous American culture, andavaluablepartofWesternstyle.
WORDS and PHOTOS
Arabella Ware
Why young people don’t drink any more
Donnacha Sharkey takes us on a journey
I’m currently sat with my head in my hands and an emaciated wallet in my front right pocket. My paycheque of two hundred and eighteen euros came through on the Thursday. This windfall, in combination with the thirty or so euros I had left over from the previous week, made me king of the world. I’m writing this on the Saturday, near enough skint, with forty-seven euros and sixteen cents to my name. Where in God’s name did it all go?
First off, the lowlife, money-hungry loan sharks over at the local credit union took their weekly payment of twenty-five euros out of my account. They have me entirely by the balls, balls that I shopped around for the most favourable student loan interest rates in town. Ultimately placing them in the cold and miserable hands of a clerk by the name of Dave, in exchange for a once off payment of five thousand euros to cover tuition fees for a single year of college. I have a further three and a half years of payments left, and they stand to make about a grand from me. A raw enough deal, but I had little choice at the time. I have accepted my reality as a debtor, I have made my bed and I will lie in it for the foreseeable, as comfortably as I can with my balls in Dave’s vice grip.
Secondly, the working person’s single greatest enemy came knocking - my landlords. I generally regard landlords as pond scum, the lowest of the low, profiteering off what should be an inalienable human right. I believe this to be true in most instances, possibly every instance except my own, as my landlords are my parents and I love them dearly. I have no qualms contributing to the running of the household, as before I started paying rent, all I really had to offer was my position as the six o’clock political correspondent. Folks may lead you to believe that you ought to be out in the streets up in arms, but real activism starts at the dinner table. In all seriousness, genuine protest is important and you should be using your voice for good, although I do hope people can sleep a little easier at night safe in the knowledge that I’ve got the supper front covered. The rent itself is only 50 euros a week which to me is more than fair, but fairness does not take the financial sting out of handing over all that cash. My net worth was dealt a particularly heavy blow this week, as I had forgotten to pay the previous week’s room and board, resulting in me forking out one hundred whole big ones.
Those of you with numerical savvy will have deduced that without me having so much as glanced in the direction of my money, I am down one hundred and twenty-five euros. You will also have deduced that at this point I should have around one hundred and thirty euros left. So how did one hundred and thirty euros become a measly forty-seven and change? That, my friends, is the eighty euro question. I admit the answer with a hint of shame, but no regret. I spent the money on my three greatest vices. No drugs if you assumed that was one of them. My nanny, God rest her soul, did an excellent job of scaring me away from them at a young age. After a long hard day of doing whatever it was I did when I was six, my nanny, in a well-meaning but misguided effort to lull me into a sleep, delved into the harrowing details of the beatings her and her classmates received at the hands of the nuns back in convent school. I knew I had to take control of the situation, or I’d never get any rest. Utilising my deft conversational skills, I smoothly steered the conversation toward something far more serious: Football.
Earlier on in the week, my dad had been showing me footage of Diego Maradona on the family computer, and my gleaming six-year-old eyes could barely comprehend what I was seeing. Little me was in awe, and excited to spread the gospel of my new hero. I had barely gotten the words “Diego Maradona” out of my mouth before my nanny proclaimed, “He’s a cokehead!”, and swiftly exited the room. She was clearly intimidated by my superior football knowledge, and she had to ruin all my fun, but it kept me up all night. It still does from time to time. Ask anyone over the age of 45 who the best footballer ever is, and they’ll tell you it’s Maradona. If he was that good on the bag, imagine how good he could’ve been off it. You know what I mean? It put the fear of God into me for some reason. I don’t really understand why. It doesn’t really make sense, but it scared me, and every time I think, see, or hear of coke, that memory of my nanny springs to mind, and to this day I’ve never touched off it.
So, no drugs for me anyway, my heart lies with beer, cigarettes, and second-hand CDs.
“Financial insecurity is stripping us of our prime years of hedonism and debauchery”
I’m fond of the pub, I enjoy a morning rollie, and my CDs look awfully pretty on the shelf. In general, I feel I’m well enough equipped to moderate my three greatest vices, I think I (generally) don’t drink in excess, my cigarette consumption is fairly regimented, and I only buy used CDs occasionally as a treat. However, I will concede that my moderation is aided by the current climate. The current climate being that everything is so fucking expensive. The money just doesn’t stretch like it used to, it’s stiff as a lamppost. If I was a twenty two year old a couple of decades ago, and I had spent eighty euros in one day, and I mean if I really stretched the eighty euros to its limits, went all out, no holds barred, balls to the wall, on booze, smokes, and music, it would have resulted in a government funded stomach pump, an intervention to address my problematic behaviour, black lung, and I’d be getting lots of questions about where I got my cheap CDs because they were expensive back then.
However I am a twenty two year old in 2025, and spending eighty euros to its fullest potential, on booze, smokes, and music in one day resulted in a mild headache, a ration of tobacco that will just about last until my next paycheck, and four CDs over which I am experiencing buyer’s remorse, because right now I would much rather have the twelve euros that they cost me instead.
My shame lies not in what I spent my money on; Anthony Bourdain once said that the body is an amusement park ride, not a temple, and I agree with him. My shame lies in my fiscal irresponsibility, the piss poor return my eighty euros got me. My four CDs of course, a few lukewarm cans of Beamish, three pints of Guinness in the pub, one pouch of Amber Leaf Tobacco, some grub to line the stomach, a bit of public transport expenditure, and poof, the money is gone. I am facing the reality that many of my peers have already come to terms with. It is becoming almost impossible to justify even a relatively quiet night of drinking. The cost is simply too great. Young people can no longer afford to live as young people are supposed to live, to exist in the manner that God intended. Financial insecurity is stripping us of our prime years of hedonism and debauchery.
Make no mistake, this is the primary reason why young people don’t drink anymore. Most of us just don’t have the cash. However, there are the lucky few who have disposable income. Unfortunately, for publicans around the country, they are not spending it on pints, most of them have been bamboozled and hoodwinked by the woke and liberal elites who control the media and wellness industry. They have conned would-be-fun-havers and turned them into fitness-freaks. They are the ones responsible for the notion that this generation is simply more health conscious than those that came before, that we prioritise mental and bodily well-being above all else. The whole thing is marketed as a cost-effective form of socialisation, people are led to believe that they are saving money, but that’s a boldfaced lie. It sucks you in until it is your life, it becomes an addiction, and addiction in any form is expensive, socialising in a healthy manner is no exception. It’s no less costly than being a drunk. Sure, it starts off cheap enough, but the fees pile up quickly. Ultimately the worst thing about fitness addiction is that it is boring and no fun. People do their best to make it appear the opposite, posting their Strava maps for all to see, sharing selfies with their running club chums. Deep down in their heart of hearts, I know they wish they were a few pints deep. Even those who take it all incredibly seriously, like marathon runners, I don’t believe that any of them do it for personal gratification, no not at all. I think people run marathons as a convenient excuse to drink a midday beer, the one you get at the end of the race to “replenish lost calories.”. I don’t believe that for a second. It’s all one big façade. It is a socially acceptable addiction that is profitable for those at the very top. People will continue to feign enjoyment until the bigwigs devise whatever fad comes along next. Then, people will pretend that whatever that fad ultimately ends up being, brings them happiness, and they will spend lots and lots of money to render their delusions truthful.
In all seriousness I have no issues with fitness, it’s great to be healthy, and it probably is somewhat rewarding. I pick up a set of old dumbbells from time to time and it makes me feel alright. But it’s all about balance. It’s all well and good going for that run, but for God’s sake, don’t be onedimensional. If you’ve got a bit of cash to spare, go and meet your buddies, prop up your local pub, get a drink (it can be non-alcoholic, no judgement here) and have a laugh.
So, there you have it folks; the ONLY two reasons why young people don’t drink anymore. It is too expensive for most, and an unbefitting lifestyle choice for those who have lost their minds to Lululemon and the like. I, myself, have been sober for a few days, not that I’ve had a choice of course, I am broke after all. I’ve been feeling good in all fairness, the fitness-freaks might be onto something. I reckon I’ll keep it up for a while. For a little bit anyway. I don’t know. Payday is just around the corner so, que sera, sera. You or I could kick the bucket on any given day. Whatever will be will be.
ART Sadbh Caulfield
WORDS Donnacha Sharkey
The Light in the Window
Ihave never been good at reflecting. In 2016, ‘reflecting on your learning’ was all the rage. It felt like for every assignment, a reflective note of a similar length had to be written and handed up in tandem with one another. You would think I would be better at it. When asked to reflect on the last four months in Boston, I reached the familiar point we all struggle with at some stage in our lives, when nothing we say makes sense or conjoins with our actual experiences. To say that I have learnt anything of the true substance of Massachusetts or of The United States would be to delude myself. Sure, I know the words to the national anthem because they are sung at the beginning of every ice hockey game. I sometimes catch myself saying ‘tomAto’ instead of ‘tomato’, I can navigate the city and its transport system without looking at a map. But these are not grand revelations, life altering shifts in understanding, they are the natural things we pick up anywhere we travel for an extended period of time. In fact, if you were to ask me what I have learnt, I might reply, ‘nothing’, or if you catch me on a good day I might reply, ‘everything’.
The night before I left for Boston, I was in a frenzy, anxiously re-packing and double checking my flight information, crying and holding my dogs to my face, telling them they weren’t to die while I was gone. The fear that I had felt over the last few months leading up to the move had bunched up into a hard knot that now clung to the lining of my stomach. Never having considered myself a ‘homebird’ before, I began to worry that I may have strayed too far out of my depth. The prospect that I would have to move into a new apartment and navigate a new environment with new people and a new set of rules for social behaviour without instant access to my friends and family for guidance, scared me. My fears were quieted the moment I got into the Uber from the airport and the taxi driver misheard me when I answered his question, ‘So where are you from?’ For the fortyminute drive, he gushed about how much he loved visiting Orlando with his family, and how lucky I was to be from there. I smiled to myself, not wanting to embarrass him, if only he knew.
Within a week I had made firm friends, and my room began to look lived in. I set a small drawer aside for my Irish things: Barry’s tea bags, Lemsip, Vanish and Butlers hot chocolate. I listened to Irish podcasts, to Sinéad and Enya and Dolores. Whenever I could, I included bits of home in my daily routine to stave off feelings of homesickness and abandonment.
WORDS Alice Moynihan
PHOTOGRAPH Isabella Wood
I kept this up for a few weeks until my routine began to slip and the motivation I had previously felt to assert my identity began to leave me. My accent began to bother me. I worried it bothered others too, often being asked to repeat myself. I developed a neutral accent, not a distinctly American one but not a distinctly Irish one either, which I pulled out when I spoke to retail workers and anyone who didn’t already know me as ‘the exchange student from Ireland.’
Life became easier, I found that I was repeating myself less and less. I developed Americanisms which made social interaction easier, and made Americans more comfortable around me. The odd time I would interact with another exchange student from England or the more frequent times I would bump into other Irish exchange students, I slipped back into a more relaxed civility.
On the 22nd of March, The President’s Instagram account posted a picture of Áras an Uachtaráin for earthing hour. The lights that shine from thirty individual windows which face the Phoenix Park were switched off. All but one, which remained lit. They wrote ‘As part of @earthhourofficial 2025, all of the lights at Áras an Uachtaráin will be switched off at 8.30pm tonight with the exception of the ‘light in the window’ for the diaspora #EarthHour.’
When I was younger, I thought the word ‘diaspora’ was from the Irish language. I pronounced it something like dia-spora. I had heard the word so much in the context of those who had left Ireland, not Europe or Africa or any other place in the world. I am not the diaspora. I will go home in May, the diaspora might never. For them, the ‘light in the window’ is a symbol that says ‘we know why you left.’ The light says to me, ‘where did you go?’
I only have a few more weeks left of my new reality before I have to go home to Dublin. A different kind of knot sits in my stomach, rather it is more like a weight on my chest. Saying goodbye to new friends will be difficult. Saying goodbye to independent living will be harder. Saying goodbye to a city that I have fallen in love with will be the hardest. But when Ireland and I reunite, it will all be worth it. •
Saying Goodbye to the Old Me
People change. This is an essential fact of being human, yet it is something that we universally struggle to come to terms with. We are repeatedly told the story of the single-minded savant; of a life dedicated to the pursuit of one passion, one dream. There is something seductive about the idea of the persistence of the self, of peering into the deepest part of your soul and finding some fundamental truth, some indomitable force that can act as a roadmap to the rest of your life and ultimately, allow you to self-actualise.
But this, of course, is a lot of pressure.
At least it was for thirteen-year-old me, who, ever an overthinker, shed tears over my decision on whether to take music or art for my Junior Cert. In my head, your teen years were for laying the bedrock for the rest of your whole life, and every little decision I made would not only dictate the person I was, but the person that I would become. That person? A YouTuber, obviously.
For a long time, I held two pictures of myself in my head; that of the person that I was, and that of the person that I hoped to become. Though incongruous, these images were held together by one force that I attributed to myself: consistency. With enough of a consistent and concerted effort, I knew that I would be able to achieve anything that I put my mind to. It was the tried and tested formula to success (if not monetary then at least spiritual). This, however, poses a paradox of sorts: the desire to become someone new by remaining fundamentally the same. And this paradox highlights a critical issue in the way that we often understand personal change: that the person we grow into is not someone new, but the person who has always existed inside us, the person that we were destined to become.
My dream of becoming a YouTuber unsurprisingly proved to be shortlived. However, it was replaced fairly regularly throughout the greater part of my teen years with a new concept of ‘who I was meant to be’, and always with a growing anxiety that I was running out of time to actually become her. Every single time I lost interest in something, I scrambled to find some wild new ambition to focus my energy on. The worst part of it all was that each change in direction felt like a betrayal to myself, or at least the version of myself that I believed was my final form. I ached to be different, to grow, to change, but not so much that I would lose what I once felt was a fundamental part of me. One of the most important things for a person is to look in the mirror, and understand themselves, and more importantly to like themselves, but this was becoming entirely impossible to me as the relationship between who I was and the idealised version of myself became increasingly muddled as I struggled more and more to find
something to which I could dedicate myself. One day, sitting on the side of my bed, the realisation hit me with the urgency of a thunderclap that I am the only version of me that exists, and this perfect version of myself was not waiting down the line to rescue me from myself.
From that point forward, things became more complicated. I threw myself into my school work, giving my ambition something solid to attach itself to, and focused on the short term goal of getting into college. But I couldn’t help but feel aimless, nor shake the guilt of not living up to the person that thirteen-year-old me hoped that I would be. These feelings culminated just before I began my final year of school, when I finally opened the letter that I had addressed to myself just before I started secondary school. Of course I knew what it would say, but it still hurt to see it written down: “Please don’t sleepwalk through life! You need to dedicate yourself to something you love! You can do anything you put your mind to!”
In that moment, so consumed with feelings of shame, it somehow did not occur to me that a thirteen-year-old girl whose greatest aspiration is to become a YouTuber is probably not the best person to take life advice from. Life is much more complicated than that. I was so caught up on the versions of myself that I had imagined, that I never considered how liberating it is to not be stuck on a one-way street. Yes, I am uncertain of who I am, and of my future, but what a gift that uncertainty is. I am free to abandon the aspirations that no longer speak to me, and I can shed the past and reinvent my ambition as I grow. But then again, maybe I am expecting too much of the girl who read that letter. I was only seventeen. I am different than I was then. I have a clearer idea of where I want to be, though I still have a while to go. But most importantly, I now know that we must, to an extent, allow ourselves to get lost in the change-ness of it all. Not so that we might find out who we were meant to be, but so that we might figure out who exactly we want to be.
WORDS Ella Baldwin
shanaia between shifts
kapoor city rain
The Far Right & Skinny’s Return to Righteousness
In recent times, the internet has observed the growth of SkinnyTok on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, TikTok. ‘SkinnyTok’ has existed to a degree as long as the platform has, with ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos and workout routines being among the most searched keywords on the app. Since January, however, this corner of the internet has successfully sought out millions of new followers worldwide, all wanting and encouraging one another to drop a few pounds and get slim for the summer.
Unsurprisingly, the space is overwhelmingly inhabited by young women. Once you engage with one SkinnyTok video, you are algorithmically bound to the content until you hit the ‘I’m not interested’ key enough times. Here arises the almost unavoidable pull of SkinnyTok. Slimming down for the summer is no new concept to women. Often, the glorious proximity of sunny days or beach trips is overshadowed by the unsettling prospect of revealing summer clothing. SkinnyTok appears to offer the solution; an online community of women who are all in it together to tighten their belts or drop a dress size, encouraging calorie-counting and a mindset of no-excuses when it comes to working out. Weight-loss is by no means inherently a toxic pursuit. However, as with any online cult-like movement, SkinnyTok has attracted numerous criticisms for its questionable approaches.
Liv Schmidt is an online creator most synonymous with Skinny Tok. The young, beautiful, and noticeably small 23-year-old influencer, who insists that ‘Half the time you’re not actually hungry, you’re just literally just thirsty.’ has been at the center of controversy ever since she began posting her weight-loss tips online to an audience of over 600,000. Schmidt’s approach to weight loss can be summed up quite frankly as eat less. Unlike other fitness influencers, she discourages ‘cheat days’ or ‘cheat meals’ and insists that portion control is the golden ticket to looking good. Her
tough-love approach to weight loss has manifested in her declaration that treats are for dogs and that eating carb-heavy dinners is for children. Her encouragement to not eat to the point of fullness is reminiscent of Kate Moss’s 2009 mantra that ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’
Her disciplined approach to eating is, to some, shocking, but indisputably a sign of the times. Virtues of hard work and no-excuses are indicative of a highly capitalistic attitude. Thinness, particularly for women, is a currency in our world. Schmidt, on numerous occasions, has highlighted the fact that thin people get treated better and enjoy a higher quality of life. She is not wrong. Amidst a global shift to the right, it should come as no shock that thinness is in. While we should acknowledge that being skinny has never been out of fashion, it is interesting to compare this trend to the Body Positivity movement of the 2010s, which thrived within the online culture most notably during Obama’s second term, a period characterised by global progressivism, with many western countries passing laws on marriage equality and reproductive rights.
Schmidt was banned from TikTok in September of 2024, after many voiced the opinion that her content promoted unhealthy eating habits that teetered on the edges of disordered. Her censorship did not silence her, and she since has amassed hundreds of thousands of new followers on Instagram. In February, she launched her pay-walled online community ‘The Skinni Société’ a €22.99 per month subscription package that allows patrons to access her plethora of tips on staying small. While she remains off TikTok, her disciples continue to spread her messages, insisting that her banishment is unethical and a violation of free speech. Schmidt’s tale appears to mirror that of another, much more famous, controversial blonde American capitalist who has long prided the virtues of hard work and discipline.
SkinnyTok may have enhanced a desirability around thinness, but it most certainly did not create it. In a survey carried out by TN2 of 75 women aged 16-30, 45.9% of respondents said that they began developing insecurities about their body by the age of 10, a further 30% stated that these thoughts started by the time that they turned 12. An overwhelming majority of those surveyed cited social media and particularly TikTok as major contributing factors to their insecurities and 74% stated that they have, at some stage, engaged in what may be considered disordered eating to alter their body.
These figures should come as no surprise. Aside from corners of the internet like SkinnyTok, social media is flooded with photos and videos of beautiful thin models against which young women can compare themselves. The term ‘thinspiration’ appeared on the internet in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, marking its territory in corners of the internet that infamously and very overtly promoted disordered eating habits. These online spaces, most notably Pro-Anorexia Tumblr and Twitter, contained millions of images of sick and starving bodies that acted as inspiration and encouragement for weight loss.
SkinnyTok is frequently referred to as Pro-Anorexia Internet’s rebrand. SkinnyTok, however, is distinct in its manifestation in the contemporary climate. It exists alongside similar trends, such as the Clean Girl Aesthetic. Clean girls are identifiable by their slim, toned bodies, slick back hair, Pilates class memberships, but most importantly by their whiteness. Pinterest boards hailing the Clean Girl rarely show racial diversity and most definitely do not show body diversity. Like every ‘Girl’ aesthetic, being hygienic, disciplined, or athletic is not what makes a clean girl – she is given her title for her proximity to European beauty standards and her ability to purchase ‘clean girl’ products.
Furthermore, this particular discourse on weight loss has come to the forefront soon after the rise of GLP1 medications for weight loss; the ‘Ozempidemic.’ GLP1 injections, such as Mounjaro or Ozempic, are groundbreaking medications for people who suffer from Diabetes or conditions that make weight loss difficult. Unfortunately, they have been appropriated by celebrities and wealthy people who do not actually need the drug and by virtue of this there is currently a global shortage of them. Proponents of SkinnyTok look down on the use of such medications, or weight-loss surgeries such as the gastric band, rendering it as the lazy way of losing weight. Once more, we see the notion of hard work and suffering to achieve results as triumphant. There is certainly a conversation to be had about wealthy people who do not need these medicines hoarding supplies and consequently hiking their price. However, shifting the discussion and applying ethics to different methods of weight loss is perplexing, futile and purely the manifestation of capitalist ideals.
Unfortunately, no critique of SkinnyTok will ever convert its proponents, as it is firmly rooted in virtues of no-excuses and self-eminency. Those that condemn it are too soft, or woke, and are unwanted in their circles. SkinnyTok and Liv Schmidt thrive in their against-the-grain approach. Yes, eating less may help you lose weight, but taking it a step too far will force you to suffer the negative consequences of burn out, fatigue, or worse. SkinnyTok does not tell you about the consequences of disordered eating because its approach to food is not, in its own eyes, disordered, and because this is detrimental to the idea’s appeal. Skinny IS in, and it always has been. It, however, does not hold any moral value and never truly has.
WORDS Kate Ryan
Doroteja Suruda
Kundera, Havel, and the Possibility of Resistance
What this fifty-year-old Czech debate has to say about modern activism.
WORDS Jakub Caco
After August 1968, when the tanks of the collective armies of the Warsaw Pact (except Romania) were sent by Moscow to crush the brief attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia, two Czech writers had a public disagreement. Neither was yet as famous as they would later become, Václav Havel as a professional dissident, playwright and later the first president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera as a philosophising novelist in a Parisian exile. Their debate was to a large degree concerned with the actual political situation and the particular nature of Czech national purpose, but they also disagreed about how to best resist overwhelming government power, when action seems to have no effect. At a time when civil discontent is growing, protests number tens of thousands of people yet their tangible effect seems minimal, the debate is ripe for revisiting. In the age of protests for Palestine, Ukraine, climate, housing, what is the appropriate reaction in the face of the absurd predicament, of having seemingly no influence on the outcome of anything?
The essay that started the debate, Kundera’s ‘Czech Destiny’, was a meditation on Czech national purpose and the meaning of Prague Spring, written in December of 1968 when it was not yet clear how the situation would pan out, whether freedom of speech and assembly would remain. According to Kundera, small nations are different from great nations and any self-assertion on the world stage is to be commended. Kundera lauded Prague Spring as an attempt to create what was never had before, a system that has neither the faults of Western capitalism nor Soviet socialism. He made an erroneous prediction that the civil liberties won during the Spring will continue. Havel responded with an essay ‘Czech Destiny?’ where he criticised both Kundera’s predictions as well as his naive presentation of Prague Spring as something unique when it was just an attempt to achieve freedoms, such as freedom of speech, which were already being taken for granted in most non-socialist countries. He also chastised Kundera for hiding behind ideas of great historical purpose to the detriment of actually doing something and trying to salvage what one can. When everything is determined by history, geographical location or the whims of superpowers, we are absolved of the responsibility of taking action.
It is Kundera’s response to Havel that is most pertinent to the present. In ‘Radicalism and Exhibitionism’ Kundera argues that Havel is attacking him from a moral standpoint and not for any factual or argumentative fallacies in his article. The debate shifts from political-historical to Kundera’s analysis of Havel’s motivation. Havel does not care about the actualities of the situation and post-facto analysis; he only cares about taking hopeless action and thus confirming his own moral superiority to the world he was born in. If there is no hope, no reasonable expectation of success, then the protestor is more interested in their own moral virtue than the ‘strategic’ thinking that could actually help the success of a cause. In Kundera’s words: ‘Such an action pursues only two ends: 1.) to unmask the world in its irredeemable amorality; 2.) to certify its agent in his unalloyed virtue. Thus an originally purely moral stance (the rejection of an unjust world) is inverted to become pure moral exhibitionism.‘ This ‘moral exhibitionism’ is more important to those protesting without the likelihood of change than actual change for the better. It is the natural position of such characters to view all situations as hopeless and yet act against overwhelming odds because only an action primed for defeat can truly illuminate the character of the protestor and thus achieve their true goal.
The questions touched on in the debate can still be relevant more than half a century later. Do people who continue to agitate without much success care more about their cause or their sense of superiority? What is the proper course of action against an overwhelmingly powerful force? The phrase ‘speaking out’ has been used a lot in the past year, usually in the context that everybody needs to speak out and those who do not are morally complacent with the immorality taking place. But speaking out only makes sense if there is someone to hear. Without that, it is just screaming into a void filled with people who already agree and who are
just as helpless. Kundera’s concept of moral exhibitionism can certainly illuminate the motivations of at least some who take these performative actions. Doing things without a chance of ever changing anything on a public platform while chastising everybody who does not do similarly purposeless actions makes a fine sense for exhibitionism, of needing to show oneself superior to an unjust world one is a part of. What Kundera did not see is that this is a natural response to a situation when one is powerless. Not everybody can stand at the sidelines and smugly judge those who are smashing their heads against a wall. The position of a cynical bystander who sympathises with a cause but is too intelligent and too practical to show themself ever doing anything for it unless it has a promise of real and immediate change is a position one can take to placate their sense of aloof superiority but often at a detriment to the cause.
Havel, in a book-length interview Disturbing the Peace, talks in length about Kundera’s position, and he makes one point that is crucial to understanding the debate as well as the position of protesting now. Havel says that those like Kundera, used to seeing society purely from above, will be sceptical of any action that does not result in an immediate change, while ignoring the pressure from below which can with time turn into an avalanche. Havel also suggests that Kundera’s youthful, now regretted enthusiasm for the Communist party made him wary of ever again participating in collective activity that might be deemed laughable, making him take up a pose of an intellectual too clear-sighted and cynical to ever participate in something that has little chance of succeeding. But this is still a pose, an outwardly more stylish one but ultimately a defeatist one that disregards any action without immediate effect. There is also the question of whether an action should only be done if it can have an effect. To paraphrase Havel, hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well but the conviction that they are worth doing anyway. Collective action has value not only as a participation in a ritual of shared helplessness, it can also foster a consciousness that may one day bud into something more.
“Do people who continue to agitate without much success care more about their cause or their sense of superiority?”
The historian Timothy Garden Ash used a metaphor to describe the end of the fixed and stolid communist regimes in the satellite states in Eastern Europe. How for decades nothing seemed to change and then suddenly everything happened at once. According to him the growing mass of people who were participating in small, hopeless acts of resistance were like candles burning under ice. The ice does not look any different from the outside but after a long enough time, the constant heat from below will make it melt. But the heat needs to be constant and steady, and sneering at the sidelines does nothing but gratify one’s ego. Some causes are too important to be avoided because of a cold rational calculation about the possibility of success. Sometimes, civic action is worth taking even at the cost of looking laughable.
Advertising as Art, Promo as Performance
No matter how much we may claim to be annoyed with guerilla marketing, obnoxious publicity stunts, or ‘shallow’ celebrity endorsements, media promotion seeks to achieve one thing: getting you to talk. Two months ago I found myself in Bison Bar ensnared in conversation with a drunk older man who opened with a question I would find myself constantly faced with every two weeks: “Have you been watching Severance?”. If you’ve spent any amount of time on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter (I’m not calling it X), chances are whether you like it or not, you’ve heard of this show. And if you’re anything like me, you were completely unaware that despite its recent uptick in popularity, Severance actually released its first season in 2022. So how do stars and producers manage to grab so much of our attention in so little time?
These days, a simple celebrity interview or movie trailer isn’t enough. We want something new. We’ve seen it all and we won’t fall for the same old tricks of the last few decades of repetitive advertising. If you want to really get people talking, it’s best not just to sell a product, but also an experience. Why not captivate people with more than a few talk show appearances? These are sentiments I think promotional outlets are starting to pick up on, as film and television marketing becomes more unconventional. Modern promotional content has given us live pop-up performances, personal insights into the minds of creators, and comical introductions to upcoming stars - the lines between art and journalism are beginning to blur.
As it turns out, there are plenty of creative ways to engage an audience without focusing on monotonous press releases or exclusive red carpet events. In the curious case of marketing Severance’s second season, many unsuspecting future fans found themselves looking at Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry followed by Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman playing their respective characters in a large glass box in New York’s Grand Central Station. Inside the box was a replica of their character’s workplace where they silently acted out a typical scene from the show. If that wasn’t eye-catching enough, director and executive producer Ben Stiller watched from the sidelines, taking photos and subsequently garnering more attention. Onlookers rapidly searched the internet asking questions and seeking answers: Who the hell are these people? What is this show about? Or, if you’re a fan: What hints does this give for season 2? Are they doing it again? Why wasn’t I there? Whether we knew what was going on or not, they succeeded in getting us to talk about it. It’s not just high-budget stunts that get attention; smaller-scale, clever campaigns are redefining how we see celebrity culture.
One of my favourite things to do is sit down and watch Criterion’s Closet Picks. Directors, actors, and other creatives are invited into a closet lined with films stocked by The Criterion Collection, a New York based movie distribution company. Current stars such as Julia Fox, Mikey Madison, Pamela Anderson, and Nicholas Hoult among many others get the chance to pick and geek out over their favorite movies in a short video format for fans to enjoy. It’s a unique, personal experience that offers fans an authentic glimpse into the personalities behind today’s cinematic stars. Not only does it somewhat endear you to talented filmmakers, but you hopefully leave each video with a new entry or two for your letterboxd watchlist. Combining personal storytelling with marketing creates an organic connection between the celebrity, the audience, and the product, proving it’s okay to have fun with advertising!
Lastly, tune in to the long-running and very popular Chicken Shop Dates series with Amelia Dimoldenberg for offbeat and funny celebrity interviews that purposefully read a bit more like awkward Hinge dates. The simple, casual format of Amelia and her guests in London chicken shops makes it easy for them to chat and joke around in a way that feels refreshingly unscripted. Several of Amelia’s videos have gone viral including her interview with Andrew Garfield that led to an influx of charmed fans and several articles about their obvious chemistry across news outlets like RTÉ, CNN, and The New York Times. In a similar vein, OG Vine creator turned LA influencer Quenlin Blackwell has started her own ‘Chicken Shop Date’ of sorts, Feeding Starving Celebrities. In this series influencers and public figures join her in their kitchen while they cook meals and answer well researched, humorous questions. Quenlin’s famously outgoing personality facilitates fast-paced and dynamic hour long videos with tonnes of clippable content for all your TikTok and Reels needs. Through unpaid fan accounts and the well trained algorithms you can see all the funniest moments from both of these shows without ever having looked them up on YouTube. This is the beauty of the comedy focused web series.
Ultimately, promotional content is seemingly improving. Smarter, funnier, more imaginative forms of press are being brainstormed everyday; creating an experience for the audience that doesn’t just sell a product but creates a story that people want to share and take part in. From the bold performance art of the Severance pop-up, to the intimate Criterion’s Closet Picks, and the charmingly outlandish Chicken Shop Dates and Feeding Starving Celebrities, the boundaries between art, entertainment, and marketing are being broken down for the better. These fresh takes on the press prove that when advertising is done right, it doesn’t just sell - it creates.
WORDS Keeva Byrne
What do the Oscars have against Horror ?
WORDS Tommie McHale
Prior to the nomination of Coralie Fargeat’s audaciously gross body horror The Substance at the Oscars this year, only six horror films have ever been nominated for best picture. Those six are The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan and Get Out. These films represent the exception as opposed to the rule, an exception to a genre viewed as cheap, tasteless, sensational and too insignificant for prestigious awards circles. It could even be argued that The Exorcist and Get Out are the only true horror films of these six to begin with, while the others veer more on the side of thriller. What does the Academy have against horror, and are the nods for The Substance a sign that times are changing and horror will get its due recognition?
The divide of what is considered high and low brow is not a debate unique to cinema, it permeates all of culture. The historical bias against horror could easily be compared with thedistinctions made between “high” literature, the kind that is shortlisted or the Man Booker Prize, and “genre” texts that appear on the window of an Easons. While ‘high literature’ is perceived to have inherent artistic merit and cultural significance, genre texts are viewed as existing merely for entertainment value. They are not an examination of the workings of language, but a product of mass-culture and publishing houses. Period dramas, resplendent with realism, would adhere more to the criteria of the former in this context, while horror is more often given the culturally equivalent value of an airport novel.
In the eyes of the Academy, horror still largely is perceived this way –merely a celebration of the sensational as opposed to the image itself, an amusement park as opposed to cinema. The Academy has historically failed to outgrow its idea of horror as a low-brow hodge podge of kitschy B-films, outside of a few technical wins throughout the years. Psycho didn’t even win a single one of its nominations. Yet although horror is perceived as not ‘serious’ enough, it is seldom acknowledged, provided a film from the genre incorporates elements of social commentary that The Academy deems to be ‘high-brow’ and intellectual. The Academy will sometimes celebrate films that incorporate horror into its narrative, such as Parasite or The Shape of Water. But they are not exclusively horror films.
Jordan Peele’s win for Best Adapted Screenplay for Get Out in 2017 was well-deserved for its exploration into the insidious inner-workings of white supremacy, but is its win also largely because it was not a genre film to begin with? Get Out had crossover appeal for both mass-audiences and cinephiles alike. It was also a comedy in addition to being a horror, as well as a satire, and a thriller. Does a horror film have to pass a genre-less barometer in order for it to be taken seriously in the award circuit as a film that isn’t constrained by generic conventions? It is also worth noting that Universal were not originally going to have an Oscar campaign for Get Out, that only came because it was a resounding success critically and commercially. The studio did not actively believe it had Oscar potential until proven otherwise.
It could be argued however that the appraisal of films, such as Parasite and Get Out, lay the groundwork for a film like The Substance, unabashedly a horror, to thrive. The Substance benefits from the same incorporation of social commentary. As an exploration into the age of ridiculous beauty standards and off-label weight loss drugs, its horror lies in an eerie similarity to our current cultural moment, through its brutal account of a middle-aged star making an irredeemable Faustian bargain. But there are other reasons for why this film has struck a nerve, and may be a turning point in the Academy’s stagnant perception of genre. We seem to be living in a time of cultural correction, acknowledging our poor judgement of past figures who were maligned and disregarded. We all agree that what happened to the Dixie Chicks in that one concert in London was wrong. Britney Spears is now a bestselling author. In the case of The Substance, the awards campaign placed unrelenting focus on shifting the perception of Demi Moore from “popcorn actress” to misunderstood talent. The trajectory of both Moore herself and Elizabeth Sparkle are the complete inverse of the ingenue. Is this shifting perception of Moore with The Substance symptomatic of a larger shift in how horror is viewed in general? We will have to see in the coming years. While Ari Aster and Toni Colette will never be vindicated for that Hereditary snub, here’s to hoping it won’t happen again.
PEOPLE ARE FANTASTIC
Tallulah Whaley sits down with John Gunn of John Gunn Camera Shop
Isat down with John Gunn on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon. His camera shop is a place I’ve been to dozens of times. It’s familiarfaint smell of dust and oil, soft carpeting, hum of the scanner in the back. John led me to the rear of the shop and opened a door, one which I hadn’t noticed on previous visits. He muttered an apology for the mess. I responded “you should see my apartment.” We walked up a short flight of stairs to a small kitchenette flooded with natural light from the white clouds pouring through the windows. A small photo of Jesus hung taped to the eggshell wall to my right. “Friend of yours?” I asked, almost immediately regretting the joke. Thankfully, he let out a soft chuckle as took off his newsboy hat and settled into a mustard yellow velvet chair.
I’d planned on primarily discussing the shop - John’s experience owning and operating Dublin’s premier establishment for all things photography, for the past half-decade. I soon understood, however, that it is not the shop itself that has kept him there for a major portion of his life. It’s something greater - less evident on paper but palpable within the walls.
He began by telling me about the day they opened. “We opened this shop, just about fifty years ago, the day that John Lennon was shot.” I asked him if the news of the assassination impacted business that day, to which he replied: “There was Beatles music playing everywhere. And it sounded out of tune, but it of course couldn’t have been. My head was out of tune from the shock of it.” What a coincidence, I responded. He returned, “I’ve had crazy coincidences in my life.” He noted how he’s often felt that it was fate alone which allowed him to open the shop. I asked him if that same fate has continued to bring the shop such prosperity. “Without a doubt,” he replied, “there is no doubt about it.”
What struck me most about Mr. Gunn is that he is a man of immense gratitude. Throughout our conversation, he continued to reiterate how grateful he was for the life he’s lived - the longevity of it, as well as the abundance of beauty - both in people and experiences - he’s come into contact with. His summation was perfectly simple: “I’m ninety years old now. And I am just so delighted to still be able to walk around.” His gratitude manifests itself in an unwavering and unconditional love for other people. “I have no right to criticise anybody because I am worse myself. That’s the way I feel - no right at all.”
John is a poet. Not self-professed or by trade, but by nature. Leaning into his evident gift for storytelling, I asked him if he remembered his first customer. “A lady called Ruth Heard. She came in for a 16 millimeter projector. She either wanted to buy one or she wanted to sell one. More likely she wanted to sell one and I think I found a market for her.” He lives poetically. He notices the magnificent uniqueness of the ordinary individual and cherishes them as if they were a valued gift. He listened with a smile as I told him how everyone I know who shoots film photography gets their film developed at John Gunn. I asked if it was always his intention to create such a vibrant community within the shop. He smiled and said, “It’s something that just happened. I love people, and I need to meet people. When you get behind a mask that is a person’s face you find the treasure.”
Perhaps seeking some advice for myself, I asked him if he had any advice he would give to a twenty-something year-old John Gunn. His eyes brightened. “Find out what you can about the person you’re talking to. And you will find them very, very interesting. They may have the most different views to yourself, but their opinions are important. And they’ve done a lot of thinking before they’ve come up with their opinion.” He continued, “young people are marvelous. Their brains are fresh and they’re able to expand and go into new areas. You have the most creative ideas by the age of twenty-three. The creativity is locked in the young mind while you’re still exploring.” I thought about what he said. If this were true, if creativity peaks in the early twenties, how is John Gunn still, at ninety, living each minute experience with such a sincere appreciation for its subtle poeticism?
Out of the corner of my eye I could still see the small photograph of Jesus, adorned with silver stars and gradient constellations, now shaded by the late afternoon. I thanked John for his time, and he thanked me for mine. I asked if he had any parting words. While refixing his hat around his head, he responded: “I find that people are fantastic. I’m damn glad to be meeting them and I’m damn glad they’re coming into my shop.” As I reached the door, he stopped me, pointed to the photo of Jesus and added, “Actually haven’t met him as of yet. But I do look forward to it.”
“What struck me most about
Mr. Gunn is that he is a man of immense gratitude”
“A poem ran through my mind there.” He began reciting “A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul. And that’s so true, isn’t it? Of course, poetry is lovely. It puts things into perspective.” I referenced his idea that the creative mind stops expanding after one’s early twenties, arguing that he is clearly a very creative person himself. He nodded, considering my proposition. “I was a very slow learner. Shakespeare is marvelous. He put things beautifully.” He began to quote a passage from Hamlet, closing his eyes and smiling. “It’s an absolutely beautiful way of putting things.” In awe, I asked him how long it took him to learn that passage. “It took me a hell of a long time.” I remarked how I can barely remember what I have to do for my assignments, to which he noted, “you remember what you have to.” Sage advice for a beleaguered university student in the middle of exams, but he was right. He remembers the people who, as he describes, he “needs to meet.” I began to think about the people who have had an impact on my life, although who were only in it for a short amount of time. José, the teacher’s assistant in my Kindergarten class who taught me how to open a plaster. Rosa, the woman who owned the nail salon I used to frequent with my mother as a teenager. Bridget, my first babysitter who owned an iPad (rare for 2010) and had a moustache tattoo on the inside of her pointer finger. Mr. Gunn has been, of course, added with high regard onto this list. It is the fleeting brilliance of brief encounters with memorable people that shape our perception of the world around us, and Mr. Gunn could teach a masterclass in appreciating the stranger.
“Strong at the broken places” Masculinity and Self-Destruction in the Work of Ernest Hemingway
WORDS James Grace
The Ernest Hemingway protagonist is a hard drinker, a big-game hunter, a fisherman, a veteran. He has an intricate understanding of bullfighting and boxing. He is white, American, stoic, and quintessentially masculine. He rarely lets a trickle of emotion pierce the wall he puts up, not to the characters around him or to the reader. The Hemingway protagonist is a thinly veiled self-insert. In these characters, Hemingway projected all of the virtues and qualities that he valued in himself.
Today, we don’t look at these attributes with the same reverence that we once did. Hemingway’s old-fashioned sensibilities have not aged as well as the writing of some of his contemporaries. While he was lauded with praise in his time, his reputation has soured with shifting cultural perspectives on gender and masculinity. People today don’t read Hemingway as much as they read some of his beloved contemporaries like Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it’s easy to see why.
Ernest Hemingway occupies a problematic place in contemporary culture. The American author is almost as famous for his incredibly turbulent and hedonistic life as he is for his writing. Here are a few flashes of that life: fist fighting in Parisian barrooms; hunting lions in Kenya; smoking cigars with Fidel Castro. It would be easy for a contemporary reader coming to Hemingway for the first time to relate the author to certain cigar-smoking, boar-hunting figures of the infamous “manosphere”. This is an online wave of male right-leaning content creators that push a particularly virulent brand of masculinity onto young, impressionable viewers. Hemingway can be seen to promote a similarly hypermasculine way of life.
While the author may seem problematic upon a cursory viewing of his life and writing, his work has a lot more to say about masculinity and loneliness than he is usually given credit for. Classic authors like Hemingway tend to be flattened into one singular idea or image, one that does not necessarily give credence to their varied and nuanced output. In novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, as well as his excellent short fiction, we are presented with male protagonists who have a fractured sense of their own personhood and an inability to reckon with that reality; people who have been broken by their experiences and are struggling to pick up the scattered pieces.
In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes is a WWI veteran who has been rendered impotent through a wartime injury. His injury means that the woman he is in love with, Lady Brett Ashley, refuses to be with him. He downplays his injury to everyone around him, desperate to maintain a stoic veneer: “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it.” Jake deals with his emasculation and the psychological impact of the war by heavy drinking and thrill seeking. In the novel, Jake and his friends travel to Pamplona, Spain, to watch bullfighting and drink inhuman quantities of red wine.
However, Hemingway never glorifies alcohol in his writing. Rather, he presents drinking as something these characters use to forget their emptiness. In his story “The Three-Day Blow” he describes it as such: “The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone.” At the end of The Sun Also Rises, Jake relapses in his alcohol consumption after his final encounter with Brett.
“Don’t get drunk, Jake,” she said. “You don’t have to.”
“I’m not getting drunk,” I said. “I’m just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine.”
Here Hemingway’s iceberg writing technique – leaving the majority of the emotion “under the surface” – reflects Jake’s self-suppression. Because the men in Hemingway’s stories aren’t capable of expressing their inner turmoil, it manifests itself in subtle ways that suggest the greater emotion that is being held under. While at first glance it seems like a simple dialogue, we understand from the context of everything that has gone before that there is a lot more at play. Brett is really telling Jake that he can overcome his problems, that he doesn’t have to destroy himself before things can get better. Jake’s response signals that he is unwilling to rehabilitate, and will most likely continue on his destructive trajectory.
Many see Hemingway’s lean, minimalist, iceberg way of writing as particularly masculine – reserved and lacking overwhelming emotion. But there is a lot of feeling and pain in these lines, it just requires patience and diligence from the reader. The reserved nature of the writing means that when we do get a glimpse of the interiority of the character, it is all
the more powerful. This is all summed up by the line at the end of chapter four: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” When the character’s hard-boiled wall comes down, we are aware of the pain that is being suppressed throughout the whole narrative, even when they are not letting on. Similarly, in the last line of A Farewell To Arms, a simple description of weather is used to convey the protagonist’s reaction to the death of his wife during labour: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
The bullfighting that is so present in Hemingway’s writing is another outlet for his characters to deal with their frustrations with the world. It is also one of the aspects of reading Hemingway that is hardest to stomach, as he describes the killing of animals in such a stark, journalistic way: “He drove the knife in again, and the bull went over, twitching and rigid.” Hemingway’s focus on bullfighting often gets him accused of hypermasculinity. Even in his own time, bullfighting was viewed as a barbaric sport.
“Because the men in Hemingway’s stories aren’t capable of expressing their inner turmoil, it manifests itself in subtle ways that suggest the greater emotion that is being held under.”
In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes is also fanatical about bullfighting, but his matter-of-fact way of describing it makes it difficult to understand the reasons for his obsession. Is it the tension he enjoys, as the matador moves swiftly between the bull’s charges? ‘And each pass as it reached the summit
gave you a sudden ache inside’. The event is almost like a replaying of Jake’s wartime experience, where Jake is the bull. Neither Jake nor the bull can control their fate. All they can do is struggle on until they are cut down.
Jake’s fascination with bullfighting is a strange way for him to relive his traumatic experience in combat. At the end of the final bullfight in the novel, the matador cuts off the bull’s ear and holds it up to the cheering crowd, an act that mirrors Jake’s own mutilation and humiliation. Why Jake would want to relive such an experience is not easily understandable, but neither are any of Jake’s modes of self-recovery. Watching bullfighting is an unorthodox and possibly misguided way for Jake to come to terms with the event, although he fails to do this by the novel’s close.
Hemingway also never came to terms with his own troubles. Like so many of his protagonists, he continued on the self-destructive path that culmi nated in his suicide in 1961, at the age of sixty one. He had undergone several bouts of electroconvulsive therapy in the year before his death. In five of his seven novels, Hemingway chose to end the work with the death of his self-insert protagonist. It reveals an instinct of fate in the author, like he knew he was one of the bulls in The Sun Also Rises, waiting to be inevitably cut down. Like Jake, all of the drinking and bullfighting and hunting couldn’t fill in the interior pain that the author was feeling.
Near the end of A Farewell To Arms, the narrator writes:
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Hemingway’s writing displays how people, particularly young men, try to mask both their emotions and emptiness through hypermasculine activities. They try to suppress their pain instead of coming to terms with it, something that young men still do in today’s epidemic of male loneliness. By reading Hemingway, we can try to find better ways of existing in an unforgiving world, and become stronger at the broken places.
Jessica Sharkey
TN2 PHOTOS
Isabella Wood
Sophia Larionova O’Connor
Sophie Eastwood
Caden Elsesser
Desiderata Musicæ
1. The pop has become, for the vast majority of people, the arts.
2 This is usually considered to be due to the accessibility and easy-listening of the pop. But these traits are hardly applicable even to the narrowest definition of the pop, and when one considers successful attempts (called ‘genres’) to augment the pop into something more complex, variegated, or technically difficult, this line of reasoning seems to disintegrate.
3. Why, exactly, the pop has become the arts is complicated – association of the pop with accessibility and easy-listening is a polite way of saying the pop is low-effort or degenerate. One should remember that, whatever the historical or scientific reasoning, the pop has become the arts because the pop is beautiful.
4. Because the pop is beautiful, and because the pop is the arts, and because the rise of the pop coincided with the sharp improvement of the science of advertisement and marketing, the pop has taken on certain formal aspects of religion. Examples include iconography in the form of plastic figurines; clothing with logos and derivative artwork; conversion of informationmedia into decoration (in passive ways, such as vinyl collecting, and constructive ways, such as upcycling of ruined tapes into wallets, CDs as seagull repellent, etc.); quotation of pop lyrics as aphorism/pseudoancient wisdom; most importantly, idolisation of musicians.
5 Idolatry, in this sense, we posit to be harmful. Firstly, a differentiation between ‘artists’ and ‘consumers’ of the pop is arbitrary, and while there are some arbitration lines which make sense (tapping one’s foot or singing along to a song in the shower is musicality, but even in traditional music, where this is encouraged, one still does not consider oneself a ‘musician’ for doing either of these actions), there are others which are enforced only by class-difference, an ill-defined division between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ music, or a belief in the special ability of some other person (called ‘genius’ or ‘talented’) to create music from the pop. To quote Terry A. Davis,
[. . . ] when I was young there was a huge chasm separating mortals from immortals. And people like Led Zeppelin, that made songs, they were immortals. And then one day I realised ‘holy fuck, I can make a song [. . . ] wow, that is the weirdest thing.’ My whole life, there was, like, the immortals are the ones who make the music, and the mortals are the ones who listen. [. . . ] I was like, ‘wow, if I just play some notes I could make a song, and that’s all it is.
The sum effects of this attitude, in combination with the transformation of celebrity life (even that of anti-celebrities such as Thomas Pynchon or Isaac Wood) into a spectacle [1], creates a scenario in which the society of celebrities and the world of the pop (which is the world of the arts, which is a large part of the World) is both equal in rank to one’s community and totally inaccessible. This is variously referred to as a hijacking of the human brain’s small capacity for number of meaningful relationships [2], or as a parasocial relationship. Whatever one may call it, it seems obvious why children, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, respond ‘famous’. It is a healthy and necessary desire to want to be a part of one’s community, and children exposed to the pop view it as their community. This is also likely part of why the pop is obtaining more and more religion-like formal aspects: many major religions, which at one time played a much greater role in organising and fostering community, have suffered various (sometimes catastrophic) failures in the recent past which has left a void for an ideology as community-organiser.
6. Self-conceptualisation (implicit or explicit) of a person as being on the ‘monkey’ side of the dialectic is associated with consumerism, and especially with a view of interaction with art as ‘consuming content’. It is easy for some to cringe at a consumer-participant of the pop for purchasing, in particular, Funko Pops or Marvel T-shirts, but this is useless and even harmful in cases where such artefacts are of sentimental value (especially from childhood) or symbolic of a work to which the consumer participant has a strong connection.1 This is especially true when we look at critics within the pop expressing anti-consumerist sentiment while still collecting vinyls, audio equipment, etc.
7. The issue at hand is that, while disregarding Funko Pops as cringe may work for many as an antidote for some parts of consumerism, it can never be a universal tool for directing a person away from the harmful (consumerist) aspects of the pop. This is because for many people consumerist archetypes are beautiful and meaningful in an important sense. Clearly we need a method for abandoning consumerism which does not cannibalise the archetypes of a person’s pop-based belief system.
8 There is a historical precedent for this. To the same degree that St. Patrick is integrated into Celtic myth, and to the same extent that the Roman gods became the Greek, and in the same way that stoicism is adopted in early Christianity, it is clear that the least oppressive and most readily adopted way of introducing a belief system is not to supplant the old one, but to synchretise it. This has many advantages, but the most obvious is that it offers a continuous (and therefore friendly, beautiful, and popular) path from the old system to the new one.
9. Our goal is thus to use the pop to synchretise consumerist archetypes into a post-consumerist belief system.
10 This cannot be done in an ironic way. Ironic integration of the pop into the old culture failed in a quite spectacular way, reflexively allowing the consumerist-pop and advertisements to acknowledge its own harmfulness without scaring away the consumer [4]. We require a way of integrating consumerist archetypes into a larger post-consumerist mythos in a sincere way without encouraging consumption.2
11. We admire the 15 Theses of Badiou [5] but disagree with the relegation of Beauty to resistance to Empire, and at the Hegelian (and therefore progression-oriented) attitude to art as a tool to effect change. In particular, art whose sole end is that of achieving Utopia (especially a materialist Utopia) has no use in the Utopia – we believe this is contradictory, as any desirable world surely contains art and especially Beauty. A Beautiful Thing is made more beautiful by its usefulness, but not if its use is to render itself meaningless. We may still freely pilfer statements 10–15. The prescription of synchretisation beats anti-imperialism as a raison d’etred’aitre because it allows the art to have function both in the struggle to achieve the desired world and in the symbolic order of the desired world once realised. In the ideal case it asymptotically approaches its true purpose.
12 The post-consumerist belief system is left largely undefined here. Aspects of Christianity are admirable for shunning concepts such as false idols and excessive wealth while uniting a community. We may incorporate and even encourages elements of this and other belief systems, but we are not in principle evangelists. It is probably a good idea for the system to be pluralist (but not populist!) in its epistemology.
13 We should avoid constructing the mystical from the knowable. An unfortunate consequence of hyper-specialisation and overselling of modern particle physics is that it has become the de facto mysticism of the consumerist belief system (even while Deepak Chopra’s quantum mysticism is shunned by, for example, Futurama, Marvel films will throw out phrases like ‘quantum mechanics’ and ‘string theory’ to invoke primordial awe, and Interstellar will posit Love as a fundamental force). We are not in principle against using fundamental physics as a creation myth, but this myth must not obscure the knowability of its own particulars.
14 Social media appears to foreshorten itself as an experience in both retrospective and prospective senses. It has other issues such as social control. All of these factors are against us. Working exclusively within the rules of social media is bound to fail, so we should put emphasis on having a strong offline existence and an online presence which is not tied to one centralised medium. Synchretisation of Internet culture is still a must (an attempt to coopt has already been started by, for example, the hyperpop movement, although it contains many of the pitfalls outlined in footnote 2 and is thus not a proper synchretisation.)
15 Copyright and trademark infringement and overt reference are paramount for proper synchretization. One cannot begin to associate plastic toys or video games to a post-consumerist work to anywhere near a desirable degree unless the name of the toy/game is explicitly co-opted. (However, encouragement of copyright infringement creates murky issues for cooperation with other artistic enterprises, as well as financial and legal difficulties, so there is an incentive to tread carefully.)
16 Hence Lego Indiana Jones.
NOTES:
1A full defence of strong connections to consumerist archetypes will not be given here. One key thing to keep in mind is that television experiences which are ‘short’ in both retrospective and prospective senses become ‘long’ in the retrospective sense when one has a genuine connection with the show [3]. We may use the notion of a ‘long’ retrospective experience as a part of an operational definition of a ‘meaningful’ experience.
2Black Country, New Road did, to an extent, already create a good example of this before the departure of Isaac Wood. This is implicit in the references to other aspects of contemporary pop music (Charli XCX, Phoebe Bridgers, Kanye West), in the extensive use on Ants from Up There of imagery relating to childhood and pop culture (Star Wars, Warhammer: 40,000), and in the explicit reference to nostalgia as a powerful motive: “the escape pod’s filled with your friends, your childhood film photos / There’s no room for me to go”. AFUT also recognises the related issues associated with the Internet, which will be discussed later.
[1] G. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books, New York, 1994).
[2] R. I. M. Dunbar, Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates, Journal of Human Evolution 22, 469 (1992).
[3] M. S. (Vsauce), Illusions of Time.
[4] D. F. Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. fiction, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, 151 (1993).
[5] A. Badiou, 15 Theses on Contemporary Art (n.d.).
WORDS L.I. Jones
“Nobody Cared For the Stories I Had” Bridging the Gap Between Literary Criticism and Song Lyrics
I used to think I would tell stories
But nobody cared for the stories I had about No good guys
I always knew the world moves on I just didn’t know it would go without me I start the day high and it ends so low ‘Cause I’m working for the knife
Working for the Knife” was the lead single to Mitski’s sixth studio album, Laurel Hell (2022). Following the success of her previous album, Be the Cowboy (2018), Mitski stepped away from the public eye and contemplated quitting music for the foreseeable future. “Working for the Knife” was a response to the super-stardom she experienced that saw the world speed up around her, in which she expresses the desire to continue to create under the weight of heightened expectations. Laurel Hell was another commercial success, but below the radio-friendly, synth-heavy music are texts that speak directly to the human condition, and a literary lens is the only mode through which we may attempt to understand them, and song lyrics generally.
What initially appears as an example of confessional writing, as so often her song lyrics are labelled, may be extrapolated to reflect society. Mitski’s experience of working in an industry that has become a “super-saturated version of consumerism” is not directly relatable, but it’s not only Mitski’s life that has sped up; it’s society itself. As such, some of the more pop-like songs on the album take on an almost frantic tempo. In “Working For the Knife”, Mitski vents her frustrations with remaining authentic in the music industry, but more broadly, she expresses the universal feeling of being guided through life by greater forces. The line “I always thought the choice was mine / and I was right, but I just chose wrong” is both an evocation of personal regret and a resignation to the capitalist myth of free choice. To convey meaning and create a narrative, “Working for the Knife” employs literary devices, alternating the verb used in combination with “the knife” between “working”, “living”, and “dying”, which further emphasises her resignation and the need to let her craft consume her.
There is no shortage of analysis to be extracted from Mitski’s words alone, but they are not meant to be experienced in isolation. In bridging the gap between song lyrics and literary criticism, we should first acknowledge the specific qualities associated with music and use that to inform our analysis. Mitski’s lyrics are intentionally sparse, sometimes a mere one or two verses, but instrumentation and production combine to construct a specific mood. “Working for the Knife” features a heavy drone that repeats almost to exhaustion, interspersed with distorted guitars and a sound suggestive of a knife cutting through metal. Mitski’s soft vocals, by contrast, become the bound-up creativity forcibly drowned out by her environment.
“Mitski’s voice commands attention and guides the listener through complex vocal melodies from beginning to end.”
The vocal melody and rhythm affect how we read the text, too. Mitski’s voice commands attention and guides the listener through complex vocal melodies from beginning to end. This is a direct result of her songwriting process, as she writes the lyrics and accompanying vocals before adding instrumentation to make it possible for her audience to sing along. On the emotional response she receives from her audience, she contends that she appreciates being useful. The notion of usefulness permeates her work, and though she rejects the “confessional” label as taking away her agency as a songwriter, she accepts that listeners may need to view her work through that lens for their own sake.
In The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2022), Mitski develops many lyrical themes first explored in Laurel Hell. The relationship between work and the self, as outlined in “Working for the Knife”, takes on new meaning in “I Don’t Like My Mind”:
I don’t like my mind, I don’t like being left alone in a room
With all its opinions about the things that I’ve done So, yeah, I blast music loud, and I work myself to the bone
And on an inconvenient Christmas, I eat a cake
A whole cake, all for me
[...]
A whole cake, so please don’t take Take this job from me
A whole cake, so please don’t take Take my job from me
Whereas “Working for the Knife” sees the protagonist grapple with her craft consuming her, “I Don’t Like My Mind” suggests a tendency to selfexploit as she uses work to escape herself and drown out her emotions. The song also expresses the desire to break free from the constraints of a job by using any means necessary, and the mundane activity of eating a cake becomes cathartic.
But The Land is not just a continuation of the lyrical themes of Laurel Hell, as Mitski also works through them to come to new conclusions. Mitski’s lyrics are deeply personal in the feelings they capture, but she uses protagonists that she can shape and reshape to convey them. She also grounds her songs in specific people, places, and objects, which become the guideposts that an “I” holds onto in the face of an increasingly fragmented society. This is exemplified by her most popular song to date, “My Love Mine All Mine”:
Moon, a hole of light
Through the big top tent up high Here before and after me
Shinin’ down on me
The moon is a constant in contrast to the fleeting qualities of life and a material object that will continue to exist after the protagonist is gone. Similarly, in “Buffalo Replaced” the protagonist stands in her garden “sucking up as much of the full moon so bright” while reflecting on the passing of time and the consequences of modernisation that have seen buffaloes replaced by freight trains. The moon again becomes an object that is eternal relative to the speeding-up of life around her, as embodied by fireflies “zoomin’ through the yard”. Simultaneously, the moon, used as a metaphor, exists beyond the material commodities that organise society.
“My Love Mine All Mine” continues by expressing the desire to claim something immaterial as exclusively one’s own:
Cause my love is mine, all mine
I love, my, my, mine
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love, mine, all mine
Nothing in the world is mine for free
But my love, mine, all mine, all mine
While there are clear parallels to “Working for the Knife”, “My Love Mine All Mine” shows how Mitski has found a way to exist in a world that only values her labour. Love remains the one thing that does not come at a cost. On a more personal level, she has discussed the song in relation to her upbringing, which saw her move between countries. While her environment repeatedly changed, she carried the same love around with her. In her own words: “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have after I die, so I can shine all this goodness, all this love that I’ve created onto other people.”
This is a recurring theme in her lyrics, and the song “Star” combines the eternal quality of celestial bodies with the immateriality of love by comparing love to the light of a star that will shine after the protagonist is gone. “Isn’t that worth holding on?” she asks. If Laurel Hell was Mitski’s realisation that it is impossible to create in a world that continually exploits her, The Land is a powerful reclaiming of herself and her love. The album is at once fatalistic and hopeful.
“Working for the Knife” was significant for Mitski – it proved to herself that she could still write songs that deeply resonated with her, even under the new and amplified scrutiny of more mainstream success. It was also significant to her songwriting as the insights she reached are felt in her music to date. The personal elements of her lyrics should not distract from the authorial choices made in writing them. At the same time, while song lyrics may be analysed as literature using common literary themes, motifs, and devices, music remains its own art form, which any analysis should reflect.
WORDS Helena Thiel
tn2 gig guide
COMPILED BY Éle Ní Chonbhuí, Erin Keenan, Sadhbh Long
May TN2 PICK 1st
Workmans Main Room Róis
2nd/3rd Olympia Viagra Boys Post-Brexit Core
3rd Bello Bar I Dreamed, I Dream
3rd Centrepoint Tresor Showcase
5th Button Factory Sorry
9th
12th
Workmans Main Room Getdown Services Rock-Funk
Dublin Unitarian Church Elijah Fox Piano
12th/13th Grand Social/Workmans/Whelans The Road to the Great Escape Festival misc
20th
Workmans Main Room Kate Bollinger Folk
20th Bernard Shaw Blaze 420
21st 3Olympia Sophie Ellis Bextor Pop
23rd
The Racket Space Ahmed, With Love Hip-Hop
28th 3Arena Scissor Sisters Pop
29th The Grand Social Winemom
30th
31st
Arthur’s Pub Dublin Soul Soul
The Pavilion Theatre Lindisfarne
June 6th The Complex Smithfield Thumper
7th Button Factory Martha Wainwright Folk
TN2 PICK 7th
Royal Hospital Kilmainham In The Meadows Festival misc
12th Olympia Public Image Ltd
13th
14th
15/16
The Pavilion Theatre Penguin Cafe Tribute/Classical
The National Stadium Boa
Button Factory Have a Nice Life /mu/ core
16th Vicar Street Kim Deal Indie
17th Fairview Park Air Downtempo/Electronica
17th
26-27
Malahide Castle Charli XCX Brat
Button Factory Gang of Four
19th Opium Black Flag Punk
19th Fairview Park Kneecap Hip-Hop
may-july ‘25
may-aug‘25
20th
20th
The Academy Psychedelic Furs Pop
Fairview Park The Mary Wallopers Trad
23rd The National Stadium Denzel Curry Rap
24th Marlay Park Olivia Rodrigo Pop as pop can be 25th
26th
Fairview Park Basement Jaxx Dance
Malahide Castle Neil Young folk
30th Malahide Castle Duran Duran + Nile Rodgers and Chic 80s pop + disco
July 1st Vicar Street The Wailers reggae
1st Trinity College WEEZER! CIARAS FAV BAND
3rd Iveagh Gardens Lucy Dacus Folk pop
19th
The Academy The Specials Ltd Ska
19th Iveagh Gardens The Murder Capital
20th Iveagh Gardens Leon Bridges
28th
The Pavilion Theatre Peggy Seeger Folk
August 15th Whelans Main Room Thumpasaurus Funk
18th Whelans Main Room Mannequin Pussy
19th Button Factory Mannequin Pussy
19th Collins Barracks Wunderhorse (SHAME)
20th
Royal Hospital Kilmainham Queens of the Stone Age Rock
21st Collins Barracks Sharon Von Etten
22nd Collins Barracks The Human League
22nd Royal Hospital Kilmainham Raye
23rd Collins Barracks Kaiser Chiefs Rock
24th Collins Barracks Father John Misty Folk pop
