Dublin Opinion

One of the consequences of being lazy and/or distracted by the mendacities of modern living is that you miss stuff on the internet that would normally interest you greatly. This may appear contrary to what many think the internet does: that is, it engenders laziness and through its cumulative mendacity distracts you from doing something useful.

Although the people who say that consider something useful to be spending an hour reading a print edition of the Irish Times.

I haven’t looked at John Waters’ column for a long time, but I’m pretty sure in one of them he’ll soon repeat his old bit of doggerel.

“The internet can only do harm
Although it does great work for only one arm
While this may sound worn
Fools are so regularly born
That I have to say 98 percent of it is porn”

(Waters is not much of a poet, is he?).

Also, the internet is so vast that I probably miss 99.99 percent of it anyway, porn included.

One thing though that I only came across today, but others who read Dublin Opinion (sonofstan, ec) have seen already are the photos of Dublin that Nina Power put up on Infinite Thought last week and even earlier the photo essay on Owen Hatherley’s blog Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy.

Also, here’s Owen’s account of the dockland development in Bdonline

“With the unfortunate timing that usually accompanies the bust after the boom, the major architecture of Irish neoliberalism is limping to completion three years late, on Dublin’s docklands. It’s a surreal place indeed — a showcase of the new international style, built in botched, lumpen fashion.

In essence, the team here is the same as at any other bit of riverside regeneration anywhere in the world: a bridge by Santiago Calatrava (who knew?!); jolly landscaping by Martha Schwartz; A large complex by Daniel Libeskind, continuing his sad decline into flashy cliche; a theatre surrounded by needlessly jagged, curtain-walled office blocks; anonymous, empty housing and offices; a more ambitious but appallingly detailed hotel by Manuel Aires Mateus; and on hold at the moment, but still present in the models, the “U2 Tower” for the noted philanthropic tax exiles, designed by Norman Foster.

Facing it across the river is the hilariously clumsy new Convention Centre by Kevin Roche, the naturalised American who began his career working for Ireland’s premier modernist, Michael Scott. Looking at this glass barrel tilted into a beige block, it’s inconceivable that Roche once worked on Busaras, the fantastic modernist bus station a mile or so west.”

Uh-harsh, dude, but very very true. It’s an account plaqued with further irony today, now that the folly that is the Dublin Dockland Development Authority is being (slowly) revealed in some report or other while the loans used to pay for these odd constructions are being taken in to NAMA.

Introducing the photos in her post Nina says:

Thanks to Daniel Jewesbury for the invite, and to everyone who attended the somewhat fractious debate we had about the ‘free university‘ on Saturday afternoon. These photos are from the Sunday, when suddenly the sun came out and Dublin looked just as depressed as it had done the day before, but with much more clarity].

Discussion of a free university idea was….fractious? Here? What do they expect coming over here promoting their crazy left-wing ideas like free education?

I was particularly taken with this image of the new convention centre, as I haven’t been around there yet. It’s very juxtaposing.

The caption is:

Time for Tubby Bye-byes! This spooky piece of weirdness lies on the edge of a pointless mini-park filled with palm trees.

Uh-harsh, dude, but very very true.

To tie the end of this post up with a vague connectedness (essential for all good blog posts, medieval conspiracy theories and orthodox economics), the guy who thought up Telly Tubbies also produced (as in engendered) In the Night Garden, which depicts a land populated by creatures the colour of liquorish all sorts that exists only in the dream of a sleeping child. The connection is that Dublin Docklands Development was a dream project put together by a coterie of corrupt politicians, tax-shy developers and greedy bankers who thought that the dream would never end. Now, of course, the consequence of what these people did, and are still doing, means we are going to be left with nothing short of a nightmare of cut backs, urban and social decay and joblessness for a long while yet.

Tubby Bye-bye!