'Dear Davy, send a bottle of the best over to the City Hall for myself and Carson - your's Mick.'
I HAVE ALWAYS been constrained to regard Davy Byrne's as the archtype, the doyen, the centre, the place where the trams go: in other words as the downntown pub. If somebody says on the teleephone "pub" and "down-town" I think of Davy Byrne's.
When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of 31 one hundred thousand people filed through the New York funeral parlour where his body lay. Now the legendary Hollywood lover has been brought back to the screen. Valentino, which opens in DiIblin next month, is the product of an explosively talented partnership. Ken Russell, the director, has become a byword for extravagant controversy with such films as Isadora, The Devils and Savage Messiah. To play Valentino, he chose another superstar, the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. By DEIRDRE FRIEL
A ROSC "assemblage" entitled The Office, by the Polish artist, Wladyslaw Hasior, includes in it the broken image of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is skewered to the backside of a Polish cooking utennsil, there is a wire noose around his neck, and his feet have been broken off. From the top of his head stands up a tuft of synthetic hair, and he seems to be preesiding over a brass tap, out of which pours a stream of groszy, the coins with which Polish people buy Polish goods.
AT ABOUT 7 p.m. on October 23, a few hours after the announcement that the 1969 Nobel Prize for literature had been awarded to the Irish writer Samuel Barclay Beckett, the Irish Times received a call for help from the literary editor of a leading Norwegian paper. "Beckett," he said, "is in Tunisia.
JOHN B. KEANE was born in Listowel, Co. Kerry, in 1928 and educated at St. Michael's College. At twenty-one he was the editor of his own newspaper, which lasted for one issue. During his varied career he has been chemist's assistant in England, a furnace operator, assistant fowl buyer, street sweeper, labourer and barman. When he had saved a few hundred pounds, John B. Keane came home to his native Listowel and bought a public-house. His writing up to that time had consisted of short stories, poems and.a few articles.
WE IRISH frequcntly strike our visitors as an introspective lot, highly sensitive as to what others think of us, especially when we are on exhibition, as at the Theatre Festival. Towards the end of the Festival's first week NUSIGHT had the chance to discuss it with three eminent visiting critics,'
Eric Shorter of the Daily Telegraph, Wolf Kauffman, who writes a column syndicated in about a dozen major American papers, and B. A. Young from the Financial Times.
AS WE go to press the 1969 Festival has not yet reached the half-way mark, and so any evaluation or even any prophecy would be at best purely speculative, a judgment with but half the evidence heard. Yet some productions have a definite interest in their own right and may providc a foundation on which to build a subsequent, more complete assessment. The Festival, it can bc argued, is more than the sum of its parts, but every part contributes to the Festival as a whole.
EVERY YEAR the Cork Film Festival is praised or condemned on the basis of the feature films screened. It is sometimes forgotten that the main objective of the Festival is to furthcr an interest in the short film as an art form. This year the gcneral standard of the sixtyone short entrics was very high indeed but, as usual, thc features were the talking point and tended to overshadow the real purpose. Too much publicity is givcn to so-called" controversial" features and not enough to the main objective in which Cork succeeds so admirably.
A DICTIONARY definition of the noun" project" tells us it is a " scheme" or a "design." Spelt with a capital' P,' it becomes the name adopted by a group of young Dubliners to describe what is certainly a comprehensive scheme and one of ambitious and praiseworthy design. Project has had its ups and downs, its successes and disappointments, but now, three years after its inception, it remains one of the most stimulating and dynamic artistic forces in Irish life today.
Peadar O'Donnell was born in Donegal, in 1893, and was educated locally and at St. Patrick's College, Dublin. He became a school teacher in Donegal but in 1918 gave up teaching to become organiser of the I.T. and G.W.U. He joined the I.R.A. and at the Truce was Ole. 1st Northern Division. He took the Republican side in the crisis of the Treaty and was elected to the Executive of the I.R.A. He was in the Four Courts when it was attacked on 28th June, 1922.