Severe Jam Damage

There have been all sorts of suggestions from friends, relations and virtual strangers as to things I could do on my week off between jobs.
‘Go for a mid-week break somewhere’
‘Go on a sun holiday’
‘Try and snag a ticket for the Electric Picnic.’
‘Take a drive down the countryside with your camera.’

All valid suggestions, except that I was watching the purse strings a little bit as I know how easy it is to spend, spend, spend when you are off work. (More on that later.) As for the suggestions of ‘driving down the countryside’ well if you’ve seen the weather lately you’ll know that was a bit of a no-go area. So crap weather coupled with watching my pennies meant I was on the look out for cheap and\or free things to do this week that didn’t involve trawling up and down Grafton St doing some window shopping. So here’s a bit of a quick list of things I got up to that were free.

The Beach – I’ve already documented my morning walk down on the beach last Monday. If I had been thinking properly I would have brought a lunch and a couple more rolls of film. But soon after I got home the rain came down in buckets so once again my timing was impeccable.

The Gallery of Photography – Took a wander in here on Wednesday to (once again) escape the rain. Currently the exhibition on display is ‘The Fifth Province’ by Tadhg Devlin. This was a selection of images – according to the gallery blurb - representing the Irish Diaspora. To me it looked like a bunch of photos that were taken at the end of a roll to use up the film and then blown up to hang on the wall. There was nothing technically proficient about the shots either as far as I could see. They could have been taken on a disposable camera for all the interest they held for me. In the second gallery upstairs one wall was given over to a selection of what I can only assume was the photographers parents as the same two people showed up again and again in each of the shots. Pictures of the back of people’s heads, of a table that hadn’t been cleaned after dinner, a man trimming hedges, a couple standing on their front doorstep. The kind of photos everyone shoeboxes full of at home, memories of nothing much at all.

The National Photography Archive – I hadn’t been in here before but the Barfly said there was an exhibition of photos from the early 20th century of the southeast (Waterford, Wexford, etc) so as it was still raining when I left the Gallery of Photography I crossed the square and ducked in here for a couple of minutes. The Archive gallery is not very large, comprising mainly the windowed room that is visible as you walk past. There is a small ‘corridor’ on the top level which is more interesting from an architectural point of view, but hardly large enough to be considered a second gallery.

The Dead Zoo – aka the Natural History Museum on Merrion Square. I love the fact that the museums and most of the galleries in Dublin are free to the public. In Toronto a day pass to the ROM ran about 7 or 8 dollars and that was 15 years ago. For something so big that you couldn’t possibly get around it in one day, the Irish museums being free are certainly worth it. I hadn’t been in the museum as I normally don’t bother to walk any further than the National History Museum on Kildare street to go and look at the gold hoards and the ceists. The Natural History Museum contains cabinets full of moth-eaten, mildewing stuffed animals. (erego ‘The Dead Zoo’) As I walked past the displays I could imagine being stuck in that old building at night with all of those glass-eyed animals and feeling fairly scared. As it was the final week before school starts the place was full of glass-eyed parents on a last ditch effort to entertain the kids until they could hand them over to their teachers. I got a bit stuck on the first floor and found myself wandering past glass displays of birds, fish and parasites. It being lunchtime and afraid I’d lose my appetite I spent most of my time in the upstairs galleries peering in at the bears and monkeys.

Shakespeare in the Park – I was on Grafton St. when a young girl in a puffball skirt and adorned with plastic bangles from her wrist to her elbow handed me a flyer advertising the ‘Public Shakespeare Company’ production of ‘Twelfth Night’. It looked fairly fine that afternoon so I headed in to catch the 2pm show. There were about 50 or 60 people draped around the Yeats Memorial in the Green, eating lunch and waiting for the show to start. It was a fairly okay production. A little bit ‘shouty-shouty Shakespeare’ for me. This version was set in 1982 (complete with ‘80s soundtrack) and although it’s already a role reversal comedy the company took it to extremes so that every characters role was reversed. So instead of Duke Orsino we had ‘Duchess Orsina’ and Malvolio became ‘Malvolia.’ It was a good way to spend an hour and a half and even when the rain started halfway through the third act people stayed put and either moved to sit under the trees or sat huddled under umbrellas. If you are at a loose end the production is running in the Green until September 9th daily at 2pm and 5pm.