MONSTER TRUCK ART

Yo ho ho nipple me not whats Dear Reader coz da word on the scene here in Liffey land is that an art gallery has just opened at the very bottom of Francis Street, going downhill, and I have been appointed as the Director of Poetry and Chief Executive of the art collective's page and stage department.

Al and Tom are the two young art school graduates who run Monster Truck gallery and are expert in multimedia and a whole host of things happen there. On Wednesday I attended a short film showing of three movies. Very new media and totally on the edge of experiment and style. The first was people doing a lot of tapping and banging in an orchestrated performance art piece that covered the kitchen, bedroom, lounge and bog. Surreal and wacko, but such is true art dearest ones. After that it was a very violent french movie minature of three men slapping each other across the face and calling each other unrepeatable names unprintable in such a respected rag as this. The final one was a cut up of the Japanese comic book feature length cartoon Akira, and it were bonkers but brill if yer get me. The original cartoon is 2 or 3 hours long and set in post holocuast Tokyo and the director had cut it up, spun it through the computer and was also able to superimpose imges at will over the found version he created, tinkling the keyboards as though it were a piano of images.

This was a highly avant garde outing and the best bit is that you can bring your own ale and the off licence does four cans of Hackenberg five percent proof for a fiver, so a tenner means you get to be in the coolest art gallery in Dublin getting tanked up at a fraction of pub prices. The other benifit of this free shebeen house of Art is that you don't have to listen or watch the lesser Dublin drinkers who do not journey on the shuttlebus of rareified thought where we do readers, so get yourself down to

Monster Truck
Francis Street
D8

Right at the very bottom going downhill.

The Thursday night poetry gigs will be held every other week and this will be the melting pot where stage and page meet and reconnect, as I firmly believe that performance poetry as it is called is going to impact on the print world and there are two ways of dealing with it. If you are a print poet you can ignore it as Z list filler and if you are a slam poet you can moan about not being taken seriously, so the natural order of things on this score is simple. Bring the two camps together and both sides will drop the acts they perform because the real physical people will be there all in the same room and they will realise, like the smoking ban, that Ireland can steal a march on the world and be number one at the old waffle in new performance form. The world will follow suit and I will keep taking my tablets to supress the fantasy on which I float, sometimes too high, like the other night when I spoke with Kev, a tramp at the canal who told me about a divine plan he knew of.

As I sat their swigging my Hackenberg, Kev supping what looked like port, he let me in on a few facts, he claims are all part of the plan. Thinking I had met a fellow magus I kept my wits about me whilst pumping him for the real gen, but not wishing to fully connect because I was scared that Kev would seize my spirit.

I have been meeting people lately who tell me fully formed stories, and I have found that the more interesting and bizzare ones come from people like Kev the tramp, but the only way to tease them out is be genuinely human with these people; the waifs, strays, layabouts and societal write offs who many, if not most, would actively steer clear of. They are everywhere and their stories could not be made up, but as I say the only way to hear them is take what they say seriously, so when Kev started on about Satan and him being the messiah, I made my excuses and withdrew, but he gave me some cracking lines.