The Dubliner Magazine

Impossible is the Opposite of Possible

Michael Cera drops some knowledge

Mortgage got you down? Recession made you lose your job? Your wife wants a bigger car, a bigger house, a bigger man? Well buck up loser.

Only a failure fails to win...

... unless he's engaged in a Machiavellian or Sun Tzu-style ploy in which he initially appears to fail, but in reality, he remerges a hundred times stronger to smite his confused enemies, who were all super relaxed because they thought he'd failed. But he totally hadn't.

But only then.

Dublin In the NY Times

Big ups from the NYC

Bloggers rejoice! Typing away at your little boxes of WordPress or TypePad can launch you directly onto the pages of the New York Times - just ask our pals over at Dublin Streets who featured in the paper's recent travel section.

Here's what we learned from the article:

Dublin is in fact a village and not a city.

Pubs no longer exist and have been replaced by bars.

Maser, as he's known on the streets, built the city (sorry village) with his bare hands, saved us from the Black and Tans and the Nazis, created the Euro and discovered the smallpox vaccine. Cheers man.

News from the Blogosphere

The best rants from the island this week:

"Mischa Barton has eyes like two pissholes in snow." Watch your back Mr. Shakespeare. Seriously. Kirstie and Aphrodite go panda hunting at Beaut.ie.

"Oh GAWD, those fucking poo monkeys bore me so." An obloquy against anonymous posters from the delightful ankles of Fatmammycat (as not seen in the Irish Times).

"Irish, Polish, traveller, space alien? No." Friend to the working man - and no one else - the irascible Twenty Major. On to his difficult second book now.

Put all these quotations together and we've got a poem. Of sorts.

Nightmare On Wall Street

Max McGuinness on the Crisis of Capitalism

Like most people, I have spent the past week trying to understand the enveloping economic crisis, lavishing levels of concentration on the Financial Times and Barron's normally reserved for Heidegger and Proust.

Like, it seems, anyone who ever bought or sold  a Credit Default Swap or a Collaterised Debt Obligation, my comprehension of what they are remains at best hazy -- CDOs involve inherently risky mortgage-based debt; CDSs are insurance against default in the CDO market. The fiendish complexity of the various financial instruments now going up in smoke has been regularly adduced as one reason for the continuing meltdown.

Wise financiers like Warren Buffet and George Soros always steered clear of these toxic derivatives, insisting that they would never invest in something that they did not understand (in the process, they made much more money than anyone who ever worked at Lehman Brothers). And these speculative sophistries in fact obscure a simple yet fundamental problem with the global economy, particulary, its Western component -- twenty-five years of excessive debt.

Getting a Bite at the Apple

The doors open on Ireland's first Apple Store in Belfast, high fives are exchanged and hipster geeks flop through the glass door in a deluge of black-framed glasses, latte bellies and appalling tattoos.

"We have wives and girlfriends who aren't very happy," says one excited customer. Who aren't very real either, one imagines.

Céid Mí­le Problems

Vitali Vitaliev
Vitali’s Ireland 
★★
It’s no go the merry-go-round/It’s no go the rickshaw/
All we want is a limousine/And a ticket for the peepshow...

Ukranian travel writer Vitali Vitaliev doesn’t think much of Ireland. But rather than just letting rip, he moans his way from county to county, inaccurately blaming the Celtic Tiger for all our problems. Bridget Hourican agrees with many of his complaints, but wonders why he can’t also see that our country has a special something?

Dragonforce

Ultra Beatdown
★★★
Hell still ain’t a bad place to be

I have to admit that I picked this one out of the pile purely because of the sleeve, which shows some sort of cyber-chick in a metal bra with a huge, futuristic gun and a tiny waist. Also: Ultra Beatdown. Now that’s what I call an album title. And if all that wasn’t enough, the song titles included ‘Heartbreak Armageddon’ and ‘The Warrior Inside.’ This was either an ironic masterpiece on the level of Spinal Tap, or – almost too much to hope for – it could be the real deal.

Ten minutes into the first guitar solo, there was little doubt that what we have in DragonForce is an actual real-life, honest-to-goodness heavy metal band.

RIP Cooke's Café

Trevor White on the demise of a Dublin Institution

Cooke's Café has occupied a prime pitch on the corner of South William Street and Castle Market for the last 16 years. It was often cited as an emblem of Ireland's so-called Culinary Renaissance. And it will shut down at the end of the month.

This morning Johnny Cooke told me that he is closing the once-feted restaurant. It's a bittersweet end to the talented chef's tenure. He will continue to offer private catering to high-end clients like U2 and Alison O'Reilly, and is talking about launching "some combination of retail and restaurant" early next year. For the moment, however, Cooke becomes the highest-profile casualty of the downturn in the restaurant industry.

The restaurant will continue trading until the end of the month. At that point the new lease-holder, Graham Beere, will turn it into a branch of YO! Sushi or Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Poignant – or ironic?

Either way, it's a sad end to a notable chapter in Irish culinary history.

When the Dubliner returned to Dublin from California in the early 1990s he quickly established a reputation as one of the city's most talented chefs, and the fact that he was a bit of a party boy lent further appeal. (His customers were the sort of people who now spend their afternoons in the Unicorn or Bentley's.) Writing in 2004, Paolo Tullio reminisced:

I remember my first meal in Cooke's Café, when Johnny Cooke had just started out on his own. I remember the meal because it was revolutionary, because it was iconoclastic, because it brought a whole new cuisine to Dublin. It's hard to imagine today, when new cuisines are thrust upon us by the week, how mould-breaking he was back then. Those restaurant staples that we take for granted: pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, goat's cheese and good breads were virtually unknown in Dublin restaurants. Cooke's Café was instrumental in bringing them to the Irish table.

Like many chefs, Cooke was never over-burdened by business acumen, and this is not the first time he has closed the restaurant. It is, however, the first time that he has managed to sell the lease. Hence the air of finality.

I have clashed with Johnny Cooke in the past (he is no fan of bolshy hacks). Today, however, is not a day to dance to graves. Cooke is a seriously talented chef, and his next move will be watched with considerable interest. Good luck to him.

Phil Me Up

Man Named After Brand of Shoes to Win Award

After Anne Enright's narrow loss of the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category at last year's Grammys to Rihanna and Jay-Z's 'Umbrella', it's good to see that some of our favourites around here are still winning awards.

Multi-platinum producer Timbaland is going to be inducted into Trinity's Philosophical Society as an Honorary  Patron, following in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Beckett and, er, Bono.

"He is the most sought after producer on the planet, and why wouldn't he be, " said the Phil's president Barry Devlin, dispensing with a question mark as not being "street" enough (his inverted commas; delivered by use of the digits).

And the shortlist for next year? Ronald McDonald, an Elvis impersonator, a stripper and the Chuckle Brothers.

"Esse est percipi," says Timbaland.

Palin Comparison

Death from Above

"You know the difference between a hockey mom and a wolf? Buckets and buckets of blood."

In Palin's defence, the last guy was popping off humans from above, so wolves ain't so bad. And if you're sick of lupine carnage, there's always the wonderful Tina Fey.