The Dublin Community Blog

First of all I am very glad to announce an exposition of Claude Cahun in Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College. She is famous for her surrealistic self portraits. It is open 25 January- 6 March 2007. Opening hours
Monday – Friday, 11am-6pm; Thursday, 11am-7pm; Saturday, 11am-4.45pm.

Another expo at the same gallery is by Lothar Hempel.

Some music for the weekend:

Stagger Lee launches their single at RadioCity on Friday at 8PM. Congratulation guys!! Waiting for the album!

The Revellions will play at Eamon Doran’s on Saturday 26th January at 8PM. Adm. 10 e. It is some surf music at Temple Bar!! Strongly advised.

Have a craic!

Tomorrow evening, the Temple Bar Irish Trad Festival kicks off with a host of concerts, workshops, children’s activities, and other events. For some of the shows, you must book tickets, but a good number of the pubs in Temple Bar (more than usual, anyway) will be hosting trad sessions at no charge. Festival goers will also have opportunity to meet the various musicians and performers each night at 11pm in the Project Arts Centre for conversation and craic.

My family and I are also looking forward to the action out on the street where there’ll be bagpipes and traditional storytelling. Hopefully the Dublin weather forecast will stay favourable!

If you are not into all that popular music you can see in TV or hear on the radio or if you just want to take a brake form all that noise, you should search for some concert of Ewa Gigon. Recently she performed at BoomBoomRoom . A nice guy with a guitar who played before her, seemed not to impress the audience and the noise in the room only could confirm that.

The first notes of Ewa’s performance calmed down the crowd imediately. But who would not pay attention to skilled soprano voice multiplied by some electronic devices. A very strange feeling just after another guitar player.

In another song Ewa guided surprised audience to darker moods of her imagination using digital noise samples and empty beer glasses. After that part followed a cover song of Talk Talk with nicely multilplied ‘talktalk’ phrace to add the rythm.
Unfortunately the gig finished as suddenly as it started. Ewa took everyone’s attention so 45 minutes performance seemed to last just a while. She sang one more song and disappeared.

We have to wait for her upcoming album this yea and check her website http://www.myspace.com/ewagigon for more gig information.

Ewa Gigon at BoomBoomRoom.

For who?

Bjork fans, ‘reaserching electronica’ lovers, free jazz and dark moods aficionados.

Hi Guys,

Apologies, we have had a problem with the site tonight that’s resulted in us having to revert back to a snapshot of the site that was taken last Thursday (Jan 17th). As a result, the most recent posts and comments that were made here since then have disappeared.

Fingers crossed this will be the last of the outages. You should also notice that the whole site is running a whole lot faster for you now, having been moved over to a new server.

If anyone spots anything broken, please let us know!

Over the weekend I met up with some of the members of the Meet Dublin group on Flickr. Flickr meets are where a group of people (mostly members of Flickr) go around and take photographs and my idea of bliss. This month (January) the group is exploring Dublin 7 with different events each weekend, last weekend was the turn of the Horse Fair in Smithfield.

The Smithfield Horse Fair meets once a month in Smithfield, on the first Sunday of the month. There were nearly as many photographers as horses last weekend as well as the presence of Gardai and the DSPCA. Dublin City Council would like to move the fair out of Smithfield but so far it remains in Dublin 7.

Flickr meets are an excellent opportunity to meet up with people whose work you have been admiring on Flickr. Not only are they are a great social outing but you can also learn lots from others. It is fascinating to see how different people approach the same shot.

So if you fancy some photography projects and a bit of craic too, check out Meet Dublin on Flickr as well as their Facebook group.

Anyway here’s some of my favourite shots of the day, you can check out more here and more in the Meet Dublin photo pool here.

Happy New Year to all our readers out there. We’ve never really spoken about our readership on the blog, but, there are a couple of thousand of you a week, both regular and occasional visitors, who log on to check out what we have to say about life in and around Dublin.

Unfortunately, what we’ve had to say of late is, quite frankly, not a lot! Many of the original team have moved onto bigger and better things, and no longer live in Dublin, or are far too busy living the high life to have time to tell us about it!

So, this is a call to arms as such, to anyone out there who feels that they have a thing or two to say about Dublin. Good, or bad, it should be heard, this isn’t the Dublin Tourist Office, this is a blog all about living in and around Dublin. So, if you are interested in writing, or indeed getting involved in any aspect of the site, such as providing photographs, feature requests, or maybe even a re-design, please get in touch. You can mail me on write4us@dublinblog.ie

Every year I’ve lived in Dublin the cost of using public transport has increased. I seem to remember the announcement usually being made around the Christmas period and the new prices come into effect early in January. So far the only increase I’ve heard about is the Luas. Starting Jan 7th prices will go up 10c at the ticket machines, smart card users will continue paying the 2007 fares.

I asked a bus driver at the weekend if the bus prices would go up and was told they would also go up on the 7th but since the budget plan for the year including the purchase of new busses had not been agreed then the increases could not be announced. With one week to go until those increases come into effect this seems to be cutting it a bit fine.

Has anyone heard any other increases? Let us know if you do.

Happy New Year 2008 – I thought I would post some of the images I captured from around Dublin during Christmas as a way of easing myself back into the Dublin Blog after a ridiculous absence, no excuse just busy and sorry about that So here’s to a great year, Sláinte everyone.