Ballsbridge is about to change into Dubai. Or something along those lines according to news of the redevelopment of the Jurys Berkeley Court site in Dublin 4 today. According to the press release...
"The plan includes a new landmark 37 storey tower standing 132 metres, sculpted like a diamond. It will have at its base, a cultural quarter and will be positioned at the entrance to the former Jurys Hotel and be centred on the median of Pembroke Road.
The plan is a mixed use development combining a multitude of facilities for the area - consisting of generous family sized apartments, destination retail, which includes an underground mall, an embassy complex that can accommodate the relocation of some of the 29 embassies currently in Ballsbridge, an office block, a 232 bedroom luxury hotel, an ice rink, a crèche for 150 children and a cultural quarter which will incorporate an art house cinema, a jazz club, art galleries, artists’ studios, music rooms, rehearsal studios and a European Centre for Culture to become a focal point for the work of many cultural institutes."
It will also be next door to the new 'glass tyre' shaped Lansdowne Road. Its about time Dublin got something on this kind of scale I reckons. The shiny video the developers have put together talks a good bit about high density polution and mixed used developments and gives it the hard sell, including a graphic that makes urban sprawl appear positively evil looking, which should not really be necessary but probably is. I imagine the end result will be scaled down a little after a brouhaha of well to do nimby squealing but I hope not. Of course the even well-er to do developers will become even more well-er to do, but them's the breaks.
By the way bringing Dubai into this post is possibly just a means for me to remind you if haven't seen before about the stuff I wrote about the development of Dubai (including world's tallest building the Burj Dubai) for the Sunday Business Post a few weeks back. You can read it here, on my work blog.
The developer's (Mountbrook) website is here.
One of my favourite things to complain about is Bob Geldof and specifically the whole Live 8 phenomena a few years back. At the time I did an interview with Jonathan Edgar from Goal where he said the drop the debt campaigners were missing the point. And yesterday I was interested to come across an article on spiked by a Ghanian teacher who is currently touring the UK to promote the new WORLDwrite documentary Damned By Debt Relief. Here is what De Roy Kwesi Andrew reckons:
"I had a memorable discussion at a sixth-form college where Bob Geldof had given a talk just a week earlier. Most of the students who attended had participated in Live8 and Make Poverty History, so they were shocked at my uncompromising swipe at such campaigns."
"When I said that the only ‘mission accomplished’ by Live8 and the G8 meetings in Gleneagles in summer 2005 was to promote and entrench survivalism, interference and low horizons, they were rattled. I outlined the facts about the insidious strings attached to the debt-relief initiative: for example, debt-relief programmes forbid poor countries from investing in the industrial base of their societies, instead demanding that they set up small-scale ‘poverty reduction’ initiatives. This is not only deplorable Western interference in our affairs; it also prevents us from taking leaps forward."
So it turns out I was right all along. Which is nice. The main gist of the article (entitled You hate being affluent? Then swap with us'), is that people in the 'developed world' protesting about climate change, low cost air travel and increasing industrialisation are doing more harm than good to African countries who need more development, more factories, roads, airports etc if they are to make decent lives for themselves.
Andrew reckons that we should be concentrating on using our brains to discover clever solutions to the problems associated with progress and developments and not sitting in fancy apartments or coffee shops discussing our carbon footprint. Makes sense to me.
The full article is here:
I finished The Road, the new Cormac McCarthy novel, on Tuesday evening, racing through the last 100 or so pages in one go. It is very, very good.
I got it as a present from my brother Colin who knows I've been a big McCarthy fan since reading Blood Meridian in college, and All the Pretty Horses is another on my top books list. I don't know if The Road is up there, but it is still very, very good.
(quick plot outline - father and son wander across a post-apocalyptic american countryside, scavenging for food in the ruins of houses and cities and trying to avoid murderous mad max style road agents)
Blood Meridian and The Road are quite similar in a number of ways. There is the trail across a bleak American countryside for the most obvious thing. The clearly described violence and death. The beautifully sparse prose. The unjudgemental tone. The biblical resonances. The lack of female characters. The cannibalism. The Road has stunning images of burnt corpses, people starving and trapped underground, the boy swimming in the sea), which are now (metaphorically of course) seared onto the inside of my eyelids.
But where Blood Meridian is primal and, well, bloody, The Road is more detached. It is a much more accessible (read potentially popular) book I think. The father - son relationship is painfully captured and there is much more emotion. People will cry while reading this book (although I didn't. obviously).
Where Blood Meridian was more episodic, The Road is one long build-up, and reading it I was completely wracked with tension. It gets pretty hard to concentrate on what is going on now at times, as you are constantly fearful of what is coming. There are times when they don't eat. There are times when they are hiding. There are times when they have to defend themselves. You are fairly sure that there is not going to be a particularly happy ending and every time the two got separated I was speed reading till they were both safe.
The father and son do not talk much, but when they do you listen. He has told his son that they are the good ones, who are carrying the flame even through this post-apocalyptic nightmare. They don't discuss what this flame might be. They don't need to. It is very, very, very sad.
I just watched the Bourne Ultimatum there on Sunday evening in the Savoy. It was pretty good, I am not normally one for long fights or chases but these were pretty well done. Choreographed, I think is the word.
Bourne III was fairly thought provoking for a present day actiony thriller I thought. Having got half way through the first Bourne book before throwing it away in exasperation, and avoiding the first two films, I was persuaded along to this by the favourable reviews. And I would agree with their gist that it is a bit of a throwback to the 70s paranoia type films with the enemy being big government or institutions. No harm this. I can just about believe that the CIA can control the CCTV cameras in London train stations. Just about.
Also involving from my perspective was the involvement of a Guardian journalist as a key character in the setup. Now I am far from a security correspondent for a top European paper, but still, like, you know. Maybe someday.
Damon's blank baffled but competent face worked pretty well. You believe him when he says he does not who he is. None of the other cast had to rummage too deep either. Julia Style's character was laughably passive, and then just headed off out of the film on a bus, which was funny. Neither Joan Allen or David Strathairn have anything to do. Presume they got well compensated.
But in fairness the supporting cast are not the point. Paul Greengrass is the real star. His film fairly hurtles along, and you are impressed by Bourne's daring and wits. The jittery camera and snappy editing work well. The sequence where the Guardian journo is trailed through Waterloo Station is fantastically well directed and unfolded. The zooming down from directly overhead google earth style on to the streets of Turin, Paris, London, New York etc was pretty damn cool looking. As well as the janey they can see us all the time aspect it also worked well to show that most cities look and feel pretty much the same now, apart from a few details like nice tiled roofs in Morocco or the Arc de Triomphe.
So a thumbs up.
"The plan includes a new landmark 37 storey tower standing 132 metres, sculpted like a diamond. It will have at its base, a cultural quarter and will be positioned at the entrance to the former Jurys Hotel and be centred on the median of Pembroke Road.
