Category: Event

After the busiest ever year at Banter – 16 sessions in 2012 – we start 2013 with Grow It Yourself.

This discussion has been prompted by the huge number of people who are now growing their own vegtables, herbs and fruit. For example, the Twisted Pepper’s sister venue, the Bernard Shaw, now has the Raver Cottage garden on its roof which provides the cafes and bars in both venues with fresh herbs and veg and we’ve also seen the massive growth in community gardens around the city and country.

We’d going to have a look at what’s behind this movement of going back to growing your own, the scalability and sustainability of this and how people can be encourage to take up a shovel and get digging. We’re doing this at the start of the year too as that’s when people make resolutions to do this kind of thing so this will hopefully prompt them to actually follow through on their good intentions.

The Grow It Yourself panel: Ella McSweeney (RTE’s Ear to the Ground and BBC Radio 4), Kaethe Burt-O’Dea (Sitric Community Garden, SPUDS), Sinead Keenan (Healthy Food For All) and Andrew Douglas (Urban Farm, Dublin). Artist’s impression of what the Urban Farm at Chocolate Factory might look like Venue and date: Twisted Pepper, Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1; Tuesday January 22 (doors open 7.30pm the Banter gets going at 8pm sharp). Tickets: admission is free but you must sign up in advance to our guestlist here. We’ve a lot of really cool Banters on the way in ’13 so make sure to sign up to the mailing list or subscribe to the site to find out more.

Another Way Of Winning is a Banter conversation and Q&A with Guillem Balague about his biography of former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola

.
It’s Pep time

Guillem is a key fixture in Sky Sports’ coverage of Spanish football, appearing regularly both on live match coverage and on the weekly round-up show, Revista de La Liga. He is also the UK Correspondent for AS, the Madrid-based Spanish sports newspaper and El Larguero, Spain’s most popular sports radio show, attracting some 1,5 million listeners. His work appears regularly in The Times and in Champions magazine, where he writes a regular column on international football. He also wrote the bestselling “A Season on the Brink”, an insider’s account of Liverpool’s 2004-05 Champions’ League winning campaign, updated later with the 2006 FA Cup victory.

In November 2012 he published the first international biography of Pep Guardiola, Another Way of Winning, based in conversation with him, his former players and Pep’s closest friends.

This event takes place at the Twisted Pepper on December 19. Tickets are now on sale at €8 and €6 (Bodytonic members) a go. As we don’t really expect to have any on sale on the door going on sales so far, get one ASAP if you want to come along to hear Guillem on Pep.

If it’s (nearly) December, that can only mean one thing. It’s time for the Banter Review of the Year.

Going on our track record when we went reeling in the year in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the Review of the Year is always a splendid, entertaining and enlightening night out as our all-star panel run the rule over the events, news stories, heroes and villians of the past 12 months.

Talk to Joe at Banter

Joining me to look back at what was what in current affairs, politics, Ireland, sports and international news during a very busy, eventful and memorable 2012 will be Joe Duffy (Liveline, RTE Rado One), Emmet Malone (The Irish Times’ football correspondant) and Una Mullally (journalist, broadcaster and blogger).

It all happens at the Twisted Pepper, Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1 on Wednesday December 12 (doors open 7.30pm the Banter gets going at 8pm sharp). Admission is free but you must sign up in advance to our guestlist here.

Please note that we expect this one to be very busy and we expect a full house in the newly extended main room in the Twisted Pepper so make sure you sign up for it today.

It gives us great pleasure to head to Dingle, Co Kerry on December 1 and 2 for the Banter Salon at Foxy John’s as part of this year’s Other Voices festival in the town. It’s our first time in Dingle, our first time at Other Voices and our first time to host a Banter in a hardware shop. Yes, it has been a year for unusual Banter venues.

The Banter Salon arrives at Foxy John’s for Other Voices

The Banter Salon at Foxy John’s will feature a wide variety of discussions and conversations over the weekend including:

– Guardian media writer Lisa O’Carroll on a wild year for the media business

– Jerry Kennelly (Stockbyte and Tweak) and Kieran Murphy (Murphy’s Ice Cream) discussing where the spark to create something innovative come from

– Historian and author Diarmaid Ferriter on a decade of centenaries and if your ancestors realised what was coming down the line in 1912

– From the Silver Threads of Hope anthology of new Irish short stories, Peter Murphy and Siobhan Mannion read from their work and are joined by anthology editor Sinead Gleeson for a discussion about Irish literature in post-boom Ireland

– The Observer’s editor, John Mulholland, on the view from the editor’s desk in 2012.

– Poet Paul Muldoon on his new book The Word On The Street: Rock Lyrics and

– Dermot McLaughlin, director of Derry City Of Culture 2013, on what’s ahead for the Maiden City in 2013.

There will also be performances at the Banter Salon on both days from various acts playing at Other Voices.

Admission will be free, but capacity is strictly limited so it will be first come, first served when doors open each day at 4pm.

After The Anti Room takeover last week (so good that we’ll definitely do it again in 2013), it’s back to business as usual at Banter this month. The politics of showbiz is a topic which has been on the to-do list for ages and it’s great that we’ve finally got around to it.

The biggest growth area in media coverage over the last few years has come from showbiz, social diary, gossip and entertainment pages, websites, TV sections and radio shows. This is the media’s real appeal for many readers – not investigate journalism or hard-hitting political exposes, despite many hacks and editors think.

Banter will look at the people on the showbiz desk and those who feature week in and week out in those pages. Who decides who gets covered and why? What do readers get from this? Are readers just a nosey bunch living vicariously through all this coverage of parties and launches or does it say something more about our psyches? And what exactly are the politics of showbiz?

Our showbiz panel: Rosanna Davison (former Miss World, model and columnist), Eoin Murphy (Entertainment Editor, Irish Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday) and Niamh Horan (The Sunday Independent).

Diary date: Wednesday November 21 at the Twisted Pepper (Middle Abbey St., Dublin 1). Doors open at 7.30pm, the bantering starts at 8pm and admission is free but you need to sign up to the invite list here.

Mo’ Banter: our annual review-of-the-year takes place at the Twisted Pepper on December 12. And eyes peeled for some very special Banter news next week.

The final stop in our festival summer tour is the Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Co Laois and this one is going to be interesting.

Did the media fail Ireland? will look at how the domestic media (online and offline) has covered the post-boom fallout and why the real stories which matter so much now never materialised until it was too late.

The Banter panel: Simon Carswell (The Irish Times and author of Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank That Broke Ireland and Something Rotten: Irish Banking Scandals), Carol Hunt (The Sunday Independent), John Ryan (Broadsheet) and Enda Leahy (Irish Mail On Sunday).

Banter at Electric Picnic details: Mindfield stage, Sunday September 2, 3.45pm-ish

Big thanks to Naoise Nunn for the invitation.

When we started out doing Banter back in 2009 in a tiny room upstairs in the Twisted Pepper, we never thought we’d end up here. A packed room in the Meyrick Hotel on Galway’s Eyre Square and the legendary Nile Rodgers in the Banter frame.

Our first involvement with the Galway Arts Festival, Banter’s Conversation with Nile Rodgers was a fantastic hour in the life of the man behind dozens and dozens of Chic hits, the producer who worked with everyone from David Bowie to Duran Duran and the author of the fantastic “Le Freak” autobiography. Many yarns were told as Rodgers talked and talked and talked some more. Every so often, he’d get the audience to yell “freak out!” which is something we must try out at future Banters. He even gave out to us for talking too fast and asking long-winded questions. Total legend.

Thanks to all at the Galway Arts Festival and Gugai at the Roisin Dubh for their help with this event.

Banter‘s annual odyssey to Donegal for the Earagail Arts Festival lead us to the late, great painter Derek Hill’s kitchen (complete with a Picasso on the wall) at the Glebe House and Gallery in Churchill just outside Letterkenny for the Glebe Cultural Summit.

Our contribution to the Summit was Irish Culture and The Way It Might Not Look at You. This saw film-maker Lenny Abrahamson, performer Little John Nee, Dublin Fringe director Róise Goan and writer and broadcaster Sinead Gleeson taking part in a lengthy, intriguing, entertaining and provocative look at how Irish culture, from books to films to theatre, has dealt with – or has not dealt with – the issues and stories of the Irish boom and bust. Thanks to Derek O’Connor, Paul Brown and all at the Earagail Arts Festival for their help with this one.

Derek Hill’s kitchen. Photo by Ianthe Ruthven 

Limerick’s inaugural Make a Move festival of hip-hop culture was the first stop in our summer tour for a panel on Irish Hip-Hop: Got to Get Up to Get Down. We were joined at the Daghdha Church by Paul Tarpey (Cheebah), Kieran Nolan (founder of irishhiphop.com), mynameisjOhn and Temper-Mental MissElayneous to run the rule over the past, present and future of life on the Irish hip-hop beat. From RTE’s Ireland’s Rappers documentary to Scary Eire and beyond, it was a hugely engaging hour in the life of the culture. Many thanks to Shane Curtin and all at Make A Move for the invitation and hospitality.

The Banter panel (from left): Jim Carroll, TemperMental MissElayneous, Kieran Nolan, mynameisjOhn and Paul Tarpey. Photo by Shane Serrano 

Best Banter ever? When we started this off in 2009, we never thought that we would (a) still be going three years later or (b) be able to persuade the legendary Bill O’Herlihy and Brian Kerr to join us for some Bantering.

But that’s how things have turned out. Bill, Brian and Miguel Delaney joined us for The Football Special as we looked back on the club football season, had a bit of a banter about various highlights, tut-tutted over various lowlights and reviewed the action at home and away. Of course, that was merely the preamble for a fantastic preview of the Euro 2012 championships.

Big thanks to all three panelists and the huge turnout for a cracking night. It was certainly the first time we’ve seen Banter panelists mobbed as they left the stage. We’ll have the “I Can’t Believe Bill O’Herlihy Is In the Twisted Pepper” t-shirts on sale soon.

The last thing we expected when we were putting this panel together were insights on Proust, brothels, oranges, Ann Summers, FOMO, Buddhism and neuroscience when Banter considered the issue of The Attention Economy. But such were the twists and turns taken on the night by our panelists Michael Foley (author of the bestselling The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy, and the forthcoming Embracing the Ordinary), Finian Murphy (consumer and media researcher) and Roisin Ingle (The Irish Times). Thanks too to those in the audience who poked us with questions on everything from Sky News to click activism.

Rip It Up & Start Again gathered together a panel of journalism practitioners to look at the current state of the trade, where it goes from here, the rise of content aggregators and curators and what this means for established publications and titles.

Thanks to our panelists – Frank Fitzgibbon (Editor, The Sunday Times Ireland), Brian Fallon (co-founder Distilled Media – The Journal, Boards.ie, Daft.ie), Gavin Sheridan (The Story.ie, Storyful) and Paul Mallon (ex-deputy editor The Star On Sunday and assistant editor The Star, currently editorial manager at Paddy Power) – for an illuminating night out. No doubt, we will be engaging in more omphaloskepsis on the state of the media trade in future Banters.

Many thanks to our brilliant panelists Garry O’Neill (Where Were You?), Mick Heaney (The Irish Times) and Eimear Fitzmaurice (Not Saying Boo/Forward Slash/Bodytonic Music) and our audience (another packed house on this occasion) for insightful views, funny quips, great anecdotes and plenty of cultural anthropological brain food on the who, what, why, how and where of the hipster then, now and to come.

If you haven’t done so already, check out Where Were You?, Garry O’Neill’s fantastic book on Dublin street culture, which was one of the inspirations behind this panel.

The first Banter of ’12 took a look at the joys (and pains) of running with Ian O’Riordan (Irish Times and author of “Miles to Run – Promises to Keep”), Raedi Higgins (Runs Like A Girl) and Barry Redsetta (Pogo, Jam the Box), with couch-to-10k newbie JIm Carroll keeping an eye on the split times. Topics included the current boom in running, previous booms in running (or, as Ian noted, “the jogging boom” which has now become the running boom), the Olympics, running in Kenya, races, shin splits, ultramarathons, training regimes, the costs of running and much, much more. A great turn-out too and we’ll definitely be doing more sports-related Banters in the future.

Banter’s annual Review of the Year session – It’s The End of 2011 As We Know It (And We Feel OK) – turned out to be a fantastic evening’s entertainment and brain stimulation thanks to our reeling-in-the-year panelists Sinead Gleeson, Miriam O’Callaghan and Conor Pope and some superb contributions from the Bantering classes in the audience.

Topics covered included elections, the euro, positivity, optimism, the media, Twitter, sovereignty, independence, Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland, the Arab Spring, the Occupy street movements, Other Voices, Wikileaks, referendums and good news stories.

Interview with Arthur Russell biographer Tim Lawrence as part of Sound Now, Seek & You Will FInd, a special celebration of Arthur Russell’s life and music as part of The Beatyard weekender. Tim is the author of the fantastic “Hold Onto Your Dreams”biography of Russell and the excellent “Love Saves the Day” history of 1970s’ American dance culture. A wide-ranging coversation about Russell, New York, dance culture, disco, Talking Heads and much more.

This Banter Uptown session, in conjunction with the Mindfield folks, saw us deliver an all-guns-blazing obituary for pop culture in the beautiful surroundings of Merrion Square, Dublin on a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon.

The panelists raking over the ashes of pop culture past and present were Todd Zuniga (Literary Death Match), Nathan Rabin (A.V. Club, The Onion) and Una Mullally.

This freewheeling, wide-ranging eulogy referenced (deep breath) John Morley (the one-time Chief Secretary for Ireland who was the first to mention popular culture in an 1876 speech), R, Kelly, Odd Future, Black Eyed Peas, Community, Youtube videos of cats, authenticity, irony, short attention spans, Bosco, Twink, Dan Charnas’ The Big Payback, Weird Al Yankovic, Timothy Leary, Shaun Dunne’s Homebird and much, much more.

It was also the only Banter to date which featured (a) Shane McGowan in the audience heckling panelists by singing The Village People’s “In the Navy” and (b) a bunch of children running around the place (which certainly cut down on the amount of cussing and swearing from the stage). If you weren’t there, you missed one hell of a do because it was not recorded.

Since it was founded in Barcelona in 1994, Sonar has established itself as the world’s leading electronic music festival, where music-makers and music fans go to hear, see and experience cutting-edge sounds and art.

As well as the Barcelona event, Sonar has also begun to hold a simultaneous festival in A Coruña in Galicia and has hosted events in London, New York, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Frankfurt, Chicago and Tokyo.

The inside story of the world’s leading electronic music festival, as told by Enric Palau and Georgia Taglietti, two of the people who make it all happen.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1007579&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Climate Wise Women is a global initiative to promote women’s leadership on climate change and to give a human face and voice to this issue.

It features women leaders from regions and communities directly affected by climate change putting their narratives on public view in a traveling speaking tour. While the world continues to debate whether climate change actually exists, communities are counting on Climate Wise Women to find bold solutions and provide leadership.

The Climate Wise Women who spoke in Dublin at Banter were Constance Okollet, chairperson of the Osukuru United Women’s Network from Tororo in Eastern Uganda, and Ursula Rakova, executive director of Tulele Peisa, an organization seeking to voluntarily relocate 1,700 Carteret Islanders whose islands and food supply are rapidly eroding to mainland Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. They were joined by Gavin Harte (Earthtalks.org).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogo-xgDeTMM]