Clara Rose Thornton

‘Mooo!’ is sexual psychedelia.

On a late night in Chicago, I told a man I was chatting with on a dating app that researching Doja Cat had filled my evening. I directed him to ‘Mooo!,’ a music video featuring farm references, milkshakes and straws, a speaking style that connotes hip-hop over melodies referencing summer-afternoon soul, and a racially ambiguous young woman eating a hamburger.

He said, “Wow. That’s a lot of breasts”.

Bouncing anime bosoms, in close-up, fill a green screen I discovered was a sheet hung in Doja Cat’s bedroom, for probably 70 percent of ‘Mooo!’. ...

She’s an elegant woman in her late 40s. A tumble of black hair dips beneath her shoulders, her august form cloaked in a gauzy appliqué black dress. She makes a fitting detail of the dim bar of Trinity City Hotel: its ubiquitous purple velvet, her style owning a hip, soft, sensuality most 20-somethings would covet.

An entrepreneur and event organiser, the woman worked as a model throughout Europe in the 1980s and ‘90s. The fact lingers in her demeanour. Yet we don’t talk about what it’s like to live and travel in multiple countries, or the trappings of surface luxury. When we’re together, ...

White supremacy is obviously such a vast, ridiculous lie, and we are already watching it crumble.

The concept of pan-”whiteness” across European national identities is a recent capitalist construction, serving to justify West African slavery to build Europeans a “New World”, e.g. North, Central and South America: a manifest destiny fantasy. The word “race” as currently understood was introduced into English around the year 1580, influenced by same word in French, first documented in 1512. ...

In 2015 amid an online storm surrounding #OscarsSoWhite, I got a call to be on “The Ryan Tubridy Show”, then titled “Tubridy” and airing on RTÉ 2fm. The year held the least diverse Academy Award slate in 17 years; nary a single person of colour was nominated in a major category. As an African-American radio film critic, I was asked to discuss “Selma”, a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic and the only film about non-white reality to glean a nomination. I was a noteworthy candidate given civil rights activism and association with MLK in my family history.

When I got the call, ...

Art is a reflection of human life as lived. The tenuous process of creating art mirrors life’s path: projection, uncertainty, connection, then disconnection, and navigating surprise. Thus it makes sense to look to collections of contemporary art and individual pathways through the market as vibrant manifestations of a zeitgeist, the mime’s shadow we cannot see. ...

“Your rhetoric being rewarded with a presidency made it perfectly okay for people to throw their privilege around like confetti.” ~Clara Rose Thornton

Dear President Trump,

I was infuriated in the first few days after the announcement of your win, when people in my social world of supposed artists, thinkers and the cultured would make flippant and dismissive jokes regarding you and your presidency. Telling people to calm down their hysterics, and that “this is what we ask for, it’s called democracy”.

The latter was spoken by someone in Ireland with little knowledge of the inner workings ...

I recently attended a play called 'Dig' from Co Leitrim playwright, actor and director Seamus O'Rourke. The set consisted of a mossy patch of cemetery soil.

A hastening dusk framed a stretch of grass that meandered to the theatre door, surrounded by stone walls – moody boulders with a look of the ancient unmoved, as weathered as the gravestones – enclosing four male characters, a whiskey bottle, a few empty beer cans and shovels.

Once I acclimated to the unfamiliar country accents at breakneck speed, and the occasionally neon comic dialogue, I had an unsettling realisation. ...

In Woody Allen films, setting is often a character. New York City breathes and vibrates, while punishing, cradling and uplifting people in those narratives; it is the reason for each person’s worldview.

In a similar way, the new Irish film Cardboard Gangsters, set in the raw and enveloping universe of Dublin’s Darndale, has a place-specific intensity that fully animates each moment and minor character. ...

It was a moment we did not think we'd live to see. America, the most powerful nation in the world, elected an African-American as president, a mere 40-odd years after our people struggled just to get to voting booths unscathed or be able to drink from the same water fountains as other citizens. Riding the coattails of an apartheid that still exists, here was Barack Hussein Obama, an elegant family man whose little black girls were going to grow up in the White House playing dolls.

"Well, well. It's a new day," a measured, tearful voice proclaimed ...

On this, the first and last day of his Chicago press run for The Painted Veil, a melancholic rumination on the criminal impulses of love, the pitfalls of Western cultural commandeering and the nature of forgiveness, Edward Norton looks a bit melancholy himself. It’s late evening and he’s been subjected to a barrage of radio, television and newspaper interviews throughout the day, critics and pseudo-critics pulling and nipping and tucking as most actors and directors complain about after these necessary parades. His appearance is more akin to his character Alan Isaacman in The People vs. Larry Flynt or Holden Spence in Everyone Says I Love You than his larger-than-life embodiments of faux masculinity in American History X and Fight Club. ...

I watched a trickle of dust filter through the light in the Workman’s Club on an unduly warm October Saturday. Speaking a line of a certain poem, I suddenly existed within, simultaneously, three places on the globe. The locales are wrapped in the fabric of how I percieve performance poetry’s relationship to the page, and to my own journey as a performer along geographic lines: Chicago, with its love of experimentation; Paris and its focus on magical illumination; and Dublin, in the wild freedom of its scene’s naissance. ...

There’s a reason medical practitioners and patients often prefer to use the term “cannabis” as opposed to “marijuana.” The stigma of irresponsible desire for intoxication continues to haunt any usage of this plant — sidestepping three thousand years of documented medicinal use and research — to a degree that necessitates clear division in jargon between medicinal and perceived recreational use. A climate of fear and culture of forced attrition persists for recreational marijuana enthusiasts, in turn causing roadblocks for the medicinal community, despite three key factors: ...

A political muckraker and an astute observer of human relations, Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s work seamlessly melds inner emotional worlds with an era’s outer political climate. She was an influential contributor to the Polish New Wave of the 1960s and ’70s, a group of artists that railed against communist censorship and included such greats as her mentor Andrej Wajda and Krysztof Kieslowski, best known for his Three Colors trilogy: Blue (1993), Red (1994) and White (1994). After a stint in France, during which she made the beautifully melancholy, Academy Award-nominated film Angry Harvest (1985), ...

The hair is shaggier than I remember, dry and framing his face, giving him the look of attractive apathy reserved solely for guitarists.

Languid, he sits in a New York living room filled with yellows, light streaming from behind. I sit on a patch of grass on a Dublin street corner, watching the bobbing head in a Skype window spotted with drizzle, wind streaking water across the face that has taught me lessons about authenticity and assumption several times prior. ...

If Dave Matthews stepped in and stole the average band's sax player, the average bandleader might get a bit angry.

But not Béla Fleck, frontman and banjo player of the enigmatic four-piece The Flecktones, whose kaleidoscopic sound has flitted defiantly above the concept of genre classification for 22 years, and, thus, consistently maintained a freshness and level of experimentation.

The need for freshness and experiment allowed the group a de facto boredom, impatience and dissatisfaction with its own direction by the time virtuoso saxophonist Jeff Coffin had been among its ranks for 14 years. This was in 2008, the same year close friends in the Dave Matthews Band lost their founding member Leroi Moore to a fatal ATV accident.

Moore had been a Virgina saxophone player like none the world had seen--graceful, ethereal, yet kinetic--the jazz equivalent of sweet almond milk. ...