(Continued from Part Two)

These posts have been a rambling account of my journey migrating my blog/podcast to WordPress. There have been some dead ends and some wasted effort, and some of these have been because the posts I have found describing similar journeys are out of date, and their authors have not updated their posts to tell their readers that. I don't blame them. Such is the nature of open-source WordPress, there isn't a central support system with definitive answers to solutions, questions on the support forums get left unanswered for months, so one ends up fending for oneself and googling for authoritative sounding individuals, and follow their opinions because they seem sensible and fairly recent. I shall try to avoid repeating that mistake, here.

Largely, in my case, this has been because of the way Blogger changed over the past few months, to their "beta" version, which involved different login mechanisms and different templates and RSS feed formats, and the changing information out there about migrating from Blogger to WordPress has reflected that. The goalposts kept on changing, and so people were coming up with hacks and often tortuous workarounds.

Through Justinsomnia's patient efforts, he managed to get the WordPress standalone Blogger Import Tool to import blogger posts properly, complete with the same permalink post title structure (meaning, of course, that the URLs for all my posts stay the same). This, sadly, is not true for the Blogger Import Tool in WordPress.com. I only realised this a couple of nights ago - my posts all had different permalink titles to those in Blogger.

When I managed to get my WordPress working on my new server, (fairly easy, but it got a bit confused at the beginning because the DNS records aren't changed yet, nor will they be until everything's fit to see) I realised with dismay that the same was true for the bundled import tool on WordPress 2.2. On further inspection, the corrections that Justinsomnia had suggested had been ignored in the latest build of the tool. It must be quite disheartening for him. A question to his blog and on the WordPress support forums resulted in a heroic effective response within hours from David Pascoe, to whom I'm eternally grateful. I had to use Justinsomnia's WordPress Suicide plugin to delete all my malformed imported posts, and then re-import them with the patched importer, and then I finally began to feel optimistic.

This time, my iframes, the embedded mp3 players to play my podcast on site, have been imported with each post, (hurrah!) and so far everything looks fine. As I suspected though, my mp3 enclosures are lost. (boo!)

Also, somewhere along in the transition, some coding got changed, resulting in invalid XHTML, which matters because I want it to look good in all browsers. It is a relatively simple matter of going through each post and saving it again. (This feels like such a marathon...)

I've downloaded all the files, images etc., from my old server. And uploaded them to the new one. And begun to customize my new blog. Minimalist is the way I'm going, and it's going to be cool, I hope.

With regard to podcasting, while going through each post to tidy it up, I realised that because I've been using the wonderful Feedburner, all I need to do is add a link to the relevant MP3 file in each post, and they add the necessary bits to make it an iTunes-ready podcast. No need for plugins. Although to keep with my new minimalist style, I'm using a very cool little flash player from 1-Bit for those who want to have a listen on site, as it were. The old hipcast iframe players looked out of place in the new regime, so out they have gone.

Now there's just a slight problem of ensuring that Blogger archives and labels don't get lost in the change, because they are structured differently on WordPress. I'm hoping it's a question that can be easily answered.

So, it's looking good on the dummy site. I'm just about to fax instructions to change the DNS records, which should take a couple of days to take effect. Hopefully you won't notice a thing, except a gleaming new blog!

(Continued from Part One.)


In summary, the options for importing blogger to Wordpress I have discovered are:

1. The Blogger import tool on Wordpress.com. As recommended by T. Jantunen.com and Ronald Lewis, I set up a temporary account on wordpress.com to use its import tool, with the intention of then exporting it to my own-server Wordpress installation later. This would have done the job for me relatively well if only I wasn't a podcaster, even though I would have lost some embedded videos/iframes along the way - but seeing as I don't have many, it wouldn't have been too much of a pain. Close, but no cigar. And this is due to Wordpress.com's restrictive policies - but I can't see how links to MP3 files are a security risk.


2. For standalone Wordpress installations: Andy Skelton's Modified Blogger Importer Tool which is a couple of years old now, seemed promising, but the tool has been deleted from Andy's website.


3. Our very own podcaster Tom Raftery made the move, which gave me some hope, but then I saw that it was three years ago now, so his experience is unlikely to be of use to me now.


4. According to Techcounter, Ady Romantika had a plugin which used an RSS feed as the source. However in April he notes that since Blogger Beta have changed the way their feeds are structured, his plugin no longer works.


5. Wordpress.org's own Blogger Import Tool which may do the trick. But someone from the podpress user group (the podcasting plugin for stand-alone Wordpress) tells me that he hasn't found an importer tool that works to bring in mp3 enclosures from another blog to Wordpress.

In considering RSS importing as a likely option, I set about trying to download my blogger feed as an XML file. To my surprise, I discovered that the atom feed since changing to blogger beta now defaults to only 25 posts. It would have been nice to have been told. There is a way of getting a blogger RSS feed to include more, as I discovered here. But first, I had to switch back to blogspot from publishing via FTP, and say goodbye to my old Blogger (pre-beta) template, and switch to a new beta layout. Having a play around with the new widgets available to me, convinces me that it is really Wordpress I'm looking for.


The upside of this move was that my feed became available at http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, and with the query parameters outlined by phydeaux3 enabling me to download the RSS file in segments thus:

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=100&alt=rss

and then:

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?start-index=101&max-results=100&alt=rss

I then joined the segments together, and hey presto, a full XML file containing my blog posts, complete with enclosures and embedded widgets, over nearly two years. This, I realise, is my most valuable asset now - no matter what happens, this is my blog in its purest form.

But, the comments are missing! They are available separately, which is worrying.

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&alt=rss

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=101&alt=rss

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=201&alt=rss

http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=301&alt=rss

Again, put them all together, and I have all my comments in RSS format in a big XML file.

But I think that the problem will now be, whether I import from Blogger beta using the import tool and leave out the enclosures (ie strip it of its podcast character) or whether I can import it using RSS and keep the enclosures, but leave out the comments. The RSS import tool is not able to include comments because of a limitation of RSS, not Wordpress, I discover here.

That's enough for today. I'll wait until I've Wordpress running standalone before I post again. I don't want to lose my comments, so I shall be at the mercy of the Blogger import tool in its standalone version. Only after I try it, will I know whether I have to manually add my mp3 file links to my posts.

I'm back in Ireland and, given the apalling absence of summer, I'm settling down to the grim and tedious business of migrating my blog to Wordpress. It's been a decision made reluctantly, as Blogger is easy and reliable. But I've tinkered with the pre-beta template there so much that upgrading to a new layout will be a pain, and users like myself who publish by FTP from Blogger to my own server have been poorly served in the transition to beta. And I'm tired of the design now, I want something fresher, brighter, crisper. So drudgery is on the cards, whatever I do.

So, I've a few choices. If I upgrade to full Blogger beta, things might be a bit easier, and there are a few Blogger gadgets and gizmos that look appealing. But in the full transition to Blogger beta, I've a backlog of a year's old posts that need labels (categories) added, as prior to that I was using del.icio.us tags on each post thanks to a natty Firefox extension, which no longer works with Beta. It doesn't make sense to have labels on only a few of the posts in the blog. So I've been adding them to each post all day today. It's been a nostalgic trip, seeing what I was up to on sabbatical and how immersed I got into my business plans. (For anyone who wonders what happened to it, it got parked for a while - I was too busy trying to get established in this town, trying to get work and earn money, rather than investing a huge amount of unpaid time in a speculative internet venture, no matter how good I know the idea is. When I'm more settled, I'll revisit it. Too much time in front of the computer is not good for me, I find it isolating.)

But I've gotten to know Wordpress fairly well, having played about with it on a Blacknight.ie host for a while, (it was a freebie for having been nominated for the first Irish Blog Awards in 2006). Then I helped a friend get going with his blog. But it wasn't until he tried to move servers and got into trouble with it that I got to know Wordpress in a scarily Biblical sense.

The main advantage at the moment of moving "a bit of bonhomie" to Wordpress is that there is an RSS feed for comments on each post. Blogger claim to do this in beta, but it's not available to me at the moment unless I upgrade to beta fully. This didn't really bother me much before, but since I started doing theatre reviews, comments have increased. And since those comments are highly specific to each post, and are (satisfyingly) turning into public debates on the merits and demerits of the relevant productions, not having an RSS feed for each discussion is frustrating. But the main reason I like Wordpress is its configurability.

Wordpress now offers the possibility, through The Sandbox theme, of allowing me to configure a new theme and tinker with it as much as I like (almost always) just with CSS, meaning the often treacherous experience of upgrading Wordpress should be relatively painless in future, avoiding the misery of having to mess with PHP and templates again. But I love the style of the Hemingway theme, and until there's a Hemingway-esque skin available for Sandbox, (which might crop up in some variant as a skin in the forthcoming Sandbox Designs Competition, according the reply to my query on the sandbox forums), I'll probably start with it or a variant of it.

But it's not necessarily going to be smooth sailing. I've gone to the half-way house of a temporary blog at wordpress.com for testing purposes, and used the blogger import tool there. After a false start, I had to "withdraw" my blogger blog away from ftp-ing it to my own server, then publish it on blogspot.com, and then the import tool worked. The comments and labels were correctly imported, but the podcast enclosures failed to make it, as well as the mp3 player iframe widgets I use for playing my podcasts in each post. Wordpress.com then told me in their forums that their service is very different to the Wordpress that is for use in own-hosted servers, which was news to me. Due to security issues, wp.com don't permit the import of iframes or mp3 enclosures.

Questions posted on wordpress.org support forums to ascertain whether other blogger.com bloggers have successfully imported their podcasts into Wordpress have not been fruitful yet.

So I am ready to try out the own-server installation of Wordpress, and see if I can import my podcast enclosures there automatically, all 37 of them. My ISP, IEInternet, told me a couple of weeks ago that Wordpress wasn't available yet, but that it was on its way hopefully by the end of June, subject to their servers being upgraded. I was prepared to wait, even as it's July now, but then I noticed today that Blacknight's price for blog hosting is a fraction of what I'm paying now, and Damien Mulley was singing their praises recently, so I signed up for the package today, and hope to get log in details soon.

It appears that not only am I switching layouts and platforms, I'm also switching ISPs and servers, all at the same time.

I do like to do things the hard way, don't I? Will keep you posted.

I am away in my beloved Tuscany on holiday, and it's wonderful to be here, especially to be back in the beautiful Chiusure where I spent my sabbatical. I consider myself blessed to have a sense of having two places that feel like home, and realise that, even though I'm only ten months back in Dublin, I am beginning to feel connected to the city in a way I never managed in London.

Just before I took the plane, I managed to catch the superlative Sweeney Todd at the Gate. (With, interestingly, its own Myspace page). As it's been deservedly lauded with rave reviews already, and I've come to it late, I'm not writing a proper review here. I've known this show all my life, the soundtrack with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou is one of my most played albums. I've seen it about four times, but of course such is the expense of staging musicals, I've never seen it in Dublin before. What makes the Gate's production so attractive is that it's dramatically very clear and inventive, the design is fresh and quirky, and really clever given the limited space of the Gate stage. Anita Reeves was born to play Mrs Lovett, she was truly spectacular. Mark O'Regan was hysterical, and I loved the balletic emphasis of the show, in particular the stunning Lisa Lambe playing Johanna, with the sweetest songbird-like voice I've ever heard on stage. David Shannon was too young and sexy to play Sweeney, (something about which I'd never thought I'd complain) a the part requires a raddled middle-aged bitterness to make dramatic sense. But his voice was a real treat. Go see this show before it closes on July 7th.

There's a moment described in Mark O'Rowe's new play Terminus, where a woman has been battered over the head with a chair. As she comes to, she realises that a man is wanking over her comatose body. That comes as close as I can get to describing the experience of watching this production, the moment I realised the opening monologues weren't just prologues before the real drama began, but the whole dramatic structure.

Maybe I was in a bad mood. The audience seemed to like it. The cast were brought back for a curtain call when I saw it in preview. There were moments I admired the language. There were moments, too, when I laughed at the regurgitated dark and comical snippets of modern Irish life. But these pleasantries paled when I realised what I was being asked to swallow.

It seems that sexual metaphors are called for, because without using them I cannot describe what I felt. This is a script that revels in sex, grotesque violence, a cold-blooded serial murderer separated from his soul on the run, women betrayed by their men, lesbianism, life after death, Faustian pacts and worm-formed demons and angels. They are fantasy themes that any adolescent lad with half an imagination and a creepy obsession with gory fantasy fiction could come up with. The trouble is, Joss Whedon has already claimed this territory in Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, with a wit, panache and a post-modern irony that redeems the terrain from its pubescent self-indulgence, and with which most under-30s (who I presume are the intended audience for this piece) are familiar. Whedon blazed a trail in creating popular strong female fantasy characters, who are just as violent as men, albeit with matchstick-like figures. But, even acknowledging the fact that few are talented enough to match his genius, it should be interesting to see what happens if such themes are played out in an Irish context. And indeed, in O'Rowe's Ireland, Toto, we're not in Sunnydale anymore. This is ugly, heartless scissor-sister-land, bleak and irredeemable. That in itself is a worthwhile exercise; apply a genre to a culture, and draw your own conclusions.

However, for that to come off successfully on stage, the end result has to be dramatic. But, this was a trio of actors taking turns reciting verse, telling us their stories, rooted to the spot. There is not a moment's silence in the 100 or so minutes - we are bombarded with clever rhyming words. The actors do not relate at all to each other onstage, they take turns to speak, segueing into each other's words without giving us a second to assimilate. The characters turn out to be linked to each other in the plot, in a time-warped elliptical way, but there isn't much to connect them otherwise. One character is a psychopathic persecutor, one a hapless victim, one an insanely foolish rescuer. But this drama triangle is curiously undramatic, because all the action is reported, not enacted. The actors are disconnected, from each other and from us. The fragmented narrative is echoed in the bare set, which is simply a framed fourth wall, a mirror that is smashed as a curtain-raiser, with the actors behind it standing up to say their piece and sitting down again. But the mirror might as well have remained intact for all the interest O'Rowe had in empathising with the audience. For this felt like a manifestation of a particular kind of masturbatory male sexuality, with which I am overly familiar; it's hot to watch sometimes, if the guy is fit, trendy and knows how to put on a display. But if he oozes arrogance and seems to think he's God's gift, and only gets off on the concept that someone is watching him, then the appeal is transitory, as appealing as a quick hand-job in the bushes. There might, conceivably, be a frisson of pleasure if he took the time to arouse me, to invite me to collude in his fantasy, to play the game with him. But such a guy doesn't stand a chance to win me over, if I want to be made love to.

I've been made love to in the theatre by playwrights, male and female. I've been treated to foreplay, teasing, encouragement; I've been cajoled and inveigled and persuaded to care, to relax, to trust. Open wide, this will only hurt a little. I've been tickled and stroked and cuddled, and squeezed so tight I could hardly breathe. And I have been right royally fucked in the theatre, in violent, sexual plays like Matt Harris' Jack the Lad and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking. And if the rhythm is right, the setting is right, the chemistry is right, then actors and audience come together in a climax of emotional impact - whether that be pain, tears, love, shock, horror, laughter or joy.

Perhaps, not for the first time, I am asking too much. I did not feel that the production was even attempting to engage my emotions, to relate to me as an equal, although the individual actors tried their best, isolated in their cold circles of light. I felt that I was supposed to be an admirer of his cocky, manipulative, wordy prowess. This is perhaps why I have reacted so negatively. Or, at least, if I am supposed to experience pleasure in being dominated and brutalised by a production, then please gain my trust first, and then do my head in. That's informed consent.

The programme is the published script, and on perusing it now, it actually reads very well. It should, therefore, be produced on the radio. Eileen Walsh, through sheer force of will, managed to get me to care about her character, and her commitment to tell the story of falling for her grotesque demon lover was impressive. And when Andrea Irvine described her gruesome murderous moment, the audience squirmed and groaned. But if O'Rowe (as both writer and director) was interested in alluding to his motives for making his actors tell such shocking tales of degradation, abuse and butchery, he failed to communicate it to me. Context is all. Is this what's fashionable now in Irish theatre? A meretricious showy sub-Tarantino Dub loquaciousness? Is psychology, by which I mean the curiosity about human motivation, passé? As the dynamic Aidan Kelly reaches the end of his tale, and tells us about his character's eviscerating descent to oblivion, we hear nothing sensible about how he came to live a life of such psychotic depravity. He sings an absurd song - correction, he describes himself singing an absurd song. It made the audience laugh. Well, that's alright then.

I am a firm believer in the use of theatre as a safe space for us to explore our shadow. Sure, place as much base immoral and abusive behaviour as can be tolerated by an audience onstage, as long as we are informed of the motives, the agonies, the cruelties, the values, the choices behind it, as long as it is interrogated dramatically, there is light and shade. That way, we can both be shocked by the dark material, and yet also shiver in recognition, and in that catharsis we advance our knowledge of the human condition a millimeter or two. But without that emotional connection to the audience, the violence and the sex and the satanic shenanigans become gratuitous and pornographic. Maybe if I liked porn I'd have liked this show.

But I doubt it.

Update: as indicated in his comment below, Alan Murrin has started his new arts blog with his own review of this show.

I was forwarded this letter today, about Ian Paisley Jr's comments on homosexuality in Hot Press, suggesting that people write in to The Irish Times to respond. I would point out that in October 2006, 84% of people in the Republic support legal recognition for same-sex relationships. And that the majority support gay marriage in Ireland. That's what I call a moral majority.

PAISLEY REMARKS ON GAYS

Madam, - Few people if any appear to be defending Ian Paisley jnr against accusations of homophobia arising from his recent interview with Hot Press; yet the majority of the population, north and south of the Border, are opposed to homosexual/lesbian practices. Unfortunately, this majority view is not reflected in the law, nor have there been any referendums on the subject.
Ian Paisley jnr was merely defending the traditional Christian teaching, which stipulates that a homosexual or lesbian orientation is not blameworthy in itself, but that unnatural same-gender sexual acts are gravely disordered and immoral. Most major religions support this position, which is based on the natural law.

It is one thing to show compassion and sympathy for people afflicted by these aberrant tendencies, quite another to give the respectability and approval of law to the sexual expression of these tendencies. The fact that the gay movement, which is anything but gay, is demanding marital status and the right to adopt children, shows the folly of this type of compromise.

Our Constitution defines the family as the natural, primary and fundamental unit group of society, which is the basis of social order, and indispensable to the welfare of the State. The pressures of the gay fraternity for equal civil rights are anti-family, unconstitutional and highly detrimental to the State. - Yours, etc,

PATRICK MOLLOY, Brackenstown, Swords, Co Dublin.

Just come from an excellent seminar by Annette Clancy and Conn Ó Muíneacháin on Blogging and the Arts in the Royal College of Surgeons, organized by Poetry Ireland. Despite the shock of discovering at the last minute that the RCSI had a firewall in place blocking access to blogs, this was resolved in a few minutes and Annette carried on with aplomb. It was quite a feat to create a new blog live in front of an audience, but she managed to do so in 2 minutes flat, and an extra minute to add a graphic and a YouTube video for good measure. It was great to meet Paul from From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace, and was chuffed that Annette and Conn used my blog to demonstrate to the audience. Annette pointed out that my theatre reviews are now reaching top of the Google search engine rankings within two or three days of publication. They are read every day by people seeking information on a particular show, with presumably a high probability that they are interested in buying tickets. See, for example, the search results for Crucible Abbey.
Hopefully more than a few of the attendees will start blogging. The interesting question of how poetry can get published if it's already online met with two differing opinions - one poet had her work published as a collection, even though her work was already online - but we also heard that if a poem is online it won't get published in a journal. The point was made effectively that if you are unknown, a really efficient way to publicize your artform, whether it is poetry, fiction, music or visual art, is by blogging - and contra-intuitively, if you give it away for free it works to generate money in the long run.

Links to the various websites mentioned in the seminar are listed here.

27th May 2007

I've had a very enjoyable couple of weeks re-engaging with the notion of gay "community", by going to see nine different plays and shows in the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, out of about thirty which were on offer over the fortnight. As regular readers of this column will be aware, the concept of gay community has seemed oxymoronic to me for many years, not least because sexuality seems to be such a volatile, often anarchic force that I am not convinced it is solid enough to form a reliable (or even credible) pillar of identity for many people, so therefore building a community on such shaky foundations can be highly problematic. But then, I have been urbanized and anonymized and atomized out of so many decent god-fearing habits in my sojourn in London that I'm open to any and all suggestions now.

The Festival is, fascinatingly, the biggest of its kind in the world, with only two or three others in the USA, and it can also claim to be the only international gay theatre festival. It has been run on a shoestring over four years, and last year's budget, to produce 20 shows, was a mere €27,000, including accommodation fees for touring productions from abroad. This was done without any Arts Council funding, and indeed without anyone from the Arts Council having attended the event since it started, although in the last couple of days I understand a small subsidy was granted to them, on appeal. Although it's been going since 2003, it's my first time catching any of it, and I had really no idea what to expect. Well, perhaps that's not strictly true. I was apprehensive. I have seen what happens when people try to create art to serve notions of ideology or political correctness, and have remained stonily unmoved when I sense I am being lectured to, or that my individuality is not being respected, or that it's assumed that my intellectual and emotional responses should conform to a particular consensus. My stomach is especially prone to heaving when I am expected to swallow crap in the name of supporting my community. I won't be told.

The worst manifestations of gay "art", or indeed any ideologically driven art such as feminist, nationalist or socialist art, involve a degrading of truth, a lowering of quality, in lieu of a collusive collective "celebration". Sometimes consciousness-raising and morale-boosting are important enough things to do that one can cheerfully turn a blind eye to the mediocrity of the content and applaud the admirable intent. But it has never appealed to me in terms of gay issues.

I remember the furore over the 1980 film Cruising in which Al Pacino's character goes hunting for a serial killer in the leather scene in New York. The gay community despised it for its portrayal of gay people, the film was picketed in production, and boycotted by many for years. It offended the "gay community" because its portrayal of gay men seemed homophobic in intent, in that they weren't happy and some were quite disturbed and disturbing. To my mind, however, it remains one of the most interesting and compelling films of that period, still unique in its exploration of the gay fetish scene, asking uncomfortable questions about the relationship between desire and violence. William Friedkin, the director, is currently working on the long-overdue DVD release.

Perhaps, sometimes, mutual reinforcement is necessary in a group, a sort of positive discrimination, and those who protested against Cruising were fuelled by an anger that there was so little positive representation of gay people's lives elsewhere in Hollywood at that time. But the anger was misdirected. A mature community should welcome diverse and uncomfortable perspectives and critiques, and relish challenges to collective shibboleths that are mounted with integrity.

Of all of the art forms, however, theatre can be the most demanding, because one is trapped in one's seat, and leaving in the middle of a performance is such a visible statement of disapproval that very few people have the nerve for it. Unlike a collection of short stories, for example, written by members of a particular community, one can buy the book and feel good for having supported the good cause, but one doesn't actually have to sit down and read it.

However, of the nine shows I saw in the festival, (most of which I reviewed here and for Phantom FM) I really enjoyed five of them, disliked one, and the rest were interesting enough, which to my mind is a very good result. Although I heard some people complain about the quality of a couple of home-grown productions, which I didn't see, I was drawn to the international shows, and found myself energised, enthralled, delighted, aroused, and moved by the experiences. Because what I witnessed in those plays was not a whitewash, (pinkwash?) nor a sentimental "let's all wrap ourselves in the rainbow flag" group hug, but a challenging series of hard-hitting, truthful, sometimes difficult, sometimes hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable productions that explored the human condition, that were relevant to my experience of life as a sexual man, struggling with notions of identity and desire. Yes there were the fluffy light-hearted frivolous shows, like Gaydar Diaries, but of course they have their rightful place in any festival, and I confess I laughed. There were the traditional drag acts, of course, but when they are as astonishingly good as Rick Skye, who out-Minnelli'd Minnelli with his own voice and razor-sharp wit, you know you're watching something world-class. There was a quiet, moving one-man show, the lovely On the Sidelines from Manchester, and there was the searing and dark experience of Jack, the Lad, a trippy X-rated fairytale about a self-loathing rent boy and his punters, that was right up my alley, and as close to the punchiness of Cruising as it is possible to get.

The festival is at an interesting stage. Born from a palpable sense of community, supported to an impressive degree (fifty hard-working and professional volunteers are evidence of a serious amount of goodwill), it's going to have to rethink itself over the next few years, now that public money is starting to trickle in. At the moment, having listened to some people in the wider theatre business in Dublin, it appears that the Festival is seen still as a community event, perhaps a bit amateur, self-absorbed and introspective, and not something that a major theatre would want to associate itself with, i.e. by putting on a gay-themed show to coincide with the festival. It does not have a firm reputation yet of quality, in that some stinkers are allowed through the net for reasons other than artistic merit, nor has it sunk in yet that tourists are coming to the festival from abroad. The challenge for the festival will be to move away from self-absorption and perceptions that the productions on offer are only of interest to gay people, and to persuade the wider theatre community in Dublin that what's on offer is high-quality theatre that has a particular but accessible theme that is of interest to all. On the strength of what I saw this year, I don't think they will have a problem.

I had a blast at the Garden Party yesterday. Weather beautiful, venue beautiful, vibe beautiful, people beautiful. Spent the day going up to people with tattoos asking could I photograph them. Most were really happy to show them off. A few declined for copyright reasons - they were jealously guarding their designs, wanting to ensure they remained unique. A couple of times I met with suspicion - I had no tattoos myself, so why was I so interested? One bitchy guy seemed a little snide about my motives. As if wanting to go up to fit folk and photograph them was somewhat dubious, or that eroticism has no place in the displaying of decorated human skin in a summer festival. But I couldn't think of a better thing to do, and I'm delighted with the results.

Most reacted to my requests with beaming good humour, and my interactions with some of the luvved up guys were priceless examples of how MDMA is the saviour of the modern heterosexual male. I learned (again, but I keep on forgetting) how I'm seen by other people as being unmistakeably gay. One cute man came up and was bemused and enthralled with me - truly marvelling at how comfortable I was being "so gay" and then revealing shyly, his heart racing in tremulous pleasure, how nervous he was talking to me. Later on, the fittest man in the festival, a 6'4" muscled smooth handsome tank of a man and his friends stopped me as I was walking past them and with great good humour asked me to commiserate with their friend. Could I reassure him that he would one day find a man, that he wasn't so bad looking? I could indeed, I said. Manly handshakes all around, and an undercurrent of mischievous flirtation beaming from the lot of them towards me.

I loved watching the Irish at play. We sure know how to party. The Pet Shop Boys were in great form, although there was a more laid back approach all around to their set compared to the ecstatic experience of their first Irish gig at the 2006 Electric Picnic. But "laid back" was just what I needed.