Author Archives: Allan

About Allan

Allan is a Galway based cartoonist with a smörgåsbord of interests including visual art, music, technology and politics, and has always wanted to use smörgåsbord in a sentence. He also blogs at Caricatures Ireland.

Review: Doctor Who Exhibition, Cardiff

  By Allan | July 9, 2009 - 7:17 pm | Random Whimsy, The Culch
6 Comments

(The next Doctor. Honest) Work brought me to Cardiff, Wales for a few days last month. I asked on twitter if anyone could suggest things to see in Cardiff and nearly dropped my sonic screwdriver when Curlydena told me there was a Doctor Who exhibition. The Cardiff exhibition is one of five throughout the UK (admission: £18 family, £6 adults, £4.50 child/concession). It’s in a relatively small space in the Red Dragon Centre in Cardiff Bay, but is dense with actual props, masks and costumes from the show. I love looking at this stuff up close. Part of the magic of television is that you seldom see seam lines, staples or brush strokes on aliens heads or laser guns, but with an exhibition like this you can get right up close and see the sieve that was butchered to make a detail on a control panel, or the wavin pipe … There’s more →

Johnny Massacre- I wonder where he got it.

  By Allan | June 28, 2009 - 8:45 pm | Comedy, Performance Art, The Arts
3 Comments

Julian Gough thought he saw Johnny Massacre in Berlin last night. Johnny was never one of the best buskers. He was the best. If you had to walk down Shop Street on a summer’s evening you’d want to give yourself an extra half an hour for your journey. Johnny would have brought the street to a standstill. I never caught up with him for that pint after he got back to Ireland from his travels. He was dead within a month of a quick chat in Easons. His funeral was one of the best day’s craic I ever had. The priest struggled to give a convincing eulogy as his inexperience with beds of nails showed. The congregation rippled with laughter and rippled with grief- we knew the enormous talent that had passed. His mother invited about a million of us to stay for dinner in the hotel afterwards. She wouldn’t … There’s more →

Review: The New Electric Ballroom, Town Hall Theatre, Galway

  By Allan | April 24, 2009 - 4:32 pm | Theatre
6 Comments

The first thing that strikes you about Druid’s New Electric Ballroom is the shockingly spare stage design. The lavish promises of the play’s title are dispelled immediately upon seeing the set. Immense grey walls wrap a raked floor and bare furniture. And with that misconception firmly in place, the gaudy colours of hope, regret and habit splash across the stage in Walsh’s absurdist tragedy. The setting, while indisputably Irish, is not any physical place, but that recognisable hinterland that borders Beckett and Ionesco, a place where ideas wear the flesh of people. 3 female siblings are trapped in an epic regurgitation of their memories of the New Electric Ballroom. For the youngest, her incarceration in these memories is vicarious- she is so familiar with the stories of a place she’s never been she prompts the elder sisters in their faltering and reluctant retellings of the dashed hopes of romance. It … There’s more →

Carousel: a narratively dense 2 minutes 19 seconds you have to watch

  By Allan | April 23, 2009 - 11:15 am | Gadgets, Movies & TV, The Internet, TV
2 Comments

UPDATE: Ah. Darragh posted it on Monday. Hopefully I’ve got this up before Rick’s Darragh’s had the chance (we generally think the same things are cool). It’s a short film commissioned for the launch of Philips’ new telly. You’re going to see a simple and rather cliched cinematic vista, the cop versus robbers stand off, reinvigorated in delicious detail. The real genius for me here is the sweep of the narrative as the camera moves through the scene: a frozen moment that’s completely story driven. It’s a story that manages to unfurl in the headspinning superposition of the viewer, with a twofold experience of time- the moment and the movement through that moment. If you can, check out the high quality version. I’m also seeing nods to: Halo 3′s TV campaign and the Timescape episode of Star Trek TNG. The video for REM’s Daysleeper video has a similar play with … There’s more →

Believe in Free Speech even if you don’t like what’s being said?

  By Allan | March 30, 2009 - 10:36 pm | In The News, Politics, The Arts, The Internet
4 Comments

The recent controversy over Picturegate transcended Conor Casby’s paintings. It revealed a national broadcaster in preemptive terror of the government; a meddling Government Press Office that overstepped the procedures the rest of us have to adhere to if we have a broadcasting complaint; and a Gardai that are clearly taking directions from murky corners of Irish politics. The full implications of a very strange week have yet to be teased out but many people are waking up to the rot in Irish political life and the episode has revealed some strange definitions of satire, and strange attitudes to the human body. If any of this concerns you, and as a citizen of a democracy it should, you should express that concern. The Leave Conor Casby Alone group on Facebook approaches 6,000 members, you might join that. You might voice your concerns to RTE [email protected] and/or the BCC http://www.bcc.ie/how_to_complaint/index.html. I’m encouraging … There’s more →

Facebook- running out of feet to shoot

  By Allan | March 21, 2009 - 11:42 am | Gadgets
8 Comments

At any given time I will have Thunderbird, Photoshop, Tweetdeck and at least 3 tabs of Firefox in use at the same time, all while having a Skype conversation with friends in New Zealand and texting my sister in Donegal. It means dealing with lots of packets of information simultaneously, but I have developed the acuity of mind and eye over the years to do just that. For some reason, however, I can make no sense of the new Facebook look. I think this might be the end of us Facebook. I can’t bear to look at you any more unless you clean yourself up.

An entry point to internet humour…

  By Allan | March 16, 2009 - 11:36 pm | Random Whimsy, The Arts
7 Comments

This is the best pun I’ve ever encountered throughout the bendy lengths of the intertubes. It is the perfect distillation of popular iconography and the bad, meaningless puns that tickle your kidneys and make you dribble your knickers with mirth. And here’s the miracle of this immense experiment of mixing and remixing and stirring and pouring and cooking and daubing and tearing and gluing and letting go and have a million people take your gag and run with it in endlessly dendritic directions… you can mix the colours forever and you never get brown.

The flabby hand of Government in the mouth of Satire

  By Allan | March 15, 2009 - 4:16 pm | In The News
6 Comments

Public Inquiry and The Irish Bulletin are both covering RTE’s editorial decision to tone down Nob Nation’s pieces on our buffoonish Taoiseach Brian Cowen. Satire is what keeps right minded people from going insane during regimes of inadequacy. I submit that the Daily Show and Colbert Report sustained the mental health of America during the Bush years. There is an inverse relationship between the strength of satire’s bite and the depths of ineptitude and moral bankruptcy plumbed by the political class, so if Oliver Callan is going harder on Brian Cowen than usual it should be seen as a barometer of Cowen’s performance. The real issue here is that RTE is emerging as an unreconstructed mouthpiece of Government, prepared to lean on its own talent rather than risk the disapproval of Leinster House. No better evidence of this is the totally discredited Prime Time, broadcasting as live a prerecorded autocue … There’s more →

Zack Snyder has an unusually cruel eye.

  By Allan | March 13, 2009 - 9:29 pm | Movies & TV, The Culch
16 Comments

I’ve written a longer review of Watchmen elsewhere, but there is an addendum I’d like to make that fell out of my head until a fridge moment today (and will serve as my inaugural post here). The Kennedy shooting during the title montage was possibly the cruellest thing to grace a cinema screen since the first filmed kick in the nuts. It was clearly based on the Zapruder footage and as a dramatic reconstruction of a significant cultural event it gets full marks. Snyder obviously had someone count the pieces of brain that landed on the back of the car. It’s that accurate. The scene serves no purpose however, other than service Snyder’s apparent fascination with the myriad ways bodily tissues disintegrate under stress. It’s not the only clumsy appropriation in the movie (the Last Supper and VE Day kiss in Times Square gave me the dry wretches) , but … There’s more →