Well Hello There....

It's been a while, a lot has happened but it's a head-wrecking non-blogworthy nature* so I won't bore yous. Cut a long story short have moved back to Ireland and am curently doing a combination of freelance writing and substitute teaching and stand up, so kinda the same thing different location, but with wee school kids shouting 'howya sir!' from chip shops while I'm singing along with Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long-Blog thing and the Commentary! on my wee ipod.

and the Tron soundtrack by Wendy Carlos. There has been some good times, have been seeing more of family, Badbrute and the Brugoes and some great stand up gigs in the company of Marcus Keeley**

See above me all tuxed up for the Monaghan Person of the Year Award black tie

Check it out, there's nothing better than being formally dressed while drawing cartoons of Batman with his wee lad out and Superman pissing himself... these were the pencils I was doing for these redoes of a stand up bit for scanning:

*It depends what kind of blog you like, these days even writing a 'blog' seems quaint, all the hip kids are Lady GaGaing their plurks until they tweet all over the place....the little dayglo feckers well 'I'm staying, I'm finishing my coffee...'
**check out his It was dark and I was drunk blog who is going true similar travails as ole Jimmny H since we both exiled ourselves from Nrrwich and has a great theory about Zac Efron:

A friend and I have a theory that whenever Zac Efron has his period, a Kinder Egg comes out, and the plastic capsule has a piece of paper inside with a list of names of people he has to save in the next 24 hours, otherwise they die.

In further Norwich nostalgia, Marcus and I went to a comedy gig he reviewed it and I photograped-well I held up a wee sliver box in the vague vicinity of people and pressed the bright eye blink button-at the Nowich Arts Centre:

As a performance poet/comedian, it’s rare for me to watch a local live stand-up comedy show in its entirety. Regardless of whether or not I’m on the bill, I’m more likely to be found outside smoking and looking anti-social, politely ignoring my contemporaries’ sets because I have seen and discussed them ad nauseam, or in a small, dark room, blowing raspberries into an empty bucket in anticipation of my curtain call. However, Dan McKee's Saltbox Comedy Club at Norwich Arts Centre was a different affair. Upon given the opportunity to review the gig, myself and fellow comedian superstar Lorcan McGrane threw on our standard-issue Irish malaise, haggard faces and nicotine-saturated charm and made our way to the venue.

Ah happy days, although thinking of them they were pretty horrific days of Marcus and I wandering around a cold Norwich in the rain trying to figure out where to stay....

Panned Puffball to preview in Monaghan, The Northern Standard, Thursday August 9th, 2007

The Nicholas Roeg film Puffball, which was partially filmed in the Monaghan area last year, will be previewed in the Diamond Screen Complex in Monaghan Town on Thursday night next, August 16.

The preview attendence is being confined in the main to invited guests and those from the locality who participated in the film. A limited number of other tickets will be available from the Market House in Monaghan.

Prospective viewers are being asked to take note of the film's strong adult content. Based on a novel by Fay Weldon, Puffball is a supernatural thriller which embraces themes that will be familiar to those who have seen the earlier film of its director, such as Performance, Don't Look Now and Bad Timing, and includes similarily frank depcitions of sexual activity and violence.
Initial critical reaction to the fillm has been extremely negative, and it has not yet been assigned an official release date in either the Uk or the United States.

"...the worst kind of unadulterated nonsense I have seen for a long time..." is one of the choicer comments from a review submitted to the IMDb internet movie database. It adds: "It's a complete mess of a film, highly insulting tp its audience's intelligence..."

A Romanian contributor to the same site, who says they have seen Puffball at the Transylvania Film Festival, is kinder:"It strongly relays on Don't Look Know's and Straw Dog's flavors (intellectual young couple in a new, strange place), but with more psychedelic and sometimes thriller elements. And it's got a really hot sex scene in it. It's old paced and sometimes quite nostalgic, but it's a treat for the eyes."

The professional cinema critics who have viewed Puffball at festival screenings such as that it received at the Galway Film Fleadh have tended towards the unkinder assessment above, an a "So bad it's good!" reputation is already building for the film.

It should be bourne in mind, however, that Nicholas Roeg is a very highly regarded director whose earlier films were often critically disapraged on their initial release only to attain elevated status in retrospect.

Notable for having its three leading roles played by women-Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson and the veteran British actress Rita Tushingham-Puffball tells the story of a couple building a home in an isolated rural location in the English countryside whose unborn child becomes the focus of superstition-fuelled enmity among the local community. The main role is taken by Donald Sutherland, reuniting with director Roeg to explore again the supernatural territory they entered in Don't Look Now.

Local actor Pat Deery plays the prominent role of Dr Holmes, while Declan Reynolds is cast in the supporting role of an estate agent. A substantial number of people from the local community feature in the general cast of the film.

Next Thursday's preview takes place at 8.30pm.