July 24, 2003
This Modern World
The US political cartoonist and satirist Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) appeared as part of the Galway Arts Festival in the Radisson Entertainment Centre (aka the basement, albeit a very well appointed one). It's a sign of the times when the performers show up with little more than an iBook.
The show consisted of Dan presenting a selection of his work (projected on a side wall), mainly cartoons, but also some small animated features (made when Dan and some colleagues got their hands of some dot com crazy money). The selection covered his early work (sniping at George Bush senior), the Clinton years (a target-rich environment) as well as the current US president (of which Dan is not a fan).
So was it any good? Well, the overall presentation was a little stilted - Dan read out the captions of the cartoons (essential for those at the back), and the fact that the projection was on a side wall menat that one was switching from the side wall to the stage. But there's no denying his ability to make a political point succinctly, and highlight the absurdities of modern political discourse in the US (not that our own is any better, mind).
Things livened up considerably when he decided to take questions from the audience. There seemed to be a lot of American accents in the audience, and they asked many of the questions, about current politics (what did he think of Howard Dean), censorship (he told an anecdote that he only added to his own blog today), and had he ever met Kurt Vonnegut (uh?).
He mentioned how he and Michael Moore were planning to collaborate on an animated movie, but the finance was from France, and the animation was to be done in Vietnam, so in the end , it didn't seem so practical...He was very happy to hear that artists don't pay tax in Ireland (no one told him how many washed-up rockers that law attracts), and all in all, seemed very at ease with his audience (even if a lot of them had to disappear before the end to catch the next show).
Posted by Monasette at July 24, 2003 10:50 PM | TrackBack