Why is the The Galway Advertiser promoting atrocity denial?

‘Video Shop’ plays in the London Independent Film Festival

Congratulations to John Dog whose recent finger puppet production Video Shop is playing next weekend in the London Independent Film Festival – Saturday April 12th at 6pm to be precise, as part of a 90 minute program of music videos. For those of us who can’t make it, we’ll have to make do with watching it again on YouTube:



UPDATE: And we have a winner! Best Animated Short: Raymond Butler for Video Shop!

The Random Walk

Christmas is saved, thanks to John Dog. Here’s his new album, and it’s available to download – for free!

In case you missed it, his lovely promo for the first track, Video Shop, is below. Find more John Dog songs, as well as full lyrics to sing along to, on Raymond Butler’s Bandcamp page.

Video Shop

John Dog’s latest, Video Shop, fantastic period videotography in this rewind to the horrors of the late 20th century, and with finger puppets! This is the first song from his upcoming collection The Random Walk.

More John Dog songs here.

School’s out for summer and forever, our childhood dream came true..

Some summertime blues: John Dog singing The River Corrib. You can listen to and download more John Dog songs from Raymond Butler’s Bandcamp page, including another dark summer number here.

Nightingale 2

I wasn’t happy with my previous attempt at rendering this bird, so here’s another try. This version reminds me of my grandmother’s kitchen curtains in Galway, which makes it a success!

A night of foxes and ghosts

We haven’t been in touch,

do they still call you . . . ?

Do you miss her more than . . . ?

I don’t understand why—

o,

I remember.

More than the living?

And I wake shivering.

Image: Uprooted. Photograph by Dor Walsh, 1985.

Galway, March 1945

Dor and Sal, probably in the back garden on Enda’s Road.

Summer’s promise, summer’s threat

Summer in Galway, postcards, and music by John Dog, particularly Waking Dream, Summer’s Promise, and Imperfect Strangers. The sound of days when time passed slowly.

Waking Dream:

Summer’s Promise:

Imperfect Strangers:

Added, one more for Ray: the Estoria Cinema, Galway, later called the Claddagh Palace, and now gone altogether. From Palace of Dreams, a short documentary by Hawkeye Films. (I’ve not seen it.)

Noisy nights in Galway and London

My old friend Ray, formerly front man for legendary Galway band The Kathleens, now performs solo in London under the name John Dog. Have a listen.

Above, sketch for a CD cover. The final version was a little different.

The Galway Advertiser

It’s not every day that Harry’s Place has a story from the pages of the Galway Advertiser, a local paper in the west of Ireland. It’s a newspaper close to my narcissistic heart as it was the first one to publish my drawings, thanks to founder and then editor Ronnie O’Gorman.

What attracted the interest of Harry’s Place was this story on poet Kevin Higgins, and his disenchantment with the anti-imperialist far left. His criticism of the Socialist Workers’ Party stance on Darfur led to this crude response, also published in the Advertiser. Read the full Harry’s Place post here.

Related: my earlier post on anti-imperialism

My own fifteen minutes in the pages of the Advertiser began with a Christmas comic strip published in 1981, when I was fourteen. Ronnie O’Gorman also introduced me to Campbell Spray, then features editor of the now long gone national daily The Irish Press, who also commissioned a Christmas strip from me the same year. Both stories were written by my mother, Dor Walsh.

Above is a drawing from a couple of years later, one of a series done to advertise a gym that my uncle was part owner of. This particular one was published at the time of Ronald Reagan’s visit to Galway. I was seventeen at the time.