I have been reading The Far Side cartoons with my kids over the past few months and I have been pleasantly reminded of how truly brilliant, concise and hilarious they are. In many ways they are the perfect little cartoon haiku. There is so much densely packed into each frame, and that constraint leads to […]
Over the years I recorded my father, Tony Ryan, reading a host of different poems and written passages of mine. I still have hours of footage that I intend to create a longform piece with, but here was a quick assembly of one such recording I made, using some timelapse footage I shot from the […]
A few years ago, when I worked at Google, I would host a monthly Spark Session at the Innovation Space, Cloud 9, where I would invite artists, entrepreneurs and thought leaders along to share their journey and give us an insight into the creative process. The session would always close with a practical, hands-on […]
So much of the creative process is about crafting a good story that resonates and reverberates with your audience. The art of storytelling is something we have been raised with since we were kids – almost every one of us had someone who read to us at night before we went to sleep – and […]
Nicolas Cage has been making increasingly erratic and poor movie choices for some time now. Back in the 90s, for the now defunct artlick.com project, myself and my friend Dave had this mad idea of creating marketing materials & collateral for a buddy road-trip movie, where Cage would star as himself opposite a bottle of ketchup. We […]
The Internet is a curious and marvellous playground of ideas and oddities. Here are 7 of the strangest “musical” YouTube phenomena currently racking up the views right now. Warning, these will worm their way into that part of your brain that refuses to let go of things. I prescribe a lovely strong dose of Wilco […]
Spotted this the other night as I was flicking through one of my dad’s final sketchbooks. To me this sketch is a haiku that folds a whole universe into it. This was the last time he drew me and it is a great snapshot of a fond moment. Drawn on a sweltering humid day in […]
I adore the podcast format and I’m an avid fan of all audio longform storytelling. I’ll do a post at another time about some of my favourite podcasts, but this post is about the brief spell where I produced a podcast of my own. It was motivated by two creative impulses. Firstly I wanted to […]
This is a poem I started writing when I lived in New York and was starting to forge a really keen interest in poetry, and specifically performance poetry. The poem was supposed to be a snapshot of the punters I saw in a bar in Manhattan called Tom & Jerry’s. But the original draft was […]
