Pea Arts About

February on Audiovisual Cultures Podcast featured episodes delving into dual outsider/insider identities, firstly in discussing Gael García Bernal's returned-from-exile character René Saavedra in No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012), and secondly in my conversation with Irish-American performing artist Shea Donovan, linked here: It is an identity I have had to come to embrace in myself, albeit to a more localised extent than a Chilean exile raised in Mexico because of a military dictatorship or a recent descendant of Irish émigrés to the United States now living in London. For me, it's grappling with the outsider identity that has fallen on me after having to leave Belfast for Britain to get work - I am no longer of my home city, and not out of choice. Pre-pandemic, I enjoyed a sense of inside-ness while outside in finding a broadly Irish community here in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in Brexit Britain I embraced the defined-only-as-other-to-the-English Irish identity projected upon me be

I keep thinking about the film Happiest Season (dir. Clea DuVall, 2020). So much of it struck me, and, apart from briefly outlining some thoughts with a friend, I haven't had much chance to talk out all the things about it that still tick over in my mind. I rented it back in December in preparation for a podcast discussion about it the next day, which the prospective guest postponed, and I never heard back. I have an open-door policy on this: folk are welcome and invited, but I will not chase them. Being someone with more authority than me on the film's most prominent subject matter, I didn't feel I had the standing to talk it through on the podcast by myself, and this person had so much to say on Twitter that I knew it would have made for a lively and informative discussion. Ach, these things happen, and I was keen to watch the film anyway because I've always liked DuVall as an actor and had a feeling she'd be a great storyteller too.  I very much enjoyed every asp

I recently received a piece of unsolicited gentle criticism and advice that was really well-intentioned, and you know what? The person was absolutely right and it geed me up to do something I'd been putting off for ages. Their words were thoughtful and sent with the sole purpose of helping me because the person - whom I hardly know - believes in me and in what I'm doing. I wish I could send this to every editor or senior academic who ever tore my work to shreds and made it personal while framing it as 'constructive criticism' for which I should be grateful to receive. To be constructive is to build up, not tear down. I know it will be controversial to say that I am having a relatively good pandemic thus far. Being faced with existential dread writ large has prompted me to confront the things that hold me back. One of those is absolute intolerance for any kind of toxic behaviour. Just no. No more. Life is too precious and short. One of the things that holds me back from

I recently embarked on a personal project I've been meaning to undertake for a while now, and that is to reboot my archived lectures from years of teaching fellowships here and fixed-term lectureships there and distribute them online. Back in 2017 I started this with screencasts of my conference papers uploaded to YouTube and intended to do the same with lectures.  A number of reasons led to avoidance. One is that only the older ones that (I feel from experience) are less robust have full notes while the stronger, more recent ones have scant notes, because that's where I had got with knowledge and retention at the time. I also got really into audio and wanted to have a go at making the podcast , which I've been doing for three years now. Another reason was simply that it dredges up memories, many of them painful, from my times at different universities in different cities. There were tough experiences everywhere I taught, but also incredible friendships, communities and ac