Pea Arts About

  Cronos Devouring his Children , Damien Hirst, 2011, image from Pinterest I remembered his eyes bulging as he tore his children apart. They were actually closed and his mouth gaped. You can almost hear the yells of him. Perhaps my memory of the bulging eyes and manic flesh eating came from an equally graphic painting rather than this sculpture. Knowing me, it was of a totally different character if so. Much of the confronting horror of Cronos Devouring his Children is obscured by coral, with enough of the scene visible that Cronos’s headless young son stretched between his hands and other children gripping his knees evoke the debauched fuller picture. There are other figures around the mounded base of the sculpture, and the guide text assures me that baby Zeus, who would go on to liberate his siblings from inside of his father and later destroy him in the Olympians’ war against the Titans, is present, but I can’t verify this for myself from the photos at my disposal. As happens...

Application for Lecturer in Film and Television Dear Prof. ___ and Selection Panel, I felt tremendously enthused when learning of this post as it is exactly what I am looking for to re-enter academia after a period away due to illness. As my CV indicates, my postgraduate studies involved a blend of film and visual culture and my subsequent research has been underpinned by concerns with convergences between different modes and practices in contemporary moving image production. Informed by these research specialisms, my teaching will be a great asset to the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media. Knowledge of television has figured significantly in my research on contemporary film, visual culture and moving image production, largely in the ways artists and film-makers engage with television archives. This is the focus of my article currently under review at Screen which compares the ways historical narratives of real events in 1980s Chile and Northern Irela...

Dr Paula Blair Teaching Fellow in Film, Newcastle University Paula.Blair@ncl.ac.uk [no longer valid] Title slide for my BAFTSS paper in 2014 Belfast had the reason: Vinyl revival, punk nostalgia, and the television archive in Good Vibrations Although Northern Ireland has experienced relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, it has been argued that the region is only post-conflict in the sense that the thirty-year period of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ has already been archived (Longley, 2011). In response to the Agreement’s authoritative processes of ‘official forgetting’, many contemporary artists and film-makers confront issues stemming from the conflict, often by appropriating and re-presenting archival material to explore the spectral anxieties which tether society to a state of past-presentness (term borrowed from Mulvey, 2010). The Belfast-made film Good Vibrations (Barros D’Sa & Leyburn, 2012) is the commercial apex of this activity. The film chronicles the ...

For a while now I've thought that our most impacting encounters with art and culture occur when we are most receptive to the ideas they present. I have often felt like a latecomer to a lot of things I or others feel I should know more about, but sometimes we're not ready or interested enough to engage with. As I've written on this blog a few times over the last year or so, coming to Star Trek after ignoring the franchise for 35 years keeps inspiring revelations in me and it has gone far beyond being just a set of television shows I enjoy. It strikes me that in exploring 'the final frontier' it is really confronting humans with the first frontier: understanding and knowing ourselves in all our complexity. I wrote before about feeling an affinity with Klingon anger, but with their relative absence in Enterprise - which I've been watching for the last few months - I have gradually felt even more of a connection with the Vulcans. More than ever before in Spock (L...

Continuing our Star Trekking with Enterprise has got me thinking about the general landscape of media in the 2000s. It is a show that was unfortunately timed, going into production in early 2001 and premiering in September that year, just a couple of weeks after 9/11. It just wasn't the time for naive exploration, mishaps and making galactic friends and allies with some friction and enemies along the way. The 'noughties' became a gravely toned decade for US television in response to attacks on their soil, and related themes and issues such as torture, internment, collateral damage, weapons of mass destruction, distrust, paranoia, large-scale warfare, razed cityscapes, and learning that not all baddies are baddies that are familiar in more directly relevant shows such as 24 . These begin filtering through Enterprise around halfway through season 1 as the writing caught up with current events and are all-encompassing by season 3 which first aired in 2003/4. In addition to ...

Well, I've gone and fallen head over heels in love with Community and pretty much every character in it. It's a show I didn't see much of first time round, and since it released on Netflix last year it has received a new lease of life and a whole new fanbase, including me. One of the reasons its run on NBC (2009 - 2014) was dogged by low ratings (as well as being up against The Big Bang Theory in the US) was that internationally it was being shared and downloaded illegally. Oh the days when we had to wait up to two years in the UK for American shows! I'm sorry to say that this was how I ever saw the odd episode as I was seeing someone who downloaded it from bit torrents and it was part of a jumble with Parks and Recreation , Arrested Development and shows I didn't enjoy and can't remember the titles of. This was during my last PhD year so it's all a bit blurry, and if you know what I was researching, you'll know I needed escapism. And my goodness, is Co...

Because I couldn't think of anything for this week's post, and especially because I'm sure you're all dying to know, I thought I'd update you on where I'm at with my late-in-life Star Trekking.  We completed Deep Space Nine a while ago and I do miss that crew. We also watched the four Next Generation movies, and with those done that means my time with Worf (Michael Dorn) is sadly at an end. I do have a soft spot for the stoic Klingon.  As I write, we're most of the way through season 2 of Voyager . Gaping wide holes in logic aside, I'm enjoying it and feeling affinity with members of its crew too, particularly Tuvoc (Tim Russ). I seem to be drawn to characters who have a stern exterior but who are actually rather vulnerable and practise stringent self-control unless something makes them crack. My favourite line so far is Tuvoc pointing out that we must 'not mistake composure for ease'. It struck me to the core. A key theme coming up in recently w...

I've recently spent some time in the company of the good and not-so-good folk of Dreamland and surrounding fairytale/medieval territories. As a huge fan of Futurama I was dubious about getting into another Groening creation for fear it would not live up to the geeky heights of its predecesor. But Netflix had my number as a substantial amount of my watch list is animation, and I bit when Disenchantment was pushed at the release of part 3 in January 2021.  The show's serial structure is notable: it is presented in parts with chapters, not seasons and episodes, reflecting its continuous story-arc rather than episodic self-contained narratives presented across a series. Even the designated lands, countries and settlements in between throughout the diegesis align with litereary genres and sub-genres all with their roots in fairytale, fantasy and science-fiction. Each place and the microcosmic communities or groupings within have despots, with unease and social change brewing amongst...

Reaching the point in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) surrogates for Miles and Keiko O'Brien (Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao) got me thinking about the ways that actors' real-life pregnancies are met with creative responses in television shows to the extent that whole story arcs reshape the series. Sitcoms such as Frasier and Brooklyn Nine-Nine found ways to re-dress the pregnancies of Jane Leeves and Melisa Fumero through Daphne Moon's stress-induced weight gain and Amy Santiago's love of bulky folders, undercover work as a pregnant prison inmate, and then later a pregnancy for her and Jake (Andy Samberg). It is in science-fiction, though, where the creative explanations for or concealment of a bump really shine. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I spent much of my teens and twenties as a committed X-phile. In the show's lore, its whole structure and story arc underwent radical change when Gillian Anderson became pregn...

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Reconfiguring Time and Place A number of years before the resurgence of Belfast’s live music scene in the early 2000s and the more widespread simultaneous nostalgia for punk, vintage and vinyl that has emerged and grown since, Duncan Campbell’s video installation Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) captures the intensity of the working class youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s that gathered around energetic live music and was fuelled by an ethos of dissent against distension. The video’s title derives from a phrase commonly seen in graffiti in Belfast during the conflict, and is indicative of class tensions between different areas of the city. This same class tension, or more specifically, anger against privilege, emerges in much of the punk lyrics of the time. 1 The images in Campbell’s work consist of photographs from the time held in the Belfast Exposed photographic gallery’s archives. It gives movement to still pho...