Pea Arts About

Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was jus...

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...