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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...

For a week bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, it was a stressful one. Instances of the public abuse of Meghan Markle came to a head and a young woman was abducted and murdered, it seems, by someone who vowed to serve and protect. With the timelines on every social media platform flooded with experiences of abuse, it’s all been overwhelming, even when hanging out on the podcast accounts in a vain attempt to build community.  It’s an atrocity that should never happen. We should all feel safe to head home at any time and not have to be wary that the unthinkable will happen. But we are because it does. The conversation around this becomes polarised when men who’ve experienced abuse or been attacked ask, ‘what about me?’ only to be told, ‘this is about us; go and start your own thread.’ I empathise with both positions here, and with trans and non-binary victims who fall through the gaps. I think I lean most to the question of who gets to be part of ‘us’.  The ...

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...

I feel thick as champ for not realising until recently that actor Stephen Rea had been married to former paramilitary Dolours Price. It's one of those things I probably was aware of 10+ years ago while researching my PhD but hadn't appreciated the significance of, and then my trauma-addled, burnt-out brain erased the knowledge. It may also be that I take so little notice of celebrities' personal lives that I simply never knew. Plus she died at a time when the flag protests were causing havoc in Belfast and I was starting a temporary and all-consuming new life in Aberdeen. Either way, it's a revelation to me now, and one that feels like an oversight in my PhD and the subsequent book based on it, specifically their conclusions which confront the pervasive legacy of the Disappeared.  The ramifications of Rea voicing Willie Doherty's video installation Ghost Story (2007) now hit me like a punch to the gut. It is Buried (2009), which became an unvoiced companion to Gho...

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...

Audiovisual Cultures Podcast Round-up The guests on the January 2021 episodes got us off to a great start for the coming year with differing topics that at their core hinged upon storytelling. For 82, I was joined from California by filmmaker Justin McAleece, and in 83, urban planner Mustafa Sherif called in from Sweden. Both conversations involve us talking through some logistics of film, video and podcast production with a common thread of finding ways to facilitate telling an interesting story, whether through music videos, corporate demos, advertising, comedy mockumentary, serious documentary or platforming someone with something to say that the rest of us can learn from.  As I begin to draft this, it is the 9th of January and in the past few days there have been deeply troubling scenes in the USA resulting from the outgoing president inciting his red-capped supporters to violence against, well, just about anyone upholding the democratic process. As many who have no choice but...

I feel as if much of my life these days is overcome with learning and managing new systems - online and business systems in a work sense as well as new ways of being and functioning in a being alive/surviving sense. I want to spend less time on social media but I have a podcast (have I mentioned it?) and a small creative business to promote, so it took a few tries to find a decent, free post scheduler (I'm trying Later.com ) and figure out how to work it, then set aside time for blitzing through posts (which need images to pre-load) and sorting up to a month's worth at a time. This is one system along with Etsy where I've found it necessary to work between the app on my phone and the website from the computer to achieve everything I need to just make one listing or post. It's flipping exhausting, and that's before we get to the spreadsheets. Facebook has been on at me for months about tagging my page photos with shop listings. That was another nearly full day just...