At Home With Series#Paddy Baxter

Patrick Baxter
Parents ‘Betty ‘Hannify’ & Jack Baxter (deceased)- both County Longford natives.
Longford, schooled in Melview Primary and St Mel’s Secondary
Paddy found the Irish Education system to be narrow and rigid, that it discouraged creative and independent thought and encouraged students to learn like if an encyclopaedia. He particularly hated St Mel’s, which he described as closer to a totalitarian regime than an education institution. 
Went on to further educate himself, firstly Undergraduate degree in anthropology and Spanish, followed a few years later by a Masters in visual anthropology. He is currently doing a practise led PhD in design, with film and social research as his practice. The subject of his research and film is Longford.  In the years between study, he has travelled the world extensively.
To say he is a film buff would be a highly understatement. All started with Raiders of the Lost Ark, followed by weekly visits to the local fleapit, seeing everything no matter the content. He first saw ‘Blue Velvet’ in the cinema at the age of 10. Also was an avid viewer of films of BBC2 and Channel 4.
Naturally he developed a keen taste for Avant Garde film, foreign language, and arthouse cinema. He became a big fan of David Lynch, Kubrick, Woody Allen, Dario Argento, Pasolini, Ken Loach and tons more. 400blows by Truffaut is one of his all-time favourites. Today.
‘It was escapism, a retreat from a shite life. Ireland was a tough place to grow up as a teen in the closet. The process of coming out is a long, slow and difficult one but I am now fully out and proud’. Since in Longford he became involved with Longford LGBT and the marriage equality campaign, and has used his skills as a filmmaker to create media to benefit LGBT community in Rural Ireland. He is founding member of Pride Arts Longford.
‘My filmmaking seems to be moving away from conventional documentary towards a strange sort of horror documentary art film, if that even makes sense’. He hopes eventually to move towards fiction film and is dying to make a pure horror film.
‘The poem ‘Flip Dynasty’ is about love, sex, sexuality, beauty, religion, me. Its inspired by my muse, a very beautiful and odd guy with whom I have a very strange, esoteric relationship. Me is not my boyfriend.’

Patricks Poem 

                                                              Flip Dynasty
​ seismic, the queen of his dynasty, so recently he has done things to me. They are spectral, unmanageable, barely digestible. I forgot how to think, breathe. Something gone wrong, like almost in side of me. Don’t wanna write verse, can’t converse. What left for me? Ah the queen of dynasty. He slaps, whacks, contracts, moves, sinewy, pert nipples, appears to be free, challenges me. He’s had heartbreaks and carparks. He too has been spat in the face. Delicious juice of prejudice, we shallow amply. My pipe is gone. I need to suck on their middle class values, cakes, and bands, and I’ve read Derrida and seen tarkovsky projected on the surface of all your white colonial intellectual beneficial why don’t ya be as smart and well read as me, fuck’n rape me with ya top down former crowned you give a shit… But we seem to has diverged somewhat, I dreamt last night of a Canadian colony, modernity really. A tunnel that went up and up, merely held me in suspended ecstasy. The belt couldn’t hold, Jesus couldn’t hold. If only he had loved me, Jesus sacrificed for what… those sweet nipples, ah yes, the cross…sweet back…I venture in, as some have done before. Godspeed ye young fellas, glory awaits, awaits there And finally he disturbs me. A rumbling perhaps. I stumble when I walk, but fuck when I talk. Many bees circle the nest, but queen bee, saffron silken tangerine turmeric golden spices, triumphs finally. In sound he is the silent cold dead spread of eloquent and invasive white snow storms, in summer he is solely the piercing sun.