I have just spent a typically over-stuffed three days in London, ending in an over-stuffed Virgin train carriage en route home to the north sitting next to someone enduring a protracted phone text relationship melt-down with someone called Trevor (not that I was peering over her shoulder, it's just the cramped conditions y'know). Thank God for my iPod - though I sometimes wonder if my total reliance on the 'shuffle' mode implies some kind of fundamentally indecisive nature.....
Nina (Pope) and I are in the final (ish) furlong of the distribution of our film Bata-ville and are limping to the finish line with our graphic designer Re. An ex-student of Nina's, the working relationship - mainly via the enormous and fraught website - has deteriorated to a kind of mute tussle, something akin to the mock-fighting that Nina's two cats engage in whilst we're all round the meeting table at her studio. Like the last bout of any long session in the ring, each party wants out as quickly as possible but with themselves as the winner. The spoils include a DVD cover and film poster which noone has the objectivity or energy to really apply themselves to. We've done so many print design jobs at this low-level stage in the last throes of an epic project, and they rarely meet one's aspirations - but how to avoid this pattern eludes us. Answers on a postcard welcome.
Before Re even arrived we had 6 hours of high-level life coaching with our assistant Jane, a woman so awesome that the title doesn't fit. A day of her time spans business strategy, mailing list additions and washing up.
Today was spent outside the studio after yesterdays 13 hour day - Bata-ville was one of three arts and regeneration case studies in 'Tracing Change', a symposium at Tate Britain. It was a pretty small event with an invited audience made up of many artists we were familiar with, some stakeholders from local authorities and other interested arts-folk. Unusually for us, Nina and I managed not to take the podium, instead of relying on our EPK (Electronic Press Kit) for the film, featuring a shockingly badly filmed interview with us about the project which we played frm DVD to the audience. David Cross (of artists Cornford & Cross) chaired the day with the authority of a better-dressed Paxman - this man is the natural successor to the increasingly flabby Mat Collings, surely.
Anyway, the event included a roleplaying workshop where I played a commissioner, the enterprise was flawed by my detailed knowledge of the field from my own activities and my boyfriend's (director of Grizedale Arts). However, I enjoy any activity using post-it notes and felt tip pens and ended up the spokesperson of the group. That might have been because I was wearing the brightest clothing. Hierarchies work in mysterious ways.
Pleasant though it was, 10 - 4 is too short an event for both the theme under discussion and for the projects presented and as it ended a handful of really interesting comments hovered in the air only to dissipate on the way out. Over lunch I met an ex-student of mine from way back in my first year of teaching, at UCE - Gavin McWilliam, who had been one of those over-talented but delicate young men whose idealism is dented fundamentally by the introspection of art school and its often puerile debates. I both recognised him and recalled his name, testament to the fact he was one of my first students and formed part of a (I now see) unique cluster of idealistic and engaged students whose group tutorials never ended on time, so vigorous was the debate. At the time, I was too inexperienced to realise that every group tutorial since would seem comparitively like a Teenager's Bible Group . It was genuinely thrilling to hear that after some years in design he was finishing a landscape architecture course and sounded like he's really found his passion. It's rare to encounter students so long after your interaction with them and even rarer to be able to remember anything about why you ever cared about them - so this was a much-needed antidote to the woes of my current academic role wrestling bureaucracy.
Before the train I met an old friend and ex-boyfriend who I have kept up with, perhaps because in the years following our break-up we attended an (accidentally) cathartic fencing class together every Thursday night. His wife is expecting their first child and - something of a comedian - David has been disrupting the antenatal group's 'breakaway' workshops. When asked to complete the sentance, 'The pain of childbirth is....", he added - to very little acclaim amongst the mothers to be - "a feminist lie?".
