A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year from The Knife on Vimeo.
With The Knife (Olof and Karin), Planningtorock (Janine), Mt. Sims (Matt).
Performed by Olivia Plender. Images by Hort

Hotel Pro Forma

My (fake) Dazed and Confused Interview

Skimming Dazed and Confused online this morning, it finally dawned on me that they probably will never ask me for an interview after all. Hmmmm. Years ago I would have slumped in a corner and licked my wounds. Not today! I publish below my answers to a typical D&C interview (with myself):


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WHAT’S…

...so special about you, then?
I find inspiration in the ordinary and don’t act my age

…the last film you saw?
The Singer

...the last song you heard?
Loin De Paname (Paris, Paris)

...the song you wish you had written?
Ode to Joy

...the best piece of advice you've heard?
“It is what it is ‘til it isn’t.”

...better, dusk or dawn?
a dusky dawn

…so good about Bournemouth?
It’s usually one degree (Celsius) warmer than the rest of the UK

...your favourite piece of clothing?
My black, red and gold Diesel trainers

...the world coming to?
a teenager’s idea of pornography in 3-D

...the name of your hero?
Ken Gergen

...so special about your hero?
He wrote academic prose that made me cry

...your worst fashion secret?
I like to wear the same clothes daily in my flat

...this future going to bring?
more art, more performance, more relaxed scholarship

...your favourite website?
kipworld of course

...at the top of your shit list?
Academics pretending to be managers

...at the top of your wish list for 2010?
become a film maker

How would you describe your work?
Treacherous and blissful

Chopin and Me

‘I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons’.

I realised somewhat later that I had been drawn into a ‘debate’. Now the British love debate just about as much as they fancy baked beans (QI fact: 'Britons eat 97% of the world's baked beans'). It’s cultural and we foreigners just have to get used to it if we are going to live and work here.

On the other hand, this was a mistake on my part. It was a blunder because my position is one of congeniality and co-operation, not confrontation. Not even trying to win the point. What’s the point?

In a nutshell, the whole ‘conversation’ or debate was about our time and energies being micro-managed, knee-jerk responses to management’s change for the sake of change and how these changes are ‘sprung upon us’ with little or no input from us in the first place. There is a lot of politics involved in this: positioning to solidify positions. It reflects a warped sense of what management is about in the first place. In the end, it is mostly about people doing whatever is necessary to pay their mortgages. This makes me very sad because any integrity goes completely out of the window-- abandoned in a smug and self-congratulatory way. Congratulations for having a survival instinct.

After this to and fro by e-mail, I needed to calm down. I was hurt and disappointed and even somewhat insulted that no one seemed interested in hearing my position on these changes. I even felt somewhat scorned for having a position or response in the first place. The silence from most was deadening (some did come to me privately the following day to congratulate me and quietly voice their approval).

Later that evening, I decided to tune into Donald Macleod’s Radio 3 Composer of the Week programme to calm myself down. This week it happens to be Chopin. Macleod has presented some wonderful programmes in this series (his week on Astor Piazzolla, the king of the tango, was amazing for its depth-of-knowledge and variety). He also presents somewhat obscure composers as well and they are a real education for me.

Macleod began by recounting the period when Georges Sand convinced Chopin to spend a winter in a run-down monastery on Mallorca. Cold and damp, Chopin became quite ill whilst there. I have visited this very monastery on a cold and damp day myself. The rooms are completely made of stone. On the day that I was there, a Spanish chaperone guarded the room that Chopin worked in by leaning her bosom over his piano and clipping her fingernails … all the while with a military eye on visitors to the room. Anyway, not a great place to compose music, I think.

The radio programme proceeded with some of Chopin’s Mazurkas. I began to fall into a dream-like sleep (I would say I was having another Keanu Reeves-like narcoleptic episode, but my GP says this is impossible). I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons.

This is the situation I am in. It is not that I would not like to impart my wisdom to freshers, but I think that my energies are better spent doing the job that I was hired to do: secure the funding to produce cutting-edge internationally important research. I write about it, make films and videos about it and it is shared in a very democratic way with all through the Internet. I have been doing this for some time now. My work is easily available to any student who wishes to access it. This very blog is a tangential and free-form educational tool. I have made commitments to write two books for publication which should benefit students for some time to come. My door is always open and I am available by e-mail at least 12 hours daily. I am willing to chat with anyone about my work or theirs.

I just do not have the time or the energy to commit to ‘teaching slots’ for undergraduates en mass who most likely are not up to speed and not yet very interested in the specific field in which I plough. This job is better reserved for those with subject expertise and experience as teachers at undergrad level.

A portion of my time (40%) is committed through external funding to leading a research project. I supervise PhD and Masters students, which is also time-consuming. The remainder of my time is devoted to making my contribution to the Centre for Qualitative Research and its activities and working across boundaries with The Media School. Enough is enough.

I am in the business of doing what I do best. This is as much as I can do.

‘But your no Chopin’, you might say? Oh, yes, I am.