Same horizon, new route

I’m pleased to be able to announce my role with Kingston University will continue for another year, albeit with a change of title. I’m spreading my wings from one academic department and joining the wider faculty.

My remit will split between running Studio KT1, curating “Not My Beautiful House” supported by Union of Kingston Students and then taking on the new mantle or perhaps a cape of “Enterprise”. Spurred on by many people who do #weeknotes I’m going to try and blog on this new part of my role more openly.

I’ve also been working with BIMA on shaping the next chapter of the Education Council and how we narrow the gap between student skills and jobs available in the industry - particularly in a pandemic. I’m excited about driving change in the sector in what has been a very challenging year for everyone, but particularly young people graduating into this environment.

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes

Andy Warhol never had to deal with Zoom did he? Imagine what his backgrounds would have been like.

After over a year of virtual meetings, I have some thoughts.

All of the platforms we are using - Teams, Zoom and Hangout were never designed for constant use. Everything from a team get-together, to a briefing, to a pitch has changed - these are no longer in person but on a screen. And not surprisingly, everyone has reported this switch to be more exhausting. A performance if you will. Does my hair look okay? Have I got my lipstick on? Is anyone going to comment if my bookshelf isn’t perfect? Hey Roomrater made a whole Twitter feed of that…

I started to schedule 15 or 30 minute meetings a couple of months ago. I had noticed that often with an hour scheduled for a slot, there was no need for that full 60 minutes. In fact, who was the first person to schedule a meeting for an hour? And why has it been assumed that virtual meetings should be deemed the same time length? I haven't seen my usual go-to workplace enthusiasts talking about this. It’s even worse if you are flexing between real-life meetings and virtual.

I spent the last few weeks in person and last week entirely IRL on the ground delivering a project in a Covid-safe environment, masked, social distancing and taking lateral flow tests. Conversely, this week I have spent three days on video calls from 9am-5pm or later with very few breaks in between. To go back to peering into a screen after a week in the field is a very odd and discombobulating experience. It made me realise that a lot of people still haven’t been able to go back to the office or their workplace. Don’t get me wrong, neither is good or bad give our current situation in the UK. I just don’t like eating my lunch standing up in the kitchen, but that has become commonplace due to the immense guilt I’ve felt being away from my screen.

Back to meeting times. I’ve found that if a meeting finishes early, everyone is immediately delighted. Those ten or fifteen minutes can be the difference between making a coffee, slipping some washing on or just going for a walk. For most platforms, the default meeting setting is one hour. So you change the default settings. F&*k up the system.

I’ll leave you with some Marcus JH Brown. You might like it.

It’s a Kind of Magic

I’ve been thinking an awful lot lately about what I do, how I define and package myself as a product. I’ve never found it easy to articulate exactly what I do. I’ve had a lot of job titles in my time.

This is taken from a presentation I used to give students back in the days when you stood up in front of a full class. But as most of you know the job title doesn’t always tell you the full story.

So why did I post the beginning of “The Prestige” at the top of this? I’m not calling myself a magician but what I seem to do baffles a few people. Let’s examine the text:

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".

I’ve always thought business development was just about building relationships. Listening to what a client wants and then delivering on it. Turns out the delivery part is hard isn’t it?

“Never show anyone. They’ll beg and they’ll flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up, you’ll be nothing to them. The secret impresses no-one. The trick you use it for is everything”

Not My Beautiful House

As soon as I started at Kingston almost two years ago now, I was introduced to Union of Kingston Students. We started to explore and research models of student-led shops to help them have a retail offering larger than a rail of hoodies on campus. We found some amazing models of student and artist-led enterprises across the country: Saltspace run by GSA alumni, Re_So from Southampton, and a hive of activity in Croydon with Turf/CAS and FMM Pop Up. In Margate, the daddy of pop up shops Dan Thompson was happy to chat about what he’d done and also SJ at Margate Superstore. We were inspired. Could we do the same in Kingston?

We recce’d many of the premises that had been vacant for well over a year with the help of Kingston First who provided a list of shops and landlords. Some of them smelt, some of them didn’t. I wish I’d recorded a call with one of the estate agents who told me “You’ll never get a landlord to agree to a temporary use for the university with art inside it”.

Before Christmas, in the middle of a pandemic — I get the call from an incredible landlord we’d met before lockdown who had an idea— did we want a space rent-free for six months? I had to get him to repeat it a few times.

The first three months of the year were spent putting together a crowdfunding bid for Make London in conjunction with the SU. And then it began to take over everything. Every week a new pledge goal to reach, another week refreshing and refreshing the page as it crept up, sharing the link in multiple Whatsapp groups of friends, family, relatives and strangers. Emailing pals asking for their support. Talking to people I’d worked with in the past, the present or might want to in the future. People who leaned into risk and got the concept straight away. Local businesses who contributed to the campaign in a lockdown when they were themselves closed. Campaigning in a pandemic, when the campaigning guidebook hasn’t even been updated to include Covid. Hours of voice notes to the SU, hours of Zoom and Teams pitches. And then it started to get serious.

Alongside all this we were briefing student teams from the department I sit in on coming up with a name, identity and branding for the space. We also briefed interior design students to come up with a space plan and interior designs for the space — still without seeing it — that could be easily assembled and moved to another space.

We had an incredible £10,000 pledge from the developer who owns a stretch of the riverfront in Kingston who we’d worked with in lockdown on a commission from Mat Collishaw which only launched last week due to lockdown.

And then the email from the website — “Congratulations the Mayor is pledging to your cause, tomorrow you will find out the amount.”

I lost my voice from screaming so much the next day. We got the maximum bid possible — £30,000 — which went onto the crowdfunding page immediately. The game was on! Two days later, we got confirmation from RBK they were about to almost match the bid. So we were overfunded, with 55 days to go.

Grace and I got interviewed on Remarkable City’s “In the Neighbourhood” about the project. I joined a podcast to talk about the model and what we’ve been doing.

As I write we are still wrangling ready for opening. But we are close, as I always say…watch this space.

You can follow the project here:

 https://www.kingstonstudents.net/creative-meanwhile

 https://twitter.com/NMBH_KUS
 https://www.instagram.com/notmybeautifulhousekingston/

Harmony Korine, innovation, why David Letterman is not listening and what I’m doing now….

In one of those odd weekend mornings where you wake up too early and blindly look at your phone I got randomly served the piece of content above. And I cannot stop thinking about it.

Let’s ignore the fact the chat show host is male (like all US chat show hosts) and the format is tired and is now mostly on the way out. Let’s ignore the fact I haven’t actually seen the movie “Kids” or read Harmony’s book. Maybe I should. And we have to ignore whether HK was using or not, for now.

Firstly, I love the way Harmony wears a suit on his first appearance. It’s adorable. He’s like the kid who got the keys to the kingdom, he’s cocky, nonchalant, IDGAF. To someone like Letterman, he’s intensely annoying.

I get it, I really get it. I’ve dealt with kids like this. Gobby, loud, full of themselves. Partly defence mechanism, partly peacocking to stand out from the crowd. They are still learning to communicate in a way. Harmony is 19 or 20 in this first interview, Letterman is around 48. They are worlds apart. And Letterman takes him down immediately as HK sits down and unbuttons his suit : “I think you take a 38 medium” — about its size. Ouch.

Immediately the audience is laughing but it is nervous laughter. Harmony comes across as a geek, a boy in a big suit – a fish out of water. He goes on to tell a story about a childhood friend who almost drowned — the audience whoops and Letterman is really stuck. Harmony is not following the chat show format. He’s giving context and background but not answering the direct questions. He’s like your annoying boyfriend on Whatsapp.

At no point is Letterman listening and really commenting on what HK says, he’s determined to stick to his guns. And his statement “Oh, I could pretty much have this conversation with myself” is the killer.

Boardrooms across the globe have “Lettermans” in them. Men in their 50’s who grew up in a certain era and stuck to the script, and earned a very nice living and can see retirement on the horizon and thank you very much. And when the “Harmonys” come in and try and talk about something they believe will work or a trend they have spotted, in most of those companies, they are shouted down. Maybe they aren’t dressed right, they don’t express themselves in the same way — but their points are still valid.

In the second segment of the interview, HK discusses his next film “Gummo”. Letterman again adopts a mocking tone and says “ It’s like nothing I have ever seen before”. He then asks about where it’s been shot:

HK: “I grew up in Nashville..and I wanted to make a different film..I wanted to make a different kind of movie…’cause I don’t see cinema on the same kind of terms or the same way that narrative movies have been made for the past hundred years. I mean, we started with Griffith, and I don’t know what the hell’s going on now. But basically nothing’s changed, so I wanna see images coming from all directions.”

BOOM. This interview was in around 1997 when “Gummo” came out. Now, in 2019 all his statements are still valid.

Letterman is more supportive in this interview but there’s still an undertone of sarcasm — particularly towards the end, he does call him “prolific” but at the same time he’s sneering at him.

In the final interview he introduces him as the “pleasantly odd” Harmony Korine. And straightway comments on how he’s dressed, because Harmony by now has dispensed with the suit. And he may, or may not be on something.

Letterman compares his last feature (Gummo again) with Titanic. I mean, what? 200 million grossed at the box office.

Letterman: Now that’s a movie

HK (smart as a whip) Yeah it sank

This as a joke is perfect, and it lands with the audience so well. HK admits he hasn’t actually seen Titanic. He doesn’t need to.

In all three interviews Letterman is obsessed with his measure of success: money. He asks what the movies cost, what they grossed, how much his book is, how much it sold. HK doesn’t care – he’s an artist, he makes things, he writes and directs. He’s always got something on the go, the next thing is already planned. Letterman can’t stand that he may be successful at more than one thing. Letterman is afraid.

— — —

In June 2019 I started a new gig at Kingston School of Art. I’d sworn never to work in education again, but this opportunity was too good to pass up on: set up a creative agency out of KSA with students instead of staff. FROM SCRATCH. Win business, prove the model works, give the students experiences outside of the modules with REAL CLIENTS. Before I’d even launched the website or met any students we had three new clients and one existing.

My job, maybe even my calling is to get many more Harmony Korine’s on TV, on stages, on platforms and in places and spaces where they aren’t normally. Bridge the gap between student and professional. My job is to empower them to make people listen to them. Unlike Letterman. My god, I’ve always been listening to people younger than me. Are you?