Barbara and Keith – I am ploughing ahead with the promised autobiographical blurt despite feeling quite uninspired. This experience has made it crystal clear that any thoughts I might have of writing a ‘My life in Art’ should be permanently shelved. When writing about myself I feel a responsibility to be interesting and of course most of my life I have not been very interesting so I end up cherry picking the few interesting bits a bit like instagram where you share just the glamorous locations or the attractive salads and it all starts to come across as contrived. Anyway contrived it will have to be – just two more chunks to go – this one is about my entrepreneurial years with yo-yo.uk.com and my break into academia (without really knowing that I had) and the next one- about being in academia – (I haven’t ever written about that I don’t think, so it might be quite fun) then I am done with reflection and can go back to Tuffin and my medical moans. They are still there by the way and bizarrely I have just been told by a nurse that I don’t have malignant spinal chord compression despite the fact that I have been carrying a card saying I do have it for 11 years. Isn’t illness a topsy turvy experience.
yo-yo.uk.com
Yo.uk.com must have been one of the first businesses named after its website address. In some ways we were innovators. Website design had been something I had become interested in while working with Paul and Caro on Modern Music Theatre Troupe, we had won an ‘innovative site’ award from British Telecom. The site was not great but in those days doing anything that wasn’t just text with a photo was innovative. If I remember correctly we had some music playing along with the images – WOW! . Anyway this was the start of Chris Newell 2.0 the digital designer. I relied on Barry to be the visual designer, a skill I have never had. Jumping ahead this lack of confidence in my visual design skills, something I eventually ended up teaching at the university, was one of the reasons why teaching for me, was not as pleasing an experience as it could have been. I was usually just a step or two ahead of the level of some of the better students and far behind the best ones who could draw especially the Chinese exchange students. I thought I could offer them something alternative /non commercial, or rather I had to offer them alternative because I couldn’t offer them commercial which is what they wanted and needed and should have been given.
Back to yo-yo.uk.com. I like to think it was a success in all but one respect. I didn’t make enough money. Even with the opera gigs and some teaching we were skint in a perilously close to repossession, not bohemian and lovely way and we had two children and Maria was ill and couldn’t work. At yo-yo we had good clients and we produced good quality work with high ethical standards of fairness and honesty in other words we were crap at business and at one time worked out that we were paying ourselves 50p an hour. The problem was that we had to innovate on every job we did. Everything was new, everything had to be learnt from scratch and this meant hours and hours of unpaid study and research.
Fortunately this fed into my MSc and accounts for my success and it also subconsciously steered me toward Chris 3.00, Chris the academic. My third but not final role for which I was only partly suited. Chris the opera director (good at the funny ones), Chris the entrepreneur (good at innovating but bad at making money) Chris the academic – well we will see…
Barry and I should be proud of what we achieved and I still feel bad that I took the academic job at Hull without properly consulting with him. My excuse is I didn’t really know what I was going for and I certainly didn’t think I would get it. It required a PhD and I had only just started mine but it was in a department that combined digital media, theatre and music so I should have figured that they would want me. Talk about a perfect fit. I knew that I could straddle all three of these worlds and that I could relate them to my PhD research in Computer Science at York which was about using human acting techniques and musical expression to enhance computer generated speech. So from their point of view I had the practical skills and commercial chops, I emphasised those in the interview because I knew their gatekeepers in recruitment would be wary at my lack of PhD and the only antidote in academic recruitment is to have commercial experience. They get so lambasted by government for not being business orientated enough that anyone who can run a successful vegetable stall in York market could be up for vice chancellor. Wo betide you if your research interests are in the Victorian pastoral novel you need to relate it to engineering solutions to resolve confusion in dementia sufferers. I jest not. I witnessed dozens of dedicated academics do similarly bizarre intellectual backflips to make their research fulfil the ‘impact’ criteria.
Back to the interview. I didn’t tell them how much I hated commerce, that I could not do commercial visual design without Barry and I earned 50p an hour from it. I had interdisciplinarity in spade loads, something they were very keen on in theory but in practise found impossible to deliver (that will be in my next post). In academia you have to be a specialist, in many ways the narrower your field the better. That way there are so few of you publishing in the area of blah blah that the only quality publication covering blah blah is full of your work and you are probably the editor anyway. Of course, all universities have been trying to produce research with more ‘impact’ which can mean getting more multidisciplinary, but academics are motivated by doing their thing, they don’t need others to do their thing with, nor do they want to do other peoples things. I remember getting a call while working at the yo-yo office in York telling me I had got the job and shouting “yes!” Fist pumping as if I were in a football stadium. Barry had little idea what was going on, that he was witnessing a totally unexpected joyful abandonment by his official business partner of 5 years, unofficially closer to 10, who was giving him just a month to figure out how the business and he could survive without his digital designer. Happily yo-yo thrived for many years without me but it was not my finest hour and frankly he would have been justified in never speaking to me again. It’s a mark of him and his wife’s decency that they did speak to me and they are still dear friends. I can be a right selfish bastard.
That’s it for the yo-yo years. I remember bits of it with great affection and some pride but the bottom line was I was having to go to work by bike and unscrupulously scrounge the money for the mortgage from my Dad. Without the academic job I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. As it was Maria got a teaching job at around the same time and we found ourselves for the first time ever with jobs that finished before dark, where if you were ill you got paid, had pensions attached and very long holidays. The life of an academic at least at the start of the 21st century was bloody bliss.
Gerald
It was Christmas Eve. The shops were so busy Gerald started to feel sick. He told his mother but she said if he was sick then he wouldn’t get any presents because Santa hated boys who vomitted. Gerald held onto to it for as long as he could but when they arrived at the sweet stall he couldn’t stand the smell and he was sick all over the chocolate Santas.
His mother said that this was the limit and that Santa will never forgive him because he was sick on an effigy which was twice as bad. Gerald wanted to cry but he felt too sick.
On the way home on the tube he still felt sick, in fact he felt even sicker because they had to stand and the train was wobbling about and it was very hot. At Charing Cross Santa got onto the train and everyone cheered and laughed. But Gerald still had enough sick in him to fill Santas sack (which was full of presents) with some fresh sick. And he did. Everyone was disgusted, Gerald’s mother pretended he wasn’t hers and Santa said Fuck and Fuck Christmas and Fuck again many many times.
It was too late for Santa to make more presents so that night the children got presents covered in Gerald’s sick which made them feel sick until Christmas dinner and their mothers told them that if they were sick at Christmas dinner Santa would come and take their presents away but not give them new clean ones but leave them with nothing. So the children tried to keep the sick in but it was too much and in the end they were sick too.
And that’s why children are always sick at Christmas. It’s not from eating too many sweets it all because of Gerald.