Crazed scenes in the House of Disorder as a crate of Adenoids arrives at the same time as metal cased Albums lie about in various states of construction. Imagine two record fairs mounted on the backs of trucks colliding at speed. I don’t think there’s been this many LPs in this house in decades. The guy at the post office rolled out my shipment on a trolley, “are you going to carry this yourself?” (No, I’ll just usher in my native bearers).
Huh, how heavy can it be? Answer, what the hell is in here? Anvils?
I finally get to see how it all hangs together – the pillow cases are hilarious – the boxes go inside, like they were left by Santa at Christmas. Good move by Frank. And I get to see how my design looks on paper… some good news some bad news. The actual sleeves came out great, as did the labels. The booklet not so good, some of the PDF files have gone awry and there’s one point where a character has dropped out leaving a mess. Main thing is that the booklet font is huge… as if for impaired eyesight. Shit. This is what happens when you try visualise a 12 inch square print job scaled down on an A4 preview.
The records are ridiculously thick. I grew up in an age where records were quite thin, extremely flexible, it was promoted as being advanced technology for some reason, but obviously the tide has turned to ‘quantity is king’. The sound is good – for vinyl. (You have to trust me, I worked on this thing for about six months and I know how it sounds on the original recordings. Vinyl is not warm, it’s muddy.) These pressings are better than most of the ones we got back in the day.
And the records have patterns on them made by the grooves… I could cry… this is what I was trying to do with the LP in Album, but obviously it depends on the era of the lathe – the lathe has to manage the groove distance to get the effect I wanted. I also think that acetates just don’t have the same sound quality as pressed vinyl. OK, so we learn. We learn.
At least I am going to get the damn booklet right. Went out and got a Hewlett Packard A3+ printer (cheapest), 250 sheets of German high finish paper, and I’m going to print the damn things myself this time. Kinkos can bind it, but there’s no way I’m letting this one go wrong.
We now have three printers set up here. Getting silly. The HP, being an A3+ is of course an utter pain in the arse and will spew out errors if looked at the wrong way.
Can’t wait for the academic session to be over. I know that sounds a bit harsh but I miss being able to do my own shit. The paradox – you are employed because you are an artist, as soon as you are employed you have no time to be an artist. I have a strong work ethic – this leaves me feeling like a charlatan.
The main line of investigation in academia seems to be how to minimise contact hours. We already lopped a few weeks off the session, shut down our winter school – now we’re working on moving courses partly online. If you had asked me a few years ago I would have said bollocks, but I start to get the point – instead of me racing through a blur of films it’s going to make more sense to let students watch full titles at their own pace.
And frankly if they are going to play with their laptops in lectures, they deserve to see me via streaming video.
Not all wonderful. I distrust peer assessment – it’s OK for people to compare notes but I don’t agree students should judge each other. Maybe they could just judge each other and save the HECS fees. What are we offering? Equipment? So what. Experience? Any young hot head artist is not going to give a shit what I think, and that’s pretty much been the case this year. A degree? Is that the whole point? I thought there was something more than that.
A big shift is needed in the whole idea of a university. I learned by apprenticeship. I teach best via apprenticeship. With 100 students at a time, the relationship breaks down. How do we provide personal inspiration? Online?