Hey folks, I'm back! And back to class, in a brand new space! LISPA is now housed in Three Mills Studio (http://www.3mills.com/ if you're interested), a lovely film and TV studio where the likes of Guy Ritchie, Gordon Ramsey, Tim Burton, and Rowan Atkinson reportedly hang around sometimes (http://www.3mills.com/aboutus/credits/index.htm will give you some sense of the kind of people I could possibly see in the coffee shop. Gosh, maybe I'll get to see the stars of a film like Lesbian Vampire Killers, or even Sex Lives of the Potato Men! Oh the excitement... Of course we've been advised to just "leave them alone" if we do recognize anyone really famous. Just being within spitting distance of anyone like that would be enough excitement for me).
The place itself is quite nice: it's located on the site of some historic mills, I think the oldest mills of their kind in England, if not in Europe (or so said the nice gentleman who informed us about the history etc. of 3 mills today). It's a pretty little island that you access via a bridge, and it's under 24-hour security of the sort where you have to wear a photo ID badge on a special lanyard and they yell at you via loudspeaker if you go places you're not supposed to go. The badge is quite exciting, makes me feel like a VIP or something.
Classes are held in two temporary spaces, until we move into our new space in February, where we're told there are sprung floors and the faucets in the loo run with milk and honey. Until then, we're still dashing between classes in different buildings, catching a bathroom break when/wherever we can in poorly supplied and unheated bathrooms, and freezing our butts off all over the place. The worst space is Studio B, a huge hangar-type place that is pretty much just as cold as Hackney (our former space, which we lovingly nicknamed "The Refrigerator") and has about 30 feet of ceiling for the little heat we're supplied to disappear up into. The other space is much nicer, a nice little warm well-lit room that I pretty much just want to move into. We also finally have a proper student lounge with couches, microwave, and fridge where everyone can hang out together, but due to LISPA's crazy scheduling we have literally no time to eat, let alone hang out. It's a recurrent topic of conversation among us that one should never have to choose between peeing and taking a drink of water at their break, but so it is. We get 15 minutes for transit twice a day, which is barely enough time to pee and get to class, let alone eat. And of course the smokers are completely screwed. But it's all good, the administration is really flexible and understanding, so they'll probably give us longer breaks if enough people ask about it.
Today we started having classes with the entire first year: we'll be split up into two classes at the beginning of each week, and the make-up of those classes will change every week. It's nice to work with new people and have fresh faces around, but it is strange to have seen half your class cry and not know the names of the other half. Kind of a unique situation, so we'll see how it goes.
After classes today (which were a combination of tour/orientation and class as normal), we watched the documentary Rivers and Tides, which is about the Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy. I'd highly highly recommend it to everyone: besides being a brilliantly made film about an equally brilliant artist, it addresses some interesting points about art and artists in general (which is of course why we watched it). There's going to be an optional video-viewing of this sort every Monday, and I'll post the videos we watch here, just in case anyone's interested. I'd also love to hear what y'all thought of the movies, if you do watch them: feel free to shoot me an e-mail about it! ;)
So that's the start to Term 2! Future adventures include me possibly getting a new job (that doesn't involve an hour+ long commute), seeing some celebrities (who knows, maybe I'll just run into Johnny Depp one day? hee hee), and of course the continuing adventure that is LISPA. I'll try to keep updating reasonably often: keep in touch, folks, and thanks for reading! :)
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2 comments:
Ooh, Rowan Atkinson! Exciting indeed. I envy your (potential) celebrity exposure.
I love reading about your life there, Joanna -- especially now that I've just been in London. And isn't Goldworthy amazing? We discovered him a couple of years ago, kind of by chance, and we've seen the movie as well as borrowed a bunch of books about his work.
Happy new year!
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