Russ L’s invaluable Lots Of Things To See And Do In The West Midlands: November 2007 is up.
Archive for October, 2007
Nicky Getgood is blogging again which is great to see.
Marc Reck has a bunch of photos from La Traviata from the performance and the after-show party.
Not a huge number of blog posts found so far.
Marc Reck (with photos)
Nadeem Shabir (with photos)
Any more, leave a link in the comments.
There’s an ongoing debate as to the role of public money in the creation of art. Some say it’s essential and a natural continuation of the patronage system of days gone by while others question the strings attached to taking money from vested interests, especially when the government is involved.
Artist Jan Bowman is in the latter camp and has written an impassioned article on why artists shouldn’t accept state funding on Spiked.
Artists have always had to work around their patrons’ whims and political agendas. However, New Labour’s social agenda is more intrusive than the most autocratic client could ever be.
[...]
Were we living in a society where the arts were under attack and artists starved in garrets, there might be a case for artists to claw as much as they can out of the state. Today, there is no justification for it financially; even less from the viewpoint of artistic survival.
A comparison between the work of designers and artists is useful here. A designer only gets state support because the fundamental value of their work can be judged objectively. With fine artists this is impossible, since art deals with individual feelings and emotions and its direct value is unquantifiable. The state can only judge artists’ work in terms of how it fits in with government agendas. This is like trying to measure how blue something is with a ruler.
The result is a burgeoning fellowship of ‘artists’ and ‘arts practitioners’ who owe their careers entirely to the state and who survive by ticking the right boxes in return for accommodating to the government’s propaganda requirements. For all Tessa Jowell’s fine words about the unique, transcendent value of art, New Labour will accept an awful lot of rubbish from artists so long as the results send the right ‘message’ about smoking, drinking, child abuse, internet porn, recycling, or any other current government obsession – even better if the process involves sufficient members of the public, from nursery upwards.
I’m not sure where I stand on this, and admittedly as someone who isn’t a working artist my opinion isn’t all that relavent. On the one hand I think it’s useful to have a financially secure environment for artists to work in – doing compromised work is better than doing no work at all – but on the other hand most of the great artists I admire don’t work for the government. They’re too independent in vision for that.
With Jan’s thoughts in mind this piece on Digital Central was amusing.
Culture West Midlands are holding a symposium to address the lack of attention cultural agencies and organisations have given to the issue of climate change.
I’m sure the people involved with Culture West Midlands have everyone’s best interests at heart but there’s certainly something prescriptive about that sentence. Hmm.
Dunc of Autumn Store on how to promote gigs.
It turned out that bands I liked weren’t playing in Birmingham because I hadn’t booked them yet. I’m hoping to demystify the booking-and-promoting process a little bit, in the hope that more people will put bands that they like on in Birmingham too, because – as previously stated – it’s genuinely easier than you think.
He starts off with a guide to getting your gigs in the listings press with more to follow. Invaluable.
Just in time for the weekend, here’s Brumcast 73.
[audio:http://ipodnetworks.com/podcast/363/1975_hifi.mp3]
Autumnstore Dunc waxes lyrical about his recent find, acoustic singer-songwriter Jesmond Villas. It also appears that one R Howard is a nodal point of activity in this regard and should probably be paid attention to.
He’s from Wolverhampton but I won’t hold that against him.
There’s a small portfolio on Dazed Digital and here’s his MySpace
I also understand he’s involved with the Colour night at the Quadrant Lounge in Wolverhampton, which has me somewhat intrigued. “The primary space for music and thought in Wolves” they call it. Really must pop along sometime.
The next round of script grants from Screen WM is open to submissions.
The scheme offers writers based in the West Midlands region up to £5,000 to help develop ideas and treatments into original screenplays, improve existing drafts, or adapt an existing work.
The deadline is Friday 5th November.
Stef Lewandowski posted this last night but I’ve been holding off writing about it while I get my head around what it might mean.
In short he’s involved in a city-wide ideas project.
I was invited to be part of what the consultants, Urban Initiatives, who are running the project are terming the ‘City Team’ – basically about twenty people who they see as being good ‘ideas people’ (well connected, opinion formers, etc etc.) to come up with good thinking about how Birmingham should change, grow and improve over the coming ten to twenty years.
What he’s finding exciting is that they’re open to all ideas from all areas – what he’s calling crowdsourcing. I think that’s stretching the definition a bit but the basic idea – that they’re widening the net and actively looking for different thinking – is sound.
Skepticism still abounds, of course, since this is the council we’re talking about. No disrespect to our leaders but councils aren’t renowned for innovative thinking. That’s just not their job. But Stef seems cautiously convinced.
It turns out (taking this at face value obviously) that this is for real – the council have employed an independent firm of consultants to crowdsource opinions from a wide variety of groups, but the kernels of the ideas that they are looking for are being sourced from an invited group of people (of which I am one) – people who have an opinion and aren’t afraid to air it.
So it’s simple – we come up with some radical (or maybe not so radical?) ideas, we come up with some a list of things that we believe in, the consultants take them, flesh them out, present them to other people, get feedback, have dialogues, start debates, etc. and then all of this gets distilled down into a Charter (a statement of intent), a Masterplan (the nitty gritty), and a Business Plan (the long term strategy for the city).
It all still seems a bit pyramid-like to me, though I grant you I can’t see any better way to get ideas into the current system. And it’s good to see that unless he’s jumped the gun Stef is able to blog about it at length, thus giving everyone else access to the process both in the comments on that post and on their own sites. The conversation on this is now open and, one hopes, will be tracked.
What would be really neat would be for Urban Initiatives, the consultants, to make this whole process completely transparent, not so they can be kept accountable or anything but so that the rest of us can work with their frameworks in our own groups. The system they have in place would be unaffected by this (unless they want it to be) but just the process of encouraging parallel conversations would produce some interesting results as people find a common grammar for discussing their city. And when the Masterplan finally comes out we’ll actually be able to digest it. Wouldn’t that be a novel notion?
Ah, I’m rambling as usual. Go to Stef’s post, read it and leave your big crazy idea.
Hard to come up with a snappy title for this, but it’s a good one. Part of Digital Central‘s remit is to study what’s needed in the local music industry and report back to the AWM mothership. Recently they’ve been “a bunch of music industry types what they think of the current set up here in the West Midlands based on their experience of trying to make a living here” and, as well as forming the basis for a consultancy document, have started putting the full responses online for everyone to benefit from.
So far they’ve got responses from Chris Thompson of emusu.com, Grandmaster Gareth of Misty’s Big Adventure and Ninder Johal of Nachural.
More will follow over the next week in their features section which has it’s own RSS feed. I must say it’s refreshing to see some of these experiences and ideas given a voice here. Nice one.
Interview with The Brothers McLeod on Animation Forum.
Since it touches numerous geek bases at once it’s not too surprising that videos of the Pacman Plus game from the Plus+ festival are something of a hit on YouTube.
The above made it to the YouTube front page, hence all the retarded comments. Sigh…
If I was going to go to just one event at the Flip Animation Festival (and remember this is me I’m talking about not necessarily you) then it’d be Animation in the YouTube Generation on Friday 2nd November from 3.30-6pm.
This panel discussion will look at the impact of new and emerging online platforms and tools and will ask what the opportunities are for animators and filmmakers and can online distribution and exhibition lead to professional commissions? The panel comprises an exiting line up of animators who have had a significant impact online and who mix this ‘amateur’ work with professional commissions: Greg McLeod, from the Brother’s McLeod who are responsible for the recent Skittles ad campaign and whose ‘Spamland’ has received nearly 1m views on You Tube; Lasse Gjertson, whose films have had a huge impact on You Tube, particularly ‘Amateur which has received more than 6m views and 6 honours, including most viewed all time; Katy Davis, who has been shortlisted for the MyMovie Mashup competition and has been a feature profile on MySpace and produced the award winning short animation, Gone Fishing. The panel will also include Ana Kronschnabl: author of Plug in Turn on: A Guide to Internet Filmmaking and is the founder of plugincinema.com. The panel will be chaired by Kate Taylor who has worked in short film distribution and exhibition since 1998 and has been involved in a number of leading festivals and agencies, including Kinofilm, onedotzero, British Council and is co-founder of the London Short Film Festival.
While this has the potential to be full of people who don’t know anything spouting off about “user generated content” and coming up with strategies to make the wonderful mess of YouTube into something resembling the old ways (sorry, I get carried away) I have a feeling this will be rather more interesting and useful than that, mainly because of the appearance of Lasse Gjertson who does stuff like this:
There is, of course, loads more going on over the three days of the festival. Check the site for details or pick up a program about the place.
Birmingham based cartoonist Laura Howell has a new strip starting in The Beano this week, Johnny Bean:
She talked about the creation a bit on her blog which is worth following if you’re of the budding cartoonist persuasion and her site has loads of examples of her work.
