Created in Birmingham

Pogus Caesar‘s new film Francesca’s Key gets a free public showing at the Library Theatre tomorrow (Thursday). There’s a nice article about it here and you should certainly check out the rest of Caesar’s work. via BiNS

The second issue of locally produced magazine Bearded hits the streets on October 29th with a Misty’s Big Adventure interview and a cover by ZeroTen

You can download a PDF copy for free from the site or pick it up from these outlets.

Get well soon Ross Lydon of skapunk band 360 who’s suffered a relapse of back troubles that had him in surgery earlier in the year. They were due to play Project X Presents and have been replaced by Dexter who I saw just the other day supporting Jeff Lewis and, in my opinion, were rather splendid.

I think the Ska scene in the Midlands needs a closer look. Anyone already doing so?

Congrats to the Birmingham Royal Ballet who won the Outstanding Achievement In Dance Award from the Theartical Management Association for their Stravinksy! season earlier in the year. More info and quotes at The Stirrer.

If you’re going to Music Live at the NEC next weekend be sure and check out the Birminghamusic.com area at stand P40 where they’re showcasing a whole swathe of acoustic acts from the region over the three days. Here’s the schedule.

Digital Central has the Gigbeth conference line-up for the 1st of November. Speakers scheduled for the day are David Ashworth, Dan B, Andrew Dubber, Neil Emery, John Hemming, Anthony Hughes, Cliff Manning, John Mostyn, Matt Parsons, Tim Riches, Ben Sandbrook, Robert Sharl and Chris Thompson. Information about who these people are, with links to their online presences, is at the link.

With no criticism implied I notice that they’re all blokes. Hmm.

Stef Lewandowski was the roving photographer at Plus and has started posting his very many photos online. Here’s his set with 171 shots so far and he’s asking people to add their own photos to the Plus Flickr pool, something I would endorse as a good idea. Check out the slideshow.

Top: Pacman Plus. Bottom: the Stereographic stand.

The Apology Line is a short film made in Birmingham that was recently shown at a 7 Inch Cinema event.

Based around messages left on a special phone number the stories are juxtaposed with beautiful yet mildly creepy surveillance-style footage of the city at night. There’s an edited version on YouTube.

It also showed at the Raindance festival and there’s a MySpace which give a bit more info about how it was put together. On a more prosaic level, it was funded in part by Screen West Midland’s Digital Shorts program.

via Prime Objective

Here’s Brumcast 72, as usual featuring an hour of music by some bands you know and and a whole bunch you don’t. Which is, of course, the point.

[audio:http://ipodnetworks.com/podcast/363/1962_hifi.mp3]

I don’t write this merely to plug Pete’s Birmingham Gig Guide. While I hope some of you will check it out and follow my tips I also hope some of you will take a look, decide I’m an idiot with my stupid tastes and start your own. Or something inbetween.

My thinking for starting this is two-fold. On the one hand I come across a lot of information about gigs in my daily work but I don’t have a decent venue to push them. Created in Birmingham is supposed to be impartial (something I find hard to be about music) and my personal blog has a wider reach that the West Mids so filling it with flyers would not be wise.

More pertinently this is an example of something I’ve been banging on about recently – that while comprehensive gig listings are a good idea they’re just the first stage in building the audience levels in Birmingham. What’s needed is a system of recommendation, filtering all this raw information into something useful. This can be done in a number of ways automagically (I like Last FM’s events section which recommends gigs based on your listening patterns) but I think there’s a special place for personal curatorship, if that’s even a word.

The point here is I’m not setting myself up as an authority. I’m not saying “This is the best stuff going on” or making some kind of objective statement. All I’m saying is if I had all the time and money in the world I’d go to these gigs. The events are linked by me and if, having perused my choices for a bit, you think we’ve got something in common then you’re more likely to try something new.

Now take this idea and expand it. Imagine if everyone who spends most of their time in Birmingham’s arts and music scene were to be running something along these lines, effectively curating the city into manageable packets of goodness. Ian’s 7inch listings are a good example of this. If you like the mindset behind 7 Inch Cinema then the chances are you’ll like the stuff they like. Multiply this, ooh, 100 times and even if you only follow five or so people you’ll probably see your gigging increasing exponentially.

Okay, enough with the evangelising. If you want to give this a go I’d recommend using Tumblr a low-impact blogging service that lets you grab images from websites and post them in seconds. Perfect for grabbing flyers from MySpace. I’d use it myself if I wasn’t already doing so.

As always, this isn’t a new idea. If you’re already curating Birmingham’s live scene in some way this isn’t aimed at you and feel free to leave a link to your stuff in the comments.

I’m not going to go crazy looking for them but here’s the collective memory post for Plus:

Rich Batsford went to the Friday night party.

Viggy La Q visited on the Sunday.

Charlotte Carey reports on the Michael Wolf talk.

Stef Lewandowski promises a series of posts: Moving Type Found is the first.

Any more reports, leave a comment.

Came across this guy while searching for the record shop of the same name and am rather glad I did. PolarBear classifies himself as “A’cappella / Hip Hop / Emo” on his MySpace. Based in Birmingham and London he did a couple of shows at the Rep last month (If I cover my nose you can’t see me). Here’s an example of his spoken word work:

[audio:polarbear.mp3]

His next Birmingham gig is on 31 October at St Martins Arts Centre at the Bull Ring from 7pm.

Over the weekend I had two separate conversations with promoters (Al of Curates Egg and Rich from Project X) about MySpace, specifically how posting flyers into the comments of everyone in your Friends list is possibly the most tedious and long winded task ever inflicted on a human. Initially I smiled the smile of pity and assumed nothing could be done, but then it struck me. While automating this might not be possible (to my knowledge anyway – if there’s a third party tool out there do leave a comment) it can be speeded up a bit.

Heres what you need.

• The Firefox browser.
• The Greasemonkey plugin – this allows you to run scripts which change the contents of web pages.
• In this case we’re using the MySpace custom style remover script.

When enabled this removes all the junk people throw on their profiles and, most importantly, neutralises any music or video meaning you can open lots of profiles at once and not kill your computer.

Now go to you’re Friends listing page and open 10 or 20 of them in tabs at a time. While you still need to enter each comment seperately it should be much quicker now.

Any other tips on making MySpace less of a bastard? Leave a comment.

I could be wrong (to be honest I get all the Creative XYZ things mixed up in my mind and, yes, I get the irony of that) but I think Creative Alliance have a new website. Part of it is a New and events page which should be pretty useful. No RSS feed but this scrape should suffice.

The Fine Art of Saying “Hello” was a presentation given by TAK! to young illustrators on how they might promote themselves. In a smart piece of meta-promotion Dom’s put the PDF of the talk online so everyone else can benefit from it.

This act is an example of something I’m very much in favour of – that by sharing your skills and knowledge you not only benefit the community of which you’re a part but you show yourself to be an important player in that community. Added to this, the sharing forces everyone to up their game as common sense becomes common knowledge, pushing that community above other more closed off ones. Small companies and individuals get this. If only it would peculate to the bigger orgs then maybe Birmingham could become the powerhouse it deserves to be.

Anyway, the talk was part of a Creative Alliance program of sessions and produced 7×7, a series of seven inch circular flyers where artists illustrated song lyrics. A bunch of these were on the flyer table at Plus and I picked up three by Joe Rogers, Karoline Rerrie and Ruth Radcliffe.

Considering the quality of work on display at Plus the fact that these just jumped out and said “take me now” is credit indeed.