The Whining Wench draws my attention to Dave Hilliard. He’s an artist and here he is with some of his art.
That photo was taken from a long-ish interview conducted by Thomas Moronic earlier in the year. Worth a read.
Archive for November, 2007
Whatsthebigmistry‘s Doorwonderland, which was one of my personal highlights of the Fierce Festival this year, is returning to Birmingham on November 28th and 29th. More details on the Custard Factory blog.
Birminghamusic.com also inform us that Templeton Pek have released their first single If All Else Fails on Small Town Records.
Birminghamusic.com draws our attention to Editors embarking on a headlining US tour, something that traditionally was a make-or-break moment for UK bands so best of luck with that one.
Grimley of The Post reports on a good year for the Birmingham Hippodrome which sees them with money in the bank to spend – apparently a rare thing in the theatre business. Their future strategy is also outlined and seems to be heavy on the dance bringing in more international companies to complement the BRB and DanceXchange.
Project X are working on their next show. “The result so far has been lots of big pieces of paper, and the thorough use of various sets of multi-coloured pens.”
Pay for my drink?! At an Art show..?!! Ben Neal muses over why “you pay to get into a music event and then quite happily pay for over priced drinks because you’re at a concert, but expect free entry & booze at art venues, and how this must be detrimental to the art world at grass roots where people are struggling to make and show work.” There’s a little debate brewing in the comments should you want to join in.
Karen Osborne is a visual artist working in a wide variety of mediums and situations, as shown in the extensive galleries on her site, but I confess I’m mainly linking to her because she has this fantastic photograph on her front page.
There’s an exhibition of works by Salvador Dali coming to the Halcyon gallery in the ICC building on December 4th and running until January 8th.
James Thornett took his his Clingfilm Camera on holiday and threw some expired colour film in it resulting in some rather nice photos. Here’s a couple.
And there’s more here.
Interesting bit of news passed my way today. Bear in mind the usual disclaimers of hearsay and gossip but I have it on damn good authority that Curzon St Station is to be boarded up and not used for any events until it’s permanent future is decided, something that could take a number of years.
The Station, a glorious piece of monolithic railway architecture first opened in 1838 and a monument to Birmingham’s industrial history, has lain dormant for years. Recently it’s become something of a venue du jour for local arts organisations housing events run by Fierce, 7 Inch Cinema, Capsule, Rhubarb Rhubarb (who made a big noise about the venue for their international featival this year) and many more including a number of graduate shows. (A quick search on this blog will give you a snapshot of some of the things that took place there this year.)
But as of some time early next year all this will stop. It’s been decided by someone at Council level that it’s cheaper to essentially shut the building down than to let it be used by arts groups or anyone wanting to do something interesting with the space. From a purely balance sheet perspective this may well be right but it does rather stink of an ignorance of what’s been going on there these last 12 months. And not just from an arts venue perspective – having the building opened in its current state has been fascinating for any residents interested in Birmingham’s history not to mention all the train nerds.
Very disappointing.
Top panorama by Futurilla. Other photos taken by me during the Rhubarb-Rhubarb photography festival.
Created in Birmingham is currently funded in a very roundabout way by the Arts Council via Creative Republic. If I haven’t been too transparent about this it’s because to be honest I never really knew who was paying for it and I’ve always had complete editorial freedom over what goes on here. Basically I just send Helga at Fierce an invoice each month and she sends me a cheque. No questions asked. Did I mention how lucky I am?
But I digress. Relying on funding isn’t necessarily the most sustainable way to finance a website so Stef (who appears to have evolved into my “band manager”) and myself have been thinking about strategies for getting advertising and sponsorship onto the blog without messing everything up and making it an ugly Nascar of a site. Before reading on be aware that we’re just talking about this for now. Nothing has been decided and we’d welcome any and all feedback on this subject, especially as we think the readers of the blog are going to be the advertisers.
Here’s some ground rules.
- We won’t accept any ads we don’t approve of or that aren’t relevant to the blog. Money is not the only criteria.
- We want ads to be of use to the readers. If they are then people are more likely to look at them, which is better for the advertisers.
- Advertisers will have no say in the content of the blog, nor on the placement of their ads regarding content.
- Anyone who wants to place an ad that moves in any way will be shown the door. Static images only.
A model that Stef came up with (and, again, this is just an idea) was for four 200 pixel-wide boxes at the top of each page selling for £50 a fortnight each. I’m not completely sold on the format but the spirit is right, keeping things relatively affordable and simple. You’re not paying for clickthroughs or page impressions – just the presence on every page of the blog.
So what sort of ads are we thinking are a good thing?
- The main impetus was to give people a way of effectively staying at the top of the blog. I might post about an event a fortnight before it happens and then it slips down into the archive. So time-specific stuff will be of use – festivals, conferences, gallery shows, that sort of thing.
- Created in Birmingham does seem to get a lot of touristy type traffic through Google for people looking for arts stuff to do in the city so the likes of Ikon and the Symphony Hall would be potential clients.
- Training courses that are looking to target creatives in the city might find this a useful thing. Let people know when the next rounds of funding are coming up and so on.
- New websites and blogs could use it as a launch tool. Also those sites that want to push their arts / creative coverage.
- Jobs is an interesting one. I know of a few people who’ve gotten jobs on the rare occasions I’ve posted about them. Looking for a new graphic designer or photographer?
You’ll notice that a lot of these are things I’d hopefully be blogging about anyway and I intend to continue to do so. CiB isn’t going to become a paid-for-placement blog (please shoot me if it does) but this will allow people to have a presence at the top of every page and in doing so support the work that goes into the blog (and it’s future expansion).
And if you just don’t like ads then switch on AdBlock. I’ll make sure the images are stored in a consistent place so you never see them. But hopefully they’ll be useful enough that you won’t want to block them.
There’s other things to think about. What about the RSS feed? Is that sacred? And who are the readers of this blog anyway? I think I have a pretty good idea but it’d be good to get some figures. Speaking of which we’ll get some decent and accurate readership figures together soon so people have an idea of the numbers they’d be reaching.
What kinda excites me about this is the core readership of the blog will also be the main group advertising on it, making it into a nice community of checks and balances. Advertisers know how the blog works because they read it regularly so they’ll keep things relevant.
This ain’t gonna happen until well into the New Year (as part of a wholesale overhaul of the site) and we’d welcome your opinions on this. Would you buy an ad on the site? How much would you pay? What sort of ads would you find useful?
Further reading:
- An inspiration for this ad model is The Deck.
- Chatting about this with Andrew Dubber fed into his ad strategy on New Music Strategies so if you see similarities that’s why.
Ben Neal, who’s involved in all manner of curious stuff including Jazz Thrash Assassin and Maggothouse, has started a new weblog. Currently he’s just done the “what I’m up to / what I like” thing but hopefully he’ll soon start documenting the weird. One to keep tabs on I reckon.
The profiles of the 4Talent Award Winners are online now.
Here’s the Birmingham contingent:
- Polarbear (poet)
- Chris Keenan (photographer)
- Nathan Hughes Berry (commedian)
This compromises the bulk of Ten4 issue 8 which you can pick up from the usual places or order online.
Craig Holmes has gotten the contract to provide new photographs to promote Birmingham, and he’s been blogging about it as well as leaking the odd image.
