Created in Birmingham

Punch Records are running a competition for desginers to create an advert for this year’s BASS Festival “highlighting this year’s theme of The Four Elements of Hip Hop – BBoying, DJing, graffiti, and MCing.”

There will be a cash prize of £500 and the winning design will receive huge exposure by appearing for six weeks on billboards in a central Birmingham location. The artist will also get one month’s exhibition space in a key Birmingham venue, as well as a launch event and PR support. Finally the lucky winner will get two full pages dedicated to their work, the project and their profile in the BASS festival brochure – of which there are 50,000 distributed nationally and internationally.

Full details are in The Punch Records newsletter and the deadline is Feb 28th.

From kate&drew

Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.

Missed this one, but then I don’t go up to Victoria Square very often these days. Design City 08 is a “celebration of design focussed experiences, bringing alive the rich culture of Birmingham to demonstrate British talent and place the region firmly on the map of national design excellence” that’s been running this week – here’s the What’s On. The above photo is of the Design Pavilion:

Unique design consultancy IntheDetail have been commissioned to demonstrate the connectivity of design in the Birmingham region through their relationships with creative individuals and have worked with the chosen companies to design a showcase Pavilion. The Design Pavilion will be installed in the city centre within Victoria Square fro the duration of the event, showcasing the work of 12 local designers including Scabetti, MRF, Pottinger and Cole, Glass Domain and Guinea Pig Design. The Victoria Square area of Birmingham has significant cultural relevance to the event, due to the locality of the Art Gallery and the newly refurbished Town Hall. The location of the Design Pavilion here, leads into an area of urban regeneration that features examples of the city’s new architectural face.

The Design Pavilion is located at the heart of Design City and focuses on creativity paired with professionalism, aiming to present ranges of Birmingham based creative industries working at the forefront of their chosen fields. Design City not only aims to attract the visitors from Interiors Birmingham, but intends to increase awareness of the local and national creative talent working in and around the city.

It’s been extended until tomorrow morning so if you’re in town tonight do have a look-see.

Heads up from Helen Graham at Guineapig Design who’s “TableManners” is part of the show: “table etiquette for the PlayStaion generation. How to get TV dinners back onto the dining table (and people communicating again) via remote-controlled salt and pepper-pot battle mischief, around correctly laid out place settings.”

Spotted on the Punch Records site – a new-ish book about Bhangra by Birmingham-born academic Dr Rajinder Dudrah, senior lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Manchester.

Bhangra music is a genre that comes from the Indian subcontinent and sung in Punjabi. Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond traces its birth in the UK to when migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent and East Africa arrived in the country in the 1960s, many settling in West Midlands areas such as Birmingham.

Along the way, we learn how stars such as Heera, Alaap, Premi and Malkit Singh stamped their influence on the scene, paving the way for fresh UK based talent such as Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Juggy D, Sukshinder Shinda amongst many others, to follow in their footsteps and become successes in their own right.

More…

Priced at £15 you can hopefully find it in the local bookshops or from Amazon. And if you’re in Manchester this weekend there’s a Q&A at the Deansgate Waterstone’s from 12-3pm.

A press release through from Marketing Birmingham tells us that TAK! have gotten the tender for the new Visit Birmingham website. I wouldn’t normally blog about such things but this is, I feel, pretty interesting.

1) TAK! is a relatively small web design company, not the sort of operation you’d expect a major City project to go to (unless I’m mistaken).

2) TAK!, in my opinion, really understand the internet and should be able to provide all the “Web 2.0″ stuff required without bolloxing it up. That MB were able to see this in their application is a credit to them.

3) TAK! come, if you’ll excuse the expression, “from the street” as evidenced by their Stickernation project so understand there’s more to Birmingham than the usual tourist stuff (as important as that is). Whether they can get this through to the content of the site is debatable, but their branding of the site should be interesting.

From the press release (Word doc):

“They are clearly experts in their field and had thought about the long term development of the site, not just a quick fix. They incorporated Web 2.0 technologies in their proposals as it is an important way of facilitating user generated content but did not overload on gimmicks just for the sake of it. They also proposed future extensions of their ideas to really add value and ensure that the website will be flexible enough to keep evolving.”

The Visit Birmingham website was created to encourage people to come to the city, make it easy for them to do so and ensure they make the most of what Birmingham has to offer while they’re here. The new design will aim to place Birmingham at the forefront of digital technology. It will be stylish yet simple and will incorporate a fresh look with an innovative content strategy to engage with, retain and guide users.

Best of luck to them!

I just wasted two hours of my life writing about the 10 Birmingham bands I think are quite bloody marvelous so the least you can do is go read it. There’s even audio to back up my assertions, and the invitation to draw my attention to other potentially bloody marvelous bands in the region. Get to it. (Pointing out typos is optional, as ever.)

Kill War created by Mohammed Ali and Hoakser on December 23rd 2007 on the corner of Sandhurst Road and Alcester Road, Moseley (map).

A mural created … as a tribute for the people who die every day in war around the world. As we see the our troops sent out, let us not forget the reality of war, and the death and destruction that comes with it… and the wasted lives of our soldiers, based on greed and lies….

If you can’t see the video click here

ta Jez

Exciting news for anyone who fancied themselves and rock and roll star with their Casio keyboard in the 80s – Jean Michel Jarre is playing Symphony Hall on March 27th, performing the album Oxygene in full with the original instruments.

I wouldn’t normally plug such a thing on this blog but hey! Part of my childhood! Sure, a part that I spent 20 years trying to forget, but still!

In April 2007 Aerosolarabic, aka Mohammed Ali, travelled from Birmingham to Chicago, New York and Boston to paint murals with the aim of breaking down prejudices against British Muslims (amongst other things). The Chicago piece wasn’t completed but the New York one, a tribute to 9 children who’d recently died in a house fire, was. Here’s a documentary covering its creation and the reaction of the residents.

Ali has also written a long travel essay about the trip which is well worth reading.

I found about this project because Ali is appearing at an event in Moseley in Thursday 31st January along with the folks from Inacity Arts, a new-ish graffiti gallery in Kings Heath (which I’ll write more about later), on the subject “Graffiti – is it Art or Vandalism?” The event is chaired by councillor Martin Mullaney who, as you’ll probably know, has been active in tackling illegal tagging and promoting graffiti “managed zones” in the area. Here’s the blurb:

Residents complain about graffiti blighting their neighbourhood, but if we want to tackle this issue we need to understand the modern origins of graffiti, why teenagers graffiti tag, and how we can harness that energy and creativity and move it into something more positive and legal, namely graffiti art.

This will be an opportunity to meet and talk to Birmingham based graffiti artists (both teenagers and older) who want to help reduce the level of tagging by providing ‘managed’ legal graffiti art zones. This will explain what a ‘managed’ graffiti art zone is, in contrast to an ‘unmanaged’ zones.

Martin “will be presenting the findings of a Scrutiny Review into tackling nuisance graffiti in Birmingham to the City Council on Tuesday 5th February. The report will be made public on Tuesday 29th January. One of the recommendations in the report is controversial, since it recommends investigating the setting up of ‘managed’ legal graffiti zones. This meeting will describe what this is, how their creation could help reduce graffiti tagging long term and move teenagers into the legal side of graffiti art.”

The event takes place at the Moseley CDT, next to the Post Office on Alcester Road (map).

From Cellach

Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.

Harry Palmer‘s Subway Art Show took place last night. He’s doing it again tonight and, if you’re awake at 1.30am, I’d highly recommend you go along.

To draw it down to the basics Harry found some artwork done by schoolchildren in the 90s framed on the walls of a subway which fascinated him. He uses this as the basis for his work, trying to understand the history of the pieces, what they mean and how they fit into his mindset. And much more beside. The event pretty much consists of Harry talking about himself and exploring the artwork along with the graffiti that covers it and you find yourself studying the walls in more detail than you’d have though possible. The fact that this takes place in the middle of the night when Bristol Street is at its quietest adds to the otherworldly atmosphere. As we left Harry in the subway I looked back and wondered if the whole thing had actually occurred, if Harry even existed. Very odd.

I’m failing to do it justice, typing this at 3.30am, but yeah, if you’re able do go. It could be one of the most unique art events of the year. Details here.

My photos can be found here

Blink Magazine have a new Fashion and Beauty blog.

I’ve been in touch with Harry Palmer and it seems his Subway art show launch is taking place here:

based on Harry’s directions: “Bristol Street (next to the St Lukes Church that is now abandoned). Bottom of Lee Bank (very near to the old Matthew Bolton College)”.

Kicks off at 1.30am tonight. And also tomorrow night for those who got a bit confused.

I’m planning to be there.

Here’s a selection of colour slide photographs of Birmingham in the 1960s taken by Phyllis Nicklin, then the Staff Tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham. I picked out three but there are many more. Have a look before we get to the meat of the matter. (Click for bigger.)

Anderton Street terraces, Ladywood, 1968

Little Anne Street / Milk Street, 1953

Bull Ring, 1959

According to the site (and D’log‘s research), Nicklin died in 1969 leaving thousands of slides taken for her classes. 450 of these were scanned and released online in 2004/5 as part of the “Chrysalis” project from the West Midlands Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. This project, and the website, seems to be firmly defunct and offline. So the only record we have of these photos (which, you’ll note, were “kindly made available to down-load and redistribute for non-commercial research or private study purposes” by the University) is an unauthorised gallery from Keith Berry who was wise enough to take some copies.

So where are these photos? I’d imagine someone is working in some department where there’s a CD with them on. If they are licensed to be made available it shouldn’t be hard to throw them up on Flickr or similar. Hell, I’ll do it if you post me the disc. Or you could contact The Big Picture – they’re looking for old photos of Birmingham as well as contemporary ones.

[Update: Thanks to Dave Harte in the comments it looks like all 450-odd are here. Yay!]

Above all this is an important lesson about the sustainability of funded online projects, not just about the need to keep them online but that passion is an important part of the process. There must be a middle ground to be found here between those with the means and those with the will.

It’s always a good thing to come across a contrary view when the prevailing opinion seems pretty unanimous, especially when that view is well thought out and comes from the grass roots.

Paul Burns reckons many of the funding decisions made by the Arts Council might be correct and explains at length. Go read the whole thing but in summary:

• It’s been managed really badly. This episode illustrates some serious problems with the way the Arts Council operates. “Many of these decisions may be right, but the process and its lack of transparency is obscuring this.”
• “Cutting funding per-se is not bad. No arts organisations should receive funding ad infinitum, and no-one working in the arts should expect the government to pay their wage.”
• “The Arts Council is responsible for arts development in England, which suggests change, renewal, growth and transition – not the maintenance of the status quo.”
• “Statements about “no confidence” in Arts Council England, or the organisation being “no longer fit for purpose” do not help the arts in any way. What do we replace it with?”

I could go on but I’ll just be reprinting the whole post.

Paul, trading as Wechtie, works in “contemporary dance, music and visual arts” and is currently with DanceXchange. His weblog mostly covers contemporary dance.

Note: when writing to me about this Paul said he’d not mentioned his blog before “as it’s rather niche”. This is the wrong attitude! I’ve been waiting for someone to start a dance-related blog all year! Niche is good!