Created in Birmingham

• The New Art Gallery Walsall – Mitra Memarzia: The Unwanted Gift Shop
  “Mitra Memarzia will transform the Artists’ Studio at the gallery into a gift shop where unwanted items will be celebrated and given a new lease of life”. 18 Jan – 18 April 2010, although you can leave gifts at reception in advance if you like
• The Through the Viewfinder photography of Pete Ashton
  The online hub of Pete’s TTV Photography is up and running. He’s an Artist now, dontchaknow
• Digbeth is Good » Ben Waddington’s beer mat art at The Spotted Dog
  “an advent calendar made up of painted beer mats depicting signs and scenes personally significant to Ben. It’s on display until the twelfth day of Christmas, 6th January 2010″
• Wolverhampton declared to be a better city than Detroit, Los Angeles, Seoul and Accra
  In a frankly tossy survey by Lonely Planet that I shouldn’t really wasting a link on, except it’s an opportunity to say that Art Gallery, Light House and quality of gigs at the Civic are all pretty darn good. So there.

I’m not about to do a full on ‘best of’ thing, but there was plenty of goodness about in 2009:

• Birmingham Opera Company’s ‘Othello’
• Birmingham Royal Ballet’s ‘Quantum Leaps’
• ‘Birmingham Seen’ at BMAG
• Zena Edwards’ ‘Security’ at The Rep
• Tom Dale Company’s ‘Roam’ at DanceXchange
• The Event
• Kindle Theatre’s ‘All You Can Eat’

And plenty more besides, although nine months away from CiB (and a fair amount of time out of the country) meant that I was slightly more out of touch with some of the smaller-ticket stuff.

What did you enjoy?

• MySpace – ::The Other Woman’s Club
  “The Other Woman’s Club are a creative women’s collective of talented DJs, Photographers, Musicians, Jewelery Designers, Clothes Designers, Journalists, Promoters…and one man”
• FREESTYLE Exhibition | Hare and Hounds
  I missed this – a showcase of twelve different photographers and illustrators from around Birmingham. I’m going to do some short posts on them instead (if I can find em online, and I think I’ve found most)
• MAKE YOUR CITY: JANUARY 2010: GO TO THESE SHOWS
  January gig recommendations for those who like their music loud and slightly awkward
• D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Terry Grimley profiles Peter James
  As well as linking to the interview, D’log rounds up a collection of books on the pre-1945 history of phootgraphy in the West Mids
• BASS 2010 commissions « Punch Records
  “For BASS 2010 Punch are opening up the commissioning scheme and we are offering awards of between £500 – £3000 to support new work developed for the festival. We are looking for innovative and creative projects that explore the theme of DNA”
• Mostly Jazz line-up
  I don’t think I’ve linked to this yet. Anyway, the acts performing at the two-day jazz fest in Moseley have been announced. It’s being organised by the folks behind Moseley Folk and Birmingham Jazz and The Yardbird are pitching in too
• One More Take
  Tommy Pearson does the CBSO’s podcasts. This is his blog
• Tom Binned over Queen’s speech gag
  Mixed fortunes for (ex-)BRMB DJ Tom Binns – he got engaged on Christmas morning then went to work and got himself sacked

Daisy Whitehouse / White Wolf Illustrations.

Daisy’s restless mind is forever thinking up new creatures and stories to entertain. Her work often incorporates handmade typography to run with humorous hand drawn imagery

She’s got a blog too.

An odd one this, but a goody. I daresay we’ll see more interesting fundraising efforts in this vein over the next little while. See also the CBSO’s recent Street Maestros thing.

More info than what I’ve pasted below on The Rep’s website.

There are some spooky goings on at The REP this festive season as A Christmas Carol brings its ghosts to our Main House.

We’re offering would be ghost hunters a chance to spend the night with us and find out more about the theatre ghosts and what happens when the auditorium empties.

A once in a lifetime experience for brave souls only!

Pledge to raise a minimum of £250 to support the work of The REP and get the chance to sleep over on the theatre’s Main Stage and await the things that go bump in the night…

For one night only on Friday 8th January 2010

• Semper Station 3 – Energy
  The next event for the writers’ group takes place on 19 January 2010 and the theme will be ‘Energy’. Click the link for details of how to get involved – deadline for entries is 10 Jan
• Gloaming News
  Good news for the film produced by swish and backed by Screen WM and the UK Film Council which “has been selected for the prestigeous London Short Film Festival where the film will receive its World Premiere on Sunday January 10, 2010″
• MusicLeader Start-Up session: Only 6 places left!
  “Are you a musician who would like to work as a music leader? Just setting out on your music leading career? Not sure where to start? Then ‘Start-Up!’ is for you!”
• BBC News – Electric cinema in Birmingham celebrates centenary
• My Gig History « Midnightpunk’s Blog
  An increasingly epic post. “Oddly I’ve kept a list of every gig I’ve ever been to starting out way back in 1985 when I was a 4th year at school. I thought this would be a good opportunity to share. I aim to update this frequently, enjoy…”

Mischief Bunnies are the invention of Chris Phillips. They’re a bunch of plasticine bunnies who explore Birmingham, occasionally getting into sticky situations.

As well as the Mischief Bunnies website (where you can see some of Chris’s other work) there’s a Facebook group for keeping up with their antics.

Eye Thief is the fashion label that Raj is in the process of launching. In the meantime she’s posting sketches and teasers at http://eyethief.blogspot.com/

Merry Christmas one and all. I’m spending a couple of days with the family Unitt and will be back on the case shortly.

Festive thanks to everyone who reads, comments, supports or sends me bits and bobs to write about. Most importantly, biggest thanks to everyone in Birmingham who does creative stuff, whether we get to write about you or not. There are loads of you and you’re ace.

In the meantime, there’s something odd happening in Berlin today. Check out this chap:

I’m going to just post the email that I received, there’s really no point me trying to re-write it.

Berlin Hoodening: Nagual for Bjørn Nørgaard

On 25 December 2009, a.a.s will perform the nagual performance Berlin Hoodening.

Hooded figures, wearing Fleischmasken, will process in a spiral up the hill at the centre of Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin, disembowel the treehorse, and make its organs circulate on its surface.

We will celebrate the depraved, deviant, tramp-spirit with the silver skull, calling forth disarticulation, experimentation and nomadism for the new decade.

This performance is part of the joint Parfyme, Reactor, a.a.s, Berlin residency 2009, and incorporates elements drawn from discussions with members of the other groups, and the guided walk developed by Reactor during their time in the city.

Hoodening is a British folk theatre tradition featuring a Hooden Horse – a wooden horse’s head mounted on a pole, with sackcloth attached to hide the bearer. The head would normally have a hinged jaw, which could snap shut with a mighty crack. Groups would tour around before Christmas, engaging in tomfoolery (horseplay) at local landowners’ houses and requesting funds to tide them over. There are also links to traditional Robin Hood Games and the Pantomime horse. Among the pagan Scandinavians the horse was often the sacrifice made at the winter solstice to Odin for success in battle.

A Nagual in Mesoamerican folk tradition is a  “transforming trickster” or “shape shifter” ? someone who has the power to magically turn into an animal form. This relates to the belief of tonalism, that all humans have an animal counterpart, to which their life-force is linked.

The Berlin Hoodening re-performs aspects of The Nagual (2007), which was originally featured at Crowd6 in Birmingham. The pulling out of tinsel, representing intestines, and spiraling it around the tree refers to the mythological origins of tinsel as a shamanistic, solstice ritual involving the draping of animal guts on trees in the forest in order to bring about the return of spring.

Follow the blog here

• Top 10 Birmingham Bands of The Decade? « The Blue Whale Blog
  Ah, finally! Some opinionated Birmingham-centric music writing, I knew it’d be out there somewhere. The Blue Whale Blog is worth a subscribe. This is their hack at a top 10 Brum bands but many others have had their say since
• iain armstrong • sound artist
  “Iain Armstrong is a Scottish composer/sound artist who has been based in Birmingham, UK since 1998″ He was involved with BEAST, has presented work with Project X Presents and done much more besides
• Kate Green Photography
  Kate does commercial, portrait, wedding and fine art photography. She exhibits too
• Fierce: Female Performers wanted for site-specific performance in Birmingham
  “Mem Morrison Company and The REP are looking for up to thirty female volunteers* to perform in its current production, Ringside. This opportunity is open to all women over the age of 18 who wish to be involved in a site-specific performance”

Manuela Voigt specialises in branding, print design and web design.

However, the pic above is from one of her free design projects and is called ‘Casette Fashion‘:

Have you ever wondered what to do with all the audio cassettes that are hiding in the back corner of your cupboards? There are several things you can do with them. One option is transforming them into fashionable items, all you need is someone with great knitting skills and the tape. It can be transformed into socks, shirts, jumpers and even bags.

Lewes Herriot is a self-taught illustrator/artist who’s worked for Johnny Foreigner, Charlotte Hatherley, Tubelord, Free Moral Agents, NME, Fly Magazine, Fused Magazine, Topman Design, Ikon Gallery (Birmingham) and This Is Tomorrow.

Busy chap. He’s got a MySpace page, a blog at The Dark Inventory and a Flickr account with plenty of work on show.

This one knocked me back on my heels – a really (and I mean really) impressive company doing amazing work on, quite literally, some of the world’s biggest stages.

Specialz Ltd is Keith Owen and Dave Smith and they describe their company as a ‘Production Design and Manufacturing House’. That is to say that they make lights like these for Radiohead’s 2008 world tour:

They’ve worked on sets for the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Pink, Girls Aloud, Kylie Minogue and U2. They also refurbished the Black Sabbath Cross from 1981:

Acquired as a piece of Black Sabbath memorabilia by Music Superstore PMT The Black Sabbath Cross found it’s way in the Specialz Workshop for a refit. The Birmingham branch of PMT Music store plan to hang the piece, dating from 1981 tour, in the shop. However, with most of fittings missing and the fact they’d have to sell twice as many instruments to pay the electricity bill if it was rebuilt with the original light sources.

Keith Owen, Specialz Technical Director, sourced some obsolete spinnings and repopulated the piece with 60 1.5w LED clusters which only draw a total of 300w max. He then used a prismatic lens to amplify the light output.

Impressive stuff. They do art installations and all sorts too. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much they can’t do and the reports I’ve found on them elsewhere are glowing – there’s a PDF here which effusively explains their role in the Radiohead stage set.

The first of what might become a regular thing, Knowing Me, Knowing You was fun last week. As part of Capsule’s longest birthday party… ever, we got together and invited a bunch of interesting people along to introduce themselves and say (for the sake of getting a conversation going) what they might do if they were to get their hands on VIVID for a little while.

The kind participants were:

• Dan Davies
• Ben Waddington
• Fin & Ken from a new (currently nameless) housing co-op
• Sara from Needles and Hooks
• Mark Murphy from Surely?
• Stuart and Ben from First Fold Records (who’ve blogged about it)
• Sarah from Heat and Light
• James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe (well, I read out his submission)
• One of Eagle and Feather from Kipple
• Ben Javens

All ably compered by Jon Bounds with half-time entertainment provided by Charlie Pinder‘s cake orchestra.

Truth be told, we weren’t sure what people would come back with or what sort of direction the evening might take. As it turned out, ideas included:

• Social spaces
• Turning the place into a massive ball pool/packing it floor to ceiling with jelly
• Setting up a swapshop
• Using it as a place for realising unfinished ideas
• Creating an edgeless, white room and projecting images through hung pieces of perspex
• Kipple Live
• Artist talks

And some other things that escape me just at the moment. To be honest, the suggestions themselves weren’t the most crucial part of the evening. The point was really to get people out, meeting each other and sharing thoughts and ideas. As far as that goes I think the evening was a success.

Capsule have written up the event here with lots of lovely photos. Thanks to them, to everyone who took part and to those who came along to watch.

Mohammed Ali is holding an evening of live graffiti-art and poetry in The REP’s soon-to-be-demolished workshop (Kate Beatty’s photos of which you can see here) on 21 January 2010. Tickets available from The Rep.

Jonzi D is directing the event with Dreadlock Alien, (the superb) Zena Edwards and Amir Sulaiman performing new poetry.

After the performance itself you can pop into the workshop to see the graffiti on:

• Fri 22 Jan 4.30pm – 6.30pm
• Sat 23 Jan 12.00 – 2.00pm
• Tue 26 Jan 4.30 – 6.30pm

Apparently there are a few things happening in the workshop area before it’s knocked down. At this stage I have no more info than that. I’d go and investigate but right now there’s a cinnamon bun calling to me.