Gor blimey, it’s another one of those really long weekends. Here are some things you might want to consider filling all that time with.
For starters, I haven’t got a flyer for this one but Lizzy Parks is playing in the Symphony Hall foyers today (Friday) from 5.30pm to 7pm and it’s free. Info on the THSH website. Or indeed the Birmingham Jazz website.
Earlier in the day (in fact from 12pm to 7pm) head over to Lombard Street in Digbeth for PST’s street party. This here flyer says there’s going to be food, live art and heavy bass. And face painting.
MakeIt Zone are having an open day on Saturday.
Capsule have got an event at Kings Heath’s Hare and Hounds on Saturday night called Wedlock. Dunno what that’s a reference to but I like the pretty picture.
There’s loads of other stuff happening too. Have a look at Live Brum for listings.
Karen Strunks’ 4am Project had another outing over the weekend, this time teaming up with Project Brutal to explore Birmingham Central Library.
(Photo by Nick Lockey)
You can browse through all the photos that have been uploaded to Flickr.
Mr Underwood did things slightly differently, going in to do some sound recordings:
Firstly, a library is meant to be a place of silence, “Shhhhh, people are trying to read”, but what we perceive as silence is just our ability to block out some sounds and not others. I wanted to focus in on these sounds as well as discovering what other sounds I might find in parts of the building one wouldn’t normally gain access to. Secondly, with the proposed demolition of the existing library, I considered this to be an opportunity to record the dying breathes of the building
I’ve been meaning to write something up about all those guest posts that we had on CiB throughout March.
I thought it went very well. Alex was organising all of that so I had no real idea of what was going to go up on the site each day. By and large I was pretty darn impressed with what we got.
If you missed the series, here’s what we had in date order:
The thing that interested me most about going back through these is the format most people adopted. Most people went for the long-form, text-centric article, with only William Fallows doing something a little different. Also, most posts were illustrated with photos but nobody embedded any video or music – even the folks talking exclusively about music.
I’m not going to pick favourites, but I was particularly interested by the posts from William Fallows, Laura Katriina Pollard and Miriam Rowe – in the case of the latter two it was because they introduced me to some things I wasn’t aware of, which is what I’d like to think CiB is all about. I thought it was interesting how Rich Batsford canvassed a wider spread of opinion for his too.
The reason I’ve always shied away from encouraging guest posts is that I think it’s healthier if people write on their own sites and build up their own archives and audiences. I’d like to think that, if I was aware of people writing the kind of thing they submitted on their own blogs, I’d have linked to them from here anyway, sending them readers who might explore their websites etc and so on.
Incidentally, of the people who answered our initial call out, we accepted pretty much everyone who had a reasonably definite idea of something to write about.
So, thanks to all our guest posters. We might do this again sometime.
I was at the MAC the other day and spotted this attached to a tree:
It’s for RE:site, which is an exhibition put together by the Hive Collective and due to be shown at St Alphege Church in Solihull. It’s:
An exhibition of contemporary artwork at St Alphege Church, produced in response to creative exploration around the Solihull area.
In addition, artists Alison Saint, Claire Hickey, Emily Warner, Eva Bennett and Keeley Lowe will lead creative activities linked to the exhibition at the St Alphege Day community celebrations on Saturday 30th April 10am-3pm.
It’s on from 30 April until 6 May but check the viewing schedule for opening times.
Better yet, turn up to the launch on Thursday 28 April (4.30-6.30pm). It’s free, you get to meet the artists and refreshments will be provided. Not bad.
After that last post on the Tsunami fundraisers I was trawling round Face’s website and found a feature on Kate Hook.
She’s a photographer and you can check out her work on her very own Facebook Page, with even more on her Flickr account.
A couple of club nights raising money for the Japanese tsunami with money from both going to the Red Cross’s appeal.
Face is first up on 23 April at The Rainbow in Digbeth.
Heducation‘s will be on 3 June at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath.
A year ago (almost to the day) we launched CiBmail – a weekly round-up of news and events delivered straight to your inbox. After a little while it went fortnightly and now we’re putting it on hold entirely.
Basically, it’s a good thing (and the number of subscribers has increased nicely over the past 12 months) and a nice experiment, but it takes too long to write it and we just haven’t got the time for it at the moment.
If you want to get this week’s Easter special then SIGN UP HERE by 3pm today.
There’s a pretty good chance it’ll come back in some form later in the year, so don’t start the wiling and gnashing of teeth just yet.
Misty’s Big Adventure are going the crowdfunding route for producing their next album. It’s a simple deal – pay £8 now, get an album to download later.
There’s also a whole shopping list of extras that you can pick up in exchange for a little more investment, including advance copies of the album on CD, T-shirts, an exclusive performance by the band and Grandmaster Gareth’s soul.
Things seem to be going pretty well so far – they’re up to 53% of their total already.
Others
A quick trawl around a few crowdfunding sites - Pledgebank, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Sponsume and WeDidThis – reveals just one more project from around Birmingham that’s asking for your money. I thought there’d be more (tell me if I missed any).
It’s a collaborative project between Birmingham-based Lantern Music and New York-based Cassis who are looking to fund the second part of A Hawk In The Rain. There’s more info about that project on their blog.
Paste artist, Lisk, rising star of the local scene and famed for his robots scattered across the city will compose a large scale paste of his robots finally completing their invasion of the city.
There’s more to come from EXYZT’s Burningham (part of this year’s Fierce Festival) with a few more events, 19-21 April.
2Weeks 2Make It is a music video competition pairing randomly drawn teams of filmmakers and musical artists who then have exactly 2 weeks to shoot and edit a music video from scratch!
The West Mids version of 2Weeks 2Make It is back again.
There were some great entries to the last one. If you want to take part then sign up on the website. If you’re not sure whether you should bother, here’s why you should.
Here’s my post on the winners of the last one.
This is on tomorrow night at the MAC. Fatima Al Matar, Jodi Ann Bickley and Matt Windle all presenting new work.
More info via Apples and Snakes.
Over the past few months a group of people have been taking part in MOB:
MOB is a project inspired by the current craze of ‘flash mobbing’ where seemingly unplanned ‘happenings’ take place involving hundreds of children, young people and adults. MOB is about creating new ‘disturbances’ that help share the values of the Olympics & Paralympics.
Among various other things (the full list is actually pretty exhausting), they’ve performed at Prince Albert School, spent a day with First Light Movies, did a photoshoot with Adrian Burrows and rode a red bus around the city doing good deeds.
All of the activity has been collected together on this Tumblr.
The final part of the project is an exhibition that’ll be launched at The Drum on Monday 18 April at 6.30pm.
On Saturday 16 April, Speech Fewapy Records are putting some bands on in record shops as part of National Record Store Day.
Swordfish Records, Temple Street, Birmingham – 1pm (Click here for map)
Ali Forbes (Malpas)/The Traps/Tom Peel/Victories At Sea
Polar Bear Records, York Road, Kings Heath – 3pm (Click here for map)
The Traps/Vinny and The Curse/John Presley/Black Heart Generator
More info on Speech Fewapy’s site.
