FlixFixer is Social Cinema at the Custard Factory Theatre. “It allows you to choose movies you love, find a venue to screen them and invite friends, family or other like-minded film-lovers to share in a screening where you set the rules – be it dress-up, dress down, no hats or no food. It allows you to build a community of friends around your shared love of movies and get together regularly to celebrate that. We screen here on Wednesdays… or you can screen here whenever you want” Loads of special nights already booking, including an offering from the Dirty Bristow team.
In a shock to rival the ‘sexy’ Smufs reboot currently going on. Look what they’ve done to the old Costermongers : a pub up the road from it: From the FAKE magazine blog: “Owners of the Hairy Lemon bar at The Square Shopping Centre are putting the finishing touches to their brand-new basement bar, with the promise that Birmingham’s latest venue will be a sumptuous mix of style, great food, and fantastic live music. The Bitter End will be unveiled on Friday (5th) to reveal a chic and sophisticated venue, which is the perfect setting for a get together whether it’s a girls’ lunch date, drinks after work or a big night out.” Chic and sophisticated. There’s even talk of a “brand and interior design concept”. Ozzy Osbourne will be turning in his grave. EDIT: Seems we may have jumped the gun a little (copying the news from elsewhere). Because: “It’s just the other side of the entrance to Oasis from Argos. There’s a bar which was once called The Priory and uses the ground floor and basement. It’s had loads of names over the years including B2 and the scottish (something or other – might be haggis). That place...
Down Poplar Road in King’s Heath is the sewing machine shop of Frank L Nutt: And if you travel down to near Star City you see signs for the sewing machine shop of one S Nutt: And I’ve been told of Walsall’s DC Nutt and Sutton’s M Nutt. It’s fascinating to me, none of the shops or website refer to any of the others…are we dealing with a schism of Dassler brothers proportions (you’ll remember that Adi Dassler set up adidas, his brother Rudolph: Puma) ? Of course we could just ask them, but it’s more fun to speculate: do you know any more Nutts? Have you been assaulted by one of them?
Should you be interested in the music known as Heavy Metal, or the history of the West Midlands, then this summer there’s an afternoon at least of your time that needs to be dedicated to the Home of Metal. Wassat? Let the blurb tell you: “Four decades since heavy metal was unleashed onto the world, Home of Metal arrives this summer, presenting a series of ambitious exhibitions and associatedevents which explore the foundations, social context and heritage of heavy metalculture, which has gone on to be a global phenomenon. .Curated by Capsule, Home of Metal is a celebration of the music that was created in the West Midlands, its legacy and influence across the world. Home of Metal focuses on the Midlands-born innovators of the genre and those thatcontinued to develop it. From Black Sabbath, unquestionably the founding fathers ofHeavy Metal, Judas Priest, defenders of the faith whose twin guitar attack paved theway for multitudes of melodic metal acts in their wake to Napalm Death, whose first two albums introduced grindcore to an unsuspecting world.” But it’s about so much more than music, behind the huge gothic drapes lurks threads of your local heritage from the immediate post-war to today’s...
We figure this is about arts funding in Birmingham, but frankly who can tell. If you can understand this get out of the arts now (but could you translate it first please). *shitty stock music* (via Dave Harte, title by Pete Ashton)
When it’s Birmingham City Council’s Brunel Street Car Park. Brunel Street car park “the red cage” is my favourite place to park in the city centre; the cross-hatched metal design is truly wonderful and the overall structure clearly an influence on the plans for the new Central Library. I’m the mayor of the place on Foursquare, I love it because it inspires oddness, I love it because it seems to have an odd soul of it’s own, but most of all I love it because it’s remarkably cheap for such a central place. I’m tight like that.
Nothing too new here in this Independent piece about “Britain’s ‘Second City’ a third-rate reputation”, but they’ve done a fair amount of research —Adrian Goldberg, Trevor Beattie, Siôn Simon, Khalid Mahmood all quoted. “In other parts of Britain there is an almost wilful ignorance of Birmingham’s attractions; a determined refusal to acknowledge that there is anything worth tasting inside its spaghetti swirl of motorways. “It’s seen as this grimy manufacturing city with an impossible one-way system – when it’s actually long-gone,” says Clare Short, former International Development Secretary. “Then everyone despises the accent. That’s the sneer at Birmingham.”" That they go on to use a stock picture of could-be-anywhere canalsde living, sort of undermines or re-inforces the lack of identify we suffer. As ever, cover your eyes before the comments if you don’t want to see the bile.
