Birmingham: It’s Not Shit

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The Artsfest programme isn’t easy to search,  and the venue map isn’t comprehensive - so with the help of LiveBrum’s by venue and day split-up of the listings I’ve started this Google map of the whats and wheres (the whens - apart from by day - proving just too much effort):

View Larger Map

It’s open to editing and improvement by all - go see.

As far as I know only rap granddaddies The Sugarhill Gang are confirmed for Gigbeth 2008, but the facebook group brings rumours of…

Argh! Maybe Peter Cunnah will be able to tell us what they’ve been up to, and how he’s stopped doing their big hit (please) as it’s tainted with Tony Blair.

Mere seconds after making a snide remark about there being no info about the Birmingham Digital Festival, the blog goes live (in fact it was transitioning from some test server as I wrote, but I couldn’t be bothered to change it). So yay for information, boo for my laziness!

Hello Digital is, they say, “an unbelievable adventure to be experienced by people of all ages.” It’s at Millennium Point from the 23rd to the 26th of October.

There does look to be some cool stuff going on, although it’s buried at the moment by the lack of a programme on the site, or a list of posts, or navigation (coming soon I hope).

There is also a bit of a weird writing style pitched oddly betwixt chatty and arts funding speak - and some hilariously positive “recent comments” (for a site only just live especially - “This sounds great! Whereabouts will this be? Wherever it is I’m sure I’ll be there.” “Sounds awesome like the Antiques Roadshow for metallers!”).

SCAMP “Sonic Computer Aided Music Performance” is looking for sound artists to contribute and sounds like it could be fun.

Metal Mania is mentioned (and something to do with this festival? I’m confused, I admit) and is an event at Wolverhampton Art Gallery to help stock up a digital archive of memories for Capsule’s metal museum (which I am very excited by):

“This is a call out to everyone – hard core fans, enthusiasts, local historians from the Midlands. On Saturday, October 25, rock on down to Wolverhampton Art Gallery and bring in memorabilia, photographs and great stories recounting your experiences of metal music to help Capsule create a ‘people’s archive’ of stories, images and pictures to tell the story of this unique moment of the region’s musical heritage.”

More to come, I’m sure, and they also has a twitter.

A day after we found out the line-up for the Book Festival, and as we continue to find out very little about Artsfest and nothing at all about the “digital festival“, the bill for the Birmingham Comedy Festival is live.

Personal highlights include Mark Steel, Richard Herring (although I’m pretty sure their tours would be coming round about now anyway) and Ted Chippington. “Meh”’s include Jimmy Carr and Lee Evans.

Bizarre bookings include Chubby Spencer (a tribute to Chubby Brown), and Steve Lilly’s Comedy Classics - “large group portraits depicting famous comedy casts, including Dad’s Army, Only Fools And Horses, Carry On and Fawlty Towers. Limited edition prints and greetings cards are also available.”

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And Ken Dodd.

Anyways, full details and a downloadable programme on the Comedy Festival site.

The charming Russ L, points us to the line-up of this years Birmingham Book festival via a post on the BiNS talk boards.

There’s the usual opening quiz, David Lodge, Mark Thomas and the godlike Will Self amongst others.

Full programme is now on the site.

Heritage Open Days are a set of tours or special openings of buildings around the country for four days every September. This year’s itinerary is now out and there are six pages of search results local to Birmingham (can’t create a permalink you’ll have to go to the search page and use “Birmingham” as a keyword).

Highlights that I’ve seen so far:

Birmingham Bonanza Walk - architectural walk around the city centre that pays attention to the modern as well as the past.

Guided Walk - Moseley Art, Architecture & History

J W Evans - historic factory in the Jewellery Quarter.

Handsworth Old Town Hall - no excuse, it’s on the 11 route.

There’s also a walk entitled “Birmigham More Canals Than Venice”, which I can’t find online at the officlal site but is here.

You may have heard me mention that I’ve been working on a project called The Big Picture, well it’s culminating in Brum this weekend with the unveiling of an artwork that should break the World Record for the largest photo mosaic ever.

But, the world’s largest anything takes a lot of putting together, and for weeks now volunteers have been sticking photos together on the 288 panels that will make up the final piece. There are about 113,000 photos in all and still a lot of work to do. So, if you have any free time this week everyone working on the Big Picture would love to see you at Thinktank to help build this huge artwork.

You can turn up at any time between 10am - 4pm each day until Thursday this week (if you’d like more details see the Big Picture site).

Even if you can’t help out, you’d be very welcome at the unveiling on Saturday (23rd Aug) outside Millennium Point, the covers will come off at 2pm.

On the 11th of November let’s create a modern ritual, a post-millennial cultural cult.

Eleven hours on the eleven bus — join us.

The rules:

• Get on the 11C at 11am (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• Get off the 11C at 10pm — 11 hours later — (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• You can get on and off the bus as many times as you like (don’t spend more than an hour off bus).
• Document your journey; photos, film, writing, cross-stitch, knitting, amigurumi, poetry, blog, twitter, however you like.
• Meet up with others as mad as you, if you want.

The point:

A post-cultural, post-sporting, post-everything pyschogeographical document of the city. The clockwise circling will create a centripetal force for good.

The route:

On the TWM site, or as a video.

The practicalities:

Get a free daysaver.

Add to your .

Facebook Event.

Upcoming Event.

The inspiration:

This is kind of inspired by Gimpo’s 25 Hour M25 spin.

Light Night, is being held as part of this year’s ArtsFest (which is fast approaching —12th to the 14th of September). While I struggle to see anything particularity arty about “architectural lighting of iconic city centre buildings and iconic landmarks”, it promises to be an interesting evening - especially if they project the painting from the art gallery of penguins onto the Town Hall as they seem to be suggesting: (that’s this one).

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Not sure if you have to be called Kenneth to enter this competition. Well I am sure, and you don’t. That would be stupid and restrictive — although funny. South Birmingham Community Radio is launching on yer actual airwaves as well as the interweb in August - on Saturday 9th at 8am.

But where to tune your radio (if you live in South Brum)? Well they’re not saying, in fact they’re offering a prize to anyone who can guess — an SBCRadio t-shirt and the chance to co-present the breakfast show for a morning.

Aspiring Terry Wogans should enter by Wednesday 23rd July — after which I guess they’ll tell us all where we can tune in.

(The RSS feeds don’t work on the site so you’ll have to check back there for updates, probably a fault of the Joomla system the website is built on).