About Brum

[A quick note about the lack of posts recently - my apologies, I’m currently busy moving house. Normal service resumes shortly!]

Fancy a bit of music to brighten up your July? You’re in luck. For the 24th successive year, The Birmingham International Jazz Festival opens its doors - today! From the 4th to the 13th of July, Jazz fans are spoilt for choice, in no small part due to the continued work of Midlands music stalwart Jim Simpson from Big Bear Music (and, having been in the business since 1968, rightly describes Big Bear as ‘probably the longest established independent record company in the UK‘… and you’re wondering how the Big Bear name came about, check the web site for the amusing backstory!)

The fest has gone all modern and suchlike this year too… 2008’s event has brought with it a new (impressively snazzy) web site, complete with Twitter profile, Flickr profile, Last.FM showcase of associated artists, detailed programme information for each day of the fest, a blog… Plus some potentially interesting new features, like an Archive of previous years’ events (currently in the works). I suspected a bit of local design talent was involved in this revamp, and it looks like Dave and his cohorts at Fireloop Creative have come up trumps with a lovely little web site; distinctive yet restrained, it’s a real pleasure to explore. Remember kids, simple is good. (By contrast, AB is neither an example of particularly simple nor a particularly good site… or refined… but then again, my design work has most definitely taken a backseat for the moment.

So, If you want the lowdown on what’s going on, check out the very detailed programme of events and pootle along for some music and good times. If it’s raining - come anyway! I can guarantee the music will brighten your day up regardless of the meteorological conditions.

And anyway, who doesn’t like a good bit of sax of an afternoon?

Birmingham has been plagued by a spate of rumoured (and actual) venue closures in the past few years, and also been unlucky with others (memorably, the burning down of Eddie’s, near New Street Station, a great blow for fans of alternative music and a decent night out). However, Roy and Jaci Davis have just opened the doors to The Asylum, a brand new live music venue next door to The Madhouse (which they also run). Sporting a £60,000 soundsystem, a 400 capacity and the treasured smoking area, this venue - still unfinished! - is already looking like a shit hot, potentially permanent fixture for many bands’ UK tours. If you’re wondering what prompted me to write this… Well, I’m currently at the launch gig (”Clive Aid”) and the bands are rocking out! if you can hear a disturbance in the force, that’s the system in this place

I had a quick chance to speak to Roy and he tells me there are loads of gigs lined up, including one every other night in July! - so if you’re a fan of rock, metal and anything inbetween, keep your eye on this place as it bodes well for the future. I’ll try and get some time with Roy to put together a full article, but I’m so stoked that live music in Birmingham has a really good new venue, particularly as it’s being run by two people who have put so much of their time, energy and money into this venue - and they actually like the music and are dedicated to the cause!

Stay tuned for the full article…

(Also, apologies for my dodgy spelling before I revised this post, I typed it up on my phone’s tiny keyboard in the venue!)

Not got anything planned for Saturday the 31st of May? Well, give The Flyover Show a go. It’s on from 1pm to 9pm (but I’m sure it may well overrun) and… well, when was the last time you got to enjoy a dollop of wholesome fun in such a glamourous location as underneath the Hockley Flyover?

No, you can’t think of a time, can you.

Shameless cribbing from the event’s Facebook page now:

For one day only the entire arena under the Hockley Flyover will be alive with inspiring sights and sounds of ground breaking art and music. Jazz veterans, reggae legends, visual artists, hip hop and grime geniuses from across Birmingham and beyond will be there.This day long festival is a unique celebration of the very best from the city’s urban communities. National and international names, backed by a live band will light up the stage with exclusive performances. The city and the site is the focus of a specially created piece designed by young artists. Cherrelle Skeete, Francis Mott, Nehemiah Smith and Tan, will debut original pieces of music, dance and theatre. Graffiti artists and b-boys will paint pictures across the creative canvass of B19.

Don’t miss this chance to see world-class creativity brought outdoors for the first time to a forgotten corner of Birmingham. Be there to reclaim these derelict spaces and restore the artistic soul of the city!!

So, go and have some fun - why not? The weather will be lovely, the music (and beer, hopefully) will be flowing, and you can get a chance to listen to some quality musical talent and support local musicians and artists while you’re at it. Plus I’d put money on it that there’ll be loads of spots to park.

Firstly - did we miss Spring? Summer’s decided to queuejump once again this year, as my (exceedingly grown up and consummately mature) housemate said to me yesterday, “strappy top season’s upon us once again. Giggidy!” But anyway, I digress.

The Big Picture project’s been running for a while now, and it’s culminating in the grand competition today. For those who aren’t in the know;

It’s a project to create the biggest photo album in the West Midlands. Everyone can add their favourite pictures – family, friends, local landmarks, even your pets, we’ve made it easy to share your photos and tell the stories behind them.”

If you’ve got a good shot of somewhere in the West Midlands, go add it to The Big Picture project today for a chance to get it on a billboard… How cool is that?

Big Picture Day is Thursday 8 May – every photo added on that day will be in with a chance of appearing on giant billboards around the region.

Add your photo of the West Midlands to the Big Picture on Big Picture Day and it’ll automatically be entered in a competition — eight winners will be selected to get the full billboard treatment. There’s sure to be one in a town near you!

Upload to the web or text from your mobile — it’s up to you. To add a photo by MMS send it with BIGPIC first in the text of your message to 60300*.

Every photograph taken will form part of our world record attempt to make the biggest photo mosaic in the world and eight lucky winners will have their image displayed on their own billboard for everyone to see.

For more info, see The Big Picture’s web site. Also, Donato ‘Bostin’ Esposito is about to embark on his fundraising trek around Peru in support of the British Heart Foundation - go sponsor him at http://www.bhf.org.uk/sponsor/bostin, and buy the BHF charity t-shirt from the Bostin shop.

Right, excuse me, I’m off to dust down the barbeque in preparation for this weekend.

Donato Esposito’s the man with the plan - the guy behind Bostin and the supporter of everything good about the Midlands. The word ‘bostin’ is in itself a wholly positive gesture; “that’s bostin mate!” is roughly equivalent to “that’s really good / brilliant / really nice / smashing” and it’s been around for absolutely ages.

He recently commissioned a special England flag Bostin shirt in time for St. George’s Day, and I was lucky enough to catch a sneaky preview of it before they went on sale (and was pretty impressed). Donato’s also got a mean marketer’s mindset too, because he always seems to get some really good press out of his ventures - most recently, Bostin was featured in the Bromsgrove Advertiser (his brother’s pictured in the article modelling the England flag design) and he’s had tons of coverage and plugs from everyone ranging from regional press to Adrian Chiles (the BBC ‘One Show’ presenter and thoroughbred Brummie), who can oft be seen sporting one of Donato’s designs.

They are really quite cool T-shirts and really make a (wonderfully positive, for once!) statement when you wear them out and about. Go buy one from the Bostin shop, and start some conversations when you’re out in public.

(and yes, I buy my Bostin shirts just like everybody else, in case you were wondering whether this was a sponsored plug.

This time, prepare to welcome BloggingBrum to the world, a product of the creative mind of one Mark Steadman… What’s it about? “It’s a blog for Birmingham. That’s it.”

Succint. I like it. (Bonus points for having a picture of the Floozie in the Jacuzzi as part of the design!)

I’m always in favour of new outlets for the wealth of news and info that flows out of the second city - that’s why you’ll see me contributing to it in due course. In the meantime, blogroll it, bookmark the feed, and enjoy.

And as a little PS, here’s an odd thought which may strike a chord with all you WordPress users out there - why does WP have an ‘Uncategorized’ category by default? Surely it’s a little tautologous; if you didn’t want to classify a post, you would just refrain from ticking any of the boxes. Programmers’ logic overriding common sense once again…

I suppose one of the advantages of promoting Birmingham and the West Midlands is that you hear about some stuff before others… I received an email from the PR department at the Town Hall, promoting their forthcoming festival under the “English Originals” moniker… I’ve been known to be a little partial to a bit of English Folk music (thanks to my Dad for that influence), so I might even pop along and check them out.

    Johnny King I commend the Town Hall for putting on an event such as this; English Folk Music has been neglected for a long time, which is sad considering there’s so much richness, culture and heritage carried in the music. Many other countries overtly celebrate and promote their folk music, so why are we, as English people, so averse to enjoying it more? Granted, I can’t listen to folk music for hours and hours on end, but there’s something very compelling about songs which, aside from the tireless efforts of a minority, remain solely as songs passed down from generation to generation with no written record.

The BBC’s always been good about promoting folk music, and they still maintain their coverage of Folk Music on broadcast radio, TV (the Folk Awards comes to mind) and the Web. However, even their coverage has been diminishing, with fewer and fewer plays on regional and local radio. A shame, but not necessarily inevitable. So, it’s good to see this kind of event being organised in Birmingham, at a really great venue - there’s some free gigs and even a film screening, apparently - can’t argue with that. The event is billed as, “a celebration of English folk music traditions with invited artists from all four corners of the country performing, as well as free gigs and a film screening. The whole ethos behind the festival is to dispel the misconceptions many people have of folk and put on show the many cross-genre collaborations and cultural partnerships developing within folk music in England.”

I’m down with that.

That said, the best part of the email has to be the supplied pack shots, including the lovely reclining Lisa Knapp:

What a press shot!

Also, hot on the heels of Creative Republic’s launch, the Birmingham Music Network site’s undergone a redesign and is now available to the public. (Hat-tip to Boy Wonder Records for the heads-up.)

I had to laugh when I read this BBC article - Major city ‘flash mob prevented’;

Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre said it stopped a major ‘flash mob’ exercise involving dozens of people. But members of the group said the event, in which people froze for five minutes, took place and images went on the social networking website Facebook. The Bullring said it prevented a “major blockage”. A spokesman added that the shopping centre “could not afford customers not being able to get past”. A spokesman for the ‘flashmob’ said they had not intended to annoy people.

And then it gets better:

The Bullring’s general manager, Tim Walley, said on Saturday lunchtime that security had spoken to a group which had assembled outside and was told they would reconvene in smaller groups in the shopping centre.  He said: “We saw one of them with a loud-hailer. “We couldn’t afford customers not being able to get past. We’ll be looking at 180,000 people coming to shop on a Saturday.”

What’s a flashmob? Well, ‘a flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.’ What’s so harmful about that? I was shopping in the Bullring last Saturday, and let me tell you, there was PLENTY of space for people to walk around - more than enough space for a few dozen people to do five minutes’ worth of Pythonesque comedy. If they’d been juggling fire or whipping round on rollerblades to the music of Starlight Express, then fair enough, I’d probably expect them to be moved on too - but standing still? How square do you have to be to not find that a bit of harmless fun (and amusingly odd?)

If I’d been in Birmingham this weekend, I would’ve taken part myself, Flashmobs are really nothing more than a bit of painless, hassle-free fun which provide great entertainment value for observers. In what way is it obstructive or harmful to shoppers? I think we can determine from this that the Bullring security staff (and the managing director) could be accurately described as humourless, revenue-driven employees who seek to disrupt peoples’ fun at every opportunity possible.

We need to have weekly Flashmobs in the Bullring from now on.

Corny I know, but appropriate… Just now (about 1am), Birmingham (and much of the Midlands and Central England) had a little earthquake! It only lasted about ten seconds here, but was strong enough to make my speakers rock on their stands and my radiator make a noise… Amusingly, we all initially blamed each other in our house

Through quickly jumping onto Facebook, fast proving to be the quickest way to gauge opinion and feedback from your friends around the country, it seems that this was felt as far afield as Sheffield, Manchester, right down to Northampton (although Bristol didn’t apparently feel it, according to one of my friends). A friend who lives in Milton Keynes says that it was much more severe, shaking the house quite violently - he heard things moving around and falling over in the loft.

The BBC hasn’t even published a full article about this yet - proof positive that citizen journalism is good at a few things! [01:18: BBC News 24 reports that it was felt as far afield as Darlington, Cheshire, Northampton and parts of London]. However, they do have much more comprehensive info on the 2002 Dudley earthquake (5 on the Richter scale!) here and here - and Wikipedia has an article about it. MadJad, a Dudley area resident, has a little minisite dedicated to it. There was also a much stronger earthquake in Kent last year.

Yay for unexpected exciting things!

Edit: my housemate’s just sent me a link to the USGS site, where there’s a much more detailed technical writeup of the quake: it was apparently 4.7 on the Richster scale at its epicentre! Here’s the initial stats:

Earthquake Details

There’s even a map showing the epicentre (somewhere near Lincoln!) from the USGS site - click here to load it in Google Maps. Take three minutes and report your experiences back to the USGS while you’re at it.

[02:44: The Sun, in its usual restrained manner, has taken the time to carefully and objectively report on the night’s events. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s really worth a read. I liked the bit with smoke and flames.]

Birmingham’s a bit of a higgledy-piggledy place when it comes to architecture. You have brash, modern buildings parked opposite 1980s ‘oddities’, which themselves are next to to clean lines and glass frontage of Starbucks and office buildings… And on top of that, you have the old, OLD buildings that were in Birmingham long before anybody else decided to move in and build the latest multi-storey hotel with a weird leopard-skin cover down one side (if you’ve seen the SAS Radisson, you’ll know what I’m on about).

This photo, taken by Bill Phillips, quite neatly sums it all up:

Image credit: Bill Phillips

I know from personal experience just how hard it is to take good shots in the centre of Brum, the contrast between light and shade around there is so extreme that if you have a less-than-great camera, you end up with half a screen of barely visible image and an overexposed remainder.

If you’re wondering where the above shot was taken, get off the bus at Colmore Row, walk to the left (heading away from Snowhill railway station), cross the road, then turn right 90°… Bingo.

Seen any other nice shots of Brum? I’d love to see them, so leave your links in the Comments.