The Manchizzle

Someday my print will come

2012-01-19T09:50:00.008Z

Everyone in Manchester has started a literary magazine. You have too, haven't you? I thought so. This is good if you're a reader or a writer. This is not good if you hate literary magazines. If you hate literary magazines, run along now, this post will bore you.

I put this literary publishing frenzy down to the fact that it is so darn easy to publish an online magazine right now that a drunk kitten could probably manage it. Some of them are, essentially, group-written blogs, published on blogging platforms with a pared-down aesthetic. Others look just like proper print magazines, with design and illustration of a professional standard and are delivered via apps like issu, which aims to create a magazine-reading experience on your computer; turning pages instead of scrolling, for example. (It must be pointed out that some of these people are actually producing old-fashioned, hold-it-in-your-hands print mags and for this I salute them.)

Are they good? Some are fantastic, some aren't. But I like the fact that these writers are getting out there, messing about with words, and giving other writers a way to bring their work to a bigger audience. With some of these online projects the product isn't as important as the concept and the process. And it's interesting to think about how the publishing process itself is changing. When we can set up an online lit mag in an afternoon, and publish at the touch of a button are we losing time that in the days of print would be spent polishing, editing, perfecting? Is the fact that the finished product often isn't actually a product, in any but the most virtual sense, making us bolder (or less painstaking) editors? You can always go back and edit your post, right?

Anyway, enough of this. If you're a writer, you can send your stuff to:
Cutaway Magazine
Shoestring Magazine
Black & BLUE
Torn
There was nowhere to go but everywhere
Top Ten

By the way, if you're interested in places to read your work or hear people reading theirs, check out this list of live literature hotspots in Manchester I did for Creative Tourist earlier this month.

I don't know if you've noticed, but it's 2012 and we still don't have a Manchester listings magazine. Our last one, CityLife, closed in 2005. I was at a Christmas party with a newly arrived BBC staffer who wanted to know where we all found out what was on, and it was interesting to hear five or six Manchester folks who work in the arts share their own cobbled together collection of blogs, newspapers and websites. No easy answer there. Established listings magazine makers continue to snub Manchester, concluding that there is no money to be made from advertising here. And to be fair, they are probably right. But we are getting a new online listings site - Manchester Wire, set up by freelance writer Ruth Allan and my frequent collaborator Chris Horkan, with startup funds from Umbro Industries. I'll link to it here when it goes live.

Image by Leigh Jay Hicks (via Flickr).

Merry Chrismizzle

2011-12-20T13:37:00.002Z

Merry Christmas everyone. Have a happy holidaze, and I'll see you on the flip side.

New blogs: Part 2

2011-11-30T14:02:00.013Z

I've long been a fan of Len Grant, the Manchester-based photographer and writer whose work focuses on telling the stories of the people the media typically ignores: asylum seekers, addicts, people fighting like hell to win their way back to a better life - sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. So I was delighted to learn that Len's current project is a blog: Her First Year documents in words and pictures the story of baby Mia and her mother Frances, who are living in supported accomodation for vulnerable young mothers. It's a beautiful project in every way, please go check it out.

On a day when we're all fairly disgusted with the lack of attention paid to women's sport in the UK, it's good to see new additions like Girl On A Terrace , a lower league football blog from the perspective of a female Rochdale AFC fan. Any more sport blogs out there written by women? Give us a shout.

Anyway, here's the second part of the enormous list of new (to me, at least) Manchester blogs I had to add to my blogroll. If I've left anyone out, send me an email.

arts & culture, design/fashion blogs:
Followyourarts
umwp
wordofwarning
Old Fashioned Susie
MancMode
northwest is best
Beauty's Bad Habit
Curious Damsel
Pepper and Buttons

literature/writing blogs
Katie Anderson Writer
Beau Brummell Press
I hug my books
Julian Lee Robinson
Craig Pay
You, me, and the story
The Poplar Tree | it's not chick lit or pulp fiction
She-Wolf
Chetham's Library

Music blogs
Carnival Saloon

Film/Television blogs
Cathode Ray Tube

Foodie blogs
Little Red Courgette
Tea and Sympatico

City/neighbourhood blogs
Manchester Meanders
So…Chorlton

Digital/tech blogs
THE BOOK OF SCRAP

Personal blogs
.....haven't had a dream in a long time
On the Edge; A Freelancer in the Recession
what red said
The Fag Casanova
My Wonderful Life

Image copyright Len Grant

The Art of Blogging at Cornerhouse Thursday

2011-11-08T15:52:00.004Z

Just a quick post to say I'm running a session called The Art of Blogging at Cornerhouse Thursday evening. It's not a "how to start a blog" session (one of those is planned for early 2012), rather this one is meant for people who already have a blog and are looking for some pointers and inspiration.

We'll be looking at a number of successful blogs and discussing strategies for developing a distinctive voice and identity for your blog, finding things to blog about, building a readership, and using links, photos and comments well, among other topics. It's going to be an informal, discussion-based session, so come with questions and problems and we'll do our best to address them all. It's taking place from 6-8pm at The Annexe at Cornerhouse this Thursday 10 November, £4/£3 concs. You can book tickets here.

UPDATE: As of Weds afternoon this has now sold out. If anyone missed out and would like to attend another workshop like this, or even a workshop about some different aspect of blogging, please let me know in the comments - it helps us plan future sessions.

Gorgeous image of Cornerhouse cinema from zawtowers (via Flickr)

Manchester Blog Awards 2011 recap (and new blogs)

2011-11-03T15:18:00.008Z

So I think the 2011 Manchester Blog Awards were the best yet. A hefty dash of creative nonfiction was provided by the winners of The Real Story competition from my digital lit sideline Openstories. The five readers were wonderful and benefitted from an exceedingly friendly audience who really listened. And then came loads of excellent shortlisted bloggers reading a tasty smorgasboard of different writing - from short stories to microfiction to razor-sharp satirical emails. And then came the ever-popular Socrates Adams reading from his new novel Everything's Fine, which I just read and can say it is (as expected) deeply funny and exceedingly well-written. And then the crowning of the new winners, a very deserving bunch. Apologies to the one or two people who were disappointed by the absence of acceptance speeches, or our shocking lack of sufficient hoopla and fol-de-rol. Next year, maybe we should have the awards presented by celebrity dogs on unicycles. Whaddaya say?

On the night I got to thinking about the many amazing writerly partnerships and endeavours that started up from people meeting at the blog awards (I'm thinking especially of the Flashtag Manchester brigade and their various individual projects, side projects, events and one-off collaborations.) It might seem to someone unfamiliar with the Manchester writing scene that everyone at the blog awards knows each other. And yes, many of the writers shortlisted for blogs every year do know each other. Some met at the same event years ago and went on to do things together. More will have met there this year. Others know bloggers from writers' groups, university writing courses, or by being involved with one of the other bountiful opportunities available to writers in Manchester (the events and publications of the Bad Language collective, Tales of Whatever, The Night Light, Blank Media Collective, etc. )

The point is, writing brought these people together. If you're standing on the sidelines feeling left out, don't be a wallflower. There will always be the odd stuck-up ignoramus, but for the most part this is one of the friendliest and most inclusive writing scenes I've ever encountered. Come along to one of the aforementioned events and introduce yourself to the guy sat next to you, or to a writer whose work you liked, or to the girl behind you in the bar queue. Who knows what could come of it? What I'm saying is: it's definitely a clique. It's a clique that's big enough to encompass Greater Manchester and we're all personally invited to join it, kapeesh?

Anyway, we always hear about loads of new blogs via MBA nominations. They're additions to the ALREADY INCREDIBLY LONG list of new blogs I have been meaning to add here for ages. Hence the massive bumper edition of new blogs.... so many I'll have to publish this in two or three parts over the next few weeks. I'm not going to be able to do my usual helpful introduction to each one this time, but will simply give you the links. They'll all then be added to the categories in the Great Manchester Blogroll at the side. Happy readings.

Writers' Blogs
What Vanishes
Emma Jane Unsworth
sweetrsalted
Nici West
Josef A Darlington
I blog every day
Bad Penny

Personal Blogs
Richard Frosty
Jilted Generation
Oddments and snippets
Random Thoughts

Arts&Culture/Design/Fashion Blogs
Cava Coma
Manchester Cycle Chic
Manchester LAB
Caitlin's Country
LogsyLou
Clothes Pony

Music Blogs
Having a party without me
Unchained Melodist

City/Neighbourhood Blogs
MCRmix
Mancunian Wave

Tech Blogs
Tony Tickle

Journalism/Media Blogs
Speechmarks

Sport Blogs:
Naturally Cycling Manchester

Indian Summer

2011-10-04T14:56:00.006Z

With two big festivals I'm involved in — Creative Tourist's Manchester Weekender and The Manche ster Literature Festival — right around the corner, I've been insanely busy and never seem to have the time to pootle around the city the way I used to. Yes, there's been a complete absence of pootling, not much pottering and certainly no meandering for as long as I can remember. But with the insane Indian Summer we had going on last Friday I gave myself an afternoon and evening for some good old fashioned moseying around Manchester. First I went to my favourite city centre park: St. John's Gardens. You know Piccadilly Gardens? It's pretty much the opposite of that. Clean, green and leafy, quiet — and in Friday's heat, kinda sleepy. I lay down on the grass listening to music and almost fell asleep.

Then I went to The Book Barge. It's a floating bookshop shoehorned into a narrowboat that has been moored at Castle Quay for a few days. I was imagining a musty, dusty floating cabinet of curiosities. But it is nothing like that: clean and light, with a clever use of space and an immaculate stock of intelligently curated new books, serendipitous seconhand ones, a thoughfully-selected children's section and the sort of ephemera that book lovers drool over (Penguin tote bags, unjustly obscure magazines, bunting.) I ran into Adrian from The Art of Fiction. And I picked up a Puffin of Joan Aiken's The Whispering Mountain for £1. So I was happy.

I spoke with proprietor Sarah Henshaw about The Book Barge in this audioboo: The Book Barge comes to Manchester (mp3)

After a lovely few days in our city The Book Barge is now chugging away from Manchester to Skipton for the weekend. You can follow them on Twitter at @thebookbarge

From Castlefield I walked over to the opening of Asia Triennial Manchester, one of the nicest launches I've been to in a long time. Had a good chat with artist NS Harsha about his Spiritual Garlands comissioned by the amazing John Rylands Library. The garlands are intricate chains of individually-sculpted heads visitors to the library can wear around their necks, the chains emphasizing the way that ideas and knowledge pass from one person to another via books. I wished I could have gone on to Cornerhouse to see Rashid Rana but will have to save that for another time.

Then some very important business. Namely, barbecue. Our city recently became home to two new barbecue joints and after hearing good things from a number of people I headed over to Southern Eleven at Spinningfields. My first impressions weren't great. Too many hard shiny surfaces, which in addition to seeming uncomfortably trendy also meant it was loud. But we were able to sit on the patio. The staff were absolutely wonderful — they really took care of us. And the other thing I want to emphasize about this place is it's an amazing deal: low prices and big portions. We didn't leave feeling like we'd just been mugged, as is so often the case when dining out in Manchester.

I do love my barbecue, so I'm happy to report that the food was good. Pork belly ribs came with a brush-on pot of barbecue sauce and were nicely executed, though would have been better if a little more of the fat had been rendered on mine. Mac n' cheese was mighty fine. Onion rings and fries were both overseasoned; the first with chilli, the second with a superfluous combo of parmesan and truffle oil (and unfortunate that they were the pale, weedy kind instead of the skin-on, dark brown artisan variety that seem to be all the the rage in the USA these days.) Jalapeno cornbread tasted good but was a bit too fine and cakey in texture. And the Tennessee Rose cocktail I had was tall, pink, icy and flowery - just the drink for such a tropical evening. I forgot to take any pictures, but The Greedy Girl has just reviewed it as well and has some lovely pics on her site, so pop over there if looking at 'cue is what you wanna do.

NS Harsha Thought Mala image courtesy Asia Triennial Manchester

Ramsbottom Festival 2011: The Recap

2011-09-20T14:15:00.016Z

So I've just about recovered from the inaugural Ramsbottom Festival. Here's a little summary:

Rain factor: You have an outdoor music festival in Ramsbottom. In September. Of course it's going to rain. The question is, how much and when. This rain wasn't too bad - it came and went, it was a bit of a drag, but you could mostly ignore it. There was always a place to get out of it if you wanted to.There was no wading through mud. We even had a few hours of sun on Sunday.

Best in show: The Waterboys. It was the very last band of the festival, it was dark, cold and wet, but they still made it very possibly the rockingest Sunday night Ramsbottom has ever seen. Those guys are professionals. The encore of Fisherman's Blues had the crowd twirling like idiots and sent us all home smiling (and shivering):

Runners up: Cherry Ghost, The Travelling Band and Young Knives all turned in solid performances on Saturday, Capercaillie rocked on Sunday. Can a traditional Celtic band rock? The answer is yes.

Miss (Non)Congeniality award: Badly Drawn Boy. I've always been kindly disposed to the beardy one's music, but after seeing this performance I'm less kindly disposed. He started things off by having a hissy fit about the sound and finished up by grousing that he should have been the headliner. In between: a whole bunch of meh. Stay in Chorlton next year and knit yourself some new hats, dude.

Personal disappointment: Missing Steve Cropper Friday evening. It was very wet, but still.

Taste sensation: Salted Caramel and Peanut Butter ice cream on a toasted brioche from the wonder that is Ginger's Comfort Emporium (long may they reign.) Really freaking good.

Best non-live-music-related activity: Silent Disco. Lots of fun.

Unexpected impressive thing: Whalley Range All Stars "PIG" performed inside a specially-built pig. The play was ten minutes long and only ten people could watch it at once. The audience had to don curly tails and stick their heads right into ten holes along the pig's belly, so they looked like a line of piglets.

Best thing for kids: The bouncy pirate ship, apparently. I spent about two hours standing next to this handing a very polite teenage girl money while my daughter bounced. And bounced. And bounced. Lots of kids about on Sunday, not so many on rainy Saturday. And don't ferris wheels look cool at night?

Comfort Factor: Weather aside, the festival was a pretty comfortable place to hang out. The drinks were excellent and keenly priced - Outstanding Beers' very pleasant festival real ale at £2.50 for a reasonably sized pint, fancy shmancy cider for £3.50. I think they had some weird mixed-drink-in-a-bottle stuff going on too, but I didn't get involved in that. In short, a far sight better than the shockingly bad beer selection (Bud and Coors?? In plastic bottles? Really?) at the Manchester International Festival pavillion this summer. You got served quickly at the bar. The food vendors were good and again, nobody was ripping you off (£5 for a massive plate of tasty Tibetan Kitchen.) There were enough toilets, so you didn't spend hours in the loo queue, and they stayed reasonably clean. Thumbs up.

Best flavor of Rekorderlig Cider: Strawberry Lime. I know, me either.

Unexpected funny thing: The VIP area resembled a cattle market - a roped off, exposed-to-the elements plot with bare benches, about as far from the stage as it could be. I think I saw two people in there all weekend. That kind of sums up the festival's ethos nicely.

Hero of the day: Stripeyman. The tirelessly boogieing, permanently ecstatic painted fellow below will dance on in the memories of festivalgoers for many years to come. I'll have what he's having.

In summary: a very good time. Of course, I walked down the road to get there, was sensibly attired and got in for free, so admittedly it would have to be awful for me not to have enjoyed it. But it surpassed my expectations in pretty much every way (apart from the weather, sadly.) Hey, I'm looking forward to next year already.

All images Brian Connor (via Flickr.)

Ramsbottom Festival Sept 16-18 2011

2011-09-09T12:50:00.005Z

I don't want to be a smug, horrible person, but I've got to say it: Ramsbottom is pretty wonderful. I really do love living here. It's hard to keep this in mind at certain times (like when I ocasionally miss the last tram to Bury.) It's bloody miles away from the nearest (non-steam) train station. There's no decent bakery, no bookstore, and the town shuts down on Wednesday afternoons which is both quaint and annoying. And old-fashioned mill towns in the Pennines can be bleak places in the winter. But it's a beautiful place with an old-school community feeling, and I mostly love it.

So I realise I'm becoming almost insufferably happy to be living here now that the Ramsbottom Festival is about to kick off. It's a proper music festival, with camping and nice food and beer and DJing and kids' activities and multiple stages. And crucially, good music. I'd be excited about a festival like this starting anywere around Manchester. But to have it delivered virtually on my doorstep, a few days after my birthday, is like God's way of saying "sorry about that whole hurricane-and-vomit vacation, I've still got your back."

The festival takes place at the lovely Ramsbottom Cricket Club on 16-18 September. Bury Met, a real gem of a performing arts venue that we are extremely lucky to have right down the road, have programmed a weekend full of music with something for everyone. As with much of their programming the overall focus is on relaxed, sunshiney acoustic pop, folk, celtic and roots, with a welcome jolt of high-test indie and blues. The last supplied by Steve Cropper, Stax guitar legend. You know, Booker T and the MGs? Green Onions?

Indie fiends will be happy with The Young Knives, Cherry Ghost and Guillemots. Yup, it's pretty cool that a band as big as Guillemots is going to be playing at Ramsbottom Cricket Club.

Folkier folks should come on Sunday, when The Waterboys headline and the lineup includes Celtic band Capercaille, led by glorious singer Karen Matheson

...and ahab, amusingly identified as a "German funeral doom trio" in their Spotify bio:

There's a fair number of performers from Manchester, but thankfully there's an emphasis on quality local talent. And world class talent that just happens to live here, like Chorlton's own Badly Drawn Boy. The beardy one always puts on a good show, and he doesn't have far to come for this one. I'm hoping he'll play his near-as-dammit Smiths cover "I saw you walk away." Which I would find totally objectionable if it wasn't so good.

Other Mancunian standouts include raspy-voiced Kirsty Almeida and her charmingly ramshackle band...

...and 6music frequent fliers The Travelling Band:

It's also good that they're serious about making this a family event, with reduced prices for kids, a creche, rides and children's activities. If I were coming from Manchester, I'd take the East Lancs Railway from Bury and arrive in style by steam train (the ELR station is just outside the entrance and they're doing cheap tickets for the day with parking at the stations in Bury and Rawtie). Definitely don't drive - parking is a nightmare here at the best of times. A bus and tram daysaver is the way to go from anywhere else in Greater Manchester - you get the tram to Bury and pick up the Rammy circular which runs every 10 minutes. Booking info here. See you there!

After the deluge

2011-09-06T12:30:00.004Z

Bad things tend to happen when I'm on holiday. I'll spare you the details of nightmares past, but let's just say it's a trend I've been trying to ignore for a few years. I mean, who wants to head off for vacation harbouring dark imaginings about what will happen this time?

What happened this time was that Hurricane Irene jumped out of the 24-hour-news cycle and bit us in the ass. We were staying at my dad's place in Waterbury, Vermont - safe, one would think, from the kind of extreme summer weather southerners are more accustomed to. But Irene took a path right up the east coast, through New York and all the way up into Vermont, where the mountain ranges that usually protect us from such dramatic storms made little difference. The worst flooding to hit the state since 1927 ensued : roads washed out, homes and businesses destroyed, power cuts, everything under a layer of toxic mud.

We can be thankful our family wasn't evacuated to sleep on cots in a church, only to wake up and find our house and all its contents destroyed, like a few people I know in Waterbury. Everyone was safe and dry in our house. We lost power for 24 hours, and yes, it was unfortunate that the power cut coincided with my eldest experiencing a barfing bug, but, well... and if our flight cancellation meant we had an extra week in Vermont, well, great! Except for the fact that we couldn't leave the house (yup, still barfing.) And we know we were lucky to get flights back to Manchester even a week later than the original departure date, it coulda been so much worse. Yes, even if the flights involved a hellish three-leg journey over 20 hours that will take several months to recover from and included inept and borderline rude airline staff, demonically tired toddlers and bumpy, endless circles in the air above Heathrow. Maybe we will have recovered by next summer. Or not? I may not go on holiday again until my children are old enough to drive.

But seriously, tiny Vermont, the most beautiful state in New England, on the Canadian border - yes, the state that most British people and indeed many Americans have never heard of - this state is in a bad state. And it's my home. I know folks there are doing all they can to help each other get through this, but it's come at a difficult time for so many people. If you can spare a little cash, send some their way.

Photo: downtown Waterbury, courtesy USA Today

Filey by Campervan

2011-07-26T09:17:00.009Z

I've been trying to get over to the North Yorkshire Coast for ages, but hadn't managed to in the many years I've lived here. It's just a hair too far away for a day trip with small children. But with a VW Campervan at my disposal thanks to the lovely people at Jolly Campervans in Huddersfield (who even dropped it off and picked it up at our house), it was at last within my reach. And so it was that me and my partner packed the two kids - and the unbelievable volume of brightly coloured kid-and-baby gear even a weekend trip requires - into the van and headed East for a long weekend. Were we crazy to be taking a 3 year old and a 10-month old camping? Hmmm.

While Mancunians traditionally go to the seaside towns of Lancashire and North Wales for their summer holidays, my resident Yorkshireman informs me that the North Yorks coast becomes like Leeds-on-Sea in summertime. For the simple reason that it was almost exactly due East of where we live, we opted for Filey, a small town near Scarborough and this was luckily a fantastic choice. We stopped off at Castle Howard for lunch (lush farm shop, very cool adventure playground) and rolled into the campsite by late afternoon. Filey Brigg Caravan Park is run by the council, tidy and spacious with sea views, and a five-minute walk from the unspoiled beach and the tidepools and rock formations of the Brigg. The small seafront is council-owned too, and maybe that's why it had quite an old fashioned feel to it. That and the fishing boats.Everything was scrupulously clean and family-oriented with a small funfair and a few stalls selling rock and fresh seafood. I even ate cockles, which is apparently an important part of the traditional seaside holiday here in the UK. The last time I encountered cockles it was in the small hours at the sadly defunct Malt and Hops in Chorley, when I was utterly amazed to learn that anyone would try to sell drunk people cold sea creatures in styrofoam pots. But you know, they were great.

We also ate some excellent fish and chips at The Brown Room in Filey town, which still uses dripping to cook their chips in like many of the chippies along this coast. It really does make a difference - they were much crispier than normal. The chips were noticeably better. But my attempts to order a fish muffin met with utter failure.

The van itself was beautiful. It had a name: The Baron, because Jolly Campervans names all their vans after characters on Danger Mouse. The Baron was fresh off the boat from Brazil, where they still make these beauties, but had been converted to left-hand drive and thoughtfully packed full of modern conveniences like digital radio, proper coffee and Fox's Biscuits. Traveling by VW bus is a wonderful way to see the world. You can't go to fast, so secondary roads are the way to go, and you really get a chance to look around and get a sense of the place you're driving through. And it's strangely liberating to be traveling in the place you're going to be sleeping in.

I'd never stayed in a campervan before, I thought it would be cramped, but once we figured out how to set up the massive canopy tent (essentially a large canvas room that fits on to the side) we had plenty of space. I was charmed by the cunning way everything fits together so neatly - the tiny but incredibly handy kitchen, the ingenious compartments, the pop-up cathedral ceiling. Not so charming: spending several hours lying in a bed located directly under a screaming, teething baby. But that can hardly be considered a design fault. Eventually, the little dear calmed down and nodded off, and the second night went much more smoothly. My eldest daughter is already clamoring for another trip in The Baron. Next time maybe Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay? I'm definitely up for it - once teething is safely behind us.

#MIF11: Doctor Dee

2011-07-10T16:11:00.005Z

Doctor Dee was a grand, blazing spectacle. On that level it was extraordinarily successful; it was good fun to watch. The staging, sets and costumes were ingenious and beautiful. From the opening moments, when Scooby the raven flew from the back of the hall for his star turn, you felt that this was going to be something really different. And it was. The way that projections were used, the cunning tricks with books, paper and balloons, the choreography and the curving beaked raven masks... it was mesmerising, in the way that watching a series of beautiful, evocative tableaux can be hypnotic.

But once you'd had your fill of spectacle, there wasn't much else on offer. For me, Doctor Dee failed on the most basic level: as a story. It lacked heart. It lacked developed characters and anything resembling a proper narrative. (Albarn has apparently said it's closer to masque than an opera, which may be an effort to excuse the lack of narrative structure, but the masque isn't a form that we know much about these days so that doesn't really mean anything to me.)

I was beyond excited to see this. It's hard to imagine a more interesting subject for an opera than Dee, who I'd read lots of mysterious things about over the years. The man was supposedly the model for both Faust and Prospero, and seems to be the closest thing to an actual magician we've ever had.

Yet with all that Dee supposedly did and was, the best they could come up with was a vague interaction with the court of Elizabeth, some noodling about with scrying bowls and blindfolds, with it all culminating in the wife swapping incident that we're supposed to believe was his downfall? Sorry, but I need more than that to work with. It felt half-baked; rushed and under-researched, and as if it was missing an experienced writer's guiding hand. I can't help but wonder how different it might have been if Alan Moore hadn't left the project early on. If reports that Moore was the one who had the idea to do an opera about Dee are true (and it certainly sounds like the kind of subject he'd pick) then his participation would have been fairly essential to the whole thing coming off well.

One of the most crushing errors of judgment here has to do with the way Dee himself is presented. He never sings, which makes him a curiously inert presence on stage. Albarn sings Dee's part (sort of) and also that of a narrator at the same time, perched above the actors like a leather-jacketed angel. The effect gives us the impression that Dee is not someone who does things, as such a powerful and illustrious man must have been, but is someone that things happen to. He's one of the weakest characters in a pretty nebulous and weak bunch; only Walsingham (in tremendously cool stilts) and unearthly-voiced medium Edward Kelley make any impression at all. But all are secondary to Albarn, who opens and closes things and is at the forefront even when he's not in the spotlight, somehow.

I have a lot of time for Damon Albarn. I like his music and he always seems like a good guy in interviews. I'm not even going to take issue with his "Englishness" obsession, which I don't really get. But I mostly wished he would have butted out a bit more here. I suppose that wouldn't necessarily appeal to the same audience, would it? His fans want to see him. But the ENO is hardly a backing band. They did astonishingly well with what they were given. The music for Doctor Dee reminded me a lot of what I'd heard of The Good, The Bad and The Queen; mournful and plonky but charming in a vague sort of way. It had a few soaring moments, but the music didn't feel very connected to what was happening on stage. The lyrics Albarn sang seemed foggy and remote from the story they were meant to be amplifying. Rather than clarifying or commenting on the action, they somehow abstracted things further.

So, I didn't like it. It must be pointed out that I seemed to be in the minority. Most of the audience was on their feet cheering themselves hoarse at the end. Go figure. For me it was a triumph of style for sure, but not so much on the substance. And you need both.

#MIF11: Bjork's Biophilia

2011-07-09T13:51:00.004Z

So this turned out to be one of those general admission, crick in the neck gigs where you really need to get their early. Trouble was, I didn't, and as a result I stood in the back of a crowd of tall men catching glimpses of Bjork between heads. My own fault. It was a proscenium gig in a big old warehouse, so I don't know what I was expecting. Never mind. It is a mark of how good this performance was that I didn't really even care that I couldn't see much of Bjork. This is because the projections were a whole show in themselves, and because there was so much happening with the music that not being able to see was kind of sensory blessing ( a theory I'm looking to test further at Amadou et Mariam next week). I didn't get to see any of those instruments she famously made herself for these gigs. But I did get to see her costume, a ruffley blue number topped by a big red afro wig with what appeared to be a chinstrap. Must have been devilishly hot.

On first listen the new music was wonderful, with a crystalline, fractured beauty to it. I think her new songs were about things like DNA, cosmology, the origin of life, and viruses, but I'm not quite sure; parsing her lyrics live is a challenge. Nobody sounds like Bjork, her voice can transform itself from a small, feline, warm creature to an avenging banshee howl in a few heartbeats.

The Icelandic women's choir, Graduale Nobili, provided an incredible texture to proceedings, like the layers of sound created through overdubbing in production but done live. I've never heard an Icelandic choir before so I don't have much to compare it to, but their sound had a stark, Eastern European dissonance to it. The choreography added a nice element to the show. Sometimes they jammed on their own, swinging loopily in their glittery choir robes, other times they loomed over Bjork like angry maenads. After seeing them perform after the show in Albert Square, I'd definitely be up for seeing the choir on their own (they're playing at St. Phillip's on July 14.)

The performance must have taken a lot out of Bjork. It was clear she threw every ounce of herself into it. And it's an intense experience for the audience too, taking all that in. So it was a great decision to end it with a raved-up version of Declare Independence, in which audience and performers joined in for a joyous jam, a needed release of energy after all that intensity. We all left smiling.

Image from Bjork Spain

#MIF11: Sinead O'Connor

2011-07-05T13:32:00.003Z

As we filed out of the venue in Albert Square, I was walking closely behind a white-haired rather posh sounding gentleman. "The music was smashing," he remarked to his companion. "But of course, she's a complete crackpot."

This nicely sums up what most people think of Sinead O' Connor. (If they think of her at all, and judging by the blank expressions on the twentysomethings round my pavilion table when I announced I was off to see Sinead, they increasingly don't.) Nice songs, but completely Dagenham. She tore up a picture of the pope on telly, for chrissakes. In the 80s she was a beautiful young woman with a stunning voice, but she shaved her head and wore shapeless clothes and made a habit of saying angry things that made people uncomfortable. Then she went all religious and wanted to sing a lot of songs based on scripture, didn't she? The record industry loves it when you do that.

This was all in the background when I went to see Sinead O'Connor last weekend. The woman who took the stage was simply dressed and seemed nervous. There was a strange dynamic between her and her backing band which became clear when she told us she'd only met them the week before. There was a white cotton banner embroidered in rasta colours with the word "Joseph" draped from her music stand, and a piece of paper facing her instructed her to BREATHE. She periodically jumped into kind of a nervous boxer bounce.

Her set was a nice combination of new and old. I'd heard she didn't perform old songs any more, but The Emperor's New Clothes was one of the first she played, followed by many of her old hits. Her acappella version of I am stretched on your grave raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Beautiful, unearthly and harrowing. For me, that alone would have been worth the price of admission.

But her newer songs, most of which I had never heard, were lovely; her voice is lower than it used to be but just as magnificent, and her songwriting skills are still very much in effect. I'm not a religious person, but I found her songs from the Theology album touching, and wondered why sacred music is so little tolerated in the world of rock and roll, where ironic detatchment often seems to be the default setting. Songs from her forthcoming album, Home, also went down well, as did a reggae cover of Buju Banton's Untold Stories. The only place where she lost me a bit was a long sermonizing number called What is a real VIP?, which could have done with some editing.

She has a salty sense of humor, which was increasingly in evidence as the show went on, and curses like a sailor. I found this mostly funny, even later on when she had a nerve-induced attack of turrets - yes, she's rough around the edges, but she seems like a real person, a far cry from the standard plastic persona of the musician on display. On the strength of this performance, I'll certainly be giving her new music a listen.

Introducing: The Real Story

2011-07-01T11:57:00.005Z

Hooray! I'm delighted to be able to share the details about Openstories' new project, The Real Story. So here's the deal:

The Real Story is a celebration of creative nonfiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with fiction. Look, we like making stuff up as much as anyone else does, but we’re more excited about the creative possibilities of telling the truth. We love true stories (even mostly true stories), personal essays, memoirs, diaries, sketches and literary journalism. After all, life is much stranger than fiction.

We’re kicking things off this summer with a writing competition. We are inviting people to submit unpublished personal essays or brief memoirs of 2,000 words or less. The topic can be anything – your childhood, travels, reflections on life, a person you have loved – as long as it tells us a compelling story from your point of view.

The best submissions will be published alongside specially commissioned photographic portraits of the writers on a new website to be launched in October at the Manchester Literature Festival 2011, and some of the winning writers will be asked to read their pieces live during the festival.

To enter, email your submission as a double-spaced Word document to info@openstories.org with “Real Story submission” in the subject line. Please include your full name and contact details and a 50-word biography. All submissions must be received no later than August 27 2011. We regret that we cannot consider entries from outside the UK.

If you’d like to learn more about using your own experiences as the basis for nonfiction writing, we’re holding a primer workshop, Life Writing Bootcamp, at Manchester City Library on Saturday July 30 from 11am to 4pm, with writer and Rainy City Stories editor Kate Feld. The workshop will cover developing and writing personal essays, memoirs, and first-person blogs. The cost is £25 (£20 concessions). Places are limited. To book call 01706 823264 (this is now the correct number, there was a typo before) or email info@openstories.org. See you there.

Literary Events Summer 2011

2011-06-21T13:14:00.004Z

Some more literary happenings flitting through the transom of my mind:

I'm going to be moderating an event for Creative Trafford called Approaching Agents and Publishers on Monday June 27, from 1-4pm at The Waterside in Sale. It's a rare opportunity to talk to some very well known agents and editors (John Jarrold, Sophie Buchan and Ollie Munson) who will be coming up from London specifically for this event. We'll be covering everything from how to prepare your manuscript to the latest trends in publishing; it's going to be a fantastic opportunity for North West writers who are serious about getting their work published. There's a limited number of tickets (£8/6)and they're going fast, so booking soon is recommended on 0161 912 5616.

A couple of calls for submissions to mention here: Comma Press is looking for stories for its new collection, Reveal (deadline July 1st) and CRESC and the centre for New Writing are running a competition, Framing the City, for the best creative writing that reflects change in the city of Manchester (deadline August 6).

Finally, I'm a little sad to say that submissions are now closed for Rainy City Stories, the website I edit that published new writing linked to locations in Manchester on a map of the city. It's been lots of fun and I'm proud of all the amazing writing we've published over the last two years, much of it from new writers. But it's time for me and my partners in the organisation that runs RCS, Openstories (Chris Horkan of Hey! Manchester/Oh Digital fame, and Cathy Bolton, director of Manchester Literature Festival) to turn our attention to our next project, The Real Story. Details on that one coming very soon...

Spring literary happenings

2011-05-09T10:38:00.001Z

Word people: There are so many great events for writers and readers floating around in Manchester at the moment it's really hard to keep up. Here are a few particularly good things on the horizon:

The shiny new International Anthony Burgess Centre has an appealingly eclectic series of events up and running, including Elemental Opera's performance of the complete Mahler Song Cycle over two nights, and poet August Kleinzahler, as well as literary salons, book launches and workshops. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Amid all the gloom and doom following the announcement of the Arts Council's Portfolio funding roster (RIP Greenroom, fingers crossed for Castlefield Gallery, Litfest and folly) there was a bright spot for Manchester literary folk: Comma Press, Literature Northwest and Madlab joined forces and won funding to create a new writers' centre at the Edge Street space. Look out for more events like their upcoming short story writing workshop.

Chorlton Arts Festival has a couple of good literary events on tap: Womens' writing website For Books' Sake is coming to town for a one-off event Friday 20th May at Lloyds Hotel. Books & Blues, a free celebration of the famous and forgotten female blues voices throughout the ages, will feature spoken word, storytelling and live music plus a bookswap booth and prize giveaways. On Thurs 26 May, Flash Mob Literary Salon will feature readings from the writer-organisers of the super short writing competition (Sarah-Clare Conlon, Ian Carrington, Tom Mason, David Hartley and Benjamin Judge) as well as the reading of the winning entries, wordgames and silliness and a special guest appearance by Nik Perring, author of micro fiction collection Not So Perfect.

There's a fanzine convention happening at the lovely Victoria Baths on May 14, with stalls featuring self-published books and zines to browse, talks, a film showing and workshops. To have a stall on the day, either as an individual zine or group of friends, costs £10 (email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury AT googlemail.com.)

Station Stories is a site specific live literature promenade event using digital technology and live improvised electronic sound. Six writers (Jenn Ashworth, Tom Fletcher, David Gaffney, Tom Jenks, Nicholas Royle and Peter Wild) will read live their specially commissioned stories inspired by the station and the people who use it and work there. Audiences are linked to the writers' microphones by wireless headsets, so they can hear them while wandering around the station. It's a collaboration between Manchester Literature Festival, Bury Text Festival and the Hamilton Project, and takes place 19-21 May.

May in Manchester

2011-05-02T15:10:00.015Z

Hello friends. Oh, it's lovely to be back in the cosy confines of blogger. I've been unable to get on here and tell you about cool stuff happening in Manchester because I've been busy with my new job, which is ... telling people about cool stuff happening in Manchester. Now I have even more of you emailing me with cool stuff to tell everybody about, but less time to get that much-sought-after information out of my inbox and on here. So if you've emailed me about something supercool you're doing lately but found me strangely unresponsive, this is probably why. I'm sorry. I'd like to say this situation will improve. But I cannot.

Anyhoo. The ever-so-cuddly Adam Buxton, half of the insane genius comedy duo Adam & Joe, is coming to Manchester May 18 to introduce a screening of the BFI's BUG: The Evolution of Music Video at the Zion Arts Centre in Hulme. If you've never heard Adam & Joe (!!!) stop whatever you're doing and go check out their amazing 6Music show here. This event is part of the Diesel School of Island Life programme, which also includes interesting things like wild food foraging May 14 at Fletcher Moss Park and a talk on sloganeering at Cornerhouse May 30, as well as the more typical major brand promotion fare of DJ nights at the Deaf. To sign up to get tickets, go here.

Last spotted in Victorian London,
The Burlington Fine Arts Club will be resurrected as a members-only, BYOB pop up social space during the Manchester International Festival. It's an effort to give local artists a space to exhibit, network, discuss ideas and a place for everyone to engage with Manchester’s grassroots contemporary art scene. Each section will be curated by a selected artist, DIY collective or independent gallery... and if you're interested in doing one of these residences, today's the last day to apply, so get on it.

FutureEverything is almost upon us. There's always some good stuff on but I'm hearing especially good things about the art and music programmes this year. If wishes were horses, I'd be driving my landau over to see On Ways to Disappear Without Leaving a Trace (pictured above) 65daysofstatic soundtrack Silent Running, Warpaint and Beach House. I have even remembered not to call it Futuresonic approximately 50 percent of the time I've referred to it in conversation - a marked improvement over last year for me. If you're a a blogger covering the festival this year, they're asking for people to send content to their portal here.

Another one for the Manchester-based arts and culture bloggers: Opera North are inviting a few bloggers to attend an upcoming production of Carmen at The Lowry and write it up, following a successful similar event in Leeds. It will be an ‘access some areas’ event with a backstage tour, the chance to have a meet and greet with cast members and pre-show. It happens Friday May 20 at 5:30, and if you're interested email julia.lumley AT operanorth.co.uk

Manchester Blogmeet March 8

2011-02-15T12:09:00.007Z

The next Manchester blogmeet will be happening Tuesday March 8, from 6:30 to 8:30 at Common on Edge Street. As usual, all Manchester-area bloggers are welcome to come along, schmooze with your kindred, and drink some fine beverages courtesy of our generous sponsor.

This particular blogmeet will be sponsored by leather jacket website I Love 2 Love, which we'll be hearing a bit more about at the event. Thanks for your support, guys.

The blogmeet will be held in the Kestrel Suite at Common, which is the room to the back and the right of the area with the booths. No need to rsvp or book a place, just come along. Don't be shy, we're a friendly bunch. We will force you to wear a non-ironic nametag, however. You've been warned.

Common image Tim France, courtesy of Common

New blogs: The Okasional Edition

2011-01-11T10:14:00.011Z

Okay, it's been a while, so I've got loads of new blogs for your delectation:

Back in December I wasn't quick enough to get to the latest incarnation of the Okasional Cafe, the itinerant venue that has been periodically squatting in vacant buildings around the city for as long as I lived in Manchester and probably much longer (The photo above was taken on Charles Street). If you don't want to miss the next one, keep an eye on the Okasional Cafe blog.

One of the most hotly anticipated openings of 2011 (at least at my house) is Common's new venture, Port Street Beer House. I've been watching thirstily as it takes shape on the beer house blog. Their about page says it all: "For those of you enthused by the world of beer we hope to provide a warm comfortable environment for you to sit back and appreciate the ever expanding world of craft brewing." We're enthused! And it's open now.

Once again, we've got plenty of new writers' blogs, including little bird stories, Tupenny Tales, Troubleau, Urban Masterplan Working Party, and blogs from writers Claire Massey (formerly of the Fairy Tale Cupboard), Hayley Flynn and my MancSpecFic comrade Craig Pay. Also, bricolage and be, the culturally-oriented blog of Dr. Beccy Kennedy.

Bloggers Ben Judge and Clare Conlon have only gone and started a new blog where you can ask them anything and they have to find, figure out or make up the answer. Go on, you know you want to.

Jennifer Grace Cook moved here from the states for one reason: to find a man. You can read all about her quest at A Girl's Guide to a Noble Manchester. Other new additions to the personal blogroll: Tales from the tower and Mad Balance Plus a stray food blog, Northern Food, that got lost on the way to my last post.

Others: Newsicmoos is music news of the electronic variety. School Boy Couture is about gadgets and design.Plastic Circles is all about the design of music packaging. Screen 150 is short and snappy movie reviews (150 words, natch) and welcomes your contribution. Happy reading.

Fress to impress

2011-01-03T15:05:00.006Z

Aloha, shalom and Happy New Year. I'm back from my maternal sabbatical to return to regular, or at least, regularly intermittent, blogging service. And I'm here to talk about food.

First, I'd like to call your attention to the resurgence of the foodie blogging scene in Manchester. Erstwhile Mancunian Foodie Sarah has cooked up a tasty little google map with all the food bloggers in the north of England plotted on it. Thanks Sarah! I'm adding the foodie bloggers in the Manchester area to my blogroll - quite a haul including Denton duo Eat Out Eat In, Stockport's Cookbook goodness, Foodographic in Chorlton and Mancfoodian.

A bit more digging revealed a few more new additions to the food blogging category: buttered crumpet, beccabakescakes and curry fiends Flavours of Manchester. Also, I'm not sure if The Greedy Girl is based in Manchester or just a frequent visitor to our delicious city, but I'm adding her anyway. Missed anyone? Let me know.

In other foodie news, the supper club trend hasn't missed Manchester, but most of the action has been taking place in twitterland. First, Gastro Club has been making a few fressers of my acquaintance very happy indeed. If you haven't heard about it before (you might have read this excellent summary on Inside the M60) it's a growing group of hungry folk who meet on the second Tuesday of the month for a themed dinner at a city restaurant. Some nice photos of past events here including the picture above by Samscam.

It was also on twitter that I also heard about Spice Club, a monthly Indian supperclub run by Monica from her Manchester home. She blogs about cooking at Monica's Spice Diary. Nice to have some off-menu culinary action in the city. More please.

Meanwhile, in Manchester...

2010-09-25T10:38:00.006Z

Hello. Goodness, there's all sorts of fascinating and fun things going on in our city at the moment. I may have dropped out of society into a strange, semi-darkened world of milk, muslins and back-to-back episodes of House, but the rest of you guys are still out there doing cool stuff and plotting interesting events that I can't go to. Damn you all.

This cultural bounty really comes as no surprise: after all, it's F-bomb time. No, not that kind of F-bomb. October is when the Festival bomb lands on Manchester, dropping the likes of the Literature Festival, Science Festival, Food and Drink Festival and Comedy Festival on us within a few short weeks. Plus this year we get AND too. Usually I pick out a few highlights from each one but as this would only depress me, you're on your own this year (Go See This and Creative Tourist should be able to help with some inspiration.)

And speaking of Creative Tourist, The Manchester Weekender - their bountiful smorgasboard of cultural goodness - takes over the town this weekend. Go sort yourself out here.

I'm also very disappointed to be missing A Haunting of Nightjars, readings organised by author/publisher Nicholas Royle as part of the Didsbury Arts Festival. In keeping with the Nightjar Press flavor, expect dark & disturbing readings from Conrad Williams, Claire Massey, Stephen McGeagh, Tom Fletcher, Graeme Shimmin, Socrates Adams-Florou and Terri Lucas. They've just published two new chapbooks as well, which I look forward to reading. The event takes place this Wednesday evening from 7-9pm at Northern Lawn Tennis Club, Palatine Road, West Didsbury. It's free.

Also, if you love The Wicker Man like I do (and of course you do), you'll want to check out The Lowry's brilliant Sing-a-long-a Wickerman screening Saturday Oct 9.

Finally, I have been observing with great satisfaction the lush growth of charity calendar project Beards of Manchester, after hearing about it at the slightly mad idea stage from the prodigiously bearded Chris of Mancubist a few months back. Go check it out and appreciate some 200 fine examples of the tonsorial achievement that lives among us. The launch party is at Common Oct 21.

A new arrival

2010-08-26T12:49:00.004Z

Big news! Just to let y'all know, my daughter Bella arrived this weekend, so I'll be taking a break from blogging for a while. So if you're wondering why I haven't responded to your fabulously interesting email/invite/request this is probably why.

Also, before I forget, I've splashed out on one of those custom urls in honour of my blog's 5th birthday. Check it out: I'm a dot com, me. Next year I want to get some of those neon undercar lights, or maybe some zebra skin upholstery. Anyway, please adjust your feed readers accordingly. See you later.

Happy 5th Birthday Manchizzle

2010-08-18T12:09:00.006Z

Hard as it is for me to believe, this blog marks its 5th birthday this week. How the hell did that happen? Five is OLD for a blog. Serious greying temples n' gravitas time.

Makes me think about how much this city has changed in that time - the pound store from my first post isn't there anymore - and how my relationship to it has evolved. Back then I was still a fresh-faced relatively new arrival to Manchester (even though I actually lived on the far end of Chorley.) Now I live in Greater Manchester and know it much better, but knowing the city better has, somehow, deepened my curiosity about it. I'm still fascinated by Manchester and I still love blogging and meeting other people around here who do too, people I have found to be disproportionately funny, friendly and interesting to talk to.

So, basically, thanks for reading. Here's to the next five years...

New books: short shorts, werewolves and babies

2010-08-06T10:18:00.012Z

The three new Manchester books this go-round have very little in common. If they were people, you'd definitely never catch them at the same party. But they're all good in their own very different ways.

First up is Nik Perring's book of short stories. Not So Perfect (Roast), is a little thing, a pint-sized but reassuringly thick book. The stories are also on the more diminutive side of short, but pack a lot of punch into their smaller word counts. One of them, The Angel in the Car Park, first appeared in Rainy City Stories, the Manchester creative writing website I edit, so I was already a fan of Nik's writing. And, as expected, I really enjoyed the book, full of offbeat characters and stripped-down, almost anecdotal narratives that are like short stories boiled down to their most concentrated essence.

And now for something completely different:

Tom Fletcher's book The Leaping (Quercus). It starts out among a gang of friends who share a house in Manchester and work at a mind-numbing call centre, living out their post-uni lives in scenes that'll be very familiar to many of the readers of this blog. Then the action moves up to The Lakes, and that's when things get very weird indeed. Yes, this is a werewolf novel, and a very good one too. It scared the bejeezus out of me, probably because Fletcher never resorts to schlocky horror gimmicks but approaches the material in a new way. It's hard to explain, but if my experience is anything to go by the book unravels into your head like some kind of psychedelic trip. It gets under your skin and creates an altered reality, a real sense of otherness and a way of life that is utterly alien and completely convincing.

Sheesh, I'm getting scared just remembering reading that book. So let's move swiftly from freaky psychedelic werewolves to babies. Yes, babies. Manchester babies, to be more specific, as the third book I want to recommend is the new edition of Babies in the City, Manchester's own where-to-go-and-what-to-do guide for Mancunian childwranglers. Their first book has been indispensable since my daughter's arrival a couple of years ago, and the revised edition has thoughtfully added in more options that will appeal to older kids.

It's all here: obscure-but-cool museums on the fringes of Greater Manchester, parks and walks, indoor play areas, classes, kid-friendly eats in the city centre, baby-friendly movie screenings... the list goes on. Only occasionally do I disagree with the reviews of the writers, and mainly because I think I'm a lot more picky about food than they are (yes, Heaton Park cafe, I'm looking at you.) But that's really my only small gripe. If you know someone with a new baby, this is an ideal present.

New blogs: The Mangle Street edition

2010-08-03T10:43:00.008Z

Hey, it's new Manchester blog time. First off, I have whole heap of new writing blogs to add. Seriously, a lot. Check this out: Write in for Writing's Sake is an interesting use of the tumblr format to host an online writing group. And Figs Might Leaf is a short story blog. And Manchester-based Fantasy and SF author Andy Remic has a blog here. And Khmer Rouge Strippergram is a joint Mancunian-Irish humor blog. Other Manchester writing blogs: The Paper Face Girl and Something Every Day. Oh, and Potwatch: Observations of a Kitchen Porter. In verse. You don't see that every day, eh?

Onto the city and neighbourhood section, where Manculiar is a new blog about the city's past, present and future, and has turned up some very interesting stuff. mightaswell is exploring the city and poking her nose into all sorts of odd corners. There's plenty more fascinating reading over at Manchester's Radical History. And Hulme seems to have some new hyperlocal action with Best of Hulme.

Mediawatchers will be interested to hear about the MediaCityUK Blog, which "delivers the latest news, views and rumours about the MediaCityUK development in Salford Quays, Manchester - entirely independently and unofficially."

On the arts and culture tip, Andy Brydon writes Curated Place,"A blog trying to capture, critique, explain and explore the meeting points of culture, tech, art, places and people in a world that has gone beyond the museum." A couple more new arts and culture blogs: fellow Rammy-ites Fishink and Pinnikity, who both make stuff. And there's a new fashion blog: Pastime Bliss.

Music-wise, Richard H-J's blog an appropriate response to reality is mainly video-based (music and other stuff.) Bad Cover Versions, on the other hand, is pretty self-explanatory.

The photo above is from this week's new photoblog. Being a former New Yorker in Mancunian exile, you know I love photoblog Manchester is Not New York. Those fire escapes are something you don't notice at all when you live in NYC, so I was almost surprised how taken with them visiting Brits are (someone I know returned from a trip to NYC with hundreds of fire escape photos.) And who knew the Northern Quarter had so many of them? This particularly ornate example is from the corner of Dale Street and the delightfully-named Mangle Street.

And if anyone wanted to get to but missed our Manchester blogmeet last week, I'm sorry for you. It was really great. Seriously enjoyable. The inimitable Fat Roland has an exhaustive (and slightly spooky) round up on his blog here. Many thanks again to the folks from The Lowry for coming and telling us all about their Spencer Tunick exhibition and buying us beer. And also thanks to the fine people at Common, who have a way with the taps and whose halloumi and felafel kebab is a thing of awesome beauty.

Stay tuned for news of another blogmeet in the Autumn.

Manchester Blogmeet July 27

2010-07-07T14:58:00.004Z

Mark your calendars: The Manchester summer blogmeet will be happening Tuesday July 27 from 6-8pm at Common, and I'm very happy to tell you that the event will be sponsored by The Lowry, in celebration of their current exhibition, Everyday People: Spencer Tunick at The Lowry (on until 26 September, free entry). One of their curators will be there in person to talk briefly about Spencer's compelling photographs - and just what it was like to work with 1,000 naked people in several secret locations across Salford and Manchester.*

Come along and enjoy a drink, a spot of culture and the conversation of your fellow bloggers. All Manchester-area bloggers welcome. Common is the apple-green coloured bar located on Edge Street in the Northern Quarter. I can personally recommend the root beer, though they have a fine array of beverages on offer as well as some tasty food in case you want to grab a bite. We'll be hanging in the Kestrel Suite, which is the new room to the right of the entrance. See you there.

*Clothing, however, is NOT optional for this event. Sorry!

(Photo: Everyday People: Spencer Tunick at The Lowry)

Bugged

2010-06-30T09:45:00.008Z

Shh. Keep your voice down. Do you see that woman writing in her notebook? No, don't turn around.

Yes, her. She's writing down everything we say.

I am not being paranoid. She's obviously warming up for Bugged, a national exercise in "creative eavesdropping" that takes place tomorrow.

Here's the deal: We all know writers are nosy parkers, right? And why shouldn't they be? You can't write real-sounding dialogue unless you study the real thing, and sometimes these illicit field recordings get appropriated for made-up stories. The Bugged project just legitimises an age-old process.

Writers are asked to write down what they overhear wherever they are, and then use the material as the basis of a piece of creative writing (poem, short story or flash fiction). Send it in to the Bugged people by August 15th and it could be published on their website or in an anthology alongside commissions from Daljit Nagra, David Gaffney and Jenn Ashworth, which is launching in October at our own Manchester Literature Festival and the Birmingham Book Festival. All the details are here. So get out and listen in.

Just, please, be discreet. It's not okay to ask people to speak up because you can't hear what they're saying. Or to throw them evil, surreptitious looks from behind your notebook, while snickering meaningfully to yourself. That kind of thing gives us writers a bad name.

(Illustration from Harriet The Spy, which you really should read if you haven't yet.)

Playing out

2010-06-22T10:31:00.008Z

I'm a huge fan of after hours parties in museums, and The Whitworth's Midsummer House Party looks set to be a cracker, with a houseful of music, poetry and crafty goodness courtesy of local promoters For Folk's Sake and Pull Yourself Together and the Manchester Craft Mafia. It's this Thursday, from 7:30 to 10:30pm.

The weather is gorgeous at the moment, so the timing couldn't be better for Parklover's handy guide to public parks and green spaces in the city centre. It's a really comprehensive look at all the options for summertime picnics/recreation/sprawling on the grass hidden away in the urban streetscape. Some great little-known spots on there I will definitely be checking out soon.

If you feel like getting outside by the water this weekend, join Manchester Modernist Society for Tales of the Riverbank, a group meander in search of nature in the heart of the city. They say: "Join us on an investigative journey to find out how life on the riverbank has evolved through changing times. How have architects and planners responded to the presence of elemental forces of nature in the city centre? Sarah’s walk will follow the River Irwell uncovering tales of ecological development in the urban environment." Meet up at 1pm outside Manchester Cathedral on Sunday 27th June.

And if getting into the water is more your thing, you might want to check out my piece for Creative Tourist about wild swimming spots near Manchester. If I've missed any, and I'm sure I have, please add your own favourite swimming places in the comments (and no, the Rochdale Canal doesn't count.)

The Life of the Mind

2010-06-08T11:17:00.007Z

Ideas are big news in Manchester at the moment. Sure, the city's universities are always hosting fascinating talks and lectures, but it can be difficult for the non-academic public to get involved in their events. Following on from FutureEverything's City Debate, it seems like there are plenty of interesting discussion-based events around or in the works, and this week I learned of a couple more that have been going for quite a while.

I saw something in Laura Barton's View from A Broad column this morning about Ladies who do Skepticism - a group I had never heard of before but whose existence I heartily applaud. They have meetings all over the country, at which crictical thinkers gather to discuss the appalling pseudoscience targeted at women (just open your nearest glossy mag to a random page). The Manchester group will be meeting for a luncheon outing this Saturday June 12 at 1pm - details here. And if you're a skeptic with a Y chromosome, you should check out the Greater Manchester Skeptics, who even do podcasts. I had no idea there were whole societies just for skeptical people. It seems uniquely English, though it probably isn't. But how cool.

Also new to me (via our great hyperlocal news blog Inside The M60), The Manchester Salon is a monthly discussion forum tackling current affairs questions such as the politics of football, how cities can best be developed, and the future of transport. The discusssions are led by experts and open to the public. The next one, Weds July 14, is about why crime novels are so popular. It's at Blackwell's Bookshop and there is a charge of £5 to attend.

Let's do launch: New Manchester websites

2010-06-03T12:26:00.012Z

The past few weeks have seen the launch of three long-anticipated sites that all aim to shake up the way Manchester's cultural life is represented online. I have written something for all of them, so I'm not exactly impartial or anything. But I think each has a lot to offer in its own way.

Following the formal lifting of election purdah (such a funny idea, that) first out of the starting gate was Visit Manchester with a bold approach that sets out a new model for city tourism websites. Built by magneticNorth, it's a dramatically different user experience, with continuous scrolling, invisible navigation and an open-door approach to content.

It would be fair to say that it has divided the city's digital folk. For my part, I'm a fan of the site's design. Of course, it has bugs that need to be worked out over time. I really love that they have incorporated so much social media content, and though its nigh-on impossible to ensure that only relevant tweets/photos end up there, VM is to be commended for relinquishing absolute control of what people say about Manchester on their own site. I wrote a little rundown of the city's cheap eats options for VM, and I'm happy that they used other bloggers' writing as well - hope that continues.

Next up was Creative Times, with a re-launch of the regional creative industry news site/print newsletter formerly run by the sadly-departed CIDS. Creative Times has been reborn in online-only format as a joint venture between The White Room consultancy, Cornerhouse and Fudge in Bolton. Edited by former Metro editor Chris Sharatt, the site looks good and has some interesting features (as well as a good amount of original multimedia content.)

It will be interesting to see how exactly it carves out its own identity alongside sites like How-Do and Creative Tourist that weren't around during its last incarnation; participation from the creative community will be key to its success. And if anyone was interested in the Manchester blog aggregator project I first posted about here a while back, you can read a bit more about it in my Creative Thinking column: Are blogs the future for arts coverage? (though I should point out that the aggregator we're working on won't just feature arts blogs, it'll have Manchester blogs on every subject.)

Finally, fresh out today is Go See This, the new what's on website from All About Audiences (them that used to be Arts About Manchester, who took on a new name following their designation as the regional audience development body in the NW). Now, I did quite a bit of work helping Editor Adam Comstive develop the content side of things, so there's no way I can even pretend to judge it in a disinterested way. It's a place where you can find out what's happening in the city's arts and cultural venues, plan outings, book tickets and get involved in a conversation about the arts in Manchester. We have needed something like this for, oh, about as long as I can remember, and I hope that it will prove extremely useful to anyone who wants to know what's happening in Manctown.

Also want to point you in the direction of the excellent Manchester Scenewipe, a smorgasboard of video from Manchester-based bands, and This is The Now, also from Visit Manchester but focusing solely on promoting live music in the city. It looks very nice indeed, but hope that content is going to keep getting updated as most of the stuff on the mainpage happened back in May.

New Blogs: The May 2010 edition

2010-05-28T10:28:00.002Z

In a town so small there's no escape from view is a blog about city centres, and often, Manchester's city centre, by Dan of PYT fame. "it is inspired by backstreets, lost architecture, broken windows and forgotten buildings." Some good photos on there.

Lazy Noggin is a new Manchester arts and culture blog. A nice post about Jesca Hoop, of whom I am also a fan, and the photography workshop that CityCo ran last weekend.

A new music blog: Come see the duck, written by Jonathan Hopkins.

Manchester filmmakers L'Institute Zoom have a very entertaining blog, Transmissive Episodes.

Ziggy Kinsella is a horror writer who maintains a blog about writing and other stuff called The Feckless Goblin. Writer Lydia Unworth blogs at getting over the moon.

Some new personal blogs: One husband, two kids (and lots of books), Joe the Dough and The Mobius Loop.

A new (mostly) political blog is Three Legged Cat, billed as the "embittered cynical mutterings of a politically marginal Manchester hack." Also, one new photo blog: Dark Adjusted Eye.

May have to invent a new category for Manchester Massages, which features "reviews, news and information on therapeutic massage, spa experiences and eco-spas in Manchester (and beyond...)" Another new sort of blog for Manchester: Makeup Savvy, which reviews beauty products.

The hyperlocal train just keeps on chugging along, and the latest Manchester nabe to get its own community happenings blog is Macclesfield: The Loop is narrowly focused on what's on there. There's also a paper edition which you can sign up to receive.

And yes, the photo above has nothing to do with any of these blogs. I usually try to use pictures from the blogs I'm writing about, but the photoblogs I have on today don't seem set up to share their photos easily. So I am using this random image of graffiti in Hulme that I have had in my computer for ages and have no idea where it came from. Both funny and appropriate given the debate about social housing on here recently...

The City Debate and the future of Manchester

2010-05-18T13:33:00.010Z

Hoo boy, is this a long post. But I had so much to say about FutureEverything’s City Debate last Friday, I just couldn’t restrain myself. For another perspective, I’ll point you in the direction of Inside The M60's coverage and blogger Sarah Hartley, who has a very interesting analysis. As a snotty aside, I also find it surprising that a serious debate about the future of Manchester with some pretty big bigshots held at Manchester Business School didn’t rate either coverage by the local press or participation from the city council (though Sir Howard Bernstein did record a video statement.) But what do I know?

Big props to FutureEverything for organising what was a very ambitious and largely successful event. The format was interesting, but I think there were simply too many people taking part. I'm sure this came out of a well-meaning desire to offer a really broad slate of views. And it was great that such a range of people were there. Unfortunately, having so many panelists made the event longer and slower to get down to brass tacks, as everyone read through their statements and responded to questions from a couple of specially-selected lead questioners. For me, it wasn’t until the questions were opened to the floor that things really got interesting.

Two big things I took away from the event: One is a growing sense of frustration from many of the people in the audience and even a few of us on the panel. For all the horn-tooting about the meteoric rise of the original modern city, the reality is that we’ve just seen a period of tremendous growth which seems to have completely passed by most of the people who live here, especially those in poorer outlying neighbourhoods. It was clear that that many of us would specifically like the people in charge to focus their innovating on making sure this doesn’t keep happening. Patsy Hodson of the Manchester Communication Academy currently being built in Harpurhey spoke especially well on this point, and she should know.

And the second is a sense that the wind is, at long last, shifting in the city. For years Manchester has been in thrall to property developers. But the boom is busted, and what we do in the future will be less about building and more about retrofitting. As a wise audience member pointed out, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Now that the cranes have stopped their seemingly-endless march across the city, let’s turn our attention to what we already have: acres of solid old industrial buildings and solid old housing that no-one’s using. And some of the housing isn’t even that old – I’d love to know how many of those new build “city living” flats are empty?

But many people are discovering that highly-marketed dream of city living ain’t all it's cracked up to be. As one CC resident pointed out at the debate: “I can get as many cappucinos as I want but I can’t find an NHS dentist.” Ever noticed a playground in the city centre? I haven’t. (But don’t get me started on park and green space provision in Manchester; we compare shamefully with every other major city I’ve ever lived in or visited. When is this going to become a priority?)

If you want to depress yourself, consider the number of long-term vacant housing units in the city (recently at more than 6,000 according to the MEN) alongside the waiting list for social housing in Manchester (this article in The Mule puts it at 23,000 a year ago). Then factor in all the houses and flats on the market people can’t afford to buy. Something isn’t working.

Meanwhile, commercial rents in the city centre are skyrocketing, and you know who can’t afford to pay them? The artists, inventors, writers, thinkers and makers who give this city its reputation for being a hub of innovation. We can’t all go and work in the Sharp Project. If the city really wants to encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation, how about fitting out some of these abandoned or derelict buildings as artist live/work spaces (see Islington Mill), community cultural/voluntary centres (Zion Arts), or technology workshops, places like MadLab which provide resources and networks as well as much-needed physical space in which digital/creative folks to do their thing.

I’m hopeful that good things will start to happen in this area. We are lucky in Manchester to have a progressive city council that has supported many innovative programmes in the past; bold ideas that often don’t get as much recognition as they should. What we need is for the city leaders to make this a priority, to devote money (even a little bit) and time and energy to these projects, to develop incentives for people to re-use. Wrangling in court with landlords to take possession of a derelict building for the common good, for example, isn’t glamorous work, but its becoming increasingly important work.

While they’re at it, they should have a think about some of the ideas that were bandied about during and after the debate: Green rooftops and vertical gardens growing food – reducing CO2 and hunger at the same time. Citywide free wifi (though I get the impression MDDA have already established that dog won’t hunt.) Developing the unloved canal network for a range of uses. Making Manchester really bike and pedestrian-friendly. And if something’s working well in another city – the free bikes or city-sanctioned artist squats of Paris, say – let’s not be shy about stealing those ideas.

And yes, I know it’s not that simple. I sure as hell don’t have all the answers to all the tough questions like where is the money going to come from and what if people don’t want to live/work in these old buildings and how much can the council actually do? I guess I’m just hoping we can start to talk about these things in a new way. And that this is a conversation we can all participate in.

(Photograph: E.O. Hoppe, Manchester 1925)

Leftovers

2010-05-13T14:59:00.008Z

A few interesting odds and ends:

Some Manchester writers have cooked up a tasty new web-based venture over at 'other' magazine. You can read new writing from various people, admire Nicholas Royle's 20-year-old collection of bread tags, and an annotated diagram of Socrates Adams-Florou's fridge (above). Plus, they're on Twitter. And this post about the absence of a UK independent lit scene has attracted 86 comments!

Not Manchester-based, but interesting all the same. The Literary Platform is a new website showcasing projects involving literature and technology. So if you like what we do over at Rainy City Stories, you might enjoy a browse.

TBA Magazine looks to be a new art webzine based in Manchester. Lovely website and some good lookin' content on there. No word on when issue 1 will be launching - will update this post when I have more info.

And I enjoyed the maiden issue of Things Happen, a fanzine about our fair city from the Manchester Municipal Design Corporation, a subsidiary group of MMU's DesignLab. Website coming soon and a second issue planned for this summer, if they can find a way to pick up the tab. You can find it at FutureEverything events.

Speculative fiction writing group

2010-05-12T13:02:00.004Z

I have helped organise a speculative fiction writing group tonight at MadLab on Edge Street. No, this doesn't mean the existence of the group itself is speculative (though it is, as this is our first meeting and I have no idea how the group will work. All I know is one person proposed the Turkey City workshop method on Twitter, which sounds scary, doesn't it?)

The group is for people who want to write and talk about writing speculative fiction, a broad category that includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream and stories that are just kind of weird. To my knowledge, there's never been a writing group specifically dealing with this kind of genre writing in town before. Though Manchester has a long and noble SF tradition.

Just to be clear, yes, this means I read science fiction. I've also been known to enjoy stories about cornershops with a pesky door into another dimension, and books which have werewolves as main characters or feature a chick in a lace-up bodice clutching a glowing blue sword on the cover.

You don't think I'm cool anymore, do you? I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Everyone welcome. MadLab tonight at 7pm.

FutureEverything and The City Debate

2010-05-11T09:50:00.008Z

I was delighted to be asked to take part in The City Debate. It's an interesting idea: assemble a big group of people who think about Manchester a lot and start an open conversation about what the future of the city should look like and the best way to get there. The festival describes it as "An ideas event for evangelists, cynics, digital artesans, policy makers, property magnates, media vultures, urban planners, you, and me."

Who else is going to be taking part? Sir Howard Bernstein (Manchester City Council) by video, Susan Woodward (Sharp Project), Roger Milburn (Arup), Mike Ryan (Manchester Digital), Dave Carter (Manchester Digital Development Agency), Lyn Barbour (Manchester City Council), Walt Crowson (Learning Skills Employment Network), Patsy Hodson (Manchester Communication Academy), Alice Morrison (NWVM), Nick Johnson (Urban Splash), Professor Alan Harding (Institute for Political & Economic Governance), Martin Carr (True North), Mike Emmerich (Commission for the New Economy), Colette Williams (Moss Side independent candidate), and Tim News (MIDAS). The BBC's Jenni Murray is going to be moderating.

Each of us had to write a statement summarising our views about where the city should be headed, and given the nature of my work I chose to focus on culture and creative industries. I'll post a link to it here when its online.

In the meantime I had to boil that statement down into a 140-character summary (that was fun) and I came up with this: "supporting small orgs, artists, writers + thinkers will ensure MCR's creative renaissance reaches beyond Salford Quays." Now I'm thinking going with revival instead of renaissance could've saved me a few characters. Ah well. You can check out what some of the other participants wrote on twitter by searching for #citydebate.

It's Friday, May 14 at Manchester Business School on Booth Street West from 3-5:30pm. Entry is free, but you have to book and tickets are limited. Come on down.

FutureEverything's full programme is online here. There's plenty going on all over the city, and the art strand has some especially interesting stuff planned this year.

(Photo by Mike Colvin via Wikimedia Commons)

Sounds from the Other City 2010

2010-04-29T10:32:00.007Z

Mayday... mayday. Sounds from the Other City is this Sunday. I will not be there as SFTOC involves standing around in hot, crowded rooms and watching other people get drunk, both profoundly un-fun ways to spend your time if you happen to be a pregnant woman. But you should go, of course. If you're looking for a rundown of the music on offer, head over to Creative Tourist, where Matthew Britton did us an excellent preview. This year, however, the homegrown Salford music festival has expanded its focus to include art and literature.

Box Office is an art installation at Salford Central station, a phantom ticket booth which will offer tickets to an intriguing assortment of one-off gigs, events and performances taking place across the city in a range of overlooked and under-loved spaces between 26th April and 2^nd May. It launches tonight with a little opening shindig from 5-7:45.

Paradox is a mash-up of live literature readings and music featuring the likes of Socrates Adams Flourou, Chris Killen, Thick Richard, Jackie Hagan and Frank Sidebottom. Watch out though, they might try to give you a flower if you go in there.

And take a gander at the SFTOC souvenir programme from the folks responsible for the Shrieking Violet zine (that's the cover up there). Pretty neat.

Manchester magazines, online and off

2010-04-19T13:04:00.013Z

Here's a long overdue roundup of new activity in Manchester's cultural media landscape. Some gigantic web launches lurk in the wings, but at the moment there' s some evidence that, at least on the smaller and more grassroots side of things, print is not entirely dead here.

There's encouraging action on the zine front. I should have heard about this one ages ago, as it's already pretty well established, but Pull Yourself Together is a music zine dedicated to the indiepop scene that's published every two months. They also have a nice sideline in gigs, and clubnights at Common. And they now have a web presence over here. Also in the zine and music business is Moon Printed Shadows, which is shortly launching a publication called Knick Knack featuring poetry and short stories from Manchester writers.

I got a chance to peruse the Salford Zine Library at Islington Mill the other day - some real gems in there, and its good to see someone taking responsibility for collecting and championing zines. If you make a zine, get in touch and send them a donation. They also have what appears to be every single edition of the long-departed City Life over there. That made for some pretty interesting reading.

In case anyone missed it, Words & Fixtures published an excellent list of Manchester magazines, fanzines and online publications that are open for creative writing submissions, as well as writers' groups - incredibly useful info for writers in our fair city.

Copywriter Tom Mason, who was responsible for November in Manchester, has a new web-based publishing project: 330 words "The concept behind 330 Words is simple. Take a photograph and let it inspire you towards a piece of fiction. Let your photograph form the foundation of your story. Choose your own genre and style. Keep the entire thing under 330 words." (Auto) Flash fiction?

Not to be confused with the previous, 3030 Magazine describes itself as "articles, reviews and stories aiming to get people in Manchester interacting. Fans of old-style documentation - written on paper. Free press out in early 2010." No information on when/where/how it is launching, though going by their Twitter activity they seem to be collecting submissions and doing a spot of matchmaking.

Now Then, the Sheffield arts and culture print magazine that planned to launch a Manchester edition this month has postponed the launch and will take a few months to regroup: "It is with sincere regret we write to inform you that, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to gather enough support from independent retailers, charities and community groups to print an edition of Now Then Manchester this month," they wrote on their blog today.

"This is not us giving up, but a postponement in order to create something which is sustainable on a monthly basis. We are all still hugely committed to seeing a magazine on the streets and in the cafes of Manchester, and to the task of informing people about their local independent artists, traders and politics," they say. They'll continue to publish content on the blog in the intervening period (props for including the word bombinated in their recent Magnetic Fields review.)

The Skinny, the Glasgow listings magazine that was planning a Manchester edition, has now reportedly shelved those plans. They started posting a bit of MCR content online, but stopped short of launching a print mag. Just like Time Out. That's right, we got stood up again. (sniff.) Come on, what's wrong with us? We deserve a what's on magazine just as much as anyone else does, dammit. Is it something we said?

Or is it the fact that everyone seems convinced that there isn't the local advertising market to support a print magazine in Manchester, to say nothing of the fact that we're in a recession, or that the entire model of financing print journalism by selling ads is crumbling before our eyes.

Oh yeah, well, okay. There is that.

(Illustration from Toothpaste for Dinner)

Malcolm Gladwell at The Lowry

2010-04-19T12:25:00.008Z

Canadian journalist, writer and professionally supersmart guy Malcolm Gladwell will be appearing at The Lowry May 11. The great-haired one cometh to promote his latest book, What the Dog Saw, a collection of pieces from The New Yorker, where he became a staff writer at the tender age of 33. His consistently great work on the magazine has established him as a master of the journalism of ideas.

So, okay, I'm a big fan of MG. His books, which include The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have become required reading for executives because of their useful applications in the business world, but they're recommended reading for anyone: fascinating, well-written and engaging books that make highly complicated ideas accessible. And I've heard that he's a good speaker, so I'm really looking forward to this rare appearance on our shores.

(Malcolm Gladwell drawing from Deadspin)

Three new books from Manchester

2010-04-14T13:06:00.010Z

I recently read Len Grant's Billy and Rolonde. It follows three socially excluded people - a junkie, an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe and a homeless alcoholic in their daily lives through a Manchester most of the people reading this probably wouldn't recognise. It was certainly new to me.

Both writing and photography are simple and direct, letting the people speak for themselves. The author is appealingly open about the setbacks he has throughout the project and the way that his relationship with the subjects changes over time as, inevitably, he becomes personally involved with them. Rather than trying to become invisible, he lets us see him engaged in the work of trying to tell these stories. This tactic can easily backfire, but here it works.

It's hard not to like Len Grant as a narrator, he seems honest and rarely gets preachy - facts and statistics are offered in an almost offhand manner, when they come up in the story, and are all the more powerful without the usual window dressing. And it's hard not to like each of his subjects, regular people in difficult situations who have done a brave and generous thing by allowing him, and us, this degree of access into their lives.

The book itself is a beautiful thing, designed by Alan Ward at Axis in Chorlton and released by Cornerhouse Publications. So it's an entirely Manchester-made project, which seems right. In my ideal world this would have been a prizewinning series in Manchester's local newspaper instead of a book, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell of the MEN devoting the necessary space and resources to a project like this. So it's a book, and a pretty terrific one.

I also read the two most recent chapbooks from Manchester author Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press, which I can't recommend highly enough. Each one contains a single short story, the perfect size to shove in your bag and read on the tram. I was impressed with the solid binding and the thoughtfully-chosen covers. Chapbooks conjure up images of bent staples and inky fingers, but these are sleek beasts.

When the door closed, it was dark by Alison Moore is about a British woman who goes to an unspecified foreign country to live with a family and look after their infant. I'm not going to say any more than that, except that it is extremely creepy (in a good way), and that it might not have been such a good idea to read it while waiting for my 20-week scan in the antenatal department of Fairfield Hospital.

Black country, by Joel Lane, is a detective story in which a cop pokes about in the anonymous suburban districts of the West Midlands, investigating some weirdly troubled kids, and ends up exorcising his own buried memories. The ending raises as many questions as it answers, but satisfies all the same. Both were so good that I'll definitely be seeking out anything else Nightjar sees fit to offer us.

(Image from Billy and Rolonde courtesy of Len Grant)

New Blogs: The Bank Holiday Blues edition

2010-04-06T09:48:00.007Z

New blog time. So what have we got? A whole mess of new arts and culture blogs. Blog Station is the blog linked with Chorlton's Lead Station, showcasing the MCR artists whose work they exhibit in the restaurant. Artist Jai Redman of the UHC Collective has an interesting blog about his work and what he's up to, most recently working with the Buddleia Commissions project in Cheetham Hill.

Look Up Manchester is a collaborative blog by students at the Manchester School of Architecture - some great images of the city on there. There's also a new crafty blog, Sally Fort's Tinkering Times. And another food blog, Manchester Foodie.

Headstretcher is the blog of Creative Concern honcho Steve Connor. Jon from music blog Black Country Grammar has started a more broadly-focused posterous blog called I'm Jonthebeef. Some more personal blogs: The Laughing Housewife, Rich Rich Rich, and a new photoblog by Boris.

Some media additions: BBC Producer Gemma Hodgson, and the (mainly) media oriented blog by my neighbour Andy Walker, Walker's Rambles. And my other neighbour Jamie and his friends have also a started new music blog, Good for the Soul. Go Ramsbottom!

A new made-in-Manchester comic blog - yeah! Flesh and Bone serves up new strips every Monday and Thursday. That's one of them up top. It's the work of David Bailey, whose excellent illustration work (as part of the Mount Pleasant duo) on gig posters and the like you may already be familiar with.

Had good chats with some new-to-the-blogroll folks at last Wednesday's blogmeet, including Abbas of Call Centre Confessional, Benjamin of the brilliantly lo-fi Ribbons & Leaves, and not one but two Gareths (The Cardboard Kid and Cutteruption), among others... please remind me if I've forgotten anyone I said I would add. It was a good night all around, thanks to the ever-delightful Common and sponsors Skiddle.com. Look out for another one in a couple of months.

Incidentally, it's another busy week for social media in Manchester, with the hyperlocal themed Social Media Cafe at the BBC tonight, and the Manchester Aggregator group meeting tomorrow night (7pm at Madlab, any curious bloggers welcome.)

Wolf Haul

2010-03-30T10:05:00.010Z

Road trip! In The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan's gobsmackingly weird 1984 film of Angela Carter's werewolf fantasy, is going to be shown Friday evening in the spooky surrounds of Grizedale Forest as part of AND festival's programme of events in Lancashire and Cumbria this spring.

The film is being presented by the fabulous Scratch n' Sniff, so that means viewers will be able to appreciate it in full Odorama splendour. People are encouraged to come in fancy dress and I am told that "a transformation station will allow patrons to paint on lips as red as blood or attach a tell-tale monobrow. Rose-imbued gin will be served on arrival, plus wolf stew, a blanket of fog and an origami apple orchard."

Details here . It's cert 18, which is too bad, since teenagers who think Twilight: New Moon is the shit should be kidnapped and forced to watch this. And smell it too.

The rad limited edition screenprint by Simon Misra above will be for sale at the film for £10.

Twestival Thursday at Hulabar

2010-03-22T10:58:00.005Z

Nearly time for the Manchester incarnation of Twestival, a worldwide charity event that harnesses the awesome power of Twitter to raise money for good works. Ours takes place this Thursday, 25th March, from 6pm-11pm at Hulabar in Stevenson Square in the Northern Quarter.

The organisers say: "the event is a unique opportunity for local Twitter users, who normally communicate through the site, to meet face-to-face and build on the relationships they have made online while raising money for international charity Concern Worldwide.

Entertainment at the event will include music, a charity auction, and many other Twitter-based activities all sponsored by low cost airline BMI Baby, North West based digital agency KMP Digitata and Manchester airport."

Tickets are £6 or £10 and include a free drink. And if you have a business it's not too late to donate a prize. More information over at the Manchester Twestival site, or follow them at @manctwester

Party in the library

2010-03-18T15:37:00.011Z

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may have picked up on the fact that I'm kind of a library geek. I worked in libraries on and off for years (oh, I can shelve books all right), and my mom was one of those righteous activist librarians they seem to have lots of in the states and not enough of over here. So one of the first things I do on moving to a new place is check out the library. And when I visited Central Library for the first time I was not disappointed. It's pretty wonderful.

Unfortunately we're saying hasta la vista to our library for a while; it is closing to be renovated until 2013. During that time we'll have to make do with a scaled-down temporary library on Deansgate. I hope that the things I love about it don't get messed with too much in the renovation (the spectacular Great Hall, the language & lit library) and the things I don't like are going to be all sorted out (the outdated cafe, the tiny general readers library, the lack of a good space for children's books and reading activities). We shall see.

The library's getting a proper literary and musical send-off tomorrow night with Manchester Central Library: A Celebration. Sean O'Brien will read from a collection of short stories written entirely about a city library, The Silence Room, and Jane Rogers will read 'Lucky' set largely in the library. Other readers include Nicholas Royle and Mike Garry - and they're going to have a klezmer band too. It starts at 6:30 and it's free and open to all.

There's another interesting bookish event on the radar in Salford: Reading for Reading's Sake, a 4-day event aimed at exploring reading as a practice. "Unlike a regular reading group, this event aims to unfold the activity of reading, the situations in which we read, reading as a shared event, a private passion, concentration, interpretation, sound and voice, the symbolic and emotional value of the act."

It takes place Thursday April 8 - Sunday April 11 at Islington Mill, and includes a whole host of reading-related activities, workshops and evening performances. Booking required, places limited. Full details here.

(Manchester Central Library photo by Flickr user brightonsinger)

The Magnetic Fields at Manchester Cathedral

2010-03-17T15:04:00.005Z

Another great gig coming up: I'm getting pretty excited for The Magnetic Fields at Manchester Cathedral this Friday evening. A Magnetic Fields show is always something to look forward to, but this one especially so: It'll be my first time at the Cathedral since the church began hiring itself out as a gig venue and I'm really curious to hear how that vast, grand space deals with rock music.

With their love of strings and unusual instruments I think the Fields are probably a good choice to try out the acoustics. Their most recent album, Realism, released in January, was recorded entirely unplugged, and used a variety of gonzo percussion instruments. I love this album, as does Alexis Petridis from the Guardian, whose glowing review includes the following delicious qualifier:

"It's not a perfect album: it is perhaps otiose to complain about the level of camp in the songwriting of a man who owns a Chihuahua called Irving Berlin, but it has to be said, The Dolls' Tea Party would cause Duncan "Chase Me" Norvelle to suggest Merritt man up a bit."

Hopefully they'll be playing lots from Realism as well as some old favourites from the warped and beautiful mind of Stephin Merritt.

Green shoots in Ramsbottom

2010-03-11T15:14:00.005Z

There always seems to be lots going on in Ramsbottom, the northernmost bit of Bury where I live. But there have been a couple of developments recently I thought I'd let the rest of Manchester know about too.

I've always loved the hundreds of funky little community gardens dotted around New York City, and I watched a great documentary recently about the urban communal gardens in Cuba - every scrap of land is used to grow stuff. Well, it looks like a bit of this spirit is coming to Rammy. Inspired by the example of nearby Todmorden, whose residents use empty lots and odd bits of disused land around town to grow fruit and vegetables. Ramsbottom is getting its own homegrown gardening effort: Incredible Edible Ramsbottom.

The group will be meeting up 7:30pm Monday March 22 at Christ Church off Bolton Road North. They also have a webpage here with a discussion forum- and it looks like they've already lined up some plots in Nuttall Park and a disused orchard in Greenmount. This could be just the thing for people despairing at the multi-year waiting list for allotment plots, or really for anyone who likes the idea of getting their hands dirty.

One really great thing about living here is the Ramsbottom film society, Real 2 Reel. The good news is that they've just moved house. Instead of showing their monthly films in the Civic Hall, they'll be screening them in the newly renovated Theatre Royal, home of the excellent Summerseat Players. I've seen a film there and can say that the seats are way more comfortable. The next movie is Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, showing on Wednesday March 31 (unfortunately the same evening as our blogmeet.) You can keep up with their schedule on the Real 2 Reel Facebook page.

(Photo by Flickr user innpictime)

Manchester Blogmeet March 31

2010-03-04T14:54:00.006Z

Time for another gathering of the blogging clans. Yes, our spring blogmeet is upon us, and this one will take place on Wednesday March 31st from 6-8 pm in The Kestrel Suite at Common. It sounds very fancy, but don't worry, it's just the extra room they added on in their recent renovation. For those who haven't been before, Common is the bright green bar on Edge Street in the Northern Quarter (just off High Street). They serve a full range of hot drinks and tasty snacks as well as a fine selection of beer, wine and spirits.

The drinks will be courtesy of our sponsor for this blogmeet, Skiddle.com. Jamie Scahill and Richard Dyer will be on hand to tell us more about their site. They say: "Now in its 9th year of operation, it's is officially one of the largest and fastest growing what's on guides in the UK. With over 222,306 events listed, 620,000 unique visitors and 119,754 registered members we offer the ideal platform for club promoters, festivals and event organisers to promote their event."

As always, you don't have to RSVP but you can always leave a comment to let me know you're coming. Or just turn up. All bloggers are welcome, so if you haven't made it to a blogmeet before please don't be shy. It's a chance to meet your online comrades in a relaxed and friendly setting. And it's usually lots of fun.

(photo: Tim France)

New Blogs: The Dark Corners Edition

2010-02-24T15:13:00.010Z

A really interesting bunch of new blogs to add: Urban Adventures, Rookie and Gone, a trio of urban explorers who post photos and reports from their adventures poking about in some of Manchester's dark corners, high roosts and forgotten buildings, getting a look at the places most people don't go. The photo above is from Jim Gillette's trip to the 5th Avenue Culvert on the Medlock in Central Manchester - a place many of us have probably passed over countless times without being aware of its existence. And they take their photography as seriously as their exploration; the resulting pictures are beautiful.

East Angles is Manchester journalist Ben East's blog about all things cultural. Dead Rabbit is artist Naomi Kendrick's blog about multisensory participatory art. Bren O'Callaghan blogs about film, digital art, media, culture and various other things.

Hey, some new music blogs: Pigeon Post and For Folk's Sake. On the latter blog you can read about Single Cell Collective's monthlong programme at Zion Arts Centre in Hulme, Finding Zion, which runs from 27 Feb - 26 March and features all manner of cultural goodies from mass bike rides, music and food.

There's a new hyperlocal blog for Saddleworth, Saddleworth News.

A few new personal blogs: Two Hour Lunch , The Tea Shop Diaries, The Book of Scrap

Some new writers' blogs: Sian Cummins and Andrew Beswick's Moon Printed Shadows. And Your Call is Very Important to Us, featuring the amusing email correspondence of Martin T.R. Higgins and Richard V. Hirst.

A photo blog, Percy Dean

New tech blogs: Tom Mason's SEO Manchester and the I-COM blog

And last but not least, the menswear fashion blog Style Salvage, which is one-half based in Manchester so we can include it here.

Gigs: Jesca Hoop and Jonatha Brooke

2010-02-18T11:28:00.004Z

Tonight Jesca Hoop (above) is playing at the Deaf Institute. A few months back I heard a track from her recently released second album on the possibly endangered 6Music (BBC: so, so wrong) and loved it enough to get her amazing first album, Kismet. It's hard to describe her songs - quirky, funky, folky but very personal, and she's got a killer voice. Turns out she moved from California to Manchester last year at the urging of her friends in Elbow. Yay! I'll be looking for other chances to catch her playing her hometown.

Another amazing folksinging lady and one with a voice that's equally unique: Jonatha Brooke is coming to Band on the Wall on Feb 20. Her old band, The Story, released a couple of great albums back in the early nineties and disappeared, but Jonatha's been doing some quality solo stuff since then. Should be a good gig.

Seoul Kimchi and Bubble Cafe

2010-02-09T14:28:00.008Z

Where can you get the best dumplings in Manchester? Until recently the answer to that question would have been easy: Red Chilli, where the Beijing dumplings have long reigned supreme. But a new contender has emerged: Seoul Kimchi, a tiny grocery and restaurant on Upper Brook Street that serves up Korean home cooking. Many of the Asian restaurants in Manchester don't bother to make their own dumplings and seem content to serve frozen ones shipped from thousands of miles away. So the gyoza at Seoul Kimchi are a revelation: crisp on the outside, bursting with flavour inside, you can tell from the first bite that they're the real thing.

The japchae, a fried noodle dish, and bibimbap, a rice-based dish, were also excellent. Don't leave without sampling the kimchi, the spicy pickled cabbage that Koreans eat with practically everything. And there are lots of choices for veggies. It's nice to finally have an alternative to Koreana, which is much more formal (and more expensive). Unfortunately Upper Brook Street isn't really convenient to anywhere, but you can take the 50 bus right there from Spring Gardens. There are only three or four tables, and if it's full, well, Red Chilli have opened a new location nearby on Oxford Road.

These are good times to be a foodie in Manchester. We may not have any Michelin-starred restaurants, but on the casual/ethnic side we're doing pretty well. During my time living in New York I got swept into the city's amazing foodie subculture. There are thousands of people who comb the five boroughs for the ultimate felafel, soba noodles or corned beef hash, and cultishly track the movements of favourite street food vendors on Chowhound ("The Arepa Lady is back on Roosevelt Ave!") One of my favourite foodie haunts was Sau Voi Corp, a Vietnamese record store on Lafayette Street in Chinatown with a lucrative sideline in banh mi, unbelievably addictive Vietnamese sandwiches filled with meat and veggies.

When I moved here seven years ago, not being able to get banh mi in Manchester got me down; it was like some kind of litmus test. Well, I'm happy to report that you can now get these sandwiches here. The recently opened Bubble Cafe on Portland Street sells bubble iced tea and a selection of Vietnamese snacks including pho, noodle soup and banh mi sandwiches (Bubble's Sandwich). On the day I went, they were out of pate, a grievous omission, but the baguette had ham, sliced pork, grated carrot and coriander. Instead of the usual sweet and spicy sauce, though, it was topped with some kind of weird mayonaise - not an improvement. Still, it was good, and at £3.80 for a giant sandwich it's a solid lunch option.

Factory seconds

2010-02-05T14:44:00.006Z

So Peter Hook's Factory-themed nightclub, FAC251, opens tonight. Whoop-dee-doo.

Sure, everyone's entitled to their own nostalgia trips, but this particular one has been rammed down our throats for the last 20 years. And I'm not even one of these hippersnappers that utterly scorns the music that came out of that scene. Yeah, I decorated my teenage walls with Peter Saville album cover postcards and still consider most of it great music (Happy Mondays, though... I think maybe you had to be there and on those drugs). But enough already. I've got chronic Factory fatigue.

And I know I'm not alone. Check out Tony Naylor's exasperated, well-argued post on Guardian Music Blog, and this post on Words Dept., which is where I found out about the brilliantly vitriolic FUC51. They're also on Twitter. Anyone considering going along to the opening tonight should check out their blog for an eye-opening Youtube preview of what's likely to be on tap.

Maybe it's time for us to move on and show some love for the great new music coming out of Manchester? It'd be interesting if this club actually did that, but I'm not holding out much hope after checking out their website. Too much grandstanding and too much Rowetta. There's something depressing about watching the Factory folk shamelessly attempting to cash in over and over again, with books, reality show slots, second-rate reunion gigs, crap DJ sets and now this. I ask you: Can officially merchandised Joy Division oven gloves be far away?

BlackLab

2010-01-27T14:39:00.005Z

Four people have separately mentioned BlackLab to me over the last few weeks, so it feels like the right time to tell you about them. BlackLab is a self-described "visual society" organised by David Oates, Liz Lock and Mishka Henner, based in Manchester. Here's their mission:

"BlackLab is here to revel in images old and new. We want to breathe new life into the presentation of still pictures by experimenting in collaboration with artists, musicians, film-makers and designers. We want to dispense with conventional forms of exhibiting photographs and create spaces in which images can collide and collude with film, soundscapes, slogans and texts."

On Friday they're hosting Trawling the Visual Wreckage, a night of screenings, socializing, and conversation about photography, imagery and film at An Outlet on Dale Street. "Meet the city’s thriving community of bloggers and image-makers (if they show up) and participate in a thrilling raffle for a prize that’s out of this world." Sounds like a great night and an especially good meetup opportunity for the many photobloggers in Manchester. The fun starts at 7:30.

New blogs: The like, totally tubular edition

2010-01-22T14:19:00.006Z

Hey, I'm back with some new additions to the blogroll for your reading pleasure.

They are: A new local politics blog, Tameside Eye. New music blog Friend Rock Manchester Not one but two new fashion blogs, avantgarde and kisses and cross stitches. And journalist Louise Bolotin's media blog Here's the Kicker.

New personal blogs Mind of Mine , The Amazing Adventures of Pottywoman and Manchestreker, about cycling in Manchester.

A healthy new crop of writerly blogs to add: Yes, I will Hold , Stories that will lead you along strange ways, The Journal of a Diet Poylmath (all published recently on Rainy City Stories), Dirty Sparkle, A Life in Manchester , Metafictio n and What Daisy Did Next, through whose links I found Contrariwise, a website dedicated to literary tattoos. Supercool.

Writer Benjamin Judge has turned his attentions from the award-winning Cynical Ben to his new Wordpress site, Who the fudge is Benjamin Judge.

Socrates Adams Florou, aka"Mister Chinatown," has written a novel. You can read all about it over at his new website, Everything's Fine, which lists a blog and a tube gallery among other impressive features and benefits. The picture up there is from the tube gallery, which makes more sense when you read Everything's Fine.

Hello January!

2010-01-21T17:24:00.007Z

Greetings comrades. 2010 has been a little rough on the re-entry so far. Snow, ice and, for my part, more work than I know what to do with. That last one is generally positive, apart from the whole not having time to write blog posts thing. I'm sorry about that, but experience has taught me that my readers are steadfast and stick with me through thick and thin. Right? ... Hello? Oh, hi. You're still there. Good.

It has recently been suggested to me that bloggers who don't shell out for their own domain name don't take themselves seriously enough to be worth reading. I don't really agree with this (I certainly wouldn't want to be accused of taking myself seriously), but I have been considering buying my own domain for a while. Maybe I should give myself a new url as a little present.

I haven't bought a domain name for this site in part because I do a lot of work helping people start blogs, and I want to show them that it really is super easy and free to create a blog. Buying a domain name is great, but it's not necessary. That's part of the reason I've stayed on Blogger, too - I've used both lots and I genuinely think the interface is easier for less tech-savvy people (counting myself in there) to deal with than Wordpress, though the latter looks way cooler and can do so much more.

I haven't experimented with Posterous yet but I know a lot of people really like it. Anyone prefer this platform to all other blogging platforms? I'd be interested to hear what you think.

Happy holidays from Manchizzle

2009-12-22T14:25:00.002Z

Merry Christmas everyone. See you in 2010!

Mad Lab, Good Grief! and the SF Panorama

2009-12-10T12:00:00.020Z

I was in the Manchester Digital Laboratory, better known as Mad Lab, for the first time the other day and I urge alert readers to add it to your map of good places in Manchester. It's on Edge Street across from Common. What is it? Well...

It’s a space you can get together with like-minded individuals and work on your urban gardening, crochet, hacking, programming, media arts, filmmaking, animating project without worrying that you’re in a library, coffee shop, pub or other unsuitable venue. We know hackers and craftspeople need work space and may need to get down and dirty – we also know sometimes you need a quiet area to present and show works to your peers. We support both activities. And we hope there will be a rich mix of individuals who’ll get out of the usual zones, the knitter talking to the software architect, the cupcake maker scheming with the laser etching builder. We know some good will come of this.

I think some good things are definitely going to come out of the Mad Lab. Also, a lot of robots. It's available for meetings, meet-ups, and dastardly plotting of all kinds, so keep it in mind.

I was in the Mad Lab to talk about the Manchester aggregator project I posted about recently. Many folks let me know they were interested in hearing more, contributing or being involved. This is an open, blogger-led project that is still evolving and if you want to see what we're talking about, join the conversation or just lurk in a shadowy manner visit the Manchester Aggregator group on the Social Media Manchester Ning page. You can also look out for twitter posts tagged #managg

In other unconventional newspaper news, McSweeney's only went and published their latest edition of the literary mag as a broadsheet, The San Francisco Panorama, that people could buy from Bay Area newstands (which sold out in about ten minutes flat. You can order it from McSweeney's in the states, but I can't seem to find anywhere selling McSweeney's no. 33 in the UK. You listening, Santa?) In addition to championing a beleagured format the paper features 16 colour pages of comics from the likes of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman. If we could get the broadsheets in this country to publish 16 colour pages of comics regularly the UK would be a better place. Or even four pages. But a few months back The Guardian axed the wonderful comic they were publishing on Saturdays. Boo.

To read more about the Panorama head over to Flavorpill's Flavorwire where there's an interview with Oscar Villalon, McSweeney’s publisher, originally sent out in their excellent weekly book email, Boldtype. Pictures via Tonx, who has a good post about it too.

I might head over here and see if they have it:

Yes, new shop Good Grief! brings a bulging sack full of art book, zine and comic goodness to a hut on the third floor of Affleck's Palace. Also music, and posters, and music posters. I am very excited about this. We could really use more places in town to buy this kind of stuff. At the moment there seems to be an amazing bounty of illustrators and comics in Manchester doing weird and wonderful work that it can be absurdly tricky to get ahold of. Keep up with the Good Grief! gang on their amusing blog here. Thanks for the tip Kate Taylor.

Newspapers and blogs

2009-11-30T09:33:00.011Z

Nobody hates blogs more than journalists. Blogs drive the less digitally-savvy journos and media industry guys crazy (and not just because we are helping to put them out of work). They gripe about bloggers having no accountability, no transparency. There is no tough editor peering over the blogger's shoulder and demanding they back up the claim they make in the second paragraph, no sub dutifully fact-checking their copy, no time-honoured professional code of conduct preventing them from writing good things about their mates or slating the work of people they don't like.

And what exactly are the blogger's credentials? This is what really rankles: Bloggers haven't been carefully selected for their role as critic or commentator by a respected news organisation, required to demonstrate writing prowess and reporting nous. They haven't stubbornly worked their way up the ladder in profession that, while incredibly competitive and often grueling, pays poorly. In short, they've jumped the queue. They're not professionals, they're bloody amateurs. And people are listening to them!

I've been both a newspaper journalist and a blogger, and have been thinking a lot lately about the overlapping ground between these roles, and the antagonism and competition that exists between the two camps in what is shaping up to be the golden age of citizen journalism. Down south, the arrival of theblogpaper has attracted attention. Closer to home, I'm meeting up with some folks tonight to discuss an aggregator project for Manchester bloggers that I suspect will share some of the aims of theblogpaper.

It's early days and I'm not sure what will come of it, but it's encouraging that people are interested. I've been beating the "we need an aggregator" drum since the original Manchester Aggregator, a one-man volunteer operation, died a few years back (and in case you've never met an aggregator before, it's a website that pulls in the posts of multiple bloggers via feeds and publishes them in one place).

But first: theblogpaper.

The all-lowercase name evokes the recently departed thelondonpaper and gives notice of the venture's designs on the freesheet market, but on this front theblogpaper is guilty of putting out mixed messages. They say "we aim to combine two different yet equally important types of media: internet and print." Yet they "promote contents to print" by voting; the top rated stories get published in a London paper edition. What's with the inferiority complex? These days, putting online content into print is more of a demotion than a promotion (and I say this as someone who will let you take away my morning newspaper when you tear it out of my cold, dead hands).

If you're interested there's some more background info on theblogpaper here. I'm not sure if it will succeed or not. The main problem is content: I think there is some truth to the assessment this t5m blogger makes of it (though as a competitor his views should possibly be taken with a few grains of salt). And there are some things I don't understand about their model. Why do they require contributors to submit articles rather than automatically pulling registered bloggers' posts from their sites aggregator-style?

Having to submit articles places more of a burden on participating bloggers, and the site already asks a lot of their community as they need people to vote on what articles to "promote". I understand the model's allure as it is both democratic and time saving. The readers are the selectors, so you don't need editors. But it's a big gamble - I think any new venture that leans too heavily on user participation via voting and liking is on shaky ground unless they have a gargantuan publicity budget.

I see they are selling advertising. Not sure if this will work. It didn't for theblogpaper's predecessor The Printed Blog. In the US big-name blogs command hefty rates. Over here, the only blogs I've seen ads on are the newspaper blogs and the blogs of Gawker's UK copycat Shiny Media, and they certainly haven't found a model that's immune to the problems of the print sector. I like the model where blogs with an established following band together and sell ad space a la The Deck, but I'm not sure local advertisers would go for it, or whether the amount of traffic UK local blogs get (at best, a couple hundred hits a day, I'm guessing) would make this a viable idea, even with the ad display replicated over several blogs.

I wish theblogpaper well and will be delighted if it succeeds; it's still in beta phase and hopefully whatever doesn't work will be dealt with soon. But whether it's this project or not, I think it's only a matter of time before something blog-sourced makes a go of it in the UK. Newspapers are in free fall. There is a content vacuum, and bloggers stand ready to fill it. In some cases, you could say they are already filling it.

Take Manchester as an example. The content of our daily newspaper, such as it is (sigh) has dwindled in terms of both quality and quantity; they've shrunk pages and offloaded experienced (and incidentally, better-paid) journalists in favor of unpaid and exploited rookie journos. No print mag has gotten very far off the ground since Citylife folded; Time Out looked at coming in and decided it wouldn't be profitable enough, I'm guessing. So on the print side, we've got a handful of well-intentioned zines, one or two property circulars masquerading as "lifestyle magazines", and the fresh-faced new culture and listings magazine that seems to arrive with a bang every six months or so and disappear with a whimper a few months later. I wish one would stick but they keep not sticking.

Online, things are buzzier. Manchester's cultural institutions have gone into the content business themselves, setting up their own web magazine (and making a damn fine job of it, says this admittedly very biased contributor) and turning to bloggers to review their exhibitions and plays. In this city, at least, bloggers really are the new press. Manchester Confidential's recent decision to start charging for content in the new year prompted an interesting debate (also here) with some asking "why would people pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?"

It's good that bloggers are getting more attention here. And I think a group endeavour that would unite the best of our content in one place would be good for everyone: readers, writers, cultural and civic institutions. But Manchester bloggers will have to step up our game if we want to be taken seriously (though some couldn't give a rat's ass about being taken seriously, and more power to them). We aren't professionals, but I think maybe we ought to hold ourselves to more professional standards. What does this mean? Well, for starters...

If you get press tickets, actually write about the thing
Be transparent: if you get free meals, free drinks or free gear say so in your post
Be independent and dispassionate, don't allow freebies to influence what you write
Get permission to use copyrighted photos instead of thieving them fecklessly
Attribute. Use links to other blogs/sites generously; credit where credit's due.
Be respectful of readers who disagree; publish and respond to critical comments
Be as accurate as you can. Sloppy mistakes erode your credibility
Correct mistakes quickly and prominently
And fer chrissakes, spell check your posts.

Hmm... I have a feeling I may come to regret posting this list. All nitpicking comments taking issue with my grammar, spelling, photo crediting, accuracy or legitimate parentage gratefully received ;) Anyway, I'll keep you lot posted on the MCR aggregator project. If anyone wants to be more actively involved, please get in touch.

Blog picture via Tubuans and Dukduks.

'My log has something to tell you'

2009-11-25T11:30:00.006Z

Twin Peaks. The drama. The flannel. The unearthly blend of mawkish and surreal that could only come from the dark, dark mind of one David Lynch. And, of course, the pie.

I'm not sure exactly how watching the weekly adventures of The Bookhouse Boys, Agent Dale Cooper, the Log Lady and the rest of the gang as an adolescent warped my mind, but I think it was in a good way. Nobody's ever figured out how the TV execs agreed to let Lynch loose on prime time, but thank god they did. The first season is some of the best TV ever. The second season... well, really, it's kind of a mess but still miles more interesting and original than 99 percent of the crap on television.

If you've always secretly longed to don Laura Palmer's prom dress, you're in luck: Islington Mill in Salford will be turned into the town of Twin Peaks for one night only on Sunday Dec 13. Come in character. There will be a Miss Twin Peaks 2009 pageant, live music, performances and djs. £11 (advance only here, limited capacity) gets you in with a slice of cherry pie.

I'm also going t'mill tonight to catch the amazing Mayming and World Sanguine Report. Some really great gigs coming up there.

Club Brenda, the big hearted club night renowned for its eclectic playlist, is the subject of a limited edition book. Strange Trees. The book is getting a proper DJ-assisted launch Dec 1 at Urbis 7:30-10 (free entry). The book "moves through the history of Club Brenda, using a series of classic narratives to form a dark urban fairytale, alongside a series of commissioned photography and artwork" from the likes of Rachel Goodyear and David Hoyle, who will also be selling art on the night. Enjoy your Urbis while you can, kids.

And closer to home (well, for me and those of us who live in the farthest reaches of North Manchester, much further for everyone else) Horse & Bamboo's Deep Time Cabaret comes to the Boo in Waterfoot on Saturday, 28 November. Looks like fun.

servicing

2009-11-10T15:04:00.003Z

Just wanted to say that I'm doing some long-overdue maintenance of the creaky old blogroll at the moment. Wow, is that thing dirty. I've rolled up my sleeves and added a long list of new literary blogs today, but that's really just the start. There are scores of new blogs to add and a few nasty defunct blogs to de-link.

Phew. This could take a while.

Anyway, if you want me to add your new (or old) blog, now's a good time to tell me.

November in Manchester: Literary News

2009-11-05T13:21:00.014Z

Well howdy. It's been a while, no? Now that the Literature Festival dust has settled, I'm here with a lot of long-overdue literary news things.

November in Manchester, an ambitious "social media love story" undertaken by Tom Mason, an SEO copywriter whose first love is creative writing, is now live. I spoke with Tom about it at Social Media Cafe and he told me how it works: he's written a story which is going to be published via characters' first-person tweets and blog posts (here are blogs for main characters James and Persephone.)

Readers can take part by sending in pics and films representing the characters and/or scenes they experience during November in Manchester (photo above is from their Flickr Group.) It's not really a collectively written story, more a collectively illustrated one that employs social media in its delivery. Interesting idea.

A wave to those intrepid Manchester writers furiously sprinting through National Novel Writing Month. Good luck, guys! In case anyone is just finding out about this excellent endeavour and doesn't want to wait another year to take part the folks who run it also do short story and script-centred projects throughout the year, so sign up to their list to find out about those.

Some news on the publications front:

Author, dreamblogger and literary Mancunian of note Nicholas Royle has started up independent publisher Nightjar Press, which got things rolling last month with chapbooks from Manchester writer Tom Fletcher (who writes a blog at Fell House) and Michael Marshall Smith.

Knives, Forks and Spoons press is now publishing poetry and organising readings, their next one features Simon Rennie, Alec Newman and John G. Hall and is at Central Library on Nov 26 at 6:30. The press was begun by Richard Barrett earlier this year and is being continued by Alec Newman. They live on Facebook here.

Lit zines The Shrieking Violet and Belle Vue (write up of it at The Mithering Times) both have fresh editions out, as does new-to-me zine Geeek and web journal The Manchester Review (now on twitter at @mancreview).

A new writing group is setting up shop at Nexus Art Cafe. Called Bad Language, it's being organised by Dan Carpenter. The first meeting was Nov 3 but as I didn't get around to posting about it til now, get in touch via Bad Language's twitter account or contact me and I'll pass on Dan's email.

And if anyone missed it, Manchester's butt-kicking literary scene gets a glowing write-up in the Guardian Books Blog by Jerome de Groot. Interesting debate in the comments on whether Manchester is tiresome about blowing its own horn. Maybe I see the original writer's point. Honestly, we've got a lot to brag about. I would say that, though. Mancs are known for being gobby, and Americans, well - we're not generally considered backward in coming forward.

What do you think? Should Manchester stop grandstanding? Answers on a postcard TO THE GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD, EVER please.

Reading, writing and listening

2009-10-14T10:47:00.005Z

Ah, October. Plenty to blog about on here at the moment, but not much time to do it. That's because my blogging energies are currently divided between the Manchester Blog Awards blog and the reinvigorated Manchester Literature Festival blog (not forgetting Creative Tourist), with whatever's left trying feebly to keep up with the three Twitter accounts I seem to have acquired. Ain't social media grand?

Anyway, while I'm here, I'll stick in a reminder to come to the blog awards, which is on Wednesday Oct 21 at Band on the Wall. It's hard to pick other literature festival events to recommend as so many are enticing this year, but I'm looking forward to Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing launch tomorrow. Yep, that's the sequel to Douglas Adams revered Hitchiker's Guide series - I haven't read or heard any of it yet. But whatever the book's like, you've got to respect the man for voluntarily exposing himself to so much fanboy "how dare you step to The Master" bitching.

Then I'm going to catch the much-missed No Point in Not Being Friends Monday night at Matt and Phred's, and Tuesday is our Rainy City Stories Live tour. I wish I could go to the entire Short Weekend, but I have a scheduling conflict involving the other literature festival launching this week, the excellent Lancaster Litfest. If anyone's up that way next weekend I'm going to be reading my own writings at the launch of Flax's Mostly Truthful anthology of creative nonfiction, along with some Manchester blogfriends. I'm really excited because this is my first creative writing to be published since sixth grade. Yay! Anyway, it kicks off at 2pm in the Storey Auditorium on Saturday Oct 24 - info here.

Vote for Jenn

2009-10-05T12:34:00.006Z

Friends of the Manchizzle, please take a moment to vote for Jenn Ashworth in the Guardian's Not the Booker Awards. Her first novel A Kind of Intimacy has been shortlisted for this exciting new award.

Jenn is a fine lady. Few people know this, but during the Second World War she was part of an elite female spy unit that singlehandedly saved the French resistance. I know she might be uncomfortable bragging about things like this herself, so I'll tell you confidentially she's an accomplished accordion player and can beat the pants off anyone at five card stud. And the crazy part is, Jenn is resistant to many new strains of bacteria and may be able to cure swine flu by just breathing on you.

Okay, so I may have embroidered a bit there in the spirit of Jenn's fabulous blog Every Day I Lie a Little. One thing Jenn is for sure, though - a damn fine writer. So go vote for her in the Not the Bookers. It only takes a minute or two. But voting closes at noon tomorrow. Don't delay!

And remember, you can hear Jenn reading her work and talking about it too at the Manchester Blog Awards October 21.

Manchester Blog Awards shortlist announced

2009-10-01T08:57:00.009Z

The shortlist for the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards is now available for your perusal on the MBA website.

I had a lot of fun picking this year's shortlist. As much as I try valiantly to keep up with blogs in the city, I was totally unprepared for the sheer number of new blogs out there - in many cases, of a very high quality indeed. It seems to me that people have really figured out what blogging is for and how to make it work. There were so many good blogs this year that I had to expand the shortlist to five in each category.

I'm especially happy about how many great newcomers there are in the city and neighbourhood category. We added this in 2008 after seeing an uptick in blogging about Manchester, but this really exploded this year. I love how all of these folks are offering up their own highly personal takes on different aspects of life in the city.

Perhaps this has something to do with the rise of hyperlocal content and citizen journalism. Maybe it's because we're losing local media outlets right and left, and bloggers are stepping in to fill the vaccum. Or maybe we're just lucky enough to have a healthy online community who enjoy Mancunian life so much they want to share it with people. I think it's probably a little bit of each. Long may it continue.

Another big trend this year: Mommyblogs ... erm, and Daddyblogs (congratulations Mr. Jones) Perhaps I should just call them "parenting blogs" and have done with it, but this sounds far too serious and worthy to me. I'll have to come up with something, though, because there are getting to be so many of these things that I'm going to have to add a new category on the blogroll soon. Some lovely writing on there. And a just-emerging trend: foodie blogs. Yes, we're finally getting more of these. Look for some additions to the blogroll soon.

Anyway, enough blathering from me, go and read the shortlist. And if anyone is wondering what happens next, or who will be choosing the winners, you can learn all about it over at the blog awards site. Winners will be announced at the all-singing, all-dancing blog awards evening at Band on the Wall October 21.

To Do: Homelife, food fest and blogger treats

2009-09-29T10:15:00.009Z

The ever-changing Mancunian musical collective Homelife are launching their new album Exotic Interlude (out Oct 5 on Humble Soul) with a gig at Sacred Trinity on Friday. The band's latest incarnation has shrunk to founders Paddy Steer and Tony Burnside (pictured above). I've listened to the album and am really impressed with the new more mellow and folky sound emerging, but there's plenty there along the lines of their older sound, a ramshackle goody bag of surprising noise, tiki grooves and snatches of melody. This is sure to be a popular show as live Homelife appearances are rare as hen's teeth, so get in there.

Manchester bloggers are invited to join Havana rum for a shindig to launch their Havana Cultura twitter campaign/new mix CD at Cord on October 8th, preceding a Havana club night at Odder, which they will take you along to. And yes, they're handing out some booty in the form of CDs, photo books, drink mixers and free rum. Yo ho ho! If you're a blogger who's interested in attending email Krista AT theneonhub dotcom.

Any Manchester bloggers interested in covering the upcoming Conservative Party Conference should speedily contact Craig Elder (craig dot elder AT conservatives dot com) Don't think they'll be doling out free grog there, though. Oh, and in other digital gathering news, Social Media Cafe is back at The Northern, Tib Street on Tuesday October 6. FYI, I'm posting stuff like this here now but will likely move these blogger-relevant announcements over to the MCR Bloggers Facebook group, so sign up if you haven't already.

The Food and Drink Festival is set to yummify Manchester October 1-11. This year brings a brand new independent wine festival, foodie hubs at St. Ann's and Albert Squares, and all manner of special meals, food tours, talks and cocktail hours. They have a shiny new website too. Go forth and nosh.

At Urbis, 'Show & Tell' opens today and runs until Oct 12. It's an exhibition by the Urbis Creatives art collective. The exhibition will give the Urbis team a chance to show their work and tell the visitors about what they do outside of the creative environment of Urbis. It will comprise of many different disciplines from photography to illustration, painting and also projects the members are involved in such as community work and music events. For more information about the collective visit the website at www.urbiscreatives.org.

In other art happenings, the big Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism exhibition has opened at Manchester Art Gallery. And the famously difficult to please Jonathan Jones has called it "magical."Am going to this soon and will report back with a full review.

Blogjam

2009-09-19T15:11:00.006Z

Oh, it's you. Hi. Just taking a break from reading blogs, which is making me crosseyed. I'll be doing a lot more of that as I compile the shortlist for this year's Manchester Blog Awards. An incredibly difficult task, given how many fantastic blogs there are this year. We had almost 200 nominations but not quite. That's loooads more than last year. I blame twitter and the flash new website. Anyway, look out for the shortlist in a week or so. Hopefully by then my vision will have returned to normal.

Some nice writeups of last week's blogmeet at Cord here and here. And here, which also comes with an excellent bonus poem at no additional charge. About 30 intrepid souls came out, many of them new faces. Thanks for coming, guys. It was fun. And thanks again to the extra-fancy Creative Tourist for sponsoring the event. It looks like we may have a sponsor on board for a blogmeet in November already. I'll keep you all posted.

MLF seeks bloggers and tweeters

2009-09-15T12:35:00.001Z

Next month's Manchester Literature Festival has plenty of treats in store, and if you're willing to write reviews for their blog or help run their twitter feed you might be able to get to see some events for free.

Last year's MLF blogging project was very popular and I'm happy to be helping organise it again. I'm really glad MLF has gotten behind this - it's great to see a Manchester cultural organisation making a serious effort to involve bloggers in what they do and engage with them in a more organised way instead of just banging out press releases.

So this is the way it works: Bloggers can choose a few festival events they'd like to attend and write a review of for the MLF blog. MLF will then commission some bloggers to review an event or two in exchange for free admission. Bloggers will need to be able to write and send in the review relatively quickly after the event - the next day ideally. All reviews should be around 500 words in length and include relevant links. MLF will publish a link to the author's blog or website at the bottom of each review.

MLF is also looking for an experienced blogger or two to edit these reviews and one or two people to help out with the festival's twitter feed or facebook account- both in exchange for free tickets to some events.

If you're interested in any of these online endeavours you can find out all the details by coming along to a meeting next week. The main MLF Volunteer meeting is scheduled for Wed 16th, September (Yes that's tomorrow) 6 - 7.30pm in Committee Room (2nd Floor) of Manchester Central Library. Digital volunteers should show up at 6:45 as the last part of the meeting will deal with blogging and social media. Please email admin AT manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk to let them know you're coming and include the url of your blog. If you can't make the meeting but still want to get involved then just email the folks at MLF and let them know.

To Do: Hobopop, Mixed Up North, Umbro Industries

2009-09-08T11:41:00.010Z

This summer is officially OVER. Don't know about you, but I am so over it. (Glances out window, shivers.)

So what happens now? Now we get overrun with students, overloaded with festivals, and overwhelmed by tasty offerings from cultural venues freshly awakened from their summer siestas. Happens every Autumn.

One interesting recent discovery of mine is Kirsty McGee (that's her above) and the Manchester-based Hobopop Collective. I'm really digging their rootsy, old-timey stomps, rags and torch songs. McGee has the kind of voice you can expect great things from. And it turns out they're recording a live album over at Contact (This is October 10, not Thursday as I wrote before, sorry peeps! But hey - more time to get tickets.)

Thursday night Bolton Octagon raises the curtain on Mixed Up North, a provocative play that revisits the Burnley race riots. Director Max Stafford-Clark and the wonderful Out of Joint theatre based the play on interviews with Burnley residents. Some blistering comments in the Burnley Citizen suggest there is strong resistance to the idea of reopening any kind of discussion about the riots there. Seems to me that's just what this kind of theatre is for - making it possible for us to talk about and think about difficult things, and consider different people's perspectives on the past. Kudos to the Octagon for having the chutzpah to mount this production, which runs from Thursday to Sept 26.

Umbro Industries is a pretty impressive new project from the Manchester-based manufacturers of athletic gear: a rolling fund of bursaries to support Manchester-based creative industries. If you have an idea for a club night or an art exhibition, want to make a book or record an album or create a pop-up fashion line, or want to do something else creative that will cost less than £10,000, go to the site and submit it and you could get the money. While people who view the site can give ideas a thumbs up, their votes have no impact on who gets the dosh. That's decided by a somewhat Hacienda and football-heavy judging panel.

Speaking of soccer, there's been some interesting news about Urbis today. The Football Museum is moving in, and Urbis' programme of changing exhibitions is moving out, or at least into much smaller quarters (I'm sure if I've got the wrong end of the stick on any of this one of Urbis' team of eagle-eyed blog readers will write in to correct me...) This might be great news if you're very enthusiastic about football, but not such great news if you're more excited about art and popular culture exhibitions, and like me were enjoying Urbis' new wide-ranging programme of events. Times are tough and needs must, I suppose. But for me, it's Art 0, Football 1. And the goths are NOT going to be amused.

(Photo Graham Smith)

New Blogs: The raining cats and blogs edition

2009-09-02T13:29:00.008Z

It's Manchester Blog Awards nomination time, and I'm being deluged with new blogs to add to my blogroll. Seriously. It's raining blogs, hallelujah. Like that.

So I'm going to be briefer than normal and just list a whole bunch of new additions here, because, you know, there are about fifty more lined up behind them, and the baby could wake up at any time.

Art, design and fashion
Switched on Art
Discouture

Manchester City and neighbourhood
LOL! Manchester - A new MCR comedy listings blog

Literature and writing:
Wondrous Reads - a really comprehensive YA/Teen fiction blog written by a bookstore employee from Stockport.
Personal/writers' blog Stick it to the Mand, and the same writer's fiction at Words Etc
Writer Richard Barrett has a new blog, Yawn.
MA writing student Kim McGowan's blog Justtesting
Power is a State of Mind

Sport:
Irontwit, chronicling an Ironman attempt
The Amazing Shrinking Gaz

Personal:
What DO you do in Preston?
Travels in my house

Photo:
TdM Photography

Music:
Songs from Under the Floorboards
S’il vous plait clubnight blog

Tech:
Fluid Creativity

Review: Margaret Atwood at Manchester Cathedral

2009-09-02T09:43:00.009Z

The long queue of people stretching out the doors of Manchester Cathedral last night was an encouraging spectacle. Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood evening was a sell-out, and whether people were there because they loved her writing, or because they thought it sounded like a good show, there was no cause for disappointment on either count.

The Trailblazer event for next month’s Manchester Literature Festival was the first performance in the author’s international book tour, with each event doubling as a fundraiser for a local environmental charity (in this case, the RSPB.)

The Year of The Flood brings us back to the world Atwood introduced in Oryx and Crake, widely acknowledged as a masterwork of speculative fiction. It’s a world where most of the human race has been killed off by a pandemic; where the few people left scrabble for survival in a dystopian wasteland overrun with freakish genetically engineered animals and patrolled by the company soldiers of CorpSeCorps. Most of all, it’s a world where a homespun religious cult called God’s Gardeners farm rooftops and sing hymns about holy pollination, vegetarianism and the preservation of species.

These hymns were set to music by California composer Orville Stoeber and they marked the beginning of the performance. You heard the singers before you saw them, filing slowly into the centre of the Cathedral bearing cardboard banners inked with images of endangered species such as the Natterjack Toad and Kingfisher. The singers, drawn from the Manchester Lesbian & Gay Chorus, Ordsall Acapella Singers and the Blackburn Community Choir, delivered Atwood’s hymns with their gentle melodies and simple harmonies in a straightforward and humble manner befitting God’s Gardeners.

In order to reduce the size and carbon footprint of her traveling posse, Atwood is enlisting local performers in every city, making the presentation slightly different each time as well as engendering a kind of community ownership of the event. The change was refreshing; It couldn’t have felt less like the standard book tour dog-and-pony show.

The real stars of the performance were the wonderfully talented and versatile actors who read the parts of main characters Adam One (Kevin Harvey), Toby (Samantha Giles) and Ren (Samantha Sidall.) They had a challenging task: the dramatic of reading of whole passages fully embodying their character while also filling in as several secondary characters. But they held the whole cathedral transfixed; the narrative spell was never broken. The readings were linked by Atwood’s elegant summaries of the background action, so the audience were able to understand the wider sweep of action in the book.

Still, at evening’s end, when all were invited to stand and join in singing a farewell hymn, several questions remained tantalisingly unanswered. There can’t be many people there last night who won’t be seeking out The Year of The Flood sooner or later. I know I will.

(Photos Jon Parker Lee)

Manchester Blogmeet Sept 17

2009-09-01T11:53:00.005Z

I've organised a long-overdue Manchester blogmeet for Thursday September 17, from 6-8pm at Cord, off Tib Street in the Northern Quarter. All are welcome... bloggers, friends of bloggers, blog readers, whatever; come on down to the basement.

And for the first time this will be a sponsored affair. The folks from Creative Tourist, the web magazine of the Manchester Museums Consortium, will be buying everyone a drink and giving us a brief rundown of their goings-on.

As nobody put forward any objections when I asked around a couple of months ago, I'm trying out this sponsorship model for future blogmeets. Seems there are quite a few organisations about who are interested in working with Manchester bloggers, so if they'd like to buy us a beer or a coffee I figure we're willing to listen to what they have to say for ten minutes or so.

As ever, the rest of the time will be spent in making friends, catching up, flirting, frontin', bullshitting and otherwise interacting with other Manchester blogfolk. If you plan on coming say so in the comments, comment on the MCR Bloggers FB group message I'm about to write, or email me so we know how many to expect.

Metro Life is dead

2009-08-28T16:49:00.007Z

Staff at Metro's Manchester office have just been told to clean out their desks. They were responsible for Metro Life, the local arts and culture section that previewed gigs and club nights, art exhibitions and poetry readings and films, and ran book and restaurant reviews. I used to write for it myself, so I'm not claiming any sort objectivity here when I say that it was a often a thin slice of clued-up and enjoyable writing that seemed oddly out of place at the center of a free newspaper that in terms of actual news value or readability pretty much deserves to get stepped all over on the floor of the 142 or flap around in the wind with the empty crisp packets.

Under a series of editors (most recently the lovely Tamsin Curry, Lucie Davies and Ruth Allan) the section did a fine job of letting us all know about good things happening in town at just the right time. The Metro folks took their work seriously and were very progressive about including a really wide range of arts and culture, especially fringe and avant garde stuff that other local news outlets generally ignored.

In the last year things had started going downhill; Associated Newspapers laid off staff and kept on a skeleton crew from the Manchester and Liverpool offices to produce a thinner Northwest Metro Life section. They were trying to cover a wider area in less space with fewer people, thus quality and range understandably suffered.

So this news isn't really shocking, but no less disappointing. Associated Newspapers: I'm sorry that you don't think the people of Manchester and Liverpool deserve good cultural coverage. I'd threaten not to buy your newspaper, but, well... Anyway, I certainly won't have any reason to pick it up from now on. And neither will a whole bunch of other people.

Stop! ... Rammytime

2009-08-20T13:26:00.010Z

Okay. So, Ramsbottom is lovely place to live. I've only been living here for eight months and already have a hard time imagining hanging up my hat anywhere else round Manchester. You get the best of both worlds: living in what feels like a small, friendly town in the green Pennine foothills, within arm's reach of the big bad city. I know there are a few places like this about, and all have their band of loyal adherents, but I feel lucky to be here.

One thing has surprised me: I didn't expect it to be so happening around here. It'll take a lot to coax folks out of Rammy with all that's going on at the moment.

First, a long-overdue tip of the hat toThe First Chop. Less than a year old, this laid-back bar and restaurant is already feeling like a comfortable pair of old sneakers. The bottled beer selection is fantastic and they always have something good on tap. The food's just right for the place - simple but classy offerings made from carefully-sourced ingredients. Their pork kebabs with salsa verde have won my heart, and I'm trying to forget how devilishly good their chips with aioli are. Their music selection is wonderful, and they're great for the bambinos. All became clear when I learned recently that the owner came from the much-loved Jam Street Cafe, a South Manchester institution.

The Chop is at the centre of a resurgence in Rammy's nightlife, which probably needed a bit of a shot in the arm. It has always been good for food and now hosts an enviable array of eateries including Ramsons and Fishermans Retreat, China Cottage and the lovely Bailey's tea room, newcomers Chocolate Cafe, Sanminis and Buddha Lounge, and my latest happy discovery Thai restaurant Spice Garden which has been tucked away on Square Street for ages. And there are plenty of good independent butchers, greengrocers, delis and shops in the area. But after dark it feels much more like the traditional Lancashire Mill Town that it truly still is, "New Chorlton" hype aside.

Some upcoming events look set to shake things up a little. The first is Rammyfest, a free musical extravaganza unfolding over August Bank Holiday Weekend. Musicians including DJ Graeme Park and The Cordels will play in venues around town and busk outdoors. And the organisers are bridging the North-South (Manchester) divide with a handy charabanc between Chorlton and Ramsbottom to ferry folks to the festival.

The party has been organised to celebrate the launch of Ramsbottom Online, a new website set up to promote all things Ramsbottom and to act as an online hub for news and discussion about life in Rammy. They've got a blog up with some nice posts about the muy controversial new Aldi currently being built (amazingly the town's third supermarket) and the pros and cons of riding the Witch Way bus.

Next month, the big excitement is the long-anticipated return of the Ramsbottom Rhythm and Blues Festival, dormant since 2005, which Bury Met is bringing to the cricket ground the weekennd of September 26 and 27. Musicians include Matt Schofield Band, Otis Gibbs,The Ben Waters Big Band among others, plus food stalls and family activities.

Nominations open for 2009 Manchester Blog Awards

2009-08-20T12:20:00.004Z

Hey, it's time to send in your nominations for this year's Manchester Blog Awards.

Come visit our delightful new Manchester Blog Awards website and submit nominations in the following categories: Best Writing, Best Arts and Culture Blog, Best City or Neighbourhood Blog, Best New Blog and Best Personal Blog. This year, instead of emailing us your nominations you can fill in this simple form here.

Multiple nominations are cool, as is nominating yourself, but keep in mind that a blog only needs to be nominated once, so there's no point getting all your mates to stuff our virtual ballot box.

Now in its fourth year, the annual awards recognise the best of Manchester’s independent online writing. Eligible blogs submitted by the close of nominations on September 18 will be narrowed down to a shortlist in each category - look for that before the end of September. Then a judging panel will select the winners, which will be announced at the Blog Awards evening event.

This year the MBA extravaganza is moving house: we'll be kicking our heels in the brand spanking new Band on the Wall on Swan Street. As much as we all adore Matt and Phreds, it was getting kinda cramped in there, wasn't it? So mark your calendars for the evening of Wednesday, October 21. Jenn Ashworth, former blog award winner and the author of A Kind of Intimacy will read her work and talk about blogging and writing.

And of course we'll be lining up a gang of blog readers over the coming weeks, with further announcements about the kind of madcap literary and musical shenanigans you can expect on the night as the date approaches. For the freshest updates subscribe via our website, catch our feed, or follow us on Twitter at @mcrblogawards.

Many thanks to our valiant supporters: The Manchester Blog Awards is run in partnership with Arts Council England, and is supported by the Manchester Digital Development Agency, which is part of Manchester City Council. And it's part of the Manchester Literature Festival, whose programme has just gone online here.

Back in the Saddle

2009-08-20T12:09:00.002Z

Hello Manchester, I return to you revitalized, refreshed and burnished to a fine sheen after a long and glorious period of rest. Before I get into blogging business, a small technical issue needs dealing with: My mobile died a spectacular death a day or two before I left for America, going down and taking a slew of texts and messages with it, so if you tried to get in touch a month or so ago and I never got back to you, that's probably the reason why. Please try again and I will reply promptly using your communication mode of choice (though please note the messenger pigeons are all vacationing in the South of France this week.)

Lots to tell you about today. I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting down to it.

Manchizzle Summer Vacation

2009-07-17T12:19:00.002Z

That's me, my brother and my cousins at the New Jersey shore. And that's where I'm going right now, to relive the summers of my youth, followed by Vermont and NYC for some intensive accent retraining. And a complete blogging blackout, so if you're looking for something interesting to read I'll direct you to those industrious folks at the right. I am now officially on vacation and won't be back until mid-August. Don't break anything while I'm away.

Manchester International Festival: De La Soul

2009-07-17T11:56:00.003Z

The 20th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising? That can't be right. Man, this album was the soundtrack to my college years, along with the followup De La Soul is Dead. So this makes me, let's see ... yep. Offically old. Shit. How did that happen?

3 Feet High didn't really sound much like the hip hop we knew before it came out, but pretty much everything that came after sounded at least a little bit like it. It was that influential. It was also pretty important for me personally, because this music was the gateway drug that eventually got me hooked on the deep funk source tracks that they were sampling. If you really, really like Me Myself and I, you'll love the song's venerable direct ancestor, (Not Just) Knee Deep, recorded by Funkadelic in 1979. From Parliament/Funkadelic and their whole crazy conflagration of splitoff projects it's a short hop to Bootsy Collins, James Brown and The JBs, Issac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, The Meters and the rest of the soul/funk explosion. So I owe De La Soul a lot.

What I miss about this music is its friendliness, the De Las willingness to be silly and lyrically real on top of actually making good music. There are people making great hip hop today that does all of these things but you mostly do not hear them on the radio.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I heard De La Soul would be coming to Manchester for the festival. And they put on a wonderful show. Believe it or not I had never been to the Ritz before. It's definitely seen better days but I was pretty happy with the venue, which was the perfect place for a gig like this.

The De Las and Prince Paul gave us a gig that was a seamless good time. Sure, they might be a bit older (and, in some cases, living very much larger) but there was no doubt that these guys still have it. Sometimes performing as a full band, and other times stripping it back to how it was in the very beginning, three men and a machine, they played the hits (A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays, Me Myself and I etc), but also revisited some less well-loved tracks from their back catalogue that actually held up extremely well.

The night had a wonderful vibe. The band seemed to be having a great time and the crowd sure was - everyone was dancing. I've never encountered a friendlier audience in Manchester. For me it was a great close to what has been a really fantastic festival. Roll on 2011.

Creative Tourist arrives in Manchester

2009-07-13T14:44:00.005Z

This week sees the launch of Creative Tourist, a wordpress-based online magazine about our fair city's arts and culture from the Manchester Museums Consortium.

And what a time to launch, eh? Manchester is positively stuffed to bursting with fabulous cultural encounters, life-changing art experiences and can't-miss performances. I don't know about you, but my art-appreciation muscles are getting tired. My critical faculties are so exhausted that I'm being forced to take myself off to New Jersey for a restorative week in which my most challenging cultural experience will probably involve getting past the windmill in mini golf, or maybe deciding what flavor of water ice to order. (Actually, this is a serious matter which I am already working on. Root beer or cherry?)

Issue 1 features Jeremy Deller, Ansuman Biswas (better known as the Manchester Hermit), Marina Abramovic in conversation with Whitworth Art Gallery director Maria Balshaw, Andrew Shanahan's guide to the best videogames ever, and Dea Birkett writing and ranting about children in galleries, among other things.

Creative Tourist's main features will be published monthly but the idea is that the website, blog and twitter feed will keep up a steady stream of interesting content. I will be helping out Editor Susie Stubbs with the words, cruisin' the local blogsphere for tasty bits to link to and commissioning guest posts from Manchester's finest culturebloggers.

If you're one of them, please don't be shy. Get in touch and let me know what you're doing and you may be linked to in a blog roundup or be asked to pitch in and write something, like Katherine Woodfine of Follow The Yellow Brick Road, who wrote up Procession for the Creative Tourist blog.

Anyway, back to work: Root beer or cherry?

Iain Sinclair and Corridor 8 launch at Urbis

2009-07-13T13:59:00.005Z

Ever wondered whatever became of that whole SuperCity thing? Ah, doesn't the very phrase make you yearn for a faraway time when Manchester's urban march seemed unstoppable? When the pots of money to build fantastically coloured and fancifully designed buildings upon acres of scorching urban blight seemed bottomless? When people camped out overnight to simply have the chance to buy an upside-down terrace or a scandalously overpriced flat in an aged tower block with a twee ladies' name in Salford and it seemed perfectly normal? Well, almost.

Things are rather different now. But here comes Corridor 8. It's an arts annual billed as "The new cultural voice of the north." It will showcase "the best in contemporary visual art, architecture, writing, photography and more." And issue 1's theme is ... wait for it... SuperCity. And as much as I don't really dig the whole SuperCity concept, I very much dig what writer and psychogeographer Ian Sinclair wrote when Corridor 8 commissioned him to create "a literary documentary that explores the ordinary and extraordinary lives and landscape of the North."

I got a sneak peak at this piece the other day and I have to say, it is just wonderful. It made me want to go out and buy everything he's ever written (if you have the same reaction, a friendly Sinclair scholar I met recently says to start with Lights Out for the Territory). It's the best kind of poetic ramble through our city, through the idea of Manchester and through Sinclair's mind-bogglingly overstuffed brain: ‘Wandering Deansgate was like finding yourself in the middle of some dark fantasy for which you had no instructions. Cliffs of unreason. Deansgate as a river of human traffic, the Irwell its liquid margin.’

And the really good news is that Sinclair will be talking about the work at the Corridor 8 launch at Urbis this Thursday at 6:30 pm. Places are limited, to register email si at corridor8.co.uk. Though a little bird told me someone might be liveblogging the event if, like me, you can't make it. What's more, a modified version of the piece is available as a podcast you can download from the Urbis website, and listen to on the hoof. A route map should be up there shortly I'm told.

So now I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Corridor 8. Look out for it later this month.

Young bring the bling

2009-07-13T12:54:00.004Z

Oh, and several people have asked where I got this blinging new masthead. Yes, it's a reference to the Snoop Dogg-inspired orgins of this blog's name. It's exactly the way I pictured it. And the designers Pete and Geth, who operate under the name Young, whipped it up for me with the greatest of ease. I don't know how they do what they do. You'll have to ask them.

Having a new masthead is great, by the way. Like buying a new pair of sneakers. This one will need to be broken in - still a bit pinchy around the ankles, and too-bright white clean. But already I feel 100 percent bouncier. I highly recommend it.

Manchester International Festival: It Felt Like a Kiss

2009-07-13T09:50:00.011Z

I was trying not to look like I was eavesdropping, but I was straining to hear every word. The couple a few tables away were totally absorbed in excited conversation. A few tantilizing phrases floated over the drone of the cricket announcer and the scrape of cutlery:

"... a broken toe"... "completely isolated"... "it was pitch black"..."chainsaw"...

Chainsaw?

I had maintained a scrupulous information blackout regarding It Felt Like a Kiss, dutifully tuning out reviews and telling my gobsmacked friends I didn't want to know. They all seemed to NEED to talk about it afterwards. I remained in a state of pristine expectation. Still, sipping the recommended stiff drink fifteen minutes before go time at Quay House, I suddenly wondered what the hell I was getting myself into.

A mixed bag, as it turns out. If you haven't seen it yet, look away now.

Adam Curtis' experimental documentary film, orginally made for the BBC but never shown, is the main attraction at the heart of It Felt Like a Kiss, and lends the whole production its title. Like the walk-through theatre experience built around it, is both fascinating and deeply flawed. It aims to pinpoint the moment where the picket-fence-painting, hula-hooping America of the fifties and early sixties climbed to ideological dominance and then curdled, tipping from something big and wonderful and glittering and too powerful to be denied into something sinister, whose long evil fingers reach forward into the present day.

Curtis starts out with the bad shit the CIA got up to during the Cold War and loads on a smorgasboard of conspiracy-theory greatest hits: electroshock therapy, serial killers, military dabblings in LSD, the origin of AIDS, the Black Panthers, BF Skinner's mind control experiments, the Kennedy Assasination and more dodgy US-backed coups and clandestine interventions than you can shake a stick at. While all these fragments successfully build an unsettling mood, they fail to knit together into a cohesive statement of any real power.

It's like that guy in college who liked to get high and talk about the freemasons a lot was given an unlimited budget and turned loose in the CBS archives. It stops short of actually saying the CIA's germ warfare research and imaginative assasination techniques were responsible for the AIDS epidemic, but only just. It is a triumph of suggestion and style over substance.

Still, I enjoyed watching it. It's mostly an unhinged procession of gorgeously edited archive material, a complete pleasure, with a few moments of sheer genius. Some brilliantly selected fragments from a Doris Day movie. And a section where footage of middle-class couples doing The Madison is woven into an explanation of the single bullet theory, complete with diagrams, made me laugh out loud.

The promenade experience surrounding the movie screening was deeply unsettling. It's awash with evergreen fairground creepshow tricks that will not fail to make the most hardened heart pound. I was surprised that there weren't as many actual actors involved in the production as I'd expected, but the dummies were certainly effective enough, if not really very lifelike. The music throughout from the Kronos Quartet and Damon Albarn was solid horror-movie stuff, pulse-quickening but completely overshadowed by the pop songs featured in the film.

It's great having a set you can poke around in at your own pace, a mystery you can actively engage with. Punchdrunk paid attention to smells, which are very important. But there was a lot they didn't pay enough attention to: A weatherbeaten address book full of Clapham and Lewisham, too many books about walking in the Pennine Dales lurking among the Reader's Digest Condensed Books and Phillip K. Dick. Yes, it's tricky to source the right props when mounting a production about the USA in the UK, but surely not impossible. Worst of all were the packs of American Spirit cigarettes littered around the sets. The name is appropriately ironic, but they didn't start making American Sprits until 1982. Lucky Strikes would have been a better choice. Okay, yes, pedant's corner, but it's this lack of attention to detail that erodes your faith in a production while you're in it.

As an AmericanI will doubtless have a different point of view here than most of the punters. I didn't know much about Adam Curtis beforehand, like what his nationality was, but I knew he wasn't American after watching the movie, though I couldn't say exactly why. This could have been a point in his favor: sometimes we can't see ourselves as clearly as an outsider can (ask the many Americans who devour the Guardian's excellent US coverage). But here Curtis seems both tin-eared, like he never really got America, and hung up on hammering home a very particular point, one that is neither new nor very interesting to me, and I sit in the front row of Curtis' political church choir. Like Michael Moore's stuff, it is basically high quality pinko porn. When I was 18 I'll bet I would have adored it. But frankly, I was hoping for more.

Art in Bury, Margaret Atwood and Flax wants you

2009-07-09T09:41:00.010Z

Not at this Address is an exhibition at Bury Art Gallery opening Aug 1 (private view Friday 31 July at 7pm). It features an interesting group of folks including one of my favourite Manchester artists Rachel Goodyear, a master of the deliciously uncanny. That's her Fawn with Hand above.

The Literature Festival is now taking bookings for a trailblazer reading by Margaret Atwood on Tuesday Sept. 1 at 7pm in the august surroundings of the Manchester Cathedral. MLF describes it as "a unique literary performance with music to launch her new novel The Year of the Flood. Set in the same dystopian world as her previous novel Oryx and Crake, it tells the story of God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the preservation of all species." Book quickly, I reckon it'll sell out.

Meanwhile, Flax is looking for submissions from bloggers. Yes, you read right. A respected literary house recognising the sterling work of many online writers.

Well, I'll be. They say:

The next Flax anthology will be a creative non-fiction anthology. Bloggers can submit work under the title of your blog and use this as an opportunity to widen your readership.

Full details on submission here. Note they're looking for up to 1000 words of prose which is NEW WRITING that hasn't appeared on your blog or elsewhere previously, submitted between 19 June - 26 July 2009. If you're a blogger who's been wanting a chance to stretch your legs creatively, this is it.

Abandon Normal Devices launches with a bang

2009-07-09T08:43:00.009Z

Abandon Normal Devices is a festival of new film and digital culture which is part of WE PLAY, the cultural programme linked to London 2012. It will move between Liverpool and Manchester in alternate years, with organisations in Cumbria, Lancs. and Cheshire contributing to the mix. The inaugural AND takes place in Liverpool 23-27 September. On tap: film screenings, art exhibitions, online projects, public art, debates, workshops and live events.

AND just released its lineup which looks to be a veritable goody bag of tasty stuff. No surprise considering that it's headed up by Manchester's own Kate Taylor, co-creator of the Halloween Film Festival. The festival represents a partnership between FACT, Cornerhouse and folly, and is a welcome example of arts collaboration across what can sometimes feel like a very splintered region. Here's a roundup of what's in store:

Primitive, the first UK solo exhibition by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Godfather of independent Thai cinema.
Keep It Slick - Infiltrating Capitalism with political artists The Yes Men in their first European outing.
Dark Fibre, a provocative feature film mixing scripted fiction and documentary by Jamie King (Steal This Film) and Peter Mann, set in Bangalore, India's silicone valley.
Strange Attractors - The Anatomy of Dr Tulp by KMA, a new interactive light installation that will take place in Arthouse Square. Using light projected onto the ground, the project explores how our bodies mediate between the internal and external worlds, at a microscopic and global level.
War Veteran Vehicle, a new large-scale video projection by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko for public spaces in Liverpool, which explores the situation of soldiers who fought during recent armed conflicts and are returning to civilian life.
DJ Spooky will create an audiovisual remix of DW Griffith's infamous Birth of a Nation, using the new Liverpool Museum into a gigantic cinema screen.

And there's an interesting chance to get involved: They're after cyclists to make an interactive game using all of Liverpool as the setting. At a workshop on 22 July, artist collective Blast Theory will take participants through the basics, using their acclaimed cycling work Rider Spoke as a working example.

If you want to volunteer at the festival, the closing date for applications is 17 August.

Blogging Business: July

2009-07-08T10:34:00.013Z

I have genuinely been trying to get there for months, but never quite did. So I was happy to be able to make last night's Manchester Social Media Cafe held in the subtropical microclimate of the BBC cafebar. I especially enjoyed Maria Ruban's film The Joy of Ceefax and Tandot's wickedly-executed game of Ceefax bingo, both of which served as my initiation into the bewildering world of Ceefax. I actually got very nostalgic for the British childhood I never had. And I now understand the cultural significance of Bamboozle. Hooray.

There is another opportunity this weekend for those of the social media persuasion to enjoy chatting amongst themselves. Labour blogging guy Mark Hanson has organised a political blogmeet for this Saturday at 4:30pm at Nexus Art Cafe on Dale Street, in the red room off to the side.

Mark says: "This is largely social/informal but we also have an open invitation to ask for more help from HQ in terms of access/info/content as well as thinking of things we might want to work on together to create an impact." All are welcome.

I am working with a couple of potential sponsors to organise a regular old Manchester blogmeet this summer, but it looks like it won't happen until August now due to holidays and MIF-related calendar overload. Watch this space. Also have some riotously exciting Manchester Blog Awards news to announce soon.

Oh, that reminds me of one more thing: Dazed and Confused is getting into the Blog awards game with the first Dazed Raw Blog Awards. they say:

"The open nomination period has begun and will be open until July 31. You can nominate your own blog or it can be someone else's blog, as long as you think it's browse-worthy. Whilst we would love to feature blogs dedicated to heartclogging fast food, we have decided to restrict our blog categories to mirror the Dazed Digital categories; fashion, music, photography and arts and culture.

Dazed & G-Star will be shortlisting 15 blogs from each category which will all be put forward for a public vote. The winner of each category will be featured in the Dazed October issue and will also receive £500 worth of G-Star product."

Go on, don't be shy.

Manchester International Festival: Antony and The Johnsons

2009-07-04T14:24:00.009Z

Hearing Antony Hegarty sing is like listening to God speaking right in your ear. If I were a religious person, I would appreciate The Almighty even more for putting this voice in the body of a 300-pound transvestite who uses it to sing songs about being beaten up by lovers and falling for dead boys. Who, moreover, chooses for his opening act a painted woman clad only in silver knickers and two strategically positioned strips of duct tape, straight out of an East Village performance art dive, who danced for twenty minutes to avant-garde noise. (The audience, which seemed heavy on nice middle-class couples, was slightly discomfited.)

Anyway, I'm here to tell you that last night's Antony and The Johnsons/Manchester Camerata concert at Manchester Opera House was a real experience.

In his flowing white gown, Antony Hegarty was an angel, big and wise and sad. He has that peculiar quality of otherness that David Bowie has - as if he is visiting us from another planet or another time, watching our downfall with a powerless sorrow.

And at the opera house, with the full powers of the Manchester International Festival at work, you really felt like you were seeing him perform in the best and most fully-realised way. The lights, the set, the whole staging of the performance was incredible.

The set featured a white kite-like structure suspended above him where he stood at the centre of a multilayered set with a series of scrims that went up as the night progressed, only revealing the orchestera near the end. The lighting did something different for every song, weaving facets, veins and bouncing prisms of light. Hegarty explained it as the manifestation of "my dream of what it's like to live at the centre of a mountain." The overall effect was weirdly powerful.

I hadn't heard any of the songs in The Crying Light before, so it's a testament to Hegarty and composer/arranger Nico Mulhy that I found every song completely engaging. And this was a million miles away from the soupy arrangements you often get when pop singers do the orchestra concert thing. The Camerata provided a lot more than a musical backdrop, at times working as a surprisingly complicated foil to Hegarty's melody, at other times creating something very different on its own.

Hegarty strayed from the new material to give us a joyous For Today I Am A Boy and an intense Cripple and The Starfish. And we had the unexpected pleasure of a gleefully deranged cover of Beyonce's Crazy In Love, reimagined as a dirge of doomed obsession.

But, for me, the high point was Another World, when he stood against a dark background studded with red pinpricks and flares of light like a starfield. Against a sustained drone, as if emphasizing the emptiness of space, Hegarty sang words chilling in their simple truth: "I need another world. This one's nearly gone." Listening to him, you feel like he's more than halfway there.

(Photo by Flickr user black_celt)

Manchester International Festival: Kraftwerk

2009-07-04T10:50:00.007Z

Before Thursday night I would have told you there was bound to be nothing exciting about watching four catsuit-clad pensioners sway gently behind their laptops. I mean, sure, music was playing, but for all we know they could have been messaging dirty jokes to each other or doing their grocery shopping online up there. I didn't really care, in the end. Because the whole spectacle, the show Kraftwerk put on to launch the 2009 Manchester International Festival was completely absorbing.

There was something monumentally right about seeing Kraftwerk at the Manchester Velodrome - not just because of Ralf Hütter's well-known cycling obsession but for the shape of the place, the long slow curve of the banked track hugging the audience like some giant gear casing.

It's a tough one as a music venue; Opener Steve Reich's piece seemed sadly diminished in the giant space. But it was just right for the main event. The sound was great, and you couldn't beat the view. From my perch up on the battlements, the scene resembled some weird postmodern rally, like a scene out of Metropolis, the crowd sparkling with the blue lights of a thousand mobiles recording. They went wild when Kraftwerk came on with Man Machine, four streamlined figures outlined with elegant brutalism against a giant screen flashing up propaganda-poster style text. And they totally lost it when cyclists from Team GB took to the track during Tour De France.

There were hiccups. The event started late, probably because it took everyone longer to get up to the Velodrome than they thought, which is, like, really far from the city centre (and next to what someone told me is the biggest Asda in Europe on the walk to the bus stop.) They ran out of 3-D glasses at some entry points whilst others had extra. And then there was the heat. Sweaty doesn't even begin to describe it. Everyone's 3-D glasses were fogging up.

The best bit for me came during the 3-D section, when the launched into Radioactivity, the stark menace of the names Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, Hiroshima flashing up on the screen, that voice instructing us with the cold precision of roentgens to STOP RADIOACTIVITY. This was the Cold War-era vision of the future as certain nuclear apocalypse. It made me almost nostalgic for the time when I went to bed at night and listened nervously to the drone of planes overhead.

So maybe we don't travel by hovertrain or have cyborgs running the country (yet! though there are a few I have my doubts about), but musically, at least, their vision of the future was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their songs don't sound cutting-edge to us anymore simply because Kraftwerk was so influential. Even leaving aside the warring tribes of Electronica who owe their very existence to these guys, Kraftwerk's haunting melodies have turned up in some pretty unlikely places. You have to wonder how many people heard Computer Love last night and went, "wait a minute... that Coldplay song."

Whoever did the visuals earned every bit of their fee. The much-anticipated 3-D section surpassed the hype, with numbers and drug capsules and radioactive symbols bouncing off the screen at you with spooky immediacy, even from as far back as I was. I devoutly hope nobody there was foolish enough to have taken hallucinogenics; none were needed. Just being there was more than enough to bend your brains.

(Picture by Catharine Braithwaite.)

The Manchester Hermit

2009-06-30T08:14:00.008Z

A hermit locks himself in a tower for a 40-day meditation on the fate of the Earth. And then he logs in to Twitter.

"First tweet from the tower: About to tackle the first job of any new tenant. Find a mop and bucket. The whole place needs a good scrub."

Crazy? Maybe. But Ansuman Biswas isn't one of your typical old-school hermits. And the tower in question isn't on a remote Himalayan mountainside, it's on Oxford Road. The Manchester Hermit is a living exhibition at the Manchester Museum. And he's both completely isolated and communicating freely with the outside world via two Twitter accounts and a blog, not to mention a very savvy marketing team.

Biswas is an artist, a Buddhist and something of a philosopher - read his fascinating account of how his background informs this project, and its ultimate aims:

"... My own hermetic training is in the Theravada Buddhist technique of vipassana... essentially an exhaustive cataloguing of every aspect of experience, up to and including the cessation of everything. The vipassana yogi, like the Victorian collector, is engaged in taxonomy – a taxonomy of things which are disappearing. Someone practicing vipassana trains his or her awareness on every minute detail of experience, and observes it while it burns away. At the completion of this enlightenment nothing is left. The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvana is ‘extinguishing’, referring to the going out of a light.

This idea of extinction will be the main organizing principle for me. By my action I hope to sensitize us to the sorrow of loss. My aim is to engage emotionally with the fact of the massive loss of memes, genes and habitats which we ourselves are precipitating on a planetary scale ..."

Oh, and if you suspect he's sneakily using his retreat from human society to play Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, you can keep tabs on him via webcam.

The project is already well underway. On the Manchester Hermit's blog, Biswas outlines his intention to destroy an item from the museum's collection every day, unless someone steps forward to demonstrate that the item in question is cared for. A fairly drastic and thus effective way of focusing attention on the bigger questions behind the museum's holdings and its role. He says, in an earlier post:

"The museum itself is a library of Babel, a seed bank and an ark. It is Gaia’s memory. At the apex of this body of knowledge, perched in a tower as a brain is perched on a spine, the hermit might symbolise conscious agency. The hermit dramatises the dialectic between deliberate, mindful knowledge and the hidden, or forgotten unconscious. I will use his presence to focus questions of stewardship, storage, and conservation, of profligacy, amnesia, and extinction."

The first item is the skull pictured above and has attracted 11 comments so far. If you're interested, join the conversation. Kudos to Manchester Museum for having the chutzpah to mount such a visionary project.

New Blogs: The Tasty Art Edition

2009-06-22T10:48:00.012Z

Loads to tell you about today, with some delicious new arts and culture offerings for le blogroll.

Hilary Jack is a Manchester-based artist and curator (half of the Apartment team) whose work is currently appearing in The Social Lives of Objects at Castlefield Gallery - above is one of her pieces from that show I really liked. Her blog is a great example of how artists can use the platform to showcase and promote their work.

Manchester/Glasgow-based artist Yuen Fong Ling has a blog in which he writes about his practice and pictures of his work as well as other stuff.

This is cool. Soup o'th'Day is a blog with vodcasts/news of arts events in Manchester. It's linked to Stephen Cambpell's project which presents arts events in Manchester in visual form. Currently featured is work from Susie MacMurrays' exhibition Lost & Found at Islington Mill opening July 10 (private view Thursday 9th July, 6.30 - 8.30pm)

They're cooking up some crazy things over at the mill these days, as always. The latest wheeze is a series of artist-led meals. At the last one, artist and curator Kwong Lee prepared a feast of red and green dishes which had to be eaten with 3-D glases on. Whenever possible, I think art should be tasty. The Islington Mill Art Academy, its free, self-organised art school, looks to be going well, too. They now have a blog here.

Moving out of the art world, Chris Norwood wrote in to introduce the Forever Manchester blog. He says: The blog is linked to the charitable work of the Community Foundation for Greater Manchester and is part of their Forever Manchester initiative, which raises money to fund community groups and other activities in neighbourhoods across Greater Manchester.

A new personal blog: Bethan Townsend's Plastic Rosaries.

Gareth Hacking describes his site as a photoblog, though artwork and other stuff appear from time to time.

Citizen Badham is a blog by comics fanatic and freelance writer Matt Badham, who is currently running a series called 100 days, 100 cartoonists.

Sean Gregson is writing a blog about the process of writing and producing a play as part of the upcoming 24:7 Theatre Festival. Said play, Donal Fleet: A Confessional is on July 20.

Finally, The Culture Cheese and Pineapple is an interesting idea. Organisers Plashing Vole and Ben from Cynical Ben describe it as a "place where you can force your favourite books, records, films, art, theatre, and the like on unsuspecting members of the public and they in return can make you sit through theirs. It is a bit like a book club but with no limits on what media you suggest." They explain how it works here. Very early days but they want to get things going in August, there are email details on the site if you'd like to get involved.

I love a parade

2009-06-18T08:30:00.000Z

All this buildup to Jeremy Deller's Procession (which looks to be amazing) has renewed my appreciation for the humble parade. And sent me searching for a half-remembered Maurice Sendak (?) book I had when I was little about a parade featuring all kinds of unusual groups of people - people with moustaches and/or people who slurped soup, among others? Anyway, I can't remember what it's called, so if it rings a bell for anyone let me know because I'm going crazy here. Maybe I should ask Jeremy Deller.

And if you'd like to whet your appetite for Procession by checking out another unconventional parade, head over to Hebden Bridge Saturday at 2pm for the Handmade Parade. As you'd expect from a town "internationally known for its funkiness" and indeed for the seriousness with which it takes its role as right-on capital of Albion, this is a parade with rules: No written words or logos, and no motorised vehicles.

They are good rules, though, so we can't poke too much fun at them, and the parade sounds terrific, with puppets (which look a lot like the ones at my beloved Bread and Puppet in VT), dancers, handcrafted floats and a samba band. There are workshops if you'd like to make something yourself and march in the parade, which is followed by a pageant and a big picnic in Calder Holmes park. This year's events have a Glorious Garden Party theme, so expect to see lots of adorable wee trustafarians cavorting in handmade butterfly costumes.