To Do: Homelife, food fest and blogger treats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Best of Manchester : The Remix

The people who run the Best of Manchester Awards are looking for the mysterious person or persons who did these spoof BOMA posters (The poster on the left is the real thing, the one on the right the spoof).

They swear up and down that this is not a clever publicity stunt, they genuinely have no idea who made 'em, but they'd like to include the spoof posters in the exhibition later this summer. So they are asking the blogging community to help track down whoever's responsible for this clever bit of culturejamming. And I just noticed as I was typing this that Chris has put a similar post up at Mancubist.

They promise that anyone who helps them with a bit of detective work will get two free invites to the BOMA awards party. Email marketing at urbis dot org dot uk.

Now I'm curious. Any idears?

As it happens, BOMA announced the shortlist earlier this week, which makes for interesting reading. Some familiar names on there, some surprises. But mainly it's nice to see folks who have been labouring quietly away for years get some recognition for all the all-nighters they've pulled in the service of art/music/fashion. And no, I'm not going to say who I want to win. That would spoil it. Winners announced at Urbis on 23 July.

Contemporary Art Manchester

Unlike other cities', Manchester's independent art scene has long been a splintered, rather disorganised thing. You hear about exhibitions, sometimes in advance, sometimes after the fact. You go to private views and you see all the same people, mainly artists, designers and curatorial bods - it's a fairly small circle given the city's size. But considering that these artists' PR often consists of personally handing out flyers and - maybe - trying to spread the word on Facebook, it's not surprising that it can be hard to reach new audiences.

But that looks to be changing. Finally, the independent artists of Manchester have come together under one banner. Contemporary Art Manchester has been bubbling away quietly for a long time, and with the huge number of cooks involved I can only imagine how long those meetings must have gone on. But the group's website launches today, (they're already on Twitter and Flickr) and I'm pretty excited about what this means for Manchester's art scene.

Basically, CAM brings together Manchester and Salford's independent artists, small collectives and artist-led initiatives in a consortium that will give them a new platform to support what they're already doing, work together more effectively and increase their visibility.

The members of the consortium include Twenty+3 Projects, 100th Monkey, Bureau, Castlefield Gallery, Contents May Vary, BMCA, Exocet, FutureEverything, Gymnasium, Interval, Islington Mill Art Academy, Harfleet and Jack, The Salford Restoration Office and Rogue Project Space. Many of those will be familiar names if you read this blog regularly, because they're the folks who are doing really interesting and engaging visual art that, some might say, runs counter to the bigger art venues' tendency to play it safe.

Their first project is 'Trade City', a large group show in the new CHIPS building in Ancoats, and includes Antifreeze, an art car boot fair and exhibition about the high end art market delivered within the format of low end trade. That's on Saturday, July 4 (dates for the exhibition were not on the CAM website, but I'm assuming it will be open then.)

Interestingly, Trade City coincides with the Manchester International Festival, but is not on the festival's programme, as far as I can tell. Which makes it a kind of visual art fringe festival. So while you're enjoying the many amazing artists and performers visiting the city this summer, take some time out to appreciate the talent that lives here all year long.

(Image of Chips building courtesy of Paul Harfleet via Gymnasium)

I'm coming out

Some of the more observant of you might have noticed that I changed the name on my profile this week. I've been writing this blog since 2005, and since 2005 it's had the name Yankunian on it.

At the time I thought that it was the sensible thing to do. Blogging under an anonymous handle would give me the freedom to write whatever I wanted without having to worry about untidy consequences of either the personal or professional variety. And the freedom to have fun with my writing and maybe be a bit shit but not worry to much about it. Plus, pseudonyms are cool and they make you feel important, like one of the cats in the Federalist Papers.

What happened then was that my blog kind of grew into a whole other thing I wasn't really expecting. I started doing blogging workshops and organising blogmeets and the blog awards and before long everyone knew who wrote The Manchizzle. It has became part of my professional life, for better or worse. So I've decided it's just silly not to put my name on it since it only takes about five seconds to figure out who writes it on google.

If this sounds familiar, maybe it's because I've blogged about this before, but have resisted reading that post for fear of learning how boneachingly repetitive I can be without even trying. There was an interesting discussion around this "should you use real names/how much about your personal life should you divulge on your blog" dilemma that jumped between Emily and Jenn and Max's blogs awhile back, if anyone wants to check it out. Much more of an issue for personal bloggers than us dry informative types but still a toughie that most bloggers have to confront at some point or another. Anyone have any thoughts?

Just don't tell me I've made a huge mistake because there are no do-overs with the internet.

Overlooked Manchester

"We are not architects, preservationists, activists, though we do know a number of each of these. We are not radicals, Situationists, academics or psychogeographers, though we are lucky to count a few of these mythical creatures as our friends..."
The newly-formed Manchester Modernist Society cannily introduces itself by telling us what it is not. So what is it? Well, the MMS manifesto makes for great reading, here's an excerpt:

"We believe that the recent past and its rich variety of grand and ordinary, cherished and neglected buildings continue to play a part in our shared consciousness and sense of identity ...We are keen to foster and help develop a greater public awareness of the rich and complex relationship between architecture, art and design and public space, and draw attention to the precarious nature of much of the 20th century backdrop that we often mistakenly take for granted.

We aim to create a real space for discussing, engaging and enjoying perhaps occasionally even campaigning for the multilayered complexities of a city that is comfortable to wear its carbuncled heart on its sleeve. Not for us the smooth uniformity of a relentlessly brand new city that is too intimidating to use."

Organisers Jack Hale and Maureen Ward have also enlisted the support of EP Niblock, who wrote the introduction to their website. The Society's first get together is a trip across the Pennines today in Leeds. But, closer to home, they also recommend this talk on The Future of Architecture tonight at The Circle Club. Look out for more events in future on their website or Facebook page.

There's more to a city than buildings, and Green Badge Guide Anne Beswick wrote to tell me about her new tour which focuses on some of quietest and possibly most neglected Mancunians - Manchester's trees. Loyal readers know I am a friend of the trees and wish there were more of them around here. Having grown up in a place that looks like this, I'm never really comfortable too far away from a forest. But it turns out I'm not far at all: The Red Rose Forest encompasses a big chunk of the parks, trees and woodlands in Greater Manchester. Who knew?

Anne says: "Did you know that alder makes the best charcoal for gunpowder manufacture, that birch trees are known as the 'ladies of the woods' or that the old name for oak was 'ac' from which we get acorn and Accrington?" More information and a schedule of the tree tour here on the Tour Manchester site. The next one is June 23.

New Blogs: The short and rushed edition

A short, highball glass full of new blogs for you to knock back as I rush out the door:

Falling and Laughing is Alistair Beech's blog about music, film and media.
Mithering Times is a new personal blog.

Thoughts of Nigel is a media commentary blog written by Nigel Barlow.

Another media addition: Katie Moffat's PR nowandthen.

A new artist/illustrator blog: Stephen Marshall Also on the art tip: ArtYarn is a collaborative fibre arts project coordinated by visual artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre. If you want to know what yarn bombing is, check it out.


Charismatic Information Technology is written by Simon Carter for those folks who know the difference between VPN and VPL, unlike myself, to whom they are just a random arrangement of meaningless letters.

Send me some more new blogs, will you? Stocks are getting dangerously low.