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.

Manchester arts venues dig social media

Increasingly, arts organisations and cultural institutions in Manchester are getting all mixed up with social media. It's not just about reaching younger and more tech-savvy audiences - though it will certainly help them do that - but taking part in the wider cultural conversation that is taking place in Manchester.

The Bolton Octagon has an excellent blog which provides behind-the-scenes peeks at their productions. Because I follow Bury Met on Twitter, I've been reminded about gigs I would have otherwise missed. The Library Theatre is on Twitter. So is Contact., Urbis and The Oldham Coliseum, which also uses a link sharing account on delicious to track coverage of their current production.

And that's just the heavy hitters. Really, one of the best things about social media is how it allows small underfunded collectives and artist groups to get the word out about their work without paying through the nose for PR. I've written about this phenomena in the Manc literature scene loads, but for a glimpse of similar things happening on the visual art side check out Exocet and Interval.

Sure, social media is another channel on which to promote your stuff, but savvy arts orgs understand that it's a tool that works both ways. It can also allow punters to participate in their work, from deciding what band should play a festival to getting involved in creating artistic content online. So the relationship becomes less one-sided and (hopefully) engenders a broader sense of ownership around these institutions.

Cornerhouse has embraced an interesting new "open source" approach which aims to engage the public more in programming, and abandon the traditional model of a head curator/programmer determining cultural output. The ensuing staff reshuffle which saw longtime film honcho Linda Pariser and Visual Art Director Kathy Rae Huffman depart caused a bit of a kerfuffle on the Manc arts scene.

Cornerhouse's new world order is laid out for your persual in The Art of With - an essay, seminar and a conversation that will potentially shape what the institution does in the future. The C-house commissioned We-Think author Charles Leadbeater to write an essay on how arts orgs can successfully incorporate this approach. And it's all just as collaborative as you'd expect: you can comment on the essay at the wiki here, and get involved in the seminar June 24.

And in July, Manchester Museums Consortium are launching a Wordpress-based online magazine to promote their activities and the city as a cultural destination. I'll be helping MMC involve the city's cultural bloggers in creating content for the site, so if you're doing reviews or criticism on your blog, drop me a line.

The Cutting Room Experiment

There's an empty square in Ancoats next to St. Peter's Church called Cutting Room Square. It's a new public square created as part of the regeneration of the area. It's pretty quiet up there these days. But that's all going to change on June 20 when the Cutting Room Experiment takes over.

What's it all about? Well, nobody knows yet. The organisers are soliciting ideas for events across 12 different streams of programming, including literature, architecture/design, art and pop music. The way it works is that people submit their ideas for what they think should happen, and the winners of open online voting decide what actually gets to happen. It's a little similar to the way the Mapping Creativity project worked, but with a different focus and on a different scale.

Current contenders include some unsurprisingly flashmobby suggestions, like the biggest Space Hopper race ever, an enormous silent disco and a mass dance routine to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The literature stream makes for particularly interesting reading with some strong, writing-led ideas alongside some stranger ones (Jane Austen and zombies???) Votes close on Friday, May 29.

The resulting events will be funded by regeneration bodies, the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) and New East Manchester.

Got questions? Want to know more? Well, you're in luck. Organiser Jon is inviting curious bloggers down to the Bay Horse on Thursday May 21 at 6:30 for what may be Manchester's first ever "blog launch," constituting a chat about the event and a free pint.

Rainy City Stories June workshops

Attention writerly folk: The Rainy City Stories project has teamed up with the lovely people at Commonword to run some creative writing workshops in Greater Manchester on the theme of writing about place.

How do the best writers successfully evoke the unique feeling of a place? How can descriptions and telling details be used to transport the reader to a particular setting? Writer Suzanne Batty will help participants explore new tactics and techniques in the two-hour session.

Suzanne Batty has published two collections of poems, most recently The Barking Thing (Bloodaxe Books). She is an experienced workshop leader who teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and is co-editor of poetry journal Rain Dog.

This workshop is suitable for all levels of writer. Places are free, but limited to 12 people per workshop, so early booking is advised. It will be offered in four locations:

Stockport Art Gallery Saturday June 13, 2-4 pm
To book a place, please ring 0161 474 4453

Bury Fusiliers’ Museum Wednesday June 24, 7-9 pm
To book a place, please ring 01706 823264

Hyde Library Thursday June 25, 1-3 pm
To book a place, please ring 0161 342 4450

Standish Library Saturday June 27, 10am-12pm
To book a place, please ring 01257 400496

New Blogs: The Checkpoint Charlie Edition

"Can I see your papers, sir?" Manchester's set to become Cold War-era East Berlin as we've drawn the short, shit-covered straw and won the privilege of being the first city in Britain to get identification cards.

They won't be compulsory, oh no - well, not at first. Good citizens will queue up to get them out of an earnest desire to help the authorities keep us all safe, right? And you're a good citizen, right? So why don't you want one? Don't you want to live in a safe country? Hmmm, maybe we should make them mandatory. For the good of all, you understand.

Don't you stand for it.

I received an email from Rosetta Hampshire telling me about her new blog: although I am not quite as delicious as I once was

"I suppose it would fit best in the personal blogs bit as I intend to write largely about myself and my feelings about moving to Manchester. I was actually born here about ninety years ago but had never actually seen the city until this year. At ninety years old I cannot promise my blog will last for very long but hopefully it will be worth reading while it (and I) keep going."

There can't be too many nonagenarian ladies who list Stereolab among their favourite bands, but the world is much stranger than we think. ;)

A couple of new music blogs: Guestlist and Cath Aubergine's Up the Down Escalator which is a blog that lives on MySpace.

Oldham 100 is a photo blog written by an Oldham bus driver who documents his route in daily snaps. Great idea, nicely executed.

The Manchester Zedders live here. What are zedders? Go find out.

Following up my last, surprisingly comment-provoking post, Sarah Hartley has a personal blog here, and will continue her food writing here.

Commonword joins the blogging fray with Commonword Blogs.

An interesting new addition to the city blogs section: Lost in Manchester, which chronicles "the weird, wonderful and plain ordinary in and around Manchester" Reminds me of the excellent Forgotten NY.

CMS, who writes Lost in Manchester, also has a photo blog called The Last Picture show.

Culture Club Social is not a blog but a ning site with the motto "Be proud, be creative, be in the city - Bee Manc (a reference of course to the symbol of Manchester, the industrious honeybee. Which is now endangered. Hmm.) They're interested in news of cultural events around the city.

All Over MCR is an anonymously written blog that seems to have a Manchester news and media focus, with recent posts on the launch of the Bury Independent and Channel M.

Peace out.

More cuts at the Manchester Evening News

Earlier this week, I couldn't believe it when I heard some of the people who'd lost their jobs at the MEN. These are not cub reporters by any stretch, but committed and experienced editorial-level folks who've been on the paper for years.

Outgoing online editor Sarah Hartley (Good luck, Sarah!) writes about her time at the MEN over on her personal blog. Wrestling such an old-school relic of a paper into the internet age couldn't have been an easy task, and it's unclear now what will become of the stable of blogs she developed for the MEN, including The Mancunian Way and Life Through Food. Or, for that matter, the CityLife website. You'd have to be pretty moronic to jettison websites and blog projects at this juncture, but the suits in charge of our local rag haven't ever been exactly visionary.

Seriously, is there anyone left in the building? This is what, the second, or is it the third round of cuts on the paper this year? Not to mention the fact that they've decimated the much-vaunted Channel M and cut its broadcasting time to a few hours a day.

Not to mention the fact that, when I bought my GMG-owned Rossendale Free Press yesterday, it had a notice about how the newsroom was now at Scott Place in Manchester, and if I wanted to talk with a reporter in Ramsbottom I could do so at a 2-hour "surgery" once a week. (Yeah, thanks, but news phoned in from six postcodes away doesn't sound so fresh to me. I'd much rather start a citizen-powered hyperlocal community newsblog. Any takers?)

It looks like we happen to be lucky enough to be seeing the death of the newspaper age up close and personal. It'll be painful for a while as journalism reconfigures itself for the new world order. But how this happens, what new forms emerge, and whether we as consumers of news will ultimately benefit remains very much to be seen.

In the meantime, the state of Manchester's print media is looking pretty bleak. If you've got news, you'd probably be better off shouting it from the rooftops then calling the MEN, where there soon may not be anyone to answer the phone, let alone file a story.

Manchester writing bits and bobs

A few interesting new developments in Manchester's blossoming online writing scene:

Nasty Safari is an online home for the best new prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction," they tell us. "It's a strange journey through the world that makes even the mundane exotic. And it may or may not involve zebras. Everyone involved in Nasty Safari lives, works and studies in Manchester, and we're really keen to get lots of submissions in from writers in the North West."

Willow Hewitt of Bewilderbliss has started Manchester Writing, "a new blog about readings and writing related things in Manchester. It's just getting going but I'm soon going to get a full diary of events on there of all (or possibly something between 'some' and 'most') of the readings around town."

Also just getting off the ground: web magazine An Apathetical Reader, "a creative community site that hopes to give a voice to the vast numbers of unsupported, disillusioned young people in the city," writes a shadowy figure called Alice Apathetical. "The website will feature local news, national political comment, features about Manchester, music journalism and artist profiles. By creating a unique and quality webzine I hope to support creative people blown by the current economic climate and finding the city a difficult place to meet like-minded people."

... "The magazine has strong links with The Chapel Social Centre on Platt Fields, where contributors can meet and discuss their ideas. It is also affiliated with People's Voice Media - the 'Reuters of the community' - which encourages and trains young people in visual media industries." To get involved, get in touch with Alice via the website.

WE ARE YOUNG AND WE ARE TRYING is "an art & literature zine with a cause. Each volume includes a piece of writing and a piece of art from ten different people and music and art from one more. Five are primarily writers, five are primarily artists. We hope to encourage creativity and trying new shit as well as providing a platform to show off the shit you do anyway."

There's news of a workshop linked to the upcoming Text Festival: Writers and artists 16 and up are invited to take part in a workshop series run by Bury Council. Participants will learn about Bury Art Gallery’s Text exhibition, have time to explore your creative ideas, work together to develop a script then help create a short digital animation which will go online for public viewing. Each workshop will be run by a range of artists for 2 hours each Saturday afternoon (2-4pm) for 6 weeks starting on the 16th May. For more information and a brief application form contact Farrell Renowden, Arts Development Officer at Bury council: artsdevelopment@bury.gov.uk or 0161 253 5804

I'm also nearly finished organising our first series of Rainy City Stories creative writing workshops. I'll post the details here soon.

A tale of two trees

Happy tree:



Tib Street at its most charming. Not the same without the old LSTD's outdoor tables, but still one of the loveliest spots in town.


Sad tree:



This tree died of embarassment after being forced to participate in the Triangle's horrifying mall sculpture atrocity. For shame.

More Manchester Spring Festivals

Okay, so a few alert readers let me know I left some festivals out of my last schpiel. Yes, there are more festivals in Manchester this spring. There are so many, in fact, that I ran out of steam and decided to do the update in two parts. But I didn't tell you that, did I? No, I wanted it to be a surprise. So, holy cats, look over there, there are some extra bonus festivals you didn't even expect queueing up on the calendar. It's like finding a freshly-baked strawberry rhubarb pie on your doorstep.

Futuresonic
13-16 May, venues around the city

Next year it's going to become the scarily-named FutureEverything, but first we have one more year of old school Futuresonic. And the sonic element of this year's fest is especially interesting. I knows some of y'all are going to be thrilled at the chance to see Phillip Glass perform at RNCM, the joint with the best acoustics in town. He's by far the biggest name. The delights of the festival's music programme are definitely esoteric; unless you're a trendhunting digital ambient anorak with £300 headphones you may not have heard of them, but who cares? Pick one that looks interesting (and they pretty much all do) roll up, and more likely than not get your mind blown.

I'm especially excited about Soap&Skin at Cross Street Chapel, and can't decide between the two great-looking opening night gigs. Music aside, there's the usual programme of arty hijinks around town, and the excellent social technologies summit too.

Bury Text Festival
30 April - exhibitions run into June, venues around Bury

The Text Festival is a biennial programme of exhibitions and events that span the overlapping ground between poetry and text-based art, based at the wonderful Bury Art Gallery. Director Tony Trehy's energy and curatorial nous help make this a gallery that punches way above its weight... and I'm not just saying that because I live in Bury.

This year's Textfest features artists including the American visual poet Geof Huth, Poet Ron Silliman (who has been working on a single poem since 1974) and artist Jenny Holzer among many others. The Bury Poems features poets Tony Lopez, Carol Watts and Phil Davenport responding to their stay in Bury with poems.

MAPS Festival
1-4 May, venues around the Northern Quarter
Note: this date has been changed (had the wrong one, thanks Diana.)

Wait a min... what? Last week I told you about Hungry Pigeon, which is meant to be the reinvention of last year's MAPS festival. Well, turns out there's been a mysterious schism between the organisers of that event last year. Some of them splintered off under the flag of the Hungry Pigeon, while others stayed on to organise the second MAPS festival - and both camps are claiming to be the real thing. Hmmm. Curious. Aaanyway, we get two festivals in the N. Quarter this year instead of one. So we're the winners here, no?

And the MAPS festival is looking like a grand old time. Check out that clever map on their website - it's a tree and a map at the same time. Very cool. As Chris has already pointed out, MAPS is strong with local promoters who look set to put on a good show. As for the bands playing at a spate of traditional and not-so venues around the nabe, well, again, I haven't heard of many of them. But I'm sure that's pretty much entirely down to the fact that I don't get out enough anymore. Go, enjoy, and maybe next year we'll get three NQ festivals in May.

Manchester Festivals: Spring 2009

You'd have to be some kind of dreary misanthrope to own up to not liking festivals. Why, the very word conjures a kaleidoscopic vision of dizzily cavorting through the streets while brightly-clad revelers play joyful melodies upon pipes and pan flutes.

No? Well, maybe that's just me.

Manchester's spring festival season is about to get underway, and as a public service I like to put all the relevant info together in one place, because there's a lot of it. Don't say I never did anything for you. And don't forget your pan flute. If you become disoriented, please consult the special pan flute instructions above, (courtesy of Eating Sandwiches.)

Chorlton's Big Green Festival
Sat 4 April, St. Clement's Church

A right-on riot of sustainability and folkin' madness. A surprisingly huge amount of stuff on for one day including film, music, art and dance, bike parades, ceilidhs, organic food, crafts.


Moves Festival
23-28 April, venues around the city

The theme of year's movement on screen festival is narrative. Highlights include a screening of Lotte Reiniger's shadowbox Arabic fairy-tale from 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Carte Blanche to Comma Press features 12 new films adapted from poems and short stories published independently in the region - based on work by John Cooper Clarke, Hanif Kureishi, Tony Walsh, David Constantine and Brian Patten, among others. And the ever-popular moves lab gets people together to make short films in six days with a screening at the end (they need writers, so get your stories and ideas in.)


Sounds from the Other City.
Bank Holiday Sunday May 3, 3pm-late, venues around Salford.

A chance to while away an afternoon and evening listening to arty bands in various Sallywood boozers, offices and churches in the company of fuzzily inebriated but mainly happy people. The acts are curated by an eclectic bunch of local promoters. Good fun. Tickets on sale now. It usually sells out.


Hungry Pigeon
May 22-25, venues around the Northern Quarter

Last year's MAPS festival has returned with an interesting new name. This year, we're promised a large outdoor stage in a secret location for "up to 5000 people." Who's playing? Mostly a bunch of local bands. Some of them probably have a big following, but I can't get too excited about them (because I don't know who they are. Mostly.)


Eurocultured
May 24-25, New Wakefield Street (that's the one off Oxford Rd right by the train bridge, where Font and The Thirsty Scholar are.)

This festival has been going for quite a while and I always hear good things about it but I never manage to make it down. Maybe I will this year. The splendid Nouvelle Vague are coming, along with a lot of bands/djs from Europe and, um, Manchester. Plus some live art too.


Mad Ferret Festival
June 12-13, Platt Fields Park

Oh dear, looks like someone forgot to renew their domain, so I'll have to direct you to their facebook page. Not much up at the minute, though.

New Blogs: The Painterly Edition

Anthony and Diarmud run a blog called Paint my Album. It's all about replicating classic album covers using the challengingly blunt instrument of Microsoft Paint. So far they've have had 802 sent in from all over the world and are trying to get 2,000 by December. Okay, that all seems fairly straightforward, but they've ratcheted things up another level with video podcasts in which they introduce the new submissions, and, well, get a bit silly. I strongly recommend you go check it out.

The Art of Noise album cover above, #452, is by Mike Daye from Bristol. Very impressive.

Oooh, and look at all the other pretty new blogs:

Manchester Climate Fortnightly does a blog which is updated more than fortnightly.

Words and Fixtures is a blog by the lovely Clare, a veritable goddess of subediting, which is "mostly about words, but also about other things that pique my interest or irk my irkness." And it is a most formidable irkness. You can totally vent to her about any misplaced apostrophe's you encounter because she feels your pain.

Rev Porl says this is "a blog of musings, things that happen, things that I see and hear, and stuff. Nothing in particular. Just some bits."

Tomato Sauce is a new writerly blog.

I'm told Filling the Space is the blog of a Chorlton-based auntie.

Th'Arctic is a live art project from Rebecca McKnight. "During April 2009, Rebecca will attempt to become one of the first British people to ski up to 300 miles pulling a pulk (sledge) from Resolute Bay to Grise Fiord, the most northerly Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic. Throughout the journey she'll be posting about her experiences on this blog. Th'Arctic blog 'stations' and photographic updates from Rebecca's journey will be on show at Cornerhouse as part of Cornerhouse Projects, BBC Radio Lancashire and on the BBC Big Screen in Manchester's Exchange Square."

Katy Murr is a freelance journalist and also a feminist.

Also, have you met David?