Brutal, beautiful, battered: we’re losing the war for our soul

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The demolition of Madin’s Library is victory for cliché and gormless ‘opinion’. A triumph of pluralistic ignorance, with the blood on the hands of an unimaginative fourth estate who sleepwalked with what passes for a second round these parts into an act of pointless vandalism.

Karl Marx developed a theory of what’s now called creative destruction: he postulated that capitalism needs continual cycles of devaluation or destruction in order to clear the ground for the creation of new wealth. As Stereolab explain, this is often by recession or war — but in our local context neglect and bogus ‘civic renewal’ serve the purpose. Capitalism has won over beauty, and the cheers of the braying classes as the thin exterior is punctured celebrate the powerlessness of all under money’s rule.

It is a war, a war for history and the public realm. The casualty of this war is beauty. The collateral damage the psyche and soul of the city.

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Outsiders: back with a vengeance

I’m here in a new bar, but it’s an old bar. The bar that was here before is old and gone, the new old bar is a lot like a bar that used to be in its place years and years ago. It’s dark and humid but the walls are yet to condense into sweat. I’m here as a homecoming, or at least to test a theory about home. Maybe home isn’t a specific place, maybe home is wherever you hang up who you think you are and stretch into the person that your skin hangs on.

So I’m here with the freaks, long hair, short skirts, denim, one-eyed, leather, awkward, coloured hair crowd. The music is loud and the drums rattle through the new sound system like fireworks in a metal bin. I’m ill and achey, but I have a writing problem, the drinks are cheap and it’s my favourite crowd to be alone in.

“We’re back home!” someone shouts, I wish they hadn’t. It kind of steps on the point of this article and sounds hack and untrue, but they do. And anyway, it is kind of home, if not here where else?

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A hundred thousand tables

This guy only needs to get up there to ask for an exchange on a shirt from Ciro Citterio.

 

A hundred (or more) tables but I’m not hungry.

How hungry can one town be? How much lunch can one town eat?

But here they are and here they eat. Here where the echo of a phone shop rings. Here, where the escalators drew you up into the Aladdin’s Cave of Sports Direct. Now: above us only sky; domes and light — but in the light the spectre.

Pallasades.

This space is still anchored in its past. I can see it as through Google Glass: ghosts of shops — shops we never loved, not really. Enough remains (the ramp, Tesco, the Bullring link) to place me in space/time. For now though there is lunch.

I am not hungry. Why am I not hungry? Because the shops are not the ghosts. I am the ghost. I am the past. This map is only mine. At Foot Locker, turn left. Vision Express where I first became blind (or rather, had my failing eye sight certified). And on. Nickelby’s. As a Birmingham ingénue, an England ingénue in fact, I bought some terrible clothes there. Just beyond, they had Internet once. An internet café where (I think) my wife sent a reply to the email that sparked our marriage, sparked my life.

I am a ghost. Ghosts do not eat.

But Grand Central lives. Grand Central eats.

Birmingham: let’s do lunch.

The scallop line: the true boundary of Greater Birmingham

It’s going to be fun to stay in the WMCA. The West Midlands Combined Authority that is. It would be called Greater Birmingham if those from the Black Country could see beyond their mounds of faggots, scratchings and closed heavy industry. Sorry to piss on their chips (we know they’d rather have mushy peas) but we’re going to call it Greater Birmingham anyway.

But a bigger problem is where it covers. At the moment it’s just a portmanteau of councils who are taken in by Tory devolution rhetoric, but there is a real Greater Birmingham and we can find it. Language and culture are more effective indicators of statehood than anything as gauche as economics, or the whims of business leaders. 

Defining the boundary of Greater Birmingham is too important to leave to our ‘betters’, who are useless (and will farm it out to Capita, who will fuck it up). The People’s’ Republic can only be defined by the people. But who are those people? Where do we draw the lines?

Paradise Circus can settle this easier, quicker and cheaper than Capita with a few simple questions about chip shop dialect. Half a million only, and we’ll chuck in a free website. 

Our methodology is that Birmingham’s influence, our Greater Birmingham orbit, extends to our shared cultural and culinary heritage: to wit. 

“Where do you get potato in batter if you ask for scallops at the chippy?”

So we asked. And amongst other things* we got this:
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The Craft City Line

We’ve been out drinking for about six hours, we’ve lost a lot of people and one of us is bleeding. In a few minutes one of us is going to try to pick a row with a train driver. I am cool hunting in the suburbs of Birmingham, and it’s going poorly.

train

Here are two things that are hot right now: craft beer, and Birmingham.

So hot are these two things that when The Guardian ran yet another piece a piece on how Birmingham is cool now, craft beer formed a central part of its thesis:

“Two years ago, you struggled to get a pint of real ale, let alone craft beer, in most of Birmingham. Now, from Colmore Row, down John Bright Street, to Digbeth, the city centre is awash in the stuff. It’s as if a phalanx of hipsters, fleeing London’s housing market, have swept up the West Coast mainline to alight at New Street.”

Now that’s not true (we’ve had real and craft beer for at least two and a half years*) but it doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. If craft beer is a measure of how cool a place is, then just how cool is Birmingham? And what would be a fair test?

I’ve got an idea.
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Concrete and Cocktails: a journey to Birmingham’s glitter-stained independent heart

An unchained psychogeographic adventure from the authors of Pier Review.

Can you drink in all of Birmingham city centre’s independent hostelries in one day in 2011? Yes of course, although it might not be sensible. This is the first appearance on the web of this adventure, although it has been available as an eBook for some time.

CC by: Danny Wolpert
CC by: Danny Wolpert

As a part-time journalist and aspiring avatar for the gods of debauchery you are asked to do some unsavoury things. Be it covering some average indie band’s third ‘my dad drives the van’ gig. Or having to find an interesting angle on Valentine’s Day, despite having all romance crushed out of your soul by a government intent on turning the country you live in into a feudal system where big business robber barons set up their own personal fiefdoms using jazzy branding and clown make-up. But sometimes you get given a task that you are so attuned to, so personally right for, that it feels like the hand of Baron La Croix himself has pushed you to this point. Granted, the email only asked for a small article about my favourite independent pubs in Birmingham, but I knew this was a coded communication from the Furies, a challenge. Could I drink in all of the independent pubs in Birmingham in just one day? Of course I knew it was possible, just not very sensible. In my head I counted ten probable targets and beer maths did the rest. One pint in each meant ten pints at least. I was going to need back-up.Jon Bounds is a man with a lot of pie-placed fingers, his intelligence is sharpened by an odd wit. He seems to be the only person whose capacity for the Devil’s Dishwater exceeds my own and can understand the startlingly lucid and intelligent observations I tend to make after four or five small beers. So recruiting him was important and understandably easy given his weakness for strong continental lager and odd tasks.Please note the following account is pieced together from handwritten notes that degenerate into a language, I suspect, is a drunken dyslexic cuneiform, and a memory that doesn’t work properly in the first place.

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Local shops

Shops used to be different back then, from now and from each other. Each one had its own smell and atmosphere. Visits to Witton Road were infrequent, as the concrete shopping centre at Perry Barr was the preferred destination, but when we did go it was usually for something exciting and interesting. Turning right rather than left at the bottom of our street was quite a treat.

Each block on the Witton Road started with a larger shop, and the sides of the buildings were painted with signs. ‘Leslie Smith for Television’ read one. I never went in as we had a TV and no need for another, but it was a special shop as I’d been told Leslie Smith used to play for Aston Villa whose ground was on the next main road over. On the next corner was Dick Taylor’s sports shop. Everyone called him ‘Discount Dick’, despite the name over the door saying ‘R. Taylor’, and he too had once been a Villan. I got my first pair of football boots there, a reward for making the school team, and the place had a beautiful dark smell of rough cloth. My dad wouldn’t have taken me anywhere else as he would get a good deal there. He often bought whole kits for the football team he helped to run, and a good customer would be remembered.

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The shops nearer to our house were also interesting. The greengrocer was known as ‘Dick Turpin’, which gave him an air of untrustworthiness. As well as an apron, my image of him has a black fedora which I very much doubt a greengrocer wore in the late seventies in Aston, Birmingham. But my favourite shops were just along from the highway-robbing fruit and vegetable man, a chemist and a newsagent next to each other.
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Thinking of you at Christmastime

a christmas offering

You open an envelope that is slightly bulkier than the average Christmas card to discover that it doesn’t contain money, only a folded couple of A4 sheets in twelve point Times New Roman. It’s the scourge of the festive season: the round robin, typed pages of sickening boasting and cloying chuckles from people you don’t really care for. A yearly reminder of just why you don’t see them from one card to the next.

That’s what happens to us every year in Great Barr, in Yardley Wood and in Witton: seasonal joy tempered with bile at the sheer entitlement of it. Or at least that’s how you’d think it would be if you read the Guardian, the Sunday Times Magazine or listen to the more magaziney programmes on Radio Four: for they are the only places that ever seem to mention them. It’s as if round robins are a strain of virus only spread aerially at tennis clubs or by physical contact at charity fundraising ‘slave’ auctions hosted in chain hotels by networking groups. It’s a disease of the home counties and of certain areas of north London, one the we are mercifully immune to.

But with the media centric as it is, when W1 sneezes the rest of the country catches a cold. Or at least has to wrap up warm.

It’s not Sports Personality of the Year that really kicks off media Christmas for me, nor is it the publication of the bumper Radio Times—it’s the first time I read or hear a bitter think piece about how the joy of others cannot be tolerated in Yuletide A4 form.

If a Christmas card I opened contained a letter with well wishes and news, I would read it and feel grateful. Grateful the senders were thinking of me; not just enough to write “To Jon from all at number 42” but enough to take time to compose a letter and that they assumed I would care as much about their lives as they obviously did about mine. Had I cared enough to send a card or write a letter, that is.

Maybe it was a perfect storm of people with geographically wider social networks, access to typewriters and photocopiers when the boss was out and, yes, a little bit of middle class entitlement. Given the same access, the working class would produce punk fanzines and reboot the publishing world, the middle class just got something new to moan about in their existing media outlets.

And then we all became middle class, according to Tony Blair and John Major, but we didn’t get the tennis clubs or typewriters we just got equal access to the hatred across the airwaves and in the broadsheets. We got to be complicit in the snideness without ever quite understanding what we were supposed to be getting riled about. Reading a Sunday newspaper magazine is much like squinting at a 1890s Punch cartoon tying to guess the references and working out if it has anything to say about your life.

This festive season, let’s give thanks that to the people of Paradise Circus it means thinking of others. And that means people outside our social norms and postcodes too.

To that end we’ve written Birmingham’s own round robin. Feel free to forward it to a city near you.

 

Photo CC: Stephen Mackenzie