A schoolgirl is stretching to reach the books in the Library of Birmingham. She is standing in front of a shelf marked “Great American Novels”. The shelves start too high up the walls, well above her head.
In the foreground some men in suits are talking. One holds a newspaper with the headline “Gove’s New Booklist”. He is saying “looks like we can cancel the step-ladders, then”.
A man in a jumper sits in a large armchair in a very traditionally decorated large semi-detached house. He’s reading the Evening Mail, he has it open on his lap and we can read the headline ‘Poor Ukip performance in Birmingham’.
His wife is carrying one cup of tea — in a cup and saucer — towards him.
He says: “it seems Birmingham decided it already had enough fruitcakes and loonies on the council.”
Then everyone retweets it as it “nails it”.
Councillor John Lines (he looks like a fat Jimmy Greaves) is in his old Lord Mayor’s uniform — he’s holding up a Tory election leaflet that says ‘No more garden tax’ and is berating a group of dustmen. The dustmen are dressed like the dad in My Fair Lady except they have some Nazi uniform bits (maybe one has a cap, another an armband).
“But you dressed us up like this.” one of the binmen is saying.
Sneaking past towards the Birmingham Council House, which is draped in a banner that says ‘Local and EU Elections Today’ — are some actual Nazis, with BNP, UKIP rosettes on riding a wheelie bin. Farage is pushing the bin and grinning — while slurping from a pint obviously.
A local newspaper reporter ‘Press’ card in the brim of his trilby hat is watching Lines and writing. He has a copy of the Evening Mail with the headline ‘Council binmen like the Gestapo‘.
When Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and William Murdoch stood at the bottom of Broad Street and stuck some post-its on the wall to plan their first sprint, little did they know they would set in motion a revolution that would see the word “silicon” put in front of every inanimate object known to man. Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 48: Startup Culture”
Spaghetti Junction: subs… to the photo library. CC by: Chris Gin
We know that a lot of local journalists look to us for, ahem, inspiration but we were wondering what we could do to help out the hacks on the nationals. Now, the national press do like to show a passing interest in our welfare, but they only really have limited frames available for their stories. We’ve parsed that through our computers to come up with the basic boilerplate you, the national newspaper hack, need to write about the second city*.
To start, lower expectations: Of Birmingham, not your article, silly. The best way to do this is point out that someone ‘right thinking’ said something bad. You could try doing a Google Books search for Birmingham to see if there are any literary quotations, or you could just use the Jane Austen quote. You know the one:
“One has no great hopes from Birmingham, I always say there is something direful in the sound”
And if you like you can forget that it’s not Jane Austen who said it, but a character in Emma. A Character — Mrs Elton — that Jane Austen wrote as a voice of the fashionably stupid.
And talking of fashionably stupid, you could maybe quote Jeremy Clarkson “There are signs directing you away from Birmingham but nothing enticing you in.” But quote him ironically while you agree with him really (a joke like on Top Gear), which ties neatly into…
A series of things you must do when visiting Birmingham.
No. 7: In the Council House smoking area.
When we were a city of a thousand trades, we had men to produce thousands of words to tell the story. One such was Joseph Priestley who essentially didn’t ever shut up, producing hundreds of pamphlets and books on philosophy, science, religion and even grammar. But that age of voluminous reason is long gone: our civic leaders now find it difficult to work out that people are unlikely to pony up £35 for having their grass cuttings taken away. They also are more likely to speak like internet cats.
Numbers and facts are hard, so it’s lucky that the power of a thousand words can now be delivered so easily by: pictures of toilet signs at different sizes, circles overlapping, and maps — all laid out like a pastel-coloured ‘30s variety bill poster.
In short, thank heaven for the infographic. Or, thank Birmingham rather.
For you see, Joseph Priestley was not just a writerly polymath but completely lithographically incontinent — and in 1769 he published A New Chart of History in which:
“the horizontal line conveys an idea of the duration of fame, influence, power and domination. A vertical reading conveys an impression of the contemporaneity of ideas, events and people. The number or density of entries . . . tells us about the vitality of any age.”
That’s a clear as it can be, without being in a skyscraper-format GIF and put on Facebook.
And that’s how Birmingham invented the infographic, saving the future communicators the bother of having to work out coherent sentences to put on the Internet. If only Birmingham had invented the Venn diagram too.
Or perhaps it did, stay tuned.
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A New Chart of History via Wikimedia , Venn diagram off of all of the Internet.
Artist Bill Drummond defaced a UKIP billboard. He isn’t the only one to do this but his intervention has been the most widely reported. The billboard that Mr Drummond worked on is just around the corner from Eastside Projects, where he has been staging a month-long artist’s residency. The painting over the poster was one of his artworks.
UKIP’s West Midlands spokesman Bill Etheridge called this “mindless vandalism” as well as making a formal complaint to the police.
In fact this was a very mindful act, as the artist explained eloquently well before Mr. Etheridge made his comments. Drummond’s statement has been widely disseminated and it provides a clear and thoughtful rationale for the work; this was not, therefore, a “mindless” act.
For a performance artist to be described in these terms is potentially harmful to their ability to work especially when this has been reported in the national media and may be the first contact with the artist’s work for many people.
The action, Drummond admits, is an act of vandalism but not an act of mindlessness. Artists and citizens should be able to enact dissent. Where their act of dissent involves a criminal activity, those harmed should have full recourse to the law but they should not be allowed to denigrate the sentiments of the act.
If you agree please pledge a small amount for us to help Bill to sue UKIP.
Let us know how much you can spare in the comments and we’ll be in touch when we have enough to collect it in.
We should point out that the artist has not asked for this to happen. If, in the event that we hit our target and we have the money available, Mr Drummond would prefer not to sue UKIP we will ask him to nominate an arts based charity to receive the funds.
First they came for the paper recycling, and I did not speak out — Because it was about 6am and I was still in bed.
A week later they came for the glass and metal, and I did not speak out — Despite them waking me up with their reversing lorry.
Then they came for the landfill waste, and I did not speak out — Because they do it at the same time as the other collections.
They didn’t come for the garden waste — so I took it to the tip on Sunday.E J Thribb, after Pastor Martin Niemöller
