misc - Paradise Circus: A Birmingham Miscellany

On the buses

The opinions of Danny Smith do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers of this blog, its affiliates, or any sane adult human beings. He currently lives in your cupboard, watching, always watching.

I am thirty years-old (-ish) and have lived in Birmingham all my life (except the times I haven’t) in that time I have never learnt to drive. Consider this my favour to you. Seeing as I’m an notorious booze enthusiast, prone to bad decisions, and have somewhat of an impulse problem giving me a car would be like giving a toddler semi automatic weapon; hilarious but someone would get hurt. So I get around using public transport, more specifically the bus.

Now its easy to complain about the bus system in Birmingham, as you’ll see in the next few hundred words. But I, as ever, have a point.
Continue reading “On the buses”

Winterval starts here

Last year Birmingham City Council held a Christmas lights ceremony that ended in what most called a ‘fiasco’. Our crap Altamont was down to nobody guessing that one of the biggest bands of the moment giving a free concert would be popular.

This year instead of a big fuss there will be a Christmas parade. In November. One month and ten days before Christmas, reindeer and whatnot will be kicking off our celebrations. With no pretence at trying to encompass other celebrations to draw out the shopping season, at least with ‘Winterval’ they were trying. Its an old rote that Christmas starts earlier and earlier each year but five weeks before Christmas is bordering on silly, seeing as most men are still be scurrying around in the dark on Christmas eve wondering if a bottle of screen wash is a suitable present for a ten year old. Granted, Jesus was probably born in April but lets try to stay within December eh?

Continue reading “Winterval starts here”

Tufty Shit

Maybe I’m romancing it because I’ve never been formally trained, or glimpsed behind the curtain of the modern newsroom. But I carry the naive notion that a journalist should be a Jedi wielding TRUTH like the Force and ramming the lightsaber of FACTS up the arse of all that is corrupt. I know it can’t be easy, not only do you have to meet deadlines, smoke fifteen packets of cigarettes a day, and wear a hat with a small ticket that says ‘PRESS’ on it but you also have find interesting things to write about every, single, day. So its not surprising that many journalists fall for the Dark Side of PR.

Like this story here http://tinyurl.com/ykn7639. The story is about a squirrel that has been banned from a popular Midlands theme park. Now this theme park is only mentioned twice, but once is in the headline and the entire story is about a new ride — that, apparently defying all common sense, is so good even the fucking squirrel enjoys it. They even named the squirrel after the ride making sure the journo HAS to mention it at least once. Interestingly, the technique they are using to this thrill-seeking rodent is the same one that some supermarkets were purportedly using to keep teenagers away from thrilling Car Parks a few years ago. The one which the manufacturer says has no effects on dogs.

PR stands for Public Relations and it used to be the PR person’s job to be the public face of the company. That can helpful and, dare I say it, good. They can act like the conscious of a large corporation, the little Jiminy Cricket pushing the people they represent to give to charities, start recycling initiatives, or even encouraging discussion and dialogue between companies and their critics. Unfortunately on the flip side it is far less effort to seed newsrooms with press releases with just enough quirky news worthiness so on a slow news day can be picked up and actually printed as facts.

Now I’m not saying I know for definite that the journalist wasn’t down at the theme park listening in on park wardens’ conversations and shouting ‘What a scoop!’* when this particular gem was mentioned. Just that I find it far more likely to be the centre of a Venn diagram. Sitting where the circles of slow news day, lazy journalism, and the social disease rash of PR overlap.

*yes, my experience of journalism is purely from black and white American films, what of it?

Sabres of Paradise

Fans of vague marketing talk and transparent attempts to make the public feel as they’re in control really should head over to paradisecircus.co.uk and marvel at the property developments Argent.

Apparently Argent and the Birmingham City Council have an ‘exclusivity agreement’ and if that brings to mind the result of an awkward conversational from a couple of Uni friends that have been occasionally drunkingly ending up in bed together, then you wouldn’t be far wrong. Argent and The Council have promised not to see other people, but on the promise that Argent phone their mates and check they don’t mind. The ‘mates’ in this analogy are us and the phone call they have promised to make is the website, its feedback forms and a small presentation they made in Paradise Forum.

I went to this ‘public exhibition’ which consisted of all the different pages of that web site on four-foot banner posters and collection of smarmy PR drones, I believe the collective noun of which is a ‘toss’. Not so much an exhibition as a talking down to. These guys talked in non-committal terms about improving the ‘flow’ of pedestrian traffic from Victoria Square to what’s behind it. Now, considering what’s behind it is/will be the library they are having to build because of the redevelopment, the exhibition centres and Broad Street, the question is do we really want to improve traffic? That is if its mainly going to consist of bored business tourists looking for lap dancing clubs and red faced Broad Street louts spewing WKD vomit like sprinklers? Or should we actually dig deep trenches filled with flaming tar and post irritable machine gunners every fifteen yards.

OK I’m being facetious, but if improved pedestrian flow is one of the major concerns — do we really think that having to walk through an enclosed shopping area is such a barrier? Are blank-faced pastel people drinking coffee in a way no English person actually does going encourage this flow? And could we not just put up better signs?

This stock photo ridden example is the most patronising and indicative of the vagueness of said drones. Hilariously suggesting that shops cafés or bars could move in, exactly like Argent’s other development, Brindleyplace. Only this time all the major bar, café and restaurant brands are already represented in Birmingham, and in this economic climate nobody is opening those sorts of businesses any more – just look at Broad Street, where nearly every other unit is a gutted smeared window, a tombstone to another dream dying.

After a while of looking at the site you notice how the entire text of its prefaced with words like ‘possible’ and ‘potential’ Is this because they so really want to avoid giving away the dirty reality? They’ve already decided what’s going to be done, and nothing will change that.

Not even protesting.

I was born in 79 so I grew up with Thatcher smashing the unions and images of policemen beating up picket lines, by the time I was a teenager student protest had become a bad cliché, and as an adult saw the biggest civil protest this country has ever saw roundly ignored as we were taken to war. So sure, email your opinion if it’ll make you feel better and part of the process, that’s what it’s there for.

In fact that’s the only reason it is there.

Blues and me

I was watching and saying manly things when Birmingham City almost beat Man Utd on Saturday, but first, a story;

When I was younger I was deemed shy and somewhat bookish, if you would have asked me at the time I probably would have more described myself as “mysterious” or “a lone wolf” proving not only was I a bit socially awkward, but also a bit of a tool. The cure for this, my matriarchal Nan decided, was to get a job in a pub as soon as I was old enough. The pub was, and by all accounts still is, quite rough. When I arrived for my first shift the manager, a lurching ex-police officer, took me to one side and explained that the pub was mainly a Zulu* pub and if there was any trouble I should just go get him, referring to a group of blokes in the corner he said:

‘See the big one?’

‘Can’t miss him’ I said

‘He’s one of the Lieutenants give him whatever he wants and I’ll square it with him later’

‘OK’ I said

‘See him’ pointing a particularly violent looking one with a fist full sovereign rings ‘he’s a nice bloke but can get a bit nasty when he’s had a drink’ I didn’t want to point out to my new manager the table of empties in front of this guy so I just nodded my head.

‘And that guy over there’ he started

‘Is Uncle ***, my, you know, uncle’ I interrupted

‘You’ll be fine’ he said as he walked away leaving me to figure out the pumps and glasses myself.

I have a complicated relationship with football, and more specifically the Blues, that goes beyond me being the sort of fat kid they stuck in goal when I was a child and never developing the sort of zeal that most other men seem to have. For a start I grew up in a family that fervently supported Birmingham City and developed an interest in the results if only so I knew what mood all the adults would be in for the rest of the weekend. But I never really enjoyed it that much, not actually disliking it, but never really seeing the point, I never developed the appreciation of the sport just a passing interest in the results.

Birmingham City v Tampa Bay Rowdies (USA) 1980, originally uploaded by footysphere.

Not loving football is a uniquely alienating experience for a man. For a start it seems to be the default conversation starter for men, who are, and lets be honest here, on the whole emotionally crippled and socially backwards at best. A common ground that allows us to interact according to shared experience and familiar rules. Lack of this knowledge will make most men seem untrustworthy and somehow feminine. So a learnt to bluff a good football conversation, and learnt quick.

There was an entire season that I went to nearly every Blues game, I was working as a security guard and got to see the inner workings. Behind the scenes it was surprisingly run-down, the player’s tunnel being a concrete corridor connected with rotting wooden gates. It was littered with the corpses of Saint John Ambulance volunteers that had dared to make jokes about Steve Bruce’s nose ‘Leave them as a warning to others’ he would growl when asked about clearing them up.

I soon became friends with the security boss and got the cushy job on the ‘Snatch Team’, we sat in the observational office and were sent to eject any trouble makers or known hooligans banned from the ground, the paid security were not the people you had to watch, it was the unpaid stewards that would take people to blind spots in the security cameras.

Since then, mainly because many of my friends are massive Blues fans, I still occasionally watch some matches in pubs but I’m strictly there for the company and bonding that football provides not the games themselves.

Unless it’s against the Villa, I hate the Villa.

*As we all know the Zulus being the name for the hooligan gang that associated themselves with Birmingham City Football Club so called because of the amount of black people that made up part of the gang, which was unusual at the time.**

**does anyone else feel a weird sort of pride in that?

Backstabbers Guide to Wolverhampton

In the slow news week between Christmas and New Years the BBC decided that it would be newsworthy to point out how shit Wolverhampton was. My first reaction was ‘have these people never been to Coventry?’

I mean our sister site, Wolverhampton: it doesn’t suck dog shit from the treads of a zombie’s hush puppies probably wont mind me saying that Wolvo is a bland wasteland of chain shops, a middlingly terrible football team with England’s most soulless and dispiriting ground and only a decent sized music venue to redeem it. But compared to the seventh ring of concrete hell that is Coventry, Wolverhampton is a mythical Shangri-La where lemonade runs from the taps and tramps vomit rainbows.

Its also not the first time Lonely Planet has had a pop at Wolverhampton or the Midlands in general. It seems we are the Lonely Planet’s go-to guys if they need quick bit of publicity. A bit like the Express resorting to anything Diana related when their figures dip, but instead of placing us on an impossible plinth, they piss all over our chips, our arms, and our hair.

Transit Trio, Wolverhampton, 1980., originally uploaded by Lady Wulfrun.

These polls are bollocks, designed to appeal to lazy copy+paste journalists that regurgitate almost any press release that crosses across their desk. PR is journalism gone Sith and they know that a easy sound bite containing hyperbole like ‘fifth worst city in the entire universe’ will make a good and quick story.

It’s also worth bearing in mind here that the Lonely Planet brand has been owned by the BBC since 2007 and is one of the top four brands, along with Top Gear, Earth, and Doctor Who, that earned the BBC %17 of its revenues as reported in the 2008/2009 report. So essentially it was a news story about a story itself had published to publicise itself. And since when have the Beeb been allowed report nonsense? In fact that’s not what bothers me, its that the nonsense didn’t go far enough.

Danny Smith: Is Mr Egg beaten?

Mr Egg is closed, and it seems only partly related to undiluted catering vinegar thrown into drunk peoples eyes. But be it through mad chefs or vermin in the cupboards, I’m not surprised it has happened; I’m surprised it took so long.

Mr Egg is a Birmingham institution (and not just because there’s a rat in the kitchen), it’s something rare in Birmingham — independent. It’s a lot like the sixties, if you can remember it you were never there, god knows no sane person would eat there sober. If pushed I can remember the giant cloth egg on the ceiling and the overpowering smell of grease. Just walking past has always a barometer of the current economic climate ‘EAT LIKE A KING FOR 50p’ declared the sign, and then in my teenage years ‘EAT LIKE A KING FOR £1’, a little later when the gay community settled down the road ‘EAT LIKE A QUEEN FOR £1.50’.

It seems to have survived due to clever marketing, location and cheap prices. The food itself was on the whole, greasy slop served on dirty plates. I like to think that the custom came from late night diners being loyal to an independent brand and making the choice to eat refried sausages and burnt beans rather than hand money over to the McCorps. In reality it was probably just due to drunken convenience of it being a short stagger away from the nightclubs on Hurst St, a place once described as ‘a cross between a Roman Vomitorium and a Bosch painting’. By me, just then.

Will Mr Egg reopen? I’m not sure, but what I do know from ten years working in the pub trade is exactly how hard it is to be closed down for health reasons. Sure, it’s a threat that’s used a lot, but you could introduce a giant radioactive cancer rat wiping his balls on individual fish fingers to the visiting EHO, and not be served anything more than a stern telling off. I retch at the thought of what was going on for the closure notice to happen.

But drunk people don’t care, if anything it adds to the myth of the place and brings in a new element of danger to eating there. And if giving dysentery to a few shaven headed Neanderthals stumbling out of Reflex is the price we pay for an independent and unhomogenised Birmingham – it’s a small price indeed.

Danny Smith: Merry Winterval

For those of you whose memory has been damaged by brolly spokes entering your ear waiting for some lights to be switched on, Winterval was the blanket catch all name for a series of council ran events that included Eid, Christmas and New Year. That turned, with the help of some lazy journalism and right wing knee jerking, into BIRMINGHAM BANS CHRISTMAS. No doubt someone will bring this story out of the loft again this year, blow the dust off and string it about, Christ it been going since ’98, it’s almost a tradition. Do you remember it now? When Birmingham became a laughing stock because we had chosen to be inclusive and tolerant? Pah! Who would want that?

Certainly not the church, when the Winterval shit storm was kicking off the shit was so deep that young children were sledding down hills on it while their dads toiled away clearing the path and the church were quick to condemn it. The Church of England leaders disgusted accusing the council of ‘trying to take the Christ out of Christmas’. So what business does the big JC have being in Christmas after all? When you look at the facts (although they won’t, facts are like kryptonite) Christmas was around way before Christ.

Firstly shepherds watching their flock at night, people sleeping in barns etc. Do you have any idea how cold it gets at night in the middle east? In winter, the shepherds would be dead and Joseph would have to chip the lord Christ incarnate from the virgins frozen womb. No, the early sellers of the Christian myth placed his date of birth on an already popular pagan festival, the Winter Solstice, or, depending on who you read, a Roman celebration that was around the same time.
I think it takes more front than Brighton to come from a religion that used its power to dominate and change an already existing festival with the intention of pushing a religion and then complain when a council does the same thing for the reasons of showing consideration for other cultures. (Even though, as mentioned before, they didn’t, the story is nonsense.)

So what else is Christian? Tree in the house? Germanic version of a pagan tradition. Decorations? Roman. St Nick? Surely St Nick must be Christian, he’s a saint for crying out loud!? Nope sorry, Norse god with a Christian name. Sitting in a cold church singing dreary hymns being threatened to be good by a man with an invisible, needy boss? Yep, well, you got me there.

So if you do take the Christ out of Christmas what have you got left? All the fun stuff Except no more midnight mass, or ridiculously inaccurate nativity plays. And St Nick would be a one eyed, Norse bastard called Odin riding an eight legged horse and throwing presents down the chimney like missiles. No turning the other cheek for him, so next time the Bishop of Birmingham climbs atop his puny four legged high horse and makes noises he has no right to make in the first place or someone jabs you in the ear because they think its perfectly reasonable to carry a umbrella round an uncomfortably packed German Market. Kick em in the balls and tell them that the real Santa Claus told you to.

Harry Palmer: Oneself, a bedroom and a pulsating unit

Besides unexpected in-situ encounters that stimulate criticism, my journey as an eccentric archaeologist continues to present contradictions and hypocrisy. This is not surprising. Curiously a recent doppelganger experience occurred in which I was identified by several people as being someone else….

Either way, I was delighted to have had such a number of simultaneous (mis)representations and encounters. It must have been at least ten years ago when I approached a person as mistaken identity. It made me question my motives and reasons for making snap observations mixed with rash excitement. Judgements have no absolute hold on what appears to be the truth of course…..

This leads me nicely onto the latest eccentric investigation into The Darknosis Project, a project that takes place as part of a mythological environment at The Edge starting this Friday for one week. The imminent PhD Show (Pete Hadfield, Harry Palmer and Diane Taylor) – have spent several months formulating vintage accounts of socio – environmental and biological ancestor hood in which previous incantations of lost tribes and civilisations have shaped our current condition as humans (and the PhD show). Myths, of course, are not merely roamers or absolute fact – they are stories which have arisen from an ongoing narrative shared via our individual interactions between each other; as necessary strategies to enable evolutionary (human) development – the evident weaving of our sentient worldwidewebness.

The PhD show is more than a walkabout form of entertainment (indeed we indulge a joyful sense of humour to elicit curiosity of course). Locating our current HQ at The Edge in Birmingham, I can now reveal a little slice of installation, a personal introduction by way of invitation.

A live webcam relay across the electronic data field (aka the internet) will hopefully pulsate personal mythological investigations from inside my purpose built metal cage. This metal cage will house my bedroom (and myself for one week 24/7), relocated for the purposes of in-situ discovery. Those familiar with my eccentric archaeological approach to date will recognise the trait – to investigate the world on location, in locations. This PhD show is therefore housing myself and my bedroom as a portal of gestating stories – fact and fiction. The Transformative Darknosis Psychic Centre of Research (myself and my metal cage and bedroom) within the PhD show has been designed to alter my consciousness once more – perhaps presenting more misrepresentation and new understanding from previous identifiable traits that have attempted to describe me and my world amongst us. You are invited!
Continue reading “Harry Palmer: Oneself, a bedroom and a pulsating unit”

Danny Smith’s Guide to 2008 Pt12

Danny Smith was writing lots of guides to Brum for the Itchy guide, last year. It never happened, so we present his guide to the past in a number of parts (see all the parts):

Costermongers
5 Dalton Way
(0121) 2363791

Costers is a dinosaur of a rock pub and one of the last in Birmingham that makes up for its unwelcoming atmosphere by having a very loyal set of regulars. It is underground in both the musical and very physical sense of the word but is one of the few pubs not to benefit by the smoking ban because now you can see the shoddy vandalized décor and smell decades of stale beer. Costers is also home of the most uncomfortable seats and ugliest toilets in Birmingham. Treat this place like a historical theme park.
Mon – Wed, 12noon – 11pm Thu, 12noon – 12mn Fri – Sat, 12noon – 1am Sun, 5pm – 10.30pm

The Black Horse
22 Jennens Road,
Aston,
Birmingham,
B7 4EH
Tel, 01213597108
Kurt Cobain delivered the lethal blow to Heavy Metal in the early nineties; by all accounts it was a mercy killing. Just over a decade later every city harbours the refugees in little die hard pockets. One of these last bastions of the Metal subculture in Birmingham is relatively new and despite its unfortunate location – that’s quite a stomp away from the city centre- it’s thriving due to its community atmosphere, friendly staff, cheap prices and ongoing support for local music. For more detail we highly recommend you pop in for a chat.

Check out The Shouting Gypsy – Danny’s ‘wordcast’