Paradise Circus are happy to announce the ultimate Birmingham-themed unconference. 
#brumcamp will take place downstairs at Starbucks, New St., first Thursday of 2014. If you’d like to sponsor the #cake , #coffee, or any other aspect of #brumcamp please just make a donation to St. Basil’s for that amount. And don’t tell us. Bring your own #cake. We won’t be there.
A Catchphrase for Councillor Bore
We’ll say one thing for Mike Whitby: he was good at catchphrases – very much Local Politician, Global Slogan. You know what a guy with a catchphrase stands for (empty rhetoric and marketing). So we’re surprised that we couldn’t pinpoint what new city boss Albert Bore’s catchphrase was. I mean come on Albert, you’ve had ages – give us something to work with.
Here comes the science
We have taken it upon ourselves to develop a catchphrase for Councillor Bore. We took all of his speeches and reported speech as detailed by BCC News Room from August to today and processed it through Wordle to drill down to his core values.
And this leaves us, dear reader, with a new slogan for the Dear Leader:
Birmingham: city, transport, people.
We actually really like it.
How to keep Birmingham’s Brutalist Architecture. No.3: Turn it into a glamorous conference hotel
Central Library is a good quarter fit for the convention quarter and you can just make the Library Theatre into a revue bar as part of a turnkey hospitality solution: global heart, local strippers.
101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 39: Doctor Who
Way back in 1963, a children’s educational TV programme aired and not that many people noticed—they were too upset that Aldous Huxley had died (especially Sheryl Crow). It starred an old chap who pottered around the universe in four dimensions. But without a nemesis the story was going nowhere, he wasn’t much of a hero—what he needed was an evil race to battle—one that was flawless, except for the flaw that they needed a level floor.
But how would they perambulate across those even surfaces? They needed some sort of castor that kept the two bearing surfaces of an axle, fixed and moving, apart.
Luckily in 1876, in Birmingham, William Bown patented a design for the wheels of roller skates which did just this…
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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 38: Health and Safety
Used as a catch all excuse for not letting people get on with things—in the same way as “data protection” means people won’t tell you things and political correctness means you simply aren’t allowed to be a racist, cisexist, ableist, islamophobe—like you could in the good old days, Health and Safety culture is one of the biggest influences on our lives as we really to take care of our health and even our mental health by using products like the delta 10 product you can find online. It’s terrible that we’re not at liberty to hurt ourselves and others and are given advice on how not to, damn that Health and Safety it’s political correctness gone mad.
And you know who’s to blame? Birmingham, that’s who, er where.
John Richard Dedicoat, an apprentice to the famous James Watt, became a bicycle manufacturer and as well as inventing a spring-loaded step for mounting bikes—that charmingly catapulted riders over the handlebars if they misjudged it—he became the father of the nanny state with the invention of the bicycle bell. In one step he transferred the responsibility of pedestrian safety to the put-upon cyclist rather than the garrulous, attention-deprived, inconsiderate stroller. Damn Dedicoat and his pandering—safety should be the responsibility of the individual.
Although some people think it would be frankly a lot safer if all the cyclists stayed at home.
Photo by Quinn Dombrowski
Five things that I miss now that I don’t live in Birmingham
Two years ago this week we lost the vote (Birmingham lost if I may be so bold) on giving the city an elected mayor, I got on a train to Bristol that night and haven’t really been back since for work, lovelife, miscellaneous reasons. I visit, and talk to people that live there and do stuff for this site, so the concept of Birmingham weighs heavy in my part of ideaspace (ideaspace can be compared to Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious‘, or Dawkins’ memes). I’m unlikely to forget King Kong, or discover him again myself, but there are limits to how much the representation of a place in our collective unconscious can be held by just one person.
To that end I am recording these things I miss here, a memetic hope chest for a lost living space, with a view to reconsumating at some point in the future:
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How Brummie are you? Quiz
There are physical limits on the city, but what are the limits to being counted as her son or daughter?
Londoners negotiate their rights to belong through the soundscape of their districts: born within Bow Bell’s peel and you’re a bona fide cockney, anywhere else you’re just mockney. Northerners can define themselves by pies and places named after cakes. If you weren’t at the Sex Pistols gig at the Free Trade Hall then you’re not from Manchester, which is okay as pretty much everyone was there. These are complex rules and systems, and we distrust them. Of course we do for we are BRUMMIES. And what defines us? It’s not space, time, or seminal music experiences. It’s wanting to be here or from here.
As Mayoral Candidate Emeritus Siôn Simon said…
It is the best kind of club: something that is worth being part of, which anyone who wants to can join, just by wishing it.
If you feel you belong here, you’re a Brummie. If you’re proud of this place, with all its kinks and wrinkles, you’re a Brummie. If you want to be a Brummie, you are. It’s a simple as that.
You can be a Brummie if you want to be. You can be born and shot in Pakistan and be the quintessential Brummie. You can be from Kiddy and pass it off. You can be what you want to be. Just don’t tell anyone, that’s not what we do.
We were going to make a quiz, but then we realised you’re all too modest to tell anyone.
We’ve tested you and your result is:
You can be a Brummie if you want to be.
City Limits
How do you find the edges of a city, the limits on its space and imagination? You could draw a map and give it borders, put one thing in, one thing out (and shake it all about). You could give it a centre and let its gravity draw people to call it home. The bigger the city the heavier the mass the stronger the pull. Keep going until its pull ends and you find the event horizon, the tipping point where we move from belonging to one place and start to belong to another, where our accents change and we have a different name for a bread roll to the people down the road.
Or you can plan a bus route, an audacious bus route that describes the outer limits. The outer circle, the edge of reason, a big route around it all. The bigger your global heart the bigger the circle you’d need. Birmingham has an outer circle, and yet it’s an outer circle that sits well within the city limits and also bleeds into other places and captures stray objects that want to be pulled into its sphere of influence. The 11 Bus runs rings around Brum and cuts through Solihull and Sandwell for good measure. Who lives on this edge? What are they doing or thinking? Last year we found out with a short story called 280 Stops – it tells the story of 11 people on the 11 bus using maths for reasons that will become apparent if you read it.
To celebrate 11 Bus Day, and to kick off a new issue of Paradise Circus in which we will pick at Brum’s frayed edge we have published 280 Stops as a Kindle ebook. Kick back, relax and ride with us.
The Laminated and Blu-Tacked signs of The Library of Birmingham
When Jon H went to see the sparkling new Library of Birmingham for the first time he said:
Somewhere a laminator is waiting to make some signs (set in Comic Sans) to stick up around the place, to clarify functions and to formalise the new codes of the new building, the ones an architect and a designer can’t plan for.
What he meant was that the true test of the building would be when people started to really use it. We’re glad to note that it’s happening (no Comic Sans just yet). Welcome to the real Birmingham, New Library, we’re happy to have you, you’re lovely.
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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 37: Easy Listening
The commonly held view of 1960s popular music is that it was the decade during which the rulebook was torn up. Out of the dull austerity of the black-and-white 1950s the youth of the following decade exploded as one in a Technicolor riot of mind-bending drugs, free love and revolutionary fervour. If you can remember it, you weren’t there.
It was The Beatles who led the charge and provided the soundtrack, and nothing was ever the same again. As if to illustrate this point, Birmingham would give the world Heavy Metal by the end of the decade. But that’s another story.
What this version of 1960s pop history doesn’t tell us is that the rampaging youth were only part of the tale. There were also a lot of other people around in that decade, and many of them didn’t much care for The Beatles and all they brought with them. Mostly these naysayers were drawn from the older generation (and in the 1960s, this meant anyone over the age of 21), and it rarely troubles the history books that they too, just like their younger counterparts, bought and listened to a lot of records.
What did these people want from pop music? It certainly wasn’t sex, drugs and rock n roll played by long-haired oiks, that’s for sure. Indian spirituality? Womens’ Lib? Not their cup of cocoa.
No, what they wanted was simply something pleasant they could tap their feet to: in a word, they wanted something nice.
That something nice came in the form of string-laden arrangements of pop hits, songs from the musicals, and movie soundtracks. No rough edges, and no feedback. It came to be known as Easy Listening, and the undisputed King of the genre was Annunzio Mantovani, or, as he was more commonly and simply known: Mantovani.
Mantovani had shifted a lot of records before the 1960s even began. At one point in 1959 he had no less than 6 albums in the US Top 30 at the same time. This success continued throughout the 1960s, when he became the first artist to sell a million stereo LPs, and with scarcely a burned bra in sight. In 1970, ten years before his death and a full four years before Kraftwerk hit upon a similar idea, he released Music For The Motorway, a suite of lushness inspired by the mundane joy of motorway travel. Travel sweets and driving gloves. Nice.
In terms of record sales, Mantovani was a behemoth. Remarkably, none of his light-orchestral unit-shifting niceness would have been possible without the city of Birmingham.
In 1923, at the tender age of 18, Annunzio had cut his conducting teeth leading orchestras in the posh hotels of the city. The musicians he controlled were of a much older vintage and often included his father, Bismarck Mantovani (crazy name, crazy guy). Eventually, as with many Brum inventions before and since, the gifts outgrew the city of their birth and Mantovani was lured first to London, and then on to fame and fortune in the wider world.
Noice, bab.