Dunkirk

From 4Talent:

Film Dash took place over 48 hours in Birmingham, with teams putting together films of less than five minutes in length, in a competition organised by Created In Birmingham’s Chris Unitt, honouring the memory of Birmingham-born Ealing comedies producer Michael Balcon. 4Talent Commissioning Editor Catherine Bray was one of three judges.

The winner was Dunkirk, by Rachael Marchant, Danny Smith and my old mate Pete Ashton. The film is a five minute Brum-based saga about love, loss and urban decay that features a rather groovy Bleep Labs' Thingamagoop synthesiser as its protagonist. In what will surely be its breakthrough role, Thingamagoop effortlessly combined fragile empathy with a captivating sense of wonder. It's only a matter of time before Hollywood comes knocking on it's door.

Pete's done a production diary here, here and here, and the film itself is here:


Dunkirk from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.

Pete does a Jarvis

My pal Pete Ashton at the MediaGuardian Awards last week.

Priceless.

Plugging my friends #1: Pete Ashton

My good friend Pete Ashton's excellent Created in Birmingham weblog has been named joint winner in the 'Independent Blog' category of this year's MediaGuardian Innovations Awards (Or MEGAs).

Here's more:


As I've probably mentioned somewhere before, I probably wouldn't be doing this is it wasn't for Pete's steady encouragement over pints of Guinness at The Old Fox. It's just as well the panel of judges weren't aware of that, otherwise they'd have probably disqualified him.



Anyhow - nice one, Pete! You've earned it.

Brum Tig: I'm "It" Now

I've been tagged by my new pal, the smart and feisty local Blogging journo Joanna Geary. I suppose I should explain what the Hell that means.

Jon Bounds of the excellent Birmingham: It's Not Shit website (they of the recent Spotted Dog Pub Landlord John Tighe-winning Brummie of the Year Awards) has come up with a novel way to help promote this fine city's thriving community of bloggers. It's called Brum Blog Tig and Jon's rules are as follows:

• Each player starts with an odd, but fun, fact about Brum and one odd, but fun, fact about their blog.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose two people to get tagged and list their names.
• Tag your post “birminghamUK” and “brumblogtig” (the second one is a memetag).
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (with their version of the post) and post these rules (or link to them here). They can tie it in with their particular subject if they so wish.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

So - without any further ado - here's My fact about Brum:

The Digbeth area has long been known as the spiritual home to the city's Irish community, but did you know that one of Ireland's most famous literary sons - a certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce - once resided there?

James Joyce and his lover Nora Barnacle arrived in Birmingham in 1920. They were about to embark on a new life in Paris after their lengthy self-imposed exile in Trieste, and in those days Digbeth's Coach & Horse Station was a common stopover point for journeys between the the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. This involved a time-consuming 1,300 mile detour, which was - at the time - a common feature of short-haul European travel, despite the fact that SatNavs had not been invented yet.

Joyce - an Irish emigre with a fondness for booze, lock-ins and a thriving live music scene - immediately felt at home in Digbeth. Nora, by contrast, instantly despised the area. After years of living in impoverished exile she longed for the style, sophistication and readily available boeuf bourguignon of the fashionable Parisian scene. According to contemporary eyewitness reports, she tried to drag her suitcases onto a Paris-bound coach and insisted that Joyce should get her "the Hell away from this fecking shithole". Joyce stubbornly refused, and tried to drag her suitcases out of the Coach Station and into a nearby pub. This luggage-based tug-of-war soon escalated into characteristically violent confrontation between the hot-tempered lovers which lasted just over a fortnight. According to Richard Ellmann, the row only ended after Joyce - who by this stage was suffering from a cut lip and broken spectacles - hastily composed a conciliatory lyrical poem to Nora entitled "In the Coach Station at Digbeth":

O cracked lookingglass
The flesh of lip now parted
By repeated blows to my skull
From your suitcase

Following the fight, Joyce and Nora left the coach station and found lodgings at a nearby public house called The Dislocated Arms, and it was there that Joyce set about forming his first and last band. According to Joyce scholar Hugh Jenner's definitive study of this period (C'mon Feel The Joyze, 1988), the resulting band - 'Molly and Her Bloomers' - were pioneers of the interwar industrial music scene. Unfortunately, their bulky musical instruments - which included heavyweight manufacturing equipment like conveyor belts, steel rolling mills and even a viaduct - prevented them from getting booked into adequately sized venues and made touring prohibitively expensive.

Frustrated by these setbacks to his fledgling musical career, Joyce submitted to Nora's persistent demands and decided to leave Birmingham and resume their journey to Paris. Before they left, though, Joyce indulged himself in a mammoth pub-crawl of the area. This event was recorded in his personal journals and - according to Ellmann and others - formed the basis of his masterpiece Finnegans Wake:

Riverrun, past the Adam and Eve, from Pershore Street to bend of Rea, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Ceol Castle and environs.

That's my Brum Fact. Here's my Blog Fact:

Not everything I write here is absolutely true.


I'm tagging Pete Ashton and Dave Metcalfe.

Brummie of the Year 2007 is....

(Sustained drumroll. Collective gasp of anticipation. Vigorous wrestling with a glitzy-looking envelope.)

...John Tighe, the Landlord of the mighty Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth.

Congratulations to a well-deserving winner. This man has taken a stand against the gentrified hordes, and for that I salute him. You can read about John's valiant efforts at his campaign website. May his commitment to the authentic live music experience continue to upset the delicate sensibilities of irredeemable gobshites and their polite, James Blunt-soundtracked dinner parties.

So say we all.

Commiserations to the runners-up, particularly my good friend and erstwhile gigpimp Pete Ashton. Here's the full results, courtesy of the award's organisers Birmingham It's Not Shit :

Who’s Brummie of The Year 2007?

• Richard Pawley (1%, 10 Votes)
• Condori : Big Chief Busks With Recorder (hats off to the buskers) (2%, 20 Votes)
• Martin Mullaney (2%, 25 Votes)
• Soweto Kinch (4%, 44 Votes)
• Carl Chinn (4%, 48 Votes)
• Catherine O’Flynn (12%, 133 Votes)
• Lisa Meyer & Jenny Moore of Capsule (16%, 186 Votes)
• Pete Ashton (29%, 336 Votes)
  
• John Tighe of The Spotted Dog (31%, 353 Votes)

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Voix pour Pete.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my good friend and erstwhile gig pimp Pete Ashton is in the shortlist for Brummie of the Year. The deadline to vote is midnight tonight, and last time I checked, Pete was in second place.

As I mentioned previously, Pete has tirelessly encouraged, urged and sometimes forcibly coerced the city's artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage. Pete is a true renaissance man - a world-renowned neurosurgeon, a leading particle physicist, a record-breaking racing car driver and a chart-topping rock star - and many of us feel that his groundbreaking work in cartography has helped put Birmingham on the map

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think its right that someone with these credentials should end up as number two. It's undignified, and it makes the rest of us look bad.

So - for one last time - I urge you to go here and Vote for Pete.

Yes, you. Don't try to look away. That won't work.