The Shrieking Violet Issue 7

Issue 7 of the Shrieking Violet is out now!

Featuring snow - the words of Diary of a Bluestocking EP Niblock accompanied by the photos of Andrew Beswick (who has compiled the best photo-diary of snowmen I have ever seen!).

Catriona Gray on the joys of boardgames (something funny happened to the picture of monopoly - the logo is back to front and the pdf added a white border to the photo. I do not know why). Adam Faulkner on French music. My article saying farewell to URBIS. Chris Lane and Peter Huntley of North West New Wave on independent film in Manchester and the North West. A short story by Nick Mitchell. My recipe for mushroom soup and Anthony Watt's red cabbage. Listings.

And a beautiful cover by Kate Alexandra McLeish.

Here is the download link for the print-and-fold-your-own or try-to-follow-the-order-of-the-pages-onscreen version.

Free paper copies will be scattered lightly across places such as Piccadilly Records, Cornerhouse, Koffee Pot, Nexus Art Cafe, Good Grief, Noise cafe, Oklahoma and Central Library.

There is also a postal order service. To request a copy, send your name and address to Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com

Open publication - Free publishing - More urbis

Goodbye, URBIS (2002-2010)

“This landlocked building, URBIS, sleek and unexpected, has turned its back on the River Irwell, to face the town and its compact, self-contained centre. Shivering in its glass cladding like a customised iceberg, Urbis belongs to a fleet…[of] boats which do not travel but are themselves the inspiration for travel by others: visitor destinations, attractors, flexible in usage, weather - resistant, brought into being with the death of the industrial process.” Iain Sinclair, London based writer and psychogeographer, who was commissioned to visit and produce a response to Manchester in summer 2009, quoted in the best-of URBIS exhibition URBIS Has Left the Building: Six Years of the Best Exhibitions in Pop Culture.

At 6pm on Saturday 27 Feburary, the museum known as URBIS will shut its doors forever. It will close for a couple of months and, after its exhibitions have been dismantled, it will be refitted before reopening again as the National Football Museum. Read the Manchester Evening News or the City Council website and they’re full of triumph about how the city has won the National Football Museum from Preston, and what a benefit it will be to the city. Manchester is famous world-over for football. The football museum was struggling in Preston and URBIS, a sort of awkward, unwieldy hybrid of popular culture forum and city museum, was failing to attract enough visitors. The idea was simple: quietly close one of Manchester’s flagship post-bomb projects (as Sinclair puts it, ‘an icon for the new theology of capital and regeneration’), which wasn’t doing as well as hoped, and replace it with a sure-fire crowd pleaser.

I, along with many others, was sad about URBIS closing, but didn’t realise the full extent of what the city will be losing until I went to say my final goodbyes by visiting the URBIS Has Left the Building retrospective.

On the sunny Saturday I went, URBIS was packed. Children ran through the displays, teenagers lurked in groups, couples scrutinised displays intently. It was alive with a cross-section of the city. By the message boards, where people could pin their comments, the conversations I overheard expressed shock and dismay. Reading the comments, a theme emerged; ‘We like football, but we like URBIS better’. ‘We like football BUT… there’s more to Manchester than football’. People are interested in football, but we already all know Manchester likes football. The people of Preston were, understandably, upset about losing their museum (facebook groups were formed both to keep the football museum in Preston and URBIS in Manchester), and it seems that even those in Manchester who like football are upset about losing theirs.

Manchester has a great variety of museums, dedicated to all manner of specialist topics — from the police to the Pankhursts, the working classes to transport. But URBIS was separate. Its name means literally ‘from the city’. Museums dedicated to one subject are the type of place you might visit as a one off, out of curiosity, but unless you’re a real enthusiast, you’re unlikely to visit again and again. URBIS, on the other hand, by being so broad, attracted what Sinclair termed ‘casual pilgrims’, from tourists wondering where to start to Mancunians who could discover sides to the city they’d never seen before.

Some of my favourite exhibitions at URBIS were encountered before you even reached the main exhibition space. Aidan O’Rourke’s Manchester epic mega-photo in the foyer challenged you to try to identify a fast-changing city scape. In the corridor space in between the shop and the entrance, photographers documented often underlooked area of city life, with changing displays ranging from portraits of the ‘goth’ and ‘emo’ kids who frequent Cathedral Gardens immediately outside URBIS to affectionately shot greasy spoons and an overview of the of the Curry Mile.

URBIS showcased movements and ideas not usually found in museums, from Urban Exploration — Andrew Paul Brooks’ photographs of hidden Manchester were taken with the help of the secret network of clandestine adventurers — to guerrilla gardening, Manga, computer games, street art and even hip-hop.

In an pessimistic opinion piece on the Culture24 website, however, URBIS’s creative executive Vaughan Allen explores the failures of building a museum to popular culture:

“Attempts to found museums based around still-living, still-developing expressions of popular activity have floundered on one simple issue: if it's already out there, already happening, it can't be captured and can't be (literally) encased.”

To him, the difficulty of capturing popular culture in a museum is “it’s about something that's fleetingly experienced and then passes away”. But surely the point of URBIS wasn’t to be or recreate popular culture. As Sinclair implies in his description of URBIS, it’s merely a vessel to find out what is going on that you may not have heard about, a starting point for other journeys and adventures.

URBIS was drawn from the city, but it also reminded us of the world outside the city. Some exhibitions were backward looking and trading on past glories — celebrating 25 years since the opening of the Hacienda, for example, but at its best URBIS related Manchester to the wider world, showing how we‘ve impacted on global events and they have changed the way we live. An exhibition on Emory Douglas and the often misunderstood Black Panthers, for instance, timed with the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, with a link drawn to Manchester‘s radical history and resistance to the slave trade. Similarly, Leon Reid IV’s installation ‘True Yank’ in Lincoln Square, which dressed a sombre statue of Abraham Lincoln in hip-hop clothes, as part of the State of the Art: New York exhibition at URBIS, reminded Mancunians of a part of Manchester and its history that‘s often overlooked — Lincoln Square is so named because there‘s a monument to the sacrifices made by the people of Manchester who boycotted cotton from the southern American states during the civil war.

Like all good museums should, URBIS inspired discussion and debate. It was more than just a place to go and look, to observe culture passively. URBIS held city tours, regular language sessions, adult education programmes, urban research forums and the acclaimed Reclaim mentoring scheme. It hosted events such as festivals, the occasional gig and Manchester zine fest. It acted as a meeting place and a showcase, holding awards, fashion shows and exhibitions of graduate art and design.

As Sinclair notes, Ian Simpson’s towering glass structure is somewhat out of place with the historic buildings around it. But, at a certain time of day, as the sun turns the frosted glass on the upper floors orange and sets over Manchester city centre in all directions, from the cathedral, Chethams library and the dome of the Corn Exchange to the Arndale, Printworks and CIS tower, it seems like the best place to watch Manchester past meet Manchester present and Manchester future.

I won’t reserve judgement on the football museum until I’ve been. Who knows, maybe it will convert me and I will spend hours browsing the nation’s sporting history. But, until then, I’m afraid I think the closure of URBIS is a big mistake.

Snow

The big wheel kept on turning.

A different view of Manchester

Capture Manchester, CUBE

If you could sum up Manchester in a single image, what would it be? And is it possible? An exhibition at CUBE sets out to capture the spirit of Manchester, comprising of hundreds of images - mainly photos - sent in by the public. The postcard size images offer snapshots of Manchester life, from its landmarks to small, neglected corners and alleys most of us walk straight past on a daily basis, with ten winning entries receiving £500 for their shots. There's no single image that, taken in isolation, says Manchester and sums up its essence, but taken as a whole the images give a sense of the chaotic fragments that make up life in the city.

I wasn’t impressed by the judges' choices of winners which, apart from a shot of graffiti boasting 'Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Chan', seemed a bit predictable. Winning images will be printed as postcards (click here to read Phil Griffin's excellent article about the lack of variety of Manchester postcards).

As you’d expect, Castlefield is well represented in the submissions, including the often seen shot of its two towers - an old, redbrick one rising from the shadow of the Beetham tower that dominates the city skyline. The famous curves of Central Library are returned to over and over again, and it’s good to see B of the Bang commemorated before it goes forever.

Many photos take the architecture of the city as their starting point, often focusing in on quirks like gargoyles. Old and new is a recurring theme, and one of the most effective shots places ornate redbrick turrets against the protruding glass blocks of the new civil justice centre in Spinningfields, a bizarre and extreme juxtaposition. The derelict Department of Employment building, its former purpose just about identifiable from battered letters on the front, takes on a new relevance for our times. Victoria Station deservedly gets a look in, with its map of railway routes, and the destination signs outside, where a tiny Hull is squeezed in between Newcastle and Belgium.

There is a large number of photos of triumphant symbols of the new Manchester like Urbis and the big wheel, many of which are embellished with technical trickery and special effects. The ones which are unplayed with are more effective, though, showing Manchester in its natural state, from the utilitarian street namies of Ancoats - Mangle Street - to a row of boarded up terraces. Pictures close in on doorways and abandoned entrances or the front of an Asian grocer's and an MEN newsagents. A worthy winner would have been the photo taken from the top deck of a Magic Bus, a rival Finglands in the background - what could be more typical of the Manchester experience than a journey along the Wilsmlow Road corridor at peak time?

My favourite photos are the ones that look beyond the glossy image - all shiny glass and big gestures - that's sold to tourists and could be seen in any of the council's promotional literature. The photos are best when they just show what's there already, and make us look at it closer, rather than trying to impress by montaging or photoshopping. For example, the area outside the Thirsty Scholar and the Attic with its spiral staircase is given a new, fairytale magic when framed in black and white that would be missed by the casual observer.

Among my favourites are those which look past Manchester's monuments and architecture, forego grand aerial views to get down to the level of its inhabitants - one photo even crouches down to a goose's eye level.

It's Manchester's inhabitants that make the city what it is, after all. A portrait of a teenager wearing a tshirt asking ‘Do I f***ing look like I’m a people person’ is instantly recognisable to anyone who spends anytime in Cathedral Gardens at the weekend, where teenagers congregate. Canals and woodland are more interesting when they have people silhouetted against them, Piccadilly Gardens more alive when children play in its fountains. The shiny new city of Spinningfields is made more human by a woman waiting by a 'Meet me in Spinningfields' poster -the advertising message becomes literal rather than an empty slogan of redevelopment.

The best photos are those dictated by circumstance, such as sunshine catching on street sculptures in New Islington, a springboard for a burst of sunlight to leap out against a cloudy sky. One of my favourite photos shows the outline of a couple holding hands in the snow, next to the Temple in Heaton Park.

Until April 18.

Incidentally, I'm far too disorganised for submitting anything to any exhibitions. I think this is my favourite Manchester photo, of Plymouth Grove pub in Ardwick, taken well over a year ago. It was the first photo I developed by myself, and wasn't meant to come out so dark, but I thought the darkness suited it perfectly, making its distinctive clock tower (Grade 2 listed) stand out against a moody Mancunian sky. The pub's derelict and boarded up, in an area that's had huge building programmes going on all around it. I don't know if it's still there, but I hope so.

Abraham Lincoln goes bling

Lincoln Square has turned into an unlikely tourist attraction, with a crowd of people holding their mobile phones up to get a picture of Abraham Lincoln gone bling. The statue that gives the small square on Brazenose Street (incidentally, one of my favourite street names) its name hitherto only stood out for its unusually large head. Now, the head has been accentuated even more by a puffed up 'NY' New York Yankees style hat with red cloth of an indeterminate purpose trailing out of it. A grave looking President Lincoln also sports some hip-hop bling around his neck, including a large gold medallion proclaiming ‘Union’ (as in, the Northern states of the Union versus the secessionist Southern States, back in American history). To top it all off, he’s given a bit of street attitude by large rings almost the size of his hands which tell us he’s a ‘true Yank’. The effect is as comical as you can imagine.

Obviously noone told the MEN, who in today's edition said “mystery surrounds who has given the statue the makeover”, that the stunt wasn't a work of an anonymous graffiti artist. It’s the doing of the American street artist Leon Reid IV and was commissioned by URBIS as part of their exhibition State of the Art: New York, which starts next week and will celebrate the city's vibrant art scene.

An interviewee in the same article - who is clearly completely devoid of a sense of humour - said: "I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to say. It's supposed to be modern art. They've turned it into some kind of African gangster statue. I don't particularly like it. It looks very strange. Apparently they had a crane. I don't like it. It's insulting. I think it looks really daft."

He’s spectacularly missed the point. The African map hanging from his neck is a reference to Lincoln’s work to stop the slade trade during the American Civil War of the 1860s.

Lincoln was supported by Manchester in his opposition to the slave trade - yet another example of Manchester as a politically radical, forward thinking city, which is why there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester in the first place.

Or maybe he's choosing not to see the point, seeing as we're also told this at the bottom of the statue, which acknowledges ‘the support that the working people of Manchester gave in the fight for the abolition of slavery during the American civil war'.
The statue was placed in the square in 1986, in a fairly tucked away location (considering Brazenose Street's proximity to the Town Hall and the prominence of the statues in Albert Square).

I, for one, had to do a double take when I went to the Post Office on Brazenose Street this afternoon. It definitely brightened up my grey afternoon as well as, I'm guessing, that of the office workers who eat lunch in the square every day. It's a thought provoking bit of modernisation, and you can't ignore the influence the past has had on our times.

www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3280

You may also enjoy Jonathan Schofield's article on the history of the statue, which was written to coincide with Barack Obama's election as president.

Additionally, the comments on the MEN website are pure gold, as ever, notably Squirrelito:

"the only link I can see between Lincoln and Hip Hop "culture" is that so many gangsta rappers were also shot dead.

Hip Hop culture?

Judging by the arc that Hip Hop has taken over the last 30 years, are we also to assume that Mr Lincoln started out as charting social conscience and decrying the plight of the black man in America but over the years became more interested in perpetuating the stereotype of the violent, money-obsessed, misogynist homophobe?

Very uplifting
squirrelito,
31/03/2009 at 15:46"

Reality Hack:Hidden Manchester, Urbis

It’s common knowledge that there’s a secret world underneath the city, a network of tunnels and underground rivers. Not many of us actually get to see it, though, so it’s a continual subject of debate and suggestion. Now, digital photographer Andrew Paul Brooks has turned what goes on below the surface into works of art. His camera acts as our eyes behind closed doors and in forgotten chambers, exposing the mechanics behind familiar facades. The pictures really draw us in, give us a sense of what’s actually like to be there, in the bits of the city that we’re closed off from, sites rotting away whilst everyday life goes on unconcerned.

We get into a pattern of walking the same old streets, past the same buildings and sights, forgetting about the possibility of anything existing on the periphery, outside our immediate range of vision. Brooks captures those “snatched glances into an open grate, through a broken hoarding, behind a door ajar”, that are often no more than that - tantalising at the time, but soon forgotten - with the help of Urban Explorers, a secretive, anonymous community that explores the hidden side of our cities. They put themselves as risk of death, arrest and unseen hazards such as asbestos, but Brooks’ photographs make it easy to see how their clandestine exploration could be addictive.

The space is perfect for the exhibition – the top floor of Urbis, overlooking a skewed window that's built into the sloping white ceiling. You can see the clock tower, grubby brickwork and ornate red metalwork of Victoria Station, with new, high-rise construction going up behind it in glass and steel. Standing on the mezzanine level, we can see all the way down to the bottom, our line of vision bouncing off the angles of the building.

‘Great Abel’ invites us inside the town hall clock tower. Light streams into the tower and our gaze ascends to a dizzying height, past worn wooden beams and warm bricks. Brooks’ photos are more snatches of overlooked memory than complete pictures, black around the edges like an overexposed negative. ‘Great Abel’ is a mere keyhole portrait swimming in a darkened background; stand back and it looks like a scrunched up can someone's crunched in the middle in preparation for throwing out to be recycled.

We look out over the toy-town of Oxford Street from behind the illuminated letters and silhouetted brickwork of the Palace Hotel, hung with glowing red cobwebs, in ‘Quiet Refuge’. We’re elevated to the same level as the stars in an opulent, over-cast sky purple with light pollution. The sight of a Magic Bus, reduced to the size of a collectible car, is almost comical in its triviality. In 'Keeping Time', we’re in the internal decay of the Palace’s clock tower, peeling and mossy. Our view descends the spiral staircase, looking down as if into a well. In another print, the dome of the Palace occupies a round area in the centre. Red-orange, yellow and lime lights fly off the dome haphazardly onto the walls around it, like being inside a Christmas bauble.

'Central Foundations' goes beneath the Great Northern Warehouse into the disused Manchester and Salford Canal Tunnel. Although it’s deserted, the picture makes us feel claustrophobic and crammed in, as it must have been during the war when the tunnels were used to shelter from the Luftwaffe. Similarly, 'Cathedral Steps' shows a tiled public toilets, eerily signposted 'Convenience Closed for Repair' on a shattered pane of glass. We can imagine what it felt like to walk down the crumbling staircases. 'Culvert Report' too descends into the underworld. A ghost figure is barely perceptible against the slimy walls, dripping with moisture. The river looks tepid and unhealthy.

We’re reminded that what goes on beyond our vision is just as important as what goes on in front of us. Things often seen as dry and unimportant are given colour: ‘Hidden Arndale’ is an underground road of red, yellow, blue and white pipes.

Brooks’ camera imbues the everyday or utilitarian with a new patina of magic. An overflow tunnel of the Ashton Canal shines in an ethereal light. It’s luminous in wintry colours: blue, red, green and white like an idyllic fairytale grotto. The picture centres on a fuzzy halo of brilliant light, and we’re drawn in, to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Whereas Brooks’ other pictures focus in on tiny, undervalued snippets of our city, 'Angelic View' reminds us of its magnificence. Perched on a corner of the Town Hall, an angel looks our over the Manchester stretching into the distance like the heavenly creatures that safeguard Berlin’s citizens in Wim Wenders’ wistful film Wings of Desire. The detail of the green, yellow, and brown grandeur of the brickwork, and the patchworks of light that is the Beetham Tower contrasts with the vastness of a sweeping, blurry sky.

'Big Humpty', which is abstract like a painting, with bursts of fiery red and a spurting green river, shows a tiny person in a tunnel of the River Medlock, and reminds us just how small and insignificant we are in relation to the great city.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of these pictures is that they portray places that are undisturbed and underexplored. Looking at them acknowledges our childlike fantasies of escaping the crammed city for somewhere where we are free from scrutiny and can truly be ourselves, and explore unconstrained. Somewhere to get lost.