When he isn't encouraging, urging and sometimes forcibly coercing the city's artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage, my friend Pete Ashton also finds the time to be a rather talented photographer. That's award-nominated polymathematical Renaissance Brummies for you. I sometimes suspect that his interest in photography is not unrelated to history as a comics aficionado. After all, he's not the first illustrious Peter to have moonlighted as a shutterbug. Anyhow, I was browsing through his Flickr pages and found the following pics he took at gigs I recently attended. They're rather good. Here's Jim White from [...]

Some YouTubery, courtesy of the Brummie of the Year nominee who sent me the link. It's from the Rootsville Festival that was held at Birmingham's Custard Factory during the last weekend of June and features the stunning set by The Dhol Blasters and The Destroyers. The former are masters of rapid-fire traditional drum-action, the latter are Conservatoire-trained swaggering maestros of Eastern European folk. So now you know.They played on the event's 'Lakeside Stage', otherwise known as the pool outside the Medicine Bar. The pool had been drained and a marquee put up over it, which struck me as a nice, [...]

My good friend and erstwhile gig pimp Pete Ashton is on the shortlist for 2007's much coveted Brummie of the Year award. He is, by his own admission, "dead chuffed about it"; I am, by my own admission, dead chuffed for him. For those who don't know Pete, he's worked tirelessly towards encouraging, urging and sometimes forcibly coercing the city's artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage. His Created in Birmingham site has - in a remarkably short space of time - become an invaluable resource for writers, artists, designers, popular beat combos and all-round creative types [...]

This is a bit of an oddity from the archives, but that's never stopped me before. While clearing out some old stuff from the attic of my mum's house I found this parody I'd written a long, long time ago in an adolescence far, far away. It must have been 1988 or 1989, and I must have been 17 or 18. It was published in my Sixth Form College's ragmag while I was supposed to be studying for my A-Levels. One of those A-Levels was Philosophy, which will become somewhat apparent later on. I also remember writing a fake biography [...]

Last night's Dream Within a Dream event at Birmingham's Ikon Eastside was fun. As well as being a Halloween-themed night, it was also the venue's Closing Party for the season. The current incarnation of Ikon Eastside is a disused factory in Digbeth, winter is upon us and disused factories in Digbeth get bloody cold in winter. It all makes sense to me. The main event was organised by 7-Inch Cinema, Birmingham-based [I think] organisers of hip and groovy underground film events. I missed the first hour's worth on account of tardiness and random acts of raconteuring, but I caught Black [...]