June 2008 Archives

My subject is war, and the pity of war.
So said First World War poet and former Birkenhead Institute student Wilfred Owen.
Well, this morning my subject is War Requiem and Westlife. In that order and in yet another rather eclectic weekend in Capital of Culture 2008.

I spent lunchtime lying on the carpet at FACT with some of the nation's foremost arts critics.
And no, we weren't ill or paralytic - we were just looking at the new Pipilotti Rist exhibition which opens on Friday.
In the ground floor gallery is an installation which is created by layering the softest, softest floor coverings into contoured hills of carpet colour.
You have to take off your shoes to walk on it.
On the ceiling are screens with images of water, rustling leaves and so on - and the idea is you lie or sit on the Ordnance Survey-style carpet hills, chill out and let it all wash over you.
It's soporific and groovy at the same time and I recommend everyone goes and gives it a try.

Can you believe we're half way through Capital of Culture already? Where has the year gone?
We at the Echo have launched a very quick, easy to fill out, survey on the internet to see what people think about the year so far and what they are looking forward to from July to December.
It's a way of people having their say, so I hope everyone takes a minute or two to fill it out.
Just log on to the Echo website and click on the 08 Have Your Say logo.
Easy!

You can't move for Liverpool sons and daughters either making programmes about or returning to the city this year.
The last of Alexei Sayle's series on Liverpool will be screened on BBC2 tonight, with Les Dennis's paean waiting in the TV wings.
Yesterday teatime it was the turn of Peter Sissons who gave the latest in JMU's series of 2008 Roscoe Lectures - entitled City of Media.
Or rather, as Sissons decided, it was a look at how Liverpool was served by and portrayed in the media.

What is WRONG with people?
Three days after the Go Superlambananas project went live around the city, one model has been stolen (you can just hear the sniggers and the tired old jokes from the rest of the country).
And I just heard today that another of the fibreglass statues has had a big boot-sized hole put in the side of it.
What makes the latter even more annoying is that it is one of the SLBs out in the community - on Townsend Lane according to my source.
It's all very well for people to moan about Capital of Culture having nothing to do with communities, but if loser vandals or light-fingered Scallies carry on like this then anything that IS out in the city suburbs will just end up being removed.
And it's such a shame because the majority of Liverpudlians and visitors who have seen the Superlambananas out in the streets love them and are treating them with respect.

I spent yesterday morning sitting in a 110-year-old train carriage.
Well, I say train but actually it was the last surviving motor coach from the Liverpool Overhead Railway - third class. I know my place!

(Lizzy Rodgers from NML and yours truly in the "Ovee")

News comes today that Liverpool has been voted the most musical city in the UK.
So tell us something we don't know?!
Ten cities have been competing over six weeks for the title, organised by the Arts Council and voted for by the public - and yes, I was one of them.
Apparently Liverpool took a storming 49% of the total vote.
We were followed by Sheffield, birth place of Arctic Monkeys and Pulp, and then in third place by Manchester.
Leicester and Birmingham made up the top five.

Another busy weekend in the European Capital of Culture.
Last night I joined about 6-7,000 others at the ECHO Arena to see the "Three Fellas" - Ardal O'Hanlon, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan.
And this morning I walked under the Mersey with 6-7,000 other people, and a marching band, in the Under and Over the Mersey event.

The Royal Liver Building atrium has been turned into a temporary art gallery.
I popped along last night for the opening of the New Middle Kingdom exhibition of contemporary Chinese art.
There is some interesting work in there. My favourite bits of the exhibition were the photographs by Wange Ningde (especially one of a cycling man on a rise with clouds behind him) and by Beijing-based Liu Bolin who took striking images of himself "camouflaged" against backdrops such as the cenotaph and a red phone box by the Town Hall when he visited Liverpool earlier in the year.

It's not the first time Rod Holmes of Liverpool 1 developers Grosvenor has sounded off about the litter epidemic in Liverpool.
And knowing how flagrantly people seem to treat their own city streets I'm sure it won't be the last.
But oh, how I agree with him and how I wish we had the guts to bring in some really punitive hit-them-where-it-hurts reprisals for the ignorant, useless losers who deliberately drop their rubbish all over the place.
I even found chewing gum on the base of our new Sheppard-Worlock statue in Hope Street the other day.