Ort Café’s The Magic Cinema is back, and looking for local short films. In their own words, The Magic Cinema is:

“A Birmingham based micro-cinema featuring an “open reel” section (bring your film along and we’ll show it, as long as it’s under 15 minutes), and a selection of underground/no-budget/obscure/DIY/outsider etc. films from further afield.”

Ort is one of those magical unique places outside of the city centre – in Balsall Heath to be precise, and well worth a venture. I was there on Friday night watching some what can only be described as mesmerising far out jazz.

For Ort’s full list of events, including language lessons, quizzes, art exhibitions, workshops, screenings and much much more, best see their website.

Tom from the 383 project sent us a round up of a few local web based happenings:

“Just to let you know that we’re doing a little web design and development conference in September called Canvas. It’s happening right in the heart of Birmingham City Centre at The Studio. We’ve got some great speakers from Twitter, BBC R&D, Opera and BSKYB coming to talk about future web design and development. Birmingham’s web creative community is really growing at the moment with things like HydraHack, Multipack and iOS Midlands.”

Get your ticket to Canvas, and find out more about the September event on the Canvas website.

In related news, last week, TechCrunch blogged ‘Could Birmingham become Britain’s Berlin for Tech?’

The word only exists and given the credence it has because not all the hippies had the good grace to OD, sell out, or go mad. Some made it through and got into power.

Any time I hear the word ‘community’ used it is being dismissed in the same sentence, wars are fought by units, gangs, packs. Communities hold fucking jumble sales and block planning permission for renewable energy because they cast shadows they don’t like.

‘Care in the community’ was a balls up, a forerunner to the Coalition doomed deformed baby ‘Big Society’. It relied on the notion of community to take care of potentially dangerous mental patients. We asked a ghost to care for our most vulnerable and ended up with another reason not to trust anyone lest they try and plait your hair against your will and molest your pets.

Community art projects are mostly hateful dull grey pieces of nothing decided by a collection of average that take the most banal, least offensive idea and squeeze the joy out of it until it becomes an art looking thing – a product. The most interesting of these projects are normally done involve an artist who, deciding they like eating food, knows a way of actually getting paid to make art is to say the magic ‘C’ word to a council, spend six weeks pretending to record and give a good god damn about a particular groups history, desire and opinions ignore it and make the thing they were always going to make anyway.

Art can not happen by committee because group think trends toward bland, consensus means compromise and compromise is mediocre. The Community Flag in the Creative War is a the herald of surrender that nobody will care about and will hopefully mean that a pack of Art Bastards in hob nail boots will find you and stomp fuck you out of your misery.

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By Danny Smith

For more from Danny Smith, take a look at – http://edgetrinkets.com