The days were getting longer, which was probably just as well for Rhubarb Rhubarb, who seemed to doing loads. Birmingham presented its final bid for the City of Culture and we crossed our fingers. Temper filled the streets with fashion icons. We looked at the trailer for Soulboy and discovered the blog for Reuben Colley Fine Arts.

The Arts Council announced a 0.5% cut in funding to RFO’s. Boo. We found some familiar faces in Synth Eastwood’s video tomfoolery from the Flatpack Festival. Treasured at the MAC looked good.

Bright Space started looking for people to get involved in Platform and I asked ‘Does Birmingham Future interest you?‘ and got a fairly resounding ‘Um, who?’. Theatre folk came together and spoke easy, the newly opened Zellig hosted the Bass Festival’s Fight The Power exhibition and there was talk of verbalising and visualisation.

Creative Republic launched Invisible City and Marketing Birmingham released a new promotional video for the city that featured a host of creative talent.

First up is this film for Bright Space’s Platform project. Filmed by Courtney Salmon and starring Matt Windle.

And secondly, there’s this rather good promo for the Birmingham European Theatre Festival 2010 (30 June to 3 July).

Update: seems the BE Festival trailer’s been deleted. Shame that.

Bright Space are doing a project called Platform and they’re after youngsters:

Platform will be a blog written by 16-19 year olds, featuring articles, reviews, events listings and much more. Written by young people for young people it will represent a unique perspective on arts activity in Birmingham.

We are now looking to recruit 15 young people aged 16-19 years old who are interested in reporting, reviewing and attending the many cultural events in and around the city, including exhibitions, theatre, dance, launches and gigs.

Successful applicants will receive a £200 bursary and the opportunity to attend a week long intensive summer school in August, which will highlight the many techniques and skills they will need to become fully fledged Platform bloggers

Which sounds like a pretty decent deal. All you have to do to take advantage is write a 200 word article on a creative passion that you have, including your name, address, date of birth and contact details and send it to Bright Space. You need to be 16-19 years old and available on certain dates. More info on all that on the Platform website.

Seems a shame to let the young folks get all the fun though – I reckon doing a project like this with OAPS/accountants/badminton players/whatever could be fun.

Birmingham, that murky, grey metropolis. It’s easy to think of everything in the ’second city’ as indistinct and ethereal as a cloud of smoke, a no-man’s land slap bang in the middle of the country, not far enough south to have a snobby art streak, not northern enough to have that quintessential soul; just stuffed of kids filling their heads with dreams of London

Then moves on to to a pretty creditable look at the city’s music scene. Would be nice if there were people in the city writing this sort of stuff regularly but, if there are, I’ve not found em.

(Via Digbeth is Good)