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by Ben Whitehouse
I asked Jon Bounds to "write a post for the blog" and wasn't too sure what I'd get back. As usual I wasn't disappointed, Jon has delivered, in his own unique, way, something wonderful about his talks for the festival. Make sure you catch them, they're not to be missed!
The ways in which place affects us are too often cloistered in the work of travel writers or gap-year bloggers hemp-shirting their way across some of the developing World's most considered facades. That or dreamy-eyed nostalgists, moisting up over the bomb-cleared playgrouds of their youth. To descibe the now and your relation to it is to record history for the losers as well as the winners, it's to let location its due in your psyche, and it's honest.
In the post-spin age; the spun are dizzy with post-modernism, never more than an involuntary muscule spasm away from an arched eyebrow or a cheese football. We've long since given up on desire for the truth but prefer to band together and hunker down with whatever lie seems most palatable.
The job of the psychogeographer is to twist the facts into something relating the truth, and it's that which I've been trying to do for ten years of development, redevelopment and regeneration of Britian's most maligned conurbation.
I founded Birmingham: It's Not Shit in 2002, just as the city was embarrassing itself on the European stage again, not this time shooting for the stars with un-government backed bids for global sporting events but merely aiming the twelve bore directly a pied and not even standing up to Liverpool in the bidding for European Capital of culture status. The city's marketeers, all second-jobbing on their way to more suitable metropoli, presented a sheen of apartments, cafes and smiling mixed-ethnicity groups laughing just too much as one at how perfect their lives were. Liverpool presented some old film of the Beatles.
It's about to start all over again, and this time the site has been cited by the Council's Minister of Fun (er Cabinet Member for Culture and lesiure or something) as an example to follow. They're going to attempt to tempt the Turner Prize to some wasted industrial unit by giving the people what they want – Jasper Carrot and the Spitfire. Goldenballs.
I'm going to give three separate, but no-doubt interrelated talks at Greenbelt this year, one telling some of the story about how Birmingham is portrayed in popular culture and myth (and yes Benny from Crossroads will feature). A second will look more deeply at how the city sees itself – nominally from the upstairs window of a circular bus ride. Hundreds of Brummie kids spent Sunday afternoons in the sixties, seventies and eighties, riding round the outer circle. They gained a sense of the size of their city, a numerologist's appreciation of the codes and glyphs of the bus ticket and a life-long 'thing' for staring at the tops of middle aged mens' heads through a system of mirrors.
Whoever said that it was "better to travel hopefully than to arrive" never spent two and a half hours on a double decker and got off at the very same stop he got on at.
Or eleven hours come to that. I did, and I got about 30 people to do the same. I'll tell you why and what we found out.
My third talk is less inward-looking, and a bit more sweary. I'm going to look at the rapid spead of internet memes and how with just a soupcon of profanity, you too can become an interweb superstar. Or at least cost yourself a few hundred quid in hosting charges and destroy your employment prospects.
Jon founded Birmingham: it's Not Shit, a website that markets Brum without ever mentioning 'canalside living'.
Jon's worked in publishing, music journalism, and in a venetian blind factory. Now, after several years at the BBC, Jon is a freelance social media consultant and producer, writer and blogger. His common theme – tech plus people equals great things. He's obsessed by place. www.jonbounds.co.uk
