Words Dept.: category

I’m quite impressed by the borderline heretical grumblings over at FUC51. Not because I hate the Smiths, New Order or Joy Division (they’re actually three of my favourite bands) but because I hate the idea of living and working in a supposedly creative city that’s obsessed with a musical movement that ended twenty years ago. [...]

There’s been a not wholly positive reaction to Manchester Confidential’s “redesign” today. It looks quite a lot like the old site although it’s somehow more grotesque. It’s cluttered, it’s dominated by an almost misanthropic shade of yellow and looks like it was conceived in about 1999. By a drunk. ManCon has unleashed the dogs of war [...]

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to pay for an ID card. £30 for the privilege of owning a little pink bit of plastic that has the same basic purpose as a passport – while at the same time handing over your fingerprints to the government – holds [...]

Manchester Confidential has been emailing some of its subscribers today asking for £11.20 a month, £30 a quarter or £100 a year to continue to access the site and receive a slew of new “benefits”. The site, which has 260,000 (free) subscribers, announced plans for the paid subscription model last month. Its first move involves [...]

The blog has now been fixed. It was offline for a couple of days after someone hacked it and redirected it to something Google didn’t like, which resulted in many seemingly intractable problems. Mercifully, someone pointed me in the direction of Manchester-based WordPress guru Simon Wheatley, who identified and fixed the problem in about ten [...]

The Conservative Party conference is taking place in Manchester this week. I know this because of the twin-set and tweed lot I spotted hanging around Piccadilly this morning (alongside a confused looking David Dimbleby). That the Tories have chosen Manchester as the host city for their last conference before a General Election says something about [...]

Look kids! It’s DJ Davey C drinking a pint of bitter and looking like a dude! He’s going to be in town at the start of October and his peeps are hosting a wicked all night rave at the Pure night club! According to the e-flyer (helpfully distributed this week by Manchester Confidential to all [...]

There’s a new video that’s been produced to show what MediaCity in Salford is going to look like in 2011. As this is the year the BBC are due to move in, one can only conclude that the broadcaster is planning to employ a load of cartoon turtles and legions of weird flourescent blobs. The [...]

For all BBC middle managers thinking of moving up north, of which there really aren’t that many, please be aware of these facts, all verifiable on Wikipedia: The last known “art gallery” closed in 1987 The crime rate rose by 900% last year, driven by a shocking trade in aggravated pigeon theft Jack Duckworth reads [...]

The concept of It Felt Like A Kiss isn’t especially easy to pin down in words. Which in my book is no bad thing. The production, developed by documentary film maker Adam Curtis, Felix Barrett and installation theatre company Punchdrunk, premieres at the Manchester International Festival tonight. It straddles the line between video documentary, theatre and art installation [...]