JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters at Tate Liverpool.

Art  This morning I attended Tate Liverpool for the press viewing of their new paid exhibition, JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters.  I could pretend that I was in completely the right mind for this.  As you'll probably gather from the scarcity of writing here this past few months, I've not been in the best places mentally.  The grief of losing Mum last year still lingers and I've never quiet felt the same since catching COVID earlier in this year.  Plus anxiety continues to thrum away in the background every now and then turning to into a full blown rock concert but sadly more Woodstock '99 than Glastonbury '99 (which at least had REM headlining)

All of which made me rather nervous about a press day at Tate, something I've really enjoyed in the past, but having not put my name down since before the pandemic or indeed been to many exhibitions in general, it felt like it was going to be a lot.  Pre-pandemic, one of these events involved reception desks and noise, lots of bodies in the space, a curator led tour at certain time making me feel need to rush around the show beforehand, followed by a meal with all the inherent low self esteem issues of being sat at a table with professional journalists when you're a blogger who's mainly doing this sort of thing as a lark.

But the format has changed, or at least it had for Turner and Fifana.  The space was just open for a couple of hours this morning.  On entering I was offered some brief directions by the press person pointing to some notable items and then I was left to fend for myself.  Perfect.  It's also not a huge show.  The fourth floor is currently being prepared for this year's Turner Prize exhibition, so T&F are inhabiting one side of the fourth floor, quality rather than quality, large oil paintings punctuated by watercolours and drawings, a conscious decision, perhaps, to recreate the feel of the Turner rooms at Tate Britain.

Well, I relaxed.  I becalmed.  I began to enjoy myself.  I also had questions.  Why was Tate Liverpool, which has generally been on the cutting edge of contemporary art hosting a Turner show?  That should not be seen a complaint.  Over the years, I've hoped they would diversify the types of work they display to before the 1900 cut off which seems to have been the general rule and cheered on the occasions when they have, for Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (ten years ago folks) and Alice in Wonderland (even longer).  It's also interesting that this is a paid exhibition when it's entirely sourced from Tate's own collection.

The most numerous selection of Turners are of his Whaling Scenes, depictions of one of the industries which developed in the 1700s out of the same docks which can be seen from the windows of this Tate (see above).  However abhorrent we might find the practice now, when these were originally painted it was a way for the public to envision how many household items such as oil for lamps. soap and lubricants were provided in the years before fossil fuels were properly harnessed.  Almost everything here was accepted by the nation at part of the Turner bequest in 1856.

Not that Turner's work doesn't take some creative license with Whalers Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846) showing the boiling of whale blubber on board ship, something which would usually have happened back in port but allows the artist to contrast the deep red of the flames against the muted grey backdrop.  In many of these later works, the objects become less important than Turner's experimentation with colour leading to near abstraction and how light interacts with the canvas to the point that the image almost "shimmers".

The centrepiece of the exhibition is A Disaster at Sea (1835) which was inspired by the loss of the Amphitrite, a slave ship which left Liverpool in 1799 and capsized off Nigeria the following January.  Unlike other depictions of sea tragedies, like The Raft of the Medusa (painted a few decades earlier) which show the anguish and fear of the sea farers against an otherwise quite static background, Turner loses the sense of individuality amid the hellish swirl of the ocean and chaotic skies with the pieces of ship and fragments of people almost indistinguishable.

Lamina Fofana's sound installations are inspired by another tragedy at sea in which the crew of the Zong massacred over a hundred and thirty slaves and threw them overboard near the Caribbean (by doing so the ship's owners could make an insurance claim).  Of the three, the most prominent and certainly the most recognisable is Life and Death by Water (2021) which mainly consists of the hummed section of Boney M's Rivers of Babylon repeated on a loop for twenty minutes like an ancient chant.  

Originally recorded by the Jamaican Reggae group The Melodians for the 1972 film The Harder They Come, the lyrics, based on Psalm 137, although originally about the Jewish exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, could equally be applied to the souls lost on board the Zong, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ... They carried us away in captivity requiring of us a song ... Now how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?"

For about five or ten minutes at the end of my visit I sat listening to Fofana's piece.  Potentially it's a distraction from the Turner paintings, especially as your ears twig a familiarity with the melody in the other room and then try to identify it like a human version of the Shazam app.  The repetition does make it inherently irritating and I fear for the invigilators who're going to have to be in the space and will collectively develop it as an earwig on mass.  But just sat listening, once again I relaxed, I becalmed and I began to enjoy myself.  

On reflection the opening paragraph to this was a bit gloomy so I wanted to say I am fine, really, and in this past week I've been on an overnight city break to Birmingham and Stratford-Upon-Avon (more on that in the next couple of days) and a day trip for Blackpool for my Dad's 80th birthday (and that) (maybe) so it's not like I've been a complete emotional wreck.  I just wanted to show that you can't approach any exhibition with a clear, neutral mind.  And at least I didn't try to make some tenuous connection between my mental state and the chaos of Turner's paintings.  I'd never have forgiven myself.

Drawing speed.

Art Local Liverpool artist Colette Lilley has opened a YouTube channel to showcase her skills through time-lapse photography. Her introductory video is above and you can visit the channel here.  Incredible.

Franchise Wars.

Food Yes, indeed, Liverpool is finally going to have a Taco Bell, which is opening at the bottom of Bold Street. For years the only frame of reference I had for Taco Bell was as a joke in Demolition Man which was deemed so obscure for international audiences that it was poorly ADRed to Pizza Hut in some versions:



The QuoDB offers dozens of other movie references and the general mood seems to be positive. Now I'll finally have a chance to fill in that gap in my knowledge of Americana.

Portraits Of Port Sunlight.

Photography Friend of the blog Pete Carr, introduces photographs from his new exhibition at The Lyceum in Liverpool, peering behind the curtains of the houses in the village near Bebbington:

"Port Sunlight has an interesting mix of architecture. Every street is different. This house basically had a living room and a kitchen downstairs and yet from outside it looked spacious. But despite the awkward design, the owner loved two things: her kitchen and her garden, which her kitchen looks out onto."

[Double Negative]

The Superlambanana is in a Fucking Mess (Updated!)

Art Excellent news. This blog post was picked up by Radio Merseyside who reported on it this afternoon. They've spoken to the council and ...

It's looking a little mutton but now @lpoolcouncil has agreed to repaint the city's #Superlambanana pic.twitter.com/Y00Kt6WZ8U

— BBC Radio Merseyside (@bbcmerseyside) July 7, 2016

We are told its replacement will find a permanent home on the Strand by 2018 #superlambanana https://t.co/BI3VqF0lPh

— Claire Hamilton (@chamiltonbbc) July 7, 2016

Here's the original post ...

Art Some friends visited Liverpool today and I gave them a tour of the city taking in the major sites one of which being the Superlambanana which is currently outside one of John Moores University's libraries on Tithebarn Street. As I discovered back in the late nineties when researching public art for various reasons, although towns and cities are very grateful to have them installed, their upkeep is a whole other thing and so it's proving with what's become a modern icon of the city.

As you can see from the above photo and the close-ups below, the paintwork is pretty much knackered, less cared for than the average bus shelter. At a certain point it has had a second layer but rather than doing what's needed which is to sand the whole thing down and start again with a more weather resistant paint, it was simply touched up between the gaps and now in large sections the paintwork has dropped away leave bare concrete. It looks sad. Unloved. Forgotten.







This shot is of a major portion of the side. As you can see the paint has almost completely fallen away.



You may have noticed in the midst of that the addition of the litter bin which has been put next to the underbelly of the beast. Here it is in-situ. I've blanked out the face of the members of the public nearby. Apologies for the language by the way but I was trying to get the getting one people who this on social media. Some intemperate bad language seems to work.  For some reason.



Who administers the upkeep of the sculpture I wonder?  Is there a special budget somewhere?  Does original artist Taro Chiezo need to be involved?  It's just extremely weird that a piece of public art which is merchandised this extensively, which has spawned all of those children, notably those produced in 2010 which are now outside the Museum of Liverpool and clearly loved by some many people should now be in such a shabby state.

Shakespeare on Merseyside.

Radio The BBC has announced local radio's contributions to their Shakespeare festival which includes Radio Merseyside and would you believe:

"BBC Radio Merseyside will be delving into the story of actress Sarah Siddons who played Hamlet in Liverpool in 1778. At a time when actresses were still associated with prostitutes, Siddons took pains to lead an exemplary life as a respectable married woman.

Although her husband was a respected actor, she was really the family’s breadwinner, the brighter talent and the bigger draw at the box office.

Siddons’ ground-breaking Hamlet extended the possibilities for actresses on stage and paved the way for a flock of others to follow suit.

Frances De La Tour and Maxine Peake are just two of the actresses who’ve tackled the role of Hamlet while Fiona Shaw and Frances Barber have played other male roles."

Which seems like is going to be a documentary, but all I've found is this longer story (which is still well worth reading).  Nevertheless there's a page at the Shakespeare on Tour website collecting stories connecting Shakespeare to Merseyside.

Shakespeare Walk visits Liverpool!

Theatre Amazing news. The Complete Walk, a collection of ten minute chunks of Shakespeare plays filmed by the Globe is to visit Liverpool and they're currently searching for potential venues. From Liverpool Confidential:

"Each film will be shown in venues throughout Liverpool city centre and Culture Liverpool is inviting anyone who wants to stage one to get in touch.

"A full list of venues, opening times and the locations of each play will be released in March. If you are venue and are interested in hosting a film please email cultureliverpool@liverpool.gov.uk no later than 5pm Friday 26 February." it says."

Hello new blogging project, new blogging project hello.

The St. George's Hall Floor.

Architecture This morning I attended the formal opening of the floor of St George's Hall by our Lord Mayor Councillor Tony Concepcion, or rather the tape cutting since the wooden covering which usually obscures the Minton tiles for safety and preservation purposes were removed before the event. As the press release describes,

"Amongst the world’s finest examples of an encaustic tiled floor, the handcrafted mosaic of more than 30,000 tiles were concealed in the 1860s to allow dancing and events at the prestigious venue.  The intricate and exquisite patterned tiled flooring depict the Liver Birds, the Roman god Neptune, sea nymphs, dolphins and tridents in what was the largest Minton pavement in the world when reconstructed."

The Hall is used for so many events it's simply impractical to have the floor open all of the time and keep it preserved, which is ironic considering its inherent utility.  So for much of the time the only glimpse visitors have is through small windows through the usual wooden cover.  There's a decent history of the hall here.

The floor has only recently become a more viewable object, with seven appearance in the past nine years.  As local historian Steve Binns explained, when it was initially built the hall was mainly used for court purposes so not seen publically and then when the hall was used for events the floor was closed up pretty quickly.

As such it's not that much different in style to most municipal mosaics or what you might find in a church.  The difference is both its scale and also how it appears unfettered by supporting columns, the Hall itself being a great architectural feat and expression at the time construction of Liverpool's national and geographical importance.

In case you want to visit, here are some details:

"The Hall will be open daily to the public from 10am-5pm (last entry 4pm) where visitors will be able to view Liverpool’s hidden gem and gaze again at the site of the Great Hall in all its original grandeur. There will also be Walk the Floor Tours available each day at 10am-11am and 4pm-5pm and A Night on the Tiles; each evening from 6pm-9pm where guests will be able to enjoy the rare privilege of being able to “walk” on the world heritage site floor."

The floor is open until the 16th August.

I've uploaded some photographs of the event and floor to flickr but here are some of the highlights:



I now declare ...



... the St George's Hall floor ...



... open ....



... and again for the cameras.



Visitors to the hall to see the floor will be given plastic shoe bags to wear if they want to step onto the floor.  Here I am taking my first step.



On the floor.



Into the Hall.



Here's why the wooden cover is important. Find above part of the floor which has just been unveiled.



Here's the same pattern on one of the edges where the public is allowed to walk all of the time. The pattern has worn away.



That's especially acute here were the pattern has almost completely gone.



Today of all days I also discovered the panorama option on my iPod and decided to give it a try for the first time whilst standing on the organ platform also for the first time. Click to make bigger.



The organ.





Here are a couple more panoramas from standing in the centre of the hall. Sorry about the slight lean. I'm still learning.







Finally, here are some shots of the floor itself.

The Omen of Sefton Park.

Film The QuoDB is a search engine for movie quotes. Imagine my surprise when searching for somewhere local that I should find:



That's Sefton Park in Liverpool mentioned in Omen: The Final Conflict, which I will now have to watch. No there isn't an Ormsby Road in Liverpool, but there is an Ormsby Street, off Lawrence Road in L15.

The Interstitial Zone of Validity.

Travel Sometimes I've sometimes wondered about is whether there's much crossover between local travel rover tickets, if there are interstitial stations or places of crossover which allow one to move validly from one piece of card with a date on to another.

I've found the North West.

It's at Newton-Le-Willows.

Here's the Merseyside Merseytravel All Areas Saveaway (price: £5.10) validity map:



And here's the Wayfarer Manchester rail (price £12.00) validity map:



So between them you can travel across a fair amount of the North West for £17.10 for a whole day.  Provided you move between them through Newton-Le-Willows.

Never, ever. Ever.

Music The announcement of Kate Bush's live tour caused a bit of a stir on social networks the other week. I decided, since I only have a cd of Hounds of Love and a cassette of The Whole Story in the house and haven't listened to either recently that I'd let other people buy tickets. Oh, did I think again when I read this.

To save you clicking, the All Saints are touring.

Wow. That's well, that's quite something. Where do I buy tickets, are they on in Liverpool?  Yes, they are. At the Echo Arena. There's a nice photo with an Appleton wearing a Women Woman t-shirt and a biography and everything:

"ALL SAINTS Natalie & Nicole Appleton, Melanie Blatt & Shaznay Lewis. Together they became one of the most successful pop groups of the 1990s, with two multi-platinum albums, and record sales in excess of 12 million worldwide. Their debut album, ‘All Saints’ went 5x platinum and produced 3 number-one singles, including the double BRIT award-winning ‘Never Ever’ that ended up selling over 1.2 million copies."

But of course, the rough runs with the smooth and they're amongst a line-up which includes Atomic Kitten, East 17, Big Brovaz, Jenny Berggren from Ace of Base and Let Loose. In other words, they'll probably have time to do Never Never, Lady Marmalade, I Know Where It's At and probably Pure Shores and I'm not sure that's worth £44+booking fees (how much?) and having to sit through all the other acts.

Essentially, the problem here is there's a horse-shoe nebula sized cosmic incident between the audience for the Saints and the rest of the acts.  Atomic Kitten's not even the Jenny Frost line-up.  As the chart website notes of Berggren, "nope, she’s not the moody-looking blonde lead singer, that’s her older sister Linn".  Let Loose.  Mutya Keisha Siobhan would have been ideal.  Perhaps a solo turn from Sporty Spice.  Not this lot.  Sigh.  Next time around then?

Paul McGann launches LJMU's Merseyside at War website.

Liverpool Hopkins Waltz.

Music As The High Definitive explains: "On November 7, 1964, Sir Anthony Hopkins composed a waltz in the green room of the Liverpool Playhouse. In the video above, he hears it performed for the first time in public by world-renowned violinist and conductor André Rieu at the Belvedere."

Vinyl Video.

Art Vinyl Video was an installation at FACT Liverpool in 2003. Vinyl Video was created by artists Gebhard Sengmuller, Penny Hoberman and Julia Scher and within the space resembled a boutique record shop. The premise was that in a parallel dimension, the home viewing format of choice was black and shiny and through a technological miracle, analogue moving images could be played from an LP. Miraculously it worked and in this moment between dvd and streaming had a real buzzy element as you took the disc from the shelf, cued it up on the turntable and watched the blurry faces of what resembled a pirated tenth generation copy of The Web of Fear: Episode One or at least something from the dawn of television. Ironically, a few years later, the creators uploaded this advert for their wares to YouTube and it offers a real flavour of what they accomplished.

Dazzle Ship.

Art Upcoming between July and October at Tate Liverpool, in association with Liverpool Biennial and the Maratime Museum is Dazzle Ship:

"14-18NOW, Liverpool Biennial and Tate Liverpool present a joint commission by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Cruz-Diez will paint a contemporary version of a ‘dazzle ship’ with ‘dazzle’ camouflage in partnership with Merseyside Maritime Museum. The “Edmund Gardner”, a historic pilot ship situated in dry dock adjacent to Liverpool’s Albert Dock will become a new public monument for the city."

"‘Dazzle’ painting played a vital role in the protection of British navel and trade vessels during The First World War when it was introduced in early 1917 as a system for camouflaging ships. This ‘dazzle’ camouflage was employed to optically distort the appearance of British ships in order to confuse the German submarines who were threatening to cut off Britain’s trade and supplies. The optical illusion imposed by the ‘dazzling’ made identifying the direction the ship was travelling in difficult for the enemy submarines, meaning that calculating an accurate angle of attack was near impossible."

The Independent has further coverage.

The Krazyhouse in Washington.

Art In 2009, Dutch photographer and videographer Rineke Dijkstra visited The Krazyhouse in Liverpool on Wood Street for an art piece. Now that art piece is to be displayed in Washington for a few months at the Corcoron Gallery of Art:

"The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nikky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK is a four channel video installation by Rineke Dijkstra, created in 2009 at a popular dance club in Liverpool. It presents in sequence a group of five young people in their teens and early twenties dancing and sometimes singing along to tunes they selected themselves. Dijkstra met her subjects at the club and invited them to perform their choice of music for her video camera in a special studio that she had built in a back room on one of the dance floors. They dance while a DJ plays live mixes of their selections and their friends watch. One of the most important portraitists working today, Dijkstra’s style produces an uncomfortable, almost confrontational realism rather than a snapshot aesthetic. She draws nuanced feelings from her subjects that are quite poignant. In The Krazyhouse, the selection of music, type of dance and mimicry, and the choice of dress all come together to evoke a social spectrum that speaks to the time and spirit of its location. While the kids’ selections of music and dance are diverse, each one seems both self-conscious and lost in the moment looking for some way to transcend their daily lives and make an impression for others."

As you might expect this isn't its first appearance having previous turned up in retrospective exhibitions at The Guggenheim and The MMK Museum of Modern Art. Here are videos from each which include interviews with the artist and glimpses of the video:





There are some screenshots on Pinterest too.

"major subject areas"

Photography In surprising move, Getty Images have made 35 million of their images embeddable on blogs, websites and the like for non-commercial purposes. As a way of testing this new service, here's a selection covering some of this blog's major subject areas.  The top one is in Sefton Park.












Keisha seems happy about it all at least.

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain at Tate Liverpool

Art When I was studying information science in the mid-90s as part of my Information Studies degree, which was the sexier name for librarianship, there was always the sense of sacred, secret knowledge being imparted from one generation of information scientists (librarians) to the next (or next but one). From the now arcane looking search strategies of online databases like DIALOG which had all the complexity of a programming language, through to such classification sequences as DDC or Library of Congress to the taxonomy of keywords and subjects, a trinity of interlocking processes designed to help the information scientist (librarian) to bring order to chaos and then make that order digestible to the end user.

Now, everyone online is an information scientist (and by extension, a librarian). Almost every type of social media, every type of website in which a person uploads a thing, from blog posts, to bookmarking, to videos, to photography asks us to apply keywords, to carry out a form of classfication so that items on similar topics can be gathered together for us to find more easily and the next person. Some of us are better than others, but nevertheless the democratisation of information science has been startling, if not a bit horrifying because arguably along with Google it’s rendered a large percentage of my degree entirely obsolete apart (from the bolted on sections about sociology and management).

At which point having glanced at the headline and the photograph above, you might be wondering what relevance this has to Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition since its inspiration, Raymond Williams’s seminal 1976 book, Keywords – A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is talking about the key words utilised in our society rather than the words which describe the key aspects of an item or object (see above for the 1988 reprint but a new addition is available). Williams selected the hundred and thirty or so words he believed most regularly cropped up when discussing “the practices and institutions, which we group and culture and society” then across a couple of hundred words describes their usage, origins and meanings and how they relates to other words in the book and so other aspects of culture and society.

The format will be familiar to anyone who’s read Kingsley Amis’s similarly useful The King’s English, The Guardian style guide or The Meaning of Liff. But whereas those are very personal extrapolations of how words are and should or could be used by a single man or group of people with a particular ideology, Williams is reflecting those words back on themselves. The entry on Genius shows how a word which in its original Latin form simply meant “a guardian spirit” through its utilisation as a way of elevating further someone whose made a genuinely important contribution to society to being applied relatively frivolously to anything and anyone. Ironically Amis’s book ignores genius despite the fact that it seems perfectly applicable to him.

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain approaches some of Williams’s words then utilises them on a subset of art from a particular period and predominantly from Tate’s own collection in a way which will be familiar to professional and amateur information scientists. But curators Gavin Delahunty, Tate Liverpool’s Head of Exhibitions and Displays and Grant Watson, the Senior Curator and Research Associate at the Institute of International Visual Arts were keen to stress in their introductory press talk that this isn’t a simple keywording exercise and that they want the visitor to ask questions about how relevant the chosen works are to the words with some of the connections not quite as immediately clear as they might, at first, appear,

This forces us to consider what Stephen McKenna’s painting An English Oak Tree has to do with “conflict”, which is written in giant blue script designed by Lucia Frei and Will Holder on the wall opposite. Except look closer and we realise that this great British symbol is standing in a city park and that it’s emphasising the struggle between the man-made and the natural world and how society still feels the need to be close to nature in a world of concrete even if we have to artificially construct the venue within which we can still experience the feeling of grass beneath our feet and the fragrance of flowers (and the fact that much of the scene is painted from McKenna’s imagination rather than a real place makes it even more man-made or constructed).

Though curatorially similar in design Tate’s previous exhibition, Art Turning Left, which grouped works within various concepts and like Keywords, visitors were asked to interact with the various relationships. But whereas the results there were pretty bewildering and an arguably more didactic, historical approach to the overall topic might have been more rewarding, in Keywords, by focusing on the politics of one period in particular and displaying far less work, the atmosphere is much more relaxed. Sometimes, when an exhibition is stuffed with work as was also the case with Art Turning Left, even with all the time in the world, there’s a feeling of needing to push forward in order to see everything. There’s none of that here.

All of which is aided by the decision to present the two dimensional objects on a single wall stretching across the centre of the Riverside Gallery and the three dimensional sculpture and installations in the Dockside Gallery as a kind of “field”. The symbolic power of walls, resonant of oppression and defence is also emphasised in the words chosen for that area which must also represent society: private, structural, folk, violence, criticism and liberation. The more metaphoric "field" (really a series of carpeted areas) offer words with more cultural aspects: formalist, native, anthropological, unconscious, myth and materialism.   Ferdinand de Saussure would have loved this.

For all of that, because this is a group or anthology exhibition based on curatorial taste we are unlikely to appreciate everything on display, but like the best of the form we’re also introduced to artists which we might not have previously considered. That’s specially true in Keywords because of the decision to choose work less often on displayed like Harry Holland’s lithographs, represented here by Lovers and TV which portray nudes in intimate if unusual settings. But there are plenty of established artists and I’m very grateful to have seen the return of monumental sculpture to Tate Liverpool with Tony Cragg’s On The Savannah, massive bronze abstract meditations on laboratory objects like Bunsen burners.

Researching that last paragraph, I notice the Tate’s own website carries a keyword taxonomy of its own at the bottom of some pages allowing users to seek similar items. On The Savannah is delineated amongst other things as “symbols & personifications -> gender -> female sexual organs - vessel -> male – pipe” and clicking on one of those items does indeed take us to objects that are thematically connected. Perhaps “formalist”, its keyword from Keywords should be added now too, though it’s also a rare example in the exhibition were the keyword actually is a keyword since Cragg’s often thought of as a formalist artist. This exhibition’s unafraid to be playful too.

If I did ultimately learn anything at university, other than that my lovelife was doomed to be classified in DDC as more 718 than 642 (unfortunately), it’s that classification is a messy business. Most items and objects still require a value judgement by the information scientist, precisely the kinds of value judgements a visitor to Keywords might have to make themselves, bringing us right back to the idea of everyone being an information scientist (librarian) now. Despite basing the exhibition on a book published in the 70s and choosing art mainly produced in the 1980s, the curators have still managed to deliver a show which has strong contemporary resonances, and for that reason is well worth a visit.

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain. 
 28 February – 11 May 2014.
Adult £8.80 (without donation £8). 
 Concession £6.60 (without donation £6).

@liverpoollogs

About Well this is something I didn't think I'd end up doing again.

Back in 2007, when blogging was still a thing, I decided that if writer Kate Feld was collect Manchester blogs on her blog The Manchizzle, someone in Liverpool should do the same thing and so I began a blog called Liverpool Blogs designed to promote blogs in Liverpool.

It was always a bit of a irony full zone because as a blog it didn't really work because mainly it was about the sidebar being a list of the Liverpool blogs and so eventually I replaced the blog completely and just ran the list of blogs as the main content on the page.

Eventually when Twitter became I think, I loaded up a folder on Google Reader and began autoposting links to the blogs to Twitter which became the main format that people seemed to read it and people seemed to like it. It's the format I eventually copied for the @shakespearelogs Twitter feed which has in and of itself been a great success within its own limits.

In mid June 2012 the main blog list page apparently gave out a virus warning and concerned something horrid may also have migrated to the Twitter feed I put both on hiatus and then realised that the process of finding out exactly which blog was the problem was causing the problem would be such a massive undertaking, the hiatus became permanent.

Which was a relief because the whole thing had become less entertaining than it had initially been due to a series of fundamental and manifold problems.

(1) Maintaining the main list page was a messy, time consuming horror because of dead links, adding new blogs and having to deal with spammers complaining that their blog hadn't been listed because ....

(2) They kept pretending to be in the area because I'd borrowed Kate Feld's rule of only listing blogs in the area and of being comprehensive. Eventually this also led to being harassed a bit via email by people who thought it was their right to be there even though I wasn't sure about the legality of what they were writing. Fun times.

(3) The geography rule also meant that the list and feed became a bit unfocused because it included blogs like mine which cover everything so people would look at a Twitter feed called @liverpoolblogs and find precious little content actually about Liverpool which I didn't ever think wasn't valid.  Plus there were whole questions about whether Tumblrs and the like should be in there of which there were hundreds.

(4) By calling it Liverpool Blogs expectations were created and sometimes it was difficult to tell what actually counted as a blog.

All of which meant that the hiatus was a relief.  But I did miss that stupid feed, it was a pretty handy thing to have and an ace way of keeping up, sometimes, with things which were happening in this stupid city.

Which is why I've decided to have another go.  Sad face.

But there are philosophical changes.  It's different.

For a start, learning a lesson from @shakespearelogs, I'm changing the name of the Twitter feed to @liverpoollogs, that single loss of a letter changing expectations in what it will cover in two ways:

(1)  It won't just be blogs

Basically this will be a news and commentary twitter feed now, but still including personal blogs if they're regularly updated and "loved".

(2)  In general it will only be about Liverpool

Utilising Web 2.0 doodat IFTTT as the new back end, means I can filter each of the feeds on the fly so each one will only ever post a link to the feed if that post is about Liverpool especially if it's a general feed like a newspaper or the BBC.

(3)  No geographical rule.

If it's about Liverpool and the surrounding areas and I think it'll be useful it's in.  I've already added in some Beatles sites for colour.

(4)  No list page.

That's biggest change.  Essentially now, I'll simply create a recipe at IFTTT and add a label to each Tweet listing the source and that's how the reader will know the source.  That means I won't  have to spend half my time pissing about with links and lists and like @shakespearelogs leave IFTTT to get on with things.  Oh and

(5)  It's going to be heavily edited

Or more specifically like my Twitter feed and @shakespearelogs it's going to be mostly things I might like to read, so there still won't be hundred of links to things on Football sites.  It's not going to be comprehensive (which is arguably what killed things last time).  I'm mainly doing this for me to use.  So there's that.

We'll see how this goes.  The feed has about five hundred followers and none of them have commented yet on it suddenly spitting out tweets again so I don't know if anyone's noticed that it's back, assuming anyone noticed it went.  Or cares.

https://twitter.com/liverpoollogs

The Bread Shop.

Geography Every so often the superlocal intrudes on the national and so is the case with the emergence of The Bread Shop on Aigburth Road in Liverpool, walking distance around Sefton Park from us and its advertising which has amused Esther Addley who on Monday said:

"Supermarket Waitrose offers free coffee and newspapers to shoppers, and small retailers complain that the retail giant is squeezing them out of business. Perhaps a new approach is needed. We applaud the example of the small grocery on Aigburth Rd in Liverpool, for instance, which tempts customers with a free coffee when they buy a paper (we approve) and, this being Liverpool, the vow: "We do not sell the Sun". But it's the tantalising promise, on a board outside, of "Crap sweets and rude staff" that surely has the crowds flocking. We try to call, to check rudeness levels reach the desired mark, but when we finally locate a number, it reaches a fax. Refreshing, in this day and age, to get what you are promised."

Later in the week she managed to phone back and ....

"Reader Liz Semeonoff gets in touch about our item earlier in the week about The Bread Shop, a small bakery on Aigburth Road in Liverpool, that flogs its wares under the slogan "Crap sweets and rude staff". "It's a fabulous shop which sells a huge range and the staff are great," she says. "The shop owner always has a smile and a hello for customers." We try once again to call and this time reach Alan Gordon, whose grandfather Len and father Frank have been running the shop since 1958, now joined by next door sweet shop (The Sweet Shop) and cafe (The Cafe). Turns out he's not rude at all. "We've always had pretty good banter with the customers," he says. "Not like Tesco where they don't look at you". You can also buy T-shirts and mugs reading "Terrible service and lousy food", while the shop's carrier bags carry the slogan "I've just supported a family business" along with a picture of Gordon's three-year-old daughter Ava and the words, "I'll be the boss one day." Lovely."

Yes, indeed, lovely.