The Manchester Weekender 2011: All Done For This Year ... Or Is It?

I love city festivals. I love that feeling of being on holiday in the place you live. I love disparate events with a collective purpose. I love tearing all over town and Tweeting about it. I love free wine and cheap tickets and good conversation with motivated people. A hectic calendar of Manchester festivals (International, Pride, Jazz, Science, Food and Drink, Literature, Asia Triennial, Comedy, and of course the Weekender) provides this in spades.

The savvy thing about the Manchester Weekender is that it mingles events that might already be happening with new and specially-commissioned work to create mutual enthusiasm and mass encouragement to get out there and see what your city has to offer.

At Castlefield Gallery, Istanbul artists blend ideas of vacation and immigration, utilising everything from suitcases to IKEA-style stills of visa application offices. Entry is through a metal-detecting airport security gate. On the inside, voices of authority are aired through video interviews with visa office employees while the voices of the disappointed and rejected literally envelop the entire gallery on the outside; the walls and windows are papered with correspondence from people denied entry into various countries. The exhibition forms part of the ongoing Asia Triennial Manchester.

Against this backdrop Beating Wing Orchestra give a musical performance with a global and mesmerising blend of influences; old European, pan-Asian, Congolese, hip-hop, Bhangra, all with astonishing vocal dexterity. ‘World music’, explains one of the singers simply. A terrific feeling of camaraderie between band members, and eventually between band and audience too, make this a special event.

Down at the Whitworth Gallery, After Hours present ‘BlackLab’, an amalgam of set pieces that complement the existing ‘Dark Matters’ exhibit. Both play with light, film, delay, transparency, print, music and motion. The slow-mo movie of burning oilfields is weirdly touching while next door live guitar and cello soundtrack short films of traditional paper silhouette stop-motion. Whether the man shouting ‘MARGARET THATCHER! KARL MARX!’ is an installation himself or someone with political Tourettes I’m still not sure. ‘Cosmodrome’, screened in the auditorium, pays melancholic testimony to the heroes of Soviet space travel.

‘Primitive Streak’ is fashion meets life science. Divided between the Royal Exchange mezzanine gallery and the windows of Debenhams, the clothes shown in photograph, sketches or their final stitched form are inspired by the cellular development of living humans, so we get designs for spinal couture, a ‘sperm’ dress and, my favourite, the ‘Anaphase Dress’ which surely should belong to Bjork by rights?

Time to hit the shoe leather for two Mancunian walks. The first sees Ed Glinert from New Manchester Walks take a group of booted and be-torched urban explorers through Manchester’s concealed subterranean history and its fascinating links with Nazi invasion, state secrecy and ambitious canal endeavours. It’s thrilling and unnerving to be metres beneath Deansgate and not hear a sound. Memories of people enduring uncomfortable, diseased hours in the expansive bomb shelters feel all-too tangible in that dank air.

Then it’s back into sunshine and air for a tour of Ancoats, incorporating old and new, alluring decrepitude and ambitious renovation. The ‘Ancoats Peeps’ are discrete viewing portals, historical fragments placed in oblique locations that preserve images of Anocats’ past even as the district develops around them. Beginning and ending at the beautifully designed Cutting Room Square, the tour brought us into renovated cotton mills and the breathtaking interior of St Peter’s Church, soon to provide rehearsal space to the Halle Orchestra no less. A book is available to chronicle and complement the ‘Ancoats Peeps’.

The weekend ends on a high with Dave Haslam’s ‘Close Up with Jarvis Cocker’ in the intricate Gothic majesty of the Town Hall’s Great Hall. Surrounded by Ford Madox Brown’s vivid and edifying murals, Jarvis and Dave talk music, lyrics, sex, Michael Jackson and recession Britain before a rapt audience. Wonderful fun.

Though the Manchester Weekender is officially over, it is in fact a gateway to an autumn/winter schedule packed with events like the ones above. Festival season continues across the city. Check links, get on mailers and Twitter feeds, see what’s afoot. After 48 hours of cultural input it becomes apparent you can make a Manchester Weekender for yourself whenever you like. Get going ...

(Big thanks to Holly Jennison at All Points North)

The Can(n)on's Opening Roar

A joint venture between Creative Tourists’ ‘Manchester Weekender’ and Dave Haslam’s successful ‘Close Up’ venture (previous guests include Mark E. Smith and Kevin Rowlands, future guests include Terry Hall and John Bramwell), it was a massive coup to have Jonathan Franzen appear at the Whitworth Gallery. America’s great literary hope actually made his appearance slap bang in the middle of the great Freedom pulping and the bizarre Situationist spectacle theft the following day. He could not have been hotter literary property as he took the stage and wrestled with a makeshift suggestion-box-cum-lectern. Inside sources hinted that the author’s enthusiasm for promotional duties had been seriously dented by the recall of his long-awaited novel, but he persevered, it was with good humour he took the stage to read to us from Freedom.

The writing is characteristically evocative and wry, always hinting at a vast dramatis personae of the usefully maladjusted that might well incorporate the whole of America. I always think of it as a Hollinghurstian talent, the knack of reproducing odd arrangements of conversational inflection and idiosyncratic syntax that really mark one individual from another, but in all probability Franzen does it best, and I’m still only a third of the way through The Corrections.

He discusses the possibility of his place, according to Time magazine, amongst the pantheon of ‘Great American Novelists’. It seems inevitable The Corrections will one day be a canonical American text, and maybe Freedom too. He is humble but palpably confident about the quality of his work, famously confident enough to deplore the quality of writing elsewhere (see ‘Perchance to Dream’). When he talks he has a lovely habit of taking great long pauses before he answers a question. When Dave opens the floor to a series of pleasingly intelligent questions, Franzen says, ‘Now I know why I remember Manchester. You ask such good questions here.’

He responds to a question from Dave about the need to cultivate a public persona in order to publicise his writing with this: ‘Occasionally one gets irritable and even snaps a little bit and you can feel it going straight to a blog’. Don’t worry Jonathan, I like you. In fact I was so enamoured with him, I went straight home and wrote. Check out the interview transcript at Dave Haslam’s site here.