Where to start? contrasts and talking to myself

I am loosing it! This may be long and very dull but from a 'better out than in' perspective I am just going to type.

Earlier today I bumped into Antonio Gould as I walked back from swimming at, what I consider the beautiful, Moseley Road Swimming baths he asked how my research was going? I very nearly started unravelling, I think what came out was: "Um my head is full, I am talking to myself, I read all the time, if I am not reading I am writing, if I am not doing that I am interviewing people and I am reading some more and trying to make it all make sense and again I am talking to myself. Breathe."

Happiness and inspiration
You see I have had a fantastic week, one of those weeks where on several occasions I have experienced happiness as it happens (if you know what I mean? as opposed to retrospectively). I feel like I have done a bunch of stuff that has inspired me or made me think, spent some nice chunks of time with my girl on half term duty, stood in the autumn sun in the park watching children play, seen her selected from an audience in a full-on audience participation play at the Midlands Arts Centre had some interesting meetings with interesting people and realised there are connections within connections. I've attended the Opera, Birmingham Opera Companies La Traviata, which was spectacular and awe inspiring to keep realising that the majority of people were just folks from Birmingham - the whole thing was fantastic. It was cool for me as my friend Sara stopped off in Birmingham on her way down to London from up north and thanks to some frenzied email/telephone exchanges and a little help from Facebook friends I managed to secure some extra tickets. I was interested to see what she made of Birmingham's cultural offerings being a little bit a snooty Londoner (sorry Sar just a little bit). I think she enjoyed it. I will write more about the whole show either in a bit or in a separate posting.

Talking to myself/writing in my head - this is becoming alarming
Something I have found in the last year or so and I think following some personal changes in my life is my ability or lack of to sleep. I mean I can sleep but I spend a lot of time awake thinking and writing in my head - does this make sense? As I try to process all the stuff, read or otherwise, I think about and sort of recite to myself, in my head, how I will write it. It now isn’t just in the night it is sort of whenever I am alone. This has been today driving me a little nuts today as I've struggled to stay focussed on what to write/think about first. As I swam laps of the little Moseley pool so many things were going through my head stuff happening locally, regionally how it fits in with my thinking and research anyway briefly-ish here is some of it:

Showbiz - all the shows I have been to this week Acts 1,2 and 3
My final theatrical visit of the week was to the deepest Black Country to see my daughter’s paternal grandmother perform in her amateur dramatics panto. Now I have to say that this was by some distance a contrast to the opera the previous evening but for all the amateurish bits it was highly entertaining. What these three shows had in common the Snow Queen at the MAC, La Triviata at the NIA (en route from Verona) through to Snow White in Tipton was that they all conveyed and offered absolute joy to the participants and to the audiences. You know I've been kind of reminded what it's all about why people sing and dance and perform. But here's the thing each of these offered some regular people the opportunity to be involved and to benefit from that endorphin inducing pleasure. When I heard some one describe the opera as a ‘community project’ the other day (I felt in slightly dismissive tones) I felt sort of insulted on behalf of all those folks who'd worked so hard and whose collective joy and energy made for an extremely professional event. Might blog some more about this in the future.

The fit with the research is I guess from the social inclusion angle. I was talking to a group of students last week about the creative industries not necessarily being conducive with regeneration or as a vehicle for social inclusion – the networks being pretty exclusive or at least might seem kind of intimidating. Def more on this another time.


The usual suspects
A final thing to mention is this thing I've been reading about on other blogs about Birmingham's (where I live) creative sector being run by the 'same old faces’ and 'usual suspects' etc .. Now I understand these feelings, have felt them myself of course sometimes it does seem like the same people get funded to do stuff year after year while others don't or whatever but I have to say I have been finding it a little amusing recently. It's hard to articulate what I am trying to say but here I'll try and say it as simply as possible. There is a sense from the younger end of the local CI sector that they possess some new view, some new way of doing things and some how assume that the old guard didn't imagine the same thing themselves when they too were the bright young things. Being somewhere in between age wise I remember the latter when I first moved to Bham I've seen them become the 'usual suspects’ I now see a younger generation working their way up to become exactly that 'the usual suspects' - I am not making any judgement on either just a bit of an observation. I sort of feel that these are imagined barriers between the two groups or perhaps I have misunderstood the whole thing.

Okay it is late.

There are a few other issues I would like to cover which have come up this week, which I will hope to explore in more detail soon:
- Gender and the music industry
- Woman's Hour's thing about artists and there never having been, other than maybe Frida Kahlo, any 'great female artists'.
- And some other stuff