Tag Archives: Arnolfini

LOCAL PLAN: HOW TO DEMAND A SLAVE TRADE MEMORIAL

The city’s political class and self-styled ‘leaders’, with strings openly being pulled by the Society of Merchant Venturers, continue to undermine any chance of memorialising the city’s links to the slave trade. Any site proposed for a memorial over the last seven years has been knocked back by the mayor who has chosen to prioritise boozy food halls and gastropubs as his legacy.

One way to get around the mayor and the city’s ragbag of crap ‘leaders” intransigence is to get a site for a memorial agreed in the forthcoming Local Plan. Potential sites available in the centre include: the Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) on Royal Oak Avenue on the corner of Queen Square and Prince Street, ideal for an abolition museum and history centre; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404), the empty space between Arnolfini and the YHA, ideal for a memorial garden and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) by the Thekla, a, potentially large space to develop.

All the sites can be found in the Draft Allocation document going to Full Council this week: https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s89151/08.2%20Appendix%20A2%20Development%20Allocations%20Annex.pdf. Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) is on page 68; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404) is on page 70 and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) is on page 58.

Details of the sites are in the document and all you need to do is respond to the forthcoming Local Plan consultation and request that each site is designated for “Community Facilities, in particular a museum exploring the history of slavery and it’s abolition from a Bristol viewpoint.”

Simple. Go tell the city’s useless self-serving ‘leaders’ what you want!

THE ELECTION SECTION – MAY 2014 PREVIEW!

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STORMIN’ NORMAN

Firebrand social care campaigner and friend of The BRISTOLIAN, Mr STEVE ‘STORMIN’ NORMAN, who’s recently been shaking things up at the council and elsewhere over the Holmwood House scandal, has declared he will be running for council as an independent candidate for Avonmouth in the May local elections.

This might disappoint Labour, who have their old stager JOHN ‘BUMBLE’ BEES lined up and would be hoping to keep the seat, currently held by their washed-up ex-MP, Doug Naysmith.

Norman will be running on a ticket attacking the council’s abysmal record in social care, which as well as embarrassing the city council may well expose Labour’s COULDN’T-GIVE-A-TOSS-PRIVATISE-THE-LOT attitude to social care in the city.

JANKE QUITS

Meanwhile, the current cabinet boss for social care, BARBARA JANKE will announce she will not be running for her Clifton seat again.

Janke has had little influence in changing the dismal quality of residential social care provided by private providers in the city and instead has been acting as little more than a mouthpiece for council managers determined to cover up the lethal state of privatised residential care in the city.

A suitably fitting damp squib finale for this politician of the second rank.

PAEDOS AND FOGHORNS

Over in the alternative universe occupied by INDYREDPANTS FOR BRISTOL – the political party that says it’s not a political party – it looks like business as usual to us with the endorsement by IfB of Stella Perrett as its candidate in Redland.

She, you may recall, is a close former friend and associate of disgraced local Lib Dem kiddie porn aficionado councillor John Astley, who in 2004 was convicted for his paedo peccadilloes – as well as a number of electoral fraud charges which, err, The Artist Formerly Known As Stella Hender also faced!

Meanwhile, the Redpants’ foghorn-voiced closet Tory boss, Mayor Fergo’s pal STEPHEN ‘UNSPARKLING’ PERRY, has “fast-tracked” himself to become the candidate for Clifton, effectively replacing one enormously embarrassing candidate – BRENDA ‘WISE MONKEY’ MCLENNAN, the Analphoney’s innumerate bean counter – with another enormously embarrassing candidate – himself!

This new politics looks strangely like the old politics, doesn’t it?

70% OF BRISTOLIANS CAN’T BE WRONG?

The local elections take place on Thursday 22 May 2014, along with the non-event of the European elections.

As many as 70% of people in Bristol will not vote. And who can really blame them?

Will it make any difference?

BRISTOL ARTS SECTOR DOWN THE SHITTER AS INFAMOUS ‘URINAL BOSS’ BRINDLEY SLASHES OVER ARNOLFINI!

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Following The BRISTOLIAN‘s report last month about the city’s crisis-hit upper class gallery-bar-cinema Arnolfini, it seems that the management team there has decided the best way to right the good ship Analphoney is to appoint KATE ‘SLASHER’ BRINDLEY as Interim Director.

Slasher, a contemporary art bullshitter of the highest order and a former director of Bristol City Council’s Museums Service, is popular among Bristol’s arty-farty/luvvie nexus for her role in bringing the Banksy exhibition to Bristol in 2009 – and because they’ve never had to actually work for her.

However, she is less fondly remembered by staff in the Museums Service, where she FIRED MORE THAN THIRTY WORKERS and downgraded and de-skilled the whole of the expert curatorial staff to save a few quid.

After all, who needs any knowledge or expertise to care for the load of crap created in the modern art self-promotion industry?

Museums insiders have told The BRISTOLIAN that if the ‘Phoney’s in financial trouble and Slasher’s at the helm, then the gallery’s 24 staff will inevitably be TARGETED FOR CUTS. They have been warned.

So what has Slasher been doing with herself during her five years away from Bristol? Well, she’s been the boss of Middlesborough’s controversial Arts Council-funded contemporary art gallery, MiMA – so any hopes the ‘Phoney has that Brindley will be increasing their visitor numbers may be premature.

Whilst at MiMA Slasher actually oversaw A DRASTIC FALL in visitor numbers at the unpopular gallery, and in 2012 a group of Middlesborough residents branded her gallery “THE MOST EXPENSIVE PUBLIC URINAL IN THE WORLD”.

The claim was made after a group of residents sat in the gallery’s cafe for a week and counted visitors to the white elephant. They discovered that more people visited the gallery to use the loos than to see Slasher’s boring exhibitions!

Middlesborough Council later published their own visitor figures for the week, which were much higher – but included 212 visitors on a Monday when the place was closed. They later had to admit that this was because they counted people who walked through the gallery’s car park as visitors!

The latest fun and games at the Analphoney began on 1 April (when else?) when Slasher took up her post. It remains to be seen who the fool is – the ‘Phoney’s trustees for hiring her, or us for footing the bill come the inevitable bail-out…

WHO PAYS FOR THESE PONCE HOLES?!

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Commentary on recent arts funding cuts – and who they really affect – from The BRISTOLIAN‘s Arts Correspondent…

Any of you readers ever venture into Bristol Old Vic? Watershed? Arnolfini? No? Didn’t think so.

Yet you, me and the rest of Bristol’s working class are expected to fund these artsy, fartsy PONCE HOLES every year through our Council Tax. Not a tenner here or a tenner there, but hundreds of thousands of pounds are given each year from our pockets to fund these unnecessary, unprofitable middle class cultural centres.

Meanwhile that smug prick the Mayor and his arse-licking councillors are more than happy to shut down libraries and day centres and cut back on essential services for Bristol’s pensioners and disabled.

According to them if the things we need don’t make a profit then they must be PRIVATISED OR CLOSED DOWN.

Working class culture is something that scares these arseholes. They don’t want large groups of Bristolians meeting up in case we

start sussing out what a con their capitalist system is and start doing something about it. So they are happy to shut down our pubs (for example, try and find a boozer in Knowle), raise ticket prices at the football, or unleash more riot cops in town of a weekend to drive us out.

They don’t want us going out talking to each other; they want us to work for them, fuck off home and slowly rot away watching moronic zombie TV. Then our rulers can sleep in peace with their profits, whilst the STREETS ARE EMPTY. Meanwhile we pay for fucking middle class arseholes called Rupert or Tristram to have a jolly good night out at the Old Vic, Wankershed or Analphoney. Well fuck that…it’s time to turn off the TV and go meet these privileged scum who we’re paying for.

If they won’t spread the wealth about equally, then maybe it’s about time we spread the violence about.

ABANDON SHIP AT THE ARNOLFINI AS ‘PHONEY WAR CONTINUES!

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Never more than one overpriced, underperforming art installation away from self-inflicted disaster, the elitist arty-farties of Harbourside’s ‘contemporary art’ gallery ARNOLFINI really have been surpassing themselves over the last year or so.

Not only did they manage to lose an entire ‘Executive Team’ in the space of a month, but their tenants – spread over three voluminous floors of their prestigious, cash-generating Bush House headquarters – all quit. If that wasn’t enough, they then uncovered a large black hole in the finances of around £360K – and promptly FIRED THEIR OWN AUDITORS, Grant Thornton!

Meanwhile, a deranged “recovery plan” to convert the top three floors of the Bush House bunker – at public expense! – into an “art hotel” predictably flopped.

At the height of last autumn’s crisis, the place had to be run by a sub-committee of posh twits from the Analphoney board of trustees. That was because centre director TOM TREVOR was frogmarched off the premises in October so that he could, er, “pursue a number of international curatorial projects”! Presumably he didn’t have a family to “spend more time with”, then?

Trevor was escorted out the door right after the other half of the “executive team”, finance chief and our old friend BRENDA ‘WISE MONKEY’ MCLENNAN, was herself ‘disappeared’ from the organisation without explanation last August.

Brenda, you may recall, is currently vice-chair of Bristol City Council’s financial watchdog, the Audit Committee. So despite an organisation apparently sinking faster than the Titanic on her watch, she got a job overseeing sound financial practice at the council! (But then again, between 2009-2013 she notched up a not-to-be-sniffed-at £1,958.53 in expenses from the council, which suggests a certain amount of flair…)

You may recall that Brenda – she of the £800k Clifton Wood mansion – was a candidate at the last election for George Ferguson’s INDYREDPANTS PARTY, promising that she was going “to shake things up” at the Council House. Well, she’s certainly managed to shake things up at the ‘Phoney!

Other victims of the mass clear out include colourfully-named former chair LOVEDAY SHEWELL. She quietly left after six years in the post in July 2012. Although oddly, despite the UK’s arty-fartie-bore-in-chief Sir Nicolas Serota describing the ‘Phoney as “one of a handful of the most significant cultural centres in Europe,” Ms Shewell has mysteriously left her time with the gallery off her extensive CV. Why could that be?

Meanwhile, that renowned patron of the arts, business genius and financial whiz – MAYOR FERGO himself – hastily quit his post on the board of trustees in December 2012.

Demonstrating, yet again, that George’s instinct for survival outstrips his business acumen by some way.

INDYREDPANTS’ UNWISE MONKEY’S HORROR NO-SHOW

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Word reaches us that BRENDA ‘WISE MONKEY’ MCLENNAN is no longer the Finance boss at the Arnolfini arts centre by the Floating Harbour. Sources there have been keen to distance themselves from her for some reason, and have been at pains to emphasise that they parted ways in October. Why could that be?

Whilst not boasting the same name recognition as His Redtrouserness, you may remember McLennan from her unsuccessful bid for a council seat back in May, when she ran as the public-spirited, politically independent candidate in Clifton for the INDYREDPANTS PARTY, that ragbag of gormless cheerleaders for King George.

What you might not know is that this ‘outsider’ to Bristol’s local politics is also now the Deputy Chair of the City Council’s Audit Committee – which is responsible for ensuring sound management of our money and clamping down on fraud and corruption within BCC. If nothing else, this unusual appointment of one of the Mayor’s keenest public supporters brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘politically independent’.

Certainly Ms McLennan (who has racked up thousands of pounds in expenses) has wasted no time in showing the kind of gumption needed to “shake things up” at Shitty Hall by, err… Not turning up for the most important Audit Committee meeting of year!

That’s right, for reasons unknown, Ms Mclennan – one of only two people providing allegedly independent oversight of council finances – failed to show at the Committee meeting in September, where the council’s audited accounts for the 2012-13 were agreed and signed off (without a hitch, natch).

Also on the agenda at the meeting was the report from the council’s Internal Audit Department cataloguing the series of gross financial failures across the organisation. These included theft, wholesale non-compliance with procurement regulations, dodgy management of cash accounts and – even – a very special mention for The BRISTOLIAN’s bête noire, Facilities Service Manager Tony ‘Toerag’ Harvey’s bent Markets Service!

So nothing there that would in any way interest an independent election candidate who wants to “shake things up” at Bristol City Council then!

ANAL PHONEY ‘INDEPENDENTS’

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The ‘INDEPENDENTS FOR BRISTOL’ (IfB) – Mayor Redpants’ second crack at creating a political ‘party that’s not a party’ in under a year following his ‘Bristol 1st’ ticket – is picking up pace, with eight people so far selected to run for council seats.

A typical flavour of IfB comes from its Clifton candidate, chartered accountant Brenda McLennan, the finance & operations boss at the Arnolfini Gallery. From her £800,000 CLIFTON WOOD MANSION she is promising “to shake things up at City Hall” as one of these “new types of politician” running for the IndyRedpants. And how very, very new her personal management practices are at the Arnolfini.

McLennan’s snooty art gallery recently advertised for stewards, offering to pay them the princely sum of £6.20 AN HOUR – a whole 1p an hour more than the minimum wage! And for that “a flexible approach to working days and hours is required” as the gallery is open six days a week!

Just the kind of progressive attitude to low pay and employment this city needs more of, isn’t it?

FROM THE BONE BLOG: KELLY THE ELEPHANT & HIS SEARCH FOR IDEAS

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KELLY THE ELEPHANT

Bristol City cultural supremo KELLY THE ELEPHANT gets two pages in the Observer today to blow his trumpet about his Festival of Ideas. Close scrutiny should be given to his selection of venues – Arnolfini, Watershed, Spike Island…. Devoid of any proletarian footfall and clustered round ‘Harbourside’……… Not a sausage for the south, north or east of the city where it is seemingly impossible for the elephant to find either venues or people interested in ‘ideas’. Oh god I’m sure he’s looked.

http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/kelly-the-elephant/