Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the Bluecoat.I was off early this morning to another Phil Redmond show as he launched ‘open culture’. It was the same super slick ‘self-depreciation and scouse pride, I’m bumbling here while fully in control’ show which he turns on with such ease. The product looked good too.  Open Culture is a web site that is a Liverpool cultural space that everyone can use and shape with their content. We are working on a project that we could well tie in with this.

When anyone comes to the Bluecoat there will be an art activity from dance to drawing to design they can take part in and the results can be up loaded to the web. There will be competitive element too for younger people leading to master classes.

Most of the crew from the culture company were there looking very cheery. The feeling seems to be that now the year is almost here there can’t be any more messing about with the will we, won’t we, what shall we, could we possibly, oh god no, let’s start again. All that can be done now is the job at hand.

It was pleasing to find the mood so up beat. I was away for the publishing of the ‘Matthew Street Report’ so missed out on any inside views but there is now a rumour in town that Panorama are scouring the City looking for bad ’08 stories. The word is they are even trying to set up projects to fail, film them and put it all out in time to piss on the January 12 opening parade. It’s positively feverish.

One flurry I haven’t missed is the ‘Orrery project’. This is a plan, and I’m sketchy on the details, in which an artist is going to make an impressive model of a cosmos in which I think the planets are the arts organisations of Liverpool. We had a questionnaire which asked things like – if your organisation was an animal what would it be and what type of sound are you? We were also asked what we thought of the other organisations in the City too. We answered very quickly as the humorous end to a management meeting but people in the City with better political antennae than me thought it might stir a bit of trouble so the questionnaire element has been replaced by each organisation producing a paragraph about what their planet would be like.

It seems a shame really as we chose rushing wind as our sound and I reckon that if you can turn a fart into art there isn’t much to fear about ’08.