You’ve probably seen it advertised around town, but the deadline for this year’s Best of Manchester Awards is fast approaching so its organisers are making one last push for entries.

The annual competition, hosted by Urbis, ‘celebrates innovation in art, music and fashion’. This deliberately broad scope means art, for example, can include illustration, photography, graphic design as well as fine art and sculpture.

There are also apparently ‘no age limits, no hype and no rules’, so any creative professional living or working in Manchester can enter. Prizes include professional career development, an exhibition in Urbis and a one-off cash prize.

Susie Stubbs, who’s helping to promote the event, has been in touch with an update about this year’s competition:

It’s early days yet as the deadline isn’t until the end of the month, but we’ve already had around 100 entries. Some of the work that’s come in so far is fantastic - the judges are going to have their work cut out.

And the judging panel itself makes for impressive reading: chaired by designer Peter Saville and including Caroline Elleray (head of A&R at Universal Publishing), Miranda Sawyer (Guardian/Observer writer and broadcaster), Luke Bainbridge (Observer Music Monthly), Justin Crawford (The Unabombers/Electriks), Tim Thomas (Blueprint Studios), Claire Lomax (Flux) and Kwong Lee (Castlefield Gallery).

The deadline for entries is 30 June and you can follow the latest from the awards camp at their blog, http://bestofmanchester.wordpress.com/. For more information on entering visit the Best of Manchester section on the Urbis website.

I’ve touched on psychogeography here a few times before and, what with it getting mainstream coverage of late, it’s convenient that Manchester is currently hosting not one but two psychogeography festivals.

Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives, or TRIP for short, runs from Thursday 19 June until Saturday (and beyond) and takes advantage of some of the city’s most recognisable locations, both indoors and out, including…

Thursday, 2pm, the MMU John Dalton Building lobby: Identikit Manchester - Mark Rainey leads a walk themed around corporate chain stores.

Friday, 2pm, outside JD’s Refectory at the MMU John Dalton Building: Bury That Dog - A walk around haunted Manchester with Peter Portland.

Saturday, 3pm, at Whitworth Park: Frank Kickball Jesus presents a psychogeographical ball game - US v UK psychogeographers.

Saturday, 8pm, upstairs at the Britons Protection: A Psychogeographic Cabaret - featuring performance poetry with soundscape and field recordings, plus short films, surprise guests and random acts of subversive joy.

Sunday, 2pm, Café Pop on Oldham Street: Postcards from Nowhere - a wander addressing issues of surveillance and CCTV; all participants will receive a unique piece of GPS art by Max Livesey.

There are also art exhibitions at the Royal Exchange, Nexus Cafe and the Zion Centre, and this is just a small selection of the festival events. Here’s the PDF flyer and visit their homepage for late additions - or read the MEN and Metro previews for their recommendations.

TRIP is also running alongside Manchester’s own psychogeography festival, Get Lost, which is organised by the Loiterers Resistance Movement - visit their site for more information on that.

As an aside, it’s good to see the festival using WordPress.com blogging platform for its homepage. Looks much better than your standard Blogger.com site, doesn’t it?

You may recall that a fringe-of-sorts ran alongside last year’s Manchester International Festival. Its organisers then returned in mid-January, for Not Part of New Years Eve - and they’re now makes a third outing for their own arts festival this summer.

Lasting 10 days (3-12 July), the inaugural festival features 29 events - plus four one-day sub-festivals. Again, Not Part of Festival seeks to gain extra publicity for its theatre, comedy, music, poetry, film and art events by placing them under one name.

The Not Part of website, which has a full brochure, keeps timing out for me but, from yesterday’s newsletter, here are some potential highlights:

• Theatre: Below the Belt @ The Waldorf Hotel
• Theatre: 2 Plays, 2 Writers, 1 Cast @ Adelphi Studio, Salford
• Poetry: Latvian Poets @ Central Library
• Exhibition: Hats off to Cheetham Hill @ The Jewish Museum
• Multi-disciplinary: Not Part of NYE (redux) @ Moho Live
• Art and music: Birds Need Trees (Jim Noir, Aidan Smith etc) @ Urbis

The organisers are asking people to be part of Not Part of - so email them if you can film parts of the festival or just want to volunteer generally. You can also visit Not Part of on Facebook and Myspace, or read a Q&A with organiser Gareth McMann here.

It’s good to see that MIF has time to contact individual Manchester bloggers with updates. They sent me details about last year’s inaugural festival so here, for your perusal, are some of the good things that MIF 2007 achieved:

• •Created 25 world premieres, against a target of 10, with a total of 105 different activities in 25 venues
• •Attracted an audience of more than 200,000 people against a first year target of 160,000
• •Secured the greatest amount of sponsorship ever raised by a UK arts festival and broke even on a £9 million turnover
• •Collaborated with 80+ Manchester and Salford arts and community organisations
  •
• Generated an economic impact to the value of £28.8 million, against a target of £19.1m
  •
• Attracted audiences not generally well represented amongst conventional arts attendees in Manchester, and encouraged people to take risks with their choices
  •
• Recruited a task force of almost 300 volunteers who between them donated more than £200,000 worth of work hours to the Festival
  •
• Produced three events with international co-commissioning partners and five events with local and national co-commissioning partners

These facts and figures come from an independent report produced by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre and Arts About Manchester, by the way.

They’ve also set the dates for next year’s festival - 2-19 July 2009 - and want to remind us that the deadline for Manchester Open, their call for submissions by local artists, is fast approaching. I’m sure we’d all love a share of the £300,000 available…

You may recall back during last year’s Manchester International Festival a bloke called Gareth McCann started up a fringe festival of sorts - Not Part of Manchester International Festival.

People - me included - thought this was generally A Good Thing, as it gave those arts events not selected (or even submitted) to MIF a bit of extra exposure when they might otherwise have been overlooked.

I expected NPOMIF (now renamed to the Not Part of Festival) to re-emerge in about 18 months time, when the second festival is scheduled to take place. But Gareth and (wife?) Beth have now organised a one-off music event and, inkeeping with quirky tradition, it’s a New Years Eve party two weeks late:

Not Part Of New Years Eve

When: 12 Jan 2008, 3pm-10pm
Where: The Dancehouse, Oxford Road, M1 5QE

Music from:
The Starfighter Pilot
Bleeding Hands
The Lazy Browns
Samson & Delilah
Kinetic Fallacy
Tom Kerswill
Belle Of Le Bois & Semi Precious Gents
Paul Hand
Pleasure Drenching Improvers
Ragz
Fublic Dick
Shakey Jakes

Poetry from:
Paul Knight
Stephanie Portersmith
24 Hour Arty People
Richard Barrett

Comedy from:
Bryan Lacey
Mel Moon
Sir Richard Swan
Jason Cooke
Fiona Abernethy
Comedy Sportz

Dance from:
The Glitter Kittens
The Spokes

Theatre:
‘Pillow-Man’
‘Being Sebastien’
Shangrila Theatre
Jamie Scott
‘Left Blank’
No Attitude Theatre Company

Sounds like it’ll be a busy evening - and the Dancehouse is well worth checking out. It’s £7 (£5 conc) on the door.