EVENTS With Liese Spencer
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Your support makes all the difference.Birmingham's 1960s festival "Happening in Spring" (to 18 May, info: 0121-622 1234) is part of a national festival "Towards the Millennium", which also stops off at London's South Bank Centre and St David's Hall, Cardiff
FAB
If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there. And if you weren't really there - because you were only a psychedelic twinkle in your father's eye - then you won't remember them either. Whether you're a Casualty or a Baby Boomer, refresh your memory at Birmingham's multi- media love-in. Packed with pop art, film, fashion, music and politics, the nostalgia fest sprawls over the coming months with all the focus of a drugged-out hippy on a bean bag.
GROOVY HAPPENINGS
This week's events include the opening of Star Trek: The Exhibition, a gig by radical Sixties folksters Fairport Convention, and a talk about the moment When Design Became Style.
The Star Trek show gathers together props, costumes and artwork from the 1960s TV series that launched a thousand small-screen sci-fi adventures. Full-size replica film sets of the Bridge and Transporter rooms will be on display, along with the rather more sophisticated equipment used for the recently released First Contact. Repertory Theatre (0121-236 4455) 10am-5pm daily, to 2 Jun, pounds 12
SIXTIES STYLE
Elsewhere in the city, Professor of Visual Arts, Nigel Whitely, will be reflecting on the popular design of the 1960s.
A decade of optimism, the 1960s spawned grand designs from the likes of the Archigram Group, whose Plug-in City offered a blueprint for a future metropolis.
Find out more about such radical plans and the everyday inventions we now take for granted (like transistor radios and the Mini) on Thursday.
Institute of Art and Design (0121-331 5800) 5.30pm-7.15pm, pounds 3
FAR OUT
Future highlights of the festival which should get even the coolest of daddios swinging their flares in excitement: Meet the Decade Day; Birmingham library's busy archivists have put together a 10-year boxed-set of memories. This open-air event promises Beehives, Beatle jackets, platform shoes and loads of flower power. In addition, there's Hair, and plenty of it. A hirsute landmark in the history of the rock musical.
FASHION REVOLUTION
The era which encouraged your parents to dress like Warren Beatty and Twiggy - and left them looking like a bad acid trip - is assessed by Lou Taylor, Professor of Dress and Textile History at Brighton University.
1960s CINEMA
Psycho, A Hard Day's Night, Barbarella and 2001: A Space Odyssey... woww!
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