So while I continue to take a break from blogging here, I’ve started a new project: ‘Manchester Wire is a website that hopes to keep you informed about the best things Manchester and the surrounding area has to offer.’ It’s edited by Ruth Allan and myself, with writing by us and a crack team of contributors, and we’re aiming to build it up in to a practical and pretty comprehensive resource for events and developments in the city.

Since soft-launching last Friday, we’ve featured gig and club previews, theatre reviews, art festivals, exhibition and venue openings – plus some of the more underground happenings in Manchesters, such as a Subbuteo club and a zine library.

Take a look at manchesterwire.co.uk – we’re keen to hear what you think, and about what you think we should be covering. We’re also on Twitter (@mcrwire) and Facebook.

We’re little over a week away from the debut outing of the Manchester Weekender, a collection of ‘the best of Manchester’s art and culture’. From 1-3 October, for 48 hours, the city showcases itself through an unmanageably large number of events. I thought, therefore, it might be helpful to pick some personal highlights direct from the programme:

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Manchester Art Gallery. A major new exhibition of interactive digital artworks by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, including the world premiere of a large-scale installation People on People, a co-commission with AND festival. The Gallery hosts an evening of live electronica by Marconi Union alongside what’s being billed as ‘interactive activity’ from Lewis Sykes in its glass-roofed atrium.

Un-convention is one of the UK’s most eclectic independent music industry events containing much for those who just love (rather than work in) new music. Employing such unconventional spaces as a barge, Salford Lads’ Club and a church, featuring Bill Drummond, Jarvis Cocker, Jon McClure, Brian Travers and Kevin Cummins – all doing ‘interesting things in the most unexplored places in the city’ – with a travelling circus, music photography projected onto buildings, Colombian Hip Hop, Jah Wobble, the BBC Philharmonic and a brass band as well.

Contemporary Cartography //01 is a pocket map that provides an overview of what makes up the creative ecology of the city (via its contemporary galleries and underground art spaces) and, to celebrate its launch, there are a number of Contemporary Cartography Tours. The map coincides with the launch of Creative Tourist’s new iPhone app. – a guide to the art and culture of Manchester.

See Manchester by water where a family boat party connects the Manchester Ship Canal with the River Irwell and puts food by one of the Northwest’s top chefs, Robert Owen Brown, on the menu.

Hidden Manchester is a very special, secret tour to one of the city’s most spectacular, but rarely seen by the public, buildings created and led by the city’s most popular guide, the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Schofield, especially for the Manchester Weekender.

You can pick your own highlights, or read more about the above events, in Creative Tourist’s Weekender guide. There’s also a pdf guide to the Manchester Weekender.

Beards of Manchester is a calendar featuring the city and some of its hairiest inhabitants. We need 12 magnificent beards for the 2011 calendar, which will be sold at various outlets in Manchester. If you think your beard deserves its own calendar page, snap a picture and send it to info@beardsofmanchester.com by Friday 24 September. We will upload all photos to the beard gallery and invite the best beards (and their owners) to a photo shoot with Manchester-based photographer Gill Moore.

The calendar launches on Thursday 21 October with an exhibition at Common on Edge Street. All profits of the calendar sales go to the Lifeshare charity, which supports homeless people in Manchester and Salford.

With the deadline for submissions just 10 days away, now’s the time to send yours in – or encourage impressively bearded friends, neighbours, family members and colleagues to do so. You and they will join the likes of comedian Justin Moorhouse in the beard gallery and have a chance of being Mr October.

You can follow @BeardsOfMcr on Twitter or ‘like’ the project on the Beards of Manchester Facebook page.

At the Imperial War Museum North, photographer Don McCullin currently has a major retrospective called Shaped by War. The 75-year-old, not to be confused with Manchester’s own Don McPhee, is best known for his war-time coverage – and in fact in 1968 his Nikon camera stopped a bullet intended for him. The exhibition’s free, and if you fancy doing some pre-visit research, check out the q&a, preview and video interview on CreativeTourist.com.

Then at Mosi, it’s the final weekend of Da Vinci – The Genius, which has been running since November last year. One of the major parts of this exhibition is Secrets of Mona Lisa, containing ’25 startling revelations’ about his most famous work – and that’s just one of over 200 items on show. Admission here is £7.50 for adults and £5 for concessions, and unless the exhibition’s final weekend is over-run with visitors, you should be able to buy from the Mosi box office on the day.

If you’re after something a bit more… live, this month is also your last chance to see Manchester’s Library Theatre in its current form. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest was the first ever production in the theatre way back in 1952 – and it’s also going to be the last. The library is closing for a major overhaul from July, with the Library Theatre Company relocating to Peter Street’s Theatre Royal in 2012. The Grade II listed building, which is Manchester’s oldest surviving theatre building, dating back to 1845, has previously been the Royal Cinema and Royal Bingo, and until recently was a particularly unregal nightclub. Glad to see it’s finally being restored to (hopefully) its former glory.

Photo: Auditorium of the Theatre Royal in 1980 while being used for bingo. Courtesy of Ted Bottle

First up is the relaunched VisitManchester.com, a ‘destination website’ for anyone visiting this fair city and asking important questions such as: what are the city’s best music venues?; where are the top five cheap eats?; and what are the top real ale pubs? (The latter written by yours truly, somewhat predictably.) Much of the site is broken down into lists and short pieces of information, while the design itself – one single, never-ending page – is dizzying. There’s some great information on there, assuming its visitors have enough time to get accustomed to the navigation (which co-incidentally vanishes). Give it a spin, see what you think.

The other new site is GoSeeThis.com, the long-awaiting listings portal from All About Audiences (formerly Arts About Manchester). This features events, exhibitions and the likes from AAA’s dozen of member organisations – everywhere from the Air Raid Shelters in Stockport to the Zion Arts Centre in Hulme. I fully expect to be using the site the next time I’m wondering what to do with a spare Saturday or Sunday – and thanks to the highly customisable search facility (including saving your preferences if you log in), it’s fast and effective too.

The Screenfields film season launches with the biography of local lad and Joy Division frontman, Ian Curtis. For Joy Division and New Order fans everywhere, the film charts Joy Division’s rise to success, their relationship with Factory Records and the personal turmoils of Ian himself. Screened to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Curtis’ death, this is a must-see for anyone passionate about the Manchester music scene. Stars Sam Riley and Samantha Morton.

And, er, afterwards you can get two-for-one entry into some place called FAC251?

Tenuous asides aside, Screenfields is the kind of free public event that Manchester needs more of – especially with the likes of Leon, Spirited Away, The Quiet Man and The Italian Job scheduled in for future screenings. But what better way to kick off this year’s season than with a depressing Manchester-centred film? It begins at 8.30pm.

The infrequently used platform 12 at Piccadilly Station is currently showing off Manchester’s music venues, past and present, with a photography exhibition. All those you expect to be there are, plus a couple of surprises, such as the Jolly Angler pub, just behind the station, and the Hardrock Concert Theatre in Stretford. Turns out the latter, a 3000-capacity venue, hosted shows by David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Bob Marley, James Brown and Elton John!

The 16th outing of Viva!, the Spanish and Latin American film festival, kicked off yesterday at Cornerhouse. From reading through the brochure, Solo Quiero Caminar (Just Walking) looks to be one potential highlight – especially ‘if your dream film is a mash up of Pulp Fiction and The A-Team’, as someone described it earlier. That’s on tomorrow, Monday 8 March at 8.10pm.  There’s also a short film festival-within-a-festival on Wednesday from 7.30pm, and a live musical accompaniment to Segundo de Chomon’ silent shorts on Monday 22 March from 6.30pm.

Upstairs in Cornerhouse’s Gallery 1, Carlos Amorales, one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists, has just opened an exhibition that runs for the duration of Viva! (6-27 March). I took a peak yesterday… it’s very video- and ambient music-heavy, in a good way.

If you follow Whitworth Street West down from Cornerhouse and take a left just before Deansgate, you’ll find yourself at Castlefield Gallery. Right now, this often-neglected space is playing host to a two-person exhibition by Leo Fitzmaurice and Kim Rugg – full of pain-stakingly detailed montages of ‘communication art’. Read CreativeTourist.com’s write-up of this exhibition, which continues until 3 April. It’s well worth the eight-minute walk.

I’m Here, a 30-minute short film; is at the heart of the new Absolut campaign, ‘In An Absolut World, Ordinary Is No Place To Be’. I’m Here, a robot love story ‘In An Absolut World’, is set in LA and celebrates a life enriched by creativity.

The highly anticipated film collaboration with Spike Jonze will be launched nationwide this month, with a series of exclusive screenings in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Across the UK, billboards and graffiti sites have subtly built intrigue around the collaboration, offering consumers the chance to attend exclusive preview screenings of the film ‘in no ordinary places’.

In Manchester, ‘no ordinary places’ equates to a car park – the shiny, round, silver one in Shudehill to be exact. At 7pm and 8.45pm tonight, Jonze’s film will play out to an invite-only audience. Visit the I’m Here site for more information.

I’m getting back into the swing of Mancubisting – and one thing that has drawn my attention lately is this:

Stuart Maconie, co-host of the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 and host of The Freak Zone on 6Music, will give a reading from his latest book, Adventures on the High Teas, and talk about the quirks and delights of his travels in the pursuit of Middle England … via Manchester.

High Tea with Stuart Maconie takes place at Mosi on Liverpool Road this coming Sunday. It’s £8 for a ticket – and with that you get a traditional English cream tea. Click here to book online, or call 0844 847 2261.

[I spotted this event via the increasingly useful Visit Manchester Blog.]

Show & Tell is an exhibition by the Urbis Creatives art collective; a collective comprised of Urbis staff. The exhibition will give the Urbis team a chance to show their work and tell the visitors about what they do outside of the creative environment of Urbis. It will comprise of many different disciplines from photography to illustration, painting and also projects the members are involved in such as community work and music events.

You can get a sneak peak of the kind of talent on show by reading more about Urbis Creatives artists. Show & Tell opens on Tuesday 29 September and runs until 12 October.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t write about Urbis without mentioning the potential transfer of one of Preston’s star attractions, the National Football Museum, over here in 2010. I’m sure it would be a great addition to this football-rich city – although Kate over at the Manchizzle expressed the other side of the argument concisely: ‘Art 0, Football 1′.