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START MESSAGE FROM SAVAGE MESSIAH

SAVAGE MESSIAH*********************************** *********************************$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ NIGHT DRIFT THROUGH KINGS CROSS: ££££££££££££££££££££@HOUSMAN’S BOOKSHOP, CALEDONIAN ROAD, N1.On Saturday 29th of September 7pm ,LAURA OLDFIELD FORD of SAVAGE MESSIAH ZINE

. …………. .. ……. .. … . ………………… will facilitate a drift through the Kings cross area. The Savage Messiah employs the tactic of psychogeography to expose the repressed desires of the city. Savage messiah welcomes participants to this walk to join a collective cognitive anti mapping of the city and hopes that stories, anecdotes, drawings, ideas generated on the route will become part of the next issue of the zine to be launched at Housman’s in November.

JOHN WILD, frequent collaborator with Savage Messiah and psychogeographical explorer of data space will be collecting the locative data calculate from mobile phone signals along the Kings X Drift.

The data will be compiled into an audio broadcast that will be transmitted in the location of Housmans book shop at the November launch.

IF OUR FUTURE HAS BEEN STOLEN NOW IS THE TIME TO LOOK BACK WITH VENGEFUL INTENT.The greasy rebranding of Kings cross is in its final stages, sycophantic bilge, faux heritage, fragments left over for the sake of authenticity. This is the cosmetic veneer that is meant to distance millennial ‘regeneration’ from the tabula rasa brutality of modernism or the high octane demolition tendencies of Haussmann . Kings Cross is in a state of confusion, it is in gripped in the foolish tyranny of the masterplan. Clarence passage is a strange juxtaposition of old tenements with the gleaming new architecture of an international airport. All places become surfaces that can accept the neo liberal stamp. Representations of places are decontextualized. These are placeless places, liminal realms opened up for subversion. Little alleyways of boarded up windows open up in the tenement ravines. And , like the damp construction of some Stalinist penitentiary are the Costain portakabin slabs.

The Golden Lion on Brittania st, 90’s pub done up, horrible, fuck this. We’re done up for a bit of the old ultra, a Bakunist wrecking spree on every gastro pub travesty we can get our hands on. Flick knife activates at sight of swaggering prick whose class background has assured him of lording it status, the dirty jeans and scruffy t shirt only serve to reinforce it. Laminated flooring, best brawled over Ikea settees . All I want to see right, is the Clinique counter a Selfridges smashed u with Paul McCarthy abjection, Robert Gober mannequins trashed i
Sean, have it, have it go on.
Don’t know what he’s doing, head splitting with the hysterical banalities of Saturday night tv.

That day when we went in search of the Groaner, we had to scour The Boot. We scanned the orange paintwork, bottle green tiles and Guiness trinkets. It was a Saturday afternoon booze up, brawls erupting, hilarity and shouting, but the Groaner wasn’t there.

“The labyrinth is basically the space where oppositions disintegrate and grow complicated, where diacritical couples are unbalanced and perverted etc., where the system upon which linguistic function is based disintergrates, but somehow disintegrates by itself, having jammed it’s own works.The labyrinth we discuss cannot be described. Mapping is out of the question.” Against Architecture The writings of Georges Bataille, Denis Hollier.

The Savage Messiah seeks out nomadic architecture, transient architecture, places that can slip out of sight, re emerge and reconfigure somewhere else. Savage messiah drifts through the city in defiance of panoptican surveillance, seeking out places that do not exist on official maps, she roams through a maze of bolt holes, alleyways and sites that slip through the net. The Savage Messiah gravitates towards settlements and reconfigurations of forms that become an outward manifestation of nomadic subjectivities. These are the enchanted places that slip out of sight, re emerge and reconfigure somewhere else. There are numerous portals, fluctuating and reversible like a Baroque ceiling, lenses opening onto other realms. Camden squatlands, headcases on psychoactive drifts, abandoned boozers, Nazi occultists, Rimbaud and Verlaine as proto flaneurs,Soane tomb transgressions, construction site labyrinths, subterranean rivers, Scala treble bills, Ballardian psychtropic nightmares………. !

VIVA SAVAGE MESSIAH !SAVAGE MESSIAH DEMANDS THE ABOLITION OF ALL ZONES!! DESTROY CARTESIAN RHETORIC, SMASH THE VILLE RADIEUSE, SAVAGE MESSIAH IS CALLING FOR A MASS RETURN TO THE LABYRINTH!!!

Bring pens, chalk, battered cassette recorders, booze.Contact and info ../savagemessiah@hotmail.co.uk
John Wild- http://rupture.co.uk/KingXdrift/


END MESSAGE FROM SAVAGE MESSIAH

START MESSAGE FROM TOM ALLAN

This is something that should interest you - a new book by the London-based photographer Stephen Gill. "Archaeology in Reverse" is an elegy to the marshes around the River Lea in Hackney, which are soon to be transformed into a soulless, bustling part of the Olympic village. It's an area I msyelf have become obsessed with since moving to London last year, an eerie no-man's land of endless football pitches (the largest continuous area of football pitches in Europe, apparently), empty underpasses punctuated by yellow witness appeal signs, concrete fly-overs and scum-caked canals. It has haunted Gill too, and as Ian Sinclair points out in his brilliant afterword, it's an area that Gill has learned to haunt in return. The photos were all taken using a battered 1960's plastic-lensed camera, bought at Hackney Wick market for 50p. This lends the images a quality at once comfortingly soft-focused and eerily charged - like that of a dusty family photo album. And as Sinclair makes clear, we feel the presence of the erased images and forgotten figures, taken by the camera's previous owner(s)...

Finally, here is an excerpt from Sinclair's afterword:

'The glittering city that is always just over the horizon. That twitch you feel in the soles your feet, the hot earth, is the first tremor,atsunami intimation of system-built structures waiting to climb out ofthe turf. And there are other small signs, long before it happens, of anarchaeology of disclosure: those marks in the forest, fragments ofmasonry, spray-painted ghost outlines, are not traces left by a vanished civilization, but the first news of a computer-generated space stationthat will burrow its way out of the hollow earth. So what we have is a very specific and unusual hauntology: the ghosts ofthe future haunting a vanishing place, refracted, literally, through thedamaged lens of the past.'

Site

END MESSAGE FROM TOM ALLAN

Bear with me, I've not given up, it's just that my schedule has gone crazy... Between reviewing the new Cronenberg for Sight and Sound and writing two Joy Division pieces for Fact, I did complete the Bawdsey sound piece (entitled 'Radar Traces') - or at least it is now an endlessly remixable work in progress. There isn't much immediate prospect of any relief - teaching is starting tomorrow, and I'm going to the Hague to interview Underground Resistance this weekend, and speaking at Tate Britain the weekend after - but I will do my very best to have a post up this week....

Suffolk hauntology, again

'Marxist Supernanny' is on its way... but I've a few deadlines and I've also been working on a sound piece that is a sort of follow-up to londonunderlondon, a hauntological remix of the Bawdsey radar oral history, which I'm producing for the event celebrating seventieth anniversary of the establishment of Bawdsey as a fully operational base in 1937. Everyone knows about Bletchley Park, but Bawdsey was equally if not more significant in the history of WWII and the subsequent development of cyberspace. Radar - operated primarily by women, of course - was crucial to the RAF's victory in the battle of Britain.

On September 15th, Bawdsey Manor, bought by the Air Ministry in 1936, but now, sadly, back in private hands, will be open to the public for the first time in years. If only the whole ex-RAF site - the imposing manor, with its grottoes and secret gardens, the concrete transmitter block, the Ballardian Cold War zone (now left mouldering and un-used) - could be acquired by English Heritage...