antipopper

The Filth finally starts kickin’! The image of Greg Feely shouting “Right you. I’m not having it. I’m not fucking having it!” as he pulls a tentacled eyeball out of his television is worth the price of admission alone! {Goes back to read it all from the beginning again}

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Got the latest issue of Colors on Friday, only to immediately lend it to one of our short-term freelancers. Why? Well, the issue’s all about fucking Birmingham in England, and Matt’s the second Brummie freelancer we’ve had in six months. (Which reminds me of that Bentley Rhythm Ace song: “Midlander: There Can Only Be One”. Ha.) I lived in Birmingham for a year when I was little, which is why I bought the thing in the first place. How cool to see what’s basically an extremely clever corporate brochure of a magazine, which was originally so focused on exoticism, finally having the nouse to tackle what’s commonly held as the moribund, the average, the middle of the road. As those of you who had to sit through my rantings on 8-Mile and Detroit know, I’m really into this angle on urban geography.

In fact, for the last eight years I’ve wanted to start a magazine of popular geography. A radical, obviously non-corporate version of Colors. One that talks about power and (sub)urban space. Small and big things. One without an obvious, overarching editorial “ideology”, but with a methodology that’s all about piecing together the stuff in the interstices of everyday life. Surveillance cameras and studded park benches meet Sesame Street-style stuff, like “from cow to beefsteak in the freezer”. I got totally politicised by studying Geography in high school; our final year syllabus was all about agribusiness, the politics of famine in “the Third World” and class war in the gentrification of London’s Docklands. Then there’s psychogeography and the wealth of interesting pre-Situationist stuff, just waiting for a rerun. Anyway, I’ve always had this weird tagline for the project: Real Life is Science Fiction — coming to grips in a materialist way with the infinite mappings that the technical narratives of everyday life entail. And the name? I just rediscovered an ancient blog that I set up a few years ago for the thing, but never used, called Exploded View. As in a style of diagram in which everything is pulled apart.