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On Savage Messiah's back cover The Indepent quote suggests that we read '[t]his black-and-white,
cut'n'paste-style zine' as a series of 'psychogeographical drifts', which I'm
not at all sure is really possible. Whilst Ford occasionally namechecks some
situationist ideas, or offers quotes from the likes of J.G. Ballard, the
majority of this marvellous book forms a nostalgic autobiography, whose narrator
moves from squat to squat, visits pub after pub, and experiences both
drug-induced epiphanies and frights in a 1980s London landscape.
It is not only the text that gets bleary-eyed about the past, the whole book
is a pastiche (or appropriation?) of 1970s zine culture: lots of faded xerox
collages, typewriter text and bad (no, truly bad, not ironically bad)
drawings. The text is also nostalgic for the recent past before the book's
setting, and occasionally interjects little social histories in the stories
being told.
It's hard to believe the book gathers up zines published from 2005 onwards,
although I guess there must be lots of readers like me who are also nostalgic
or at least warmly inclined towards a rather romanticised view of their
teenage London years. The chapters (originally specific issues of the zine)
I like the most are those set in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove; others will
be drawn further east or north to the other London Borough hotpspots of
counterculture and lingering hippydom they were part of or wished they were
as they looked onÉ
Like others before her, Ford glamourizes the harsh realities of squatting,
drug use, hunger and general hand-to-mouth existence on the edge of
homelessness. The book could cynically be read as one long celebratory binge
framed as psychogeography, a celebration of poverty and addiction with the
author wallowing in her own cesspit of desire. Her world narrows to
acquaintances, occasional friendships, and endless long walks, moves from one
temporary abode to another. She is angry with the police, with society at
large, but most of all angry with herself, although this is sharply
contrasted with sunset euphorias and street-urchin epiphanies as she comes up
for air, ready to grab her pen and glue stick.
If I sound cynical, well I am. It's hard to take this kind of work seriously
any more, even if it's possible that Ford is making us question the present
through the past. Yes, I had a good time in the 70s and 80s in London, yes it
was easier to drop out, to live cheaply, to slip unobserved through the
not-yet-yuppified city; but 30 years on it doesn't seem like a very practical
place to want to revisit, isn't the answer to anything we might be asking or
having to deal with in 2011. There's something strange too about Verso
publishing this kind of stuff now and giving it a certain kudos, yet at the
same time neutering any credibility or hipness it might have had in its
original published form.
If I sound less than cynical it's because I like finding my own past
mythologised by others, I like revisiting the London I once knew, like coming
across references to places I once frequented, people I feel I know even
though I never have. There's no way this is psychogeography nor great art. I
resisted Mark Fisher trying to brand it 'hauntology' in his Introduction but
he might be right, particularly in the sense of something coming back to
haunt us. In this case the joy of life lived off the radar only a few decades
ago, a world forgotten by the businesses and bankers who now own us, who many
of our contemporaries have become. I
long, with Mark Fisher, that 'there might be a rupturing of this
collective amnesia'. Ford may help us remember.
© Rupert Loydell 2011
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