Hello friends,
A couple publishing related bits (my bread and butter): The Grass is Green in the Fields For You is a project by Matthew Walkerdine (of Good Press, Museums Press, Vital Idles, & much more) around pop music, fandom & (re)production. Originally a subscription service, Matt would send you new work, bits of research or wholesale bootlegged reproductions of zines, posters, keyrings, etc mainly of 90’s British bands but spanning all aspects of ‘fan’ culture, amateurism and collective subcultural activity. The project as a whole is one of my highlights of the last ten years let alone today’s reading but after what sounds like some frustrating hold ups the Grass is Green in the Fields For You 2019 reader is here and available to buy w/ pdf available for you to look at immediately. It’s such a great combination of singular vision in terms of it’s research interests, like specifically coming from a personal perspective and the collective & collaborative approach to cultural production - including the work of others, credited or not, whether they know it or not - to link together all these threads. I love it. Debord was right about a few things & culture being a collective production and therefore belonging to everyone is one of them. Reproduce. Bootleg. Plagiarise. Adapt. Absorb. Psyched to get the physical object in my grubby hands asap.
Also, this “Utopian Vision for the next 10 years of publishing” by Kit from Influx Press has absolutely nothing to disagree with.
Yesterday Sarah Maldoror died from coronavirus. I’d never heard of her or her work before, but her film Sambizanga is available on youtube so I watched it today. It’s set in Angola in the early days of the anti-colonial struggle (Maldoror’s partner was Mario Pinto de Andrade, one of the founders of the MPLA) & follows a construction worker who is arrested and tortured, and his wife and comrades trying to locate him. V recommended. RIP to a real one.
The new Muro is out and fuckin rips. Sold out everywhere but cop when u can.
Also this eulogy by Mao to Norman Bethune popped back into my head today. I’ve not thought about it or read it in years but looked it up and it’s still as beautiful as I remembered. Why it floated up to the front of my brain now I don’t know, will leave to you armchair analysts to deduce but sharing because I love it. RIP Comrade.
That’s it - more fun tomorrow I promise.
P x