the modernist magazine and other news

the modernist is a new, quarterly magazine for lovers of modernism, published by Manchester Modernist Society. Whilst it leans towards architecture and design, primarily in the North West, I was asked to write an article about the constructed language Esperanto, which shares many of modernism's ideals. The article came about following a chance discussion about encountering a strange, early to mid twentieth century young people's magazine (published in Manchester) in the National Co-operative Archive called Our Circle which was so enthused by a Esperanto and its possibilities for fostering international freedom and contributing to world peace and universal brotherhood that it published stories, lessons and correspondence from its readers in Esperanto.

The theme of the first issue is 'bold', and other contributions include: a foreword by Jonathan Meades; Blackburn market; Aidan Turner-Bishop on cooling towers; Richard Brook on an iconic logo; Dr Steve Millington on the Mancunian Way; Matthew Whitfield on the 1965 plan for Liverpool; David Oates' photos of Oscar Niemeyer's Brazil; Eddy Rhead on tripe restaurants; Stephen Hale on mods; and news and reviews.

the modernist will be launched at CUBE gallery on Thursday June 23 from 6.30-8.30pm, with wine!

Issues cost just £3.75 — or £15 for a subscription (including postage).

It is available from Cornerhouse bookshop in Manchester, Aye-Aye books in Glasgow, News from Nowhere in Liverpool and Do You Read Me in Berlin and can be purchased online here.

Read more about it at www.the-modernist-mag.co.uk.

Read it online here:

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

In other news:

Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention went really well. Thanks to everyone who came and browsed, helped sell out Deerly Beloved Bakery's stall, ran and took part in lino-cutting and embroidery and fanzine-making workshops and watched the film and spoke and listened. There are a few write-ups floating around, as well as lots of photos taken by Alex Zamora from Fever Zine here, and there are some more photos here and here and here. Maybe there will be something similar next year...

More news:

Hayley Flynn nominated The Shrieking Violet in the monthly blog section of Blank Pages, Blank Media's magazine, which meant I had to write about my blogging experience then nominate a blog (my choice was not very imaginative!).

Read it here:

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Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Rotherham Zine Library asked me to do an interview about The Shrieking Violet fanzine! Read it here.

Woman's Outlook magazine (visiting the National Co-operative Archive)

Working a few metres away from the National Co-operative Archive, occasional glimpses into what lays within has made me fascinated by Woman's Outlook, a bi-weekly (and later weekly) magazine produced for the Women’s Co-operative Guild between 1919 and 1967. I recently visited the Archive on my day off work to have a closer look.

Woman's Outlook was an enticing and, in some ways, surprisingly modern, mix of the political and the domestic that combined tips for housewives and working women with fashion, fiction and features. Its editors included Mary Stott in the 1930s ‘40s and ‘50s, who went on to edit the women’s pages in the Guardian.

The Women’s Co-operative Guild (which still exists today as the Co-operative Women's Guild) was formed in 1883 and worked for the improvement of the status of women, championing women’s rights, campaigning for women’s suffrage and demanding other important changes to society such as maternity benefits. Issue one of Woman’s Outlook describes the guild as: “Over 50,000 woman co-operators who have banded themselves into a guild to work through co-operation for the welfare of the people, seeking freedom for their own progress and the equal fellowship of men and women in the home, the store, the workshop, and the state.” Co-operation is described in a later issue as 'not only an ideal form of trade for the community' but also 'the fairest system under which the consumer can purchase his needs'.

The first issue of Woman's Outlook has on its cover the WCG logo, which depicts a woman gazing out over an industrial scene. As encapsulated by the logo of the WCG, Woman's Outlook was aimed at broadening its readers’ viewpoints, offering information and comment on the issues and laws affecting women in the UK, as well as global economics and politics, and preparing women for an increasingly prominent role in industry and society. In its own words: “We hope to assist her in her outlook upon industrial and social questions, and to give her thoughts, through our pages, something of the freedom of a flock of birds…we dream of it as a friend of all, seeking always to help forward to better things — a fuller life, more social opportunities and a wider choice of spheres of civic usefulness for women.” Later covers featured glamorous, stylised women either at rest or engaged in various pursuits such as golf, with my favourite being the decorative covers of illustrators such as G Beuzeville Foyster (who also illustrated children's books) in the 1930s.

Though Woman’s Outlook was published from Long Millgate in Manchester, it had an international perspective, with regular features on women and their place in societies all over the world, considering issues such as Scandinavian countries’ attitude towards prostitution and what it was like for Muslim women living behind the veil. As well as sending journalists to the House of Commons and to see a police court at work, it went out and about visiting women and celebrating their achievements, featuring profiles of women ranging from prominent trade unionists to Canada’s first women senator and 'the world's champion female aviator'. As it noted: “No paper would live that confined its news to events of its own town and nation. Readers, even the most rabid and nationalistic, want to know all about the world…the world is alive and we can no more escape being members of it than we can jump out of our own skin.”











































When Woman’s Outlook started in 1919, women over the age of thirty had only recently gained the vote in England, and throughout its almost fifty year lifespan the magazine urged its readers to be politicised, join trade unions and get involved in campaigns such as: increasing the number of women MPs; providing nursery education; raising the school leaving age; abolishing the marriage bar; bringing women’s wages into line with men's; providing pensions; giving women equal compensation to men after industrial accidents and disarmament, to name but a few. Discussing a 1930s inter-country naval conference one writer pondered “I have been wondering if there is no dramatic action we women could take up so as to impress the world with our serious attitude on the question”, and elsewhere the magazine wondered 'is it any wonder we women get fed up and become radicalised' doing 'the same jobs day after day'. The magazine also offered self-help tips, from how to make a portfolio and advice on chairing and managing meetings — women were encouraged to become board and committee members in co-operative societies — to suggesting setting up study circles to share experiences with other women.

Whilst Woman’s Outlook urged women to take up causes and from its start gave women advice on how to find jobs, it acknowledged that many women were based in the domestic sphere — indeed, many women, such as teachers, had to give up their jobs upon marriage well into the twentieth century — and offered practical advice on hygiene, nutrition, child rearing and maternity as well as hints on furnishing the home and ‘smart and practical’ patterns for knitting and sewing. Love stories — often didactic tales with messages warning against moral ills such as taking credit and investing money unethically — sat alongside entertainment features on art and literature and more serious, educational articles on housing solutions and women’s working conditions.

Published during times of high unemployment, the magazine encouraged thrift and making the best out of limited means, and recipes were introduced with titles such as ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it but you can eat your orange and have the rind for use in countless ways’ and ‘When shelves are empty. Emergency jams from dried fruit.’. Women were encouraged to write in with recipes and advice, with the magazine running competitions ranging from making your own wine, including how much it cost (a potato and raisin wine, its submitter adding the detail that it was ‘in colour like best whisky’, triumphed), to the best ways to make the others around you happy at Christmas. A regular children’s page, ‘For the Bairns’ offered riddles, stories and advice such as how to look after pets.

From its inception Woman’s Outlook argued for world peace. It continued production through the second world war, printing a woman’s war time diary, a rousing series on pioneers of social reform throughout history, growing advice for allotments and recipes for making rations last as long as possible — whilst also running pieces scrutinising the distribution of food and questioning policies such as conscription. Women entered into debate through its pages, writing in to discuss topics ranging from the benefits of vegetarianism to political hot potatoes. Light relief was provided by a regular film column. All the while Woman’s Outlook urged for a Britain to be rebuilt as a fairer, more equal society after the war with better housing and access to healthcare and education.

By 1967, though modernised and resembling more of a newspaper, the magazine was no longer viable and closed for economic reasons. As the final issue noted, however: “Outlook has outlasted many of the women’s magazines that were concerned only with the more trivial aspects of a woman’s life.”

Woman’s Outlook was one of a number of publications produced by the Co-operative Movement. The magazine, and others including the Our Circle children’s magazine and the Co-operative News, can be found in the National Co-operative Archive in Holyoake House, Hanover Street, Manchester.

Cover images are used by permission of the Co-operative Press.

Ghosts in the Machine: Maurice Carlin’s ‘The Self Publishers’, found art from photocopiers

Every two months, Maurice Carlin does a sweep around the photocopying shops of Manchester and Salford, gathers unwanted copies that are left on the glass or discarded around the machines, enlarges them to A3 and collects them into a publication about the cities and the people who live in them called The Self Publishers. As well as including what you’d expect to find scattered around the shops — maps, adverts for rooms to rent, posters for missing pets, failed attempts at reproducing academic texts, sheet music, even a poem by Manchester poet Carol Batton who distributes her photocopied works around the city — some of the material is surprisingly personal. Since it started late in 2009 The Self Publishers has constituted a city-wide scrapbook or diary, with letters and children’s drawings popping up next to Primark pay slips and to do lists. In September Morry exhibited the work at the Pigeon Wing Gallery in London and he was also invited to take the project to Midnight Coffee Preview in Antwerp in December. The Shrieking Violet had a chat with Morry at Islington Mill, where he is based.

SV: What inspired the project? Were people's leftover bits of paper something you had been interested in for a while?

MC: I mistakenly took some stuff that had been left behind in a copy shop and I had it around for a while — I do tend to collect stuff. Sometimes you have something and you don’t know why you’re interested in it then later you realise why. Then later I thought ‘maybe all I need to do is present it differently.’.

I’m interested in the photocopier as a format as it’s democratic — it reduces everything to a black and white image and flattens it all out. Even glossy magazine articles are reduced to a bit of text.

SV: What are the most common mistakes that are made when photocopying?

MC: There are quite often bits missing, pages the wrong size or copies are too light or too dark. In one copy someone’s hand somehow got in there. But the bits that have gone wrong are more interesting.
SV: It’s interesting that you’ve chosen to call the publications The Self Publishers (and chosen quite a decorative font for the title, in contrast to the mainly functional nature of what's inside), as the people who made these copies probably didn’t intend to publish to a wider audience — with a few possible exceptions, I imagine most of the copies were made for personal use.

MC: It is accidental publishing. It would be quite different if I collected all the material I found on the street like scraps of paper — it is found in a place of publication and reproduction. Even if it is being reproduced for one person it is still being reproduced and published.

SV: What interests you about looking through these unwanted documents from other people’s lives?

MC: I’m interested in how meaning is formed. The material I collect is both mundane and vital. A lot of it is things that are really important to people, for example propaganda — people copying 100 posters saying ‘Say no to the English Defence League’— or forms motivating people to do something. It’s a document of a moment just gone. I take all these different narratives and put them back to back.

I’m interested in Chantal Mouffe and the idea of agonistic democracy. The public sphere should be based on dissensus rather than consensus. We should be a community of difference rather than a community of one and acknowledge our differences and that we can still get things done.
SV: What’s the most interesting or surprising thing you’ve found?

MC: There are grievance forms about being sacked, documents relating to harassment and someone’s personal fitness report. Some of it is copyrighted material, and there’s an article about JD Salinger suing Random House and copyright law. There’s a seating plan for a bar mitzvah party which I love as it’s really visual and pages with random letters at the top — I don’t know what they are but they remind me of concrete poetry.

SV: Do you feel voyeuristic, like you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to? What if you were looking through a copy and you found something of yours staring back at you?

MC: The ethics of it is something I’ve thought a lot about. It was a shock when I came across someone’s death certificate. Sometimes I’ve blocked out names and personal information but sometimes it’s an essential part of that story. It’s an internal seesaw but there’s something about wanting to present the material in its purest form.

We leave a trail behind us all over the place — online, on social networking sites. There’s a residue of human activity everywhere and artists are among the few people who take an interest in it and find it poetic. They sift through the refuse to find something that says something about people and what they care about and what they don’t care about and leave behind.

SV: How do you go about putting the material together? Apart from adding a cover and stapling the material together, is there an editing process?

MC: In one way you could look through this and think that it’s a random jumble of stuff one after the other but in the way I do it there is a kind of mechanism. Some people suggested I should take the text and put it into some kind of design format but there is a sensibility. It follows a sort of rule of publishing, for example when I have found an abstract, introductory remarks or contents list I put that at the front and when I have found acknowledgements, conclusions and evaluations or indexes they have gone at the back, even if they didn’t relate to what’s inside. But in other ways it makes no sense at all and things don’t really belong together. It could be quite a surreal experience to read through from the front cover but I always want to find the narrative thread — that’s a natural instinct.

It’s a bit like reading a newspaper, which has a design aesthetic but apart from that it’s a jumble of different information, reports and trivia.SV: If there is too much duplication in the material you collect do you limit what you put in?

MC: I use 90 per cent of the material I find, for example there were four copies of the same photograph but each one was slightly different so someone had obviously been trying to get something right and they were failed attempts. I put them all in.

SV: Don’t you find it frustrating that you only have a part of the story when you include a page that is just one part of a longer article, for instance? Don’t you ever find that there’s a page or scrap that interests you so much that you want to go away and read more?

MC: Through one page you can read a whole story about what might have happened. It reflects my own reading habits — I have five or six different things on the go at once and quite often only read a page or a paragraph at one time. I like that I’ve only got a section of the story or a part of it and you have to fill in the rest yourself.

It’s quite in tune with life, which is full of different voices and sources for information and knowledge constantly competing for your attention. I don’t really want to read all of them but I will take in something of all of them.
SV: How does the project work in other cities?

MC: I had no idea if it would translate into a different place. In Antwerp I had to make more of a choice when deciding which material to put in. There was more material in English than I had expected and I chose more in English than was perhaps representative.

I was really surprised the things I found related so directly to the place. Lots of the material related to Antwerp, for example one person wrote an abstract about Antwerp as a port town.

Someone suggested I should go ask copy shops for the material. I went in to shops and asked if they had any old paper they were going to dump. There’s less suspicion of that kind of thing there and they handed a pile over. I asked copy shops when I got back to Manchester and they said they couldn’t possibly give it out for confidentiality reasons. There is more openness and transparency in Antwerp.

I also spent some time at the Middlesex University Philosophy Department occupation in May and June and did an edition there as they were producing lots of material related to the occupation.

SV: Is there a noticeable difference between material collected from copy shops in different areas of Manchester and Salford and do you have a favoured photocopying shop?

MC: It is a barometer of what’s going on around the copy shop. What you find in Staples in Salford is different to what you might get in the Northern Quarter. The ones on Oxford Road are the best for collecting material as they’re really untidy.

SV: How do other people react to the project?

MC: People either love it or hate it. I’m not sure that the project really works in a gallery setting though. It would work much better if you could buy it like any other magazine.

To purchase a copy of The Self Publishers email Morry at deaddigital@islingtonmill.com.

www.islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.com

Ralph Brookes — Salford newsagent and amateur filmmaker

Ralph Brookes saw almost a century of Salford life. Born in 1900, he was a delivery boy for the Evening News and Evening Chronicle who then joined the navy, became a docker and went on to run the family newsagents on New Park Road in Ordsall. In the late 1950s, Mr Brookes, already a keen photographer of everyday people and places, took up a video camera and started recording life in inner city Salford on Standard 8 film*; the man who sold the official version of the news and had delivered the news to local houses started to create his own, informal stories of the neighbourhood around him. The resulting silent films show some of the radical changes the working class area underwent in the space of a few years as part of Salford Council’s slum clearance plan, which led to Mr Brookes’ newsagents being knocked down and him and his wife being moved into new housing.

The film People and Places Around Ordsall starts with Mr Brookes mingling with a crowd that has gathered to watch Coronation Street stars film a tug-of-war in Ordsall Park, which is later shown on Mr Brookes' TV screen as it is being broadcast. Mr Brookes’ shop and home stood in a row of other shops and houses bordering the park, in an area of traditional Victorian terraces not far from a real life street called Coronation Street on the New Barracks Estate.

Mr Brookes’ highly personal films are home movies and thus probably weren’t meant to be seen by a wide audience. They celebrate events such as weddings, birthdays and Christmas — showing his grandchildren dressed up smartly, the house decked out for Christmas and the table laden with festive food. But his camera also frequently visited the outside of the shop which, it seems, was a meeting place for local children who hung around and read comics or played games in the street. We’re also taken to the local nursery, full of smiling children and to the local swimming pool, as well as venturing into the shell of a church mid-demolition.

Mr Brookes also often travelled further afield, and showed the world outside his immediate community. It appears that he took his camera nearly everywhere: window shopping in a toy shop in Manchester city centre, admiring central library, taking us round the exhibits at the zoo, even on a daytrip to Liverpool on the train to look at the Christmas lights — Mr Brookes spent the train journey glued to the window, his camera speeding through the snowy landscape outside.

People and Places Around Ordsall is a collage of snippets of film spanning the seasons, shot across a wide time frame, which leads up to a scene showing the empty plot of land where his shop once stood. Though there’s no commentary explicitly stated in words, by choosing to take us into his bathroom earlier in the film, and showing us how the floor tiles match the bath, with a carefully co-ordinated checked towel hung neatly over the side, you get a sense Mr Brookes was proud of his home. Mr Brookes’ camera closes in on the compulsory purchase order made for his property in 1969, returning several times to the value of £5 which was to be given by the council in compensation.

I watched the films People and Places Around Ordsall and Christmas Streetscenes; Manchester and Liverpool in the North West Film Archive.

*There is a fascinating essay by Heather Norris Nicholson comparing the films of Ralph Brookes and Michael Goodger from 1957-1973, and their differing representations of Ordsall, which can be read here.

The Shrieking Violet Issue 11 media special

Issue 11 of the Shrieking Violet is out now. It is a media special — I started with the aim of looking at Manchester media city then and now, considering the history of the city and print, but ended up focusing on a few specific areas I found particularly interesting.

This issue's cover is by Dan Russell of Manchester Municipal Design Corporation, which produces the Things Happen fanzine (to read the current issue, including my article about the Ashton Canal, click here).

I'm interested in the way old newspaper premises still leave a mark on the city, from the Printworks to the Daily Express Building. I interviewed Manchester Modernist Society in 2009 when they had just formed and, when I asked them each to pick their favourite modernist building in Manchester, Jack Hale chose the Daily Express building because of the way it combines form and function. I asked him to elaborate by writing an article on the building for this issue.

I've also considered free weekly titles Shortlist and Stylist, and their skewed perceptions of men and women.

Evan Cowen has written a tragicomic diary of week undertaking work experience — that essential, yet often frustrating rite of passage for anyone hoping to work in the media — at his local newspaper in Cumbria.

Manchester based artist, singer and performer Lowri Evans, who is currently living in Brazil, has captured a day in her life as a page from the São Paulo Folha newspaper.

Matthew Austin of Austin Brothers Films has written an account of the challenges of producing a feature film on a tight budget, and looks ahead to the premiere of their debut feature length film Cricket, which will close the Salford Film Festival at the Lowry Outlet Mall on November 14.

Other articles in this issue include my write-up of a visit to the North West Film Archive to watch documentary films about Manchester newspapers from the '60s and '70s, which are fascinating not just as portraits of the publications themselves but glimpses into the society of the time and Manchester in days gone by.

I am interested in not just the 'official' media that forms the narrative of the city, but also independent, alternative publications, and I have profiled publications that have inspired me, from the Salford Star magazine to local fanzines.

I have recently been asking Manchester based zines and magazines why they still bother to produce a print publication — a very labour intensive form of communication — when it is so cheap, easy and convenient to publish online. I have compiled a few of the answers.

Issue 11 also features illustration by Alex Boswell, poetry by Rachel Cranshaw and photography Manchester Daily Photo blogger Paul Capewell. Chef and film maker Rich Howe contributes recipes for banana soup and an Elvis Sandwich, whilst Norwich based singer Kayleigh Read has written a recipe for vegan moussaka.

I went a bit linocut crazy having recently rediscovered it!

Free paper copies of the Shrieking Violet will be scattered around Manchester city centre at some stage today and tomorrow. Likely places include the Cornerhouse, Piccadilly Records, Koffee Pot, An Outlet, Oklahoma, Good Grief fanzine shop in Afflecks Palace, Nexus Art Cafe, Magma Books, Manchester Craft Centre etc.

Download Issue 11 with the pages in the right order for printing here.

Read Issue 11 with the pages in the right order for reading here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More media

Back issues of the Shrieking Violet can be downloaded here.

To obtain a free paper copy of this zine or any back issues (free service), email your name and address to Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com.

To contribute to future issues email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com or join The Shrieking Violet fanzine facebook group.

In an homage to the pointless lists Shortlist magazine loves so much, here is a list of trivia relating to things I did during the making of this issue:

Went from never having seen any of Sex and the City to having seen all of it apart from the second film.
Started watching Mad Men but only got as far as the first two episodes.
Read a copy of Nuts magazine, Zoo magazine and Glamour magazine.
Used my John Rylands University Library alumni card and spent a couple of hours pretending to be studious.
Was inspired by watching the films Beautiful Losers and $100 Dollars and a T-Shirt.
Cut my fingers open several times with lino cutting tools.
Discovered and fell in love with balsamic vinegar.
Attended two debates about the media, one about ownership of the media organised by the Mule newspaper which featured Stephen Kingston of the Salford Star, Dave Toomer from the National Union of Journalists and Nigel Barlow from Inside the M60, and an Urbis Research Forum on digital media and the city which had representatives from Creative Tourist, Manchester Climate Fortnightly and Future Everything on the panel and had a pessimistic tone but seemed to conclude that media works best when it is a complementary combination of new digital media and traditional print media.
Joined twitter because everyone else has.

Masculine, feminine: Shortlist and Stylist magazines

Every Wednesday morning, two free magazines appear on the streets of several cities around the country, including Manchester (as well as airport lounges and French Connection stores). Left in piles next to the Metro newspaper, or handed out by men in yellow jackets, they’re designed to be grabbed by workers on their daily commute.

Why two magazines? Well, with its bold title in an unfussy font and covers in primary colours featuring prominent men such as Alan Sugar, Gordon Gecko, Russell Brand and Fabio Capello staring you straight on, with some cover stars, such as Tony Blair, so important they’re further emboldened in black and white, Shortlist is aimed at attracting the eye of men. The strapline promises that inside you will find ‘News, Sport, TV, Cars, Movies, Style’ — the same subjects you might see covered in the ‘Men’s Lifestyle’ section of a newsagents. Stylist’s decorative font, italicised to give the impression it’s a bit more thoughtful, and backed up by a palette of pinks and lilacs, is meant to attract the female sensibility. Its sleeves show cupcakes, shoes, handbags, a puppy with floppy ears, and singers and Hollywood actresses staring pensively into the distance or looking down shyly. Inside, is ‘Fashion, Travel, People, Ideas, Beauty’.

The two magazines are produced in the same building, and published by the same company, yet their whole premise is that men and women are fundamentally different. Rather than looking at the interests men and women have in common and producing a magazine anyone could find interesting, they focus on heightening traditional male and female pursuits and exaggerating conventionally male or female attributes until the two magazines display complete parodies of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

The magazines’ content is primarily concerned with selling a certain, ideal lifestyle — something for men, and women, to aspire to, which often harks back to recapturing the values of an earlier era. In Stylist, interviewees are praised for their sophistication, glamour and mystique, and for being enigmatic — in comparison with what the magazine regards as the ‘laddish’ behaviour of some women today. Shortlist talks admiringly of the ‘hard living charisma’ of Serge Gainsbourg and the glamour of the Rat Pack, emphasising timeless elegance, from Savile Row tailoring to owning a decent watch — ‘The mark of a gentleman’.

Shortlist is obsessed with the escapist themes of adventure, endurance, war and danger, from endless articles about drug lords and South American gangs to reports from war zones, instructions about how to survive in space and lists of the most dangerous places in the world to trade in. Shortlist is also heavily biased towards technology, and keeping up to date with the latest ‘must-have’ gadgets. Interestingly, Stylist has more emphasis than Shortlist on food and literature (although it does liken Philip Larkin, hilariously, to a ‘grumpier, smarter Bridget Jones’), but Shortlist makes more of music, covering newer, 'hipper' bands compared to Stylist's recommendation of mumsy music like Robbie Williams.

In case you’d missed what’s being sold to you, Shortlist backs it up with adverts for beer that promises adventure, deodorant that will ‘give you balls’, face cream that ‘wages war on oily skin’, phones aiding survival and endless adverts for cars, watches, clothes and the Discovery Channel. Stylist, in contrast, is primarily packed with adverts for grooming products such as shampoo and hair dye, IKEA furniture, clothes and the occasional car or rom com film.

Each magazine has a regular columnist with whom we’re supposed to empathise and sympathise. Danny Wallace’s column, in Shortlist, is one of the highlights of the magazine, a feature that rarely fails to make me laugh as he fails woefully at performing everyday tasks, from ordering a sandwich to securing the services of a plumber. His well-written column reads like a piece of creative writing exaggerated slightly for comic effect. I don’t believe for a minute that he’s as hapless as he makes out. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Dawn Porter, who was somehow given a column in Stylist magazine (which, thankfully, seems to have disappeared for the time being) despite being one of the least interesting women you can imagine meeting. Over the course of a few insipid paragraphs of fluff, Porter shares insights into her life such as being chased by a wasp, dying her hair and having PMT.

In her recent critique of contemporary feminism, One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power said ‘If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man’. We can blame a lot of this on Sex and the City, which, in one of several Sex and the City specials, Stylist claims ‘shaped the cultural development of the 21st century’ and acts as a ‘champion of women…a platform for female independence, career success, a woman’s right to hideously expensive shoes…and made single life sexy’ (I couldn’t agree less with this description of Sex and the City — which focuses on superficial, self-obsessed, dull, needy women whose lives revolve around where their next man is going to come from). Stylist goes on to say that the biggest appeal of the women in Sex and the City is that they are ‘real’, managing to ‘tap into the pysche of modern, professional women brilliantly’, yet they are not like anyone I know or would ever wish to meet. It states that, unlike '99% of the female population', ‘men just don’t understand Sex and the City’ — ignoring all the women who, too, think Sex and the City is banal and shallow.

The biggest problem I have with Sex and the City (aside from its limited depictions of homosexuality and bisexuality) is the same I have with Shortlist and Stylist magazines — the distinctions they make between men and women, and the way they don’t even try to understand each other. The women in Sex and the City show little interest in anything outside men and each other; their level of political engagement is limited to sleeping with politicians, they have no heterosexual male friends and find it seemingly impossible to relate to men on any level other than sex — not that they want to. As Samantha says: “I’ve never been friends with any men. Why would I? Women are for friendships, men are for fucking.”

At the start of this century, David Gauntlett noted in Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (one of many studies of men’s and women’s magazines) that the men’s magazine market is relatively new as it had long been thought that “‘real men’ didn’t need a magazine to tell them how to live". Today, however, Shortlist magazine seems hell bent on reclaiming manliness from a perceived social and cultural assault on male values and pursuits. It runs articles with titles such as ‘Why it’s ok to be a man again’, and Giles Coren defending the barbecue as ‘the last bastion of masculinity’. Despite this, there’s just as much pressure on men as women to look after their appearance, from protecting their hair on holiday to ten steps to getting the perfect beach body.

Shortlist and Stylist magazines are inherently conservative. Writing almost forty years ago, in a set of essays entitled Ways of Seeing, the critic John Berger said 'publicity is the culture of the consumer society' — advertisements are the images by which capitalism sustains itself, selling the public an idealised vision of themselves. It manufactures glamour, which is described by Berger as the 'happiness of being envied'. Publicity shows people who they could be and where they could be placed within society if they make the right choices (ie purchases) or, if they already hold that position in society, it sells them the ability to maintain that position — one which is, in the eyes of others, enviable. Shortlist and Stylist magazine, despite masquerading as serious magazines which are read for their content, are in fact just publicity for the dominant, accepted lifestyle. Those who read Shortlist and Stylist do so either because they accept that the lifestyles the magazines portray are something to aspire to, or because they already belong to the social group that can afford such a lifestyle. They see their values reflected, so their place in society is therefore reinforced and confirmed.

I don’t, however, think that either magazine is bad — they both have several features I enjoy, and in both magazines there are whole sections I flick straight through (sport in Shortlist and beauty in Stylist). Shortlist magazine’s ‘Secret Genius’ quiz page is fun for passing time, and some of the ‘Instructions for Men’, such as ‘how to avoid showing fear in a job interview’, are useful. Stylist magazine celebrates female achievements, holds networking events for female entrepreneurs and prints women’s responses to topical news stories such as the Marie Stopes TV advertisements. Its ‘Elsewhere’ page rounds up world news stories relating to women around the world, often focusing on the quirky and bizarre, which I would otherwise have missed. I’ve also cut out and tried several recipes from Stylist magazine (Shortlist too used to publish recipes, but stopped for some reason). ‘Work Life: A one-day diary, from morning latte to lights out’, which looks at the typical day of a different career woman each week, from school teachers to paramedics to zookeepers, is a good idea — although it almost always focuses on women in London and the south. I admired Stylist’s election coverage, which looked at each of the main parties’ policies, and how they affect women, in turn, and even hosted a women’s question time.

Furthermore, both magazines, albeit separately, try to address issues affecting men and women, such as depression, bereavement, work life balance, housework and fertility, and sometimes even offer new perspectives on much written about stories — what it’s really like to be raised by a teenage parent, the psychological impact on men of women waiting longer to have children, the mindset of female terrorists and mafia members, and what motivates women to ‘kiss and tell’.

I’ve been reading Shortlist since it started in 2007 (Stylist is a far more recent addition to newsstands which hit the streets just over a year ago), for the simple reason that it has a sense of humour — it makes me laugh. Of the two, I’d say Stylist is the slightly better magazine — not, I’d like to think, because I’m a woman, but it has more consistently substantial, varied content than Shortlist which, as the name suggests, is full of lists of trivia aimed at a short attention span. Stylist has some good features, from a recent article about women graffiti artists to reports on the oppression of women around the world and pieces on serial killers and prostitution. The main criticism I’d make of both magazines is their homogeneity — the people and lifestyles shown within their pages are rarely anything other than white, affluent and heterosexual.

I don’t understand why, instead of patronising us with sexist, outdated notions of male and female interests, such as ‘a generation of women obsessed with shoes’, Shortlist Media can’t just produce one super magazine that will appeal to everyone, combining the intelligent, interesting, feature length articles and topical news stories of Stylist with the humour and factoids of Shortlist. I, for one, would definitely read it.

www.stylist.co.uk
www.shortlist.com

You might also enjoy my friend Olivia Singer's article about Stylist magazine and feminism.

$100 & A T-Shirt — A Documentary about Zines in the Northwest US

A few years ago, a documentary was made about the Portland Zine Symposium, which takes place in Portland, Oregon, every year. As well as showing footage of the event, including a seminar conducted by Calvin Johnson, the film compiles interviews with zine makers from the city’s Independent Publishing Resource Centre, covering such fundamental questions as ‘What is a zine’, and concluding ‘zines are a visual medium — we should try our hardest to make them look good’, ‘Who makes zines’ (’99% of us are all nerds’), ‘Why make zines’ — not to make profit, but to have fun, educate and ‘alter people‘s perceptions', ‘How do you make zines?’ — something to have in the back of your mind is that ‘everything needs to be a multiple of four’, ‘Where have zines taken us and what’s next’ and, perhaps most importantly of all, ‘Why do people spend all their time in front of Xerox machines?’.

It’s a thorough introduction to zines, suggesting their spirit goes as far back as Martin Luther nailing his words to a church door, and can be identified in publications as diverse as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, publications from the Labor movement, satirical magazine the Realist, the poetry anthologies of the Beats, and the punk and Riot Grrrl movements, when women made zines in their ‘hundreds and hundreds’.

The interviewees leaf through a zine library, picking out their favourite zines — or the strangest, which range from the niche — zines about collecting shoes and a publication about substitute teachers — to the practical — from a pamphlet dedicated to fonts to feminist zines offering advice on rape, sexual assault, the law, where to go for abortion advice and insight into mental health problems — and the downright grotesque — a zine about ‘the use of bodily fluids for revenge’.

There’s a strong community element, with zine makers sending zines all over in the post and receiving detailed critiques in return. The documentary’s charm is the enthusiasm everyone shows towards what they do, with one participant describing it as a ‘co-dependent relationship I couldn't break up even if I wanted to’ and others concurring ‘You have to find a way to produce it no matter what it takes’ because if you didn’t ‘you’d be standing yelling on street corners’.

Newspapers on Film — visiting the North West Film Archive

I first became interested in films about newspapers after discovering Wakefield Express by the Free Cinema director Lindsay Anderson, a portrait of the town’s newspaper commissioned to mark the paper’s centenary in 1952, which places the Express at the heart of the Yorkshire community it serves. Lasting just over thirty minutes, it’s a snapshot of Wakefield life, and the city’s expansion, which the Express was there to record at every moment — as the narrator notes, ‘the Express has grown with Wakefield’. It was rescreened in the town last year during protests against the Wakefield Express leaving its town centre offices and moving to the outskirts of town.

Similarly, films in the North West Film Archive document Manchester’s history as the ‘second city of newspapers’, where both northern editions of the daily national papers were produced, as well as Greater Manchester's own regional daily paper the Manchester Evening News.

News Story is a twenty minute behind the scenes portrait of the Manchester Guardian made in 1960, four years before it moved to London (and a year after it dropped the ‘Manchester' part of its name), which traces the history of the paper from its foundation in 1821 following the Peterloo Massacre to its status as an international paper.

The NWFA also holds two documentaries about the Manchester Evening News (like the Wakefield Express, the Evening News, too, has now moved out of town — from Deansgate in the city centre to Chadderton, Oldham earlier this year): Here is the News, made to mark the paper’s centenary year in 1968 and The Voice of a Region, from 1970-2, which celebrate the Evening News’ role as ‘an important voice for a famous city’ and ‘a strong heart for the community it serves’.

Lingering on the city’s achievements and admiring its new modernist architecture, they’re modern and optimistic, talking admiringly of Manchester’s abundance of supermarkets and self-service stores, panning past glamorous shop fronts, showing celebrities such as George Best and exalting the young people of the city. In Here is the News, bright yellow Ford vans glide around the city's roads to a soundtrack of jaunty jazz, distributing newspapers like rolled up rays of sunshine.

Shown being read in a suburban home by members of the nuclear family, the Manchester Evening News is ‘the family newspaper that is indeed a member of the family’. It’s a ‘pleasure at the end of the working day’ that's ‘read by all types of people — men and women, young and old, rich and poor’, and is ‘full of the sorts of things that everyone is interested in’, from the stock market, football, dogs and horses to fashion pages, recipes and hints for housewives and nightclubs, cinemas and jobs for young people.

The films rush around the different departments that work towards the ‘daily miracle’ that is the production of a newspaper; from crime reporters at the scene of the crime to clattering typewriters with hands dancing over the keys, splashing chemicals in the darkroom, pipe-smoking men in waistcoats, girls chattering on telesales headsets, the sawing of metal plates and the rolling of printing presses that could turn out up to 38,000 papers an hour.

The Voice of a Region visits the Evening News’ then new premises, purpose-built by the architects Leach Rhodes Walker next to John Rylands Library on Deansgate (where Spinningfields is now), praising the ‘striking modern building’ surrounded by courtyards and squares where the public can relax, ‘soothed by the sight of flowers’. It concludes ‘as the city continues to grow, so will the newspaper’.

Unfortunately, though, within decades the old ways of newspaper production were becoming obsolete. In complete contrast to the confidence of the Evening News films, The Way It Was comprises of grainy, jerky footage shot in Thomson House (now the Printworks entertainment complex) on Withy Grove, base of the Mirror and Telegraph, which was once home to the largest composing room in Europe.

Filmed shortly before the printworks was taken over by the press baron Robert Maxwell in 1985, maudlin classical music accompanies images of the massive machinery which has come to rest, zooming in on contemporary headlines and hovering over the word ‘redundancies’. Another brief film, New Newspaper Premises, shows old staff who made been made redundant being shown the new computerised facilities which replaced them.

If you're interested in seeing archive footage relating to any aspect of local history, you can search the North West Film Archive's website and make an appointment to go in for a viewing. Also look out for public screenings of highlights from the collection.

Story of the Salford Star

A few years back, you might have seen copies of free community magazine the Salford Star, a snapshot of life in Salford that was searching, biting, sometimes funny, often celebratory and always readable and well-written. It featured everything from investigative reporting — showing the other side of local ‘success’ stories such as the Lowry, Mediacity and Urban Splash regeneration — to chats with councillors, gig reviews and interviews with local musicians and artists — the role, in fact, you would expect a local newspaper to fulfil. The Salford Star, though, was launched as an independent project, written and produced by Salfordians for Salfordians, with up to 100 members of the local community involved, from a pool of writers and photographers to graphic designers in bedrooms all over Salford, and families distributing it around the city streets door-to-door.

Unfortunately, the chances are you've never got your hands on the Salford Star. Since starting in 2006, the Salford Star produced nine highly regarded print copies — the magazine was even runner up in the prestigious nationwide Paul Foot Award for Campaigning Journalism in 2007 — before it was forced online in 2008, due to a difficulty attracting advertising and what could be seen as unfair competition from Salford City Council’s own expensive to produce, self-congratulatory magazine Life In Salford which is distributed around the city’s households. The situation has resulted in a long and frustrating struggle for funding, with requests for public funding repeatedly being denied by council committees.

At a talk at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford during the summer, Salford Star editor Stephen Kingston set the scene, describing the backdrop against which the Salford Star started and the motivation behind it: “Salford is one of the most deprived areas in the country. The Salford Star didn’t come about by people sitting in garrets thinking let’s make a nice community magazine. We spent six months researching what our communities wanted and needed.”

Kingston and the other volunteers chose tell the stories of the city because if they didn’t, no one else would. Kingston has to fit it around working in schools and driving a mobile library: “I was up at 4am this morning investigating swimming and taxi ranks. It’s a full time job investigating what’s going on. We‘re not saying it's right or wrong, we‘re investigating it objectively - who else is there to investigate it?”

At a time when the newspaper industry has been struggling, with local newspapers across the country being forced to make redundancies, or in some cases even close down altogether, the Salford Star plugs an important gap in being able to look at stories in depth and perform vital functions such as holding the local council to account, which includes frequently making Freedom of Information requests and looking at where public money goes.

“Without independent media, there is no democracy. There is no investigative journalism even in the nationals anymore because of the cost of reporting it,” Kingston explained.

“The Salford Advertiser has five reporters and the MEN has one reporter covering Salford — they have no time. Why are there so many police stories in the Salford Advertiser/MEN? They’re written for you, they come with video and a photo. They’re there for you. It’s cheap and easy journalism.”

The Salford Star quickly became a political hot potato (“Those that supported us took copies under the desk with a wink. If we put it in the civic centre then 10 minutes later it would be in the bin — but they don’t tell you they won’t take it.”), with the Council denouncing it as biased, although Kingston insists it is non-political: “They can’t find evidence of us being political or unbalanced. We’re not anti the council. We gave John Merry [Salford Council leader] seven pages — we don’t wave flags saying burn the town hall down, we use it as a bridge. We have no axe to grind. We’re not anti Labour. Whoever was in power we would investigate and print anything we find.”

The Salford Star also shows off positive aspects of life in Salford. Kingston claims: “2/3 of it is positive. We have positive stories — actors, dancers, singers, local artists, football teams.”

He continues, “We give people a voice to tell their stories. The Salford Star gets phoned up at least once, twice, five times a day by people wanting to get their stories told.”

The Salford Star was free, as a cover price could exclude people. Thousands of people a month read the Salford Star now it’s online, from as far afield as London, Australia and Brazil, but Kingston is adamant that ‘it has to be a print copy’. The magazine is currently trying to raise the funds to return to print as “we’re updating practically every day, but 60 per cent of people in Salford don’t have the internet”. Kingston gets lots of encouragement from the people the newspaper serves: “We get supportive letters and we’ve had donations in 5 and 10ps.”

Kingston undertook research in the WCML for inspiration for the Salford Star, linking the magazine to a long tradition of radical publications: “There is a history dating back 300 years of communities trying to tell the truth. We ransacked past community magazines — the Northern Star, the Tameside Eye, Rochdale Alternative Press — every little town had one.”

“People have always tried to stop magazines, criticising them and stopping people from having a choice. In 1712, a tax on newspapers was introduced. In 1815, there was a 4p tax on 2p newspapers. In 1818, the editor of the Manchester Observer was jailed, as was the editor of the Northern Star and Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican.”

The Salford Star editor may not have been sent to jail, but according to Kingston, censorship is still alive and well, working in far more subtle ways: “Censorship is national and international. In Mexico and Columbia they blow up the offices of investigative journalists. In Britain they do it with your wallet. Salford has a regeneration economy. There is no business in Salford — it’s dead. The only businesses we have can’t afford to advertise. Our potential advertisers would be the Lowry, PCTs, fire and police services, but we’re saying things they don’t want to hear. Any application for funding we make just gets ripped up.”

“Salford has nothing. It’s so hard to do anything in Salford as it’s so spread out. That’s why we need the Salford Star.”

To make a donation towards the future of the Salford Star, or to read the magazine online, visit www.salfordstar.com.

The Salford Star also offers journalism training. Email skingston@salfordstar.com for more information.

The Shrieking Violet upcoming media special

Some time in the (hopefully near) future, there will be a media special of the Shrieking Violet fanzine. I have long been interested in Manchester's history as an alternative Fleet Street, producing northern editions of the daily newspapers, and the way the buildings of the old newspaper industry still shape the city, from the iconic Daily Express Building on Great Ancoats Street to the Printworks, formerly Withy Grove printing press. The Guardian famously started in Manchester as the Manchester Guardian, and the city also has a history of radical and alternative publications and journals, from socialist journal the Clarion to the Co-operative Women's Guild magazine Women's Outlook.

I would also like to cover good independent, alternative publications today and ask the question why do people still think it is important to produce print publications when it is so easy to publish online in an instant?

Although the Guardian Women's pages started in Manchester, something else I am interested in is whether, in the 21st century, these is still a role for specifically gendered 'men's' and 'women's' magazines, with particular focus on the slightly troubling Shortlist and Stylist magazines which are distributed for free in the city centre.

I have to admit I am feeling quite overwhelmed and have been suffering from writer's/mental block (for this reason, rather than writing anything I have been spending my time trying unsuccessfully to recreate the Daily Express building in lino cut form for inspiration). Therefore, if anyone would like to help me out or make any suggestions, please email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com.