The Shrieking Violet issue 23 and fifth birthday party at Castlefield Gallery, Thursday 14 August

The Shrieking Violet 'zine is five, and will be celebrating with a mini-birthday party at Castlefield Gallery on Thursday August 14 (turn up and drink cocktails, eat cake and look at the current exhibition as part of the gallery's one-off late-night opening) from 6-9.30pm.

North West-based designer and curator Robert Carter, who contributed the cover design, has work on display in Castlefield's current exhibition, I Would Like to Join a Club and Hit Myself With It, until Sunday August 17. The image, by an unknown artist (though possibly a member of La Libre Esthétique, an artistic society formed in 1893 in Belgium), is taken from the periodical Arte et décoration, Volumes 1-2, 1897, encountered whilst undertaking research for the Exhibition Centre for the Life and Abuse of Books' upcoming exhibition Butterworth at the Anthony Burgess Centre (opening on Thursday August 14). Robert has worked with a number of artist-led projects, including Auto Italia South East (London), Malgras|Naudet and Lionel Dobie Project (both Manchester). He was editor of the kuboaa publication from 2011-2012 and is currently co-curating a pilot programme at The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books with Daniel Fogarty and Lauren Velvick. Robert and fellow Manchester artist Monty, who also has work in I Would Like To Join a Club and Hit Myself With It, also contribute 'A structure for standing' (2012), a drawing of a wall structure Robert made for an exhibition that he then got another artist to draw on in situ – a still life of an exhibition.

In the meantime, copies (printed by Marc) are on sale in Piccadilly Records and Cornerhouse bookshop, Manchester, costing £2. Alternatively, download and print a copy here or read online:



Listen online to an interview about the Shrieking Violet's fifth birthday on Fiona Ledgard's Anything Goes breakfast show on Manchester's All FM radio station, broadcast on Thursday August 14 (9am-10.30am), alongside a number of tracks inspired by self-publishing, DIY culture and Shrieking Violet content past and present:

14/08/2014 The Anything Goes Breakfast Show with Natalie Bradbury (Shrieking Violet Fanzine) by Fiona Ledgard // All Fm 96.9 on Mixcloud

In issue 23:

Claire Hignett explores the story of a group of 1930s Basque children in Salford. Claire is an artist interested in the transience and accumulation of memory, using textiles as a means to express the erosion and piecing together of memory and its beautiful fragility. She is particularly intrigued by the way we attach memory to objects, creating souvenirs of our past. Stumbling on the story of the Basque children has sparked an interest in the period between the wars, which she intends to mine for her own creative projects on memory. She earns her living as a community artist and facilitator.

Stephen Marland documents some of the varied former Co-operative premises of Greater Manchester, many of which have found new and diverse uses. Stephen was a van lad, BR goods guard, gardener, taught photography for thirty years and took early retirement in order to explore the world on his bicycle. He also takes pictures. Stephen is interested in almost everything and has recently started a blog dedicated to bus stops in Greater Manchester and beyond.

Adrian Slatcher, who has poetry and fiction in the Rialto, Sculpted: Poetry of the North West and Unthology 4, delves into the secret history of the synthesiser. Adrian blogs at artoffiction.blogspot.com and makes electronic music as Bonbon Experiment.

Artist Jade Montserrat explores art and gender with reference to the recent AGender conference in Leeds. Jade is currently based at Islington Mill, Salford, where she is continuing to research and develop work issuing from a project called 'Josephine and The Rainbow Tribe'. Her practice includes printmaking, books, performance, writing, sculptural objects and installations, which are generated through the merging of opposite processes, both revealing and concealing information.

Rob Jackson, a cartoonist from Bolton, takes a trip to Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rob, whose day job is making and selling home-made ice cream, has also self-published a lot of comics over the years.

Kyle Baddeley-Read, who used to live in Manchester but now lives in Norwich, contributes his latest comic. Kyle spent a few years writing and drawing the absurdist comic saga Silent V, and is now co-editor of the sci-fi anthology RhiZome.

This issue also features poetry by Kenn Taylor, a writer and journalist from Merseyside who now lives in Yorkshire. He has a particular interest in the relationship between community, culture and the urban environment.

Manchester-based filmmaker and musician Richard Howe continues his series on mental health in the movies with 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. Richard is currently co-editing the films ‘Realitease’, and ‘The Were Squirrel’. Tweet him about films @rikurichard and watch short films about a variety of things at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1tCl13aUbRbNSatyCAKNOw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28W8muNaik0.

Steve Connor, co-founder and CEO of Creative Concern, contributes a summer recipe for satay tofu and aubergine skewers. Steve does a lot of writing and brand-related work and helps make campaigns happen for organisations working on sustainability, climate change, regeneration, culture and a whole bunch of other issues, together with a talented team of 20-plus people at Creative Concern and with a host of other gifted people across England and the rest of the world.

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.