King Mob Echo

In 'The King Mob Echo' Tom Vague (earlier) has brought together a collection of newsletters and magazines originally published between 1966 and 1970 by King Mob. King Mob was a London Based group whose members were at some point members of the Situationist International (Christopher Gray, excluded in December 1967 and Charles Radcliffe, resigned in November 1967, also see this). Gray is best known as the editor of the Situationist anthology 'Leaving the 20th Century'. There is no foreword and no explanation, I think Vague has typed it all out and published it in the same lay-out style he always uses. There are a few reprints of texts from the Situationists, the Provo's, the Motherfuckers and the Dadaists but most of the material here was written by Gray and Radcliffe. I have this book for three weeks now and I pick it up, look at it, look through it, reads bits from it, recognize it as a wonderful archival artefact, but I can't push myself to really read it: apart from the eyewitness accounts of Provo Amsterdam by Radcliffe it is all righteous hardline political posture, revolutionary purism and Dada-Leninist missionary zeal. 

 

London Psychogeography with Tom Vague

The cheap thrills of Ebay!

Tom Vague's 'Rachman Riots and Rillington Place', an episodic treatment of certain key moment in the recent history of Nothing Hill, is a real page turner even though I had never heard of most of the people discussed (Christie Evans, Rachman, Michael X). They are probably household names to the average Londoner.

On the face of it Vague's treatment of history is conventional to the point of barbaric idiocy: his use of a timeline to structure the narrative can hardly be called sophisticated and his refusal to interpret events or people psychologically or sociologically would be below most hystoriographers. 

Almost all history is written by dinosaurs but Vague is of the 1-2-3-GO! school and the result, raw and elementary, creates a lot of space for your own associations, relevant knowledge and mental garbage to fill the gaps. In the context of psychogeography Vague is moving in the opposite direction of most psychogeo writers. Instead of writing about a spatial entity from the perspective of the individual (place and space presented as malformed after a rollercoaster ride through the maelstrom of the personal madness and deep emotions of a very special person (as, you are aware, all writers (boring fucks) are)). If you read carefully - the last page gives the biggest clue - Vague presents this almost as the autobiography of Nothing Hill with him as the inspired mouthpiece, his own biography mixed with that of the subject. He is the place.