Whaaat? #1

2008-04-23T17:32:00.021+01:00

Front cover image of Whaaat? #1 is an armed Iraqi woman.
The picture is a couple of years old...
...and we are still staring down the barrel.

JC Greenway's opening polemic, featuring:
George Orwell, our favourite real dragon slayer (or at least dragon-tilter)...
Joe Strummer of The Clash...
The Criminal Justice Act 1994 (not to be confused with the Criminal Justice & Immigration Bill currently being driven through Parliament and unpicked by backlash here)...
The late and lamented and debatably lamentable Raoul Duke...

Page Three Un-lovely.
Words by Allen Ginsberg,
pictures of Lindsay Lohan's exposed buttock from Heat magazine.

Page Four: Words of Hélène Cixous...

The writer of the 'harmony of noise' bit, uncredited in the paper version, regrettably, due to not having the name at time of press, was Phillip Vannini.
The lack of credit may have led to a notion that we were claiming authorship... which I suppose makes the alternate title for page five 'Milli Vannini'.

Food intolerance bit from N.T. Doherty: PG Tips adverts /generation gap, Delia Smith going off on one (again and again), global food crises... anyone fancy a cuppa?

It's the taste...

Pages six and seven were devoted to 1960s radical group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker. We had one reader query the use of the word 'extremists' to describe the group; they observed that this is the kind of language often associated with use as political shorthand by tabloid papers... Setting aside a debate about ownership of potential meanings of words, with the word 'extremist' we were quoting a piece of writing by John McMillian (from a book 'Up against the wall motherfucker!' available in the UK from Active Distribution) throughout the article. The term 'extremist', of course, can be applied to any one who fully lives out ideals - which can be as usefully applied to those who "excel" at sports, science or art ("Physics extremist Stephen Hawking") as it can to "political radicals" or "religious fundamentalists". Depends on your terms of reference, of course.

WAAAR? A number of good banners and sense of community at the "Five Years On And Our Elected Representatives Still Mostly Have Their Fingers In Their Ears And Are Going Lalalalalalala Every Time Someone Mentions Iraq" Anniversary anti-war march. There were a number of non-aligned marchers, one of whose banners is misquoted below: it actually said 'STOP KILLING PEOPLE YOU FUCKING TWATS'. Given the prevalence throughout Whaaat? of the much coarser synonym used instead, it didn't occur to us until later. Still, eh? Better out than in. And there is, still, a fucking war on, incidentally

The two links in the article are:
Holdthemtoaccount.com, which is, alright, a Liberal Democrat site, but they do at least have the political high ground having not voted for the war in the first place. The other is the more radical site Make Peace Reality, whose proponents were haranguing the marchers at length with informative facts about the illegality under international law of paying tax that supports illegal war. More information on matters of financial conscience here.

Page nine...

Contraducktion: The last page was inspired by various collages at the Tate, Paul Krassner, one of a number of sites also fascinated by 1930-1940s propaganda and the fact that actually, Disney was maybe right. The cryogenically-stored fruitcake.

Issue #2... coming soon!