'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

Walkabout

these cartographies bleed biographies

Sukhdev Sandhu, Night Haunts (2007)

Over ancient slabs

in the portico...[1]

snail-SNAILpaced via

St.Magnus Martyr;

up Fish Street Hill

to see Cibber’s[2] bas relievo

As promised, Davis rolls out the opposite polarity to Planet of Slums: the inverted slum or gated Emirate.  His description bristles with empirical insight, but the rhetorical antithesis between the 'global slum' (analysed from an 'objective' distance) and gilded/fortified hyperluxury (apparently experienced firsthand) remains problematic, especially as Davis is admirably insistent on the antislum's dependence on cheap indentured labour inside it. 

Speaks for itself, in devastating earnest

Join the London Riot Re-enactment Society now!
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The London Riot Re-enactment Society will stage re-enactments of noted riots from London's history, with some attempt at historical accuracy. You are no doubt aware of the widespread popularity of historical re-enactment societies, you may also be aware of moves to re-enact more recent events in history. The London Riot Re-enactment Society was inspired by the idea that we can re-enact not the distant past, but events that we remember and may actually have taken part in. We have chosen define our re-enactment society not by choosing a period of time, but by choosing a theme. We will tap London's rich history of rioting, and make these riots live again, in our re-enactments.

Peter Carty examines two conflicting strategies in contemporary psychogeography and asks whether rules and regulations or radical subjectivity is the way forward

Mikhail Epstein’s essay ‘Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality’ shoehorns the memory of the Russian poet Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990) into a simultaneously deconstructive and annunciatory treatise on mythmaking and historical times - past, present and future. In the process, he tells us more about contemporary myths of subject formation, but who are we to complain?

'I sighed, so deeply that I almost dislocated everything I had'

'I've got squirting glue out of my hands that gets people. I've got lines the come out of my eyes
special eyes that lines come out of and poke people and make a blast.......' short fiction by Matt Fuller

I've got squirting glue out of my hands that gets people. I've got lines the come out of my eyes special eyes that lines come out of and poke people and make a blast. They go red and they've got special things in to do power. I've got special cheeks and eyes and lips and teeth and mouth and hair. I've got a mask that has got scary eyes and has things in it. Lots of things and sweets crawling things. I've got a belt. My hands and feet are sticky and I can climb up buildings and get people. I can squirt glue that swings like a rope and ties people up. My feet are full of power and grow giant. I can fly like an aeroplane and squirt string that tastes like chocolate onto a special house that has writing on it. Inside there is treasure and sweets and chocolate.

A mixed crowd of heavy-coated academics and younger and hipper things assembled to hear psychogeographic shaman Iain Sinclair hold forth.

Senate House in the rain, a Friday night in January: floodlit and looming. A mixed crowd of heavy-coated academics and younger and hipper things is here to hear Iain Sinclair give this year's George Orwell lecture, on 'Houses of Memory and London's Orbital Motorway.'

Following the lukewarm reception that met his latest novel Landor's Tower, the M25 project is awaited with mixed feelings. Sinclair has 'done' London so effectively in the last decade, infecting the culture and sowing seeds that have sprouted in everything from the current Johnny Depp movie (From Hell) to Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, that it is hard to know what is left. And what's he doing here, in the halls of academe?

Mike Sperlinger retrieves a gem from London's Pandemonium Festival, Rainer Komers short film B224

Rumour has it that German filmmaker Rainer Komers came away from the Pandæmonium Festival 2001, held at the Lux Centre in London, promising to make his next project on video. Certainly his film B224, shot on ravishing 35mm, looked classical – almost anachronistic, even – in the context of Pandæmonium’s combustible mix of ‘daft punk cinema’. Composed mostly of static shots, with no voice-over or music but with an exquisite attention to the recording of ambient sound, the film juxtaposes scenery, industry and people discovered along the eponymous autobahn near Frankfurt.