BLOGDIAL : We are the best

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Aphex Twin has just bought that strange silver building
in the middle of the Elephant & Castle roundabout.
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http://www.R107.co.uk/~aediaed/

So many mission statements, manifestos and ideals are nothing but prosaic, vacuous rhetoric. Whether it is for or against a supposed higher moral ground, there is always a discrimination; a set of entry requirements to join this radical new elite, this revolutionary new clique, with nothing to offer except shallow polemic. The movements rotate in cycles, and soon we are back to what we were fighting against last week: undermining the (anti) bourgeois; the (anti) commercial perfection; or whatever else seems wrong with the world this week. Elites form, not from perfection in corporate eyes, nor through nepotism, but through the movements that oppose, subvert and criticise. We will try to avoid such tripe/hype.

æ›i æ› will undermine the underminers. We should embrace De Certeua’s “art of being in between” as Naomi Klien so rightfully pointed out. We are neither right nor wrong; left nor right; today’s neo clique nor anarchist; and yet we are all those things individually. We need a force of conflicting opinions to learn through the eyes of our opponents, for they see the wrong in our perfect light.

No bosses. No guidelines. No deadlines. No by-lines.

Issues, heartbreak, passion, inspiration, anger and hope that are important in our lives; the lives of the "in betweeners" – the kids who slip through the cracks of left and right, of global and local, of anti and pro, of speak out and shut up, of intelligent or ignorant, of know all and know nothing.

We are the in-between. We have the chance to seek solace in the middle ground, a place where the elites of intellectual and dumb cluck cannot rest their heavy souls. We are not a revolution, yet word is rotation of so many things: of inspiration; leading and miss-leadings; get up and go or stay in bed; can’t sit down, can’t stand up; want to die, want to live; want to be something I’m not, want to learn who I am; want the world to know and want to hide from the day.

Hopefully this lack of ineffectual writing will be plea in itself to urge journalists and writers world-over to get in touch before we put our verbal diarrhoea, spelling mistakes and non-factual facts to print.

æ›i æ› will present itself in 10” folded form. Distribution details to be confirmed shortly. Please note that no money will be made from this project, so if you are after the cash-carrot go to Sleazenation – oh, they don’t pay either. We are relying heavily on shameless advertising for businesses of the most needy kind (i.e. who we think are worthy), and personal loans. There will be no reviews, no interviews. This isn’t about music or film, neither is it some lame lifestyle mag marketed and driven by a multimedia conglomerate, aimed at narrow demographic that was invented in a boardroom. If you really feel the need to write about your favourite band, then ask them to write for themselves. Fiction or non-fiction. Politics or prose. Try doing something different, something you wouldn’t normally write, or at least, wouldn’t normally submit for publishing. Anything but normal. Perhaps your deepest, darkest thoughts or maybe some verbal doodles; scribbles from your Post-it Notes; illiterate experiments or that piece no one else wanted; too weird, too intense, too political, too opinionated.

Having said that, if there is some creative force out there, from any discipline; unknown and undiscovered, something fresh, something the world simply needs to know about, then feel free to write about it in the form of innovative interviews or informative introductions. We will, most probably, accept anything, as long as it’s good.

From a few words to an essay, all stories, muses and rants should be emailed to the address at the bottom of this page. If you want answers to any of the information we avoided to discuss in this word-splurge, then you know what to do.

email: aediaed@R107.co.uk