Savage Messiah

One of the most striking fanzines of recent years is Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah, focussing on the politics, psychology and pop- cultural past of a different London postcode. Ford's prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought. Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography. Ford-or a version of her, at least-is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis. The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest. Sukhdev Sandhu New Statesman