Return of the Equi Phallic Alliance!
“Anti-social behavior – the new lycanthropy
The concept of Society had been getting into trouble for some time, then late one evening – as the shadows lengthened across the playing fields – Society vanished on her way home. The police couldn’t find her, neither alive nor dead (but Society had always got on their nerves).
Cheeky though she was, and Society was always answering back, she was never really bad. [...] Society’s body was never found. [...] In her place, goody-goody Community was creeping around the parents and teachers, repeating all of her lessons as if they were true…”
I’m a bad bad correspondent, this came out in July but I’ve only just found it in a pile of mail. The EPA were one of the strangest and strangely compelling of the “groups” haunting the 1990s small press underground. Along with the Neoist Alliance, the London Psychogeographical Association (East London Section) and countless others, they’d disseminate excellent newsletters which would rip a hole in your preconceived notions of space and time – all over breakfast.
Their earliest newsletters concerned themselves with the disappearance of a certain Dr Mintern who was last seen investigating the concept of landscape in the construction known by some as “Wessex”. Mintern had found that the landscape was actually on stilts and had then vanished into the underchalk. His discoveries were used as a way of attacking various poets in “Wessex” who were attempting to shield people from the fact that the landscape was entirely artificial by romanticising it.
The latest issue concerns itself with childhood vs adulthood (which is to my mind the key factor in the current furore about “anti-social behaviour”). Adulthood is seen here as loss. The subject is examined through the prism of the psychogeography of Camberwick Green and its residents’ commitment to “the old ways” of witch burning.
There are some great sideswipes at Gerald Gardner and the “serious” wiccans of The Pagan Federation – although these could actually be read as celebrations by people who don’t take themselves too seriously.
This is the best thing I’ve read in ages and if this review has even slightly interested you, then I would urge you to get hold of your own copy.
Copies of the Listening Voice are available for an SAE from The EPA, 33 Hartington Road, Southampton SO14 0EW. You are strongly recommended to subscribe by sending 6 2nd class stamps to the same address.
Warning — actual pagans need a massive dose of thick skin and humour to get anything out of this. Wiccans even more so.
It really does cross the boundary between satire and feverish, mindless attack and I thought there was a depressing bleakness at the heart of it. It upset me for a day when I read it. Mind you it is Sahmain and there’s a lot on at the moment so I might be somewhat sensitised….
[...] In the mid-90s, before the proliferation of the internet – a lot of people seemed to have access to DTP stuff and photocopying. There was an explosion of zines of all sorts of hues. I gravitated towards a kind of post- situ/neoist/mail art/occulture ultra-left milieu which included things like the Association of Autonomous Astronauts at its more accessible end, and the Equi Phallic and Neoist alliances at the other. I can’t begin to tell you how prolific and energised that scene was. Some of the texts are anthologised in Stewart Home’s Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism (Serpents Tail) , alas without their graphics. [...]
[...] with Croydon, by wandering about ourselves. This is reminiscent of the work done by the Equi Phallic Alliance to undermine notions of “Wessex” generated by reactionary [...]