Posters
A fun day last week in the Free Hetherington with Samara, Kirsty and Stephen. We drew about thirty posters for our pending zine and indie press fair. Here are my four favourites:
The zine fair takes place from 3pm on Thursday 2nd June. Come along if you’re in the area.
Mind Your Business
I have a useful essay in the upcoming Idler 44: Mind Your Business. My piece is called ‘The Business of Escape’ and pulls together some of the economic and entrepreneurial ideas covered in New Escapologist 1-5 and learned through my own experience of being professionally on the lam.
As is now traditional (after three years in its current format) the new Idler edition looks utterly stunning with its fine typography and hardback cloth binding. My essay is in good company too, sitting alongside works from Penny Rimbaud and Bill Drummond et al. The Idler is an astonishing annual event. Copies now available to pre-order at their shop.
Eventful
A resounding “thanks!” to everyone who came along to last night’s Issue 5 launch event, and special thanks to Liz and Maria at The Arches for kindly hosting us.
New Escapologist Issue 5 launch event tomorrow
Just a quick reminder that there’s a New Escapologist gathering in Glasgow tomorrow. If you fancy coming along, we’ll be at The Arches (beneath Central Station) between 6pm and 9pm.
All are welcome. Bring friends. Meet the creative team behind the magazine, mingle with other readers and buy a copy of the mag. Free entry, naturally.
“Foppish, irresponsible, and very needed” – Pat Kane, ThoughtLand
“Excellent publications which deserve a wide readership” – Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler
New Escapologist newsletter #3
Dearest Readers,
Welcome to our third newsletter. Among other things, we’d like to tell you about our new issue and invite you to celebrate its launch at The Arches bar in Glasgow.
1. Issue Five available now.
Our fifth print edition is now available. It’s a truly splendid issue featuring Alain de Botton on status anxiety; Dickon Edwards on Quentin Crisp and the Bohemian bedsit; Reggie C. King on Erik Satie; Chris Miller on Emperor Norton; Neil Scott on beards; and plenty more. A new cover format and some elegant illustrations from talented artists like Jason Botkin and Philip Dearest (all curated by Samara Leibner) arguably make it our most beautiful issue to date. At 106 pages, it is at least our heftiest. Subscriber copies and pre-orders will be shipped in the next two days. If you’ve not ordered a copy yet, you
can do so from the shop.
2. Issue Five launch event in Glasgow, Scotland.
New Escapologist comes home to celebrate the most recent addition to the Escapological library.
The launch event will be held on 10TH MAY 2011 at The Arches in Glasgow. All are welcome. Bring friends. Meet the creative team behind the magazine, mingle with other readers and buy a copy of the mag. Free entry, naturally.
3. What the readers say about Issue 5.
“After I read it I wanted to scream their name from the rooftops. NEW ESCAPOLOGIST! It’s a magazine so good that I immediately went to their website, ordered every issue they’ve ever published AND subscribed.” – Nicolette, Mainz, Germany.
Upon buying a second copy: “Although I’ve already ordered an issue 5 previously, I loved it so much I’m giving it to a friend.” – Mark, Leicester, UK.
“The presentation is quite beautiful. I was expecting a magazine, but this is more of a collector’s item.” – Heather, Glasgow, UK.
“It kept making me laugh out loud while waiting in the doctor’s office.” – Gwen, Birmingham, UK.
4. Reader Survey.
The eternally-open New Escapologist reader survey is a gigantic ear, waiting to receive your opinions. New readers are thanked for completing the questionnaire.
5. New Escapologist online.
As ever, you can freely subscribe to our blog by RSS.
You can also follow us on Twitter (@NewEscapologist) and there’s a Facebook group now too. Blimey, what have we become?
6. Rob Westwood’s eBook.
Our handsome friend Rob has released an eBook called ‘Simplify’ on the subject of minimalism. It is for sale through iBooks and other channels, but Lulu are offering a 10% discount.
7. Issue Six.
The theme of the forthcoming issue is evolution; and will be titled À rebours after the inspiring and hilarious French novel by J.K. Huysmans. We’re aiming for an August release.
8. New friends
The Wivenhoe bookshop in Essex are our latest stockist. They are a remarkable bookshop. Pop along if you’re in the area.
Thank you again for reading. Enjoy Issue Five.
Robert Wringham
Editor, New Escapologist
www.newescapologist.co.uk
Collars: a guide
White-collar: the sector concerned with semi-professional, administrative, or sales coordination tasks and endless games of computer solitaire. Employment in this sector leads principally to debt, early rises and the pinning of hopes upon the national lottery.
Blue-collar: the sector concerned with manual labor. Though there are many noble circumstances for this flavour of work, it all too often comes down to sustaining two Capitalist continents of ungrateful and over-privileged skittles who can’t be successfully encouraged not to overfill a kettle.
Green-collar: the brave sector charged with delaying the oncoming environmental collapse.
At last! New Escapologist‘s contributions to the collar-based taxonomic system:
Orange-collar: unpaid interns and reluctant volunteers. The term derives from the satsuma-orange shirt I wore for the duration of my school work experience.
Detachable collar: the sector of society concerned with ‘detaching’ themselves from every flavour of grunt work and career ladder available. It also refers to the extremely practical, eminently stylish, decadent and bafflingly out-of-vogue detachable shirt collar. This is the kind of collar-work for readers of New Escapologist and possibly those of The Chap.
Self-Employed
Here’s a nice quote from comedian Simon Munnery. I found it in a copy of a Glasgow listings magazine, which itself I found in a bin:
Job? No thank you. I am self-employed and proud to be so. I come from a long line of self-employed people. We can trace our family tree all the way back to the family tree, and not one of us has ever been employed by, or employed, anyone other than ourselves. And my wife is self-employed too; I employ her on a self-employed basis. Not for us the numbing comfort of the regular wage, the possibility of a mortgage and tacit acceptance by mundane society. Ours is the ever-bracing wind of the free market, the exciting scrabble for patches of work, and the constant thieving.
A gorilla review
One of our minty-fresh readers blogs some nice comments:
And then I found The New Escapologist. The New Escapologist! I read their blog and I ordered an issue of their magazine. That issue came in the mail, and after I read it I wanted to scream their name from the rooftops. THE NEW ESCAPOLOGIST! It’s a magazine so good that I immediately went to their website, ordered every issue they’ve ever published AND subscribed. I may not agree with every article (this month’s issue is about Bohemians, with whom I have my qualms), but every article is brilliantly written. That’s right, BRILLIANTLY. Intelligent writing, humor, and articles covering everything from beards to Bohemian escapology? Please excuse me while I retire to the powder room for a cold shower.
Get your own copy of Issue 5 at the shop.
The last piece of chocolate in the universe
I spotted a diet book recently called Mindful Eating, Mindful Life. It’s message is to maximise mindfulness while eating: to savour one’s food absolutely rather than gorging upon too-big quantities. The stomach needs time to register fullness, and so slower eating reduces overall consumption and prevents obesity. Slower eating is also a parable for general mindfulness: surely the key to enjoying life while it’s actually happening.
Practicing this kind of restraint is a good idea, I reckon, but one I’ve been practicing for ages. I sometimes play a game called “the last piece of chocolate in the universe”.
If I have a piece of chocolate, I sometimes imagine that I’m the last human alive, floating through space in an escape pod after the destruction of the Earth and last manned space station. I have limited food supplies and, in particular, I am down to the last piece of chocolate. Given that I’m the last human being alive, that I’m surely going to suffocate or starve in a matter of days, that the Earth is destroyed, and that the means of chocolate production will never be reestablished, this is probably the last piece of chocolate in the whole universe. I must savour it.
And so, in the real world, I eat my chocolate, tiny piece by tiny piece, and savouring every last morsel.
I truly have been doing this forever. I don’t know how it got started. I have a childhood memory of being in a long-distance car ride with my family. My mum had brought a sack of chocolate-coated raisins along for the journey. I played ‘the last chocolate coated raisin’ game and made a single raisin last for about five minutes. “Okay, I think you’ve had those for long enough”, said my mum from the back seat and took the raisins back. I protested and said that I’d not even finished my first raisin yet, but she wouldn’t believe me.
So I’ve been savouring for ages. In fact, I am practically a skeleton, so it must work.
Try it this Easter, egg lovers. See if you can make a single chocolate egg last until next Good Friday. (Actually, that’s a bit extreme. Just see if you can make one last the weekend).
Reggie’s smelly drawers
One of our lovely contributing editors, Mr. Reggie Chamblerlain-King, is releasing some additional Bohemian content onto his blog.
We were originally going to publish these pieces in Issue 5 of the magazine but – in our longest issue to date – something had to give.
These bonus pieces concern Bohemian-themed musical numbers. If this floats your boat, keep an eye on Reggie’s site for updates.
