Thursday 19 October 2023

Teeny's Zineys!

Below is a list of the current zines that are available. Just click on the link to take you to further information:

How to write a...MANIFESTO!

A research-based guide on how to write a manifesto, including historical and contemporary examples. More info...

What I Love About....CATS!

A zine about the complete and utter loveliness of cats. More info...

Hunstanton: Wish You Were Here!

A psychogeography of this North Norfolk seaside town. This is a limited edition run of 25 zines. More info...

What I Love About....WORDS!

A zine about...yes, words! Not language or speech or books, although about all those things, too. More info coming soon...

How to write a . . . MANIFESTO!

 

This is the latest zine from the Aca-Zine series, which is designed to introduce academic thought and analysis, in an accessible way, to anyone interested in the subject matter of the zine.

The zine is A5 size, has 11 black and white pages, which includes text and images. The cover is coloured card (colour not specified). Below is further information on the author.


This zine does what it says. Based on the research and analysis of two famous and historical manifestos, and providing a contemporary example created by the author, it will show you how to create your own manifesto on whatever subject. Here is the contents page:


This zine is £3.50 plus postage, which in the UK is standard letter (please inquire for international postage). Thank you.

Please note: this is a hand produced zine and, by definition, consequently has its imperfections.

Sunday 15 October 2023

Hunstanton: Wish You Were Here!


My latest zine is out. It's a psychogeography of the seaside town Hunstanton, in Norfolk. Here's the text from the prologue: 
I know this is a cliché, but this booklet is a kind of love letter to Hunstanton: one that is deeply influenced by both my childhood (being a progeny of King’s Lynn) and the nostalgia of my late teens and early twenties, when me and my peer group used to socialise here. This is way before Hunstanton became the ‘posh’ seaside town it now is. This text is both a celebration and lament. How can it be both, you may well ask. I left King’s Lynn, for London, in 1987 and I returned to Hunstanton in 2022 due to an unexpected change in my personal circumstances. This is the story of that journey: from the standpoint of a person whose perspective has changed. Moreover, also the space that is being explored has changed…

 


The A5 zine is in black and white with photos of Hunstanton and other related images. It also includes some academic analysis. The cover is made of yellow card and the zine is photocopied and professionally trimmed and stapled, retailing at £5.50 plus postage (UK is standard letter). The appendix includes a map, a collage and a poem.

Note: This is a Limited Edition run and consists only of a run of 25. At the time of writing (16/10/2023) there are 18 left. No more will be printed when these have all gone.



Tuesday 3 October 2023

What I Love About . . . Cats

 


My new zine is out. It's about - yes, you can see by the title - all the things I love about cats (well not all, as there isn't a book big enough for that!).

The A5 zine has 13 black and white pages of text with photos of cats, some of whom I know in person! It also includes researched facts and figures about cats. The cover is made of coloured card (colour not specified) and the zine is hand trimmed and stapled. Please note: this is a hand produced zine and, by definition, consequently has its imperfections.

The zine retails at £3.50 plus postage. Here is some further information on the zine:










Tuesday 29 August 2023


Schizocartography of a Seaside

The above is a recent 'map' of mine published by Colossive Press. It is for a series entitled 'Colossive Cartographies'. They are foldable maps in an A5 size. Below are some more images of my own version. You can buy it here (current price £2.00).






Sunday 19 February 2023

Walking Inside Out - Introduction



Introduction:A Wander through the Scene of British Urban Walking

by Tina Richardson


WHAT IS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY?

Get a map of your local area and spread it out on the floor. Study the map, imagine the terrain, find your preferred route – perhaps a bridleway or a towpath – and trace it on the map. Grab your coat off the hook in the hallway and put on your sturdy shoes. Leave the house and dump the map in the wheelie bin. Forget the map. Go to the nearest bus stop and get on the first bus that comes along. Get off when you feel you are far enough away from home that the area is unfamiliar. Begin your walk here.

Psychogeography does not have to be complicated. Anyone can do it. You do not need a map, Gor-Tex, a rucksack or a companion. All you need is a curious nature and a comfortable pair of shoes. There are no rules to doing psychogeography - this is its beauty. However, it is this that makes it hard to pin down in any formalised way. It is also this ‘unruly’ character (disruptive, unsystematic, random) that makes for much discussion about its meaning and purpose - today more than at any other time.

This volume does not pretend to have a definitive answer to what psychogeography is, but it does propose to open up the space that can be defined as psychogeography, providing examples and encouraging debate. In his introduction to Psychogeography (2006) Merlin Coverley asks: “Are we talking about a predominantly literary movement or a political strategy, a series of new age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices?” and goes on to say that it is all the above (2006, 9-10). In just a couple of sentences we have opened up a can of nebulous worms on the ambulatory behemoth that psychogeography (or urban walking) is. What this selected volume of essays does is present the state of play as it is for psychogeography in the UK in the 21st century...

Click here to download a pdf of the introduction.


Sunday 9 October 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd

Hello Folks,

I have contributed a chapter in this new book on Pink Floyd. I have included a book overview below, beneath that are a few paragraphs introducing my own chapter. You can find full details of the book here.

Thanks, Tina

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd, edited by Chris Hart and Simon Morrison, is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to the critical study and interpretation of one of the world’s most important and successful bands. For the first time, this Handbook will ‘tear down the wall,’ examining the band’s collective artistic creations and the influence of social, technological, commercial and political environments over several decades on their work. Divided into five parts, the book provides a thoroughly contextualised overview of the musical works of Pink Floyd, including coverage of performance and sound; media, reception and fandom; genre; periods of Pink Floyd’s work; and aesthetics and subjectivity. Drawing on art, design, performance, culture and counterculture, emergent theoretical resources and analytical frames are evaluated and discussed from across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. The Handbook is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals. It will appeal across a range of related subjects from music production to cultural studies and media/communication studies.

Chapter 20: Hey You! Subjectivity and the Ideological Repressive State Apparatuses in Pink Floyd’s The Wall by Tina Richardson

Pink Floyd’s long musical history (spanning two decades at its peak) had always reflected the cultural zeitgeist, even at a time when it was at odds with other musical movements of the day, as was the case in the late 1970s with the advent of punk rock. While it is often reported that punk heralded the demise of progressive (or psychedelic) rock – “Never trust a fuckin’ hippie” Johnny Rotten if often wrongly claimed to have said – Pink Floyd’s single from The Wall, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, was no.1 for five weeks in 1979 (UK music charts). Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) followed, and Pink Floyd entered film history.

Parker’s film, which responded directly to Roger Water’s lyrics, presents us with the protagonist Pink, a rock star who is at odds with his position as a revered musician: he is both a victim of the system of music production and a fascist proponent of it. Early in the film, we see him in his hotel room, barely conscious, waiting for the gig to start. Pink (played by Bob Geldof) looks both physically ill and mentally exhausted (and psychologically removed from the hotel room he occupies). His agent, and the doctor employed by him, inject him back to consciousness – ‘Just a little pinprick’ – so that he can perform for the audience. Within a short space of time, Pink is on stage in a Nazi-style rally as he sings the lyrics to ‘In the Flesh’, asking the audience “So ya… Thought ya… Might like to… Go to the show.” It is this relationship with the audience – one in which he hides from them, but also presents himself to them as if he was their leader – that creates cognitive dissonance in him.

In his book Which One’s Pink? Phil Rose (2002) acknowledges the cultural moment, as it was for rock audiences in the 1970s. He describes an early scene where we see Pink’s reaction to his fans, “As the emergency doors break open at the concert venue, crowds of frantic people are seen running down an empty corridor. In his imagination Pink superimposes on this scene the trampling feet and screaming faces of battle”. It seems, for Pink, that if he must deal with his fans, it will be from the position of someone who is at war. A war that appears externalised for Pink, is really internal and existential.

We see many images of Pink sitting in a chair, alone in his hotel room, holding a cigarette which is turning to ash. This dialectic – the ‘marauding hordes’ (of music fandom, of battle, of collective violence) versus the ‘estranged loner’ – sets up the story of Pink’s life (and along with that a multiplicity of contradictions) as it unfolds in the narrative presented to us through the album and film. At the same time, it creates for the cultural theorist another position open to interpretation, that of the structures of socio-political, cultural space and power, as they pertain to their influence on the individual (in Pink’s case, as they are imposed upon the individual). Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to set up these oppositions in too binary a way, since by using phrases like ‘social structure versus the individual’, we imply that these phenomena sit in clearly delineated camps. The very structures of society that are so prominent in The Wall – the army, the family, education, the media, the judiciary - are what creates the subject in the first place. The subject, which for Louis Althusser, is never an individual: the subject is always the subject of the ideology of societal structures.

This chapter examines the narrative of Pink’s existential anguish as it pertains to the ideological and repressive structures that surround him. By using Althusser’s theory, as defined in ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, I will discuss how these structures have the simultaneous effect of forming Pink as a subject, yet overwhelming him to the extent that his psyche is fractured and all that is left for him to do is to create a wall to protect himself from the outside world. It is the closing scene ‘The Trial’ that will be analysed to explore the compromise the subject has to make regarding their own position within these structures of power. Following this, the chapter also examines Pink’s existential crisis in the context of the symbolism of the wall. But, firstly, we need to examine Althusser’s concept of the ‘subject’ in some more depth...