‘The Man’ had the lip-smacking notion that a new magazine could exist –

A screeny magazine happy to tell it as it is. Living the Life in Brighton & Hove. Nothing more, nothing less than that.

It’s just our observations during the normal course of our days, during our dull weeks and during our thrilling months… We may live at home, or with our mates or in a bed-sit all alonesome, but what we have in common is a lust for life; a creative spirit; a respect for our daily bread – yet, we have to confess – a disappointment in The State of things, with how the grown-ups sold us short, with how our Target-Driven teachers didn’t have the time to notice our inquisitive little selves with their heads hidden inside The State Handbook on Education, Education, Education. How they gave us certificates for turning up; A*’s for breathing; Honorary Degrees for being Most Riddled with Life-long Debt; with the mean-spirited, mealy-mouthed attitude towards us by consumer-driven, bloated, corporatised Yes-Men and Press-Men and how they made our own families frightened of us, how they trained the elderly to be suspicious of us, how they made keeping our heads ‘n’ necks warm a Criminal Offence… How they Sold us Short.

Well, this is what we became. And this is what we did.

In the Grand Old Year of 2000 and nine, in a post ‘War on Terror’ climate of mistrust, a cynicism that anybody in Power actually gives a fuck for anyone other than their own Ego, Pocket, Career, when vacuous celebrity overloads our shit-for-brains media and Grown-ups pretend they have our best-interests at heart. Our successive governments have massaged the statistics to suit their dick-dastardly plans; bankers are wankers, big-business sell souls for a profit; idiot mothers feed their babies hydrogenated fat, sugar and salt and swindle their own flesh and blood of their innocence by creating thick, mini-me consumers. Our neighbours are ready to lynch us for swearing, for smoking in public or for not recycling properly, the Mob chase guarded vans to Court Houses hoping to rip an innocent-’til-proven-guilty Human to shreds for the grisly crime of being Human.

We know that smoking’s not good for us, but we know that dumping toxic waste in our oceans is worse. We know that breast-feeding’s good for babies, but we don’t understand why maternity wards take the dirty pound of  formula milk conglomerates. We know that smoking weed is illegal, but we enjoy the shared meandering intellectual discussions and the hilarious, innocent fun! We sure as fuck know that giving Credit to Poor People’s a crime, that pretending there’s an evil middle-eastern Terrorist riddled with Bird-flu, Swine-flu, SARS, foot’n’mouth and a flesh-eating bug hiding behind our garden shed – oh, and then bombing the Foreign Land of Far Off Peasant-ville because some self-important TWAT thinks it’ll distract us from asking any questions about how they’ve mis-managed, sold short and fucked up our Past, Present and Future…

And when we tell our fellow man our civil liberties are being eroded– they blink slowly and tell us the age-old lie:

“If you don’t do anything wrong, then you ain’t got nuthin’ to be worried about, have you?”

Well, SMACK THAT. We’re gonna swear because we can and it’s not fucking illegal. We gonna live our lives, read our books, listen to our tunes, walk tall and walk free. The Creative Spirit is alive and well. We’re gonna produce a screen-based magazine that tells it as we see it. If you don’t like it, don’t read it you Nazi-fucking book-burner. We will not resort to the sycophantic, dishonest blurbfest-nepitism of publishers with their snouts in the advertising trough. If we think something’s shit we’ll say so. If we think it’s great, it’s because it is – not because THE MAN told us to say so.

That’s the manifesto. According to the Editor: and he is The Man