King Mob Echo
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The first issue of King Mob Echo contained only one original statement from those who put the magazine together and that was on the back page with Urban Gorilla Comes East written by Phil Cohen and Don N Smith. Basically it's a series of questions about how modern repression works in relation to working-class youth. It is, in effect, quite well written put in a short list of generalised, rhetorical, even poetic questions such as, "Why is King Kong the most heavily guarded animal in the Children's Zoo? Why is he asleep." etc and is the outline for a kind of research directive for Catch 22, a proposed youth initiative in the East End of London." --Phil Cohen[1] |
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King Mob Echo (#1-6, 1968 - 1970, five issues; there was no number 4) was the magazine of radical collective King Mob.
King Mob Echo 1 (April 1968)
This first issue features a film still from Louis Feuillade’s film Fantômas on its cover, a menacing masked man[2] above the "I am nothing but I must be everything" Karl Marx quotation from Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
Its contents include:
- “The Return of the Repressed” by Norman O. Brown
- “Desolation Row”, the title of a freely translated excerpt from Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations (1967)
- “Urban Gorilla Comes East”, the magazine’s only original King Mob statement, co-written by Phil Cohen (also known for his involvement with the London Street Commune and the 144 Piccadilly squat) and Donald Nicholson-Smith
- A photo of Rosa Luxemburg's corpse three weeks after her murder (Luxemburg's corpse was found and identified after an autopsy at the Charité hospital in Berlin)
- "The text has a companion image, a photograph of the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg three weeks after her murder (fig. 2.2), under which the caption “The reality principle is not quite over...” reads, the ellipsis signalling the uncertainty of what is to come. It illustrates the dialectic of life and death that is referenced within the text as follows: “Hegel, Phenomenology: 'Not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself undefiled by devastation (Werwustung), but the life that suffers death and preserves itself in death is the life of the Spirit. Spirit gains its truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment (Zerrissenheit).”22" --Situationist Margins: The Situationist Times, King Mob, Black Mask, and S.NOB Magazines (1962-1970) (2017) by David A.J. Murrieta Flores
- An image of Man Ray's Gift (1921)
- A passage from Richard Huelsenbeck's En Avant Dada (1920)
See also
- King Mob
- The Situationist International in Britain Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde (2016) by Sam Cooper
- King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International (London: Dark Star, 2000), pp. 71-81, edited by Tom Vague
![[2]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Barrabas.jpg){kind=link}