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TITLE: LOCATING THE WILD
ZONE
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TITLE: LOCATING THE WILD
ZONE
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DESCRIPTION: Locating the Wild Zone explores a fascinating web of connections between the festal pleasures of warehouse rave parties that occurred in sites of urban dereliction, the lost personal histories of nineteenth century Londoners, and attempts by big business in the twenty-first century to transform the sites of dance cultural activity and so regualte the "leisure time" of youth. Selecting four distinct urban sectors which symbolically comprise the spaces of the dance culture over the last decade, Ian McKay seeks to penetrate the "skin of the city" and go beneath the received histories; to get above the city too, to reveal the geography of power, and to reveal in the hidden spaces of youth the psychic ambiences that resonate through the decaying buildings and streets that are quickly disappearing. Drawing on the writings of the situationists, this book may be seen to offer a situationist "take" on the dance culture, but it is a story based also upon extensive research among clubbers themselves. Through the psychogeographical "games" of the situationists posed a threat to established order in the city, it is perhaps the dance culture that has shown itself most adept at inheriting the spirit of situationism - not least because potent synthetics such as Ecstasy have produced a generation of "unwitting psychogeographers" who continue to find new uses for the city space that challenge property and land rights, resist the contriction of social space and refuse the move towards "organised leisure".. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ian McKay is Senior Lecturer in Media Writing and Media with Cultural Studies at Southampton Institute. Since 1985 he has written on dance music, urban culture and the visual arts and his writings have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. In 1998 he founded the Virtual Psychogeographical Association (VPA).
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