Well now. Well well well well well. Now. 'Sup. It's been a while. About a year and a half, in fact. Regular readers, if any remain, might have noticed the change in the site's layout and the new URL. They might also have noticed the general lack of new content. An explanation, then.
When Brazen started out, it was firmly Glasgow-based, with three of its four regular writers living here, and one in London. Now, however, the balance of power has shifted somewhat between the cities. I'm still in Glasgow. London Correspondent Simon Thomson has done nothing to warrant a change in that title. But editors Gavin Summers and Steve Dinneen, alas, have also been lured down that road paved with gob and syringes to the home of Charles Dickens, Prince Albert and other fine luminaries of the day (albeit fairly circuitously in at least one case).
All the while I was lumbered with a throbbing she-bitch of a Masters thesis that Just. Wouldn't. Die. I thought I had it beat around September, but, hydra-like, it merely sprouted four more monthly-extension-shaped heads and continued to have its wicked way. Needless to say, this necessarily precluded the writing of much for Brazen (although it has lead to some increasingly contentious, needlessly loquacious Facebook posts, basically addressing what I'd likely have been writing about here anyway).
Besides, having been assured repeatedly (mostly, and worryingly, by fully paid-up journo Steve) that print is dead, I've been focusing my pop cultural attentions on that hip, happening young medium, the radiolamatron: since September 2008, roughly around the time that new material stopped appearing here, I've been hosting Left of the Dial on Glasgow University's Subcity Radio, which has garnered plaudits ranging from 'competent' to 'means well' in its brief time on air.
Still, like a hacking cough, you can't keep a coughing hack down and, thesis written and critical faculties returned, Brazen is officially back. Well, I say 'officially'. There's a good chance it'll just be me for a while, until I convince the others that its condition has been upgraded from stable to frisky. But expect a return to more regular, hopefully even eventually daily, updates from across the realm of pop culture.
At least until we can put together a more regular stable of writers, we won't be accepting promo copies or critic's screenings, simply because we don't have the time to cover anything we don't really want to write about purely out of a sense of obligation to a bunch of PR bods. Everything that's written about here will be written about out of a genuine desire to engage with, debate, or otherwise feel something from it. This might mean reviews of new albums or movies appear a couple of weeks later than other publications, but it also means that when they do come, the wait will have been worth it because, hopefully, we'll have something that's genuinely worth saying about them. Ditto the past year and a half.
Cheers for reading
Chris Ward
Chief Hack/Music Editor
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