Launch: Abridged 0 - 106

Launch: Saturday 28 June 2025, 7–9pm
Coinciding with the opening of Love is blindly reaching out rhizoids and anchoring them to a rock by McGibbon O'Lynn, CCA is hosting the launch of the new issue of Abridged.

From Abridged:

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.” The Beautiful And The Damned

“Sitting here, now in this bar for hours, strange men rent strange flowers, seconds to the drop but it feels like hours…” Flood II

Abridged 0 - 106: Umbra Sumus is essentially about collateral damage. A much used but nonetheless chilling and morally corrupted phrase. In Nagasaki on 9th August 1945, you’re standing in a queue at the bank, waiting for it to open, when the first nuclear bombs in history explode on your town, and all that is left of you is a shadow. It’s fair to say that none of those shadow people wanted to be a part of probably the most historically significant event in warfare ever. This event was the inspiration behind Umbra Sumus, abbreviated from "Pulvis et umbra sumus” (We are but dust and shadow) attributed to the Roman poet Horace. We chose a nuclear attack as it has become iconic and because we consider nuclear weaponry the epitome of moral decay. It’s a kind of sequel to Abridged 0 – 2: Damaged Collateral, which wryly inverted the phrase to emphasise the often financial motives behind conflict. We could equally have chosen any of the modern conflicts or current genocides.

It's always good to be launching in the CCA. It's like coming home. Abridged originated in the Context which became the CCA. Little did we know we'd still be doing it twenty odd (very odd) years later. We're glad we still are! Old goths never die...