Dirty Secrets

We’ve just come back from Latitude Festival, where BAD IDEA ran our Tell All Printing Press: a mobile magazine publishing factory printing stories written by festival goers. With seven separate editions of the magazine created over the weekend, and a box of over 1500 submissions (soon to go up online, I promise), there was no shortage of scandalous confessions and tawdry anecdotes. However, in my opinion, the wild and uninhibited apogee of these submissions definitely occurred during the Saturday night edition (issue 5), as contributors crawled into the tent cider heavy or wrestling with some beastly narcotrauma to tell us their filthy secrets.

Much of the material we received in the unthreatening hours of daylight recounted hilarious sexual misadventures, drunken embarrassments, and cheeky but ultimately forgivable offences. Surrounded by the shadows of whirring cogs, laptops, a photocopier and a multitude of dirty secrets, the BAD IDEA editorial team spent much of the early afternoon sifting through tales of alfresco defecation, the likes of which had been flooding the editorial machine all weekend, to be swiftly positioned on the growing pile of ‘maybes’.

But as the sun went down however, the confessions too become sable black. “I’m cheating on my boyfriend” rapidly metamorphosised into “I’m cheating on my boyfriend with his dad, who likes me to dress as a Gestapo agent whilst he pummels me with Ikea cutlery and a budgie.”

Unpublishable pet murders, drug-induced cruelty and sex that would make Kinsey flinch rapidly filled our tainted tray. Some begged for advice others for absolution. A minority were too high or guilt-crippled to construct coherent glyphs. If you heard our gasps, moans and expletives, many apologies. BAD IDEA’s Latitude confession is this: you shocked even our filthy minds. Good going.

Posted by Laura Snoad in Events | July 26, 2008 8:19PM |