The Drawbridge is an independent quarterly delivering thought, wit and reflection through words, photography and drawing. It is in turn critically nonsensical and radically serious.

With each issue authors, artists and politicians cast an unflinching look at a selected theme. The surprising combination of views and insights pays honest tribute to the progressive reader.

The Drawbridge takes the form of a full-colour broadsheet newspaper. Passionately written, elegantly designed and intelligently illuminated, it reinvents a long-standing format with purpose and aplomb.

“A journal that thinks bigger than most, and in more ways than one... there’s intellectual meat here but no paucity of visual and verbal wit either.”
The Guardian

“With abstract themes and even more abstract headlines, The Drawbridge can be off-putting even for aficionados.”
The Times

Creative director:
Stephen Coates
stephen@thedrawbridge.org.uk
www.stephencoates.co.uk

Picture editor:
Millie Simpson
millie@thedrawbridge.org.uk

Drawings editor:
Paul Davis
paul@thedrawbridge.org.uk
www.copyrightdavis.com

Commissioning editors:
Mark Reynolds
mark@thedrawbridge.org.uk
Alice Waugh
alice@thedrawbridge.org.uk

Contributing editors:
Brock Norman Brock
brock@thedrawbridge.org.uk
Giuseppe Mascoli
giuseppe@thedrawbridge.org.uk
Stanley Moss
stanley@thedrawbridge.org.uk
Vincenzo Ruggiero
vincenzo@thedrawbridge.org.uk
Sophie Walker
sophie@thedrawbridge.org.uk

Website design/build:
Lift www.studiolift.com

Distribution:
Central Books, London: www.centralbooks.com

Published by:
Drawbridge Publishing Ltd

There was a time when he kept pigs, fed them acorns. How sweet the fat on them prize hogs. Come Sunday he would go to the bathhouse and have himself whipped with birch twigs: "Give us some more of that steam, young fellow!" Once there were the boulevards of Paris. Chestnuts in bloom. Silken petticoats. French francs, jangling on zinc.

Now all is just a green mess in the middle distance. Pointillist mannerism by the yard. A continuous screen attached to the fence of Hyde Park, running images of nameless trees, anonymous artists, taciturn orators. A hologram of life as it once was, only better for trade because in just two dimensions. The third dimension is money – pay as you go, and word becomes flesh.

The fourth is no more – gone the way of the farthingale and the sweet hams of acorn-fattened swine.

Eternal: e. life, e. delight, e. glory, e. passion, e. friendship, e. now, hope springs e., e. triangle, mine e. jewel, thy e. summer shall not fade, ah there it is: e. feminine, what's happened to that? I mean, if oaks and birches and chestnuts have become abstract trees, what's the story with the Ewig-Weibliche? With the Carmen, the Helen, the Gretchen of all those yesterday's Goethes? With that mystical chorus, you know, that launched a thousand ships?

It has become plasma, that's what. Radiant matter for man to stare at with pared eyes, a terminally ill inmate of the nursing home watching a children's morning programme. It is tumescent beneath its smooth surface of hyaline, bulging with excitement like an erect nipple, an aquarium of colour and flame wherein nude commerce pulses. He is hypnotized by its aggregate energies, suckling on them as if it were a life-giving fount, never realizing that it is his own energies, in particular, that this global teat is suckled on. His and the other suckers'.

Women seem to surround him like a swarm of she-o-matic bees, pushed up, pumped up, plumped up to the point of suffocation. They leap out of red cabriolets at zebra crossings, sculpt themselves into toothbrush handles, get plastered on walls, leer suggestively from shop windows; their procrustean skirts, Machiavellian stilettos and apocalyptic glosses confuse all incoming signals, like the jamming posts erected under Khrushchev to suppress Radio Liberty; and that's just the urban lunch hour, with Lucifer still safely in his moonlit pen and God's gentle breath upon street asphalt and office desk.

At twilight, as plasma begins to phosphoresce, shadows darken in cleavages; olid musk and synthetic violet are mainlined into olfactory receptors; mirages of Arabian olibanum and Russian oligarch are served like cocktails. He is agaze, agog, agape. He is alone, marooned on a desert island with the picture archive of Hot Babes. "Better than nothing, I guess," everyman-the-voyeur in him mutters to himself as everything dissolves into plasma.

Continues in the print edition. Order now.

Russia's current sporting success is not confined to "the people's game". This year CSKA won the European club basketball title and the national ice hockey team celebrated victory in the world championships, beating Canada in the final. That's some progress from the shambles left by the chaotic Yeltsin regime of 1991–2000.

Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, immediately seized upon sport as a means to restore Russia's pride, power and dignity after the international humiliation it had received since the Gorbachov era. A top-class athlete himself, Putin was mindful of the prestige accruing to the old Soviet Union through its sporting success at the Olympic Games. The Party had spelled out its sports objective as early as 1948 (previously it had boycotted the Olympic movement, branding it as "bourgeois"): "We must raise our level of skill so that Soviet athletes win world supremacy in the major sports in the immediate future." And after joining the International Olympic Committee in 1951, the Soviet Olympic team fulfilled its plan, winning almost every Olympics in which it participated between 1956 and 1992.

Yet Putin's aim has been more ambitious, encompassing the world's top professional sports as well as the old amateur Olympic events. Whereas the erstwhile communist regime invested state cash in sport, Putin has been clawing back the nation's assets from the oligarchs and forcing them to invest their fabulous fortunes at home, including in Russian sport. If they demur, they know they will lose not only their gas, oil and metals assets; they may end up shot, poisoned, pick-axed, debris in a helicopter crash or working in a Siberian labour camp, like the Yukos oil chief Khodorkovsky. According to the Russian press, in 2006 over 5,000 "known" hit-killings took place.

Continues in the print edition. Order now.

Of the many tales told by Orellana on his return about the strange people of the new realms, the most remarkable one was that of El Dorado, the Golden Man, king of the land of Manoa where everything is made of gold, down to the paving of the roads. Once a year, according to what Orellana had heard, the king would be covered in gold dust and plunge into a lake that, over the years, had taken on the colour of the precious metal. Not only the king's dust lay at the bottom: golden artifacts of all sorts were also cast into the lake to honour the pagan gods. There was more gold in this savage region, Orellana told his listeners, than any man had ever dreamt of. His audience believed him, not only because it implied the immediate promise of riches, but because, like certain other travellers' tales, the story of El Dorado merely lent shape to a deeply rooted ancient myth, that of an earthly paradise of purely material rewards. Orellana confirmed an ancestral intuition and desire.

History is seldom respectful of conventional chronology. The coda to the El Dorado story took place in Mexico, some twenty years earlier. Exhausted from the continuing battles, convinced that further struggle was now useless, having decided to attempt capitulation rather than lose not only his freedom but his life, in the summer of 1520, the Aztec king Montezuma, prisoner of the Spaniards, agreed to hand over to Hernán Cortés the vast treasure that his father, Axayactl, had laboriously assembled, and to swear allegiance to the King of Spain, that distant and invisible monarch whose power Cortés represented. Commenting on the ceremony, the Spanish chronicler Fernando de Oviedo reported that Montezuma was in tears throughout the proceedings and, pointing out the difference between a bond willingly accepted by a free agent and one performed in sorrow by someone in chains, Oviedo quoted the Roman poet Marcus Varro: "What is given by force is not service, but larceny."

The royal Aztec treasure was, by all accounts, magnificent and, when assembled in front of the Spaniards, it towered in three golden heaps made up, for the most part, of exquisite utensils whose secret purpose suggested sophisticated social ceremonies; intricate collars, bracelets, wands and fans decorated with many-coloured feathers, precious stones and pearls; and carefully wrought birds, insects and flowers which, according to Cortés himself, "were, beyond their value, so marvellous that their very novelty and strangeness rendered them priceless, nor could it be believed that any of the known princes of this world might possess things like these, and of such quality." The name El Dorado had not yet been pronounced, but the Spaniards realized that here, before their eyes, lay a fabled realm where even ordinary, everyday objects were made of gold.

Montezuma had intended the treasure to be a tribute from his court to the Spanish king. Cortés's soldiers, however, demanded that the treasure be treated as booty and that they each receive a fair part of the gold. A fifth of the treasure belonged by rights to the King of Spain, and an equal portion to Cortés himself. A large sum was destined to indemnify the Governor of Cuba for the cost of the expedition. The garrison at Veracruz and the leading caballeros were expecting their part, as well as the cavalry, the harquebusiers and the crossbowmen, who were entitled to double pay. This left the common soldiers with about one hundred gold pesos each, a sum so insignificant, compared to their expectations, that many eventually refused to accept it.

Bending to his men's wishes, Cortés sent for the famed goldsmiths of Azcapozalco to turn Montezuma's precious objects into ingots which were then stamped with the royal arms. The task took the goldsmiths three full days of work. Today, engraved in stone over the door of the Museum of Gold in Santafé de Bogotá, the visitor can read the following verse, addressed by a Aztec poet to the Spanish conquerors: "I am marvelled by your blindness and folly, that you undo such beautifully wrought jewels to make bricks out of them."

For Orellana, the value of the land he thought he had discovered, "a land of notable greatness and opulence", lay in the promise of plunder and financial gain. For Cortés, the value of the works of art presented to him, whose "very novelty and strangeness" rendered it "priceless", was superseded by the value of the raw material from which the work was made. Since gold itself was the measure of the value of his social transactions, he deemed it right to turn the Aztec artwork into ingots. (In our time, the advertising executive who "discovers" new artists and grants their work market value, follows Orellana; the businessman who buys Van Gogh's Sunflowers and locks it up in a safe, follows Cortés).

Two conflicting myths surround El Dorado. One, the generosity of travel, the world as constant opening, the impulse to search that which lies beyond. The other, the obsession of loot, the fever of greed and possession, the closing up of borders and the erection of walls. Every museum partakes of this ambivalence. It exposes and it hoards, it shares and it declares itself sole owner, it maps a strict cartography of its physical space and opens an imaginary vastness of limitless geography and history. It lends value to its contents through its own symbolic existence (vide Duchamp) and overlays that value with another symbol, created for economic purposes.

The opulent and evanescent El Dorado (even Orellana confessed that he had only heard about the riches but never set foot in the kingdom) is the land that is never reached, whose principal merit is that it exists beyond our grasp, as proof of a prize that will never be ours. If we accept it on its own terms, it glitters endlessly, marking a direction, not a destination; if we make it our goal, it vanishes, because it has no existence outside the symbolic realm.