Mister Trippy

Free Beer

May 13th, 2012

Tonight I witnessed a great way to get a free beer. I was in a small town pub with my friend Leon who ordered a pint of Fosters. The barmaid had slightly more than half-filled the glass when the barrel ran out. She said she’d have to go and get another keg and came back sometime later to tell us there wasn’t one – so she offered Leon the half-pint she’d pulled for free. Now that’s what I call a good price for a lager! And of course a stout drinker like me wouldn’t give an XXX for a more expensive lager! Although there are easier ways to get free beers - like going to certain art openings and other cultural events – it’s always nice to get a drink on the house in a bar you’ve never been to before!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: beer, Fosters, lager
Posted in food and drink | 17 Comments »

Primera Persona In Barcelona

May 6th, 2012

Arriving in Barcelona early on Thursday evening (3 May 2012) I was whisked from the airport to Hotel Jazz in the city centre by Ana Pareja and Claudia Cucchiarato from my Spanish publisher Alpha Decay. Having dropped my bag, I was taken on a quick walking tour of the city before we arrived at Bar Ramón where we watered for the rest of the evening. The first thing Ana did was order drinks and tapas, after which we were able to relax and enjoy the groovy sounds…it was blues to start with but switched to sixties soul. The food was incredibly good and I ate more of it than anyone else! When we arrived around eight the bar was empty but it quickly filled with regulars and people connected to the Primera Persona spoken word festival in which I was participating.

I was introduced to a slew of hipsters including Jonathan Ames who was performing at Primera Persona the night after me. We talked about writing and writers, and although Ames is from New York he only knew of – rather than knew – most of my close east coast novelist friends like Lynne Tillman and Darius James…. Primera Persona organiser Kiko Amat and Miqui Otero somehow found time to talk to everyone, including me. With Kiko I got into a passionate discussion about smoking seventies bands who’ve been left out of the rock canon such as The Dictators and The Gorillas. I also caught up with a couple of journalists who’d interviewed me for the Spanish press – Laura Sangrà and Jaime Casas. Ironically the barman who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Cannabis Street’ still looked completely straight by the end of the night….

After Bar Ramón most of the crew went on to some other late-night drinking place, whereas I went back to the hotel and was in bed by 2.30pm. The next day I got up in time for breakfast and without even a whiff of a hangover. Spain isn’t really a breakfast country and I’m always shocked by the number of cakes on the buffet in Spanish hotels. I stuck to muesli and even that was way too sweet (I prefer it without sugar added to the mix). I risked the coffee but it proved to be beyond bad and I didn’t even manage to drink half a cup of the horrible shit. It isn’t hard to get good coffee in Spain, just don’t expect it to be good if it comes in a jug… I think they make the bad coffee mostly to please American tourists – who for reasons that beat me seem to like the beverage extra weak!

At noon Claudia from Alpha Decay came to meet me and shortly afterwards Paul Geddis from Vice Magazine arrived to do an interview. I took them both up to the swimming pool and sun bathing area on the roof of Hotel Jazz, and we had these facilities to ourselves as I answered the questions Paul put to me. We rapped about all sorts of shit including my books and political activism in Spain – but as this wasn’t an interview for a Spanish language publication we didn’t talk about Memphis Underground, my most recent book in that territory.

After Paul left, Ana from Alpha Decay arrived and we had a car to take us to a radio station. We had to produce ID, be signed in and pass through a scanner – making it feel like going into the BBC in London. There was a link up to the main studio in Madrid and I talked mostly about Memphis Underground with some very nice tunes played either in the background or inbetween the talk – including the Herbie Mann instrumental I’d used for the title for this book. The final question I was asked is apparently put to all guests on the show: “What’s your cloud?” This seems to be based on a Spanish phrase about daydreaming and I suggested my cloud was a purple bubble floating across the universe as if I was on an acid trip….

From the radio station we went on to the CCCB where I was performing that night so that I could do a soundcheck. The theatre had just been build and the equipment was top-notch – not since I’d participated in an event at The Barbican Theatre in London a year earlier had I had such a perfect environment in which to strut my funky stuff. I did my headstand reading and got applause from the technicians and administrators in the theatre despite the fact it was only a run through. One of the things I really appreciated on this trip to Barcelona was just how well the hospitality was handled. I never get treated as well in London! And so naturally enough my soundcheck was followed by a very late lunch with Ana and Claudia at the CCCB. Then I had an hour-and-a-half of free time before I had a photo session booked, so I went and chilled at the hotel. Returning to the CCCB I found Miqui, Kiko and their friends drinking beers, so I joined them. We had a bit of a crack before Claudia and Ana turned up.

The photographer was running late so we went into the theatre to get on with the event. First up was the young English novelist Ben Brooks who read while getting members of the audience to tattoo random words on his legs. This was apparently painful and at times Brooks pleaded with his tormentors not to push the needles in so far. I liked the idea of a distraction making it harder to read, although not being a self-harmer like Ben (or at least his fictional self) I prefer pleasurable distractions of the type suggested by my old Apeman Performance. The performances were being filmed and so we had close ups of blood oozing from the needle marks on Ben’s legs projected larger than life on a screen at the back of the stage.

Each section of the night was to run for around an hour with a break inbetween – so I didn’t have to go on straight after Brooks. I found Javier Calvo in the backstage area and had a quick chat with this legendary Spanish novelist. Javier was reading my story New Britain in Catalan, and he went on before me, immediately after my video based on the piece he was doing had been screened. Javier is an incredible performer and had a range of voices for the different characters in my story, making his reading style very different to my rhythmic monotone. When Javier finished we had Cranked Up Really High by Slaughter and the Dogs blasting from the PA, and with that as accompaniment I bounced out into the centre of the stage. The first thing I did was a recite a passage from Memphis Underground, then I moved on to 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess. Next I did a bit of talk partly based on my book about punk rock Cranked Up Really High, but at the same time explaining why I preferred power pop bands like The Hammersmith Gorillas to The Sex Pistols. Finally I stood on my head and recited the final section of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. I left the stage basking in the warmth of my reception and a lot of applause.

I chatted to various people in the break after my hour. Juanjo Sáez and various friends appeared next to speak about their comics in Catalan. Since I couldn’t follow this, I nipped into the green room to stuff my face with the food put out for performers, and while I was at it I grabbed a few beers. The cut-off jeans Ben Brooks had been wearing onstage were on the floor in the middle of the green room and someone picked them up and laughed that he was so teenage! After I’d eaten, the photographer who’d taken some shots of me onstage finally got around to snapping the long planned posed pictures of me.

The final act on the bill that night was Tobi Vail who I’d last seen perform as the drummer of Bikini Kill nearly 20 years earlier. She did a mixture of readings and music. When I saw Bikini Kill live I found them thrilling and I was hoping for something similar from this solo set. Vail sang and played electric guitar backed by only a bass player – and without a full rhythm section I found what she did lacked the kick of Bikini Kill. However, I was pleased when her last tune turned out to be a song in support of the imprisoned members of the Moscow grrrl power band Pussy Riot. Politically I thought Vail’s heart was in the right place, although I found her views about indie culture and her self-identification as a punk rocker way too earnest to groove me. That said, I’m obviously not a part of the demographic of teenage girls Vail is aiming to inspire, so I’m sure the fact that what she’s doing these days isn’t my bag won’t bother her at all…

After the first night of Primera Persona was over at the CCCB, I ended up at Bar Manchester where I mostly talked with Ana from Alpha Decay and Txell Torrent from the MB Literary Agency. Txell expressed amusement at the outrageous nature of my fiction, but also chatted about various London writers we know. She told me that she was a huge fan of horror fiction and absolutely loved Kim Newman (who she represents in Spain). Having performed I was able to really relax and enjoy some beers. The results of this are perhaps predictable, so I think I’ll end things here on a high rather than providing any more details of my trip to Barcelona. I left Txell in Bar Manchester and… Well let’s just say that since embarrassing confessions are a Ben Brook’s speciality, I’m happy to leave such things to him…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Alpha Decay, Ana Pareja, Bar Manchester, Bar Ramón, Barcelona, Bikini Kill, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, CCCB, Claudia Cucchiarato, Cranked Up Really High, Darius James, Hammersmith Gorillas, Herbie Mann, Hotel Jazz, Jaime Casas, Javier Calvo, Jonathan Ames, Juanjo Sáez, Kiko Amat, Kim Newman, Laura Sangrà, Lynne Tillman, MB Literary Agency, Memphis Underground, Miqui Otero, Paul Geddis, Primera Persona, Pussy Riot, Sex Pistols, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Dictators, The Gorillas, Tobi Vail, Txell Toreent, Vice Magazine
Posted in books, culture gossip & parties, exhibitionism, performance | 29 Comments »

Let’s Kill The Novel & Remake The World! Stewart Home interviewed by Raül De Tena

April 30th, 2012

This is an interview I did recently with H Magazine around the publication in Spain of my novel Memphis Underground. They will have run a Spanish translation but here it is with my original answers in English. I know some of my bilingual readers have enjoyed comparing the original interviews about the Spanish edition of Memphis Underground and their translations… so this provides another opportunity for them to do so. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish but are fluent in English, you get to read something you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I haven’t run through all the Spanish interviews I’ve done yet but I’m tempted to call it quits with this one for now…

Raül De Tena:. At one point in Memphis Underground you say that you’re gonna use one of the sentences you just wrote to answer a random journalist. That part of the book scared me when I started to write down these questions… Are you gonna answer the truth and only the truth in this interview? Or is it better keep the mystery to make the interview more appealing?

Stewart Home: I don’t think I wrote that in the book but this might be because of the way the passage has been translated or perhaps you’re misremembering it. My memory is often so faulty that I’ve no idea about the actual content of things I wrote last week, let alone a few years ago! And the same goes for what I read, but much more so!

Anyway, I think the passage you’re referring to is the following: “In my rereading of Marcuse, I paid particular attention to the chapter entitled The Aesthetic Dimension, since I thought it might be amusing to bamboozle a journalist by using this as a theoretical justification for my own work.”

This is from one of the diary sections in Memphis Underground written as if it is a piece of non-fiction by me, rather than one of the fictional sections, so I’m not surprised it would worry you as a journalist. In journalism (and I too write journalism) we assume that truth is something we can reach, but as an anti-novelist I have to assume it is something slippery that escapes us but that can be approached more closely through fiction than non-fiction. The tricky bit here is that Memphis Underground contains both fiction and non-fiction, or at least blends them.. One of the intended effects of much of my prose is to amuse – and also if the reader thinks deeply about how I’m giving them laughs, to leave them all at sea! Confused? You will be!

Raül De Tena: Anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography are three important concepts in Memphis Underground. Do you think a reader who doesn’t know anything about those concepts can enjoy the book? Or you don’t even care about those considerations?

Stewart Home: I don’t think most people need to know anything about anything to enjoy the book – as long as they haven’t been brainwashed into thinking about ‘literature’ in the restricted sense of bourgeois subjectivity. Those who think that books are about linear plot and plodding characterisation will have a real problem with my writing. We can liken those with this outlook to people who think paintings have to be representational – they’re living in the past and incapable of understanding contemporary culture. But aside from plonkers of this stripe, I don’t think anyone will have any problems understanding Memphis Underground. I think it’s a very accessible book for contemporary readers, and they’ll laugh their asses off as they go through it.

Raül De Tena: The concepts I just mentioned are referred to a lot in the book, but how do anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography influence your writing and your style in Memphis Underground?

Stewart Home: Of these three concepts the most important is anti-literature – this is a tradition that predates literature and that encompasses black humour, theory and experimentation with prose and poetic forms. One could cite anything from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to the works of Kathy Acker by way of Karl Marx…. The important thing is not to restrict yourself to the genre known as literary fiction. Most of the contemporary writers promoted as being worthwhile by the bourgeois press are in fact boring, and this is precisely because they project themselves as being serious. To do anything worthwhile you have to get over the adolescent mania for being po-faced and grow up and grow into humour and laughs. The adolescent thinks that to be adult you have to always act like grown up – whereas the precise opposite is the case. To be properly grown up and to do anything really serious you have to do it with humour and levity. There are just way too many middle-aged writers out there whose misplaced sense of ‘gravity’ and importance reveals them to still have the minds of adolescents. Only anti-literature attains the levity that is a necessary corollary to real gravity.

Moving on, neoism is a prefix and a suffix without any content…. but then as Hegel demonstrated if you have nothing you have to have something because one is meaningless without the other. And if you’ve something and nothing then you must have becoming and from this foundation Hegel builds his entire philosophical system – which I find pretty hilarious, although I wouldn’t go along with it’s final realisation in the Prussian State and God, which is unfortunately where Hegel took it…. Returning to neoism, if it is nothing then it must be everything… And it can be pretty much whatever you want, so my take on neoism in Memphis Underground is subjective and possibly solipsistic!

Finally as regards this question, psychogeography is now so popular with the chattering classes and sections of the literary establishment that pretty much everyone who ever had anything to do with it in its earlier incarnations tends to disavow it. But for the situationists it was a way of drawing up new emotional maps of the city, although before doing this they’d have to get blind drunk or really stoned and then wander around letting the unconscious solicitations of the architecture draw them on. It was only by getting completely out of it that the situationists were able to do psychogeorgraphy and this is something that seems to be lost on many contemporary practitioners of the craft… and may explain why their results, in England anyway where psychogreography seems to be most popular, are so utterly useless…

Raül De Tena: When you read through Memphis Underground you are left thinking that the book is a direct attack on two concepts. First of all, art as a business and as a dead scene. Is there no hope for art in the 21st Century?

Stewart Home: As the radical New York group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker (UATWM) declared back in the 1960s: “Art is Dead Baby! Burn The Museums!”

Raül De Tena: It’s interesting that the only hope for art in Memphis Underground is precisely through fakery. But even that practice seems to be pretty ridiculous… Don’t you trust the fake as a motor for art any more? Or is even fake art a business?

Stewart Home: Well you know what they say – “Fake It Till You Make It!” This is also called the ‘act as if” doctrine and in English it is a common catchphrase that exhorts us to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence. Fake art all too often falls into this trap and becomes real art, and I’m definitely faking it here coz I just copied and pasted the previous sentence from Wikipedia…. But to return to what I was saying, even being landed with the label art is a problem nowadays because it means people can put something that might otherwise disturb them in a little mental box and not even think about it. This was not a dilemma the Dadaists had to deal with when they embraced the negative a century ago… But Dadaist art trapped in museums does become a part of this problematic. Duchamp says somewhere that art dies (it has a life of maybe 30 or 40 years) and then ends up in graveyards called museums…. The same can be said of anti-art and fake art nowadays, except the half-life of such projects is getting shorter by the minute.

Raül De Tena: Your interest in fakery seems to relate to the annihilation of individuality (this is the other main concept Memphis Underground appears to be attacking). In the book you’re always ‘playing’ with the reader so the reader never knows who’s really the main character – or if it’s even the same person. Are you trying to annihilate the usual certainty of literature about the main character’s individuality and psychology? Or is this just a game played with the reader?

Stewart Home: There’s a difference between us all being unique individuals (although not necessarily that unique in our desires and tastes) and the ideology of individuality. I see characterisation in literature and all psychology from Freud to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and beyond, as bourgeois. Therefore this trope in literary fiction and the psychoanalytic theories associated with it for the past hundred years or so do need to be smashed! So what you’re asking me about is more than a game played with my readers….

Raül De Tena: Memphis Underground seems to be divided into two parts. The first half of the book is more classical, and the second half is perhaps your revenge against those who thought the whole book was gonna be easy reading… Is that division into two parts intentional? Do you usually think about the accessibility of what you’re writing?

Stewart Home: I always think about the audience for what I do, but the audience does not have to be broad, although sometimes it is. No book is going to have universal appeal. Memphis Underground has four main parts and some nice fills between these… and the opening was designed to read like a really typical piece of bland contemporary writing, which is then smashed up against a description of a map like you’d find in the French nouveau roman. So the book does set up the expectation that it will be more conventional than it ends up being, and I rerun that trope as you move through the text. But I don’t think that makes Memphis Underground hard to read for those have open minds, but it does create an accessibility problem for those who have been conditioned in their expectations by conventional bourgeois literature….

Raül De Tena: Lady Di and Death appear as characters on Memphis Underground. I find this awesome… But didn’t you think it was gonna be a dangerous move? Do you think you succeed using them as characters?

Stewart Home: Unless you’re prepared to take chances, and really willing to fail, then you’re not going to move writing or any other cultural form forward. Lady Di was probably the biggest celebrity we had in England for a hundred years, and like all celebrities the coverage of her drained her of all real humanity until we were only left with a cipher…. So I don’t think I could easily go wrong with her… In his 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman has a knight play chess with a personification of Death and I thought that was hilarious. So that was my starting point but obviously I wanted to trash Death up and not treat ‘him’ too seriously. So the humour in my use of Death is intentional, whereas in Bergman’s case I suspect it was unconscious…But again judged on my terms I’d say my use of Death was a huge success….

Raül De Tena: You mention Joyce and Finnegans Wake as the death of literature. Haven’t you found any interesting authors after Joyce? Could you mention some and why you find them interesting?

Stewart Home: There are many… Clarence Cooper Junior for his vision of prison and junkie life. Blaster Al Ackerman for his fried humour. Ann Quin for her deployment of a ventriloquist dummy in her first novel Berg. Alain Robb-Grillet both for his use of repetition and multiple perspectives…. and also for attacking the bourgeois disdain for pleasure – of which humour and laughter are important examples, as well as eroticism which is the springboard for Robbe-Grillet’s critique. British beat novelist Alex Trocchi for being a friend of my mother, and the fact they dealt smack together…. The list could go on and on and on! But I’ll stop here!

Raül De Tena: Your vision of London in Memphis Underground is fairly negative. Has it changed recently? How is your vision of London right now?

Stewart Home: London is always best in winter and in a recession, it ain’t a pretty city but it can be picaresque. Unfortunately the fact that there is a global market in London property means that the process of gentrification is continuing and rather than the rich and poor living side by side as has been the case for hundreds of years, the city is in danger of turning into somewhere like Paris with poverty concentrated in a ring around the outside, that is to say in the suburbs. So London ain’t what it used to be but then change is an integral part of the urban experience. But London is now much more like any other European city than the place I knew as a kid and teenager, when it was much dirtier and more smashed up, but also more unique….

Raül De Tena: Music is pretty important in Memphis Underground… Aren’t you afraid someone could think you’re part of pop literature (such as Nick Hornby)?

Stewart Home: I wouldn’t mind being seen as a part of pop literature if that meant like Michael Moorcock or some cool sci-fi writers. But Nick Horby! Ha ha ha! He just completely sucks….

Raül De Tena: You’re gonna be in Barcelona in May as part of Primera Persona. What can we expect of your lecture?

Stewart Home: Expect the unexpected – and loads more of the same as you get in this interview! My writing will give you better orgasms, but seeing me in the flesh is even better!

Raül De Tena: Javier Calvo’s gonna be with you at Primera Persona. Do you know his work? What do you think about it?

Stewart Home: I don’t read Spanish but I’m told by people who do that his writing is fabulous. So it will be groovy to appear with him!

Raül De Tena: Right now in Spain you’re considered a big influence on some important writers. Do you think your work has any connection with contemporary Spanish literature?

Stewart Home: I feel a strong connection for sure – and especially to hot female Spanish writers… I think I can develop my relationship with Spanish literature much further by getting to know some of these lit chicks intimately. I’d particularly like to meet some Spanish girl power writers who are churning out novels about sex and proletarian revolution – and who like to wear short skirts and white boots! But even if they’re not writers but are hot and like to wear white boots and skimpy dresses, then I’ll still be happy to meet any Spanish girls when I’m in Spain or if they come to London….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: act as if, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alex Trocchi, anit-literature, Ann Quin, Barcelona, Blaster Al Ackerman, Clarence Cooper Junior, Dada, dadaists, death, fake art, fake it till you make it, Finnegans Wake, Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Javier Calvo, Karl Marx, Kathy Acker, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Duchamp, Memphis Underground, Michael Moorcock, neoism, Nick Hornby, nouveau roman, Primera Persona, Princess Diana, psychogeography, Raül De Tena, Situationists, Stewart Home, The Seventh Seal, Tristram Shandy, Up Against The Wall Motherfucker, Wikipedia
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

No Piece

April 23rd, 2012

Stewart Home: Don’t send a work to the art show. Tell the curator it got lost in the post. Do it again for the next exhibition. No art is the best art!

Curator: Great event score! I will use that as your contribution to the show (unless the postman happens to have found it).

Stewart Home: Only a dishonest postman could find a work I didn’t send, they only fake my work so they can make money from collectors, ingrates!

Curator: Bastards!

Stewart Home: At least they’re ripping off the collectors. But they ought to give me a cut of the dosh!

The anti-performance script in the top line of this post is one of many pieces not included in my mini-retrospective Again, A Time Machine on until 20 May 2012 at SPACE, 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH, UK.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Again A Time Machine, anti-art, art, London, Mare Street, Space, Stewart Home
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions, humour | 20 Comments »

Get Down On It: Stewart Home interviewed by Jaime Casas

April 20th, 2012

I did this interview for a Spanish newspaper El Pais a few weeks ago and figured I might as well run it here in the original English. The Spanish publication of Memphis Underground has been generating a lot of interest there….

Jaime Casas: I see many different genres in Memphis Underground: from autobiography to meta-literature, but above all there is a sense of passion in everything said and done by the characters. It is a very a nondescript book it seems, and an experiment. But, I guess there are some ideas and intentions, what are they?

Stewart Home: At the most basic level I’m saying there are many new ways in which we can write, and by analogy many new ways in which we could organise the world. My writing varies from book to book, but very often I sample a lot of other writers (and correct them too of course), so that what I do becomes a collective authorial practice. Actually Memphis Underground has less of this sampling than many of my other books but it is still an attempt to move away from the ideas of possessive individualism and character (or what I view as bourgeois subjectivity) that characterises the reactionary literature of the capitalist ruling class. Most successful writers subscribe to the backward world-view of the bourgeoisie because they are more interested in being celebrities than in writing worthwhile books. Time will judge them very harshly – or to put it another way, they will very quickly be completely forgotten.

Moving from the macro to the micro level of the book, I’m dealing with how large sections of the working class has been forced out of London through the process of gentrification. Unlike in much of Spain, the property bubble has yet to burst in London but there is also a debate to be had here on how we can be more proactive rather than just waiting for the next crisis of capitalism.

Jaime Casas: Anyway, I’d say the protagonist Jack Johnson, has a lot of you in him, and yet many other modern characters too. It seems that he is some sort of collective consciousness…

Stewart Home: John Johnson is feisty like the boxer Jack Johnson – and he has some of me and some of a lot of other people in him. He’s a kind of (post)-modern everyman figure… We’re all unique in that we’re different people but actually the similarities between us far out-weight the differences – and so I’m not into creating the kind of generic but supposedly unique ‘characters’ you find in bourgeois fiction. As a consequence I’m able to think of John Johnson as my pet rock… so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I remember to give him food and water… he’ll just keep on keepin’ on right to the end of the book.

Jaime Casas: So he is not an alter-ego although you have described yourself as “an egomaniac on a world historical scale”; but is he still a platform from which you provide people with a different perception of yourself as an artist, writer, or whatever you consider yourself…?

Stewart Home: The protagonists in my books could never be identical with me even if I wanted them to be – and this definitely isn’t my intention anyway. When I call myself an egomaniac on a world historical scale this is intended to be humorous – and obviously I’m invoking Hegel in particular and to a degree Marx too. However, humour should be like an iceberg. The laughs are the ten percent visible above the water but the real matter lies below.

Historical changes in how egomania is perceived and what it means are certainly worth considering here. Max Nordau in his infamously reactionary late-nineteenth book Degeneration used the concept of egomania to attack the avant-garde of the fin de siècle as criminals and madmen. I wouldn’t want to defend politically all of those Nordau savages – including Wilde, Ibsen, Wagner and Nietzsche – but at the same time I’d want to resist his line of attack. And because many people still use the term egomaniac in the moralistic and negative sense Nordau deployed it, I think it is worth adopting as a form of self-description for humorous purposes.

That said, I would also reject the more recent positive use of the term to describe the quest for success and celebrity by the likes of businessman Donald Trump. A business celebrity like Trump is a superficial egomaniac who doesn’t take the concept seriously enough to make it worthwhile pursuing. Trump doesn’t want to change the world we find ourselves living in today, he just wants to sit on top of the stinking capitalist heap. There’s not much ambition in that – which is why I would distinguish world historical proletarian egomaniacs like myself from the half-hearted capitalist egomania of Trump. My ambitions aren’t focused on the world we live in but on one we’ve yet to create – which is why I (like all self-conscious proletarians) am genuinely ambitious and tossers like Trump aren’t worthy of our consideration.

I think the whole purpose of revolutionary activity is to overcome capitalist canalisation. Rather than being one thing we should all be many things. So I can take on the role of artist, writer, egomaniac etc. But what I want to avoid above all else is being ‘myself’ – accepting a limited identity which is exactly what capitalism encourages us to do. Instead, the proletariat does much better by working through in practice the theoretical implications of the slogan: “I am nothing therefore I must become everything….” And so one minute I am a comedian and the next I am a lover… and I consider one of my greatest accomplishments to be the fact that I can make my lovers laugh at the same time as they have an orgasm…. Which is, of course, one of the many reasons why I’m sexy, seductive and smart!

Jaime Casas: The paradoxical relationship between the hero and the anti-hero is perhaps an integral part of this book?

Stewart Home: In this fractured world we must leave for a better one we’ll create collectively, we’re all as imperfect as each other… we need to do away with the notion of heroes and the anti-hero can play a role in that…. The important thing is not to get too caught up in any role, including that of the anti-hero.

Jaime Casas: As a free form expression, it seems that this novel is a complaint against the British high culture, or at least that kind of literature covered by this concept…

Stewart Home: The conventional novel is the most favoured and privileged cultural vehicle of bourgeois ideology – although obviously it would be pretty useless were it not backed up by the army and the police force. The emphasis on character in the novel reflects the bourgeois conception of the individual as the sole proprietor of his or her skills and as owing nothing to society. These skills (and those of others) are presented to the reader as a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market in a society where a solipsistic and unending thirst for consumption is considered the crucial core of human nature. These ideas found their clearest articulation in the non-fiction of liberal political writers such as Hobbes, Harrington and Locke; but they have also formed the bedrock of bourgeois literary fiction for the past few hundred years.

Jaime Casas: The language that you use in this book is very direct, very in your face and spoken as if you were a tough or a hoodlum; is this related to the narrative or just the way you like to use language.

Stewart Home: I prefer to use direct language so that my meaning is clear. I say what I want to say as simply as possible – that said a complex idea requires more complex expression. In other words it is easier to say ‘fuck off’ than it is to articulate a critique of commodity production and capitalist alienation. Nonetheless, I try to keep things straightforward and at the minimum necessary level of complexity for what I want to say. Literary writers do the opposite, their defences of bourgeois society are really very simple and not at all convincing, which is why they try to dress them up in unnecessarily mannered and complex language. In this and all other senses literature is decadent. And it is also why in the long run literature stands no chance against those who – like me – have learnt the collective strength ‘secrets’ of the proletarian superwomen.

Jaime Casas: I know that you are not the biggest fan of most well-know English writers, people such Martin Amis. Do they represent an idea if England that goes against yours? Or is just that they are in your opinion “bad writers”?

Stewart Home: Bourgeois writers like Martin Amis represent a world I want to leave behind. I am against nation states and have no time for the idea of England; whereas these hacks want to deny the power of the international working class and thus are very often fixated on national differences. Their bad writing follows on from their reactionary political views and vice versa – each flows from the other. Those that want to defend a discredited capitalist system can’t write well, they have to obfuscate.

Jaime Casas: As you said when we interviewed you in London, capitalism has led to an individualised culture and this is weaker than one that is created collectively. How we can stop this process and recover some kind of common creativity?

Stewart Home: I think the answer to this problem can only be found collectively, and in a continual reforging of the passage between theory and practice. This is not something that one person can resolve in isolation. It requires mass movements and we’re beginning to see these becoming more effective in the face of the ongoing crisis of capitalism. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and the indignant ones (indignados) provide a great starting point – but things need to be taken much further.

Jaime Casas: In a society that has overcome any postmodern considerations and is no longer affected by anything, it seems impossible provoke any commotion in the audience, but you still do. In a way, we live in a hyperbolic reality, where we accept everything without questioning anything. We accept everything in the a context of hyperreal simulation, as theorised by Baudrillard. But provocation seems to be an essential part of your work!

Stewart Home: It is interesting to go back to Baudrillard’s earlier work of the 1960s and look at his attempts to break with Marxism; and when you do this his whole project and critique becomes much clearer. I’m thinking of books like Mirror of Production and For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Those are his better works, but if you think of Baudrillard’s later writing in relation to Marx then you can see that rather than breaking with Marx, what Baudrillard did with his notions of the silent majority, the destiny of objects and simulation was invert him. So in the critique of alienation where through the process of commoditisation subjects appear to become objects and vice versa, Baudrillard is simply celebrating what Marx condemns. Rather than seeing alienation as a bad thing, Baudrillard argues the masses taking on what he calls ‘the destiny of objects’ is something positive. Once you understand matters such as this you can see that post-modernism is a continuation of modernism rather than a break with it. The basic nature of capitalist alienation has not changed and yes, what I write provokes those who wish to defend the global capitalist system because I am able to focus on this rather than being distracted by irrelevancies. Obviously to claim that society and/or the masses are not effected by anything is both ideological and untrue. Right now you can see the effects of the banking crisis everywhere in Europe.

Jaime Casas: The transmedia narrative brings new meanings with changes in technology but I think you are also drawing from older forms – from pulp fiction to avant-garde literature, and even many influences from music. What are the main reason that you have used these things and how do you see the evolution of transmedia narrative after the irruption of technology?

Stewart Home: Again the problem I see here is a failure to think historically and an over emphasis on what is alleged to be unique now. Technology has been transforming the world for hundreds of years. One could compare the introduction of the internet to the introduction of the railways. Both transformed society and have had a massive impact on everyday life. The railways made it possible to commute long distances to work and led to a process of suburbanisation; in theory the internet should act to bring this process of suburbanisation to a logical conclusion with home working – but in practice we’ve yet to see it have much impact in this area.

One can look at the avant-garde and transmedia practices without over emphasising the distinction between them. These are often grossly overstated anyway, given the ongoing blurring of lines between them. For example, when I checked it just now, Wikipedia (in English) defines flarf poetry as ‘an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century’ – and obviously flarf poetry would not exist without the internet (since it is generated through the deployment of search engines among other things). Likewise all culture today exists partly in and through the internet. Once cannot escape the implications of this – which is why in my last anti-novel published in English – Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – I incorporated a huge amount of penis enlargement spam.

Likewise it is not a matter of doing away with the culture of the past in its entirety – but rather of bringing selected parts of it back into play. In many ways so much has now been written that all we need to do is plunder and rewrite what’s already online – and this is in many ways the basis of new movements in the arts such as conceptual literature. It is no longer a question of writing but of editing – and editing with a complete disregard for the logic and narrative structure of the texts we plunder. As the Lettrists declared back in the 1950s, the cultural heritage of mankind is to be cut-up and used for partisan political purposes.

Jaime Casas: New technology and the internet has created new ways to consume culture. Its seems to have created a new passion for music and all kinds of old pop manifestations, from you side, how do you watch that new phenomenon?

Stewart Home: The internet has meant that there is a greater accessibility to pop culture. For example, for years I had been hearing rumours about a film called Bruce Lee Vs Gay Power, but many people doubted it existed. Now it is possible to view the whole of that film online and discover that the English translation from Portuguese is not exactly accurate (the film itself is not available in English dub or with English subtitles). The original title of this Brazilian film is Kung Fu Contra as Bonecas – and when I saw it I immediately understood that it was a mid-seventies parody of the popular Brazilian genre of bandit films, and that the kung fu comedy element within it has more to do with David Carradine than Bruce Lee. I don’t speak Portuguese but whether the film has anything to do with ‘gay power’ is also something people are still arguing about online.

On the one hand it is possible to have instant access to all sorts of things online… and to me this is great because it demystifies and devalues them. When I was teenage I would hear about films and bands and would sometimes have to wait months or even years to see or hear them. That meant when I did get access to something that had really captured my imagination I paid it a great deal of attention. Among those of us with instant access on the web neither I – nor those who are still teenage – tend to give what we’re accessing nearly the same amount of thought. One day I’ll discover an incredible cover of the song Gloria by US sixties act Robb London and the Rogues, and the next I’ll have forgotten about it because I’m trying to locate a streamed online copy of Official Exterminator 3: Joy of the Living Dead. Right now Official Exterminator 3 is holding my attention because I can’t even find a single scene from it uploaded online – but once someone makes the whole film accessible to me my interest in it will no doubt wane.

The profits to be made from films, books and music have declined greatly with the rise of the internet. This is a good thing because it has resulted in such pursuits being of less interest to those who merely wish to make money and/or become celebrities. Those of us wanting to develop proletarian culture into something even more revolutionary will keep doing what we’ve always been doing and we’ll become even more effective at it.

Jaime Casas: Is passion the ultimate appeal of pop culture?

Stewart Home: Pop culture and high culture produce and mediate each other. If I had to choose one then of course I’d take pop culture. But I don’t have to accept class society and so my aim is instead to overthrow all capitalist canalisation including the division between high and low culture. While there is still more passion in pop culture than art, I don’t think there is much real passion left in either and our passion should be directed towards overthrowing both of them.

Jaime Casas: What does the term post-capitalism means for you? (I ask after listening to your words in our video)

Stewart Home: Post-capitalism will be a world in which money, commodities, nation states and classes have been abolished. It will be characterised by the free movement of vast majorities – and exactly how it operates will be decided by those vast majorities from moment to moment without interference from so called leaders or states.

Jaime Casas: In Memphis Underground music plays a strong role. You write about a very concrete period of the music history but without any sense of nostalgia of the past, and I think that’s the difference. Would you agree?

Stewart Home: I personally like the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s best because that is the music I encountered as a child and which had the greatest immediate impact on me. I had less to judge the music against then but if I was 8 years old now I’d probably be knocked out by Lady Gaga rather than Marc Bolan and T.Rex. That said, in the eighties I was massively into everything from early hip hop to go go to techno; and in the nineties I remained impressed by a great deal of minimal techno and breakbeat. I have seen fewer musical innovations in the past ten years but while I love music it is not the only thing I live for, so there is no reason to be nostalgic about the past. Some things are better and some things are worse than 50 years ago – and we can be sure we are closer to overthrowing capitalist social relations now rather than then. I certainly wouldn’t want to revisit London in the 1960s or 1970s for the food, which was terrible then and is much better now!

Jaime Casas: The northern soul period, the punk and the rave music explosion (from Madchester to Summer of love and the pirate radios scene from the 90)… all of that music movement were assertive. Is there any new genre, movement or ideas that could do the same now?

Stewart Home: I think the things that have come closest recently seem to have emerged from south London (where I was born) in the form of grime and dubstep. But maybe something even better has emerged more recently and it just hasn’t come to my attention yet…

Jaime Casas: What kind of music do you listen now?

Stewart Home: I listen to many different things but soul, jazz and funk from the 1960s and 1970s more than anything else. Willie Mitchell, Eddie Bo and Eddie Harris, number among my favourites.

Jaime Casas: Do you think that is possible to break the boundaries between the art and the politics? What do you think about the new protest movements (Occupy WST, 11-M, Arab Spring)?

Stewart Home: I find it incredibly exciting to see and participate in such movements. I was lucky in that I was in New York for some of the highlights of OWS, but was also close to the Occupy movement in London. Close up one can make many criticisms of these manifestations, but from a distance they are a massive inspiration to many across the world – and I think that for now that inspiration is more important than the criticisms one could make of the politics connected to these mass mobilisations. Of course, they need to go much further but then that’s something we all need to participate in to make taking these movements further a reality.

And as I’ve said, what I’m interested in is overcoming capitalist canalisation, so of course the distinctions between art and politics need to disappear into a revolutionary praxis.

Jaime Casas: There is a formal critique in your work of the gentrification of the cities, but London has the strongest role, of course. Do you think that this is a irreversible process?

Stewart Home: The gentrification of London and New York in particular has been horrific, but this could still be reversed even under the capitalist system – and may well be depending on what happens economically. Of course, in a post-capitalist world there will be no gentrification since private property will be abolished and this is the solution we should really be aiming for.

Jaime Casas: We met at William Blake’s tomb and there is a quote from him in your book. The “greatest artist that UK has had”, as someone said. Could you tell me something about him?

Stewart Home: What I like most about Blake is the way the City of London dislikes him and the fact that his tomb is in the City of London. Much more than his poetry and art work, his real value lies in the way he is perceived as a threat by financial self-interests…. Blake serves us well as an example of the proletarian flood that must sweep over the over-cultivated planes of capitalism. The City of London can celebrate republican leaders like Cromwell (there is a tower block in The Barbican complex named after Cromwell), but those who stand fundamentally against the idea of leadership like Blake are anathema to them.

And yes there are even more interviews around the publication of Memphis Underground in Spain that I may or may not post in English on this blog in due course…..

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: avent-garde, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee Vs Gay Power, conceptual literature, David Carradine, Degeneration, Donald Trump, Eddie Bo, Eddie Harris, egomania, fin de siècle, flarf poetry, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria, Hegel, Henrik Ibsen, indignados, indignant ones, Jack Johnson, Jaime Casas, James Harrington, Jean Baudrillard, John Johnson, John Locke, Karl Marx, Kung Fu Contra as Bonecas, Lady GaGa, Lettrists, London, Marc Bolan, Martin Amis, Max Nordau, Memphis Underground, Mirror of Production, Occupy Wall Street, Official Exterminator 3: Joy of the Living Dead, Oliver Cromwell, Oscar Wilde, penis enlargement, pet rock, possessive individualism, Richard Wagner, Robb London and the Rogues, Stewart Home, T. Rex, Thomas Hobbes, transmedia, William Blake, Willie Mitchell
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour | 24 Comments »

Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc

April 16th, 2012

Violette Leduc spent three years working on the first part of her novel Ravages. When the manuscript of the book was presented to her publisher Gallimard in 1954, her readers there – Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand – decided the first third of the book should be nixed because it described a torrid lesbian affair between two schoolgirls. Ravages was offered around to other French imprints but no one was prepared to issue it without cuts. In the end a censored version of the novel appeared in 1955 under the aegis of Gallimard. Parts of the cut text were reworked and incorporated into Luduc’s 1964 memoir La Bâtarde. The success of this mid-sixties autobiography led first to the printing of a limited private edition of the censored opening of Ravages under the title Thérèse and Isabelle: and then to the novella appearing commercially as a Gallimard book in 1966.

Like much of Leduc’s writing, Thérèse and Isabelle is autobiographical. While attending the Collège de Douai girl’s boarding school, Leduc had affairs with a fellow student and a teacher. Her novella is narrated by seventeen year-old Thérèse, who embarks on a sexual relationship with her eighteen year-old fellow boarder Isabelle. In the book Leduc uses high-blown literary language in an attempt to recapture both the physical and emotional sensations she experienced during her first affair. Both what is described and the subsequent censorship of the text make Thérèse and Isabelle a valuable social and historical document regardless of whether it has any artistic merit. Its publication in English acts as a timely reminder of the extent to which gay sexualities were subject to severe legal repression in Western Europe just half-a-century ago.

Sophie Lewis has done English readers a huge favour with her carefully rendered translation of Thérèse and Isabelle. Until now the easiest way for us to engage with this work was via the 1968 movie loosely based on the book and made by American sexploitation supremo Radley Metzger. The film is a softcore effort made under Metzger’s real name (he directed hardcore porn films – including The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann and Naked Came the Stranger – under the pseudonym Henry Paris). Metzger has Thérèse revisiting her boarding school twenty years after leaving it; and so Leduc’s story is told in flashback. Imagine an exploitation director attempting to cross The Belles of St Trinians (Frank Launder 1954) and Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais 1961) – but minus the humour of the former and the complexity of the latter – and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Metzger’s snorefest is like. There are some nice tracking shoots of the school and its grounds, but the faux-sexy narration and a very poorly choreographed catfight number among the many elements that make it impossible to enjoy Hans Jura’s crisp black and white cinematography.

Judged by the commentary I’ve looked at online it seems that like Radley Metzger, many readers view Thérèse and Isabelle as an ‘erotic classic’. I found this slightly surprising because for me Leduc very successfully conveys the thinking of a gauche and pretentious teenager in the first flush of love – and it isn’t a pretty sight! Thérèse is cloying, silly and unsure of herself – and so there is clearly something very wrong with anyone over the age of twenty-one who finds her depiction sexually arousing. As a reader I can empathise with Thérèse and what she’s experiencing (after all, I too was once teenage), but for an adult to find Leduc’s portrayal of young love erotic is both ridiculous and worrying. For those of us who are no longer teenage and don’t suffer from kiddie fiddling tendencies, this text will act as a salutary reminder of the many and varied reasons why it would be a mistake to have a sex with a seventeen-year old.

While Leduc’s sexual descriptions might appear sophisticated to an adolescent naïf and they are an accurate reflection of the way an insecure and pretentious seventeen year-old girl might think, older readers are more likely to find them comic. Take, for example, the following passage:

“We skimmed and flew over our shoulders with the wild fingers of Autumn. We hurled great striations of light into nests, we fanned caresses, we wove patterns out of the sea breeze, we wrapped out legs in zephyrs, we held the hum of taffeta in our palms. Entering was so easy. Our flesh was in love with us, our scent sprayed up. Our leavening, our bubbles, our bread. The back-and-forth was not servitude but back and forth of beatitude. I was losing myself in Isabelle’s finger as she was losing herself in mine. How our conscientious fingers dreamed… What weddings of movement. Clouds helped us. We were streaming with light…”

This passage is typical of Thérèse and Isabelle and is every bit as ridiculous as the book taken in its entirety. But I am able to view it as humorous in part because the society I live in is very different to the one Leduc belonged to when she wrote the novel. Leduc took her work on this text very seriously and seems to have viewed it as her best piece of writing. Her biographer Carlo Jansiti provides an afterword to this English translation that traces the genesis and publishing history of the book, and in part he attributes Leduc’s ‘descent into paranoid delirium’ to its suppression. That is a tragedy, as was the atmosphere of heterosexual conformism that led to the censorship of Thérèse and Isabelle and contributed to Leduc’s decline into mental derangement. Nonetheless, Leduc somehow managed to continue writing until she died from cancer at the age of 65 in 1972.

As I hope I’ve made clear, Thérèse and Isabelle taken as a social document is historically significant. It is also a literary work, and it suffers from all the faults one would expect in an author who has failed to break with bourgeois modes of cultural expression. Those who admire literature may find Leduc’s novella to be an almost flawless work; whereas readers who approach books from a more progressive proletarian perspective will appreciate its historical significance while simultaneously viewing the text as either comic or rather boring (depending on their tastes and sense of humour).

Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc (translated by Sophie Lewis, Salammbo Press, London 2012).

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Alain Resnais, Carlo Jansiti, Collège de Douai, Frank Launder, Gallimard, Hans Jura, Henry Paris, Jacques Lemarchand, La Bâtarde, Last Year At Marienbad, Naked Came the Stranger, Radley Metzger, Ravages, Raymond Queneau, Salammbo Press, Sophie Lewis, The Belles of St Trinians, The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, Thérèse and Isabelle, Violette Leduc
Posted in books, porn | 20 Comments »

I Just Can’t Get Enough Spanish Fly: Stewart Home interviewed by Joan Cabot

April 10th, 2012

I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now.

Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice?

Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old. When I was in my early twenties I started reading through all the books I could lay my hands on by a number of authors as if they constituted a single work. Among the many writers I re-read the one I liked most was Mick Norman (AKA Laurence James), in whose books the the gay hell’s angels were even harder than the straight bikers and whose politics were of the liberal left. The best known of these hacks is James Moffatt AKA Richard Allen who wrote a series of skinhead books.

With this more focused re-reading, what I noticed is that a lot of the authors I’d checked out when I was young repeated plots and sentences and sometimes even paragraphs from one book to the next. So I thought it would be interesting to write fiction about youth cults in which I compressed this process, with every other page being an almost identical sex scene (which made writing the books very easy). I decided to use lots of deliberately repeated words and phrases in a single book.

I was taking different influences and mixing them together. I was aware of the way surrealism and the French nouveau roman had inscribed elements of pulp prose into what were essentially non-linear and highbrow novels. I wanted to take that further and apply Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation (it was the eighties) to plot within my books – so they resembled pulp more closely than say the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet but at the same time because they collapsed the repetitious effects of reading a dozen novels by the same pulp author into one book, they effectively deconstructed themselves as fiction and escaped being easily categorised as either art or low brow prose.

Over the course of five very similar novels – Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death – I felt I’d perfected what I wanted to do with this approach to writing. Therefore after completing Slow Death, the last and I’d say my best book using this third person condensed and collapsed pulp style, I wanted to move on. I then decided to do a self-consciously non-linear book about the occult and mind control. My first five books were written in the third person and I wanted to switch to writing in the first person; this really limits what you can do as an author but I figured if the narrator’s personality changed every time he had an orgasm (due to mind control – and there is a lot of sex in the book), then working in the first person wouldn’t be too difficult. Once this book – Come Before Christ and Murder Love – was published, the critics in the UK immediately noticed I’d been influenced by Robbe-Grillet, whereas although he was a major influence in my earlier books the way I worked this through was less obvious and many critics didn’t understand that I was producing a simulacrum of pulp and had no interest in writing pulp books.

Anyway, as I’ve continued to write novels I’ve used different approaches with different books. But until my last anti-novel I stuck with first person narration – in both male and female voices. I’ve tried to structure each book differently. With 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess I set the book in Aberdeenshire (which is a part of the British Isles not much used as a setting for fiction) and incorporated a lot of capsule book reviews. With Cunt I was self-consciously creating a post-modern variant on the picaresque novel. Whips & Furs was a cut and paste novel where I simply altered two nineteenth-century books and spliced them together to make a work with a more contemporary structure. In many ways that was an editing job since I did very little original writing to produce it. In Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph was exactly 100 words long. With Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – my most recently published book and written after Memphis Underground – I wanted to make bigger changes to my writing style so I wrote in the second person (which I hadn’t done before – addressing the reader as ‘you’ rather than referring to the narrator as ‘I’) and I used a lot of sampled penis enlargement spam in the text. With Memphis Underground I wanted to structure a book using a classic science-fiction device but at the same time not write sci-fi. So the first half of the book is the events in the life of the narrator six months apart and cut against each other chapter by chapter, and because the narrator has changed his name the reader may not realise straight away that the alternating chapters are about the same person.

Joan Cabot: In the book you write that MU is a book about how housing projects affect people’s life (sorry, it may not be the exact words, but I have to translate the translation…), but I think you talk about a lot more things in the book…

Stewart Home: Obviously Memphis Underground is also about art and London and celebrity and many other things. It is also concerned with writing and how most so-called contemporary literature is old-fashioned and ill-suited to the times in which we live. Of course the book also deals with sex and the idea of death… But there’s no point providing an exhaustive list of the various subjects it covers, including of course train travel in Germany!

Joan Cabot: I think art is in fact the main subject of the book. How will you define your relation with the art world?

Stewart Home: I think that my relationship to the art world is troubled. But at the same time I’m well connected within it, particularly in London, and could be described as an art world insider. It is part of the nature of the art world that no one thinks they are truly inside it, but of course many are. Where I take a different stand from many others is in being more critical of the commodification of culture and in viewing the role of the artist dialectically. Thus because I know disalienation is integral to the communist project, I also understand that to become truly human we have to realise every aspect of what we are – what is sometimes called our ‘species being’. Aside from being social that also means integrating our physical, emotional and intellectual activity. So rather than one person being a brain worker (white collar) and another performing physical labour (blue collar), in a classless society (which will also be one without money and nation states), we’ll all do a bit of everything and have a lot of variety in our lives. To look at the role of the artist in a positive light, it is a deformed prefiguration of how we’ll all be in post-capitalist society. But the artist is also a specialised non-specialist in a commodified gallery system, so you can also look at that role negatively and stress it’s alienation and disconnection from what it is to be truly human.

Joan Cabot: I always though that art should be indistinguishable from vandalism nowadays…

Stewart Home: There’s not much new in that, it runs through a lot of modernism and post-modernism. Dada was the first worthwhile modernist movement to stress the suppression of art and negation and the negative in general, and I find that preferable to surrealism that mistakenly attempted to realise art rather than treating it as a product of capitalist society. In the second half of the twentieth-century the negative again rose to the surface in art movements ranging from nouveau realisme through Fluxus to auto-destructive art. In the visual arts post-modernism has tended towards a recuperation of this negative attitude and its diversion into commercial ends. Late twentieth-century writers such as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker were on the whole using the negative in more interesting ways than gallery artists.

Joan Cabot: I’m sure you have another idea about the motivations to work against the establishment of modern art, but, isn’t it fun just to piss them off?

Stewart Home: Sure. That’s why I inserted the names of many well-known artists into the penis enlargement spam I appropriated to use in my last book. In New York the piece that got quoted the most was: “7 inches simply isn’t big enough to pleasure the Gorilla Girls.” And while many found that funny, those who make the mistake of taking post-modern art seriously were upset by it.

Joan Cabot: You’ve written books about utopian artistic movements and punk… Which interest came first? How much of the relation between art & music movements are true and how much just a way to legitimate the music that we like?

Stewart Home: One interest doesn’t really come before the other – although I was into pop music first. I have clear memories from when I was two years old. So I remember some sixties music from the time – but what I mostly heard when I was small wasn’t of much interest to me. Too much of The Beatles and not enough of mod and freakbeat bands such as The Small Faces, The Who, The Downliners Sect, The Creation and The Action. I remember one morning when I was taking the bus to school and all the kids were talking about the news that the Beatles were breaking up. Some of the older children were quite upset but I was one of the younger ones and I really didn’t care about The Beatles and the fact they were breaking up didn’t bother me. The first music that got me really excited was glam rock. I liked T. Rex best of all. I liked it most when they were doing tunes like Get It On And Jeepster. I also liked bands like Slade and The Sweet – and from the USA Alice Cooper and Suzi Quatro. But then just silly songs like Me & You & A Dog Named Boo by Lobo also appealed to me. But after 1973 the quality of glam singles started falling away. So by the time I was 12 I was looking back into the history of pop…. That’s when I discovered old soul records like Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, or You Can’t Sit Down by the Phil Upchurch Combo: and at the same time started digging all the London mod and freakbeat groups of the 1960s….

I came across dada and happenings and pop art when I was about 12, in books to start with. I guess I was into music before that but the two interests both kept growing – with music way ahead until I was about 20. The idea of what art is has changed a lot of the last thirty years – so now you have people talking about pop music and football as art, which didn’t happen in the old days. The most over-hyped relationship between music and the kind of anti- art that interests me is found in discourse around punk, which some pundits claim is situationist inspired. Such claims are ridiculous as I demonstrate in my book Cranked Up Really High. It’s just a way for silly American music journalists to pretend they’re art history professors, and for English cultural studies lecturers to pretend they’re hip… Rock and roll is somewhere else entirely!

Joan Cabot: Do you think that your books are understandable and enjoyable for anybody. I mean, what kind of people is interested in your work? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Stewart Home: My books are written for people with a sense of humour. I really enjoy the way they wind up and upset those who are upright and serious about literature and music and art. I tend to scream along to the sound of my keyboard as I type my novels, and I’m very happy when my readers laugh out loud when looking at my books. Intellectuals are a sorry bunch so I don’t expect them to be grooved by my prose.

Joan Cabot: Some of your former fictional books are not translated in Spanish. Do you know if there are plans to do so?

Stewart Home: I guess if Memphis Underground sells well then more of my novels will be translated into Spanish. But I haven’t signed any contracts for more books yet. It’s curious watching which books get translated into what language. I have books in many languages but it was my two full-length non-fiction books – Assault On Culture and Cranked Up Really High – that appeared first in Spanish. Both those and another non-fiction book came out in Italy before a small publisher did one of my novels there. In French, Russian, Finnish, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian etc. I only have novels published. In languages such as Lithuanian, Portuguese (with a Brazilian publisher) and Polish only my non-fiction books are translated. It is very hard to predict what will happen with translations.

Joan Cabot: What are you working on now?

Stewart Home: I recently finished a novel based on the life of one of my relatives who was a famous cat-burglar and prison escaper – he was originally from south Wales but pursed his life of crime in London from the 1940s to the 1970s. That book’s called The Nine Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones. This week I have to install a solo show in a London gallery. But with the nice coverage I’ve been getting for this new translation of Memphis Underground I think I might well spend the summer getting to know some hot Spanish girls very very well… that’s the kind of ‘work’ I like doing best!

Joan Cabot: In the book, you say that you cannot distinguish between England and any other country, but I think that something like MU is in some sense a very British book…

Stewart Home: There are different cultures around the world and what you’ll write in English is going to be different to what you’d write if you were using – for example – Spanish. That said I’m against national borders, not against regional difference. But London is now a very European city. It is much much cleaner than it was when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and with that cleanness it has lost much of its old identity. That said not everything has got worse. The food you can eat in London today is way better than what you got when I was small! The food used to be really terrible but now it’s actually very good if you pick and choose. I’m not sure that Memphis Underground is that British, I think I’m more a product of London, and I find it extremely difficult to identify with the rest of England let alone the rest of the British Isles… My mother was Welsh but came from an Irish family, so we’ve been moving slowly east. I don’t really want to go anywhere, I like London… although it is always nice to have a change and visit somewhere like Barcelona or Bilbao or Valencia or Madrid, or even some of the smaller towns like Burgos or Carmona…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alice Cooper, alienation, art, Auto-Destructive Art, Barcelona, Bilbao, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Blow Job, Burgos, Carmona, Come Before Christ and Murder Love, communism, Cranked Up Really High, cunt, Dada, Defiant Pose, disalienation, Down and Out In Shoredtich and Hoxton, Fluxus, freakbeat, Get It On, glam rock, Gloria Jones, Gorilla Girls, James Moffatt, Jean Baudrillard, Jeepster, Kathy Acker, Laurence James, Lobo, Madrid, Me and You and A Dog Named Boo, Memphis Underground, Mick Norman, mod, Mondo Sonoro, nouveau realisme, nouveau roman, Phil Upchurch Combo, post-modernism, pulp fiction, punk, Pure Mania, Red London, Richard Allen, Slade, Slow Death, Spanish Fly, Stewart Home, surrealism, Suzi Quatro, T. Rex, Tainted Love, The Action, The Beatles, The Creation, The Downliners Sect, The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones, The Small Faces, The Sweet, The Who, Valencia, Whips and Furs, William Burroughs, You Can't Sit Down
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

Cleaner Mistook My Art For Rubbish – A Flying Start To My Space Show In Hackey!

April 4th, 2012

Every couple of years you read in a press report that a cleaner mistook a work of art for garbage and threw it away. My personal favourite example of this cyclical news story is the Tate cleaner who in 2004 chucked away a bag of rubbish that was part of a Gustav Metzger piece on show in the Art & The 60s exhibition. The damaged rubbish bag was retrieved by the gallery.

Something similar happened to me this morning. I arrived at Space Studios in Hackney to continue installing my solo show there and found most things as I’d left them – including a hat I’d forgotten to take home the night before. Among the art selected for my Space mini-retrospective is the version of Shredded Book I’d previously shown at the nearby FormContent gallery in 2010. To get Shredded Book to Space, I’d taken the shreddings out of the shredder and put them in a plastic bag. This enabled me to carry the top part of the shredder separately from the bucket that has contained the shreddings, and made it possible to cycle to the gallery by balancing these items (which I’d placed in various bags) on the handlebars on my bike.

This morning the two parts of the shredder where were I’d left them yesterday, but the shreddings that I hadn’t got around to putting back in the machine had disappeared! Looking about I found the shreddings in a corridor with various other bags of rubbish. I was elated by some unknown cleaner’s critique of Shredded Book – whoever dumped my art in the corridor literally considered it to be rubbish! Having found the shreddings, I placed them back inside the shredder, and I guess they’ll be safe there now that the work has been fully reassembled and restored.

Having your art work not just described as rubbish, but mistaken for garbage, is an aesthetic rite of passage. It proves you’ve really made it as a contemporary artist and that you are capable of alchemising what most people would consider to be rubbish into aesthetic gold! The fact that this has finally happened to me means way more than having had the show I’m currently installing in Hackney positively reviewed by the New York Times (when it was on at White Columns in the USA last year)! Is my work rubbish or do I transmute garbage into the living embodiment of everything that is most noble about the human spirit? Clearly I’m going to claim the latter is the case. And whether you do or don’t believe me you’ll still have to come to Space to discover the truth about this for yourself!

Again, A Time Machine – a Stewart Home mini-retrospective – is at SPACE, 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH from 6 April until 20 May 2012. Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10am –5pm – Sat/Sun Noon- 6pm. And it’s free to get in!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: aesthetics, Again A Time Machine, alchemy, art, cleaners, FormContent, garbage, Gustav Metzger, Hackney, London, Mare Street, New York Times, rubbish, Shredded Book, Space Studios, Stewart Home, Tate, trasmutation, White Columns
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions | 27 Comments »

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Posted in advertising, humour, literature, scam, Web 2.0 | 20 Comments »

Yet more reasons to be an ego-maniac on a world historical scale!

March 22nd, 2012

I was asked to answer these questions for an event in Barcelona and having done so figured I might as well post them here too. You couldn’t make it it!

1. When were you happiest? I’ll be at my happiest in about 10 minutes when I’ve answered these questions – coz then I can make another huge pot of espresso and watch yet another Godfrey Ho movie.

2. What is your greatest fear? That the list I have of Godfrey Ho movies is complete and that before long I’ll have watched everything he ever made. Fortunately not even Godfrey Ho can remember all the films he made and there’s a good chance of many more being added to the 150 we know about.

3. What is your earliest memory? Going to the Isle of Wight by ferry when I was 2 years old. It was raining.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My modesty. I feel I need to be more egotistical.

5. In what historical time would you have liked to live? I like the times I’ve lived in best – and would only want to live in London (or possibly New York) at any time. I wouldn’t mind going back to the 1960s for the music, the 1970s for the feeling the whole political system was going to collapse (but then it feels like that again now), and the 1980s for seeing Godfrey Ho movies as they appeared at the point this director was most prolific.

6. Ever been in a fight? Of course! No idea how many.

7. Where do you stand politically? Ultra-left.

8. What do you owe your parents? I can thank my mother Julia Callan-Thompson for my intelligence and good looks, and great stories to tell people about her life as an original mod and then in the 1960s counterculture. Also my great taste in music, since my mother was listening to cool modern jazz all the time she was pregnant with me. I don’t know who my father is so I probably don’t owe him anything – but I reckon he owes me a big bundle of used notes!

9. Who would you invite to your dream party? Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Lopez and Godfrey Ho, among others.

10. If you could edit your past, what would you change? I wouldn’t have gone to see Joy Davison who are a lousy band and unfortunately I knew what I was doing when I went into the gig. I definitely wouldn’t have seen The Police either, but they were a last minute substitution among the support acts when I went to see The Brian James All Stars in 1978 (and I did go to the bar and turned my back on them when they played). I can’t be blamed for seeing The Police because I didn’t know I was going to see them when I went into The Electric Ballroom – but I wish I hadn’t seen them.

11. When did you last cry, and why? In 1971 when I lost a ten pence piece down a drain. We’d only just had the change in the UK to decimal currency and I thought it was a fifty pence piece, which is why I cried.

12. What is the closest you’ve come to death? Sitting in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in east London one winter day. I was leaving my body behind and entering this golden tunnel of light and thinking how great it was to be dead, when one of the museum attendants shook me awake and asked me if I was alright. I was very disappointed to still be alive coz death seemed like it was a groove sensation!

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement or quality? My ability to talk endless and without any prompting – even when I’m standing on my head!

14. What song or songs would you like played at your funeral? “Burn, Baby, Burn” by Mel Williams.

15. Why and when did you decide to start talking about yourself? As soon as I could speak – so when I was about a year old. I didn’t have a reason then, it was just intuitive. Now it’s a case of I started doing this in 1963 so why the hell should I stop?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Brian James All Stars, Burn Baby Burn, egotism, Electric Ballroom, Godfrey Ho, Isle of Wight, Jennifer Lopez, Joy Division, Julia Callan-Thompson, London, Mel Williams, New York, Pamela Anderson, Stewart Home, The Police
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Mister Trippy

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Primera Persona In Barcelona

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Yet more reasons to be an ego-maniac on a world historical scale!

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