July 2nd, 2009
The Serpentine Gallery is a curious institution. On the one hand it is stuck in the middle of Hyde Park and gets treated by the weekend hordes as a glorified toilet; while on the other, current co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist is preparing some heavy-weight exhibitions, most notably a Gustav Metzger retrospective that will kick ass from the end of September. But last night it was the opening of the summer show, a silly season special called Popeye Series by Jeff Koons.
Popeye Series doesn’t interest me. Koons makes exactly the sort of art you’d expect from a former Wall Street commodity broker, the visual equivalent of junk bonds, over-priced trash. Just a tad more entertaining from the perspective of morbid curiosity are the idle rich who flock to be seen at the shows Serpentine director Julia Peyton-Jones puts on for their benefit. These are the people who bankroll the Serpentine as an institution, and exhibitions by the likes of Koons are payback for their support.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the Serpentine was an enormous queue to get in; waiting in line is fine for those who have just spent the afternoon in Harrods buying fake wings for their lap-dogs, but personally I’ve got better things to do with my time. I quickly figured out there was a scam way to beat the queue via a back entrance. When I got into the party area what immediately caught my attention was a very tall and thin woman wearing a pink diaphanous summer dress and no knickers. Given her size zero figure, this off-the-peg garment was a poor fit but it did make her stand out among the identikit millionairesses.
Inside the gallery there were a lot of people getting very excited by the fact that photographers and a diarist from Art Forum were present. The Eurotrash polluting the place were clearly craving attention of a type they’d be more likely to get at a night club, so it beats me why they bother with events like the Serpentine summer show and the Venice Biennial. I saw a good number of people I know and exchanged greetings with Serpentine staff Sally Tallant and Nicola Lees, writer Paul Buck and assorted artists including Clunie Reid, Cedar Lewisohn and Jonathan Allen. Nonetheless, we were completely outnumbered by girls in very high heels with plumbs falling out of their mouths. Said girls were asking inane questions like: “what is Koons trying to say?” Others didn’t know who he was, and I even heard one woman tell another that: “Poons is wonderful”.
On the whole the culture industry types present and the Eurotrash didn’t mix. The most visible exception to this caused a great deal of puzzlement. Some middle-aged artists asked me if I could tell them the name of the man who had more press photographers interested in him than anyone else. I revealed that the geezer in the red jacket and black jeans was Duggie Fields. My acquaintances thought the name rang a bell but couldn’t place it, so I gave them a quick run down of eighties phenomena like ZG Magazine. My guess was that the photographers were more interested in the Eurotrash ‘babes’ Fields was greeting than the artist himself.
As I left an identikit millionairess was using her mobile to tell her daddy how excited she was by the Jeff Koons exhibition: “I’ll have to ask Andrew what it means, he’ll know!” This particular woman had transformed intellectual vacuity into a fine art. I trust that ‘Andrew’ was able to tell her that art no longer has anything to say, if it ever did, and Jeff Koons is the best proof yet that bourgeois culture is utterly bankrupt. That said, there were hundreds of super-rich people present with blank expressions on their faces. They all looked like they needed a harsh does of reality to jolt them out of their self-satisfied stupor, but they’re not going to get that from a Koons exhibition. All I can say is roll on Gustav Metzger!
And while you’re at it, don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Cedar Lewisohn, central London, Clunie Reid, Duggie Fields, Eurotrash, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Harrods, Hyde Park, Jeff Koons, Jonathan Allen, Julia Peyton-Jones, Kensington Gardens, London, Nicola Lees, Paul Buck, Popeye Series, Sally Tallant, Serpentine Gallery, Venice Biennial, ZG Magazine
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 23 Comments »
June 30th, 2009
Having blogged about click thru ad busting and related issues in the recent past, I’m now moving along to take a look at so-called ‘get-paid-to-blog’ sites. The bottom line with these frauds is that a bunch of suits use content you create to attract an audience for click thru ads. There are many different companies running scam sites of this type, and among the better known are Triond, Helium and Associated Content. It should go without saying that the sweated labour which monetizes such rip-off schemes is conned into thinking they’ll be ‘rewarded’ for their graft; but if they see any money at all, they only get a tiny percentage of the click thru income they’ve generated for the swindlers raking-in the real profits. The idea is that other people get rich at your expense!
If you really want to try to make money from producing content that generates click through advertising, it is obviously more sensible to set up your own websites and blogs on which you run Google AdWords. While most of those doing this report very low earnings, their income is nonetheless far higher than if they’d allowed a third party like Triond or Associated Content to rake-off the lion’s share of this advertising revenue. My own view is that only a fool would try to make money from producing click thru content, but you’re an even bigger fool if you chose to work in this way on other people’s sites rather than your own. I regularly receive emails asking if I’ll accept click thru on this site, and I ignore them all because click thru screws up the web.
There are a lot of articles online advising you how best to write copy for sites like Triond and Associated Content. One of the key pieces of advice most of them contain is that you need to dumb down. Looking at them, I frequently came across rhetorical questions like ‘when was the last time you clicked on an ad?’ The proffered ‘advice’ then usually proceeds along the lines of: ’since you’re obviously not dumb enough to think ads offering you the chance to meet Russian girls are worth investigating, and you only make any money if people click on the ads, you need to tailor your content for idiots.’ But then only someone with their brains housed in their asshole rather than their head could be fooled into thinking that generating click thru content for idiots, and further cretinising themselves in the process, will be financially remunerative. This is very definitely a case of dumb meets stupid.
Another piece of advice you’ll find in many web articles about ‘making money’ from ‘get-paid-to-write’ sites is that you should favourite your own efforts on Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon etc. So you’re not only working for peanuts, you’re also on the case 24-7 generating traffic for the likes of Triond or Associated Content. Obviously you’d do much better putting all that effort into a blog you actually control, and why not help raise the general level of human intelligence and knowledge instead of actively playing a role in lowering it? Basing what you produce on the search engine optimisation (SEO) rules that ‘get-paid-to-write’ sites drum into their ‘content providers’ is a sure-fire way of diminishing both your own humanity and that of your readers.
According to James Boswell, Samuel Johnson once quipped: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Today this line should run: “No one but a blockhead ever wrote a hundred articles a year and spent several hours a day generating traffic for ‘get-paid-to-blog’ sites in return for the price of a cup of coffee.” The stark truth is you’ll spend more on the electricity to run your computer as you generate content for ‘get-paid-to-blog’ sites than you’ll earn for your efforts! So remember kids, if you want to have fun on the web only favourite and link to sites that don’t carry click thru ads!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: ad busting, Associated Content, blogging, click through, click through advertising, click thru, click thru advertising, con, Digg, get paid to blog, get paid to write, Google AdWords, Helium, James Boswell, make money from the internet, meet Russian girls, rip-off, Samuel Johnson, scam, search engine optimisation, SEO, Stumble Upon, Triond
Posted in Web 2.0, advertising, economics | 20 Comments »
June 28th, 2009
Don’t Call Me A Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime by Bob Moore (Dissident Books, New York 2009) is apparently a reprint of a tome first published in 1935 by Hurst & Blackkett of London without the exclamation mark; and the variant subtitle My True Autobiography. When I first read the introduction to this ‘reprint’, I suspected Dissident Books CEO Nicholas Towasser was pulling my leg over the provenance of the text when he wrote: “There mustn’t have been many copies printed (of the original edition), because despite many Web searches, I’ve found no used book dealers selling it. In fact, I’ve located only five owners of the original Hurst & Blackett edition: the New York Public Library; the National Library of Scotland; Cambridge University; Random House (years ago Random House acquired a publisher named Hutchinson, who had earlier merged with Hurst & Blackett); and a woman in Essex, England.”
Towasser’s claims immediately sound suspicious to anyone familiar with the legal deposit system for books in the UK. British publishers are required by law to send free copies of their books to the five legal deposit libraries in the UK (supplying the national library in Dublin is currently optional but many publishers still send them complimentary tomes). Towasser mentions only two of the legal deposit libraries (Edinburgh and Cambridge), and it struck me as unlikely that more than half the legal deposit copies of a book like Moore’s would have disappeared from these orderly and well maintained institutions. My gut feeling was that if the book couldn’t be found in at least the majority of the legal deposit libraries, then the provenance Towasser provided for it in his introduction was at best dubious. I checked at the British Library and found they did in fact have a catalogue entry for the Hurst & Blackkett edition of Don’t Call Me A Crook. Of course, entries can be forged, and even whole books produced with fake publishing histories and then slipped into library collections. However, the most likely explanation seems to be that Towasser isn’t familiar with the UK legal deposit system and therefore didn’t think to check with the relevant libraries (which isn’t difficult, anyone with internet access can consult the British Library catalogue via its online service).
Likewise, when I checked online, I found an entry for the Hurst & Blackkett edition of Moore’s book on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, from which one can conclude that at least one used dealer has offered the book for sale via those sites. These amazon entries may have gone up after Towasser wrote his introduction, or he may have missed them. Since I found evidence of further copies and online sales in the first three places I looked, I didn’t pursue the matter. Regardless of whether Don’t Call Me A Crook was first published in 1935 or the ‘original’ edition was faked later (still possible but rather unlikely on the basis of what I’ve found), it is fairly safe to conclude there will probably be entries for further copies of the ‘1935′ edition in the legal deposit libraries I haven’t checked, and that a search of online auction sites such as eBay may turn up further evidence of a used trade in the ‘1935′ edition.
I’m a huge fan of literary fraud and I always appreciate a good leg-pull. I’d rather like Don’t Call Me A Crook to be con job involving a faked provenance; hi-jinx that would place it on the same level as ‘anti-literary greats’ such as the cod medieval works Thomas Chatterton attributed to Thomas Rowley, James Macpherson’s bogus cycle of Gaelic poetry credited to a non-existent ancient bard called Ossian, and Clifford Irving’s phony ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes. For me, more recent incidents of literary fraud, including Laura Albert’s J. T. LeRoy hoax and James Frey passing off works of fiction as memoirs, are considerably less thrilling than chicanery that entails concocting more complex counterfeit attributions for pieces of writing. Sadly, despite Towasser raising my hopes with what I take to be honestly made but improbable claims in his introduction, it does rather look like Don’t Call Me A Crook was first published by Hurst & Blackkett in 1935.
Nonetheless, despite being published as a non-fiction ‘memoir’, Moore’s book resembles a picaresque novel and its literary origins can be traced back to Elizabethan works such as The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets. Moore tells us little about his childhood, his story really begins when he joins the British military underage in the hope of seeing action in World War I. He ended up greasing aeroplanes for the Royal Flying Corps at a base near Boulogne. Moore tells us that after the war he qualified as a mechanical engineer. From that point on he mostly worked on ships, but combined this activity with maintaining hotel lifts and other odd jobs. Moore criss-crossed the Atlantic, spending a lot of time in New York and Chicago, where he combined bouts of employment with opportunist thievery and con-artistry. When he comes into large amounts of money, he inevitably blows it on high-living (with women, boozing and gambling, being his favoured recreational divertissements).
Mirroring Robert Greene’s real and ‘fictionalised’ life, Moore abandons his wife and child and adopts a sardonic attitude towards the world, which he combines with endless serious drinking. Imagine Celine if he’d had a working-class upbringing in Glasgow and no interest in literary posturing. That said, Moore’s anti-semitism and other bigotries are casual, and not ideologically motivated. Moore reflects the prejudices of his time and place without consciously embracing any overt political ideology; this contrasts sharply with the fascist stink that envelopes Celine’s writing. Perhaps Bukowski makes for a better comparison, except Moore is better than Bukowski.
Despite its casual racism, the Chinese setting of Moore’s ‘autobiography’ in its final section makes for very interesting reading. From Shanghai he travels up the Yangtze, where he battles river pirates. This part really rams home the parallels between Moore’s book and The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594) by Thomas Nashe. The narrator of the earlier work, Jack Wilton, relates his adventures as a page during the wars against the French, and subsequent travels in Italy where he serves the Earl of Surrey. Wilton witnesses numerous atrocities, he narrowly escapes both being hanged and cut-up alive as an exercise in anatomy. His tale climaxes by detailing the brutal revenge of one Italian against another. Wilton eventually escapes from the clutches of his foes and returns to England.
Moore’s tale very much mirrors The Unfortunate Traveller; his first ‘foreign’ experiences are in France, but he substitutes the ’savagery’ of Nashe’s caricatured Italians for an equally stereotypical Orientalism. Moore describes various forms of Chinese ‘cruelty’, ranging from deliberately drawn out public executions down to unnecessarily vicious acts of banditry. He is nearly killed on a number of occasions, is kidnapped by pirates but eventually escapes and returns to Glasgow. Moore and/or his ‘editor’ (perhaps ghost-writer) Pat Spry need not have read Nashe’s text to have been influenced by it. The Unfortunate Traveller is a foundational work of modern English prose, its influence has been widely felt and its structure can be picked up from later tales it influenced.
To me it isn’t important how much of Moore’s book is true, it’s a fast and fun read. My guess is that the book is loosely based on fact but the adventures are exaggerated to maximise their impact. If you like over-cooked and not entirely reliable ‘memoirs’ such as Jungle West 11 by Majbritt Morrison, or even Mr Nice by Howard Marks, then you’ll love Don’t Call Me A Crook too!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1920s, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, Atlantic Ocean, Bob Moore, Boulogne, British Library, Cambridge University, Charles Bukowski, Chicago, Clifford Irving, Cony-Catching, Dissident Books, Don't Call Me A Crook, Earl of Surrey, eBay, France, Glasgow, Howard Hughes, Howard Marks, Hurst & Blackkett, Hutchinson, Italy, J. T. LeRoy, James Frey, James Macpherson, Jungle West 11, Laura Albert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Majbritt Morrison, Mr Nice, National Library of Scotland, New York, New York Public Library, Nicholas Towasser, Orientalism, Ossian, Pat Spry, Random House, roaring twenties, Robert Green, Royal Flying Corps, The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Rowley
Posted in True crime, books | 20 Comments »
June 26th, 2009
I try to catch as many of the BFI’s Flipside nights as I can, since this monthly delve into the wilder side of British cinema should not be taken for granted. It is sobering to think that only a few years ago the BFI was an incredibly stuffy and conservative institution that haughtily ignored the film culture it now highlights in its Flipside programming. So big up to Vic Pratt, Will Fowler and the current BFI management for being forward thinking and in the groove! The days of tossers like Colin McCabe passing-off their tiresome taste in bourgeois snore fests as somehow representing everything that is ‘progressive’ in cinematic culture are thankfully over!
First up at Flipside last night was Towers Open Fire (1963, directed by Antony Balch). This was a clean 35mm print from the BFI archive, and you could actually see where Balch had deliberately degraded the film stock to create contrasts between different passages. Towers Open Fire was written by and stars beat novelist William Burroughs. It condenses his literary obsessions and cut-up techniques into a dozen minutes of screen time. The world disintegrates, the stock exchange crashes, and some strange things happen in the old BFI boardroom on Dean Street. Magic is performed over cans of film, the director lies on a bed and jerks off, there are shots of a Brion Gysin dream machine, cameos by BFI luminary Liam O’Leary and junkie novelist Alexander Trocchi, and things more or less end with Ian Sommerville doing a comic dance. I’ve seen this short many times, but never from such a good print.
Next up was the legendary Kronhausen’s Psychomontage No. 1 (1963, originated and executed by Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen), a short I’d never seen before. Antony Balch did some of the cinematography for this movie, the rest is by the Granada Zoological Unit and Harold Keene. The film cuts between shots of animal sexual activity and amorous human subjects. Towards the end, the Kronhausen’s up-the-ante with some almost explicit scenes of a woman getting fresh with a dog. This short is very hard to source and the BFI screened it from a video copy supplied by Mark Pilkington of Stranger Attractor. By chance, Mark had the seat next to me in BFI Screen 1. We said hello but the programme had just started when he came in, and he rushed off at the end of this Flipside session, so I didn’t get a chance to quiz him about the Kronhausen movie. I’m still trying to get my head around it, and would like to see it again.
The main feature was Horror Hospital (1973, directed by Antony Balch). This is essentially a parody of a Bela Lugosi-style b-movie. The plot revolves around a mad scientist called Dr Storm (Michael Gough), who is performing brain surgery on victims he lures to his Gothic mansion, turning them into mindless slaves (who he sexually abuses). Inevitably one of Dr Storm’s assistants is a dwarf (Skip Martin), and the flick also features iconic 1970s British sex-comedy star Robin Askwith. Balch plays with old dark house and horror tropes but keeps the campy parody reigned in just enough to maintain audience interest in the slight plot, which concludes with the mansion going up in flames. The overall vibe is similar to movies such as Thundercrack (1975, directed by Curt McDowell) and Flesh For Frankenstein (1973, directed by Paul Morrissey), but Balch gives the proceedings a uniquely English twist and does so with considerably more aplomb than the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, directed by Jim Sharman). The audience at the BFI was in stitches throughout Horror Hospital.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, Antony Balch, Bela Lugosi, BFI, Brion Gysin, British Film Institute, central London, Colin McCabe, Curt McDowell, Dean Street, Eberhard Kronhausen, Flesh For Frankenstein, Flipside, Granada Zoological Unit, Harold Keene, Horror Hospital, Ian Sommerville, Jim Sharman, Kronhausen's Psychomontage No. 1, Liam O'Leary, London, Mark Pilkington, Michael Gough, Paul Morrissey, Phyllis Kronhausen, Robin Askwith, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Skip Martin, South Bank, south London, Stranger Attractor, Thundercrack, Towers Open Fire, Vic Pratt, Will Fowler, William Burroughs
Posted in film | 17 Comments »
June 25th, 2009
This morning I received several emails about the death from cancer of Steven Wells. Swells was best known as a music hack and was the dominant figure at the New Musical Express for much of the eighties and nineties. While he was at the NME, Swells was always prepared to go out on a limb with an opinion to support off-beat bands and writers. It was Swells who penned the infamous quote about Will Self and me that both AK and Do-Not Press used as a blurb on my books:
“Stewart Home’s sperm’n'blood-sodden scribblings make Will Self’s writings read like the self-indulgent dribblings of a sad Oxford junkie trying to sound hard.”
This quote really rattled and angered Self. Swells knew exactly what he was doing; he wanted to help me find a larger audience and this soundbite created a big stir. And I wasn’t the only person Swells pushed in this way, he did it for a legion of people. He was very loyal and if he though what you did was worthwhile, extremely vocal in his attempts to create space for you in an overcrowded cultural arena. Swells wanted to make things happen, he wasn’t interested in passively reporting cultural and other news.
Swells was a laugh to be around and you could always count on him for a good argument too! His essentially Trotskyist stance rubbed up against my left-communist positions with at times explosive results. Nonetheless, the biggest blow-up we ever had occurred when I said I didn’t like the film Apocalypse Now, and Swells insisted it was impossible for me not to like Apocalypse Now. What followed was a good humoured and thoroughly enjoyable ding-dong; we were sitting in a cafe on Beak Street and some of the other customers seemed worried our disagreement would end in fisticuffs, they didn’t understand we were friends with passionate but opposed opinions. Such differences never stopped us working together. Swells brought me in as an extra on some of his GobTV/Pig Productions pop videos, and also put out ‘my’ novel Whips & Furs: My life as a bon-vivant, gambler and love rat ‘by’ Jesus H. Christ on his short lived Attack Books (co-run with Tommy Udo).
Although Swells initially made his name as a poet, his real strength was as a stream-of-consciousness prose writer. His book Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty is a sustained assault on the idea of what the novel should be, and it is stuffed with his crazy word play – brilliant turns of phrase like ‘a pol potpurri’. After his move from London to the USA, Swells was writing for the Philadelphia Weekly, and you can find his final piece of writing for them and links to other pieces by him HERE.
I’ll miss Swells, although recently my contact with him was mainly via the links he’d email me to his articles as they appeared. My thoughts are, of course, with his wife and family.
Steven Wells born Swindon (England) 1960, spent much of his childhood in Bradford (England) and moved to London (England) as an adult, died from cancer Philadelphia (USA) 23 June 2009.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: AK Press, Attack Books, Do-Not Press, Jesus H. Christ, New Musical Express, NME, Philadelphia Weekly, Steven Wells, Swells, Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, Tommy Udo, Whips & Furs: My life as a bon-vivant gambler and love rat, Will Self
Posted in counterculture, music, obituary | 29 Comments »
June 24th, 2009
Waitrose is a chain of 200 UK supermarkets flogging high-quality nosh at extortionate prices. The company is run as a co-op and prides itself on its image of ‘corporate social responsibility’, despite its core client base being the over-privileged English white middle-class. Its branches are concentrated around London, there are only four in Wales and two in Scotland. Some readers of this blog will recall that way back in January we got into a discussion of Waitrose in the comments to my Anti-Capitalist Shop Closure Wish List. I made my feelings about Waitrose clear then when I wrote:
“Waitrose is part of the John Lewis Partnership but I object to their client base. Watching the mega-rich residents of the Barbican complex in the City of London campaign to get the supermarket that had been Safeway and more recently Somerfield on Whitecross Street turned into a Waitrose was pretty horrible, but all part of the (anti)-”social cleansing” of the area. When it was a Safeway, and latterly a Somerfield, this supermarket used to have a lot of working-class customers from nearby Peabody and council flats (social housing) but they’ve all pretty much disappeared. Instead middle-class Barbican residents shop at Waitrose, rather than having to trail all the way to the M&S Foodhall on Moorgate! These days it’s the poor who have to trudge further for their food, they’re not jumping in cars and taxis like the owners of flats in the Barbican would. Scumsuckers!”
This comment floated back into my mind as I was cruising for Waitrose reduced price bargains (food that had reached its sell-by date) in the Canary Wharf branch yesterday. While doing this, I noticed the stupid slogans on a line of Waitrose “Cooks’ Ingredients”. One thing that particularly offended me was the strap-line “Discovered by Columbus” on their red chillies. Christopher Columbus didn’t discover the Americas, there were indigenous civilisations and peoples on the continent for thousands of years before he arrived. Columbus was an imperialist! Which leaves me wondering whether or not Waitrose care that the fraudulent claims carried on its chillies will piss many people off (mainly those too poor to do their main shopping in their chain). And just how much did the idiot who came up with this offensive piece of marketing spiel get paid for the inanity?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Canary Wharf, Christopher Columbus, City of London, council flats, east London, imperialism, John Lewis Partnership, London, M&S Foodhall, Moorgate, Peabody flats, Safeway, Social Cleansing, Somerfield, The Barbican, Waitrose, Whitecross Street
Posted in economics, politics | 41 Comments »
June 22nd, 2009
You don’t necessarily need drugs to get high, as Ann Lislegaard’s art work proves. According to a page that is no longer available on norway.org (a Norwegian government website in various languages): “Bellona, the fictional city of Samuel R. Delany’s 1974 science fiction cult classic Dhalgren is a place beyond reason, where time and space is out of joint and architectural fixtures seem to be in constant flux and transformation. In Lislegaard’s video animation installation, Bellona is a psychological space, in which norms and standards seem to dissolve into a chaos of anti-hierarchical conditions.”
What norway.org has to say is fair enough if you want Lislegaard’s work explained ‘rationally’, but I found it more enjoyable to let the constantly moving images trip me out. Bellona is a psychedelic groove sensation, and for me it worked best at the opening of the current Raven Row show, when the room was very effectively blacked out because it was dark outside. I went to see it again at the weekend but there was a lot of sunlight bleeding through the shutters that covered the windows, and this reduced the intensity of the flashback effects the film delivered. You have to sit and let yourself go with this one, but once you adjust to the pace, the three screen looped projection will give you hours of drug free hallucinations.
Lislegaard’s other film currently on show at Raven Row is based on and named after J. G. Ballard’s sci-fi novel The Crystal World. Simon Sellars on the Ballardian website says: “I fully agree with her (Lislegaard’s) view of the novel: it’s a ‘mental space, a state of mind’, and that is really emphasised by her iterative work, which constantly chases its own tail. It’s shown on two screens, side by side, and takes place inside a modernist hotel which residually succumbs to the crystallising process described in the novel. Scenes loop back and subsequently fade and buckle from screen to screen under supersaturation of light, forcing you to constantly question the veracity of what’s come before, and where you are in the loop. Mirror images from one screen to another split off into parallel worlds/scene..” The Crystal World didn’t do much for me at the Raven Row opening, but going back and seeing it with daylight bleeding into the room, I was getting flashes of colour as I looked at this black and white work. Far out!
Just to clarify, Sellars is mistaken when he describes the building in Lislegaard’s film as a hotel. On the web page I’ve quoted him from, he reproduces the following Murry Guy gallery promotional blurb for the Crystal World film: “Lislegaard’s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time…” Bo Bardi was an important modernist architect, and the Glass House was her home, not a hotel. Esther da Costa Meyer in Harvard Design Magazine (Number 16, Winter/Spring 2002) says of the Glass House: “Though now part of the fashionable suburb of Morumbi, the Glass House once hovered over the remnants of the original rain forest… Suspended high above a sea of green, the building resembles an International Style treehouse. A swaying metal staircase connects the winding path to the living spaces above… Even though the entire area is now built up and the wildcats are long since gone, the lots are large and densely planted, and the Glass House is almost invisible from the road… the contrast between the abstract aesthetic of steel and glass and the lush green of the forest was an important element … For structure, Bo Bardi opted for that of the paradigmatic Dom-Ino house: spindly supports sandwiched daringly between two slabs of concrete. Thin, Corbusian pilotis, set back from the perimeter to permit a free facade, raise the glass box elegantly aloft. Le Corbusier was an obvious point of reference…”
Lislegaard also has an audio installation on at Raven Row, a condensation of the soundtracks to various sci-fi films entitled Science Fiction_3112. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to derive any flashback effects from this piece, and got far less neural stimulation from it than Lislegaard’s film-works. Exhibited alongside Lislegaard are Thomas Bayrle and international audio collective Ultra-Red. The documentation of Ultra-Red’s art activism left me cold. I presume participating in one of their public events is more enthralling. Bayrle’s hybrid minimal-pop sculptures showed the Raven Row space off to fantastic effect; forget the work (I find Bayrle boring), just check out the beautiful architectural achievement it so effectively sets off. The space is very light and airy, and there are many beautiful details; take a close look, for example, at the exquisite handrail on the stairs that take you down to the back gallery in which Bayrle’s work is shown.
Thomas Bayrle, Ann Lislegaard and Ultra-Red are on at Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS, until 2 August 2009.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Ann Lislegaard, Bellona, Dhalgren, east London, flashbacks, J. G. Ballard, London, psychedelia, Raven Row, Samuel R. Delany, Science Fiction_3112, Simon Sellars, The Crystal World, Thomas Bayrle, Ultra-Red
Posted in exhibitions, psychedelia | 17 Comments »
June 20th, 2009
On Thursday night I took in the opening of the Hoppy (John Hopkins) exhibition Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary at Idea Generator on Chance Street in Shoreditch. The displayed photos date from the early and mid-sixties. Mostly they seemed to be straightforward examples of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. There were also some freak graphics by people other than Hoppy, but connected to him via his involvement with the underground newspaper International Times. So what Idea Generator presents us with is very much an official history of one phase of the London counterculture. That said, it looked a little odd in east London, when so much of what was on display depicted west London more than 40 years ago.
The opening was too packed to be able to see the images properly, but what most interested me was coverage of ‘ban-the-bomb’ demonstrations. I didn’t clock Hoppy’s Doctor Steve Abrams portraits which I’ve roundly criticised elsewhere (do a word search to get to Abrams and Hoppy on this page) for: “mimicking the depiction of male doctors and female hysterics in nineteenth-century medical paintings. Since some viewers were inevitably going to make a connection between these publicity japes and the earlier imagery upon which they so strikingly draw, Abrams left himself wide open to criticism for generating negative perceptions of both women and recreational drug users.” If these problematic images were on display, they were hidden in one of the nooks it was impossible for me to enter because of the crowds already there.
I couldn’t see enough of the show to make any real judgement of it; and beyond Joe Boyd and Hoppy himself, I spotted very few familiar faces from the sixties. I did manage to grab hold of Malcolm Dickson from Street Level Gallery in Glasgow, and as we needed to catch up, we ducked out for refreshments elsewhere. So I guess I’ll go back and see the show properly later, it is on until 19 July. The place was just too mobbed, with endless flashbulbs going off and professional film-makers getting in my way, to be pleasant.
Moving on, I hadn’t posted anything on YouTube for more than six months until yesterday because I was fed up with being censored on that site. As I’ve said elsewhere: “YouTube actually removed a parody of a Fluxus film for violating their rules. This was a countdown from 10 to 1, no images in it at all, just numerals. Presumably the problem was the joke title 10 Erotic Movies – it had more than twenty thousand hits before being taken down by the authoritarians who run that platform. If YouTube won’t allow a film like this, then Web 2.0 is a joke and we need to move on to Web 2.1, where we control the sites we’re posting on!”
But right now there is a new video of mine up on YouTube entitled Does Modern Art Give You A Headache? Check it out, and see how it emerged from an earlier blog on this site: Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org - you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 10 Erotic Movies, Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary, ban-the-bomb, Chance Street, Does Modern Art Give You A Headache, east London, Fluxus, Hoppy, Idea Generator, International Times, Joe Boyd, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, John Hopkins, London, Malcolm Dickson, Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video, Shoreditch, Steve Abrams, Street Level Gallery, Web 2.1, west London, YouTube
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 25 Comments »
June 18th, 2009
Although a number of famous American beatnik writers made Buddhism the focus of their spiritual quests, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac being the most notable among them, this certainly wasn’t the only avenue of religious pursuit to be explored by the European-wing of post-war drop-out youth. A good number of European beatniks wanted to come into knowledge of God. As a consequence one of the things that came up in conversation as they sat around getting stoned was Subud, a syncretistic movement that can be traced back to the mystical ecstasies a Javanese man called Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo experienced in 1925. After taking on an institutionalised form and acquiring the name Subud around 1947, the movement was brought to Europe in the 1950s. Thus by the 1960s some beatniks – including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson – had involved themselves with Subud.
Regardless of whether or not the word Subud was chosen for its similarity to founder Pak Subuh’s name, it is usually explained by initiates as being derived from the abbreviation of three Sanskrit words: Susila, Budhi, and Dharma. Susila requires that followers lead a life in accord with the Will of God. Budhi represents the inner force to be found within all men and women. Dharma indicates submission and surrender to God. Subud attracted my mother and 1965 marks the onset of her seven year flirtation with the movement. Subud’s proponents claimed it wasn’t a religion but to non-initiates like me it appears to most closely approximate a cross between Islam in its heretical Sufi form and Buddhism in its Zen manifestations. Thus the term Subud is perhaps most easily explained as a contraction of Sufism and Buddhism, even if this definition will be found wanting by converts.
In Subud the specific spiritual practice of its initiates was called the latihan, which entailed spontaneously achieved contact with God. Initially someone who has already established contact with God’s power transmits this experience across to the new human receiver. Experienced devotees are able to do latihan alone, although the number of sessions per week is stringently restricted. Perhaps unconsciously revealing the Islamic roots of Subud, contact with God through latihan is described as an act of submission, which can be halted by human acts of will and volition – but never initiated by such means.
That said, my mother’s circle believed that drugs were of huge assistance in achieving these higher states of consciousness. One of the things my mother liked about Subud was the value it placed on the teachings of all the great world religions. In this Subud, like political doctrines such as Bolshevism, was entrist; but for my mother the opportunism that I might read into a stance of tactical pantheism was of absolutely no significance, since it was a theological position that opened up the beginnings of a rapprochement with a Catholic upbringing from which she felt estranged.
I’m not particularly sympathetic to the ‘new’ religious movements with which my mother involved herself; Subud, followed by seven years of deep immersion in Divine Light Mission activities. However, in a comment appended to an earlier blog on this site, I invoked the famous quote from Marx about religion: “‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.” Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
I went on to say: “Marx is clearly talking about organised religion not other states of consciousness, and mysticism can be about either one of these, or both! But when mystical experiences are enjoyed away from organised religion, they enable us to experience at a higher level the states of consciousness enjoyed by man in primitive communist societies. The idea that mature communism is only going to replicate at a higher level the modes of social organisation found in primitive communism is clearly ludicrous, it must also be about regaining lost states of consciousness. Anything less would be a failure to break with bourgeois modes of thought and shallow rationalism.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Bolshevism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Christianity, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Islam, Jack Kerouac, Julia Callan-Thompson, Karl Marx, Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, Subud, Sufism, Zen
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, counterculture, occulture, psychedelia | 24 Comments »
June 16th, 2009
James Daly is one of the many curious underworld figures who knew my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. It seems my mother first came across Daly when they were both scoring smack at 75a Cambridge Gardens in the early 1970s. The gear sold at this address was supplied by a former jockey of Australian extraction called Larry Benns. He’s been described to me as a hot tempered man suffering from low self-esteem who excelled at pissing off his girlfriends. The scene at 75a was intense, a number of addicts seem to have overdosed there including, it is said, one of Brenda Grevelle’s boyfriends. Benns apparently went on the run while on bail facing drug charges; he is rumoured to have returned to Australia where he died.
Turning our attention to Jim Daly, he was a blonde-haired small-time thief from an Irish family who’d take stolen goods to 75a Cambridge Gardens and exchange them for drugs. The absurd nature of Daly’s criminal life is evident from an escapade in which he played a peripheral role that garnered coverage in The Times under headings such as ‘Man On Firearm Charge’ (5 February 1973), ‘Escape Plot Alleged’ (6 February 1973), ‘Shotgun Court Breaks Up In Disorder’ (6 April 1973) and ‘Escape Bid Was Based On Black Power Type Plot’ (12 June 1973). The gist of the story is that while on remand in Brixton Prison, Daly then aged 24 met a 38 year-old American consultant engineer called Nathan Greenberg who was facing a fire-arms charge and wanted to make an escape bid. With others they cooked up a plan inspired by the antics of the Black Panthers in California, whereby Greenberg’s 19 year-old German girlfriend Erika Pijanka would smuggle guns into the West London Magistrates’ Court during his next hearing and use them to free him.
Thus on 1 February 1973 Pijanka entered the public gallery of the court, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the magistrate and screamed: “All right, stay where you are!” As a cop wrestled Pijanka to the ground, a single shot went off. The escape bid was foiled without loss of life or serious injury. Greenberg eventually got a seven year sentence for his fire arms offences, and nine months to run concurrently for contempt of court. William White, the man who Daly had allegedly placed Greenberg and Pijanka in touch with to supply the guns for the escape bid, was found not guilty of furnishing the weapons. Daly got an eighteen month suspended sentence for his role in the plot.
Daly evidently spent a lot of time in jail in the 1970s and my mother visited him at least once while he was banged up. Among her extant papers is a letter dated 23 October 1975 on Blenheim Project headed paper and addressed to the “The Officer on the Gate, H. M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, W6”:
Re: James Daly.
Miss Julia Callan-Thompson is a bona fide Social Worker at the above named Blenheim Project and is the bearer of this letter.
A visit had been arranged for Miss Druecilla Verney, also of the Blenheim Project, to visit the above named at 4.00 this 23rd day of October, and we hope that it will be possible for Miss Callan-Thompson to accompany Miss Verney on this visit. Miss Callan-Thompson is also a member of the S.C.O.D.A. working team.
Yours faithfully,
Kathrine Parker,
Social Worker
The Blenheim Project.
If my mother was ‘a bona fide Social Worker” at the Blenheim Project, this was due to a touch of fraud on her part. I have a copy of a job application she made to the Blehheim Project in the summer of 1975 on which she falsely claimed she attended University College London and gained an upper 2nd philosophy B.A. Hons. in 1963 and an MPhil 1966. In fact, my mother left school at the age of 16 in 1960, and during the period she told the Blenheim Project she’d studied at UCL, she’d been far more gainfully employed as a showgirl and hostess at Murray’s Cabaret Club and Churchill’s in the west end of London. Despite her job as ‘a bona fide Social Worker’ providing my mother with an excellent front when visiting jailed friends, she didn’t like the nine-to-five regime that went with it and soon jacked it in.
As for Jim Daly, I’ve no idea what happened to him. Blog comments from anyone with information about him would be appreciated. I don’t know whether or not William White was a part of the well-known London crime family of that name, it seems possible but is certainly not proven right now; one of Alf White’s sons, known to friends and family as Billy, went by this name.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alf White, Australia, Billy White, Black Panthers, black power, Blenheim Project, Brenda Grevelle, California, Cambridge Gardens, Churchill's, Druecilla Verney, Du Cane Road, Erika Pijanka, James Daly, Jim Daly, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kathrine Parker, Larry Benns, London, Murray's Cabaret Club, Nathan Greenberg, seventies, The Times, UCL, University College London, west end, west London, West London Magistrates’ Court, William White, Wormwood Scrubs
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime, counterculture | 33 Comments »