Counterculture | Mister Trippy

Archive for the ‘counterculture’ Category

Love Comes In Spurts: Stewart Home interviewed by Jesús Rocamora

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

This is an interview i did with the arts editor of Spanish newspaper Público a month or two ago. I figured I’d let enough time pass to run it here for English readers since it was translated for publication in Spain….

Rocamora: The writer and journalist Kiko Amat says in the introduction to Memphis Underground’s Spanish edition that it is a “book of ideas” – a philosophical novel. Is it a political book? In what sense?

Home: Everything is political. The conventional bourgeois novel is conservative and is all about reproducing the ideas and subjectivities of the dominant class – that is why it is so concerned with what is euphemistically called ‘character’. And while bourgeois novels don’t reflect the world we live in, they exhibit an obsession with realism, naturalism and nineteenth-century ideas about narrative because these are the distortions and blinkers through which the ruling class wishes us to misperceive the world. Just breaking with such nonsense is political – but the way issues such as housing in London are addressed in the book is even more explicitly political.

Rocamora: The story is fragmented. In this sense, Amat invites readers to read your books as “a serial of radical and fascinating articles about all kind of concepts, cults and ideas” that interests you. Which ideas or concepts did you want to write about?

Home: Among other things I wanted to demonstrate that literature was dead – I didn’t so much want to write about this as show it! The opening of the book is a parody of the kind of mediocre writing that is currently popular in the UK, then I slam into a description of a map that is obviously inspired by the French nouveau roman. The juxtaposition was intended to be humorous but at the same time I think it illustrates very well that what passes as contemporary literature today was old-fashioned and out-dated fifty and more years ago. But I feel showing these things is more interesting and powerful than simply providing an explicit written denunciation of them.

Rocamora: And what effects do you want to evoke in reader’s mind with this kind of fragmented narration?

Home: I’m crediting the reader with intelligence and imagination, as well as giving them more freedom than they’d find in the dead literature of the ruling class. The reader can fill in gaps and the juxtapositions can be funny, beautiful or startling. Readers can take them any which way they want. While I’m not interested in realism, the fragmented style I use is in fact closer to what we experience in daily life than conventional literature. Our minds flip from one thought to another, we flick through channels on TV and move from stories about the massacres in Homs to documentaries on the sex life of rare sea species, and from that to gymnastic and cycling competitions, and on to shopping channels and chat shows. Such flipping from one thing to another can be done like a sleepwalker, or it can be done critically.

Rocamora: Aren’t you interested in making literature in a traditional way? What ‘tricks’ or ‘vices’ don’t you like in the literary tradition?

Home: This question reveals a lot about how backward literature has become. I think it unlikely you’d ask an artist why they didn’t want to paint like Goya or Velázquez. Certainly when I talk about the art work I do in galleries I’m never asked questions like this. People understand that visual art has moved on over the past few centuries. Why would I want to write like nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? Aside from the fact that I find such writing both boring and reactionary, those who still produce superannuated prose of this type are expected to behave as if they are dull and square (which since they mostly are obviously isn’t a problem for the sad sacks still writing nineteenth-century literature today). The public image of the serious writer requires that they don’t do the sort of things I like to do – such as standing on my head and reciting passages from my books when I appear in public. By way of contrast I like Goya and Velázquez but there is no point in painting like them now – they did their own period very well and we have to (un)make art for our own.

Rocamora: Another remarkable features in Memphis Underground are these long descriptions about streets and houses, in which you write as a map or (sorry for my insolence) a GPS, as well as detailed description of daily acts, like shaving or cooking scrambled eggs. What roles do this features play in your writing?

Home: I explained the map before as an invocation of the nouveau roman – when I was teenage I read through lots of modernist literature by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. Such descriptions serve to break up the text, change it’s texture and challenge traditional notions of what it is entertaining and worth reading. It reflects the interest in the everyday that you can find in discourses as diverse as fine art and sociology. And also I find it side-splittingly funny!

Rocamora: And what role does sex play in your writing? Why are sex and pornography so present in Memphis Underground?

Home: Sex and pornography are very popular. On the internet, in films, in books, in magazines, at home and even on the street. Indeed, many of the Spanish women I’ve got to know intimately are very fond of fucking in the street – so I think it’s useful to have a lot of sex in my first novel published in Spanish, coz the Spanish women who’ll read it will know I’m not uptight and it will alert them to the fact that if they get it together with me then they’ll have a really good time! I also like to use repetition to structure my writing and sex is very repetitive – and I can dig that!

Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground in 2004, and in its pages we can find social references, about the British youth, pop culture, business and some 21th century’s ways of life. Do you think Memphis Underground can operate as a social reflection of your country at the present time? Are you trying to reflect your society?

Home: I think you end up reflecting the time you live in whether you want to or not. People writing traditional literature reflect the fact that too many people are living in the past albeit without necessarily knowing this…. I want to consciously reflect the times I live in and right now – I want to show up what’s wrong with this world and the direction we need to move in to make positive change. One thing we need to do is put an end to nation states. I find the very existence of England and the United Kingdom utterly ridiculous and am keen to do away with all nation states in the very near future.

Rocamora: From nothern soul to urban tribes, in what ways are you interested in pop culture?

Home: I think it’s important to understand pop culture historically – so my interest goes back to things like true crime writing of 400 and more years ago, people like the sixteenth-century English writer Robert Greene. When you look at pop culture and so called ‘high’ culture then you can see that they interpenetrate and mediate each other – one would not exist without the other. So while I prefer popular culture to high culture I want to abolish them both and create a new communist culture without hierarchies.

Rocamora: Why do we still distinguish between high culture and pop culture?

Home: Because we live in an alienated capitalist society that creates false divisions…. proletarian revolution will necessarily be an overflowing of all such canalisation.

Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground with first person voice. How biographical is it? In general, how much of real experience is there in your literature?

Home: My sex life is very toned down in my books, but in general I’m not just drawing on my own experiences but on everything I’ve seen or heard, it’s based on the experiences of people I know as much as my own. Truth is a slippery construct but in fiction we can approach truth more closely than through documentary writing. Memphis Underground is, of course, completely biographical because it is an accurate record of the keys I hit on my computer as I was writing it. This is a new type of autobiography, one stripped of all romantic and personal content.

Rocamora: Why do you interviewed yourself as a part Memphis Underground?

Home: I’ve long promoted myself as ‘an ego-maniac on a world historical scale’ and any ego-maniac worthy of the name would want to interview themselves way more than anyone else. I thought it would be funny to do this too. Although actually the interview is a mash up – a series of questions I put to someone I interviewed for a magazine cut against the answers I gave to an interview for a completely different publication.

Rocamora: Do you believe in some kind of global conspiracy or maybe it’s only a trick, a game, as narrator? I think, in this sense, in this kind of writing and that of authors like Pynchon (who uses magical elements in his stories) the reader is being invited to “play” with the veracity of the story.

Home: I don’t think there is any kind of global conspiracy but the idea that there is can be used in fiction to point up the absurdity of this idea. People who get seriously involved in conspiracy theory and who believe they can uncover ‘the truth’ end up crazy (if they weren’t already mad when they set out on this path). When I write fiction about conspiracy theory I want to show it is useless. There is no need to uncover hidden truths about who controls the world – our oppression under capitalist social relations isn’t hidden, and conspiracy theories are a distraction from the ways in which we can remake society.

Rocamora: Which authors do you like?

Home: There are many but Lynne Tillman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney and Darius James, would be a few contemporary names among those that write fiction in English.

Rocamora: “Nostalgia is the future”, says the main character near the beginning of the book. Do you think cultural industries are exploiting consumers’ nostalgia to survive in 21th century?

Home: Nostalgia is not a good thing because it is conservative – there is no golden age in the past, we have a world to win. The main character is fictional, he is therefore able to express opinions with which I’d disagree. That’s one of the things I like about fiction, it allows you to explore a broad range of subject positions.

Rocamora: Sorry if it is a personal question: how is a day in your life, from when you wake up until you go to bed?

Home: Every day is different. Some days I get up and go to the gym, others I start writing or working on gallery stuff after eating breakfast. My meal times vary every day too. Tonight I was at the pub with three friends who work for different London publishers, the night before I went to a poetry reading, the night before that I stayed in. That said, most days I spend an hour or two walking the streets so that I can meet some hot Spanish girls. It isn’t difficult as there are a lot of Spanish girls in London. One of the more curious Spanish women I met recently works professionally as a porn actress under the name Snake Girl. She has a snake tattoo on her body and is what as known as a fetish model and actress. I was just standing outside a pub in Soho when I got introduced to her. However, while there are lots of hot Spanish girls in London, there are even more in Spain, which is why I always enjoy visiting cities like Barcelona. My days are varied and I have to travel quite a lot – for example I went to New York three times over the last four months, and many other places too. And it’s as easy to meet hot Spanish girls in New York as it is in London! But when I’m not meeting hot Spanish girls I’m mostly eating, writing, drinking or working out in the gym.

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

Tags: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Barcelona, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney, Charles Dickens, class and culture, Claude Simon, Darius James, ego-mania, Goya, Jane Austen, Jesús Rocamora, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kiko Amat, London, Lynne Tillman, Memphis Underground, modernism, Nathalie Sarraute, naturalism, New York, northern soul, Nostalgia, nouveau roman, pop culture, pornography, realism, Robert Greene, sex, Snake Girl, Soho, Stewart Home, Thomas Pynchon, Velázquez, youth culture
Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

Stewart Home Gives You Better Orgasms! An Interview With Playground

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

This is an interview I did with Playground Magazine for translation into Spanish around the publication by the Barcelona based literary press Alpha Decay of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured I might as well run it here in English too! I’m told this interview was published about ten days ago but the urls I was sent to it don’t work – so I can’t link you to the Spanish version here….

Playground: First of all, I’d like you to tell me about the place you are at the moment, answering these questions. What things do you have around (is there a cup of coffee, a little pencil, something like that)?

Home: I’m sitting at a desk in a flat in east London. I’ve got a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse plugged into it. The computer is sitting on a pile of books. Also on the desk is a lamp, a half drunk cup of green tea (it had coffee in it before I finished that and made the tea), a 2012 diary, a few pens, and a DVD copy of the old school movie “Kung Fu Vs Yoga” which I bought in a bargain store on Broadway in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago and haven’t gotten around to watching yet.

Playground: Let’s talk about John Johnson. Where does his (in so many ways, filthy) life come from? Do you feel him like a sort of an alter ego?

Home: When writing fiction I draw on elements from my own life and the lives of other people I know – but also from books, the media and folklore. John Johnson can thus be viewed as containing elements of me – but my life is much filthier than that of the narrator of this book. Ultimately John Johnson is an everyman figure rather than me.

The name John Johnson has his origins in folklore and folk song. The name comes from a recursive English language rhyme entitled “Yon Yonson”. This is often sung in a Scandinavian accent. If recited in American or British English the name Yon Yonson would be pronounced “Jan Jansen” or “John Johnson.” The song is sometimes credited to Jan Sophus Jansen (1870–1953). Jan Jansen (pronounced Yon Yonson) was born in Amager Denmark. In 1893 he emigrated to Berlin, Wisconsin (USA), where he first worked in a lumberyard and later as a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and wood pattern maker. Jansen was known to sing his namesake song while playing the concertina as he walked the streets of Berlin: “My name is Yon Yonson/I come from Wisconsin/I work in a lumberyard there/Everyone that I meet/When I walk down the street/Says “Hello! What’s your name/And I say: My name is Yon Yonson…” (repeated again and again).

It has also been claimed the song has its origins in the Swedish play “Yon Yonson” (1899). The play was set in a Minnesota lumber camp (Minnesota is a neighboring state to Wisconsin – and part of “Memphis Underground” is also set in Minnesota). The song has appeared in many places including Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse 5” and the single “Yon Yonson” by Canadian post-punk band The Dave Howard Singers. A friend of mine in London was very fond of The Dave Howard Singers and often played the track when I visited him in the late eighties. So I chose a metafictional name for the narrator of the book – because he isn’t simply me, he’s everyone!

Playground: When did you start writing “Memphis Underground”, and why?

Home: I probably started writing the book in 2002 or 2003. I don’t remember exactly – I do know I finished it several years before it was first published. I wrote it before my novel “Tainted Love” which was published in English in 2005. I started it because I wanted a challenge, to construct a novel in a different way to anything I’d done before (there is quite a lot of variation in the ways my different books are structured). I’d always liked the sci-fi device of alternating chapters with the same character at different stages of their life, and I thought that would be a good way to do a mash up of different styles without being explicitly science-fiction. I mashed in the music I was listening to as I wrote the book by including the song titles as chapter headings. There were non-formalist concerns as well, since I wanted to address the housing situation in London among other things. And I guess I also wrote “Memphis Underground” because I’d finished my previous novel “Down & Out In Shoredtich & Hoxton.”

Playground: In this novel music plays a significant role, like in all of your work. I heard you wanted to be in a band more than becoming a writer. Tell me how music has influenced your work (this specifically, but also the rest) and your life. And why the band idea didn’t work out.

Home: I only started writing because I wanted to get free records and to get into concerts for free, so when I was teenager I began penning music reviews. Some people told me I was a really good writer and I should concentrate on that… but I was more interested in playing music than prose.

When I was teenage I played in bands at small venues around London, and I was okay on the bass, but then I realized that guitar players tended to have better looking girlfriends than drummers and bassists, so I switched to guitar. That was a mistake musically because although my bass playing and rhythm guitar playing were alright (I wasn’t a particularly good musician – but then that isn’t really an issue in a lot of rock and pop bands), my lead guitar came out back to front. I’m never sure if I’m right or left handed (as I do some things one way and some things the other). I learnt to play bass and guitar right handed, and I think I should have learnt left handed when it came to lead but by the time I realized this it seemed like too much effort to start learning to play guitar from scratch again as a left-hander. Eventually I just stopped playing music, although I still listen to a lot of music. I’d have probably rather been a singer but my voice is weak – it was always my dream to be able to sing like Aretha Franklin, but like most people I just can’t.

Music influences my writing in many ways. Records create a mood and I like a driving beat when I’m working so I also feel like I’m being propelled forward with the book as well as in my life. But then, of course, I use my knowledge of music in different ways. The rhythm of my sentences in English is important to me. They have to flow when they’re read aloud, so I try to get that from the monster beat of the tunes that groove me. Also I use parts of the history of popular music in my books. For example, my first novel “Pure Mania” parodied the London punk scene of the 1970s. And of course I’ve also written a non-fiction book about punk “Cranked Up Really High”. But I’ve also always listened to a lot of soul and funk. I’m not stuck on just one genre of music.

Playground: Reading “Memphis Underground”, the first writer that comes to my mind is Hubert Selby Jr (specially that Hubert Selby Jr of Last Exit to Brooklyn, all this Queen is Dead stuff), because of the self-controlled rage and the (in cases) filthy way you describe everything… Is him one of your favourite writers? Can you tell me your favourite ones? (I was thinking about Irvine Welsh as well).

Home: I read “Last Exit to Brooklyn” when I was teenage but nothing else by Selby and he’s not important to me as a writer. My first novel was published four years before the first book by Irvine Welsh came out, so he couldn’t have been an influence. What I like about Welsh is that he gets up the noses of the literary establishment in London because he’s not some upper class twit, but beyond their working class setting his books aren’t particularly to my taste as I don’t particularly like his prose style. I always wanted to used a clipped journalistic prose style while combining elements of both pulp and experimental fiction. You can see that in writers like William Burroughs or Kathy Acker. However, my biggest sources of inspiration when I started writing fiction were 1970s British youth culture novels by writers like Mick Norman (real name Laurence James) and Peter Cave, whose style I set out to cross with that of people like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec. A British experimental writer who particularly grooves me is Ann Quin, and my book “69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess” begins as a riff on her first novel “Berg’.

My reading is quite wide, so when I was younger I ran through a lot of pulp authors like Clark Ashton Smith and Abe Merritt. Also forgotten genres such as future war are an influence on my novels and in books like “Red London” I was drawing on largely forgotten writers and works such as “Angel of the Revolution” by George Griffith and “Hartmann The Anarchist” by E. Douglas Fawcett. Other writers I really like would include Clarence Cooper Jr., Blaster Al Ackerman, Calvin C. Hernton, Michael Moorcock and, of course, Karl Marx. My reading is wide ranging and so it would be a mistake to think only a few big names influenced me, it is more whole genres than indivudals that I’m drawing on. And I’m also influenced just as much by film.

Playground: You talk about an anti-ego narrative, but you include an interview with yourself in the middle of the book… It’s the whole thing a big joke to the literary establishment?

Home: The interview you mention is a mash up. I took the answers from an email interview I’d written in reply to questions from a fanzine and replaced their questions with the things I’d asked a really dull and ttalentless singer when I’d taped an interview with him at the request of a third party. I think that is a way of saying that rather than being unique most cultural figures are interchangeable and that most music and books simply don’t matter…

I have repeatedly described myself as “an ego-maniac on a world historical scale.” My problem with most egotists is that they take themselves so seriously they’re not able to be as egotistical as I am. I’m unsure what you mean by “an anti-ego narrative,” so it is difficult for me to respond to that part of your question. I can’t recall saying anything along these lines – although possibly you mean something within “Memphis Underground” (but if that is the case this is an example of my fiction and I often have characters express things that I personally would not agree with).

Playground: I’ve heard you are not a big fan of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie… Did you meet them? What kind of things you didn’t like about them?

The first thing that is wrong with Rushdie and Amis is that their writing is awful. They are typical of the talentless hacks promoted by the English literary establishment. Both are products of exclusive schools and Oxbridge, and neither have anything to say worth hearing either. They don’t know the first thing about how ordinary people live and they don’t know how to write. I’m lucky in that I’ve never met Amis; but one time when I’d won a prize from the Arts Council of England, Rushdie was handing out the money for them. He spoke to everyone else who’d been given a writing award that year, but not me, which I found very funny. I didn’t want to speak to him – or even meet him –but I did want the money.

Playground: Johnson feels like a fake person when pretends to be a middle-class guy, why are you so worried about middle-class?

Home: I’m not worried about the middle class, I just find them uninteresting culturally and in every other way. They also side with the bourgeoisie in its conflicts with the working class. I just wanted to show the middle-class as I see them, in other words as a bunch of tossers.

Playground: In the book you also talk about the concept of the ghetto and the suburbs. In terms of music, what kind of music de you think people of the ghetto would listen? And the suburbs people?

Home: That would all depend where in the world they were. But, for example, in south London a lot of people listen to dance music genres like grime. But then a lot of people in England are being displaced from the city into the suburbs, and in that way London is becoming more like Paris, so probably people are listening to grime in the suburbs as well.

Playground: Talking about music, which are your favorite bands at the moment?

I don’t go and see many bands these days. The music scene in London isn’t as interesting to me now as it was in the late seventies when I used to go to rock concerts roughly four times a week on average. Then in the eighties there were still good American bands coming over like Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. Now there isn’t so much worth seeing. The bands I see these days are mainly people I know personally like Chicks On Speed or Luke Haines. I saw Billy Rath’s Street Pirates recently because he was using a friend of mine, Chris Lowe. as a pick-up drummer. Billy Rath had been out of the music scene for a long time and I’d last seen him playing bass in Iggy Pop’s backing band in London in 1979! The Street Pirates mostly played songs from his old band The Heartbreakers. I spent more time listening to old soul records from the sixties and seventies these days than anything else. Although I still also listen to a lot of electro and rap from the eighties, and minimal and hardcore techno from the 1990s. I don’t listen to that much rock music any more.

Playground: What were your top ten albums of 2011?

Home: I don’t really like to do chart listings, and there weren’t ten new albums I really liked released in 2011 anyway. The only album I can remember writing sleeve notes to last year was ‘Wyrd” by Brend – which is an amazing experiment in crossing over dance beats and Scottish folk music orchestrated by Glasgow based DJ and producer Guy Veale. That is definitely a stand out release, but although I did the sleeve notes last year, it wasn’t issued until last month, so it is a 2012 release!

Playground: Best song ever is…

Home: Always the last one I played, which right now happens to be “Soul Galore” by Jackie Wilson, but give me a couple of minutes and it will be something else.

Playground: Tell me the name you imagine for that band you want to get it when you were a little kid…

Home: The band name I always wanted to use when I was younger, but could never get the rest of the group to agree to taking on was The Teenage Pricks. In one band the singer objected on the grounds she was a girl and not a guy and she wasn’t teenage anymore either…. Which all seemed a bit literal to me!

Playground: Do you usually listen to music when you’re writing? If so, does music shape the way you place the words, helps to find a rhythm?

Home: Yes, as I explained above.

Playground: I read you’ve said that these days in London youth culture is far less visible than it used to be twenty or thirty years ago, can you figure out why?

Home: I’m not sure I said that about youth culture, it seems more likely I was talking about subculture. Youth culture is everywhere, it is ubiquitous and that’s partly why subculture has largely disappeared. Gentrification has changed a lot. Kids find it difficult to afford living in London, so do most people, but if you’ve been around a long time you’re more likely to have found somewhere relatively cheap to rent. The other factor is everything is instantly available now via the internet, so kids can get into something new every day or hour or minute. This means they’re less likely to evolve a unique style of their own over time. But you see youth culture in the form of sportswear brands all over London, it’s completely mainstream.

Playground: You state on your website that one of your motivations is blurring the lines between artistic mediums and literary genres. What do you hope your readers’ gain from this blurring of the lines? A new type of genre, a “non-genre”?

Home: A precursor of what we’ll all gain from revolutionary activity, the overflowing of capitalist canalization and the realization of our species being. It isn’t a question of being this or that, we can be everything at once. An end to the separations that characterize our social alienation under the current system of anti-social relations. Genres will disappear too!

Playground: What were your motivations to create the Neoist Alliance?

Home: To make trouble and have a bubble bath (laugh). This anti-group was also a way of confronting the question of communist organization, something I’d been involved in debates about since the 1970s. What happened was that a bunch of us in London all created one-person ‘groups’. So there were things like The London Psychogeographical Association, The Association of Autonomous Asttronauts and Decadent Action. That meant the person who constituted the group could organize an action and those who constituted other groups could choose to get involved with that action or not, but didn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Playground: I’ve read you hate capitalism (you define yourself as a communist). What do you think about the economic collapse these days?

Home: The collapse of capitalism goes back a long way, don’t forget the USSR was also a capitalist state despite it’s phony rhetoric about being Marxist. So the euphoria the western bourgeoisie expressed about the collapse of the USSR was at best short sighted. You can’t expand economically indefinitely, so capitalism was bound to collapse. The important thing now is to organize a non-hierarchical world where everyone gets what they need, rather than a few having far more than they deserve while millions starve to death.

Playground: The way the world should run, according to Stewart Home, is… (Imagine there are no rules and you can choose a new way to make the world run).

Home: I don’t want a world run by one person or an elite. The only sensible way to organize is by everyone collectively working together.

Playground: Are you writing now? Or working on any new project? Please, tell us about it.

I recently finished a novel called “The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones” based on the life of one of my relatives who was a burglar. He made the front pages of all the British newspapers in 1958 when he escaped from Pentonville Prison in London, but many of his court cases were also reported in the UK press. Ray Jones always stressed that the reason he stole from rich people was as act of class war. So having finished that book I’m doing a humorous plagiarized work about the artist David Hockney’s time at The Royal College of Art in London.

Playground: Give us a reason to read “Memphis Underground” RIGHT NOW.

Home: It will give you better orgasms, improve your blood circulation and make you roar with laughter too!

Playground: And, finally, what can readers and audiences expect from you in the future?

Home: Anything could happen in the future, so they should expect the unexpected!

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, Abe Merritt, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alpha Decay, Amager, Angel of the Revolution, Ann Quin, Aretha Franklin, Arts Council of England, Association of Autonomous Asttronauts, Berg, Berlin, Billy Rath, Billy Rath's Street Pirates, Blaster Al Ackerman, Brend, Calvin C. Hernton, Chicks On Speed, Chris Lowe, Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers, Clarence Cooper Junior, Clark Ashton Smith, Cranked Up Really High, Dave Howard Singers, David Hockney, Decadent Action, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, E. Douglas Fawcett, George Griffith, Georges Perec, grime, Guy Veale, Hartmann The Anarchist, Heartbreakers, Hubert Selby Jr, Iggy Pop, Irvine Welsh, Jackie Wilson, Jan Jansen, John Johnson, Karl Marx, Kathy Acker, Kurt Vonnegut, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Laurence James, London, London Psychogeographical Association, Luke Haines, Martin Amis, Memphis Underground, Michael Moorcock, Mick Norman, Minnesota, Neoist Alliance, Pentonville Prison, Peter Cave, Playground Magazine, Pure Mania, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Red London, Royal College of Art, Salman Rushdie, Slaughterhouse 5, Soul Galore, Stewart Home, Tainted Love, Teenage Pricks, The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones, William Burroughs, Wisconsin, Wyrd, Yon Yonson
Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature, performance, politics, talk | 20 Comments »

Lost London – Compendium Books

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

Compendium Books in Camden Town opened in August 1968 but I didn’t start visiting the shop until the end of the seventies. The first person I got to know well at Compendium was Mike Hart. Mike ran the fiction and poetry section from the early 1980s until the store closed just over a decade ago now. I was 14 years younger than Mike and about 15 years after we met, he told me he knew I was okay when he started at the shop because I was into William Burroughs novels rather than Jack Kerouac books (this was of course before interest in Burroughs soared from the late-eighties onwards). He didn’t have a lot of time for the kids who came into the store solely to buy copies of On The Road. Mike was the last in a series of older friends who turned me on to new authors when I was still young relatively young – and like a good number of those who preceded him, he’d been to art school. He always discounted the books I bought and often got me free copies of records I wanted from his innumerable contacts in the music business.

By the time I became acquainted with Mike I’d already read plenty of dada, surrealist, nouveau roman and beat literature – but he got me checking out the likes of Boris Vian and Jim Thompson. Mike would find cheap English language editions of books by writers he felt I should have read, and offer to order them for me. He’d also introduce me to countercultural figures like Jeff Nuttall whenever I happened to be in the shop at the same time as them. When I started getting books published, Mike put them in the window…. and hosted a number of my book launches.

The best event I had at Compendium was the publication party for my first novel Pure Mania in 1989. I mentioned 100 Pipers whiskey repeatedly in the book, and so the company very kindly sent along a couple of crates. Many of those present got completely smashed – it was a top night precisely because those who were there remember very little of it! I went to many events at Compendium but the most memorable (aside from my own, of course) was a Robin Cook (AKA Derek Raymond) reading. Cookie spent so long talking about his book that there wasn’t time for him to actually read from it. I was massively impressed!

But there was a lot more to Compendium than the front of house fiction section. I never really investigated the occult selection at the back of the shop, but I was very familiar with the politics and theory departments in the basement. In the eighties the Compendium basement was a fantastic mash up of the ultra-left and the postmodern - a virtual battlefield in which Guy Debord slugged it out with Paul Virilio. While I got to know those toiling in the basement – Paul Hammond, Phil Derbyshire and Andrew Burgin among others – like everyone else, I missed the Compendium theory crew’s most legendary event, a Jean Baudrillard book signing for which not a single punter turned up! I once went to a Jeff Nuttall poetry launch with only two other members of the public present, but most of the many Compendium events I caught were well attended.

Moving on from the apocryphal tale about Baudrillard, there are other Compendium stories I used to hear regularly without ever knowing whether they were true. The front runner in this field must be the claim that in the early days Compendium only survived financially because the shop dealt dope under the counter. While this seems plausible, I never saw any evidence of drug dealing going on during the many hours I spend in the shop (although, to be fair, supposedly this practice had been discontinued before I started going there). Equally legendary was shop founder Nick Rochford’s lock up in which I was told he kept two copies of every publication that ever passed through Compendium. If the story was true then Rochford must have had a book collection to die for – although the fact that his publication store was allegedly located in Virginia Water of all places, made me doubt the veracity of the tale!

Last time I checked the old Compendium premises at 240 Camden High Street was a shoe shop. Mike Hart died from cancer in 2002 at the age of 54. In the brief period between Compendium closing and Mike’s death, I’d pop in and see him at the crime bookshop Murder One where he’d gone to work. He seemed happy there and it was a shock when I was told he’d died.

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

Tags: 100 Pipers, Andrew Burgin, Boris Vian, Camden, Compendium Books, Derek Raymond, Guy Debord, Jack Kerouac, Jean Baudrillard, Jeff Nuttall, Jim Thompson, London, Mike Hart, Murder One, Nick Rochford, On The Road, Paul Hammond, Paul Virilio, Phil Derbyshire, Pure Mania, Robin Cook, Virginia Water, William Burroughs
Posted in books, counterculture, literature | 43 Comments »

New York On A Dozen Espressos A Day!

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web.

On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. Among other things I check out the 5.99 DVD Funhouse on Broadway. Actually while a lot of their films are $5.99, they also have loads of $2.99 bargains (or 4 for $10). There wasn’t much in the horror department that interested me, but as always the DVD Funhouse had plenty of martial arts films to groove a discerning trash fan fanatic. I picked up a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga on the notorious Videoasia label (which specialises in public domain pan and scan reissues mastered from dodgy VHS tapes). I’d wanted a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga for a long time but wasn’t prepared to part with the tenner in sterling it would have cost me to buy the Videoasia edition online – I managed to miss picking up a copy of the UK Vengeance Video release of this title because it sold out before dropping to a price I’m willing to pay for DVD (£3 and under – and most of the Vengeance Videos I have were picked up for a quid from London retail outlets that were closing down as the credit crunch kicked in).

I’d arranged to meet up with Tom McGlynn and Bill Doherty at White Columns at lunchtime. I got to WC a little early so I could check in with Matthew Higgs, Amie Scally and Carolyn Lockhart. I’d also wanted to see the 6th White Columns annual show. The exhibition Looking Back was curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss. The idea behind the annual is for those making the selection to give a flavour of the art that was exhibited in New York over the past year. Sherrie Levine is the only artist included in Looking Back whose work I actually saw in NYC over the past 12 months, so overall the show was a fantastic catch up for me. It’s also great to see Levine’s sculpture just sitting on the floor, which gives it a really different vibe to the carefully considered installation of her retrospective at the Whitney last year…

Tom, Bill and I go to Snice for coffee, then take the subway to Long Island City in Queens. Our first port of call is PS1. We’ve just missed the big 9/11 show but there are still curiosities – in particular My Best Thing (2011) by Francis Stark (an animation about cybersex) and Rania Stephan’s tribute to Egytpian actress and suicide Soad Hosni. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) is a scratch video featuring themed selections of scenes from 60 of this actress’s movies. While I’m at PS1 Tom introduces me to Robert Nickas. The 2010 annual at White Columns was curated by Nickas, and he’s just done an occasional publication with White Columns about disappeared artists. Nickas tells me that thanks to my Art Strike, I came up in discussion with his students when they were working on this project.

From PS1 we move on to Dorksy Project Space for a really strange show of artists who have both sculptural and video practices… Video<>Object was not to my taste but in case you’re interested it featured Nancy Davidson, Yasue Maetake, Halsey Rodman, Jeanne Silverthorne and Moira Williams – and was curated by Laurence Hegarty. After an overload of art, we decided coffee was needed, so we headed to some place Tom and Bill knew and this turned out to be a funky little bistro. Fortified with our drug of choice, we moved on to the Yace Gallery for the opening of Reenacting Sense – a group show and only the second ever exhibition at a space that is so new it isn’t listed in the Long Island City Cultural Alliance guide. We’re at the opening because Tom and Bill know Pinkney Herbert who is showing alongside Cecile Chong, Kyung Jeon, Dominic Mangila and Pierre Obando. The show isn’t so much walking a tightrope between eclecticism and incoherence as jumping headlong into the void. It might be amusing – albeit challenging – to create a theoretical discourse that is capable of drawing the work together. I think the curator is called Juri Kim Pang, and she didn’t appear to have any kind of argument to explain the selections she’d made…

Friday morning found me once again wandering around downtown alone – doing things like checking out the record stores on Bleeker Street. There was nothing worth buying in the bargain bins. At lunchtime I met up with Tom McGlynn and Kenny Goldsmith at White Columns. After saying high to Jeff Eaton, who’d been off work when I’d popped in the day before, we moved on to Snice for coffee. Over our brews we talked about sound poetry and pop music. Kenny walked with us to meet Lynne Tillman outside SVA on 21st Street, but headed off before Lynne appeared. With Lynne, Tom and I went to a nearby Italian restaurant – the food was great and the conversation even better. Tom was surprised by the opinions Lynne and I expressed about one well known American writer in particular – but unlike me, Lynne never voices her dislikes publicly, so I won’t name the guilty party here! After we ate, Lynne and Tom headed south, while I wandered north as I had a hotel room for one night.

I decided to walk to 92nd and Madison Avenue, mainly because I can’t recall ever going through Central Park in the dark and I wanted to see if it feels anything like the way it is depicted in the 1974 movie Death Wish. If you were able to ignore the joggers and the dog walkers – which is difficult – then just maybe the landscape is capable of evoking that long gone 1970s era of decline in NYC! I don’t spot anyone who looked the part of a potential mugger or murder victim in a Michael Winner movie. That said, I’ve loved Charles Bronson movies since I was a kid, so I overshoot my destination and go all the way to the north end of the park at 110th Street, then double back along Fifth Avenue and down 93rd Street (all this despite the fact I much prefer Bronson in movies like The Street Fighter AKA Hard Times to Death Wish). Earlier on I’d found it impossible to reconcile some of what were once New York’s sleazier areas – as depicted in films such as Abel Ferrara’a Driller Killer (1979) and Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) – with how they are today. On the subway over the previous couple of days I’d almost had flashes of the way the city appeared in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982) – but in the end I had to conclude that NYC as I’d most liked it on thirty to forty year old celluloid had disappeared (assuming that is, this hadn’t always been a fiction).

Hotel Wales turned out to be a conversion. I tried opening what I thought was a cupboard and it turned out to be an unlocked connecting door to the next suite, and in doing so I seriously freaked out the married couple occupying the room. Once I’d settled in I sat on the bed and read most of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus. After taking a shower I went to bed. In the morning I finished reading Video Green and checked out around 9.30am. I had planned to use the gym (but the hotel wanted to charge me $15 for that) and work online (but it was $12.95 for internet access), so I didn’t bother with either (the hotel was paid for by the Guggenheim, I had to cover the extras). It was snowing when I left the hotel and I enjoyed the way the city and my walking were transformed by the weather. I ambled down to 13th Street amazed by how little traffic was on the roads. I made use of the customer wi fi in Snice while eating soup. I was waiting for White Columns to open so that I could check in there for a final time this trip. The gallery is closed on Sunday. Neither Matthew nor Amie were around but I caught Jeff Eaton. Then it was the PATH from 14th and 6th to Hoboken. Tom wasn’t in when I arrived at his apartment, but he came up the stairs two minutes behind me. We headed out almost immediately to catch up with Bill Doherty in a nearby coffee shop.

I headed to the Guggenheim alone – Tom was coming later. I took the PATH to 33rd Street and walked the rest of the way to 89th. The Last Word event was mobbed. The queue went around the block and all the way back and along Madison Avenue. Even as a participant it took a while to get in, so despite turning up at six I missed the beginning. I’d have needed to get there early to catch it from the start. The Maurizio Cattelan show was pure spectacle and it was packed – making it even harder to get into the museum. Everything was hanging from the ceiling on ropes of many and varied lengths, and there were people milling on every level of the Guggenheim spiral. Like a lot of successful contemporary artists, Cattelan’s work is obviously difficult and expensive to fabricate, although the actual imagery is extremely populist and accessible. Cattelan had announced he was going to stop making art, which was why I was speaking at an evening of talks dedicated to endings and death – it was designed to accompany his farewell retrospective.

The set up for The Last Word is great: 7 hours with a wide range of speakers talking for just 10 minutes each. There’s a green room with fabulous food and everything is perfectly set up in the theatre. I natter to various people as I grab grub and drinks – including, of course, organisers Nancy Spector and Simon Critchley. It’s particularly nice to connect with M C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel from Baltimore, who know all about me through our mutual friend John Berndt. My talk about The Art Strike gets plenty of laughs, so I’m happy with that too. After I’ve spoken, Richard Kostelanetz grabs hold of me. We’ve been trying to meet for years but somehow it’s never happened, so we finally hooked up in 2012!

After I’ve chatted with Richard, Tom McGlynn grabbed hold of me. He’d turned up around eight and had been enjoying the event, but we decided to leave about 11.30PM. There are only so many talks you can take in during the course of a night! The next morning we hang out before I take the PATH to 14th Street. I buy a pair of Levi 501s from Dave’s on The Avenue of the Americas (just a couple of blocks up from the PATH stop). I still had some dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I got a copy of The Flying Guillotine (the pre-Wang Yu 1975 Shaw Brothers epic that inspired the superior spin offs) in Entertainment Outlet on 14th Street. Then I moved a few shops shops down the road and spent the rest of my money in 14 Street DVD Center, where I picked up a copy of Golden Needles (1974) starring Jim Kelly (I didn’t even know that film was on DVD!). I used my Metrocard to take the subway to JFK (actually it’s ten cents short of the fare – but I get through okay).

Virgin Atlantic tell me my flight is cancelled but I’m in time for an earlier plane if I’m prepared to pay for an upgrade from economy to premium economy. I tell them to stuff that and say insist I should get on the earlier flight without paying extra for it. They say tough basically because there are no economy seats left on the earlier departure. Now that’s what I call corporate generosity (not), since it would have actually cost them nothing to put me in premium economy and they cancelled my later flight… So I’m left to hang around the airport until it is time to board an even later departure for London… While I’m kicking my heels at JFK, I notice one of the dollar bills I was given in change at the 14 Street DVD Center is stamped with the slogan: “Track this bill at wwww.WheresGeorge.com”… This is a website that records the movements of currency but it relies on those who end up with the notes the project has marked logging in there. I haven’t registered my dollar bill. Does anyone know anything about the site and whether there are any good reasons for either registering or not registering with it?

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

Tags: 110th Street, 13th Street, 14 Street DVD Center, 14th Street, 21st Street, 33rd Street, 5.99 DVD Funhouse, 6th Avenue, 8th Avenue, 92nd Street, 93rd Street, 9th Street, A Train, Abel Ferrara, air train, Amie Scally, Art Strike, Avenue of the Americas, Baltimore, Basket Case, Bill Doherty, Bleeker Street, Carolyn Lockhart, Cecile Chong, Central Park, Charles Bronson, Chris Kraus, Dave's, Death Wish, Dominic Mangila, Dorksy Project Space, Drew Daniel, Driller Killer, Entertainment Outlet, Fifth Avenue, Francis Stark, Frank Henenlotter, Golden Needles, Guggenheim, Guggenheim Museum, Halsey Rodman, Hard Times, Hoboken, Hotel Wales, Howards Beach, Jeanne Silverthorne, Jeff Eaton, JFK, Jim Kelly, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Berndt, John F. Kennedy Airport, Juri Kim Pang, Ken Okiishi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenny Goldsmith, King Fu Vs Yoga, Kyung Jeon, Laurence Hegarty, Levi 501s, Long Island City, Long Island City Cultural Alliance, Looking Back, Lucio Fulci, Lynne Tillman, M C. Schmidt, Madison Avenue, Matthew Higgs, Maurizio Cattelan, Metrocard, Michael Winner, Moira Williams, My Best Thing, Nancy Davidson, Nancy Spector, New Jersey, New York, New York Ripper, Nick Mauss, NYC, PATH train, Pierre Obando, Pinkney Herbert, PS1, Queens, Rania Stephan, Reenacting Sense, Richard Kostelanetz., Robert Nickas, Sherrie Levine, Simon Critchley, Snice, Soad Hosni, SVA, The Flying Guillotine, The Last Word, The Street Fighter, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni, Tom McGlynn, Vengeance Video, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Videoasia, VideoObject, Virgin Atlantic, Wang Yu, Washington Street, WheresGeorge.com, White Columns, White Columns Annual, Whitney, Yace Gallery, Yasue Maetake
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, dreams, exhibitions | 24 Comments »

“Baron’s Court, All Change” by Terry Taylor reissued at last!

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

If you’ve checked out the main part of this site you will probably already know that I consider Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor to be one of the greatest drugs and youth culture novels of all time. Therefore I’m very proud to have written the introduction to a fiftieth anniversary reissue of the book. For my old take on the importance of this novel in relation to the emergence of mod and the counterculture see the piece I posted on 14 February 2007. My introduction to the new edition starts like this:

“Many novels are forgotten and more or less disappear from circulation. The majority of books to suffer this fate more than deserve it. A handful of them are classics and eventually find their way to wide circulation. One of the most famous examples of this is Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, which made little impact upon publication but became a canonical example of modernist literature after being rediscovered and championed by the surrealists. Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor is a very different type of lost classic. It created a bigger splash upon publication than Maldoror, but by the late-sixties had faded from view and most people’s memories. It provides an accurate account of the drug subculture in London at the end of the fifties. The realism and hep talk of Baron’s Court shocked many readers when it first appeared in 1961, but would have raised far fewer eyebrows in the aftermath of the summer of love. That said, it is only more recently that it has become possible to appreciate its historical significance…”

Since if you’ve any sense at all you’ll want to read Baron’s Court, there’s absolutely no point in my reproducing the whole of my introduction here! You can read it all in the reissue and you’re unlikely to lay your mits on anything else – because the original sixties hardback and paperback editions have been near impossible to get for years. The reissue is available to UK residents for £8.00 by cheque from the publisher: Ross Bradshaw, Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham, NG1 9AW: or for £9.99 by credit card at http://tinyurl.com/taylor-barons. It will soon also be in bookshops and on Amazon. If you want to order from outside the UK, you may do best to use www.bookdepository.co.uk – since they don’t charge postage. Baron’s Court, All Change was republished on 11 November 2011. It’s a stone-to-the-bone mod classic!

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

Tags: Baron's Court All Change, Comte de Lautréamont, counterculture, drug dealing, drugs, Five Leaves Publications, Les Chants de Maldoror, mod, Ross Bradshaw, Terry Taylor
Posted in books, counterculture, drugs, literature | 22 Comments »

In New York Paranoia Is Just A Heightened State Of Awareness!

Monday, November 14th, 2011

I arrived at the Heathrow Virgin Atlantic bag drop late. I was told I’d missed my plane and to go to desk 13 to discuss whether I could be transferred to another flight. The next person I talked to said that since my bag to be checked was well below 10kg, I could take it as hand luggage on my original flight, but that I’d have to run to the gate. I got through security in good time and made it to the plane by sprinting all the way. I was pleased to be the last passenger on-board and having avoided hanging around – all that queuing is such a drag!

I checked the in-flight entertainment and since all the film and music selections were complete and utter wank, decided to read Barry Graham’s new book The Wrong Thing instead. This turned out to be a smart move since I really dug Graham’s noir-style prose which was finely crafted and engrossing. A Mexican-American boy called The Kid who isn’t loved by his family gets into drug dealing, finds love and in loosing it winds up dead. All the trademark Graham interests are present too – from boxing to the unnecessary cruelty of capital punishment. On one level the book is a narrative essay illustrating how the law serves the rich and screws the poor.

Returning to my flight, I was travelling economy and since I’d last taken a transatlantic jaunt on Virgin they seemed to have introduced three classes of travel. I guess you get what you pay for and in premium economy they had more and larger toilets – the rich don’t just shit like you and me, they do it on a grander scale! The attendants got very pissed off with economy passengers who went into the premium economy bogs – they’d have probably had a heart attack if we’d tried to use the first class karzai! It wasn’t exactly service with a smile – when tea and coffee were being offered around and I asked for water, I was told I could only have a hot beverage. So I had to say I wanted a black coffee but to hold the coffee, so I ended up with a cup of hot water. Why I couldn’t just have a glass of cold water beats me… Likewise all the pep talk to passengers about safety is obviously absolutely nuts when Virgin make their female flight attendants wear high-heels. I saw one stewardess fall on her arse and I’m sure she wouldn’t have tumbled if she’d been wearing flat shoes.

Remembering I wanted to go for a heightened state of awareness on this trip, I decided to develop my paranoia and assume the guy in the seat next to me was an undercover cop. We didn’t say much to each other, although that may have been because he spent much of the flight asleep. I like to stay awake, not just because it seems safer when you’re simulating paranoia but also because it’s a way of easing into a new time zone. I finished Barry Graham’s book and had to move onto another less interesting one. I was pleased when we landed at JFK and I got to immigration. At first the immigration officer gave me a bit of a grilling, but when he asked what my job was and I told him novelist, he became very friendly. I always say novelist at immigration because it is both true and generally seen as less contentious than if you say you’re a writer (you might be a subversive journalist) or an artist (in which case you’ll probably be suspected of making porn).

I didn’t have to wait long for the express bus to Manhattan. I got off at 42nd Street and crossed the road to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was a short hop to Hoboken. On the way I checked the voice mail messages that had come in on my US cell phone while I was back in London for twelve days. Two of them were a regular series of bleeps – probably just random attempts to send spam faxes, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be paranoid about them. When I arrived in Hoboken I saw immediately the place had undergone a massive change. The town looked nothing like it had when I’d last stayed there back in the eighties. It was Friday night and people were partying on the street as if having a good time was about to go out of fashion. Instead of local stores and down market chains like Domino’s Pizza, it now boasted branches of Footlocker and American Apparel, as well as a lot of trendy bars.

Tom McGlynn’s apartment building was now an anachronism, it looked as run down as when I’d first stayed there more than twenty years before. Going through the hallway and up the stairs there were still blaring TVs and shouted conversations in both Spanish and English. Tom has a rent controlled flat and he’d been doing it up, so it looked much smarter than when I was last there. We chatted for a couple of hours – mostly about Occupy Wall Street – and then crashed out. Tom’s take on OWS was really interesting because he was designing shelters for protesters to sleep in, so he was involved in some very practical discussions about how to keep the movement growing. But he was also keeping a close eye on the various elements involved in political discussions around the occupation.

Saturday morning was just a question of acclimatising to the hood. Last time I’d been in Tom’s flat there was a view of the Hudson River from one end, but new and expensive apartment buildings had completely hidden the water. After lunch it was time to head to Manhattan. We took the PATH rather than the bus. We got off at 9th Street and went to St Marks Books, which is still the best place to pick up texts in New York. From there we moved on to Bullet Space, an artists collective on the Lower East Side. I sat in on Tom’s meeting with Alex Rojas and Andy Castrucci about a group show they were including him in entitled Mob. When we exited Bullet Space we ran into Carlo McCormack on the street outside the gallery.

I hadn’t seen McCormack since 1989 and we chatted about our mutual friend Jon Savage, as well as the Billy Childish opening that I’d missed since it had taken place a couple of hours before I arrived at JFK. Tom and I headed up to White Columns so that I could check in with the gallery and see how my show there had been going. When we arrived we were told we’d missed Billy Childish and Steve Lowe by minutes – they’d been in together to see my retrospective before heading on to the airport. From there we moved around the corner to Snice for coffee and burritos. After our refreshments, we made out way to Murray Guy on West 17th Street for the opening of Ann Lislegaard’s show TimeMachine. A cartoon creature projected onto mirrors stuttered segments of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells… It grooved us and I’m sure it would appeal to the kids too!

When Tom headed back to Hoboken, I made my way to White Columns for an Eileen Myles reading of prose, poetry and a long extract from an essay she’d contributed to the SF MOMA catalogue for The Air We Breathe: Artists & Poets Reflect On Marriage Equality. I’d been to see Myles read at Apexart two weeks earlier, but had to miss her performance because she was on last and the event ran late. White Columns had bought me a yoga mat for my performance there a couple of weeks earlier, and since it was still in one of the offices, I decided to take it away so that I could practice my headstand reading in comfort. I quickly discovered that in New York guys use yoga mats as ‘babe magnets’. On the subway four girls aged about twenty started to hit on me by initiating a conversation about yoga. Once I was safely back in Hoboken, Tom introduced me to two Canadian friends who’d come to visit him – Mary and Larry. I’d only been away from the US for twelve days but during that time the clocks had gone back an hour in the UK. Now I was in the east coast for the weekend when the clocks went back there…. It seemed like I was in a time slip.

Sunday morning was a chance to run through the stuff I was planning to do on Thursday for the Performa live art festival – including my headstand reading. After lunch I headed to Brooklyn… I took the PATH to 14th Street in Manhattan, changed onto the L train and then changed once again to the G train. I’d heard the G train was really infrequent but I caught one quickly and arrived early at Tim Beckett and Charlotte Jackson’s pad a couple of blocks from the Bedford Nostrand subway stop. You could see the area was being gentrified but it still had more of the old time vibe than anywhere else I’d been since I’d arrived in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.

Next to turn up at Tim and Charlotte’s was Ron Kolm. As more people arrived – including Carl Watson and Maggie Wrigley – it became an old school East Village writers meet with me as the overseas guest of honour. When Darius James walked in with Norman Douglas, it was great to see DJ for the first time in five or six years. When I complimented Charlotte on the music she was playing – a lot of Model 500 among other things – and asked her how she had picked a bunch of my favourite tunes, she told me that this was easy to do, since she’d been checking the links I posted on my Facebook page. That really helped raise my state of awareness by making me paranoid that every intelligence and police agency in the world knows I like sixties soul tunes and old school house!

Shortly after this John Farris arrived and he had real presence. I’ve not read his novel The Ass’s Tale but will try to make up for that omission in due course. I ended up sitting with Darius, Norman and John for a long time: and rather than trying to give a flavour of the conversation here, it’s easier just to direct you to an online interview of Norman’s with John. Following much chat, chow and drinking, everyone settled down to watch a rough cut of the documentary about voodoo that Darius was scripting and presenting. The movie went down a storm, with everyone impressed by the classy cinematography… and the way Darius explained some of the finer points he was wanting to get across as the footage rolled… After the screening most people split, and once again I had no problem getting a G train. I was back in Hoboken by 11.30pm.

Monday morning was another chance to hang in Hoboken and practice for my performance… At lunchtime I headed into Manhattan to meet with Darius, Tim, Tom and Mary in The Old Town on East 45th Street. Tom and Mary had gone into town with Larry ahead of me – but Larry then went off in search of famous baseball sites in Brooklyn. I was travelling alone and everyone else arrived late. I had a bet with myself that Tom and Mary would arrive before Tim and Darius, and when they did I took out the 100 bucks I had in my left pocket and placed the notes in my right pocket. The Old Town was a traditional bar with booths and ultra-retro toilets (or maybe they’d just never been refitted). We talked about writing and the stuff Darius was doing, so voodoo was on the agenda too. Tom and Mary left before me, so Tim and I walked Darius down to Grand Central Station well after dark, then went our own ways. I’d planned to go to to both Occupy Wall Street and MOMA that day, but ended up spending all of it in The Old Tavern before heading back to Hoboken. After eating everyone at Tom’s settled down to a Roger Corman produced piece of trash in the form of a DVD of Sharktopus… I was laughing so much at the movie that I forgot I was supposed to be paranoid, so that rather blew my attempts at heightened perception for the day!

Directed by Declan O’Brien, Sharktopus is one of those “so bad it’s good’ movies that came out last year. Corman has nice cameo as a mean spirited beach walker, and Eric Roberts looks like he was method acting being a drunk. We were speculating on the dinner conversation between the Roberts family when they meet up, with Eric’s more famous sister Julia talking about her latest A-list Hollywood productions, and Eric announcing he’s in Sharktopus. The monster isn’t in the least bit scary but there are plenty of laughs and girls in bikinis – including a group of ‘babes’ doing yoga sun salutations on the beach as the half-shark/half-octopus creature attacks….

Tuesday was another morning of hanging in the hood and working on my act. After lunch I went to Manhattan to meet Mark Bloch on the Lower East Side. On the way I dropped in on This Is What Democracy Looks Like – an Occupy Wall Street themed show in an NYU building on Washington Place. There were handmade signs and printed ephemera from OWS. When I hooked up with Mark we rapped about art and politics, in terms of the latter mainly OWS. After coffee and a snack we moved on to the Billy Childish show at Lehmann Maupin’s 201 Chystie Street space. Billy’s canvases have got bigger as he’s got more successful but otherwise his painting hasn’t changed much in 30 years. The clean white cube space and uncluttered hang also signalled that 30 years of hard graft have finally paid off to make him an ‘overnight success’. Upstairs there was a nice display of Billy’s records and publications… The layout was not dissimilar to my current White Columns show, which perhaps isn’t surprising because Matthew Higgs curated both exhibitions.

With Mark I moved on to the NYU Grey Gallery back in Washington Square to see Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life… There were lots of familiar works but the tight curatorial categorisation seemed to work against the original iconoclasm of the movement. The curator Jacquelyn Baas has a reputation as being the hippest young expert on Fluxus and related currents, so I guess a lot of people like her methods of interpretation, but I didn’t go for her division of works into categories such as ‘change’, ‘danger’, ‘death’, ‘god’, ‘love’, ‘nothingness’ and ‘sex’. To undermine the conceit each category had a question mark after it – so I guess that’s an admission it wasn’t going to work for everyone, and for me the theming just got in the way of the work. Downstairs there was a selection of time related New York art to contextualise the Fluxus material. Between rapping and seeing two shows, Mark and I had used up most of the day… and when my old Neoist/mail art pal went home, I wandered around downtown in the dark. I’d intended to go and see the Fluxus show at MOMA that day after not making it the day before, but I was fated to miss it…

After hanging in Hoboken on Wednesday morning, I took the PATH train to World Trade Center rather than along the 33rd Street branch. Going into the station amongst the construction on the Ground Zero site felt eerie, although I guess you’d get used to it if you did it all the time. For me it provided a stark reminder of the stupidity and futility of terrorism – and let’s not forget that terrorism is always vanguardist and thus always anti-working class, regardless of who is responsible for it. I headed on up to Broadway and while there took another look at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. It almost felt like I hadn’t left since I was last there nearly three weeks earlier. I had my luggage with me – including the yoga mat for my headstand reading – and a woman engaged me in a conversation about where I did yoga classes. Because I was getting hit on rather than participating in political debates, I split. After leaving OWS I checked into Hotel 91 on East Broadway, then rushed out to visit noted Ray Johnson expert Bill Wilson at his Chelsea home. Tom McGlynn had got there before me – after coffee and a long conversation with Wilson about Johnson and his playful aesthetic, the two of us headed north to call on Ben Morea. Among other things Tom and I talked to Ben about OWS. His take seemed to be that we weren’t yet in a revolutionary situation and so right now we shouldn’t act as if we are in one – the important thing was to push in that direction.

Tom and I moved on to the Sherrie Levine and David Smith opening at the Whitney. Smith’s sculpture made us think of Cy Twombly on acid. The Levine show was a great hang and a real time trip back to the eighties. I liked both exhibitions but the opening party left me cold – like so much museum hospitality these days, it seemed aimed at trustees and businessmen who like the illusion of moving in the art world but wouldn’t want to do it for real. The opening had attracted mostly suits and very few artists. A swift exit and a walk of a few blocks enabled us to hang with Nicholas Towasser of Dissident Books at Mid-Town Bagels. After drinks and a chat, Tom and I headed south again – me to East Broadway and Tom to Hoboken.

Thursday at noon I had to check in at Westport, the former strip club that was hosting my reading that night. I carried my yoga mat there without incident – I guess women don’t hit on men in the streets of New York that much in the morning. We ran through the technical requirements of the night and everything was sorted in an hour-and-a-half. The venue was still laid out as a strip joint and all the readings were taking place from a catwalk with multi-coloured spot lights. I tried to make a meet with Lee Wells but our timings were out, so I wandered around downtown before going back to Hotel 91 to shower and rehearse before my show…. I got a call from Lynne Tillman who said she’d had to take a friend for emergency admission to the hospital, so she wasn’t going to make the reading.

I left the hotel just after six and got to Westport on Clarkson Street before seven – having walked from one side of Manhattan to the other. With Performa curator Mark Beasley we had a hurried rehearsal of Lynne Tillman’s text More Sex, with Sadie Laska from the band Joe and Sadie’s Trip reading it. She sounded good and it looked funny with Mark holding up a laptop for her to read from. We didn’t have a printer so this was the only way the story could be accessed. Tom McGlynn and Ben Morea turned up early, so I chatted with them – and sorted out the reading order with my fellow performers Jarett Kobek and Ken Wark when they arrived.

At eight – and not a minute before – people were allowed into the venue. It quickly filled with hipsters and I shredded one of my novels, then stood on my head to give a recital from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – I always work from memory rather than with copies of my books. Jarret followed with a storming reading of a new piece and a section of his most recent novel Atta. He says it’s difficult to read from his Semina novel Hoe #999 (edited by me), so he didn’t do any of that – much as I’d have liked him to do so! Ken was up next and read from some of his expansive writings on the situationists, then ended with a great call and response piece about Occupy Wall Street. Sadie read Lynne’s story from her new collection Some Day This Will Be Funny – with Mark holding the laptop. She was even better in front of an audience than on her run through. I finished off the readings with more party trick pieces – a passage from 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess with my ventriloquist puppet Mister Dog, and several pages from Defiant Pose (with OWS in mind). Then Joe and Sadie’s Trip played raw and loud psychedelic music…

People seemed to have a good time, and a couple of women engaged me in conversations about yoga, since they’d seen me stand on my head – although I kick up with more force than a yogi would use…. The Performa crowd left for other places and by ten-thirty Westport was filling with a different breed of hipster – the type who were regulars at the bar. My plan had been to move on to Ear for drinks – but that was closed for renovations, so we ended up at Milady’s at 162 Prince Street. I’m told this is one of the very last regular bars left south of Houston, and that it gives you more beer for your dollar than plusher places. Tom McGlynn, Tim Beckett and Charlotte Jackson got there before me – they’d called me on my cell to say Ear was closed and had already decided we should go to Prince Street instead. I arrived with Jarett Kobek, Eve Blackwater, Ken Wark and Christen Clifford. Lee Wells and Katie Hofstadter Winton came later. There was much drinking and talking – and, of course, Occupy Wall Street was among the subjects covered….

I walked back to Hotel 91, buying falafel on the way. As I waited for the lift to my room a woman asked me where I’d been doing yoga – she was with a friend and both were about my age. I told the two women I’d been doing a reading standing on my head on the catwalk of a strip club, which was why I had the mat with me. I don’t think they believed me but they were obviously amused by what I was saying, and seemed disappointed that I got out of the lift before them without suggesting we go to my room or for a drink somewhere nearby…. I took the yoga mat back to White Columns the next morning and left it there. Matless I found myself left in peace by women looking to meet a new boyfriend.

On Friday I went for lunch with Lynne Tillman at Snice. Lynne’s sick friend had improved in the hospital overnight. Lynne herself was on top form, talking in an upbeat way about her writing and her recent visit to Japan. I was really glad to catch up with Lynne – who I’d first met at a post-opening party for Susan Hiller when I’d been in New York back in 1989. Having done my gig and met up with Lynne, I felt my current mission in New York was accomplished. We had so much ground to cover in our conversation that I didn’t even get around to talking to Lynne about Richard Nash – whose innovative approach to publishing seems to have done a lot to raise her profile. I’d invited Nash to my Performa reading but he told me he was out of town that night….

Next time I visit the Big Apple I’m gonna make sure I’m not carrying a yoga mat around with me. Being hit upon by around a dozen women who didn’t know me from Adam because of my yoga mat – it’s like a sign saying you’re a ‘sensitive’ man – rather ruined my attempts at raising my state of consciousness through self-induced paranoia…. I just didn’t feel lonely and alienated enough after being flirted with to get into the proper noir mood! Oh well, here’s to me actually achieving a heightened state of awareness next time I’m in the city!

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

Tags: 14th Street, 33rd Street, 42nd Street, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, 9th Street, Alex Rojas, American Apparel, Andy Castrucci, Ann Lislegaard, Apexart, Atta, Barry Graham, Bedford Nostrand, Ben Morea, Bill Wilson, Billy Childish, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Broadway, Brooklyn, Bullet Space, Carl Watson, Carlo McCormack, Charlotte Jackson, Chelsea, Chrystie Street, Clarkson Street, Cy Twombly, Darius James, David Smith, Declan O'Brien, Defiant Pose, Dissident Books, Domino's Pizza, East 45th Street, East Broadway, Eileen Myles, Eric Roberts, Facebook, Fluxus, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, Footlocker, G train, Grey Gallery, Ground Zero, H. G. Wells, Heathrow, Hoboken, Hoe #999, Hotel 91, Hudson River, Jacquelyn Baas, Jarett Kobek, JFK, Joe and Sadie's Trip, John Farris, Jon Savage, Julia Roberts, Ken Wark, L train, Lee Wells, Lehmann Maupin, Lower East Side, Lynne Tillman, Maggie Wrigley, Manhattan, Mark Beasley, Mark Bloch, Matthew Higgs, Mid-Town Bagels, Mister Dog, Mob, Model 500, MOMA, More Sex, Murray Guy, New Jersey, New York, Nicholas Towasser, Norman Douglas, NYU, Occupy Wall Street, PATH, Performa, Port Authority Bus Terminal, Ray Johnson, Richard Nash, Roger Corman, Ron Kolm, Sadie Laska, SF MOMA, Sharktopus, Sherrie Levine, Snice, Some Day This Will Be Funny, St Marks Books, Steve Lowe, Susan Hiller, The Air We Breathe: Artists & Poets Reflect On Marriage Equality., The Ass's Tale, The Old Town, The Time Machine, The Wrong Thing, Tim Beckett, TimeMachine, Tom McGlynn, Virgin Atlantic, Washington Place, Washington Square, West 17th Street, Westport, White Columns, Whitney, World Trade Center, yoga, yoga mat
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, performance | 24 Comments »

Back In The New York Groove!

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

I hadn’t been to New York in 16 years so my sojourn there last week proved a trip! Somehow it didn’t surprise me that I should find myself leaving from Gate 23 of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 4 on Monday 17 October. Even more predictably I wasn’t interested in any of the in-flight movies, so I didn’t watch them. The choice of on-board music was pretty lame too…. although they did have Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles ‘greatest hits’ albums, so I gave those a spin – and otherwise just left Aretha Franklin’s classic 1968 platter Aretha Now on repeat play. Arriving at Newark I took the air train to Penn Station in Manhattan. Gavin Everall – who’d booked my flight and hotel – said I could walk to the accommodation from the station. I enjoy proving a point, so I covered the seventy or so blocks to 103rd street on foot, and with my luggage slowing me it only took about ninety minutes.

The Marrakesh Hotel was cheaper than most other accommodation in Manhattan for a reason – in places the carpet was worn through and the bare brick work in my room had crumbled badly. When I opened the blind I had a delightful view of a brick wall about two feet from my window. The Moroccan themed decoration in the hotel was at best half-hearted, but then I guess the fact that the place was way cheaper than your average New York perch made up for that. Even the Guest Safety Tips I was handed with my key were old school: “Always use the deadbolt. Secure valuables. Report suspicious persons or acts. Never open door prior to verifying ID.” So if you want a taste of old New York then The Marrakesh may be the place for you – although unlike when I was staying in downtown Rio about seven years ago, I didn’t actually spot any armed muggers in the corridors. I arrived at the hotel around midnight, read for an hour, then went to sleep.

I woke about 7am and got myself together before strolling down to White Columns on Horatio Street. This was an amble of about ninety blocks but without luggage I was able to cover the distance a little faster than my seventy block power walk of the night before. When I arrived at White Columns, director Matthew Higgs introduced me to his crew and then took me out for coffee at Snice – where I could get a double espresso rather than the too weak for me American diner coffee. I then unpacked the boxes of material for the exhibition that had been sent from London, and aside from a Mexican lunch with Matthew, worked through until about 6pm on starting to arrange the show.

I decided to walk back to the hotel and detoured into a video shop on the way – I hadn’t looked closely at the TV set up in the hotel and wrongly thought that like the last hotel I’d been in (west country in England), there was a DVD player. The store I went into was chock-full of kung fu movies priced at less than ten bucks a pop – lots of old school classics such as The Shadow Boxer (AKA Spiritual Boxer II), Backalley Princes (with Angela Mao and Carter Wong), Return To The 36 Chambers (AKA Return of the Master Killer), The Kung Fu Lizard (with Lo Lieh), and Enter The Fat Dragon (with Sammo Hung). In the end I picked up Bruce Lee & I, a notorious piece of Brucesploitation with his mistress Betty Ting Pei playing herself in a particularly shameless piece of trash made shortly after Lee’s death. After that I went to an AT&T store to sort out a cell phone for while I was in the USA. I kept wandering north but not always in a straight line. I stopped for some chow and still made it back to the hotel before 9pm. Discovering there was no DVD player, I tried the TV channels but all I could get without paying for a movie on the hotel system was a New York educational/community station (running a History Detective programme about the evolution of Ronald MacDonald’s clown costume) and an old episode of Cheers. So I read until one and then caught another full six hours sleep.

When I exited the hotel on Wednesday morning it was pissing with rain. Still I decided to walk to the gallery, and as I did this I made calls to my friends on my mobile, which I’d set up before leaving the hotel. Strolling south down Amsterdam Avenue with everything looking wet and grey, and very aware that the streets were laid out in grids, I started fooling myself into thinking I was taking a psychogeographical trip around Glasgow. When I got to White Columns someone had put a huge plastic bucket beside the door, where I deposited my umbrella alongside many others. I worked away steadily at putting up my show, took lunch on my own but during shorter breaks I was cracking jokes with Matthew’s White Columns team – Amie Scally, Carolyn Lockhart and Jeff Eaton.

My old mate Tom McGlynn – a New York artist I’ve known since the mid-80s – turned up mid-afternoon and we went for a coffee at Snice. After that, Matthew and I continued to work on my show. Around 6pm Gavin Everall appeared with some more of my material from London. He left to check into the same hotel as me, and I got back on with organising my exhibition until Tom McGlynn came back to the gallery at eight. Leaving Matthew working on my show alone, I headed off to Brooklyn with Tom to catch Jarett Kobek giving a presentation of his new novel Atta at the Issue Project Room on 3rd Street. At the space we hooked up with Simon Critchley and Gavin Everall. Gavin did a Q&A with Jarett after the main presentation. Then it was on to some Brooklyn bar for drinks and a chin-wag with Tom, Gavin and Simon. The talk was good, the hardcore punk rock being played in the bar was lousy.

Thursday morning found me back at White Columns working on my show – once again I power walked the ninety blocks after a full six hours sleep. By Thursday gallery technician Ian Holman was hanging some of the material I’d arranged by placing it on the floor beneath where I wanted it on the wall; while Amie, Jeff and Matthew were also helping out with various aspects of my installation. When Gavin turned up I went for lunch with him at Snice, then it was back to work for me. Gavin went off and when he came back we headed up to the Chelsea Museum for a performance of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero – a recreation of a happening performed by Group Center several times between 1963 and 1965.

Black Zero featured some recorded sounds, including the voice of poet Calvin C. Hernton who couldn’t be there in person because he was dead. One of the improvised elements was Henry Grimes on double bass and Ben Morea on power tools adapted as musical instruments – and they were fabulous together! There were film projections all over the place and a very good modern dancer, who amid apocalyptic verse about racism and nuclear holocaust, eventually fell down into an erotic death pose: at this point Tambellini entered the stage area with a pen knife and popped a balloon onto which film was being projected, and that was the end of the performance. I was knocked out by the event, describing it in words really doesn’t do it justice. Afterwards I went for a drink with Tim Beckett, who I’d arranged to meet at the Black Zero event but he’d been delayed and missed it.

I didn’t need to go into White Columns early on the Friday as the show was coming together nicely, and Matthew wanted to get on with some final touches on his own. After breakfast in a diner with Gavin – where I got into a good humoured argument with a waitress over the relative merits of the Mets and the Yankees - I gave Ben Morea a call and we hauled our asses over to his tiny Manhattan apartment. We took a look through a selection of Ben’s recent paintings, he does them in Colorado where he lives most of the time – they’re Zen-like abstracts which he’s been doing since 1982, and very different from the darker pictures he made in the sixties prior to the founding of Black Mask. After we’d rapped a bit, we went out for coffee and further talk – with the subject matter ranging from Ben’s friendship with Valerie Solanas to the current activism going on around Occupy Wall Street. I’d spent a week with Ben in Europe during the summer, so we also did a bit of catching up.

Gavin and I left Ben to check out what was happening at the gallery. Overall I was very happy with how Matthew had finished the installation, but wanted to make one small change which he agreed to. Then it was around the corner to Snice for lunch with Ken Wark and a conversation covering everything from the recent travels of those present through to the political situation in New York and elsewhere. After checking in at White Columns and finding I wasn’t needed, Gavin and I headed for Occupy Wall Street. There was a good atmosphere and we picked up all the literature we could. Everyone was friendly and I had brief conversations with kids in their teens and twenties through to a middle aged rank-and-file member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). The groups involved were really diverse, but then I guess that’s the nature of a broad movement. It looked to me like the beefy union members who’d got involved had played a key role in putting the authorities off using force to break up the demonstration. While I was at Occupy Wall Street, I got a call from Lee Wells who’d shown pieces of mine in group exhibitions in the New York area in the past, so we walked around to his nearby office for coffee and a chat.

Heading back up to White Columns on Horatio Street we were early for my opening, so I had a drink with Gavin in The Art Bar opposite Snice. When we went to the private view it filled up quickly and when I tried to talk with various friends like Tom McGlynn, Lynne Tillman and Hari Kunzru, I was constantly pulled away to meet new people. We went back to The Art Bar for drinks after the opening. I was told David Byrne had been inspecting my work very closely, and a lot of critics had turned up including Hal Foster. I hadn’t clocked these people but then that isn’t surprising since the place was packed and I don’t know what they look like. Indeed the opening was so busy that I even failed to clock some of the people I knew from London – such as Mike Sperlinger, who I learnt later was doing his own event in NYC. It’s a shame I didn’t get to speak to everyone I know, but I guess that’s showbiz…. Anyway, after a generous helping of Talisker in The Art Bar, it was back to the hotel on the subway.

Saturday morning I just wandered around Manhattan, and as I walked I was calling up a few friends for some catch up, including Darius James who hadn’t been able to make it into town while I was there. I was basically heading south, so that by 2pm I was at Apexart, 291 Church Street, for a series of readings being promoted under the banner Mad As Hell! Given this was really close to Occupy Wall Street I’d assumed it was going to be an afternoon of stories based around current political activism. Instead it turned out to be inspired much more by Network, a movie I haven’t seen for years, with stories about anger rather than politics. I saw Dale Peck, Elissa Schappell, John Haskell, Patrick McGrath and Lynne Tillman read. I was really curious to see Eileen Myles but the reading started late and I had to get to White Columns for 4pm, so I had to miss her. Tillman was for me the highlight – her sharp but spare prose and incredible wit really make her stand out from most other writers.

Back at the gallery I was doing a reading with Kenneth Goldsmith. Kenny was way more than a warm up, he presented me with the challenge of matching and attempting to better his riotous spoken word act. So I started by standing on my head and reading from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, then proceeded to shred a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, and finished up by rapping about the work I had in the show. It was another packed event but I managed to catch up – often too briefly – with some old NYC friends like mail artist Mark Bloch. Afterwards a crowd of us moved on to The Art Bar. As it got later and people started drifting off, I decided to walk to the upper west side with Esther Leslie, who was over from London and staying on 79th Street. I carried on to 103rd by foot, reaching The Marrakesh Hotel sometime after midnight. I was feeling great thanks to both a successful show and the extremely large shots of Talisker served in The Art Bar.

On Sunday morning I walked around the upper west side, before heading to White Columns to do an interview with Aimee Walleston from Art In America. I’d planned to hook up with Tom McGlynn after this, but when I called him he’d was unexpectedly tied up at home, so I wandered around downtown on my tod until it was time to go to the airport. I really couldn’t believe how much dowtown had changed since I’d last visited 16 years before. Streets like Christopher and Bleecker were unrecognisable from how I’d first encountered them at the end of the 1980s, they’d been completely gentrified. Canal Street seemed to retain more of the atmosphere from the old days than anywhere else I went… And while it is in the nature of cities to change, it is always gonna be better when that change is directed by the working class rather than the rich! So we still need a new urbanism!

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

Tags: 3rd Street, Aimee Walleston, Aldo Tambellini, Amie Scally, Amsterdam Avenue, Angela Mao, Apexart, Aretha Franklin, Art In America, At&T, Atta, Backalley Princess, Ben Morea, Betty Tng Pei, Black Mask, Black Zero, Bleecker Street, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Brooklyn, Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee and I, Calvin C. Hernton, Canal Street, Carolyn Lockhart, Carter Wong, Cheers, Chelsea Museum, Christopher Street, Church Street, Dale Peck, Darius James, David Byrne, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Eileen Myles, Elissa Schappell, Enter The Fat Dragon, Esther Leslie, Gavin Everall, Group Center, Hal Foster, Hari Kunzru, Heathrow Airport, Henry Grimes, History Detective, Horatio Street, Ian Holman, Issue Project Room, Jarett Kobek, Jeff Eaton, John Haskell, Ken Wark, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenny Goldsmith, Lee Wells, Lo Lieh, Lynne Tillman, Mad As Hell!, Manhattan, Mark Bloch, Marrakesh Hotel, Marvin Gaye, Matthew Higgs, Mets, Mike Sperlinger, New York, Newark, Occupy Wall Street, Patrick McGrath, Penn Station, Ray Charles, Return of the Master Killer, Return to the 36 Chambers, Ronald MacDonald, Sammo Hung, Simon Critchley, Snice, Spiritual Boxer II, Talisker, The Art Bar, The Kung Fu Lizard, The Shadow Boxer, Tim Beckett, Tom McGlynn, Valerie Solanas, White Columns, Yankees
Posted in counterculture, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitions | 23 Comments »

And The World’s Greatest Legal High Is… Influenza!

Monday, October 10th, 2011

Flu has a bad reputation, but if you think about it you’lll soon realise that the most important thing that drugs do for you is alter your state of consciousness, and influenza can do that too! Squares denounce flu as an illness, but hipsters know it’s much more productive to look on influenza as a psychic elevator and a short cut to ‘enlightenment’.

You could spend a life-time sitting in the lotus position meditating and still never get ‘enlightened’; or you could catch flu and – as the fever takes a hold - unlock the secrets of the universe and learn to let go of everything (or if not everything, at the very least your lunch, either via your bowels or barfed up through the mouth). With flu your dreams will be more vivid, you will experience visions that more than equal those of the Magi of old – and what’s more, you’re not lining the pockets of the local CIA operative whose been pushing you LSD (and has secretly enrolled you in a mind control programme)! In short, flu is the ultimate groove sensation.

Had I not accidentally caught flu this weekend, I would have proceeded with an ill-conceived plan I’d formed to write and post a blog about the film Norwegian Ninja (2010, directed by Thomas Cappelen Malling). When I’d watched Norwegian Ninja, I’d been severely disappointed that it came nowhere close to the bad craziness of director Godfrey Ho’s 1980s ninja flicks – and in particular that spectacularly inept holy grail of Grade Z movie making Scorpion Thunderbolt (1988, starring Richard Harrison and Juliet Chan).

Catching flu expanded my consciousness and made me realise that I couldn’t be arsed writing a critique of Norwegian Ninja; and instead I found myself imbibing large quantities of Spingbank Malt Whisky (for medicinal purposes only, of course) and experiencing hour upon hour of extremely vivid lucid dreaming. As the greatest legal high of all time, influenza not only provided me with a whole series of crazy sensations – I felt like I’d been wrapped in cotton wool and then battered with a sledge hammer – it also made me more creative (after all this blog about legal highs is way better than one about Norwegian Ninja)!

Oh, and influenza helped me save on my fuel bills too, coz I was sweating away in my bed and didn’t need to put on the heating! What’s more, influenza can help you lose weight as well, coz when you’ve got flu you really don’t feel like eating! With flu there is no need for expensive dietary supplements, you can lose weight on the cheap!

So kids, if you want to experience some serious highs this winter, catch a does of flu and you’ll find yourself having a gas! And if a doctor or nurse offers you a jab of flu vaccine, just say ‘NO’ – coz you don’t wanna let the man mess with your fun! Flu rocks and unfortunately it’s not even addictive, since your body builds up immunity to the various strains after catching them…

And remember, don’t believe the medical hype that paints flu in a negative light – it’s better than most drugs, and if you catch it then your croak will write you a sick note giving you time off work too! What more could you want, and what are you waiting for? Catch flu now!

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

Tags: barfing, CIA, cut your billls, cut your fuel bills, diarrhea, diarrhoea, dieting, drugs, enlightenment, expanded consciousness, fever, flu, Godfrey Ho, grooviness, highs, influenza, Juliet Chan, legal high, legal highs, lose weight, LSD, lucid dreaming, malt whiskey, meditation, mind control, ninja, Norwegian Ninja, psychedelia, Richard Harrison, save money, Scorpion Thunderbolt, secrets of the universe, sick note, Springbank, the magi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, time off, visions, vivid dreams, vomit
Posted in counterculture, dreams, drugs, humour | 22 Comments »

10 Reasons Not To Read My Books

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

1. They don’t cater to bourgeoisie sensibilities.

2. They’ll make what you do read look like a shower of shit (assuming you’re into middle-brow ‘literature’ by the likes of Julian Barnes and Philip Roth).

3. They’re an all out attack on serious culture.

4. They challenge the discredited beliefs of every insecure reactionary knobhead who ever sloped across this planet.

5. They transgress all genre boundaries and as a consequence upset traditionalists.

6. They’re not in the least bit funny if you haven’t got a sense of humour.

7. They’re an absolute groove sensation, so they don’t appeal to squares.

8. They wholeheartedly reject every discredited Victorian idea about ‘characterisation’

9. They’re chock full of sex, violence and sadism.

10. They’re sick psychodramas without any redeeming literary features whatsoever.

Just in case none of the above points apply to you, here’s a link to the Book Works site where you can purchase a copy of my most recent experimental novel Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie.

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

Tags: Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Book Works, Julian Barnes, Philip Roth, sadism, sex, Stewart Home, transgression, violence
Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour | 21 Comments »

3-Sided Football & Other Alytus Biennial Repetitions

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

In August 2009, and again in August 2011, I found myself referring the games of 3-sided football staged as a part of the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania. I don’t attend many biennials, but since the one in Alytus has evolved into a jamboree of post-artistic practices – and it is also a delightfully intimate event – I’ll always make an exception for it.

But let’s get back to 3-sided football. It was Asger Jorn, the Cobra artist and founding member of the Situationist International, who first came up with the idea of a football match involving three teams. However, it appears that Jorn considered it impossible to stage a real life game of 3-sided football, and so never attempted to do so. As far as I know the first game of 3-Sided football was organised by the London Psychogeographical Association at a Glasgow Summer School in 1993. Since then there have been many games of 3-sided soccer, and in the 1990s they were particularly popular with people involved with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (who were running an independent proletarian space exploration programme at the time).

3-sided football is played on a hexagonal pitch with each team being assigned two opposite sides for bureaucratic purposes, but only one of these two sides has a goal. The winning team is the one that concedes the least goals, not the one that scores the most. This means that strategic alliances can arise between sides, since it is in the interest of the teams that are losing at any particular point in the game to work together against those that are ahead of them.

In Alytus the pitch was marked out in the city’s forest park, meaning that not only was it difficult to kick the ball all the way across the pitch – because there were trees in the way – but also that as referee I wasn’t always able to see what was going on in the match. On both occasions I refereed in Alytus we had three teams of seven players and I ran the game in three thirds of fifteen minutes each; with two third-time breaks of five minutes. I rotated the teams around the different goals and sides of the pitch during the match, so that each team spent one third of the game defending each of the three different goals. Also, because I’m a lousy referee, I didn’t enforce offside rules (which are a more complicated in 3-sided football than conventional soccer).

The 2009 game was competitive but the teams did seem to understand how to make strategic alliances and we had an excellent match (with the team mostly made up of anarchists from Vilnius winning). This year I was a little disappointed that the two best teams were so competitive and antagonistic towards each other that the worst team won. At one point the two better teams had the ball in front of the worst team’s goal with only one defending player anywhere near them. Instead of co-operating, those who should have been attacking the worst team’s goal tackled each other. This was blatantly stupid since who scored the goal was irrelevant, I was only keeping a tally of goals conceded.

The better teams missed innumerable opportunities to thrash the frankly awful side of footballers who were mostly from London. I had complaints that since I was from London, I was biased in the worst team’s favour, and while I admired the sneaky way they played their superior rivals off against each other – and thereby won the game – I’d also be the first to admit that as athletes they sucked. Given the way the winning side tactically conceded the first goal and continually exposed their football skills as being utterly rubbish, and by such ruses goaded the other two teams into attacking each other, I’d hate to engage any of these lousy sportsmen in 3-sided chess (this is another game that interests them).

Although I was disappointed by this year’s 3-sided football game, the 2011 Alytus Biennial – which ran from 22 to 28 August – also repeated and improved upon a number of events from 2009. The monstrations – demonstrations lacking demands that would be comprehensible to a capitalist politician – were even more of a party than at the previous biennial. We marched with brightly painted placards celebrated the rise of the psychic worker and their solidarity with their dead comrades. The slogans were mostly incomprehensible and some placards even mixed languages and alphabets within words and phrases. This year we not only demonstrated during the day, but also had a late-night march. The way we threw fireworks around in the streets, banged drums and chanted, delighted the Friday night drunks hanging around outside bars.

The scratch music session was also an improvement on 2009, because it was more free form and didn’t become bogged down in rock idioms. Likewise, the 2011 discussions were both more impressive and considerably more global in scope than in 2009. We also did some cloud busting, and that gave me a remarkable sense of deja vu, since it was neither better nor worse than two years previously! I want to keep this short, so I’m not gonna describe everything that went on, but suffice to say that once again the Alytus Biennial proved a complete groove sensation!

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

Tags: 3-sided football, Alytus, Alytus Biennial, Asger Jorn, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, cloud busting, Cobra, football, Glasgow, Lithuania, London, London Psychogeographical Association, monstration, scratch music, Situationist International, soccer, three-sided football, Vilnius
Posted in counterculture, occulture, performance, sport | 20 Comments »

Mister Trippy

Archive for the ‘counterculture’ Category

Love Comes In Spurts: Stewart Home interviewed by Jesús Rocamora

Stewart Home Gives You Better Orgasms! An Interview With Playground

Lost London – Compendium Books

New York On A Dozen Espressos A Day!

“Baron’s Court, All Change” by Terry Taylor reissued at last!

In New York Paranoia Is Just A Heightened State Of Awareness!

And The World’s Greatest Legal High Is… Influenza!

10 Reasons Not To Read My Books

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Pages

Archives

Also Find Me Here

Blogroll

Categories

Meta