Archive for the ‘exhibitionism’ Category
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.
1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there’s a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist’ drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.
2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin’s summer 1973 death). Although Quinn’s first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton’s Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.
3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it’s oceanic), but having given you three of these I’ll move on to lesser forms of suicide.
4. Donny Hathaway – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway’s case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism’s most famous suicide. He didn’t really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).
6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don’t seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who’d thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he’d scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.
7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: “and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…”). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I’d thought Brood’s leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I’ d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.
8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I’m aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. “I know you!” I said before pausing dramatically. “You was in Rat Poison!” Borland’s jaw dropped, he’d lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: “I’m Adrian Borland. I’ve gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound.” “Never heard of ‘em mate!” I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn’t surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!
9. Wendy O. Williams – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She’d started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.
10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma’s aphorism: “Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful.” Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adrian Borland, Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, André Breton, Ann Quin, Arthur Cravan, B. S. Johnson, Bas Jan Ader, Berg, Brighton, Dada, Darby Crash, death, Destroy All Monsters, Donny Hathaway, English Channel, Essex House Hotel, Finsbury Park, Finsbury Park Station, Gonks Go Beat, Graham Bond, Guy Debord, hells angels, Herman Brood, Herman Brood's Wild Romance, heroin, Jack Johnson, Jacques Vaché, Jesse Jackson, John Miller, Julien Torma, Kurt Cobain, LA, Laurence James, letterism, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, Mexico, Mike Kelly, NEL, New English Library, New Malden, New Malden Town Hall, New York, North Atlantic, opium, Pacific Ocean, Palace Pier, Poetics, Rat Poison, Ray Johnson, Roberta Flack, Rock and Roll Junkie, situationism, suicide, surrealism, The Germs, The Outsiders, The Plasmatics, The Sound, Tony Oursler, Wendy O'Williams
Posted in art criticism, drugs, exhibitionism, music | 22 Comments »
Sunday, December 25th, 2011
1. You’re a woman – you ain’t got one!
2. You already have an erection!
3. As far as most women are concerned (and many men too) it isn’t size that counts but what you can do with it!
4. Scientific research suggests that silicon impants are dangerous – and simply ingesting herbs doesn’t work!
5. Adding three inches to your donger would make your balls look distressingly small by way of comparison!
6. You’re already a complete dick so you don’t need to make yourself a bigger one!
7. A small blood sausage is easier to swallow (a variation on the small is beautiful argument)!
8. Herbal remedies are a rip-off – why waste your money?
9.. Too great a fixation on genital size and pleasure is phallocentric and will result in most women (and many men) viewing you as a complete cock!
10. If you really want to reclaim your manhood then you’ve got to learn to love it just the way it is!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: blood sausage, cock, donger, erection, genitals, herbal remedies, manhood, penis, penis enlargement, silicon
Posted in exhibitionism, humour, porn | 20 Comments »
Monday, December 12th, 2011
For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I’m always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who’d organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA “Scotland’s Turkish Kebab House” – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.
It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn’t eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.
I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina’s spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was ‘destroying’. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.
After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they’d closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina’s Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don’t use the internet, and much else besides. I’m a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.
On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow’s many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it’s sell-by-date. I wasn’t gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn’t buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.
I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren’t using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they’re not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden’s News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn’t consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden’s website:
Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n’brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.
Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it’s an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.
Aside from books, I always find Poundland’s DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn’t great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops. On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it’s curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.
Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 23rd Century, Argyle Street, Ballater Street, Billy Blanks, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bloodfight, Bolo Yeung, Bruce Li, Candleriggs, Chino, Defiant Pose, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Dragon Lee, Expect No Mercy, Fake Sheikh, falafel, Fist of Fury II, Five Fingers of Steel, Glasgow, Glasgow Central Station, Golden Dragon Silver Snake, GrabIt, HarperCollins, hauntology, headstand, Jamaica Street, Jefford Horrigan, John Liu, Johnnie Chan, Keith Miller, London, Lonsdale, Lorna Moon, Mark Dacascos, Mazher Mahmood, Mono, Music Zone, Neville Thurlbeck, News Corp, News of the World, News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, Onan The Barbarian, Oswald Street, Peter Burden, phone hacking, Pound City, Poundland, Premier Inn, psychogeography, René Salemi, Return of the Tiger, River Clyde, Rupert Murdoch, Sanctuary, Scotland's Turkish Kebab House, Showdown, shredding, Sports Direct, Stewart Home, Thats Entertainment, The Dhabba, The Dragon The Hero, The International Martial Arts Collection, The Pound Shop, Tower Records, Transmission Gallery, Turquoise, Woolworths
Posted in culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitionism, performance | 23 Comments »
Sunday, November 27th, 2011
1. Metrosexual – self-consciously middle-class and faux-sophisticated; some are simply wankers whereas others claiming this label are utter pricks.
2. Undersexual – just not getting any.
3. Autosexual – a wanker and proud of it.
4. Retrosexual – the moth-eaten comfort blanket of a memory AKA nostalgia dating.
5. Pansexual – desperate enough to be up for anything including the five-knuckle shuffle.
6. Asexual – so in love with yourself you’re not interested in anybody else.
7. Monosexual – the not so silent majority (a post-modern wall of sound) who never tire of the same old thing, or themselves!
8. Polysexual – see pansexual above.
9. Pornosexual – fans of dirty movies and one-handed reads.
10. Octasexual – those who are attracted to men, women, he-shes, transvestites, animals, inatimate objects, food and jerking off.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: asexual, autosexual, jerking off, metrosexual, monosexual, octasexual, pansexual, polysexual, pornosexual, retrosexual, synonyms, undersexual, wamker, wank, wanking
Posted in exhibitionism, humour | 23 Comments »
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 »
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
A 34 year-old Bristol based research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the ‘real’ author of the Belle de Jour blog and books. These texts ‘documented’ the life of a high-class London call girl. Dr Magnanti claims her writing is an authentic record of the time she spent working as a prostitute to fund the final phase of her PhD research. I haven’t looked deeply into the various proofs that Dr Magnanti is Belle, but plenty of news journalists have and they seem convinced by them. So while I can’t say with absolutely certainty that Dr Magnanti is Belle, it seems to me to be rather unlikely that she isn’t.
One thing I am absolutely certain of is that I didn’t write the Belle de Jour blog and books despite the claims to the contrary made by various conspiracy nuts. Although the media (most notably The Evening Standard and The Guardian) ran with this story, it didn’t originate with them and I was never under the impression they believed it to be true; they covered the claim without taking any very strong line on it because it made a good story. I benefited from the publicity and sold books as a result, while the journalists in question were paid and generated profits for their bosses.
Curiously, it appears that the majority of those who made and repeated the claim that I was Belle de Jour as if they personally believed it, did so out of spite and malice. It is therefore ironic that their activities helped rather than harmed me. The endless conspiracy theories propagated by these bozos were so ludicrous – involving as they did interminable and utterly fantastic international ‘criminal’ and ‘political’ outrages – that no one took them seriously. It was even claimed that when I temporarily took the position of writer-in-residence at Strathclyde University, I’d ‘fled’ to Scotland in a vain attempt to avoid arrest by the cops. Despite the linked assertion that my incarceration for endless heinous sex crimes was imminent, I remain at liberty…
In fact, beyond a handful of nutters, no one who’d looked into the matter ever believed I was Belle de Jour. You only had to compare my prose to Belle’s to see that I couldn’t possibly have written the tedious shit ‘she’ spews out. My view of Belle’s work is that it is mindless bollocks aimed at middle-class airheads. Had I not been publicly accused of having composed this garbage, I wouldn’t have bothered looking at it, and so it shouldn’t be necessary to add I would never have bothered writing it. That said, if Dr Magnanti is indeed (as I think likely) Belle, then hats-off to her for evading detection for so long and doing something useful in the area of cancer research. Since her prose is so unappealing, she should quit writing and stick to medical matters instead.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Belle de Jour, Brooke Magnanti, cancer research, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, Diary of a London Call Girl, Dr Brooke Magnanti, Evening Standard, Guardian, prostitutes, prostitution, Stewart Home
Posted in books, culture gossip & parties, exhibitionism, humour | 111 Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Yes, those crazy non-erotic soft porn DVDs are invading UK pound shops once again, which led Justin to comment on my Jenna Jameson blog of a few days ago: “Have you noticed that Poundland actually sell porn DVDs?” Well, I blogged about the porno on offer in pound shops back in the days when I was posting on MySpace. Poundland still seem to be concentrating on the more ‘tasteful’ Penthouse and Electric Blue type stuff. Pound shops stuffed with trash DVDs, let alone euro or dollar shops selling anything at all, are in short supply in inner London; but the same shirt turns up at the same prices on market stalls in Whitecross Street and elsewhere (okay, I lied, a lot of these DVDs go for 50p when they turn up down Whitecross Street – never trust a Londoner!). Two years ago, I was more impressed with what was on offer in Poundgate in Glasgow than Poundland. However, when I gave a talk at the Streetlevel Gallery a few weeks ago, very close to where Poundgate used to be, I noticed the shop had gone. Anyway, here’s what I had to say about their porno DVDs a couple of years back:
“Poundgate was doing titles like Lust In The Grass (although personally I’d prefer Lust In The Dust as the ‘hard’ sell end of a tiresome video of a Czech chick getting ‘filthy’ – double entendre – in her garden), Bondage Party (you can see a picture of that here) and Best of Sammy Marshall (image of that here). I’d never heard of Sammy Marshall but a web search led me directly to her site (this was nearly two years ago, the site is no longer up): ‘Sammy Marshall. A model for around 20 years now, I’ve been published in all the top shelf magazines, page 3, calendars etc, and have also been in various movies. I also do lap dancing and strip shows all over the country…’ The Internet Movie Data Base provides the following filmography for Ms Marshall: Women That Wank: Volume 1 (2004), British Bitches in Leather (2001), Best of Single Sensations 1 (2001), Girls in Uniform 1 (2001), Dodger DVD 2 (2001), Dodger DVD 25 (2001), Golden Shower Girls 1 (2001), The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshall (2000), Lesbian Amateur (1998), Mistress Leather (1997), Fetish Special 4 (1996).”
Having checked, I see that no new titles have been added to her IMDB filmography, so I guess Sammy Marshall’s glamour career ain’t going so well. You now need to add at least a year to the estimated age I gave Sammy in what I went on to say, but it looks like I judged things about right.
“At 34 Sammy Marshall has obviously reached a career peak as far as her work as a glamour model goes, but you can still book her: ‘My rates start from £40 per hour. I tailor every job to your specific requirements and my rates change accordingly. Please contact me to discuss your needs and we can agree a price. Minimum booking time is 2 hours, unless petrol money paid on top. If you want me for more than two hours then we can come to a special discount arrangement on price. All day bookings are £250. If you require a model release, then that’s an extra £25 on top. I will work all over the country but may ask for petrol money if it’s a long way. i.e. Newcastle. I will not do any anal, water-sports, animals or anything illegal. If you would like any more information on my work please contact me. Email sammy@sammymarshall.co.uk… Facing the future and the glamour age barrier that she’s already hit, Ms Marshall is now acting as an agent for other dancers and models. Check her r18models site…”
The r18models site is still up, albeit with slightly fewer models than last time I looked. And for me it makes the world of glamour modelling look distinctly unattractive. In fact, neither it nor one pound porno DVDs are at all tempting… I still prefer horror and crime as movie genres to bored housewives getting it on with candle sticks and water hoses in their suburban homes and gardens…. And if you want to book Sammy Marshall for a stag night or whatever, she now appears to be managed by the Stand and Deliver Booking Agency, who specialise in supplying comedians! You gotta laugh!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Best of Sammy Marshall, Best of Single Sensations 1, Bondage Party, British Bitches in Leather, Dodger DVD 2, Dodger DVD 25, Electric Blue, Girls in Uniform 1, Glasgow, Golden Shower Girls 1, Jenna Jameson, Lesbian Amateur, London, Lust In The Dust, Lust In The Grass, Mistress Leather, MySpace, Penthouse, Poundgate, Poundland, Sammy Marshall, Streetlevel Gallery, The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshal, Whitecross Street, Women That Wank: Volume 1
Posted in exhibitionism, porn | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
After its sponsor UBS AG went into near financial meltdown, Tate Modern named this year’s UBS Long Weekend ‘Do It Yourself’ (22-25 May 2009) and based it around an Arte Povera exhibition. UBS is both a private and investment bank, as well as an asset management corporation. In the past it has been a major sponsor of the arts, but is unlikely to remain so for much longer.
After incurring huge losses on subprime mortgage securities in 2007, UBS only survived after it secured a multi-billion dollar bail out from the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GISC) and an unnamed source in the Middle East. At the end of last year, after even more disasters, UBS managers pledged to return bonuses and shareholders voted to accept financial aid from the Swiss government. This is supposed to restore trust in UBS. It won’t in the long term. UBS made advance commitments to its Tate sponsorship, but given the financial shape this corporation is in, it seems unlikely it will be renewing them. UBS has already cut back on its own art collecting activities, and has let go of its collections curator Joanne Bernstein (who is now doing some far more interesting freelance work, see my earlier blog that summarizes her contribution to Performing Localities).
The art world is part and parcel of the financial world. When high finance catches a cold, local art scenes react as if they’ve got the plague. An institution like The Tate is particularly vulnerable because it has few resources beyond its brand. It has no real money, its art collection is full of holes and its director Nick Serota is committed to ongoing and massive expansion without the resources to sustain such a programme. The maths simply doesn’t add up, and every day it seems more likely that the unstable stack of cards that is The Tate could collapse.
In an attempt to cover up this fragile state of affairs, Serota is attempting to attract ever larger crowds to Tate Modern. The big draw this year during the UBS Weekend was a recreation of the 1971 work Bodyspacemotionthings by Robert Morris. Tate Modern promoted this as art you can touch. It got a lot of media coverage. I even heard it reported on local London radio news but without the name of the artist or his work mentioned. Bodyspacemotionthings looks remarkably like a commercial soft play space aimed at small children, but without the padding one might expect. Nothing wrong with that, and there were loads of kids in Tate Modern having a lot of fun. Art is dead baby and Tate Modern is now an adventure playground.
So rather than waiting for The Tate’s money to run out, let’s allow kids to run riot through all its Bankside galleries, taking the canvases down from the walls and treating them as toys. As for the curators, I’m sure most of them would rather be doing something useful – like running a nursery that gives kids a good time – than handling art. Duchamp suggested using the Mona Lisa as an ironing board, but actually it makes more sense to use old and modern ‘masters’ as den walls and capes…. And once the kids have gone home, as suggested in an earlier blog, we can have nudist nights at Tate Modern.
The entire Tate Modern treated as a play space would have been much more fun than the UBS Weekend as I experienced it. There were a lot of people sitting on the grass by The Thames, not really listening to the bands playing on a stage. I spent most of the time I was there talking to people like Laura Oldfield Ford and Dan Mitchell. I was introduced to a shed load of new faces by their first names, so beyond Paul Sakoilsky – who gave me a copy of his newspaper The Dark Times – I can’t properly identify them here. The event was very much a case of create your own entertainment, and while all those around me were downing beers, they didn’t appear to consider what they were doing ‘drinking sculptures’. That said, since we did ‘do it ourselves’, that is create our own entertainment, The Tate’s ‘anti-corporate’ arte povera shindig simply proved the obvious – the institution of art is utterly redundant. Given this, it is hardly necessary to add that Tate director Nick Serota would make a much better clown if he donned face-paint and a red nose.
After writing the above, I picked up the following email from Selina Jones: “I hope you all had a fab time at The Long Weekend. Over 100,000 people came down! For those of you who didn’t make it or who want more, I have good news! The amazing Robert Morris installation will now be opened for an extended period – until 14th of June. That is 3 more weeks of having an excuse to play, even if you are technically a fully grown adult.” Yes, Tate Modern no longer even attempts to cover up the fact that art is infantilising. Who needs an excuse to play? It’s time for some ‘serious’ redecoration at Bankside!
If you haven’t done so already, you might like to check out my posts about the low quality of recent events at Tate Britain too: Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’, an eclectic mix of bullshit & bad taste and 5,494 Linda McCartney Vegetarian Sausages For Nicolas Bourriaud.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Altermodern, Arte Povera, Bankside, Bodyspacemotionthings, Dan Mitchell, GISC, Government Investment Corporation of Singapore, Joanne Bernstein, Laura Oldfield Ford, Linda McCartney, London, Marcel Duchamp, Mona Lisa, Nicholas Serota, Nick Serota, Nicolas Bourriaud, Paul Sakoilsky, Robert Morris, Selina Jones, south London, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Modern UBS Long Weekend, The Dark Times, The Tate, The Thames, UBS, UBS AG
Posted in art criticism, culture gossip & parties, exhibitionism | 18 Comments »
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Is it possible to enjoy modern art with your clothes on? Not if you are Mavis Artlover of the Art Lovers Network. According to promotional material you can find online: “This group is for everyone who likes to romp around naked with works of art. Sex with art is even better than masturbation!”
Mavis Artlover is a 25 year-old hotel chambermaid who moved from Totnes in Devon to Dollis Hill in London five years ago. She told me that she discovered she was sexually excited by art as a teenager when she was visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol: “I was looking at this Anselm Kiefer work and I felt a wave of pleasure washing through me. I discovered later I’d just had my first orgasm. Since then I’ve always felt an overwhelming urge to strip-off when I’m looking at great works of art.”
Despite 47 arrests and 23 convictions for nude and disorderly conduct in art museums, Mavis has never looked back since the Kiefer knicker-wetting incident. “I’m sexually fulfilled,” she told me, “and although the price of that has been several months of jail, it was worth it. That said, I don’t want to do any more porridge, which is why I’m campaigning for all major world museums to introduce regular clothes-optional days.”
Mavis has even got together with several like-minded aesthetes who share her passion for viewing art in the buff, and they are demanding a weekly nudist night at Tate Modern. And I’m with Mavis on that, since I can’t see why those who are so inclined shouldn’t leave both their clothes and their inhibitions behind in the Tate cloakroom while they enjoy a finger or three of the old Bill Viola.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve made the beast with two backs in an art gallery that you and your humping partner are sharing with stone-to the-bone contemporary masterpiece such as Santa Claus with a Buttplug by Paul McCarthy or The Great White Way Goes Black by Katharina Sieverding!” Mavis told me.
I agreed when she told me this, but mainly because I wanted to get into her pants. Then I realised Mavis wasn’t wearing any knickers, she was as naked as the day she was born. I thought I was in luck, but Mavis made it clear there was no way she’d let me ram my French stick into her her fuzz-box until The Tate Modern agreed to a weekly nudist night
So there you have it, two really good reasons you should join the campaign to demand that Nick Serota introduces regular naked art appreciation sessions at Bankside: 1) You’ll never look at Mike Kelly’s work in the same way again after experiencing it buck naked; 2) Mavis isn’t going to let me shag her until Tate Modern give in to her demands!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anselm Kiefer, Arnolfini, Art Lovers Network, Bankside, Bill Viola, Bristol, central London, Devon, Dollis Hill, Katharina Sieverding, Mike Kelly, Nicholas Serota, Nick Serota, nudism, Paul McCarthy, Santa Claws With A Buttplug, south London, Stendhal Syndrome, Tate Modern, The Great White Way Goes Black, Totnes, west London
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitionism, humour | 23 Comments »