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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!

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Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature, performance, politics, talk | 20 Comments »

10 Best Royal Deaths Of All Time!

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

1. Charles I – who was beheaded on 30 January 1649. The execution was at Whitehall in London. At the very least, the current British royal family need to be completely stripped of their titles and wealth – although there are those who think it would also be a good idea to behead, hang, or shoot them!

2. Cleopatra VII Philopator is by tradition said to have committed suicide on 12 August 30 BC by inducing a snake to give her a poisonous bite. She was following in the footsteps of her bigamous husband Mark Anthony, who topped himself after losing the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC. Regardless of quibbles over the exact details of Cleopatra’s death, it marked the ultimate demise of the Pharaoh royal parasites in ancient Egypt.

3. Louis XVI – beheaded by guillotine at Place de la Révolution in Paris on 21 January 1793. This was an event that dealt a body blow to royal parasites in France.

4. Diana, Princess of Wales – who was fatally injured in a car crash in the Ponte de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris on 31 August 1997. It is unfortunate that her ex Prince Charles – current heir to the British throne – didn’t die with her!

5. Frederick, Prince of Wales – who died from a burst abscess in the lung on 20 March 1751 at Leicester House in London – nearly a decade before his scumbag father George II. There are, of course, millions around the world hoping that the arch-reactionary slimeball Prince Charles will follow in Frederick’s footsteps and drop down dead right now!

6. Nicholas II of Russia was condemned to death and then shot by Yakov Yurovsky shortly after 2.00 am on the morning of 17 July 1918. There is little in Bolshevism to be praised but getting rid of the Russian royal parasites was definitely one of its better ideas – much of the Russian royal family was shot at the same time as Nicholas II.

7. King Dipendra of Nepal – who shot himself with an AK 47 after going postal and murdering nine of his family of parasites at a house in the grounds of the Narayanhity Royal Palace on 1 June 2001. Among those Dipendra shot to death were his mother and father – King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Dipendra, who after shooting himself outlived his parents for three days, only got to be ruler while in a coma – making for a delightfully short reign!

8. Princess Grace of Monaco – who died in hospital on 14 September 1982, the day after suffering a stroke that caused her to lose control of her car and suffer serious injuries after it plunged down the side of a mountain.

9. George I of Greece – shot in the back by the anarchist assassin Alexandros Schinas at the White Tower in the city of Thessaloniki on 18 March 1913. Like Bolshevism, anarchism doesn’t have much to offer the working class, but Schinas’s practical opposition to monarchy and aristocracy is something with which most people will have some sympathy.

10. Queen Elizabeth II. Okay so she ain’t dead yet but there are millions of us in the UK looking forward to seeing the back of this particular royal parasite! But don’t forget kids, we still need to strip the entire British royal family of their titles and wealth!

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

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Posted in humour, obituary, politics | 22 Comments »

Occupy London & Richard Chartres – or Let’s Bash The Bishop!

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

The Corporation of London and their representatives in the Church of England look all set to evict the Occupy London encampment sometime this week. For anyone approaching the Occupy London protest from the east along St Paul’s Churchyard, the sight of the tents with a branch of camping equipment shop Blacks also in clear view is probably enough to raise a chuckle. The manager of Blacks couldn’t have arranged a better advert for the store’s winter sale. Less hilarious is the effect of The Church of England on the protest. When I was down there on Saturday, some religious nutcase was banging on and on about how she’d become a more effective activist after finding Jesus five years earlier. Rather than concentrating on real issues, Occupy London has at times been diverted into debates that are about as relevant to the working class as theological hair-splitting about ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’

That said, these arguments are not simply turning the focus away from how the City of London operates, they’re also causing splits in the utterly repugnant Church of England. First Dr Giles Fraser resigned from his post at St Paul’s Cathedral (canon chancellor), and he’s now been followed by the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles (the dean). Despite their insane religious delusions, these characters are apparently more sympathetic to anti-capitalist protests than the likes of the power mad and equally bonkers Richard Chartres (Bishop of London). Chartres may claim he is sympathetic to Occupy London’s views but he remains hard-line about removing their camp from outside St Paul’s precisely because his interests are completely aligned to those of both the City of London and the parasitic House of Windsor. Understanding that Chartres’ manoeuvres are necessary if he is to retain the support of his influential City backers goes a long way towards explaining the actions of this establishment toady. The City operates through unofficial ambassadors like Chartres, who it seeks to place in positions of power.

Richard Chartres (born 11 July 1947) has been Bishop of London since 1995. Before this appointment he was Bishop of Stepney (1992–1995) and Gresham Professor of Divinity (1987–1992). Gresham College is ‘an institution of higher learning’ located at Barnard’s Inn Hall off Holborn in the City of London. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham (the founder of the stock exchange). Gresham professorships are handed out to City of London insiders. During a lecture Chartres gave on the History of Gresham College at Barnard’s Inn Hall, he described the institution as a ‘magical island like Atlantis’  which disappeared and re-emerged from the ocean. This was a reference both to the Invisible College of the Rosicrucians and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. In a non-Gresham lecture in east London a few years later, Chartres let slip he wanted to build a church in the pyramid at the top of Canary Wharf. Chartres may or may not be a genuine ‘Christian’, but he’s clearly influenced by barking mad occult ideas, and will invoke them to please his influential City of London friends.

Chartres was born in Ware, Hertfordshire  and educated at Hertford Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge (where he read history). After that he went on to study at Cuddesdon and Lincoln theological colleges. Chartres was ordained as a priest in 1973. He was chaplain to Robert Runcie, then Bishop of St Albans and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Subsequently he’s sucked up to the British royal family, and his faux ‘green’ church campaigns seem designed to make him attractive to ultra-reactionary tossers like Prince Charles. In 1997 he was one of the executors of the will of Princess Diana and he also delivered the address at her memorial service in 2007. He confirmed Prince William. On 12 September 2009 he presided at the marriage of Lord Frederick Windsor to actress Sophie Winkleman at the Chapel Royal in Hampton Court Palace. More recently he preached the sermon at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes Chartres in relation to Occupy London: “In October 2011, the Occupy London group camped in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in order to protest at the use of taxpayers’ money to reward bankers who were perceived to have initiated the financial crises leading to draconian cuts in public spending which had affected the poorest hardest. Canon Giles Fraser requested the police to withdraw and condoned the actions of the demonstrators. This was in stark contrast to Chartres who wanted the protesters to leave – he offered to mediate between the demonstrators and a panel of representatives from the financial sector but only if the protesters disbanded – he also stated he was considering asking the police to evict the demonstrators – this prompted Canon Fraser to resign on the grounds that he could not condone violence against peaceful demonstrators.”

From the above it should be obvious that Richard Chartres is a greedy and ambitious toe-rag who is acting in the interests of the City of London and the British establishment. His offer to mediate between protesters and the financial sector is a sick joke. Anti-capitalists shouldn’t trust Chartres any further than they can throw him. He’s a City of London puppet. It’s high time some real pressure was put on wankers like Chartres who act as secret ambassadors for The City. If we really want to Occupy London then we need to bash this bishop!

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

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Posted in activism, politics | 25 Comments »

Murder In Notting Hill by Mark Olden (Zero Books)

Friday, September 30th, 2011

The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards. Olden’s text is in part a narrative of his attempts to identify the killer, and the naming of Digby represents its climax.

Murder In Notting Hill is much more than simply a true crime book, it is also a social history. There are uplifting paragraphs about the struggles of those who in the 1950s were newly arrived in London from the West Indies, and far less edifying passages about racist teenage gangs and organised fascist activists. Over the years it has been claimed by some commentators that either Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement or Colin Jordan’s White Defence League had a hand in Cochrane’s murder. Olden is dismissive of this idea and if his identification of Digby as the killer is correct, then he is almost certainly right on this score. The lives of all Notting Hill residents are portrayed as pretty grim in this paperback, so Olden hits on the fascist ideologues and a toff copper – Superintendent Ian Forbes-Leith (“The Governor in the Bowler”) – as figures from whom he can wring a little humour. Describing a fascist meeting in defence of a gang of teddy boys imprisoned for a series of extremely vicious racist attacks the year before Cochrane’s murder, Olden writes:

At a meeting at Oxford Gardens School, just off Ladbroke Grove, the campaign to free the nine young men was growing. A tall thin Welshman – rarely seen out of the same jacket and trousers – held aloft a newspaper with their grinning portraits. “Thugs. That’s what they were called,” he said. This was outrageous. “These,” he shouted, “are some of the finest faces you could wish to see in Britain.” He vowed they “must not be forgotten as they lie in prison during the best years of their lives.”… The speaker was Jeffrey Hamm. He was 43-years old, had lived in Notting Hill for the past six years and was Secretary of a far-right political party called the Union Movement.

There are laughs to be had from filthy fascists who always dress in the same clothes, and such amusements very effectively lighten the mood and prevent the reader getting bogged down in Olden’s serious and at times very depressing subject matter. Occasionally the jokes are recycled, such as the chapter heading “One Foot In The Grove”, which will be familiar to those who have read Tom Vague on Notting Hill (and I wouldn’t be surprised if Vague had filched this one-liner from an earlier source). For those that aren’t acquainted with west London and/or English idioms, The Grove refers to the area around Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill, and Olden’s chapter heading is a play on the hackneyed phrase ‘one foot in the grave’. That said, ultimately Murder In Notting Hill makes for compelling reading because Olden deftly and very confidently walks us through his own investigation into Cochrane’s murder – as well as the failed police enquiry. The book works on one level as a whodunit, although obviously there is far more to it than that.

Murder In Notting Hill explores the long lasting detrimental effects of Cochrane’s murder on both the victim’s family and the killer (assuming, of course, Digby was the thug responsible for this repugnant act). It is also a timely reminder that neither institutional racism, police corruption, nor the old bill being in the pockets of the media, are anything new in London. Like the majority of historical works I read, Murder In Notting Hill relies a little too heavily on an established history to provide a backdrop to the main story. Olden writes well about the working class (both black and white) of Notting Hill but omits to deal with the hipsters who by the late-fifties were also an established part of the area. For example, Terry Taylor and his circle go unmentioned, despite the fact that Taylor provided the inspiration for the first person narrator of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes.

Moving on, the dry as dust far-Right splinter groups Olden disinters are old news to anyone who is au fait with the history of post-war British fascism. Less well documented – and completely passed over by Olden – is the Spartacan movement, which was organised by a group of right-wingers associated with the angry young man literary scene; they lived together at 25 Chepstow Road in Notting Hill from the mid to the late-fifties. The Spartacans appear to have had close links to Oswald Mosley and his Union Movement. They are viciously satirised by Bernard Kops in his 1958 novel Awake For Mourning. Obviously only so much material can be included in any one book, but I was nonetheless disappointed that in sketching the backdrop to his story, Olden – like the overwhelming majority of writers working today – stuck to such a well-beaten historical track.

No author or book is perfect, and despite some slight and inevitable imperfections, Murder In Notting Hill is an impressive piece of historical detective work. That said, one of Olden’s footnotes really pissed me off:

Among the speakers at Kelso’s graveside was the Notting Hill hustler Michael de Freitas, who later re-styled himself into the revolutionary Michael X, aka Michael Abdul Malik, Britain’s supposed answer to Malcolm X. De Freitas finished up more like Charles Manson, his life spiralling into megalomania and murder in his native Trinidad, where he went to the gallows in 1975.

For all his faults – and clearly de Freitas had many – to compare him to Charles Manson is deeply obnoxious. De Freitas may have engaged in criminal behaviour but he was not a deranged maniac. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the de Freitas trial will see that it was a miscarriage of justice and he should not have been hanged on the basis of the ‘evidence’ presented in court. De Freitas may or may not have been guilty as charged, but he was not a complete nutjob like Manson.

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

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Posted in books, politics, True crime | 20 Comments »

Still the same old song from the former Artists’ Placement Group…

Friday, December 11th, 2009

John Latham and the Artists’ Placement Group came up in conversation the other day. While I liked much of what Latham did, I always found the theoretical justifications for his work extremely dubious. Thus when through Latham I came into direct contact with the Artists’ Placement Group (APG) in the 1980s, I found it utterly ridiculous. Now that the APG is no longer a going concern and The Tate has purchased its archives, it is unfortunately easier for for those coming across it for the first time to take it rather more seriously than was the case with old hands who encountered it as a live entity.

I have heard rumours of a Leninist critique of the APG in an issue of Artery Magazine (edited by Jeff Sawtell and published from 1971 and 1984), but to date I have been unable to trace this. I wrote my own brief appraisal of the APG a year or two after first encountering the beast ‘up close and personal’, and this was published in Smile Magazine No. 10 (London 1987). It seems worthwhile reposting that here to remind people of the reactions the APG elicited when it was a going concern. Strangely (or perhaps not), in my encounters with Stuart Brisley and Ian Breakwell from the 1980s onwards, neither ever mentioned the APG to me.

When I first met Latham and his wife Barbara Steveni (who struck me as the real power and key activist in the APG), both spoke to me about the importance of the APG but neither seemed to understand my criticisms of it for retrenching the role of the artist as a specialist non-specialist (to resort to caricature, it was as if Latham and Steveni ‘had never encountered left-communism in all its originality, nor understood the nature of its break with the Third International…’). Anyway, here’s what I wrote way back when:

ARTISTS’ PLACEMENT AND THE END OF ART

“Artistss’ Placement is intended to serve Art rather than provide a service for artists.” Barbara Steveni ‘Will Art Influence History?’ (in AND Journal of Art No. 9).

In the same article from which the preceding quote is extracted, Steveni elaborates that the ‘APG (Artists’ Placement Group) was never created as an agency to help artists find employment, or to create new forms of support for artists. APG is a means of generating change through the media of art rather than through verbal proceedings only, in the context of organisation’. Thus the APG seeks to propagate the concept of the placement of artists in government and industry. The ‘placed artist’ is to play the role of ‘incidental person’ and carry an open brief.

Such aims are at best reformist. For those who do not adhere to a ‘revolutionary perspective’ the idea of placing ‘incidental persons’ in government and industry might appear ‘radical’ if the concept were removed from the conservative framework within which the APG attempt to contain it.

However, close examination of the APG’s theory shows that in terms of its actual practice, the propagation of the concept of artists as ‘incidental persons’, is only a second order activity. Its first priority is clearly the maintenance of a belief in ‘Art’, and the role of the artist, in a society where such mystifications are increasingly viewed as irrelevant not only by the general population, but also by those whose system ‘Art’ once helped to maintain.

In effect, the APG is calling for the utilisation of specialists (artists) in a non-specialist role (the ‘incidental person’). Thus the APG hope to create for themselves (artists) a preserve as professional non-specialists, while excluding ordinary workers and the unemployed from fulfilling any ‘incidental’ function.

The APG are a professional self-interest group. Like all artists they stand in opposition to the aims and aspirations of the impossible class.

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

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Posted in art criticism, politics | 21 Comments »

The only reasonable perspective on Martin Heidegger is that he was a complete scumbag!

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

One of the things that really depresses me about post-graduate fine art education in London is that the Nazi thug Martin Heidegger has become central to the teaching of many theory modules on practice-led courses. Heidegger wasn’t your ordinary Nazi party member, he not only wanted to introduce the Fuhrer-principle into the German university system, he actually attempted to take on the position of spiritual leader of National Socialism – which had he been successful, would have placed him above Adolf Hitler (the political leader) in the Nazi hierarchy! Heidegger’s so called ‘philosophy’ is clearly rooted in the same rotten shit as Nazi politics, and as a consequence it is so reliant on etymology that aside from the fact that it is a puerile waste of time, it is probably also completely pointless for those who don’t speak German (the overwhelming majority of fine art post-graduates in London) to read very much by him. On top of which, this self-styled ‘philosopher’ and hardcore Nazi moron believed it was only possible to think deeply in German anyway – so he wouldn’t have much cared for being read in translation.

In a piece entitled The Evil Of Banality: Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger, published at the end of last month, Ron Rosenbaum observed: “In general, I’m in favor of separating the man (or woman) from the work, but it was Heidegger himself, his defenders don’t seem to recognize, who claimed Nazism for his own. He didn’t make the separation between man and philosophy that they conveniently claim to excuse his personal racism.” A new round of arguments about Heidegger’s status in the Anglo-American academy have been triggered by the fact that Yale University Press are about to publish an English translation of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy. While I welcome this publication, surely we don’t need a new book to convince us that Heidegger was a Nazi scumbag, we already have works by the likes of Victor Farias and Hugo Ott that do just that. So, as Faye suggests, let’s remove Heidegger from the teaching of theory and philosophy, and instead let those who wish to study him do so in the form of historical and political research relating to the ideology and development of Nazism and the holocaust.

While those reading Heidegger should be doing so in the context of a familiarity with crud like Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, they might also like to hear one of the best put-downs of the clown prince of fascist ‘philosophising’ – a thirty year-old song by Dutch punkers Panic. In Requiem For Martin Heidegger, Panic satirise the meaninglessness (‘intellectuals’ might call this opacity) of Heidegger’s pseudo-philosophical Nazi propaganda. The lyrics to this tune include the following: ‘Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? Where has he gone? No one can tell!” Likewise, the presence of German language elements and an exaggerated count-in, leave this listener in no doubt about the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi cretin!

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

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Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer

Monday, October 26th, 2009

When I first heard about Children of the Sun, I assumed the title was taken from the classic sixties psyche single of the same name by The Misunderstood, but anyone who reads the book can see that it actually invokes Savitri Devi, a particularly bonkers and unpleasant exponent of post-war Nazi occultism, and one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists. That said, the focus of this ‘novel’ is very much on English neo-Nazi scum of the Thatcher era; although Devi does appear in extended fictional form, partly on account of the fact that she died in England on the same day that the moronic bonehead band Skrewdriver played their comeback gig in London.

The book intercuts two narratives, which are joined at the end. One is about a lumpen south London secretly gay Nazi skinhead called Tony; and the other concerns the middle-class liberal James, whose family is financially supporting his research into the far-Right, so that he can write a TV script about British Movement activist and amateur porn star Nicky Crane. Schaefer uses the first narrative to undermine reader expectations, his main character Tony is complete low-life, and in every fight sequence I was rooting for him to be annihilated; so it was a major disappointment that this piece of trash survives right the way through to the end of the book.

Although Tony is a member of the British Movement, his depiction often led me to think of a Strasserite plonker on the ‘far left’ of a 1980s photo of Ian Anderson ‘manning the deliberately provocative National Front stall in the Asian area of Brick Lane, East London’, which is available from photographersdirect.com (search for “Ian Anderson Brick Lane”). In the ‘Tony’ parts of Schaefer’s book we encounter fictional depictions of figures such as Nicky Crane, Ian Stuart (of Skrewdriver), Savitri Devi and even Nick Griffin (now the BNP’s leading Nazi twat, but back then in his national ‘revolutionary’ phase an associate of a motley crew of Italian fascists with a string of criminal convictions implicating them in more than one mass murder, as well as a huge fan of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi).

Children of the Sun not only takes the reader through a very lightly fictionalised version of key incidents in the development of British neo-Nazism, it is peppered with genuine historical documents relating to these events. What will most immediately grab many people’s attention is documentation relating to Nick Griffin’s unbelievably unsavoury past. However, of more interest to me was the resurfacing of two press clippings I’d appraised some time ago – an October 1986 news item from Searchlight linking Tony Wakeford’s National Front band Above The Ruins (the name was subsequently changed to Sol Invictus) to Nazi bonehead Nicky Crane as well as Michael Walker of The Scorpion, plus a 1986 review from the fascist zine English Rose that suggests top Nazi prick Patrick Harrington was a member of Wakeford’s group during its early days. Above The Ruins are mentioned more than once in the ‘fictional’ sections of the text, and these invocations prove extremely suggestive. For example:

“I was reading the Scorpion, this would-be intellectual journal put out by Michael Walker, who used to run a tour company with Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore. So in summer ’93, just before Nicky died, Walker published an article by Stephen Cox, who ran something called the Jarls of Baelder, which as far as I can tell was a sort of occult, quasi-nazi homoerotic naturist group. Baelder had, or has, a secret inner order called the Fraternitas Loki, devoted to ‘covert aeonic action’: aeonics is a key Nine Angles term, and in Norse mythology Loki was the father of Fenrir, the wolf, right? The Above The Ruins album was Songs of the Wolf, and Fenrir was the in-house journal of the ONA… Anyway, Cox’s piece is this barking analysis of European history that says we need to reappraise the Third Reich and seek our destiny among the stars. And it’s illustrated with diagrams that say, at the bottom: copyright Order of Nine Angles. So this is explicit Nine Angles material appearing in the major British journal of the new right. They’re all over each other…” (pages 252-253).

There are, of course, other ways of linking Wakeford to David Myatt and the Order of Nine Angles, and Children of the Sun provides more than enough information to encourage readers to do just that and much else besides. Therefore, I’m not sure I’d describe this book a novel, it seems to me to be closer to what the Wu Ming collective call an ‘unidentified narrative object’; in fact, it reads a lot like recent work by Iain Sinclair crossed with gay porn for Nazi fetishists. The tome is incredibly well researched, and is guaranteed to stir up a lot of debate about links between the music scene and neo-Nazi politics (especially as, yet again, it blows away the threadbare argument a number of fascist musicians and their apologists have used for years in order to attain a fig-leaf of respectability; viz, they couldn’t possibly be Nazis because either they or some of their associates are gay). Likewise, although this is by no means the last word on why some extremely sad non-fascist gay men are turned on by Nazi uniforms and related trash (like Nicky Crane), it explores the area much more effectively than say Bruce La Bruce’s ill-conceived film Skin Gang/Skin Flick (1999).

Children of the Sun is at times an extremely unpleasant read, but it will nonetheless prove an eye-opener to those who run the literary world (anti-fascist activists will already be familiar with much of this material). I’m very much looking forward to some of the debates this book is likely to spark when it is published early next year. A couple of the ‘fictional’ Nazi scum turn out to be copper’s narks, and this might well lead to heated arguments about whether or not they are based on certain real-life characters. Schaefer has written an arresting debut that makes me extremely curious not only about what he will be doing next, but also what will happen to the huge amount of as yet unused research he’s done into the Nazi music scene and its fellow travellers.

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

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Posted in books, music, politics | Comments Off

Is Mark Waugh’s “Bubble Entendre” banned in the USA?

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Two weeks ago I received an email informing me that an attempt to sell titles in my Semina series at the New York Art Book Fare had descended into farce because the books had been impounded by US customs. Book Works told me they’d flown from Europe to America to sell  the novels, but ended up manning an empty table. The publications have now disappeared and may have been destroyed; from New York any unsold copies should have gone on to a distributor in Los Angeles, but there is still no sign of them on either the east or west coast. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago, when the following message from Bubble Entendre author Mark Waugh turned up in my inbox:

“Hi, could you expand on the rumour that Bubble Entendre has been impounded by US customs? In a week when the Tate flirted with showing Spiritual America, and then withdrew the work, I am curious about a conspiracy to regulate the flow of subversive literature into the homes of bourgeois America? Best wishes, Mark.”

Word on the grapevine is that the Semina books were impounded because a US customs official took a look at Bubble Entendre and decided it was a blue-print for a terrorist attack on the 2012 Olympic Games. The novel does contain a narrative about an entirely fictional kidnap incident during this event; but I’d like to stress that I only accepted the text for publication because it was, in my opinion, critical of terrorism.

For the benefit of customs officials and cultural cops around the world, I’d like to clarify that I am 100% opposed to all forms of terrorism – regardless of whether it is committed by the US and British governments (as is currently happening in the Middle East and Afghanistan); or by religious fundamentalists (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or any other variety). It should go without saying that terrorism is always vanguardist and can never be justified.

To reiterate, I do not write, edit or endorse books that in any way condone terrorism. I’d also like to know what happened to the missing Semina books – Index by Bridget Penney, One Break, A Thousand Blows by Maxi Kim, Bubble Entendre by Mark Waugh and Rape New York by Jana Leo. I trust that the several hundred missing copies of these works have not been mindlessly destroyed by US customs, and that they will be delivered to Book Work’s LA distributor in the very near future.

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

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Posted in books, politics | 28 Comments »

Dispersible manifesto of situationist skinheads: part 1

Monday, September 14th, 2009

1. A situationist skinhead is a skinhead who engages in the construction of situations. This means the construction of concrete momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a passionate and superior quality based on the principle of a permanent revolution of every day existence, from which, several of the principles below evoke a number of observations linked to the study of the situationist skinhead in his/her natural environment. If s/he realizes it by reading this, all skinheads can become situationists. All situationists can become skinheads for the same reasons, but not from one day to the next. As we know, even if all roads lead out of Babylon, the situationist hacienda will not be built in a single day but will in fact be a project of ongoing transformation. An intense cultural curiosity is necessary and must be accompanied by the sensation of a quasi-orgasmic osmosis, an effect well appreciated by situationist skinheads due to their enjoyment of skinhead reggae. Let’s state with candour that an authentic situationist skinhead, regardless of the way s/he first became involved in beating down Babylon, will recognize him/herself in what follows. In fact, a true situationist skinhead won’t care much for this manifesto because it is something they will want to move on from. A dyed-in-the-wool situationist skinhead is suspicious of manifestos, of anythings fixed, and thus this text is is 100% dispersible but nonetheless necessary. This manifesto does not prescribe; it dissects the situationist skinhead so that s/he might renew his/her attack on the Babylon, and finally destroy the false idols of capitalism.

2. The situationist skinhead is above all else working class by filiation or affiliation. Whether s/he is employed, working or not, whether his/her work is artistic, salaried, illegal or not, the situationist skinhead identifies with all attempts of his/her class to create a new, emancipatory and revolutionary situation. The situationist skinhead loves strikes and knows of nothing better than a good factory occupation.

3. The situationist skinhead absolutely rejects all isms –and for that reason all definitions of so-called “situationism” or “skinheadism”- which are nothing more than revisionist and reductive transformations of his/her culture into sterile stereotypes, and thus another reactionary set of doctrines. Therefore, s/he escapes all reifications and refuses to become invisible in the manner profit and bureaucracy demand. The situationist skinhead rejects authoritarian so-called “communism”, since all Bolshevik and Maoist regimes were in reality capitalist states. Isms are the instruments by which the dominant society transforms the proletariat’s endless reforging of the passage between theory and practice into doctrines. Thus certain “thinkers” define “anarchism” and thereby reduce its possibilities to the reproduction of individualist and western consumerist patterns of behaviour and thought. The situationist skinhead does not wish to replace one reductive system with another. S/he will destroy false representations or will be destroyed by them.

4 . The situationist skinhead has no leaders (not even Joe Hawkins); he is not a Marxist – indeed, Marx himself was the first person to deny he was a Marxist. The situationist skinhead is not a Leninist, Trotskyst, Guevarist or Buddhist either; and most emphatically not a Castrist or Maoist. S/he does not raise statues, temples or churches and does not put corpses in mausoleums. S/he says let the dead bury their dead while we blaze a trail to new modes of being. In brief, s/he does not idolize, does not pray, does not implore and does not even ask but takes what is his/hers as a member of the class that will abolish all classes.

5. The situationist skinhead stresses that the fundamental characteristic of this society is its division into classes. Therefore s/he is skeptical of the perfidious attempts of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) to recuperate her uncontrolled rebellion. The situationist skinhead rejects the trajectory of petty bourgeois mods, or worse, that of those former revolutionaries who landed jobs in academies, whose writings are now studied by postgraduate students and recuperated by his/her enemy the bobo (aka “bohemian bourgeois”). For the contemporary situationist skinhead, this rank breed of socialite recyclers is far worse enemy than its ancestor, the baba cool (hippie). The bobo recuperation of elements of skinhead culture (shaved head and Dr. Martens), an attempt to “hipsterfy” a sterile vision of the world, has a far more deleterious effect than the baba who merely took drugs and attempted to withdraw from the material realities of capitalist exploitation.

6. The situationist skinhead rejects cults such as the “spirit of 69″ because, aside from rejecting all nostalgia, s/he knows that the skinhead movement, as a youth rebellion against the ruling order, is demographically much older today than during those years (but then we follow Isidore Isou in seeing youth as essentially a function of social position rather than age). Nevertheless, the situationist skinhead still refers to “the spirit of 69″ since it expresses the triolectical nature of his/her movement. To that effect, and leaving aside the delights of this egalitarian sexual position, the number 69 expresses the contradictions and semantic inversions that characterise the situationist skinhead. Let’s note that Sham 69 are and remain one of the seminal bands of situationist skinheads, since they helped purge punk rock of its socialite hangers-on. Furthermore, 1969 was marked by some of the most enthralling rhythms of skinhead reggae, including the mighty Liquidator. Likewise, in 69 the last issue of the Internationale Situationsite review appeared.

Communiqué of the International Situationist Skinhead, Combative Cell Yul Brynner In Sta-Prest

As far as I can tell this first appeared as a printed text around 2002 and can now also be found as a comment to a post on the L’En Dehors blog (scroll down to find it). Translated and adapted into English, there were a couple of points I wasn’t in complete agreement with in this section, so I modified them (I still don’t agree with everything here). This represents roughly 25% of the French language manifesto, I may or may not run more of it on future blogs. You can always go read the whole thing in French! I’m not in complete agreement with everything in the rest of this either, but it is amusing and curious, so I thought it more than worth running an adapted part of it here.

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

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Posted in counterculture, humour, politics | 31 Comments »

Narendra Modi, toxic alcohol & the cult movie “Street Trash”

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

After the mass protests last week and demands for the resignation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) political gangster Narendra Modi, I’ve been checking out the follow-up reporting.  The demonstrations were a spontaneous outpouring after more than a hundred people died from drinking toxic bootlegged alcohol in India; many more were poisoned. Modi is a hardline Hindu nationalist whose fundamentalist political positions have exacerbated Hindu-Muslim discord in Gujarat, the only part of India where there is an outright ban on alcohol. It should go without saying that Modi’s inflammatory policies play a significant role in contributing to social misery in Gujarat. Prohibition of drugs and alcohol doesn’t work, and the criminalisation of either is an authoritarian insanity.

Over the past couple of days  news about Modi was mainly focused on matters other than toxic alcohol. For instance, former Gujarat chief minister Suresh Mehta’s insistence that Modi should be cross-examined by the GT Nanavati Commission of Inquiry over his role in the post-Godhra riots of 2002. In an article for Akhbar (#3, July 20o2) entitled Ethnic Cleansing In Gujarat, Tanika Sarkar addressed these horrors, and responsibility for them must ultimately rest in part at Modi’s feet: “Communalism Combat published a comprehensive report of the situation in April (2002). According to its estimate, based on painstaking research, the death toll is at least 2000, economic losses among Muslims amount to Rs. 3500 crores, and more than 270 mosques and dargahs have been reduced to rubble. Of course, the death toll is necessarily underrated, since very large numbers of corpses were burnt to ashes after the killings. After April, moreover, there have been many more flare-ups, more of destruction and terror. What is going on there, judging from the nature of selected targets of violence, is clearly a process of ethnic cleansing, an elimination of the cultural, economic and demographic presence of the Muslim.”

Other news coming in yesterday on Modi included this from The Hindustan Times: “The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a plea seeking a probe against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for the March 2003 killing of former state home minister Haren Pandya.” There are lots of pressures on Modi, and let’s just hope that one or more of them leads to this murderous creep being forced out of office. Returning to the toxic alcohol scandal, a few days ago much newspaper coverage was devoted to India Inc’s booze baron Vijay Mallya launching ‘a war of words’ against Modi by calling for an end to prohibition in Gujarat. Today, Express India reported that the Opposition Congress were demanding Modi give up his Home portfolio and that Minister of State for Home, Amit Shah, be sacked. I’ve lifted the following from that newspaper’s report:

“Making a startling revelation, the Opposition Congress leader (Shaktisinh Gohil) alleged that ‘notorious bootlegger’ Rasik Sodha Parmar, who is also a BJP councillor in Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, was the main person behind the hooch tragedy in Ahmedabad. Parmar was also the Mahemdabad municipality president between March 2003 and September 2005, and had been detained under PASA and was refused bail by the Gujarat High Court, he said.

“Gohil also alleged that Parmar runs a huge distillery in Bodi Roja area near Mahemdabad, and gives Rs 1.5 lakh every week to the police in hafta. Parmar has employed as many as 14 agents and sub-agents to sell liquor, and Arvind Solanki who died in the Ahmedabad hooch tragedy two days ago was part of Parmar’s network.”

Modi’s response has been covered by the DNA website: “Reacting strongly to the criticism by the Opposition Congress, the Gujarat government… announced that it would amend the existing Prohibition law in the state, making it stricter by introducing capital punishment for guilty… the government said once the new law came into force, the guilty could be awarded even death punishment for hooch-related crimes. The law would also have provision for one-year imprisonment for police officials responsible for hooch crimes or any serious offence related to Prohibition…” So, as usual, it is one law for them – and far harsher laws for us!

On a lighter note, the recent toxic alcohol tragedy reminded me of the cult movie Street Trash. This 1987 horror-comedy was directed by Jim Moro and it details what happens when an unscrupulous New York liquor store owner flogs-off way past its sell-by-date bottles of Viper to derelicts at a dollar a pop. Anyone who drinks the poisoned booze dies in a spectacular shower of gore and melting body parts. Needless to say, one hobo is sitting on a toilet when he imbibes the toxic hooch, and there is even an infamous scene featuring a game of catch with the freshly dismembered dick of a down-and-out. Screenwriter Roy Frumkes has claimed: “I wrote it (Street Trash) to democratically offend every group on the planet, and as a result the youth market embraced it as a renegade work, and it played midnight shows.” Regardless, this flick simultaneously demonstrates via its ‘characterisation’ of bickering runaway brothers  Fred and Kevin, that divided we are powerless but united we have a world to win. The working class needs to unite not just in Gujarat but also around the world, so that we can free ourselves not just from super-scum like Modi, but all politicians and bosses.

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

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Posted in film, politics, True crime | 14 Comments »

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