Archive for April, 2009
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
I found myself back at the Whitechapel Gallery last night for the world premier of John Rogers’ film The London Perambulator. This documentary is a portrait of arsonist and ‘deep topographer’ Nick Papadimitriou. In 1975 the teenage Papadimitriou burnt down his school, and as a result got banged up in Ashford Remand Centre; a little later he found himself locked in a cell next to serial killer Dennis Nilsen at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Now in his fifties and after overcoming drug addiction, north London based Papadimitriou spends his days tramping around the liminal spaces of the city and collecting archival material connected to his walks. Some might call this psychogeography but since the term is now hackneyed, ‘deep topography’ provides a more attractive description. Papadimitriou’s fascination with suburban sprawl and sewage works might be seen as ‘eccentric’, and The London Perambulator struck me as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s Channel 4 movies such as The Falconer and works by the artist Luke Fowler including Bogman Palmjaguar and The Way Out (see right column on link for Fowler review).
Like Luke Fowler in his art film portraits, Rogers refrains from providing a straight account of Papadimitriou’s life, instead leaving it to the viewer to piece together biographical fragments. The London Perambulator has a grunge aesthetic, including shaky camera-work and with the outdoor shots filmed from a walkers’ perspective, so there are no panoramas or aerial shots. Intercut into this are talking head sequences of Papadimitriou’s three most famous friends speaking about him and his activities. The talking heads are media personalities Russell Brand and Will Self, complimented by writer Iain Sinclair. Self and Sinclair are shot in their homes, whereas Brand appears to be reclining in the offices of his Vanity Productions company. There is the odd shot of Papadimitriou in his flat, but mostly he is filmed outside, sometimes accompanied by Will Self. There are variations in sound quality, with the audio on the Brand segments being superior to everything else. Brand’s Vanity company produced The London Perambulator, Rogers works there and obviously studio equipment is generally superior to its portable equivalents. That said, the sound is acceptable throughout the film, and the changes in its quality are simply a part of its grunge aesthetic. In the interests of clarity, I also need to declare here that there are a couple of projects I’ve been developing with Rogers and Vanity for some time; so if anyone wants to make accusations of nepotism, I should be included in them for blogging about this film!
After the screening there was a panel talk featuring Rogers, Sinclair and Self, with Goldsmiths College academic Andrea Philips as chair. Rogers and Sinclair acquitted themselves well. Unfortunately, the discussion became somewhat strained when Andrea Philips asked Self whether there was a master/slave relationship between him and Papadimitriou. Self jumped down her throat by denouncing this as a detour into the bondage parlour, whereas it seemed to me that Philips was invoking Hegel’s famous and much discussed master/slave dialectic as a reference point. Likewise, my impression was that Philips was putting Papadimitriou forward as the more senior partner in his obviously close and collaborative relationship with Self, but the media personality angrily responded that Papadimitriou was in no way beholden to him. It is difficult to imagine anyone who had just seen Rogers’ film coming away with that impression, since after viewing it only a reversal of Self’s perspective would seem in the least bit feasible.
Philips appeared shaken by Self’s odd reply to her question, which might explain why having opened the session by talking up her own academic expertise in the areas of psychogeography and urban walking, she closed by asking why these activities appealed only to men. Sinclair soon put her straight by explaining that most of those wanting to do walks with him were women, and of course Philips’ own academic research also served to disprove her final assertion. Afterwards a good number of those present headed up to the Whitechapel bar, where Self’s claim that Papadimitriou was a contemporary Rimbaud came in for some heavy criticism. On the basis of the Rogers’ film, it would appear that Papadimitriou is principally concerned with observation, whereas Rimbaud’s focus was transformation; such differences clearly render Self’s claim untenable.
The London Perambulator was screened as a part of the East London Film Festival (23-30 April 2009, various locations).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Philips, Arthur Rimbaud, Ashford Remand Centre, Bogman Palmjaguar, Chris Petit, deep topography, Dennis Nilsen, east London, East London Film Festival, Goldsmiths College, Hegel, Iain Sinclair, John Rogers, London, Luke Fowler, master/slave dialectic, Nick Papadimitriou, north London, psychogeography, Russell Brand, The Falconer, The London Perambulator, The Way Out, Vanity Productions, west London, Whitechapel Gallery, Will Self, Wormwood Scrubs
Posted in film, talks | 28 Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Following on from my blog at the weekend detailing how Iwona Blazwick has turned the Whitechapel Gallery into a truly horrid mini-Tate Modern, I’m now going to focus on the pointlessness of her appointment as chairwoman of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy Group. According to a promotional blurb on Boris “The Spider” Johnson’s local government website: “The London Cultural Strategy Group is a high-level advocacy group aimed to develop and promote London as a world-class city of culture, bringing together representatives of the key agencies that support culture in London.” Apparently a ‘world-class city’ doesn’t require world-class copy-writing; the sentence I’ve just quoted is clumsy, for instance in its deployment of the word ‘aimed’ and repetition of the term ‘group’.
NEWSFLASH FOR CULTURAL TRASH – LONDON WOULD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT YOU! Yes indeed, ordinary people are more than capable of coming up with their own strategies for making London a better place, and this needn’t cost a penny! So what follows is my own modest two point proposal for flushing rich people out of London, and thereby re-branding the city I am very proud to have been born in as The Toilet!
1. While the London Cultural Strategy Group wish to maintain London’s alleged position as number one travel destination in the world, what is actually required to make it a better place is the running down of the tourist industry. Excessive tourism is a blight on any city and those of us who aren’t blinded by greed couldn’t give a shit about the billions of pounds it generates annually. To facilitate a decline in tourism we should abolish the monarchy and demolish popular tourist destinations such as The Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace and The Queen’s House in Greenwich. We should also cancel the 2012 Olympics and abolish The London Cultural Strategy Group.
2. Introduce progressive local taxes that penalise the wealthy and thereby discourage rich scumbags from visiting, working or living in London. We should have sliding scales of taxation on catering and hotels; heavily penalising those who wish to spend more than £20 a head on a meal or stay in anything other than very basic accommodation. The private motor car and the black cab should also be banned from the city.
Strategies as simple as this would enable London to live up to the name The Toilet, by flushing thousands of unwanted rich parasites out of the city. For Iwona Blazwick, the abolition of The London Cultural Strategy Group would have the added advantage of leaving her free to concentrate on using the ongoing expansion/ruination of the Whitechapel Gallery to prove that she really deserves to be appointed as next director of The Tate. Having chummed up to both Nick “Wagstaff Prime” Serota and his buddy Sandy “Don’t Call Me Andrew” Nairne, she is presumably aware that the current Tate incumbent doesn’t want to retire until he’s seen the institution through its next phase of expansion, and given the recent financial climate that may take a long long time…. So Blazwick really needs to focus on making the Whitechapel even more horrendous in order to remain in the front rank of contenders for “Wagstaff Prime” Serota’s job when he finally steps down.
Likewise, the abolition of The London Cultural Strategy Group would give other members such as Sandy “Don’t Call Me Andrew” Nairne the opportunity to spend more time networking on behalf of his siblings; and afford Jude Kelly the opportunity to appear as Freddy Krueger in an off-Broadway stage version of the film A Nightmare On Elm Street.
It is high time we made London into a people’s city by kicking out the Oxbridge educated scum who dominate its culture and its politics! Both Sandy “Don’t Call Me Andrew” Nairne and Boris “The Spider” Johnson attended Oxford, while Nick “Wagstaff Prime” Serota went to Cambridge. Since they have proved incapable of dismantling their own old boy network, Oxbridge graduates should be barred from all publicly funded jobs.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 2012 Olympics, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Buckingham Palace, Freddy Krueger, Iwona Blazwick, Jude Kelly, London, London Cultural Strategy Group, Nicholas Serota, Nick Serota, Sandy Nairne, St Paul's Cathedral, Tate, Tate Modern, The Queen's House Greenwich, Tower of London, Whitechapel Gallery
Posted in culture gossip & parties, humour | 19 Comments »
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
The Whitechapel Gallery re-opened this month and what a disaster its expansion turns out to be. The new spaces, created from the acquisition of the old library next door, are poky. The circulation is appalling, I kept having to stop because other people were in my way, and no doubt they felt I was in their way too. There are endless heavy doors throughout, presumably to reduce fire risks but these ugly items induce feelings of claustrophobia. There are also a lot of stairs and level changes which add to the cluttered and alienating atmosphere. On the plus side, the light is good throughout the expanded gallery, but the overall effect is still extremely depressing. Obviously any conversion is going to be a compromise, and so losses and gains must be weighed up, but here as soon as you go inside you can see the losses heavily outweigh the gains. The innate imbalance between these two knocked together buildings is badly compounded by the unsympathetic programming and piss-poor curation that blights the re-launch of the gallery.
Having doubled its exhibition space, you’d have thought the Whitechapel could put on a decent Isa Genzken retrospective. But rather than utilising the new spaces, Genzken’s Open, Sesame! is crammed into the old galleries. Worse still, false – and I trust temporary – walls have been added, resulting in the old galleries feeling nearly as poky and cramped as the new spaces. Far too much work by Genzken has been rammed into the space allocated to it and as a consequence, it looks like absolute shit. Given room to breath, some of Genzken’s output strikes me as at least potentially interesting, but you can’t judge it properly when it has been shoe-horned into less than half the space it requires.
The new space the Genzken show might have been spread across has been allocated to less worthwhile projects, such as an incoherent display called Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection. The earliest work in Passports dates from 1914 and the most recent from 2001, as a result it comes across as a completely random exercise in cod curation. That said, the selector Michael Graig-Martin clearly has an agenda since he not only includes his own work but also that of the more famous alumni from his period of tenure at Goldsmiths College in New Cross.
Craig-Martin strikes me as akin to Narcissus if he’d been condemned to using only mud baths, rather than washing in clear water, i.e. an extremely dull reflection of more general art world nepotism. Goshka Macuga’s Bloomberg Commission in another of the new galleries is considerably more irritating than Craig-Martin’s flop precisely because what could have been an exciting and informative piece of local history suffers at the hands of an artist too lazy to undertake proper research. The subject of Macuga’s installation is the display of Picasso’s Guernica at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939. A full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s painting depicting the most infamous fascist atrocity of the Spanish Civil War thus becomes the centre-piece of Macuga’s botched attempt at local history. For me the tapestry by Jacqueline de la Baume Durrbach is less interesting than many of the documents on show in the room. The history of Picasso’s painting and the politics surrounding its display are fascinating. Unfortunately, Macuga has made no attempt to properly order the few items she’s gathered in relation to this, the overwhelming bulk of which appear to come from either the Whitechapel archives or the anarchist bookshop located next to the gallery.
Given the complexity of the material Macuga has failed to engage with, careful selection and proper interpretative texts were required if she’d wanted to produce a successful installation. That said, in order for useful interpretation to take place, the items on display first require proper identification. When I went there was, for example, a photograph of a protest in London labelled as dating from 1938. A cursory glance at this shows the demonstrators to be wearing flares and other fashions associated with the early to mid-1970s. They are holding banners to protest against Franco’s treatment of the Carabanchel 10. Carabanchel Prison was built between 1940 and 1944 by political prisoners and it became perhaps the most notorious symbol of Franco’s repressive fascist regime in Spain. The prison wasn’t even operational until 6 years after the incorrect date Macuga provides for this photograph. A quick web search led me to the Steve Nelson papers held by New York University Library, where dated Carabanchel 10 items are listed as being from the 1973-75 period. However, you don’t need to do a web search to see that the dating of the photograph is wrong, this is obvious just by looking at it.
Likewise, a series of 10 pre-war pamphlets on producing agit-prop art materials are displayed, numbered consecutively 1 to 9, and then 11. There is no explanation as to why pamphlet 10 was not displayed, nor any indication as to whether 11 was the last in the series or not. There was also a display of contemporary agit-prop material leading up to the anti-G20 protests in London earlier this month, all provided by Freedom Bookshop. Anarchists only make up a tiny minority of anti-capitalist protesters but if you go to the anarchist bookshop sited next door to the Whitechapel Gallery and ask them for anti-G20 material they aren’t going to provide a representational sample. So what we get is solely anarchist propaganda against G20. In this way, Macuga manages to completely misrepresent anti-capitalist activity as being essentially anarchist in character. I would imagine her sponsor Bloomberg are very happy that the broad movement opposed to the financial system from which it profits is thereby reduced in this particular representation to one of its more marginal factions.
Macuga has a reputation as a wily networker, and she appears to me typical of many contemporary career artists who treat their CV and professional contacts as far more significant than the slight works they produce to facilitate their occupation of elevated positions within the cultural world. Likewise, Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick has more of a reputation as a networker and deal clincher than an exhibition maker. That is not to say Blazwick has not curated numerous shows, but on the whole they have not been particularly memorable. She is, however, highly regarded as a university level teacher specialising in areas such as art advocacy, that is explaining and metaphorically selling contemporary visual culture to those unfamiliar with it. What Blazwick has done with the Whitechapel expansion reflects more general trends in culture, and is very much in keeping with the activities of her predecessor at this institution Nicholas Serota, who in more recent years has overseen the re-branding of The Tate. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that walking around the expanded Whitechapel left me with the impression that Blazwick had paid far more attention to sponsorship and revenue streams than aesthetic issues. As director that’s her job, and it keeps her in a job, that’s the way commodified culture works.
Given the many important shows the Whitechapel has hosted in the past – including not only Picasso’s Guernica but also This Is Tomorrow in 1956 and the first really seminal post-war exhibition of photography in London, Ida Kar’s 1960 solo show – it is pitiful to see the gallery reduced to such a sorry state after its thirteen million pound refurbishment. But then capitalism and capitalist culture can only go backwards, they have no where else to go.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bloomberg, Carabanchel 10, Carabanchel Prison, east London, fascist atrocity, Freedom Bookshop, G20 protests, General Franco, Goldsmiths College, Goshka Macuga, Guernica, Ida Kar, Isa Genzken, Iwona Blazwick, Jacqueline de la Baume Durrbach, London, Michael Graig-Martin, Narcissus, New Cross, Nicholas Serota, Open Sesame!, Pablo Picasso, Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection, Spain, Spanish Civil War, Steve Nelson, This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel, Whitechapel Gallery
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 15 Comments »
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Zero Books launched last night at Daunt on Marylebone High Street in central London. Upon arrival I was greeted by Zero editor Tariq Goddard. I hadn’t realised he’d moved out of London, but then I hadn’t seen him around for a while, so I wasn’t too surprised when he told me he was living in the country. Shortly after arrival I found myself chatting to sci-fi novelist China Miéville who brought up the extremely ugly subject of David Tibet (real name David Bunting) of Current 93 and his utterly ridiculous sub-musical collaborations with hardcore fascists. Our anti-fascist exchange was interrupted when the evening’s formal speeches began. I didn’t catch the name of the first speaker who was passionate on the subject of how neo-liberalism had collapsed but we still needed to clear away the ruins.
Next up was journalist David Stubbs who gave a short talk based on his book Fear Of Music. The blurb for this runs as follows: “Modern art is a mass phenomenon… However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant-garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant-garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances… This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?”
My impression is the tabloid press devotes more space to deriding modern art than it does to attacking modern music. That said, the (post)-modern art the ‘red tops’ have derided in recent years is largely a waste of space anyway; i.e. the yBa bores who put the con back into neo-conceptual art by jettisoning any overt political content and instead concentrating on selling over-priced luxury items to the rich. As a consequence, it has been rather amusing to witness the response of complete bafflement to the Ray Johnson retrospective currently on at Raven Row; most of the London art world simply cannot grasp a visual practice that is so obviously hostile to the commodification of culture. As for Rothko and Stockhausen, for me there is nothing to choose between them, and the bourgeoisie can stick them both up its arse!
In his talk Stubbs appeared to be defending everything about Stockhausen, which I found more than a little odd. There have certainly been reactionary attacks on Stockhausen, but by focusing on these Stubbs seemed to be saying sock it to the critics to my right and ignore my own problematic positions. Personally I agree with the critique of Stockhausen made by Henry Flynt and Action Against Cultural Imperialism back in the 1960s; among other things they pointed out that Stockhausen’s criticisms of jazz were racist. I also find Flynt’s radical avant-garde hillbilly far more of a groove sensation than Stockhausen. And while I can dig much of what Cornelius Cardew did musically from the Scratch Orchestra through to his reworkings of folk melodies, his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism lacks the edge of Flynt’s critique of this bourgeois hack. I have no problem with listening to modern music, but everything from Luigi Nono to grime is just so much better than Stockhausen. The positions Stubbs defended in his talk were both simplistic and wrong-headed.
As a speaker, Owen Hatherley was a lot more impressive than Stubbs. His book Militant Modernism was billed as a defence of modernism against its defenders. Hatherley was arguing in favour of post-war modernism, not just its early twentieth-century manifestations, and for its entanglement with revolutionary politics. I was with him on that, although I suspect we may well have differences on specific figures such as Bertolt Brecht and what is revolutionary. For me, defending the gains of modernism also means going beyond it, and this necessitates abolishing the capitalist social relations modernism emerged from. Of course, I haven’t read Hatherley’s book yet, because as a proletarian post-modernist, I’m blogging the launch and not the texts. Moving on, after Hatherley there was a quick word from publisher John Hunt. I then spoke to Hales Gallery artists Laura Oldfield Ford and Richard Galpin about the antagonism towards criticism on the gallery circuit. In the spirit of immaterial friendship I got to say hi and little else to Nina Power… and a few others. Then the booze ran out so most people moved on to the pub….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bertolt Brecht, central London, China Miéville, Cornelius Cardew, Current 93, David Bunting, David Stubbs, David Tibet, Fear Of Music, Henry Flynt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Luigi Nono, Mark Rothko, Marylebone, Marylebone High Steet, Militant Modernism, modernism, Nina Power, Owen Hatherley, Raven Row, Ray Johnson, Richard Galpin, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Tariq Goddard, yBa, Zero Books
Posted in culture gossip & parties | 37 Comments »
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind AKA Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) is considered by many to be the first Hong Kong kung fu horror comedy, and as such it influenced a lot of subsequent releases. The opening is remarkably similar to low-budget American splatter fests of the same period, and features some mediocre comedy which inevitably includes the central character Bold Cheung (played by director Hung) being subjected to a prank that functions as a prelude to the ‘real’ horrors he will encounter later in the movie. That said, once Bold Cheung accepts a wager to spent the night in a haunted temple the film really takes off. Here we have possibly the first example of a hopping vampire in Hong Kong cinema, and this is definitely a groove sensation. Bold Cheung is even tricked into spending a second night in the temple. There are also some far-out possession scenes and very funny fights (choreographed by director Hung). The plot, which revolves around the attempts of Bold Cheung’s love rival to kill him, doesn’t do much for me and is mainly an excuse for a series of very good set pieces. Despite a slow start, Encounters provides non-stop low-brow fun once it finds its groove. While not quite reaching the same heights as some of the films it inspired- such as the first flick in the Mr Vampire series – this one is definitely worth revisiting. I also loved the copy on the Hong Kong Legends DVD reissue of the film: “Generally recognised as one of the possible inspirations for Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series…” Well, with a caveat like that you could put almost anything at the end. What about ‘Encounters is generally recognised as one of the possible inspirations for Britney Spears’s personal and professional struggles of the 2006/7 period’? That said, if you like the Evil Dead comedy horrors, then you will probably dig Encounters of the Spooky Kind.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Britney Spears, Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind, Encounters of the Spooky KInd, Evil Dead, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Legends, Mr Vampire, Sammo Hung
Posted in film | 17 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2009
On Friday I read at the Permanent Gallery in Brighton which, needless to say, was a groove sensation. Aside from booking me for that, Jay Clifton’s Tight Lip literary organisation also checked me into the Pelirocco Hotel at 10 Regency Square. The latter establishment can be found close to the wreck of the old West Pier. The rooms are themed around rock and roll lore and the pleasures of sex. I had the Modrophenia Room, done out in purple with an orange mod arrow over two walls; there was a target bedspread, a poster for the film Blow Up and a painting of Keith Moon in red, white & blue. So, all in all, the decor was closer to the mod revival than the original movement, and very heavily influenced by the 1979 film Quadrophenia. The room was cosy and provided a good talking point with my fellow revellers. Likewise, the hotel service was very attentive and this combined with the teen-style decor provided an experience that ranked way above the sterile and generic environment an overnight trip more usually entails. The bar downstairs was open until 4am, the cocktails potent and the bright pink stools and light shades truly surreal. The late breakfast in this bar was also great fun. Several of the hotel rooms are themed for kinky sex, so I was trying to guess which of my fellow guests had The Play Room, which is billed as: “the ultimate dirty weekend suite, dedicated to all things decadent and indulgent, think burlesque, kitsch and sexy boudoir all rolled into one…”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes no sense!
Tags: Blow Up, Brighton, Jay Clifton, Keith Moon, Pelirocco Hotel, Permanent Gallery, Quadrophenia, Regency Square, Tight Lip, West Pier
Posted in culture gossip & parties | 22 Comments »
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
The late-1960s saw a major shift in British government drug policy. Until that time, GPs were allowed to prescribe maintenance doses of drugs to addicts. A few GPs over-prescribed and a small black market in drugs that originated with the National Health Service developed. The government responded to this by preventing GPs from prescribing heroin and instead sent addicts to a restricted number of treatment centres. This marked the start of an American-style criminalisation of hard drugs in the UK. The result, as any objective observer could have predicted, was a disaster.
The two GPs who were really singled out in the scapegoating that accompanied this shift in drug policies away from maintenance and onto reduction were Lady Frankau and John Petro. Frankau died in March 1967, thus it was Petro who’d inherited her script hungry patients and fed their needs, who felt the heat from this witch-hunt.
John Petro was born in Poland and came to the UK as a child in 1916. Until the mid-sixties he had a distinguished professional reputation, having been seconded into the navy during the war to work with Alexander Fleming on the administration of penicillin to troops. Petro’s troubles are said to have begun in 1966 when he was run down by a car. He soon found himself in financial difficulties because he was unable to continue with his practice while recuperating, and he was declared bankrupt in March 1967. Having no regular base to work from, Petro began issuing maintenance prescriptions from London hotels, underground stations, and even his car. He justified this by saying it was difficult to find premises from which to oversee the clinical treatment of addicts due to their unpopularity.
The media dubbed Petro the ‘junkie’s friend’ and he was widely perceived to be over prescribing drugs to addicts in return for payment, with the excess drugs obtained being sold on at a profit to those who were not yet, but would shortly be, ‘hooked’. On 14 February 1968 Petro was fined £1,700 at Marylebonne Magistrates Court after pleading guilty to 17 drug offences, all of which related to him failing to accurately record details of exactly what drugs he’d supplied to which patient. On 31 May 1968 he was struck off by the General Medical Council for providing drugs without making adequate inquires as to medical histories, circumstances or clinical condition, and other acts of negligence.
After this, Petro found himself hauled before various courts for a variety of offences, ranging from theft to possession of drugs. This continued until at least June 1975 when he was handed a 12 month suspended sentence for obtaining prescriptions by deception. Petro became a whipping boy for the establishment, but it was their drug policies and not Petro that are the root cause of still soaring addiction figures.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960, 60s, Alexander Fleming, Dr John Petro, drugs, General Medical Council, John Petro, Lady Frankau, London, Marylebonne Magistrates Court, National Health Service, Poland, sixties
Posted in True crime | 14 Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Because actress Lana Clarkson and her sadistic killer Phil Spector met in an LA hostess club, the producer’s conviction for murder earlier this week turned my attention once more to 1960s London variants on the ‘lonely men pay pretty girls for conversation’ clip joint racket. Murray’s Cabaret Club where Profumo Affair sex scandal girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked is the most famous London hostess joint. Being glitzy, Murray’s presented itself as a cabaret but the real draw was the more fatal combination of drink and hostesses. But Murray’s wasn’t the only such club in London in the sixties, other examples include Churchill’s and Winston’s. The staff often circulated between these places; for example, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson worked at Murray’s in the early sixties and then moved on to Churchill’s for a few years.
Gangsters like Frankie Fraser and the Kray Twins were inevitably familiar with many London clubs and their owners, and among those mentioned in Fraser’s various books are Billy Hill’s former wife Aggie Hill who ran The Modernaires in Old Compton Street and The Cabinet Club in Gerrard Street, Tommy McCarthy’s Log Cabin in Wardour Street, Al Burnett’s Stork Club and The Astor; Bertie Green acquired the latter establishment after Burnett let it go. The clubs operated by Aggie Hill were aimed at the criminal fraternity, whereas others were successful precisely because of the frisson created when high society mixed with the more successful members of the so called ‘dangerous classes’.
Those hostess and related clubs that weren’t fronts for organized crime generally paid protection money to gangsters. Frankie Fraser writes about Billy Howard receiving a ‘pension’ from Bruce Brace for ‘protecting’ Winston’s. Howard’s son Michael Connor in his book The Soho Don suggests his father and Brace were actually partners in the club. Connor says criminal convictions prevented Howard from openly owning premises licensed to serve liquor, and therefore his name didn’t appear on legal papers. Howard’s interest in Winston’s is affirmed by Jimmy Evans in his autobiography. In the late-sixties Joseph Wilkins took over the establishment with help from Evans. Brace insisted later he was terrorised into giving the club away; a claim that might be substantiated from the fact that no money changed hands during the course of this transaction. According to Evans, Howard would have come out on top in a fair fight, but he put the frighteners on the old-timer by threatening him with a gun. Howard’s son Connor tells a more complex story about his father’s pragmatic decision to walk away from Winston’s, but the end results still chime with what Evans has to say. With Howard neutralized, Brace had no choice but to sign the club over to Wilkins.
After he took over Winston’s, Wilkins was also running various escort agencies in partnership with Wally Birch. These included La Femme, Glamour International, Playboy Escort and Eve International. Regular catalogues of girls available for hire were produced and rather unsurprisingly in 1976 Wilkins was jailed for living off the immoral earnings of the prostitutes he controlled. Prior to this Wilkins had been jailed for the way he obtained club licenses, and later on in the eighties he did time for drug smuggling. Writing well after the event in 1992, James Morton was able to give Joe Wilkins and Wally Birch’s misdemeanors detailed coverage in his book Gangland: London’s Underworld.
Club links to organized crime meant that the hostesses who made their living from these joints didn’t always have the most pleasant of working conditions. To give an example, a minder called Big Alf Melvin who worked at The Bus Stop was treated very badly by his boss Tony Mella. One night Mella pushed this minion too far and was shot by him. Mella managed to stagger into the street where he died with his head in the lap of one of his hostesses. Meanwhile, Melvin turned the gun on himself and blew his own brains out. Melvin and Mella are covered by Morton in Gangland.
Club hostess Lisa Prescott had a very bad time in December 1966 after being picked up by gangsters at either Churchill’s or Winston’s – depending on who’s account you believe. One commentator, John Pearson, even has it both ways, saying Winston’s in his book The Profession of Violence and correcting it to Churchill’s in the follow-up The Cult of Violence. Regardless, Prescott was taken to a flat in Barking where Frank Mitchell was hiding out after being sprung from Dartmoor by associates of the Kray twins. Mitchell and Prescott engaged in a series of sexual acts over a number of days. Then on Christmas Eve, Mitchell was taken to a van outside the flat and shot because the Krays found him hard to control and figured that the easiest way to save face was to kill him. Prescott who’d been paid about £100 to have sex with Mitchell was taken to a party and told to forget she’d ever met him. A terrified Prescott saw in the New Year working as a hostess; she also found herself having occasional unpaid sex with Albert Donoghue, who she believed had murdered Mitchell and suspected was planning to kill her. Many commentators view Donoghue as a red-herring, and believe the murder was actually committed by Freddie Foreman.
The confusion of Winston’s and Churchill’s probably becomes more understandable if you know that Churchill’s was originally set up by Bruce Brace and Harry Meadows, with the active involvement of Billy Howard. Meadows eventually gained sole control of the venture, with Brace and Howard setting up across the street as Winston’s. They’d lost a lot of money when Meadows eased them out of the first club, so they gave their next venture a similar name to wind him up.
Moving on, like Lana Clarkson, many women who worked in London hostess clubs in the sixties swung between showbiz proper and hostessing. Again, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson is a good example. She did a bit of modelling and film-extra work alongside hostessing at Murray’s and Churchill’s. She wasn’t as successful as Clarkson in films, but that was partly because her main interest was inner exploration. At the end of the day, beatnik concerns were closer to my mother’s heart than showbiz. Obviously, unless they are looking for a rich husband, the women who work as hostesses aren’t really interested in the men who pay them for conversation. In the case of my own mother, she much preferred the real hip scene to the sham of bourgeois marriage.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Aggie Hill, Al Burnett, Albert Donoghue, Alf Melvin, Barking, Bertie Green, Big Alf Melvin, Billy Hill, Billy Howard, Bruce Brace, Christine Keeler, Churchill's, Dartmoor, east London, Eve International, Frank Mitchell, Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, Gangland, Gangland: London's Underworld, Gerrard Street, Glamour International, Harry Meadows, James Morton, Jimmy Evans, John Pearson, Joseph Wilkins, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kray Twins, La Femme, Lana Clarkson, Lisa Prescott, Log Cabin, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mandy Rice Davies, Michael Connor, Murray's Cabaret Club, Old Compton Street, Phil Spector, Playboy Escort, Profumo Affair, sixties, Soho, Stork Club, The Astor, The Bus Stop, The Cabinet Club, The Cult of Violence, The Modernaires, The Profession of Violence, The Soho Don, Tommy McCarthy, Tony Mella, Wally Birch, Wardour Street, west end, Winston's
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Watching the coverage of the Phil Spector murder trial as it came in on BBC News 24 last night, really rammed home the celebrity agenda behind most reporting. There was lots about the famous people Spector worked with, and while it is always a pleasure to see footage of Tina Turner in her sixties prime, it didn’t surprise me that The Ramones weren’t among the famous acts the Beeb mentioned the record producer having worked with. There was little of Clarkson beyond one brief clip, which I didn’t see repeated.
I always thought Lana was a great ‘scream queen’ even if the films she appeared in weren’t so wonderful. Below I’ll reproduce an old review of her in the movie Barbarian Queen, originally written and posted when this Mister Trippy blog was hosted on MySpace. We need a more even balance between the coverage accorded to murder victims and their killers. Returning to the BBC news, they didn’t even make the obvious point that in a culture that sees it as normal to have guns lying around, it isn’t surprising that murders like this take place. Not just Lana Clarkson, but Phil Spector too is a victim of a sick society. That said, it’s good that Spector was found guilty because all too often rich men like him are able to buy their way out of trouble. But while Spector is a misogynist twerp and has to take personal responsibility for that, he was also the product of a social system that places profits above human community, and ultimately it was this that made him into the “demonic maniac” denounced by the prosecution in his murder trial.
Barbarian Queen directed by Hector Olivera (1985)
This starts with a rape before the credits – which is mainly an excuse to rip off an actress’s top and expose her tits. Marauding Romans proceed to ruin Barbarian Queen Anethea’s wedding day by attacking her village and after a few more rapes and some murders, nearly everyone else is captured and sent off to slavery. Fortunately Anethea (Lana Clarkson) and a couple of other women escape. They decide to head on down to the nearest Roman city to exact revenge for the disruption of Anethea’s nuptials and the enslavement of her husband. Along the way there are far too many lame sword fighting scenes.
Director Hector Olivera was a serious Argentinean film-maker who’d been enticed into concocting schlock by the lure of producer Roger Corman’s yankee dollar; and yes, this movie was ‘shot in south American where life is cheap’ (to use the tag line from the film Snuff). Lana steals the show, partly because she is far fitter than the other actresses (she is 6ft tall so she towers over them), and partly because her eighties haircut is very slightly better than the abominations sported by her co-stars.
Despite Barbarian Queen being mercifully short at 71 minutes, my attention began to wander pretty early on because the cast can’t act and the ‘action’ scenes are so poorly choreographed, however once Lana and her friends are captured by the Romans we are rewarded with some orgy and torture scenes (and these are the only reason for watching this flick). The highlight of Barbarian Queen is Lana’s all too brief tenure in a Roman torture chamber, where she’s stretched out on a rack so that her lithe and very tall frame is displayed to stunning effect… call me perverse but I also kinda got off on the fact that her skin looks pretty rough and you can see spots under her make-up; but then its not Lana’s face that I really go for, it’s that fabulous scream queen body with those impossibly long legs.
Of course, the torture is unconvincing but who cares when you can look at Lana fully stretched out with her legs spread… Eventually the extremely ugly man interrogating Lana in the hope of finding out where the other rebels are hiding, decides to rape her. Sexually assaulting the Barbarian Queen is a fatal mistake on the part of this torturer, because after he penetrates Lana he discovers that her cunt muscles are so well toned she can hold his prick in an agonisingly painful grip. He begs her to let go, Lana agrees to do this if he unties her, which he does and she then shoves him into a bath of acid… rock and roll! After this there isn’t really any reason to watch the rest of the film, but for those who need to know, Lana succeeds in defeating the Romans and freeing her people. Barbarian Queen is fun but is most definitely something to watch with your finger on the fast forward button, since aside from the orgies there isn’t a scene without Lana which is worth watching.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Barbarian Queen, BBC, Hector Olivera, Lana Clarkson, Mister Trippy, MySpace, Phil Spector, Roger Corman, Snuff, The Ramones, Tina Turner
Posted in film, True crime | 19 Comments »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
In late 1961 my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – moved across London from a one room bedist at 101 Barnsbury Street N1 (Islington) to a two room pad on the top floor at 24 Bassett Road W10 (off Ladbroke Grove). Both the basement flats beneath her at 24 Bassett Road had interesting occupants. In one was the Trinidadian drummer Russ Henderson who led the first steel band to play on the streets of London, and later had a hand in setting up what became known as the Notting Hill Carnival. In the other was a refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster, who I’ve been told was a Jewish bookseller and a member (or a former member) of the Communist Party. Forster apparently threw extraordinary parties and among the many amazing people my mother allegedly met in her basement flat over the coming months and years, another former Communist Party member called Gustav Regler made perhaps the greatest impression. If my mother did indeed meet Regler, then this must have been in either late 1961 or sometime in 1962, since he died in New Delhi in January 1963.
Regler was a confused man from a German Catholic background. He was born in 1898 and wrote many books, the overwhelming majority of which have never been translated into English. A World War I hero of sorts, he travelled to Berlin in 1919 to join the right-wing militias. After serving the cause of reaction in the German capitol, Regler moved on to Munich where he abortively involved himself in defending the Bavarian Soviets, but the revolution was viciously snuffed out. Next a good marriage resulted in Regler becoming a wealthy businessman. However, feeling oppressed, he abandoned his wife and young son to become an impoverished writer. A committed Stalinist by the time the Nazis ascended to power, Regler became a German exile in Paris from where he very actively participated in the anti-fascist struggle. Regler later claimed that visits to Moscow led to his disenchantment with Bolshevism in the mid-thirties, although this didn’t prevent him from assuming a position of authority within the Stalinist controlled International Brigade in Spain.
During the Spanish civil war Regler befriended the American novelist Ernest Hemmingway and appears to have held himself aloof from the acts of sabotage carried out against the Republican cause by some of his Bolshevik comrades. Regler didn’t actually break with Stalinism until after Franco’s fascist triumph in Spain and the forging of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Following internment in a French concentration camp and then a period of exile in Mexico, he returned to Europe in 1957. All of this is recorded in his autobiography The Owl of Minerva. Ruth Forster is mentioned in passing towards the end of this book as the girlfriend of Walter, a former German artillery officer with progressive political views, who was imprisoned in France with Regler. Part of a letter Forster sent to Walter is reproduced in The Owl of Minerva and Regler makes it clear that she’d taken part in the underground resistance to Nazism in Germany and had been imprisoned for these activities in 1937. How she got away from Germany isn’t recorded. The text of her letter does, however, reveal that she was greatly enamoured by the poetry of Rilke.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes no sense!
Tags: 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 60s, anti-fascism, Barnsbury Street, Bassett Road, Bavarian Soviets, Berlin, Bolshevism, Communist Party, Ernest Hemmingway, France, General Franco, Germany, Gustav Regler, International Brigade, Islington, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ladbroke Grove, London, Mexico, Moscow, Munich, Munich Soviet, Nazi-Soviet Pact, Nazism, New Delhi, north London, Notting Hill, Notting Hill Carnival, Paris, Russ Henderson, Ruth Forster, sixties, Spain, Stalinism, The Owl of Minerva, Trinidad, west London
Posted in books, Julia Callan-Thompson | 21 Comments »