Posts Tagged ‘Calvin C. Hernton’

Aldo Tambellini At Tate Modern

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

A  year ago on this blog I described seeing the recreation of a 1960s Aldo Tambellini happening in Manhattan on 20 October 2011:

…headed up to the Chelsea Museum for a performance of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero – a recreation of a happening performed by Group Center several times between 1963 and 1965. Black Zero featured some recorded sounds, including the voice of poet Calvin C. Hernton who couldn’t be there in person because he was dead. One of the improvised elements was Henry Grimes on double bass and Ben Morea on power tools adapted as musical instruments – and they were fabulous together! There were film projections all over the place and a very good modern dancer, who amid apocalyptic verse about racism and nuclear holocaust, eventually fell down into an erotic death pose: at this point Tambellini entered the stage area with a pen knife and popped a balloon onto which film was being projected, and that was the end of the performance. I was knocked out by the event, describing it in words really doesn’t do it justice.

From 9-14 October 2012 Tambellini was at Tate Modern under the banner of Retracing Black. In The Tanks for six days there was a Tambellini environment with film and slide projections, film on TV monitors and an audio loop lasting about 22 minutes. On the evening of Saturday 13 October there were screenings of individual films and the re-staging of two happenings. Tambellini’s strength in the 1960s lay in collaborating with others and collaging different mediums into environments and happenings – and while we’re at it let’s not forget he played a key role in creating a vibrant cultural scene in New York’s East Village that flourished precisely because it kept itself utterly separate from the institution of art!

The Tate’s screening of various Tambellini shorts allowed me to get a better understanding of some of the elements that make up his mixed-media collages but for those new to Tambellini (which seemed to be the case for most of the audience) then seen in this format they didn’t make for a good introduction to his work. The films were mostly abstract and black and white, to fully appreciate their fast flicker in a cinema environment you don’t want distractions from other light sources… unfortunately a number of people on both sides of me were using smart phones during the screening and even in silent mode such coloured flashing really lessened the impact of Tambellin’s work. Nonetheless you could still see there were a lot of parallels between Tambellin’s mid-sixties shorts and lettrist cinema of the early nineteen-fifties. The scratching of film stock and the soundtracks at times being dissociated from the imagery being just two examples of this.

To really grasp what Tambellini is about you  need to experience one of his mixed media happenings. In this context his films become part of a complete sensory overload in an electromedia environment. Moondial recreated from 1966 was an improvisation on the part of a musician and dancer with film and slide projections by Tambellini. The costume worn by the dancer – originally Beverly Schmidt but at the Tate Tanks Daliah Touré – with its wild headdress and reflective parts, brought to my mind the Afro-Futurism of Sun Ra and others. Obviously Tambellini’s mixed media happenings are always to an extent an improvisation and are never going to be exactly the same twice. I was, however, surprised at just how different the version of Black Zero I saw at Tate Modern was to the re-staging I’d witnessed in Manhattan a year earlier. There was more space for the projections, Seth Woods playing the cello rather than Henry Grimes on double bass, and recordings of Ben Morea rather than the man himself improvising live with his ‘noise machines’, fewer recorded words from poet Calvin C. Hernton (nothing about nuclear holocaust at Tate but still plenty about racism), less on stage action in general in terms of performers too.

What was more impressive at Tate Modern than Chelsea Museum was the balloon which Tambellini pops at the end of the performance – this was gradually inflated throughout the event to a huge size (whereas in Manhattan a year earlier it was much smaller). That said I preferred the more cluttered first performance I saw and thought that while Seth Woods was good, Henry Grimes playing live with and against Ben Morea was way more sonically impressive. I also preferred the longer selection of Hernton recordings since his anger at the racism and stupidity all around him is not only deeply felt but theoretically incisive (as anyone who has read his non-fiction books about race in America will already know). Hernton’s poetic style owes something to the beat generation but at the same time he is way better than Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs rolled into one! Tambellini’s mixed media events are at a midway point between beat and psychedelic culture and all the better for not being frozen into one period or the other.

Even if I preferred the version of Black Zero I saw re-staged at Chelsea Museum, it was still great to see it again at Tate Tanks. And the audience at Tate Modern applauded wildly at the end of both pieces, many were clearly ecstatic. Likewise, the Retracing Black environment was also an absolute triumph, providing a great introduction to Tambellini for anyone who wanted to be able to wander in and out without necessarily watching an entire happening. What Chelsea Museum in New York had last year that wasn’t at Tate Modern was a good selection of Tambellini’s Black Paintings, so these really do need to be shown sometime soon in London….

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, exhibitions, performance | 20 Comments »

Stewart Home Gives You Better Orgasms! An Interview With Playground

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playground: What were your top ten albums of 2011?

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

Playground: Best song ever is…

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

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

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

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

Home: Yes, as I explained above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature, performance, politics, talk | 21 Comments »

Back In The New York Groove!

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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