Posts Tagged ‘Glasgow’
Monday, May 21st, 2012
When my show Again, A Time Machine opened on 5 April I broke all records for attendance at a Space Studios event in London. I had another great turn out for the close of the exhibition last night. But then that’s hardly surprising. First off there were readings by Katrina Palmer, Bridget Penney and me. I kicked off with a couple of pieces from old books (Memphis Underground & 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess), and concluded this section of the evening with my usual headstand reading from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. Katrina read a couple of new stories and a passage from The Dark Object – part of the Semina series I edited for Book Works. Bridget read a long passage from Index – also included in my Semina series.
After that there was music in the courtyard (mostly selected by me although after a couple of hours someone else took over on the tunes front) and a barbecue. There was also plenty of booze. But better yet there were kung fu films inside where we’d had the readings earlier. First off Godfrey Ho’s schlock po-mo classic Scorpion Thunderbolt (1988). Fight and sex scenes featuring b-movie micro-star Richard Harrison are cut fairly randomly into a Hong Kong horror movie that’s been bought off the shelf. Copyright is infringed left, right and centre, on the soundtrack – the most extraordinary example being the use of Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene for a sex scene in a porno cinema!
We followed this with Jimmy Wang-Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976) – another copyright infringing martial arts classic! Aside from a shed load of crazy and entertaining fights, the flick also boasts an uncleared kraut rock soundtrack, making it a truly formidable example of cultural hybridity. Many of those present who were unfamiliar with these movies were truly amazed by what they’d been missing out on…. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see them projected onto the big screen because I was talking to more people than I can remember…. I won’t attempt to list them all but among the more recognisable art world figures I will mention Clunie Reid, Elizabeth Price, Simon Bedwell and Chris Dorley-Brown.
And even those who opted for nosh, booze and chat in the gallery courtyard had a great time – since I’d programmed so many groovy sixties and seventies soul sounds. And of course everyone also had a final chance to take a gander at my fabulous mini-retrospective! Yes it was so great someone stole a piece of work at the opening – not that this was the first time this had happened to me; you’d have to go all the way back to the opening of Desire In Ruins at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow (May 1987) to unearth the initial incident of this type in my art world anti-career! And finally many people were left spaced out at Space – suffering from Stendhal Syndrome after getting to take in some of my visual work!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Again A Time Machine, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Book Works, Bridget Penney, Chris Dorley-Brown, Clunie Reid, Desire In Ruins, Elizabeth Price, Glasgow, Godfrey Ho, Index, Jean Michel Jarre, Jimmy Wang Yu, Katrina Palmer, kraut rock, London, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Memphis Underrground, Oxygene, Richard Harrison, Scorpion Thunderbolt, Semina, Simon Bedwell, Space Studios, Stendhal Syndrome, The Dark Object, Transmission Gallery
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions, film | 3 Comments »
Sunday, December 18th, 2011
Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn’t happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. Although in the seventies and eighties I went to cinemas all over London, I ended up spending more time at The Scala in Kings X than anywhere else.
I actually started going to The Scala when it was in Tottenham Street but my memories of it’s first two years of existence (1979-81) in Fitzrovia are a little dim. I do recall being really knocked out when I saw Ministry of Fear there one afternoon – I think on a double-bill with The Third Man. I recently watched Ministry Of Fear again and was rather disappointed by it, since this Fritz Lang feature didn’t live up to my 30 plus year old memories of it. That said, I’ve had worse reactions to watching films at home that I’d enjoyed when I last saw them at the cinema decades earlier. Ministry Of Fear wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t nearly as good as my recollections of it.
The Scala on Tottenham Street was perfectly placed for those of us on the punk rock trail between Soho and Camden. Walking distance away to the south there was the 100 Club, Marquee, Notre Dame Hall and Rock On Record Stall; and in the other direction were venues like The Music Machine and Electric Ballroom – as well as Compendium Books. But at that time there were still a lot of cinemas around central London, so The Scala didn’t seem too special.
As we went into the eighties a lot of both repertory and first run cinemas disappeared from the face of London. As a result, The Scala – which had relocated to Kings X in 1981 – came to seem a lot more like a lone London beacon for lovers of midnight movies. Aside from having better flicks than anywhere else, The Scala must have been the dirtiest and most run down fleapit in The Smoke – and therefore it had way more character than places like The Everyman. The Scala also had ultra-cheap daytime multi-bill screenings with concessions (for the unemployed and pensioners) – and I was merely one of a crew of dole scum who seemed to spend more weekly daylight hours in this particular fleapit than out on the street or looking for work.
One of the things that particularly sticks in my mind from the earlier part of the eighties are the all night screenings – particularly stuff such as all night beat generation movies, which was where I first encountered flicks like Beat Girl and Bucket Of Blood. Around this time there were also free preview screenings for The Worst of Hollywood TV series (a Friday late-night slot on UK Channel 4 shown towards the end of 1983). As anyone who went to those free screenings can tell you, they’d do filmed introductions for several flicks before showing them. The audience were there to applaud and laugh at Michael Medved running down various grade Z movies – and we got commands from the film crew about how to react to him. Despite doing free screenings for all the films in the series (3 per day as far as I recall), the TV people used the same piece of stock footage of me in the audience on each of their weekly broadcasts. The films themselves – Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wild Women of Wongo, Robot Monster etc. – found a new life and a new audience, and went on to be recycled on more recent TV reruns such as Mystery Theatre 3000.
After a while The Scala became a home from home for many, and the regulars had their favourite seats. I always took the one immediately in front of Kim Newman (who I didn’t actually ever get to know until years after The Scala closed). Other things I suppose I should mention include the famous Scala cat – who’d walk over the seats and across the front of the screen – and the rumble of trains going under Kings X. Ditto the fact that there were lots of broken seats.
in the early and mid-eighties The Scala seemed good at building new films. They’d put movies without a ready-made audience on a multi-bill with established cult favourites. To give an example, I don’t remember what Liquid Sky was showing with the first time I saw it at The Scala, but I was mesmerised and didn’t know if it was really great or totally shit – so I went back to see it again and decided it was great.I must have seen Liquid Sky at least half a dozen times at The Scala during the eighties. The Scala was also a good place to see multi-bills of John Waters or Russ Meyer flicks; although it wasn’t where I first encountered films by either of these directors, it was one of the few places I could see their movies regularly. Thundercrack was another of my Scala favourites, alongside the more obvious art house choices like the I Am Curious movies and WR Mysteries of the Organism (which I still love). The Scala also had some less tasteful multi-bill choices – such as the regular Nazi exploitation triple of The Night Porter (a massively over-rated piece of shit), Salon Kitty and Red Nights of the Gestapo.
Later The Scala seemed to lose its way and failed to build up new to their audience (but not necessarily recent) films. I guess the cinema’s founder Stephen Woolley was concentrating on making a go of his film production company Palace Pictures. I brought Decoder to the UK for the first time in 1989 and screened it in Glasgow as part of the Festival of Plagiarism I organised there, and also arranged to show it at The Scala a couple of days later. I remember getting dropped off by a friend outside the cinema (he’d brought me back from Scotland in his car) and the queue for the screening stretched back to the main Kings X station. It was an amazingly large audience – some of whom I guess had to be turned away.
Colour was important to Decoder and you didn’t really get it’s full celluloid effect on the videos that had circulated in rather limited circles in the UK until then. I don’t remember the exact deal, but The Scala basically insisted that Tom Vague (who came in on the promotion of London screening of the film with me) and I take all the financial risks; then when they saw the audience and money coming through the door for Decoder, suddenly discovered loads of extra expenses so they could keep nearly all the dosh. I presume they wouldn’t have insisted we four-wall it if they’d realised we had a sell out, so they could have made their cash grab look like less of a rip-off – which in the end included things like alleged bottles of whisky for members of staff.
I got the impression that by the end of the eighties the Scala management had become absolutely shameless about doing anything for money because Palace Pictures was a financial black hole. After seeing the crowd Decoder pulled, The Scala started screening it themselves as part of their programme… but earlier in the eighties I think they’d have realised it was a film worth showing without someone coming in from outside. I don’t know or don’t remember how they started screening all the Hong Kong action movies they showed later on (and which I enjoyed seeing at The Scala a great deal), but I assume it was someone coming in from outside and wanting to do it that kick-started those John Woo/Chow Yun Fat etc. screenings.
I was sorry The Scala closed but by the time disappeared in 1993 it wasn’t the institution it had once been. I think it was Palace Pictures – as much as the court case over an illegal screenings of Clockwork Orange – that killed the place. The Scala had been showing that Kubrick film for years under titles like Mechanical Fruit, but I never liked it much as a movie (or a book) and avoided those screenings. The closest we’ve got now to The Scala is the Prince Charles but that’s more a second run place, and the excellent monthly BFI Flipside screenings (but that’s a much cleaner environment).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 100 Club, 1980s, all nighters, beat generation, Beat Girl, BFI Flipside, Bruce Lee, Bucket of Blood, Camden, Channel 4, Chow Yun Fat, Clockwork Orange, Compendium Books, Decoder, Electric Ballroom, Festival of Plagiarism, Fitzrovia, Fritz Lang, Glasgow, I Am Curious Yellow, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Waters, John Woo, Kim Newman, Kings X, Liquid Sky, Marquee Club, Mechanical Fruit, Michael Medved, midnight movies, Ministry Of Fear, Music Machine, Mystery Theatre 3000, Notre Dame Hall, Palace Pictures, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prince Charles, punk rock, Red NIghts of the Gestapo, Robot Monster, Rock On Record Stall, Russ Meyer, Salon Kitty, Soho, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Woolley, The Night Porter, The Scala, The Third Man, The Worst of Hollywood, Thundercrack, Tom Vague, Tottenham Street, Wild Women of Wongo, WR Mysteries of the Organism
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, film | 32 Comments »
Monday, December 12th, 2011
For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I’m always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who’d organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA “Scotland’s Turkish Kebab House” – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.
It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn’t eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.
I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina’s spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was ‘destroying’. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.
After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they’d closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina’s Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don’t use the internet, and much else besides. I’m a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.
On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow’s many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it’s sell-by-date. I wasn’t gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn’t buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.
I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren’t using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they’re not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden’s News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn’t consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden’s website:
Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n’brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.
Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it’s an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.
Aside from books, I always find Poundland’s DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn’t great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops. On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it’s curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.
Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 23rd Century, Argyle Street, Ballater Street, Billy Blanks, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bloodfight, Bolo Yeung, Bruce Li, Candleriggs, Chino, Defiant Pose, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Dragon Lee, Expect No Mercy, Fake Sheikh, falafel, Fist of Fury II, Five Fingers of Steel, Glasgow, Glasgow Central Station, Golden Dragon Silver Snake, GrabIt, HarperCollins, hauntology, headstand, Jamaica Street, Jefford Horrigan, John Liu, Johnnie Chan, Keith Miller, London, Lonsdale, Lorna Moon, Mark Dacascos, Mazher Mahmood, Mono, Music Zone, Neville Thurlbeck, News Corp, News of the World, News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, Onan The Barbarian, Oswald Street, Peter Burden, phone hacking, Pound City, Poundland, Premier Inn, psychogeography, René Salemi, Return of the Tiger, River Clyde, Rupert Murdoch, Sanctuary, Scotland's Turkish Kebab House, Showdown, shredding, Sports Direct, Stewart Home, Thats Entertainment, The Dhabba, The Dragon The Hero, The International Martial Arts Collection, The Pound Shop, Tower Records, Transmission Gallery, Turquoise, Woolworths
Posted in culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitionism, performance | 23 Comments »
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
In August 2009, and again in August 2011, I found myself referring the games of 3-sided football staged as a part of the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania. I don’t attend many biennials, but since the one in Alytus has evolved into a jamboree of post-artistic practices – and it is also a delightfully intimate event – I’ll always make an exception for it.
But let’s get back to 3-sided football. It was Asger Jorn, the Cobra artist and founding member of the Situationist International, who first came up with the idea of a football match involving three teams. However, it appears that Jorn considered it impossible to stage a real life game of 3-sided football, and so never attempted to do so. As far as I know the first game of 3-Sided football was organised by the London Psychogeographical Association at a Glasgow Summer School in 1993. Since then there have been many games of 3-sided soccer, and in the 1990s they were particularly popular with people involved with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (who were running an independent proletarian space exploration programme at the time).
3-sided football is played on a hexagonal pitch with each team being assigned two opposite sides for bureaucratic purposes, but only one of these two sides has a goal. The winning team is the one that concedes the least goals, not the one that scores the most. This means that strategic alliances can arise between sides, since it is in the interest of the teams that are losing at any particular point in the game to work together against those that are ahead of them.
In Alytus the pitch was marked out in the city’s forest park, meaning that not only was it difficult to kick the ball all the way across the pitch – because there were trees in the way – but also that as referee I wasn’t always able to see what was going on in the match. On both occasions I refereed in Alytus we had three teams of seven players and I ran the game in three thirds of fifteen minutes each; with two third-time breaks of five minutes. I rotated the teams around the different goals and sides of the pitch during the match, so that each team spent one third of the game defending each of the three different goals. Also, because I’m a lousy referee, I didn’t enforce offside rules (which are a more complicated in 3-sided football than conventional soccer).
The 2009 game was competitive but the teams did seem to understand how to make strategic alliances and we had an excellent match (with the team mostly made up of anarchists from Vilnius winning). This year I was a little disappointed that the two best teams were so competitive and antagonistic towards each other that the worst team won. At one point the two better teams had the ball in front of the worst team’s goal with only one defending player anywhere near them. Instead of co-operating, those who should have been attacking the worst team’s goal tackled each other. This was blatantly stupid since who scored the goal was irrelevant, I was only keeping a tally of goals conceded.
The better teams missed innumerable opportunities to thrash the frankly awful side of footballers who were mostly from London. I had complaints that since I was from London, I was biased in the worst team’s favour, and while I admired the sneaky way they played their superior rivals off against each other – and thereby won the game – I’d also be the first to admit that as athletes they sucked. Given the way the winning side tactically conceded the first goal and continually exposed their football skills as being utterly rubbish, and by such ruses goaded the other two teams into attacking each other, I’d hate to engage any of these lousy sportsmen in 3-sided chess (this is another game that interests them).
Although I was disappointed by this year’s 3-sided football game, the 2011 Alytus Biennial – which ran from 22 to 28 August – also repeated and improved upon a number of events from 2009. The monstrations – demonstrations lacking demands that would be comprehensible to a capitalist politician – were even more of a party than at the previous biennial. We marched with brightly painted placards celebrated the rise of the psychic worker and their solidarity with their dead comrades. The slogans were mostly incomprehensible and some placards even mixed languages and alphabets within words and phrases. This year we not only demonstrated during the day, but also had a late-night march. The way we threw fireworks around in the streets, banged drums and chanted, delighted the Friday night drunks hanging around outside bars.
The scratch music session was also an improvement on 2009, because it was more free form and didn’t become bogged down in rock idioms. Likewise, the 2011 discussions were both more impressive and considerably more global in scope than in 2009. We also did some cloud busting, and that gave me a remarkable sense of deja vu, since it was neither better nor worse than two years previously! I want to keep this short, so I’m not gonna describe everything that went on, but suffice to say that once again the Alytus Biennial proved a complete groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 3-sided football, Alytus, Alytus Biennial, Asger Jorn, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, cloud busting, Cobra, football, Glasgow, Lithuania, London, London Psychogeographical Association, monstration, scratch music, Situationist International, soccer, three-sided football, Vilnius
Posted in counterculture, occulture, performance, sport | 20 Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Yes, those crazy non-erotic soft porn DVDs are invading UK pound shops once again, which led Justin to comment on my Jenna Jameson blog of a few days ago: “Have you noticed that Poundland actually sell porn DVDs?” Well, I blogged about the porno on offer in pound shops back in the days when I was posting on MySpace. Poundland still seem to be concentrating on the more ‘tasteful’ Penthouse and Electric Blue type stuff. Pound shops stuffed with trash DVDs, let alone euro or dollar shops selling anything at all, are in short supply in inner London; but the same shirt turns up at the same prices on market stalls in Whitecross Street and elsewhere (okay, I lied, a lot of these DVDs go for 50p when they turn up down Whitecross Street – never trust a Londoner!). Two years ago, I was more impressed with what was on offer in Poundgate in Glasgow than Poundland. However, when I gave a talk at the Streetlevel Gallery a few weeks ago, very close to where Poundgate used to be, I noticed the shop had gone. Anyway, here’s what I had to say about their porno DVDs a couple of years back:
“Poundgate was doing titles like Lust In The Grass (although personally I’d prefer Lust In The Dust as the ‘hard’ sell end of a tiresome video of a Czech chick getting ‘filthy’ – double entendre – in her garden), Bondage Party (you can see a picture of that here) and Best of Sammy Marshall (image of that here). I’d never heard of Sammy Marshall but a web search led me directly to her site (this was nearly two years ago, the site is no longer up): ‘Sammy Marshall. A model for around 20 years now, I’ve been published in all the top shelf magazines, page 3, calendars etc, and have also been in various movies. I also do lap dancing and strip shows all over the country…’ The Internet Movie Data Base provides the following filmography for Ms Marshall: Women That Wank: Volume 1 (2004), British Bitches in Leather (2001), Best of Single Sensations 1 (2001), Girls in Uniform 1 (2001), Dodger DVD 2 (2001), Dodger DVD 25 (2001), Golden Shower Girls 1 (2001), The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshall (2000), Lesbian Amateur (1998), Mistress Leather (1997), Fetish Special 4 (1996).”
Having checked, I see that no new titles have been added to her IMDB filmography, so I guess Sammy Marshall’s glamour career ain’t going so well. You now need to add at least a year to the estimated age I gave Sammy in what I went on to say, but it looks like I judged things about right.
“At 34 Sammy Marshall has obviously reached a career peak as far as her work as a glamour model goes, but you can still book her: ‘My rates start from £40 per hour. I tailor every job to your specific requirements and my rates change accordingly. Please contact me to discuss your needs and we can agree a price. Minimum booking time is 2 hours, unless petrol money paid on top. If you want me for more than two hours then we can come to a special discount arrangement on price. All day bookings are £250. If you require a model release, then that’s an extra £25 on top. I will work all over the country but may ask for petrol money if it’s a long way. i.e. Newcastle. I will not do any anal, water-sports, animals or anything illegal. If you would like any more information on my work please contact me. Email sammy@sammymarshall.co.uk… Facing the future and the glamour age barrier that she’s already hit, Ms Marshall is now acting as an agent for other dancers and models. Check her r18models site…”
The r18models site is still up, albeit with slightly fewer models than last time I looked. And for me it makes the world of glamour modelling look distinctly unattractive. In fact, neither it nor one pound porno DVDs are at all tempting… I still prefer horror and crime as movie genres to bored housewives getting it on with candle sticks and water hoses in their suburban homes and gardens…. And if you want to book Sammy Marshall for a stag night or whatever, she now appears to be managed by the Stand and Deliver Booking Agency, who specialise in supplying comedians! You gotta laugh!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Best of Sammy Marshall, Best of Single Sensations 1, Bondage Party, British Bitches in Leather, Dodger DVD 2, Dodger DVD 25, Electric Blue, Girls in Uniform 1, Glasgow, Golden Shower Girls 1, Jenna Jameson, Lesbian Amateur, London, Lust In The Dust, Lust In The Grass, Mistress Leather, MySpace, Penthouse, Poundgate, Poundland, Sammy Marshall, Streetlevel Gallery, The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshal, Whitecross Street, Women That Wank: Volume 1
Posted in exhibitionism, porn | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
I was in Glasgow over the weekend and the new arts buildings and galleries in Trongate look extremely impressive, but the area around it is one of most impoverished in Europe and there are junkies galore hustling on the streets. I went into T. J Hughes to acquire some discount shit and was hugely impressed by a very blatant shoplifting technique being used by one thieving prick. This particular skaghead chose a relatively expensive but discounted designer item and took it to the pay desk to ask for a refund. He was, of course, asked for the bill of sale he’d never acquired, and so picking up the leather handbag he announced his mother was waiting outside and he needed to get the receipt from her. The addict shot off into the street, while one of the two girls working the tills told the other that this showed why they needed a security guard on the door. Presumably the entire incident was covered by CCTV but to anyone watching that, it probably looked like the junkie had paid before walking out. One of the till girls lazily followed the shit-faced scammer out, but by the time she got to the doors he’d already disappeared. I’ve witnessed some blatant shoplifting in my time, but this really took the biscuit. Glasgow’s miles better!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: CCTV, Glasgow, junkies, scamming, Scotland, shoplifting, skaghead, T. J. Hughes, theft, thieving prick, Trongate
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography | 20 Comments »
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Don’t Call Me A Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime by Bob Moore (Dissident Books, New York 2009) is apparently a reprint of a tome first published in 1935 by Hurst & Blackkett of London without the exclamation mark; and the variant subtitle My True Autobiography. When I first read the introduction to this ‘reprint’, I suspected Dissident Books CEO Nicholas Towasser was pulling my leg over the provenance of the text when he wrote: “There mustn’t have been many copies printed (of the original edition), because despite many Web searches, I’ve found no used book dealers selling it. In fact, I’ve located only five owners of the original Hurst & Blackett edition: the New York Public Library; the National Library of Scotland; Cambridge University; Random House (years ago Random House acquired a publisher named Hutchinson, who had earlier merged with Hurst & Blackett); and a woman in Essex, England.”
Towasser’s claims immediately sound suspicious to anyone familiar with the legal deposit system for books in the UK. British publishers are required by law to send free copies of their books to the five legal deposit libraries in the UK (supplying the national library in Dublin is currently optional but many publishers still send them complimentary tomes). Towasser mentions only two of the legal deposit libraries (Edinburgh and Cambridge), and it struck me as unlikely that more than half the legal deposit copies of a book like Moore’s would have disappeared from these orderly and well maintained institutions. My gut feeling was that if the book couldn’t be found in at least the majority of the legal deposit libraries, then the provenance Towasser provided for it in his introduction was at best dubious. I checked at the British Library and found they did in fact have a catalogue entry for the Hurst & Blackkett edition of Don’t Call Me A Crook. Of course, entries can be forged, and even whole books produced with fake publishing histories and then slipped into library collections. However, the most likely explanation seems to be that Towasser isn’t familiar with the UK legal deposit system and therefore didn’t think to check with the relevant libraries (which isn’t difficult, anyone with internet access can consult the British Library catalogue via its online service).
Likewise, when I checked online, I found an entry for the Hurst & Blackkett edition of Moore’s book on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, from which one can conclude that at least one used dealer has offered the book for sale via those sites. These amazon entries may have gone up after Towasser wrote his introduction, or he may have missed them. Since I found evidence of further copies and online sales in the first three places I looked, I didn’t pursue the matter. Regardless of whether Don’t Call Me A Crook was first published in 1935 or the ‘original’ edition was faked later (still possible but rather unlikely on the basis of what I’ve found), it is fairly safe to conclude there will probably be entries for further copies of the ’1935′ edition in the legal deposit libraries I haven’t checked, and that a search of online auction sites such as eBay may turn up further evidence of a used trade in the ’1935′ edition.
I’m a huge fan of literary fraud and I always appreciate a good leg-pull. I’d rather like Don’t Call Me A Crook to be con job involving a faked provenance; hi-jinx that would place it on the same level as ‘anti-literary greats’ such as the cod medieval works Thomas Chatterton attributed to Thomas Rowley, James Macpherson’s bogus cycle of Gaelic poetry credited to a non-existent ancient bard called Ossian, and Clifford Irving’s phony ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes. For me, more recent incidents of literary fraud, including Laura Albert’s J. T. LeRoy hoax and James Frey passing off works of fiction as memoirs, are considerably less thrilling than chicanery that entails concocting more complex counterfeit attributions for pieces of writing. Sadly, despite Towasser raising my hopes with what I take to be honestly made but improbable claims in his introduction, it does rather look like Don’t Call Me A Crook was first published by Hurst & Blackkett in 1935.
Nonetheless, despite being published as a non-fiction ‘memoir’, Moore’s book resembles a picaresque novel and its literary origins can be traced back to Elizabethan works such as The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets. Moore tells us little about his childhood, his story really begins when he joins the British military underage in the hope of seeing action in World War I. He ended up greasing aeroplanes for the Royal Flying Corps at a base near Boulogne. Moore tells us that after the war he qualified as a mechanical engineer. From that point on he mostly worked on ships, but combined this activity with maintaining hotel lifts and other odd jobs. Moore criss-crossed the Atlantic, spending a lot of time in New York and Chicago, where he combined bouts of employment with opportunist thievery and con-artistry. When he comes into large amounts of money, he inevitably blows it on high-living (with women, boozing and gambling, being his favoured recreational divertissements).
Mirroring Robert Greene’s real and ‘fictionalised’ life, Moore abandons his wife and child and adopts a sardonic attitude towards the world, which he combines with endless serious drinking. Imagine Celine if he’d had a working-class upbringing in Glasgow and no interest in literary posturing. That said, Moore’s anti-semitism and other bigotries are casual, and not ideologically motivated. Moore reflects the prejudices of his time and place without consciously embracing any overt political ideology; this contrasts sharply with the fascist stink that envelopes Celine’s writing. Perhaps Bukowski makes for a better comparison, except Moore is better than Bukowski.
Despite its casual racism, the Chinese setting of Moore’s ‘autobiography’ in its final section makes for very interesting reading. From Shanghai he travels up the Yangtze, where he battles river pirates. This part really rams home the parallels between Moore’s book and The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594) by Thomas Nashe. The narrator of the earlier work, Jack Wilton, relates his adventures as a page during the wars against the French, and subsequent travels in Italy where he serves the Earl of Surrey. Wilton witnesses numerous atrocities, he narrowly escapes both being hanged and cut-up alive as an exercise in anatomy. His tale climaxes by detailing the brutal revenge of one Italian against another. Wilton eventually escapes from the clutches of his foes and returns to England.
Moore’s tale very much mirrors The Unfortunate Traveller; his first ‘foreign’ experiences are in France, but he substitutes the ‘savagery’ of Nashe’s caricatured Italians for an equally stereotypical Orientalism. Moore describes various forms of Chinese ‘cruelty’, ranging from deliberately drawn out public executions down to unnecessarily vicious acts of banditry. He is nearly killed on a number of occasions, is kidnapped by pirates but eventually escapes and returns to Glasgow. Moore and/or his ‘editor’ (perhaps ghost-writer) Pat Spry need not have read Nashe’s text to have been influenced by it. The Unfortunate Traveller is a foundational work of modern English prose, its influence has been widely felt and its structure can be picked up from later tales it influenced.
To me it isn’t important how much of Moore’s book is true, it’s a fast and fun read. My guess is that the book is loosely based on fact but the adventures are exaggerated to maximise their impact. If you like over-cooked and not entirely reliable ‘memoirs’ such as Jungle West 11 by Majbritt Morrison, or even Mr Nice by Howard Marks, then you’ll love Don’t Call Me A Crook too!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1920s, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, Atlantic Ocean, Bob Moore, Boulogne, British Library, Cambridge University, Charles Bukowski, Chicago, Clifford Irving, Cony-Catching, Dissident Books, Don't Call Me A Crook, Earl of Surrey, eBay, France, Glasgow, Howard Hughes, Howard Marks, Hurst & Blackkett, Hutchinson, Italy, J. T. LeRoy, James Frey, James Macpherson, Jungle West 11, Laura Albert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Majbritt Morrison, Mr Nice, National Library of Scotland, New York, New York Public Library, Nicholas Towasser, Orientalism, Ossian, Pat Spry, Random House, roaring twenties, Robert Green, Royal Flying Corps, The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Rowley
Posted in books, True crime | 21 Comments »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false. All the available evidence would suggest Wyllie is correct on these matters, and while this adds to the credibility of his tale, it will probably do little for the sales of his book.
The book is a personal account of Wyllie’s time with The Process and the story he tells is more convincing than the portraits of the group found in books such as The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and the first edition of The Family by Ed Saunders, but it is also far more banal. Therefore, if you want to read sensationalist and ultimately fictionalised accounts of Satanic killing sprees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There is plenty of that online, and a web search will also locate many Process writings and graphics.
The history of The Process is essentially this: in 1963 two former Scientologists Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston established a therapy business in Wigmore Street, London. Mary Ann MacLean was a former prostitute who grew up in poverty in Glasgow, while Robert de Grimston was from an upper class family and had served as an officer in the British army before becoming an architecture student and then dropping out three years into these studies. Wyllie first met de Grimston in 1959 when they both enrolled on the architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic (renamed Polytechnic of Central London in 1970, with a further name change to University of Westminster in 1992). In 1963 McLean and de Grimston began using Wyllie as a guinea pig to test and develop techniques they’d learnt as Scientologists, adapting them to their own purposes.
Wyllie’s circle of student friends provided the initial recruits to what was then called Compulsions Analysis. In Wyllie’s account, those involved with MacLean and de Grimson recognised a sense of spirituality in their activities and the name of the group was therefore changed to The Process in 1965. My own impression is there was nothing spiritual about MacLean and essentially she conned the group into becoming her disciples and funding the luxury life-style she and de Grimston craved. Even from Wyllie’s rather misty-eyed account, it is apparent MacLean was a hard-bitten hustler who’d mastered the con game when she was working as a high class London hooker throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.
While Process acolytes panhandled for money and lived in abject poverty, the group rented properties it could barely afford in an attempt to trick the outside world into believing they possessed wealth and power. De Grimston and MacLean were the only Process members to live in style. While de Grimston provided the theology, MacLean was the real power running this cynical money-grabbing hierarchy. Over the years the group expanded and at various times had chapters in Rome, Paris, New Orleans, San Francisco, Munich, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Miami. Chapters were sometimes moved from one city to another, and the membership never seems to have stretched beyond the very low hundreds, although The Process claimed to have tens of thousands of members.
Process theology was based on the unification of opposites, and a reading of the Bible that took Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy enemy’ to mean love Satan. Much of this gnostic garbage was confected in group sessions and then written up by de Grimston, and even Wyllie admits it didn’t read well on the printed page. After an Idris Shah book fell on his head in a Notting Hill bookshop, Wyllie convinced himself that de Grimston and MacLean were disguised Sufi masters, and like other members of the cult was also prone to viewing the latter as a human incarnation of the Goddess! The original core of The Process consisted chiefly of over-privileged and privately educated brats, and it seems to me that much remains to be written about how an upper-class upbringing renders individuals peculiarly susceptible to the brainwashing techniques of religious cults.
The Process fell apart when de Grimston and MacLean ended their marital relationship in 1974. De Grimston attempted to revitalise The Process without success. MacLean led the disciples who stuck with her into The Foundation, which adopted increasingly conventional Christian doctrines before reinventing itself as a secular animal charity called Best Friends. MacLean died in 2005, de Grimston is still alive.
Wyllie’s account of his 15 years with The Process is supplemented by the stories of various other members. The most shocking thing to come out of this is the criminal neglect of children whose parents belonged to the cult. The overall impression I’m left with is that life in The Process was very dull, and you had to be deluded to join it in the first place. The Process memoirs gathered together here also show that those conned by guru-figures are very slow to give up their illusions, and will often attempt to off-set the fact they were ripped-off with the desultory claim they enjoyed some kind of spiritual adventure in ‘the process’.
In addition to these memoirs, this book also contains a selection of unimpressive texts by de Grimston, and a very silly essay by Genesis P. Orridge about how he modelled Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth on The Process. The image section in this tome is rather more interesting, since it illustrates the strong design sense and corporate-style marketing of The Process as a self-consciously totalitarian cult. From Wyllie’s account of the group it is clear why The Process chose to project itself as a totalitarian ‘elite’:
“Mary Ann (cult leader Mary Ann MacLean) never made any apologies, for instance, about having considerable sympathy and respect for the Nazi regime. Doubtless it suited her authoritarian personality. A story I have heard her relate more than once is of her as a small girl of nine or ten, who found herself leaving her physical body and being transported into Hitler’s bunker during World War II. There she would slip around the table in her astral form whispering into the generals’ ears. Whether she ever claimed to observe der Fuehrer’s legendary rages, I don’t recall, but if she had I can only imagine she would have egged him on in his carpet-biting frenzies.” (Page 56).
Elsewhere Wyllie recalls:
“Michael and I stopped in to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘American Nazi’, out of allegiance to Mary Ann’s interest in extreme ideologies…. Rockwell sat in the only armchair… He looked younger than I thought he was going to be, with a buzz-cut and a surprisingly open, pleasant, face, marred now by a fixed scowl that didn’t leave him while we were there… He had a military bearing but was clearly a frightened man… Later I found out that Lincoln Rockwell was killed in August of 1967 by a disgruntled ex-member of his party and only days after our visit. I should add that Michael is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family and I can only imagine that Mary Ann instructed him to visit Rockwell as a way of testing his mettle…” (Pages 80-81).
Elsewhere in his narrative Wyllie tells tales of counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Simon Vinkenoog, assisting The Process. He also writes about a few of the celebrities the group attempted to shake down for donations; they range from Miles Davis to Salvador Dali. Sadly, he has nothing to say about Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, who okayed the reproduction of Process material on the art work to a couple of his albums. Mostly this is a book about the internal dynamics of The Process and as such it makes for curious but nonetheless extremely depressing reading; it appears that most of the ‘former’ cult members contributing to it are still deluded about their experiences years after the group broke up.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Abbie Hoffman, Adolf Hitler, American Nazi Party, Amsterdam, Best Friends, Boston, central London, Charles Manson, Chicago, Christianity, Compulsions Analysis, Ed Saunders, Feral House, Funkadelic, Genesis P. Orridge, George Clinton, George Lincoln Rockwell, Glasgow, Gnosticism, Idris Shah, London, Los Angeles, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, Mary Ann MacLean, Maury Terry, Miami, Miles Davis, Munich, Nazism, New Orleans, New York, Notting Hill, Paris, Polytechnic of Central London, Profumo Affair, Regent Street Polytechnic, Robert de Grimston, Rome, Salvador Dali, San Francisco, Satanism, Scientology, Simon Vinkenoog, sixties, Son of Sam, Suagr Ray Robinson, Sufism, Tate-LaBianca murders, The Family, The Process, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, The Ultimate Evil, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, Timothy Leary, Timothy Wyllie, Toronto, University of Westminster, Wigmore Street
Posted in books, counterculture | 51 Comments »