Posts Tagged ‘Iain Sinclair’
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid) is well known for his cruel and nihilistic pranks. To save myself the effort of writing very much about Sierra (whose work is tedious but simultaneously serves to illustrate the complete decomposition of the institution of art), I’ve taken the following from a Wikipedia page about him: “Some of Sierra’s most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition… In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim Germany.”
Sierra’s cynicism and inhumanity are well illustrated by the examples above. He titillates the rich by locking them out of galleries, whereas when it comes to the wretched of the earth, Sierra delights in degrading them by providing a meagre wage in exchange for the performance of boring and humiliating tasks. Sierra’s treatment of those he hires demonstrates not just his repugnant inhumanity – his success as an artist is also based on some extremely cynical calculations about exactly what types of degradation inflicted upon the poor will most appeal to rich collectors.
As an adjunct to the Frieze Art Fair in London, Sierra’s new film No was screened last night to an invited audience at The Prince Charles Cinema just of Leicester Square. The promotion for the movie ran like this: “NO, Global Tour, 2011 A film by Santiago Sierra, Directed by Santiago Sierra, Filmed by Diego Santome, black and white film, 120 minutes. Santiago Sierra(‘s)… recent work, NO, GLOBAL TOUR, consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck. The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this large NO through various world cities… The film, full of all manner of references, does not aim for surprise but thought. Using the strict black and white that characterises his work, and with a soundtrack limited to a careful treatment of incidental sound, the film revitalises the road movie genre through a productive encounter with other languages and disciplines.”
The information that came with my invitation to the free screening was, of course, hype (as is the claim – sometimes made about Sierra – that his work is in some way ‘anti-capitalist’). Free beer and popcorn were a further enticement to attend. Rather than provoking ‘thought’, NO looked like someone had randomly strung together a bunch out-takes from one of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s TV movies – and with results that were far less enticing than those achieved by this pair of London psychogeographers. I went to the screening with the intention of watching the reaction of the audience, who looked bored shitless after ten minutes. Most had walked out before the end of the movie. I presume this is what Sierra wanted and that he’s more than happy with this result. For the rest of us NO is simply a bit of a yawn. The lettrists achieved far more with their deliberately boring films of the early-1950s, and if you want to be alienated in style then stick with the output of the French avant-garde of sixty-odd years ago. Sierra is strictly for the idle rich, and hopefully they won’t be with us for much longer.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Chris Petit, cynicism, degradation, Diego Santome, Frieze Art Fair, Iain Sinclair, idle rich, inhumanity, Leicester Square, lettrist cinema, Lisson Gallery, London, No, No Global Tour, Prince Charles Cinema, psychogeographers, psychogeography, Santiago Sierra, Wikipedia
Posted in art criticism, film, scam | 22 Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
When I first heard about Children of the Sun, I assumed the title was taken from the classic sixties psyche single of the same name by The Misunderstood, but anyone who reads the book can see that it actually invokes Savitri Devi, a particularly bonkers and unpleasant exponent of post-war Nazi occultism, and one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists. That said, the focus of this ‘novel’ is very much on English neo-Nazi scum of the Thatcher era; although Devi does appear in extended fictional form, partly on account of the fact that she died in England on the same day that the moronic bonehead band Skrewdriver played their comeback gig in London.
The book intercuts two narratives, which are joined at the end. One is about a lumpen south London secretly gay Nazi skinhead called Tony; and the other concerns the middle-class liberal James, whose family is financially supporting his research into the far-Right, so that he can write a TV script about British Movement activist and amateur porn star Nicky Crane. Schaefer uses the first narrative to undermine reader expectations, his main character Tony is complete low-life, and in every fight sequence I was rooting for him to be annihilated; so it was a major disappointment that this piece of trash survives right the way through to the end of the book.
Although Tony is a member of the British Movement, his depiction often led me to think of a Strasserite plonker on the ‘far left’ of a 1980s photo of Ian Anderson ‘manning the deliberately provocative National Front stall in the Asian area of Brick Lane, East London’, which is available from photographersdirect.com (search for “Ian Anderson Brick Lane”). In the ‘Tony’ parts of Schaefer’s book we encounter fictional depictions of figures such as Nicky Crane, Ian Stuart (of Skrewdriver), Savitri Devi and even Nick Griffin (now the BNP’s leading Nazi twat, but back then in his national ‘revolutionary’ phase an associate of a motley crew of Italian fascists with a string of criminal convictions implicating them in more than one mass murder, as well as a huge fan of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi).
Children of the Sun not only takes the reader through a very lightly fictionalised version of key incidents in the development of British neo-Nazism, it is peppered with genuine historical documents relating to these events. What will most immediately grab many people’s attention is documentation relating to Nick Griffin’s unbelievably unsavoury past. However, of more interest to me was the resurfacing of two press clippings I’d appraised some time ago – an October 1986 news item from Searchlight linking Tony Wakeford’s National Front band Above The Ruins (the name was subsequently changed to Sol Invictus) to Nazi bonehead Nicky Crane as well as Michael Walker of The Scorpion, plus a 1986 review from the fascist zine English Rose that suggests top Nazi prick Patrick Harrington was a member of Wakeford’s group during its early days. Above The Ruins are mentioned more than once in the ‘fictional’ sections of the text, and these invocations prove extremely suggestive. For example:
“I was reading the Scorpion, this would-be intellectual journal put out by Michael Walker, who used to run a tour company with Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore. So in summer ’93, just before Nicky died, Walker published an article by Stephen Cox, who ran something called the Jarls of Baelder, which as far as I can tell was a sort of occult, quasi-nazi homoerotic naturist group. Baelder had, or has, a secret inner order called the Fraternitas Loki, devoted to ‘covert aeonic action’: aeonics is a key Nine Angles term, and in Norse mythology Loki was the father of Fenrir, the wolf, right? The Above The Ruins album was Songs of the Wolf, and Fenrir was the in-house journal of the ONA… Anyway, Cox’s piece is this barking analysis of European history that says we need to reappraise the Third Reich and seek our destiny among the stars. And it’s illustrated with diagrams that say, at the bottom: copyright Order of Nine Angles. So this is explicit Nine Angles material appearing in the major British journal of the new right. They’re all over each other…” (pages 252-253).
There are, of course, other ways of linking Wakeford to David Myatt and the Order of Nine Angles, and Children of the Sun provides more than enough information to encourage readers to do just that and much else besides. Therefore, I’m not sure I’d describe this book a novel, it seems to me to be closer to what the Wu Ming collective call an ‘unidentified narrative object’; in fact, it reads a lot like recent work by Iain Sinclair crossed with gay porn for Nazi fetishists. The tome is incredibly well researched, and is guaranteed to stir up a lot of debate about links between the music scene and neo-Nazi politics (especially as, yet again, it blows away the threadbare argument a number of fascist musicians and their apologists have used for years in order to attain a fig-leaf of respectability; viz, they couldn’t possibly be Nazis because either they or some of their associates are gay). Likewise, although this is by no means the last word on why some extremely sad non-fascist gay men are turned on by Nazi uniforms and related trash (like Nicky Crane), it explores the area much more effectively than say Bruce La Bruce’s ill-conceived film Skin Gang/Skin Flick (1999).
Children of the Sun is at times an extremely unpleasant read, but it will nonetheless prove an eye-opener to those who run the literary world (anti-fascist activists will already be familiar with much of this material). I’m very much looking forward to some of the debates this book is likely to spark when it is published early next year. A couple of the ‘fictional’ Nazi scum turn out to be copper’s narks, and this might well lead to heated arguments about whether or not they are based on certain real-life characters. Schaefer has written an arresting debut that makes me extremely curious not only about what he will be doing next, but also what will happen to the huge amount of as yet unused research he’s done into the Nazi music scene and its fellow travellers.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1980s, Above The Ruins, Brick Lane, British Movement, British National Party, Bruce La Bruce, Children of the Sun, Colonel Gaddafi), David Myatt, English Rose, Fraternitas Loki, Iain Sinclair, Ian Anderson, Ian Stuart, Jarls of Baelder, Libya, London, Max Schaefer, Michael Walker, National Front, Nick Griffin, Nicky Crane, ONA, Order Of Nine Angles, Patrick Harrington, Photographers Direct, Roberto Fiore, Savitri Devi., Searchlight, Skin Flick., Skin Gang, Skrewdriver, Songs of the Wolf, Stephen Cox, The Misunderstood, The Scorpion, Third Reich, tony Wakeford, World Union of National Socialists, Wu Ming
Posted in books, music, politics | Comments Off
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), both directed by Arnold L. Miller. The Miller titles are mondo movies about London and its nightlife in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of director and producer Richard Lester but I’ll sit through anything with Rita Tushingham in it at least once – with The Leather Boys (1964, directed by Sidney J. Furie) being my favourite film featuring this actress, since among other things her character Dot gets to deliver the immortal line: ‘Do you like me hair?’ By way of contrast, The Bed Sitting Room is merely a curious sixties period piece greatly lifted by the presence of Tushingham, but nonetheless a movie that is ultimately a vehicle for Spike Milligan. It is based upon his Cuban missile crisis inspired play of the same name, and is imbued with a pre-Beatles and pre-permissive society mind-set.
The Bed Sitting Room takes place in the ruins of post-nuclear apocalypse London, and I guess the humour is supposed to be zany and surreal, but I found it very old-fashioned. The best joke comes during the credits where the cast are listed by height from shortest to tallest; a device that fortuitously provides Tushingham with top billing. Among the other famous names featured in this film are Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Lowe. During a panel talk after the screening, Lester said that while he had no issues with the cast when making the film, their respective agents proved rather argumentative about billings and thus listing the actors by height was his means of resolving this problem.
Lester dominated the panel talk although he’d been joined for it by Rita Tushingham, with BFI curators Will Fowler and Vic Pratt moderating. Lester mixed some entertaining anecdotes with an unbelievably superficial take on events in Paris in May 1968. He seemed to view the entire year – and in particular the occupations movement in France – as a bit of a downer, largely because these political events disrupted his travel plans. Unfortunately Rita didn’t get to say much, but she’s an old pro and having known Lester for around forty-five years appeared both used to and unflustered by his habit of hogging the conversation.
Tushingham is in incredibly good shape for a 67 year-old, and while she now appears a little older than in her 1960s prime, her distinctive looks are still very much with her. At the BFI she adroitly deployed her exaggerated feminine moves of the sixties, with several big arm swings to keep her legion of fans happy. Afterwards in the corridor as I was making my way towards the private party, I was nearly knocked over by a group of men who were mobbing Rita for autographs. I haven’t seen a celebrity creating that amount of havoc at the BFI since Jane Fonda was in the building signing copies of her autobiography My Life So Far back in 2006.
At the party I exchanged brief greetings with BFI luminaries Eddie Berg and Vic Pratt, spent a little longer speaking to Will Fowler about the Flipside releases, and managed a proper conversation with my fellow-freelancer Kim Newman; this latter exchange covered everything from Lester’s films to our shared family connections to Elgin Crescent in west London. The BFI had provided crisps and peanuts for revelers, but I wanted to eat something more substantial and so left after a couple of drinks. While I had a curry on my mind, of more interest to everyone else will be the viewing menu on offer to those that grab hold of the current and upcoming BFI Flipside releases. Of the future releases I’m particularly looking forward to Privilege (1967, directed by Peter Watkins), coz it must be coming on for 30 years since I last saw this very curious flick about the corporate control and political manipulation of a rock star. As already mentioned, out next week are two of the most important films of the mondo movie genre: London In The Raw and Primitive London. There are variant versions of each film on the disks plus a host of extras, including two great documentary shorts about London strip clubs – Strip (1966) is served up alongside London In The Raw, while Carousella (1966) acts as a side-dish to Primitive London.
And now it’s time to declare my personal interest in all this. I contributed an essay to the London In The Raw booklet, while Iain Sinclair provides a companion-piece to my text for Primitive London. I got quite carried with this engagement, since it was an opportunity to write about London clubs in the 1960s… and very quickly my composition became too long to accompany a film release. Therefore, I chopped out a lot of material before I emailed the text to the BFI and reformatted some of that into an earlier blog (the opening and closing paragraphs were written to make this material work as an online post, the rest is unrevised material I’d cut from my BFI essay). I find the subject of London clubs of the 1960s endlessly fascinating, which is why I ran way over the word count the BFI provided and had to take rather a lot out. Originally, I’d wanted to conclude with a paragraph or three of contextualising remarks, but in the end this also had to go. One of those ‘lost’ paragraphs read as follows:
“The fascination with strip and hostess clubs evident in the work of both sets of film-makers represented on this disk reflects the fact that such establishments proliferated in London during the sixties as a direct consequence of the 1959 Street Offences Act, which attempted to sweep prostitution off the city’s pavements in line with the desires of the Wolfenden Committee. It should go without saying that the sex industry didn’t disappear, although large parts of it did relocate to both dank basements and apparently swanky clubs. When strip clubs spread to the vast bulk of cities in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar cinematic obsession with such establishments was evident in many North American movies. That said, to my eyes and ears, London in the sixties is infinitely preferable to the American mid-west of the nineteen-nineties; the girls were more varied in those largely pre-plastic surgery days and the music was better. The British pop-cultural obsession with strippers was still very much in evidence a few years after the films gathered here were made; one example being the song The Girls Are Naked issued by top London mod act The Creation as the b-side to their May 1968 Polydor single Midway Down.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Arnold L. Miller. Arnold Louis Miller, Arnold Miller, Arthur Lowe, BFI, British Film Institutes, Carousella, Dick Lester, Dudley Moore, Eddie Berg, Elgin Crescent, Flipside, France, Harry Secombe, Iain Sinclair, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Edwards, Kim Newman, London, London In The Raw, Marty Feldman, May 68, Midway Down, My Life So Far, occupations movement, Paris, Peter Cook, Peter Watkins, Polydor Records, Primitive London, Privilege, prostitution, Richard Lester, Rita Tushingham, Sidney J. Furie. The Leather Boys, sixties, south London, Southbank, Spike Milligan, Street Offences Act, Strip, The Bed Sitting Room, The Creation, The Girls Are Naked, Vic Pratt, west London, Will Fowler, Wolfenden Committee
Posted in culture gossip & parties, film | 22 Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
The London Zine Symposium 2009 took place at The Rag Factory (16-18 Heneage Street, London E1 5LJ) yesterday, Sunday 3 May. As an event, it occupies the ground between Publish & Be Damned (with its self-published art focus) and the Anarchist Book Fair (for those committed to full-on and weekend variety anarchist life-styles). There were a lot of familiar faces on the stalls at the Zine Symposium ranging from Mark Pawson (who can also be seen at Publish & Be Damned) to Active Distribution (who favour the Anarchist Book Fair). I was at the top of Brick Lane at lunch time before making my way to the Zine Symposium, and the Whitechapel Anarchist Group (all two of them) were out in force selling their publication WAG in front of the Beigel Bake. Later they were manning a stall down the road at the Zine Symposium. The anarchists somehow managed to constitute themselves as a separate fraction within this event, although the art elements appeared to dominate in terms of the stalls, reflecting the fact that Published & Be Damned is currently the biggest annual bring-and-buy self-publishing event in London.
There were a bunch of readings, workshops and debates, but I only attended Alternative Visions: comics, zines and politics since the 1970s at 2.30pm. The event was dominated by Roger Sabin, a reader in popular culture at Central Saint Martins College of Art. He was assisted by Teal Triggs, Professor of Graphic Design at the London College of Communication. After their own presentations, Sabin and Triggs put a few questions to Isy from Morgenmuffel and Edd from Hey Monkey Riot/Last Hours zines. I had difficulties with the way Sabin treated the hippie and punk subcultures as ultimately distinct, since I feel they are more closely entwined than he assumed, and I also find he takes the rhetoric of those involved with such scenes rather too seriously. However, my main problem with Sabin’s presentation was that he didn’t really deal with the economic and technological factors that have driven change in zine and comic production over the past forty years. However, his ideological idealism didn’t really surprise me given that I’ve never found Sabin’s academic work on subculture very satisfactory, as my ten year old review of his book Punk Rock, So What? indicates (see text in right column of link for this).
As the afternoon wore on, more and more people I knew – starting with Malcolm Hopkins and concluding with Richard Essex – drifted off to The Pride Of Spitalfields. I looked into the pub, but then decided to try to catch the William Blanchard AKA Wildcat Will show Assemblage at the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery in Redchurch Street. That exhibition space turned out to be closed and locked up; but as I headed up to it, I did see Jimmy Cauty making his way towards his car, and Martin Sexton standing outside his Artwars Project Space on the other side of the street from the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery.
Martin told me Jimmy had just been in to see his joint show with Dominique Lacloche, Beneath The Pavement… The Beach, which was coming down that very night. This joint effort between Sexton and Paris based Lacloche is certainly one of the crazier art manifestations I’ve seen on Redchurch Street in recent years, featuring as it did giant leaves on which photographs have been developed, a levitation machine and a mask of Socrates made out of a 4.5 billion year old meteorite. It made sense to me that a former member of the KLF would have been visiting it. I haven’t seen Jimmy for a couple years, and the weekend just gone was an interesting one for passing people without speaking to them; this started late on Friday afternoon when I’d walked past Liam Gillick on the stairs at Book Works, as he’d been making his way up to the editorial floor of the building, and I’d been leaving. There were a few people I’d avoided speaking to at the Zine Symposium as well, but they shall remain nameless.
Martin Sexton talked me through a few of his innumerable upcoming plans. One that I suspect will remain unrealised is for a psychogeographers super-group featuring Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Tom Vague and me, to play a one off concert at his Artwars Project Space. The next show opening at Sexton’s space is Psycho Pomp, which runs from 8 to 31 May 2009. After leaving Sexton, my next move was a meet with Tom McCarthy, Eva Stenram and visiting US writer Jesse Ball; the conversation ping-ponged between Iceland, Finland and teaching creative writing. Later in the evening I opened an email from Richard Thomas apologising for the short notice but saying that the Gloria radio show I’d recorded for Resonance FM would be broadcast tonight (Monday 4 May) from 9.00 to 10.00pm, and repeated on Sunday 10 May, 7.30 to 8.30pm. Finally, I caught the likes of John Williams and Kodwo Eshun talking on Sukhdev Sandhu’s curious but ultimately unsatisfactory BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature The Life & Times of Michael X, before deciding that was enough counterculture for one day, and settling down with an old school kung fu movie.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Active Distribution, Alternative Visions: comics, Anarchist Book Fair, Artwars Project Space, Assemblage, BBC, BBC Radio 3, Beneath The Pavement... The Beach, Brick Lane, Brick Lane Beigel Bake, Central Saint Martins College of Art, Dominique Lacloche, east London, Eva Stenram, Heneage Street, Iain Sinclair, Jesse Ball, Jimmy Cauty, John Williams, KLF, Kodwo Eshun, Last Hours, Liam Gillick, London, London College of Communication, Malcolm Hopkins, Mark Pawson, Martin Sexton, Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery, Michael X, Monkey Riot, Morgenmuffel, Peter Ackroyd, Pride of Spitalfields, Psycho Pomp, Publish & Be Damned, Punk Rock So What?, Radio 3, Redchurch Street, Richard Essex, Richard Thomas, Roger Sabin, Socrates, Sukhdev Sandhu, Teal Triggs, The Life & Times of Michael X, The Rag Factory, Tom McCarthy, Tom Vague, Whitechapel Anarchist Group, Wildcat Will, William Blanchard, zines and politics since the 1970s
Posted in counterculture | 37 Comments »
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 »
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Nice to see Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire being bigged-up in the Saturday Guardian by Andy Beckett this weekend. I don’t read The Times or The Telegraph so we won’t talk about how I know there were thumbs up reviews in those papers too. Talking to a few people after I blogged the book I realised there’d been the odd misunderstanding because I’d only really dealt with the ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ section that devotes more lines to me than any other part of the book; oh I just love reading about myself! ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ really is the most fictional part of the tome, and the rest of the work is far more factual. Sinclair hasn’t written a conventional history of Hackney, since the focus is bohemia, but there are plenty of hard facts for those that want them. Sinclair is even surprisingly polite about assorted Hackney-linked Trotskyites and liberals; you’d think his nihilism might make him more critical of them… but maybe it’s a generational solidarity thing going on here. That said, Sinclair is still more than capable of the odd mordant spasm, as the following jibe at the expense of one section of the professional middle-classes shows:
“The (Chambers) bequest was a nuisance, paintings of variable quality, curious objects, to be catalogued, stored, exhibited. The best that could be said of this stuff was that it gave employment to an emerging human type, the conceptual curator. Bureaucrats schooled to replace unreliable and indigent artists. Professional explainers: even when there was nothing to explain. The Chambers Collection was unfit to view, but it couldn’t be sold off at auction or dumped in a car boot sale at the Hackney Wick Stadium….”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andy Beckett, Chambers Collection, curators, Guardian, Hackney, Hackney That Rose Red Empire, Iain Sinclair, liberals, Mister Trippy, nihilism, Stewart Home, Trotskyites
Posted in books | 18 Comments »
Monday, February 9th, 2009
In Hackney, That Rose Red Empire (published by Hamish Hamilton tomorrow), Iain Sinclair brings together his fictional practices and his cultural journalism with stunning results. Sinclair has interviewed dozens of subterranean London figures such as Chris Petit and then, as he frankly admits, freely rewritten what they told him to suit his own agenda. I’ve already had hours of fun trying to work out what is true and what is made up in this book, and I’m sure once more people have read it this will generate endless pub discussions too.
The transcription of an interview with me bears little resemblance to what I actually told Sinclair. Likewise, Sinclair invents all sorts of fantastic stories about me and these include the allegation that after being beaten about the head with bricks I suffered short term memory loss (not true), I have a £600 bicycle (the cycle I bought in 2001 and still use actually cost less than £100), and he even has me imply that I wouldn’t involve myself in Hackney cottaging! Still the portrait he paints of me is mythic and I come across more like Julian MacLaren-Ross than the regular guy possessed by supernatural powers that I actually am; so overall it is rather flattering! But no mention of my boyfriends coz in this book I’m painted strictly as a serial ladies man – so watch out girls! If the material about me is a gauge of the rest of the book, then more than 50 percent of it is fiction.
Much coverage is devoted to the Hackney Mole Man William Lyttle, and while the recollections of some of those who knew him back in the eighties (basically me and my friend Mark Pawson, who rented a room from him) have some grounding in reality, it seems that the entire interview with this legendary figure is simply made up. However, this may just be a double-bluff on Sinclair’s part. Who knows? For those who don’t know, the Mole Man is notorious for digging tunnels under his Hackney home and neighbouring properties, thereby making them unstable.
Needless to say, Sinclair’s documentary fiction is considerably more accurate than the telephone checked stories of Fleet Street journalists. Likewise, he doesn’t let the Hackney borders contain him, since he devotes a chapter to the Golden Lane Estate just east of Smithfield Market, an area notorious as Pickt-hatch in the Jacobean era due to the many brothels it housed, but now the base of writers like Tom McCarthy and Chris Petit. I only clocked the historical sex industry connection the other day as I was reading Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book, which takes up from Pierce Penniless by Thomas Nashe, where a modern footnote stated: “Pictk-hatch suburban brothel district, just south east of the intersection of Goswell Road and Old Street”. It is unfortunate I didn’t disinter this in time to tell Sinclair, so that he could include it in his book.
Drawing on A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature by Gordon Williams (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994), I understand that a pickt-hatch was originally a brothel door with the upper part surrounded by spikes. Williams cites numerous examples of the term’s usage, including Middleton’s Black Book, and notes its application to the area now occupied by the Golden Lane Estate. It is interesting that this locale should have been notorious for prostitution because Fortune Street which housed the Fortune Theatre lies just to its east, and of course the Bankside stews were by The Globe, and there was a theatre in Shoreditch (another area synonymous with prostitution in Elizabethan and Jacobean London). I’m not sure if Whitefriars or Turnmill Street which were also stuffed with ‘punks’ and ‘bawdy houses’ back then also had theatres so close by, but there was obviously a connection between popular spectacle in the form of the theatre and the sex industry of that time.
Something else Sinclair doesn’t report is that the Golden Lane Estate was the work of the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who later designed the adjacent Barbican complex. Golden Lane is also the current home of a shed load of artists and architects including Merlin Carpenter, the one time Martin Kippenberger assistant whose work was notoriously ‘rejected’ by the ‘master’ but subsequently used in a skip installation. This type of information simply doesn’t catch Sinclair’s imagination and so isn’t in his book. That said, and despite my failing to pick up on the historical sex industry aspects of the Golden Lane area in time to feed it to Sinclair for use this time around, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire is easily the best book I’ve read this year. And I don’t expect to read anything better until my novel Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie comes out with Book Works next year!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, Bankside, Barbican, bawdy houses, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, brothels, Chamberlin Powell and Bon, Chris Petit, Continuum International Publishing Group, cottaging, documentary fiction, Fleet Street hacks, Fortune Street, Fortune Theatre, Golden Lane Estate, Gordon Williams, Goswell Road, Hackney, Hackney Mole Man, Hackney That Rose Red Empire, Hamish Hamilton, Iain Sinclair, Julian MacLaren-Ross, London, Mark Pawson, Martin Kippenberger, Merlin Carpenter, Old Street, Pickt-hatch, Pierce Penniless, prostitution, Shoreditch, Smithfield Market, The Black Book, The Globe, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe, Tom McCarthy, Turnmill Street, Whitefriars, William Lyttle
Posted in books, literature | 28 Comments »
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
In recent weeks I’ve heard a lot of chatter about Iain Sinclair and Audi. The car manufacturer puts it this way: “Author Iain Sinclair joins filmmaker Chris Petit as they take an unusual trip though the North West of England. Available on The Audi Channel SKY 884.”
Richard DeDomenici sent me this message the other day: “What do you think of Iain Sinclair’s Audi advert? I have mixed emotions. Surprise, disappointment, and jealousy.”
I replied: “Oh I have no problems with it… except I don’t like cars (everyone should use public transport)… but we all have to live out the contradictions of capitalism and Sinclair has paid his dues and deserves to be where he is… and he needs the money… I mean what can you say… He’d probably rather be doing something else but has to pay the bills….same goes for Chris Petit, it’s his advert too..”
Now I’m wondering if next time I see Sinclair he’ll be driving a new Audi rather than his old Merc. But what I’m really looking forward to his new book “Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report”, out later this year. That’s gotta be more interesting than an Audi advert, even one featuring Sinclair and Chris Petit!
In terms of Sinclair paying his dues, check out what Ben Watson has to say about him: “The notion of artistic ‘genius’ – a mysterious attribute granted to a few special individuals – allows journalists to pretend that their own lack of literary creativity derives from innate limitations rather than real conditions of life and thought. Sinclair’s ‘vision’ and ‘imagination’ do not spring from nowhere. Born in 1943, success has come late. A ‘literary failure’, he spent the 70s and 80s as a hippie drop-out, parks labourer and book-dealer, publishing his own small-edition runs of poetry. This was a crucial apprenticeship: a commitment to the Word vindicated by Downriver‘s power to awaken us to the realities of London”
From http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/critlit/SINCLAIR.htm.
Likewise, for my at length take on Sinclair’s films go to:
http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/luv/sinclair.htm.
And if you really want to know, I don’t think Sinclair is Belle de Jour… I mean compare their prose, could anyone (even me!) be that versatile?? And is it actually worth asking the question: “Is Chris Petit the man behind the Belle de Jour persona?” No, I don’t think so. Anyone for Ben Watson as Belle? Now that really would be a groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Audi, Belle de Jour, Ben Watson, Chris Petit, Hackney, Iain Sinclair, literature, Militant Esthetix, psychogeography, Richard DeDomenici
Posted in literature | 37 Comments »