Posts Tagged ‘Julia Callan-Thompson’

Yet more reasons to be an ego-maniac on a world historical scale!

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

I was asked to answer these questions for an event in Barcelona and having done so figured I might as well post them here too. You couldn’t make it it!

1. When were you happiest? I’ll be at my happiest in about 10 minutes when I’ve answered these questions – coz then I can make another huge pot of espresso and watch yet another Godfrey Ho movie.

2. What is your greatest fear? That the list I have of Godfrey Ho movies is complete and that before long I’ll have watched everything he ever made. Fortunately not even Godfrey Ho can remember all the films he made and there’s a good chance of many more being added to the 150 we know about.

3. What is your earliest memory? Going to the Isle of Wight by ferry when I was 2 years old. It was raining.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My modesty. I feel I need to be more egotistical.

5. In what historical time would you have liked to live? I like the times I’ve lived in best – and would only want to live in London (or possibly New York) at any time. I wouldn’t mind going back to the 1960s for the music, the 1970s for the feeling the whole political system was going to collapse (but then it feels like that again now), and the 1980s for seeing Godfrey Ho movies as they appeared at the point this director was most prolific.

6. Ever been in a fight? Of course! No idea how many.

7. Where do you stand politically? Ultra-left.

8. What do you owe your parents? I can thank my mother Julia Callan-Thompson for my intelligence and good looks, and great stories to tell people about her life as an original mod and then in the 1960s counterculture. Also my great taste in music, since my mother was listening to cool modern jazz all the time she was pregnant with me. I don’t know who my father is so I probably don’t owe him anything – but I reckon he owes me a big bundle of used notes!

9. Who would you invite to your dream party? Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Lopez and Godfrey Ho, among others.

10. If you could edit your past, what would you change? I wouldn’t have gone to see Joy Davison who are a lousy band and unfortunately I knew what I was doing when I went into the gig. I definitely wouldn’t have seen The Police either, but they were a last minute substitution among the support acts when I went to see The Brian James All Stars in 1978 (and I did go to the bar and turned my back on them when they played). I can’t be blamed for seeing The Police because I didn’t know I was going to see them when I went into The Electric Ballroom – but I wish I hadn’t seen them.

11. When did you last cry, and why? In 1971 when I lost a ten pence piece down a drain. We’d only just had the change in the UK to decimal currency and I thought it was a fifty pence piece, which is why I cried.

12. What is the closest you’ve come to death? Sitting in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in east London one winter day. I was leaving my body behind and entering this golden tunnel of light and thinking how great it was to be dead, when one of the museum attendants shook me awake and asked me if I was alright. I was very disappointed to still be alive coz death seemed like it was a groove sensation!

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement or quality? My ability to talk endless and without any prompting – even when I’m standing on my head!

14. What song or songs would you like played at your funeral? “Burn, Baby, Burn” by Mel Williams.

15. Why and when did you decide to start talking about yourself? As soon as I could speak – so when I was about a year old. I didn’t have a reason then, it was just intuitive. Now it’s a case of I started doing this in 1963 so why the hell should I stop?

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

10 Art Works You Must Jerk Off Over Before You Die!

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

In 2001 when Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art was on at the Hayward Gallery, a female visitor to the show walked into a room in which Tadasu Takamine’s Inertia was being shown only to discover a man jerking off to the projection. The woman left and complained to the gallery, but by the time security got there the man had disappeared. The work was recently re-shown at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham, I don’t know if anyone was caught wanking off to the piece there, but the description of it on the Icon website illustrates you’d have to be seriously sad to do so: “Inertia (1998) involves the uneasy combination of a young woman and a bullet train. She is shown close-up and feet first on top of a carriage while the rest of the world flashes past. A powerful electric hum dramatises her fruitless attempts to push her dress down over her legs against the force of the wind; the situation is intensely sexual, unstoppable and exhilarating, clearly drawn from classic fetishism and nightmare scenarios.” You’d have to be really unimaginative to jerk off over something as clichéd as that – and especially in a public place! So in the interests of public education, I bring you 10 art works you must jerk off over before you die!

1. The One & The Many by Stewart Home. 72 copies of Home’s novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton factory wrapped in three packets and arranged as a sculpture. The work is for sale at $480 and has an immediate retail value of $720 since the books sell at $10 each. Anyone buying the work needs to choose between breaking up the sculpture and realising an immediate profit by selling the books at their retail price, or keeping it as it is and speculating on it greatly rising in value thanks to its aesthetic merits. On show at White Columns in New York until 19 November. This one would be perfect for a circle jerk. Arrangements might be made with the artist for a special viewing and wanking session out of normal gallery hours – so that the general public can enjoy the work in peace.

2. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. A half length portrait famous thanks to the sitter’s smile. It has been widely rumoured that the model is in fact Leonardo da Vinci in drag, so this one is perfect as a fetish object for all you gender benders out there. Forget about the original, jerk off over a reproduction.

3. Art Strike Bed by Stewart Home. After Home went on art strike between 1990-1993, the first thing he showed in a gallery for his comeback was a bed – which acted as a symbol of his lack of activity during the art strike. He didn’t show the bed he slept on during the art strike, and he’s shown various different beds as ‘the’ Art Strike Bed, since he wants the work to be radically inauthentic. Since you’ve no doubt jerked off on a bed innumerable times, why not wank off over this one! On show right now at White Columns in Manhattan. Arrangements might be made with the artist for a special viewing and wanking session out of normal gallery hours.

4. Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian. Mainstream pornography dulls the brain with literal images. Radical pornography is abstract and requires the stimulus of a healthy imagination in order for you to get off on it. This famous abstract by Mondrian is a perfect example of that. Forget about the original, jerk off over a reproduction for that extra ersatz/seminal experience.

5. Becoming (M)other by Stewart Home & Chris Dorley-Brown. In 2004 Home took his mother’s 1966 modelling portfolio and reposed the pictures with photographer Chris Dorley-Brown. The two sets of images – of Home’s mother (Julia Callan-Thompson aged 22 in her photos) and her son (Stewart Home aged 42 in his photos) – were then morphed together to create an inter-generational & cross-gender composite. Like the Mona Lisa, this is another work that will appeal to gender benders of all ages, as well as the bi-curious. Currently on show at White Columns in New York. Arrangements might be made with the artist for a special viewing and wanking session out of normal gallery hours.

6. White On White by Kazimir Malevich. White stains could only add to the appeal of this classic work of Suprematist abstraction! Judging by the immediate critical reception, Malevich was already wanking in the wind when he made this painting! Forget about the original, use a reproduction to jerk off over. But if you wanna see a really dirty art work use Black On Black by the same artist, which you’ll totally ruin by adding white!

7. Heroin Is The Opiate Of The People by Stewart Home. Wall drawing of a man injecting himself with skag. The image ain’t attractive so getting off over this one will prove you’re a hardcore pervert! On show at White Columns in Manhattan until 19 November. Arrangements might be made with the artist for a special viewing and wanking session out of normal gallery hours.

8. After Walker Evans by Sherrie Levine. Levine re-shot well known Walker Evans photographs from an exhibition catalogue and presented them as her own artwork with no manipulation of the images. The Evans photographs are considered by some to be a quintessential record of the rural American poor during the great depression. The Walker Evans estate saw these works by Levine as an infringement of their copyrights, and acquired them to forestall their circulation. You don’t need Levine re-makes to jerk off over these pieces, just get a decent Walker Evans catalogue and pretend Sherrie has re-done the work for you!

9. Prostitution II by Stewart Home. In the 1970s Cosey Fanni Tutti worked as a model for pornographic magazines and announced that her sex images were performance art. In 1996 – a few years before the current revival of interest in Tutti – Home re-shot a series of her magazine spreads onto Polaroid not merely as an act of appropriation, but also to counteract the fallacious arguments of various self-styled art critics who claimed that in the 1970s British women artists adhered to ‘feminist propriety’. On show at White Columns in New York right now. Arrangements might be made with the artist for a special viewing and wanking session out of normal gallery hours.

10. Samo Is Dead by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Graffiti announcing the end of the Samo Project was painted on walls in Soho, Manhattan, in 1979. You don’t need to find traces of the original graffiti, a photograph of it will do for a wank!

Needless to say there is far more in my White Columns show Again A Time Machine: A Stewart Home Retrospective than the five works described here – and it’s all worth jerking off over. The show is on until 19 November – make sure you catch it! White Columns, 320 West 13th Street (enter on Horatio Street, between Hudson and 8th Avenue), New York, NY 10014, USA.

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

Blog closed until further notice…

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.

Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!

A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.

I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.

My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying  – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.

Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.

Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me -  to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!

In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing  one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!

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

Terry’s Taylor’s cult novel ‘Baron’s Court, All Change’ is a classic – official at £238!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. As I write, Repton Readers are offering a copy of Barons Court on Amazon UK Marketplace for a whopping £238 plus postage.

So how does a hard-to-obtain title go from being offered for sale for a few quid to an asking price of hundreds of pounds? Obviously, it is a combination of buzz and a bookseller chancing it with a high price. Baron’s Court is a far-out drugs novel that fell through the cracks and disappeared for forty odd years – the main problem being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. That said, it only needed a handful of relatively ‘young’ hipsters to realise that the book described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and that the author Terry Taylor had a quite incredible life story, for interest in it to rocket. Since my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) was a friend of the author, when I started researching her life at the turn of the millennium, I came across Baron’s Court and once I’d obtained copies for myself I started talking the book up. I not only wrote about Baron’s Court, I was so knocked-out by this novel, I mailed photocopies of it to key contacts – and after receiving a Xerox from me, Andy Roberts even bigged it up in his recent history of British acid culture Albion Dreaming.

If you want to know why Baron’s Court is so hard to find,  you have to understand both publishing and the used book trade. It is the difficulty of obtaining a title like this that leads dealers to asking an exorbitant price for it. I don’t know the print run of the hardback edition of Baron’s Court, but I’d guess it would have been between two and five thousand. It seems to have generated some coverage, but not massive interest – after it was published Terry Taylor was invited to do some reviewing, but the paperback rights didn’t immediately sell. Taylor’s follow-up, which drew more explicitly on the literary experimentalism of figures like William Burroughs, was rejected by his publisher. So Taylor has been to date a one-shot novelist, and was thus unable to draw readers to his earlier book through the publication of further tomes.

The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback four long years after the appearance of the MacGibbon & Kee hardcover edition is probably best explained by the burgeoning drug culture. By 1965 ‘with-it’ publishers were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject. The Baron’s Court paperback was published by Four Square (later New English Library) who by the late sixties/early seventies did first printings of their books in runs of 20,000 and they only reprinted if this first run sold quickly (see my interview with NEL editor Laurence James as an example of background research I’ve done in this ares). If we assume the company worked in the same way in the mid-sixties, then 20,000 seems a reasonable guess for the print run of Baron’s Court in paperback. We can conclude that in its two editions to date possibly as many as 25,000 copies of Baron’s Court were printed. Most of them will now be destroyed. I don’t know exactly how the book sold, but since it clearly wasn’t like ‘hot cakes’ (if it had there would have been more reprints), it is possible some copies were pulped by one or both of the publishers. I have yet to properly determine the initial reception of the book, and if anyone can point me in the direction of contemporary reviews I would be grateful.

Mass market paperbacks put out by companies like Four Square are cheaply made – perfect bound rather than sewn and printed on pulp papers that deteriorate quickly – after being read a few times this type of book tends to fall apart and get thrown away. Although the paperback will have been printed in a far bigger run than the hardback, my guess would be that far fewer copies of it survive than of the first edition. That said, I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about many copies of the first edition surviving either! It is likely the majority of hardbacks sales would have been to libraries, and library books are often roughly handled and suffer damage – before being either sold off or thrown away at the end of their lending life.

But what about those copies of Baron’s Court that were offered to secondhand dealers over the years? Since the book had no buzz about it until recently, few dealers would have wanted to buy copies even if they had recognised the title or author (and very few would have done so); and if they did acquire copies in job lots of books, they may have simply thrown them away or used them for fuel. Owners of copies of Baron’s Court who were unable to sell them to dealers may have treated this once hard-to-sell tome in an equally caviler fashion. Precisely because until recently there has been little to no market for Baron’s Court as a novel, the overwhelming majority of copies will have been destroyed.

Now there is some buzz about Terry Taylor and Baron’s Court, the remaining copies of the book have a greater potential value than many other out-of-print titles precisely because its earlier lack of popularity makes it rare. Baron’s Court is also, without a shadow of a doubt, not only a cracking good read but of considerable historical significance. So fingers-crossed that some clued-up publisher puts it back in print, and rather than having to shell out hundreds of pounds for a used copy, you can buy it new for roughly the same price as any other mass market tome. And if there are any interested publishers out there, I’d be happy to put them in touch with the author who still controls the rights….

Terry Taylor’s story is one with a relatively happy ending for those who like to believe fairy tales about ‘literary immortality’, but don’t let it blind you to the fact that the vast bulk of books published every year are very quickly forgotten!

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