Posts Tagged ‘New York’
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!
Tags: Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Brian James All Stars, Burn Baby Burn, egotism, Electric Ballroom, Godfrey Ho, Isle of Wight, Jennifer Lopez, Joy Division, Julia Callan-Thompson, London, Mel Williams, New York, Pamela Anderson, Stewart Home, The Police
Posted in exhibitionism, humour | 20 Comments »
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
This is an interview i did with the arts editor of Spanish newspaper Público a month or two ago. I figured I’d let enough time pass to run it here for English readers since it was translated for publication in Spain….
Rocamora: The writer and journalist Kiko Amat says in the introduction to Memphis Underground’s Spanish edition that it is a “book of ideas” – a philosophical novel. Is it a political book? In what sense?
Home: Everything is political. The conventional bourgeois novel is conservative and is all about reproducing the ideas and subjectivities of the dominant class – that is why it is so concerned with what is euphemistically called ‘character’. And while bourgeois novels don’t reflect the world we live in, they exhibit an obsession with realism, naturalism and nineteenth-century ideas about narrative because these are the distortions and blinkers through which the ruling class wishes us to misperceive the world. Just breaking with such nonsense is political – but the way issues such as housing in London are addressed in the book is even more explicitly political.
Rocamora: The story is fragmented. In this sense, Amat invites readers to read your books as “a serial of radical and fascinating articles about all kind of concepts, cults and ideas” that interests you. Which ideas or concepts did you want to write about?
Home: Among other things I wanted to demonstrate that literature was dead – I didn’t so much want to write about this as show it! The opening of the book is a parody of the kind of mediocre writing that is currently popular in the UK, then I slam into a description of a map that is obviously inspired by the French nouveau roman. The juxtaposition was intended to be humorous but at the same time I think it illustrates very well that what passes as contemporary literature today was old-fashioned and out-dated fifty and more years ago. But I feel showing these things is more interesting and powerful than simply providing an explicit written denunciation of them.
Rocamora: And what effects do you want to evoke in reader’s mind with this kind of fragmented narration?
Home: I’m crediting the reader with intelligence and imagination, as well as giving them more freedom than they’d find in the dead literature of the ruling class. The reader can fill in gaps and the juxtapositions can be funny, beautiful or startling. Readers can take them any which way they want. While I’m not interested in realism, the fragmented style I use is in fact closer to what we experience in daily life than conventional literature. Our minds flip from one thought to another, we flick through channels on TV and move from stories about the massacres in Homs to documentaries on the sex life of rare sea species, and from that to gymnastic and cycling competitions, and on to shopping channels and chat shows. Such flipping from one thing to another can be done like a sleepwalker, or it can be done critically.
Rocamora: Aren’t you interested in making literature in a traditional way? What ‘tricks’ or ‘vices’ don’t you like in the literary tradition?
Home: This question reveals a lot about how backward literature has become. I think it unlikely you’d ask an artist why they didn’t want to paint like Goya or Velázquez. Certainly when I talk about the art work I do in galleries I’m never asked questions like this. People understand that visual art has moved on over the past few centuries. Why would I want to write like nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? Aside from the fact that I find such writing both boring and reactionary, those who still produce superannuated prose of this type are expected to behave as if they are dull and square (which since they mostly are obviously isn’t a problem for the sad sacks still writing nineteenth-century literature today). The public image of the serious writer requires that they don’t do the sort of things I like to do – such as standing on my head and reciting passages from my books when I appear in public. By way of contrast I like Goya and Velázquez but there is no point in painting like them now – they did their own period very well and we have to (un)make art for our own.
Rocamora: Another remarkable features in Memphis Underground are these long descriptions about streets and houses, in which you write as a map or (sorry for my insolence) a GPS, as well as detailed description of daily acts, like shaving or cooking scrambled eggs. What roles do this features play in your writing?
Home: I explained the map before as an invocation of the nouveau roman – when I was teenage I read through lots of modernist literature by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. Such descriptions serve to break up the text, change it’s texture and challenge traditional notions of what it is entertaining and worth reading. It reflects the interest in the everyday that you can find in discourses as diverse as fine art and sociology. And also I find it side-splittingly funny!
Rocamora: And what role does sex play in your writing? Why are sex and pornography so present in Memphis Underground?
Home: Sex and pornography are very popular. On the internet, in films, in books, in magazines, at home and even on the street. Indeed, many of the Spanish women I’ve got to know intimately are very fond of fucking in the street – so I think it’s useful to have a lot of sex in my first novel published in Spanish, coz the Spanish women who’ll read it will know I’m not uptight and it will alert them to the fact that if they get it together with me then they’ll have a really good time! I also like to use repetition to structure my writing and sex is very repetitive – and I can dig that!
Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground in 2004, and in its pages we can find social references, about the British youth, pop culture, business and some 21th century’s ways of life. Do you think Memphis Underground can operate as a social reflection of your country at the present time? Are you trying to reflect your society?
Home: I think you end up reflecting the time you live in whether you want to or not. People writing traditional literature reflect the fact that too many people are living in the past albeit without necessarily knowing this…. I want to consciously reflect the times I live in and right now – I want to show up what’s wrong with this world and the direction we need to move in to make positive change. One thing we need to do is put an end to nation states. I find the very existence of England and the United Kingdom utterly ridiculous and am keen to do away with all nation states in the very near future.
Rocamora: From nothern soul to urban tribes, in what ways are you interested in pop culture?
Home: I think it’s important to understand pop culture historically – so my interest goes back to things like true crime writing of 400 and more years ago, people like the sixteenth-century English writer Robert Greene. When you look at pop culture and so called ‘high’ culture then you can see that they interpenetrate and mediate each other – one would not exist without the other. So while I prefer popular culture to high culture I want to abolish them both and create a new communist culture without hierarchies.
Rocamora: Why do we still distinguish between high culture and pop culture?
Home: Because we live in an alienated capitalist society that creates false divisions…. proletarian revolution will necessarily be an overflowing of all such canalisation.
Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground with first person voice. How biographical is it? In general, how much of real experience is there in your literature?
Home: My sex life is very toned down in my books, but in general I’m not just drawing on my own experiences but on everything I’ve seen or heard, it’s based on the experiences of people I know as much as my own. Truth is a slippery construct but in fiction we can approach truth more closely than through documentary writing. Memphis Underground is, of course, completely biographical because it is an accurate record of the keys I hit on my computer as I was writing it. This is a new type of autobiography, one stripped of all romantic and personal content.
Rocamora: Why do you interviewed yourself as a part Memphis Underground?
Home: I’ve long promoted myself as ‘an ego-maniac on a world historical scale’ and any ego-maniac worthy of the name would want to interview themselves way more than anyone else. I thought it would be funny to do this too. Although actually the interview is a mash up – a series of questions I put to someone I interviewed for a magazine cut against the answers I gave to an interview for a completely different publication.
Rocamora: Do you believe in some kind of global conspiracy or maybe it’s only a trick, a game, as narrator? I think, in this sense, in this kind of writing and that of authors like Pynchon (who uses magical elements in his stories) the reader is being invited to “play” with the veracity of the story.
Home: I don’t think there is any kind of global conspiracy but the idea that there is can be used in fiction to point up the absurdity of this idea. People who get seriously involved in conspiracy theory and who believe they can uncover ‘the truth’ end up crazy (if they weren’t already mad when they set out on this path). When I write fiction about conspiracy theory I want to show it is useless. There is no need to uncover hidden truths about who controls the world – our oppression under capitalist social relations isn’t hidden, and conspiracy theories are a distraction from the ways in which we can remake society.
Rocamora: Which authors do you like?
Home: There are many but Lynne Tillman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney and Darius James, would be a few contemporary names among those that write fiction in English.
Rocamora: “Nostalgia is the future”, says the main character near the beginning of the book. Do you think cultural industries are exploiting consumers’ nostalgia to survive in 21th century?
Home: Nostalgia is not a good thing because it is conservative – there is no golden age in the past, we have a world to win. The main character is fictional, he is therefore able to express opinions with which I’d disagree. That’s one of the things I like about fiction, it allows you to explore a broad range of subject positions.
Rocamora: Sorry if it is a personal question: how is a day in your life, from when you wake up until you go to bed?
Home: Every day is different. Some days I get up and go to the gym, others I start writing or working on gallery stuff after eating breakfast. My meal times vary every day too. Tonight I was at the pub with three friends who work for different London publishers, the night before I went to a poetry reading, the night before that I stayed in. That said, most days I spend an hour or two walking the streets so that I can meet some hot Spanish girls. It isn’t difficult as there are a lot of Spanish girls in London. One of the more curious Spanish women I met recently works professionally as a porn actress under the name Snake Girl. She has a snake tattoo on her body and is what as known as a fetish model and actress. I was just standing outside a pub in Soho when I got introduced to her. However, while there are lots of hot Spanish girls in London, there are even more in Spain, which is why I always enjoy visiting cities like Barcelona. My days are varied and I have to travel quite a lot – for example I went to New York three times over the last four months, and many other places too. And it’s as easy to meet hot Spanish girls in New York as it is in London! But when I’m not meeting hot Spanish girls I’m mostly eating, writing, drinking or working out in the gym.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Barcelona, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney, Charles Dickens, class and culture, Claude Simon, Darius James, ego-mania, Goya, Jane Austen, Jesús Rocamora, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kiko Amat, London, Lynne Tillman, Memphis Underground, modernism, Nathalie Sarraute, naturalism, New York, northern soul, Nostalgia, nouveau roman, pop culture, pornography, realism, Robert Greene, sex, Snake Girl, Soho, Stewart Home, Thomas Pynchon, Velázquez, youth culture
Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.
1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there’s a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist’ drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.
2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin’s summer 1973 death). Although Quinn’s first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton’s Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.
3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it’s oceanic), but having given you three of these I’ll move on to lesser forms of suicide.
4. Donny Hathaway – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway’s case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism’s most famous suicide. He didn’t really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).
6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don’t seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who’d thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he’d scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.
7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: “and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…”). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I’d thought Brood’s leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I’ d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.
8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I’m aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. “I know you!” I said before pausing dramatically. “You was in Rat Poison!” Borland’s jaw dropped, he’d lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: “I’m Adrian Borland. I’ve gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound.” “Never heard of ‘em mate!” I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn’t surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!
9. Wendy O. Williams – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She’d started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.
10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma’s aphorism: “Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful.” Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adrian Borland, Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, André Breton, Ann Quin, Arthur Cravan, B. S. Johnson, Bas Jan Ader, Berg, Brighton, Dada, Darby Crash, death, Destroy All Monsters, Donny Hathaway, English Channel, Essex House Hotel, Finsbury Park, Finsbury Park Station, Gonks Go Beat, Graham Bond, Guy Debord, hells angels, Herman Brood, Herman Brood's Wild Romance, heroin, Jack Johnson, Jacques Vaché, Jesse Jackson, John Miller, Julien Torma, Kurt Cobain, LA, Laurence James, letterism, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, Mexico, Mike Kelly, NEL, New English Library, New Malden, New Malden Town Hall, New York, North Atlantic, opium, Pacific Ocean, Palace Pier, Poetics, Rat Poison, Ray Johnson, Roberta Flack, Rock and Roll Junkie, situationism, suicide, surrealism, The Germs, The Outsiders, The Plasmatics, The Sound, Tony Oursler, Wendy O'Williams
Posted in art criticism, drugs, exhibitionism, music | 27 Comments »
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
Shame is a film about a really boring suit in New York who has a troubled relationship with his sister (Carey Mulligan). The suit (Michael Fassbender) not only has a really tiresome office job, his leisure time is equally tedious – it is mostly spent looking for nookie (both with and without his vapid boss). The suit often buys sex and it is precisely because he thinks that human relationships can be commoditised that his love life is as dull as ditch water.
Imagine the most lacklustre out-take from a story by a forgotten eighties literary brat-pack also ran and then make whatever you’ve dreamt up about a hundred times worse, and you’ll just about have a handle on Shame. The film is set in the present but its addled reinvention of New York owes more to the way the city was depicted by the likes of Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz about 25 years ago. And by drawing on outdated clichés, McQueen manages to make Manhattan look way less exciting than Cleethorpes.
The sex scenes are ultra-tame softcore with no come shots, no erect pork swords, and a focus on brief glimpses of female tits and ass. Shame is squarely aimed at middle-brow audiences from middle England and middle America who are easily shocked and incredibly prudish. There are lots of shots of faces and heads (and I mean the type of head primped by a regular hairdresser – not anything sexual) with out-of-focus backgrounds to make the movie look mildly arty. Typical of this over-used trope is a scene where we see the backs of the heads of the brother and sister with an out-of-focus TV playing cartoons to provide visual ‘interest’. Overall the cinematography sucks as badly as a rubber slave with a dirty butt plug jammed down their throat. The soundtrack is really crass as well – with way too much Bach.
Shame is a movie that will appeal to repressed and aesthetically-challenged saddos who consider TV programmes like Strictly Come Dancing sexually charged. If you don’t fit this category then avoid Shame like the plague. I thought McQueen’s first film Hunger was unadulterated middle-brow crap, but Shame manages to be even worse! There’s more excitement to be had from watching flies swarm around a dog turd for ninety minutes than in McQueen’s cinematic slumber parties. But if you like Merchant Ivory Productions, you’ll probably love Steve McQeeen. Me? I prefer watching paint dry!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bach, butt plug, Carey Mulligan, Cleethorpes, come shot, Hunger, Jay McInerney, literary brat-pack, Manhattan, Michael Fassbender, middle America, middle England, New York, pork sword, rubber slave, sex addiction, shame, Steve McQueen, Strictly Come Dancing, Tama Janowitz, tits and ass
Posted in film | 22 Comments »
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web.
On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. Among other things I check out the 5.99 DVD Funhouse on Broadway. Actually while a lot of their films are $5.99, they also have loads of $2.99 bargains (or 4 for $10). There wasn’t much in the horror department that interested me, but as always the DVD Funhouse had plenty of martial arts films to groove a discerning trash fan fanatic. I picked up a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga on the notorious Videoasia label (which specialises in public domain pan and scan reissues mastered from dodgy VHS tapes). I’d wanted a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga for a long time but wasn’t prepared to part with the tenner in sterling it would have cost me to buy the Videoasia edition online – I managed to miss picking up a copy of the UK Vengeance Video release of this title because it sold out before dropping to a price I’m willing to pay for DVD (£3 and under – and most of the Vengeance Videos I have were picked up for a quid from London retail outlets that were closing down as the credit crunch kicked in).
I’d arranged to meet up with Tom McGlynn and Bill Doherty at White Columns at lunchtime. I got to WC a little early so I could check in with Matthew Higgs, Amie Scally and Carolyn Lockhart. I’d also wanted to see the 6th White Columns annual show. The exhibition Looking Back was curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss. The idea behind the annual is for those making the selection to give a flavour of the art that was exhibited in New York over the past year. Sherrie Levine is the only artist included in Looking Back whose work I actually saw in NYC over the past 12 months, so overall the show was a fantastic catch up for me. It’s also great to see Levine’s sculpture just sitting on the floor, which gives it a really different vibe to the carefully considered installation of her retrospective at the Whitney last year…
Tom, Bill and I go to Snice for coffee, then take the subway to Long Island City in Queens. Our first port of call is PS1. We’ve just missed the big 9/11 show but there are still curiosities – in particular My Best Thing (2011) by Francis Stark (an animation about cybersex) and Rania Stephan’s tribute to Egytpian actress and suicide Soad Hosni. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) is a scratch video featuring themed selections of scenes from 60 of this actress’s movies. While I’m at PS1 Tom introduces me to Robert Nickas. The 2010 annual at White Columns was curated by Nickas, and he’s just done an occasional publication with White Columns about disappeared artists. Nickas tells me that thanks to my Art Strike, I came up in discussion with his students when they were working on this project.
From PS1 we move on to Dorksy Project Space for a really strange show of artists who have both sculptural and video practices… Video<>Object was not to my taste but in case you’re interested it featured Nancy Davidson, Yasue Maetake, Halsey Rodman, Jeanne Silverthorne and Moira Williams – and was curated by Laurence Hegarty. After an overload of art, we decided coffee was needed, so we headed to some place Tom and Bill knew and this turned out to be a funky little bistro. Fortified with our drug of choice, we moved on to the Yace Gallery for the opening of Reenacting Sense – a group show and only the second ever exhibition at a space that is so new it isn’t listed in the Long Island City Cultural Alliance guide. We’re at the opening because Tom and Bill know Pinkney Herbert who is showing alongside Cecile Chong, Kyung Jeon, Dominic Mangila and Pierre Obando. The show isn’t so much walking a tightrope between eclecticism and incoherence as jumping headlong into the void. It might be amusing – albeit challenging – to create a theoretical discourse that is capable of drawing the work together. I think the curator is called Juri Kim Pang, and she didn’t appear to have any kind of argument to explain the selections she’d made…
Friday morning found me once again wandering around downtown alone – doing things like checking out the record stores on Bleeker Street. There was nothing worth buying in the bargain bins. At lunchtime I met up with Tom McGlynn and Kenny Goldsmith at White Columns. After saying high to Jeff Eaton, who’d been off work when I’d popped in the day before, we moved on to Snice for coffee. Over our brews we talked about sound poetry and pop music. Kenny walked with us to meet Lynne Tillman outside SVA on 21st Street, but headed off before Lynne appeared. With Lynne, Tom and I went to a nearby Italian restaurant – the food was great and the conversation even better. Tom was surprised by the opinions Lynne and I expressed about one well known American writer in particular – but unlike me, Lynne never voices her dislikes publicly, so I won’t name the guilty party here! After we ate, Lynne and Tom headed south, while I wandered north as I had a hotel room for one night.
I decided to walk to 92nd and Madison Avenue, mainly because I can’t recall ever going through Central Park in the dark and I wanted to see if it feels anything like the way it is depicted in the 1974 movie Death Wish. If you were able to ignore the joggers and the dog walkers – which is difficult – then just maybe the landscape is capable of evoking that long gone 1970s era of decline in NYC! I don’t spot anyone who looked the part of a potential mugger or murder victim in a Michael Winner movie. That said, I’ve loved Charles Bronson movies since I was a kid, so I overshoot my destination and go all the way to the north end of the park at 110th Street, then double back along Fifth Avenue and down 93rd Street (all this despite the fact I much prefer Bronson in movies like The Street Fighter AKA Hard Times to Death Wish). Earlier on I’d found it impossible to reconcile some of what were once New York’s sleazier areas – as depicted in films such as Abel Ferrara’a Driller Killer (1979) and Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) – with how they are today. On the subway over the previous couple of days I’d almost had flashes of the way the city appeared in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982) – but in the end I had to conclude that NYC as I’d most liked it on thirty to forty year old celluloid had disappeared (assuming that is, this hadn’t always been a fiction).
Hotel Wales turned out to be a conversion. I tried opening what I thought was a cupboard and it turned out to be an unlocked connecting door to the next suite, and in doing so I seriously freaked out the married couple occupying the room. Once I’d settled in I sat on the bed and read most of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus. After taking a shower I went to bed. In the morning I finished reading Video Green and checked out around 9.30am. I had planned to use the gym (but the hotel wanted to charge me $15 for that) and work online (but it was $12.95 for internet access), so I didn’t bother with either (the hotel was paid for by the Guggenheim, I had to cover the extras). It was snowing when I left the hotel and I enjoyed the way the city and my walking were transformed by the weather. I ambled down to 13th Street amazed by how little traffic was on the roads. I made use of the customer wi fi in Snice while eating soup. I was waiting for White Columns to open so that I could check in there for a final time this trip. The gallery is closed on Sunday. Neither Matthew nor Amie were around but I caught Jeff Eaton. Then it was the PATH from 14th and 6th to Hoboken. Tom wasn’t in when I arrived at his apartment, but he came up the stairs two minutes behind me. We headed out almost immediately to catch up with Bill Doherty in a nearby coffee shop.
I headed to the Guggenheim alone – Tom was coming later. I took the PATH to 33rd Street and walked the rest of the way to 89th. The Last Word event was mobbed. The queue went around the block and all the way back and along Madison Avenue. Even as a participant it took a while to get in, so despite turning up at six I missed the beginning. I’d have needed to get there early to catch it from the start. The Maurizio Cattelan show was pure spectacle and it was packed – making it even harder to get into the museum. Everything was hanging from the ceiling on ropes of many and varied lengths, and there were people milling on every level of the Guggenheim spiral. Like a lot of successful contemporary artists, Cattelan’s work is obviously difficult and expensive to fabricate, although the actual imagery is extremely populist and accessible. Cattelan had announced he was going to stop making art, which was why I was speaking at an evening of talks dedicated to endings and death – it was designed to accompany his farewell retrospective.
The set up for The Last Word is great: 7 hours with a wide range of speakers talking for just 10 minutes each. There’s a green room with fabulous food and everything is perfectly set up in the theatre. I natter to various people as I grab grub and drinks – including, of course, organisers Nancy Spector and Simon Critchley. It’s particularly nice to connect with M C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel from Baltimore, who know all about me through our mutual friend John Berndt. My talk about The Art Strike gets plenty of laughs, so I’m happy with that too. After I’ve spoken, Richard Kostelanetz grabs hold of me. We’ve been trying to meet for years but somehow it’s never happened, so we finally hooked up in 2012!
After I’ve chatted with Richard, Tom McGlynn grabbed hold of me. He’d turned up around eight and had been enjoying the event, but we decided to leave about 11.30PM. There are only so many talks you can take in during the course of a night! The next morning we hang out before I take the PATH to 14th Street. I buy a pair of Levi 501s from Dave’s on The Avenue of the Americas (just a couple of blocks up from the PATH stop). I still had some dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I got a copy of The Flying Guillotine (the pre-Wang Yu 1975 Shaw Brothers epic that inspired the superior spin offs) in Entertainment Outlet on 14th Street. Then I moved a few shops shops down the road and spent the rest of my money in 14 Street DVD Center, where I picked up a copy of Golden Needles (1974) starring Jim Kelly (I didn’t even know that film was on DVD!). I used my Metrocard to take the subway to JFK (actually it’s ten cents short of the fare – but I get through okay).
Virgin Atlantic tell me my flight is cancelled but I’m in time for an earlier plane if I’m prepared to pay for an upgrade from economy to premium economy. I tell them to stuff that and say insist I should get on the earlier flight without paying extra for it. They say tough basically because there are no economy seats left on the earlier departure. Now that’s what I call corporate generosity (not), since it would have actually cost them nothing to put me in premium economy and they cancelled my later flight… So I’m left to hang around the airport until it is time to board an even later departure for London… While I’m kicking my heels at JFK, I notice one of the dollar bills I was given in change at the 14 Street DVD Center is stamped with the slogan: “Track this bill at wwww.WheresGeorge.com”… This is a website that records the movements of currency but it relies on those who end up with the notes the project has marked logging in there. I haven’t registered my dollar bill. Does anyone know anything about the site and whether there are any good reasons for either registering or not registering with it?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 110th Street, 13th Street, 14 Street DVD Center, 14th Street, 21st Street, 33rd Street, 5.99 DVD Funhouse, 6th Avenue, 8th Avenue, 92nd Street, 93rd Street, 9th Street, A Train, Abel Ferrara, air train, Amie Scally, Art Strike, Avenue of the Americas, Baltimore, Basket Case, Bill Doherty, Bleeker Street, Carolyn Lockhart, Cecile Chong, Central Park, Charles Bronson, Chris Kraus, Dave's, Death Wish, Dominic Mangila, Dorksy Project Space, Drew Daniel, Driller Killer, Entertainment Outlet, Fifth Avenue, Francis Stark, Frank Henenlotter, Golden Needles, Guggenheim, Guggenheim Museum, Halsey Rodman, Hard Times, Hoboken, Hotel Wales, Howards Beach, Jeanne Silverthorne, Jeff Eaton, JFK, Jim Kelly, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Berndt, John F. Kennedy Airport, Juri Kim Pang, Ken Okiishi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenny Goldsmith, King Fu Vs Yoga, Kyung Jeon, Laurence Hegarty, Levi 501s, Long Island City, Long Island City Cultural Alliance, Looking Back, Lucio Fulci, Lynne Tillman, M C. Schmidt, Madison Avenue, Matthew Higgs, Maurizio Cattelan, Metrocard, Michael Winner, Moira Williams, My Best Thing, Nancy Davidson, Nancy Spector, New Jersey, New York, New York Ripper, Nick Mauss, NYC, PATH train, Pierre Obando, Pinkney Herbert, PS1, Queens, Rania Stephan, Reenacting Sense, Richard Kostelanetz., Robert Nickas, Sherrie Levine, Simon Critchley, Snice, Soad Hosni, SVA, The Flying Guillotine, The Last Word, The Street Fighter, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni, Tom McGlynn, Vengeance Video, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Videoasia, VideoObject, Virgin Atlantic, Wang Yu, Washington Street, WheresGeorge.com, White Columns, White Columns Annual, Whitney, Yace Gallery, Yasue Maetake
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, dreams, exhibitions | 24 Comments »
Monday, December 5th, 2011
1. It was actually Jackie Kennedy who assassinated JFK in Dallas. He was shot from inside the car! Jackie was fed up with being paraded before the public as a trophy wife, and also with her husband indulging his sexual peccadilloes with hundreds of different prostitutes.
2. Julius Caesar faked his own death and having discovered the secret of immortality is actually the secret power behind the sub-prime mortgage speculation that led to the current financial collapse.
3. Using his vast financial resources Aristotle Onassis paid Nikola Tesla to construct a time machine, and then travelled back to the eighteenth-century. Once in the past Onassis created a fake identity as Adam Weishaupt – a professor of law at The University of Ingolsttadt – and then on 1 May 1776 founded the Bavarian Illuminati.
4. Albert Einstein plagiarised all his scientific theories from secret papers that originated with the The Knights Templar and that were passed down through the ages with the avowed intention of undermining twentieth-century civilisation.
5. After her death Princess Diana’s body was ritually carried around the sites of 69 stone circles in north-east Scotland. This is the basis of the book 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess.
6. Howard Hughes wasn’t actually a recluse. Hughes switched identities with actress Jane Russell (who wanted to drop out of the public eye), so that he could indulge his penchant for cross-dressing in public without anybody realising he was a man.
7. The 9/11 attack was carried out by several Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan whose fascist world view led them to loath the city of New York and the US government in Washington.
8. Lady Gaga is the public face of a huge international plot by fashionistas to take control of the world.
9. Richard Nixon was innocent of any wrong doing over Watergate.
10. The real identity of the psychotic serial killer Jack The Ripper is beat novelist William Burroughs. This forms the basis of the book Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton.
NB. There are no great conspiracy theories. You’d have to be off your trolley to believe the Templars organised the French revolution or that the Illuminati was ever in a position to seize world power (since it was a tiny sect that was completely suppressed in the eighteenth-century). Because for many years I have been plagued by conspiracy nuts who lack the wit to work out that material like the stuff in this post is satiric, it is unfortunately necessary to point that out here. There are, of course, political conspiracies of which Watergate is an example – but vast consciously organised conspiracies on a global scale simply aren’t practical. Or to put it another way, if you think the World Trade Centre in New York was destroyed by the US government using controlled demolition from within the buildings, then you’re a nutjob who’d believe almost anything!
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, 9/11, Adam Weishaupt, Albert Einstein, Aristotle Onassis, conspiracy theory, cross-dressing, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Howard Hughes, Illuminati, Ingolsttadt, Jack The Ripper, Jackie Kennedy, Jane Russell, John F. Kennedy, Julius Caesar, Knights Templar, Ku Klux Klan, Lady GaGa, New York, Nikola Tesla, Princess Diana, Richard Nixon, stone circles, sub-prime mortgage, Templars, Washington, William Burroughs
Posted in humour, scam | 30 Comments »
Monday, November 14th, 2011
I arrived at the Heathrow Virgin Atlantic bag drop late. I was told I’d missed my plane and to go to desk 13 to discuss whether I could be transferred to another flight. The next person I talked to said that since my bag to be checked was well below 10kg, I could take it as hand luggage on my original flight, but that I’d have to run to the gate. I got through security in good time and made it to the plane by sprinting all the way. I was pleased to be the last passenger on-board and having avoided hanging around – all that queuing is such a drag!
I checked the in-flight entertainment and since all the film and music selections were complete and utter wank, decided to read Barry Graham’s new book The Wrong Thing instead. This turned out to be a smart move since I really dug Graham’s noir-style prose which was finely crafted and engrossing. A Mexican-American boy called The Kid who isn’t loved by his family gets into drug dealing, finds love and in loosing it winds up dead. All the trademark Graham interests are present too – from boxing to the unnecessary cruelty of capital punishment. On one level the book is a narrative essay illustrating how the law serves the rich and screws the poor.
Returning to my flight, I was travelling economy and since I’d last taken a transatlantic jaunt on Virgin they seemed to have introduced three classes of travel. I guess you get what you pay for and in premium economy they had more and larger toilets – the rich don’t just shit like you and me, they do it on a grander scale! The attendants got very pissed off with economy passengers who went into the premium economy bogs – they’d have probably had a heart attack if we’d tried to use the first class karzai! It wasn’t exactly service with a smile – when tea and coffee were being offered around and I asked for water, I was told I could only have a hot beverage. So I had to say I wanted a black coffee but to hold the coffee, so I ended up with a cup of hot water. Why I couldn’t just have a glass of cold water beats me… Likewise all the pep talk to passengers about safety is obviously absolutely nuts when Virgin make their female flight attendants wear high-heels. I saw one stewardess fall on her arse and I’m sure she wouldn’t have tumbled if she’d been wearing flat shoes.
Remembering I wanted to go for a heightened state of awareness on this trip, I decided to develop my paranoia and assume the guy in the seat next to me was an undercover cop. We didn’t say much to each other, although that may have been because he spent much of the flight asleep. I like to stay awake, not just because it seems safer when you’re simulating paranoia but also because it’s a way of easing into a new time zone. I finished Barry Graham’s book and had to move onto another less interesting one. I was pleased when we landed at JFK and I got to immigration. At first the immigration officer gave me a bit of a grilling, but when he asked what my job was and I told him novelist, he became very friendly. I always say novelist at immigration because it is both true and generally seen as less contentious than if you say you’re a writer (you might be a subversive journalist) or an artist (in which case you’ll probably be suspected of making porn).
I didn’t have to wait long for the express bus to Manhattan. I got off at 42nd Street and crossed the road to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was a short hop to Hoboken. On the way I checked the voice mail messages that had come in on my US cell phone while I was back in London for twelve days. Two of them were a regular series of bleeps – probably just random attempts to send spam faxes, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be paranoid about them. When I arrived in Hoboken I saw immediately the place had undergone a massive change. The town looked nothing like it had when I’d last stayed there back in the eighties. It was Friday night and people were partying on the street as if having a good time was about to go out of fashion. Instead of local stores and down market chains like Domino’s Pizza, it now boasted branches of Footlocker and American Apparel, as well as a lot of trendy bars.
Tom McGlynn’s apartment building was now an anachronism, it looked as run down as when I’d first stayed there more than twenty years before. Going through the hallway and up the stairs there were still blaring TVs and shouted conversations in both Spanish and English. Tom has a rent controlled flat and he’d been doing it up, so it looked much smarter than when I was last there. We chatted for a couple of hours – mostly about Occupy Wall Street – and then crashed out. Tom’s take on OWS was really interesting because he was designing shelters for protesters to sleep in, so he was involved in some very practical discussions about how to keep the movement growing. But he was also keeping a close eye on the various elements involved in political discussions around the occupation.
Saturday morning was just a question of acclimatising to the hood. Last time I’d been in Tom’s flat there was a view of the Hudson River from one end, but new and expensive apartment buildings had completely hidden the water. After lunch it was time to head to Manhattan. We took the PATH rather than the bus. We got off at 9th Street and went to St Marks Books, which is still the best place to pick up texts in New York. From there we moved on to Bullet Space, an artists collective on the Lower East Side. I sat in on Tom’s meeting with Alex Rojas and Andy Castrucci about a group show they were including him in entitled Mob. When we exited Bullet Space we ran into Carlo McCormack on the street outside the gallery.
I hadn’t seen McCormack since 1989 and we chatted about our mutual friend Jon Savage, as well as the Billy Childish opening that I’d missed since it had taken place a couple of hours before I arrived at JFK. Tom and I headed up to White Columns so that I could check in with the gallery and see how my show there had been going. When we arrived we were told we’d missed Billy Childish and Steve Lowe by minutes – they’d been in together to see my retrospective before heading on to the airport. From there we moved around the corner to Snice for coffee and burritos. After our refreshments, we made out way to Murray Guy on West 17th Street for the opening of Ann Lislegaard’s show TimeMachine. A cartoon creature projected onto mirrors stuttered segments of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells… It grooved us and I’m sure it would appeal to the kids too!
When Tom headed back to Hoboken, I made my way to White Columns for an Eileen Myles reading of prose, poetry and a long extract from an essay she’d contributed to the SF MOMA catalogue for The Air We Breathe: Artists & Poets Reflect On Marriage Equality. I’d been to see Myles read at Apexart two weeks earlier, but had to miss her performance because she was on last and the event ran late. White Columns had bought me a yoga mat for my performance there a couple of weeks earlier, and since it was still in one of the offices, I decided to take it away so that I could practice my headstand reading in comfort. I quickly discovered that in New York guys use yoga mats as ‘babe magnets’. On the subway four girls aged about twenty started to hit on me by initiating a conversation about yoga. Once I was safely back in Hoboken, Tom introduced me to two Canadian friends who’d come to visit him – Mary and Larry. I’d only been away from the US for twelve days but during that time the clocks had gone back an hour in the UK. Now I was in the east coast for the weekend when the clocks went back there…. It seemed like I was in a time slip.
Sunday morning was a chance to run through the stuff I was planning to do on Thursday for the Performa live art festival – including my headstand reading. After lunch I headed to Brooklyn… I took the PATH to 14th Street in Manhattan, changed onto the L train and then changed once again to the G train. I’d heard the G train was really infrequent but I caught one quickly and arrived early at Tim Beckett and Charlotte Jackson’s pad a couple of blocks from the Bedford Nostrand subway stop. You could see the area was being gentrified but it still had more of the old time vibe than anywhere else I’d been since I’d arrived in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.
Next to turn up at Tim and Charlotte’s was Ron Kolm. As more people arrived – including Carl Watson and Maggie Wrigley – it became an old school East Village writers meet with me as the overseas guest of honour. When Darius James walked in with Norman Douglas, it was great to see DJ for the first time in five or six years. When I complimented Charlotte on the music she was playing – a lot of Model 500 among other things – and asked her how she had picked a bunch of my favourite tunes, she told me that this was easy to do, since she’d been checking the links I posted on my Facebook page. That really helped raise my state of awareness by making me paranoid that every intelligence and police agency in the world knows I like sixties soul tunes and old school house!
Shortly after this John Farris arrived and he had real presence. I’ve not read his novel The Ass’s Tale but will try to make up for that omission in due course. I ended up sitting with Darius, Norman and John for a long time: and rather than trying to give a flavour of the conversation here, it’s easier just to direct you to an online interview of Norman’s with John. Following much chat, chow and drinking, everyone settled down to watch a rough cut of the documentary about voodoo that Darius was scripting and presenting. The movie went down a storm, with everyone impressed by the classy cinematography… and the way Darius explained some of the finer points he was wanting to get across as the footage rolled… After the screening most people split, and once again I had no problem getting a G train. I was back in Hoboken by 11.30pm.
Monday morning was another chance to hang in Hoboken and practice for my performance… At lunchtime I headed into Manhattan to meet with Darius, Tim, Tom and Mary in The Old Town on East 45th Street. Tom and Mary had gone into town with Larry ahead of me – but Larry then went off in search of famous baseball sites in Brooklyn. I was travelling alone and everyone else arrived late. I had a bet with myself that Tom and Mary would arrive before Tim and Darius, and when they did I took out the 100 bucks I had in my left pocket and placed the notes in my right pocket. The Old Town was a traditional bar with booths and ultra-retro toilets (or maybe they’d just never been refitted). We talked about writing and the stuff Darius was doing, so voodoo was on the agenda too. Tom and Mary left before me, so Tim and I walked Darius down to Grand Central Station well after dark, then went our own ways. I’d planned to go to to both Occupy Wall Street and MOMA that day, but ended up spending all of it in The Old Tavern before heading back to Hoboken. After eating everyone at Tom’s settled down to a Roger Corman produced piece of trash in the form of a DVD of Sharktopus… I was laughing so much at the movie that I forgot I was supposed to be paranoid, so that rather blew my attempts at heightened perception for the day!
Directed by Declan O’Brien, Sharktopus is one of those “so bad it’s good’ movies that came out last year. Corman has nice cameo as a mean spirited beach walker, and Eric Roberts looks like he was method acting being a drunk. We were speculating on the dinner conversation between the Roberts family when they meet up, with Eric’s more famous sister Julia talking about her latest A-list Hollywood productions, and Eric announcing he’s in Sharktopus. The monster isn’t in the least bit scary but there are plenty of laughs and girls in bikinis – including a group of ‘babes’ doing yoga sun salutations on the beach as the half-shark/half-octopus creature attacks….
Tuesday was another morning of hanging in the hood and working on my act. After lunch I went to Manhattan to meet Mark Bloch on the Lower East Side. On the way I dropped in on This Is What Democracy Looks Like – an Occupy Wall Street themed show in an NYU building on Washington Place. There were handmade signs and printed ephemera from OWS. When I hooked up with Mark we rapped about art and politics, in terms of the latter mainly OWS. After coffee and a snack we moved on to the Billy Childish show at Lehmann Maupin’s 201 Chystie Street space. Billy’s canvases have got bigger as he’s got more successful but otherwise his painting hasn’t changed much in 30 years. The clean white cube space and uncluttered hang also signalled that 30 years of hard graft have finally paid off to make him an ‘overnight success’. Upstairs there was a nice display of Billy’s records and publications… The layout was not dissimilar to my current White Columns show, which perhaps isn’t surprising because Matthew Higgs curated both exhibitions.
With Mark I moved on to the NYU Grey Gallery back in Washington Square to see Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life… There were lots of familiar works but the tight curatorial categorisation seemed to work against the original iconoclasm of the movement. The curator Jacquelyn Baas has a reputation as being the hippest young expert on Fluxus and related currents, so I guess a lot of people like her methods of interpretation, but I didn’t go for her division of works into categories such as ‘change’, ‘danger’, ‘death’, ‘god’, ‘love’, ‘nothingness’ and ‘sex’. To undermine the conceit each category had a question mark after it – so I guess that’s an admission it wasn’t going to work for everyone, and for me the theming just got in the way of the work. Downstairs there was a selection of time related New York art to contextualise the Fluxus material. Between rapping and seeing two shows, Mark and I had used up most of the day… and when my old Neoist/mail art pal went home, I wandered around downtown in the dark. I’d intended to go and see the Fluxus show at MOMA that day after not making it the day before, but I was fated to miss it…
After hanging in Hoboken on Wednesday morning, I took the PATH train to World Trade Center rather than along the 33rd Street branch. Going into the station amongst the construction on the Ground Zero site felt eerie, although I guess you’d get used to it if you did it all the time. For me it provided a stark reminder of the stupidity and futility of terrorism – and let’s not forget that terrorism is always vanguardist and thus always anti-working class, regardless of who is responsible for it. I headed on up to Broadway and while there took another look at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. It almost felt like I hadn’t left since I was last there nearly three weeks earlier. I had my luggage with me – including the yoga mat for my headstand reading – and a woman engaged me in a conversation about where I did yoga classes. Because I was getting hit on rather than participating in political debates, I split. After leaving OWS I checked into Hotel 91 on East Broadway, then rushed out to visit noted Ray Johnson expert Bill Wilson at his Chelsea home. Tom McGlynn had got there before me – after coffee and a long conversation with Wilson about Johnson and his playful aesthetic, the two of us headed north to call on Ben Morea. Among other things Tom and I talked to Ben about OWS. His take seemed to be that we weren’t yet in a revolutionary situation and so right now we shouldn’t act as if we are in one – the important thing was to push in that direction.
Tom and I moved on to the Sherrie Levine and David Smith opening at the Whitney. Smith’s sculpture made us think of Cy Twombly on acid. The Levine show was a great hang and a real time trip back to the eighties. I liked both exhibitions but the opening party left me cold – like so much museum hospitality these days, it seemed aimed at trustees and businessmen who like the illusion of moving in the art world but wouldn’t want to do it for real. The opening had attracted mostly suits and very few artists. A swift exit and a walk of a few blocks enabled us to hang with Nicholas Towasser of Dissident Books at Mid-Town Bagels. After drinks and a chat, Tom and I headed south again – me to East Broadway and Tom to Hoboken.
Thursday at noon I had to check in at Westport, the former strip club that was hosting my reading that night. I carried my yoga mat there without incident – I guess women don’t hit on men in the streets of New York that much in the morning. We ran through the technical requirements of the night and everything was sorted in an hour-and-a-half. The venue was still laid out as a strip joint and all the readings were taking place from a catwalk with multi-coloured spot lights. I tried to make a meet with Lee Wells but our timings were out, so I wandered around downtown before going back to Hotel 91 to shower and rehearse before my show…. I got a call from Lynne Tillman who said she’d had to take a friend for emergency admission to the hospital, so she wasn’t going to make the reading.
I left the hotel just after six and got to Westport on Clarkson Street before seven – having walked from one side of Manhattan to the other. With Performa curator Mark Beasley we had a hurried rehearsal of Lynne Tillman’s text More Sex, with Sadie Laska from the band Joe and Sadie’s Trip reading it. She sounded good and it looked funny with Mark holding up a laptop for her to read from. We didn’t have a printer so this was the only way the story could be accessed. Tom McGlynn and Ben Morea turned up early, so I chatted with them – and sorted out the reading order with my fellow performers Jarett Kobek and Ken Wark when they arrived.
At eight – and not a minute before – people were allowed into the venue. It quickly filled with hipsters and I shredded one of my novels, then stood on my head to give a recital from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – I always work from memory rather than with copies of my books. Jarret followed with a storming reading of a new piece and a section of his most recent novel Atta. He says it’s difficult to read from his Semina novel Hoe #999 (edited by me), so he didn’t do any of that – much as I’d have liked him to do so! Ken was up next and read from some of his expansive writings on the situationists, then ended with a great call and response piece about Occupy Wall Street. Sadie read Lynne’s story from her new collection Some Day This Will Be Funny – with Mark holding the laptop. She was even better in front of an audience than on her run through. I finished off the readings with more party trick pieces – a passage from 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess with my ventriloquist puppet Mister Dog, and several pages from Defiant Pose (with OWS in mind). Then Joe and Sadie’s Trip played raw and loud psychedelic music…
People seemed to have a good time, and a couple of women engaged me in conversations about yoga, since they’d seen me stand on my head – although I kick up with more force than a yogi would use…. The Performa crowd left for other places and by ten-thirty Westport was filling with a different breed of hipster – the type who were regulars at the bar. My plan had been to move on to Ear for drinks – but that was closed for renovations, so we ended up at Milady’s at 162 Prince Street. I’m told this is one of the very last regular bars left south of Houston, and that it gives you more beer for your dollar than plusher places. Tom McGlynn, Tim Beckett and Charlotte Jackson got there before me – they’d called me on my cell to say Ear was closed and had already decided we should go to Prince Street instead. I arrived with Jarett Kobek, Eve Blackwater, Ken Wark and Christen Clifford. Lee Wells and Katie Hofstadter Winton came later. There was much drinking and talking – and, of course, Occupy Wall Street was among the subjects covered….
I walked back to Hotel 91, buying falafel on the way. As I waited for the lift to my room a woman asked me where I’d been doing yoga – she was with a friend and both were about my age. I told the two women I’d been doing a reading standing on my head on the catwalk of a strip club, which was why I had the mat with me. I don’t think they believed me but they were obviously amused by what I was saying, and seemed disappointed that I got out of the lift before them without suggesting we go to my room or for a drink somewhere nearby…. I took the yoga mat back to White Columns the next morning and left it there. Matless I found myself left in peace by women looking to meet a new boyfriend.
On Friday I went for lunch with Lynne Tillman at Snice. Lynne’s sick friend had improved in the hospital overnight. Lynne herself was on top form, talking in an upbeat way about her writing and her recent visit to Japan. I was really glad to catch up with Lynne – who I’d first met at a post-opening party for Susan Hiller when I’d been in New York back in 1989. Having done my gig and met up with Lynne, I felt my current mission in New York was accomplished. We had so much ground to cover in our conversation that I didn’t even get around to talking to Lynne about Richard Nash – whose innovative approach to publishing seems to have done a lot to raise her profile. I’d invited Nash to my Performa reading but he told me he was out of town that night….
Next time I visit the Big Apple I’m gonna make sure I’m not carrying a yoga mat around with me. Being hit upon by around a dozen women who didn’t know me from Adam because of my yoga mat – it’s like a sign saying you’re a ‘sensitive’ man – rather ruined my attempts at raising my state of consciousness through self-induced paranoia…. I just didn’t feel lonely and alienated enough after being flirted with to get into the proper noir mood! Oh well, here’s to me actually achieving a heightened state of awareness next time I’m in the city!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 14th Street, 33rd Street, 42nd Street, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, 9th Street, Alex Rojas, American Apparel, Andy Castrucci, Ann Lislegaard, Apexart, Atta, Barry Graham, Bedford Nostrand, Ben Morea, Bill Wilson, Billy Childish, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Broadway, Brooklyn, Bullet Space, Carl Watson, Carlo McCormack, Charlotte Jackson, Chelsea, Chrystie Street, Clarkson Street, Cy Twombly, Darius James, David Smith, Declan O'Brien, Defiant Pose, Dissident Books, Domino's Pizza, East 45th Street, East Broadway, Eileen Myles, Eric Roberts, Facebook, Fluxus, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, Footlocker, G train, Grey Gallery, Ground Zero, H. G. Wells, Heathrow, Hoboken, Hoe #999, Hotel 91, Hudson River, Jacquelyn Baas, Jarett Kobek, JFK, Joe and Sadie's Trip, John Farris, Jon Savage, Julia Roberts, Ken Wark, L train, Lee Wells, Lehmann Maupin, Lower East Side, Lynne Tillman, Maggie Wrigley, Manhattan, Mark Beasley, Mark Bloch, Matthew Higgs, Mid-Town Bagels, Mister Dog, Mob, Model 500, MOMA, More Sex, Murray Guy, New Jersey, New York, Nicholas Towasser, Norman Douglas, NYU, Occupy Wall Street, PATH, Performa, Port Authority Bus Terminal, Ray Johnson, Richard Nash, Roger Corman, Ron Kolm, Sadie Laska, SF MOMA, Sharktopus, Sherrie Levine, Snice, Some Day This Will Be Funny, St Marks Books, Steve Lowe, Susan Hiller, The Air We Breathe: Artists & Poets Reflect On Marriage Equality., The Ass's Tale, The Old Town, The Time Machine, The Wrong Thing, Tim Beckett, TimeMachine, Tom McGlynn, Virgin Atlantic, Washington Place, Washington Square, West 17th Street, Westport, White Columns, Whitney, World Trade Center, yoga, yoga mat
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, performance | 24 Comments »
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!
Tags: After Walker Evans, Again A Time Machine, Art Strike, Art Strike Bed, Becoming (M)other, Broadway Boogie Woogie, bullet train, Chris Dorley-Brown, circle jerk, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Down & Out In Shorditch and Hoxton, Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art, fetishism, Hayward Gallery, Heroin Is The Opiate Of The People, Horatio Street, Icon Gallery, Inertia, Jean-Michel Basquiat, jerking off, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kazimir Malevich, Leonardo da Vinci, Manhattan, masturbation, Mona Lisa, morph, New York, nightmare, Piet Mondrian, Prostitution II, Samo Is Dead, Sherrie Levine, Stewart Home, Tadasu Takamine, The One & The Many, Walker Evans, wanking, White Columns, White On White
Posted in art criticism, humour | 25 Comments »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
I hadn’t been to New York in 16 years so my sojourn there last week proved a trip! Somehow it didn’t surprise me that I should find myself leaving from Gate 23 of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 4 on Monday 17 October. Even more predictably I wasn’t interested in any of the in-flight movies, so I didn’t watch them. The choice of on-board music was pretty lame too…. although they did have Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles ‘greatest hits’ albums, so I gave those a spin – and otherwise just left Aretha Franklin’s classic 1968 platter Aretha Now on repeat play. Arriving at Newark I took the air train to Penn Station in Manhattan. Gavin Everall – who’d booked my flight and hotel – said I could walk to the accommodation from the station. I enjoy proving a point, so I covered the seventy or so blocks to 103rd street on foot, and with my luggage slowing me it only took about ninety minutes.
The Marrakesh Hotel was cheaper than most other accommodation in Manhattan for a reason – in places the carpet was worn through and the bare brick work in my room had crumbled badly. When I opened the blind I had a delightful view of a brick wall about two feet from my window. The Moroccan themed decoration in the hotel was at best half-hearted, but then I guess the fact that the place was way cheaper than your average New York perch made up for that. Even the Guest Safety Tips I was handed with my key were old school: “Always use the deadbolt. Secure valuables. Report suspicious persons or acts. Never open door prior to verifying ID.” So if you want a taste of old New York then The Marrakesh may be the place for you – although unlike when I was staying in downtown Rio about seven years ago, I didn’t actually spot any armed muggers in the corridors. I arrived at the hotel around midnight, read for an hour, then went to sleep.
I woke about 7am and got myself together before strolling down to White Columns on Horatio Street. This was an amble of about ninety blocks but without luggage I was able to cover the distance a little faster than my seventy block power walk of the night before. When I arrived at White Columns, director Matthew Higgs introduced me to his crew and then took me out for coffee at Snice – where I could get a double espresso rather than the too weak for me American diner coffee. I then unpacked the boxes of material for the exhibition that had been sent from London, and aside from a Mexican lunch with Matthew, worked through until about 6pm on starting to arrange the show.
I decided to walk back to the hotel and detoured into a video shop on the way – I hadn’t looked closely at the TV set up in the hotel and wrongly thought that like the last hotel I’d been in (west country in England), there was a DVD player. The store I went into was chock-full of kung fu movies priced at less than ten bucks a pop – lots of old school classics such as The Shadow Boxer (AKA Spiritual Boxer II), Backalley Princes (with Angela Mao and Carter Wong), Return To The 36 Chambers (AKA Return of the Master Killer), The Kung Fu Lizard (with Lo Lieh), and Enter The Fat Dragon (with Sammo Hung). In the end I picked up Bruce Lee & I, a notorious piece of Brucesploitation with his mistress Betty Ting Pei playing herself in a particularly shameless piece of trash made shortly after Lee’s death. After that I went to an AT&T store to sort out a cell phone for while I was in the USA. I kept wandering north but not always in a straight line. I stopped for some chow and still made it back to the hotel before 9pm. Discovering there was no DVD player, I tried the TV channels but all I could get without paying for a movie on the hotel system was a New York educational/community station (running a History Detective programme about the evolution of Ronald MacDonald’s clown costume) and an old episode of Cheers. So I read until one and then caught another full six hours sleep.
When I exited the hotel on Wednesday morning it was pissing with rain. Still I decided to walk to the gallery, and as I did this I made calls to my friends on my mobile, which I’d set up before leaving the hotel. Strolling south down Amsterdam Avenue with everything looking wet and grey, and very aware that the streets were laid out in grids, I started fooling myself into thinking I was taking a psychogeographical trip around Glasgow. When I got to White Columns someone had put a huge plastic bucket beside the door, where I deposited my umbrella alongside many others. I worked away steadily at putting up my show, took lunch on my own but during shorter breaks I was cracking jokes with Matthew’s White Columns team – Amie Scally, Carolyn Lockhart and Jeff Eaton.
My old mate Tom McGlynn – a New York artist I’ve known since the mid-80s – turned up mid-afternoon and we went for a coffee at Snice. After that, Matthew and I continued to work on my show. Around 6pm Gavin Everall appeared with some more of my material from London. He left to check into the same hotel as me, and I got back on with organising my exhibition until Tom McGlynn came back to the gallery at eight. Leaving Matthew working on my show alone, I headed off to Brooklyn with Tom to catch Jarett Kobek giving a presentation of his new novel Atta at the Issue Project Room on 3rd Street. At the space we hooked up with Simon Critchley and Gavin Everall. Gavin did a Q&A with Jarett after the main presentation. Then it was on to some Brooklyn bar for drinks and a chin-wag with Tom, Gavin and Simon. The talk was good, the hardcore punk rock being played in the bar was lousy.
Thursday morning found me back at White Columns working on my show – once again I power walked the ninety blocks after a full six hours sleep. By Thursday gallery technician Ian Holman was hanging some of the material I’d arranged by placing it on the floor beneath where I wanted it on the wall; while Amie, Jeff and Matthew were also helping out with various aspects of my installation. When Gavin turned up I went for lunch with him at Snice, then it was back to work for me. Gavin went off and when he came back we headed up to the Chelsea Museum for a performance of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero – a recreation of a happening performed by Group Center several times between 1963 and 1965.
Black Zero featured some recorded sounds, including the voice of poet Calvin C. Hernton who couldn’t be there in person because he was dead. One of the improvised elements was Henry Grimes on double bass and Ben Morea on power tools adapted as musical instruments – and they were fabulous together! There were film projections all over the place and a very good modern dancer, who amid apocalyptic verse about racism and nuclear holocaust, eventually fell down into an erotic death pose: at this point Tambellini entered the stage area with a pen knife and popped a balloon onto which film was being projected, and that was the end of the performance. I was knocked out by the event, describing it in words really doesn’t do it justice. Afterwards I went for a drink with Tim Beckett, who I’d arranged to meet at the Black Zero event but he’d been delayed and missed it.
I didn’t need to go into White Columns early on the Friday as the show was coming together nicely, and Matthew wanted to get on with some final touches on his own. After breakfast in a diner with Gavin – where I got into a good humoured argument with a waitress over the relative merits of the Mets and the Yankees - I gave Ben Morea a call and we hauled our asses over to his tiny Manhattan apartment. We took a look through a selection of Ben’s recent paintings, he does them in Colorado where he lives most of the time – they’re Zen-like abstracts which he’s been doing since 1982, and very different from the darker pictures he made in the sixties prior to the founding of Black Mask. After we’d rapped a bit, we went out for coffee and further talk – with the subject matter ranging from Ben’s friendship with Valerie Solanas to the current activism going on around Occupy Wall Street. I’d spent a week with Ben in Europe during the summer, so we also did a bit of catching up.
Gavin and I left Ben to check out what was happening at the gallery. Overall I was very happy with how Matthew had finished the installation, but wanted to make one small change which he agreed to. Then it was around the corner to Snice for lunch with Ken Wark and a conversation covering everything from the recent travels of those present through to the political situation in New York and elsewhere. After checking in at White Columns and finding I wasn’t needed, Gavin and I headed for Occupy Wall Street. There was a good atmosphere and we picked up all the literature we could. Everyone was friendly and I had brief conversations with kids in their teens and twenties through to a middle aged rank-and-file member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). The groups involved were really diverse, but then I guess that’s the nature of a broad movement. It looked to me like the beefy union members who’d got involved had played a key role in putting the authorities off using force to break up the demonstration. While I was at Occupy Wall Street, I got a call from Lee Wells who’d shown pieces of mine in group exhibitions in the New York area in the past, so we walked around to his nearby office for coffee and a chat.
Heading back up to White Columns on Horatio Street we were early for my opening, so I had a drink with Gavin in The Art Bar opposite Snice. When we went to the private view it filled up quickly and when I tried to talk with various friends like Tom McGlynn, Lynne Tillman and Hari Kunzru, I was constantly pulled away to meet new people. We went back to The Art Bar for drinks after the opening. I was told David Byrne had been inspecting my work very closely, and a lot of critics had turned up including Hal Foster. I hadn’t clocked these people but then that isn’t surprising since the place was packed and I don’t know what they look like. Indeed the opening was so busy that I even failed to clock some of the people I knew from London – such as Mike Sperlinger, who I learnt later was doing his own event in NYC. It’s a shame I didn’t get to speak to everyone I know, but I guess that’s showbiz…. Anyway, after a generous helping of Talisker in The Art Bar, it was back to the hotel on the subway.
Saturday morning I just wandered around Manhattan, and as I walked I was calling up a few friends for some catch up, including Darius James who hadn’t been able to make it into town while I was there. I was basically heading south, so that by 2pm I was at Apexart, 291 Church Street, for a series of readings being promoted under the banner Mad As Hell! Given this was really close to Occupy Wall Street I’d assumed it was going to be an afternoon of stories based around current political activism. Instead it turned out to be inspired much more by Network, a movie I haven’t seen for years, with stories about anger rather than politics. I saw Dale Peck, Elissa Schappell, John Haskell, Patrick McGrath and Lynne Tillman read. I was really curious to see Eileen Myles but the reading started late and I had to get to White Columns for 4pm, so I had to miss her. Tillman was for me the highlight – her sharp but spare prose and incredible wit really make her stand out from most other writers.
Back at the gallery I was doing a reading with Kenneth Goldsmith. Kenny was way more than a warm up, he presented me with the challenge of matching and attempting to better his riotous spoken word act. So I started by standing on my head and reading from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, then proceeded to shred a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, and finished up by rapping about the work I had in the show. It was another packed event but I managed to catch up – often too briefly – with some old NYC friends like mail artist Mark Bloch. Afterwards a crowd of us moved on to The Art Bar. As it got later and people started drifting off, I decided to walk to the upper west side with Esther Leslie, who was over from London and staying on 79th Street. I carried on to 103rd by foot, reaching The Marrakesh Hotel sometime after midnight. I was feeling great thanks to both a successful show and the extremely large shots of Talisker served in The Art Bar.
On Sunday morning I walked around the upper west side, before heading to White Columns to do an interview with Aimee Walleston from Art In America. I’d planned to hook up with Tom McGlynn after this, but when I called him he’d was unexpectedly tied up at home, so I wandered around downtown on my tod until it was time to go to the airport. I really couldn’t believe how much dowtown had changed since I’d last visited 16 years before. Streets like Christopher and Bleecker were unrecognisable from how I’d first encountered them at the end of the 1980s, they’d been completely gentrified. Canal Street seemed to retain more of the atmosphere from the old days than anywhere else I went… And while it is in the nature of cities to change, it is always gonna be better when that change is directed by the working class rather than the rich! So we still need a new urbanism!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 3rd Street, Aimee Walleston, Aldo Tambellini, Amie Scally, Amsterdam Avenue, Angela Mao, Apexart, Aretha Franklin, Art In America, At&T, Atta, Backalley Princess, Ben Morea, Betty Tng Pei, Black Mask, Black Zero, Bleecker Street, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Brooklyn, Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee and I, Calvin C. Hernton, Canal Street, Carolyn Lockhart, Carter Wong, Cheers, Chelsea Museum, Christopher Street, Church Street, Dale Peck, Darius James, David Byrne, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Eileen Myles, Elissa Schappell, Enter The Fat Dragon, Esther Leslie, Gavin Everall, Group Center, Hal Foster, Hari Kunzru, Heathrow Airport, Henry Grimes, History Detective, Horatio Street, Ian Holman, Issue Project Room, Jarett Kobek, Jeff Eaton, John Haskell, Ken Wark, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenny Goldsmith, Lee Wells, Lo Lieh, Lynne Tillman, Mad As Hell!, Manhattan, Mark Bloch, Marrakesh Hotel, Marvin Gaye, Matthew Higgs, Mets, Mike Sperlinger, New York, Newark, Occupy Wall Street, Patrick McGrath, Penn Station, Ray Charles, Return of the Master Killer, Return to the 36 Chambers, Ronald MacDonald, Sammo Hung, Simon Critchley, Snice, Spiritual Boxer II, Talisker, The Art Bar, The Kung Fu Lizard, The Shadow Boxer, Tim Beckett, Tom McGlynn, Valerie Solanas, White Columns, Yankees
Posted in counterculture, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitions | 23 Comments »
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The oldest of suppressed traditions
In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent “reality” of our “time”. Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, “literate” consensus maintains that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. It is clear that Power has a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on censorship. The “concept of freedom” is an unreachable, collapsing, absolute. All experience becomes equal when exchanged via Capital; with class “privilege” determining how much of this worthless “equality” each person is entitled to.
The negative and its use
Anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. The censors of the “left”, “right” and “centre”, all do their collective part; despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be motivated by the very beliefs we will ultimately negate.
From originality to ontology: the decline of the text
The possibilities for communal transformation of this world lie in disconnection from imposed notions of progress and democracy. Plagiarism is the “beginning”, the negative point of a culture which finds its justification in the “unique”. Censorship supersedes plagiarism as an “intelligent” negation of “originality” because it suppresses not only (“original”) production, but also reproduction (plagiarism, appropriation &c.) which revalue the “original” and maintain its circulation in “reality”. Censorship is to the present what plagiarism was to history.
The healing power of doubt
Revolutionary propaganda sets itself the task of discrediting all received ideas without offering a single “alternative” thought with which they might be replaced. Kill your desires and live! Erase, destroy and make useless all recorded information. Physically and otherwise attempt to suppress all expression in art, politics, history &c. Resist culture and all other forms of institutional identity. Suppress, by refusing to participate in, interpersonal and mass social relationships. As you see fit, smash the “imagination”, “schizophrenia”, “death”, “sexuality”, “values”, “time” and all other forms of seduction and abstraction. Experimentally break down the frames of reference by which you organise non-valued perceptions into valued entities: i.e. objects, ideas, means of self-perception &c.
An end to social relations
“Self-destruction” is a semantic swindle. The moralism against suicide is reactionary resistance to change. Only total opposition, both theoretical and practical (i.e. silence), is irrecuperable. Anything else must necessarily appear absolutist and contradictory.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 557087 Seattle, 60s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, APG, Art and Culture, Artists Placement Group, Arts Journal, Barry Flanagan, beat generation, Better Books, black beauties, black bombers, Bluecoat Gallery, Bow Street Magistrates Court, cannabis, central London, charge, Clement Greenberg, conceptual art, Destruction In Art Symposium, Destruction in Art: Destroy to Create, Diamond & Co., drug smuggling, Durophet, Finch College, Finch College Museum of Art, Fluxus, forgery, Francis Morland, heroin, Jeff Sawtell, Jeffrey Sawtell, John Latham, John Lennon, John Perreault, junkies, Liverpool, London, LSD, Lucy Lippard, MOMA, Morning Star, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York City, New York Museum of Modern Art, Norwich, Norwich School of Art, Number 7, NYC, Paula Cooper Gallery, pot, purple hearts, Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, Sheila Malcham, Simon Ford, sixties, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, Still and Chew, The Art Forum, UK, USA, weed, Yoko Ono
Posted in art criticism, counterculture, True crime | 26 Comments »