Posts Tagged ‘Paris’
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
1. Charles I – who was beheaded on 30 January 1649. The execution was at Whitehall in London. At the very least, the current British royal family need to be completely stripped of their titles and wealth – although there are those who think it would also be a good idea to behead, hang, or shoot them!
2. Cleopatra VII Philopator is by tradition said to have committed suicide on 12 August 30 BC by inducing a snake to give her a poisonous bite. She was following in the footsteps of her bigamous husband Mark Anthony, who topped himself after losing the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC. Regardless of quibbles over the exact details of Cleopatra’s death, it marked the ultimate demise of the Pharaoh royal parasites in ancient Egypt.
3. Louis XVI – beheaded by guillotine at Place de la Révolution in Paris on 21 January 1793. This was an event that dealt a body blow to royal parasites in France.
4. Diana, Princess of Wales – who was fatally injured in a car crash in the Ponte de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris on 31 August 1997. It is unfortunate that her ex Prince Charles – current heir to the British throne – didn’t die with her!
5. Frederick, Prince of Wales – who died from a burst abscess in the lung on 20 March 1751 at Leicester House in London – nearly a decade before his scumbag father George II. There are, of course, millions around the world hoping that the arch-reactionary slimeball Prince Charles will follow in Frederick’s footsteps and drop down dead right now!
6. Nicholas II of Russia was condemned to death and then shot by Yakov Yurovsky shortly after 2.00 am on the morning of 17 July 1918. There is little in Bolshevism to be praised but getting rid of the Russian royal parasites was definitely one of its better ideas – much of the Russian royal family was shot at the same time as Nicholas II.
7. King Dipendra of Nepal – who shot himself with an AK 47 after going postal and murdering nine of his family of parasites at a house in the grounds of the Narayanhity Royal Palace on 1 June 2001. Among those Dipendra shot to death were his mother and father – King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Dipendra, who after shooting himself outlived his parents for three days, only got to be ruler while in a coma – making for a delightfully short reign!
8. Princess Grace of Monaco – who died in hospital on 14 September 1982, the day after suffering a stroke that caused her to lose control of her car and suffer serious injuries after it plunged down the side of a mountain.
9. George I of Greece – shot in the back by the anarchist assassin Alexandros Schinas at the White Tower in the city of Thessaloniki on 18 March 1913. Like Bolshevism, anarchism doesn’t have much to offer the working class, but Schinas’s practical opposition to monarchy and aristocracy is something with which most people will have some sympathy.
10. Queen Elizabeth II. Okay so she ain’t dead yet but there are millions of us in the UK looking forward to seeing the back of this particular royal parasite! But don’t forget kids, we still need to strip the entire British royal family of their titles and wealth!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alexandros Schinas, assassination, Battle of Actium, beheading, bizarre deaths, British royal family, Charles I, Cleopatra, funny deaths, George I, George II, going postal, House of Windsor, King Birendra, King Dipendra, Leicester House, London, Louis XVI, Mark Anthony, Narayanhity Royal Palace, Nicholas II, Paris, Pharaoh, Place de la Révolution, Ponte de l'Alma, Prince Charles, Prince Frederick, Princess Diana, Princess Grace, Queen Aishwarya, Queen Elizabeth II, royalty, suicide, Thessaloniki, White Tower of Thessaloniki, Whitehall, Yakov Yurovsky
Posted in humour, obituary, politics | 22 Comments »
Friday, November 13th, 2009
A question I’ve been asked a number of times recently is how do I maintain my lavish life-style? The answer is simple, my life-style isn’t particularly lavish but many people find me so fascinating that they project their fantasies onto an image they create of me. It should go without saying that if you know your way around the place, then London can be a very cheap town in which to live. I very much doubt I could survive as easily in New York or Paris, although someone born in those places may be able to do so. However, to satisfy those who dislike rational explanations I shall add that I have multiple personalities that run into six figures and each one of them earns a living in a different way – some as gangsters, others rob banks, one has been bleeding a hedge fund dry, and all of them earn me a fortune as I sleep! You too could be making money as you shower, but to do so you need to buy all my books and read them carefully so that you can decipher the coded messages they contain. Hot tip: the coded messages only manifest themselves to those who buy my books, so borrowing them from a library or a friend just won’t work!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: books, lavish life-style, London, make money, make money while you shower, make money while you sleep, New York, Paris, rich and famous, Stewart Home
Posted in humour | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Searching for someone called Francois Raymond on the outskirts of Paris is probably a little like looking for a specific John Smith in London. Who is Francois Raymond? The one I’m looking for exhibited a series of six photographs of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson as part of an exhibition entitled Exposition Tamrauc at the Maison de Jeunes et de la Culture (Paris) in October 1967. I have two prints of just one of these photographs, and rubber stamped on the back of one of them is an address: Francois Raymond, 37 Rue Gambetta, Puteaux (Seine). I’d like to acquire copies of all the photographs Raymond took of my mother, which is why I’ve been attempting to track him down…
Virtually every town in France seems to have a street named after the nineteenth-century French politician Leon Gambetta – so the fact that someone with a name as common as Raymond’s should have an address on one such street seemed psychogeographically apt to me. There is another Rue Gambetta in the neighbouring commune of Suresnes, which is a ten minute walk from the street of that name in Puteaux.
On my first visit to Puteaux I approached Run Gambetta via La Defense, the Paris business district. Two thirds of this high-rise office development is situated within the Putueax municipality, although parts also encroach upon Nanterre and Courbevoie. As a consequence, Puteaux is one of the richest municipalities not just in France, but the whole of Europe. Initially I was a little confused by the lay-out of La Defense but I managed to walk out of it and along to Rue Gambetta without wasting too much time. Raymond’s street was a mix of old and new dwellings, with a monstrous vista of La Defense. The view towards Paris must have been very different in 1967 when Raymond took the pictures he exhibited of my mother.
37 Rue Gambetta turned out to be an apartment block. The outside had been refaced and the balconies replaced relatively recently, but close examination of the structure, the garages behind it, and in particular the doors, led me to the conclusion it had probably been built in the 1950s. It seems safe to conclude that Raymond had lived and/or worked in this building around 40 years before my visit to it. I examined the buzzers to the flats but none of these were labeled with the name Raymond. Next I tried stopping people on the street outside the building but no one knew of a Francois Raymond who had lived there.
I went back to Puteax a couple of days later, approaching it on foot via the bridge over the Seine. This time I went first via Boulevard Richard Wallace (presumably the street is named after the illegitimate son of the Marquess of Hertford, a 19th century ‘philantropist’ and art collector), to Rue Gambetta in Suresnes, since I wished to compare it with the Puteaux street of that name. This second Rue Gambetta looked a little less well-heeled than the one in Puteaux, and was considerably less ambient. Both lie in municipalities that are densely populated by European standards. This second trip to Puteaux seemed to take me no further in my quest for Francois Raymond and his lost pictures of my mother than my previous one. However, rather than walking back to La Defense, I decided to take the suburban train there from Puteaux.
Approaching the train station I clocked a couple of pissheads who were weaving so erratically on the pavement that I decided to let them get a little ahead of me as we all approached the escalators up to the platform. The drunks looked like a working class couple in their late-sixties, and they were pretty hefty too. As they reached the escalator, the woman – who’d gone ahead – placed a foot not on the first or second steps which were closest to her and still flat, but the third step that was rising; having done this, she quickly brought her other foot up onto the escalator and placed it beside the right one. The man attempted to do the same thing and lost his balance, grabbing hold of the woman as he did so.
I run forward and caught both the man and the woman. If I hadn’t the man would have certainly bashed his head on the metal stairs and this might have resulted in a nasty injury or even worse. The pair of them were heavy and behaved like a dead weight. I thought the woman would pull herself upright, and then that the man would do the same. When this didn’t happen, another passerby took the woman’s hand to help her, but it seemed she was too drunk to stand up. I held this fat and heavy couple up until we reached the top of the escalator, where the woman rolled awkwardly off the stairs and the man managed to get himself upright.
The first thing the man did was check that none of the multiple bottles of wine in the plastic bag he’d been carrying had been smashed, and amazingly they were all in one piece. I rescued one of the woman’s shoes which had come off, another passerby returned the other. I hoped that once the woman had her shoes on she would get up, but she was too dazed. By this time a small crowd were trying to help the couple, particularly the woman. Since neither of them were able to understand my English and odd words of French, I decided to leave them in the hands of the native speakers who’d come to their assistance after me.
As I made my way towards a train, the man shouted ‘merci’ at me. My impression was that neither he nor the woman were fully aware of what had happened, but he at least knew I’d caught them both as they were falling. Once I was on the train and speeding toward the centre of Paris, I realised I should have asked the man if he was or knew Francois Raymond. Obviously it is unlikely he was Raymond, although I guess he was about the same age as the man I was looking for, and if he’d lived in Puteaux most of his life he may have known him… This chance encounter on an escalator seems as close as I’m going to get to the elusive Monsieur Raymond for the time being. That said, he can’t be any more elusive than my mother, who changed her name by deed poll in the early sixties and then rarely used her full legal name; more than one person has told me they’ve never heard of Julia Callan-Thompson, but upon being told other names she went by and given contextual information to place her, they realise she was indeed somebody they knew way back when!
BTW: several sequences in my short In The Street Today were shot in Puteaux; towards the end of it the actual escalators on which I prevented the drunks from falling are featured, and the decorative night lights earlier in the video are situated right beside them. The soundtrack to the film is a looped recording I made of this particular set of Puteaux escalators (there is another set of identical escalators, not featured in my film, a little nearer Rue Gambetta).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 37 Rue Gambetta, Boulevard Richard Wallace, Courbevoie, Exposition Tamrauc, France, Francois Raymond, John Smith, Julia Callan-Thompson, La Defense, Leon Gambetta, Maison de Jeunes et de la Culture, Marquess of Hertford, Nanterre, Paris, Puteaux, Richard Wallace, Rue Gambetta, Seine, Sir Richard Wallace, Suresnes
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 16 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
La Subversion Des Images tells us a lot more about the state of official culture in Europe than it does about surrealism. This is an expansive show of surrealist film and photography, but it is also incredibly lazily curated. The good news first, there are examples of Man Ray’s hardcore pornography that I’d not seen before, and I assume are rarely shown. His undated stag film Two Women, featuring both oral sex and strap-on penetration is very curious; and for me it made my trip to surrealist show worthwhile.
Overall I’ve never been impressed by surrealist film. Bunuel is obviously the exception who proves the rule that there weren’t any good surrealist film-makers. Hans Richter’s abstract films hold some interest for me, but it is the tedious Ghosts Before Breakfast that is featured yet again in the current Pompidou show. Richter’s film is shown on one three screens lined-up beside each other, with the result that the shorts on the other two distract the viewer’s attention from whichever movie they try to watch. With the exception of the four works shown on rotation in the temporary cinema at the end of the exhibition – Bunuel’s first two films are included, of course – the movies in this show are abysmally displayed.
The surrealist photography fares little better than the films in terms of inadequate display and it is equally variable in quality. There are many now iconic pieces from Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, but these are shown alongside mediocre works by minor surrealist photographers and pictures taken by the movement’s major literary figures who happened to own a camera (but weren’t necessarily over-endowed with a sense of visual flair).
Those unfamiliar with the surrealist movement may be left with the impression that the exhibition is comprehensive; it isn’t, as I’ve said, it is badly curated. Ida Kar may have played only a small role in the surrealist movement but she was a major – albeit for now largely forgotten – twentieth century photographer. There is nothing by Kar in this exhibition, not even her extraordinary portraits of Andre Breton (although pictures of him that are considerably less striking are included).
For me the omission of Ida Kar is indicative of what is wrong not only with this show, but curation in general. Given that Kar was an amazingly talented photographer, I can only conclude she is missing because the curators are unaware of her. This would not be surprising since on the whole contemporary curators know next to nothing about visual culture. They tend to avoid serious reading (and rarely do archival research), preferring instead to ‘learn’ about art more or less solely by going to each other’s exhibitions. This leads to a situation in which the same names are featured in show after show.
Claude Cahun was ‘rediscovered’ not so much by the art world as by those engaged in gender studies. Kar needs ‘rediscovering’ too, and perhaps by making the poverty of contemporary curatorship more shameful by publicising it via the omission of Kar from shows such as this, I can assist in the process of her rehabilitation.
I also really hated the way La Subversion Des Images was organised by theme. I’d have much rather had rooms dedicated to individual artists, with a mixed room or two for the amateur photographers in the surrealist movement and its minor figures. Nonetheless, despite being at best half-cocked, there remains just enough in this exhibition to make it worth visiting. It didn’t thrill me but I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed it.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: André Breton, Centre Pompidou, Claude Cahun, Ghosts Before Breakfast, Hans Bellmer, Hans Richter, Ida Kar, La Subversion Des Images, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Paris, surrealism, Two Women
Posted in exhibitions | 22 Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Hadewijch is the latest film from Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy lecturer whose movies are often compared to the work of Robert Bresson. Dumont doesn’t so much take inspiration from Bresson, as allow the older man’s films to possess his own, so that he might correct their faults. If someone had told me before I went to see Hadewijch that it was ‘The Trial of Joan of Arc meets Mouchette in the age of post-modern simulation’, then I could have imagined the flick in its entirety before I viewed it. That said, the process of attending the screening was nonetheless worthwhile, albeit rather irritating.
It was difficult to get into the Vue in Leicester Square due to a simultaneous premier for a very boring British film set in Twickenham in the early sixties. The crowds and the cops were out in force, and I had to get past some ridiculously heavy security before being allowed anywhere near the multi-screen Vue. Thus after much hassle and finally seated, I realised I hadn’t seen a Dumont flick since his big screen debut, The Life Of Jesus, came out a decade or more before.
Hadewijch is inspired by the writings of a 13 century Flemish mystic of this name, a rich but nonetheless hip chick who liked to eroticise her relationship with ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ by foaming at the mouth until the resulting insanity poured forth from her pen. Hadewijch’s religious pornography took the forms of poetry, letters and written records of visions; and these mystical freak-outs might be likened to free spirit heresies. But while this provided Dumont with his initial inspiration, he sets his film in contemporary France.
The plot of Hadewijch isn’t of much consequence. Celine (Julie Sokolowski) is booted out of a nunnery for being too zealous. She returns to her parent’s opulent apartment. The 20 year-old Jesus freak then hangs out in and around her Parisian home; she meets Yassine (Yassine Salihine), an unemployed teenager from the suburbs who wants to get it one with her, but they never do anything more intimate than embrace. However, in Yassine’s brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) she recognises a kindred spirit, a fellow religious nut. Nassir tells Celine about Islam and then takes her to Lebanon; when they return to Paris they ‘matyr’ themselves by performing a two person suicide bombing on a metro train. If this were a realist film, then the explosion would be the end of the movie, but Dumont’s speciality is a Baudrillardian simulation of realism, and there is a lose thread to tie-up in the form of a character called David (David Dewaele).
At the beginning of the film, David is a prisoner doing restoration work on the nunnery from which Celine is expelled. He is also framed at various times to look rather like the image of Christ in various Dutch old masters. A succession of scenes indicate that he is a conflation of both Christ and the thieves on the crosses beside the Toad Of Nazareth at the time of ‘The Crucifiction’. I assume Dumont is inviting viewers to recall Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and even if he isn’t, this is what the depiction of David brought to my mind; in other words, religion is an alienated projection of human attributes into a bogus realm of ‘the sacred’.
After the explosion (i.e. after Celine and Nassir’s implied but not explicitly depicted deaths), Celine and David appear back at the nunnery, but rather than it being winter – as was the case when we first saw them there – it is now spring. Celine attempts to drown herself in a pond but is saved by David. The series of events that take place after the explosion clearly confused much of the audience and became a focus for questions to the director during his Q & A session. I wasn’t feeling engaged enough to point out that the failed drowning rather too self-consciously invokes the climax of Bresson’s Mouchette. My unwillingness to join the discussion stemmed in part from Dumont’s answers exuding the rotten-egg smell of what is sometimes labelled ‘the anxiety of influence’, and this made what he did say so boring that I left before he finished.
Nonetheless, a director like Dumont becomes significant when you see how many of the people attending his screenings don’t understand that film as a medium need not be restricted to utterly flat realist narratives; and is, in any case, better understood as ‘poetic’ images. Quite a few people walked out during the festival screening of Hadewijch I attended. I like the effect Dumont has on audiences considerably more than his movies – which are still too tastefully made to shake up the film world as much as I’d like.
After seeing Hadewijch, I found myself imagining an alternative version in which Celine was a white rasta rather than a catholic, who is loosely modelled on Gale Benson (the daughter of a British Tory politician murdered at Michael X’s black power commune in Trinidad); this would also allow for a heavy dub soundtrack rather than the shit classical music Dumont favoured. Such a venture is not something I can imagine Dumont carrying off successfully – and so, instead, I look forward to him making a Deulezian cross between my two favourite Bresson movies A Man Escaped and Pickpocket. Dumont remains the Jean-Philippe Toussaint of contemporary French language film. Good as far as he goes, but cinema will leave him behind when we force it to go much further….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Man Escaped, Bruno Dumont, David Dewaele, Flanders, France, Gale Benson, Hadewijch, Jean-PhilippeToussaint, Julie Sokolowski, Karl Sarafidis, Leicester Square, London, London Film Festival, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael X, Mouchette, Paris, Robert Bresson, The Essence of Christianity, The Life Of Jesus, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Trinidad, Twickenham, Vue, Yassine Salihine
Posted in film | 16 Comments »
Friday, September 18th, 2009
For a couple of years at the end of the sixties hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas financed a series of films by a group of young artists and writers with little to no cinematic experience. The end result was the French equivalent of US underground movies, which is hardly surprising when you consider that Andy Warhol and The Factory had been a big influence on this informal group of around a dozen hipsters. When I saw the Zanzibar short Vite by Daniel Pommereulle screened at Tate Modern as part of a 1968 movie season in London last year, I got the impression that very few of those in the audience were aware of Zanzibar films: most seemed to have turned up to see the 1968 newsreel shorts that were screened alongside Pommereulle’s fabulous 37 minute freak out that takes you from the north African desert to outer space.
When I first heard of Zanzibar, quite a few years ago now, it was via whispered tales of a freaky heiress who would write cheques for hippies who wanted to make films, and then never asked them to account for the money she very freely handed out. Vite is actually the shortest Zanzibar flick, most are an hour to two hours in length, and with one exception they are filmed in 35mm, not the cheaper 16mm format that was so typical of American underground movies. Likewise, little effort was made to distribute Zanzibar material, so it isn’t nearly so well known as transatlantic improvisations by directors such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Connor, Jim McBride or Jack Smith. Reflecting Warhol’s Factory aesthetic, Zanzibar films are full of beautiful people, non-actors, a number of whom were high-fashion models. Likewise, the technicians and directors who made these movies were predisposed to formal experimentation because they had little if any film training. The results are on the whole much more interesting than the self-consciously commercial recuperation of letterist cinema by the earlier and older French ‘new wave’ of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (but not as good as Alain Resnais or Chris Marker when they were firing on all six cylinders).
It has always been difficult to see Zanzibar movies outside Paris, and at least four of the sixteen Zanzibar titles Shafto lists in her pamphlet appear to have been lost. Philippe Garrel is the only film-maker from this group still working as a director today, and he is now well known for more ‘mainstream’ material such as his 2005 movie Regular Lovers, starring his son Louis. Garrel Senior had a ten year relationship with Nico, the model turned drug-icon and pseudo-singer (she also appeared in seven films Garrel directed), and so his name should also be familiar to those with an interest in mock-rock and substance abuse.
The Zanzibar group took their name from a part of Africa that boasted a Maoist regime in the late-sixties, and which some saw as a crossroads between the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’. An attraction to Maoism is merely one factor that makes it difficult to take the group’s political and mystical pretensions seriously. It should go without saying that despite their deployment of ‘communist’ rhetoric, virtually everyone whose political inspiration can be traced back to Lenin is a moderniser attempting to effect a shift from the formal to the real domination of capital in societies still largely characterised by agrarian modes of production. However, and as I’ve already said, aesthetically Zanzibar represent a real continuation of letterist experimentation in the cinema. Likewise, the fact that two of the Zanzibar films were made by women directors (Un Film by Sylvina Boissonnas and Deux Fois by Jacqueline Raynal) at a time when it was unusual for women to helm French movies, serves to further underscore the way in which the group’s practice ran ahead of its theoretical positions.
Sally Shafto’s pamphlet on Zanzibar consists mainly of an extended essay about the group and its dissolution during a journey through Africa that fell far short of its original geographical and artistic goals. This is appended with a ‘who’s who’ of the group, credits for sixteen Zanzibar films, and sleeve notes for an album of music recorded on the trip that put an end to this loose collective. There are a lot of really groovy photographs illustrating the text too, so despite an ungainly academic prose style quite an odds with the elegant subject matter, this is a good introduction to the Zanzibar group. What I’m reviewing here is a 64 page pamphlet put out by Zazibar USA (AKA Jackie Raynal-Saleh and Joseph J. M. Saleh) in 2000: there is also a dual French and English language book of this material with additional interviews issued as Zanzibar: Les films Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968 by Paris Experimental Editions in 2006. Neither publication appears particularly easy to obtain but if you put a little work into getting your mits on this shit your efforts will be well rewarded!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1968, Africa, Alain Resnais, Andy Warhol, Bruce Connor, Chris Marker, Daniel Pommereulle, Deux Fois, François Truffaut, Jack Smith, Jackie Raynal, Jackie Raynal-Saleh, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim McBride, Joseph J. M. Saleh, Ken Jacobs, letterists, London, Louis Garrel, Maya Deren, Nico, Paris, Paris Experimental Editions, Philippe Garrel, Regular Lovers, Sally Shafto, Stan Brakhage, Sylvina Boissonnas, Tate Modern, The Factory, The Zanzibar Films & The Dandies Of May 1968, Un Film, Vite, Zanzibar, Zanzibar: Les films Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968
Posted in books, film | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
The Pompidou Centre in Paris has rearranged its collection to highlight women artists. Looking through the material now on display I was left with the impression that the French Musee National D’Art Moderne has an acquisition problem. Given the material the curators had to work with, they probably did a reasonable job of selecting it; it’s just that looking at pieces ranging from relatively recent photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg to much older work by Niki de Saint Phalle, the acquisitions seem to have been poorly made in terms of the choice of works by those artists who merit being in this collection. There are notable exceptions to this such as the utterly talentless one trick pony Rachel Whiteread, whose ‘sculptures’ of domestic spaces are far too literal to be of any interest me. But the curators have cunningly managed to make Whiteread’s very large work disappear. They’ve performed this conjuring trick on Whiteread’s ‘negative space’ by placing her primo example of schlock at the entrance to the show, and all the visitors I observed ignored it; those I spoke to about it said they’d thought it was as an architectural feature rather than a work of art. It thus qualified as the most ignored work on display.
The highlights of elles@centrepompidou include Touch Cinema by Valie Export (a film from the sixties showing a woman allowing men to come up from a crowd to grope her tits), various films by Carolee Schneemann and photographs by Hannah Wilke. Overall this ‘permanent display’ creates the impression that it was in performance works that women artists have been able to create the greatest impact over the past 50 years. There are some good artists on display, and a lot of bad ones too, making it very much like any large show, since 99 percent of all art is utter shit.
Dominique Gonzalez-Forester has made better work than the films on display here, and she delivers a rather pathetic slap to the public’s face when she prefaces them by saying this was the best work she was able to make over a two years period because she’d been so engrossed in reading books she hadn’t been able to concentrate on her own work. Patti Smith is represented by a diagram, when a piece of her music would have seemed more fitting: there are also sections given over to female furniture designers, which is a nice idea although the displays aren’t too hot. All in all the Pompidou deserve ten out of ten for their focus on women artists, and about one out of ten for execution; the work is badly installed and very poorly organised, rather than being displayed by theme, it would have worked much better being organised by artist.
To conclude, looking at the work of Marina Abramovich once again provided a stark reminder of just how bad her live art is, since her ungainly movements mean that she is never convincing as a performer, while her narcissism renders her twitchy locomotion much uglier than it would appear in someone less self-absorbed and self-obsessed. Her work is truly awful, and thus for me her name offers a counter-term to The Stendhal Syndrome. The Abramovich Syndrome is thus the feeling of being underwhelmed and bored shitless by seeing a huge amount of art; and that’s just the way I felt after viewing elles@centrepompidou. My feelings on this score were underlined when I went upstairs to look at the mainly dead white males from the French National Collection. As Duchamp observed, works of art die and museums are their graveyards – and my visit to the Pompidou Centre left me with a bad case of The Abramovich Syndrome.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Carolee Schneemann, Centre Pompidou, Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, elles@centrepompidou, Hannah Wilke, Marcel Duchamp, Marina Abramovich, Musee National D'Art ModerneMusee National D'Art Moderne, Niki de Saint Phalle, Paris, Patti Smith, Pompidou Centre, Rachel Whiteread, Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Abramovich Syndrome, The Stendhal Syndrome, Touch Cinema, Valie Export
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions | 23 Comments »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false. All the available evidence would suggest Wyllie is correct on these matters, and while this adds to the credibility of his tale, it will probably do little for the sales of his book.
The book is a personal account of Wyllie’s time with The Process and the story he tells is more convincing than the portraits of the group found in books such as The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and the first edition of The Family by Ed Saunders, but it is also far more banal. Therefore, if you want to read sensationalist and ultimately fictionalised accounts of Satanic killing sprees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There is plenty of that online, and a web search will also locate many Process writings and graphics.
The history of The Process is essentially this: in 1963 two former Scientologists Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston established a therapy business in Wigmore Street, London. Mary Ann MacLean was a former prostitute who grew up in poverty in Glasgow, while Robert de Grimston was from an upper class family and had served as an officer in the British army before becoming an architecture student and then dropping out three years into these studies. Wyllie first met de Grimston in 1959 when they both enrolled on the architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic (renamed Polytechnic of Central London in 1970, with a further name change to University of Westminster in 1992). In 1963 McLean and de Grimston began using Wyllie as a guinea pig to test and develop techniques they’d learnt as Scientologists, adapting them to their own purposes.
Wyllie’s circle of student friends provided the initial recruits to what was then called Compulsions Analysis. In Wyllie’s account, those involved with MacLean and de Grimson recognised a sense of spirituality in their activities and the name of the group was therefore changed to The Process in 1965. My own impression is there was nothing spiritual about MacLean and essentially she conned the group into becoming her disciples and funding the luxury life-style she and de Grimston craved. Even from Wyllie’s rather misty-eyed account, it is apparent MacLean was a hard-bitten hustler who’d mastered the con game when she was working as a high class London hooker throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.
While Process acolytes panhandled for money and lived in abject poverty, the group rented properties it could barely afford in an attempt to trick the outside world into believing they possessed wealth and power. De Grimston and MacLean were the only Process members to live in style. While de Grimston provided the theology, MacLean was the real power running this cynical money-grabbing hierarchy. Over the years the group expanded and at various times had chapters in Rome, Paris, New Orleans, San Francisco, Munich, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Miami. Chapters were sometimes moved from one city to another, and the membership never seems to have stretched beyond the very low hundreds, although The Process claimed to have tens of thousands of members.
Process theology was based on the unification of opposites, and a reading of the Bible that took Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy enemy’ to mean love Satan. Much of this gnostic garbage was confected in group sessions and then written up by de Grimston, and even Wyllie admits it didn’t read well on the printed page. After an Idris Shah book fell on his head in a Notting Hill bookshop, Wyllie convinced himself that de Grimston and MacLean were disguised Sufi masters, and like other members of the cult was also prone to viewing the latter as a human incarnation of the Goddess! The original core of The Process consisted chiefly of over-privileged and privately educated brats, and it seems to me that much remains to be written about how an upper-class upbringing renders individuals peculiarly susceptible to the brainwashing techniques of religious cults.
The Process fell apart when de Grimston and MacLean ended their marital relationship in 1974. De Grimston attempted to revitalise The Process without success. MacLean led the disciples who stuck with her into The Foundation, which adopted increasingly conventional Christian doctrines before reinventing itself as a secular animal charity called Best Friends. MacLean died in 2005, de Grimston is still alive.
Wyllie’s account of his 15 years with The Process is supplemented by the stories of various other members. The most shocking thing to come out of this is the criminal neglect of children whose parents belonged to the cult. The overall impression I’m left with is that life in The Process was very dull, and you had to be deluded to join it in the first place. The Process memoirs gathered together here also show that those conned by guru-figures are very slow to give up their illusions, and will often attempt to off-set the fact they were ripped-off with the desultory claim they enjoyed some kind of spiritual adventure in ‘the process’.
In addition to these memoirs, this book also contains a selection of unimpressive texts by de Grimston, and a very silly essay by Genesis P. Orridge about how he modelled Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth on The Process. The image section in this tome is rather more interesting, since it illustrates the strong design sense and corporate-style marketing of The Process as a self-consciously totalitarian cult. From Wyllie’s account of the group it is clear why The Process chose to project itself as a totalitarian ‘elite’:
“Mary Ann (cult leader Mary Ann MacLean) never made any apologies, for instance, about having considerable sympathy and respect for the Nazi regime. Doubtless it suited her authoritarian personality. A story I have heard her relate more than once is of her as a small girl of nine or ten, who found herself leaving her physical body and being transported into Hitler’s bunker during World War II. There she would slip around the table in her astral form whispering into the generals’ ears. Whether she ever claimed to observe der Fuehrer’s legendary rages, I don’t recall, but if she had I can only imagine she would have egged him on in his carpet-biting frenzies.” (Page 56).
Elsewhere Wyllie recalls:
“Michael and I stopped in to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘American Nazi’, out of allegiance to Mary Ann’s interest in extreme ideologies…. Rockwell sat in the only armchair… He looked younger than I thought he was going to be, with a buzz-cut and a surprisingly open, pleasant, face, marred now by a fixed scowl that didn’t leave him while we were there… He had a military bearing but was clearly a frightened man… Later I found out that Lincoln Rockwell was killed in August of 1967 by a disgruntled ex-member of his party and only days after our visit. I should add that Michael is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family and I can only imagine that Mary Ann instructed him to visit Rockwell as a way of testing his mettle…” (Pages 80-81).
Elsewhere in his narrative Wyllie tells tales of counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Simon Vinkenoog, assisting The Process. He also writes about a few of the celebrities the group attempted to shake down for donations; they range from Miles Davis to Salvador Dali. Sadly, he has nothing to say about Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, who okayed the reproduction of Process material on the art work to a couple of his albums. Mostly this is a book about the internal dynamics of The Process and as such it makes for curious but nonetheless extremely depressing reading; it appears that most of the ‘former’ cult members contributing to it are still deluded about their experiences years after the group broke up.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Abbie Hoffman, Adolf Hitler, American Nazi Party, Amsterdam, Best Friends, Boston, central London, Charles Manson, Chicago, Christianity, Compulsions Analysis, Ed Saunders, Feral House, Funkadelic, Genesis P. Orridge, George Clinton, George Lincoln Rockwell, Glasgow, Gnosticism, Idris Shah, London, Los Angeles, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, Mary Ann MacLean, Maury Terry, Miami, Miles Davis, Munich, Nazism, New Orleans, New York, Notting Hill, Paris, Polytechnic of Central London, Profumo Affair, Regent Street Polytechnic, Robert de Grimston, Rome, Salvador Dali, San Francisco, Satanism, Scientology, Simon Vinkenoog, sixties, Son of Sam, Suagr Ray Robinson, Sufism, Tate-LaBianca murders, The Family, The Process, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, The Ultimate Evil, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, Timothy Leary, Timothy Wyllie, Toronto, University of Westminster, Wigmore Street
Posted in books, counterculture | 51 Comments »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), both directed by Arnold L. Miller. The Miller titles are mondo movies about London and its nightlife in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of director and producer Richard Lester but I’ll sit through anything with Rita Tushingham in it at least once – with The Leather Boys (1964, directed by Sidney J. Furie) being my favourite film featuring this actress, since among other things her character Dot gets to deliver the immortal line: ‘Do you like me hair?’ By way of contrast, The Bed Sitting Room is merely a curious sixties period piece greatly lifted by the presence of Tushingham, but nonetheless a movie that is ultimately a vehicle for Spike Milligan. It is based upon his Cuban missile crisis inspired play of the same name, and is imbued with a pre-Beatles and pre-permissive society mind-set.
The Bed Sitting Room takes place in the ruins of post-nuclear apocalypse London, and I guess the humour is supposed to be zany and surreal, but I found it very old-fashioned. The best joke comes during the credits where the cast are listed by height from shortest to tallest; a device that fortuitously provides Tushingham with top billing. Among the other famous names featured in this film are Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Lowe. During a panel talk after the screening, Lester said that while he had no issues with the cast when making the film, their respective agents proved rather argumentative about billings and thus listing the actors by height was his means of resolving this problem.
Lester dominated the panel talk although he’d been joined for it by Rita Tushingham, with BFI curators Will Fowler and Vic Pratt moderating. Lester mixed some entertaining anecdotes with an unbelievably superficial take on events in Paris in May 1968. He seemed to view the entire year – and in particular the occupations movement in France – as a bit of a downer, largely because these political events disrupted his travel plans. Unfortunately Rita didn’t get to say much, but she’s an old pro and having known Lester for around forty-five years appeared both used to and unflustered by his habit of hogging the conversation.
Tushingham is in incredibly good shape for a 67 year-old, and while she now appears a little older than in her 1960s prime, her distinctive looks are still very much with her. At the BFI she adroitly deployed her exaggerated feminine moves of the sixties, with several big arm swings to keep her legion of fans happy. Afterwards in the corridor as I was making my way towards the private party, I was nearly knocked over by a group of men who were mobbing Rita for autographs. I haven’t seen a celebrity creating that amount of havoc at the BFI since Jane Fonda was in the building signing copies of her autobiography My Life So Far back in 2006.
At the party I exchanged brief greetings with BFI luminaries Eddie Berg and Vic Pratt, spent a little longer speaking to Will Fowler about the Flipside releases, and managed a proper conversation with my fellow-freelancer Kim Newman; this latter exchange covered everything from Lester’s films to our shared family connections to Elgin Crescent in west London. The BFI had provided crisps and peanuts for revelers, but I wanted to eat something more substantial and so left after a couple of drinks. While I had a curry on my mind, of more interest to everyone else will be the viewing menu on offer to those that grab hold of the current and upcoming BFI Flipside releases. Of the future releases I’m particularly looking forward to Privilege (1967, directed by Peter Watkins), coz it must be coming on for 30 years since I last saw this very curious flick about the corporate control and political manipulation of a rock star. As already mentioned, out next week are two of the most important films of the mondo movie genre: London In The Raw and Primitive London. There are variant versions of each film on the disks plus a host of extras, including two great documentary shorts about London strip clubs – Strip (1966) is served up alongside London In The Raw, while Carousella (1966) acts as a side-dish to Primitive London.
And now it’s time to declare my personal interest in all this. I contributed an essay to the London In The Raw booklet, while Iain Sinclair provides a companion-piece to my text for Primitive London. I got quite carried with this engagement, since it was an opportunity to write about London clubs in the 1960s… and very quickly my composition became too long to accompany a film release. Therefore, I chopped out a lot of material before I emailed the text to the BFI and reformatted some of that into an earlier blog (the opening and closing paragraphs were written to make this material work as an online post, the rest is unrevised material I’d cut from my BFI essay). I find the subject of London clubs of the 1960s endlessly fascinating, which is why I ran way over the word count the BFI provided and had to take rather a lot out. Originally, I’d wanted to conclude with a paragraph or three of contextualising remarks, but in the end this also had to go. One of those ‘lost’ paragraphs read as follows:
“The fascination with strip and hostess clubs evident in the work of both sets of film-makers represented on this disk reflects the fact that such establishments proliferated in London during the sixties as a direct consequence of the 1959 Street Offences Act, which attempted to sweep prostitution off the city’s pavements in line with the desires of the Wolfenden Committee. It should go without saying that the sex industry didn’t disappear, although large parts of it did relocate to both dank basements and apparently swanky clubs. When strip clubs spread to the vast bulk of cities in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar cinematic obsession with such establishments was evident in many North American movies. That said, to my eyes and ears, London in the sixties is infinitely preferable to the American mid-west of the nineteen-nineties; the girls were more varied in those largely pre-plastic surgery days and the music was better. The British pop-cultural obsession with strippers was still very much in evidence a few years after the films gathered here were made; one example being the song The Girls Are Naked issued by top London mod act The Creation as the b-side to their May 1968 Polydor single Midway Down.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Arnold L. Miller. Arnold Louis Miller, Arnold Miller, Arthur Lowe, BFI, British Film Institutes, Carousella, Dick Lester, Dudley Moore, Eddie Berg, Elgin Crescent, Flipside, France, Harry Secombe, Iain Sinclair, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Edwards, Kim Newman, London, London In The Raw, Marty Feldman, May 68, Midway Down, My Life So Far, occupations movement, Paris, Peter Cook, Peter Watkins, Polydor Records, Primitive London, Privilege, prostitution, Richard Lester, Rita Tushingham, Sidney J. Furie. The Leather Boys, sixties, south London, Southbank, Spike Milligan, Street Offences Act, Strip, The Bed Sitting Room, The Creation, The Girls Are Naked, Vic Pratt, west London, Will Fowler, Wolfenden Committee
Posted in culture gossip & parties, film | 22 Comments »
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
As noted in an earlier post on this blog, at the end of 1961 my mother Julia Callan-Thompson moved to a two room top floor flat at 24 Bassett Road, London W10. The area around Bassett Road had been developed as a series of housing estates in the 1860s in conjunction with the extension of the Metropolitan train line on a viaduct constructed over the Portobello stream and marshes to Ladbroke Grove. The station at this latter location was originally called Notting Hill, which is why an area that might more properly be designated Notting Dale is better known by the former designation. The development of the area was followed by an economic depression, which led the likes of nineteenth-century busy-body Florence Gladstone to complain: “Whole streets were not inhabited by the class of people for whom they were designed.”
In the late-nineteenth century rather than housing city clerks, many of the buildings in the Ladbroke Grove area were under multiple occupancy by members of the working class, and in particular Irish labourers who’d been forced by famine to migrate and were engaged in the construction of new railways in the area. Multiple working class occupancy of these building was something that would continue for more than a hundred years. By the beginning of the sixties the rail network was still providing work for many of the recent immigrants who were enlivening this drab part of west London; although now rather than constructing railways, a substantial proportion of those who’d been enticed to the metropolis from the West Indies with promises of remunerative employment were involved in the smooth running and maintenance of public transport.
24 Bassett Road is a large house with some neo-classical features such as the pillars that hold up the porch to the main door. By the early sixties the building’s generous rooms had been carved up into smaller units. I’ve been told the property was owned by a Trinidadian called Sandy Dalton-Brown who liked bohemians. My mother made friends with her landlord and would visit him at his home near Hyde Park. At one point he offered to sell her both the flat she rented and that of another tenant, so that the rent from the second flat would pay off the one hundred percent mortgage which he offered to arrange for the two dwellings. Before the introduction of stricter controls on British building societies at the start of the sixties, it was common for property speculators to off-load properties to both tenants and other parties with one hundred percent mortgages which the seller had pre-arranged. Indeed, constant resale was one of the best ways of inflating the value of slum dwellings. Despite the prices paid under such arrangements generally being above market value, ownership still proved cheaper than renting.
Apparently my mother didn’t like the idea of being a landlady, so she opted to remain a tenant. Dalton-Brown seems to have been known by this double-barrelled moniker in bohemian circles, which is how he is listed in my mother’s address book, without a forename or even a prefix such as Mister. It may be that Dalton-Brown was fronting as landlord for the real owner of the property, since the use of nominee landlords was common in Notting Hill at the time. If Dalton-Brown ever actually owned either parts or all of 24 Bassett Road in the early sixties, he’d at least partially sold up before my mother moved out since the Kensington General Rate book for the year to 31 March 1966 contains the following listings: Basement Flat – Dalstead Property Co. Ltd; Ground Floor Rooms – Miss Mary Murphy crossed out and entered by hand G. J. Warden; First Floor Rooms – The Occupier; Second Floor (on which my mother lived) – Miss Whitehurst. Dalton-Brown is said to have been involved in many different business ventures, and also seems to have owned a race horse which was kept at a stable in the north of England.
In one of the two basement flats was a Trinidadian musician called Russell Henderson who’d come to London in 1951 as a mature student and never left. Henderson was a first cousin to Sandy Dalton-Brown – who at one time owned or managed at least part of the property – and some of those in Henderson’s circles referred to his and my mother’s landlord as Uncle Sandy. In 1952, Russ Henderson linked up with Sterling Betancourt. Together they made some recordings of Henderson’s piano music which were released as singles by Melodisc. With the addition of Mervyn Constantine they switched to playing pan drums and became The Russ Henderson Steel Band. When Constantine left the band, it was augmented by Ralph Cherrie and his brother Max Cherrie. As well as performing regular gigs, they also appeared on the radio and in both TV shows and feature films; including Danger Man, The Saint and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (Amicus, 1965, in a segment also featuring Roy Castle and the Tuby Hayes Quartet!). By the mid-sixties, with a minor shift in the line-up, Henderson was running his ensemble as both a steel band and a jazz quartet. For the latter, he’d sit at the piano, Sterling Betancourt played drums, Max Cherrie was on double bass and Gigi Walker blew the trumpet. The group had house spots as both a jazz ensemble and a steel band at different London venues, and also played further afield. Henderson continued to make records in the sixties but all are now deleted and they have become collector’s items; however, one of his best tracks, West Indian Drums, appeared a few years ago on the CD compilation London Is The Place For Me Volume 2.
In the second basement flat at 24 Bassett Road was a Jewish refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster (covered in an earlier blog). Both Forster and Henderson lived at 24 Bassett Road from the nineteen-fifties right through to the mid-eighties. Forster appears to have died in the mid-eighties, while Henderson moved on to other parts of west London, where he still lives, now aged 85. Another very interesting occupant of a conversion at this address in the earlier part of the sixties was Peter Hammerton, who’d set up an Interplanetary Society in the late-fifties and was a fixture of early science-fiction conventions. Hammerton was a friend of the writer Michael Moorcock who also lived in the area. During the half-decade my mother rented her two room flat at 24 Bassett Road, she would take long trips to Europe but nonetheless liked having somewhere secure to come back to, despite being away for periods of up to six months. Eventually in the summer of 1966 she moved on to a pad at 55 Elgin Crescent W11; this street is only a short walk from Bassett Road, but the flat my mother lived in there was located to the east of Ladbroke Grove, rather than to its west like her old gaff.
At the time it was first developed in the 1860s, the area around Elgin Crescent was known as The Stumps. A hundred years before my mother moved there it was described in Building News as ‘a graveyard of buried hopes’ with ‘naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls and slimy cement work’. The terraced houses in Elgin Crescent were of a similar pseudo-classical design to the detached building my mother had just left in Bassett Road albeit with fuller whitewashing. When Julie moved in, the property at 55 Elgin Crescent had just been divided into flats by a development company, so she signed a three year lease which she was able to sell on at a small profit when she left for Paris less than six months later.
In the mid-sixties, Michael X’s mother Iona Brown lived in Elgin Crescent, and she made money practising Obeah and dispensing spiritual advice from her flat. However, Iona Brown died in May 1966, shortly before my mother moved to the street. Someone my mother had befriended and who lived in Elgin Crescent at the same time as her was Terry Taylor. He had a place right by Finches pub, possibly at number 16. At the end of 1966, my mother left London to live in Paris and after a year there travelled on to India. When my mother took up living in London full-time once again in the summer of 1969, it was initially in a flat she shared with Terry Taylor and other friends at 58 Bassett Road. But that’s another story….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Bassett Road, Building News, central London, Dalstead Property Co. Ltd, Danger Man, Doctor Terror's House of Horrors, Elgin Crescent, Finches, Florence Gladstone, G. J. Warden, Gigi Walker, Hyde Park, India, Interplanetary Society, Iona Brown, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kensington, Ladbroke Grove, London, London Is The Place For Me, Mary Murphy, Max Cherrie, Mervyn Constantine, Michael Moorcock, Michael X, Miss Whitehurst, North Kensington, Notting Dale, Notting Hill, Paris, Peter Hammerton, Portobello, Ralph Cherrie, Roy Castle, Russ Henderson, Russell Henderson, Ruth Forster, Sandy Dalton-Brown, sixties, Sterling Betancourt, Terry Taylor, The Russ Henderson Steel Band, The Saint, The Stumps, Tuby Hayes Quartet, West Indian Drums, West Indies, west London
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 33 Comments »