Posts Tagged ‘psychogeography’

Let’s Kill The Novel & Remake The World! Stewart Home interviewed by Raül De Tena

Monday, April 30th, 2012

This is an interview I did recently with H Magazine around the publication in Spain of my novel Memphis Underground. They will have run a Spanish translation but here it is with my original answers in English. I know some of my bilingual readers have enjoyed comparing the original interviews about the Spanish edition of Memphis Underground and their translations… so this provides another opportunity for them to do so. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish but are fluent in English, you get to read something you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I haven’t run through all the Spanish interviews I’ve done yet but I’m tempted to call it quits with this one for now…

Raül De Tena:. At one point in Memphis Underground you say that you’re gonna use one of the sentences you just wrote to answer a random journalist. That part of the book scared me when I started to write down these questions… Are you gonna answer the truth and only the truth in this interview? Or is it better keep the mystery to make the interview more appealing?

Stewart Home: I don’t think I wrote that in the book but this might be because of the way the passage has been translated or perhaps you’re misremembering it. My memory is often so faulty that I’ve no idea about the actual content of things I wrote last week, let alone a few years ago! And the same goes for what I read, but much more so!

Anyway, I think the passage you’re referring to is the following: “In my rereading of Marcuse, I paid particular attention to the chapter entitled The Aesthetic Dimension, since I thought it might be amusing to bamboozle a journalist by using this as a theoretical justification for my own work.”

This is from one of the diary sections in Memphis Underground written as if it is a piece of non-fiction by me, rather than one of the fictional sections, so I’m not surprised it would worry you as a journalist. In journalism (and I too write journalism) we assume that truth is something we can reach, but as an anti-novelist I have to assume it is something slippery that escapes us but that can be approached more closely through fiction than non-fiction. The tricky bit here is that Memphis Underground contains both fiction and non-fiction, or at least blends them.. One of the intended effects of much of my prose is to amuse – and also if the reader thinks deeply about how I’m giving them laughs, to leave them all at sea! Confused? You will be!

Raül De Tena: Anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography are three important concepts in Memphis Underground. Do you think a reader who doesn’t know anything about those concepts can enjoy the book? Or you don’t even care about those considerations?

Stewart Home: I don’t think most people need to know anything about anything to enjoy the book – as long as they haven’t been brainwashed into thinking about ‘literature’ in the restricted sense of bourgeois subjectivity. Those who think that books are about linear plot and plodding characterisation will have a real problem with my writing. We can liken those with this outlook to people who think paintings have to be representational – they’re living in the past and incapable of understanding contemporary culture. But aside from plonkers of this stripe, I don’t think anyone will have any problems understanding Memphis Underground. I think it’s a very accessible book for contemporary readers, and they’ll laugh their asses off as they go through it.

Raül De Tena: The concepts I just mentioned are referred to a lot in the book, but how do anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography influence your writing and your style in Memphis Underground?

Stewart Home: Of these three concepts the most important is anti-literature – this is a tradition that predates literature and that encompasses black humour, theory and experimentation with prose and poetic forms. One could cite anything from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to the works of Kathy Acker by way of Karl Marx…. The important thing is not to restrict yourself to the genre known as literary fiction. Most of the contemporary writers promoted as being worthwhile by the bourgeois press are in fact boring, and this is precisely because they project themselves as being serious. To do anything worthwhile you have to get over the adolescent mania for being po-faced and grow up and grow into humour and laughs. The adolescent thinks that to be adult you have to always act like grown up – whereas the precise opposite is the case. To be properly grown up and to do anything really serious you have to do it with humour and levity. There are just way too many middle-aged writers out there whose misplaced sense of ‘gravity’ and importance reveals them to still have the minds of adolescents. Only anti-literature attains the levity that is a necessary corollary to real gravity.

Moving on, neoism is a prefix and a suffix without any content…. but then as Hegel demonstrated if you have nothing you have to have something because one is meaningless without the other. And if you’ve something and nothing then you must have becoming and from this foundation Hegel builds his entire philosophical system – which I find pretty hilarious, although I wouldn’t go along with it’s final realisation in the Prussian State and God, which is unfortunately where Hegel took it…. Returning to neoism, if it is nothing then it must be everything… And it can be pretty much whatever you want, so my take on neoism in Memphis Underground is subjective and possibly solipsistic!

Finally as regards this question, psychogeography is now so popular with the chattering classes and sections of the literary establishment that pretty much everyone who ever had anything to do with it in its earlier incarnations tends to disavow it. But for the situationists it was a way of drawing up new emotional maps of the city, although before doing this they’d have to get blind drunk or really stoned and then wander around letting the unconscious solicitations of the architecture draw them on. It was only by getting completely out of it that the situationists were able to do psychogeorgraphy and this is something that seems to be lost on many contemporary practitioners of the craft… and may explain why their results, in England anyway where psychogreography seems to be most popular, are so utterly useless…

Raül De Tena: When you read through Memphis Underground you are left thinking that the book is a direct attack on two concepts. First of all, art as a business and as a dead scene. Is there no hope for art in the 21st Century?

Stewart Home: As the radical New York group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker (UATWM) declared back in the 1960s: “Art is Dead Baby! Burn The Museums!”

Raül De Tena: It’s interesting that the only hope for art in Memphis Underground is precisely through fakery. But even that practice seems to be pretty ridiculous… Don’t you trust the fake as a motor for art any more? Or is even fake art a business?

Stewart Home: Well you know what they say – “Fake It Till You Make It!” This is also called the ‘act as if” doctrine and in English it is a common catchphrase that exhorts us to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence. Fake art all too often falls into this trap and becomes real art, and I’m definitely faking it here coz I just copied and pasted the previous sentence from Wikipedia…. But to return to what I was saying, even being landed with the label art is a problem nowadays because it means people can put something that might otherwise disturb them in a little mental box and not even think about it. This was not a dilemma the Dadaists had to deal with when they embraced the negative a century ago… But Dadaist art trapped in museums does become a part of this problematic. Duchamp says somewhere that art dies (it has a life of maybe 30 or 40 years) and then ends up in graveyards called museums…. The same can be said of anti-art and fake art nowadays, except the half-life of such projects is getting shorter by the minute.

Raül De Tena: Your interest in fakery seems to relate to the annihilation of individuality (this is the other main concept Memphis Underground appears to be attacking). In the book you’re always ‘playing’ with the reader so the reader never knows who’s really the main character – or if it’s even the same person. Are you trying to annihilate the usual certainty of literature about the main character’s individuality and psychology? Or is this just a game played with the reader?

Stewart Home: There’s a difference between us all being unique individuals (although not necessarily that unique in our desires and tastes) and the ideology of individuality. I see characterisation in literature and all psychology from Freud to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and beyond, as bourgeois. Therefore this trope in literary fiction and the psychoanalytic theories associated with it for the past hundred years or so do need to be smashed! So what you’re asking me about is more than a game played with my readers….

Raül De Tena: Memphis Underground seems to be divided into two parts. The first half of the book is more classical, and the second half is perhaps your revenge against those who thought the whole book was gonna be easy reading… Is that division into two parts intentional? Do you usually think about the accessibility of what you’re writing?

Stewart Home: I always think about the audience for what I do, but the audience does not have to be broad, although sometimes it is. No book is going to have universal appeal. Memphis Underground has four main parts and some nice fills between these… and the opening was designed to read like a really typical piece of bland contemporary writing, which is then smashed up against a description of a map like you’d find in the French nouveau roman. So the book does set up the expectation that it will be more conventional than it ends up being, and I rerun that trope as you move through the text. But I don’t think that makes Memphis Underground hard to read for those have open minds, but it does create an accessibility problem for those who have been conditioned in their expectations by conventional bourgeois literature….

Raül De Tena: Lady Di and Death appear as characters on Memphis Underground. I find this awesome… But didn’t you think it was gonna be a dangerous move? Do you think you succeed using them as characters?

Stewart Home: Unless you’re prepared to take chances, and really willing to fail, then you’re not going to move writing or any other cultural form forward. Lady Di was probably the biggest celebrity we had in England for a hundred years, and like all celebrities the coverage of her drained her of all real humanity until we were only left with a cipher…. So I don’t think I could easily go wrong with her… In his 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman has a knight play chess with a personification of Death and I thought that was hilarious. So that was my starting point but obviously I wanted to trash Death up and not treat ‘him’ too seriously. So the humour in my use of Death is intentional, whereas in Bergman’s case I suspect it was unconscious…But again judged on my terms I’d say my use of Death was a huge success….

Raül De Tena: You mention Joyce and Finnegans Wake as the death of literature. Haven’t you found any interesting authors after Joyce? Could you mention some and why you find them interesting?

Stewart Home: There are many… Clarence Cooper Junior for his vision of prison and junkie life. Blaster Al Ackerman for his fried humour. Ann Quin for her deployment of a ventriloquist dummy in her first novel Berg. Alain Robb-Grillet both for his use of repetition and multiple perspectives…. and also for attacking the bourgeois disdain for pleasure – of which humour and laughter are important examples, as well as eroticism which is the springboard for Robbe-Grillet’s critique. British beat novelist Alex Trocchi for being a friend of my mother, and the fact they dealt smack together…. The list could go on and on and on! But I’ll stop here!

Raül De Tena: Your vision of London in Memphis Underground is fairly negative. Has it changed recently? How is your vision of London right now?

Stewart Home: London is always best in winter and in a recession, it ain’t a pretty city but it can be picaresque. Unfortunately the fact that there is a global market in London property means that the process of gentrification is continuing and rather than the rich and poor living side by side as has been the case for hundreds of years, the city is in danger of turning into somewhere like Paris with poverty concentrated in a ring around the outside, that is to say in the suburbs. So London ain’t what it used to be but then change is an integral part of the urban experience. But London is now much more like any other European city than the place I knew as a kid and teenager, when it was much dirtier and more smashed up, but also more unique….

Raül De Tena: Music is pretty important in Memphis Underground… Aren’t you afraid someone could think you’re part of pop literature (such as Nick Hornby)?

Stewart Home: I wouldn’t mind being seen as a part of pop literature if that meant like Michael Moorcock or some cool sci-fi writers. But Nick Horby! Ha ha ha! He just completely sucks….

Raül De Tena: You’re gonna be in Barcelona in May as part of Primera Persona. What can we expect of your lecture?

Stewart Home: Expect the unexpected – and loads more of the same as you get in this interview! My writing will give you better orgasms, but seeing me in the flesh is even better!

Raül De Tena: Javier Calvo’s gonna be with you at Primera Persona. Do you know his work? What do you think about it?

Stewart Home: I don’t read Spanish but I’m told by people who do that his writing is fabulous. So it will be groovy to appear with him!

Raül De Tena: Right now in Spain you’re considered a big influence on some important writers. Do you think your work has any connection with contemporary Spanish literature?

Stewart Home: I feel a strong connection for sure – and especially to hot female Spanish writers… I think I can develop my relationship with Spanish literature much further by getting to know some of these lit chicks intimately. I’d particularly like to meet some Spanish girl power writers who are churning out novels about sex and proletarian revolution – and who like to wear short skirts and white boots! But even if they’re not writers but are hot and like to wear white boots and skimpy dresses, then I’ll still be happy to meet any Spanish girls when I’m in Spain or if they come to London….

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

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Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

Trippy Does Glasgow Again

Monday, December 12th, 2011

For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I’m always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who’d organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA “Scotland’s Turkish Kebab House” – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.

It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn’t eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.

I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina’s spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was ‘destroying’. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.

After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they’d closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina’s Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don’t use the internet, and much else besides. I’m a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.

On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow’s many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it’s sell-by-date. I wasn’t gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn’t buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.

I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren’t using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they’re not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden’s News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn’t consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden’s website:

Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n’brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was  caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.

Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it’s an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.

Aside from books, I always find Poundland’s DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn’t great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops.  On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it’s curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.

Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.

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

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Posted in culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitionism, performance | 23 Comments »

No, Or Santiago Sierra’s Latest Art World ‘Prank’

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid) is well known for his cruel and nihilistic pranks. To  save myself the effort of writing very much about Sierra (whose work is tedious but simultaneously serves to illustrate the complete decomposition of the institution of art), I’ve taken the following from a Wikipedia page about him: “Some of Sierra’s most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition… In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim Germany.”

Sierra’s cynicism and inhumanity are well illustrated by the examples above. He titillates the rich by locking them out of galleries, whereas when it comes to the wretched of the earth, Sierra delights in degrading them by providing a meagre wage in exchange for the performance of boring and humiliating tasks. Sierra’s treatment of those he hires demonstrates not just his repugnant inhumanity – his success as an artist is also based on some extremely cynical calculations about exactly what types of degradation inflicted upon the poor will most appeal to rich collectors.

As an adjunct to the Frieze Art Fair in London, Sierra’s new film No was screened last night to an invited audience at The Prince Charles Cinema just of Leicester Square. The promotion for the movie ran like this: “NO, Global Tour, 2011 A film by Santiago Sierra, Directed by Santiago Sierra, Filmed by Diego Santome, black and white film, 120 minutes. Santiago Sierra(‘s)… recent work, NO, GLOBAL TOUR, consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck. The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this large NO through various world cities… The film, full of all manner of references, does not aim for surprise but thought. Using the strict black and white that characterises his work, and with a soundtrack limited to a careful treatment of incidental sound, the film revitalises the road movie genre through a productive encounter with other languages and disciplines.”

The information that came with my invitation to the free screening was, of course, hype (as is the claim – sometimes made about Sierra – that his work is in some way ‘anti-capitalist’). Free beer and popcorn were a further enticement to attend. Rather than provoking ‘thought’, NO looked like someone had randomly strung together a bunch out-takes from one of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s TV movies – and with results that were far less enticing than those achieved by this pair of London psychogeographers. I went to the screening with the intention of watching the reaction of the audience, who looked bored shitless after ten minutes. Most had walked out before the end of the movie. I presume this is what Sierra wanted and that he’s more than happy with this result. For the rest of us NO is simply a bit of a yawn. The lettrists achieved far more with their deliberately boring films of the early-1950s, and if you want to be alienated in style then stick with the output of the French avant-garde of sixty-odd years ago. Sierra is strictly for the idle rich, and hopefully they won’t be with us for much longer.

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

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Posted in art criticism, film, scam | 22 Comments »

The Psychogeography Of Dundee – or, Ae Phor Ain’t Here!

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

I’ve always been rather fond of the psychogeographical device known as ‘the possible appointment’, and so I’m generally willing to make that extra bit of effort in order to fail to meet someone. Yesterday I went to Dundee where I narrowly missed hooking up with Ae Phor. To explain what happened I need to backtrack a bit.

In April 1984 I met Dundee based artist Pete Horobin in London, and started to collaborate with him on various projects. As a result,  from 1984 onwards I’ve visited Dundee on a fairly regular basis.  I liked the city and in the eighties I’d go there to pick up used books and vinyl for a fraction of the price they’d cost me in London. I’d often stay in Horobin’s flat, The Data Attic  on Union Street, right in the centre of town. When in Dundee I’d make durational videos,  sound pieces and other stuff, both with Horobin and on my own – and when I got fed up doing that I’d wander all over the town.

Horobin spent the eighties building up a vast archive of bizarre and banal material which he classified as ‘data’. He hoarded everything that crossed his path, since to him it was all ‘data’. More recently this material has been dispersed across Europe. What couldn’t be placed with archives such as Art Pool (Budapest) has been returned to those who’d made it. In recent years, various materials I’d either left in or send to the Data Attic were given back to me by a shadowy figure calling himself Haining. Six days ago I received an email message from an individual who identified himself Ae Phor stating that the Data Attic was being emptied in preparation for its sale, and that he wanted to make arrangements to pass back to me “a VHS video cassette + photos” . By way of reply, I proposed a final visit to 37 Union Street so that I could collect these goodies in person.

My initial suggestion was that I should travel to Dundee between Friday 7 October and Monday 10 October, and that I would drop in on the Data Attic for an hour or two. By the time Ae Phor got back to me suggesting I come on Monday (because on Friday he was planning to cycle across Fife, and would be away all weekend) my schedule had changed and I was only free to hang out in Dundee on 7 October. I emailed suggesting I arrive early on the Friday.  I heard nothing back (and when I phoned and sent texts there was still no reply) but in the true spirit of psychogeographical exploration, I decided to make the journey anyway. I considered it a ‘possible appointment’ .

According to the original 1950s psychogeorgraphers of the Lettrist International, the possible appointment was when a subject was asked to find themselves alone, at a precise time, in a preordained place. No one was there to meet them. Other variations include arranging to meet an unknown person, which it was claimed led to interesting interactions with strangers. I arrived at the downstairs street door of the Data Attic before nine in the morning. There was no reply when I rang the bell. Since I was keen to climb the steps to the top floor one final time, I decided to walk around and come back later.

I had a heavy cold and so I rejected the notion of walking up to the top of the Law Hill, or across the Tay Road Bridge into Fife, both things I’d done many times in the past. Instead I headed up to the Wellgate Centre. It was a curious experience since the recession had taken a heavy toll on Dundee. One of the pound shops at the entrance to this particular shopping mall had closed (it hadn’t been open very long, the unit was previously an outlet for Head and before that the bankrupt Virgin Records) and many other units were empty too – including one on the third level that until recently had been occupied by another bankrupt bargain bin chain called T. J. Hughes.

There is a Poundland on level two of The Wellgate, and there I also found a big new branch of the charity shop (thrift store) The British Heart Foundation, and another cut-price operation I’d not come across before – Home Bargains.  This outfit was occupying about half of the space previously used by the defunct chain Woolworths, the rest of it was still empty and boarded up.  On their website Home Bargains say they have more than 250 stores in the UK and they run the slogan Top Brands – Bottom Prices immediately beneath their name. Having looked at their Dundee store, I’d say this company was talking out of its arsehole with the claim about ‘top brands’.

That said, I did become mildly excited when I noticed Home Bargains were selling unicycles for £29.99. Since I’ve recently been doing readings from my books while standing on my head, I wondered if I could move on to riding a unicycle onstage while reciting my fiction. It took me a few seconds to realise that the continual movement necessary to avoid falling off the unicycle would prove distracting, and so it just wouldn’t work as an additional prop to my readings. I then moved on to wondering how a bargain store selling £29.99 unicycles in Dundee could possibly be a viable business…. It was a surreal proposition and left me wondering how long the chain would survive.

Two months earlier, filling in time while waiting to get a bus to Kaunas airport in Lithuania, I’d spent an hour or so in the Akropolis Shopping Centre, and it quickly became clear that Kaunas was another town that had been visibly devastated by the economic downturn. The Akropolis appeared even less financially viable than The Wellgate Centre in Dundee, since it was virtually empty; in every unit I entered there’d be no shoppers but several assistants, who’d descent like vultures asking if I needed help the moment I stepped through their door. In the end I fled and hung out at the bus station to avoid being harassed.

Returning to my trip to Dundee, I next checked out The Forum Shopping Centre and that was in even more of a sorry state than the Wellgate, with loads of empty units and no one looking like they were doing any business. I decided to skip the Overgate mall and head straight to Grouchos, my favourite used record store in the world! It has been interesting watching them shift back to selling more vinyl and reducing their stock of CDs and DVDs in recent years. Despite this, I didn’t have much luck finding any sounds I wanted. Grouchos did have a copy of Chuck Brown Live 87, the double album on Rhythm King, but they wanted £8.99 for it – and I knew I’d be able to find it online for under a fiver, so I gave it a miss. I’ve had some amazing vinyl bargains out of Grouchos over the past 27 years, but yesterday I left the store  bereft of vinyl.

By this time I had a slight fever and was starting to  hallucinate – what I though at first glance were rare 45s, turned out on examination to be worthless dreck- so I thought it might be a good idea to sit down and eat. I went to The Capitol – a Wetherspoons pub handily close to the bus station – and ordered a regular vegetarian breakfast for £3.10. When the platter arrived, it was a £4.20 large breakfast. There was way to much food, more than I’d paid for, but me being me I ate everything on my plate anyway. This is the story of my life, I’m always being given extra food; one time when I was staying in a hotel in Paris a waitress gave me two breakfasts every morning, one after the other, but nobody else was given double portions… I was very skinny and in my late-teens, I must have looked like I needed feeding up.

Eating too much and getting to sit down made me feel better. There was also free wi fi in The Capitol, unlike  some of the local cafes. When I checked my email I found a message from Ae Phor that had been sent while I was ordering my breakfast. It said: “this morning I left The Attic at 08.45 to cycle to Cupar via Leuchars. All of which indicates that we are fated not to see each other…” I’d missed Ae Phor by about 5 minutes, and then coming out of The Capitol I saw the bus I’d intended to catch whizzing down the street. Before I finally got out of Dundee, a distraught woman asked me if I could call her mobile because she’d lost it. I dialled the number from my phone and her mobile turned out to be in the front pocket of her handbag, which she’d not looked inside. I met another flustered woman standing outside a supermarket a bit later on. She stopped me and asked if I’d carry a chair she’d just bought – she said she thought she’d be able to lug it home but it was too heavy for her. I suggested she call a cab….

Later, checking my email again, I found a message from Laura Simpson of The Cooper Gallery in Dundee. She’d sent me a link to the Retro Dundee blog and specifically a post about The Data Attic. Now that’s what I call psychogeography!

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

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Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, neoism | 22 Comments »

A possible appointment in Old Street with the literary heir of Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones…

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

A few days ago I got an email from Michael Morgan, who’d acted as press agent for Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (the greatest burglar ever and one of my mother’s cousins to boot): “I wonder if you could find time and get in touch with me regarding a story about ‘Ray the Cat’ in Wales on Sunday on 1st November?” I replied: “I have to go into The City on Friday, if you’re still based around Dalston maybe we could meet at the The Masque Haunt (the Wetherspoons on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row) at 3pm on Friday? If this isn’t good let me know another day or time that is… And if you’re not in Dalston any more let me know…” Since I’d not heard back, and I felt like heading home to The Island (Isle of Dogs E14 that is, not Long Island) when I’d finished my editorial tasks on the Semina fiction series in the Book Works office, I called Michael Morgan on his mobile. Unfortunately all I got was an answer service, so I left message saying I’d head to the Masque Haunt anyway in the hope that he was there.

I arrived bang on time and had the joy of going around all the solitary afternoon drinkers (about a dozen) asking if they were Michael Morgan. None of them were, but I got asked plenty of questions by a couple of drinkers who seemed a bit bored. Is he a relative? Why don’t you know what he looks like? Why do you want to find him? Where’s he from? Is he thin and tall? So as a psychogeographical exercise in the classic ‘letterist’ style, this non-meeting sparked off many conversations and was very revealing of the ambiance of that particular bar (progressively proletarian, during the daytime anyway, and far more so than when I used to drink there a decade ago)… but I’m still curious to know what there is to discuss about the recent Wales On Sunday article. The piece by Nathan Bevan merely repeats in Michael Morgan’s words a story I’d blogged way back in June using a rare example of Ray The Cat’s own writing.

The long and the short of it is that Ray was always insistent he became a major league burglar to avenge himself against the cops, who’d fitted him up and in the process inadvertently caused the death of his brother. It’s nice to see information about my most famous criminal relative becoming more widely known, since Wales On Sunday clearly reaches a few people who don’t regularly check this blog, but what really interests me is putting fresh information about Ray The Cat into the public domain. This was, of course, one of the things that really pleased me about my last Ray Jones blog, I was making available a story that as far as I knew was not until then a matter of public record. And it is, of course, particularly important that this tale of a fit-up becomes as well known as Ray’s legendary jewel thefts and prison escapes.

Hopefully I will manage to meet up with Michael Morgan soon, and get some new stories. But if you have any tales about Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, please post them in the comments below or email them to me via my website contact form. Only by stories about Ray being collected and disseminated can his legend live on!

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

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Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, True crime | 24 Comments »

The London Perambulator

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

I found myself back at the Whitechapel Gallery last night for the world premier of John Rogers’ film The London Perambulator. This documentary is a portrait of arsonist and ‘deep topographer’ Nick Papadimitriou. In 1975 the teenage Papadimitriou burnt down his school, and as a result got banged up in Ashford Remand Centre; a little later he found himself locked in a cell next to serial killer Dennis Nilsen at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Now in his fifties and after overcoming drug addiction, north London based Papadimitriou spends his days tramping around the liminal spaces of the city and collecting archival material connected to his walks. Some might call this psychogeography but since the term is now hackneyed, ‘deep topography’ provides a more attractive description. Papadimitriou’s fascination with suburban sprawl and sewage works might be seen as ‘eccentric’, and  The London Perambulator struck me as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s Channel 4 movies such as The Falconer and works by  the artist Luke Fowler including Bogman Palmjaguar and The Way Out (see right column on link for Fowler review).

Like Luke Fowler in his art film portraits, Rogers refrains from providing a straight account of Papadimitriou’s life, instead leaving it to the viewer to piece together biographical fragments. The London Perambulator has a grunge aesthetic, including shaky camera-work and with the outdoor shots filmed from a walkers’ perspective, so there are no panoramas or aerial shots. Intercut into this are talking head sequences of Papadimitriou’s three most famous friends speaking about him and his activities. The talking heads are media personalities Russell Brand and Will Self, complimented by writer Iain Sinclair. Self and Sinclair are shot in their homes, whereas Brand appears to be reclining in the offices of his Vanity Productions company. There is the odd shot of Papadimitriou in his flat, but mostly he is filmed outside, sometimes accompanied by Will Self. There are variations in sound quality, with the audio on the Brand segments being superior to everything else. Brand’s Vanity company produced The London Perambulator, Rogers works there and obviously studio equipment is generally superior to its portable equivalents. That said, the sound is acceptable throughout the film, and the changes in its quality are simply a part of its grunge aesthetic. In the interests of clarity, I also need to declare here that there are a couple of projects I’ve been developing with Rogers and Vanity for some time; so if anyone wants to make accusations of nepotism, I should be included in them for blogging about this film!

After the screening there was a panel talk featuring Rogers, Sinclair and Self, with Goldsmiths College academic Andrea Philips as chair. Rogers and Sinclair acquitted themselves well. Unfortunately, the discussion became somewhat strained when Andrea Philips asked Self whether there was a master/slave relationship between him and Papadimitriou. Self jumped down her throat by denouncing this as a detour into the bondage parlour, whereas it seemed to me that Philips was invoking Hegel’s famous and much discussed master/slave dialectic as a reference point.  Likewise, my impression was that Philips was putting Papadimitriou forward as the more senior partner in his obviously close  and collaborative relationship with Self, but the media personality angrily responded that Papadimitriou was in no way beholden to him. It is difficult to imagine anyone who had just seen Rogers’ film coming away with that impression, since after viewing it only a reversal of Self’s perspective would seem in the least bit feasible.

Philips appeared shaken by Self’s odd reply to her question, which might explain why having opened the session by talking up her own academic expertise in the areas of psychogeography and urban walking, she closed by asking why these activities appealed only to men. Sinclair soon put her straight by explaining that most of those wanting to do walks with him were women, and of course Philips’ own academic research also served to disprove her final assertion. Afterwards a good number of those present headed up to the Whitechapel bar, where Self’s claim that Papadimitriou was a contemporary Rimbaud came in for some heavy criticism. On the basis of the Rogers’ film, it would appear that Papadimitriou is principally concerned with observation, whereas Rimbaud’s focus was transformation; such differences clearly render Self’s claim untenable.

The London Perambulator was screened as a part of the East London Film Festival (23-30 April 2009, various locations).

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

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Posted in film, talks | 28 Comments »

Laura Oldfield Ford opening at Hales totally rocks!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

I first met Laura Oldfield Ford 5 years ago when what public profile she had was as an activist rather than an artist; but even then I could see she was serious about pictures as well as politics…  and she still is. Recently she’s become the most happening newcomer on the London gallery circuit, as the heaving crowd for the opening of her first solo exhibition at Hales Gallery on Bethnal Green Road last night proved. As I was walking through the door I ran into writer Janine Bullman. Once inside I got chatting with former Mute Magazine editor Anthony Isles who was standing next to Anna Harding from Space Studios, then Fabian Tompsett formerly of the infamous London Psychogeographical Association ambled over… Next I was saying ‘hi’ my long time collaborator Chris Dorley-Brown; followed by Tracey Moberly, Bill Drummond and Richard Thomas from Resonance FM. Familiar faces were flashing by faster than a speeding train… To give just one random example, Malcolm Hopkins from Housman’s Bookshop disappeared into the crowd before I could catch his attention. By the time I found Laura I’d been in the gallery close on two hours and the crowd was finally thinning as people headed on to The Owl & The Pussycat for post opening drinks. And since most of us had already had a few beers by then, we were certainly ready for a few more…

The opening was too busy for me to give the work the attention it deserved, but I’ve been looking at Laura’s pictures for a long time and they are most definitely a groove sensation. I ran into Adam Dant AKA Donald Parsnips on Bethnal Green Road a couple  of days ago and when I’d asked him if he was going to the Oldfield Ford opening, he’d replied: “Of course, she’s the new Daumier.” I’ll be going back to London 2013, Drifting Through The Ruins to check it out properly, and some of you can do so too, because it opens today (30 January) at 7 Bethnal Green Road and continues until 14 March 2009. In the meantime, here’s a bit of the gallery blurb about the exhibition:

“The main focus of the show is more than one hundred ink drawings that Oldfield Ford has recently produced as part of an ongoing project chronicling the impact of regeneration on London called 2013, Drifting through the ruins. The drawings form a broken narrative, focusing on part of east London currently being cleared for the 2012 Olympic site and documents the city as palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing. Oldfield Ford has made many walks (or ‘Drifts’) through these abandoned areas and imagines them populated by the semiotic ghosts of failed utopias in the year 2013.  ‘The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates’. ”

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

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Posted in exhibitions | 21 Comments »

Are the Belle de Jour blogs and books really the work of psychogeographer Iain Sinclair?

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

In recent weeks I’ve heard a lot of chatter about Iain Sinclair and Audi. The car manufacturer puts it this way: “Author Iain Sinclair joins filmmaker Chris Petit as they take an unusual trip though the North West of England. Available on The Audi Channel SKY 884.”

Richard DeDomenici sent me this message the other day: “What do you think of Iain Sinclair’s Audi advert? I have mixed emotions. Surprise, disappointment, and jealousy.”

I replied: “Oh I have no problems with it… except I don’t  like cars (everyone should use public transport)… but we all have to live out the contradictions of capitalism and Sinclair has paid his dues and deserves to be where he is… and he needs the money… I mean what can you say… He’d probably rather be doing something else but has to pay the bills….same goes for Chris Petit, it’s his advert too..”

Now I’m wondering if next time I see Sinclair he’ll be driving a new Audi rather than his old Merc. But what I’m really looking forward to his new book “Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report”, out later this year. That’s gotta be more interesting than an Audi advert, even one featuring Sinclair and Chris Petit!

In terms of Sinclair paying his dues, check out what Ben Watson has to say about him: “The notion of artistic ‘genius’ – a mysterious attribute granted to a few special individuals – allows journalists to pretend that their own lack of literary creativity derives from innate limitations rather than real conditions of life and thought. Sinclair’s ‘vision’ and ‘imagination’ do not spring from nowhere. Born in 1943, success has come late. A ‘literary failure’, he spent the 70s and 80s as a hippie drop-out, parks labourer and book-dealer, publishing his own small-edition runs of poetry. This was a crucial apprenticeship: a commitment to the Word vindicated by Downriver‘s power to awaken us to the realities of London”
From http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/critlit/SINCLAIR.htm.

Likewise, for my at length take on Sinclair’s films go to:
http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/luv/sinclair.htm.

And if you really want to know, I don’t think Sinclair is Belle de Jour… I mean compare their prose, could anyone (even me!) be that versatile?? And is it actually worth asking the question: “Is Chris Petit the man behind the Belle de Jour persona?” No, I don’t think so. Anyone for Ben Watson as Belle? Now that really would be a groove sensation!

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

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Posted in literature | 37 Comments »