https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/ Recent content on Better Living Thru Chemistry Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:52:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/09/18/send-cah-the-collected-poems-of-stewart-home/ Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:52:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/09/18/send-cah-the-collected-poems-of-stewart-home/ Stewart Home is a prose machine but when his settings malfunction sometimes poetry spews out instead. He is the author of sixteen novels including the pulp/avant-garde classics “Slow Death,” “Tainted Love,” “She’s My Witch,” and “69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.” His work since the late 1970s has included visual art interventions, music and seven books of cultural commentary. This is the first collection of his poetry, song lyrics and an appendix of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson’s poetry. Released: 9 May 2018 ISBN 978-0-9956450-6-6 Available here: https://morbidbooks.bigcartel.com/product/send-ca-h-the-collected-poems-of-stewart-home Below review of SEND CA$H by Tony Oats from: http://www.creatrixmag.com/stewart-home-send-cash/ YOU ARE YOUR OWN POETRY MACHINE! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/09/15/dual-flying-kicks-by-stewart-home-chris-dorley-brown/ Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:53:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/09/15/dual-flying-kicks-by-stewart-home-chris-dorley-brown/ Five Years, 3a Boothby Road, London N19 4A. June 2018 Dual Flying Kicks collaborative work by Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown plus solo work by Stewart Home. The show was facilitated & organised by Esther Planas with the assistance of the rest of the Five Years collective. Dual Flying Kicks is an exhibition by Stewart Home and Chris Dorley-Brown. The collaborative works are two series of photographs. Firstly Occult Androgyny, morphs in which Dorley-Brown has photographed Home imitating pictures of a witch incarnating the triple goddess in her maiden form. Home and this Spanish but London based witch merge to create a higher being that has evolved beyond binary gender oppositions. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/08/30/stewart-home-recent-manifestations/ Sun, 30 Aug 2020 13:37:06 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2020/08/30/stewart-home-recent-manifestations/ 13 SEPTEMBER – 13 DECEMBER 2020 Darling Pearls & Co, 18A Kinnoul Mansions, Rowhill Road, London E5 8EB. Free. Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia joint exhibition Sexus Maleficarum. 29 AUGUST 2020 Publication of Denizen of the Dead: The Horrors of Clarendon House edited by Stewart Home (Cripplegate Books, London). 29 JULY 2020 Publication of Stewart Home’s novel She’s My Witch (London Books, London). 25 FEBRUARY – 15 JUNE 2020 Scheduled Stewart Home events in Hong Kong, London & Trondheim postponed or cancelled due to Covid 19 pandemic. 21 FEBRUARY 2020 Close-Up Film Centre, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR. 7pm. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/07/30/the-berlin-wall-considered-as-a-work-of-conceptual-art/ Tue, 30 Jul 2013 23:03:43 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/07/30/the-berlin-wall-considered-as-a-work-of-conceptual-art/ When I think of Christo and Jeanne-Claude I think of their work Running Fence, and when I think of Running Fence I think of the Berlin Wall. Christo and Jeanne-Claude began work on Running Fence in 1972. The fence was 5.5 meters high and 40 kilometres long. It was constructed in Sonoma and Marin Counties, California. It was a fabric fence, supported by steel posts and steel cables, running through the landscape and leading into the sea. Towards the end of 1973, Christo and Jeanne-Claude marked the path of the fence with wooden stakes. On 29 April 1976, the work finally began after most of the necessary permissions had been granted. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/06/28/the-downing-street-affair/ Fri, 28 Jun 2013 23:01:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/06/28/the-downing-street-affair/ At the beginning of this month (June 2013) news broke of a love affair that might rock Downing Street, and this became known as the Downing Street Affair. The sex scandal was said to be so shocking that it could throw the British government into crisis if the public knew about it. However the so called ‘legacy’ media claimed the names of those involved couldn’t be published for legal reasons. The internet was rife with speculation as to who the middle-aged mystery pair might be – but within a week interest faded away. Because some things shouldn’t be allowed to disappear – and I’d like to know whether this was a real story or just ‘legacy’ media hype – I thought I’d blog a list of anagrams and near anagrams of ‘the Downing Street affair’. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/05/29/the-haters-still-love-to-hate-me/ Wed, 29 May 2013 16:50:43 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/05/29/the-haters-still-love-to-hate-me/ Clearing out my inbox I came across dozens of messages sent to me that I didn’t bother to answer – mostly they had come in via the webmail form on this website. Here are a couple of examples – sadly the abuse sent by these haters is very often homophobic….. Subject: stewarthome: The Tragedy of S.H.(I.T.) This is an enquiry e-mail via http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/senior/ from: Sewage Homo henry_haller@yahoo.com It’s truly a sign of the times that “artists” like S.H.(I.T.) can actually get devoted fans to waste their time by forming “societies” dedicated to their “work.” People like S.H.(I.T.) make up for their lack of intelligence and talent by living on the crud that has accumulated on the surface of our petroleum-intoxicated, suicidal, decadent civilisation, where they can amuse others whose are as tasteless as themselves by pulling “art” out of their assholes which titillates peoples’ lowest instincts, causing them to think that they’re actually doing something significant, when in fact you’re all just filling the howling emptiness of your lives with more garbage. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/04/30/the-avant-garde-pamela-anderson-versus-the-playland-arcade-punk-rock-steve-finbow-interviews-stewart-home/ Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:44:48 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/04/30/the-avant-garde-pamela-anderson-versus-the-playland-arcade-punk-rock-steve-finbow-interviews-stewart-home/ We were to meet in a pub that’s name is a mash-up of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – concealed identities, immorality, disassociation, depersonalisation and Gothic materialism – and the trending critical theory of hauntology all retro/futuristic absence/presence, the past inside the present. But the Masque Haunt has no postmodern pretences and the closest it gets to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is the library named after the 19th-century revolutionary socialist a ten-minute walk away in Clerkenwell. The Masque Haunt is a Wetherspoon’s boozer – low on prices, high on pissheads and it’s located on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row – Silicon Roundabout and William Blake, Bunhill Fields and the bodies of plague victims – hauntology a go-go. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/03/30/michael-roth-interviews-stewart-home-about-mandy-charlie-mary-jane-2/ Sat, 30 Mar 2013 01:38:56 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/03/30/michael-roth-interviews-stewart-home-about-mandy-charlie-mary-jane-2/ Stewart Home is a writer, artist and filmmaker living in London, England. His latest novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, came out on February 26 2013. Here’s an email interview I did with Stewart about this book. Unfortunately, we did not discuss Three-sided Football, King Mob, bread dolls, Lucio Fulci or Punk rock from Finland this time around. There’s always next time. What is Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane about? Stewart Home: Among other things the book addresses delusional thinking and in this particular novel it is manifested through the narrator Charlie, who is a hack academic with a drug problem. Charlie also has an obsession with porn and likes to have sex with unconscious women. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/02/25/tilting-against-the-mainstream-with-mandy-charlie-mary-jane/ Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:01:36 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/02/25/tilting-against-the-mainstream-with-mandy-charlie-mary-jane/ My new novel Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (published on 26 February 2013) was in part inspired by certain reviewers suggesting some of my earlier novels might be English equivalents of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The books that particularly attracted this comparison were Come Before Christ & Murder Love, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton. The reviewers concerned were trying to place me in a mainstream context and were doing no more (and no less) than what was expected of them as journalists. However, I know I’m a far better writer than Bret Easton Ellis – who I still view as unusual for a successful writer because he can actually write reasonably well – and so I decided to make a burlesque parody of what critics were saying about me. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/01/31/new-novel-by-stewart-home-published-26-february-2013/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:33:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2013/01/31/new-novel-by-stewart-home-published-26-february-2013/ Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane by Stewart Home is published February 26, 2013 by Penny-Ante Editions: Charlie Templeton, his wife Mandy, and student mistress Mary-Jane Millford survived the London terrorist bombings of 7/7, but history has yet to be made. To save the future of western civilization, Charlie, a schizoid cultural studies lecturer with a penchant for horror films and necrophilia, must fight the zombies of university bureaucracy and summon the will to become the last in a long line of mad prophets announcing the end of art. And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/10/william-s-burroughs-at-the-october-gallery/ Mon, 10 Dec 2012 01:56:05 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/10/william-s-burroughs-at-the-october-gallery/ All Out Of Time And Into Space is an exhibition of William Burroughs’ ‘art’ that opened last week and is on at The October Gallery (24 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AL) until 16 February 2013. Burroughs’ cultural reputation rests as much upon his autobiography (rich kid who became a junkie, rich kid who killed his wife in a shooting ‘accident’ and got off scot free etc.) as on anything he actually produced. Influenced by Brion Gysin’s ideas on the cut-up (using collage in writing), back in the 1960s Burroughs produced The Nova Trilogy of experimental novels which are both interesting and entertaining. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/05/horror-club-screening-shiver-directed-by-julian-richards/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:46:10 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/05/horror-club-screening-shiver-directed-by-julian-richards/ The queue to get into the second Horror Club evening at London’s Horse Hospital (4 December 2012) got a pair of foreign tourists excited enough for them ask me what was going on. I explained that I was going to a splatter film screening and although this was free you had to have your name down on the door to get in. Basically it was an event for the cognoscenti only! And to attract them (and me) there were free beers and free Horror Channel coffee mugs too. The real entertainment began when Emily Booth and Billy Chainsaw introduced a trailer of upcoming Horror Channel TV premiers of recent low budget splatter movies. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/01/2-classic-cafes-paris-and-london/ Sat, 01 Dec 2012 15:16:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/12/01/2-classic-cafes-paris-and-london/ The cheap and traditional cafe has been in terminal decline in the west end of London for some time now. And there is a real dearth of inexpensive and uncrowded places to sit down for a coffee later on in the evening. Bar Italia may have its fans but I’m not one of them – I prefer to go to Valentino at 13a Greek Street. It is very small but relatively inexpensive and uncrowded, and seems to be used more for take out coffee than by people stopping to consume their fare. I’ve never tried the food but I’m told it does what it says on the box: i. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/26/upside-down-in-oslo/ Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:51:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/26/upside-down-in-oslo/ Although I’ve been to Bergen in the west of Norway more times than I can count, until this weekend I’d never been to Oslo. The reason for the trip was that I had a few pieces in Again, A Time Machine at Torpedo/Kunsthall Oslo. Exiting the airport with Katrina Palmer, I found that Nordic precision led the coach driver to tell us that he only went to the central bus station not the central train station. We decided to risk this and arrived in central Oslo to discover – not very much to our surprise – that the central bus station was very very close to the central train station. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/22/take-a-birth-in-the-dark/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 23:12:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/22/take-a-birth-in-the-dark/ Ever since I was a small child I’ve enjoyed taking a bath in the dark. These days I usually shower but when I do take a bath I still like it to be as near to pitch black as possible. Hotel bathrooms are often best for this as they don’t have windows. I find it relaxing and I can let imagination run riot and enjoy acid flash backs; or just create new hallucinations in my mind. So I see a hot bath in the dark as a real trip. You don’t even need to take drugs coz you can achieve the same effects without them! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/18/more-good-news-starbucks-closes-down/ Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:14:37 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/18/more-good-news-starbucks-closes-down/ Walking down Great Ormond Street into Lamb’s Conduit Street in central London a few days ago I noticed that the Starbucks which used to be on the corner of these two roads had shut down. I haven’t yet been able to get any kind of ‘official’ confirmation as to why it closed down – and when I last checked about an hour ago Starbucks still listed it as open on their corporate website. A celebratory tweet of 26 October from The Lamb Bookshop is the earliest evidence of the shut down I could find from a quick online search: “Oh my gosh, Starbucks has closed on Lamb’s Conduit Street! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/14/a-bigger-splash-opening-at-tate-modern/ Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:35:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/14/a-bigger-splash-opening-at-tate-modern/ As The Tate, and in particular Tate Modern, gets increasingly populist there is a curious disjunction between the art world insiders who attend the private views and the audience at whom these exhibitions are aimed. On my way in to the opening of A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance I ran into Jemima Stehli, Milly Thompson and Coline Milliard, among others. The first room was reserved for the biggest names – who even most of the tourists who flock to Tate Modern will recognise – Jackson Pollock and David Hockney. It was here I ran into Avi Pichon who told me he’d just returned to London from a trip home to Israel. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/12/10-popular-activities-at-accident-and-emergency/ Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:02:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/12/10-popular-activities-at-accident-and-emergency/ Bleeding to death. Starting a fight. Hitting on a nurse. Sleeping (or at least remaining unconscious). Feeling the pain. Acting bored shitless. Agitated mobile phone conversations. Slumping in chairs. Throwing up. Falling down. Sobering up. Based on years of observation and the fact there are too many drunks in this world. Accident and emergency does not make for an entertaining Friday or Saturday night out, but you’d be surprised how many clubbers end up there! And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense! Comments Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-11-12 20:53:19 +0000 Chuckletastic! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/06/kali-yug-express-by-claude-pelieu-bottle-of-smoke-press-2012/ Tue, 06 Nov 2012 22:17:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/06/kali-yug-express-by-claude-pelieu-bottle-of-smoke-press-2012/ Claude Pélieu was an associate of William Burroughs and his 1973 anti-novel Kali Yug Express is a continuation of the cut-up experiments begun more than a decade earlier by Brion Gysin. Although the book appeared in French (the language in which it was written) and German back in the 1970s., Kali Yug Express has only just been published in English. The English translation seems to have been made by Pélieu’s second wife Mary Beach many years ago. Pélieu and Beach also had a hand in the translation of many beat writers – including Burroughs – into French. While Kali Yug Express takes some major cues from Burrough’s cut-up trilogy – The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express – in terms of its space age mythology, the more autobiographical elements of Kali Yug Express owe less to the book’s most obvious source of inspiration. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/02/why-do-men-love-kettlebells/ Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:13:37 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/11/02/why-do-men-love-kettlebells/ I was talking to a female fitness instructor I know today and she gave me her take on why kettlebells have become so popular among male fitness enthusiasts in recent years. My friend didn’t put what she was saying in the words I’m about to use, but the crux of her argument was that doing the key kettlebell exercise – the swing – was the closest a guy could get to having sex in a gym. The swing is all about hip thrust and thus resembles male movement in penetrative sex! My friend’s take on the kettlebell swing was that it was a good exercise since it raised the heart rate and used many different muscles, but that you could do it just as effectively with a dumbbell. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/27/the-unending-cesspit-of-jimmy-savile-and-the-1970s/ Sat, 27 Oct 2012 23:40:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/27/the-unending-cesspit-of-jimmy-savile-and-the-1970s/ I’d planned to write a blog about Max Clifford shooting himself in the foot over Jimmy Savile. I had the idea before I’d seen anyone else covering this but before I finished putting my piece together T_he Guardian_ run a story headlined: Jimmy Savile scandal: ‘celebrity hedonism no excuse for child abuse’ and straplined, ‘Child protection expert criticises Max Clifford for saying celebrities didn’t ask for birth certificates’. Paul Roffey may not say things the way I’d have formulated them but the points are basic and unfortunately still need laying out in this way because there are so many twerps around who can’t grasp the key issues. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/23/instituational-puritanism-censorship-wordpress-com/ Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:59:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/23/instituational-puritanism-censorship-wordpress-com/ While ‘free speech’ is something that goes down big in theory in capitalist heartlands like the United States, in practice the protestant heritage of the WASP elite in North America means that today’s online web 2.0 environment is in reality heavily censored. High-handed bans on platforms like Facebook, Photobucket and YouTube are well known and generate much commentary. To give just one notorious example, earlier this year Facebook removed the painting Ema by Gerhard Richter that had been posted on the platform by the Pompidou Centre to promote a Richter retrospective. Against such dumb-ass attitudes Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com likes to pose as a libertarian defender of freedom of expression on Web 2. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/19/10-quickest-ways-to-write-a-blog/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 04:16:37 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/19/10-quickest-ways-to-write-a-blog/ Re-blog someone else’s effort. Copy and paste (sneakier and better than re-blogging since you can take the credit without doing the work). Use pictures or videos. Write the first thing that comes into your head. Share your sexual fantasies with the world (but don’t be surprised if the world isn’t interested). An advice blog on how to blog (or even on how to blog quickly). String something together from your favourite song lyrics. What would Bruce Lee (or whoever you happened to dig) say about some current news story. And, of course, Bruce would say with regard to Alexis Wright – the alleged Zumba Madam with her own porn channel- that every good athlete deserves to be famous. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/14/aldo-tambellini-at-tate-modern/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 23:49:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/14/aldo-tambellini-at-tate-modern/ A year ago on this blog I described seeing the recreation of a 1960s Aldo Tambellini happening in Manhattan on 20 October 2011: …headed up to the Chelsea Museum for a performance of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero – a recreation of a happening performed by Group Center several times between 1963 and 1965. Black Zero featured some recorded sounds, including the voice of poet Calvin C. Hernton who couldn’t be there in person because he was dead. One of the improvised elements was Henry Grimes on double bass and Ben Morea on power tools adapted as musical instruments – and they were fabulous together! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/11/was-jimmy-savile-a-necrophile/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 23:58:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/11/was-jimmy-savile-a-necrophile/ One of the more surreal aspects of the unfolding scandal around media split-personality Jimmy Savile is the way British media reports of the disgraced disc jockey and TV presenter sexually assaulting young kids are finally being run so long after they did the rounds elsewhere (including on various nutjob conspiracy blogs). As soon as Savile died a slew of right-wing commentators felt free to put online stuff they’d have feared being sued about earlier. That said, the stories they tell had gone around the music business and elsewhere for years before they appeared in endless copy and paste jobs on web operations run by loonies who are deranged enough to believe that the Illuminati is something more than a very minor secret society that was successful suppressed in the eighteenth-century! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/07/urban-crawling-the-monument-london/ Sun, 07 Oct 2012 21:31:19 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/07/urban-crawling-the-monument-london/ While today’s urban climbers and psychogeographers attempt to access liminal anti-spaces, those opposed to elitism in culture are taking up urban crawling – that is to say they are visiting popular and crowded tourist spots. This weekend my urban crawl took me to The Monument on the north side of London Bridge. Designed by Christopher Wren in the form of a colossal Doric column and completed in 1677, it both commemorates The Great Fire of London and celebrates the rebuilding of the city. For £3 you can climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform 160 feet above the ground. Since the Monument is a seventeenth-century construction there is no lift up and it is amusing to hear 20 year-old tourists complaining about the the effort required to get to the top. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/04/10-more-blogs-i-didnt-get-around-to-writing/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:55:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/10/04/10-more-blogs-i-didnt-get-around-to-writing/ Charles Radcliffe’s mvoing tribute to his friend Chris Gray at Housmans Bookshop in London on 4 October 2012. This would have made a great blog – since I agree completely with Charlie that to appreciate Chris you have to look beyond the situationists and King Mob and read his book on LSD too…… Opening night of the Turner Prize… and why Elizabeth Price was the only artist up for the award who I both clocked at the event and spoke with on the night. That said, I did have a conversation with Luke Fowler about a week before the opening at a Tate dinner – but I haven’t exchanged a word with Paul Noble for years and I don’t think I’ve ever said more than hello to Spartacus Chetwynd…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/28/the-return-of-beatnik-legend-terry-taylor/ Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:16:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/28/the-return-of-beatnik-legend-terry-taylor/ On Wednesday (26 September) I did an event to promote Terry Taylor’s republished novel Baron’s Court, All Change, a book I’ve been championing for the past decade. The book was first issued in hardback back in 1961 when novelists weren’t expected to make endless promotional appearances, so I could appreciate that Terry – who is a very youthful 79 – didn’t want to get involved in all that. I was, however, pleased when he decided to travel down to London for the event. I checked with Terry before we started to see if he was alright with me mentioning he was in the audience, and he said this was okay. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/23/the-tube-map-is-not-the-territory/ Sun, 23 Sep 2012 12:41:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/23/the-tube-map-is-not-the-territory/ When I was standing on Homerton High Street in east London the other day a cyclist stopped and asked in an American accent if I could tell him how to get to Bermondsey and then Stratford. I had to explain to this psychogeographer that while Bermondsey might come before Stratford if you are travelling from central London on the Jubilee line, to get to the second location from Hackney he needed to go east and to get to the first he would have to go south. The cyclist decided he wanted to go to Stratford so I directed him east through Hackney Marshes. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/20/porno-girl-amina-noir-disappears-from-the-web/ Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:25:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/20/porno-girl-amina-noir-disappears-from-the-web/ One of the interesting effects of the protests against The Innocence of the Muslims film is the way they have led to the removal of data from the web. To take just one example – searches for the adult actress and model Amina Noir who appears in Innocence of the Muslims currently turn up a number of very recently dead links. If you try to see individual images of Noir on the Model Mayhem site you get a message saying: “This user is not here atm. bye.” And if you try to access her profile at Model Mayhem you get a message saying: “Unable to show profile #1201168 This member is either awaiting approval or has removed their profile from the site. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/17/from-the-sex-life-of-jesus-to-the-innocence-of-the-muslims/ Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:39:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/17/from-the-sex-life-of-jesus-to-the-innocence-of-the-muslims/ Looking at press coverage of The Innocence of the Muslims (2012) I’m not particularly surprised I’ve yet to find any that compares the reception of this film to the reaction that greeted Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s attempts to make the movie The Sex Life Of Jesus in the 1970s. Before even starting to shoot his flick Thorsen’s found himself vilified in the media and banned from the UK and many other countries. Thorsen had planned to make the film in Britain but was forced to (temporarily) abandon the project under intense opposition from Christian morality campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, Queen Elizabeth II (the fundamentalist head of the Church of England, as well as head of the British state), then British Prime Minister James Callaghan, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan (Elizabeth II’s top Church of England hatchet man of the time). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/13/the-end-of-cinema/ Thu, 13 Sep 2012 23:34:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/13/the-end-of-cinema/ The ongoing transformation of human social organisation is reflected in the transformation of cultural forms. This is, of course, why the lettrists announced back in the early 1950s that: “the cinema too must be destroyed!” Right now movies look pretty superannuated in comparison to gaming and social media. Even Hollywood bores like Brad Pitt are admitting there is no way they are going to get the kind of upfront salaries they did in the past. However, Pitt is wrong when he claims the economic crisis alone is responsible for doing-in Hollywood. Downloading and file sharing are games changers as much for film as for music. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/ Sun, 09 Sep 2012 20:51:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/ Self-obsession, self-referentiality, solipsism, egotism and narcissism: «a href=“http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882> The sheer amount of resources poured into search engine optimisation (SEO) which is a zero sum game: «a href=“http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882> The reduction in the number of items in list blogs as attention spans shorten. Lists blogs are increasingly made up of less than ten items: «a href=“http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882> Repetition of basically the same information again and again: «a href=“http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882> Link wheels creating a pattern of links that flow from one website to another and which finally link to a targeted website requiring promotion (SEO): «a href=“http://stewarthomesociety. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/05/dogging-and-psychogeography/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:46:02 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/05/dogging-and-psychogeography/ For me there is little if any point in defending the historical standing of the Lettrist International. Histories are always contested and a passive contemplation of the past is pointless. As the Lettrist International knew it is a matter of bringing the past back into play or else forgetting it. In the 1950s the Lettrists adopted the term psychogeography because they liked its pleasing vagueness but today in the anglophone world this word is totally recuperated. Psychogeography in England is now a matter of middle-class literary hacks walking around urban and suburban spaces and then acting as if they have simultaneously swallowed a thesaurus and a very bland work of local history and are ever so politely regurgitating both at once. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/02/turn-turn-turn-spinning-away-from-the-mysticism-of-the-dervishes/ Sun, 02 Sep 2012 21:36:02 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/02/turn-turn-turn-spinning-away-from-the-mysticism-of-the-dervishes/ When I was a toddler I used to like spinning around and around for long periods of time. Sometimes I’d fall down, while on other occasions I’d stop still standing up and marvel at the room still spinning around me despite my movements having ceased. When I first tried acid as a teenager it took me right back to these early childhood experiences of spinning. And although those first LSD experiences are a few decades behind me I can still dig whirling around and around. I was spinning around this morning for the first time in several months and it really grooved me as a trippy experience. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/28/10-reasons-why-list-blogs-suck/ Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:51:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/28/10-reasons-why-list-blogs-suck/ The numbered lists found both online are all too often incoherent – rather than making real connections the blogger just ranks random statements. Best of lists are not only subjective, ninety-nine percent of the time they’re not nearly subjective enough – for example, check out the many lists of ‘best opening lines of books’ and notice how all too often these are simply lists of famous ‘canonical’ books. Ditto best films or albums of all time lists. These aren’t so much what the blogger likes as what the blogger thinks their audience will recognise and they (the blogger) ought to like to demonstrate their ‘fine’ (in reality below-average and handed down from square teachers) tastes. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/25/when-will-the-art-bubble-burst/ Sat, 25 Aug 2012 23:22:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/25/when-will-the-art-bubble-burst/ An economic bubble is trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably above the intrinsic value of the product or service in question. In other words an economic bubble is the exchange of products or assets at inflated prices. Some of the more notorious economic bubbles in recent years have been in assorted property markets – with crashes in the value of property occurring from 2005 onwards in various markets around the world. The US property bubble in particular – and the sub-prime mortgages tied to it – sparked the current financial crisis and could also be said to have burst the banking and financial industries bubble. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/22/august-is-a-slow-month-for-news/ Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:07:35 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/22/august-is-a-slow-month-for-news/ August is a slow month for news – but remember kids that’s because the news is manufactured by public relations departments and this is when they go on summer holiday in the northern hemisphere. This year we had the misfortune to have the Olympics to obliterate the more usual silly season stories. What amazes me is that much of the media claimed that even cynics were won over by The Games during and after the London Olympics. I haven’t seen any change in attitudes among the people I know who opposed the Olympics for screwing over people in east London. Likewise, while one might admire the skill of some of the athletes, for me the Olympics was still an exercise in corporate branding and patriotic bullshit. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/18/mister-trippy-at-sight-and-sound-greatest-film-poll/ Sat, 18 Aug 2012 23:41:41 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/18/mister-trippy-at-sight-and-sound-greatest-film-poll/ A month or three ago the BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine asked me to contribute my top ten films of all time for their 2012 critics poll. Now the BFI has published the results of their poll listing both the top 250 films and the choices of each individual critic! You can find that here. I was pleased to see that my tastes fell completely out of line with dominant critical opinion. As far as I can make out nine of the ten films I picked were unique to me. And my bottom and final choice Videodrome appears to have been nominated by only one other of the 846 critics who contributed top ten lists. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/12/finnish-bed-hopping-a-close-encounter-with-high-culture/ Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:18:38 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/12/finnish-bed-hopping-a-close-encounter-with-high-culture/ Today someone starting a conversation about the architect Alvar Alto reminded me of a funny incident that happened in Finland back in 1995. I’d done a reading in Tampere and had gone back to Helsinki to stay for one night with the writer and musician Petteri ‘Pete’ Paksuniemi. Pete insisted I have his bed and said that he’d sleep on the sofa. So I crashed out in a very comfortable bed at maybe three in the morning. Around seven Pete’s girlfriend – who was closely related to both Alvar Alto and the composer Jean Sibelius – came home and got into bed. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/09/the-chus-martinez-project/ Thu, 09 Aug 2012 21:38:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/09/the-chus-martinez-project/ Chus Martínez is a relatively obscure Spanish guitarist who in the late-sixties and early-seventies played cheesy easy listening tunes with this band – often covers of well known hits. Given Martinez’s failure to conquer the world musical scene he can be interpreted as a symbol of heroic failure, and his name has been specially selected for a new multiple identity project in the tradition of Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett. The Chus Martínez moniker has the advantage of being one that might belong to either a male of a female since Chus as a first name does not appear to be gender specific. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/07/celebrities-suck-thats-official/ Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:26:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/07/celebrities-suck-thats-official/ Seeing the pictures of British Olympic gold medal winners with pop celebrities in the papers today reminded me that for some time I’d intended to post a blog about why celebrities suck. I’d had the idea of doing this long before cyclist Bradley ‘Wiggo’ Wiggins said in his post-Olympic win speech that he disliked celebrity culture. Anyway there is the papers today is Wiggo with an arm around Paul Weller in a Shoreditch nightclub, alongside speculation that Weller inspired Wiggo’s sideburns. Paul Weller is a paradigmatic example of a celebrity who sucks. Back in the mid-seventies one of my mates had older brothers who were close friends of Weller – which is how I became acquainted with this particularly poxy poseur in his pre-fame days. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/04/10-most-popular-comment-topics-on-this-blog-why-they-bore-me/ Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:09:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/04/10-most-popular-comment-topics-on-this-blog-why-they-bore-me/ No matter what the original topic of my posts, sooner or later those commenting on them get back to the same old things they always want to talk about. Here are 10 topics I rarely dissect, examine, rehash or argue over but that spammers just can’t leave alone: Penis enlargement. When you’re a swinging big dick like me you just don’t need penis enlargement, and nor do any of my readers about half of whom don’t have cocks anyway because they’re female. How to monetise your blog. If those offering these services were able to monetise their own blogs they’d be doing that rather than trying to scam me out of dosh by offering to teach me how to become an “internet millionaire”. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/02/forget-the-olympics-play-3-sided-football-in-south-london-this-saturday/ Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:41:12 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/02/forget-the-olympics-play-3-sided-football-in-south-london-this-saturday/ This Saturday (4 August 2012) there will be a three-sided football tournament at Fordham Park between Deptford and New Cross in south-east London. The games are scheduled to run from 11am to roughly 4pm. You can turn up as an individual and join a team there or bring a whole 5-a-side team with you. Or just go as a spectator. There is plenty of information about 3-sided football online and I’ve also blogged about it here. The game is played with three teams and three goals making it more strategic than two -sided football- if you want to know more check it out elsewhere by using a search engine or going to Wikipedia. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/01/forget-the-sport-london-2012-is-actually-a-psychogeographical-activity/ Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:09:10 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/08/01/forget-the-sport-london-2012-is-actually-a-psychogeographical-activity/ Warned in advance of travel chaos during the 2012 Olympics due to overcrowding on the transport system, local people have been doing everything they can to avoid central London. Some of my acquaintances were actually told by their employers that during the games they should find accommodation within walking distance of their jobs to ensure they clocked in on time – since it wasn’t going to be feasible for them to commute across London. Many decided they didn’t want to put up with such bullshit and took holidays to get out of London during the Olympics. As a result despite detours, Zil lanes and closed roads, it is actually much easier to get around the city than is usually the case. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/29/london-disappears-is-replaced-by-a-fake-olympic-image-of-itself/ Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:53:33 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/29/london-disappears-is-replaced-by-a-fake-olympic-image-of-itself/ Even before the opening ceremony for the Olympics central London was strangely deserted. There were less people most places I went and a lot less traffic. Every now and then I’d run up against barriers to hold back crowds that were supposedly going to materialise to watch the Olympic flame procession – but I was pleasantly surprised by how few people appeared to be interested in this, although the media and Olympic organisers claim this non-event attracted huge crowds. Now when I go into corner shops – such as newsagents – the owners complain that the Olympics has ruined their business. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/26/2012-olympics-are-crap-says-us-expert/ Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:17:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/26/2012-olympics-are-crap-says-us-expert/ Dr Al Ackerman, a noted expert on the many pleasurable ways it is possible to manipulate Chinese anal love beads, says the London 2012 Olympics are crap. Dr Ackerman’s criticisms focus on the fact that instead of concentrating on real sports like topless tennis, nude mud wrestling and bedroom athletics, the organisers have turned the event into a fashion parade. “The original Olympic spirit was naked as nature intended,” Dr Ackerman opines by Skype from his Baltimore home, “I could spend all day watching nude gymnastics but what’s the point if the performers are wearing post-modern designer leotards? The ancient Greeks stripped off for all their sporting activities and we should do the same. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/24/humour-shortage-devastes-blogosphere/ Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:55:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/24/humour-shortage-devastes-blogosphere/ The blogosphere has been hit by a humour shortage following an influx of blogs secretly funded by major corporations to boost the poor public images of companies such as Wal-Mart. Comments on social media are also becoming increasingly dry as a result of PR driven astroturfing campaigns and spam comments designed to boost the search engine rankings of commercial websites. Research indicates that the blogosphere is now 67% less humorous than it was 5 years ago and the situation is getting worse. Mister Trippy can confirm that this blog has been inundated with astroturf and spam comments in recent weeks. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/20/10-places-not-to-eat-in-london-during-the-2012-olympics/ Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:44:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/20/10-places-not-to-eat-in-london-during-the-2012-olympics/ Much of what I say below is well known and would apply at all times and not just during the 2012 Olympics – junk food always tastes nasty. Nonetheless it seems worth reiterating a few basic facts about McDonald’s as a scummy corporation and Olympic sponsor (seasoned with some comments about other really crap fast food and coffee chains). Any branch of McDonald’s – as official Olympic sponsors McDonald’s have prevented other food outlets selling chips in the Olympic area; and this despite the fact they only sell french fries made from reconstituted potato and not chips (which are sliced and fried potatoes). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/17/from-t-rex-to-tate-back-again-tanks-opening-party/ Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:02:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/17/from-t-rex-to-tate-back-again-tanks-opening-party/ Despite BP sponsorship, the Tate still do their PR very well. Tate boss Nicholas Serota could have been a politician as he clearly has all the requisite skills – and in many ways he has had to act like a politician as he’s massively expanded the Tate and built it into the world’s leading art brand. The new Tank galleries at Tate Modern were launched with press coverage of Serota praising non-doms (UK-based high earners who are not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes) for their contributions to London generally and Tate’s new extension in particular (see for example page 11 of The Evening Standard 16/07/12). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/15/from-sonic-weapons-to-a-bulletin-board-at-venus-over-manhattan/ Sun, 15 Jul 2012 18:29:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/15/from-sonic-weapons-to-a-bulletin-board-at-venus-over-manhattan/ Back in the summer of 1996 I was invited on a journalist junket to watch KLF pop star Jimmy Cauty demonstrate sonic weapons at a remote location on Dartmoor (south Devon and close to Cauty’s home at the time). A carriage on a London to Exeter train was blocked booked for stringers attending the event and we were plied with booze on the journey. By the time we boarded a helicopter at Exeter airport (a small provincial facility that shuts down in the early evening), the majority of journalists present were at least mildly drunk. After a twenty minute chopper ride disaster struck. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/12/10-best-opening-lines-of-all-time/ Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:34:02 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/12/10-best-opening-lines-of-all-time/ Forget those boring guides to the best opening lines in books compiled by cruds who either draw solely on canonical literary novels and/or recent bestsellers. This is the real deal and I haven’t restricted myself to book length works either! “I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Shows.” Daniel P. Mannix Memoirs Of A Sword Swallower. “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto. “When I was nine years old I burned down my school. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/08/things-to-do-avoid-doing-in-london-during-a-wet-olympic-games/ Sun, 08 Jul 2012 20:52:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/08/things-to-do-avoid-doing-in-london-during-a-wet-olympic-games/ Curious about what those stuck in London over the summer but keen to avoid the Olympics might do, I decided to visit a few museums to check out various free tourist attractions. I started with the John Soame Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on Thursday afternoon (5 July 2012). I used to visit this museum dedicated to the life and work of architect and collector John Soame a lot when I was in my late-teens and early-twenties. Back in the day you could just walk in but now you’re greeted by a door-person and have to hand in any luggage that is much more than handbag size. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/06/shards-of-the-spectacle/ Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:39:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/06/shards-of-the-spectacle/ For no particularly good reason I decided to head down to The Millennium Bridge in central London to watch tonight’s supposedly spectacular light show to launch The Shard: the just completed tallest building in Europe, and one that allegedly contains apartments for sale at £50 million (although that is probably just hype). On The Millennium Bridge I found myself blinded by the lights not from The Shard’s lasers but the flash photography of the crowd around me. Oddly more people were taking pictures before the lights went on than after the show began…. Both The Millennium Bridge and The Embankment below were packed when I arrived just before the laser ‘spectacular’ kicked off; but once the event got underway the crowd quickly thinned. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/04/big-brother-boris-is-boring-you/ Wed, 04 Jul 2012 23:59:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/04/big-brother-boris-is-boring-you/ The Olympic Games haven’t even started yet but the restrictions on movement around London are already in full effect. Today I was at Kings X railway station and an announcement boomed out saying something like: ‘this is your mayor Boris Johnson and public transport will be more crowded this summer so your journeys may take long…..’ We don’t need the banker loving Boris Johnson to tell us this. If we have to have announcements of this type then the usual anonymous announcer will do fine. One just gets the impression that Johnson wants to bore those that live in London out of the city during the Olympics. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/01/scarp-by-nick-papadimitriou-sceptre-20/ Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:31:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/07/01/scarp-by-nick-papadimitriou-sceptre-20/ This is one of the wackier books I’ve seen published by a corporate press in recent years. It is a mix of memoir, north of London local history and drug-fucked fantasy. It comes across as the written equivalent of a Godfrey Ho movie where various elements are cut together with a total disregard for narrative and logical sense. Does the Godfrey Ho school of exploitation film-making work on the written page? Well if you wanna know the answer you could do worse than check out Scarp. My favourite line: “And the entire suburb is a groove sensation, a humming colony lit deep in ancient woodland. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/29/10-reasons-to-get-rid-of-all-your-printed-books/ Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:54:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/29/10-reasons-to-get-rid-of-all-your-printed-books/ Once your book collection runs into double figures it takes up too much space and due to its weight is a drag to cart it around if you move! Most books aren’t worth the paper they are printed on! Plastic bottles filled with liquid make for better improvised weights than books. With bottles you can add water or pour it out to adjust the weight; and they are a much better shape (fairly close to a dumbbell) for working out with! Printed books are so last century and having a collection of them makes you even sadder than a vinyl fetishist! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/25/barbaric-genius-directed-by-paul-duane/ Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:51:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/25/barbaric-genius-directed-by-paul-duane/ Barbaric Genius is a documentary about John Healy who was born in London during World War II. Healy went on to be an army boxer, then a homeless street drinker and petty criminal before learning chess from a fellow con at the age of 30. After release from jail he became a chess champion and was particularly adept at playing multiple games simultaneously. Realising he’d learnt chess too late to become a grandmaster, Healy gave up the game and wrote an acclaimed autobiography The Grass Arena (1988). He fell out with his publishers Faber and Faber in the early nineties over nothing very much and his memoir was taken out of print in English. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/23/a-boil-in-the-bag-blog/ Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:49:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/23/a-boil-in-the-bag-blog/ This blog is designed to be heated from either frozen or thawed. Use a pot big enough to hold 1 to 1 ½ gallons of water. Bring water to a rolling boil. At least 24 hours earlier you should have printed out a copy of this blog, placed it in an supermarket carrier bag and frozen. Remove blog from your freezer (or fridge if you have defrosted it – please note once frozen this blog should always be defrosted in a fridge and never at room temperature), place in boiling water and set a timer according how soggy you like your prose. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/18/10-best-ways-to-fail/ Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:53:22 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/18/10-best-ways-to-fail/ Elegantly – that’s with a massive advance from a production company or publisher and no audience! Spectacularly – as success slips from you’re fingers you realise that in a few moments you’ll be dead! Hypocritically – by being evil when your motto is ‘don’t be evil’! Hypothetically – that’s when your visualisations of your future success are so good you can’t be bothered with the actuality. Happily – by realising that you didn’t want a house in the Hollywood Hills or to be chased around by the paparazzi anyway. Secretly – since all success is relative and is ultimately an illusion. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/15/retail-sector-continues-to-wash-dirty-lingerie-in-public/ Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:49:12 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/15/retail-sector-continues-to-wash-dirty-lingerie-in-public/ The UK’s double dip recession has led to some wacky transformations in the retail sector. Among the less welcome of these are the continuing transformation of central London into a shopping theme park. Having ruined parts of east London with Olympics developments, the planners now want to turn those parts of The City between Holborn and Cheapside into a so-called ‘shopper’s paradise’ too – so the suburban middle-class can have days out in town where they enjoy retail therapy a-go-go all the way from Oxford Street to Spitalfields. Right now there is also a race on to open new (as well as revamp old) London stores before the start of the Olympics. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/09/ken-campbell-nina-conti-me/ Sat, 09 Jun 2012 15:09:29 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/09/ken-campbell-nina-conti-me/ Nina Conti is a showbiz ‘personality’ who has just revealed – to promote her new TV film A Ventriloquist’s Story – that she was theatre maverick Ken Campbell’s lover in the mid-nineties (when he was twice her age). Conti claims Campbell decided she was ‘a clown who didn’t want to wear a nose’ so he sent her a teach yourself ventriloquism kit. And Conti now seems to credit learning ventriloquism with kick-starting her career – although the fact she comes from a showbiz family must have helped too! Conti’s current publicity drive reminded me of my own encounters with Ken Campbell (minus the affair, scandal lovers). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/04/is-zurker-a-facebook-killer-or-is-adblock-plus/ Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:12:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/04/is-zurker-a-facebook-killer-or-is-adblock-plus/ Yesterday I joined cooperative social networking site Zurker. Like Diaspora before it this one is being promoted as a potential Facebook killer. To take over from Facebook any new social networking site needs a critical mass and we haven’t seen this happen yet – but presumably will do at some point. After all, Facebook effectively killed MySpace, and MySpace effectively killed Friendster. However the mechanisms for taking over from Facebook may be more complicated than Zurker founder Nick Oba realises. That said I’m giving Zucker a go and if you want to do so as well you can get an invite to participate in the site’s beta testing by clicking here. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/03/the-most-boring-blog-in-the-world-evah-pt-2-repetition/ Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:39:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/06/03/the-most-boring-blog-in-the-world-evah-pt-2-repetition/ I was going to repost my last blog under the almost new title above (I’ve changed the number and subheading) – but then figured it really would be too boring to do this. Besides if you want to read “The Most Boring Blog Post In The World Evah Pt 1: Supermarket stock control” two or more times, all you have to do is click on the link I’ve added to the title here and then you can go over it as much as you like! But don’t forget kids that the French philosopher of vitalism Henri Bergson claimed repetition is the basis of all humour! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/29/the-most-boring-blog-post-in-the-world-evah-pt-1-supermarket-stock-control/ Tue, 29 May 2012 08:40:29 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/29/the-most-boring-blog-post-in-the-world-evah-pt-1-supermarket-stock-control/ There are many ways to make yourself stand out online and one of them is to do things in the worst or most boring way possible. Since this blog is mainly an outta sight groove sensation I figured a few really boring posts would draw both interest and attention to how good most of what I put up here actually is! And obviously the best place to start when aiming for ennui is with something that is not only dull but also frustrates us all – such as supermarket stock control. Like many people I get my shopping in a number of outlets in order to obtain everything at the cheapest possible price. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/26/poetry-posture/ Sat, 26 May 2012 23:08:55 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/26/poetry-posture/ Recently I’ve become hyper-aware of not being able to concentrate on readings by writers who stand or sit really badly. Is this a problem for anyone else? It seems to be particularly bad amongst poets although I also notice it with some fiction writers. I just can’t take in what someone reading their work is saying when they place way too much weight on one side of their body throughout their performance, or if they’re slumped really badly. Instead of paying attention to their work, I’m just fixated on the aesthetically unpleasing way in which they hold themselves! Too many of the poets (in particular) who I see performing look like they spend all their time reading and writing – or else combining those activities with a university job (or some similar time wasting white collar employment). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/21/spaced-out-at-space/ Mon, 21 May 2012 14:59:19 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/21/spaced-out-at-space/ When my show Again, A Time Machine opened on 5 April I broke all records for attendance at a Space Studios event in London. I had another great turn out for the close of the exhibition last night. But then that’s hardly surprising. First off there were readings by Katrina Palmer, Bridget Penney and me. I kicked off with a couple of pieces from old books (Memphis Underground & 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess), and concluded this section of the evening with my usual headstand reading from Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. Katrina read a couple of new stories and a passage from The Dark Object – part of the Semina series I edited for Book Works. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/18/nick-lezards-wacky-birthday-bash/ Fri, 18 May 2012 16:31:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/18/nick-lezards-wacky-birthday-bash/ Nick Lezard is a journalist with a reputation for championing the overlooked when it comes to books (as well as for being able to drink any writer you care to name under the table). I wouldn’t normally make the effort of going to west London for a birthday bash but last night I made an exception as I’ve known Nick for some time now. OK so Marylebone is virtually in central London – but these days it is rare for me to take a tube as far as Edgeware Road unless I’m going to Paddington Station or Heathrow Airport. And as far as I’m concerned anything the other side of Regent Street is west London anyway…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/13/free-beer/ Sun, 13 May 2012 23:24:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/13/free-beer/ Tonight I witnessed a great way to get a free beer. I was in a small town pub with my friend Leon who ordered a pint of Fosters. The barmaid had slightly more than half-filled the glass when the barrel ran out. She said she’d have to go and get another keg and came back sometime later to tell us there wasn’t one – so she offered Leon the half-pint she’d pulled for free. Now that’s what I call a good price for a lager! And of course a stout drinker like me wouldn’t give an XXX for a more expensive lager! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/06/primera-persona-in-barcelona/ Sun, 06 May 2012 22:11:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/05/06/primera-persona-in-barcelona/ Arriving in Barcelona early on Thursday evening (3 May 2012) I was whisked from the airport to Hotel Jazz in the city centre by Ana Pareja and Claudia Cucchiarato from my Spanish publisher Alpha Decay. Having dropped my bag, I was taken on a quick walking tour of the city before we arrived at Bar Ramón where we watered for the rest of the evening. The first thing Ana did was order drinks and tapas, after which we were able to relax and enjoy the groovy sounds…it was blues to start with but switched to sixties soul. The food was incredibly good and I ate more of it than anyone else! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/30/lets-kill-the-novel-remake-the-world-stewart-home-interviewed-by-raul-de-tena/ Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:05:33 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/30/lets-kill-the-novel-remake-the-world-stewart-home-interviewed-by-raul-de-tena/ 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… https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/23/no-piece/ Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:43:41 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/23/no-piece/ Stewart Home: Don’t send a work to the art show. Tell the curator it got lost in the post. Do it again for the next exhibition. No art is the best art! Curator: Great event score! I will use that as your contribution to the show (unless the postman happens to have found it). Stewart Home: Only a dishonest postman could find a work I didn’t send, they only fake my work so they can make money from collectors, ingrates! Curator: Bastards! Stewart Home: At least they’re ripping off the collectors. But they ought to give me a cut of the dosh! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/20/get-down-on-it-stewart-home-interviewed-by-jaime-casas/ Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:02:55 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/20/get-down-on-it-stewart-home-interviewed-by-jaime-casas/ I did this interview for a Spanish newspaper El Pais a few weeks ago and figured I might as well run it here in the original English. The Spanish publication of Memphis Underground has been generating a lot of interest there…. Jaime Casas: I see many different genres in Memphis Underground: from autobiography to meta-literature, but above all there is a sense of passion in everything said and done by the characters. It is a very a nondescript book it seems, and an experiment. But, I guess there are some ideas and intentions, what are they? Stewart Home: At the most basic level I’m saying there are many new ways in which we can write, and by analogy many new ways in which we could organise the world. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/16/therese-and-isabelle-by-violette-leduc/ Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:42:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/16/therese-and-isabelle-by-violette-leduc/ Violette Leduc spent three years working on the first part of her novel Ravages. When the manuscript of the book was presented to her publisher Gallimard in 1954, her readers there – Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand – decided the first third of the book should be nixed because it described a torrid lesbian affair between two schoolgirls. Ravages was offered around to other French imprints but no one was prepared to issue it without cuts. In the end a censored version of the novel appeared in 1955 under the aegis of Gallimard. Parts of the cut text were reworked and incorporated into Luduc’s 1964 memoir La Bâtarde. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/10/i-just-cant-get-enough-spanish-fly-stewart-home-interviewed-by-joan-cabot/ Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:47:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/10/i-just-cant-get-enough-spanish-fly-stewart-home-interviewed-by-joan-cabot/ I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now. Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice? Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/04/cleaner-mistook-my-art-for-rubbish-a-flying-start-to-my-space-show-in-hackey/ Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:41:15 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/04/04/cleaner-mistook-my-art-for-rubbish-a-flying-start-to-my-space-show-in-hackey/ Every couple of years you read in a press report that a cleaner mistook a work of art for garbage and threw it away. My personal favourite example of this cyclical news story is the Tate cleaner who in 2004 chucked away a bag of rubbish that was part of a Gustav Metzger piece on show in the Art & The 60s exhibition. The damaged rubbish bag was retrieved by the gallery. Something similar happened to me this morning. I arrived at Space Studios in Hackney to continue installing my solo show there and found most things as I’d left them – including a hat I’d forgotten to take home the night before. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/30/12-hours-of-spam-or-poetry-in-motion/ Fri, 30 Mar 2012 01:39:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/30/12-hours-of-spam-or-poetry-in-motion/ I was very pleased to find this website. I wanted to say thanks for your time for this wonderful read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you blog post. I adored your rich writing. Brilliant stuff. I hope you produce others. I will carry on subscribing. Hey there! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be OK. I’m definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to new posts. Spot on with this write-up, I actually suppose this web site wants way more consideration. I’ll probably be once more to learn far more, thanks for that info. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/22/yet-more-reasons-to-be-an-ego-maniac-on-a-world-historical-scale/ Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:30:35 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/22/yet-more-reasons-to-be-an-ego-maniac-on-a-world-historical-scale/ I was asked to answer these questions for an event in Barcelona and having done so figured I might as well post them here too. You couldn’t make it it! 1. When were you happiest? I’ll be at my happiest in about 10 minutes when I’ve answered these questions – coz then I can make another huge pot of espresso and watch yet another Godfrey Ho movie. 2. What is your greatest fear? That the list I have of Godfrey Ho movies is complete and that before long I’ll have watched everything he ever made. Fortunately not even Godfrey Ho can remember all the films he made and there’s a good chance of many more being added to the 150 we know about. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/18/youve-read-this-blog-before/ Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:17:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/18/youve-read-this-blog-before/ If you’re a time traveller from the future with a special interest in this little corner of cyberspace… If you consider contemporary writing to be thrillingly unoriginal and you see this blog as just words other have used before with some very minor variations in their order. If you’re into the late-seventies Boston band The Nervous Eaters and you realise I’m just riffing on their tune “You’ve Heard These Chords Before”…. If having read this blog as it was originally posted in March 2012 on the Stewart Home Society site you then came across it copied and pasted elsewhere – or even reposted at more or less the same place… If having come across this blog copied and pasted elsewhere or reposted here, you’ve now discovered the original blog… https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/14/love-comes-in-spurts-stewart-home-interviewed-by-jesus-rocamora/ Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:04:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/14/love-comes-in-spurts-stewart-home-interviewed-by-jesus-rocamora/ This is an interview i did with the arts editor of Spanish newspaper Público a month or two ago. I figured I’d let enough time pass to run it here for English readers since it was translated for publication in Spain…. Rocamora: The writer and journalist Kiko Amat says in the introduction to Memphis Underground’s Spanish edition that it is a “book of ideas” – a philosophical novel. Is it a political book? In what sense? Home: Everything is political. The conventional bourgeois novel is conservative and is all about reproducing the ideas and subjectivities of the dominant class – that is why it is so concerned with what is euphemistically called ‘character’. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/08/cyber-sex-with-a-bot-girl-it-was-bound-to-end-in-disappointment/ Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:17:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/08/cyber-sex-with-a-bot-girl-it-was-bound-to-end-in-disappointment/ “Amy Hastings” sent me a friend request on Facebook on 12 February 2012. I think “she” had four or five friends by the time I accepted. She didn’t have a profile picture or any other photos up on “her” page. I waited to see what happened next and wasn’t particularly surprised when “Amy” sent me an unsolicited message. Here it is followed by my and “her” replies: Amy Hastings on February 13: I have some really erotic photoz, but I can’t post them here. Do you have an email or mobile number I can send them to? That is if you want to view them. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/03/here-come-the-kung-fu-clones-by-carl-jones-woodwums-books/ Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:42:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/03/03/here-come-the-kung-fu-clones-by-carl-jones-woodwums-books/ “Here Come The Kung Fu Clones” is a book about the superabundance of Bruce Lee imitators who attempted to fill the void created by the Little Dragon’s death in 1973 with movies such as “Bruce Lee Against Supermen”, “Bruce Lee His Last Days, His Last Nights”, “Bruce Lee Fights Back From The Grave” and “Bruce Lee In New Guinea”. While a lot of work has obviously gone into this book, the writing is fan level and could have been much better organised. As you’d expect the focus is on summarising plot rather than critical analysis. Bruce Li is well covered – the other Bruce Lee clones are not well served. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/29/weasel-coffee-made-from-beans-eaten-and-shat-out-by-wild-weasels/ Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:13:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/29/weasel-coffee-made-from-beans-eaten-and-shat-out-by-wild-weasels/ Pho is a small chain of family owned Vietnamese cafes. They have 5 branches in London and one in Brighton (UK). There are two branches in the west end, one in Clerkenwell, and one apiece in the Westfield shopping centres in Shepherds Bush and Stratford E15. Their food is both good and modestly priced but it was only recently that I noticed they sold weasel coffee for £5.95 a cup. This struck me as cheap for the world’s ‘most expensive’ coffee – since I remembered reading newspaper articles a few years back about how the brasserie at the Peter Jones department store in London’s Sloane Square was selling a single cup of this rare brew for £50 (US $79. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/25/stewart-home-gives-you-better-orgasms-an-interview-with-playground/ Sat, 25 Feb 2012 17:07:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/25/stewart-home-gives-you-better-orgasms-an-interview-with-playground/ This is an interview I did with Playground Magazine for translation into Spanish around the publication by the Barcelona based literary press Alpha Decay of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured I might as well run it here in English too! I’m told this interview was published about ten days ago but the urls I was sent to it don’t work – so I can’t link you to the Spanish version here…. Playground: First of all, I’d like you to tell me about the place you are at the moment, answering these questions. What things do you have around (is there a cup of coffee, a little pencil, something like that)? https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/23/a-dangerous-method-chronenberg-bites-back/ Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:21:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/23/a-dangerous-method-chronenberg-bites-back/ While Videodrome (1983) remains my favourite Cronenberg movie and on the whole I prefer his earlier to his later work, he is a director who continues to amuse me. When I went to see Cronenberg’s latest flick A Dangerous Method (at the Soho Curzon) I was apparently surrounded by a bunch of badly dressed shrinks and therapists who found the film ‘intense’ and lapped it up in the same way they’d ‘appreciate’ any other worthless costume drama designed to appeal to the type of middle-class and middle-brow film-goer who thinks a TV show like Strictly Come Dancing is raunchy. In stark contrast to the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard on my way out of the cinema, I knew I’d just sat through a slab of exploitation schlock rooted in horror and art house tropes, which simultaneously provided a bellyful of laughs at the expense of the founding fathers of psychoanalytic pseudo-science. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/18/you-didnt-read-it-here-summaries-of-10-blogs-i-decided-not-to-post/ Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:51:48 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/18/you-didnt-read-it-here-summaries-of-10-blogs-i-decided-not-to-post/ Many of the posts on this blog originate as ideas sketched out in note form. I work on these ‘ideas’ until I think they are ready to post or else I decide to discard them. Not all my binned blogs reach the stage of completed first drafts – but here is a list of 10 that underwent varying degrees of revision before I decided against posting them…. “The First 3 Letters of Espresso Are ESP, So Is Coffee a Psychedelic Drug?” – I guess I was high when I came up with this blog title. In the cold light of day it didn’t seem worth following through! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/12/lost-london-compendium-books/ Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:20:30 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/12/lost-london-compendium-books/ Compendium Books in Camden Town opened in August 1968 but I didn’t start visiting the shop until the end of the seventies. The first person I got to know well at Compendium was Mike Hart. Mike ran the fiction and poetry section from the early 1980s until the store closed just over a decade ago now. I was 14 years younger than Mike and about 15 years after we met, he told me he knew I was okay when he started at the shop because I was into William Burroughs novels rather than Jack Kerouac books (this was of course before interest in Burroughs soared from the late-eighties onwards). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/05/instant-blogs/ Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:34:34 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/05/instant-blogs/ Instant blogs were first marketed in the USA in November 2002 under the brand name Technorati. The Technorati platform was founded by Dave Sifry, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Tantek Çelik was the site’s chief technologist – obviously they should have used someone else. The fact that Technorati is virtually useless can be demonstrated by the fact that it’s link to the feed from my rss worked for a few months and hasn’t uploaded anything now for more than two and a half years. Technorati’s ranking system is equally stupid and promotes tired and conventional views at the expense of innovation and smart thinking. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/02/10-greatest-anti-art-suicides-before-mike-kelly/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:20:12 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/02/02/10-greatest-anti-art-suicides-before-mike-kelly/ The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/29/aint-that-a-shame-steve-mcqueens-new-movie-is-another-turkey/ Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:37:07 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/29/aint-that-a-shame-steve-mcqueens-new-movie-is-another-turkey/ Shame is a film about a really boring suit in New York who has a troubled relationship with his sister (Carey Mulligan). The suit (Michael Fassbender) not only has a really tiresome office job, his leisure time is equally tedious – it is mostly spent looking for nookie (both with and without his vapid boss). The suit often buys sex and it is precisely because he thinks that human relationships can be commoditised that his love life is as dull as ditch water. Imagine the most lacklustre out-take from a story by a forgotten eighties literary brat-pack also ran and then make whatever you’ve dreamt up about a hundred times worse, and you’ll just about have a handle on Shame. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/26/new-york-on-a-dozen-espressos-a-day/ Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:16:22 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/26/new-york-on-a-dozen-espressos-a-day/ The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web. On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/17/10-best-ways-to-die/ Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:27:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/17/10-best-ways-to-die/ Heart attack upon orgasm during sex! Heroin overdose! 3, Suicide with a single bullet through the head on live TV! At home in bed in your sleep! Becoming so engrossed in gaming that you fail to move, eat or drink – and eventually die! On the toilet like Elvis Presley – it ensures that people remember you! From laughter after reading this post. Drowned by beer – nine people died in the London Beer Flood of 17 October 1814, when barrels of booze at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst and spilled into the street! With an orange in your mouth and a pair of tights around your neck – it’s a little like point one, the difference with auto-erotic death being that you don’t need to inconvenience someone by dying while humping them. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/13/eric-roberts-richard-harrison-battle-it-out-for-the-title-of-greatest-movie-career-slide-of-all-time/ Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:36:00 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/13/eric-roberts-richard-harrison-battle-it-out-for-the-title-of-greatest-movie-career-slide-of-all-time/ In terms of having the greatest film career slide of all time you’d have thought Eric Roberts had everything going for him. For starters his sister is Hollywood A-lister Julia Roberts, and he got Golden Globe nominations for his early starring roles in King of the Gypsies (1978 – best actor debut) and Star 80 (1983 – best actor). But by the time Roberts took the lead role in the martial arts flick Best of the Best (1989) you can see it has all gone wrong. Why Roberts was cast as a member of a fictional US karate team when he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag is a mystery in itself. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/08/dynamic-inertia-a-week-is-a-long-time-in-blogging/ Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:37:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/08/dynamic-inertia-a-week-is-a-long-time-in-blogging/ One time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. When it comes to the internet things move even faster…. but the speed of these changes might be likened to ‘dynamic inertia’ (in both politics and blogging). The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ has been used to promote the shake weight ‘exercise’ fad of recent years – and appears to have been coined for this purpose. Shake weights were marketed with adverts that featured women grasping these light dumbbell-like objects in their hands and jerking them about with their arms. The infomercials featuring this imagery went viral online because many saw in such hand and arm gestures a connection to onanistic sexual activities. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/02/10-best-winter-cold-cures/ Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/01/02/10-best-winter-cold-cures/ Bottle of good whiskey. Get blind drunk and simply sleep until you’re over the cold! A hot sauna and followed by a dip through an ice hole into a frozen lake – then get a hot friend (straight from the sauna daddio) to beat you with birch twigs! A date with a snot sex enthusiast – if you develop performance anxieties about doing the shag nasty with someone who wants to be covered in you mucus during sex, you may well find your cold symptoms drying up! Eat a double helping of vindaloo curry and run your cold out of every orifice in your body! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/28/deconstructing-goodreads-reviews-or-the-not-so-great-leap-backwards/ Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:13:41 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/28/deconstructing-goodreads-reviews-or-the-not-so-great-leap-backwards/ I just read through all the reviews of my books on the Goodreads website – and a lot of the negative ones are premised on the retarded assumption that realism is the only valid form for ‘fiction’. I’ll begin with some examples of this from Goodreads ‘reviews’ of my anti-novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess: J.C. Moylan: “stewart home needs to learn how women think if he’s going to make his protaganist (sic) a woman.” What a plonker – and dig the lower case spelling of my name, although I doubt this is an e. e. cummings fan. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/25/10-reasons-not-to-enlarge-your-penis/ Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:43:58 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/25/10-reasons-not-to-enlarge-your-penis/ You’re a woman – you ain’t got one! You already have an erection! As far as most women are concerned (and many men too) it isn’t size that counts but what you can do with it! Scientific research suggests that silicon impants are dangerous – and simply ingesting herbs doesn’t work! Adding three inches to your donger would make your balls look distressingly small by way of comparison! You’re already a complete dick so you don’t need to make yourself a bigger one! A small blood sausage is easier to swallow (a variation on the small is beautiful argument)! Herbal remedies are a rip-off – why waste your money? https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/22/occupying-my-future-reclaiming-my-past/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:20:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/22/occupying-my-future-reclaiming-my-past/ Asserting that ‘we are everywhere’ is probably more convincing than the claim that ‘I am everywhere”. Nonetheless it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before I’m able to convince myself that indeed “I am everywhere” – after all, I’ve been billing myself as ‘an ego maniac on a world historical scale’ for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can’t possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he’s based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/18/lost-london-the-scala-cinema/ Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:16:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/18/lost-london-the-scala-cinema/ Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn’t happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/12/trippy-does-glasgow-again/ Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:15:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/12/trippy-does-glasgow-again/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/05/10-greatest-conspiracy-theories-of-all-time/ Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:37:00 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/05/10-greatest-conspiracy-theories-of-all-time/ It was actually Jackie Kennedy who assassinated JFK in Dallas. He was shot from inside the car! Jackie was fed up with being paraded before the public as a trophy wife, and also with her husband indulging his sexual peccadilloes with hundreds of different prostitutes. Julius Caesar faked his own death and having discovered the secret of immortality is actually the secret power behind the sub-prime mortgage speculation that led to the current financial collapse. Using his vast financial resources Aristotle Onassis paid Nikola Tesla to construct a time machine, and then travelled back to the eighteenth-century. Once in the past Onassis created a fake identity as Adam Weishaupt – a professor of law at The University of Ingolsttadt – and then on 1 May 1776 founded the Bavarian Illuminati. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/02/barons-court-all-change-by-terry-taylor-reissued-at-last/ Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:06:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/12/02/barons-court-all-change-by-terry-taylor-reissued-at-last/ If you’ve checked out the main part of this site you will probably already know that I consider Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor to be one of the greatest drugs and youth culture novels of all time. Therefore I’m very proud to have written the introduction to a fiftieth anniversary reissue of the book. For my old take on the importance of this novel in relation to the emergence of mod and the counterculture see the piece I posted on 14 February 2007. My introduction to the new edition starts like this: “Many novels are forgotten and more or less disappear from circulation. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/27/10-synonyms-for-being-a-wanker/ Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:19:55 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/27/10-synonyms-for-being-a-wanker/ Metrosexual – self-consciously middle-class and faux-sophisticated; some are simply wankers whereas others claiming this label are utter pricks. Undersexual – just not getting any. Autosexual – a wanker and proud of it. Retrosexual – the moth-eaten comfort blanket of a memory AKA nostalgia dating. Pansexual – desperate enough to be up for anything including the five-knuckle shuffle. Asexual – so in love with yourself you’re not interested in anybody else. Monosexual – the not so silent majority (a post-modern wall of sound) who never tire of the same old thing, or themselves! Polysexual – see pansexual above. Pornosexual – fans of dirty movies and one-handed reads. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/23/bill-wymans-gallery-art-or-the-rock-star-considered-as-a-complete-scumbag/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:59:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/23/bill-wymans-gallery-art-or-the-rock-star-considered-as-a-complete-scumbag/ Aside from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones were pretty much the most tedious British Invasion band of the 1960s. Both these acts lacked the mod flash and live excitement of the way superior Who, Small Faces and Creation; not to mention the raw primitive energy that enabled the likes of The Troggs, The Pretty Things and The Downliners Sect to completely outclass bigger rock and pop names. While Mick Jagger’s staid middle-class mannerisms and absurd attempts at imitating Tina Turner’s high sixties dance moves meant that his glossed lips were forever begging for a mod fist to bust them open, Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman proved himself to be the biggest tosser in the group by dating 13 year-old school girl Mandy Smith in the 1980s. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/20/from-paradise-row-to-a-rock-roll-toilet/ Sun, 20 Nov 2011 14:15:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/20/from-paradise-row-to-a-rock-roll-toilet/ On Thursday (17 November 2011) I went to the opening of Margarita Gluzberg’s Avenue Des Gobelins. She seems to do a solo exhibition with her London gallery Paradise Row more or less annually. For 2011 her focus is photography – last time around she was showing paintings and before that drawings of pugilists. In Avenue Des Gobelins Gluzberg projects slides and video onto graphite paper, thereby referencing drawing – which lies at the heart of her multidisciplinary practice – in the way she presents her photographic and film work. Gluzberg is also exhibiting platinum prints – the most expensive photographic developing process – featuring similar subject matter to her projections. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/16/10-best-royal-deaths-of-all-time/ Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:24:35 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/16/10-best-royal-deaths-of-all-time/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/14/in-new-york-paranoia-is-just-a-heightened-state-of-awareness/ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:33:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/14/in-new-york-paranoia-is-just-a-heightened-state-of-awareness/ I arrived at the Heathrow Virgin Atlantic bag drop late. I was told I’d missed my plane and to go to desk 13 to discuss whether I could be transferred to another flight. The next person I talked to said that since my bag to be checked was well below 10kg, I could take it as hand luggage on my original flight, but that I’d have to run to the gate. I got through security in good time and made it to the plane by sprinting all the way. I was pleased to be the last passenger on-board and having avoided hanging around – all that queuing is such a drag! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/03/how-to-make-money-fast/ Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:32:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/03/how-to-make-money-fast/ “How To Make Money Fast” is just one of thousands of spam comments my filter prevented from being posted on this blog. If the spammer in question actually knew a good way of making money fast, it’s unlikely they’d be telling other people about it. My filter is also repeatedly blocking spam comments from someone offering to write cheap blog posts for me and my readers. This seems to rather miss the fact that I prefer to put my own spin on shit – not to mention that with all the spam that comes my way, I’ve more than enough material from which I can write blogs fast, so I don’t need to pay someone else to do it for me. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/01/occupy-london-richard-chartres-or-lets-bash-the-bishop/ Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:49:52 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/11/01/occupy-london-richard-chartres-or-lets-bash-the-bishop/ The Corporation of London and their representatives in the Church of England look all set to evict the Occupy London encampment sometime this week. For anyone approaching the Occupy London protest from the east along St Paul’s Churchyard, the sight of the tents with a branch of camping equipment shop Blacks also in clear view is probably enough to raise a chuckle. The manager of Blacks couldn’t have arranged a better advert for the store’s winter sale. Less hilarious is the effect of The Church of England on the protest. When I was down there on Saturday, some religious nutcase was banging on and on about how she’d become a more effective activist after finding Jesus five years earlier. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/30/10-art-works-you-must-jerk-off-over-before-you-die-2/ Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:36:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/30/10-art-works-you-must-jerk-off-over-before-you-die-2/ In 2001 when Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art was on at the Hayward Gallery, a female visitor to the show walked into a room in which Tadasu Takamine’s Inertia was being shown only to discover a man jerking off to the projection. The woman left and complained to the gallery, but by the time security got there the man had disappeared. The work was recently re-shown at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham, I don’t know if anyone was caught wanking off to the piece there, but the description of it on the Icon website illustrates you’d have to be seriously sad to do so: “Inertia (1998) involves the uneasy combination of a young woman and a bullet train. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/28/time-slip-at-the-electric-ballroom-in-camden/ Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:47:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/28/time-slip-at-the-electric-ballroom-in-camden/ Until last night I hadn’t been to The Electric Ballroom in Camden for over 30 years. If you are obsessed by 70s English punk rock then the last time I’d gone might be considered an historic occasion. It was the last day of 1979 and the final time the old pre-pop Adam and the Ants played live, as well as being the swansong performance by the original line-up of The Lurkers. I don’t remember who else was on the bill, but I do recall getting belted by two bouncers. They didn’t throw me out, they were labouring under the mistaken impression that some girl who was giving Adam Ant a hard time was there with me – and being ‘gentlemen’ they didn’t want to hit a lady, so walloped me because they wrongly assumed I was her boyfriend. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/26/back-in-the-new-york-groove/ Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:33:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/26/back-in-the-new-york-groove/ I hadn’t been to New York in 16 years so my sojourn there last week proved a trip! Somehow it didn’t surprise me that I should find myself leaving from Gate 23 of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 4 on Monday 17 October. Even more predictably I wasn’t interested in any of the in-flight movies, so I didn’t watch them. The choice of on-board music was pretty lame too…. although they did have Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles ‘greatest hits’ albums, so I gave those a spin – and otherwise just left Aretha Franklin’s classic 1968 platter Aretha Now on repeat play. Arriving at Newark I took the air train to Penn Station in Manhattan. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/16/10-reasons-not-to-blog-2/ Sun, 16 Oct 2011 13:31:35 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/16/10-reasons-not-to-blog-2/ These days most of those surfing the web prefer reading status updates to blogs – it takes less time. You can’t see the trees because of the astroturf. Likewise, you’ll get way more link spam than comments from people who’ve actually read your content. If you write something over 800 words in length virtually no one will reach the end. To get a point across you have to keep repeating it, which is boring after a while. No one is interested in what you’ve got to say – not even your mom (although she’ll be monitoring your web activity because she suspects you’re taking drugs and wants ‘proof’ before she confronts you about it). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/14/no-or-santiago-sierras-latest-art-world-prank/ Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:51:17 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/14/no-or-santiago-sierras-latest-art-world-prank/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/12/shaming-the-spammers-part-1-trish-stevens-ascot-media-the-self-styled-new-media-pr-experts/ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:38:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/12/shaming-the-spammers-part-1-trish-stevens-ascot-media-the-self-styled-new-media-pr-experts/ One of the rip-off outfits that persistently sends me spam emails is Ascot Media of Houston, Texas. I thought I’d shame this scamster operation by commenting upon and correcting one of their missives. The individual behind the Ascot Media rip-off is called Trish Stevens, and while there are some sites online talking positively about this scam operation, they are probably all run by Trish Stevens under other names – or at the very least people paid to promote her, or with a financial stake in the company! I’d expect a successful PR ‘guru’ to have lots of social media connections, and so I found it rather telling that Trish Stevens only had two contacts on her LinkedIn profile when I checked it just now (note added 13 October – since I posted this blog about 28 hours ago, Stevens appears to have added more than 400 contacts to her LinkIn profile; good to know a bit of criticism has forced her to work harder at her con, but it leaves me wondering how many of her new contacts are profiles she has created herself). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/10/and-the-worlds-greatest-legal-high-is-influenza/ Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:34:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/10/and-the-worlds-greatest-legal-high-is-influenza/ Flu has a bad reputation, but if you think about it you’lll soon realise that the most important thing that drugs do for you is alter your state of consciousness, and influenza can do that too! Squares denounce flu as an illness, but hipsters know it’s much more productive to look on influenza as a psychic elevator and a short cut to ‘enlightenment’. You could spend a life-time sitting in the lotus position meditating and still never get ‘enlightened’; or you could catch flu and – as the fever takes a hold – unlock the secrets of the universe and learn to let go of everything (or if not everything, at the very least your lunch, either via your bowels or barfed up through the mouth). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/08/the-psychogeography-of-dundee-or-ae-phor-aint-here/ Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:56:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/08/the-psychogeography-of-dundee-or-ae-phor-aint-here/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/06/10-reasons-not-to-read-my-books/ Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:05:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/06/10-reasons-not-to-read-my-books/ They don’t cater to bourgeoisie sensibilities. They’ll make what you do read look like a shower of shit (assuming you’re into middle-brow ‘literature’ by the likes of Julian Barnes and Philip Roth). They’re an all out attack on serious culture. They challenge the discredited beliefs of every insecure reactionary knobhead who ever sloped across this planet. They transgress all genre boundaries and as a consequence upset traditionalists. They’re not in the least bit funny if you haven’t got a sense of humour. They’re an absolute groove sensation, so they don’t appeal to squares. They wholeheartedly reject every discredited Victorian idea about ‘characterisation’ They’re chock full of sex, violence and sadism. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/04/3-sided-football-other-alytus-biennial-repetitions/ Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:29:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/04/3-sided-football-other-alytus-biennial-repetitions/ In August 2009, and again in August 2011, I found myself referring the games of 3-sided football staged as a part of the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania. I don’t attend many biennials, but since the one in Alytus has evolved into a jamboree of post-artistic practices – and it is also a delightfully intimate event – I’ll always make an exception for it. But let’s get back to 3-sided football. It was Asger Jorn, the Cobra artist and founding member of the Situationist International, who first came up with the idea of a football match involving three teams. However, it appears that Jorn considered it impossible to stage a real life game of 3-sided football, and so never attempted to do so. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/02/holy-objectional-objectivists-a-richard-grayson-opening-at-alma-enterprises-in-london/ Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:15:47 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/10/02/holy-objectional-objectivists-a-richard-grayson-opening-at-alma-enterprises-in-london/ Friday 30 September was a hot night in London and the meteorologists were already promising us that the late summer heatwave was going to produce record October temperatures. Likewise, after the August lull, the art world was back in full party/opening mode. Since I didn’t want to be running all over the city, I decided to pick one event and to screw all the other invitations I’d received. The Serpentine private view that night was bound to be mobbed, so I quickly dismissed any thoughts of going there. I decided not to go anywhere too ‘institutional’ because I wasn’t in the mood for sweaty crowds. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/09/30/murder-in-notting-hill-by-mark-olden-zero-books/ Fri, 30 Sep 2011 22:36:05 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/09/30/murder-in-notting-hill-by-mark-olden-zero-books/ The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/09/28/web-2-1-a-revolution-in-plumbing/ Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:26:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2011/09/28/web-2-1-a-revolution-in-plumbing/ My impression is that I’m not the only person to have found that Web 2.0 is proving less interesting these days than it was five or six years ago. I don’t think this is simply because for my social (networking) circle the novelty has worn off. It has more to do with the fact that the web is less chaotic than it was and corporations have learnt how to better use and control social networking. Friendster fell out of favour because it kicked out fakesters (those that refused to use their ‘real’ identities) and it was continually crashing due to lack of server capacity. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/31/blog-closed-until-further-notice/ Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:28:41 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/31/blog-closed-until-further-notice/ I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008. Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/29/the-real-christopher-lee-tall-dark-and-an-airhead/ Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:00:07 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/29/the-real-christopher-lee-tall-dark-and-an-airhead/ Having recently read Phil Baker’s The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, I was moved to revisit the Hammer film adaptations of Wheatley’s novels – The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) and To The Devil A Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976), both of which ‘starred’ pseudo-aristocratic plonker Christopher Lee_._ The first flick is an ultra-conservative thriller with some occult trimmings that looks absolutely pathetic when compared to what was happening in horror cinema at the time. It is of the same vintage as early post-modern classics like Succubus (Jess Franco, 1967), Rape of the Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1968) and Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968), but looks positively antediluvian in comparison. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/27/69-years-of-press-coverage-for-ray-the-cat-jones/ Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:35:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/27/69-years-of-press-coverage-for-ray-the-cat-jones/ Over the past year I’ve devoted a number of blogs to my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones. Having talked to various people about Ray and located assorted print references to him made after he’d retired from being the greatest cat burglar in the world, I thought it was time to dig back into the past. Old newspaper reports of Ray’s court appearances verify much of what he had to say about his life, clarify various matters, and show that more recent accounts of his famous jail break have been distorted by those retelling the tale. Doing a quick search through national newspapers, I found no reports of Ray’s boxing career, and the earliest press coverage I could locate was dated 8 March 1940. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/25/porno-galore-ii-orgy-of-the-xmas-blogs/ Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:42:38 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/25/porno-galore-ii-orgy-of-the-xmas-blogs/ Greetings pop pickers! I figured that this being the time of year when people go nuts for lists, mainly of presents for “Santa” admittedly, then I might as well take part by giving you my Christmas album Top Ten. I hope that I’ll be only one of many bloggers to do this, so that just about justifies my “Porno Galore II: Orgy of the Xmas Blogs” header at the top of this. Moving on, here’s my top ten Christmas albums, please add your top ten or top five or top one or why you don’t like Christmas albums as comments. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/23/martin-or-where-it-all-went-wrong-for-george-a-romero/ Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:51:20 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/23/martin-or-where-it-all-went-wrong-for-george-a-romero/ Martin (1977) was the film that revealed director George A. Romero’s desire to emulate the middle-brow success of ‘horror’ author Stephen King. It is the tale of a teenage boy who believes he’s a vampire. Obviously, and as Romero confirms in a making of documentary you’ll find on the Arrow’s ‘2 Disc Special Edition’, he isn’t; in ‘reality’ he’s just an alienated psycho. The central character comes from a dysfunctional family who believe they suffer from a vampire curse. Despite this, Martin can eat garlic, attend church and walk about in sunlight. His main problem is he is confused and the only way he can get laid is by drugging women; he also murders his rape victims by slashing their wrists with a razor, and then drinks their blood. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/21/the-best-of-beat-beat-beat-as-incoherent-as-the-60s-will-always-be/ Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:56:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/21/the-best-of-beat-beat-beat-as-incoherent-as-the-60s-will-always-be/ The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Bea_t was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple, The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/19/peter-plate-and-the-off-line-revolution/ Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:22:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/19/peter-plate-and-the-off-line-revolution/ San Francisco based novelist Peter Plate came up in conversation the other night. I was at the launch of the Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge edited tome The Form of the Book at Art Words new Broadway Market shop, where I ran into some people I hadn’t seen for a while and we started rappin’ about mutual friends. None of us had been in contact with Peter Plate for a year or two and he became the focus of our conversation. While we were still in touch with him, he refused to do anything on the internet: he seemed to see it as a vehicle for police surveillance. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/17/digital-tenderness-mp3s-have-some-advantages-over-cds/ Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:10:51 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/17/digital-tenderness-mp3s-have-some-advantages-over-cds/ The other day as I was eating out (and no I wasn’t with my girlfriend Tessie Talk), Gang Starr’s Moment Of Truth album was playing in the background. I find Gang Starr’s earlier work a mixed bag but there are some good tracks among it. That said, by the time they made this 1998 album they were so self-obsessed and up their own arses that their rhymes were a shower of shit. It should go without saying they wouldn’t have recognised a ‘moment of truth’ if it had hit them on the head with a brick. There are a lot of rappers I prefer to Gang Starr, but Moment Of Truth remains an excellent example of how the CD rather than the MP3 ruined the pop/rock/rap album…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/15/terrys-taylors-cult-novel-barons-court-all-change-is-a-classic-official-at-238/ Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:02:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/15/terrys-taylors-cult-novel-barons-court-all-change-is-a-classic-official-at-238/ Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/13/the-sinful-nuns-of-st-valentine-meet-the-marquis-de-sade-at-the-borders-closing-down-sale/ Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:49:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/13/the-sinful-nuns-of-st-valentine-meet-the-marquis-de-sade-at-the-borders-closing-down-sale/ Watching capitalist corporations fail is a groove sensation, and it takes me right back to everything from the three day week to the ‘winter of discontent’ in the 1970s. All those who love power cuts will recall that the mid-1970s was a real peak for this type of fun in London. As a long-term fan of this great anti-tradition, you can’t keep me out of shops that are closing down. The last 12 months has been a real bonanza for entertainments of this type: first there was the closure of Woolworths, then there was Zavvi, now there is Borders (UK)! Okay, so the flagship Borders store in Oxford Street has already gone, but the sense of chaos and anti-climax in the still just hanging-on-by-a-thread Charing Cross Road branch really gives me the horn. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/11/still-the-same-old-song-from-the-former-artists-placement-group/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:50:58 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/11/still-the-same-old-song-from-the-former-artists-placement-group/ John Latham and the Artists’ Placement Group came up in conversation the other day. While I liked much of what Latham did, I always found the theoretical justifications for his work extremely dubious. Thus when through Latham I came into direct contact with the Artists’ Placement Group (APG) in the 1980s, I found it utterly ridiculous. Now that the APG is no longer a going concern and The Tate has purchased its archives, it is unfortunately easier for for those coming across it for the first time to take it rather more seriously than was the case with old hands who encountered it as a live entity. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/09/ray-the-cat-jones-the-hackney-connection-completely-missed-by-iain-sinclair/ Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:58:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/09/ray-the-cat-jones-the-hackney-connection-completely-missed-by-iain-sinclair/ Way back in February I posted a couple of blogs about Iain Sinclair’s book Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. What I didn’t realise back then, or even earlier when I’d given Sinclair a few pointers as regards research on this book, was that Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones was a long time Hackney character who during the 1990s featured regularly in The Hackney Gazette. Since Ray doesn’t appear in Sinclair’s book, I guess this proves that neither of us read the Hackney press with any diligence…. Ray lived for many years at Flat 9, St Andrews House, Cranwich Road, Stamford Hill, London N16 5JB. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/07/john-latham-the-birth-of-conceptual-art-the-1960s-drug-culture-at-st-martins-school-of-art/ Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:07:06 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/07/john-latham-the-birth-of-conceptual-art-the-1960s-drug-culture-at-st-martins-school-of-art/ The oldest of suppressed traditions In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent “reality” of our “time”. Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, “literate” consensus maintains that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. It is clear that Power has a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on censorship. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/05/another-round-of-burglary-with-ray-the-cat-jones/ Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:37:52 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/05/another-round-of-burglary-with-ray-the-cat-jones/ I finally caught up with one time Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones press spokesman Michael Morgan at his Hackney flat yesterday. We spent much of the day going over Ray’s life-story, and Michael also kindly presented me with a bundle of press clippings and other material he’d photocopied for me. Among the many impressive cuttings Michael Morgan gave me is one entitled ‘The Night I Stole Liz’s Jewels In The Gresham’ (from the Irish tabloid The Sunday World, 23 November 1997): “One of the world’s oldest jewel thieves has spilled the beans on how he amassed a £5 million fortune by robbing top showbiz stars as revenge for his brother’s tragic death in a World War II bombing raid. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/03/wigan-casino-directed-by-tony-palmer-showing-at-space-in-hackney/ Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:22:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/03/wigan-casino-directed-by-tony-palmer-showing-at-space-in-hackney/ By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/01/pleasure-never-hurt-anyone-some-cocteau-twins-pre-history-and-the-way-london-rocked-30-years-ago/ Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:55:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/12/01/pleasure-never-hurt-anyone-some-cocteau-twins-pre-history-and-the-way-london-rocked-30-years-ago/ I’ve never been into the Cocteau Twins myself… just ain’t my thing. However, I recently got into an online discussion in which I mentioned that I’d known their second and main bass player Simone Raymonde in the old days when he’d been in a band called Disruptive Patterns, and that this group had morphed into The Drowning Craze. Or rather, I mentioned that the Drowning Craze had emerged from a band whose name I couldn’t remember off the top of my head! It took some serious thinking to retrieve the name… In the late-seventies and early-eighties I belonged to various groups that played and rehearsed in and around London and its south-west suburbs – the furthest out of London I played was in places like Guildford and Stevenage (okay Stevenage is north of London, but mainly we played south-westish), usually in pubs or sometimes clubs like The Starlight in West Hampstead (the less prestigious upstairs venue twinned with the relatively small Moonlight Club). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/29/from-alejandro-jodorowsky-to-breakin-there-aint-nothing-going-down-but-the-rent/ Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:48:20 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/29/from-alejandro-jodorowsky-to-breakin-there-aint-nothing-going-down-but-the-rent/ You have to love Alejandro ‘Chuckles’ Jodorowsky… he’s such a great conman that he’s able to fool most of his fans most of the time (fooling all the people at any one time is rather more difficult). His first feature film Fando y Lis (1968) was fabulous, but his output went gradually downhill from there…. as I’ve already said in different words elsewhere on this site. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed watching Chuckles’ almost overnight transformation from an obscure cult figure whose films were very difficult to see, to his re-emergence as a maverick who merits regular name-checking by the ‘mainstream’. The tipping point for Chuckles was 2007, when Tartan in the UK and Blue Anchor in the US issued a box set of his three key movies (Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain), and since then I haven’t been able to move without stumbling over press coverage for Jodorowsky; a couple of weeks ago he was even featured on the front cover of the print version of The Guardian’s weekly Guide. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/27/transcript-by-heimrad-backer/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:26:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/27/transcript-by-heimrad-backer/ Heimrad Backer’s book of concrete poetry transcript (to be published in Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling’s English translation by Dalkey Archive next March) consists entirely of quotations of material relating to the holocaust seen from the perspective of both its victims and the perpetrators. A few rearrangements using techniques such as repetition (all indicated in the notes at the end) are made to draw out the nature of the language used, particularly as regards documents that demonstrate the bureaucratic obsessions of the Nazi butchers. Nonetheless, rather than resorting to representation, through limited and selected citation transcript confronts the reader with a small portion of the Nazi regime’s bloodbath of mass murder and attempted genocide. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/25/the-only-reasonable-perspective-on-martin-heidegger-is-that-he-was-a-complete-scumbag/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:19:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/25/the-only-reasonable-perspective-on-martin-heidegger-is-that-he-was-a-complete-scumbag/ One of the things that really depresses me about post-graduate fine art education in London is that the Nazi thug Martin Heidegger has become central to the teaching of many theory modules on practice-led courses. Heidegger wasn’t your ordinary Nazi party member, he not only wanted to introduce the Fuhrer-principle into the German university system, he actually attempted to take on the position of spiritual leader of National Socialism – which had he been successful, would have placed him above Adolf Hitler (the political leader) in the Nazi hierarchy! Heidegger’s so called ‘philosophy’ is clearly rooted in the same rotten shit as Nazi politics, and as a consequence it is so reliant on etymology that aside from the fact that it is a puerile waste of time, it is probably also completely pointless for those who don’t speak German (the overwhelming majority of fine art post-graduates in London) to read very much by him. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/23/volatile-dispersal-festival-of-art-writing/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:34:57 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/23/volatile-dispersal-festival-of-art-writing/ On Saturday night I read at Volatile Dispersal, a festival of art writing held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event proved so crowded and popular that it was hard to take very much in. I found this ironic because after I’d used my FaceBook account to remind people about the event (I list all the public events I’m doing initially on my homepage), among the comments I garnered were the following: “I like the idea of ‘art writing’; its the best phrase I’ve ever come across (Barry Watten?) to describe the efforts of those of us who spend anywhere between 5 to 50 to 75 hours on one text, which is little more than a page, only to have said text become tucked away appropriately in a ‘slim volume’ which no one in their right mind will pay 10 dollars for when all is said and done… go boy! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/21/a-possible-appointment-in-old-street-with-the-literary-heir-of-ray-the-cat-jones/ Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:46:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/21/a-possible-appointment-in-old-street-with-the-literary-heir-of-ray-the-cat-jones/ 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? https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/19/legend-of-the-witches-directed-by-malcolm-leigh/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:45:31 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/19/legend-of-the-witches-directed-by-malcolm-leigh/ Back in 1970 this allegedly ‘serious’ documentary about witchcraft sneaked a lot of full frontal nudity past the British censor and was then screened in sex cinemas for the enjoyment of the dirty raincoat brigade. It acts as a kind of companion piece to Derek Ford’s Secret Rites, since both feature Alex Sanders (as, indeed, does Angeli bianchi, angeli neri AKA Witchcraft 70, but that’s an Italian mondo movie not an English ‘documentary’). As the self-styled King of the Swingers (oops, sorry, I mean witches), Sanders camps it up as much here as he does elsewhere; unfortunately there’s a lot less of his rib-ticklingly softly spoken voice than in Ford’s short. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/17/yes-the-bozos-who-claimed-i-was-belle-de-jour-were-completely-deluded/ Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:12:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/17/yes-the-bozos-who-claimed-i-was-belle-de-jour-were-completely-deluded/ A 34 year-old Bristol based research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the ‘real’ author of the Belle de Jour blog and books. These texts ‘documented’ the life of a high-class London call girl. Dr Magnanti claims her writing is an authentic record of the time she spent working as a prostitute to fund the final phase of her PhD research. I haven’t looked deeply into the various proofs that Dr Magnanti is Belle, but plenty of news journalists have and they seem convinced by them. So while I can’t say with absolutely certainty that Dr Magnanti is Belle, it seems to me to be rather unlikely that she isn’t. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/15/yesterday-afternoon-a-thrift-store-saved-my-life-or-from-funk-to-bubblegum-and-back-again/ Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:34:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/15/yesterday-afternoon-a-thrift-store-saved-my-life-or-from-funk-to-bubblegum-and-back-again/ It is curious what you pull out wading thru piles of records in charity shops…. coz I was in one again yesterday and wedged between platters by the likes of Jim Reeves, Conway Twitty, Sidney Devine and The Alexander Brothers, I pulled out some class vinyl in the form of the second eponymous Gavin Christopher album (the 1979 RSO Curtom one) For those that don’t know, Christopher was mentored by Donny Hathaway and Curtis Mayfield (hence his late-seventies signing to Curtom), played early on with Chaka Khan and other future members of Rufus, and was a quick off-the-mark industry mover on the hip-hop scene. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/13/how-does-stewart-home-maintain-his-lavish-life-style/ Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:04:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/13/how-does-stewart-home-maintain-his-lavish-life-style/ 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! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/11/searching-for-francois-raymond-in-puteaux/ Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:40:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/11/searching-for-francois-raymond-in-puteaux/ 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… https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/09/la-subversion-des-images-a-surrealist-show-at-centre-pompidou/ Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:42:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/09/la-subversion-des-images-a-surrealist-show-at-centre-pompidou/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/07/friends-reunited-or-500-words-on-the-inside-of-a-ping-pong-ball/ Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:10:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/07/friends-reunited-or-500-words-on-the-inside-of-a-ping-pong-ball/ How long most people will continue to put up with corporate web 2.0 platforms when they could be controlling their own sites using similar software is anyone’s guess… What we do know is that while a platform like Facebook has many users, it is not necessarily profitable. That is not, of course, the only reason why the financial value of web services that rely on user generated content ping-pong, but it is definitely a contributing factor One corporate operation that is clearly well past its sell-by date is Friends Reunited, which ITV bought for £170 million in 2005. Attempts to sell the platform have been ongoing for most of this year – in August DC Thomson put in a £25 million offer (£145 million less than ITV paid for it), but the sale has been blocked until April so that the Competition Commission can conduct an inquiry. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/05/omer-fast-at-south-london-gallery/ Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:43:19 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/05/omer-fast-at-south-london-gallery/ Omer Fast’s film installation Nostalgia is a good example of how material is formatted to fit the institution of art. This is not a criticism of Fast or his work; everyone has to survive in a capitalist society, and in doing so we all reproduce our own alienation. It should go without saying that the creation of a society where all distinctions between high and low culture are abolished in favour of a truly human world is a pressing task – but in the meantime, where I’m forced to choose between art and popular culture, I’d opt for the latter most of the time. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/03/another-banned-youtube-video-is-now-available-via-vimeo/ Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:53:43 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/03/another-banned-youtube-video-is-now-available-via-vimeo/ I reported on an earlier YouTube banning of my work in a blog I posted in September, and shortly after I’d written that YouTube pulled another video of mine, Nude In Melbourne. The point of the second piece, which was clearly lost on YouTube’s half-wit censors, is that I may or may not be nude in this short: you can’t tell because anything that might break the YouTube rules is hidden by a camera… but that didn’t stop the platform from banning it. However, the video is now available again via Vimeo: «a href=“https://www.vimeo.com/7103351" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://www.vimeo.com/7103351> Due to the hassles I’ve been getting from YouTube, I decided to post my recent video Two Strippers straight to Vimeo: https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/01/secret-rites-witchcraft-night-at-bfi-flipside/ Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:04:04 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/11/01/secret-rites-witchcraft-night-at-bfi-flipside/ Shortly after I’d settled into my seat at BFI Screen 1 for the Flipside Halloween shindig, a ‘real-life witch’ came and sat next to me. I figured this woman was a Wiccan because she looked completely out of place among hordes of trash film fans. A few minutes later Geraldine Beskin from the Atlantis Bookshop joined her. Among many other things, I overheard the pagan immediately to my left make the following observation to her occult book dealing friend: “A lot of people said they would have come any other night of the year but not tonight because they need to be alone to communicate with the spirits. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/30/international-manifesto-of-the-left-bourgeoisie/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:05:42 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/30/international-manifesto-of-the-left-bourgeoisie/ Flying around the world, attending art biennials and eating expensive meals puts us in touch with the wretched of the earth – by underlining exactly what it is that peasants and workers are missing out on. Like the lumpen-proletariat, the left-bourgeoisie is a distinct class fraction and cannot be conflated with its bourgeois and lumpen enemies. Since the proletariat has failed to act as a class for itself, we have no choice but to lead it to taste and discernment via our elevated aesthetic principles (viz, if you liked Damien Hirst, you’ll love Takashi Murakami – and don’t forget that the current Tate show featuring both of them takes its name from the 1991 album Pop Life by Bananarama! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/28/flying-lizard-tribute-to-tony-sinden-at-tate-modern/ Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:37:47 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/28/flying-lizard-tribute-to-tony-sinden-at-tate-modern/ Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/26/children-of-the-sun-by-max-schaefer/ Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:17:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/26/children-of-the-sun-by-max-schaefer/ When I first heard about Children of the Sun, I assumed the title was taken from the classic sixties psyche single of the same name by The Misunderstood, but anyone who reads the book can see that it actually invokes Savitri Devi, a particularly bonkers and unpleasant exponent of post-war Nazi occultism, and one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists. That said, the focus of this ‘novel’ is very much on English neo-Nazi scum of the Thatcher era; although Devi does appear in extended fictional form, partly on account of the fact that she died in England on the same day that the moronic bonehead band Skrewdriver played their comeback gig in London. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/24/is-mark-waughs-bubble-entendre-banned-in-the-usa/ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:44:33 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/24/is-mark-waughs-bubble-entendre-banned-in-the-usa/ Two weeks ago I received an email informing me that an attempt to sell titles in my Semina series at the New York Art Book Fare had descended into farce because the books had been impounded by US customs. Book Works told me they’d flown from Europe to America to sell the novels, but ended up manning an empty table. The publications have now disappeared and may have been destroyed; from New York any unsold copies should have gone on to a distributor in Los Angeles, but there is still no sign of them on either the east or west coast. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/22/hadewijch-or-bruno-dumont-at-the-london-film-festival/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:25:17 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/22/hadewijch-or-bruno-dumont-at-the-london-film-festival/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/20/zoo-2009-or-the-art-world-in-recession/ Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:24:04 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/20/zoo-2009-or-the-art-world-in-recession/ With plenty of galleries and art fairs closed for good by the vagaries of the current recession, some might see it as a surprise that Soraya Rodriguez’s Zoo has survived at all. No longer billed as an art fair, Zoo 2009 (16-19 October 2009) was restructured to include more curated projects and a section given over to multiples. Becoming more ‘educational’ is, of course, one way of securing sponsorship when the commercial sector has become both less willing and less able to support shebangs of this type. The location for Zoo had also changed, although this had nothing to do with the recession; the event is now taking place in a dirty former industrial space at the southern end of Shoredtich High Street, on the edge of both the city and east London. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/18/saturday-night-out-in-london-with-wu-ming/ Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:12:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/18/saturday-night-out-in-london-with-wu-ming/ Yesterday night I was at the ICA doing an event with Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4, who were presenting their latest book Manituana. After a very brief intro from me, Wu Ming 1 opened things up with a short explanation of the collective writing activities he’s been embroiled in for many years as one part of the Wu Ming collective (and before that the Luther Blissett Project). Then there was an introduction to the new Wu Ming novel, after which I read a passage from the book that required a strong London accent. Having read live many times, yesterday I decided to record the passage in question, and it was played back while I lip-synced very badly. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/16/running-away-by-jean-philippetoussaint/ Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:17:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/16/running-away-by-jean-philippetoussaint/ I read Running Away about two weeks ago and ever since I’ve been thinking about blogging it, but there’s something in me that revolts against writing about this book. It’s short and light and Matthew B. Smith’s translation reads really well… but the narrator is repulsive, a middle-class idiot savant who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He goes to Shanghai to deliver money to a guy called Zhang Xiangzhi, and then indulges in all the usual orientalist fantasies; including misreading menace into acts of friendship in a culture he doesn’t understand. This culminates in him concluding that Xiangzhi is a heroin wholesaler. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/14/the-attic-archive-at-the-cupar-arts-festival/ Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:43:38 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/14/the-attic-archive-at-the-cupar-arts-festival/ The Cupar Arts Festival went head to head with The Frieze Art Fair once again this year, and for me there was no contest in terms of prioritising one over the other. I headed out of London and away from Frieze to Cupar in Fife (Scotland). The main attraction was The Attic Archive on at The Y (Marathon House, Bonnygate, Cupar, Fife KY15 4LG). The Attic is a private space on Dundee’s Union Street that has been an international centre for marginal art collaborations since the early 1970s; the Cupar Arts Festival exhibition provides a rare chance for the general public to get a sense of what’s been going on there all that time. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/12/famous-glamour-model-sammy-marshall-stars-in-amazing-one-pound-porno-bargains-including-golden-shower-girls-lesbian-amateur/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:10:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/12/famous-glamour-model-sammy-marshall-stars-in-amazing-one-pound-porno-bargains-including-golden-shower-girls-lesbian-amateur/ Yes, those crazy non-erotic soft porn DVDs are invading UK pound shops once again, which led Justin to comment on my Jenna Jameson blog of a few days ago: “Have you noticed that Poundland actually sell porn DVDs?” Well, I blogged about the porno on offer in pound shops back in the days when I was posting on MySpace. Poundland still seem to be concentrating on the more ‘tasteful’ Penthouse and Electric Blue type stuff. Pound shops stuffed with trash DVDs, let alone euro or dollar shops selling anything at all, are in short supply in inner London; but the same shirt turns up at the same prices on market stalls in Whitecross Street and elsewhere (okay, I lied, a lot of these DVDs go for 50p when they turn up down Whitecross Street – never trust a Londoner! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/10/is-tony-wilson-even-worth-thinking-about-or-24-hour-party-people-really-sucks/ Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:08:07 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/10/is-tony-wilson-even-worth-thinking-about-or-24-hour-party-people-really-sucks/ 24 Hour Party People (2002) kept coming up in conversations I was having as I wandered around the UK, and so I have finally checked it out, although I am no fan of director Michael Winterbottom. This particular film with its super self-conscious po-mo ersatz drug patter is more like his A Cock & Bull Story(2005) than Wonderland (1999) – and let’s not even get into the puke-inducing television journalist-centred Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), or the pathetic ‘pop cultural’ _9 Song_s (2004). Winterbottom’s 2002 effort focuses on Tony Wilson – a Manchester based television journalist, unsuccessful businessman and would-be hipster. It goes without saying that no matter how Wilson’s PR minions attempted to gloss his life story, it always ended up looking really boring to me. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/08/jenna-jameson-steals-the-show-in-evil-breed-the-legend-of-samhain/ Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:25:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/08/jenna-jameson-steals-the-show-in-evil-breed-the-legend-of-samhain/ Those of you with long memories may recall that I wasn’t too thrilled when I got around to watching Jenna Jameson in Zombie Strippers, but now I’ve found a horror film in which the hardcore porn legend doesn’t star but she does really steal the show. Evil Breed (2003) directed by Christian Viel is a train wreck of a movie. It starts with some hetro sex in a tent and a stupid murder, then cuts to the title credits, and during this there is really bad heavy metal playing on the soundtrack. I watched the opening a second time with Yellowman’s Walking Jewellery Store on repeat play on my hi fi, and this massively improved it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/06/capitalism-can-only-go-backwards-it-has-nowhere-else-to-go/ Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:51:47 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/06/capitalism-can-only-go-backwards-it-has-nowhere-else-to-go/ Although it is only a matter of time, capitalism hasn’t collapsed yet; but even so, right now the way it is going backwards is still a groove sensation – empty retail units and what only a couple of years ago would have seemed like really unlikely pop-ups in place of tedious corporate chains. As a teenager in the 1970s I always loved exchange bookshops and there were plenty of them in London, even in the centre of town… you’d buy a paperback and if you didn’t want to keep it you could trade it in at half price for something else. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/04/redchurch-street-in-the-fall-or-art-in-the-dark/ Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:27:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/04/redchurch-street-in-the-fall-or-art-in-the-dark/ Catching the opening performance of Shaun Caton’s ‘…netherwhat…’ at the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery (1 October) I could have imagined I’d walked into a time warp had I not been in Redchurch Street… I hadn’t seen Caton do a performance since the 1980s, and I understand he’s done nothing in London for the past 15 years, but he seemed to be picking up from where I’d left off with him. Every Caton performance may be unique but he also runs through endless variations on the same theme in his shamanistic rituals; and here he was on the 2 October 2009 with a noised up soundtrack splattering red paint over toy babies he’d strung up from the ceiling. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/02/miss-leslies-dolls-at-bfi-flipside/ Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:51:52 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/10/02/miss-leslies-dolls-at-bfi-flipside/ Just when you think the monthly Flipside untamed cinema screenings at the BFI (Belvedere Road, Southbank, London, SE1 8XT) can’t get any more entertaining and deranged, that’s just what happens. Wednesday’s session began as always with the hardcore comedy double-act of Will Fowler and Vic Pratt. Next, Julian Marsh III rolled out of the audience to explain that contrary to blog rumour, Miss Leslie’s Dolls was not a lost movie – because he had a 35mm copy at home (and while Marsh didn’t mention it, there are also two prints in the BFI archive). Marsh also played back a recording of a conversation with Charles W. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/30/gustav-metzger-opening-at-the-serpentine-gallery/ Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:52:31 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/30/gustav-metzger-opening-at-the-serpentine-gallery/ The Gustav Metzger retrospective Decades 1959-2009 is the most extensive single exhibition of auto-destructive art ever to be held in London. Not just the work, but also the head-on collision between the Serpentine as a chic white cube space and Metzger’s decidedly funky left-field practice is in itself interesting. The good news first, and that is Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment has never looked better! With the walls inside the North Gallery painted black, and very effective blackout curtains, the colours are really luminous. This piece was also a highlight of the otherwise lousy Tate Triennial earlier this year, but at the Serpentine it looks even better than it did there, or at the Summer Of Love exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2005. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/28/the-game-of-war-film-at-the-http-gallery/ Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:36:37 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/28/the-game-of-war-film-at-the-http-gallery/ Yesterday I travelled to the far-north of London to catch the world premier of the Class Wargames film The Game Of War at the HTTP Gallery, close to Green Lanes. Divided into five segments of five minutes, the individual parts of this movie can be viewed in any order. While appearing to heap extravagant praise on Guy Debord, the film actually undermined his vanguardist positions by massively exaggerating the problematic self-promotional aspects of his film-making and other cultural-cum-politico activities. The spoken word Game of War soundtrack repeatedly exhorted viewers to play Debord’s game in order to make themselves more effective proletarian revolutionaries, and did so using the most blatant techniques of (post)-modern advertising. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/26/banned-by-youtube-but-10-erotic-movies-is-available-once-again-via-vimeo/ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:13:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/26/banned-by-youtube-but-10-erotic-movies-is-available-once-again-via-vimeo/ I finally got around to adding my banned YouTube video 10 Erotic Movies to my Vimeo account. Check it out and marvel at the fact that after 21,442 hits, YouTube banned this for inappropriate content: «a href=“https://vimeo.com/6740722" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://vimeo.com/6740722> Despite this, I’m continuing to post the odd video to YouTube, since that platform has a larger and more active user base than Vimeo. My most recent YouTube posting is Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre: «a href=“https://youtu.be/UJELyF3yrSs" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJELyF3yrSs> But if the countdown from 10 to 1 in 10 Erotic Movies is inappropriate for YouTube, then we really do need to concentrate on building our own sites well away from corporately owned Web 2. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/24/from-gryphon-to-the-banned-back-again-or-why-prog-to-punk-aint-always-a-groove/ Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:02:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/24/from-gryphon-to-the-banned-back-again-or-why-prog-to-punk-aint-always-a-groove/ I was hanging with a mate the other day who’d just acquired a pile of vinyl from a friend who was emigrating to the US. You could tell by the content of this record collection that the former owner had been born in the 1950s. I’d never heard Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and by listening to it I discovered I hadn’t missed anything at all. I had heard Mountain at some point in the seventies and one track of their generic blues rock was enough to remind me of why it was instantly forgettable. Moving on, when I was about twelve me and my mates at secondary school used to wind up older kids from a nearby grammar school by telling them that bands like Gentle Giant and Pink Floyd were commercial cop-outs, and if they were hip they’d have been groovin’ to Greenslade. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/22/a-shit-faced-scots-scammer-on-the-lam/ Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:42:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/22/a-shit-faced-scots-scammer-on-the-lam/ I was in Glasgow over the weekend and the new arts buildings and galleries in Trongate look extremely impressive, but the area around it is one of most impoverished in Europe and there are junkies galore hustling on the streets. I went into T. J Hughes to acquire some discount shit and was hugely impressed by a very blatant shoplifting technique being used by one thieving prick. This particular skaghead chose a relatively expensive but discounted designer item and took it to the pay desk to ask for a refund. He was, of course, asked for the bill of sale he’d never acquired, and so picking up the leather handbag he announced his mother was waiting outside and he needed to get the receipt from her. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/20/the-wordless-or-julia-callan-thompson-as-high-priestess-of-the-aporetic/ Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:03:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/20/the-wordless-or-julia-callan-thompson-as-high-priestess-of-the-aporetic/ My mother Julia Callan-Thompson didn’t publish very much during her lifetime, but anyone who has read her diary and letters will know she was a natural when it came to putting pen to paper. What follow are a couple of pieces by my mother that appeared in issue one of an underground publication called Shoestring put together by Sonya Perry in Harlech, north Wales, crica 1974. Cutting to the quick, here’s my mother’s humorous essay from that Roneoed journal: STILL IN THE SAME KICK Hippies usually come from families which suffer from ‘status mal-integration’ – inter-ethnic or mobile families, or families whose economic and cultural status are not on a par. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/18/the-zanzibar-films-the-dandies-of-may-1968-by-sally-shafto/ Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:40:34 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/18/the-zanzibar-films-the-dandies-of-may-1968-by-sally-shafto/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/16/how-to-make-a-very-bad-piece-of-art-disappear-plus-the-abramovich-syndrome-unveiled/ Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:24:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/16/how-to-make-a-very-bad-piece-of-art-disappear-plus-the-abramovich-syndrome-unveiled/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/14/dispersible-manifesto-of-situationist-skinheads-part-1/ Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:04:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/14/dispersible-manifesto-of-situationist-skinheads-part-1/ A situationist skinhead is a skinhead who engages in the construction of situations. This means the construction of concrete momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a passionate and superior quality based on the principle of a permanent revolution of every day existence, from which, several of the principles below evoke a number of observations linked to the study of the situationist skinhead in his/her natural environment. If s/he realizes it by reading this, all skinheads can become situationists. All situationists can become skinheads for the same reasons, but not from one day to the next. As we know, even if all roads lead out of Babylon, the situationist hacienda will not be built in a single day but will in fact be a project of ongoing transformation. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/12/the-eternal-return-of-londons-most-down-dirty-beatniks/ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:21:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/12/the-eternal-return-of-londons-most-down-dirty-beatniks/ Going to my post box the other week, I found within my haul of letters a small collection of stories entitled _Chomsky And The Kultigato_r by Graham Nowland (Clear City Press). The title piece about a man who is mistaken for the linguist Noam Chomsky is very good, but another story called Some Of The Times I Have Died is even better: “How can I be writing this if I am dead? Well, I can think of at least three novels with dead narrators and I’m not even trying. Take it from me, you can write when you are dead..” https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/10/naked-kangeroos-versus-watching-paint-dry/ Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:48:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/10/naked-kangeroos-versus-watching-paint-dry/ YouTube has a reputation as the social networking site with the lowest level of collective intelligence among its members. That said, it also has a lot more users than a site like Vimeo, which may sustain reasoned debate but mostly offers the alternative of indifference to the cut and thrust of YouTube. I use both, but I use YouTube more. Fed up with some of the comments elicited by my explorations of what experimental film might be in a digital age, last month I posted on YouTube a video I’d originally entitled Watching Paint Dry – both as a humorous response to numskulls and as an examination of the aesthetics of boredom. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/08/the-acid-on-sustained-experiment-with-lysergic-acid-diethylamide-or-lsd-by-sam/ Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:09:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/08/the-acid-on-sustained-experiment-with-lysergic-acid-diethylamide-or-lsd-by-sam/ The author of The Acid (Vision, London 2009) uses the pen name Sam, but is probably better known to most readers of this blog as Chris Gray. For me, and probably for many of you, The Acid reads like a continuation of where Chris left off in the essays he contributed to his English language Situationist anthology _Leaving The 20th Centur_y (1974). There he wrote: “What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored in the body and mind of each individual, and this is where it must be dissolved. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/06/on-the-irreducibility-of-julia-callan-thompson/ Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:43:58 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/06/on-the-irreducibility-of-julia-callan-thompson/ Yesterday I posted an essay on the main part of this website entitled The Real Dharma Bums: on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain. The text documents one of my mother’s relationships and the endless scamming that accompanied the hardcore drug use that was a part and parcel of said romance. Running to 10,000 words, this piece was too long to use as a blog. I prefer to place shorter and more fragmentary materials here. But as a supplement to that and other writings about my mother, I’m running below a couple of letters she wrote to my grandmother Elsie in the early 1960s. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/04/worlds-best-nudist-beaches-part-1-smiltyne-lithuania/ Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:14:39 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/04/worlds-best-nudist-beaches-part-1-smiltyne-lithuania/ There are various beaches running down the Coronian Spit from the tiny port at the top: the common beach, men’s beach, women’s beach and, of course, the nudist beach. These beaches at Smiltyne at the top of the Spit appear to be quieter than those devoted to swimming at Juodkrante and Nida. This is the Baltic coast so it is strictly summer time swimming and sunbathing, but from June to August the water is warm and the sands are clean. There is a fairly strong current pushing you up towards Klaipeda but essentially the swimming is easy. When I visited the naturist section not everyone on the beach was nude, with perhaps half the women being topless rather than totally nude. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/02/the-magician-or-why-cokeheads-make-better-film-students/ Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:25:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/09/02/the-magician-or-why-cokeheads-make-better-film-students/ The Magician is a 2005 movie written and directed by its ‘star’ Scott Ryan. It was issued on DVD in 2006 and is currently available for a couple of quid in a bargain bin near you (if you live in the UK anyway). This is essentially a no budget film shot on DV for about AS $3000 dollars, it is talk heavy and the dialogue is mainly improvised. Ryan plays Ray Shoesmith, a Melbourne hitman who will make anyone disappear for the right amount of money. Shoesmith’s schtick is that he kidnaps his victims and then murders them at remote locations – this is patently a ridiculous strategy for a successful hitman, so it is clear from the off with this mockumentary that we are in la la land. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/31/one-week-of-art-strike-activities-in-alytus-lithuania-18-24-august-2009/ Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:41:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/31/one-week-of-art-strike-activities-in-alytus-lithuania-18-24-august-2009/ The central HQ of the 2009 Art Strike Biennial switched constantly between Alytus Art School, Hotel Dzukija about five minutes walk away, and a bar-cum-restaurant located between these two venues in downtown Alytus. At the art school a lot of coffee was consumed, at the hotel innumerable bottles of wine, and in the bar industrial quantities of beer and cold beetroot soup. The Dzukija was an old school Soviet hotel, a concrete shell with stained glass in some of the public areas and cantilevered stairs between the floors. The building was absolutely crammed full of original oil paintings by official Soviet artists of yesteryear. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/16/blog-strike-17-to-30-august-2009/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:58:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/16/blog-strike-17-to-30-august-2009/ We call on all bloggers to turn off their computers and cease to post from 17 to 30 August 2009. Blogging is an indulgence of a self-perpetuating elite; those who can afford regular access to computers and the internet. Those bloggers who struggle against the reigning society find their work either marginalised or else co- opted by the bourgeois net establishment. Blogging creates the illusion that, through activities which are actually waste, this civilisation is in touch with ‘higher sensibilities’ which redeem its exploitation of those who live outside the overdeveloped world. Those who accept this logic support the bourgeoisie even if they are economically excluded from the class. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/14/manituana-by-wu-ming/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:14:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/14/manituana-by-wu-ming/ Following on from Q (authored as Luther Blissett) and 54, comes a new novel Manituana by the Bologna fiction collective known as Wu Ming. Verso are publishing Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, the proof copies were circulated last month, and the book will be available in both the UK and the US shortly. Like the earlier tomes by the same authors, Manituana is a heavily researched historical novel that speaks as much about a future we have yet to make, as the past in which it is set. The main action takes place around the ‘American War of Independence’, with the focus on the alliance the Iroquois Indians made with the English. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/12/buck-naked-in-bergen/ Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:51:26 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/12/buck-naked-in-bergen/ Although I’ve been to Bergen four times in the past five years, I’ve never pulled the classic tourist move of arriving on a cruise ship. Known locally as the city of the seven hills, Bergen is in the language of love and tourist hype ‘the Rome of the north’; as are also Riga, Tallinn, York and Sutton Scotney. Bergen’s development as a Hanseatic trading port is a historical groove sensation, but today most visitors are more impressed by the bar prices; hot tip – take a bank loan before buying a round. This time around I discovered some cute local customs while sitting outside The Calibar (Vaskerelven 1, Bergen). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/10/herman-brood-rock-and-roll-junkie/ Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:04:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/10/herman-brood-rock-and-roll-junkie/ Since Herman Brood came up on a blog I posted a few days ago, I’ve been thinking about why I like his tune Rock & Roll Junkie. There are elements within it that on their own I would normally hate. Somehow the super-dumb boogie-woogie keyboards manage to become a non-irritating element in the overall racket. Brood’s voice is acceptable but nothing special, with his cracked English lyrics and pronunciation being a definite plus element. I guess most listeners will connect the lyrical content to Brood’s own life, since he is Holland’s most famous rock and roll junkie. That said, the words relate most immediately to music and only secondly to drugs: https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/08/new-world-believe-in-music/ Sat, 08 Aug 2009 07:46:07 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/08/new-world-believe-in-music/ Here’s a strange one pop-pickers, I was on the prowl for Viola Wills’ cover of If You Could Read My Mind when I stumbled across a bargain bin copy of the New World album Believe In Music, which features a different version of the tune I was looking for. The band name rang a vague bell, and so I turned the platter over and immediately noticed the Gordon Lightfoot song in the track listing. The album is a 1973 RAK release, and the Mickie Most connection (RAK was his label) brought back vague memories of early seventies singles by New World that were more familiar to me as tunes done by other acts: Rose Garden covered by Lynne Anderson and Tom Tom Turn Around, which had also been waxed by The Sweet. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/05/another-side-of-1977-eddie-holman-as-salsoul-sound-sensation/ Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:15:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/05/another-side-of-1977-eddie-holman-as-salsoul-sound-sensation/ I’ve liked Eddie Holman’s A Night To Remember for a long time, and I guess it’s familiar to me because it was one of the late Salsoul singles that contributed to a revival of interest in him. So when I spotted an original vinyl copy of the album that takes its title from this single in a bargain bin last week, I grabbed it with both hands. The tune A Night To Remember alone is worth a round pound of my money, or anyone else’s for that matter! And a quid was all I had to pay for a 12 inch 8 track vinyl trip right back to my last year at school. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/03/merseymania-a-great-lost-lou-reed-album/ Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:43:20 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/03/merseymania-a-great-lost-lou-reed-album/ Merseymania by Billy Pepper and the Pepperpots is an album I rescued from a bargain bin on the strength of the cover and the sleeve notes. It is also rumoured to be a Lou Reed and John Cale effort from their days producing crud budget music for Pickwick during the earlier part of the sixties. Can anyone substantiate this rumour? Cale and Reed worked at Pickwick, but I’ve never seen any documentary evidence that convinced me they are actually responsible for this particular abomination. The black and white cover photo of screaming Beatles fans is an absolute classic, with some lovely period lettering above it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/01/steve-burns-whispering-winds-the-real-sound-of-1977/ Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:21:29 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/08/01/steve-burns-whispering-winds-the-real-sound-of-1977/ Here’s a find of mine from the bottom of a pile of charity shop records – the album Whispering Winds by Steve Burns. When I came across this platter it meant nothing to me. I didn’t recognise the record label either; BGS of Lethame Road, Strathhaven, Scotland. It was the sleeve notes that convinced me I should part with 50p for this particular 12 inches of vinyl pleasure: “As a disc jockey, I have to listen to a lot of alleged singers, which is, I suppose, as good a way as any of getting your ears pierced in an era when the average pop singer sounds like a Rice Crispy calling to its mate, and a pop song seems to be anything that isn’t worth saying made into a song. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/30/1970s-nightmares-part-3-wading-through-the-stiffs-to-get-to-rachel-sweet/ Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:03:56 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/30/1970s-nightmares-part-3-wading-through-the-stiffs-to-get-to-rachel-sweet/ Back in the late-seventies I really liked multi-band concert bills, especially the Sunday night punk cabarets that started at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm and then switched to The Lyceum in The Strand. I don’t remember exactly when and where, but I also took a punt on the 5 Live Stiffs tour featuring Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric and Larry Wallis, that hit the UK for a month in the autumn of 1977. Back then punk and new wave acts did proper tours, heading as far north as Aberdeen or Inverness and doing around 30 dates in as many days. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/28/1970s-nightmares-part-2-forgotten-bands-hopeless-causes-the-search-for-the-lost-chord/ Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:33:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/28/1970s-nightmares-part-2-forgotten-bands-hopeless-causes-the-search-for-the-lost-chord/ Despite the recently fashionable status of the Bethnal Green area in east London, this has to date failed to lead to a revival of interest in the 1970s band who named themselves after the hood. Bethnal were formed in Bethnal Green in 1972, and sounded like a cut-price Who minus the vocal skill of Roger Daltrey and the songwriting talent of Pete Townshend. I saw Bethnal at The Marquee in Wardour Street on Thursday 24 August 1978 and had a good night out. Bethnal had plenty of energy but beyond their deployment of a violin, there was nothing very memorable about them. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/26/stewart-home-answers-38-questions-from-catalonia/ Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:54:55 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/26/stewart-home-answers-38-questions-from-catalonia/ 5 years ago Kiko Amat wrote a big feature on me for La Vanguardia, Spain’s biggest selling paper. A couple of days ago he emailed me 38 questions saying: “…we’ve started a new series of Q&A to people we like or we feel inspired by. It’s a very simple Q&A, very Guardian Weekend like, but we find it very telling. And amusing too.” Since my answers will be published in translation, I thought I’d share them with English speaking readers here. Q. When were you happiest? A. This morning. Q. What is your greatest fear? A. The US hardcore punk band Fear – I’m not a huge hardcore fan but I do like Fear’s I Don’t Care About You and I Love Living In The City. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/24/1970s-nightmares-part-1-seeing-sting-the-police-unannounced-at-a-punk-gig/ Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:39:04 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/24/1970s-nightmares-part-1-seeing-sting-the-police-unannounced-at-a-punk-gig/ I knew 1979 was gonna be a bad year before it even started, although I didn’t see Thatcher’s election as a certainty until it happened. Much of my take on the world back then was filtered through the music I loved. On 29 December 1978 I headed up to Camden to catch a multi-band new wave gig at The Electric Ballroom headlined by The Brian James All Stars. This was the band that eventually became The Brains. Their performance that night was so-so and for me it didn’t compare with the excitement of seeing The Damned live when James was their guitarist (or even when they reformed without him). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/22/yoko-ono-gustav-metzger-and-me/ Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:49:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/22/yoko-ono-gustav-metzger-and-me/ Yoko Ono keeps popping into my life. Last week I was reading and commenting about her on the Old Rope blog. The piece in question particularly grooved me because it featured an embed of Ono’s Bottoms (AKA Four) from YouTube. Here’s a short extract from that blog followed by some of my comments: “…Ono has taken more than her fair share of shit over the years. Richard Di Lello’s The Longest Cocktail Party, whilst being an illuminating and entertaining insight into the world of Apple, also offers glimpses of the derision leveled at Ono – even from within the Beatles inner circle. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/20/nick-hornby-never-had-days-like-these/ Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:28:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/20/nick-hornby-never-had-days-like-these/ Recently a friend suggested I try to acquire some Russ Henderson vinyl I wanted via Discogs. I’d landed on this site a few times but had never really investigated it. When I checked it out, I was disappointed to find only two Russ Henderson titles were listed there, the 1966 vinyl album Caribbean Carnaval! (sic) and the CD compilation London Is The Place For Me 2, which features a Henderson track taken from Caribbean Carnival; only the latter was available in the Discogs marketplace, but needless to say I already had both it and the release it is taken from. I double-checked my copy of the 1966 vinyl and ‘Carnival’ is spelt correctly on the sleeve and labels, the spelling error had been generated in the Discogs listing, although I’ve now amended it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/18/india-freaks-on-the-hippie-trail-in-the-high-sixties/ Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:29:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/18/india-freaks-on-the-hippie-trail-in-the-high-sixties/ Back in the late 1960s my mother Julia Callan-Thompson was in the countercultural jargon of the time an ‘India freak’; a drop-out obsessed with the ‘mystic east’. Among my mother’s extant papers are a number of letters she sent while out on the hippie trail, and one she received from a woman called Georgian Shaw as she was making her way back to Europe. My favourite among the various surviving missives my mother sent my grandparents over the years is the following, mailed from Kathmandu on 13 June 1969: “Everest although cold was the most beautiful sight you could see. Yes! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/16/narendra-modi-toxic-alcohol-street-trash/ Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:12:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/16/narendra-modi-toxic-alcohol-street-trash/ After the mass protests last week and demands for the resignation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) political gangster Narendra Modi, I’ve been checking out the follow-up reporting. The demonstrations were a spontaneous outpouring after more than a hundred people died from drinking toxic bootlegged alcohol in India; many more were poisoned. Modi is a hardline Hindu nationalist whose fundamentalist political positions have exacerbated Hindu-Muslim discord in Gujarat, the only part of India where there is an outright ban on alcohol. It should go without saying that Modi’s inflammatory policies play a significant role in contributing to social misery in Gujarat. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/14/protect-yourself-from-data-mining/ Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:49:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/14/protect-yourself-from-data-mining/ You know how Google, for example, keep records of all the searches anyone makes online using their service; to counteract this I not only use lots of different computers and search engines, I also periodically makes searches for things that don’t really interest me that much – you know stuff like “flower arranging” (not something I care about), “love and romance” (which seems to turn up a lot of dating services, not something I need) or “chemical composition of DNA” (which actually pulls up links to loads of really interesting info, although a bit off track from my more usual concerns) – and what I’d really like to see posted in the comments here are other examples of things people think it would be good to search for (or already search for), just to leave false trails for the data miners…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/12/shake-and-shimmy-with-the-credit-crunch-its-a-groove-sensation/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:27:50 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/12/shake-and-shimmy-with-the-credit-crunch-its-a-groove-sensation/ It’s been interesting to watch CDs piling up in bargain bins this year. Right now the compact disk feels as obsolete as VHS tapes did a few years back. Throw in a major recession and there’s a lot of great music out there being flogged off ‘for a song’. While three quid albums by the likes of Can and Augustus Pablo more than pique my interest (and there are plenty of them around), what really amused me last time I was in FOPP were the bargain bin copies of Keep Reachin’ Up by Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators. As far as I can recall, I first heard tracks from Keep Reachin’ Up while listening to The Robert Elms Show on Radio London. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/10/julia-callan-thompson-the-the-swinging-london-film-scene/ Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:40:08 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/10/julia-callan-thompson-the-the-swinging-london-film-scene/ I imagine there must be many autobiographical accounts of working as a film extra in London in the sixties, although I can’t recall reading any. Looking at the film industry from the bottom up strikes me as considerably more interesting than the recent obsession with celebrity focused accounts of the movie world. My mother, Julia Callan -Thompson, briefly took up extra chores in the mid-sixties and she ran them in tandem with attempts to establish a modelling career. She found her way onto the fringes of the London film world through a friend called Annette Monaghan. Annette had grown up two streets away from my mother in Newport and relocated from south Wales to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/08/vicky-does-new-cross-the-art-of-sexual-obsession/ Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:45:12 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/08/vicky-does-new-cross-the-art-of-sexual-obsession/ On Sunday afternoon I went to the opening of a show entitled Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar at Guy Hilton Gallery in Fournier Street, London E1. It was actually a group show but Vicky Gould got the star billing under her new moniker of Gold, and was the main selling point. Allegedly Gould’s work was produced for her final year fine art BA show this summer, but was censored by Goldsmiths College because it focused on her sexual obsession with a lecturer called Paul Davis. When I arrived for the opening the exhibition was still being installed. I was introduced to Vicky who was sitting on the floor making chocolate icing, presumably so that she could smear it over her body during her advertised performance. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/06/anyone-got-a-good-use-for-technorati-or-lastfm/ Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:10:34 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/06/anyone-got-a-good-use-for-technorati-or-lastfm/ Last week I took control of my tunes and spoken word pieces on LastFM. I’d noticed that various parties had been uploading my tracks there and figured it was about time I did something about it. I don’t have a problem with people file exchanging my tunes, but drum and bass label Moving Shadow had uploaded my spoken word album Cyber-Sadism Live! and totally destroyed the flow of that album by re-ordering the tracks. Of course, anyone can listen to the tracks from Cyber-Sadism Live! any which way they want, but with the original running order restored you can listen to the live sets collected there as they were performed, if that’s what you wanna do! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/04/chicks-on-speed-piss-all-over-the-dead-futurists-at-tate-modern/ Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:31:04 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/04/chicks-on-speed-piss-all-over-the-dead-futurists-at-tate-modern/ Yesterday I went to see the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. The first thing in this display is a large blown-up poster of F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, which included the following: “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice… we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long Italy has been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.” https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/02/identikit-millionairesses-eurotrash-storm-jeff-koons-opening/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:07:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/07/02/identikit-millionairesses-eurotrash-storm-jeff-koons-opening/ The Serpentine Gallery is a curious institution. On the one hand it is stuck in the middle of Hyde Park and gets treated by the weekend hordes as a glorified toilet; while on the other, current co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist is preparing some heavy-weight exhibitions, most notably a Gustav Metzger retrospective that will kick ass from the end of September. But last night it was the opening of the summer show, a silly season special called Popeye Series by Jeff Koons. Popeye Series doesn’t interest me. Koons makes exactly the sort of art you’d expect from a former Wall Street commodity broker, the visual equivalent of junk bonds, over-priced trash. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/30/get-paid-to-blog-sites-are-a-rip-off-so-dont-digg-them/ Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:13:13 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/30/get-paid-to-blog-sites-are-a-rip-off-so-dont-digg-them/ Having blogged about click thru ad busting and related issues in the recent past, I’m now moving along to take a look at so-called ‘get-paid-to-blog’ sites. The bottom line with these frauds is that a bunch of suits use content you create to attract an audience for click thru ads. There are many different companies running scam sites of this type, and among the better known are Triond, Helium and Associated Content. It should go without saying that the sweated labour which monetizes such rip-off schemes is conned into thinking they’ll be ‘rewarded’ for their graft; but if they see any money at all, they only get a tiny percentage of the click thru income they’ve generated for the swindlers raking-in the real profits. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/28/world-travel-whisky-crime-in-the-roaring-twenties/ Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:54:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/28/world-travel-whisky-crime-in-the-roaring-twenties/ Don’t Call Me A Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime by Bob Moore (Dissident Books, New York 2009) is apparently a reprint of a tome first published in 1935 by Hurst & Blackkett of London without the exclamation mark; and the variant subtitle My True Autobiography. When I first read the introduction to this ‘reprint’, I suspected Dissident Books CEO Nicholas Towasser was pulling my leg over the provenance of the text when he wrote: “There mustn’t have been many copies printed (of the original edition), because despite many Web searches, I’ve found no used book dealers selling it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/26/antony-balch-night-at-the-bfi/ Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:32:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/26/antony-balch-night-at-the-bfi/ I try to catch as many of the BFI’s Flipside nights as I can, since this monthly delve into the wilder side of British cinema should not be taken for granted. It is sobering to think that only a few years ago the BFI was an incredibly stuffy and conservative institution that haughtily ignored the film culture it now highlights in its Flipside programming. So big up to Vic Pratt, Will Fowler and the current BFI management for being forward thinking and in the groove! The days of tossers like Colin McCabe passing-off their tiresome taste in bourgeois snore fests as somehow representing everything that is ‘progressive’ in cinematic culture are thankfully over! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/25/steven-wells-rip/ Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:32:34 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/25/steven-wells-rip/ This morning I received several emails about the death from cancer of Steven Wells. Swells was best known as a music hack and was the dominant figure at the New Musical Express for much of the eighties and nineties. While he was at the NME, Swells was always prepared to go out on a limb with an opinion to support off-beat bands and writers. It was Swells who penned the infamous quote about Will Self and me that both AK and Do-Not Press used as a blurb on my books: “Stewart Home’s sperm’n’blood-sodden scribblings make Will Self’s writings read like the self-indulgent dribblings of a sad Oxford junkie trying to sound hard. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/24/christopher-columbus-didnt-discover-the-americas-he-began-their-colonisation/ Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:11:29 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/24/christopher-columbus-didnt-discover-the-americas-he-began-their-colonisation/ Waitrose is a chain of 200 UK supermarkets flogging high-quality nosh at extortionate prices. The company is run as a co-op and prides itself on its image of ‘corporate social responsibility’, despite its core client base being the over-privileged English white middle-class. Its branches are concentrated around London, there are only four in Wales and two in Scotland. Some readers of this blog will recall that way back in January we got into a discussion of Waitrose in the comments to my Anti-Capitalist Shop Closure Wish List. I made my feelings about Waitrose clear then when I wrote: “Waitrose is part of the John Lewis Partnership but I object to their client base. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/22/totally-tripped-out-at-raven-row/ Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:43:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/22/totally-tripped-out-at-raven-row/ You don’t necessarily need drugs to get high, as Ann Lislegaard’s art work proves. According to a page that is no longer available on norway.org (a Norwegian government website in various languages): “Bellona, the fictional city of Samuel R. Delany’s 1974 science fiction cult classic Dhalgren is a place beyond reason, where time and space is out of joint and architectural fixtures seem to be in constant flux and transformation. In Lislegaard’s video animation installation, Bellona is a psychological space, in which norms and standards seem to dissolve into a chaos of anti-hierarchical conditions.” What norway.org has to say is fair enough if you want Lislegaard’s work explained ‘rationally’, but I found it more enjoyable to let the constantly moving images trip me out. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/20/john-hoppy-hopkins-in-shoreditch-a-communist-headache/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:04:48 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/20/john-hoppy-hopkins-in-shoreditch-a-communist-headache/ On Thursday night I took in the opening of the Hoppy (John Hopkins) exhibition Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary at Idea Generator on Chance Street in Shoreditch. The displayed photos date from the early and mid-sixties. Mostly they seemed to be straightforward examples of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. There were also some freak graphics by people other than Hoppy, but connected to him via his involvement with the underground newspaper International Times. So what Idea Generator presents us with is very much an official history of one phase of the London counterculture. That said, it looked a little odd in east London, when so much of what was on display depicted west London more than 40 years ago. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/18/beatnik-religious-pursuits-part-1-subud/ Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:50:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/18/beatnik-religious-pursuits-part-1-subud/ Although a number of famous American beatnik writers made Buddhism the focus of their spiritual quests, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac being the most notable among them, this certainly wasn’t the only avenue of religious pursuit to be explored by the European-wing of post-war drop-out youth. A good number of European beatniks wanted to come into knowledge of God. As a consequence one of the things that came up in conversation as they sat around getting stoned was Subud, a syncretistic movement that can be traced back to the mystical ecstasies a Javanese man called Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo experienced in 1925. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/16/jim-daly-the-1973-black-power-type-plot-at-west-london-magistrates-court/ Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:02:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/16/jim-daly-the-1973-black-power-type-plot-at-west-london-magistrates-court/ James Daly is one of the many curious underworld figures who knew my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. It seems my mother first came across Daly when they were both scoring smack at 75a Cambridge Gardens in the early 1970s. The gear sold at this address was supplied by a former jockey of Australian extraction called Larry Benns. He’s been described to me as a hot tempered man suffering from low self-esteem who excelled at pissing off his girlfriends. The scene at 75a was intense, a number of addicts seem to have overdosed there including, it is said, one of Brenda Grevelle’s boyfriends. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/14/female-prisoner-701-scorpion-and-the-the-trope-of-revenge/ Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:08:34 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/14/female-prisoner-701-scorpion-and-the-the-trope-of-revenge/ While most women-in-prison flicks bore me, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1973) directed by Shunya Ito is a groove sensation. The plot is simple, Nami Matsushima AKA Matsu the Scorpion (Meiko Kaji) is betrayed by her bent cop boyfriend Sugimi (Isao Natsuyagi), who sets her up to be raped by his gangster cohorts. After Matsu is jailed for attempting to murder Sugimi, her only aim in life is to escape in order to fully avenge herself. The story is told largely through visuals and partially in flashback, with lashings of torture, nudity, beatings and lesbianism. A shower room cat-fight and other staples of this genre spin off into surreal flights of fancy, and much of the action is colour-coded – red for hatred, green for revenge. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/12/two-bent-london-coppers-of-the-1960s-norman-pilcher-victor-kelaher/ Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:41:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/12/two-bent-london-coppers-of-the-1960s-norman-pilcher-victor-kelaher/ After noticing that Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher is listed on the Wikipedia as a living person, I figured it was worth blogging this scumbag and his boss Detective Chief Inspector Victor Kelaher. I don’t want people to forget that Plicher and Kelaher were worse than slime; and it is still worth pointing out they got away with most of the shit they pulled, so much for so called ‘justice’. According to Wikipedia, Pilcher was born in 1936 and so if he isn’t dead yet, he ought to be very soon. And as far as I’m concerned Pilcher deserves to rot in hell. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/10/graciela-carnevale-shafted-by-the-pump-house-gallery-in-london/ Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:24:58 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/10/graciela-carnevale-shafted-by-the-pump-house-gallery-in-london/ Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia were an ‘avant-garde’ group active in the Argentinian city of Rosario in the late 1960s. The ground floor of the show currently dedicated to them at the Pump House Gallery focuses on their Experimental Art Cycle, ten pieces executed over six months in 1968. Among other things, Eduardo Favario invited people to a gallery opening, then locked the space in order to create a large crowd waiting to get in. Given that the Argentinian military dictatorship had made street gatherings illegal, this was considerably more provocative than doing the same thing in Paris or New York at that time. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/08/the-testament-of-ray-jones-the-greatest-cat-burglar-in-the-world-ever/ Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:04:56 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/08/the-testament-of-ray-jones-the-greatest-cat-burglar-in-the-world-ever/ After clocking my earlier blogs about Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, a couple of readers kindly passed on further information about this legendary criminal. As a consequence, I can now bring you a written statement in which Ray The Cat explains that he embarked on his career as a master thief in order to get his revenge on bent cops; these crumbs wrecked Ray’s boxing career by fitting him up on trumped-up assault charges. The story is best told in his own words: “I have never had much schooling but I have learned a great deal from life. From the age of 12 my whole dream was to have become the middleweight boxing champion of the world. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/06/getting-it-on-with-yvonne-rainer-at-the-whitechapel/ Sat, 06 Jun 2009 08:52:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/06/getting-it-on-with-yvonne-rainer-at-the-whitechapel/ Thursday night offered a rare chance to catch a public screening of Yvonne Rainer’s 1985 feature film The Man Who Envied Women at The Whitechapel Gallery in east London. The movie mixes fictional and documentary passages. The fictional sequences feature a character called Jack Dellar talking subjectively about the breakdown of his relationship with his second wife, while his ex’s speeches tend towards more general reflections on gender and related issues. The film begins with Dellar exercising in an apartment he’d shared with the woman, and from which she is collecting some of her possessions. From then on we mostly see Dellar, played by two different actors, in various situations – while the former wife is, with one vitally important exception, visually absent and represented only by a voice-over. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/04/ibiza-in-the-beatnik-hippie-eras/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:35:09 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/04/ibiza-in-the-beatnik-hippie-eras/ After World War II, Ibiza was one of several spots strewn across the Mediterranean that attracted two distinct expatriate types from northern Europe and North America. There were writers and artists ostensibly escaping from the crass materialism of New York and London, many of whose views were so incoherent that what they were really objecting to became by default the innate human capacity for rational thought; and the rich who felt hostility towards even the mildest attempts at wealth redistribution, and who liked the tax breaks offered to them by Spain’s fascist junta then headed by General Franco – even if the areas in which they settled tended to be those in which anti-fascist sentiments prevailed. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/02/from-soho-clubs-to-bloomsbury-glamour-in-early-sixties-london/ Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:11:11 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/06/02/from-soho-clubs-to-bloomsbury-glamour-in-early-sixties-london/ In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Christine Keeler and Mariella Novotny. According to some observers, Keeler’s club crowd was manipulated for geo-political gain by the British and other security services; books such as Honeytrap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, or An Affair of State by Caroline Kennedy and Philip Knightley, cover this in some depth. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/31/another-take-on-the-process-church-of-the-final-judgment/ Sun, 31 May 2009 12:33:15 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/31/another-take-on-the-process-church-of-the-final-judgment/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/29/david-cameron-panhandling-for-small-change-since-2009/ Fri, 29 May 2009 00:10:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/29/david-cameron-panhandling-for-small-change-since-2009/ This week a lot of people in the UK were subjected to David Cameron’s pug-ugly mug dropping onto their doormat. There he was, looking like a complete creep, on the the front of a bulk-mailed Conservative Party ‘election communication’. Under the banner ‘It’s time for change’, this prime example of absolute twattery advised readers to ‘Vote Conservative on 4 June’ (the date of the European elections). Clearly, voting for a party headed by an over-privileged arse-wipe educated at Eton and Oxford is not going to change anything. There is no more traditional route to political power in Britain than the exclusive education Cameron received. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/27/art-is-dead-baby-the-tate-modern-ubs-long-weekend/ Wed, 27 May 2009 09:35:15 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/27/art-is-dead-baby-the-tate-modern-ubs-long-weekend/ After its sponsor UBS AG went into near financial meltdown, Tate Modern named this year’s UBS Long Weekend ‘Do It Yourself’ (22-25 May 2009) and based it around an Arte Povera exhibition. UBS is both a private and investment bank, as well as an asset management corporation. In the past it has been a major sponsor of the arts, but is unlikely to remain so for much longer. After incurring huge losses on subprime mortgage securities in 2007, UBS only survived after it secured a multi-billion dollar bail out from the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GISC) and an unnamed source in the Middle East. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/25/more-on-the-death-of-king-mobs-chris-gray/ Mon, 25 May 2009 00:08:36 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/25/more-on-the-death-of-king-mobs-chris-gray/ In the past couple of days I’ve found some more online pieces about the death of Chris Gray. I’ve also come across blog talk of a Guardian obituary that was supposed to appear on 21 May; there is no sign of it yet but I guess this may still materialise. The most comprehensive obit so far is by Charlie Radcliffe who was very close to Chris in the 1960s, had little contact with him for more than 30 years after that, then rekindled this intimate friendship seven years ago. Among the many interesting observations Charlie makes at The Void are the following: https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/23/london-the-worlds-greatest-city-laid-bare-on-bfi-flipside/ Sat, 23 May 2009 08:36:50 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/23/london-the-worlds-greatest-city-laid-bare-on-bfi-flipside/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/21/soho-keep-it-unreal/ Thu, 21 May 2009 09:11:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/21/soho-keep-it-unreal/ Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols. I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/19/king-mobs-chris-gray-rip/ Tue, 19 May 2009 15:10:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/19/king-mobs-chris-gray-rip/ I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact. I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/19/why-we-need-a-weekly-nudist-night-at-tate-modern-in-london/ Tue, 19 May 2009 10:09:48 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/19/why-we-need-a-weekly-nudist-night-at-tate-modern-in-london/ Is it possible to enjoy modern art with your clothes on? Not if you are Mavis Artlover of the Art Lovers Network. According to promotional material you can find online: “This group is for everyone who likes to romp around naked with works of art. Sex with art is even better than masturbation!” Mavis Artlover is a 25 year-old hotel chambermaid who moved from Totnes in Devon to Dollis Hill in London five years ago. She told me that she discovered she was sexually excited by art as a teenager when she was visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol: “I was looking at this Anselm Kiefer work and I felt a wave of pleasure washing through me. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/17/ladbroke-grove-in-the-1960s-with-the-accent-very-much-on-24-bassett-road/ Sun, 17 May 2009 14:19:30 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/17/ladbroke-grove-in-the-1960s-with-the-accent-very-much-on-24-bassett-road/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/14/from-whitecross-street-to-falmouth-harbour-back-again/ Thu, 14 May 2009 08:39:37 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/14/from-whitecross-street-to-falmouth-harbour-back-again/ Reader let me take you by the hand to Whitecross Street… are the words with which nineteenth-century writer George Gissing begins his first novel Workers of the Dawn. In Gissing’s time Whitecross Street was synonymous with poverty but now it boasts art galleries and a regular farmer’s market. Just down the road is the site that provided Gissing with the title of another novel New Grub Street. Today this road stops dead where it hits the Barbican complex and what is left of it is called Milton Street. Grub Street was once the favoured home of London’s hack journalists and other impoverished writers; it was originally called Grope Cunt Street because of the broken down prostitutes who plied their trade within it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/12/holy-armageddon-batman-a-richard-grayson-opening-at-matts-gallery-in-london/ Tue, 12 May 2009 07:38:50 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/12/holy-armageddon-batman-a-richard-grayson-opening-at-matts-gallery-in-london/ I went to the Sunday afternoon opening of Richard Grayson’s The Golden Space City of God at Matt’s Gallery (42-44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR) on 10 May. Some drapes and stacked chairs, designed to make the gallery look like a community space, formed a minor part of an installation. The main item was a 45 minute film of a choir singing a libretto that had been assembled by Grayson from writings he’d found on the website of Christian fundamentalist cult The Family International (formerly The Children of God And The Family of Love). The music is composed by Leo Chadburn. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/10/the-bfi-dwoskin-season-continues-with-even-more-cinematic-sadism-absolutely-the-most-disturbing-movie-youve-ever-seen-about-strippers/ Sun, 10 May 2009 08:23:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/10/the-bfi-dwoskin-season-continues-with-even-more-cinematic-sadism-absolutely-the-most-disturbing-movie-youve-ever-seen-about-strippers/ You can forget Zombie Strippers (2008), nothing quite equals Dyn Amo (1972) as a burlesque horror show! I caught a screening of the movie on Thursday 7 May 2009 as part of the BFI’s Stephen Dwoskin season. The film is disturbing and quite a few audience members walked out before the end. I lost count of how many once the numbers reached double figures. Although the Dwoskin movie is based on the play Dynamo by Chris Wilkinson, the original narrative is stripped away and the focus of the film is the emotions of the cast; these are mainly revealed through facial close-ups. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/08/performing-localities-recent-guatemalan-performance-art-on-video/ Fri, 08 May 2009 10:11:52 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/08/performing-localities-recent-guatemalan-performance-art-on-video/ There were two evenings of screenings and talks about Guatemalan live art at Iniva in Shoredtich on 5 & 6 May (2009). On both nights six videos lasting around 40 minutes in total were followed by a talk that went on a little longer. The panel on the first night consisted of London-based curator Joanne Bernstein and her Guatemala City counterpart Rosina Cazali. Among other things, they outlined the political background to contemporary cultural production in Guatemala. This might partly be summarised by explaining that mid-twentieth century land reforms in Guatemala led to a CIA sponsored coup in 1954; then after a presidential assassination three years later and other internal troubles, there followed a civil war that only ended in 1996. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/06/willaim-blanchard-in-redchurch-street-or-the-death-of-art-spells-the-murder-of-artists-the-real-anti-artists-appear/ Wed, 06 May 2009 10:38:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/06/willaim-blanchard-in-redchurch-street-or-the-death-of-art-spells-the-murder-of-artists-the-real-anti-artists-appear/ Although The Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery (30A Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP) has set opening times, it doesn’t always stick to them. I was curious about their William Blanchard show (24 April -6 May 2009), but whenever I turned up to see it, the joint was closed. Fortunately, at 15,24 on 4 May 2009, I got the following text message: “William Blanchard show open now for 3 hours. Sexton.” The message was from Martin Sexton who runs the Artwars Project Space on the opposite side of the street, and who’d kindly agreed to text me when the Blanchard show was viewable. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/04/there-is-no-beginning-there-is-no-end-the-counterculture-goes-on-forever/ Mon, 04 May 2009 09:41:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/04/there-is-no-beginning-there-is-no-end-the-counterculture-goes-on-forever/ The London Zine Symposium 2009 took place at The Rag Factory (16-18 Heneage Street, London E1 5LJ) yesterday, Sunday 3 May. As an event, it occupies the ground between Publish & Be Damned (with its self-published art focus) and the Anarchist Book Fair (for those committed to full-on and weekend variety anarchist life-styles). There were a lot of familiar faces on the stalls at the Zine Symposium ranging from Mark Pawson (who can also be seen at Publish & Be Damned) to Active Distribution (who favour the Anarchist Book Fair). I was at the top of Brick Lane at lunch time before making my way to the Zine Symposium, and the Whitechapel Anarchist Group (all two of them) were out in force selling their publication WAG in front of the Beigel Bake. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/02/down-dirty-stephen-dwoskin-movies-at-the-bfi/ Sat, 02 May 2009 13:23:17 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/05/02/down-dirty-stephen-dwoskin-movies-at-the-bfi/ Last night I was down at the BFI on the South Bank (the nearest thing you’ll find to a real rock ‘n’ roll club in London these days) to catch the first screening in a series dedicated to notorious underground/art film-maker Stephen Dwoskin, a one time contemporary of Andy Warhol. The first night of this month long season was given over to 5 early underground shorts. After an introduction by William Fowler which laid out Dwoskin’s role as a pioneer in both the New York and London underground movie scenes, the films were screened in chronological order, so Asleep (1961) came first. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/30/the-london-perambulator/ Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:42:47 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/30/the-london-perambulator/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/28/since-new-york-is-the-big-apple-lets-re-brand-london-as-the-toilet/ Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:40:07 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/28/since-new-york-is-the-big-apple-lets-re-brand-london-as-the-toilet/ Following on from my blog at the weekend detailing how Iwona Blazwick has turned the Whitechapel Gallery into a truly horrid mini-Tate Modern, I’m now going to focus on the pointlessness of her appointment as chairwoman of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy Group. According to a promotional blurb on Boris “The Spider” Johnson’s local government website: “The London Cultural Strategy Group is a high-level advocacy group aimed to develop and promote London as a world-class city of culture, bringing together representatives of the key agencies that support culture in London.” Apparently a ‘world-class city’ doesn’t require world-class copy-writing; the sentence I’ve just quoted is clumsy, for instance in its deployment of the word ‘aimed’ and repetition of the term ‘group’. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/26/the-great-whitechapel-gallery-expansion-disaster-of-2009/ Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:07:04 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/26/the-great-whitechapel-gallery-expansion-disaster-of-2009/ The Whitechapel Gallery re-opened this month and what a disaster its expansion turns out to be. The new spaces, created from the acquisition of the old library next door, are poky. The circulation is appalling, I kept having to stop because other people were in my way, and no doubt they felt I was in their way too. There are endless heavy doors throughout, presumably to reduce fire risks but these ugly items induce feelings of claustrophobia. There are also a lot of stairs and level changes which add to the cluttered and alienating atmosphere. On the plus side, the light is good throughout the expanded gallery, but the overall effect is still extremely depressing. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/24/zero-books-launch-in-marylebone-high-street/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:31:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/24/zero-books-launch-in-marylebone-high-street/ Zero Books launched last night at Daunt on Marylebone High Street in central London. Upon arrival I was greeted by Zero editor Tariq Goddard. I hadn’t realised he’d moved out of London, but then I hadn’t seen him around for a while, so I wasn’t too surprised when he told me he was living in the country. Shortly after arrival I found myself chatting to sci-fi novelist China Miéville who brought up the extremely ugly subject of David Tibet (real name David Bunting) of Current 93 and his utterly ridiculous sub-musical collaborations with hardcore fascists. Our anti-fascist exchange was interrupted when the evening’s formal speeches began. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/22/encounters-of-the-spooky-kind/ Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:52:05 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/22/encounters-of-the-spooky-kind/ Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind AKA Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) is considered by many to be the first Hong Kong kung fu horror comedy, and as such it influenced a lot of subsequent releases. The opening is remarkably similar to low-budget American splatter fests of the same period, and features some mediocre comedy which inevitably includes the central character Bold Cheung (played by director Hung) being subjected to a prank that functions as a prelude to the ‘real’ horrors he will encounter later in the movie. That said, once Bold Cheung accepts a wager to spent the night in a haunted temple the film really takes off. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/20/my-dirty-weekend-at-the-pelirocco-hotel-in-brighton/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:13:42 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/20/my-dirty-weekend-at-the-pelirocco-hotel-in-brighton/ On Friday I read at the Permanent Gallery in Brighton which, needless to say, was a groove sensation. Aside from booking me for that, Jay Clifton’s Tight Lip literary organisation also checked me into the Pelirocco Hotel at 10 Regency Square. The latter establishment can be found close to the wreck of the old West Pier. The rooms are themed around rock and roll lore and the pleasures of sex. I had the Modrophenia Room, done out in purple with an orange mod arrow over two walls; there was a target bedspread, a poster for the film Blow Up and a painting of Keith Moon in red, white & blue. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/18/doctor-john-petro-the-junkies-friend/ Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:14:18 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/18/doctor-john-petro-the-junkies-friend/ Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The late-1960s saw a major shift in British government drug policy. Until that time, GPs were allowed to prescribe maintenance doses of drugs to addicts. A few GPs over-prescribed and a small black market in drugs that originated with the National Health Service developed. The government responded to this by preventing GPs from prescribing heroin and instead sent addicts to a restricted number of treatment centres. This marked the start of an American-style criminalisation of hard drugs in the UK. The result, as any objective observer could have predicted, was a disaster. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/16/london-hostess-clubs-of-the-1960s/ Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:14:54 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/16/london-hostess-clubs-of-the-1960s/ Because actress Lana Clarkson and her sadistic killer Phil Spector met in an LA hostess club, the producer’s conviction for murder earlier this week turned my attention once more to 1960s London variants on the ‘lonely men pay pretty girls for conversation’ clip joint racket. Murray’s Cabaret Club where Profumo Affair sex scandal girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked is the most famous London hostess joint. Being glitzy, Murray’s presented itself as a cabaret but the real draw was the more fatal combination of drink and hostesses. But Murray’s wasn’t the only such club in London in the sixties, other examples include Churchill’s and Winston’s. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/14/lana-clarkson-phil-spector-both-victims-of-american-gun-culture/ Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:23:31 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/14/lana-clarkson-phil-spector-both-victims-of-american-gun-culture/ Watching the coverage of the Phil Spector murder trial as it came in on BBC News 24 last night, really rammed home the celebrity agenda behind most reporting. There was lots about the famous people Spector worked with, and while it is always a pleasure to see footage of Tina Turner in her sixties prime, it didn’t surprise me that The Ramones weren’t among the famous acts the Beeb mentioned the record producer having worked with. There was little of Clarkson beyond one brief clip, which I didn’t see repeated. I always thought Lana was a great ‘scream queen’ even if the films she appeared in weren’t so wonderful. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/11/gustav-regler-the-owl-of-minerva-ruth-forster-julia-callan-thompson/ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:17:51 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/11/gustav-regler-the-owl-of-minerva-ruth-forster-julia-callan-thompson/ In late 1961 my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – moved across London from a one room bedist at 101 Barnsbury Street N1 (Islington) to a two room pad on the top floor at 24 Bassett Road W10 (off Ladbroke Grove). Both the basement flats beneath her at 24 Bassett Road had interesting occupants. In one was the Trinidadian drummer Russ Henderson who led the first steel band to play on the streets of London, and later had a hand in setting up what became known as the Notting Hill Carnival. In the other was a refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster, who I’ve been told was a Jewish bookseller and a member (or a former member) of the Communist Party. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/09/fear-loathing-in-fitzrovia/ Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:36:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/09/fear-loathing-in-fitzrovia/ While Julian MacLaren-Ross could turn a reasonable sentence, I’ve always felt the cult that exists around this writer is based more on his sad bohemian life than his books. Therefore it has taken me a few years to get around to reading Paul Willetts 2005 biography of this bourgeois clown. Fear & Loathing In Fitzrovia is a fantastically well researched book, and for fans of MacLaren-Ross I’m sure it provides them with everything they want. For the rest of us there is a certain amusement to be gained from the repetitious nature of the MacLaren-Ross spendthrift life-style, which resulted in endless moonlight flits, but it only serves to confirm what most readers already know, he was ultimately a bore. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/07/keith-singletons-the-dummy-failing-to-slay-cinema-audiences-due-to-a-straight-to-dvd-release/ Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:46:36 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/07/keith-singletons-the-dummy-failing-to-slay-cinema-audiences-due-to-a-straight-to-dvd-release/ This 9 year-old film is a real shocker due to the dreadful cinematography and acting rather than the gore epiphanies it singularly lacks. Only a movie that was directed and produced by its main actor could have a lead this ugly! And when I say ugly I mean hideous! Keith Singleton as Paul Chandler will make horny masochists everywhere very happy, and turn the rest of us off big time. This flick was first released in 2000 and looks like it was made on no budget, but it uses James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet on the soundtrack and credits it to Arista Records, so presumably the tune was paid for and it can’t have been cheap! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/05/what-can-it-all-mean/ Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:31:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/05/what-can-it-all-mean/ I was playing a bunch of old records today, and wondering why I don’t hear so many new ones that really groove me. The thing that really got me going on this was the Steinski double CD retrospective What Does It All Mean? on the Illegal Art label. Back in the day I had a 12 inch white label of The Lessons, and I particularly love Lesson 3 coz of the way it’s build around Herman Kelly’s Let’s Dance To The Drummer’s Beat. These days The Lessons don’t sound quite as hot as they once did, possibly due to this near legitimate CD release – but they still shake the walls a lot harder than the recent radio mix on the second disk. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/03/phil-green-the-lost-world-of-londons-beatnik-hipsters/ Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:44:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/03/phil-green-the-lost-world-of-londons-beatnik-hipsters/ It has long been a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, but in terms of the London counterculture it would be far more accurate to state that to date accounts of this scene have largely been composed by the squares; individuals who failed to penetrate the truly hip inner circles because they are too straight to know about them. Since I started researching my mother’s life, I have come across a massive amount of material that was missing from histories of the period. The most amazing oversight is without doubt the Victor James Kapur acid manufacturing bust (my mother’s friend Detta Whybrow persuaded the chemist to make the LSD, and organised its distribution in London); fortunately after I turned Andy Roberts onto newspaper accounts of the court case, he did further research and included it in his book Albion Dreaming (2008). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/01/santiago-sierras-four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse/ Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:19:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/04/01/santiago-sierras-four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse/ I made a tour of the City of London around midnight to check out the final stages in the construction of a major new street installation by Santiago Sierra entitled The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The controversial Spanish artist, represented in London by the Lisson Gallery, had workers boarding up a series of buildings. These were mainly shops since apparently the many banks in the area didn’t want their frontages spoiled by an artist. The greatest concentration of sealed buildings are located immediately around the Bank of England, but more can be found in Moorgate and Bishopsgate too. The businesses participating range from shops selling shoes and bagels to at least one branch of Carphone Warehouse. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/30/ray-the-cat-jones-rides-again/ Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:45:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/30/ray-the-cat-jones-rides-again/ What a difference a blog makes! The flurry of excitement that kicked off after my January entry on Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones continues apace with the greatest cat burglar of all time being featured in yesterday’s Wales On Sunday. There are few new details in the piece by Nathan Bevan but there is a lovely photo of Ray The Cat as a part of the print version (not with the online variant, which you can find here). Of course, there has to be a news angle, and in this instance it is the fact that the account of Ray The Cat’s escape from Pentonville as quoted in my earlier blog features in Paul Buck’s recent book The E-list. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/29/dress-like-a-banker-to-fool-g20-cops-demonstrators-warned-fear-of-attacks-as-old-bill-plots-violence/ Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:09:15 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/29/dress-like-a-banker-to-fool-g20-cops-demonstrators-warned-fear-of-attacks-as-old-bill-plots-violence/ London is preparing to go into lock down amid fears of cop violence directed against anyone who dares to make use of those public spaces the authorities have designated as no go zones for the duration of the G20 summit. This doesn’t just effect people who wish to engage in peaceful protest, it also impacts on anyone who wants to nip out and buy a tin of baked beans or visit a doctor. The Corporation of London has issued a letter to local residents advising them to stay away from the area around the Bank of England on 1 April. However, within this missive its “Safer City Partnership” offers no advice on what to do should you, for example, need to acquire food from the Cheapside Tesco on that day. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/28/unseen-polish-films-of-the-1970s-1980s/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:15:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/28/unseen-polish-films-of-the-1970s-1980s/ I headed over to the RCA in South Kensington on Thursday to catch Controlled Image: The Question of Image Control in Poland in the 70s and 80s. This was funded by the Polish Cultural Institute who in recent years have been running some groovy film programmes all over London, and this particular event was part of a season at various venues including Tate Modern and The Barbican. There was a good crowd, some had stayed on from a packed Dan Graham talk before the screening. I find Graham painful to watch in the flesh because he is so pathetic and unsure of himself, so I didn’t attend that. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/26/chucky-meets-natural-born-killers/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:30:02 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/26/chucky-meets-natural-born-killers/ I always say you can’t get more post-modern than your local Blockbuster video store, and once again I proved this to myself when I popped in this week to find something to watch. I hadn’t noticed it before but lurking in a dim corner of the shop was a copy of Dummy (Triloquist in the US) directed by Mark Jones (the man behind Leprechaun and Rumpelstiltskin). No need to review the film really, the blurb says it all: “Norbert hasn’t spoken since his mother’s suicide – except through her old ventriloquist’s dummy. But does this dummy hold an evil spell over Norbert and his attractive sister? https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/24/key-neoist-practice-plagiarised-from-french-academics-shock/ Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:51:41 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/24/key-neoist-practice-plagiarised-from-french-academics-shock/ In recent months much has been made of the fact that the term Neoism can be traced back to a 1914 occasional poem by American satirist Franklin P. Adams. Okay, so most of the world seems to have ignored the excitement this discovery generated among half-a-dozen fools and jesters, but it is nonetheless referenced on the relevant Wikipedia page. That said, when Blaster Al Ackerman coined the term in 1978, he did so initially as No Ism. The following year this mutated into Neoism, and no one active within the group using this name from the late 1970s onwards appears to have been aware of Adam’s fleeting use of the term until a year or so ago. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/22/x-rated-adventures-of-an-exploitation-film-maker/ Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:14:19 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/22/x-rated-adventures-of-an-exploitation-film-maker/ This is the autobiography of British exploitation legend Stanley Long, London’s answer to Russ Meyer, as ghosted by by Simon Sheridan. Long started out as a photographer, then moved onto stag films for the 8mm home market, before making a couple of non-sex documentary shorts in the late 1950s. However, it was his nudie cuties Nudist Memories (1958), Nudes Of The World (1961) and Take Off Your Clothes And Live (1963) that first made him into a figure that anyone with more than a passing interest in cinema would want to check out. Long went on to make a very notable trilogy of mondo films: West End Jungle (1960), London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), which take in both a series of night clubs and the commercial sex scene in Europe’s leading city. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/20/daniel-johnson-his-songs-just-bore-me/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:37:38 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/20/daniel-johnson-his-songs-just-bore-me/ I just got this Tartan DVD box set of music documentaries out of a bargain bin. I’d seen End Of The Century at a preview for the flick back in 2004, and I was literally the only person in the cinema when I paid to see Mayor Of Sunset Strip in 2005. I wanted to see these two films again, and figured they were worth picking up cheap even when they’d been bundled with a piece of junk like The Devil And Daniel Johnston. Why has anyone got any time for Johnston? He lacks the charm of The Shaggs and his songs are basically really bad imitations of Jonathan Richmond on his post-Velvet Underground trip. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/18/grainger-trina-2-ladbroke-grove-hipsters-of-the-1960s/ Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:54:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/18/grainger-trina-2-ladbroke-grove-hipsters-of-the-1960s/ Two names that come up frequently when I’m looking at the real hip scene of the 1960s are Malcolm Drake AKA Grainger and Trina Simmonds. Their names even appear from time to time in print but to date the semi-official historians of the London counterculture have singularly failed to get to grips with what they and their scene were all about. Alan Semple, who knew Trina Simmonds in the early sixties, told me that before she met Grainger she’d been partnered up with another London streetwalker called Kay, and that this pair were as likely to roll johns as do the business with them. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/16/ban-black-cabs-in-london/ Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:34:31 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/16/ban-black-cabs-in-london/ The conviction of John Worboys last week on 19 charges of drugging and sexually assaulting women in his black cab demonstrates that licenced taxis are neither safe nor reliable. It is believed Worboys raped and assaulted 100 women. The authorities have always had an indulgent attitude towards licenced cabbies and this was undoubtedly a factor that encouraged the old bill to overlook complaints about him (alongside institutional sexism). Both licenced and unlicenced cabs are a menace in London. They clog up roads and in my experience black cab drivers number among the most intolerant motorists in the city, with a size-able proportion of them being particularly aggressive towards pedestrians and cyclists. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/14/myspace-power-pop-julia-callan-thompson/ Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:40:38 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/14/myspace-power-pop-julia-callan-thompson/ While bringing you this blog I haven’t entirely forgotten about the main part of my site, to which this is – of course – just a back end. And over there you get pictures too, whereas this part is all text. Aside from tidying up bits and pieces on the main part of the site, I’ve also been adding new pages. But if you wanna comment on these new pieces you’ll have to do so below, since the main site consists of static pages. On MySpace (I also put this out as an “ediffusion” pamphlet a week or so ago): https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/12/ray-the-cat-jones-again/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:11:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/12/ray-the-cat-jones-again/ My post of 24 January 2009 about career criminal Ray “The Cat” Jones caused a flurry of interest. I got a couple of messages saying Ray was dead, and further confirmation of this in a comment added to that blog yesterday: “Ray died in 2001, just so you know.” Likewise, Neil Milkins told me: “I have made some enquiries with a nephew of Ray, Michael O’Dowd of Nantyglo. (Ray was his mother’s brother.) He said Ray died of cancer in London about 7 years ago.” To clarify my own distant relative status with the greatest cat burglar of all time, Ray’s mother was an older sister of my maternal grandfather David Callaghan (AKA Dai Callan), and my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was named after this particular aunt. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/10/people-lets-freak-out/ Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:08:50 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/10/people-lets-freak-out/ Saturday night (7 March 2009) in the city of the dead and I’m part of the small team organising Fiona’s Shoe; __an evening of music, poetry and film at the South London Gallery. We’d obviously created a buzz coz we’d sold out three days before the event and on the night we were turning people away. Those that got in found themselves in a darkened room with a large DVD projection of a Jud Yalkut snippet. Next up was a 16mm print of Wholly Communion directed by Peter Whitehead, a half-hour documentary about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/07/its-time-to-demand-progressive-unemployment/ Sat, 07 Mar 2009 11:54:35 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/07/its-time-to-demand-progressive-unemployment/ I find it really strange that so many people view the credit crunch and recession as a curse. Personally I consider them a groove sensation! Over-consumption stinks up the planet and wreaks ecological havoc. We don’t need more plastic junk, and we should let the car industry go out of business: replacing it with free, fast and frequent public transport. Likewise, many people perform boring and meaningless jobs. Admittedly it is tough being without work in a capitalist society because even basic necessities like housing and food are treated as commodities from which the bourgeoisie can turn a profit. But there is nothing noble about work, no dignity in alienated labour, and we need less not more of it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/06/parlez-vous-inverness-street-an-indie-wanker-moi/ Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:59:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/06/parlez-vous-inverness-street-an-indie-wanker-moi/ Have you noticed how indie-wankers not only make really bad records, but in a failed attempt to compensate for the fact they can’t rock, have this tendency to ineptly reference classical mythology and so called French ‘intellectuals’? All too often indie-wankers puff up these cultural failings by utilising words and concepts they don’t fully understand. Since a phrase to describe such phenomena would be useful, I suggest the term Inverness Street English. This is the street in Camden which boasts one of the worst pubs in London, The Good Mixer, a magnet to indie-pop mockneys and related tossers. In creating this new term I was, of course, inspired by the older coinage Wardour Street English, referring to the: “affected pseudo-archaic diction of historical novels. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/04/crime-journalist-david-seabrook-found-dead-in-bed-at-48/ Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:42:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/04/crime-journalist-david-seabrook-found-dead-in-bed-at-48/ Is David Seabrook dead? This is a question I’ve heard again and again in the past two days. What started as a trickle of email and phone call rumour yesterday, had by today turned into a flood of conversation. The first message was from true crime author Neil Milkins: “Are you able to tell me if David Seabrook has died. I have had an email saying he died January 2009.” When Cathi Unsworth contacted me about Seabrook today, I was able to trace the rumour mill carrying this story back through a network of my friends via novelist David Peace to film director Paul Tickell. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/03/gazwrx-the-films-of-jeff-keen/ Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:15:16 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/03/gazwrx-the-films-of-jeff-keen/ The BFI have just done us proud with a box set of Jeff Keen films entitled Gazwrx, not to mention various screenings of his works – and all from brand spanking new prints! Keen was one of the earliest and best British underground film-makers. He was largely self-taught and is blessed with a beatnik sensibility that converges with the hippie scene of the later sixties but remains a distinctive strand within it. As a starting point for all this, imagine a surrealist remake of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) set in Brighton and you’re not a million miles away from Like The Time Is Now (1961); except, of course, the comparison glosses over Jeff Keen’s singularity. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/01/ray-johnson-opening-at-raven-row/ Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:47:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/01/ray-johnson-opening-at-raven-row/ Ray Johnson was a pop artist, friend of Andy Warhol and one of the key figures in international mail art (aestheticised communication in the form of a ‘paper net’ that acted as a precursor to the world wide web). He committed suicide in 1995 and had dropped out of the New York art scene years before that, opting instead for non-commercial underground activity. Johnson was a major figure in the early years of American pop art, but more recently had been largely forgotten beyond an international underground scene that idolised him. I was in communication with Johnson in the 1980s when he initiated a correspondence with me. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/27/come-on-man-on-wire-is-actually-mediocre/ Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:00:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/27/come-on-man-on-wire-is-actually-mediocre/ Last night I saw Watchmen at the London Imax. The film is, of course, pure spectacle and if you’re going to see it in the UK, then don’t bother unless you’re going to the Imax, the largest screen in the country. The movie is way too long but its over-financing means there are plenty of really expensive shots that look good if you’re watching on a big enough screen. However, enough of that, what about so called ‘quality” film these days? The flick that won a shed load of awards recently was Man On Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit, who pulled high-wire stunts culminating in an illegal walk between the New York Twin Towers in 1974. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/25/loot-oxford-burn-cambridge/ Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:20:28 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/25/loot-oxford-burn-cambridge/ Thought I’d give it a couple of days to simmer up, but the Guardian on Tuesday was a groove sensation. The front page headline promised: “Britain faces summer of rage – police. Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets”. Nice! Although middle-class anger clearly lacks the staying power of working class resentment. Talking of which, the pull out quote from a Trevor Phillips interview in the second section read: “The task today is not to shout for black people or women, but to break the grip of white men who went to public school. And that’s why I’m here. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/23/sinclairs-new-london-anti-classic-again/ Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:14:40 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/23/sinclairs-new-london-anti-classic-again/ Nice to see Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire being bigged-up in the Saturday Guardian by Andy Beckett this weekend. I don’t read The Times or The Telegraph so we won’t talk about how I know there were thumbs up reviews in those papers too. Talking to a few people after I blogged the book I realised there’d been the odd misunderstanding because I’d only really dealt with the ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ section that devotes more lines to me than any other part of the book; oh I just love reading about myself! ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ really is the most fictional part of the tome, and the rest of the work is far more factual. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/21/screamtime-at-the-bfi/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:51:53 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/21/screamtime-at-the-bfi/ I hadn’t seen Stanley Long perform in public since the BFI screened Primitive London a couple of years ago, so last night it was off to the South Bank to catch the veteran exploitation producer and director in action… Rumour had it that Stanley was in bad shape after various surgical procedures, but he didn’t look much different from last time I saw him. He did his usual stock-in-trade bad jokes to laughs and heavy applause: “My writer Michael Armstrong has put on a lot of weight since he wrote these scripts for me, but I’m not going to embarrass him. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/19/london-when-it-sizzles/ Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:01:24 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/19/london-when-it-sizzles/ Lynne Tillman and Tony White speaking and reading at Toynbee Studios last night proved to be the best event so far in the “Existential Territories” series of talks organised by Book Works. Tony chose to present himself very much as a writer, which I found curious since he is art school trained and his textual practice originally emerged from story-telling elements in his performance work. Tony read an unpublished story woven around a set of words chosen by an artist collaborator. Lynne read from her novel American Genius, the first tme she’s performed from this book in London. The focus of the Q & A was very much on why artists were keen to have Lynne and Tony contribute fictional stories to their catalogues, and what this might signify. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/17/bourriauds-altermodern-an-eclectic-mix-of-bullshit-bad-taste/ Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:41:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/17/bourriauds-altermodern-an-eclectic-mix-of-bullshit-bad-taste/ The recent trend for curators to view themselves as the ‘real’ ‘heroes’ of the art world continues with the Parisian fashion-poodle Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass) using “Altermodern”, the 2009 Tate Triennial, to promote himself over and above anything he’s actually included in this aesthetic disaster. The selection of works for ‘Altermodern’ struck me as remarkably similar to the last ‘big’ show I’d seen curated by Bourriaud, the Lyon Biennial in 2005. The art itself doesn’t really matter, it is there to illustrate a thesis. The thesis doesn’t matter either since it exists to facilitate Bourriaud’s career; and Bourriaud certainly doesn’t matter because he is simply yet another dim-witted cultural bureaucrat thrown up by the institution of art. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/15/yet-another-b-movie-unafraid-to-take-that-plunge-into-po-mo-extremism/ Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:27:36 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/15/yet-another-b-movie-unafraid-to-take-that-plunge-into-po-mo-extremism/ Fed up with seeing the dreadful films those I meet through my involvement with the culture industry want to discuss (Hunger, Milk etc.), I decided to catch My Name Is Bruce (2008) at The Prince Charles. It had been on for a week at the Soho Curzon before being moved for one night only to this second run movie theatre (on Friday 13th of course!); part of a very limited UK theatrical release before it is issued here on DVD in March (it came out on disk a few days ago in the US). In My Name Is Bruce, actor/director Bruce Campbell stars as an obnoxious caricature of himself, a washed-up b-movie star living in a trailer. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/13/steve-mcqueens-hunger-is-boring/ Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:02:57 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/13/steve-mcqueens-hunger-is-boring/ Since I was continually being asked by acquaintances what I thought of Steve McQueen’s _Hunge_r (2008), I finally went to see it this week… on second run at central London’s only budget cinema The Prince Charles. The film turned out to be exactly the type of middle-brow bollocks I can’t stand; it takes a political subject and turns it into a typical Hollywood-style fairytale about an ‘exceptional’ individual. Yes, this is yet another completely unsatisfactory drama about a generic white centred male subject. The movie starts by showing a patriarchal screw getting ready for work, then descending the stairs of his council house and sitting down to eat. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/11/dark-they-were-golden-eyed/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:12:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/11/dark-they-were-golden-eyed/ I mentioned the bookshop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed in this blog the other day, and doing this made me wonder what I could dig up about it on the web. Not that much as it happens, although there was a Flickr picture of the shop sign with the following remark underneath: “DTWAGE was a bookshop in St. Anne’s Court off Berwick St. market I think, in London. It sold a lot of SF and head stuff like old copies of Friendz and Oz. Posters, bongs. They would play music I had never heard before like Zappa so I would have to ask them what it was and then go and buy the records. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/09/another-deranged-london-anti-classic-from-iain-sinclair/ Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:12:03 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/09/another-deranged-london-anti-classic-from-iain-sinclair/ In Hackney, That Rose Red Empire (published by Hamish Hamilton tomorrow), Iain Sinclair brings together his fictional practices and his cultural journalism with stunning results. Sinclair has interviewed dozens of subterranean London figures such as Chris Petit and then, as he frankly admits, freely rewritten what they told him to suit his own agenda. I’ve already had hours of fun trying to work out what is true and what is made up in this book, and I’m sure once more people have read it this will generate endless pub discussions too. The transcription of an interview with me bears little resemblance to what I actually told Sinclair. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/07/last-days-of-consumerism/ Sat, 07 Feb 2009 10:11:56 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/07/last-days-of-consumerism/ I was walking around the west end yesterday and it struck me how much recession and winter suits London. For the first time in decades London feels once again like the city I knew as a teenager in the 1970s. It was wet and everything looked dirty and shitty, not much snow left but plenty of muck where the white stuff had melted. I dived into Zavvi coz being in shops that are closing down grooves me. This particular retail chain was never very well stocked, not even the ‘superstore’ I checked out on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and not even when it was called Virgin Records. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/05/the-1960s-nude-murders-17th-century-whitefriars-punks-who-liked-to-give-head/ Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:25:59 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/05/the-1960s-nude-murders-17th-century-whitefriars-punks-who-liked-to-give-head/ Having spent some time looking at my mother’s life and in particular her time from 1961 onwards in Notting Hill, I have inevitably had cause to ponder Jack The Stripper and the nude murders. At least six west London prostitutes died in a bizarre series of mid-sixties sex slayings but the killer was never caught. I have always been more interested in the victims than their murderer(s), but I felt it worth commenting on a recent book that claimed to identify the killer. My focus in this review was on the author of this travesty, since he made a number of outrageous claims without any proof to back them up. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/03/altermodernism-cancelled-due-to-wrong-type-of-snow/ Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:06:27 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/03/altermodernism-cancelled-due-to-wrong-type-of-snow/ I wasn’t planning on going to the 2009 Tate Triennial opening last night, but in my efforts to get Mister Trippy lovers all the latest London art world gossip, I had planned to attend the ‘unofficial afterparty’ organised by Tate curator and all round good guy Cedar Lewisohn. This was supposed to take place at The Double Club, 7 Torrens Street in Islington, but was cancelled due to snow. I’m sure Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud rolled up a hundred dollar bill and hoovered up a good quantity of snow before deciding it was too watery to give anyone a buzz… For those of you from outside the UK, several inches of snow fell in London yesterday so there were no buses, few subway trains and many roads were closed; it is unusual for it to snow here so the equipment for dealing with this kind of ‘severe’ weather just isn’t in place. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/02/regina-jose-galindo-the-dematerialisation-of-the-live-artist-1999-2009/ Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:40:06 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/02/02/regina-jose-galindo-the-dematerialisation-of-the-live-artist-1999-2009/ Regina José Galindo is a 34 year-old artist from Guatemala City and the major retrospective of her work that opened this weekend at Modern Art Oxford (AKA Oxford MOMA and Madam Mao’s) entitled The Body Of Others is stunning. The large upper gallery contains 3 video works: I’ll Shout It To The Wind (1999), Who Can Erase The Traces (2003) and The Fashionable Cut (2005). In the first, Galindo hangs by a harness from an arch in the centre of Guatemala City and is filmed literally shouting her poems to the wind; as she does so she drops sheets of her poetry and the crowd beneath her scramble after the paper thinking it might be money, since this is an area used for illegal currency exchanges. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/31/31-posts-in-31-days-now-im-gonna-slow-down/ Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:06:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/31/31-posts-in-31-days-now-im-gonna-slow-down/ Blogging can be a curious experience, sometimes it makes 3 weeks feel like a life-time ago. Talking of which, only 20 days have passed since I reviewed a recent book by Ken Wark, although subjectively for me it feels like this was done back in my 2006 MySpace blog days. In his tome, Wark observed: “The newspapers are devolving, bit by bit, into shopping guides. The ‘quality’ magazines are just coded investment advice. One turns with hope to the blogosphere, only to find that it mostly just mimics the very media to which it claims to be an alternative. Alternative turns out just to mean cheaper…” I like that quote, and while there are some blogs drifting through the depths of cyber-space that groove me, many are just a waste of time. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/30/laura-oldfield-ford-opening-at-hales-totally-rocks/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:37:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/30/laura-oldfield-ford-opening-at-hales-totally-rocks/ 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. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/29/lets-burst-the-web-20-commercial-bubble-instead-get-really-funky/ Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:12:43 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/29/lets-burst-the-web-20-commercial-bubble-instead-get-really-funky/ The commercially driven nature of Web 2.0 has been stressed by many commentators, for instance Tim O’Reilly in his influential essay of September 2005 “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software“. Thus when I first looked at MySpace a little before O’Reilly published that text, rock bands clearly knew how to promote themselves to a new (as well as their existing) audience via this site, but writers and artists on the whole didn’t. The later two categories of would-be culture industry ‘professionals’ tended to use the internet as a means of advertising (largely ineffectively) what they were doing, rather than integrating their activities into it. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/28/secrets-of-click-thru-ad-busting/ Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:08:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/28/secrets-of-click-thru-ad-busting/ I want to look briefly at a specific aspect of one of the web’s greatest commercial success stories, Google. AdWords is the name for the pay per click service offered by Google to advertisers for the sponsored links that appear beside the queries entered into their search engine. Google explain their advertising system this way: “Concerned about costs? Don’t worry – AdWords puts you in complete control of your spending. Set your budget. There’s no minimum spending requirement – the amount you pay for AdWords is up to you. You can, for instance, set a daily budget of five dollars and a maximum cost of ten cents for each click on your ad. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/27/the-baader-meinhof-complex/ Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:34:46 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/27/the-baader-meinhof-complex/ Uli Edel’s film about the Red Army Faction AKA The Baader Meinhof gang takes us from the late-sixties through to the late-seventies; from student demonstrations to bank robberies and kidnappings. The early part of the movie shows police brutality which no doubt led to the radicalisation of some of its victims. However, Edel chooses to follow the political degeneration of a clique of middle-class reactionaries whose minds have been warped by vanguardist Bolshevik fallacies. The dialogue makes it clear that Leninist cretin-in-chief Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) considers his tiny cell of urban guerrillas to be in advance of ‘the masses’. One can only conclude that in Baader’s deluded idealist fantasies the role of the RAF was to prevent the working class from acting as a class in itself and for itself, and to single-handedly preserve capitalist (dis)order by injecting false-consciousness into the minds of ‘the masses’. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/26/gus-van-sant-milking-it/ Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:22:17 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/26/gus-van-sant-milking-it/ Harvey Milk was a gay rights activist and pro-small business populist politician who was murdered alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone at their local City Hall in 1978. He is now also the subject of a Gus Van Sant movie starring Sean Penn called Milk. Despite the usual slew of rave reviews and award nominations that are a part and parcel of productions with the financial clout to hire celebrity leads, the film is a turkey. With a running time of around two hours it is way too long and left me bored shitless. The movie is full of clunky devices, such Milk recording his life story on tape just in case he is assassinated, something he apparently did but that nonetheless comes across as completely contrived in its celluloid anti-realisation. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/25/the-sexual-healer-tells-you-how-to-enter-the-mystic-state-of-meg/ Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:25:32 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/25/the-sexual-healer-tells-you-how-to-enter-the-mystic-state-of-meg/ Listen to all your mp3s, cds, records and tapes one after the other without a break and without sleeping. This won’t work unless you have enough music to keep you up for days on end. You may eat as you listen. Sit on a toilet for 24 hours without moving and with a pillow case over your head; don’t sleep and while you’re on the john shout the word “Ling” at least 10 times a minute. You may urinate and defecate as you do this. Stand in front of a mirror, blow a raspberry. Repeat until you attain enlightenment. Take a tube train from Morden to Camden Town, and never return. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/24/the-return-of-ray-jones-the-greatest-cat-burglar-in-the-world-ever/ Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:46:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/24/the-return-of-ray-jones-the-greatest-cat-burglar-in-the-world-ever/ I’ve known Paul Buck for years and the other day I went to see him do a talk in which he covered his entire career as a writer, from a recent true crime book to his involvement with heavy weight French theorists back in the day. While Paul has endless tales about the innumerable highbrow chancers he has known, when we spoke after his presentation I asked him about The E… List: Notorious Prison Escapes, and specifically whether my relative Ray “The Cat” Jones had featured in it. Paul said he had covered Raymond Jones. I’ve never met Ray but he is one of my mum’s many cousins and my uncles like to talk about him. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/23/help-me-write-a-paper-on-porn/ Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:19:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/23/help-me-write-a-paper-on-porn/ Oh why do I get myself into these situations…. the gorgeous Jane Lewty asked if I’d contribute to a book on porn. Since Jane moved to the USA to take up an academic post there I haven’t seen much of her, and I figured if I said yes to the sex assignment it would mean we’d have to meet for a drink or three when she was back in the UK for vacations – to discuss the progress of my paper of course! However, having failed to write a word so far, I was forced to blow Jane off when she was in London for the winter solstice…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/22/psychology-sucks/ Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:51:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/22/psychology-sucks/ A dream with some commentary. “I travel to Berlin at the behest of my friend Mario who is something of a cultural impresario. Mario fails to meet me at the airport and I can’t get him on the phone. I call Stiletto and Kirstein and hang out with them instead. The next day I manage to meet up with Mario. He’s been on a bender and doesn’t feel like making the TV interview he’d flown me over to do happen. He says it can be postponed for a day or two. I tell him I have to return to London that night. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/21/alex-trocchi-the-revolt-against-authenticity/ Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:52:14 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/21/alex-trocchi-the-revolt-against-authenticity/ Hey kids just in case the notorious lobster loving nude chefs of the International Necronautical Society fooled you into thinking I was the first person to attack the cult of authenticity (and I’m sure they only took this humorous stand to demonstrate that they are absolute masters of the inauthentic), let’s backtrack a bit. Since we’ve been talking about the inauthentic lately in relation to Tom McCarthy and Simon Critichley taking up the trope from various 1980s and 1990s countercultural networks, it seems worth putting my introduction to Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam online. This is a book from the 1950s that brilliantly satirises the authenticity obsessed existential movement of that time. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/20/super-generic-ultra-low-budget-sci-fi-schlock/ Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:05:49 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/20/super-generic-ultra-low-budget-sci-fi-schlock/ Deathsport directed by Allan Arkush and Henry Suso (1978) Set in a post-apocalyptic world, this movie features lots of motorcycle chases and loud explosions. David Carradine is as lame as ever when it comes to martial arts, but he is paired up with former Playmate Claudia Jennings, so the film isn’t entirely worthless. This is kinda a follow up to Death Race 2000 and was allegedly the work of three directors – Allan Arkush and Nicholas Niciphor (credited as Henry Suso), and producer Roger Corman who isn’t credited for his directorial contributions. Deathsport is like super generic ultra low budget sci-fi schlock but if you like Rollerball, Mad Max, Year of the Sex Olympics and Lucio Fulci’s The New Gladiators, or want to see a naked Claudia Jennings being tortured with electric rods, then you’ll love it! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/19/art-critics-on-crack-their-rock-smokin-sociologist-friends/ Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:21:52 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/19/art-critics-on-crack-their-rock-smokin-sociologist-friends/ Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the Contemporary by Travis Jeppesen (Social Diseases, London 2008) As a book Disorientations is very much a product of print-on-demand publishing, a technological advance that allows the tastes of tiny micro-audiences to be serviced. Jeppesen is a young American writer – based in recent years in the Czech Republic and Berlin – who has published a couple of novels and a book of poems on independent presses, while the present tome is a collection of his journalism mainly dating from the earlier part of this millennium. The content is not simply art, since we are also taken on detours through popular film and music. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/18/5494-linda-mccartney-vegetarian-sausages-for-nicolas-bourriaud/ Sun, 18 Jan 2009 12:51:44 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/18/5494-linda-mccartney-vegetarian-sausages-for-nicolas-bourriaud/ As a taster for their 2009 triennial ‘curated’ by Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass), Tate Britain hosted a series of talks concluding with one this weekend by the International Necronautical Society (INS). For their 17 January shindig, the INS hired actors to play General Secretary Tom “Thunderbird” McCarthy and Chief Philosopher Simon “Hip Hugger” Critchley. The event sold out well in advance because a sensation hungry public were under the entirely false impression that they would be personally addressed by this notorious pair of lobster loving nude chefs. Despite Radio 4 (Today programme, 29 December 2008) making the outrageous claim that McCarthy is widely recognised as a best-selling novelist, the majority of those present appeared blissfully unaware of the fact that the thespians pretending to be the notorious INS nude chefs were Sexton Blakes! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/17/i-may-be-jfks-illegitimate-son/ Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:38:57 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/17/i-may-be-jfks-illegitimate-son/ Okay, time to get back on track with these weird blogging feedback and time loops. There are lots of blogging list formulas. One I’ve noticed over the years is simply to divulge 6 weird things about yourself, and another is six weird true things mixed with six lies. So in the spirit of mix and match here are my twelve unlikely truths and true lies. It is possible to put together a credible argument that John F. Kennedy was my father (this involves my mother belonging to the set of British good time girls centred on Christine Keeler that Kennedy couldn’t keep away from, JFK visiting the UK nine months before I was born, the fact that there is no father named on my birth certificate etc – and actually there are odd photos in which JFK and I look pretty alike, although I do hope this cold warrior wasn’t my father since I don’t exactly dig shirt (misprint) like the Cuban Missile Crisis etc. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/16/zombie-strippers/ Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:57:58 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/16/zombie-strippers/ This movie is what in Hollywood jargon is called “high concept’. That means it can be pitched in two words – in this case ‘zombie strippers’. That’s pretty much all you’d need to know before investing in it if you were a producer. And yeah, I came late to this flick which was theatrically released in the US last summer. But why rush when you know what you’re gonna get? In this instance former porn star Jenna Jameson in the lead role as Kat, a stripper who gets bitten to death by a zombie while doing a pole dance and is soon reanimated as one of the living dead. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/15/newsflash-for-t-mobile-gimmie-some-quids-capitalist-scum/ Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:39:21 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/15/newsflash-for-t-mobile-gimmie-some-quids-capitalist-scum/ As I was making my way through Liverpool Street Station this morning, several hundred people were dancing on the main concourse…. it could have been a flash mob but it wasn’t… for those who don’t know, a flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then disperse… It turned out a T-Mobile ad was being filmed. By lunchtime there were reports of this stage-managed media event in the British national press: “There are many ways to kill time while waiting for your train – read a paper, grab a sandwich . https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/14/andy-warhol-nude-troubadour/ Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:51:29 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/14/andy-warhol-nude-troubadour/ Back in the eighties when I was unemployed I used to hang out a lot at the old Scala cinema in Kings X coz they did ultra-cheap day time movie screenings…. the programmes varied from day to day, but not that much from month to month, but they showed some great films, and among them a slew of Andy Warhol movies such as Chelsea Girls…. Aside from night screenings of Empire on the outside of the South Bank complex a few years ago, my Warhol viewing experiences recently had been restricted to the Raro reissues on DVD from Italy…. So I figured I’d check out the Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms exhibition before it closed. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/13/on-the-alchemical-secrets-of-the-data-stream/ Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:54:20 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/13/on-the-alchemical-secrets-of-the-data-stream/ Sometimes I like to try fairly random web searches just to see what comes up; and this has the added bonus of confusing data miners. Doing this today I started with “empty blogs” coz like Hegel in the Logic I figured you should start at the bottom and work your way up (not that you’d catch me stoppin’ with the Prussian state!). Unfortunately the search for “empty blogs’ didn’t turn up much of interest. Personally I just can’t take supposedly ‘professional’ blog tips seriously, and especially when they include advice like don’t repeat yourself. As you probably know, I love repeating myself coz it’s so post-modern, as well as being side-splittingly funny. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/12/laura-hird-rhymes-with-merde/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:16:00 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/12/laura-hird-rhymes-with-merde/ Let’s jump straight into it, coz once someone has learnt how to read my novels, the next step is to learn how to like them! The following is a citation from a ‘review’ of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton by Marc Goldin. The review begins on a sympathetic and interested note, it is not entirely negative but I prefer to focus on that. The review is hosted on the Laura Hird site: “After the Ripper ruminations, it was decided that the narrator and colleagues would embark on a snuff film and selected a john named Alan Abel as candidate. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/11/50-years-of-recuperation/ Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:57:56 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/11/50-years-of-recuperation/ “The newspapers are devolving, bit by bit, into shopping guides. The ‘quality’ magazines are just coded investment advice. One turns with hope to the blogosphere, only to find that it mostly just mimics the very media to which it claims to be an alternative. Alternative turns out just to mean cheaper…” McKenzie Wark 50 Years of Recuperation… (Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2008, page 4). McKenzie Wark is probably best known as a cyber-theorist, but 5o Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International is an amusing essay he’s written on the Situationists with some groovy illustrations at the back. In his text Wark stresses the importance of the 2nd Situationist International, Asger Jorn and others from outside the Parisian circles centred on Guy Debord. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/10/the-house-of-books-has-no-windows/ Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:06:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/10/the-house-of-books-has-no-windows/ Just checked out “The House of Books has no Windows” by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, the Canadian husband ‘n’ wife-style installation art team so beloved by Documenta-style curators, and after doing so I wished I hadn’t bothered. It’s just ending at Modern Art Oxford, although I still prefer to call the place by its old name Oxford Museum of Modern Art. According of MOMA, Janet ‘n’ George “create visual and spatial theatres that invoke altered states of perception”. I’m not entirely sure what an “altered state of perception” is, but if it is a synonym for an “altered state of consciousness” then whoever wrote the blurb can’t be faulted on the accuracy of their assessment. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/09/what-kate-muir-did-next-with-the-drunk-ventriloquist/ Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:22:31 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/09/what-kate-muir-did-next-with-the-drunk-ventriloquist/ The following piece was pointed out to me a couple of days ago, I’d missed this snore fest of a non-review when it came out.. It is by someone called Kate Muir and comes from “The Times of June 23, 2007”. It dates back to when I appeared at The Poetry Shack that summer: The piece is called “The Dark Ages” and is much longer, but since it is really boring I’ll only quote the bit about me:: “Then a man in a black T-shirt runs on bearing a brown stuffed creature that might be a dog or a monkey. It turns out he’s a drunk ventriloquist, and the dog will speak his carefully crafted words, Sixty Nine (sic) Things to Do to a Dead Princess. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/08/unbelievable-hot-music-sex-more-efm-than-emf/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:10:43 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/08/unbelievable-hot-music-sex-more-efm-than-emf/ So today I fell through a wormhole and was asked by the Fabulous FAB (“Thunderbirds Are Go”, but no Bomb The Bass here) to open up my music player, let 10 random songs play and then blog about them. Well I’d been having some problems with my MP3 player and had to reinstall the software before doing this (and wipe everything off it first) and I kinda cheated by only putting ten songs on before doing this, I’ll get more on now…. But here are my 10 “random” songs: 1. “Morning Way” by Trader Horne – acid folk at its very best, the title track of the duo’s only album – and what a combination: sometime Fairport Convention member Judy Dyble and Jackie McAuley ex-guitarist with Them and Belfast Gypsies (dig all that stuff Kim Fowley produced for the Gypsies, but especially “People Let’s Freak Out”). https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/07/web-21-an-end-to-anti-social-networking-sites-let-real-fraternisation-begin/ Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:18:45 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/07/web-21-an-end-to-anti-social-networking-sites-let-real-fraternisation-begin/ As some readers know, the Mister Trippy blog was something I originally ran on MySpace. I was interested in exploring web 2.0 and that blog was one of the ways I did this. Eventually I deleted my MySpace profile, although a couple of cloned versions are still around. I also deleted my Bebo account because I found it boring. I’m still on Facebook although I don’t much like it… it seems like Twitter but for those who prefer to interface with computers rather than mobile phones. The key function on Facebook is the status, update it frequently and you’re a true Facebooker! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/06/a-technicolor-dream/ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:02:12 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/06/a-technicolor-dream/ This 2008 DVD is a TV-style talking head documentary that mainly covers the early years of stadium rock band Pink Floyd, and inadvertently reveals how they used the British counterculture to hitch a ride to success. The Floyd themselves come across like a bunch of talentless drama students in the pathetic promo films that are cut into the main feature. Sound wise they vary from seeming like a pleasant if not entirely convincing imitation of The Who (“Arnold Lane”), all the way down to prefiguring a lot of really bad indie bands (“Scarecrow”). There is also some far more interesting archive material on here, but most of it is rather too familiar. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/05/anti-capitalist-shop-closure-wish-list/ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:15:48 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/05/anti-capitalist-shop-closure-wish-list/ After 806 Woolworths shops closed their doors in the UK over the past few days, which British high street chain will be the next to go? According to “The Times” of December 29, 2008: “Begbies Traynor, the insolvency expert, predicted only days before Christmas that up to 15 retail chains would crumble by the middle of January… PwC has already calculated that 4,000 empty shops will appear on Britain’s high streets if only 10 per cent of the nation’s retailers hit financial problems over the next 12 months.” What would you like to see go first? Here’s my anti-capitalist top ten wish list! https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/04/turn-your-poor-credit-history-in-with-neoism/ Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:16:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/04/turn-your-poor-credit-history-in-with-neoism/ Did you know that Neoism is a Nigerian money scam? On the one hand you go to those poetry sites where people cut and paste words and phrases together to form post-modern nonsense then, on the other hand, you get all this spam coming through which uses exactly the same technique to fill out the body of the email and avoid the spam filters, while sticking in an image which is an ad for some Venezuelan gerbil-farm’s stock offering. It’s great. I can’t get enough spam, which is why I spend all day submitting my name to as many goofball spam sites as I can. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/03/20-searching-personal-questions-about-stewart-home-with-answers/ Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:28:23 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/03/20-searching-personal-questions-about-stewart-home-with-answers/ Why do you write? To create laughter. Where do you write? Anywhere there is space for a computer: I don’t write, I type. Which person in history do you most admire? Myself. What do you consider to be the most important moment in literary history? The publication of my novel “Memphis Underground” on 26 April 2007. 5 What is your favourite quotation? “Bad poets borrow, good poets steal” or “I learn nothing from the dead art of living men, I learn everything from the living art of dead men, long live the dead!” Which writer (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with? https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/02/are-the-belle-de-jour-blogs-and-books-really-the-work-of-psychogeographer-iain-sinclair/ Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:55:01 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/02/are-the-belle-de-jour-blogs-and-books-really-the-work-of-psychogeographer-iain-sinclair/ 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…. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/01/hello-world-2/ Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:23:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/01/01/hello-world-2/ I’m always surprised at the amount of personal feedback that appearing on BBC Radio 4 generates. Programmes like Today clearly have a greater influence than, for example, Resonance FM, another radio station I’ve recorded material for recently (and over the past few years). That said, while Resonance has a smaller audience than Radio 4, I personally spend more time listening to the lesser known station. A few days ago, 29 December 2008, I appeared on a pre-recorded Today feature about “what the avant-garde stands for in the 21st Century”. Tom McCarthy and Hari Kunzru were interviewed alongside me, and we’d all been invited along by guest editor Zadie Smith. https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/about/ Thu, 01 Jan 2009 11:23:25 +0000 https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/about/ This is the blog section of the official Stewart Home website https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – there is a lot of written and visual material on the non-blog parts of the site, so it is well worth checking out. Stewart Home is a cultural activist with a taste for satire and innumerable schizophrenic personalities. Mister Trippy is one of Stewart Home’s many personas, and more recently the identity may or may not have been taken on by a number of other individuals. Mister Trippy was created to explore the dynamics of social networking and Web 2.0, appearing originally as a now deleted MySpace profile and blog.