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!

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).

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.

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.

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.