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.

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.

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.

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.

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.