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.

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.

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.

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.

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.