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.

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.

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..”

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.

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.