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.

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.

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.

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.

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.