Yesterday I went to see the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. The first thing in this display is a large blown-up poster of F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, which included the following: “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice… we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long Italy has been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.”

The Serpentine Gallery is a curious institution. On the one hand it is stuck in the middle of Hyde Park and gets treated by the weekend hordes as a glorified toilet; while on the other, current co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist is preparing some heavy-weight exhibitions, most notably a Gustav Metzger retrospective that will kick ass from the end of September. But last night it was the opening of the summer show, a silly season special called Popeye Series by Jeff Koons. Popeye Series doesn’t interest me. Koons makes exactly the sort of art you’d expect from a former Wall Street commodity broker, the visual equivalent of junk bonds, over-priced trash.

Having blogged about click thru ad busting and related issues in the recent past, I’m now moving along to take a look at so-called ‘get-paid-to-blog’ sites. The bottom line with these frauds is that a bunch of suits use content you create to attract an audience for click thru ads. There are many different companies running scam sites of this type, and among the better known are Triond, Helium and Associated Content. It should go without saying that the sweated labour which monetizes such rip-off schemes is conned into thinking they’ll be ‘rewarded’ for their graft; but if they see any money at all, they only get a tiny percentage of the click thru income they’ve generated for the swindlers raking-in the real profits.

Don’t Call Me A Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime by Bob Moore (Dissident Books, New York 2009) is apparently a reprint of a tome first published in 1935 by Hurst & Blackkett of London without the exclamation mark; and the variant subtitle My True Autobiography. When I first read the introduction to this ‘reprint’, I suspected Dissident Books CEO Nicholas Towasser was pulling my leg over the provenance of the text when he wrote: “There mustn’t have been many copies printed (of the original edition), because despite many Web searches, I’ve found no used book dealers selling it.

I try to catch as many of the BFI’s Flipside nights as I can, since this monthly delve into the wilder side of British cinema should not be taken for granted. It is sobering to think that only a few years ago the BFI was an incredibly stuffy and conservative institution that haughtily ignored the film culture it now highlights in its Flipside programming. So big up to Vic Pratt, Will Fowler and the current BFI management for being forward thinking and in the groove! The days of tossers like Colin McCabe passing-off their tiresome taste in bourgeois snore fests as somehow representing everything that is ‘progressive’ in cinematic culture are thankfully over!