Thursday night offered a rare chance to catch a public screening of Yvonne Rainer’s 1985 feature film The Man Who Envied Women at The Whitechapel Gallery in east London. The movie mixes fictional and documentary passages. The fictional sequences feature a character called Jack Dellar talking subjectively about the breakdown of his relationship with his second wife, while his ex’s speeches tend towards more general reflections on gender and related issues. The film begins with Dellar exercising in an apartment he’d shared with the woman, and from which she is collecting some of her possessions. From then on we mostly see Dellar, played by two different actors, in various situations – while the former wife is, with one vitally important exception, visually absent and represented only by a voice-over.

After World War II, Ibiza was one of several spots strewn across the Mediterranean that attracted two distinct expatriate types from northern Europe and North America. There were writers and artists ostensibly escaping from the crass materialism of New York and London, many of whose views were so incoherent that what they were really objecting to became by default the innate human capacity for rational thought; and the rich who felt hostility towards even the mildest attempts at wealth redistribution, and who liked the tax breaks offered to them by Spain’s fascist junta then headed by General Franco – even if the areas in which they settled tended to be those in which anti-fascist sentiments prevailed.

In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Christine Keeler and Mariella Novotny. According to some observers, Keeler’s club crowd was manipulated for geo-political gain by the British and other security services; books such as Honeytrap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, or An Affair of State by Caroline Kennedy and Philip Knightley, cover this in some depth.

Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false.

This week a lot of people in the UK were subjected to David Cameron’s pug-ugly mug dropping onto their doormat. There he was, looking like a complete creep, on the the front of a bulk-mailed Conservative Party ‘election communication’. Under the banner ‘It’s time for change’, this prime example of absolute twattery advised readers to ‘Vote Conservative on 4 June’ (the date of the European elections). Clearly, voting for a party headed by an over-privileged arse-wipe educated at Eton and Oxford is not going to change anything. There is no more traditional route to political power in Britain than the exclusive education Cameron received.