After its sponsor UBS AG went into near financial meltdown, Tate Modern named this year’s UBS Long Weekend ‘Do It Yourself’ (22-25 May 2009) and based it around an Arte Povera exhibition. UBS is both a private and investment bank, as well as an asset management corporation. In the past it has been a major sponsor of the arts, but is unlikely to remain so for much longer. After incurring huge losses on subprime mortgage securities in 2007, UBS only survived after it secured a multi-billion dollar bail out from the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GISC) and an unnamed source in the Middle East.

In the past couple of days I’ve found some more online pieces about the death of Chris Gray. I’ve also come across blog talk of a Guardian obituary that was supposed to appear on 21 May; there is no sign of it yet but I guess this may still materialise. The most comprehensive obit so far is by Charlie Radcliffe who was very close to Chris in the 1960s, had little contact with him for more than 30 years after that, then rekindled this intimate friendship seven years ago. Among the many interesting observations Charlie makes at The Void are the following:

On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), both directed by Arnold L. Miller. The Miller titles are mondo movies about London and its nightlife in the 1960s.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols. I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig.

I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact. I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson.