Is it possible to enjoy modern art with your clothes on? Not if you are Mavis Artlover of the Art Lovers Network. According to promotional material you can find online: “This group is for everyone who likes to romp around naked with works of art. Sex with art is even better than masturbation!” Mavis Artlover is a 25 year-old hotel chambermaid who moved from Totnes in Devon to Dollis Hill in London five years ago. She told me that she discovered she was sexually excited by art as a teenager when she was visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol: “I was looking at this Anselm Kiefer work and I felt a wave of pleasure washing through me.

As noted in an earlier post on this blog, at the end of 1961 my mother Julia Callan-Thompson moved to a two room top floor flat at 24 Bassett Road, London W10. The area around Bassett Road had been developed as a series of housing estates in the 1860s in conjunction with the extension of the Metropolitan train line on a viaduct constructed over the Portobello stream and marshes to Ladbroke Grove. The station at this latter location was originally called Notting Hill, which is why an area that might more properly be designated Notting Dale is better known by the former designation.

Reader let me take you by the hand to Whitecross Street… are the words with which nineteenth-century writer George Gissing begins his first novel Workers of the Dawn. In Gissing’s time Whitecross Street was synonymous with poverty but now it boasts art galleries and a regular farmer’s market. Just down the road is the site that provided Gissing with the title of another novel New Grub Street. Today this road stops dead where it hits the Barbican complex and what is left of it is called Milton Street. Grub Street was once the favoured home of London’s hack journalists and other impoverished writers; it was originally called Grope Cunt Street because of the broken down prostitutes who plied their trade within it.

I went to the Sunday afternoon opening of Richard Grayson’s The Golden Space City of God at Matt’s Gallery (42-44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR) on 10 May. Some drapes and stacked chairs, designed to make the gallery look like a community space, formed a minor part of an installation. The main item was a 45 minute film of a choir singing a libretto that had been assembled by Grayson from writings he’d found on the website of Christian fundamentalist cult The Family International (formerly The Children of God And The Family of Love). The music is composed by Leo Chadburn.

You can forget Zombie Strippers (2008), nothing quite equals Dyn Amo (1972) as a burlesque horror show! I caught a screening of the movie on Thursday 7 May 2009 as part of the BFI’s Stephen Dwoskin season. The film is disturbing and quite a few audience members walked out before the end. I lost count of how many once the numbers reached double figures. Although the Dwoskin movie is based on the play Dynamo by Chris Wilkinson, the original narrative is stripped away and the focus of the film is the emotions of the cast; these are mainly revealed through facial close-ups.