January 26th, 2012
The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web.
On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. Among other things I check out the 5.99 DVD Funhouse on Broadway. Actually while a lot of their films are $5.99, they also have loads of $2.99 bargains (or 4 for $10). There wasn’t much in the horror department that interested me, but as always the DVD Funhouse had plenty of martial arts films to groove a discerning trash fan fanatic. I picked up a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga on the notorious Videoasia label (which specialises in public domain pan and scan reissues mastered from dodgy VHS tapes). I’d wanted a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga for a long time but wasn’t prepared to part with the tenner in sterling it would have cost me to buy the Videoasia edition online – I managed to miss picking up a copy of the UK Vengeance Video release of this title because it sold out before dropping to a price I’m willing to pay for DVD (£3 and under – and most of the Vengeance Videos I have were picked up for a quid from London retail outlets that were closing down as the credit crunch kicked in).
I’d arranged to meet up with Tom McGlynn and Bill Doherty at White Columns at lunchtime. I got to WC a little early so I could check in with Matthew Higgs, Amie Scally and Carolyn Lockhart. I’d also wanted to see the 6th White Columns annual show. The exhibition Looking Back was curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss. The idea behind the annual is for those making the selection to give a flavour of the art that was exhibited in New York over the past year. Sherrie Levine is the only artist included in Looking Back whose work I actually saw in NYC over the past 12 months, so overall the show was a fantastic catch up for me. It’s also great to see Levine’s sculpture just sitting on the floor, which gives it a really different vibe to the carefully considered installation of her retrospective at the Whitney last year…
Tom, Bill and I go to Snice for coffee, then take the subway to Long Island City in Queens. Our first port of call is PS1. We’ve just missed the big 9/11 show but there are still curiosities – in particular My Best Thing (2011) by Francis Stark (an animation about cybersex) and Rania Stephan’s tribute to Egytpian actress and suicide Soad Hosni. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) is a scratch video featuring themed selections of scenes from 60 of this actress’s movies. While I’m at PS1 Tom introduces me to Robert Nickas. The 2010 annual at White Columns was curated by Nickas, and he’s just done an occasional publication with White Columns about disappeared artists. Nickas tells me that thanks to my Art Strike, I came up in discussion with his students when they were working on this project.
From PS1 we move on to Dorksy Project Space for a really strange show of artists who have both sculptural and video practices… Video<>Object was not to my taste but in case you’re interested it featured Nancy Davidson, Yasue Maetake, Halsey Rodman, Jeanne Silverthorne and Moira Williams – and was curated by Laurence Hegarty. After an overload of art, we decided coffee was needed, so we headed to some place Tom and Bill knew and this turned out to be a funky little bistro. Fortified with our drug of choice, we moved on to the Yace Gallery for the opening of Reenacting Sense – a group show and only the second ever exhibition at a space that is so new it isn’t listed in the Long Island City Cultural Alliance guide. We’re at the opening because Tom and Bill know Pinkney Herbert who is showing alongside Cecile Chong, Kyung Jeon, Dominic Mangila and Pierre Obando. The show isn’t so much walking a tightrope between eclecticism and incoherence as jumping headlong into the void. It might be amusing – albeit challenging – to create a theoretical discourse that is capable of drawing the work together. I think the curator is called Juri Kim Pang, and she didn’t appear to have any kind of argument to explain the selections she’d made…
Friday morning found me once again wandering around downtown alone – doing things like checking out the record stores on Bleeker Street. There was nothing worth buying in the bargain bins. At lunchtime I met up with Tom McGlynn and Kenny Goldsmith at White Columns. After saying high to Jeff Eaton, who’d been off work when I’d popped in the day before, we moved on to Snice for coffee. Over our brews we talked about sound poetry and pop music. Kenny walked with us to meet Lynne Tillman outside SVA on 21st Street, but headed off before Lynne appeared. With Lynne, Tom and I went to a nearby Italian restaurant – the food was great and the conversation even better. Tom was surprised by the opinions Lynne and I expressed about one well known American writer in particular – but unlike me, Lynne never voices her dislikes publicly, so I won’t name the guilty party here! After we ate, Lynne and Tom headed south, while I wandered north as I had a hotel room for one night.
I decided to walk to 92nd and Madison Avenue, mainly because I can’t recall ever going through Central Park in the dark and I wanted to see if it feels anything like the way it is depicted in the 1974 movie Death Wish. If you were able to ignore the joggers and the dog walkers – which is difficult – then just maybe the landscape is capable of evoking that long gone 1970s era of decline in NYC! I don’t spot anyone who looked the part of a potential mugger or murder victim in a Michael Winner movie. That said, I’ve loved Charles Bronson movies since I was a kid, so I overshoot my destination and go all the way to the north end of the park at 110th Street, then double back along Fifth Avenue and down 93rd Street (all this despite the fact I much prefer Bronson in movies like The Street Fighter AKA Hard Times to Death Wish). Earlier on I’d found it impossible to reconcile some of what were once New York’s sleazier areas – as depicted in films such as Abel Ferrara’a Driller Killer (1979) and Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) – with how they are today. On the subway over the previous couple of days I’d almost had flashes of the way the city appeared in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982) – but in the end I had to conclude that NYC as I’d most liked it on thirty to forty year old celluloid had disappeared (assuming that is, this hadn’t always been a fiction).
Hotel Wales turned out to be a conversion. I tried opening what I thought was a cupboard and it turned out to be an unlocked connecting door to the next suite, and in doing so I seriously freaked out the married couple occupying the room. Once I’d settled in I sat on the bed and read most of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus. After taking a shower I went to bed. In the morning I finished reading Video Green and checked out around 9.30am. I had planned to use the gym (but the hotel wanted to charge me $15 for that) and work online (but it was $12.95 for internet access), so I didn’t bother with either (the hotel was paid for by the Guggenheim, I had to cover the extras). It was snowing when I left the hotel and I enjoyed the way the city and my walking were transformed by the weather. I ambled down to 13th Street amazed by how little traffic was on the roads. I made use of the customer wi fi in Snice while eating soup. I was waiting for White Columns to open so that I could check in there for a final time this trip. The gallery is closed on Sunday. Neither Matthew nor Amie were around but I caught Jeff Eaton. Then it was the PATH from 14th and 6th to Hoboken. Tom wasn’t in when I arrived at his apartment, but he came up the stairs two minutes behind me. We headed out almost immediately to catch up with Bill Doherty in a nearby coffee shop.
I headed to the Guggenheim alone – Tom was coming later. I took the PATH to 33rd Street and walked the rest of the way to 89th. The Last Word event was mobbed. The queue went around the block and all the way back and along Madison Avenue. Even as a participant it took a while to get in, so despite turning up at six I missed the beginning. I’d have needed to get there early to catch it from the start. The Maurizio Cattelan show was pure spectacle and it was packed – making it even harder to get into the museum. Everything was hanging from the ceiling on ropes of many and varied lengths, and there were people milling on every level of the Guggenheim spiral. Like a lot of successful contemporary artists, Cattelan’s work is obviously difficult and expensive to fabricate, although the actual imagery is extremely populist and accessible. Cattelan had announced he was going to stop making art, which was why I was speaking at an evening of talks dedicated to endings and death – it was designed to accompany his farewell retrospective.
The set up for The Last Word is great: 7 hours with a wide range of speakers talking for just 10 minutes each. There’s a green room with fabulous food and everything is perfectly set up in the theatre. I natter to various people as I grab grub and drinks – including, of course, organisers Nancy Spector and Simon Critchley. It’s particularly nice to connect with M C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel from Baltimore, who know all about me through our mutual friend John Berndt. My talk about The Art Strike gets plenty of laughs, so I’m happy with that too. After I’ve spoken, Richard Kostelanetz grabs hold of me. We’ve been trying to meet for years but somehow it’s never happened, so we finally hooked up in 2012!
After I’ve chatted with Richard, Tom McGlynn grabbed hold of me. He’d turned up around eight and had been enjoying the event, but we decided to leave about 11.30PM. There are only so many talks you can take in during the course of a night! The next morning we hang out before I take the PATH to 14th Street. I buy a pair of Levi 501s from Dave’s on The Avenue of the Americas (just a couple of blocks up from the PATH stop). I still had some dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I got a copy of The Flying Guillotine (the pre-Wang Yu 1975 Shaw Brothers epic that inspired the superior spin offs) in Entertainment Outlet on 14th Street. Then I moved a few shops shops down the road and spent the rest of my money in 14 Street DVD Center, where I picked up a copy of Golden Needles (1974) starring Jim Kelly (I didn’t even know that film was on DVD!). I used my Metrocard to take the subway to JFK (actually it’s ten cents short of the fare – but I get through okay).
Virgin Atlantic tell me my flight is cancelled but I’m in time for an earlier plane if I’m prepared to pay for an upgrade from economy to premium economy. I tell them to stuff that and say insist I should get on the earlier flight without paying extra for it. They say tough basically because there are no economy seats left on the earlier departure. Now that’s what I call corporate generosity (not), since it would have actually cost them nothing to put me in premium economy and they cancelled my later flight… So I’m left to hang around the airport until it is time to board an even later departure for London… While I’m kicking my heels at JFK, I notice one of the dollar bills I was given in change at the 14 Street DVD Center is stamped with the slogan: “Track this bill at wwww.WheresGeorge.com”… This is a website that records the movements of currency but it relies on those who end up with the notes the project has marked logging in there. I haven’t registered my dollar bill. Does anyone know anything about the site and whether there are any good reasons for either registering or not registering with it?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 110th Street, 13th Street, 14 Street DVD Center, 14th Street, 21st Street, 33rd Street, 5.99 DVD Funhouse, 6th Avenue, 8th Avenue, 92nd Street, 93rd Street, 9th Street, A Train, Abel Ferrara, air train, Amie Scally, Art Strike, Avenue of the Americas, Baltimore, Basket Case, Bill Doherty, Bleeker Street, Carolyn Lockhart, Cecile Chong, Central Park, Charles Bronson, Chris Kraus, Dave's, Death Wish, Dominic Mangila, Dorksy Project Space, Drew Daniel, Driller Killer, Entertainment Outlet, Fifth Avenue, Francis Stark, Frank Henenlotter, Golden Needles, Guggenheim, Guggenheim Museum, Halsey Rodman, Hard Times, Hoboken, Hotel Wales, Howards Beach, Jeanne Silverthorne, Jeff Eaton, JFK, Jim Kelly, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Berndt, John F. Kennedy Airport, Juri Kim Pang, Ken Okiishi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenny Goldsmith, King Fu Vs Yoga, Kyung Jeon, Laurence Hegarty, Levi 501s, Long Island City, Long Island City Cultural Alliance, Looking Back, Lucio Fulci, Lynne Tillman, M C. Schmidt, Madison Avenue, Matthew Higgs, Maurizio Cattelan, Metrocard, Michael Winner, Moira Williams, My Best Thing, Nancy Davidson, Nancy Spector, New Jersey, New York, New York Ripper, Nick Mauss, NYC, PATH train, Pierre Obando, Pinkney Herbert, PS1, Queens, Rania Stephan, Reenacting Sense, Richard Kostelanetz., Robert Nickas, Sherrie Levine, Simon Critchley, Snice, Soad Hosni, SVA, The Flying Guillotine, The Last Word, The Street Fighter, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni, Tom McGlynn, Vengeance Video, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Videoasia, VideoObject, Virgin Atlantic, Wang Yu, Washington Street, WheresGeorge.com, White Columns, White Columns Annual, Whitney, Yace Gallery, Yasue Maetake
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, dreams, exhibitions | 12 Comments »
January 17th, 2012
1. Heart attack upon orgasm during sex!
2. Heroin overdose!
3, Suicide with a single bullet through the head on live TV!
4. At home in bed in your sleep!
5. Becoming so engrossed in gaming that you fail to move, eat or drink – and eventually die!
6. On the toilet like Elvis Presley – it ensures that people remember you!
7. From laughter after reading this post.
8. Drowned by beer – nine people died in the London Beer Flood of 17 October 1814, when barrels of booze at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst and spilled into the street!
9. With an orange in your mouth and a pair of tights around your neck – it’s a little like point one, the difference with auto-erotic death being that you don’t need to inconvenience someone by dying while humping them.
10. Sudden diarrhoea followed by copious haemorrhaging and anal expulsion of the intestines – like Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, who may have been poisoned back in AD 336! It’s spectacular and means that in the long term your death will be bigger than that of those who simply died sitting on the pot like Elvis Presley.
And it should go without saying that you should try to die with as many unpaid debts as possible – since before you go there’s nothing like living way beyond your means, and afterwards no one can get the money back from you!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Arius, Arius presbyter of Alexandria, auto-erotic death, beer, death, debt, diarrhoea, Elvis Presley, gaming, haemorrhaging, heart attack, heroin, laughter, London Beer Flood, Meux and Company, suicide, Tottenham Court Road
Posted in dreams, humour | 23 Comments »
January 13th, 2012
In terms of having the greatest film career slide of all time you’d have thought Eric Roberts had everything going for him. For starters his sister is Hollywood A-lister Julia Roberts, and he got Golden Globe nominations for his early starring roles in King of the Gypsies (1978 – best actor debut) and Star 80 (1983 – best actor). But by the time Roberts took the lead role in the martial arts flick Best of the Best (1989) you can see it has all gone wrong. Why Roberts was cast as a member of a fictional US karate team when he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag is a mystery in itself. Best of the Best has a tediously moralistic plot that is so predictable you could set your watch by it, and Roberts also displays his not so unique ability to over act (particularly in the hospital scene with his injured five year-old son). And Julia’s big brother also boasts a haircut that is even worse than his inability to fake the fight and exercise routines depicted throughout the flick…
Let’s skip Best of the Best 2 and a whole slew of other junk and move onto Ninja Creed AKA Royal Kill (2009). Despite the fact that Roberts refrains from any martial arts antics in this utter train wreck of a movie, he somehow manages to make his barnet look even worse than in Best of the Best. Having sat through the movie on DVD I can concur with the Washington Post’s verdict: “deliriously bad film-making… Royal Kill needs to be seen to be believed, but don’t see it, under any circumstances”. And Roberts followed this up with among other things Shartopus (2010), in which he appears to be drunk rather than acting….
All that said, Eric Roberts looks like a rank outsider in the movie career slide stakes when compared to muscleman Richard Harrison. After a bit part in South Pacific (1958), Harrison discovered the best way to get his career going was to marry the daughter of B-movie boss James H. Nicholson (of American International Pictures). For much of the sixties, Harrison found himself in Italy making an assortment of spaghetti westerns, spy flicks and sword and sandal movies. In the seventies and eighties Harrison went from being a B-movie star to having his name used to sell grade-Z flicks. He worked with virtual everyone who was considered to be no one in the film industry – ranging from the notorious Jess Franco and sleazy Joe D’Amato, to the utterly fabulous Godfrey Ho.
Godfrey Ho was the William Burroughs of martial arts films. As deftly as Billy Burroughs applied the cut-up technique to text, Ho utilised it to splice together unrelated celluloid elements. Working with producer Joseph Lai, Ho took footage from other films and more or less randomly intercut this material with his recurring motif of ninja fight scenes (usually featuring Richard Harrison) to create new movies. This is the situationist method of detournement deployed on an industrial scale, and it leaves more carefully wrought exercises in subversion – such as René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) – looking like tedious Hollywood bollocks by way of comparison.
Ho and Harrison’s masterpiece is Scorpion Thunderbolt (1988), which is basically two films mashed down into one. The earlier material comes from Name (1985), an unreleased Hong Kong horror flick about a woman who is half-human and half-reptile – she commits gory murders under the influence of a snake charmer and a witch (who has groovy erotic dance moves and really long finger nail extensions). Meanwhile a gang controlled by the same enchantress is attempting to assassinate Richard Harrison because he’s unknowingly in possession of a ring that poses a threat to the semi-nude sorceress’s occult omnipotence.
The early scenes set the tone for the whole of Scorpion Thunderbolt. In one of these sequences, Harrison drives past a hitchhiker. He changes his mind about not wanting to give the nubile young woman a lift after getting a flash of her tits. Once inside Harrison’s car, the horny wanton tells our man she’s an actress. After a bit of banter this dangerous seductress takes our hero to a sex cinema, where he dogs her as film of the ‘actress’ in a porn vehicle is projected behind them. However, what makes this episode particularly insane is that Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene is used on the soundtrack (presumably without anybody actually bothering to pay for the rights). The ‘actress’ attempts to kill Harrison during sex but bites a suicide pill when he foils her attack.
The plot of Scorpion Thunderbolt doesn’t matter much. It is enough to say it veers from the comic capers of badly dubbed cops investigating the snake murders to brutality and bloodshed, and back again. It is these startling shifts in tone and imagery that make Scorpion Thunderbolt a post-modern schlock classic. Unfortunately Hollywood and its fans failed to recognise that Ho’s pictures left Jeff Koons looking like a rank amateur when it came to transforming eighties post-modern tropes into high art: and as a consequence once these flicks were released in the USA on video, they did so much damage to Harrison’s reputation as an actor that by the mid-nineties he’d retired from making movies. So there you have it – a no contest – Harrison easily beats Eric Roberts to claim the title of greatest movie career slide of all time!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: . Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, American International Pictures, B-movie, bad hair, Best of the Best, Best of the Best 2, cut-up, detournement, Eric Robers, Godfrey Ho, Golden Globe, James H. Nicholson, Jean Michel Jarre, Jeff Koons, Jess Franco, Joe D'Amato, Joseph Lai, Julia Roberts, karate, King of the Gypsies, kung fu, martial arts, monster, Name, ninja, Ninja Creed, Oxygene, porn, post-modernism, René Viénet, Richard Harrison, Royal Kill, schlock, Scorpion Thunderbolt, sex, Sharktopus, situationist, snake, South Pacific, Star 80, Washington Post, William Burroughs, witch
Posted in film | 20 Comments »
January 8th, 2012
One time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. When it comes to the internet things move even faster…. but the speed of these changes might be likened to ‘dynamic inertia’ (in both politics and blogging). The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ has been used to promote the shake weight ‘exercise’ fad of recent years – and appears to have been coined for this purpose. Shake weights were marketed with adverts that featured women grasping these light dumbbell-like objects in their hands and jerking them about with their arms. The infomercials featuring this imagery went viral online because many saw in such hand and arm gestures a connection to onanistic sexual activities. There is now also a slightly heavier shake weight for men. The female shake weight has been marketed as trimming women’s arms and making them slimmer – whereas the manufacturers claim the male equivalent enables men to bulk up (although obviously what are essentially the same set of exercises cannot do both these things)!
Despite spurious claims by those marketing the shake weight, there is no scientific evidence to back up their assertions this expensive branded product is at all effective as an exercise aid. What the shake weight represents is a triumph of marketing over common sense – as do many other recent exercise crazes such as the power plate. Obviously any exercise is better than no exercise, but there are far more effective and less expensive ways to workout than using a shake weight or a power plate. What the people selling the shake weight have usefully done is provide us with a term to describe our current cultural condition. The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ perfectly encapsulates the political and cultural situation we find ourselves in – which is no longer postmodern but has simultaneously failed to move on from the postmodern. This is a world in which capitalism (and thus official history) can only go backwards – and one where the products of alienated labour are still being falsely presented by our exploiters as having transformed themselves into ‘pure image’.
Obviously the only way to go beyond this post-postmodern condition is through the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. This will be an overflowing in which we’ll be able to realise every aspect of ourselves as human beings, and together enjoy the wealth of this world in a truly collective fashion. Although it will number among the more minor benefits of communist revolution, I will at last be able to dispense with my spam filter, something I currently require to block ‘messages’ such as the following: “Discover The Untold Secrets Used By The World’s Top Cat Trainers To Make Their Kittens Listen To Their Every Command” (link removed). It should go without saying that we don’t want a society of ‘order givers’ and ‘order takers’ (or even one divided into ‘hep cats’ and ‘kittens’), we want a society of equals!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: alienation, blogging, capitalism, communism, dynamic inertia, exercise, Harold Wilson, hep cats, hype, kittens, onanism, post-postmodern, postmodern, power plate, pure image, revolution, scam, sex, shake weight, spam, spam filter
Posted in advertising, mass media, scam, spam, Web 2.0 | 20 Comments »
January 2nd, 2012
1. Bottle of good whiskey. Get blind drunk and simply sleep until you’re over the cold!
2. A hot sauna and followed by a dip through an ice hole into a frozen lake – then get a hot friend (straight from the sauna daddio) to beat you with birch twigs!
3. A date with a snot sex enthusiast – if you develop performance anxieties about doing the shag nasty with someone who wants to be covered in you mucus during sex, you may well find your cold symptoms drying up!
4. Eat a double helping of vindaloo curry and run your cold out of every orifice in your body!
5. A flu jab (the boring solution – and it’s prevention not cure).
6. Run a nude mini-marathon (the hair of the dog cure)!
7. Sex magick – of course the magick doesn’t work but the power of auto-suggestion just might!
8. Nude swingers tantric yoga – starting with deep breathing exercises of course!
9. Count backwards from a hundred billion to one – by the time you finish your cold will be gone!
10. Suicide – this is the extreme solution but it works every time! Once you’re dead you’ll never have a cold again!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: birch twigs, cold, cold cure, curry, deep breathing, flu, flu jab, hair of the dog, nude marathon, nude running, nude swingers, sauna, sex, sex magick, shag, shag neasty, snot sex, suicide, tantric yoga, vindaloo, whiskey
Posted in humour | 26 Comments »
December 28th, 2011
I just read through all the reviews of my books on the Goodreads website – and a lot of the negative ones are premised on the retarded assumption that realism is the only valid form for ‘fiction’. I’ll begin with some examples of this from Goodreads ‘reviews’ of my anti-novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess:
J.C. Moylan: “stewart home needs to learn how women think if he’s going to make his protaganist (sic) a woman.”
What a plonker – and dig the lower case spelling of my name, although I doubt this is an e. e. cummings fan.
Likewise, C. Vance: “very few men can write from a woman’s point of view. very few men can write from a woman’s point of view this poorly – especially the first-person recollections of sex. after the narration of her ‘meat curtains’ and his ‘fuck stick’ i was done. inane nonsense with regurgitated lit theory to try to make it seem like legitimate fiction instead of another smut book.”
Which leads us on to the same error made from the opposite perspective by Tess (no surname give) on her Goodreads ‘review’ of Dead Princess: “too many references to pulp fiction get in the way of this book actually BEING pulp fiction, which is what I percieve (sic) as the author’s intentions.”
What I’m actually trying to do is render all genre boundaries meaningless – and not just those between pulp and literature, but also fiction and non-fiction - none of which are actually real, but they are nonetheless perceived as ‘real’ by those in thrall to them. It should go without saying that genres evolve over time, and that what is included in any particular genre also shifts historically. Given that I’m going beyond literature, I’ve no interest in the straight production or reproduction of other genres either. Literature is in part created by its division from pulp, these two categories both conjure up and buttress each other – what I want to do is overflow canalisation of this type. While those who berate me for failing to write realist literature tend to be way more obnoxious when giving vent to their ridiculous opinions, anyone who tries to understand my anti-novels as pulp has also failed to grasp what it is I’m doing (and is therefore unable to pass worthwhile judgements on my books).
Returning to Dead Princess but moving onto another common misunderstanding when it comes to my writing (and, indeed, the work of all those who have grasped that literature is dead), we get this from Alberta (no surname given):
“disappointing… the writing seemed too rote… like he was anxious to get everything down but he didn’t care how he said it. ”
Which echoes but is less explicit than a comment I noticed on a Goodreads review of Steve Beard’s Meat Puppet Cabaret:
Becca “… i think that a book which strays so far from conventional narrative, it should have more exciting language.”
The complaint that I suspect is being made here is that the language isn’t literary – unfortunately many ‘reviews’ on Goodreads are so short and/or poorly expressed that it is often difficult to understand very precisely what the poster is trying to say. That said, I have been told numerous times that I can’t write because I don’t use flowery literary language. Those who make this claim simply don’t understand I want my words to flow so I make my sentences as simple as possible to achieve the effect and ‘meaning’ (or in many cases disillusion of ‘meaning’) I’m aiming at. Mostly complexity in my books comes from a piling up of concepts, not from individual sentences. That said my prose is worked at – you don’t get smooth and rhythmic sentences from a first draft – and obviously I am not aiming for literary effect (since that would mitigate against what I set out to achieve – the supersession of literature among other things).
The problem with Goodreads – and Amazon ‘reviews’ too for that matter - is that many of those who presume to pass judgement on my writing lack the skill and knowledge to do so. A ‘good’ proportion of these would-be ‘critics’ have been brainwashed into thinking that all books should be judged by conventional and hackneyed nineteenth-century literary standards. While I don’t doubt that readers of this type dislike what I write, were they able to understand my books I might yet groove them – but even if after gaining a little relevant knowledge they still loathed my prose, it would be better if they were able to express an opinion about my writing without making complete fools of themselves. Those who’ve never encountered tripped out post-fiction in all its (un)originality – and haven’t yet understood the nature of modernism’s break with realist tropes – aren’t so much reversing into the future as plunging headlong into the past!
Of course I wouldn’t stop these ill-informed bozos from adding their reactionary inanities to Goodreads – after all their failed attempts at putting down my books simply add to my credibility. The question is to what extent we should bother to engage with small ‘c’ conservatives who base their criticisms of 21st century post-fiction on the conventions of nineteenth-century realist prose? They might learn something from us but should they fail to do so, then having anything to do with these imbeciles is just a complete waste of time.
Just in case you want to see it here is my author profile at Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29676.Stewart_Home.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Amazon, anti-narrative, C. Vance, canalisation, e. e. cummings, genre, Goodreads, J. C. Moylan, literature, Meat Puppet Cabaret, narrative, post-fiction, pulp, realism, smut, Steve Beard, Stewart Home, writing
Posted in books, Web 2.0 | 26 Comments »
December 25th, 2011
1. You’re a woman – you ain’t got one!
2. You already have an erection!
3. As far as most women are concerned (and many men too) it isn’t size that counts but what you can do with it!
4. Scientific research suggests that silicon impants are dangerous – and simply ingesting herbs doesn’t work!
5. Adding three inches to your donger would make your balls look distressingly small by way of comparison!
6. You’re already a complete dick so you don’t need to make yourself a bigger one!
7. A small blood sausage is easier to swallow (a variation on the small is beautiful argument)!
8. Herbal remedies are a rip-off – why waste your money?
9.. Too great a fixation on genital size and pleasure is phallocentric and will result in most women (and many men) viewing you as a complete cock!
10. If you really want to reclaim your manhood then you’ve got to learn to love it just the way it is!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: blood sausage, cock, donger, erection, genitals, herbal remedies, manhood, penis, penis enlargement, silicon
Posted in exhibitionism, humour, porn | 20 Comments »
December 22nd, 2011
Asserting that ‘we are everywhere’ is probably more convincing than the claim that ‘I am everywhere”. Nonetheless it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before I’m able to convince myself that indeed “I am everywhere” – after all, I’ve been billing myself as ‘an ego maniac on a world historical scale’ for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can’t possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he’s based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here.
When I read what other people write about me it can often seem like I’ve been even busier than I actually am. Reviewing my recent White Columns show in the New York Times on on 18 November, Roberta Smith wrote: “A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork.” To me the entry in question has an inconsistency which makes it obvious it is a collective effort rather than mine. I suspect that some of the imbalances in the article are the result of other people using Wikipedia to promote themselves. For example, while many of my books and exhibitions are passed over without discussion, there is a bizarre passage about the Evening Falls nightclub (including the fallacious claim that I didn’t read there). Likewise, when I last checked, no one had updated my list of exhibitions on this Wikipedia page to include my recent White Columns outing.
Moving on, I’ve also seen some nutjob using web 2.0 comment facilities to allege that I write my own Amazon reviews…. of course they offered no proof, and had obviously missed the fact that I just don’t take the user generated content on that site very seriously. As you’ve probably gathered by now, way too many of my leisure hours are spent reading about myself for me to have the time to write reviews of my own books for Amazon. Likewise, it will come as little surprise to most of my readers that one of the things I love about the web is the way it allows everyone to turn over their own past – and in some cases rediscover material they’d pretty much forgotten. I didn’t have any images of the Anon exhibition I’d been a part of in Luton back in 1989 until John Wynne posted some photographs of it on his Facebook profile. I immediately snaffled those featuring my contributions and added them to my Flickr photostream – where they look absolutely fantastic in an utterly weird eighties appropriated post-pop art kind of way. Likewise, earlier this year I finally got around to putting an image of my ‘original’ Art Strike Bed onto Flickr, done several years before Tracey Emin attempted to recuperate this particular assault of mine on the sensibilities of the London art establishment.
I could use this piece as an opportunity to write about how I’m attempting to replace the planking fad with a craze for photos of people standing on their head – there are currently a dozen pictures of me doing headstands on my Flickr profile (see if you can find them all). However, rather than banging on about my topsy-turvy online presence, I’m now going to get even more self-referential and obsessive. What I’d like readers of this blog to do is tell me in the comments below whether I used the best possible title for this post, or whether I should have reversed it so that it ran: “Reclaiming my future, occupying my past”?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1980s, 80s, Amazon, Anon, appropriation, Art Strike Bed, eighties, Evening Falls, Facebook, Flickr, Goodreads, headstand, John Wynne, Luton, planking, Roberta Smith, Stewart Home, Tracey Emin, Web 2.0, White Columns, Wikipedia
Posted in books, exhibitions, Web 2.0 | 27 Comments »
December 18th, 2011
Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn’t happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. Although in the seventies and eighties I went to cinemas all over London, I ended up spending more time at The Scala in Kings X than anywhere else.
I actually started going to The Scala when it was in Tottenham Street but my memories of it’s first two years of existence (1979-81) in Fitzrovia are a little dim. I do recall being really knocked out when I saw Ministry of Fear there one afternoon – I think on a double-bill with The Third Man. I recently watched Ministry Of Fear again and was rather disappointed by it, since this Fritz Lang feature didn’t live up to my 30 plus year old memories of it. That said, I’ve had worse reactions to watching films at home that I’d enjoyed when I last saw them at the cinema decades earlier. Ministry Of Fear wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t nearly as good as my recollections of it.
The Scala on Tottenham Street was perfectly placed for those of us on the punk rock trail between Soho and Camden. Walking distance away to the south there was the 100 Club, Marquee, Notre Dame Hall and Rock On Record Stall; and in the other direction were venues like The Music Machine and Electric Ballroom – as well as Compendium Books. But at that time there were still a lot of cinemas around central London, so The Scala didn’t seem too special.
As we went into the eighties a lot of both repertory and first run cinemas disappeared from the face of London. As a result, The Scala – which had relocated to Kings X in 1981 – came to seem a lot more like a lone London beacon for lovers of midnight movies. Aside from having better flicks than anywhere else, The Scala must have been the dirtiest and most run down fleapit in The Smoke – and therefore it had way more character than places like The Everyman. The Scala also had ultra-cheap daytime multi-bill screenings with concessions (for the unemployed and pensioners) – and I was merely one of a crew of dole scum who seemed to spend more weekly daylight hours in this particular fleapit than out on the street or looking for work.
One of the things that particularly sticks in my mind from the earlier part of the eighties are the all night screenings – particularly stuff such as all night beat generation movies, which was where I first encountered flicks like Beat Girl and Bucket Of Blood. Around this time there were also free preview screenings for The Worst of Hollywood TV series (a Friday late-night slot on UK Channel 4 shown towards the end of 1983). As anyone who went to those free screenings can tell you, they’d do filmed introductions for several flicks before showing them. The audience were there to applaud and laugh at Michael Medved running down various grade Z movies – and we got commands from the film crew about how to react to him. Despite doing free screenings for all the films in the series (3 per day as far as I recall), the TV people used the same piece of stock footage of me in the audience on each of their weekly broadcasts. The films themselves – Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wild Women of Wongo, Robot Monster etc. – found a new life and a new audience, and went on to be recycled on more recent TV reruns such as Mystery Theatre 3000.
After a while The Scala became a home from home for many, and the regulars had their favourite seats. I always took the one immediately in front of Kim Newman (who I didn’t actually ever get to know until years after The Scala closed). Other things I suppose I should mention include the famous Scala cat – who’d walk over the seats and across the front of the screen – and the rumble of trains going under Kings X. Ditto the fact that there were lots of broken seats.
in the early and mid-eighties The Scala seemed good at building new films. They’d put movies without a ready-made audience on a multi-bill with established cult favourites. To give an example, I don’t remember what Liquid Sky was showing with the first time I saw it at The Scala, but I was mesmerised and didn’t know if it was really great or totally shit – so I went back to see it again and decided it was great.I must have seen Liquid Sky at least half a dozen times at The Scala during the eighties. The Scala was also a good place to see multi-bills of John Waters or Russ Meyer flicks; although it wasn’t where I first encountered films by either of these directors, it was one of the few places I could see their movies regularly. Thundercrack was another of my Scala favourites, alongside the more obvious art house choices like the I Am Curious movies and WR Mysteries of the Organism (which I still love). The Scala also had some less tasteful multi-bill choices – such as the regular Nazi exploitation triple of The Night Porter (a massively over-rated piece of shit), Salon Kitty and Red Nights of the Gestapo.
Later The Scala seemed to lose its way and failed to build up new to their audience (but not necessarily recent) films. I guess the cinema’s founder Stephen Woolley was concentrating on making a go of his film production company Palace Pictures. I brought Decoder to the UK for the first time in 1989 and screened it in Glasgow as part of the Festival of Plagiarism I organised there, and also arranged to show it at The Scala a couple of days later. I remember getting dropped off by a friend outside the cinema (he’d brought me back from Scotland in his car) and the queue for the screening stretched back to the main Kings X station. It was an amazingly large audience – some of whom I guess had to be turned away.
Colour was important to Decoder and you didn’t really get it’s full celluloid effect on the videos that had circulated in rather limited circles in the UK until then. I don’t remember the exact deal, but The Scala basically insisted that Tom Vague (who came in on the promotion of London screening of the film with me) and I take all the financial risks; then when they saw the audience and money coming through the door for Decoder, suddenly discovered loads of extra expenses so they could keep nearly all the dosh. I presume they wouldn’t have insisted we four-wall it if they’d realised we had a sell out, so they could have made their cash grab look like less of a rip-off – which in the end included things like alleged bottles of whisky for members of staff.
I got the impression that by the end of the eighties the Scala management had become absolutely shameless about doing anything for money because Palace Pictures was a financial black hole. After seeing the crowd Decoder pulled, The Scala started screening it themselves as part of their programme… but earlier in the eighties I think they’d have realised it was a film worth showing without someone coming in from outside. I don’t know or don’t remember how they started screening all the Hong Kong action movies they showed later on (and which I enjoyed seeing at The Scala a great deal), but I assume it was someone coming in from outside and wanting to do it that kick-started those John Woo/Chow Yun Fat etc. screenings.
I was sorry The Scala closed but by the time disappeared in 1993 it wasn’t the institution it had once been. I think it was Palace Pictures – as much as the court case over an illegal screenings of Clockwork Orange – that killed the place. The Scala had been showing that Kubrick film for years under titles like Mechanical Fruit, but I never liked it much as a movie (or a book) and avoided those screenings. The closest we’ve got now to The Scala is the Prince Charles but that’s more a second run place, and the excellent monthly BFI Flipside screenings (but that’s a much cleaner environment).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 100 Club, 1980s, all nighters, beat generation, Beat Girl, BFI Flipside, Bruce Lee, Bucket of Blood, Camden, Channel 4, Chow Yun Fat, Clockwork Orange, Compendium Books, Decoder, Electric Ballroom, Festival of Plagiarism, Fitzrovia, Fritz Lang, Glasgow, I Am Curious Yellow, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Waters, John Woo, Kim Newman, Kings X, Liquid Sky, Marquee Club, Mechanical Fruit, Michael Medved, midnight movies, Ministry Of Fear, Music Machine, Mystery Theatre 3000, Notre Dame Hall, Palace Pictures, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prince Charles, punk rock, Red NIghts of the Gestapo, Robot Monster, Rock On Record Stall, Russ Meyer, Salon Kitty, Soho, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Woolley, The Night Porter, The Scala, The Third Man, The Worst of Hollywood, Thundercrack, Tom Vague, Tottenham Street, Wild Women of Wongo, WR Mysteries of the Organism
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, film | 32 Comments »
December 12th, 2011
For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I’m always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who’d organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA “Scotland’s Turkish Kebab House” – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.
It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn’t eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.
I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina’s spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was ‘destroying’. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.
After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they’d closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina’s Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don’t use the internet, and much else besides. I’m a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.
On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow’s many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it’s sell-by-date. I wasn’t gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn’t buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.
I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren’t using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they’re not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden’s News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn’t consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden’s website:
Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n’brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.
Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it’s an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.
Aside from books, I always find Poundland’s DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn’t great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops. On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it’s curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.
Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 23rd Century, Argyle Street, Ballater Street, Billy Blanks, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bloodfight, Bolo Yeung, Bruce Li, Candleriggs, Chino, Defiant Pose, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Dragon Lee, Expect No Mercy, Fake Sheikh, falafel, Fist of Fury II, Five Fingers of Steel, Glasgow, Glasgow Central Station, Golden Dragon Silver Snake, GrabIt, HarperCollins, hauntology, headstand, Jamaica Street, Jefford Horrigan, John Liu, Johnnie Chan, Keith Miller, London, Lonsdale, Lorna Moon, Mark Dacascos, Mazher Mahmood, Mono, Music Zone, Neville Thurlbeck, News Corp, News of the World, News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, Onan The Barbarian, Oswald Street, Peter Burden, phone hacking, Pound City, Poundland, Premier Inn, psychogeography, René Salemi, Return of the Tiger, River Clyde, Rupert Murdoch, Sanctuary, Scotland's Turkish Kebab House, Showdown, shredding, Sports Direct, Stewart Home, Thats Entertainment, The Dhabba, The Dragon The Hero, The International Martial Arts Collection, The Pound Shop, Tower Records, Transmission Gallery, Turquoise, Woolworths
Posted in culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitionism, performance | 23 Comments »