Until last night I hadn’t been to The Electric Ballroom in Camden for over 30 years. If you are obsessed by 70s English punk rock then the last time I’d gone might be considered an historic occasion. It was the last day of 1979 and the final time the old pre-pop Adam and the Ants played live, as well as being the swansong performance by the original line-up of The Lurkers. I don’t remember who else was on the bill, but I do recall getting belted by two bouncers. They didn’t throw me out, they were labouring under the mistaken impression that some girl who was giving Adam Ant a hard time was there with me – and being ‘gentlemen’ they didn’t want to hit a lady, so walloped me because they wrongly assumed I was her boyfriend.

I hadn’t been to New York in 16 years so my sojourn there last week proved a trip! Somehow it didn’t surprise me that I should find myself leaving from Gate 23 of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 4 on Monday 17 October. Even more predictably I wasn’t interested in any of the in-flight movies, so I didn’t watch them. The choice of on-board music was pretty lame too…. although they did have Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles ‘greatest hits’ albums, so I gave those a spin – and otherwise just left Aretha Franklin’s classic 1968 platter Aretha Now on repeat play. Arriving at Newark I took the air train to Penn Station in Manhattan.

These days most of those surfing the web prefer reading status updates to blogs – it takes less time. You can’t see the trees because of the astroturf. Likewise, you’ll get way more link spam than comments from people who’ve actually read your content. If you write something over 800 words in length virtually no one will reach the end. To get a point across you have to keep repeating it, which is boring after a while. No one is interested in what you’ve got to say – not even your mom (although she’ll be monitoring your web activity because she suspects you’re taking drugs and wants ‘proof’ before she confronts you about it).

Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid) is well known for his cruel and nihilistic pranks. To save myself the effort of writing very much about Sierra (whose work is tedious but simultaneously serves to illustrate the complete decomposition of the institution of art), I’ve taken the following from a Wikipedia page about him: “Some of Sierra’s most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition… In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim Germany.

One of the rip-off outfits that persistently sends me spam emails is Ascot Media of Houston, Texas. I thought I’d shame this scamster operation by commenting upon and correcting one of their missives. The individual behind the Ascot Media rip-off is called Trish Stevens, and while there are some sites online talking positively about this scam operation, they are probably all run by Trish Stevens under other names – or at the very least people paid to promote her, or with a financial stake in the company! I’d expect a successful PR ‘guru’ to have lots of social media connections, and so I found it rather telling that Trish Stevens only had two contacts on her LinkedIn profile when I checked it just now (note added 13 October – since I posted this blog about 28 hours ago, Stevens appears to have added more than 400 contacts to her LinkIn profile; good to know a bit of criticism has forced her to work harder at her con, but it leaves me wondering how many of her new contacts are profiles she has created herself).