Although it is only a matter of time, capitalism hasn’t collapsed yet; but even so, right now the way it is going backwards is still a groove sensation – empty retail units and what only a couple of years ago would have seemed like really unlikely pop-ups in place of tedious corporate chains. As a teenager in the 1970s I always loved exchange bookshops and there were plenty of them in London, even in the centre of town… you’d buy a paperback and if you didn’t want to keep it you could trade it in at half price for something else.

Catching the opening performance of Shaun Caton’s ‘…netherwhat…’ at the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery (1 October) I could have imagined I’d walked into a time warp had I not been in Redchurch Street… I hadn’t seen Caton do a performance since the 1980s, and I understand he’s done nothing in London for the past 15 years, but he seemed to be picking up from where I’d left off with him. Every Caton performance may be unique but he also runs through endless variations on the same theme in his shamanistic rituals; and here he was on the 2 October 2009 with a noised up soundtrack splattering red paint over toy babies he’d strung up from the ceiling.

Just when you think the monthly Flipside untamed cinema screenings at the BFI (Belvedere Road, Southbank, London, SE1 8XT) can’t get any more entertaining and deranged, that’s just what happens. Wednesday’s session began as always with the hardcore comedy double-act of Will Fowler and Vic Pratt. Next, Julian Marsh III rolled out of the audience to explain that contrary to blog rumour, Miss Leslie’s Dolls was not a lost movie – because he had a 35mm copy at home (and while Marsh didn’t mention it, there are also two prints in the BFI archive). Marsh also played back a recording of a conversation with Charles W.

The Gustav Metzger retrospective Decades 1959-2009 is the most extensive single exhibition of auto-destructive art ever to be held in London. Not just the work, but also the head-on collision between the Serpentine as a chic white cube space and Metzger’s decidedly funky left-field practice is in itself interesting. The good news first, and that is Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment has never looked better! With the walls inside the North Gallery painted black, and very effective blackout curtains, the colours are really luminous. This piece was also a highlight of the otherwise lousy Tate Triennial earlier this year, but at the Serpentine it looks even better than it did there, or at the Summer Of Love exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2005.

Yesterday I travelled to the far-north of London to catch the world premier of the Class Wargames film The Game Of War at the HTTP Gallery, close to Green Lanes. Divided into five segments of five minutes, the individual parts of this movie can be viewed in any order. While appearing to heap extravagant praise on Guy Debord, the film actually undermined his vanguardist positions by massively exaggerating the problematic self-promotional aspects of his film-making and other cultural-cum-politico activities. The spoken word Game of War soundtrack repeatedly exhorted viewers to play Debord’s game in order to make themselves more effective proletarian revolutionaries, and did so using the most blatant techniques of (post)-modern advertising.