This 9 year-old film is a real shocker due to the dreadful cinematography and acting rather than the gore epiphanies it singularly lacks. Only a movie that was directed and produced by its main actor could have a lead this ugly! And when I say ugly I mean hideous! Keith Singleton as Paul Chandler will make horny masochists everywhere very happy, and turn the rest of us off big time. This flick was first released in 2000 and looks like it was made on no budget, but it uses James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet on the soundtrack and credits it to Arista Records, so presumably the tune was paid for and it can’t have been cheap!

I was playing a bunch of old records today, and wondering why I don’t hear so many new ones that really groove me. The thing that really got me going on this was the Steinski double CD retrospective What Does It All Mean? on the Illegal Art label. Back in the day I had a 12 inch white label of The Lessons, and I particularly love Lesson 3 coz of the way it’s build around Herman Kelly’s Let’s Dance To The Drummer’s Beat. These days The Lessons don’t sound quite as hot as they once did, possibly due to this near legitimate CD release – but they still shake the walls a lot harder than the recent radio mix on the second disk.

It has long been a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, but in terms of the London counterculture it would be far more accurate to state that to date accounts of this scene have largely been composed by the squares; individuals who failed to penetrate the truly hip inner circles because they are too straight to know about them. Since I started researching my mother’s life, I have come across a massive amount of material that was missing from histories of the period. The most amazing oversight is without doubt the Victor James Kapur acid manufacturing bust (my mother’s friend Detta Whybrow persuaded the chemist to make the LSD, and organised its distribution in London); fortunately after I turned Andy Roberts onto newspaper accounts of the court case, he did further research and included it in his book Albion Dreaming (2008).

I made a tour of the City of London around midnight to check out the final stages in the construction of a major new street installation by Santiago Sierra entitled The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The controversial Spanish artist, represented in London by the Lisson Gallery, had workers boarding up a series of buildings. These were mainly shops since apparently the many banks in the area didn’t want their frontages spoiled by an artist. The greatest concentration of sealed buildings are located immediately around the Bank of England, but more can be found in Moorgate and Bishopsgate too. The businesses participating range from shops selling shoes and bagels to at least one branch of Carphone Warehouse.

What a difference a blog makes! The flurry of excitement that kicked off after my January entry on Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones continues apace with the greatest cat burglar of all time being featured in yesterday’s Wales On Sunday. There are few new details in the piece by Nathan Bevan but there is a lovely photo of Ray The Cat as a part of the print version (not with the online variant, which you can find here). Of course, there has to be a news angle, and in this instance it is the fact that the account of Ray The Cat’s escape from Pentonville as quoted in my earlier blog features in Paul Buck’s recent book The E-list.