London is preparing to go into lock down amid fears of cop violence directed against anyone who dares to make use of those public spaces the authorities have designated as no go zones for the duration of the G20 summit. This doesn’t just effect people who wish to engage in peaceful protest, it also impacts on anyone who wants to nip out and buy a tin of baked beans or visit a doctor. The Corporation of London has issued a letter to local residents advising them to stay away from the area around the Bank of England on 1 April. However, within this missive its “Safer City Partnership” offers no advice on what to do should you, for example, need to acquire food from the Cheapside Tesco on that day.

I headed over to the RCA in South Kensington on Thursday to catch Controlled Image: The Question of Image Control in Poland in the 70s and 80s. This was funded by the Polish Cultural Institute who in recent years have been running some groovy film programmes all over London, and this particular event was part of a season at various venues including Tate Modern and The Barbican. There was a good crowd, some had stayed on from a packed Dan Graham talk before the screening. I find Graham painful to watch in the flesh because he is so pathetic and unsure of himself, so I didn’t attend that.

I always say you can’t get more post-modern than your local Blockbuster video store, and once again I proved this to myself when I popped in this week to find something to watch. I hadn’t noticed it before but lurking in a dim corner of the shop was a copy of Dummy (Triloquist in the US) directed by Mark Jones (the man behind Leprechaun and Rumpelstiltskin). No need to review the film really, the blurb says it all: “Norbert hasn’t spoken since his mother’s suicide – except through her old ventriloquist’s dummy. But does this dummy hold an evil spell over Norbert and his attractive sister?

In recent months much has been made of the fact that the term Neoism can be traced back to a 1914 occasional poem by American satirist Franklin P. Adams. Okay, so most of the world seems to have ignored the excitement this discovery generated among half-a-dozen fools and jesters, but it is nonetheless referenced on the relevant Wikipedia page. That said, when Blaster Al Ackerman coined the term in 1978, he did so initially as No Ism. The following year this mutated into Neoism, and no one active within the group using this name from the late 1970s onwards appears to have been aware of Adam’s fleeting use of the term until a year or so ago.

This is the autobiography of British exploitation legend Stanley Long, London’s answer to Russ Meyer, as ghosted by by Simon Sheridan. Long started out as a photographer, then moved onto stag films for the 8mm home market, before making a couple of non-sex documentary shorts in the late 1950s. However, it was his nudie cuties Nudist Memories (1958), Nudes Of The World (1961) and Take Off Your Clothes And Live (1963) that first made him into a figure that anyone with more than a passing interest in cinema would want to check out. Long went on to make a very notable trilogy of mondo films: West End Jungle (1960), London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), which take in both a series of night clubs and the commercial sex scene in Europe’s leading city.