Saturday night (7 March 2009) in the city of the dead and I’m part of the small team organising Fiona’s Shoe; __an evening of music, poetry and film at the South London Gallery. We’d obviously created a buzz coz we’d sold out three days before the event and on the night we were turning people away. Those that got in found themselves in a darkened room with a large DVD projection of a Jud Yalkut snippet. Next up was a 16mm print of Wholly Communion directed by Peter Whitehead, a half-hour documentary about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965.

I find it really strange that so many people view the credit crunch and recession as a curse. Personally I consider them a groove sensation! Over-consumption stinks up the planet and wreaks ecological havoc. We don’t need more plastic junk, and we should let the car industry go out of business: replacing it with free, fast and frequent public transport. Likewise, many people perform boring and meaningless jobs. Admittedly it is tough being without work in a capitalist society because even basic necessities like housing and food are treated as commodities from which the bourgeoisie can turn a profit. But there is nothing noble about work, no dignity in alienated labour, and we need less not more of it.

Have you noticed how indie-wankers not only make really bad records, but in a failed attempt to compensate for the fact they can’t rock, have this tendency to ineptly reference classical mythology and so called French ‘intellectuals’? All too often indie-wankers puff up these cultural failings by utilising words and concepts they don’t fully understand. Since a phrase to describe such phenomena would be useful, I suggest the term Inverness Street English. This is the street in Camden which boasts one of the worst pubs in London, The Good Mixer, a magnet to indie-pop mockneys and related tossers. In creating this new term I was, of course, inspired by the older coinage Wardour Street English, referring to the: “affected pseudo-archaic diction of historical novels.

Is David Seabrook dead? This is a question I’ve heard again and again in the past two days. What started as a trickle of email and phone call rumour yesterday, had by today turned into a flood of conversation. The first message was from true crime author Neil Milkins: “Are you able to tell me if David Seabrook has died. I have had an email saying he died January 2009.” When Cathi Unsworth contacted me about Seabrook today, I was able to trace the rumour mill carrying this story back through a network of my friends via novelist David Peace to film director Paul Tickell.

The BFI have just done us proud with a box set of Jeff Keen films entitled Gazwrx, not to mention various screenings of his works – and all from brand spanking new prints! Keen was one of the earliest and best British underground film-makers. He was largely self-taught and is blessed with a beatnik sensibility that converges with the hippie scene of the later sixties but remains a distinctive strand within it. As a starting point for all this, imagine a surrealist remake of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) set in Brighton and you’re not a million miles away from Like The Time Is Now (1961); except, of course, the comparison glosses over Jeff Keen’s singularity.