Ray Johnson was a pop artist, friend of Andy Warhol and one of the key figures in international mail art (aestheticised communication in the form of a ‘paper net’ that acted as a precursor to the world wide web). He committed suicide in 1995 and had dropped out of the New York art scene years before that, opting instead for non-commercial underground activity. Johnson was a major figure in the early years of American pop art, but more recently had been largely forgotten beyond an international underground scene that idolised him. I was in communication with Johnson in the 1980s when he initiated a correspondence with me.

Last night I saw Watchmen at the London Imax. The film is, of course, pure spectacle and if you’re going to see it in the UK, then don’t bother unless you’re going to the Imax, the largest screen in the country. The movie is way too long but its over-financing means there are plenty of really expensive shots that look good if you’re watching on a big enough screen. However, enough of that, what about so called ‘quality” film these days? The flick that won a shed load of awards recently was Man On Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit, who pulled high-wire stunts culminating in an illegal walk between the New York Twin Towers in 1974.

Thought I’d give it a couple of days to simmer up, but the Guardian on Tuesday was a groove sensation. The front page headline promised: “Britain faces summer of rage – police. Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets”. Nice! Although middle-class anger clearly lacks the staying power of working class resentment. Talking of which, the pull out quote from a Trevor Phillips interview in the second section read: “The task today is not to shout for black people or women, but to break the grip of white men who went to public school. And that’s why I’m here.

Nice to see Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire being bigged-up in the Saturday Guardian by Andy Beckett this weekend. I don’t read The Times or The Telegraph so we won’t talk about how I know there were thumbs up reviews in those papers too. Talking to a few people after I blogged the book I realised there’d been the odd misunderstanding because I’d only really dealt with the ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ section that devotes more lines to me than any other part of the book; oh I just love reading about myself! ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ really is the most fictional part of the tome, and the rest of the work is far more factual.

I hadn’t seen Stanley Long perform in public since the BFI screened Primitive London a couple of years ago, so last night it was off to the South Bank to catch the veteran exploitation producer and director in action… Rumour had it that Stanley was in bad shape after various surgical procedures, but he didn’t look much different from last time I saw him. He did his usual stock-in-trade bad jokes to laughs and heavy applause: “My writer Michael Armstrong has put on a lot of weight since he wrote these scripts for me, but I’m not going to embarrass him.