Lynne Tillman and Tony White speaking and reading at Toynbee Studios last night proved to be the best event so far in the “Existential Territories” series of talks organised by Book Works. Tony chose to present himself very much as a writer, which I found curious since he is art school trained and his textual practice originally emerged from story-telling elements in his performance work. Tony read an unpublished story woven around a set of words chosen by an artist collaborator. Lynne read from her novel American Genius, the first tme she’s performed from this book in London. The focus of the Q & A was very much on why artists were keen to have Lynne and Tony contribute fictional stories to their catalogues, and what this might signify.

The recent trend for curators to view themselves as the ‘real’ ‘heroes’ of the art world continues with the Parisian fashion-poodle Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass) using “Altermodern”, the 2009 Tate Triennial, to promote himself over and above anything he’s actually included in this aesthetic disaster. The selection of works for ‘Altermodern’ struck me as remarkably similar to the last ‘big’ show I’d seen curated by Bourriaud, the Lyon Biennial in 2005. The art itself doesn’t really matter, it is there to illustrate a thesis. The thesis doesn’t matter either since it exists to facilitate Bourriaud’s career; and Bourriaud certainly doesn’t matter because he is simply yet another dim-witted cultural bureaucrat thrown up by the institution of art.

Fed up with seeing the dreadful films those I meet through my involvement with the culture industry want to discuss (Hunger, Milk etc.), I decided to catch My Name Is Bruce (2008) at The Prince Charles. It had been on for a week at the Soho Curzon before being moved for one night only to this second run movie theatre (on Friday 13th of course!); part of a very limited UK theatrical release before it is issued here on DVD in March (it came out on disk a few days ago in the US). In My Name Is Bruce, actor/director Bruce Campbell stars as an obnoxious caricature of himself, a washed-up b-movie star living in a trailer.

Since I was continually being asked by acquaintances what I thought of Steve McQueen’s _Hunge_r (2008), I finally went to see it this week… on second run at central London’s only budget cinema The Prince Charles. The film turned out to be exactly the type of middle-brow bollocks I can’t stand; it takes a political subject and turns it into a typical Hollywood-style fairytale about an ‘exceptional’ individual. Yes, this is yet another completely unsatisfactory drama about a generic white centred male subject. The movie starts by showing a patriarchal screw getting ready for work, then descending the stairs of his council house and sitting down to eat.

I mentioned the bookshop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed in this blog the other day, and doing this made me wonder what I could dig up about it on the web. Not that much as it happens, although there was a Flickr picture of the shop sign with the following remark underneath: “DTWAGE was a bookshop in St. Anne’s Court off Berwick St. market I think, in London. It sold a lot of SF and head stuff like old copies of Friendz and Oz. Posters, bongs. They would play music I had never heard before like Zappa so I would have to ask them what it was and then go and buy the records.