Hey kids just in case the notorious lobster loving nude chefs of the International Necronautical Society fooled you into thinking I was the first person to attack the cult of authenticity (and I’m sure they only took this humorous stand to demonstrate that they are absolute masters of the inauthentic), let’s backtrack a bit. Since we’ve been talking about the inauthentic lately in relation to Tom McCarthy and Simon Critichley taking up the trope from various 1980s and 1990s countercultural networks, it seems worth putting my introduction to Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam online. This is a book from the 1950s that brilliantly satirises the authenticity obsessed existential movement of that time.

Deathsport directed by Allan Arkush and Henry Suso (1978) Set in a post-apocalyptic world, this movie features lots of motorcycle chases and loud explosions. David Carradine is as lame as ever when it comes to martial arts, but he is paired up with former Playmate Claudia Jennings, so the film isn’t entirely worthless. This is kinda a follow up to Death Race 2000 and was allegedly the work of three directors – Allan Arkush and Nicholas Niciphor (credited as Henry Suso), and producer Roger Corman who isn’t credited for his directorial contributions. Deathsport is like super generic ultra low budget sci-fi schlock but if you like Rollerball, Mad Max, Year of the Sex Olympics and Lucio Fulci’s The New Gladiators, or want to see a naked Claudia Jennings being tortured with electric rods, then you’ll love it!

Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the Contemporary by Travis Jeppesen (Social Diseases, London 2008) As a book Disorientations is very much a product of print-on-demand publishing, a technological advance that allows the tastes of tiny micro-audiences to be serviced. Jeppesen is a young American writer – based in recent years in the Czech Republic and Berlin – who has published a couple of novels and a book of poems on independent presses, while the present tome is a collection of his journalism mainly dating from the earlier part of this millennium. The content is not simply art, since we are also taken on detours through popular film and music.

As a taster for their 2009 triennial ‘curated’ by Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass), Tate Britain hosted a series of talks concluding with one this weekend by the International Necronautical Society (INS). For their 17 January shindig, the INS hired actors to play General Secretary Tom “Thunderbird” McCarthy and Chief Philosopher Simon “Hip Hugger” Critchley. The event sold out well in advance because a sensation hungry public were under the entirely false impression that they would be personally addressed by this notorious pair of lobster loving nude chefs. Despite Radio 4 (Today programme, 29 December 2008) making the outrageous claim that McCarthy is widely recognised as a best-selling novelist, the majority of those present appeared blissfully unaware of the fact that the thespians pretending to be the notorious INS nude chefs were Sexton Blakes!

Okay, time to get back on track with these weird blogging feedback and time loops. There are lots of blogging list formulas. One I’ve noticed over the years is simply to divulge 6 weird things about yourself, and another is six weird true things mixed with six lies. So in the spirit of mix and match here are my twelve unlikely truths and true lies. It is possible to put together a credible argument that John F. Kennedy was my father (this involves my mother belonging to the set of British good time girls centred on Christine Keeler that Kennedy couldn’t keep away from, JFK visiting the UK nine months before I was born, the fact that there is no father named on my birth certificate etc – and actually there are odd photos in which JFK and I look pretty alike, although I do hope this cold warrior wasn’t my father since I don’t exactly dig shirt (misprint) like the Cuban Missile Crisis etc.