“The newspapers are devolving, bit by bit, into shopping guides. The ‘quality’ magazines are just coded investment advice. One turns with hope to the blogosphere, only to find that it mostly just mimics the very media to which it claims to be an alternative. Alternative turns out just to mean cheaper…” McKenzie Wark 50 Years of Recuperation… (Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2008, page 4). McKenzie Wark is probably best known as a cyber-theorist, but 5o Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International is an amusing essay he’s written on the Situationists with some groovy illustrations at the back. In his text Wark stresses the importance of the 2nd Situationist International, Asger Jorn and others from outside the Parisian circles centred on Guy Debord.

Just checked out “The House of Books has no Windows” by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, the Canadian husband ‘n’ wife-style installation art team so beloved by Documenta-style curators, and after doing so I wished I hadn’t bothered. It’s just ending at Modern Art Oxford, although I still prefer to call the place by its old name Oxford Museum of Modern Art. According of MOMA, Janet ‘n’ George “create visual and spatial theatres that invoke altered states of perception”. I’m not entirely sure what an “altered state of perception” is, but if it is a synonym for an “altered state of consciousness” then whoever wrote the blurb can’t be faulted on the accuracy of their assessment.

The following piece was pointed out to me a couple of days ago, I’d missed this snore fest of a non-review when it came out.. It is by someone called Kate Muir and comes from “The Times of June 23, 2007”. It dates back to when I appeared at The Poetry Shack that summer: The piece is called “The Dark Ages” and is much longer, but since it is really boring I’ll only quote the bit about me:: “Then a man in a black T-shirt runs on bearing a brown stuffed creature that might be a dog or a monkey. It turns out he’s a drunk ventriloquist, and the dog will speak his carefully crafted words, Sixty Nine (sic) Things to Do to a Dead Princess.

So today I fell through a wormhole and was asked by the Fabulous FAB (“Thunderbirds Are Go”, but no Bomb The Bass here) to open up my music player, let 10 random songs play and then blog about them. Well I’d been having some problems with my MP3 player and had to reinstall the software before doing this (and wipe everything off it first) and I kinda cheated by only putting ten songs on before doing this, I’ll get more on now…. But here are my 10 “random” songs: 1. “Morning Way” by Trader Horne – acid folk at its very best, the title track of the duo’s only album – and what a combination: sometime Fairport Convention member Judy Dyble and Jackie McAuley ex-guitarist with Them and Belfast Gypsies (dig all that stuff Kim Fowley produced for the Gypsies, but especially “People Let’s Freak Out”).

As some readers know, the Mister Trippy blog was something I originally ran on MySpace. I was interested in exploring web 2.0 and that blog was one of the ways I did this. Eventually I deleted my MySpace profile, although a couple of cloned versions are still around. I also deleted my Bebo account because I found it boring. I’m still on Facebook although I don’t much like it… it seems like Twitter but for those who prefer to interface with computers rather than mobile phones. The key function on Facebook is the status, update it frequently and you’re a true Facebooker!