Stewart Home's Blog, page 10

A Dangerous Method – Cronenberg Bites Back!

While Videodrome (1983) remains my favourite Cronenberg movie and on the whole I prefer his earlier to his later work, he is a director who continues to amuse me. When I went to see Cronenberg's latest movie A Dangerous Method (at the Soho Curzon) I was apparently surrounded by a bunch of badly dressed shrinks and therapists who found the film 'intense' and lapped it up in the same way they'd 'appreciate' any other worthless costume drama designed to appeal to the type of middle-class and middle-brow film-goer who thinks a TV show like Strictly Come Dancing is raunchy. In stark contrast to the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard on my way out of the cinema, I knew I'd just sat through a slab of exploitation schlock rooted in horror and art house tropes, which simultaneously provided a bellyful of laughs at the expense of the founding fathers of psychoanalytic pseudo-science. It seemed the so-called 'mental health professionals' sitting around me were just too self-absorbed and/or ignorant to notice their idols were being mocked.

The movie begins with a woman being restrained in a coach pulled by black horses – creating a mood more akin to a campy Hammer period horror than a faux-historical snorefest concocted by the likes of Merchant Ivory. The woman is Sabrina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley), a hysteric who undergoes a 'talking cure' and emerges from this to play a leading role in the cult of psychoanalysis. The character and the way her hysterical outbursts are framed are obviously modelled on Isabelle Adjani's performance in  Andrzej Zulawski's horror/thriller/drama crossover Possession (1981). That said Knightly isn't nearly as good an actress as Adjani – but that doesn't matter too much as Cronenberg plays A Dangerous Method mostly for quiet laughs (so the fact that Knightly's cod-Russian accent wanders across the Atlantic and back is of little consequence).

Speilrein's doctor is the idiotic Carl Gustav Jung and the fact he is played by Michael Fassbender (who many cinema goers will have seen recently in Steve McQueen's celluloid train wrecks Hunger and Shame) means that even if he weren't such a pathetic figure it would still be impossible to take him seriously. Speilrein and Jung talk complete bollocks to each other until they get so bored with their moronic chats that they embark on a sado-masochistic affair (which is laugh-out-loud funny precisely because Fassbender as Jung brandishing a leather belt makes for a hilariously unconvincing top).

Meanwhile Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen) has entered the frame and quickly proves himself to be as much of a charlatan as Jung (hardly surprising since Jung models his 'medical work' on Freud's quack theories). Freud in A Dangerous Method reminded me of Roy Scheider playing another quack – Dr. Benway – in Cronenberg's earlier film adaptation of the William Burrough's book The Naked Lunch. As a result of this, at any moment I was expecting Freud to announce:  "I deplore brutality. It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skilfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt." (Words Burroughs credits to Benway). In Cronenberg's new movie, Freud (like Benway) lacks a conscience and enjoys seeing other's dependent upon him.

Ultimately the 'true story' on which A Dangerous Method is based doesn't amount to much. What makes the film work is Cronenberg's endless use of pastiche and cinematic reference. For example, Jung and Freud conversing while strolling through a formal garden that brings to mind scenes from the Alain Resnais/Alain Robbe-Grillet collaboration Last Year In Marienbad (1961). As an attack on the quackery of psychoanalysis A Dangerous Method may be more restrained that Lucio Fulci's superior A Cat In The Brain (1990), but nonetheless both movies successfully portray shrinks as being totally unsuited to care for the mentally disturbed. The invocation of Last Year At Marienbad really underlines this – despite there being no consensus about the central subject matter of the film. One of the more convincing interpretations of Marienbad is that it is concerned with a rape. Spielrein too can be read as being raped by Jung (both mentally and physically), and after being abused goes on to become an abuser (psychoanalyst) herself.

So don't believe the hype – Cronenberg hasn't degenerated into the type of effete middle-brow tosser worshipped by bourgeois cineastes. He's still way better than that! Long live the New Flesh!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

You Didn't Read It Here: Summaries of 10 Blogs I Decided Not To Post

Many of the posts on this blog originate as ideas sketched out in note form. I work on these 'ideas' until I think they are ready to post or else I decide to discard them. Not all my binned blogs reach the stage of completed first drafts – but here is a list of 10 that underwent varying degrees of revision before I decided against posting them….

1. "The First 3 Letters of Espresso Are ESP, So Is Coffee a Psychedelic Drug?" -  I guess I was high when I came up with this blog title. In the cold light of day it didn't seem worth following through!

2 "Chatham Is Fucked" – inspired by my first trip to that  town in 15 years. It was almost as depressing to write this as it was to visit one of the more blighted parts of the so-called "Garden of England". A post on this subject would have been way too much of a turn off for my readers.

3. "Bill Ayers: Fake Leftist" – a critique of the former Weatherman explaining in simple terms why he is a reactionary tosser despite the pseudo-revolutionary posturing in his crap book Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. In the end I preferred not to give this right-wing twit fulsome coverage on my site. It just isn't possible to take Ayers seriously when he talks about 'joining' the working class in the same way as he might join the masons or the boy scouts. Ultimately I figured a relatively short review without direct citations from the book and placed on GoodReads (rather than here) was the best way to deal with vanguardist scum like Ayers.

4. "Synchronicity II at Tiwani Contemporary" – a lively exhibition of African photography running from 3 February to 17 March 2012. I went to the opening and spent as much time talking to Grace Ndiritu (who is in the show) as doing anything else there. While I had fun, the private view didn't attract your usual London art world rent-a-crowd, so there weren't enough people about who I recognised for me to be able to write an insider account. Indeed, apart from Ndiritu, I only recognised the likes of curator Caroline Hancock (who has been based in Paris for some years) . Shame as the work is definitely worth seeing, although I was only really familiar with James Barnor's pictures before I went.

5. "Reading: A Town More Like All The Others I've Been To In England Than Any Other I've Ever Visited…." – middle England considered as a postmodern simulacrum. At first this idea seemed funny but the more I worked on it the scarier it became! The Stepford Wives can eat their hearts out!

6. Review of "Untouchables: Dirty Cops, Bent Justice and Racism in Scotland Yard by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn" – necessary background reading if you want to understand how the phone hacking scandal unravelled into also being a sordid exposé of corrupt relations between the cops and the media. In the end I felt reading the book was a lot easier than providing a summary that covered all the ground.

7. "Chicks On Speed at The Showroom, London: 14 February 2012″ -  a great night but writing about it didn't add anything to what I've already said about COS.

8. "Uncreative Writing, Conceptual Literature & Flarf Poetry" – checking what was online under these headings, I found more than enough information to satisfy me. And so in the true spirit of 'uncreative writing' I decided not to add my voice to this discourse. Of course, this doesn't preclude me from copying and pasting something written by someone else on the subject (without crediting them) at some point in the very near future!

9. "10 Reasons To Be Unfaithful To Your Lover" – in the end I didn't really feel it was necessary to explain yet again why smashing monogamy is an integral part of destroying patriarchy! And my attempts to come up with laugh-out-loud lines floundered at point six.

10. "Why I'm Even More Bored With Facebook Now Than I Was Last Year (If That's Possible)" – like point one, this never got beyond me typing up and saving the title. Facebook proved too boring to contemplate!

In many ways blogging has been superseded by the status update and the tweet. Information just keeps getting more and more compressed. But shrinking 10 potential blog posts down into one – as I've done here – is one way of keeping the superannuated form of blogging relevant! Back in the 1980s your typical postmodernist hack made an academic career of disappearing up his or her own arse. Web 2.0 has taken us way beyond postmodernism and the academy. Our turdy tongues have passed through our own guts and re-emerged from our mouths; enabling us to really shoot the shit in style!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Lost London – Compendium Books

Compendium Books in Camden Town opened in August 1968 but I didn't start visiting the shop until the end of the seventies. The first person I got to know well at Compendium was Mike Hart. Mike ran the fiction and poetry section from the early 1980s until the store closed just over a decade ago now. I was 14 years younger than Mike and about 15 years after we met, he told me he knew I was okay when he started at the shop because I was into William Burroughs novels rather than Jack Kerouac books (this was of course before interest in Burroughs soared from the late-eighties onwards). He didn't have a lot of time for the kids who came into the store solely to buy copies of On The Road. Mike was the last in a series of older friends who turned me on to new authors when I was still young relatively young – and like a good number of those who preceded him, he'd been to art school. He always discounted the books I bought and often got me free copies of records I wanted from his innumerable contacts in the record business.

By the time I became acquainted with Mike, I'd  already read plenty of dada, surrealist, nouveau roman and beat literature – but he got me checking out the likes of Boris Vian and Jim Thompson. Mike would find cheap English language editions of books by writers he felt I should have read, and offer to order them for me. He'd also introduce me to countercultural figures like Jeff Nuttall whenever I happened to be in the shop at the same time as them. When I started getting books published, Mike put them in the window…. and hosted a number of my book launches.

The best event I had at Compendium was the publication party for my first novel Pure Mania in 1989. I mentioned 100 Pipers whiskey repeatedly in the book, and so the company very kindly sent along a couple of crates. Many of those present got completely smashed – it was a top night precisely because those who were there remember very little of it! I went to many events at Compendium but the most memorable (aside from my own, of course) was a Robin Cook (AKA Derek Raymond) reading. Cookie spent so long talking about his book that there wasn't time for him to actually read from it. I was massively impressed!

But there was a lot more to Compendium than the front of house fiction section. I never really investigated the occult selection at the back of the shop, but I was very familiar with the politics and theory departments in the basement. In the eighties the Compendium basement was a fantastic mash up of the ultra-left and the postmodern -  a virtual battlefield in which Guy Debord slugged it out with Paul Virilio. While I got to know those toiling in the basement – Paul Hammond, Phil Derbyshire and Andrew Burgin among others – like everyone else, I missed the Compendium theory crew's most legendary event, a Jean Baudrillard book signing for which not a single punter turned up! I once went to a Jeff Nuttall poetry launch with only two other members of the public present, but most of the many Compendium events I caught were well attended.

Moving on from the apocryphal tale about Baudrillard, there are other Compendium stories I used to hear regularly without ever knowing whether they were true. The front runner in this field must be the claim that in the early days Compendium only survived financially because the shop dealt dope under the counter. While this seems plausible, I never saw any evidence of drug dealing going on during the many hours I spend in the shop (although to be fair, supposedly this practice had been discontinued before I started going there). Equally legendary was shop founder Nick Rochford's lock up in which I was told he kept two copies of every publication that ever passed through Compendium. If the story was true then Rochford must have had a book collection to die for – although the fact that his publication store was allegedly located in Virginia Water of all places, made doubt the veracity of the tale!

Last time I checked the old Compendium premises at 240 Camden High Street was a shoe shop. Mike Hart died from cancer in 2002 at the age of 54. In the brief period between Compendium closing and Mike's death, I'd pop in and see him at the crime bookshop Murder One where he'd gone to work. He seemed happy there and it was a shock when I was told he'd died.

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Instant Blogs

Instant blogs were first marketed in the USA in November 2002 under the brand name Technorati. The Technorati platform was founded by Dave Sifry, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Tantek Çelik was the site's chief technologist – obviously they should have used someone else. The fact that Technorati is virtually useless can be demonstrated by the fact that it's link to the feed from my rss worked for a few months and hasn't uploaded anything now for more than two and a half years. Technorati's ranking system is equally stupid and promotes tired and conventional views at the expense of innovation and smart thinking. The content of instant blogs has varied over the years, but with the maturation of Web 2.0 now generally consists of the following:

3 parts bullshit (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).

2 parts worthless opinion (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).

1 embedded video.

Seasoned with lots of pictures.

Mix all together.

Serve on WordPress, Blogger or LiveJournal.

Can be fortified with swear words! Fuck, cunt, motherfucker, shit, etc.

Can be thickened by adding gratuitous insults or spam links!

Instant blogs are on the whole self-referential, narcissistic and not quite vicious or crazy enough to keep me entertained. By way of contrast I'm sexy, seductive and smart! I've also gone beyond narcissism to become an ego-maniac on a world historical scale; and I'm so self-referential that my tongue has not only disappeared up my own arse, it has emerged once again from my mouth! No one makes an instant blog the way I do – compare and contrast and you'll find this one is better than anything else on the net! Sarcasm and irony can only take you half-way there – you also need infinite, absolute negativity. And I've got that in spades!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

10 Greatest Anti-Art Suicides (Before Mike Kelly)

The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he'd make anyone's list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute 'NO' to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I'll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he'd left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I'm including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.

1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there's a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. 'New York's most famous unknown artist' drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.

2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin's summer 1973 death). Although Quinn's first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton's Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.

3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it's oceanic), but having given you three of these I'll move on to lesser forms of suicide.

4. Donny Hathaway  – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway's case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism's most famous suicide. He didn't really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).

6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn't quite believe what he'd been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don't seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who'd thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he'd scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.

7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: "and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…"). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I'd thought Brood's leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I' d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.

8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I'm aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. "I know you!" I said before pausing dramatically. "You was in Rat Poison!" Borland's jaw dropped, he'd lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: "I'm Adrian Borland. I've gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound." "Never heard of 'em mate!" I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn't surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!

9. Wendy O. Williams  – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She'd started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.

10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma's aphorism: "Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful." Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Ain't That A Shame – Steve McQueen's New Movie Is Another Turkey!

Shame is a film about a really boring suit in New York who has a troubled relationship with his sister (Carey Mulligan). The suit (Michael Fassbender) not only has a really tiresome office job, his leisure time is equally tedious – it is mostly spent looking for nookie (both with and without his vapid boss). The suit often buys sex and it is precisely because he thinks that human relationships can be commoditised that his love life is as dull as ditch water.

Imagine the most lacklustre out-take from a story by a forgotten eighties literary brat-pack also ran and then make whatever you've dreamt up about a hundred times worse, and you'll just about have a handle on Shame. The film is set in the present but its addled reinvention of New York owes more to the way the city was depicted by the likes of Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz about 25 years ago. And by drawing on outdated clichés, McQueen manages to make Manhattan look way less exciting than Cleethorpes.

The sex scenes are ultra-tame softcore with no come shots, no erect pork swords, and a focus on brief glimpses of female tits and ass. Shame is squarely aimed at middle-brow audiences from middle England and middle America who are easily shocked and incredibly prudish. There are lots of shots of faces and heads (and I mean the type of head primped by a regular hairdresser – not anything sexual) with out-of-focus backgrounds to make the movie look mildly arty. Typical of this over-used trope is a scene where we see the backs of the heads of the brother and sister with an out-of-focus TV playing cartoons to provide visual 'interest'. Overall the cinematography sucks as badly as a rubber slave with a dirty butt plug jammed down their throat. The soundtrack is really crass as well – with way too much Bach.

Shame is a movie that will appeal to repressed and aesthetically-challenged saddos who consider TV programmes like Strictly Come Dancing sexually charged. If you don't fit this category then avoid Shame like the plague. I thought McQueen's first film Hunger was unadulterated middle-brow crap, but Shame manages to be even worse! There's more excitement to be had from watching flies swarm around a dog turd for ninety minutes than in McQueen's cinematic slumber parties. But if you like Merchant Ivory Productions, you'll probably love Steve McQeeen. Me? I prefer watching paint dry!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

New York On A Dozen Espressos A Day!

The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web.

On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. Among other things I check out the 5.99 DVD Funhouse on Broadway. Actually while a lot of their films are $5.99, they also have loads of $2.99 bargains (or 4 for $10). There wasn't much in the horror department that interested me, but as always the DVD Funhouse had plenty of martial arts films to groove a discerning trash fan fanatic. I picked up a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga on the notorious Videoasia label (which specialises in public domain pan and scan reissues mastered from dodgy VHS tapes). I'd wanted a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga for a long time but wasn't prepared to part with the tenner in sterling it would have cost me to buy the Videoasia edition online – I managed to miss picking up a copy of the UK Vengeance Video release of this title because it sold out before dropping to a price I'm willing to pay for DVD (£3 and under – and most of the Vengeance Videos I have were picked up for a quid from London retail outlets that were closing down as the credit crunch kicked in).

I'd arranged to meet up with Tom McGlynn and Bill Doherty at White Columns at lunchtime. I got to WC a little early so I could check in with Matthew Higgs, Amie Scally and Carolyn Lockhart. I'd also wanted to see the 6th White Columns annual show. The exhibition Looking Back was curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss. The idea behind the annual is for those making the selection to give a flavour of the art that was exhibited in New York over the past year. Sherrie Levine is the only artist included in Looking Back whose work I actually saw in NYC over the past 12 months, so overall the show was a fantastic catch up for me. It's also great to see Levine's sculpture just sitting on the floor, which gives it a really different vibe to the carefully considered installation of her retrospective at the Whitney last year…

Tom, Bill and I go to Snice for coffee, then take the subway to Long Island City in Queens. Our first port of call is PS1. We've just missed the big 9/11 show but there are still curiosities – in particular My Best Thing (2011) by Francis Stark (an animation about cybersex) and Rania Stephan's tribute to Egytpian actress and suicide Soad Hosni. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) is a scratch video featuring themed selections of scenes from 60 of this actress's movies. While I'm at PS1 Tom introduces me to Robert Nickas. The 2010 annual at White Columns was curated by Nickas, and he's just done an occasional publication with White Columns about disappeared artists. Nickas tells me that thanks to my Art Strike, I came up in discussion with his students when they were working on this project.

From PS1 we move on to Dorksy Project Space for a really strange show of artists who have both sculptural and video practices… Video<>Object was not to my taste but in case you're interested it featured Nancy Davidson, Yasue Maetake, Halsey Rodman, Jeanne Silverthorne and Moira Williams – and was curated by Laurence Hegarty. After an overload of art, we decided coffee was needed, so we headed to some place Tom and Bill knew and this turned out to be a funky little bistro. Fortified with our drug of choice, we moved on to the Yace Gallery for the opening of Reenacting Sense – a group show and only the second ever exhibition at a space that is so new it isn't listed in the Long Island City Cultural Alliance guide. We're at the opening because Tom and Bill know Pinkney Herbert who is showing alongside Cecile Chong, Kyung Jeon, Dominic Mangila and Pierre Obando. The show isn't so much walking a tightrope between eclecticism and incoherence as jumping headlong into the void. It might be amusing – albeit challenging – to create a theoretical discourse that is capable of drawing the work together. I think the curator is called Juri Kim Pang, and she didn't appear to have any kind of argument to explain the selections she'd made…

Friday morning found me once again wandering around downtown alone – doing things like checking out the record stores on Bleeker Street. There was nothing worth buying in the bargain bins. At lunchtime I met up with Tom McGlynn and Kenny Goldsmith at White Columns. After saying high to Jeff Eaton, who'd been off work when I'd popped in the day before, we moved on to Snice for coffee. Over our brews we talked about sound poetry and pop music. Kenny walked with us to meet Lynne Tillman outside SVA on 21st Street, but headed off before Lynne appeared. With Lynne, Tom and I went to a nearby Italian restaurant – the food was great and the conversation even better. Tom was surprised by the opinions Lynne and I expressed about one well known American writer in particular – but unlike me, Lynne never voices her dislikes publicly, so I won't name the guilty party here! After we ate, Lynne and Tom headed south, while I wandered north as I had a hotel room for one night.

I decided to walk to 92nd and Madison Avenue, mainly because I can't recall ever going through Central Park in the dark and I wanted to see if it feels anything like the way it is depicted in the 1974 movie Death Wish. If you were able to ignore the joggers and the dog walkers – which is difficult – then just maybe the landscape is capable of evoking that long gone 1970s era of decline in NYC! I don't spot anyone who looked the part of a potential mugger or murder victim in a Michael Winner movie. That said, I've loved Charles Bronson movies since I was a kid, so I overshoot my destination and go all the way to the north end of the park at 110th Street, then double back along Fifth Avenue and down 93rd Street (all this despite the fact I much prefer Bronson in movies like The Street Fighter AKA Hard Times to Death Wish). Earlier on I'd found it impossible to reconcile some of what were once New York's sleazier areas – as depicted in films such as Abel Ferrara'a Driller Killer (1979) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) – with how they are today. On the subway over the previous couple of days I'd almost had flashes of the way the city appeared in Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper (1982) – but in the end I had to conclude that NYC as I'd most liked it on thirty to forty year old celluloid had disappeared (assuming that is, this hadn't always been a fiction).

Hotel Wales turned out to be a conversion. I tried opening what I thought was a cupboard and it turned out to be an unlocked connecting door to the next suite, and in doing so I seriously freaked out the married couple occupying the room. Once I'd settled in I sat on the bed and read most of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus. After taking a shower I went to bed. In the morning I finished reading Video Green and checked out around 9.30am. I had planned to use the gym (but the hotel wanted to charge me $15 for that) and work online (but it was $12.95 for internet access), so I didn't bother with either (the hotel was paid for by the Guggenheim, I had to cover the extras). It was snowing when I left the hotel and I enjoyed the way the city and my walking were transformed by the weather. I ambled down to 13th Street amazed by how little traffic was on the roads. I made use of the customer wi fi in Snice while eating soup. I was waiting for White Columns to open so that I could check in there for a final time this trip. The gallery is closed on Sunday. Neither Matthew nor Amie were around but I caught Jeff Eaton. Then it was the PATH from 14th and 6th to Hoboken. Tom wasn't in when I arrived at his apartment, but he came up the stairs two minutes behind me. We headed out almost immediately to catch up with Bill Doherty in a nearby coffee shop.

I headed to the Guggenheim alone – Tom was coming later. I took the PATH to 33rd Street and walked the rest of the way to 89th. The Last Word event was mobbed. The queue went around the block and all the way back and along Madison Avenue. Even as a participant it took a while to get in, so despite turning up at six I missed the beginning. I'd have needed to get there early to catch it from the start. The Maurizio Cattelan show was pure spectacle and it was packed – making it even harder to get into the museum. Everything was hanging from the ceiling on ropes of many and varied lengths, and there were people milling on every level of the Guggenheim spiral. Like a lot of successful contemporary artists, Cattelan's work is obviously difficult and expensive to fabricate, although the actual imagery is extremely populist and accessible. Cattelan had announced he was going to stop making art, which was why I was speaking at an evening of talks dedicated to endings and death – it was designed to accompany his farewell retrospective.

The set up for The Last Word is great: 7 hours with a wide range of speakers talking for just 10 minutes each. There's a green room with fabulous food and everything is perfectly set up in the theatre. I natter to various people as I grab grub and drinks – including, of course, organisers Nancy Spector and Simon Critchley. It's particularly nice to connect with M C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel from Baltimore, who know all about me through our mutual friend John Berndt. My talk about The Art Strike gets plenty of laughs, so I'm happy with that too. After I've spoken, Richard Kostelanetz grabs hold of me. We've been trying to meet for years but somehow it's never happened, so we finally hooked up in 2012!

After I've chatted with Richard, Tom McGlynn grabbed hold of me. He'd turned up around eight and had been enjoying the event, but we decided to leave about 11.30PM. There are only so many talks you can take in during the course of a night! The next morning we hang out before I take the PATH to 14th Street. I buy a pair of Levi 501s from Dave's on The Avenue of the Americas (just a couple of blocks up from the PATH stop). I still had some dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I got a copy of The Flying Guillotine (the pre-Wang Yu 1975 Shaw Brothers epic that inspired the superior spin offs) in Entertainment Outlet on 14th Street. Then I moved a few shops shops down the road and spent the rest of my money in 14 Street DVD Center, where I picked up a copy of Golden Needles (1974) starring Jim Kelly (I didn't even know that film was on DVD!). I used my Metrocard to take the subway to JFK (actually it's ten cents short of the fare – but I get through okay).

Virgin Atlantic tell me my flight is cancelled but I'm in time for an earlier plane if I'm prepared to pay for an upgrade from economy to premium economy. I tell them to stuff that and say insist I should get on the earlier flight without paying extra for it. They say tough basically because there are no economy seats left on the earlier departure. Now that's what I call corporate generosity (not), since it would have actually cost them nothing to put me in premium economy and they cancelled my later flight… So I'm left to hang around the airport until it is time to board an even later departure for London… While I'm kicking my heels at JFK, I notice one of the dollar bills I was given in change at the 14 Street DVD Center is stamped with the slogan: "Track this bill at wwww.WheresGeorge.com"… This is a website that records the movements of currency but it relies on those who end up with the notes the project has marked logging in there. I haven't registered my dollar bill. Does anyone know anything about the site and whether there are any good reasons for either registering or not registering with it?

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

10 Best Ways To Die

1. Heart attack upon orgasm during sex!

2. Heroin overdose!

3, Suicide with a single bullet through the head on live TV!

4. At home in bed in your sleep!

5. Becoming so engrossed in gaming that you fail to move, eat or drink – and eventually die!

6. On the toilet like Elvis Presley – it ensures that people remember you!

7. From laughter after reading this post.

8. Drowned by beer – nine people died in the London Beer Flood of 17 October 1814, when barrels of booze at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst and spilled into the street!

9. With an orange in your mouth and a pair of tights around your neck – it's a little like point one, the difference with auto-erotic death being that you don't need to inconvenience someone by dying while humping them.

10. Sudden diarrhoea followed by copious haemorrhaging and anal expulsion of the intestines – like Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, who may have been poisoned  back in AD 336! It's spectacular and means that in the long term your death will be bigger than that of those who simply died sitting on the pot like Elvis Presley.

And it should go without saying that you should try to die with as many unpaid debts as possible – since before you go there's nothing like living way beyond your means, and afterwards no one can get the money back from you!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Eric Roberts & Richard Harrison Battle It Out For The Title Of Greatest Movie Career Slide Of All Time!

In terms of having the greatest film career slide of all time you'd have thought Eric Roberts had everything going for him. For starters his sister is Hollywood A-lister Julia Roberts, and he got Golden Globe nominations for his early starring roles in King of the Gypsies (1978 – best actor debut) and Star 80 (1983 – best actor). But by the time Roberts took the lead role in the martial arts flick Best of the Best (1989) you can see it has all gone wrong. Why Roberts was cast as a member of a fictional US karate team when he couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag is a mystery in itself. Best of the Best has a tediously moralistic plot that is so predictable you could set your watch by it, and Roberts also displays his not so unique ability to over act (particularly in the hospital scene with his injured five year-old son). And Julia's big brother also boasts a haircut that is even worse than his inability to fake the fight and exercise routines depicted throughout the flick…

Let's skip Best of the Best 2 and a whole slew of other junk and move onto Ninja Creed AKA Royal Kill (2009). Despite the fact that Roberts refrains from any martial arts antics in this utter train wreck of a movie, he somehow manages to make his barnet look even worse than in Best of the Best. Having sat through the movie on DVD I can concur with the Washington Post's verdict: "deliriously bad film-making… Royal Kill needs to be seen to be believed, but don't see it, under any circumstances". And Roberts followed this up with among other things Shartopus (2010), in which he appears to be drunk rather than acting….

All that said, Eric Roberts looks like a rank outsider in the movie career slide stakes when compared to muscleman Richard Harrison. After a bit part in South Pacific (1958), Harrison discovered the best way to get his career going was to marry the daughter of B-movie boss James H. Nicholson (of American International Pictures). For much of the sixties, Harrison found himself in Italy making an assortment of spaghetti westerns, spy flicks and sword and sandal movies. In the seventies and eighties Harrison went from being a B-movie star to having his name used to sell grade-Z flicks. He worked with virtual everyone who was considered to be no one in the film industry – ranging from the notorious Jess Franco and sleazy Joe D'Amato, to the utterly fabulous Godfrey Ho.

Godfrey Ho was the William Burroughs of martial arts films. As deftly as Billy Burroughs applied the cut-up technique to text, Ho utilised it to splice together unrelated celluloid elements. Working with producer Joseph Lai, Ho took footage from other films and more or less randomly intercut this material with his recurring motif of ninja fight scenes (usually featuring Richard Harrison) to create new movies. This is the situationist method of detournement deployed on an industrial scale, and it leaves more carefully wrought exercises in subversion – such as René Viénet's Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) – looking like tedious Hollywood bollocks by way of comparison.

Ho and Harrison's masterpiece is Scorpion Thunderbolt (1988), which is basically two films mashed down into one. The earlier material comes from Name (1985), an unreleased Hong Kong horror flick about a woman who is half-human and half-reptile – she commits gory murders under the influence of a snake charmer and a witch (who has groovy erotic dance moves and really long finger nail extensions). Meanwhile a gang controlled by the same enchantress is attempting to assassinate Richard Harrison because he's unknowingly in possession of a ring that poses a threat to the semi-nude sorceress's occult omnipotence.

The early scenes set the tone for the whole of Scorpion Thunderbolt. In one of these sequences, Harrison drives past a hitchhiker. He changes his mind about not wanting to give the nubile young woman a lift after getting a flash of her tits. Once inside Harrison's car, the horny wanton tells our man she's an actress. After a bit of banter this dangerous seductress takes our hero to a sex cinema, where he dogs her as film of the 'actress' in a porn vehicle is projected behind them. However, what makes this episode particularly insane is that Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene is used on the soundtrack (presumably without anybody actually bothering to pay for the rights). The 'actress' attempts to kill Harrison during sex but bites a suicide pill when he foils her attack.

The plot of Scorpion Thunderbolt doesn't matter much. It is enough to say it veers from the comic capers of badly dubbed cops investigating the snake murders to brutality and bloodshed, and back again. It is these startling shifts in tone and imagery that make Scorpion Thunderbolt a post-modern schlock classic. Unfortunately Hollywood and its fans failed to recognise that Ho's pictures left Jeff Koons looking like a rank amateur when it came to transforming eighties post-modern tropes into high art: and as a consequence once these flicks were released in the USA on video, they did so much damage to Harrison's reputation as an actor that by the mid-nineties he'd retired from making movies. So there you have it – a no contest – Harrison easily beats Eric Roberts to claim the title of greatest movie career slide of all time!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Dynamic Inertia – A Week Is A Long Time In Blogging

One time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase 'a week is a long time in politics'. When it comes to the internet things move even faster…. but the speed of these changes might be likened to 'dynamic inertia' (in both politics and blogging). The phrase 'dynamic inertia' has been used to promote the shake weight 'exercise' fad of recent years – and appears to have been coined for this purpose. Shake weights were marketed with adverts that featured women grasping these light dumbbell-like objects in their hands and jerking them about with their arms. The infomercials featuring this imagery went viral online because many saw in such hand and arm gestures a connection to onanistic sexual activities. There is now also a slightly heavier shake weight for men. The female shake weight has been marketed as trimming women's arms and making them slimmer – whereas the manufacturers claim the male equivalent enables men to bulk up (although obviously what are essentially the same set of exercises cannot do both these things)!

Despite spurious claims by those marketing the shake weight, there is no scientific evidence to back up their assertions this expensive branded product is at all effective as an exercise aid. What the shake weight represents is a triumph of marketing over common sense – as do many other recent exercise crazes such as the power plate. Obviously any exercise is better than no exercise, but there are far more effective and less expensive ways to workout than using a shake weight or a power plate. What the people selling the shake weight have usefully done is provide us with a term to describe our current cultural condition. The phrase 'dynamic inertia' perfectly encapsulates the political and cultural situation we find ourselves in – which is no longer postmodern but has simultaneously failed to move on from the postmodern. This is a world in which capitalism (and thus official history) can only go backwards – and one where the products of alienated labour are still being falsely presented by our exploiters as having transformed themselves into 'pure image'.

Obviously the only way to go beyond this post-postmodern condition is through the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. This will be an overflowing in which we'll be able to realise every aspect of ourselves as human beings, and together enjoy the wealth of this world in a truly collective fashion. Although it will number among the more minor benefits of communist revolution, I will at last be able to dispense with my spam filter, something I currently require to block 'messages' such as the following: "Discover The Untold Secrets Used By The World's Top Cat Trainers To Make Their Kittens Listen To Their Every Command" (link removed). It should go without saying that we don't want a society of 'order givers' and 'order takers' (or even one divided into 'hep cats' and 'kittens'), we want a society of equals!

And while you're at it don't forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!