Stewart Home's Blog, page 11

10 Best Winter Cold Cures

1. Bottle of good whiskey. Get blind drunk and simply sleep until you're over the cold!

2. A hot sauna and followed by a dip through an ice hole into a frozen lake – then get a hot friend (straight from the sauna daddio) to beat you with birch twigs!

3. A date with a snot sex enthusiast – if you develop performance anxieties about doing the shag nasty with someone who wants to be covered in you mucus during sex, you may well find your cold symptoms drying up!

4. Eat a double helping of vindaloo curry and run your cold out of every orifice in your body!

5. A flu jab (the boring solution – and it's prevention not cure).

6. Run a nude mini-marathon (the hair of the dog cure)!

7. Sex magick – of course the magick doesn't work but the power of auto-suggestion just might!

8. Nude swingers tantric yoga – starting with deep breathing exercises of course!

9. Count backwards from a hundred billion to one – by the time you finish your cold will be gone!

10. Suicide – this is the extreme solution but it works every time! Once you're dead you'll never have a cold again!

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

Deconstructing Goodreads 'reviews' – or the not so Great Leap Backwards!

I just read through all the reviews of my books on the Goodreads website – and a lot of the negative ones are premised on the retarded assumption that realism is the only valid form for 'fiction'. I'll begin with some examples of this from Goodreads 'reviews' of my anti-novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess:

J.C. Moylan: "stewart home needs to learn how women think if he's going to make his protaganist (sic) a woman."

What a plonker – and dig the lower case spelling of my name, although I doubt this is an e. e. cummings fan.

Likewise, C. Vance: "very few men can write from a woman's point of view.  very few men can write from a woman's point of view this poorly – especially the first-person recollections of sex. after the narration of her 'meat curtains' and his 'fuck stick' i was done. inane nonsense with regurgitated lit theory to try to make it seem like legitimate fiction instead of another smut book."

Which leads us on to the same error made from the opposite perspective by Tess (no surname give) on her Goodreads 'review' of Dead Princess: "too many references to pulp fiction get in the way of this book actually BEING pulp fiction, which is what I percieve (sic) as the author's intentions."

What I'm actually trying to do is render all genre boundaries meaningless – and not just those between pulp and literature, but also fiction and non-fiction -  none of which are actually real, but they are nonetheless perceived as 'real' by those in thrall to them. It should go without saying that genres evolve over time, and that what is included in any particular genre also shifts historically. Given that I'm going beyond literature, I've no interest in the straight production or reproduction of other genres either. Literature is in part created by its division from pulp, these two categories both conjure up and buttress each other – what I want to do is overflow canalisation of this type. While those who berate me for failing to write realist literature tend to be way more obnoxious when giving vent to their ridiculous opinions, anyone who tries to understand my anti-novels as pulp has also failed to grasp what it is I'm doing (and is therefore unable to pass worthwhile judgements on my books).

Returning to Dead Princess but moving onto another common misunderstanding when it comes to my writing (and, indeed, the work of all those who have grasped that literature is dead), we get this from Alberta (no surname given):

"disappointing… the writing seemed too rote… like he was anxious to get everything down but he didn't care how he said it. "

Which echoes but is less explicit than a comment I noticed on a Goodreads review of Steve Beard's Meat Puppet Cabaret:

Becca  "… i think that a book which strays so far from conventional narrative, it should have more exciting language."

The complaint that I suspect is being made here is that the language isn't literary – unfortunately many  'reviews' on Goodreads are so short and/or poorly expressed that it is often difficult to understand very precisely what the poster is trying to say. That said,  I have been told numerous times that I can't write because I don't use flowery literary language. Those who make this claim simply don't understand I want my words to flow so I make my sentences as simple as possible to achieve the effect and 'meaning' (or in many cases disillusion of 'meaning') I'm aiming at. Mostly complexity in my books comes from a piling up of concepts, not from individual sentences. That said my prose is worked at – you don't get smooth and rhythmic sentences from a first draft – and obviously I am not aiming for literary effect (since that would mitigate against what I set out to achieve – the supersession of literature among other things).

The problem with Goodreads – and Amazon 'reviews' too for that matter -  is that many of those who presume to pass judgement on my writing lack the skill and knowledge to do so. A 'good' proportion of these would-be 'critics' have been brainwashed into thinking that all books should be judged by conventional and hackneyed nineteenth-century literary standards. While I don't doubt that readers of this type dislike what I write, were they able to understand my books I might yet groove them – but even if after gaining a little relevant knowledge they still loathed my prose, it would be better if they were able to express an opinion about my writing without making complete fools of themselves. Those who've never encountered tripped out post-fiction in all its (un)originality – and haven't yet understood the nature of modernism's break with realist tropes – aren't so much reversing into the future as plunging headlong into the past!

Of course I wouldn't stop these ill-informed bozos from adding their reactionary inanities to Goodreads – after all their failed attempts at putting down my books simply add to my credibility.  The question is to what extent we should bother to engage with small 'c' conservatives who base their criticisms of 21st century post-fiction on the conventions of nineteenth-century realist prose? They might learn something from us but should they fail to do so, then having anything to do with these imbeciles is just a complete waste of time.

Just in case you want to see it here is my author profile at Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29676.Stewart_Home.

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

10 Reasons Not To Enlarge Your Penis

1. You're a woman – you ain't got one!

2. You already have an erection!

3. As far as most women are concerned (and many men too) it isn't size that counts but what you can do with it!

4. Scientific research suggests that silicon impants are dangerous – and simply ingesting herbs doesn't work!

5. Adding three inches to your donger would make your balls look distressingly small by way of comparison!

6. You're already a complete dick so you don't need to make yourself a bigger one!

7. A small blood sausage is easier to swallow (a variation on the small is beautiful argument)!

8. Herbal remedies are a rip-off – why waste your money?

9.. Too great a fixation on genital size and pleasure is phallocentric and will result in most women (and many men) viewing you as a complete cock!

10. If you really want to reclaim your manhood then you've got to learn to love it just the way it is!

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

Occupying my future, reclaiming my past!

Asserting that 'we are everywhere' is probably more convincing than the claim that 'I am everywhere". Nonetheless it doesn't take much suspension of disbelief before I'm able to convince myself that indeed "I am everywhere" – after all, I've been billing myself as 'an ego maniac on a world historical scale' for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can't possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he's based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here.

When I read what other people write about me it can often seem like I've been even busier than I actually am. Reviewing my recent White Columns show in the New York Times on on 18 November, Roberta Smith wrote: "A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork." To me the entry in question has an inconsistency which makes it obvious it is a collective effort rather than mine. I suspect that some of the imbalances in the article are the result of other people using Wikipedia to promote themselves. For example, while many of my books and exhibitions are passed over without discussion, there is a bizarre passage about the Evening Falls nightclub (including the fallacious claim that I didn't read there). Likewise, when I last checked, no one had updated my list of exhibitions on this Wikipedia page to include my recent White Columns outing.

Moving on, I've also seen some nutjob using web 2.0 comment facilities to allege that I write my own Amazon reviews…. of course they offered no proof, and had obviously missed the fact that I just don't take the user generated content on that site very seriously. As you've probably gathered by now, way too many of my leisure hours are spent reading about myself for me to have the time to write reviews of my own books for Amazon. Likewise, it will come as little surprise to most of my readers that one of the things I love about the web is the way it allows everyone to turn over their own past – and in some cases rediscover material they'd pretty much forgotten. I didn't have any images of the Anon exhibition I'd been a part of in Luton back in 1989 until John Wynne posted some photographs of it on his Facebook profile. I immediately snaffled those featuring my contributions and added them to my Flickr photostream – where they look absolutely fantastic in an utterly weird eighties appropriated post-pop art kind of way. Likewise, earlier this year I finally got around to putting an image of my 'original' Art Strike Bed onto Flickr, done several years before Tracey Emin attempted to recuperate this particular assault of mine on the sensibilities of the London art establishment.

I could use this piece as an opportunity to write about how I'm attempting to replace the planking fad with a craze for photos of people standing on their head – there are currently a dozen pictures of me doing headstands on my Flickr profile (see if you can find them all). However, rather than banging on about my topsy-turvy online presence, I'm now going to get even more self-referential and obsessive. What I'd like readers of this blog to do is tell me in the comments below whether I used the best possible title for this post, or whether I should have reversed it so that it ran: "Reclaiming my future, occupying my past"?

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

Lost London – The Scala Cinema

Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn't happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. Although in the seventies and eighties I went to cinemas all over London, I ended up spending more time at The Scala in Kings X than anywhere else.

I actually started going to The Scala when it was in Tottenham Street but my memories of it's first two years of existence (1979-81) in Fitzrovia are a little dim. I do recall being really knocked out when I saw Ministry of Fear there one afternoon – I think on a double-bill with The Third Man. I recently watched Ministry Of Fear again and was rather disappointed by it, since this Fritz Lang feature didn't live up to my 30 plus year old memories of it. That said, I've had worse reactions to watching films at home that I'd enjoyed when I last saw them at the cinema decades earlier. Ministry Of Fear wasn't bad, it just wasn't nearly as good as my recollections of it.

The Scala on Tottenham Street was perfectly placed for those of us on the punk rock trail between Soho and Camden. Walking distance away to the south there was the 100 Club, Marquee, Notre Dame Hall and Rock On Record Stall; and in the other direction were venues like The Music Machine and Electric Ballroom – as well as Compendium Books. But at that time there were still a lot of cinemas around central London, so The Scala didn't seem too special.

As we went into the eighties a lot of both repertory and first run cinemas disappeared from the face of London. As a result, The Scala – which had relocated to Kings X in 1981 – came to seem a lot more like a lone London beacon for lovers of midnight movies. Aside from having better flicks than anywhere else, The Scala must have been the dirtiest and most run down fleapit in The Smoke – and therefore it had way more character than places like The Everyman. The Scala also had ultra-cheap daytime multi-bill screenings with concessions (for the unemployed and pensioners) – and I was merely one of a crew of dole scum who seemed to spend more weekly daylight hours in this particular fleapit than out on the street or looking for work.

One of the things that particularly sticks in my mind from the earlier part of the eighties are the all night screenings – particularly stuff such as all night beat generation movies, which was where I first encountered flicks like Beat Girl and Bucket Of Blood. Around this time there were also free preview screenings for The Worst of Hollywood TV series (a Friday late-night slot on UK Channel 4 shown towards the end of 1983). As anyone who went to those free screenings can tell you, they'd do filmed introductions for several flicks before showing them. The audience were there to applaud and laugh at Michael Medved running down various grade Z movies – and we got commands from the film crew about how to react to him. Despite doing free screenings for all the films in the series (3 per day as far as I recall), the TV people used the same piece of stock footage of me in the audience on each of their weekly broadcasts. The films themselves – Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wild Women of Wongo, Robot Monster etc. – found a new life and a new audience, and went on to be recycled on more recent TV reruns such as Mystery Theatre 3000.

After a while The Scala became a home from home for many, and the regulars had their favourite seats. I always took the one immediately in front of Kim Newman (who I didn't actually ever get to know until years after The Scala closed). Other things I suppose I should mention include the famous Scala cat – who'd walk over the seats and across the front of the screen – and the rumble of trains going under Kings X. Ditto the fact that there were lots of broken seats.

in the early and mid-eighties The Scala seemed good at building new films. They'd put movies without a ready-made audience on a multi-bill with established cult favourites. To give an example, I don't remember what Liquid Sky was showing with the first time I saw it at The Scala, but I was mesmerised and didn't know if it was really great or totally shit – so I went back to see it again and decided it was great.I must have seen Liquid Sky at least half a dozen times at The Scala during the eighties. The Scala was also a good place to see multi-bills of John Waters or Russ Meyer flicks; although it wasn't where I first encountered films by either of these directors, it was one of the few places I could see their movies regularly. Thundercrack was another of my Scala favourites, alongside the more obvious art house choices like the I Am Curious movies and WR Mysteries of the Organism (which I still love). The Scala also had some less tasteful multi-bill choices – such as the regular Nazi exploitation triple of The Night Porter (a massively over-rated piece of shit), Salon Kitty and Red Nights of the Gestapo.

Later The Scala seemed to lose its way and failed to build up new to their audience (but not necessarily recent) films. I guess the cinema's founder Stephen Woolley was concentrating on making a go of his film production company Palace Pictures. I brought Decoder to the UK for the first time in 1989 and screened it in Glasgow as part of the Festival of Plagiarism I organised there, and also arranged to show it at The Scala a couple of days later. I remember getting dropped off by a friend outside the cinema (he'd brought me back from Scotland in his car) and the queue for the screening stretched back to the main Kings X station. It was an amazingly large audience – some of whom I guess had to be turned away.

Colour was important to Decoder and you didn't really get it's full celluloid effect on the videos that had circulated in rather limited circles in the UK until then. I don't remember the exact deal, but The Scala basically insisted that Tom Vague (who came in on the promotion of London screening of the film with me) and I take all the financial risks; then when they saw the audience and money coming through the door for Decoder, suddenly discovered loads of extra expenses so they could keep nearly all the dosh. I presume they wouldn't have insisted we four-wall it if they'd realised we had a sell out, so they could have made their cash grab look like less of a rip-off – which in the end included things like alleged bottles of whisky for members of staff.

I got the impression that by the end of the eighties the Scala management had become absolutely shameless about doing anything for money because Palace Pictures was a financial black hole. After seeing the crowd Decoder pulled, The Scala started screening it themselves as part of their programme… but earlier in the eighties I think they'd have realised it was a film worth showing without someone coming in from outside. I don't know or don't remember how they started screening all the Hong Kong action movies they showed later on (and which I enjoyed seeing at The Scala a great deal), but I assume it was someone coming in from outside and wanting to do it that kick-started those John Woo/Chow Yun Fat etc. screenings.

I was sorry The Scala closed but by the time disappeared in 1993 it wasn't the institution it had once been. I think it was Palace Pictures – as much as the court case over an illegal screenings of Clockwork Orange – that killed the place. The Scala had been showing that Kubrick film for years under titles like Mechanical Fruit, but I never liked it much as a movie (or a book) and  avoided those screenings. The closest we've got now to The Scala is the Prince Charles but that's more a second run place, and the excellent monthly BFI Flipside screenings (but that's a much cleaner environment).

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

Trippy Does Glasgow Again

For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I'm always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who'd organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA "Scotland's Turkish Kebab House" – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.

It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn't eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.

I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina's spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was 'destroying'. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.

After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they'd closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina's Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don't use the internet, and much else besides. I'm a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.

On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow's many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it's sell-by-date. I wasn't gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn't buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.

I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn't seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren't using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch's News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they're not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden's News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn't consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden's website:

Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag'n'brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He'd set out to expose a naturists' boarding house whose owners allegedly offered 'extra' sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to 'make his excuses and leave' (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was  caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his 'manhood' and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker 'Onan the Barbarian', bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.

Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it's an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.

Aside from books, I always find Poundland's DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn't great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops.  On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it's curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.

Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.

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

10 Greatest Conspiracy Theories Of All Time

1. It was actually Jackie Kennedy who assassinated JFK in Dallas. He was shot from inside the car! Jackie was fed up with being paraded before the public as a trophy wife, and also with her husband indulging his sexual peccadilloes with hundreds of different prostitutes.

2. Julius Caesar faked his own death and having discovered the secret of immortality is actually the secret power behind the sub-prime mortgage speculation that led to the current financial collapse.

3. Using his vast financial resources Aristotle Onassis paid Nikola Tesla to construct a time machine, and then travelled back to the eighteenth-century. Once in the past Onassis created a fake identity as Adam Weishaupt – a professor of law at The University of Ingolsttadt – and then on 1 May 1776 founded the Bavarian Illuminati.

4. Albert Einstein plagiarised all his scientific theories from secret papers that originated with the The Knights Templar and that were passed down through the ages with the avowed intention of undermining twentieth-century civilisation.

5. After her death Princess Diana's body was ritually carried around the sites of 69 stone circles in north-east Scotland. This is the basis of the book 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess.

6. Howard Hughes wasn't actually a recluse. Hughes switched identities with actress Jane Russell (who wanted to drop out of the public eye), so that he could indulge his penchant for cross-dressing in public without anybody realising he was a man.

7. The 9/11 attack was carried out by several Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan whose fascist world view led them to loath the city of New York and the US government in Washington.

8. Lady Gaga is the public face of a huge international plot by fashionistas to take control of the world.

9. Richard Nixon was innocent of any wrong doing over Watergate.

10. The real identity of the psychotic serial killer Jack The Ripper is beat novelist William Burroughs. This forms the basis of the book Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton.

NB. There are no great conspiracy theories. You'd have to be off your trolley to believe the Templars organised the French revolution or that the Illuminati was ever in a position to seize world power (since it was a tiny sect that was completely suppressed in the eighteenth-century). Because for many years I have been plagued by conspiracy nuts who lack the wit to work out that material like the stuff in this post is satiric, it is unfortunately necessary to point that out here. There are, of course, political conspiracies of which Watergate is an example – but vast consciously organised conspiracies on a global scale simply aren't practical. Or to put it another way, if you think the World Trade Centre in New York was destroyed by the US government using controlled demolition from within the buildings, then you're a nutjob who'd believe almost anything!

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

"Baron's Court, All Change" by Terry Taylor reissued at last!

If you've checked out the main part of this site you will probably already know that I consider Baron's Court, All Change by Terry Taylor to be one of the greatest drugs and youth culture novels of all time. Therefore I'm very proud to have written the introduction to a fiftieth anniversary reissue of the book. For my old take on the importance of this novel in relation to the emergence of mod and the counterculture see the piece I posted on 14 February 2007. My introduction to the new edition starts like this:

"Many novels are forgotten and more or less disappear from circulation. The majority of books to suffer this fate more than deserve it. A handful of them are classics and eventually find their way to wide circulation. One of the most famous examples of this is Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, which made little impact upon publication but became a canonical example of modernist literature after being rediscovered and championed by the surrealists. Baron's Court, All Change by Terry Taylor is a very different type of lost classic. It created a bigger splash upon publication than Maldoror, but by the late-sixties had faded from view and most people's memories. It provides an accurate account of the drug subculture in London at the end of the fifties. The realism and hep talk of Baron's Court shocked many readers when it first appeared in 1961, but would have raised far fewer eyebrows in the aftermath of the summer of love. That said, it is only more recently that it has become possible to appreciate its historical significance…"

Since if you've any sense at all you'll want to read Baron's Court, there's absolutely no point in my reproducing the whole of my introduction here! You can read it all in the reissue and you're unlikely to lay your mits on anything else – because the original sixties hardback and paperback editions have been near impossible to get for years. The reissue is available to UK residents for £8.00 by cheque from the publisher: Ross Bradshaw, Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham, NG1 9AW: or for £9.99 by credit card at  http://tinyurl.com/taylor-barons. It will soon also be in bookshops and on Amazon. If you want to order from outside the UK, you may do best to use www.bookdepository.co.uk – since they don't charge postage. Baron's Court, All Change was republished on 11 November 2011. It's a stone-to-the-bone mod classic!

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

10 Synonyms For Being A Wanker!

1. Metrosexual – self-consciously middle-class and faux-sophisticated; some are simply wankers whereas others claiming this label are utter pricks.

2. Undersexual – just not getting any.

3. Autosexual – a wanker and proud of it.

4. Retrosexual – the moth-eaten comfort blanket of a memory AKA nostalgia dating.

5. Pansexual – desperate enough to be up for anything including the five-knuckle shuffle.

6. Asexual – so in love with yourself you're not interested in anybody else.

7. Monosexual – the not so silent majority (a post-modern wall of sound) who never tire of the same old thing, or themselves!

8. Polysexual – see pansexual above.

9. Pornosexual – fans of dirty movies and one-handed reads.

10. Octasexual – those who are attracted to men, women, he-shes, transvestites, animals, inatimate objects, food and jerking off.

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

Bill Wyman's Gallery "Art" – Or The Rock Star Considered As A Complete Scumbag

Aside from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones were pretty much the most tedious British Invasion band of the 1960s. Both these acts lacked the mod flash and live excitement of the way superior Who, Small Faces and Creation; not to mention the raw primitive energy that enabled the likes of The Troggs, The Pretty Things and The Downliners Sect to completely outclass bigger rock and pop names. While Mick Jagger's staid middle-class mannerisms and absurd attempts at imitating Tina Turner's high sixties dance moves meant that his glossed lips were forever begging for a mod fist to bust them open, Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman proved himself to be the biggest tosser in the group by dating 13 year-old school girl Mandy Smith in the 1980s.

While Whyman's affair and subsequent marriage to Smith generated a lot of media coverage, he somehow managed to avoid the kind of excoriation heaped upon other kiddie fiddling scumbag pop paedophiles such as Gary Glitter or Jonathan King. That doesn't necessarily make Wyman better than Glitter or King -  he was just lucky to have been operating from the more powerful position of belonging to one of the very biggest acts in the entertainment business.

Throughout October and November 2011 there has been an exhibition of Whyman's photographs entitled Second Nature at Rove in London's Hoxton Square. Like most celebrity exhibitions the show sucks. The selection and presentation of work is incoherent – a mix of music related shots and nature photographs; with stuff such as a portrait of Marc and Bella Chagall thrown in for no good reason (this is the only portrait of a painter).  Wyman is a mediocre photographer and there is little of interest in his nature pictures. For those in thrall to celebrity, his snaps of his fellow Rolling Stones and those around them (Jerry Hall, John Lennon) may hold some interest although overall they are nothing special. Constant privileged access means that there are a couple of lucky shots – but even those pictures showing the Stones looking completely threadbare and worthless (such as a scrawny and bare chested Keith Richard pathetically holding up his fists) pale in comparison to the way the Maysles brothers film Gimmie Shelter explodes Jagger and Company's empty posturing.

Looking at Second Nature I couldn't help but feeling I'd seen exactly the same kind of celebrity junk art many times before. Then I remembered I'd not only seen it all before, I'd also written about it for The Big Issue back in the 1990s. What goes around comes around, so rather than saying any more about Wyman – who is a typical Tory supporting rich toe-rag – I can just reproduce what I wrote about celebrity art 14 years ago…. it remains as valid today as it was then!

But first a quick comment on the celebrity art claims made by a pair of academic clowns – Dr John Schofield and Dr Paul Graves-Brown – as reported by the BBC yesterday. The Beeb quotes these ejits as saying: "The tabloid press once claimed that early Beatles recordings discovered at the BBC were the most important archaeological find since Tutankhamun's tomb. The Sex Pistols' graffiti in Denmark Street surely ranks alongside this and – to our minds – usurps it." The Beatles and The Sex Pistols both contributed massively to ruining rock and roll – the success of these fifth rate acts led many others to imitate everything that was bad about them.

Schofield and Graves-Brown are reported as dating all the Sex Pistols graffiti from 1975. If this is in fact the case it illustrates nicely why they are archetypal academic idiots: one piece of graffiti features Nancy Spungen and it wouldn't take much research to discover Johnny Rotten (who allegedly did the cartoons) wouldn't have known what she looked like until she arrived in London in 1977. Thus this part of the 'art' either dates from at least a couple of years after 1975, or else it isn't by Rotten. Of course, it also remains possible that none of the graffiti is by Rotten and it is not anything like 36 years old. Judged on what the Beeb report Schofield and Graves-Brown as saying, it would take someone with considerably greater historical and archaeological skills than they possess (zero basically) to determine the provenance of this work.

And after that detour here's my old article about celebrities and art.

THE ANTIQUES ROADSHOW

Throughout the swinging sixties a good many young people imagined that they belonged to the first generation that could do anything, which mostly meant being a bohemian. Although no longer far out and fabulous, sixties has-beens still cling to the belief that it is possible to do one thing today, and another tomorrow. The sheer number of once beautiful people who've waddled onto the gallery circuit in recent years is proof of a tenacious, if largely misplaced, belief in their own creative capacities.

Thirty years ago, self-important groovy people like David Bowie and the recently dead Allen Ginsberg were inspired to mix different art forms by the burgeoning 'happenings' movement. More recently, mixed-media experimentation has given way to self-indulgence, with sixties stars attempting to revitalise their celebrity status through exhibitions of paintings. Most pop icons who've made credible art works did so at the height of their fame, through a marriage of music, theatre and painting. Attempts by former members of the glitterati to reinvent themselves as artists are rarely successful.

Sixties movie icon David Hemmings shot to fame when he starred in the Antonioni film Blow Up. This portrait of swinging London included a scene where a game of tennis was played without a ball. Eclectic Similarities by Hemmings, a solo art show which opens this week at London's Osborne Studio Gallery, promises to be considerably more pedestrian. Working in the highly traditional mediums of pen, pencil and water-colour, the faded luvvie now finds artistic inspiration in what Pimm's swilling toffs still call 'the season'. Occasionally broadening his horizons beyond Henley, Lord's, Ascot and Goodwood, Hemmings has also knocked out some London townscapes and a series of pictures on the theme of magic. However, it's with the storyboards from his film and tv production credits, including The A Team, that he finally manages to scrape the bottom of his threadbare barrel. Don't expect any surprises, Hemmings doesn't have it in him to fling a pot of paint in the public's face.

Infinitely superior to Eclectic Similarities is Brian Eno's current show Music For White Cube, running at London's White Cube gallery until 31 May. Eno being Eno, it comes as no surprise that there is nothing to see in this exhibition. Instead, there is a room of randomly generated 'ambient' music, something the former Roxy Music star pioneered in the late-sixties. In the words of White Cube, 'the installation consists of four CD stations each playing a specially cut CD containing between eight and sixteen tracks. The CD players are set to 'shuffle' mode, thereby selecting tracks at random, to produce a landscape of sound that continually remakes itself."

Don't be put off by the po-faced promotion, the work is a lot more interesting than the press release implies. After all, Eno has a great sense of fun. He is rightly notorious for having relieved himself in the dadaist ready-made Fountain – an ordinary urinal that artist Marcel Duchamp signed R. Mutt and then submitted for exhibition.

Considerably less successful are the paintings and sculpture of Eno's fellow glam rocker David Bowie. Some of these were shown a couple of years ago under the title New Afro/Pagan and Work 1975-1995 at Chertavia Fine Art in London. Bowie's pictures were a mixture of expressionistic squibs and fantasy figures set against an underlay of Laura Ashley wallcoverings. With his usual aplomb, Bowie admitted in the accompanying brochure 'in neither music nor art have I a real style, craft or technique. I just plummet through on either a wave of euphoria or mind-splintering dejection.'

Beyond the obvious financial rewards, one is left wondering why Bowie bothers himself with creative matters. The same might be said of actor Tony Curtis, who is currently showing his sub-Cubist paintings in Cannes. The Berlin based art curator Berthold Golomstock is currently putting together an exhibition of social realist style paintings by original Stones guitarist Brian Jones, to be toured internationally in 1999.

Art exhibitions by long forgotten sixties stars are likely to become an increasingly common feature of the cultural landscape. Former teen icons suffering from middle-aged spread find painting landscapes on a Sunday afternoon a considerably less demanding pursuit than making innovative music and films.

First published in The Big Issue #233, May 19-25 1997.

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