Stewart Home's Blog, page 16

Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing

On Saturday night I read at Volatile Dispersal, a festival of art writing held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event proved so crowded and popular that it was hard to take very much in. I found this ironic because after I'd used my FaceBook account to remind people about the event (I list all the public events I'm doing initially on my homepage), among the comments I garnered were the following:

"i like the idea of 'art writing'; its the best phrase I've ever come across (Barry Watten?) to...

A possible appointment in Old Street with the literary heir of Ray 'The Cat' Jones…

A few days ago I got an email from Michael Morgan, who'd acted as press agent for Ray 'The Cat' Jones (the greatest burglar ever and one of my mother's cousins to boot): "I wonder if you could find time and get in touch with me regarding a story about 'Ray the Cat' in Wales on Sunday on 1st November?" I replied: "I have to go into The City on Friday, if you're still based around Dalston maybe we could meet at the The Masque Haunt (the Wetherspoons on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row) ...

Legend of the Witches directed by Malcolm Leigh

Back in 1970 this allegedly 'serious' documentary about witchcraft sneaked a lot of full frontal nudity past the British censor and was then screened in sex cinemas for the enjoyment of the dirty raincoat brigade. It acts as a kind of companion piece to Derek Ford's Secret Rites, since both feature Alex Sanders (as, indeed, does Angeli bianchi, angeli neri AKA Witchcraft 70, but that's an Italian mondo movie not an English 'documentary'). As the self-styled King of the Swingers (oops, sorry, ...

Yes, the bozos who claimed I was Belle de Jour were completely deluded!

A 34 year-old Bristol based research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the 'real' author of the Belle de Jour blog and books. These texts 'documented' the life of a high-class London call girl. Dr Magnanti claims her writing is an authentic record of the time she spent working as a prostitute to fund the final phase of her PhD research. I haven't looked deeply into the various proofs that Dr Magnanti is Belle, but plenty of news journalists have and they seem convinced ...

Yesterday afternoon a thrift store saved my life, or from funk to bubblegum and back again….

It is curious what you pull out wading thru piles of records in charity shops….  coz I was in one again yesterday and wedged between platters by the likes of Jim Reeves, Conway Twitty, Sidney Devine and The Alexander Brothers, I pulled out some class vinyl in the form of the second eponymous Gavin Christopher album (the 1979 RSO Curtom one) For those that don't know, Christopher was mentored by Donny Hathaway and Curtis Mayfield (hence his late-seventies signing to Curtom), played early on...

How does Stewart Home maintain his lavish life-style?

A question I've been asked a number of times recently is how do I maintain my lavish life-style? The answer is simple, my life-style isn't particularly lavish but many people find me so fascinating that they project their fantasies onto an image they create of me. It should go without saying that if you know your way around the place, then London can be a very cheap town in which to live.  I very much doubt I could survive as easily in New York or Paris, although someone born in those places ...

Searching for Francois Raymond in Puteaux…

Searching for someone called Francois Raymond on the outskirts of Paris is probably a little like looking for a specific John Smith in London. Who is Francois Raymond? The one I'm looking for exhibited a series of six photographs of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson as part of an exhibition entitled Exposition Tamrauc at  the Maison de Jeunes et de la Culture (Paris) in October 1967. I have two prints of just one of these photographs, and rubber stamped on the back of one of them is an...

"La Subversion Des Images", a surrealist show at Centre Pompidou

La Subversion Des Images tells us a lot more about the state of official culture in Europe than it does about surrealism. This is an expansive show of surrealist film and ph0tography, but it is also incredibly lazily curated. The good news first, there are examples of Man Ray's hardcore pornography that I'd not seen before, and I assume are rarely shown. His undated stag film Two Women, featuring both oral sex and strap-on penetration is very curious; and for me it made my trip to surrealist ...

Friends Reunited or 500 words on the inside of a ping-pong ball….

How long most people will continue to put up with corporate web 2.0 platforms when they could be controlling their own sites using similar software is anyone's guess… What we do know is that while a platform like Facebook has many users, it is not necessarily profitable. That is not, of course, the only reason why the financial value of web services that rely on user generated content ping-pong, but it is definitely a contributing factor

One corporate operation that is clearly well past its...

Omer Fast at South London Gallery

Omer Fast's film installation Nostalgia is a good example of how material is formatted to fit the institution of art. This is not a criticism of Fast or his work; everyone has to survive in a capitalist society, and in doing so we all reproduce our own alienation.  It should go without saying that the creation of a society where all distinctions between high and low culture are abolished in favour of a truly human world is a pressing task – but in the meantime, where I'm forced to choose...