Stewart Home's Blog, page 19

From Gryphon to The Banned & back again, or why prog to punk ain't always a groove…

I was hanging with a mate the other day who'd just acquired a pile of vinyl from a friend who was emigrating to the US. You could tell by the content of this record collection that the former owner had  been born in the 1950s. I'd never heard Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and by listening to it I discovered I hadn't missed anything at all. I had heard Mountain at some point in the seventies and one track of their generic blues rock was enough to remind me of why it...

A shit-faced Scots scammer on the lam

I was in Glasgow over the weekend and the new arts buildings and galleries in Trongate look extremely impressive, but the area around it is one of most impoverished in Europe and there are junkies galore hustling on the streets. I went into T. J Hughes to acquire some discount shit and was hugely impressed by a very blatant shoplifting technique being used by one thieving prick. This particular skaghead chose a relatively expensive but discounted designer item and took it to the pay desk to a...

The Wordless – or Julia Callan-Thompson as high priestess of the aporetic

My mother Julia Callan-Thompson didn't publish very much during her lifetime, but anyone who has read her diary and letters will know she was a natural when it came to putting pen to paper. What follow are a couple of pieces by my mother that appeared in issue one of an underground publication called Shoestring put together by Sonya Perry in Harlech, north Wales, crica 1974. Cutting to the quick, here's my mother's humorous essay from that Roneoed journal:

STILL IN THE SAME KICK

Hippies...

The Zanzibar Films & The Dandies Of May 1968 by Sally Shafto

For a couple of years at the end of the sixties hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas financed a series of films by a group of young artists and writers with little to no cinematic experience. The end result was the French equivalent of US underground movies, which is hardly surprising when you consider that Andy Warhol and The Factory had been a big influence on this informal group of around a dozen hipsters. When I saw the Zanzibar short Vite by Daniel Pommereulle screened at Tate Modern as...

How to make a very bad piece of art disappear… plus The Abramovich Syndrome unveiled

The Pompidou Centre in Paris has rearranged its collection to highlight women artists. Looking through the material now on display I was left with the impression that the French Musee National D'Art Moderne has an acquisition problem. Given the material the curators had to work with, they probably did a reasonable job of selecting it; it's just that looking at pieces ranging from relatively recent photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg to much older work by Niki de Saint Phalle, the acquisitions ...

Dispersible manifesto of situationist skinheads: part 1

1. A situationist skinhead is a skinhead who engages in the construction of situations. This means the construction of concrete momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a passionate and superior quality based on the principle of a permanent revolution of every day existence, from which, several of the principles below evoke a number of observations linked to the study of the situationist skinhead in his/her natural environment. If s/he realizes it by reading this, all...

The 'eternal' return of London's most down & dirty beatniks!

Going to my post box the other week, I found within my haul of letters a small collection of stories entitled Chomsky And The Kultigator by Graham Nowland (Clear City Press). The title piece about a man who is mistaken for the linguist Noam Chomsky is very good, but another story called Some Of The Times I Have Died is even better: "How can I be writing this if I am dead? Well, I can think of at least three novels with dead narrators and I'm not even trying. Take it from me, you can write...

Naked kangeroos versus watching paint dry

YouTube has a reputation as the social networking site with the lowest level of collective intelligence among its members. That said, it also has a lot more users than a site like Vimeo, which may sustain reasoned debate but mostly  offers the alternative of indifference to the cut and thrust of YouTube. I use both, but I use YouTube more.

Fed up with some of the comments elicited by my explorations of what experimental film might be in a digital age, last month I posted on YouTube a video...

The Acid: on sustained experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD by "Sam"

The author of The Acid (Vision, London 2009) uses the pen name Sam, but is probably better known to most readers of this blog as Chris Gray. For me, and probably for many of you, The Acid reads like a continuation of where Chris left off in the essays he contributed to his English language Situationist anthology Leaving The 20th Century (1974). There he wrote: "What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored i...

On the irreducibility of Julia Callan-Thompson

Yesterday I posted an essay on the main part of this website entitled The Real Dharma Bums: on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain. The text documents one of my mother's relationships and the endless scamming that accompanied the hardcore drug use that was a part and parcel of said romance. Running to 10,000 words, this piece was too long to use as a blog. I prefer to place shorter and more fragmentary materials here. But as a supplement to that and other...