Stewart Home's Blog, page 22

Protect yourself from data mining

You know how Google, for example, keep records of all the searches anyone makes online using their service; to counteract this I not only use lots of different computers and search engines, I also periodically makes searches for things that don't really interest me that much – you know stuff like "flower arranging" (not something I care about), "love and romance" (which seems to turn up a lot of dating services, not something I need) or "chemical composition of DNA" (which actually pulls up link

Shake and shimmy with the credit crunch, it's a groove sensation!

It's been interesting to watch CDs piling up in bargain bins this year. Right now the compact disk feels as obsolete as VHS tapes did a few years back. Throw in a major recession and there's a lot of great music out there being flogged off 'for a song'.

While three quid albums by the likes of Can and Augustus Pablo more than pique my interest (and there are plenty of them around), what really amused me last time I was in FOPP were the bargain bin copies of Keep Reachin' Up by Nicole Willis & The

Julia Callan-Thompson & the swinging London film scene

I imagine there must be many autobiographical accounts of working as a film extra in London in the sixties, although I can't recall reading any. Looking at the film industry from the bottom up strikes me as considerably more interesting than the recent obsession with celebrity focused accounts of the movie world. My mother, Julia Callan -Thompson,  briefly took up extra chores in the mid-sixties and she ran them in tandem with attempts to establish a modelling career. She found her way onto the

Vicky does New Cross: the art of sexual obsession

On Sunday afternoon I went to the opening of a show entitled Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar at Guy Hilton Gallery in Fournier Street, London E1. It was actually a group show but Vicky Gould got the star billing under her new moniker of Gold, and was the main selling point. Allegedly Gould's work was produced for her final year fine art BA show this summer, but was censored by Goldsmiths College because it focused on her sexual obsession with a lecturer called Paul Davis.

When I arrived for th

Anyone got a good use for Technorati or LastFM?

Last week I took control of my tunes and spoken word pieces on LastFM. I'd noticed that various parties had been uploading my tracks there and figured it was about time I did something about it. I don't have a problem with people file exchanging my tunes, but drum and bass label Moving Shadow had uploaded my spoken word album Cyber-Sadism Live! and totally destroyed the flow of that album by re-ordering the tracks. Of course, anyone can listen to the tracks from Cyber-Sadism Live! any which way

Chicks On Speed piss all over the dead futurists at Tate Modern

Yesterday I went to see the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. The first thing in this display is a large blown-up poster of F. T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, which included the following: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice… we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long Ital

Identikit millionairesses & Eurotrash storm Jeff Koons opening

The Serpentine Gallery is a curious institution. On the one hand it is stuck in the middle of Hyde Park and gets treated by the weekend hordes as a glorified toilet; while on the other, current co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist is preparing some heavy-weight exhibitions, most notably a Gustav Metzger retrospective that will kick ass from the end of September. But last night it was the opening of the summer show, a silly season special called Popeye Series by Jeff Koons.

Popeye Series doesn't interes

'Get paid to blog' sites are a rip-off, so don't Digg them!

Having blogged about click thru ad busting and related issues in the recent past, I'm now moving along to take a look at so-called 'get-paid-to-blog' sites. The bottom line with these frauds is that a bunch of suits use content you create to attract an audience for click thru ads. There are many different companies running scam sites of this type, and among the better known are Triond, Helium and Associated Content. It should go without saying that the sweated labour which monetizes such rip-off

World travel, whisky & crime in the 'roaring twenties'

Don't Call Me A Crook! A Scotsman's Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime by Bob Moore (Dissident Books, New York 2009) is apparently a reprint of a tome first published in 1935 by Hurst & Blackkett of London without the exclamation mark; and the variant subtitle My True Autobiography. When I first read the introduction to this 'reprint', I suspected Dissident Books GEO Nicholas Towasser was pulling my leg over the provenance of the text when he wrote: "There mustn't have been many copies print

Antony Balch Night at the BFI

I try to catch as many of the BFI’s Flipside nights as I can, since this monthly delve into the wilder side of British cinema should not be taken for granted. It is sobering to think that only a few years ago the BFI was an incredibly stuffy and conservative institution that haughtily ignored the film culture it now highlights in its Flipside programming. So big up to Vic Pratt, Will Fowler and the current BFI management for being forward thinking and in the groove! The days of tossers like Coli