Stewart Home's Blog, page 24

Getting it on with Yvonne Rainer at The Whitechapel

Thursday night offered a rare chance to catch a public screening of Yvonne Rainer’s 1985 feature film The Man Who Envied Women at The Whitechapel Gallery in east London. The movie mixes fictional and documentary passages. The fictional sequences feature a character called Jack Dellar talking subjectively about the breakdown of his relationship with his second wife, while his ex’s speeches tend towards more general reflections on gender and related issues. The film begins with Dellar exercising i

Ibiza in the beatnik & hippie eras

After World War II, Ibiza was one of several spots strewn across the Mediterranean that attracted two distinct expatriate types from northern Europe and North America. There were writers and artists ostensibly escaping from the crass materialism of New York and London, many of whose views were so incoherent that what they were really objecting to became by default the innate human capacity for rational thought; and the rich who felt hostility towards even the mildest attempts at wealth redistrib

From Soho clubs to Bloomsbury - ‘glamour’ in early-sixties London

In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Chr

Another take on The Process Church of the Final Judgment

Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings.  Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann

David Cameron: panhandling for small change since 2009

This week a lot of people in the UK were subjected to David Cameron’s pug-ugly mug dropping onto their doormat. There he was, looking like a complete creep, on the the front of a bulk-mailed Conservative Party ‘election communication’. Under the banner ‘It’s time for change’, this prime example of absolute twattery advised readers to ‘Vote Conservative on 4 June’ (the date of the European elections). Clearly, voting for a party headed by an over-privileged arse-wipe educated at Eton and Oxford i

Art Is Dead Baby: The Tate Modern UBS ‘Long Weekend’

After its sponsor UBS AG went into near financial meltdown, Tate Modern named this year’s UBS Long Weekend ‘Do It Yourself’ (22-25 May 2009) and based it around an Arte Povera exhibition. UBS is both a private and investment bank, as well as an asset management corporation. In the past it has been a major sponsor of the arts, but is unlikely to remain so for much longer.

After incurring huge losses on subprime mortgage securities in 2007, UBS only survived after it secured a multi-billion dollar

More on the death of King Mob’s Chris Gray

In the past couple of days I’ve found some more online pieces about the death of Chris Gray. I’ve also come across blog talk of a Guardian obituary that was supposed to appear on 21 May; there is no sign of it yet but I guess this may still materialise. The most comprehensive obit so far is by Charlie Radcliffe who was very close to Chris in the 1960s, had little contact with him for more than 30 years after that, then rekindled this intimate friendship seven years ago. Among the many interestin

London, the world’s greatest city laid bare on BFI Flipside!

On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive Londo

Soho - keep it ‘unreal’!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have f

King Mob’s Chris Gray RIP

I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that ove