Stewart Home's Blog, page 3

Kali Yug Express by Claude Pélieu (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2012)

Claude Pélieu was an associate of William Burroughs and his 1973 anti-novel Kali Yug Express is a continuation of the cut-up experiments begun more than a decade earlier by Brion Gysin. Although the book appeared in French (the language in which it was written) and German back in the 1970s., Kali Yug Express has only just been published in English. The English translation seems to have been made by Pélieu’s second wife Mary Beach many years ago. Pélieu and Beach also had a hand in the translation of many beat writers – including Burroughs – into French.

While Kali Yug Express takes some major cues from Burrough’s cut-up trilogy – The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express – in terms of its space age mythology, the more autobiographical elements of Kali Yug Express owe less to the book’s most obvious source of inspiration. However, it is worth noting that Pélieu – like Burroughs – had been a junkie. But Pélieu owes a great deal to French influences including surrealism and lettrism, despite his frequent allusions to Burroughs:

“Some youngsters are rolling cigarettes, and passers by smile indulgently, except for an avant-garde French poet, a guy who knows who isn’t taken in… he’s always afraid that some Hippie in civilian clothes will drop drugs in his lemonade… he’s an ex-Lettriste very much in favor…. one time his wife panicked and threw an ounce of hash in the garbage, to protect her dear little ones… One of the guests had mistaken a bar of Pakistani hash for chocolate, his sight was getting bad as of a long time ago. He ate the bar in secret, that fool!… two ounces in one day!…. expensive, hard to take!… in short, a half hour later the guy smiles for the first time in forty years, as high as a kite, wanting to hear some real rock, dancing with broads……” (page 67).

Elsewhere fragments of situationist sloganeering appear: “As soon as you take your desires for realities you start to invent. We catch all the signs drifting among reflections of waves whispering on the edges of clouds.” (page 95).

The novel returns to more familiar Burroughsian territory at its climax, an effect achieved through a speed up of the rate and rhythm of the cut-ups as the novel progresses (obviously there is no narrative): “We’re sitting on police glue. People were wandering through reality, absorbing death, wavering like cops evacuated by the pipeline of time, crossing that mosaic of spray-cameras, impaling themselves on jakchammers of worker-agents… risky messages in the light… to survive in a macrobiotic night, naked, dying in the taste of the world, flying over the scenery, crawling among technical lines – yes-yes superstar yes-yes leaning over the sink, vomiting the latest information.” (page 238).

Kali Yug Express is a curio of the seventies that riffs around surrealism and Burroughs (but reads more like Kathy Acker) and yet also manages to be an early and very French example of post-modern literature. This anti-novel probably works better in French than this English translation – since its sources are French and would be more apparent in that language (and I’m not just thinking of French language writers in the surrealist tradition and its slipstream, but also of the Beats in their early French translation). Nonetheless it is good to finally read an English edition of a book I’ve often heard about but until now have been unable to check out….

And just in case you don’t know, Pélieu was born in France in 1924, but from 1963 onwards he mostly lived in the United States where he died in 2002.

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

Why Do Men Love Kettlebells?

I was talking to a female fitness instructor I know today and she gave me her take on why kettlebells have become so popular among male fitness enthusiasts in recent years. My friend didn’t put what she was saying in the words I’m about to use, but the crux of her argument was that doing the key kettlebell exercise – the swing – was the closest a guy could get to having sex in a gym. The swing is all about hip thrust and thus resembles male movement in penetrative sex! My friend’s take on the kettlebell swing was that it was a good exercise since it raised the heart rate and used many different muscles, but that you could do it just as effectively with a dumbbell.

Moving on, a year or so ago there were dozens of TV and video parodies of people using shake weights – since those exercising with them looked as if they were masturbating. Now I’m wondering why given the similarity between kettlebell swings and humping there aren’t dozens of YouTube piss-takes of this exercise? Perhaps  today’s video generation is repressed and just feels more at home with jerking off… Or maybe the fact that the kettlebell swing is an effective exercise, whereas scientific research indicates that the claims made for the shake weight are nonsense, means parodies are less attractive? On the other hand if the world was just waiting for someone to point out in public the similarities between the kettlebell swing and penetrative sex, once this blog is posted perhaps the web will be flooded with videos riffing on this elective affinity to comic effect. It would certainly be interesting to see how macho proponents of kettlebell use – such as Pavel Tsatsouline – responded to parody videos (or whether they just ignored such a phenomena).

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

The unending cesspit of Jimmy Savile and the 1970s

I’d planned to write a blog about Max Clifford shooting himself in the foot over Jimmy Savile. I had the idea before I’d seen anyone else covering this but before I finished putting my piece together The Guardian run a story headlined: Jimmy Savile scandal: ‘celebrity hedonism no excuse for child abuse’ and straplined, ‘Child protection expert criticises Max Clifford for saying celebrities didn’t ask for birth certificates’. Paul Roffey may not say things the way I’d have formulated them but the points are basic and unfortunately still need laying out in this way because there are so many twerps around who can’t grasp the key issues.

There is obviously much greater awareness of paedophilia today but in the 1960s everyone knew about the age of consent and people were regularly tried for breaking the law over it. The fact that someone may have looked 16 or 21 if they were male may be mitigation but it is no defence. (Roffey tells The Guardian)

This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need stating. Nonetheless scumbags like Max Clifford make it necessary to do so since their arrant bullshit on the subject shouldn’t pass unchallenged. The rich and famous remain arrogant enough to think they can defend the indefensible – but we won’t let them get away with it!

Moving on, when I was sixteen in the late-seventies I had a female friend of the same age who a thirty-something photographer persuaded to pose naked. A twenty-something guy we both knew who worked in a punk record shop thought my friend was being exploited, so he told the photographer my friend was only 15. In a panic the thirty-something perv destroyed the prints and negatives he’d made of my friend (who’d actually turned sixteen a week so so before she posed nude for him). The photographer knew he’d get done if he was caught with indecent images of a 15 year-old and he’d asked my friend if she was sixteen, but our older acquaintance was more convincing when he falsely claimed she’d lied. The record shop assistant clearly had a better understanding of the nature of consent than the law – where there is a massive inequality in power relations there cannot be consent.

Around the same time various members of my male peer group (including me) were offered a hundred quid if we’d submit to being bum-fucked on camera. £100 was a lot of dosh to us back then and we were even told that our faces wouldn’t be on the films, only our backsides. We concluded that rather than being for our benefit this was to protect the pornographers making the movies – if we couldn’t be identified then no one would be able to prove that were beneath the age of consent for gay sex in the UK at that time (as we were). In the late-seventies I found myself constantly proposition by older men as I wondered around London – and I was not only under the age of consent for gay sex, I also looked considerably younger than my actual age. The saddos hitting on me knew having sex with me wouldn’t be legal – but they didn’t care coz they thought they could get away with it. It was more usually men who I had to tell to fuck off as they harassed me, but I’d get just as pissed off women who did it (and the oldest person to offer me money for sex as I came out of a punk concert was a female in her seventies – the men who did this were more usually in their thirties of forties).

The punk scene was full paedophiles and those attempting to exploit paedophilia for commercial gain. The Guardian may now be carrying on the whole relatively sensible articles about Jimmy Savile, but as recently as 10 April 2010 Alex Needham wrote in a laudatory blog about the punk poser Malcolm McLaren: “After managing the band Bow Wow Wow (and attempting to bring paedophilia into the mainstream via a magazine called Chicken), McLaren decided to make records himself. ” This is in an article with the strap-line: “The punk impressario’s stunts shook up pop music for ever. Here are some of the best.” Doh!

Not that The Guardian should be singled out for criticism on this score. The British tabloid press has way more to answer for since it played a role in turning Savile into an untouchable celebrity. Right-wing hack Garry Bushell has written for a range of the red tops, as well as involving himself with some of the more unsavory elements of the punk rock scene, and fronting his own really bad dumbcore band The Gonads. Bushell may or may not claim the following lyrics from his song I Lost My Love To A UK Sub are a joke, but nonetheless they ought to provide all the tabloids for whom he’s written with some food for thought:

My first love was a virgin only 13 years old/Till Charlie Harper grabbed on his pension day I’m told/He showered her with badges/He bought her lots of booze/And then showed her his warhead/Now don’t you think that’s crude?/He got her in a stranglehold/He got her in the club/Before I bleedin’ knew it I lost my love to a UK Sub…

Charlie Harper was the rather unlikely middle-aged front man to the punk band The UK Subs, and he had a reputation for bedding underage girls. Whether Harper’s unsavory reputation was deserved or not I’ve no idea, but when I hung around the punk scene in London in the late-1970s, Harper was widely perceived to be a dirty old man with a penchant for young girls. Bushell is playing off and celebrating Harper’s reputation for bedding jailbait, as is obvious from the large number of UK Subs song titles worked into his lyric. Towards the end of the song Bushell returns to the subject of grooming underage girls that is first addressed in the words quoted above (viz badges and booze): “Tank her up with vodka till the silly cow is sick/Take her in a stranglehold/Take her out the pub/Get back to your place and you’ll never lose your love to a UK Sub…” And for the benefit of those not familiar with all of the UK slang in the song ‘in the club’ (first verse) means pregnant, so this lyric is a very blatant paean to kiddie fiddling.

I’ll end by noting that while child abuse imagery could be found in various parts of the punk scene of the 1970s, it seemed to have the strongest appeal to those with far-Right leanings. Neo-Nazi punk moron Ian Stuart recorded a song on this subject called Jailbait with his band Skrewdriver in 1977:

Normal hair looks so good / Temptation think I should? / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / No one knows you’re sneaking out / Your old man would scream and shout / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / Just because you’re just fifteen / They can’t guess the things you’ve seen / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / They don’t want you getting pissed / Enjoying things that they have missed / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait.

Again note the alcohol reference (‘getting pissed’) and the role this plays in grooming underage girls (and also boys in the case of many of those in the Skrewdriver entourage – such as fascist bonehead Nicky Crane who also wrote bad lyrics and drew crap record covers for the group). On a live recording of Skrewdriver performing Jailbat at The Marquee in London on 4 June 1977, Ian Stuart introduces the song by saying” “Right we’re going to do one about little girls….” in a leering voice, just in case anyone misses the fact that he fancies himself as a perv.

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

Institutional Puritanism And Censorship At WordPress.com

While ‘free speech’ is something that goes down big in theory in capitalist heartlands like the United States, in practice the protestant heritage of the WASP elite in North America means that today’s online web 2.0 environment is in reality heavily censored. High-handed bans on platforms like Facebook, Photobucket and YouTube are well known and generate much commentary. To give just one notorious example, earlier this year Facebook removed the painting Ema by Gerhard Richter that had been posted on the platform by the Pompidou Centre to promote a Richter retrospective. Against such dumb-ass attitudes Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com likes to pose as a libertarian defender of freedom of expression on Web 2.0. He’s even been quoted as saying: “WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for ‘uncomfortable thoughts and ideas’, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that.”

You’d have thought then that unlike Facebook, Photobucket and YouTube, WordPress.com wouldn’t disallow ‘pornography’ in their terms of service. But check those terms and you’ll find that they do! Of course, like all those corporate sites that ban users from posting ‘pornography’, this is just a catchall term allowing WordPress to censor anything they like. One person’s pornography is another’s social critique and/or art. In the case of WordPress.com it seems they’ve banned what they brand ‘pornography’ on their free site in an attempt to driver users onto their paid for hosting services. Like WordPress.com’s use of ads on their ‘free’ site, this is just another capitalist scam (they’ll remove ads from you blog if you pay an annual fee)

And check out the messages sent to those running blogs WordPress.com disables: ” “If your blog is designed to promote affiliate links, get rich quick programs, banner ads, consists solely or mostly of duplicate or automatically generated material, or is part of a search engine marketing campaign, WordPress.com is not the place for you.” You’d think WordPress were living in the 19th century since it seems they’ve never encountered appropriation art and conceptual writing in all their unoriginality – nor understood the nature of their break with the old order of representation… Like the ban on ‘pornography’, the phrase ‘consists solely or mostly of duplicate or automatically generated material’ is designed as a subjective catchall to allow WordPres.com to disable blogs and thereby drive users off their ‘free’ service in the hope they’ll then cough up the dosh for hosting. After all, if WordPress.com genuinely didn’t want duplicate material on their site then they wouldn’t include a reblogging button on it would they! Ultimately WordPress.com censors nearly as much as Facebook and is just as stupid – both suffer from institutional puritanism despite their on the surface rather different agendas….. And this illustrates very well that there are no alternatives under capitalism!

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

 

10 Quickest Ways To ‘Write’ A Blog

1. Re-blog someone else’s effort.

2. Copy and paste (sneakier and better than re-blogging since you can take the credit without doing the work).

3. Use pictures or videos.

4. Write the first thing that comes into your head.

5. Share your sexual fantasies with the world (but don’t be surprised if the world isn’t interested).

6. An advice blog on how to blog (or even on how to blog quickly).

7. String something together from your favourite song lyrics.

8. What would Bruce Lee (or whoever you happened to dig) say about some current news story. And, of course, Bruce would say with regard to Alexis Wright – the alleged Zumba Madam with her own porn channel-  that every good athlete deserves to be famous.

9. A column on self-referentality considered as a post-modern groove sensation!

10. Do a list blog (10 greatest eusosleaze movies of all time, 10 sleaziest chancers in the London art world etc.).

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

Aldo Tambellini At Tate Modern

A  year ago on this blog I described seeing the recreation of a 1960s Aldo Tambellini happening in Manhattan on 20 October 2011:

…headed up to the Chelsea Museum for a performance of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero – a recreation of a happening performed by Group Center several times between 1963 and 1965. Black Zero featured some recorded sounds, including the voice of poet Calvin C. Hernton who couldn’t be there in person because he was dead. One of the improvised elements was Henry Grimes on double bass and Ben Morea on power tools adapted as musical instruments – and they were fabulous together! There were film projections all over the place and a very good modern dancer, who amid apocalyptic verse about racism and nuclear holocaust, eventually fell down into an erotic death pose: at this point Tambellini entered the stage area with a pen knife and popped a balloon onto which film was being projected, and that was the end of the performance. I was knocked out by the event, describing it in words really doesn’t do it justice.

From 9-14 October 2012 Tambellini was at Tate Modern under the banner of Retracing Black. In The Tanks for six days there was a Tambellini environment with film and slide projections, film on TV monitors and an audio loop lasting about 22 minutes. On the evening of Saturday 13 October there were screenings of individual films and re-staging of two happenings. Tambellini’s strength in the 1960s lay in collaborating with others and collaging different mediums into environments and happenings – and while we’re at it let’s not forget he played a key role in creating a vibrant cultural scene in New York’s East Village that flourished precisely because it kept itself utterly separate from the institution of art!

The Tate’s screening of various Tambellini shorts allowed me to get a better understanding of some of the elements that make up his mixed-media collages but for those new to Tambellini (which seemed to be the case for most of the audience) then seen in this format they didn’t make for a good introduction to his work. The films were mostly abstract and black and white, to fully appreciate their fast flicker in a cinema environment you don’t want distractions from other light sources… unfortunately a number of people on both sides of me were using smart phones during the screening and even in silent mode such coloured flashing really lessened the impact of Tambellin’s work. Nonetheless you could still see there were a lot of parallels between Tambellin’s mid-sixties shorts and lettrist cinema of the early nineteen-fifties. The scratching of film stock and the soundtracks at times being dissociated from the imagery being just two examples of this.

To really grasp what Tambellini is about you  need to experience one of his mixed media happenings. In this context his films become part of a complete sensory overload in an electromedia environment. Moondial recreated from 1966 was an improvisation on the part of a musician and dancer with film and slide projections by Tambellini. The costume worn by the dancer – originally Beverly Schmidt but at the Tate Tanks Daliah Touré – with its wild headdress and reflective parts, brought to my mind the Afro-Futurism of Sun Ra and others. Obviously Tambellini’s mixed media happenings are always to an extent an improvisation and are never going to be exactly the same twice. I was, however, surprised at just how different the version of Black Zero I saw at Tate Modern was to the re-staging I’d witnessed in Manhattan a year earlier. There was more space for the projection, Seth Woods playing the cello rather than Henry Grimes on double bass, and recordings of Ben Morea rather than the man himself improvising live with his ‘noise machines’, fewer recorded words from poet Calvin C. Hernton (nothing about nuclear holocaust at Tate but still plenty about racism), less on stage action in general in terms of performers too.

What was more impressive at Tate Modern than Chelsea Museum was the balloon which Tambellini pops at the end of the performance – this was gradually inflated throughout the event to a huge size (whereas in Manhattan a year earlier it was much smaller). That said I preferred the more cluttered first performance I saw and thought that while Seth Woods was good, Henry Grimes playing live with and against Ben Morea was way more sonically impressive. I also preferred the longer selection of Hernton recordings since his anger at the racism and stupidity all around him is not only deeply felt but theoretically incisive (as anyone who has read his non-fiction books about race in America will already know). Hernton’s poetic style owes something to the beat generation but at the same time he is way better than Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs rolled into one! Tambellini’s mixed media events are at a midway point between beat and psychedelic culture and all the better for not being frozen into one period or the other.

Even if I preferred the version of Black Zero I saw re-staged at Chelsea Museum, it was still great to see it again at Tate Tanks. And the audience at Tate Modern applauded wildly at the end of both pieces, many were clearly ecstatic. Likewise, the Retracing Black environment was also an absolute triumph, providing a great introduction to Tambellini for anyone who wanted to be able to wander in and out without necessarily watching an entire happening. What Chelsea Museum in New York had last year that wasn’t at Tate Modern was a good selection of Tambellini’s Black Paintings, so these really do need to be shown sometime soon in London….

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

Was Jimmy Savile A Necrophile?

One of the more surreal aspects of the unfolding scandal around media split-personality Jimmy Savile is the way British media reports of the disgraced disc jockey and TV presenter sexually assaulting young kids are finally being run so long after they did the rounds elsewhere (including on various nutjob conspiracy blogs). As soon as Savile died a slew of right-wing commentators felt free to put online stuff they’d have feared being sued about earlier. That said, the stories they tell had gone around the music business and elsewhere for years before they appeared in endless copy and paste jobs on web operations run by loonies who are deranged enough to believe that the Illuminati is something more than a very  minor secret society that was successful suppressed in the eighteenth-century! However just because these sites manage to grab the wrong end of the stick with regard to virtually everything they cover, that doesn’t mean that very occasionally they don’t get things right. And they may be more or less correct on most of what they have to say about Savile and his colleagues.

So this leaves me wondering whether there is more than a grain of truth in the decades old rumours that Savile volunteered as a hospital porter because it provided him with the opportunity to get it on with corpses (as well as to sexually abuse crippled children). The mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the necrophilia allegations to date but they are now repeating so much of what has been widely available on nutjob conspiracy blogs since Savile’s death a year ago that it seems merely a matter of time before they bite the bullet on this one too. It is less likely – but not impossible – that they will eventually repeat the allegations that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath abused kids at the same Jersey children’s home that Savile trawled for young victims.

Another peculiar aspect of the Savile scandal is that many commentators seem unable to understand why paedophilia is unacceptable. Acceptable sex is consensual sex. It should go without saying that consent is only possible when all those partaking in a sexual act enjoy social equality. Given the power differentials between adults and children, paedophilia can never be consensual and thus it should be condemned as an utterly inappropriate form of behaviour. So regardless of whether it is Savile, or his fellow Radio One DJ John Peel (or pop musicians like Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page), adults having sex with kids in their early teens is always abuse. Some John Peel fanboys seem to think he wasn’t a paedophile when he slept with young girls (and married a 15 year-old when he was 26) because he is their hero. Such posturing is absurd and illustrates a generalised inability to grasp the real issues.

Finally, the Savile scandal is yet another manifestation of the destruction of the status quo – and needs to be connected back to the ongoing scandals around banking, phone hacking and MPs expenses. The establishment is in ruins and Savile shouldn’t be treated as a rogue celebrity but rather as one manifestation of a more general malaise. Saville like John Peel and Alan “Fluff” Freeman (another dead former Radio One DJ about whom there are plenty of child abuse allegations floating around the web) were all recognised by the British honours system (with Savile himself also being close to various members of the British royal family during his life). This starts to create the impression that unless you are a kiddie fiddler you’ll never be offered an honour by Queen Elizabeth II. The class system still stinks something rotten and it is high time we not only stripped all royals of their titles and wealth, but did the same to every last member of the superannuated  establishment!

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

Urban Crawling – The Monument, London

While today’s urban climbers and psychogeographers attempt to access liminal anti-spaces, those opposed to elitism in culture are taking up urban crawling – that is to say they are visiting popular and crowded tourist spots. This weekend my urban crawl took me to The Monument on the north side of London Bridge. Designed by Christopher Wren in the form of a colossal Doric column and completed in 1677, it both commemorates The Great Fire of London and celebrates the rebuilding of the city.

For £3 you can climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform 160 feet above the ground. Since the Monument is a seventeenth-century construction there is no lift up and it is amusing to hear 20 year-old tourists complaining about the the effort required to get to the top. The staircase twists tightly and there is just room for those going up to pass those going down. The viewing platform still provides fine views of the city – the best of which is east along The Thames taking in both Tower Bridge and much beyond it.

The viewing platform is build around the outside of the column, it has room for people to pass each other and that is it. Once the numbers on the platform go beyond double figures it feels very crowded. While I was at the top of the Monument most of those around me were from outside the UK and seemed to see their elevated location as a photo opportunity more than anything else. As an antidote to the tedium that has attached itself to psychogeography since the discipline has been hijacked by would-be Booker Prize winners, you couldn’t do better than an urban crawl up the Monument.

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

10 More Blogs I Didn’t Get Around To Writing

1. Charles Radcliffe’s mvoing tribute to his friend Chris Gray at Housmans Bookshop in London on 4 October 2012. This would have made a great blog – since I agree completely with Charlie that to appreciate Chris you have to look beyond the situationists and King Mob and read his book on LSD too……

2. Opening night of the Turner Prize… and why Elizabeth Price was the only artist up for the award who I both clocked at the event and spoke with on the night. That said, I did have a conversation with Luke Fowler about a week before the opening at a Tate dinner – but I haven’t exchanged a word with Paul Noble for years and I don’t think I’ve ever said more than hello to Spartacus Chetwynd….

3. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Scroll at the British Library (until 27 December). First London showing for this extraordinary object, the 120 foot long scroll made from rolls of taped together tracing paper on which Kerouac’s most famous work On The Road was written. Kerouac fabricated the roll in order to avoid replacing paper at the end of the page as he was typing – which he felt interrupted his creative flow.

4. Why the Artist Placement Group (APG) is boring. I’m afraid this potential blog post was just too tedious to contemplate – although I would have gone to the APG opening at Raven Row regardless had that private view not clashed with a talk I was giving about Terry Taylor.

5. More unusual London museums such as the Hunterian (surgical museum based on John Hunt’s collection) and the Museum of Zoology (with a lot of animal skeletons).

6.  Why I’m sick of hearing from people who don’t like something I’ve written that part of the content can’t be true because they’ve never heard of some fact or person. Ignorance and proof are quite distinct and anyone over the age of three who needs this explained to them clearly isn’t worth engaging with.

7 Jeff Keen at the Tate Tanks. Like Charlie Radcliffe on Chris Gray this would have made a great post…. I just didn’t get it together.

8. Yet more reasons to stop blogging. I think I’d rather just stop blogging than come up with an argument to convince myself that I need to do so.

9. Jimmy Saville considered as a kiddie fiddler, and why – when I first heard the rumours that he was sexually abusing young girls when I was schoolboy in the nineteen-seventies – it took until 2012 before the subject was aired in the media. Basically everyone else got in on this one before me.

10. Ten exhibitions openings I didn’t bother to attend. Since I could be bothered to go and see the work I didn’t see why I should trouble myself with writing about it….

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

The Return of Beatnik Legend Terry Taylor

On Wednesday (26 September) I did an event to promote Terry Taylor’s republished novel Baron’s Court, All Change, a book I’ve been championing for the past decade. The book was first issued in hardback back in 1961 when novelists weren’t expected to make endless promotional appearances, so I could appreciate that Terry – who is a very youthful 79 – didn’t want to get involved in all that. I was, however, pleased when he decided to travel down to London for the event. I checked with Terry before we started to see if he was alright with me mentioning he was in the audience, and he said this was okay.

So after a brief introduction from Malcolm Hopkins of Housmans Bookshop in Kings X, I outlined the plot of this classic London youth culture novel and talked a little about Terry’s prose. The story line that most interests me concerns the unnamed 16 year-old modernist jazz freak narrator getting into first smoking and then dealing charge (pot). I found out later after talking to Terry that this strand originally made up the bulk of the novel – but his editors had insisted he add in more of the narrator’s family background. This additional material works well enough but it is more conventional and not as ahead of its time as the rest of the book.

What is truly incredible about Baron’s Court, All Change is the prose – which is really fresh, direct and not at all hung up on literary style. The vitality of the writing really makes it stand out from everything else published in London between the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties. It is on a par with the best of American beat literature but unashamedly written in a working class London accent (with plenty of hipster slang) – and while closer in spirit to Jack Kerouac than the UK’s most famous beat Alex Trocchi, it is just as good as Cain’s Book but very different from Troochi’s more mannered prose! And while I really dig Cain’s Book, I don’t wish I’d actually written it but I do wish I’d written Baron’s Court, All Change!

After I’d rapped for a bit, Iphgenia Baal read one of three passages I’d chosen from the book to break up my talk with a very different voice to my south London monotone. The first passage I’d picked describes Terry’s unnamed narrator having his first taste of wacky baccy. It was fantastic hearing Baron’s Court being read out loud really professionally in front of an audience – it sounded absolutely fabulous. I then talked a bit about some of the legends surrounding Terry before Iphgenia read a passage from his novel set in a jazz club where the unnamed narrator is persuaded he should get into dope dealing. After further words from me, Iphgenia wrapped up our formal – albeit quite casual – presentation of Terry’s novel by reading a section of the book that covers the junkie scene, something the narrator wants nothing to do with….

We took a few questions from the floor and since I wasn’t able to answer them all correctly, Terry filled in from the audience. One question was about why ‘Jazz’ and ‘Charge’ are capitalised throughout the book. My incorrect guess based on my own experience of publishing was that Terry’s editor thought it would make them appear more dramatic. Terry corrected me by saying that the capitalisation was his idea because Jazz and Charge are as important to the narrator as God is to other people. Speaking off-the-cuff from the audience in an event dedicated to him seemed to me like a perfect non-return to public life for Terry Taylor; he writes brilliantly about being a hipster because first and foremost he’s lived his life as one! And like all those who are truly mad for kicks and living life to the full, that’s necessitated him staying out of the spotlight!

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