Stewart Home's Blog, page 4

The Tube Map Is Not The Territory

When I was standing on Homerton High Street in east London the other day a cyclist stopped and asked in an American accent if I could tell him how to get to Bermondsey and then Stratford. I had to explain to this psychogeographer that while Bermondsey might come before Stratford if you are travelling from central London on the Jubilee line, to get to the second location from Hackney he needed to go east and to get to the first he would have to go south. The cyclist decided he wanted to go to Stratford so I directed him east through Hackney Marshes. I should have added that if he checked out the Lee Valley carefully he might find some dogging going on; and this would have proved more fun than attempting to use a tube map to guide himself around Lud’s Town! The way many people rely on the subway to get around London leads to some really wacky misreadings of the city’s actual topography, and the cyclist who asked me for directions had come up with one of the craziest I’ve encountered in my entire life! You couldn’t make it up!

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

Porno Girl Amina Noir Disappears From The Web

One of the interesting effects of the protests against The Innocence of the Muslims film is the way they have led to the removal of data from the web. To take just one example – searches for the adult actress and model Amina Noir who appears in Innocence of the Muslims currently turn up a number of very recently dead links.

If you try to see individual images of Noir on the Model Mayhem site you get a message saying: “This user is not here atm. bye.” And if you try to access her profile at Model Mayhem you get a message saying: “Unable to show profile #1201168  This member is either awaiting approval or has removed their profile from the site.” There clearly was an Amina Noir profile at Model Mayhem because pictures from it currently still come up in image searches; and to me it seems strange that it would have been removed by Noir as she has yet to take down her public figure profile from Facebook. The latter is less interesting than her Model Mayhem profile appears to have been since there is only one photo on her Facebook promo page and little else: when I checked earlier today it only had 42 likes despite having been up for nearly 3 years! I think we can safely conclude Noir was struggling to make it in the adult entertainment industry.

Those who attempt to view a series of photos of Noir’s bondage activities in a Californian art gallery on Violet Blue’s Flickr stream are repeatedly told: “This photo is currently unavailable.” That said The Sweet Spot LA haven’t (yet) removed their photo of Noir with Mommy Fiercest and Afrodisiac Lehana Love that was taken on 22 January 2011; when I looked today this had clocked up 173 views. Likewise one of the images that appears to have been removed from Violet Blue’s Flickr stream is still up alongside an article she wrote about an Art Of Restraint ‘art’/bondage show at Femina Potens Gallery for the San Francisco Chronicle of 21 May 2009.

And again, the page for Noir’s 2010 profile on ‘modelling agency’ Chameleon Kittenz on the Blogspot site now gives the following message: “Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.”

I don’t know whether the removed images and pages were taken down at the request of Amina Noir or because those in control of the ‘disappeared’ material had received (or possibly only feared) threats from those protesting against Innocence of the Muslims. Material is lost from the web all the time and the disappearance of a sizeable proportion of the available data about (and images of) Amina Noir is a timely reminder of this; whether you believe this to be a good or bad thing (or are largely indifferent to it) probably depends on a complex series of factors.

The producer and backers of The Innocence of the Muslims are clearly a bunch of racist far-Right nutjobs. That said, I’m still not at all taken with the slogan “Behead Those Who Insult The Prophet” (popular among some of those protesting against Innocence Of The Muslims – but let’s not forget that the idiots using this slogan are actually only a tiny minority of those who adhere to an Islamic worldview). Stupid formulations such as the one I’ve just cited should, of course, be transmogrified into messages that are much more positive and reasonable, such as: “Praise Those Who Insult The Capitalist God Of Profit!”

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

From The Sex Life Of Jesus To The Innocence Of The Muslims

Looking at press coverage of The Innocence of the Muslims (2012) I’m not particularly surprised I’ve yet to find any that compares the reception of this film to the reaction that greeted Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s attempts to make the movie The Sex Life Of Jesus in the 1970s. Before even starting to shoot his flick Thorsen’s found himself vilified in the media and banned from the UK and many other countries. Thorsen had planned to make the film in Britain but was forced to (temporarily) abandon the project under intense opposition from Christian morality campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, Queen Elizabeth II (the fundamentalist head of the Church of England, as well as head of the British state), then British Prime Minister James Callaghan, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan (Elizabeth II’s top Church of England hatchet man).

The racist mainstream media in the Anglo-American world portrays Muslim fundamentalism as a major world problem, while mostly ignoring the fact that Christian fundamentalists are far more of a danger (they are clearly much better armed once you take into account the influence of the Bible belt on American mainstream politics &c., and they’re also yearning for Armageddon). And because ultimately fundamentalism is a global manifestation of an inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world, it is only to be expected that reaction to The Innocence Of The Muslims should mirror earlier reactions to The Sex Life Of Jesus.

Indeed during the 1980s there were ongoing petitions by US Christian fundamentalists arising from rumours that a film portraying Jesus as gay was about to be released. A number of sources suggest these rumours were based on a very partial knowledge of Ed D. Louie’s lost hardcore gay film Him (1974), which Al Goldstein described in the following terms in a review from his magazine Screw dated (29 April 1974): “The plot of HIM theoretically is about a faggot who is preoccupied with Christ and constantly has sexual reveries about balling that great Son of God.” Him was screened at the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan from 27th March to 23rd May 1974, and it possibly also played at a few other fleapit film theatres in American cities in the mid-seventies.

I’ve no idea if Jens Jørgen Thorsen was aware of Him, and if so whether it influenced his to attempt to make The Sex Life Of Jesus. Due to pressure from reactionary Christian fundamentalists, Thorsen was unable to complete his movie about Jesus until the early 1990s, and when it was finally shot as Jesus vender tilbage (Jesus Returns – 1992) the script appears to have been drastically revised (to the extent that some maintain Thorsen never got to make the movie he’d proposed to shoot in the 1970s).

Thorsen was a leftist prankster and leading light of the Second Situationist International – and in many ways the reaction to his proposed film is more important than what he eventually made. I haven’t seen Jesus vender tilbage (and I’m not sure whether there is a version dubbed or subtitled into English), but I’ve been told by Danish speakers who have sat through it that it is awful. The films I have seen by Thorsen I’ve liked – his celluloid adaptation of Herny Miller’s Quiet Days In Clichy (1970) is a truly explosive marriage of avant-garde and exploitation cinema.

The producer of The Innocence Of The Muslims (Nakoula Basseley Nakoula) and his backers are exactly the type of right-wing extremist Christian nutjobs Thorsen exposed as reactionaries when his attempt to film The Sex Life Of Jesus was shut down by uptight scumbags ranging from Queen Elizabeth II on down. That said Nakoula’s project was in many ways subverted by those employed to carry it through. Director Alan Roberts is a competent low-budget exploitation film-maker. His work is lent a particularly surreal quality by the overdubbing of anti-Islamic elements not included in the original script and added after the end of his involvement in the production. The many commentators who say the film is bad or poorly made are simply bourgeois hacks whose judgements are based on the false ‘standards’ of high budget Hollywood productions. The Innocence Of The Muslims (or at least the nearly 14 minute long trailer for it available on the internet) shares many tropes found in the output of artists such as Mike Kelly or Paul McCarthy. Visually and in terms of acting this is not a bad film (if one judges it on terms other than those of Hollywood), what sucks about this production is its detournement through overdubbing into racist rant.

The Innocence Of The Muslims has a dialectical relationship to Thorsen’s Sex Life Of Jesus. As Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx also famously noted in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” In other words we won’t get rid of fundamentalism until we get rid of capitalism.

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

The End Of Cinema?

The ongoing transformation of human social organisation is reflected in the transformation of cultural forms. This is, of course, why the lettrists announced back in the early 1950s that: “the cinema too must be destroyed!” Right now movies look pretty superannuated in comparison to gaming and social media. Even Hollywood bores like Brad Pitt are admitting there is no way they are going to get the kind of upfront salaries they did in the past. However, Pitt is wrong when he claims the economic crisis alone is responsible for doing-in Hollywood. Downloading and file sharing are games changers as much for film as for music. The revenue streams generated by cinema have changed and weakened, just as they have for music and books. While ongoing economic turmoil may have added to these pressures, the changes were coming anyway. Today badly shot mobile phone footage of inconsequential acts in public space go viral on YouTube and Hollywood can’t compete with this. If this isn’t the end of cinema then it is at least a chance to reinvent it – burn, Hollywood, burn!

If we’re not yet witnessed the end of cinema, we will in due course. As Amadeo Bordiga put it: “…in the fog of the depths off Nantacket, in the dark of the walled tomb of the living in Marcinelle, in the bitterness of the slime of the stagnant ponds of the Arabian Desert, while the forces of the Revolution seem to be hiding and Great Capital carouses in the bright sunlight, we have again found, at his inexhaustible work, the Old Mole who undermines the curse of the infamous social forms, who prepares for the not near, but most certain, destructive explosion.”

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

Seven Wonders Of The World Wide Web!

1. Self-obsession, self-referentiality, solipsism, egotism and narcissism: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

2. The sheer amount of resources poured into search engine optimisation (SEO) which is a zero sum game: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

3. The reduction in the number of items in list blogs as attention spans shorten. Lists blogs are increasingly made up of less than ten items: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

4. Repetition of basically the same information again and again: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

5. Link wheels creating a pattern of links that flow from one website to another and which finally link to a targeted website requiring promotion (SEO): <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

6. Cynicism and nihilism: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

7. Seven & seven is – in this instance seven and seven  is actually less than one since we’ve reached the implosion point of capitalist ideology: <http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/4882>

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

Dogging and Psychogeography

For me there is little if any point in defending the historical standing of the Lettrist International. Histories are always contested and a passive contemplation of the past is pointless. As the Lettrist International knew it is a matter of bringing the past back into play or else forgetting it. In the 1950s the Lettrists adopted the term psychogeography because they liked its pleasing vagueness but today in the anglophone world this word is totally recuperated. Psychogeography in England is now a matter of middle-class literary hacks walking around urban and suburban spaces and then acting as if they have simultaneously swallowed a thesaurus and a very bland work of local history and are ever so politely regurgitating both at once. Not only is this utterly tedious but the sense of decorum with which it is carried out is profusely reactionary.

Today’s literary psychogeographers know nothing of defamiliarising themselves with urban spaces they may have known for years – since they construct themselves as uptight white male bourgeois subjects (regardless of their actual gender or ethnicity their minds are ‘male’ and ‘white’) their sole desire is to master time and space. Standing in complete opposition to this are a multitude of subjective proletariat explorations (and transformations) of time and space. This can be done with drugs – as a teenager I was quite taken with dropping acid and then embarking on bicycle rides – or in other ways. Today I decided to defamiliarise my immediate surroundings by walking backwards out of a block of council flats and into east London. I was surprised by how easy it was to walk backwards down the communal stairs and out of the block. Once I was on the street people mostly ignored me. However I hadn’t gone far before I tripped on a paving stone and fell on my arse. Feeling happy to have proved my lack of concern with bourgeois dignity, I felt able to leave off my experiment in walking backwards (for today anyway).

I have no problem with the meaning of words changing over time – only a reactionary would want to fix meanings once and forever. The reason I’m against the gentrification of psychogeography is because it is a manifestation of bourgeois stupidity. So  while middle-class literary fuck-wits remain fixated with sedate walks, proletarians need to find ways to open up exciting new psycho-sexual spaces. And while in the so called twenty-first century neither rock and roll nor dope sound nearly as enticing as they did in the 1960s, we still haven’t done enough fucking in the streets! So from now on where a literary hack would use the phrase ‘psychogeography’ let’s deploy the term ‘dogging’!

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

Turn, Turn, Turn – Spinning Away from the Mysticism of the Dervishes

When I was a toddler I used to like spinning around and around for long periods of time. Sometimes I’d fall down, while on other occasions I’d stop still standing up and marvel at the room still spinning around me despite my movements having ceased. When I first tried acid as a teenager it took me right back to these early childhood experiences of spinning. And although those first LSD experiences are a few decades behind me I can still dig whirling around and around.

I was spinning around this morning for the first time in several months and it really grooved me as a trippy experience. There’s nothing mystical or new age about such activity – it is simply playful fun. After spinning this morning I wondered if other adults liked to spin in this way without resorting to mystical justifications. Putting spinning into a search engine I was disappointed to discover the top results were all for the fixed bicycle exercise of that name. With whirling the lead results were for Sufi dervishes. Turning took me even further off-subject to items such as lathes.

For me spinning is just turn, turn, turn – but from there we can go on to overturn, overturn, overturn! Constituting yourself as a bourgeois subject is all about decorum and there is no decorum frolicking around in a spin. Whirling without mystical delusions is fundamental anti-bourgeois! Marx famously described religion as ‘the opium of the people’ and the ‘heart of a heartless world’, and so Marx would have understood the necessity of stripping the mysticism out of spinning and instead linking it to the states of radical subjectivity that accompany revolutionary activity. Disalienation entails reforging all our connections to our species being – and living up to our status as homo ludens! Turn, turn, turn to overturn, overturn, overturn!

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

10 Reasons Why List Blogs Suck!

1. The numbered lists found both online are all too often incoherent – rather than making real connections the blogger just ranks random statements.

2. Best of lists are not only subjective, ninety-nine percent of the time they’re not nearly subjective enough – for example, check out the many lists of ‘best opening lines of books’ and notice how all too often these are simply lists of famous ‘canonical’ books. Ditto best films or albums of all time lists. These aren’t so much what the blogger likes as what the blogger thinks their audience will recognise and they (the blogger) ought to like to demonstrate their ‘fine’ (in reality below-average and handed down from square teachers) tastes.

3. List blogs are repetitious but mostly they’re not repetitious enough – generally their authors are looking to create an impression of individuality in an alienated world rather than aiming at the overthrow of consumer and fan relations through parody and repetition.

4. By around point four the blogger is usually getting pretty bored and just types the first thing that comes into their head!

5. The bizarre and the offbeat are so over-emphasised in list blogs (non-best of cultural artifacts variety) that they cease to be odd.

6. List blogs are bad enough when done as text but they are even worse when they’re streamed video compilations of ‘top’ gaming escapades – mostly boys demonstrating their ‘skill’ at shoot ‘em up computer games.

7. Unfortunately most bloggers are numerate enough to correctly order the numbers one to ten, or even one to one hundred – and list blogs are generally so boring that speaking personally I’d find it more exciting if they more were jumbled up, or simply skipped from point one to point ten (at least that way they’d be shorter)! The overwhelming majority of bloggers appear to have had the type of bourgeois college education designed to utterly smash any sense of imagination they may have possessed as children.

8. The attention span of most web surfers is so short they’re unlikely to get beyond point 3!

9. Very often one or more items in the list will only have the most tenuous of connections to the subject allegedly under discussion. NB this statement is a deliberate repetition of point one – the words are different but the meaning is the same. Therefore you’ve been cheated – despite including ten points I’ve actually only provided you with 9 reasons why list blogs suck!

10. The final point is usually even more lightweight and throwaway than than the rest of the blog!

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

When Will The Art Bubble Burst?

An economic bubble is trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably above the intrinsic value of the product or service in question. In other words an economic bubble is the exchange of products or assets at inflated prices. Some of the more notorious economic bubbles in recent years have been in assorted property markets – with crashes in the value of property occurring from 2005 onwards in various markets around the world. The US property bubble in particular – and the sub-prime mortgages tied to it – sparked the current financial crisis and could also be said to have burst the banking and financial industries bubble.

Fearing that stocks and bonds are too volatile some investors have diversified into collectibles that range from old master paintings to expensive wines by way of rare coins and stamps. In a capitalist economy there is no safe investment – speculative investment works on the basis that what goes up must come down. Blue-chip art is currently over-valued and will deflate at some point – the question is simply when…

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

August Is A Slow Month For News…

August is a slow month for news – but remember kids that’s because the news is manufactured by public relations departments and this is when they go on summer holiday in the northern hemisphere. This year we had the misfortune to have the Olympics to obliterate the more usual silly season stories. What amazes me is that much of the media claimed that even cynics were won over by The Games during and after the London Olympics. I haven’t seen any change in attitudes among the people I know who opposed the Olympics for screwing over people in east London. Likewise, while one might admire the skill of some of the athletes, for me the Olympics was still an exercise in corporate branding and patriotic bullshit. My attitude hasn’t changed and I think it is a real shame that some incredible displays of human skill were perverted to benefit right-wing politicians and scummy corporate brands like McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Community sports like 3-sided football remain way superior to the so-called elite sports featured in the Olympics. It is already time to start organising against the 2016 Olympics in Rio!

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