Stewart Home's Blog, page 6

10 Places Not To Eat In London During The 2012 Olympics

Much of what I say below is well known and would apply at all times and not just during the 2012 Olympics – junk food always tastes nasty. Nonetheless it seems worth reiterating a few basic facts about McDonald’s as a scummy corporation and Olympic sponsor (seasoned with some comments about other really crap fast food and coffee chains).

1. Any branch of McDonald’s – as official Olympic sponsors McDonald’s have prevented other food outlets selling chips in the Olympic area; and this despite the fact they only sell french fries made from reconstituted potato and not chips (which are sliced and fried potatoes). This chip ban is yet another McDonald’s’ public relations disaster and it has received plenty of coverage in the UK media. Back in the 1990s there was The McLibel Trial, when this giant corporation took two London based activists to court for documenting its poor environmental, health and labor records, only to discover such a heavy handed approach to legitimate criticism backfired. The book Fast Food Nation (2001) by Eric Schlosser addresses how McDonald’s uses its political influence to increase its profits at the expense of people’s health and the social conditions of its workers. Schlosser  also criticises McDonald’s for targeting its advertising at children. In 2002 McDonald’s were successfully sued for misrepresenting its French fries as vegetarian, when they contained beef broth. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)  continues to pressure McDonald’s to change its animal welfare standards.

2. Any branch of YO! Sushi – The food goes around the restaurant on a convey belt and you take off what you want. Despite labels supposedly telling you when the food should be consumed by (I don’t remember ever seeing one – but then it is years since I first and last ate in a branch of this chain and on that sole occasion I was a victim of  ‘corporate hospitality’) you might as well be eating at a buffet. The chances are the food is not going to be that fresh, but then the experience might appeal to connoisseurs of that variant on Russian roulette that I call botulism roulette.

3. Anywhere in Stratford. Back in the 1980s the old Stratford shopping centre had the last branch of The Golden Egg I can recall seeing anywhere in England. That cafe was a relic from my childhood.  Set up by Philip and Reggie Kaye in the early 1960s, the Golden Egg chain brought a jazzy mood to eating in British low-price popular restaurants through riotous colour schemes and brilliant opaline lights. Right through the 1980s and into the 1990s Stratford had a gritty if run down urban vibe. The Olympic development seems to be a final attempt to get rid of that and since it and the new Westfield shopping centre will be packed out with tourists during the Olympics, it is a place to be avoided at all costs this summer. For a taste of old Stratford check out Bronco Bullfrog (1970, directed by Barney Platts-Mills) – it isn’t the greatest movie in the world but has a nice title track by The Audience and shows Stratford at its peak.

4. Starbucks – mediocre coffee and mediocre sandwiches and snacks to go with it. The mediocre coffee of other big chains like Costa Coffee is also to be avoided… The best coffee in London is sold by smaller operations.

5. Pret A Manger – another soulless chain selling mediocre coffee and disgusting filled baguettes, soups, salads, croissants, muffins and cakes. ” Bad news for Londoners – 75% of this chain’s outlets are in the British capitol.

6. Pizza Hut – crummy pizzas, crap interior design.  You know you don’t want it!

7. Bella Italia – bad pasta and worse pizza. Part of the Tragus Group, who also own Cafe Rough and Strada – which should also be avoided. Rather than corporate chains like Bella Italia you’ll get much better food in family run Italian cafes and restaurants – the numbers of these small business in London seem to have declined but there are still many around.

8. Nando’s – a chain specialising in chicken dishes, this ‘restaurant’ is strictly for the birds.

9. Burger King – McDonald’s by any other name stinks just as bad… McDonald’s and Coca-Cola might be the two big 2012 Olympic sponsors but it could just as well be Burger King and Pepsi for all the difference it makes. Both McDonald’s and Burger King sell junk food you really don’t want to eat coz it tastes like shit.

10. Anywhere in or around Russell Square – This area of central London seems to be housing a lot of the international media during the Olympics and has been transformed (along with Southampton Row that runs off it) into a major traffic bottleneck. More than a week before the Olympics began Russell Square seemed to have been largely emptied of traffic and filled with dozens of security personal in high-visibility jackets ordering around anyone who had the temerity to enter the area. Aside from Stratford itself, this part of Bloomsbury appears to the the worst place you could go in London during the Olympics!

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

From T. Rex To Tate & Back Again – Tanks Opening Party!

Despite BP sponsorship, the Tate still do their PR very well. Tate boss Nicholas Serota could have been a politician as he clearly has all the requisite skills – and in many ways he has had to act like a politician as he’s massively expanded the Tate and built it into the world’s leading art brand. The new Tank galleries at Tate Modern were launched with press coverage of Serota praising non-doms (UK-based high earners who are not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes) for their contributions to London generally and Tate’s new extension in particular (see for example page 11 of The Evening Standard 16/07/12). This also served to underscore – - without anything being explicitly said – that the Tanks extension wasn’t sponsored by BP. It is a good example of the more public side of Serota’s Tate campaigning – but he and his organisation also work very hard to get London based artists onside with Tate.

You need to be visible in the London art world but you certainly don’t need to be a big name as an artist to get invited to Tate events – and you’re not only invited, you get emails telling you in effect that you’re valued and Tate really wants to see you at its openings. Since considerable effort is put into getting artists to Tate private views, their parties are way better than many of those I’ve been to at other big name modern art museums around the world (some of whom seem to specialise in pulling in crowds made up almost exclusively of really boring business sponsors).

At last night’s Tanks opening party there was a lot of free booze and a huge crowd. You couldn’t see everyone who was there but I did run into the likes of artists Elizabeth Price, Simon Bedwell and Ian White; curators such as Roger Malpert of the Hayward, Will Fowler who handles artist film for the BFI, Nicole Yip from Firstsite, and Teresa Gleadow; other people I spoke to included Pauline de Souza and Gavin Everall. However the party wasn’t all chat, there were also screenings, performances and DJs. The Tanks is an all concrete environment and looks really impressive architecturally – but as a dedicated live art space it also has some obvious limitations. The concrete floors looked like they were playing havoc with dancers’ joints and the acoustics were somewhat murky since the sound was just bouncing off everything in what felt like an echo chamber. This will no doubt either be sorted out in due course, or may not need to be depending on what type of live art the spaces are mostly used for; but if there is to be much dance a sprung wood floor would seem to be in order.

Perhaps more surprising for an organisation so good at branding was the signage. Tate on Tate signs is never ‘The Tate’ but simply ‘Tate’. The projected Tanks sign read ‘The Tanks’ with a ‘the’ in front of ‘Tanks’. Perhaps Tanks on its own doesn’t look so great – but Tate could have followed Marc Bolan’s lead in using the spelling “Tanx” (the title of Bolan’s 1973 T. Rex album). I’m sure the vast majority of the crowds flocking daily to Tate Modern won’t notice this small branding slippage – but you can also bet your bottom dollar it won’t escape the notice of those who make a close study of corporate image. That said, what probably matters more is that Tate is still very adept at throwing parties. I went intending to look at the architecture and to spend less than an hour at The Tanks launch – but it took me nearly three hours to drag myself away from my friends and the free bar….

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

From Sonic Weapons To A Bulletin Board At Venus Over Manhattan

Back in the summer of 1996 I was invited on a journalist junket to watch KLF pop star Jimmy Cauty demonstrate sonic weapons at a remote location on Dartmoor (south Devon and close to Cauty’s home at the time).  A carriage on a London to Exeter train was blocked booked for stringers attending the event and we were plied with booze on the journey. By the time we boarded a helicopter at Exeter airport (a small provincial facility that shuts down in the early evening), the majority of journalists present were at least mildly drunk.

After a twenty minute chopper ride disaster struck. The pilot announced that we couldn’t land because a mist had swept across the moor. Instead, we returned to Exeter airport where we were told a coach would pick us up and transport us to the acoustic weapons test site. After an hour of waiting, the PR people were going crazy – hardly surprising when you consider that they’d spent fifty thousand pounds staging the event and wanted to impress us stringers into giving them lots of coverage. Meanwhile, an assortment of journalists and photographers were having luggage cart races around an otherwise deserted passenger concourse. The airport had closed down for the night, until one of our party succeeded in activating the public address system and went into pirate DJ mode.

A security guard appeared and attempted to restore order when a bored music journalist switched on a luggage conveyor and one of his friends disappeared down it. While this was going on I picked up a huge pile of postcards depicting a Jersey European Airways jet and placed them in my bag; my thinking being that one day I’d make an art work out of them. The postcards sat around various flats I lived in for 16 years waiting to be alchemised into art, which finally happened this summer when Matthew Higgs asked me to contribute to a show of Bulletin Board art he has organised at Venus Over Manhattan – you can see my work here.

Returning to 1996, I was supposed to get an exclusive interview with Jimmy Cauty for The Big Issue but because not a single journalist had seen the promised sonic weapons demonstration, the PR people offered all the stringers present an interview with the KLF star as a form of compensation. We’d been left stranded at Exeter airport for several hours and weren’t taken to something approaching civilisation until around midnight. I got to speak with Cauty early on – he saw us journos one by one in the back room of a local pub – and he admitted to me that his sonic weapons were actually just some disco gear through which he played back pop music at high volume (I already suspected as much having seen an earlier demonstration in London). He told me he’d simply hoaxed the media and police into believing he was developing acoustic weapons.

I wrote up my interview and sent it to The Big Issue who very shortly afterwards called me to thank me for producing a really great piece. Two days later my editor Tina Jackson phoned me sounding distraught – I’d done my work properly but Cauty had given nearly identical quotes to The Independent newspaper.The Big Issue now couldn’t run the piece I’d written but Tina Jackson said if I could quickly knock up something else about Cauty then they’d use that. I replied that since Cauty’s sonic weapons were a hoax, I could write a joke story about him showing me a secret bunker where among other things he stored more conventional combat equipment including guns and ammunition. This suggestion was immediately accepted by Tina Jackson.

My humorous story Captive of the KLF appeared in The Big Issue of 19 August 1996. On 26 August 30 anti-terrorist cops waving a copy of my hoax Big Issue article raided Jimmy Cauty’s country home and arrested him. This made the front page of The Western Morning News on 28 October 1996; on 15 November that year The Guardian newspaper provided their take on the matter (and this is my favourite piece of coverage of the incident – despite the fact ‘The Grauniad’ call me an ‘art terrorist’ which is not a term I would use to describe myself):

“So where do you reckon the intelligence services get all their best stuff from? Telephone taps? High-level informers? Secret agents? Or none of the above? It appears in fact that they spend their days reading The Big Issue. Following an entirely spoofed article by self-styled art terrorist Stewart Home describing how he was kidnapped and shown an arsenal of weapons at the house of KLF/K Foundation money-burner-in-chief Jim Cauty, Mr Cauty’s abode was put under police surveillance for several days. Not long after, it was raided by 30 officers who searched the gaff from top to bottom and found nothing….” John Dunan Guardian Diary, 15 November 1996, page 17.

This incident involving Jimmy Cauty and the anti-terroirist cops gave me a great anecdote to tell friends – but actually the best thing to come out of that journalist junket is my Bulletin Board art work which after 16 years has finally finished its necessary period of gestation The Matthew Higgs/White Columns curated show Bulletin Board – including my postcard piece – is on at Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, from 20 July to 24 August.

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

10 Best Opening Lines Of All Time

Forget those boring guides to the best opening lines in books compiled by cruds who either draw solely on canonical literary novels and/or recent bestsellers. This is the real deal and I haven’t restricted myself to book length works either!

1. “I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Shows.” Daniel P. Mannix Memoirs Of A Sword Swallower.

2. “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto.

3. “When I was nine years old I burned down my school.” James Carr Bad.

4. “What I was 40 I decided I wanted to meet my (m)other.” Stewart Home Tainted Love.

5. “The first time I ever laid eyes on the fabled novelty item known as Leaping Panty Hose, I felt my third, or inner, eye pop open on a glowing sphere of revelation that seemed as miraculous as it was coincidental.” Blaster Al Ackerman Revelation of the Leaping Panty Hose.

6. “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.” Ann Quin Berg.

7. “At some point, almost everyone asks me how I first made the connection between speech therapy and oral sex.” Marcy Michaels Blow Him Away: How to Give Him Mind-Blowing Oral Sex.

8. “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;–that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;–and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;–had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,–I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.” Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

9. “Now the shadow of the column – the column that supports the south-west corner of the roof – divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts.” Alain Robbe-Grillet Jealousy.

10. ” ‘Victory! It flies! I am master of the Powers of the Air at last!’ They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale, haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless room on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there was a triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on his thin cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in their truth. ” George Griffith The Angel of the Revolution.

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

Things To Do & Avoid Doing In London During A Wet Olympic Games

Curious about what those stuck in London over the summer but keen to avoid the Olympics might do, I decided to visit a few museums to check out various free tourist attractions. I started with the John Soame Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on Thursday afternoon (5 July 2012). I used to visit this museum dedicated to the life and work of architect and collector John Soame a lot when I was in my late-teens and early-twenties. Back in the day you could just walk in but now you’re greeted by a door-person and have to hand in any luggage that is much more than handbag size. There was a small queue when I arrived but it only took a couple of minutes to get in. By the time you read this a new circulation system involving a separate entrance and exit will have been introduced – but I missed it by a whisker (one day)  and until 6 July 2012 y0u went in and came out through the same door. The museum occupies the large townhouse that John Soame lived in when he was alive. The biggest attractions for me are works by Piranesi and Hogarth but the whole building is packed with weird shit – making it one of the best free visits in London.

On Thursday afternoon I also went to the British Museum in Great Russell Street, since it is just a short walk from the John Soame Museum. I wanted to see the old British Library reading room which I used to use regularly when i was researching my early books. Unfortunately this part of the British Museum was closed – but luckily it isn’t difficult to get into the British Library at it’s new location at St Pancras. As a child my favourite bit of the British Museum was the extensive ancient Egyptian collections on parts of the ground and first floor. These were so packed with tourists it was difficult to enjoy the displays.  Aside from the crowds there was also the distraction of constant flash photography – it beats me why people are endless snapping photographs of a well documented collection! I’d say avoid the The British Museum, it is way too crowded to enjoy.

On Friday I went to the Museum of London at London Wall. This takes visitors through 2000 years of London history and provides hours of fun. I hadn’t been to this museum for a couple of years. The displays start with the landscape of London before London was built: including such curious facts as The Thames being a tributary of The Rhine when The British Isles was joined to the European mainland; and that a giant glacier shifted the river south and created the Thames Valley as we have it today. Roman London and the ruination of the ancient city follows before we move on into the Saxon and medieval eras. There are groovy displays on The Black Death and The Great Fire Of London… and even a  recreation of The Vauxhall Pleasure Garden! There is also plenty of Victoriana for those that dig that kinda stuff but to my eyes the history of the past 60 or so years is considerably more far-out! The Museum of London was busy but not overcrowded – and I’d say is definitely worth a visit.

On Saturday afternoon I went to Tate Modern on Bankside and it was very difficult to enjoy anything in the main galleries due to the crowds. I’d say make an effort to avoid most of Tate Modern unless you’re looking to pick up a new boyfriend or girlfriend – in which case visit between 6pm and 1opm on a Friday or Saturday for their late-night opening (which they really ought to advertise as a speed dating service). The best part of Tate Modern – and the only part I found empty-  was the Level 2 Project Space (for ‘emerging’ international art), and you can get into that from Bankside without going into the main part of the building.

On Sunday afternoon I went to The Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road – which I had previously only visited once when I was about eight years-old. It wasn’t too crowded and the circulation was pretty good. Mostly the museum is dedicated to a history of warfare (and the cold war) from the past 100 years and an Anglo-American perspective. Can’t say I’m very interested in tanks, guns, war planes, military uniforms etc. But there is also an extensive display about how World War II impacted on the lives of one working class south London family. So for the social history it encompasses I’d say The Imperial War Museum is probably worth a visit-  as long as you can put up with a few nerds walking around in combat jackets and fatigue trousers (at least one of the tossers I clocked matching this description appeared to be a very sad Laibach fan; but then I guess everyone who likes pop acts such as Laibach is very sad).

I have left aside the glaringly obvious here – which would include avoid visiting Westfield Shopping Centre, Oxford Street and similar locations. It should go without saying that public transport should be avoided as far as possible too – travel in London during the 2012 Olympics should be made on foot or by bicycle.

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

Shards Of The Spectacle

For no particularly good reason I decided to head down to The Millennium Bridge in central London to watch tonight’s supposedly spectacular light show to launch The Shard: the just completed tallest building in Europe, and one that allegedly contains apartments for sale at £50 million (although that is probably just hype). On The Millennium Bridge I found myself blinded by the lights not from The Shard’s lasers but the flash photography of the crowd around me. Oddly more people were taking pictures before the lights went on than after the show began….

Both The Millennium Bridge and The Embankment below were packed when I arrived just before the laser ‘spectacular’ kicked off; but once the event got underway the crowd quickly thinned. Revelers were underwhelmed by the spectacle and I heard people josh that “it was Shardly worth coming” and that “I’d have had a better evening drinking Chardonnay in front of the telly…” It seems the light spectacle itself was created for the cameras, not for those who came out to watch it on the night. Right now London is suffering from spectacle fatigue, but perhaps the footage might look moderately interesting to an insomniac YouTube fanatic a dozen years from now…. Whereas most of those who came to see the event live were so bored they left well before the show concluded.

And for an encore could we have the final and absolute collapse of capitalism? That said, can we actually trust the Barclays Capital analysts who six months ago claimed to have established an unhealthy connection between the world’s tallest buildings and every financial crisis over the past 140 years?

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

Big Brother Boris Is Boring You!

The Olympic Games haven’t even started yet but the restrictions on movement around London are already in full effect. Today I was at Kings X railway station and an announcement boomed out saying something like: ‘this is your mayor Boris Johnson and public transport will be more crowded this summer so your journeys may take long…..’ We don’t need the banker loving Boris Johnson to tell us this. If we have to have announcements of this type then the usual anonymous announcer will do fine. One just gets the impression that Johnson wants to bore those that live in London out of the city during the Olympics.

And while we’re on this subject, the Olympic traffic lanes in central London are just as much of a wind-up as Boris Johnson’s announcements…. Yesterday I cycled along the Embankment from Blackfriars to Pimlico and you only have to look at the Olympic lanes there to see that they’re stupid. Rather than staying in central London, all the so-called dignitaries visiting the games should have been accommodated in Nissen huts on Canvey Island. If the ‘dignitaries’ were going to Stratford from the east rather than the west it would be far less disruptive! And if they were staying on Canvey Island they’d see a totally different slice of English life!

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

Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou (Sceptre £20)

This is one of the wackier books I’ve seen published by a corporate press in recent years. It is a mix of memoir, north of London local history and drug-fucked fantasy. It comes across as the written equivalent of a Godfrey Ho movie where various elements are cut together with a total disregard for narrative and logical sense. Does the Godfrey Ho school of exploitation film-making work on the written page? Well if you wanna know the answer you could do worse than check out Scarp.

My favourite line: “And the entire suburb is a groove sensation, a humming colony lit deep in ancient woodland.” That’s about Moor Park, which is just a bit south of Watford! Elsewhere Papadimitriou attempts to merge with the landscape and ‘become’ Middlesex (a historic English county that disappeared in 1965). He also narrates a flash fiction history of Stanmore in the language of the birds – which may well fly over the head of anyone who doesn’t believe themselves to be an occult initiate. By way of contrast the most accessible parts of the Scarp are the autobiographical sections: Papadimitriou was a teenage arsonist who ended up in borstal for setting fire to his school and burning down a neighbour’s house.

Imagine a working class Iain Sinclair (of recent vintage such as Ghost Milk rather than White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings) who is high on speedballs instead of knocking back red wine. Papadimitriou isn’t slumming it, he’s from the ‘lower depths’ (hence his obsession with sewage and sewage systems). This is documentary-fiction with the difference that it is just about possible it might all be true. And one final pedantic note: like my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Scarp seems to suffer from a dedication that wasn’t sent to the author for proofing. When Papadimitriou offers special thanks to John Regers surely that’s a typo and should read John Rogers! ‘The devil is in the detail’ and there is a lot of detail in Scarp.

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

10 Reasons To Get Rid Of All Your Printed Books!

1. Once your book collection runs into double figures it takes up too much space and due to its weight is a drag to cart it around if you move!

2. Most books aren’t worth the paper they are printed on!

3. Plastic bottles filled with liquid make for better improvised weights than books. With bottles you can add water or pour it out to adjust the weight; and they are a much better shape (fairly close to a dumbbell) for working out with!

4. Printed books are so last century and having a collection of them makes you even sadder than a vinyl fetishist!

5. They’re a dust trap – so get rid of them if you don’t want to be sneezed at!

6. Most people will interpret whatever books you have visible in your pad as evidence of your poor taste (although their judgements on this score may or may not be right)!

7. Most of your reference needs are better served by the internet!

8. Old books often smell of damp!

9. A two-handed wank is better than a one-handed read!

10. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo numbers among those who’ve refused to allow their recent novels to be sold as e-books. Anyone who has won the Pulitzer Prize isn’t worth reading; and if those who make the mistake of writing something that ‘merits’ such an award are horrified by the demise of the printed book then it is definitely worth dumping (on) them!

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

Barbaric Genius directed by Paul Duane

Barbaric Genius is a documentary about John Healy who was born in London during World War II. Healy went on to be an army boxer, then a homeless street drinker and petty criminal before learning chess from a fellow con at the age of 30. After release from jail he became a chess champion and was particularly adept at playing multiple games simultaneously. Realising he’d learnt chess too late to become a grandmaster, Healy gave up the game and wrote an acclaimed autobiography The Grass Arena (1988). He fell out with his publishers Faber and Faber in the early nineties over nothing very much and his memoir was taken out of print in English.

Duane focuses on Healy as a character. Healy’s street drinking, chess playing and disputes with his publisher are at the core of this documentary. There is little about Healy’s time in the army and as a boxer: and nothing about his second book, the novel Streets Above Us. I guess this is because to have included everything that happened to Healy over the past seven decades would have slowed and complicated the film’s driving narrative.

Once Duane has addressed Healy’s (undeserved) ongoing reputation for violence and time living rough on the streets of north London, the screen unexpectedly goes white and and the narrative shifts to Healy’s yoga practice and spiritual interests. Healy demonstrates various poses and obviously has remarkable flexibility for his age. That said, a jump cut from the final yoga sequence to Healy walking Charlie Chaplin-style with his feet splayed apart like a penguin dramatically undercuts any notion viewers may be harbouring that he is a fully fledged yogi. Healy walks with a gait that is typical of a Londoner of his class and gender; whereas someone who’d properly mastered yogic techniques and integrated them into their life could reasonably be expected to move with their feet parallel to one another. That said, Healy appears more interested in meditation than the physical aspects of yoga, so while his development of the practice looks to be a little one-sided, it reflects his interests and personality. I really dig the way Duane shows us things like this rather than tells them to us. Duane also illustrates very well (without ever explicitly mentioning it) that Healy finds it easier to get on with middle-class women than upper-class men; although this probably has at least as much to do with sexism within the bourgeoisie as Healy’s troubled relationship with his father.

What I found most interesting about Barbaric Genius is the way it depicts through Healy the class biases of the English literary establishment. While Healy was treated in a particularly vindictive way by Faber and Faber (and specifically by Robert McCrum), his story is far from unique. Writers from ordinary backgrounds are consistently under-valued by the bourgeois literary establishment: and this is as true for best-selling names like John King or Irvine Welsh as for everyone else who isn’t a posh boy. The publishing industry in the UK still favours ‘writers’ with a private education followed by a stint at Oxbridge since they come from the same privileged background as those who generally edit and review books. Obviously, standards of writing and intellectual debate are driven downwards by the limited world-view and experience of these plodding clots.

McCrum is clearly the villain in Duane’s movie – and rightly so because he is a stereotypical example of the over-privileged and completely untalented tosser who would have never got anywhere  close to the ‘successes’ he’s enjoyed in his life were it not for his family background. When McCrum describes Healy as angry and resentful he might just as well be talking about himself. The reason literary pond-life like McCrum hate working class writers in general, and Healy in particular, is because without the benefits of a fancy education they are still objectively way more intelligent than a moron like this former Faber and Faber and Observer literary editor. Among other things, Duane is to be applauded for demonstrating so well that Robert McCrum is a vindictive little twerp.

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