Stewart Home

Stewart Kevin Llewellyn Callan Home (Londra, 24 marzo 1962) è uno scrittore, regista e attivista britannico.

Biografia

È uno degli scrittori neo-concettualisti e pulp più conosciuti sulla scena anglo-americana, soprattutto per i suoi romanzi 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002) e Tainted Love (2005), in cui re-immagina gli anni sessanta.
Nei circoli di controcultura, ma anche in Germania e Finlandia, è invece più conosciuto per i suoi primi lavori pulp (come Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt e Defiant Pose) e per i suoi pastiche, in cui mescola i romanzi dello scrittore skinhead-pulp James Moffat con testi agit-prop, pornografici e riferimenti all'arte avanguardista e al punk rock.
Negli anni ottanta e novanta, ha scritto un elevato numero di pamphlet, riviste e libri, principalmente basati su temi di estrema sinistra, cultura punk, occultismo e sulla storia e l'influenza del Situazionismo (di cui è un critico severo) e di altri movimenti estremisti di sinistra e di avanguardia del XX secolo.

Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962), better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.

Life and work

Home was born in South London. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and Situationist Alexander Trocchi.^{[citation needed]}
In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited art and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books, and edited anthologies.
They chiefly reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history and influence of the Situationists – of whom he is a severe critic^{[citation needed]} – and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde movements. In Home's earlier work, the focus of these reflections was often Neoism, a subcultural network of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. Typical characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s included use of group identities (such as Monty Cantsin) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot"); overt employment of plagiarism; pranks and publicity stunts.

1970s

As a youth Home was drawn first to music and bohemianism, and then to radicalism.^{[citation needed]} He attended meetings of many different leftist groups including several organised by the Trotskyist Socialist Youth League and even two editorial meetings of Anarchy Magazine. He refused to join any of these organisations and later repudiated them as reactionary, instead professing autonomous communist political positions after going to London Workers Group. In the late seventies Home produced his first punk (music) fanzines including early issues of "Down in the Street" which had run to seven numbers by the time he stopped publishing it in 1980. At the end of the seventies Home also made his first public appearances as a musician most notably as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs. The latter group mixed covers of classic reggae numbers like 'Johnny Too Bad' with original tunes such as "Notting Hill Carnival" (about rioting) and 'Don't Envy The Boss' (the juvenile irony of the chorus ran to: "don't envy the boss, I know he's got a lot, but he really really earned the money to pay for his yacht”).

1980s

From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours (named after an experimental novel by R. D. Reeve) in 1980, he started a new group with the same name in 1982. He also published an art fanzine SMILE, the name of which was a play on the Mail Art zines FILE and VILE (which in turn parodied the graphic design of LIFE magazine). The concept was that many other bands in the world should call themselves White Colours, and many other underground periodicals should call themselves SMILE, too. Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dadaist manifestos.
In April 1984, Home got in touch with the originally American subcultural artistic network of Neoism, and participated in the eighth Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism operated with multiple identities, too, and called upon all its participants to adopt the name Monty Cantsin, Home decided to give up the "Generation Positive" in favor of Neoism, and make SMILE and White Colours part of Neoism as well. According to Florian Cramer (who didn't come into contact with Neoism until the late eighties) one year later, Home took a sleep-deprivation prank played with him at a Neoist Festival in Italy as the reason to declare his split from Neoism; Home insists he decided to break with Neosim before going to Italy. Shortly before, a conflict between him and Neoism founder Istvan Kantor had escalated and led to their alienation.
Home's SMILE no 8, which appeared in 1985, reflected the split with Neoism by proposing a "Praxis" movement to replace Neoism, with Karen Eliot as its new multiple name. This and the following three SMILE issues otherwise featured an eclectic mixture of manifesto-style writing, political reflections on radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International, the Situationists, Fluxus, Mail Art, individuals such as Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his then unwritten early novels. Many texts included in Home's SMILE issues plagiarised other, especially Situationist, writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour".
At the same time Home was involved in a series of collective installations including "Ruins of Glamour" (Chisenhale Studios, London 1986), "Desire in Ruins" (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 1987), "Refuse" (Galleriet Läderfabriken, Malmö 1988) and "Anon" (33 Arts Centre, Luton 1989) which generated serious art world interest and art publication reviews and even coverage in British newspapers such as "The Observer" and "Independent". Those Home worked closely with on these shows included Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks (collectively known as Art in Ruins), Ed Baxter and Stefan Szczelkun.
Following on from this and drawing on 1980s American appropriation art, Home's concept of plagiarism soon developed into a proposed movement and a series of "Festivals of Plagiarism" in 1988 and 1989, which themselves plagiarised the Neoist apartment festivals and 1960s Fluxus festivals. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike between 1990 and 1993. Unlike earlier art-strike proposals such as that of Gustav Metzger in the 1970s, it was not intended as an opportunity for artists to seize control of the means of distributing their own work, but rather as an exercise in propaganda and psychic warfare aimed at smashing the entire art world rather than just the gallery system.
The Art Strike campaign caused something of a rumpus in the contemporary London art world (Home got to talk about the Art Strike at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as on national BBC Radio arts programmes and London area television arts programmes), but was more seriously discussed in subcultural art networks, especially in Mail Art. Consequently, mail artists made up a reasonable proportion of the participants at the Festivals of Plagiarism, and Mail Art publications disseminated the Art Strike campaign.
To what extent Home actually participated in the Art Strike remains disputed, since two of his books, completed allegedly before 1990, appeared during the period of the strike.
In the 1980s Home was also a regular contributor to the anarcho-punk/cultural magazine VAGUE.

1990s

In 1993 Home officially resurfaced, having meanwhile gained an influence and reputation in American counter-culture comparable to writers like Hakim Bey and Kathy Acker. Aside from reassessments of his earlier engagement with Neoism, the Situationists, punk, and the plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns, and, as his source of income, the continued parodistic pulp-novel writing, Home's style had undergone some significant changes. While his late 1980s pamphleteering could be viewed as an, albeit subtly humorous, project to collect and fuse radical energies from aesthetically uncompromising extreme left-wing fringes of art and politics, Home reinvented himself in the 1990s as a cynical satirist and jester.
In the post-Art Strike years, he had for the first time publicly occupied himself with hermeticism and the occult. The Neoist Alliance, his third one-person-movement after The Generation Positive and Praxis, served simultaneously as a tactical reappropriation of the Neoism label for self-promotional purposes, and as a corporate identity for pamphlets that satirically advocated a combination of artistic avant-garde, the occult, and politics into an "avant-bard". Meanwhile, Home continued to be courted by the London art world, and in the mid-nineties in particular he was championed by the young and very fashionable artist-curator Matthew Higgs (who at that time was also playing a significant role in propelling future Turner Prize winners Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed into the public eye).
Higgs included Home in group shows he curated – such as "Imprint 93" at City Racing (London June–July 95), "Multiple Choice" at Cubitt Gallery (London March–April 96) and "A to Z" at Approach Gallery (London 1998) – as well issuing a pamphlet and later a badge by Home as part of his prestigious edition of Imprint 93 multiples. At this time uber curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also included Home in his survey of young British art "Life/Live" Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 96- January 97, subsequently toured). In the mid-nineties Home was also appearing regularly as a live artist at "Disobey" events organised by Paul Smith and featuring music from the likes of techno acts Panasonic and Aphex Twin.

2000s

Aware of the marked decline in countercultural activities throughout the urban centres in which he operated, Home shifted gear in this area of his work in the new millennium, upping his level of Internet activities; web work had been only a minor part of his repertoire in the 1990s. Aside from running his own website, Home is a dedicated blogger and had six separate MySpace profiles (as well as having active accounts with other social networking sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook). However, given Home's extrovert personality, he maintains a taste for live appearances and in 2007 began performing ventriloquism in public.
This activity was preceded by Internet ventriloquism using two MySpace profiles as Mister Trippy and a ventriloquist doll called Tessie (who often claimed to be pregnant and became very angry when Home suggested dolls can't become pregnant). Home's novels in this period no longer incorporated subcultural elements and instead focused on issues of form and aesthetics: 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess contains capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in Down and Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. At times in this period Home's film making also became radically non-representational, and rarely required any original cinematography whatsoever; for example his 2002 fiftieth anniversary English language colour re-make of "Screams in Favour of De Sade", and 2004 "Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex", the latter consists solely of still photographs of his mother with a narration scripted by Home but delivered by Australian actress Alice Parkinson.
This tendency towards abstraction was already evident in some of Home's work of the 1990s, particularly sound pieces such as the cut up radio play "Divvy", but in the 2000s it became increasingly central to his output. This ran parallel to Home's increasing acceptance by various sections of the high brow art world, evidenced for example by the fact that in 2006 he produced an exhibition entitled "Hallucination Generation" at the prestigious Arnolfini in Bristol, won a major Arts Council/BBC commission "London Art Tripping" and he was editor of the Semina series for art book publisher Book Works in London (2007–2010); as well as being writer-in-residence at the Tate Modern in London (2007/08). However, Home combines these activities with a critique of the institution of art.

Neoist Alliance

The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occult psychogeographical activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. The manifesto called for "debasement in the arts" and in a parodic manner plagiarized a 1930s British fascist pamphlet on cultural politics. Alliance activities mainly consisted of the publication of a newsletter "Re-action" which appeared in ten issues.
In 1993, the Neoist Alliance staged a prank against a concert by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Brighton by announcing its intention to levitate the concert hall by magical means during the concert. This was an homage to the 1965 anti-art picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York by Fluxus members Henry Flynt and George Maciunas.
Alliance activities ran parallel and were closely related to those of the revived London Psychogeographical Association and the Italian-based Luther Blissett project.
Despite its name, the Neoist Alliance had no affiliation with the international Neoist network which had been active since 1980. Stewart Home had previously become a member and activist of that network in 1984, but renounced it one year later and subsequently worked under the collective monikers of "Praxis", later "plagiarism" and the Art Strike movement.

Books

Home's first books, which appeared between 1988 and 1995, are essentially an outgrowth and elaboration of his earlier SMILE writings, though without their fragmentary-aphoristic character and eclectic mix of genres. The Assault on Culture, written when Home was twenty-five, is an underground art history sketching Home's ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of post-war culture to make it conclude with Neoism (and which it is sometimes claimed includes character assassinations of individual Neoists) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis.
Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least, been under-documented. Like Home's other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International.^{[citation needed]}
Pure Mania, Home's first novel from 1989, took the recipe of the Richard Allen parodies from SMILE and turned them into a recipe for much of his subsequent novel writing of the 1990s (there are exceptions such as the non-linear "Come Before Christ & Murder Love"). The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, on its first part, abridged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike from various authors and sources, mainly Mail Art publications.
His 1995 novel Slow Death fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism (including the planting of archives at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum; this recently became reality when Home sold the V&A his own archive documenting twenty years of his art and underground activities including those involving Neoism) as if to give his own game away but, typically with Home, as soon as one agenda has, apparently, been exposed, whether Home's own or one at large, the game moves on so that he constantly forces readers into a position of 'Should I believe any of this?'.
With the publication of his novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), Home finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking serious notice of him, ironically for a book which carries his most acidic condemnations of the literary establishment. Home's skinhead looks and attitude on official photographs of the mid-nineties are merely publicity poses, and recently he has been much more inclined to appear nude in publicity material (this started after Home consented to appear in a nude celebrity feature for a Finnish newspaper in 2004); and this nudity is something that offends just as much as Home's earlier faked 'hard man' looks.

Repression in Russia

Alex Kervey of T-ough Press, publishers of the Russian edition of Come Before Christ and Murder Love has reported repression of the book as "pornography and insulting Christian values". Kervey says this is happening in the context of a campaign run by such far-right groups as the National Bolsheviks against Home, which has included arson attacks against T-ough Press alongside state censorship.

Bibliography

Novels

Pure Mania (Polygon, Edinburgh 1989. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1994. German translation Nautilus, Hamburg 1994).
Defiant Pose (Peter Owen, London 1991. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995. German translation, Nautilus, Hamburg 1995). Some of the action of this novel takes place on the Samuda Estate
Red London (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1994, ISBN 1-873176-12-0; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995).
Slow Death (Serpent's Tail, London 1996. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1996) ISBN 978-1-85242-519-7
Blow Job (Serpent's Tail, London 1997. Finnish translation, Like, Helsinki 1996. Greek translation Oxys Publishing, Athens 1999. German translation, Nautilus, Hamburg, 2001).
Come Before Christ and Murder Love (Serpent's Tail, London 1997).
Cunt (Do-Not Press, London 1999) ISBN 978-1-899344-45-1
Whips & Furs: My Life as a bon-vivant, gambler & love rat by Jesus H. Christ (Attack! Books, London 2000).
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2002) ISBN 978-1-84195-353-3
Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Do-Not Press, London 2004).
Tainted Love (Virgin Books, London 2005).
Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, London 2007).
Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, London 2010).
Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013).
The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones (Test Centre, 2014).

Stories

No Pity (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1993, ISBN 1-873176-46-5; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1997).

Non-fiction

The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 0-948518-88-X (New edition AK Press, Edinburgh 1991. Polish translation, Wydawnictwo Signum, Warsaw 1993. Italian translation AAA edizioni, Bertiolo 1996. Portuguese translation, Conrad Livros, Brazil 1999. Spanish translation, Virus Editorial, 2002).
Neoist Manifestos (AK Press, Edinburgh 1991).
Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory And Punk Rock (Codex, Hove 1995, new edition 1997. Italian translation Castelvecchi, Rome 1996) (an 'inside account' of the history of punk rock).
Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Diversions: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes and Hidden Truths (Sabotage Editions, London 1995).
Green Apocalypse (a critique of the magazine and organisation Green Anarchist) with Luther Blissett (Unpopular Books, London 1995).
Analecta (Sabotage Editions, London 1996).
Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis (AK Press, London, Edinburgh 1995. Italian translation Costa & Nolan Genoa 1997).
The House of Nine Squares: Letters On Neoism, Psychogeography And Epistemological Trepidation, with Florian Cramer (Invisible Books London 1997).
Disputations on Art, Anarchy and Assholism (Sabotage Editions, London 1997).
Out-Takes (Sabotage Editions, London 1998).
Confusion Incorporated: A Collection Of Lies, Hoaxes & Hidden Truths (Codex, Hove 1999).
Repetitions: A Collection of Proletarian Pleasures Ranging from Rodent Worship to Ethical Relativism Appended with a Critique of Unicursal Reason (Sabotage Editions, London 1999).
Anamorphosis: Stewart Home, Searchlight and the plot to destroy civilization (Sabotage Editions, London 2000).
Jean Baudrillard and the Psychogeography of Nudism (Sabotage Editions, London 2001).
Fasting on SPAM and Other Non-aligned Diets for Our Electronic Age (Sabotage Editions, London 2002).
The Intelligent Person's Guide to Changing a Lightbulb (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).
The Correct Way to Boil Water (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).
The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).

As editor

Festival of Plagiarism Ed., (Sabotage Editions, London, 1989)
Art Strike Handbook Ed., (Sabotage Editions, London, 1989)
What is Situationism? A Reader Ed., (AK Press Edinburgh and San Francisco, 1996) ISBN 978-1-873176-13-9 .
Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage And Semiotic Terrorism Ed. (Serpent's Tail London, 1997).
Suspect Device: Hard-Edged Fiction (Serpent's Tail, London 1998).

Spoken word and releases

Comes in Your Face (Sabotage, London 1998).
Cyber-Sadism Live! (Sabotage, London 1998).
Pure Mania (King Mob, London 1998).
Marx, Christ & Satan United in Struggle (Molotov Records 1999).
Proletarian Post-Modernism (Test Centre 2013).

Funded Internet projects

NATURAL SELECTION (1998 organised by Graham Harwood & Matt Fuller, funded by the Arts Council).
TORK RADIO (1998 organised by Cambridge Junction, funded with lottery money).

Exhibitions

Humanity in Ruins, Central Space (London, February/March 1988).
Vermeer II, workfortheeyetodo (London July to September 1996).
Becoming (M)other, Artspace (London December 2004 to January 2005).
In Transition Russia, NCCA (Moscow, November/December 2008).
Hallucination Generation: High Modernism in a Tripped Out World, Arnolfini (Bristol April to May 2006).
Again, A Time Machine at White Columns (New York October/November 2011).
Part of Again, A Time Machine: a Book Works touring exhibition in six parts, SPACE (London April to May 2012).
Tilt, Building F (London November 2013).
The Age of Anti-Ageing, The Fucntion Room (London October/November 2014).

Selected film and videos

'Oxum: Goddess of Love' (2007 30 mins).
'Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex' (2004 41 mins).
'Screams in Favour of De Sade' (2002 60 mins).
'Has The Litigation Already Started?' (2002 70 mins).
'The Golem' (2002 84 mins).
Ut Pictura Poesis (1997, 35 mm, part of project organised by Cambridge Junction with Arts Council funding).
Numerous videos including promos for books COME BEFORE CHRIST & MURDER LOVE (1997), RED LONDON (1994) & NO PITY (1993)

" A straightforward account of the vanguards that followed Surrealism: Letlrisme, fluxus, Neoism and others even more obscure" Village Voice.

"Home's book is the first that I know of to chart this particular 'tradition' and to treat it seriously. It is a healthy corrective to the overly aestheticised view of 20th century avant-gorde art that now prevails." City Limits.

" Much of the information is taken from obscure sources and the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. It demystifies the political and artistic practices of opponents to the dominant culture and serves as a basic reference for a field largely undocumented in English. It is also engagingly honest, unpretentious, questioning and immediate in its impact" Artists Newsletter.

"Reflecting the uncategorisable aspect of art that hurls itself into visionary politics, the book will engage political scientists, performance artists and activists" Art and Text.

" Apocalyptic in the literal sense of the word: an uncovering, revelation, a vision" New Statesman.

" A concise introduction to a whole mess of troublemakers through the ages... well written, incisive and colourful" NME.

External links

Stewart Home Society
3:AM Magazine interview (2002)
Face feature (2000)
Stewart Home on Diffusion.org.uk – Freely downloadable eBooks authored by Stewart Home

Stewart Home was born in south London in 1963. When he was sixteen he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he'd never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, in the early eighties he switched his attention to the art world. Now Home writes novels as well as cultural commentary, and he continues to make films and exhibitions. His website can be found at: stewarthomesociety.org/

External Links

http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/

THE 9 LIVES OF RAY THE CAT JONES BY STEWART HOME ISBN13 9780992685843 PRESS RELEASE

Publication date 30 October 2014.
Format paperback. 272pp.
RRP £15.

'what I want to do is tell you the complete and true story of my life, so you can understand me as an ordinary working-class man who acted as he did because of extraordinary circumstances'

• The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is the exciting new novel by writer, artist and performer Stewart Home.

• It tells the story of the life of Ray 'The Cat' Jones, who nearly became middleweight boxing champion of the world but instead went on to become the greatest cat burglar of all time and made one of the most notorious prison escapes in British history.

• Ray is a tee-total, fitness obsessed, working-class Welshman whose boxing ambitions were thwarted when he was set up by a corrupt cop and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit, setting him on a path of revenge and a crusade against the inequalities and injustices of British society. Ray is a modern Robin Hood waging an ideological class war against the rich.

• From the jewels of movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren, to the private papers of the Duke of Windsor, paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt, and the furs of the London aristocracy, Ray's carefully targeted burglaries are perfectly planned and thrillingly executed.

• Part biography, part true crime story, part political manifesto, the novel combines Home's typically sharp social and political comment with a fascinating, highly personal story of a life of crime and punishment. Ray was, it emerges, the cousin of Home's mother.

• Ray is a thief with an 'extensive knowledge of radical history', highly articulate in his revolutionary call for social change. Through his shrewd and hilarious narration, combining cockney rhyming slang with theoretical discourse, his life story becomes a political protest and a call for action, in which Ray rubs shoulders with the likes of the legendary Kray Twins and Mad Frankie Fraser.

• The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is a great London novel, a vision of the city's underworld from wartime to the present. It moves between the clubs of Soho, populated by gangsters and gamblers, to the wealthy mansions of Kensington and Hampstead, inhabited by corrupt politicians and millionaires, and inside the walls of the city's prisons.

• The novel is in many ways a departure for Home; formally more traditional that his avant-garde 'anti-novels', nonetheless it plays with the traditions of biographical writing, blurring the lines between real life and fiction, biography and autobiography.
• It is as funny and astute as anything Home has written. Its compelling amalgamation of the genres of biography, crime thriller, historical fiction, satire and political protest novel will appeal to Home's many followers, while attracting a wide new range of readers. To the uninitiated, it is a perfect way in to the unique world of Home's writing.

Praise for Stewart Home
• 'I really don't think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.' - London Review of Books.

• 'Stewart Home is one of our most important and interesting novelists. His work has been termed 'avant-garde', but it is much more ambitious than that, as honest as it is unique.' – New Statesman.
About Stewart Home
• Stewart Home is an artist, filmmaker, novelist and activist. Over his 30-year career he has worked in a variety of media including performance, music, film, writing, installation and graphics.

• He is the author of the novels Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Blow Job, 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess, Memphis Underground, Down & Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, and Mandy, Charlie & Mary Jane, among others. He has also published a number of non-fiction books, and was editor of the acclaimed Book Works series Semina.

• Home was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award in 2013, in recognition of his work as a visual and performance artist.

About Test Centre
• Test Centre is an independent publishing house and record label based in Hackney, with an interest in the spoken and written word. The label's first release was Stone Tape Shuffle, a spoken word vinyl LP with Iain Sinclair, followed by Chris Petit's Museum of Loneliness, and Stewart Home's Proletarian Post-Modernism.

• As a publisher, Test Centre has published 4 issues of its fiction and poetry magazine. Other publications include a number of books and pamphlets by Iain Sinclair including Austerlitz & After: Tracking Sebald and RED EYE; GOOGLEmeGOD and House of Memory by Chris Petit; a facsimile edition of Derek Jarman's rare and only collection of poetry, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth; the poetry anthology I Love Roses When They're Past Their Best; and Within Habit by Oli Hazzard.

Launch event for The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones
• There will be a launch for The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones on Thursday 6 November at The Function Room gallery at The Cock Tavern. This will also mark the closing of Stewart's exhibition with Chris Dorley-Brown, The Age of Anti-Ageing, which opens at the gallery on 16 October. http://functionroom.co/antiage/index.html

• The Function Room is upstairs at The Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Road, London NW1 1HB. The event is unticketed and starts at 6.30pm. More details will be available on the events page of our website.

MANDY, CHARLIE & MARY-JANE BY STEWART HOME
Penny-Ante Editions $18.95 . 26 February 2013. ISBN 978-0985508531

Charlie Templeton, his wife Mandy, and student mistress Mary-Jane Millford survived the London terrorist bombings of 7/7, but history has yet to be made. To save the future of western civilization, Charlie, a schizoid cultural studies lecturer with a penchant for horror films and necrophilia, must fight the zombies of university bureaucracy and summon the will to become the last in a long line of mad prophets announcing the end of art.

"Notwithstanding the appearance of several of Home's trademark riffs, for a good long while it looks as though Home is going to disregard his own disregard for the conventions of polite fiction and actually write something that looks like a satirical novel... Home sets about his prey with extraordinary glee. The dialogue between the lecturer and his students is extraordinarily funny – in fact, there are chunks of this book that count as the best contemporary comic writing I've come across since Howard Jacobson." Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian.
"Of course, it’s a masterpiece. Throughout there’s a process of shedding the scales of his insides in an act of hilarious, up-beat and hay-making desquamation. The names dropped are the pieces of wood pulp that he turns into the paper, the fine particles that end up as the final word. And if ‘Zombie Sex Freaks’ doesn't curl your hair some, then a) you need to check your pulse and b) go away. Home’s writing is the sexiest around." Richard Marshall, 3AM Magazine.
"Stewart Home’s latest novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, is a brilliant satire on academia that begins simply enough then slowly devolves into a blood bath…" Michael Roth, Opsonic Index.
"The simplicity of the prose in Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane belies the book’s theoretical complexity and the multi-layered functions. It was, of course, ever thus in Home’s work. While he has often taken an idea and run it into the ground over the course of a novel, Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane proves that Home is, if anything, growing more ambitious and more sharp in his dismantlement of contemporary culture, and stands as a veritable explosion of ideas. As contemporary fiction continues to slide evermore into formulaic banality, Home’s writing seems more essential than ever." Edward S. Robinson, Paraphilia Magazine.
"Stewart’s Home’s new book, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, follows Charlie Templeton, a crack-smoking and possibly schizophrenic lecturer in cultural studies at City University of Newcastle on Tyne (CUNT). Between conducting rubbish seminars on Cannibal Holocaust and the Beverly Hillbillies, Charlie finds time to make love to his sleeping wife (Mandy) and unconscious mistress (Mary-Jane), bungle numerous attempts at date rape, put down a local terrorist cell, and expel the only student in his department insolent enough to complete assignments on time." Eugenie Kraftte, Richardson Magazine.
"The works of Stewart Home are often morally devoid. This isn't something the author particularly aspires towards, they’re just by-products of the avant filters he applies to his art." Benjamin Lovegrove, Glass Magazine.
"The word anti-novel is always used when a novel by Home is reviewed, talked about, considered, analysed (and he is reviewed in erudite journals and newspapers; the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Statesman to name a few, he must be famous, egotistical notoriety is probable his second name, his not intrinsic nature). But what is the anti-novel? It is a question that is vexing…. So what is the message, unless one casts the book aside after the first page, but then the message has already sunk in (literally), this reader is already the zombie that Home describes, the living dead reading to pass the time, reading because a good story satiates limitation, for this reader there is no message, this reader is the message? And if one does not cast it aside, one ponders and thinks, what one finds is that the anti-novel is an insolent challenge to everything that one knows; a work filled with plagiarism and appropriation, it flouts a society that cherishes the notion of individuality and originality…" Barbara Adair, Sensitive Skin Magazine.

Stewart Home is the internationally-acclaimed author of "Red London", "69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess" ("Canongate", 2002), "Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton" ("Do-Not Press", 2004) and "Tainted Love" ("Virgin Books", 2005), among others. His new book, "Memphis Underground", documents his obsessions with Soul music and the theory and practice of art while marking another step up in his progress as one of the country's most fascinating avant-garde writers.

"Home is a novelist, art agitator, and documenter of art terrorism... The art terrorist's art terrorist." —Modern Review.
Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis is concerned with what's been happening at the cutting edge of culture since the demise of Fluxus and the Situationists. It provides inside information on the Neoists, Plagiarists, Art Strikers, London Psychogeographical Association, K Foundation, and other groups that are even more obscure.

A slice-and-dice splatter novel in which time-travelling streetwalkers hump their way from the trendy east London of today back to the skid row mutilations of the Jack The Ripper era. As gentrification forces the hookers from their age-old beat along Commercial and Wentworth Street, they don Victorian widows’ weeds and ply their trade in local graveyards. Amid these psychogeographical dislocations, warm blood isn't the only thing that gets sucked by the night creatures who haunt Home’s anti-narrative. This is without doubt the weirdest book ever written, the illegitimate offspring of the Marquis De Sade balling a post-modern literary extremist at a ladies of gangster rap convention.

As the leader of Class Justice, Steve Drummond has the London anarchist situation in his pocket, until Swift Nick Carter makes his return to the political scene. Unlike Drummond, Carter believes there's more to starting a revolution than claiming the credit every time trouble breaks out on the rundown inner city London estates. Soon Drummond finds himself drawn into a local conflict between a crew of anarchists and a fascist fringe where events start to get murderously personal. As the tempo of bombings and assassinations speeds up all across London, from Whitehall to Brixton, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the warring parties. Finally, as the plot races to its cataclysmic conclusion, anarchism and fascism are revealed as mirror images of each other. Stewart Home's ongoing satire of urban subcultures has never been so fierce, furious entertaining.

A gang of socially ambitious skinheads run riot through the London art world, plotting the rebirth and violent demise of an elusive avant-garde art movement. Taking genre fiction for a ride, Slow Death uses obscenity, black humor and repetition for the sake of ironic deconstruction. The sleazy sex is always pornographic, and all traditional notions of literary taste and depth are ditched in favor of a transgressive aesthetic inspired by writers as diverse as Home, de Sade, Klaus Theweleit, and 70s cult writer Richard Allen.

This is where the novel has a nervous breakdown. Anna Noon is a twenty-year-old student with a taste for perverse sex involving an enigmatic older man and a ventriloquist's dummy. Anna lives in Aberdeen and her sex life revolves around the ancient stone circles in the region.The sublime grandeur of the stones provides a backdrop against which Anna is able to act out her provocative psychodramas.

In London, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts are expanding the terrain of social struggle, launching an independent proletarian space exploration programme. Future ventures shall include raves in space. In Italy, the Bologna Psychogeographical Association are helping to levitate government buildings and playing mind games with prime-time TV. Meanwhile their London counterparts are busy exposing the macabre occult practices of the British Royal Family, and Decadent Action plot to bring capitalism to its knees through a programme of exorbitant shopping sprees leading to hyper-inflation. Break out the champagne and canap?s! The material collected here will turn your brain inside out, providing the most serious challenge to consensus reality since Albert Hoffman first synthesised LSD. Read it and you'll never be the same again!

Kevin Callan is running away but the past keeps catching up with him. That's the price he has to pay for using the occult to get his sexual kicks while manipulating everyone around him. Sometimes Callan claims to be the victim of a state-sponsored mind control programme, at others, the man in charge of this whole operation. The thing is, Callan has a thousand different identities, and a range of London apartments, disciples, lovers, and possibly murder victims to go with the lifestyle. Come Before Christ and Murder Love is a tale of mental disorder, magick, London, food, thought control and human sacrifice.

I MIEI SOGNI D'ANARCHIA - Calabria Anarchica

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giovedì 1 settembre 2016

Stewart Kevin Llewellyn Callan Home (Londra, 24 marzo 1962) Anarchist Artist