Stewart Home (Ed.): Mind Invaders – A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism (Serpent’s Tail, London 1997, ISBN 1-85242-560-1)

This anthology edited by Stewart Home collects a selection of material [Read more →]

Blood and Volts – Edison, Tesla & the Electric Chair
(Autonomedia 1996)

The grim and gripping story of the first electric chair and much more.Power and progress embodied by the technological death machine, proving the emerging superpower to be one step ahead and more advanced than the rest of the world. [Read more →]

A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi [Rebel inc.]
ed. Allan Campbell and Tim Niel

A follow through from the TV documentary of the same name, this volume collects together the various interviews that were gathered for research and presents them in their entirety together with fragments of Trocchi’s writing, odd letters, tape transcripts, essays and appreciations. The basic tenor of the questioning lies around Trocchi the writer and the reasons for his ‘silence’ after Cain’s Book; so like the TV programme there is much about wasted talent and drugs. As most of the interviewees have some kind of professional investment in writing it is hardly so surprising that they don’t too arduously pursue the reasons behind Trocchi’s criticisms of and dissatisfactions with writing. At the same time, though the interviewers˛ try to encourage people to talk about Project Sigma, the phrasing of their questions shows next-to-no identification with even the idealist component of Sigma. An image of rebellion as egotistical and radicalism as self-indulgent is what certain interviewees and contributors eagerly embrace and it is really only Bill Burroughs and Leonard Cohen who defend Trocchi’s communitarian hopes. It is Burroughs, who responding to the lead-in that Sigma was far-fetched, replies sympathetically: “I think that it is indeed far-fetched but he possibly had some idea there’s enough minds that would…. Different ideas would of course make a change in society and that’s not without foundation. It’s the way changes come about”. [Read more →]

August Sander
National Portrait Gallery
London, March – June 1997

In London in the first half of 1997, Weimar Germany came back with a discreet vengeance. The trend may not have been strong enough to cut the rope from which the 60’s swing in perpetuity, and we’re still waiting for a new Social-Democratic Freikorps to kickstart ‘Zero Tolerance’. But the last few months have seenDr.Hans Prinzhorn’s ‘Art of the Insane’ (collected 1919-1922) at the Hayward Gallery, George Grosz at the Royal Academy, Marlene Dietrich – the West End musical, and August Sander’s ‘exact’ photography at the National Portrait Gallery. [Read more →]

all record reviews published in Datacide3, 1997 [Read more →]