Homeless Chic
– In January 1999 the Independent on Sunday ran a post-modern success story: A homeless person, camping outside the Savoy Hotel in London was “discovered” to become a supermodel! “Heroin chic is dead – Long live homeless chic”, it declared and reached new heights of cynicism. In Blair’s Third Way society, where class conflict is abolished, it is merely a career move to sleep in the street in mid-winter.
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shitloads of record reviews from spring 2000…

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The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle by Simon Ford
(Black Dog Publishing, London 1999, £19.95)

By focusing on a performance art troop that metamorphosed into a rock group, Simon Ford has produced a book that illuminates the political economy of UK cultural production during the 1970’s. This was a time when there was cheap housing plus plentiful arts grants and welfare benefits. Perfect conditions in which cultural experimentation could flourish as well as a lot of art wank that was pushed by those responsible as cutting edge work. Far more than the other members of COUM and TG, motor mouthed front man Genesis P.Orridge exemplifies the commendable excesses of this era. WHile P.Orridge’s collaborators had day jobs and identifiable talents, Genesis lived out his fantasies of bohemian dissolution as a life-style option and non-stop fashion statement. This entailed the proto-slacker presenting himself as a starving artist in order to get grants, as well as making judicious use of that alternative arts funding scheme known as the dole.
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a Lost And Found Times anthology [Invisible Books]

An excellent compendium of poetry drawn from the Ohio based magazine Lost And Found Times that neatly presents over twenty years of international writing activity in a well designed journal sized book.
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Critical Art Ensemble
Autonomedia, 1998

Critical Art Ensemble’s first two volumes, The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil Disobedience, established that they’re among the few people saying something coherent about ‘nomadic power’, and even more unusually, proposing an organizational model for resistance. Flesh Machine promises to extend their critique of techno-politics to cover bodily experience and the role of health administration.
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