A report on our visit to the Estorick Collection is forthcoming

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. 10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

We're so cross, we're not even going to bother to find a token picture to enliven the look of our post

First off, a hearty fuck you to Vice Magazine and Topshop for presiding over the biggest ticketing farce of the year so far in their organisation of the Black Kids gig previewed here. Corporate sponsored free events like these always leave a bitter taste in the mouth, but at least they tend to be organised with some semblance of competence and money driven efficiency.

So this is what happened: A couple of months ago, Vice advertised a special gig at 93 Feet East with Black Kids, Friendly Fires et al. Tickets were free and all you had to do to get one was to register on their website. We quickly did this and looked forward to the gig. Within a few weeks, we received a multitude of junk e-mails from Vice, advertising their rubbish website. This didn't bother us too much. We arranged a big birthday night out with lots of our friends. Two days before the gig we receive an e-mail from Vice informing us that we should arrive early because the gig will be first come, first served and that we should bring our booking details with us. In other words, our confirmation e-mail did not entitle us to entry but merely meant that if we queued up long enough, we might be accorded entry. We turned up over an hour before doors opened on the coldest night of the year and queued for an hour and a half. During that time we moved almost five metres. Our music industry friend used a contact to get inside and spotted Faris Rotter. It was that sort of event. The quue wasn't regulated properly so people kept joining at the front meaning we barely moved forwards at all. Meanwhile, we couldn't feel our toes. It turned out that Vice, in their infinite wisdom, had issued 5000 tickets for a venue that only takes 800 people. They had done this to ensure that it was full. It didn't bother them that potentially thousands of people would be massively inconvenienced and pissed off.

So...we went to the pub instead.

Perhaps it serves us right for going to such a raw advert of an event. We should have stayed at home and read Marxist literature instead. Or if not Marxist literature, the very good new novel by Jonathan Coe.

The dog ate my artslondon posts...

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. This has been caused by a combination of ill health, financial shit-storms and computer problems. We have many exciting plans for February though, although Thursday nights look to be a bit of a write off thanks to this.