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Mind Invaders
“The only movement to work consistently towards the death of history since the disbanding of the Situationist International has been the Global Neoist Network.Since 1979, Neoism has been defending the revolutionary gains made by the Situationists and Fluxus. The Neoists are the only group to have brought about the conjunction of nihilism and historical consciousness — the two elements essential for the destruction of the old order, the order of history.”
You can never quite be sure to what degree Stewart Home, (or the Neoists from whom he noisily split, but under who’s banner he long continued to write / agitate), is/was taking the p*ss. Decades of provocation, parody, backhanded agitation, ideological feuding, art, anti art, ideological feuding as both art and anti art, all of it written up, reported upon, exaggerated, added to, invented, and thrown into the face of late 20th / 21st century culture /subculture, first as polemic, eventually as farce.
Mind Invaders was first published in 1997, culled from a panopoly of underported , unregarded, barely noticed sources : obscure zines, half finished manifesto’s , loosely formed political strands starting to coalesce in shaded corners of the early web.
Through force of will and a desire to exist, it pulled together a ramschackle, but somehow cohesive collection of currents that run deep through the post Situationist, anti-art, anti-trot, anti-spectacle European underground, tracing a definable lineage back from Dada > Bauhaus > Lettristes, through to the mail art movement of the 60’s, loosely tied to Fluxus, and by it’s very nature, a scattered, interconnected avant garde network, attempting to subvert the art-industrial complex by circumventing it, undermining commercial straitjackets by ignoring them.
Techno paganism and Avant-bardism, 3 sided football, Five Year Plans for establishing community-based Autonomous space programmes around the world, psychogeographers planning to levitate . the Corn Exchange in Hulme…and most prominently,“The Luther Blissett Project, launched in Bologna, Summer ’94, by an international gang of revolutionaries, mail artists, poets, performers, underground ’zines, cybernauts and squatters, collectively casting a long, long shadow.
You can never quite be sure to what degree Stewart Home, (or the Neoists from whom he noisily split, but under who’s banner he long continued to write / agitate), is/was taking the p*ss. Decades of provocation, parody, backhanded agitation, ideological feuding, art, anti art, ideological feuding as both art and anti art, all of it written up, reported upon, exaggerated, added to, invented, and thrown into the face of late 20th / 21st century culture /subculture, first as polemic, eventually as farce.
Mind Invaders was first published in 1997, culled from a panopoly of underported , unregarded, barely noticed sources : obscure zines, half finished manifesto’s , loosely formed political strands starting to coalesce in shaded corners of the early web.
Through force of will and a desire to exist, it pulled together a ramschackle, but somehow cohesive collection of currents that run deep through the post Situationist, anti-art, anti-trot, anti-spectacle European underground, tracing a definable lineage back from Dada > Bauhaus > Lettristes, through to the mail art movement of the 60’s, loosely tied to Fluxus, and by it’s very nature, a scattered, interconnected avant garde network, attempting to subvert the art-industrial complex by circumventing it, undermining commercial straitjackets by ignoring them.
Techno paganism and Avant-bardism, 3 sided football, Five Year Plans for establishing community-based Autonomous space programmes around the world, psychogeographers planning to levitate . the Corn Exchange in Hulme…and most prominently,“The Luther Blissett Project, launched in Bologna, Summer ’94, by an international gang of revolutionaries, mail artists, poets, performers, underground ’zines, cybernauts and squatters, collectively casting a long, long shadow.
254 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 28, 1997
2 people are currently reading
165 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Home
95 books289 followersStewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for 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 more recent books such as "She's My Witch" (2020) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature.
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 27, 2011
There are further reflections on the content of this book here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ga/...
July 25, 2007
lots of psychogeography, weird pranks and other great shirt, the greatest collection of underground 90s bad craziness ever...
July 31, 2021
disappointed that the english version of this book isnt actually a translation of the luther blissett original; it’s just a collection of essays (some written by stewart home under various pen names, some poached from the LB original and other related psychogeographic texts.) this mixup led me down a very annoying rabbit hole when doing my reseach. 100 curses upon you stewart home!!! HOWEVER the autonomous astronauts association bit is particularly good and saved this book from being a wash re: my work. would have given more stars had it not been a ruse.
December 11, 2024
Happenings, flash mobs, situations, etc. became banal and commonplace with the advent of mainstream Internet sites like Youtube, Twitch, Tik Tok amongst many others. Simulation is the rule not the exception. Baudrillard frequently mentions is his philosophy books about how misinformation is already fundamental for contemporary society. Pro-revolutionary, 68 rhetoric became the new establishment of fakeness for decades now. Nowadays, to subvert and to trangress is, unfortunately, to remain coherent and to actually mean what one say.
The mention here of contemporary british fascists and their good relations towards the establishment shows where most of this actual flood of european far-right parties taking over now came from, ever since Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood.
Also, Elon Musk and his Space X most improbably way really made space colonization closer to become economically viable but boring nevertheless.
The mention here of contemporary british fascists and their good relations towards the establishment shows where most of this actual flood of european far-right parties taking over now came from, ever since Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood.
Also, Elon Musk and his Space X most improbably way really made space colonization closer to become economically viable but boring nevertheless.
February 17, 2009
That the pointlessness of modern life should be pushed into further pointlessness until collapse. Luther Blisset ftw
July 27, 2018
I'd categorize this more as Christian Science Fiction, and I'm really on the fence about my rating. I would have stopped reading after about 50 pages, but I was challenged to read this book. It got better as I neared the end, so I almost liked it (2.5 stars would be my real rating). I was bothered most by the super hereo/comic book characters. The premise of Antichrist and World Domination would be much easier to take if the characters were more dimensional.
December 17, 2018
La psicogeografía más punk, una oda al neoísmo.
NO ENTIENDO CÓMO NO ESTÁ TRADUCIDO AL CASTELLANO TT
Lloran los fans hispanohablantes por las esquinas en sus derivas...
NO ENTIENDO CÓMO NO ESTÁ TRADUCIDO AL CASTELLANO TT
Lloran los fans hispanohablantes por las esquinas en sus derivas...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews