Stewart Home - Guide To Changing A Lightbulb

Stewart Home - The Intelligent Person's Guide To Changing A Lightbulb

(Sabotage Editions, 2005)

Limited printrun pamphlet including reviews, interviews and articles by Stewart Home

Review by John Eden:

By my reckoning this booklet, published on 25th December 2005, is the 13th released by Sabotage Editions. It is part of a trilogy released to commemorate the demise of the International Standard Book Numbering system. Like many of its precursors it collects diverse articles, reviews and other writing by Stewart Home. So, as usual, a mixed bag - and all the better for that.

I particularly enjoyed Stewart’s extended review of Luther Blissett’s Q, which takes in some sideswipes at previous reviewers, Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio and the legacy of Italian left-communist Amadeo Bordiga. A left-communist analysis makes an all-too-necessary entrance into Stewart’s scathing review of Martin Amis’ Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. I have read Q, and have no intention of reading “Koba”. That Stewart manages to write engagingly about both of them says a great deal.

Other books reviewed more briefly (but just as insightfully) include Bill Drummond’s (post-K Foundation) How To Be An Artist, John Barker’s (post-Angry Brigade) Bending the Bars: Prison Stories, Darius James’ Negrophobia and Brendan Mullen et al’s Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs.

There are a couple of interview-esque pieces with Stewart himself - "Things I Was Once Asked by a Journalist" is possibly previously unpublished, given his answers:

Which books do you think should be given the Hollywood treatment?

"Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement by Jean Barrot and Francois Martin directed by David Cronenberg would be a real corker - a Battleship Potemkin for the twenty-first century. I’d also love to see Spike Lee adapt Henry Flynt’s Blueprint For a Higher Civilization for the wide screen."

"26 Things to do with a Pedagogal Paradigm" is an a-z list with everything from ambiguity to zeitgeist via Dracula and Trans Europe Express.

Other articles cover topics such as Stewart’s preferred funeral arrangements, 9/11, why Tony Hancock was the ultimate avant-garde artist, the euro and a brutal slagging of Sam Taylor-Wood.

About Stewart Home

Stewart Home was born in south London in 1962. He developed an interest in northern soul and punk rock as a teenager, and from 1974 onwards spent a lot of his time hanging around the West End of London, both alone and in the company of other juveniles.

After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he first signed on the dole in the late seventies, and last claimed unemployment benefits in the mid-nineties. He has never held down a regular job for more than a few months at a time. On those rare occasions when he's been forced to work, Home has taken employment as a factory labourer, agricultural labourer, shop assistant, office clerk and art class model.

Deciding he didn't like working in factories as a teenager, Home pursued cultural and political interests, writing many books and participating in even more gallery exhibitions. He lives in London. Thames water, rather than blood, is said to run through Home's veins.

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