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 | Recently read - E.F Benson's Mapp and Lucia. The affectless lives of the affected middle classes in the dreamland of the 1940s provinces. Great fun, if you enjoy mannered writing and the tiny bitchery and humiliation of the bourgeoisie, which I do. The men talk like they own the world, the women keep their stupid diaries....
Others also clearly have been influenced, whether by the books or the television series, which is apparently repeated endlessly on what a dear friend of mine calls Master Race Theatre. This depicts an encounter between the inhabitants of Tilling and - God help us - Mulder and Scully.
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| Friday, December 29, 2000 |
| Something they don't tell you about cardboard coffins; you expect them basically to look like your standard mahogany deluxe. You know, more environmentally friendly, but essentially following the same aesthetic lines.
In fact, they look like cardboard boxes. That's it. White cardboard boxes with carry-straps made from the sort of stuff riot police use to secure people's hands. Like some sort of stacking solution for the dead.
Which, in a sense, I suppose they are.
This is not my world. This is a world where the ten pound notes are different.
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| Thursday, December 28, 2000 |
| I'm back. More tomorrow on funerals, the birth of Christ and transvestites in rubber. Meanwhile, Neil has become a danger to himself and others on the UpsideClown. It makes me shiver, I feel so tender....
Hi, my name's Neil and I'm going to be your facilitator for today.
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| Sunday, December 24, 2000 |
| Matt brings more e-cards. This time, it's breaking up. On the bright side, disvocering that your partner was the sort of person who broke up using a mass-produced e-card would soften the blow of being chucked somewhat.
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| This scabrous attack on blogging, however cruel its generalisations, does in fact raise some interesting questions about the nature of the weblog.
Who are we writing for? What do we seek to achieve?
And what constitutes a weblog, anyway? Matt uses his to share interesting sites, to relate his own experiences and to talk about new and exciting bits of technology. Kottke details the rock'n'roll life of the alpha geek. Kitschbitch writes articles inspired by another site or her own experiences, but in a very different mode. Is there a common thread, or is there actually nothing beyond the fact that all these people use software packages which do about the same thing to do about the same thing?
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| Friday, December 22, 2000 |
| This is brilliant - from Matt. Ex-Lover e-cards. The horror. It's sort of timely, as well, for reasons I will go into later.
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| Wednesday, December 20, 2000 |
| Just about to head for the funeral.
I'd rather not be going to this. Which is to say, I wish there were no "this" to be going to. And there's not really much else to say.
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| Tuesday, December 19, 2000 |
| Hey kids! Do you love elemental chemistry?
Do you also love comic books?
But can you not concentrate either on your comic book collection or your studies of chemistry, because people just keep asking you to have sex with them? Because those premieres won't attend themselves? Because, God damn it, Ted Turner needs your advice again?
Relax. We have the solution. And the precipitate.
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| You know, I'd always kind of hoped that Jesus would be a little less ugly. I mean, thanks for dying for my sins and everything, but could you possibly face the other way? Also, that means I'll be able to fantasize about John the Baptist.
This is a messed-up kitten, or a brilliant joker. However, those who persevere to his bathtime pictures may note that claiming to have a "swimmer's body and six-pack" is throwing his bread pretty thin upon the water. Still, it netted him a communications major from Portland, Oregon...
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| Interesting - the origin of the phrase "Waiting for the other shoe to drop", which I have only ever encountered in the context of hideous disasters in progress. The "three shoes" gag is also attributed to the Goon Show.
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| Ahem. Before somebody lynches me, I'd like to make it quite clear that I was only joking about the pandas. This man, however, is deadly serious. Track him down and kill him.
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| We all feel low sometimes. That's why God gave us two arms - to hold each other up. My father told me that. It was, I found, a most inspiring lesson.
Oh, no. He is no longer with us. Going down, by the way? Excellent.
I'm up on the UpsideClown, and this time the clown goes down.
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| Just as I shouldn't be surprised a nebulous "lifestyle" site has overextended itself and gone for a Burton, and I shouldn't be happy that Breathe.com has screwed up, I shouldn't be depressed that that rabble-rousing demagogue is looking a shoe-in for the Christmas number 1, beating out great white hope Eminem, a most kind and generous young man. This depresses me. On the bright side, the yet more pointless two from Boyzone are stiffing with their could-we-be any more-obvious Milli Vanilli cover.
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| There's a certain irony in a superheroine devoted to helping people through breakups disappearing, but leaving a note (considerate, like). However, the earlier cartoons are good for a laugh, and the affirmatron kicks ass.
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| Threadnaught has recently brought our attention to these people and these people , the former claiming to be able to turn geeks into hip urban boys for a small fee, the latter satirically suggesting that perhaps more hip urban girls should become geeks instead, since that’s clearly where the money is.
It’s a funny one; I can never quite work out whether my position as half-man half-geek is good or bad. Hand one is that I am never far from a topic of conversation. Hand two is that my knowledge of the other’s fanaticism, be it basketball or Buffy, is never going to be up to scratch. Never quite socially excluded enough, that’s my problem.
Best of all, though, is the fact that the queen of degeeking’s tip for a healthy soul leads straight to a picture of the leader of Aum Shinriyo (of, unless I am very much mistaken, sarin gas attack on Tokyo Subway fame). How cool is that?
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| Saturday, December 16, 2000 |
| There's been a death in the family. As such, entries may be a little infrequent, and a little less cheery. Normal service will no doubt be resumed - it always is.
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| Thursday, December 14, 2000 |
| Recent post on Barbelith's Underground bulletin board:
What's interesting me at present is whether one can be in love, and then look back and think that one was at the time not actually in love, and be correct at both points.
Here's how the thought is going currently. At any given moment, one can say "I feel love" (taking "love" for the sake of this argument as equivalent to the sensation generated by the act of being *in love*). This is pretty much an arm raising-arm raised gig - you can't say "I believe myself to be in love, but I know that my sensation is incorrect", because sensations are neither true nor false per se, but reactions to stimuli. And you *certainly* can't say "I feel love but I know the person I feel love for has no characteristic whoch would tend towards creating the sensation of love in me, ergo I am deluded". Your best friend can, but won't if s/he knows what's good for her.
So far so good. Apperception of the feeling of being in love is a metaphor for the inapperceptable condition of being in love itself.
So, if that is the case, and one is by definition in love by the act of feeling emotions comcomitant with being in love (excepting extraordinary circumstances such as concussion, mood-altering chemicals, de dum de dum), how can one then say "I felt the emotions of the state of being in love -"I felt love" for short - but I was incorrect in feeling them"? Can one?
I'd suggest possibly some sort of sawn-off Heidegger; in a situation where one is forced to subject that past emotion to scrutiny (an authentic moment, if you will. And you will. You will, you will, you will).
Authenticity means acknowledging forward motion in time while recoiling back through it. Which means that one can at that point look at the emotion of "feel love" and conclude that, in order to harmonise that emotional feeling with one's current state (not in Hell, for starters), that emotion, or one's judgement of it, must have been in some way erroneous. You felt cold in the heat. But at the same time, moving forward temporally (and, of course, I use these terms as necessary rather than absolute), the emotion has to remain valid. P and not-P.
I'm not sure that this is useful, but it's certainly long.
Oh-kay......
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| Hey, here's one for the paranoid. What if the Blogs evening was actually three separate blog evenings (rather than two, separated only by place), and Tom, Katy and Meg were just desperately trying to get away from the rest of us? Because they hate us? And want us to die?
I have got to stop working late.
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| And speaking of pubs....
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves....
Having only opened in mid 98 this pub was quickly enclosed in my heart !
Brace yourselves.....
This pub is absolutely fab ! Whenever I am in central London over lunch I visit The Moon under water.......Its interiour is definitely worth seeing (modern, more curves than edges). Definitely recommended !
Lash yourselves to your seats....
The bar you will want to visit in London (of the Pitcher and Piano, Dean Street).
It's the London pub guide written by the man with the worst taste in pubs ever!
And yes, I know it's wrong to laugh at the afflicted. I feel bad.
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| Last night was the UK webloggers' meet, which was an interesting experience. I have to confess that I felt pretty fraudulent, having only done this thing for a month or so, and having little or no ability to converse meaningfully about either the social or the technical aspects of this thing we call blog. Or rather, this thing we don't call blog. Faux pas number one.
Faux pas number two - mistaking Meg for Meg. I'm not sure who should feel insulted by that, if anyone.
Otherwise, a fun night, although it all started to fall apart rather after we left our first of five projected "the Blue Posts". Pub crawls in the West End - tricky business and one ending without seats, as Matt had dolefullypredicted. Anyway, Tom, Katy and Meg departed after that, and Kylie and Dave were scraped off when I accidentally took the remaining rump to the most crowded pub ever (I swear, it was completely empty when I went there with Matt a few weeks ago...). Matt, Catherine and I ended up in the Rat and Parrot somewhere near Charing Cross shouting over Fatboy Slim and fighting a losing battle with exhaustion.
All good clean fun. Also present at either of the Blue Posts - Luke, Tom E, Pete and Jen (who looked like she was waiting for something specific to happen, then left, thus stealing the mysterious prize).
Curious that I'm suddenly on first name terms with all these people....
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| Oh God no, not that. I really don't think you should. But, let's face it. No matter what I say, you're going to do it anyway. I know that. Advice never works. So don't ask for it. You don't want it and you're not going to take it. Let me tell you what you do want.
Victor's turn on the spinning UpsideClown. She's giving advice. Or not.
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| I didn't feel a thing when you told me that you didn't feel a thing when I told you that I didn't feel a thing....
Ladytron have that most important of modern musical elements - a really cool cover artist. As it happens, however, they are exceptional in that their last release, the mu-tron EP, was very good - it's taken me a while to get around to it, but is definitely worth a listen. Intermittently glacial, intermittently tangled, ineffably Gallic electropop.
I must check out some more Invicta Hi-Fi stuff; any label with a sampler called "Special Skool" is doing something relevant right.
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| Tuesday, December 12, 2000 |
| Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Allow me to explain my profanity. While cleaning out a bunch of old stuff recently, I happened upon the six Wild Card books I had bought and read between about 82 and 86 (probably less time than that - they are production-line stuff). Set in a "realistic" world in which an alien virus has conferred superpowers or hideous deformation upon the inhabitants of Manhattan, New York, America, and the Earth, in approximately that order of priority. Yes, that kind of realistic world. Mmmmm-mmmm.
So, anyway, I was struck with a wave of nostalgia at their Brian Bolland covers, and thought "Hey! I remember these fondly, why not take them home with me and re-read them. It'll be a laugh!"
See me laughing? Three weeks on I have finally dragged myself past the finishing line, and I feel like somebody shat in my brain. A fairly bright start, and an intermittently entertaining premise, manipulated more and more lazily, with that faclity for shit dialogue and paper-thin characterisation only science fiction authors seem to be able to pull off.
So bits of it were quite fun. Bits of depression are quite fun. Still, I guess I was asking for it. Never go back to anything you read as a child unless you remember every word and sincerely know it to rock.
So, run down the curtain. Except that, while researching for this post, I discovered that:
a) I need to get out more.
b) There are nine more of the fuckers.
Nine more. I thought that six was quite enough. And I imagine that the "names" - Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Walter John Williams, Roger Zelasny, not themselves exactly the world's finest, but equipped with the odd trick - jump ship, and the faceless, Dragonlance Chronicles stringers take over. Sweet Jesus. Luckily, they all seem to be out of print, so I am at least safe from my completist instinct forcing me to plow through them, just to get to the end of the plots.
But it doesn't end there. Once set on this course to Hell, there is no getting off. For you are on....the HELL TRAIN.
Wild Cards fan fiction crossovers with X-Force. Wild Card action figures, in the name of the God of Fuck.
Still, if it weren't for the action figures, we would be denied this beautiful evocation of the dangers of seeking novelty in an exhausted format:
Edward St. John Latham was an attorney who earned the nickname Loophole because of his ability to acquit his shady clients of almost any charges, no matter how solid the prosecution's cases seemed to be. He later became the head of a cult of bodyjacking teen criminals.
Well, of course.
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| Yellow.
Yellow. Smooth skinned and elongated. Tapered towards the ends.
The skin's very smooth, but not waxy. Almost like dolphin hide, but dolphins aren't yellow. Yet this is very yellow, very bright; not as shy as amber and definitely not as whorish as orange. Just - yellow.
George is getting jaundiced on the UpsideClown.
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| Friday, December 08, 2000 |
| And speaking of Gary Busey, the greatest minor celebrity since Jennifer Connoly, while I was checking whether there were Gary Busey fan sites (there are, but don't worry about that now), I came across this, and promptly came.
Gary Busey fan fiction is what you all need to preserve your heterosexuality in the face of the evil barrage of polymorphous perversity. Dagnabbit.
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| The Internet Movie Database is the new crack. Nowhere can you find such utterly degrading visions of humanity at it's most hopeless. Case in point: according to his "Trivia" section, Gary Busey "made a rare public appearance at the "Ray & Sharon Courts Hollywood Collectors & Celebrities Show" at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn in North Hollywood. He sold personally autographed pictures from his own collection and charged $15.00 to take a picture with him."
Now, I can sort of relate to Gary Busey doing this. Your career is basically made up of second bad guy in low-budget movies. And occasionally second bad guy in slightly less low-budget movies. You're Jaws without the overbite. That sound is the eternal footman. Pretty soon, someone else with a psychotic leer will replace you. Maybe even your own son. Selling autographed photos while comparatively famous may be your only stab at securing a future.
But who would buy one?
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| Thursday, December 07, 2000 |
| MY top-of-the-range, balls-out work computer can, for some reason, not manage anything ending in ".jsp". This means I cannot experience more than a few pages of Gotham Girls. I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not, obviously, but I love the simple, clean visual style of the icons and pictures. And Harley Quinn reminds me a lot of somebody I used to go out with.
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| In the universe next to ours, Adolf Hitler was nine metres tall with a moustache like a sofa and when he invaded Poland the rest of the world turned round and said, "mate, just have it."
Matt larges it on the UpsideClown.
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| Wednesday, December 06, 2000 |
| Some of you people reading this are aspiring basketball stars. Great! Be a star, but be educated, lucid and open-minded at the same time. There is no rule against that, though sometimes, you really wonder….
I know nothing about basketball. I don't want to know anything about basketball. But John Amaechi seems like a pleasant young man, and wins points by having profoundly mixed feelings about whether basketball is actually any worthwhile way for a young man to spend his time; it's so rare that a highly-paid athlete admits that he wouldn't be twatting around on a court all the time if it weren't for the shedloads of cash.
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| Ah, wank. Office web site screwed up. Now I have to do stuf with FTP. I hate that.
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| One from our "people are fucking morons" department (now bigger than all our other departments put together. Skipping over the fact that a sequel to the Matrix is a bad idea on almost every level, let's see what those brave boys at "Coming Attractions" have to say about the Matrix 2.
We all know now that the Wachowskis carefully selected the character names from the first Matrix so they could have hidden meanings (Morpheus being the god of sleep from Greek legends, Neo meaning "new" as well as a anagram of "one").
That's a hidden meaning? Hate to see an obvious one. It might burn out my eyes with its brilliance. How fucking moronic do you have to be before sincerely believing that you have plumbed the depths of gnostic mystery by discovering...ooh, let's say a secret about as well-kept as the presence on Manhattan Island of the World Trade Centre. They go on to say that, bearing this in mind, and forearmed with the knowledge that there would be a character called "Niobe", one of their flat-headed little friends "put two and two together". They don't add whether he got four or not.
And Hypnos is the god of sleep. Morpheus is the god of dreams. Dickpopes.
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| When I was in NYC last year, my visit coincided with that of the KKK, who wanted to rally in Times Square or somewhere similar. Mayor Giuliani (for it was he) cited an archaic law forbidding assemblage in masks, and the KKK cried foul. Bless 'em.
Cue a group of deeply confused civil rights lawyers winning 50 pointy-headed goons the right to be barracked by thousands. Perhaps that's why I found this endearing.
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| When I was in NYC last year, my visit coincided with that of the KKK, who wanted to rally in Times Square or somewhere similar. Mayor Giuliani (for it was he) cited an archaic law forbidding assemblage in masks, and the KKK cried foul. Bless 'em.
Cue a group of deeply confused civil rights lawyers winning 50 pointy-headed goons the right to be barracked by thousands. Perhaps that's why I found this endearing.
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| The risks involved in noncing up the sons of the Prime Minister are, of course, enormous. But think how much kudos you would get in your local nonce circlefor doing it. Do you think you'd risk it?
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| I feel one of those warm Tube-drafts, watch a couple of mice scuttle between the tracks, and it takes another second for me to realise. I'm totally naked. Cock cooling in the tunnel breeze, and those bastards have stolen my clothes.
James experiences one tube too many on the UpsideClown.
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| Searching for love in the House of Sleep. Since I stopped doing it, sleep has become the new sex. Just look at the REM on that one.
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| Oooh, scary. My office was blacked out today - no phone, no Internet, no lights. It felt like being snowblind on the datapiste.
Datapiste. I need someone to slap me.
Anyway in honour of leaving for the pub at 4:30 when the light failed, here's a reminder. EMP is the least of our worries.
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| Here's a thing. On Wednesday, I was in Borders, after a day spent seeing Apocalypse at the Royal Academy of Art.
A quick sidebar. Apocalypse is not a particularly good exhibition. It lacks thematic unity. Some of the pieces are actively bad. Webster and Noble are an embarrassment - never trust anybody who describes themself as a "punk" beyond the age of 30. In its defence, Mariko Mori's Dream Temple is glorious, and the Pope being hit by a meteorite is always a laugh and a half.
So, anyway, there I am in Borders, having a coffee, when suddenly I see the Lost Love out of the corner of my eye.
Panic on the streets of London. What to do? Approach her, and hope that she is surprised enough to speak to me? Finish my drink and leave quietly? Run like Hell?
While I’m enjoying option paralysis, she is getting down to some sort of form-filling fun with a third party. I don’t recognise the third party.
Hang on a second…looking a little closer, I don’t recognise the Lost Love, either. Is it her? Or just somebody who looks like her? Her face is different in every photograph I have, and over the fifteen months or so since last I saw her that cubism in turn has been corrupted by received media images of people who look like her in some way. So, my imperfect memory, coupled with the constant image bleed of modern times, means I can’t see her face in my mind.
The end of the story? I spend half an hour staring at her, trying to puzzle it out. In the end, I phone a friend. We work out probabilities. It wasn’t her. I’m almost certain of it.
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| Saturday, December 02, 2000 |
| I've got my own place," she tells me, but I'm not interested and we carry on walking the streets.
I've been away. More on the week of rest, but for now check out Neil's descent into madness on the UpsideClown.
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