Month: November 1999

Bit of a change of pace today, as barbelith is updated directly from my place of work whenever I take a break.

I have stumbled upon a benefit that is happening in Los Angeles later this month. Gillian Anderson (Scully on ‘The X-Files’) is hosting it, and it is in aid of The Trevor Helpline. This is the first round-the-clock national toll-free suicide helpline for gay teens, who are three times more likely to attempt to take their life than their heterosexual peers are.

I don’t normally go for advertising charity events, but gay suicides are robbing America and the world of sexual dissidents. What kind of system generates such mind control that those who can’t follow the rules feel their only option is to kill themselves?

[Today’s weblog comes to you live from Tom’s place of work, Time Out in London]

Microlith proceeds apace. Heh heh heh.

OK. So let’s get something out of the way first. I know that not everyone agrees with my epinions (and I am sorry to go on about it so much, but I can’t help thinking it’s a great idea), but I don’t understand why some of them are much read, and some haven’t been read at all. It’s got nothing to do with what the film is – Forrest Gump and Natural Born Killers are read a lot, while The Matrix, My Fair Lady, South Park, Head On and The Astronaut’s Wife – well, no one seems to want to go near them with a barge pole. WHY!?

Here’s an exchange for you from the Nexus. Possibly my favourite in some time. Discussing the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles…

IANJONES: And what struck me about this issue is how full of references to incidents in my own life it is. I will not go on about them because its dull. I imagine you all found similar references however, in which case the comic has achieved a kind reification of the hologramatic universe and the surface of magic mirror.

GANESHA: Yeah, it reminds me of how I daubed myself with my friend’s ashes last year, and that time we infiltrated the cyphermen factory.

IANJONES: I was actually thinking a little more intratextually than that.

Well it made me laugh. For those of you that are interested, I have put up as many of the annotations for the new issue as I could, and there you go…

I haven’t been suggesting many sites recently. However I can wholeheartedly recommend k10k.com for its design nous alone. Expect heavy influence on barbelith from them…

What else has happened to me recently? I won the soundtrack to Fight Club in a bizarre online competition accident. I’d tell you more, but I think I’m on to a “nice little earner”. It’s wonderfully moody and cool in places (and drags like buggery in other places). All I can say is, like most music, it just gets better the louder you play it.

I went to see EDtv, but don’t think it interesting enough to write an epinion about. You shouldn’t let that stop you watching it though – it’s an idle afternoon’s entertainment.

I have just found a book by Huysmans (you should all read his stuff – I swear it is wonderful) called La Bas, which includes first hand information on fin de siècle 19th Century Black Masses. A must buy.

Let me just undercut my “supercool” image by mentioning at this point that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer three video boxed set of the first half of the first series is now available in UK shops.

Fans of Attack Force D (which include me) don’t think he’s ripped off barbelith at all. What do you think?

All together now – “Jeffrey Archer, rot in hell, rot in hell, rot in hell…” Watch with glee as a modern (downmarket) Sir Miles Delacourt rip-off gets his comeuppance. It’s like getting Capone on tax evasion. Wonderful.

Every good student of deconstructive philosophy knows that any text can be seen to be advocating any one position and its direct opposite. Watch with awe as I write an epinion about Halloween that manages to justify it as a subversive and revolutionary text. You’ll moisten. Trust me.

I have lost count of the days recently in which there has been something that I really wanted to talk about and yet have not been able to.

Instead – see if you can trigger some form of latent epilepsy with this little gem of net freakishness. It has no point.

I’ll be sorting out the annotations and news for The Bomb tomorrow morning. Now I plan to go and get trashed on cocktails.

A couple of things to talk about today. Where shall we begin? Um.

Guess what! About bloody time…
The new issue of The Invisibles is out. Tremendous news all round. Annotations, discussion, barbelith gets very exciting at these times of the month…

Weblog mood and it’s relationship to daily page views
So what is the relationship between mood and page views? I have been analysing this over the last couple of weeks and have come to the conclusion that no one wants to read people being depressed. Or at least the people that DO want to read about people being depressed are slightly scary.

Let’s put my theory to the test:

Cheery Logs:
absolute piffle
lemon yellow
mood swings

Naughty Logs:
eatonweb blog
have browser will travel

Sad/Cross Logs:
damn dirty ape

What’s this football thing about then, eh?
I went to watch the football. I didn’t understand how anyone could get so excited. Lost on me completely. I tried to explain to the assembled masses that if the players had handlebar moustaches, smoking jackets, armchairs and muskets, the game would be both more civilised and more entertaining. They resolutely refused to see reason.

Exciting new retail opportunities…
Seems you can buy anything on the net nowadays. Do you have a Zombie? Do you need a brain? Brains4Zombies.com is for you…

Catastrophe
My link to the great trans-cultural overmind has been severed. I still have TV, but since I am never in I have to use my VCR. But today I find that it doesn’t work and many episodes of TV series have been eaten. I don’t feel as liberated as perhaps I should. I need a new VCR.

So I missed another day. Perhaps I’m not really committed….

Since I started working at Time Out full-time, I no longer seem to read a newspaper or keep up with the daily news. I no longer have any idea what is going on in the world. I can’t even be bothered to read The Onion.

Being newsfree for a while makes you feel lighter – it’s almost as good as not wearing a watch (which I didn’t do for two years). I wonder how long it will last.

So tonight I have been invited to watch a football match in Finsbury Park (the pub’s called the Fulback on Perth Road if anyone fancies joining us). I don’t care about football in the slightest. It is not an affectation – I just don’t enjoy it. However there are a large number of people who are going to be there that I like. What does one do? Drink oneself to death while all around burn David Beckham into their collective retinae? I fear I may be bored…

Decisions, decisions. Participation in the Day Without Art is much more my kind of thing. I can’t decide whether I should participate though. I’ll follow the instructions of the first person who e-mails me.

Evil, subversive site of the day must go to the tremendous disobey.com. Ghost sites is a laugh, netslaves cuts a little close to the bone for my liking, and the disobey news network will keep you bogged down with information for a few hours. Not that I read it.

Announcing the first ever Nexus Online Poetry Slam! All the details are in the Core. I went to see Fight Club yesterday evening. Then I came home and wrote a long, complicated and detailed epinion about it. And then my computer crashed. Epinion lost. Today I have been visiting Pippa in Highgate. She is an old flatmate of mine who has moved into a flat with another old flatmate of mine purely for the purposes of making me neurotic with flat in-jokes and knowing looks. I’m kidding of course… Under the instruction of megnut, I went to find out my Wu-Tang Clan name. I was less than thrilled to find out it was “Dizzy Cow”. Here’s a few of my other friends. (If you don’t believe me – check it for yourself!)

Nick Cornwell – Furtive Ventriloquist
Chris Bell – Ol` Filthy, Sweaty Bastard
Max Prutzel-Thomas – Temporary Spastic
Kate Myers – The Nation`s Favourite Galoot
Toby Stone – The Littlest Vandal
Pippa Sturt – Sweaty Butcher
Melanie Goldblatt – Tha Ever So Weary Assistant

Some things get me very unhappy. One of them is being completely crushed by someone else’s pure design superiority. I am in awe of saturn.org.