Thanks to all the Los Angeles residents and visitors from barbelith.com who kept me entertained yesterday, especially to Ralph who was particularly entertaining. Experience the thrill of the after-meet glow over on the Underground – and pass me a cigarette while you’re over there, will you?
Sean, one of my hosts in LA, has produced a great Flash movie that will shortly be doing the rounds of everyone’s office PCs. It’s a splice of a recent Brit-movie favourite and an esteemed horror classic. I’m going to see if I can get someone to host it for him in the long term – but in the short-term I might see if I can stick it on plasticbag.org – more information as I have it…
Ok – it’s occurred to all of us at one time or another – weblogging is based upon the presumption of authenticity – people actually writing about their own lives. But this presumed authenticity is almost certainly to a greater or lesser extent a fantasy – while I’m sure most webloggers don’t lie about their lives, I’d be surprised if people were not selectively choosing what to write about in such a way that would alter people’s perceptions of their life.
So I’m sure it’s occurred to many of us at certain times to set up fictional weblogs – to generate completely articificial online personae. I know that it’s occurred to Matt and Nick because they’ve both talked about it with me. But what no one has yet talked about is undertaking weblogs of already established fictional characters. I mean – it would be a tremendous fan site for Buffy to have a weblog ostensibly maintained by Willow, with links and commentary based around what happened to her in the latest episode. And from a more literary perspective, a weblog based upon Sherlock Holmes writing each day about his cases (assembling itself into a chronology of the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) might be both interesting and academically valuable. Are there any weblogs like this out there? If not, why not?
By writing about the Minor Musings piece on the reasons for ‘weblogging’, I suppose I’m really rather missing the point, but nonetheless it’s worth talking about. I think it’s important that we have these conversations (at least with ourselves) every so often: ‘why am I doing this?’. If anything, the longer you maintain a site like this, the more you should be asking it of yourself, and (indeed) the more times you might be stumped for an answer.
In many ways, in the presentation of this site, the last thing that I’m thinking about is whether or not I should be finding new and exciting links for people out there in the ether. So in a sense I’m not a weblogger in the classic mode. But then, I’m not sure that many of us are. The links and commentary approach is, at its most simple form, rather uninteresting. My priorities are slightly different – first and foremost I think of this place as somewhere that I can write – and I use the hypertextual nature of the web to reinforce that writing. It’s like tracing an intellectual flow – following through the impulses that one has in some worked-out and public form, and in a place where they are not merely lost forever.
People read my site, and I have to confess that I like that, but I’ve run a lot of sites (fan sites, personal sites, creative sites) and a lot of people have come to those too. In the end I’ve deserted most of them. The thing that keeps me coming back to plasticbag.org every day is the opportunity to spark off a discussion, or to say something in a place where I know I’ll be heard. I suppose it is a space where my opinions feel valuable, interesting to people. And if weblogging gives other people the same feeling – well I can’t helping thinking that it is, therefore, a profoundly wonderful thing.
I’ve found this internet café on Melrose called @coffee, which is quite cool, although vastly more expensive than places like easyeverything in London. It’s given me a little time to relax with the net – write a little, think some stuff through – generally to get a little head rest. If you can imagine the brain as a muscle imagine mine as tight and contracted – it feels a bit like there isn’t space down any synapse for a pulse of thought to travel. Fucking around on the net seems to let my brain relax – to slump like mush and swill around the bottom of my skull. It’s more relaxing than it sounds. I need this sensation of emptying stress and excess thought from my mind… Nothing else quite does it for me…
Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles arrives the same way as every other day, as far as I can tell – I’ve been up since nine in the morning, and I can expect to wait until midday or one pm before I have any company. The weather has finally broken – it looks really sunny outside, although it’s still pretty chilly. I’m off to meet some people from barbelith.com in an hour or so.
I’m in LA for the release of the Oscar nominations, and they are a fairly mixed bag. The most important categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Film, Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Screenplay) are mostly shared between ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, ‘Erin Brokovich’, ‘Quills’, ‘Traffic’, ‘The Contender’ and ‘Chocolat’ – but with notable appearances from ‘Almost Famous’ and ‘Requiem for a Dream’. One film dominates though: Crouching Tiger with a total of ten nominations, but even this is matched by the combined nominations for Steven Soderbergh’s competing films. Notable (and delighful) absence from Best Film: ‘CastAway’.
I am currently trying out Melatonin pills as a way to regulate my sleep patterns while I’m out here, as not only do I have the eight hour time difference to deal with, but I also must content with my gorgeous hosts’ nocturnal debauchery. Essentially this amounts to a thirteen hour time difference from how I live in London.
It has rained pretty much constantly since I arrived in the city that Time Out says has ‘possibly the most temperate climate in the world’. Last week apparently was near tropical heat. Next week is expected to be more pleasant as well. In the meantime though, this makes two trips out of three to LA which have ended in near flooding. I must be cursed in some way.
I am having a cool time though – went to see a cheerleader movie yesterday with Kerry and Sean. I was hoping that the movie would resemble in some form the awesome ‘Bring it On‘. It didn’t. In fact ‘Sugar and Spice‘ sucked arse. Don’t see it.
I’ve arrived in Los Angeles (near Santa Monica and Vine if that means anything to anyone), and am experiencing yet again the wonders of sleep deprivation and chronic jet-lag. I’m not at my best at the moment, that much is for sure.