Netnation has just charged me $220 for excess bandwidth over the last two months. As of this moment, the nexus is closed completely. They are going to charge me a similarly ridiculous amount for this month as well. Frankly I am horrified and don’t know what do do – although I think getting myself to a different host is pretty crucial. All you big time designers out there – kottke, powazek, glassdog etc WHERE ARE YOU HOSTED? This is an emergency. HELP!
There are benefits and there are horrors to staying on people’s floors. Benefits include not having to pay rent, seeing more of your good friends and getting to know local geography. Horrors include continual exhaustion, sometimes uncomfortable bedding and making sure that you don’t upset anyone by being under their feet 24 hours a day. Tomorrow morning I am wandering up to Kentish Town to look at a flat before work. I’m not convinced that it is the place for me, but I’ll give it a go. I just wish I wasn’t so tired all the time.
One of my oldest friends, Gideon, told me about an article in Salon the other day, and asked my opinion about it. It suggests that gay people should arm themselves with handguns in order to protect themselves from anti-gay attacks. Gideon’s exact words on this one were: “an intriguing proposal by a journalist i know… any ideas? I can’t decide if he’s right or crazy”.
I read through the article carefully. As I read through the first page my immediate reaction was one of mild horror – what was this man advocating? Did he really want to start some form of gang warfare on the streets of American cities – to put a whole new meaning to the phrase “gay mafia”? But then, on the second page I came up against this:
“The abiding fact is this: Homosexuals have been too vulnerable for too long. We have tried to make a political virtue of our vulnerability, but the gay-bashers aren’t listening. Playing the victim card has won us sympathy, but at the cost of respect. So let’s make gay-bashing dangerous. We should do that for our own protection. But we should also do it because we will win a full measure of esteem from the public, and from ourselves, only when we make clear our determination to look after ourselves”
On rereading the article it seemed clear to me that the article wasn’t actually about arming gay people at all, but an appeal for an escape from the current politics of gay identity – a politics that defines gay people by their vulnerability – continually subject to name-calling, workplace discrimination, harrassment or attack. It wasn’t so much calling for violence to counter violence, but instead desperately scrambling for something to replace “Gay Man/Woman: Perpetual Victim”.
Queer as Folk 2, which recently aired in the UK, included some pretty startling scenes – a man taking on board all of the insults thrown against him in order to savagely expose the blackmailing attempts of his ten-year-old nephew, the same man blowing up the car of a woman who disinherits her estranged gay son (she called him to his father’s death-bed to ask him to sign the papers) and a full-on confrontation between a name-calling hick and a poof with a gun. Each one of these scenes inspired something proactive inside all the people who saw them – the desire not to have to “run to daddy” when something horrible happened. It’s the same feeling – the same discomfort with the idea of gay people as being weak and needing outside help to get them through their daily lives.
So what do I think? Do I think gay people should carry handguns? I don’t know. But I know one thing for certain – we should be doing something.
My plans to move the weblog to a new domain have been rather scuppered by someone having registered it four days ago (damn, damn, damn). It just goes to show – farewell reptilebrain.com [whois].
I saw this ages ago but completely forgot to link to it. So here I present: American Beauty in ASCII.
Two things before I get down to the serious business of complaining about stuff. 1) Derek Powazek has put his SXSW photos online. There are some great ones – particularly of Jason and Mark. 2) I am too jealous to even speak properly at the moment because everyone got to go to SXSW except me. Katy came to me with an idea a while back for a similar conference – WXW1 (West by West 1) – for London based internet obsessives and professionals. Would anyone actually be interested? Because if you were (you never know) we might actually organise it. Spread the word, gauge the interest.
In about an hour I have to go and meet my prospective new flatmates (in the process probably missing an old friend’s birthday party) to discuss their anxieties regarding the flat in King’s Cross. I can’t help but think that the experience is unlikely to be entirely positive – but I have to try to restrain myself from saying that I’ll get a place by myself. I still don’t want to, but it has occurred to me a couple of times that perhaps we are just looking for different things in a flat.
I don’t get it – everything seemed to be going so well. The King’s Cross place looked like it had at least two of us completely committed and only one waverer. How did that situation turn into one where I am the only one who still wants it? Over the last 24 hours I had really managed to resolve things in my head – the location seemed to give me opportunities to make more gay friends and to be a local/regular at one of my favourite places in London. By yesterday evening the ever-present anxiety of my vagrancy had almost completely faded, and my mind was swimming with the possibilities of living so close to the centre of London. And now…
Let’s drown our relative sorrows with a few links: Are webloggers becoming self-indulgent?, Bump redesign madness.
With the end of the Invisibles in sight, I am again considering the fate of barbelith, the nexus and the bomb. This is what I have come up with so far (a quote from the nexus):
“My thoughts on the future of barbelith have been prompted by Eloi and a variety of other people’s comments – some more carefully worded than others …
“My ramblings on the front page (which I accept might not be to everyone’s tastes) – were originally put up because i didn’t have anything else to put there – people weren’t sending me things to put up and those that were were generating so much work for me that I didn’t have time to do it, a full time job and eat or breathe.
“However, I have roughly decided to buy myself a new domain name to shift the weblog into (because I enjoy doing it and I get a lot of positive feedback but I accept that it might not always be in the spirit of the Invisibles) and from there attempt to concentrate more on the subversive and political aspects of the Invisibles on Barbelith.
“All opinions are valued – but projects that require considerable initial effort with limited difficulty in updates are preferable to me to those which are less initially time consuming but take longer on a weekly basis. I would ideally like to be able to almost completely leave the page for a few weeks without it dying. I am thinking of some system which would misuse something like blogger to put content into pages as easily as possible. Perhaps some kind of article submission proceedure, where I built a page which ten or so people were randomly chosen as editors for things people wrote to them (to spread the load), and could post them as required, with me only having to update the front page. It could be like a repository of articles somewhere between Disinfo and the Bomb’s analysis sections. We could even use the articles currently in the analysis section to smooth over any gaps in the schedule. I would be thinking of getting between four and six new articles a week up.
“I don’t know really – what do people think of that kind of thing? Discussion could then follow in the Nexus.
“Oh and bear in mind that the Bomb as to remain a substantial part of the site…
“All ideas appreciated, as I say – and look out for web-applications and web-based publishing ventures that might help the site operate with as little FTPing, html rewriting etc etc as possible.”
I don’t even know where to start today – there is so much that I want to say. After a week back in the UK, sleeping on people’s floors, I finally think there may be hope on the horizon. Kate, Manuella and I went to see a flat in King’s Cross yesterday that blew me away. It’s not the most beautiful of buildings, and it doesn’t have a sitting room, but the bedrooms are clean and large and have lots of plug sockets (these things matter to me). But the most impressive feature about the place is its location. We can see King’s Cross station from what would be my bedroom, and Popstarz is just over the road. I just hope everyone agrees to it – and soon…
I’ve been thinking about LA again over the last couple of days. I haven’t heard much from Kerry or Sean since I left, and in a strange way I miss them. I was listening to Beck on the radio today and it brought it all back. His album is full of references to Hollywood and hot-tubs and the like which only really make sense if you are in LA – and of course it has special relevance if when you are being driven through the city your host points offhand and murmurs – “Oh – and that’s where Beck lives…”
I went to see Being John Malkovich yesterday afternoon with Liz, Katy and Rhonda. I can’t tell you how excited and inspired I was. I think it has been years since I saw such imagination and playfulness on screen – and I don’t think that I have ever seen it from a Hollywood studio. The Guardian has assembled a pretty useful page collating all the British responses to the film – definitely worth a visit.
This is turning into quite a year for impressive film-making – a few months ago, American Beauty stomped on my head, and now this! And next week – Magnolia. It’s at times like this when I really hate the fact that UK release dates are so far behind the US.
Mark at Riothero is having a pretty weird time at the moment – not that you would know it from the main page of his weblog. If you want to read some of the most heartfelt and occasionally painful writing on the web, you have to explore his Quietriot section. You need a password, but as long as you don’t actually know him in real life, he’s pretty cool about sending it out. Obviously I can’t go into detail about what he is going through at the moment – that would rather defeat the purpose of the password – but let’s just say that anyone who has ever been a teenager and in love will be able to relate to everything he says. In some ways it really reminds me of the writing I did when I was his age – I have these notepads hidden away somewhere at my parents where I used to write down all the things I couldn’t say in public. I read them now and again and they hit me like a ton of bricks.
I’ve just decided to join weblogs.com. I’ve been putting it off for weeks because I was stumped by the question “Describe your weblog”. I always find those questions both alarming and absurdly difficult – it’s like those bits on CVs (resumés for the Americans amongst us) where you have to explain why you are perfect for the job. They make me queasy. Anyway – this is what I have managed to come up with:
“A half-baked attempt to fuse personal writing on the web with commentary and links of a futurist, politicised and millennial nature.”