Author: Tom Coates

I wrote a review of Fight Club. Don’t read it. I have no idea what I think about it.

Oh cool – I’ve figured out how the archiving works (duh). Have a look at my life over the last month. I’ve had a funny time…

A range of important information that everyone should know about:

• Terrence Higgins Trust — Information about HIV and AIDS in the United Kingdom
• CDC National AIDS Prevention Information Network — from the Centers for Disease Control
• Gay Men’s Health
  Crisis — one of the oldest AIDS service organization
• The NAMES Project AIDS
  Memorial Quilt — remembering those we have lost, using the
  world’s largest community art project
• Children With AIDS Project
  — information about HIV, AIDS and kids
• AEGIS — a comprehensive
  database of AIDS information, updated hourly

Check out the beginnings of microlith (currently content-free) and the beginnings of my new stark monotonous grey aesthetic. If you complain, I rip out your spine…

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?