I got quite a shock on the bus yesterday. As we passed Selfridges I glanced at the new window displays only to be startled by the awesome presences of Blode, a Giant Bee, a Frightened Boy and many other smiling, brightly-coloured creatures. That’s right! Joel Veitch, insane kitten manipulator of rathergood.com has now ascended to the status of a cultural icon. It really brings back those days colouring in crabs on Exmouth Market with only custard tarts for pay…
Another year rolls by, and with it comes (and passes) another ETCon Proposal Deadline. The afternoon of the deadline seems to be becoming nothing more than a pan-world panic proposal-writing session – with about half the people on my buddy list (many of whom I met at last year’s event) frantically trying to knock their thoughts into some vaguely coherent order before the O’Reilly Geek Gong sounds. I’d love to mention everyone’s names, but I guess it could be seen to be pretty tactless if I were to reveal just how random and unprofessional we all appear to be.
I’ve put a proposal in this year – which unfortunately isn’t about the work that Matt and I have been doing at BBC Radio and Music Interactive. In the end, although we’ve got a fair amount we’d like to say, we haven’t really been working in the area long enough to be able to feel confident in our proposals. Maybe we’ll do that next year. As to this year, we hear whether or not our papers have been accepted around the beginning of next month… Successful or not, I’ll be attending whatever happens (particularly after winning a free ticket at last year’s event). You try and keep me away.
So without denying for one moment that I am very lucky to have the job I have and that it’s extraordinary, it does have one drawback. Working in a team that only has the function of thinking up new things for an organisation means (obviously) that you get to think up ideas for a living, but it also means (obviously) that they are first and foremost for that organisation. So I can see really interesting posts like this one at kottke.org on ways of registering the popularity of songs broadcast on the radio and get quite excited and want to explode with thoughts and comments around it and I’m just not sure if I can. And if in principle I could, I’m not sure how to do it in an ethical, business-friendly way. And because thinking-up things professionally is different from building something (which allows a reasonably clear distinction to be drawn between what you’re there to accomplish and what you do that’s your own), almost everything we think around is – to a greater or lesser extent – kind of work-related. It’s a bit of a quandary…
This is one of those posts that gets me into trouble with people. If you don’t like rude words, or have any particular love for David Blaine then walk away! Walk away!
So I want to talk a bit about David Blaine. Hardly the most auspicious reason to get myself back into the weblogging habit after a difficult week, I admit, but I have to vent. I mean – can it really be true that the British are evil for finding him so… ludicrous? Hasn’t anyone noticed? I mean, surely it’s obvious? You talk to American friends over AIM and they’re all, “Oooh, you’ve done it now… We’re pulling out the Blaine inspectors. And then we’re going to have to invade!”
The British don’t have a “healthy disrespect” for celebrity and if you’ve been told that, then you’ve basically been lied to by a professional Englishman-abroad or by some weird kind of Dick Van Dyke cod-Anglo-faker. The British don’t have a healthy disrespect for anything at all, they’re just grumpy old sods who don’t really like anyone who sets themselves above the rest of the herd. Basically if we don’t fancy them and if we don’t want to be them, then we pretty much hate their guts. While they’re funny or cool or interesting – well that’s great – but a chink in the armour and we strike. That’s why British celebrities after a while have to either treat the whole thing as a bit of a job or as a bit of a joke. The most successful take the piss a bit. They go, “It’s Ok! I understand! I get it too! They give me lots of money and I sing songs and have lots of sex, but I’m just like you lot! I think it’s all dumb too!” That’s why people get a bit bored when Robbie Williams writes songs about his inner pain. Whatever you do, you mustn’t believe the hype. Or you mustn’t show that you believe the hype or the cry of ‘wanker’ will resound from hill and dale, from weir to West Wittering…
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, the press is confused. Surely the British are terribly terribly polite? But they’re always so modest and quiet when you see them on television… Well now you know why! The secret need for fame may burn bright in our hearts, but for many people it would be far too embarrassing to admit it. There’s always the secret desire for the banana skin lying provocatively in the path of those who think their farts smell of summer blossom and happy fairies. And there’s always the fear of that self-same skin lying in wait ready to cut us – quite rightly – back down to size. It’s just not the same in the States – where aspiration is celebrated and failure mourned. There each person who becomes huge is an indication that you too could make it if you just ate less mexican food and got your teeth fixed. If you did that in England you’d just get duffed up by some bloke with a bit of a lazy eye who thought you were checking out his girlfriend. Inevitably.
Weirdly, though, the whole trans-Atlantic miscommunication has a menacing side. Several of my American friends have asked me – quite genuinely and quite nervously – whether the vilification of Blaine is somehow representative of the British position towards America. But I must confess it is not – while the image of the USA giving up on the Stars and Stripes as a symbolic representation of their country and instead stringing-up Blaine has a certain visceral appeal to me, I can’t see it happening. Blaine is not being attacked because he is American. But there is a connection with the slathering excesses of fringe America – and that’s to do with the fundamental connection between American celebrities and total and absolute unmitigated bullshit.
I’ll give you an example. Jennifer Lopez somehow managed to claim that being ‘for real’ was – for her- ‘like breathing’ – that she was indeed still Jenny from the Block. But in fact she was possibly the least grounded human being since Yuri Gagarin – and everyone knew it! But it didn’t matter – they still lapped it up shamelessly. Blaine is radically post-Lopez (po-lo?) in the scale of his attempts to turn pure shit into gold – hence the in-box nappy – and that’s the aspect that the British can’t forgive. So why is he hated? It’s not because he’s American and it’s not because the British are evil. Fundamentally, simply, basically, finally he’s just hated because he’s a twat. It’s just that in America, many more twats get famous…
The last few days – it has to be said – have not been the easiest of my time on the web. I’ve been spending more time that I would like dealing with problems on Barbelith trying to work out where to take the board next. The board has experienced long-term problems that only recently have reappeared – in the process forcing me to recast our battle in terms of an ongoing stalemate. There seem to be only two options available to me at this point – neither of which I’m particularly comfortable with. I either have to fight – using every mechanism in my power to resolve the situation once and for all no matter how difficult or unpleasant it gets – or I have to accomodate myself to the possibility that the situation may simply never end as long as the board survives. This in turn brings up the possibility of turning the damn thing off. Since the end of last week, this has been pretty much the only thing on my mind – whether to attack, whether to continually defend or whether to abandon the whole project. It’s been taking up more of my headspace than I would like and meant that a weekend that had been planned to be creative, exciting and rife with projects has been spent sweating, feeling desperate/trapped and being completely unable to concentrate. Hence the paucity of updates…
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” said Benjamin Franklin.
I’ve just noticed there’s a Spiked online weblogging event going on tomorrow at the South Bank called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The panelists will include Brendan O’Neill, Perry de Havilland, Bill Thompson and James Crabtree. I will be there, probably looking surly in the back…
So Simon Waldman has been asked to take down the At Home With Hitler spread by Homes and Gardens. The full story is here. Someone’s already put up a mirror, which I can’t help thinking is a good thing. The most irritating thing about the whole debacle is that I don’t think they have an obligation to make him take it down – instead I think they’ve just decided that they don’t want to publically have their magazine linked with Hitler. I suppose I can understand the anxiety, but it is unfortunate. The article is a fascinating piece of history that we will shortly no longer have access to. I don’t know that we ever really think about that aspect of copyright – that it stops us having unmediated access to recent history…
In March 2000, I’d been a weblogger for about four months. Blogger itself wasn’t much older. The directory pages which tracked the start of each new public weblog are still up online and you can see new weblogs starting at the rate of one or two a day. The very first page on that directory contains the names that still conjure up the early weblogging experience to me – Evhead, Megnut and Onfocus, of course. But also Anil Dash, Saturn.org, Ethel the Blog, prolific.org, Prehensile Tales, WrongWayGoBack, etc. etc. If you dig around a bit, I’m in that list too somewhere – the past subtly retroactively edited by me changing the name of my site from Barbelith to plasticbag.org at a much later date…
This nascent community was in some ways not nascent at all – many of the people in that early weblogging space were just looking for a platform in which they could do something creative. In fact, I think maybe one aspect of Blogger’s initial success was how connected the initial webloggers were with earlier creative communities and individuals like Derek Powazek‘s fray and – in particular – Lance Arthur‘s epic Glassdog.net – back at the time when you could make great things online even if you couldn’t program for shit. Glassdog.net’s collection of wonderful web projects is completely lost now, unfortunately, but it was a space for many people eager to do something wonderful online. In a way, the early weblogging community was an extension – almost a sideline – of this community – a sideline that grew and grew to occupy not only much of our time, but also the time of many hundreds of thousands of other people… And in return, the communicative aspects of weblogging galvanised that community – exposing the people behind the projects, creating stated connections and creating genuine friendships, partnerships (and occasionally animosities).
A couple of days ago Meg linked through to a site which featured a quicktime movie of an amateur interview with the early Blogger crew. And all I kept thinking about when I watched it was how much I wanted to go to SXSW to meet them all back in March 2000, and how I couldn’t, and how much I wish I’d been able to. It was a fun time…
If all I cared about was traffic, then of course I’d write more about politics. Or religion. I wrote about religion a while back, and – yeah, I got lots of traffic. And I also had to spend about two weeks fielding e-mail from people, explaining my position again and again, taking issue with people who mischaracterised my position, trying to remain at all times relatively cool headed, relatively reasonable. I wish I could say that I succeeded all fo the time.
Of course if all I cared about was traffic, then I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have let my rhetoric fly free and wild. Facts? What facts! Logic? Who cares! I’d have stripped myself of the constraints of society (Arguing fairly – pah! Accepting when you’re wrong – how retro! Looking to learn through debate rather than win through debate – ludicrous!) like I was shedding clothing, and I’d have run naked screaming through the fields of cheap attack, jingoism and name-calling! Who cares what I’m saying as long as it has the effect I desire? Who cares what tactics I use to get my point across? A win by a technicality – or a win by cheating – is still a win godammit…
If all I cared about was traffic, I’d write like James Lileks. I’d talk to people’s guts, I’d talk to their pain. I’d do whatever I could to avoid their ears and their minds. Because otherwise how would I be able to argue that being the victim of a terrorist atrocity automatically made every decision of a country – past, present and future – purer than the driven snow…? How else would I be able to argue that the only response that would be unreasonable would be atomic war…? How else would I be able to argue that anyone who even questioned this position hated humanity and was insulting the families of victims?
I’m sure James gets a lot of traffic, and I’m sure that a lot of people feel that he speaks for them and says things that they feel to be true. There are a lot of people who feel vulnerable in the world at the moment, and there are a lot of people who feel that something must be done. They’re right to feel vulnerable – we all feel vulnerable. They’re right to want to do something to make the world a better place – there’s no doubt that it could do with the help. But selling arguments on the basis of fear and bile and name-calling isn’t the way to go. If I was James I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. And I don’t think the traffic would help…
Addendum: I’d like to apologise for the tone of this post, which was written in anger and ironically suffers from some of the same rhetorical excesses that I was taking James Lileks to task for. I do – however – still stand by the content.