|
WARNING This page contains a few links to weblogs which may include pornographic images or fiction as content |
"JUST GOT WEEZER'S HASH PIPE!"
It's art school, and a lecturer who looks like Mike Leigh in a back to front jumper, pauses by my handicraft to wince, "Blue is such a cold colour. You see, cold colours depress people." As he toddles off, I shout "Whoa there, hipster. Unemployment and homelessness depress people. Your pissy fucking jumbo cords depress people. Blue is just a colour." Actually, I muttered this in a club, much later, waiting for some dud ecstacy to work it's magic.
Rainbow Healing. Colour therapy. A personal resentment perhaps. But you have to despise all that jazz - shiatzu for cats. Regression therapy for kids. What did you do yesterday, Timmy? I had fish fingers. That's it, let it all out, Timbo. I've no objection to anyone picking up the doo lally brush to wave their work-a-day cobwebs goodbye. But when you wrap yourself up in Marie Claire cod philosophy or GQ pop psychology, you might think that every Joseph Shmoe out there is trying on the double bluff.
"GOING TO TREAT MY BROKE ASS TO A PEDICURE"
Now you can dress how you'd like to be regarded rather than who you actually are, laser-guide your eye contact and remember not to fold your arms even if you're feeling defensive as fuck, thank you very much. It's not hard to see through the hippy boot camp corporate bobbins and Pacific Rim feng spin, of course, but why jog for the master-race?
I'm reading e/n websites. Weblogs. Bloggers. Why do these digital diarists and fantasy journal/ists do it? My flatmate, Christelle, is slouching across a chair with a book. She knows so much about literature, I'm always telling her she should do something creative, write. "Reading is creative" she sighs and gives me some spiel about the reader completing - cutting out their own bespoke imagery and sewing together that which remains unsaid. And looking at e/n websites, I'm starting to see what she means. They are a primary form, a transparent one, but a form nonetheless.
"I'M HERE BECAUSE I NEED THIS"
Talking to God never hurt a soul. If no-one's stopping by your weblog, what odds? If people are reading this stuff, this everything, this nothing - why invite the voyeur? I'm pimping high class MP3 - that's my excuse for being here at all, in this Temporary Autonomous Zone. And it must be temporary. But sometimes, independently, the site cries "feed me" and I pad over to the laptop rubbing my eyes and muttering "alright already I'm coming." I'm grounded.
"I'M IN SUCH A MOOD FOR NESTLE STRAWBERRY QUICK RIGHT NOW"
Sex - confusion, frustration, and fear of seem to be the lifeblood of e/n. Sketched out in confession - "I have an anxiety and panic disorder which causes me to throw up when I get intimate with women," self-promotion - "I have a tight oochiebangbang." or fantasy - "Calm down, slut. I haven't even begun on you yet."
They write, which makes them writers, if one can remove the destinction between high and low art, the academic and the proletarian, even the top whack and the stank, for a moment. But they exist without the endorsement of a publishing house or the comfort of a dot com brainstorm. People, in a room somewhere, typing away. So the second guess comes out to play. It should be pretty obvious when they're talking straight, telling tales, satirising or spitting miscellaneous all over the screen. But, no matter how spelt out these sub-genres are, Let It Bleed is where the revolution of the rolling transparent form, the guy or the girl in a room somewhere, without sanction, lies. We can see more about them than they can. She's not a girl who misses much, Big Sister.
"SHIT IS SO FUCKED UP"
If people jog to hold back the years, da kids gonna blog out their hopes and fears. Vanity can be civilising force - as any teenage high-rise granny-basher turned ladies man, giving it the Lynx effect round the dancefloor at Spangles or Phorensiks, will tell you.
So there're worse things than these..who are they? Booger-eating basket cases sticking their inky jotters full of hash-inspired hokum on-line? Or the salt of the earth projecting how they feel, bro'? Flirters - saying what will get a reaction rather than what they mean? Bridget Jones in the on-line equivalent of a Suicidal Tendencies t-shirt? Proper little madams with an in-box full of drool? Droogs? Or Anthony Burgess? The truth, as always, is never pure. It's all of these and less. For, if the truth be told, The Peoples Publishing is a wealth of yankee doodle and a load of old Anne Frank. That said, there are moments when adventures in transparency can beat reading about shiatzu for cats, or other people skateboarding.