‘and the sirens sweetly singing...’ (in the room full of mirrors)

it’s the tenth anniversary of horsemouth joining facebook.

ten years in the room full of mirrors listening to ‘the sirens sweetly singing’. of course before that there was myspace - now a deserted zombie infested shopping mall on the wrong side of the tracks...

before that horsemouth had to make do with print publication, the occasional ‘gig’, face-to-face meetings with his friends, email (yes once upon a time we used email to communicate), phone calls - he was an early(ish) adopter of email - a late adopter of the mobile phone (for work only he tells himself).

horsemouth is older, greyer, balder (and on more than one front) and with worrying signs of arthritis in his hands. but on the whole he doesn’t feel too bad on it. he’s engaged in his usual semi-monastic retreat of a holiday. but it is still longer than he cares to mention until his pension.

facebook affords him the chance to write everyday (with the possibility of it being read), to recommend music (remember the dj set with vinyl, the compilation cassette tape), to collect newspaper clippings (as if one day the power structure will be held to account), to get out the photo album and show the slideshow of his holiday. it enables him to show you the sunny side of (his) ocean if not the dark shadows moving in (his) woods. so does blogger.

it has however slowed down his work rate in proportion that it has made it more available to people - this he regrets. ...

meanwhile howard has been busy yet again...



and last night’s featured presentation was high rise from a novel by j.g. ballard.

ballard takes the tropes of the genius architect and machines for living and undercuts them with the r.d. laing let it all hang out notion of therapeutic communities bringing difficult subconscious material to the surface. do you remember that one from when you were a kid where you would wake up in the night to discover your parents were having a party and find your house suddenly invaded by loads of drunk adults engaged in being very strange? a desire on the part of the adults to play at lord of the flies - all that class and sexual tension spilling out messily.

it ends with a thatcher speech but this is weak - the one that is needed is the there is no such thing as society speech (but even that is the wrong one) - really thatcher has nothing to do with this, these are early 70ies tensions we are dealing with here. it is the blank flexible doctor who thrives (rather than the history man documentary film-maker, another retro-fit ).