In answer to a few mails…

Thanks so much for the offers of free bandwidth from kind readers blessed with vast unused bits of the Internet.

Supanames seems pretty reliable, and I think I’ll stick with them even if I have to upgrade, in the interests of a simple life. But I might use donated space for hosting images and any large files, particularly if ImageBucket’s free service is found wanting. Readers will recall I previously used a paid Flickr account for image hosting, but withdrew my custom after their ignorant and brutal cancelling of author Dennis Cooper’s account.

Some statistics. Last month the DE site bandwidth usage was 1708770K. This month so far the usage is 2091821K. And rising.

The tariff I would probably upgrade to handles 10GB per month. It would mean paying about £55 for another two years starting now. That’s a reduction on their normal rate; including VAT, their discount and refunding the difference from unused months of my current dirt-cheap tariff. I bought two years’ worth of the latter last October. It’s only May and already I’m too much for them.

Some of you have suggested I set up a Sponsor DE / Friends Of Dickon page with a PayPal donation button. Readers could donate in return for a permanent mention as a site sponsor, unless they wanted anonymity to cover the shame of supporting an elegant wastrel like me.

But for now I’ll keep the images off-site, and wait. If the site starts failing to load, or Supanames send me a definite demand for the upgrade, I’ll implement the donation button.

Thanks for the kind thoughts as ever. It means a lot.

An email from Supanames, the company who host this website and its diary.

Dear Customer,
Our engineers have recently conducted a performance audit of the server hosting your website dickonedwards.co.uk. During this work they identified that dickonedwards.co.uk is one of the top users of server resources…

How wonderful! I’m one of their ‘top users’! Are they going to give me a medal, an award, a reward, perhaps?

… and contributes significantly to the loading of the server, impacting on speed. We’re writing to politely ask that you upgrade to a more appropriate SupaNames hosting package designed to meet your website’s power and resource requirements. We’d like to help by giving you an instant £15 discount off selected hosting upgrades or £50 off a Semi Dedicated server… As you may be aware the terms and conditions of our packages state that we can suspend any website using too many server resources, and we’re keen to avoid having to suspend your website in order to ensure good service performance for other users. By upgrading now you can avoid this happening.

If you sell over 100,000 records a month, your record label showers you with gold discs.

If your novel sells over 100,000 copies a month, it’s bigger than The Da Vinci Code (which currently pegs out at a mere 60,000).

If your website gets over 100,000 hits a month, your hosting company asks you for more money to handle the extra resources.

Okay, so the comparison is shudderingly naive, but you get the general idea where my ranting mind is at tonight.

The Supanames tariff I currently use is commendably cheap and allows an ‘unlimited bandwidth’, as long as I don’t use the service for promoting audio and video downloads. But clearly even ‘unlimited’ has a limit.

I’ve hastily moved a few photos from recent entries to ImageBucket, in the hope of alleviating the burden on the Dickonedwards.co.uk servers. Fingers crossed that brings down the bytes a little. It’s partly my fault for indulging myself with too many photos and vidcaps lately.

What irks me is that whether I like it or not, I have to admit to being a far more successful public diarist than I am a songwriter or recording artist (the things I’m meant to have been successful at), at least to date. While I’m obviously grateful for having the readership, it’s frustrating that not only do I fail to receive a penny for this so-called achievement, but I have to pay for being allegedly entertaining on a mass level. It’s assumed that I can somehow find the money elsewhere. Talk about negative equity.

Fair enough if my diary was a commercial concern. But it isn’t. It’s just me. Hosting garish pop-up display ads is out of the question. But I do need a sponsor. Or something else to point to that gives me an income.

The current trend for giving writers of popular blogs a book deal appears to have amusingly passed me by. Well, I don’t want to make this diary into a book per se, but I do want to have a few books out there between now and the grave. It’s about time I sent those chapters off. There’s a table in Waterstones marked ‘Quirky Fiction’. It includes The Complete Saki alongside a smattering of modern works. I looked at it and thought, for once in my life I know where I want to be. So get on with it and stop moaning! cries the readership.

Till then, I’m forever painting Tom Sawyer’s fence. I don’t mind that so much: I’m living a penurious but pleasant existence getting by on my wits and the long-suffering kindness of friends and relations. But paying Mr Sawyer more money, for doing a job too well, imbues the concept of Performance Related Pay with a wry twist too far. And that’s coming from a Saki fan.

I spend the night after my loosely Scott Fitzgerald-inspired club night with a loosely Scott Fitzgerald-inspired movie maker.

I’m with TMC at the ICA, attending a screening of the 1990 film Metropolitan, though we’re really going for the Q&A afterwards with its writer and director, Whit Stillman.

I’m embarrassed – even ashamed as a Londoner – at what a poor state the ICA cinema is in comparison with the NFT. It’s resembling an aged regional arthouse fleapit, all scuffed black walls and crumbling heaters, and clearly hasn’t been refurbished in years. I don’t usually mind or even notice such things, but the print is outrageously scratchy and grainy: projecting the DVD would have given a clearer picture. They forget to switch on the sound until some time into the credits, the closing credits are completely out of focus, and the ancient Q&A microphone makes the voice sound worse rather than better, like an announcer at a rail station. There’s a line between being charmingly rough around the edges and just plain broken, and the ICA crosses it, at least in the cinema. Welcome to London hospitality, Mr Stillman.

That aside, it’s nice to see the film again, and Mr S gives a good little Q & A. I’m pleased to discover he’s like a character from his own films: well-dressed in a nice dark suit with a pocket square hanky in the lapel pocket, floppy boyish greying haircut, nervous and wary of the world. Clean-shaven, too, unlike the almost predictably hirsute trendy film critic who introduces him. For a man to be seen clean-shaven in the trendy spots of London is currently nothing short of radical. Trendy men have never had it so easy. It’s fashionable to let yourself go. Messy hair, scuzzy beard, trainers, jeans. As long as you don’t get fat.

Mr S is almost a foppish Brian Wilson. If he’d turned out to be a normal person, I’d have been terribly disappointed.

One to tick off the list, as Mr C says. We’re both big fans of the Stillman trilogy (Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco being the other two), and 15 years on his work is still fresh and original. It certainly holds up better than Kevin Smith’s very 90s Clerks does in 2006. Probably because it was out of time even in 1990.

Very witty, very well-made and well-acted, and actually rather brave. He doesn’t pander in the slightest to the mythical target market – even the arthouse target market. Movies like Me and You and Everyone We Know are very much made with that audience in mind: quirky, wordy, quiet; carrot cake not popcorn. But Mr Stillman’s films are completely in their own genre beyond typical arthouse fare. Which takes some doing. No wonder they sometimes come in for some stick as ‘conservative’. Sometimes daring to be different actually means dressing smartly: see also the cover of Dexys’ Don’t Stand Me Down. You risk being laughed at at the time, but eventually people come round to you and hail you as a genius. (Can’t be long for me, I tell myself daily).

So, the world of Whit Stillman. No sex scenes or Mamet-like swearing. No masturbation references (which in a US indie flick is de rigeur). Instead, it’s quietly wealthy – yet all too inept – young Americans sitting around in a deliberately undetermined New York time setting (anywhere in the 1970s / 80s) talking in elaborate Austen-like sentences, and pretty much every other line is quotable.

“When you’re an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional.”

“I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking.”

“Her father died”
“That must have been awful for her.”
“Yeah… It was pretty hard on him, too.”

And so on.

One Stillman remark from the Q&A abides, mirroring the Quentin Crisp ethos:

“Your style comes from your mistakes.”

3.30am. T-shirt before bed. A quick self-portrait by photo, frozen in the heartless flash of the automatic camera. I see how long it takes me to work out how to upload a photo from camera to web diary, using this new Mac laptop that’s still very unfamilar. And I surprise myself.

Faded make-up. I quite like the end of the evening look.

A very solitary, very silent feeling. 3.45am, 34 years old. Alone in the world? No, alone in a world.

I could do anything. Or I could do nothing.

My first post written on a lovely new iBook. Outside, small boys are talking about Cybermen.

As preparing for it takes up the rest of my day, I should post a reminder that my club night takes place tonight.

The Beautiful And Damned: A Thoroughly Splendid Club Night.
Your Host: Mr Dickon Edwards
When: 18 May 2006 , 9pm – midnight.

Where:
The Boogaloo,312 Archway Road, Highgate, London, N6 5AT, UK

Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.

Free entry. But please dress up.

Some pasted blurb:

After a successful try-out in March, Dickon Edwards’s hot new club returns to the Boogaloo on Thursday May 18th. He’s already been interviewed about the night in London magazines such as Time Out and The Penny, and this is only the second outing.

The Beautiful And Damned is a new decadent disco curated by dysfunctional dandy DJ Dickon Edwards, with Miss Red. Patrons are encouraged to dress up in their own take on 1920s and 30s glamour, though anything more stylish than the ubiquitous Old Street fashions is welcome. Cigarillos, braces, tweeds, beads, silk scarves, unforgiving teddy bears Drink, dance, and ponder the nights tenderness to an eclectic but discerning mix of Sinatra (Frank & Nancy), Strauss waltzes, soundtracks, musicals, El Records, Gilbert & Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dory Previn, Doris Day, Bugsy Malone, Cabaret, Chicago, deviant disco, shadowy soul, parvenu pop and insouciant indie.

Selected music from last time:

Bernice Bobs Her Hair – Divine Comedy
Get Happy – Judy Garland
Youve Either Got Or You Havent Got Style – Frank Sinatra
Nice On The Ice – Vic Godard
Initials BB – Serge Gainsbourg
I Wanna Be Loved By You – Helen Kane (1920s recording)
I Feel The Earth Move – Carole King
Casino Royale – Bacharach (theme from the movie)
Dream A Little Dream Of Me – Mama Cass
Anything Goes – Harpers Bizarre (theme from The Boys In The Band)
The Lady Is A Tramp – The Supremes
I’ll Keep It With Mine – Nico
How Does That Grab You Darlin? – Nancy Sinatra
Move Over Darling – Doris Day
The Number One Song In Heaven – Sparks
Mrs Robinson – James Taylor Quartet
Yada Yada La Scala – Dory Previn
Talking Heads – This Must Be The Place
Finale From The Mikado – Topsy-Turvy cast

I realise there’s a few other things on offer tonight. Not least taping The Sultan’s Elephant on BBC4.

Other activities are available.

But only one of them has me.

Thanks to all those who emailed in with laptop advice and thoughts. I had about 50/50 Mac and PC recommendations.

So, aware of all the pros and cons and asking myself what I really wanted on a gut level (or indeed, a lap level), I decided to take the plunge and invest in a brand new Mac laptop.

I definitely wanted a cute, stylish laptop per se, and I’m so fed up with my PCs crashing and freezing all the time. I think the limit of my Windows prowess has been well and truly reached after ten years, and it’s about time I at least had a go at learning the ways of the Mac world.

The iconic affordable Mac laptop is the 12″ G4 iBook. The latest version was revised last July with extra sturdiness and memory and so forth. I ordered it on Saturday, and it’s due to arrive tomorrow.

In that short limbo of days (and Mac fans know what I’m about to say), Apple pulled the iBook from its shelves. From today, the iBook has ceased to be, replaced by a Cyberman controlled by Roger Lloyd Pack. Sorry, I mean the all-new singing and dancing MacBook.

But I was aware of this. Although I could send the thing right back and exchange for a hot-off-the-press MacBook, I’d actually rather have the snowy soap-like iBook, at least as a first Mac machine. I saw a louche young man using one in Muswell Hill Library today, and frankly it was lust on first sight. (insert innuendo here, firmly)

The way I see it, it’s preferable to have the last generation of a tried and tested model than the first version of a new machine altogether. It’s never a good idea to get the first release of any gadget, I find. People act as if new equals final, forgetting that the upgrade after that is just around the corner. After the Christmas-like rush of the first kids on the block dies down, there’s usually a few kinks to be ironed out, for the next revision. There might be a whining noise that manifests itself after a month, or the unit could burst into flames if you look at it in just the wrong way. Or there could be an experimental substance in the battery that leaks out and gives the user a disease that turns them into a parody of Celia Johnson.

My priority is to get used to the Mac world per se, and I think it’s better to do that on something other people are more likely to have had experience of. And then I’ll see about graduating cautiously to the MacBook, if and when.

Given my 4-year old desktop PC keeps crashing more frequently, particularly when I play long videos or try to convert audio files, I’ve been thinking of eschewing the installation of a new processor (and hoping for the best), and replacing the bloody thing with a laptop. Ten years of desktop ownership, while really envying laptop users. I feel I’ve almost earned it. It would solve my DJ problem too.

Alex M has suggested I take the plunge and convert to the world of Macintosh, buying a used G4 iBook on Ebay rather than a brand new Windows laptop. I’m not sure. I’ve been swimming in the Windows seas for so long, I’m rather wary of such a change. Then again, it could be just what I need. Many writers and artists I admire bang on about Macs, but then PC users don’t really say anything: they just get on with it.

Any pro-Mac or pro-PC evangelists out there with advice , please drop me an email. Bearing in mind I have a budget of £500, which rather narrows things down.

I’m preparing for the next Beautiful & Damned night on Thursday 18th. Someone from Time Out is keen to run a feature, so I’ve given them a photo and conducted a short email interview. It’s the third time I’ve been interviewed about the club, and Thurs is only its second outing.

I’m rather concerned about the problem of the CD decks being jolted by enthusiastic dancing on the neighbouring floorboards, particularly by those fond of the Charleston – all that stamping about.

One solution is to forgo CDs altogether, and play mp3 files on a laptop for the whole set, something I’ve seen others do a few times now. I’m told there’s a program called Traktor that’s particularly suitable for the purpose. Thing is, I don’t have a laptop. If any kind London-based soul out there can lend me one for the night, or has alternate helpful advice, please get in touch.

Or perhaps I could try this suggestion from Alex M:

“You could borrow two Sony mobiles and do it off them! My K750 plays mp3s and you can get a standard photo audio lead for it. I don’t actually think it’s been done before and you’d be hailed as the New Streets overnight!”

Another day, another large mechanical elephant.

On many Saturdays, the streets of Central London host some protest or other. Recently, there was a protest against some Danish cartoons. A few weeks later there was a Free Speech protest, to protest against the other protest. I heard there were also a few counter-protesters at the Free Speech protest. So that’s a protest against a protest against a protest. And so on. Everyone’s annoyed nowadays.

So this week, I suppose you could call The Sultan’s Elephant a protest against the lack of giant mechanical elephants and towering puppets of little girls on the streets. Quite right too.

Then to Islington for an acoustic set by The Boyfriends. It takes at least twenty French street theatre performers to work one Martin Wallace. You can’t see the strings, though.

It’s very late.

After the last results are read out, the leaders of each local party are allowed to make a speech.

Cllr Charles Adje, leader of Haringey Labour Party, and returning leader of Haringey Council:

He makes a pretty cursory, unemotional speech reminding people that they still won the council despite losing a few seats to the Lib Dems. Though he hinted at ‘dirty trick’ tactics by rival parties, he didn’t go into details. Just another day for him.

Cllr Neil Williams, leader of Haringey Lib Dems, returning councillor (from Highgate, in fact):

Mr Williams has a very Lib Dem face, I think. Lembit Opik has one too. Speccy, wary, cautious. He’s slightly angry, reminding people that the Lib Dems have actually beaten Labour on votes across the borough. He doesn’t mention Proportional Representation, though. Some rather rowdy Labour types in the audience heckle him. “Loser! Loser!” “Oh, Neil, really!”

Then Pete McAskie, leader of Haringey Greens and my election agent speaks up. He gives a pretty angry speech, actually. The Haringey target ward results are disappointing, the old first-past-the-post system is an anachronism and misrepresents the thousands of Green votes received across the borough. Going by green issues, he said, an average European council make Haringey look shameful.

The Haringey Tories don’t bother with a speech. With no seat gains whatsoever, they’ve left the building by this time. It’s past five o’clock in the morning.

During the night, I do meet a few gentle and friendly types from all parties. My gut stereotype reaction is:

Tory candidates: Arch, quiet, Women’s Institute, helpful with directions.
New Labour candidates: Bullies, loud, ruddy-faced, Student Union. On-Message.
Old Labour candidates: Friendly, fun, aware of knives in their backs.
Lib Dem candidates: wary, guarded, bespectacled.
Green candidates: passionate, humane, bearded.

The gossip of the night is a locally popular Old Labour councillor losing his seat by three votes. His election agent and party backers, the rumour has it, have deliberately denied him a recount. The implication being New Labour would rather lose a council seat than keep an old-style socialist among their numbers. That’s the story from the other parties, anyway.

I get a lift home in Mr McAskie’s charmingly clunky old van. The sun is coming up.

I put on a rented DVD to help me go to sleep.

“Hellraiser 4 – Bloodline”.