ah fb

 

I have previously pinpointed the exact moment I first heard about facebook. It was when I was a contributor to Laura's excellent assemblog Sarsaparilla and one of the contributors explained the recent lack of content there... read my memory of that here if you wanna, it's coming up to 20 years I've been on it which is, like, a third of my life ffs. Speaking of my life, in many ways it remade my life. No doubt yours too, even if you have never been a member which, btw, makes you a bit of an outsider in western society, but it's OK.

I deleted fb off my phone about six months ago (but not my laptop... yet) and it made a big difference with my engagement, and the Meta bullshit re: Trump etc has made me want to completely leave (being on bluesky admittedly under Perry's name makes me appreciate how hard it is to build up a community afresh) and I'm still using it for various connections at the moment so it's going to be hard (a version of my strong resentment of the three main telephone companies here in Australia - which one do I hate the least so I can still have a telephone account? Probably Telstra, all they did was take money out of my account when I wasn't a customer and make it impossible to talk to anyone there to get it back). And then there's things like the above.

I have always had a soft spot for Jimmy Somerville. His single with June Miles-Kingston, a cover of 'Comment de dire adieu', is an absolute gem, a record I sincerely love.* I also of course could do with never hearing those Bronski Beat singles he made again because of overexposure but I fully admire him for them. Other things he's done have also really made an impact on me. But he just seems like a straight-up great guy. I tried to imagine him being rude to his PA or sullen in his manager's office or slapping a fan's autograph book to the floor or smashing a glass because someone confused him with Jimi the Human or Jimmy Hannan,** and I couldn't. So I like him. 

...And here he is, in my fb feed, uninvited but welcome, proudly showing me some ratshit thing like Brighton Beach, not the real one but the English one, where they have a beach made of kittylitter and fishtank pebbles, and I just think... fb can be so great when it connects me to a celebrity I have fond feelings for. 

I'm not going to follow him, just because I don't want to engage with fb any more than I already am, but I am going to feel a little bit better because somewhere, the algorithm thought hey, this 60 year old Australian man with a longstanding interest in pop music who likes Soft Cell and the Human League will probably want to see this post, and fuck it, I did. 

* In the old days I had a kind of pre-going out ceremony, sometimes, which by the way was semi-ironic but also semi-real, of playing some records I really liked that I thought of as my 'party records'. 'Comment te dire adieu' was one of them. Alongside 'Epic Merriment' by the Craven Fops, 'Roxy Roller' by Nick Gilder (or the Sweeney Todd version), 'All You Want to Do Is Dance' by Trevor White, 'Cool' by Pylon, 'Love by Numbers' by Ash Wednesday... I'm sure there were plenty of others but I can't recall them atm. All singles. My 'Comment tda' is a 12". 

** Or Jimmy Savile. I bet he gets that a lot, not because he's anything like Savile, but because the names sound so similar.