I wasn’t sure what to write about this month so I’ve decided to tell you a story about a cat and the internet….
The internet is full of cats, crawling with them. If the internet was a building, you’d open the door and cats would tumble forth in grotesque volumes. Cats upon cats. And on top of the cats? A whole load of strange and horrible stuff that we won’t think about, not today. Today is for the cats.
I’ve been thinking, recently, that I miss the old internet. Not the internet we have now, I’m not insane. I suspect we’re all painfully aware of the current internet, omnipresent and exhausting. But there was another internet from before. Before what? I suppose before everything.
In the early 2000s I was a certain kind of internet person. I didn’t keep a livejournal (though I thought about it, often) and I wasn’t really on myspace with any real commitment. I wasn’t really adding to the internet but I was consuming it. I read (and sometimes posted on) the message boards for bands I liked. I read pitchfork album reviews and tour news for US indie bands who would never visit South Devon. I read web-comics by Kate Beaton and Kelly Vivanco and downloaded an obscene volume of music for which I still feel quite guilty.
Being online felt fruitful, it added to my life in quite a meaningful way. Whilst all teenagers have a tendency to think they’re the only ones who like what they like, I had certainly carved a niche for myself that had very little crossover with the stuff my school friends were into. Devon was clinging onto the tail-end of the skate-punk and nu-metal movements that exploded in 2001/2 and I wanted wordy, baroque alt-folk bands. I used the phrase alt-folk. I needed the internet. Urgently.
Not least because the internet played host to most of my early friendship with Jez, who lived an hour up the south-coast train line (the best stretch of train, in my opinion). We liked the same things. The exact same things, which was no small thing aged seventeen in the early 2000s. We spent hours online talking about these things, hours and hours, everyone-in-my-house-has-gone-to-bed-and-i’m-still-up-trying-to-craft-the-perfect-screen-name hours
Occasionally we met up in Exeter. Or…not quite in Exeter. Me being eternally accommodating (and definitely harbouring a crush) I would get a bus into Plymouth, then the hour long train to Exeter, then walk to the bus station where there was a bus to Cullompton (half an hour away). Where I’d alight in an unremarkable lay-by and wait for Jez.
Next to the lay-by was Fagin’s Antiques. A warehouse you could see from the main road, with it’s name painted in white on the roof. I don’t know what prompted us to go there, which of us suggested it first. We weren’t entirely cool and we liked junk and ephemera and this warehouse was reachable by bus. So I guess it was the logical outcome.
We loved it. I have no idea how many times we visited. Maybe only three, maybe fifteen. Hard to say. It was three floors of dusty shit that we could make jokes about and photograph in grainy black and white for A-Level coursework, there was a giant prop robot in the yard outside and a maybe (?) a sculpture of Elvis in the basement.
There was also a roomed filled with books. We’d trawl the spines for funny titles, reading them out to make the other laugh. We could do it for hours. Jez, who wanted to study Graphic Design, would buy a few to scan the type-faces at home and I would buy one or two to make it seem like there was a valid reason for me to come to this antiques warehouse (when in fact I just definitely fancied this boy).
There was one book, a book about cats. It was priceless; an absolutely sincerely written, fawning book of praise for..just…the concept of cats. It included a photo of a kitten staring bleakly into the distance captioned ‘Reverie’. We loved it; we howled over it.
There was one page we loved the most. Buffins. Buffins was the cat with ‘the most appealing expression, 1958’. It really tickled us. We loved Buffins. The name, obviously, but also, it was the right call, he did have the most appealing expression. But we didn’t have the money for a hardback book about cats. So, much to my absolute shock and deep anxiety, Jez, heretofore a sweet, sensible music nerd, ripped the page out (and the kitten one too, we needed that one as well).
Here is Buffins.
Buffins, was scanned, he became part of the paper archive Jez was keeping, a massive, ongoing repository of paper textures and antiquated fonts and halftone print textures. He used all this Fagin’s ephemera throughout his graphic design degree at Brighton Uni. When I went to Edinburgh College of Art I took many of these paper scans and used them in my own work too.
At University we found the people we needed to find. We let go of some of the stuff we thought defined us. Against all better judgement and with zero money or experience we ran our own tiny publishing company from the flat we, eventually, shared in Edinburgh. All the things we’d consumed, for years, online became material within our own work.
Buffins, the cat with the most pleasing expression, sat on a hard drive for a while, a few years in fact and then Jez, and his friend Will and Alex, started a site called It’s Nice That. It’s Nice That still exists. You can go there now and see all manner of exciting creative projects from all over the world. They run events and have full-time staff and are, generally, a super professional operation. The first iteration of the site, though, was three designers in 2008 (ish) posting things they thought were ‘Nice’. And once, in amongst, songs by Bill Callahan, illustrations by Nous Vous Collective and photos by Autumn De Wilde, Jez posted the picture of Buffins.
And so Buffins stepped out. Buffins entered the internet. And one thing we know about the internet is that images can and will roam free. They become separated from their origins, gain new meaning, become emblems for movements they had nothing to do with or they end up as a stupid joke that resurfaces every year or so.
Last year I saw this post on twitter. Buffins had gone viral. It could have been someone else’s scan. Surely more than one copy of the book existed. Only, it wasn’t someone else’s. It was ours. The same angle, the same torn edge. This was our cat. I screenshot the image and sent it to Jez, who now lives in Seattle where, amongst many other things, he has written a book and designed the logo for Threads. Yeah. He did that.
Something about it moved me. Obviously Buffin’s expression moved me, look at him! But the fact that these two kids had, somehow, woven themselves into the internet, in even a very minor way..there’s something in that that makes me feel very warm. I like the thought that Buffins will recur, every now and again, a dumb thing that two bored teenagers found funny in the very early stages of the 2000s.
Some things that are nice on the internet in 2023
(Specifically things made by people who I think of as being in my internet ‘year-group)
Krisatomic’s narrowboat life videos.
Illustration Chronicles by Philip Kennedy
ALSO!
Alison is book of the month on Bookshop.org UK which means free postage all month!
im desperately trying to find the cat book now 😭😭
Such a nice read! I loved ”I am the friction”, and think it played a big part in me wanting to collaborate with people and print books on my own. Thanks for making it seem possible!