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Bill Pannifer pays his respects at a cemetery, visits a celluloid hero, then decides to veg out
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Your support makes all the difference.The World Wide Cemetery
http://www.cemetery.org/
As abstract as the aftermath of a modern cremation, but perhaps offering greater comfort to mourners, the Internet's own version of eternal rest seems less deserving of satire than its earthbound equivalents. For once, the much-discussed "placelessness" of the World Wide Web - intangible yet universal -is fully vindicated. Come to terms with the basic concept, and this is a tastefully presented site, where a convincingly nominal one-off payment of $7 will provide a perpetual homepage for the deceased - one that "will not weather with the passage of time and can be visited easily by people from around the world". There are about a hundred people so far interred, some with photographs and sound samples, and visitors can offer "flowers" in the form of messages of condolence. Names may also be entered on general monuments in honour of the victims of Aids, Vietnam and even the First and Second World Wars. The site compares itself with traditional print obituaries, but it adds a unique metaphysical tease: a world map locates the mere "physical remains" of those now safely gathered together in spirit and online.
The Chris Marker WWW Site
http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/projects/media/marker/index.html
This year's London Film Festival programme included new work from Chris Marker, the veteran French film maker whose graceful "photoroman", La Jetee, re-emerged last year in rather lumbering form as 12 Monkeys. A film essayist of unclassifiable genius, Marker's usual concerns - left- wing politics and paradoxes, the nature of memory, Alfred Hitchcock - have also long included computers: he was staging cryptic "online" interviews as far back as 1984, and now is working on an autobiographical CD-Rom. Till then, this site, dedicated to him by an Australian academic, will fill out the filmography, display a script or two and supply stills from Sans Soleil: all against background graphics of the favoured feline who inevitably slinks her way into Marker's most abstruse reveries.
The Forever Corporation
http://www.forever-corp.com
The seriously underpublicised Guildford space programme is well under way now, and wants your money. The Forever Corp (UK branch) will place your e-mail or other message on a spaceproof CD-Rom and send it up as a commercial payload on a Russian rocket scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan some time next year. Would-be space cadets - sorry, "virtual voyagers in outer space" - are offered the vicarious thrill of knowing their words will soon be in geostationary orbit above their heads. The plot thickens when the same company, using the same forms, offers membership of "Celtic Heart", which will bury your message in an archive of the Irish people somewhere in Co Down. Then there's the "Pyramid of Time" (still under construction, but with similar memorial aims). It seems Irish astronauts with an interest in Egyptology may be offered a discounted, all-in package.
New York Skyscrapers
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/3366/nyc.html
The low-down on high-rises is offered by this site, which out-Warhols Warhol with its continuously updated Webcam views both of, and from, the Empire State Building (called the Empty State Building when it opened because of the lack of tenants during the Depression). The Finnish architect who runs the site unsurprisingly lists Bauhaus among his favourite rock bands, but his taste in tower blocks runs more to Modernist and Art Deco. The Chrysler building, we learn, had an upmarket speakeasy on the top floor during Prohibition; FW Woolworth's edifice features a mural of FW counting up his cash. Running through it all is an account of the two forces shaping the Manhattan skyline: zoning laws, leading to architectural contortions to let light through on to the street, and the drive of New York corporate machismo to create the tallest erection in the world (deflated when, recently, Malaysia claimed the title).
Veggie Heaven
http://www.webserve.co.uk/Veggie/
Twee little vegetable pictures float around this unpretentious-looking but useful UK vegetarian site, created by the cookery writer Rosamund Richardson. The fare on offer sounds enticing enough, with comfortably short and simple cooking instructions for the culinarily-challenged. Despite the homely design, it's ideologically uncompromising, though it advises against preaching to the unconverted: "the seduction of the stomach is the most powerful persuasion". There are a number of vegan options - cutting out meat, dairy products and eggs reduces heart attacks by 90 per cent, the site claims - but no time for fish-finger-eating vegaquarians and their ilk
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