The Hooksexup Video Blog: Deep, Deep Inside The World of Online Video

Unrelated thingy: I just got my picture taken by the Associated Press. The category of photo? "Person standing outside and smoking a cigarette while surrounded on all sides by three feet of floodwaters." Yes, the entire city of New Orleans floods if it rains hard for longer than two hours, as it did today. I'm currently trapped "Uptown" by the flood, when really, I'd rather be back at my house "Downtown." Question: Is New Orleans ready for another hurricane? All signs point to "No"!

Additional unrelated thingy: I was driving home last night, when I saw cool blueish flashing lights at the end of my street. "Oh, someone put up Halloween lights early," I said to myself. Nope. It was cop cars. Someone got shot a couple of blocks away from me. New Orleans!

...Moving on to the topic of 'Star Wars.'

Wonderful/horrible news, everyone! George Lucas has announced that he'll be producing a 'Star Wars' TV show that will begin in 2009. Oh good! Let's piss all over my childhood memories some more, shall we?

The major problem with the series that I can see? George Lucas will be writing the first season of it. Some of us felt that the three horrible Star Wars prequels successfully proved that George Lucas couldn't write his way out of a leaky paper bag, but here we go again.

Some facts to consider:



And consider:




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Most people hate Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And yes, this movie was godawfully, unwatchably bad. In fact, my heart sank within the first five seconds, when the opening "crawl" appeared on the screen. Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. Ummm... thrilling. What were some of the alternate proposed "crawls," you ask?



And so on. But I reserve my special hatred for Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Episode II managed the interesting feat of somehow being even fucking worse than Episode I, a feat that heretofore had seemed impossible. In fact, I'll go ahead and say it: Episode II is the worst movie that I have ever seen in my life. That's right. Worse than "Freddie Got Fingered"; worse than "The Real Cancun"; worse than "Hello Again!" starring Shelly Long. Worse than... You get the idea.








Do you not remember how bad "Attack of the Clones" was? Watch the video clips that I've posted above. The dialogue will make your ears bleed. And note that there's no difference between the flat awfulness of the actors in the parody, and the flat awfulness of the actors in the real thing.

But the part of "Attack of the Clones" that I really wanted to post here was the scene where Padme and Anakin talk about sand... for five minutes. But I couldn't find it. Here's my reconstruction of the dialogue.




Or whatever. Anyway, I tremble for what the future holds. Go away, 'Star Wars' TV show!

"Not a week goes by that I don’t want to quit this job; because staring at New York this way makes me sick.”

"I figure if people look at my cleavage then they won’t listen to my words."

"Shame is a weapon"

...Those are just a few enticing quotes from New York Magazine's long article on Gawker, the website that writes fourteen mean columns about Paris Hilton per day. Excellent.

I have to confess, I've read Gawker about five times. It's not of that much interest to me, because I no longer live in New York, and plus, the website's aura of hypermeanness (what the article calls a "cruel and vicious... echo chamber") makes me... uneasy.

Anyway, here's a link to the article. (Read "Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass".) Thrill to stories of bloggers taking Adderall! Marvel at the seeming assholishness of the editor-in-chief! Mutter "tsk-tsk" to yourself while reading of Gawker's ability to make untalented cute people famous! And so forth. Anyway, go ahead and read the article, and then come back, and we'll chat.

...This article is of particular interest to me because I also happen to write a daily blog. I get paid only slightly less per piece than Gawker bloggers, but on the whole, I end up making a lot less, because I don't snort cocaine and then write fourteen snarky columns about Paris Hilton. It occurred to me the other day that I could do this. In fact, I called up my friends this weekend and asked them if that's what I should be doing. Some said yes, some said no.

I say it "occurred" to me, because I honestly hadn't thought of doing this before, even though that would be an obvious thing for a daily blogger to do. As you may or may not have noticed, my M.O. with this blog is to do the opposite of writing fourteen mean short things about Paris Hilton. I don't write about stuff like that, not necessarily because I'm a good person, but for the following three reasons:



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One thing that is fascinating to me about the "Gawker" article is how the site has become more and more dominated by the comment-leavers, so much so, that the site is now written specifically with them in mind. (At one point in the article, the editor-in-chief dreams hopefully of a website that is run entirely by the comment-leavers.) And if you parse the article carefully, you come to realize that the ideal Gawker blog is a short mean piece about something that inspires hundreds of angry comments, and in-fighting among the comment-leavers themselves. (Because then, people will come back to check the fights, driving up the number of page "hits," and generating more and more revenue.)

That's weird to me, because back when I used to write for the "Blog-a-Log," I used to get, say, seventy comments about a blog, and half of them would be mean, and people would get in "flame wars" in the comment section. It never occurred to me that this was a good thing. In fact, whenever this happened, I assumed that I had done a bad job as a writer. My goal as a blogger, each time, was to write a really awesome column that everyone would like. My ideal comment section was a hundred happy comments about how much everyone had enjoyed what they had just read.

But it appears that this is a bad business model.


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One more thing from me and then I'm done. In college, I had an excellent professor, who taught Irish Literature. One day in class, all of us students were having a ferocious debate about "Waiting for Godot," or some such. The professor let the debate rage for a while, and then silenced us all, and told us who was right, and who was wrong. When a few people dared to question his wisdom, he silenced us all again with the following words: "I am your professor," he said, "because I know more than you do."

At the time, I thought that this was kind of rude of him, but now that I'm older, I have a different response. And my response is this: Yeah! Fucking right on! Because... (and this is so obvious that it took a long time to occur to me) ...because, after all, why the fuck would you want to take a class with a professor who wasn't smarter than you?

And that's my issue with Gawker's comment-driven theory of blogging. And this sounds egotistical of me, and maybe it is, but, well, anyway: I would hope that I'm a better writer than everyone who reads my blog. (Or at least that I'm equally good.) Because if I'm not a better writer than you, then why the fuck are you wasting your time reading this? If you're smarter and funnier than me, then go and write your own blog, and hopefully someday I'll find it and say to myself, "Wow, X is really way better than me."

Because if you're reading a blog just to bitch about it (as many Gawker readers seem to), or to get in a fight in the comment section, or just to leave a comment that proves your absolute snarky superiority, then why? Why bother? Reading something so that you can be mean or get in a fight: it's like the literary equivalent of slowing down on the highway to look at a car wreck. It's taking time to witness and absorb trauma. And I always try to avoid doing this, when I'm driving on the highway.

(Note: Blog-wise, of course, I break this rule all the time, and leave mean comments on blogs. But I always feel awful, a few hours after I've done it.)

A question: Democracy is a good idea, but is it a good idea for writing? Aren't we reading in order to learn, or to be amazed? And how can we do either if we're thinking the whole time that we're better than the writer?

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Okay, just one more thing: If you want to see my idea of an ideal blog, go to www.freedarko.com. It's a blog about basketball, so if you hate basketball, you may not give a shit about it. But I find it fascinating as an example of what blogs can be like, and what they often aren't. Freedarko features only long writing, seemingly random pictures, lots of philosophical discussions about weird topics... and yet people love it. And it gets tons of comments -- but, incredibly for a sports blog, the comments are almost never mean or angry. Instead the comments are universally polite, and even when they're argumentative, it's always a civilized argument that serves to further the debate.

That's an ideal blog to me: a blog that is relevant, current, witty and philosophical, and that inspires the commentators to have further interesting conversations with one another. Not a blog that creates an echo-chamber of "cruelty and viciousness." I realize that I'm stacking the deck in my favor here with this argument, but I don't mean to. Maybe my vision of a perfect blog isn't what appeals to a lot of people. People read different things for different reasons; you can be a smart guy or girl who likes to curl up with "Moby Dick," and yet still also want to leave bitchy comments about Paris Hilton. And perhaps most people's ideal blog is something that allows them to let off a little angry steam; something that inspires instinctive, furious debate.

I don't know. Anyway, that's me. I'm done here.

Thoughts? Comments?

1992 in the house once again! '92 was truly a banner year for shitty rap songs that I love, as evidenced by the song "Jump Around," by House of Pain, the world's only Irish rap group. This is a song which features the immortal lyrics, "I'll serve your ass like John McEnroe; If your girl steps up, I'm smacking the ho'."

Brilliant!

...And you probably didn't know this about me, but I was a hip-hop reporter for SPIN Magazine, back in the early 90s. When House of Pain's first album, Fine Malt Lyrics, "dropped" in 1992, my editor-in-chief immediately dispatched me to interview the band, and to report on this fascinating musical trend. ...And here's a transcript of that interview:



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...So there's that. Pointless sidenote thing: my sister Rommey is the world's number one "House of Pain" fan. This is an unintentional result of my giving her a House of Pain CD as a "joke gift" one Christmas. (The joke about the gift being that I was too poor to buy actual presents, and so had to wrap up my old CDs as hilarious "jokes.") ...Of course she ended up loving it, and I ended up hearing House of Pain for the next five years, whenever I returned home.

Anyway, shout out to Rommey, and shout out to HOP! And yeah, I have a sister named Rommey. She was born on a commune. I don't want to talk about this.

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Moving on. ...So below is a special bonus video, the only problem with it being that the video itself sucks. But I have to include this song. I just have to. If only for the lyric, "I rip shit and back flip like a Jedi." ...Well, and also for the line, "'Cause I can get real thick like a bowl of Malt-o-Meal." Has any other rapper compared himself to a bowl of breakfast cereal before? I think not!


House of Pain -- "Top o' the Morning To Ya"