So one of my myspace "friends", a director whose work I admire, has a podcast. I admire this person's work, and so I downloaded his podcast, thinking that the qualities that attract me to his work might also be present in his podcast.
O, God, it was the most boring thing I ever heard. Two guys sitting around shooting the shit. I suppose this might be entertaining if you were one of the people involved, but otherwise, who the hell wants to hear this? I guess this is the problem with all the power that the internet puts in the hands of individual users. Any one of us is free to beam our most mundane thoughts around the globe.
(Aside--I'm not oblivious to the irony here. I can't sell my cranky opinions about pop culture, so I give them away here. But I get 60 or 70 hits a day, only about 50 of which are people on a misguided hunt for nude pix of fat female celebrities.)
And, I mean, it's fine if you don't want to listen to somebody's podcast or read their blog or whatever, but who's going to sort out the worthwhile from the crap? Hell, there was actually some worthwhile stuff in this podcast--like when they discussed what they thought of Grindhouse. Even though they mistakenly liked the Quentin Tarantino half of the movie, at least this is a director I like talking about movies. When he started talking about how much he paid for his dog, well, let's just say that was significantly less interesting. But absent any kind of editor, who's gonna tell people what to cut in their blogs or podcast or whatever?
I'm being coy about the name of the director (hint--he appears in many of his movies as a character who rarely speaks and spends all his time with a tall thin guy with logorrhea. Also, his first movie was a black and white comedy about two guys who work in stores in New Jersey.) because I know from reading his myspace blog that he is a relentless auto-googler. I am too, but I thought someone with that much more popular success than I've had would not be interested in what random people are saying about him on the internet. But apparently he is. And he's not the only one. Lisa Yee stopped by with a comment when I mentioned her book Millicent Min, Girl Genius. (Hi Lisa! We finished it! It was great! Can't wait to read Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time!) And of course I look for every word anybody writes that has anything to do with me, and I suspect lots of other authors and musicians and artists of all stripes do too, because I think we're all fundamentally kind of insecure.
So should this affect what I, or anybody else writes about their work? I've always been happy making nasty comments about other people's work because I thought they wouldn't ever see it and would therefore not get their feelings hurt. (Except that Frank McCourt. I was hoping against hope that he'd raise my profile by going after me after I wrote a review in the Boston Globe in which I said that Teacher Man sucked total ass. Frank, if you're auto googling, Teacher Man is a complete pile of doodoo. And yes, I am jealous that it outsold my own teaching memoir, Losing My Faculties, by probably ten to one. But this doesn't change the fact that your book sucks.). But now, knowing that so many people are tuning in at all times to see what's being said about them, do I have an obligation to be kind? Does anybody? I mean, it's fun to read stuff where people are being nasty and snarky. Unless you're the one someone's being snarky about.
Not sure what conclusion I'm leading to here, and I have no editor to tell me that I have to have an ending before I publish it.
