Fortune Favors The Bold

spiers:

Thing is, I don’t find Lodwick very weird at all. He has a definable eccentricity that, in my opinion, is consciously cultivated. And isn’t particularly original.  Shaving your head, making odd performance art videos of yourself, authoring lots of personal statements on the Internet about identity, choosing to write about and document your personal relationships as if you’re part of a reality show…I mean, you can’t walk three steps down Metropolitan Avenue without tripping over someone who’s doing exactly the same stuff. If that’s weirdness, there’s a creepy conformity to it. Jakob’s “weirdness” seems to manifest itself in exactly the same way it does for a lot of young, white, upper-middle class creative types in New York.  And it’s not a weirdness I find interesting.

I think what people find irritating about Jakob isn’t his supposed weirdness, it’s his seemingly endless appetite for attention and the look-at-me tone of his projects, all of which are Entirely About Jakob. It’s just another side of the Julia Allison coin. A little more diverse in its breadth, maybe, but more similar than different.

Very well thought.

My attitude on browsing his site today was, “Well, I wouldn’t pay a nickel for this right now as entertainment, but keep working on it.” In some ways, I missed the point, and made the viewing experience about my own need for satiation. (Intellectual? Artistic? Humorous? Sexual?) In other ways, some which relate to what Elizabeth just said, I gave it far too much credit.

In general, maybe my distaste context here is that he’s a smartypants rich boy with obnoxious hobbies, and I find nothing to admire in that but everything to loathe. It is one of my unreasonable tendencies. I should drop that bias before I possibly end up having offspring who are just like him.