Being WRONG on the Internet
I enjoyed the video at the bottom of this page, although it’s a little long for most internet attention spans. In it filmmaker Kevin Smith, of Clerks, Dogma and Chasing Amy fame, to name but a few, talks about how obsessively he used to read all his internet reviews, right down to the comments. This is quite rare, or at least it was until recently, because most people still tended to treat internet criticism as a distant and very poor relation to its more salubrious and established cousins.
The problem with taking it seriously is of course, well, where do you stop? It’s like being able to overhear every last pub conversation about your work that has ever taken place. Not one single human being talks complete, considered sense all of the time and before you even get into whether or not you want to bother agreeing with someone or not just imagine how many times you yourself just don’t quite express yourself properly. Instead of disappearing into the air, being re-stated slightly better, or just mitigated with a shrug of the shoulders this stuff now sits there in black and white for all eternity, staring you down on the screen.
The Soft Pack – Right and Wrong (How I wish these guys were still called The Muslims.)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Then there’s whether or not you really want to bother. As he sort of mentions, would you ever want to hear every last conversation about you which was had by anyone who’d ever met you, no matter how brief? Christ, the number of people out there saying that I, for example, am a bit of a dick would be enormous. Face it, most people don’t like you that much. Think how many people you like, then subtract it from the five or six billion people in the world. Think about how many bands, or films, you like and then subtract that from the total number of bands or films which have ever existed.
For some reason, because things are in black and white, including both the comments and the posts on this site, people seem to vest them with more importance than they merit, whereas they are the musical equivalent of a pub conversation. The table might be a little bigger for those sites with a large audience, but how many of us would your average band or fan even bother to disagree with if they overhead us publically not liking their band in a bar somewhere? Probably very few. I know the internet has made these conversations much more public than they used to be, but they are still just ordinary conversations.
Kevin Smith:
i love you
or even
i heart you
I have to say that Kevin Smith comes across as one of the most lucid and intelligent men in Hollywood. If you ever have a few hours to piss away on the internet look for his interview where he almost gets the job writing and directing superman.
talking sense is a dangerous sport….i avoid it at all possible cost
toad loving
Apart from me.
Tom, I think it’s: I <3 U
Yes Dylan, everyone but you. If only I could find any evidence of you talking bollocks. Gosh, I wish I knew where to look…
Actually, that looks like a bottom. I bum U, Chutters.
Dylan’s words are gospel to me….he is my guiding light and inspiration…..i’ll doubt you’ll find any evidence of him talking gash!
Shite!!!
groping my bum is ok…..anything else is off the me-n-u
Is that an open invitation to any passing internet pervert, or just me?
good interview.
anyone really……
…can i just say that the actual post is spot, and i really enjoyed the Kevin Smith video.
my word, everyone reads XKCD now…
It’s fucking ace, why should we not be reading it? Damn you!
Have we heard the (new album) news, ‘Wavers’?:
http://www.thewavepictures.com/
because now everyone’s reading it I don’t feel so special. It’s not my little secret anymore… how dare he be successful! How very dare he!
because now everyone’s reading it I don’t feel so special. It’s not my little secret anymore…
Funnily enough, that’s precisely how Matthew feels about groping Chutters’ arse.
nice ‘UK’ tour That the Wave Pictures are doing….
my arse is lovely…..
Wasn’t there a Father Ted episode/Neil Hannon song called ‘My Lovely Arse’?
It was My Lovely Horse. I think.
But if you mis-pronounce horse it sounds like arse.
And vice versa.
Kevin Smith makes terrible films.
Alessi – now Alessi’s Ark – sings a song called The Horse which sounds, however much you know it’s not right, like The Whores when she sings it live.
Kevin Smith makes *some* terrible films, Bart. And some good ones.
WRONG.
Mallrats.
And apparently Clerks was good.
And Dogma was quite good.
Mallrats is a terrible film.
Dogma is pretty bad.
Clerks, admittedly, has some lo-fi charm. But it is not a great movie. And is very over-rated.
All his films normally have one or two funny lines or ideas, but not enough to fill the running time. Chasing Amy is the only one of his I think holds together as a film.
But thats just me. I’m as anal about films as I am with music.
I like Chasing Amy too, although I find myself hating Ben Affleck a little too much to enjoy it.
I enjoyed Mallrats, although I’ll happily admit to not being that picky about movies.
Being as we’re talking about it, let’s have a link to My Lovely Arse from Father Ted, shall we?