Thursday, September 25, 2008

Dirty Tricks

There are blogs I read whose authors inspire me, whose words throb with meaning, whose nuanced and elegant writings resonate with me on a cerebral-emotional level so that I'm rendered thoughtful, introspective, moved.

This is not one of those blogs. It's scattered, rambling, clumsy, rude, vulgar, and visceral.

And I love it.

The design leaves a lot to be desired. There's no functionality besides the archives, and when you go to read them you're given each month's posts on one page, which gets super long. The font jumps from light blue to dark blue to red (Christ, my eyes) to pink to holy fuck it's purple, which I can't even read. Give us a break, please: dark text on a light background, or my eyes will fall out of my freaking head. Or, if you must stay with a dark background, use a more reader-friendly text color in a larger font.

I love the header image, but it's ginormous and requires extensive scrolling. The reading space is way too narrow -- too narrow is better than too wide (mostly, except in terms of penises and TV screens), but this makes for awkward reading. Set up an about page; I hate diving right in and trying to figure someone out from the backlog of archives. Give us a cast of characters, a few sentences about you, something to go on.

Now, to the writing. There are some rambly, boring, and pointless posts. There's a lot of weekend wrap-up, I did this then this. But you know what? I don't really give a good god damn because Lauren is raucous and inappropriate and unfailingly, brutally honest. I mean, naked in a wheel barrow? How can I not love that? She drinks a lot and posts pictures of her butt and has a funny kid. She tells interesting and naughty stories, if not particularly well written. She's fucked 80s rock stars, and I'm really ashamed by how impressed I am.

Lauren is really good with a one (or two) liner: "So I let down God and a bunch of babies so that I could have a one night stand. Nice work." And she says things like, "Ryan Reynolds... I would kill him, stuff him and hang him on my wall just to be able to fuck him for the rest of my life" which I can totally relate to. She's kind of fascinating, really, and there is no shortage of twisted little walks down memory lane. Her writing is unapologetic, balls to the wall, this is me, this is real, and I don't really give a damn what you think about it. It's refreshing and dirty at the same time.

What I really love about this blog is that there's no agenda, there's no front, there's no tidy little cubby hole you can shove her in -- it's just, flat out, the Dirty Pirate Hooker, with all her mishaps and narcissism (which is oddly endearing) and boozing and mothering her little punk and forgetting her underwear and making the best of things. There's a real life happening here, and it's not spiffed up and polished and twisted into a crowd-pleasing family friendly bit of entertainment. Lauren is completely original and an intriguing individual, and I'm adding her to my reader right now.

1 comments:

Bimbo Baggins said...

Seriously, thank you so much for my awesome fucking review.

I don't know how to make some of the changes you suggested, but I'll figure it out.