Introducing a new blog feature

The most compelling blogs seem to manage a perfect balance of immediacy, regularity, and self-exposure. New York Hack and Thirty-Year-Old Secretary, two that I followed closely and are both now on indefinite hiatus, were also highly specialized, which I found appealing. These offered windows onto particular professions, a cab driver and a secretary. The latter was a fictionalized account, but a faithful and emotionally resonant rendering nonetheless. Also, I know both the writers, so I admit to personal attachment. But I don’t know the gentleman who chronicled his cocaine usage on a blog and quite handily fed my own voyeuristic and prurient appetites. I was an avid reader of his exploits until that all came to an abrupt halt when he “went off the air” one day in 2006.

The blogs I mention were also excellent at sustaining the diaristic voice. They were funny, rueful, idiosyncratic, and intimate. My instinct, though, is to rein in the confessional tendency. Of course, there’s some degree of self-protection there, but I think it’s also about trying to conserve that kind of energy for my fiction. It’s possible, though, that’s the wrong impulse. Maybe that voice isn’t a finite resource and maybe more simply is more. (For a discussion of literary style and the internet, see Caleb Crain’s incisive take on the subject. )

But also, I like getting paid for writing. So there’s that. The other night at IFC I saw Isabella Rossellini introduce her new Green Porno Series along with her father’s film, The Flowers of St. Francis (which weirdly made me think of the Teletubbies, but that’s another post). She talked about distributing content online and the dilemma of how to get any money from the whole thing and never has the phrase “business model” been sexier.

But I’m straying here.

Recently I started to wonder if there was a way I could extract some organizing principle from my aimless YouTube surfing and inflict a small bit of order or at least regularity on Kill Fee. Imposing constraints—writing only about your work or only about your drug habit—does promise to yield interesting results, such as behind-the-scenes coverage of the taxi line at JFK and the pros and cons of carrying your coke in a vial vs. in a baggie. But there’s a recession; I can’t afford a ravenous drug habit right now. And writing about my line of work seems like a deadly path as it involves teaching writing, editing writing, or just simply writing. That said, much of what ends up on Kill Fee has been what I think of as the effluvia of my writing, research, and random preoccupations.

I’m intrigued by my friend John’s approach to his blog, the mildly named Help! My Pussy Is Literally on Fire. John has designated several “beats” for himself and they include: Carol Channing, news stories about people in the nude, Patti LuPone, Peaches Geldof, and wearing a wig. (I like to imagine unsuspecting porn seekers innocently plugging some x-rated terms into search engines and ending up with the totally deranged clip of Joe Franklin interviewing “Carol Channing” and her son “Carl.”)

All this is an extremely long way of saying that recently I detected a beat of sorts in my more desultory web browsing: random clips of John Cassavetes. And so without further digression, I present “Fridays with John.”

In today’s installment John endures an interview with a French journalist while driving through the Hollywood Hills and contemplates a musical version of “Crime and Punishment.” I hope you enjoy.