Between the Toilet Wall and the Love Letter
Somewhere on the internet right now, a guy is publishing his fourth theory this week about the media conspiracy behind minimum-wage policy, and he has had nine visitors in the past month, all of them lost. This version of the internet has always existed and probably always will. It is not the version I’m interested in.
The version I’m interested in is made of genuine weirdos doing something they actually care about. Fashion blogs and photo blogs and life-blogs that feel like letters addressed to no one and everyone simultaneously. Personal websites that have a distinct face, a personality that coheres across posts in a way that no algorithm designed it to. That world is alive right now, in 2010, and worth paying attention to before it gets flattened into something more monetizable.
On the German side: Jana at Bekleidet, who has approximately a thousand facial expressions and deploys all of them; Abgeschirmt for the finest cocky hipster content currently available; LookyLooky, where three girls are making the fashion world nervous in their own specific way; Zephyr’s Darth Vader’s Diary, which is as much about photography and everything else as it is about clothes; Davaj!, where Henri and Johanna are cheerfully traumatizing their surroundings; the fashionable recklessness of Knalleffekt; lil.bit; the graceful professionalism of pale.; Sandra’s Heavensdarling; Alina at Goldmädchen; Veronika’s Popcorn Paranoia; Amélie’s There’s No Sex In Your Violence; and the sharp, curtain-peeling quality of Shoupett.
In English: the bleak modernity of Phenomena; .tiff, which is the kind of pixel blog you fall slightly in love with; the large-format desolation of Dandy Gum; Sara’s Have Love Will Travel; the rightful supremacy documented at Tahti Syrjala; a genuinely warm photo blog from Australia at Ppppapertissue; Sim Wise; the art-and-more world of The DuckDuck Collective; Va$htie, doing something distinct and fragile in the twenty-first century; Barney at A Lion Hearted Boy; and Lou at Louby’s Wardrobe, who has strong and apparently non-negotiable opinions about hairdressers.
Some of these will fold under the weight of life—better weather outside, family obligations, the creeping sense that nobody’s reading. Some will become something real. Worth watching either way.