Tales of Blogging Passion, Part IV.

You wouldn’t be reading this right now if you didn’t have some kind of a passion for blogging as a writer yourself or as a reader of the format. With that in mind, ask yourself this question: do you get more of a thrill out of writing your own site, posting and sparking a discussion in the community; or is your passion fired up from the discovery of other bloggers’ posts, of stumbling across a terrific insight or sardonic diatribe and then jumping into the conversation there?

Naturally, I fall into both schools of thought, but I probably spend more time searching out the work of other writers, delving deeply into their archives and comment forums, following links where they’ll go and losing myself far down the rabbit holes created by zealous and robust writers. News, criticism, satire – these are simple things to find in the bloguverse. What compels and inspires me are the ideas and creativity of true innovation.

I ventured out to read Pat Piper’s inventive, sometimes surreal, always uncommonly creative site Lazy Eye Theatre a little over a year ago after he’d stopped by here and left a comment for the first time. An advertising Creative Director, Piper has been blogging for about a year and a quarter, having created LET originally as an internal site for the benefit of his coworkers. In fact, his boss Brian is also a contributor on the site.

Ever since that initial introduction, LET has become a mainstay of my daily blogging ritual, an automatic stopover to see what’s been posted most recently. Even if I don’t have the time for a regular, full-on expedition through my RSS feeds, I’ll at least glance at LET to see what’s new. This is because even if Piper’s scribed a quick, off-the-cuff article, it’s still likely to be something that’ll send my recently-sipped coffee surging unexpectedly from my nose. Here’s a recent example:

I’m just going to vomit love. I’m going to drink a whole bottle of ipecac and I’m going to let it spill. I’m going to fill buckets and when those buckets are filled, I’m going to lift up the couch cushions and puke under there so that no one really notices. And then I’m going to open the medicine cabinets and puke love in there and then close the medicine cabinet. And then when someone opens the cabinet, there will be all this puke but they’ll say “oh, it’s love puke” so it will smell like cinnamon oatmeal cookies and they’ll want to eat the love puke but they won’t because it may be lovely but it’s still puke.

And here’s a rather kind-hearted piece from a meme that Piper initiated in which he imagines having dinner with my personal cinematic messiah Michael Bay:

Once [Michael Bay] showed up, I would act like I didn’t know him so I would have no choice but to let loose a couple of pitbulls that had been trained by Michael Vick. Of course Bay would try to put up a fight, but now he would probably be pretty weak. But he’s Michael Bay, man! He’s not a puss. He’s the illegitimate son of John Frankenheimer. So he would fight those pitbulls. He would throw punches and say things like “but I discovered Tea Leoni in Bad Boys” and “Pearl Harbor is more historically accurate than it seems at first.” But this would not affect the pitbulls because what Michael Bay doesn’t know is that his super high-end body wash that he used that morning isn’t super high-end body wash at all. It’s pitbull pheromones that I put in there that very morning.

And from there, that post goes south real quickly. Part of what I love about Piper’s writing at LET is that he’s not afraid to go to strange places and explore concepts from an angle you don’t expect. It’s always with a mission, however, and it always gets there when you least expect it. I’ll show you more about what I mean – including a bit about deviant puppets – after the jump.

What Piper writes is interesting. Why he feels the ways he does about movies is compelling. But the strength and passion of LET are found in how Piper crafts his posts and the unique and inspired conventions that he adopts to get his ideas across.

On his first blog-birthday last November, Piper reinvented LET for four days in a row with a different title, topic, writing style, and theme. The resulting week of posts – which ran the gamut from a pithy discussion of nutmeg all the way through a contentious exchange about puppet perversion – was every bit as chaotic as it was inspired.

LET also hosted the Bizarro Blog-a-thon in August of 2007, a film blogging free-for-all in which contributors were encouraged to run roughshod over conventional wisdom, reasonable criticism and good taste. I’m writing with no small degree of bias because I was a gleeful participant, but I have to tell you that the Bizarro event was the most entertaining and original ‘thon I’ve witnessed. Freed from the constraints of truth and logic, movie bloggers were able to explore the furthest reaches of invention and creativity – mangling, snapping and breaking all of the rules for the enjoyment of all. Cathartic and thrilling, the Bizarro ‘thon may become an annual event at LET, and I’ll be the first to sign up when it does.

These two examples go far in portraying Piper as a blogger who possesses not only the writing skills to keep his site fresh and relevant, but also the ability to pull his readers onto the runaway train of his imagination, and – as great bloggers should do – encourage them to make it their own. He reminds me of Bugs Bunny, tarted up in a dress and bright red lipstick, fooling Elmer Fudd into a smooch that will lead to the poor bastard’s head getting blown off yet again – because you know that each time Bugs is scheming, regardless of his costume or wacky plan, he’s got something much more devious on his mind. Bloggers who inspire or encourage comments are terrific but not uncommon; Piper’s writing engages his audience on a deeper, more participatory level, and it’s infectious as all hell. He told me,

“…I enjoy the creativity of [blogging]. It’s one thing to write a review, it’s another to wrap that review around an idea or a theme. That’s my gig and I’m happy to do it. Blogging keeps me creative and keeps me up on my skillz. That’s right, I said skillz. You know, for the kids.”

Blogging friendships are odd beasts, resembling “real” relationships in some ways, yet feeling also like phantoms at the same time. Even so, I’ve written to Piper both on and off our sites, and he’s always come across to me as a genuine presence, a creative and fun-loving guy who enjoys entertaining others and values the regular outlet that blogging provides for writing and reaching out to others of similar taste and interests.

For myself, I think I’ve keyed into his site partly because of how similar the two of us seem to be. We both make a living as writers (although he’s in advertising as opposed to marketing, so I’m guessing that he is more cool than me, definitely has a better expense account, and perhaps wears a goatee or a soul patch); we also both have young children and dogs named after food. Like me, Piper can be challenged by the demands of regular blogging, what with the need to spend time”making a living” and “paying the bills” and “loving his family” and other non-blogging but supposedly life-affirming endeavors. We also share an underwhelmed opinion of the late director Robert Altman, a feeling I only recently discovered that Piper had expressed in one of his earliest posts here.

If you haven’t already from the eight dozen or so times that I’ve linked to him in my blogging lifespan, head over to Lazy Eye Theatre today – and make sure you jump headfirst into the deep end.