When Chester and I sat down at a table by the dart boards in a dive bar in Houston to write the first Culture Warrior post a year ago, a girl, a stunningly beautiful girl I dated for a couple weeks in high school, happened to be hanging out there too. She took notice of us probably because we were the only dudes in the place lit up by a computer screen during happy hour. We played it cool. “You mean, you don’t bring your computer out to bars,” we asked her coyly, adding, like we’d just thought of it, “when you do out, what do you do?” She laughed, walked away, a beer in each hand, and sat down at a table full of boys.

What we were trying to do was write the kind of site we’d like to read, something that had all the right ideas about all the different shit we like: music, politics, art, sex and whatever, done in such a way all the cool kids would be into it. Naively, we also thought this might be a prosperous adventure as well. Three hundred and sixty-eight days later we find that while this certainly has been emotionally prosperous, we have not made a penny. As far as the cool kids go, yeah, we’ve made an impression on one or two, and regular posts or no, we get fairly consistent traffic . Chester picked up a gig at Houstonist and I picked one up at Wonkette and may or may not soon be editing another such site for a pittance.

The first half of the year was just ramping up, pretty much. Eventually, a few people began paying attention and there were three notable ‘events’ Culture Warrior events, all over the summer. The first was when I said something about John Roberts being dead when, in fact, he was not. This went unnoticed by most of the Universe, but we became target du jour of the conservative wind machine for a couple days. Former prostitute Jessica Cutler drove a lot of traffic to the site a month or so later when she pointed out that I clearly had no idea where the Waldorf Astoria was located when I wrote a post making fun of her*. The third came shortly after moving to New York, when some friends back in DC became in embroiled in Assgate, Karl Rove’s final vindictive act while on the public payroll.

Many lessons have been learned about writing this kind of site in the first year. Since this thing could really have gone any way, we think, all in, this has been a pretty good year for us. Since we also believe in openness and the free-low of ideas, information, and not paying for music, etc, we’re going to share some of the lessons we’ve learned that will make our second year so much better than the first, right after the jump.

Special Lessons from the Jessica Cutler Incident:

• There is only one Waldorf Astoria and it’s in Manhattan.
• People often read the mean things we say about them, so it’s best if they are somewhat factually correct, or at least spelled correctly.
• It’s not very nice to hit girl.

Special Lessons about blogs written by crazy people on the right:

• When making the point you are a typical craven, hypocritical liberal for wishing death on a sitting member of the Supreme Court (whether this is actually what occured or not), it doesn’t make a difference what other positions you have espoused or other political leaders you have wished death upon. “This just goes to show that the left,” blah blah blah.
• These people are basically on hair-trigger alert and they’ll take pretty much any bait. We will demonstrate.
• No matter what crazy thing you say about them, they still appreciate being linked in the sidebar.
• Jill Stanek made a disturbing sex tape with Saddam Hussein’s sons.
• Almost anything moderately funny written about Michelle Malkin gets traffic from her site. This is because she’s a huge fan of what we do.

Lessons from the Assgate incident:

Finally, perhaps the most important lesson learned from my the first year of Culture Warrior is that writing a blog at a bar will never get anybody laid, ever. And that’s just God’s honest truth. Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for such a stupid year, America. We’re thankful to have so much to look forward to.

Featured Song: “This Will Be Our Year” by The Zombies


DOWNLOAD MP3

Posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 7:28 pm in Culture Wars. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.