For her day job, sex columnist/Gawker punching bag/celebrity commentator Julia Allison goes on cable news shows and assesses the behavior of people like Britney Spears by offering pithy diagnoses along the lines of, “Who needs a boyfriend when you’ve got the paps?” She — or someone — records those segments by pointing a camera at the television, then uploads the recordings to Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by Jakob Lodwick, who happens to be Allison’s sometime boyfriend. A few weeks ago, Lodwick and Allison broke up and then got back together — both via blog post. Since their reconciliation, Allison has been using the same Vimeo account to display (generally PG-rated) videos of the couple…being a couple.

I pretty much missed the boat on Allison’s rise to Internet infamy, and I was content with that. But then, last week, I saw this:

Jake & Julia: Monday evening communication breakdown from Julia Allison on Vimeo. Read more of this story

TitleThis, which used to be called Name That Painting, is a weekly series starring painter Mark Kostabi that appears on both NYC cable access and Blip.TV. Described on Kostabi’s Web site as a game show in which “art critics and other celebrities compete to title [Kostabi's] paintings for cash prizes,” TitleThis essentially reduces both art packaging and art criticism — and all of the lofty implications inherent to both — to the level of The Gong Show. It’s extremely inside baseball, but it’s got a cheeky, tacky, undergraduate-art-seminar-directed-by-Michel Gondry vibe to it that I like a lot.

Gondry is actually one of the recurring guests on the show, which is set up as a three-way dialogue between Kostabi (who is sometimes live in the studio and sometimes appears via live video feed from Rome), a panel of three “expert” judges, and a peanut gallery of less-exalted art world figures. The three judges have first crack at naming each painting. Kostabi vets their ideas, then asks the panel to vote yay or nay on his favorites. If the panel turns down all of the judges’ suggestions, individual panel members can then shout out their own ideas for voting. The author of the winning title gets a small cash prize, usually $20 or $50, which is handed out by Kostabi’s niece, a young brunette who convincingly sashays like Vanna White.

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Brenda Dickson used to be legitimately semi-famous. A former beauty queen, she played the role of Jill Abbott on the daytime soap The Young and the Restless for over a decade. In 1987, after she was, according to IMDb, “fired” from Y&R, Dickson self-produced a video infomercial called Welcome to My Home. In it, the soap star strikes various poses in various baroque evening gowns whilst standing in various corners of her opulent mansion. Then, “through the magic of Hollywood,” Dickson invites the viewer to “teleport into my closets” for lessons on “style, which is as important in your life as your look.”

Twenty years later, in January of this year, this improbably insane slice of celebrity self-indulgence made it to YouTube, where it has since, predictably, become fodder for a number of takeoffs and parodies. Now Brenda Dickson is internet famous, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

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A few months ago, Jackson West brought you a profile of a video producer who had recently been hired by Gawker Media to “produce, shoot and edit original clips” for the company’s snarky lifestyle blogs. I don’t know how that’s going; I haven’t seen an in-house shot video clip on any of the Gawker blogs that I read in a while. The only original video content that I regularly watch on a Gawker blog is the The Lady Bunch, a talk-show clip-show of sorts that’s been appearing weekly on Jezebel since the day the blog launched in May.

I suppose this is where I should note that The Lady Bunch is the only thing that has me regularly visiting Jezebel. The rest of the site is … well … I guess this kind of thing is someone’s idea of “what women want”, but my guess is that it’s actually what straight, gadget-and porn-loving dudes fantasize about women wanting. The Lady Bunch, meanwhile, actually offers a semi-cogent critique of the commercial products that are marketed to women in the guise of (and in lieu of) a legitimate femme-centric popular culture. Thereby, in a single feature, fulfilling what I imagine was the ostensible goal of the site in the first place.

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BensonLover99 is a YouTube user dedicated to the prolific production of videos in tribute to Olivia Benson, the sex crimes detective played on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit by Mariska Hargitay. In just the past week, BensonLover (who, according to her YouTube profile, is a 16-year-old girl named Erika whose passion for dance “pretty much takes up my entire life”) has posted seven Benson-centric clips, each describing the character’s personal history and declining spirit from a different angle.

Seen as a unit, an all-Benson all the time spin-off, some of BensonLover99’s “episodes” are more successful than others. Olivia and Her Mother pulls most of its power and narrative from its soundtrack, a Reba McEntire/Kelly Clarkson duet of Clarkson’s “Because of You”. It’s the perfect song choice for the subject, and in picking images to match the song lyrics, BensonLover proves herself to be a smart editor with a feel for irony. In all of her clips, BensonLover seems to be drawing footage from a wide range of episodes culled from a variety of broadcast sources. But in this case she doesn’t have a lot to work with — the character of Olivia’s mother only actually appeared on screen in a single episode — so her determination to tell this part of the story despite a lack of material shows a remarkable dedication to the character.

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When I first become aware of a funny YouTube clip that’s been making the rounds, I rarely watch it more than once, but I can’t stop watching this Filipino-prisoners-doing-”Thriller” thing. Obviously, I’m not the only one–as of Sunday morning, the clip has been viewed over 553,000 times, which means it’s been seen about 550,000 times since I discovered it via Boing Boing on Friday. What makes a video like this so sticky, and why am I, a cynic who is usually fairly resistant to the lure of globalism kitsch, totally helpless in the face of its charms?

I think first we have to throw Michael Jackson out of the equation. I’m not going to say that the well for Michael Jackson jokes has completely, conclusively dried up, but I do think Keith Olbermann’s use of puppet reenactments during Jackson’s child molestation trial brought the idea of Jacko-as-walking-joke full circle.

This video isn’t funny because the inmates are emulating Michael Jackson specifically (though some of their choreography is certainly lifted straight from John Landis’ epic music video, the inmate coded as the protagonist also seems to throw in some moves of his own), and even if they were, it’s probable that Jackson’s products have the ability to move through other cultures free of the baggage of his personal problems.

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The West Side, a new series produced by Zachary Lieberman and Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo, is a western set in an alternate-universe version of contemporary New York, impressively shot on a shoe string in real NYC locations. The city (known colloquially within the first episode as The Side) is re-envisioned as a wasteland, every block heavily spotted with graffiti and rubble. Men in overcoats and neckerchiefs silently eye one another in recognition, hands always ready to reach for a holster.

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If you made it to Pixelodeon a couple of weeks back, you might have seen Rob Parrish’s Tapes of My Father. Composed entirely of found, public domain footage set to voice over, Tapes purports to be a son’s presentation of recently unearthed videos made by his late father, a public access TV producer who secretly recorded his innermost thoughts over stock footage reels. On Parrish’s Blip.TV page, the clip is listed as the 33rd episode of his fascinating and addictive weekly series Next to Heaven, but to me it seems like a more logical entry point for the series as a whole than any of the 32 episodes that precede it.

The intro to Tapes is played dead straight. When the son says something like, “Releasing dad’s secret videos in this film is part of the healing process for me,” even though it plays over footage branded “Public Access Producer’s Association” (or, “P.A.P.A”), it’s still possible that this could be a real, non-ironic tribute from a real son to his real dad–there certainly are enough of them on YouTube. But the second we flip over to “dad’s footage”, it’s clear that Parrish isn’t emulating or even spoofing the existing family tribute genre. He’s much more interested in a different genre: the comedy of personal misery.

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Last night, I overheard my boyfriend and a friend bitching about how physical copies of VICE Magazine have become increasingly hard to find. Whereas pretty much every other cultural niche magazine is on deathwatch, record and skate shops here in New York can’t keep VICE in stock. I thought, “Well, yeah.”

VBS.TV has been around for almost five months, and already the video portal has completely revitalized the aging VICE empire. It almost amazes me that VICE even bothers to continue to put out a print edition, when it’s already successfully transferred everything about its brand that anyone ever cared about to its online video site. If aliens were to take over the planet tomorrow and outlaw the printed press, VICE would just shrug their shoulders and maybe buy another crate of Xactis. Is there any other magazine born in the 20th century that could say that?

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