The (Nauseating) World According to Perez


Limiting Pajiba to a weekly TV column and reviews of the three to five new movies released each week often leaves the site with a review vacuum between Tuesdays and Fridays, a period in which I probably get just as sick of looking at the same top entry as do the smattering of Pajiba devotees who haven’t discovered RSS (thanks, y’all — every time you hit refresh, a Pajiba critic gets to eat). And yet, when we reluctantly travel outside our comfort zone of movies and television, we either get an angry or an indifferent reaction. The latter response is the more disconcerting to much of the Pajiba staff, which feeds off of the backwoods vitriol delivered by the folks who randomly stumble onto the site because they think “Pajiba” is either a synonym for jihad or the newest craze in autoerotic gratification; indeed, it was a banner day around the water cooler when The TV Whore was called both an Aryan and a Jew.

Still, it’s nice to present to our readers a little something different occasionally, allowing us to add a photo to the front page that doesn’t feature Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Lindsey Lohan, or any of the other folks we display in our mostly misleading advertising campaigns, from whence most of you have come at one time or another. As publisher of the site, and thus master of the pursestrings, I take every penny we earn from the ads on these pages and pump them into advertising on the blogosphere’s best gossip sites, which include the lovely and hilarious Jenny, those crazy bitches at Go Fug Yourself, and our queer pals at A Socialite’s Life (who ignore our calls and thumb their noses at us, like all our favorite gay men do).

About a month ago, however, I thought I’d give a different website a shot at accepting our money, and resolved to litter Perez Hilton’s unattractively pink blog with a 150 x 200 square featuring an embarrassing photo of some inane celebrity you gossip whores and undersexed men seem to gravitate toward, with our trademark Pajiba! written boldly across the bottom in white, drop-shadowed bubble letters, per our usual Blogad order. And, as I usually do, I added Perez’s blog to my RSS feeder and checked it for a while just to get a general sense of what the guy was all about and what made his blog popular enough to warrant write ups on Page Six and guest spots on E! News.

... and now I know.

At the risk of offending any of you new readers who have steered your way to here from PerezHilton.com, it is with some reluctance that I report in Pajiba’s first and only blog review that Mr. Hilton — whose real name is the far less sexy Mario Lavandeira — makes my very short list for most reviled person in the blogosphere. I would’ve never imagined a blogger who could actually elicit the same reaction in me that a viewing of Eight Below or (gasp!) First Daughter could, and yet Hilton fits that description. He’s repugnant, phony, and petty — and those are his most redeeming qualities. Indeed, he is to gossip blogs what Matt Drudge is to political ones: a vainglorious, self-absorbed twit, who substitutes his own brand of obvious wordplay and “OMIGOD He’s soooo gay!” musings for the observational wit and tawdry intelligence of bloggers like the folks at Gawker Media and Idontlikeyouinthatway.

Listen: I’m not an expert on gossip blogs; Pajiba tried to enter that province once, about a year ago and for only about three weeks, before we learned just how difficult it is to churn out smart and/or amusing ruminations on the banality of our pop culture icons several times a day. But I do know this: The better gossip blogs out there are more than a collection of paparazzi photos, photoshopped arrows, and multiple exclamation points, which is what PerezHilton.com amounts to. Well, to be fair, Mario does like to insert himself into his own “reported” gossip, making himself not only the gossip whore but a pseudo-celebrity prostitute, which makes for a quite an acrobatic blow job(!).

Even before the Gawker/Perez flap (which only the more astute gossip blog readers would either know or care about), it had become obvious that Hilton had taken whatever small amount of dignity he’d acquired stringing exclamation points together and exchanged it for a quick jaunt as the blogging world’s most notorious starfucker. He has forgotten what separates bloggers like Jessica Morgan, Ana Marie Cox, Jenny, and Mark Lisanti from both the paparazzi and their tabloid fodder. Indeed, Perez Hilton has sold the blogging world out in his quest to become not only the slavering prisoner of his own lust for celebrity but an object of desire himself, only there is absolutely nothing to desire about Hilton’s fuck-me grin, ersatz fashion, and overweening visage. Indeed, a quick examination of his blog reveals the depths to which Mario has sunk: He can hardly add any photo in which he’s not standing alongside a celebrity conspicuously mugging for the camera; if he’s not in the picture, he etches glowing, self-absorbed Perezcentric messages onto them; and as a gay man, he can’t even respect his own goddamn sexual identity. A piece of advice, Perez: You’re not winning over legions of gay men by referring to Clay Aiken as your “friend in faggotry,” or Bryan Singer as a “homo chicken chaser.” Self-deprecation can be funny, but self-fulfilling stereotypes, not so much.

For sure, Perez does have his legion of fans, who must appreciate the ability to string together a sequence of typos and grammatical errors to form a series of mostly incoherent sentence fragments. I can only imagine his minions consist mostly of portly 16-year-old girls from small towns who don’t have any self-respecting gay men of their own to latch onto, so they choose Mario, who is the closest thing to “Will & Grace’s” Jack McFarland they can find on the net. But like Jack, Perez’s antics wore thin about five minutes before they even began, and no amount of grotesque parody or overexposure will make them any more amusing. Still, I do hope that his 15 minutes extend for as long as Pajiba is around; so long as Paul Walker keeps making movies, I’m going to need the sort of self-loathing, celebrity-hating inspiration that only Perez Hilton can provide. Thanks, Mario!

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I've never read Perez' site, but I know alot of you here love/hate him.

Oh and wtf? They changed the layout here and I can't seem to do a cut, so uhhhh here it is, long, boring and pictureless. Sorry.