The Scary Knife Rites of an Apostate Fameball
Hipster millionaire Jakob Lodwick can't stop seeking web attention. Yet even the dim lights of internet semi-fame drive him up the wall. So he's left to stab in frustration, in the dark.
The fired Vimeo founder's latest posting to his video-sharing site is, frankly, frightening. It's also his first in three months.
The comeback, a lipdub of Little Boots' "Meddle," seems innocent enough if you don't watch it closely and completely. "Yay!" wrote one commenter. "You're back"
But about halfway into the video, Lodwick inexplicably swings a knife, which he keeps somewhere off camera. It's only later that Lodwick starts making angry punching motions and using psycho eyes to underline the lyric "you don't know what she hides."
This outburst comes from an on-again-off-again blogger as famous for his emotional volatility as for his prolific oversharing. Lately, his behavior has turned disconcertingly bizarre.
Last summer Lodwick produced a creepy psychedelic video, looking high and nearly catatonic. In January, he turned up at a Web industry networking event shirtless, sweating and flailing his arms. March's internet sex picture seemed an almost pedestrian way of acting out in comparison.
But now there's the knife video. The blade comes out quickly in the excerpt above. A frenetic, apparently naked Lodwick ducks in and out of an enveloping darkness. He's a tortured internet pioneer looking like he's ventured all the way into a new jungle, straight to the heart of dot-com celebrity darkness. He's Colonel Kurtz, and he's seen horrors.
Or maybe Colonel Kurtz was nuts to begin with and just found a way to make us all watch. We probably won't know whether there's anything to learn from the manifest pain of the world's most tortured millionaire until it's too late.