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Well, after almost 4 months of this site being up, aweekofkindness.com is finally the number one Google result for the phrase “A Week of Kindness.” This is definitely a good thing, unless you are a Dada scholar, or someone who’s actually trying to start a National-Week-Of-Kindness-kind-of-thing thing.
More interestingly, however, A Week of Kindness is also now the number one Google result for the phrase “Pick Withers.”
Yes, that’s right, somehow I have made the most popular Pick Withers site on the Internet. Thanks to everyone who made these two things possible.
Also, I’d like to share a snippet of conversation I had with Stefan from Elephant Larry at a Sketchfest after-party this past weekend.
Me: Why is every sketch comedian I’ve met tonight so damn nice?
Stefan: We have to be, because we’ve chosen an art form that nobody likes.
Posted by Nate Kushner at 02:35 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Last week’s Tony Awards got me to thinking: which award is lamer, the Tony or the Grammy? In this writer’s opinion, there’s no contest.
It angers me slightly that anything thrown onto a live stage is endowed with an instant artistic vindication. The “Vagina Monologues,” for instance, is seen as a valiant feminine-empowering cry to society, when, in reality, the show is a sprawling, unfunny, uninteresting mess, and any person who finds it empowering probably doesn’t deserve to be empowered. The task of the Tonys is to reward one of the perhaps seven Broadway musicals that are produced in a year as the best, though in reality, the most impressive element of Broadway remains its magical ability to, say, garner critical respect for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” or to make the songs of Abba even gayer. Save the sitcom, the Broadway musical is the only contemporary art form that makes no effort to improve or progress beyond its formulaic foundation, and any attempts to do so get obliterated like Gallagher melons on the Berlin Wall. In 1989. You know what I meant. On the other hand, though, there have been a multitude of extremely deserving straight plays which have been awarded Tonys, plus there have been plenty of good musicals over the years, so, as pissed off as I was to sit through the 2005 Tonys (though “A Light in the Piazza won “Best Lighting,” and that’s funny) there is no doubt in my mind that the Grammies remain far and away the most vomit-inducing yearly award spectacle.
First off, the Grammy Award is valueless. In 2005, there were 107 Grammy Awards and 535 nominations dished out. How many fucking songs could possibly get written in a year? Maybe, like, two hundred? By those numbers, I’ve concluded that any song that anyone writes in a given year has a 268% chance of getting at least nominated for a Grammy, and that percentage is considerably higher for corpses, women who play the piano (Zowee!), and for bands who consider the sound of a dead horse being beaten to be a viable rhythmic backbone.
If you live in a lead-lined cave and somehow missed the 2005 Grammies, I’ll bring you up to speed, even though I missed them too and have seen no evidence they occurred. For starters, Bill Miller took home the coveted “Best Native American Album” for his magnum opus “Cedar Dream Songs,” but, while Billy’s “Cedar Dream” came true, his “Dream of an End to Reservation Alcoholism” remains in an Axl-Rose-esque stasis of incompletion. “Best Hawaiian Music Album” went to “Slack Key Guitar Volume 2,” which is not a compact disc but rather an actual pineapple, though it was deemed to be more a pineapple than the four other nominees in the characteristically stacked Hawaiian category. Brave Combo scored “Best Polka album,” Jack Renner grabbed “Best Engineered Album, Classical” and Tom Chapin pulled off the upset to take “Best Spoken Word Album for Children,” and you know I’m not making these up, because none of them involve 1920s moustaches. To save time, no speeches are allowed at the Grammies, and the statues are given out by an elderly ballgame peanut vendor who strolls down the aisles and tosses out awards and peanuts as the winners are announced.
The greater argument against the Grammy is its flagrant irrelevance, evidenced annually by how poorly the awards reflect significant modern music. In addition to defendable wins by Outkast and Lauryn Hill, Grammy’s “Album of the Year” winners since 1990 include Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Santana, Steely Dan, a bunch of dudes playing bluegrass, and, in 2005, Ray Charles. Where should I start? Since its 1992 Grammy win, “Clapton Unplugged” has collected more dust than “The Joshua Tree” and “Best of the Doors” combined. Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature” isn’t ballsy enough to function as a paperweight, and that’s from a band named after a dildo (no joke) which was named after me (joke). Now it’s Ray Charles, a man who hasn’t written a song that’s not about Pepsi in 25 years, appearing as a blue Jedi ghost to beat nominees Kanye West and Greenday for “Best Album,” though Greenday still took “Best Impersonation of The Clash Impersonating Greenday.” Etta James won a Grammy this year, she’s 67. Herbie Hancock won one. Henry fucking Mancini won one, and he’s been dead since 1994. Zach Braff won one for the “Garden State” soundtrack - I’ve made mix cds with Nick Drake on them, where’s my fucking award? The Grammy is nothing more than a meaningless ego-perpetuated trinket that reminds us year after year that not everything worth doing is worth rewarding.
Now that’s a rant. Think I got a shot at the Criticism Pulitzer?
Posted by Dan Hopper at 07:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
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