General "Award Stuff" with a catchy title.
So lets stipulate that it’s a fine day. A fine, fine day.
Crisp and bright and the trees are all giving me the Autumnal Foliage Top-Shelf Trollop yoo-hoo and competing for my eye’s business by breaking out and flaunting their most garish bustierres and petticoats before winter forces them to close up shop.
And I want to be here. I enjoy it. So to maximize my enjoyment of the day I have decided to take all this gaudy wonderfulness in while zooming down the lakefront on my kick-ass Sear’s
Spider bike.
Yeah baby.
The banana-seat glitters.
The studly chrome “SpineStabber 5000” back-rest (Guaranteed to snap right off and pierce a kidney at the slightest pressure) has been freshly chamoissed.
I have even eschewed my Official Orgy Lair
headgear
for a more peripheral-vision-friendly
helmet.
Faraway traffic noises, shrieking pedestrians and intermittent small arms fire Doppler lazily by, as the sun stabs buttery light at everything through every crack in the canopy.
In other words, I’m having a good old time.
Rolling goofily along, gawking at whatever interests me, singing or not as it suits me, when quite suddenly I’m surrounded by 6-7 other cyclists.
Some are recumbent with the sweetest little bong-holder you’ve ever seen.
Some are towing kids.
Some are virtually polymer/composite Greyhounds; light and sleek, created out of carbon monofilment, space-shuttle heat tiles and sparkles, and moving without displacing a whisper of air.
One -- stenciled with camo from stem to stern – has a severe grin painted on its front fender
And then I am told by disembodied voices that, quite unbeknownst to me, I am in competition with these people.
WTF?
Some of these other cyclists I know. Some I know of. Some I’ve never heard of. But now my perfectly lovely afternoon in the park has become a fucking race, with winners and second placers and losers and lobbying and trading and stakes and strategies.
And I am forced yet again to ask myself that most primal of all questions:
“So this helps me get laid how exactly?”
And having looked it all over from every angle and determining that the answer is “Not one little bit”, well, I’m having none of it.
Nope, nope, nope.
So, an awards-twofer.
First, the “Weblog Awards”
I am flattered and grateful that people nominated this blog, have voted for it, have asked others to vote for it, every bit as much as I am flattered and grateful that people read what I write and take the time to comment in-depth, or send kind and wise remarks my way.
Also astonished – from my end of the telescope it is a weird thing to pound out a ”WTF?!” in the minutes I find between obligations, and then wash back ashore hours or days later to read all you have written – but mostly just grateful and delighted: only an idiot turns away from kindness or respect or honesty disagreement when it is offered forthrightly.
Furthermore, I have no objections whatsoever to competition. Quite the opposite: no liberal blogger should object to a stand-up fight, since it is by only by winning a hundred hard inter- and intra-party contests that we will ever be able move progressives into positions of power, and regressives the hell out of anyplace where they can continue to damage this country.
We are a fightin’ bunch, but if I want to contend on a field of honor, I’ll file to run for office because I want to, or send my own story of my own volition to “The Paris Review” to get booted, or ask a lively lass if she wouldn’t just be a whole lot more comfortable with her pants off. What I will not be is dragooned into a competition that I have no interest in.
Ours isn’t a race, it’s a movement. This isn’t a contest, it’s a cause.
That being said, I wrote this over a year and a half ago, and it still holds up OK:
For me awards themselves fall wispily into “All glory is fleeting” pile: I am quite sure, for example, I still have a bit of rotting, blue rayon that I lived and died over in fourth grade, obediently following the same impulse that Napoleon described when he said that, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
Well I don’t want to fight for scraps of silk: life is too short and my friends and champions in Left Bloggylvania too numerous and talented and variegated for a “Best” moniker to be anything but a curiosity. How does one compare the kind of 15-round, lead-weighted-and-barbed-wire-laced whuppin’s that Steve Gilliardhandsused to hand out gratis three times a day with James Wolcott ‘s brand of seemingly-effortlessly whipwork so marksman-like and fatal that Vincent Price’s “Baka” character from “The Ten Commandments” would happily stand in line to take lessons?
So count me out.
And second, the Koufax Awards.
Which don’t belong to anyone but their creators, but, c’mon; isn’t it about time to give this fella
a decent Viking funeral
and retire him with honor?
The crew over at Wampum did yeoman’s work creating and branding the thing; so much so that “Nominatcha for a Koufax” has been absorbed into the Body as shorthand for “Fantastic writing/analysis/series/consonantness/poop joke! Best I’ve read since forever.”
However, separate and apart from any philosophical problems a voting/awards thing might present, two more mundane facts argue for putting on a helluva farewell party and formally sending them off to the Awards Puppy Farm to gambol and play with other retired trophies, ribbons and statuettes:
1. It’s already getting to be a year overdue and appears to have become Santiago and the big fish from “The Old Man and the Sea”. Cut ‘er loose and come back to shore.
2. The “Best Writing” category this year (Last year?) came with this caveat:“Last year, Digby at Hullabaloo took best writing (for the second year running) and thus is not eligible this year.”
Sorry, but Digby – post for post – is absolutely among the very, very best we’ve got. And if you’re going to go through all the agita of sponsoring an awards thing at all…and you’re going to have a category for writing at all…but you’re not going to include Digby precisely because she kicks ass too magnificently, well you might as well have a tallest mountain contest without Everest.
And that point right there is where it violated its own premise, stopped being about terrific writing, and started being something else.
* (thanks justme)
17 comments:
All that without a single mention of egos being stroked to cataclysmic bliss.
You are the man.
yeah. word. dude.
Being awarded for expressing a succinct opinion...what a strange concept. It's not like saving children from a burning bus or enhancing the revenue stream of one's zaibatsu.
Still, if respect is offered, politeness accepts with grace and humility. The relentlessly humbling effect of real life will continue apace.
And too right, the olympians of the medium should be included, irrespective of whether they 'won' already...where would the spur to greatness, to more fully formed thought and focused rage be without them?
Of course, if they start treading water with interminable catblogging or shaking their digital bon bon for dodgy sponsors...Open the gates to the glue factory.
;>)
Hey! I like catblogging!
Though I agree, it shouldn't be interminable.
The whole award thing is a workable concept that has unfortunately been beaten into something it was never meant to be. Only minibrains who cannot make up their own minds cling to some other person's definition of "best."
Best is also dangerous; it implies you don't need anything else. "Best" movie? How can an art form so varied, something that runs the gamut from Plan Nine from Outer Space to Citizen Kane get boiled down to "best"? And even if you could, would you want it to be the only movie you brought to that mythical desert island?
Myself, I elevate such things as certain movies and meals and yes, cats, into "Greatness."
Greatness is better than Best. It removes competition. I can have as many Great Things as I want.
And one of them is reading a Driftglass piece.
Write on, my brother. Write on.
I like Digby's opinioneering quite a bit. In my opinion, your writing is much better. You have such a vivid authentic voice. She may be Count Basie; you are Thelonius Monk.
drifty = Monk!
Read driftglass first.
Nothing else to say.
You have amazing commenters, too.
Not to be the Cheney in the punchbowl, but... It's the P-40 what was most famous for the toothy visage. The occasional Mustang sported a set of choppers as well, but it was the Warhawk that was known for them.
/old plane geek
Oh, and I had a bike like that, too. Sigh, oh for simpler days, or at least a simpler me.
Sometimes the scenery's too nice to worry about the race. To hell with awards, just keep typing, drifty. We'll keep reading.
It doesn't surprise me you'd feel this way about the awards. Even in the short period of time I've kept up with this blog, I guess I knew it. Its part of the reason you get nominated. Sorry dude, you get the votes anyway! You, Blue Gal, First Draft crew, Field Negro, Digby, Jon Swift an others there aren't time or space to add. Daily reads all at willis' computer.
All we need to know about the Weblog awards is how they're being freeped by the denizens of Wingnuttia. Once we start getting into this kind of pissing contest, we lose our way.
I got nominated my first year running and haven't been for anything since. And that's OK. Every time I'm tempted to have my feelings hurt by this, I tell myself:
1) You didn't start doing this to win awards.
2) You don't get up at 5:30 AM every day and turn on the PC and start writing in order to win awards.
3) The people who read your stuff are enough reward.
At least until someone wants to pay me to write. :)
Bitchen spider bike.
I had one like that too. Lime Green.
Speakin' of Digby, Drift, I hope you won't mind a little cross-post of mine about Robertson's annointing of Rudy, yesterday.
"I was delighted to see Father Pat thumbing the sacred Jeebus-shit onto Rudy's forehead. :o)
How natural an alliance.
The porker of his mistress two doors down the hall from his wife...(forget Bill Clinton; GOP sleaze is God's Work, right, Pat?)
The protector of the anal sadists in the NYPD...
The patron of a nominee for Homeland Security Capo with more mob connections than Tony Soprano...
His own children refusing to endorse him...
A man whose political campaign consists of having a model of the imploding WTC Towers surgically implanted on his head...
With all of this, a man kneeling in sweet humility to receive the jizzum-endorsement of one of our leading moral arbiters (arbeiters? abteilungers?), who has spent a lifetime worshipping at the Temple of Mammon, and for whom no "christian" belief can not be steam-curled and twisted into hatred, bile, and bigotry.
By God, the sight of Rudy and Father Pat on the podium, smiling their corrupt, fatuous, unctuous, smiles, as they twined and mingled, and politically copulated like a pair of satanic ferrets, brought tears of joy to my eyes.
If the american voters can swallow THIS union without gagging, then I say, let them have their 4th Reich. Costa Rica calls.
Of course, we should spare a thought for poor old John McCain, who wasted all that time and energy giving prostate-gland tongue massages to the wrong "man of God".
Who knew that Jerry was about to make the big sky-hop?"
Digby DOES write some goood stuff, particularly that little three-paragraph piece about how the GOP strategy is to disappear george bush and transpose Hillary into the role of "incumbent", for them to run against. She nailed it, with that.
But, just like a lot of the women bloggers, she gets upset when people start asking Clinton the tough questions, and I just can't resist stirring the pot a bit at her place, and FireDogLake, by pointing out things like...this!:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/09/politics/main1600694.shtml
Clinton is the one candidate who can keep the white house in GOP hands, and lose us the Senate and maybe, the House, too.
I insist; nominating someone who won't state unequivocally that invading Iraq was a monumental fuckup, means that she cannot, will not, be able to roll Rudy, Bush, and the republicans into their (her!) bloody, useless, mesopotamian blanket and beat them like a fucking pinata.
If our candidate can't do that, we will not win this election.
Sorry; that link was to the CBS article about Hillary's attending the 10th anniversary of FauxNews' reign of error, to schmooze with Rupert Murdoch, etc., and about his fundraising for her.
If anyone wants to read it, just google:
"Hillary and Rupert Murdoch".
Wow... now I know how The Monkees felt after having Jimi Hendrix as their opening act. Tanbark? Yeah, what YOU said.
Now back to our show...
Drifty, enjoy the bike screw the crowd. You gotta stop and stomp the roses along the way. I miss the old school banana seat but mine didn't have the kidney killer bar like that spider does. Vinnie, next-door to me had that, mine was a Huffy, "Scoot..." Taxicab yellow and for what mechanical duress I put it through, (thinking I was Evel Kenevel), it was a helluva lot of fun and a sweet ride for what my Mom paid for it.
And this awards tsooris? Small potatoes and unworthy of the majority of the nominees. I saw the freeping of the awards, courtesy of the great minds at Sadly,No!, and thought the whole scene was childish and said more about the hosts being stuck in the 9th Grade than it did about any or all of the nominees. Then again the whole intertoobz is full of self-aggrandizing hucksters, innit?
Drifty, methinks all of the awards are a joke. That partickler one you was in was begun by righties and all of them game it bigtime to prove how besty-best they can waste their time.
The Koufax show, OTOH was of great worth and took a lot of work. It offered a good way to showcase new talent and great posts, and MB & Eric & Dwight deserve a lot of credit for that. I believe they got a lot of feedback about repeaters and tried to adjust to offer fresh alternatives. I agree with you, though, but just wanted to add that their efforts were, in themselves, awardworthy.
But on to your Spiderbike....
Here's some clothes to match when you really want to cruise and get laid.
Ooooh...a recumbent with a bong-holder. I like.
Hey, drifty, can I borrow that Orgy Lair pic? It puts me in mind of a filthy screed that I'm writing in my head even as we speak and shriek.
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