...So You Don't Have To (MTV VMA Awards 2005 Edition)

I condensed the 3 hours into 45 minutes of viewing thanks to TiVo. I could write some 12 paragraph piece to try to put it down using hysterical wording and witty analogies, but quite frankly, since I don't get paid for this nor have 60.000 readers, it isn't worth the effort. The "fire & water" set was spectacular, the water actually more than the fire since pyrotechnics are so ubiquitous the public is jaded. And that was it. That was the biggest highlight: the set.

Diddy was an embarrassement. That night he lost all pretension of being anything than a self-aggrandizing poser -- literally: all he did was strike poses and talk about how cool everything was, especially because he was there. We all knew it was coming, but one has to watch the trainwreck to see just how much he would use this opportunity to plug anything and everything connected to his label: random artists on stage, random shout outs, an idiotic skit about his name changes. The crowd shots were usally of other celebrities, and they were doing what they could not to walk out. His tribute to B.I.G. was tasteless in its fakeness, showing some B.I.G. videos in all his fat sweaty sticky glory on the ubiquitous screens while an attempt to graft some gravitas was made by having Diddy pretended to formally conduct an actual playing orchestra. Nobody was buying it, because there was nothing to be bought other than Diddy finding another opportunity to shine and trying to get cred by bring Snoop on stage. His other little skit to get his current cash-cow, Omarion, some stage time became absurd when Diddy actually tried to share that stage time with his own dance moves, of which the woodenness had already been painfully showcased during the opening whatever-that-was.

MC Hammer appearing was a genuine OMGWTF moment, which then quickly became very sad because of his missed cues and anemic rapping. The rest was people cynically shelling their wares, culminating with Eric Roberts announcing someone or somebody but not before mentioning that he never watched videos, had nothing to do with them until by coincidence he did 3 of them in a month, and then plugged his son's new CD and mentioned his website, and only then came to the point he had been given a microphone for. The audience shots reflected that by now all the pimping of labels and stables had left the audience beyond embarrassement, and now just plain annoyed. Or gasping at how crappy Lohan looked, and how vulgar -- hot, but vulgar -- Longhoria looked, and how R.Kelly needs some quiet time far, far, far away from us.

In an evening in which at least four awards were handed out to rock groups, only two performances could qualify as rock, of which Green Day, opening it all, did indeed rock. The Killers, well, they tried, but their song was about pasty white boy pathos, and while they performed it just fine, that really gets in the way of actual rocking. Only one pop performance I can actually recall at this point -- Shakira being her amazing self -- eventhough Kelly Clarckson walked off with three statuettes. Her major contribution that night was wonderfully sending up the whole posse thing by during her first speech, while being completely floored and out of breath at having won, mentioning that she didn't have a posse so instead that girl they saw her almost literally drag on stage was her best friend. Who really should have dressed for the occasion.

Well, if it all was to be rap-themed, thank the lord for Kanye West. While his "Jesus Walks" track irritates me to no end with the Christian persecution complex displayed within, when he took the stage with Jamie Foxx the intensity of what they were doing, the actual skill displayed both singing and rapping, for one brief moment blew all of Diddy's empty gunk away from the screen, showing that even in that genre some people actually have chops, and others end up being award-show hosts.

Visuals Of Flood

folk pointed to a a live stream of WDSU of a helicopter flying around New Orleans and station personnel, I preume anchorpeople, discussing what they see, the 8 feet of water at gas stations where they got gas, or where they used to live, and they start an exchange along the lines of:

"Can you believe this? Would you have imagined it?"
-- "Never in my wildest dreams. We were warned. I have never seen anything like this."
"This isn't the graphics. This isn't the computer animation. This isn't a warning. I never in a million years thought it would look like this."
-- "I couldn't fathom that this would ever occurr."

And a couple more of these lines from various voices about how they never seen anything like these scenes. This was all new.

And as a former inhabitant of an area that is also several feet below sea level, kept dry by pumps and water walls just as much, all I can think yet again how blessed this whole area affected today must have been. How insanely blessed to have been allowed to be so oblivious for so very long, part of the strange set of blessings the US has received this way. The water is always there, and always ready to kill; it is the basis of so much of my home culture. It gives and it takes. It is ingrained in me.

Are the distasters the same? No, they are very different. But the scenes are very familiar, from back then, to the tsunami so recently ago. Oh yeah, that tsunami that devastated, among other things, Indonesia. I guess the anchorpeople forgot to actually watch that video when they talked around it back in December. Or they are just babbling in shock in right now.