We're Not Gonna Take It!

Just like Jesus, The Terminator, and Kotter, I’m back. I had a few slight little diversions there for a week or so called “moving” and “no internet” and “death”. But hallelujah I’m back. I know you been anxiously awaiting my return, (liar) as you should have been because there is much to discuss.

For my readers around the nation who might not happen to be in New York City currently (translation: no one), let me tell you, it was crazy yesterday. People filled the streets with signs of protest and cries of outrage. Pain, anguish and indignation hung heavy in the air. Never before had an issue of national and international importance brought together the citizens of this city so passionately.

That’s right, The VMAs were moved to Miami.

It is an outrage I say. It our constitutional right as New Yorkers to be able to gaze upon celebrities as they and their possies arrive across from Radio City Music Hall (or Lincoln Center that one random year). We are better than everyone else and so we have earned this right. The right to see P. Diddy arrive in his pimped out ride with Ma$e and Bruce Willis whom he apparently is trying to promote as the new Ashton Kutcher, which is kind of ironic seeing as how he was really the FIRST Ashton Kutcher, or at least to Demi Moore he was. The right to see some guy named Omarion talk about going solo without answering the more pressing question of what exactly he is going solo FROM. The right to see John Norris morph into Kurt Loder before our very eyes. The right to see Sway shout incoherently and do whatever the hell it is Sway does. These are our rights as New Yorkers and these rights were taken away from us on Sunday. Our basic liberties were violated and our privileges stripped from us. So we New Yorkers took to the streets to let MTV know we would not stand for this another year. So hear me now, person-who-decides-where-the-VMAs-will-be-held-each-year, you and your administration must go, because you are bad for the people of this great land. And by great land I mean Manhattan. And select parts of Brooklyn.

Luckily though the show was televised and I could watch it in all its glorious splendor. And watch I did.
And splendor it did not.

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I fully intended this week’s entry to be about the VMAs. It’s just the sort of event that’s ripe with type of material I want to write about. But a funny thing happened as I sat there watching, waiting for something to strike me as being good material to use. I realized I am now officially really old. Too old. Perhaps it was just the fact that this was the worst VMAs in history, but I mean when you have no host, no compelling performers, no controversial moments and a sound system apparently on loan from a community theater, what were they expecting? Perhaps the fact that they failed to nominate "Megalomaniac" in any of the top categories cast such a bad pall over the proceedings in my mind that I would not have been able to enjoy it even if they had shot Yoko Ono and then let Paul and Ringo piss on her corpse live on stage. Perhaps. But I’m starting to think maybe I’m just too old. Old to the point where I see through it all too much to even derive guilty enjoyment out of it.

Oh, I still have thoughts on the show, but MTV didn’t even provide enough compelling material to really inspire any feelings strong enough to be worth writing about. I could roll out the old “Musicless” Television bit here if that hadn’t been played out like 10 years ago. I could mention how its fitting that a show that peddles unintelligent, mindless schlock and that had to identify Clarence Thomas as “a Supreme Court justice” because it assumed its viewers wouldn’t know that without being told, would draw an audience that would boo John Kerry’s daughters. I could note how MTV’s ads get exceedingly more brilliant and cutting edge in direct proportion to how idiotic and processed the station’s content gets. I could talk about all of these things and more, but I just don’t feel like it. Maybe I’m old, but I just don’t have the desire to. Because I loved the show when it was processed, hyperactive, contrived, dumb, insulting, and manipulative. But now it’s just boring.
And that is the one thing I could never love.