The Webby Awards -- A Shiny Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Last year's viral video featuring the drummer of OK GO in a staring contest with the Muppets got me both initially acquainted with--and really excited about--the existence of the exquisitely postmodern ceremony called The Webby Awards. Why had I never heard about them previously? After all, like most voices of my generation, I'm fairly web-savy. I help my parents append files to their emails. I masturbate. [Not necessarily in that order.] But I clearly wasn't spending enough time surfing the web--which is an alarming concept, to be sure.

So in preparing to cover this year's Webby Awards, I found out that not everybody thinks this particular bacchanal is all that savory.

Owen Thomas wrote a not-so-subtle piece on Gawker called "The Webby Awards Remain The Best Scam Going".

My first thought was: The best scam going? Hasn't this guy ever heard of ShamWow?

My second thought was: Well... Haters gonna hate.

So, I went to the Webbies with an open mind, but with that less-than-euphoric taste in the back of my adult brain that says: this might all be bullshit.

The gentleman sitting next to me was David Spencer. David was pretty excited to be there, having flown in from Illinois. He owns PhotoSeed.com. According to his business card, Photo Seed spends its nano-hours "Bringing to Light the Growth and Artistic Vision of 19th & 20th century Photography."

Even after he explained it to me, I'm not really sure what that means. Presumably, he's really into old photographs (actually, that part was stated literally), and his website... I'm guessing, features them en masse?

Let's go check it out real quick:

"PhotoSeed, representing an evolving online record of this early fine-art photography movement, is a private archive with simple goals: beauty, truth, scholarship and enjoyment for all who visit. A rich collection of photographs representing numerous vintage processes will be found on the site."

Yup, so his website is a fancy Flickr account for old-assed photos. It might sound like I'm dissin on his passion, but it only sounds like that because: 1) Everything on-line is simply a reconstitution of something else (go google "etewaf") and 2) You're too used to reading things on the Internet, where the aural patina of snark accompanying pixelated text can leave ugly acerbation grooves on your cortex. I actually like his website, or at least I think it's a well-designed site that I'd possibly ever visit again if my interests were niche enough.

Interestingly, though, I never saw it win a Webby. Nor have I been able to find any Webby-Award-Winning content on it. He assures me, though, that he's received a great boost in traffic due to his website's involvement in The Webbies.

Traffic that he paid for with his $275 entrance fee, as did a ton of other websites not lucky enough to win their traffic boosts.

Okay, enough of that for now. How was the show? Patton Oswalt is always outstanding. A linguistic gymnast, he paints portraits with every sentence, and he plays off unpredictable moments with a natural talent for finding humor at every juncture.

"For those of you watching at home, you know there's porn on the Internet right now, right? You see this? [gestures at his whole body] This is the money shot! This is as good as it gets tonight! That's right, they got the OTHER fat guy from King of Queens. I look like the Internet personified. Like if the Internet took human form and started walking around, this would be it."

There's something odd about this very funny joke. I look around the Webbies, and all I see are super glamorous people who appear very wealthy. In fact, this entire ceremony embodies what I imagine L.A. to be like. I have never been, but I’ve seen enough Woody Allen to know that, tonight, the Hammerstein Ballroom aint in New York, this is Hollywood.

There are a few exceptions. Spike Lee makes an appearance, introducing Jeremy Lin. Jeremy Lin introduces Skip Bayless (but not before the epic remix of Bayless touting Tebow in “All he Does is Win” plays on the jumbo-tron). Even Mayor Bloomberg receives a lifetime achievement award, presumably for being willing to make an appearance at the Webby Awards--although I think his media corporation was the stated reason.

If the internet is supposed to be about sharing gritty reality, with special bastion for the socially awkard, how-come every woman at the Webbys looked like Charlize Theron except better dressed and every guy looked like Patrick Dempsey, except wealthier. And those are just the non-celebs. Something is growing fishy.

I notice that Google + is one of the major sponsors. In fact, on the curtain above the show, Google + has shared billing with The Webby Awards in spotlight-letters.

Is that the same Google + who’s winning a--to quote A Christmas Story--”major award” at tonight’s event? To be fair, they won the "People’s Voice" sub-category, which specifies that their victory was based on votes at the Webby Awards website. Still though, this feels sloppy. Imagine “The People's Choice Awards, brought to you by Coldplay”.

There was one moment, however, where sh*t got real. Richard Dreyfus went up to talk about Steve Jobs. But before he did, the possibly intoxicated Dreyfus said, “Marc Zuckerberg, if you’re going to steal our privacy, maybe, in the words of quid pro quo, you should tell us something private about you. And if you’re going to change our world, maybe you should pay for it, because it’s theft."

For the record, I’m not really sure what that means, and I don’t begrudge Zuck’s business strategies. [This may be because I have a “There Will Be Blood” view of free-market capitalism, but I digress.] Still, even though I disagreed with Dreyfus, I found it moving to actually hear someone dispensing with the cyber-fellatus and speaking from their heart. He wasn’t really making a shit-ton of sense, even when he went on to speak about Jobs. He was rambling, passionate, unfiltered and unpolished.

He was, in a word, the Internet. It was nice for The Web to actually show up.



As for the infamous five word speeches, they're fun to hear what folks will come up with, but they rarely work out as funny or poignant as one hopes. Award winners ought to be allowed at least a Haiku, especially person of the year. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to see the greatest living comedian actually be confined to 5 words?. Or the nice lady from "I Had Cancer" from whom--having had clearly been drinking away her stage-fright--it probably would have been inspiring to hear a message of elevation. Not that “I had cancer, not coodies.” isn’t a great bumber-sticker or bracelet. But the five word speeches serve the dual purpose of allowing for a bajillion awards (and entrance fees), while keeping that hip layer of detached snark as if each winner is posting in the comments section of a live video.

The weird truth of the matter is that, when all is said and done, I actually really liked The Webby Awards. I get the feeling I would have liked it better had I not been there in person. I think--for a non-participant anyway, watching online is the way the Webby Awards is truly meant to be enjoyed. A party like this needs to be savored in the most superficial way possible. “On a tiny corner of the screen while the Diablo server reloads,” to paraphrase Patton.

I enjoyed a nervous tremble at what it says about me that despite its often shallow and possibly unethical nature, I still had a good time. It means I’m truly a member of my generation. As long as there are loud, flashy presentations; instantly gratifying laughs; attention-span-catering multi-media and promises of favs like Patton and Louis... It doesn’t matter what’s going on underneath. It’s all what's on the shiny surface that counts.

The Truth About Cars and Dogs

by C.T. Heaney

It is a commonplace among dog fanciers that the age of a dog can be roughly correlated to human age in a 7-to-1 ratio. We speak often of our pets' 'dog years', thinking of our 2-year-old terriers as rambunctious teenagers and our 10-year old basset hounds as stately old ladies and gentlemen. We say it's been 'a dog's age' since an event occurred: about seven years ago, or perhaps one year that felt like seven. It's much rarer to speak in the same way about cats, since cat lives don't seem to map properly onto the human aging scale in the same way. Cats become adults faster and remain 'middle-aged' much longer than humans. Constructing a 'cat years' scale would require a more complicated algorithm, one not necessarily conducive to quick mental math, and thus far less useful as a social metaphor.

I own neither a dog nor a cat. But I own a car. And what I want to know is, are cars more like dogs or cats? Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a more or less linear correspondence between 'car years' and human years based not on the car's actual age, but on its mileage. It's typically expected nowadays that an automobile that's not in a major accident will last at least 150,000 miles, and many well-built and well-maintained cars, even from mediocre manufacturers, will nearly reach, or even exceed, 200,000 miles. Yet it becomes very rare to see cars that last more than about 250,000 miles; maintenance costs begin to surpass the cost of simply junking the car and buying another one with far fewer problems. 300,000 is about the upper limit that any person can reasonably expect from even the best-built and maintained vehicles; it's extremely unlikely and indicative of sheer chance as much as design or care.

300,000 miles will therefore be our benchmark for the end of the natural life of a car, corresponding to 120 years in a natural human life (a milestone reached by only a handful of people in recent history). Life expectancy in most developed countries hovers around 80 years old, matching more or less perfectly with a 200,000-mile ordinary life expectancy for passenger vehicles. Assuming a linear relationship, then, every 50,000 miles on a car would correspond to 20 years of human life; every 2,500 miles you drive ages your car a year, and you should be changing your car's oil about every two to three car years (despite what Jiffy Lube tells you). It may be objected that city miles age cars differently than highway miles, but that's true of people as well; if you only drive in congested city traffic, your car may break down much earlier than one used for tens of thousands of miles of 55-mph country road trips, just as your health will probably suffer from high-stress jobs and burger/shake combos more than it will from peaceful, quiet living and grain diets.

According to this schema, I am the proud owner of a sturdy and surprisingly well-mannered 71-year-old 1997 Subaru Impreza sedan. Prior to this, I had purchased (for - and I am not joking - $75) a 96-year-old 1986 Toyota Corolla, which received no life support and met its demise on an offramp immediately following a four-hour freeway drive. It was 98 at the time. On my recent vacation in Hawaii, I rented three vehicles: a sprightly, playful 7-year-old 2011 Nissan Sentra on the Big Island; a chubby but unusually efficient 10-year-old 2011 Jeep Patriot on Maui; and a sputtering, asthmatic 42-year-old 2004 Dodge Neon on Kauai, which soldiered on cantankerously despite vociferous concerns for its own well-being.

Summer of 2011, at age 65

The life expectancy of Japanese, Korean, and Swedish cars seems to be reliably longer, on average, than that of American cars, while these autos in turn enjoy longer life expectancy than cars manufactured in Soviet-bloc and developing countries, such as Ladas and Tatas. There will always be exceptions, of course; we all know of pack-a-day geezers and alcoholics who hit 95 as sharp as a straight razor, as well as relatively young folks who fall victim to cancers and unusual conditions well before their time. The tail seems quite a bit longer for cars than for humans, if only because our capacity to replace parts on machines we've designed far exceeds our ability to switch out organs and extend telomeres on bodies whose inner workings we still understand rather poorly. A recent news story recounted the story of a ninety-three-year-old woman who'd kept her '64 Mercury Comet in working order for an astounding 576,000 miles - 229 in car years. Apparently, there's a fellow with a record-setting 2.8 million miles on his '66 Volvo, making the car a Methuselan 1,120 years old.

Clearly, this is ridiculous. I am committing what is known as the 'pathetic fallacy'--the ascription of human qualities to non-sentient beings. It may be silly to anthropomorphize cars in this way (am I not, rather, canimorphizing them?), but it's something mankind feels compelled to do with automobiles, or for that matter anything else even remotely humanoid. After all, they're designed to look kind of like people, with obvious eye and mouth analogues, and they seem to develop individual personalities in the way they respond to their owners and to environmental conditions. They seem more alive, more personable, than, say, goldfish or hamsters, if perhaps not as much as dogs or cats. And people want their cars to be their friends - they name them, talk to them, imagine that they communicate through the dashboard interface and the rumble of the engine, pretend that they have sexual urges. Web cartoonist Chris Onstad was spot-on in observing, "People obviously want to think that their cars can nail each other. That is a given."

I've often complained to friends that they treat their pets better than they treat the people in their lives. They sometimes have tremendous concern for a dog's or a cat's physical space requirements, need for companionship, and emotional health - well beyond the care they show for their neighbors and friends. This seems incongruous for two simple reasons: One, these are people you know, and therefore it seems logical to assume that they should matter to you as members of a shared society; and two, they are people, and we tend to think of humans as fundamentally deserving of certain dignities which are not afforded the other beasts. Yet we are all familiar with pet owners who lavishly spend time and money on their charges, to the point where it seems only reasonable to posit that perhaps some basic need for friendship, or parenthood, is being met by proxy. Films such as Children of Men and Z.P.G. have explored the notion that, if we lost the right or capacity to breed, we would have to fill the void with animals or inanimate objects that reminded us of progeny. The pathetic fallacy, in these cases, is being lived out literally, as a coping strategy, or a path of least resistance.

So perhaps extreme pet-ownership does not deserve my derision; perhaps the pathetic fallacy is itself a human impulse, one that all but the most callous of us participate in to some degree or another. Given our natural sympathies toward each other (if we do indeed have them), it is only a matter of time before we visit them upon creatures, or objects, that merely resemble the fully human in appearance, behavior, or function. I don't generally have this problem; I rarely anthropomorphize dogs, cats, birds, otters, trees, pet rocks, stuffed animals, Pokemon, toddlers, stereos, buildings, ships, volcanos, or most other things that are commonly described in ways that might lead one to believe they are human. It does occur with computers, since they do things like talk back to me ("Are you sure you want to open this document?") and disobey me ("That operation is not allowed.") in ways that make me want to punish them for their insolence.

My car doesn't have a name. I buy 87-octane gas and do minimal maintenance; I have no intention of spending time or money fixing the dented bumper or the hairline crack in the windshield. I listen to her, watch her vitals on the dash display, and think that I am being told something, but I am never under a delusion that this is anything other than an analogy. Yet I still feel, totally irrationally and at the same time utterly reasonably, that we have been through a lot together, that we have seen some great times and some great places, that we've made it through some crazy roads that we weren't sure we were going to conquer. I pat her on the steering column now and then, and I thank her when I get worried she's going to break down and she doesn't. I think she'll hit 80 like a summer breeze; she's rusting pretty bad in some spots, but with heart like hers, I have to believe that reaching 100 isn't completely out of the question. And I'll say one thing for sure: I'll be real, real sad when she shuffles off this mortal coil.

Segel / Stoller Weekend

Notes from Segel / Stoller Weekend

On pure coincidence, I saw both The Five Year Engagement and The Muppets this weekend, not noticing that they were both scripts by my new favorite writing team, Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel. Their Forgetting Sarah Marshall was my favorite of the outstanding Apatow family of films (with possible competition from the ringer Superbad). Now it's The Five Year Engagement. Here are some thoughts:

1) 5YE is probably my favorite romantic comedy since High Fidelity. I liked it better than Bridesmaids, even though it wasn't as roll-on-the-ground funny.  5YE simply has so many of my favorite things, e.g. Chris Pratt, who has inspired me to break out a full-update of the Man-Crush List (coming soon).

New rule for film-makers: If you want your movie to get a glowing review from me (which, you definitely do!) cast Chris Pratt. He has officially reached the Joseph Gordon Levitt level of can-do-no-wrong. He's almost as funny as Jack Black and almost as dreamy as Ryan Gossling (sorry ladies, you no longer get him all to yourselves!).

2) The Muppets is my second favorite Muppet movie after Christmas Carol. When you adjust for nostalgia, this effectively makes it number one, but I simply have too many VHS coppies of Christmas Carol lying around my mancave for it to be a fair contest.

It was basically Blues Brothers meets UHF. I was going to jokingly throw There Will Be Blood in there, since the villain is an oil baron, but that doesn't figure prominently into the plot, and I don't want my world-famous film-venn-diagrams to become a joke (i.e. Hunger Games is basically 1984 meets Survivor).

The Muppets is more or less the feel-good romp of a life-time. A relatively simplistic story, but I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. It's probably the most heartwarming and feel-good flick I've seen since Waking Ned Devine, the film from whence the banner-head of this blog derives. I enjoyed my favorite sensation in all of arts-appreciation, which is goose-bumps and chills to the point of tears. This is a confusing feeling for me, which is probably why it's my favorite. I've mastered a thorough understanding of all the other feelings (so far) and this one remains somewhat mysterious to me, which is probably why it always feels fresh and new. It probably has to do with the semi-erotic nature of the relationship between any artist / chef / professor and his audience / diners / students.

You might say, "Don't you feel taken advantage of when a blatantly sappy movie like The Notebook is intended to make you cry, and then you just give yourself over to its demands, reacting exactly as expected? Yes, but I like it. The phrase "Taken advantage of" has such a negative connotation, which is probably dually connected to both victim culture and unfortunately big egos. The movie didn't assault me, I chose to see it. And any feelings on my part of not wanting to seem predictable are always bad instincts left over from college, i.e. not wanting anyone to be smarter than me. We participate in entertainment to feel certain feelings. If it's scary, we want to be scared, if it's sappy, we want to cry. If it's suspenseful, we want to not know what happens next. And if it's unfathomably vibrant like Rhapsody in Blue or Handel's Messiah or Waking Ned Devine or The Muppets I want to feel that ghost in my spine come to life and fill my god-void with post-evolutionary chills until I don't know why I'm crying.