I would like to be able to connect these two subjects, but I don’t think I can. My narrative skills fail me. It might be because last night, when I went to find my copy of The Genealogy of Morals, it had gone missing. Now, this could be a sign from the twilit gods that I shouldn’t read the book again, or maybe someone just stole it, someone uber enough to be above the morality of theft. Pip? Tik pronounced teek? Damn, the conundrums that affect us day in and day out. None of this stuff happens when I just sit around playing Kingdom Hearts.
The Hen Hud school district budget went down in flames last night. Will this affect our beloved Sailors? I don’t think much, but stay tuned. When I went over to vote after work yesterday the joint was truly jumping. I haven’t seen this many people at the polls since the Gore victory in ’00. I’ve also never seen the inside of the gym at the grammar school before, because that’s usually where the Mothers Against Debate are always meeting during Bump, and they always cordon off the area to keep out the riff and the raff of LD. Well, there’s a first time for everything. I was disappointed. I figured this was where they kept the sacred monkeys, but there was nothing but great apes eating donuts and shooting down the tax increase.
The latest installment of Nostrum has gone up successfully on iTunes, and the accompanying pdf is over on the Mite Site. I’m also in the middle of editing part 2 of Caveman, the part where I mispronounce Augustine the saint as Augustine the city in Florida. I’m learning a lot from this lecture; it’s a very strange process, because the material sounds new to me. It’s like when I write something and then read it a year or two later. It’s as if someone else wrote it. Lingo, for instance. I can’t for the life of me remember committing it to paper, and if I thumb through it, it’s totally foreign. Weird.
As for Ruby Keeler, here’s the thing. I was watching Golddiggers of 1933 and yet again wondering why, exactly, old Ruby was a star of musical comedy. It’s not that she’s terrible, not really, but she’s also not particularly good, and you can’t imagine why they hired her when there were presumably so many other people around who could sing and dance and act. Ruby is, at best, only passable at all of these, and she’s certainly no great beauty. Most remarkable is the fact that she is primarily a tap dancer, yet she has absolutely no physical grace whatsoever. A dancer’s body should anything but a physical body; tap dancers especially appear notoriously insouciant when they’re plying their trade, their hands in their pockets, wry smiles on their faces, a wink in their eyes, their feet doing the most amazing things. If they ever take their hands out of their pockets, their incorporeality will dazzle you. Ruby, on the other hand, in pocket or out, is complete corporeal. It’s as if her feet, with some mind of their own, have learned how to passably imitate tap dancing, and the rest of her is either trying to keep up or marveling at curiosity of it all. She constantly and famously stares down at her feet as if she’s never seen them before, and she’s wondering what they hell they think they’re doing down there anyhow. And, she was one of Warner’s biggest musical stars. (And Mrs. Jolson, at some point.) Go figure. Or, go into your dance. If you watch Warner films, you’re not doing it to reacquaint yourself with Ruby’s feet (much as she is doing). You’re there for Busby B, the great abstractionist choreographer. But you have to put up with a lot of Ruby to get there. Oh, well…
I am always impressed with JWP’s style of award presentation at the Wheaties (AKA the Breakfast of Champions at TOC). The Wheaties is a couple of hours of grits and speeches and awards, and if those awards were dragged out, we’d still probably be there. JWP has the perfect style, and I urge all tournament directors to emulate it. The problem with awards, from the TD point of view, is that people take their bloody sweet time coming up to the podium to collect them. The better an LDer is, and therefore the more likely to be winning an award, the further away they like to sit from the podium. They’re like tap dancers, sitting all the way in the back with their hands in their pockets, insouciant about the whole taking-tin business. When their names are called, even if they proceed with all due haste, it still takes them an hour to reach the stage because they’re starting out from six blocks west of Cleveland. Then there’s the gangsta approach. The debater’s name is called, the roof is raised a few times, and the Walk That Knows No Direction takes place. The WTKND is about as much right and left and up and down as it is forward. Watching it, you can’t believe that the perambulator is actually covering any lateral distance. This is, I guess, the hip-hop MTV version of tap-dancer cool, with about the same results, and it seems to be more Policy than LD. Maybe that’s the big difference between the two activities. I haven’t watched enough Pfffters accepting awards to fit them into this construct yet.
There is a solution to this problem, and JWP knows it, although at the Wheaties he’s mostly working with the problem of people jostling their way up through the aisles crowded with forensicians from far and wide staring at the plates of grits and trying to figure if they’re food or science project. And the solution is, you call out the name. Pause. Then you call out the next name. Pause. Then you call out the next name. Rinse. Repeat. Until all the awards are handed out. This forces people to hustle along, because the train appears to be pulling out of the station and, all matters of ego aside, no matter how insouciant a forensician is, what he or she really wants is to grab hold of that tin! The worst thing a tournament director can do is announce a name and wait for Mr. or Ms. America to traverse the catwalk to accept it. Hours can pass for each one. Think of it as the equivalent of the speecho-American single clap, where that one thunderous SSSWWWAACKK for each name keeps those speecho-As moving along at quite the clip. The rule of thumb is simple: no one cares about an award ceremony beyond grabbing their own award, if they are receiving one, and getting the hell out of there, if they’re not. I cannot for the life of me remember anyone saying, after any tournament of any stature or of any tradition, boy that was one great award ceremony. The only good award ceremony is a brief award ceremony. Head ‘em up! Move ‘em out! Your attendees with thank you for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment