....quite all "that."

 

 

At the beginning of the night, during a dreadful solo acoustic act, a woman approached me and asked if I knew anything about the awards.

"I've never been to these before," she said, "I'm wondering how crazy the book people get."

"I don't know; but if this is any indication," I said, looking at the guitarist, "we could be in for a long night."

Fears were confirmed when the second act, a band called Steve Wynn & The Miracle 3, took the stage, and sucked so royally hard they made the previous guy look like a musical genius. My companions and I ducked out of there, went to eat some pizza and returned around ten o'clock -- when they were due to be finished with this aural assault -- only to have to suffer this band for another twenty minutes. They had played for about an hour and a half to their captive audience, and had sucked all energy right out of the room. It was no wonder that as soon as the awards segment ended and one final horrible band took the stage the crowd fled as if things were on fire.

But, with the first two acts out of the way, finally the awards presentation began. Legendary underground satirist Paul Krassner emceed. Awards were given in a dozen categories: Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Politics, Sex, Drugs [oh boy, a Drug category -- how could the underground go without that...that drugs are part of anything progressive, is one of those sixties myths that will not go away...the underground, forever doping itself into irrelevancy], Music, Art/photography, Graphic Novel, Zine/e-zine, Kids, and Outstanding Independent Press of the year [the nominees are listed on the website, www.firecrackerbooks.org].

Most of the recipients weren't present to receive their awards. Under Politics, Noam Chomsky won for his 9/11 but unfortunately was not there. Which is a shame because it might have been amusing to watch him give one of his rambling, nonsensical talks [His books aren't so much written by him as they are pieced together from interviews, lectures and email exchanges done with him]. Annie Sprinkle took the Sex category for Hardcore from the Heart. And it's a bummer she wasn't there, because who knows what she might have done on stage. The diminutive woman presenting the Sex award read a poem about balls. It was called "Balls."

Presenters didn't have much to say, which was probably a function of trying to speed things up due to the late start. In his role as emcee, poor Paul Krassner had to hobble back and forth across the stage on a bad leg through about three presenters until some genius figured out a chair could be placed on stage for him to sit in [From what I heard later, Krassner had refused a chair in the beginning. Who knows....].

The conspicuous lack of nominees present [at least one had left, allegedly, during the auditory torture from the Steve Wynn band], the horrible musical acts forced on us, the disrespecting of an underground icon...I didn't know what to make of it. The event doesn't get big points for organization.

There was one bright spot. After the presentation, I was barely talking to Ayun Halliday--who won for Best Zine--for fifteen seconds before she pulled out a copy of her East Village Inky and gave it to me.

My cohorts -- including King Wenclas and Private Balgobin of the ULA, and a Wookie-like editor of a prominent website the name of which I don't want to mention because I don't want to accidentally promote or disparage it, because we had exchanged insults over the Internet at one point in the recent past and were just kind of tolerating one another on this night -- and I stood there and finished our beers. We decided we had seen and heard enough, and the Wookie led us to a nearby bar.

 

 

 

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