Catch a Cannonball

[seeing Rory making her hour-by-hour exam week agenda]
Lorelai: Hey, could we move your chill session from four o'clock tomorrow afternoon to right now? That'd be great, thanks.
[later]
Rory: There is no chill time scheduled for four o'clock tomorrow, and the one thing I really don’t have time for are your jokes, missy!
- Gilmore Girls

Made the mistake of watching the Grammys® last night... and I do emphasize the word “mistake.” What a joke. So many questions, no sufficient answers. What happened to music? When did we flush quality down the toilet? What happened to pop? When was it swallowed whole by R&B and regurgitated as some Mariah Carey-esque excuse to grind a semioperational voice up and down randomly-selected scales spewing semi-decipherable lyrics? What the hell happened to Beyonce’s pants? (Mom said, when you look like her I guess you can stand to leave them behind. I think pants and skirts are obligatory in most societies for a reason, but that’s just me. I’m sure the male half of my species disagrees.) What tasteless idiots decided to give Vince Gill “Country Album of the Year” over George Strait’s infinitely more deserving and quality-replete It Just Comes Natural?

There were two legitimate highlights of the evening. One was when Kanye West, whom I despise, accepted an entirely undeserved award for something-or-other and the orchestra started cuing him to wrap up his speech by piping music over his words. Without missing a beat, he muttered, “It would be in good taste to turn off the music now.” They did, the audience cheered, and score one for the antiestablishment movement! For once, I agree with the guy on something. The other was Amy Winehouse’s performance, so highly publicized throughout he evening that I thought for sure they had set the poor girl up for a letdown. But she was wonderful! She retained the slightly dazed/drunk/stoned demeanor permeated by passionate lyric renditions that served as the trademark of her pre-rehab performances and provided the highlight of the evening via satellite.

I just heard Daughtry’s newest single and Dad was absolutely correct: every single song sounds the same. Like he recorded one sixty-minute song and the record company partitioned it into three- and four-minute sections for the purposes of track naming and radio release.

We had a meeting about graduation today. They handed out these sheets summarizing our law school career (“graduation reports” they’re officially called, but they bear a strong resemblance to unofficial transcripts as I understand them in the common vernacular). I am so tired. It’s strange to see the last three years of my life neatly summarized in eight-point New Courier on an Excel printout. Hopefully it was not time wasted.

We were talking about “band leaders” in Trademarks and that got me thinking about the proliferation of strange band names I’ve encountered over the years of writing bios. Then I started thinking what I might name a band were I to found one. Perhaps Beyond the Great Divide, a nod to The Band? Or perhaps The Load Out, in honor of Jackson Browne’s incredibly insightful tune? It’s tougher than it sounds. Cannonball, in honor of The Band’s “The Weight”? You know, “catch a Cannonball to take me on down the line...”