I Survived the Stranger Genius Awards!

OK, I'm not important enough to get an invite, but my friend Jim is, so we showed up to witness the carnage. The Moore was smelling fairly old last night, in case you're interested. This was the scene on the stage when I arrived:

The reason for the crowd was that the food and booze were up there. Here's a better shot of where they were giving out free drinks:

I went last year, but that was a lot different. For one thing, there were a lot more people. And there seemed to be much more enthusiasm. Last night was sedate by comparison. After a fashion, they got down to handing out the awards. Here's D.K. Pan holding perfectly still for about a minute:

It was a little bit awkward, a guy not moving or talking or anything, but it eventually ended. It was just a prologue to what turned out to be quite a short ceremony. Here's a bad picture of my favorite Stranger writer, Paul Constant:

And here's a slightly better shot of Jen Graves:

And those are all of my photos. Like I said, the whole ceremony was notably brief. Last year, one recipient in particular, Jim Woodring, gave a wonderful, funny and rather lengthy acceptance speech. This year, there was none of that. Everyone pretty much collected the loot ($5,000 and some kind of trophy-thing) and waltzed off.

You know, for the last two months, I've been trying to get someone - anyone - on the Stranger staff to listen to my album and write about it. So far, my efforts and repeated follow-ups have come to nothing. Although there were plenty of Stranger-folk milling around last night, I figured that wasn't the time or place to flog my disc to them. I think I was wrong. After all, it's a worthy effort. People seem to dig it quite a bit. I should have probably cornered somebody about it. But I didn't. Oh well, another opportunity squandered. At least they had free booze. That was worth something.