I Love LA... Wait, What?

So I spent this past weekend in LA attending the Grammy Awards and pretty much having a shitload of fun. It was wonderful to get away from the Jersey cold and see the Pacific again. Had some great food, met some interesting people and yeah, went to the Grammy Awards.

LA is a totally different planet. It's winter and it's green. It also has a lot of cars. A lot of cars. And it takes forever to get from point A to point B. Staying downtown, close to the Nokia Theatre and Staples Center, we must have driven through Koreatown 657 times.. at least. During all this time in the car, I began to notice a few things.

The first thing that stuck out... literally, was there are too many women in too tight pants or too short skirts. And then there are the too tight and too short skirts. We were waiting for our table for dinner Saturday night when this couple walked in. The woman, mid-twenties, had hair longer than her skirt. She spent a good deal of time pulling the skirt down. She should have spent a little time looking in the mirror before she left home. She might have noticed the nasty runs she had in both legs of her pantyhose. Classy.

Then there is the sex shop district. Very interesting. There were fashions I had not ever seen before, nor could have imagined. And let's not forget the cars. Except for one car parked across the street from the Record Plant recording studio, I don't think I have ever seen as many pristine, new and expensive cars in my life. It was so nice to watch as a high maintenance middle-aged man picked his nose in his very expensive convertible. Again, classy.

What I really liked was all the art. Walls of buildings, covered in art. Banners hanging off the street lamps. Posters. Colors everywhere. From the stark winter colors of the northeast, the vibrancy of the streets of Los Angeles are a delight to the eyes.

All in all, I enjoyed my time in LA, could I live there... don't think so. But for Grammy weekend, it suited me just fine.

Grammy Nominations in Real Time

So it's a strange thing to be watching the Grammy Award nominations when you actually have some horses in the race. Realistically we may have one or two long shots, and the categories they are in won't be announced until after the show.

So the opening was a whole lot of... what? Do we really need all that visual and audio stimulation and... clothes racks onstage.

Can they make the graphics for the nominees any harder to read? And wtf was Ed Sheeran saying? I will say Swifty didn't annoy me as much as she usually does, but I still don't understand the need for all the drama onstage. Keith and Miguel did serious justice to "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," though Keith losing his long hair was distressing to say the least.

Maybe after hearing it so much I'm just numb, but Katy Perry was ok and she didn't have a troop of dancers behind her, so that's a vast improvement over most of the entertainers.

Oh look, there's Lorde and she's just singing. What a freakin' concept. No clothes racks, no dancing armies, just singing. Please god, let it be the next big thing.

And what would the evening be without "Blurred Lines?" Actually done well, minus Miley this time.

The show is over and I just looked through the entire list and we weren't nominated. But we worked our butts off to get a record company launched and have several of our artists accepted onto the Grammy ballot. Earth Hertz Records, we are just starting to tell our story. You better believe it.