LUDIC LOG

Each year at this time, the Grady McIlhenny Foundation releases a list of the annual recipients of the McIlhenny Foundation Scholarship Grant, popularly known as the 'Grady Train'.

Mr. MacIlhenney, heir to the McIlhenny Tabasco sauce fortune, spent his 72 years on Earth attempting to be a poet. Although he never completed any poems of more than three lines in length, his dedication to wearing black turtle-neck sweaters, becoming drunk and unruly at parties, and gazing moodily out the window of his Bossier City, LA loft was unrivalled by any poet of his or any other generation. Late in life, he realized the great truth of his existence: you are an artist if you say you are an artist. Placing the majority of his great wealth in a perpetual trust, he stipulated that upon his death, it should be used to give cash rewards to Americans and Canadians who showed great promise in pretending to be artists, behaving like artists, and generally living an artistic lifestyle without ever actually producing any art. In the last 14 years, the MacIlhenney Foundation has distributed over $7 million to deserving poseurs, wannabes and hangers-on throughout North America. It has been called "the lazy man's Pulitzer"; the New York Times recently noted that "what the MacArthur 'genius grant' is to people who accomplish things, the McIlhenny Foundation Scholarship Grant is to people who think about accomplishing things".

This year, in the spirit of the late Mr. McIlhenny's twin slogans of "Get on the Grady Train!" and "You can do it! Or, at least, you can tell people you do!", we are pleased to announce the follwing grant recipients.

- To Roger Wilco, a self-described "prose sonnetier": $24,000 to aid in the purchase of a number of partially filled-in notebooks to scatter around his garret to make it appear that he has been writing.

- To Jean Valdenim of Detroit, MI, who wishes to be thought of as an avant-garde composer: $50,000, which he needs to purchase field recording equipment to make a record of urban ambient sounds to sample into a song cycle he does not intend to complete.

- To Betty Lou Handbag, a "antikinetic actualist" because that sounds more important than "sculptor", $10,000 to fund her travels to art museums around the world so as to study the works of other sculptors who have actually engaged in the creation of sculpture.

- To Mark Laandgraab, an investment banker, $75,000 to invest in high-yield tech futures so he can afford to have other people paint paintings and then he can sign his name to them, "you know, like that one guy".

- To Ned Cheezit, who has studied neither physics nor art, $20,000 to determine if he can think about coming up with some sort of unified field thing that totally explains both art and science forever.

- To Sidney Brokeback, photonovelist, $30,000 so he can transcribe this really amazing dream he once had to an actual novelist and see if the guy can do anything with it.

- To Karl Spurgbeer, a student of filmistry, $25,000 to take a year off and finally see a bunch of the movies that he has very strong opinions about, and then criticize them in public in an even more arresting way than previously.

- To Charity Balles, head of the Western Cultural Studies Department of the Charity Balles College of Apartment #3F, $40,000 to have some letterhead and business cards made up so it looks like she's got accreditation, with raised gold leaf lettering and everything.

- To Alison Ra, jazz motionographer, $10,000 to go to jazz clubs every weekend for the next 6 months and listen to real cool sounds and order drinks while thinking about how, if someone were to choreograph them for a dance troupe, that would be so awesome.

- To James Ganngg of Williamsburg, $50,000 to be seen at all the best parties and hire a couple of people to talk about how breathtaking his work is so that everyone will admire him and invite him to even more parties because they just assume that he's doing something vital and new, even if they aren't exactly sure what it is.