Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Doug Walker is a man in love with culture. To be specific the American culture. Conveniently, he was born an American and raised on the culture he loves. His appetite for films, videogames and injokes is enormous and vigilante. In this respect he is much comparable to Orson Welles; fat, gluttonous, hungry for power and mad with ambition.
He has come at a time where the American cuisine is not what it was where aesthete cooks play fast and loose with the food of millions. He has eaten, eaten, eaten and is now sick, violently, hatefully sick. He has eaten in the finest of resturant’s and is unhappy with the kids’ meal he once ate. The plastic toy that once looked cool can now only be looked on with revulsion, bewilderment and morbid curiosity. Revolting and morbid he takes his complaints up with the head chiefs that cook up, defrost and regurgitate what we are supposed to take as a main meal but looks suspiciously like leftovers from a gourmet party gone wrong, tastelessly, unconvincingly and nonsensically wrong.
He has seized on the ‘cult’ of culture and made criticism of the subjective into a necessary calling for every citizen of the nations of YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook. He’s also a bit funny. Funny how? What do I mean by funny? Funny like a clown funny? He does amuse people as he gives a critical breakdown, breakdown being more literal than figurative, of a film sugarcoating his arguments with comedy to make his self prepared bitter concoction all the more sweeter to swallow down the spit he provides.
Beginning a humble two years ago his following has been both quick and strong. People were already following and helping him before they even knew he was a contender. The feeling of love and bitterness of corporate entertainment was felt by many before him and the need to voice their opinions of praise and of disparagement was greatly wanted. Though each voice, each sounding whiningly familiar to each other, were alone and desperately nerdy and geekily weak. Then he came to unify these echoing voices into a rhythm to which he supplied the beat and tone came out on its own and the pitches were varied correspondingly and all critics, reviewers, ‘comedians’ and communicators had themselves a salsa dance where they tangoed unhesistantingly, seductively and flauntingly tauntingly into the long dark messy and flawed night of popular culture.
For the many talents he has groomed have flourished into an intelligent ongoing comment of life in art and games where people may have no embarrassment screaming ‘KHAN!’ ‘GET TO THE CHOPPA!’ and, of course, ‘OF COURSE!’. Each of his contributors have their own specialist field of work with their own particular take of culture. Some look to the worst, some look to the best that is on offer, some are serious, others are whimsical, others look to the past and others stare straight down at the present, and few are practically helpful. Together they build a wonderful mosaic of popular culture from the early eighties onwards and forwards into the future, twittering and bloggering on and on as a living evaluation of what we have produced and how it can be better.
His sophisticated grasp of post-modernism, intertextuality, relativism, subjectism, objectism, narcissism, obsesstionism, humourism, jism, ismism and rhetoric is sophisticated enough to be able to kick a running joke into marathons and to let it keep running long past the point where it should have died at the finishing line. He has a commendable wrist of satyr in which he holds himself high wearing those finely wrought bracelets, wrought in his own critical infernos, that shine so splendidly from the sun that rises from his behind and shadows all he analytically mocks with the most sinister of smiles, the most maniac of laughs and the most loosest of ties, he is unsparing in his jewelry. A man of much bling.
To him I award this prize.
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