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Michael Jordan is about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame – the Clap Academy Hall of Fame.

There are few more evocative childhood memories than the ones tied to my beloved Chicago Bulls. Imagine being a child and latching onto something very early on — a player and a team — and then watching every year as the both of them, fates entwined, struggle to mature, grow, get better, then ultimately win.

And when they win they don’t stop winning. Suddenly that team’s name is synonymous with championships and that player is an international superstar. It’s like being able to say you were a fan of The Beatles since way back when Pete Best was on drums. It’s the perverse pride of being at the ground floor of something that later turns into a phenomena. There is a weird pride in that. You did nothing to contribute to the success of it, but you feel as though you did, and it reaps a lasting emotional reward.

It is also rare to watch someone, in real time, become the absolute best at something. Not just good, THE BEST. It’s happened before of course. We saw it during the seven year run of TV’s Empty Nest when Richard Mulligan became the finest actor of a generation. Then there was that fleeting moment in 1983 when David Copperfield vanished the Statue of Liberty, allowing him to claim title as “the greatest large-objects magician” since Wilbur the Druid Tempest, in 1884, made Spain disappear for five full seconds.

Michael Jordan’s Top 23 Most Memorable Moments

So what was so great about Michael Jordan, besides his prescient ability to never be wrong athletically (excluding baseball, golf, or, actually, anything not basketball)? It could just be the man’s highlight reel. The dizzying string of heroic game winning shots, acrobatic plays and official dunks. Maybe it was his commercials?

Maybe it was his Marx-like range of facial expressions in those Spike Lee commercials? The man emoted facially like someone about to lose to a Keynesian economist at math camp– and by someone, Karl Marx. Maybe it was just that everybody loves a winner. Or maybe it was the shoes? THA SHOOOS!

Whatever it was that made Michael Jordan a seminal figure it all came together at the right moment. In terms of fame, the 90′s were a lot like the 80′s but with slightly rounder edges. You could still be a matinee idol, but corporate culture made more demands on your personality. Jordan marched arm-in-arm, lockstep with those demands, and in return his iconography was captured in front of billions of cameras. Big cameras. Not like the millions of tiny ones, cellular and invasive, we know and use today that smudge our vision of celebrity. Big cameras make you a matinee idol; tiny ones make you the butt of a YouTube joke.

Above all else though, Michael Jordan became the idealized heir to the fame African-American celebrities enjoyed in the 1980′s. Black fame was nothing new, but Jordan came along at a time just after black crossover appeal had taken hold in the American culture and he illuminated its strongest characteristics.

He was as exciting to watch as Michael Jackson but not as erratic. He was as friendly as Bill Cosby but the context of sport gave him permission to be edgy. He was as self-confident as Ali, and as rich as Oprah.

It may likewise be said that MJ’s success laid its own groundwork for progress in this current decade, and for the fortunes of another high-profile black Chicagoan. There must be something about that particular commodity, being from that particular town. The marker tends to get moved.

Welcome Michael Jordan’s career to the Clap Academy Hall of Fame.

In 1983 NBC aired a primetime special called Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever to celebrate Motown’s anniversary. It was a nostalgia trip return to the glory days of R&B- of black music in general. In ’83 the charts were not exactly overflowing with popular black music. Just too many one-hit wonder New Wave bands and Police records crowding the charts. So on Motown 25 some of the old acts got together again to give an old era some new thrills. The Supremes got back together, as did The Temptations, and parents in living rooms bragged about Smokey Robinson to their kids, and about how much better music was “in them old days,” especially compared to- compared to…

That was until about halfway through the show. Then Michael Jackson went on stage and proceeded to out dance, out sing, and out perform everything that ever came before him in popular music. The parents all shut up, and at minute 3:35 everyone everywhere put their Men at Work album under the bed and shook hands with the future.

Welcome Michael Jackson’s Motown 25 performance to The Clap Academy Hall of Fame.

If you’re wondering why comedy snobs everywhere are shedding so many bittersweet tears over Conan’s inevitable move to The Tonight Show, thereby Los Angeles, after this week it’s because it symbolizes everyone getting older. It’s not like we’re not all happy for him. Anyone who went to college in the 90′s loves Conan, because Conan was what Letterman was to college kids in the 80′s: the band leader of an absurd universe that somehow got on-air on network TV. Conan got away with comedy we thought only very small audiences made up of nerds who remember “Get A Life” would enjoy.

Of course, Conan isn’t really going anywhere. He’ll probably be hosting The Tonight Show for the next 16 years. We just will miss it the way it was, you know? In our dorm room, a half-empty pizza box covering up your Boyz II Men tape, and all of a sudden there’s a masturbating bear on your 16-inch television, or a robot using the toilet. Of course Conan kept rolling along after our college years were done, but to us those moments evaporated from memory like the syllabus to our class on Chaucer poetry. We were never up that late that frequently again. The curse of post-college. Every once in awhile though you stayed up and caught the show, maybe had too many drinks, and remembered where you put the TV in your first dorm room.

Late Night with Conan O’Brien joins The Clap Academy Hall of Fame.

(illustration: mybigmuddy)

This is not a Chris Rock movie, or a disaster movie, or a disaster TV show, or the premise for a funk song, or a song by George Clinton. This is not Bill Clinton, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Roosevelt, Franklin D., or Benjamin Franklin, or Al Franken. This is not a test, and the White House is still white, and the poor houses are still Black. The Confederacy will not rise again, and our union is more perfect from now on. This was not a test but we still passed it, flying colors.

Welcome 2009 Presidential Inauguration to The Clap Academy Hall of Fame.

"You know what would be funny? You know how James Brown is always shrieking?
Well what if he was shrieking singing a song about getting into a hot tub?"

~ (hypothetically) eddie murphy

Since then Eddie Murphy has seriously gone off the rails but during the 80′s, time of the planet-consuming pop idol, he was the biggest, freshest comedian on the planet. His SNL years were but a harbinger.

Welcome The Best of Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live VHS tape to The CLAP Academy Hall of Fame.

From Onion A/V:

AVC: So it wouldn’t be a pleasure to look at them [past movies], like an old photo album or something, just to see where you were at a particular time?

Woody Allen: That’s a pleasure I deny myself, because then you get into nostalgic self-involvement, and I don’t think that would be good for me. I don’t like to reminisce much, and my walls don’t have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff. If you were in my house in New York, you wouldn’t know I was in the movie business. It just looks like a regular house, like the home of a lawyer or something, and I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.

On the Knicks:

What I’d like the Knicks to develop into is a team that’s fun and that’s colorful and that you really like to watch every night, which is the way they were many years ago. It was fun to watch them, because they didn’t just pile up wins in unappealing ways.

AVC: Like the [San Antonio] Spurs.

WA: Yeah. I’d really rather be entertained and have them come in second than be bored stiff and see them grind to a first-place finish.

What Comic-Con conventions need are less storm troopers and more Woody Allen nerds. Nerds with dark rimmed glasses who take 5 minutes to finish a thought; nerds who would rather be at a book party at Elaine’s than in outer space. Light sabers in the form of self-deprecation, but with a hint of self-assured intellectual superiority. From 1977-1994 Woody Allen made movies that made me happier than any movie, by any other filmmaker, at any other point in time. Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Hannah and Her Sisters, Shadows and Fog, Husbands and Wives, Manhattan Murder Mystery, just to name eight. And those aren’t even his “earlier, funnier ones.”

There’s alot to take away from the Woody-verse, especially in your mid-20′s when maturity is suddenly in reach. What’s more sophisticated at age 25 than acquiring a taste for Sidney Bechet records, the Marx Brothers, the word “didactic,” Bergman, existentialism, muted colors, jokes that reference books, Sentimental Education by Flaubert, Tracy’s face …

Of course the other reason to love Woody – that is, if you like New York – is because he loves New York. Instead of grilling the immigrants the city should make every 1st year investment banker in this town watch Manhattan. The Woody-verse bolsters your NY IQ ten-fold. Never mind that when you actually move to New York not even 5% of his movies translate to your day-to-day life. For instance: Winona Ryder won’t be asking you to meet her at El Teddy’s at midnight (closed anyway), and that table at Rao’s is not available even if its restaurant week. But this is not my point. We’re not talking about the show Friends here – disparities don’t make his New York any less real, or the love-contempt relationship to the city his characters embody any less authentic. And there is always the opening sequence of his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan to consider; as rapturous a valentine from an artist to his environment as you’ll find.

Having said all of that let me now say this: 2nd entrant into SlapClap’s Clap Academy Hall of Fame … (drumroll) … I wasn’t planning to do this … (drumroll)

Get up here Wood-man! It’s Woody Allen. Save your messages of praise for after the jump.

(image courtesy Refined Vices)

I had an epiphiany but I don’t know when. It happened at a bar, I do know that. At some point in the night I realized something: I’m not fancy.

There, said it. Never have been either. Those years of me wearing purple jeans to match the bill of my hat; auditioning for West Side Story for a drama coach with a polaroid of him shaking hands with Brad Pitt framed in his office; keeping 4/4 time signature in that funk tribute band to Mark Knopfler – they were a waste of time. I was a poser.

When I first moved to New York I made $15,000 a year (not true) and I still paid $75 each Monday to listen to Woody Allen play clarinet at the Cafe Carlyle. I owned the script pages for My Dinner with Andre. My girlfriend was a cellist. Fancy!

But then I dipped my lips into a delicious rock glass full of Jamesons- hold the rocks please, but then put the rocks back in because I love “the rocks” – and things were never the same. It’s the best drink at the bar every night.

There you have it. Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, congratulations on being the first ever entry into SlapClap’s Academy of CLaP Hall of Fame. A nod of honorable mention goes out to fishing, Bob Costas interviews and Redbreast. Stay tuned for more updates.

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