And so it comes to this. Actually, it hasn't come to anything. We've simply reached the final destination point of our international promotional campaign: the MTV European Music Awards in Madrid, Spain. Several members of the jackass cast were going to be presenting awards, and we, the lowly crew, were lucky enough to ride their coattails straight through the VIP backdoor and into the celebrity thick of it.
Some instantly retired to the cast green room to sip water and eat nuts. Others disappeared into the open bar/food area to down booze and ingest exotic buffet fare. Several took up faux-instruments to test drive the new Rock Band 3 video game. And Rick Kosick went big-game hunting for the Jersey short woman known as "Snooki" to bag an exclusive backstage money-shot photo for his website www.rickkosick.tv.
The EMAs were ... well, the EMAs. Whether you like it, love it, hate it, or could care less about it—it simply is what it musically is. Me, I'm not exactly the most new pop-culture kid on the block, so most of the winning and performing faces were way, way off my radar, a/k/a highly irrelevant to my life and times. I did catch the Kings of Leon perform from the long distant vantage point of our VIP seat block, but others, like Ke$ha, whom when I first heard the name announced confused her for a breakfast cereal spokesmodel, drove me out of the arena and into the backstage bar zone, where the act of getting a drink was nearly if not more difficult than keeping up with the commas at this point. So. Let's put an end to that. There! Okay.

Photos clockwise from upper left: Johnny Knoxville runs the gauntlet outside the Westin Palace hotel with class; Rock Band 3ers Rick Kosick, Knate Gwaltney, Dimitry Elyashkevich and Cordell Mansfield; Backstage photo time-killing with Danger Ehren and that one random aforementioned tall girl from London; Wee Man goes commando on live TV; Sean Cliver gets green-roomed with Caleb Followill of the Kings of Leon; Chris Pontius and the EMA skeleton key of credentials.
By now you've no doubt heard or perhaps even seen the penile spectacle that the boys made out of their EMA award presentation. (I can't even remember what or who they were awarding, such was the upstaged case.) However, for those that live under a bigger slab of rock than I presently do, Wee Man freed his willy and done stuck his dick in the proverbial mashed potatoes of the event. Funny how a bared penis can be such a hard thing for the mainstream to swallow when it's force-fed to them, and yes, you can make of that what you will.

Photos clockwise from upper left: A bowl of Ke$ha and Cliver (for all I know she still might as well be a breakfast cereal spokesmodel); Sometimes you just have to do it because it's just so ludicrous—Dave England, Lindsey Shupe and Cliver mob up with Miley Cyrus; A crowded backstage house with the Dudesons and our crew (make special note of the unopened Pepsi soda pop cans).
I didn't bring along my camera to this event (aside from the crummy photo-taking feature on my iPod Touch), so you'll have to bear with several of the images from the EMA's backstage after-party as I was often on the giving end of the digital putty. Quite honestly, though, it really can be a relief to be cut free from the responsibility of toting a $3000 camera around (I was, admittedly, rolling the dice with my rig at the Irish after-party in the state I was in), especially when there is loads of free alcohol to grease the wheels of stupid. Yee-hah!

Photos clockwise from upper left: Danger Ehren with yet another King of Leon, Jared Followill; Cliver, lost in translation between a "high-five" and a "go fuck yourself"; Alcohol can harm you, Cliver and Ryan Dunn; Kosick and Lindsey support Kid Rock; Dimitry, Guch, Coronita and Seamus "I was in the jackass 3D credits 'Blue Room'!" Frawley.
All of the above was the upside, by the way. The downside was that the majority of us were to be leaving the hotel bright and early that Spanish morning—approximately four hours from when several of these photos were taken—for our international and overwhelmingly hungover trip back to the United States ... and it was not pretty.
(Crappy iPod Touch photos by Sean Cliver; all other photos courtesy of Lindsey Shupe's camera; Madrid, Spain 2010)