Only read this if you Googled The Long Count by the National, currently playing at BAM.

There are nine billion songs in existence, and I've never had a problem adding new ones to the catalog. When Sting writes another easy-listening opus, I don't complain. Maybe there's some housewife in Santa Monica who's scared of world music by ethnic folk. When Elvis Costello shits out another loser, I don't say a word, because elevators need music too. But during the pretentious little snoozefest The Long Count last night, suddenly I realized the category needed a velvet rope to protect it. Plus a burly doorman to tell the writers, "Hey, dudes, sorry, but the 'song' category is full. Maybe we'll let some of these things in when, like, Ethel Merman Disco goes out of print."

From the playbill:[A]s you might expect, the narrative of the Long Count, which uses a counting system based on non-repeating sequences of thirteen-day numbers and 20-day names that combine to form a divinatory 260-day calendar that simultaneously represents the transit of Venus, the length of a typical pregnancy and the growth cycle of corn, also transcends mere linear time.Deftly answering the question, "Why does the music stink?"
"'We can go, go, go," sings Kim Deal, quoting Denny Doyle in the 1975 World Series, who thought he heard the Sox third-base coach Don Zimmer yelling "Go, go, go!" "No, no, no, this has not worked out well," sings Kelley Deal in "Bull Run," recalling that in reality, Zimmer was screaming, "No! No! No!" and also referencing the destruction of three worlds, or designs, before our own.Succinctly answering the question, "Why do the lyrics stink?"

When your six-year-old niece puts on a puppet show about a snowman who wants to be an astronaut, it's cute. It's fun. It's adorable. Should your niece happen to secure funding to mount this production, though, and signs Benicio Del Toro to play the snowman and Randy Newman to write the score, though, that cuteness is probably going to disappear. Now it'll just be a bloated mess. Perhaps The Long Count actually might work on some small scale -- say, some hippie chick singing the songs in a subway station in between weaving beads into her hair -- but as an offering by an actual arts institution it's insulting. It's an argument against funding avant garde art, because at some point somebody with sense should have gone up to these people and said, "Um, let's do something to turn this into non-crap."