In the dream, you are sitting with all your
friends at a diner. She with her long hair and
twinkling eyes sits across from you, and around
her are the arms of another man. The conversation
bounces back and forth, always missing you by such
and such. It is bright outside, and you stare out
the window at the parking lot, waiting for the
charade to end. “Even in your sleep, you’re
alone,” you think to yourself. You wake to a
pounding headache and drag yourself out of bed as
you mechanically dress and prepare for another
day. You decided to go for a walk, and you hardly
notice it is raining the entire time.
John Hodgman, everybody, lecturing the Radio
and TV Correspondents’ Dinner on nerds and jocks.
I like how CSPAN has nearly completed its
transformation into a comedy showcase of
my favorite people. (via Daniel Jalkut)
As you know, I like to think of The Dark Balloon
as a place where you can come, set your suitcases
down, and get some sound financial advice. As part
of my continuing effort to turn you from a poor
orphaned elfling into a rich orphaned elfling,
I’ve compiled lists of ways you can make money off
of simple household items. Today’s household item:
love.
You kidnap your rivals’ girlfriends, leaving a
business card that contains only the URL of your
website. The website is a Netflix knock-off for
parts of said girlfriends. After signing up,
users can choose to spend unlimited time with
two queued parts, and then return them to
receive the next two parts. Is this week more of
a thigh-and-waist or elbows-and-fingers? Choose
carefully! Your first month is a free trial.
There is also an “Instant Watch” feature but,
really, it’s just a gruesome photo gallery.
At a bar, you wait for a woman to spill a drink
on you. You create an optical illusion in which
the woman thinks you are giving off electrical
sparks. You introduce yourself in a robotic
voice. She introduces herself, intrigued by your
metallic accent. She asks you about it; you tell
her you are a robot—a love robot. You two hit
it off. Your relationship quickly progresses,
but she knows deep down inside in her heart of
hearts—she is part bovine—that your callous
lack of emotional ability will stymie all hopes
of true love. You tell her there’s a wonderful
robot artificer who is willing to upgrade your
emotional circuits but it’s too much to afford
and you only have half the money saved up. She
takes this news sadly. One day, she surprises
you with the other half. She has been cutting
corners and saving up ever since you told her
about the miraculous surgery. Mechanically, you
thank her as heartfelt as you can; she knows
that in a few hours you will be able to truly
express your feelings. You run away with the
money. She dies alone, in poverty. As time
progresses, you realize your heart has
solidified during this long confidence game and,
in a fit of irony, you become the robot you
always pretended to be.
You open an amusement park where visitors pay
money to experience love. The nearby people are
surprised; they had not seen nor heard the
construction. Everybody comes for a look-see;
you generously charge $5 for admission. At the
entrance, the most wonderful fried foods are
offered, from sweet to spicy, from juicy to
crunchy. Visitors engorge themselves, and the
food seems to always have the same warm, giddy
effect on everybody, as if all the troubles in
the world had melted away, as if nothing else
mattered but that sensation of ecstatic
happiness. The people amble toward the rides,
knowing the emotion will never end. But no
matter which ride visitors choose—be it the
merry-go-round, the hula hoops, or the roller
coaster—they end up vomiting. People begin
looking for trash cans but there are none. Soon,
vomit covers the entire ground and then the
booths and then the rides themselves. As
visitors wade through the Katrinaesque splurge
toward the entrance, which turns out to be the
only exit, they find you, the ticket taker, are
gone, and so is that feeling of life and
humanity that had so enraptured them earlier.
Now they only feel hollow and aimless. And they
return back to their prosaic, loveless lives
while you escape with the money to your prosaic,
loveless life, hoping the stench of dirty money
can mask the stench of a dirty conscience—but
it never will.
You put yourself in a cage and hire somebody to
paint a sign next to it. The sign would read
“World’s Worst Person”, and you could have
someone charge tourists $5 to watch you silently
dance in uneven circles.
Jeff looked nervous. “This is a very nice
restaurant,” rumbled María, rubbing Jeff’s
shoulders. “I feel like a hill again.”
“Primary-succession ecosystems only,” whispered
Jeff, grateful for the compliment.
They sat at the dinner table, staring at
their menus, finding what he or she had already
decided to order, and putting the menu back down.
Jeff went to say something. He put his mountain
hands on those of María, who pulled hers back.
Jeff blushed and pulled his as well.
“Look, this is moving a little too
cretaceous-tertiarily for me.” María said,
as if she had been
rehearsing those words all night and suddenly,
like a flank eruption, could no longer hold it, as if
that was how she felt all along. “I
think we should just be friends.”
“But we are already friends,” Jeff said, quietly.
“What’s the level below friends?”
“Rangemates?”
“We’ll be rangemates,” María said in an as
cheerful and comfortable tone as a mountain that
was neither cheerful nor comfortable could be. She
reached for her glass, drank, and shot another
smile with the sincerity of an ostensibly
slow-moving magma flow.
Jeff could only stare at her. The mountain
elephants on Jeff’s south face, who had watched
with the interest generations of mountain
elephants could muster over centuries and
centuries, whinnied softly, embarrassed. María
stared at her hands and stood up and left.
Mountain elephant said, “You moved too fast.”
“Mountain elephant, what knows you in the ways of
mountain love?” Jeff said, avalanches gently
rolled down his slope, stopping a comfortable
distance away from harming anyone.
Once, on the first day of class, Angela Carter,
who taught at Brown, was asked by a student what
her own writing was like. She carefully answered
as follows: “My work cuts like a steel blade at
the base of a man’s penis.”
Advocacy groups and advocates everywhere are
mourning the loss of Kansas pro-choice doctor Dr.
George Tiller following a fatal shooting during
religious services yesterday.
“George Tiller was a great man,” says pro-choice
Director Jeff Maloney of the Spangled American
Liberties Committee of Truth and Beauty. “He was
everything you wanted in a symbolic figure truly
abstracted from whatever it was that he did.”
Pro-life Director Jeff Maloney of the Beautiful
Spangly American Coalition for Liberties and Truth
offered similar condolences. “You could really
eviscerate Dr. Tiller. For years we were lost in
the wilderness without a guiding light. Who do we
attack? Where’s the face of pro-life
antagonism?”
Director Maloney paused in a moment of staged
drama and pretended emotion.
“George Tiller was that man.”
Director Maloney of the Liberties Committee
extended his commiseration to Tiller’s family. “We
hope they make it through this time of hardship
and become an equally great symbol for our
pro-choice advocacy with the same great ability to
be transformed into something empty of their
actual actions and humanity.”
Upon this remark, pro-life advocates reacted with
outrage. In one pointed criticism, individual Jeff
Maloney unintelligibly shouted, “I can’t believe
these murderous communistic fetus haters would
paint George Tiller in such broad strokes.”
“Clearly, he’s a pro-life symbol,” a statement
to which pro-choice individual Jeff Maloney
hysterically screamed, “Nuh-uh.”
Ultimately, of course, at the center of this awful
situation is the death of a courageous man whose
shooting can only be seen as a warning sign for
the increasingly heated abortion debate.
“It’s true. George Tiller’s death will be his last
great symbolic contribution to the visceral bile
from both sides,” says Jeff Maloney.
“It’s tragic, really,” says Director Maloney,
“that George Tiller can only die once.”
I went to see some live heart surgery yesterday.
Sat in a auditorium for three hours watching the
queer thing beating, then not beating for a bit,
then beating again. Didn’t lose concentration
once.
Glee
opens on a scene of cheerleaders with abrasive coach Sue Sylvester;
it’s Jane
Lynch playing the same role she played in Role Models. Cut to
title scene “Glee”.
Do the cheerleaders or Jane Lynch play an
important role in the narrative of Glee? No. In an
impressive directing decision, the cold open
completely fails to illuminate neither the show’s story
or characters.
Cut to scene of our protagonist Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison)
pulling into the parking lot, where jocks throw a nerd into the
dumpster.
“OK,” says you. “One of the show’s central themes
is that high school is hard.” Accurate guess, were
it not terribly wrong. Yet more impressively,
Strangers with Candy does a better job of
conveying that than Glee ever does. A better
theme for the show would be the word mish-mash.
“High school is tough” is mish-mashed with
“Teacher Will Schuester struggles with making
performing cool” is mish-mashed with “Rocky
marriage turns into family and romantic drama” is
mish-mashed with “Bully struggles with peer
pressure” is mish-mashed with “Unpopular kids
finding their place in the world” is mish-mashed
with “Woman finds unrequited love in married man”.
Glee spends all of 12 minutes (act one) packing
these plots and subplots in before cutting
sporadically in and out in the longer act two.
(In the interest of fairness and disclosure of my own laziness, I
stopped watching after the second act.)
“OK, the plot has problems, mainly that I’ve seen
both Strangers with Candy and Hamlet 2 and
High School Musicals 1 Through 9. What about the
characters?” You can’t see me, but I’m
patronizingly ruffling your hair right now. Will
Schuester is a teacher going against both his
administration and the de facto social structure.
Someone we can root for, until he frames athelete
Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) for
marijuana possession. “A complicated character,”
you say. Great until you take two steps back and
realize that he did it to force Hudson into
joining glee club at which point the
Disproportionate Action-Motivation Train rolls
into town and everybody gets on board for a
magical journey far far away from Suspended Belief
Land. Schuester is a Good Guy; the story hammers
that enough into the viewer like any good “teacher
against odds” plot (subplot? sub-subplot? main
plot? impossible to tell?). If the writers wanted
Schuester to be a Good Guy with Flaws, they took
the certainly took the most heavy-handed approach
possible.
But at least Schuester is not a flat character.
Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) is the over-ambitious
student learning to tone it down a notch; done to
death. Finn Hudson is the school quarterback who’s
more thoughtful than he lets on: no drug use,
cares about his academic record, and wants to be
successful in life; done to death. Sue Sylvester
is Gayle Sweeney from Role Models with better
lines. Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) is the
stereotypical sassy black woman; even 30 Rock
can’t pull that off without seeming pretentious or
over-trodden despite that show’s
self-referential nature, Sherri Shepard’s role as
Tracy Jordan’s wife, Johnnie Mae’s wonderful
conversation as an airport screener with Liz Lemon
(“Sandwich Day”), and the show’s generally
gorgeous writing. The one-off flamboyantly gay
ex-glee club teacher sexually harassing a teenager
at the beginning … in the pilot … of a
musical comedy series—well, it’s hard to tell
if that’s a stereotype or offensive mistake or who knows
how you’re supposed to feel about that in all of
the three seconds the show devotes to it. The
school’s jocks are jocks; the school’s
cheerleaders are cheerleaders; never mind that
these cliché cliques rarely form along such clean
lines in high school or with such sheep-like
meanness. And now you know the inhabitants of the
overpopulated Glee universe.
Yet it’s clear despite the suffocating writing and
haphazard plotting and epileptic directing that
the acting is decent if not wonderful. Jayma Mays
is fantastic as Emma Pillsbury (pictured in the Hulu thumbnail), a character we can
actually sympathize—possibly the only one—with
saddled by the writers with a germaphobic quirk
that’s neither realistic (as in Monk) or funny
(as in Monk). Cue a five-second scene where
Pillsbury cleans a table that neither drives the
story or character forward nor provides laughter.
Principal Figgins (Igbal Theba) deftly strikes the
balance between hard-ass and fatherly as the
slightly cynical principal. And perhaps with more
time and breathing space these characters can
become people with depth and humor and drama and
backstory, with whom we can empathize and I
certainly have no reason to doubt that. But by
throwing them into an overflowing cauldron of a
pilot episode aboard the Disproportionate
Action-Motivation Train chugging at light-speed
away from Suspended Belief Town into Weird,
Mish-Mash Plot Land, Glee does a great
disservice by handicapping the story and the
characters for what appears to be no gain.
Perhaps the greatest roast beef I have with Glee
is that it’s billed as a “musical comedy”. For the
first part, it should be noted that no original
music is being written for the show; that is,
the music itself is not actually comedic. Nor is
it staged particularly comedically. It’s telling
that the funniest music scene is the regional glee
club competition, and even those laughs are pulled
off by contrast not actual music (for reference,
see Little Miss Sunshine). As for the second
part, Glee treats comedy as a filler in between
scenes of drama leading to a particularly flawed
form of comedy-drama—which is a much more
accurate, if more nebulous, genre if we’re going
to be assigning those as the cavemen did—where
comedy and drama are in separate rooms and try to
take peeks at each other through a single small
muddy window; meanwhile, the writers take turns
throwing mud at the window. In pointing out the
places where comedy drives the story or the
character development, I could give you the scene
with Hudson by the dumpster or Berry on the
receiving end of a berry smoothie, but I’d be
hard-pressed to offer anything more substantial.
In a strange way, Glee takes the same approach
to comedy that Family Guy or Punk’d or Sit
Down, Shut Up or a large chunk of Adult Swim’s
programming does: a vehicle for jokes, one-liners,
quirky characters, and pie/smoothie-to-the-face
jokes mostly devoid of basic human compassion for
the characters involved, something that propels
Arrested Development or 30 Rock or even
Everybody Loves Raymond to a level far above
Glee.
But this is just a pilot. Glee is a decent
show at heart that certainly deserves to become
the success everybody else already thinks it is
provided, every now and then, it lets itself
breathe and expand. I’ll be rooting for it.
It was a fantastically beautiful geological era.
And, even though all the other landforms were out
partying, Mount Jeff was home, checking his
mountain email for the tenth time in two minutes.
“Nothing but spam,” he thought—a thought that
spanned decades of erosion and climate and
tectonic activity, all pockmarked, however
slightly, with a distinct yet indescribably sad
current of mountain loneliness.
Mount Jeff let out a mountain sigh, badly
disturbing a billy goat.
With nothing to do, he checked his mountain email
spam folder. “I’m so pathetic,” he thought. He
read the first one.
“Enhance your albedo!” it read.
Mount Jeff chuckled to himself.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic—” (Even though Mount
Jeff was only 2% iron and had no idea what it was
like, he thought it was cool to throw that word
around anyway.) “—if I bought some?”
But Mount Jeff secretly hoped it would work. All
his friends with girlmountains had positively
glowing faces. When he brought it up, they would
rumble, “No; I think you look brilliant.” But he
was convinced he looked duller.
Mount Jeff let out another mountain sigh. The
billy goat bleated furiously, decided to seek
solace in a more self-secure home, and left. “Just
like all my dates,” Mount Jeff thought with his
big, sad, boulder thoughts.
I uploaded a theater script for the Monkey Boners post. A shout-out to Celtx (Wikipedia), a free multi-platform screen-writing application based on Mozilla and XUL that made this way more fun that it should have been.