The Dark Balloon

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I try to explain what's wrong with Glee’s pilot episode in a way I hope is convincing and sexy.

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.

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Steve Jobs is a perfectionist my behind.

I categorically state that I am the first person on the internet to ever point out these flaws. Go ahead. I dare you to find prior art.

(This is on Windows. I have the fat iPod nano.)

• iPod nano charges when you plug it in. But there’s no indicator of battery percentage full anywhere. This is a feature that most electronic devices had back in 1990.

• iPod touch: Rotation would be much faster without the crappy animation. Why is the animation crappy? Because it’s slow.

• Does the iTunes store render each pixel rendered in a separate process? I’m on a 300 KB/s bandwidth here. I know it does not take seconds to do a fancy HTTP request especially when the song samples load instantaneously.

• iTunes cannot detect duplicate items being dragged onto an iPod. FTP clients had this technology in 1998. You build a hash table. Do I need to show Apple how to build a hash table?

• iPod syncing: Oops, I deleted all your music. Again, FTP clients perfected the user interface back in 1998.

• Right-click a podcast episode. Click Show Description. Watch as MS Sans Serif rendered in a text box in a white window pops up. Aliased. When the bleeding stops, wonder why someone didn’t take the five seconds to think of a better way to read the podcast description. Maybe—maybe it could show up when you click “Properties,” like how every other media library does it.

• Why are the edges sharp? Theory: Apple enjoys scraping people’s skin.

• Why are the backs made of aluminum? Theory: America likes staring at smudgy, scratched metal covered with fingerprints.

• Why can’t I mark files as Podcasts without resorting to metadata esoterica? There’s a separate window for podcast description but not this?

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I review Everybody Loves Raymond.

Everybody Loves Raymond is a gem among sitcoms. It’s not about bratty adults, usually post-collegiate, with messy relationships (Scrubs, Friends, Graey’s Anatomy [which might as well be a huge medicine joke], How I Met Your Mother, House, The Office). It’s about a family, but not about kids (Fresh Prince, Two and a Half Men, George Lopez, The Simpsons, and the list goes on). It’s about adults in a family, which isn’t dysfunctional, which is as apparent as the difference between its finale shot—in which the family sits down for dinner—and the Arrested Development finale, pre-teaser shot—in which Michael and George-Michael sail away from their soon-to-be convicted family. It’s one of the last sitcoms that’s not afraid of love. So many shows treat love as a ten-foot high dragon with a bad breath and a crippling social awkwardness. It’s “he might love me, he might not” or “should I commit” or “doesn’t everybody deserve second chances” when you flip past prime-time sitcoms about relationships. And it’s annoying that writers can’t approach love with any kind of sentimentality or tenderness or even realism because it has to be frigging dragon with a frigging flamethrower on top of a frigging castle. In fact, the show that anywhere approaches this level of frankness in dealing with love is Pushing Daisies on ABC, and it’s being canceled after this season. (Editor’s note: Fuck you, ABC.) ELR is refreshingly, retrospectively different. Debra loves Ray, despite their flaws; Marie loves Frank, despite their flaws. The family loves each other. It’s one of the few TV shows where I’ve watched all the entire series more than four times. Because it’s radically different comedy, where you can turn on the TV and not think, “Ha ha, what horrifyingly emotionally disfigured people these are” but “What a lovely place to be.”

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I review The Emperor of Scent.

The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr is what scientific nonfiction should be: engaging, fun, funny, and thrilling. It provides just the right amount of biology and high-school organic chemistry to adequately portray the theory, but not enough to overwhelm Joe the Reader who whiled away the time spent in AP Chemistry by talking about the Ebonics robot in the movie Transformers (not me). It’s the story of an underdog where the antagonists aren’t evil bastards as much as scientific corruption is and where everybody’s surprising and where the way the story’s told is almost as smart as the people it’s about.

(Using emails between Stewart and Turin (who gave a TED talk in 2005. You might have been there, if you were insanely rich enough to pay the $6,000/year membership fee.) does get old after a while, though. Emails in the book overall prove that scientists as a rule like molesting English. Also, the Author’s Note would have worked just as well at the end of the book.)

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Help arrives, drunk.

If anybody needs a review sheet for an introduction to differential equations course, I had to make one recently for awful, terrible reasons beyond my control. You can find the sources to de.tex and de.sty on Pastie, however long they’ll last. At most, until MySpace and 4chan team up to buy out the internet.

And, if you can, avoid Nagle’s Fundamentals of Differential Equations. It focuses all too much on applications before explaining the theory, and it does the latter in a willfully obtruse manner. Given the alternative of hearing it from a teacher again, the matrix exponential function chapter would probably lower your test scores.

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If AMG had stars: 200 out of 5.

An All Music Guide review of Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid recently came out. Note that it thinks Elbow is a plural noun. Here it is:

In a world where even the generally mediocre likes of Snow Patrol can have honest to goodness mainstream pop success, it seems peculiar that Elbow have never broken through beyond a devoted cult following. (Admittedly, the fact that their new labels, Polygram’s alt rock imprint Fiction Records in the U.K. and Geffen in the U.S., are their fourth and fifth, respectively, after stints on Island, EMI, and V2, may have a lot to do with their lack of mainstream attention.) Exploring the fruitful middle ground between early Radiohead’s mopey art rock and Coldplay’s radio-friendly dumbing down of the same, Elbow makes records built on a balance of things not often found together anymore: strange musical textures alongside immediately accessible pop song choruses, or unexpected left turns in song structure paired with frontman Guy Garvey’s warm, piercing vocals. It’s no surprise that Elbow are regularly compared to old-school prog rockers like Pink Floyd and Electric Light Orchestra: they’re proof that records can be cool and commercial at the same time, an idea that’s not particularly hip in this day and age. Yet a song like “Grounds for Divorce,” which puts a sharp, wryly funny Garvey lyric against a clanging, Tom Waits-like arrangement and throws on one of the album’s catchiest tunes for good measure, or “Some Riot,” which filters a yearning, lovely melody for guitar and piano through so many layers of effects and processing that it can be hard to tell what the original instruments sounded like, isn’t afraid to display its accessibility even on its most experimental numbers. At the album’s best, including the spacious, atmospheric balladry of the opening “Starlings” (imagine if Sigur Rós could write a pop song as emotionally direct as Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing”) and the potential radio breakthroughs of the soaring, semi-orchestral epic “One Day Like This” (complete with choral climax!) and the wistful “Weather to Fly,” The Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s most self-assured and enjoyable album so far. [The U.K. version added “We’re Away” as a bonus track.]

Now without all the fluffy adjectives that never seem to match up with anybody’s personal experiences:

In a world where even the likes of Snow Patrol can have pop success, it seems peculiar that Elbow have never broken through beyond a cult following. (Admittedly, the fact that their new labels, Polygram’s alt rock imprint Fiction Records in the U.K. and Geffen in the U.S., are their fourth and fifth, respectively, after stints on Island, EMI, and V2, may have a lot to do with their lack of attention.) Exploring the middle ground between early Radiohead’s art rock and Coldplay’s dumbing down of the same, Elbow makes records built on a balance of things not often found together anymore: textures alongside immediately choruses, or left turns in song structure paired with frontman Guy Garvey’s vocals. It’s no surprise that Elbow are regularly compared to prog rockers like Pink Floyd and Electric Light Orchestra: they’re proof that records can be cool and commercial at the same time, an idea that’s not particularly hip in this day and age. Yet a song like “Grounds for Divorce,” which puts a Garvey lyric against a Tom Waits-like arrangement and throws on one of the album’s tunes for good measure, or “Some Riot,” which filters a melody for guitar and piano through so many layers of effects and processing that it can be hard to tell what the original instruments sounded like, isn’t afraid to display its accessibility even on its most experimental numbers. At the album’s best, including the balladry of the opening “Starlings” (imagine if Sigur Rós could write a pop song as direct as Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing”) and the breakthroughs of the epic “One Day Like This” (complete with climax!) and the “Weather to Fly,” The Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s most self-assured and enjoyable album so far. [The U.K. version added “We’re Away” as a bonus track.]

Now without all the name-dropping of bands, which usually muddles the review with people you’ve never heard of playing music that never sounds remotely alike:

It seems peculiar that Elbow have never broken through beyond a cult following. Elbow makes records built on a balance of things not often found together anymore: textures alongside immediately choruses, or left turns in song structure paired with frontman Guy Garvey’s vocals. They’re proof that records can be cool and commercial at the same time, an idea that’s not particularly hip in this day and age. Yet a song like “Grounds for Divorce” or “Some Riot,” which filters a melody for guitar and piano through so many layers of effects and processing that it can be hard to tell what the original instruments sounded like, isn’t afraid to display its accessibility even on its most experimental numbers. At the album’s best, including the balladry of the opening “Starlings” and the breakthroughs of the epic “One Day Like This” (complete with climax!) and the “Weather to Fly,” The Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s most self-assured and enjoyable album so far. [The U.K. version added “We’re Away” as a bonus track.]

By the way, when did a song’s having a climax become so titillating? Now with only the sentence structures that describe the music on the actual album:

Elbow makes records built on a balance of things not often found together anymore: textures alongside immediately choruses, or left turns in song structure paired with frontman Guy Garvey’s vocals. Yet a song like “Grounds for Divorce” or “Some Riot,” which filters a melody for guitar and piano through so many layers of effects and processing that it can be hard to tell what the original instruments sounded like, isn’t afraid to display its accessibility even on its most experimental numbers. At the album’s best, including the balladry of the opening “Starlings” and the breakthroughs of the epic “One Day Like This” and the “Weather to Fly,” The Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s [best album yet].

Well, at least this album doesn’t discriminate against handicapped people.

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A relationship, a handsome sphere absorbed with itself.

If you like beautiful stories and you like beautiful art, you must already be a fan of Anders Loves Maria by Rene Engström, which is copious with both. Today’s comic—even outside of the storyline, completely devoid of context—should win Most Powerfully Poignant of the Year award in the mathematic category of “Hell, Yes, Finally the Internet is an Awesome Artistic Media.” (This is also known as Set by mathematicians, but mathematicians are lame.) (via smbc)

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I review Mother Night.

Mother Night is a punch to the stomach, and yet I can’t recommend it highly enough. It should firmly unseat Vonnegut from the catch-all postmodernist literature movement because, whereas Pynchon or Wallace eschew emotions, Vonnegut will emote the hell out of you. When I had a periodontal abscess, which is slightly less painful than reading some of the more horrifying parts of Night, I was giving benzocaine, which is also called Hurricane Spray to make people feel better about, I don’t know, anesthesia. “Hurricane Spray takes your breath away.” This might be the most popular motto in the medical world because I’ve now heard it twice, word for word. And it’s true. The first spray numbs your throat. The second one force you to cough for air.

(If you have ever read Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night is nothing like it. I’m good at imagining fake similarities and differences between works of literature; it’s the only thing that gets you through high school and college classes. Night and Slaughterhouse-Five, though? Worlds apart.)

Mother Night is benzocaine.

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I review Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Recently, I discovered Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via @sherbondy. It’s a beacon of consistent humor. These will get you started: 881, 806, 816, 827, 833, 837, 843, 848, 866, 868, 714, 764, 773, 557, 581, 614, 634, and 639.

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I summarize Spider-Man 3.

Mary Jane gets jealous of Peter’s success. That’s right, Peter. He is possibly the nicest and nerdiest interpretation of a superhero ever, whose success manages to offend Mary Jane. She questions her love, thus compounding Spider-Nerd’s problems, thus putting his life in mortal danger. Along the way, the movie touches on every other cliché not yet employed in this subplot. Also: nobody bleeds; Harry chooses to be near Mary Jane’s bosom and die rather than call an ambulance; you can talk audibly even if a monster pierces both your lungs; Spider-Nerd’s rib cage is invincible; you can survive a grenade explosion two inches from your face with minimal reconstructive surgery; women will predictably scream in large numbers every time something—usually glass—breaks; you can take your kids out to watch a highly dangerous battle between monstrous freaks; gravitational acceleration is 9.8 meters per second squared for the first three seconds before falling to zero; and an invincible monster will rampage your city when all he really wants is forgiveness. Having watched this and Bones in the same week, I think I’ve reached my capacity for bad writing (and I still have to read over this week’s Dark Balloon posts).

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I review Bones.

To recreate a murder, the detective avaunts. She leaves the scene, she scurries, she is no more, et cetera. You would think she’s going to the crime scene and have an epiphany about the nature of mankind and/or the murder in question. No. She journeys into some forensics department room of the police station. It’s completely dark. There’s an illuminated table in the center with a technician standing opposite our detective. Sand is falling on the table, or so you think. Until they begin talking.

Then, you realize with mounting horror and fascination (horcination), the falling sand and table contraption is actually a hologram machine. The sand acts as pixels, right? Wrong! When possible hypotheses for the mechanics of the murder gently float on the table, the sand just flows around it. Does the sand create the hologram? No. In real life, that’d be awful. Imagine projecting a movie onto a screen as we do now. Imagine that screen was infinitely long with tiny holes. Now accelerate the screen downward at 9.8 meters per second squared for the entire duration of the movie. Now make that movie three dimensional. That’s how awful that idea would have been.

Not the type of people to take this setback without fighting, the writers merely ignored the sand. It’s there to look pretty. It’s decoration sand. There’s decoration sand in my hologram. The horcination continues. With every hypothesis, the technician pulls up a new visualization. How? The viewer has no idea; I have no idea; the writers probably don’t have any ideas. They’re just standing there, talking, and new holograms pop up. The detective has a degree in kinesthesiology, which is the basis for the conversation that’s ongoing I suppose. Now, you might ask yourself, “Is the conversation scientifically accurate? Would that redeem the show?” First of all, I tried to focus on the dialogue and the completely improbable futurism of the room, and I passed out. The doctors said I had an aneurysm and hernia and heart attack at the same time induced by stress, but I think it’s because shutting down the body is its way of defending against hyper-bullshit.

Nothing can redeem the show. During the last spring season, Jesus tried and his liver exploded. Jesus doesn’t even have a liver. (They were invented in 1821, long after he died, came back to life, and defeated gravity—the final boss.) If you can project your thoughts onto a 3-D hologram, I refuse to suspend my disbelief. My disbelief is so great that there’s not enough hard drive space in the world to which I could suspend it. There’s no limitation to the plot devices you can construct if you let yourself write an imagination machine into your TV show. Let there be police robots! Let there be computers that stop crime before it happens! Wait, this completely abandonment of reality already happened, and it was called Minority Report, and I already saw it, damn it.

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Ambiguity is the drop shadow of literature.

As the horse galloped through the forest with a rider on his back, he aimed for all the low branches. Thus, he participated in a rudimentary form of evolution in which trees eventually stopped growing low branches and decided the whole “forest” idea wasn’t such a good one if wild animals were going to be running through them the entire time.

People who think Equus is an easy play to understand don’t understand that (a) the main character Dysart doesn’t say anything substantial for most of the play; (b) the important things we learn about Dysart are by proxy through Alan whom I call the Beacon of Crazy Ambiguity; (c) a lot of meaning is conveyed (and I use that word loosely) through avant-garde stage directions and unreliable dream sequences slash flashbacks that don’t go anywhere and don’t mean anything; (d) the play at once interweaves a depressed man going through mid-life crisis and a equine-Freudian sexual exploration; and (e) Peter Schaffer is guano insane.

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“Standards were falling everywhere. They usually do.”

Seriously, A List Apart? Two Ruby on Rails tutorials in this issue? (Oh, Web 2.0. Is nothing sacred to you?) There are, on my last count, approximately 42 infinities of Rails tutorials on the Internet. You can tell Ruby on Rails is easy to use because there are so many tutorials and because it generates code for you automatically—less typing! So ALA decided to publish two new tutorials. What happened to the good old days when it wasn’t involved in the hip new stuff? A couple of issues ago it was the brouhaha over IE 8’s rendering engine switching. Back in the old days, ALA single-hanedly launched CSS techniques. Sliding doors, sprites, and Suckerfish. Doing Ruby on Rails is like New York Times doing a nine-page investigation of Ruby on Rails.

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If you only hadn’t thrown our tea into the harbor.

John Oliver’s Terrifying Times stand-up set premieres on April 20th on Comedy Central, which is remarkable. It’s the first time a Daily Show correspondent has done a comedy special while still on the show as far as I can call, a reversal of what they did with Demetri Martin. Oliver is also one of the most versatile comedians: In addition to all this, he along with the wonderful Andy Zaltzmann does the radio with The Bugle, a consistently funny podcast and truly a pleasure to hear. I’m working through the archives and “Hotties from History” along with the reaction from their audience is just comedy gold. I wish I had caught their Political Animal radio show. Kudos to whoever casted Oliver onto The Daily Show. He along with John Hodgman brought the show back after Colbert and Carrell became less frequent and finally left. They really brought back the tradition where correspondent sketches could literally go anywhere, Hodgman with his quiet, insane madness (“John, is that really true? / Yes. I said it, didn’t I?”) and Oliver with his zany eye for satire (the 3-minute list of silly names for British military figures, “The Meter is Running”).

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Wow!

[In reaction to questions he’s written beforehand] I gotta be honest with you, that’s a pretty poor question. / [Later] Now that question I like.

A rare gem of a SNL show happened recently.

Sue really likes surprise parties.

(This turns out to be the understatement of the century.)

Did anybody else double take at Tina Fey in the fake commercial? If SNL doesn’t care that it’s rerunning old commercials (That was an old commercial, right?) for live shows, they might as well start interlacing new episodes with Blues Brother sketches.