Thursday, May 27, 2010

Not to make this a TV show blog, but my American Idol experiment has ended, and I have to say, I’m not impressed. People tell me I should have seen earlier seasons, but I didn’t, so yeah. Let’s start at the beginning.

In the beginning, there are months and months (maybe not) of audition episodes, where a few good singers, a lot of mediocre singers, and several horrible singers parade themselves in front of the judges in order to get a golden ticket. This is fun for about two episodes before everyone starts sounding the same. The bad singers stop being funny, mostly because you know they just showed up to get on TV. They can’t possibly think they can sing, and their badly acted tantrums when told they can’t sing aren’t funny after about the third one you see. Because we only get back stories for a few people a show, it’s hard to care about most of the people who show up, especially since many of them look and sound the same. Also, it’s impossible for the judges to look at hundreds of thousands of contestants, simply because there’s not enough time in the day, so the ones we see in these “audition” rounds have already auditioned for various groups of producers, and those who don’t have an interesting enough story or good enough looks are sent packing because they wouldn’t make good TV. Sure, it’s supposed to be a talent show, but who wants to watch a boring, unattractive person with an amazing voice when we could see hideously ugly people or continue to enforce the rules that in order to be a pop star in this country, you have to be pretty?

So after what seems like an eternity, we’ve shuffled through all the audition episodes and we go to Hollywood, which is where we’re bombarded with episode after episode of subpar singers taking the stage for a few seconds. Again, we don’t get to know anyone, because there are still hundreds of contestants here. There’s a karaoke bar right by my house I could go to to have a better time if I wanted to watch people with fine voices sing. We’re shown a few heartbreaking clips of the girl whose grandma has Alzheimer’s or the guy who was in a car accident and hurt his leg a little (yeah, the stories are always played up with dramatic music but they’re not always really interesting), and sometimes they’re sent home because they can’t sing. Then there’s this thing called “group sing” which is where like five people get on stage together and do a bad New Kids on the Block routine. Anyway, somehow the judges cut down this group to like 24 or something, and then we go to the next round.

Amazingly, the top 24 are still bad. You’d think that if you seriously held hundreds of thousands of auditions, you might be able to come up with 24 people who can do a pretty damn good job singing. You’d be wrong! Anyway, now they get to sing some more bad songs and they get booted off. It’s hard to watch pretty, delusional people cry because they thought they could sing. The judges are still making decisions as to who goes home at this point, so there’s really no reason to watch still, because you have no control over anything that’s going on. So if you liked that dude with the fucking huge ass giant ridiculous chin who thought he was Jim Morrison, I’m sure your heart felt crushed when he went home and you were powerless to do anything but scream and fling things at the TV. The contestants are divided by genders here, and one man and one woman goes home each week so they can ensure that there are six men and six women in the final 12, just in time for the little girls who watch this show to vote off all the girls, I assume in order to eliminate dating competition.

Then we’re down to the final 12, and now we can start voting the prettiest girls and the ugliest guys off. The final 12 is where the show goes from a singing competition to a beauty pageant. Now I know that in seasons past some guys have won like Ruben Studdard and the gray haired fellow who weren’t particularly attractive, and maybe back in those days actual music fans watched the show. But this season you could almost see the tween girls voting over and over to keep the pretty girls away from the pretty boys by eliminating the girls right off the bat. This left Crystal Bowersox, who was by FAR the best singer this season, as the only girl throughout most of the competition. Then we had to sit through weeks of her beating the singing shit out of everyone else as we were forced to say goodbye to the cute little 16 year old, the doe eyed mop haired guy, the muscular black guy, and the cougar bait with the long blond hair, none of whom could really sing particularly well, but all of whom could have been on the cover of Tiger Beat. Now we’re left with Crystal, the living embodiment of a cross between Janis Joplin and Alanis Morissette, and Lee DeWyze, a guy blessed with a cockeyed smile and a natural rocker’s voice. Unfortunately, Lee decided he would sing pussy songs like Fireflies by that guy who sounds exactly like The Postal Service, and a bunch of other “rock” songs that barely have a pulse.

Crystal Bowersox’s song in the finale or whatever, the last singing show, “Up to the Mountain” was amazingly good, by far the best performance of the year, and cemented her as the clear winner in the eyes and ears of music fans all over the country. Unfortunately, not many music fans watch AI, so Lee won because… he… has a goatee, I guess. I guess that’s coming back around. Or it’s because the American public has no taste, as evidenced by the state of music right now. If Lady Gaga is hailed as an innovator because she wears weird outfits, that’s not a good sign for any innovation coming soon, because her music is indistinguishable from anything else that’s been on the radio for the past 20 years. Anyway, now we’ll soon have another Jack Johnson kind of guy on the radio soon in Lee DeWyze, which is a shame because Jack Johnson is SO fucking boring, and Lee really could have a great voice if he had ever been introduced to real rock and roll music growing up. Fortunately, winning this show doesn’t really guarantee you’ll be a bigger star than anyone else on the show, so Crystal will probably put something out too. I’m actually tempted to buy it, I liked her so much. Hopefully losing this show won’t convince her that she needs to drop the folk rock thing and go pop star on us.

Overall, American Idol is a waste of time. The judges say the same thing every week (“Dog,” “It didn’t work for me,” “Sound younger,” “Make it more current,” “It was pitchy,” etc). The audition shows are boring after the first one. The Hollywood Week shows are boring after the first minute, the top 24 is pointless because the public has no say in who stays or goes, and then when the public does vote in the top 12, they pretty consistently vote off the wrong people. It also doesn’t help that there are only three or four people in this group that legitimately have a shot at winning, so that automatically means there are going to be eight weeks of painfully obvious cuts, and they’re not even going to be the first eight cuts, so really the show’s not worth watching until the final episode, when the two best people are left, and even then it’s not worth watching because whichever guy is cuter to the most girls wins. On the plus side, Simon Cowell is gone now so this show will probably be off the air in a couple of years.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Lost is over and the series finale was a pitch perfect ending to the show we’ve all come to love and hate simultaneously over the years. I can see how the episode would frustrate a lot of people, especially those who spent the series more focused on the island than the characters. It is easy to get wrapped up in the mythology of the show, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that without an outstanding ensemble cast portraying characters we’ve all gotten to know incredibly well over the past six years, the island mythology wouldn’t have been interesting. If the show were full of cardboard cutouts of stereotypes who were discovering all this mystical stuff, the show would have been canceled after the first season. Regardless of what you’ll read from comments about Lost in other places, the show WAS always about the characters. The setting provided an intriguing and different location for the action to take place, and the island itself was basically another character, but when it came time to wrap up the series, it had to be about the characters.

The answers simply weren’t that interesting! People for whatever reason seemed to lose sight of the fact that this was a TV show. They had outlandish expectations for answers, so when we DID find concrete answers, they weren’t satisfied. The whispers being the souls of the dead trapped on the island. Jacob and the Man in Black being regular people with their own problems and insecurities. Adam and Eve being the bodies of Jacob’s brother and mother. The island literally being a cork that keeps evil at bay. The list goes on and on. It seemed like fans of the show expected answers that would blow our minds away and reveal some hidden truth behind the veil of reality. But now, the show is over, and we will never find out where the island came from, who its original protector was, who built the statue, what was up with all the hieroglyphics, why Walt and Aaron were so important, how the magic lighthouse worked, how Jacob learned to be the protector of the island, the science behind the donkey wheel that disappears the island and travels people to Tunisia, what would have happened if the island were “uncorked,” why Desmond could survive cataclysmic electromagnetic events, or tens of other questions. And I assert that it doesn’t matter. Part of the appeal of the show all along was its mystery. To have everything unraveled in such plain terms as they had explained things this season would take away from the mystical aspect of the show and hurt it.

Now that the show is over, I can actually tell people what it was about. Up until last night I had to say something like “Well these people get stuck on an island and all kinds of crazy shit happens to them.” But Lost was the story of an island that needed a protector. The island is a stopper for an evil that, if unleashed upon the world, would end life. There are forces at work on the island that are actively trying to unleash the evil, and the island’s current protector, Jacob, knows his time is coming to an end. He brings a group of people that he has chosen to the island to find his replacement. These people are all flawed, handpicked because their lives off the island are full of sorrow. They crash on the island and learn to survive, and throughout six seasons they grow as people more than perhaps on any other TV show I’ve ever seen. They are oblivious to the reason they were brought to the island for most of the series, though they quickly get a sense that this island is not normal. While we watch the small picture drama in the group play out, the pieces are being moved in the larger game – the search for the island’s new leader. And in the finale, the island finds its new leader. And the show ends. The finale’s on-island plot satisfactorily resolves the main plot of the show.

Now that it’s over, looking back at these characters’ story arcs cements just how amazing the show was. Jack, the doctor, the man of science, who wants more than anything to leave the island and never look back, transforms into a man of faith, willing to become Jacob’s replacement and sacrifice himself for the island.

Ben, the leader of a group of “native” inhabitants of the island, goes from being a lying, manipulative murderer who believes he is next in line for the throne, to a disillusioned and defeated shell of a man, misled into killing Jacob, and back to a place of redemption in the end when he is offered a job as the right hand man of the new island leader.

Every character on the show goes through an unbelievable arc, so much that when you look at these characters now, in the series finale, and look at them then, in the pilot, it’s hard to fathom how far they’ve come. The process of character development was so organic that watching the show you didn’t really notice. Instead, the Sawyer that jumps from a helicopter so that it can safely carry his friends to rescue is the same Sawyer that wouldn’t give sick people medicine three seasons earlier, and it seems natural, not forced. I have never seen a show with such well-rounded, realistic, believable, and fully-developed characters.

I wasn’t thrilled with everything about the series. At times during seasons two and three, the show stalled for time too much. Part of me does want more answers, despite myself. This final season wasted too much time on the “flash-sideways” plot device that was revealed in the finale to be a form of purgatory. While it served as a way to show us the highlights of the past six seasons, it felt, and feels, divorced from the main story on the island, and I don’t honestly think Lost would have lost much by leaving that out. But, in the end, the show was an overwhelming success, and the finale resolved the on-island storyline that we had cared about for so long. Leaving out the flash-sideways and a couple of minor missteps this season, it was a fitting cap on the series as a whole. I’m sad that I’ll never have another new episode of Lost to look forward to, but I’m happy that the series ended on such a high note.

Finally, the direction of this final episode was amazing. In the first shot of the first season, Jack opens his eyes in a field of bamboo, Vincent the dog runs over to him to wake him up, and he finds that his plane has crashed. His whole transformative ordeal is in front of him. Six seasons later, when he has finished sacrificing himself to save the island, he finds himself laying in the same field of bamboo, looking up at the sky. He sees the plane carrying his surviving friends to safety flying overhead, away from the island forever, and he knows his work is finished. Vincent comes and lays next to him, and he closes his eyes. Beautiful.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Brian here. I'm writing this blog post at the Josh Ritter show. It's Wednesday night and I'm writing it in my notebook. I'll type this up tomorrow. For now, I just want to tell you about The Most Awkward Concert Experience of My Life. First, the show is at Town Hall, a very fancy theatre in Times Square. That means there are seats. I've never been to a concert with assigned seats before. I feel sorry for the musicians, as this setup just doesn't facilitate crowd response and feedback. So, that's the first level of awkward. The awkwardness then gets compounded by the fact that I'm sandwiched between the wall and Mr. and Mrs. Make Out Machines. They started making out about five minutes before the show started. It's now the band's fourth song. They've taken short breaks -- that align with the band's breaks between songs, appropriately enough -- but have been going at it pretty consistently for about 20 minutes now. I don't know what all's going on -- I can see from my periphery that the girl's doing lots of stuff with her hand near/around the guy's upper thigh -- and I'm trying not to look too much. There is no one else in this row. These two, me, and the wall. Awesome. I'm definitely going to move before Josh Ritter comes on, because this is just ridiculously distracting. Oh, and the final level of awkwardness is that I have to write this all in the dark theatre, so who knows how legible it'll be when I look at it tomorrow. My god. This is the most ridiculous concert I've ever been to before.

[Then, later...]

Intermission. Time to scout for a new seat in just a moment. In the meantime, Mr. Make Out has gone away. He's wearing a blue trucker hat. People still wear those? Anyway, instead of relaxing a bit, all I can think of is how weird it feels not having people [insonely?] making out next to me at the moment. Strange how that works. Anyway, lesson learned: Don't go to shows with assigned seats.

So yes, those were my field notes from the show last night. Thankfully, the seat I moved to was much less distracting. I had the entire row to myself. And Josh Ritter put on an amazing performance, so it totally made up for the immense level of awkwardness I had to sit through during the opening band. He played most of the tracks off the new album, as well as great renditions of old songs like "Girl in the War," "Monster Ballads," "Harrisburg," "Right Moves," "Wait for Love," "To the Dogs or Whoever," and several others I can't remember off the top of my head. Oh, and one of the encore songs was a great cover of "Moon River." Good stuff.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Texas is getting ready to rewrite the history book, literally. They say they’re changing the content of history books to “promote patriotism.” Now I’m no scholar, but it seems to me like the history books should be written to “promote history.” Let’s take a look at their proposed changes, shall we?

-Take Thomas Jefferson out (or at least keep the bastard to a minimum) – Kids, he favored separation of church and state. While that is a principle that this country was founded on, it’s best not to teach kids that, because history has proven that theocracy is the best and fairest form of government, and if we’re ever going to get this godless, sinful country to that point, we’ve got to stop focusing so much on this Jaferson guy, or whatever.

-Talk about the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action – Kids, black people used to work for us for free. They don’t do that anymore, partly because of affirmative action, which makes black people think they deserve the same opportunities as real people! If we ever want to have black people be our… “butlers” again, we better focus on…

-Giving Jefferson Davis the same level of attention as Abraham Lincoln – Kids, at one time, there was a man named Ibrahim Al-Incon, and he was the man responsible for giving black people the notion that they deserve to get paid for their work. At the same time, however, there was another man named Jefferson Davis, a good, strong, Christian man. The country was torn apart – sinners in the North favored treating all people, regardless of their lack of whiteness and Christianity, equal. The South, or the “Real America” favored keeping things the way Jesus intended: white Christians ruling the land with an iron fist. Unfortunately the sinners, aided by Satan himself in the form of Ulysses S Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant – please note that you can easily spell “Satan Him Rules Grys” from his name), were able to overcome the pure and decent South, which is one of the main reasons our country suffers the ills that it does today. So, how did black people come to this land in order to be our “helpers?” Well..

-Renaming the slave trade to the "Atlantic triangular trade” – Kids, black people were brought here in the “Atlantic triangular trade.” We all grew up being taught that black people were brought here as slaves to do our bidding for nothing more than enough food to keep them alive long enough to plow our fields, and for us to “plow their fields” if you know what I mean (that Joferston guy sure did). But that was vicious lies, told to us by the liberal media! The black people were apparently brought here in trade for… Atlantic… triangles. That sounds pretty good right? They weren’t slaves, they were just helping us out, because they knew deep in their hearts that we were better than them, and that Jesus, a white Christian man (certainly not an Arab Jew), had given us rule over the animals, which includes black people! Speaking of Jesus…

-Adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles – Kids, we all know that Jesus is the one true way to reach Heaven. We also know that our Founding Fathers (except for that guy Timmy Jeffries or whoever) were Divine Angels sent from On High to speak the True Word of the Lord, which is why now, hundreds of years later, we interpret the Constitution to be God’s Law. Many textbooks in the past have tried to act like the founding fathers were Deists and didn’t want this country to be a Christian nation, using obviously faulty evidence like this excerpt from Article XI of the 1796 Treaty with Tripoli, “…the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…” Obviously these liberal dogs didn’t bother to read the rest of the article, which ends tellingly with the word “Psych!”

There are plenty of other changes being made, like eliminating minorities who were important in shaping this country, changing terms like “imperialism” and “capitalism” to “expansionism” and “free market”, including country music and excluding rap music (because we all know country music was the sound of a revolution, while rap music was just some black people talking?), etc. The point is, Texas is once again paving the way for the US to be perceived as giant racist douchebags who think they’re better than everyone else in the world. And now our kids will have proof in their “history” books! I was born there… :(

Friday, May 14, 2010

I'm 0-2 when it comes to McSweeney's submissions. I'll keep trying, though. Maybe after 10 rejections I'll get the hint. Until then, I'll just keep posting the rejects up on this blog. (The other reject was the fake Barack Obama speech on education -- they seemed to like it, but they would've posted it long after the timely event.) So, for your consideration:

Twitter Shout-Outs to Literary Characters

(Yes, this is something I did a bit of on my Twitter account. But now with five bonus tweets!)

@HoldenCaulfield: Stop being an emo waif. “If you really want to hear about it”? All I wanna hear is the sound of my first on your face. Best, BK.

@JayGatsby: Dude. Get the fuck over her, old sport. For real. Your other neighbor, BK.

@Heathcliff: Talk about having a bigger-picture mentality – whoa! We’re still friends, right? Your pal (right?), BK.

@HumbertHumbert: @Lolita is my niece, man. Would appreciate it if you toned down the creeper vibe. Thanks, BK.

@HesterPrynne: You saucy minx. Let's grab drinks next time you're in town. I'll call up @Desdemona and who knows... XO, BK.

In reply to @Othello: Whoa, dude, chill. I didn't mean anything by that. She's just a friend. Seriously. No harm. Your bro, BK.

@BigBrother: Thanks for being my first follower! But you’re not going to use this stuff against me, right? That’d be doubleplusungood. BK.

@OedipusRex: Thanks for the warning about CougarLife.com. Sorry about your eyes. Must've been quite a MILF, though. Fondly, BK.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Exciting events coming up in May:

--Ricky Gervais on the 12th at Madison Square Garden
--Josh Ritter on the 19th at Town Hall
--Maybe seeing a new off-Broadway play with John Larroquette sometime

Exciting, yes? Speaking of music, it seems like there's been a slew of good music coming out recently. Let me see if I can list it all in similar dash-format:

--She and Him's Volume 2
--Joey Cape and Jon Snodgrass' Liverbirds
--Josh Ritter's So Runs the World Away
--The New Pornographers' Together
--Minus the Bear's Omni
--The National's High Violet
--Band of Horses' Infinite Arms

And that's just the past month, I think. This is the most I've kept up with new music in a long time, and it's exhausting. Fun and entertaining and fulfilling, but exhausting. I haven't listened to The National's or Band of Horses' albums, I'm just expecting good stuff considering their oeuvre. Oeuvre. That's a cool word. Good for hangman, too, in case you're wondering.

Can I talk about The New Pornographers for a quick second? I don't know what it is about this band, but I just cannot get myself to get into them. They have the workings of an indie super-band (because they are), yet I don't really like their albums. I like certain cuts off the albums, but not the entire thing. My favorite New Pornographers release would be a mix tape of 2-3 songs per album. Maybe I should do that. But when I try to listen to an entire 45-minute record by them, I start losing interest pretty fast. Does this happen to anyone else? And I love me some Neko Case, too, so I don't like disparaging her work. Alas.

I'm reading another Murakami novel. Sputnik Sweetheart. I'm ready to distill the plot of every Murakami novel I've read into three sentences: A first-person male narrator, your average joe, falls in love with a girl. There's some sort of complication (herein lies the difference in his novels) so that he cannot be with the girl. In the end, he doesn't get the girl. That's the formula. Yet I continue reading them anyway.

Okay. It's a nice day. Enjoy it.

Monday, May 03, 2010

So, you've probably heard about the bomb scare in Times Square, right? It was Saturday. I was actually downtown on Saturday. I was just walking around, enjoying the weather. Went from Penn Station to the Staten Island Ferry. Quite a walk, for you non-New Yorkers. Anyway, I wasn't actually in Times Square at all on Saturday, so I had no idea anything was going on until I read the news Sunday morning. Still, it's a little unnerving. I've always known in the back of my mind that there's a potential for a terrorist attack, but it's not really something I think about. It's pointless to worry about something that might maybe potentially happen. I love this city. I love the subway. I love the crowds and the bustle and the energy. And I'm not about to stop loving any of those things less just because there's a risk involved with living here. The chance of something catastrophic happening is incredibly slim. I certainly hope we can avoid another tragic event, but, if one does happen, and if I happen to die as a result of that, that'd be fine. Because at least I had the opportunity to live here, in the best place I've ever lived. So, to all the people trying to scare us: fuck you. It's not going to work. It's not worth it go through life afraid, regardless of where you live.