Oh Em Gee.

The Back Catalogue: Radiohead's "OK Computer"

2012-01-22T15:33:00.004-05:00

The Back Catalogue is a column that attempts to plug the holes in our pop-culture knowledge, and then write about the results. It is probably the column on this site with the least appeal to anyone besides its author. I will try not to write too many of these.

Every music dork has a weak spot, a band or even a genre they just know nothing about. Sometimes it's something well-established, so it's embarrassing, something you just try to ignore and hope it goes away. For me, that's Radiohead.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to keep me so thoroughly in the dark; most of my friends went through a serious Radiohead phase, worship OK Computer and Kid A and pay hundreds of dollars for shitty tickets in stadiums (ugh, stadiums) to see them live, even today. But I never really listened to them. I think I might've been going through a jazz fusion phase while my friends were listening to music that's actually pleasant to listen to. It took me longer than most to get really heavily into interesting pop music (indie or otherwise), and by the time I did, it seemed like everyone was already a long-established Radiohead fanatic. I just kind of let them go, listened to other stuff, and by the time I graduated from high school, just after the release of Hail to the Thief, I probably couldn't have named one Radiohead song.

For the sake of full disclosure, because such ethereal ethics are definitely important while writing a self-important article about listening to an album everyone likes, I listen to In Rainbows sometimes. I heard one of the songs on the radio or something and realized maybe Radiohead isn't as epic/angsty as I thought, because both "15 Step" and "Bodysnatchers" are pretty great pop songs. OK Computer still kind of made me nervous, because it's one of those intimidating career-making epic albums that I don't usually like for the same reasons I don't like hardly any of those sweeping Great American Novels, and also it's from 1997 and basically nothing from 1997 is any good. Still, I'm really curious about this thing I know nothing about that means so much to everyone who's my age and also white and upper-middle-class and from the suburbs, so here are my track-by-track impressions.

Track 1: "Airbag"
This is real alterna-rock sounding. Distorted power chords, simple 1-5 progressions, "I'm not trying too hard" vocals, slurred delivery. Seems like it's building but it never really goes anywhere--I was expecting some kind of anthemic chorus that never came. Pleasant enough but this is a very familiar sound to me and there's nothing about this song that really sets it apart.

Track 2: "Paranoid Android"
I know this riff. Where did I hear this riff? I feel like some other band played it in the middle of one of their songs and everyone around me was probably like "oh I get that reference, I will nod knowingly" and I probably stood there with my neck stock-still, like an idiot. Anyway this is okay. Better than the first track. Has that late-'90s thing that I always associate with Everclear where they play the riff kind of softly and acoustically and you just know at some point the guitarist is going to stomp on a pedal and all of a sudden that little acoustic riff will become a big rock riff, and then he does it and you're like yeah! and maybe you nod your head harder.

But I'm also starting to think that I wouldn't have liked this in high school very much. I'm still waiting for hooks; I know from my limited listening of In Rainbows that this band can write a hell of a hooky chorus, but I haven't heard one yet and it sort of sounds like that's not what they're going for. I can't imagine why someone would withhold hooks if they are capable of writing hooks. It's like a chef saying "No, this dish is experimental. That's why there's no salt."

Track 3: "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
Lololol at that track title. I like Thom Yorke's voice in this one a lot more. The wavering whiny thing is kind of grating and he's doing a lot less of that here. This sounds like an Eels song to me. That's a compliment; I like Eels a lot. Think it'd be better if E from Eels (my god, let's just lololol at the '90s in general. E from Eels!) sang it, though. If I don't get angry comments for that it'll definitely mean that nobody is reading this site.

Track 4: "Exit Music (For a Film)"
Sounds like Eels again. Which band came first? I guess Beautiful Freak came out the year before OK Computer, but Radiohead had certainly been around longer. Who here was not a basically a fetus in the early '90s and can answer the question of Eels vs Radiohead? I like the fuzzed-out bass in this song a lot, and I like the way it builds, but it peters out way too soon. I don't like this tendency to just elevate the volume and distortion but not really change the melody--it makes it sound like the song is going somewhere but it's ultimately not very satisfying.

Track 5: "Letdown"
I like this! This is a pop song! I could definitely have played this at night while 16 years old and thought about how terrible my pretty great suburban life was. It sounds like that band Keane decided to make an entire career out of ripping this song off twelve times per album.

Track 6: "Karma Police"
This is an important song, right? This is like The Song from this album, I think. It immediately sounds different than the other songs--tighter, more cohesive, not rambly. It's a thoughtful, structured pop song, which makes it way more up my alley. I know the chorus, too. I didn't recognize anything up until then but I know that chorus. It's pretty catchy. If "chorus" is even the right word; Radiohead isn't doing traditional verse/chorus/verse/break structure, but they're also not breaking it in any kind of experimental way, like Soul Coughing or even Neko Case does. They just kind of take an eight-bar snippet and repeat it, building in volume and instrumentation, then break, then do the chorus. I'm not sure I'm sold on that being a better way to do things than verse/chorus.

Track 7: "Fitter Happier"
"Hey guys I just found this tangerine iMac, let's make it say my shitty poem out loud. Now put that cat on the piano keys and hit record while it stomps around."

Track 8: "Electioneering"
Where did this song come from? It sounds like an electric La's song or a noisy Blur song or something. It's okay I guess but a song with that kind of classic electric guitar riff has to have a hell of a catchy melody and this one doesn't. Also somebody shut that fucking cowbell up.

Track 9: "Climbing Up the Walls"
I hate this song. There's not a single thing I like about it. It's everything that was wrong with amelodic alterna-rock: it settles into a painful screeching groove and repeats for the entire length of the song, with various distorted elements swelling and shouting and scratching behind it. If I wasn't trying to do this professionally I would have hit the next track button after 20 seconds.

Track 10: "No Surprises"
I know this song too. Again, sounds like an Eels song. It has that sweetness, that nod to classic pop, that makes Eels great, but the pacing and tones of the guitar and bass are total late-'90s, which is a good thing. Thom Yorke's voice is maybe at its best here. My favorite song on the album so far.

Track 11: "Lucky"
Mopey, man. This whole album is mopey. I was expecting it to be more, I dunno, sad/soaring, I think, than straight up mopey. A lot of people were depressed in the '90s, I guess. This whole album has a really low beats-per-minute rate, which probably contributes to the mopery. Really hurts the songs when they try to do a breakdown at the end, like in this song. Hard to rock out when you're stuck at like 80 BPM.

Track 12: "The Tourist"
This song is boring.

I'm sort of confused by OK Computer as a whole. I didn't really like it very much, to be honest; like a lot of music in the late '90s, it's got this slow trudging sadcore thing going on that I guess is hard to connect with outside of that era. I don't really know what else was going on in 1997; I was 11 years old at the time, so it's not like I was aware of broad shifts in alternative rock music, and that kind of thing is hard to rediscover afterwards. Maybe the fact that it sounds quintessentially '90s is testament to its impact.

In their review of Radiohead's followup album, Kid A, AllMusic wrote, "multiple plays are necessary just to discern the music's form, to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks." OK Computer isn't really quiet or minimally arranged, but I'm starting to understand why I never got into this band in the first place. There is nothing about that description that sounds like something I'd be interested in--it sounds like a demonstration, not an album that you want to listen to. There are a couple of nice pop songs on this album, but even if I had listened to it back in high school, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have liked it much. I'll just stick with my pop music, thanks.

House of Fuck You

2012-01-16T20:35:00.008-05:00

House of Lies, Showtime's newest comedy, is the worst new show I've seen this year. That might not make it the worst new show of the year; I haven't seen either of those shows about how hard modern American life is for straight white males, or that other show about how hard modern American life is for straight white males that also includes improbable cross-dressing, because I know those shows are bad without having to suffer through them. But House of Lies stars Don Cheadle, and Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Recreation), and Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars from Veronica Mars), and it's on a premium channel that theoretically has less restrictions and is able to take the medium of television in new and exciting directions. The reality is, it's on Showtime, America's channel for people saying "fuck" and also for tits, and holy christ it is terrible. Its crimes are as follows:

Tits and Fuck.
Showtime is allowed to show nudity (female nudity, obviously, and maybe a male ass cheek as a punchline or something) and broadcast whatever foul language they want. This sounds like it'd be freeing but apparently all of Showtime's writers and showrunners are forever trapped in a lucite prison of FuckTits from which there is no escape. I have the total tit count at 12 in the pilot episode, which I should add is only 30 minutes long. The first use of the word "fuck" comes at 1:30, the second at 2:45, and then I stopped counting until the first time a child says fuck (30:45). There are lots in between, though, so for all of you living in the as-yet-unreleased third Crank movie in which you cannot survive unless someone says "fuck" every 60 seconds, this is a good show for you to watch.

Other stats:

1. First reference to drugs: 1:35
2. First tit shot: 0:45
3. First girl-on-girl sex scene: 19:55
4. First HILARIOUS use of a risque sexual term in a public place in which everyone around stops eating their fine white-person meals and falls silent and stares at the utterer of said risque sexual term: 22:25
5. First non-ironic use of the word "panties," further made useless by the fact that this is applied to two men and one woman, the latter of whom (without getting into heteronormative undergarment theory) probably is actually wearing them: 7:08

Nobody Cares About Your Premise.
There are many jobs or situations that are inherently interesting. Drug dealer! Lawman! West Wing staffer! Doctor! Chef! Professional rich English countryperson! All interesting. House of Lies is a show about management consultants. Problem 1: nobody knows what the fuck that is. Problem 2: once they figure it out, nobody will care about it. And yet House of Lies treats the who-gives-a-shit world of management consulting like it's a secret world we've all been curious about. It gives us the structure of a typical job. It explains pay grade. It reveals what kind of person gets into this kind of work. And it defines the terms of the trade, even though the terms are not interesting or funny and actually have very obvious cognates in regular English that everyone would understand.

After someone says "We really can't afford to get counseled out on this job," Don Cheadle pauses time (yeah.) to say "Counseled out. That's consultant for 'fired.' It's not good." Let me break that down for you. That phrase adds nothing to the show. It is already useless. But it's also not hard to understand in its current form. Literally everything that is said on any British show is harder to understand than that. But okay, Don Cheadle explains that it means "fired." Fine. BUT THEN HE EXPLAINS THAT GETTING FIRED IS BAD. He defines the phrase, then defines his definition! Fuck you, Don Cheadle's writers.

As far as I can tell, this job, which nobody cares about, seems to mostly consist of "trying not to get fired" and "billing lots of outrageous expenses," which in the laziest possible way is demonstrated by having our noble leads go to a strip club. There's sort of a bigger problem here in that the show can't really decide if it's satirizing these characters, sympathizing with them, or glorifying them, Entourage-style. Really it's the latter, with a couple of nods to the former two options I guess out of recognition that in 2012, or 2011, 2010, 2009, or 2008, for that matter, it is ridiculously tone-deaf to have a show about useless bajillionaire management consultants who help despicable companies overcome their crimes to become successful enough to presumably commit more crimes and be despicable once again. But that's a bigger discussion, and I am too angry to remember any of those helpful terms I learned in my cultural studies classes in college that might be useful in discussing this, so I will keep my focus instead on how fucking awful this show is.

The show makes the mistake of giving its characters long soliloquies about business strategy, two lines into which every single viewer will be reaching for their iPhones, but which also make no sense and which would fool no reasonably intelligent humanoid businessmonster. That strategy to make one of those evil subprime mortgage lending firms a paragon of business ethics? THAT WOULD NEVER WORK. Because 1. it won't work, and 2. those businessghouls don't even want it to! They are the soulless riverbed-dredging catfish of our society. They make lots of money and they basically can't get arrested because nobody besides Matt Taibbi understands which crimes they've committed and his job is to come up with new fun similes to describe these people, not to arrest them or whatever. The strategy is obviously bullshit and nobody would ever fall for it. And yet that plan is the sole evidence we've seen that these consultant idiots are good at their job and thus the masters of the universe.

Sheer Laziness.
1. There are constant music and sound effects, like we're watching a Dreamworks animated picture about an anthropomorphized river otter who just wants to see the ocean even though river otters, despite their name, often live in coastal areas, which Dreamworks would know if they read Wikipedia once in awhile. When Don Cheadle tosses a cardboard sign aside, there's a whooshing sound. When a man bites into an eclair, it goes SQUISH. There is never not music playing. It is tremendously distracting.
2. At one point, in the strip club, Don Cheadle is supposed to take a shot off a stripper's ass. It sounds like the kind of thing someone who has never seen a stripper or an ass would think you would do in that situation; from a practical perspective, it seems really difficult to balance, and after a second Don Cheadle just picks the shot glass up and drinks it. You can practically hear him think "fuck this stage direction."
3. Jean-Ralphio, as he writes his name on a sign-in form, says "and this is my mobile, feel free to call." Then he literally makes one small circle and taps the paper twice with his pen. I have deduced that his phone number is "0..". Feel free to call and ask about the logic of that shit.
4. The show uses the word "paradigm" as an example of "indecipherable jargon," cribbing from Dilbert comic strips circa 1998.
5. There is an uptight blonde society woman who hates her husband, with tight pulled-back hair and a big chunky pearl necklace. Because that is a new type of character that I am definitely intrigued by.
6. Somebody crashes through a dinner table.

7. The final shot of the episode is Don Cheadle staring at himself in his bathroom mirror while shaving, in the cold fluorescent light of morning, wondering at last if the choices he's made have oh jesus fucking christ
8. Don Cheadle's son has some HILARIOUSLY ambiguous sexuality. In case you didn't understand that from his, you know, purple tights and neckerchief and miniskirt and you know what everything he's wearing is shades of purple, he does the least balletic twirl I've ever seen within the first 90 seconds of the episode. Then he mentions musicals, Olivia Newton-John, and shoe-shopping, and is catty towards another child in his children's school for small children, within the next 90 seconds. Later he will sing beautifully.

Wasting Talent.
There is only one brief glimpse of Jean-Ralphio dancing. It is the most transcendent moment in the entire show. Ben Schwartz was basically hired to be, like, a successful version of Jean-Ralphio, or like what Jean-Ralphio thinks he is, except the writers of House of Lies are, as we know, really bad at their jobs, so the only time he doesn't look like a grainy photocopy of Jean-Ralphio is when he's dancing.

Veronica Mars is utterly wasted, as she has been in just about everything since Veronica Mars.

Don Cheadle, I don't really have many thoughts about him, since he has a knack for picking movies other people like and I am not interested in, but I just saw him in Ocean's 13 and now it sounds like he's doing an American accent even though I'm pretty sure he's American. All those hard growled Rs, I think. "It was harrrrd worrrrk."

Oh, Right. That.
This show fucking has a time out conceit. Don Cheadle will turn to face the camera, and the world will freeze behind him as he explains what exciting business terms like "after-work" mean. Then someone calls "TIME IN!!!," silently, and the world begins to move again. Yes, it is just like Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. But with weirder sound effects; at one point, he calls time out and birds flying overhead freeze in mid-air. Then when time in is called, the birds continue flying, only now you can hear them flap-flap-flapping, really loudly. Clearly there are some things I don't understand about the science of freezing time in order to explain things nobody cares about.

The entire episode is available on YouTube, for free, with the tits and cursing taken out. Showtime clearly thinks that they are losing nothing by doing this; you can practically hear executives say, "Don't worry about it, bro. If they can't see the tits, they'll only watch for a minute or so. Then they'll come crawling to their cable service provider." I do not recommend watching it. It is infuriating. But here's the episode, for completeness's sake.

List Without Comment: The Noir Revival

2011-12-11T16:10:00.001-05:00

Love this shit. Pithy wisecracks, mysteries, dark worldviews, destructive alcoholism, action, style, tough-minded philosophy, overt sexism. Good stuff. The genre never really went away--The Big Lebowski, Chinatown, and Blade Runner are all noir too, and came long enough after noir's heyday to be labeled neo-noir. But in the last five years or so there's been this new revival and it's been done in such a cool and respectful way that I thought I'd make up a little list of some of my favorites. These are all great. I wouldn't put them in a list if they weren't great. Or, I might, but I'd have a reason, and I'd tell you what that reason was. Anyway there's no reason here because these are all great. Stop asking for a reason and just read/watch these.

Books.
1. Icelander by Dustin Long.
2. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.
4. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.
5. Misadventure by Millard Kaufman.

TV.
1. Veronica Mars.*
2. Bored to Death.
3. Sherlock (BBC, 2010).*
4. Terriers.*
5. The Hour (BBC, 2011).

Movies.
1. Brick.*
2. Mystery Team.*
3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
4. Gone Baby Gone.
5. In Bruges.

An asterisk means this title is available on Netflix.

The Pop of 2011

2011-12-06T23:46:00.002-05:00

I like end of year music lists! Not because they are objective markers of what is good, because that is objectively impossible. And not because I like thinking about which album is better than which album, or even because I like discussing things like that, because that's the kind of thing people who comment on blogs do, and I do not comment on blogs because I do not have whatever chemical imbalance propels people to comment on blogs and think that it's socially acceptable behavior. I like the lists because at the squooshy overripe age of 25 I have basically completely lost my desire to trawl through music blogs, like rummaging for change beneath a car seat. Sometimes you come up with a quarter, sure. Quarters are great! You can use them in snack machines and laundry machines. But most of the time you come up with a half-eaten cough drop, or a used tissue, or a clump of hair that does not recognizably belong to anyone you've ever met, or a penny (don't even get me started on pennies hoo boy), and I don't want to listen to those. And these end of year lists save me from doing that. Or at least they restrict the area I have to search through to a manageable two square feet under the passenger seat where quarters have been known to fall.

I am unqualified to write any kind of comprehensive roundup list, of course. Do not expect qualifications or experience or professionalism here at Oh Em Gee. But this is a pop culture blog that updates more than once a year [ed. note: barely more than once a year] [ed. note: I am the ed.], so we are contractually obligated to make some kind of halfhearted traffic-grabbing attempt at a top whatever list. I have decided to make this about pop music, because that's all I listen to, really. I'm not picky about genre--the list includes country, rock, punk, hardcore, hip-hop, and comedy--but I am picky about music being as hooky and catchy as possible. I demand hooks! So here's a list of things like that that I liked over the past year or so.

Some of these are albums, and some of these are songs. It's all in one list because who cares. If I didn't like the album as a whole, or didn't bother listening to it because it's by Britney Spears, I will list the song I want you to listen to specifically. Also it is literally in the order that I thought of it, which is probably as good a way as any to order something like this.

1. Cloud Nothings
Album: Cloud Nothings
This is my most-listened-to pop album of the year, by a long shot. Sometimes people call it lo-fi, or noise pop, or other music critic names like that. But really it's just slightly unpolished pop-punk, crammed full of monster, monster hooks. One of the catchiest sets of songs I've ever heard. Oh also it's really just one dude and he's from Cleveland and he's about nineteen years old. Facts!
Video.

2. Ha Ha Tonka
Album: Death of a Decade
Ozarks country-pop. It is very good.
Video.

3. Josh Rouse and the Long Vacations
Album: Josh Rouse and the Long Vacations
I love Josh Rouse, but he's been on a little bit of a rough streak, releasing maybe two or three kind of crappy albums before now. This one is his best since Subtitulo for sure, maybe since 1972. Summery!
Video.

4. Chiddy Bang
Album: Peanut Butter and Swelly
I like Chiddy Bang because I like poppy party hip-hop, which is deeply uncool in the sad headphone-rap year of Drake and Shabazz Palaces and The Roots' Undun, the latter of which is pretty great but not too poppy so it does not make this list. Also I am probably racist if the only hip-hop artists on my list either sample Sufjan Stevens or are actually jokes.
Video.

5. Rihanna/Britney Spears
Songs: "We Found Love," "'Til the World Ends"
These are great songs. Listen to them while you are very drunk, or put them on at a party when you and other people are very drunk. Or yell their names in the direction of the DJ booth at bars in Sillyamsburg. All good suggestions. You're welcome.
Video.

6. Pepper Rabbit
Song: "Rose Mary Stretch"
These guys kind of suck. But this song is really really great.
Video.

7. Beirut
Album: The Rip Tide
The Rip Tide is definitely Beirut's least ambitious, least sonically interesting album to date. It is of course my favorite of his, because I am also unambitious and uninteresting. Oh man, "Santa Fe." I could listen to that song forever.
Video.

8. Fucked Up
Album: David Comes to Life
I AM YELLING LOUDLY
Video.

9. Sloan
Album: The Double Cross
Sloan is one of those Canadian bands like the Weakerthans (or Americans like Fountains of Wayne) that kind of does what they do and have been doing it so long and at the same level of very-goodness that they've achieved this mysterious level of mid-range success where they aren't really "cool," and probably won't ever will be cool, nor will they ever really be popular unless some freak single of theirs catches on, but they can just keep making the music they want to make until they don't feel like doing it anymore. They don't have to pay attention to trends, or worry about backlash, nor will they get tons of press or unwanted attention. But it doesn't matter: they just release their old-school power pop and it's great and I will listen to it a lot and then forget about them until their next album comes out.
Video.

10. The Lonely Island
Album: Turtleneck and Chain
Home to one of the best Justin Timberlake songs ever written. The line between serious and parody JT songs is basically invisible at this point, and "Motherlover" is flat-out one of his best songs. The songwriting is surprisingly strong on this album; there are like four or five songs that are actually great stomper modern pop-hip-hop songs. It's got really funny stupid lyrics about premature ejaculation and other weiner problems too but the songs stand alone pretty well.
Video.

QB Hot or Not

2011-11-27T22:52:00.000-05:00

A Note From the Founder/Editorial Director: Oh Em Gee. does not normally post about sports, due to them being the worst. But their inexplicable popularity does not seem to be waning, so to please the masses who like this sort of thing, I have asked our Senior Art/Sports/Words Editrix to write a tasteful little essay on the bangability of the various quartered-backs in the Nationalized Footballing League.

I am a lady who watches football. And because of the horrendous affliction I have called heterosexuality (Men Are Disgusting), I find myself peepin extra hard at the QBs. Football quarterbacks come in all shapes and sizes...of nerds. Here I've featured the hottest and nottest of current NFL QBs.

Hottest!

Note: Tom Brady did NOT make this list.

Tom Brady looks like a Ken doll. He is married to like the #1 supermodel in the world and he just looks like a huge fucking asshole. His teeth are clearly fake, he has a chin like a hard ass, and people call him "chiseled."

Fucking. Ew. Also ugh, The Patriots. Anyway I'm just bringing him up to let you know he did not make the list. He sucks. Ok here we go!

5. Tim Tebow. Denver Broncos.

Tim Tebow is a Jesus freak. He starred in a really lol pro-life ad during the Super Bowl last year with his mom:

Also he writes bible passages on his football war paint. Sometimes he cries.


He's just a sensitive, Lord-praising, lovable juicehead goofball virgin (he is saving himself for our wedding night) and he's totes cute in the face.

4. Cam Newton. Carolina Panthers.

Cam Newton I could just eat you up.

Look. At. That. Smile.

Smile again.

Luv u Cammy

3. Sam Bradford. St. Louis Rams.

I barely even know who this guy is but he is so adorable. Look at his lil teef! And his messy hair!


He's 1/16th Cherokee, that is fucking adorable!! 1/16th, you guys. My lil' Cherokee.

2. Ryan Fitzpatrick. Buffalo Bills. I could settle down with Ryan Fitzpatrick.

I want to start a fire and go fishing with Ryan Fitzpatrick.

I'm gonna go ahead and admit most of this is beard. But what a lush honey brown beard it is.

1. Mark Sanchez. NY Jets. Look at this beautiful man and his cute little noodle arms.

I will excuse pictures of Mark Sanchez like this:

for the pictures of Mark Sanchez like this:

Check this FUCKING ADORABLE collage his nephew made: Love you tio Mark!

A 17-year-old girl took that pic inside his apartment after she presumably gave him a blowie (IT'S LEGAL IN NEW JERSEY OK). REGARDLESS, I would def lick all the moles right off his scruffy Mexican-American face. [Ed. note: This sounds rapey to me. The 17-year-old thing, I mean. The mole-licking is gross but legal.]

Ugliest. This was difficult because "goofy" is the word I would use for pretty much every quarterback. It's when goofy mixes with ugly that you get the following list:

5. Drew Brees. New Orleans Saints.

Drew Brees and The Saints won the Superbowl in 2010, which is Wow, Great! But Drew, let's be real here, what is with your hair. Your combover looks SO STRINGY when you get all sweaty. Stringy is like, the worst hair adjective. Get a damn haircut, it might help your face. Maybe. Probably not.

4. Eli Manning. New York Giants. Eli Manning looks like a 15 year old who wears light wash carpenter jeans from Old Navy and plays Zelda all day long. [Ed. note: I see a distinct Zuckerberg thing happening in this nerd's face area.]

He led the Giants to a Super Bowl victory against the undefeated Patriots in 2008 (epic burn suck on that Brady), but I think we should congratulate him more for losing his virginity and his acne clearing up.

3. Kyle Orton. Chicago Bears.

I just, cannot.

2. Peyton Manning. Indianapolis Colts. Peyton Manning looks like an uglier version of The Situation from MTV's The Jersey Shore (The Situation is ugly).

Peyton has inherited the same doof face and smushy nose as his brother Eli.

Technically he's out for the season now with some neck injury (I guess that tree trunk holding up his head gets in the way), but he's there on the sidelines every game grimacing.

Not a good look, Pey!

1. Ben Roethlisberger. Pittsburgh Steelers.
Ben Roethlisberger rapes women.

Blah blah innocent until proven guilty blah blah RAPELISBERGER

Coincidentally your fat fucking face matches your ugly rapist soul. Fuck you.

#12: Toast Sandwiches

2011-11-21T11:56:00.004-05:00

Pictured above: the best of English fine dining.

THAT IS ALSO NOT A SANDWICH. That is the first two steps of several other steps necessary to create a meal fit for god damn adults. This I looked up, because unlike the history of the word "sandwich," I made a wager with myself that any further research of the phrase "cheese on toast" would result in just total humiliation for the Grand High Wizard Queen's Islands of Sadness. And I won that wager! Facts learned during 25 seconds of research in which I did not even finish the three-paragraph Wikipedia article of the subject:

1. Under the "recipes" section: "Cheese on toast consists of toast, either buttered or not, with cheese on one side." Do not be fooled into thinking there is more to this dish than the words in its name! There is not, for the English are a race blessed with neither imagination nor tastebuds!

2. There is a "National Cheese on Toast Day." I believe this is also the day where any Englishperson fortunate enough to have left the Archipelago of Cold Precipitation kills themselves, thus performing a crude but effective form of population control.

3. This dish/object is included in English cookbooks. This bolsters my theory that the British are actually functionally illiterate, since the phrase "cheese on toast" is itself a recipe.

It is possible that the BBC's investigation of the toast sandwich is actually an extension of the population control experiment indicated in Reason Number Two, above. How else to explain this passage?

"I would emphasise that toast sandwiches are also good at saving you calories as well as money, provided you only have one toast sandwich for lunch and nothing else."

This is how England dies, people. This is how it all mercifully ends.

Bible Alternatives

2011-11-10T23:10:00.001-05:00

I see a lot of people reading various versions of the Bible on the subway. Some are in English, some are in Hebrew. Lots of them seem kind of way too short to be the entire Bible--can you buy Bible singles, like Kindle Singles or Atavist stories? Like, just the adventure stories! Or, like, The Bible: Jesus-Only Edition? Anyway, I always think it's really weird and depressing that of all the books (and there are a lot of books, according to libraries), these people chose the Bible? First of all, these people are probably re-reading. I never see anyone like "holy shit this is a page-turner. Can't wait to see what happens next!" It always seems so rote, like they're not aware that there are other books and think they just have to keep reading this one book even though they know it all by heart.

Also by regular book standards the Bible is not a great book. It's really long and rambling and there are tons of plot holes, if there's even a plot, which sometimes there isn't. Sometimes it sets the narrative aside and just goes on these furious rants about how terrible a person, or people in general, is/are. Then there are just pages and pages of rules, which is incredibly boring to read. And it's all written in this language that has clearly been translated a half-dozen times from a half-dozen languages which probably no longer exist, and it's super stiff and unnatural and unclear at times. It is not a super fun book, is what I'm saying.

So, here are some suggestions for the people reading the Bible on the subway, on the off-chance (on the no-chance) that they somehow took a break from the Bible and are reading this post right now.

For A Centuries-Spanning Epic, Try Tom Robbins.
I guess one of the appeals about the Bible might be that it's a real epic. Right? I'm guessing, but it seems super long, and it spans somewhere between a few thousand years and infinity (I am unclear of the specific timeline. Like, how many years was it between Adam and Eve and Abraham? Two hundred? A million? Were Adam and Eve, like, Homo habilis? Did anyone evolve from anyone? Or, no, the Bible is not big on evolution. Was Adam Abraham's grandfather? That seems really fast. Like I think there was civilization by the time Abraham was around. This is confusing.), and has all these different characters and this one god person who is always there but who also evolves, sort of, but not in a clean way, more like in a "what does god have to do to suit this particular moral lesson today?" kind of way.

So the Bible is a lousy book for the above reasons. Know what's not a lousy book? Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

So Tom Robbins is the worst book titler of all time. His other titles/mistakes include Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1980s romcom barf), Skinny Legs and All (2000s romcom barf), and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (I can't even). Jitterbug Perfume is a stupid title too, but it's a really great book. Tom Robbins's books are sort of all the same, in the way that John Irving books are all the same--those dudes just have a few tricks and tropes and neuroses and obsessions that they never seem to get over, and so they repeat them in every book. But what's odd about Tom Robbins is that he's also a ridiculously, fantastically inventive writer, so the first Robbins book you read is like "um how could this author ever be repetitive, this book has like a billion ideas and they're all crazy," and then you read the second Robbins book and you're like "oh." But instead of, like, prostitutes, or writers, or New England, or any of the other things John Irving stuffs into every novel he writes, Robbins has, like, millenia-old characters, or reincarnated versions of mythological characters, or parallel timelines. What I'm saying is, Tom Robbins is a very interesting writer, even if he's not as good as you think he is when you read him for the first time.

Jitterbug Perfume is my favorite of his books. I like that it has characters in France, New Orleans, Seattle, and, I don't know, Macedonia, or something, all at the same time. I like that it glorifies the beet, that most beautiful and sumptuous of vegetables. It's funny and vulgar and good-hearted and profane, and is it EVER an epic. Shit spans a few thousand years, watching the rise and fall of civilizations. If you're attracted to stories that are "grand," subway-Bible-readers, try this maybe!

For a Story About Rules, What They Mean and When They Fall Apart, Try Chad Harbach.
I hate n+1. To be fair, I've worked for two companies which were the subject of an n+1 hit piece--McSweeney's and Gawker--and while I think any hit piece on Gawker is probably fair just on principle, it feels so...cruel, I guess, to be mean to McSweeney's. Like, I guess they are twee and precious? And while those are not things I typically mind I can understand why other people might mind them. But also McSweeney's is a bastion of success in independent publishing, they have a valuable network of 826 non-profit organizations, they publish tons of amazing authors, they make cool-looking books, which nobody else does, really, they discover and put out some really fantastic stuff (most recently, that food quarterly Lucky Peach, which is awesome), and more to the point, they don't have a mean bone in their entire organization. They are so enthusiastic and positive and optimistic about everything! It just feels like kicking a puppy to hate on McSweeney's.

n+1 is annoying for other reasons, too--the hyper-intellectualization, the Ivy League snobbery, the we're-still-writing-and-acting-like-grad-students tone. They are no fun at all. And when Chad Harbach, co-founder of n+1 and proud Harvard man, got a massive advance on his very first novel, to be called The Art of Fielding, I was annoyed. I was sure I'd hate it. It was about baseball; I could just imagine the kind of academic analysis of a sport I don't even like the book would include. THIS IS THE AMERICAN DREAM, I imagined. Cover to cover. Complex narrative, I assumed. Grand ambitions. Barf.

But.

I fucking love this book.

It's about baseball, yes. I won't say "but it's really not!," because it definitely is--just because it's about other things too doesn't mean it's not a baseball book. But it transcends every cliche about what baseball "is" or "means." It's written in totally approachable, confident but nowhere near cocky, sometimes funny, plain-speak. It is not intimidating, not does any individual sentence or phrase make the mistake of feeling "big." It all adds up to some kind of minor masterpiece about togetherness, solitude, teamwork, family, love, and the crash that happens when everything you worked for, everything you're made for, everything you sacrificed for, everything you deserve, doesn't work out. It is gorgeous. And, more importantly, it is fun to read.

I like very few books that try, whether they say it or not, to capture an entire experience--the American experience, a generational experience, whatever. They tend to be no fun, even if they're well-written. I fight my way through them. But The Art of Fielding is more like East of Eden, my favorite book. It's a goddamn page-turner. You want to see what happens next. It never feels heavy--you realize by the end that something big and special has been shaping itself while you worked your way through the story, and that only then can you sit back and look at it and see its outline. When you're reading, you should always want to keep reading. You should be absorbed; you should not be thinking "I am reading." This book manages that. It is incredible.

For a Series of Supernatural Vignettes, Try Stephen Millhauser.
Maybe these Bible readers just like little stories, because most of them are pretty short I think, in which crazy shit happens. Like fantasy short stories, kind of. Bite-sized supernatural pieces. Well then, person to whom I have and will be condescending to throughout this piece, perhaps you should try the great Stephen Millhauser, whose name I always attempt to spell with the wrong number of "Ls"!

Millhauser is a modern short-story writer, not too dissimilar from someone like Jim Shepard or even some of Dave Eggers' short story work (which is good, shut up, internet since 2006. His short stories are good.) He likes to do kind of big shiny unreal stuff, set marginally in the real world, often in history. My favorite short story of his is called "A Precursor of the Cinema," which was first published in McSweeney's 15. It's a fictional history of a sort of alternate branch of the moving picture in the late 19th century, which may or may not have involved some kind of combined trickery of lighting, paint chemicals, and perspective. Harlan Crane, a painter and creator of the technique, was a showman--"carnivalesque" is a term often applied to Millhauser's work--who created these sort of art exhibits in which, for example, a painted fly would seem to emerge from a painting, fly around the viewers' heads, and land again on the painting from which it emerged--as paint once again. The exhibits escalate in intensity until they involve the sensation of touch, at which point the entire exhibit turns into shrieking, terrified madness. It is an amazing story, written so drolly that you could almost think you've stumbled on an actual historical account that just happens to be fucking insane.

So, subway reader: mayhaps you'd like the magical and fantastical short stories of Stephen Millhauser, rather than the magical but sort of messy and boring stories in the Bible? "A Precursor of the Cinema" appears in the Millhauser collection Dangerous Laughter, which can be had for the very cheap price of $9.60, in hardcover. He also has a new collection called We Others, which I have not yet read, but which according to reviews is just as fun and fascinating as his others, so I will buy it soon. Thanks for the reminder, me.

For Jews Acting Like Badasses, Try Michael Chabon.
This is mostly for the Orthos I see reading the Bible in Hebrew on the train. I am just going to go ahead and assume that any gentile reading the Gentile Bible on the subway is probably terrified of Jews, especially if they have that Special Jesus-Only Edition of the Bible, and would rather we stay bookish and thin-haired and bespectacled indoor kids in the entirety of the written word. But for members of the Tribe, sometimes we want to see our ethnic group smash a few heads, as they certainly do in the Bible. There are lots of stories of Jews getting beaten up, but there are also lots of stories of Jewish military triumph, Jewish kings and great leaders of men, and big beefy dudes who break things and kill people.

Perhaps you'd rather read the greatest of Michael Chabon's books, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It's a classic riff on hardboiled detective noir, more Sam Spade than Spenser, but set in an alternate world in which the Jews lost the Six-Day War, forfeited Israel to the Palestinians, and were banished to ghettos around the world. In America, that means a ghetto in Sitka, Alaska, an oddly apt place for Ashkenazic Jews. Discussion of that alternate timeline isn't nearly the focus of the book, which is good, because that's not uninteresting but also not interesting, you know? Somewhere between the two, like you'd raise an eyebrow and say "Hm!" but in your head be like "I don't really care." So, good. That's just kind of background. The actual book is a murder mystery, investigated by a toughened, grizzled old alcoholic cop and his bear-like younger partner. It is an awesome, awesome mystery story. Plus, there are references to Yiddish literature, if you're the type to get excited about a nod to Isaac Bashevis Singer, which probably if you're reading the Hebrew Bible on the subway, you are.

For Total Fantasy, Because That Shit Is All Fake, Try Lev Grossman.
Grossman's two books, The Magicians and The Magician King, are real derivative of Harry Potter and probably Tolkien and god knows how many other fantasy writers I'd know if I was a different kind of nerd. But they are awesome page-turners, they are a ton of fun, they are set for brief moments in Brooklyn, they are funny and action-packed and feature anthropomorphic arctic fox sex scenes. And if you're going to read something as obviously not true as the Bible, why not read something that has better magical fight scenes and more interesting demons?

People Holding Birds

2011-11-01T13:05:00.003-04:00

I like birds. Oh Em Gee.'s Senior Associate Editrix Mollie has gone on record accusing most birds of being "useless," and I guess she's right in a pet sense, because I always feel like non-raptor non-parrot birds are too dumb and dinosaur-like and primitive to really have much of a sense of loyalty to an owner beyond being fucking terrified every single second. We'd like to imagine that they'll perch on our fingers and eat sunflower seeds we feed them in that super precise way they eat sunflower seeds, swiftly rotating the shell and testing it for weakness and then cracking it and tonguing out the seed like the sunflower seed experts they are, instead of chomping the whole thing and spitting out seed-pod mush like our oafish human baseball players. But we are like forty times bigger than them and if there was an animal forty times bigger than me you had better believe I would be too busy running and hiding and hiding and running to think about perching on its monsterfinger.

But I like birds. They're pretty, and I like the way they move, and I want them to be my friend even though like I said they are almost certainly fucking terrified of me. So sometimes I look at pictures of birds on Wikipedia, because it's learning sort of, and I notice that the accepted way to hold small birds is to grasp their feet in between your fingers so they sit on the back of your hand. At first glance, a bird being held this way looks so calm and comfortable. Look at it! It's just sitting there on that dude's hand! But they you look closer and you realize that the bird is probably like "goddammit dude, let go of my fucking legs so I can fly away from you."

Anyway here are pictures of people holding birds enjoy!

(Note: the above bird is clearly giving the cameraman the finger.)

"Um, what exactly do you think you're doing?"

"Fuck your hand."

[Most images from Cape Cod Bander]

#11: Australia

2011-09-27T16:39:00.003-04:00

Stuff That's Lame About England is a column about a grey, rainy island (or possibly archipelago) in the North Atlantic. The column is comprised of articles with no factual basis, composed without the benefit of any research whatsoever, and with any luck will contain several half-truths, misconceptions, and flat-out lies per article. It neither knows nor cares what the difference is between the British, the English, and the residents of the United Kingdom. It is a travelogue written out of pure guesswork with a dash of irrational xenophobia.

For the record, the closest any of us editors have been to experiencing that Sceptered Isle is Graeme's three hour layover in Heathrow on his way to Africa or whatever. But we've all listened to Oasis so we're basically experts.

First, a word about racism. I believe it is entirely acceptable to be racist against entire nations, as long as they're rich nations full of mostly white people. Both those parts are important. Being racist against Japan, a prosperous nation of non-white people: inappropriate! Being racist against England, a prosperous if depressing nation of the absolute whitest people imaginable: just fine. So in this column, I am going to be racist against Australia.

Australia is not part of England. It's sunny and full of weird animals, which is very unlike England, which is rainy and full of squirrels or pheasants or some shit, and I believe it is in a different ocean than England anyway. But Australia, as awful as it is (and it is very awful, according to some anecdotal evidence and two blog posts I am about to reference), is mostly England's fault. We all know that Australia started out as a prison for England, a nation so dumb they failed to realize that if you move people off of the various sad rainy North Atlantic rocks in the English archipelago and move them to a sunny place with palm trees and koala bears, they'll want to stay and maybe it's not exactly a punishment because ugh England. But England, as we know, thinks England is great, so they shipped their prisoners to a big island with beaches that would soon be populated by tanned blonde people who are all in shape and who all sort of look the same.

But Australia is more like England than America or Canada. They still spell things the British way, and they have peculiar accents in which the long "o" vowel sound is like "er," and they play those shit sports like cricket that the English use to pass the time before the rain and depression kills them, and they are uncontrollably drunk delinquents, just like England's youth. I know that seems like a broad generalization to make, to say an entire country is made up of drunk brawling white people, but I have some incontrovertible evidence that will prove once and for all that Australia is so awful.

1. When I lived in Montreal, these drunk Australians lived in the apartment above me. They were drunk and loud and destructive. Montreal has these weird communist laws about renter's rights and somehow the Australians got away with not having to leave a deposit, which worked out real nice for them since they were only there for six months, at which point they just left, apparently despite having a year-long lease. Worse: they left the water running, and a little while later my bathroom ceiling smashed down onto my bathroom floor, which is not where a bathroom ceiling should be, and for the next three months we had a skylight in our ground-floor bathroom through which a cheerful French man would often peek while you were taking a poop, mumble "Pardon!" or "Excusez!" and retreat through the skylight while you sat on the toilet, cursing those goddamn delinquent Australians.

2. Australia has a particular weakness for invasive species, due to it being basically the weirdest island on Earth. The worst invasive species on Weird Animal Island is the cane toad, which is just a normal toad, really, but it has no natural predators and took over the entire island, chomping down on crops and wreaking havoc on the weirder species there. That sucks, right? I understand, and I sympathize. Where I'm from, we have a very nasty overpopulation of white-tailed deer, which seem cute until they run like goddamn idiots into traffic all the time and kill people, which happens a lot. Also we killed all our mountain lions (whoops) so there's nothing really left to eat deer except us, and we like it okay, but we really prefer cow and pig and chicken, so there are tons of deer everywhere and I just hate them so much.

Which is to say, I get it. BUT! Just because I get it does not mean that Australia hasn't dealt with the cane toads in the most insane destructive way possible. Those lunatic prison surfers play golf and cricket (lol at cricket but not at this) with LIVING ANIMALS. They hit them with goddamn golf clubs! And cricket…clubs! Cricket sticks! Jesus Christ, Australia!

3. Apparently there are drunk parrots in Australia. My first reaction to that was, okay, animals sometimes get drunk. Here in America, we have these normal animals, like black bears, and they get drunk on fermented apples and berries sometimes and try to have sex with bird feeders and then we call animal control and they tranquilize the bears and throw them back in the woods to sober up, which is necessary but almost definitely unsettling for the bear ("the fuck did that bitch bird feeder tease go?"). Still, not that weird. Except okay I am not a scientist and do not know for sure but these parrots do not seem at all drunk. They seem really sick! Like, drunk animals do not typically suffer from "respiratory problems" or "discharge from nostrils, mouth, and eyes," nor do they pass out all the time and nor do HALF OF THE GODDAMN ANIMALS DIE when brought in for treatment.

The natural reaction of Australians to seeing this kind of illness, even Australians who have presumably gone through a year or two of public school and been granted an Australian Ph.D in bird science, is that these obviously sick birds are just drunk ha ha ha drunk birds. And the next day, they're not "attempting to recover their tiny bird organs from a devastating illness," they're hung over. Just like we always are!

4. Chris Lilley is funny a lot of the time but seriously his depictions of Asian people are basically just Asian blackface. This corroborates something I heard or maybe made up, that despite being sort of in Asia, or near Asia, or something, Australians are incredibly racist against Asians. Probably other races too but are there black or Hispanic or south Asian or other races in Australia? I feel like there aren't, going by my research which involved no research, so according to logic and the transitive property of racism, Australians are racist against those races too.

Australia: What happens when England discovers beaches.

List Without Comment: Top Chef Seasons, in Order of Quality

2011-09-04T11:29:00.000-04:00

1. Top Chef: Las Vegas (season 6)
2. Top Chef: Chicago (season 4)
3. Top Chef: All Stars (season 8)
4. Top Chef: Los Angeles (season 2)
5. Top Chef Canada: Toronto (season 1)
6. Top Chef: Miami (season 3)
7. Top Chef: San Francisco (season 1)
8. Top Chef Masters: Season 1
9. Top Chef: New York (season 5)
10. Top Chef Masters: Season 2
11. Top Chef: DC (season 7)
12. Top Chef Masters: Season 3
...
...
...
743. Top Chef: Just Desserts (who cares)

It's a Top Ten List Read It!: Ten Adorable Moments From Top Chef Canada

2011-07-06T02:16:00.003-04:00

Top Chef Canada just aired the finale of its first season, which I haven't seen yet because I don't have access to niche Canadian cable channels (um do I even have to say no spoilers? I dare you to spoil this.), but I've obsessively watched every other episode because:

1. I love Top Chef in all its forms, even that Just Desserts season, which was legitimately not good in any way, and:
2. I love Canada in the particular way that Americans who have lived in Canada for a long time love it. Part of it is an understanding that many things in Canada are legitimately preferable to the States (politics, healthcare, public art, the CBC, a lack of crime, wide open spaces, affordable higher education, poutine) but part of the love is an understanding that Canada is also hilarious and adorable in lots of little ways that are missed by most Americans whose knowledge of the country is not much besides climate, hockey, and the interjection "eh."

So I also love Top Chef Canada, obviously. The cooking, especially in the first third of the season, is sort of not very good? Like after watching Top Chef and Top Chef Masters, and eating in the sorts of fancy restaurants that the Extremely Junior Editor of a Leading Science Magazine...'s Blog gets to eat in (boasting!), you kind of get an idea of what modern high-end food looks like, and a lot of the Top Chef Canada food looks more like what I cook. Example:

Given a breakfast challenge, that is about what I would make, which is meant to be an insult and not more boasting.

BUT the cooking quality does definitely go up as the season progresses, and in any case the season is much more interesting and watchable than the most recent season of Top Chef Masters, which had a pretty flexible definition of the word "master," right?

Anyway, here are ten extremely adorable Canadian things from this season of Top Chef Canada.

1. Everyone Is So Nice!

This is a stereotype, and to be honest I didn't find it noticeably true during my time in Canada, but there is remarkably little shit-talking and back-stabbing on this season of Top Chef Canada. Everyone is very polite and respectful, and when somebody's food looks so fucking awful that it cannot go uncommented upon, the commenter will look appropriately abashed while saying how much that steamed salmon sausage seriously looked like a poop.

There was one instance that I figured would induce at least a little riot, but nope, nothing. Susur Lee guest-judged a Quickfire Challenge and awarded the prize to Dustin, a mediocre-to-good competitor (whose dish, a beet carpaccio, looked pretty boring), which would be not very remarkable except Dustin happens to be Susur's sous chef. Not one person said "um hey hold on that sounds kind of like bullshit to me." Instead, everyone congratulated Dustin on his win and expressed happiness that Dustin was finally cooking up to his considerable potential. On Top Chef America, Dustin definitely would have gotten his head shaved for that.

2. Todd Perrin, Newfoundland's Top Chef

Todd Perrin was my favorite contestant this season. He was relentlessly good-natured, which always helps, but what I really loved was that he was unapologetically Newfie. It's hard to explain the status of Newfoundland (and Newfies, the inhabitants of Newfoundland) in Canada; they're so isolated that it's tempting to compare them to Alaskans, but Newfies have a much more distinct culture, cuisine, and, most adorably, accent. That accent does not sound Canadian at all. I think most Americans would place it as some sort of cockney or Irish or Scottish twinge.

Aside from his accent, I actually found Todd to be the most interesting chef--he was the only one who had a unique style of cooking, really. The other chefs, predictably, cooked either typical modern North American cuisine or modern French, but Todd cooked straight-up Newfie food. In the first episode he cooked motherfucking SEAL FLIPPER. Later he would cook moose poutine and salt cod brandades. Awesome, right?

3. The One Hispanic Dude in All of Canada

Canada is diverse, yes, but there are, by my own highly scientific estimates, between zero and two Hispanic people in the entire country. There's that dude Juan who lives in Victoria, and apparently there's this guy Steve Gonzales, whom I was not aware of before the show. I have made the disastrous mistake of eating in Mexican restaurants in Quebec, which are staffed by French people and which sometimes serve flautas with DUCK SAUCE FOR DIPPING, which may not technically be racism but is close enough, really. Anyway, this poor guy. Steve was just not very good at this show, although he did have one of my favorite segments of all, in the blind taste test challenge. Tasked with identifying ingredients while blindfolded, here is the Best Hispanic Chef in Canada in action:

"That's a dry-ass cucumber" is one of the best lines I've heard on any show, reality or otherwise, ever.

4. The Poutine Challenge

It took them six episodes, but yes, they did do a poutine challenge. Aside from Todd's moose poutine, most of them were tasty-looking but generally uninspired riffs on Au Pied de Cochon's foie gras poutine, or weird, bad ideas like a cheese and gravy soup into which you dip fries. Still, that's everyone's first question when I tell them I've been watching Top Chef Canada rather than going outside. Well, technically the first question is usually "seriously?" but that's more of a rhetorical thing.

5. What's Ethiopian Food?

Okay so yes in different parts of America we are woefully unaware of certain cuisines (ahem New York City and Mexican food ahem San Francisco and Jewish food ahem) but generally in the cities, everything is available in some form or another. Even though New York blows for Mexican food, you can technically get a taco, you know? And we assume that chefs will be familiar with just about every national cuisine that has any sort of foothold in the country, so even if they have never cooked it, they've at least eaten it and know what it is.

This is not the case in Canada! I know Canada is extremely multicultural and all (Canadians like to talk about that more than Americans; in Canada they use the term "mosaic" in place of America's "melting pot," and boy do they use it way more than Americans would ever seriously use the phrase "melting pot." Also I can't tell you how many times Canadians have bragged that Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world, like there's a prize for that kind of thing) but um every contestant was terrified of the challenge that had them creating ethnic food. The object of the most fear? ETHIOPIAN. Seriously guys they have Ethiopian restaurants in strip-malls, and yet Canadian chefs have never tried it and act like it's some sort of ultra-niche cuisine. We're not talking about Bhutanese or Kyrgyzstanian or even, like, Danish food. Ethiopian is incredibly distinct and instantly recognizable and sort of not that complicated as long as you can figure out how to make injera!

That being said, the two chefs tasked with making Ethiopian food did end up grilling the owners of an Ethiopian spice shop in Toronto for info on Ethiopian cuisine and eventually cooked some food that looked pretty awesome (pictured above), and they did make their own injera bread, which going by the crazy texture and flavor of that stuff sounds pretty tricky, so.

6. The Good Canadian Boy

The concept of the Good Canadian Boy is a rough analogue to the All-American Boy, except in place of football or baseball, the Good Canadian Boy is a hockey star. There's one of those on Top Chef Canada, an unbelievably white guy named Darryl who compares all of the Top Chef challenges to hockey situations and who sports that spiked-up-in-the-front haircut every American boy had (and then abandoned at age 14). He brought his hockey stick to the Top Chef house. Let me say that again: HE BROUGHT A HOCKEY STICK TO GO ON A NATIONALLY TELEVISED COOKING COMPETITION.

For Canadians: Don Cherry would be rooting for Darryl.

7. Head Judge Mark McEwan's Insightful Comments

Besides looking curiously like Mickey Rourke circa The Wrestler, Tom Colicchio's Canadian counterpart is a fucking awful judge. Some of his best lines:

- "The taste is really good, in your mouth."
- "This has a really good base flavor."
- "In terms of flavor profile, it's...not that flavorful."
- "It's got a great taste. Best taste."
- "It's pretty bad. It's all pretty bad."
- "It tastes better than I expected." (Repeat this one at least twice per challenge. Apparently Chef Mark expects everyone to suck, all the time?)

8. Patrick the Gay Canadian Bear

Patrick is not a very good chef, but is endlessly lovable. He's a massive dude, like he worked out so much that his torso became as wide as he is tall, and is covered in hair from head to toe like the friendliest gorilla you ever saw. Most adorable thing? He's actually American, but moved from Chicago to gay-marry his boyfriend, because that kind of thing has been legal in all of Canada for years and years.

Careful not to crush your husband with your massive gorilla arms, Patrick!

9. Everything Francois Says or Does

This one is probably exclusive to anglophone Americans who've lived in Quebec, but there is something so specifically hilarious about the Quebecois accent in English that it just brings this warm nostalgic giggle out of all of us ex-McGillers. It's nothing like a French accent, really. Easy (and fun!) to imitate, but hard to explain, so here's a clip! PS: He's saying "culinary career," even though it sounds like he stumbles and resorts to Frawnch.

10. Dan Aykroyd Is the Only Celebrity in Canada

There are actually a decent number of big-name guest judges on the show, despite the bias against Quebec chefs and contestants (there's only one French-Canadian contestant, and Martin Picard, one of if not the most famous chef in Canada, does not appear)--Vikram Vij, Daniel Boulud, and Susur Lee, among others, make appearances. But whereas Top Chef in America gets tons of celebrities (Foo Fighters, Natalie Portman, Martha Stewart, Nancy Pelosi (?)), Top Chef Canada had some trouble scoring the likes of Jim Carrey or Eugene Levy or even Nickelback. Instead, the one celebrity guest judge was...a disappointingly zaftig Dan Aykroyd, plugging his line of vodkas that come in bottles shaped like clear glass skulls. He judged a Russian food challenge, to pair with his Crystal Head Vodka, which is a dumb idea in every possible way.

Reviews of Weird Products I Get at My Real Job: A "Ladies' Toothbrush" Disguised as a Vibrator

2011-06-22T15:38:00.003-04:00

Written by Lisa Guis

Long have I asked myself: Who will respond to the needs of the fashion forward, on-the-go woman who has almost everything? I have almost everything. I have long legs, lustrous hair, strong nails and only one wrinkle, which for 25 is pretty alright, imho. What am I missing?, you might ask.

I would answer that I, and many of my sisters, am fed up with the embarrassent that inevitably comes when people find out that I care about dental hygiene! And I am ALWAYS looking for ways to make people think I masturbate more that I actually do. I need a toothbrush disguised as a vibrator, OBVIOUSLY.

Enter the Violight Sonic Slim. Oh Slim. Why you gotta be so seductive? The silky silver sack that you fit so neatly into makes me want to cradle you in my arms as I relax after a long day. Your sleek packaging and suggestive battery-like heft make me want nothing more than to remove your 'mascara-style cap', push your discreet power button and...put toothpaste on you and put you in my mouth to brush my teeth.

Coming in a simple cylindrical case in your choice of fabulous, sexy colors and patterns, and slipped into a mesh sack with a ribbon tie, the Slim is a fully electric toothbrush disguised as the sexy-time toy no modern woman's bedside table drawer is complete without.

In answer to your obvious question, no, it can't really perform more than it's intended teeth cleaning function. If you turn it on and leave the cap on the toothbrush element, there is a rather unpleasant buzzing sound and it doesn't vibrate particularly strongly. But boy do my teeth feel clean! The cap is vented, so no worries if you are just slipping this into your work purse for a quick brush between meetings. Bonus points if your boss sees it in your bag, and by bonus points, I mean a promotion.

Just Sayin: Noah and the Heartbreakers

2011-03-19T11:14:00.000-04:00

Recap in Brief: Top Chef, S08E08

2011-02-05T15:44:00.000-05:00

Oooof. Better luck next episode, guys.

Arcanities: Grim Fandango

2011-01-14T20:01:00.002-05:00

Roger Ebert is the best. He's not just the greatest film critic of our era, he's also one of the best pure writers. He's an unashamed populist (rare in the criticism world), a devout opponent of the artistic migraine that is 3D, and is the subject of a long-germinating Oh Em Gee. article (consider yourself teased, reader (singular intentional).). He's also determinedly wrong about videogames, stubbornly and repeatedly arguing about their status as "art." There are all kinds of ways to smack that down--from the ambiguity of the word "art" to the nature of interactivity in entertainment to the relative youth of the medium--but the easiest might just be to hand Ebert a copy of Grim Fandango.

Continue reading.

Grim Fandango, developed by LucasArts and released in 1998, was the dying gasp of the adventure genre. Though it was one of the earliest and most successful genres in the early days of gaming, from text-based Zork series to the bajillion-selling Myst, by 1998 these games--characterized by narrative above all else, with puzzle-solving to advance the plot--were dying. Shooters like Half-Life and strategy games like Starcraft were the big sellers that year, and shooters would largely remain dominant all the way to the present day. Though Grim Fandango was the crowning achievement of Tim Schafer (one of the most brilliant designers ever) and LucasArts (until that point a dominant force in the industry), though it garnered universal critical acclaim and even won GameSpot's Game of the Year award, though it was a gorgeous, immaculately crafted, expertly plotted game, it flopped. Hard. By most estimates it sold in the low six figures, an embarrassing number for the flagship title from a major studio. So it remains a rarity in the world of gaming: a cult hit.

Grim Fandango is interactive film more than anything else. It has puzzles, sure, and many of them are fiendishly clever (though I'm convinced one or two are completely impossible to figure out without the help of a walkthrough), but first and foremost it's about plot, character, and style--like a movie, rather than a traditional game. While awarding it the Game of the Year award, GameSpot wrote, "It presents itself as an unlikely yet entirely viable representative of an entirely new artistic medium, one every bit as rich as literature or film, only newer."

At its core, Grim Fandango is a classic noir in the vein of Double Indemnity or The Maltese Falcon, though as it was created decades after the conventions of noir became cliche, it's a somewhat winking, self-aware style. Still, it has the hallmarks of '40s noir: femme fatales, slippery gangsters, classic cars, snappy suits, and sharp dialogue. It anticipated the return of noir by a decade--Bored to Death, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and all the rest of the noir rebirth movement wouldn't come into vogue until the end of the 2000s--and did it with as much style, humor, and respect for the source material as any of the works that came after it. The villain, for example, was modelled after Signor Ferrari from Casablanca, and Manny's somewhat mundane job--travel agent--was inspired by the lead character's insurance job in Double Indemnity.

Grim Fandango takes place in the Land of the Dead, a sort of purgatory world between the land of the living and the true afterlife, which is vaguely referred to as the Ninth Underworld. But some are stuck in this purgatory, forced to work off debts "to the powers that be." One of these is our hero, Manuel "Manny" Calavera, a travel agent at the Department of Death (the agents pick up the recently departed souls while dressed as the Grim Reaper--Manny's all-purpose tool throughout the game is a collapsable scythe). See, when somebody dies, the ease of their journey to the afterlife is decided by how good that person was in life. A common thief might be given a lousy travel package--a walking stick, say, to provide meager help while embarking on the dangerous four-year journey on foot. A saint in life would be given a ticket on the Number Nine train, which makes the trip in a comfortable four minutes instead. Manny is in charge of getting his clients the best travel package he can, motivated to do so for his own sake: the better clients he gets, the faster he can pay off his debt and get out of purgatory. Despite the fantastical setting, Manny's life, or afterlife, or whatever, is pretty dull, and he just plugs away at his office job, trying to get out of purgatory as fast as he can.

But Manny isn't getting good clients. He's stuck with loser after loser, even though the assignments are supposed to be random (which may or may not be a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross--the game is littered with allusions like that). So he takes matters into his own hands and steals a client from his greaseball coworker: Mercedes "Meche" Colomar, a true saint on earth who should qualify for a ticket on the Number Nine without a sweat. But somehow, Meche gets screwed, qualifying for nothing more than a walking stick, and Manny realizes that something ugly is happening behind the scenes at the Department of Death.

Soon, he's swept up into a genuinely fascinating web of intrigue, involving a revolutionary organization bent on infiltrating and overthrowing the Department of Death from the inside, a criminal mastermind who is able to kill even those in purgatory who are already dead, saints used as slave labor at the literal Edge of the World, and a memorable cast of dozens, all spanning a four year narrative. It's a classic noir concept--everyday schlub stumbles onto a vast and ugly conspiracy, becoming the catalyst for its undoing--but transported to a completely different setting.

It's the visuals that make Grim Fandango a legend. It's not a pixel-pushing action game that looks state of the art for a whopping eight months, like many action games; instead, most of the backgrounds are just static images. Where Grim Fandango succeeds is in artistic visuals, something often overlooked in videogames. There may never be a more distinctive-looking game; the visuals are inspired by Mexican Day of the Dead figurines, with every character appearing as a particularly dapper skeleton, many peppering their speech with Spanish, and the architecture drawing from the angular stonework of Aztec buildings. (The plot, too, was inspired by the myths of the Aztec afterlife, with its treacherous four-year journey to the underworld.) That style meshes surprisingly well with the overarching art deco environments, from Rubacava (the swinging nightclub town where Manny spends his second year) to the opulent retro-futuristic office buildings in Manny's purgatory hometown, El Marrow. The game is designed to be looked at--hell, to be gawked at.

Even the gameplay reinforces that: Unlike other adventure games, which change the image of the mouse cursor when it hovers over an object you can interact with, in Grim Fandango, Manny's head turns to look at any object that might be useful to his quest. There's no mouse cursor at all, a subtle evolution (and meta-wink at even the name) of the point-and-click adventure genre. You're never taken out of the world with unnatural "videogamey" things like mouse cursors or inventory menus--to look through the tools you're currently holding, for example, you hit a key and Manny will pull each tool out of his coat pocket, one at a time. That kind of thing sounds like a minor quirk, but it really was a major step forward, an effort to play like a game without the artificial gamey aspect that's usually accepted as necessary.

After Grim Fandango flopped, LucasArts tried once last time at adventure games--the pretty-good Escape From Monkey Island--and then cancelled every adventure title then in development, instead focusing on boring but high-selling Star Wars games. But Tim Schafer is still around. He left LucasArts to create DoubleFine Productions, which has released a few games with his signature playful wit and unique vision. Psychonauts, released in 2005, was a riotously fun platformer in which each level took place inside a different character's mind. It, like Grim Fandango, flopped.

Brutal Legend, released in 2009, was a strategy game, looking something like a heavy metal album cover brought to life (with all the gleefully stupid battle-with-a-Flying-V-guitar gameplay that implies). It too flopped.

Grim Fandango is a brilliant piece of art that shows just what gaming is capable of if allowed to grow to its full ambitions. It combines elements of film, music (its soundtrack is an elegant take on swing and big band jazz), and long-form fiction (the game takes at least a dozen hours to complete--closer to episodic television or a novel than a film), while adding interactivity in ways that add to, rather than interrupt, the experience as a whole. Its ambition and achievement were largely ignored by the public, which, of course, is hardly a mark against its quality.

Works with this kind of personality and vision are much more rare in the modern gaming world than in other media, and have only gotten scarcer in the years since. Not to get too "things were better in my day, now get off my lawn," but it seems like all you need these days is to come up with a little twist on the first-person-shooter genre, and then you can churn out sequels and spinoffs ad infinitum. Games are notoriously expensive to make, and often don't recoup their budgets, so the major studios, like their equivalents in the film industry, hardly ever take risks. The difference is, the indie gaming world has no real structure in place to bring its titles to the masses. A brilliant indie movie might kill at Sundance, get picked up by Sony Classics or whatever, and eventually play in theaters. A brilliant indie game gets written about on a handful of blogs, downloaded a few thousand times, and that's about the end of it.

Grim Fandango hasn't proven as influential as I'd like. You could make an argument that some of Rockstar's games owe a certain debt to Schafer's masterpiece (especially the recent Grand Theft Auto titles and the upcoming L.A. Noire, but it'd be pretty flimsy. Grim Fandango is pretty much the only game of its kind, for better or worse.

It's a Top Ten List Read It!: Ten Current TV Show Intros Good Enough to Watch Every Time

2010-12-24T15:59:00.021-05:00

After the latest in what's become a long series of hiatuses (hiati?) in the history of Oh Em Gee., brought on partly by life stuff (moving, new job, a big new TV that shows Jeopardy! in high-definition) and partly (mostly) (entirely) (ignore all other explanations) by sheer laziness and creative bankruptcy, I have decided to come back with a shameless attempt to grab web traffic, possibly with the aim of earning dollars, plural, in annual revenue from Google. Hence, the introduction of a new Oh Em Gee. column: It's a Top Ten List Read It!. This is based on the Law of Cracked, which states that even the fucking stupidest and most poorly written top ten list will make the front page of Digg, infect your site with an influx of semi-literate but very vocal commenters, and kill your soul a little bit, all of which I obviously want for my ~~passion project~~ thing I write when I'm bored and staying at my parents' house.

The first in this exciting new feature: current TV show intros that, whether due to catchiness of theme song or indelibility of imagery, are good enough to entice me to actually watch them instead of fast-forwarding through them. Not an easy feat!

Continue reading.

Justified.

Justified, a new show this year based on an Elmore Leonard book I haven't read (the dude wrote about a million books and I've been limiting myself to those that were made into movies starring Jennifer Lopez), stars the always likable Timothy Olyphant (in maximum cool-dude mode) as a U.S. Marshall (apparently a real thing) who's forced to move back home to bumfuck Kentucky after a little hiccup in Miami (he shot a dude. It was awesome.). The show has one of the best villains ever in the slippery, faux-earnest psychopath played by Walter Goggins (of The Shield), and was one of the most purely fun dramas on the air this year. Its intro is similarly great, showing the hardscrabble rural Kentucky town in quick cuts, shot in the evening, soundtracked by the song "Long Hard Times to Come" by Gangstagrass--a song that sounds like Three Six Mafia performing with bluegrass trio on a southern porch.

Dexter.

After six seasons, about half of them good, Dexter is still compelling television for two reasons: Michael C. Hall's lead performance as the title character, and the amazing intro. (Note to Dexter's writers: neither of those reasons is Deb.) The intro shows a man's typical, entirely harmless morning routine in the most sinister, visceral way possible, often calling back to the show's preoccupation with blood. As shown in eerily detailed macro shots: Dexter strokes his facial stubble with a finger, cuts himself while shaving (causing a few drops of blood to land in the sink), then we watch as the piece of toilet paper he's stuck to the cut swiftly absorbs the blood, fiber to fiber. Dexter's breakfast, too, is gruesome despite its banality: fresh-squeezed blood orange juice, sunny-side eggs (the yolk of which is mercilessly pierced), disturbingly-flesh-like Canadian bacon (sliced and pan-fried), and fresh-ground coffee in a French press. Has a sliced orange or a cracked egg ever made anyone shudder before? It's all beautifully shot and utterly mesmerizing, and is a better argument for high-definition than a million Planet Earths.

Terriers.

The recently cancelled Terriers just finished its first and only season, due for the "I can't believe they cancelled that!" file, along with AMC's single-season-wonder Rubicon. The show did, if we're being honest, and given the single-digit readership of Oh Em Gee. I think honesty is totally within the realm of possibility, suffer from sometimes cliched dialogue and situations ("Tell me where my husband is, you bastards! Tell me where he is!"). But even at its worst, Terriers was a breezily fun show, able to coast on the considerable appeal and chemistry of its two leads, Donal Logue (of The Tao of Steve and Grounded for Life fame) and Michael Raymond-James (of having three first names fame). The intro perfectly captured the vaguely retro idea of a scrappy, buddy-detective neo-noir set in San Diego, with one of the most ridiculously catchy theme songs this side of Parks and Recreation.

Mad Men.

I know I'm going to get shit for this, but the intro is by far my favorite part of the critical darling, every-Emmy-ever-winning, raising-the-quality-and-expectations-for-episodic-televised-drama-as-a-whole series Mad Men. The show itself is often too concerned with mood and not enough with plot for me, with relentlessly unlikable characters (Betty Draper is the worst, always). But every time I see the intro, with its stylish silhouettes, touch of confident pathos, and stirring RJD2 score, I think, "Well, maybe I can put up with these assholes for another 42 minutes."

Jersey Shore.

Like Dexter's intro, Jersey Shore's is surprisingly long, distilling the mood of the show into a minute or so in a way that ensures you can't look away, no matter how many times you see it. Jersey Shore replaces Dexter's wryly conceptualized intro with dialogue like "Umm, HELLO?!" and "Hahahaha." It's laced with Ed-Hardy-inspired faux-graffiti scrawlings, grainy film clips, flashing lights and other shiny things, and a song that implores the listener to "get crazy," "get loud," "party," and "do something crazy." The intro is a great barometer for the trash-TV event of our generation: If you find it merely repulsive and not also fascinating/hilarious/compelling, the show itself is probably not for you.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Sorry guys, this one just made the list because I'm from a Philadelphia suburb and can name all of the landmarks shown in the intro, thus making me feel like I grew up in authentic, artsy, gritty Philly rather than in the fluffy marshmallow WASP-land of the western suburbs. Boathouse row! Love Park! South Street! I'm cool, right?

Still a good show, though. How funny was that "Wormhat's worm hat" thing this season?

Parks and Recreation.

Voted "most likely to get stuck in my head all day, causing me to hum it at work, causing my coworkers to notice my humming, causing my coworkers to mention to me that I'm humming, causing me to feel super self-conscious, causing me to forcefully tamp down my impulse to hum, causing a physical and/or psychosomatic reaction, causing me to see a doctor for what I think might be an ulcer but is actually repressed humming" in an informal but unanimous poll both conducted by and exclusively surveying me.

Bored to Death.

Aside from the pleasant surprise that was Bored to Death's excellent second season, one of the best reasons to watch the show is the intro. It's actually one of the more noirish parts of the show--even though Jonathan Ames's amateur detective series is ostensibly a riff on detective noir, it's much more silly comedy than even a mock-noir would be. I love the way all the characters in the intro are animated to be constructed of words, how "Jonathan Ames" (played by Jason Schwartzman) continuously chases the femme fatale across the pages, and I love the "ba-DUM, ba-DUM" theme song (also written and performed by Schwartzman).

Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule.

Check It Out! was one of the new crop of surprisingly fantastic live-action shows on Adult Swim (also including Delocated and Childrens Hospital, both of which are better shows but with less hilarious intro sequences). A spin-off of one of the best sketches from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Check It Out! has a new intro for each episode, but they all riff on the delights of cheap, public-access TV with missed cues, awkward shots, rambling speeches, and harsh, unflattering lighting.

The League, Eastbound and Down, and Burn Notice.

Because most intros are so long and boring, I wanted to give a special award to these three great shows (well, two great shows and one shiny stuff go boom show) that abandoned the intro for a simple splash credit: The name of the show, a guitar riff, and then back to the show. In and out in seconds. Great idea.

Vague Platitude [Ellipsis]: The Finale

2010-07-15T19:44:00.013-04:00

The Hills is over, and the final scene of its otherwise-tedious finale might be its best achievement yet, a tacit and final acknowledgement of what we've all been thinking for the past four years. Oh Em Gee. began with The Hills, and I'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about its ending no matter what it was--but I'm glad the series went out on such a brilliant, side-smirking note.

Continue reading.

I haven't watched any of this season, nor most of the last, but The Hills is not a show that punishes that sort of lax viewing. Really, every episode is the same, with a handful of broad sea changes taking place over the past six seasons. Each relationship has ups and downs that last an impossibly long time: Lauren and Jason, Lauren and Brody, Kristen and Brody, Audrina and Justin "Justinbobby" Bobby, Heidi and Spencer. Some characters hate other characters, embittered battles also drawn out sometimes for years. You can tune in to pretty much any episode in any season and follow what's happening within a few seconds of seeing two characters interact.

In the finale, I find that the Kristen and Brody relationship is still happening, though probably in its final stages, while Audrina and Justinbobby seem to be done. Heidi and Spencer, I remember now, were kicked off the show mostly for being themselves. Neither they nor Lauren were anywhere to be found in the finale. But each of the other cast members gets a happy ending, of sorts.

Audrina buys a beach house, though judging by the quick look we get at the beach, she'll probably be eaten by sharks within a few days.

Lo moves in with her boyfriend. Lo remains the most familiar of all the girls to me--there was a shot of her in Laguna Beach, wearing a pastel polo shirt and driving a VW Jetta, that could well have been filmed back home on the Pennsylvania Main Line. I don't understand beach girls, but I understand perky, preppy, blonde sorority girls who wear pastel polo shirts. And I understand VW Jettas.

I'll be forever grateful to her for coining the name "Justinbobby" for Audrina's ex-boyfriend, who doesn't seem to have ever gone by that name.

Stephanie is dating a motocross racer. This is consistent with her former meth habit.

Brody wears sunglasses in the pool. Not just while at the edge, talking to someone outside the pool: he actually swims with them on.

Kristen is moving to Europe. Europe is a big place, I'm pretty sure, but neither Kristen nor anyone she talks to seems to require any further specification. "Do you know anyone there?" her friend asks. "Yeah, I know one person there," Kristen says. One person where? I know that England is only about the size of a full-sized sedan like the Dodge Stratus, but there are at least four other countries in Europe. Maybe even five!

That's all nice, I guess. It's interminably boring, really, though as always, the episode is over before you know it. The Hills is remarkable in that way: nothing really happens in a show like Mad Men, yet it seems to take forever. But even more nothing happens in The Hills, and it flies by in what seems like seconds. You just get snapshots: Brody with sunglasses in the pool, Audrina eyeing the sharks that will soon devour her, Lo giggling about that unnecessary 3AM tequila shot, Stephanie saying "um." And then it's over.

But the finale! Oh, the finale! Brody meets Kristen to reluctantly wish her bon voyage on her trip to the concept of Europe. They hug, they cry, she leaves. Brody stands, hands in pockets, baseball cap on head, with the Hollywood Hills and that famous crooked sign behind him. Then, his background moves. It slides, pushed by a production assistant, revealing floodlights, cameras, a huge crew, all standing in a Hollywood film lot, in an alley between studios. Kristen re-emerges from off-set, hugs Brody, for real this time, and two production assistants pound one in. It's a wrap, says the fist bump. Phew, says the ensuing fist bump explosion.

It's the first time the show has acknowledged the fakery behind the scenes, though that's the entire reason I and a whole crop of sort-of-ironic viewers watched it in the first place. Yes, this is fake. Is Kristen even going abroad? Will she and Brody get back together? Are any of these relationships real? Who cares?

Also interesting is that the people who really watch this show, who really love it, the 14-year-old girls, don't get the ending. They don't like it. "This was the worst ending ever!" says Twitter user RuthieZNG. (ZNG!) But most of the commenters on Facebook and Twitter just talk about the drama, the same as always. "Spencer and Heidi need help!" "I just love Audrina and Lo!" "Audrina's new house is amazing!" They ignore the show's unmasking. It doesn't matter to them.

Part of what's so great about the ending is that it's for me. And you, and anyone who reads this, and anyone who understands that liking The Hills means hating it, and hating it means liking it. It's not for the 14-year-old girls. The rest of the show is for them, sure. The commercials are for them. The marketing is for them. This ending is for us.

I've been saying for a long time that the producers of The Hills are smarter than either its cast or its audience. I'm glad they showed it.

Alternate Universe Emmy Nominations, 2010

2010-07-13T19:48:00.007-04:00

The 2010 Emmy Award nominations were announced last week sometime. Oh Em Gee. is by default a non-profit publication (out of laziness rather than philanthropy, I guess, but CHARITY IS CHARITY), so our turn-around time is a little late because who cares, but we have rallied and put together our own little nomination list. The official Emmy nominations are, as always, an excellent representation of what is popular among television executives with no taste, all of whom, I'm pretty sure, are responsible for the cancellation of Veronica Mars. Thus their nominations are terrible!

So here are the Oh Em Gee. revised Emmy nominations. We don't have a cute name, like the OMGies, because these aren't our nominations. These are the correct nominations. We do not have opinions here at Oh Em Gee.: we have facts.

Continue Reading.

I should probably note that my knowledge of television comedy is way ahead of my knowledge of television drama. I just don't watch that much episodic drama, at most one or two currently-airing series per year. I should also note that I'm fully aware that this list is sexist as fuck. I don't know if the sexism is coming from me or from whoever is writing/producing/airing these shows, but I had a hell of a time coming up with lead and supporting actress nominations.

Even the actresses I nominated are sometimes stretching it--Jane Lynch was great in Glee, but neither she nor Party Down's Lizzy Caplan were inarguably the lead in their shows. Tina Fey was great in 30 Rock, as always, but this was really not one of 30 Rock's strongest seasons. And I haven't even seen Friday Night Lights this season, having exhausted my tolerance for that much True American Spirit about three seasons ago, but slotted in Connie Britton because...she was pretty good in season one?

Most of these shows focus on men, with women playing supporting roles, usually the wife-girlfriend type, which isn't often conducive to really great acting. Julie Benz as Rita on Dexter is a perfect example--she's a great actress, I'm sure, but the role is extremely limited in scope, mostly consisting of hectoring Dexter, being frustrated with the kids, and consistently not realizing her husband is a serial killer. There are exceptions, of course: Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are both powerhouse lead comic actresses, and Glenn Close is ridiculously good in the often-ridiculous Damages. But I really had to work to whittle down some of those male lists (especially Supporting Actor in a Comedy) while struggling to come up with some of the female lists (especially Supporting Actress in a Drama). I'd like to think that isn't my fault.

I think probably if I ~~managed to stay awake during~~ watched Mad Men I'd have more good female nominees, but that show makes me very sleepy.

Anyway, the nominees!

Outstanding Comedy Series

Party Down
The League
Archer
Michael and Michael Have Issues
Childrens Hospital [sic]
Parks and Recreation
The Life and Times of Tim

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series

Adam Scott, Party Down
H. Jon Benjamin, Archer
Charlie Day, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
John C. Reilly, Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule
Steve Dildarian, The Life and Times of Tim
Mark Duplass, The League

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series

Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Lizzy Caplan, Party Down
Jane Lynch, Glee
Portia de Rossi, Better Off Ted
Sarah Silverman, The Sarah Silverman Program

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series

Martin Starr, Party Down
Aziz Ansari, Parks and Recreation
Nick Offerman, Parks and Recreation
Chris Pratt, Parks and Recreation
JB Smoove, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Nick Kroll, The League
Danny Pudi, Community

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series

Megan Mulally, Party Down
Aubrey Plaza, Parks and Recreation
Jessica Walter, Archer
Katie Aselton, The League
Susie Essman, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Allison Brie, Community

Outstanding Drama Series

Dexter
Breaking Bad
Rescue Me
Justified
Dollhouse

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series

Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
Michael C. Hall, Dexter
Timothy Olyphant, Justified

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series

Glenn Close, Damages
Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

Walter Goggins, Justified
Enver Gjokaj, Dollhouse
Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad
Bob Odenkirk, Breaking Bad

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series

Anna Gunn, Breaking Bad
Joelle Carter, Justified
Olivia Williams, Dollhouse

Outstanding Reality Program

Jersey Shore
Top Chef: Las Vegas
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Fresh Meat 2
Top Chef Masters
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Worst Actual Emmy Nominations

The Office, Outstanding Comedy Series
Jim Parsons, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (The Big Bang Theory)
Tony Shalhoub, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (Monk)
Matthew Fox, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Lost)
The Fact That There Is Even a Category for TV Movies or Miniseries
Jon Cryer, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (Two and a Half Men)
Julie Bowen, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Modern Family)
Undercover Boss, Outstanding Reality Program

Arcanities: Home Movie

2010-06-29T22:20:00.001-04:00

Note: Arcanities is a column in which the pop-culture gems lost to time are forcefully dragged out of the cellar of our collective memory and analyzed for the mild enjoyment of a meager audience.

Discussed within: The bayou, drum circles in Kansas, Japanese sitcoms, cat-themed calendars, hypnosis, regional maxims, and the difference between eccentricity and obsession

Home Movie is my favorite movie.

Continue reading.

It's a fluffy, inconsequential film, based on a series of commercials, that runs barely an hour long. It's a lesser work in the career of filmmaker Chris Smith, who has achieved some significant success from his other films, including American Movie, The Yes Men, and last year's Collapse. It doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. But I've probably (read: definitely) seen it more than fifteen times, and whenever I meet somebody I really like, I demand that person sit and watch it with me. Everybody else likes it, too; I don't think they're just humoring me. It's the warmest, most soothing, most calmly transcendent movie I've ever seen.

Chris Smith's three major movies, American Movie, The Yes Men, and Collapse, are widely acclaimed, skillful, thought-provoking documentaries. (The Yes Men is a bit of an outlier; it has Smith's friendly, familiar camerawork, but he's more of a director-for-hire for the political prankster group from which the movie takes its name.)

American Movie and Collapse are both portraits of forceful, possibly disturbed personalities who allow their lives to be taken over by obsession. Mark Borchardt, the subject of American Movie, dedicates his life to making horror B-movies despite a deficit of funds, materials, and, frankly, talent. American Movie, which was awarded the Sundance Jury Prize for Documentary, traces Borchardt as he puts everything he has into his filmmaking, to the detriment of his well-being, his financial situation, his family, and his friends. But Borchardt isn't a villain; his drive and obsession manage to be both admirable and pitiable at the same time.

Collapse focuses on author and former LAPD detective Michael Ruppert, who is usually derided as a conspiracy theorist and alarmist. The title comes from Ruppert's theory that oil production has reached its apex, and the impending decline in oil production will lead to the collapse of society and civilization as we know it. Collapse jumps from theory to theory, from economic policy to CIA drug trafficking to sustainable energy. It's an unusually haunting and persuasive film--it's impossible to believe everything he says, but equally impossible to believe nothing he says. Though it's essentially a static shot of Ruppert explaining his theories (in what appears to be a bunker of some sort), many critics (including Best Person Ever Roger Ebert) have categorized the documentary as a "thriller." But most of all, it's a movie about Ruppert, the obsession that drives him, and the dark places such an obsession can take someone.

Home Movie is also a movie about obsession, but where American Movie and Collapse explore the destructive nature of obsession, Home Movie dials it back to something much lighter: eccentricity. Eccentricity is really just benign obsession, obsession that's chronic rather than terminal. You can live with it. You may not even mind it.

Home Movie focuses on five homeowners (three of which are families) who have adapted their homes in extraordinary ways to suit their lifestyles. They're all crazy, really, but the movie is so warm and nonjudgmental that their craziness becomes endearing and lovable by the end.

The movie flits back and forth between the five homes without any particular narrative reason. Home Movie doesn't have a plot, an arc, or a definable act; it reveals things about each of the five homeowners at a steady pace throughout its length. It begins in Louisiana, slowly cruising through the bayou with a simple blues guitar riff to back it. Bill Tregle drives up to his houseboat, a smallish boxy affair, and says, "This is where I live. This is what we call home." Goddamn if that isn't some kind of quietly beautiful thing to say.

Bill Tregle, a big, florid Louisianian in cutoff jean shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops, is my favorite of the bunch. His segments are filled with the kind of anecdotes I'll never have; there's the time an alligator tore off his heel, or the time he spent weeks in the hospital after the boat he was on exploded due to a gasoline spill. Tregle is endlessly good-natured and optimistic--his proclamation that "I plan to live to about a hundred and fifty" seems uncomfortably dim at first (his evidence is that people are living longer these days), but once you've spent a little time with him, you realize that it's a good distillation of who he is and how he sees the world. Some of Bill Tregle's wisdom:

After describing a 45-minute effort to find his "good butterfly ashtray" a friend accidentally tossed into the Gulf:

On the dangers of alligator wrangling:

Linda Beech is utterly fascinating. Perhaps obviously, as she's the oldest subject, we find out the most about her of anyone in the movie. At first she's a goofy old lady who lives in a treehouse in a Hawaiian jungle. Then we find out she was a major sitcom star in the '50s and '60s--in Japan. Then we find out she was raised bilingual in Hawaii, returned home after two decades in Japan to build a home based on a story her mother used to tell her, about a treehouse in the depths of the Waipio Valley.

Her house is amazing, too. It's powered fully by hydroelectricity, a recent addition (it's implied she lived in the treehouse for years without running water or reliable electricity), from a waterfall on her property. The trunk of the 200-year-old monkeypod tree in which her house is build runs right through her living room floor and out through the ceiling. "Is that your tree?" Smith asks her. "Very much so, yes," Linda replies. "Or I'm it's person, I'm not sure which."

I can't even explain how much I love the way she says "abundant flowing water."

Ed and Diana Peden live in an underground nuclear missile silo and launch center in Kansas that was designed to withstand a one megaton blast. It's a very cool house, but Ed Peden (who gets almost all of the screen time for his family) likes it for all the wrong reasons. He's an overgrown hippie who thinks the transformation of his house from a missile launch center into a single-family home represents some kind of transformation in the world. As further evidence of this transformation, he says "the Soviet Union is not the threat it once was," which is almost charming in its xenophobic patriotism. It's the foreign relations equivalent of a lava lamp.

Not coincidentally, his living room has a lava lamp, several Buddha statues, and a poster that reads "Love everyone--including yourself." There's an extended drum circle featuring Ed on an American Indian wooden flute (which Ed of course also traces to the spiritual land of Kansas, or whatever). The drum circle is completely silly, as (let's be honest here) a drum circle in Kansas would have to be, but Smith's direction is gorgeous. The profile shot of Ed playing the flute is more than a little bit beautiful, but it's tempered with Ed's wife Diana timidly tapping a rhythm at the top of the stairs, or Ed's chubby friend awkwardly playing a variety of faux-authentic percussive instruments.

Ben Skora's house in Illinois is a monument to 1970s and '80s technology, a time when bigger was better, louder was better, and everything was physical, tangible, and mechanical. No pussy-ass touchscreens or cloud-based syncing for Ben Skora--he has a fucking living room that rotates when you call a number and type in a code on a landline phone. That's fun enough, and Ben is endearingly crazy. But his live-in girlfriend, who must be thirty years his junior at least, is the star of the show.

I have never in my life seen a person flaunt the survival of the fittest more than Darlene. She's impenetrably dumb, incapable of understanding basic concepts or communicating coherently, but might be the most Chris Smithian subject in the movie. She too is obsessed; she quixotically believes she can become an A-level movie star. Not an actress, a movie star.

Ben and Darlene believe in a few eye-rolling concepts--reincarnation, hypnosis, that kind of thing. For Ben, it's understandable; over the course of repeated viewings of the movie, I've come to see Ben as a deeply sad person. He lost his wife and son, and threw himself into the creation of this robotic equipment to distract himself. When he talks about his family you can see why he clings to these kinds of ideas.

Darlene, on the other hand, is just dumb. This monologe is deeply unnerving to watch; it's very funny and very sad at the same time. The moment when she says "it just takes one producer" is a shocking moment to me. She's completely serious about this--there's no self-awareness at all.

The crazy cat people suck. They're my least favorite of the bunch, and, you know, I like cats. They've modded out their house with secret rooms on top of closets with black lights and pillows, cat-sized pathways around the ceiling, and cat decorations everywhere. They have tiny little mice effigies hanging in the kitchen. Their linoleum is plastic lathed over cut-out pictures of cats from magazines. They both wear cat-emblazoned clothing at all times.

The one interesting thing about them is their profession. Bob Walker is a cat photographer, the kind who takes those saccharine photos of cats for calendars that end up in the discount rack by the second week of January. I find it somehow reassuring to know that the people behind those calendars really are as crazy as I thought. It's not some mercenary photographer in between "real jobs," or some student on summer break from a mid-tier photography school looking to build his portfolio--it's Bob, crazy cat dude. I like that.

Home Movie is chicken soup, it's tea with milk and honey, it's spaghetti and meatballs. It's warm, homey, and comforting. Critics have knocked it for its lack of both plot and "statement," but those are two of the reasons I love it so much. Not everything has to have a three-act arc or a grand artistic reason for being--Home Movie is leisurely and utterly pleasurable, and that's no small achievement.

The Donner Party Dinner Party

2010-06-27T01:33:00.005-04:00

I have this nerd program called Boxee, which presents all of the music and movies and TV shows on my computer in nice big fonts so when I hook my computer up to my TV, I can browse through them comfortably while sitting on the couch, ten feet away. It's pretty great, really; it automatically looks through IMDb and gets movie posters and synopses for all my video, and AllMusic for all my album art, and it plays Netflix and Hulu and all that stuff. But sometimes I've accidentally named my files in a way that confuses Boxee, and it'll list that movie or TV show completely incorrectly. I downloaded The Brothers Grimm, for example, a fairly poorly received Terry Gilliam movie starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, that for whatever reason Boxee identified as Once Upon a Brothers Grimm, a fairly poorly received movie from 1977 starring nobody you or I has ever heard of.

Usually it's pretty obvious what the problem is (there's often an issue with remakes), but when a whole host of movies I definitely don't own showed up in my movies section, I was baffled. I had downloaded a couple seasons of Seinfeld, and turns out Boxee does not understand that Seinfeld episodes are not movies. I'm not sure what the issue is--maybe all those "The __" titles are confusing? Anyway, here's a sampling of the synopses of the original Seinfeld episode, and the movie Boxee insists it actually is. Anyone expecting to watch any of these movies is going to be pretty upset, I think.

Continue reading.

Seinfeld episode: "The Chaperone" (1994)

Jerry gets a date with Miss Rhode Island, a Miss America contestant. When they need a chaperone, Kramer is available. On the date, Kramer gives her advice and becomes her personal coach. Elaine tries to get a job at Doubleday, filling in the shoes once filled by Jackie Onassis. Instead she gets a job being the personal assistant of a top executive who likes white socks. Meanwhile, George decides that the Yankees need to change their uniforms from polyester to cotton.

Boxee guess: The Chaperone (2012, still in preproduction)
Starring: Paul Levesque, Jose Zuniga, Nick Gomez, and Kevin Ranking (the latter was the creepy RA in Undeclared)

An ex-con on the run from his criminal past hides out from those he ratted on by chaperoning a field trip to New Orleans.

Seinfeld episode: "The English Patient" (1997)

Jerry visits his parents in Florida. Kramer asks Jerry to pick up some Cubans while he's there, but Kramer doesn't specify whether they are cigars or not. The next day, Jerry has an encounter with Izzy Mandelbaum, the founder of the Magic Pan crepe restaurant. Izzy challenges Jerry to a weight-lifting contest, but when Izzy takes it too far, he winds up in the hospital. Jerry goes to visit and learns that Izzy, his father and his son are nearly identical in age, and each one challenges Jerry to a weight-lifting contest. Meanwhile, back in New York, Elaine is repeatedly dragged to go see the best picture winning film "The English Patient", but she absolutely despises it. Peterman nearly fires Elaine when she gets angry and leaves half way through the movie. Peterman gets so angry at Elaine that instead of firing her, he decides to teach her a lesson by making her go to Tunisia and live in a cave for six weeks. Jerry gets back to New York and Kramer learns that the Cubans aren't really Cubans but Dominicans. They then take jobs rolling crepes at the Magic Pan restaurant, but get fired and wind up becoming Cubans, hijacking Elaine's plane and flying it to Cuba.

Boxee guess: The English Patient (1996)
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth

A young nurse tends to a badly burned man in an abandoned castle at the end of WWII. The story of his life is shown in flashbacks. Based on the best-selling novel by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje.

Seinfeld episode: "The Dealership" (1998)

Jerry goes to buy a new car from David Puddy, who's been promoted to the sales floor. But after Elaine breaks up with Puddy (again), Jerry is worried that he wont get a good deal on the car. George seeks revenge on a mechanic after he accuses the mechanic of stealing his candy bar. Kramer takes the same car Jerry is looking at out on a long test drive to see how far he can go on free gas without filling up the tank.

Boxee guess: The Dealership (2009, made for TV)
Starring: William Devane, Tricia Helfer (Number Six from BSG), Patrick J. Adams

'The Dealership' is about the dysfunctional world of Carson Luxury Auto Gallery, a family-owned used-car dealership. Market collapse, credit crisis, the shrinking global economy--everything is conspiring against Rachel, Jack and Frank Carson. But this Main Street family isn't going down without a fight and will do whatever it takes to make the sale and live for another day.

Seinfeld Episode: "The Dinner Party" (1994)

En route to a dinner party, Jerry and Elaine stop off at a bakery and get held up when the bakery runs out of what they want to purchase (Ed. note: Seriously, IMDb? You have a synopsis of this episode that doesn't include the word BABKA?). Meanwhile, George and Kramer, en route to said dinner party, stop off at a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and have a hard time picking one out.

Boxee guess: The Donner Party (2009)
Starring: Crispin Glover, Clayne Crawford, Michele Santopietro

Based on the real events of The Donner Party tragedy. The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the western expansion of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847, a number of the trapped settlers joined together in a final effort to reach California and organize a rescue party. (Ed. note: Seriously, IMDb? You have a synopsis of this movie that doesn't include the word CANNIBALISM?)

Seinfeld Episode: "The Conversion" (1993)

George decides to convert to Latvian Orthodox to impress a girl, against his angry parent's objections. Meanwhile, Kramer converts a nun at the church, and Jerry takes a peek in his girlfriend's medicine cabinet and is stunned by what he finds.

Boxee guess: The Conversion (2009)
Starring: Marc Robinson, Mark Pergolizzi, Jessica Morgan

June 12, 2009, the day America ushers in a bright new future, or is it? The government mandate to convert analog television signals to digital promised to be a smooth transition, however, something went wrong. America plunges into digital chaos as television, radio and internet fall silent. Is it a fluke or an attack? The government is hush as conspiracy abounds and the truth hides within tiny ones and zeros.

Seinfeld episode: "The Comeback" (1997)

George spends most of this episode thinking of a perfect comeback line for a comment made by his co-worker Reilly-- but it may not be delivered to Reilly, or even in New York. Elsewhere, Jerry mulls over the fringe benefits of not exposing a tennis pro as a phony. Elaine and Kramer reap different results from their video picks (from the "staff pick" section). And can you really recover from a coma?

Boxee guess: The Comeback (1978)
Starring: Jack Jones, Pamela Stephenson, David Doyle, Bill Owen

A singer holes up at a sinister estate to write new songs for his act. The ghost of his murdered wife begins to haunt him, then the person who actually killed her shows up at the mansion.

#10: The Gulf Oil Spill

2010-06-10T22:53:00.010-04:00

The London mayor [the aforementioned Lord Idiot Baron Archduke] called for an end to the "buck passing and name calling", saying the anti-British rhetoric from the US might damage UK interests. "It starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves," Mr Johnson told the BBC.

Man, if BP is a "great British company," I'd hate to see a mediocre British company. Unless His Idiotship means "great" in the archaic, quaint sense (meaning "big"), which given his residence on FairyTale Island, he probably does, BP is not great even a little bit. BP is the worst. They are being beaten up, yes, because they are a terrible and irresponsible company who may have irreparably damaged a massive and vital ecosystem, not to mention destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families who have for generations made an honorable living from the bounty of said ecosystem. That is a good reason to beat a company up!

There are many reasons for Americans to express anti-British sentiments. I've laid out nine already in this series of investigative journalistic xenophobia (for example: their food sucks, and their countryside is drab). But nobody, anywhere, has even thought to blame the Fiefdom of England for the Gulf oil spill. Not even me, and I'm a semi-professional England-basher. So calm the fuck down, England. And elect a new Lord Baron Archduke Mayor of Olde London-Towne. The one you've got now sucks.

Sentence Fragment Album Reviews, Part II [Updated Infrequently]

2010-05-28T01:26:00.010-04:00

Some kind of vintage year for music; not even June! Amazing new stuff every week, can barely keep up. Am choosier this year than ever before--solid B+ albums get one listen and are discarded. Roundup time. Sometimes I stray into complete sentences. Like that one. Accidental, promise.

Continue reading.

Robyn, Body Talk Pt. 1: Better in concept than in practice. Ice-cold vocals, chilly production, surprisingly emotional lyrics, ultra-modern (i.e. very Summer Two Thousand and Ten) dance-pop. Not nearly as interesting as it sounds in reviews--better than Lady Gaga, but that's not a high bar.

Blitzen Trapper, Destroyer of the Void: Love this band. Makes it hard to keep claiming I hate classic rock. I wish this one rocked a little harder, maybe.

Hot Hot Heat, Future Breeds: HHH lives or dies on strength of hook in chorus. Not their hookiest choruses here.

Christina Aguilera, Bionic: Desperately inessential.

Cornershop, Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast: Sitar-tinged jangle roots rock, like Marah relocated to India. No "Brimful of Asha," but somehow comforting in its complacency and simplicity.

Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record: Songs kind of blend together, as usual. "Art House Director" my personal poppy highlight--sort of a BSS version of "The Underdog" by Spoon.

Shad, TSOL: Recycles beats deemed too boring for Common, Lupe Fiasco, et al. Lyrics still pretty great ("Pick the drug or the rapper, man/ I'm better than Meth") but great rhymes can't make up for dull beats. Highlight: "Yaa I Get It." Not that high a light.

Sleigh Bells, Treats: Andrew W.K. with hipster glasses, crunk beats, cute girl vocals. Only two worthwhile tracks ("Tell 'Em" and "Crown on the Ground"), but both are A+++++ will dance clumsily again.

The Futureheads, The Chaos: Best track ("Heartbeat Song") sounds like a repurposed mid-period Green Day song. Angular rock genre (Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc) had a shelf life of about six months, am I right?

Jamie Lidell, Compass: What in the fuck? Stomping soul replaced by some kind of bullshit synthetic R&B. Modern, in an unwelcome way. British, in a too-obvious way. Caucasian, in the worst way.

The National, High Violet: Makes me wish I still lived in the arctic--too morose for California.

The New Pornographers, Together: Love it. Love it, love it, love it. In "mature mode," like Challengers, but more immediately ingratiating. Be warned: front-loaded. But that's okay.

LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening: Still do not get this guy at all. Don't have the patience for five-minute buildups or songs that sound like fifteen-second clips of spare drum beats copy/pasted for eight minutes.

Kate Nash, My Best Friend Is You: More power-poppy, to my liking. Would love, in an affectionate and not leery way, if teenage girls blasted this while driving in the summertime.

The Black Keys, Brothers: Better than last two, okay. Will probably never top Thickfreakness--be better if I stopped wishing they would. Auerbach's still got the best pipes in town.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, I Learned the Hard Way: Wish it had more dirty soul stompers. And no ballads. Soul ballads are as bad as bubblegum ballads.

Holy Fuck, Latin: Without a "Lovely Allen" I'm not really sure Holy Fuck is for me. Sort of sounds like background music at an Urban Outfitters.

Tallest Man on Earth, The Wild Hunt: "Dylanesque" is inadequate. Superior songwriting, perfectly matched vocals (may take a listen or two to grow on you, but they will), beautiful guitar work. The summer album of my dreams. Should come with sunglasses and Mexican beer.

MGMT, Congratulations: Respect it more than I like it. Not a sophomore toss-off; ballsy, unconventional, sometimes (often) (usually) to its detriment. More interesting than expected.

She and Him, Volume Two: You know, cute.

Laura Marling, I Speak Because I Can: Not so fresh--no longer a precocious 17-year-old, after all--but still good enough to make me qualify myself when I call it a "coffeeshop" album.

Jonsi, Go: Logical step following last Sigur Ros album. Full-on, uplifting, unbelievably hooky stadium pop. Attempts at English are pretty suspect/hilarious but lyrics are still better than Justin Timberlake's, who I'm pretty sure is fluent or at least conversational in English.

Miles Kurosky, The Desert of Shallow Effects: Sounds pretty much like Beulah (his former band). Not unwelcome: thoughtful, Beatles by way of Destroyer pop.

Mumford & Sons, Sigh No More: Blurs line between Celtic and bluegrass--has nobody done that before? Anchored in folk-pop, works astonishingly well. Every song builds to banjofied climax.

Broken Bells, Broken Bells: MOST MISLEADING ALBUM OF THE YEAR. First track is fucking amazing, rest of album is the same boredom that results every time Danger Mouse tries his hand at indie rock.

Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me: Don't like it, at all. If I want opaque bucolic free association poems, I'll go a slam poetry event in Golden Gate Park. Newsom is squandering her natural pop songwriting gifts (see: "Sadie") with this musically accompanied poetry, and I won't be a party to it.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Brutalist Bricks: More spotty than "Living With the Living," but some great, classic tracks. Love "Bottled in Cork."

Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks: Sort of unambitious, but really enjoyable and solid. Would get lots more listening time in any other year.

The Magnetic Fields, Realism: Welcome return to form after that weird noisy joke I didn't get, a few years back.

Dr. Dog, Shame, Shame: Puzzler: Cannot get this band to make any impact on me. Every song sounds like an unreleased Fruit Bats track. Unreleased for a reason, I mean.

Josh Rouse, El Turista: Officially adult contemporary. May stop listening to him--feels like when I stopped watching The Office. Analogy is deeper than you think.

#9: The Royals

2010-05-13T22:27:00.013-04:00

I've decided to start paying attention to Oh Em Gee. again, after months of inattention brought on by my brief tenure at Gawker Media Blogger Boot Camp, LLC. As my first act in the low-profile (so low) relaunch, I have decided to merge my long-dormant experiment in Brit-Bashing, Stuff That's Lame About England, into Oh Em Gee. as an occasional column. Here's a primer on the blog-turned-column:

Stuff That's Lame About England is a column about a grey, rainy island (or possibly archipelago) in the North Atlantic. The column is comprised of articles with no factual basis, composed without the benefit of any research whatsoever, and with any luck will contain several half-truths, misconceptions, and flat-out lies per article. It neither knows nor cares what the difference is between the British, the English, and the residents of the United Kingdom. It is a travelogue written out of pure guesswork with a dash of irrational xenophobia.

For the record, the closest any of us editors have been to experiencing that Sceptered Isle is Graeme's three hour layover in Heathrow on his way to Africa or whatever. But we've all listened to Oasis so we're basically experts.

Now onto number eight in this pointlessly offensive exercise: the royals.

Continue reading.

England/the UK/Britain/the Kingdom of the Druids is by all accounts a fairly modern place. They've got, according to my own brain, electricity, at least one and possibly as many as four television channels, and David Attenborough, all of which are nice 20th-century innovations. And yet they still have a rudimentary caste system comprised of vassals, yeomen, serfs, and the royal elite, the latter of which is a hereditary line stretching back to Stonehenge.

I understand that the royals have no legitimate political power, which is why the newly elected Prime Minister must ask the Grand High Wizard Queen of England permission to, and this is a quote from a newspaper or maybe from a dream I had after too many "Rebel Yell" brand bourbon shots, "form a government." Just because she always says yes doesn't negate the utter weirdness of that interaction, England. The Wizard Queen (seen above wearing a non-ironic tiara while probably sober) also still rules over her Diminished Empire, which is significantly more lame since all those uppity Africans and Pacific Islanders and South Asians decided they wanted self-rule instead of the manicured iron fist of England. This Diminished Empire includes Canada, a country that to this day is brutally forced to put a picture of the Wizard Queen on all their currency. Canada also has a Lieutenant-Governor (spelled that right on the first try!), the Wizard Queen's representative who I think has the power to make the Canadian Prime Minister fetch her tea every afternoon.

The royals have historically been, much like doilies or black pudding, an outmoded relic of the past that nonetheless retains prominence in the Britgeist. Given their social importance over their serfs, the private lives of the royals are often headline news, partly because they are celebrities, and partly because England is a very dull place. Example one: this article, "Duchess of Cornwall Breaks Leg Hill-Walking in Scotland."

First of all, let's address the problem of the phrase "hill-walking." Scotland is more geographically diverse than England, which I have previously compared to a hockey rink in its perfect, NHL-standard flatness. Scotland, which I believe is either attached to England or is some sort of nearby, similarly grey island, is not much different. The tallest peak in the country (is it a country? nevermind, I don't care) is Ben Nevis, at 4,409 feet above sea level. The 100th tallest peak in the United States, Wyoming's Francs Peak, is 13,164 feet above sea level. Ben Nevis is a goddamn wuss of a peak, and the Duchess wasn't even hiking that one.

So, "hill-walking"? In America, we just call that "walking."

That someone fell down and broke her leg isn't really that funny, but the fact that it's being breathlessly reported by the BBC and the further fact that the BBC must, as per their 6,000-year-old contract with the Druid Elders, refer to one Camilla Parker Bowles by a series of fawning royal salutations--that's funny. It's even better because the broken-legged person in question has several different official titles, including Duchess of Cornwall, Princess of Wales, Duchess of Rothesay, and Archbishop of Canterbury. Take this sentence: "Consequently her royal highness is wearing a plaster cast and will be for six weeks." Comedy!

Other facts gleaned from this article:

1. The BBC, one of the world's most respected news organizations, employs an official "Royal Correspondent." This is the rough equivalent of the New York Times employing an official "Speidi Correspondent." Oddly, the official BBC Royal Correspondent was not allowed to write this article, which is an excellent example of why the BBC is so respected.
2. Clarence House is mentioned several times in this article as some sort of official source of royal news, as in "Clarence House advised that this was not a 'serious injury.'" Since the BBC does not explain who or what Clarence House is, I am going to go ahead and assume it is the awkward name of the Grand High Wizard Queen's personal assistant. He is of no relation to Dr. House, a famous American doctor.
3. This news is important enough that an entirely unrelated and currently retired doctor with no connection to the Grand Wizard Queen was consulted for insight into the matter of the Queen's "tumble." He helpfully provided the definition of a fracture. For American readers (as opposed to increasingly angry Brits), this is a lot like when Us Weekly or In Style Magazine asks a doctor educated at Jorge's Discount Junior Medical College of Cuba whether he thinks Jessica Simpson is pregnant or just fat (Jessica Simpson is always just fat, but requires constant medical supervision to be sure).

The royals are one of the biggest reasons I'm half-convinced England is a fairy-tale land somewhere between Narnia and the Mushroom Kingdom. What gives, England?

And the Award Goes to...

2010-05-13T01:18:00.013-04:00

Hello and welcome to the inaugural "Worst Person on the Internet Today" awards ceremony. I'd like to present this virtual award to Tom Chambers, a journalist out of San Diego, for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Being a Cockface in recognition of his timeless piece, "Five Things You Should Know Before Dating a Journalist." It's timeless in part because it was written three years ago and in part because his narcissism, egotism, sexism, and misguided arrogance will surely live on for years to come. Reverse congratulations!

Continue reading.

"Five Things You Should Know Before Dating a Journalist." Sounds kind of fun, right? Should be a nicely-written, self-deprecating little piece. Maybe something like "Learn to think of our brains as toned, because we sit all day so our bodies sure aren't." A normal human with a normal amount of self-awareness would write something like that. But Tom Chambers is not a normal human, and what he writes is nothing like that. And that is why Tom Chambers is the very first winner of the Worst Person on the Internet Today award, an award I had to invent just for him.

The piece isn't designed to poke fun at journalists; it's designed to elevate them to deity status, copy-producing gods among men. Should you be lucky enough that a journalist pays you a modicum of attention (and here we should sneer at the possibility--like you're good enough for a journalist! Ha! But keep dreaming, it's adorable), here are the ways in which said journalist will repeatedly display his natural superiority over you. You will be made to feel small and insignificant; your achievements and intelligence will be belittled; you will never be as important as the all-important work a journalist does; and you will eat up this degradation like the starving refugees of war-torn sub-Saharan African devour each of their shamefully inadequate daily rations. Remember: you wouldn't even know about that African shit if it weren't for journalists. It's a neverending cycle (that is not what a cycle is).

Yes, we think we’re smarter than you. In fact, we know it. Does that smack of ego? Absolutely — but that confidence is what makes your heart go pitter-patter.

We have a strong, working knowledge of how the world works. That makes us great in conversation. We can delve into the intricacies of zoning laws, local and national politics, where to find the good restaurants, what’s happening with pop culture, where the good bands are playing and more.

But there are pitfalls.

Tom Chambers does not understand what the word "pitfall" means. Those things he just named, the Montana-sized ego and cocksure certainty that a journalist is smarter than his partner--those are pitfalls. Thinking that a knowledge of "the intricacies of zoning laws" is a great conversation topic...that isn't exactly a pitfall. I don't really know what that is, besides a starred bullet point on the résumé Tom Chambers used in his successful application for Worst Person on the Internet Today.

That's not to say that the things he lists as pitfalls aren't actually pitfalls. They are. They're bottomless, smooth-walled pits of emotional and psychological abuse which Tom Chambers advertises as charming, shallow potholes before heaving any woman unfortunate enough to cross his path into them.

We carry ourselves with a certain arrogant air. Embrace it (that’s what attracted you to us in the first place, after all). Don’t be surprised if we’re not impressed when you say, “I’m a writer, too.” No, you are not. The fact that you sit in a coffee shop wearing black while scribbling in your journal does not make you a writer. Nor does the fact that you “wrote some poems in high school” or that one day you want to pen “the great American novel.”

Good points! People often identify as "writers" and use "I wrote some poems in high school" as evidence. That is a thing that totally happens, in the reptilian mind of Tom Chambers!

Other warnings given by Tom Chambers (species Pogona vitticeps) include "our job is more important than you," "we will write about you, likely in a dismissive and condescending way," and "our keen professional experience will see through your inevitable lies, which will 'just piss us off,' so don't even try, you liar." These are not pitfalls, according to Tom Chambers, an agamid lizard native to semi-arid Australia. These are desirable attributes, which you will desire, because Bearded Dragon Tom Chambers tells you you will.

Number 5, of course, is that journalists are the best. Yes, this was also the underlying thesis in Numbers 1 through 4, but you, a non-journalist, are too fucking stupid to understand subtext, and Tom Chambers (genus Pogona) has been gracious enough to spell it out for you in English, which you barely even speak (because you are not a journalist).

The final sentence written by Tom Chambers (pictured above, in his San Diego home) in this award-winning article is illustrative both for what it says and for the degree of self-awareness with which it's said (none. Less than none.).

"And yes, ladies, I'm single."

Yes, you are, Tom. But not for long, because you're now the proud owner of the brand-new Worst Person on the Internet Today award.

But...

2010-02-02T22:22:00.002-05:00

Every once in a long while, I stumble on something that's so powerful yet so alienating that while I know I've experienced a primal artistic force, I'm at a loss for how to approach it. Not only can't I understand what it means, I can't even decide if I enjoy it. I felt this way about There Will Be Blood--it's a gut-punch of a movie, but does the fact that I sat spellbound for two hours mean that I liked it? I'm not really sure. Die Antwoord, a South African rave-rap ensemble, gives me the same uneasy feeling. It's like the last episode of Twin Peaks, in music video form, but with the added doubt that it might even be the darkest, weirdest parody (of what? no idea) I've ever seen. You guys, what in the FUCK is going on here?

Some elements of the videos and the group itself are sort of funny, which is relieving--the dick bouncing around in the Pink Floyd boxer shorts, now that's funny! I understand that! I will proceed to laugh. And oh, look at this interview, from Vice:

Right. So, are you hip-hop or what?
Ninja: Ja we’re from the hip-hop family, but we do rap-rave next level shit. Die Antwoord started with my one homeboy, DJ Hi-Tek (shows tattoo on hand)—He’s got his own PC computer and he makes basically like phat rap-rave beats. I was checking out his shit, and we started making some beats, you know, next level shit. So then I was speaking to my homegirl Yo-Landi, you know she’s got some funk and super flavour, so we started with a kind of, like, 2Unlimited, C+C Music Factory kind of thing… but a bit more gangster, with a street edge. Then we found out you can put the songs for free on the interweb, no problem. Now the album’s pumping worldwide, like some next-level futuristic shit. Scotland, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Japan… In like, one second we’re in the overseas, it’s instant—like the matrix.

Ahhh. Now that's some solid Ricky Gervais/Christopher Guest/Chris Lilley kind of humor. He's got his own PC computer, for the interweb? Rap-rave next level shit? C+C Motherfucking Music Factory? That's got to be a joke. And a pretty good one! But wait a second--why are the production values so high? Why is this video (and the group's website) so, well, legitimately creepy? And the music itself doesn't seem to contain any jokes--it's just dark. And the setting for the video is a seriously poor urban South African neighborhood, which isn't exactly an incisive setting for a mockumentary rap group.

So, fuck if I know what this means. But it means something, right? Right?

Finally.

2010-01-29T23:12:00.002-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It only took a year, but the West-Wing-based President finally busted out a performance worthy of the West Wing. This is how you win a news cycle when you've got a conscience: by being right and not being afraid to show it.

Top Chef, Season 6: Actual Suspense!

2009-09-25T01:19:00.003-04:00

The sixth season of Top Chef is now six episodes in, which means most of the obviously shit chefs are gone and the ones that may actually have a shot at winning the thing are becoming clear. Top Chef as a show is rarely boring, especially if you're into food, but the last couple seasons have been lacking in competitive suspense. Season 6, thankfully, doesn't have that problem.

A lot of writing about Top Chef (and hell, the judges on the show encourage it) try to make objective judgments about the talent of one season compared to another. That's bullshit and pointless: First, the challenges are different each season; second, judging is essentially comparative in nature anyway (a lackluster dish will still win a challenge if the other dishes are lousy); and most importantly, WE CAN'T TASTE THE FUCKING FOOD. The judges, especially in the first episode of each season, tend to make those kinds of statements: "Wow, we're in for a real treat this season! This is the most talented crop of chefs yet!" Maybe they can tell, since they're, you know, eating the food, but we aren't and we can't.

The only way of judging seasons against each other is by judging the competitiveness of the field of contestants. Every season's cast consists of three types of chefs. One-half are shitty chefs who are going to be sent packing as soon as they send out that one explosively, horrifically, inevitably disastrous dish. One-quarter are chefs who are talented and may well win a challenge or two but are not, barring some kind of epic screwup from a favorite, going to make it into the finals. And the last quarter, the ones that really decide whether a season is great or just entertaining, is the chefs that could actually win.

In a great season, you'll have a solid handful of chefs that could win. Season 1 had Harold, Tiffani, Lee Ann, and Steven, with Dave as an outlier from that "talented but unlikely" group. Season 2 had Ilan, Sam, Cliff, and Elia, with Marcel as a borderline from the "talented but unlikely" who took Cliff's place in the finals after Cliff (rightfully) put that annoying fucker in a headlock and tried to shave his head, and was sent home for his philanthropic anti-Marcel efforts. Then the show, in this view, starts going downhill. Season 3 was the worst; while Hung is probably the most dominant competitor in Top Chef history, he had zero competition, coasting through for an easy, obvious, and boring win. Season 4 was a little better, with Richard, Stephanie, and Dale all conceivable winners, but Season 5 went right back to that lack of competitiveness. Stefan won half of the entire season's challenges, an absolutely insane winning streak, and though he was somehow beaten by Hosea in the finals, his season had zero suspense.

That's all pretty fucking boring if you're not a diehard fan of the show like I am, I'm sure. So let's get into the current season, which is awesome so far.

This season has a whopping five contestants who could actually win. That's fucking great, or at least it will be once we clear out the chaff (and by chaff I mean Robin). Kevin, my pick for the eventual winner, has the calm demeanor and distinctive style that's made for a winning chef in the past, but Jennifer (whose ugly-ass South Philly accent brings tears to my eye. Tears of pain, not nostalgia, but still), the comically divergent Voltaggio brothers (one of them is straight-laced and conservative! One has tattoos and is into molecular gastronomy! It's a fucking sitcom!), and kind of unfortunately, Mike Isabella (whose frequent misogynistic and borderline-racist comments are only matched in annoyance by his attempts to be known for wacky nicknames, but who is regrettably talented) all have a shot at winning.

The season has already been pretty interesting; two chefs have gone home sooner than expected (Hector the Puertoriqueno and Mattin the mincing, scarf-wearing Basque--Top Chef does not like foreigners) and the five frontrunners have been trading wins fairly evenly. Unfortunately Toby Young, Master of the Forced, Unfunny and Uninformed Food Zinger, recently made an appearance (you might remember him from last season, saying things like "This fennel has a real anise taste to it!") but otherwise I'm really excited about it. Top Chef is one of the best shows, period, on television right now, and we're in the middle of what's sure to be one of its best seasons. If you're not watching, you should be.

A Venereal Disease/ Like a Menstrual Bleed: The Great Lil Wayne Hoax

2009-09-02T23:52:00.009-04:00

Lil Wayne has achieved unbelievable success in a few short years. He came to prominence around 2004-2005 through his membership in the Cash Money crew (which also includes Juvenile (Ha!) and Birdman) and exploded with the release of Tha Carter III in 2008. Aside from racking up record-breaking sales (over a million albums sold in its first week), Tha Carter III was nominated for a whopping eight Grammys, winning four. He's a rare beast in the mainstream hip-hop world: a hugely popular artist who is also critically acclaimed.

Yet a close examination of his work reveals an artist who is functionally illiterate and (I say this with all due respect) probably retarded. His flow is sloppy and simplistic, his beats monotonous and repetitive and his lyrics nonsensical, contradictory, and vaguely offensive. I posit that Lil Wayne is neither a talented rapper nor a pile of musical garbage, but a brilliant and far-reaching pop-culture hoax in the vein of Ern Malley.

Ern Malley was a literary hoax perpetrated in Australia in the mid-1940s. Two Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, were behind the hoax, irritated with pretentious modernist poetry that seemed to be more concerned with masking meaning than with having any meaning in the first place. To shame the editor of a local modernist poetry magazine, the two poets created a fictitious life story of a man named Ern Malley, and wrote, in a single afternoon, 17 poems constructed exclusively of nonsense. The poems were made up of random quotations from Shakespeare, the dictionary and a few phrase books, strung together with no care at all for meaning. The words were chosen for their ominous intonation and for the end product's total impenetrability. In their words:

We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary.

The hoax worked, briefly. Their target did indeed excitedly publish the supposed Ern Malley masterwork, "The Darkening Ecliptic," in his next issue, but once the story got out, some legitimate poetry critics began to suspect a fake. The editor was humiliated, his magazine folded, shitty avant-garde bullshit poetry suffered a severe setback, and McAuley and Stewart went on to successful careers.

I suspect that Lil Wayne is a similar experiment to the Ern Malley hoax, only even more successful in that everybody, even rap aficionados, seem to think he's great. The thing is, he's really, really not. His singles are a pastiche of modern hip-hop tropes slapped together without thought for the end product; his songs are decidedly less than the sum of their parts. Ern Malley's poetry was gibberish start to finish, but Lil Wayne's is not--there are glimmers of comprehension and several lyrical phrases that very nearly make sense. This is because Ern Malley was mocking modernist poetry, which was concerned with obscuring meaning, while Lil Wayne targets modern mainstream hip-hop, a very different beast. In analyzing both the cohesive and nonsensical aspects of Lil Wayne, we can get a clear view into the work that went into this remarkable hoax.

Note: the evidence that follows is based on Lil Wayne's singles. I've heard that his singles are not representative of his body of work, which I choose to ignore. I mostly don't believe that an album could be good while several (not one or two, like I've examined here, but all) singles suck so thoroughly and determinedly.

"A Milli"

Let's go through Lil Wayne single by single. First up is "A Milli," which won a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance, was ranked the #1 best song of 2008 by Blender (Blender has since folded, so suck on that), and peaked at #6 on the Billboard charts. Those are some serious accolades for what's either the worst rap song ever "written" or an elaborate hoax.

I believe that "A Milli" is a thoughtful and insightful jab at the current state of rap music. Today's mainstream hip-hop abandons the social awareness of Grandmaster Flash, the revolutionary underpinnings of Public Enemy and the intelligent and literate jazz-rap of A Tribe Called Quest, instead opting for lazy, simplistic beats, dull 4/4 metered rhymes without any lyrical dexterity, and shallow, witless vulgarity. There are of course exceptions, but in a hip-hop arena dominated by 50 Cent and Kanye West, the lowest common denominator reigns.

"A Milli" takes the soulless flow of 50 Cent and mashes it with the barren beats of crunk, but it's the layer of total absurdity Lil Wayne adds that elevates the hoax to epic stature. His rhymes don't even come close to rhyming--he rhymes "Mike Lowry" with "lawn mower"--and his flow stays to a strict regular eighth-note rhythm without any variation. The best line in the song:

I'm a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed.

Let's examine this closely; god knows it warrants it. First, it doesn't rhyme. Second, it seems as if Wayne either doesn't know what a "menstrual bleed" is, or in some vaguely misogynistic way he views menstruation as a disease. This echoes the dumb sexism of 50 Cent while making no sense if taken by itself. Further evidence of Wayne's artful lack of lyrical substance:

Man I hate a shy chick
Don't you hate a shy chick
I had a plate of shy chick and she ain't shy no mo'
She changed her name to my chick
Hahaha, yea boy that's my girl
And she pops excellent up in Wayne's World
Totally dude you should
See their faces when they see that
This robot can move

This one, frankly, is too esoteric for me. I see the reference to a nostalgic pop culture icon (Wayne's World), appropriated without particular care for what that reference may mean in the context of the narrative. The preceding phrase is possibly sexual ("pops excellent up") but it's not specific enough to refer to a particular act, at least not one with which I'm familiar. Beyond that, I think it's mostly gibberish. "I had a plate of shy chick"? If anyone can figure that one out, let me know, but I maintain that it's a sophisticated avant-garde statement.

My criteria compared to your career just isn't fair/
Threw the pencil and leak on the sheet of the tablet in my mind.

This is another really nice bit of nonsensical absurdity. That latter line, the reference to writing (although I'm doubtful the persona Wayne presents would ever write anything) is in turn a reference to the "artist as god" concept Kanye West so often espouses. Except Lil Wayne turns the idea on its head by making it make absolutely no sense. He sort of gets that he's supposed to know how to write, but that's as far as the impulse goes.

Musically, "A Milli" is possibly the most irritating fucking song of the last decade. The title of the song is repeated on every single beat of the song's intro and chorus and the beat itself is little more than a few handclaps and snare drum hits scattered sparsely throughout. Lil Wayne's flow is stuttering, hoarse, vocally obscure and exhibits absolutely no rhythmic ingenuity. Such a simultaneously boring and annoying song must have some kind of unforseen depth to be so successful--and I think the dullness and staggering awfulness of "A Milli" must be an elaborate and vicious statement on the state of modern mainstream hip-hop that took off unexpectedly as a huge hit.

That an insightful and incisive satirical dig on a cultural touchstone would become massively successful and actually turn into what it originally parodied is not as uncommon as you'd think. Sketch comedy group The State, for example, were once instructed by network executives to create a character with a memorable catchphrase--an idea totally contrary to the ethos of the group. They came up with a catchphrase that's little more than a thinly-veiled 'fuck you' to the whole idea of catchphrases: a shouted "I'M GONNA DIP MY BALLS IN IT!" But this catchphrase actually took off, and the State was forced to revisit it in several later sketches. Similarly, "A Milli" could at once be a brilliant satire and a stellar example of the subject it satires.

"Lollipop"

Let's now look at Lil Wayne's first single from Tha Carter III, "Lollipop." "Lollipop" spent five weeks atop Billboard's top singles chart and won the Grammy for Best Rap Song. As brilliant and far-reaching as the Lil Wayne hoax goes, "Lollipop" is perhaps the least inspired single on the album. It's pretty much a retread of the boneheaded hypersexualized single entendre rap song used by 50 Cent is his absolutely abysmal single "Candy Shop." Whereas "A Milli" is an avant-garde absurdist masterpiece, "Lollipop" is far too accessible. Here, I'll spoil the song for you: the lollipop is his cock.

Still, there are some intriguing subtleties to "Lollipop." Early in the song, Lil Wayne pronounces the word "here" as "hurr," a staple of dirty southern rap that's mostly used to create inexact rhymes between words that wouldn't normally rhyme, such as "there" ("thurr") with "girl." It's an overused cliche at this point, to the point where it's used by those for whom the peculiar pronunciation is obviously not natural. Case in point: The Ferg uses it in her bizarre spoken-word song "London Bridge," despite being a suburban white girl and former bubblegum pop singer. Lil Wayne uses "hurr" very prominently in the middle of a line, and we know it's a contrivance because he later pronounces the word in the more common way. Yet why bother stressing an unusual word if it's not for a rhyme?

However, I love the way "Lollipop" uses onomatopoetics and nonsense words. This probably hearkens back to jazz scatting, but rap has definitely embraced silly noises and turned them anthemic (Juvenile's own "Ha" would be a good example, but the Ying Yang Twins are also masters of the technique). Lil Wayne inserts a couplet into "Lollipop" that seeks to describe the motion of an lady's ass in non-verbal grunts:

Told her to back it up like erp erp/
And make that ass jump like shczerp shczerp

Of course, "shczerp shczerp" is not the kind of sound a woman's ass would (or could) make, but neither does it have any particular meaning beyond a silly noise. Whereas in Master P's classic "Make 'Em Say UHHHH!", at least you could assume the "UHHHH!" might mean a satisfied climactic moan or some other less savory noise. But "shczerp shczerp" is resolutely devoid of meaning. It's difficult to create the illusion that something so completely claptraptic is worth listening to, but Lil Wayne has made that leap.

Lil Wayne is an enigma. How can a man who writes a line like "And he who don't believe me I'll make dessert of him/ Sherbet him, I mean" be at all serious? I think the evidence speaks for itself: either he's the world's worst rapper, or he's the Ern Malley of the 21st century.

#8: British Blog Commenters

2009-05-29T15:16:00.004-04:00

So about a year ago, instead of studying for finals, I created a little side project called Stuff That's Lame About England, partly because Stuff White People Like was all the rage (trivia: the creator of Stuff White People Like and I attended the same school. Bet you didn't know McGill was such a hotbed of internet talent) and partly because sometimes, I really feel bad for England. It just seems like the kind of place where everybody's sad all the time, you know what I mean? Like it rains a lot, the food sucks, and they used to have such a sweet empire but now everyone hates them just because they ruined several continents forever. But, being me, I lost interest with Stuff That's Lame About England after a few weeks, and left off at #7, a limp jab at music criticism's favorite punching bag, Coldplay.

After going back and reading through the posts for old times' sake, I realized that some unfortunate Brits had stumbled upon my xenophobic, cluelessly offensive attack on a country I've never visited, and for some reason seemed a little irked about it.

My favorite comment is this diatribe from a commenter with the oddly misspelled handle "cash_regester" in response to Mollie's hilarious smackdown on British food.

Mate, I'm sorry, but have you tried American chocolate? It's crap is it not? Oh yeah, and what's that about blood pudding being a popular dish? I've never eaten one, and I've never seen anyone else eat one, in fact i don't even know where you can buy them! So it's not really that famous to be honest.
But, putting all that aside. What food is America famous for, apart from slopburgers, sorry, hamburgers? Oh yeah, and what was it that one famous American said?
"If you're going to America, bring your own food."
But according to an American mate of mine, who incidentally prefers English grub to American food, you basically just add mustard and tomato sauce (sorry, American sauce) to anything to give it flavour, oh, and apparently Tabasco sauce is supposed to obliterate the taste of most things too.
When all's said and done you can carry on eating that over-flavoured, dripping-in-grease American junk that you guys love so much, and we'll be happy eating proper bacon, eggs from the fridge, cottage pie (without Tabasco sauce), fish and chips (real chips that is, not crisps), and chocolate that doesn't taste like it's been through the wash 14 times.

Wow! First, I love that in this guy's crazed British mind, tomato sauce is somehow known as "American sauce," because I guess he's never heard of Italy, France, or Spain. But I particularly love his ruthless attacks on the well-known American reliance on Tabasco sauce to flavor every meal. After all, we can barely choke down our "slopburgers" (motherfucking ZING) without a thorough dousing of Tabasco sauce. And there are parts of the rant I just don't understand, like how Brits eat "eggs from the fridge." Where else would you keep eggs? Do Americans not eat eggs? Is that some kind of overseas stereotype I've never seen before? "Oh, look at the fucking American, I bet he keeps his eggs in a cabinet."

This comment is like a bizarro version of Stuff That's Lame About England. It too consists of baseless and, frankly, factually incorrect stabs at a foreign country, but it's also totally unaware that Stuff That's Lame About England was at least 10% self-mocking. Well, maybe 5%.

In response to my post about England's penchant for ridiculous-sounding place names, commenter Gibby (sounds British, doesn't it? Gibby watches telly while eating jellies! Ha ha ha!) wrote:

This is the Stupides page. You are making fun of the names of cities. Because Guess what I think you're STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And so I officially submit number 8 on the list of Stuff That's Lame About England: British Blog Commenters.

None of These Celebrities Have Seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall

2009-05-08T15:11:00.000-04:00

While watching Parks and Recreation on Hulu this morning (I'm concerned that it's only that terrific theme song that keeps me watching, but that's a thought for another time), I was introduced to my new favorite ad campaign, from DoSomething.org. Usually I use the 30 second breaks in Hulu episodes to fully exhaust my interest in news not about the President's preference in condiments, but this ad was something special.

It was a carbon-copy of a parody featured two years earlier in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Only for real.

Here's the music video for "We've Got to Do Something," from what I've decided is my favorite Apatow movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Even without the added meta-ridiculousness of the DoSomething.org campaign, it's an amazing video, perfectly encapsulating the bullshit vague faux-activism of pompous rock stars.

"We've Got to Do Something" might well be a take on DoSomething.org; thanks to my exhaustive research (skimming a Wikipedia page), I found out that Do Something was actually founded in 1993 by some actor from Melrose Place and his buddy, both from New Jersey. Here's their mission statement or whatever:

The New Jersey natives had a dream: what if making a difference in a community became just as cool and important and second nature to teens as athletics or other activities? Kids would develop not only their minds and bodies, but their souls, too.

That's already pretty funny, but as it turns out, every dumb self-aggrandizing bit of activism can be made even funnier with the addition of the Jonas brothers. Here's the ad I saw.

I don't really give a shit if the emo-haired "Worst Actor on Gossip Girl Award" winner (it's a competitive category) or the not-so-surprisingly gay-voiced Jonas brothers throw in their lot with this nonsense, but what is ~~Veronica Mars~~ Kristin Bell doing there? She STARRED in Forgetting Sarah Marshall! Come on, Veronica. I know you can connect the dots.

Scenes From America's Rainy Tea Party

2009-04-16T12:07:00.006-04:00

No crass "teabagging" joke shall be made here at Oh Em Gee, where maturity and journalistic integrity are valued so highly. Instead, we shall present these photos without comment.

[Wonkette: 1, 2]

Further Adventures in Pennsylvania

2009-04-01T18:08:00.006-04:00

Pennsylvania occupies a weird spot in the country, geographically. Its eastern section, including Philadelphia, lies firmly in the Northeast, bordering New York and New Jersey; its southern border to the east borders Delaware and Maryland, putting it in the Mid-Atlantic region; its western side, including Pittsburgh, sits next to Ohio, placing it in the Rust Belt section of the Midwest; and the western two-thirds of its southern border is shared with West Virginia, which means we're talking Appalachia. James Carville once famously described the state as "Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle," and Pennsylvanians routinely refer to the part of the state in between the cities as "Pensyltucky."

During the presidential election, a canvasser somewhere in central Pennsylvania encountered what's maybe the best example of this state's political leanings I've ever seen. An imposing, burly sort of dude answered the canvasser's knock, and upon being asked who he planned to vote for, stopped and thought for a second. Then he yelled back into the house, "HONEY! WHO WE VOTIN' FOR?" From somewhere behind him, the reply came back. "WE'RE VOTIN' FOR THE NIGGER!" The dude turned to the canvasser and calmly answered, "Right. We're votin' for the nigger."

So I get it. My home state has a bit of an identity crisis. But there's no excuse for this fucking bullshit.

That's a OFFICIAL PENNSYLVANIA PRO-LIFE LICENSE PLATE. The state profits from this shit! This isn't like some pro-life group made a license plate holder and sold it to their members. Pennsylvania is implicitly offering approval of one side of an incredibly divisive issue by selling their slogan (and thoughtfully diverse drawing) on state property. Even if the sides were switched and the state only offered a pro-choice plate, I'd be exactly as offended: Pennsylvania has no right to support a private and controversial political, religious, and/or moral position through official means.

The state also offers plates extolling local firefighter precincts, Pennsylvania colleges and universities, and oddball stuff like the "Ancient Order of the Hibernians of America" that might be offensive, if I had any idea what the fuck it meant. But it's shocking and embarrassing to see one side of an issue as explosive as abortion get the stamp of approval from the state government. I wonder if I can get an official "Fuck Pennsylvania" Pennsylvania license plate.

Sentence Fragment Album Reviews

2009-03-23T19:04:00.002-04:00

Curt gut reactions. Sometimes better than wordiness. In no particular order. No accompanying picture. Couldn't think of one. Whatever.

Malajube, "Labyrinthes"
Still French, still awesome. Not an easy combination, so extra kudos.

K'naan, "Troubadour"
Disappointing, over-produced, features a mysterious and recurring faux-Caribbean accent (he's Somalian and Canadian; neither is in the Caribbean, I'm pretty sure). New version of "If Rap Gets Jealous" especially garbagey.

DOOM, "Born Like This"
Lost the MF prefix, but still a gloriously arhythmic weirdo.

Wavvves, "Wavvves"
Tough to tell through the wall of distortion, but may feature instruments and/or vocals. Not sure though. Sucks either way.

The Thermals, "Now We Can See"
(Sloppily) imitating Weezer fifteen years after everyone else stopped. Lame or "retro"?

Metric, "Fantasies"
Metric: persistently moody and boring since "Old World Underground." No change here.

1990s, "Kicks"
Might be a long-lost Cars album with misleading packaging. Not a bad idea, really.

K-Os, "Yes"
Curiously lifeless and stale. Just noticed he sounds like will.i.am. Definitely doesn't help.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, "Fruit"
Would've been better if all ten tracks were "Around the Bend."

Beirut, "Holland EP"
Sort of simplistic take on The Postal Service-esque electronicapop. Not bad, but not especially noteworthy either.

Beirut, "March of the Zapotec EP"
Subtitle: "Beirut Goes to Mexico!" Still sounds Slavic, somehow.

Andrew Bird, "Noble Beast"
Absolutely refuses to write a simple fucking pop song, despite obvious inclination. Evidence: "Fitz and the Dizzyspells," "Plasticities" (latter from previous album). Full of irritating flourishes. More annoying: doesn't suck.

Andrew W.K., "The Japan Covers"
Hilarious, as always. Not as good as "I Get Wet," also as always. Sample lyric: "You are beautiful, just like a rat/ And I will catch you like a cat."

Animal Collective, "Merriweather Post Pavilion"
Still awful, atmospheric noise gibberish. Album name as retarded as the music within.

The Decemberists, "The Hazards of Love"
Still hyperliterate and very solid songwriters. But continues trend of decreasing freshness since "Her Majesty." Band badly in need of a shakeup.

Arcanities: Mike Doughty

2009-03-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

Discussed within: John Darnielle, one-liners, blogging, the importance of stage banter, the hipster credo ("his old stuff was way better"), alterna-rock, and the Dave Matthews Virus

Unlike Late World with Zach, which sort of rightfully has no fans, singer-songwriter Mike Doughty has a reasonable fan base that includes absolutely nobody I know. Apparently one of his new, cloyingly-overproduced singles ("27 Jennifers") is making itself known on college radio, but his first solo album and several live albums are unbelievably good and pretty much unknown. He's one of those artists, like Brendan Benson or Josh Rouse, that languishes out on the edges of success despite being universally appealing. What the fuck, Universe?

Mike Doughty started out in the mid- to late-90s as the frontman of Soul Coughing, the genre-bending jazz/alternative/funk/pop/goofball band responsible for the minor hit "Circles" (fan-made, and pretty stupid, video here). They were mildly popular and well-respected by those who like a little arty weirdness with their alterna-rock, and only lasted three albums before splitting up apparently as a result of Mike Doughty's crushing heroin addiction. So it came as a pretty significant surprise when he resurfaced a few years later as a folk troubador, singing poppy acoustic songs about girls instead of rock songs about whatever the fuck "Super Bon Bon" is supposed to be about. Basically, he went from this:

to this:

I love the lyric "I swear, I'd like to drink the fuel straight from your lighter" in that last song ("Rising Sign"). Is it sexual? Kind of sweet? Gross? All three?

He HAS had sort of a disturbing progression, from utter weirdness to the Dave Matthews-lite of his last two albums, but the stuff in the creamy middle is total perfection. Besides, he still sounds great live, away from the plasticization of Dave Matthews' ATO Records studios.

His first proper solo album, Skittish, sets the tone for what I love about this period of his career. The songs are simple, usually only four or five chords, with low-key instrumentation. They've got super catchy yet unassuming melodies, and retain some of the best lyrics you'll hear in a modern singer-songwriter this side of John Darnielle. Mike Doughty is a master of the one-liner, something I didn't realize a songwriter could be a master of, but because his songs are usually about girls, he doesn't get the same lyrical respect as John Darnielle. It's true, Mike Doughty has never written anything as heartbreaking as the Mountain Goats' "Dance Music" or as haunting as "Dilaudid," but I like the lightness and good humor he brings to his songs. Lines like "You snooze, you lose,/ And I have snost and lost" don't try to get at any fundamental truth or touch any kind of raw nerve; they're clever and fun for the sake of being clever and fun, and goddammit, sometimes that's all I want.

Some more quick comparisons to John Darnielle, because I know some people (Carolyn) love him and maybe haven't given Mike Doughty the chance I, in my intense fandom, think he deserves. They're both experts at stage banter, they both keep highly readable blogs (Darnielle, Doughty), they both endure the easy criticism of "all their songs sound the same" (they do, but I like the song, so fuck you), they've both recorded excellent covers of cheap pop songs (the Mountain Goats did Ace of Base's "The Sign," Mike Doughty did Mary J. Blige's "Real Love), and both are clearly lyricists first and songwriters second.

The reason why the Mountain Goats are indie superstars and Mike Doughty isn't is, distressingly, related more to business than music. Both of them started out with inadequately distributed early records; most of the Mountain Goats' ouevre is cassette-only, and Mike Doughty's Skittish was sold exclusively out of his car, on CD-Rs in blank sleeves, for years. The problem is that when the Mountain Goats made it big (around the release of We Shall All Be Healed, I'd say), the more expensive and cleaner production made their albums better. In effect, once people started listening, they released better songs. Mike Doughty, on the other hand, landed on Dave Matthews' ATO records, where his breakout album (Haughty Melodic) gained a plasticky sheen not at all beneficial to his rough-voiced folk. Interestingly, Haughty Melodic was produced by Semisonic's Dan Wilson, and it sounds like it. The songs are catchy, I guess, but they've lost the low-fi tone that made Skittish and Smofe and Smang: Live in Minneapolis so great. Here's his newest single, off Haughty Melodic's follow-up, Golden Delicious.

It's not BAD, the same way Jack Johnson isn't exactly bad. But it's unremarkable, and to be honest, Mike Doughty was already kind of toeing that line. His live renditions of those songs show that they've still got legs: when stripped down, they're almost as good as his earlier stuff, but it's still disappointing to see him go in this direction. Hell, "27 Jennifers" lifts the chorus from one of his earlier and much better-titled song called "Lisa Ling and Lucy Liu." I have three of his live albums, only one of which is official (Smofe and Smang: Live in Minneapolis). The other is a long set he did at Bonnaroo in 2004, and the last is a five-song "set" that's actually just him busking in a New York subway stop. All three are stellar; his between-song stage banter is smart and funny and he's musically at his best with just an acoustic guitar. Here's some nice MTV-referencing banter.

According to his blog, Mike Doughty is recording his new album in a cabin in an artist's retreat somewhere in upstate New York, and will be using a new producer for the final edits. That's promising, and I'll definitely acquire and pore over whatever he releases, but I'll be a lot more excited when a bootleg live recording of the new songs leaks onto the Internet.

Required Listening: Skittish, Smofe and Smang: Live in Minneapolis, Live at Bonnaroo 2004

It's 'Yo Dawg,' Actually

2009-03-03T03:13:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Oh No They Didn't for the photos.

Arcanities: Late World with Zach

2009-02-19T00:48:00.002-05:00

Note: Arcanities is a column in which the pop-culture gems lost to time are forcefully dragged out of the cellar of our collective memory and analyzed for the mild enjoyment of a meager audience.

Discussed within: Natalie Imbruglia, Hollyweird, big black gay cops, public beard shaving, suicidal television, and Conan O'Brien

Late World with Zach, starring comedian Zach Galifiankis, was a late-night talk show that ran for about two months on VH1 in 2002. Before you start thinking, "wow, that's not a very long time for a television show to live," let me tell you about why it is absolutely shocking that VH1 gave it even that long. But the weird thing is, Late World with Zach is great television, despite being sort of an epic failure at the same time.

Zach Galifianakis, for those who don't know, is the bearded stand-up who appears with the Comedians of Comedy tour as well as an actor who has appeared in, as he says, a bunch of fucking awful movies and a couple semi-respectable television shows. His stand-up routines are really funny, but his total disdain for his audience's enjoyment is sort of his hallmark. Zach genuinely could not care less if the crowd thinks he's funny, and sometimes he'll intentionally sabotage himself with rape "jokes" that have neither setup nor punchline. It's hard to think of anybody less appropriate to host a late-night talk show, a format requiring a fair amount of populism and eagerness to please. Zach seems much more concerned with coming up with new and more creative ways to make his show unmarketable than with achieving any sort of success. Here's a little sample of his style. How could anybody watch this and think giving this guy a nightly show that demands likeability would be a good idea?

Back in 2002, VH1 was still MTV's uncool older step-brother, running nonstop Natalie Imbruglia music videos for months on end. In an effort to hippen up the place, they picked this edgy comic to come in and be the new face of the channel, and it blew up in their faces like you wouldn't believe. Late World with Zach had abysmal, laughable ratings, still hasn't found a cult audience, and was canned as quickly as possible. The show itself is, pardon the cliche, wildly uneven. When it's funny, it's burst-out-laughing funny, but a lot of the sketches just don't work and the ramshackle feel often works against it, seeming lazy instead of relaxed. Besides, the parts of the show that are funniest are usually when Zach's trying to get himself cancelled.

Probably the easiest comparative late-night show is the early years of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, which was just as recklessly experimental and prone to audience-silencing explosions of joke failure, but Conan really wanted to succeed. Zach mostly wanted to have fun and not work all that hard because what the hell, the show's probably only gonna last a few weeks anyway. The following clip, from an episode about halfway into Late World's run, shows just how much fun Zach had trying to get cancelled. To the strains of "Under Pressure," he runs into the audience and strips down to a t-shirt that reads, "MY DAYS R #'D," and then uses his easel for a dig at VH1.

The following video is maybe the best interview he ever conducts on the show. It's got his weird, standoffish sense of humor, but it's also funny because he's trying to be funny; Zach has this tendency to fall back on intentionally awful jokes that he knows will bomb, which is fun for a little while but gets old quick. The only other "serious" interviews that don't end up kind of stilted and awkward are the ones with the guests Zach has obvious contempt and/or a boner for, like Cameron Diaz and Vanessa Carlton.

But like I said, the best part of Late World with Zach is discovering all the unexpectedly exciting ways a talk-show host could destroy his own show. Here's a short list of things Zach did to piss off VH1:

- Introduced actor Matthew St. Patrick, who played Michael C. Hall's boyfriend on Six Feet Under, as "that big black gay cop from Six Feet Under," and then got his entire crowd to chant "BIG! BLACK! GAY! COP! BIG! BLACK! GAY! COP!"
- VH1 made a big deal about his admittedly distracting beard, putting it in ads and billboards and so forth, so he shaved it off in the middle of one of the first episodes in defiance of... the hand that fed him?
- Hosted an entire hostel of foreign tourists on the set, and interviewed them in their native languages without providing a translation.
- Instead of saying "Hollywood," he would always say "HollyWEIRD!" and then mock-laugh uproariously for a full minute while his audience looked uncomfortable.
- Performed his opening monologue on a Los Angeles public bus several times, where he knew damn well he wouldn't get a single laugh.
- Frequently wore the world's most ridiculous wig with no explanation:

His best known bits are also my least favorite; I love his idea of doing fake red carpet interviews while holding a beer and standing next to a dumpster, but the actual "interviews" themselves never turn out that funny. A lot of his skits, like Sneaky Jesus and Oscar Losers, fail so badly that I can't even be bothered to upload them. But a lot of his trademark absurdist one-liners survives intact, and his determination to get cancelled in a fiery ball of failure is still admirable today. What's even more remarkable is the complete freedom VH1 evidently gave him: he cursed, insulted the network and its affiliates, drank during filming, and basically gave them every reason to smack some sense into him, but they left him alone to create this hilarious disaster of a talk show. With their money.

Zach has mentioned in recent years that Late World is sort of embarrassing for him, and that the show won't see a DVD release because, "the only tapes are in [his] attic and [he's] pretty sure there's a possum up there." But he's appeared in better and better shows, from Dog Bites Man (which I'm sure will receive its own Arcanities article) to Reno 911! and The Sarah Silverman Program, and he's set to star with Judy Greer in a movie called Visioneers that looks like a very funny joke I don't really understand.

Late World is one of those shows, like Arrested Development or Twin Peaks, that got cancelled at the right time. Its imminent cancellation brought out new levels of genius that hadn't been seen before, since it turns out Zach Galifianakis is at his best when making fun of his own sinking ship. So I'm not too bummed that there are less than 30 episodes in existence and four of them have the goddamn audio and video synched all wrong so they're pretty much unwatchable. It's thrilling to see such total disregard for viewership, focus groups, pilot testing, and star power. Late World with Zach probably couldn't exist today, but we're lucky VH1 was once a shitty and desperate enough channel to fund something as foolish as this.

Norm MacDonald is the Greatest Talk Show Guest of Our Generation

2009-02-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

Norm MacDonald went on Late Night with Conan O'Brien apparently for the sole purpose of totally fucking with Gordon Ramsay. The guy didn't have anything to promote, so he made up a movie about Current American Hero of the Week Sully Sullenberger (whose name he failed to remember correctly a number of times) that perfectly executes the real genius of Norm.

You see, Norm MacDonald is a funny guy, but not necessarily a funny actor. I made the mistake of watching Dirty Work the other day while neither stoned nor eight years old, and the few times it's actually funny, it seems like it was by accident. He wasn't that great on SNL either, because Norm is at his best when he's either ruining somebody else's day or trying to be as unfunny as possible, which in turn ruins somebody's day.

Option 1: Ruining Somebody's Day

Norm went up against a wall of Fox Television-created theatrical anger in Chef Gordon Ramsay on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Ramsay can probably cook but is really only on television because some jackass producer likes the way he yells "DONKEY!" But even manufactured tough guy and likely misogynist Ramsay looked a little shaken after Norm's relentless personal insults and refusal to take him the least bit seriously. Watch Norm the whole time; I love the way he fake-stabs at an orange and then tosses it away instead of even pretending to listen to instructions.

And, because I'm always looking for a way to show this around, here's the now-legendary interview of Norm fucking with some actress I don't care about.

Option 1A: Unfunny is Better than Funny

Comedy Central's Roasts are the nadir of both comedy and common sense. First they choose to roast, among other failures, people who aren't funny (Bob Saget), the mentally challenged (Flava Flav), and giant tits (Pamela Anderson), and then when they stumble on something that's actually funny, they cut it from the broadcast so nobody will suffer the discomfort of laughing. Norm MacDonald's genius set at the Roast of Bob Saget was one such victim of Comedy Central's merciless vendetta against comedy. Or maybe they just hate when the best set of the night is a comedian mocking the entire idea of the program and not giving a shit if anybody laughs. Norm's deadpan, squeaky-clean (in defiance of Comedy Central's whole "hey watch comedians say 'fuck,' it's so edgy god we're great" concept for roasts), and totally irrelevant jokes quietly bomb until the comedians figure out what he's doing. But it looks like Comedy Central didn't get the joke and is, officially, dumber than Gilbert Fucking Gottfried.

I really hope Norm stays right out there on the edge of public consciousness. He's no good as a superstar, but we really need him throwing comedy rocks through the windshield of formulaic television shows.

I Hate Football

2009-02-01T20:37:00.000-05:00

So I'm kind of watching this game because I feel like I'm expected to give a shit. But I really, really don't, so it's on in the background while I mostly read celebrity gossip online. Did you guys know that Shia Laboeuf drinks one of those big Arizona iced tea things every morning? You probably missed that while watching some gay football game.

I turned my attention to the game after the second quarter, because I'd been told there would be some kind of craaaazy 3D experiment during halftime. I was sorely disappointed.

I went to the supermarket like half an hour before the game started to pick up some arugula and lean ground turkey, which was awkward in itself because I was surrounded by big dudes stocking up on Doritos and pre-made fried chicken wings who were giving me uncomfortable looks. At the checkout, the dude ticking off my items asked if I wanted some glasses for the halftime show. Just to be nice, I said sure, why not, and he handed me FIVE 3D glasses.

Can I just say for a second that it's cool and all that 3D is getting more popular, but that it really feels like by now we should have moved beyond arts-and-crafts-style glasses made of multicolored saran wrap and cardboard? Why can't some scientists fix it so it's just 3D without making us look like a country of fools for half an hour?

Anyway, I took the glasses and sat through (read: looked at funny .gifs of Britney Spears online) the first half, and guess what, I was too distracted to catch whatever 3D nonsense I was supposed to be watching. But I did see Bruce Springsteen's halftime performance.

That guy has got to have the best ratio of exciting performer to boring songs in the history of the world. He was so into it but his songs were more tame than the Puppy Bowl. The guy rocked out like the Sex Pistols while playing music Tipper Gore would find a little bit dull.

Look at the crotch action on this guy:

But the Boss wasn't satisfied with only one embarrassing phallic incident in the performance. He's a rock star, dammit, and it's his right to shove his crotch directly into a camera's lens, which in turn means shoving his crotch all up into America's collective grill:

Prince, who performed at the halftime show two years ago, would not approve.

The Back Catalogue: Pilot Season, Part II

2009-01-20T15:03:00.000-05:00

I sometimes forget that television wasn't always as cinematic and well-budgeted as it is today. The two shows I've lined up for today, The Larry Sanders Show and Sports Night, are dated. Obviously dated. They were produced cheaply in the mid-'90s, and they have the same issues with artificiality in dialogue and interaction that plagued most shows from that era (and really, they're far better than most shows from that era). These two shows are more notable for what they influenced than for what they were, and I think anybody who remembers, say, Sports Night as a great show isn't thinking of the show itself but what it did for television as a whole.

Sports Night: Pilot

I have to go over a brief history of Aaron Sorkin here, because Sports Night doesn't make sense as a phenomenon without him. It was a well-liked but not particularly successful behind-the-scenes look at a SportsCenter kind of show that ran for only two short seasons on ABC before getting the axe. The show was offered a place to grow at HBO, but Sorkin turned it down to work on his new show, The West Wing. Sports Night now exists as sort of a forgotten Sorkin relic, of interest only to his biggest fans (and I'm certainly one of them), because it's impossible to live in the shadow of The Motherfucking West Wing. Sorkin made the right choice in moving to politics: The West Wing is the most decorated television drama of all time and in my mind the greatest show ever, period. That shit won nine Emmys in its first year. NINE. Turned out it was just as tough to follow that juggernaut as to precede it, because Sorkin's next show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was a disastrously entertaining train wreck. After a stellar first three episodes, the show shifted focus to its least talented and least interesting cast member and quickly imploded into a mess of horrifically clunky writing and misguided self-importance. It was mercifully axed after one short season.

Aaron Sorkin has since shifted back to the big screen (he also wrote A Few Good Men) with Charlie Wilson's War, which I really liked. He's one of the few writers out there, like Charlie Kaufman or the Coen Brothers, with an immediately distinctive writing style. Sorkin always sounds like Sorkin, no matter what, to his detriment or his success. He pioneered a particular technique of rapid-fire dialogue exchanges, and his screenplays are so dialogue-rich that each episode seems to include a season's worth of plot. Most importantly, I think he's really fucking great, and that's bound to color my opinion of his first show.

Sports Night stars Peter Krause (of Six Feet Under and Dirty Sexy Money), Felicity Huffman, Joshua Malina (The West Wing), some dude I don't know named Josh Charles, and apparently William H. Macy, though he's not in the pilot. It's very different from his other shows at first glance: it's far more on the comedy than the drama side, it's only 22 minutes long, and there's a laugh track.

Just to get this off my chest, I can't stand laugh tracks. I don't need some computer telling me when to laugh. I know where the jokes are, Laugh Computer. And I'll laugh when the urge hits me, not when you're up there cackling away at whatever awful pun hits your circuits the right way. Every show with a laugh track is worse because of it, from Seinfeld to the inexplicably-adored How I Met Your Mother. Apparently Aaron Sorkin fought with ABC over the laugh track in Sports Night and eventually won, so it'll be gone by the end of the first season, but goddamn is it infuriating. This is a particularly bad one; it doesn't even come close to fooling you into thinking a real audience is laughing. It's so obvious that some dude is standing in the editing booth mashing the "hysterical laughter" button at all the wrong times.

Sports Night is pretty good. It's definitely Sorkin style, and the cast is a bunch of solid television regulars. The jokes are even funny sometimes, despite the laugh track wiping any smile off my face. It looks, unfortunately, like a '90s sitcom. Everybody is overacting just a little bit, and sometimes it's too self-conscious (do you really need to show me four separate times that the anchor is wearing shorts under the desk? I got it the first time.). The drama and redemption motifs that are so common in The West Wing were clearly birthed here, and while they're not as developed, maybe they shouldn't be. They're making SportsCenter, after all, not saving America from Iranian terrorists. The zingers are sometimes too cheesy; every Sorkin show toes the line between clever and cheesy and he doesn't win them all. But he has more hits than misses and due to the density of dialogue, if you don't like a laugh line, there'll be four more in the next minute anyway.

The pilot is pretty typical in plot, I thought. Co-anchor Peter Krause is dealing with a divorce, his on-air performance is suffering, and it takes a really spectacular athletic achievement (a 41-year-old South African Apartheid protester winning a distance race) to bring him out of it and remind him why he loves his job. I wonder if I'll start not to care about the show because I hate watching sports, but in the first episode it didn't really matter. Sports Night isn't about sports, after all. It's about making a television show, and I love television.

Pilot Score: a heavily colored 5.5. It'd definitely rank higher if I wasn't already familiar with just how great Aaron Sorkin can be, but as it stands, it's not nearly as good as either of his other two pilots.

Series Potential: 7.5. No laugh track plus a maturing writer should mean that the show gets better, and like I said, I know what Sorkin is capable of. But with only two short seasons, I'm not sure how much improvement there can really be.

The Larry Sanders Show: The Garden Weasel

The Larry Sanders Show ran for six seasons in the mid-'90s on HBO. It starred Garry Shandling, a comic who absolutely nobody cares about these days, as Larry Sanders (clever!), and the opening line is a punchline of how long ago the show was made: "So who saw President Clinton play the sax on the Arsenio Show?". But it's also the forerunner of every single good comedy of the past ten years, especially Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and 30 Rock. Yet again, this is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a television show (TV screenwriters write what they know, I suppose), this time of a talk show. It boasts one of the best casts I've ever seen; aside from Shandling, it also stars Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), Rip Torn (30 Rock), Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Jeremy Piven (Entourage), Wallace Langham (CSI and Mission Hill), Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show), and Mary-Lynne Rajskub (24). Holy shit.

The thing about The Larry Sanders Show that's so groundbreaking is how little you laugh during it. It's consistently funny but there aren't many laugh-out-loud moments, instead relying on a steady level of people acting outlandish for its tone. Even more interesting, Garry Shandling's character, a talk show host, is not funny. At all. He's kind of an awful human being, shying from any confrontation, folding under the weight of his intense neuroses, and making ridiculous demands on his crew. The humor comes from his refusal to act with any consideration or compassion, and his reaction to the chaos around him. Whenever he tries to be funny, which is a lot of the time, he's not. His jokes are mostly just self-deprecating puns and I don't think we're supposed to think he's a very funny guy.

The plot of "The Garden Weasel" is a lot more interesting than the Sports Night pilot. The network representatives for the Larry Sanders Show force him to include an on-air commercial for a gardening tool called the Garden Weasel. Larry's very uncomfortable with the idea, but it seems to come not from an artistic standpoint but just out of fear for his dignity. Here's Larry showing his wife an embarrassing commercial he'd done years before:

Larry eventually gets his sidekick, played with brilliant vapidity by Jeffrey Tambor, to do the commercial. After all, Tambor's character, Hank Kingsley, had made countless commercials before. This is one of my favorite scenes from the pilot, when Hank explains his philosophy on commercial work:

The Larry Sanders Show was one of the first sitcoms to forego a laugh track (thank god) and also to mix media: the show uses video tape for the Larry Sanders Show itself, and film for the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes up the majority of the series. The low-key character-based humor is starkly different from other sitcoms of its time, and despite the dated references, the script holds up a lot better than even, say, Seinfeld's pilot. The cast is unbelievable, especially Tambor and Janeane Garofalo as Larry's sullen booking agent. As a side note, I've long had a crush on Janeane Garofalo. I guess I might be weird because nobody ever talks about her like that, but that woman is sassy and adorable and she wears horn-rimmed glasses. She's like twice my age but I wouldn't let that come between us.

Pilot Score: 7.5. More subdued than I expected but still pretty funny.

Series Potential: 7.5. This one seems to have arrived fully-formed. The voice is nailed immediately, and it's not stumbling around making dumb mistakes like most pilots. I'm not sure how it's going to hold up for six full seasons but I'm curious to see what they do with it.

An Oh Em Gee Sing-A-Long, Part II

2009-01-16T01:57:00.000-05:00

Usher - Dot Com

Ooh, I love the way you dirty type
I can take you home on escape
Ooh, I need your backspace in my life
Thank God you don’t have a flat screen

Please, baby I got to see you
And I really wanna please you
So get on my laptop so I can download

Online, I love the way you log on
We can do it all night
I’ll make you dot com

Baby, if you sign on
I'ma make you light up
Ooh, Baby, if you log on
I’ll make you dot com

I wanted to link up with you, baby at first sight
With you I get to use my f keys
I can’t wait to give you mega bytes
I got all the memory you’ll need
Let my fingers do the talking

Please, baby I got to see you
And I really wanna please you
So get on my laptop so I can download

Online, I love the way you log on
We can do it all night
I’ll make you dot com

Baby, if you sign on
I'ma make you light up
Ooh, Baby, if you log on
I’ll make you dot com

Ooh, baby you want this I know
I can’t wait to give you my hard drive
My moonlight
If It’s alright, baby

I’m always at your window
Ready to shift and control you
If you want me to
Say yes, baby
Say yes, baby
Say yes, baby
Say yes, baby
Got to say, ooh

Say yes, baby
Say yes, baby
You got to say yes,
Yes

Please, baby I got to see you
And I really wanna please you
So get on me baby, get up on me, oh

Online, I love the way you log on
We can do it all night
I’ll make you dot com

Baby, if you sign on
I'ma make you light up
Ooh, Baby, if you log on
I’ll make you dot com

The City: New York Gives Itself a Handjob

2009-01-12T22:30:00.000-05:00

I was planning on liveblogging the premieres of both The City and Bromance, but New Year's Eve found me in, no lie, a Quebecoise igloo frathouse with neither internet nor television. Now it's weeks later, but I'm still getting asked if The City is good enough to watch. So here's a primer to Whitney's spin-off of a spin-off, complete with character introductions, themes, motifs, and conflicts. But short answer: yes.

Introduction.

I can't believe I didn't see this coming, but The City is a pretty obvious way for MTV to capitalize on the success of Gossip Girl and America's current obsessive fellating of Manhattan. It's the kind of show that pitches itself; mashing together MTV's most successful show of all time with the new show supplanting The Hills in the minds and hearts of adolescent girls is a total no-brainer. It's kind of too bad that Whitney was the one roped into starring in the spin-off. She always seemed the most normal and maybe brightest of the girls on The Hills, though of course that's so relative I might as well not have mentioned it. Anyway, the basic plot: Whitney gets hired by fashion mogul Diane Von Furstenberg and moves from her native Los Angeles to the big, cold, intimidating world of New York City (even though no boroughs other than Manhattan have even been hinted at so far).

Characters.

We already know Whitney, but which wealthy, attractive, endlessly vapid and beautifully photographed New Yorkers will be joining her in The City? MTV didn't make it at all clear who these people are; they just tossed their pretty and/or chiseled faces into the opening credits and left it up to the audience to figure out who the fuck Adam is and why he doesn't show up for two full episodes. This kind of stuff hurts because it makes me feel like I'm too dumb to follow one of the dumbest shows I've ever seen. Now that I've seen a few episodes, I think I have it down, but I'm still guessing on some of them.

Erin: Not Whitney's roommate, as it turns out: Whitney is couchsurfing at Erin's place for the first two eps, which is ridiculous since Whitney gets paid enough to purchase an entire Brooklyn neighborhood. Erin is just a friend of hers, I guess. She has Feist bangs and an insufferable hipster Torontonian boyfriend who makes me embarrassed for the entire nation of Canada. She's pretty boring, to be honest.

Jay: Jay is that Aussie soft-rock guitarist or whatever who Whitney met in one of the more recent episodes of The Hills. The first real conversation we get with him, I decide I hate him forever. He demands Whitney do an Australian accent, then he makes fun of her awful, but reluctant, attempt. What a cock. I haven't heard his band because MTV hasn't played a single second of their music (take that, transparent attempt at publicity!) but I'm sure it sounds something like Coldplay. Don't ask me how I know that.

Adam: I still have no fucking clue who Adam really is. He has the bland good looks of most of the extras on the show, so I'm never totally sure if that's him in the background or just some random passerby. There's been only one scene I'm sure he's in, and from the eight words he speaks it sounds like maybe he's Jay's roommate? I wonder what he had to do to get his face in the title credits.

Olivia: Oh man. My favorite character by far. Olivia is like an inept Girl Talk mashup of Heidi Montag's stupid bambi eyes and intellect with Blair's self-importance from Gossip Girl, plus a dash of Whitney herself in early eps of The Hills. She takes New York very. seriously. and hilariously calls herself a "social," which I guess is short for socialite. Calling yourself a socialite is like calling yourself charismatic: once you do it, it's automatically no longer true. She works in Diane Von Liverwurst's publicity department with Whitney, which looks suspiciously/exactly like Whitney's old Teen Vogue office, and represents one side of the Upper/Lower conflict.

Conflicts and Themes.

The "Socials" vs. The Lower Manhattanites

Rich kids battling poor kids. It's a classic conflict. But what happens when the poor kids live in fucking penthouses in fucking Gramercy and SoHo? This conflict has been trumped up by the producers, but I'll tell you all a secret. Aside from Harlem and Chinatown, there are no poor people in Manhattan. That's what the other four boroughs are for. The City's poor kids are the entire world's rich kids. Jay, triumphantly able to turn from reasonable to retarded in the span of a sentence, puts himself in the poor kids group when talking about why he doesn't want to go to one of Olivia's parties with Whitney:

I like that he's reluctant to hang out with the obviously unbearable Olivia and her ilk, but "I just have this thing, I do what I want, and that's... it." is such a ballsy inappropriate thing to tell a girl you've been dating for like a week. Poor Whitney.

The City's New York City vs. New York City

It's interesting to watch MTV's impenetrable gloss take on a city I'm familiar with, and now I know why Resident Los Angeleno Chesley was always yelling at the screen during The Hills. Manhattan is, to be honest, huge, loud, rude, dirty, ugly, and dehumanizing. I love the way MTV paints it as a playground of rich, fashionable people and glamorous parties featuring said rich and fashionable people. You can bet your ass Whitney will go to Brooklyn at least once this season, but that it'll be to Williamsburg for a hip show Jay's playing. You can also bet that nobody will ever go to Harlem, Chinatown, Queens, The Bronx, or anywhere in Brooklyn not already mentioned in Gossip Girl. The City is an attempt to subdue New York City into the dream metropolis of Rockefeller Center, SoHo, and the Upper East Side. Who needs minorities anyway, rite?

Motifs.

Whitney's Gams

So I guess Whitney has a great pair of legs or whatever; not being much of a leg man myself, I'm not really sure what the barometer is. Length? Musculature? But The City's editors can't get enough of them. The very first shot in the show is of Whitney walking down the street in a deliriously skimpy dress, followed by a bunch of construction workers eye-raping her as she strolls past. Then one of the construction workers bangs another on the shoulder, as if to say "MTV told me to do this." Honestly, I worked in SoHo and spent a lot of time there, and while there are a lot of fashionable people around those parts, if I saw someone dressed like Whitney walking around, I would've turned it into an anecdote about how ridiculous Manhattan is.

Awful Facial Hair

In a nod to The Hills (anyone remember Jason's amazing chinstrap beard?), The City is rife with awful, awful facial hair. Jay rocks the carefully cultivated forgot-to-shave stubble, which, sorry dude, doesn't hide his English-esque underbite. And then there's the embarrassing straggly hipster beard worn by Erin's boyfriend, whatever his name is.

I haven't really gotten into the plot yet, because I don't know or care about anyone but Whitney yet and mostly it's just been nonsense like The Hills pre-Spencer. But I'll be sure to report the inevitable visit from Lauren. Check back for when there's actually some story to talk about.

The Back Catalogue: Pilot Season, Part 1

2008-12-18T13:27:00.001-05:00

It's pilot season here at Oh Em Gee. Instead of going through the entire first season of any individual show, which takes at least a day and a half when you're as unemployed as I am, I'm going to watch several different pilots for shows I've put on the back burner. I'm plenty aware that it usually wouldn't be fair to judge a show by its pilot, as it's often one of the weaker episodes in a series' run. Great shows like 30 Rock, Firefly, and The Office all had weak pilots, so it's not a surefire indicator of quality. But that first episode is all the networks (and a lot of viewers) see, and even those shows with uncharacteristically weak pilots showed glimmers of future greatness. So it might not be fair, but it should be interesting. On the list: Monk, The Shield, Six Feet Under, The Comeback, Rescue Me, and The Larry Sanders Show.

Monk: "Mr. Monk and the Candidate: Part 1"

Sometimes I have really dumb reasons for avoiding shows. For Monk, I had two, and only one of them was the least bit reasonable. First, it's a police procedural, and I've never met a procedural I didn't hate. But the other reason is Tony Shalhoub, the titular star of Monk, has won the Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy three times, and has been nominated a whopping six times. For the same role. In a procedural. He once knocked out Jason Bateman for Arrested Development, which is a near-unforgivable sin. But the show's been on forever, and people with good taste have recommended it, so I tossed it in the pile.

Monk is a police procedural with a twist, not that I think there exists a police procedural without a twist. Shalhoub is a brilliant detective (surprise) with very severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (leading to the cringeworthy tagline: "Obsessive. Compulsive. Detective." Ugh.). I don't really know the rules of the genre, but the rest of the show seems pretty prototypical. Shalhoub may be the greatest detective, ever, in the history of the world, but is still kept on the outside by his former precinct commander, the stuffy and uptight Lt. Disher. The dialogue includes such clunkers as, "This isn't police work. This is Vaudeville!" and unless they're throwing a red herring the size of San Francisco, the culprit is incredibly obvious right from the start.

That being said, I'm annoyed to say that Tony Shalhoub is very, very good in this role. He doesn't overplay it, even when he's burdened by lousy cliched dialogue, and he's clearly having fun with the part. The other characters that I think are going to stick around (the precinct captain, and Shalhoub's nurse and psychiatrist) are all well acted, although nobody could make that Vaudeville line sound anything but awful.

Monk mostly reminds me of Psych, the only other police procedural I've ever seen. Psych overdoses on goofiness and frivolity, turning the procedural into a sitcom with murders, and none of the mysteries carry any suspense as a result. But even though Monk's pilot has a clumsy and obvious cliffhanger, I still want to see where they're going with the first mystery.

As a side note, Michael Hogan, who also plays Colonel Tigh on Battlestar Galactica, features in the pilot as the morally-questionable Mayor of San Francisco. Can Michael Hogan ever play anybody but a morally-questionable authority figure? He hasn't done anything to indicate guilt so far, and I'm still so sure he had something to do with one or both of the murders in this episode. As soon as he came on, all I could think was "Tigh! What mess have you gotten us into this time!"

Pilot Score: 7. I was honestly entertained through the pilot, which isn't an easy task. It was a fun little mystery and despite its oft-lousy dialogue, I never once checked my watch.

Series Potential: 6. I'm going to watch another episode or four, but I didn't see much in the pilot to indicate any emotional heft or inventive narrative that would separate it from the lethargic herds of procedurals.

Rescue Me: Guts

I'm not really sure what took me so long to get around to Rescue Me. Nobody I know watches it, I suppose, but that's true of a host of other shows as well. Rescue Me is part of FX's fairly recent makeover as an HBO-style channel on basic cable, a bit like what AMC is doing with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Along with Rescue Me, FX has Sons of Anarchy and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and though I've only seen the latter, I'll probably seek out Sons of Anarchy as well, because the Rescue Me pilot was fantastic.

Denis Leary stars as Tommy Gavin, a New York City firefighter and former alcoholic dealing with the aftermath of his cousin's death during the 9/11 attacks. It's a much more nuanced role than I'd expected from Leary, who I know pretty well as vitriolic and foul-mouthed stand-up comic. The character, like many of his fellow firefighters, is barely making it through the day. Leary's job is one of the things slowly but surely breaking him down, but it's such an integral part of his self-perception that he won't give it up without a loud and messy fight.

His marriage is near collapse, and though the show plays it for laughs a few times (the scene where Leary pays his three kids in cash for information on his wife's new boyfriend, for example), it's also dragging him down. Leary needs his home life to be stable, a place where he can heal from the day's work. But the minor squabbles with his wife and the difficulty in maintaining a healthy relationship with his kids makes his personal life no less stressful than his professional life.

The job itself is emotionally and psychologically killing him. He sees ghosts of those who have died in fires all around him, especially his cousin Jimmy. Jimmy appears to converse and advise Leary in the same way as Dexter's father in Dexter or Lily Kane in Veronica Mars. But those two examples served to guide the protagonist through the story, and the profane banter between Jimmy and Denis Leary is mostly just a warning sign that Leary is dangerously unstable. He's begun drinking again, even though Jimmy reminds him of the 14 months he spent in AA kicking the habit, and in a brief moment of lost control, Leary breaks down in front of a psychotherapist brought in to counsel the firefighters. He quickly turns the emotion into anger, just as one of the gruffest, most vulgar firefighters has begun writing poetry to vent, but his mental stability is suspect at best.

Rescue Me's pilot is exceedingly well-written, especially after the pile of cliches I saw in Monk. It has the same rapid-fire dialogue that Aaron Sorkin uses in The West Wing, but the difference in the characters' education and social standing turns the exchanges from esoteric displays of knowledge to vulgar digs and quips. From very early in the pilot:

Franco Rivera: So get this. The girl I was with, with the sideburns? She shuns me when I try to make a move.
Tommy Gavin: She shuns you?
Franco Rivera: Blows me off. Leaves in a huff. Can you believe this shit?
Tommy Gavin: What I can't believe is you, making a move on a chick with sideburns.
Franco Rivera: Tommy, it's gettin' slow out there, pal. All that pussy I was getting after 9/11? Now, nothing. People forget.
Tommy Gavin: Yeah. Sad commentary.

Pilot Score: 8.5. It really is one of the best pilots I've seen recently, and doesn't make any of those amateur dialogue mistakes that so often pop up in first episodes. "Guts" showed a nice mix of humor and very dark drama, and makes me want to explore this world and learn more about the characters.

Series Potential: 9. That's a high score, and I'm not totally confident the series will live up to it, but judging from this episode, Rescue Me could turn in some top-notch seasons. Overall narrative arc is my only concern, but the writing so far has been good enough that I think they'll pull something out.

Next time on Pilot Season, I'll be looking at two shows already in the pantheon of immortal television: Six Feet Under and The Larry Sanders Show.

The 1990s: Era of Clean-Cut Filth and Depravity

2008-12-11T14:47:00.001-05:00

A lot of us came of age in the mid- to late-'90s in the midst of the boy band explosion that rocked the world and left a trail of crying 10-year-old girls in its path. But what those girls didn't realize was exactly how filthy a lot of those songs really were, being wrapped up in sugary bubblegum pop. I remember turning down the volume on the car stereo so my mom wouldn't hear the cursing in Green Day's "Longview," but it turns out they were one of the most family-friendly groups around.

Jordan Knight - Give It To You

Key Lyric: The entire song is really, really dirty ("Show me where, I'll taste you there"?), but if I had to pick, it'd be this pair of charming couplets:

"I don't care who leads
As long as we move horizontally
Anyone can make you sweat
But I, can keep you wet."

Cuteness Factor: 8. The video takes place at a candy-colored county fair or something, with Ferris wheels and raffle tickets and no sign at all that Jordan Knight plans to "keep you wet." The lyrics are unabashedly filthy from start to finish, so I guess he had to cutesy it up with the video. It features one of those "obviously gorgeous girl we're supposed to think is homely takes off her glasses because that's what was stopping her from being gorgeous" plotlines, and the whole thing is totally G-rated. Well, except for that weird vibrating crotch-thrust thing Jordan does at around 2:45.

Third Eye Blind - Semi-Charmed Life

Key Lyric: This song, which I love and you're a liar if you don't, is one of those cute songs like The La's "There She Goes" that's so sweet and poppy that you don't realize it's about horrific drug abuse and addiction. Third Eye Blind added a twist: it's not that the lyrics are metaphoric, like in "There She Goes," it's just that they're indecipherably mumbled so you can't hear how obvious the references are. "Crystal myth"? Really?

"Doing crystal myth,
Will lift you up until you break."

"Those little red panties,
They pass the test,
Slide up around the belly,
Face down on the mattress."

Cuteness Factor: 4. The video's not that cute and the song isn't particularly marketed to 10-year-old girls, though I'm sure they loved it too. Really, it was just that nobody had the patience to figure out what that mush-mouthed Stephen Jenkins was talking about.

B4-4 - Get Down

Key Lyric: This is it, guys. This is the apex of filthy boy band lyrics. It's also gotta be high in the running for funniest music video ever made. B4-4 were these three Oompa Loompa-colored guido dorks wearing pearl necklaces (?) who belted out the worst single entendres I've ever heard. Canadian correspondent Carolyn insists that their audience of pre-teen Canadian girls somehow did not realize that "If you get down on me, I'll get down on you!" might have something to do with unimaginably horrible oral sex. Bonus line from their Wikipedia entry: "After breaking up from the band, twins Ryan and Dan formed a group together called RyanDan."

The key lyric has got to be the line that the CRTC (Canadian FCC) forced them to put in to make the worst lyric in the song somehow more palatable.

"Gonna make you come tonight....
... overtomyhouse!"

Cuteness Factor: 0. These guys are totally repulsive and there's an odd current of homoeroticism constantly below the surface. Usually boy bands would throw in a cry of "Girl!" to assure their listeners and themselves that they really do like ladies, but B4-4 doesn't go that route. Instead, they populate their video with images like this one for no reason I can see:

O-Town - Liquid Dreams

Key Lyric: Poor O-Town. They were constructed the same way as all the other boy bands but had a rough go of it because the whole process was aired on TV. Everybody saw how artificial these groups were, and it was the beginning of the end of the boy band era. Still, that's no excuse for an ode to nocturnal emissions. While titling your song something dirty ("Give It to You") isn't new, at least those other ones weren't as gross as "Liquid Dreams." And they even created the word "morpharotic," which sounds like a line out of a robot porno. A bad robot porno, with shitty production values.

"Now this hot girl, she's not your average girl
She's a morpharotic dream from a magazine
And she's so fine designed to blow your mind
She's a dominatrix supermodel beauty queen."

Cuteness Factor: 2. Hear that, B4-4? O-Town is talking about sleep splooge and they're still cuter than you.

Honorable Mention.

*NSYNC - I Want You Back

This one isn't actually a dirty song; *NSYNC were so clean-cut they make my teeth hurt. But this video is a triumph of awfulness and I can't let it go without some comment.

The video for "I Want You Back" is so quintessentially '90s that I had to include it somehow. The goofy, unexplained space motif and the special effects that are used only because they were just invented the week before are highlights for me. Why did that girl collapse into confetti? Is she the one that is wanted back? How did Justin and his backup dancers/bandmates end up here in lonely outer space, rehearsing their dance moves and and sometimes walking along an unrelated hallway in normal earth-clothes? Why did they ever let Joey Fatone into the band?

Most of *NSYNC's videos are comedy gold, especially "(I Drive Myself) Crazy", which is so very close to having a plot but falls apart because, oh right, it makes no sense at all. The hair in that one is pretty stellar though, especially since it reminds us that before he paid Timbaland a gazillion bucks to stop him from sucking, Justin Timberlake was just a dude with a thin, reedy, unappealing voice and, as Mollie put it, "hair like ramen noodles."

The Back Catalogue: Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque

2008-12-10T15:59:00.000-05:00

Teenage Fanclub's album Bandwagonesque beat out three of the most important albums ever made to become Spin Magazine's album of the year in 1991. Nirvana's Nevermind, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and R.E.M.'s Out of Time all lost the honor to the near-unknown Scottish band's third album. Bandwagonesque hasn't reached the level of legend that those three albums have, but it still graces any list of "Best Albums of the '90s" or especially any compilation of great power pop records, my personal genre obsession. So how come I found it so boring?

First, I should say that I hate writing about music. It's such an evocative and personal form of entertainment that music criticism ends up being mostly useless except for the 1-5 star rating. So much of it is a variation on "sounds like a cross between this and this band, with a dash of this one" and doesn't make sense to anybody except the dude who wrote it. I think it's because unlike film, television, and the written word, music isn't constructed from words. It's awfully difficult to use one language to describe another, which is why this might be the only entry of The Back Catalogue to focus on music.

The only place in a pop song you can find words is in the lyrics. I know some of you probably think lyrics are important, but trust me, they aren't. That's why 50 Cent is a superstar and The Mountain Goats sell about eighteen albums a year. I really only think about lyrics when they're especially fantastic (The Mountain Goats, Sufjan Stevens) or a verbal train wreck of illiterate pornographic cliche (Justin Timberlake). This is unrelated, but here's an excerpt of a Justin Timberlake song, just so you guys can see how right I am that lyrics couldn't matter less:

"She looks like a model
Except she's got a little more ass
Don't even bother
Unless you've got that thing she likes
I hope she's going home with me tonight

Those flashing lights come from everywhere
The way they hit her I just stop and stare
She's got me love stoned
Man I swear she's bad and she knows
I think that she knows

She's freaky and she knows it
She's freaky, but I like it

She shuts the room down
The way she walks and causes a fuss
The baddest in town
She's flawless like some uncut ice
I hope she's going home with me tonight"

My point is that I hate writing about music. But I love power pop, and Bandwagonesque is supposed to be a milestone in the genre's history. Unlike Harold and Maude, I actually have listened to this album a few times-- at least, I've put on the first track, gotten bored, and switched to that idiot Justin Timberlake after 30 seconds. So I sort of knew what Teenage Fanclub sounded like before I sat down this time to really give them a try. What's really disappointing about Bandwagonesque is that those 30 seconds told me all I needed to know: sure, the first track isn't their best, but their best (track 6, "Star Sign") just sounds like a slightly better version of that first track.

Bandwagonesque is incredibly dated, which isn't so good for Teenage Fanclub: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, one of the albums they beat out for that best of year award from Spin, is just as bracing and fresh as it was in 1991. Probably some of the problem is due to their genre. Power pop is inherently classicist, and derivative is never an insult to a power pop band, even a great one. As a genre, it looks back to The Who and the Beach Boys rather than the harder rock of The Rolling Stones or the experimental pop of The Beatles. Power pop boils down to three-minute, three-chord songs with catchy, singalong choruses, ringing guitars, and enduring harmonies. Artists as divergent as The Ramones, Andrew W.K., and Fountains of Wayne all fall into the scope of power pop. In the early '90s, the most important power pop bands were Teenage Fanclub, Weezer, and Matthew Sweet.

Here's my favorite song off Bandwagonesque, "Star Sign."

It's just so early '90s, you know? Immediately recognizable are those jangly guitars that are played so messily you almost don't notice that the song itself is immaculately put together. Remember, in the '90s, apathetic was the coolest thing to be. I might be too young to remember it, but I've seen Daria, so I know how important it was to not give a shit. This song is actually far and away the tightest on the album besides the instrumental closer "This Is Music?" and even this one features a 100% useless intro that's a whopping 1:18 long. Power pop should be tight and punchy: this is not the genre for aimless noodling, yet a lot of these early '90s power popsters were so caught up in the sound of the moment that they forgot about that.

But I actually do really like "Star Sign." It's catchy, it's simple, and I love how the harmonies seem so effortless but work so perfectly. It's the peak of Bandwagonesque, but that's not actually saying all that much due to the intense sameness of the album. Here's the opener, "The Concept."

It's sort of catchy, sort of messy, and plods along like it's on some kind of death march. Every song on the album except "Star Sign" feels like it should be played about twice as fast. Power pop should be fun, and this song makes it sound like a chore or worse, a job. Compare that to the artist who sounds most similar, fellow '90s power pop guitarist Matthew Sweet.

If you overlook that truly ridiculous video (and I'm sure he's more embarrassed to have made it than you are to watch it), you can hear in Matthew Sweet what Teenage Fanclub is missing. Matthew Sweet has this misguided notion of himself as a guitar-god arena rock star, which is a little silly considering his biggest hit features the lyric "I'd really like to call you my girlfriend." But at least it's some kind of passion, however foolish. Both Matthew Sweet and Teenage Fanclub have that pointless kind of guitar noodling devoid of melody or knowledge of the next note, but at least Matthew Sweet does it with feeling.

I suppose Bandwagonesque was one of the first in the modern line of power pop that lead us to The New Pornographers, Brendan Benson, Ok Go, and other solid acts. But if you just pretend the whole thing started with Matthew Sweet and then Weezer, I don't know that you'd be missing all that much. Bandwagonesque isn't a bad album by any means. It's reasonably catchy and like I said before, the harmonies are really stellar. But I just didn't have any fun with it, and without fun, I'm not really sure what the point of power pop is.

Verdict: Disappointment.

The Back Catalogue: Harold and Maude

2008-12-08T16:00:00.001-05:00

Harold and Maude is a default reference point for any new, well-made romantic comedy, like High Fidelity, Secretary, and everything Wes Anderson has ever done. I love good romantic comedies, being a big ol' softy, and added Harold and Maude to my movie collection about three years ago. It's one of those DVDs that I always paused at, then passed, thinking I'd watch it next time.

After finally watching it a few nights ago, I can see why it's brought up so often. For the first hour and a quarter, it's a solid, and very dark, romantic comedy, and the last fifteen minutes are powerful, emotionally resonant, and heartfelt. What was especially interesting about Harold and Maude is how it changed my perception of the movies it influenced. Garden State, Zach Braff's variably loved and hated film debut, is one of those descendents that comes off worse in a comparison: the movies are so similar in so many minor ways, but Garden State's emotional immaturity firmly places it as a pale copy of Harold and Maude.

[Note: There will be spoilers beyond this point.]
A word about Garden State: I've found myself on the defensive in any conversation about that movie. Sure, the dialogue is sometimes smug, the name-dropping certainly obnoxious, and many of its biggest emotional moments about as subtle as the Blue Collar Comedy tour. But I like the framing in a lot of the shots, even the much-maligned shot of Zach Braff's shirt and its matching wallpaper, and it's funnier than most critics give it credit for. But then the AV Club's fantastic article exposed the archetype they term the "manic pixie dream girl," and Garden State is the example to end all examples. The manic pixie dream girl, or MPDG, is a shallow writer's crutch of a love interest that is so quirky, so out-there, so free-spirited that she can rescue a somber man and show him that life can be fun! In a real-life situation, outside the confines of romantic comedies, the MPDG would be dangerously unpredictable and destructive. But actresses like Kate Hudson and Jennifer Aniston have made careers out of playing this character, and Natalie Portman's character Sam in Garden State is one of the purest examples of the MPDG.

Harold and Maude is, I think, one of the earlier examples of the MPDG feature, along with Woody Allen's twin triumphs of Annie Hall and Manhattan. But looking at Harold and Maude and Garden State together shows shows that there's a both a good and a depressingly shallow way to present the MPDG story arc. Even before those last 15 minutes that hit me so hard, the movie is messing with the formula: Maude is in her late 70s, and Harold about 19, which if anything is a reversal of the MPDG standard. Harold and his Garden State counterpart, Zach Braff's Andrew, have a lot in common; the difference between the movies isn't in their characters. Both have "endured" a very privileged childhood, only to feel intense apathy and shiftlessness due to their single parents' (Harold's mother and Andrew's father) lack of emotion and attention. Andrew has the modern and trendy problem of over-prescribed anti-depressants, while Harold has a less obvious sort of existential problem, but the difference here is in the MPDG character.

Maude, for most of the movie, just seems like a goofball who, in that epic cliche, lives every day like it's her last. She steals cars apparently for the fun of it, embarks on trips to replant sad urban trees, and lives in an incredibly quirky house. More accurately, she lives in an incredibly quirky train car, outfitted with half-finished art and a machine that creates different smells. Compare this to Garden State's Sam, who pathologically lies (and confesses the lie; she's not a bad person!) and takes special care to act unique. Sam is a more socially appropriate match for Andrew than Maude is for Harold, but then, Andrew's problems are much easier to combat than Harold's.

Harold's apathy is an example of the general malaise felt by his generation, the depression felt by youth who have no power to change the destructive war going on around them. This is all blind analysis, since much of Harold and Maude's strength is in its reluctance to spell out its messages. I'm pretty certain director Hal Ashby is contrasting the Vietnam and World War II generations, since Maude's reaction to her war is so different than Harold's reaction to his, but none of this is ever put out in the open. In Garden State, Andrew's depression is specific: I hope Zach Braff wasn't making some point about our modern "medicated generation," but either way, Andrew's problems are his own. His mother's physical trauma and death are Andrew's issues, not his generation's. That specificity makes it easier for Sam to help Andrew. All he needs is to give up the mood-altering medication and confront his father, and the problem's good and solved. But Harold needs an incredible shock to his system and mere quirk just wouldn't cut it. Lucky for him, Maude isn't Sam.

The ending of Harold and Maude explains how Maude came to be, and Garden State does no such thing; Sam apparently arrived a fully-formed quirkfest (notwithstanding her epilepsy, which is at best a halfhearted way of explaining her behavior). What makes Harold and Maude so great is both the explanation for Maude's behavior and how it's conveyed: instead of slamming the viewer over the head like Garden State does, we're clued in very briefly and left to make the connection on our own. Late in the film, we're treated to this shot:

That shot, presented without comment for a whopping one second, is what makes Harold and Maude a great movie and Garden State a lousy one. For those who can't tell, that's Maude's arm tattooed with a Holocaust concentration camp ID number. Maude's live-life-to-the-fullest credo isn't quirk at all, it's a genuine reaction to having seen true horror and acting in the only way that can keep her feeling human. She needs to constantly explore, to find what makes life worth living, because she's been forced to see evidence that it's not. That's a hell of a shock: Harold has come into contact with somebody who really knows the value of life, not some fantasy of a cute girl who listens to nonthreatening indie rock.

Maude's suicide a few scenes later is so cleanly reasoned that it borders on cold. She had already confessed to Harold that she thinks 80 is the right age to die, and she doesn't see herself as an exception. Harold is devastated, of course, but more than that, he understands, and experiencing life through Maude's eyes, even for a little bit, has shocked him out of his apathy. The final shot of the movie shows Harold skipping along a cliff, playing the banjo that Maude gave him, experiencing life like Maude did. That's an ending that'll stick with you. Garden State's ending is a bullshit little unrealistic, saccharine moment that combines the angst of Harold and Maude and The Graduate while devaluing the emotional weight of both.

After confessing their love for each other, Andrew and Sam are uncertain about their next step, in a nod to The Graduate. Andrew eventually decides to fly back to his life as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, using the confidence and new outlook Sam has given him. But at the last second, he leaves the plane, calls Sam, and tells her he doesn't want to live a life "without her in it." It's the last Disneyfied nail in the coffin; I hated that ending even before Harold and Maude, and now I hate it more.

Even those meticulously framed shots that I loved in Garden State are taken, intentionally or not, straight from Harold and Maude. Here's that shot of Andrew and his matching wallpaper I mentioned earlier:

I still like that shot; I like how stonefaced Zach Braff plays it, and I like the little touch of the two matching lampshades on either side of him. But that kind of deliberate symmetry is all over Harold and Maude as well. Here's a shot of Harold at his psychiatrist's office, fairly early in the film:

I love how Harold is lying backwards on the classic shrink's couch, and how the art and furniture encircle him. I don't mind the similarities in framing, exactly, but it's just one more element of Garden State that loses its shine when compared to Harold and Maude.

I've glossed over a lot of Harold and Maude. I haven't mentioned Harold's suicide attempts or the Cat Stevens soundtrack that so adeptly works with both dark humor and deep emotional shock. Worst of all, I've somehow forgotten to mention that Harold and Maude is a really, really funny movie. I think this article makes it seem like a dusty dramatic picture, but it's not: Harold and Maude is a classic romantic comedy. It's hilarious, it's romantic, and it's surprisingly moving. But this isn't a review, of course. My notes from the beginning of the movie say that it's very dark and very funny, but a little light on emotion, and that until that climactic shot I screencapped above, I didn't really understand why Maude had to be so much older than Harold. My notes would have changed drastically in tone in the last 15 minutes of the movie, if I had written any, but I didn't: I sat there, mesmerized, with my computer in front of me, totally forgotten.

Harold and Maude is pretty much a must-see in my book. In the same way that you can't understand a modern sitcom unless you've seen Seinfeld, or that you can't understand modern pop music unless you've heard the Beatles, you won't really understand romantic comedies until you've seen Harold and Maude. In what I'm sure is going to be a refrain in this column, this was my biggest thought after watching this movie: "Ohhhh. Now I get it."

An Introduction to The Back Catalogue

2008-12-08T15:16:00.000-05:00

The Back Catalogue is to be a recurring column in which I watch, listen to, read, or absorb by osmosis one piece of entertainment that, while I assume it to be a classic, has sat in a stack of unwatched DVDs, on a bookshelf of unread books, or (most depressingly) in my giant collection of digital music, waiting to be taken in. These aren't going to be reviews, exactly; I'm not qualified to write, say, film reviews, knowing pretty much nothing about the medium itself. They'll be more like reactions, based on whatever gibberish I jot down during the movie/show/book/album. Here's a short list of what's hopefully to come in this column:

Movies.
- Harold and Maude (dir. Hal Ashby)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (dir. Terry Gilliam)
- Faces (dir. John Cassavetes)

Music.
- Public Enemy: Fear of a Black Planet
- Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
- Teenage Fanclub: Bandwagonesque

Television.
- Six Feet Under
- Northern Exposure
- The Shield

Books.
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard)
- East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
- The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)

The Best and Brightest of The Hills: Viewer Comments

2008-12-01T17:38:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, The Hills started a contest that asked its audience to contribute little text-message-sized comments about the on-screen action. The "best, wittiest, and funniest" comments would appear on air during the show, in a kind of Twitter-generation twist on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The difference is that MST3K featured comedy professionals, and this debacle relies on the witticisms of the viewership of The Hills. It was such a fantastic trainwreck that I'm still not sure what happened during the episode, so transfixed was I with the commenting.

The comments fall into a few different categories, the most prominent and grating of which was the Shameless Plugs. But there were quite a few in the Why Did You Bother? category, a couple Topical Jokes, and my personal favorite, Hey Guys, Isn't It Crazy How Big Girls' Sunglasses Have Gotten?

Shameless Plugs.

Misspelling abounds, but this one isn't quite as funny as my favorite typo of the night:

Hiedi??????

Oh man, I've definitely been there.

Ugh.

I think you mean "I love this song by an MTV-approved Viacom-owned Epic Records recording artist!"

Why Did You Bother?

Well, thanks for writing in, then.

Topical Jokes.

Hey Guys, Isn't It Crazy How Big Girls' Sunglasses Have Gotten?

And finally, we have the rarest category. These are like finding a needle-sized unicorn in a haystack the size of Los Angeles.

Legitimately Funny Jokes.

In response to a tearful goodbye in which Lauren reassures Audrina, saying, "I'll always come cry with you on the kitchen floor."

The Mystery of Gossip Girl's "Dress Code"

2008-11-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

The Constance Billard School, which according to Wikipedia is the academic institution at the center of Gossip Girl, is awfully close to having a dress code, but ends up having more of a theme than any kind of specific guidelines. It's kind of like how a Catholic schoolgirl stripper uniform has motifs (the short plaid skirt, knee socks, white shirt) but those lucky strippers can really make the costume their own. So what I'm saying is, the Gossip Girl characters are a lot like strippers.

Here we can see what's pretty much the male dress code. See, until mid-second season when Chuck started dressing like some kind of gay hipster CEO of a plaid factory, he wore the standard uniform: khakis, emblazoned blue blazer, yellow shirt, and a maroon and yellow tie. Even back then, Chuck was embellishing his uniform with a vest that's apparently made from the same material as my boxers. Here's what he looks like toward the end of the second season:

But the male students are pretty traditional for the most part, which tricks you into thinking this school actually has a dress code. Then come the girls.

Here you can see five different girls, all in the same year, who are all dressed differently. They're all easily identifiable as "private school girls," but what the fuck? At least all the girls in that photo are fairly demure, as opposed to Serena, who takes the stripper analogy a little too literally:

That's a boy's tie, worn Avril Lavigne-style, a low-cut wifebeater, a chest-accentuating silver lamé cardigan, a skirt made out of almost enough fabric for a short scarf, and calf-high boots. Um.

I suppose the differences in wardrobe are one of those incredibly obvious hints at the character of each girl. Here, you can see that Serena is a fun-loving party girl who owns more neckties than I do, whereas Blair is a British grandma.

On the subject of deducting character from dress, Chuck is apparently in perpetual Halloween mode in the latest few episodes. This is a burgundy velour blazer. Let me say that again, because dear god does it warrant it. Burgundy. Velour. Blazer.

He's also busy keeping his plaid factory afloat:

Glasses McIndoorScarf models his wardrobe on Wikipedia's bulletted article on hipsters:

Jenny is rebellious and/or in the Hell's Angels:

Serena has a great rack!

Serena has a great rack!

Serena has a great rack!

My guess is that most people who watch Gossip Girl are 12-year-old girls who are too enamored with the the pretty clothes and that guy Nate's simian black eyes to notice little things like how ridiculous the school uniform is. But the apathy to detail leads to even more deliciously retarded developments like Dan's writing career ("writing" in this case being hastily-composed and angsty Livejournal entries that turn fact into fiction by changing "Chuck Bass" to "Charles Trout." This story is apparently enough to get published in New Fucking York Magazine, at least in the world of Gossip Girl). Would Serena be thrown out of any school, public or private, for wearing any combination of clothes in her closet? Of course. But in the face of secretly-British royalty and plotlines ripped from Cruel Intentions, dressing like Avril Lavigne is the most realistic thing Gossip Girl has going for it.