I don’t really care to turn this into a vegetarianism or animal-rights debate. And since Palin, Sorkin, and I all eat animals, it doesn’t need to be. (If you’re a vegetarian and want to object to the episode on the grounds that animals should never be killed and eaten, go right ahead. But not on this blog.) Sorkin says he doesn’t “relish the idea of torturing animals.” From the footage shown on the episode, it doesn’t look like torture to me. Close-up on Palin, “Bang!” goes the shot from her gun, then cut to the animal to see it fall down. By the time the hunting party walks over, the caribou is long dead. If I had to choose between that death and the death of the average factory-farm-raised cow or chicken, I’d take the caribou’s death. (And if I had to choose which life to lead, it’d be the caribou, by far. Wandering across Alaska beats standing in my own shit any day of the week.)

Sorkin goes on to call the episode a “snuff film.” He also says that Palin wasn’t “killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion”; instead, she was “killing it for fun.” He says that in spite of the fact that Palin repeatedly mentions how the caribou meat will stay in her freezer all winter and feed her family; when the camera peeks into her freezer, she points out various packs of caribou and moose meat. Does Sarah Palin really need to hunt for meat to provide for her family? Of course not. She lives in a suburb of Anchorage. She’s got a Pizza Hut and McDonald’s and Wendy’s in her town. But in no way does Sorkin explain how it’s morally preferable to eat at a fast-food chain or buy ground meat from the supermarket instead of hunting your own meat. Does Palin clearly relish the opportunity to shoot a caribou? Absolutely. She talks several times about the joys of hunting, shooting, and killing. Does this satisfaction make her actions morally reprehensible? Not at all. I would go so far as to say that killing a caribou that lived its entire life in the wild, then skinning it, carving it up, and processing the meat yourself is morally superior to thoughtlessly tossing a pack of ribs or chicken breasts into the shopping cart at the grocery store, given the many questions and complaints that have been raised about the treatment of animals in the American food production system.

Furthermore, Sorkin even claims that he “can’t make a distinction” between Palin’s hunting trip and Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation. This smacks of either ignorance, disingenuousness, or both. Surely a man of Sorkin’s intelligence is smart enough to distinguish between a single shot through a caribou’s chest and evidence of horrific mistreatment and deaths of dogs involved in the Vick case.

He also calls Palin a “phony pioneer girl.” This, I wouldn’t disagree with. In the episode, Palin is unable to tell east from west during the morning in the Alaskan tundra. For a supposed outdoorswoman to not know her directions is way worse than to slip up and get North and South Korea confused. She also misses the caribou several times and has to use another gun; however, it is revealed later in the episode that the gun’s sight had some sort of malfunction, explaining why she missed high on her first several shots.

Finally, he levels the accusation that this was “the first moose ever murdered for political gain.” First of all, it’s a caribou, not a moose; just more ignorance from a typical limousine liberal who doesn’t know anything about the world outside of New York and LA. Second of all, of course it was for political gain! As Sorkin points out, Palin knew PETA would get upset. She knew it’d be a chance to get people to take her side. But everything politicians do is for political gain. Whether it’s carrier deck photo ops, books about hope and dreams and audacity, kissing babies, shaking hands, or anything else, politicians are always looking out for themselves. That’s nothing new. But again, this additional benefit of her hunting trip does not corrupt it, just as the fact that she takes pleasure in hunting does not make it an immoral activity. If I had to play armchair psychiatrist, I’d suggest that Sorkin isn’t exactly comfortable with the morality of his meat-eating. He wants to divorce himself as much as possible from the idea that the meat he eats was once a living, breathing animal. If you don’t want to “volunteer to be the one to kill” animals, that’s your choice. I’ve never hunted either, and I don’t have any particular desire to start now. But your squeamishness is not something that should be forced upon everyone else. After all, if no one wanted to kill animals, you wouldn’t have any meat to eat, would you, Aaron? You’re a talented guy. I thought The Social Network was a great movie. I watched Sports Night when it first aired on ABC. But maybe you should leave the blogs alone and stick to screenwriting. Because on this issue, despite your protestations, you’re a hypocrite.

It’s pretty ridiculous how much of an average TV show is advertising. According to Wikipedia, commercials used to take up nine minutes of an hour-long program in the 1960s. Now they take up roughly eighteen minutes an hour. That’s almost a third of the show. Since modern TV shows are written to fit into the contours of commercial breaks, watching them isn’t usually too annoying; sure, it’s nicer to fast-forward through the commercials if you can, but I can stomach sitting through the commercials. What annoys the crap out of me is having to watch a sporting event or movie that gets interrupted every ten minutes for a commercial. Many movies feel completely disjointed when they’re edited and cut up for television. And besides, I have an extremely short attention span, so I usually change the channel, watch something else until a commercial comes on, then flip back to the movie to find I’ve missed some major plot point. Whoops. I love watching a movie on TCM or Fox Movie Channel or HBO or whatever, where I get to see the whole thing straight through. But AMC or some other commercial-laden network? Forget it.

And sports? Sure, some sports (baseball, for example) have plenty of natural stopping points for a brief commercial break. But I hate the way in which football and basketball games get stopped every few minutes by TV timeouts. If I could go back in time and change one thing about American sports, I’d make it like soccer where teams whore themselves out with advertising on jerseys and all over the stadia in exchange for getting to see a game without commercials.* I’d love it if we got rid of TV timeouts every four minutes in college basketball; just show a 30-second commercial each time a team calls a timeout. And who doesn’t hate the touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial pattern so common in NFL games? And to throw in an example from another sport, DirecTV offers a couple of channels of bonus coverage for all of the Grand Slam events in golf and tennis. And for the recent British Open** golf tournament, they had something I hadn’t seen before on one of the extra channels—an international feed, completely commercial free. (Also, on a somewhat unrelated note, it was also blissfully free of the stupid feature stories, lengthy interviews, and talking-heads segments that ESPN felt compelled to shove down our throats. I tried watching ESPN a few times and several times I went 20 minutes without seeing more than one or two actual golf shots.) And every time the Olympics rolls around, NBC has to scramble to fit advertising into team sport telecasts that lack commercial breaks. I enjoyed watching hockey in the Olympics; there was a wonderful flow to the games (thanks to the lack of TV timeouts) that’s completely missing from an NHL broadcast.

I realize that the business model of television requires lots of ads. But I think it’s fair to say that with the Internet and DVRs, the model is shifting. Probably we’ll be seeing a lot more product placement and on-screen advertising graphics, as TV executives realize how many ads are being skipped over. And hopefully this somehow leads to a world where I don’t have to see 20 minutes of ads an hour.

* Actually, if I could change one thing about sports, I’d probably require that all teams be fan-owned enterprises that are concerned with winning, not with turning a profit. But that’s not exactly feasible, I suppose.

** Yes, I am aware that the proper name is “The Open Championship.” Now shut up, Anglophiles.

I’d say I have the opposite problem. For me, it’s too late.

I was lucky enough to miss out on the worst of it. I evacuated on August 28th, found a college 1500 miles away for the semester, made it back to visit for Thanksgiving, and wasn’t home for good until the middle of December. And I was one of the lucky ones—only eight inches of water in my house.* So things on Treme right now are worse than they ever were for me. For the first year or two especially Katrina was everything. Upon seeing an old friend for the first time since the storm, every conversation started with “Where’d you go?” and “How’s your house?” Every moment of evacuation, exile, and return seemed a vivid memory. But time moves on and memories fade. For a long time we were linked by the common bond of suffering. And that suffering still exists, to be sure. Just today I was driving through the back streets of Gert Town—South Carrollton is an inconvenient mess of construction and repaving—and the decay, the abandoned buildings and blown-out windows are still everywhere. Physically, the city still bears the scars of the storm, but psychically, many of us are so much better off now than we were a few years ago. I mean, we’re the Super Bowl Champions! There are people, here and elsewhere, who don’t get football, but there isn’t a city anywhere in the world that had so much to gain from a sports championship. But it’s about more than just that. We’re also having the most gorgeous spring I can ever recall (which, I admit, came after a late, long, cold winter). It’s the time of year when festivals are everywhere. Thanks to the still-continuing rebuilding process, our economy has been insulated from much of the recent recession. All in all, it’s a good time to be a New Orleanian. So going back to that time isn’t something I feel like doing. Maybe that means it’s too soon for me after all. But I would have been absorbed in this show had it premiered in, say, April 2007. I would have wanted to feel all of these emotions—perhaps because I had suffered so little, perhaps because it was my way of being a New Orleanian—whatever the reason, I’d have loved the show then. Now I like it and admire it. By now we’ve come far enough that the post-Katrina suffering seems worse than it seemed two or three years ago. When your house is still a mess, when you can’t find a grocery store or restaurant that’s open at reasonable hours, when prices for basic goods are sky-high, when your friends are still exiled in Houston or Dallas or whatever—it just seems like a continuation of what the first few months after the storm were, and the improvements are so gradual that you can forget them. But now so many things are so much better than they were in the time period Treme depicts, that to be plummeted into the worst of the worst can be devastating.

I don’t want to exaggerate what I personally feel—I’m sure there are a lot of people who truly can’t watch the show or, even if they can, can’t enjoy it at all. I feel sorry for those people because they probably suffered a hell of lot more than I did. I’m glad I can watch the show and enjoy it. I just hope it runs for four or five seasons and ends with a Sunday night in Florida in February 2010.

* When I was a kid, I’d see TV footage of people walking around houses with a couple inches of water and thinking, “Wow, that really sucks.” While I don’t want to minimize my family’s sufferings—they were the ones who cleaned and gutted and repaired and suffered from October onward while I was in a dorm room in Massachusetts—a tour of, say, Lakeview was enough for me to count my blessings.

Now, I guess it makes sense that the show uses Auto-Tune at least occasionally. The show does (and to a large extent, should) reflect the sensibilities of modern pop music, however misguided those sensibilities may be. And some of the show’s singers are clearly stronger than others; I realize that there are tremendous difficulties in casting a show like this. But the extra layer of artificiality caused by the usage of Auto-Tune often distracts from the music and the story.

I don’t really mind when Auto-Tune is used in a number that acts as a music-video fantasy. For example, “No Air” starts in the rehearsal room, then segues into a fantasy sequence. It’s understandable that you’d want a consistent sound throughout the whole song, both the fantasy and rehearsal room halves of the video. And if the show is going to accurately depict a modern music video, it makes sense that it would use Auto-Tune. (Whether Auto-Tune is used to much in modern American music is another question entirely, and one that I don’t really give a shit about.)

But I can’t stand when I see Auto-Tune used on one of the show’s strong singers in a situation that doesn’t call for it. We know that Lea Michele and Matthew Morrison can sing; why use Auto-Tune on them in songs that aren’t a part of any sort of fantasy sequence? I’m thinking of scenes like “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and the “Don’t Stand So Close to Me/Young Girl” mash-up. I realize that some of the actors may need some help (*cough* Cory Monteith *cough*), but those two certainly don’t. I’d much rather hear them sing than the Auto-Tune machine.

And it’s worth pointing out that I’m not the only one who feels this way. A google search brings up a ton of complaints from fans and writers, and even an online petition to stop it.

Maybe the network or the producers are afraid that sub-par vocals might dampen the enthusiasm of the audience, but I doubt that’d be the case. Just look at all the crappy singers who get voted back week after week on American Idol. If people are still voting for Tim Urban even though he sucks*, I’m sure Glee can manage just fine without Auto-Tune.

So please, Ryan Murphy et al., turn down the Auto-Tune.

*Maybe “sucks” is too harsh. But I think it’s safe to say that his fans are 12-year-old girls lost in his blue eyes and mop of hair.

But I’m not totally sold on Ellen as a judge. I love her jokes, but her comments on the contestant’s performance are often a little too nice. And what music background does she have, anyway? She’s a stellar comedienne, but that’s no qualification for this show. And Kara DioGuardi is still less than outstanding. She’s not bad, but she’s not great, either. The bottom line is that the two of them combined can’t replace Paula Abdul and her drug-addled ramblings. And once Simon leaves, I fear the show will be headed way downhill. I’m sure they’ll try to pick up some curmudgeonly Brit to replace him, but I doubt it’ll work.

The problem I have with the judges is that their advice constantly contradicts itself. It’s always been a problem, but this year, it seems ten times worse. Contestants who sing a song with an arrangement close to the original are told, “You didn’t make the song your own.” If they change it up and don’t do a good job, they’re told, “When you sing a great song like that, you don’t need to make all those sorts of changes. Just sing it!” The judges are usually right when it comes to knowing if the contestant gave a good performance or not, but their advice is all over the place. They figure out whether they like a performance or not, then they have to think up reasons for it. Art is always somewhat subjective, so even for professionals in the music business I’m sure it’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what works or doesn’t work about a particular singer or performance. The judges will praise someone for being unique, then criticize another contestant for being too old-fashioned—that is, they don’t fit into the mold of a modern pop singer. But being old-fashioned makes them unique! Katie Stevens, for example, kept getting advice to sing a younger, newer song. She did that this week and gave a mediocre performance of a boring Kelly Clarkson song. Then the judges criticized her. The main thing they kept saying was that she didn’t know what sort of artist she was, which I guess is a valid complaint, but when her earlier choices were criticized, what can you expect? She probably shouldn’t have gone anywhere near that Clarkson song, but she felt obligated to do so after what the judges had told her. And there’s no point if having the judges give advice if their advice is bad. They don’t have a direct say in who advances from here on out, so why have them around if they aren’t going to coax better performances out of the competitors?

The Olympics are in Vancouver, so that should be great for TV in the USA, right? No need to tape-delay stuff for ten or twelve hours until prime time. I’m cautiously optimistic that the live prime time coverage will be good, but it looks like NBC is going to suck horribly at everything else. I’ve been looking through the TV schedule and this is pretty much the way it works on the average day (all times Central):

NBC: mixture of sports/feature pieces from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. (weekdays) or 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. (weekends), the big-name sports from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., then recap/medal ceremonies/some sports coverage from 10:30-11 or 11-12.
MSNBC/CNBC/USA: USA curling & hockey matches, some other hockey matches.

And that’s it. Even if the prime time/afternoon coverage is stellar, that’s still 18 or so hours of the day in which the only other things to watch are curling and hockey. Now, I enjoy watching curling far more than I should, and I’ll watch hockey during the Olympics because I’ll watch anything during the Olympics, but some variety would be nice. During Beijing 2008 I’d watch badminton and rifle shooting at 2 in the morning. It seemed like just about anything that could be streamed live was streamed live. Obviously with the time zones there won’t be much going on at 2 in the morning this go-round, but surely I could be watching some cross-country skiing or bobsled or whatever during the daytime.

But NBC has decided that instead of streaming 2000 hours of live footage like they did in Beijing, they’d rather keep you from watching anything other than their primetime package. (This cnet article details some of the thought process—that may be too loose a term—from the bigwigs at NBC on what they’ve done to the Olympics this year.) The only live competition footage you can get online is curling and hockey. That’s it. It’s utterly pathetic. You never know what live event might turn out to be utterly gripping. Today’s Nordic combined event had a thrilling finish, and thankfully it was televised live. But for all I know there’s a dozen other exciting events we didn’t see. I think there was speed skating this afternoon, but NBC couldn’t be bothered to show it. (Granted, long track can be pretty boring, but still.)

And thankfully, I don’t live on the West Coast, or I’d be up the wall right now. Even though the Olympics are in Vancouver (which is in the Pacific time zone, in case you didn’t know), no one on the West Coast can watch the primetime coverage live on NBC. (And so far NBC has had quite a few live events on primetime.) Watching tape-delayed sports frustrates me immensely. If I want to discuss the events online with people from around the world, I can get screwed over when other countries’ TV stations broadcast more events live than NBC does. Or if I venture on to facebook or twitter I can see results posted before NBC has a chance to air them.

And this go-round, you have to be subscribed to a participating cable or satellite provider—in Beijing anybody in the USA could get all of NBC’s online video. This year’s coverage is a clusterfuck on so many levels that I hope NBC never wins the Olympics TV rights ever again.

I understand these people have jobs, but it seems that their life revolves around two places: bars and tanning salons. These people are the shallowest ever. And they’re ugly, which makes it even funnier. Except the show isn’t so much funny as it’s just sad. I think these people are utterly pathetic, but I don’t really feel any compassion or sympathy for them. That’s not a combination that makes me want to keep watching. The show doesn’t have enough unintentional comedy value for me to tune in. It just disgusts me. I had to turn it off before I lost all faith in humanity. They get drunk at clubs, flash their underwear (or their abs), and then act surprised when they get punched in the face.

And what’s with the tanning? Do people really find that attractive? Orange skin is for muppets, not people. Not to mention that whole cancer thing. These people disgust me. Just look at them:

The guys hit the gym, and the women hit the plastic surgeon’s office, but ugly is ugly and trashy is trashy and these people are both.

Basically, this show has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The people are ugly, stupid, shallow, contemptible, and completely unsympathetic. And the show’s tone doesn’t help. If the show just set out to mock these morons, it would probably be edited in a way so as to be reasonably entertaining. And if it took itself overly seriously, it probably would be unintentionally funny. But it sits somewhere in the middle and sucks as a result.

The first great outrage occurred when Allison Iraheta failed to make it to the final. She burst on the scene with this performance in the round of 36:

How did she not make the final? WTF, America?

That miscarriage of justice was bad enough. Yet the American populace sank to even more horrible depths when it came down to the final two: the pleasant, competent, but somewhat bland Kris Allen versus Adam Lambert, a man whose incredibly gifted vocal pyrotechnics were matched only by his usually outrageous appearance. I don’t mean this essay to be a diatribe against Kris Allen. He was never one of my early favorites—I started the season thinking Adam, Allison, Lil, and Alexis were the front-runners, although the performances of the latter two turned out to be very disappointing. But Kris came on strong and was one of the few contestants who got better as the competition went on. He had quite a few very solid performances, but his talent paled in comparison to Adam’s, and Kris even admitted as much, saying Adam deserved to win. Adam’s talent is mindblowing, and perhaps his best performance was this:

.

And yet, even though Adam obviously deserved to win, he didn’t. Commentators have often examined the show and its popularity in terms of a red state/blue state divide, or in terms of a Christian/secular divide or a Southern/non-Southern one. When a red-state inhabitant or a Christian or a Southerner goes up against someone from the other categories in the finale, he or she usually wins. And with the down-home church-going guitar-playing country boy from a small city in Arkansas going up against the flaming, screamingly homosexual Californian Jew, the result should have been no surprise. Kris Allen certainly had his share of genuine fans, and I’ll certainly admit that I can see how Adam’s over-the-top voice might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I can’t help but feel that had Adam not been so obviously gay the result might have been different. Is everyone who prefers Kris Allen a homophobe? No, of course not. But I find it hard to believe that it wasn’t a huge factor for many people. Many were turned off by Adam’s almost always outrageous appearance and ignored his talent, much to the chagrin of those of us who’d rather see the more talented person win.

Let me start right off by saying that I’m a huge fan of Glee. I start with a positive disposition to any sort of movie or TV musical, and I was hooked on Glee from the pilot, not only for the musical sequences but also for the outstanding ensemble of character actors and actresses, the cameos by Broadway superstars, and the bitingly sharp writing. The first few episodes of Glee have shown that it’s willing to mock Christians, cheerleaders, people with lisps, homosexuals, blacks, football players, mysophobes, and plenty of others. There were the occasional sensitive moments—Kurt coming out to his dad, Will learning from his wife that they’re going to have a baby, Ken’s longing for Emma despite the fact that she’s hopelessly in love with Will, etc. But last night’s episode (“Wheels” is the episode title) went way off the deep end of maudlin sentimentalism with a veritable miscellany of topics fit for an after-school special or a very special episode.

We got treated to not one, not two, but three jolts of needlessly dramatic emotionalism. We’ve already seen Kurt come out to his friends and his dad, so I felt like that topic had been covered sufficiently. But when his dad gets a threatening phone call, he’s willing to flub an audition to keep from getting the solo he had so desperately wanted, admitting this to his dad in a scene that manages to make Kurt look like he’s bragging about how humble he is—willing to put aside his desire to be the diva to reduce his dad’s discomfort at being harassed for having a gay son. One could even make the argument that giving into this sort of homophobia is undesirable. Why should Kurt pass up the chance to sing “Defying Gravity”? Just because an anonymous prank caller is a homophobe? Just because his dad is clearly still struggling to come to grips with the extravagantly flamboyant homosexuality of his only son?

We also got bashed over the head with the “people in wheelchairs have feelings too” message. Up to now Artie had been mocked occasionally (for example, when Sue was dividing up the Glee club and calling everybody by their stereotypes), but he seemed to fit in with the rest of the club pretty well. When the school doesn’t have the money for a handicapped-accessible bus to sectionals, the rest of the team seems pretty happy to throw Artie under the metaphorical bus and make him ride with his dad while the rest of the glee club gets to share a fun bus ride. First of all, I question the fact that no one on the club would have stood up for him. Sure, there’s a few divisions, and nobody except Finn likes Rachel, but everyone seemed to like Artie. Second, what sort of douchebag would reject a girl because her stutter was fake? WTF? It’s bad to discriminate against people who are “different,” but okay to reject people who are “normal”? Double standards, much? It’s like those deaf people who have deaf kids and then get offended when someone suggests that they treat their kids’ deafness with cochlear implants. Yeah, don’t give your kids a chance to enjoy music or anything like that. Great call.

Finally, we got a seemingly bizarre moment of kindness from the delightfully diabolical Sue Sylvester, who, when forced by the principal to have open tryouts for Quinn’s spot on the Cheerios, puts a Down’s syndrome student on the squad. Will is confused and certain that Sue has something nefarious in mind, but then we cut to a scene with Sue at a nursing home visiting…her Down’s syndrome older sister. A fascinating window into the softer side of Sue, to be sure, but piled onto the others it was just too much.

Any of these three things might have been nice had they been the sole dramatic subplot in an otherwise funny episode—for example, having all the glee clubbers get around in wheelchairs was a great bit of writing. But piling them up dragged down a bright, uplifting, yet satirical show, turning it into just another after-school special. As I said in a facebook status last night, if I wanted to watch a second-rate after school special I’d watch Degrassi.*

* In case you didn’t already know, I’m pretty much obsessed with Degrassi. I love that show way more than any twenty-something heterosexual male should. But it does have a tendency to get a little shark-jumpingly preachy every now and then. And it also has a tendency to reuse plotlines—I knew when we got to Jimmy’s erectile dysfunction episode we had used just about every possible plotline. Come to think of it, Degrassi has had a guy in a wheelchair (Jimmy), homosexuals and bisexuals (Marco, Dylan, Alex, Paige, etc.), and the mentally disabled (Emma’s dad, who was left brain-damaged after an acid-trip led to either falling or jumping off a bridge). You can’t beat Degrassi in a very-special-episode contest, so don’t even bother trying, Glee.