Moody Dudes

I've been saving that name for FOREVER. Isn't that just a perfect band/album/song name? Yes. It is.

Anyway, I'm tired/annoyed so here are just some songs to listen to and think about:

"You Love Me" by DeVotchKa



"When you said you loved me, I thought you loved me." Included on the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine, one of my favorite cinematic worlds to get lost in.

"I Can See Your Tracks" by Laura Veirs



"Oh, I can see your tracks, but I won't follow them. I'll just hope for rain, or some kind of crazy wind, to erase them, and chase them into oblivion." It's on a cell phone commercial of some kind, but don't let that deter you from listening to this beautiful song...It's currently the most-played track on my new computer, an easy feat when every other song has been listened to a grand total of zero times.

"Between the Bars" by Elliott Smith



"I'll kiss you again, between the bars." Well, this is perfect.

"Go On, Say It" by Blind Pilot



"A hitchhiker once told me I don't talk a lot. Made me feel fine, made me quiet." That line is one of my favorites out of any song that I've heard. I wish I had written that. I wish I was talented enough to write anything half this great.

"Ghost Town" by First Aid Kit



"If you've got visions of the past, let them follow you down. They'll come back to you, some day." I've been singing this line a lot lately. (I am by no stretch of the imagination a "good" singer so I probably am doing a disservice to the song by singing it.) Just wonderful.

"So Nice So Smart" by Kimya Dawson



"You're so nice and you're so smart." For some reason I started thinking about this song a lot lately, despite not having heard it since whenever the last time I watched Juno was (at least a year ago). Something about it just really stuck with me. It's very simple, very listenable. (Not to mention the silly "I like my new bunny suit, when I wear it I look cute" line that I also like a lot.)

Guess I could have made a much easier to listen to playlist but I'm feeling difficult. Good night.

Sticking To That Creepy Guy's Guns

Last week when I was at the library (the very same library from which I borrowed A Gate to the Stairs and Brick, along with Bonnie and Clyde and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; hope I get around to watching those before they're due) I used the schwanky computer lab to look up books. In front of me was this very large, old guy with a gigantic tattoo on his leg. Guess what he was doing? He was researching guns. Handguns, pistols, rifles. Not only was he looking for pictures and information about them, he was also looking at places to buy them from. Needless to say, I was thoroughly creeped out.

If you're wondering what that preface has to do with anything, well, truth is, it doesn't. I just have virtually nothing to say. Life is  pretty dull around these parts. I did manage to convince my cat to sleep on my bed, though. It's adorable. HE'S SO WARM AND ADORABLE OH EM GEE.

The most noteworthy thing I've done so far is think a lot about Digimon. This happens periodically. That's what you get when you stay indoors your whole life! Someone started a thread on NeoGAF about that horrible game that I hated on the PS1, Digimon World. I rented that game once from Blockbuster and it was just so confusing. Also, we didn't have a PS1 memory card so we always had to start all stinking' over. I hated that. If you read the thread you'll hear them griping about how their Agumons digivolved into Poomon. That was because the game was idiotic and you couldn't digivolve into the Digimon you were SUPPOSED to. I mean, who does that? Bandai liked to torture children, apparently. Awful.

Anyway, it got me thinking - man, how awesome would it be if they had a JRPG where you played as Takato and it was basically just the entire plot of Tamers (the 3rd season)? That would be an EXCELLENT game. Tamers was one of the best anime that I've ever seen (I've come to consider the different seasons like different series; same with Pokemon, but let's not talk about that right now). I need to get it on DVD. Too bad it's so darn expensive because it was only released in limited edition sets.

This is going slightly off-topic, but it always makes me sad when people say, "LOL HEY REMEMBER WHEN WE LIKED DIGIMON?! YEAH THAT SHOW WAS AWESOME LAWL WELL WHATEVAH BACK TO JERSEY SHORE." Why can't you -still- like Digimon? I mean, you're not actively watching it anymore, but still. It hasn't changed. It also bothers me when people say the opposite and are like, "UGH YOU LIKE DIGIMON? THAT SHOW WAS FER LOSERS MAN WTF GROW UP BRB BUYING KEGGER FOR RAGING KEG PARTY ANOCHE BRUH." Maybe I'm just a misanthrope (okay, not "maybe") and maybe I just don't want to grow up, but Digimon and Pokemon and even stinking Sailor Moon are better than the majority of the things people my age like to do in their spare time.

I like to say that we spend the majority of our lives as adults, so why should we grow up NOW? And why do we have to devolve (IMO) from liking completely fine, normal things like Mario Party 4 to driving around to some coffee shop while blasting whatever awful music they're playing on Z100, then stopping by LuAnn Herschfeld's "awesome" party where no one can even hear each other over the underage drunkards playing Beer Pong and the girls grinding and the music blaring? This is slightly more descriptive than necessary, isn't it?

I understand that people change, but maybe I don't want to accept that. Maybe I don't want to move on from liking to rant about how bad Digimon World was on the PS1 and maybe I don't want to stop hyping the latest Pokemon games. But the alternatives aren't any better, anyway. Perhaps there isn't anything even wrong with liking to talk about Pokemon and Digimon. Maybe I shouldn't feel so stupid and "immature" for talking about Pokemon and Digimon OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN in these last gigantic paragraphs.

Why do we have to grow up? And why does growing up have to mean THIS? That may be an extreme case, but then again, is it? It's something to think about.

What to expect for tomorrow: me struggling yet again to post something. Or maybe not.

P.S. I was totally about to start ranting about my hatred of Taylor Momsen but I think that's enough for today.

I Feel Like I Don't Have Much To Say

today. I just can't think of anything to write about.

I'm pretty obsessed with How to Train Your Dragon right now, so let's talk about this:

This year so far has been pretty terrible when it comes to movies. The Top 5 best-reviewed films of this year so far include 4 movies that were only released in limited and Toy Story 3. While the Top 5 at the end of the year does sometimes look a lot like this, by the summer months, we should be seeing more films that people have actually heard of in the Top 5 - at least one more. Toy Story 3 was amazing (it's probably going to be my pick for the best of the year/decade/my life, etc.)

Look at the Top 10 though - only one of them came out in wide release, too, and that was How to Train Your Dragon, coming in right after TS3 at 6th. The other four were Exit Through the Gift Shop, which I saw, the movie that won Best Foreign Film (so technically it came out last year, anyway), and two other films that most people have never heard of this.

The Oscars expanded the Best Picture playing field to 10 films last year so that wide releases would get attention and they'd get more ratings. Sadly, in a perfect world they would do this because there are 10 very deserving films. Back in the 90s, 80s, 70s, etc., people had heard of the Best Picture nominees. People had SEEN them. Does this mean movies are getting worse in general, or does it just mean that Hollywood productions are starting to lose steam? I'm thinking the latter.

Another thing: when the two best wide releases of the year (so far, but I might wager that they still will be in December) are animated films, I think that means that we need to start giving more credence to the animation genre. Animation is SO GOOD. Every year my top film is usually animated. Last year, it was Up. The year before that? WALL-E. Most widely-released animation isn't as good as Pixar, but every Pixar film is just as good, if not better, than the live action films that come out around it. Same with the limited-release Miyazaki films (I think Tales of Earthsea is this year; last year, it was the pretty good Ponyo), which always place in my EXCLUSIVE "Best of the Year" list. (It's exclusive because it only exists in my head.) DreamWorks either is really good (HTTYD, the original Shrek, and I guess Kung-Fu Panda even though I thought it was boring with AMAZING animation) or really horrible (every other film they've made except Shrek 2, which I for one liked). I almost didn't see HTTYD because the ad campaign was so horrible; they were selling it as yet another pop culture-referencing, stupidly kiddy film, which it isn't, AT ALL. People need to understand that animation is not just kid's fare anymore, and even when it is targeted towards kids (like Ponyo), most animation studios don't seem to get that "kid's film" does NOT equal "idiot's film."

This summer, the movies have been pretty lackluster, TS3 aside, obviously. This has been griped about a lot lately, mostly in passing, apparently, because I can't seem to find many articles. Here's one. Every movie that people hoped would be good turned out to be horrible or mediocre. Iron Man 2 had high expectations and fell flat, critically. I heard a LOT of people say that it was awful. Robin Hood was bad and failed commercially, too; Prince of Persia, The A-Team, Jonah Hex. The only summer film to come out that's gotten good reviews (ONCE AGAIN OTHER THAN TS3 I WILL REITERATE THIS OFTEN) is The Karate Kid, another "kid's film."

The only movies coming out that I'm excited for this summer now are Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Nothing else seems like it's going to be worth the money to me. Despicable Me's been getting good reviews; The Kids Are All Right's supposed to be good, although that's in limited. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (starring Hiccup!) looks like it could be pretty decent. But even though the word on these movies may be good right now, it's more likely than not that they'll end up being the same old dreck that's been pumped out all year. I call it the MacGruber effect: a movie gets positive early buzz but ends up having a negative consensus. But I guess we'll see.

I hope this summer picks up in terms of movies, but I don't see that happening.

(On a side note - does anyone want to get an email saying that a new post has been published? Let me know and I can sign you up for that.)

And though we are falling stars, we feel just fine: The Romanticism of Yoko and Pinkerton

I'm a bit of a romantic.

Not in that horrible sense meaning "lover of Sandra Bullock films and other examples of extreme sap-pery," but in the sense that I can't help but find myself attracted to stories of trial and failure.

My love of these types of stories is so great that sometimes the presence of them alone can compel me to do or learn about something that I otherwise would not have.

This happens a lot, probably the most often in fact, with music. Let's discuss.

---

One of my favorite albums is Yoko by the little-known band Beulah. Their biggest claim to commercial fame is their song "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" being featured in The O.C., a show I know way too much about for someone who hasn't even seen more than 25 minutes of it before. 

"Popular Mechanics" could be called representative of Beulah's larger body of work. It's sunny, breezy, and it sounds like something you'd hear on a boardwalk. The lyrics are clever, sometimes biting ("Don't believe a word he says/he wouldn't ever take his heart out for you"), and while they're not necessarily upbeat, the music definitely is.

But to call this the Poster Boy of Beulah's work as a whole would be an outright lie. Yoko is the story of what happens to a band when it's on the brink of destruction. Yoko is what a breakup sounds like. 

It's fitting that the title is the name of the woman often credited for breaking up the Beatles. Here, in a nutshell, is the history of Yoko's production, courtesy Wikipedia:

The period surrounding Yoko's conception and recording was one of great personal strife for the band - [Miles] Kurosky split with his long-term girlfriend and three of the six band members went through divorce while the record was being written, rehearsed and recorded. Amid all this, the foundations of the band appeared to be shaking; rumours of a break-up were rife and well-founded. The mood of the album was certainly much darker and the band phased back much of their instrumentation, preferring to create more of a live sound than layering multiple overdubs atop the mix. The album took a much rockier direction than their previous efforts; yet, upon its release in 2003, attracted a similar lauding that had greeted their previous two records.

So, obviously, heartbreak had a huge effect on the album. The album opens with "A Man Like Me," which is a plea to a lover on her way out to stay. "So try/try lifting all your weight/for a man/a man gone wrong," sings Kurosky, lead singer and one of the principal songwriters for the band. From "A Man Like Me," which is quiet with well-placed outbursts of energy in the chorus, we head into the unbelievably angry "Landslide Baby." Beulah was known for its clever and personal lyrics, and they're definitely there on "Baby;" this time, however, the lyrics (of which "I do believe that you hate yourself" is one) are now combined with a sound that better fits their mood as opposed to the sunny pop Beulah fans were used to. It's angry, it's loud, but it's still catchy and genuine pop. "Baby" stands out as the harshest and maddest song of the band's, and when it comes on right after the sentimental "A Man Like Me," you know that you're in for something quite different.

The band was also once reasonably religious (although it didn't have the greatest bearing on their music) but as their lives started to crumble around them and they fell into their states of (relative) despair, that belief was called into question. This was communicated in "Me and Jesus Don't Talk Anymore". The lyrics are slightly vague, but the devil is talked to "have a lease" and to be "riding with me again," along with "Maybe I'm losing sleep over nothing/maybe I'll be just fine/He tears me away from all those little things/that seemed so important when I knew you." The song ultimately is another lamentation of a relationship ended; this time, it seems more like it's a relationship with Jesus than with a woman, but it resonates all the same, even for those of us less-religious. (It's also really darn good, just in general.)

The sunny pop that the band was most well-known for did not belie any sunny or necessarily optimistic attitude. Even on The Coast is Never Clear, the album that came before Yoko and one that similarly had a troubled production, the recording process was tough and reflected in the lyrics: "Kurosky was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and took daily therapy sessions, which informed the lyrical mood of the record, which was often incredibly downbeat, very much at odds with the breezy, summery feel of the music." However, with Yoko, it was much more obvious that something had gone wrong, if not with the music, then with the band itself.

The band had been struggling to get by from the beginning, from company buyouts to poor sales, but it was never apparent to those who did buy their albums and see their shows that they were really going to call it quits until Yoko. In a way, Yoko the album was the "Yoko" that broke up the band; Kurosky and company flat-out said that Beulah would be no more if the album didn't reach gold status.

Guess what? It didn't. 

While other indie bands were recognized for their greatness and became cult figures post-breakup, even if they didn't necessarily have much fame when they were together, Beulah did not and does not have much of that. Yes, there are devoted fans who constantly lament the death of the band, but in the broadest sense, Beulah failed. They failed, and it stung. While Kurosky rose from the ashes to release a solo album, he and his former band still has not received the recognition they truly deserve. Beulah has faded away, for the most part, and it's a tragedy.

But what a way to go out.

Yoko is one of the band's most critically acclaimed releases, shining bright amongst its brothers. There are, indeed, shades of Coast and the tunes that made Beulah popular with the fans it did have, like "My Side of the City" (which was even featured in a Dance Dance Revolution game!) and "Your Mother Loves You Son." 

The most sensitive and beautiful stuff of their career is on the album, too, like "Don't Forget to Breathe" and my number one favorite, "Hovering." "Don't Forget to Breathe" is the penultimate track to not just the album but also to the band's career. It may be hard to imagine that one track less, less than four minutes long, could end an eight-yearlong journey so perfectly, but it did. When listening to it, the song doesn't really sound like anything special, and it definitely doesn't sound like anything on the other three previous albums (Coast, When Your Heartstrings Break, and Handsome Western States, in reverse chronological order), but that's why there are lyrics. The song sounds like a letter to the people who never cared, never took the time to listen: "Your last words will not be heard/there's too many of them that no one deserves/I don't need your love." This is driven home by the chorus, which rhetorically asks outright, "Is it worth me trying?" 

While their sales weren't strong and their fanbase still remains small, I'm going to answer emphatically "yes." While most people don't know of Beulah, to the people who do, they mean a lot. Their work took a dramatic and darker turn on Yoko, but honestly, it was for the best, and turned out to be the one album that I'll want to have with me always. Yoko might have broken up the band, but if they had to go, at least they left us with this as a parting gift.

---

The best example of this kind of behavior is my love for Weezer's Pinkerton, probably one of the greatest romantic(ist) stories in not-really-that-recent-anymore musical history.

Pinkerton's story is one that I have studied in-depth, but at the same time, it's complicated for me to explain. For the average listener, it can be summed up more easily. It was their sophomore album, following the much poppier and overall happy-go-lucky Blue Album that had sold exceedingly well. The thing was,  Pink was the complete antithesis to Blue, being dark and seen as the progenitor of that now mainstream, much-maligned "emo" genre. Here, as seen on Wikipedia:

Pinkerton is named after the character B.F. Pinkerton from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and the album is loosely based on the opera. Like the Puccini opera, the album includes other references to Japan, Japanese people, and Japanese culture from the perspective of an outsider who considers Japan fragile and sensual. The album's lyrical themes infuse the Japanese allusions with its first-person narrator's romantic disappointments and sexual frustration, the latter at times visceral and graphic. Due to the cohesion of the narrative themes, the album plays as a concept album about sexual longing and lost love, and because of its first-person voice, many consider Cuomo's songs autobiographical. Cuomo has stated that "the 10 songs are sequenced in the order in which I wrote them (with two minor exceptions). So as a whole, the album kind of tells the story of my struggle with my inner Pinkerton."

But then, you still don't know the real background. It started with a leg surgery.

Rivers Cuomo, our Byronic Hero, was born with one leg shorter than the other, a defect that prevented him from pursuing his childhood soccer dreams and required major surgery. If you have seen Cuomo recently, you would know that, obviously, the surgery was successful, but it was still insanely painful. Thus, he took to writing in the hospital as he recovered.

Also during this post-Blue time, Cuomo, disillusioned with the rock star life (a theme he would later address in album opener "Tired of Sex," as well as center the lost Weezer opus Songs from the Black Hole around), took some time off, enrolling at Harvard. Living in self-imposed near-isolation, this period of time was dark for the front man, inspiring directly some of the greatest songs on the album (my personal favorite and lead single, "El Scorcho," has some direct Harvard influence, as Cuomo once told the Crimson, "...one example is, in 'Pinkerton,' in 'El Scorcho,' two lines in the song are actually taken from someone else’s essay in my [Expository Writing] class. Because at one point, we had to do a little workshop thing, and we each got assigned to review someone else’s essay. So, I reviewed this one person’s essay, and I liked some of the lines in it, so I took them and used them in the song"). 

Some other inspired moments from the album include "No Other One," in which Cuomo tells us that, despite all of the things he doesn't like about the girl he's with, "She's all I got/and I don't wanna be alone." "No Other One" has some of the best instrumentation on the album, but it's Rivers Cuomo's sincere and sensitive vocals that really do it for me. "The Good Life" references Rivers persevering disillusionment again; while some called it out for its occasionally less than stellar lyrics ("shaking booty/making sweet love all the night," anyone?), it was a pretty honest expression of the desire to return to the less lonely life, the same one he dreaded in "Tired of Sex."

["The Good Life"] chronicles the rebirth of Cuomo after an identity crisis as an Ivy League loner. Cuomo, who had been isolated while at Harvard, wrote it after "becoming frustrated with that hermit's life I was leading, the ascetic life. And I think I was starting to become frustrated with my whole dream about purifying myself and trying to live like a monk or an intellectual and going to school and holding out for this perfect, ideal woman. And so I wrote the song. And I started to turn around and come back the other way."

Pinkerton is a chronological album, presented in the order it was written. Rivers Cuomo starts off as a rock star getting tired of the lifestyle ("Tired of Sex"), lamenting about it ("Why Bother?") until he decides to lead a life in isolation, as a "hermit" in a completely new place (Harvard). The single most-discussed song on the album, "Across the Sea," recounts the absolute lowest point in Cuomo's romanticist journey to find himself. It's the heartbreaking story of his receiving a fan letter from someone all the way "across the sea," and, even knowing he'll never see her, ever, falls in love with her, largely because he's so lonely. Fans bring it up so often because it's such a specific tale, as opposed to the slightly more general but still extremely personal "No Other One" and "Getchoo", and you can feel the pain that he's feeling. The exceptional songwriting that is heard throughout the album stands out the most here.

So the album stemmed from pain to begin with. Despite that, it was quite brilliant. The problem? Few people initially felt the same. Fans felt alienated, critics called the lyrics childish, overwrought, and insincere, and the band faded into the exact thing that Cuomo had wanted to get out of so badly, obscurity, and even more so, isolation. The album crashed and burned; being a very dark and wintry album released in mid-September, the teenagers that made up the majority of Weezer's fanbase either were disinterested in it when they had it or did not feel compelled to buy it. The sales were awful, and it seemed that what the critics of Blue had thought was true: the band was just a novelty act, a two-hit wonder. (You can read an interesting and informative thesis by a Harvard grad on the subject here.)

As everyone familiar with the phrase "Beverly Hills, that's where I want to be" knows, Weezer isn't exactly suffering anymore; at least, not commercially. But it is critically and artistically that they have let their game down. Cuomo thought that the failure of Pinkerton was everything that made it so appealing to the people who embraced it, albeit a little too late; he thought it was too personal, too romantic. He famously compared it to "being really drunk at a party and having everyone watch you." But if Pinkerton is what Rivers Cuomo produces when he's "drunk," then I hope that he sips some of that alcohol again soon. 

(Note: while Weezer's absolute worst album, Make Believe, sold a ton, the two similarly awful albums to follow it were not nearly as successful, and the band, last I heard, has now found themselves without a record label. While they're sure to end up somewhere else soon, it's a sign that maybe today's listeners would be more receptive, even encouraging, of a new Pinkerton-style Weezer album. Rivers Cuomo, though, being the Byronic figure he is, is probably too arrogant to ever admit that he was wrong about thinking that Pink was dreck, and we'll probably see him in even stranger facial hair and outfits to come.)

---

What does it say about our society that it's the tragedies that stay with us the most? Better yet, what does it say about us that we let these musical tragedies occur? 

You may think that the story of Weezer isn't tragic, and as I said before, commercially, no, it isn't. But artistically, the death of Pinkerton and the band's integrity is a loss for lovers of good music.

Beulah's story is most sympathetic, especially when you consider that they never really achieved the success that they wanted to or deserved. But I do believe that the band appreciated the fans it did have. Why would they give us four excellent albums if they didn't? 

The romanticism of music is the most compelling to me, but in other media it is of interest and importance, too. Maybe we'll get to that someday.

Download: "Don't Forget to Breathe" and "Landslide Baby" by Beulah; "El Scorcho" and "Across the Sea" by Weezer; *BONUS* "Hovering" by Beulah 

I'd recommend that you buy Yoko here. 

And I'd also suggest that you purchase Pinkerton here. (A deluxe edition is on Pre-Order here if you're interested.)

P.S. Weird teenager-y Rivers pic found here.  
P.P.S. Sorry this post has a stupid URL. I pressed publish too early. Hence the wrong "posted by" time. I actually posted it about three and a half hours later, heh. But you probably don't care!

Six

I guess you've heard of Glee. If you've ever been around at least one 15-year-old girl, or one 28-year-old guy (yeah, I don't get that, either), then you most certainly have. And if you know about the show, then you probably know that they have the second most obnoxious fanbase out there.

Until last Friday, I considered myself to be sitting on the lowest rung of that scary collective. That is no longer.

What do we blame? We blame "The Power of Madonna."

Background you don't care about: I stinking hate Madonna. Yeah, her songs are "catchy." Yeah, her style was cool. Whatever. I don't care. I don't like her. (And Desperately Seeking Susan was so bad that I couldn't watch more than 45 minutes of it. Sorry.)

For some reason, Ryan Murphy and his gang of gal pal writers thought that people my age and younger/very slightly older idolized Madonna. They also thought a lot of other stupid things that they deserve to be slapped for: they thought they knew what was a satire was. They thought they knew what a capella was. They thought they knew that it's totally cool to leave the toilet seat up in the bathroom. (FYI, it's not. At all. So put that seat down before I jam it up a place it shouldn't go...yeah, no, I won't do that. But please, I appeal to you, put that toilet seat down. Do you know how many animals die from falling into the toilet each day? MILLIONS. Yeah. Think about that.)

In actuality, they knew nothing. I was enticed by Glee at first by the happy-go-lucky musical numbers by some truly good singers and the promise of satire. I was let down, again and again. For thirteen weeks in a row, I was let down. Those musical numbers? Yeah, they weren't even live. They were overproduced and Auto-Tuned so much that even T-Pain would cry from the sheer faux perfection. That satire? Excuse me, what satire? How is this supposed to be the anti-High School Musical, again? Oh, because you have like fifteen pregnant characters? Oh, that's original! Oh, because the obviously gay kid actually comes out of the closet? Oh, that's original! (Even more original is that the fat black girl with the awesome voice, yet another innovation by the Glee creators, fell in love with him because she COULDN'T TELL HE WAS GAY. YEAH. THAT WOULD TOTALLY HAPPEN, RYAN MURPHY. TOTALLY. And when he came out of the closet, he cried and acted as if NO ONE COULD TELL. SERIOUSLY GUYS. ROUND OF APPLAUSE.) Oh, because the high school sophomores are played by some blatantly obvious 28-year-olds? Have you seen Dawson's Creek, Ryan Murphy? How old did you think they were? 16? HA. FUNNY.

 Oh, is this another example of your winning satire, Glee gang? Oh, that's just precious.

The show is not tongue-in-cheek. The show is a teen drama. All of the good reviews it gets are by people who want so badly for it to be good that they read all of this (melo)drama crud into it. I mean, dear god, people. Really? "Glee is one of the darkest shows on television. When Rachel sings 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' to herself with her hairbrush, it really shows how lonely she is inside; in fact, it may even be a metaphor for the suicidal tendencies she will most definitely soon display in an upcoming episode, and it gives her some great characterization and emotional depth." NO. NO. THE GIRL IS SINGING WITH A HAIRBRUSH. SHE IS NOT PROUST. SHUT UP. 

Why the heck do you hire Lea Michele and Matthew Morrison if they're NOT EVEN GOING TO SING LIVE? Oh, because you want those stupid little girls who are going to buy the songs off iTunes later to be able to hear the exact same song? WHO CARES? Obviously Ryan Bleeding Murphy cares more about his brand than his integrity. But then again, WHAT STINKING INTEGRITY? THIS IS THE GUY WHO MADE THE SHOW ABOUT PLASTIC SURGERY GUEST-STARRING ROSIE O'DONALD.

Despite the overproduction, the music is the best part of the show. But is that saying much? Because the writing is horrible, the editing makes me want to punch babies, the acting is sub-par, the smugness, the self-righteousness, the awkwardness, everything ignites a fire in me. A FIRE THAT BUUUURNS. This fire is outta control -- wait, this is not the time to be singing that.

So, what does Madonna have to do with me going from enjoying this show, despite pointing out its very obvious and numerous flaws, to hating it so much that I am forced to write a long and angry post punctuated with obnoxious capitalization? Because last week they showed "the" Madonna episode. Yes, as if every show worth its weight in anything needs a Madonna-centric episode. And the Madonna episode was probably the worst episode I have seen of this show so far. In fact, it's one of the worst episodes I've seen of any show this year. And I watch The Office on a regular basis! (Oh, snap. If you want to hear me rant about that show, then you'll have to give me another good three hours. We'll save that for another day.)

But first, the good. Um. Jonathan Groff was there. I love Jonathan Groff. I mean, he was pretty bad, but just the fact that he was there was nice. Um, the 4 Minutes scene was pretty awesome? Yeah. That's kind of it.

The bad? Um, does "everything else" count? Sue Sylvester just isn't that funny. That "Vogue" scene was sososososososo bad I can't even begin to explain it. The "Like a Virgin" scene? No. No. No. NO ONE DOES THAT. NOT EVEN IN DREAM SEQUENCES. And they tried to make that scene so "powerful," so interesting, but really, it wasn't. It was so painful for me to watch that whatever sad poignance it was supposed to have was totally lost on me.

This show just tries to do too much in too short of a time. It tries so hard. It's like that annoying girl in your tenth grade Earth Science class who is like, "Yeah, I do this, this, and this, and I'm awesome, and I'm so good at everything I do, because I do a lot and that makes me awesome and yeah and stuff and um, crud, do we have a test today, because I totally did not study, like, at all" and then they go and they suck at everything they try to do, and you would applaud them for their effort if they weren't so annoying, and then you have to be fake friends with them because you don't want to be mean and then you go and you take to your little blog and you go and you rant like crazy and everyone has no choice but to agree with you because you are so irritated. Yeah. It's exactly like that.

Glee. It's definitely not as bad as that show I saw once on ABC after Modern Family, The Middle, but what makes it so irritating to me is that people seem to be oblivious to its flaws. People can't watch it with a true unbiased eye because of the sparkly magic power of MUSIC by "HIGH SCHOOLERS" who are SO VERY DIVERSE. I mean, there's even a dude in a WHEELCHAIR SINGING! HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE 'EM?

Well, for me, I find it very easy. Try to watch that Madonna episode because it was really, really bad. I can't talk too much about it because my arm is starting to hurt and I might have to bite it off soon if I keep typing. Maybe the show will pick up, but personally, I doubt it, and I don't even know if I want to stick around to see if it does. I'll probably wait out Jonathan Groff's guest appearance and then just cut ties with this machine. Glee's on tonight (Tuesday) at some time that I can't remember on FOX if you care to check it out for yourself.

Thinking

 "He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid-afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

           --Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

 Download: "Lonely" by the Middle East

I think that every person who has ever felt lonely should join together so that no one will ever feel lonely again.

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Download: "North by North" by Faded Paper Figures

(Yeah, I'm on a JSF kick today.)

Buy The Recordings of the Middle East here.

Buy Dynamo here.

(PLEASE) buy Everything is Illuminated here.

(PLEEEEEASE) buy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close here.