El Paso (Breaking Bad Thoughts, or the Continuation of Sporadic Television Ramblings)

It took me a long time to get into Breaking Bad.

I downloaded the first few episodes of the first season from iTunes way back in 2008, when I was working at the student union and my job basically consisted of watching seasons of television for 30+ hours a week, while sporadically lending out billiards equipment to foreign students.

I'd been spending most of my time watching middling-to-bad shows like Dexter, Weeds and Lost, and when I started Breaking Bad, I just didn't see what the hubbub was about. You may not remember it now, but the pacing of the first season was laboriously slow (in part due to the writer's strike). I didn't care about Walt, I thought Skyler was overbearing and I saw no redeeming qualities in Jesse. I also didn't like the direction - I found all the shots of the New Mexico landscape indulgent and I hated the stylized use of color. I made it through three episodes before I determined to turn my attention to something more pressing (probably World of Warcraft).

For the next several years, I carried around that image of Breaking Bad in my head. In my mind, it was a plodding show with an uninteresting protagonist and irritating visuals.

The next year, when I was free of the union desk, is when I really started to get into television as a transcendent medium. I started watching The Wire (which I loved from the get go) and Mad Men (which, as noted in another blog, I didn't care for at first), and yet, as critical acclaim was building for Breaking Bad, I still couldn't be bothered. I was happy to sit with my headphones in while my taciturn roommate, Joe, watched it as it aired on our little TV.

I didn't give the show another shot until the summer of 2012, when it became clear that this was "an important show," and I was a boob for not keeping up with it.

I started watching it on my phone at the gym (not the best way to take in a show as dedicated to visuals as BB is) and made it through slowly but surely.

I still found the show a bit of a slog, and it wasn't until season two's finale, ABQ, that my thinking on the show changed.

In case it's been too long or you don't recognize episode titles, ABQ, is the episode where a midair collision occurs over Walt's house, just as his whole enterprise is beginning to fall apart. It turns out, that the collision is the result of an inattentive air traffic control, who failed to perform his duties due to grief over the recent death of his daughter. The daughter happened to be the girlfriend of Walt's partner, Jesse Pinkman, and she died due to asphyxiation after overdosing - a death Walt witnessed and allowed to happen. Not only that, but Walt, in his own moment of desperation, happened to share a drink with said air traffic controller earlier in the episode.

If you read that summary with no knowledge of the show, you'd think it was pure hackery - a series of absurd coincidences that have no place in a plotted piece of drama.

Twenty-twelve Kyle would agree with you (and in some ways still does). However, rather than reject the show as pure silliness, I realized that I was wanting it to be something that it fundamentally wasn't. Breaking Bad wasn't The Wire or Mad Men, Breaking Bad wasn't trying to elevate television as a medium. It was, instead, pure pulp fiction - remarkably acted and compelling pulp fiction - but pulp all the same. Walt is more akin to a comic book villain than he is to Charles Foster Kane.

The pieces started to fall into place for me there. I still didn't really care about any of the characters (a hurdle Gilligan never ended up helping me over), but I could appreciate the over-the-top plot, and I could especially appreciate where Gilligan was taking his characters. Whatever Walt did had ramifications, ramifications that debilitated not only his own soul, but the souls of any innocents in his area. I admired that the only grounding in reality that Gilligan left in his fantastical show was the one aspect of reality that is rarely seen on screens both LCD and silver - on Breaking Bad, actions have consequences.

The absurdity of Walt and Jesse's adventures only served to make this one uncomfortable and rarely confronted truth all the more mesmerizing.

All of this leads up to my critique of Felina, the final episode of the series, which aired this past Sunday.

But, before I get to Felina, I want to briefly touch on another phenomenon that has been buzzing around the tweet-o-sphere, and that is the concept of the "Bad Fan."

A few weeks ago, New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum (whom I agree with almost all the time) published this piece about Breaking Bad and the fans' interaction with the series:

A few weeks ago, during a discussion of “Breaking Bad” on Twitter (my part-time volunteer gig), we all started yakking about the phenomenon of “bad fans.” All shows have them. They’re the “Sopranos” buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and who posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else). They’re the “Girls” watchers who were aesthetically outraged by Hannah having sex with Josh(ua). They’re the ones who get furious whenever anyone tries to harsh Don Draper’s mellow. If you create a TV show, you’re probably required to say something in response to these viewers along the lines of, “Well, you know, whatever anyone gets out of the show is fine! It’s not my place to say. I’m just glad people are watching.”

Luckily, I have not created a show. So I will say it: some fans are watching wrong.

Nussbaum's conclusion is not dissimilar to what I wrote about Mad Men a few months ago:

So if we reduce all of this down, what Weiner did with the past two episodes is basically tell the audience that they've been watching Mad Men the wrong way this entire time.

Because I have nothing approaching Nussbaum's clout (probably Klout as well), I didn't opt to call out bad fans personally, I instead used Weiner as a surrogate, but our points are basically the same (they also point out a fundamental difference between Weiner and Gilligan, one is obsessively guarded, the other self-sacrificially eager to please).

This Bad Fan concept took the internet by storm, to the point that the term is now a part of the lexicon of the great and omnipresent commentariat.

The beauty of the climax of Walter White's story is that it refused to deviate from the fundamental truth underlying the show - actions. have. consequences.

Despite all of the buffoons championing #teamwalt (undoubtedly between posts railing against Skyler on various mens' rights advocacy websites), Gilligan and co. steadfastly destroyed Walter (and Jesse and Hank and Walt's entire family).

Walter Hartwell White was a fundamentally selfish man, who elevated his own ego above anything else, while simultaneously perverting the concept of family by invoking it as a justification for his amoral actions.

The episode that Nussbaum is critiquing when she posits the Bad Fan Theory is Ozymandias, the third to last episode of the series. Ozymandias is the logical termination of Walter's journey, the episode ends with Hank, Gomey, Walter and Jesse pinned down by a pack of neo-nazi's with no chance for profit, justice or redemption.

Granite State, the series penultimate episode, is even more bleak. Hank and Gomey lay in a shallow grave in the desert, Jesse is enslaved and Walt is a shell of a person, dying alone in a cabin in New Hampshire, offering $10,000 for an hour of poker, while his family suffers the consequences of his actions back in New Mexico. It was the nadir of Heisenberg.

I loved those two episodes. They were entirely consistent with the reality that Gilligan had built over the previous five seasons, and they were everything I wanted from the show.

These two episodes make what transpires in the finale truly baffling.

Felina drew a 10.8 on its initial viewing - astronomical numbers for a niche show on a niche network. The great oracle of Twitter portended this level of viewership in the week leading up to the finale, and there was no doubt that Gilligan must have had some inclination about just how monumental his series' ending would be - even some months ago when he and his staff were writing it.

Undoubtedly, he felt that he owed the viewers for sticking around for so long, and wanted to craft an episode that would satisfy them and make them feel like the five years (or four or three or a few months or a week [depending on your netflix alacrity]) had been worth it.

In the final episode of the series, Gilligan threw out everything that made Breaking Bad so remarkable. Rather than living out his miserable fate, Walter White goes out on his own terms. Not only that, but somehow manages to rectify almost all of his past misdeeds. His family walks away with ~$10m, he has some sort of resolution with Skyler, Jesse is freed, and anyone who ever crossed him (or abetting crossing of him) is blown away in a hail of gunfire or addiction to artificial sweetener. The series ends with Walt in repose, his death mask a smile, as he is surrounded by the laboratory that he loved so much.

There are no consequences for Walter White. He isn't brought to justice, he doesn't die a lonely, miserable death from cancer, he never has to witness what his actions do to Skyler, Marie, Holly, Flynn, and Jesse (and presumably the Gomey family). Instead, death comes to a dying man a little more quickly and he gets to go out a hero, rescuing Jesse, providing for his family and avenging Hank. Heisenberg's legend is secure.

The finale seems to posit that the Bad Fans were right all along. This wasn't an exploration of the pernicious effects of violence and moral compromise, this was the epic story of Walter White, unconquerable badass. #teamwalt, I guess?

There is no way that this ending doesn't fundamentally alter how I interact with the show. Everything that comes before has to be seen through the prism of Walt's final victory. It doesn't necessarily take away from the sublimity of Ozymandias and Granite State (the text is the text and the text in those instances is unflinching), but it does leave me awful confused.

Other, better critics have tried to come up with ways to reconcile this ending with the show as a whole. Nussbaum posits that it may have been a fantasy sequence, and Walt actually died in cold back in New Hampshire.

 I mean, wouldn’t this finale have made far more sense had the episode ended on a shot of Walter White dead, frozen to death, behind the wheel of a car he couldn’t start? Certainly, everything that came after that moment possessed an eerie, magical feeling—from the instant that key fell from the car’s sun visor, inside a car that was snowed in. Walt hit the window, the snow fell off, and we were off to the races. Even within this stylized series, there was a feeling of unreality—and a strikingly different tone from the episode that preceded this one.

Nussbaum herself admits that this is probably grasping at straws, but it's a way to have Felina exist within the same established universe as the 61 episodes previous.

However, Nussbaum specifically mentions a moment in that episode that struck me, as well as TV Club patriarch Todd VanDerWerff - that is, the moment when Walter, trapped in an iced in car, prays for the opportunity to make things right (his version of right, anyway) and he is delivered:

There was a good reason for Breaking Bad to be able to do this: It is, fundamentally, a religious show. I don’t mean that Walter White needs to find Jesus or Buddha or Allah (though he probably would have been better off if he turned to anything that wasn’t his own hubris). I mean that this show occupies a world with the concepts of good and evil, where “the right thing” and “the wrong thing” exist.

I agree with TVDW on this one, Breaking Bad opens with a moral choice. Walter could have easily avoided all of this if he had only taken the money from Gretchen and Elliot. Once he rejected that initial "right thing," the show tackled the consequences of compromise and the moral fracture that inevitably occurs when one gives over to darkness. By the end, there are no opportunities for good, only different paths to destruction.

Because like it or not, something like God exists in the Breaking Bad universe. He’s a vaguely deist sort of god, keeping his hands clean, mostly, but he’s there to rain down fire from the sky upon Walter White for daring to disturb the universe, and he’s there to tell Skyler White to run from New Mexico, only to have her ignore it. When Hank does the right thing and accepts punishment for beating Jesse Pinkman in season three, he’s saved from death via fairly unlikely means, and when Jesse becomes just another pawn to him, he’s marked for doom. And finally, in the finale, when Walter earnestly entreats whatever this moral force is to survive just long enough to complete his life’s work, he’s like Samson, crying out to God for his strength one last time, that he might pull the temple down upon his enemies’ heads (though a machine gun would have worked just as well).

If we reject Nussbaum's theory (which is more fantasy than actual argument, really) and we're left with just the text that we have, then I think VanDerWerff's position is the only one that can ultimately satisfy.

When the events of ABQ cease being the result of some wildly unlikely coincidences, and instead become the act of some divine intercessor, it's actually a little more palatable. Breaking Bad becomes a sort of twisted morality play, where a divine (and decidedly more Old Testament skewing, judging from the final body count) being intercedes to ensure that everybody gets the comeuppance they deserve - and is even willing to grant a little grace to make that happen.

It certainly ties into the particular look of the series - the filters, the landscapes, the many, many crane shots (particularly the final one of Walt).

Maybe we were never watching pulp to begin with, maybe the story of Walter White is a modern day myth. A myth with a messy, unclear message, to be sure, but at least one that has an internal consistency.

Or maybe the Bad Fans were right.

A Unified Theory of the Anti-hero (Starring Don Draper and Yeezy)

Buckle in folks, because I'm about to pop a wheelie on the zeitgeist.

Something has been rattling around in my brain lately, inspired by the Mad Men episode Favors (aka the one where Sally catches Don en flagrante) and two articles that were written around the time when the episode aired.

The first article was this piece in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The central thesis of the piece is that Don has essentially turned into a comic book villain.

When it was published, I took issue with it. (After all, if anyone is a cartoon villain, it's Walter White. For all its greatness, Breaking Bad is an exceptionally well-produced and well-acted pulp story.)

My issue with the piece dovetails nicely with the other aforementioned article. This one appeared in Vulture and is a Q&A with Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete Campbell. I'll quote the relevant parts:

Well, Pete makes an ass of himself in wonderful, hilarious ways.
I’m not playing it for laughs.

Right, that’s why it’s funny. Pete’s so serious. It makes his quiet moments, like when he’s alone with an empty box of cereal in his apartment, that much more sad. They’re more of a gut punch.I actually had no idea that people thought it was funny. Sometimes I think Matthew does not intend these things to be funny, so if I am having that as the outcome, then I would consider that a failure on my part. I will say that Matthew would re-shoot if he thought that I had given the editors something that they couldn’t manipulate into a performance worthy of what he’s trying to express. I do have faith that, if people are finding it funny, and if Matthew finds it funny, then I guess that was what his goal was.

The assiness referenced is a pratfall that Kartheiser performed as an irate Pete in an earlier episode. It was imminently gifable and seen as a piece of comic relief. In the interview, Kartheiser seems confused that the audience took it this way.

Both of these pieces touch on something that I've long took issue with in regards to Mad Men - the seeming discordance between showrunner Matthew Weiner's intentions and the audience's reaction to the material.

Now, I don't claim to be a savant when it comes to interpreting TV shows. (I initially didn't see the appeal of Breaking Bad.) But I find myself strangely simpatico with Weiner, in that the way that I perceive the characters and the direction he is taking them is largely predictive of the way the actual narrative plays out. So in some ways, my reaction to the reaction to Mad Men is personal.

I don't "get" a great many things on television, but I believe that I "get" Mad Men.

Pete has been my favorite character since season one because I've always believed that he was fundamentally different than the characters surrounding him (excepting Ken, who is the closest thing to a normal person the show has). Pete is emotional, empathetic and, comparatively, progressive. The most layered instances of male/female interaction on the show have come courtesy of Pete. (Pete and Peggy, Pete and Rory Gilmore.)

I also had trouble getting into the show because for the first half-dozen episodes, I just couldn't stand Don. I felt that he was a bad person. This belief was cemented when he tried to buy off his brother in the middle of the first season and it led to a suicide.

Because of my distaste for Don, I was always more sympathetic to Betty than the internet at large seems to be.

(I also never hated Glenn, and Weiner is on record as being confused why people find him creepy.)

It wasn't until the end of the first season that I kind of realized that I was feeling the way Weiner intended for me to feel.

Don, for all his charm and complexity, is fundamentally a selfish, small human being.

This realization has led to a lot of frustration on my end from people who tune in to Mad Men seemingly only to see Roger crack wise and Don engage in coast-to-coast swordplay.

(My friend Jordan rightly pointed out that it's these yahoos who provide the eyeballs that keep the show afloat, so I should be grateful for the braying masses.)

I imagine that my frustrations are felt, by an order of many magnitudes higher, by Weiner himself - which brings us back to the Atlantic piece.

As I said, I initially took umbrage with it, until the airing of this week's episode in which Don is basically twirling a Dick Dastardly mustache throughout the entire 42 minutes.

At this point it seems clear that Weiner has basically given up trying to give much nuance to Don and is just trying to force it into the audience's collective heads that Don is a bad person. Once again, charming and complex, but ultimately rotten.

(I wish I could remember who wrote the article (it may have been Todd Vanderwerff at TV Club), but I read recently that every relationship in Don's life, outside of with his children, is ultimately transactional. People are only good for what they can provide him. This is played out explicitly in Favors with Don's interaction with Ted and Art/Sylvia.)

Weiner basically has two characters act as mouthpieces for himself in the most recent two episodes. In Favors, Sally blurts out, "You make me sick!" and in The Quality of Mercy (Sunday's episode) Peggy laments, "You're a monster."

That's about as on the nose as you can get.

I think a lot about what the central thesis of Mad Men is and, up to this point, it seems to be that you can't change who you are. Behind Don's smooth veneer, Dick Whitman is always there, threatening to run. The Roger LSD arc is probably the most concise example of this idea. Roger has what he believes to be a transformative experience, but he ultimately just returns to his old ways.

The only two characters who've shown any ability to escape this paradigm are Pete and Peggy. Peggy by taking agency and leaving for another agency (though external factors nullify that decision) and Pete by learning from his past mistakes when dealing with Bob Benson. 

And the funny thing about Don being explicitly outed as a villain is the whiplash of reevaluation by viewers. In reading comments and listening to podcasts this week, there's suddenly a lot of sympathy for Betty (which should have bubbled up earlier, she's arguably been the funniest character this season) and even old creepy Glenn, who came to Sally's rescue in the worst-acted scene of the entire series.

So if we reduce all of this down, what Weiner did with the past two episodes is basically tell the audience that they've been watching Mad Men the wrong way this entire time.

I brought this up with master TV critic Alan Sepinwall on Twitter.

Some other cool folks chimed in.

The "Death of the Author" is nothing new and I believe it has some value in the world of criticism, but I feel that that value is diminished in an auteurish work like Mad Men. The show is so fundamentally Weiner's vision that to separate his intention from it entirely is to view a different show than the one that he created. 

Dr. Spaceman wrote, "If the intent isn't self-evident, tough." And he'd be right, except that I think that the intent was entirely evident throughout the run of the series. People just either a) were blind to it or b) refused to accept it. 

This ties in to my earlier thoughts on Community. It's my belief that the reaction to Mad Men was so flawed that Weiner had to alter the narrative to get his point across. It's another example of this weird convergence between author and audience that we exist in now.

I don't know where Weiner will take the show now that we've established our moral footing. It's possible that season seven just follows Don into the pits of hell, bearing out my thesis for the duration, or it's possible that he could invert it, and instead Don could rise from the ashes. Either way, it'll be much more interesting than this season's 13 episode exposition of Don's brokenness.

All of this talk on reception and reinterpretation brings us to the other important cultural event of the past week - the release of the latest album by pop music's anti-hero, Kanye West.

I'm fascinated by Yeezus. It's spectacularly layered and I probably haven't even listened to it enough to properly dissect it.

The whole point of the album seems to be Kanye daring us to like him. Like Weiner, he's done burying the lede.

To start with, the production is different than anything he's done before. These aren't pop songs and they aren't paeans like on 808s. They're aggressive and stripped down, except in a few meaningful moments, where he sounds like vintage Kanye.

Then there's the lyrics. They're similarly aggressive, and at times grotesque. ("Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign" from I'm In It being a good example).

Kanye seems hell-bent on telling us that he isn't a good guy.

In I'm In It, Assassin starts a verse with "I'm a badman you if know say." The word "badman" is said four times in the song. In I am a God (ft. God) he says, "Soon as they like you, make 'em unlike you," then goes on to reference iconic College Dropout Kanye aesthetics.

But while Kanye keeps telling us that he's a bad guy, he never actually says anything that would make you really believe that he's as bad as he wants us to believe that he is, and this calls back to what I said about the pointed throwbacks to his old sound.

On Sight is a great example of this. The whole track is basically Kanye disrespecting women and their men and it builds to a hook where Kanye says, "How much do I not give a fuck? Let me show you right now 'fore you give it up," over and over.

The thing is, Kanye never shows us anything, instead, the pulsing electro beats cut out and in comes this really beautiful classic Kanye choral sample that says, "He'll give us what we need, it may not be what we want."

And lyrically, that line reinforces Kanye's seeming position with this album, he feels that the public needs this, despite them probably wanting another amazing pop album like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

But musically, he's throttling back. It's almost passive aggressive. He's showing that he can do what people want, but he chooses not to, but at the same time, he's still giving it to us. He can't commit fully to the Yeezus persona.

This happens again at the end of what I believe to be the defining song on the album, New Slaves.

At first blush, it sounds like a very angry indictment of racism in the US, but if you listen to the lyrics, it's trite and almost toothless. It's the Akeelah and the Bee of black rage - carefully packaged to make you feel bad about racism, but not bad enough to actually do anything and certainly not bad enough to reflect on your own actions. It's confronting racism at arm's length.

Then, after Kanye finishes his rant with, "I'm about to air shit out, I'm about to tear shit down, what the fuck y'all gon' say now?" he apologizes again, this time blessing us with that gorgeous Frank Ocean segment.

Repeatedly, Kanye gets right up to the line and then pulls back and gives us what he knows we want - be it chipmunk soul or PBR&B or Justin Vernon.

And once Kanye, like Weiner, established that (at least for this record) he's a bad guy, he invites us to reevaluate his older work from this new paradigm.

On Sight has reference to both Monster and Stronger. 

In the first verse, he says, "A monster 'bout to come alive again," and the song concludes with, "I need right now, uh oh, I need right now."

Allow me to quote Mr. West himself, in reference to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (this comes from the great NYT piece by John Caramincia):

“Dark Fantasy” was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: “Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves.”

So I think what Kanye is saying, in referencing two of his biggest hits (from MBDTF and Graduation respectively) is that he's essentially been playing us so far. When you listen to monster, the lyrics are braggadocios and aggressive, but not evil. With On Sight, Kanye is attempting to set the record straight. We may perceive him to be this brilliant pop artist who makes songs we all like, but in reality he's an actual monster. 

West again:

It’s always going to be 80 percent, at least, what I want to give, and 20 percent fulfilling a perception. If you walk into an old man’s house, they’re not giving nothing. They’re at 100 percent exactly what they want to do. I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.

This dynamic crops up again on Hold My Liquor. 

Chief Keef says, "You say you know me my nigga/But you really just know the old me." Which seems to be a reference to Heartless where Kanye says, "I did some things but that's the old me."

Keef's line is a subversion of the line from Heartless. On that track, Kanye is apologetic, but on Hold My Liquor, he's confessional. 

So tracking back to my thoughts on reinterpretation, I think with Yeezus, Kanye is inviting us to reinterpret his work with GOOD Music. Up until Kanye "popped a wheelie on the zeitgeist" with Yeezus he and the GOOD collective were seen as the saviors of pop music. They created this insane collaboration of talent that produced several of the best songs of the past few years and everyone expected that Yeezus would be a continuation of that. Instead we get this dark, half-apologetic, half-shameless record.

Unlike Weiner, however, I don't think it fundamentally changes the way we think about GOOD. As much as Kanye may want us to look for subtext in those records, I'm not certain that it exists.

Yeezus ends with the track Bound 2 which is just vintage Kanye. Productionwise, it sounds like it could have come from College Dropout.

Bound 2 is everything that Yeezus isn't. It's hopeful, lush, and loving.

So why did Kanye end his opus with this track? I think there's a lot of significance in the title. "Bound" could be a reference to how Kanye feels about his persona as the savior of pop music, it could be a reference to him being "bound to fall in love," it could be any number of things. "2" is equally significant. It references the two people in a relationship, it references being bound to a partner, and it could again be a reference to him being bound to his persona.

So what is Kanye trying to say with this album? Is he Yeezus? The angry, dismissive monster from the first nine tracks? Or is he Kanye West from Bound 2 and his earlier albums?

The best guess that I can hazard is that it's either a resignation - he's bound to be Kanye even though inside he's Yeezus, or it could be a rebirth - an admission that Yeezus lurks inside of him, but ultimately he is Kanye West, whomever that may be.

Introduction to Diminishing Returns (The State of Community)

Up until late last week, it wasn't certain whether or not NBC's cult sitcom, Community, would see a fifth season.

The show was in a tough spot as is, with NBC/Sony firing series creator and showrunner Dan Harmon at the conclusion of the third season. This left a skeleton crew of writers and new showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port in the unenviable position of maintaining a series that had become synonymous with Harmon's vision.

The results were mixed. The show was still capable of being blisteringly funny, but the characters seemed to regress (a problem that began at the tail end of Harmon's tenure) and the show's trademark "meta-ness" was exploited to exhaustion.

At times, the writers showed an awareness of this. In an episode set in Pierce's ostensibly haunted mansion, Abed finds his way into a security booth and begins an on-the-nose deconstruction of both sitcom tropes and Community's own tendency to subvert them in an attempt at cleverness that often ended up seeming just as forced and tired as the warmed-over turds that they were lampooning.

If the show had maintained this level of lampshading, it may have been more interesting. Instead, the creative team took an easier route and just barreled through the season, allowing each character to hit his or her requisite shallow emotional benchmarks while being placed in front of a revolving set of contrived, high concept backgrounds.

This all came to a head in last week's season finale, which was widely and appropriately panned as a jumbled, incoherent mess.

Writer Megan Ganz, a very capable and talented holdover from the Harmon regime, did her best to provide a satisfying resolution to the character arcs that was faithful to the show's vision and that would hold up as a series' finale or a transition between the fourth and fifth seasons.

Unfortunately, not only was the finale bad, it was embarrassing - downright cringe-inducing at times. In her attempt to recapture Community's whimsical spark, Ganz instead bastardized it and turned the show into the same self-important, unfunny mess that critics had often labeled it.

Community is a show that I love and deeply respect, but I've never been attached to it on an emotional level the way that I was with something like Scrubs. In its attempts to avoid being fake, the show prevented itself from ever being genuinely sincere. You can't expect the audience to cry along with the characters if, in between sobs, they're shooting winks at the camera.

However, I can't blame Community's failures on the showrunners, at least not directly. The blame for Community's slide rests, instead, on the fans.

Any show that's remotely weird, but manages to scrounge up a fanbase (Archer, Arrested Development, Dr. Who) is going to generate stupidly obsessive online discourse. This is actually good, because it's better for people to think about what they watch and why they watch it rather than for them to just blithely consume. The problems begin when these same cultish fanbases mistake their enthusiasm for intelligence. Community may very well be a smart show (I believe that it is), but watching and enjoying it doesn't make you smart. Winning online fan favorite polls doesn't generate the kind of martyrific pop culture cred that many of the fans feel it does. It only serves to create an insular, alienating echo chamber that's incapable of having a discussion that goes beyond either "This is the smartest show evar!" or "This show sucks without Harmon!" It's a circlejerk of the most insufferable kind.

The echo chamber only intensifies when the creator steps down from his authorial pedestal to interact with the fans.

I'm always interested in hearing what a creator has to say about their piece of art, and I put a lot of faith in authorial intent. (This is actually a somewhat antiquated view of criticism.) What I'm not interested in, is telling the the creator what I think his or her art should be - I don't believe that that's the role of the audience, particularly not when the work being discussed is of ostensible importance.

Unfortunately, through the wonders of the digital age, audiences have access to creators to the point of intrusion. If an artist has a Twitter account, he or she is going to be inundated with suggestions, critiques, paeans, etc. Because artists are human beings too, there's no way that they are immune to the deluge of admiration.

There's nothing wrong with people wanting to interact with their fans and vice-versa, but issues arise when the fans begin to influence (either directly or indirectly) the creative process. Very rarely is it a good idea for showrunners to kowtow to fans' expectations. I think we all remember Nikki and Paolo.

The problem is exacerbated when the artist is someone like Dan Harmon, who Alex Pappademas points out in his piece, is, in many ways, an overt narcissist with an enormous ego. He also appears to struggle with severe self-doubt.

That's not to cast aspersions at Harmon. It's impossible to create anything of value without first believing your thoughts to be valuable.

This paradoxical pride/shame personality will naturally gravitate toward flattery. In the early days of Community, Harmon was very active on Twitter and Tumblr. Later in the shows run, he started doing a weekly show, Harmontown, at Meltdown Comics - the conceit of which was that Dan and other Harmonites were fed up with the world and intended to form a new human colony, possibly on the moon. In essence, people would pay $10 to listen to Harmon and sidekick Jeff Davis riff on Harmon's thoughts and feelings for the week.

I've been to a show and it was a fun, sometimes bizarrely emotional and unflinchingly honest* time. Harmontown also features a large degree of audience interactivity. Harmon frequently calls out to repeat attendees from the stage and has long conversations and improv sessions. Through Harmontown, it's clear that Harmon doesn't only get off on making himself the center of attention, but he gets off on providing the audience with a chance to show what they can do.

*(It's almost impossible to say that anything that happens on a stage is legitimately honest. Regardless of how true to the real Dan Harmon the Harmontown persona is, it's still just a facsimile. Performed honesty generates sympathy and admiration. The audience views the performer's admissions of misdeeds, fears, etc. as a form of courage. No performer is unaware of this relationship**, which means that a stage provides an opportunity for "honest" discussion that doesn't lead to the sometimes necessary chastisement and alteration of behavior that true honesty engenders. When you're honest on stage, you can dismiss certain things as being part of a performance. When you're honest in real life, that's when you can really hurt people.)

**(The application of this to preaching is interesting to consider.)

That level of interaction is all well and good in a space like Harmontown, it's not as effective when trying to produce a network sitcom. One of the early strengths of Community was its adaptability - when certain characters weren't working, the creators either abandoned their annoying traits or caricatured them. I think the online fandom may have conflated the showrunners' awareness that these characters weren't working with their own perceived expectations of what the characters should be. From that point forward, Twitter and Reddit began shipping characters left and right.

Things escalated when they show stopped being your typical wacky sitcom and started engaging with the genre in subversive ways. The first inclination of this came in the ninth episode of the first season, when amateur filmmaker Abed shows the study group a series of shorts that he made that appeared to predict the future of the group by analyzing its previous behavior,  but the show didn't really become Community until the 21st episode of that season, "Contemporary American Poultry." It was the first episode to fully commit to a high concept send up (this one to mob films). Two episodes later, the first paintball episode aired and we saw what Community was capable of.

On the groundwork laid in season one, season two built a progressively more ridiculous and openly genre breaking show - it was probably the high point, creatively, of Community - it's also where the fandom really took off. Every Friday, the Internet was flooded with memes and lazy deconstructions.

Harmon and Co. seemed to take this in stride, even mocking a popular YouTube video of clips of Jeff and Annie exchanging glances while sappy music played in the background. An episode featured a very similarly edited video, except pairing a bunch of characters together who clearly had no romantic interest. This should have a been a clever and gentle chastisement of overzealous fans. Instead, it served as evidence that Community's creators were not only aware of the show's obsessive base, but were influenced by it enough to actually address it within an episode.

The show hit its zenith with the third season episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory," an incredibly well-plotted 22 minutes that played with alternate timelines. From there, things began to fall apart. For every great episode, there was another that just wallowed in meta-ness and reference humor. Harmon's much publicized troubles with NBC/Sony came to a head and it was clear that he probably wouldn't be returning to the show, on the off chance that it was actually renewed. Under pressure from the studio and with declining ratings, the show turned progressively more insular. Any pretense at being a broad comedy was abandoned and it became clear that Community was being produced explicitly for the enjoyment of its existing fanbase.

There's a certain creative freedom to this. When you don't care about pleasing everybody, you can work very hard to please a dedicated few, but it can also be creatively stifling. When people feel that you are making something expressly for them, then criticism is going to be infrequent at best. Even lazy, tired episodes of Community were praised and fed through the Internet's many gif mills. The high-concept buffoonery also served as a distraction from the fact that the show had all but abandoned any meaningful character development. I honestly don't ask for much of that in most sitcoms. Everyone on Arrested Development is essentially static. But, if you're going to bill yourself as a "smart" alternative to something like The Big Bang Theory, you at some point have to demonstrate some emotional intelligence - not just cleverness with form.

With Harmon gone, there was no one to anchor the show emotionally in the fourth season. The new showrunners did their best (and I give them more credit than most), but ultimately produced a watered-down version of Harmon's vision. In their desperation to appeal to the show's insane base (which was always going to hate a Harmon-less version anyway) they recycled the same tired fanservice that had brought down season three.

Looking at the final episode, it had everything that hardcore fans would have wanted - the darkest timeline, shipping and paintball - but it was almost unwatchable. The worst part is that Community fans seem utterly unaware that they are almost entirely to blame for the downfall of their favorite show. By celebrating every single callback and reference, they stripped them of whatever narrative power they may have once had. It was a cult of personality built around Harmon that was ultimately untenable. In some sort of weird irony, a show that was built around tearing down lazy cliches ended up become one itself.

In short, the Community fans are the AT&T of fans.

The show was renewed for a fifth season last week, and I'm hoping that the distance from Harmon and the fact that there's basically no way it'll get a sixth will produce some story lines that hearken back to the show's early days. Whoever ends up taking over for this season has the perfect storm of creative freedom - a limited run, very little oversight and a show that has established itself to be capable of extreme creativity. If they want to, they actually can break the genre.

The Future of Television (Thoughts)

The first few paragraphs of this are personal ramblings. If you want to get to the meat of my valueless essay, just skip ahead. 

I wrote a pilot this month.

It's a 22-minute sitcom that centers around a group of misfits who use friendship and love as a means to overcome their day-to-day struggles - groundbreaking, I know. 

I don't have high hopes for the pilot. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm submitting it to Slamdance and the Austin Film Fest. I know in my head that I probably won't be any kind of finalist, but in my heart I'm still the same 16 year old who believes that he can have everything if he just puts himself out there.

(Getting turned down for 3+ jobs in the past four months have somehow not subdued those feelings). 

Writing the pilot itself was really easy. I was helping my girlfriend prepare for work one evening when I made a joke. It wasn't just any joke, it was one of those perfect jokes that comes out of nowhere and contains the perfect blend of cleverness, conciseness and immaturity. It was a mind-clearing moment. 

I made that joke and then I just couldn't stop. I whipped out my screenwriting shareware and set out to create a universe for those jokes to live in. I wrote five pages the first night and spent hours in bed just typing out more jokes, character beats and plot points on my phone.

In a shocking display of follow through, I actually wrote more the next day. (Normally my creative ambitions shine bright like a diamond only to quickly opaque like some lesser gem). 

Within a week, I'd spit out 23 pages. 

With the submission deadlines for the competitions weeks away, I figured I'd have plenty of time to polish the script and make it tighter and funnier. 

The bullshitting begins here.

Unfortunately, my thunderstorm of creativity subsided and I was left bereft of creative ideas. Rather than sit in front of the computer and try to power through with great material, I did what every lazy creative does and sought out inspiration. 

Two of my favorite shows that are on right now are Fox's The Mindy Project and ABC's Happy Endings. They're both funny, they both have a little heart and I think that they both are a precursor for what's to come in the world of the sitcom. 

Happy Endings is basically a 21st century version of Friends (a comparison the show lampshades) - a bunch of near thirty-somethings hanging out for unreasonable amounts of time and cracking jokes at each other's expense. 

The show hits a lot of the same beats that my writing does, lots of pop culture reference, wordplay and the aforementioned lamp shading. It's also got everything I need in a show to make me feel like the enlightened modern American that I am. An interracial couple! A non-threatening gay guy! A vaguely sexual title with no connection to the content of the show! Foodtrucks!

It's also my favorite Wayans' vehicle since Major Payne. 

(This trailer is spectacularly well edited. You know going in exactly what to expect. Also, I laughed out loud when the commander informed Payne that there was no one left to kill because he'd already killed them all - I've seen this movie 20+ times)

Add what is possibly the cheeriest opening score for any sitcom on right now and you've got one Happy Kyle. (Alternate title if the show's protagonist had the same name that I do). 

The Mindy Project is similarly delightful. It follows a rom-com obsessed OBGYN's quest to find love in The Big Apple (New York City, New York). 

The Mindy Project may be the most tightly written sitcom on TV right now. Every episode is perfectly paced and each character gets enough screen time to remind you that they're all great. Every time I watch an episode, I email my friend Jordan and tell him to watch it. He lives in Korea where I'm certain there isn't huge demand for sitcoms about cute Indian doctors, but I demand it of him nonetheless. 

As much as I love genre breaking shows like Arrested Development and Community, I have a ton of respect for the people behind TMP (Mindy Kaling) and Happy Endings (David Caspe).

I think it almost takes more skill to work within an established genre and still produce a smart, funny show.

I was listening to a podcast recently with Chuck Klosterman and Alex Pappademas where Chuck mentioned that there has been a reaction against the Auteur Theory. People are losing trust in the idea of the godlike creator. 

You can see this in the direction that programming as a whole is headed. As Mad Men and Breaking Bad are coming to a close, there haven't been many successful recent programs put out that exist as conduits for the voice of the creator. 

(I'd even argue that Breaking Bad isn't as auteurish as say The Sopranos or Mad Men. Alan Sepinwall's book goes into the BB creative process in depth, and it seems that Gilligan isn't as heavily involved as some other prestigious showrunners). 

Even previous giants of the industry (Davids Simon and Milch) haven't found much success with recent projects. (Treme and Luck, if you're wondering). 

AMC, who made a name on two of the best shows of the past decade, is floundering to come up with anything of value in the original programming department. Rubicon and The Killing failed, Hell on Wheels was nothing special and The Walking Dead, while hugely successful, is pure garbage from a narrative standpoint. 

(I just watched the Major Payne trailer again. Still great). 

On the other side of the coin (comedy, as opposed to drama) the only network that dared take any risks, NBC, is a laughingstock. The Dan Harmon experiment clearly failed and even though Mike Schur is brilliant and Parks and Rec is spectacular, the show doesn't pull terribly great ratings. (Any show that airs an episode featuring 20+ references to Infinite Jest probably isn't going to take America by storm).

(Learning from P&R, I deleted a David Foster Wallace reference earlier in this entry so as not to alienate my audience). 

The only network that is still chugging along by allowing its creative voices to have total control is FX. FX was one of the first networks to start producing really good, creative television, both comedy and drama (The Shield/It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia), and they've continued that legacy with Archer, Justified and The League. 

Even then, FX is still potentially screwing the pooch by splitting up the network and diluting their brand. 

HBO is a bit of an outlier in all of this, because they're not beholden to advertisers and can basically do whatever they want.

However, I feel that Girls is both the apex and the nadir of the auteur movement in television. It's the best and worst of what that type of vision engenders. It's a sign of the end of an era. 

I think we're about to hit a new phase in the Television Renaissance. Auteur productions are no longer tenable for networks and studios. The good thing is that the new crop of TV writers have been so influenced by the genre breaking shows that the quality of more traditional work is leaps and bounds better than Friends, Two and a Half Men, etc. 

(In addition to being more in tune with the times, Happy Endings differs from Friends in that it is actually funny - as opposed to fun and familiar).

What we're going to find in the future are more traditional shows with amazingly talented writing staffs serving as incubators for new, better content. 

You can already see this with The Mindy Project. Kaling spent years with Greg Daniels, Mike Schur and BJ Novak on The Office (which, while stale now, was at one point the best comedy on television. Y'all remember when it was hip to like The Office?) and is using that kind of emotional, intelligent writing in a more traditional sitcom format.

The preponderance of online content is helping as well - Mail Order Comedy, Human Giant, Derrick Comedy, etc., have all gone on to do excellent work for networks and on cable.

The future of television comedy is very bright. (Especially once my script gets fast-tracked!)

Drama is a different story.

I think, to make a drama of value, you need that strong, singular creative voice. You also need networks willing to take risks on these voices. 

As it stands, there appears to be a dearth of both of those things.

The same thing that's working in comedy's favor (lots of talented people being influenced by older innovators) is actually working against drama. 

It's easy to be funny in your early twenties. It's much harder to produce something with depth. The fundamental lack of life experience is a legitimate handicap. 

It's doable to watch Community and say, "I'm going to be Dan Harmon!" and go out and write a subversive comedy. It's a lot more difficult to watch The Wire and say, "I'm going to be David Simon!" and go out and write one of the best pieces of American fiction ever created. 

I think drama writing takes time and practice. You have to develop your chops. 

Just look at the people who are best at it.

David Chase wrote for TV for twenty years before he created The Sopranos. Milch wrote for NYPD Blue. Simon was a reporter for decades. Matthew Weiner worked on The Sopranos and learned from Chase. Kurt Sutter worked on The Shield. Vince Gilligan worked on X-Files.

Drama is a much more slowly ripening fruit than comedy. 

The other thing hindering drama is that it's difficult for a serialized, hour-long show to find an audience. As such, networks and studios don't want to invest in something that will probably fail. Instead, they gravitate toward easily digestible pablum. Hyper-violent, hyper-stylized and hyper-shallow spooky schlock seems to be particularly en vogue. 

I don't know what started it. Probably the success of True Blood and Dexter (Dexter, while sometimes repetitive and featuring some of the worst acting from secondary characters that I've ever seen, is clever enough to escape my avenging bludgeon of criticism), but it seems that every network is coming out with a high-concept horror vehicle. The Following. American Horror Story. Hannibal. Even lowly A&E is getting in on the action with Bates Motel. 

These things are cyclical, of course. A few years back, every network was trying to create their own Lost (a show that's a good example of what happens when showrunners with lots of freedom aren't meticulous and domineering enough). This too, shall pass.

In short, I don't have high hopes for drama in the coming years. Hopefully young writers are able to cut their teeth on the some of the solid content still being produced while the networks soak in their creative fart hot tub for a while. In five years or so, maybe drama will be as exciting and unpredictable as comedy is setting up to be.

(I'm particularly interested in what happens post-Mad Men. Most of the show's writers are women, and outside of aforementioned Girls, female showrunners are fairly rare. There should be an influx of previously unheard voices).

Anyway, I think a lot about TV. Keep an eye out for my pilot when it hits the trades. There's going to be a hell of a bidding war!

 

How We Talk When We Talk About Johnny Manziel (Ombudsmandry)

For those of you who may not know, Johnny Manziel, a redshirt freshman quarterback for Texas A&M won the Heisman Trophy last season (the first freshman to do so) and guided the Aggies to an 11-2 record and a no. 5 finish in the AP Poll.

I'm reminded of this nearly every day because Manziel's exploits, both on the field and off, are meticulously documented through social and traditional media. America can't get enough of the legend of Johnny Football. That's right, grown men are unabashedly and unironically calling a 20-year old kid "Johnny Football" (Johnny Fucking Football, if you're not into the whole brevity thing). 

Since winning the Heisman and beating Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. Manziel has been spotted sitting courtside at various sporting events, earned a new Mercedes, took in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, done his level best to avoid contact with actual Aggie fans, was declared the "King of Cabo" by TMZ and met rapper/former Degrassi hero Drake. (I bet he calls him Aubrey). 

Johnny Manziel is America's hero. He's the rootinest, tootenist quarterback since Broadway Joe. He's living the dream of every poor schlub with long dashed d-1 aspirations. He's got talent, fame and, apparently, unlimited access to basically everything. 

Think on that readers, dwell on that, dwell on the fact that Manziel basically exists as a youthful surrogate for your average football fan.

Now... imagine if Manziel was black. 

Did I just blow your mind? Did I just go Toure on your ass?

Ok, so don't actually imagine the Johnny Manziel is black - that's a weird and unproductive thought exercise. 

Instead imagine that, out of nowhere, a black freshman quarterback put on an electric season, won the Heisman trophy and then proceeded to party his ass off for the ensuing four months - popping dom in the club with his parents, driving an expensive car and trolling his own fanbase. 

There would be mass hysteria! It's pure, unadulterated gloryboyism! 

Imagine with me, if you will, if that same athlete had been arrested only a few weeks prior to the start of the season for scrapping in a bar district and using a fake ID? (It should be noted that Manziel missed no playing time for this, and his punishment was handled internally).

Why he'd not only be a glory boy, but also a thug! He'd be no good to anyone. Awarding him the Heisman trophy would be a disgrace to the good name of the Downtown Athletic club. (Gregg Easterbrook would personally bar the doors to the event).

"But Kyle," you say, "we're living in post-accidental racist America. Surely you're trying to make mountains out of molehills?"

I counter, "Bullshit." 

There was another electric young quarterback who recently came out of nowhere to destroy SEC offensive records and win a Heisman Trophy. Like Johnny Manziel, the fans have also given him a charming nickname. 

Perhaps you're familiar with $cam Newton? 

Newton's no innocent (he was kicked out of Florida for stealing a laptop and someone in has family probably received a hefty sum for delivering him to Auburn), but he certainly doesn't deserve the amount of vitriol that is routinely leveled at him via sports radio and online forums. 

You may argue that Cam is actually castigated because he allegedly took money to play at Auburn and thus violated the romanticized notion that all college players are just dedicated "student-athletes" playing to lift the spirits of their fellow young scholars. If intimations of untoward behavior are all it takes to stain an athlete forever, I point toward Manziel's sudden influx of discretionary cash and priority access to basketball games. After I'm done pointing at that, I'll point toward A&M's own illustrious history.

(Ahem...)

But, if you still think Cam is a false equivalency, turn instead to former Oklahoma State star (and apparent nightclub enthusiast) Dez Bryant. Prior to being drafted into the NFL, Bryant was asked by Miami Dolphins' GM Jeff Ireland if his mother was a prostitute. That question is not only utterly inappropriate, but also oh wow yeah kind of racist. 

Even more egregious than Ireland's questioning was the Palm Beach Post's Ben Volin claiming that Bryant's recent behavior justifies what Ireland asked. Go home America - clearly racism is solved. 

"Ok," you concede, "maybe there is a little bit of double standard. Maybe black athletes are more highly scrutinized and more harshly judged than white ones, but why single out Johnny Football?" 

Let's delve back into that arrest report from earlier:

Seaton says an officer on bike patrol intervened to break up a fight between Manziel and McKinney. McKinney told the officer that Brant, Manziel's friend, called him a racial slur and he approached 

Brant. Seaton says Manziel then shoved McKinney and the two exchanged punches.

The arrest that kicked off the legend of Johnny Football all started because Manziel felt that he was honor-bound to defend his friend's right to degrade a passing pedestrian with a slur. 

Of course, that's all dependent on whether or not the police report is true. It's possible that McKinney embellished the story, or that Manziel didn't hear Brant say what he said.

Regardless, it's odd to me that no one in the national media has asked about this particular part of the incident, if only to get a good soundbite of Manziel admonishing such behavior.

Instead, it's swept under the rug, it's not something that's fun to talk about.

Just like it's not fun to talk about the incredible chasm between the way in which Manziel is received and the way previous, black, college superstars have been received. 

It's a difficult thing to write about. First, one must prove that there is a clear difference in public perception - which is pretty hard to do - and even then, the type of person who doesn't want to think about these kind of things will claim that there is no difference and that the writer is merely "race-baiting" (the preferred phrase of anyone avoiding introspection for the past forty years).

Beyond that, what purpose does such an observation actually serve? It tells us that football fans may be racist (however inadvertently) and may have a selective bias about whether or not an athlete's behavior offends him or her, but that's not news. 

What does the legend of Johnny Football tell us about America?

I think the most basic (and, again, not unexplored answer) is that white behavior is still very much held up as normative. When a black athlete indulges in the perks that come with talent it's seen as aberrant and detrimental to "The Game" - the sport-above-sport from which all punditry flows. 

When a white athlete partakes in similar indulgences, he is praised for having fun out there and doing what anyone would do in his situation. 

Of course, my conclusions about all of this could be wrong, but I'm dead certain that the way we're ignoring this double standard is a black eye on sports journalism as a whole. 

Radio (A Rant)

I've spent a lot of time driving lately.

My girlfriend, Lindsey, recently took a job in Round Rock and, rather than fight the traffic every morning, she's found herself an apartment near her work.

Seeing as I am the one with loads of free time on my hands and no real responsibilities, I've taken it upon myself to be the one to make the 17 mile trek to her apartment whenever I want to see her.

This means that I spend a good 30-40 minutes per day in the car. Seeing as it's April, I'm usually in a position to listen to the Astros valiantly flail about in the AL West while I'm driving. Unfortunately, today, the Astros had already lost by the time I was driving home and my iPhone was dead - rendering Spotify unavailable.

This meant that I was beholden to the caprices of terrestrial radio. I absentmindedly flipped through the stations until I found something acceptable - your standard top-40 stuff. After enjoying a little Adele, this song came on.

This is pure, unrepentant garbage.

In the first four seconds, the listener gains all she ever will from the song. There's a drumbeat, a few chords on the piano and the line:

I feel so close to you right now 

Being close to someone is a reasonable subject for a song, but it takes a turn toward turdliness immediately after that sentiment.

It's a forcefield

What is a force field? Closeness? Love?

Love is a great many things, and I suppose that it could be seen as a forcefield. Love often protects us from the worst parts of the world and the worst parts of ourselves, but here, divorced from any context, this line is meaningless.

Calvin Harris, the songwriter, continues.=:

I wear my heart upon my sleeve, like a big deal

Well we've solved the mystery of the forcefield. Apparently its chief utility is that it somewhat rhymes with the word "deal." Harris' heart is on his sleeve. He's not afraid to let the world know that he is surrounded by a forcefield of closeness. He will not hide his inanity from the hostile masses.

Your love pours down on me, surrounds me like a waterfall

This line isn't terrible, but it's not particularly meaningful either.

And there's no stopping us right now

Harris and his lover cannot be stopped.

I feel so close to you right now

The coda! Harris also gets to rhyme "now" with "now" thus making his job easier.

These same six lines are then repeated ad nauseum for the next four minutes, over the same simple hook.

Clearly, this song is devoid of any meaning or artistry. It's only value appears to be that it's simple and catchy.

There is no truth in this art.

It's just some simple rhymes that are tangentially related to some vague notion of love and commitment. No one learns anything from this song, no one can relate to this song - its meaninglessness makes it inherently unrelatable.

The question, then, is why is this song being played on the radio? No human being can actually enjoy it. It's not going to inspire anyone either personally or creatively. Two years from now, this song will be a relic remember by no one.

This isn't an indictment of pop music by any stretch. I enjoy a lot "disposable" art. I listen to Katy Perry's Peacock at least twice a month. But Katy Perry's music is fun. When you listen to Katy Perry, you're immediately excused from being a normal human being. Consuming her music is a conscious decision to give yourself over to a form of cartoonish hedonism for three minutes and fifteen seconds. You're granted a reprieve from being yourself and instead become the type of person who enjoys a song about passing out on a Friday night or being abducted by Kanye West.

By contrast, Harris' song does nothing. There is no catharsis in "I Feel so Close to You Right Now." It's music that is meant to be ignored.

This cannot stand. There is enough good pop music being produced right now, that there's no reason that Calvin Harris should ever destroy the integrity of the airwaves with his schlocky bullshit.

I implore all of you to write to Music and let them know that you're fed up. Only when we raise our voices as one will we be able to achieve justice.

Here's a palate cleanser to help choke down that spoonful of aural trash.

What I've Been Up To (An Update)

I've always had a complicated relationship with math. It started in the first grade.

I'd been aware of the joys of reading for several years (though most of the literature I consumed dealt with dinosaurs), but I had yet to be introduced to the world of arithmetic. I made it through kindergarten alright, when the only hurdle I had to overcome was being able to count from 1 to 100, but when they started throwing adding and subtracting into the mix I was overwhelmed.

I grasped addition fairly quickly (it is, after all, the cousin of counting), but subtraction alluded me. I remember very distinctly one of my first math assignments. It was a worksheet with a number of problems that I had to solve. (In my memory it was something like 25 questions, but my experience teaching second graders leads me to believe it was closer to 10).

It was a mix of addition and subtraction problems, which I understood. What I didn't understand, was how to subtract. So, in a moment of juvenile earnestness, I simply added every problem, confident that it was "close enough."

Shockingly, my first grade teacher, Ms. Dawn, didn't find my outside-the-box approach to mathematics as acceptable as I did, so she had a conversation with my mother about my struggles. In an attempt to aid my understanding, my parents sat down with me that night to work on math together.

My dad, an engineer and therefore a competent mathematician, explained to me that subtraction was just reverse addition, which turned out be exactly what I needed to make the concept click.

After that initial struggle, I traipsed ably through my elementary school curriculum. (It helped that most math at that level can be taught through the power of song.) I made straight-As and was in the gifted and talented program. I aced the TAAS in fourth grade (or I would have, had I not filled in the wrong bubble on one the scantron questions - I circled all the correct answers in my workbook).

My success continued in fifth grade, but fifth grade is also the time in one's life where you start to formulate a conception of yourself as an academic. I could certainly do math, I just didn't like math. I was a literary mind - a writer. So I naturally decided that math was not for me.

The sixth grade was where this newfound identity manifested itself into something with actual consequences. We started learning the most basic algebra - x + 4 = 5 and whatnot - and my struggles reemerged.

Come math time, my class was divided into groups. Those who understood the concepts got to stay in the classroom, while those who didn't had to retire to the desks in the hall and receive help from our student teacher.

Invariably, I would start in the classroom, become overwhelmed, and then request to go into the hall. After five or ten minutes, everything would click and I'd ask to be returned to the classroom.

I feel like I must have grasped the material, but I had decided that I was not good at math and therefore I became not good at math until I grew bored of being with the remedial students.

At my junior high, everyone was tracked. I was in the middle math track, and my teacher was an overweight woman who wore flowing purple pantsuits everyday - kind of like Stevie Nicks mixed with   Violet after she chewed Willy Wonka's three course gum. I remember that her name was Gigi, because she signed everything G^2 and was quite proud of that little pun.

Her room was always dark, illuminated only by the overhead projector. She kept a drawer of snacks in her room that she always fished in when we were working.

Looking back, I think she was probably depressed. She was always on the verge of crying, and did so every once in a while.

This, obviously, made her a target of 7th grade ridicule.

Anyway, she wasn't a terribly able math teacher. She'd been in the game for a long time and didn't seem to care whether her students learned or not.

I sloughed through her class alright, but there was no foundation for more advanced math really instilled in me - which didn't bother me in the slightest.

Eighth grade is where I had my first crisis of self. My teacher was a young guy just out of college. Our class didn't take him seriously and he returned the favor. I spent most of my math period vacillating between trying to distract the teacher and dicking around with my friends. This strategy didn't do much to facilitate any learning and, after one particularly inattentive six weeks, I took home my first and only C on my report card.

I don't know what my parents made of it. I think they were mostly flummoxed by their son. When I was 13 there were only two things I cared about - becoming a comedy writer and classic rock. I'm sure it was confusing to them when their son who, the year previous, had insisted on wearing Abercrombie and once loudly protested when his mother took him to Kohl's that he "didn't wear that kind of stuff anymore" had now switched to wearing exclusively black t-shirts from hot topic and Chuck Taylor's with ZOSO symbols drawn all over them.

(My life has been a procession of ill advised fashion decisions made in an effort to fit in. In 5th grade, when I wanted to be an athlete, I wore my baseball pullover everywhere. I also had a Braves hat from my little league days that I had frayed (because my cousin wore a frayed baseball cap) to the point that the fabric was not attached in the front and the plastic of the bill lay proudly exposed. I also insisted on wearing the hat into any body of water (natural or artificial) that I entered - this, too, was a signifier of my coolness. Seventh grade saw the aforementioned flirtation with proto-Jersey Shore apparel. Then there were the band shirts, which I defiantly wore during high school retreat of my freshman year to make sure that everyone at Trinity knew that I was cool and not bound by the crushing authority of their dress code. When I discovered girls in ninth grade I switched to American Apparel, which was the worst choice for me because all of their clothes are cut for boxy future frat-bros. When I bought Hot Fuss, I was determined to become indie-cool like Brandon Flowers and, in the most regrettable fashion decision of my life, I once wore a black tie over an army green Fender t-shirt to youth group. My senior year, I was introduced to the v-neck and my wardrobe has remained pretty consistent since then. It should also be noted that throughout all of these transitions I lacked both the fashion sense and a profligate enough mother to buy more than one or two pieces - so I just wore the same ensemble repeatedly, or some horrible mishmash of conflicting styles.)

To return to the narrative, my insistence on spending more time on learning the various guitars that Jimmy Page played on each album rather than on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder had rendered me utterly inept at math. I don't quite recall how this resolved itself. I have a vague memory of my parents and math teach and I having a conversation during the mandatory parent-teacher meetings where I pledged to focus more in class, which led to an uptick in my GPA.

The last time I succeeded in math was my freshman year of high school with Mrs. Wolcott (Connie, as I came to call her once I graduated and played World of Warcraft with her and her family for untold hours during the summer).

I spent my next two years with Dr. Hickey bumbling through algebra and pre-cal. I spent most of my time in Dr. Hickey's class curating CDs for us to listen to during tests (they were heavy on Journey and Sufjan Stevens) or listening to one of my more unsavory female classmates discuss her sexual misadventures with a sympathetic male classmate, who I imagine listened more out of prurient interest than anything approaching concern.

I took physics as a junior and did quite well, but it's only because our teacher was excellent. Even then, I failed to retain anything and in the week between the end of the semester and the final I had forgotten enough physics to make a 70 on the final and bring my average from an A to a B.

I renounced math entirely as a senior and instead took statistics, which is math for the unmotivated. The early days of the semester were spent watching videos on the importance of stats. Unfortunately for Dr. Hickey, one video discussed manatees at length and my friend Jeth and I latched onto them as our spirit animal and proceeded to draw them on everything. My other friend Donnie openly slept through class and the remainder of the students (all female) diligently worked with Dr. Hickey. I took the AP test at the end of the year and earned a gentleman's 2.

I took one college math course. It was called "Contemporary Math." It was taught by a bored TA and the most challenging thing we tackled was adding and subtracting fractions.

All of that to say, I'm trying to learn math again.

While visiting Mrs. Wolcott this Christmas, I flipped through one of my old math books and was shamed by my lack of knowledge. I've always been a bit sensitive about this deficiency in my learning - my roommates are engineers and my ignorance is a source of occasional humor - but I'd never thought to do anything about. The afternoon after visiting Mrs. Wolcott, I resolved to become more well rounded and ordered two of my high school textbooks off of Abebooks.

When they arrived in Austin, I promptly abandoned my commitment and they lay buried under third class mail on our dining room table.

When I graduated, I was fairly certain that I'd find a job within weeks. I had a great GPA and tons of internship and freelance experience. I sent my resume to twenty newspapers that had posted openings for sportswriters. I received exactly one reply and it was simply a courtesy response.

My dreams of being the next Dave Halberstam temporarily shelved, I started applying for jobs in the corporate communications world. I got one interview and I was almost certain that I would be hired. It's been three months since that meeting, so I assume I probably didn't get it.

My dad told me about an opening at his company in Dallas. I had a meeting with the head of the department and she was incredibly nice and the job sounded interesting, but I feel bad taking a job because of my father's influence. I know that this is how these things work, but it would still bother me.

In order to escape this fate, I've established a backup plan.

I've applied to UT's Arabic Flagship Summer Program in hopes of a) learning Arabic and b) setting myself up for graduate school. I have my eye on UT's dual-degree Middle Eastern Studies and Global Policy Studies master's program.

In order to get into the program, it's recommended that one have 6 hours of economics, 3 hours of stats and 3 hours of calc. In order to obtain this modest amount of quantitative knowledge, I've enrolled at Austin Community College, which is shockingly lax about basically everything. They needed no confirmation of my place of residence, nor my up-to-date immunization. I'm taking an online economics course and dominating it. I'm also taking stats through EdX, which is the big free online class thing that schools like MIT, Berkley, UT and others are doing. It's surprisingly difficult. I feel like I'm really learning something.

If all goes according to plan, I'll apply for grad school in the fall and enroll next August.

All of this meditating on the future has led me to realize something. Chiefly, that I never made any real effort of pursuing what I really want to do, of attacking an actual dream.

The first thing that I ever remember wanting to be (other than a paleontologist, which is decidedly less cool than Jurassic Park makes it appear) was a writer for Saturday Night Live. I read Live From New York when I was in the 7th grade and in the 8th grade I took drama for the first time (out of two times). I loved playing improv games and making up skits and generally acting a fool. It's around this time that I realized that I was a funny human being.

Somehow, my sense of humor hasn't fallen prey to my usual flights of hubris. It's always taken the backseat to more lofty aspirations like blogging about my feelings.  I've always felt that I was funny, but I never defined myself as the funny guy. It's not a skill that I've honed, but I'd like to change that.

I still plan on applying to grad school, but I'm also going to take my first shot at being an actual writer. I've already written a pilot and I'm working on refining it. Oddly enough, the humor has been the easiest part for me. The dialogue is what's hard. It's basically impossible to make written characters sound like actual human beings, which is fine if you're going for a deliberate aesthetic, but is tough when the characters are all channeling a particularly low-energy voice (my voice).

I plan to submit the finished script to Austin Film Fest and to Slamdance. I'm sure I'm being just spectacularly naive in this endeavor, but what else am I going to do? I'm a man with a dream and an insane amount of free time.