Racheline Maltese

Glee: Connecting the dots on the Warblers’ fall

While I feel like I’ve spent most of the summer making lists of shows I wish I could keep up with and write about (The Newsroom, Political Animals, and a cut of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies not edited for US TV. Since that spectacle was about the importance of storytelling in forming identity — whether for children or for nations — I really had wanted to write about it), Ryan Murphy’s gone and got himself on Twitter and has released a spate of deleted Glee scenes.

These have included the infamous box scene (in which Blaine gives Kurt a promise ring), the bridesmaids scene that leads up to Rachel and Finn not getting married due to Quinn’s car accident, and an amazing first season moment between Rachel and Jesse set to “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love” from A Chorus Line. That Rachel and Jesse scene, in particular, merits a significant amount of time an attention all to itself, because it focuses on Rachel’s relationship to sexuality as both tool and reward, which are ideas very much in play when she loses her virginity to Finn in the third season, also present around the evolution of Emma and Will’s relationship, and nearly completely absent from the Kurt and Blaine narrative.

But, since there’s also a long lost Dalton scene that’s just been released, Rachel and Jesse are going to have to wait.

“I Want You Back” was originally slated for the “Michael” episode, and it’s another moment where the fallen Warblers under Sebastian Smythe come off as sexually menacing. If the performance had appeared where it was supposed to, between “Uptown Girl” which just hints at some darkness having contaminated the Warblers, and “Smooth Criminal,” in which it becomes clear just how much of the “Michael” episode is at least metaphorically about rape and response to rape, we wouldn’t have had to connect the dots on the Internet, because Sebastian’s escalation from coveting something, to pressing for something, to taking/ruining what he can’t have, would have happened far more clearly on our screens.

The flip side of that narrative would have also been clearer from Blaine’s initial sense of being flattered and uncomfortably interested in Sebastian to Blaine being annoyed and feeling like he can’t say no to him. Kurt’s complete unwillingness to leave Blaine’s side in “I Want You Back” is telling, because it doesn’t read like jealousy or possessiveness, it reads like fear for another person who’s already vulnerable.

Of course, Blaine is not the only target or illustration of Sebastian and the fallen Warblers. That Artie’s chair has to be carried in and out of the room where the confrontation takes place is extremely telling. In Blaine’s era, Dalton was a place for everyone, and while we didn’t see anyone who used a wheelchair at Dalton during that time period, I feel sure were supposed to assume that Dalton was enthusiastically ADA compliant given how Blaine spoke of the school.

But there’s no room for someone like Artie there now, and it speaks volumes both that New Directions cooperates to get him into and out of that scene, and that it’s through Blaine’s ongoing need to deal with the Warblers that Dalton is only able to become vaguely and inadequately accessible to Artie once again.

Santana and Rachel also get targeted in this scene. With Rachel, that menace is brief, and sexual, and it almost seems like Sebastian loses interest in trying to intimidate her when it seems like she’s not even entirely clear on what she should be afraid of from him. Santana, however, is another story — there are too many ways for Sebastian to target her: sex, race, and class are all weapons he uses against her, in this scene and others, with abandon.

Class, in particular, becomes an explicit, if unexplained, issue in a way it usually doesn’t on Glee at the end of this scene, because Blaine — whose family wealth and social class is a matter of intense debate on Tumblr and in fanfiction circles — tells Sebastian he was proud to be a Warbler because, in part, they were “classy,” and this display wasn’t.

This rather ineffective and uncomfortably delivered attempt at a put down implies two really fascinating things about Blaine.

The first is that while he is relatively good at ingratiating himself into a given environment, Blaine is terrible at code switching. He certainly fit into Dalton when he was there, but when he tries in this scene to insult the Warblers on their terms after he’s left, he can’t quite pull it off. When you’re a person who lives in and between multiple worlds (which is an ongoing issue for Blaine on several fronts because of his school history and the passing issues he encounters related to race, gender, and sexuality) and you’re bad at code switching, one of the things it can mean is that while you usually seem to almost fit in if no one looks too closely, you actually never do — not with the people you’re like, and not with the people others think you’re like.

The second thing the “classy” remark brings up is Blaine’s relationship with sex. Because while Blaine might be criticizing the cruel and threatening way he and his friends were just treated, he may also just be criticizing the ridiculous and over accentuated hip action of the choreography. After all, let’s not forget Blaine’s “not for sale.” Blaine’s narrative bounces between sex-positivity, slut-shaming, and what eventually seems to become real fear in the face of Sebastian’s aggressively sexual advances, and that doesn’t get any less unsettling just because this scene happens to fill in some blanks. This moment is very much in line with things about Blaine’s past on which I’ve speculated before, and the way Kurt keeps close to him really underscores that for me.

Finally, there’s one other sort of delightful yet horrifying nod to class issues in this scene, that I have no way of integrating into the rest of this article, but is too amazingly weird not to mention: Kurt Hummel is wearing white shoes. To Dalton. I don’t know how commonly known this slang is any more or if it is used much outside of my region, but a “white shoe” firm historically refers to old, moneyed, and highly successful banking, law, or consulting firms that serve blue chip corporations and are known for their discretion, conservatism, and, to be frank, WASPishness. Many of those Dalton boys surely have fathers at white shoe firms and will one day be bound for them themselves.

For Kurt “one day you’ll all be working for me” Hummel, who is the son of a proudly successful blue collar man, to wear actual white shoes to Dalton, is that character’s personal and peculiar viciousness (and the Glee costume department) at its very finest. Because that type of trivia is exactly the sort of thing Kurt collects and uses all the time, even when no one else in the room is likely to notice; Kurt Hummel is a writhing ball of cultural references, and it’s one of the reasons this show is so much fun for me to write about.

At any rate, in many ways, we did not need “I Want You Back” placed into “Michael” as it ultimately aired — after all, we were able to do the math that this cut now, in some cases confirms, or at least supports. But its release is incredibly valuable not just in forming arguments about what’s really going on in Glee and the faerieland at its borders, but for asserting that there is an actual point to indulging in all this analysis. “I Want You Back” fills in holes in a way that makes it much easier to say to those who disagree that the show clearly does plan arcs and engages in argumentation, even if it, quite literally, has a tendency to replace too many of its numbers with variables.

Hopefully Ryan Murphy will keep treating us to these delicious goodies from the vaults.

The Land of Stories: When the fourth wall is a doorway

In many ways, I am the worst possible person to review Chris Colfer’s The Land of Stories. Not only am I not a middle grade reader, I often loathed books appropriate for my age group even as a child because I felt they were too overt in the lessons they were trying to impart and the narrative tricks they were engaging in to do so.

“Oh look, another book about some girl who communes with wolves that will teach me about the importance of self-reliance, algebra, and offering loving respect to my parents,” I would start monologuing each May when faced with my annual the summer reading list requirements. That stuff made me bitter.

I can’t tell you that Colfer’s book necessarily avoids content that stirs that reaction in me, but I also can’t tell you it should. After all, not only was I cantankerous about these sorts of books as a child, I am certainly not a middle grade reader now, nor am I the parent of one.

But, aside from the necessary content and structural oddities of book designed for this age group, there’s a ridiculous amount of interest in The Land of Stories. Some of it, such as the sure to be endlessly quoted “unicorns don’t have rabies” discussion, is mostly just hilarious, even if I can’t help but link the discussion of one-horned magical creatures and disease to the use of “unicorn” as a way of discussing Kurt Hummel’s queerness on Glee and finding a witty, and unfortunately necessary, indignance in the remark.

Much of it, however, is overtly poignant not only in the context of the book, but unavoidably unsettling in the context of its authorship. One of the first, and most crystalline examples of this comes in the protagonists’ meeting with Queen Cinderella:

“What was it like?” Alex asked Cinderella. “What was it like to go from being a servant to being a queen? What was it like to be saved from a horrible situation? Your life is literally… well… a Cinderella story.”

A sadness came to Cinderella’s face.

“I never thought my life would change so drastically, so I always made the most of what I had,” Cinderella said.

…

“… living a public life is a difficult thing to do, and even now I still find it a bit overwhelming. No matter what you do, you can never please everyone. And that was the hardest lesson to learn. In fact, I am still learning it.”

The actual passage is several times the length of what is quoted above, and is not necessarily even the book’s most startling moment. In fact, each interaction with the queens of the storybook world can arguably be read on two levels, one of which is fixed outside of the narrative of the novel. In case you’re curious, the kings Charming (they’re brothers) fare less well as attractive and largely interchangeable cardboard cutouts.

The Evil Queen’s remarks on ambition are perhaps the other, most precise moment of double vision the book provides:

“Every driven person comes from a mountain of pain they wish to keep hidden,” the Evil Queen said.

Certainly there is something sly and uncomfortable about the queens of a series of storybook kingdoms serving as the clearest representation of the authorial voice, when that author is the one in question. If this is intentional on Colfer’s part, it’s a delightful and pointed play on expectation and underscores the allegorical queerness in a book that isn’t really queer at all (except perhaps when Conner tells us he really, really can’t let the guys at school find out about his newly discovered ancestry). And, if it is unintentional on Colfer’s part, the reader response to it makes for a no less compelling conversation.

It’s statements like Evil Queen’s on ambition, however, that also make the book interesting regardless of authorship. Among other things, I wonder what it would be like to read that sentence as an eight-year-old. What does that sentiment — which rings very true to me — impart to a person of that age? It doesn’t seem like all those boring lessons about wolves and algebra and loving my mother at all.

Where The Land of Stories excels as literature is in the voices and dilemmas of its adults. Colfer’s ability to juggle multiple narrative voices is interesting, and I probably shouldn’t be surprised that as an actor he clearly has the most fun with the parts of the narration that come to us in the first person.

Much like Struck by Lightning, Colfer’s freshman film effort that I believe will be in general release soon, the adult stories which we see in passing through the eyes of children with bigger concerns linger because Colfer suffuses the adult relationships with loss and longing, knowing that in his fairytale book the ending everyone craves — happily ever after — is innately boring.

Ultimately, while I am reasonably sure that The Land of Stories is a clever, competent, and viciously funny middle grade book that will be deeply pleasing particularly to children who feel peculiar because of how their intelligence manifests, The Land of Stories impressed me for the way in which it emphasizes and exemplifies the infinite nature of story telling: A young man who is living what some would call a fairytale writes a novel about two children who fall into a fairytale and then navigate that world through the journals and stories of others, while the reader, upon noticing these layers of narrative, unavoidably also extends the story in ways that were, if not surely unintended then are, at least, intentionally unacknowledged.

If nothing else The Land of Stories is a unique entry in the annals of transformative work as the narrative performs multiple functions and extends multiple stories for several, often disparate audiences, simultaneously.

The Hunger Games: Deathmatch – American Idol vs. Upfronts

Yesterday, I asked Patty if the reason YA is interesting to people is a desire for more mythic texts and more texts that are about myth-making. My argument, such as it was (I don’t read or what enough YA material to call it an argument comfortably), was this: because YA is arguably “simpler,” the stories it tells are unavoidably more mythic and iconic.

Patty is pretty sure I was wrong (and since she is super smart and really into YA, is probably herself correct), and said that YA is popular because it’s a genre that’s allowed to be experimental and therefore offers high returns for lower time investment, and my mythic argument is a result of self-selection and the lens I read everything I like through.

Because it’s not just Brave that is a story about how stories get made. The Land of Stories (which I have a copy of again and so a review is imminent) is also very much about the construction of myth. As is The Hunger Games, which was what we were waiting to see at the time of the convo.

I’d seen it before, actually, but hadn’t found the energy to write about it in what has been a busy and chaotic 2012. Patty hadn’t managed to catch it in Delhi though, and I was excited to take a look at it without comparing it to the book or feeling like I would have to write about it because it’s so focused on the construction of fame.

It’s really a ridiculously good movie for what it is. The craft is exceptional, the adaptation is interesting, and it expands on parts of the world meaningfully in recompense for where it had to excise material for time and clarity. It also owes some of its most effective moments to the DNA of some of my absolutely favorite films, and it’s that slyness — and the fact that the film doesn’t exist in a vacuum of a hot thing of the moment money grab — that makes it such a pleasure to watch.

The largest influence is arguably The Truman Show. While reality TV existed when it was released, it still showed up in movie theaters two years before Survivor was first on US screens. What it indicted and asked us to collude in was something that we were neither deluged with nor asked to be responsive to in 1998. It was, more conspicuously than most films that get dammed with this faint praise, very much ahead of its time.

But it’s all over The Hunger Games in the attention the film adaptation pays to Seneca Crane and the arena’s game team, which operates with a sterility and dispassion reminiscent of what films insist are true about things like operating theaters and NASA control rooms.

Particularly, the way The Hunger Games shows us the segment where Katniss is directed away from the edge of the arena, feels like the scramble in the control room in The Truman Show when Truman’s determination to get to the edge of the world becomes clear. I imagine this similarity will only become more visible in Catching Fire considering that the Tributes do actually succeed in breaking the arena open and escaping it.

But another big piece of film DNA in The Hunger Games comes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The scenes of rioting in Rue’s district (the only part of the film to make me cry both times), the images of Katniss’s father in the mine shaft elevator, and even the positioning of Katniss as both innocent and temptress, are all things that reference Metropolis both visually and conceptually.

Both these sets of references are ridiculously satisfying. They root the world of The Hunger Games into a story we’ve been told before, but instead of making it seem repetitive, it helps makes it mythic (beyond the already excellent job Collins did with epithets in the original book that helped make the narrative sound so much like oral history at given points: the girl who was on fire and the boy with the bread — these are not characters who need names, for they are not people, but ideas). It also helps to underscore that in any future we imagine — at any time — we are always tempted, it seems, by the same mistakes of idolatry, imprisonment, and violence.

One thing that I’ve heard The Hunger Games likened to again and again is American Idol or other reality competition shows where fame is an explicit prize as opposed to an implicit one. But that’s not what I saw in Haymitch’s quest for sponsors, and Ceasar Flickerman’s odd mix of absurdity and gravitas (seriously, who is Ceasar Flickerman when he’s alone? That’s my fanfiction question of the day). I kept seeing upfronts.

Upfronts are a funny thing, because they’re about advertising dollars — sponsors — and they are something the broader audience never used to be aware of (and in all fairness, I had to explain them to a friend just a few weeks ago). Yet, there are adverts about them on the buses in New York now, and fan cultures have been paying attention to the events, parties, and performances related to them for at least a few years now.

Because while the Hunger Games are meant to instill fear and loyalty and submission in the districts, they are really just for the Capital, the sponsors, the stylists, and the creators, and while they are arguably about celebrating the tributes, they’re really about examining the goods and making the most lucrative bets that can be made.

While TV isn’t going to kill anyone, no matter what The Hunger Games, The Truman Show, and, while we’re at it, Max Headroom (remember blipverts?) say, the disconnect between what upfronts are and what they pretend to be even though everyone knows better is hard to miss, at least if you know enough people in the business. “It’s all very checking horses’ teeth,” a friend who’s been a part of the upfronts game has said to me more than once, and it’s one of those things I can’t ever seem to forget.

Ultimately, while The Hunger Games is busy being a cautionary tale (you don’t want fame — you don’t want to be Haymitch or Katniss or Glimmer or, for that matter, Seneca Crane), it’s also one that tells us that a lot of the stuff we often like to say is the end of the world as we know it — e.g., American Idol — isn’t actually that bad. The really creepy stuff in the industry actually huddles in other corners.

At least for now. Because the other thing The Hunger Games has in common with the films it gets so much of its DNA from is that it’s all about convergence. When the mechanism is also the entertainment, that’s when things get really messy. At least that’s what I can’t stop thinking every time another over-packaged behind-the-scenes video gets released from a movie or TV show I love, or there’s another ad about upfronts that makes absolutely no sense to 95% of the people who see it on NYC public transit.

Like The Truman Show and Metropolis, The Hunger Games is likely to age strangely and seem, at a given point, quaint. And that’s probably exactly when we should really worry.

Brave: Threatdown – Bears!

Last night Patty took me to see Brave, and this review actually has nothing to do with the significant bear content, but as a regular watcher of The Colbert Show I couldn’t resist the title.

At any rate, as I think I have mentioned in these pages before, I don’t really see animated features as my thing, but she’s judicious about the ones she takes me to, and I’m nostalgic enough that Pixar’s insistence on placing a short before the main feature really charms me.

While Brave‘s animation is surely a technical achievement (the hair!), what’s particularly interesting is how the structure of the script makes its format — that of an animated feature — a necessary part of the storytelling mechanism. Because while Brave is about a girl and her mother overcoming the pitched war that often goes on between mothers and daughters at some point in their lives, Brave is also, thanks in part to a very judicious use of a voiceover, about the creation of legend.

And, because Merida’s voiceover in the film suggests, when combined with her father’s recounting of his battle with a bear that everyone has heard so many times they can tell it along with him, that what we are witnessing is her story as it has come to be told as opposed to the events as they happened, Brave provides an access point for people who distrust or just don’t have the receptor sites for animated features. Because if we’re being told a legend — a broad tale meant to teach us a lesson — its not being live-action is, in its way, more honest.

It’s a fabulous trick in a film that gives repeated shout-outs to stories and story-telling: there are the troublesome triplets that turn into the three bears; Merida, like Robbin Hood, splits an arrow already occupying the bullseye location on a target; the witch’s head in the caldron evokes the The Wizard of Oz; and the importance of storytelling technologies, from oral tradition to woven tapestry is plot central.

Prior to seeing Brave, I had been warned that it’s slight, but I really don’t think it is. Rather, the film has three things happening at once — comedy; structure about storytelling; and a narrative about freedom and duty. While, as audiences, we are deeply used to films about masculine honor and duty (see: Gladiator as perhaps the most obvious example of hundreds if not thousands of films), we’re not used to, I don’t think, films about feminine honor and duty where obligations are both questioned and ultimately met through change. This, combined with the lack of romantic resolution in the film could, I suppose, make it easy to miss the amount that happens and changes in the course of it.

Also contributing to the idea that the film is slight, may be the degree to which Merida and her disinterest in marriage is something of a cypher. Is she supposed to be echoing forward to some idea of Queen Elizabeth with her red hair and statement that only she is worthy of her own hand? Is she asexual? Is she lesbian? Is she just far too young to be interested in marriage? The film never tells us, but this is less a failing and more another structural nod to the construction of legends: Merida is whatever we need her to be. It’s an awfully dutiful role for a character that just wants her freedom.

The Newsroom: Symbolism – 0; Mythology – 3

Unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait a little bit longer for my review of The Land of Stories (although the giveaway on my Tumblr continues apace), because my personal, non-giveaway copy got nabbed along with my bag and my wallet at Pride today. Luckily, a friend is lending me their copy, and I should be able to get that in by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, tonight was the first episode of The Newsroom on HBO. In many ways, it’s not the type of show I’m inclined to write about, because it doesn’t particularly trade in symbolism. No one is secretly Death’s beloved servant, and we’re probably not going to be able to predict episode structures based on what colors people are wearing.

But I do like Sorkin, a lot. I like the hyper-verbal quality of his stuff and the degree to which he’s good at making it clear how much certain types of intelligence can be really agonizing to functioning in the world. When our main character Macavoy recounts, in detail, what happened at a baseball game he went to with his ex’s father years ago, this doesn’t just tell us about the lingering feelings he has for her, it tells us about how he retains information, holds grudges, and develops wounds unable to heal. It’s vastly informative about the character, and for some people, unpleasantly realistic.

What’s super interesting about Sorkin though, isn’t the incredibly dense language and racing pacing (although I thought the first episode of The Newsroom got severely bogged down during some of Mackenzie’s speeches), it’s his ability to amplify, beyond reality, the importance of things that are already pretty important.

The evening news, for example, is pretty damn important, even in this age of cable and the Internet. It sets the media agenda through trickle-down into other mediums and broadcasts; even if it doesn’t reach an audience directly in the same way it used to, it absolutely reaches an audience indirectly with remarkably similar power. The linkages between TV broadcast tonality on the economy and the Consumer Confidence Index, for example is marked, and news tonality in fact usually leads the CCI by a couple of weeks. When the news tells people it’s bad out there, people decide it’s bad.

Yet, despite this, Sorkin’s romanticism makes the news somehow even more important in his world. Some of that is a result of the breaking news pacing, but a lot of that, in the case of this show, is in the initial set up. As Patty said to me tonight so succinctly after I made her watch Macavoy’s initial statistical tirade, “Does America really care what happens at some random J-school forum?”

Well, no. But… but it could! Right?!?!? Sorkin convinces us his world could be, and perhaps even should be, true, even as we all know better. His fantasies remind us that we know better.

The West Wing, in some ways, is an even better example of this exaggeration of importance. What could be more important to Americans than the US presidency? Well, a lot, actually, and I don’t even have to make a catty remark about American Idol for that to be true. The American presidency is not nearly as central to the thoughts of most people most days as The West Wing makes its viewers feel, and that’s one hell of writing trick, creating a show in which the only sensible response is to say it’s blowing the US presidency out of proportionate significance.

So, despite many very rough edges both in execution and content, I think I am totally on board for The Newsroom. I may or may not write about it much here, as it’s not a particularly symbolic world, and we know how I love that, but I’m interested in its existence, both because it shares so much in common with many of the other things I write about here and because my original degree is in journalism.

The Newsroom is a backstage story. It’s about performance, competition, awkward people, and the fiercely, unpleasantly ambitious. It’s about romance. And, even without symbolism, it is about mythology — American mythology: newsmen, politics, and baseball.

It’s about the business of the truth, but it’s also about our lies. Like Glee, I suspect it will require us to do as much work, if not more, than its creators to make it work in the contexts we want — or even need — it to work in. But, like Glee, I suspect that work may be a lot of fun, at least for me.

Did anyone else out there tune in?

Personal: Musical theater is not like baseball, except when it is

In some ways musical theater is not like baseball. There’s totally crying in it, and if something flies into the audience, you can’t keep it.

In other ways, it’s totally like baseball: getting into the minors is one hell of an accomplishment in itself, the journey to your goals can be a long one, and there’s a lot of mythology to play with along the way.

Dogboy & Justine, the full-length musical version, completed its first (and nearly sold-out) run yesterday. We got what we wanted out of it — a good show, and lots of learning from the audience, the actors, and the rest of the team about what to tweak next to make it an even better show.

I personally discovered what was apparently obvious to everyone else, which is that I like, and am fairly good at, producing. It was also a tremendously character building exercise for me; I am absolutely a more capable person, with better self-esteem and better boundaries than I was three weeks ago, which is really good considering the ways in which musical theater is not like baseball (look, I cry very easily) and we’re no where near done with the show’s life-cycle yet, which means if you didn’t catch it this time, there will be other chances to see it.

I also discovered that no matter how much of an introvert (people exhaust me) and a natural complainer (I’m a NYC-native for heaven’s sake) I am, I do genuinely like people, enjoy their company, am fascinated by their foibles, and want to do right by them as much as possible.

Other facts, which aren’t really new discoveries, also remain: My life is largely defined by its propensity for small world theater and freakish synchronicity, and I do the stuff I do for lots of reasons.

A lot of those reasons aren’t necessarily “good,” even if they’re really human. They include vanity, and a need to feel like I actually exist. Some of the reasons are also pretty murky, because the desire to make an impact and the desire to tell stories about people like me and my friends — that’s vanity too, even if it sounds more altruistic than fame or success.

So I’m not gonna lie and say I didn’t enjoy all those moments in the American Theatre of Actors lobby where people were complimenting what my collaborator and I, and the whole creative team, made happen up on the stage. I loved that. The truth is, is that if you make stuff, those moments are like food.

But every once in a while this past week someone said we made an impact with the piece in a way that meant so much because it wasn’t about me — or any of us but that audience member — at all. The experience of that type of feedback, on some level, is about finding out I was able to help give someone else the stuff I’m always trying and failing to find for myself and instead tend to find in other people’s art.

That sentence is outrageously convoluted, but if you both like stuff and make stuff too, you probably know what I mean. And if you were there, and were one of those conversations, I hope we get to continue it (this is, in fact, being posted here for that very reason, and also to wrap up this round of D&J intensity, before this blog goes back to other subjects).

So thank you so much — if you came to the show, worked on the show, or just had patience with this space while I haven’t had as much energy for it as I would like. I still have a lot of administrative wrap-up to do, and I’ve an essay due this week for an anthology, but we’re almost back online here.

See you soon!

Personal: coming attractions

If I’ve discovered nothing else in the last few weeks, it’s that it’s almost impossible to do anything else while co-producing a show.

But, of course, there’s been other things to do: I’ve an essay due by the 20th for something, and Patty comes home on Monday. There’s been the hard news analytics work I don’t generally talk about here, and there’s also been friends and music and adventures, and being dragged out to bars at 11pm on a Monday.

There’s been the work my upstairs neighbors (one of them a landscape designer it turns out) have done on our now glorious yard, and spending time with people I have known since I was a child, even if by child what I mean is the year I was 19 and I thought I knew what I was doing being all clever and coy.

But I haven’t really had time to write here, not in an organized way. Even if I do have things to say about Tyrion Lanister and leader-of-men speeches, about how only we maybe believe them from the men we are told should not be leaders, because only they can know what to say to lead the terrified into battle.

I have random things to say about Glee too — Kurt Hummel’s collection of death related brooches is probably top of the list. And I keep thinking that today is the day that Ianto Jones died on Torchwood, but actually, I’m just forgetful and eager, because that’s actually next month.

Meanwhile, I desperately want to see Snow White and the Huntsman (which I’m sure will give me things to write about) and, I guess, The Avengers so I can keep up with what everyone is talking about.

But right now, and speaking of fairy tales, I am reading Chris Colfer’s The Land of Stories.

It’s an odd read for me, as I barely do YA, and this is meant for an even younger audience, but once it finds its voice and the the location it actually wants to be set in, it’s quite luminous, and, at least so far, uniquely melancholy. Even if it’s not really my sort of book at all, it’s a little bit the right one at the right time, and certainly, I’m excited enough to think about how I’m going to write about it as I am reading it.

So I promise I’ll be back soon, with cogent and perhaps excessive arguments about ridiculous things. I’ll have some announcements of stuff coming out soon, I think, as well (publishing is glacial, my friends, glacial), and I should probably backtrack enough to talk about the BEA children’s author breakfast, at which every speaker was truly stellar.

There’s also a slight chance I’ll blog about tomorrow’s Starkid show (even though I still don’t get it) through my regret that Patty couldn’t go with me to be boggled and outraged by this tour’s archaeology theme (when I thought she might be able to join me, I was seriously considering making me write a guest post on it — trust me when I say we’re all the poorer for that not happening).

In the meantime, I hope you’re having a lovely not-quite-summer-yet thus far, and if you do come to Dogboy & Justine, please be sure to take a moment to say hello.

Soon: Tyrion Lannister. Now: Kinkstarter!

Sorry about the headline, it was just a little bit irresistible.

So, while I slowly work my way up to a post about leader-of-men speeches and Tyrion Lannister, but must currently plead exhaustion as I spent the night on a train to Boston, I do have one more Dogboy & Justine related announcement for now: Kinkstarter!

On June 6 at 9pm, please join us as we bring Broadway to its knees for an evening of cabaret as the cast, crew, and friends of Dogboy & Justine and Treble Entendre put a naughty, kinky twist on classic Broadway (and a few pop hits!) at the historic Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall Inn is located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City.

There’s no cover and a two drink minimum for this event as we pass the hat in support of our upcoming production of Dogboy & Justine.

I’m MC’ing (after spending a day adventuring at BEA), and I promise you, it’s going to be very strange, very funny evening.

Dogboy & Justine — tickets now on sale!

At least some of you know that amongst my many projects is a musical called Dogboy & Justine, which is going up at the American Theatre of Actors June 13th – 17th.

This thing actually began its life as a short, non-musical play I wrote back in 2006, so, I am incredibly happy to be able to point you to SmartTix, where you can now buy tickets for our Equity approved Showcase.

We’ve been in rehearsals for a few weeks now and have an amazing cast and production team, each and every one of which I am in awe of on a daily basis. You can learn more about them at the show’s website, where we’re adding the cast headshots and bios daily.

So yeah. Stuff! Come see the show, and if you do, please come say hi.

Glee: Love is not a victory march

Love is not a victory march.

Neither is ambition. Or fame.

And, for that matter, neither is blogging about random TV shows.

While Glee adhered to my rules in its finale (the Ferryman took a toll from Rachel and from Finn, and wouldn’t let Kurt leave), I was gobsmacked when Kurt didn’t get into NYADA. Although with Kurt’s lovely moments with both his father and Blaine as the season’s end drew closer, what else could have happened really? I should have seen it, and I had too many hearts in my eyes to notice.

I’ve spent a lot of time tonight being amazed at how much a post I tossed up on Tumblr about the nature of highly selective programs is getting reblogged, but the reason there seems pretty clear too.

It’s clear in the sad, frustrated, resigned feeling I had at the end of tonight’s episode: Rachel wins the day for the simplest of structural reasons; someone like Rachel is, innately, an avatar for more people than someone like Kurt.

Rachel is, and has always been, the center of the show, despite the kindnesses delivered to people who see themselves in Kurt Hummel. She has to get the victory story, because, as hard as it is to comprehend when you’re not someone who sees themselves in Rachel, more underdogs are hurt if it’s Kurt and not her.

I get it. I really do. Not even as the queer kid, but as the weird kid. My problem wasn’t that I was an ugly duckling or overbearing (although I have been and can be both), my problem is that I was just other — sad, powerful, never the right age, and generally poor at acting on my halfway decent political instincts.

Stories are never really about people like that. I know that; Tumblr knows that; Glee knows that; and Kurt Hummel definitely knows that.

But once I got past that and thought about some of the things I keep saying about Glee — the toll of the ferryman, and Kurt’s death work in particular (did you see him, with that giant beetle pinned to his graduation robe? I’ll have to do a whole post about his brooches during hiatus) — I hit a point of peace with it.

Kurt hasn’t paid his price yet, and hasn’t done any of his work as chief mourner on his own behalf. I imagine he’s frustrated that his assets make it harder for him to achieve; and boggled that he suddenly seems so much older than Blaine (and he really, really did in this episode).

I think about all the metaphors and symbolism we’ve played with and tried to decode this season — faerie foods and mystical pregnancies — and I wonder if every time Kurt kisses Blaine it’s like another pomegranate seed that keeps him in this Underworld that is Lima.

However, at the end of the season, without knowing where we’re going next, that’s rather besides the point. It’s not the metaphor or the symbolism that matters, so much as the reason we seek it (other than it’s fun).

For a lot of us, I think that reason, oddly, goes back to one of the first things I ever said about Glee: which is that it’s really hard for me to watch shows supposedly about outcasts when I know that if we shared a world, I still wouldn’t be cool enough for them.

This is why it hurts when Kurt Hummel fails, because unlike most of the “outcast” teens on TV — including Rachel and Finn (and oh, is is hard to watch everyone have so much damn gratitude for them) — it’s easy to get the sense that Kurt might be nice to us, or, you know, at least willing to sit at our table during lunch, even if he’s totally judging our choices in footwear.

But Kurt is older and wiser than Rachel. He doesn’t need NYADA to shape him, so much as he needs something to spin him around and point him in the right direction. That’s coming, and it won’t be easy, or nice or kind for any of us, but it will be necessary.

In the meantime, maybe we should take some time to feel pretty awesome about his victories. Kurt Hummel changed his life, his dad’s life, Blaine’s life, Dave Karofsky’s life, Rachel’s life; and he changed, just a little bit, that hellhole of a school. I can’t be the only who cried at the shot of the tadpole gays; are those two boys best friends just waiting to discover they’re in love? Do they dream of one day being as cool as Kurt and Blaine?

Let’s face it, whether he’s salved wounds new or old, real or imagined, Kurt Hummel’s changed our lives too, even if just for an hour every Tuesday night.

So yes, there was a lot of to be frustrated with in that season finale structurally and thematically, but some things remain true: Kurt’s always been better than Lima, and arguably Glee, but why it hurts is because we never thought Kurt was better than us, and we were sure were all going to get out of this place together.

But don’t worry. Take a deep breath. It’ll happen. This is all normal. I promise.

Because you know what else isn’t a victory march?

Loving stories.

It’s the lack of control, you see. That’s what makes it sweet when it all finally turns out exactly the way we want. Until them, like Kurt, we have to hold on tight, smile at the margins, and write our own stories.

And you know what? They’re going to be amazing.