... introducing Glee to the Shark

Glee is one of the breakout hits of the current TV season. It has been lauded for its musical numbers, portrayal of high school social stratification, and snappy writing. At the same time, it's also been sharply criticized for a misanthropic outlook. Not many of the characters are truly likeable, particularly the female characters. Even the most sympathetic of them - Mr Shuster, the teacher ostensibly in charge of the glee club - spends most of his screen time being either unbelievably bland or unbelievably stupid, and not in that interesting Jason-Stackhouse-Stupid way.

Personally, I watch the show but do not love it. Part of this is my somewhat complex relationship with musicals - I love music, I love movies, I love plays, I do not love when they come together. I'm not a huge fan of the misanthropic undertones of the show, but I can live with them. I do see how over time they could really alienate a lot of people, especially casual viewers who might have been tuning into this week's show based on a lot of public appearances by the cast and all the hype surrounding the release of the first soundtrack album (second one to be out in a couple of week's time).

In this week's episode Artie, who is in a wheelchair, was not going to be able to travel with the rest of the club to a competition because there was no wheelchair accessible bus. Having to be driven there by his father left him feeling lonely and an outsider resulting as it so often does in singing "Dancing with Myself" (which I never realized until this week is a terribly monotonous song). Mr Shuster sees this and upbraids the team for making him feel this way, and to teach them a lesson orders them to use wheelchairs for a week and create a routine to go with them. He also leads them to put on a bake sale to raise money for a wheelchair-accessible bus. In the end they get the money, but Artie admits he does not mind traveling with his father to the competition, and would rather the money went to build more ramps for the school, including the auditorium in which he has inexplicably been able to perform every week so far. However, they discover that a benefactor has already paid for new ramps.

Who is this benefactor? Well, it's Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the red track suit wearing, deliciously evil head of the cheerleading squad at the school who is in a death battle with the glee club for reasons that make less sense every week (It's supposedly about funding, but between the losing football team, active theatre and band programmes, and the cheerleading squad I've failed to see anything this school can't afford). In the B-plot she was pressured by Mr Shuster to be more inclusive. To prove her point she gave a child with Down's Syndrome the chance to be on the cheerleading squad, which led to some "Who is more the fool" role reversal about what it means to be handicapped. In the end Sue is seen at an assisted living home reading to her older sister (who had never been mentioned before, unless I am mistaken), who has just been revealed to us as suffering from Down's Syndrome and whose favourite story? Is Little Red Riding Hood.

Why go into so much detail about the plot? Mostly because the previous episodes of Glee have featured

• Mr Shuster's wife Terri (not appearing in this episode) faking a pregnancy so that he would get a better job and she would not have to continue being a part time clerk at a linen store,
• Terri approaching pregnant former head cheerleader Quinn to offer to pay her medical bills so she could have take the baby and pass it off as her own
• Terri taking a job as a nurse to spy on her husband, which resulted in her getting most of the school hooked on speed - for which she was unrepentant
• Quinn deceiving her boyfriend Finn into thinking the baby she is carrying is his, when it was really fathered by his best friend. (This plot thread was mentioned in the episode, but turned into standard boy/girl relationship drama Edited to add: Also, it was turned into an excuse for a "boy does right by girl he impregnated by trying to pay for some medical costs" plot) For the record, Quinn and Finn have never had sex, but Quinn is too dumb to notice this fact
• Emma Pillsbury (also not appearing in this episode) the guidance counsellor who has a crush on Mr Shuster entering into a loveless marriage with Ken, the football coach, to avoid talking to Mr Shuster. This marriage is predicated on the belief that she does not want to see, be seen, or even be in the same room as Ken at any time, which he is all too willing to go along with

So...what we have here is an episode with all the trappings of the dreaded Very Special Episode, completely selling out the tone and content of almost every other previous episode. We even had a first kiss, a confession, a tender father/son moment about dealing with being openly homosexual (which seemed to me to end on a "keep it in the closet" note), and a cute food fight with cupcake ingredients.

I couldn't help but think of the Arrested Development episode "S.O.B.s", where the Bluths try everything to get attention and be relatable before they pretty much admit that's not who they are, and to do anything else would be so counter to how they operate that it could only end in disaster.

"Jumping the Shark" is an overused term, but it's important to remember what it really means: When a show, in a bid to extend its audience, abandons the qualities that made it successful in the first place. Agree or disagree with how you feel about the amount of misanthropy in the show, it was one of things that lead to a lot of conflict and humour. However, in a week when the show was returning after a brief time off for the World Series and when it was promoting its album, it chose to end with a big a musical number featuring all of the kids in wheelchairs singing "Proud Mary" (...rolling, rollling, rolling on the river...) with nary a hit of irony or self-awareness of the absurdity of the situation or how it brought them there. Compare this to the end just one episode before: Quinn's pregnancy had been exposed and she was at her nadir, and she stood hand-in-hand between Rachel and Finn (who are fighting their own feelings for each other) singing a song about standing together in times of distress. While this big number was going on it was also serving to highlight the love triangle that is at the fulcrum of the club and the series and hollow out the actual message of the song. (By the way, for a pregnancy that was supposed to be secret, they sure did talk about it in the hall between classes a lot, didn't they?)

As I said before, I don't love this show. I like it, and PVR it, but there are many other things I'll watch first - I have no dog in this hunt. The one thing I admire about any show, even those I don't like or feel a need to watch, is a vision and an understanding of tone aided by a creative team making sure it adheres to that. That was one thing that made Arrested Development, The Sopranos et al great. I really hope that Glee remembers this sooner rather than later, lest it should join the ranks of series that started strong (Desperate Housewives), but got wrapped up in their own press and simply couldn't avoid going for the damn shark.

... remembering Spencer Bernard

Updated: Here is Spencer's obituary

I had just moved back to Canada after three years in Barbados. The four things I was looking most forward to were:

1. Not having to wear a uniform to school
2. Not having to take history anymore
3. Skipping a grade, essentially going from 9 to 11
4. Girls (three years in an all-boys school...yeah...)

On my first day back at Minto Memorial High School, feeling oh-so-rebellious in jeans and a black jacket, I tried to find my home room. I guess between re-enrolling and being bumped up, I was not put on any homeroom sheets (so begins the G Valentino Adolesence of Obscurity). I ran into the principal and told him my predicament. He walked down a hall, leaned into a room and said "Spence, can you take an Italian student?" "Well, does he make good pasta?"

And that's how I met Spencer Bernard.

Now everyone has that one teacher at some point that they idolize and write navel-gaving epistles about, and Mr Bernard was mine. I'd love to say that it was he was a great educator, that his classes were insightful and pushed our boundaries, that he challenged us. But really, he didn't. He was a high school teacher of history and biology who from time to time forgot he was a teacher and would basically act and think like a student.

But he did teach something very crucial for a boy who was back in a hometown that he didn't quite remember, experiencing a bit of a culture shock, and going from 12 to 15 in terms of some basic human interactions overnight. He taught me that it was okay to be myself.

We both soon discovered that we had a shared fondness for Fawlty Towers, which I had watched in Barbados. That's how he introduced me to Monty Python and a whole other realm of British humour and satire. He was a Star Trek fan, something that I was becoming at the time, and he was the first adult I had met with that interest and who took it seriously. He had a keen knowledge of pop culture. He was also a sharp observer of people, and had an eye for the little absurdities that most would ignore going on around them, those little rules of behaviour and etiquette that created a social fabric, but made no sense. He would then pepper a lot of those in his interpretations of history. We would talk about these things before and after classes, and probably during them most of the time (which I'm sure annoyed a lot of people in the class).

The more time I spent in his classes and in conversation with him, the more I saw that those little things that I had classified as "weird" or "nerdy" (obsessiveness with books and the details of stories, little hidden connections between disciplines, distrust of popular opinion) weren't things to be kept out polite conversation, but were the things that made me who I was and conversely made others who they were. I came to see that all of us, in our own way, are a little bit nerdy. As humans we are creatures of irrational obsessions and odd passions. If you could recognize those in yourself and celebrate them in others, than the world was going to be a far more interesting place. The more I talked to Mr Bernard, the more I came to believe that the two greatest traits we as humans have are empathy and curiosity. So long as you never lost those, you'd never lose the wonder of life.

When I came back to Canada, I was ready to leave History behind. When I went to University, it was my minor. I went from seeing it as a bland progression of dates and causes and effects to recognizing that it's a story of those things that make people who they are only writ large, filled the same ambitions and pettiness as the rest of our daily interactions are. As trite as it sounds, that all started with Mr Bernard asking if the new kid could make good pasta. From anyone else, it would have been offensive. From him, it sounded like a little note that said "Don't take the story too seriously, because in the end the story sure as hell ain't gonna take you seriously."

The last time I was back in New Brunswick, about two years ago, I opened the paper and saw his picture in the community notices section. They were having a party to celebrate his retirement from teaching. I was one of the first people to arrive, and hadn't seen him in almost a decade. I walked in and he looked across the room. "Giuseppe," he said (it was the name he loved calling me in the hallways at MMHS) "I can't believe it, how in the hell are you?" and he threw his arms around me. We talked about his retirement, about the things he wanted to do, and what he'd probably wind up doing, and I'm pretty sure both were just going to be sitting on his couch, watching Star Trek.

Spencer Bernard passed away today. He once said me to "When I die, I want them to bury me with a credit card and a bottle of whiskey, because if I can't buy my way into heaven I'm gonna drown my sorrows in hell." Maybe I'm idealistic, but I think if what I learned from Spencer could be applied to more people, we wouldn't need to worry much about either.

... proving Louie Louie is the greatest song ever written

Here's "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen:



Now here's three songs, three different decades, three different styles.

Here's "Wild Thing" by the Troggs:



Here's "Smells like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana:



Here's "More than a Feeling" by Boston:



Notice anything the same?

... Fran Healy and Andy Dunlop of Travis, October 30th

"Since this tour was just going to be Fran and Andy from Travis, we thought about calling it 'Frandy Travis', but figured we'd get sued," joked Fran Healy at the start of their set at the Mod Club in Toronto. This little joke at their own expense nicely summed up the structure and tone of the North American club tour he and lead guitarist Andy Dunlop are in the middle of, which appears to be modelled after VH1 Storytellers.

We had seen Travis before a couple of years ago when they were touring behind The Boy With No Name. We missed their show at the Sound Academy earlier this year since it fell on the same night as The Walkmen opened for King of Leon. It's a very very hard choice that I don't wish upon anyone. So when we heard that Fran and Andy were doing these smaller, stripped down shows we jumped all over that like a Glasswegan on a deep fried Mars bar, in a manner of speaking.

Going in there was a feeling that this was a different type of show, and not just because of all the Halloween decorations all over the venue. Even though the show was general admission, there were rows of steel folding chairs on the floor which is unusual for your typical Friday night club gig, even with a very hard-out for a DJ set (more on that later). The stage set up was two microphones, Fran and Andy's guitars, and a banner for the Glasgow newspaper, giving the whole thing the feel of being like a little busking set-up at a fair.

The whole set had a very informal and conversational feel about it as Fran went through the band's history, with little stories about each song or the history of the band. These were accentuated by a slideshow, though it was more of the Don Draper variety than the boring PowerPoint seminar we've all been in. The majority of these helped to accentuate Healy's wit and playful nature. One slide which was just a map of Scotland was described as "How we Scots think of the rest of the British Isles: Underwater." Another set of slides detailed the writing of "Writing to Reach You" as the confluence of a butane heater, Noel Gallagher, Franz Kafka's love letters, and a song by an American band whose name escapes me right now. These stories were always entertaining, and told with enough good humour and humility that they never seemed boring or pedantic. Rather, Healy came off as someone who enjoys what he does, has no illusions about it in the greater scope of things, and at times it genuinely shocked by quickly the band became popular (in the U.K. at least).

Mind you, you can tell as many great stories as you want, the show will be painful if the music is horrible (See: most junior high versions of Oliver!). Despite their reputation as a soft-rock Radiohead, Travis in any form actually puts on a very good show that does rock in the traditional sense. Like Johnny Greenwood, Andy Dunlop's guitar often serves as a counterpoint to the songs: buzzing over and sometimes through them, giving it all a little edge. In the more intimate setting Dunlop's ability as a guitarist shone through, confirming my belief that he is one of the more underrated guitarists playing today. His style is understated without being showy while at the same time allowing him to play a strong solo without overshadowing the song. It's a tough trick.

The set list, as could be expected from the subject matter, was of the "greatest hits" variety, though they did play a couple of B-Sides ("Twenty" and "Beautiful") as well as an unreleased song they are currently working on. As well, little parts of "Sweet Caroline" and "Footloose" made it into the set also.

"Did you bring your sleeping bags, because it's going to be a long night," Healy joked early in the set. However, the Mod Club is not just a concert venue, it is an actual club which had a DJ set booked to start at 11:00. This meant that everything started early, but also that the show had a rushed quality to it, especially towards the end. They have averaged about about 20-25 songs a night, and while I didn't keep count it didn't feel quite like it. As well, they said that they liked to do a set of requests at the end of the show, but instead in ended with them doing one pseudo-request (I didn't get the feeling they could actually make out that most of the crowd was yelling "Driftwood" and instead went into "All U 16 Girls"). Also, Fran and Andy sell their own merch, which meant that they had to wrap up even earlier than they might otherwise have.

When it came to emptying the place, the staff did as much as they could to keep the crowd orderly and moving, but yelling "We're going to have to kick you out in five minutes, so form a single line to the merchandise counter" without describing where such a line is seemed a little foolhardy. We still got our picture taken with them though!

Radiohead became the standard bearer for the second wave of BritPop before they became their own genre. Coldplay then became the new headliner, but in the middle was Travis, cutting and earnest but in it for love. Spending an evening with Fran and Andy might not make you a believer, but it will remind you about why you love music, regardless of your preferences.