Totally/Technically Great: Jordin's "On A Clear Day" is joyous, and the girl is gorgeous, but her antics before and after the song are wearing thin. She's a kid. Doolittle sings "I've Got Rhythm" in a seamlessly polished performance that schools everybody and brings a trite tune back not only to life but to awesomeness. LaKisha sings "Stormy Weather" in what I'm being told is a fabulous fashion, but I don't get the point of that song, so I was mostly lost.
Boring But Serviceable: Gina sings an understated -- yet not sentimental or cheesy -- "Smile," then Paula correctly praises her for these exact reasons. "Mr. Saturday Night" is another song I can't stand, but Chris's messy notes and all-over-the-placeness: obvious.
And Blake. "Mack The Knife"? My most hated song, in my most hated songbook, sung in my most hated David Radford crooning bullshit Sinatra impression. I'm not going to bed angry, I'm just going to bed. We don't actually need to talk about it or anything, it's fine. You should probably just go. I'll call you tomorrow, I promise. Don't look at me like that, I'm not mad. I'm not anything, I just...I'm really tired, okay? You too. Bye.
Creepy, Bizarre, Upsetting: Phil sings "Night And Day" in the style of an American singing like a French person singing like a German singing like Sundance Head: creepy and a tad disingenuous, but at least he dedicates it to 9/11 some more. Haley's "Ain't Misbehavin'" is a moving violation in many spooky, crazy ways; Tony Bennett has to remind her that the song is anti-sluttiness, her dress disagrees. Sanjaya's white Wolfe-suited "Cheek To Cheek" is the usual masterwork of Dadaism. Only way it could be more offensive is if it were delivered wearing a pith helmet, and he knows it.
Irrelevant: Idol Gives Back, standards. Tony Bennett.
Hitting Seal: Phil, Haley, hopefully Blake. Just enough to hurt, like Ryan can send him right back to the stands in like one hot second, but I want him afraid week.
Going Home: Haley, please.
When it comes to singing a song and telling a story, or in fact talking forever about nothing in particular, we got Tony Bennett. He's spent sixty years having hits in every decade, starting with 1950. 106 albums and $50M worldwide sales, 15 Grammies and eighty years of age later, he's a legend. He sings with Xtina and is beloved by Stevie, Barbra, and Bono. His Duets is his biggest album ever. Everybody loves him, he's a legend. He jumped on the "ironic cover" bandwagon after everybody else had finally jumped off it, desperately grasping for the tweener buck, and still couldn't equal the emotional power in one pinkie toe of "Hurt." He represents a bygone age when men were men and women were women, and he's still stuck there, along with countless fans and members of the Greatest Generation. Like so many of his fans and fans of the show, he prefers to hear the songs he's heard a million times before, performed just like they have been performed a million times before, because he is deeply afraid of change. His comfort zone is the circumference of the action of a pair of wingtips, in the middle of a lazy soft-shoe. He is a performer par excellence, much like his whole generation of showmen, and is thus part of a phenomenon in which I have a notorious lack of interest. To say I would rather throw myself off a tall, tall building than ever hear Clay Aiken "interpret" a dusty old standard or five thousand is not to say that Clay Aiken is untalented. I'm given to understand he's good at doing this thing. It's just that he's doing something I don't care for. There are people who are good at golf too, but I don't want to watch them being good at it.
The Idols cheer, as they do every week, on Tony's arrival. He describes them all as "very competent," and tells them that he likes all of them. He then explains that, coincidentally enough, the songs in which he is most proficient happen to be "the best songs ever written in America," and explains to us that the "whole idea" is longevity. Keep doing the same thing for sixty years, never growing or changing or challenging your audience in any way, and you too could still get wheeled out onstage for applause when you're billions of years old, like a toothless tiger in a decaying circus cage. You too can be complicit in the consensual illusion that things were better in the past, when racism and misogyny were the order of the day; you too can look back fondly on the Depression and two World Wars and have the gall to get misty about it. You too can be part of the lie. You too can say -- with eyes wide open -- that Sophia Loren still is, and will always be, the sexiest bloated corpse on the planet.
Blake's excited about "Mack The Knife," because he finds it "very swing." There are levels on which Blake and I will never understand each other and I've made my peace with that. It lends things an air of mystery which I quite like. Amber is, after all, the color of our energy: you listen to 311 all you want, I'm still going to watch six hours of Buffy every day; won't stop me leaving little cartoons in your sack lunch. Tony Bennett, however, doesn't get Blake on all levels simultaneously. There's a Paula filter, a cloud of unknowing, that hangs between these two men, some drastic generational occlusion, a musical or perhaps literal cataract that obscures them from each other. Tony Bennett reaches across that space to slap Blake across the face, but he's moving too fast. He'll always be moving too fast. Tony makes a sad, angry face about "putting a beat to it and all that," and begs Blake to "get to the meaning of" the song. He explains, charmingly out of his depth and long since gone to the misty pastures all old men eventually find themselves prowling, that the song is "pre-rap, you know." He explains the "meaning" of the song, as he incorrectly understands it: the song's "about being a sharp gangster." He hopes Blake slows down the tempo, to give each line more impact; he hopes Blake slows down.
Had I been writing for the site back in the old days, back when it was Mighty Big Broadsheet (or, even earlier, "Dawson's Revivifying Elixir"), all those love odes for Blake would have been written to Berthold Brecht. The Threepenny Opera is the most intense sustained blast of hate this side of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day": a horrifying Punch & Judy story, reveling in and indicting the evils in the Weimar Republic. "Und die minderjährige Witwe/ Deren Namen jeder weiÃ/ Wachte auf und war geschändet/ Mackie welches war dein Preis?": "And the child bride, in her nightie, whose assailant is still at large, was violated in her slumbers: Mackie, how much did you charge?" Imagine. Imagine singing this song with your fingers snapping, cheesy fucking grin plastered across your face, envisioning a "sharp gangster," something to be respected and feared: something Tony Bennett wants you to celebrate. Mack the Knife, setting fire to orphanages, raping children in their beds, knifing people all over town. And "Pirate Jenny," my favorite by far, the girl mopping floors and dreaming of carnage, her Black Freighter bringing death to the entire city. There is nothing more beautiful than a violent poet. There is nothing worse than seeing him declawed, no broomstick, piss and vinegar and blood drained out. This recap is so weird -- trust me, it gets hairy -- because I have decided that instead of dedicating it to our boys in Iraq, as I usually do, I have dedicated it to Brecht's tattered, trod-upon memory, and all the violent, beautiful poets in his invisible college: Dickinson, Rimbaud, Ernst, Artaud, Joe Orton, Shirley Manson from the band Garbage. (See? Weird. Sorry, I'm in a mood this week.)
I don't expect Blake to do his homework, I don't expect anybody who sings this song to understand what it means -- if you understood what it meant, you wouldn't sing it. I saw a couple making out at the Tori Amos concert, during "Spark," which has gotta be the third harshest sustained blast of rage in the history of music. And there's Blake doing little dances, wearing Muggle pants again, the Dino, the Sinatra in his voice, the ecstasy of performance, the sheer power of singing a song everybody's heard a million times in the way they've heard it a million times. Out in the audience a dead person is clapping slowly, and they're clapping for Phil, of course. There's a bad note, then stretching hideously, warping up to catch it like a butterfly, dissonance becoming scatting and then losing his breath altogether and then slipping into Vegas manqué for the last bar. Dreadful, unoriginal, pitchy, stupid, passé and trite performance, by Tony Bennett's command: Add absolutely nothing to the sum total of human experience.
So Randy loves it, of course. "Check it out, man," it was a good way to start the evening, what with the "cool jazz vibe" and all. Blake, pitch problems aside, is a "funky, jazzy, cool kinda guy," says Randy. Randy's never seen anything like Blake and thus doesn't have the vocabulary. Paula, well, you know how she rolls: "You personified pizzazz! You're a hip cat! You were great! You're just cool!" Simon gives him good song choice, and it was, and tells him he performed it well. Seven out of ten for Blake, and eight out of ten for the band, who rocked it. Randy and I both silently agree. Ryan asks him which is harder: going first or learning the lyrics while completely ignoring their meaning. Definitely the lyrics, little Blake admits: "Going first is fun!" Ryan describes watching Blake lovingly during rehearsals, and then they abruptly cut each other off; Ryan sends him away to relax so he can tell us "the plan": the plan is for Phil and Doolittle to sing .
Out in the audience there's a diptych sign: Ryan, You Know I Love You: Simon Is Always Right. Two pieces of truth that when fitted together describe me completely. These two little children, I hasten to point out, are not in my employ. "I love you too," he grins, and thanks them. He talks about Idol Gives Back and mentions some people: Keira Knightly, Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Radcliffe, Rowan Atkinson, and...Pink. She seems not to fit in there at all, until you realize that all of them are not singers, and thus do not need to be involved with this ridiculous show in any capacity. (Also, they are all lesbians.) And then somewhere else or something, I kind of zone out when people talk about pyramid schemes, Kelly Clarkson will finally admit she was on this show one time! That's legitimately interesting! And kinda OMG! Kelly Clarkson! Yay!
Phil has been looking forward to this week more than anything, because Tony Bennett is his hero. I'm just quoting, I'm not trying to be mean. He really said that. Of course he did, he dedicates every breath he takes and every move he makes, night and day, to the victims of cerebral palsy or his wife or his grandfather or the cancer of his second cousin once removed or whatever causes fake tears to come squirting out of your Hallmark gland. Gwen Stefani, Diana Ross, J. Lo are probably his heroes too, but I mean, of course he loves Tony Bennett. Who doesn't? Phil will be singing "Night And Day," a "passionate" love song, and he will be singing it super slow and super creepy and in a stupid accent that sounds like Sundance Head after a week of PBS Britcom reruns. The idea of putting Phil Stacey and the word "passionate" in the same hemisphere of our beautiful world makes me want to beat someone soundly with a broomstick. Tony Bennett begs Phil to suck less, but confides in us that Phil's one of the better singers he's heard: not just today, but ever. Firstly, I question Tony Bennett's powers of recall, not to say continence. However, the really offensive thing here is that the reason for this hyperbole, astoundingly enough, is that when Tony Bennett is nearby, Phil sings just like...Tony Bennett. Proving once again that the quickest way to a man's heart is up his ass.
I can buy it better from Phil, because he is not my one true love and thus it does not reflect poorly on me as a person, although the truth remains that looking at him makes my tummy hurt. Is he getting sicker? Is his degrading state causing some kind of glossolalia? The sounds coming out of his hollow ghostly face don't sound like a song, they sound like a snake handler. His eyes are hooded in death as usual. My notes at one point: "Pronounciation is fucking weird of the words." You know what, I'm not even skeeved about the song this time around. He can spend his life making love to you if he wants; he's not long for this world, and deserves to go out happy. Then, right after his cheesy-ass, troubling singing is done, he makes a face that I can only describe as "noble," in the same way that beagles often make a face like this which is similarly honorable in appearance but has no actual honor behind it. I so often make the mistake of anthropomorphizing the contestants on this show.
Randy: "check it out Dawg that was an interesting choice for you," you "sang it good," there were "big notes," it was "cool." No mention by anybody of the fucked up sounding Uta Lemper vocal issues, of course, which means he must still be pulling shit votes, which means he's going to be the Bottom Three But One Of You Is Safe guy AGAIN this week. Watch. Mark my words. Randy does note however a lack of "connection" and "passion" -- which is unfair. The man's barely drawing breath and you're expecting him to waste his precious life force on projecting "passion"? Just be glad he didn't pass out onstage. Or start drinking Ryan's blood, for that matter. The crowd boos of course, as they have been told to do, and Randy laughs nastily: "I know how you feel! I was listening to it too!" Um, Randy? Come here a minute. Closer. No, closer. BOOM. That was snotty and stupid. The only person who can be Simon here is Simon, and even he pulls it off only three-quarters of the time. Not witty in this context, even. He repeats that it was "disconnected a little bit, I don't know," and Paula jumps right up in the crazy and starts rolling around in it, like a ball pit at McDonald's, or a hound dog in a very smelly area of the yard: "Good news! Reminiscent of a young Frank Sinatra!" Simon, Jacob, Ryan, ["Joe R," -- Joe R] Charlie's Angels, the West Memphis Three, Kim Jong-Il, Boris and Natasha, Chevy Chase, Forrest Gump, and everybody down through history screams, "WHAT?"
Also, I can see Simon Cowell's left nipple is how low his shirt is open this week. I don't think that's okay, or like, maybe legal. They fight about Paula's nonsensical bullshit, which means Simon is dumb too for engaging and creating two problems where previously there was only one, and it was one we already knew about. She keeps talking about how Phil needs to acquire a personality immediately, but Simon's stuck on the whole thing she just talked crazy about, and she actually tries to justify that shit, and it's ugly. You can see his damn nipple! You can see his belly button! You can see the soles of his feet! He finally just shuts her off, like in his mind, and tells him it was hearing a beautiful song in a funeral parlor. You know what else is like a funeral parlor? Phil Stacey.
Phil and Simon discuss how the performance was "gloomy" and "really dark," and Phil once again gives him some unnecessary and unearned attitude about it. You see, he was dedicating his performance to his wife, who is right now in Iraq single-handedly bringing freedom to the world and whatever, her cat just died and it's her birthday and if Phil doesn't get through this week she'll leave him and then he'll fall apart and finally succumb to his illness, whatever it takes, his wife is actually the Pentagon, whatever it takes, he's not picky, he has no shame, he looks like half of a surprised drag queen crossed with a haunted Charlie McCarthy doll, all he has to trade is this Hallmark poem he's made of his life. There is no cloud of anything, there is no drastic occlusion, between Phil Stacey and Tony Bennett: they are cut from the same cloth, and nobody's been smart enough to pull on the seams yet. But one day soon, some kid, some angry little Sanjaya out there, is going to ask why Tony Bennett has no clothes, and then it'll all come crashing down.
Doolittle is , and she's got rhythm! And that's also the song she'll be singing! She's adorable singing to Tony, who recognizes her very real talent and tells us that she's got a "good change in the business," and tells her she's a "real good singer," and just when you think we're gonna get out of here without getting Doolittle all over it, he tells her she's been the best of the way, and she goes Melinda full-throttle about it, how "somebody of that caliber" telling her the same shit everybody on Earth is constantly telling her is "amazing." She cries, of course, and Tony Bennett prays that she will continue to believe in herself, and thus only pretend to be shocked right out of her bra and garter every single time anybody ever says anything nice to her. I...really hope for that too, Tony. SUCKA!
Melinda looks enchanting in a black dress with white rose-printed panels, and the song is BOSSSS. Swank, flirty horns, Melinda prowling around with her lack of need for things that money can by, with her straight-ironed hair making her giant face even cuter, with just a hint of the existence of a neck, edging ever so slightly out of the dark woods of polio and into the relatively sunny clearing of simple scoliosis, prancing around her pot of gold, and a full-on goddamn rainbow comes sparkling out of the sky and lights up her shoes, which have both rhythm and music, and unicorns come out with ribbons in their manes, and she rides them around while singing, dancing, doing this and that, being adorable in all directions simultaneously but never too much, never that...extra unicorn...that would put it over the top. Dude, Doolittle, I love you! She looks prettier than I think she ever has, and her hair looks amazing, and the band is blowing everybody's minds. I mean, I hate this song. I HATE that plucky Unsinkable Molly Dodd shit about how poverty can be charming, if you just sing while you starve, but dude, it's Doolittle. She does a rooster strut! And at the end, this HUGE note, for no reason! Just for grins! Just to make you feel like you're seeing something even more amazinger!
Randy brings God into it, and he and Paula agree that watching Melinda is like learning to sing, that's how good she is, her interpretation and storytelling skills are that amazing, she's a Master Class. The irony of Randy and Paula and their cheap little QVC DVD saying this, it's lost on everybody, but Paula gets good and crazy: "Flawless! You got rhythm, you got music, you got CDs, you got number ones, you got concert halls..." Heh. You got a spool of blank DVDs, you got contact solution, you got a chocolate croissant, you got a pair of shoes, you got some laundry to do, you got mounting debt, you got a post-grad degree, you got a donkey and a goat and some pears! Paula loves how Doolittle's songs have a beginning, middle and end! Simon laughs at her and then tells Melinda that the first bit was "a little cabaret," and then tells the crowd to STFU, that he liked the second part, but that the extraordinary popular delusions & the madness of crowds that cause this bunch to fucking riot every single time Simon opens his mouth put a damper on the concept of constructive advice, so he'll just sit tight. She's like, "Um, okay thanks?"
Ryan, taking umbrage at the letter and not the spirit of Simon's comment, turns it into some dumb thing about how Simon's just got this natural urge to be mean and shitty to everybody all the time, like just so we understand their relative roles here, and Simon flows with it, because it's less than useless to talk about any of it. Randy and Paula agree that Simon is a "case study," in a way that suggests they often call him this. I don't know, that sounds like a joke they both would find funny. Ryan's so in love with Melinda Doolittle he can't even handle anything: "IF YOU FELT THE ELECTRICITY FROM MELINDA DOOLITTLE TONIGHT," he spits, you should vote for her. On the act out, there's Chris R and Jordin being cutesy in the corner. Bitches, if Blake Lewis couldn't fix me tonight, you might as well just slump on over to Phil's creepy mausoleum of sex, because it's not happening. Then, in the commercials, a perfect picture is painted of the continuing infantilization and self-obsession of Baby Boomers some more: not one but two commercials for movies that the whole family can enjoy! Parents no longer need to sacrifice even ninety minutes for their children! A movie about a magic dog, and another one about penguins that dance. Hell, go see it without your kids! A magic dog and penguins that dance! It's fun to be a grownup! And so easy, these days!
Chris Richardson looks dirty but sweet in his vest and hat and jeans. The viewer Q this week is about song choice: Chris explains stiltedly that it's a balance of first finding things you like, narrowing that down to the LCD in order to pander and get votes, and then remembering that the judges will find some way to diss you, thereby legitimizing their role on the show. Ryan asks him, creepily enough, if it calms him to think about Paula down there watching your performance, gazing hazily and crazily into your eyes. Chris: "... Sure? Getting Craggled is better than thinking about the cameras. Plus she's mostly all over Blake's jock, so..." He's singing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," causing a mass delusion among all my fact checkers and a deluge of one point six billion emails to me this week about how the song doesn't even contain the words "Mr. Saturday Night," so am I in reality as stupid as I make myself out to be. Both of these are sadly quite true. It's not an act, I truly am this ignorant, I kind of love it. Good to have that out on the table.
Tony Bennett watches Chris fucking up the lyrics big time and then offers this helpful, doddering, senile advice: Chris ought to memorize the song, Tony explains, so that he doesn't forget the lyrics. That's Tony's take on the situation. He then goes on a lengthy grandpa rant for a year about how Chris needs to remember the lyrics, and can do this by memorizing the song, and that he shouldn't forget the words of the song, but instead remember them, and in the old days, you had to walk six miles to the lyrics, uphill, carrying a bucket of water which you would then use to quench the thirst of the dinosaurs who used to guard the lyrics of songs before words were invented, and you always kept an apple in your pocket in case you got hungry on the way, and this is the bottom line: Don't Forget The Words, Memorize Them Instead. DFTWMTI. DFTWMTI.
Chris immediately joins himself on a journey toward the lyrics, and toward the correct pitch of the notes, that is...quixotic at best. There are a lot of side trips and some cute dancing, and he never quite gets there. He tilts at imaginary windmills of tricks and vocal Olympics while never noticing that the song, his personal Pancho Villa, is rolling its eyes hardcore and begging him to get right. This is hell. I am in my personal hell. DFTWMTI! He cannot. His breath is wild, his eyes are crazy scared, he stretches mightily and desperately for some kind of confidence, and each time he reaches, it recedes into the distance, until his eyes get squinty with the effort to not suck. To no avail. He goes out squealing louder than Ryan and Simon trading purple nurples in the dark.
Randy takes a big old sip of Kool-Aid and radically reinterrogates the hideous musical abortion we just witnessed with our own eyes, from the angle that it was actually totally awesome, that he "came out with a vengeance," that it was one of, if not the, best performances of any song in the history of the American economy. Chris's giant grin is...somewhat intoxicating. I am so confused by him, each week, it's become something I am actually anxious about when I know he's coming up. I do not want to worry about Chris R, or why this kind of thing happens at such odd intervals, or making out with gas station attendants. I don't need that shit in my life. I'm boxing it up like a mime with a secret. We won't discuss this again. Randy congratulates Chris on melding Chris's style -- remarkably similar to a dyslexic tenth-grader aping Justin Timberlake -- with a bloodless "old standard," resulting in something both young and hip but still easy and unthreatening, but that's not the kicker. The kicker, Paula notes, is that this activity -- being as boring as you possibly can without hating yourself -- is the hallmark of "true artistic integrity." Chris R "didn't compromise," except for how compromised being on this show, especially this week, already makes him; he was "so hip, so cool," and there was some sort of "feeling" of eyes, some kind of eye-related vibe, going back and forth between the youngster and the cougar. Randy and Paula loved it so, so much. There's a sign that's funny but I can't read the whole thing, and Simon calls Chris out for his palpable terror onstage. He says Chris was very good, very believable, and that he agrees with his compatriots: "You made it kinda hip, and worked it out very well." Really? This is the first time I've felt Simon inside my brain moving things around like furniture in the night and making me believe something for no reason other than the fact that he said it. It is a rough thing to know that sometimes our thoughts are not our own. Thank God I was taking notes or else I would believe it was good. "Probably one of the strongest tonight," Simon would say. Ryan cracks jokes about how Simon's "so uncomfortable being nice" -- cut to sad Simon's dead eyes -- "...Trust me." Um?
Jordin! Singing "On A Clear Day!" I love this song! Do you know about this song? Barbra Streisand goes to a therapist to quit smoking in order to be more supportive to her husband, a total wanker, and he hypnotizes her and is very deeply French, and under hypnosis her alternate personality comes to the fore: a woman who was burned as a witch for acting like a drag queen version of Tallulah Bankhead back when women were treated even more like property than they are in the context of the film itself, where she's not got the willpower to quit smoking on her own and doesn't really want to anyway, but just wants to stand by her man. Jack Nicholson lives on top of their building in the garden, and is in love with Barbra and marijuana, and they are step-siblings who are in love but cannot fuck because of their nonexistent incest being another problem her husband doesn't grasp. So then French therapist -- who is played by the French version of Tony Bennett, or I guess maybe the Tom Jones -- falls in love with the alternate personality, and starts using post-hypnotic suggestion and psychic powers to fuck with Barbra, and that part is really cool but kind of scary if you think about it vis-Ã -vis the doctor/patient relationship, much less the whole psychic powers/trying to submerge the actual here-and-now Barbra in order to get it on with her alternate witch personality from history. Lotta subtext in there, it's great, and there are parts where they sing for no reason, but like in ever Barbra Streisand movie, the moral of the story is that Barbra is very pretty, no matter how mean people were to her growing up, and that The Mirror Will Always Have Body Issues.
Tony Bennett bitches that Jordin "changed it for herself," but that it was to such a negligent degree, to a degree that wasn't "outlandish," and that he has decided that her rendition is "called for." I think I actually hate Tony Bennett. You've gotta know how offensive that shit is to me. He is on Team Death, not Team Life. Sing a song a new way, you're not stepping on the ghost of anything: the Tony Bennett version still exists, codger. You can go listen to it any time you want. I suggest you do that and leave things to people who are actually capable of moving forward. Jordin's wearing a black vest and a white tailored shirt, and she's so very lovely, this girl. Stacey was like, "Sometimes she's grownup pretty, sometimes she's little girl pretty, but in this case she's just-Jordin pretty, and it's stunning." I have nothing to add about that very true statement. She looks not cute and not sparkly, but truly beautiful. Cute slacks, everything. UFO lighting scheme, in case you needed reminding that she's a high point this week. In case you hadn't noticed she's a high point every week.
What is Randy Jackson looking at right now? "Nine people," actually. And some "heat, up in here," and some "fire going on in here." And at Jordin The Bomb, who just turned in a show-stopper of a controlled performance that drives him mad with professionalism. When Paula starts to talk, the mics feed back for a moment, and everybody giggles, and Paula babbles randomly for awhile about something and calls her "this magnet of joy." This gives Simon a giggling fit even though it's true. Jordin exudes something on stage, she's "hip" and "cool" (making Jordin the twentieth person Paula has given this bizarrely pointless "critique" this evening) and, verbatim: "You took a song it's not really God I'm just fricking proud of you and I don't know sail through to the round." Got that? Simon's like, "Well, 'magnet of joy,' you didn't manage to walk the razor-thin line between pabulum and relevance quite as solidly as Chris, so I'm going to bitch about how you were old-fashioned and traditional, so I didn't quite like it as much as Squiddly and Diddly over here..." Paula calls dibs spastically on Squiddly, okay, and then Ryan's like, "As though they are watching two different shows!" As though opinions can differ without the world falling down around you! As though the word "subjective" had a definition you can find in the dictionary! Jordin is cute and self-conscious and dorky and wiggly and kind of tough to take, and then Ryan spills the beans breathlessly that up we'll be seeing "Gina...aaaaaaaaaaaaand Sanjaya." Who looks like Eurotrash tonight, to such a distracting degree that I didn't even notice Gina standing there. God, the grin on his little horrible face. I want to you take this moment to compare and contrast Sanjaya and Constantine. I will give you a Sacajawea dollar for each difference you can imagine. Go.
Gina will be singing a song called "Smile," which was written by Charlie Chaplin between lines of crack and whores coming in and out the revolving door installed in his crib to give him more time to write songs. "Smile, though your heart is breaking," Gina sings, which is actually the total opposite vibe from her Hot Topic ass, if you think about it. Tony Bennett gets completely untenable at this point and starts crying unforgivably about 9/11 and Phil's wife having her dead cat birthday in Iraq, it's horrifying and saccharine and borrowed and disrespectful and vampiric. It's the worst shit he's pulled yet, and it has nothing to do with Gina or the show or the song or anything, it's just Tony Bennett having a breakdown about shit he actually could care less about. Disgusting. Disgusting, rotty, gross old fakester. He tells us that the song gives you hope, "in your darkest moments," but like I'm having one of those at this very second, due to the immensely insulting content of this segment, and let me tell you that it is not helping. He tells her it was beautiful and then joins us in prayer for the victims of 9/11 and our boys in Iraq, and American flags unfurl down the walls and yellow ribbons spontaneously sprout from every surface in the room, and everybody watching feels a beautiful feeling that they cannot name, and meanwhile? Over in Iraq? People are dying. Human beings. Men and women and children are being shot and blown up and killed, for no reason whatsoever beyond the financial interests of the oil industry and the economy of the military complex. But Tony Bennett sheds a tear, and we go out and fill up our tanks with gasoline, and tomorrow morning we'll go back to work, and feel like great Americans, because Tony Bennett shed a tear. For freedom.
Or to be fair, perhaps he weeps for Gina's cornrowed, crimped, fucked up, fugly, stupid cockatoo-looking hair, or perhaps for her stupid-ass tongue ring clacking around in her stupid mouth, and her very pretty makeup making a mockery of the rest of her. She looks simultaneously better than she's ever looked, and worse than anybody has the right to look. It's like a phrenology head or a relief map: the cornrowed part, you see, controls gross motor skills, the crimped part is the short-term memory, the trashy bright pink stripes control the McKibbin cortex, the bit that's sticking up is the corpus callosum, the random ringlet is where the reptile brain is located, the annoying area that cannot properly be described on paper is in charge of singing. And it's doing a hell of a job, because her performance is as wonderful as it is unmemorable. She's as fake as ever, of course, and smiling creepily without trying to hide the fact that she has no interest in smiling because she's only happy when it rains or whatever, and it's like a carnival, like a half-man half-woman at the carnivals of old. You are being presented with such violently dissonant streams of information, one in your left eye and one in your right, that you cannot Magic Eye them together. You must submit to the groundless ground of Gina's binary opposition. In a gorgeous dress she made herself, out of Edward Scissorhands' hand-me-downs, with her mother crying hard in the audience, Gina puts you in Schrödinger's box and refuses to let you out no matter how you scream and cross your eyes, neither interested nor bored but somehow both at once. For a second Gina is Derrida's ultimate land mine, a record player that plays the record that destroys the record player, and it is nauseatingly difficult to reconcile the two things -- one beautiful, one monstrous -- going on, or even to resolve the equation of her hair, but you try and try, and then I think maybe you fall down crying with exhaustion, and sweating, probably. I just bleep-blooped, m'self, but I do imagine that's what would happen if you were watching it live. Too hard, too weird, too much, too self-indulgent. Which is why her ass is going home, and which is also of course why you stopped reading this thing a paragraph or two ago. Aha! See?
Randy calls it a "very nice, controlled performance from the rocker girl," all of which is true, and Paula calls it "flawless" and "understated," "beautiful" and "unsentimental." For once tonight, that's exactly right. (Funny that it only comes up with Gina, though. What's the difference between the "sentimental" when a woman sings and when a man sings? The things men sentimentalize -- being a "sharp gangster," singing for the Air Force, suspenders, the imagined uncomplicated life of our forefathers -- have the go-ahead. You can't be sentimental about zoot suits, can't be sentimental about fedoras, can't be sentimental about this imagined definition of manhood that relies on otherizing pretty much everybody that's not a white male but which we've somehow fooled ourselves into mourning anyway as a culture, can't be sentimental about these shitty, overused, trite songs, because they are a priori nostalgic artifacts. If you're a douchebag, I mean.) She thanks them for congratulating her basically on being genuine for once, which is quite a hump to drive over on this show, but especially for Gina, but Simon cautions her that she's already been outsung by two other women, not to mention we still got two-ton gorillaKisha in her cage out back, beating her 58-double-Pangaea chest and devouring bananas and little white girls like Gina at a prodigious rate. Gina points out that she's there solely to provide variety while the Gorilla Thing fights it out among itselves, so she kind of has to go with her own style, and while that's true, her ass is still going home tomorrow. Ryan swoops in, like the wonderful superhero he truly is inside, and saves her from that shit with a quickness. But alas! He is too late! The bell has tolled, the sidewalks of Halloweentown are rolling away, the Von Dutch outlet and all your piercings are closing up for the night, the Punky Colors are all in their bed sleeping tenderly, Buffalo Exchange softly exhales, breathing in the dusty scent of ridiculous vintage markups, Urban Outfitters has sung its last breathy boot-cut French pop song, Urban Decay has closed its glittery eyes and folded its vamp-painted nails in vespers prayers, the Doc Marten Airwares have slowed their flapping tongues, the bondage pants have uttered their last safeword. Siouxsie and the Banshees are calling, out on the moors, and they are calling for you.
I am making...so much less sense than usual. It's kind of amazing! I got food poisoning Thursday night, and I'm still pretty dazed. I think I might have a fever. I hope I didn't catch what Phil's got! I'll be honest, though: nothing brings you closer to crazy than waking up on the bathroom floor every hour for forty-eight hours, and your only relief is crawling your ass to the living room to recap The Freakin' Apprentice between bouts of the full-on head-twirling Regan MacNeils. Or maybe that's a misdiagnosis like on House, and my brain is just turning out the lights in preparation for the perennial Sanjaya Malakar assault on reason and propriety. (Man! How great was the House that came on after this? F! A! S! T! I gotta start watching that show.) He moves toward us in the deeps like something too big to comprehend, wearing a white linen suit and a skeleton's mindless grin; he is attended by the little people of the forest, and the names to which they answer are Ignorance and Bliss. Ignorance wears the FOX logo branded across her licensed baby tee, Bliss carries with him a tiny briefcase, inside which are one thousand index cards, each inscribed in a different font with the word "Anarchy." If you called Sanjaya the Manchurian Idol, he wouldn't get it; you'd have to talk about Zoolander instead. You gotta know that's his favorite movie, right?
Sinatra was really good in that. Not Zoolander, of course. The other one. It's nice to imagine, though. Ryan calls it the collision of "two legends," the meeting of Tony Bennett and Sanjaya. They lie that they have not only heard of one another, but are gigantic fans. He's so weird it could be true, and that's a reciprocal statement. To paraphrase the wisdom of Tony Bennett: "Every week Sanjaya does some shit, and every week it's interesting." Sanjaya sings to Tony, and then tells us sweetly and crazily that his goal is to force America to understand that he actually can think. Tony tells him he's "terrific" and notes for us Sanjaya's puckish sense of humor, the way he sings ("well"), and his unbelievable passion for being "different." If by "different" you mean "the harbinger of the death of all culture," then yes. While Rome burns, Sanjaya lipsynchs to "Toxic" in his bedroom, with choreography he created himself. The sound of Sanjaya Malakar singing is the sound of the impending death of empire, and he's scaring those old men senseless. He'll save us all, I guarantee you. With punk rock: Sanjaya is Wyld Stallyns made manifest, and the only reason we're so terrified by him is because we fear change. It won't be so bad, when Sanjaya's in charge. I think that's the message of this performance, actually.
"Heaven," he sings, "I'm In Heaven..." I wonder if heaven is really like this? Sanjaya Malakar in a white suit, creepy smiles and grimaces, walking around aimlessly onstage like we're taking a garden stroll with his ass. He's so wildly insane. He "sings," pulls a cleverly hidden knife from his loafer and hurls it with unsettling accuracy into Nigel Lythgoe's right eye, tosses goblin bombs into the audience, slow-dances with Paula and then throws her somewhere in the audience, and then gets stuck behind a chair. Sanjaya's gelled hair helmet. Sanjaya's nervous, unceasing movements. Sanjaya's isometric calisthenics, that describe in the air a rage as old as time, like an eldritch hula. Sanjaya hitting the bottom of his range at the end, like Liz Phair, for no reason. Sanjaya winking at the camera, letting us know his hate has still not reached its fullness, that it is waxing like the moon, that one day it will eclipse us all, Sanjaya winking at a sign reading "SANJAYA IS MY PAPAYA." Sigh. This papaya, it tastes like the electric future coming like a wildfire across the dry plain of classic swing standards! ...Or it is merely a mango?
"You know what," hums Randy Jackson, "I can't even comment on your vocals anymore. You are becoming something unearthly, something connected to a dark power older than the written language, older and more dread even than Nigel, something with hairdos and an entertaining factor, something like an ageless clown, something that dances with Paula ever nearer to the abyss. You might destroy us quite soon, and take down the franchise once and for all, but in the meantime, as we stumble toward Bethlehem, you are at the very least entertaining." Paula's like, "Your mangled artifice is charming, and you cannot sing, but this too is charming. Thank you for the dance, our dark master." She then pops a bug in her mouth; tastes like papaya. Simon's like, "Uh huh. How about some reverse psychology? Or the muffled screams of desperation? You were incredible, how about them apples? America's brain has clearly shit the bed, so I could be sitting here describing every sexual experience I've ever had, starting at public school and moving forward through the '80s right through to the insouciant handjob I received in Ryan Seacrest's dressing room twenty minutes ago, it wouldn't matter. Maybe I'm not speaking loudly enough." Ryan's like, "I love how Sanjaya keeps staying under the radar, don't you? And how nothing means anything anymore?" Sanjaya makes hideous faces like The Scream as Ryan reads out the numbers. We're done, right? That's all of them.
Oh crap, nope. Fucking Haley or Samantha or Syndrome or whatever. In the last spot? Weird. She's dressed like that movie, I don't remember the name. The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Whoremaid. No, Aquamarine was the real name of that movie. I don't even remember why we called it that, except there was an Amanda Bynes movie based on Twelfth Night that we called The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Dickpiece, so probably it came from that. Also: Who is Amanda Bynes, in actuality?
Hello Haley, Ryan grumbles. Haley has a viewer Q: "Who are you? Where did you come from?" Is Haley more nervous on Tuesdays, bending the music over and beating its ass, or on Wednesdays, when she takes out people with actual talent each and every week with not a damn thought in her head? Her answer is "World Peace."
She needs to run a damned brush through her hair. She looks like she just washed up onshore. Simon stares at her with death in his eyes. The song she's singing? "Aphids Bennigan." I swear that's what she said. She acts totally gross trying to impress/sleep with Tony Bennett, because that's the only kind of male approval she understands. Tony's like, "Stop saying that you're saving all your love for me and him and sailors on leave. You're ruining the song. The point of the song is that she's NOT Misbehavin', do you see? It's in the title. Please stop grinding on my colostomy bag, and get out of my lap." She looks like some old bitch from accounting wearing J. Lo's green dress. I am already so very, very tired of this new girl. She's not convinced that Tony's right, about how he explained the concept of nouns and verbs to her, so she sluts it around all over the place. Doesn't work the cameras, slogs around sullenly, does sassy weird twirls for the camera...and then she makes a series of very fucked up faces. What the fuck? Is she crazy like Sanjaya? Did we know this? Her tongue comes shooting from her mouth and back again like a sociopathic lizard, she may have rabies, she twinkles and sparkles and is angry! Then excited! Then a sex kitten! It's like watching America's Top Model on fast-forward, or being a fly on the wall during a meeting of sexually dysfunctional dolts. A Doltmoot. A Caucus of Dunces. Her body is kind of ridiculously good, but her eyes are close enough together that it always makes me think of Preacher, that comic book? Where the inbred people have eyes closer and closer together until they eventually have just one eye in the middle of their heads? In the middle of her head there's just the beating plastic heart of a Barbie doll.
So they cast whatever was making those faces into a herd of pigs, and then Randy's like, "I kind of thought you wouldn't suck this week, but you've destroyed that hope pretty much. Paula?" Paula's like, "Did I mention? Green is a good color for you. Simon?" Simon's like, "You guys are being dicks. Tell her what you really think." Paula's too fast for that one, though: "Don't you want to know what Simon thinks?" Simon's like, "You have great legs." Nobody's saying anything because if they're cagey enough and leave enough of it subtle, they can take out Gina easily. Syndrome is that white ball and Gina is the eight ball and their silence is the cue. Bonk! Watch.
They're like, "It was kind of like a beauty pageant. In theory, you should be able to sing boring music like this. You were standing on a stage singing, and then you moved around and continued to sing. You are female, under thirty, and you are wearing green. The square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Brandon Flowers is the Bob Dylan of our generation. Friday Night Lights is the best show on television. The dominant gay paradigm of the Baby Boomer generation can be found between the lines of The Wizard Of Oz: a faceless, looming father figure requires you to retrieve the 'broomstick' of masculinity from an overbearing, succubus mother figure before he will grant you your heart's desire: to be whole again, to have a home. This, combined with the general self-involvement of the first generation reared on TV, has convinced the men of today that this paradigm is a constant, when in fact the true gay experience today is more closely reflected in television shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, Six Feet Under, or Doctor Who: a fictional world in which the Father archetype has absented itself from the scene altogether, leaving a malleable world in which the discovery and mastery of personal power, and not a rigid anima-destroying quest, are the keys to the kingdom. The young gay men of the current generation know they've already got the 'broomstick': they've had it all along. More importantly, they know they don't have to kill anybody to get it. Nothing inside must die for us to be healed. The reason that the seeming breakdown of the illusory and temporary modern nuclear family coincides with women's rights, minority rights, and the gay cultural insurgence of the last fifty years is precisely because it puts a halt to the received wisdom of generations, allowing personal desire to come to the fore and present itself genuinely, rather than as pathology. The absent father contributes to his child's homosexuality in only one way: through the freedom his absence connotes, in the breakage between generations of male fear and anger, the child is able to discover his gender and sexuality on his own terms, rather than repressing it his entire life and spending that life in a horrible, shadowy, half-authentic haze. Drinking, marrying his mother, trying desperately to become his father, instead of becoming a man. But since the desperate, typical, broken 'men' of the last generation are still in control, we'll keep singing those same old lounge hits the same old way, hating and fearing ourselves and our bodies and each other, letting you twist our innocence into leather daddies raining down spit and degradation on us in dirty rooms, and calling this love, until the dead weight of you is off our backs forever." Ryan holds Haley's hand and half-heartedly wishes her luck. After the break, LaKisha, who is dressed as a four-poster bed.
So there's this thing they're doing where all the movies have Shia LaBeouf in them now. Every film from every studio being released over the five years: Shia. He's the new Mark Ruffalo. And you know, I've waited a long time for this day. Not with my NAMBLA hanging out, or anything gross like that, but Shia LaBeouf is I believe the best actor in the world, regardless of how old he is, or how many crap movies he's been in, or even if any of them were titled Constantine. It's a positive development, is what I'm saying.
We return to a brilliant, bizarre tableau: Ryan Seacrest in the firm ad hyperactive embrace of Sanjaya Malakar's father, who seems to be attempting to meld their two bodies into one single creature, or perhaps to reproduce with him as they do in the wild. Ryan has to literally peel the octopus of Sanjaya's father off him one tentacle at a time, as the others wrap wildly into niches and folds and spaces, wherever a fingerhold can be found. Sanjaya's dad doesn't want to let go. Who would? Up on the screen, Tony Bennett begs LaKisha not to put the usual jazzy tag at the end of her song, like everybody else is doing: just do it as written. Just listen to Daddy. Just hit the big note at the end that everybody wants from a big girl of color. She appears on the stage and it's like if the entirety of a Victoria's Secret came to life and assembled itself into a Voltron of lace and satin, then attacked you brutally. She starts out way less confident than usual, and it's very weird, and it occurs to me that I want her gone before Doolittle. In an uncertain world, I am sure of this. She finally gets into it, and I think maybe it was a choice and not jitters, but the song -- "Stormy Weather" -- is so bizarre and meandering who knows. I'll never fit my head around this song. It's a Master Class in Theory! Heh. She rushes up the stairwell of her voice, slapping key changes at each landing as she goes by with one meaty palm, until she's singing for the dogs and bats. Everybody gets to their feet and loses their entire minds. God, I hate this music. I hope that the person who invented the muted horn is not my own grandfather, because once I finish my time machine it is motherfucking on. She does the tag thing Tony didn't want, and then has face sex with the camera for awhile, and it's totally scary. Nigel claps wildly in the audience, because he loves big girls of color doing the one thing they're born to do. LaKisha fulfilling her racist diva function. Well, that's kind of Dartmouth to say, because the truth is she is very good at it, stereotypes don't come out of the ether and all that, but it's not her I have a problem with, or even the stereotype, it's the fact that dudes like Nigel, and more regrettably Simon, can't seem to separate the factors out, and just love that it sounds like more and more money.
Randy loves how she "saved it for the ending," which is true, she was great. Paula says she's at her "most gorgeous," though I think she's looked slightly better than the radiant and joyful beauty she's rocking tonight. "We all love Tony Bennett," Paula says, on an unrelated note, and tells LaKisha how he's done such a great job mentoring all of them. Except for how he kind of hated all of them, and none of them followed his directions. I blame Sanjaya for this gross lack of respect! Simon says she's "back on form" and praises her ... gulp ... "sassy," great performance. Ryan Seacrest is taller than LaKisha by about six feet, which makes her what, two, three negative feet tall?
Recapperator: Blake, we're not talking about that. Phil doing an entire matreshka doll of fucked up accents inside each other until you get to the song itself -- so small it's invisible to the naked eye -- and feasts on innocents in his spare time. Melinda created magic with her every movement, note and breath, and is quickly edging up on Sanjaya in terms of making this whole show a joke. Chris R ran around the stage and enjoyed himself less than he let on, but there were good parts. Jordin: Perfect. Simply fucking perfect. Gina erasing herself from your memory like a stage magician. Sanjaya gaping wildly and thinking about how all his neighbors will say what a nice, quiet boy he was, before the bodies started piling up. Haley being creepy with her vagina showing, then masterfully deep-throating a broomstick. Lakisha blowing it up, and then giving Tony Bennett the finger, and then maybe touching herself just off camera. In the lineup, Haley thinks about how she's going home, then the color yellow; Phil wonders why his vision's going in and out of focus like that; Blake apologizes with his eyes and certain subtle signals the two of us worked out, Carol Burnett style, so that I will always remember he loves me best; Chris Sligh is buried headfirst in the biggest chocolate sundae you've ever seen, still crying angrily; the Loch Ness Monster and his friend the Wolfman power-voted for fellow movie monster Sanjaya, but threw some to Melinda in a futile anti-irony gesture nobody will ever know about; it's over, it's done, see you tomorrow.