Personal Landscapes

It’s Fall and I am nesting. Soup’s on (quinoa salad, actually; plus roasted beets for a risotto later tonight). Puffy clouds in a blue sky above a vista of red and gold. So what if I am gazing at it out of the western exposure of my 9th floor window in a city.

Autumn makes me conscious of the changes to the planet that go on with us or without us, and that we are at the mercy of these changes. These feelings, I think, are strong for Canadians. “Hewers of wood and drawers of water,” as I learned in grade school; making many of us hyper-conscious and protective of our abundant natural resources. Certainly for me, as a child raised in Northern Ontario, I feel a kinship with rocks and trees and lakes. I recoil from the strident frenzied chant of “drill baby drill” as I would from the jagged slash of a chainsaw against my own hide.

Our greatest singer-songwriters regularly use the Canadian landscape as metaphor and context. Here are two fine examples, one newish and one legendary:

Great Lake Swimmers – Your Rocky Spine

Neil Young (from The Last Waltz) – Helpless

I’ve been looking for New King, by The Constantines, but can’t find a video to post. This song also pulses with Canadian landscape as metaphor and saving grace. A clip is here but doesn’t do it justice.

“Your mother and father / walked out of the city / bound together as they were bound to be

To pull a fortune / from the river / to drink the syrup from the trees

Kith and kin when the ice gets thin / we’ll forage and we’ll fend

As you delivered, will begin to deliver them”

Must Watch TV – McCain Blows Off Letterman

John McCain cancelled his appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman at the last minute tonight, claiming he needed to return to Washington “immediately” because of the current financial crisis.  The excuse was unbelievable and then proven false, when Letterman found him being interviewed with Katie Couric at a nearby studio. Dave then took the opportunity to rip McCain a new one.

Letterman lodges one of the most carefully conceived political attacks, supported by trenchant analysis of the core issues driving the insanity of McCain’s campaign, of ANY media outlet or pundit during the campaign so far.  It is nine minutes and eleven seconds of sheer brilliance.

Aside from myriad things to love about it, including the fact that it was leaked three hours prior to air time (by Letterman himself?), is the way Dave starts by stating how much respect he has for McCain, for his service and for what he gave to the country as a P.O.W.  Then, he absolutely shreds him on all key points. He undermines McCain’s decision-making, questions his integrity and his capability to lead, then points out that McCain couldn’t turn to Palin as second-in-command to even keep his campaign going, much less …… (the point is left unsaid, but is clear as a bell).

He shows how the one decision McCain made to blow off his show, lying to Dave in the process, is indicative of all the flaws of McCain’s campaign and potential presidency.

There is no personal attack here.  There is no undue focus on Palin.  This is about McCain and a bad decision.  A really minor decision in the scheme of things–and therefore, the implicit message is…what about the major ones?  Will McCain make the right decisions come crunch time?  Can he handle a crisis?  Can she, if he can’t?

Now, let’s hope a whole bunch of on-the-fencers and independents have tuned in.  And let’s hope all those with loud voices in the media, the Democratic campaign and elsewhere learn from this exactly how to launch an effective attack against your political opponent.

Watch.  Think.  And Vote Letterman for President.

Canadians for Obama

A recent BBC World poll of 22,500 people in 22 countries showed 49% preferred Obama compared to 12% in favour of McCain. Read more here at The World Wants Obama Coalition blog.  Canada was the fifth strongest supporter, at 66% in favour of Obama (14% McCain; rest undecided), topped only by Italy, France, Australia, Kenya and Nigeria.

The astonishing majority supporting Obama outside of the U.S. is in stark contrast to how close the race is within the U.S.

Here is a link to the current polling results which shows Repubs leading Dems by 208 to 202 among states where a preference can be determined statistically (with 128 seats in play).  There are currently 12 swing states where it is too close to call:

Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, New Hampshire

In 2008, after eight years of Bush and close to 50 years of civil rights activism; after Martin Luther King and JFK; after rioting and Viet Nam and Watergate and women’s rights and gay rights and Roe v. Wade; after war upon war upon war fought for oil and corporate greed; after Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez; after Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove; after the desecration of the tropical rain forests and the hole in the ozone and the melting of the ice caps; after AIDS and Afghanistan; after the flooding of Katrina and the meltdown of Wall Street–this Presidential race should NOT be this close. And the reason that it is points to a deep-seated, inherently narrow worldview that is nurtured and sustained by what any rational thinking person believes must be, can only be, a minority segment of U.S. population.

But, it is not a minority.  It appears to be a majority:  those who shout from a pulpit, point to a Bible and maintain a hold over the hearts and minds of Americans who are too afraid and too uneducated to be able to slash their way through the hypocrisy and deception perpetrated upon them by the very people who claim to be Christians but act without compassion, without mercy, and without any level of responsible, critical thought.  And another percentage who may not be in a church–maybe they are on a street corner or in a bar, or at the Nascar races or working in a hardware store or in an insurance office–but they believe, still, remarkably and almost impossibly, that not all people are created equal.  That a black man–because of his skin and only because of his skin–cannot be President.

Check this out from Associated Press today:  Racial Views Steer Some White Dems Away From Obama.  Of note:  “The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.”  Another pundit I read elsewhere cites “the Bradley effect”:  the requirement of a 7-point margin of error for a black candidate to assure victory.  In other words,  Obama needs to be at least seven points ahead in the polls to be sure of a win in any state.  While the Bradley effect is said to have softened since 1984, when it was first identified, the poll shown above is hardly stable, even where Dems look to be ahead among decided voters.

I despair.

Argggh … Politics!!

It’s been so long since my last post.  I’ve been avidly following the U.S. election.  It seems so much more important than our own here in Canada.

The Republicans and especially McCain and Sarah Barracuda frighten the living daylights out of me.  That a party can be so disingenuously in the pockets of lobbyists and evangelical Christians and STILL be seen by 50% of the electorate as a viable choice to form a government is nothing short of evidence of mass psychosis.

Where Obama and his people are spinning and positioning but generally taking the high road, McCain and his people are outright lying.  In particular, McCain’s statement that Obama’s plan for health care reform puts a government bureaucrat in the way of the “average American” and adequate care would be laughable, if it wasn’t so blindingly, simplistically WRONG.  The strategy here is to deceive a huge swath of the U.S. electorate who have been conditioned to fear “socialist” policies:  tricking them into believing that health care reform will cost them more money and mean worse care.

As it is now, huge insurance companies, for-profit organizations, stand between the average American and adequate care.  And these days, that means a great number of the formerly middle middle-class, not to mention those who don’t have health insurance at all because they have lost their jobs and therefore their coverage.  That is, what, better?!?!

The Canadian health care system has flaws, for sure.  But we don’t regularly have people being denied care or going bankrupt because they can’t afford private insurance premiums. People bleeding to death after being shuttled from one emergency department to another because their credit cards were maxed out or the hospital they stumbled into had already served their quota of uninsured.  Or people simply dying because they couldn’t get the proper treatment as it wasn’t on their HMO’s approved list.

“Big government”, “socialized medicine” and the potential of higher taxes are like waving a red flag in front of a bull for so many Americans.  Brains turn off, and fears take over any kind of logical or critical thinking.  Combine that with raising the spectre of unpreparedness or weakness in terms of facing down the “terrorists,” and it’s a lie that quickly turns lethal.  Lethal for Americans who are living in poverty.  Lethal for those who are fighting a misguided and illegal war.   Lethal for those who can’t afford a college education to dig them out of the cycle of poverty that inevitably leads to lowered life expectancy through violence, poorer health and death in war in disproportionate numbers.

And McCain and Guiliani and Palin had the utter balls and contempt to scoff at Obama’s experience as a community organizer.  Someone who has actually got his hands dirty trying to help the very people that eight years of Bush ineptness have driven deeper into poverty and despair.

McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, the far-right wing, anti-abortion, NRA-supporting, environment-destroying and woefully inexperienced Creationist Governor from Alaska, betrays his dangerous recklessness and opportunistic pandering to his party’s base at the cost of his own principles.  Until this pick revealed him for what he was, McCain was actually appearing to be a tolerable Republican.  I wouldn’t have voted for him, even if I could, but I wouldn’t have felt so heart-achingly, mind-numbingly frightened of the potential third term of Republicanism in the U.S. had he selected, say, Lieberman as his running mate.

Maybe he has done us a favour by showing his cards so clearly.  Within the first few days of her nomination, I had hope that it would be seen for what it was:  a shameless ploy to curry the favour of undecided independents, and one that showed utter contempt for voters with even a few remaining braincells.  But alas, his ploy seems to have worked to mobilize the Republican base.  I can only hope it mobilized the Democrat base, as well.

Unfortunately, the Democrats–the thinking person’s party–appear to be making their typical campaign errors of talking over the heads of people and shooting themselves in the foot by navel-gazing and psychoanalyzing, instead of going on the offensive with clear, compelling arguments to counter Republican fear-mongering.

Maybe Palin will sewer him yet.  Or better yet, McCain will sewer himself.  The debates will tell a tale, I believe.  I don’t know if I have the intestinal fortitude to watch them.

As it stands, watching the two conventions and the campaigns unfold, I am on the edge of my seat with my heart in my throat and my stomach in knots.  I think there is a very real possibility that the Republicans could win this election.  What that says about the malaise, fear, and complete lack of common-sense and rational thought of a population of 300 million people just south of me makes me shake my head in wonder.  And worse, what it means for the future of the planet makes me want to vomit.

Sigh.

This, along with Jon Stewart and Spamalot (which I saw here in Toronto recently) are the only things that’ve made me laugh in the last two weeks.  Enjoy:

Let The Games Begin!

I don’t know what I love most about this … Hillary whacking Bill with a frying pan; Obama riding a pretty pink unicorn in a demented Disney-scape; war hero/monger McCain; or the fact it uses Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.

VERY nice political satire–even-handed in its mockery. Let the games begin ….

Pssstt … there’s a new Mensa brainteaser up here.  I’m off to watch the big night of the Dems’ convention.

I heart Anderson Cooper.  Too bad he plays for the wrong team.  And I don’t mean the Repubs.

The Worlds Within Us

Coral Reefs, Papua New Guinea Photo: Mila Zincova

There is a poem by Helen Humphreys that I’ve had posted on my fridge since 2001. Halfway through reading The World Without Us, I took it off my fridge and have had it sitting near my laptop. I’ve read it again several times, and it now has taken on another layer of meaning. That means it’s a good poem, I guess. And it also points to the fact that the issues touched upon in this poem and in Weisman’s book have simmered in my unconscious mind for … well, a long time–much longer than the time the poem has been on my fridge, that’s for sure.

The ideas are so big, it’s difficult to process them. So difficult to process, that I spent a sleepless night last night with images roiling in my brain: nuclear waste leaking into the planet’s bedrock for millions of years and the fact that “nurdles” may exist for the same amount of time. (Nurdles is such a cute word for such a deadly thing: the cylindrical plastic pellets that now infest our oceans, killing creatures at the very base of the food chain–and you know what that means). This is what will remain of us:  the products of our ingenuity are the very things that have destroyed our planet.

Red-Eyed Tree Frog: The Swimsuit Calendar Frog

The inevitable conclusion from Weisman’s book is that humanity’s most distinctive and redeeming capacity–the power we have to think, to create, to imagine–is the one leading most irrevocably to our extinction. If that capacity also includes the ability to problem-solve and act in our own best interests as an entire species, it might also lead to our salvation. That, however, I feel less hopeful about, at least this morning.

As I said in a prior post, the only way I can wrap my mind around the enormity of the issues presented is through art and literature. Ironically, with the exception of bronze statuary, these products of our complex meta-cognition–our art, music and writing–are the most ephemeral, the ones most likely to fade away quickly, the ones with half-lives that often don’t survive one lifetime, never mind lasting into a world without us. Books and paintings will be among the first to decay, and even though newsprint is actually one of the last things to decompose in oxygen-depleted landfills, decompose it will and with it will go much of human knowledge and artistic production.

River in Costa Rican Rainforest

The poem on my fridge, clipped from the Globe and Mail back when they used to publish poetry fairly regularly, is yellowing now with age. It is impossible to find online: it is not included in any poetry anthologies or databases. Humphreys is better known for her short novel, The Lost Garden, which is infused with her poet’s sensibility. As much as I enjoy her writing, Humphreys is no Tennyson, no TS Eliot, no Shakespeare. Her work will not very likely be chosen to blast out into space, etched on a copper plate in some interstellar time capsule. But it has provided strange comfort to me over the years, and I will enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

Installation

By Helen Humphreys, Anthem (Brick Books, 1999)

What we make doesn’t recover from us.

Twisted scaffold, trellis of rust. This

is how we will be gone. The steel hull

grinning with rivets. Shiny notes of chrome

swinging from the stave of the wrecker’s wall.

Those we loved and nothing for that. The moon

a chalk circle over dark harbour.

Old rail tracks slippery under my feet.

Broken ladder on the tanker. My breath

ascending the rungs of air. I have

been here, lived in this place, loved you.

There’s a snarl of wire on white sand.

Plastic bottles nested in tall grasses

by the channel mouth. We are survived by these

shapes, by the shape of our lives without us.

Too Funny

Found on Gawker, as posted by SarahHeartburn. Thanks, Sarah.

Seriously Eccentric Saturday Musings

Ok, brace yourselves. When nothing in particular occupies my mind, it leaves a lot of room for randomness. And so it begins …

Mama elephant and her kids - Kilimanjaro in background

Still reading The World Without Us. The author, Alan Weisman, is jumping around quite a bit from topic to topic; era to era; location to location. Since we’re often dealing in geologic time, you can imagine how disorienting this is. It suits me to a T. It forces the reader to seek patterns in trends and events across time and invest them with meaning that might not occur if she was led down a straight, chronological path.

Current mood: a heightened sense of excitement brought on by the bracing winds of chaotic intellectual stimulation. (Bite me, facebook and myspace. Let’s see you come up with an emoticon for that.)

After the jump, we travel to the origins of Homo sapiens accompanied by Paul Simon’s Graceland and U2’s One.

The World Without Us

I’m reading a book called The World Without Us. It’s “speculative non-fiction” by a writer named Alan Weisman, who poses the scenario of the elimination, in the blink of an eye, of all human life from the planet. Poof. We are gone, and the buildings, animals, plantlife, air and water start to revert to their natural state, decaying or growing as the case may be, without human intervention.

He details what will happen in 100 years; in 1,000 years; in 10,000 years: as seasons change, as the oceans rise and lakes and rivers reassert their natural pathways, and as trees, vines, plants and animals retake their habitats until the next ice age–which we’ve pushed back through the climate change already wrought–scours the slate clean again. In a best-case scenario he presents, it will take a minimum of 1,000 years for the earth’s oceans to cleanse the air of the carbon we’ve dug from the earth and spewed into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Age in about 1750. Eventually, there will be no trace left of us except, perhaps, for some stainless steel pots that will befuddle the next lifeforms to evolve or arrive on Earth; and the Statue of Liberty, cast in bronze, barnacled and buried under a mile of silt in the Atlantic Ocean.

Weisman is saying that it will take a tremendously long time but left to its own devices, the earth will replenish itself. This, evidently, is supposed to be good news–a message of hope that, despite our current predicament, if humans finally drive ourselves to extinction before doing too much more damage to the earth, air, water and other species, things will rectify themselves.

Well, ok … but the problem I’m having (and granted, I’m only on p. 51) is the implausibility of that scenario actually transpiring. Weisman overtly says that the premise is not to speculate on what ends humanity, only that it ends quickly and completely–all at once, everywhere.

But, but … it won’t happen that way, will it? Even a massive asteroid hit, a broadscale nuclear war, biological warfare or the outbreak of a world-wide plague will have human life petering out slowly, unevenly, inconsistently. There will be no quiet overtaking of our cities by kudzu, birch and aspen. Instead, as human beings slowly–slowly and agonizingly–die off, those small bands of survivors who’re left will not go gently into that good night. As resources dwindle, as infrastructure fails, as hope fades … human nature and, never mind that, our basic will to survive, will remain intact. And the will to survive is an individual, not collective, one. Individuals will fight for the basic resources to survive: food, water, shelter. Maybe, maybe, parents will share those resources with their own children. Maybe, maybe, small bands or communities will form, if they are more powerful together than alone. But civilization, government, order and what we in the coddled, so-called developed world construe as morality and humanity, will cease in any meaningful, effective way.

It won’t be pretty.

Perhaps I am a pessimist about human nature, informed by my study of social psychology, and more recently, my reading of The Road and Blindness, which foretell gruesome, cruel and barbaric acts perpetrated by humans on humans in the face of just such doomsday scenarios. There has never been a situation, in the lab or in the real world, throughout history, where–especially in the face of annihilation–those with power and resources have not wielded them to their own advantage, to the extent of overtaking and enslaving those without.

So. I struggle with the premise, and before humans are wiped from the face of the earth, I wonder how much more damage we will do, not just to each other but to our home planet.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter. Perhaps the lingering, cruel destruction of humanity–the “every man for himself” phase–is just a blip on the timeline, as brief as the 15 or 20 minutes of twilight marking the transition from day to night.

We are on an inevitable path, though, to this twilight. By 2100, if we do nothing to curb it, the earth’s atmosphere is projected to contain 900 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2), up from 380 ppm today, which is up from 280 ppm in the pre-industrial age. In other words, in less than 100 years, we will triple our CO2 emissions, which have taken 250 years to rise by slightly more than one-third. This is just one measure of the escalating destruction of our planet. Another is the exponential increase in the number of species we have eradicated in the last 100 years by deforestation–and the proportion of species that will be made extinct by climate change in the next 45-50 (between 15 to 37% by 2050, according to a January 2004 Nature article).

Mr. Weisman–as much as I appreciate your long-term view, I can’t buy it. We will not get to your 1,000 year recovery scenario. We have less than 50 years to dramatically and unequivocally turn back the clock on climate change, on the destruction of habitat, on greenhouse gas emissions and on species extinction. If not, there will not be much left to recover.

I leave you with a poem. In the end, I can’t process this kind of information with scientific facts, journal articles or non-fiction treatises. I need poetry and literature to fully grasp the beauty of what we are destroying, and to galvanize me into the action required to save it.

We Have A Beautiful Mother

Alice Walker, Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete

We have a beautiful

mother

Her hills

are buffaloes

Her buffaloes

hills.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her oceans

are wombs

Her wombs

oceans.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her teeth

the white stones

at the edge

of the water

the summer

grasses

her plentiful

hair.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her green lap

immense

Her brown embrace

eternal

Her blue body

everything

we know.

If I Ruled The SYTYCD Universe…

…I would watch only the contemporary couples.

For a blog I do elsewhere, I put myself in the place of one of the judges this year determining which performances would be reprised in the finale. I definitely agreed with including Will & Katee’s Pas de Deux, Mark & Courtney’s Jazz by Sonya Tayeh, and Katee & Josh’s Bollywood routines. Find out what I might’ve replaced the rest with, after the jump.

Dorothy and Alice: Precocious Precursors to Potter

Ralph Steadman's Mad Tea Party, 1967

I’m discovering more and more information about Dorothy, Alice and other kidlit heroines; the similarities between them; and their origins and evolution. Wendy of Peter Pan keeps coming up–and not just in the “Lost Girls” erotic graphic novel, by Alan Moore (of V for Vendetta, Watchmen and From Hell fame), where the intrepid trio share stories of their sexual adventures. That’s a dialogue for another time.

Naturally enough (for me), I started down this winding path because of the Homage to the Rabbits group number in the SYTYCD Finale, and now I am enmeshed in research into the literary analysis of The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, fairy tales and their place in our culture and human psychology, and what they say about our apparently innate need to create fantasy worlds and live in them–if only briefly–through literature (also, stage and film).

First, an erratum: L. Frank Baum created a series of books, on which the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland was based, about Dorothy Gale and her adventures in a mythical land called Oz. So apologies for my lack of precision in Ramble Through The Looking Glass and I now note that Oz was indeed based on a book series.

More after the jump…

Still Down The Rabbit Hole …

A.E. Jackson, illustr., 1914

I’ve come across a marvellous review by James Schellenberg of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass here. It offers an interpretation of the real power of this story: the character of Alice herself, and the rich visual nature of her encounters with the strange creatures and startling events in Wonderland.

This, indeed, is what most appeals to me, both as a kid and now as an adult. Even when illustrated sparsely, as some editions are, the descriptions are so marvellously evocative that you can’t but help–if you are at all creative or visual–to form vivid impressions of them in your mind. This may be why the movie versions of Alice sometimes pale in comparison to the book. It’s definitely why I’m so looking forward to Tim Burton’s take on it. There is no other director whose artistic sensibility is as well-matched to the story.

Among the tidbits I’ve picked up from Schellenberg’s site is that Salvador Dali himself illustrated an edition of Alice in 1969; as did Ralph Steadman, most famous as illustrator for Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Dali’s hookah-smoking caterpillar is extraordinary, pictured below at left. The frame on the right appears to reference the White Rabbit’s “I’m late, I’m late” refrain, with Dali’s iconic melting clocks. How perfect.

Salvador Dali, illustr. 1969

Steadman, on the other hand, seems to skip over the adventures in Wonderland to focus on Carroll and his relationship with the real Alice, Alice Liddell–one of the three sisters who accompanied the author and a friend on a rowing trip in which Carroll first spun the Alice tale. I haven’t yet found any other of the Steadman Alice illustrations, so it could be that the cover and one illustration shown below are misleading on this count. At least, I hope so.

The allegations of Carroll’s paedophilia have been hotly contested and seem to be based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence, possibly betraying a misunderstanding of the role of the child in Victorian times. Carroll’s photographs–which show young girls in various poses as themselves, and as fictional characters, are provocative in any number of ways. I am no expert on this topic, but Schellenberg and numerous other Carroll scholars have addressed it directly. The conclusions are inconclusive, to say the least.

Ralph Steadman, illustr. 1967

To me, trained in the New School-style of literary criticism, it’s authorial heresy to read too much of the author’s personal life into his work. The story stands on its own, and those that have turned their hand to illustrating it have invariably brought another layer of richness to it. This site has an excellent list of the artists who’ve illustrated Alice over the years, including links to their work. And this site–Bedtime Story Classics–presents the full text illustated with selected artwork from the many illustrators who’ve created representations in oil and ink of this feast for the senses.

And this song deserves to be playing in the background as you peruse them all:

Love Tommy Smothers introducing “Grace Sick … I mean … Grace Slick.” hehehe

Feed your head. Feed your head.

Ramble Through The Looking Glass

Jessie Willcox Smith, Collage from Boys and Girls of Bookland, 1923

I’ve watched Homage To The Rabbits at least 10 times now, and it continues to delight me with its weirdness and the Alice-In-Wonderland feeling of being transported to an absurd dreamscape where things all of a sudden stop making sense. The piece was choreographed by Wade Robson, with music composed by Eric Serra, and danced by Cirque du Soleil for the Criss Angel® Believe show. Yes, the “lie” is boldfaced (!) in the middle of “believe”, which is quite clever but insufferably contrived coming from someone who has registered his name as a trademark. (Despite that, click on the link and you will be taken to a very nice homepage with some awesome flash animation on it.)

I am predisposed to dislike magicians and magic, both of which are simply deceptive as opposed to deliberately surreal. I distrust anyone who creates a fantasy they want to dupe me in to believing is real, while smugly refusing to reveal the artifice behind their craft. It’s the height of arrogance, and the opposite of artful. Whereas, offer me a fantasy that bends the laws of logic, physics and reality as we know it–create an intentional falsehood to amuse and delight me, and acknowledge it as such–and I am putty in your hands.

In other words, I look for honesty in the attempt to deceive, bringing to mind the Dylan quote from Absolutely Sweet Marie, “to live outside the law you must be honest.”

More about fantasy versus reality, and why Alice trumps Dorothy every time, after the jump.

Good TV is NOT an Oxymoron

Finally, my SYTYCD Finale Recap!

The SYTYCD Finale was damn good TV, and that says a lot coming from a person who considers “good TV” to be an oxymoron.

Like the great talent and entertainment shows of the 60s and 70s–Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson to name just two–SYTYCD is bringing new talent, and a whole new artform, to the TV-viewing audience. An audience that has been dumbed down to the point of catatonia by writers’ strikes; the short-term expediency of inexpensively-made reality TV; and the spineless ass-kissing of Hollywood TV execs who capitulate to advertisers and sponsors and lack the patience and vision to invest in a show as it builds momentum.

The SYTYCD Finale was remarkably entertaining: a spectacle for the eyes, the mind and the heart. And, it was highly respectful of its audience, offering up the best moments of the season as picked by judges so committed to the quality of dance-as-entertainment and to the nurturing of dance talent, that two of them actually got up to perform. Rather than this coming across as shameless self-aggrandizement or an opportunistic tactic to prove or revive their fading credibility (hear that, Randy Jackson? Or you, Paula Abdul?), it was instead a demonstration of their love for dance and their support of this under-rated and under-supported art form.

Some of the most successful elements of the Finale show, plus a continuation of my rant against AI, and my five favourite SYTYCD moments of the Season Four Finale, after the jump.

Why So Sad, Josh?

Congratulations to Joshua Allen for his well-deserved win of SYTYCD 4!!

(photo courtesy of: www.rickey.org)

And congratulations to Twitch, Katee Shean and Courtney Galiano for a fun, fantastic-to-watch Finale and to the SYTYCD producers, judges, choreographers and entire Top 20 for a truly terrific Finale Results show and a great season. Awesome TV!! Last night’s show was definitely Emmy-nominatable (is that a word? No? Well, it should be.).