Alone and Unobserved

I mentioned before that Jacob’s recaps over on TWoP are amazing, superlative, etc., but I didn’t really provide any examples of why. Well, it’s because he’ll be recapping along and suddenly say something like this:

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 previous 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.

Now click here to read the original context. Amazing, huh? An entire semester’s worth of gay male gender theory, packed into a throwaway paragraph in the recap for one of the worst American Idol episodes ever to air. Now do you see why I idolize him?

If you do not watch Battlestar Galactica—and understand that there is no good reason not to; your excuses and protestations are unacceptable—have always been unacceptable!—watch it in order to read Jacob’s recaps on Television Without Pity. I don’t have the words to describe how sublime they are. They are an end unto themselves, a peak experience, like being carried away by an avalanche or a torrential flood: powerful, overwhelming, dangerous. After reading his recap of the last episode I feel exalted, stunned and breathless, and I know it sounds crazy, but someday I want to be as good a recapper as he is.

I’ll get it out right away: Blake is the hottest guy on the show this season. He’s like a singing, beatboxing Travis Wall, except without the prepubescent vibe. He also gets props for not saying that God is the first person he’ll thank when he wins, although “Mom and Dad” isn’t too original, either.

Blake’s followed closely in hotness by Chris Richardson (as opposed to Chris Sligh, who is the most fun). Chris immediately loses points by mentioning God twice in his bio, but he gained them back this week by revealing that he used to be forty pounds heavier. Go him! When Ryan pressed him for his weight-loss secrets, he just said he started eating better. Maybe I ought to give that a try.

As for the girls, my faves are Gina Glockson, who rocked some Evanescence last night (her cute boyfriend doesn’t hurt, either), and Melinda Doolittle, who declared, in a voice of steel and silk, that she is a W-O-M-A-N.

Lastly, don’t worry that this will become a regular blog feature—why would I bore you with weekly Idol updates when you can get them on TWoP?

Television Without Pity just posted an interview with Jason Dohring, who plays Logan Echolls on that amazing show, Veronica Mars. It’s eleven (short) pages of Jason discussing his motivation, describing his sex scenes with Charisma Carpenter (“How’s your wife?”), and the possibility of LoVe in the future of the show. It’s an extremely candid look at the man behind my favorite character on my favorite show, and you know what? He doesn’t sound half bad.

Remember: “Donut Run,” the first episode after the holiday break, airs two weeks from tonight! See it at 9pm on UPN.

Everyone else is doing it.

I was browsing some Veronica Mars sites the other day (all right, every day for the past several days) and was very gratified to know that my condition has a name–LoVe–and is shared by many other people. I discovered today that the topic of our obsession has inspired an ongoing thread over on the Television Without Pity discussion boards, so of course I immediately signed up. I’m hoping that probing my bleeding wound with a hundred-odd other people will help the pain go away. It works with physical wounds, right?