I realize it is kind of terrifying when small children start making remixes before they turn ten.  And that the relationship children have to technology is different than the one I had growing up when two-year-olds see Kindles and print books as interchangeable.  I suppose I have some regrets about the abandonment of print books (It’s not for nothing that The Club Dumas, one of my all-time favorite books, is about our physical and emotional relationships with books, especially old ones.), but I generally think advancements in technology are good for our relationship with and engagement to technology.  Maybe that 6-year-old isn’t painstakingly crafting mixes or scratching turntables herself, but her Nintendo program has her thinking about how music works and sounds much earlier than I ever did (ditto for Garageband), and she can go wild for craftsmanship as she gets older.  E-readers may be unromantic, but they preserve literature and disseminate it quickly.  The Internet may be a timesuck, but it’s also a place where folks rehash, remix and reimagine their favorite culture.

I’ve written before about the power of fan fiction, and I’m generally in favor of people having the power to dissect and recreate the stuff they love, and to disseminate.  At the most professional end, you get stuff like DJ Earworm’s year-end mixes, and at the less professional end, stuff like this brilliant re-creation and skewering of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance video:

Slate, in a profile of Weird Al Yankovic that remains one of my favorite pieces of pop culture criticism of all time (the dorkiness runs deep, people), noted “Weird Al’s essential service is to point out that, from the perspective of the middle-class suburban lifeworld, pop culture itself is weird.”  Technology gives us all the power to be Weird Al, or DJ Earworm, or even to figure out how to be artists on our own.  I tend to think that represents progress, of a particularly hilarious sort.  As PostBourgie‘s Shani pointed out when she and I were talking about this yesterday, “Think of all the Madonna parodies we missed out on in the 80′s!”

Because you can just read this, instead, which had me snorting with laughter.  How much better would the movie have been if House was stomping around, oozing sarcasm, and maybe romancing Sigourney Weaver?

The trailer for Treme, David Simon’s next effort out of HBO this spring, sure is gorgeous:

I have to admit, I’ll be extremely curious to see how Simon handles musicians as main characters.  There may be similarities between the dynamics of groups of artists and groups of cops, or groups of drug dealers, or groups of politicians, but the structures within which they operate are fairly different from the ones Simon’s dealt with in the past.  Although of course, the setting among post-Reconstruction New Orleans will give him plenty of corruption and structural idiocy and iniquity to deal with, I’m sure.  I did think The Wire did have a nice touch with music, so even though scoring a TV show, and particularly rad montages, is very different from the process and the meaning of making music, so for now I’m going to choose to be optimistic.  Especially for a show that gets Bunk playing brass.

Obviously, much, much more to come.

This is the best way I can summarize how good I feel about Glee‘s renewal for a second season:

That said, I have a couple of concerns about the show, and a couple of proposals.  First, the show’s main characters appear to be at least juniors in high school.  That means they’re time-limited, or the show’s going to get awfully awkward.  I think the best way for Glee to stay fresh and viable, if the show and the network are hoping for an extended run, would be to make clear that some of the characters are in different graduating classes.  That way, the show could move characters in and out in a way that feels logical, while giving viewers some continuity from season to season. There are so many characters in the show who haven’t had major storylines yet, that it should be possible to do this within the existing cast.

Second, the show’s going to have to find a way to keep the competition around which it’s structured fresh each year.  I was actually thinking this morning about the debt the first half of Glee‘s freshman year owes to Bring It On (shut up, the original is genius).  You’ve got the eager new leader with questionable leadership skills (Lea Michele or Kirsten Dunst) taking charge of a fractious squad.  At a critical moment in both the movie and the show, both the New Directions’ and Toro’s routines are leaked to the competitors.  Cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester is a better-written and expanded version of the evil choreographer Sparky Polastri role in Bring It On–both of them sell out the team at the center of the show or movie, Sue for pleasure, Sparky for profit.  And I think Bring It On may offer a wise way for Glee to end its first season: New Directions should lose.  If the glee club wins it all in their first outing, all the dramatic tension will dissipate.  Losing gives them something to rally around, and to fight over.  It provides a motivator for the second season.  And maybe even for Mercedes to coup Rachel!