The Case for Enthusiasm

If you read this site, you’ll already be aware of the fact that I’m a pretty sarcastic person. I’ve been known to say that my mother tongue is sarcasm, but that’s not quite true — it’s my father tongue. My mother is generally quite positive.

I am also fairly critical, a skeptic, and I definitely sometimes yield to the temptation to be elitist with regards to art and entertainment — Mumford and Sons? Really? — but I am also a sucker for enthusiasm.

How I feel about the Olympics/Disneyland/a new Toni Morrison novel/insert thing I love here

The two worlds I spend most of my time in are academia and the art world, and I’m constantly surrounded by people hating on everything. It gets tiring. Wow, you don’t like Sylvia Plath, congratulations on your discerning taste, jackass. While academia certainly has a canon that it’s acceptable to worship/you’re expected to worship, academics can also fall prey to the hipster ethos of “the more obscure it is, the better it is” (unless it’s written by a woman: then it’s “chick lit”— or possibly young adult lit — and unworthy of serious discussion). And while artists love geeking out with each other over shared love of a certain writer/painter/musician, they also love hating on anyone whose work becomes successful. Just ask any young poet about the Dickman brothers: it’s a love them or hate them thing, and bitches will throw down.

Did you just say All American Poem was a shitty first book?

John Lithgow knows what's up. (Also, these gif Tumblrs are all over my Facebook feed recently, so you're getting some gifs today.)

But really, I’m so bored with all this hating. A few weeks ago, The Awl published a piece in which they’d asked a number of editors of literary magazines, as well as some contemporary writers, to name books or authors that they’d loved in the past and are now ashamed to think about. Quite a few mentioned Ayn Rand (duh), since many writerly and intellectual types go through an infatuation with her — she particularly appeals to the individualistic mindset of the teenage years. Now, while the woman’s philosophy was batshit insane, I think the fact that thousands of teenagers read her massive novels (Atlas Shrugged is a brick: the thing’s like 1200 pages — imagine a high schooler choosing to read a 1200-page novel) and feel galvanized by them is a sign that she has a certain kind of talent.

The Beats were another oft-repeated example of books people used to love but now are embarrassed to have cared so much about. The Beats are an easy target, and I think it’s kind of lazy to say you hate them. It’s like saying you hate Nickelback: you don’t have to provide any reasons, everyone just nods along. Of course, Nickelback makes me want to drive my face through the wall, and I think their lead singer is impressively unattractive, but still, hating them isn’t very original. It’s the same with the Beats: you can say they’re simplistic and self-indulgent and overly grandiose, and everyone will just go with it. Even though what’s really simplistic and self-indulgent is regarding this passionately inventive and massively influential group of writers as somehow insufficiently literary, but whatever — have fun at your Douche Convention! (I will defend Alan Ginsberg to my grave. “America” is one of my favorite poems of all time.)

Apparently the lead singer of Nickelback is named Chad Kroeger. I'm sorry, Chad, but you are one creepy-looking mofo.

The part of The Awl article that really bothered me, though, was Edmund White’s comments on Virginia Woolf. What he said:

My reaction:

Well fuck you very much. You cannot tell me that reading Mrs. Dalloway isn’t a journey for your very soul, or that Orlando isn’t a tour de goddamn force. (Also, thanks for writing off basically the only female modernist anyone takes seriously — sorry, Djuna Barnes, but almost no one remembers you, even though you’re a genius — or rather, one of the only female novelists period that people are willing to accept as truly great, because she can keep up with people like Faulkner and Joyce, which she fucking does, by the way.)

Now, Mr. White teaches at Princeton, so I’m sure he feels entitled to belittle anything he damn well pleases. And that’s his (annoying) prerogative, but I’m really tired of a culture in which degrading others’ work is the key to establishing yourself as a “serious cultured person.” (Are you wearing a monocle? Why are you not wearing a monocle, serious cultured person? If you’re going to talk about how television is the opiate of the masses, you should at least be wearing a monocle. And a bow-tie.)

Are they playing...Coldplay? Guards, take them away!

Imagine you are standing on a ladder, the top of which reaches a platform with a plate of cookies on it. Hitting the person next to you doesn’t get you any higher in the air, it simply knocks them down to a lower rung. There still isn’t anyone getting the cookies. (And yes, the ladder/cookie bit is an analogy for the progress of the human race. Where do I pick up my Philosopher of the Year award?)

And as much shit as I give various things/people on this site, it’s ultimately more fun to gush about something I love than to rant about something I hate — thus all the pictures of puppies and bunnies and Bradley Cooper.

I die.

I’m trying not to tamp down my natural enthusiasm in my life or apologize for liking the things I like. Yes, I write literary criticism that looks at Faulkner through the lens of poststructuralist and other twentieth century philosophical theories of consciousness, and I ALSO LOVE THE HUNGER GAMES. I LOVE THEM. I LOVE THE CHARACTERS. I LOVE KATNISS AND PEETA AND CINNA AND EVERYONE. I SOBBED THROUGH THOSE FUCKING BOOKS. THEY ARE INCREDIBLE AND THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DISS THEM:

I think The Hunger Games books demonstrate keen attention to character development and a masterful management of plot, and you can make fun of them and of me all you want, but at the end of the day, I’m the one that gets to marry Peeta Mellark in my mind…I mean, what?

I adore Peeta in the books, so I was very skeptical about the casting for the film. Against my expectations, however, Josh Hutcherson was phenomenal as Peeta in the first movie. So now I obviously love him.

I’m campaigning for enthusiasm. Let’s love things and not feel ashamed for it.

My friend C is a continual example to me in this. C has perhaps the most unabashedly open heart of anyone I’ve ever encountered; she’s got love spilling out of her very pores: love for people, for nature, and for art and entertainment, both “high” and “low.” She doesn’t distinguish between these last two; she just loves things. Her heart is practically bursting with affection and joy when she watches Pretty Little Liars, and that enjoyment is not at all ironic. She feels no need to regard such a “trashy” TV show cynically, and watching her watch PLL is an absurdly enjoyment experience in and of itself.

We have a friend who doesn’t watch TV and sometimes when we’re talking excitedly about a show, he looks at us like we’re paramecia to his homo sapien. And we’re like, bitch, talk to Frank O’Hara:

My Heart

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

— Frank O’Hara

I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. So let’s roll back the cynicism a bit. I aspire to be this excited at least once a day:

I have a new crush, thanks to The Voice, and it isn’t Adam Levine…well, it isn’t JUST Adam Levine

So I was planning on publishing like five blog posts when I published those last two, and then I realized that they’d all be about The Voice, because apparently I have a lot of things to say about The Voice, like really a lot. So I decided to sketch those posts out and save them for after I’d written some non-Voice-related posts…except that that second part never happened. All week I thought about nifty things I could be writing for the amusement of all my (imaginary) followers and the proceeded not to write a single one of these things.

So you’re getting another post on The Voice. And because 65% of the entries on this blog end up being about people that I think are sexy — regardless of what my intended topic is in beginning the post — you’re getting also getting another “Look at this person I find attractive! LOOK!” entry. This one departs a little from my norm, though, in that it features a lady person. So straight men, lesbians, and other lady-lovers, congratulations! Sexy chick: ahoy!

But first I’m going to make you sit through some gushing about Adam Levine because, come on, his sweaters?! Adorbs.

In case you’re not sure who Adam Levine is, he’s one of the “coaches” on The Voice, and he’s the lead singer of Maroon 5, that band whose songs sound like sex. If you haven’t listened to one of their records all the way through (because midway you and your partner got…distracted) you might be familiar with some singles like “She Will Be Loved,” “Harder to Breathe,” “Makes Me Wonder,” and that mental parasite “Moves Like Jagger” (that song’s a catchy ringworm that squeezes its way into your brain).

I’ve always liked Maroon 5. Yes, with varying degrees of shame, I’ve always liked them. Maroon 5’s songs are catchy pop-rock with a sensual funk/jazz flavor, and their lyrics mix actually interesting figurative language (“The sex she slipped into my coffee”) with the straightforward: “It really makes me wonder if I ever gave a fuck about you.” Okay, so the latter is more common, but come on — that coffee line is pretty good stuff.

So while I’ve liked the band, my feelings about Adam Levine specifically have been a bit mixed. On the one hand, he writes sexy songs and looks like this:

On the other, he always seemed a bit sleazy to me — the kind of guy my friends and I might describe as an “STD grab-bag,” who not only knows what “manscaping” is but participates in it (photo above says “yes”). So I was always vaguely attracted to him, but I resented being attracted to him and felt like I had somehow gotten oil all over my body any time I thought of him.

But then I started watching The Voice and Adam began his campaign to win me over, which he did by being incredibly invested in the singers in the competition (especially but not only the ones he’s coaching), making jokes with Blake Shelton about how the two of them are in love, and wearing adorable sweaters.

Thanks to the fact that they shot all the Battles on one day but showed them over four weeks meant that we got four weeks of Adam’s awesome sweater. I approve, NBC, I approve. Also, re: my recent post on facial hair, this is a successful employment of stubble. Though his hair is a bit too gelled.

And then hiding behind said adorable sweater when he doesn’t want to be mean and send someone home.

He’s such a shy little bunny!

Actual shy bunny.

Also, that above photo where he’s nude is an awareness ad for testicular cancer, and the hands belong to his (now ex) girlfriend, model Anne LongRussianName, so even that is now less vaguely unsettling.

But anyway, Adam — sextastic as I’ve come to think he is, what with his sweaters and his posing for Out magazine and his pro-queer rhetoric and his feminist-y comments to the media — is not the crush I’ve come here to talk about. I’m here to discuss Lindsey Pavao.

Lindsey is one of the contestants on The Voice this season and, in my opinion, one of the best ones. For her audition, she performed a cover of the Trey Songz tune “Say Aah,” which she had arranged herself and which essentially remade the song entirely, turning the beat-heavy hiphop song into The Weeknd meets Lily Allen meets the Antlers.

This has the audio for the full song and I think it’s worth a listen. I like this a lot better than the original.

At the time, Cee-Lo called Lindsey’s audition the most interesting thing to happen on the season so far. Since then, Lindsey trounced her Battle Round opponent on their duet of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” then two weeks ago gave an invigoratingly creepy performance of Gotye’s definitively excellent “Somebody that I Used to Know.”

Now that the live shows have arrived, the production value has risen exponentially. Instead of throwing the contestants onstage with some basic lighting changes that Kyle, the 10th grader who does the lights for the school musical, could pull off, Lindsey and the others now get fully choreographed routines complete with a half dozen to a dozen dancers (for one female performer, they were half-naked men, to  Blake’s confusion/distraction), complex lighting effects, smoke, and help from wardrobe.

While I appreciate what they’re trying to do, I also think that producing each song likes it’s the VMAs sometimes distracts from the actual contestant singing and other times makes a nervous, inexperienced performer look very out of place amongst so many professionals. Sometimes, however, that VMAness works in tandem with the singer to elevate the song to an experience. That’s how Lindsey’s performance of “Somebody that I Used to Know” went that Monday night. When the music began, viewers couldn’t pick her out onstage amongst a crowd of dancers wearing creepy mime masks. Then Lindsey leaned out from their midst, totally in command, and her voice slid into the song with a spooky airiness and her signature slightly ragged tone. My poet side wants to say her voice “slunk” into the song, like a cat (that may or may not be an animagus and thus magical) slinks into a room. Lindsey has a slinking quality about her. In a good way.

That shit is terrifying.

After emerging from the line of terrifying mime-corpses, she then proceeded to own the gorram stage. That woman has presence. There’s a shyness to her that emanates as an enigmatic quality, and it only makes her more magnetic. Even after the performance, when the coaches were commenting and Adam noted that he liked it overall but wanted her to really blow it out more on the chorus, she just stood with her gaze slightly lowered, head tucked into her shoulder a bit, with this small smile that said she was totally in control and not at all bothered by the criticism of the smoking-hot Grammy winner 15 feet in front of her. (That I could be so composed; I run into furniture, counters, and doorhandles on a daily basis. I know they’re there, that knowledge simply doesn’t alter my course.)

Yes, her voice is beautiful — both strange and lovely — but Lindsey also has something else, call it what you will: “command,” “charisma,” “the ‘it’ factor.” And aiding her in cultivating this magnetism is the fact that she is damn sexy.

Really, really sexy.

There’s actually another part to the Lindsey story for me, in which I wanted her to do well even before I saw her audition or heard her voice: my brother knows her. My younger brother J currently attends the University of California, Davis, from which Lindsey just recently graduated. She happens to be dating one of J’s friends.

The first time J mentioned her was about 9 months ago and our conversation had nothing to do with The Voice, or singing. We were talking about how my brother is attracted to girls with short hair, like pixie cut short, and he said that the girls he thinks are really hot his friends often don’t quite get. As an example, he then mentioned a girl from Davis who had one half of her head shaved with the other half of her hair long; J and his roommate K both thought this girl was super hot, which their other friends found weird. There’s no accounting for (bad) taste, other friends.

I remembered that conversation because it isn’t every day you hear about a girl with half her head shaved — especially if this is somehow a good look. When it came up that a girl J knew was going to be on The Voice, he mentioned to me that this singer happened to have half her head shaved, I think so that I would be able to recognize her easily, but I immediately said, “Oh! The hot one?” to which he (vaguely surprised) replied in the affirmative.

I was excited. I was going to get to see the hot girl with the half-shaved head! Then Lindsey appeared on my computer monitor.

Hot damn. I did not realize what I was in for.

So yes, Lindsey shows up and she is FOXY. Oh yeah, and she went to UC Davis, so she’s obviously not a moron. And then it turns out she has a great voice and is actually an interesting artist? Aaaand then it turns out I have a crush on her.

I’m sorry, did you say something? I was busy being stupid adorable.

Lindsey is hot. Really hot. It’s absurd how hot she is. Even more absurd than my being attracted to the same girl as my younger brother. (It’s going to be super awkward when he reads this blog post, isn’t it? Hi, J! Sorry about the awkward…)

(Side bar: I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog recently talking about men I find attractive, so it’s possible regular readers have assumed I’m straight. Meh, not quite. 

I identify as pansexual (any time I say that I get blank stares), which basically means bi, except that I hate the term bisexual because it 1) perpetuates the notion that there are only two sexes and thus ignores the existence of trans and genderqueer people, and 2) in its reference to duality implies that the bisexual person is attracted to men and women equally, when I don’t think most people are. I’m certainly not.

I mostly subscribe to the Kinsey Scale notion of sexuality, which suggests that sexuality is a spectrum, not two poles of “gay” and “straight.” Some people may be “totally straight” or “totally gay” in that they are attracted to only one sex 100% of the time, but some people might be 80% attracted to women and 20% attracted to men. Trying to quantify it like that only works as an example; actual attraction is clearly not as simple as percentages. Kinsey tries to approximate this division of attraction with a scale beginning at 0 (stone cold hetero) and ending at 6 (flaming queer), but I think you catch my drift. I slide toward the heterosexual end of the scale; I’m primarily attracted to men. Primarily, but not always. Like in Lindsey’s case. End of explanation/lecture.)

This is why not in Lindsey’s case:

Meanwhile, backstage, Lindsey takes a timeout to be stupid gorgeous.

So to recap: Lindsey has a really cool, strange, vaguely creepy singing voice, which I adore, that is also super sexy, which I am totally on board with.

After her audition, Lindsey disappeared from my TV until her Battle duet/sing-off with some guy I’ve already forgotten. They covered Nirvana’s “Heart-shaped Box” (Lindsey covered it in sexy; random dude covered it in blah — yay puns!)

During the video coverage for her Battle, Lindsey sang well, liked Nirvana, made pretty interesting comments (considering the bank of cliches contestants seem to pull from when they’re talking on shows like this), and was generally adorable. Oh yeah, and her hair looked awesome during rehearsal.

I just love her braid-bun hairdo here — I think it’s gorgeous; I wish I ever did anything that interesting with my hair. Until I was 15, I didn’t even wear it in a ponytail, I just wore it down. All the time. All the time. (It was long, it hid my face, I had self-esteem issues, moving on.) The one confusing thing about being attracted to people of your own sex is that sometimes you can’t figure out if you are more attracted to them or jealous of them. It’s a mind-bamboozling rush of “Ah! I want to look like you!” and “Ah! I want to kiss you!” Not for the faint of heart…

So, as for the Battle: Lindsey did a fine job with Nirvana, securing her place in the live shows and returning my heart rate to normal, and then for the first live show week she sang “Somebody that I Used to Know” by Gotye, which I think is a great song on its own. Add Lindsey and it’s like putting chocolate on my pretzels: sweet and salty and ohmygosh delicious! (Now I’m hungry…) Gotye’s original version is great, and his music video is pretty interesting too.

So anyway, Lindsey sings Gotye, and she wears this:

It’s like Mummenschanz, Renaissance Venice, and a Thierry Mugler fashion show are all happening in the middle of that god-awful Lestat Elton John musical from like 2005 that was based on Anne Rice’s vampire novels and the only real accomplishments of which were in fog effects and boring me to tears.

She stomps around the stage being badass and having a sick voice and generally looking hot as all hell. My parents told me later they thought she had the best performance of the night; I thought that she definitely had one of the best performances and at the very least looked hotter than everyone else. Even Adam. And have you seen Adam?

Oh hi, bunny.

Mmm. But still, during the live show Adam wasn’t wearing his sweater, and the fierce singer with the sharp grey eyes captured my attention.

I think her eyes are hypnotizing me…

Then, this past Monday, The Voice quarterfinals aired. Lindsey sang Katy Perry’s “Piece of Me” (thing I just learned: I don’t know how to spell Katy Perry’s name, which I feel sort of proud about) and was generally badass, although the song is a bit “eh” in my opinion.

Oh yeah, and she looked awesome. Her costumes are pretty much just better than the stuff the other contestants wear.

Because The Voice is all about my not getting bored, they had a surprise instant elimination at the end of Monday’s show in which each coach who’d had singers perform had to eliminate one of their team members on the spot. Brutal. Fast moving. The excellent opposite of Idol’s dragging-on-forever-how-is-that-person-still-here (non-)eliminations. Point for The Voice.

Christina Aguilera is Lindsey’s coach and I was really afraid she’d send Lindsey home because the other three performers on her team are very showy — big, big voices. There’s opera singer Chris Mann (whom I actually quite like), middle-aged soulful singer Jesse Campbell (who is technically very good but who just doesn’t excite me), and pop-princess wannabe Ashley DellaRosa or something like that (who has a good voice but whom I just find bo-ring. She sounds like every other pop diva on the radio, only with less personality — though she has been improving lately.) To the shock of people who actually give a shit about this show, Christina eliminated Jesse Campbell, who these giving-a-shit people, including the other coaches, had dubbed a frontrunner. Whatever, Lindsey was safe!

Then the live eliminations of Tuesday rolled around. Each coach had three singers. America voted (like on Idol) and the singer from each team with the most votes was safe, while the other two had a “last chance” to sing for their coach, at which point the coach would save one and send one home.

Opera man Mann did a mostly entertaining if not terribly interesting Coldplay cover on Monday night, which America apparently liked because he got the most votes, leaving Lindsey and her quiet weirdness to battle the pop belter.

Ashley Pop Singer sang an engaging if predictable version of Gaga’s “You and I,” while Lindsey followed with a performance of Mike Posner’s “Please Don’t Go,” which was at turns quiet, sly, powerful, desperate, and just generally fucking moving (can you tell I’m getting into this?). Though she managed to finish with some lovely final notes, Lindsey was in tears by the end, and so was I. And so was her coach, Christina.

Tears = good sign?

A few agonizing minutes later, Christina restarted my heart by announcing that she was saving Lindsey and sending Ashley home. I cried. Then I cheered. In my living room, alone.

So here’s the moral of this rather meandering story: Lindsey Pavao is talented and also a FOX, so you should support her on The Voice (though it is not on FOX, but rather NBC, to clarify) because apparently I care a lot more about this show than I thought I did, since I was in tears watching her perform/when I thought she was going to be eliminated.

Next week Adam and Cee Lo’s teams are competing, so Lindsey and the rest of Team Xtina (and Team Blake) get a reprieve, but in two weeks, it’s the semifinals. Help me keep my heart rate manageable: vote for Lindsey. You can vote on Facebook. You don’t even need to use one of those old-fashioned “telephone” things. Hell, you don’t even need to watch the show. On Monday April 30, after 10 pm (but before 10 am on May 1), just go to The Voice’s Facebook page and click to vote for Lindsey like 10 times. It’s easy, it’ll help my mental health, and let’s be honest, you’ll be on Facebook anyway.

And according to my brother/the imaginary friendship with her I’ve created in my head, Lindsey is a pretty cool person in real life. Plus, how can you resist this face?

Help me? Please? I’m just so damn adorable, like a bunny.

You should be watching The Voice: It’s like television candy, with glitter

I recently started watching The Voice on NBC. Or rather, on Hulu, but they tell me it’s made by NBC. This is the televised singing competition judged by Christina Aguilera, the guy from Maroon 5, some handsome country singer, and That Guy Wearing a Cape.

To elaborate, from left to right, we have:

1) Adam Levine, lead singer of Maroon 5, known for his sex-heavy lyrics, his tattoos, and those Adult ADD commercials he’s doing now

2) Christiana “I was totes on the Mickey Mouse Club with Britney and JT and Baby Goose before I became a superstar” Aguilera

3) Cee-Lo Green, half of Gnarls Barkley and the slick pipes and sharp wit behind the best breakup song of all time, “Fuck You” (on the coaches’ voice-over intros on The Voice, Carson Daly refers to this song as “Forget You” — the title of the radio-friendly censored/neutered version that basically destroys the song. When Gwyneth Paltrow sang “Forget You” on Glee, I wanted to punch her in the mouth even more than I normally want to punch her in the mouth.)

4) Blake Shelton, apparently a super famous country singer who is married to another super famous country singer

“But isn’t The Voice just a rip-off of American Idol?” you ask, from which the follow-up question for people who know me is “Why are you watching it?!” Often people say this because they know I hate American Idol. Sometimes they say this because they think television other than Mad Men is a waste of time (I watch Mad Men, too!) or they think anything that needs electricity to run is inherently abhorrent (I have a poet friend who is a fairly hard-core luddite, and super pretentious about it, too, which is obviously the best part…there are downsides to having super arty friends.)

And yes, I hate American Idol. Why are they still searching for the next American Idol when they already found him? (I heart you Adam Lambert.) But yeah, watching American Idol makes me feel physically ill (true story). It’s basically a televised celebration of mediocrity, judged by the astonishingly dull (and Steven Tyler). Seriously, Randy Jackson is so predictable that they could put a giant brown teddy bear in his seat and play a recording of him saying, “I dunno, I wasn’t really feelin’ it dawg,” and no one would notice the difference.

Unlike that Neilsen juggernaut, however, The Voice doesn’t actually have “judges,” it has “coaches.” This is actually a significant difference because each of the four coaches personally chooses singers for her/his team and then works with them each week, setting up each contestant to battle the singers from the other coaches’ teams. Or that’s what eventually happens. First, there is a series of “Battle Rounds” in which two members from a given team sing a duet, then their coach chooses the singer he/she prefers and sends the other one home.

That’s one of the great things about this show: they’re always getting rid of people left and right. Sweet; I’m not interested in the average performers. During each of the four weeks of “battles,” half the singers go home, and then during the initial “live shows,” viewers vote (like on Idol) to keep half the singers, while each judge can save one remaining person from being kicked off the show (so to tally, that ultimately means that a third of the people go home from each of these live shows).

I know. That was confusing. That’s one thing about The Voice: it’s not dull because nearly every week they change how people get kicked off/kept, so you’re too busy trying to keep up with the gorram rules to get too bored. After the initial audition weeks in which the coaches pick their teams, the show progresses as follows:

Battles (4 weeks): 6 out of 12 singers kept each week

Initial live shows (2 weeks): 8 out of 12 kept each week

More live shows: unspecified number go home each week

Thus, over the course of six weeks, they go from 48 performers to 16. Mitt Romney would be excited by that rate of dismissals. After they’ve whittled the pool down to 16, I’m not sure how many people they’ll let go each week because I just started watching this shit and I’m just happy to have understood the rules up to this point, but eventually someone wins, and that person’s coach gets bragging rights through the next season, while all the other coaches get the right to whine about the winning coach’s bragging rights.

Each of these coaches brings his or her own flair to the show — and I’m talking flair, not the personas American Idol judges have, like “The Mean One,” “The Female One, i.e. The Nice One,” or “Steven Tyler.” I mean, Steven’s fun, what with his outfits that look like he found them in a dumpster in 1978, but The Voice has more than one sartorially entertaining celeb.

Christina dresses like Wet Seal and Bebe threw up,

And this is the best thing she's worn all season. Honestly.

wears rhinestoned cocktail coasters on her head,

treats her breasts like flotation devices that won’t work if they aren’t exposed to air,

and appears to live in Barbie’s Dream House,

complete with a Diva Throne.

But while Xtina has some crack-tacular outfits, Cee-Lo isn’t satisfied with her brand of trashy glamour. He goes for full-on Spectacle.

He wears pink satin pajama suits during the day for his important meetings and rehearsals, the same way other people wear, you know, suits.

Cee-Lo also has a throne, only his came from Ethan Allen rather than Kim Kardashian's imagination.

He wears what seems to be the red sequined version of the above ensemble for performing with the other coaches…

…and in celebration of the first live show, he wore a wig and whatever else this is:

Look at the sleeves!

That is some intense fringe. I adore this man.

The biggest star on The Voice, however — other than Christina’s breasts — is a furry companion of Cee-Lo’s.

This is Purrfect the cat (no, I am not shitting you; that is the cat’s actual name). Cee-Lo brings him/her out for all of his chats with the camera, stroking the cat Dr. Evil-style. Or to be more historically correct, Blowfeld-style. (I deeply impressed a professor of mine a few weeks ago when I immediately and easily answered his question about what character Dr. Evil is parodying. I was raised on James Bond; my dad is so proud right now.)

While Cee-Lo and Christina are metaphorical disco balls, Blake Shelton spends his time wearing vaguely Western-looking shirts, saying “y’all,” making wisecracks, and being sweet to the contestants, while Adam Levine waits for the female portion of the audience to stop screaming every time he talks and then similarly makes wisecracks and says sweet things to the contestants, only while wearing more rocker-ish ensembles and without saying “y’all.” Adam and Christina also bicker like children. Children that want to do each other. Anyway…

I failed to mention earlier that the coaches choose their team members through the Blind Auditions, so called because singers preform onstage while the coaches’ backs are turned, and if a coach likes what she/he hears and wants that person on his/her team, the coach pushes a button and the chair turns around to face the performer. If only one coach turns around, the singer automatically joins that coach’s team, but if more than one chair turns, the contestant gets to choose which coach they want to work with.

The Blind Auditions’ force the coaches to judge based on voice rather than looks whether they like it or not (this doesn’t last, though; image comes into play later when the contestants are competing against each other, though that seems fair to me since music is a business, and the audience at a concert doesn’t watch with their eyes closed). Partly due to this limiting of first impressions to voice alone rather than voice plus appearance, along with each of the coaches’ having a distinct individual style, The Voice is populated by singers much more varied, unique, and even strange than the regular cast of Idol characters. Opera singer Chris Mann is learning to adapt his killer chops to other genres, while contestants like Charlotte Sometimes, Erin Martin, and Lindsey Pavao have weird and wonderful voices that actual sound unusual.

So despite the fact that it’s hosted by life-size plastic doll Carson Daly — who would give white bread a run for its money in a Contest for the Exceedingly Dull — I’ve found The Voice to be an entertaining, quirky show that features singers with actually interesting talent and coaches with idiosyncrasies galore.

The Voice: like American Idol, only interesting.

Sometimes it's just amusing how extremely different the coaches are from each other. I mean, look at that picture. These four would not have been friends in high school.

I Do Not Trust People Who…

I’m a judgmental person. I like to think myself as “discerning” rather than “judgmental,”  but let’s just call it like it is.

I try, however, to keep my criticism to myself (and close friends) — with the blatant exception of this blog. I can certainly be a bitch, but ripping someone a new bodily orifice because she admits to liking Mumford and Sons is just unnecessary.

Plus, maybe it’s my intense love for media so bad it’s good, or so overblown it’s great, but I don’t want other people to feel as if I’m looking down on them for watching The Vampire Diaries. Perhaps the base impulse here is my desire not to have others look down on me for watching Pretty Little Liars. Or Gossip Girl. Or Beauty and the Geek (man, I wish that show still existed). I have so many guilty pleasures I’ve just started calling them pleasures.

But I have known quite a few people over the course of my life that are unapologetic elitists. Or “pricks,” to use the common parlance. This is one of my least favorite personality traits, so naturally, I keep trying to date guys who possess it.

But really, I hate people who are dickish about what other people like. If the woman who works two cubicles down from you loves Taylor Swift, unless she plays “Love Story” on repeat without headphones, shut your damn mouth.

All that said, while you are free to like and dislike whatever you want (you are quite probably wrong, but that’s your prerogative), I do think it is fair to judge you based on what you know about and do not know about. If you think Camus is a perfume, I will think less of you.

Thus, below you will find a list of knowledge gaps, behavioral tendencies, and character traits that mean I will not trust you.

I will not trust you if

1. …you cannot quote Mean Girls. I don’t expect everyone to have memorized all ten seasons of Friends like I have (except for my best friend K, I do expect this of her. Luckily, she doesn’t disappoint), but Mean Girls is one of the movies of my generation (I will give you a pass on this point if we have a significant age gap). If you don’t know what I mean when I say that “My father, the inventer of toaster strudel” would not approve of something, our senses of humor are not going to align.

Why is this line the best thing ever? I don't even know. Speaking of: this is the best valentine I've ever seen. Thanks, Feminist Ryan Gosling.

2. …you don’t know who Paul McCartney is. During this Sunday’s Grammys, featuring an appearance by the man himself, the twittersphere blew up with this mess:

via Buzzfeed -- to be read with a keen sense of disgust and a fear for the future of humanity

I can forgive the people who haven’t heard of Bon Iver — although that ignorance demonstrates that we probably can’t be close friends, and we can definitely never date — even if they (well, Justin Vernon, so “he”) won their “Best New Artist” Grammy in 2012 when their first album came out in 2008. But Paul McCartney?! Paul McCartney!! Please God, tell me you know who the Beatles are.

I hate when older people say that the younger generation is taking the world straight to hell, but come on, is this a generation that have not only never heard the Beatles, they’ve never heard of the Beatles. Hello, Hades, I hear you have good pomegranates here…

3. …you do not like Adele. It’s fine to be sick of her songs getting overplayed on the radio — especially “Someone Like You,” which is an incredibly emotional and touching song and which I don’t want to hear after some Bruno Mars shit while I’m shopping for groceries. If you genuinely think that Adele is not a good singer or a good songwriter, even if her style is not necessarily for you, you have the musical IQ of Paris Hilton (remember “The Stars Are Blind”?) and are the emotional equivalent of fossilized dinosaur dung.

I didn't watch the Grammys, but I am happy she won all of the things. She deserves all the recognition she can get, even if the Grammys are a pandering mess that often make the Oscars look like the paragon of artistic taste.

4. …you do not like/watch television. My perverse fascination with The Bachelor aside, I truly think that television is an unfairly maligned and undervalued art form. The structure of multiple episodes produced over a long period of time allows TV shows to develop characters in a manner that other more limited media, such as film and even (non-series) novels, simply cannot approximate. This is not to say that television is a superior art form to film, but it can achieve things film cannot, and vice versa.

There’s a reason I sobbed wildly during the season 5 finale of Bones when Booth and Brennan finally express their love for each other and then not only do not get together, but depart for different parts of the globe for the next year. I care deeply about these two as human beings, and while I know that they are fictional characters that do not “exist” in our traditional understanding of the term, I do think that fictional characters engage us emotionally in important and useful ways, and as someone who loves stories, all forms of stories, I love a medium that allows narratives of human lives to be explored and examined over such a protracted period of time.

Anyone who doesn't think these two should be together was tragically born without a heart. Or the brain region responsible for feelings of empathy, as Brennan might more accurately say.

Plus, no one who’s ever seen Battlestar Galactica can say that television is an inferior art form. That show is like a philosophical treatise. With bonus Tamoh Penikett.

BSG's confronting the notion of fear of the Other would make the show incredibly necessary and beautiful, even if its many other nuances were absent.

I have friends who would like to spend all of their time climbing trees and growing organic food, and who are genuinely not interested in TV, but these people similarly are not interested in/do not like/do not know anything about film. The other day I was talking to a friend about a poem I wrote that features Ryan Gosling’s dog, and she said, “Is that an actor?” She wasn’t putting me on — this is simply someone for whom electronic media, including television and film, are not even peripheral to her life.

However, 9 times out of 9.78, if you are the kind of person to say, “What is this ’30 Rock’ of which you speak? I don’t watch television,” you’re probably an elitist asshole.

Most redeeming thing James Franco has ever done.