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Glee has many great things about it — and you can read about those all over the internets, so let me offer a couple of minor complaints. The show could be so much better.

1. Any scene with cheerleaders wearing cheerleader outfits in it pretty much sucks. Painfully clichéd, caricatured and shallow, especially when there’s more than one girl wearing her cheerleader outfit around school.

2. The musical numbers don’t sound like what they look like. Big problem. Huge problem! Come on — give us cred. We are smart viewers, we can handle it. Many (most?) of the actors on this show can really sing quite well, so let us see what it would sound like if we were present in the scene as we see it. Instead, we see obvious lip synching, and we hear instruments that make no sense. Not right! (Please note: I am not talking about fun, surreal moments like when the football team dances to “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it.” Nope. That’s great. It was staged and we bought it. But almost all other numbers where you hear and see something that doesn’t add up: these make the show less than it could be. If you show four vocalists, let us hear four vocalists in the moment. Etc.)

So much good. So much potential, also, to be that much better.

Dudes. I haven’t been to a big rock concert in many years. Elton John at Madison Square Garden (in 2000?) was probably the last big one, at which point I remember saying that I was never going to a large indoor rock concert again. I have kept my self-promised and managed to enjoy some serious 80s rock by going to an outdoor concert featuring Cheap Trick, Poison and Def Leppard. Dudes. Dudes.

What more can I say? You can look up my Tweets from last night, but there’s not much to share except a few observations:

• Cheap Trick’s logo has stood the test of time best.
• There were no mullets.
• The crowd was younger than I would’ve guessed.
• The bass player for Poison didn’t make it, so they got the guy from Cinderella. (So much for your theory, Danny. That positively proves they’re totally different bands.)

Progressive Congressman Promotes Bill in 7/8 Time

I loves me some Onion Radio News pretty much every day, but it tickles my fancy even deeper when it mentions odd time signatures and wah wah pedals. The music geek inside of me is very happy. And the political geek.

You say you don’t know Doyle Redland of the Onion Radio News? Click the above link now immediately right away soon ASAP stat this very second! And subscribe to the podcast! Doyle Redland is the best curmudgeonly fake newscaster on this planet!

What is 7/8 time, you say? It’s the time signature used for Money by Pink Floyd, from the album Dark Side of the Moon.

Question for y’all: Are there other popular songs in 7/8?

Tonight I attended an event where students of the High School of the Recording Arts performed. Hip hop and R&B stuff. A couple of repeated themes were to get your hands in the air and swag. “Swag” — my new term of the day. Not sure I fully get it, but I think it means who you are and how you present yourself, more or less, with a predilection for your swaggering self, but just be you, man, no matter who you are. Don’t be me, be you.

It’s like blogging but with a beat: Check. Out. My. Swag.

The other story is that this is a charter school in St Paul that is getting HS degrees to kids that otherwise probably wouldn’t. Smart, capable kids. Pretty awesome, glad to have attended and to have put my hands in the air.

Just saw Pope Joan, a new musical, at the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood. An unholy trinity of Catholicism, Dark Ages history and sex, and my limited familiarity with said trinity, left me a little lost in tonight’s viewing. But my friend Whitney Avalon plays the title role, and it was a pleasure to see her perform. Two other leads really stood out, so even if the story and the storytelling were mysterious to me, I enjoyed those performances.

The show is a mix of Rafiki from The Lion King, silly monks from Spamalot, Che and Evita from Evita, the masses from Les Misèrables, and a sentence of Sondheim, too. All very serious, except for the parade of dancing monks. So while the show was all over the map, at least there was Whitney. She and I were in a show once upon a time, and I helped her prepare the music to audition for this show. Many congratulations to you, Ms. Avalon!