Copious Notes

Usually Mariano Rivera is the one getting saves this time of year in New York City.

But Saturday night, with an American League East Championship already sewn up for the Yankees, it was Lady Ga Ga who was pulling out a last minute victory for Saturday Night Live.

And this was a screecher.

It was like one of those saves in a bad game where Mariano gets a few on base and has us Yankee faithful nibbling our nails before he gets the final out.

Now let’s be honest: two episodes into the season, Saturday Night Live has been terrible, like the Yankees starting a season 3-22. Three may be the most laughs I uttered last week, one being when I realized Jenny Slate uttered the F-word during a skit that set her up to do it.

This week started with an op-ed piece masquerading as an opener that had Fred Armisen’s doing his effortless — and I don’t mean that in a good way — Obama impression with the President saying he has not done anything since he got in office. Then, host Ryan Reynolds wasn’t as funny as expected, we got a pointless Family Feud sketch, another lame SNL Digital Short and even Ga Ga’s first appearance was a dud.

In a bit that’s already gotten a lot of bytes, she and Madonna staged a cat fight and nearly kissed during Kenan Thompson’s (inexplicably) recurring Deep House Dish sketch. Really, why did Madonna waste her time with this bit? There should be more to an SNL skit than showing up.

And Ga Ga’s first number, Paparazzi, was pretty routine, maybe most notable because she put the show on a two-week streak of airing words you’re not supposed to say on TV.

Really, it was not until the eighth inning, when Ga Ga came back, that she brought the episode into the win column. It was a shaky start as she appeared in a dress that looked like several conjoined silver hula hoops to sing Love Game. She went through a mechanical verse, then became human. She sat down, making no pretense that this was easy with the hoops. Taking off her sun glasses and popping her hands in the air, she greeted the audience, “Hello SNL” — somewhat unheard of from musical guests on SNL – and proceeded to get all Billy Joel playing a ballad/medley of Poker Face and Bad Romance injected with some personal reflections on New York, the Yankees, and simpler music than what we’ve been hearing from her all summer.

Then, she came back for the next and last skit mocking her outrageous outfits as both she and Andy Samberg showed up in bubble dresses — “I spent $20,000 on this dress,” she said, and he replied, “I made this  out of garbage.” She also gamely attempted to kiss Samberg several times in their ridiculous outfits.

Ga Ga showed she has some chops beyond crazy fashion and naughty songs that make Madonna’s catalog sound like Amy Grant, and she had a sense of humor about herself.

Saturday Night Live showed it doesn’t have much going for itself this year without a suprisingly good guest performer. And unlike Mo Rivera with the Yankees, Ga Ga isn’t in the lineup for SNL every night.

My Twitter home page. Look for me @copiousnotes.

The video service Hulu, we are told in its advertising campaign, is “an evil plot to destroy the world.”

That might be — he says, having been sucked into hours of watching ­reruns of Saturday Night Live and WKRP in Cincinnati.

But to listen to some people, you’d think Twitter was the one pulling the planet apart, 140 characters at a time.

David Letterman was at least ­honest in his dressing-down of ­Twitter on his April 24 show: “When you don’t ­understand anything, and you’re ­frightened by things, then you make fun of it, you ridicule it, and that’s what I’m doing. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it.”

Funny — and funnier if you saw Dave deliver it in his cranky-old-man fashion.

It’s more annoying when you hear clueless comments. For instance, on NPR’s Weekend Edition on April 26, This I Believe co-producer Jay ­Allison compared his series of essays about faith to several Internet upstarts: “I think that separates it from Twitter and blogging and Facebook. It’s not a chronicle of what’s happening in that moment. It’s something that’s gathered over the course of an entire life.”

Yes, but neither I nor ­anyone else I know of has ever equated jotting a quick note with writing a memoir.

Lumping Twitter with an essay, or even ­blogging and Facebook, shows a ­fundamental lack of ­understanding of what ­Twitter is — and of the ­curiosity to find out.

(By the way, NPR has a Twitter account, churning out headlines on a regular basis.)

It’s not that hard to learn what Twitter is. As Internet applications go, it is one of the easiest out there.

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SNL Get A Life

So, this was my most recent experience as a Star Trek consumer: Earlier this year, at the Presbyterian Women’s book sale at our church, I picked up a trio of old Star Trek episodes on VHS for something like 50 cents a pop.

When I got home and my 12-year-old daughter saw the tapes, she pointed at me and screamed, “Neeeeerrrrrd!”

And she hadn’t even seen the Saturday Night Live episode where William Shatner asks a Treekker played by Jon Lovitz, “Have you ever kissed a girl?” and tells the whole crowd at a Star Trek convention to, “Get a life.” (The video is above, and the Shatner portion starts at the 2:30 point.) Yes, Star Trek’s reputation as the benchmark show for sci-fi obsessed geeks still residing in their parents’ basements has trickled all the way down to today’s tweens, which makes the impending opening of the Star Trek movie this week really interesting.

Left to right: Chekov (Anton Yelchin), James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Bones (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), and Uhura (Zoë Saldana) in the new "Star Trek" film, which opens Thursday. Photo from Industrial Light and Magic.

Yes, there is a Star Trek movie opening this week, the latest in the reboot trend that has touched franchises such as James Bond and Batman. Normally, it would be silly to say, “yes, there is a Star Trek movie opening this week,” for the latest installment of a franchise this iconic. And yes, the movie is getting a lot of ballyhoo.

But then again, some of the ads for Star Trek, like ones rolling during the NBA Playoffs, have almost been unrecognizable as Star Trek. There are lots of hot young actors, hard charging music and things blowing up real good. One of the headlines on the current issue of Entertainment Weekly touts Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana as “Sexy new Kirk & Uhura.” Sexy? Star Trek?

Well, that is one of the delicate lines this reboot is dancing, as do other reboots: recrafting the old show for a new audience with new sensibilities while leaving enough of the franchise in to make it recognizable and satisfying to the established fans.

How well director J.J. Abrams pulls that off will be the key to whether the Star Trek brand, now 43 years old, continues to live long and prosper.

A few weeks ago, I saw an old Simpsons episode with Krusty the Clown hosting a Saturday Night Live-type show and telling the audience that the last half hour was awful — he used some more colorful terminology I cannot recall right now. Anyway, that has often been true of SNL.

But this week’s Zac Efron-hosted episode actually saved some of the best stuff for after Weekend Update, including this High School Musical 4 bit where Troy Bolton returns to East High to tell the next graduating class the awful truth about college.

Efron, of course, was on SNL to pump up enthusiasm for his new movie, 17 Again, which opens Friday and includes onetime Lexington resident and Kings star Allison Miller in the cast — if you follow that link, you’ll discover something about Allison that would drive many a tween girl crazy with jealousy. Kings, by the way, has moved to 8 p.m. Saturday, and guest stars Macaulay Culkin this week.

Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon on the second episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Photo by Dana Edelson | NBC.

I can honestly tell you that I watched the very first Late Night with Conan O’Brien episodes. I cannot honestly tell you I remember much about them. In fact, watching Conan’s grand finale was a reminder the show started with a very different look and feel from how it ended.

If I remember anything, it was that Conan was a little awkward and you didn’t quite know what to make of the show after the first few nights.

Considering how things turned out for Conan — he’s now off to take the reigns of the The Tonight Show from Jay Leno, completing the succession David Letterman had wished for 16 years ago — that must mean Jimmy Fallon is off to a decent start.

The biggest thing to like about Late Night with Jimmy Fallon out of the gate is the tone. Yes, Jimmy made some bad-to-middlin’ movies, but we met him and know him for Saturday Night Live, where his chief accomplishment was creating, with Tina Fey, the best Weekend Update team since Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd (and until Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers who had a brief but glorious run). From the title sequence to the set, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon echoes SNL cool without overtly referencing it. And The Roots may have in a couple of nights become the best house band on late night TV, not only able to provide cool bumper music, but also able to be part of the jokes, starting right away with “slow jam the news.”

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Kanye West at a Dec. 12 performance in New York's Madison Square Garden. Copyrighted AP photo by Evan Agostoni.

For decades, I have been a big fan of Saturday Night Live musical guests. It is a premier spotlight of exposure for artists, whether they are new or already chart toppers. I can recall performances by the likes of Sting (in the midst of the early days of the Gulf War), U2 (in a special it’s-about-time performance in 2004), and even Power Station (the only live performance on record with Robert Palmer) that were as riveting as the comedy was hilarious.

In years when I haven’t been paying as much attention to the pop charts, SNL has been where I discovered Fall Out Boy, Arcade Fire and others.

And all that has created a Fall 2008 mystery for me: What’s with the lame performances on SNL this season?

No one’s knocked my socks off, and several have let me down, particularly Coldplay and Kanye West.

Coldplay.

Coldplay was shockingly bad, especially since I’ve seen them be so good on shows like Austin City Limits. I am not part of the legion of Coldplay haters, and for the most part, I liked the band’s summer release, Viva La Vida. With all that in mind, I was geared up for another great SNL performance when they played Oct. 26. And then, Chris Martin hit the stage bouncing around like a jumping bean and doing something that looked like faux martial arts — maybe they were real moves, I dunno. Not only was Martin’s routine during Viva La Vida’s title track annoying, it was killing his performance. Before he hit the first chorus, he was out of breath. And the whole set with the timpanis out front and string players apparently being broadcast from the 1950s onto a little onstage TV was just bizarre.

Even more bizzare was whatever happened to Kanye last Saturday, performing Love Lockdown. The man was flat-out flat, in a way that had me and my wife and daughter wondering what was up: Was the Auto-Tune effect, the Cher-like vocal processing program West uses throughout his new album, messing him up live? Was his monitor throwing him off? Was his band pitched too low? Did he have a cold? Can he really just not sing? The problems and questions persisted into his next number, Heartless.

Each number looked great, with Kanye performing in front of large video screens that, at times, turned him into a lunging, posing silhouette. But it sounded awful and certainly didn’t do justice to 808s and Heartbreaks, West’s new album that really establishes him as a bona fide artist and is easily his best effort since his debut, 2004’s The College Dropout.

“At least we know he’s not lip-syncing,” my 11-year-old said, recalling Ashlee Simpson’s SNL debacle.

The thing is, neither Kanye or Coldplay are Ashlee Simpson. They are established stars — I’d say superstar in Kanye’s case. They’ve played Saturday Night Live before. So how did they show up and lay such colossal eggs?

Coldplay’s debacle prompted several chats I’ve had with friends about whether the pop charts are being filled with people who can’t hack it live. I don’t know. Love or hate it, American Idol shows there’s still a premium on live performances, and reigning champ David Cook may be the most satisfying SNL musical guest this fall. There are still plenty of current acts, such as the aforementioned Fall Out Boy and Arcade Fire, who are great live.

These unfortunate performances should just remind performers that key word in the show’s title is “Live,” and if they’re going to go on, that’s how they need to bring it.