First Impression: RuPaul's Drag U

I'll admit, I've always loved drag queens. It may be the least "high-minded" and stuffy-nosed of performance art, but at least it's goddamned entertaining. I can't remember any significant period of my life when I wasn't enchanted and delighted by these trampy-campy gender clowns (to tap another branch of popular performance art oft afforded about as much respect as drag queens).

All the same, I love very few things more than to grab a few drinks at Godfrey's in Richmond and watch the girls rock it pretty hard for an ordinary Wednesday evening. It relieves a pretty and intelligent little working girl like me, constantly bitten and hounded by the tacit social demand to apply a full face of whore paint every morning to serve pancakes to a horde of usually jovial rednecks, to see the mask of adornment that defines classic "femininity" taken up by men in masquerade. It reminds me what is costume and what is play.

And now for the show. As far as daytime dribble makeover/amateur sing-and-dance bits go, this is exquisitely fuck-the-important-novel-I-was-reading-glued-to-the-couch-trash entertainment. The show centers around Ru Paul, the "academic dean," so to speak, of Drag U, and some choice picks from the two seasons of Ru Paul's Drag Race. Fans will remember Raven (personal favorite), Jujubee, Pandora Boxx, Morgan MacMichaels, Ongina, and that Flores fellow. She's a fellow of Drag U, right? Each episode the reigning queens compete to affect the most dramatic transformation in some dour hetero-female hausfrau, motorcycle enthusiast, grad student, whatever. A very distinct melange of superb bitchiness ensues.

So whether you skim by on youtube and resolve quickly never to watch an entire episode or fall in love with the wide-eyed and rhythymless pupils of Drag U, I leave you with this to ponder: If you're going to watch trash T. V. at all, why not pull out all the stops?

Why I am DONE with you, Charlaine Harris!!!

Now, this post may upset a small, probably air-headed portion of TrueBlood fans, and I don't give a damn. I admit, I read the first six installments of the Sookie Stackhouse series. I now wash my hands of it, adrift again in my search for compelling, contemporary, literary vampire fiction. But back again to my title:
1. A little too quaint for comfort
Look, I get it, the ambience of the books is very much that of a voluptuous, nostaligic, and romanticized Deep South. Still and all, I've always toyed with the idea of asking Charlaine herself, given the oppurtunity, what she meant in her particular description of a character as "some racial blend that had turned out very well," and further ask her to offer up an example of what sort of blend that might be. Are there any particular, peculiar racial blends which you wouldn't, perhaps, say work out as well, Ms. Harris? This is to say nothing of the oddball Hotshot community, a motley bunch of incestuous, patriarchial, drug-peddling, barbaric, hillbilly-fied shapeshifters. Somewhere between Sookies "brutal honesty" and her epic stupidity, authenticity suffers. Some may find that a harsh criticism of a fantasy story, but Sookie is the series' grounding influence, so if I can't believe her, what point is the rest of it?
2. Sex doesn't make sense in Charlaine's world.
So...just a few quick questions...
Vampires are not "alive" in the sense that humans and other animals are, they are essentially bags of blood directed by an ever-developing superhuman phantom of their human selves. They are animated by the vital energy contained in human blood and physicially sustained by artificially manufactured TrueBlood.
I presume this would mean that male vampires either do not ejaculate, or merely ejaculate blood. This is intriguing, because the sharing of blood entails a magic psycho-sexual bond in the Sookie Stackhouse universe. I would prefer to assume that they don't release fluid when they come, because it arouses a similarly messy question about female vampires. Be fucking honest, Charlaine, do vamp broads begin to secrete blood when they're feeling frisky? I feel as though I would have noticed this in the course of the books and episodes, but nothing. Please, let me know if I missed something. It certainly wouldn't be too gross to mention, the author felt no need to spare us Bill's voracious glare upon noticing (by smell) that Sookie had entered her menstrual period.
By contrast we also have the shifters, particularly the bitten, half-human, hybrid ones. A little more mechanics of how these things worked instead of incest drama {OVERDONE} would have been lovely. I see, however sadly, that this isn't the route you've chosen to take. That is one of many reasons that Alan Ball has been so instrumental in making TrueBlood a watchable, sexy, drama instead of the drab trash that is your entire literary career.
3. The Growing Absurdity of it All
Believe me, I really, really wanted to like these novels and every little thing to do with TrueBlood for a while now, but I've become involuntarily bored, annoyed, and disdainful simultaneously as I read on. Why is it that a)almost every single character has to have something weird, mythological, psychic, or whatever cut-and-paste collective narratives you can stitch hastily together and b)your lack of originality becomes almost a trademark, a certain way if rebranding cliche storylines so we can rush it all up to your insipid and nonsensical sex scenes. Alas, farewell Charlaine, you otherwise remind me of a grinning toad, and that will always and forever make me smile fondly in remembrance of you.