Kristin Wiig is Saturday Night Live’s strongest performer. She’s funny and awkward. She does impersonations effortlessly (see Bjork and Kathy Lee). And she takes skits that could be awful (Penelope, Target Lady) and makes them funny as all hell. Just check out her Bjork appearance above.

There is something gay about Wiig too. She’s not gay-gay and there is nothing classically camp about her. She’s no Liza. But she does have a wicked sense of humor and the ability to find humor in strange behavior and ugliness. And we gays get that and love that.  This is why she’s been our hero for sometime. Gawker has grouped some of her best performances and gives an update on Wiig’s new primetime Christmas special, SNL Presents: A Very Gilly Christmas. I have never been as bitter as the folks over at Gawker. While they hate the idea of a special focussed on their least favorite Wiig skit, Gilly, I welcome it. After all he gays have been saying “Schharry! for years in Gilly’s accent.

Unless you have been living under a rock then assuredly you have witnessed the pop culture tipping point and subsequent freaky-deaky takeover of the world by one Miss Lady Gaga. It should be noted that she’s not your typical Madonna-wannabe. She’s the heir apparent.

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Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch and Parker Posey at the Sundance Channel Studio

Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch, director Ryan Shiraki, Parker Posey, Jane Lynch and Missi Pyle squeezed onto the Sundance Channel studio’s couch this afternoon, ostensibly to discuss their movie SPRING BREAKDOWN, but instead it became a game of comedic one-upmanship. If their conversation among is any indication, the film promises to be a pun-laced comedy.

“It’s kind of a big, broad physical comedy,” said Amy Poehler, referring both to the film’s appeal and the gender of its stars.

When host Faith Salie asked if the women’s periods had synced during shooting, it sparked a string of menstrual puns.

“Like water, we flow, we meander, we encounter resistance and flow around it,” deadpanned Lynch. About the script, Pyle said, “It didn’t have to be padded or anything.” Later, Salie turned to Pyle and joked, “Missi, it took me a while to absorb your joke.” To which someone else—I couldn’t tell whom, because I was in the director’s room—replied that eventually such jokes “bleed though.”

All of which, to steal another of Pyle’s joke, may seem “out of Kotex” in this post. In any case, it suggests that SPRING BREAKDOWN, which is rated R, may be raunchier than its PG trailer suggests. Whether you’re at Sundance or not, you can soon find out for yourself: The straight-to-DVD film comes out next month.

The opening-night premiere of claymation film Mary and Max made it clear that the Festival decided to throw a curveball for its opening pitch.

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“Punk—what nonsense that was,” Elvis Costello recently said to Spin magazine. “I never really went along with the philosophical background…I’m just a songwriter. I knew older stuff and I knew newer stuff.”

It’s easy to understand why, given his obvious other interests from Day One and the wide range of musical styles he would soon begin exploring, Elvis is so resistant to being given the “punk” tag. But the reality is that he—like his guest on this week’s edition of SPECTACLE, Lou Reed—will forever be inextricably linked with punk rock.

Reed’s work with the Velvet Underground, characterized by raw, often dissonant sound and spare, unblinking lyrics which chronicled the underside of urban life, was part of the blueprint on which punk was modeled. And for Elvis, time, setting, and attack all connected him to punk’s golden moment, whether he likes it or not.

His first album, My Aim is True, was released in May of 1977, at the pinnacle of punk’s big takeover of music in the UK. He was signed to Stiff Records, a meeting point between punk and the more R&B/roots-based “pub rock” scene; his labelmates included the Damned, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and Richard Hell.

The moment that forever secured Elvis in the punk pantheon (at least in the US), was his appearance on Saturday Night Live in December of 1977. Recruited as a last-minute replacement for the Sex Pistols, he was supposed to perform his single “Less Than Zero”—but abruptly cut off the song as soon as he started it, instead delivering a ferocious version of his new song “Radio Radio” (In 1999, he recreated the moment, backed by the Beastie Boys, for SNL’s 25th anniversary broadcast).

Elvis’s second album, and his first recorded with the Attractions, was 1978’s magnificent This Year’s Model, which is probably the closest he got sonically to pure, back-to-basics punk rock. Steve Nieve’s jittery, nagging organ fueled this rapid-fire set of songs, with Elvis spitting and sneering words non-stop. More sophisticated than punk’s primitivism, for sure, but no less assaultive than the Pistols or the Clash.

The albums that followed—Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, Almost Blue—would see Elvis experimenting with pop, soul, and country, and begin the sense of musical adventurousness that would define the next three decades of his career. But every few years, especially on projects that reassembled the Attractions, that old, stripped-down fury would re-emerge.

From Blood and Chocolate (1986) to Brutal Youth (1993) to his most recent release, Momofuku, Elvis has always retained a connection to the approach he started with. And it doesn’t take his appearance at the Grammys paying tribute to Joe Strummer, or his work alongside such bands as Green Day and Fall Out Boy, to know that the best thing to call that sound is one word: punk. Sorry, Elvis.

– Alan Light

Alan Light is the former Editor-in-Chief of Spin and Vibe magazines, and a former Senior Writer for Rolling Stone. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, he is the author of “The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys” and a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for excellence in music writing.

I can think of few things in my lifetime that have been more depressing than presidential elections. But politics may be turning over a new leaf. This year there will be one thing more depressing than the presidential election, and that’s the end of the presidential election.

Post-election depression is forecasted to hit the country in about two to three days.

If you can (and I know this is hard), try to imagine a country in which cold medication commercials roll in the place of attack ads, the evening news reports Iraq war death tolls instead of swing state election polls and the only people asking you for donations are Salvation Army Santas in front of Bloomingdales.

I don’t know about you, but to me, this seems devastating. Just thinking about Wednesday fills my mind with a million questions, starting with: Now where am I going to donate my money? What am I going to talk to my friends about? How will Saturday Night Live be funny?

Because of this election I walk around wearing buttons that tell people to vote with corny colloquialisms (“Fired Up to Vote!”) and I am completely immune from ridicule because it’s election-related, which means it can’t be cheesy, it’s noble!

Had I spent this Sunday volunteering at a soup kitchen to feed starving people who have lost their homes due to the financial crisis, or volunteering in a short-staffed hospital where people’s health and lives are reliant on sufficient personnel, I would have been a complete nerd. “What are you?” some friends would say, “seventeen and trying to impress some ivy league school with your extracurriculars?!” The others would just assume I’m there to network or meet a good-looking man. But in Obama-world, I am approaching “hip” for being a part of a phone bank in Philadelphia for the day.

Come November 5, what will I fight for that feels cool enough and socially acceptable without being too pretentious? What will be there to remind me that there is a U.S. state north of Maine? How will I feel morally okay about not reading the international section of the newspaper?

As you can see, the final countdown is presenting me with a certain existential crisis that I fear will take more than a few “ ballot recounts” to assuage.

–Jamie Wong

This week’s topic on THE GREEN is fashion. As some of you may remember from the golden days of “Saturday Night Live”, Billy Crystal used to play a character named “Fernando”. Fernando used to comment on people’s fashion sense by stating that “it’s better to look good than to feel good”.

To this day, many people sacrifice comfort for fashion, but perhaps these days are coming to an end. Carson Kressley, a fashion designer and a star from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, feels that we may finally be reaching a point where we can look good and feel good at the same time, even if the “feel good” part of that scenario may only apply to knowing we are doing something good for the world by wearing green-friendly clothing.

Thanks to high-fashion designers like Linda Loudermilk and fashion labels like Ekoganik, it seems more possible than ever to wear ecologically safe clothing that looks simply amazing. However, even though there may be some designers who choose to take the sustainable path because they believe it is right, there are still many who opt for the quick buck. In a sense, it’s the job of the consumer to send a message to these companies by buying smart. Ali Hewson believes that consumers have an amazing power in their pockets. This power can affect the world around them based on what products the consumer chooses to buy.

We trust you enjoyed these brief snapshots from the minds of people who are committed to being green. Check out our Green Discussion boards [www.sundancechannel.com] and let us know if we got things right, wrong, or somewhere we could not even imagine.

In parting, please remember that everyone holds limitless potential, and all it takes is determination to transform that potential into reality.