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29 posts tagged tv
If you happen to be a fan of The Wire, and you happen to be in New York City tonight, here is an event for you.
To celebrate the recent issue of Criticism devoted to The Wire, the co-editors Robert LeVertis Bell and Paul Farber, along with contributor Hua Hsu, will be hosting a panel discussion at Housing Works Bookstore on 126 Crosby Street.
My article, “Greek Gods in Baltimore,” is in this issue. If you happen to be a fan of both Aeschylus and Omar, now is your chance.
Dominic West, left, and Clarke Peters. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer
This is the news: a new production of Othello at the Sheffield Crucible starring McNulty as Iago and Lester Freamon as Othello. The pain I feel that I am not in England during its run (September 15 to October 15) is intense. Luckily, Byronic will be there, and I hope she offers us a report.
The Guardian interviewed Dominic West and Clarke Peters about their careers after The Wire. Funny and intriguing all of it. Guess whose apartment Peters lived in in Paris?
D’Angelo Was Right (The Past Is Always With Us)
They took away your tower, sent you down
to tighten all the loose screws in the Pit.
It stung, but hey, they’re family—that shit
means something, don’t it? Count the money, clown
around with no one, make that orange couch
your own. These kids don’t have a clue what game
they’re playing—they don’t know the rules, they came
because they had no choice. At night, they crouch
in front of doors that may or may not lead
straight to the stash. Their feet are cold. There’s not
a goddamn reason for this cycle: shots
and pain; betrayal; truce; a hungry greed
for power—more of it—driving these calls
on payphones late at night. You try to tell
the kids about the pawns, but there’s a smell
like endings in the air. Like fall. Brick walls
behind you, bars in front: they tell you to
be strong, to bear the load for family, that
f-word fat with lies. Yeah, you’ll go to bat
for them, as long as they stay straight with you:
Where’s Wallace at? Where’s the boy, String? A dim
lightbulb blinks out. That shit caught up to him.
Tragos HQ will keep endorsing and reblogging these poems as ewilcox writes them.
(via byronic)
“Are you fucking kidding me? You think I’m going to spend 10 years sitting on a hard-wood bleacher getting splinters in my ass and cheering on Kyle Chandler? You’re out of your mind.”
Connie Britton, before accepting the role of Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights
From a really interesting and sentimental oral history of FNL here. Do check it out if you’re a fan of the show at all, or thinking about watching it (because the first few seasons are on Netflix and you should and shame on you if you think it’s “just a football show”).
(via scout)
Sitting in the bleachers and cheering on Kyle Chandler sounds like my ideal job.
(via byronic)
Mrs. Tragos and I just finished the final episode a few nights ago. There are shows out there that might be better written, or more consistently well acted, or more purely resistant to mawkishness. But—with the possible exception of ‘Northern Exposure’—I’ve watched none on which you, the viewer, stand on more solid emotional and moral ground.
Plus you get to watch a show about football.
(via byronic)
“We a drunkass pair of meta motherfuckers right now.”
“Look, American television has been a juvenile medium for most of its existence. This is true. Because of the commercials, because of the need to placate the maximum number of eyeballs, happy endings abound, redemption abounds, perfect revenge is often achieved in an action sequence. It’s very much unlike life as I have experienced it, and as most people have experienced. Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That’s not a unique David Simon perspective. That’s the perspective of anyone who contemplates anything as simple as mortality. You’re gonna die, and everyone you love and care about is gonna die. Life is finite. Some of them are gonna die too soon, and some of them are gonna die with things unsaid and things unfinished. And if you look at life in a fair and accurate context, you see that it is often deeply tragic, regardless of how well or poorly you live portions of your life — and certainly some people get luckier than others. Television, by and large, has not dealt with that…because first of all, there’s no money in it. And second of all, because they’re scared of distracting you for a moment from what you have to do, which is buy Lexuses, or buy iPods, or buy bluejeans, or buy feminine hygiene products. Every few minutes, they need you reassured enough that you’re gonna pay attention to the ads.”
David Simon, interviewed by Salon. (via thebronzemedal)
Thanks for that, The Bronze Medal. As some of you might know, I have a certain interest in The Wire and tragedy. And I’ll a bit to say on the subject in a few weeks.
But for now, I declare that Mrs. Tragos and I have been watching HBO’s Western Deadwood. I’ll just say this: the writing: very smart. Even better, the dialogue doesn’t fall victim to the Scylla of empty artifice or the Charybdis of lame-ass “realism”. We’re midway through Season 3 right now, and lamenting the day it all has to end.
The good and great Peter Santiago turned me on to the New Yorker’s profile of the show’s creator David Milch (they’re all named David), lovingly titled, “The Misfit: How David Milch got from ‘NYPD Blue’ to ‘Deadwood’ by way of an Epistle of St. Paul.”
How indeed.
Albert Camus talks about his stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed”, (also known as “The Devils” and “Demons”), in 1959, a year before his death in an automobile accident.
(via elvira)
“We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, among other things, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture of which I’m aware.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, in an essay in the NYRB in which he explores the appeal of Mad Men. (via thebronzemedal)
I’m currently writing about The Aeneid and Battlestar Galactica, and am very pleased to see others making the connection.
For the last decade, I felt myself grow more disappointed with the offerings on the silver screen, as I grew more impressed, and often just plain enthused, by what I was seeing on the tube. Especially the shows Mendelsohn mentions in this quotation.
I realize I’ve felt this way for no other reason than that I’m a bastard who prefers novels to short stories. It seems like a heavy-handed paradox, but it’s true: I don’t have the patience, normally, to read short stories. I need to be engrossed, to be drawn into decisions and revisions and developments that the novel seems especially suited to portraying.
And the same goes for TV in relation to movies. Bubbles, Number Six, Carmela, Tim Riggins…in a two hour span, none of these characters would inspire the meaning and empathy that they do over the course of multiple seasons.
My hope is that this summer, I’ll be able to devote some time to thinking through what TV has meant over this last decade, show per show. I’d love to hear what you all think.
(via soupsoup)
11-year-old Tragos. Meet your adult self’s favorite show.
(via thebronzemedal)
