but love is a trackless domain
Work was stupidly busy today, I did not sleep well last night, and my nap this evening was interrupted by hammering in the hallway outside my apartment. WTF? So I am still headachy and melancholy in equal measure. And cranky about Eliot Spitzer. I would like real life to resemble The Wire slightly less.
Speaking of The Wire, and the inimitably cranky David Simon, have some links:
+ big_pink on why you should watch it
+ Alan Sepinwall's long and loving review of the series finale Including my favorite description of the show ever: "The Wire": a guy goes up some stairs, and another guy takes a bullet to the head for being an a--hole, and these are the feel-good moments!
+ and his wide-ranging interview with David Simon (Spoilers)
+ The AV Club interviews David Simon (Spoilers)
There are some redundancies in the interviews, and Simon is, well, himself. He's kind of an asshole, but I generally enjoy his interviews, so I totally think they're both worth reading.
I feel like I need to rewatch all five seasons before I can do any kind of real talking about it, because it is structured like a novel - not a novel-adapted-for-tv, but like a (really dense and complicated) novel written via one hour chapters/episodes - and because there is so much that comes back around in the end, and I want to go back and see how early some of the fates were laid. I also feel like I should be able to talk about the structure and the tone, the way you know going in that it's a tragedy, and that it's the tragedy of individuals mostly not triumphing against the forces arrayed against them. There are moments of brightness, and dignity, and certainly humor, but there is a lot of betrayal and a definite sense of inevitability, of necessity that can't be fought, in any number of the arcs that play out, both plot- and character-wise.
So on the one hand, you can argue that the ending feels too neat, neater than this show would normally provide, but on the other, I think for the most part, even if you didn't know exactly how it was going to go down, the ending we saw made so much sense in light of all that came before that it couldn't be any other way. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again, to quote another show that I've been watching a lot of lately (and funnily enough, when I was looking up the quote to make sure I had it right, I found a review of "Flesh and Bone" that mentions how Starbuck's interrogation of Leoben recalls various scenes in The Box on "Homicide"). Possibly we didn't need to see all of it - The Wire has always been good at expecting viewers to keep up and letting us draw our own conclusions - but I am glad we did.
Hmm... maybe now I will watch some BSG.
***
Speaking of The Wire, and the inimitably cranky David Simon, have some links:
+ big_pink on why you should watch it
+ Alan Sepinwall's long and loving review of the series finale Including my favorite description of the show ever: "The Wire": a guy goes up some stairs, and another guy takes a bullet to the head for being an a--hole, and these are the feel-good moments!
+ and his wide-ranging interview with David Simon (Spoilers)
+ The AV Club interviews David Simon (Spoilers)
There are some redundancies in the interviews, and Simon is, well, himself. He's kind of an asshole, but I generally enjoy his interviews, so I totally think they're both worth reading.
I feel like I need to rewatch all five seasons before I can do any kind of real talking about it, because it is structured like a novel - not a novel-adapted-for-tv, but like a (really dense and complicated) novel written via one hour chapters/episodes - and because there is so much that comes back around in the end, and I want to go back and see how early some of the fates were laid. I also feel like I should be able to talk about the structure and the tone, the way you know going in that it's a tragedy, and that it's the tragedy of individuals mostly not triumphing against the forces arrayed against them. There are moments of brightness, and dignity, and certainly humor, but there is a lot of betrayal and a definite sense of inevitability, of necessity that can't be fought, in any number of the arcs that play out, both plot- and character-wise.
So on the one hand, you can argue that the ending feels too neat, neater than this show would normally provide, but on the other, I think for the most part, even if you didn't know exactly how it was going to go down, the ending we saw made so much sense in light of all that came before that it couldn't be any other way. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again, to quote another show that I've been watching a lot of lately (and funnily enough, when I was looking up the quote to make sure I had it right, I found a review of "Flesh and Bone" that mentions how Starbuck's interrogation of Leoben recalls various scenes in The Box on "Homicide"). Possibly we didn't need to see all of it - The Wire has always been good at expecting viewers to keep up and letting us draw our own conclusions - but I am glad we did.
Hmm... maybe now I will watch some BSG.
***