collected observation

Today, I present to you, a brief glimpse into the truly disjointed mind of one, Nate Tyson.

whole lotta nonsense. 1st ed.

I just read that Laura Linney is playing Abigail Adams in the John Adams TV movie that I was completely unaware of until five minutes ago. Paul Giammati is evidently playing John Adams. Good casting, but I wish Ian Holm had been given the role at some point before he was ancient. He woulda tore that up. Or Terrance Stamp. (By the way, my favorite portrayal of John Adams is Mr. Feeney's [William Daniels] in the film version of 1776, which was a musical.) Point being, that Laura Linney is a funny duck, because I think that she is one of the last of the old school female movie stars. She only takes somewhat pedigree roles, she is usually offered almost every serious female role that fits her age (I'm sure), she is classy and private, and she almost always plays the famous wife. She is the master of being the famous dude's wife. She is the go-to gal for that.

++++

There is a British website that will give you music festival tickets for sperm donations. I shit you not. It is called Sperm for Tickets, which shows a frankness I respect. I wish I lived in Europe. But only for this purpose. Otherwise? Screw you guys.

++++

White people like me like The Wire a lot. And now it's over. But Lost has started kicking extra butt to make up for it.

Sometime soon, I will have a retrospective on The Wire (I would just do a review of the final episode, but I want to put some larger effort into this). I'm considering of doing a brief piece on the closing montage, but other than that, no Wire until I do a larger piece. I ahve to keep myself to this.

I just can't accept that it's over. Oh...Bubbles...Michael...

++++

...speaking of Michael, Lost's big boat-oriented reveal last night was somewhat anti-climactic just because everyone and their mother had predicted it. But the show still manages to reel you in, doesn't it?

This season has had a noticeable effect on people who watch Lost in my room. Some have never seen the show, some stopped watching half-way through Season 1, some gave up as recently as the end of last season. But all of them are completely (re)hooked after watching the recent stuff in my room. That kinda says something.

++++

That Dodos album is pretty great the more I listen to it. This, Earth, and Times New Viking are a pretty strong trio. There are tons of other good albums so far this year, but those three are special.

I'm also really digging the recent albums from Ocrilim, Natural Snow Buildings, the Teenagers, Boxcutter, and the Fleet Foxes.

++++

Animal Collective had a new EP released this week. It's called Water Curses, and it's pretty great. The tempo is definitely toned down, and the sound is thicker and spacier than most of the material on Strawberry Jam. Both those things are good indicators for the future, if you ask me. This may be my favorite thing I've heard so far this year.

Am I becoming predictable? I love Animal Collective, but I'm not a fanboy. I mean, Sung Tongs is one of my top five records of the decade probably, and Panda Bear was my #1 last year...and I just talked about the Dodos, who sound a little like 'em.

Whatever. Great band.

++++

I had a piece in The Climax this week. It featured excerpts from this post.

The only editing that upset me was the disappearance of the quotation marks around the phrase "get relaxed" (which had replaced "get high" in my draft for the paper) in the Earth review. They didn't remove the quotes from "the law" earlier in the article, so it was obviously a moral decision to not include a gentle, non-explicit weed joke in the student newspaper.

Sigh. It wouldn't matter, except that a somewhat tongue-in-cheek joke now reads like a banal observation.

++++

I love you all. Thelma Ritter is amazing in Pickup on South Street, and Paul Reuben's performance in Pee Wee's Big Adventure is an overlooked comedic masterpiece.

Nathaniel

in three minutes...

goodbye.

Nate

s'all in the game, bee

British television personality Charlie Brooker once declared that The Wire was not only "physically multilayered", but also, "just fucking brilliant".

Just fucking brilliant. He got it on the nose right there.

Saying goodbye to The Wire has been very, very hard for many, many reasons. However, for the sake of brevity, I will concentrate on two. The first, and most obvious, is that a show of The Wire's quality and craft is a rare thing on television. So rare, in fact, that The Wire will remain the only one ever to have been in existence until next Monday, at which point there will be none, with no salvation in sight.

I don't mean to put down the other shows television has to offer; I'm sure, however, that their feelings are a little hurt at this point. But it's no fault of theirs that The Wire is as good as it is. However, after five seasons of social criticism and increasingly complex urban drama, The Wire stands as a singularly epic work that offers no real comparison on television.

Another difficulty in The Wire's send-off is the emotional toll saying individual goodbyes to a richly developed cast of roughly forty major and minor characters can have on the viewer. Having spent years weaving through the lives of so many different individuals, the Wire's writers and cast created a world of ancient social institutions and flawed people being victimized by or operating within them. And damn it, things do not end well for most of them. (the show is, after all, described by its own creators as a Greek Tragedy)

This epic scope could have lead to a Brechtian utilitarianism in the massive cast, but, somehow, even the cameo roles on The Wire resonate with a lived-in history, as if these characters had been living for years in Baltimore before the cameras started rolling on. This narrative sincerity imbues every action, every piece of dialogue with years of back story, which is an effect often attempted but rarely achieved in television. So when we watch one character meet death by asking their murderer how their hair looks, it has the same emotional effect as a three monologue for an invested viewer. That small moment in the character's life holds the exact same weight as any other as far as The Wire is concerned, but that is an indicator of the show's natural understanding of its characters.

Instead of taking the moment for theatrical tactics, the show's writers chose to keep the scene intimate. This puts The Wire in the strange No Man's Land between the identities of social issue show and ensemble drama. So The Wire affects the viewer on these two levels, the societal and the personal.



Sigh. Anyways. I'm gonna head to bed. Good night all.

One week and counting until the end of The Wire.

Nathaniel Tyson

It's a small DC-Baltimore metropolitan area afterall

I'm almost 100% certain that Brad King is in tonight's episode of The Wire. He even has the tattoos.

Brad was briefly my manager at IKEA. He was head of Customer Service. Anyways, he's the guy on the left in that screencap up there.

CRAZY.

Nathaniel

edit:

Having finished episode 9, I can say that this show is really terribly heartbreaking. The final scene of the episode between Mike and Duquan almost made me cry.

Tell him that Omar says that Marlo is not a man for this city

I am officially two episodes away from the end of the fifth season of The Wire.

There are only two episodes of The Wire, in exsistence, that I haven't seen.

I'll miss it more than any other TV show I've ever watched. Even more than Buffy, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, and Clarissa Explains it All combined.

The fifth season has been far, far too short, but the writers have done their best to wrap-up a show that has always flaunted its disdain for tying-up loose ends. The season's central story arc is shorter and less intricate than the other seasons' have been, but the absence of a new major police investigation (replaced this season by McNolte's serial killer) allows for the writers to make brief forays into the rich history of minor characters the show has introduced over the course of four seasons. One of my favorite examples of this occurs when Bunk ends up questioning an older, angry Randy Wagstaff, who has made clear progress toward ridding himself of his snitch label by adopting a confrontational, agressive persona. Between this season the fourth, Randy has become as unknowable and foreign to Bunk (and the audience) as every other hopper on the corners of Baltimore.

This short glimpse of a sad fade out is the farewell chosen for many of the series' peripheral characters, as we can also see in Nicky Sobotka's impotent protesting of Carcetti's pet project, the gentrification and demolition of Baltimore harbor's port system, and in Omar's casual murder of Savino, a former Barksdale muscle who switched loyalties to Marlo out of simple necessity and survival.



Two episodes shy of the finale, I can say that I fear for McNulty, who seems destined to prove one of the The Wire's more cynical codas ( that long-established social institutions will easily control most people, and ultimately destroy those who try to operate outside of them) correct. Like Stringer Bell, Bunny Colvin, and Prop Joe before him, McNulty's manipulation of the bureaucratic machine he operates within may prove to be his downfall. Stringer's attempts to reshape the Baltimore drug trade as a non-violent open market environment were undermined by his own moral failings, some of which lead to his assassination. McNulty's plan to redistribute the city's major crime budget with a fictionalized serial killer is similarly undermined by McNulty's own delusions of grandeur and deeply-buried insecurities about his own intelligence and worth to the department. While I don't see a shotgun blast to the chest in Jimmy's future, I'm not sure the likely alternative is much better.

Well, I'm off to watch #9, and then last night's Lost. Steve told me that it has been called one of the best episodes ever. Steve is capable of exaggeration, but I want to believe this too much to not get excited. I also want to watch 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days sometime this weekend, but I have a lot of general life stuff that I really need to take care of first.

Jeez. Real life. Always getting in the way of the really important things, no?

Nathaniel