TONGUE OF THE DAY
Lucia Micarelli (Annie from “Treme”) with Josh Groban and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” …
Goosebumps?
Yes. Yes, I did.
Lucia Micarelli (Annie from “Treme”) with Josh Groban and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” …
Goosebumps?
Yes. Yes, I did.
David Simon on David Petraeus and the media’s obession with sex …
This is just sex. This is nothing more than the odd, notable penis or the odd, notable vagina staggering off the marked path and rubbing against the wrong tree. This is just people.
I told myself that I wasn’t in journalism to chase something so ordinary, so adolescent as other people’s sexuality, that I wouldn’t play this game, that there were better reasons to be a reporter, and there were better things for readers to consume. I knew that one soldier opting out from such a lurid and exalted battlefield of the media wars meant nothing, but I did it anyway. Fuck Gingrich’s divorces. Fuck Lewinsky. Fuck where Herman Cain found some happy moments. I’m not playing anymore. I long ago ceased to even pretend to care.
And …
It would be one thing if this were a scandal that could have compromised the CIA or American intelligence, if this were some honey trap set by foreign entities. When politically connected columnist Joe Alsop was famously lured into a homosexual liaison by Russian intelligence, which then attempted to turn Alsop, he rightly marched into the CIA headquarters and revealed the ploy, rendering it moot. And if there were indications that Petraeus was vulnerable to being so blackmailed, this mess might have actual import. But no, upon being confronted with his paramour’s indiscreet emails, he confessed all, resigned, and returned to private life to attempt, no doubt, to salvage his marriage or at least deal with the personal implications of it all.
As one commenter posts “I will read anything this man writes.”
As should we all.
I worked in the Australian music industry for almost 20 years.
David Simon, creator of “The Wire” and “Treme” had a few things to say about the music industry recently, and I concur with all of them …
“This is what I want to say about the music industry,” said Simon, a Baltimore Sun reporter before making the transition to writing books then TV-making. “I used to think there were aspects of the entertainment industry that made me genuinely uncomfortable. I came from journalism. There’s a dishonesty and mendacity to the entertainment industry that every now and then you sort of go, ‘Really? You had to pay them for that? What did he say?’
“I now realize that compared to the music industry, I work in a (expletive) orthodox church of legitimacy. When I deal with record companies, when I deal with these guys I deal with, when I hear the stories from New Orleans musicians about their management, apparently anybody who never made an honest buck, and managed to do it with the short con and long con, they’ve all arrived at the music industry. It’s (expletive) amazing.”
“When it came to actually pushing the soundtrack and the videos, they were shockingly inert. To the point where I consider the way we were treated to be quite dishonest. I was shocked by Geffen Universal and their behavior and their capacity for being disingenuous.”
“We gave those things to the record company and said, ‘Here, launch them. Do all the great things you said you were going to do.’ We never heard back.”
A summary of Simon’s comments was sent to a Geffen publicity representative for reply, but the label declined comment. Geffen also declined a request for sales figures for the song and video downloads and soundtrack CDs.
And here is independent film director John Sayles (from the book “Sayles on Sayles”), who directed three music videos for Bruce Springsteen in the 1980’s and was asked why he didn’t do any more …
“I haven’t been that interested, mostly because in the music business, the bullshit aspect of it is more intense than in the movie business … It just didn’t seem like the way I wanted to make a living.”
I’ve occasionally felt tempted to post about a few of my own experiences in the music industry on this blog.
And one day, maybe I will.
Or then again, maybe not.
I fear to do so might lower the tone of SMELLY TONGUES something quite dreadful.
And I’d rather it stayed classy.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have just announced that David Simon is among 23 recipients of a $500,000 “genius” grant to do with as he chooses.
The MacArthur Fellows Program is awarded over a five year period to individuals “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction”.
Reckon so.
The grants are awarded each year to a broad range of professionals, and previous recipients have included sculptors, astrophysicists, a developmental biologist, a geriatrician, writers, musicians, choreographers, psychiatrists, and historians to name but a few.
It is presumed Mr. Simon may well have just cause to feel rather pleased with himself right now.
Reckon so …
Television you can dance to.
A story does not require a “plot” in order that it be considered a good story.
Lives do not have “plots”. Lives are stories, an accumulation of moments, an incohesive narrative of vague strands that we vainly struggle, against all unforeseen circumstance, to keep neat, tidy, controlled.
And then … something happens …
“Simon has never pandered before and doesn’t here. You need to pay attention to find out who is who, their connections and the history.
Simon says it best: “Thematically, what ‘Treme’ is interested in is this: New Orleans is a city that still creates. Even in its damaged state, even amid a shocking continuum of national indifference, it remains a city that continues to build things. What it builds – its very product, in fact – is moments. Extraordinary moments in which art and ordinary life intersect.”
If five seasons of institutional failure on “The Wire” was a bleak indictment of Baltimore (and the country), it takes only one episode of “Treme” to sense the hope.”
Hope. Resilience. Community.
Random acts of bravery, charity and opportunism, kindness and unkindness that spring from somewhere to surprise us, acts unplanned and unpredictable, these are the things that define us, our essence, not ideology, not belief.
“Simon’s almost experimental willingness to throw everything but the kitchen sink into his dramatic gumbo, when taken together with the romantically ramshackle setting, the unmatchable cast, the infectious music, conspire to make this epic tale feel intimate and humble.”
Simon and his writers introduce a multitude of characters, all of whom seem, initially, of a “type”, and yet, just as in “The Wire”, with each scene, each episode, aspects of character are added, layered in such ways that we begin to believe we are in the presence of real people living real lives that go far beyond the screen. Of course, this is due, in no small part to a flawless cast of players. From John Goodman as Creighton Bernette, (whose character was based on two New Orleans residents and whose “Fuck you, you fucking fuckers” rant to YouTube is an almost word-for-word replication from the blog of the late Ashley Morris), to Lucia Micarelli as violinist Annie who had never done a jot of acting in her life prior to “Treme” and acquits herself beautifully.
There’s Khandi Alexander as Ladonna Batiste-Williams who, in one of the later episodes, is just electrifying in a scene where she joins a typical New Orleans funeral procession, her body swaying, jerking, gradually finding a rhythm that conveys such a depth of emotion, it’s almost too painful to watch (give that woman an Emmy, for God’s sake) …
Then there’s Wendell Pierce, effortlessly shaking off our memories of him as Bunk in “The Wire” to portray his hand-to-mouth, jobbing trombone player and pantsman Antoine Batiste …
But singling out these four individuals does a disservice to what is, essentially, a show built for an ensemble – there are no “star turns” in “Treme”, no one character is more or less important than any other to the portrait of a city and its citizens that is being constructed here …
Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe …
““Treme” is an openly emotional piece of work, filled with sorrow, passion, pity, didacticism, and love for New Orleans. Instead of comparing it to one of the most revelatory crime series of all time, hold “Treme” up beside almost every other show on TV and listen closely. You’ll hear a sound that moves you.”
“A sound that moves you”. Literally.
When I first learned that David Simon (with co-creator and New Orleans native Eric Overmeyer) were going to tackle the tale of New Orleans after Katrina, I was expecting a full-throttle howl of visceral rage and anger, a searing indictment of the colossal clusterfuck that was the Bush administrations’ epic mishandling of the relief and recovery effort. After all, Simon had previously been labeled the “angriest man in television”, and that anger – the mindless futility of the “war on drugs”, the death of labour, the dysfunction of the political and educational “industries” – was the engine that so successfully drove so much of “The Wire” …
“5 Days on my Rooftop” rappermcj …
But “Treme” is not that at all …
From the book by David Rutledge, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” …
“The crime and poverty were always there. My garage was invaded three times so I quit locking it. You could not live in the city and avoid the dreary performance of democracy; yet the town was held together by a spiritual essence few cities in this country possess. We were like many families in having those we loved most within a short drive. That infrastructure of the heart is severely fractured now.”
… The “infrastructure of the heart”, the “spiritual essence” of a city, that is it exactly. And that is what “Treme” is all about.
Yes, the anger is there, the sense of a people abandoned by their government, the despair, but Simon’s characters (for the most part) do not wallow in these things. They simply do not have the time …
The Rebirth Brass Band, April 24, 2008 …
It’s a refreshing change to follow a programme that, without resorting to schmaltz and predictable sentimentality, unashamedly celebrates the human spirit, its strengths and frailties, its victories and failures, for I am a little bit over all these contrived dramas of dysfunction. You know the ones – mum’s got cancer, dad’s an alcoholic, the son’s autistic, the daughter’s turning five buck tricks in a strip club, and everyone stands around all day and night either screaming at one another, or beating each other senseless …
… So I’m not expecting to get up close and familiar with “Precious” any time soon, even though I’m sure the performances were all perfectly fine …
… For if I had a hankering to habitually immerse myself in a toxic environment and watch a bunch of scumbag arseholes fuck each other around on a daily basis, I think I’d just go back to working for the music industry again …
Dianne Reeves, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” …
… No, I don’t know what it means, as I’ve never been there, but I’d sure like to find out.
Perhaps one day in March sometime.
Anytime.
Now would be good.
This blog is in serious danger of tipping over the edge of reality to become an altar before which we may kneel and give thanks (or sacrifice a few chickens and goats) to David Simon for the televisual blessings he has seen fit to send us these last several years.
And so, without further ado, here is the opening credit sequence for Season 1 of “Treme” …
And a favourite moment from Episode 4, John Goodman as Creighton Bernette speaks to YouTube in no uncertain terms …
The real aftermath of Katrina, a brief montage of footage from Nicholas Kadick …
I expect I’ll have more to say about this show when I’ve finished watching the first season. Lots more.
And you will feel the love.
…
Another HBO programme that’s hooked me is “Big Love”. For the fourth season, they’ve changed the opening credits. Watch …
Now, if all this isn’t enough, how about this news? …
Martin Scorsese and Soprano’s writer Terence Winter have teamed up for HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”, set in Atlantic City during the time of prohibition.
Steve Buscemi stars. And Michael K. Williams (Omar from “The Wire”) is in it …
Life just can’t get any fucking better, can it?
Over at Groupthink, I see gay people!
… And in other news, I am currently working my way through the first few episodes from season one of David Simon’s new series, “Tremé” (up to episode 4, but I’ve seen the first 3 eps twice over already).
What I can say so far is this …
Does this man ever fuck up? Ever? How the hell does he do it? How the hell does he maintain such an astonishingly high standard in every single thing he does?
“The Corner”, “The Wire”, “Generation Kill”, and now “Tremé”.
Who is this man?
Where did he come from?
Can we clone him? Can we have a copy sent down here?
Because it is not just about his talent, that he has in spades.
It is about integrity.
Consider this …
“Television producer” … “integrity”.
That is an unusual combination of words.
It’s around this time of the year that everyone starts compiling “lists” of bests and worsts, but I’ll be doing no such thing here.
While I enjoy writing this blog as it gives me a chance to blow off steam and generally prattle on about all manner of rubbish (albeit in a largely empty room), next year I may take a stab at something a little more substantial. A couple people have been nagging me all year for a screenplay, so ….
Whatever.
Here are a few things I’ve greatly enjoyed this year, no blockbusters, just things I approached with no expectations whatsoever that took me by surprise (and one rediscovery) …
“LET THE RIGHT ONE IN” (2008)
A horror film for adults with the emphasis firmly on character and story, beautifully shot, sparsely written, little in the way of explicit gore, I can’t recommend this highly enough. See it if you haven’t already.
Allan Hunter from The Daily Express …
“Beautifully crafted and expertly acted, Let The Right One In eschews the easy options of excessive gore and cheap laughs to create a haunting, emotionally involving journey into the macabre.
It can only become a classic of the genre.”
“STUCK” (2007)
This is what I had to say about “Stuck” earlier this year …
“A tight, taut (80 minutes), blackly comic, toe-curling little thriller that perfectly captures the blindly self-absorbed amoral cruelties, the (as Jules Feiffer put it) “little murders” of the soul that we and others casually commit every day in the name of our own self-preservation until all trace of our basic humanity is stripped back to the raw and chalky bone. The one-ply tissue veneer of so-called “civilised” behaviour flushed effortlessly away to sleep the sleep of the dead with the fishes.”
“ACOLYTES” (2008)
An Australian film that eschews “Australianisms”, I wrote this about it …
“The only recognisably Australian elements are the accents and the suburban topography, those red tile roof, red brick houses. I wish there were more Australian films like this and less of the, “This is an AUSTRALIAN film! We gotta have colloquialisms and flannelette and men in big hats and some fucking bush, NO, not that type of bush, you cock, I’m talking shrubbery out to fucking buggery out there!” variety. I know there are some dangerously deranged freaks wandering about the fucking desert, the so-called romantics of the land, salt of the earth blah, they’d hump your leg if it had a hole in it, but you ought to see some of the people up the local mall on a Saturday morning.
This is a very well made, very (unselfconsciously) stylish psychological thriller, eschewing most of the tired and tiring clichés that bore me to tears in so many films of its type, headache inducing rapid cut editing and zoom in, zoom out, bang crash cinematography and sound that makes you know what it might feel like to be in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and have someone smashing cymbals over your head for ninety minutes.”
I’ve seen this three times now, and I think it’s a better film than “Silence of the Lambs”. Buy it.
“VAMPIRE’S KISS” (1988)
When Nicolas Cage was good … I hadn’t seen this in many years, picked it up for about six bucks and wrote this …
“…this sadly under-rated, neglected jewel of a film contains a performance by Cage that is so BIG, so HUGELY BIG that it essentially takes every rule from the various bibles of performance art, that is, the received wisdom that “less is more” in film acting, and turns it thoroughly arse over tit. It’s a major “fuck-you” to the dreary twaddle peddled to the eager and impressionable by so many drama teachers still stuck in their Actors Studio ruts of psycho-dramatic self-indulgence … “Mumble, mumble, mumble, scratch face, mumble, mumble, cry, scratch face, scream a bit, scratch face, mumble, mumble”.”
I’ve already had my fanboy rant about “The Wire”, so I’ll shut-up about that for the time being and recommend David Simon and Ed Burns’ book, “The Corner” which has just been republished and is well worth your bucks.
Have a pleasant Christmas and New Year.
Bye.
I’ve just spent the better part of the last two months watching a 66 hour long movie. And when it was finished, I went back and watched it all over again. Then I watched the episodes with commentaries.
This movie came in five volumes and each volume comprised ten to thirteen chapters. Like the best of books, you come to the end of one chapter and think, “Just one more”.
Hello. My name is Ross and I’m a Wireaholic.
I hate “The Wire”.
I hate it because it’s made it damn near impossible to watch any cop show or cop movie (even though it is not a “cop show” in any traditional sense), any television series of any kind and not think, “Yeah, it’s okay, but it’s not “The Wire”” or “They wouldn’t do it like that on “The Wire””, or “No, that’s not credible, I know so from “The Wire”, or “This is a limp-dick puddle of piss in a desert, “The Wire” had depth, for Chrissakes” …
I can’t think of anything I could possibly add to the plethora of material that has already been written about this extraordinary series.
During the height of my immersion, I spent many a lunch hour cruising through the streets of East and West Baltimore courtesy of Google Maps streetview.
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, who plays “Snoop” Pearson in series 3 through 5, used to sling drugs from this corner, North Montford and Oliver …
Pearson has written a book about her life and experiences. I’ve yet to read it, but I fully intend to. I haven’t read any books by George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane either, three of the series’ regular scriptwriters, but they’re on my “must-do” list as well.
If you were to ask me a year ago what the capitol of Maryland was, I don’t think I would’ve been able to tell you. If you were to ask me where Maryland was, I would’ve thought for a moment and said, “One of those small states clustered around New York? East coast?”
But if I ever manage to get to the States (something I’ve always wanted to do, but I’m crap with money, always have been, my fault entirely) I’d like to visit Baltimore. Not to roam around those means streets of the East and West which would be patently stupid, but to see the good of the place.
Perhaps to eat a “lump crab cake” at Faidley’s (mentioned a number of times in the series), even though it looks like a deep-fried stomach cancer.
Here are a few “Wire” and Baltimore related resources I’ve enjoyed recently …
There’s a wealth of material available on The Guardian and Steve Busfield has an excellent episode-by-episode blog there covering all five seasons which is well worth digging into. It starts here and has links galore (also spoilers, so take care if you’ve not worked your way through every episode yet).
Irvine Welsh and a few other crime novelists look at the series. Also from The Guardian, Jon Wilde pronounces it the “greatest ever television drama”.
From “The Atlantic”, Mark Bowden profiles David Simon, “The Angriest Man in Television”.
I’m not surprised he’s the angriest man in television, considering that, over five seasons, not one single actor from the programme was so much as nominated for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. What on earth did this man do to piss people off?
Sociologist turned Baltimore police Peter Moskos has a blog, “Cop in the Hood”. Moskos is an advocate for drug legalisation and regulation and a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
The Baltimore Sun and UK’s The Independent have swapped crime reporters to look at the different ways crime is reported and dealt with in both countries.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the possibility of change on Baltimore streets due to the ReWIRED for Change programme.
The New York Times highlights a few of the nicer aspects of Baltimore life and entertainment.
And a big “fuck you” to Warner Home Video Australia who, for some inexplicable reason, have yet to see fit to release season 5 locally even though it’s available everywhere else on the fucking planet. And thanks to the friend in Sydney who “lent” me her, er, “copy” of it, which I have subsequently “lent” to two other friends I’ve hooked into the series. If you’re losing money fellas, it’s because people are buying it from Amazon or ripping the bloody thing from the web, so wake the fuck up.
Housekeeping 1 -
I’ve just deleted a bunch of posts.
Why?
Didn’t like ‘em. They were lazy, or old, or just plain dumb.
Meh.
It’s too easy on a blog to just see some shit, some headline, some idiotic claptrap masquerading as “news” or “opinion” or whatever and fall into the trap of simply being reactive. Dumbly reactive. And frankly, nothing that the likes of Gerard Henderson or Miranda Devine or Andrew fucking Bolt has to say on any topic is worth a hill o’ beans in the grand scheme of things when you really think about it.
I gave up reading Bolt months ago. Same with Henderson. And Devine’s so relentlessly, impenetrably fruit-loopy that just one or two paragraphs of her deranged twaddle can seriously damage your mental health.
And the sum total of pretty much everything they write adds up to this …
“We’re all fucked, and it’s [Insert ideology, race, religion, political affiliation] fault”
Add exclamation marks. Add comments from barely articulate, illiterate fuckwits furiously nodding their pimply little pinheads in agreement.
I saw this quote today in an article by David Greenberg on Slate describing fringe conservatism as “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas”.
Reckon so.
And Ol’ Rupert thinks people are going to pay to read a bunch of “irritable mental gestures” from batshit crazy creative typists who labour under the delusion they’re journalists?
Pig’s arse we will.
I’d pay for Slate. For The New York Times. A couple others. If the price were right. But Fairfax in its current state? News Limited?
Fuck off.
Housekeeping 2 –
I can’t access Google blog functionality from the computer I’m using. So, if you have a Google blog, and you’re on my blogroll and I’ve never darkened the towels over at your crib, it’s ‘cause I can’t. You feel me, yo?
Housekeeping 3 –
Ross. You are not an African-American resident of Baltimore, and you are not a character from “The Wire”. Knock it off with the fucking lingo.
Dickhead.
…
…
UPDATE
colourNOmovement questions my identity crisis, and provides incontrovertible proof that I am, in reality, Michael Jackson in reverse …
You made me look like Stringer Bell, cNm. Damn, I can live with that …
“Red Tops! Got them Red tops! Pandemic! Right here for that Pandemic! … A’right, I’m feelin’ it, yo.”
(Illustration by cNm from The colourNOmovement Declarations © 2009 cNm. Reproduced by kind permission.)
… And we all love “The Wire”.
A bunch of academics from the U.K. love it so much, they produced a 93 page journal about the programme. Which is well worth reading if you can push past the horrid article headings (“The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO’s The Wire” anyone?)
And, thanks to Google Maps, I’m currently cruising down West Baltimore Street, corner of North Stockton.
Feelin’ a bit empty, yo, so I be checkin’ into “Chick’ N Trout” for a sub …