Last week the final episode of David Simon’s The Wire was leaked, I just finished watching it.
I viewed the truncated season with mistrust, Season 4 had been powerful, funny and touching. It was also a dark, horrible slog to get through that ended on the blackest of low notes. I have been surprised at the majesty of these final 10 episodes, their wit, charm, the fact that it being the final season gave Simon licence to go wild, writing beyond even his excellent standards and bringing a fitting conclusion to the show.
I’m here upset not because of anything the show did in it’s final year (Although the regular ‘Where are they now’ montage will cause you to giggle like a child at one characters fate and immediately make you weep at another) but because that is it for ‘The Wire’. Whilst Simon even had characters within the show reading ‘Generation Kill’ - a journalist’s account of the Iraq war dealing with similar themes as The Wire, we must stand solemn and understand that a narrative as exquisite as this comes only once a generation.
Thanks (all of you) for telling me the Beasthouse is closing. Despite once attempting to catalogue all of Lawrences’ written output (Which I think you can find on the Internet Archive and still on Wikipedia) I won’t be bothering this time. Lawrence is doing his level best to irritate and alienate his fanbase, his readers and everyone else. Let me be clear - I am a rabid Lawrence Miles fan, but he’s infuriating!.
I don’t buy one volume in his ‘About Time’ series purely because I wanted to read the Season 25-26 Volume first (The Final one, natch) - but he pulls out thanks to arguing with Tat Wood. He kills the Beasthouse for some unknown reason, the same why he will probably kill the ‘Doctor Who’ thing and killed the ‘Top Ten Countdown’ two years ago. It’s as if the second he realises that notoriety or even the notion of an admiring Fanbase emerges, he immediatley shies away from it - despite needing those same people to continue to read his damnably good books.
Oh and I’m sure in the June entry he wrote something about not being a homophobe. He bloody well is.
David Barrow used to be a stockbroker, but he’s given up on all that to write his great novel - something set in history, about a lost soul, something that’d make Martin Amis wet with jealousy. There’s a few problems. He knows nothing about history - for one, then there’s his wife. She’s determined to make him fail so she can go back to being the wife of a rich stockbroker, and his drug dealer’s been replaced with someone not altogether convincing…
Urban Scrumping features
Me (Sadly) as David Barrow,
the Tolerant Rachel Warnes as Serena
and the Brilliant Sam Johnson as Mike.
DOP: Matthew Long
Sound: Laura Adams (with no help from my godawful ATR 55)
Written, edited and directed rather shamefully by me*, it was rejected for the Channel 102 August 2007 screening.
went into the postbox today. It got me to thinking about something Siobhan Curran discusses a few times, about the dichotomy between those who feel that before they can create, they should have knowledge of what to do - she expresses it thus “I wish I could do X artwork, but I don’t know how to work Photoshop’. The opinion being that without this mental barrier in their head, more people would just do stuff.
See, I don’t agree. I can’t find a decent way to express it thus, but I’ll do my hamfisted best. I wanted to push myself by writing a show outside of my comfort zone with material that I knew wouldn’t appall other people into not being. Statutory died on it’s arse, thrice, because of various actor-based drop outs, and as a consequence the show that I put body & soul into writing remains a series of word documents sat on my hard-drive. Consequently I wrote a show about middle-class angst without a necessarily ’strong’ TV show format (It’s a serial, the journey of our central character during his writers’ journey, of which Part one is merely the beginning) and in my head, the show looks amazing, sounds amazing and has a crisp and sharp colour pallette.
Now, following the ‘just do it’ method, I threw myself into it, blundering about like an idiot and making life three or four times more difficult with the result that the show does not look how it is in my mind. I’d like to rebut Curran’s theory another way - imagine as a child I was obsessed with drawing tables. Now I drew the world’s greatest table using pencil and paper. It looks something like this:
___________
| |
| |
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——————
Yeah, so whilst in my mind’s eye, I’ve drawn the world’s greatest table, the imagination / expression dicohtomy has meant that whilst all you see is a rectangle, I see my magnum opus. How the hell do I convey that to you, unless I’ve been taught how to express what I see in my head properly?
The same thing happened during the shoot. I had the magnificent help of a crew (real bloody people!) for the ‘Drug Dealer’ scene, which is why it looks a million times better then the ‘house’ stuff, credit going to Matt Long and Laura Adams for coming out on the sunniest day of the year and spending it indoors with me giving orders. But the video came out grainy and uncoloured, thanks to the way that I had unknowingly set the camera up, and the following day, my precious, shiny shotgun microphone (An Audio-Technica ATR55, Fact fans) broke after only one other shoot. I was heartbroken, having my iSight camera poking out of shot for the ‘desk’ scenes paled in comparison to that beauty, who I shall be replacing (probably upgrading, since the ATR55 seems to have shoddy build quality) soon, but not after I’ve submitted U.S. to New York with Godawful sound.
My whinge has trailed off a little, but in general, what I’m saying is that there are some things in this world which have to be taught, learned and understood, and you can’t simply (I should rephrase. I can’t simply) throw myself into it with all the expectation in the world and expect miracles.
Oh, and don’t buy an Audio-Technica ATR55. They’re shit.
10/08/07 - My Tank is Fight by Zack Parsons
Twenty brilliant deranged yet entertained inventions from WW2, some of the also-rans in Hitler’s quest for the Allies-beating superweapon, discussed with a frankness, delicacy and humour that makes a book like this entertaining enough to wish you could make it required reading for history classes.
The Norwich Odeon (Formerly the UCI) now has a digital projector in screen 8, which is where Rachel & I watched Transformers for our 5th anniversary. Aside from my usual quibble of being tired of watching enormous blurs because they can’t be bothered to render in the detail and slow the footage down, the film’s awesome. A true spectacle.
I’ve been getting back into playing the Piano since being back at home. When away it’s rarely something I ‘miss’ (Notwithstanding moments of drunkitude, I do realise what I’ve lost out on not having it with me. This last summer, I’ve been trying to play several songs that have irritated me with their excessive use of sharps and minors which my useless, oversized hands won’t stretch to - most of which exist within Beck’s Sea Change.
When I purchased the music from a store in Canterbury a year and a half ago, the guy on the desk asked me if it was any good. I was stricken with a bad case of nothing-to-say, the album was beautiful and exquisitely melancholy, a masterful work of genius which I couldn’t in any way express. Some music just gets you like that - ’specially in a world so personal as music. One man’s Beck is another man’s Trivium, and discussing music on here brings with it the dread fear that Dr David Thorpe will arise from the mire and start shitting on me (As if me complimenting Beck would force him out of retirement, but allow me my paranoia).
Either way, with only the guitar tab for comfort, I’ve spent a while picking the songs apart and putting them together in a way that can be understood for piano, and playing them on my (SHIT!) digital piano is a soulless, hollow excuse for the real thing. My real piano, as noisy and de-tuned and awful as it was, had enormous character (Even if you had to de-tune your ears to make it sound right in your mind) and I really want to be able to have my own space and money sufficient to buy myself a proper (i.e. black satin baby grand or grand) piano. I doubt even in my wildest dreams I could afford a Steinway & Sons, but by jove I’d like a proper piano that can make you feel a sound that no computer can replace, no matter how advanced. I doubt anyone but other string-fondlers would appreciate that sentiment, but I’m sure one of my reader knows what I’m talking about.
If I wish to watch, like I did this evening, my legally purchased copy of Star Trek III - The Search for Spock , then the only way to do it, would be to download it from Mininova, because it’s shure as hell not playing on my machine.
Oh look, Dan’s writing instead of revising. Did you learn nothing from the various maladies you have yourself when you revised for Equity?
I just deleted a four page essay on Spiderman 3. Let’s be short. It’s got too many villians, Venom’s not a proper character, Harry’s arc should have taken longer, it’s all a bit contrived and should have let the film breathe more by spacing this out over another film, with three baddies, all three of which have some character connection to Peter, it all becomes a mess. The Effects are (as usual for Spider-man,) below par and the structure has been photocopied from the second film Peter is happy > Peter becomes ’someone else’, > Peter becomes normal > Peter talks the baddie down. You will, however, go to see the film. So whilst you’re there, enjoy ‘Dark Peter’, enjoy the gags (JJ is grossly underused in this film, but when he’s on screen it is hysterical) and James Franco who goes to prove that he’s A-List in the waiting. In fact, it’s Franco who is the revelation here, but the script does him disservice by not allowing his machinations to breathe a little more.
Oh and there’s nowhere near enough Willem Defoe.
Oh, and I wrote at least four paragraphs about how I thought Venom was the Anti-Spider-Man. Not in this film, he’s just a vehicle for Brock’s revenge. Blah blah blah.
