Eventually, watching it, I would play the same game with those scenes that I had played with Buffy the Vampire Slayer's credit sequence, whose goofy action-hero theme song I loved: Have I Seen This Scene Yet? (Insert ritual genuflection here to Best Feminist Hero Ever and Wittiest Mockery of High School Drama Ever.) By season's end, when I could check them all off, I felt a sense of completion. The same-song-different-rendition was just another illustration of Simon's brilliant and cynical theme: No matter whether your organization is dealing drugs, policing the streets, trafficking humans, running a political campaign, or loading containers at the docks, they're all singing the same tune, just with different emphases here and there.Īside from that, The Wire used a familiar device: the credit sequence included intriguing highlight scenes from the season. When I first realized that he was changing the rendition every season, it irritated me.
WOKE UP THIS MORNING GOT YOURSELF A GUN SOPRANOS SERIES
The Wire (insert ritual genuflection here to the Greatest TV Series Ever, a brilliant sociological dissection of a decaying urban world) had a great song. (If I remember correctly, James Atlas wrote a Times Magazine piece a couple of decades ago contending that TV dramas have in large part taken the place of those baggy social novels for the most part, that's where our culture now collectively absorbs an artist's ambitious attempts to trace an entire society in fiction.) If you watch a credit sequence every night, you develop feelings about it. I'm not an omnivorous TV watcher I tend to come to a television series after everyone else has raved and ranked it, which means I end up watching in huge gulps, staying up night after night, greedy for what happens next, the way I used to read Dickens or Tolstoy. Of course, I get it: spinning wheels within wheels, complicated gears turning, everyone's all busy trying to win power. And I'm bored out of my mind with the credit sequence. The prosecutor likes the wars and murders I like the evil intrigue and hints of weird magic. We've discovered Game of Thrones, and are now midway through the second season. So today I want to offer up a far more serious topic: television shows' credit sequences. A presidential commission confirmed the birthfamilies' stories. And you?" "Oh, learned more about that Sierra Leone story in which four-year-olds were kidnapped for American adoption. Dude smashed her face into a zillion pieces with a mallet. "Hi, honey, how was your day?" "Saw some autopsy photos.
(Speaking of which, having family dinner conversation about your day can be a bit strained when one parent is a prosecutor who focuses on murder, child rape, and sexual assault, and the other is a journalist drawn to social injustice and evil deeds generally. So long Jimmy Reed.We've been talking all kinds of heavy-duty topics lately, haven't we? Rape, anti-gay violence, fistulas-the kinds of things things that you might not want to bring up at your family's dinner table. So long Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. So long John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Now I'm gonna be food for worms And just like Charles Mingus wrote that beautiful piece of music 'Epitaph' for Eric Dolphy, I say, so long Eric. Forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave, you know, the box awaits its grisly load. Monterose and Jackie McLean duet on those saxophones and, the sound makes its way out the window minglin' with the traffic noises outside you know, and all of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality Cause I'm gettin' on in the world, comin' up on forty-one years. And listen to the sweet sculptural rhythms of Charles Mingus. Wend myself up that spiral staircase and stretch out nice on the Chesterfield Pithecanthropus Erectus already on the CD player and I just push that remote button to sublimity.
The sun's comin' up and the birds are out singing. And after three days of drinkin' with Larry Love, I just get an inklin' to go on home So, I'm walkin' down Coldharbour Lane, head hung low, three or four in the mornin'.
0 kommentar(er)
