I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

I suddenly find myself with about a dozen things I’d like to write about, which is a remarkable change from the blankness that I’ve experienced when pondering the blog. At least a couple of these things I’m quite behind the curve on, given our recent preparations for travel, and our travel, and our adjustments to travel, but I’m operating in the spirit of better late than never today, which seems only appropriate to my pitifully jet-lagged state.

So, the first of those things: the finale of The Sopranos. Folks have weighed in on this everywhere (so everywhere, in fact, that I’m not going to bother linking), but I found the episode’s ending compelling enough that I want, however belatedly and repetitively, to record my reaction to it. For propriety’s sake, I’ll note that one should stop reading now if one is among the three people left in the country who don’t know how the episode ended.

I understand that some folks were really perturbed by what seems like the series’s non-ending — the sudden cut to black in the midst of not very much happening. Not least of these, my mother; my phone rang four-point-three seconds after the credits started rolling, and when I answered, all she said was “I don’t get it.” The good news is that we’d watched the east coast feed, rather than waiting for the west coast, so I could give her my sense of what had just happened, at least as it was then developing.

That sense is this: the scene is filled with a very intentionally constructed and uncertainly located though not in the least vague sense of menace, a menace which emanates from some expected places, like the hinky guy at the counter who keeps looking at Tony over his shoulder and the fairly tough-looking guys apparently scouting the jukebox in one of the last shots, but also from some unexpected places: the man sitting with a table full of Cub Scouts; Meadow’s repeated inability to parallel park. The scene pays just a bit too much attention to the small details of what’s going on around Tony, encouraging us to begin guessing what’s going to happen: the hinky guy at the counter is going into the men’s room to get a gun hidden there, à la Godfather, or he’s just given a signal to the toughs at the jukebox, who are going to open fire; the Cub Scouts are going to get caught in the bullets’ path; Meadow is going to be a horrified late witness to the scene that’s just unfolded. Or, perhaps, Meadow is going to get caught in the crossfire, and the Cub Scouts are going to be horrified onlookers.

Or perhaps none of that. As Tony and Bobby Baccala discussed earlier in the season, probably you don’t even hear it when it happens, and so it’s very likely that the cut to black is that end: the shots that Tony never sees coming. But on the other hand, perhaps what’s after the black isn’t carnage, but just more of the same, and this last scene is just allowing the viewers to enter into the world that Tony will, as long as he lives, continue to inhabit: a world filled with unlocalizable menace, in which every moment could well be the last.

For both of those reasons — that you don’t hear the bullet that gets you, but that if you think it’s coming, you hear it everywhere — the only way that the series could conceivably end was simply to end, precisely because, as Steve Perry reminded us, “the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on.” And that, I’ll confess to thinking, was a brilliant choice, and evidence of the show’s impact: “Don’t Stop Believin’” finds itself, 26 years later, at number 22 on iTunes.

The world’s going to be a bit different without The Sopranos, but on the other hand, the world’s radically different for their having existed. There could have been no Six Feet Under, no Deadwood, no The Wire, no The Tudors — or, for that matter, no turn toward complexity in network television, either — without The Sopranos leading the way. It’s an appropriate end, I think, for the series not to end, but rather to go on in imagination and discussion and argument. Not a big fuck-you to the fans, as some have accused David Chase of delivering, but one last thing worth thinking about.

Last night, I have to say, was a heck of a night of television — the second-to-last episode of The Sopranos (EVER, as the trailer for next’s week’s episode informed us, in case we hadn’t been paying attention), followed by the second-to-last episode of the first season of The Tudors. The two episodes make for an interesting pairing; one could imagine Melfi’s dawning awareness of the manipulative uses of talk therapy made by the sociopath just as easily coming from Thomas More, with the substitution of piety for psychoanalysis.

R. and I just started watching The Tudors this last week, however, and went on a fairly minor binge, watching the re-airings of season one’s first eight episodes over the course of the week, leading up to last night’s episode nine. There are some fairly significant tinkerings with the history involved in the series, not least some key deaths that are shifted around for narrative effect. Henry Fitzroy, for instance, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, died when he was 17, but the series kills him off as a toddler. I get the dramatic impact there: just at the point at which Henry is rolling out his “God is punishing me for having married my brother’s wife” argument, his one acknowledged son dies, a harbinger of the plague that follows. But others of the changes are less easily understood. The series’s Margaret Tudor, for instance, dies of consumption in 1533ish (after having killed her first husband, the king of Portugal, and remarried Charles Brandon, the first duke of Somerset) — when, in fact, it was Mary Tudor who married Somerset and died in 1533; Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland and bore a line of Stuarts, living until 1541. (So far as I know, none of the Tudors killed the king of Portugal, though I could well be wrong, and wouldn’t be a bit surprised.) Why substitute Margaret for Mary here? Did the producers just like the name better?

Such changes to the historical narrative, however, are relatively superficial; the series strikes me as a compelling reimagining of the period, if through a somewhat presentist lens. That, The Tudors shares less with The Sopranos than with Deadwood, with which series I’d also be willing to swear The Tudors also shares the producers of its opening titles, as well as the composers of its title music, though I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of that hunch.

More notes from a very interesting session of Flow.

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I’m posting some of my notes from yesterday’s sessions here. These notes should be taken primarily as my impressions of the conversations that took place; any misimpressions created by these notes are solely the fault of yours truly.

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Right before I left for Paris and Vienna, I did an email interview with a writer from Media Life magazine who was working on an article about The Anxiety of Obsolescence.  The interview, unsurprisingly, was mostly about the television end of the novel-and-television relationship, but the questions were interesting, and the article turned out pretty well, I think.  (And it may be the first time in the history of ever that a review of an academic book ended with the weekend box office report.)

Given how little of my rambling made it into the article, though, I thought I’d post the entirety of the interview, for my own future reference, if nothing else.

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So I really honestly did add them to my blogroll a couple of hours before Liz popped up in the comments, and had made a note-to-self to post an actual bloggy link this afternoon, before getting all distracted by the notion of my disappearing audience, and then wrapped up in a little bit of work.  But all this is neither here nor there.

The thing that is most important:  two of my most fantabulous former students have started a blog, Glowy Box, focused on the most serious matter of watching television.

I like to think that I taught them, if not everything, at least some small subset of what they know.

We’re headed out of town sometime this afternoon, starting down the road toward SoCal.

There’s not that much left to do between now and then, so I’m watching television.

Or not really television. Shows originally broadcast on television, now streaming over the net.

ABC is streaming episodes of four of its series—Lost, Alias, Desperate Housewives, and Commander in Chief, which is what I’m watching, as I never managed to catch it on-air. It’s a pretty decent interface, with limited commercial interruptions.

I’m hoping that this kind of streaming becomes more and more a standard practice, but I fear that there’s soon to be a paywall thrown up around the service—the proud announcement “Watch full episodes online for free!” is followed by the fine print: “May 1 - June 30, 2006.”

We’ll see. More from the road, if I can.

On another note:  last night’s Alias contained what I have to call the worst moment of product placement in the history of crass commercialism.  It went something like this (names have been elided to avoid spoilerage):

Scene:  car interior, en route to crucial surveillance mission.

Operative 1:  So you finally bought the Ford Hybrid.
Operative 2:  Electric.  Good for when you need to be quiet.

Cut to:  zoom on Ford Hybrid logo on back of car.

And I thought that season three’s “Quick!  To the Ford F-150!” was bad.

If there’s good news, I guess it’s that it’s a bit harder to effect such product placement on Lost.