Required viewing: Deadwood's David Milch talks with a "Religion, Media and Hollywood" class at USC.

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.

In teasing the season of Deadwood that never was, David Milch comes out against endings.

For himself he says, "every episode is an ending of sorts" and imports meaning into one of the final murders by Swearengen, in which he cleans up the blood after.

Still, he rails against "the idea of an end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning."

Endings that supposedly "fixes the mark and meaning of any experience is one of the lies agreed upon that we use to organize our lives," he says. A bigger lie, he says, is that "we were entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing of something which never concludes."

Milch says he hopes viewers enjoyed the series keeping in mind its meant to "import no truth beyond itself."

Naturally, I almost completely disagree. In literature and in life, lies or not, there are few things more important than endings, precisely because endings are never final.

An Overheard Conversation at the Suburban Neighborhood Pool, If the Suburban Neighborhood Pool Were in Deadwood.

I don't like showing up this late on the blog, but due to factors including

* class;
* getting what must be my fourth cold in two months;
* what can only be described as the Unfortunate Incident of the Apple Juice in the Nighttime, which has rendered my space bar completely inoperable;

I'm only getting around to blogging now.

Sorry.

Here's some stuff to look at it:

* Lord of the Rings as Property Law.

* Alternate universe baseball.

* Alan Kirby on the death of postmodernism and the birth of pseudomodernism.

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

* The Valve, re: Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos: What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about?

* Infinite Thought announces a new competition: "Down with Existing Society!" These are the terms:

Each and every one should express in a succinct manner his or her rationally hostile feeling about the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to put together an entry right now, but if I did I'm certain it would probably have a lot to do with our sympathy for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.

Or else, you know, this:

There's a long and necessary roundtable at The House Next Door on what I have long said is the most pressing cultural question of our age: Which is the greatest TV show of all time, The Sopranos, The Wire, or Deadwood? Still coming down from the last, fantastic season of The Wire, I'm inclined at the moment to give it the nod, on the following grounds:

* The Sopranos went on too long.
* Deadwood was too short.

A Deadwood that received its fourth, apocalyptic season—culminating in the devastating fire that destroys the town in 1879—might have eclipsed The Wire. But until we get it, we're still missing the last act.

And I'm pretty sure The Sopranos, distilled of all the filler, red herrings, and plot diversions—distilled, I'm saying, into essence du Sopranos—pretty easily beats all comers. Take out nearly all of season 4, half of season 5, and the second half of season 6a, and you've got a show that can easily go head-to-head against The Wire. In this sense, for my money The Sopranos is the better show—its valleys may be lower, but its artistic peaks are higher.

But like it or not, we have those superfluous seasons, and we have to take them into account.

With its huge cast of fully fleshed-out characters and total inhabitance of the city of Baltimore, The Wire has no fluff and wastes none of your time. Episode to episode, it's nearly flawless and always utterly pitch-perfect. From a political standpoint, too, if that's your thing, we must concede that its critique of late capitalism is far more devastating than either Deadwood's or The Sopranos's precisely because there is so little fantasy content to distract us from the brutal reality of what we're seeing. The Wire is the thing itself—there's nowhere to run.

But it's a close, close race, and it'll be a long time before anything cracks this top three.

Bookmark this for later: WGA Theater presents a few hours of Deadwood creator David Milch lecturing on the idea of the writer.

* Advice for academic job talks. Not that there are any jobs out there anyway... Via MeFi.

* At Atheist Media Blog, the scabtastic* Colbert Report mocks Will Smith for joining the Church of Scientology. My vague, never-really-voiced intention not to watch The Daily Show or Colbert in solidarity with the writers' strike never really panned out, by the way—I cracked pretty much on the first day. But I do watch with scorn now. Scorn.

Here's Salon on the state of these now-writerless shows. I agree that the magic is missing somewhat, especially with regard to Stewart, but I'm also amazed by how well they've both been able to fake it thus far.

* My understanding is that Colbert and Stewart came back because Viacom threatened to fire everyone, writers and crew included, if they didn't. I cling to this justification, true or not, for dear life.

* Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything; it's a little something I call Mr. Fusion. Via MeFi. We're saved!

Fresh from the critical and commercial disaster that was John from Cincinnati, David Milch and HBO are looking to try again with a series set during the 1970s Knapp investigations, which gave rise to the story of Serpico (immortalized by Max Fischer during Rushmore). The article also sadly tosses a little more dirt on Deadwood's grave.

Via AICN, which also links to the promo for the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica. The third season was very much not what I wanted, but I have to stick around to see how it ends.

Apocalypse forestalled: Ian "Swearengen" McShane says the long-promised Deadwood movies aren't going to happen.

Salon has a whet-your-whistle preview of David Milch's follow-up to Deadwood, John from Cincinnati, which from the looks of things seems to have abandoned the "surf noir" motif in favor of "surf apocalypticism," something I'm much more excited about.

No matter what, however, we still need those last four episodes of Deadwood eventually. For me the entire point of that series—as, indeed, of The Sopranos itself—has been (surprise!) apocalypticism: the bitter irony that no matter what these characters do or say, no matter what they manage to build for themselves in the Black Hills, it will all of it burn to the ground on September 26, 1879.

UPDATE: On the other hand, the critics don't seem to care for it, which can't be a good sign—they like everything on HBO.

Yahoo! News of all places has an article up about prose writers like Lethem and King increasingly turning to comics.

Here's a photo of Deadwood, South Dakota, c. 1888.

And, at Boing Boing, the Zombie Last Supper.