The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment.
What’s to like?
Lavish $40 million production
Ridley Scott involvement
Matthew Macfadyen
Rufus Sewell
Middle Ages
A cathedral
Not to like? Well… it’s based on trash historical fiction. Ken Follett’s rep has slid from Eye of the Needle days. Pillars and its sequel no doubt took long labor and research, and they show a glimpse of the period that I like to hear about, even if I’m not sure it represents the period accurately. The books also pander to Gothic tastes, kind of a guy’s take on bodice ripping. Follett’s villains have all the subtlety of Snidley Whiplash. (Come to think of it, Ian McShane, who plays Waleran in the series, would make a great Snidley Whiplash.)
I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the thrill of the Gothic in tiny infrequent doses, though I’m really embarrassed to recognize I like it. As for the mini-series, I figure if a story puts me in even a broken time machine to the 12th century, I’m in, ready to enjoy the good bits and slide the trashy bits over to (alright, over near) the periphery of my judgement.
Walternate strolled in, in the final minutes of the last episode. Two more eps to go in the season. About time. I’ve been channeling Sringer Bell‘s impatience.
Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.
So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.
Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.
I love The Wire, the HBO series, and I love watching great series on DVD, but I’m compulsive and once I get started, I can’t stop. Also it gets me talking like Bodie.
This is a problem near the end of winter in Chicago, permapiles of black snow dotting the parking lots and the hope of spring not quite evident. Start watching a depressing (though wonderful) collection of stories and you can get caught up. It gets embedded in your brain, in your whole way of thinking.
It’s easy for me to slip into the world, since I operated on the periphery of one a lot like it 30 years ago as one of those dreaded community organizers in St. Louis, a city very like Baltimore: old, a little southern, beaten-down. I was a community involvement coordinator for the St. Louis Public Schools working in the voluntary desegregation program, part of a consent decree that preceded court-ordered busing in 1980. The Magnet School District office was located in an old elementary school at Pendleton and Enright, something like the cast-off digs of the major case squad on the show.
I had to do an intervention on myself on Sunday after a 12-hour streak. I made myself get up, and I ran through some of the things I should be doing around the house. Talking to myself, I said, “OK, I need to take the clothes out of the washer. Then I gotta dry that shit up.”
Count on the blogosphere to remark on interesting errors. Here’s the blog reaction to the MSBNC host or producer whose mic was open as Bobby Jindal was strolling into the shot for the Republican response to the president’s address to Congress last night. It is output from a Google blog search feed.
Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.
The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment. 
