I think it is being said. Consider Cutty's face when he learns about why he's a truant officer (all that "school is school" stuff), or the upside of the face slashing being that the girl doesn't have AIDS, if you were concerned about that (one of the most chilling asides I've ever heard), or the teachers talking about how to keep the kids distracted and tired so they won't be disruptive, or the look on the face of the girl who threw Prez's pencil back at him when she learns that she's in the corner kids group. Next week, when they pick up the "teach to the test" stuff, the only difference is that it'll be said in capital letters.

This is true...God, taking both sides much? Pres was so horrified when he heard that, I think that will stick with me forever. But I do miss George's hand with the...thrills and chills. And shit.

Hey, I am a week or so back. I just got to the face-slashing thing, then the chilling aside.

First: Major props to the writers for ducking the Dangerous Minds thing. If one more white person Movie Star steps in to heal the beleaguered blacks, I may hurl.

The Wire pace is picking up.

Second: Opinion? Reserved.

Groats.

OK, I am caught-up on The Wire.

You know who I am watching? The little dude who likes cars. Him, and Dukie.

Dukie, more. These boys have tech, but Dukie has more tech.

Yeah, Dukie's going to break all our hearts in a big way.

In semi-DEADWOOD related news, I'm going up to my brother and his wife's in Maine tonight (these are the folks who got me hooked on DEADWOOD), and I'm bringing one of my old MST3K tapes that has a "movie" from the 70s with Ian McShane as the villain. Movie in quotes because I think it was actually a pilot for a failed spy show set in Hawaii - the MST version was called CODE NAME: DIAMOND HEAD, but I've no idea if that's what the series would have bee called. Might also have been a made-for-TV-movie, though. It definitely is some form of 70s network television.

Ok, Six Feet Under people: Why don't I feel the love? Apart from(Sorry, Gus) thinking that PK is hot.(Casey, maybe it *was* the hair) It's dark, it's twisted, and it's got a brainy teen girl in it. So why can't it pull me in? I like it well enough...watch one and tell it "That was fun. We should do it again soon." But I don't. Months go by and I don't even care that much. People love the shit...what's wrong with me?(Uh, okay, maybe I shouldn't open the floor *quite* that much.)

My wife loved that show, but I never got it, either.

Ok, so, we can rule out that I'm a braindead. Maybe it's something about Simon fans...one of those diagrams from logic. One circle"Wirefiends", one circe 6FU fans and a tiny intersect(possibly only Mrs. Corwood)

Ok, Six Feet Under people: Why don't I feel the love?

Six Feet Under is the greatest show I've ever seen but that has less to do with it being generally successful and more to do with it striving in directions I think important.

When it was at its best, it eschewed almost all the trappings of high-brow and low-brow fiction so it could have fidelity to the character's interior lives as its first, last and middle concerns. Like, Claire's arc in season two is, when you strip away the specifics, identical to her arc in season three. So, by letting the characters become victims of habit, then have them wake up to it, then having them become victims of some slightly different habit that degrades in the exact same way and by asking 'But why? But why? But why?', it shaded in some pretty ugly psychological mechanisms that all people share. Like the unavoidable tendency to objectify and the almost unavoidable tendency to romanticize people we're in relationships with. The character-up approach to writing is optimum, I think, because if you stick close to it, dogma can't get in and infect it. When it got philosophical and started up offering answers to their characters' predicaments, I cringed but it was expert at elucidating the problems.