Instead of hibernation

Here’s some of the pop culture that’s helping me get through the midwinter chill: 

The “Fuck fuck fuck” scene from The Wire. Jamie and I finally started watching the show this week after years of planning to get around to it, and man is it worth it. We’re five episodes in, and I’m already wishing it would never end. My favorite scene so far is a bit in the fourth episode where two detectives investigate a crime scene and find vital evidence while saying nothing but the occasional variation on “fuck” or “motherfucker.” The words change meaning every time they say them, of course, as in “Fuck, I pinched my thumb in my tape measure” or “Motherfuck, we’ve been examining this scene from entirely the wrong angle.” The detectives are old partners, and there’s a friendly, almost casual vibe to the scene that somehow fits right in with the grimness of the murder they’re investigating. When the scene was over (it’s less than five minutes long), Jamie and I looked at each other and immediately rewound the DVD to the beginning of the scene so we could watch it again. I now try to make sure to watch it once a week.

Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” (and video). I’m not much into Nine Inch Nails, judging by the small amount of their stuff I’ve heard, but I do like Cash, especially the stuff he did in his late years with American Records: he was  one of those fortunate singers whose voice just seemed to get better as he got older. His elegiac version of this song is, I think, one of the best things he ever did, especially in the context of its remarkable music video, which juxtaposes film of a seventy-year-old Cash with archival footage of his much younger, healthier self. As the song goes on, the older images come thicker and faster, until in the final chorus they’re constantly shifting, as if Cash’s life is flashing before his eyes (indeed, he died the year after the song and video were released). It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also impossible to stop watching the older Cash’s face, which looks simultaneously exhausted and... not bright-eyed, exactly, but alert and clear. He seems ready for the close of his life.

George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (currently in the middle of volume two, A Clash of Kings). Soon enough, too soon, I will be one of the many, many readers—tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?—impatiently waiting for Martin’s fifth Ice and Fire book, but right now I’m still innocently enjoying the early going of his epic. So far it’s a mix of one part high fantasy to one part intricate royal intrigue—think along the lines of an Arthurian romance combined with I, Claudius or The Lion in Winter—and it moves along at a generally bullet train-like pace. It has a huge and ever-increasing cast of characters, including some satisfyingly complicated villains, and Martin is still in the midst of teasing out the answers to the mysteries that catalyzed a lot of the action in the first book. There are roughly eight easily distinguishable story threads at the moment, alternating nicely between violent adventure stuff and crafty political machinations. I’m a bit too short on sleep to conjure up more specific examples of the awesomeness, but the series is every bit as good as I was given to expect.