Month: July 2016 (Page 17 of 23)

• Innocence will be punished
• The innocents get fucked, and then charged for it: two dollars extra for ass-fucking.
• Regardless of what the Mormons will tell you, Jesus didn’t make it anywhere close to America, and certainly not the Black Hills.
• This is the Preacher:
• 
• And to downshift from the thematic/metaphysical/overarching grand pronouncement, the actor (Ray McKinnon) has one of the most fascinating faces I’ve ever seen: all angles and pinions and a giant nose and mouth that twist around the Gospel and dance with each other during his sermons.
• The Preacher is kind, and without guile or ambition; he is truly Christ-like.
• There are moral people in the camp, who only kill them what got it coming.
• And there are decent people in the camp, who only kill when they have to.
• The Preacher doesn’t kill anybody at all, ever.
• He’s got, like, a rule about it.
• You can see the brain tumor coming up the road from Yankton, can’t you?
• We’ll get back to Reverend Glioma in a bit, because it’s time to meet everyone’s favorite Celestial, Mr. Wu:
• 
• Can we all just acknowledge the racist joke in the picture and move on with post, please?
• …
• Thank you.
• Mr. Wu (Keone Young) is the Al Swearengen of Chinatown, because Chinese guys like drugs and gambling and whores just as much as white guys, but they weren’t allowed into the Gem or the Bella Union.
• The racism of 1870’s America was pure, primal, uncut.
• There really was a Chinatown in Deadwood because by that point there was a Chinatown in any place with any money in America: Chinese immigrants had been arriving since the mid 1800’s, mostly through San Francisco, and then the railroad spread them across the country.
• Wait.
• First, they built the railroad.
• Then the spreading thing.
• The Chinese–referred to as Celestials and many other awful things–came here for the same reason all immigrants do: the American Dream, even though no such concept or phrase existed in 1876.
• Wait.
• They came because there was money, big piles of it right underground or laced into the sides of hills, and you could work for some of it or steal a lot of it.
• You could also feed people to your pigs, which is one of the business arrangements Mr. Wu had with Al Swearengen: sometimes a body had to disappear, and pigs are like magicians that only know one trick.
• Anyway, Mr. Wu also supplies the opium in Deadwood and when two white cocksuckers rob and kill his courier, they have to die.
• Well, one of them does: even though–by traditional custom–both of those men had put a death mark on themselves, they were white and you could not kill two whites for the death of one Celestial.
• It wouldn’t cause a race riot or anything.
• A “race riot” is when an underpowered minority group rises up and loses their shit, momentarily and in the long run ineffectually.
• This would have been a massacre: the white Deadwoodians would have overtaken Chinatown and killed, raped, and enslaved all of the inhabitants.
• And there would have been no consequences whatsoever.
• The past was terrible.
• If you look on the innertubes, the present seems awful, but the past was so much worse; do you know anyone who has been fed to pigs?
• Because if you lived in Deadwood, you knew several people who had been fed to pigs.
• They do not feed the Preacher to the pigs.
• Remember the Preacher?
• He’s going to die.
• To leave the sty, Magistrate Claggett from Yankton is most likely fed to the pigs after his lieutenant slits his throat in Al Swearengen’s office.
• (A note on spoilers: the program of Deadwood aired in 2004; it was based on events from 1876-8 featuring characters that were literally in your history book. Spoilers does not apply here. Deadwood is not a safe space, in any sense. Also, it’s tough to spoil any death in this show because you see every single one coming. People waste away from disease over a season, or other characters discuss murdering them for several scenes prior.)
• When you hear “Yankton,” think “America.”
• Remember: Deadwood is an illegal settlement on Indian land, and while annexation by the United States and integration into the Dakota Territories is inevitable, the terms have not been settled.
• Custom dictates that any claim a man has worked honestly is his, but that’s not the way the law works.
• The law works the way D.C. wants it to work.
• Yankton arrives in Deadwood–after being whispered of for several episodes–in three forms, all America.
• First there is the devious Magistrate’s lieutenant, who is business.
• Then the Magistrate, who is the law.
• And then the army, who is the army.
• Knock knock.
• Who’s that cocksucker banging on my fucking door?
• America!
• Also: Yankton and Deadwood (the actual physical real places) are 334 miles apart, so: holy fucking shit, these human beings were made out of iron and hardtack.
• Seventeen days. (I have no idea whether there were trains up there yet, but I don’t think so.)
• The tiniest bit of googling says that a horse can travel 20 miles a day, so that makes it more than half-a-month on the trail.
• Not road.
• Trail.
• There may not be any place on the planet it takes seventeen days to get to now, let alone a town in the same state.
• Okay: maybe Texas.
• The camp of Deadwood has two types of women in it: women who shouldn’t have come, and women who aren’t allowed to leave.
• The first category includes Alma Garrett, who looks like this:
• 
• She is played by Molly Parker, who has a spectacular chin, and the only reason she lives through the first season is luck and the script saying so.
• However, by the end of the season, with her claim a bonanza, she has the money to purchase violence.
• Violence can take money, but money can purchase violence.
• Power lies in the middle of those two things.
• She’s also protected by her status in society: a married woman (and then a widow).
• She is respectable, and men stand when she enters the room.
• When the whores enter the room, the men stand, but for different reasons.
• Remember the thing about Yankton being America?
• Well, when you hear “whore,” think “slave.”
• “Whore” makes it sound nicer than it was, which is entirely fucked up.
• Some of them were sold outright by their parents to the pimps, but the real-life Al Swearengen liked to advertise in the papers back East.
• Waitress, actress, whatever.
• And who would answer this ad and take this job?
• Girls without connections or money or many other options, and when they got out West, Al would take all their money and papers and beat the shit out of them and rent their pussies and mouths and asses out until they died, or killed themselves, or whatever.
• He could always get more.
• The past was terrible.
• Also, when rich ladies get naked on Deadwood, they are wearing fancy and symbolic corsets and the shots are gauzy, sultry, tasteful.
• The whores just walk around with their titties out.
• This is one of the whores from the Gem, Trixie:
• 
• The actress’ name is Paula Malcomson, and her nose is mind-blowing.
• We are introduced to her, way back in the first episode, after she has shot a trick for hitting her.
• Trixie is a Whore With A Heart Of Gold, but like I said: Deadwood contains every trope in the Western playbook.
• A teleological argument can be made for Westerns, that without the WWAHOG, and a Righteous And Handsome Sheriff, and a Cunning And Charismatic Baddie, and a Town Drunk, it wouldn’t be a Western at all.
• You can’t just lay down some wooden sidewalks and spread shit everywhere and call it a Western: the genre comes from the stock characters, not the setting.
• Anyway, we’ll get back to Trixie because she is awesome and also because I want to keep these things under 1500 words.
• I mean: I’ll do one for each episode, but only for cash on the barrel.
• Otherwise, you’re getting the scattershot approach.
• Speaking of which: the plague has passed and the guy Powers Boothe left in the woods to die did not; Ricky Jay starts to have something interesting to do, but then disappears forever; Joanie (who is the Bella Union’s version of Trixie) begins to break away on her own; there is a meeting in which peaches are served; Alma Garrett’s father shows up and gets the shit kicked out of him by Seth Bullock, who then bangs Alma Garrett; Ellsworth and Farnham and Merrick and Charlie Utter all do things, too, but we’ll get to them because we have to get to the Preacher.
• You know: he has to die.
• A big part of the show–and the actual moment in history–is the Civil War: many people called out for Jesus at 2nd Manassas, but He only answered the Preacher; after the war, he went West and wound up in Deadwood to save sinners’ souls.
• You gotta go where the action is.
• The Preacher watches Seth Bullock and Sol Star’s hardware store in the evening for a tiny wage; he tends to the small pox victims in the pest tent; he prays for the dead at the frequent funerals in the graveyard overlooking the camp.
• People mix up “disinterested” and “uninterested.”
• Disinterested doesn’t mean to not care, uninterested does; disinterested means that you have no financial stake in the proceedings.
• The Preacher is literally the only disinterested character on the show.
• Remember when I said he dies?
• I lied.
• Al Swearengen smothers him on a whore’s mattress in the back of a saloon.
• So much for the innocents.

(Second addendum, same as the first: this is happening. If you’re not into it, I understand. Check out for a few days and when you come back, Bobby and Josh Meyers will be rescuing Katy Perry, and Roy Head is going to Europe, and I have absolutely terrible things to say about Ann Coulter. Also, I want to do a podcast and I have many ideas and that will be next week. For now, though: Black Hills, bitches.)

• If you come at me with The Wire, I will fight you and–according to the laws of custom–be allowed to shoot you in the back in public: Deadwood is the best TV show EVAR.
• The Wire is about how terrible the present is, and I know that already.
• Deadwood is about how terrible the past was, and I don’t know if I’ve told you this: the past was terrible.
• (It should be stated upfront that I will be taking the entertainment program as actual history and researched events even though in real life, Seth Bullock got to town after Wild Bill Hickock had already been killed, and Al Swearengen was barely in his 30’s, and there was a Bella Union saloon but it was owned by a guy named Tom Miller instead of Powers Boothe. Deadwood is best understood as semi-fictionality: they’re real people, kind of; and this all happened, sort of.)
• Okay: it’s the 1870’s in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the land has been granted to the Sioux in a treaty, but then someone found gold and you know how that goes.
• Men, broken and battered from the Civil War mostly, make their way to the camp to pan for their fortunes, and other men, cleverer men, followed the miners to sell them stuff.
• Prospecting for gold requires tools–a pick and a pan and overalls and a beard–so Seth Bullock gives up his job as sheriff to open up a hardware store in Deadwood with his friend, Sol Star, who is Jewish.
• Finding gold, however, requires a place to spend one’s money, so Al Swearengen opened up a saloon.
• Saloon meant something different back then.
• You could rent a slave for sexual purposes.
• We call them whorehouses or brothels, but Al Swearengen was a slaver.
• He was also a throat-cutting cocksucker.
• And yet he is nowhere near the worst human being on this show; at least he’s got style.
• Plus he looks like this:
• 
• Which will take you far.
• Anyway: the whole town is illegal; it’s not actually in America and there are no laws of any sort.
• You are allowed to stab people in bars.
• There is also no medicine, beyond opium and having someone sit by your bed while you die.
• You may also have opium if you are not sick because, again, there are no laws whatsoever.
• To be honest: if you are anything but a white, male, rugged individualist, you should not go to Deadwood.
• Rich white women were treated better than poor white women, in that they were not immediately forced into sexual slavery.
• Children simply should not have been there at all.
• You know how I disapprove of children at Dead shows?
• I much more strongly disapprove of children in Deadwood.
• The first season revolves around a child, though, sort of, partially.
• There are a lot of plots going on, which makes sense: what else was there to do but plot?
• There was no movie theater in town, and the internet service was spotty.
• So everyone is double-crossing everyone else, and spying on one another, and eavesdropping.
• Except the whole town is one street and all the floors are made of wood, so it is impossible to sneak around.
• People all up in people’s business.
• While wearing incredibly complicated clothing.
• Look at this bullshit:
• 
• The suspender loops on the shirt?
• Oh.
• My.
• God.
• It’s almost worth the smallpox and racism.
• Almost.
• Here’s how racist the past was: actively.
• Sometimes you assume that racism was merely permitted in the past, but you’d be wrong: racism was enforced.
• If, say, you were an enlightened sort and made friends with a Chinese guy, the other white people might kill you.
• Obviously, they would also kill the Chinese guy.
• You should not be Chinese in the past.
• Even in China, it was kind of shitty, but in South Dakota, it was the pits.
• Oh, right: TV show.
• Many plots: road agents have killed the Squareheads, but left a mute child alive.
• I feel the creators missed a chance to have Sigourney Weaver adopt the child.
• (Although it should be said that a mute child actor is the best kind of child actor, so kudos to the writers.)
• The mute child could name her family’s killers, so there is much drama, and Nick Offerman shows us his penis; throats are cut and there is quite a bit of acting.
• Not actoring, though this show could have very easily slid into that morass: there are heavy-duty monologues and soliloquies addressed to the rafters, but the cast is a murderer’s row of grimy, ugly dudes and women with interesting noses.
• Also Kristen Bell, who I forgot was in this, and should not have been in this, or at least been given a storyline that made sense or went anywhere; she existed mostly to highlight the difference between Swearengen’s crew and the rival saloonkeeper, Powers Boothe.
• Powers Boothe is fucking evil, and he seems to enjoy it.
• Swearengen’s just practical.
• A rich couple has recently arrived to camp from New York City; their names are Brom and Alma; she is addicted to taking laudanum in diffused light from a glass bottle atop a wooden dresser.
• Because that’s how Westerns work.
• If I watch a Western and there’s not a rich white lady who’s been left back at the hotel by her husband getting high in her nightgown while surrounded by cameos, I feel cheated.
• The dude gets thrown off a cliff because of course he does: rarely do you root for the tosser in that situation, but the dude was so damned dumb.
• At a certain point, I lose sympathy for characters that don’t realize they’re tropes.
• And there are a shitload of tropes; Deadwood is both a deconstruction of Westerns, and a fulfilling straight oater: you get Wild Bill Hickock drawing down in the street, but you spend far more time with the poor schmuck who’s got to scrub the blood from the floor.
• There are quite a few blood-scrubbing scenes.
• Oh, yeah: Wild Bill Hickock is there.
• He looks like this:
• 
• I KNOW, RIGHT?
• It’s worth watching the show just for the costumes and hair.
• And the hats.
• Each character has a different style hat, and you can tell how much thought went into matching the hat to the person, and that adds another layer of enjoyment to the program.
• Except for Al Swearengen, who never wears a hat, although he doesn’t leave the Gem too much.
• He’s essentially Jabba the Hut that says “cocksucker” a lot.
• Holy shit, does that cocksucker say “cocksucker” a lot.
• It’s a cliche to call Deadwood‘s language Shakespearean, but it would be incorrect not to: it is high operatic frizzle-frazzum; Gabby Hayes starring in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Globe Theatre.
• Anyway: Wild Bill Hickock gets shot in the back while holding a Full House of Aces and Eights (kinda).
• Spoiler?
• The guy who shoots him later reincarnates as a serial killer, but that’s not important right now.
• And Calamity Jane bellows at people, and there is horse riding, and Ricky Jay becomes involved, and the rich lady quits taking laudanum with the help of Trixie the Whore, and an Indian shows up and does a war dance, and several people are stabbed, and a preacher has a brain tumor.
• Also, there is a plague, and the town doctor is Brad Dourif and this is the extent of what he can do for you if you get sick:
• 
• Doc Cochran tried to mean-mug sickness away, but it did not work ever.
• Brad Dourif also delivers every one of his lines in what can only be called a rageful whisper.
• Bedside manner was different back then, but so was everything.
• For example, when Trixie the Whore meets Alma Garrett (the rich lady), she (Trixie) instantly asks to bathe her (Alma’s) child.
• “She’s so beautiful. Let me wash her.”
• In Trixie’s defense, it is difficult to overstate the amount of drinking, so she was probably half-crocked when she said that.
• One would have to imagine that it is exaggerated for dramatic purposes, because characters will down shots to punctuate beats in their conversation; in a four-minute scene, each may take seven or eight shots of whiskey.
• That’s a tough pace to keep up and not die.
• There seems to be no beer, though cider and sarsaparilla have been mentioned.
• You can also get water from the creek, but that is where the town stores dead bodies prior to burial.
• The past was terrible.
• Great line: “The jury will now retire to the whores’ rooms and begin their deliberations.”
• I’ll be honest: this will probably continue, as I tend to get a bit obsessed with things and will–the second I hit the Publish button–begin watching another episode.