Posted on 06/29/2004 10:45:43 AM PDT by BluegrassScholar
At first I thought it must be a joke, some TV critic geekoid friend's idea of leg-pulling in the highest order.
But who would pretend to be Deadwood creator David Milch?
For those of us who follow TV, Milch is a famously flawed legend. A writer on the legendary cop drama Hill Street Blues, he co-created NYPD Blue and let his demons grow to the point that he wasn't even writing out scripts but telling the Blue actors what lines they should say on the set just before filming scenes.
Most recently, Milch has developed HBO's super-real western drama Deadwood, basing his profanity-laced, explicit characterizations on an actual mining town in South Dakota's Black Hills just after Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn.
And he was calling this particular critic to discuss a June 12 article in which I and Sideshow columnist Sharon Fink disagreed over the quality of his show.
But Milch wasn't concerned with my criticisms on too-slow storytelling, aimless characters or dense language. He wanted to talk about race, specifically the notion that Deadwood unfairly excludes black characters.
Milch's defense: Deadwood was a mining town that didn't attract the black cowboys who learned to work the cattle industry during the Civil War.
"The only guy I could find in my research in the first year of the camp was a guy who called himself Deadwood Dick," Milch said. "His real name was Nat Love, and he published his autobiography. But it was all lies and fabrications, and nobody has been able to verify . . . that he was actually there."
Next season, Milch hopes spend more time with a proud black character named Hostetler that viewers saw in one scene last season, bringing him together with another character called the N--- General, a subservient black man who dresses in a stolen war uniform and runs errands for white people.
(He's hoping to workout a deal with longtime comic and comedy writer Franklin Ajaye to play the "General.")
"I just wanted to take a moment to explain that it was not that there had been African-Americans there and I had chosen not to represent them," Milch said. "Specifically, in the first year of the camp, several researchers had made the point that none were there."
He made a good point, and I had to admit to enjoying the show more toward the end of its run.
But after hearing about at least one of the black characters Milch has planned for next season's Deadwood, I was left wondering if I shouldn't be more careful what I wish for in the future.
I am pretty sure that nudity wasn't.
EB Farnum: "An august commencement to my administration, waiting outside the door for a degenerate t!t-licker to pass."
[Middle English, attested in pseudo-Latin fuccant, (they) fuck, deciphered from gxddbov.] Word History: The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, “Flen flyys,” from the first words of its opening line, “Flen, flyys, and freris,” that is, “fleas, flies, and friars.” The line that contains fuck reads “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The Latin words “Non sunt in coeli, quia,” mean “they [the friars] are not in heaven, since.” The code “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields “fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli.” The whole thus reads in translation: “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”
Looks like RoseofTexas was onto something after all.
"I had a problem with the language the first time I saw it, but I kept watching it..."
therefore the overall morality of the nation drops another notch.
Incrementalism - WAKE UP! The proverbial frog in the pot of water - soon the nation will be dead.
Well, if we're talking about blacks, something like one third of all cowboys were black.
bump
Here's an article that talks about the cussing on the show Deadwood:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/n_10191/
The word itself must go back even earlier.
"something like one third of all cowboys were black"
This doesn't seem plausible. Do you have a source for this?
Re: black cowboys:
http://www.coax.net/people/lwf/bawmus.htm
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/18/BAGFP780P61.DTL
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