I don’t talk about it much, but I spent part of my child­hood in the care­less & tacky con­di­tion of the very poor. Small town Col­orado was where I learned what an evic­tion notice is, what food stamps could & couldn’t buy, & what the terms “dry out,” “blackout,” & “bail bond” mean. I also learned, by watch­ing & lis­ten­ing to the adults around me, about grow­ing, buying, sell­ing, & smok­ing mar­i­juana. And I learned how to make myself very small, nearly invis­i­ble, during the seem­ingly random explo­sions of casual vio­lence that I spent much of my time dreading.

But besides the humil­i­a­tion & anx­i­ety, I remem­ber the aes­thet­ics. I remem­ber over­sized t-shirts printed with styl­ized uni­corns & wolves.

American tele­vi­sion now belongs to a sub­cul­ture. No longer part of the main­stream of artis­tic and intel­lec­tual life, it has become the spe­cial­ized occu­pa­tion of a rel­a­tively small and iso­lated group. Little of the fre­netic activ­ity it gen­er­ates ever reaches out­side that closed group. As a class tele­vi­sion shows are not with­out cul­tural status. Like priests in a town of agnos­tics, they still com­mand a cer­tain resid­ual pres­tige. But as indi­vid­ual enti­ties they are almost invisible.

What makes the sit­u­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary tele­vi­sion par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing is that it comes at a moment of unprece­dented expan­sion for the medium. There have never before been so many new tele­vi­sion shows broad­cast, so many net­works or channels.…There has also never before been so much pub­lished crit­i­cism about con­tem­po­rary tele­vi­sion; it fills dozens of mag­a­zines and websites.

Michael Wood, on The Wire:

I don’t really doubt the authen­tic­ity of The Wire, its pro­lif­er­a­tion of unpulled punches, but it isn’t good because it’s authen­tic, it looks authen­tic because it’s good, and if one day I learn that Bal­ti­more cops and crim­i­nals do not deduce and die and kill with the mag­nif­i­cent style they show in this series, I shall be unsur­prised and undisappointed.

I must have done some­thing right lately because I sure hit the tri­fecta this weekend:

Friday Night: The Thin Place at the Inti­man Theater

I’ve been hol­ler­ing about this play for months. Friday night I finally got to see it, and forty-​eight hours later I’m still mar­veling. Huge props to my friend Sonya Schnei­der for turn­ing a near-​dozen real-​life reli­gious nar­ra­tives into a compelling—I’m tempted to say Pentecostal—story about losing and living with faith. Con­grat­u­la­tions also to Gbenga Akin­nagbe, whose con­jur­ing of eleven wildly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters was noth­ing short of remark­able. The play’s open until June 13, and if you’re within three states of Wash­ing­ton you’ve got no excuse for not find­ing your way here to see it. Buy your tick­ets here.

Sat­ur­day Night: Mark Morris Dance Com­pany at the Para­mount The­ater

I won’t be coy: get me on the par­quet and I’m a pretty good dancer. But what I know about modern dance wouldn’t fill a postage stamp. Luck­ily, the MMDC was made for people like me. We got three excel­lent pieces—”Lake,” “Gloria,” and the best of the bunch, “Jesu, meine Freude.” If Morris & Co. swim within your range, be sure to catch them.

Sunday Night: The Oath at Har­vard Exit Theater

The sur­prise of the week­end. My fiancee and I walked down to the Har­vard Exit The­ater plan­ning to see the Argen­tine film The Secret in Their Eyes. While we were in line for tick­ets, the direc­tor Laura Poitras (who made the Oscar-​nominated doc­u­men­tary My Coun­try, My Coun­try) approached and offered us a pair of tick­ets to her new movie The Oath, which is screen­ing as part of the Seat­tle Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val. The Oath is billed as the story of Salim Hamdan (of Hamdan vs. Rums­feld fame) but the movie’s real sub­ject is Hamdan’s brother-in-law Nasser al-​Bahri (aka Abu Jandal), who was a body­guard to Osama bin Laden and also Al Qaeda’s Emir of Hospitality.

Al-​Bahri is engag­ing, intel­li­gent, and canny, and Poitras does a ter­rific job of cap­tur­ing the com­plex­i­ties of his char­ac­ter and com­pli­cat­ing any sim­plis­tic notion of who ter­ror­ists are and why they do what they do. (In fact, if this excel­lent doc­u­men­tary has a fault it’s in making it too easily for us to forget that al-​the charm­ing al-​Bahri, unlike his brother-in-law, was an active enemy of the United States.) After the movie Poitras and her cin­e­matog­ra­pher were joined for ques­tions on stage by some of the heroic lawyers from Perkins Coie who have assisted the JAG corps with Hamdan’s case. The Oath will show up on PBS some­time soon; until then, check out this con­sid­er­a­tion at the Times.