The Friday High Five

A delayed recognition of greatness, thinking about Rome, and notable anniversaries

That feeling when you discover where a legendary gif comes from. HBO

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing

The Wire: Season 1

This week I finished season one of The Wire.

It’s really good. Really, really good.

Smart writing. Three dimensional characters. A setting that feels alive and real. There’s black and white, but also lots of gray. The good guys aren’t all that good all the time. The bad guys are sympathetic. There’s a lot to chew on.

I’m buzzing with thoughts I can’t quite articulate yet, but you’ll be hearing about this one soon. Unlike some people—like Barack Obama, perhaps you’ve heard of him—I’m not yet ready to name The Wire the best TV show ever. Let me get through the other seasons before we schedule an inauguration. Deadwood will not go without a fight.

I’d heard of McNulty and Stringer Bell even before I started The Wire, but why wasn’t anybody talking about Detective Freamon? Dude’s the clear MVP.

Other Things I Enjoyed

This is 40

I published an entire piece on This is 40 just a few days ago. In the interest of saving everyone some time, I’m just going to drop a convenient link and a self-quote:

The upside of all the madness is that anyone who has made it to their 40s will see some aspect of their life reflected. And that's all we really want, right? To see something familiar, by which we can be reaffirmed or encouraged, or at least to laugh at as we stuff Oreos in our face holes. And I guess maybe that's the film's main contribution to society—your home life might be crazy, but is it this crazy? Not as a challenge or measuring stick, but as a kind of reassurance. But maybe we're all just normalizing our dysfunctions so that nobody will bother us when we're hiding out in the bathroom with an iPad.

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

I have been completely taken by this book, which sheds light on what life would’ve looked like in the years before, during, and immediately after Jesus’ life. Despite the subject matter, it’s not a religious book. Or, at least, not obviously one.

The author, a multi-degreed researcher in the field of religious studies, is Muslim. Obviously not a believer in Jesus the Christ, but he is a big fan of Jesus of Nazareth.

As a history buff, I’ve enjoyed how ably he explains daily life during the original aughts, and the context he provides to Biblical events. If you like thinking about Rome, you’ll find a lot to love. Rome ruled Palestine during this time and are major figures in the drama.

The book is full of details about how Rome governed, like this:

Rival gods, far from being vanquished or destroyed, were often assimilated into the Roman cult (that is how, for example, the Canaanite god Baal became associated with the Roman god Saturn). In some cases, under a practice called evocatio, the Romans would take possession of an enemy’s temple—and therefore its god, for the two were inextricable in the ancient world—and transfer it to Rome, where it would be showered with riches and lavish sacrifices. Such displays were meant to send a clear signal that the hostilities were directed not toward the enemy’s god but toward its fighters; the god would continue to be honored and worshipped in Rome if only his devotees would lay down their arms and allow themselves to be absorbed into the empire.

The Jews were a notoriously difficult bunch to control:

The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”

This bombshell related to Jesus preaching in his hometown:

When Jesus first begins preaching in his hometown of Nazareth, he is confronted with the murmuring of neighbors, one of whom bluntly asks, “Is this not Mary’s son?” (Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed. Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus bar Mary, instead of Jesus bar Joseph—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse.

This book is full of such nuggets.

The Phantom Menace Documentaries / Footage

2024 marks the 25th anniversary of Episode One: The Phantom Menace. In honor of such an occasion—but really because it gives me a convenient excuse to talk about Star Wars—I’m planning a few related pieces for May.

I’ll be revisiting the film, which I haven’t watched in at least 5 years but may be closer to 10, and sharing the normal kinds of observations that bubble up when I watch something. Right now I’m busy exploring YouTube’s shadowy alleyways in search of archival footage—making of documentaries, yes, but also breathless news reports of feeding frenzies once the new toys hit shelves.

I was more or less fully formed in the 90s, and retain clear memories of the time. The footage doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, so much as it injects veracity into my own memories. The details get fuzzy after a while.

The most unsettling thing I’ve unearthed is an episode of Entertainment Tonight from that era. The entire episode is constructed around a trailer reveal for The Phantom Menace, which the show continually references but waits until the end to play. Even though the video is edited down to just the Star Wars relevant bits, it’s super obnoxious. Can you believe this is how we used to get our news?

I probably sat through the entire telecast in 1990-whatever and was happy about it.

My Local Library

I can't believe there are places with thousands of books that you can borrow, for free, and somehow these are not our most popular places. Then again, I’m also one of those weirdos that likes the smell of old paper and ink.

I never go to the library with a clear agenda or even a book in mind. I just wander and pick up books that ping my ‘this looks interesting’ radar.

The radar hits skewed a bit fiction-heavy this time.

This month’s haul

I started reading the biography of Roald Amundsen, who is not actually a Viking in the axing and pillaging sense. He’s a famous polar / arctic explorer, apparently. I picked up the book because I thought it was about a Viking Viking.

This is why we read: To become less ignorant. And also because it’s fun.