Comments on: Confessions of a Theme Whore

By: Mimi Kramer-Bryk

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:15:18 +0000

In reply to Joe DeFilippo. Thanks, Joe, for your insights and for the link. I'll be sure to check it out.

By: Joe DeFilippo

Joe DeFilippo — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:09:24 +0000

sorry, i don’t think it’s so obviously nonsense that chase et al might intend to recall the red barn painting in setting up the killing of tony blundetto. your first instinct was good–maybe not correct, but certainly not obviously nonsense. Not sure that art is a huge issue in itself throughout the series, but it definitely is used in interesting and important–and quirky–ways, as is nature. pine barrens, bear, ducks–even (maybe especially) the jersey suburban setting itself, which is removed from the urban newark of tony’s childhood and his father’s simpler, less conflicted life. when you move west from newark, you move into more prosperous and sylvan settings, which are closer to nature but nevertheless not really nature, and characters find that the more prosperous setting doesn’t really make them better or happier. in some sense it makes them less happy and less emotionally stable, and so they need therapy…. i’ve always felt that chase was in part doing with italians what roth did with jews in goodbye columbus (the story, not the movie, which is atrociously set in nyc/scarsdale rather than newark/short hills).

on art in sopranos btw, have you seen this? http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

By: Mimi Kramer-Bryk

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:40:13 +0000

In reply to Deborah Barlow. Deborah---Thank you! That means so much to me. I hope you'll be as tolerant about my abiding conviction that the Michael Bay movie The Rock, where Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery have to break into Alcatraz, is loosely based on Sophocles' Philoctetes!

By: Leaky Margins « Slow Muse

Leaky Margins « Slow Muse — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:59:43 +0000

[…] was with pure relish that I read the latest posting by my friend Mimi Kramer-Bryk, Confessions of a Theme Whore, on the blog she writes with her husband William Byrk, City of Smoke. Nobody makes popular culture […]

By: Deborah Barlow

Deborah Barlow — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:39:24 +0000

What a great piece this is. Reading your take on something I think I know well–like the series House for example–is to come at it fresh all over again. Little theme whore, you’re the one for me. Keep seeing those patterns and taking me on these rhapsodic journeys no matter what the launch site.