HBO’s Rome

Was an impossibly good presentation of the colors and textures of the Roman World.
It was comical inasmuch as the cost of production was what got it shut down and the Romans were in themselves notoriously gaudy, but still, it’s what sold me on the show entirely.
I mean, like, I think the writing and the acting was tremendous as well, but the show existed for me in the sets and the costumes.

It was a similiar experience to me as watching David Lynch’s Dune, which although it took exceptional canonical liberties (sound guns, facial diseases..etc) was still I thought exceptionally true to the texture of the world of Frank Herbert in a way that was dissasterously lacking in the much more textually true Sci-fi adaptation.
The walls looked like they should, the costumes were appropriate, there was a strangeness and a grittiness that suffused the sets much in the same way that the love of fresco and of graffiti is palpably present in Rome.

I never watched Deadwood although I have heard it described as being of a like-mind with regards to that feeling of authenticity being central to the aesthetic of the show. I have never particularly been fond of westerns, being as they are translations of the archetypes present in the samurai films of the east into western costumes, but I suppose I can’t say that I have never seen a good one being that I watched Firefly with unbridled love and enthusiasm.

Oh Joss Whedon. Can you be the bridge between myself and People of the Earth, We Are the Neptunes ?

I wonder, as I listen to that album, what it was in that sound that attracted the attention of the men who made it. Was it Deadwood? Was it some older instantination of the theme?

Im thinking about pitching an ecology article to Dragon magazine. That would be pretty kickass I think, and I think I would be good at it.

I was thinking the other day how much Rome season 1 (I have never watched season 2) gained for me when I started to concieve of it as the prequel to I, Claudius - the BBC production that my father introduced my family to. It actually darkens the tenor of the Augustus found in that production very attractively, showing the shrewdness that only later turned towards trying to set in place good family ethics out of a sense of frustration at having been denied that.

It is easier for me to appreciate the softness of the BBC Augustus when recalling the sequence wherein Pullo is aghast at the ease with which a young Octavian commanded him to torture a man under interrogation.
Here then is the mind that could outthink even Calilgula’s occasional genius. The coin from which the empire was struck that stood in good stead for so long despite so many terrible transactions.

Anyway. Dragon Magazine. That will be fun. I used to read them endlessly when I was younger, and usually I was reading exactly for this quality which constitutes the texture of the worlds proposed. I used to read older ones, with articles on panache and non-weapon-proficiencies. The steps that the game worlds took to be something other than just mechanical representations of combat.
I -love- mechanical representations of combat, and I would like that to be clear, but for some reason I am also compelled by the things which support and color that combat – the behind the scenes stuff that increasingly wizards of the coast has left to auxilliaries like the magazines and the fan produced content.

I understand their decision, I think, but it was such a shock reading the new Monster Manual when I had grown up with the old that I hope they will allow me the opportunity to get in on the game.
I feel like they started moving away from what I wanted without consulting me. I looked up and the bard was gone and the gnome was a monster and monsters didn’t have manualized ecologies anymore.

Well, here I am Wizards. Let’s talk.

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Tags: david lynch, deadwood, dragon magazine, dune, dungeons and dragons, ecology, i claudius, Joss Whedon, pharrell williams, Rome, the neptunes