Saturday, December 2, 2006
David Milch @ MIT
The Scientific American podcast praised this podcast. It's an interview with David Milch of Deadwood fame talking for over an hour. Milch tells something of his family and personal history — an aggregate of dysfunction and achievement. Milch turned out okay though, as apparently did his brother, a hospice doctor. Tough times can hone the spirit bright.
It's worth watching this as a video because Milch is a real character; he schlumps in his chair like a collapsed marionette as, with gravelly voice, he barks out his viewpoints. He described his concept of the culture of the Old West that Deadwood circles as having just that mentality: curse a lot to show you are a dangerous character — the equivalent of your dog growling so as not have to fight. One questioner, a former student, said he was a little afraid of Milch when he taught at Yale.
There is a lot of shuck and jive in Milch — he wants to please and impress, but doesn't want to show it: he overcompensates. The rhetoric is a mix of academic burble and TV smart-huckster talk. By the end the act was becoming tiresome, but near the end he opened up; he allowed something of his more fractured self out and you saw him as he really was. He trusted the audience at that point. The mix of academic reference and colloquial toughness is entertaining, although sometimes this former drug addict sounded as though he might have fried a few too many neurons — there were disconnects in his logic, a fuzziness (a weakness often accompanying the tough guy persona).
Anyway, underneath, Milch is a giving and generous spirit I thought. Certainly worth listening to the beginning of this stream. The interviewer, David Thorburn, is what Woody Allen would look and act like if he had made his career in academia.