To Do 05.07.20

BINGE: The Wire

It trades places with The Sopranos in topping different lists of the best TV shows of all time. It’s mainly a crime show of cops and drug dealers, and it starts slowly. But each minute, each episode, each of its five seasons (which pulled police, schools, government, labor and newspapers into their orbit), kept building out its world of Baltimore society until it was as dysfunctional, wondrous and tragic as any real American city with big troubles. It juggled a boggling amount of characters – from drug dealers to mayors, dock workers to kids – with clarity and humanity (and helped launch a bunch of actors including Wendell Pierce, Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan). Its creator, David Simon, and his partner Ed Burns, had worked in or with Baltimore’s police, school and newspaper institutions, so they wrote from experience. The Wiredidn’t win major awards and it struggled with low ratings, but that may have been due to its intelligence and complexity. For those who stuck with it, there was no stopping. It didn’t have fans so much as proselytizers. It is raw, violent, funny, warm and wrenching, but it’s not depressing. It is believable and brilliant. On HBO or Amazon.

READ: The Henna Artist

“Independence changed everything. Independence changed nothing.” So begins Alka Joshi’s debut novel, set in 1950s India eight years after the country gained independence from the British Raj – the same time of Joshi’s parents’ arranged marriage. It imagines what might have happened to a woman like Joshi’s mother had she not lived in a patriarchal society that robbed her of volition over her own life. Lakshmi, the novel’s teenaged protagonist, escapes an abusive husband and flees to another city to become a henna artist and herbalist serving upper-class women. The novel is an immersion into Indian culture that took Joshi, who was born in India and lives in Pacific Grove, 10 years of research, reading, travel and interviewing to write. It was all set to launch in March, during Women’s History Month, at the P.G. Museum of Natural History, accompanied by sitar music, an Indian classical dancer, and samosas and chai. Then coronavirus. But, don’t let that stop you from escaping to the book’s rich immersion into Indian culture and the story of a woman’s struggle for liberation. On May 1, Reese Witherspoon announced it was her book recommendation for the month, and within an hour it shot up to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list. Kudos. Available online. thehennaartist.com.

WRITE: Those closest to you.

1) Music promoter Kiki Wow had a good suggestion in her latest newsletter: Each week, write an email or letter or text to a friend you haven’t heard from for a while. You might think they are busy, inundated, that they don’t have time for you. Do it anyway. You might be surprised, and you’ll probably be thanked. 2) Author Alka Joshi (see above) says she quizzed her parents about their early years in India for material for her novel The Henna Artist. You and your family should do so too. Ask questions that you’ve always wondered about (or never wondered about), then answer each other fully and faithfully. Do it by email if you’re physically separated. Or pen and paper if sheltering together (or pencil, if you think you might need to erase). Treat it as one-of-a-kind primary research into a very important subject – your family. 3) Write down all the details of one day, any day, everything you can recall, from the most significant to the most mundane. Especially when the days blend one into the other, it’ll help differentiate at least one day of this span of time. And years later, when this all seems like a surreal dream, you’ll appreciate the detail and clarity of that piece of writing. It’ll be a touchstone.