A Thousand Corners

2009-10-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

Truth be Told

I got a book in the mail the other day from a publisher in the UK. It's a thick, nearly 600-page hard cover about the show. Been flipping through it and it's a very impressive book. Lots of interviews with Wire actors, crew, producers, you name it. The most interesting part of the book is a long foreword by David Simon which sets the context for the show among television cop shows as well as in his own career as a journalist. I had not read much prose by Simon and it's very well written and elucidates all the themes and intentions very clearly. Also an 18-page interview with Simon by Nick Hornby.

The main reason to get this would be for the interviews and the hundreds of photos interspersed throughout. It's really a good addendum to the show with the interviews really shining a light on the myraid aspects of the show. It's got summaries of all the episodes, through from what I read, they're not always carefully put together - the summary for Season 4, episode 1 for example, inexplicably failed to mention the murder of Lex. But overall, it's a great resource for a Wire fan.

2009-10-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

Friday Night Lights

Other than sports, the Daily Show/Kolbert, "Mad Men" and "Family Guy" I don't watch much TV. But there's one show I think Wire fans would like, or at the very least appreciate.

NBC's "Friday Night Lights" has been, like "The Wire," a critically acclaimed and little watched program. It is about the travails of a team and their fans that live and die on their fortunes in fictional Dillon, Texas. Like "The Wire," the show has won a Peabody Award (awards issued for excellence in radio and TV broadcasting issued by the Univ. of Georgia - they do a great job of singling out great shows).

The subject matter is vastly different, the teen romance drama often gets annoying, but in its focus on regional mores it is aesthetically similar to the show. I have written in the past about how one of the great attractions about "The Wire" is its "regionalism" - it's ability to capture the mores, customs and language of a particular area. You usually hear this term to describe Flannery O’Connor and other Southern writers but its applicable to anybody who is able to capture the area they are writing about in such fullness. “The Wire” does for Baltimore what Raymond Chandler does for Los Angeles, what Dennis Lehane does for Boston, what “The Maltese Falcon” does for San Francisco: it lends the place a sense of mystery giving it a sense of place. It makes the place come alive by lending a sense of immensity to the unique details of the particular city.

Likewise, "Friday Night Lights" does a fantastic job of portraying conflict, ambition and daily life in a world far away from the happy-go-lucky cosmpolitania usually portrayed on the small screen. Life in hard scrabble towns like Dillon do not get much play on networks or in popular culture. The show has a little-known ensemble cast with a superb lead actor (Kyle Chandler) playing the paternal central figure of Coach Taylor. It is an earnest and serious show that deals with serious topics. It's fourth season starts at the end of the month but it's worthy of being placed at the top of your Netflix queue.

Watch the first episode at the very least. The first ten minutes of that first episode are expertly made.

2009-09-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

Wire Art

Don't know who this guy is exactly, but his art project is a pretty great use of time at work. I like Clay Davis's one at the bottom. But Bodie's "smart ass pawn" is the best quote.

• And here's an article about Sonja Sohn, aka Greggs, doing some work with at-risk youth in Maryland. Like Bunny's role in Season 4.

• And Poot can do a lot more than just sling and talk about "world going one way, people another." He's a scribe too with a new autobiography. Don't think it'll sell as many copies as Snoop's one though.

2009-07-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

Quick Guide for New Users

If you are just visiting this blog for the first time, let me explain the history of the blog quickly to improve usability.

I started this blog in September of 2006 at the onset of the Fourth Season, writing up "decomps" and critiques of every episode in between September and December of that year. All blog posts in 2007 monitor critical reaction to the series as well as updates on the Fifth and final season which began airing on HBO in America in January, 2008. You can read my Season Five episode posts by clicking on the posts in between January and March of that year. Afterwards, I blogged only occasionally, linking to articles of interest to David Simon, about the various mystery writers on the show which I have taken a liking to and the myriad sociological aspects which made the show so fascinating.

Speaking of which, I just started reading "Lush Life" by Richard Price, a novelist who wrote a handful of "Wire" episodes. I highly recommend it.

2009-07-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Wire and International Respect

Looking at Google news feeds for "The Wire," most stories are about characters that used to be on the show that are now striking it on their own. This one, about Felicia Pearson, aka Snoop, is par for the course talking about what the young actress is up to. I saw "Public Enemies" last night and was pleased to see Herc and the Judge make appearances.

More interesting have been articles in the international press in countries that are just now "discovering" the show. Here's one I found from New Zealand about the culture of "Wire bores" who talk about all the myraid details of the show to no end, sending their mates into a tizzy (I spent four months in NZ and can attest that Kiwis much prefer sports talk). These overseas chronicles attest to the resilience of the material and how far its themes of the complicated nature of urban life resonate.

- Also, after languishing behind Detroit for murder capital of the nation, Baltimore is back on top. The city had the highest murder rate for any city with over 500,000 people in 2008. All this despite having fewer murders in the city in 2008 than 2007.

The trend in the national homicide rate has been very interesting in recent years. Seattle, Los Angeles and New York have just seen 40-year lows in their homicide rate, whereas places like Memphis, Detroit and Miami top the list.

2009-05-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

Pelecanos in LA

Last night, along with perhaps 40 other individuals, I saw novelist (and Wire producer and writer) George Pelecanos speak with fellow novelist Lawrence Block at the Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles. Both writers spoke about their lives as writers as well as their current books. Pelecanos is on tour to promote his new novel “The Way Home,” which he told the audience was “my chick novel,” since it’s all about the relationship between fathers and sons.

Surprisingly, I was among perhaps four people under the age of 40 in the crowd with most questions directed towards Block. Pelecanos was very articulate and used the plain language that populates his books. Well-trimmed with a tightly clipped beard and clad in a black blazer over a light purple dress shirt, he looked just a little Hollywood for the night. He spoke very cleanly and directly when asked questions, his voice rarely emphasizing any words. He always made firm eye contact with the questioner and was effusive in his praise of novelist Block (I bought one of Block’s novels he recommended, “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.” I must admit that I had never heard of him before that night.)

One audience member asked him about the differences between writing novels and screenplays. He made it sound like a mixed bag. Your writing often would get tore up in screenwriting and you’d have to accept the fact that you didn’t have final control over the product. He said the writing room at “The Wire” was sometimes contentious with competition among the show’s bevy of talented novelists (Lehane, Price, himself) to write certain scenes or episodes. However, working with such talented people though also improved the quality of one's own writing.

I asked him how he came to write the second-to-last episode in every season and about his influence on the show. He told me that he had originally been brought in to the write the episode where Wallace was killed, and every season after that he and David Simon had an unwritten understanding that that’s the episode he would write. Pelecanos said that David wanted to keep him on as a producer and writer for the second season because he was going to have a lot of Greek characters in the season at the docks (he made a humorous joke about this that everybody laughed about in regards to this). From that point forward, he was on the staff.

Pelecanos spoke about how he was instrumental in introducing a character on the show who would win. The character of Cutty was his idea. Much like his novels, where the hard-working man usually emerges triumphant, so too does Cutty navigate the drug world to come out on top with his boxing gym.

Finally, one audience member asked him how he was able to portray the character of Derek Strange, a black cop turned private eye, who is the protagonist in several of his novels. “He is so different than you, how did you look through the world through his eyes?” He talked about how his parents put him to work at their diner when he was 11, and how he rode the bus in the D.C. at a time when the city was 80% black. He would just sit on the bus and listen to people, much like he says he sometimes goes into a bar and just listens to people. Someone then asked, “Do you go home and write it down?” Pelecanos said no, it’s just something that he can remember and call up. It didn’t seem like he was a very methodical in making notes and said he didn’t use outlines in his novels. Overall, he came across as a hardworking, empathetic straightforward guy.

At the end of the night I approached him and told him about the blog. “Yeah, I’ve read it,” he said. “David read it. He brought in that stuff.” That made my day. His matter of fact reply though masked whether he and the staff liked the blog. I made an off-hand query into that but didn’t get a solid response. That’s cool. It was enough, and a lot, to be acknowledged. He did tell me, “You’re gonna love ‘Treme,’” the forthcoming Simon series on HBO about musicians returning to post-Katrina New Orleans which he’s also working on.

After that I drove to Hollywood and saw the Decemberists play. A good night.

- Speaking of Simon, he was a featured panelist on the last week’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO. Haven’t watched it yet. Sometimes those panels are a too awkward of a mix like that time Mos Def kept interrupting Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie to make some pedestrian point.

(photo is of me, Block, Pelecanos from left to right)

2009-05-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Back in the Game

It's been many moons since I posted anything on the blog. The show is over, grad school life is intense... what else can a man say about the show?

But a few weeks ago, I was driving up through Westwood past the W Hotel on my way to campus when a familiar figure caught my eye. It was Wood Harris, hanging out in front of the hotel with a small entourage. "Avon!" I yelled. "What's up baby," he said (seeing him and two of Claire's boyfriends from "Six Feet Under" have made up the core of star sightings down here). The sighting brought back the living reality of the show to me and that maybe my Wire blogging days are not all behind me.

George Pelecanos on tour

I'm very excited about this. His tour, which launches today in D.C., swings through the country this month. Pelecanos is a D.C. crime novelist who was a producer and writer on "The Wire," penning every several episodes, including the second-to-last episode in every season. I've now read about five of his novels - his latest, "The Way Home" came out Tuesday - and the more of his novels I read, the bigger his stamp I see on the show. An interview in the L.A. Times is here.

People always talk about Simon and Burns as the genius behind the show, but there are so many similarities between the themes of "The Wire" and Pelecanos' novels that I think that his contribution to the overall product has been minimized and overlooked. The street language, the love of the city no matter how broken it appears, the interest in the mores of contemporary urban masculinity, the portrayal of villains as individuals whose lives took the course they did as a result of societal dysfunction and injustice rather than personal failure - these are all aspects of the show that one finds again and again in his novels.

I recommend them and stopping by and seeing him speak. I'll be at the reading in LA on Tuesday.

2008-08-02T10:06:00.001-07:00

I found two interesting interviews with David Simon on the web site for Baltimore magazine:

One is about Generation Kill and his next project, Treme. Money quote from the interview:

Interviewer: What’s next?

Simon: Treme. A story set in the musical culture of post-Katrina New Orleans. The title is that of a historic and predominantly black neighborhood just back of town from the French Quarter. We have a green light from HBO on the pilot but will have to wait until next summer to know if we are to film the first season.

Here's another one from back in February.

2008-08-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

Wire Cast at Museum of Moving Image

Sounded like a nice night. I would have liked to have been there.

And the Season Five DVD box comes out on Aug. 12.

- I've watched the first two episodes of "Generation Kill." I think it's very good. It's a little hard to tell all the characters apart though. But it has great dialogue and shows the perspective of the soliders very well. I'm not enraptured by it, but I enjoy watching it.

- And George Pelecanos' new novel "The Turnaround" just came out. I've read "Soul Circus" and "Hard Revolution." Very good. I enjoyed them better than Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island." Pelecanos' novels just do such a great job of capturing a sense of place - of driving around a city, listening to music, seeing people, hearing and seeing things. It seems to me to be a particularly unique form of urban American realism.

There's a lot in his novels. I recommend picking one up. I'll have to check out some the Richard Price novels at some point too that one of this blog's readers recommended.

- Lastly, I am now the articles editor at www.newgeography.com. Check it out!

2008-07-22T08:22:00.001-07:00

Three Villains

Like much of America, I went out opening day to see "The Dark Knight." I found it to be a fascinating and unique film whose themes and ending I am still processing. I was impressed by the way it was willing to dive into the personal darkness of the characters, how it did not present an ending that neatly wrapped up everything, how it presented sticking up for one's ideals as a process that is not easy to do. The hero isn't necessarily the benevolent man who always does the right thing. As Batman tells Sergeant Gordon, "I can be whatever you want me to be."

As a film, I didn't think it was as good or as taut as "Batman Begins" but I liked its focus on the Joker as a symbol of a particularly menacing kind of evil. He's a character who truly doesn't care about anything or anybody else. He's interested in spectacle, "watching the world burn" as Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, and in convincing society that all its rules just doesn't matter. Life is random and unjust, the Joker believes - a joke - so there's no reason to take anything, even life, seriously. He's been called an anarchist in press reviews but even anarchists believe in something - no government. He's just a supreme nihilist who seems anxious to prove a point to society - the antithesis to Bruce Wayne who believes that society can be changed, that people are inherently good and that life is most certainly not a joke.

But I have grouped the Joker along with Anton Chirgush (Javier Bardem from "No Country for Old Men") and Marlo Stanfield because all three represent a certain kind of villain that we seem to be seeing more and more of: the villain that has no rules, is completely devoid of empathy and places an infinitely small value on life.

In all three movies/shows, the challenge for the heroes is how to effectively deal with someone who really cannot be reasoned with. Nothing is off limits to these guys, they obey no "code" as Bunk and Omar believe in the term (or the guy at the bank in the first scene of "The Dark Knight)". There is no honor, only the code of self-preservation. They act is there the whole world is against them and that absolutely no one can be trusted. While they live purely for their own kicks, none of these three seem particularly interested in money (even though that is Anton's mission). It seems that what motivates them is righting some past wrong, showing the world that they are "for real" and that no one better get in their way.

I think that in all these features, there is an undercurrent of comparison to terrorism. The hardcore members of al Qaeda cannot be bought off, they do not want the same things that we want. The challenge these characters present is, "how do you deal with villains like these?" I think that their presence is also not enough to throw society off its rocker. They scare us, but we shouldn't let that change the way that we dispense justice.

2008-07-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Wire news roundup

I know I've been a bit remiss in updating this blog. There actually has been a good amount of Wire news too.

- The show is an Emmy Award semifinalist for best drama series. The final five (there are ten now) will be announced on July 17. I guess it's never too late for recognition, even though I think Season Five didn't equal the previous four. Hopefully, though a nomination will at least give the series the following it deserves (though S5 doesn't deserve to beat out the absolutely superb first season of "Mad Men" for best series).

- There's a real-life scandal currently going on at Baltimore City Hall that sounds eerily familiar to those who have watched the show. It involves the new Mayor, Sheila Dixon, who was portrayed as Narese Campbell on the show. Life imitates art.

- Ed Burns now lives in the countryside of West Virginia. "I'm something of a loner," he says in the short article. I always thought he was a little unfairly crowded out by Simon for credit for the series (certainly didn't generate as much press) but perhaps it's just because he's more of an introvert.

- Also, interesting to note that Baltimore native Joey Dorsey, a basketball player for the University of Memphis that was just drafted into the NBA, had this to say about the show on how realistic it portrayed his hometown:

Ask him whether his neighborhood bears any resemblance to the one on "The Wire," and Dorsey says no.

"It's worse," he said.

The locals nickname it "Iraq." Surveillance cameras on every street corner. Rampant crime. Lost souls, desperation, a numbing hopelessness.

"I don't even want to go back home because it's not safe," Dorsey said.

He also said, "Oh yeah, I watch it. That's right around in my neighborhood. West Baltimore. And all that stuff in actually happens back home. It's so bad that I stay in Memphis a lot. I go back home for probably three days to see a couple of my friends there, and then I'm out."

2008-06-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hard Times at Douglass High

This is the new documentary from HBO Documentary Films about an inner-city Baltimore high school. It's definitely worth watching. If anything, it confirms everything we saw in Season Four (though it takes place in high school and the kids are much more well behaved than they were in Prez's class). You see characters that remind you of Snoop, of Namond and an English teacher who reminds you of Prez.

While the filmmakers wanted to make it to incriminate "No Child Left Behind," the film points to a singular direction for a lot of the problems in the schools: the lack of family-support. The teachers appear pretty dedicated, the staff committed and passionate. One of the most fascinating scenes was about "Parent's Night." The teachers said that, for a school of 1100 people, they only got 3-4 parents who would show up. This one young woman said she didn't know any body who lived with their mom and dad.

Amazing statistic: the school has 500 freshman and 200 sophomores. Wow! When did the families in these communities start to dissolve? I think this is something that wasn't addressed very much in "The Wire." Simon and co. were more interested in taking on the economic/political/social system as opposed to looking at how that affected the break down in family.

But how do you keep families together?

2008-06-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

Looks the show has been a good stepping stone for many of its actors. That's what this short piece in New York magazine tells us. I didn't know they were making a movie based on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." The book was so good though so I'm anxious to see it, especially now that Michael K. Williams will be in it.

The NY Mag piece links to lots of articles about "Wire" actors including one about Dennis Wise ("Cutty") working at a grocery co-op in Park Slope.

Also, Season One episodes are now available on iTunes for $1.99 each.

2008-05-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Rewatching the Third Season

Over the last month I rewatched the Third Season. Now, I’ve watched every episode of the Wire twice save the Second Season (which is many people’s favorite).

I forgot how good it is. Sociologically, I think it’s the most interesting of the five. The season’s central conflicts – Hamsterdam, Cutty’s journey from soldier to boxing coach, Carcetti’s rise, and the tension between Avon and Stringer – were some of the show’s strongest.

There’s a long list of memorable scenes from this season: Bunk and Omar discussing the moral disintegration of their neighborhood since their youth; Bunny Colvin lecturing Carver about the difference between soldiering and policing as well as his “there ain’t never been a paper bag” speech; McNulty talking with D’Angelo’s mom in the police station. And, of course, the scene where Omar and Mouzone execute Stringer at his condo…. Rewatching that scene it felt tragic. Here’s a guy who tried to overcome his surrounding and upbringing and couldn’t. He looked vulnerable and scared.

Stringer and Avon had more than one great scene together. One of my favorites was the one where they tussle after Avon tells him he didn’t “have it in him” to be a gangster and Stringer tells him that he was responsible for D’Angelo’s death. And their final scene together on the rooftop penthouse looking over the city where Stringer tells him, “We ain’t gotta dream no more, man.”

The two had very different visions of what life can be. Avon is like Marlo. Both either cannot imagine, do not think they qualify or just don’t care about the life beyond the ghetto fiefdom they carved out for themselves. And in a way, why should they? They were both kings of their own neighborhoods, rulers of their own lives. And “the king stay the king” right? They believed in the gangster mystique and lived it to its apex.

Stringer was different. There are “games here beyond the game” he told Avon who never adjusted to Stringer’s way of thinking. Stringer wanted to be legitimate, to escape the neighborhood and be a downtown developer. But he shafted so many people on his way to becoming a lord of the underworld that it did him in. Ultimately, he couldn’t escape his past. If Avon had adjusted to Stringer’s plan, things could have gone well but, as Avon put it, “I’m a just a gangster, I suppose.”

Interesting how in the last episode, Avon comes around to Stringer’s position. He looks lost and lonely directing the hit that never happens against Marlo. It seems he realized his old partner’s logic too late.

2008-04-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

This Guy watches more Wire than me

From LA-based actor Pete Handelman. I like his impression of Lester.

2008-04-20T21:16:00.001-07:00

Cure for Wire withdrawl

I've been missing the show lately. "Friday Night Lights" has become my recent Netflix fave but it doesn't quite cut it. Watching Season Three has been good but I've already seen it. How do you have a new experience with something that's over?

I decided to read one of the novels by the show's trio of high-caliber novelists (Richard Price, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane): "The Night Gardener" by Pelecanos. Part of the attraction was to counterbalance such riveting titles in my graduate program like "Twenty-five years of State Budgeting Practices" and "The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure."

It was an amazing read (much better than the Harlan Coben novel I read next). It's easy to see how his name was on some of the best episodes of the show. It wasn't just hard-boiled, neo-noir Chandler-in-the-Beltway detective fiction; I found it to be extremely insightful into race relations. The way people talk and interact will seem familiar to anyone who lives in a diverse urban community. He's to D.C. what Simon is to Baltimore.

Many of the characters and cop-talk reminds me of "The Wire." Some characters talk and you think - "That's Bubbs! McNulty! Landsman!"

Anyways, I recommend you check it out. If you have read any "Wire"-like novels, post a comment and refer them.

2008-04-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

Obama a Wire fan?

Wouldn't be surprising if he was, given his tastes and background as a poverty organizer in inner-city Chicago. That's what this article from a Nashville alternative weekly says, claiming that the Presidential hopeful once called it his "favorite show."

What the story also keys into is how people in public service are die-hard into the show.

Been re-watching the Third Season lately. I'll post on it later. Forgot how good it was (and is).

2008-04-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

Wire Roundup

David Simon spoke in Austin last weekend. You can read the article here. I'm not sure, but it's almost as if he's on a speaking tour right now. Here's the Harvard Crimson article about his speaking engagement there last week. If he's ever coming to LA, I'd appreciate it if somebody could drop me a line.

- And here's a recent article from the SF Chronicle that mirrors the talk on "The Wire" about the new generation of hoppers - the Marlos of the underworld - refusing to abide by a code, and not following the rules of the game. Money quote:

"Shootings in that part of Oakland have become so brazen that some Baby Boom-era street
hustlers have complained to Oakland police officers about an increased level of violence from emboldened youngsters.
One of them told police that he was terrified.
'He was saying the (street) game is all twisted and these youngsters aren't playing by the
rules, and he was more concerned for his life now than he ever was,' said Lt. Ersie Joyner,
head of the Police Department's homicide unit and an East Oakland native. 'I had a couple of
guys call to say, 'Please do something about them, because I'm scared.' '
Joyner said he has seen the seeming disdain some suspects have for arrest, incarceration or
conviction."

I don't believe that the murder rate is skyrocketing nationwide or anything - NY and LA both had the lowest numbers of homicides in 2007 in a very long time - but it seems as if violence is getting more concentrated in certain communities and the violence perpetrated is dispensed more casually, like it's just a normal part of life. Like we saw in the Baltimore of "The Wire," it's just so entrenched.

- The actor who played Savino on the show was stabbed recently. Fortunately, his injuries were not too bad. Guy sounds like a real committed actor though judging by the article.

2008-04-03T15:49:00.001-07:00

Harvard to host symposium on "The Wire" tomorrow

David Simon will be there as well as Sudhir Venkatesh, the blogger/economist who wrote "What Real Life Thugs Think of the Wire." Sounds really amazing. Wish I could go. (hat tip to Nicole)

Why aren't there any Wire events on the West Coast?

Also, according to tvsquad.com the Season Five DVD set will be released Aug. 12 (initial artwork at left).

And BET is showing Season Four right now.

2008-03-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Wire's War on the Drug War

This article escaped my attention but it was an op-ed published in Time magazine in the March 5 issue. Penned by Simon, Burns and the show's trio of mystery novelists-cum-screenwriters - Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos - the piece urges jury nullification as a form of civil disobedience towards the flawed drug war.

In their own words, "If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented... No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens."

Now, I really, really admire these guys and hope that I can have half as great a writing career as they've had; however I can't say that I agree with this approach. It smacks of nihilism: the drug war is bad so we're going to sabotage it. We're going to undermine the bedrock of the court system - citizens arriving at objective decisions on a jury by listening to presented evidence - to make a point. It's just an arms-crossed "pooey" gesture that does not contribute to any real lasting solution.

Those interested in proposed substantive changes in drug policy should visit the Drug Policy Alliance's web page. Here's a link to their "What's Wrong with the Drug War" page that goes into the issues deeply. As far as I know, they're the preeminent organization creating policy alternatives to the current mess.

All right, that's all for blogging this week. If anybody wants me I'll be at Joshua Tree.

2008-03-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

Wire Roundup

- Here's the last entry on Sudhir Venkatesh's page on the Freakonomics blog about watching the show with real-life thugs. Funny how they stopped participating. Favorite quote, "This is fun if you work all day behind a desk, or you’re sitting in some suburb. But for us, it’s like watching somebody make a movie about you." I guess the show hit home.

For those of you interested in the sociology and street economics behind the show, I highly recommend reading "Freakonomics." At the very least read the chapter, "Why Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers" which is based on Venkatesh's research in Chicago housing projects. UCLA had the book on its summer reading list and I read it (and I'm a very slow reader) in about two days.

- For all the print "The Wire" got the ratings did not back it up. Only 1.1 million people watched the finale at its originally scheduled time. That's less than "John from Cincinatti" got! And it's less than last season's finale as well. I can't remember any show who's reputation so far out performed its ratings.

One thing I've always wondered about is the business model of HBO and indeed all premium TV channels. "The Wire" can't be a cheap show to make. How did it stick around for so long given its low ratings? If this show were on NBC or CBS or something, we would have never made it past the middle of Season One.

2008-03-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

Atlantic Monthly round table on "The Wire"

Recently, the Atlantic had a discussion among two of their senior writers: Mark Bowden, Jeffrey Goldberg. Bowden, a former Baltimore and Philadelphia writer who wrote "Blackhawk Down" is one of my favorite journalists (for the record, my fellow Californian George Packer is my favorite. Come to think of it though I've never read anything he's written about CA).

You can go the page with four separate clips here. I didn't watch the whole thing. It didn't really start to get insightful till the second clip. I liked their insights into the Sun though their accolades for the show are familiar.

2008-03-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's taken me awhile to post about. I'm in finals right now and all I do is write all day anyways. Really appreciate all the comments and positive feedback.

I rewatched the series finale a few days ago and I've scribbled down some thoughts but rather than just let them dribble out half-formed I'd like to take some time to compose them.

There were many write-ups of "The Wire" after it was over in all the big papers. The only one that made an impression on me was the LA Times write up by Mary McNamara. She called it a "sad and lovely finale." Money quote:

"Snoop did what she did -- killed lots of people -- because that's what you do, you know,
when you're Snoop. It's not any more complicated than that. Or at least not according to 'The Wire.' The universe moves in slow, painfully familiar patterns that creep in that
ever-widening gyre toward degeneration. Only a few small instances of transformation
briefly postpone the decline."

Also, here's an interview with Dominic West from the LA Times from last month. If there's going to be anymore Wire it will be in the form of a prequel.

- I'll post more later this week. I'm flipping through a H.L. Mencken biography right now. I'd like to compose a short little piece comparing his life to Simon's. Both skeptical, hyper-productive men who were able to have amazing careers in journalism without leaving Baltimore.

2008-03-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

–30–

“It was worth it. Wasn’t it?” – McNulty

It’s a wrap. Hard to believe, but it is. I had a lot of anticipation for this episode; I had high expectations. I purposefully avoided reading anything on the web this week that would give away its contents. And I was mostly pleased with the results.

I was expecting Simon to end the show on a more pessimistic note. The man who said that “’The Wire’ is a show about the end of the American empire” had his contrasting plotlines end rather neatly. Just about every character makes their swan appearance in the ending montage with a full smile. I didn’t see Dukie becoming a junkie – and his transition to this was too sudden – but Michael becoming the next Omar was the logical choice after his association with Marlo ended.

The general lesson? Things don’t change (that was the vibe from the montage, which reminded me so much of the ending montage for Season One). Everybody who gets their bread from the system finds a way to scratch the back of the other guy to make sure that nothing changes. Everyone’s incentive is to cooperate, to go with the flow of events no matter how immoral it is. Valchek put it best counseling Herc about how to deal with his discovery of Royce getting head in the mayor’s office last season, “Just shut up and play it up.”

At the end of the day, that’s what everybody does. Rawls, Washington, the Sun staff and Carcetti do it and ride it to success. Anybody who cared more about accomplishing a mission and “po-lice” work – Daniels, McNulty and Lester – finds themselves forced into retirement.

Now this tide of events is not surprising. Simon and Burns have always been interested in showing how “it’s better to be clever than good” and how people in institutions operate in this self-reinforcing game of back scratching. I’ve written about this theme before. So how the characters ended given their dispositions is not at all surprising.

Would there be room for a Sixth Season? As much as I love this show, my gut is to say that there might not be. Another season of watching bureaucratic in-fighting, of valiant individuals being crushed by expediency would be too predictable (it was oftentimes this season). For the show to continue, it would have to turn a new page in its tonality and approach the urban experience in a different light. The show would have to focus on something else besides decay and a blue-collar city’s fall from grace and embrace recent demographic and labor trends.

I read once somewhere that if Simon were to do a Sixth Season, it would be about the influx of Latinos in Baltimore, and more broadly, in the U.S. That would be perfect. Instead of showing something rotting, it would show something new and coming into being. The time is ripe for the first great television show about the experience of Latino immigrants in this country – and to be executed in that gritty, uncompromising Burns-Simon style. So, it’s too bad that they won’t be doing this - though I think Baltimore wouldn't be the right setting for a show like this.

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I’ll also say this: the plotline of the Sun was the weakest in the series. It had its moments but it never had the same legs as the world of the docks, the police, the Hall or the streets. Why? It lacked good characters. None of the characters ever became really three-dimensional. We mostly saw them at work. Scott was nothing more than a pip-squeaking lying reporter. We could have seen a personal scene where he’s visiting some successful college buddy or his parents to better understand his motivations. This would have added a lot of texture.

Likewise with Alma and Fletcher. Besides one scene where Haynes is at home, we never really got a feel for who they were. Perhaps in a 13-episode season this would have been different.

I was particularly disappointed in this episode. Haynes has all this evidence against Scott and it never fully comes out. Scott never has to defend himself in front of the editors who presumably make excuses for his work. There’s all this tension building and building – and then nothing comes of it. Just a lame montage scene of him accepting a Pulitzer at Columbia. There needed to be a climax scene like there was between Levy and Pearlman.

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A funny thing about this season: it was all shot during the spring and summer months. I don’t know any other season that did that. The Baltimore of this season looks more inviting than seasons past.

I always have a bit of envy watching summer scenes where all the characters wear short sleeve shirts at night. Can’t do that in San Francisco save five freakish nights of the year. That scene in the park with Bubbles and Waylon was particularly well shot.

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As for the Fayette Mafia boys? Michael becomes Omar, Dukie-Bubbles, Namond looks poised to become like Bunny or Carver, and who knows what Randy will become. Sadly, only Namond will become anything. The rest will flame out at some point.

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I liked that scene at the end with Marlo. He’s like Greggs or McNulty: he’s just meant for action. He can’t really change who he is. He doesn’t feel right in that suit at the downtown cocktail event. Instead he has to crack heads at some forlorn corner in his own neighborhood. After he scatters the hoodlums, he wears an expression that seems to say, “Damn that felt good!” The corners are all he knows. Like we’ve seen with Omar or Greggs or a thousand other characters: you can’t change who you are. This man will always be a man of the streets. His background is his destiny.

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It's always been unclear to me what exactly Daniels' transgressions were at the Eastern District when he was coming up. Obviously, they were big enough to warrant his dismissal. It's been around since Season One but it's never been explained exactly what he did. We've just seen a binder being waved around with menace by different officials. A rare overlooked detail on the show.

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I'll close with this thought:

At the end of the day, “The Wire” isn’t about Baltimore or corrupt bureaucracies and drug organizations: it was a 60-episode lament of the decline of community, of trust and the social and moral decay that results from this. While Robert Reich’s “Supercapitalism” could be read as the catalyst for what we’ve seen over the last six years on our televisions, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” would be its social result. When Putnam writes, “Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century” it might as well be Simon talking.

Simon wants there to be a tighter social cohesion, where people don’t just get ahead by “shutting up and playing it up” but have an incentive to do the right things – as Daniels wanted to do with the police department – to make social institutions function more justly and with greater competence. Only then will people trust each other more, and have incentives to act in the public interest. People shouldn't just want to earn enough money to shut themselves away in a gated community but should be fully engaged in their surrounding communities.

It was an amazing show and I’ll be re-watching it for a long time.

- I’ll post more when I have more time and when I’ve gotten the chance to watch the episode for a second time.

2008-03-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

Late Editions

“My name is my name.” – Marlo
“Be creative gentlemen.” – Michael Steintorf (Carcetti’s chief of staff)

Wow. The second-to-last episode in every season has always been the action-packed one and “Late Editions” did not disappoint. The similar ones in season’s three and four were among the show’s all-time best and were penned (as this one was) by D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos.

“Late Editions” started out with a very quick pace, almost as if they were making up for lost time. The Stanfield re-supply is discovered, staked out, and taken down all in the first 15-20 minutes.

Given that the police have spent much of the last two seasons building up a case against his operation, the take down happened with surprisingly little drama. I was almost disappointed. I was at least hoping for some dramatic face-to-face in the interrogation room between Bunk and Chris. We see the SWAT team going in directly after the scene where Daniels calls in for a warrant to go into the warehouse. No jockeying for power among different agencies. For once, everything operates as it is supposed to.

One thing this season has lacked up until this point: surprises. McNulty brutalizing that DOA body in episode two and Prop Joe’s death were the only two things that jump out. Every other plot twist has been fairly predictable. But having Snoop and Omar dropped by people you wouldn’t think of as their adversaries added a nice twist. Those were the “Damn!” moments.

That scene with Michael and Snoop in the alley was memorable: a sudden switch from on the hunt to the hunted. Snoop shows no real surprise when she knows she’s about to get got. We even see, for the first time, some femininity. She asks Michael, “How do I look?” before he kills her. “You look good girl.” He pulls the trigger. The creed she lived by, “Deserve got nuthin’ to do with it” was fulfilled by her protégé.

But her look reminded me of the one on Chris’ face when he learns he’s caught a murder. It’s like, “Hey, it’s just a part of the game and I didn’t expect much else to happen anyways.”

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This was the first episode where I found myself feeling sorry for Marlo and his crew. Why? How isolated they are from society, from humanity and really – from themselves. What was a tight operation appears to be disintegrating into a sort of “Reservoir Dogs” cruelty where the players turn on themselves. When you think about it, it was entirely predictable.

Why? Simply put: there’s no trust in Marlo’s organization; no “code” as Omar and Bunk believe in the word. Witness what Snoop says to O-Dog when he learns he has to take a few years for a gun charge he’s innocent of: either take the years or find himself “working at Wal-Mart or some shit.” It’s cruel, it’s mean but people like O-Dog know they have no other good choices. Such actions only encourage short-term loyalty.

There was some vindication in finally seeing Marlo’s lack of trust - and resulting narcissism - turn on him. I’d bet a lot of money this guy was abandoned by his parents at a young age. Whether it was spying on Vondas after Omar’s heist last season or flying to the Caribbean to take money out of his bank, the guy has no trust in anybody. He effectively made getting picked up by the police a death sentence. You’re guilty before proven innocent as Little Kevin and Bodie found out. Michael was sly enough to realize this and make a pre-emptive strike.

What’s sad about it is how no one from this world is able to really escape their neighborhood, their circumstances, their frame of reference to the world. For instance, it never occurs to him that Levy is culpable for anything. Marlo’s boys hear “sources of information” and instantly think about a snitch – one of their own. They’re just not educated enough to think outside of their environment and as a result find themselves isolated from the surrounding society. Paranoia occurs. “I just don’t see the boy snitching,” Chris says. “Are you willing to bet your future on that?” Marlo replies.

The best example of this isolation is in Season Three where Stringer attempted to become a business man. Avon ridiculed him. Stringer wanted to be something greater than just a West Baltimore drug dealer but found himself out of his league dealing with people like Clay Davis. It wasn’t about the corners, he told Avon, it was “about product” and distribution. But no one agreed with him. He couldn’t overcome the environment he grew up in and he died as a result of a lifetime of shady deals.

The counter to this is Namond. That was his world but he’s been removed from it and is thriving. All it took was a little love and respect, something he got none of from a mom who wanted him to be a drug dealer.

I figured that Michael was poised to become the next Marlo but instead he looks like another refugee of the corners. That was a profound scene in the car outside the Arabber stables where Dukie and Michael talk about the past. It was well acted and paced. Great long silences. I liked the way that Dukie looked at Michael but Michael didn’t look back. Just proves that while Michael is more confident than Dukie, he’s less connected to the world outside him. Dukie is resourceful, he’s courageous enough to ask for other’s help. Like the rest, he has bad choices but he hasn’t adapted a hardness that – as we’ve seen with Michael – is equal parts an asset and a liability.

That conversation between Lester and Clay would seem to set up a plot thread for Season Six: going after Levy and the white-collar criminals who enable the drug trade. It’s about time the focus went there. However, there is talk of a Wire movie…

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One thing I cannot quite understand is Greggs’ motivation in ratting on McNulty. She’s always been one of the boys in the squad. What compelled her to go to Daniels? Perhaps it’s the humiliation she suffered. She interviewed the families of the “victims,” accompanied him to Quantico, dug up files. She has a right to be pissed. But she doesn’t seem happy about the final result: Marlo in bracelets. I’m surprised too, how McNulty didn’t defend himself to her, how he never took credit for it.

Great line from Landsman to McNulty: “With everything we’ve given you, you should have fire coming out of your ass.”

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This is the episode where Bubbles became Reginald. This show wouldn’t have been the same without him – it would have been just a really well-crafted cops-and-robbers show. He’s the real “Dickensian aspect” the Sun’s editors are after. He’s the real humanity on the show. We see the pain of the city through his journey, how common people are tripped up by the internecine conflicts that clog up bureaucracies.

And his line, “Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief as long as you make room for other things,” was one of the show’s all-time best.

- “You lie about combat if you weren’t there.” Good line from the vet. Joseph J. Ellis would agree.

- Carcetti has become what he said he wouldn’t be: the statistics-obsessed politician. His ambition for the governor’s mansion has made him break all the promises he kept. He’s become totally unlikable.

- Herc has fallen too. He’s a snitch for Levy now.

- It’s worth pointing out that the last few episodes have been the season’s best. They’ve all written by crime novelists who write for the show: Richard Price, Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane. Coincidence? Also, there was a large profile of Richard Price in Sunday’s NY Times.

- I still don’t quite understand the code, and how Lester got map coordinate “G10” from the clock time he saw on the phones. But then, I’ve watched “LA Confidential” four times and couldn’t explain the plot to anybody.

- I’m tired of how every episode this season lifts its title from some aspect of journalism. A lot of the episode titles haven’t been especially descriptive or emblematic of its contents.

- Oh, sorry about giving away the plot twist for "No Country for Old Men" last week for parable's sake. I just figured most people had seen it. My bad.

I’m looking forward to next week’s episode “ – 30 – “ with anticipation and dread. I can’t believe this show’s gonna end! Though I’ll probably do better in my classes when it does.

And by the way, “- 30 –“ is the old school way to sign the end of a press release. When I wrote press releases I’d end them with “###” but one of my old bosses made me change to that.
The final episode isn’t available On Demand so I won’t be able to blog about it in detail till the 11th.

If there’s anybody in LA interested in having a “Wire” party let me know!

2008-02-25T07:34:00.001-08:00

"Conscience do cost.”

Clarifications

“There are some things that happen, you don’t ever fuck with them.” – Terry, the homeless vet

RIP Omar. I knew he was going to die but didn’t expect it to be from a head shot delivered like a sucker punch from little Kenard. I was hoping the hunt would continue till the very end.

And yet challenging audience expectations has always been a hallmark of “The Wire.” His death reminded me of how one of the characters dies in “No Country for Old Men.” The movie (my favorite of the year) proceeds as if it is leading up to final a showdown between two men. That is what the audience is expecting… and then (I'm editing this post so as not to give it away to those who have seen it - my apologies), it doesn't quite happen that way.

Similarly, we were watching this season with anticipation for the “High Noon” moment where our hero surprises some combination of Chris, Snoop, Monk and Marlo in a Baltimore alley and dispenses the justice the police can’t meter out.

I didn’t notice it till the second viewing but Kenard was one of the kids torturing the cat in the alley. Makes you think of that dismissive line Omar said last season when he was watching Michael talk to Marlo: “He just a kid.” His death mirrors that of Jesse James or Wild Bill Hickock – fearsome gunslingers gunned down by marginal figures they never would have thought to fear.

In a way it was his old-school sensibility that did him in. “Marlo Stanfield is not a man for this town,” he says, betting that people may respond to his invocation of honor. Omar went after more established muscle, the shady folks in the game. What he either didn’t realize or accept is how pervasive the game is now, how even pre-pubescent, entry-level hoppers like Kenard see themselves inextricably a part of it and want to move up. Kenard knows as well as anyone how violence commands the upmost respect in the wretched world he lives in: it’s easy to see how he would see shooting Omar as the most rational thing he can do to get ahead.

The death scene happened very early in the episode. It took me aback, like when Nate Fisher dies near the end of the last season of “Six Feet Under.” But after hearing the Michael K. Williams interview on “Fresh Air” in which he says, “It’s Baltimore baby, everybody dies!” you knew it was inevitable. And his death doesn’t even warrant making the Sun.

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Ever since the wire was surreptitiously launched a few episodes ago, this season has had legs. It dragged a bit before as we watched McNulty painstakingly set up the lie of the serial killer. There was too much focus on the horrors of budget cuts, the resulting low morale and what is perhaps the central theme of “The Wire” – the dysfunctional mechanics of institutions.

But now that’s changing. A lot of the key characters are coming back with fresh missions: Greggs and Carcetti especially. The producers seem to have finally settled on who the important characters are at the Sun and aren’t throwing all these extraneous characters at us who we don’t know or care much about. We just saw Fletcher, Haynes and Scott this episode with minimal exposure to other Sun characters. By and large, that whole world and plotline hasn’t sung so well and part of the reason “Clarifications” was so great is that the Sun felt in the background to the developing police investigation of Marlo.

When you’re watching all of Carver’s people drive around in their Enterprise cars, it reminds you of Season One and why you first liked the show so much to begin with. It shifted the focus away from selling the con of the homeless murderer to building the case against Marlo. And the truth is starting to come out little by little and I’m just disappointed there’s only two more episodes to explore this. I wish this episode had come one or two in the past.

Everyone is eating right out of McNulty’s hand. “The king of fucking diamonds,” as Bunk told him. He’d grin like a Cheshire cat if no one were around in that police room using Compstat to con everyone.

But McNulty doesn’t seem to have the emotional stability of Lester to be able to deal with this. Out there on that porch talking to Beadie – the guy looks positively lonely. He wants to be understood so badly. He wants to be appreciated, he wants someone to validate him. And this keeps him spilling the beans and you know it’s not going to end well.

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It looks like it’s going to end well for Carcetti. He’s getting traction on the homeless thing and making all the necessary deals. This was a very good political episode (Oh yeah, PG is Prince George County, I believe). The conversations at the hall are always strategic. How can we play this? How is this going to advance my own ambition? However, he runs into a problem that Kerry did in ’04, taking the black vote for granted. Ah, when will the Democrats learn?!?

As one reader remarked last week, Carcetti is now a full-blown political hack. “New Day” does seem far away. He keeps leaving money on the table just so he looks good. That scene where he’s watching TV at home while his wife meekly looks at him showed this better than any other. She’s not even asking him to do the right thing any more.

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One gets the feeling that Michael is too independent for what’s he’s doing – he’s a leader. My bet is the series ends with him ascending to Marlo’s place. And the importance of the Omar and Michael scene is not what it said about Marlo but what it made Michael think about Marlo. Marlo had cultivated this image of the invincible one and it looks like Michael is questioning it (and by next week’s preview doing something about it). He doesn’t think he’s for real any more. The kid just can’t seem to stand anyone being in a position of power over him. I wonder why…

Surprised Snoop and Chris don’t do more than lightly push him in the scene where he’s mouthing off at them about what Omar said. Chris doesn’t seem happy with Omar’s death. Professionally disappointed? Wish he had pulled the trigger?

And yet, it’s Bunk who is going to bring Chris to jail. “No shuckin’, no jiving. Just good old police work,” he tells McNulty. He’s going to do what McNulty or Omar couldn’t do, and he got it done by being resourceful.

“Good old honest work,” he says. And Bunk is joined in his work ethic by Dukie and Fletcher. By contrast, there’s McNulty, Scott and Clay Davis. I’ve never watched a show that pays as much attention to work ethic as this one is. Simon and Burns’ take on it feels almost Calvinstic in its morality.

- One thing that the producers seem intent on pushing across time and time again: Federal authorities are pompous, egotistical and unhelpful. But this time they’re right on in their description of the suspect… only it’s McNulty. Amazing how they describe him so perfectly. “Trouble with lasting relationships” authority and likes alcohol. As they leave the building McNulty says, “They’re in the ballpark.” Classic.

- Hey, Fletcher used my term, calling Bubbs a “tour guide.”

- Good line: “Playing that race card, shameful.” Clay. Wasn’t quite sure what Lester was wanting Clay to do by confronting him in the bar.

- Who thought Sydnor would have broken the code? He’s always been the real salt-of-the-earth guy on the show. He’s never shown us any flashes of intelligence nor any idiosyncracies to really attach ourselves to. He’s not a memorable character, but he gets it. “That’s police work son,” Lester tells him.

- I liked Poot’s cameo. He’s the only one from the orginal S1 crew in the low-rises that got away. “Shit got old,” he tells Dukie. And he broke his own prophecy, “world going one way, people another,” by getting out of the game.

- The first time, I didn’t understand the identity switch by the OCME guy in the last scene. Then I saw: they were switched to begin with. It’s a scene I think that just shows the notoriety of Omar and how everyone knew him.

- That line I put below Omar's photo comes from something Butchie said in S3.

- Lastly, I want to thank everyone who leaves a comment on my blog. If I had more time I’d respond to people’s comments but I get a lot of out reading them.

2008-02-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

Took

“Shame on ya’ll. And I mean it.” – Bunk

I had a lot of déjà vu in this episode: it reminded me so much of Season One, particularly the episode (“The Hunt”) where the cops search for those who shot Greggs. They even had the same surveillance shot from the helicopter with the date visible.

The first two seasons put a lot of emphasis on police work, how it’s done, how cases are built, and “Took” was a return to the basics of the show. I thought it was one of this season’s best with a brisk pace that didn’t get bogged down in very long scenes which has been a weakness this season.

Speaking of “The Hunt,” even Savino was back (he was the one who set up Orlando and Greggs to get ambushed by Little Man and Wee-Bey), albeit he was only around long enough to become Omar’s third Stanfield causality (speaking of which, whatever happened to O-Dog?).

The juxtaposition between Daniels and Haynes both dispatching their troops was very effective. They’re both trying to do the right thing, too bad what they’re trying to make right is just a scam. But Daniels is different than Burrell. There’s no “dope on the table” speech from him (I don’t know what the equivalent is when you hunt after a serial). It was a vintage “Wire” scene, showing how institutions react to a crisis.

Fitting that McNulty was in the opening scene since Dominic West (McNulty) directed the episode. Crime novelist Richard Price wrote the script. I was very impressed by the directing in the episode. I liked the way he shot certain scenes.

My favorite was where Landsman tells Bunk to come upstairs to join the hunt for the fictitious homeless serial killer. The whole time, the camera sits on Bunk with Landsman blurred in the background. You see how his rage building and building until he unleashes a tirade at his boss without looking at him. “Fuck your stripes and fuck McNulty!” he finally says. Landsman leaves him be.

I was disappointed that Bunk’s scene with Michael didn’t last longer. I thought they cut it short. I wanted to see if Michael was gonna break when confronted with the murder of the “baby bumping motherfucker.” You didn’t see him stonewall or anything.

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Scott, McNulty and Lester all seem to have created the same problem for themselves: they don’t have an exit strategy. They didn’t foresee things getting carried away the way they are now. Scott almost trips on his own lie when grilled by his editors. That scene with McNulty had my favorite sequence of dialogue:

“He’s just using you,” McNulty says. “He needs you.”
“I kind of resent that,” Scott says.
“I don’t know. Kind of working well for both of you.”

How true it is. Characters are just using the tools in front of them to manipulate the public for their own agenda. Scott and McNulty are the same in that way as is Clay Davis.

The courtroom scenes with Clay were great. Isiah Whitlock, Jr. plays the character so well. What’s particularly impressive is how he is able to switch emotions so easily and quickly. He can go from talking like a preacher, to showing real fear and anger without a blink.

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I do think that the producers have made some odd decisions about the Sun. Here we are, four shows from the end of the season and Fletcher is finally introduced to us as a real character. Now Fletcher is a good character, his gentleness and human touch set him up as the heir apparent to Haynes, but why did they wait till now to do this? It’s especially strange when you see that Alma – who got a lot of exposure the first three episodes – hasn’t had a worthy line in a while. But he’s to Scott what Bunk is to McNulty, the professional working patiently and honestly to find the story and do right by that.

I like the scenes with him and Bubbs. This episode was a big one for him. He’s not washing dishes any longer, he’s serving food and next we see him helping out Fletcher. Bubbs is doing for him what he did for the police: helping someone with a benevolent goal navigate a world they otherwise would not understand. He’s like a tour guide or something. Bubbs doesn’t seem calculated enough to have any alterior goal for himself, he just likes to help people out. “Write it like it feels,” he tells the cub who follows his bosses advice to “just spend a day being with people.”

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- I guess I can't finish without mentioning Omar. I don't quite get why he surprised Michael like that. He's already put the word out that Marlo is a bitch if he doesn't come after him on the street; he's already dropped three of his muscle and harmed his business. Aren't the speeches getting a little old? I'm anticipating the Chris-Snoop-Omar showdown with the greatest anticipation.

- The final scene was one of the best ever on this show. Greggs talking to her child telling her a nursery rhyme of sorts about nighttime Baltimore - saying good night to all the illegal elements in the city. You look at her with her baby and Fletcher pounding the streets like an honest man and you have hope.

And you know, I get like that too when I have to assemble Ikea stuff too (like the desk I’m currently writing on).

- Carcetti dialing for dollars. It’s so easy when you’re Mayor.
- I’m hoping to see Prez make a guest appearance next episode and break the code of the clock. I’m assuming Vondas made it up since he’s the one who gave Marlo the original phone. In that scene in the park he shows Marlo something with the phone just when the camera cuts away. I'll be damned if I know what it means.

2008-02-11T19:26:00.001-08:00

The Dickensian Aspect

“Homelessness huh? I’ll be damned.” – Carcetti

A good Carcetti episode. He has been one of my favorite characters on the show, simply because he’s changed so vividly and convincingly through every season. He may come across as a conniving politician interested in advancing his own career of late, but that homeless speech was fun to listen to. It did have a lot of pep. With his short height up on the podium, he seems like Paul Wellstone with a Baltimore accent.

But of course, in the back room, he transforms a social problem into one that could lead him to the Governor’s mansion. And then he doesn’t back up his words with more police surveillance. But still, to his defense, what can he do without the money? (“He just don’t want the cost,” Rawls says.) I think that he’s always been largely a sympathetic character. He does good with what he has. He could go the extra mile on things, like taking the Governor’s money for the schools.

The irony is, if he did that, he would not have had to cut police funding which might have lead to Marlo’s arrest which would have averted the fictitious “homeless serial killer” which is giving him his signature campaign issue! So, in a twisted, circuitous route, he helped himself in his gubernatorial run by not taking the money from the Governor, though not of course how he saw it happening.

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One thing I scratch my head about over at the Sun is the disappearance of Alma as a character. She got “a lot of play” (as she would say) over the first few episodes but now is relegated to Scott’s shadow. Much like we see Bunk serving as McNulty’s moral foil on good police work, I think it would be effective to see her pounding the pavement generating honest journalism to serve as Scott’s foil. But she’s barely been there.

Still, I gotta give credit where it’s due. The scene where Scott interviews the vet seemed a little superfluous at first but it came together when Haynes was commending it back at the Sun. He is capable of doing the grunt work, of making it happen. But then, he creates – what one would presume – to be another lie about the woman’s sister from a previous article who died did not gambling away the charity money but making up another story. It seems so insignificant now but I’m thinking this will be the small little crack that will unravel the whole homeless murder bullshit. And then heads will role.

There were a lot of really long scenes in this episode. Scott interviewing the Iraq vet, the press conference about the homeless murders, McNulty taking the homeless man to the shelter. If this were a network show, these would have been edited way down.

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Above all, “The Dickensian Aspect” saw the emergence of Bunk as a moral force. He’s always been one of the most likeable characters on the show but he never seemed as dedicated as McNulty nor as intelligent as Lester. But here he comes into his own. He’s not going to rat out McNulty so he’s going to lead by example. “I don’t fuck with no make believe. Work it like I’m supposed to,” he tells a non-plussed McNulty.

And he makes headway. “The Wire” likes to have good and bad examples in every section of society. It’s a little predictable now that you watch every episode. Towards the end of every season, the police make headway after initial frustration, and it seems like Bunk will lead the way this season on this.

Loved the scene of McNulty talking to the statue. Shows how truly, the man is just plain lonely. He can’t talk the way he wants to with anybody it seems save Lester. And that look on his face when Landsman rejects his call for surveillance: he’s more hurt by anything Landsman says than anything Beadie or his ex-wife ever says to him.

Lester's speech to Sidnor was great. How he saw the decision to abandon the Marlo investigation as "illegitimate." He and McNulty both seem emotionally pained by what happened, their dedication to their work is so great. He is so much more thoughtful than McNulty. And yet he's linked his fate to his. I'd hate to see him fall in this show, but when your partner is as much of a loose cannon as he is, it seems all but probable.

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A few of you wrote about how Omar seemed a little rusty. He got it back in this episode. His tactics are curious however. He keeps trying to appeal to Marlo’s sense of masculinity – one could say, an old-fashioned masculinity – by telling people “he ain’t man enough to come at me.”

Now, it’s ironic that a gay stick-up boy would accuse the drug lord of Baltimore of not being masculine – one could say he’s talking a page out of Bush’s book when he attacked Kerry for not being an authentic war hero – but I have my doubts that it will work.

Besides the time when he shot that girl who Barksdale set him up to have sex to arrange his murder in S3, Marlo’s never done anything so menacing as wave a golf club around. He has no incentive to meet Omar’s threats. His credibility as a man in this community comes from his ability to have his muscle make people disappear and take over drug real estate. That’s what real power is, when you don’t to raise your voice to re-alter the landscape. It looks more and more like Omar’s sentiments don’t fit in with the new landscape of the Baltimore drug trade. And we’ve seen what happens to characters on this show who don’t fit in as old-school codes are abandoned in favor of the zero-sum game of self-advancement and results.

Meanwhile, Marlo thinks that the best way to lead is through fear. “Bring it to me, or sit on that shit,” he tell the co-op. He rules like a king. I see a revolt brewing.

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- Randy got big. That sweet, wily boy with the great smile seems long gone. He’s been socialized to learn that tough makes right, that you only gain credibility through intimating violence. Watching this scene, you can see why the police can’t make inroads in this community, and why people like Marlo and Chris turn out the way they do.

- Loved how they got Nancy Grace up there acting like Nancy Grace.

- The boys of the dock live on! Good to see them. At least they haven't changed.

2008-02-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

React Quotes

“How do you get from here to the rest of the world?” – Dukie

A juicy thickening of all the plotlines in this episode. Everybody gets deeper into what they’re doing and it doesn’t appear that there’s a way out for many of them. Lester, McNulty, Marlo, Chris, Scott, Omar… there’s no shortage of people on this show who are completely committed to what they are doing. You have to admire their dedication, no matter how twisted their agenda may be.

Something I picked up on a little in previous episodes was more apparent in “React Quotes”: Chris is not happy with Marlo. He’s more prudent that his petulant boss. He seemed skeptical about going after Bodie at the end of last season and doesn’t appreciate how the targeting of Omar – which is totally unnecessary from a business perspective – is screwing up his life. But he’s gotta be as ruthless as his boss demands (but hey, at least we saw Marlo smile in this episode as he saw Chris play with his kids. Had no idea he was a family man).

What’s so scary about him is how coldly professional he is. I didn’t understand until the second viewing that Monk was set up as bait for Marlo (of all the actors on the show, Jamie Hector – Marlo – is the most difficult to understand). Chris is always thinking a step ahead of his opposition. Besides the murder of Michael’s father, he has always executed people with a dispassionate efficiency. He even cautions his boss away from living the high life in the AC.

Outsmarting Avon wasn’t too hard but he’s ahead of Omar here and nearly ends his life. That jumping out the window though, that felt too much like it was out of a Batman or superhero flick. Can a guy jump out of a four-story window and just walk away?

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During the first four episodes, the Sun mostly ran a largely self-contained plotline. I think that’s why the whole world of the newspaper just doesn’t have the same gravitas and appeal that the world of the docks, the streets, the police or the school had. The Sun doesn’t have a mission that feels as vital or as important compared to what characters from previous seasons went through.

There’s a coldness, a distance to all the characters at the paper. None of them, save Haynes, I have found especially likeable. Scott is just an ambitious brat whose lack of idiosyncracies makes him wholly unlikeable. Alma doesn’t take enough initiative for us to want to root for her. We rooted for McNulty is Season One, the boys at the docks in Season Two, Bunny Colvin in Season Three and the kids in Season Four but who are we rooting for this season? The show lacks a hero now, which I suppose one could argue, is Simon’s point.
The central plot premise of the season – will McNulty get away with his serial killer story to boost the police budget to apprehend Marlo – didn’t really come into vogue until last episode but now, in the words of Scott, it’s got “juice.”

Great scene where McNulty calls his bluff in the newsroom. Scott now knows that McNulty is lying. My guess: Scott will ultimately get trapped in his own lie and will take McNulty down with him. McNulty didn’t have to second him at the meeting. He could have just let the reporter stand alone. Both are committed to perpetrating the small con to bring about the larger con. They’re the same but they just don’t know it.

Scott’s lying gets more elaborate. The homeless woman he interviewed “couldn’t stop stroking her daughter’s blond hair.” Classic.

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So far, I’ve found the Clay Davis plotline pretty straightforward. But this episode gave us something we haven’t seen too much of – if at all – on “The Wire”: the invocation of the race card.

Listen to Clay’s defense of himself on the radio show. He calls the host “my brother” and talks about “the people” and invokes “they” who are “pulling the strings” and “prosecuting, no, persecuting” him. He adopts the language of a Black Panther member from the sixties to beef up the “us vs. them” story to cover up his sizeable transgressions. He hopes this cloaking of himself in the narrative of the aggrieved minority standing up to the powerful white political establishment will get him off the hook. This is what Marion Berry attempted. Identity politics has long been a staple of African-American politics, and watching this scene makes you appreciate the breath of fresh air that people like Obama and Corey Booker, the Mayor of Newark, have breathed into this world (The New Yorker has made the link cold, but the article in the Feb. 4 issue about Corey Booker was fantastic).

Next, we see him standing next to Royce on Calvert Street who wears a tie to match his “Marcus Garvey” campaign approach from last season. It reminds me of something one of my professors said a few months ago: if you get people to buy into your metaphor, you get them to buy into your solution.

So, in this episode, we saw McNulty using sexual manipulation to get his non-story on the front page, Royce and Clay Davis using racial manipulation to defray their own corruption, and Scott using the pulpit of the press to advance his own career. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” Bunk said. Amen.

- Levy the lawyer. It seems pretty obvious he’s using Herc to try and incriminate Marlo and get “some business for the law firm.” He’s not a dumb man.
- Great music in this episode (seeing Donnie, sing along to those Motown songs in the car) was a good character window.
- It was great to see Cutty back. That was a good, long conversation between him and Dukie. They both seek an alternative to the world they live in. “World is bigger than that,” Cutty tells his new disciple. “At least that’s what they tell me.” But what is the alternative to the world they live in and how do they get there?
- What will Daniels do with his frustration? If Carcetti had just took the money from the governor at the end of last season, much of all this could have been averted.

2008-02-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

I'm behind the eight-ball on a few things today so I won't be able to post about "React Quotes" till tomorrow.

In the meantime, check out this link on the Freakonomics blog to what "real thugs" think of the show. It's very interesting, written by the guy responsible for the "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers" chapter in Freakonomics, the book (hat tip to my man at NY Magazine).

Damn, what a Bowl!

2008-01-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

"Same blood but not the same heart." - Cutty

Transitions

“It matters. It all matters. I know we thought it didn’t but it does.” – Carver
“Singed, your true and loyal friend, Prop Joe.” – Prop Joe

This was easily the best episode of the season. Great, great writing in particular. I can think of few Wire episodes with so many memorable lines. It also somehow managed to keep up a brisk pace without feeling as rushed as previous S5 episodes.

This season has been exceptionally plot driven compared to prior ones – ostensibly to accommodate the stresses of a ten-episode season. What was sacrificed in the first three episodes was a focus on the personal lives of the ensemble cast – a badly needed texture if you ask me. “Transitions” went back there showing us the characters as they behave away from work and it worked very well.

There were many great “character windows” (to use a screenwriting term) in this episode. Greggs had really disappeared from the show emotionally. She had broke up with her partner, gotten used to the homicide detail. That is why her observations of the orphaned witness were so important. It just showed us a different side to her that we hadn’t seen in awhile. It added a fullness to her character that was missing.

Likewise the scene where McNulty goes home and gets chastised by Beadie. Yes, it was predictable, but it was an important scene that gives us a more human feel for our characters. We haven’t seen much of that with the newspaper people yet.

Of course, the best of all these “window” scenes was the conversation between Prop Joe and Cheese at the very end. “Why you live in this dump with all the money you got?” quips the codeless Cheese. “Your great grandfather was the first colored man to buy a house in Johnson Square,” Joe says. “That means something… something you youngins lost.” Then there’s the shot of his grandfather and his bride.

There’s no concept of history to people like Cheese and Marlo. And where do you learn to appreciate history? School. Parents. Family. And these are exactly the kinds of institutions that are lacking in the moral and economic emptiness of their neighborhood. And in the absence of this, they learn to get what they want through strength, by exercising raw, cold-blooded power. It’s like the return of the state of nature.

Beyond his ruthlessness evil, Marlo also is impossibly narcissistic. It’s always about him. “I treated you like a son,” Joe quips. “I wasn’t made to play no son,” Marlo replies in a memorable line. But I’m a little disappointed that through three seasons with this character, we haven’t seen any windows into him. We never learn anything personal about him, no personal tastes or preferences. But, perhaps that’s just the way he is, just a simple, one-dimensional, heartless gangster. Maybe what you see is really who he is.

It’s a shame to see Joe go, he was a great character. However, thinking back on it, he always yielded to the violent types. Every time Omar pressured him he gave in. And he eventually did with Marlo. It’s a surprise to me why this guy didn’t have more muscle around him. He just expected that people would behave decently showing respect when respect is given. But Marlo proved him wrong. There’s got to be a chapter in “The 48 Laws of Power” that Joe violated here. Points to the reader who can cite it.

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I’m very glad that the Daniels-Burrell-Rawls police commissioner plot line got resolved. It had been going on for awhile and badly needed resolution. And it was a satisfactory one.

Burrell’s speech to Rawls as he packs up his office was a great one. It sounded out of Macbeth. “You might think it would be different when you sit here, but it won’t,” he says. “You will eat their shit.” It ties into that pervasive theme in “The Wire” about the endless frustration of bureaucracies; that everybody is controlled by somebody else in this vast web of power that no body can quite understand nor control.

And when Daniels sits in Rawls chair later on, he sits there and smiles. He thinks it will be different. But experience says that it won’t.

Conflicts of loyalty were all over “Transitions.” Many people caught between being loyal – and what being loyal meant – and their own ambitions. The Greek and Vondas pondering what to do about Marlo and his suitcases full of neatly packed bills. “But he is not Joe,” Vondas says. “He will keep coming back,” the Greek says. “He is not Joe.” Their moral quandary, however, was resolved for them across town.

Daniels trying to assuage a silent Burrell that his force-out is not his fault, that he’s a good soldier after all. But, at the end of the episode, he looks pretty content sitting at Rawls’ old desk. And Carver, decides to write up that idiot officer Colicchio after he doesn’t accept the story Carver comes up with about what happened. He has a loyalty to standards even though he knows he will pay a price from the men he commands. (That scene was just like Season 1 where Daniels tells Prez, Carver and Herc what they should say to Internal Affairs after their ill-fated mission to the towers goes awry and Prez blinded that kid).

And of course, there’s Omar, who never flinches for a second when the question of loyalty comes up. He’s there, all the way through. There is absolutely no economic incentive in his return to Baltimore. It’s all pride and loyalty. With the moral fall of McNulty and Lester, he’s one of the few heroes left on the show.

- I related to McNulty and Lester this episode. Just for a minute. Once I wrote an article about crime in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I walked around the area near the foot of Haight Street and tried to interview homeless people and like McNulty, not too many people wanted to talk to me. And I wasn’t even wearing a suit and tie.

- One thing that is unclear to me: Did Cheese collude with Marlo in Joe’s death? When he walks out the door at the end, Marlo walks in and the business is finished minutes later. We’ll see whether the law of pride and loyalty to family win out with him, or whether the law of self-interest does. Judging by the sacrifice of Hungry Man, and seeing Cheese for four seasons now, he’ll choose the latter.

- McNulty showing off his badge at the bar like it was a medal he won. The man has fallen far. He needs a vacation.

- Viewership is down this season for the show. Oh yes, and that photo is from last episode's. I thought it was fitting for this one.

- Lastly, one thing I have to get off my chest. I just cringe every time I see Daniel Attias’ name up on the screen (he was the director for this episode and has directed several episodes). Why? Professionally, perhaps there’s no good reason. It just makes me think of that fateful night, seven years ago next month, when his son murdered four people with his car at my alma matter, UC Santa Barbara, while I was at school there. Lucky I was downtown that night. I’m very disappointed that the insanity plea worked and that he ended up in a mental hospital instead of jail.

2008-01-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Michael K. Williams interviewed on "Fresh Air"

The interview with Terry Gross was broadcast on Tuesday. It's a great interview. I found it riveting from start to finish. Didn't know that he was homeless for an entire year. At the end she asks him if Omar dies at the end of the season. Williams' response, "It's Baltimore baby!"

This link also lists other features they've done with previous Wire cast members. Clarke Johnson (Haynes) was interviewed on Monday and Jermaine Crawford two weeks ago.

It's pretty amazing how much attention NPR gives to the show. Somewhere in that place is someone who is a Wire fanatic.

2008-01-21T10:42:00.001-08:00

Not for Attribution

“He doesn’t get to win, we get to win.” – McNulty

It’s hard to think that things will end well for McNulty. The way he mocks Bunk to his face in the office, his overbearing petulance… he’s a model of self-destruction, of a man who has completely succumbed to his id. He used to be the hero of the show, committed to solid police work and now he just looks like a man in moral free fall.

In the scene in the bar where he hooks up with the blond, he catches a glance of himself in the mirror. It’s subtle but he can’t quite keep his own gaze. There’s a consciousness below, but he’s too deep into what he’s doing to get in touch with it. He is surrounded by people who don’t take pride in their work, who perform at the bare minimum to get through the day and he just can’t accept it. Despite all the things of ill repute he does, there’s something inspiring about his determination, his drive to win.

I have ambivalent feelings about the “red ribbon” murderer plot thread. As I said about it last week, something about it feels forced. Through the last four seasons we’ve seen McNulty and Freamon wait patiently for cases to hatch, sitting on rooftops for hours. For them to suddenly create this serial killer to make a point and get the money to take down Marlo just doesn’t feel plausible given the pace and deliberation we’ve gotten used to on this show.

Particularly from Lester: He’s always been the calm one. It doesn’t seem a part of his nature to do anything rash. I’m crossing my fingers, but if “The Wire” will prove to have a “Jump the Shark” moment, the scene where Jimmy creates a murder scene at the end of “Unconfirmed Reports” could be it.

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We’ve seen it a million times on this show: people don’t control their own destinies. Still, it was at no time more powerfully shown than in the layoff scene at the Sun. The decision about a case, about what your job will be always comes from above. It’s not the Sun editors making the layoff decisions: it’s Chicago. According to Carcetti, it’s not him cutting the police budget to the bone, it’s the mean Republican governor in Annapolis who’s responsible for not giving him the money to get the city in shape.

Watching this show doesn’t make you exactly want to go out and work in a bureaucracy, or at a large corporation. But that’s what the show is documenting, how these large institutions, which (in theory) used to provide a measure of comfort and security for its members can’t promise that anymore. There’s just too much bottom-line pressure.

(I could talk about this much more but “Supercapitialism” by Robert Reich is a great non-fiction companion piece to this show. Many of the between the show and the book are perfectly congruent. It’s a great, highly readable and original work that I highly recommend it).

By the way, it doesn’t always happen this way. The editor at the LA Times was just forced out because he refused to make newsroom cuts. And the guy he replaced refused to do the same. And maybe that’s why the LA Times is a much better paper than the real Baltimore Sun.

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If there’s a weakness to “The Wire” – one that has held constant in every season – it is a propensity to nostalgize about the past. There’s often this sort of “Greatest Generation” subtext to the show, as if the characters are saying, “Man, things used to be great around here. What happened?”

True, Baltimore has lost a lot of its population over the last four decades, has one of the highest murder rates in the nation and is no longer a big player on the national scene. However, Simon and Burns never point to a new direction. They never seem to point to a new way of being, a second act, for the city. Instead we receive an endless solemnity about the “lost” Baltimore, for the blue-collar work ethic, for pride in one’s work. We have all these illusions to how great everything was in the past.

The conversation between Haynes and Twigg brought this to light. They have so much pride in what they do, but it’s that brutish force of capitalism to “make more with less” and serve the bottom line that shortchanges them. They talk about all the things that made them become journalists. And then Twigg quotes the finest journalist Baltimore has ever known, the famous H.L. Mencken. But Haynes says, “Fuck Henry Mencken.” I didn’t get that, why he would say that.

Mencken and Simon’s lives both have some parallel to each other but I’ll leave that for another post.

And short comments:

- I believe that this was the first episode penned by Chris Collins, who according to the New Yorker article, is the youngest writer for the show. He always appears as “Staff Writer” in the credits. However, in the New Yorker piece, Simon claims to rewrite much of the episodes himself so it’s difficult to know how much of the script originated with the writer itself.

- In a season that has been devoted to the process and effects of public manipulation, the scenes with Clay Davis have a different tint to them. There are no lies in these scenes, no sense of irony, no greater agendas that are being advanced. You just have the slow process of justice. Of course, you could say that Pearlman is trying to manipulate the jury, but at least she's using the truth.

- The Marlo scenes didn’t provide me with any new windows into his character. He doesn’t seem to change too much. We already now how unsocialized he is, how he doesn’t trust anybody, how ruthless he is, how his weakness is pride. At least we got to see the hottest woman ever on this show (the bank teller in the Carribean).

We’ll see what Omar going after him does though. Omar is back. What more do you need to say?!? Interesting to see how he and McNulty fare considering they have the same agenda.

2008-01-14T08:50:00.001-08:00

Unconfirmed Reports

“You got to let it out or let it go.” – Waylon

A very solid episode. This season needed some focus and traction after last episode and “Unconfirmed Reports” (aka “CSI comes to Baltimore”) provided that. It did what “More or Less” failed to do and filtered out the noise and honed in on a few characters’ journeys.

In particular, the world of the Sun really came into being. Last episode, it felt clunky with too many people talking too much jargon (anybody know what an “e-dot” is?), but the scene where the executive editor talks about his desire to have a “Dickensian” series of articles on the city schools brought the season’s theme as well as each character’s ambitions and agendas into focus.

It appears that Haynes is to this season what Bunny Colvin was to the last: the consciousness of the season, the consummate, old-school professional trying to enforce a sense of decency and professionalism in a Machiavellian world obsessed with results.

Haynes line, “I think you need a lot of context to examine anything,” reminded me a lot of Colvin telling the superintendent, “We pretend to teach them and they pretend to learn. They’re learning for their world, not ours.” They both spoke truth to power and failed to make an impression.

One could make the case that Haynes’ line sums up what “The Wire” is essentially concerned with: capturing the context of modern, urban life. And that’s largely responsible for why the show is beloved as much as it is: this obsession with portraying this context as accurately as possible.

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But this episode belonged to McNulty. It’s hard to know immediately what to make of the gut-wrenching final scene. This incredibly grotesque act he commits shows the man in complete free-fall, corrupting the main source of his pride: his work. After the FBI agent tells him, “Fish and fucking Wildlife couldn’t help you,” as he tries to reignite the Stanfield case, he just loses it.

And yet, this act of desperation, of utter frustration has happened so soon. Before, McNulty has displayed a lack of control over his drinking and his womanizing, but it’s always been accompanied by a great commitment to police work. We saw his frustration building, but by attempting to make that death into a murder, what are his intentions? The way the scene played out, it just felt like he wanted to say, “Fuck you” to the city bureaucracy the loudest way he could.

At the very least, for a show that has always avoided cliffhanger episode endings the way a network show like “Lost” is so fond of doing, this dramatic turn feels just a bit rushed. I feel that it’s also lacking context. Two episodes ago, the guy was fine, and now he’s reignited his alcoholic womanizing ways with a vengeance. Is his relationship with Beadie going badly? Do his kids hate him? It has all happened a little too quickly, we didn’t see his breaking point build up quite enough to justify his actions.

(For those of you who watched “Six Feet Under,” it reminded me a little bit of the episode in Season Four where David (Michael Hall’s character”) picks up a hitchhiker who almost murders him. It felt like a radical and unnecessary plot twist at the time. The show took a while to recover from that.)

Bunk’s reaction was also telling. Earlier in the episode when McNulty grabs a body that has come in, he deplores him for “ giving a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck.” But that is what is so winning about McNulty: he does give a fuck in a world where everybody is consummated by self-preservation. And that’s exactly what Bunk does: flees the scene in an act of self-preservation. A professional who wanted the job done right would have intervened.

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There was more than one parallel between McNulty and Bodie in this episode. “There are no fucking rules. Fucking game is rigged,” sounds a lot like Bodie telling him that he felt like “those little bitches on the chessboard” in last season’s finale (did Bodie say “game is rigged” too? I forgot). Neither man can accept being ground down by the higher-ups, and both commit a brazen act of self-destruction when they feel that they have lost total control over their situation.

The deference of Haynes stands in stark contrast to McNulty’s self-implosion. Like McNulty, he is contradicted and betrayed by his superiors, but instead of insolence, he follows the chain of command.

Of course, Scott’s “E.J.” probably has about as much validity as Stephen Glass’ “Juke Micronics” or Jayson Blair’s description of Jessica Lynch’s front yard (Glass and Blair are two of the most famous cases of journalistic malfasence in recent years), but he’s a good soldier and follows orders. But, like McNulty, he’s haunted by the idea that the job wasn’t done right, waking up in the middle of the night.

You never hear it being discussed, but one of the things that Simon seems concerned with the most on the show is the American work ethic. Hell, he devoted Season Two to it. All the heroes on the show are the professionals who show the highest commitment to their work. The show is full of characters who are obsessed with their work and derive much of their identity and sense of self-worth from it. It’s a far cry from one of the current business books in vogue, “The Four Hour Workweek.”

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Great to see Avon back. That scene with him and Marlo reminded me of how great an actor Wood Harris is. He is so much more likeable than his former nemesis who only grows more and more petulant. “I’m what you might call an authority figure around here.” He brings so much life to Avon’s character.

Avon shows something that Marlo lacks: respect. Marlo shows no loyalty, no trust of anybody he does business with. Avon, by contrast, has “nothing but love” where he came from. He and Marlo battled, they played the game, and Marlo won fair-and-square by their rules. Avon respects that. But, sitting in that prison waiting room, you don’t get the impression that Marlo cares one bit for Avon’s West side pride. He’s simply the conduit with which he will use to cut out Prop Joe.

I liked the way the triple-homicide of Junebug and his crew was shot from Michael’s perspective. You just hear shots and screams, you only see the blood and carnage from the police view. The scene was shot to show how the murder of these three people effected Michael.

He’s being groomed to be as cold-blooded and remorseless as Snoop and Chris but he’s not there yet. He questions the perverted honor code of Marlo and his environment where any perceived disrespect is a capital offense. As Chris explains to Michael, “It doesn’t matter if he said that Marlo (sucks dick), it only matters that people think that.” But there’s no one in his world to tell him how disgusting and destructive that logic is. There is no economic advantage in killing Junebug, no territory to take, it’s just about demonstrating toughness and demanding complete subjugation.

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A good Bubbles episode. Poor guy just is not ready to take on any responsibility in his life. He just can’t seem to decide whether he’s meant for this world or not. People ask him to fill bigger shoes but at the end, he only feels comfortable doing the dishes. I liked how the end of the episode contrasted him and McNulty: two frustrated men who can’t quite deal with the uncomfortable realities they face.

2008-01-07T19:33:00.001-08:00

More With Less

“What kind of people stand around watching a fire?” – Haynes

And so, off we go…the much talked about “media season” – which was the subject of glowing write-ups in the LA Times and the NY Times Sunday – finally begins.

We know that this season is going to largely be about manipulation, particularly about how the media sets the public agenda by what they choose – and don’t choose - to cover.

The opening scene with Bunk (rewatching the Fourth Season, the opening scene usually does little to advance the plot, it’s all about setting the theme) was a harbinger of this: how do you manipulate the truth? How do you get the outcomes you want with the information that you have? As we’ve seen with how the institutions run on “The Wire, ”it’s not about truth, it’s about results. Everyone – from the cops, to the dealers to the journalists – has got to hit their numbers. You do what you have to, even magically turn a Xerox machine into a polygraph.

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Still, overall, I thought “More With Less” was one of the weakest of the five season premieres we’ve seen. The parallels between the police department and the Sun newsroom were too transparent. Unlike Season Four’s “Boys of Summer” which was mostly interested in the emergence of Carcetti and setting up Randy’s involvement in Lex’s murder, this episode had a bit of a didactic feel to it. There was a lot of repetitive, expositional dialogue in this episode, particularly about explaining the effects of budget cuts and demonstrating low morale.

We didn’t get a feel for too many of the characters at the Sun except the two cub reporters, the managing editor and Haynes. Rewatch “Boys of Summer” or “Ebb Tide:” we get a much stronger feel for the new characters of those respective seasons (four and two, respectively) than we got in this one.

It was difficult to tell the journalists apart, what their jobs were and what each character wanted. But of course, in a show as masterfully crafted as this one, I’m sure that patience will reward the viewer over the next few episodes. Haynes’ character was the exception: you get a good feel for what he’s about right away.

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The plot thread with Marlo appears to be promising. Despite his overwhelming brashness, his saving grace is that he is careful.

This quality has saved him from many traps that way with Barksdale and the police. But he is no team player. His petulant manners at the Co-op meeting and the look that Cheese gives him at the end suggest there will be blood between East and West Baltimore this season.

As Bunny tells Wee-bey in jail in last season’s finale, “there’s no code, no family, no trust” in the game today. Marlo is front and center on this. He’s the unfettered capitalist, ruthless and almost completely lacking in empathy. He has shown little in the way of hobbies (Dozerman’s remark), and is just interested with expanding territory and the bottom line. How it was before doesn’t matter.

Again, it’s all about results. He’ll short anybody and put someone in a vacant if they present only the slightest threat. It will be interesting to see if these qualities will give him more territory or if he will perish from overstretching himself too much. If this were a normal cop show, he'd of course fail and die a miserable death. But this is "The Wire" and it's nice to know that the ending won't be so predictable.

I’m not sure how Sergei, the Greek’s jailed henchman, will play into things but it’s good to see Season Two dragged back into the picture. This will be an interesting plot line.

-----------

And yet, we still have the believers among us. “Promises were made and promises will be kept,” Carver says to the disgruntled men in the Western District. Daniels invokes Carcetti’s promises as evidence that things will change. Everyone keeps waiting for things to change, but political considerations and expediency always get in the way.

This theme, of the valiant underlings working their hearts out at the docks (take your pick), the corner (Bodie) and in the police (McNulty) while their superiors subvert them, gut their operations for political or financial considerations, has been present in every season. We can already see it on display in Season Five.

I just wonder, and hope, that there’s some expansion of this theme. I don’t think it’s merely enough to see it happening in the same way in a different sector of society. The theme has to be expanded or augmented somehow. We’ve seen plenty of superiors hijacking the hard work of good men on this show. What’s beyond this?

And some random points:

- Looks like Dookie has grown about 6 inches from last season! He towers over Michael and yet commands little respect. Michael doesn’t look any different though. Dookie still has that look of resigned sorrow on his face; the only difference now is that he looks man enough to do something about it.

- Carcetti looks doomed in a way. There’s not enough money and he’s unwilling to compromise with any element that could jeopardize his political future. And, all of a sudden, he’s worried about stats. He looks panicked in this episode. Norman is a great character, his political conscious.

2008-01-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that the Fifth Season is now available On-Demand. It was a good thing to wake up to New Year's Day - got my brain humming better than a pot of coffee. I'll post about the episode Sunday. Happy New Year!

2007-12-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a trailer for the Fifth Season with some real footage from the season:

This one is about the set:

In general, there's lots of great material on YouTube for "The Wire." I could link to it, but it might be better to do your own search. Only a few days till the first episode of Season Five is available On-Demand.

2007-12-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

Realism, Regionalism and “The Wire”

With the fifth and final Season premiering just weeks away, the idea comes to the forefront, “What does it all mean?” Every time anything ends, whether it’s an administration, a life or a television series, this is always the inevitable question. If you don’t ask it, it seems to follow that it must all be meaningless.

“The Wire” is, of course, compelling for many different reasons, but I would argue that what gives it its hypnotic quality and truly separates it from the pack is its aesthetic of unflinching realism. I’ve heard some MFA-types use the term “hyper-realism” in describing literature (perhaps Hemingway fits this bill) and I deduce that it refers to an author chronicling everything – the sound of a glass hitting the table, the crackling of a tree branch, the hue of an old building – in excruciating and unadorned detail. This description greatly corresponds to the vision for the show as laid out by Simon in the New Yorker piece. He refers to himself as an “authenticity nut” in the article in how he wants to portray the city of Baltimore on screen.

Rarely in the show are you being petitioned to empathize with a character’s situation. The show has always lacked a traditional protagonist, a hero or even a sex symbol (though at times McNulty fit these roles). What Simon/Burns are trying to do is let the story tell itself without interjecting their opinions into the mix. When there’s a climactic scene, there’s never ever any music to cue how you’re supposed to feel, there’s just action. The intent is to portray events as they unfold without infusing them with any sort of judgment.

But these are just directorial choices; the realism I’m really talking about is the way the city of Baltimore and its people are portrayed. Television is traditionally an escapist medium, and “The Wire” is its complete opposite, showing the tarnished underbelly of a beat-up American city that seems a world away from the idealized camaraderie of urban life portrayed on “Friends.” The majority of American TV shows are set in the affluent places of the country. I can’t think of too many before “The Wire” that have been set in Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit or St. Louis or the other American cities that have seen vast population declines in the past sixty years.

We see dirty, refuse-filled streets, broken families and drug-fueled depravity in almost every episode. Where else have we have ever seen a character like Delonda (Namond’s mom)? And of course, there’s the dialogue of the show, which is worth a whole other post by itself.

It is this meticulous chronicling of one city’s social fabric that makes the show so strong. It gives a roundness and a fullness to the language and social makeup of a city in ways that few other shows have. And it is this quality that I believe has attracted so many because it addresses how various aspects of the city commingle and exist alongside themselves (I think “Crash” tried to do this for a cinematic equivalent).

Finally, the show has made a great contribution to the aesthetic of “regionalism:” the portrayal of the mores, customs and language of a particular area. You usually hear this term to describe Flannery O’Connor and other Southern writers but its applicable to anybody who is able to capture the area they are writing about in such fullness. “The Wire” does for Baltimore what Raymond Chandler does for Los Angeles, what Dennis Lehane does for Boston, what “The Maltese Falcon” does for San Francisco: it lends the place a sense of mayhem and a sense of mystery and ends up giving it a sense of place. It makes the place come alive by lending a sense of immensity to the unique details of the particular city.

I wish there were other shows that strived to portray an area so well, that explored the “regional realism” of different areas of the country. Simon has shown that you don’t have to leave where you are to create amazing things; you don’t have to write about extraordinary events or beautiful people. You just write about the area that you are from in a plain, unadorned style and let the story tell itself. And then let the world come to you.

2007-12-17T14:07:00.000-08:00

"The Wire" just got nominated for Best Dramatic Series by the Writer's Guild of America. Just shows that the show has credibility where it matters.

Also, you can watch "The Wire: Final Word" and "The Wire: Odyssey" streaming from the HBO web site along with the entertaining prequel clips. First time I ever heard McNulty (Dominic West) talking in his native accent. Pretty impressive too that they got a heavyweights like Joe Klein and Jacob Weisberg to talk extensively about the show and journalism.

Looks pretty good, it opens up a strong dialogue about what journalism means today. Of course, the take is very pessimistic (surprise).

2007-12-06T21:37:00.001-08:00

Check out these very entertaining prequel video clips released by HBO. It shows quick, entertaining shorts of Omar and Prop Joe back in the day. There's also one of McNulty meeting Bunk and what we can expect of McNulty and Bubbs this season. (hat tip to GB and NS). You can also seem them on amazon's Season Four page .

And today, I saw a big, gigantic billboard promoting Season Five at the corner of Santa Monica and Bundy here in LA, just a short walk from my pad. It's coming....

And what's the epigram for the first episode? "The bigger the lie, the more they believe."

But most excitingly, there will be a two-part special about "The Wire" on HBO. "The Wire Odyssey" will air on Dec. 20 and "The Wire: The Last Word" the following night. Here's the tease complements of the SF Chronicle's TV critic - and someone who has lauded the merits of this show for years - Tim Goodman.

2007-12-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

Season Four DVD set is out today. If you go on to Netflix, there's already a wait for them. But there's already almost 6,000 people who have given it an average rating of 4.8 stars. Only $39 on Amazon.

Also, here's an interview with Andre Royo with TV Guide. It's pretty good. These guys all spend 6 months of the year in Baltimore; it's almost like their football players.

Oh yes, sorry about my sloppiness in the last post. But it is season one where Waylon says that. I only know that cause I just finished re-watching the first season.

Another revelation I had is that it really pays to turn on the subtitles. You'd be surprised by how much you miss until you turn them on.

2007-12-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

Countdown to Season Five

Good news! HBO is again offering "The Wire" a week early On-Demand.
While there seems to be some debate about why HBO is doing this, my attitude is "who cares?" The Fifth Season should premiere on Monday, Dec. 31, so we're only 30 days away.

I am a little surprised and let down that HBO has only released that teaser where you follow a typewriter writing about Baltimore - not a lot of suspense building. But the show is wrapped and is a dead duck so it's not like they're trying to win over a new audience. Very unlike "Tell Me You Love Me" where they launched a big marketing campaign to win over new viewers.

- The writers of the excellent book "Freakonomics" have an interesting post about the realities of life in a street gang. There's a chapter in the book titled, "Why Crack Dealers Live with Their Mothers" which is a great companion piece to watching "The Wire." Anyways, the man responsible for the research for that chapter talks about how much he admires the show.

- Heres Andre Royo talking about the character of Bubbles and how's clean in Season Five. "What does he do with himself now that he's clean?" Royo asks. As Waylon says to him in Season Five, "Now comes life."

2007-11-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

Season five to only be ten episodes. Drat! That's what it says in this article from the AP.

Also, here's a scene from Season 4 with Colvin and the criminology professor interviewing a teenage crook cued up to a laugh track. It's worth watching.

2007-10-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

David Simon article in the New Yorker

This is easily the best article about "The Wire" thus far. It's from last week's New Yorker and it's an absolute must-read for Wire fans. The article is written as a profile of David Simon and gives us a better understanding of how the show came into being. The focus on the relationships between Simon and Burns and Simon and the other writers of the show is really spotlighted here.

One long-standing question I've had is how all of the show's writers - nearly all of whom are middle-aged (and probably quite affluent) white guys - are able to capture the dialogue of low-income black Baltimoreans so convincingly. Here's a quote from the article:

Gbenga Akinnagbe, the actor who plays a drug dealer’s henchman named Chris Partlow, said, “This is David’s domain. He gets the streets of Baltimore better than we do.” The novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), whom Simon hired to write several scripts, agrees: “When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue—that’s them. They are so much further ahead of the curve on that.”

The article says so many things about so many aspects of the show. The author calls Simon an "authenticity freak," which seems accurate. I could go on and on but you might as well go read it for yourself.

- In personal news, I moved to Los Angeles six weeks ago.

2007-09-27T08:52:00.001-07:00

Season Five promo on YouTube! Check it out.
Season Five is set to air on Sunday, Jan. 6.

2007-09-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

Steve Earle's "Down in the Hole"

The theme song for Season Five by Steve Earle is now available on iTunes. The album is called Washington Square Serenade. I have to say, my immediate reaction is that it's one of the weakest of the five versions. It doesn't really go anywhere, there are few intonations in the lead vocals. It feels sort of flat to me and doesn't build off any of the other versions.

Felicia Pearson ("Snoop") has authored a book that is being released on Nov. 1. Titled "Grace After Midnight" it's a memoir of her coming of age in East Baltimore. She's also speaking tomorrow at Karibu Books in Baltimore. Donut from the show is speaking at a Baltimore Book Event this weekend (click on same link for info).

And the DVD box for Season Four will be released on December 4th.

2007-09-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's a Wrap for Season Five!

The Washington Post ran this article on its front page of Monday's edition (if the link doesn't work just do a Google News search for "The Wire" to find it). The show finished shooting on its fifth season last weekend. This article is really a must-read, giving a great glimpse into the actors' lives and how much the show meant to them as well as the intentions of Simon and Burns. The show, as conceived by its creators, is meant to be the television equivalent of a long novel. Money quote:

"In many ways, 'The Wire' is a long, convoluted love letter to Baltimore-- from a conflicted but resolutely committed lover."

The photo above is Dominic West (McNulty) addressing the cast and crew once the shooting had wrapped.

2007-08-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Tragic Death

In a cruel example of life imitating art, the younger brother of Ralph Anwan Glover (Slim Charles) was gunned down two blocks south of the Columbia Heights Metro stop in Washington D.C. last Thursday. Tayon Glover, 29, was killed in the area he and his brother grew up in.

According to the article in the Washington Post about the shooting, Tayon had had several brushes with the law but was trying to get his life straight when the shooting happened.
Like many of the actors on the show, the elder Glover and his brother had taken a hands-on role in empowering their community and it's incredibly tragic to see this happen.

One thing that's fascinating about "The Wire" is how so many of the actors on the show are from areas similar to the one portrayed on the show. Simon and Burns, by and large, did not take a bunch of gleaming, eager young actors with head shots waiting tables in New York and Los Angeles and take them to Baltimore, teach them the slang and the accent in the hopes that they'd gel - they went into the communities they knew and found people who lived and understood the life they wanted to portray. Brutal events like this eerily underscore the connections this show and its cast have to the real happenings that unfold in the type of community they portray on-screen.

- In more upbeat news, Lance Reddick (Lt. Daniels), will be joining the cast of "Lost" this season. "Lost" has a good crew of writers - they've been able to do a lot with the premise - so I'll be curious to see how he fits in.

- If you haven't been watching "Mad Men" you should. It's terrific. The brainchild of one of the executive producers of "The Sopranos," it has great dialogue and an attention to detail that makes every scene come alive - "Wire"-esqe qualities if you ask me.

2007-08-22T13:12:00.001-07:00

The DVD art for Season Four has been unveiled. Not bad huh? However, there is no release date yet. Nice cover, if nothing surprising - that was the main poster HBO used for Season Four the whole way through. It should be out before Christmas which would mean that the fifth season would probably start airing in January of '08. That would be my guess at this point though no one has told me anything definitive.

2007-08-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

The Model for Omar?

That's what this article on the front page of the NY Times yesterday claims about one Donnie Andrews who is now getting married to former addict Fran Boyd who was in turn the protagonist on "The Corner." Both knew Burns and Simon when they were a homicide detective and a reporter (respectively) and are the subject of this article which shines a light on how information was gleamed for both "The Wire" and "The Corner."

Interestingly enough, according to the article, "Starting in 1998, Ms. Boyd, Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns began lobbying for Mr. Andrews and in subsequent years attended his parole hearings." This was to get him out of prison (he admitted to murdering a drug dealer) where he had turned himself around. He is now the antigang outreach worker for the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Baltimore.

However, if you listen to the long interview on the HBO podcast with David Simon, I believe that he says that Omar is a composite of a number of stick-up men, not just Andrews. So, the NY Times writer jumped the gun a little. Nonetheless, if you're a "Wire" fan, you'll like the article.

- Also, the UK paper, the Guardian is streaming the first season of "The Wire" from its website. Read this for more info.

2007-07-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

UNBELIEVABLE!!!!

The Emmys today, released its list of nominees and "The Wire" - incredibly, stupefyingly - did not recieve ONE nomination. Not one! Hell, I bet those godawful shows on the UBN got more nominations than our boys in Baltimore. WTF?!?!? ("The Sopranos," by contrast, received 15 nominations.)

With an ensemble cast, it's understandable that none of the actors were nominated - who really could you nominate for "best actor" on "The Wire" in terms of them playing the lead? However, to pass up the writing for the show, the uber-gritty streetscape design and some of the expressionistic directing is tragic. Sorry, but if "Boston Legal" is gonna be nominated over "The Wire" for Best Drama then there's something rotten in the Denmark.

Despite all the great press, the slobbering reviews and editorials written in the LA Times and the NY Times, the show still gets little mass attention or respect. With only one season left, it appears that the show could forever be destined to be a cult favorite.

My own two sense: in the current political climate in the US, there is no real great potential for popular appeal for such a hard-hitting piece of social realism as "The Wire." With a bungled war that never seems to get better - and yet without a leader with a vision to really extract ourselves from the conflict - people are tired of opening up their newspapers and reading about suicide bombers and brutal violence. They want to see the Jack Bauer/John McClane badass who can slay everything in their way, they want to see families. The horribly dysfunctional Baltimore of Simon and Burns' vision is just not something, sadly, enough people want to dive into right now. It's understandable, but yet very disappointing at the same time.

2007-07-08T21:11:00.000-07:00

Greetings.

- Someone posted a rumor that Steve Earle would be performing the "Down in the Hole" official Wire theme song for Season 5. And... the rumors are true. The song won't be commercially released until Sept. 25. If anybody has an in into listening to the song sooner please let me know. I'm still waiting to get my hands on the Season Four version.

I'm not super knowledgeable about Earle's music (though I've always thought "The Revolution Starts Now" would be the perfect campaign song) so I don't know what to expect. I do hope that he doesn't country-fy it too much. He is a great musician, though for a show that the hip-hop community as adopted as its own it's possible that his version might not fly too well given his more down-home style. Politically though, his views are pretty in-tune with what Simon and Burns have said.

- "Night at the Wire," the annual philanthropic event thrown by the actors and producers of the show, happened a few weeks ago. Sounded like they gave away some interesting prizes to people who donated funds.

- Not a whole lot of Wire news I've seen out there. With such a large ensemble cast as the show has, there's always news about what each cast member is up to, which I decide not to post since there's so many cameos and public appearances.

The most interesting thing are all the articles written by people who reference plot events in the show to illuminate current events. Here's a particularly brilliant one that makes a link between the famous "dope on the table" episode from Season One and the crackdown in China recently due to deadly toothpaste. The gist: by cracking down on a problem through showy plant closures, you don't really solve the problem. The problem is much deeper and thus the solutions must go much deeper.

"The Wire" may not be a commercial success but it's influence among the intellegentsia in this country and beyond is profound and should not be underestimated. Lots of journalists reference "Hamsterdam" for example when talking about the War on Drugs and practical social experiments. It's one of the legacies of this show.

2007-06-08T17:09:00.001-07:00

Well, with "The Sopranos" ending Sunday, there have been a cajillion and one articles about "the end of an era of television and all" and talking about how HBO needs another hit... blah blah blah. I'm getting a little tired of reading them, as much of a fan of that great show that I am. So everytime I search for Wire news, I end up wading through that for awhile. And it also appears that "John from Cincinatti" isn't getting too good reviews. Oh well. But, any-hoo, on to what little Wire news I know about.

First off, the show filmed at the Washington Post office last weekend. Check it out here.
Apparently none of the name actors from the first four seasons were involved - it was all the newby journalists who we don't know yet.

Apropos of nothing, here's an interview in 2005 with Andre Royo (Bubbles) you might like to read.

And somebody posted this article from the Baltimore City Paper where you can give yourself a self-guided tour of East Baltimore. Looks like a fascinating article with great photos. Please let me know if anybody in fact gives themselves this tour. Curious to know how it went.

I gave myself a self-guided tour of West Baltimore two years ago. I went to H.L. Mencken's home near Union Square, went to Poe's house and the B&O Railroad Museum. I was awestruck at the number of vacant homes - that was my strongest memory.

All right, out.

2007-05-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted in quite a while. Truth be told, I just haven't seen too many interesting articles about "The Wire" being written. With "The Sopranos" coming out for its last season, all the ink on HBO has been about that. But now that that show is well into its season, I'm starting to see some stuff get out there.

First off, they are full swing into shooting Season Five right now. It's been said that the show will come back on the air "this winter." In any case, I bet we're gonna see it in early '08. "Big Love" has got to come back and I think that HBO is hoping that "John From Cincinatti" will be the heir apparent to "The Sopranos." That's all got to go first. And Burns and Simon got to get back from Africa where they're shooting their Iraq War miniseries. I also read a rumor that Spike Lee will be directing the first episode of the next season.

Back to Wire stuff. Here is a good article in the Baltimore Sun about the costume design for the show and all the brand names they keep in the closet for each character.
It's a good piece. I thought it was funny that the journalists this season are wearing Banana Republic since I'm a journalist and I wear BR stuff all the time (all right, I'm not a full time journalist).

Also the article chronicles how the hip-hop community and the show have worked together in this odd sort of symbiotic relationship to market brands and popularlize them - especially Zoo York and Phat Farm. It's a good testament to how much street cred "The Wire" has in the hip hop community and also about the importance of brand labels in the popular culture. Young, professional white women wear stuff they see on "Gray's Anatomy" and well, young teenagers will wear stuff they see on "The Wire."

A few other random bits of "Wire" news:

- You can now watch the show on Delta Airlines. No, really! I'm serious!
But you gotta pay for it.

- The show won the 2007 Edgar award for writing. It's given by the Mystery Writers of America and was given to nine writers on the show this year. Here's the brief Sun article.

- Lastly, Baltimore appears to continue to live up to its name of "Bodymore, Murderland": there have been 95 murders in the city this year through early May - more than last year. Here's a blog devoted to crime in Baltimore. Just by a cursory glance through it, you can see that Burns and Simon really are realists and don't make up the stuff we see on the show.

2007-03-13T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Story of a Snitch

There is a superb article in this month's Atlantic Monthly. It's a real-life story of a snitch, or police informant, in Baltimore and all the tribulations and hardships endured by him. It's a sad story and it gives the reader a window into how the value system operates in this community. It really gets into the sociology behind why people in the community turn so much on those who cooperate with the police and is very complementary to Season Four and what Randy endures.

In a nutshell, the criminal element is so powerful and pervasive, and the reach and sway of the police so limited that law-and-order cannot really be enforced. It's vintage "Wire" in its cataloging of how institutions have failed and the unsavory characters that have filled its vacuum.

P.S. Here's a brief interview with Wendell Pierce (Bunk) from a Detroit paper.
Worth reading.

2007-03-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

Burns and Simon to film mini-series on Iraq

Check out this article in the Baltimore Sun about "The Wire" team shifting to making a seven-episode series about the first days of the Iraq War.

Titled, "Generation Kill," after the book by the same name, Burns and Simon are going to be spending much of the summer in Africa filming it. They're also writing all the scripts along with "Kill" author Evan Wright.

Sounds like a perfect avenue for their talents. Nothing needs the hyper-realist eye of Burns-Simon more than the fiasco in Iraq.

The article says that Season Five of "The Wire" will wrap filming in August.

2007-02-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

It takes a Thief

Check out this article on a break-in to the warehouse used by "The Wire" that occurred last week. It's in Columbia, Maryland - a suburb of Baltimore. The article sheds some light on where exactly the show is shot.

Money quote:

"Most of the filming for The Wire takes place in Baltimore, but directors shoot some indoor scenes on sets at the warehouse, such as ones depicting Baltimore police headquarters and the mayor's office. Equipment also is stored there...The show moved its soundstage to Columbia after its third season. The crew had been working out of an abandoned Sam's Club on Eastern Avenue in Baltimore County, (Producer Nina Noble said."

Also, here is an great article by Mark Bowden, one of America's greatest journalists, on the East Division of Philadelphia. From Bowden's descriptions, it sounds like a place eerily similar to the West Baltimore we see on "The Wire." Bowden describes the the social breakdown of the neighborhood, the immense unemployment, the abandonment of the area by industry and commerce, the great violence. The article also mentions the show.

2007-02-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

David Simon

As you know, David Simon spoke on February 6 at Loyola College in Maryland. A reader of this blog who knows David personally also conducted this interview with him (thanks for the alert David).

I could talk a lot about what he's said but I'll just try and briefly sum up my thoughts. While he calls himself a "social democrat" (a la the Scandinavian countries I'm assuming), I believe that the most accurate term to describe his beliefs is neo-populist.

Many of the things he talks about, bemoaning the flight of manufacturing jobs and the decline of the traditional social contract in the work place, echo themes and points that John Edwards makes from the campaign trail. Edwards and Simon both hail from areas of the country (Edwards grew up in mill towns in the Carolinas) that have been hit hard by the loss of blue collar jobs and have yet to see economic benefits arising from the post-industrial economy and its reliance on professional services conducted by highly educated workers. As David Brooks notes in a recent column in the New York Times, neo-populists are on the rise on the left. I'm not sure I agree with Brooks but I think it's worth considering that this is a "trend" on the left and that Simon's rhetoric matches this resurgence. The only difference is that Simon's rhetoric is populism with a wholly urban slant on it (there's a tendency to equate populists with agrarian areas and ideas).

I can't say that I agree with Simon's pessimistic stance on contemporary America, and I don't consider myself to be a neo-populist, but his interviews are very worth reading. His take on the world is a bit of a throwback in many ways: You don't hear many people bemoaning technology so vehemently as Simon in the days of the Internet. The guy comes off as a bit of a Luddite in his interviews, but he makes a lot of valid points.

Lastly....

Here's a good article about Idris Elba in the San Francisco Chronicle. It interviews him vis a vis his new film, "Daddy's Little Girls" which I've heard nothing about.

2007-01-31T17:00:00.000-08:00

Richard Price, Chad L. Coleman and Jamie Hector to speak in Brooklyn Thursday night

Richard Price (Wire writer), Chad L. Coleman (Cutty) and Jamie Hector (Marlo) will speak tomorrow night (Feb. 1) at 7 p.m. at the Brooklyn Information and Culture Center's Rotunda Gallery. The series is part of the STOOP series.

Richard Price is also speaking in San Francisco on March 27 as part of the City Arts and Lecture series at the Herbst Theater. Not sure what the occasion is but I'm definitely going. You'd think he'd be promoting a new book but I couldn't find anything on Amazon.

2007-01-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

Fifth Season to Begin Filming in March

That's what it says in this article in the LA Daily News via Michael K. Williams (Omar). Williams plays a detective in Ben Affleck's directorial debut, "Gone, Baby Gone" due out later this year.

Also, if you live in the DC-Philly nexus, you might want to check out David Simon speaking in public on February 6 at Loyola College. From the "Towson Times:"

"On the Wire: An Evening with David Simon," creator, writer and producer of HBO's Baltimore-set series "The Wire," 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6 in Loyola College's McGuire Hall, 4501 N. Charles St. Free.

I would LOVE to go to this.

In other miscellaneous Wire news....

Gbenga Akinnagbe appears in this "Out of Charcter" video via HBO talking about his acting. It's a bit campy if you ask me. If you would like to preserve the evil mystique of his character in your mind's eye, you might not want to watch it.

Oh yes, and watching the NFL playoffs not long ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see Isiah Whitlock Jr. (aka Clay Sheeeeeeet Davis) make a cameo in a Verizon Wireless commercial. He was dressed in a bath robe and holding a mug and acting much more wholesome than his counterpart at City Hall.

Also, in personal news, I just bought a small neighborhood monthly newspaper in San Francisco. I'll disclose the URL and more info once the ball gets moving and there's actually content to show...

2007-01-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

Two quick bits of info:

This week is "Wire Week" on allhiphop.com (I'm guessing to coincide with the BET premiere). There's been interviews with Wood Harris, Snoop and Michael K. Williams (Hat tip to zilla roc). They're good interviews. It seems as if every single actor on this show is also a rapper. Interesting to read about all their side projects.

Secondly, a source at HBO tells me that ratings for Season Four were up 17% from Season Three. Including On Demand and repeat viewings, each episode was seen by 6 million viewers. All the good press had an influence after all....

And lastly, the Sopranos shows on A&E, as a full page ad in the New York Times this morning not so subtly informed me. So I was wrong about not many HBO shows breaking out into normal cable.

2007-01-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

BET to broadcast the first two seasons

BET will be showing the first two seasons of "The Wire" starting this Thursday at 9 p.m. After a special "3 day premiere event" (whatever that means when you're showing repeats) BET will show weekly episodes.

It looks like all the momentum from the critically-adored Season Four has given this show some new legs. I think it's great that the show is receiving more recognition and will have the chance to be seen by a wider audience. As far as I know, "Sex in the City" is the only other HBO show to get broadcast outside of HBO (I bet it's only a matter of time till "Entourage" busts out as well).

I'm a little concerned about how much of the language and swearing will be edited out. It seems like a better time for the show on cable would be 10 p.m. I believe that shows shown after that time can show more "adult content" (a la "Nip/Tuck"). Language is such an important part of the show and it would be a shame to see that compromised. But I suppose that's the price you pay when you want to reach a wider audience. Nonetheless, I don't think it will impact it a whole lot - just as long as they don't do any awful overdubbing. God forbid!

Here's a shot from the third episode of Season One which should speak volumes to anybody who just watched the past season.

I'll post more info here on anything "Wire" related as it becomes available.

Feel free to email me at asywak@gmail.com.

2006-12-14T21:38:00.000-08:00

Good evening everybody and thanks for your comments, criticisms and compliments.

I feel the need to respond to some of the questions and comments raised in previous posts so let me begin:

1. The guy Michael shot was just some anonymous street dealer. Just someone who Marlo wanted killed no doubt cause he had some nice real estate. And no, I did not notice what Butchie said to Omar when he handed him the money. Butchie has good lines though so I bet it was funny. What did he say?

God I would love to get my hands on a Wire script!

2. Curious about the media season as well. Cops, drug dealing, teaching I know nothing about. The media and writing for newspapers I do, so I will be especially interested in this one.

I think it will be about how the media influences the public, for better and, this being the Wire, mostly for worse. It will probably follow some beat reporter who follows Carcetti and ends up becoming part of the problem. Maybe they get co-opted and become Carcetti's parrot, a sort of Judith Miller of Baltimore

Don't know much about the Baltimore Sun. It ain't what it was in Mencken's day, that's for sure.

3. Yes, the scene at the Arboretum was amazing, brilliant. I wish I could get the transcript for it.

I did not notice the change in light at the end of the scene. I'll have to watch it again. And yeah, good notice on that line of Bodie's, "It's nice." You almost never heard somebody from his world make a comment on the weather. Nice to see him let down his guard. Sad to see him go.

4. I think Parenti is a hero because he gets his hands dirty. The man leaves his comfortable College Park office and gets down into a gritty inner city school to see what goes down. He's trying to effect societal change. He doesn't look heroic or is particularly dramatic but he's trying to effect change in the way that he knows how.
He is taking a risk.

In terms of future postings, I'll see what I can do. I guess I'm just not sure what to write about having no real inside source at HBO. "The Wire" may take place in Baltimore but it's really about urban America. And I'm fascinated by urban America, not the least cause I live in it (San Francisco) and am always eagerly reading articles about trends and ideas in the big city.

Not surprisingly, one of my favorite non-fiction writers these days is a man named Joel Kotkin who's an urban historian. He's written some great articles about the current state of American cities. He lives in LA and he's always raking San Francisco and he has good criticisms. You can find his latest one at www.democracyjournal.org. It's about "the boutique city" and how cities are bending over backwards to try and appear cool. He writes that cities today, instead of trying to cater to the middle class and build communities centered around families and education are instead trying to make their cities "cool and hip" so that young people will wanna move there. He says the strategy is foolish. That's it in a nutshell. He brings up Baltimore.

There's also a great article by Richard Florida in the Atlantic Monthly about how people with college educations are congregating in fewer and fewer places.

Well, I find these things interesting at least.

I'll try and post something here in the future.....

Thanks to all you readers who make this blog worth it!

Happy holidays,

Andy

PS. Does anybody have an mp3 of the Season Four song? I want it and I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. It's so great. Thanks.

2006-12-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

Final Grades

“They gonna study your study! When do things change?” - Colvin
“This game is rigged.” – Bodie

Another gripping episode, compelling to watch from start to finish. The episode kept up a brisk pace, exhibited some interesting directorial flourishes, and contained some surprises. It was a worthy coronation for one of the best seasons of any show ever.

“Final Grades,” however, did not possess the finality that previous season finales did. Unlike the strong endings we saw in the finales to seasons Two and Three, the Season Four finale closed a few plotlines but opened up lots of new ones. And it did not resolve many of the open plotlines. What happens to the revenge of Officer Walker? Are Chris and Snoop going to jail? How does Carcetti solve the school budget problem? How will Bodie’s death impact McNulty’s policing?

By contrast, seasons Two and Three had much stronger endings. With Stringer dead and Barksdale sent to jail, the whole Barksdale plotline was effectively over and the Hamsterdam experiment was junked. The entire world of the docks was put to rest and concluded at the end of Season Two. Season Four, by contrast, gives our characters new beginnings but not too many endings. This IS NOT a criticism, I’m just pointing out the differences between this season and the others, which largely stand on their own.

“Final Grades” seemed more interested in setting up Season Five than concluding the story arcs for the characters we met this season. But since this show is so fricking amazing, and the new characters so vivid, that is just fine. It will have to tide us over till next September, or whenever the execs at HBO will decide to bequeath us with Season Five, aka the “media season.”

-----------------

The episode was penned by David Simon and after reading his interview on Slate last week, I could see some of his views on display here.

The theme most prevalent on “Final Grades” was pride, its costs and benefits, and particularly how pride relates to work. Pride as a double-edged sword. It brings out the best in people like McNulty, Colvin, Daniels and Lester, causes them to dig deep in themselves and bring out the best in others. But pride also causes Bodie to turn his corner into his own Little Bighorn, and it looks like it might begin to unravel Carcetti as he sacrifices his constituents’ needs for his ambitions for Governor. (let’s remember that Carcetti is modeled after current Baltimore Mayor O’Malley – somebody who Simon has made negative comments about).

Remember Daniels’ line to Carver (I believe it was Season One), “you gotta decide if it’s about you or about the work.” Carver, after some hesitation, saw that it was about the work. To Bodie and Omar, who both show themselves to be consummate professionals in this episode, it’s about the work. To Lester, it is about the work as well. Rawls, it’s about him. And Carcetti, we’re starting to see, it’s about him too.

“Omar ain’t no drug dealer,” the stick-up boy says as he extorts Prop Joe for some “her-o-an” paying the fat man for his clock that baffles everyone in the electronics store. Prop Joe refuses to give up Cheese to a pissed off Marlo. “I can’t do that,” he says. “That’s my sister’s boy.” Even in the bottom-line obsessed world of early 21st century America where as Simon insists, “people are worth less everyday” we see the strong residues of pride intact… but not everybody lives to tell about it.

And then there’s people letting go of their pride for the best. Wee-Bey letting Colvin take his son in being the best example of this.

--------------

My favorite scene, and easily one of the best this season was McNulty and Bodie at the Arboretum. Screenwriting classes should study that scene over and over again. It was just brilliant. McNulty reinforces Bodie’s own thoughts of himself, “You’re a soldier Bodie.” He says this without irony. Through the game of cops and robbers they’ve come to know each other in an unorthodox way. It’s something that Landsman displays – a bit grudgingly perhaps – to Bubbles.

And McNulty also challenges him. “Somebody’s got to step up,” he tells the young slinger. It is a call that goes unanswered. In a parallel world, it would have been interesting to see Bodie survive into Season Five and attempt to answer this call. Become another stick-up boy like Omar or try and go clean like Cutty. Just at the point when we see him become self-conscious about the world he lives in and look at his world with new eyes, he gets shot.

While it is a shame to see Bodie go, this leftover from the Barksdale days, let’s also avoid the temptation to canonize him. He comes across as valiant this season but he often exhibited a self-serving sense of justice, justifying his murder of Wallace with Poot but decrying that of Little Kevin. He is a victim of a system he was himself complicit in. As we see all along in “The Wire” individuals get chewed up by the system they belong to, their sense of morality becomes distorted into something so nakedly self-serving that they end up lying to themselves and ultimately they don’t really know which way is up anymore. At this point, to borrow a phrase from Bunk last episode, “black is white and right is left.”

But he’s right, Marlo is evil. He seemed cool and above the fray earlier in the season - just purely a businessman. But he’s disintegrated before our eyes into just another cold-blooded thug. There’s nothing particularly benevolent about the man, save his handouts for school clothes and books we saw at the beginning of the season. He is the raw, ruthless, no-holds-barred businessman who doesn’t live by any rules. He’s all about the bottom line and is representative of something “The Wire” has taken an interest in: the triumph of people like Marlo who fail to live by rules and how this dehumanizes themselves and those around them.

Even Chris questions him. When Marlo tells him to take out Bodie he doesn’t immediately understand telling his boss he may not have talked. “Doesn’t matter, we gotta send a message,” Marlo says. There’s no trust, no focus on relationships, just money. Anything is legitimate to him since he has no code and little pride. He’s cut off from anything traditional. No surprise this man don’t like Town Cars.

That is why his interaction with Vondas was so interesting. This quiet, physically unimposing old world man who runs his business based on trust – and Marlo can’t really understand it at all. But that’s just him reacting to his own world.

-------------------

An interesting, inauspicious start to the episode considering all the other things going on. Landsman has always been a pretty minor character. We rarely see him out of the homicide office cradling his Jugs magazine and shaking his head at all the red ink on the board. But behind the clearance rate obsessed bureaucrat we some humanity. It comes out clumsily at first, “What’s in your head fella?” but we see a notable change in his character. He goes from “don’t pull down any more fucking wood,” to “fuck the clearance rate” in the span of barely one episode. Nice.

Poor Bubbles. He has effectively cried “uncle” to the streets. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Andre Royo does such a fantastic job with this character. He is amazing. He is Bubbles.

---------------

Once again, I have to laud the direction of Ernest Dickerson. The man has an expressionistic touch that the other directors don’t utilize. The direction on “The Wire” always strikes me as adequate and functional, nothing extraordinary or creative. Again, it’s the writing and the acting and the scope of the subject matter that make this show what it is.

But Dickerson is different. The man likes long, long shots. How long did the camera stay on Bodie’s dead body? On the gutter where Monk dumped Michael’s gun? On the tranquil street corner that Namond now calls home? He wants us to ponder, he wants us to look more deeply into what we’re seeing. For a show with so much rapid dialogue, these shots really stand out.

Another shot that stood out was of the one of Carcetti in his red chair after he rejects the Governor’s money. For the first time, he doesn’t look right. He looks isolated and a little evil amid all that red leather. You can’t make out his face too well when he’s sitting in that chair. He has changed, calculating the risks to his future power rather than take a bailout for the schools. But you knew this was going to happen. His ambition and the demands of political campaigning did the switch.

A great shot of Michael in the back of the SUV. You can’t really see his face, you have no idea what he’s feeling. But you can feel Chris’ eyes on him as he tells him the importance of looking a guy in the eyes when you shoot him. It’s eerie and very effective. You have no idea what Michael will become, but it doesn’t look good.

And a great montage of scenes after Michael performs his first murder. Very skillful.

----------------

Before discussing the ending, I want to bring up my favorite quote about endings. David Lynch said, “Endings can be beautiful things but only if they leave room to dream.” I think that the closing image does that. It passes the Lynchian litmus test.

The last scene of the episode was sublime. Donut rides up in his latest find and Namond smiles but lets him ride away. They don’t talk to each other. They’re not on the same page no more. He looks out at a quiet and pristine corner in Baltimore. You can hear the wind blowing, the wind chimes making noise. It’s a picture of urban peace and quiet. And the camera stays there forever. The perspective of the camera is interesting. We’re not seeing that corner through Namond’s eyes necessarily. He may have gone back inside. The shot confirms what the show is in its raw form really about…. Baltimore.

But what does it mean exactly? This is what cities should look like? This is what a child needs to thrive? Hmmmmmmm…

Still, as far as a closing image to a season, I didn’t think it was as powerful or as profound as Nick Sobotka looking through the chain-link fence at the harbor knowing that his uncle was murdered. Looking at him walking away and running his hand on the fence, I’ll remember that.

-----------------------

And what can one say about the middle-schoolers? We have one successful intervention (Namond) and one botched intervention (Randy). And with Dookie and Michael, they don’t really have any choices. They become what society expects of them. They don’t choose their own path.

Randy falls through the cracks. I liked the scene where an impassioned Carver practically begs the social services worker to get Randy in. She wears a serious expression above her silly outfit. And all she can say is the bureaucratic standard, “the list is the list.” If Cheese is Randy’s father, than Prop Joe is his great uncle. But in a community this broken, no one even knows this. Or maybe they do, they just don’t care.

Michael. He’s on his way. But he’s really doing this for his family, for Bug. But it seems like he’s slowly falling into the trap that success breeds, kind of like Carcetti.

That’s something we saw a lot of in this episode. People trying to save others: McNulty and Bodie, Carver and Randy, Colvin and Namond, Landsman and Bubbles in a bumbling sort of way. Half the time, it’s the institutions that get in the way.

--------------

So I suppose the question on every body’s tongue is, how does this season stack up against the others? Tough call since every season has been compelling and first-rate. However, I would make the call that this one takes the gold. Why? Because for the first time, the show has genuine heroes in the middle-schoolers. Sure we rooted for McNulty and some of the other cops in the past and maybe some of the more conscious and sensitive people on the street like Wallace or D’Angelo but the middle-schoolers gave us something that previous seasons had lacked – an innocent and uncorrupted presence.

David Simon has said that “’The Wire’ is not about good and evil” but I find that sentiment suspect given the evidence this season. We see the boys, surely no angels, becoming victimized by their own environments. By creating characters whom the audience ends up rooting for, Simon and Burns created an emotional focal point. They’re presence roots the show, especially since so many characters, from Prez to Colvin revolve around the kids. With the exception of Dookie, the kids all had strong plotlines (I know some of you disagree with me over that but Dookie’s character did not encounter the same, firm set of challenges and plot obstacles that Namond, Randy and Michael did.)

Carcetti was also a great character as we got more into the political life in the city. Omar faced real tribulations and looked scared for the first time. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here.

And as always, random comments:

- The guy next to Cutty watching “Deadwood,” “Ha, he called him cocksucker.” You can’t say they were plugging the show cause it’s basically done.
- Scene with Carcetti and his wife was interesting. She looked horrible. She looked scared. And they weren’t really communicating with each other. It’s all about him now and power.
- Great to see Vondas back. He’s a great character. I like how they brought back in Season Two. An old world man in a place like Baltimore. What he said to Marlo, “I look into the soul” of his driver… that’s exactly what Bush said when he was asked what he thought about Putin.
- I liked Colvin’s line to Parenti when they get in the elevator at City Hall: “They gonna study your study! When do things change?” He’s a great character. And seeing him storm out of Parenti’s class was instructive too. But Parenti is a hero here.
- Every post I've read today on "Final Grades" on the Internet lauds Bodie's line about feeling like "them little bitches on the chessboard." Yes, that was great.

Well, season’s over now so I suppose this is my last post. Thanks to everybody for reading and for commenting. I may post something here if I think it’s of interest to Wire watchers in the future.

My email address is asywak@gmail.com if you'd like to drop a line.

2006-12-04T21:58:00.000-08:00

That’s Got His Own

“I kept you in Nikes since you was in Diapers.” – Namond’s Mom, aka “The Dragon Lady”
“Mike ain’t Mike no more.” - Namond

Wow. Just amazing. This episode floored me. The action in this season has ratcheted up considerably in recent episodes. Like “The Sopranos,” the second to last episode of the season, not the last episode, has always been the most action packed on “The Wire.” “That’s Got His Own” did not disappoint.

I did a little research: in all four seasons, the second to last episode was penned by George Pelecanos, a D.C. native and crime novelist. He’s written some of my favorite episodes, the one where Stringer Bell was shot, where Sobotka is lured to the water by the Greek and subsequently killed and where Daniels tells Burrell (in one of my all-time favorite lines from this show), “You’d rather stand in shit than have someone see you swing a shovel.” He did an equally good job on this script.

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Let’s all remember Wee-Bey’s advice to his son in prison earlier this year, “Either you for real nigga or you ain’t.” It mirrors Daniels’ question to Carcetti, “How for real are you?” That’s what this episode was about and to a certain extent what “The Wire” is about: who’s for real and who isn’t? Who is willing to put, as Michael says, “somethin’ real behind your words.”

Carcetti is for real. He goes and “begs his Republican ass” the governor for school money and then smiles as he has to eat another bowl of shit when even the icy Madame Washington tells him, “I’m glad I’m not the Mayor,” before telling him she’s gonna go after him no matter what he decides. Carcetti, modeled in many ways after the current Baltimore mayor and governor-elect of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, has been a joy to watch this season.

From afar, being the mayor of a major American city and calling the shots looks to be an envious job full of all sorts of perks and privileges. But you watch Carcetti this season, and it all looks like one gigantic headache followed by another. You constantly have to make deals with unsavory people (Clay Davis) and make policy compromises that will demonize you to a chunk of the population. You constantly have to watch your back for ambitious opponents (Washington) and prostrate yourself for the right people (the Governor).

The man’s gonna have a head full of gray hairs in no time.

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Lester and Daniels are for real and triumph. You never witness either of these men in a negative light. They’re the public sector heroes – representing what is possible in government when it functions competently and passionately about protecting the public.

“Being for real” though is also Wee-Bey behind bars for life. Cutty and Bubbles provide a further cautionary tale about the consequences of stepping up to the plate. Bubbles ends up killing his quasi-adopted son and Cutty’s life is only spared by Michael’s outstretched arm.

His reformation from Barksdale muscle to youth savior was pretty dramatic but the man’s lack of a sense of pragmatism almost proved fatal. All season along, hell all series long, we’ve seen it’s the pragmatists and those willing to make compromises on their values that end up getting ahead. It’s Machiavelli in the inner city.

Namond, of course, is about as real as a plastic Christmas tree. He’s been living the lie for so long, acting like ghetto royalty with his expensive sports jerseys and tough talk without having to undertake too much of the sordid business that finances his lifestyle. But when he’s got to walk the walk – he can’t “put somethin’ behind those words.” Even little Canard thinks he’s so feckless he can pull a fast one on him.

The look on his face when he’s faced with violence – Sherrod hitting him outside Cutty’s gym, his Mom slapping him, witnessing Michael’s beating of Canard, Michael’s punishment – is one of a terrified child. And that’s what is so easy to forget when you watch these middle schoolers navigate the broken world around them – these are kids. They don’t have the emotional tools and experience and vision to deal with these things.

That was a most powerful scene – in Cutty’s gym. Namond picking on Dookie to feel some of the toughness he covets, prompt Michael, the Great Protector, to call his bluff. Michael’s most unique power is how he forces everyone to be honest. He’s done it all season long. He only had to hit his friend two or three times to shatter any illusions Namond had left about who he is. Michael says nothing the entire scene. After all, it’s about actions, not words. Again, realness.

Funny how Namond chooses the same language that Cutty used last season when he quit Barksdale’s organization: “it ain’t in me.” But hey, he’s like 14, so what does anyone expect? The fact that it’s in Michael seems to be the exception, not the rule.

I have to give my props to Julito McCullum (Namond). He did a superb job in this episode. His character has the greatest range of the four middle-schoolers and he’s always believable. I would venture to say that he’s the best actor of the four, but they’ve all done a great job.

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A word on touch and intimacy. Dookie lets Prez drape his arm around him; Namond lets Colvin hang his hand on his shoulder, but Randy shrugs off Carver and Michael pointedly tells Cutty not to touch him.

That’s why the brief talk in Prez’s classroom about “intimacy” was so instructive. Here is this basic component to human relationships, and the children not only don’t understand it, they can’t comprehend the concept. That’s how deprived and depraved their homes are of basic family functions. They joke that “intimacy is about getting some” and Prez goes on to tell them about what intimacy means to him. He says that “intimacy can be a conversation.” But he can’t really explain it. Can you really teach something like intimacy in school?

Which leads us to the Dragon Lady’s great line, “I kept you in Nikes since you was in diapers.” It describes one of the great tragedies in the values of this community: the conflation of coveted material goods with love. The definition of intimacy, of love, that has taken root in this depraved community is purely material. Everything has to be tangible. Sex. Nikes. Lexus Landcruisers. An intimate conversation? Show me the money.

In this environment, since everybody values ostentatious wealth, you will too. And without someone to nurture the young girl student who asks Mr. Prezbo what “intimacy” is, she could end up as screwed up and morally twisted as Namond’s Mom.

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A great first scene. It seems there is a never-ending supply of abandoned buildings in Baltimore. Initially, I thought that they were going after him for being close to Randy after the last episode. I was on the edge of my seat. The fear that Michael exhibits in the chase make you think he’s running for his life. But Michael outwits Chris and Snoop and exhibits surprisingly good aim with a paint gun.

Still, this scene was perplexing. At the end of “New Day,” Marlo tells Chris that Michael stood tall for Randy. And the next scene we see is… Michael’s training? It doesn’t make sense. You’d think they’d discipline him or at least lecture the boy, instead of bringing him more into their organization.

It is still unbelievable to me why Michael always gets breaks from Marlo when no one – NO ONE – ever gets any. How does he tell off Monk, who is much his senior not to finish off Cutty? It’s not believable why he gets special treatment. Why would Marlo venerate a kid like him while treating all other human life as as disposable commodity as a paper towel? It’s a little incongruous if you ask me.

We’ve seen Marlo Stanfield now for about a season and a half. And we still never see him when he’s not doing business. I’m a little disappointed by this. That’s what was great about Barksdale. He had his club, his bar, his women. But Marlo and Chris and company don’t seem to ever have any fun. They lack a certain depth and roundness that Stringer and Barksdale had. Perhaps the writers were sick of pouring their energy into the street characters and felt that they had elucidated well the personalities and traits of drug dealers in previous seasons. Still, I would like to see Marlo flushed out more.

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One complaint I have had this season was well illustrated in this episode - the tendency to end scenes quickly. There’s never any lingering. When Landsman tells off Lester, when Bubbles discovers Sherrod’s dead body, when Michael bitchslaps Namond – the damage is done and the scene suddenly ends. They build up the scene leading to an insult, a tragedy and then – cut.

I’d like to see more of the reaction of these characters. Perhaps I’m being overly sentimental, but it couldn’t hurt to linger here for a moment on the character’s expressions. Watch Lester cuss a little bit, watch Namond cry more and try and hide his embarrassment. We saw all these for a microsecond. They did this earlier in this season when Greggs enters that house at gunpoint.

One could make a good case that, in this season especially, “The Wire” is now story driven as opposed to character driven. The focus is on the story as an aggregate, not on putting too much emphasis on its individual parts. It leads to a riveting television series but with many characters who feel like there’s more to them than you can see or ever find out.

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A superb last scene, when Carver walks through a brightly-lit hospital hallway as Randy mocks him. You could hear Randy’s voice the whole time, and you could see Carver’s face the whole time and it all spoke volumes. It felt a little bit, just a little bit, like a Kubrick film. Very powerful, very good television.

The amount of distrust people show for the system and the police is vast in this show. And you can see why people like Randy turn away from the system. What does he have left to believe in?

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And so what is next for the middle schoolers? History and the circumstances of the times have made these boys who they will be. A talented boy like Michael, with a fortitude that could enable him to be the next Barack Obama, instead will pour his smarts and energy into the drug trade in West Baltimore.

Dookie, Namond and Randy. I don’t know. But it doesn’t look good. But I can’t wait to find out. This show is just amazing, absolutely spellbinding and I'm sad that there's just one episode left.

But do check out this interview with David Simon:
http://www.slate.com/id/2154694/nav/tap1/

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And as always, random comments/observations:

- The scene with Bubbles talking to the guys in the stables seemed out of place. It just seemed incongruous that somebody like Bubbles would know folks who sweep up stables. I mean, c’mon, how many people are there in any city these days who work in stables?
- I loved Cheese’s line talking about the woman who jumped them. “This woman pulled a pistol out of her pussy. Shit was unseemly.”
- Wonderful scene at the bar between Lester, Bunk and McNulty. Bunk’s lines about J-Lo were hilarious. Great, great dialogue - “The Wire” does this better than anybody. Bunk can’t understand the drive of Lester. “You act like you’re on the trail of Pol Pot or some shit,” he says as Lester turns Chris's signature nail around in his hand.
- I watched this episode twice, parts of it three times. And I never caught the “that’s got his own” line. Never heard it. If I have one complaint about “The Wire” – and this applies to other HBO Series, namely “Deadwood,” it is that it is not always easy to understand the dialogue. But thank goodness for On Demand!
- Michael is supposedly getting better at boxing but the kid never uses anything but his right. Use your jab man!

Thanks again to all the comments last week. I definitely learn things and hear things that I didn’t hear or see from reader’s posts.

2006-11-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

New Day

“You’re my boys right? I’m here for ya’ll and ya’ll here for me?” – Randy
“I don’t trust him, but I trust his fear.” - Omar

At its most basic level, what “The Wire” is really about is the breakdown of American urban society – at the very least in Rust Belt cities like Baltimore that have never adjusted to the flight of blue-collar jobs. Every segment of Baltimore we see is broken, balkanized and divided. The police, the operatives of City Hall, the gangsters all backstab each other in a circular, Machiavellian, zero-sum game of survival.

The middle schoolers are the exceptions. The most uplifting and poignant aspect of this season is the loyalty they display towards each other. As they start to go on divergent paths we’ll see how Namond, Michael, Randy and Dookie treat each other but it is a sense of belonging and mutual responsibility arising out of their shared background and heritage that define their interactions towards each other right now. As we see in “New Day,” they are a wily bunch but they still abide by a basic honor code of pride that the adults have learned to avoid in the name of self-preservation. They have all followed Valchek’s advice to Herc, “Just shut up and play it up.”

The most instructive dialogue on “New Day” was the exchange Michael and Namond had in front of the jewelry shop. It builds on another of the great themes of the season – pragmatism versus idealism. “The Wire” has always been preoccupied with the idea of “How much should one stand up for one’s self and what one believes in?” You’re taught to do this instinctively for this is what heroes do, but Namond throws out his own bit of “discretion is the better part of valor” wisdom to Michael when he tells him, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Sounding very much like the security guard that Marlo had killed, Michael explains why he stood up to Randy’s attackers, “I ain’t gonna let some chump-ass niggas think I’m took. I ain’t.” These are the sort of benevolent values that struggle so dramatically on "The Wire."

(A little frustrated that they haven’t done much with Dookie. While Namond, Michael and Randy all have strong plotlines, Dookie just plods along. Nothing has really challenged him directly. He’s just the teacher’s pet in the background of everything, sad and depressed and deprived. His character hasn’t really changed much all season. A missed opportunity if you ask me.)

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Like Michael, Carcetti is learning the price for valor. “Yummy, my first bowl of shit,” he says as he has to balance the needs of the police versus the ministers. But that’s nothing compared to what he has to do with the schools. What place does society have for idealists? Still, I like Carcetti. He seems like a pretty ideal leader, trying to balance a visionary’s idealism with the realities of the vested interests of the city. But you look at him in that room where everybody has ties to Barksdale drug money and you just wonder whether it’s a matter of time till he becomes like Royce.

It is telling that this episode was written by Ed Burns. Both he and David Simon have voiced their belief that “individuals are worth less every day.” Whereas the political culture in our country is absorbed with advancing the mantra that personal responsibility is everything, “The Wire” is very interested in showing how the individual is affected – and often crushed – by society acting as an aggregate. We’re all born good – like the middle-schoolers – but it’s the world that makes us wicked and selfish. It’s all systemic and any positive change will have to be enacted on the system not the individual. Their take is more akin to some LBJ Great Society view on the world and a complete reversal about everything you hear from the contemporary Republican Party.

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A word on Bodie. One of the comments from last week talked about him and it got me thinking. You know who he is starting to remind me of? As a lonely drug dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, but who he really reminds of are the dockworkers from Season Two. He is the working man who is controlled by larger forces. Whether he sees members of his crew getting picked off and stuffed in a vacant by Marlo or has to hide from the police, the man has no control over his life. He’s stuck in a dead end job and without any union to protect him.

That was a nice scene with him and McNulty with the cop talking to him like they’re friends. At least McNulty knows he can be honest with him. When he’s honest with Officer Walker, “Since when is yellow paint a declaration of war?” he gets nowhere.

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Another superb ending scene. Rather than, say, “Lost” which leaves you with questions and cliffhangers, “The Wire” likes to leave you with a shot to ponder which are mysteries in themselves. The writers and directors really want to impart this whole idea of “soft eyes.” It’s softness and vision that solves murders, that teaches kids, that leads the way forward. But in a bottom-line society “obsessed with juking stats” as McNulty remarks, it is rare to find the individual that knows how to use these “soft eyes.” It’s the difference between Lester and Bunk, who can never really learn anything new it seems.

Random comments:

- Disappointed that Prez didn’t tell them anything about knowing that the bodies were in the vacants. He seems to completely not trust the police nor the schools for that matter. This is the crucial bit of information and he abstains. It wouldn’t hurt to tell them.
- Good scene with Namond in the trust-building exercise. He really responds to Bunny. He’s the strong but kind father figure he never had.
- A real Shakesperean line from Prop Joe when he talks about Omar having a shovel and Marlo a spade and "no way I'm crawling back in" to my grave.

I also would like to thank everyone who reads my blog and takes the time to write comments.

2006-11-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

Misgivings

“They’re not learning for our world, they’re learning for theirs.” – Colvin

If you could take a pull quote from this entire season so far to say what it has been about, I would undoubtedly select the exchange between Parenti, Colvin and the school superintendent in this episode. It addresses education, how institutions function – and most importantly – how they fail.

“It’s not about you or us, or the test or the system,” Colvin, the show’s Great Communicator, tells the naïve superintendent. “It’s about what they expect of themselves. We pretend to teach them, they pretend to learn.” Later, when he drops off Namond to his wretched mother he sees all the proof he needs. How can someone like Namond function and be expected to thrive and care about permutations and subject-verb agreements when you come from a home like that?

Bill Gates once called American high schools “irrelevant” and you see the irrelevance on display in “The Wire.” Donnelly and the administrators work hard and have good intentions, but the education fails the kids cause it just isn’t relevant to their world. The one-size-fits-all, “No Child Left Behind” logic towards education currently in vogue is well debunked on this show. Like Colvin’s Hamsterdam experiment last season, Colvin and Parenti are trying a much more practical approach to education that is based not on ideology but on the social reality they encounter. But unfortunately, they can’t get others onto their side.

For schools to be effective they have to be a tool of education and socialization. At Edward Tilghman, they unfortunately seem to be just socializing them. But you can hardly blame this on the teachers – these kids are damaged.

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Usually when I watch “The Wire,” I am mostly aware of the writing, but for “Misgivings,” I was really aware of the direction. Ernest Dickerson did a great job. He let the camera give pan on certain characters that flushed them out better.

Before this episode, Chris was just a thug – a calm, ruthless, articulate one – but still a thug. But that long shot on him as he’s gauging what Bug’s Dad did to Michael was great. He looks scary and frightening but also intelligent and understanding. He does seem to smart to be Marlo’s enforcer. “We’ll take care of it boss,” he tells Michael. The long shot of Michael as he’s watching TV as Chris mercilessly beats that man to death is also instructive.

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We’ve seen throughout this season how following through on noble intentions gets you in trouble. The security guard who stepped up to Marlo didn’t live to tell about it. Colvin putting the cuffs on the guy who beat up the prostitute and gets fired. And now Little Kevin pays the price. He thought he was being upfront, being “in front of it” and now he’s dead. Bubbles wanted protection from Herc for police work and betrays the knucklehead sergeant when he doesn’t keep up his end of the bargain.

“The Wire” is preoccupied with how institutions function but also with what fills the void when institutions fail. What steps in its place? We saw this last episode when Michael approached Marlo. And we saw it with Officer Edwards assault on Donut, and Herc’s bungling of Bubble’s predicament yet again.

It is all an absence of leadership. No one is taking responsibility. When Namond is sitting in jail you beg the question, “Where are all the adults?” There is no substitute for poor governance. And there are too many ill forces that are all too willing to step in should governance fail.

And, in no particular order:

- Never really understood Slim Charles. He was one of Barksdale’s boys and now he’s a major player. But you’ve never known what his role is exactly. He’s with Prop Joe and then he talks to Marlo. Not sure what his deal is. If he got killed off, it would save me a few headaches.
- What is Omar planning? His character’s motivation is a little unclear to me right now. He swore off dropping bodies to Bunk but he can’t seem to change his nature. He’s like Greggs – just an alleycat by nature.
- A great scene between Poot and Bodie. That “World going one way, people going another” line was just genius. I’ll remember that line for a long time.
- Carcetti and Daniels. Another scene with good dialogue. Eric Ovemyer did a fantastic job with this script.

2006-11-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

Know Your Place

"Everybody's safe in the end, right?" – Dookie

I believe that the last scene where Michael approaches Marlo was nothing short of brilliant. This season has had so many superb ending scenes – the juxtaposition of Randy and Carcetti staring out into the night, the boys looking at the dead body in the vacant, Carcetti rejecting the sexual advances of his campaign manager – but this one wins the prize.

In my estimation, what has long distinguished HBO shows from network television (and I just mean HBO – Showtime’s “Weeds” and “The L Word” don’t do this either) is how it is able to convey so much without dialogue. On network shows, there’s always a direct camera shot on the character in question followed by some sort of verbalizing of their emotions. “Six Feet Under,” “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire” don’t do this. They rely on expert acting and directing and communicating emotions through facial expressions and body language to convey a character’s emotional state. And characters don’t always mean what they say. This is much more effective and real. After all, we usually gauge how others feel around us intuitively not through their direct statements.

In this scene, there is almost dialogue. You don’t know what Michael says to Marlo after the initial few words or what Michael said to Dookie before on their walk over here. Dookie escorts Michael to Omar’s court as if he’s giving him away at an altar. The way he looks at Michael as he walks in there - it’s like he knows they’ll never be the same again. And then Omar staring down at the scene below trying to figure out what’s going on.

One thing I can’t understand is why Omar and Chris want this guy so much. They treat him like a first round draft pick for slinging, like he’s the Reggie Bush of West Baltimore. Omar is right, “He’s just a kid.” But as we’re seeing, no one stays young and innocent for long in their world - even little, prepubescent Canard, who gets handled like a grocery bag by Carver’s boys.

Another telling scene was when the kids were searching for an adult they could trust. The social worker? A drunk. Mr. Prezbo? Maybe. Cutty. “He too friendly,” says Michael, who displays lots of the signs of a child who was abused. Where are the responsible, upstanding men in their world? Marlo is the real power broker, the ring-giver in their busted community. It is he who steps in when institutions fail as miserably as they have for the middle schoolers. People like Marlo fill the vacuum of power, just like people like al-Sadr currently fill that vacuum in Iraq for example. While these scenes have a great emotional resonance to them, you look at them and realize how important good governance is and what forces are all too eager to fill it when it is absent.

Was this the first Wire episode ever penned by a woman? It could be.
Kia Corthron, a dramatist and native of Cumberland, Maryland, did a superb job on the dialogue with “Know Your Place.” I just wonder how Simon and Burns and rotate writers like Price, Pelecanos, Corthron and Overmeyer into writing this show. How can they keep up with a show this nuanced and complex if you’re working on your own stuff? Price, Pelecanos and Lehane are all crime novelists while Overmeyer and Corthron are dramatists. I’d love to know how this works.

And in no particular order, random comments:

- Like to see how the bitchy, power-mad “Madame President” will serve as Carcetti’s new foil. After walking the streets with the police, where he looked akin to Michael Dukakis riding a tank in the 1988 election, it’s nice to see him back in his element among wood-paneled rooms and leather chairs. He’s confident here.

- Herc’s bumbling stupidity. Will there be ramifications for his tacit giving up of Randy?

- The scene with Rawls and Carcetti was telling. When Carcetti tells Rawls he’s promoting Valchek, Rawls goes, “Valchek is a good man.” “He’s a hack,” Carcetti replies. Rawls keeps parroting the “tell them what they want to hear” ethos of bureaucracy, but Carcetti sees right through it.

- Everything is a racket, even homicide. Check out this article on the Baltimore police department: http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/10255729/detail.html. According to the article the budget for overtime work is five times over budget. It also states that the police force has 150 vacant positions – an interesting fact not alluded to by the show’s writers. More evidence that “The Wire” ain’t just fiction.

- Great scene with Prop Joe and Andre. Using the allegory of the broken television set to tell him to get out of town but Andre is too stupid to listen - and winds up covered in quick lime in a vacant. That Prop Joe has a good way with language.

- Those middle schoolers at the steak house. It was a telling scene even if we’ve seen that fish-out-of-water one before. It reminded me of the scene in Season One when D’Angelo takes his girl out. Both parties leave feeling very out of place.

2006-11-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

Corner Boys

“How honest should I be?” - Daniels

(Sorry this was so late. I got wrapped up in the election. But hey, I helped defeat Pombo so I'm happy)

This was easily one of the best episodes of what has already proven to be an incredible season. The last few episodes had a bit of a slow pace to them, but this one was very meaty and heightened a lot of the existing plot lines.

The scenes where Bunny is talking to the class of corner kids were the most memorable. I think the writers have done a remarkable job contrasting the more academic and clinical approaches of Parenti and the teacher with the street smarts of Colvin to the dilemmas of kids like Namond. It’s art and sociology all rolled into one.

They both need each other. Colvin knows how to communicate with them, he speaks to Namond and Zenobia and company in a vernacular they can understand but Parenti and the teacher are cognizant of other educational approaches and the big picture. They seem to recognize that in order to be successful there’s got to be an educational approach that speaks to the kids within the context of their own lives. One New York Times Sunday magazine article last year about contemporary missionaries in Africa calls this sort of communication “contextualism” which I think is a perfect phrase to describe it. It’s all about speaking to people in a language that they can understand.

It was interesting how, like other Americans, how many of the kids expected to be successful in life. Even though a few expected to be dead, they still expected to rise within the ghetto hierarchy. This mirrors studies of college kids who all expect to be wealthy and successful in their lives. I can’t decide whether it’s comforting or not that the myth of the American dream and perpetual social advancement seems to be well-embedded in low-income urban youth who have all the decks stacked against them.

Funny how Carcetti, the next Mayor of Baltimore, often looks out of place. Whether he’s dancing and clapping at a black church or strolling through the homicide department, he looks like he doesn’t belong. He’s only looked natural in his campaign office or in Royce’s leather chair.

2006-10-31T21:37:00.000-08:00

Unto Others

“It’s fascinating. I mean clinically speaking.” – Parenti

What a superb opening scene. Great pithy dialogue where the character’s body language really communicates what’s happening. The look on Omar’s face when he gets fitted with phone book armor and then the lick to his attacker’s ear – priceless. It’s scenes like this that no other TV show comes close to imitating and make “The Wire” so worth watching.

This season is billed as the season about education and what disparate factors lead to the education of youth today, but philosophically speaking, it seems to be about the merits of pragmatism versus idealism. Every group from City Hall to the middle school to the drug crews has a certain code and every group has those who successfully navigate their way through it with lies and half-lies and those who play it straight.

It’s like life is one big game, one big racket where everything operates in a certain system with rules that are tacit to its operation. These rules are in many ways irrespective of conventional morality and are thus rules that outsiders cannot understand. The successful player learns these rules, understands them, digests them and then spins them to his own advantage. All the big players, Marlo, Daniels, Omar, Rawls, Carcetti understand this. When Omar throws back the words that Bunk uttered to him last season, “A man got to have a code,” he could be talking to everybody.

Prez is probably the best example this season. He goes into teaching with the purest of intentions only to discover just how educationally unseasoned his students are and how dysfunctional the school system is. He learns that the by-the-book methods and straightforward learning that probably worked for him will not work with his students so he gets his probability lesson through with a game of dice. Like any good player, he finds out what he can get away with. You have to be infinitely resourceful in this world.

Juxtapose him with Cutty, the great idealist. In a world where everybody is trying to work the system, he’s the straight shooter, the one with the purest intentions and the greatest inability to compromise. You’re always rooting for him even if he lacks the necessary sophistication to massage people the right way and glide through the world.
He never quite understands why his kids desert him. He doesn’t know how to talk to Spider, who has quickly degenerated into the undisciplined street tough he was before he started to box. Cutty is at once the real hero of the show and also the one who seems most destined for some sort of failure of his own making.

And the project at Edward Tilghman got more interesting. Some great dialogue in those scenes. I especially liked it when the woman who moderates the class says, “Namond suffers from conduct disorders.” Bunny adds, “Yeah, he got a mouth on him.” But that’s the marriage that needs to happen for public policy to work, combining street knowledge with academic frames and tools. This plot angle is very exciting and I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Now for some random observations:

- One little detail of notice this season. While slinging heroin has been a mainstay in all four seasons, this is the only one where the names of the products have been featured. It was “WMD” and “Pandemic” where Bodie’s crew was dealing. When Cutty confronts Spider, it’s “Brokeback” and “Darkhorse.” I don’t know about you but I don’t think “Brokeback” is a good branding choice in inner city Baltimore.

- The ex-Mayor telling Carcetti about the difficulties of being mayor and how “being a downtown lawyer and seeing my family every evening made for a fine life.” It mirrored something San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said the other day. He was talking about whether he would run for re-election (a shoe in) and said that it wasn’t any kind of life to lead, “Ordering take-out every night and bringing work home with me, that’s not how I imagined my life at 37,” he said in my own paraphrase. An interesting anecdote to those pondering a political career of public service.

- I think it’s time for Bubbles to strap himself. The guy is amazingly resourceful about everything except for self-protection. Why not?

- Greggs is still an alleycat as they called her in Season One. I didn’t like it that they panned out when she entered the house with her gun drawn. Sometimes, the show cuts its scenes too close. It couldn’t of hurt to go in a bit more and see how she would have handled herself amidst all that.

2006-10-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

Margin of Error

“It could be a great city again.” - Carcetti

In the opening scene of “Margin of Error” – which seems more like the beginning to a film than a television episode – we witness one of the only functioning and uncorrupt communities in Baltimore: the church. It’s so virtuous that all three mayoral candidates go there to wrap themselves in it. It's the last vestige of order from the old days, and it looks glorious and healthy as we see it here.... And then there’s Carcetti dancing and clapping, looking like a goof. But he looks just like Edwards, Kerry or Gore when they visited black churches on the campaign trail.

The first time I watched this episode I thought it was amazing. The second time, I thought it was just OK. Strange huh? There aren’t too many transcendent moments in “Margin of Error.” Not too many nuggets of great, ambiguous dialogue that have defined this show and made it what it is. Is this the first episode penned by Eric Overmeyer? I Googled him, the man’s a playwright, not a crime-oriented writer like the rest of “The Wire” writing staff.

My favorite moment was of Namond sitting there on his bed staring at the package he got from Bodie. He wears a burdened, horrified look on his face - the face of lost youth. With choices like the ones he has, it’s no wonder he likes video games so much. Video games are the comic books of our day – a primary vehicle of adolescent escapism. But he’s been living in hypocrisy for so long – dressing like a tough young dealer and enjoying the splendor of the drug trade while avoiding its brutal realties – that it’s hard to feel entirely sorry for him. He had to know at some point that this was going to happen. “I’m counting on you Nay,” his Mom says. Sure. To keep her supplied with Jack Daniels and fish food.

One of the pretexts of “The Wire” is who understands that the systems everyone operates in is a game and who doesn’t. You can’t just wear your intentions on your sleeve and get ahead. You’ve got to be wily and crafty and endlessly resourceful. “Better to be clever than to be good,” Bunk bemoans at one point.

The most successful players, Rawls, Marlo, Carcetti, Prez even, understand this. They make compromises with the system and make deals with unsavory players and elements in favor of the greater good. They're skeptical, they're not idealists but they know how to work it. They know how to hold their nose and act nice with people like Clay Davis and Burrell. And they not only survive, they get ahead and thrive. It’s not a purely Machiavellian world, but it’s close.

And then there are those who don’t get it. Cutty never understands why kids don’t show up to his gym or why people may resent him for his womanizing ways. Randy gets played by his friends. He lets his buddies get in on all the walkaround money and then has to do all the work. Is he clever enough to survive? I don’t like his chances in a Darwinian world like West Baltimore. But I like how he asked for Lake Trout when Dookie was buying for him. A good echo to Bunk and McNulty’s dialogue from a few episodes back. He is real. His foster Mom is a chip of the old block, very unlike any of the other characters so far.

I liked the last scene. You can see how Carcetti is waging an open war against his own lust. He likes the ladies, and now that he’ll soon be mayor, they’ll certainly like him and he’ll have to be even stronger. But it’s refreshing to see how his character has changed even over this season as he rejects his sexually insatiable campaign manager. Her last line, which closes the episode, was very on-point for her: "Just write me a check."

And it isn’t that much a surprise that Carcetti won. The actual mayor of Baltimore, Martin J. O’Malley, is white and originally from the Third District on the Northeastern side of the city.

2006-10-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

Alliances

“No special dead, just dead.” - Dookie

I liked this episode quite a bit. It was written by one of the show’s big guns, Ed Burns, and it really flushed out the personalities of the kids. They seem more age-appropriate, more innocent than in the past. In a word, more believable.

Another solid opening scene, a clever send-up on the classic teens-sitting-around-the-campfire-telling-zombie-stories routine. These kids aren’t at some well-supervised summer camp, they’re in a derelict alleyway sitting on crates and discarded lawn chairs guessing the caliber of the guns that produce shots in the distance, wondering the fate of real (not imagined) bodies that they’ve seen disappear. It’s a scene very familiar and yet almost incomprehensibly foreign at the same time. And very sad when you think about it.

Their personalities are coming more into focus: Namond the loud-mouth trouble-maker who’s force of character makes him the apparent leader; Randy who’s wiliness hides his immense fear; Dookie appears to have low self-esteem but he’s the most even-headed and self-controlled of the group and would be my odds-on favorite to grow up the least scathed.

Michael is still a bit of a mystery. He obviously has issues with authority but we don’t know quite why – the show’s writers haven’t given us a reason for why he is so mistrustful. Whether it’s Cutty, Marlo, Monk or Prez, he just doesn’t want to deal with anyone. He cares about his friends and his little brother and boxing. He’s got a certain sensitivity about him, patting Randy as they see the dead body. But what’s his story? He doesn't seem to evolve episode-to-episode like his three buddies.

The scene with Namond talking to Wee-Bey would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. It’s amazing how acceptance of the criminal lifestyle is so ingrained in this community. Selling drugs and being a cold-hearted gangster is not looked at as a way to make a living and win respect, it’s looked at as THE WAY. The nostalgia in which Wee-bey speaks to his son about the glory of gang-banging in the old days and the ways in which Namond wants his father’s approval are something to behold. It’s all over before it starts. You can blame the schools, but the problem here is more societal: no viable sustainable lifestyle is presented to these kids as an alternative to a life of crime. Namond will follow his Dad, it seems to be foreshadowed, because... what else will he do?

But the “Stand By Me” moment at the end where the boys journey to see the body was the show stealer. The way they reacted to it shows their personalities: Randy scared, Michael comforting and unabashed, and Dookie the great realist making sense of it for everybody. If unknowingly sending Lex to his death riled Randy, what will seeing a body do? He seems the most fragile of the bunch.

Walking up to the house in the rain, the first signs of winter all around them, it all felt like a Poe story. Perhaps it is a Poe story, “The Cask of Amantarillo(?)” but this time the body is not in the crypt of a decaying aristocrat’s house but covered in tarp in a long vacant home in a long suffering part of the city. Just a gruesome scene but very, very powerful and instructive. What's amazing about it is all the things that aren't said, that are showed on the faces of the children (and, remember, that's what they are, children).

Two tidbits:

Marlo and Chris continue to prove that they’re smarter and more cunning than Barksdale. True, he breaks the rules as Wee-Bey says, but his cold-hearted approach to business and the streets seems to be working.

One disappointment to me is Daniels. He had a great presence in the first three seasons. Principled about police work and yet always calibrating the best way he could work around the incompetent do-nothing leaders at City Hall to give his unit what he needs. Now as the number two at the Western he’s been relegated to an office. It seems strange to me why he doesn’t stand up to Marimont. He could couldn’t he?

And yes, I waited to post this till Wednesday afternoon. Unacceptable. Last time.

2006-10-03T13:03:00.000-07:00

Refugees

“You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.” - Marlo

Another fine episode – though I have to say, my least favorite of the four to date. There were some great scenes in “Refugees” (written by “Mystic River” author Dennis Lehane) – no doubt –but there was a slight touch of pedantry to it. The episode had a bit of a didactic tinge as if the writers we’re saying, “ We want you to know how bad it is in Baltimore.” The scenes with Ms. Donnelly, Cutty with the truant van, as well as Michael taking care of his brother all possessed this in small, though tangible amounts. Don’t get me wrong, “Refugees” was fantastic, but by the end I thought it was trying to teach me a lesson. Haven’t gotten that feeling too much with this show.

Poker. The Mayor bilks his business connections in Texas Hold ‘em while Marlo gets schooled in Omaha. I saw on some website that Omaha is gaining in popularity. I wonder if Omaha is randomly placed here or if that’s really the game of choice for the Marlos of the world. Will it be another fad that started in the inner city?

The dialogue in the poker game is instructive on the importance of material tastes and the subtle distinctions that are made about what a certain car says about you in this world. The genial older gentleman lauds Town Cars. “A man look quiet and content in one,” he says just as he cleans out Marlo for all he’s got. “You youngins all into Lexus and Hum-V-Fucking-eight shit.” Yeah, but Town Cars ain’t what the game is about, though I’d see Marlo in one before Barksdale. Imagine a Town Car with $10,000 dollar rims….

If “Refugees” advanced the plot in one important way it was witnessing Marlo descend into the greed and tit-for-tat violence that he previously managed to be above. So far, he’s been the model of restraint and effective brutal leadership. He keeps his troops in order, doesn’t get caught up in messy reprisals and can smell out a trap miles away. Swiping the two lollipops and provoking the security guard who is later doused in quick lime, initially seems out of character. You see that his weakness is pride.

“I ain’t one for sentiment,” he says later. True. He’s never been showy and petulant the way Barksdale was; he’s always been a big picture guy. He’s a bit like Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada.” He’s so powerful, he knows he’s the king of the underworld that he doesn’t have to raise his voice to make a point. He’s icy and confident and appears to never drop his guard. And he’s got plenty of people to do his dirty work.
In ten episodes, “Refugees” could be looked at as the one where Marlo started to become undone.

I did like the scene where Prop Joe is trying to woo him to the co-op using the allegory of the pigeons. “They always got a place to fly back to where they know food is at,” Joe says. “But no one fucks with me now right,” Marlo says correctly.

The two best scenes were Andre with Marlo in the rim shop and Omar and Marlo getting acquainted over a .45 at the poker game. Great, great dialogue in that one. Really brilliant. If I were teaching a screenwriting class I’d show those two scenes over and over again. “Omar ain’t no terrorist,” Marlo quips, “he’s just another nigger with a gun.”

Lastly, if it’s Sunday morning why is Prez watching college football? Was it too hard to get the copyright to broadcast a snippet from a Ravens game? This scene kinda reminded me of that one in “Slackers” where a guy wants to stay inside all day while his girlfriend begs him to go on a walk with him. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says. Prez doesn’t quite say, “Fuck that nature shit,” but comes close.

2006-09-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

2006-09-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Home Rooms

“It’s not what you take, it’s who you take from. You feel me?” – Omar

As we know, David Simon and Ed Burns have said that this season is about education and about the different factors and inputs that contribute to a child’s education. They’re trying to challenge people’s notions of thinking of education as confined to schools and textbooks. School is a process of socialization and if schools fail on this part, where and how do the children become socialized and educated? What does a child identify with in a world characterized by non-existent family structures and dysfunctional public institutions?

This episode reminded me, thematically at least, of the movie “Thirteen” that came out a few years ago where two Southern California teenage girls forge an identity out of celebrity culture and the material shopping culture. They both come from broken families and create meaning and a sense of relevance from their friendship and by how much they fit into the wider material culture around them. By the end of the film - before of course, they find themselves – their self-journey looks as comical as it looks grotesque. But, you can see why it played out the way it did. It looks almost natural and expected.

And that is why the image of Namond wanting to ink himself with Chinese characters he doesn’t understand stayed with me. In the absence of role models, of father figures, viable economic opportunities, functioning families and public institutions, these kids create their own identity. It looks perverse and skewered to us but it makes perfect sense in their context. Identity is forged, clumsily, out of the random grab bag of symbols of the surrounding culture. But what is the alternative?

“Home Rooms” also brought back uncomfortable memories of junior high – surely the lowest point in anybody’s adolescence. The scenes at Edward P. Tilghman are a great depiction of this stage of adolescence, the viciousness, the in-your-face insults, the immense pressure to conform. My own junior high had a strong inner-city presence to it, and I can totally imagine this scene playing out at my alma matter – except for the slashing (still, “Welcome to the Dollhouse” will always be my favorite “junior high as hell” film depiction).

I like the scene where Bunk brings some wine when he visits McNulty and Beadie. With the end of the Barksdale investigation, life has gotten a little boring for these guys. That’s one aspect of the cop’s world on “The Wire,” whether it’s Colvin, McNulty, Greggs, Herc or Carver – everyone is built for action. Standing still, not being out there, seems to be more painful, more difficult to fathom than a busted case.

A great image of these two big guys, sitting in those god-awful yellow chairs drinking a wine that no one seems to know anything about other than the fact that it cost “two digits.” Try saying that at a dinner party in Northern California. Domesticity ain’t their thing. It’s a bit like the fake “lake trout” they make fun of being sold around town (“ain’t no lake nor no trout”). But McNulty seems calm and happy for once.

There’s an odd sort of parallel between Omar and Carcetti. A streak of pragmatic idealism runs in both of them. They both understand that they live in an imperfect world and negotiate with it as best as they can. They both understand that world they operate in is in many ways a game, but that underneath that gamesmanship, there’s something real worth fighting for and something real to win. They both get the irony of what’s going on but soldier on unafraid.

It’s nice to see the “downtown, tie-wearing, trying-to-do-good, stay-to-do-good, college type” that Colvin teams up with for the study. Even though Johns Hopkins University is the largest private employer in the City of Baltimore, we’ve had little to no exposure to academic Baltimore. The cultural divide in that holding cell is vast, almost incomprehensibly so in a town Baltimore’s size. But the interviewer does violate some basic tenants of conducting sociological research that does make him seem a tad unbelievable.

Rawls redeems himself in this episode. After gutting the Major Crimes Unit and outmaneuvering Fraemon, he begrudgingly recognizes his strength as an investigator. Rawls seems distraught with himself. The way he looks at the floor as he talks to Fraemon, he seems to be saying, “I know the way things operate is fucked up but I still want to do good.” Beneath his job enforcing bureaucratic standards, there’s a buried idealist. Something you would never expect from Burrell.

This was also the first episode this season penned by one of the three great crime novelists employed by the show, Richard Price. The others are, of course, Dennis Lehane (who wrote the next episode, “Refugees,”) and George Pelecanos. I think Pelecanos has penned some of the best episodes of “The Wire.” My question, how do these guys nail Baltimore slang so well? I’d love to know more about how the show is written.

I think “Lake Trout” would have been a better name for this episode. I want to get the transcript for that conversation between Bunk and McNulty. That was the gist of this episode….

I promise to post by Monday next week.

2006-09-21T10:21:00.001-07:00

Soft Eyes

“Just shut up and play it up.” – Walchek
“Better to be lucky than to be good” – Bunk

What stayed with me after watching this episode was the immense dysfunction that inhabits every segment of the population as portrayed in “The Wire.” Even though everyone acknowledges that they live in a crime-ridden city in serious need of attention, the system is set up in a way where everyone ends up valuing their own piece of the pie and protecting themselves, their jobs, their way of doing business rather than trying to bring about any kind of change. No one is willing to make any personal sacrifices. In this sort of climate, the city’s problems sit and fester as Walchek memorably puts it, “like a bad pirogee on the plate.” Isn’t this what economists call “The Prisoner’s Dilemna?”

For a show that features so much rapid-fire dialogue, the slow scene that opens this episode served as an appropriate intro to an episode called, “Soft Eyes.” Herc may be making a career move being on the Mayor’s detail but his wiry, impatient nature can’t stand idleness. But when you don’t perform as expected you can find yourself in a whirl of trouble.

Carcetti appears to initially be in the throes of a Bullworth-like meltdown. Why not play a game of Battleship if you can’t win? But he finds his resolve at the end (one question: why did Landsman tip off Valchek about the dead witness?) Carcetti, Fraemon, ladies-man Cutty and the middle schoolers seem to be the incipient heroes of this season. At they very least, they’re all underdogs who challenge the established order in some sort of way. At least they seem to thinking freshly about the things around them instead of just following orders and following lock-step behind the organizational flow chart. They try and make some sort of community out of all the surrounding discord and dysfunction.

The greatest breakdown in the community is in the black community affected by the drug trade. Lex’s Mom shows no concern about where her son is. All she’s doing is protecting herself. “It’s like she’s off somewhere else in her head,” as Bunk describes it. Wee-bey talking to his son about his burgeoning drug dealing career the way Ward Cleaver might have spoken to Beaver about working as a soda jerk down at the corner store. At least Marlo is giving back to the community that he’s taken so much from.

One thing I find curious, every police officer in the Major Crimes Unit has been given a pretty vivid and detectable personality. But why not Sydnor? What’s he about? He just seems to go along with everything. When he delivers the subpoena to Clay Davis (“sheeeeet”), is he just following orders or following through on some deep vision of justice? Hard to say, but I wish the film’s producers would flush him out a little bit more, give him more a persona that is more recognizable like Herc or Carver.

And another satisfying final scene: Namond lighting up a blunt as his Mom smiles at him, prattling away on the phone. How is he going to evolve? On the TV screen, Gray talks about helping out Baltimore schools, but Namond just wants to play a shoot-em-up video game.

2006-09-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

2006-09-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

"Boys of Summer"

An excellent beginning to Season Four of "The Wire." "Boys of Summer" introduces us to the middle-schoolers and continues the story thread of the mayoral race. We also see the adjustments on the street to Marlo’s hegemony of druge dealing in West Baltimore. This episode also used a lot of interesting scene juxtapositions. Of the four season openers of “The Wire” I think “Boys of Summer” is second only to “Ebb Tide,” which began the Second Season.

On a half-hour HBO special that delved into Baltimore and what to expect in Season Four, either David Simon or Ed Burns said about the show, “I’m very unconcerned with good and evil.” Hmmmmmm, I would say that has largely been true the last three seasons but I sensed some more firm moral delineations of character in this episode than in episodes past.

The four middle-schoolers and Prez, in particular, come across as virtuous. You can’t help but root for them when you see the derelict alley they play in and the equally derelict classroom that Prez has to turn into a learning center. Carcetti, the“lost-ball-in-the-high-grass muthafucka” (love that line by Royce) strikes a sympathetic pose in this episode, particularly after milking a few connections to get the “tank traps” removed from the blighted neighborhood he calls “Fallujah.”

While this season has been talked about as the “education” season, “Boys of Summer” was really about Carcetti. Next to a pouty Gray and the slimy, corrupt Royce, he looks fresh and energetic. Behind his pretty boy looks and coy political maneuverings and despite his petulant outbursts, he appears to have most of his moral compass intact. Or so it appears.

But I did find it to be an odd directorial juxtaposition between him dialing for dollars while Lex waits patiently – like Omar would – for Fruit to emerge from the club. Two killers on the prowl? I’m not sure what this was about. And yes, Carcetti’s right, the Orioles’ pitching does suck.

And Marlo. He’s the Sun Tzu of West Baltimore. He knows when to hold back, restraining himself from engaging in endless reprisals of the twisted ghetto honor culture that ended Stringer and Barksdale. He sends a message with his assassinations, but as they are targeted and discriminate, he avoids falling into the cyclical nature of violence, at least for now. He stays above the fray and realizes that you don’t need to make too many bodies to get your point across.

But, above all, the best part of this episode is the ending: the juxtaposition of Carcetti and Randy both looking out into the night. One sits tipsy on a bench in tony Federal Hill overlooking the harbor overwhelmed by his own ambitions, the other guilt-ridden after sending Lex into a fatal trap. One boy and one man staring into very different realities of life in Baltimore. It’s something you see a lot at the end of TV shows, characters plaintively staring out into the night, but in this instance it looks fresh. And powerful.