the wire

You Disappoint Me. I Had Such Fuckin’ Hopes for Us

By in jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, silent moving pictures, the wire 8 Comments

Dave Zirin:

The events of the last two weeks, however, have changed my view of The Wire in a very fundamental way. I have spent most of my time listening to people in Baltimore speak about how this uprising came to be and why the anger runs so deep. I’ve been primarily speaking to black Baltimoreans in grassroots organizations who have, in a state of MSM invisibility, been building movements for years to fight poverty, end street violence, and challenge police brutality. This is humbling to admit, but this experience has made me reassess my favorite show, as if a very dim light bulb was being switched on above my head.

The idea that David Simon, praised as someone with an ear to these Charm City streets like no one since H.L. Mencken, could look at what was happening in the Baltimore of 2015 and not see the social movements and organization beneath the anger, makes me wonder how much he truly “saw” when producing the show.

Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people’s ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I’ve met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday’s march? In the season about the drug war and “Hamsterdam,” where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity—and frankly the luxury—of David Simon’s pessimism.

I am not saying that art should conform to a utopian political vision of struggle like some dreck from the Stalinist culture mills. But I am asking a question that I wasn’t before: Why were those fighting for a better Baltimore invisible to David Simon? I don’t mean those fighting on behalf of Baltimore—the (often white) teachers, the social workers, and the good-natured cops who are at the heart of The Wire—but those fighting for their own liberation? Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves? And if these forces were invisible to David Simon, shouldn’t we dial down the praise of the show as this “Great American Novel of television” (Variety!) and instead see it for what it is: just a cop show?

In the wake of the Baltimore uprising, The Wire’s pessimism seems childish to me, and I’m going to put it away for a while. I could see myself revisiting it in the future, maybe amidst a more dreary political moment. But that moment isn’t now.

This Paint-By-Numbers Life Is Fucking With My Head

By in getting and spending, identity, spiritual-not-religious, the statusphere, the wire No Comments

William Deresiewicz:

Call it upper middle brow. The new form is infinitely subtler than Midcult. It is post- rather than pre-ironic, its sentimentality hidden by a veil of cool. It is edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive. It is Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson, Lost in Translation, Girls, Stewart/Colbert, The New Yorker, This American Life and the whole empire of quirk, and the films that should have won the Oscars (the films you’re not sure whether to call films or movies).

The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook. Like Midcult, it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within the bounds of what we already believe, affirms the enlightened opinions we absorb every day in the quality media, the educated bromides we trade on Facebook. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb—the definition of a true avant-garde—our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world. (Think, by contrast, of some truly disruptive works: The Wire, Blood Meridian, almost anything by J. M. Coetzee.)

Eh, I don’t know how useful the particulars of this classification are. It makes me think of what Ian Hacking called the “looping effect” — the very act of delineating the traits of this supposed character type initiates a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which people consciously identify with it and shape their beliefs and attitudes accordingly. At its worst, you have people who take astrology seriously, or the, uh, personality distinctions between PC/Mac or iPhone/Android users, or other such marketing fictions.

Nevertheless, I do agree that the complacency he describes exists; I just think it’s a general privilege of consumerism, period. I’ve frequently criticized its manifestation in the form of what I call the spiritual-not-religious — people who settle down in metaphysical suburbia and customize their generic, unexamined beliefs with some exotic accessories from the world bazaar: a little Sufi mysticism here, a few references to Buddhism and Taoism there; nothing too challenging or genuinely transformative. Culturally and politically speaking, I sense that sort of complacency in varying degrees from sites like Salon, Slate, the Atlantic Wire, Gawker Media. I see it among the Twitterati who number less than one in five people, but continuously talk to and about each other as if they constitute the entire world worth knowing. And while The Wire is certainly a work of artistic excellence by any standard, I don’t doubt for a second that it also represented a rich, previously untapped vein of status and hipster cred for many of its online fans, who could claim a familiarity with a dangerous, foreign way of life from the safety of their living rooms (and get sniffly when David Simon called them out for it).

I see it as a corollary to what others have noticed for some time: the sheer plethora of choice available on the Internet paradoxically helps ensure that our experience becomes more monolithic, as we curate a collection of websites and online relationships that reinforce and flatter our identities rather than challenge them.

The New Dealers and the Hope Fiends: A Parable

By in extraordinary popular delusions, the wire, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

The ongoing discussion from a recent post made me think of this scene:

Stringer Bell: Doin’ good out there, D.

D’Angelo Barksdale: We’ll be doin’ even better when we get that new package.

Stringer: *scoffs* New package same as the old, man.

D’Angelo: Say what?

Stringer: Ain’t no new package. We’re just gonna put that same shit out with a different color gelcap, is all. We might spike that shit with some procaine, or some caffeine, but otherwise it’s the same.

D’Angelo: String, man… people already comin’ back on us, tellin’ us that shit is weak.

Stringer: I know, shit is weak, but, you know, shit is weak all over. The thing is: no matter what we call heroin, it’s gonna get sold. Shit is strong, we gonna sell it. Shit is weak, we gonna sell twice as much. You know why? Because a fiend is gonna chase that shit no matter what. It’s crazy. We do worse, and we get paid more.

Communication Breakdown

By in atheism, conspicuous crusading, george carlin, moralizing, psychology, religion, the madness of crowds, the wire, tribalism No Comments

Rawls: I’m a reasonable guy. In fact, everywhere I go, people say to me: “Bill Rawls, you are a reasonable fucking guy.” Am I right, Jay?
Landsman: You are reasonable, sir.
Rawls: Yes. Yes, I am.

Massimo Pigliucci:

The point of this list, I hasten to say, is not that the opinions that I have expressed on these topics are necessarily correct, but rather that a good number of people in the CoR, including several leaders of the movement(s), either hold to clearly unreasonable opinions on said topics, or cannot even engage in a discussion about the opinions they do hold, dismissing any dissenting voice as crazy or irrelevant.

As you can see, the above is a heterogeneous list that includes scientific notions, philosophical concepts, and political positions. What do the elements of this list have in common, if anything? A few things, which is where I hope the discussion is going to focus (as opposed to attempting to debunk one’s pet entry, or deny that there is a problem to begin with).

B) The “I’m-smarter-than-thou” syndrome. Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.

C) Failure of leadership. It is hard to blame the rank and files of the CoR when they are constantly exposed to such blatant and widespread failure of leadership within their own community. Gone are, it seems, the days of the Carl Sagans, Martin Gardners, and Bertrand Russells, and welcome to the days of bloggers and twitterers spouting venom or nonsense just because they can.

…Do I have any practical suggestions on how to move the CoR forward, other than to pay more attention to what the people just mentioned say, and perhaps a little less attention to what is spouted by some others who shall go unmentioned? At the risk of sounding somewhat immodest, yes, I do. Here are a few to get us started (again, discussion on how to improve the list will be most welcome). Once again, the order is pretty much random:

i) Turn on moderation on all your blogs, this will raise the level of discourse immediately by several orders of magnitude, at the cost of a small inconvenience to you and your readers.

ii) Keep in mind the distinction between humor and sarcasm, leave the latter to comedians, who are supposed to be offending people. (In other words, we are not all Jon Stewarts or Tim Minchins.)

iii) Apply the principle of charity, giving the best possible interpretation of someone else’s argument before you mercilessly dismantle it. (After which, by all means, feel free to go ahead and mercilessly dismantle it.)

iv) Engage your readers and your opponents in as civil a tone as you can muster. Few people deserve to be put straight into insult mode (Hitler and Pat Robertson come to mind).

ix) Keep in mind that even the very best make mistakes and occasionally endorse notions that turn out to be wrong. How is it possible that you are the only exception to this rule?

This seems to be a recurring theme on several of the blogs I read. What’s with all these intelligent, deep-thinking people going for each others’ throats lately, needing to be restrained and sedated? I blame the heat. Fucking summer. It’s good for nothing, I’m telling you.<

I snickered a little at the pains he was taking to be coy about which bloggers he thinks are spouting venom and failing to provide examples of leadership. It reminded me of something I read a while back:

Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?
The Dude: No, you’re not wrong.
Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?
The Dude: You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.
Walter Sobchak: Okay then.

Ahh, no, it wasn’t that. Close, but no, it was something else…

So when people, atheists and theists alike, complain that I’m obnoxious, I feel good about it. There’s the fact that most of the people doing the complaining are not the sort I have much respect for, so I take pleasure in pissing them off, but also that I’m fulfilling my responsibilities. I make people aware that where I stand, there stands an atheist, and not some simpering milquetoast making apologies for his temerity in disrespecting religion, but someone who is proud of his beliefs.

Pigliucci complained about the arrogance of some atheists who think all believers are dumb, which is a common complaint, and one you hear from believers as well. But they’re wrong: I don’t think I’m smarter than everyone else.

I just think I’m right.

That’s important. Atheists should have a feeling of unrepentant confidence — we are on the right side of reason, the right side of history, and the right side of the evidence…And anyone who’s bothered by my cockiness should have a little more self-awareness: we all think we’re right, or we wouldn’t be doing what we do. Yeah, the faitheists and believers think I’m a bad guy, for the reasons above (and I’m OK with that). My other sin, though, is that I encourage other atheists to join me, I reinforce my kind of rudeness in a large group of people, and I do that community building stuff. I foster my tribe. We grow stronger and louder and bolder, we are all bad guys together.

…If you aren’t angry, there’s something wrong with you.

Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit. I will not support it in any way, and I resent the complacent schmoes who urge us to close our eyes to it. One the one hand, we’ve got the moderate academic types who like to tell us it’s mostly harmless and we’ll never be able to get rid of it, anyway; to them I’d say that, as people who are supposedly dedicated to learning the truth, you ought to be the first to deny religion because a) it’s wrong, and b) it’s a fallacious way of learning about the world. On the other hand, we’ve got the happy progressives who want us all to do interfaith work, and tell us that the fundies might be bad, but we share common cause with liberal Christians; to them I say that a mind addled by liberal opium is just as faulty as one fired up on conservative crack.

Deep sigh, rub hands over face, run fingers through hair. Okay. Being that we write as cultural Christians for the most part here, it’s fine to grapple mostly with monotheism. Most of the religion that affects our lives is “of the book”. But it’s also true that there are a few billion other people in the world who don’t experience religion as an inferior version of science, as propositions aiming to become workable theories, as statements of metaphysical facts that you must accept on faith. As some of those in the nascent field of evolutionary religious studies can tell you, for those people, religion is what you do rather than what you think. Telling them that their religion is “wrong” would be like telling someone that art and poetry aren’t “true” (of course, we don’t know anyone that ridiculously literal-minded, do we?) And even here in the cultural shadow of the cross, plenty of people “do” their religious practice in a way that no reasonable person should find fault with. Religion is just one particularly ancient and widespread way people have of solidifying tight bonds within groups. If religion as we know it disappeared completely, human beings wouldn’t suddenly become hyper-rational lone wolves; something else would serve as the anchor for people to band together and exclude outsiders.

I hate a group of people who have a common purpose, because pretty soon they have little hats and arm bands and fight songs and a list of people they’re going to visit at 3 AM. So I dislike and despise groups of people, but I love individuals.

— George Carlin

Lately I’ve been interested in things like the differences in individual versus group psychology, as opposed to the less-interesting ideological distinctions. It’s especially interesting to see those differences in the context of a movement which generally prides itself on being above such atavistic irrationality by virtue of its heightened focus on reason. But honestly, if you read comment threads on posts like those above from the vantage point of a bystander with no particular sympathies, you can’t help but notice that the participants sound indistinguishable from any other bunch of assholes fighting on the Internet. Cheap shots, non-sequiturs, sarcasm, posturing, and various other rhetorical fleurs du mal sprout up even in what you’d think would be the inhospitable soil of rationality.

As we were just talking about the other day, the nature of our thinking and the tenacity with which we defend our conclusions changes simply by doing so as part of a cohesive group. The Internet, by facilitating instantaneous communication between people separated by the superficial differences of geography and personal idiosyncrasy, makes it easy to believe that one’s intake of news and information is more diverse than it really is. The old conversational topics we were taught to avoid in polite company, like religion and politics, are especially prone to gravitate toward balkanization and echo chambers when individuals in a more distant, impersonal medium can easily avoid having any substantial interaction with people who don’t fit their customized preferences. And even with the best of intentions, the imprecise nature of language itself, combined with the flawed rhetorical and written talents that most of us have at our disposal, turns any mass communication into the children’s game of telephone.

I doubt this would be news to anyone. And yet, there we have PZ in full stride, taking criticism even from allies as confirmation of his righteousness and as encouragement to be even more recalcitrant and hostile; using phrases like “the right side of history” in complete, uh, unscientific earnest like any good Christian or Marxist; proudly bragging about “reinforcing” his rudeness among his “tribe”; and circumventing reasonable consideration by using selective, highly inflammatory examples of religion at its worst in order to make a naked appeal to raw emotion in the form of bumper sticker platitudes about how not being outraged means not paying attention. I guess he believes that he and his tribe have already done all the important thinking that needs doing, or else they can always hit the pause button on the amygdala and rationally sort through their conclusions every now and then to make sure they’re all still valid. Sounds likely. So, when the last reactionary has been strangled with the guts of the last priest, I take it that no one will ever need to act like an obnoxious jackass ever again? Why am I not optimistic?

But as I’ve said many times, being offended is not such a terrible thing, and can even prove useful. Sometimes my feeling offended is actually a case of being embarrassed over being jolted out of my complacency. And in some contexts, such as the slightly-removed environment of the online world, a person can feel offended or attacked without feeling overly defensive, as would be the case if they were being insulted in person in front of their friends, thus allowing them to change their mind rather than entrench themselves even more firmly in a desperate attempt to save face (it’s at least possible, if not likely). What I actually find most tiresome about his shtick is the way he’s turned his attention to sociopolitical issues with the same ham-fisted subtlety he uses in reminding us that creationism is wrong. Reasonable people can disagree in good faith over age-old arguments about where to draw the line between liberty and equality, over how important it is to have X-amount of racial/sexual diversity at conferences, over exactly what feminism entails now and what the best means of achieving its goals should be, or, indeed, over whether any of this naturally follows directly from atheism as a given, but he acts as if all that’s needed to solve such problems is “reason”, delivered with the brash certainty of loudmouthed adolescence.

The Afterbirth of Tragedy

By in art, the wire No Comments

John Gray:

Simon has acknowledged the influence on the series of ancient tragedians such as Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Like the Greek dramatists he shows humans enacting fates they cannot escape. As Simon put it in a 2007 interview with Nick Hornby, he lifted his thematic stance “wholesale” from the Greeks, aiming “to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The idea that… we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious… But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts… In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalised, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak.”

In ancient Greek tragedy the protagonists were shown as the playthings of the gods. Human actions were scripted by powers beyond human control or comprehension. In The Wire, human beings go to their ruin because of what they and others have unknowingly done. In some interpretations, this is the true meaning of Greek tragedy: the arbitrary meddling of capricious deities in human affairs is a metaphor for the fact that human beings neither understand nor truly determine their own actions. Whether or not the classical Greek dramatists understood tragedy in this fashion, it is hard to imagine a world view more subversive of 21st-century pieties and hopes.

…Steiner’s analysis helps clarify why The Wire is so challenging. In rejecting theism, modern meliorists have not renounced the hope of redemption. Instead they have transposed a Christian narrative into a succession of political projects. Whether it is a fantasy of market freedom or one in which the market is abolished, modern politics is haunted by myths of redemption. In the prevailing anti-tragic world view, human institutions are the result of human action and can therefore be altered by human decision.

The lives that are shown in The Wire confound this seemingly obvious inference. What is done cannot be undone; history cannot be repealed by human will. The workings of necessity that have shaped the past will also shape the future. Serious politics accepts this fact. Redemptive politics only magnifies the waste of life: the drug war, which is supposed to deliver society from the evil of addiction, exposes millions to violence and chronic insecurity. Failing or refusing to accept tragedy, politics has become a theatre of the absurd.

In denying us the comfort of redemption, The Wire re-connects us with reality. When it shows human lives ending in a lack of meaning, the series confronts us with the absurd in its most pitiful form. When it shows human beings joking, cursing and carrying on despite this absurdity, it achieves something like the liberating catharsis that Nietzsche imagined being produced by ancient Greek drama. The struggles we share with the protagonists are not deviations from some ideal version of humanity that will someday come into being. Intractable conflict goes with being human. In one way or another, practically everything in current media culture is escapist in intention or effect. In astonishing contrast, The Wire returns us to ourselves.

I Live In a Rather Special World

By in fresh hell, socmed, the wire No Comments

John Hendel:

David Simon brings a historian’s sword in his analysis of urban decay, and the blade is very much one that befits the years 2002 to 2008. The era carried a specificity to its history that is worth noting and is memorialized in this iconic HBO show. The drama was a portrait of its time in the same way a show like AMC’s Mad Men strives to capture the 1960s. The only difference is Simon sought to tell his story in real time. These breakdowns of institutional order emanate from the history that surrounds them, history that already feels distant to those of us rewatching episodes in 2012. To see 2002 again is jarring. Recall the hoppers’ casual use of payphones? Characters’ confusion at the very idea of text messaging or an Internet search in season 2? Or the lack of social media in the disintegration of journalism Simon depicted in season 5?

There’s a scene at the end of the fourth season that you would think might be more relevant to the sort of highly-educated, culturally sophisticated writers who enjoy pontificating about The Wire online:

Dr. David Parenti: We get the grant, we study the problem, we propose solutions. If they listen, they listen. If they don’t, it still makes for great research. What we publish on this is gonna get a lot of attention.

Howard “Bunny” Colvin: From who?

Dr. David Parenti: From other researchers, academics.

Colvin: Academics?! What, they gonna study your study? [chuckles and shakes head] When do this shit change?

As it happens, I’ve been watching the show all the way through again in recent weeks, and yet I somehow haven’t been overcome with culture shock while trying to mentally inhabit such an alien world where toy phones and their apps didn’t comprise the cultural center of gravity. I know, right? Somehow these proto-humans managed to fill the empty, interminable hours of their lives regardless.

When faced with sixty hours of drama centering on the destruction of white and black working-class life in recent American history, the bleak prospects for both cops and dealers, teachers and ghetto kids, it takes something…special to single out the absence of Twitter and Facebook as something noteworthy. I mean, it shouldn’t require aggressive slumming to encounter representatives of the twenty percent of adults who don’t use the Internet at all.

Simon Says

By in bread and circuses, jests japes jokes jollies, silent moving pictures, the wire No Comments

Sean O’Neal:

And yes, of course we can give Simon the benefit of the doubt that, as always, he’s only trying to protect the integrity of his show by arguing against premature evaluation, being reductive, and distracting silliness, all of which can indeed sometimes get in the way of the message. But maybe he could do all of us the same courtesy by not presuming those who may amuse themselves with a “who’s cooler?” tangent don’t also recognize that this sort of thing is not the point of the show.

There’s room for all kinds of Wire fandom, after all, and if he’s arguing for first-time viewers to ignore those tangents and stick with a show until its entire structure can be built, it’s probably not a good idea to discourage them from even bothering by telling them to straighten up and dictating the terms of what he thinks that appreciation should be. Otherwise, it’s not a TV show you should be making; it’s a civics class.

Omar Is Taking His Evening Constitutional, Yo

By in omnigatherum, the wire No Comments

If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.
The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic. Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back. Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master. The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries. Meanwhile there is an element of the fay, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge. Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe. Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.

The Wire re-imagined as a Victorian novel. This is the coolest thing since Adam Bertocci’s retelling of The Big Lebowski in the form of a Shakespeare play. I think this makes me a gigantic dork, but I don’t care.

I Need a Scratch from the Hand of the Ass that Sold Me the Itch

By in art, bread and circuses, the wire No Comments

We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, among other things, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture of which I’m aware.
With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday.
I don’t have any critical talent or deep insight when it comes to art; I’m just a dude who knows what he likes. After seeing so many people in the blogosphere wanking themselves silly over Mad Men for so long, and after kicking myself for waiting so long to see what all the fuss over The Wire was about, I finally decided a couple months ago to get the first season through Netflix in case it really was worth all the hype.
No. It was not. This dude did not like it. I didn’t even finish half of the season. You can either take my unsophisticated word for it, or you can read the rest of the article by Daniel Mendelsohn to get a more nuanced analysis.

Leftist History Nerd Porn

By in art, history, the wire No Comments

From your lips to the collective ears of the Greek pantheon, baby:

What projects will you pursue now that you have the funds?
There’s a project that [“The Wire” co-creator] Ed Burns wants to do that reflects on the 1880 Haymarket bombing in Chicago, which was an elemental point in terms of capital and labor in our society. There’s a book I’m working on with [longtime Simon collaborator] Bill Zorzi about the drug economy of Baltimore in the ’50s and ’60s. We’re trying to reach as many of the surviving players before they pass on. I’m working with Ed and [Baltimore Sun reporter] Dan Fesperman on beating out scripts for the history of the CIA from 1947 on. That’s a long-term project. This grant may enable me to hold onto writers for projects that aren’t greenlit yet.
And while I’m in an ecstatic trance over the thought of David Simon doing a TV show about the anarchist and labor movement, Ima link to this excellent (and very long) interview he did with Vice last year. Just because.
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