Your Family Is Next

I sometimes worry that no one likes the posts I’m most proud of. Yesterday’s was one of those, and, reaching back, this one about language and otherness stands there, too.

So you can imagine my surprise—and glee—when a friend put me on to Andrew Devereaux’s “‘What Chew Know About Down the Hill?”: Baltimore Club Music, Subgenre Crossover, and the New Subcultural Capital of Race and Space.” Plus, as a failed academic, I take no small pleasure in being prominently cited in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Also, I have decided that Whitting is one of the most profoundly obnoxious creations in the history of making up shit. SOCIAL SATIRE, people: It’s supposed to clunk a little!

UPDATE: That link is now to full text. I have no idea why it wasn’t before.

What You Know Won’t Work

WE LIVE ON THE ON-DEMAND SCHEDULE. NO ONE SAID ANYTHING ABOUT #52, THIS GETS INTO #53.

Really nothing on #52, then or now. Avon’s sitdown with Marlo was a hoot, and Wood Harris really showed us the no-man’s land between swagger and kookiness. Worth noting that there was more warmth between those two than in any of the times Avon and Stringer talked through glass. So you know, gangster recognize gangster.

But—and here’s where the #53 talk starts—that East/West acrimony Avon appealed to got me thinking. The Western has always been all that wrong, or at least hidebound, about policing. And while Prop Joe’s got overseas connects, means to expedite passports, and money laundering schemes, the Barksdales and now Marlo are decidedly local. I wrote before the season started that Marlo looking for the Greeks showed he was trying to become a real criminal. Not just some hood lord, but on the level with the “real” operations.

After #53, I’m realizing that Prop Joe’s already there. He’s the one with off-the-boat dope, and now the means to offer Marlo grown thug financial advice. Stringer might have thought he was changing the game, but his plan was to leave the drug game for the more legit pastures of real estate. Joe, on the other hand, is serious, ambituous, and collected as String, but stays in the realm of illegal. The very dichotomy of Avon/Stringer is a false one projected by the West Side’s mentality; across the highway, Joe’s bringing the best of both worlds together.

In Stringer’s utopia, territory was irrelevant and everyone’s product sold out wherever it was. Under Joe, the co-op’s become a way to consolidate purchase power and keep some major players from stepping on each other’s toes. Worth noting that the whole idea sprang up out of the pragmatic agreement that String and Joe reached in Season Two; given what the co-op’s become, and the fissures that are starting to emerge, you wonder if it’s more realistic tenets belong more to Joe’s knack for mutual agreeable arrangements than Stringer’s economic modeling.

When Joe quips that (inexact quote) “Marlo’s a hard one to civilize,” there’s a lot there beside the surface irony of the “civilized” criminal. Marlo took the West Side the West Side way: By employing exactly the same kind of tactics that Avon had used before him, the ones that Stringer frowned upon. Even if he’s part of the co-op, still he’s thinking in terms of murder and intimidation. Just not, for now, against those he’s in league with. He’ll offer his product to area crews, but only as a friendly alternative to them getting blown off the block. Stringer was West Side in the negative; Marlo, with his power moves, adversarial approach to meetings, and bloodlust, is “that other thing” chomping at the bit.

In some ways, Marlo is the show’s least “civilized” character. He makes Avon look like, well, Stringer. But here Marlo is, trying to make that leap that eluded Stringer because Russ was looking in the wrong direction. What remains to be seen is whether he’s recognizing that Prop Joe’s a mentor for this, or if Joe’s willingness to hold his temper, think calm, and not send out soldiers is construed as a weakness. I doubt Marlo wants to tone down his West Side ruggedness. Does that mean, then, that he thinks he can become Proposition Joe while still following in the footsteps of Avon?

Based on his weird trip to the Antilles, Marlo’s got a long way to go before he can conduct himself like a cosmopolitan pro. And this might have disastrous consequences for everyone involved. It’s like Bunny and the kids at dinner all over again.

P.S. I thought the last scene of #52 was retarded, but when Lester came out in support of it, I had to change my tune. Which I’m assuming was the appropriate reaction.

Art Still Imitates Art

I protect the flame. Turns out the “spoiler” in here is that Namond returns at some point. False alarm, I was a victim of someone else’s in-joke. Good thing he’s a friend of mine. Anyway, enjoy and stay paunchy.

keep those uppity characters alive!

There is much back-scratchin’ going on with sub-media (such as this joint) and mainstream media coverage of this show. We appreciate it, but we haven’t done up to the minute updates thus far. (I did enjoy, last week, Julianne Shepherd/ Cowboyz’n'Poodles’ coverage of the premiere and link to MKW’s appearance in a George Michael video)

However, this is not a link, this is a want ad. Today’s Freakonomics blog post “What Do Real Thugs Think of the Wire?” yielded some awesome comments. My favorites:

I was a thug released from Jail. and there are two options in Baltimore

1. Get out the game count your losses and start a new.

2. Get whatever gig you can and work it to the wheels fall off. and constantly convince yourself that slow money is better than no money .. ya digg
as u see I chose the latter.
Jay- Hustler in east bmore from 93-01
Network security for local co. in bmore.

Being an ex-gang member and ex-cop in a major city and a lover of “The Wire” from season one, I think I got some cred. First, I didn’t like the infusion (I didn’t say I was a stupid gang member)of the Baltimore Sun into the storyline. Second, season five’s premire was lacking the hardcore street element that was present during previous seasons. And finally, Marlo is without a doubt going to get smoked, simply because HBO is NOT going to send the message that the most ruthless banger is going to is going to come out on top. Just ask Stringer Bell! Oh yeah, he’s dead…my bad!

— Posted by X-THUG X-5-0

Jay, X-THUG-X-5-0, are you reading this? Hit us up! Jay, especially, I wanna talk about cybercrime.

Hell Is For Some of You

I don’t know how much stock to put in one errant search query that led here, or the first link that comes up when you type said query into Google. But holy fucking hell am I mad right now. I may—repeat, MAY—have just nosed my way into two enormous spoilers. So let me say this once and again: Anyone looking for spoilers, don’t come here. Don’t click over here from your search engine. And if the person who did this time is reading this, I wish I could spit in your face and rob your parents’ graves. You people are an insult to everyone with hair covering their bodies.

I’m going to watch #52 and TRY NOT TO WATCH THIS AND ALL SUBSEQUENT EPISODES WITH THIS PREMONITION IN MIND. Then I will take a handful of downers, and hope that I can induce some sort of brain damage that will erase this entire experience from my head. If that happens, someone please delete this post. Either way, expect something long and literate tomorrow that sounds nothing like this.

On the bright side, at least there’s no way I can spend the whole season knowing my favorite Wire character is going to die. That already happened to me last time.

Oh and also, even if this wasn’t true, leakage sets up this paranoia-inducing conflation of speculation and premature reality. We can all think about what might happen, but at the same time, it already has happened. Who knows if this, or any other random plot detail about the series, is rumor or fact. It might well be that only one of these spoilers is real; in my current state, though, I have no idea but to believe them all. The existence of absolute truth is that kind of far-fetched bastard.

Yours truly,

The Angel of Nature

P.S. A reader has informed me that Tom Shales’s recent WaPo piece might be the cause of all this. So don’t read it.

Das K.R.E.A.M.

As explained, we’re not up on #52 yet, so we now understand the woe of all you non-on-demand folks. Of course, this has been a sticking point of mine since they implemented the ludicrous rewarding of the haves and obliterated the possibility of water cooler life for the not-technologically-possible-to-haves. We fall into the latter category for the moment, and it sucks.

But season 5 is not really the time to rally behind good old-fashioned television and broadcast worldviews, especially since, individual luddite tendencies aside (hooray for books!), this is the new media we’re using right now, and the future, though unwritten, will certainly not occur on a rigid schedule allowing families to gather ‘round the warm glowing flatscreen. So be it.

Something that has been bothering me about the deluge of stories on the show lately (which is , as Shoals said to me earlier today, “split now between nay-sayers and people drowning in their own adulation,”) is the loose use of the term “Dickensian.” Some stories are simply grabbing onto the upcoming plotline of the Sun editor assigning a story on “Dickensian” kids, but more often than I like, I see lazy writers using Dickens as a sort of shorthand for intricacy, urban despair, and nightmarish institutional breakdown, as if he owned the patent on all that.

Now, I don’t mean to enter into a dissertation of what Dickens was and was not, as I’m certainly not equipped to answer that question too satisfactorily. However, I would like to distinguish Dickens’ vision of city life (and he certainly envisioned plenty of country life too). Whether in grimy London or on mouldering estates, Dickens’ work dealt not strictly in decline, despair, and nihilism. Perhaps treacly it’s true, still everyone knows “A Christmas Carol,” and everyone knows that in the end Tiny Tim is still crippled, but lessons have been learned, so let’s eat some Christmas cheer. Much of Dickens deals in people less clearly “saved,” people moving up and down the dignity chain, passing one another on the way, yet always the thrust is about the good getting their due and the bad getting thrashed. Dickens world is also deeply comic, in the sense of embracing the absurd and ridiculing its subjects.

The Wire shares some of these properties, but in an essential way the show is not interested in saving anyone, redeeming their character, or providing them with a pure villain to work against. In this sense the show may in fact be less realistic than Dickens’ world, because however fantastic the notion of heroes and villains might be, it is still a motivating fantasy in a lot of our lives. Yet The Wire’s universe allows for very little development in the sense of individuals finding themselves, making deep and meaningful connections with others, or somehow working their way out of the diabolical machinations that determine their lives. Sure, there’s some dire wit lurking in even the darkest shadows, but there’s also Wallace, Sharrod, and Bodie (and these, I would argue, are not merely occasions for pity).

Dickens loved writing about humans lost in industrial modernism, but he also loved watching them shine on through and make something of even the most debased circumstances. On The Wire, conversely, humanity is in many cases beside the point. Dignity is one thing, because it’s a process of striving for dignity that can at least temper life’s absurd, often pointless struggle, but full-bore humanity? Maybe out in the county. Simon seems to think so.

This isn’t an effort to split hairs per se, just to clarify that when we use analogy we need to take care to point out that we’re simply providing a general direction for analogic thinking. Perhaps to put a finer point on it: it’s dangerous and useless to confuse Charles Dickens with that other observer of industrial Victorian England: Karl Marx. To that end, if there is a pure villain I have seen emerging through last season and into this one, it’s Herc, and if his villainy has a beginning and an end, it is with capital.

Hello My Friends

New shit later. For those not living the OnDemand Dream, here’s the writing for #51. Oh, and we haven’t seen #52 yet, so don’t talk about.

Pizzawhale on lady cops

Christy$$$$$ on the newsroom and others

Shoals on authenticity and eavesdropping

WHERE WILL IT END? (Shoals)

pure lust

My Abuela spent so many nights of the 1980s watching Murder She Wrote and Columbo with me at her side, not to mention some Father Dowling Mysteries and Matlock phases and whatever tawdry murder plots they worked into the novelas and the Dallas nightly news. Other kids clandestinely watched horror movies and Cinemax with those closer to their own age, but despite logging that serious time with old Cubans, butter cookies, and fictional detectives, somehow I didn’t grow up into a crime show watcher. I don’t have the patience or the stomach for pattern murders, casual depictions of sexualized violence and hints at truly destructive patriarchal structure to handle that shit, much less so routinely. But like everyone else in the nation, I can rattle off the leading ladies of gristle and forensics, although I can’t keep straight the titles of their shows: Angie Harmon, classy Republican bitch from my hometown; Jayne Mansfield’s daughter, whom at first appears normal; the daughter from What About Bob; Crossing Jordan, for whom Shoals harbors an enduring boner; and the woman who was in Secrets and Lies. Women’s faces are the reigning currency in crime television- their empathy, patience, and intuition serve as a humanizing force in the fictionalized entertaining crime/court/time cycle of our big prison/industrial racket.

So I was shocked to get so sucked into the last installment of Prime Suspect on Masterpiece Theater a few weeks back. Talk about a classy bitch! Helen Mirren, written as a real-person woman detective, DCI Jane Tennison, not lacking in the whole coercive/stern/lovely/moral element so banally given to her American broadcast counterparts, but also demonstrating the option to numb herself from the repeated shock of crime, and dealing with the reality of being a menopausal low-level civil servant. Y’know, I thought, this admits that it’s not only hard for a woman to prove herself effective in a macho realm of criminal investigation, but it actually depicts what these lady detectives do so well, which is being traditionally feminine, observant and empathetic as real work that takes its fucking toll. (Not to mention the ramifications implied of living in a society where violence is alternately economical and sado-sexual or in navigating civil structures that are macho-hierarchical to the end.) In short, DCI Tennison is a woman detective portrayed with the intellectual, moral, and emotional complexities of Jimmy McNulty.

There has been much talk about the Wire’s uneven development of its female characters. To this I am ambivalent, as Simon et al have hinted enough at the differentiation of gender and sexuality in crime and criminal procedure to make me think that it’ll come sooner or later. Shakima Griggs, whose real life on the show started when she got shot posing as a whore, is somehow assumed to be a character who struggles, despite her confidence and composure, with simply dealing in violence and the male sphere of the police force. Yet that’s simply not true; as a veteran of southern hardcore shows and graduate computer science seminars, I can attest that being in a male space is not hard, but attempting to build something there and get credit is. Kima, whose relationship with Bubbles is at the show’s moral core, spends greater amounts of psychic energy in listening to a tragic junkie and identifying elements of criminal networks from his tips than any other detective’s singular contributions on the street or on the wire. As we all know, Kima hates babies, so the fact that she nurses Bubs’ wounds and manages to emerge with a minimum of fussing and a modicum of credit is a demonstration of how little this achievement is actually recognized. We can’t say the same for Beadie’s work in the second season; all that against-moral-reason empathy she poured out to the dock workers she had grown up with only really won her the fraught prize of roosting with McNulty, which I’m so not looking forward to watching unravel. (Why do you think I was hanging out with Abuela on the weekends in the first place?) It’s as complex of a task to examine the motives of criminals, emotional or legal, as it is to examine their acts, yet the feeling and seeing elements of police work, policy, criminal action, and as we see in this first episode of the new season, reporting, are assumed and uncredited. (Note: Gutierrez, you are my GIRL. It took 5 seasons to get a single Latina on this show, and my chips are on you to be a meaningful character.)

But seriously, read sociologist Leigh Star’s work about nurses and office workers. Medical computing has struggled for 50 years in trying to capture the communication of nurses in hospitals, because no one can accurately gage the complex system of work that is deemed invisible even by the worker herself. It’s not that The Wire’s female characters are too attractive, too sweet, or too simple, it’s that their role in the actions has yet to be fully realized.

Yes, that is Donna Haraway and her dog, Cayenne. Also, read Ruben Castaneda’s Sunday Post magazine essay on being a crime reporter with a crack problem in early 90’s DC.

Whoa-whoa-won

Ready… okay. Episode 1. I’ve got some thoughts on it. duh.

I want to start with a question that builds off Shoals’s post about the newsroom. I, for one, am pretty psyched to have the Sun and the newsroom as a big part of the plot. But I’ve always been the HH-er who likes the Carcetti plots and the politics plots, so it’s really no surprise that I welcome this one. It’s not that I don’t like the corner, it’s just that after this many seasons, the day-to-day drama of the same system doesn’t appeal to me as much as branching into the new world of the new season. The corner boys have my sympathies and my respect, but their world is way fucked up, and I like the plots that talk about how it got to be that way and how it intersects with the powers. So to get to my question. Some of the journalists’ dialogue is a little hard to take, but I think that’s just because it’s so familiar. I’m thinking particularly of the bit about evacuating people vs. evacuating buildings. That is like Copy Editing 101, and anyone who’s ever worked at a paper or a magazine knows it. So what I’m wondering now is how much of the cop or street dialogue is boilerplate to listen to for the people from those worlds. What have I been missing?

Second thing I want to say. McNulty had a line about how he wonders what it’s like to work for a “real” police department; eager beaver ladder climbing reporter boy had his own quip about working at a “real” paper. (He, by the way, is going to get really annoying really fast if he doesn’t do more than establish his character with neon signs.) They see their situation as a kind of referendum on how shitty Baltimore is. But it seems to me that the cutbacks they’re dealing with are the rule, not the exception. They are interpreting a mass breakdown of urban infrastructure as local. Of course, when you’re in Baltimore or Philly or wherever you’re going to long to get out and get someplace where the trains run on time. But the trains don’t really run anywhere anymore.

Third and last thing, riding my lady horse. My friend A. had a great point the other day re women and the show, relating to the sex slaves sting. Why, she wanted to know, was McNulty sleeping with one of those women played for laughs? Would you think it was funny if a white master had sex with a black slave in 1800? The little crack in this most recent episode about what a hotshot McNulty was reminded me of what she said. And irked me! It was written to get an appreciative laugh from male viewers and without any regard to the woman’s humanity. Enough with the boys club already.

Thinking of McNulty. I’m going to sign off with some reflections on Irish cops from Bonfire of the Vanities, which I’m reading for the first time. (so please no spoilers!) “The Irish were disappearing from New York, so far as the general population was concerned. In politics, the Irish, who twenty years ago still ran the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and much of Manhattan, were down to one seedy little district over on the West Side of Manhattan, over where all the unused piers rusted in the Hudson River…. Everybody moving up in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office was Jewish or Italian. And yet the Irish stamp was on the Police Department and on the Homicide Bureau of the D.A.’s Office, and it would probably be there forever. Irish machismo — that was the dour madness that gripped them all. They called themselves Harps and Donkeys, the Irish did. Donkeys! They used the word themselves, in pride but also as an admission. They understood the word. Irish bravery was not the bravery of the lion but the bravery of the donkey. As a cop, or as an assistant district attorney in Homicide, no matter what kind of stupid fix you got yourself into, you never backed off. You held your ground. That was what was scary about even the smallest and most insignificant of the breed. Once they took a position, they were ready to fight. To deal with them you had to be willing to fight also, and not that many people on this poor globe were willing to fight.”

The Accidental Native

It goes without saying that The Wire is a show proud of its insider authority. If there is such a thing as “realistic” in television, this is it—down to the slightest detail, the show tries to make itself resonate with the people it’s based on. Sometimes this takes the form of subtle touches, other times it’s about references or gags that only an insider would get. And yes, I equate a regional sensibility with “insider,” even if there’s usually a populist/elitist divide that springs up there. Take anything colorfully regional outside of its element and, in today’s cultural climate, it very quickly becomes a sought-after commodity.

For viewers, this aspect of the show is part of what makes it so engrossing. Plenty of folks look upon it as some form of exoticism, whether we’re talking cops, robbers, or pols, and whether race or region are even the main point. The back room dealings of city government are, for most of us, unfamiliar and mysterious. Feeling that The Wire isn’t trying to translate them into outsider-speak both alienates and attracts us. Again, the show’s exclusivity gives it a kind of credibility that more accessible programs lack. It’s not just a justification, or an excuse—it’s the thought that rings in your head through every second of the show.

Of course, the show’s triumph comes in its ability to make us understand, to pinpoint the universal, etc. And yet there’s a third part of viewer-dom that’s rarely discussed: Our desire to feel “down”. Hell, the very existence of the show was, until last season, this kind of cult phenomenon. The assumption being that to know The Wire was to in some way belong to its orbit. For sure, there are fans of the show who didn’t need to synthesize this effect, and respond, maybe even defiantly, to art that acknowledges them and treats them like human beings. But it’s been said (more or less) that the show’s audience consists of two kinds of people: Drug dealers and fancy critics. And any time there’s race and class involved, especially when it’s related to the outlaw life, there’s going to be appropriation.

Whenever I read a review that riffed on the character’s “impenetrable, slang-laden dialogue,” I’d think to myself “not for me!” Of course, all that changed when Snoop showed up, but I digress. While this is most true for the street side of things, it’s remarkable how much this holds for other realms. Bunk and Jimmy make cop buddy-dom into something enviable, and Norman makes me want to rethink my career choice. It’s dangerous to utter these words so close to a show known as unflinching and pessimistic, but about half the characters succeed in making themselves—and their line of work—vaguely heroic. Or at least something we can secretly aspire to.

Will this happen with the news room? Too soon to call, obviously. The real Baltimore Sun seems to think not; as someone who has in the past written for a collapsing Knight-Ridder paper, I might not be in the best position to judge, either. A journalism mentor of mine once said he enjoyed Shattered Glass because it made deadlines and fact-checking into high drama; there was something perversely exciting about that, but I don’t know if I’d want it displacing the fantasy posed by Marlo or McNulty.

Maybe it has to do with the content—there’s really not much romance left in daily journalism, even from afar. Even saving bright minds in inner city schools has more aura to it. Writing for The Atlantic, Mark Bowden suggests that Simon’s visceral rage (or “vindictiveness”) might get the best of him here; I could certainly see that standing in the way of his more darkly rhapsodic touch. A flying duck told me once that over-eager satire is the enemy of literature.

Or maybe it’s just that, for the first time, I don’t get to play the game of penetrating someone else’s world. For once, the show’s speaking to me.