Baltimore

Margaret Talbot profiles David Simon, creator of The Wire →

Margaret Talbot profiles David Simon, creator of The Wire
Season 5 to focus on the newspaper and how the media frames crime in the American city.

tags: , , , , | #

For The Wire, rap that’s pure Baltimore →

For The Wire, rap that’s pure Baltimore
No national rap star has emerged from Baltimore, despite all this grass-roots activity, largely because a distinctive local black sound — Baltimore club, or house, a thrusting, occasionally lewd form of dance music — already existed.

tags: , , , , , , | #

Setting Aside: The Wire

Posted by Richard on Wednesday, 15 November 2006

After searching through Jason Kottke's site for links about The Wire, and remembering his strong recommendation of season 3, it feels a little strange to say that after watching both the first and second seasons, it's time for a break. Season 4 is currently in progress, so I don't feel like there's too much left to get caught up, meaning I can wait until the holidays and use the hour or two gained from not watching Baltimore homicide and narcotics cops catch the bad guys to catch up on the first season of space pilots battling their robotic creations.

Thoughts so far on the first two seasons: lots of parallels between it and Homicide: Life on the Streets. Both are set in Baltimore, Maryland. Both have homicide detectives joining police raids while wearing bullet-proof vests. Both have black ink on the whiteboard for solved cases ("clearances" in The Wire, meaning they passed it on to the district attorneys), and red for unsolved cases, like the 14 Jane Does in Season 2. Both had the district attorney's office as a largely tangential player, but from what I remember, The Wire has more politics. (A running theme is that if you follow the drugs, all you find are drug users and drug dealers, but if you follow the money, you don't know what you'll find.) Homicide was a little edgier, especially with the editing, and dark, and maybe a little better. But then again, it didn't have Method Man acting as one of the gangsters.

Like Some Kind of Geographic Secret Handshake

Posted by Richard on Friday, 10 November 2006

Remember when I said I don't watch TV? Come on, you remember. Well, that's over now: BitTorrent and DVD rentals are my new TV. Here's what I'm watching (contains spoilers if you haven't yet seen them).

Prison Break: I initially downloaded episodes to catch up with the first season, but now I do it because they show it on Mondays at 8 o'clock, which is about the time my girlfriend and I are on the phone. (Aww.) The show is utterly preposterous: in one recent episode we see escaped convicts Michael Scofield and Fernando Sucré falling into a river only to see them in the next scene high and dry, the former wearing different clothes giving the latter a note from his pocket. That's on top of all everything else in the second season: now that they've escaped from prison, the FBI and "The Company" and the prisoners' former guards are on their tail, each prisoner with their own story line, involving revenge, marriage, clearing their name, and so on. At least they killed off the annoying characters (Veronica Donnavan, "Tweener") but shit's ridiculous. And yet I watch.

Battlestar Galactica: I finally watched the miniseries on DVD as well as a few episodes I had already seen and can see what people like about it. Almost everything about it—the story and the morals in the story, acting, soundtrack, the effects—are great. Almost? It tends to gloss over a few things, like how Boomer landed her ship after leaving Caprica. But something tells me they explain that later on.

The Wire: Jason Kottke wouldn't shut up about it, so I watched the entire first season over a span of a couple weeks. Set in Baltimore, the first season takes us inside the low-rises of the projects, with the police trying to break down a drug operation. The second season takes us to the docks and inside the dock workers' union. (The title refers to wiretaps placed on pay-phones and pagers in the drug dealer network.) Unlike Prison Break, The Wire seems intent on killing off the most interesting characters, like Wallace in the first season (unfairly, he just wanted out of the game) and almost Kima, the black lesbian. In season two, they kill of D'Angelo and make it look like a suicide, also for wanting out of the game (but also because they were afraid he'd snitch or already had). The series introduces me to slang like "mope", "the bug", and "suction". Also interesting is how they namedrop neighbourhoods, like some kind of geographic secret handshake. (I wonder if that's how Vancouverites felt about Da Vinci's Inquest.) Other things I learned about Baltimorians: they swear every third word and are all alcoholics, especially Baltimore cops. Oh, and don't fuck with Omar.