-30- thoughts

Damn, I miss you guys, I have had a busy period.

I loved the ending. I like the way Simon finished his story

For all of our speculation about who was going to die by the end of the show, there was relatively little blood spilled. And even knowing the substance of the show, knowing people get killed, the bullet-to-the-head scenes over the last few episodes absolutely moved me to my core, they were so fucking perfect.

How is it that the final scenes of Prop Joe, Omar, and Snoop, on a show like The Wire, still manage to be so damn powerful? It doesn’t get any better than this.

If David Simon said at the meeting for the final episode, “We are going to kill one person. Who should it be and why? “, this show is what we should have gotten. I love this proposition, and I love that the answer was “Cheese gets it for doing Joe.” We had typical, predictable reasons for the deaths of any gangster or cop in our loveable lineup. Cheese spilled his own bloodline and by any code of any gangster, cop, thief, hopper, po-po or trickster god, that shit is going to take you down. Period. So I say, ” well played.”

More later…

Deep Background on Mr. Boston, Please.

I have not seen this connection written about elsewhere, so here are some tasty bits for trivia obsessed NuPakers.

The homeless man Templeton talks to in episode 55 says he is “Nathan Levi Boston.” He tells Templeton he knows who committed the murders and asks him, “Do you believe Satan walks the earth in fleshly form?” On a whim, I do some name tracing.

Namond’s world, by the numbers

There are some stark realities that kids growing up on the Baltimore streets must face. There are certain things that probably aren’t going to happen. And the probabilities are not glossed over on any level by the show writers. I also like seeing the numbers presented to me directly. Let’s start with this statistic:

Baltimore, Maryland, home of The Wire, was 65% Black in the year 2006. Whites make up 32% of the population.

With this in mind, I wonder what things will be like for Namond, our 9th grader from the show who is most likely to succeed in the modern world? Let’s look at a few things he will run up against (using a few Powerpoint slides). It’s still play or get played, man…

Why Lester, why?

Goddamn. I knew something was up with Lester, but I didn’t think it would be… this. Or this soon. Lester is jumping on board with Jimmy’s plan to create a serial killer. Damn, Lester. Why did you do it?

Allow me to get started on the overanalysis.

Every plan a weak link…

My other favorite comedy moment.

This bar scene, the last minute where the broke cops plan to rob a liquor store to pay their bar tab. I left the first 45 seconds in to give a complete scene, and we get listen to Mcnulty call everyone liars.

“Who’s gonna be our wheelman?”

Every plan a weak link.

Episode 1 straggling thoughts…

If Al Franken were to name the first episode, perhaps he would call it Lies, And the Lying Liars Who Use Lying Lie Detectors … I’ve watched that first scene quite a few times now, and it continues to make me giggle. What a perfect setup to talk about media and the free press in America. We grew up believing the media was supposed to be society’s lie detector, ready to speak truth to power. Now the lie detector we used to trust is just a rigged copier machine, spitting out what was fed into it by a liar who thinks he is doing us a favor. Awesome. And fucking funny.

 

Track marks from my Wire addiction?

Upon reflection, it seems I rode my way through a cliché on September 16 of last year. That day of fatigue started in Washington, D.C. The previous day’s antiwar march with the folks of the Eschaton blog had been fun, maybe a little too fun, and I hauled my tired, dehydrated self through Union Station onto a business class train to New York City. I was sitting on the left side of the “quiet car” as I sipped water and ignored my book. It was a bright, sunny midday trip passing through scenic parts of the Northeastern corridor I had never seen before.

Not long after the trip started, we were going through Baltimore. I was looking off to my right at the tall downtown buildings, and a prominent Johns Hopkins structure in particular caught my eye. I was probably wondering how snobby the doctors must be in such a place, perhaps what newer procedures they performed that would make their way to my hospital in a few years. At some point I looked back to my left, at the western side of the city, and there it was, a distinct, unmistakable urban portrait right in front of me. Blocks of row housing, old and falling apart, with a peculiar architecture I found familiar to memory. I was looking at “The Wire” just outside my train window. I even said “it looks just like ‘The Wire’ ” to the young black woman sitting in the seat next to me. She looked out, smiled back at me and returned to her text messaging without saying a word. Not a fan of the show, I guess.

Captain O Captain

Cannot get to the Rap Sheets to personalize.  Advice?