"The Wire" on HBO

i love pretty much every scene that everyone hates and i never understand any of the criticisms

i'll relent slightly on the balcony thing but i still don't think it really matters seeing as 99% of the ppl who've watched the show (and any who thought the whole thing was bullshit) probably will not see those quotes from simon

tamtam: i never really knew you well enough in your former guise to have an opinion on you one way or the other, but i think you are an a+ poster no homo.

it's not really a lack of realism! it's what realist fiction is made of! like have you ever read a dickens death scene? i always end up sounding like that awful baltimore sun editor from season 5 on wire threads.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, March 9, 2011 5:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is very otm to me - it seems hyper-literal and a little lunkheaded to complain about this stuff imo.

jaymc-chan....

tv show is not 100% reflective of reality, oh my god

that said, I had a similar reaction as js my first time through, this tv series was lauded for being 'realistic' and I took 'realistic' to mean 'verisimilar' but actually it just means 'realistic' and then I was like okay, I can get down with that...until season 5

not sure why you would expect a scripted dramatic tv serial to be "verisimilar"

well yeah it would be badass if prodigy rapped about killing his enemies with a flamethrower while perched in the middle of queens on top of a purple elephant but i'm not sure if i would call it "working within the parameters of 'reality'"

― little humma boy (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, March 9, 2011 11:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is this something that omar does in the show cuz i missed that

horseshoe, difficult listening hour otm

― ℳℴℯ　❤＼(◕‿◕✿ (Princess TamTam), Wednesday, March 9, 2011 11:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

u think im offtm or are u just making sure i know u still dont like me

are you starting beefs, just to start them?

like Marlo putting people in those boarded up houses not cause he has to, but because he can?

im not 'starting' anything thnx for your input

because tamtam didn't include you in his otm litany? like, while you were banned, did you think about how 51 people came to press that button?

i mean, clearly the thing to do would have been to post, "you did not otm me? surely some mistake!"

oh my godddddddddddd

max otm
deej otm
everyone otm

except for jordan and whiney

oh my godddddddddddd

― max, Thursday, March 10, 2011 2:59 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

not sure why you would expect a scripted dramatic tv serial to be "verisimilar"

― sarahel, 2011年03月10日 星期四 下午2:55 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah but people always cite the 'realism' of the wire as being one of its strongest points, its just interesting that 'realism' covers such a broad category of factors, but when people foreground it like that in the conversation I expected idk something closer to the verisimilar side of the spectrum, instead like you said it's just a scripted tv serial

btw deej otm.... SIKE

Ah, good old Local Garda, being clueless and British again.

anyway the "fuck" scene is awesome, omar is awesome, & local garda is british. keep that in mind

― kl0p's son (k3vin k.), Thursday, March 10, 2011 2:40 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

id thought he was irish for the years i've posted here. huh.

who is sarahel

Snoop arrested in drug raid

:(

the Snoop buying the Hilti gun opening sequence (sea 4 ep 1) is easily my favorite Wire scene

Simon's cynicism was so noxious by the last couple of episodes that I'm surprised he didn't end the scene in which the new Judge Pearlman crisply informs Daniels that he can't prosecute his case because of a conflict of interest *CLOSE-UP of Pearlman slyly winking at Daniels*.

xp dayo - i don't recall people telling me I "had to see it" because it was "so real" - just that it was "so good" - so I didn't come at it with those expectations.

if you guys want to see what the wire would be like if it were more realistic you should watch the corner cause thats some real ass dire shit

yeah:

The ‘Lowest Form of Humor’? (No Way)

March 10, 2011 11:34 A.M.
By Jay Nordlinger
Okay, I gotta work, but I have to do one more Corner post — can’t resist. In today’s Impromptus, I revisit — prompted by a reader — the pronunciation of forte: which is “fort.” That’s if you mean forte as in expertise, strong suit. Forte as in loud is “for-tay.” (I could explain the roots of these things, but I have done so a hundred times, and must have bored people to tears by now.)

A reader writes, “The strong half of a fencing blade is also a forte, pronounced ‘fort,’ and is used for parries.” Great. Glad to know. But then our reader continues, “The strong parry, like unto a brick wall, is the parry Mason. The easy and apparently casual but effective parry is the parry Como. The Canadian water parry is the parry, eh?”

Don’t shoot the messenger! I mean, the printer of the letter! Shoot, instead, that punning genius from Astoria, Ore.

Thanks, and see you.

i think maybe when people talk abt the wire being real they mean more subtle and caring abt how the world works from certain societal perspectives more than tv shows generally do rather than resembling real life in every conceivable way

surprise surprise the things i like the most about the wire are when it gets kind of deadwood-y: using the structures of different parts of the drug economy to try to dramatize how things in the "real" economy and "real" politics work

goole - me too!

claims to realism always make me suspicious because a) there's usually an underlying aesthetic presumption that realism is somehow the most admirable of artistic virtues (which I don't agree with) and b) the term means radically different things to different people, so it's a fairly vague signifier. These two things in combination I find particularly annoying

the exposed mundanity at the heart of the drug drama is a beautiful lol xp

xp dayo - i don't recall people telling me I "had to see it" because it was "so real" - just that it was "so good" - so I didn't come at it with those expectations.

― sarahel, Friday, March 11, 2011 12:25 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

looks like we heard different things from different people, no wai!!

David Simon responds to Snoop's arrest

kind of symptomatic of Simon's incurable logorrhea that he felt the need to write a fucking essay about this and tie it into the show's thesis

kinda feel bad for snoop

or demonstrative in his passionate belief in the subjects of his concern (xpost)

it must be weird like being a huge breakout fan favorite star of a show out of nowhere & feeling like maybe your life has turned around in a way that you'd never foresee & then slowly realizing that there's nowhere to really go from there

that too, but i dunno -- i appreciate that he ends it with "I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter" but he just climbs on the soapbox in the local media so often at any opportunity that turning a friend/co-worker's misfortune into a rant like this is just a little ugh to me (xpost)

im not 'starting' anything thnx for your input

― deej, Thursday, March 10, 2011 7:53 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is kind of amazing its like watching u spin around and around pointing your gun at anyone approaching

his name is his name, yo

kinda like when bodie gets offed

it must be weird like being a huge breakout fan favorite star of a show out of nowhere & feeling like maybe your life has turned around in a way that you'd never foresee & then slowly realizing that there's nowhere to really go from there

just like plenty of scenes involving omar go past what i can tolerate in terms of the violation of the parameters of reality

You know, if you wanted Omar to hew more to the life of his real-world counterpart, he would've lived and hooked up with Khandi Alexander.

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/wirepage136.jpg

This is pretty good: http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/when-its-not-your-turn-the-quintessentially-victorian-vision-of-ogdens-the-wire/

Herc is now following me on Twitter.

Link doesn't work for me, Stevie, looks good. (and pertinently amusing given my blethering last week about Victorian realism/workplaces/The Wire).