"The Wire" on HBO

one of my favorite characters on ILX!

The opening scene (replete with Snot Booger) is repeated almost wholly from the "Homicide" book, as are a few other bits and pieces throughout the show.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, January 17, 2011 5:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

and so I'm to assume that it was transcribed directly from a tape recording of whatever real-life situation it was taken from?

I think David Simon heard a cop retelling that story.

yeah but all stories are embellished through retelling

I just read The Corner co-written by Simon & Ed Burns - a Baltimore detective for 20 years & then a public school teacher. interesting perspective there, to say the least. you can totally see the genesis of several Wire characters in the real people on The Corner: D'Angelo Barksdale & Bubbles. fascinating book whether you've seen the series or not.

only skimming this thread since I'm in the middle of season three

uh, don't read the ~50 or so posts above yours

i really want to read the corner too

mouzone's right hand man is the actual dude from the corner book

i read like half The Corner before its library due date, really need to go take it out again and finish it.

i love Omar and totally get why he's the most iconic character from The Wire, but i can't imagine him being remotely my favorite out of all the great characters on the show.

Omar
Bunk
Ziggy
Frank Sbotka

i can dimly see the objection to the first scene of the show, but criticizing 'the wire' for being writerly... very occasionally they go too far, but mostly not. 'the corner' is never writerly, iirc, but it's also kind of boring. i don't think 'the wire' is even aiming for that kind of verisimilitude -- example, it's set within the half-decade the show ran for, but also stands for about a quarter-century.

it incorporates stories and situations and people from 1980s and 1990s IRL Baltimore but it's all internally consistent to the show's present day timeline, don't see how that has any relationship to the show's verisimilitude

yeah but all stories are embellished through retelling

― dayo, Sunday, January 16, 2011 5:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what point are u even making here

sometimes real life is like this & dudes on the corner say some profound shit abt life

if a real life street dude said "thin line 'tween heaven and here" i'd roll my eyes at him too

bunk
prop joe
frank sobotka
randy
norman

if a real life street dude said "thin line 'tween heaven and here" i'd roll my eyes at him too

― Alex Da Dad (some dude), Monday, January 17, 2011 12:20 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

o rly

norman is a great

i am trying to come up with a list of my favorite characters, but it would be more efficient to say everyone except marlo and namond's mom

i guess norman might be kind of a flat Good Guy but he's more fun than gus and i like the suggestion that he is in a cycle where he continually works closely with politicians who then disappoint him so he finds a new one -- like the whole country, but more intimate.

I love the deadness of marlo. Not that I'd list him as a favorite character but I love that after us building up this love for all these bad street dudes like Stringer or Omar, you get Marlo who is such a complete cipher, like a vaccuum of anything identifiable, just straight ambition. I find him kind of fascinating in a weird way.

yeah i don't actually think he's badly characterized, i just hate him.

yeah SPOILERZ i really like the contrast between the rooted barksdale empire -- which is rapacious and destructive but which does things like fund cutty's gym not just as a repaid favor but out of a sense of residence in a community, and whose leaders eventually destroy each other because of incompatibilities/impossibilities in dreams and ideals they have that go back to childhood -- and marlo who just consumes money and people and has no discernible history. the show's position seems to be ALL THESE SYSTEMS ARE FALLING APART AND GETTING WORSE INCLUDING THE DRUG TRADE

plus in seasons 1-3 you get used to kind of rooting for stringer as the guy who wants to legitimize the outfit, over avon as the guy who seems too caught up in his own street reputation, and then at the end of 3 stringer turns out to have been hugely naive and just exploited laughingly by people who are playing a much higher-level destructive game than mere drug trafficking, and avon might actually have been the smart one, and then marlo shows up just to show you what someone who only cares about his own reputation actually looks like.

otm

i fuckin love marlo

Marlo is kinda terrifying to me.

As a written character I find his place in the story really interesting and great, but to watch, he leaves me begging for humor or sadness or happiness or anything. His flatness is really something else.

i might hear "you want it to be one way, but it's the other way" quoted more than any other line on this show and i think it's because after the barksdale/marlo contrast it hits people as being about entropy vs. order. like not necessarily in those terms, but: you want things to trend naturally towards complexity and justice and harmony, but they don't; they rot.

Norman gets some great lines -
"It does have a certain charm to it. They manufactured an issue to get paid. We manufactured an issue to get you elected Governor. Everybody's gettin' what they need behind some make believe."

"Don't get the crime rate down, ain't no governor neither....Just a weak-ass mayor of a broke-ass city."

yeah Norman is the shit

i actually really liked Chris.

sometimes real life is like this & dudes on the corner say some profound shit abt life

― *gets the power* (deej), Monday, January 17, 2011 1:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I didn't know "The Corner" was a tv show and I thought deej was just casually droppin some Chi-town street knowledge

Marlo easily in my top 5

Chris was really interesting.

I didn't know "The Corner" was a tv show and I thought deej was just casually droppin some Chi-town street knowledge

― domo genesis p-orridge (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, January 17, 2011 12:55 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it wasnt about the show.

& im not claiming 'street knowledge' but hey whiney try not to ruin this thread please

wanna explain "o rly" for me

i just mean that sure maybe its delivered in a *more dramatic way* but if u read the book the anecdote as told is completely believable & there's nothing 'out of character' for someone to have thought of just bcuz they happen to be poor & black imo

i mean huge portions of rap music are based around similar ideas & saying otherwise seems borderline condescending to me

wanna explain "o rly" for me

― Alex Da Dad (some dude), Monday, January 17, 2011 1:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if you were talking to a guy who knew someone who was just shot & he said something vaguely poetic about it, i guess some dude is probably the kind of dude who would roll his eyes so never mind me

if this starts to turn into another one of *those fights* the 3 of us are known for im probably gonna bow out tho

if you were talking to a guy who knew someone who was just shot

now can i ruin this thread?

were talking about a specific anecdote, dude, where this occurs

hold on, let me remove my bookmark first..

based on a real life event

wait a guy that just got shot!? talk about loading the question.

haha xp

some dude are we not talking about the snot boogie story at the beginning of the 1st episode??

"thin line 'tween heaven and here" is something Bubbles says about 3 episodes later in a completely unrelated scene

oh i was thinking its what dude said about snot boogie

my confusion -- ok, well, coming from a junkie living in a shitty neighborhood i think the point still stands?

like, if the dude bubbles is based on said that to me i dont think id roll my eyes but maybe u are a different kind of dude