September
3, 2006
(Quick housekeeping note: did some major re-arranging
of some of the older pages on the site, particularly the old thought
pages. You should not notice any changes, but if you hit any dead
links or see any issues, please
let me know. Thanks...)
New month, and a new update. No, still no baby as
of yet...Maria is continuing to progress, but no real idea of when
it will be. Suffice to say that it could be any time for the next
couple of weeks, so we live on the edge right now. Diaper bag is
already packed, and the car seat is already in the back seat of
Maria's car. For now, we're all waiting for the baby to show up.
It is a little frustrating, though...basically any time we call
anyone or send messages, people automatically assume we are having
a baby. RELAX, PEOPLE. No baby yet. We'll tell you when it is, I
promise...till then, answer the phone in a relaxed manner.
So, this week has been packed...I have pretty much
stayed at school late every evening, staying till almost 8 on Friday
night. Why, you ask? This week was when the first issue of the newspaper
finally went to presses. I ended up staying late to help with layout,
and Friday night was spent distilling the PageMaker files, making
PDFs, and checking for consistency. Anyways, as of Friday night,
the printers had it, although it looks like they won't be able to
actually print it until Wednesday. Oh well. However, for my loyal
website readers: if you'd like to see what our student newspaper
looks like, I have taken the liberty of uploading a completed PDF
file up to the website. Remember, before you look at this thing--I
don't write it, I don't lay it out, I just supervise and give advice
when asked. I try to proofread, but mostly, this is a student run
publication. That being said, I think it mostly looks very good,
especially the front page. Check it out here,
and let me know what you think of it...
Speaking of the newspaper, although I doubt this will
honestly apply to anyone who reads this: if anyone out there is
interested in buying some ads in the newspaper, please let me know.
Money is a much bigger issue than I realized with this thing...not
only are we still a ways from having enough to print all year, but
to fix up our computers (we currently have a Windows XP upgrade
paid for that we cannot use until we get licenses for all our software)
is going to cost about 1300 dollars. WAY more than we have. If you're
interested in buying, drop me a line at my school e-mail account,
mauthej at wcschools.com...
What else is going on? Went to the Celebration last
night. For those of you who have no clue what this is, it's the
big Tennessee Walking Horse festival in Shelbyville. It is the biggest
competition of the year, and where the World Champion is crowned
in each category. This all matters to me because Maria's family
owns a walking horse farm and competes in it every year. Well, last
night, Nathan had a horse entered in the Weanling category...and
won. That's right--my brother-in-law owns a World Champion Weanling.
No, I don't know what it means either...except that it's a VERY
big deal for the family, both financially and with regard to reputation.
It's also a big deal to Nathan because, although he's won before,
this is the first time that it has been with a horse that he actually
owns (not just trained). So good for him. At least we bailed before
the
shit hit the fan...
Otherwise, not much of note. Been enjoying the American
Recordings series by Johnny Cash lately, and have found them
outstanding, all of them. These are the stripped-down, man and his
guitar recordings that Cash made several of, most notably IV, which
contained "The Man Comes Around" (put to brilliant use
in the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead) and his haunting,
painful cover of "Hurt". The entire series (well, I have
4 of the 5--I need Unchained, the second of the set) are
brilliantly done, and beautiful pieces of music. Cash's old stuff
is good, but the American Recordings are works of art.
Finally, I want to close with two separate articles
about what is soon to be the best show on TV (as of next week).
I am still upset about Deadwood being over (despite my
willingness to defend the finale from unappreciative cocksuckers
who don't see it for the perfection that it is), but next week,
the fourth season of The Wire begins on HBO. I have been
praising this show for years, and been going unheard. It doesn't
matter when I tell people that it is among the most powerful and
intelligent shows ever made. It doesn't matter that I tell them
that it attracts writers like Dennis Lehane and Richard Price to
write scripts. It doesn't matter that I tell people that it will
literally change the way you look at the world around you. But,
despite all that, I will say it again: Deadwood may be
my favorite HBO show, but The Wire is far and away the
best show HBO has ever done, and one of the best of all time.
But now, I have others to back me up. I want to post
two articles here. The first is by The Sports Guy, who is my friend
Adam's favorite columnist on ESPN. He had this to say about The
Wire, and it speaks directly to those who have been ignoring
me, think I am making it up, or simply think it can't be as good
as I have been saying. TSG never watched The Wire...until
this.
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Readers kept telling me to watch this show.
They implored me. They kept e-mailing me. They badgered me.
I didn't listen. As I've described multiple times in this space,
I hate being told that I should watch a show; I like discovering
them at my own speed. And if it made me three or four years
late for the party with classics like "The Sopranos" and "24,"
so be it. It's just that I can't willingly jump onto a show;
it needs to happen organically.
For instance, here's what happened with "The
Wire:" On a Tuesday night in mid-August, the Sports Gal and
I were home with nothing to watch and ending up stumbling onto
"The Wire Re-Up" button on HBO On Demand. I'd been avoiding
this show for four years because the Baltimore drug scene didn't
appeal to me unless Raffie Palmeiro and Miggy Tejada were involved.
But the Sports Gal was the one who said, "Let's watch the first
show of 'The Wire' and see if we like it."
Within 10 minutes, we were hooked. We ended
up banging out three episodes the first night and another three
the second night. Then our cable system switched to a new provider
... and all the Season 1 episodes disappeared into thin air.
Now we were scrambling. None of the video stores around us had
Season 1 in stock. I ended up ordering Season 1 online (two-day
delivery courtesy of Amazon Prime), but we were so hooked on
the show that when someone returned Season 1 to our video store,
we rented the last three discs that same night. We banged out
the last seven episodes in two nights before the DVD was even
delivered. That's how hooked we were.
I'll go this far: I'd put Season 1 of "The
Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos."
Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER"
or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like
it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-plus,
then Season 2 was a B-plus), and we're just about to dive into
Season 3, so I don't have an opinion on that yet. Everyone seems
to agree that they outdid themselves with Season 4 and that
it's a legitimate masterpiece. Just know that you can absolutely
start watching Season 4 without having seen the other three
seasons. It's not an ideal way to break into the show, but you
can do it.
Without giving too much away, four more things
you need to know:
A. Before I started watching "The Wire,"
my four favorite TV/movie detectives of all-time were Sonny
Crockett ("Miami Vice"); Jack Cates ("48 Hrs."); Johnny Kelly
("NYPD Blue"); and Nick Curran (Michael Douglas' character in
"Basic Instinct"), who couldn't break away from Sharon Stone
even though he knew that every time she climbed on top during
sex, there was a 50 percent chance she might ram an ice pick
into his chest. But Jimmy McNulty in "The Wire" (played by Dominic
West) ... he might end up beating them all before everything's
said and done. He might have even moved to No. 1 during the
scene in Season 2 when they raid a brothel and he ends up in
a threesome before the rest of the cops arrive. Not even Sonny
Crockett would have done that.
B. I love any show with a slew of mostly
no-name actors that bang their roles out of the park, although
it was weird to see one of the leads from "Remember the Titans"
playing drug lord Avon Barksdale. With that said, Alonzo Mourning
gives an inspired performance as Stringer Bell (Avon's manipulative
consigliere). Maybe the best athlete/Hollywood crossover since
Kareem in "Airplane."
(Wait, that's not Alonzo Mourning? Are we positive?)
C. In an attempt to be gritty, they
didn't cast any of those Angie Harmon/Jill Hennessey types who
always seem unrealistically cute for a drug/crime show set in
a place like Baltimore. And since the actresses on the show
are average-looking down the line, guess what happens? It's
like the Lambeau parking lot, any press box or any NESCAC keg
party ... the females who do appear on this show end up seeming
disproportionately hot by about the fifth episode. Absolutely
bizarre. I love when this happens.
D. Omar might be my favorite HBO villain
since Adebici. And that's saying something.
Anyway, I can't believe I didn't watch this
show sooner. It enrages me. I'm not doing the "YOU NEED TO WATCH
THIS SHOW OR YOUR WHOLE LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE!" routine, because
that might scare you away. Just know that it's one of the five
greatest shows I've ever seen. And I hope you stumble across
it some day.
Organically, of course.
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Not good enough for you, you say? Fair enough. So
let me close out my thoughts page today with one last article about
the show. The author is credited at the bottom, but just read it
through naturally, then come to that. I want you to read the words
before seeing the person who wrote them all, is all. No prejudices
here.
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In David Simon's version of Dante's Inferno,
Hell is played by Baltimore and all seven of the deadly sins
are doing just fine, thanks. Midlevel drug dealers welcome fall
by giving their corner boys money for new clothes — a little
perk to keep them happy and moving those spider-bags and red-tops.
The bigger crooks give to the politicians to make sure the influence
keeps flowing. The only difference is the amount changing hands.
And Lester Freamon, a detective Sherlock Holmes might hail as
a peer, has an aha moment while looking at an abandoned row
house — one of thousands in the city's decaying core —
on a chilly winter afternoon. ''This is a tomb,'' he says.
Welcome to Hell...and to the world of The
Wire, season 4, bowing on HBO in September.
Lester's right, by the way. There's a body
in the row house he's looking at, and two dozen or so others.
They are victims of a stealth gang war being waged by Avon Barksdale's
successor, the handsome, dead-eyed Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector).
But it wasn't Marlo who kept me riveted, or kept me plugging
HBO's semidefective preview discs into my DVD player with increasing
dread and fascination; that honor belonged to Marlo's hired
hit team of Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson).
The latter is perhaps the most terrifying female villain to
ever appear in a television series. When you think of Chris
and Snoop, think of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo,
only smart.
And with a nail gun.
The Wire is smart too, but never too
smart for its own good. There's enough going on about the decay
of the urban environment to scare the living crap out of you,
but no one climbs up on a soapbox. Not even Tommy Carcetti (Aidan
Gillen), the white man who would be mayor in a black city, does
any preaching; he only runs, harder and faster, as he sees a
chance of winning — slim, but real — appear late in
the primary campaign.
Season 4 of The Wire is a dazzling
three-ring circus of interwoven plot threads, and its take on
America's drug war makes Miami Vice look like a Saturday-morning
cartoon, but what I kept coming back to was Detective Freamon
looking at that boarded-up row house and saying, ''This is a
tomb.'' Simon and his gifted co-conspirators (they include novelists
Richard Price, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane) aren't shy
about extending the metaphor to all of Baltimore...and then
suggesting you connect the dots to your own urban jungle.
Roland ''Prez'' Pryzbylewski has quit Baltimore
PD to become a middle-school math teacher, only to discover
that in the age of No Child Left Behind, he's working another
part of the same cemetery. He scrapes the gum off the bottoms
of desks, takes attendance, passes around out-of-date textbooks
(while new computers gather dust in unopened boxes due to a
bureaucratic snafu), and preps students to pass state tests.
He finds himself still ''juking the stats'' to please his superiors,
only now in his grade book instead of his arrest reports. And
cleaning up the blood when a disturbed child cuts another in
class, disfiguring her badly. Prez gets at least some good news
(because even in Hell, there's good news): The kid who was cut
tested negative for HIV. So no worries there, mate.
When this run of 13 episodes begins, the original
wire — a listening post designed to target and build cases
against drug barons like Marlo — has been taken down, mostly
by that constant need to juke the numbers. But in the school
where Prez is actually making some progress, another kind of
wire pops up: a unique class for corner boys and girls, the
Marlos of the future, run by another Baltimore PD burnout who
veteran Wire watchers will recognize: Maj. Howard ''Bunny''
Colvin, now retired. It's a classroom where there's some hope
for change; it's also a room where adults can look — and
listen in — on a world that is otherwise closed to them.
In a normal TV series, this is where AU (Automatic
Uplift) would kick in. Not in Simon's Baltimore, where uplift
is possible...but where viewers will also be shocked when one
beloved character inadvertently feeds his friend a hot shot,
killing him. Shocked, but not surprised. Because the world of
The Wire is a tomb filled with the living dead. A few
fight their way out, but not unless they can beat the streets,
themselves, and the vast dead engine of the entrenched bureaucracy.
Even City Hall is a tomb, as Tommy Carcetti
learns: ''You're sitting eating s*** all day long, day after
day, year after year,'' a former mayor tells him. For a politician
in David Simon's Baltimore, there's only one thing worse than
losing, and I probably don't need to tell you what that is.
The Wire keeps getting better, and
to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic
TV — put it right up there with The Prisoner and
the first three seasons of The Sopranos. It's the sort
of dramatic cycle people will still be writing and thinking
about 25 years from now, and given the current state of the
world and the nation, that's a good thing. ''There,'' our grandchildren
will say. ''It wasn't all Simon Cowell.''
No. There was also Chris and Snoop. Their
terrible nail gun. And the empty houses that have become tombs,
standing as silent symbols for what has become of some of our
inner cities. The Wire is a staggering achievement.
--Stephen King
August 25, 2006
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