The only sad thing about The Wire season 5? It's the last season...*sob*


( Spoilers for episodes 51 and 52 )

Why didn't I know about this until now?

Three short The Wire prequels posted on the Amazon website here. Including one of Young!Omar! Hee.

Thoughts regarding The Wire seasons 1 -3, with a few remarks about season 4 for good measure.

I have recently rewatched the first three seasons of The Wire. I’ve wanted to do that for some time, and for a strange reason I apparently found the time during the busiest exam schedule. Or its possible I was just trying to find an excuse not to read yet another book on politics, rhetoric and advertising.

At any rate these are some thoughts jumble together and they span all the three seasons, with references to season four. To summarise: SPOILERS FOR ALL FOUR SEASONS!

( cut for SPOILERS, quite a bit of text and bulletpoints )

If this was fiction no one would believe it! A drug ring in Queens copied "The Wire".

Call it a case of crime imitating art imitating crime.

That's what the police say happened with a drug ring in Queens whose members honed their trade and learned to evade arrest by watching the HBO series "The Wire," a gritty, realistic police procedural about a crew of drug dealers in Baltimore and the police and prosecutors who use wiretaps to try and take them off the street.[...]

"Believe it or not, these guys copy 'The Wire,' " said the sergeant, who is assigned to the Organized Crime Investigation Division. "They were constantly dumping their phones. It made our job so much harder."

The rest of the article here.

Hmm..not much posting lately - but I'm currently trying to finish a paper and watching season 4 of The Wire.

I'm on episode six now and I must say that this season might become my new favourite, right next to season two. ( cut for s4 spoilers )

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And then for something entirely different:

taken from appplegnat and finnygan - The ten things a reader of this LJ should know about me. Possibly...
( spoilers for me? )


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And some links for last:

schionutlander has a fascinating post on the art of Otl Aicher. It is based on the life and theories of the medieval philosopher Wilhelm von Ockham, and is a modern interpretation of medieval art. Very interesting!

mr_kit has made some nice and creepy icons of Kittelsen's Old Mother Plague illustrations. (which I wrote about here)The icons capture the mood and the composition of the illustrations, all while being clear and a bit frightening. Highly recommended.

For all those of you who love The Wire I urge you to head over here and read the_grynne's wonderful and thought provoking post about The Wire and Greek Tragedy


And for all those of you who haven't seen "The Wire" then please use this as another incentive to check out the show. There is nothing out there quite like it.

ps. applegnat? I've mentioned "The Wire" to you before - take this as a hint that you would probably love it. ;)

Another link from Jason Mitchell’s blog – this time about The Wire

I especially liked this part:

For many critics, bloggers, fans, and even creator David Simon himself, The Wire is best understood not as a television series, but as a "visual novel." As a television scholar, this cross-media metaphor bristles – not because I don’t like novels, but because I love television. And I believe that television at its best shouldn’t be understood simply as emulating another older and more culturally valued medium. The Wire is a masterpiece of television, not a novel that happens to be televised, and thus should be understood, analyzed, and celebrated on its own medium’s terms.

I think it touches upon something I’ve been pondering myself. Because recently a lot of the Norwegian media have started to discover The Wire and several (so called) intellectuals and writers have gone out and said "Oh, this is more like a book than television" or "This is so much more than television". All of which has really bugged me. Mostly because of the reasons Mitchell mentions above. For The Wire’s storytelling isn’t simply done by dialogue or acting, but also in the filming, the use of location, colour and shade and in the use of music and camera panning. All of which are audio-visual tools that novels cannot use.

Granted I'm also guilty in saying that The Wire can resemble a novel, specifically in how it is plotted and thought out. Yet I feel there is a difference in saying the storytelling can resemble a novel, and saying it is a visual novel – or "more than television". (Or you know – this might be me just trying to cover my own tracks. ;D)

I suspect the attitude that The Wire is more akin to novels or more than television harkens back to television’s status as the unruly youngest child of the cultural arena.

At any rate the essay, though long, is highly recommended. But please note that the essay is a little spoilery for all four seasons.

Five reasons I love the things I do - the second.

Being a continuation of our heroine’s account of her favourite things + lists are made + numerical standards are broken+ and book passages are quoted

( Tolkien )

( Band of Brothers )

( The Wire )

( A Song of Ice and Fire )

So I’ve spent the day at a seminar on photography. From this I’ve learned two things.

1.When they key note speaker looks like the twin brother of Nathaniel Parker – aka Inspector Lynley among other things – and has a wonderful, honey voice it is extremely easy to get distracted. When he starts talking about the sensuality and the intimacy of photography this doubles.

2.Art Historical titles on books or lectures are sometimes bordering on the pompous and the absurd. Today I’ve listened to "The Death of the Death of the Photograph", "The Arbitrary Stillness of Surrendering to the Image" (no, I have no idea what that was about. At one point she talked about "the sharp intake of breath as we watch images, as a sign that time passes" Okay then... And "Sepulchre – the image in a new media age".

Fortunately the day also saw the arrival of The Wire season 3! And I’ll just add some more exclamation marks here: !!!!!! to properly highlight the occasion.

So far I’m two episodes in. I’m possibly already loving Bunny Colvin – who has just given his "paper bag for drugs" speech – and Stringer Bell with his chair meetings is beyond words.
"The chair don’t recognise your ass!" Hee. And the bit about Cheese and his dawg was absolutely wonderful.

In conclusion- if you don’t hear from me the next few days it’s because I’m hugging my The Wire dvd – or I’m silently pondering the question if it’s sane to watch Rome and The Wire at the same time.

Continues from part one.

The Wire analysis

- In which there are duck-metaphors, ponderings on being a maverick and the similarities of season one and two.



Bunk: Them Greeks sure have some weird-ass names.
McNultey: : Hey, don't knock the Greeks. They invented civilization.
- Some closing remarks about history

I keep returning to the Greeks, and thereby this could be seen as a postscript to the “history is important and it defines us” theme that was part one.

( continue to the gift bearing Greeks )