March 21, 2008
Stuff White People Like: The Wire
"The Wire" creator and executive producer David Simon with Andre Royo, who plays the character Bubbles.
This is just too classic, from the blog Stuff White People Like: Entry No. 85 is "The Wire," our homegrown, just-completed crime drama produced by former Sun colleague David Simon:
Though white people have a natural aversion to television, there are some exceptions. For white people to like a TV show it helps if it is: critically acclaimed, low-rated, shown on premium cable, and available as a DVD box set.For more hilarity, visit the entire site, Stuff White People Like.The latter is important so that white people can order it from Netflix and tell their friends “they are really into
and I watched ten episodes in a row in the weekend. I’m almost caught up.” If you attempt to talk about an episode they have not seen yet, they will scream and cover their ears. In white culture, giving away information about a film or TV series is considered as rude as spitting on your mothers grave. It is an unforgivable offense.
Recent series that have fallen into this category include The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and most recently The Wire.
For the past three years, whenever you say “The Wire” white people are required to respond by saying “it’s the best show on television.” Try it the next time you see a white person! Though now they might say “it WAS the best show on television.”
Here's another great line, true in my experience discussing "The WIre" with people from anywhere from D.C. to Alaska:
If you need to impress a white person, tell them you are from Baltimore. They will immediately ask you about The Wire and how accurate it is. You should confirm that it is “like a documentary of the streets,” the white person will then slowly shake their head and say “man” or “wow.” You will be seen in an entirely new light.I've been meaning to round up some of the kazillions of links looking at "The Wire" and David Simon, focusing mainly on how he trashes the Sun in the final season, the fifth, just concluded.
I was surprised at how harsh Simon was toward his previous employer. Without the Sun, Simon doesn't become a Baltimore cops reporter and meet the homicide detectives that led to his first book, his first network series, and ultimately to his second series with HBO.
Also, I think all workplaces are a Faustian pact for a writer (or artist), caught by definition between wanting to write or create what you want and having to deal with inpenetrable bosses in exchange for this little thing called money.
At lunch with another former Sun colleague, we laughed away at the spectacle of seeing people we worked with -- Bill Zorzi, Laura Lippman, Jeff Price, David Ettlin, Steve Luxenberg and many other real former staffers -- on screen. My lunch buddy made a great point asking why Simon attacks former Sun editors John Carroll and Bill Marimow by proxy, when their predecessor, editor Jim Houck, was truly clueless in our eyes, as seen by a post-Sun career that sent him into invisibility, as Carroll and Marimow continued to do high-level news editing post-Sun.
Here's a second friend from the Sun making a similar point:
I didn't know Simon but remember him storming around the newsroom like a panther. He was an early believer in his own legend. Of course James Houck was the managing editor then. What an empty suit. Why isn't he one of the named evils in the series?In fairness to David, Carroll apparently (after I left to go to the Washington Post) coddled a reporter named Jim Haner, who may have made up stuff for his stories, but not to the extent "The Wire" character Scott Templeton did.At least Carroll and Marimow had significant careers before and after. What ever became of Houck? He vanished. ...
Everybody was unhappy in those days -- 1986 and 87 -- and I gather nothing ever really changed. It was rather depressing, now that I remember those times. In retrospect I entered the newspaper industry at arguably its high-water mark, when financially, editorially, and institutionally, it was the best it ever was going to be. From then on things ran downhill, not just at the Sun, but everywhere.
My friend quoted above may think that '86 and '87 just before things ran downhill. Maybe ... the timing point is interesting, and it seems also though that a whole lot of talent -- including gifted editor Steve Luxenberg, who decamped reluctantly to the Washington Post to make his mark there -- was still going strong at the Sun.
My memories of David Simon at the Baltimore Sun:
My first week at the Sun was in January 1987. David wrote a series on Little Melvin, the Baltimore drug kingpin. As I recall, it ran for five days including over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and Baltimore's black community was riled over feeling slighted by the series' timing. I heard some very quiet grumbling on the copy desk that someone on Metro should have been aware of this clash and worked around it. I think the copy editors were embarrassed too at their more minor role in the oversight.
Later, I had to copy edit a story by David glorifying some criminal or other, that was supposed to run on a Monday. I think everyone else on the copy desk had steered around the story because they didn't want to deal with it.
I spent Sunday unable to get in touch with him or his editor on the fact that the wording in the intro was attempting, I thought unsuccessfully, to give the criminal's stream of consciousness on how he justified his outlaw behavior, but it made it seem as if the reporter's own voice was endorsing the behavior. I added with my boss's permission and as artfully as possible, a brief qualifier that the thought process belonged to subject of the portrait. David showed up Monday to ream me out, standing over me as I sat at my desk. It was an unnerving experience. I explained the point of view had a problem and we couldn't reach him or his editor and that was pretty much that. He seemed fascinated with the underworld and seemed quite determined not to be bourgeois in judging it.
Years later, David's first book, "Homicide," was accepted for publication. I wanted to write and have publish a book idea on my travels, which later became 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet
When we run into each other, at funerals for example, I am always glad to see David.
Oh I remember one other encounter ... right after I arrived at the Sun, he came up and said, "You used to be a reporter at the Montgomery Journal, and you interviewed me when I was in high school," at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High. I thought didn't recall the meeting but thought that was sweet, and you will see in the Mark Bowden profile below the extent to which David really, really knew and wanted to be a journalist, and found meeting me -- the schools reporter at the local county paper -- something to file away in the memory banks.
He's one of the Sun's noted alumni from a time of great talent at the paper, which also included Lippman and Stephen Hunter, whom I blogged about here.
David Simon with Michael K. Williams, who plays Omar, "The Wire's" most compelling character. Here Williams' discusses his shock at what happened to him on the show.
Anyway, here are links galore for anyone wanting to follow the debate that exploded in the East Coast media.
'The Wire' loses spark in newsroom storyline. From Sun TV critic David Zurawik:
... the newsroom scenes are the Achilles' heel of Season 5 - with mainstream entertainment sacrificed to journalistic shop talk, while fact and fiction are mashed up in the confusing manner of docudrama.Simon's own response to Zurawik's article:
The story is fictional, but it is rooted in concerns about out-of-town chain ownership, wholesale cutbacks in the newsroom, the declining scope of coverage and the continued influence of the prize culture in newspapering, up to and including the temptation among less ethical practitioners to hype or manufacture the news.Here's The Angriest Man in Television by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, in The Atlantic:That's a lot for any newspaper to endure and The Sun has been very tolerant. And while the Chicago folks ordering up buyout after buyout might want to pause for reflection, Editor In Chief Tim Franklin is right: The people on the ground in Baltimore, though there are less of them, are doing the most to produce the best newspaper they can. He and his staff have nothing of which to be ashamed in that regard, nor was it our intent to in any way shame them. We believe in the themes we have pursued and we believe these problems plague The Sun as all other major papers, some currently, and some under previous regimes. But none of that takes away from the work still being done in Baltimore.
For all his success and accomplishment, he’s an angry man, driven in part by lovingly nurtured grudges against those he feels have slighted him, underestimated him, or betrayed some public trust. High on this list is his old employer The Baltimore Sun—or more precisely, the editors and corporate owners who have (in his view) spent the past two decades eviscerating a great American newspaper. In a better world—one where papers still had owners and editors who were smart, socially committed, honest, and brave—Simon probably would never have left The Sun to pursue a Hollywood career. His father, a frustrated newsman, took him to see Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper farce, The Front Page, when he was a boy in Washington, D.C., and Simon was smitten. He landed a job as a Sun reporter just out of the University of Maryland in the early 1980s, and as he tells it, if the newspaper, the industry, and America had lived up to his expectations, he would probably still be documenting the underside of his adopted city one byline at a time. But The Sun let David Simon down. So he has done something that many reporters only dream about. He has created his own Baltimore.From The New York Observer: Whose Bastard Sun: If The Wire Is Wrong, Why Is Baltimore's Paper So Bad?
The Sun that I covered for Baltimore's City Paper in the '90s was the Sun of Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow. It was redesigned and ambitious and on its way to Pulitzer glory. It was also a damaged and declining newspaper.'The Wire' finale is a cop-out for a once-great show: More from Zurawik:How can both those things be true? It comes down to a disagreement about the purpose of a newspaper. Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow's Sun was a place for young, talented reporters to do ambitious stories. It was not particularly dedicated to covering the news in the city of Baltimore.
That's because the Sun of the '90s was not a Baltimore newspaper. It was a colonial holding of The Los Angeles Times, which had bought it in 1986. Actually, The Times had bought two papers, The Sun and The Evening Sun—in a sense, it had even acquired a share of a third, as the Sunpapers absorbed staff and features from the collapse of the Baltimore News American. But by 1995, The Evening Sun had been folded into The Sun, and Baltimore was down to one daily-paper newsroom. Buyouts, ordered from the other side of the country, were clearing out the veteran employees.
In my preview of the season, I termed the newsroom scenes the "Achilles heel" of the series. Worse, they became a cancer that grew deeper and deeper into other parts of the drama as the season wore on.The problems began with the depiction of a newsroom that lacked any sense of the urgent new-media priorities in the real ones today. Worse, from an entertainment standpoint, it was filled with stick figures and former journalists who couldn't act a lick.
And this is in such stark contrast to the series' richly nuanced treatment of larger-than-life gangsters, played by superb actors. Watching the gears turn inside the mind of Jamie Hector's Marlo Stanfield was one of the great pleasures of the series.
The arch-villains - editor James C. Whiting III (Sam Freed), managing editor Thomas Klebanow (David Costabile) and reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) - behave more and more reprehensibly in the finale without viewers getting any sense of their moral reasoning. Whiting and Klebanow go on to commit unpardonable journalistic crimes.
Given the way Simon has identified them in interviews as having been inspired by two real-life newsroom executives who once worked at The Sun, former editor John Carroll and former managing editor Bill Marimow, the term character assassination does not seem too harsh for what he has attempted to do in Season 5 of The Wire. Embracing the controversial genre of docudrama like never before, Simon has repeatedly blurred fact and fiction this year. Take just the matter of chronology. Simon left the Sun in 1995, and the people on whom he bases his villains are long gone, yet he presents events set in the newsroom as if they are taking place at The Sun today.
Is it any wonder that so little truth has emerged from such a stew?
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:31 AM in The Neighborhood
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March 7, 2008
How Americans view the world
Click on the image to see it at full size.This tickles me as someone who wrote an entire book about what Americans could learn from foreign countries.
I laughed out loud at the depiction of Alaska and Hawaii, the thrill of "More America!!" in two great vacation spots.
One of the better jokes is the complete absence of Africa, which I touched on in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet
The chapter was subtitled "Our Love-Hate Relationship with Africa," and a subtext was "our hefty ignorance about Africa," born of the tiny trickle of American tourism there.
Hat tip to my friend Blaire for sending me this image.
March 1, 2008
Bloggers tackle the Supreme Court and the Exxon oil spill
Three quick updates as bloggers attempt to wrestle with Wednesday's Supreme Court gathering to hear oral arguments in the punitive damages phase of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.Long and fascinating, here is Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News in Washington, D.C., Oil and Water:
The most fascinating thing about the argument—and it really was one of the most fascinating arguments of the term--was watching the justices explore different proposals and options to put some limits on punitive damages.I tried to capture a bit of this in my own story for the Cordova Times, here -- how it did seem even to my uninformed eyes that this was a rockin' day at the court, and that Ginsburg ruled the day.You saw Justice Scalia—who has long refused to put constitutional limits on punitive damages (he doesn't see it in the Constitution any more than he sees a right to abortion in the Constitution)—free to weigh in and discuss a framework.
You saw Chief Justice Roberts, who has not ruled squarely on that broader constitutional issue, expressing skepticism about punitive damages and exploring the differences in maritime law—an area he knows well, having argued (and won) the important maritime case, Grubart v Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, which came about after the great Chicago flood. That case, written by Justice Souter, is one of his favorites—as a lawyer he quoted it frequently as an advocate, because it squarely rejected confusing multi-factor tests for admiralty jurisdiction.You saw Ginsburg—who always is prepared at argument, but yesterday exhibited an almost astoundingly expert level of knowledge about this tortured and complex case—pressing Dellinger on the record, on precedent and on federal procedural rules. It was an extraordinarily impressive display, and to many observers she clearly got the best of the argument.
At Scotusblog, former Baltimore Sun courts reporter Lyle Denniston weighs in with Commentary: Exxon may both lose and win.
First impressions, based on what was said or intimated at a fast-paced oral argument, can be quite misleading. This Court usually divides quite deeply in considering punitive damages claims — a factor that is even more complex in this case, because one Justice (Samuel A. Alito, Jr.) is not taking part, leaving at least a chance of a 4-4 split, perhaps on some but not all issues. But first impressions also might qualify as reasonable reactions, when what was asked and answered is parsed closely, and when atmospherics are taken into account. It was apparent that Exxon’s lawyer, Washington attorney Walter Dellinger, was under serious challenge throughout his argument, and critically so on his efforts to get the Court to forbid any punitive damages award for this kind of maritime accident. But it was equally apparent that the lawyer for the individuals and businesses who were awarded punitive damages, Stanford professor and lawyer Jeffrey L. Fisher, had to deal with a spreading view on the bench that there had to be some curbs on punitive damages in the maritime context — especially when the punitive verdict runs into the billions.And finally, here's a podcast from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Studies, direct link here. This gives a more skeptical view of the plaintiffs' arguments for those seeking a balance of information.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:16 PM in Alaska
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