Weekend Reading #3

Last of the lot, I promise.

The Wire hits its final season on Jan 6. This is bittersweet news because this is The Best Television Show In The History Of Television.

What is this The Wire, you might ask? Apparently you are not one of the 11 viewers (10 of who are critics) who keeps up with this show. The New Yorker has a great 12 page article about the series and a biography of David Simon, genius behind Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Corner. This is a man who is not afraid to chase Big Ideas. Required reading.

Stealing Life (from The New Yorker)

A favorite phrase of David Simon’s is “You can’t make this shit up.” In the opening sequence of the very first episode of “The Wire,” Jimmy McNulty—the half mensch, half jerk of a Baltimore cop, played by the British actor Dominic West—is sitting on a stoop across from a crime scene. McNulty is talking to the compatriot of a dead guy called Snot Boogie, and can’t resist a little philosophizing on the subject of his name: “This kid, whose mama went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts—you know, he forgets his jacket, so his nose starts runnin’ and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him Snot. So he’s Snot forever. It doesn’t seem fair.” Snot Boogie liked to shoot craps with his pals in the neighborhood, it seems, but, every time he did, he’d steal the pot before the end of the game. So why, McNulty wants to know, did they still let him play? “Got to,” his interlocutor answers. “This is America, man.” It was a perfectly crafted setup for Simon’s themes: how inner-city life could be replete with both casual cruelty and unexpected comedy; how the police and the policed could, at moments, share the same jaundiced view of the world; how some dollar-store, off-brand version of American capitalism could trickle down, with melancholy effect, into the most forsaken corners of American society. But, as it happened, the Snot Boogie story was real—Simon had heard it, down to the line about America, from a police detective, and it appears in “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.” Simon’s gift is in recognizing an anecdote like that for the found parable that it is—“stealing life,” as he once described it to me—and knowing which parts to steal.