Okay, here’s a minor little question I’ve been wondering about. Eventually we see Bubbs turn into a sort of rolling 7-11, selling anything he think he can. But he starts out selling white T-shirts.
Why? Why T-shirts, of all the things he could try to sell?
For a while, those oversized white tees were The Uniform for drug dealers, and kids who want to look like them. Bubs was able to get them cheap and sell them reasonably.
Thanks Ruby! I had no idea.
Lippman’s books? I’ve only read one – What the Dead Know – and IMHO it could have been set anywhere. Police work wasn’t a focus of that book.
I’m curious about Lehane and Pelecanos. I haven’t read any of their books, but if they have the same sensibility as what they write for The Wire, I’d try them.
About Bubbles tee-shirts – :smack: I was thinking he was selling shirts discarded by the hoppers. He says something like “they only wear them once or twice”. But Bubbles has no way to launder them, and a hopper isn’t going to buy a secondhand tee-shirt anyway. Duh me. So Bubbles was buying new and reselling at a profit?
There’s a great opportunity for someone to make a fantastic youtube video… scenes from the wire set to Good Morning, Baltimore from Hairspray.
And yes, it’s the greatest TV show ever, period.
I’m really looking forward to S5. I love the literary quality of The Wire - layered character development, tight plot lines, revealing dialogue, foreshadowing, and symbolism. It’s the best 60 hour movie ever made.
My favorite scene is the opening of Season 3 when the city is demolishing the towers. The dialogue between onlookers about where the tower business will go, and then the dust wafting over the crowd once the towers fall. The dust makes everyone cough and floats into the rest of Baltimore – You can’t win the drug war by tearing down the towers, it just moves elsewhere. This is an amazing scene, subtle and powerful.
Stringer, I’m usually too engrossed in following the story to notice or look for the symbolism.
To be honest, symbolism is often beyond me. I thought the cloud of dust represented the city fathers fucking up again, letting people get too close to the site. Your interpretation has much more power.
What do you make of most of the scenes where Bubbs is getting high? Almost all of them are shot near a window, with diffused light coming through a curtain, usually yellow or gold. Is that Bubbs finding his happy place?
Stringer says ;
“My favorite scene is the opening of Season 3 when the city is demolishing the towers. The dialogue between onlookers about where the tower business will go, and then the dust wafting over the crowd once the towers fall. The dust makes everyone cough and floats into the rest of Baltimore – You can’t win the drug war by tearing down the towers, it just moves elsewhere. This is an amazing scene, subtle and powerful.”
David Simon says in the commentary to that episode that a great deal of care has been taken in writing the opening scene of every opening episode of each season so that it reflects thematically on the forthcoming season. So when I watched the ‘nailgun’ scene, and on repeated viewings failed to understand Snoop, I could only wonder.
Could anyone point to a link of the dialogue?
From memory - here are the opening scenes;
S1 Snot Boogie - “It’s America”
S2 Moneyed boat pays off McNulty
S3 As above
S4 Nailgun purchase
As the OP, I can only extend my love to all you Wire-ites, and promise to continue to spread the word over here.
MiM
I don’t know if this scene has any direct symbolism, but Marlo’s dead bodies piling up in the row houses is a driver for the plot throughout the season. The homicide detectives are often wondering in the first half where the street violence has gone now that the Barksdales are gone – it is simply being covered up. However, you can’t keep the bodies locked away forever, soon the smell will leak out and everyone will know.
Compare this to the season’s approach to the schoolchildren’s lives and Carcetti’s mayoral race. The school administrators can barely keep their heads above water, let alone address the underlying problems in their students lives. Remember when Cutty tries to volunteer as a truant officer? He doesn’t want to affect these kids lives one time, he wants to overturn their problems and actually help them.
Carcetti’s ideals from Season 3 got obscured pretty quick in his political campaign didn’t they? Does he really want to help Baltimore or is he willing to sacrifice the city he worked so hard for on the council for statewide support in his gubernatorial campaign? Will Carcetti make efforts to eliminate the $52M education budget deficit and improve schools, or will he pass the buck to his successor when he moves on to governor? Will he ignore the problem and pass it on to someone else?
Wow, great pick of scenes, I’ll take a stab at it for fun. Where does Bubbs always shoot up? Dirty, graffitoed, abandoned row houses. Bubbs is totally stuck in this awful world, on the outside looking into others’ lives (cops and drug dealers.) Bubbs wishes he was free, like a prisoner gazing out his window.
That’s a fine stab!
I rewatched a couple of S3 episodes today. In one scene, Johnny is getting high. He hears Bubbs’ voice outside and goes to the window. He sees Bubbs and smiles, and it looks like maybe he’s going to call out to him, but then he sees that Bubbs has a new helper. His smile fades, and he moves away from the window and nods out. I almost cried.
Some more S3 confusion for me, from stuff I didn’t pay attention to before. Awhile back, we saw Stringer make a phone call to the Western District Police. Later, he appears to have a go-between set up the meeting with Colvin. I’m wondering why the go-between for the second call.
I’m also wondering about one of the tapped calls in Mission Accomplished. They hear what sounds like Stringer’s voice and there’s talk about two hitters. Was it Stringer trying to set up a hit on Clay Davis? The “two hitters” made me think Brother Mouzone and Omar, but it’s Stringer’s voice I hear, not Avon’s.
The final scene between Stringer and Avon never gets old. This time I noticed that they couldn’t look at each other, after the hug. Why either one of them got out of bed the next day, I sure don’t know.
Made in Macau, you think McNulty took the payoff? I figured he gave it back in a scene we didn’t see. I can see him feeling justified in taking money for acting as an attendant for that party boat, but I’d rather think he didn’t.
Missed the edit window: I can’t find Snoop’s dialogue verbatim, but a synopsis is here
I was under the impression that he speaks to Colvin each time. Didn’t Bodie pass along a card he (and all the other lieutenants) got from Colvin when he was setting up Hamsterdam?
Yes, he was setting up a hit on Davis, but couldn’t complete the arrangements (unfortunately!).
What I don’t understand about that scene is that Avon (uncharacteristically, ISTM) asks Stringer where he’ll be the next day. Stringer hems and haws and finally tells him. When I first saw that scene, I assumed that Stringer would be suspicious of Avon and give him false info. But either he didn’t, or Omar and Mouzone are smart enough to find him anyway.
I was just re-watching some S2 episodes and found out something fairly cool: D’Angelo grew up on my street!
In his last scene with Brianna in prison, he recounts how when he was a kid, “the twins” came up on his porch to beat him up. Brianna wouldn’t let him into the house, telling him he had to make his own way in the world. That house was on “Linden Avenue.”
I grew up on Linden Avenue in Towson, just north of Baltimore!!!
Now, it turns out that there are three other Linden Avenues in the Baltimore area that I had no idea existed, but I think the Barksdales lived on my Linden Avenue.
In that same episode, some inmates are talking about The Great Gatsby in a discussion group in the prison library, and D says some fairly perceptive things about the character. That’s inspired me to re-read the book, and I’d be interested in further conversation about the parallels between D’Angelo and Gatsby, here or in a separate thread.
You’re joking, I think, but the Linden is most probably the one that is south of Dru Hill.
I think that the west side was Simon’s beat. That’s where The Corner was set. I remember Simon saying that once he was on a radio show in Baltimore and people from the west side were calling up and going “Stringer Bell didn’t die.”
They knew exactly who he was based on.
I think Stringer had already told Avon where he was going to be. He didn’t get suspicious until Avon asked him what time.
About Stringer contacting Colvin, Stringer didn’t use the card for the first call. He called information and asked for the number for the police, then specified Western District. For the second call he just called one of his boys and said something like “Set that up.” Now that I think on it, that second call might have been setting up the meeting at the construction site. Never mind! 
I never really thought about it at all. I guess I just assumed that he had because they are towing the boat in the next shot. I like the fact that we made different assumptions with the same information. Another cool aspect to this show. 
Thanks for the info on Snoop’s speech and the truly piss-poor joke played on Kima. I was anticipating Wildean invention but should have realized it would be schoolyard quality.
Here’s another thing I love. The differentiation between the detectives in terms of their speech. Lester, Bunk, McNutty, and especially Jay all have distinctly different speech patterns/vocabulary. I am a big fan of Jay’s locquatious phrasing - like when he told Beadie she should dress in mufti and said something about Bunk’s ‘pinstripe lawyerly pretentions’ and Lester’s ‘tweedy impertinence’. Made me piss myself laughing. And then the eulogy he gave in the bar in S3, and the brief eulogy in the detectives room in 4, both made me weep, and hand on heart gave me real inspiration for my own speech at my father’s funeral two weeks ago. (The delivery, not the content 
)
Thanks again AuntiePam
MiM
I’m sorry about your dad. I see what you mean about the actor’s delivery. He’s not ashamed to be eloquent. Another nice bit from him was in S1, when Bodie was in the interview room. I don’t remember his exact words – something about “the young Mr. Broadus being flung about with wild abandon” by the interviewing officers.
Isn’t he supposed to be based on the real Jay Landsman? It’s weird, because the real Jay Landsman’s lines are nothing like the fake Jay Landsman’s. And they sure don’t look alike.
That’s because the real Jay Landsman is playing Lt. Mello, a different character. Acting!
A few more little insider things for Baltimoreans I’ve noticed from S2. Before McNulty is finally pulled from the boats, after Elana has quashed his efforts at a reconciliation, and he realizes that he couldn’t have been happy staying in the Marine unit, he asks, rhetorically, “Who am I, Captain Chesapeake?”
Captain Chesapeake was a daily kids show that ran for nearly 20 years on Baltimore’s channel 45. A low-budget local show, but practically legendary in Baltimore.
In the next episode Ziggy pulls his weird stunt with the duck, whom he introduces as his lawyer, Stephen L. Miles. Miles is a former Balto D.A. now in a private practice that he has advertised heavily on local TV for many years.
And not half bad either! I wonder if they ever considered having Landsman play himself.
It’d be great if someone would publish a behind-the-scenes book about the show, with all the insider stuff. I’ve been trying to keep up at TWOP and elsewhere, but there’s just too much.
HBO’s doing a retrospective of the first four seasons on December 21, 9:30 CST. I’ve been watching some of the teaser videos on YouTube. I’d watch them on HBO but right now, there’s no reason to watch HBO.
I suspect that, at first, giving the character that name was just an inside joke But clearly the character Jay Landsman was too significant a role to give to a non-actor. When the real Landsman first shows up as Mello (S2, Ep 9–I just watched it last night), he’s a walk-on with only one line. Mello becomes a more prominent character in S3, after Landsman demonstrated that he’s a decent (if not great) actor. One reason I like seeing him is that, as I’ve mentioned in other threads, he’s one of only a handful of performers in The Wire (or any media, for that matter) who does the real Bawlamer accent.
Well, since you’ve been such a good AuntiePam this year, I’ll grant your wish: The Wire: Truth Be Told. It only covers the first two seasons, I think, but it’s pretty good. Now that I think about it, I should re-read it.
Thanks for the heads up.
Awesome! I ordered a copy.
I have a tin ear for accents, unless it’s a really bad Southern accent, like Kyra Sedgwick on the Closer, and that lawyer on Damages.
I’ve read a lot of discussion about the Baltimore accent, but except for that slurry pronunciation of Baltimore, everybody sounds Midwestern to me, but with a slight drawl.