Seven Red

It’s fitting that David Simon and Co. would leave the most intense speech of The Wire‘s last episode to the least likely character. A review of the blogs and entertainment magazines (which I’ll leave to you) suggests that the key speech – even the key moment in the episode – belongs not to Marlo, or McNulty, or Bunk, nor is it really the eloquent encomium put forth by Landsman at McNulty’s fake wake. Rather, it comes from Cheese Wagstaff (ahem, Melvin), played by the inimitable Method Man.

Out on bond, Cheese is looking to take the lead in the drug consortium; he pledges $900,000 to a general fund for buying Marlo’s contact with the Greeks. When the other dealers express surprise at his offer, he notes, “We sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore…any y’all who ain’t got that kind of money need be ashamed.” It’s the set up. There’s something eloquent in the delivery of even this line, but the killer move is coming: “There ain’t no back in the day. There ain’t no nostalgia to this shit here. There’s just the street, and the game, and what happen here today.” And then Slim Charles offers a rebuttal. Apart from nailing Cheese’s character as the perfect post-industrial opportunist (when Joe was on top, he was with Joe, when Marlo was, with Marlo, etc.) – a pretty consistent portrayal, I might add – it’s also the real moment of nihilism, a kind of nihilism that (even in Cheese) is almost attractive: the cow with no memory. A man’s gotta have a code, Omar tells us. Cheese has no code other than this: we sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore. That’s it. It’s a perpetual decoding. At first glance, Omar’s version – which is also, of course, Bunk’s – seems the more admirable; they’re men of principle, ultimately. Cheese’s version – which more closely reflects McNulty’s (“They don’t get to win. We get to win.”), however, may be the more interesting. Here’s the preview clip: Cheese’s speech appears at the end here too:

I also want to tip a hat to Method Man for his performance throughout the series, which this speech illuminated for me in some ways. Cheese might seem like a one-dimensional character, a pure sociopath (supposing one believes in that category), and would therefore seem not too distant from the kind of character Method Man might have played in his Wu Tang role. I think it would be interesting to go back and follow out the performance in light of this speech. For my money, Method Man was never the best lyricist in the WTC. That would be RZA and Inspectah Deck, although he’s definitely a close third, and probably with better delivery. But I think he was always the most charismatic and just plain interesting of the crew; there was always something extra and off that made his verses strange and memorable. So, for example, this from “Protect Ya Neck” (which was, amazingly, an independent single, pre-record deal):

And like fame, my style’ll live forever
N*ggaz crossin over, but they don’t know no better
But I do, true, can I get a zuuu
Nuff respect due to the one-six-ooo
I mean oh, yo check out the flow
like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin
N*ggaz off because I’m hot like sauce
The smoke from the lyrical blunt make me *unh*

It was that last line that got me way back in 93 or 94, the line that made me say “Hey, what is this we’re listening to?” Because it’s a brilliant little transformation and twist on the rhyme. The way it’s supposed to work is AABA: “N*ggaz OFF because I’m hot like SAUCE/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me COUGH.” That would be perfectly fine as a lyric. But Method doesn’t do that. Instead of saying the word “cough,” he actually coughs, like “unh.” This twist not only substitutes the sound for the word, but also ends up rhyming the sound with “blunt,” thereby changing the rhyme scheme to a totally unexpected AABB. It sounds ridiculous trying to explain it, I know. It’d make a good parody skit to have a tweedy English professor doing some New Critical close reading of th Wu. But that is goddamn good stuff. Take a listen instead, starting at about 1:05:

When we lived in Albany, I worked in a Vietnamese restaurant that was near the governor’s mansion, so we drove by the Pataki residence a lot, although Pataki himself was notorious for spending as little time in the liberal city as possible (on the other hand,  the mayor of Albany at the time – former assistant principle of the high school, if I remember correctly – was often to be seen in the bars…weird town). Despite Pataki’s absence, I had a little ritual for when we drove by: I’d shake my fist out the window of the car and yell Stupid Governor! I feel like doing that again. she was pretty upset about the whole Spitzer thing, having been a fan for many years. My reaction was more shoulder shrugging, like, whatever. But I think a good stupid governor fist-shaking is appropriate. So, Stupid Governor! A few points, though:

1) The Huh? – I’m fishing for the grammatical principle here. A colleague sent me the following sentence, which appeared in the New York Times:

And now add to the lengthening list Gov. Eliot Spitzer, husband, father of three teenage daughters, who authorities on Monday said had been involved with a ring of prostitutes.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the sentence is at best ambiguous. It does seem to suggest, in the placement of the relative clause, that Spitzer’s three daughters were involved with the ring of  prostitutes, no? The copy editor is sick with love.

2) The Ring – Doesn’t everything sound more sinister when it is part of a “ring?” A ring of car thieves is more sinister than a car thief, or even car thieves. A ring of prostitutes is more sinister than a prostitute, etc. I want to be in a ring. Or a racket.

3) Probative Value? – Another colleague asked me whether I had seen Heidi Fleiss on Nightline discussing the Spitzer issue. Let me repeat. Heidi Fleiss on Nightline. Why is Heidi Fleiss on Nightline? Apparently, she was there to provide viewers with more insight about prostitution rings, and to suggest that she wouldn’t trust a Governor who wasn’t getting laid. Thumbs up, traditional media!

I’d like some time to digest The Wire in all its brilliance. For now, I just want to comment on one minor feature of the dialogue that I love: the colloquial use of the word “behind.” Every Wire fan knows that the show made the term “to get got” popular for white folks everywhere. I think that the usage of “behind” is similarly African American vernacular that plays throughout the show while receiving little recognition from our language experts. It was satisfying that the usage plays an interesting role in the final episode, when Carcetti’s chief strategist and aide, Norman Wilson, uses it:

It does have a certain charm to it. They manufactured an issue to get paid. We manufactured an issue to get you elected governor. Everybody’s gettin’ what they need behind some make-believe.

As used in The Wire, “behind” means “as a result of of,” as in “He gonna get got behind this shit.” Bunk is a big fan of this word, but it is used by many of the black characters. It appears nowhere in the OED; indeed, a quick search turned up nothing in any lexicon or dictionary that mentions this usage (I’d be grateful if one of you fine folks with better researching skills could turn something like this up). It sounds wholly natural, and I’d heard the term a lot growing up, but I always took it to be an African American and even distinctly Southern expression. So, why do I like it, apart from some authenticity fetishism? It’s pretty much perfect as an expression. We usually think of the cause as hidden, and we usually designate this hidden depth with the term “behind.” We say somebody is working “behind the scenes;” we ask what is “behind this turn of events.” The list could go on: the result is on the surface, while the cause is behind. But what I take to be the AAVE usage reverses this, at least (semi-)grammatically. The result (getting got; getting what they need) is behind the cause (this shit; some make believe). Of course, it’s not hidden; behind does not mean behind as a metaphorical spatial location (as it does in the typical usage). Rather, it is a pure substitution for “as a result of.” It still interests me as a reversal, though. I wonder whether it indicates a different way of parsing out causality.

We’ve discovered one of the great advantages of our location. When we put on Thomas the Tank Engine to distract babygirl for five or six minutes, we can actually comply with the request to ride a train. This morning, we took a little train ride because babygirl wanted to. It’s easy. We live a few short blocks from one of the renovated Brown Line stations, so we just packed her up and took her down. We opted for a short train ride, taking the Brown south to Paulina, where we ate a nice brunch at the Wishbone Restaurant, billed as “Southern Reconstruction Cooking,” and “family friendly.”

Was it ever. The place was packed with toddlers. We’ve noticed this strange phenomenon here on the Northside. Whenever we go to some “family” place or event, it’s always toddlers and smaller children. Not a kid over five years old. There are two explanations. First, people with six, seven, and eight year olds simply do other sorts of things. That may be. The more disheartening explanation is that once the kids hit five, people move out of the city in order to avoid the Chicago Public Schools. As a product of the New York City public schools, I’m disturbed by this explanation, but I honestly don’t know what we’d do. Sixteen Chicago public school students have been killed this year alone.

In any case, we finished brunch, then took a stroll in the neighborhood, stopping by the famous Dinkel’s Bakery and generally wasting time. Here are some “choo choo” pics of our Daylight Savings Sunday morning.

On the Choo Choo

babygirl Watching her Back on the CTA

After various yuppie enterprises like buying a collander made out of 100% recycled plastic, we headed back. Welcome to Brown Line construction.

The Loop-bound train distracted babygirl for a few seconds, then she was back to her old tricks.

Not our choo choo.

Here comes our train.

babygirl checks out the fill-ins on the Metra tracks, or something.

What?

Of course, Daddy had his own agenda. (I’ve been wanting to write that sentence for years). To wit, a few picks for the other series, all new stuff on the Brown:

DYRE straight letter and fat SPECK tag, off Irving Park

SAEL and SARS, Lincoln and Paulina: Your Sign Here? Be careful what you wish for…

I finally got a chance to catch American Gangster. I heard a lot of buzz about it when it came out, so I was expecting it to be pretty good. I really wanted to add it to Great New York City 70′s Films, put it up there with Warriors, you know. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was spotty at best, with choppy narrative, half-drawn characters, and general confusion. Not even Denzel – who I usually like (hell, I liked him in the awful Deja Vu) – or even Russell Crowe, or even a moderately killer soundtrack could save this one. What does any of this have to do with Graffiti Fridays? I’m glad I asked.

I may have been disposed early against the film because of its blatant graffiti anachronisms. They occur throughout the film, but were particularly noxious in the first few minutes, when Russel Crowe and his partner are discovering a bookie’s money in New Jersey, circa 1968. Here are some still from the offending scene:

I will tell you with full assurance that no such thing existed in 1968, period. It’s not merely that VELO, KUMA, and MEER hadn’t been born yet, although this is true in all likelihood. I don’t mean that the specific writers are anachronistic. I mean the form itself. It simply hadn’t been invented yet. There were no tag fill-ins or straight letters or throwees anywhere at all, much less on a rooftop in New Joizy. Nobody had experimented with the caps necessary to do that MEER throwee, period. It didn’t exist at the time. The form itself didn’t exist. Crowe could just as well have pulled out a cell phone and checked his email. That’s how off it is. You might as well have a Picasso hanging in the background of a Jane Austen flick. That’s how bad it is.

So, big deal, right? Wasn’t I praising Kubrick just a few posts ago for his anexact representation of Hue City in Full Metal Jacket? And really, isn’t the graffiti just serving as a signifier of urban decay here? Isn’t it just in the frame to develop that feeling of the late-1960′s and early 1970′s anomie? Yes, fine. I get it. That’s great. At the same time, I don’t see why’d you’d bother getting the cars just right, getting the clothes just right, getting the technology and phones and shoes just right, but leaving in something like that. And if you’re making the BIG movie, the putative Oscar contender, the “true story,” the secret history of New York, it’s pretty close to unforgivable. The film gets a 3 out of 10. The location scout gets a 1 out of 10.

If you want to see a bunch of writers celebrating this anachronism, go here. They also provided a more recent flick of that KUMA YOUTH rooftop:

Ugh. I’m ready to go odds-and-evens on this one.

When I was a kid, we used to go odds-and-evens to pick teams (the winner would pick first). I guess everyone knows odds-and-evens, but if you don’t, it’s very simple, like Rock-Paper-Scissors. The two captains announce as an odd or an even number (as in, “I’m odds.”), then face off, and – on a given signal – extend either one finger or two. The sum of their choices can therefore be 2, 3, or 4. If the sum is odd, the person who announced as odd wins the round, etc. It was usually best of three.

For some reason, the “signal” required both captains to shake a balled fist in a motion that portended other activities once puberty hit, while saying in unison:

Odds-and-evens says SHOOT!

On “shoot,” you would hold out your selection (one finger or two). There were also “latesies,” if one captain tried to gain an unfair advantage by waiting a split second to see what the other captain presents. Accusations of latesies were often met with the rather cogent rebuttal of “Naw, naw it wasn’t!” or “Bullshit, motherfucker!” There was one final twist. If you won the round, you had to announce it thusly: “Mine.” So your typical best of three odds-and-evens sounded like this:

Odds-and-evens says SHOOT!
Mine.
Odds-and-evens says SHOOT!
Mine.
Odds-and-evens says SHOOT!
Mine.
Latesies!
Bullshit, motherfucker!

I say we go odds-and-evens on the Democratic primary. It’s time. Let’s do it. We can get Obama and Clinton together in a fancy room and go best-of-seven. Anti-democratic? Perhaps. But think of the advantages. Chris Matthews would have to find a real job.