The Illustrated Wallace Stevens

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I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,

So what’s being compared here?

At first the answer seems fairly obvious; three minds are being compared to three blackbirds. When you think about it a little more, though, things get blurry. For one thing, the simile doesn’t quite map; the three minds are actually being compared to the tree, not to the blackbirds. So is there one overmind in which the three minds sit? Or is the tree the mind in which the blackbirds sit — or a number of minds, in which different explanations of the simile quietly caw? The poem doubles — or triples — back on itself; it seems to be describing or explaining its own processes. And if it’s talking about itself, the simile is there merely to multiply. The mind, the blackbird, and the poem are shadows that slide one into the other, each and each and each.

Or, to put it another way, the connection between the blackbird and the mind is arbitrary. That’s how metaphors work; they connect unlike things. Language is all metaphor; a string of arbitrary links, slipping signs that magically pull meaning out of non-meaning, like an infinite string of blackbirds rushing out of that tree, or mind, or poem. Wallace Stevens poems are built out of metaphors and think about metaphors, which is what I meant here when I said:

Wallace Stevens is very much about words. It’s words as imagery, but the point of most of his poems is the evanescence of those images; they’re arbitrary. They appear in language and disappear into language.

As a result, it’s not really possible — or at least very difficult — to create an illustration that works like a Wallace Stevens poem.

Though, of course, there isn’t anything to stop you from illustrating a Wallace Stevens poem. Nothing simpler. Here’s my own illustration of the above poem, taken from a zine I made way back in 2002.

This drawing neatly reverses the poem its illustrating. In Stevens, the mind comes first, and then the image of the blackbird follows. But in the illustration, the blackbirds are as solid as, and essentially precede, the split consciousness. Instead of three minds generating three blackbirds, the blackbirds generate three minds, represented by the chain of question marks. The poem spins an epistemological conundrum (what do I think?) into an ontological one (where are the blackbirds?) The illustration, on the other hand, takes an ontological question (what is the status of these multiple, poorly drawn critters?) and spins it into an epistemological one.

Here’s another example:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Here, the illustration’s concreteness doesn’t so much mirror the poem as parody it. The poem treats the blackbird’s insubstantiality as sublime; the word is beautiful because it shimmers and passes; the singing depends on the silence and the silence on the singing. The illustration, by nailing down the ephermerality, reimagines it as (or teases out the implication of) violence. Language’s play is freedom — what separates us from the blackbird is that we can contemplate the blackbird. But that (loooooooooooooong separation) from the animal is also our knowledge of sin, which is the knowledge of death. The poem is about the joy of the world slipping into words. The illustration is, maybe, a reminder that, from the perspective of the blackbird, human mastery of the world may have a downside.

One last one…and here, I think, the illustration and the poem really do come close to meaning the same thing.

In “Thirteen Ways,” the blackbird stands in for both sign and signified. It’s the mark that points and the thing pointed to; the trace of a reality that can be indicated but not reached. The poem above can be read, perhaps, as an acknowledgement that words are not a self-contained system; the world is in there too, even if we can’t really tell exactly where. If words coat our images, then maybe images infest our words. We speak blackbirds — or at least something that looks a little bit like them.

New Visitor Intro

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We’re still getting many new visitors, so I thought I’d repost and slightly rewrite this intro post.

If you’ve come for the Victorian Wire post by Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria, you might also be interested in our entire roundtable on the Wire. I thought we were done with it…but in the interest of pandering I figured we’d do a couple more posts later in the week. So stay tuned!

You can also check out other posts by Sean Michael Robinson, including his discussion of teaching art to anime kids and his report on the issues around child pornography cases.

If you’re interested in cultural bricolage and mash-ups, you might want to check out our past roundtable on copyright and free culture. Also, you can read this recent post on the pre-fame experiences of Haydn, Christina Aguilera and Duke Ellington.

Though we’re mostly a comics blog, we do have some non-Wire posts on Television.

As for this blog, The Hooded Utilitarian is a quasi-blog/quasi-magazine hybrid devoted to cultural criticism.

HU is edited by Noah Berlatsky (that’s me). You can see a list of our other bloggers, columnists, and contributors if you look up there on the bar under the lovely banner created by awesome artist Edie Fake.

We also have frequent guest posters. If you’d like to write for us, you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail.

Hope you enjoy the site. Thanks for visiting!

Memories of Old Hong Kong

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(Two Comics by Stella So)

The cartoonist, Stella So, is the last entry in Chihoi and Craig Au Yeung’s 2007 survey of “25 Years of Hong Kong Independent Comics” (Long Long Road) — a brief stopover for this small but vibrant scene.

Au Yeung’s blurb at the back of the 2010 reissue of So’s Very Fantastic describes her as one of a new generation of born and bred Hong Kong cartoonists; an artist who has a singular eye and feel for the life and character of that city.

The book in question is an early sign of that promise. It documents the entire process through which she created her 7 minute animated film of the same name which won a gold medal at the 2002 Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Award (IFVA). It is in many ways the more interesting project of the pair, revealing her working methods and the components which make up her art.

Very Fantastic was done as a graduation project from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2002, and describes the fading world of old Chinese tenements (tanglou in Mandarin). Her travels through the corridors and byways of these old structures make up the bulk of the book, combining sketches, photos and description in a kind of careful collage. Hence the distortions in this view of a row of bird cages…

…and this sketch of a dark iron door crowned with frosted glass funneling a warm orange intensity.

So’s book is not only a record of grizzled castaways — faded electronics, old furniture, and tiles — but also a collection of chromatic reminiscences, not least from the fiery glow of the humble incandescent light bulb. The quality of light in a stairwell is noted at one point and is seen to transport that space back 30 years.

The most vital elements collected during her expeditions are selected and assembled into a whole which is curious yet evocative.

The rest of the book chronicles the process of character design, sound recording and animation; every page formulated on a grid design which is typical of practice books for writing Chinese characters. These don’t merely act as guidelines but also as flexible panels to which she fits her sketches. As such, the book becomes not just an exercise in cartooning and the deployment of the imagination, but also one of using the practical qualities of the page. The final shot of the cartoon shows the protagonist walking down a staircase lodged in the thin gutter between the four rows of calligraphic squares, the paper now turned on its side to give a long vertical space instead of a horizontal one. The paper lodges the proceedings firmly in a Chinese past, the fading green lines hardly being the stuff of modern printing (and modern Hong Kong). A reasonably common practice in the East, and one which is not unknown even in America (for example, in the work of Lynda Barry).

The large fold out panoramas which inhabit the first section of the book are not only functional in design, but calculated to draw readers into the centuries old tradition of Chinese scroll painting.

The most famous example of this must be Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During the Qing Ming Festival (QingMing Shanghe Tu; 11th-12th century) which, to this day, is reproduced in scrolls and collapsible books like the one shown below.

The ultimate expression of So’s longing can be found in City of Powder -Vanishing Hong Kong, an oblong-shaped book of illustrations and comics published in 2008. So is fascinated by the sensory environment of the city, and the chapter titles of this memoir reflect the colors, smells, and sounds she experienced during her excursions. As with her earlier project, the drawings here are an amalgamation of the real and the imagined; a compression of time, place, and meaning.

A lyrical article at Honey Pupu is as detailed an analysis of So’s art as you will find online. The author doesn’t see her as any sort of conservationist — she hasn’t the influence or the training for this — but as a nostalgist, the poetry of whose images convey something of the truth of memory. These comics are free from narrative and the flow of time; the saturated hues and imaginings not suggestive of history, but of something instinctive and almost incontrovertible.

The chapter describing “Wedding Card Street” could be described as a burst of synesthesia captured on paper. The first page shows an accumulation of sensory and emotive detail harvested from various points in space and time, all focused on the central area of the artist’s work sheet.

The next two are mythical constructs depicting flowering Wedding Card trees and the romance of manufacturing.

So is especially concerned with the latter aspect of city living, and dwells at length on the preparatory steps involved in cooking a bowl of noodles at a favorite noodle stall, and the logic of the signs which litter her vistas. The building cutaways reveal a progress from the joys of union to the intermittent pleasures of old age. It is not a story with a happy ending. The first drawings in this series are dated 2004, the last showing beshrouded buildings, withered trees, and gaping maws is from 2008, the last act in a place now consigned to dust.

City of Powder ends with the origins and customs of the Chinese Ghost Festival; a not surprising conclusion in view of the theme of So’s book. It begins with a description of Maudgalyayana’s (a disciple of Gautama Buddha) quest to liberate his mother from hell where she has been transformed into a hungry ghost, a creature in a perpetual state of longing due to its inability to consume any food. The food offerings which are sometimes found at various houses and temples during the Ghost month relate directly to Buddha’s solution to this dilemma. The Indian elephant is a reminder of this cross-cultural fertilization; the dialog between the little girl lost and the boy, a not so subtle call to remember tradition amidst modernity.

When the boy asks the girl how she came to be lost, she replies that she couldn’t find her way home because of the rapid changes to the city. The ceremonies and offerings which make up innards of the mechanical pachyderm are reminders of an urban past, a ritual of rebirth which recalls Maudgalyayana’s efforts to ensure his mother’s reincarnation.

This is awkward and yet so charming in its delivery that it becomes convincing and emotionally satisfying; much more so than some itinerant stories concerning the destruction left in the wake of the Three Gorges Dam that I’ve seen. Because the sadness of displacement, and the sweat and tears of the dispossessed are not the only reasons why we cherish a hard but now desolate past. The artist of City of Powder captures that rose-tinged spark of remembrance, and while her portrait is sometimes tinged with sentimentality, it is one that should not be casually dismissed.

Further Reading

A profile of the artist in Chinese.

An interview with Stella So at HK magazine.

Commercial Press online where the comics of So and her contemporaries can be purchased.

The “real” Wedding Card Street (culled from Google images):

 

Adolescent Power Fantasies for Adults

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A slightly edited version of this was posted earlier this week on Splice Today.
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Superman was one of those ideas that conquered the world through the sheer force of its elegant stupidity. Kids like to imagine that they’re powerful. Wouldn’t they like it even better if they could imagine that they were…superpowerful? Pulp heroes were strong and fast and handsome…why not make a pulp hero who was stronger, faster, and wore primary-colored tights? Okay, so the last bit didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. But the rest of it? That was sound.

And eight odd decades later, it’s still sound. For evidence, you need only look to Hollywood, where every third film seems to be a superhero fantasy, with tights or without.

The latest entry in the genre is Limitless, a film whose power fantasies are almost as nakedly crass as those of Siegel and Shuster themselves. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a wastoid wannabe novelist with writer’s block, one failed marriage, and a girlfriend who’s leaving him. But then…an ancient wizard gives him a magic word of power, he is bitten by a radioactive stock broker and subsequently eye-fucked by ghostly ninja warriors who pass him their skills in their ninja semen . And everything changes!

Okay; there are no ghostly ninja warriors, nor radioactive words of power. There’s just a pill, NZT-48, which increases brain capacity, because you only use 20% of the brain of your scriptwriters in coming up with some stupid pseudo-science explanation, and then, hey, you’re off to impress and then screw your landlord’s bitchy wife and write your novel in four days and then clean your apartment and get a shave. Also, extreme sports. For now you are…Superyuppie!

Or, to put it another way, Limitless demonstrates with depressing finality that the power fantasies of adults are much more banal than the power fantasies of children. Super strength, super speed, heat vision, beating the bad guys and saving the day — they’re clichés now, sure, but they still have an exuberant charm. Wanting those things doesn’t make you dumb or boring. It just makes you a kid, or somebody who used to be a kid. My seven-year-old just yesterday looked at me and said, “Daddy, I wish I could fly.” And I laughed because it’s true enough to always be a surprise. Everybody wishes they could fly.

But the power fantasies in Limitless aren’t big, reach-for-the-stars daydreams. They’re cramped and puerile; Superman curdled. As soon as that landlord’s wife appears, looking less like a typical dowdy Hollywood landlord’s wife and more like a typical Hollywood hot-young-transient-fuck, you know that Eddie is going to get some. And the rest of his successes unfold with a similar dreary predictability. He starts stock trading and makes oodles and oodles of money. He gets his old girlfriend back…and then indulges in a wild round of debauchery, canoodling (with admirable political correctness) women of varying melanin, culminating in an especially hot blonde socialite who could be in movies. Which, of course, she is.

The walk on the wild side is, we are assured, Out Of Character; it’s a side-effect of the wonder drug and not of course related to Eddie’s actual real power fantasies no no no. Besides, he is punished for his hubris and his satyrism and, one hopes, for Bradley Cooper’s smug smile, which is insufferable even by the standards of the smug smiles usually distributed to scruffy, raffish, second-tier leading men. And since it isn’t really him doing the bad things, and since he is punished with headaches and withdrawal and the threat of being tortured by the inevitable sadistic gangsters, we can forgive him and cheer him on as he lopes inevitably to chemical-powered victory. Right?

I think that’s how it’s supposed to play, anyway. Something goes rather awry in the delivery though. Maybe it’s Eddie’s utter lack of anything resembling an individual personality — even in his wry, self-deprecating voice over he doesn’t manage to say anything either witty or memorable. For that matter, when he’s on the superdrug that makes him supersmart, he comes across not as a genius but as a superbore. The movie shows landladies dropping their pants for him and stockbrokers struck with awe…but Eddie never actually inspires awe in the viewers. When a upwardly-mobile Eddie Murphy wowed the upper crust in Trading Places, you could sort of see it, because Murphy has charisma. Cooper though — all he’s got is a pretty face. One comes away from Limitless with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the NZT-48 is really just cocaine. Even when Eddie’s making a fool of himself, it lets him think he’s the most brilliant guy in the room.

The real reason it’s difficult to sympathize with Eddie, though, is not that he’s a bore. It’s that he’s kind of an evil schmuck. Blessed with superintelligence, he doesn’t try to cure cancer or develop cold fusion, or even devote his life to the art he ostensibly values. He just scrabbles for cash and then runs for political office.

Along the way, incidentally, he maybe possibly kills a woman — that blonde socialite mentioned earlier. After he slept with her she shows up murdered, and Eddie can’t remember whether it was him who did it or not. With his recently acquired millions he hires a high-powered lawyer and beats the charge, but it seems quite possible that he was responsible. Nonetheless, he shows no particular remorse. He does vomit after he hears she’s dead, but this seems as related to withdrawal symptoms as to conscience, and he certainly seems to experience no long term guilt.

In the final scene Eddie, now a Senatorial candidate, outmaneuvers and humiliates ruthless tycoon Carl Van Loon, played by a text-messaging-it-in Robert De Niro. It’s the final wish-fulfillment fantasy; beating big bad daddy at his own game and taking his place. Our hero started out a hollow narcissist without the focus to achieve his boring ambitions, and he ends up a hollow narcissist with the drive to be Senator — and maybe someday even President. It’s a triumph for us all, I suppose. Still, I think I might have enjoyed the movie more if he’d, I don’t know, gone back to being a loser, or been shot in the head by gangsters. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist at heart, but if it’s going to be a dumb old superhero power fantasy, I’d prefer that the good guys win.

The Wire Roundtable: Conclusion

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I thought for a moment there we were going to have another contribution or two to our Wire roundtable, but it looks as if they didn’t pan out alas. So I thought I’d finish up by highlighting a couple of the more interesting comments.

First, Jason Michelitch has a long discussion of Pryzbylewski.

Pryzbylewski: not about temper, not about mentoring. Anger plays into it, but not in the heat-of-the-moment uncontrollable way. It’s a deeper anger, an anger of resentment and insecurity. Prez in his early days is not acting out of raw temper, or assuming a learned mode of behavior; he is lashing out from a volatile mixture of fragile ego and stark fear. In short, Prez is Ziggy.

If Ziggy’s family connection had been to police rather than stevedores, he’d have shot up his patrol car, put a slug in the wall of his unit’s office, and he damn sure would have clocked a project kid in the eye with the butt of his gun. But Ziggy wasn’t a creature of temper. Ziggy was desperate for respect in the only milieu he knew to look for it. Ziggy was terrified of being proved a failure, a fuckup, a geek, and so he formed a thick layer of humor, bravado, and rage.

A cop acquaintance of mine once said this to me about his profession, and I take it to be true. He said, “About a third of the guys out here, they’re like me. They just want to help people. All the rest of them are the kid that got picked on at school and now he’s got a gun.” When Prez takes that kid’s eye out in the projects in Season One, he’s not doing it because the kid pissed him off. He’s doing it out of anger at the world, and to prove to the world and to himself that HE’S in control now.

It’s only later, after Lester has shown him how he can be competent and respected through the wiretap, that Prez is then confronted by the kid he hurt, and he realizes that he was not in control at all.

And that isn’t the end of his journey, because while Prez finds a new well of confidence and self-respect in his work with Lester, he’s still a cop, and he still carries a gun, and he has not recognized his own flaws sufficiently to make him safe with that responsibility. And so his renewed confidence leads to overconfidence, and in the chase with McNulty, some part of him (subconscious, surely) sees an opportunity to finally achieve that original goal of respect through “manly” police work. That it goes so horribly wrong is Prez’s second wake-up call, the one that finishes the job that the kid with the eyepatch started of shocking Prez into self-awareness. At that point, Prez knows he shouldn’t have been a police, with the power of life and death.

Prez is driven to teaching primarily out of his guilt over the kid from the first season (though there is also an element of him needing to have a career that feeds his ego’s need to be in control. Cops and teachers both wield big swinging dicks, even, or maybe especially, the good ones. And Prez, like all the major characters on the show, is complex. Nothing he does has only ONE motivation).

The Prez that shows up in that classroom, though, has had two huge blows to his sense of self that have resulted in him making an absolute resolution to himself to never let something like the blinding of the kid or the shooting of the cop happen again. Prez’s arc as a teacher is not a wimp learning to be a disciplinarian. It’s someone who has seen what can happen when he lashes out getting over his fear of ever doing so again and learning how to instead exert force (either verbally or physically) in a safe, mature manner. When he disciplines the snatchpops kid in the last episode, it’s through a controlled hand on the shoulder and a stern and unwavering voice of authority.

All of the preceding is why Pryzbylewski’s character arc is my absolute favorite from the show, and why I could not let stand the dismissal of his intense personal growth as mere plothammer.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on Wallace:

The beating of Johnny Weeks, and Wallace’s role in it, is different from Brandon’s death, and his role in that, in several ways. (1) Johnny is “merely” beaten. Brandon is tortured, mutilated and murdered. (2) Wallace’s participation in the beating occurs in the heat of the moment. His decision to rat on Brandon is dispassionate and calculated. (3) Wallace doesn’t really see the long-term effects of Johnny’s beating. Brandon’s body is displayed in Wallace’s backyard. (4) Punishing cheating junkies is presumably a relatively routine event for Wallace. Participating in a murder is novel, and thus more salient. (5) Wallace’s role in the beating is not crucial; even if he didn’t participate, Johnny would still be beaten by Bodie et al. His role in Brandon’s murder *is* crucial; if Wallace didn’t make that phone call, Brandon wouldn’t be murdered–at least, not at that time. (6) The beating happens in the company of Wallace’s peers. The murder involves him with his superiors, who are adults, and serious–and scary–criminals. (7) Johnny is just a junkie, a figure of contempt. Brandon, although a homo and dope-snatcher, is at least higher in the street hierarchy. (8) Brandon seems closer in age to Wallace. Johnny is indisputably an adult; when Wallace spots Brandon, he is playing pinball at a local hangout. (9) Wallace beats on Johnny. He (kind of) snitches on Brandon. Snitching is worse than beating (exhibit A: Randy Wagstaff). (10) Finally, doesn’t DeAngelo express some qualms about Brandon’s vicious treatment? Boadie couldn’t give a shit, but Wallace takes his moral cues from DeAngelo, to some extent.

Given all these differences, Wallace’s different reactions seem not at all inconsistent. Could the show have made these differences, or Wallace’s thinking about them, more explicit? Sure. But if the show made everything explicit, each season would have been one thousand episodes long.

And Jog on Zach Snyder’s translations of Alan Moore’s epic poetry.

Ugh, the hell with Zach Snyder… not only does he constantly favor flowery look-at-me phrasing at the expense of the text, his Moore translation seemed flatly ignorant the critical aspect of DIALOGUE with the oral tradition Noah mentions. Specifically, Moore’s liberal, detailed quotations from Steve Ditko are so bowdlerized as to render them mere surface decoration, despite being utterly fucking central to the work, down to seemingly tiny sections — Dr. Manhattan’s disastrous encounter with the scribes — referring directly to crucial verses from Ditko’s Captain Atom. And yes yes, the Kalermites will tell you that attribution is difficult in antiquity — where would our classics departments be without “Bob Kane”? — but Ditko, remember, commonly operated with an intent of conversion, to deliberately replace earlier, pagan narratives with substitutes derived from that unfashionable monotheistic bedrock, Mr. A, himself (of course!) parodied in the form of Rorschach, despite the protestations of “Sunday Catholics” with no appreciation of tradition, duly aided and abetted by Mr. Snyder… you see why I’m pissed??

Although, I’ll even read Snyder’s shitty-looking novel this weekend before I sit through one more second of Ayn Rand, the enduring (if limited) popularity of whom can only properly be analogized to the embrace of Tommy Wiseau among particular Victorians… contrary to one million posts online, I found it a relief when she just plopped that dude in front of the camera and had him talk, because she cannot frame a shot to save her life…!

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This has been a kind of amazing week here, as Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson turned into a meme, linked by everyone from boingboing on down. My statcounter says we had 70,000 hits plus over the course of Thursday and Friday, which is the amount of traffic we usually get in two months. Things have calmed down a little (we only got as much traffic as we usually get in a week and a half yesterday) and our bandwidth has dropped to levels that allow the blog to function again.

So, I wanted to give a big thank you again to Derik Badman, who’s been fighting to keep the blog working and available to readers. Thanks also to Bill Randall and Caroline Small for helping out on the technical level. And thanks to all our contributors, commenters, and readers. It’s been a blast.

Before They Were Famous

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Joy and Sean’s bricolage Victorian Wire piece has netted us many new readers,most of whom probably have not yet realized that this blog is usually less about Omar and clever homage/parody and more about comics and post-structuralism and flame wars.

But! I am hoping to fool them at least a little longer, so I thought I’d reprint this piece which ran in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a little while back. It reimagines famous people in different eras/situations. It’s not about the Wire, but it’s what I’ve got.

What Were They Like Before They Were Famous?

1. Franz Josef

For the science fair, Franz Josef Haydn constructed a working castrato. No one expected it because the school was underfunded. So he had to use an abacus instead of a Bunsen burner, plus it was made out of rusty glass condom wrappers. But he tried hard and learned important lessons broadcast on television like “don’t be poor” and the Western cultural tradition. His teacher, Ms. Friedrich Nietzsche, gave him stickers with assertive slogans. She had a cave to go into for the Jedi Mind Trick, but when she came out she was just Aquaman, which doesn’t usually help.

Haydn didn’t understand what he had done wrong. “Doesn’t anybody like beautiful music?” He kept shouting that. The judges were stupid movie stars and people like that. First prize would go to growing bean sprouts like always. And all he wanted was to be able to look at his college pictures sometimes without being sad forever.

I think the problem is that there is too much creativity in the world. It means rich people can feel good about themselves too easily. Also everybody talks and nobody shoots them. If we really want to stop floods and starvation, a better way would be a lot of robots doing math in the dark. Without Oprah.

2. Christina

So it was in the car and we said who has the best memories? So the Little Mermaid was in the Holocaust and learned important lessons about personal growth, and Buffy had a sad marriage to Raymond Carver but with moments of real quirkiness. And everyone else was Asian. But Christina Aguilera kept saying, gee I don’t have any memories, isn’t that funny? They told her to make some up but she wasn’t inventive in that way, so they felt bad for her but wouldn’t talk to her anyway.

She tried to tell people about a dream where she met herself and was different. Buffy said, “Oh, right, you must be a creative writing major.” I guess that’s a memory, Christina thought. I’ll just listen to this song for the rest of my life.

Luckily there’s happiness and you’re more famous than some people. If you have cheerful slogans and make others say them then they will be depressed and you win. Even if that doesn’t work, someday high school will just be a place you read porn about.

3. Duke

It is underwater and the guidance counselors are puffy and fat like some kinds of fish. Duke Ellington is sort of a savior so he comes through security and down, down, down. It is pretty because it is green and no one has any clothes or penises.

The littlest teachers have lights in their tails. You are never more than fifteen feet from one and you accidentally eat them while you sleep. That happens to Duke Ellington too, which is why he ended up so creative just like most people. If you shut your eyes you can see their skulls because they glow and bob where the water is dark. That is all the teachers people swallowed making that possible and I think we should thank them for it.

Duke Ellington’s cell phone rings. It is Hollywood and they want him to be in a movie where he will listen to music and then be inspired to listen to better music. “When I do as they wish, even the eels sing of love.” He would cry a single tear but nobody would notice underwater. There are a lot of beautiful things and terrifying things where you can’t see them here, but if you really study them closely they become boring.

The Wire Roundtable: What’s Missing From This Picture?

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Others have already pointed out that The Wire isn’t as realistic as it seems. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), for instance, is the hero of the American Monomyth. Here’s how the latter is summarized in the link above:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

The Wire revises the myth thus: a community in hell (Bubbles – Andre Royo: “it’s a thin line between heaven and here.”) is threatened by some of hell’s inhabitants; normal institutions, paralyzed by red tape, political agendas, and business as usual, fail to contend with this threat; a self-aggrandizing supercop emerges to be afflicted by temptations and fails to carry out the redemptive task; bumping his head against the system the supercop recedes into obscurity.

That’s quite good. It revises the myth until it lies there, almost unrecognizable. Here’s my version though: in its mythology of being the only possible system (in the best of all possible worlds as Pangloss would say; at the end of history as Fukuyama would add), and in its sanctification of profit (the market will provide), global capitalism transferred labor to developing countries where the wages are low (Walden Bello):

The extreme international mobility of corporate capital coupled with the largely self-imposed national limits on labor organizing by the Northern labor unions (except when this served Washington’s Cold War political objectives) was a deadly formula that brought organized labor to its knees as corporate capital, virtually unopposed, transferred manufacturing jobs from the North to cheap-labor sites in the Third World.

Under these conditions a parallel economy thrives (mimicking the mainstream economy with its power struggles, cut-throat wars and iron clad hierarchies); those who are unprepared and uneducated, the poor, have no other option than to go underground; everything becomes simulacra in order to keep up appearances.

Hostage to the worlds of finance and economics politics is reduced to being a sport (I love the scene in which Carcetti campaigns in an elderly home: we can hear the crickets chirping because the seniors in there couldn’t care less for this kind of sport); the police are a political tool; the education system is a dead end (and the students know it – Howard “Bunny” Colvin – Robert Wisdom: “I mean, they’re not fools these kids. […] [T]hey see right through us.”). That’s why Marcia Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall), the Assistant Principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School says to Bubbles that Sherrod (Rashad Orange) is going to be “socially promoted” after missing school for three years. In the end, everybody knows that it doesn’t matter (those who do matter aren’t in that kind of school). Everybody has some reason to pretend that it does though. I’ll give the last word to David Simon:

Baltimore’s dying port unions, is a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class, it is a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy, that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.

My problem with this statement is that David Simon should be saying it about the series as a whole. Why just season two? I hope that there isn’t a hint somewhere suggesting that, given the chance, black people would still prefer the world of the corners instead of being part of the mainstream economy.

Another instance where the creators of the series juggle dangerously with cliché is in season four (my favorite, pardon the personal note). The aforementioned season includes a kind of Teacher Movie. It’s true that, again, the writers do a good job of transcending the pernicious genre (the teacher, Roland “Mr. Prezbo” Pryzbylewski – Jim True-Frost – doesn’t win the trust of his most difficult students completely alone). But he also conveys what I call the flawed Sesame Street Syndrome (or SSS). That is, students can learn while playing. In the link above, the reporter, Nicholas Buglione, wrote:

Dr. Robert Helfenbein, an education professor at Indiana University who specializes in urban education issues, believes these films trivialize the learning process and present an erroneously simple solution to what’s really a far more complex problem: Closing the achievement gap in inner-city schools.

That goal can’t be achieved by any superhero teacher or caped crusader. It can only be achieved by closing the parallel gap between the wealthy and the poor.

The image above shows Bubbles pushing his peripatetic business. The original is a print on a t-shirt. I chose it because it is semiotically fascinating. On one end it’s the perfect symbol of the parallel economy I talked about above. On the other end it shows the absolute base of the social pyramid, the junkie that is everybody’s victim (I’m aware that Bubbles is a fictional character, mind). And yet… it’s in a t-shirt… for sale! Grammar mistakes and all!… Capitalism appropriates everything by selling everything.

What’s missing above is the real one.

In conclusion, the use of parallel montage gives the impression of a kaleidoscopic and complex view of the city. That’s not untrue, but it just gives us the street level (in today’s world of virtual politics, even the temples of infotainment and city hall are at street level). What really affects these people’s lives is happening elsewhere.