Some things in life are inevitable. Birthdays. Death. Farting. Another thing that's invetivable is that if you have a blog, and have watched The Wire, you will at some stage write a blog post about how it is one of the greatest TV shows ever made and evangalise the show. Well, I have a blog. I've just watched The Wire. And I emplore you to watch the show, as it's one of the greatest TV shows ever made.
Actually, calling it "one of the greatest TV shows ever made" isn't really accurate, because it's not really a TV show at all. It's really a five part novel about an American city that happens to be told through the medium of television rather than in printed words. It tears up the conventions of screenwriting and paces each season like chapters in a book a good book, rather than episodes in a tv series. The first couple of chapters you can't quite figure out what's going on or why it's important, you just try and get a grip on who's who and try and figure out where it's all heading. You are slowly drawn in, shown a different world and the characters that inhabit it. Before you know it you have a visceral need to know how the story plays out. You are gripped from the inside and have to see it to the end.
It's this same structure that probably puts a lot of people off; normaly TV makers are careful to structure a show so that each episodes brings a complete narrative. With each season of The Wire you have to make it a few episodes in before you really get a grip on what the story actually is and so if you're not prepared for that, or don't have the patience, you might bail out too early.
Season one for example opens like it's just another cop show. There's a dead guy, flashing blue lights, some detectives, a court room, nothing really out of the ordinary and little sign of what's to come. But it's not really about cops, it's about two competing instutions - the police vs. a drug gang. They both have their power structures, their rules and codes of conduct. It's not about good vs. evil, they're both just doing their jobs, playing out the roles they've chosen in life.
Each season has a stand alone theme. Following the drug trade in season one, the second season looks at the working class, season three at politics, season four education and season five the media. It ends up showing how all these institutions interact with each other, how an event in one impacts on the other, how the agendas of each push the others towards an inevitable conclusion and how together they ultimatley end up maintaining a kind of status quo despite their diverse goals.
So there you go, there's my needless contribution to the near universal praise for the show. Buy it, borrow it, rent it or steal it.
Sunday, June 21, 2009 3:11 PM
I remember walking down the street in Istanbul a couple of years back and thinking to myself how great it would be if there was some kind of "audiograph" I could take instead of a photograph. There was nothing interesting to look at, yet the sound of the city was incredible. The hustle and the bustle of a city that's trapped between east and west - how do you capture that experience so that you can relive it or share it with friends on your return?
You can't. Sure, there's video cameras but the quality just isn't there, both technologically and in the competence of the end user. Something about a still camera forces you to consider what you're capturing; even if you don't really know what you are doing the very fact that you are selecting a subject, placing it in the frame and capturing it means that you are doing some basic composition. With video, more often than not people compose a scene in the viewfinder as they would for a photograph, hit record, then pan and/or zoom. What do you end up with? An image that is far lower quality than a still photograph, with poor quality sound. In fact the sound design is just going to be an after thought. You don't take video to capture sound, you take it to capture an image, and that same poor quality sound you're capturing will actually detract from the image, rather than add to it.
So really, if you do want to capture sound, that leaves you with having to carry something like a mini disc recorder and a mic around with you on your travels. It will work (I've seen people doing this in fact) but it's a bit clunky, and still leaves you with having to edit the results down when you're home. And how exactly do you publish this so your friends can share in the sounds you capture? Is there a community for sound recordings as frequented as something like Flickr for photos?
I came across something the other day called
AudioBoo which comes close to solving a lot of these issues. It's an iPhone app with which you capture sound, and then upload to a web 2.0 site (ugh, can't believe I just used the term "web 2.0" - shoot me) with a description, and if desired the automatically captured location data of where it was taken. Simple. OK, a couple of things to bear in mind - the quality of the audio is as good as the quality of the iPhone's camera, i.e. not great. But that doesn't stop people like me using it to upload pictures to Twitpic, so why should it stop me uploading audio when there's an interesting sound I want to capture?
I road tested it the other day to capture some
thunder and rain in the car park at work. You may have seen the result pop up on my Twitter feed (which AudioBoo will automatically post to). It's worth noting that in the same way that the camera works best with brightly lit subjects, the mic works best with louder sounds. If what you're capturing is too quiet, it can get a bit lost in the background hiss, as this capture I just took of
Jimmy Purring just now demonstrates (I removed the location data from that as it was taken at home).
I came across the application in Coco Smiley Bajingus Riley's
FriendFeed feed, which linked to
this BBC World Service article about their project to capture sounds around the world, which they're plotting on
a map of the world. To add to this map, all you do is tag your audio with BBC_SOS and it will get added to their queue. Almost makes me want to travel back to Turkey to that street and fire up Audio Boo!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:50 PM
Stupid BNP scum put a flyer through my door demanding we put British People First (apparantly oblivious of the fact that this is a half British, half Irish household). The leaflet if full of fail:
Its says "Battle For Britain 2009", illustrated with a picture of spitfire, presumably used as a symbol of British heroism in WW2.
Except that they've used a picture of a spitfire flown by a Polish pilot.
It has a made up quote from a British soldier, illustrated with a stockart photo of a member of the Irish Guards.
The section about British Jobs for British Workers is illustrated with a picture featuring
American actors.
It has another made up quote from a happy looking old couple complaining about asylum seekers, illustrated with
a stock art photo of an Italian couple taken by their Italian photographer son.
Seriously, if you're whole raison d'être is the protection of some warped view of what Britishness is (though by "British" I suspect they really mean "English"), you think they'd make the effort to find some pictures of actual British people to illustrate their point. Or maybe that's their point, maybe the whole leaflet is making a satirical swipe at how immigrants are taking over British society to such an extent that they're even making it hard to find photos of British people anymore.
It's easy to mock the British National Party. Very very easy indeed. (
Here's Charlie Brooker having a pop at them from the Guardian the other day, and
here's a great doc by Russell Brand where he singles out a particular BNP Youth member for ridicule.) I had the mis-fortune to catch their party political broadcast before The Wire the other day and it was almost laughably cringe inducing.
Almost. Because they really don't really deserve our mocking. They don't even deserve out pity. They only deserve our disgust and contempt. I ceremoniously burned the leaflet, and I suggest you do the same, it's cathartic.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 10:26 PM
When I was clearing out Grandma's flat I found a stash of old photographs, including a load of my grandad in Egypt, Palestine and Syria during the war. He was a wireless mechanic in REME. That's all I know really. Anyway, there's some pretty interesting photos from a different era. Click the photo to see more.
Sunday, May 10, 2009 10:28 PM
Me and Tony were remarking to each other last night about how neither of us really find the time to blog anymore. I should do a blog, I thought, I really should, like in the olden times when I used to write stuff here all the time, before Friend Feed became my primary method of posting shit on the internet.
You have to understand that there's a big difference between me saying "I should do that" to me
actually doing it. "I should do that" != "I am defintiely going to do that thing that I should do." For example, I should mow the lawn, but I'm not going to. I should clean out the airing cupboard, but I'm not going to.
A few weeks ago, Liv was sitting on the sofa and I walked into the room and gave her what I like to call "a micro hug". It's like a full blown hug but less time consuming. Something about the position I was in (leaning down arms stretched out), meant that my shoulder started to pop up. Yes, that shoulder, the shoulder that I dislocated shopping in Tesco. I snapped out of the hug situation and said to Liv "I nearly disclocated my shoulder again. I should start up my physio excercises to strengthen those shoulder muscles again." I didn't.
It's hard to say what the length of time between me first saying I
should do something, and me actually do the thing that I said I should do. One thing that I first said I should do about six months ago was to learn the front crawl, on account of the fact that the breast stroke was knackering up my knee. Well six weeks ago I finally got round to booking some lessons, and they started four weeks ago. We spend very little time in the lessons doing the actual front crawl, it's mostly lots of different exercises based on small parts of the stroke getting us used to each individual element.
This week, we were working on body rotation, about how unless you are taking a breath your face should be nose down in the water, and the rest of your body should be rotating in sync with your arm action. We had to hold a float between our legs and crawl with our arms and pay attention to the rotation of the body as we moved our arms flat behind us out of the water and reached forwards for the next stroke.
It was on the last of these strokes that I dislocated my shoulder. Not a micro dislocation like when I gave Liv a micro hug, but a proper arm not in its socket situation. Since the Tesco incident, I know more about the physio of a shoulder, and knew how to get it back in. Move it down, and then let it snap in. Down and snap in. Easy. I mean, it's pretty fucking painful of course, but was nowhere near as painful as before. Mostly I just felt a bit sick, as I tried to explain to the others that the swearing I was doing was on account of having just dislocated my shoulder. Swimming.
Swimming, hugging, shopping in Tesco. All these are activities that have caused me to disclocate my shoulder. I should do some more physio on it. In fact, I'm going to the loft to get my therabands as soon as I've posted this.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:22 PM
There's something I forgot to add in my last post: as with actual sorbet it's best to remove the grapes from the freezer to soften a little before serving. Definitely don't do what I just did and take a single frozen solid grape out of the freezer and stick it straight in your mouth. It fused to my lips. I had to stick my face under the kitchen tap to free it.
Sunday, March 08, 2009 1:03 PM
Grapes are boring. Fact.
However, it takes very little effort to turn them from something very boring to very nice.
1) Freeze them. If you freeze grapes, in say a little ramekin, with as much effort as it takes to open and close the freezer door, you've made grape sorbet. Sweet, refreshing, addictive grape sorbet.
2) Add CO2. Put a cup of halved grapes into a cream whipper. Charge with CO2. Leave for a few hours or overnight. Serve. Fizzy grapes. Magic.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009 9:31 PM
