The Wire Everywhere: What is that thing?

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A payphone

I was at Westmoreland State Park with my family today and I saw a payphone by the visitor’s center and immediately thought of The Wire Everywhere assignment for ds106. It’s interesting how the payphone is becoming a vestigial technology in a society where the majority of folks carry one in their pocket—in addition to it also being an extremely powerful computer.

I love the aesthetic of the payphone, and it’s a staple of season 1 of The Wire, so I figured I would document just that. It’s interesting how something as ubiquitous as this technology 25 years ago has all but disappeared in the wake of the mobile revolution. The idea of vanishing technology like the payphone is fascinating to me, and when Grant Potter set up #ds106radio so that you could broadcast to it from a payphone through an 800 number, I thought that was the coolest mashup of old and new technologies I’d ever seen. The absence of payphones is one of the more telling signs of the transformation of communication technologies over the course of a generation.

I can’t give myself any star credit for this assignment because I already did it, and it was just a picture.

Wire106 Double Feature: S02E01/S02E02 “Ebb Tide” and “Collateral Damage”

For this discussion of the first two episodes of Season 2 Paul and I were joined by wire106ers Kris Hooks and Maggie Stough. We discussed the first two episodes of Season 2 of theThe Wire, “Edd Tide” and “Collateral Damage.” I felt like this conversation was really starting to suggest a model for the discussions. Everyone was sharing there thoughts and throwing out there ideas fluidly. Major kudos to Kris and Maggie for coming prepared and making this a throughtful and engaging discussion. Wire106 is really starting to catch its groove, and I recommend watching this discussion for a model of what we we’ll be expecting of these moving forward.

The Contest Somebody Should Win

For this assignment, I told myself I would pick something random and do whatever came up and make it about The Wire. So what do I get? The Contest Nobody Could Win (Video-Mashup Edition) The directions are to: Create a mashup of 6 video clips (either TV or Movie) no longer than 2 seconds each. See if anyone can guess your favorite films! Since we already know it’s about The Wire, it sort of defeats the purpose. So I picked an episode, not necessarily my favorite one, and tried to pull six clips that don’t give away which one it is. Can you figure it out?

I used MPEG Streamclip to grab the clips. The Edit->Select In and Edit->Select Out functions marked the clips, and then File->Export to Other Formats saved them. I did this for eight clips, then imported the six I liked the best into iMovie. There, I pulled exactly two second from each one and put them together. Here is the result:

Judge Rawls on Justice

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I wanted to start warming up with a nice “Troll Quotes”assignments, one of my all time favorites. This troll quote is actually inspired by the theory that the hard-ass character Major Bill Rawls in The Wire is ironically named after the political philosopher John Rawls. And after reading that John Rawls was from Baltimore, I was all but sure. That said, I was sure others have thought about the connection, and after a quick search on Google I confirmed that fact.

Like Simon, Rawls was interested in institutions, particularly institutions of justice. His writings also frequently address the issue of rights and liberties, a subject that often comes up in The Wire (the show is something of a crash course in all the regulations that prevent police from conducting surveillance without a warrant, or committing other civil-liberties violations). That is where the positive parallels end, however. Rawls the philosopher was an idealist, deeply committed to a vision of justice as impartiality. The Wire by contrast is the opposite of idealistic, and portrays a moral universe in which impartiality is a distant dream.

I was struck by the connection, and A.M Lamey frames it perfectly in the above quote. Rawls the philosopher suggests philosophy is above political bargaining or calculated interests, but the universe of The Wire stands in stark contrast to such a theory. Major Rawls being part and parcel of the alternative, so I was sure to source him for the other Rawls’ quote. As for the image, I figured the institutional representative of justice in this series, Judge Phelan, would complete the triumvirate of this troll quote nicely. While appearing austere and learned in his book lined office and three-piece suit, he’s the epitome of the institutional machinations that have usurped any vision of justice in the world of The Wire.

As for the process, I opened up the image in GIMP and added some yellow text so it would stand out. Given the background had varying colors, I used the Filters–>Light and Shadow–>Drop Shadow option to make sure people could read the text even when the background was light (you can adjust the value based on how much shadow you need). It’s a simple finishing touch that helps you avoid looking like a total amateur.

String’s Gonna Get You

Today’s Daily Create was to make a themed video montage. I took all the Stringer Bell clips I had saved from the first season and put them together with the song String’s Gonna Get You (YT) which I actually have on an LP. Youtube credits it to Rutabaga, but it’s really the legendary Andre Williams.

I made this with Audacity and iMovie. The song is about five minutes long, and it’s about a Texas sheriff, which doesn’t really fit the theme. In Audacity I cropped off the first few minutes with all the lyrics and applied the Fade-In effect at the beginning, then I exported it as an MP3. I imported that and my clips into iMovie. Since my clips only added up to a few seconds, I duplicated them over and over again until it filled up a couple minutes. I right-clicked on the clips and used the Detach Audio function to get rid of the sound. My sound file was still running longer than the video clips, so I cropped the end off. And there’s my String video, such as it is.

Wire 106: S01E13 “Sentencing”

This is the last episode of season 1, “The Sentencing.” Paul and I were joined by UMW internaut Amy Wallace, who has been doing a great job thus far this semester. Paul blogged about color in this episode, and I just finished an assignment about mirroring scenes between this episode and the first of Season 1. I’m pretty blown away after a very close reading of this entire season just how tight a piece of art these first 13 episodes are. And after talking to the sound editor for the series, Jen Ralston, yesterday—I’m even more blown away.  More anon, but for now enjoy the last discussion of season 1, at least for now.

Wiring Mirror Scenes

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It’s time to do some assignments for #wire106, so I dreamed up a new one called “Wiring Mirror Scenes.” One of the things that came up again and again during our discussions of The Wire over the last month is how the show is constantly paralleling and mirroring scenes. One of the most obvious example is the mirroring of courtroom scenes in the first and last episodes. Below is a comparison of a number of shots from the two episodes to suggest how much they’re mirroring each other.

And while the compositions are almost identical, it’s interesting how much the body language and expressions become so defeated by the end of Season 1. What was an intense, hungry Jimmy McNulty in episode 1, becomes a dejected “what the f**k have I done?” McNulty by the end of the season. You can see a similar transformation in D’Angelo, and even Stringer Bell. The toll the detail has taken on everyone is readily apparent, yet they still find themselves literally in the same positions when they started. A sense of futility permeates the final episode’s mirroring of the first—and this idea of not escaping one’s self is abstracted to the institution. Looking into the mirror that will be placed in front of other characters and institutions in the coming episodes

How I did It
I took the screen shots on my Mac with the Command+Shift-4 keys simultaneously. From there I created a 2400 pixels by 1100 pixels canvas use File–>Create. I then imported the twelve images of the two different scenes in as layers. From there I arranged each layer in the order you see with the layer move tool. And added text up top to denote which row was episode 1, and which was episode 13. I’ll do a quick screencast tutorial to start getting folks comfortable with GIMP.

The Game Supercut

John Johnston, hearing my call, created an automated supercut video of all the mentions of “the game” in Season 1 of The Wire. The VideoGrep script provides a quick, easy, and exacting way to analyze a show like The Wire around very specific themes in the script. It’s not comprehensive, but seeing John create this video moments after my blog request is mind blowing.

What an amazing resource for students to be able to search and be immediately presented with the clips across 60 episodes of The Wire as a starting point for their analysis. What’s more, playing the above video back is mesmerizing. It’s like the show is speaking back to the me through the filtered lens of a coded theme deeply embedded in a masterpiece of television. This technology provides a pretty compelling example of how quickly we can extract these themes/patterns across a TV series like The Wire to open up new and powerful ways of reading. We provide variables that fuel a formula to represent our interpretive assumptions, as well as challenges them. Can machines tell stories? I think they can if we provide interesting search terms and damn good metadata :)

Wiring Supercuts

John Johnston’s post yesterday about Videogrep really piqued my imagination.

Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator.

In other words, if I can get this thing wired up, I can create a supercut video of every mention of “the game” throughout all of season 1. How sick is that? This is my new goal in life. The script will search through the subtitles (.srt files) and link them with timestamps of the video to immediately cut the scene and link it with every other scene that has a mention of “the game.” John included some examples to give you an idea of how this might work.

A good one is every mention of “know” in Blade Runner—I love this:

And here’s an example of every time “jungle” is mentioned in Apocalypse Now:

And John even threw in an example from episode 1 of season 1 of The Wire featuring every mention of “Barsksdale.”

It begs the question, apropos of this week’s focus, are such automated, script-based videos an example of digital storytelling? On top of that, what term would you search across a single episode, or even the entire first season?

Week 3: Putting the Digital in Storytelling

Important: If you haven’t gotten and verified an email from ICANN confirming your domain, login into umw.domains and there should  be a message asking you to resend the email for confirmation—if there isn;t you did it already. Do that ASAP or else your domain will be suspended.

Follow the “continue reading” link for a breakdown of what will be expected for week 3, but be sure to watch the video in its entirety for context, details, and new and improved personality this week :)

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