Quick Updates.

1.  The Wire series is on hold for a second while I figure out how to get this damn DVD player to work.

2. I still can’t get into Mad Men, although I’m giving it time.  I don’t dislike it, but it’s just cigarette porn to me.

3. Rehearsals for Chad Deity are awesome.  It’s been mainly fight choreography.  Wrestling choreography.  We’ve almost worked up to the powerbomb.  It’s a little crazy to watch.  I’ve got videos and pictures galore, but I can’t share them until I’ve got union clearance.  Working on it.

4. Tickets are onsale, by the way.

5. For Year Zero too.

6. There’s a lot of great stuff happening in Chicago in September theaterwise.  It’s going to be a hell of a month.  You should be here.

The Wire: Season One, Episode Five.

S1E5
“…a little slow, a little late.”

There’s a scene in episode five that surprises me every time I see it (and I’ve seen it five times now), mainly because I never remember that it even exists. In fact, it’s the scene that contains the “…a little slow, a little late” quote. Avon (with D’Angelo in tow) goes to visit his brother, who happens to be in what appears to be a coma caused by a bullet to the temple. The scene – an admittedly weird one, seemingly outside of and disconnected from most of the rest of the narrative – opens an important window onto Avon’s character. We’ve already seen signs of the kingpin’s extreme paranoia, beginning from the top of this episode, when he tells Wee-Bey to get the phone line out of (one of) Avon’s girlfriends’ apartment. Bey hesitates (“we going past careful”), but like the solider he is, he follows orders. In the long run, Avon is right to mistrust phones – his crew is careful, and they’re not paranoid, and downfall is still inevitable.

The coma scene lets us know that Avon is aware of and realistic about this inevitability. All it takes for everything to fall apart is to be “a little slow, a little late,” and, he rightly wonders, “how you ain’t never gonna be slow, never be late?” There’s probably never been a Baltimore drug dealer as thorough about his operation as Avon (although Prop Joe might have something to say about that—that’s not a spoiler, is it?), and even he knows that it only goes so far. It’s impossible to stay on top forever.

The recipient of Avon’s lesson is, of course, D’Angelo, who seems destined to come up late and/or slow sooner than later. He’s a thinker, but not cut from the street smart Avon or business savvy Stringer molds. It’s more accurate to describe D as an overthinker, hung up on the moral implications of his actions, and even more hung up on other people’s perceptions of his actions. He takes his girl to a fancy restaurant down in the Inner Harbor, and really, that’s the whole point of being part of the game, right? You take the risk for the money, and the money doesn’t do you any good if you don’t spend it on some of life’s finer things. That’s her take on it, at least: “you got money, you get to be whatever you say you are.” No one in that restaurant can tell or remotely cares about how D made his cash (and to some degree, who really cares at all about the drug game? It’s the violence that matters – we’ll revisit this idea during the “Hamsterdam” era, I’m sure), but he can’t shake the idea that everyone knows, everyone thinks he’s out of place, and everyone stands in judgment. His is an entirely different kind of paranoia than Avon’s, and certainly far less productive.

Back on the detail, Lester’s not paranoid, exactly, but he’s certainly concerned about how slowly the investigation is moving. They get up on D’Angelo’s pager, and it’s a huge moment, and they turn the pager on…and they wait. It’s a complete anti-climax, but perfectly in keeping with Lester’s overall policing style: be patient, keep your head down, and wait until you stumble across something you can use. The trick is that you’ve got to hurry up to get to the waiting, and the Baltimore Police Department doesn’t do hurrying up all that well. Getting up on the pager is helpful and somewhat timely, allowing the detail to catch the flurry of activity surrounding Wallace leading Stringer and company to Brandon (who happens to be at the same arcade as Wallace and Poot – coincidence, sure, but also a reminder that these are all kids, and kids who basically travel in the same circles, at that). The pager isn’t enough though; if they were up on the payphones in the pit, they’d have direct actionable intelligence (or at least as much as they could expect to get from Stringer over a phone). The bureaucratic nature of the BPD (and of the American legal system in general) almost dictates that they’ll always be all kinds of slow, and at least a little late.

Chad Deity, Day One.

Monday, August 25
5:30am – Wake up an hour earlier than planned, due to heavy rain. Four hours of sleep.

5:45am – Longest sustained thunder clap I’ve ever heard. Start to be convinced that my flight will be delayed for days. Might never make it to Chicago.

8:30am – At the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. Sky is clear, if hazy. Can make out the Minneapolis skyline from my seat at gate H7. That’s a god sign, I think.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had more of an interest in being on time for anything, even with the fact that I can hardly keep my eyes open. Sometimes I wish I drank coffee.

We start rehearsals today. Production meeting. Meet and Greet. Table read. I’ve been a part of these before. Never on this scale before. Never as the guy who wrote this thing on which we’re all here to work. I might have to give a speech or something. Not a speech. An address. A welcome. In keeping with the wrestling theme of the show, I’ve got visions of a Paul E. Dangerously extreme manifesto to the ECW troops. I’m not quite the general here though; even if I was, I can’t imagine I’d make such a speech. You feel like you want to set a tone though.

I’m more The Emperor than Lord Vader in this. Sounds bigger and more obnoxious than it is. It’s not my job to lead this mission. I sit back and oversee, to an extent. I sit back and sit on my hands, keep my mouth shut. To an extent. It’s a quality control job from here on in, really. Eddie can take care of things. The cast has most text-related things already under control. The challenge is getting it all up on its feet. The challenge for me is letting that process unfold without feeling the need to control it. Trust.

(8:39am – Receive this text from Aaron Carter, literary manager of VG: Aaron here. I’m picking you up from airport. Text when u get outside and I’ll drive up and powerbomb you.)

10:55am – Off the plane. Heard a snippet of “Keys (It’s Alright)” from Passing Strange on NPR’s Studio 360 via podcast – there really couldn’t be a better song for right now.

2:30pm – Production meeting. Set model. Costume mock-ups (including some of the most appropriately offensive stuff you can imagine). Lots of discussion about lights and effects for the “elaborate entrances.” Video screens. Actual wrestling ring ropes have already been purchased. Each wrestler has his own logo already designed. At one point, the director asked the sound designer what his plans were, and the sound designer said “well, the script says the sound should be loud and obnoxious.” It’s all pretty much what I hoped it would be. (Pictures should follow at some point. I hope.)

I was asked to say a few words. I was unprepared. There might be video of this. It will be far less inspiring than Paul E.

4:00pm – First read. The whole play ran about an hour and forty five minutes, which is a little too long, and only going to get longer when we add the production elements (and laughs, hopefully). Part of what I’m going to have to do over the next month is find places to trim. Should be all internal cuts – I don’t think we’re getting rid of anything structural at this point. The script is pretty much what it’s going to be.

7:00pm (roughly) – Wrestling practice. I cannot express how giddy I was about this. The five guys in the cast, plus our assistant fight choreographer, are throwing themselves on the mat, working on collar-and-elbow tie-ups, learning to sell the simplest of moves. In the play, Mace talks about wrestling being a dream job, like a literal dream job, the thing he dreamed about on the floor as a kid. I’m not going to lie and say that I dreamed about this as a kid, but man, it’s definitely some kind of dream come true.

The Wire: Season One, Episode Four.

S1E4
“…thin line ‘tween heaven and here.”

Episode four is strange. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that episode four is not a very good episode. In fact, there’s a real possibility that when this little blog project is all said and done, I’m going to look back and call this the worst episode in the history of The Wire. Of course, we’re talking about the worst episode in the history of the best show in the history of television, so there’s still tons of goodness, including one of the most iconic scenes in the show’s early days.

That scene, of course, is the “fuck” scene, a call back to Simon’s original Homicide true crime book, the earliest inspiration for both this show (and Homicide the TV show before it). In the book, Simon remarks (and I’m paraphrasing here), that it’s pretty much possible for two homicide detectives on a crime scene to engage in an entire conversation using only the word “fuck” (and its various permutations) and convey all the information and emotion they could possibly need. And that’s exactly what Bunk and McNulty do while retracing the steps of a poorly investigated murder. It’s remarkable as a police procedural; we get to witness two brilliant investigative minds in the process of discovering the truth of how a crime was committed. And that’s the beauty of the use of language here. It’s like we’re watching good subtextual theater, where the words don’t matter. By relying only on “fuck” to tell the story, the writers allow language to get out of the way of the police work, even while that language remains obtrusive and gimmicky (and admittedly, it’s laid on way too thick here – the “fuckity fuck fuck”s are more than we need). What the language is really doing is giving us the opportunity to follow the policing on our own, to put it all together at the same time the cops are.

The real beauty, of course, is that we actually know more about this crime than the cops do, because D’Angelo (in his need to show off and establish himself as a tough guy pillar of the Barksdale clan) has already described, in great detail, this exact killing to Bodie, Wallace, and Poot. At the time, we don’t even know if the story is true – why wouldn’t Avon put Wee-Bey or one of the real killers on this? D’Angelo’s incredibly fractured language certainly doesn’t help lend him an air of authority (and the more I think about it, the more I think D’s language is entirely intentional – it sounds stilted because he, the character, is awkward and out of place). But D gives the single detail – the “tap, tap, tap” against the glass – and it all snaps into clarity when McNulty reconstructs the crime right down to that same “tap, tap, tap.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how McNulty and Bunk come to be reworking an old, cold crime scene to begin with. It comes, like most things on The Wire, out of a bureaucratic imperative. Landsman digs through an open file, discovers that a distant, almost tangentially related witness had mentioned a “D” as a possible shooter in the cursory and ineffective first canvas of the scene. “D” could be “D’Angelo,” Landsman reasons, and is more than happy to stick McNulty with the old case. It’s passing the buck. It’s dumb luck. Sometimes, both of those things work, especially if you combine them with solid police work.

This episode (again, maybe my least favorite episode) contains three other superb moments that only become superb in retrospect, after having watched all five seasons. First, we get an absolutely great shot after Lester explains how he’s traced D’Angelo to his pager. McNulty looks on in amazement, realizing that there’s another natural police on the detail to go with him and Kima. More importantly, more subtly, and more beautifully, in retrospect, is the glimpse of Presbo in the back of that frame, nodding, impressed, learning right there in that second that there’s more to being a cop than being a tough guy. You can trace Presbo’s entire evolution back to this moment – he gains admiration for Lester and his way of solving crimes, which leads him to understand and appreciate the need to break codes and look for patterns, which leads him to be a teacher, which leads us to season four, which happens to be the best thing that’s ever happened on television. So yeah. It’s an important two seconds of screen time.

Second, and this is super brief, and I’m only catching it this time around after having seen season five, but the reason that Lester gets bumped down to the pawn shop in the first place has to do with the power of the newspaper editor. It’s not a direct correlation with the events of season five, but the implication is clear: the guys who report the news are responsible for public perception and therefore carry a whole lot of weight. We’ll revisit this in season five.

Finally, in the same scene where Lester reveals his past to McNulty, he also dishes out some sage advice (again, a rough paraphrase here, emphasis added): “when they ask you where you want to go, and they will ask you where you want to go, don’t answer.” Problem is, they’ve already asked. He’s already answered. His path to the boat (and our path to season two) is clear. The first time you watch the show, there’s no way you fully appreciate how screwed McNulty already is. Once you know his fate, it’s clear that every single step of this journey matters.

Shante: Pay Us What You Owe Us.

Congratulations to Roxanne Shante.

KRS-One always talked about how we had more than enough hip-hop MCs and DJs, and how what the movement needed now was hip-hop doctors and lawyers.  It’s good to see people using the record industry as exactly what it can be — a tool to make all kinds of other good things happen.

Chad Deity in Chicago: The Cast and Crew.

I mentioned that there are 35 people on our e-mail distribution list for production.  These are the key players, starting with the director (all of this comes from the Victory Gardens press release, which you can find over at victorygardens.org):

Edward Torres (director) is a Co-Founder and current Artistic Director of Teatro Vista…Theatre With a View. Most recently, he appeared in the Goodman’s production of Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad. He also appeared in Victory Gardens’ critically acclaimed Pulitzer-Prize winning play Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz.  Directorial credits for Teatro Vista include The Show Host, co-produced with Victory Gardens Theater (also at Theater on the Lake), Ambrosio, Broken Eggs (Theater on the Lake), The Boiler Room co-produced with Steppenwolf Theatre for their Student Exchange Program (also at Theater on the Lake) and the critically acclaimed production of Aurora’s Motive (also at Theater on the Lake).

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity stars Usman Ally (Vigneshwar Padujar, aka VP), Kamal Angelo Bolden (Chad Deity), Desmin Borges (Macedonio Guerra, aka The Mace), James Krag (Everett K. Olsen, aka EKO, Ring Announcer), and Christian Litke (Joe Jabroni). Designers include Brian Bembridge, set; Christine Pascual, costumes; Jesse Klug, lights; Misha Fiksel, sound; D.J. Reed, props; and David Woolley, SAFD, fight director. Production stage manager is Tina M. Jach.

Previews of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity are September 25-October 4: Tuesday through Thursday at 7:3 pm; Friday and Saturday at 8 pm; Sunday at 3 pm. Previews are $30 – $37. Press opening is Monday, October 5 at 7:30 pm. Regular performances are October 7-November 1: Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 pm; Friday at 8 pm; Saturday at 5 pm and 8:30 pm; Sunday at 3 pm. Performances are $37-$48. Added matinees are Wednesday, 21 and 28 at 2 pm. No evening performance Tuesday, October 6 or October 13. Ask the box office about student, senior, Access, rush and “$20 Ringside Seats” discount offers.

The Republican Party.

Superb article here.

I know I’ve got some readers on the right.  Talk to me about this.

Chad Deity in Pictures.

Well, not Chad Deity himself, but the Victory Gardens production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. These are the promo pictures featuring the lovely and talented Usman Ally (who plays VP) and Desmin Borges (who plays Mace).

Rehearsals start in less than a week.

Desmin Borges is Macedonio Guerra, aka The Mace.

Usman Ally is Vigneshwar Paduar, aka VP.

The Wire: Season One, Episode Three.

S1E3
“The king stay the king.”

Again, minor spoilers abound. Proceed with caution.

The corollary to last episode’s “you cannot lose if you do not play” is this week’s “the king stay the king” — when the game is rigged, there’s no avenue for ascendency. So the question becomes this: if you can’t move up, why bother trying? In y though, people do try. They try all the time. McNulty tries to fight the system, basically declaring himself the de facto head of an entirely new system within the boundaries of the old one. Stringer tries to move up constantly, first from the poverty of the life into which he was born, then out of the illicit lifestyle he has created for himself. Bubs tries to get better. D’angelo (and later Ziggy, among others) try to rise up from the undesirable roles they play in their communities, striving to become the big, powerful, important man they’ve always wanted to be. The quest towards a better life might a Sisyphusian task, but for a lot of folks, it’s still the only journey they can envision.

I’ll hold on D’angelo here, since this is, in some way, his season. It’s clear to see that in his mind, he’s the next Stringer – a mind for business, an ability to school the young ones, all the money and prestige that comes along with being the brains of the organization. Problem is, he’s more McNulty than Stringer. He sees another way of doing things, of running the drug game without killing and violence, of living the high life without having to get your hands dirty. He actually co-opts McNulty’s language when talking about the game, illustrating right there that he doesn’t have the right stuff – if the police can influence you at all, let alone that readily, you can’t run the streets. You could see an alternate universe in which D could find himself on the side of the Baltimore Police, and he’d probably make a decent detective someday. His sad lot then is that he was born in the wrong place, on the wrong side of the game, with the absolutely dead wrong uncle.

Shardeen becomes the ideal counterpoint for D in a lot of ways, although we might not realize it as we’re watching it the first time around. We know she’s more than just a stripper because of her big awkward glasses (yes, even The Wire sometimes missteps into clunky symbolic character clues), but we still see her in the early episodes as a gold-digger really, someone who is into D because of his cash and perceived power. And there, exactly, is D’s fatal flaw: it’s not his power that he uses to get ahead, not his smarts or his business acumen or even the fact that he killed a guy – it’s all Avon. The tragedy of D’angelo Barksdale is one of self-reliance, or more accurately, a lack thereof.

Episode three introduces us to three major players in the show’s future, and each is brought to our attention with great subtlety and attention to the details that define their personalities. I’ll flip through them in order of importance, starting with Valchek, who we first encounter in a closed door police conference, working to get his screw-up son-in-law Presbo off the hook. Amazingly, he succeeds. Presbo might be the worst cop on the force – he’s clearly not cut out for the job, or at least the part of the job for which he wants to be cut out (shades of D’angelo) – but he’s got suction with Valchek, who is the absolute master of suction. In fact, Valchek might be the best example of retroactive inevitability in the whole show. When we meet him, it should be clear that there’s only one place for him to end up. And spoiler alert: he gets there.

Part of Valchek’s success comes back to our recurring theme: stay in your lane, know what you’re good at, don’t make waves. Valchek’s not natural (or even particularly good) police, but he’s an absolute master of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Lester Freeman, on the other hand, is nothing if not pure unadulterated police – and we get our first sense of that in episode three. Until this episode, Lester is lumped in with the other undesirable castoffs sent to fill out Daniels’ special detail. He sits at his desk all day, handling paperwork and carving model antique furniture (the perfect hobby for a the kind of cop he turns out to be), and giving not even an inkling that he’s capable of offering even the most rudimentary assistance on this case. And then it happens: he overhears that Avon was a Golden Gloves boxer, and he sees an angle. He can help this case. He doesn’t spend any time explaining himself. He goes out and contributes. There’s no drama here – there’s just a natural police doing natural police work. And now, with Lester, this case actually has a chance of being cracked, although we STILL don’t know that.

(Two other minor details from Lester’s introduction: first, he gets winded climbing up the stairs to the gym, which is just a sweet, perfect little character moment – we’re watching a guy who has been on ice for years, and he’s just now decided to thaw himself out. Second, the entire sequence introduces the world of boxing, which plays a substantial role in season four {and three, I believe}. Minor stuff, but tight storytelling.)

And then. Finally.

Omar.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a more perfect introduction of any character anywhere ever, although you wouldn’t realize that on first viewing. First pass around, he’s just some guy in a van. The only possible reaction to him is “who the fuck is that?” But in retrospect, I mean, Jesus: it’s the introduction to the baddest dude in Baltimore, and it’s entirely in character. He’s calm, taking it all in, completely undetected and under the radar, looking down on the whole drug trade, entirely unimpressed by the raggedy operation – and we get this all with just a handful of words. Later, Sydnor and Bubs are out doing hand-to-hands, Kima is doing surveillance them, and OH SHIT SO IS OMAR (that’s virtually word for word from my notes). We still don’t know who he is. A cop? A dealer? All we do know is that this dude is smart; his one line in the scene is “well now,” and we get it. He’s taking it all in. He’s got this game figured out in a way that no one else does. It’s not long before we see him rush the stash house, ruining life for both the crooks and the cops, entirely changing the game, and (if you haven’t bought in already) boldly announcing that you’re watching something that (a) you’ve never seen before and (b) is markedly better and more complex than anything you have seen before.

And we still don’t even know that Omar’s gay.

Ballet and Baseball.

No comments from me on this one, but it’s a story well worthe reading (andnot just because it involves my new hometown Twins).  It makes sense to me that the kid of two dancers could become an elite athlete.