"It's essentially a six hour lecture on zoning regulations" - David Simon's Show Me A Hero

thank you!

haha you're welcome! i want to berate you for your views on simon but they seem fair. i don't think he comes off like a moron in interviews, but he does come off like a dick

my husband met simon in the aftermath of the baltimore uprising this past year. they were both out cleaning up in one of the affected neighborhoods. he says he's nice in person. also that he started yelling at some random police officer who was doing his job wrong in a way that seemed unnecessarily surveilling of the people who lived in the neighborhood. this is a thing i value about simon, the way he nerds out about public service jobs and tries to hold people accountable when they fuck them up. the journalist in him i guess. it's also the jerk in him.

yeah maybe dick is more the word. i just hate the kind of macho persona and all this "difficult men" fanboy shit that fed into it.

super satisfying on the ground david simon anecdote!

TAL remarked that listeners shouldn't judge the white racists in the school desegregation meeting too harshly bc most white people elsewhere in America are never faced with school desegregation. she opined that whites in nyc, chicago, wherever would likely react the same way. i think she's probably right.

this is otm i think, in a kind of close to home way. i feel like the speech usually reflected this, also - that most of the comments were prefaced by some kind of limp acknowledgement of a broader duty to commit to reform, only when it didn't directly affect their kids' education.

i am only on ep. 1 of this BUT also while it is the case should mention that the awful crash guy isn't doing anything wrong at all

yeah i was really mad when i found out haggis was the director like simon, how could you let this happen but he clearly does not have a say in the writing, otherwise all the scenes of the project-dwellers would involve them being reciprocally racist toward white people and the overarching message would be "see, we're all a little racist" and it would be totally apolitical and terrible.

i think the direction is fine. i'm not really smart about that stuff.

also ever since the scientology article in the new yorker (haven't read the book yet) i've felt really bad for haggis.

It's too bad more people didn't stick w/ Treme past the ehhh 1st season, season 3 in particular was almost Wire-level good (albeit in a totally different way)

mind you I don't really get why people itt dislike Simon, what's the specific grievance?

i'm trying to rewatch treme right now. i gave up during the first season when it was actually airing. it's better than i remembered it being, even though i'm only in the first season.

i understand that 90% of eveyone hates brooce but ffs the show is set in late 80's whitebread Yonkers, what were you expecting? sonic youth?

i don't think people hate bruce to be fair (i mean, if they do, we will fight) i think it just reads as lazy/overkill to have two springsteen montages in the first episode. again i must clarify that i would watch a tv show that was nothing but montage with hungry heart playing on a loop.

i like how the show so far captures the impossible bind of desegregation efforts, because for it to work in practice, it's really necessary to change "hearts and minds" and how on earth do you do that? every time the yonkers whites are bellowing in the meetings, i imagine what wacisko would have to do to explain why building low-income housing in white and black neighborhoods is the only way to honor the principle of equality (saying "we have to follow the law" seems inadequate) and it would just require a lot of calm and rational discourse, which is clearly an impossibility in that setting. i personally have always inclined to antiracist activism that ignores changing people's minds because it seems exhausting and unrewarding and also fuck those people frankly, why does changing a horribly unjust system have to happen on their terms. but desegregation really does, and it's maddening.

i know i keep pimping them but the this american life episodes are really good on this, too.

xpost the David Morse police corruption storyline in season 3 of Treme was as harrowing as any Wire police side plot, and pretty prescient considering contemporary events.

i understand that 90% of eveyone hates brooce but ffs the show is set in late 80's whitebread Yonkers, what were you expecting? sonic youth?

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, August 20, 2015 11:25 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha otm

the kind of macho persona and all this "difficult men" fanboy shit that fed into it.

never really thought of simon as macho simply for writing about social institutions full of macho personalities (police, drug crews, political structures, the marine corps). that said, i do agree with the distaste for difficult man fanboy bullshit that became tied to certain segments of wire fandom (and sopranos/breaking bad/mad men/insert prestige show here fandom)

i will def check out the TAL episodes

and maaaaaybe I will finally revisit Treme. I quit on it pretty early

Treme benefits from being able to binge, I think - I only lasted a few episodes week to week but since it's more character based than plot based being able to watch people develop in relatively quick succession helps a lot.

you could honestly just start w. s2 and not lose out on too much

Steve Zahn is so fucking annoying in Treme, he is almost unbearable in every scene.

never really thought of simon as macho simply for writing about social institutions full of macho personalities (police, drug crews, political structures, the marine corps). that said, i do agree with the distaste for difficult man fanboy bullshit that became tied to certain segments of wire fandom (and sopranos/breaking bad/mad men/insert prestige show here fandom)

i guess i feel his writing even about these institutions is a studied form of overly erudite machismo. and that feeds into the fanboy stuff. i guess i can't imagine breaking bad fans or mad men fans being annoying in the same way as hardcore wire fans, even though i'm sure there are awful people everywhere.

would def say that's true of a segment of BB fans - consider the huge swell of online hatred for the skyler white character. prob not so much mad men, aside from finance/accounts bros who view don draper's behavior as an etiquette manual

i see more what you're saying tho re: simon by characterizing it as a hypereducated/literary/erudite brand of macho

segue: did people like winona in this? i thought she was pretty good!

in the uk i feel like i've heard white middle class men do omar impressions far too often for comfort. i guess that's not quite simon's fault, but that character is completely ludicrous.

um plenty of mad men fans are insufferable please

i've never heard anyone quote mad men. is there any notable quote? i mean besides "yowzah!" and "i am the secret man who drinks at work"

i think i'm just referring to people who seem to want to live in the era depicted, have mad men costume parties, whatever. i don't really get that show, also, so i'm being mean.

winona is fine so far but she kind of takes me out of the show because she's winona ryder, you know?

Yeah direct quotes aren't the only way to be an annoying fan.

her meltdown at the bar was a good cautionary tale moment, i thought. don't become a politician, kids!

xxp i see what youre saying but she has the look of a harried politician down imo

i think i'm just referring to people who seem to want to live in the era depicted, have mad men costume parties, whatever. i don't really get that show, also, so i'm being mean.

― horseshoe, Thursday, August 20, 2015 2:33 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i find this hugely annoying too, and i'm a pretty big fan of that show. the era fetishization literally misses the entire point of what it's saying about the time period (as does viewing draper as anything but a trainwreck cautionary tale)

yeah i didn't recognize her at first, either. i am enjoying the 80s-i-fication and also the dowd-ification of everyone's look.

xp

Yeah direct quotes aren't the only way to be an annoying fan.

for sure - they feel more prevalent though than someone's private parties or whatever.

Steve Zahn is so fucking annoying in Treme, he is almost unbearable in every scene.

great depiction of an annoying guy imo

i understand that 90% of eveyone hates brooce but ffs the show is set in late 80's whitebread Yonkers, what were you expecting? sonic youth?

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, August 20, 2015 11:25 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Warren Zevon

Steve Earle is sooooo much worse than the Boss, you guys are aiming at the wrong target

uhhhhh I grew up around people like the average yonkers citizen and even a generation later they had/have slightly softer version of the same opinions

― slothroprhymes, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 10:29 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah yonkers is basically buffalo afaict. also the reporter on TAL remarked that listeners shouldn't judge the white racists in the school desegregation meeting too harshly bc most white people elsewhere in America are never faced with school desegregation. she opined that whites in nyc, chicago, wherever would likely react the same way. i think she's probably right.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 9:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That may be true, but OTOH I went to an integrated middle school in DC where the white parents were mostly ok with it? I mean maybe by that time it had been integrated long enough that you knew what you were getting already when you bought a house in the neighborhood and there was nothing to "fight." And I did have a couple of friends whose parents decided they were dissatisfied after the first year and sent them to (super expensive) private schools instead. It occurs to me that those kids didn't go to better colleges or wind up with better careers than the rest of us, in fact they both went to kind of mediocre private lib arts schools.

And OTOOH, I watched parents this year in my NYC neighborhood freak the fuck out as they discovered their kindergartners were waitlisted and that they were being assigned to schools in Jamaica and the like, and honestly we freaked the fuck out about it too (our daugher is three but we have hoped she would attend the neighborhood school). Of course just sending a handful of white and asian kids to a struggling school in a poor black neighborhood is not really the kind of integration that has proven to be beneficial the way the TAL reporter described.

tell me about your integrated middle school! how did that happen?

"...malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, any of the -feasance family!"

um, I'm not sure what the history of it is? I grew up in DC which was a majority black city at the time but also had majority-white enclaves. I lived in one, although there were still several black families within a block of me. My elementary school was mostly white, although the teachers were almost all black, just a function of the demographics of the city I guess. The elementary school fed into a middle school that was larger and drew from a wider area, and it was in a majority white neighborhood, and I think the school was around 40% black with a significant number of those kids bussed in from other parts of town, although certainly a substantial minority of them coming from the neighborhood. So there was clearly some deliberate integration going on or you wouldn't have the bussing.

The school had a black principal who was into running a tight ship when it came to student discipline, and like I said there weren't really major issues at the school beyond playground fights. I remember a single time when someone brought a weapon to school and a single time when cops came to the school and it was rumored that a big quantity of drugs were found in a student locker, but I'd imagine almost any public middle school in the country could have something like that happen once or twice in three years.

As I said, my impression is that the school had already been integrated for a while, so any parents buying in the neighborhood already knew what to expect. Some got cold feet after a year, most didn't. And private school was so insanely expensive in DC that even a lot of affluent professional parents couldn't really have afforded it anyway.

four episodes in, this is something truly remarkable imo. but i'm bracing myself for a brutal fuckin ending

this still feels overextended as hell to me. keener's subplot embarrassingly pat.

As a six-hour lecture, it's wildly successful. Dramatically, it's pretty unsubtle.

every time Bernthal appears on screen I shouted "SHAAAAAANE!"

he's really good playing the polar opposite of shane!

I can't help hearing this title to the tune of "Can I Borrow a Feeling"

I am fond of him shane or anti-shane

he takes overacting to a level I didn't think possible.

Did you watch that footage of the real Sussman upthread? He's dead-on!

Just finished Episode 5, really moving, even though some aspects of this show seem hackneyed.

The phonebox scene -- "Ask him about the Desmond Hotel" -- felt a bit disrespectful to include, whether it's true or not.

Just finished this - I had the impression that Vinni was lying with this phonecall? Purposefully trying to fuck with Nick and Nay? And I thought the scene where Nay asked him about it during the vote count and he had no idea what she was talking about and she realised Vinni was lying was really well-handled.

Overall I loved this. It took a few episodes for the families in housing to feel real and not sketched out, and I thought the pacing was strange in places, but by the last half of the series it definitely worked. And Nick doesn't come off as any hero, really - why should he? He had no burning desire to make the integration happen when he got elected, he only backed it when it was clear how catastrophic avoiding it would be, and his later attempts to claim credit for the housing showed that his ego was bruised and he was a pretty selfish and damaged guy, albeit a mostly likeable one who did the right thing when it was necessary (and didn't realise that that would be catastrophic for his career in politics).