WIRES I HAVE KNOWN

The Wire on HBO: perhaps the best thing ever--nay, the best thing ever. faith in the possibilities of culture and narrative, rewarded sevenfold! exchange between two honchos of Barksdale syndicate during season three's penultimate hour always makes me wonder about my own life ("Dream with me" ... "We don't gotta dream no more" ... (or does he actually reply: "We don't got a dream no more," as in, the days of shared aspirations, or friendship, are over?))



Further: What does it say about the entertainment industry that much of the acting talent that animates The Wire was largely undiscovered, and continues to draw primary pay from Wire residuals? As in, other than a few bit parts as toughs on Law and Order or toughs on Homicide many years ago, why were these people waiting by the phone? Oddly, IMDB around enough and you will discover that a lot of The Wire's Bodymore, Murdaland residents (sorry) got their start on The Cosby Show, including one Brother Mouzone. He played "Floyd," a bourgie bourgie (cue: Ashford and Simpson) boyfriend to one of the Huxtable girls who was just so damn "Floyd-like" that it made me wonder, at a young age, about the whole sign/signifier thing.

This is probably as good a time as any to link this: "The Cosby Jam (Do the Huxtable)" by Imperial Sounds (opens as rm file, just to warn you)

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WIRE, A BAND: An interesting but not quite engrossing story about the making of "I Am the Fly". Call me soft but I love "Outdoor Miner." I always wondered if U2 did anything with "I Am the Fly" when Bono was going through his "ill-advised eyewear" phase--a live cover, maybe? Speaking of eyewear...

TOP FIVE EYEWEAR-RELATED SONGS ON MY COMPUTER, RIGHT NOW:
1. Snatching Cazals :: Cazal Boys (seminal)
2. Sunglasses at Night :: Corey Hart (bad)
3. Sunglasses at Night :: Tiga and Zyntherius (worse)
4. Stunna Shadez :: Nump (filipino)
5. I Wear My Stunna Glasses at Night :: The Federation (below)

...barbs about punching out Christian Dior frames, copping the newest styles at Dave and Busters, riding around in burnt-orange scrapers and looking like Kool Moe Dee, a bug, or both. Doon shines, bragging about a rare Spiderman-inspired shade frame that’s the color of cayenne pepper. E-40 hogs up a considerable portion of the middle with a so-so clarification that he neither invented the term Hyphy nor started the shades thing.

No mention of wire-rimmed frames, sadly:



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THE WIRE: ADVENTURES IN MODERN MUSIC: A magazine that allows Dave Tompkins and I to "just flow, man." We have been there long enough to see seven years, one major redesign, about 200,000 words, eleven totally made-up records and one crazy "HipHop vs. Critical Beats" columnists-on-columnist basketball tournament. (We got dunked on. Repeatedly. Our opponent, the unusually tall (for a music critic) Peter Shapiro dropped the non-essentials from the Wire song, shouted "I FLY" and skied to the rim. I still have a footprint on my chest.)

Not to be confused with...

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WIRED MAGAZINE: A magazine that has probably paid me as much as I've earned in seven years at The Wire, only in a micro-fraction of the time. I'm just not sure I'm "on board" with the long-tail thing.

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COY WIRE, DB, BUFFALO BILLS: Though he went to Stanford, and thus is the target of my light Cal jingoism, I've always appreciated the oddness of Coy Wire's name. Did his parents name him after the adjective?



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INTERNATIONAL WIRE TRANSFERS: Never again.