But he was killed in cold blood by a cop in an Oakland transit station on New Year’s Day.

This may not have gotten the attention it did if not for the cell phone recorded video that has been posted online. You know what, technology keeps getting more useful.

I have just seen the clearest-so-far clip of the murder. I warn you, this is brutal, and it happens late in the clip.

The officer, who has resigned from the force, has not been charged at all for anything, which is almost mind numbing.

Oakland mayor Ron Dellums is quoted to have said:

“Even with our anger and our pain, let’s still address each other with a degree of civility and calmness and not make this tragedy an excuse to engage in violence,” he said. “I don’t want anybody hurt. I don’t want anybody killed.”

Which is bullshit. If you don’t want anybody killed, then bring this officer, Johannes “Hoping his name is so difficult to pronounce that nobody will cover this” Mehserle to justice. Deliver a fucking body already, Dellums, because Mehserle already has.

And finally, Mr. President Elect, speak about this. You may be surprised to find out about this, but you’re black. The country needs you to have one of your great speeches, now on the topic of excessive force from the police to minorities and the public in general. This country needs someone of power to say that Enough Is E-Fucking-Nough. You know you’re the right guy for the job. I know we have a troubled economy on all of our minds and bank accounts, but this is important.

More from the Times of UK article I’m sourcing:

Videos shot by onlookers on camera phones show Mr Grant being pushed onto his stomach shortly before Mehserle fired his gun at his back. The bullet ricocheted off a pavement and pierced his lung, killing him.

The victim’s family claims that the officer shot him deliberately but some have argued that he may have thought he was firing his stun gun.

A group of angry demonstrators smashed store windows late on Wednesday, set fire to cars and clashed with officers equipped with riot gear and tear gas in downtown Oakland. More than 100 people were arrested and about 300 businesses were damaged.

Extra police were posted at Bay Area Rapid Transit stations after the rioting and a demonstration passed off relatively peacefully yesterday. At the mayor’s request, the Oakland Police Department has launched an investigation into the shooting.

Mehserle was initially placed on paid leave. He resigned from the BART police force on Wednesday, but officials say he has refused to speak with the transit agency’s investigators.

BART officials said the agency is trying to conduct a thorough investigation, but that the public appears to be making judgments about the case based on raw video online or on television.

First off, the stun gun shit is pure Dept. Spin. The stun gun is a rectangle. A hand gun is not. Get out of here with that nonsense.

Further: They’re making judgments from raw video? How dare they view actual source material and not listen to what they’re told? This ricochet theory may in fact be true, but it doesn’t matter if it were a ricochet or not in terms of the fact that Mehserle should have been hauled down to the station for a full fucking debriefing. An investigation shouldn’t have been something happening just because of a request from the Mayor.

This reminds me of The Wire, seriously. Remember when Prez blinded the kid with the butt of his handgun when him, Herc, and Carver were out at night up to no good? That was some seriously in need of Internal Affairs fucking shit. But he skated cause of his family ties to the force.

Facts are sourced to this post from The Times of London.

2. Black man with potential to be elected to the office of POTUS / White man elected Mayor of modern day Baltimore.

3. Both, though, may inherit a shit economy.

4. Carcetti had a black chief of staff, Norman Wilson, while Obama has a white chief of staff, Plouffe, it seems and I can’t remember the last non-family member black person I’ve seen the man with.

5. Obama aspires to Bartlett level politics; Carcetti was grounded in a much more realistic desperateness.

Nas, getting his 25th Hour* on, in the new video for the song “Be A Nigger Too,” off of his self-titled release NaS, formerly known as Nigga, which was originally to be titled Nigger.

Who makes teaser posters for music videos?

The same people who put effort and thought into music videos.

And when did it start that the internet became the place you’d find the best videos first?

Celeb cameos: Larry Gilliard Jr. AKA D’Angelo Barksdale, Andre Royo AKA “Bubbles”, John Cho AKA Harold Lee, Gbenga Akinnagbe AKA Chris Partlow, and James Kyson Lee AKA Ando from Heroes.

* Fuck Dirty Harry, Spike Lee is right, Eastwood’s head is up his ass.

“-30-” the title of the episode is one of the few titles in the history of the show that you don’t really know unless you’re a journalism nerd or, the possible polar opposite, a wikipedia peruser. Wikipedia explains the title thusly:

“–30–” is a journalistic term that has been used to signify “the end” or “over and out” since the Civil War when telegraphers tapped “XXX”, the Roman numeral signifying 30, to end transmissions.

This was the end of the show. But what you could see coming a mile away was that this would not be the end of all of the characters. Simon has not held back in the past with ending major, beloved characters, who we probably thought would be in it until the end. When Stringer Bell was offed, that was a moment for me to think that the show is not beholden to it’s characters. That the show payed homage to the issues, and the show stayed true to this practice until the end.

The most important of these issues to the show being that you do not lie. Simple enough truth and ideal, right? Tell that to anybody who didn’t know what was going on during the back and forths between Daniels, Pearlman, and the Mayor’s Office with Nerese pitching in the extra innings to end Daniels; and that one scene wherein McNulty and Rawls argued over the specifics. The institution and it’s unwillingness to be honest in order to survive peaked with last night’s episode, with Carcetti’s speech to the press, where they tip-toed around the truth, and lying through dishonesty.

The lifers, the my-career first individuals, are the villains of the show throughout the series. In the finale, Daniels continued to straddle the gray line between being righteous and protecting family, by holding his ire back to let Ronnie survive. He would do it back in the day, biting his tongue to help now ex-wife Marla get elected. His decisions are noble because it’s never his career he’s looking out for. He would have thrown McNulty in the Hague even if it meant he had to step down, but since it would require Pearlman to fall on her own blade, as Carcetti would say, he held back. The first amazing moment in the finale returned us to the closed circuit cameras in the Police Department as McNulty and Daniels rode the quietest ride on earth. Norman’s fits of laughter hold a place in my heart, he seems to be the show’s writers voice if they ever had to spend time in a back office deal. The too-perfect connection between the storylines is just too great not to rip into with a snort and a giggle.

Going back to the unadulterated bullshit: Scott Templeton. Pulitzer Prize Winning Scott Templeton. It’s sad to say but this entire plot was pretty easy to see coming. I didn’t include it in my grievances piece yesterday because, well, it’s not that big of a problem. It was only something we could see coming because we’re closer to that plot than to any of the previous focuses, and that we sort of know where The Wire will take us: the success of jackasses.

And finally, the truth telling within the Baltimore Police Department. Rawls being the liar, the stupid fucking asshole of a liar. Trying to pin all of the murders on the crazy man just proved that Rawls is always going to be a Stat Juker, and that’s why he got promoted, again the advancement of the douchebag. McNulty finally finding it within him to stop his inner liar is what saved him, and after he found the reason within him, he was back together with his lady in no time. But before he was free, he had to die. Or, rather, his career had to die.

Here is the last section on The Truth, that I’d like to talk about, the very much above image of Landsman conjures probably one of the best dark senses of humor in the show’s history. Here is his speech from the wake (which I got from NYMag.com):

He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman’s shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don’t say that about many people, even when they’re here on the felt. I don’t say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat’ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole.

And I’m not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion-to-every-other-facet-of-his-humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — “from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned.” He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I’d want it to be you standing over me catchin’ the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had.

And that’s a truth I think Simon wanted to get back to, that McNulty at his core is good at being an officer. While the McNulty is Smarter Than Everyone Else code cracking scene happened almost too quickly, I think the eulogy hit the nail on the head and through the bullet-ridden shoe that was pretty good at staying still next to the bottle of Jameson. Putting his badge, his whiskey, and his stupid youth behind him, he was able to sit down on the porch with Beadie and she was able to relax and just be there with him. Once in his life he was just with a woman, and not arguing with her. This is a new truth for Jimmy, and I think he can live with it, as we saw him accept life from his view on the road.

David Simon, I expected nothing more than perfection. You slipped up a tad bit, so I have to call you on this.

I’m torn because I loved it, but the season did not have it’s normal flow, as I’ve said before I blame HBO for this, but Simon should have readjusted the homeless plot angle and some other lines so they fit the smaller season. Blame does have to fall down to him. I’ve got a lot of love for the finale, and that I’ll give my full effort to in the coming days, for now, I’m going to go through the areas of the finale definitely show the problems:

- The cold open with Tommy Carcetti’s reaction. Really, we open the ending with him? I mean, Tommy Carcetti is not The Wire. Maybe open up with Avon, who we didn’t see at all in the finale, as Pat reminded me, who could have had one of those classic Wire moments that isn’t actually about the plots, but establishes both an idea and a mood. When Gus talks to a guy named Carl at the newspaper, Mr. “Fuck Fuck Fuckity Fuck” with the cottage cheese lunch, that was a moment. Marlo standing on the corner, cut, that’s a moment that doesn’t further a plot line. That was what really got us in.

- The increased role of Chief of Staff Michael Steintorf. Even if you watch the show obsessively (any other way) you still might not recognize the name.

Here’s the face.

He works under Carcetti. He’s undeveloped and boring, he’s just a prick, nothing else. Not even a charmer like Valchek, who got what he deserved after a lifetime of “work.” I would have loved to see a final snapshot of the surveillance truck, though.

- The leak being a guy (above) in the court house who I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen before. Never ever. Not once. That was probably the most glaring shortcut of the episode, and coming from a season where Clark Johnson, the director of the finale (who really banged a great one out here) lectured all of us (while Bunk did the same for McNulty) about cutting corners to Templeton.

And from that scene on, it’s nothing but net. Over and over again. I mean McNulty’s serial killer never really worked until now that it’s hit the fan and everybody hates McNulty for a good portion of the episode for it.

- That it’s Michael’s turn to be Omar. Lovely and funny at the moment but another shortcut, as it should be Kenard, but Kenard is too damn young to shoot again. Michael seemed to almost recapture his youth in that scene. The smile on his face was not too far from when he, Namond, Randy, Dukie and Donut, if I recall, throwing the piss balloons. That this is the first we see of him since he drops Bug and Dukie off, respectively, is truly missing something. Snoop said it in the last episode that Michael wasn’t made for an organization, so going rogue makes sense, but it just wasn’t placed well.

- Finally, the final line of dialogue: “Let’s go home.” Really?

What I loved, and there’s a lot of that, from the finale, to come soon.

HBO uses this as their preview image, I have a feeling it won’t be the summary image come tomorrow.

Despite my problems with season five, this is still the best show I’ve ever had the luxury of watching. I still care about each and every character on the show, something I will never say about The Sopranos (I could have gone the entire last hour without a second of Carmella). On The Wire, I even care about McNulty’s ex-wife. Care enough to want her see Jimmy where he is and maybe feel bad for leaving him in the lurch. All I know regarding tonight’s episode is what we’ve seen in the trailer, so this (late) post will have nothing new for those caught up. If you’re not caught up, do not click on the jump … (AKA SPOILERS IF YOU’RE NOT CAUGHT UP).

First of all, I think one of the most important lesser plot lines that begs to be shown/tied-up/etc. is Kenard. Little boy kills Omar and then is nowhere to be found. Here’s a photo of him in “Dead Soldiers,” episode 28 (S03E03):

“It’s my turn to be Omar!”

That’s literally what a young, uncredited, Kenard (Thuliso Dingwall) said when we first saw him. Which was when we didn’t know who he even was. I’ve been talking with people lately about how at first the death of Omar by Kenard seemed too, that only someone who we didn’t hate or think was morally inferior to Omar could kill him. That if Marlo himself actually came down to the streets and did the deed himself, it would feel horrible. Well, Omar’s death still felt like crap, and this way we got to see Marlo’s in-holding reaction to his name being sullied, and god damn did Jamie Hector carry that scene. But, again, they need to address Kenard before the show is over, as he ended one of the most beloved characters with a single click. Dingwall did an amazing job with the brief shot of his reaction to actually having committed murder, but there’s more to be shown, I’m sure.

I worry that Daniels, as Carcetti says in the preview, falls on his sword. The complete corruption in the department regarding everybody being in on McNulty’s scheme makes it seem like something will have to happen beyond McNulty and Lester getting shitcanned. Although a part of me thinks it will be Rawls that falls, as he didn’t figure McNulty’s scheme out or have someone come to him. Kima coming to Daniels shows that he has the respect. And if not Rawls, then Valchek. Either of those two has to be the leak to Levy, odds favoring Rawls at this point due to Stanislaus’s incompetence.

Did Herc fuck everybody over, or just send Levy on a wild goose chase? I hope that if he did help Maurice out (as evidenced by Marlo being out of jail in the preview?) that he pays for it. Or maybe Herc becomes an example of incompetence getting promoted, something I’m sure that Simon wouldn’t be too much against showing.

I want Slim Charles to exact revenge on all sorts of people, especially one Melvin “Cheese” Wagstaff, maybe Partlow. (Speaking of which, show Cheese as being related to Randy already) I think we’re going to have a Marlo/Avon encounter in jail, where maybe, just maybe, the King Stays The King.

And finally, I’m furious with HBO for letting show in the teaser that we see the return of Roland “Prezbo” Pryzbylewski, and that he meets with Dukie. I’ve been worried that Dukie’s been on that junk. He’s seen what it can do, seeing as he came from that kind of parenting, but maybe that’s not enough. His face has been showing signs.

See you all after 10:33 pm EST.

Time Is Almost Up. ©HBO.com

As we sit here today, eagerly chomping at the bit which is protecting us from biting our own tongues, while we wait until for the clocks to strike (blink? can we get a study of analog clocks as opposed to digital clocks, somebody? we can take a couple people off the Mitchell Report investigations) 9:00 PM on Sunday Night so we can begin the long goodbye with the greatest* show of my life, The Wire. So I’d like to examine what I consider to be the juiciest topic until the finale airs, that being the season’s true villain.

Marlo Stanfield is not the villain of this season. Melvin “Cheese” Wagstaff is also not the villain. Neither is one Scott Templeton. In this season of The Wire the villain is not on camera. That is not to say that the villain is going to be shown at some point on screen. The villain, to me, of the series is the Home Box Office channel, known to most as HBO.

First of all, the newspaper headline ad campaign was possibly the most feeble I’ve ever seen. How do we attract viewers to the hottest realest and goddamn greatest thing we’ve ever shown (yes, it’s better than The Sopranos)? Let’s make banners with newspaper headlines which are not in full and no photos of any characters at all. No focus on The Fall Of McNulty, or Marlo Stanfield’s rendition of “The Takeover,” which was probably one of the more compelling angles of the season as it brought Joe down. Such foreshadowing could have been accomplished tastefully. Or maybe a series of posters that were wide shots of the different cliques of the show.

Putting episodes up early on On Demand sets up a time/money differential that makes talking about the show with your friends much more complicated. Jason Whitlock picked up on this on the new B.S. Report, and I agree with him about this mistake (he didn’t involve money, but I think it is relevant).

But the most important blunder that HBO is mirrored in the way that the show talked about how the Newspaper Industry is dealing with budget concerns, which gave us the line, “More with less,” which I saw a conncection between at the jumpoff. And I quote:

Season 5

HBO announced on September 12, 2006 that it commissioned a fifth and final season consisting of 13 episodes, but which was later reduced to ten.^[206]

That’s copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I’d rather a more reliable source, direct link to Undercover Black Man – the source for this, but I think you trust me with this more than anyone trusts that some kid named “E.J.” rolled his ass to an Orioles game and couldn’t get in.

I know that the theme of More With Less is probably something that Burns and Simon had cooking long before HBO announced that they were going to shoot less episodes, but this season has a distinct feeling unlike any other season.

It feels marginally rushed. Plot lines proceeding faster than normal. Episodes beginning and ending on exact plot points and not the usual sort of not-as-obvious development. While the Omar plot has great traces back to the third season, and the junkie who talked about the list of things you won’t do that you will do appeared in the Hamsterdam plot, I have to say that the Newspaper plotline is incredibly half baked.

And finally, McNutty, as Bubbles called him once. To have his fake serial killer start in episode two, is a rush job of the most obvious magnitude. That should have been built up to a reveal in episode 3 or 4 like how Bunny Colvin started Hamsterdam up. We were rushed into the idea of the budget shortages, and that really didn’t help things at all. If the newspaper were involved with the budget shortages (not their own), they would mean more. If the newspaper had poorly covered the bodies in the row houses, that would have been amazing and helped us care about this fiction rendition of the Sun.

But, really, this is a good season of television, and I’ll get back to why that is before the finale airs. And yes, to a certain degree, this was rushed.

PS: I’d like to thank you all, the fans of The Wire, my base. On 3/5/08, HenryCasey.Wordpress.Com had it’s Best Day ever, with 91 Page Views. Thanks for taking the sting out of Hillary’s wins.

Via 2DopeBoyz

When I first heard of HBO’s program The Wire, I didn’t pay it much mind. The fact that it took me as long as it did to get with the program as it did is something I regret entirely. Blinders go up with critical praise it seems. The same blinders would fall around the time when I read the NYMag article where they compared Ghostface Killah to Omar, The Wire’s gay shotgun-slinger with a code of honor. That The Clipse were the equivalent of cold blooded Marlo Stanfield. These kinds of comparisons really get me, so there I was watching the first season, transfixed by what I now refer to as the greatest piece of art developed for the TV I’ve ever seen.

Now, when The Wire’s brought up, I sometimes think about how my father and I bonded over it, eagerly awaiting the next disc to come in the mail from NetFlix, like we were any of the many addicts in the foreground or background of Ed Burns and David Simons’ lens. Sure, we’ve connected over film and television in the past, but this was something utterly different, something that wasn’t big watercooler talk like X-Files at it’s peak or any episode of The Sopranos ever. This was something that even back when we started to watch it, in late 2006 and early last year, that was still enough out of the mainstream for it to feel sacred and true. Of course, me being me, I wasn’t as focused on the screen as I should have been, frequently balancing my attentions between screen and laptop. Over the past few months, I’ve been rewatching the series, with the intent of getting my roommate caught up with the show that I’d been raving about for the previous year or so.

More talk, spoilerriffic, below the cut. Do not read until you’ve caught up. Seriously, this is going to talk about who dies and who doesn’t and you really need to learn and see that for yourself.

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I said stop reading. If you just clicked on a link to this article, this is your secondary warning.

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A moment from watching the show that stands out was the end of “Bad Dreams,” the second to last episode of Season 2, when we see Frank Sobotka walk towards towards Spiros, The Greek, and I believe Sergei was there too. I guess the NetFlix disc was scratched, and couple that with my parents’ DVD/VCR combo player that I’ve been disparaging for years, and you have a moment resembling every household watching the end of the Sopranos, as it just skipped ahead to black, and the credits. We missed the slow fade to black. You knew what was going to happen the minute that Special Agent Fitzhugh blindly sent the info up to HQ, but the slow fade, to take that away was fucked up. The slow fade is almost always the norm on The Wire, and to have anything else happen might suggest cliffhanger, and not Sobotka’s body winding up in the fucking harbor, and then out there for everybody to see. But you really knew what happened. This show doesn’t fuck around with cliffhangers, with the exception of the time it took to learn the fate of Kima Greggs.

Watching the series a second time has been great because of how you come back to the show with the information of all the names and faces, and for Stringer, D’Angelo, Frank Sobotka, Bodie, Ziggy, Double G, Orlando, and even Ray Cole, their fates. Also, with some characters who play more tangential roles in the show, like Landsman and Slim Charles, you know how they fit into the show, and it just flows more.

Something I really appreciate that the show does right is the means of which it will introduce a character, wait a while sometimes to say their name, and with Snoop, wait a while to even give them a line. It’s more natural, and another reason why going back through the series has been so productive.

Possibly, the second season benefited the most from repeated viewings, as you understand and already empathize with the dock workers going in. You know that the season has an added message of saying, “The show isn’t as much about race as it is about class.”

Any single character benefiting more, it’s Prez, as knowing his follies as they’re coming, you understand more of his person and therefore what happened to him before he came to Major Crimes, beyond the rumor of him shooting up his own car. You know what a good person he is, and when you get to that scene with him and Lester talking off hours, after Prez got cut loose for shooting the other cop that scene just kills you.

Most of all, what sticks out to me while watching all of this is that the visual aesthetic (almost) never changed on the show. You couldn’t tell if there was any more critical attention from one season to the other, if any more budget was thrown into it or taken away from it. I say almost, because of “Back Burners,” the episode that Tim Van Patten, legendary director, helmed. When Bubbles walked through Hamsterdam, that was a completely different means of shooting the show, and god damn if it wasn’t exactly what was right. You needed to see some hell on Earth kinda shit to really show what Hamsterdam was. For that sole scene, it didn’t take anything away from the show that it looked a little different, because Hamsterdam was as different as it got.

As is Hamsterdam, so is The Wire. Ed Burns and David Simon pooling their collective genius, partner that with HBO’s standard for not giving two shiiiiiiiiiit’s about language, violence or nudity, and a central cast featuring the likes of Dominic West, Idris Elba, Andre Royo, Sonja Sohn, Michael K. Williams, Frankie Faison, and Wendell Pierce; that made this a show that’s as different from the rest of the cultural landscape as it could have been.

As the series begins it’s final season, my excitement grows more and more, because there’s something strange about the show. No matter how I hype it to myself or to others who havn’t seen it, it will always exceed their expectations. Maybe there’s some level where my recommendations are taken with a fist full of salt, I don’t know. The show may have suffered from poor timing, coming up at the same time that HBO’s flagship shows like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, and Six Feet Under were owning the network and it’s promotional capacity. David Simon, who loves Baltimore as much as anybody can, probably understands what it means to be underfunded and passed over. At the same time, though, if the show had begun right now, right now, with HBO all out of real brand name television (Entourage, as much as I like it, really pales, Larry Bird-pale, in comparison to The Wire) the show, and Baltimore might have gotten the attention they deserve.

I’m waiting to watch the season premiere on Sunday night, and you can expect a review later next week.