Saturday, October 18, 2008

The Wire, David Simon

"Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This of course, sucks.

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time... but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely."

E-mail excerpt by David Simon, writer/producer, The Wire, from the booklet of the CD 'The Wire: ...and all the pieces matter. Five Years of Music From The Wire'.

I don't watch TV. I don't even own one. But I admit that I became addicted to The Wire after my housemate in 2004 showed it to me. And here David Simon perfectly sums up both how and why I love traveling in an analogy for one of the reasons why The Wire is such a great show.

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