Sweetney Archives

Yesterday I unexpectedly received a package in the mail from my friend Two Busy. I opened it, and inside was a gift-wrapped rectangular box. I quickly emailed him. Our conversation went something like this:

Subject: WAAAAAAAAAAAAH
From: Me
Date: December 8, 2010
To: TwoBusy

What? A gift?!?! Dude, you’re gonna make me cry… AND THEN YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY.

Should I open? Or wait?

Subject: RE: WAAAAAAAAAAAAH
From: TwoBusy
Date: December 8, 2010
To: Me

Totally your call on when to open. ‘Sup to you, and all those whose lives it will transform…

(for the better)

(or, quite possibly, not)

At which point I of course tore the box open in a maniacal frenzy not dissimilar to that of the Nintendo 64 kid. Because Klass with a K is, after all, my middle name.

Here’s what was inside said box:

It’s an E.L.O box set. Which was on my Amazon.com Wish List.

Now before you commence with the judging of me, allow me to explain.

Growing up in the mid-seventies, I was pretty much musically at the mercy of 1) My Father’s choices in music and 2) The vagaries of Top 40 Radio. Both had their charms and drawbacks, but there’s no denying my Dad’s lasting influence on my taste in music. He loved, and still loves, The Beatles and The Everely Brothers, The Kingston Trio and Neil Diamond, ABBA and Donna Summer, and others. He played music relentlessly, daily, and so in most if not all instances by way of a kind of musical osmosis I grew to appreciate those artists, too.

But more than any other group or individual artist, my Dad loves E.L.O.

And so the soundtrack of much of my early life in the 1970s and 80s was comprised of E.L.O records – Discovery, A New World Record, and El Dorado in particular – and these forever shaped my musical tastes. For better or worse, I can quite literally sing every E.L.O song ever written, and know the lyrics, timing, and the precise inflection Jeff Lynne deployed on every syllable of each and every track. I guess some kids rebel against their parents music on principle – needing something of their own to place in opposition/contrast to the tastes of their elders – but I just… didn’t. At least not in those early, formative years. I loved E.L.O. I still do.

But it’s about more than merely liking the music, the individual tunes, now. E.L.O’s music is infused with a kind of visceral gut-level memory for me – a feeling – of what it was like to be a kid, to be the kid that I was. Listening to their songs now, I get flashes of memories – birthday parties, family car trips, and a clear mental picture of myself sitting on the carpet in front of my Father’s gleaming silver-toned multi-component stereo system, scores of albums fanned out on the floor in front of me. I’d sit there for hours with my Dad’s oversized, earmuff-like headphones clasped to my sweaty skull, pounding record after record, rising only to flip them over and gently drop the needle back onto the dark, outermost ring of each slab of vinyl. There was something meditative, solemn, ritual, about the act. This is how a kid grows to love and appreciate music – to see it as an important, integral part of life, rather than as just accompanying background noise.

So it’s understandable that after seeing what was inside that box from my friend, I replied to him with the following email:

Subject: WAAAAAAAAAAAAH
From: Me
Date: December 8, 2010
To: TwoBusy

OH MY FUCKING GOD. LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. Am doing that *I am not going to cry * hand-fluttery thing.

GAAAH TEARY GAAAH RUINING MY REP GAAAAH… THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH.

And I totally meant that shit. Every. Single. Repetitive. Yelly. All-Caps. Word.

As I grew older and up into my teenage years, I did eventually part ways musically with my Father. At thirteen, I started listening to The Smiths and The Cure and other I wear black on the outside, cause black is how I feel inside -type groups, and to some degree or other put away E.L.O for a time, along with childhood things. But their influence is obvious in my love of lush, quirky, hooky music, as well as in my strong appreciation for the subtle joys of the White Man Fro (MAJESTIC!). I’m so glad that I’ve finally reached an age in my life where I can openly proclaim my nerdy fangirldom regarding things like this – things I’m pretty sure a lot of people would consider eye-roll worthy, passe, or outright lame. Have I mentioned that I also think Hall & Oates is kind of awesome? Dude, if I had an indie rock band Kiss on My List would be the FIRST song we’d cover, for real. Why are you looking at me like that?

So thanks, Dad, for steering me right back in the day. And thanks to Two Busy for reminding me of the importance of my musical roots, however nerdy they might be.

So this morning, it finally happened. The day I’d been fearing for years has come.

While eating her breakfast, the kid turned to me and casually asked, “Is Santa Claus real? Sometimes I think he is, and sometimes I think that parents put the presents under the Christmas tree and eat the cookies we put out for him.”

I almost did an actual spit-take with my coffee.

“That’s what my friend at school said. So is that true? Do you pretend to be Santa and eat his cookies?”

My brain: Think fast, think fast… uhhh, do I *pretend to be Santa*? Do I dress up in a red suit with a white beard and ho ho ho? Do I *actually* eat those cookies? Well, no! Technically, in responding to her question, I’ve never *pretended* to be Santa, and I’ve personally never been the one to take Santa-mimicking bites out of those cookies. So no. SAY NO.

Me, averting my eyes: “No? I mean, NO.”

She pondered this for a moment. “Well I’m going to tell my friend at school that she’s wrong then.”

Oh lawd, THE SHAME.

I immediately shifted gears and hurried her along in her before-school tasks, cleverly diverting her attention from The Santa Question. But, of course, this isn’t going away. And soon I will be unmasked. And I will pay for my jolly, tinsel-draped crimes.

I remember, back when I was about her age, someone at school similarly breaking this same sad news to me, and that evening confronting my father with my suspicions regarding Santa and his minions. At first he danced around the matter, but finally came out an told me in no uncertain terms that yes, aided and abetted by fellow parents, the public school system, and the national media (all in cahoots! Oh, the humanity!), my mother and father had indeed for years perpetrated the merriest of seasonal frauds, with my brother and myself as their victims. I remember being so angry and disappointed that I sulked for days, presaging my stock attitude and behavior as an emo teenager. Thinking back, I feel fairly sure that at that time I wished they’d continued to lie to me. I mean, a good chunk of the joy and wonder gets sucked out of Christmas when you stop believing, right?

Right. Right?

Here I am, in the same situation as the one I’d put my father in more than thirty years ago, and I’m not entirely sure which choice is the better one. At what point, as a parent, do you finally give up the holly-jolly ghost? When is it time to your kid tell the whole, deflating truth, knowing that in doing so you will wholly obliterate a little bit of the magic of their childhood? How do you, in essence, bring yourself to become a SANTA KILLER?

I am in NO WAY ready for this shit. If you people need me, I’ll be over here drowning my sorrows in eggnog and eating my feelings of shame and regret (they taste like spiced Gingerbread this time of year!).

Yesterday morning, like every morning, the kid and I drove the 30 minute route through Baltimore that leads to her new charter school, nestled deep at the city’s center. It’s impossible to cross any broad expanse of Baltimore without hitting areas where the road is strung on either side with boarded-up row houses, block after block (this set on flickr, taken by a local photographer, perfectly captures the strange desolation we see here every day). It’s an urban moonscape, empty and forbidding.

This is Baltimore, cold stone and concrete and immediacy. There is no facade, no face the city presents to the world that conceals its essential truth. For better and for worse, Baltimore is urban living with the mask torn away.

There are miles of these streets in Baltimore. I can’t help but feel a certain amount of sadness, and a touch of uneasiness, as we drive through those eerie, dead zone blocks. I’m not sure what M makes of them. She’s been living here since before she could walk, long before she could speak complete sentences. This is the only reality she’s ever known.

There’s a particular section of road we hit every morning near the lush green campus island of Johns Hopkins that is a especially difficult. Five long city blocks. If we hit all the lights green, it’s perhaps a minute’s time, a blip on the radar of the experience of the day. A dispiriting sixty seconds.

Seen from the corners of my eyes as we move past them, those sad, empty row homes with their plywood doors and black, gaping windows look like faces. Faces frozen by fear, or sadness. Or death.

Yesterday we hit a red light. M shouted out to me from the backseat, “Hey look! Free stuffed animals!”

She was looking at one of several street corners we pass in this five block stretch where a light pole has been festooned with balloons and teddy bears and cards, an urban marker memorializing someone’s death.

“No baby, those aren’t free stuffed animals,” I sighed. Then, of course, I had to explain what they actually were, what they actually meant. As I said the words, I felt my throat close, and a fist tightened around my heart.

By the smallest degrees and increments we destroy their innocence. As parents, we have no choice. We can’t lie to them and pretend the world is better, easier than it is. We can’t omit the reality that people kill people every day on these streets, on the streets of every city in every country the world over. We can’t hide the truth that the same humanity that makes Pixar films also makes human beings who murder without flinching, without conscience or remorse. We can’t not answer their questions when they ask them. We have to tell the truth, though it might break our hearts to do it.

It does, it does.

Yesterday, the truth was, and remains: five blocks of desolation, concrete, and death. And I hate that I had to be the one to break it to her.

Take your daughter to Disney World solo — just you and her.

Eat a lot of candy. And your weight in ice cream. And mouse-head-shaped chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast each morning.

Hold hands every second you can. Cuddle her on your lap, though she’s getting far too big and heavy for that.

Climb the Swiss Family Treehouse. Fly on Dumbo The Elephant’s back. Put your arm around her and pull her close as you float along the dark shores of Pirates Of The Caribbean together.

Stay up far too late, way past bedtime. Watch the fireworks on Main Street and giggle to yourself when, mouth gaping in dumbfounded unison, you both mutter, “Wow…” in one voice to the sky.

See the magic of the world, of simply being alive, fresh again though her eyes. Remember what it’s like to be seven years old.

Wipe the tears away when her head is turned, so she doesn’t see you crying.

The other night I was watching “Mad Men” — a show ostensibly about the machinations of the Madison Avenue advertising industry of the mid-sixties, but in truth more about what the lives of women were like during that era — when I realized something. The only time in history I could’ve ever existed was during the past forty years.

It sounds silly, but there was something downright creepy about realizing that everything about who you are has really relied on the fact that you were simply born at the right time, the only time. Here I am, a somewhat overeducated single mother and business owner, starting my life over entirely at age forty. At what other point in history would that have even been conceivable for a woman? In what other age or era could a woman be entirely in charge of her own destiny and freely chart the course of her personal and professional life, divorce without taint or stigma, run a household alone, or own a business and be driven and career-minded without apology?

I know. Creepy, right?

Creepy because it’s such a narrow band of time — a razor-thin strip cut into the enormity of the whole of history — and the odds of anyone being lucky enough to be here, now, are infinitesimal. And yet, here I am, here we are.

In one of the first episodes of “Mad Men,” Betty Draper, stay-at-home wife of the show’s protagonist and mother to his two children, is in her very 1960s kitchen with a pregnant friend, both glugging coffee and smoking cigarettes openly and with abandon. There’s another nudge-wink moment when their young children enter the room, one girl wholly enveloped in a clear plastic dry cleaner’s bag, who then gets reprimanded not for her hazardous choice in playthings, but rather for man-handling the clothing the plastic was protecting. Oh those crazy, carefree, noxious sixties! At any rate, what struck me was that as Betty and her friend gossiped, their conversation became downright grim and their voices hushed when they began discussing — with a mixture of pity and muted disdain — the divorcée moving into the neighborhood, whose mere presence it was feared might bring down property values (video here, embedding was disabled, stupid youtube).

I’m that woman, of course. But then, I’m not. Forty-five years later, no one gives a second thought to my marital status or lack thereof. No one blinks an eye at the idea of me, a woman, owning my own home, running a household as a single mother, owning a business. If not common-place or the norm, these are at the very least not things anyone would tsk-tsk, condemn, or look down upon. No, not in the slightest. It’s kind of incredible, the distance women have traveled in just a few decades. Downright miraculous, in fact.

Near the end of that same episode, Betty Draper, plagued with sudden bouts of numbness in her hands that would later be diagnosed as psychosomatic, ie: “hysterical,” loses her grip on the family car’s steering wheel and careens onto a neighbor’s lawn. Watching this for the second time recently, I felt my throat involuntarily tighten. How symbolic that Betty’s hands would numb, rendering her functionally impotent, unable to take care of herself in any complete way, denying her power, control, and any possibility of freedom. What woman could be self-sufficient, independent, without use of her hands? It would be impossible.

And it was, back then, the culture organized as it was around maintaining women’s lesser status, reinforcing false, proscribed helplessness. But here I am, here we are. We’re free in ways someone like Betty Draper couldn’t have fully conceived of. So this Memorial Day weekend I’d like to suggest we each take a few moments to also acknowledge the women before us who bravely fought for women’s rights, many of whom didn’t live long enough to see true liberation simply because they were born at the wrong time. I am so, so grateful for everything they did for us, for making my remarkable life as a woman possible. I am so, so lucky to have been born at the right time.

It’s odd how you can live day-in day-out with something (someone, my daughter would correct), and not think to say much about it. We got our new puppy Locke just a few short days ago, and I’ve already broadcast numerous photos and a bit of video of him. But no one really knows about Stella, and we’ve had her for years.

This is Stella:

She’s my daughter’s best stuffed friend and constant furry companion. She’s the one my daughter cannot sleep without at night, the one we scour the house for with increasing panic when we can’t find her. My daughter carries Stella everywhere, except to school, and her inclusion in trips and sleep-overs is naturally assumed. Stella is just there, always present, always included in what we do.

But what IS she?

I mean, obviously Stella is a brown stuffed dog. But she isn’t that to my daughter. She’s something else. Something more.

Security. Comfort. Constancy. Softness. Reassurance. Safety. Something else?

When I was around her age I had a stuffed panda — unremarkably named Teddy — who I had a similar sort of relationship with. I loved him to the point of near-deterioration, to where his red felt tongue was worn down to a pinkish nubbin and his glassy button eyes finally popped off. The eyes were eventually replaced with ones my brother fashioned by hand from construction paper and glue — white ovals with jet black circles for pupils that left him forever after looking out on the world with an expression of apparent amazement. And when the turn-key music box embedded in his chest finally died we performed surgery to remove it, a metal malignancy whose extraction left a Frankensteinian scar down his back. All of this was done out of love, love as real as any I knew then.

When I see children with dolls and stuffed animals now I can’t help but think about how hard it is to be so little and alone in this world. Perhaps the shock of our physical separateness begun at birth echoes on through those early years, a nagging but nameless anxiety we can’t quite shake. And so it makes a kind of sense that these stuffed things, these comfort-objects — if only by virtue of their solidity and our ability to physically connect with, cradle, and hold them — would make us feel less alone somehow. They are a child’s reinforcements. They are their tangible rejection of our inherent aloneness as humans.

In time, of course, children get used to that unshakable loneliness we all sometimes feel. The discomfort of their own singularity lessens. Eventually, my daughter will stand comfortably alone, as all of us do. But in the interim, Stella will be there, as long as she needs her.

And maybe longer.

I need to get something off my chest, ladies. I LOVE the VH1 series “Rock Of Love” (its present incarnation of course being the “Rock Of Love Bus,” or as I have dubbed it “Rock Of Love: Bus Of Fools”). It is, I think it’s safe to say, a guilty pleasure of a show on par with “Paradise Hotel” (also LOVED!), or the cringe-worthy but eminently watchable “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” (VH1 clearly has my number… my sad, shameful number) — something one imbibes as a palate-cleansing aperitif in-between sober and intelligent programming like, oh, anything on HBO or “Mad Men” — at least that’s what we tell people, right? But really, why are so many of us — educated women who consider themselves thinkers and feminists — watching this BS?

I think I have it all figured out. One word: Schadenfreude.

The word is an imperfect fit, but it captures the spirit of what I’m going for. Defined as “delight in the misfortune of others,” for the purposes of unpacking what’s so compelling about shows like “Rock Of Love” I think of it more as “delight in the mistakes of others,” whether the mistake is choosing to wear an outfit that makes you look as though a strip club got sick on you (see: most of our lovely “Rock Of Love Bus” contestants), or creating flimsy and baseless alliances with untrustworthy douchebags (see: every relationship between every person on every season of “Paradise Hotel”), or just being desperate and imprudent enough to allow yourself to be filmed while trying to untangle your life from the death-grip of drug addiction (see: “Celebrity Rehab”… Oh and also “Hey Paula!“), all of these shows play to the dark but very human place in each of our psyches that can’t help but be tickled by watching stupid people make stupid decisions and do stupid things. I’m not saying it’s right or good, I’m just saying it undeniably IS.

However, as a woman, it gets a little more complicated when we’re talking about a show like “Rock Of Love,” because it’s pretty easy to correlate the joyous disdain women like myself feel for the surgically-enhanced Stripper Barbies on that show as a case of women hating on women, which raises some hackles, and I get that. But ladies, these are women who have wholeheartedly subscribed to the bottom-of-the-barrel worst, most self-denegrating and loathsome versions of womanhood Mankind (with great emphasis on MAN) has fabricated and foisted on us in our time. Their behavior, self-presentation and demeanor all effectively drain the female viewer of all sense of kinship with them AS women. I mean, it’s hard to feel all sisterly about a woman who’d see carrying a blow-up doll to the altar as being a way to bring that extra special something to a wedding, or would be eager to give aging douchebag and Hairclub For Men client Bret Michaels a lapdance in front of an audience of twenty other heckling women (I’m keeping my examples decidedly PG13 here, this being a family site and all, but OMG YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE THE THINGS SOME OF THESE WOMEN DO. NO, SRSLY).

Another, more introspective and cerebral way to look at this phenomena would be to say that perhaps these women are something like televisual voodoo dolls for the female viewer, each representing parts of us that we don’t like talking about, the parts we’d like to, at least figuratively, stick pins in — the hidden, trashy “slut”; the needy girl seeking approval and validation from men; the vain part of us that wishes our bodies were “perfect” and resents anyone we think prettier than ourselves — and certainly, the women of “Rock Of Love” could collectively be conceived of as a place for us to dump these sorts of “bad” shameful feelings. And from the comfort and safety of our living room couches, no less!

Does any of this ring true to you? How do you explain the mass appeal of these programs? Why do you watch — or not watch — these sorts of shows? And even if I’m wrong about why I shouldn’t have to feel bad for loving “Rock Of Love” — if it’s all just sick and wrong and I should be ashamed of myself — would it be okay if I kept my TiVo season pass just for this season? I mean, I kind of need to know if Bret Michaels is really so dumb as to not pick Beverly, who is clearly the least skanktastic and repulsive of the lot (not saying much it’s true, but I’m doing what I can with what I got). Listen, IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME, OKAY?

[small voice] Please? [/small voice]

I don’t believe in magic.

I’m not even what you’d call a spiritual person, honestly. I was raised in the Catholic church, a religious community I abandoned when, around age nine or ten, I listened to a priest who stood before our congregation and heard him, in so many oblique words, tell us that we could buy our way into Heaven (or, alternately, miser our way into Hell, one supposes). I was a kid at the time, sure, but even then I knew that wasn’t right.

I’d now consider myself Agnostic — I can neither confirm nor the deny the existence or a personal or impersonal God, though I tend to lean toward thinking along the lines that the divine isn’t a man in flowing white robes, issuing condemnation and approval from some Great On High. If there is, in any sense, a realm of the spirit, I think it’s likely something we puny earthlings can’t even begin to understand or wrap our minds around (so why not anthropomorphize, I suppose). Anyway, the point is that I still, despite my skepticism, hold out some hope for that. For whatever reason, throughout my entire life, some root part of me still searches for The Transcendent long after having given up The Church. Even as I question it, scrutinize it, and examine it for holes that will drain it of all mystery, I look for it still. The Divine It.

. . . . .

Since moving into this house five years ago, I’d regularly noted the abundance of praying mantises in and around the front garden with an immutable kind of excitement and awe. There’s just something about those things… something serene and otherworldly, fascinating and alien. In the process of doing some reading about upkeep for our sprawling garden a while back, I read of them:

The praying mantis is the oldest symbol of God: the African Bushman’s manifestation of God come to Earth, “the voice of the infinite in the small,” a divine messenger. When one is seen, diviners try to determine the current message. In this culture they are also associated with restoring life into the dead. “Mantis” is the Greek word for “prophet” or “seer,” a being with spiritual or mystical powers.

The praying mantis shows the way. In the Arabic and Turkish cultures a mantis points pilgrims to Mecca, the holiest site in the Islamic world. In Africa it helps find lost sheep and goats. In France, it’s believed that if you are lost the mantis points the way home.

During one summer a few years ago, we had one mantis that, curiously, seemed to live entirely on our front porch. Back when M used to take midday naps, I’d retire to the porch early each afternoon and sit with it, me on one of the folding wooden chairs that served as our porch seating, my praying mantis friend on the thatched metal side-table I’d picked up at Target one day on a whim. It was an odd relationship, one I never quite knew what to make of. I mean, surely this thing knew I was there, sometimes mere inches away, but it never budged. Only when I made some kind of fast movement or gesture would it stir, cocking its head to one side in a gesture that suggested it might be thinking, “O RLY?”

So it seemed odd to me that I hadn’t seen even a single mantis all year this year. Maybe not odd — after all, my attention has most certainly been elsewhere, far away from the transcendent… far from nature, for that matter. In any case, that I hadn’t seen one seemed a bad omen somehow. Though, lately, I’ve taken to seeing bad omens in so many things.

Then, yesterday, I opened my front door, and saw this:

It was an enormous one, easily the largest mantis I’d ever seen. It was attached to the side of my house, hanging from a shingle near the front door. As I approached it with my iPhone to snap this photo, its head rotated just slightly in my direction, “O RLY?”

. . . . .

I don’t believe in magic, the hocus pocus of so much spiritualism and religion. And yet I still can’t help but look for the divine in the real, the transcendent poking through the fabric of the material world. The infinite word of some God I’m not even sure I believe in, scribbled on a mote of dust.

Last week I was reminded of the greatness of the HBO drama “The Wire,” and how lax I’ve been in singing its praises of late. Indeed, “The Wire” is a show that merits some serious evangelizing — I can scarcely think of another television program that inspires such depth of feeling, thought, and devotion in its audience. And while “The Wire” is a luminous achievement for the medium of television to be sure, it’s more than that. It’s a rich testament to the power of narrative and storytelling, a work that transcends the confines of scripted television and plumbs the inner depths of those who experience it as perhaps only great literature can. Does it sound like I’m overstating things? Well, I’m not.

I was, incidentally, reminded of “The Wire” last week because of a few lines I read on Politico, namely:

“The president [likes] the HBO drama ‘The Wire.’ His favorite character is Omar, a gay stickup artist who steals from drug pushers to give to the poor. (‘That’s not an endorsement. He’s not my favorite person, but he’s a fascinating character,’ Obama said last year.)”

And when I read that I think I went into some sort of shock — the good kind, the kind you get when you walk into a dead-quiet room on your birthday and then suddenly, SURPRISE!, friends and family appear from nowhere wearing silly hats and throwing confetti. THAT kind of shock. That our president is now someone who enjoys a show as intellectually and psychologically complex as “The Wire”– as opposed to his predecessor, whose favorite TV shows are, I suspect, likely something along the lines of “COPS”or “Cheaters” —  is something that brings me to the edge of tears. And why that is, why I and so many other people I know became invested in this television show to the point where someone feeling an affinity for it and its characters seems not a statement about their taste but rather about what they as a human being are made of... well that my friends could take a few days. So for the sake of brevity I’ll try to keep things punchy and limit myself to just the following three (only three!) reasons you should watch this show:

*Please note that the videos included below do contain NSFW language and include “The Sopranos”-level acts of violence. This is not a show for the squeamish, be aware.*

1. Omar Little. Our President isn’t the only one who has mad love for Omar. Almost without fail, when I told someone I was writing this piece the first thing that came out of their mouth was this character’s name, and with good reason. For while the show fairly bursts at the seams with memorable characters, Omar, the stoic, trench-coated gay stickup artist, is perhaps THE character that best articulates what makes “The Wire” great. Omar’s nothing if not a complex bundle of shifting contradictions: a hardened criminal who is sensitive and deeply feeling, an uneducated street thug who possesses startling depth and rare wisdom, a man who shamelessly defies the rule of law at every opportunity yet lives by a strict moral and ethical code. It’s hard to watch “The Wire” and not fall in love with him, with his awesome strength and tenderness, his commitment, oddly, to doing what’s right and playing fairly by the rules of The Game, even if his sense of “right” and what “rules” should be followed is a bit questionable. The following clip, in which Omar confronts Brother Mouzone (another incredible character) who he believes to be responsible for the murder of his lover a year prior, gives a taste of what makes Omar so compelling:

2. The Writing. This is a show that, as one friend pointed out to me, Berkeley’s film/media studies department has created an undergraduate course about (course readings include works by Aeschylus, Theodore Dreiser and, predictably, Charles Dickens). Never before or since has a television show been so, well, untelevision-show-like. That’s not an indictment of the medium, but a remark on the unique nature of the show’s narrative, which resembles a Shakespearean play more closely than it does your average police procedural drama. The writing bears that level of subtlety, complexity, and depth, and challenges the audience’s hearts and minds relative to its characters in ways generally associated with great works of literature.

I was emailing with a friend about the show, and with her permission would like to quote at length some of what she said on this matter, as it distills so much so well:

YES. THAT. WHAT SHE SAID.

This clip, in which crew boss of the low rise projects D’Angelo teaches his underlings Wallace and Bodie how to play chess, hints at the depth and the complexity of these characters who are, lest we forget, hoodlums and drug dealers:

3. Baltimore. Well, not quite Baltimore. David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” has said that the show isn’t really about Baltimore specifically but about America, about inner city America, the “other America.” And from the beginning of the series straight on through its end it’s apparent that the heart of “The Wire” beats in the dark places of America, in the parts of it hidden from the view of most Americans, in the places where lives begin and end in brutality, anonymity and despair. At its best “The Wire”explores the lives of those who inhabit that other America in a way that not only recognizes and respects their humanity, but finds poetry in it. A rough and bloody sort to be sure, but lyrical nonetheless. It’s a poetry that doesn’t offer reassurances of inner city redemption or false hope, but instead meditates on survival and sheer endurance. There is no uplifting triumph of the human spirit here. Instead there is the often grim reality of urban exhaustion, conflict, and ambivalence.

What’s surprising though is how easy it is to love this other America — in spite of or because of its utter brokenness, I’m not quite sure which. But in a broader sense, it’s impossible to watch “The Wire” and not feel that in some essential way it captures profound truths about the complicated business of being human in all its ugliness and awfulness, beauty and tenderness, and that in doing so blurs the lines dividing those opposites. In “The Wire” as in life, there aren’t heroes and villains, “good” people and “bad” people — there are just people, all trying to live as best they can within the limitations of their respective circumstances. Whatever our address, whatever clothes we wear, car we drive, or occupation we labor at, our likeness to one another runs deep — perhaps deeper than many would like to admit. As stick-up artist Omar quips to the smug lawyer Maurice Levy in defense of what Levy condemns as  Omar’s “parasitic” life of crime: “I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?”

Tru dat.