Paragraph of the Week

From David Segal's article, "Is Law School a Losing Game?," published in the January 8, 2011 edition of The New York Times:

It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows. 

David Simon should probably write a TV series about the stat juking going on here.

Video Essays: The Wire's Opening Credits and Man Men's Visual Style

Looking back, the thing I liked most about Phillips' description of Pele from two posts ago is that it felt very much like a video essay, just with the commentary separated from the video, in this case taking the form of the paragraph preceding the video. Video essays are one of my favorite things about the internet: the mixing of mediums allows for smart people to demonstrate arguments and theories with the very evidence needed to best convince the reader of the point being made. Phillips did exactly that and this is why I was struck by the beauty of what he accomplished. I only recognized what he did as a video essay in retrospect.

These essays are perhaps the best form of commentary because it requires the writer to show his work. Video essays are particularly well suited to visual mediums, and there are loads of great ones illuminating films. But the low technological barrier of entry has allowed for some wonderful pieces on serious TV dramas. Here are two examples of what I mean, the first on the visual language of the first two seasons of Mad Men and the second on the opening credits of The Wire's first season.


RETRO: The Camera & 'Mad Men'
Uploaded by Jefferson_Robbins. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

And:

Steve Earle, In Concert

Here is a partial but representative list of things I like because of The Wire: Honey Nut Cheerios, Tom Waits, Baltimore, Jameson, Idris Elba, nail guns, Gus Triandos, and, maybe most of all, Steve Earle.

I was first introduced to Earle as Bubbles' sponsor and was surprised to see him pop up on that episode of 30 Rock in which Jack holds the musical benefit for his father's kidney. Intrigued, I looked into this fellow from The Wire, and realized that he first became known for his music. That episode aired on May 14, 2009. I borrowed some music from Ariel, found a concert on NPR, went nuts on the Amazon MP3 page, and have been listening to Earle ever since. And on Thursday, August 5th, I saw Steve Earle in concert.

It was my first time seeing a concert on purpose. And, you know what, I kinda liked it. It definitely helped that I knew roughly three-quarters of the songs he played. I liked that there were seats to sit upon. (I'm not much of a dancer. The expectation of standing and dancing make me nervous; this would most likely dampen my enjoyment of the experience.) I liked the friendly strangers that sat next to me, one of whom asked me if I take drugs. (He responded with a terse "Good for you" when I informed him that I do not, in fact, take drugs. I did soon after, however, order another Jameson.) I liked that Earle opened with his cover of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole," tying together another one of those things I like because of The Wire.



And, mostly, I liked the music. It put me in a reflective mood, reminiscing on the two years--nearly to the day--since my stint at Publishing Camp officially ended, most of which time (since that fateful episode of 30 Rock) has been spent with Steve Earle as my life's soundtrack.

I have some definite thoughts on these last twenty-four months, as I transitioned from student to employee, from a person enrolled in a set course of action to someone who needs to decide how I want to spend my time and live my life, from someone who hadn't really faced adversity to one who is slowly realizing that success--however you might want to define it--is not automatic.

But exposition of those thoughts will have to wait for a different time. For now, Copperhead Road:

Yet More Evidence that Laugh Tracks are Bad

We've spoken a few times about the problems with laugh tracks. There have been some new developments, so I think it's high-time we revisit this issue. Let's begin by witnessing what would have happened if David Simon had decided that creating the greatest American work of art of the '00s wasn't sufficient and had, instead, opted to try to broaden the appeal of The Wire. (There's some profanity in the following clip.)



More interesting, perhaps, is the effect of Gawker TV's video edit of a great scene from Arrested Development. The edits were similar: they added a laugh track. It's amazing how the addition of a laugh track makes this scene decidedly unfunny. The result is not embeddable, so you should definitely click over and check it out.

Shows without laugh tracks are still in the minority today. So let's take a look at what happens when one of those standard sitcoms has it's laugh-crutch taken away. Without further ado, here's CBS' Big Bang Theory with the laugh track stripped away:



So we've learned that laugh tracks:

1. Ruin good dramas;
2. make funny shows unfunny;
3. and, lastly, mask the unfunniness of unfunny shows.

And I think that makes a pretty appropriate 200th post in The Daily Snowman's history.

Wanted: A New David/Dave

The past 12 months have been rough at times. I think that's what happens when your first foray into adult life coincides with a bad economy. But more than that, I've been missing my David/Dave. From the age of 12, I've always had a celebrity David/Dave to entertain, enlighten, and edutain me. I started off with Dave Barry, reading books and books along with as many archived columns as the internet could hold. Soon after, I transitioned to David Sedaris. This was nice, because he was actually producing new material at the time I was reading him. There was even a brief time when two of David Cross's stand-up albums were basically played on repeat in my apartment (check out maybe Cross's best known bit at the 7:20 mark of this youtube video with plenty of cussin'.) Soon after, I discovered David Foster Wallace. And just when I had finished reading eulogies of DFW, I started watching The Wire, created by David Simon. But I finished The Wire in the early portion of 2009, and I've been Dave-less ever since, the first time since the late '90s that my favorite artist in the world hasn't been named David.

I'm looking for a new David/Dave.

I've done some light research using the internet. By this I mean, I typed the words "Dave" and "David" into Amazon's search engine, and I let the mildly creepy auto-complete function fill in the rest of my search. Leaving out redundancies (e.g., Dave Matthews Band and Dave Matthews) this is what it came up with:

• Dave Matthews Band
• Dave Ramsey
  
• Dave Eggers
• Dave Chappelle
• Dave Brubeck
• David Gray
• David Guetta
• David Bowie
• David Sedaris
• David Cross
• David Archuleta
• David Foster Wallace
• David Crowder Band
• David Baldacci
• David Cook

Musicians are out because I don't like/understand music quite enough to obsessively follow any of them. Though I do kinda like David Bowie. That eliminates most of this list, and almost all of the Davids/Daves that I hadn't heard of before tonight. Dave Ramsey is some sort of financial writer, who has authored some works as The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan For Financial Fitness. David Baldacci writes crappy mass market novels. I've seen enough of Dave Chappelle's work to be impressed, but I'm happy to leave it at that.

Which leaves us with Dave Eggers. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of the best things I've ever read. But What is the What is the first book I can remember that led me to consciously decide to stop reading. (How We Are Hungry was pretty good.) But can a pantheon David/Dave member be responsible for a What is the What level misstep? I've heard good things about You Shall Know Our Velocity, so maybe that will be Eggers's last chance to achieve official David/Dave status.

The only David that I know of who may fit the bill is David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. I think I'm going to give him a shot, but if you know of any good Davids/Daves that are out there, please let me know. It's not easy being Dave-less.

Your illiteracy has screwed us again, Charlie!

Back let's say two months ago, I had never seen an episode of The Wire. The only things I knew about the show were that there is a cool/interesting character named Omar and that they pronounce the word "shit" in a peculiar way. Now, about 43 viewing hours into the series I have a much better sense of what the show is about and why it has been consistently ranked as one of the very greatest achievement in the history of American television. I am in the process of filling a gap in my cultural literacy.

I've been thinking about cultural literacy because I just discovered, via J.E. Skeets's twitter feed, something called Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. I don't know if it's smart to watch or read or peruse all of these things in one sitting--these are things you should have already experience, not a playlist for a Saturday night when the subway is running local or whatever. But the collection is cool because it is one guy's take on what internet literacy is for non-loser young people.

This list reminded me of an article written by Jim Emerson, on Roger Ebert's blog, about movie literacy:

On the "Brokeback Mountain" panel, I talked mainly about the film as a work in the tradition of the classical American Western, exemplified by John Ford ("Stagecoach," "The Searchers") and Howard Hawks ("Red River," "El Dorado"), and the Hollywood love story, as exemplified by Douglas Sirk ("All That Heaven Allows") and many others. You can't fully understand a contemporary work of art or pop culture unless you know at least something about its heritage -- just as Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (which Roger Ebert dissected shot by shot with an audience during the conference) would be meaningless without the classic private eye movies and films noir it invokes and subverts, especially "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." "Brokeback Mountain" is not an "anti-Western," but (in the parlance of 1973), you could definitely say that "The Long Goodbye" is an anti-noir. It's like jazz: You have to know the notes Altman isn't playing to understand how he's riffing on and around the familiar melody of the generic private detective movie.

He then provides a helpful list of the 102 "movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate.' I hope these movies are experiences we can all assume we share."

What Makes The Wire Different

Middlebury College is offering a Spring 2009 course titled "Watching The Wire." The syllabus is posted online, and it includes a pitch letter written by series creator David Simon to two HBO executives. Here is my favorite section of the note, which acts as a type of thesis statement for the show:

But The Wire is, I would argue, the next challenge to the network logic and the next challenge for HBO. It is grounded in the most basic network universe--the cop show--and yet, very shortly, it becomes clear to any viewer that something subversive is being done with that universal. Suddenly, the police bureaucracy is amoral, dysfunctional, and criminality, in the form of the drug culture, is just as suddenly a bureaucracy. Scene by scene, viewers find their carefully formed presumptions about cops and robbers undercut by alternative realities. Real police work endangers people who attempt it. Things that work in network cop shows fall flat in this alternative world. Police work is at times marginal or incompetent. Criminals are neither stupid nor cartoonish, and neither are they all sociopathic. And the idea--as yet unspoken on American TV--that no one in authority has any reason to care what happens in an American ghetto as long as it stays within the ghetto is brought into the open. Moreover, within a few hours of viewing, the national drug policy--and by extension our basic law enforcement model--is revealed as calcified, cynical, and unworkable.

And, while we're here, David Foster Wallace loved The Wire:

He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire -- he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I'm really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?