The Wire Re-Imagined as a Classic Video Role-Playing Game

If some­one has insis­tent­ly rec­om­mend­ed that you watch the whole of The Wire, David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series of Bal­ti­more­an insti­tu­tion­al dys­func­tion, that per­son has — let’s face it — prob­a­bly been a thir­ty­ish white guy. But we thir­ty­ish white guys do have our iso­lat­ed moments of cul­tur­al astute­ness, of which, accord­ing to all the legit­i­mate crit­ics, enthus­ing over The Wire counts as one. But we also go into volup­tuous Prous­t­ian rap­tures at the sight of our favorite old video games, so you’d do well to take us with a grain of salt. The above video from Col­lege­Hu­mor, a site that knows its audi­ence, trans­pos­es the social­ly crit­i­cal, bor­der­line-nihilis­tic action of The Wire into the pix­el-inten­sive, usu­al­ly moral­ly sim­plis­tic form of a con­sole role-play­ing game from the late eight­ies or ear­ly nineties. This will make a cer­tain over­lap in the cul­tur­al Venn dia­gram quite excit­ed indeed, and no doubt pro­vide a source of strange fas­ci­na­tion to the rest.

The play­er takes the role, for the most part, of trou­bled Bal­ti­more Police Depart­ment Detec­tive Jim­my McNul­ty, whose equip­pable items include “gun,” “badge,” “whiskey,” and “hair gel.” When he elects to “fight the sys­tem,” a turn-based bat­tle launch­es, pit­ting McNul­ty against the sys­tem’s lit­er­al embod­i­ment, a pha­lanx of invin­ci­ble bureau­crats. The game ren­ders a drug deal as the kind of store you’d vis­it in The Leg­end of Zel­da. Items avail­able: “crack,” “hero­in,” and “mana potion.” One stage even turns into some­thing of a graph­ic adven­ture, where the play­er, in search of evi­dence, clicks com­mands like “inspect,” “take,” and “hit,” although every pos­si­ble action seems to result in noth­ing more than curs­ing from either McNul­ty or his part­ner Bunk More­land. Clear­ly, this video con­tains a wealth of laughs for the Wire (or vin­tage role-play­ing game) diehard. If you’ve put off get­ting into the show, per­haps the prospect of get­ting these inside jokes will con­vince you to take the plunge. And putting in a few hours with the ear­ly Final Fan­ta­sy titles won’t hurt.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969)

Can you imag­ine Jimi Hen­drix singing a duet with Lulu? Well, nei­ther could Hen­drix. So when the icon­o­clas­tic gui­tar play­er showed up with his band at the BBC stu­dios in Lon­don on Jan­u­ary 4, 1969 to appear on Hap­pen­ing for Lulu, he was hor­ri­fied to learn that the show’s pro­duc­er want­ed him to sing with the win­some star of To Sir, With Love. The plan called for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to open their set with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and then play their ear­ly hit “Hey Joe,” with Lulu join­ing Hen­drix onstage at the end to sing the final bars with him before segue­ing into her reg­u­lar show-clos­ing num­ber. “We cringed,” writes bassist Noel Red­ding in his mem­oir, Are You Expe­ri­enced? The Inside Sto­ry of The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence.

Red­ding describes the scene that he, Hen­drix, and drum­mer Mitch Mitchell walked into that day as being “so straight it was only nat­ur­al that we would try to com­bat that atmos­phere by hav­ing a smoke in our dress­ing room.” He con­tin­ues:

In our haste, the lump of hash got away and slipped down the sink drain­pipe. Pan­ic! We just could­n’t do this show straight–Lulu did­n’t approve of smok­ing! She was then mar­ried to Mau­rice Gibb of the Bee Gees, whom I’d vis­it­ed and shared a smoke with. I could always tell Lulu was due home when Mau­rice start­ed throw­ing open all the win­dows. Any­way, I found a main­te­nance man and begged tools from him with the sto­ry of a lost ring. He was too help­ful, offer­ing to dis­man­tle the drain for us. It took ages to dis­suade him, but we suc­ceed­ed in our task and had a great smoke.

When it was time for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to go on cam­era, they were feel­ing fair­ly loose. They tore through “Voodoo Child” and then the pro­gram cut to Lulu, who was squeezed awk­ward­ly into a chair next to an audi­ence mem­ber in the front row. “That was real­ly hot,” she said. “Yeah. Well ladies and gen­tle­men, in case you did­n’t know, Jimi and the boys won in a big Amer­i­can mag­a­zine called Bill­board the group of the year.” As Lulu spoke a loud shriek of feed­back threw her off bal­ance. Was it an acci­dent? Hen­drix, of course, was a pio­neer in the inten­tion­al use of feed­back. A bit flus­tered, she con­tin­ued: “And they’re gonna sing for you now the song that absolute­ly made them in this coun­try, and I’d love to hear them sing it: ‘Hey Joe.’ ”

The band launched into the song, but mid­way through–before Lulu had a chance to join them onstage–Hendrix sig­naled to the oth­ers to quit play­ing. “We’d like to stop play­ing this rub­bish,” he said, “and ded­i­cate a song to the Cream, regard­less of what kind of group they may be in. We ded­i­cate this to Eric Clap­ton, Gin­ger Bak­er and Jack Bruce.” With that the band veered off into an instru­men­tal ver­sion of “Sun­shine of Your Love” by the recent­ly dis­band­ed Cream. Noel Red­ding con­tin­ues the sto­ry:

This was fun for us, but pro­duc­er Stan­ley Dorf­man did­n’t take it at all well as the min­utes ticked by on his live show. Short of run­ning onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was noth­ing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talk­ing at the end, played through Stan­ley tear­ing his hair, point­ing to his watch and silent­ly scream­ing at us. We played out the show. After­wards, Dorf­man refused to speak to us but the result is one of the most wide­ly used bits of film we ever did. Cer­tain­ly, it’s the most relaxed.

The stunt report­ed­ly got Hen­drix banned from the BBC–but it made rock and roll his­to­ry. Years lat­er, Elvis Costel­lo paid homage to Hen­drix’s antics when he per­formed on Sat­ur­day Night Live. You can watch The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From SNL here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘Elec­tric Church’: The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence Live in Stock­holm, 1969

Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

In April of 1959 the British philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Bertrand Rus­sell sat down with John Free­man of the BBC pro­gram Face to Face for a brief but wide-rang­ing and can­did inter­view. Rus­sell rem­i­nisced about his ear­ly attrac­tion to math­e­mat­ics. “I got the sort of sat­is­fac­tion that Pla­to says you can get out of math­e­mat­ics,” he said. “It was an eter­nal world. It was a time­less world. It was a world where there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cer­tain kind of per­fec­tion.”

Rus­sell, of course, dis­tin­guished him­self in that rar­i­fied world as one of the founders of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy and a co-author of Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, a land­mark work that sought to derive all of math­e­mat­ics from a set of log­i­cal axioms. Although the Prin­cip­ia fell short of its goal, it made an enor­mous mark on the course of 20th cen­tu­ry thought. When World War I came along, though, Rus­sell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tow­er of abstract think­ing. “This world is too bad,” Rus­sell told Free­man. “We must notice it.”

The half-hour con­ver­sa­tion, shown above in its entire­ty, is of a qual­i­ty rarely seen on tele­vi­sion today. The inter­view­er Free­man was at that time a for­mer Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a future Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. Rus­sell talks with him about his child­hood, his views on reli­gion, his polit­i­cal and social activism, even his amus­ing con­vic­tion that smok­ing extend­ed his life. But per­haps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Free­man asks the old philoso­pher what mes­sage he would offer to peo­ple liv­ing a thou­sand years hence. In answer­ing the ques­tion, Rus­sell bal­ances the two great spheres that occu­pied his life:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on the Exis­tence of God and the After­life

Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell (and a Col­lec­tion of Free Texts)

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) Talks Death Penalty with William F. Buckley (1968)


Tru­man Capote did­n’t study to become expert in cap­i­tal crime and its pun­ish­ment,” says William F. Buck­ley on the Fir­ing Line broad­cast of Sep­tem­ber 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engage­ment of the slaugh­ter of the Clut­ter fam­i­ly, which went into the writ­ing of In Cold Blood, left him with high­ly set­tled impres­sions in the mat­ter.” You can hear Buck­ley elic­it and Capote con­cise­ly lay out the posi­tion to which these impres­sions brought him in the clip above. Though remem­bered for his own con­ser­v­a­tive views, Buck­ley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, fre­quent­ly and with­out hes­i­ta­tion, pub­lic fig­ures who strong­ly dis­agreed with him. This sense of con­tro­ver­sy gen­er­at­ed a stream of clas­si­cal­ly com­pelling tele­vi­su­al moments over Fir­ing Line’s 33-year run, but for my mon­ey, all the direct con­flicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from stan­dard ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tions, as Capote does here.

Buck­ley opens by ask­ing whether “sys­tem­at­ic exe­cu­tion of killers over the pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tion might have stayed the hand of the mur­der­ers of the Cut­ter fam­i­ly.” Capote replies that “cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite dif­fer­ent rea­sons than are usu­al­ly advanced — would in itself be a sin­gu­lar­ly effec­tive deter­rent, if it were, in fact, sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly applied. But because pub­lic sen­ti­ment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this end­less pol­i­cy of appeal — to such a degree that a per­son can be eleven, twelve, thir­teen, four­teen years under a sen­tence of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusu­al, and cru­el pun­ish­ment. If peo­ple real­ly were sen­tenced to be exe­cut­ed and were with­in a rea­son­able peri­od of time, the pro­fes­sion­al mur­der­er knew the absolute, pos­i­tive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would cer­tain­ly give them sec­ond thoughts.” This per­haps lends itself poor­ly to a sound bite, but Fir­ing Line at its best nev­er dealt in those.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William F. Buck­ley Meets (Pos­si­bly Drunk) Jack Ker­ouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hip­pies, 1968

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem He Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Jim Henson’s Animated Film, Limbo, the Organized Mind, Presented by Johnny Carson (1974)

Not hav­ing grown up dur­ing the Mup­pets’ first and high­est wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty, I’ve always won­dered how some­thing like The Mup­pet Show could pos­si­bly have attained such main­stream cul­tur­al pri­ma­cy. A friend of mine who did spend his child­hood watch­ing pup­peteer Jim Hen­son’s array of crea­tures do their thing on nation­al tele­vi­sion offers a sim­ple expla­na­tion: “It was the sev­en­ties.” Though Hen­son began his pup­petry career twen­ty years before The Mup­pet Show’s 1974 pilot episode, his dis­tinc­tive­ly earnest yet pre­scient­ly post-psy­che­del­ic vision seemed made for that decade. Amer­i­ca respond­ed by ele­vat­ing his work into the zeit­geist, and not just the stuff prop­er­ly involv­ing Mup­pets. Above, you can watch a 1974 clip from The Tonight Show fea­tur­ing a short per­for­mance from Hen­son and fel­low Mup­peteer Dave Goelz called Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind.

Hen­son and Goelz treat John­ny Car­son and the Tonight Show audi­ence to a jour­ney through the brain, as an abstract­ed, hand-oper­at­ed face nar­rates the pas­sage through organ­ic struc­tures like his medul­la oblon­ga­ta, and cere­brum, and the seats of things less defin­able, like thoughts of his fam­i­ly, thoughts of his ene­mies, his “extra-spe­cial sec­tion of good thoughts,” his evil thoughts, and his fears. The score comes from elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tion pio­neer Ray­mond Scott, whose 1964 album Sooth­ing Sounds for Baby has won great respect among enthu­si­asts of ambi­ent music. Watch­ing Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind in 2012 brings one obvi­ous lament to mind: why don’t they make such delight­ful­ly eccen­tric and artis­tic tele­vi­sion any­more? But of course they do make it, in stranger and less pre­dictable ways than even Hen­son did, but main­ly in the count­less frag­ment­ed, com­par­a­tive­ly mar­gin­al venues of mod­ern media. Lim­bo aired on a show that half the peo­ple you knew would have seen. It was the sev­en­ties.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim Henson’s Vio­lent Wilkins Cof­fee Com­mer­cials (1957–1961)

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

Jim Hen­son’s Short, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Film (1965)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

Intel­li­gence comes at a price. The human species, despite its tal­ent for solv­ing prob­lems, has man­aged over the mil­len­nia to turn one of its most basic sur­vival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essen­tial­ly,” says Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make our­selves sick.”

In the 2008 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (above), Sapol­sky and fel­low sci­en­tists explain the dead­ly con­se­quences of pro­longed stress. “If you’re a nor­mal mam­mal,” Sapol­sky says, “what stress is about is three min­utes of scream­ing ter­ror on the savan­nah, after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.” Dur­ing those three min­utes of ter­ror the body responds to immi­nent dan­ger by deploy­ing stress hor­mones that stim­u­late the heart rate and blood pres­sure while inhibit­ing oth­er func­tions, like diges­tion, growth and repro­duc­tion.

The prob­lem is, human beings tend to secrete these hor­mones con­stant­ly in response to the pres­sures of every­day life. “If you turn on the stress response chron­i­cal­ly for pure­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons,” Sapol­sky told Mark Shwartz in a 2007 inter­view for the Stan­ford News Ser­vice, “you increase your risk of adult onset dia­betes and high blood pres­sure. If you’re chron­i­cal­ly shut­ting down the diges­tive sys­tem, there’s a bunch of gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders you’re more at risk for as well.”

Chron­ic stress has also been shown in sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies to dimin­ish brain cells need­ed for mem­o­ry and learn­ing, and to adverse­ly affect the way fat is dis­trib­uted in the body. It has even been shown to mea­sur­ably accel­er­ate the aging process in chro­mo­somes, a result that con­firms our intu­itive sense that peo­ple who live stress­ful lives grow old faster.

By study­ing baboon pop­u­la­tions in East Africa, Sapol­sky has found that indi­vid­u­als low­er down in the social hier­ar­chy suf­fer more stress, and con­se­quent­ly more stress-relat­ed health prob­lems, than dom­i­nant indi­vid­u­als. The same trend in human pop­u­la­tions was dis­cov­ered in the British White­hall Study. Peo­ple with more con­trol in work envi­ron­ments have low­er stress, and bet­ter health, than sub­or­di­nates.

Stress: Por­trait of a Killer is a fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant documentary–well worth the 52 min­utes it takes to watch.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sapol­sky Breaks Down Depres­sion

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

Julia Child Shows David Letterman How to Cook Meat with a Blow Torch

Julia Child would have turned 100 years old today. As an author and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty, Child intro­duced French cui­sine to the main­stream Amer­i­can pub­lic and turned cook­ing into a dai­ly adven­ture.

Child became fas­ci­nat­ed with French food after mov­ing to Paris in 1948. She stud­ied cook­ing at the renowned Cor­don Bleu school, and in 1961 co-authored the two-vol­ume Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing. More than 2 mil­lion copies of the book have been sold, but Child is best known for her tele­vi­sion appear­ances on a suc­ces­sion of pro­grams, start­ing with The French Chef in 1962 and end­ing with Juli­a’s Casu­al Din­ners in 1999, just three years before her death in 2002 at the age of 92.

In 2009 she was the sub­ject of the film Julie & Julia, star­ring Meryl Streep. The movie is based on the real-life adven­tures of Julie Pow­ell, who was great­ly inspired by Child. “Some­thing came out of Julia on tele­vi­sion that was unex­pect­ed,” says Pow­ell in a video at Biography.com. “She’s not a beau­ti­ful woman, but her voice and her atti­tude and her playfulness–it’s just mag­i­cal. You can’t fake that. You can’t take class­es to learn how to be won­der­ful. She just want­ed to enter­tain and edu­cate peo­ple at the same time. Our food cul­ture is bet­ter for it.”

For a quick reminder of Child’s voice, atti­tude and playfulness–not to men­tion her con­sid­er­able skill with a blowtorch–we bring you her mem­o­rable late-1980s appear­ance on Late Night with David Let­ter­man, in which the resource­ful Child adjusts to time con­straints by chang­ing a sim­ple Amer­i­can ham­burg­er into beef tartare grat­iné.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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