James Hynes

Of all the weekly postmortems of episodes of season five of The Wire (in Slate, Salon, Variety, and a zillion other places), one of the most unusual and insightful, not to mention the liveliest and most entertaining by far, is the one in the New York Times Freakonomics blog, "What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?" It's a weekly discussion of each week's episode by a group of real gangstas (mostly retired) from the New York area, moderated (if that's the word) by Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day. The gentlemen of this informal seminar, which is fueled by beer and pork rinds with hot sauce (which sounds pretty great, actually), go by Wire-worthy sobriquets like Shine and Flavor and Tony-T, and they've already made a number of wonderfully astute predictions, which I won't spoil for you by telling you what they are. It's also a lot of fun to watch the Grey Lady Herself trying without much success to disguise the casual obscenities lacing their conversation. Apparently even the Times' web editors take that "fit to print" business seriously, so you get locutions like "m—er f—ing," which is kind of like the itsy bitsy, teeny weeny string bikini of a bleep that Comedy Central lays over the obscenities on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. You wonder why they even motherfucking bother.

I can't vouch for Professor Venkatesh's book, not having read it, but judging from the title and his sly, self-deprecating prose in the blog, I just might check it out. 

Here's a really interesting interview from the LA Times with actor Dominic West (aka, Jimmy McNulty) about season five of The Wire. As the intro to the interview says, there are a few lines that might be considered oblique spoilers, so read it at your own risk. It doesn't give away anything crucial, though, if you ask me, and it goes a long way toward explaining why this season feels rushed and more implausible than earlier seasons: to wit, HBO cut the season from the usual 13 episodes to only 10. If Simon and his writers had had the extra three episodes, I'm confident Jimmy McNulty's derailment (and Lester Freamon's astonishing decision to join in) would be a lot more credible. It also explains why Clay Davis's trial, which would last weeks in real life, lasted only a day in the show.

But I hasten to add, even less-than-perfect Wire is still better than the best of almost anything else on TV. And I also have to say that West's debut as a director (he directed last Sunday's episode 7) resulted in the best episode of the season so far. Especially that lovely moment at the end, with Kima doing the Baltimore version of Goodnight Moon with her adopted son. It was gorgeously written by the great Richard Price and beautifully shot by West. The Wire usually doesn't go in for bravura filmmaking, but when it does, as in the crane shot of Kima and the boy in the window, it's stunning. It wasn't just one of the best moments in the season, it instantly became one of my favorite moments in the whole history of the show.

Looming out of my childhood comes this monster from my id, circa 1963 (clip courtesy of my brother Mike in Los Angeles). I only dimly remember this commercial—which seems to have been art directed and photographed by the same people who made Star Trek a few years later—but christ almighty, do I remember King Zor. He appeared under our Christmas tree that year, bright green, already loaded up with batteries and armed with ping pong balls. The switch (I dimly recall) was on his underside, and he rolled around on two wheels, with a tinny, recorded roar that was only just barely louder than his junky, grinding little engine. In retrospect, he seems like the kind of toy that you'd play with a lot on Christmas morning, but get bored with by Christmas afternoon, yet I remember playing with him for months afterwards, until his motor burned out. Who knows what this says about me. I usually played with him down in our finished basement, where Zor could wheel and lurch and grumble relatively freely on the tile my dad had laid down—and where I could play with him without bothering my mother, who found him pretty annoying. The point was not just to let him roll around and bump into things, it was to shoot at him with the equally bright green plastic raygun that came with him. The gun fired those darts with little suction cups on them, and the idea was to hit the broad disc at the end of his tail, which would make him wheel around and fire a ping pong ball at you out of the hump on his back. (Just like a real dinosaur, natch.) Come to think of it, the whole exercise was kind of counterintuitive—instead of the dart "killing" King Zor, or incapacitating him, or even just slowing him down, all it did was piss him off and make him more dangerous. Like I say, just like a real dinosaur. Just like a lot of things in life, come to think of it.

It also seems to me that he was a pretty sophisticated toy for a pre-digital age, since he exhibited "behavior" of a sort, and responded to stimuli—or to one stimulus, I should say, and only if you actually hit him at the right spot on the tail. (And never, not once, did I ever make the dart actually stick to his tail, the way that kid did in the commercial.) But soon enough, entropy began to encroach upon the mighty Zor—just as it did on the real dinosaurs—as the ping pong balls went missing or got dinged up so that they wouldn't fire or (in one case) got accidentally crushed underfoot in the heat of battle. And then his roar gave out, and he began to lurch more like a raucous drunk than a murderous carnivore, and finally his motor fried itself, and the light went out of Zor's eyes forever. Well, to be honest, he never had a light in his eyes, but you know what I mean. I kept playing with the gun, though, even after the spring inside broke and it wouldn't fire darts anymore, because it was so cool looking. (Hey, I was eight, alright?) I can still remember the feel of the grip in my hand.

The noble thing to do when he died would have been to bury him in the backyard, so that he could either join with the elements, or fossilize like his brethren and intrigue future paleontologists. I can't actually remember what happened to him, but it's possible he's still in the attic of my parents' house, along with the broken gun and three and a half ping pong balls, still waiting for me, still fighting mad.

Forget Cloverfield—King Zor rules!

Since I'm singing the praises of my friends, I also thought I'd mention my pal Jennifer Howard's new blog. It's funny, it's droll, and it's your one-stop source for all things James Wood. Kidding! Kidding!

Jen's blog is also where I discovered that John Crowley, a truly great American writer, also has a new blog.

And I thought I'd mention two new first novels, by two very talented former students from my novel-writing seminar at Iowa a couple, three years ago. One is Nina Siegal's funny, suspenseful, and sexy new novel, A Little Trouble With the Facts, which is due out on February 26. The other is Love Marriage by V. V. Ganesananthan (aka, Sugi), a cross-generational and cross-cultural story of love and politics (and you can't get much more volatile than that). It's due out on April 8. Good luck, Nina and Sugi!

Coming soon: the mostly true tale of two Jims on the Rio Grande.

Today, a shameless plug for a new book and a new movie from my good friend John Marks over at the Purple State of John. John's a gifted novelist, a veteran journalist, a fluent speaker of German, a lover of country music and barbecue, and my partner in horror movie self-indulgence (Rawhead Rex, anyone? Hellraiser IV? Tombs of the Blind Dead? No?). Here are three things you need to know about John:

1) He's just published his first nonfiction book, Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind, in which John interweaves brilliant and insightful reportage about evangelical Christianity with a powerful memoir of his personal journey from born-again Christian to unbeliever. Most books on this subject are written by journalists who treat their subjects like aliens and act like visiting a megachurch in Colorado Springs is as dangerous as dropping in on Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora. John, on the other hand, writes without condescension and with genuine compassion and respect, even when (especially when) he disagrees with them. It's a terrific book, and I say this as an atheist who is somewhere to left of Richard Dawkins.

2) A byproduct of the book is John and Craig Detweiler's provocative new documentary film, Purple State of Mind. In the course of researching Reasons to Believe, John renewed his friendship with Craig, who had been John's roommate at Davidson College in the 1980s and who had been witness to the first stirrings of John's unbelief. Craig's a filmmaker, an author, a minister, and a professor at Biola University, a Christian university. They started to talk about their faith or their lack of it for the first time in years, and they've filmed four of their conversations for the documentary. It's riveting stuff, often very funny, and finally incredibly moving. Which leads me to the third thing you need to know, which is that...

3) John and Craig are on tour with the film and with John's book. They're screening the film and continuing their conversation with audiences at colleges, churches, and bookstores across the country through April. John's been blogging about their appearances and getting some passionate and unexpected responses from viewers, and I'm looking forward to seeing them in Austin in April and asking them a couple of unexpected questions myself.

John and Craig, I'd say "Godspeed" to you both, but, well, you know. So good luck, and see you in April!