So Many People: Day Five

We got up late today.

After some delicious falafel at the Sphinx, Will, Meg and I walked to the Waterlooplein market. We may or may not have bought a grinder at this point. I don’t really remember (this is the problem with blogging about events that happened more than a week ago… I should takes notes everyday to make writing the actual posts easier…hmmmm)

Soon, it was time for us to go and pick up Marissa at the airport. Of course, Will and Meg had Skype dates with their S.O.’s (I think I hate that term) so I ventured forth to Schiphol alone, again buying an outrageously priced magazine to read (Wired, this time).

[Speaking of Wired, Fake Steve Jobs has a pretty funny feud going on with the magazine. Frigtards.]

I met Marissa (hooray!) without any difficulties and we made it back to Funen. Once we had all reconvened, we ordered some delicious take-out Thai food and had dinner in the apartment. Afterwards, we took the tram to Abraxas and all got shakes. They were, again, delicious. After hanging out at there for a while, we made our way back to Funen. While waiting for the tram in Leidseplein, I had my first encounter with any sort of crime in Amsterdam. Apparently a big soccer game was being played that night (most likely involving the Ajax) and people were gathered around TVs set up all throughout the square. After the game ended, a guy set off a flare (presumably in celebration), filling the entire area with smoke and an orange strontium nitrate blaze. Minutes later, polices cars poured into the square from every direction. As the police flooded in, I saw a man take off running away from the square and within seconds more police chased after him on foot. They quickly caught up to him and grabbed him by the head, eventually shoving him into the back of one of their police vans. It was an exciting couple of minutes.

Back home, we got comfortable and put on John Adams part two. I think it was around this time that I made grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches for everybody, sandwiches that Meg proclaimed “the best sandwich[es] ever.” She also made a great joke that goes a little something like this:

Question: What sound does a grilled turkey make?

Answer: Gobblezzzzzzzzzz

It was funny.

It’s possible that Will and I stayed up until almost 5am playing the copy of SimCity 2000 that he downloaded, but I don’t want to make any promises.

Also: David Morse as George Washington is a fucking pimp.

So Many People: Day Four

While Will and I were still asleep, Tim C. left to catch his flight to London.

After grabbing a quick lunch at the Sphinx Snackbar, I went back to sleep until class at five. After quite a bit of confusion, Will and I eventually worked out the way in which we would reconvene in order to meet Meg at the airport. Her flight was getting in at 8:40, a mere 40 minutes after my class ended, so I felt that it was imperative to figure out the most efficient way to get me from class and Will from Funen to the airport. This was especially difficult because Will had been deferring to me to navigate and hadn’t developed much sense of the geography of the city, so we worked out complicated way for him to meet me at school then get to Centraal.

Luckily, however, class was excruciatingly boring, which led me to bring out my laptop and check my email during class. I therefore found out from Meg that her flight has been delayed. I then got on Skype to make sure that Will had received the same information I had and to let him know I would just meet him back at Funen.

Later, we made our way to the airport. Once we were there at Schiphol, I bought an obscenely expensive copy of The New Yorker to read while we waited (€9.99!) I was half-inclined to go back to Burger King to buy another Smokey Barbeque Mountain burger, but I resisted the impulse. I’m sure my arteries are thankful.

We met Meg (hooray!), ventured back to Funen, smoked, and watch part one of the John Adams miniseries on HBO. It was hilarious and completely over the top in terms of intensity. Maybe that’s just because we were high. One thing that can’t be debated, however, is that Paul Giamatti is a glorious grouch.

And Laura Linney is pretty good, too.

So Many People: Day Three

I had class today. Will and Tim biked around a lot. The fun began that evening when I sat down to write an essay for Regulating Cultural and Religious Diversity in the Netherlands. I spent the evening trying to get through the reading that I needed to do in order to write the essay, but that wasn’t easy with Will and Tim smoking and watching a DVD showcasing highlights from the New York Giant’s improbably run to the Super Bowl last season. I had hoped to go and work at the library, but by the time we woke up from our naps and made dinner, it wasn’t really worth it.

Later, around 11 or 12, we decided to go out drinking for St. Patrick’s Day. This probably wasn’t the brightest idea on my part, but I’m young and dumb, so I did it anyway. We found a buzzing Irish bar in Leidseplein and each ordered a Guinness. After chewing through our drinks, we went back to Funen. I sat outside the room reading so Will and Tim could continue their DVD, but they soon went to sleep and I returned inside to write. Seven hours, 1300 words and 1.5 liters of Coca-Cola Zero later I turned in the paper through BlackBoard, slightly concerned because I didn’t think I had included a thesis nor made an argument of any sort. But I was done, so I went to bed, willfully sleeping through my morning class.

So Many People: Day Two

I don’t think we woke up until four o’clock or so in the afternoon Sunday afternoon.

Eventually, we pulled ourselves of my room and visited the Anne Frank House. It wasn’t really what I was expecting. I assumed the house would be decorated and furnished as it was during the time the Franks and the Van Pels were in hiding there. Instead, most of the room were sparsely furnished (if they were furnished at all) and artifacts from the Frank’s time their were incased in glass. I liked it enough to strongly consider buying a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl from the museum gift shop. I’ve never actually read the diary–my 8th grade Language Arts course read The Diary of Anne Frank, which is stage adaptation of her diary. Why we didn’t just read the diary I’ll never understand, though we did go see a performance of the play after reading it, so maybe that had something to do with it. This was also around the time that Anne Frank: The Whole Story premiered on ABC. I don’t remember much about the miniseries other than that there was a scene where Anne had her period and my dad asked me if I understood what was going on. Yes, Dad, I’ve been through Family Life. Remember? I don’t think I watched the subsequent installments after that.

After leaving the museum, it was decided that we would all benefit from a smoke and a bite to eat. We found a nearby coffeeshop. The only available seating was in a small alcove at a table with three other guys. Having no other options, we sat down across from them. They kept to themselves at first, playing some racing game on a PSP, but as they watched Tim roll a joint, they began to talk to us. Unimpressed with the joint Tim rolled, they began to instruct us about the proper way to roll a joint. Their finished product was a work of art, it was absolutely beautiful. After that, we chatted a little bit about the city. They lived in the city and that coffeeshop was their typical hangout spot after getting off from work. I think they felt that we were offended when one guy made a comment about how there are many not so nice places in the U.S. I just assumed he was talking about the South, so I took no offense at all, but at the same time, I didn’t really know how to respond.

After leaving the coffee, we biked to a pizza place nearby and got some dinner. I got the biggest calzone I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it was absolute packed with peppers, and while I enjoy peppers in moderation, the plethora present in the calzone was a little much. After eating, we took a circuitous bike route back to Funen. I think we might have left the city limits at one point, and we definitely entered a neighborhood I had never even heard of before. Bos en Lommer, I think it was called.

Will was worried the entire time that we were irreparably lost even as I continued to assure him that it was very hard to get lost in Amsterdam by bike since it’s so easy to get around and they city is relatively small, that eventually you’ll come across something recognizable. Whatever.

Before heading back to my apartment, we made a brief detour through the red-light district. I would say that both Will and Tim were pretty entranced. Me? The red light district ain’t no thang anymore, in the parlance of our times. It’s a bit old-hat, I suppose you could say.

We probably watched a movie or something after getting back home, but who remembers?

So Many People: Day One

In the back of my mind, I think I knew that I wouldn’t get any sleep before leaving to pick Will up at the airport. I didn’t even have anything important to do, or any real reason to stay up, but since when has that kept me staying up in the past? Feeling nice and nostalgic after finishing my eulogy for The Wire earlier in the day (a surprisingly emotionally taxing experience), I watched a couple of season one episodes in bed before giving up on sleep completely. Will’s flight was landing around 6:30am, but it was going to be early. The train schedule informed me that I would have to leave from Centraal around 5:30am to be sure to arrive at Schiphol before Will, and because buses didn’t run that early, I would have to leave time to bike from Funen.

Around four, bored in my apartment, I decided it would be more fun to wait for Will in the airport than in my room, so I got dressed and left for Centraal, being sure to bring along my laptop and a book. I got to Schiphol a few minutes before five and headed straight for the 24-hour Starbucks in the main plaza. There aren’t any Starbucks in Amsterdam, so this was my first coffee from the Siren since I stopped by my store the night before my flight to the Netherlands. I wanted a serious kick of caffeine, so I ordered an iced-quad-venti-four-pump-mocha in my best barista voice. The girl on the register just kind of looked at me with a confused look then asked me what “quad” meant. Clearly they do things differently over here. I explained that it meant four shots, and after a bit of confusion over whether I ordered a mocha or a latte, I paid and received my drink at the other end of the bar.

I was initially surprised by the size difference between the Dutch venti and the American venti. In the U.S. an iced venti drink is actually 24oz, slightly disingenuous since the word “venti” literally means “twenty” in Italian. The Dutch venti, however, was quite a bit smaller, perhaps closer to being an actual 20oz, though I’m sure the size was measured in milliliters. This was one of the clearer examples I’ve seen of how the Dutch (and probably Europeans in general) don’t feel the same need that Americans do to consume the largest amount possible. I sipped on my drink as I walked around the airport. Most of the shops were closed, aside from the Starbucks and a 24-hour Burger King. I found the arrival gate that Will would eventually be passing through, and then, because I had plenty of time to kill, I walked back towards the Burger King.

One of my goals while in Amsterdam was to avoid the McDonald’s and Burger King franchises scattered throughout the city. I had succeeded so far, and I rationalized this foray to Burger King because, well, it wasn’t actually in Amsterdam, and, really, where else was I going to get food at that ridiculous hour? The Smokey Barbeque Mountain burger I ordered was pretty good though it seemed to lack the greasy, fatty deliciousness of American fast food products. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. As I ate, I started reading Amsterdam, another novel by Ian McEwan. It seemed pretty good, though not instantly engrossing like Saturday.

After finishing my meal, I decided I needed more coffee, though after the debacle ordering, I thought it prudent to try another one of the three Starbucks locations in the airport. Unfortunately, the only other location in the main concourse was closed, so I gave up on finding more coffee and returned to the arrival gate to wait for Will.

He eventually made it through customs and out through the arrival gate and lots of man-hugging ensued. It was great to see him again after going Will-less for three whole months. We were both exhausted (he had stayed up all night doing homework the night before he left, then didn’t sleep at all on the plane) so after getting back to Funen, doing some quick shopping at AH and grabbing a delicious pastry from a bakery on Csaar Peterstraat, we both crashed around 9:30am.

I was woken a couple hours later by a phone call from Tim Campbell. He had just arrived in the city and was going to walk from Centraal to Funen. I went back to sleep after assuring him we would be there when he arrived and didn’t wake up again until he buzzed up to my apartment. I let him up and greeted him, but after he got settled, I again went back to sleep. Throughout the entire proceedings, Will barely did more then turn over in bed and mumble a hello. He was pooped.

After a few hours we had all woken up and hung around the room chatting again. We were brought out of our stasis by a knock at the door. I had made plans earlier to go to Abraxas with Christy, Alex and Sarah as a way to introduce my guests to Amsterdam’s wonderful coffeeshop scene. We decided to meet them there, as Will and Tim wanted to rent bikes. So the three of us took the bus to Centraal and visited the illustrious MacBike. When the guy working behind the desk saw Will’s last name on his credit card, he began to tailor the rest of his spiel towards his newly-identified Jewish customer. He recommended biking through the Jordaan, the old Jewish neighborhood where we could enjoy a nice drink and a shmoke. Now that we were all cycling-enabled, we biked down the Damrak to Abraxas. After we each ordered a shake (Mocca, Chocco and Kiwi-Mango) we went upstairs to join the group.

Fully aware of what happened last time I had a space shake, I tried to drink this one a little slower. I suceeded, and even refused the joint that was passed around. I felt pretty-fucking-proud of myself. The seven of us eventually split up, and Tim, Will and I decided to walk around the area for a while in search of a restaurant. After at least forty-five minutes of searching that took us down Spuistraat to Rembrandtplein to Rokin and back around again, we eventually settled on a fairly fancy looking Indian restaurant. We began to suspect that the waiter was fucking with us, as he would come up to us to take our order, then rush off quickly to help other customers before finishing with us. Unsurprisingly, the three of us were all really hungry; Will and I each ordered an appetizer, an entree and naan, along with a drink, while Tim ordered an eight-course meal of some sort. As time went on, the shakes began to hit us hard. Long periods of time would go by without any of us saying anything, instead we sat in silence taking in the atmosphere of the restaurant. Will mentioned the auditory hallucinations he was hearing.

As we got ready to leave, though, the conversation picked up again. In fact, it became positively frantic as we struggled to properly split up the bill. Tim and Will’s paranoid voices filled my head as we struggled to stand up up the table. They continued as we began the long walk back to our bikes, a walk that I’m fairly certain took much longer than it should have, though I’m unsure of whether we ever actually got lost. After reaching our bikes, we originally decided to walk them back to Funen as I didn’t think we were in any condition to bike, but after a few minutes of walking Will suggested that we bike, and I complied. I lead the way fairly successfully. I crashed into a girl near Centraal: she was standing in the bike lane and didn’t respond to my repeated warning bells, so I side-swiped her and just kept on riding. Will contends that at another point a scooter almost hit me, but I’m not so sure that happened. I do remember Will and Tim constantly calling out warnings to me from behind, alerting me to the presence of upcoming cars and scooters.

Later, when I asked Tim and Will about the night, they contended that almost all of it was spent in silence. This confirmed a suspicion that had slowly dawned on me as the night progressed, that the conversations between the three of us that I was hearing were all in my head. This was a bit unsettling because I don’t remember ever hallucinating like that before, but I guess at the very least it’s an improvement over believing that I’m dying.

We ended the night by watching the iTunes visualizer for a while and listening to some meditation audio file that Will had downloaded. This was after I had emphatically informed Tim and Will that I was nowhere near the right state of mind to watch The Wire. I don’t think I actually meditated, but I did fall asleep, which I guess is the next best thing.

Out at the Pictures

Nice to see you again. It’s been a little while, I know, but I’ve been busy, I swear. You know, this and that. Anyway, I’m back now and I promise* never to leave you for this long ever again.

Pre-influx of visitors, I went to see Hot Chip perform at the Paradiso. I’m trying to figure out the exact chronology, but I think that was the day before I wrote my Wire Eulogy. So really, I was already behind. The night started out with a pretty useless IES meeting. They provided free pizza (it was unbelievably mediocre pizza from Domino’s. Clearly, they don’t put the same TLC into their pizza in the Netherlands that they do in Minnesota) but that still didn’t make it worth it. We had to talk about our feelings and shit. Not fun.

After that, I went back to Funen and got a little boozy before the concert. After getting well and prepared, I biked off to the Paradiso. I was slightly worried when I saw a line outside the venue because I was getting there at doors open, but these fears quickly turned out to be unfounded as everybody else poured into one of the other rooms, leaving me alone to wander slowly into the main hall. The instruments were already set up on the stage, but as I remained the only person in the room aside from the bartender, it slowly became apparent that I had miscalculated when the show would start, therefore leaving me with an hour and a half to kill before the show actually began. After downing a couple of beers and playing a bit of Solitaire on my iPod, the hall began too slowly fill, so I made my way to the stage, securing myself a spot in the front row.

After a very decent DJ opening set and a bit more Solitaire, Hot Chip came on. Now, a couple of stars had aligned that lead to to believe that this would be an above average show. First of all, I had read in a Pitchfork interview with band member Joe Goddard that the Paradiso was one their favorite venuse to play in the world. It’s easy to see why. As I’ve mentioned before, the club is beautiful. It’s been renovated from an old church and the main hall still has stain-glass windows above the stage. This main room has three levels: the floor and two balcony levels that stretch along three different walls around the stage. This brings me to the second star that aligned: the show was sold out. What I really appreciated about this was that, while the room was very obviously full, and people were spread across all three levels, it wasn’t packed to the point where it became uncomfortable and impossible to move. This is a problem I’ve had at First Ave many times (example: Girl Talk), and I don’t know if maybe it was because I was at the front or because the Dutch are just nicer, but I never felt the wave of claustrophobia that sometimes washes over me at shows there. So, the venue was beautiful and comfortably. On top of that, I saw various cameramen around the room, which indicated to me that the show was being filmed, probably for a live DVD or video of some sort. This meant the band would be trying extra hard to put on an entertaining show.

They delivered.

What followed can only be described as an hour-and-a-half dance party to some seriously great music. The band was very clearly into it, though a smattering of technical difficulties with monitors and guitars slightly marred the first few numbers. After working through the glitches, the show took off. This was right around the time the band, having played mostly from their recent album, Made in the Dark, began to play tracks from their better known album, The Warning. With their hit single Over and Over, the audience let loose, flipping a switch from idle dancing-in-place to full-blown moshing. It was glorious.

Here’s a taste of the mood in the venue about halfway through the show. Sorry about the shitty sound quality. Just imagine me right up at the stage:

The set ended on an incredibly high note and the band returned for a triumphant encore that included No Fit State, a song I had hoped all night that they would play. If one thing made the entire night for me, I think it’s the fact that one of the band members, the fat and jolly vocalists/keyboardist, was wearing a WristStrong bracelet. The Colbert Nation truly knows no bounds.

After downing a final beer and slyly sticking the empty cup in my pocket, I rode back to Funen. Back at home, after resisting prodding to go to PopTrash, I set in for my fantasy baseball draft. I took A-Rod first, followed by Ichiro and Texiera. A pretty beast top three picks, if I may say so myself. Then I stayed up far too late for no reason at all, before getting up on Friday to write about The Wire.

Coming soon: Will’s arrival

*Not really.

A Eulogy for The Wire

Part of me wanted to title this post “A Eugoogoly for The Wire” but I don’t know how appropriate that would be for the situation.

Anyway.

[By the way, a quick note: this will have absolutely nothing to do with Amsterdam, so if you only read these to follow my overseas exploits, you can turn back now. Also, beware of thpoilerth.]

I suppose I’ll begin with my experience with The Wire. At some point during second semester of sophomore year at Mac, Will and I decided that this was a show that we should probably be watching. This was around the time that season four was wrapping up on HBO and critic across the country were hailing the show as the greatest television program ever made. I was skeptical, but it’s also not like I had anything else to watch, either. I had finished Six Feet Under freshman year with Brendan, The Sopranos never captured me like it did everybody else, I caught up with Battlestar Galactica over break, Lost was on hiatus after its disappointing six episode “miniseries,” Studio 60 wasn’t nearly the worthy followup to The West Wing that I had hoped for and season five of 24 just sucked. Hard. The only shows I was watching on a regular basis were Veronica Mars and The Office, but two weekly shows aren’t nearly enough to keep me entertained. So I torrent season one of The Wire and Will and I began to watch.

I should mention, hopefully briefly, the kickass set up Chris and I had in our room to watch pirated content. We had a very respectable off-brand flat screen television measuring 22″ or 24″, I can never never remember. The TV was set up right next to my desk and I had an s-video cable running directly from my laptop to the television. A pair of pimp, twleve-year-old Altec Lansing speakers that came with my family’s first computer, a Gateway 2000, hooked into my laptop completed the setup. Coupled with Bittorrent and VLC player and The Couch of Magical Naps, the room was well-prepared for the consumption of illegal media. And it was glorious.

The Wire captured me right away. The first scene of the series, which I have since learned was lifted almost verbatim from David Simon’s previous show Homicide: Life on the Street, which in turn had lifted the scene from Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, laid out the entire philosophy of the show. Detective McNulty sits next to an unnamed character on the steps leading into a vacant row house, a dead body in the street. The victim, we learn, is Snot Boogie. Snot, the witness explains to McNulty, was known for getting in on their weekly game of back-alley craps, waiting until the pot got big, then running off the money. Usually they would just beat on him a little bit once they caught up to him, there was no need to kill him, the witness, a friend of Snot Boogie’s, laments. If he did this every week, McNulty asks, confused, why did you let him play? He gets his answer: “We got to, man. This is America.”

Perhaps more so than any other single scene, this opening vignette, unrelated to the show’s greater narrative, illustrates one of the show’s primary themes: America as an institution is broken, and from these institutions, the shit always rolls down hill. Characters throughout the show, from all walks of life, are trapped in their existence, unable to move up in life or better society because society and its institutions are against everybody. Scott Tobias, writing for the A.V. Club sums this up far more elegantly than what I can:

The main effect of the homeless murders, though, is to get us right back where we started: In a system so paralyzed by corruption that even the good-intentioned, principled people within it cannot function. The massive cover-up of the murders in City Hall and at the Sun might seem outlandish, but it’s all been worked out to where everyone has to bottle up: If Rawls doesn’t talk, he gets a plum job at the statehouse. If Daniels decides to blab, then he takes down his lover and his ex-wife, and he loses his shot at being Police Commissioner. The Stanfield case can’t go to trial or else the dirt behind an illegal tap and a non-existent “source of information” gets exposed, and maybe more with a little digging…The whole plot has been ingeniously devised to maintain the status quo, and ensure that the system remains broken indefinitely.

From the top down, each character in each institution is stuck in stasis. Tommy Carcetti starts out as an idealistic, silver-tongued member of the city council is elected mayor of Baltimore on his pledge to reduce crime, making promises to the police department about how he’s going to change things, to give them the money they need. But when a budget shortfall is discovered and the schools need money, Carcetti, instead of getting money from the Republican governor who he plans to run against in the next gubernatorial election, cuts funds to the police department, shortchanging them in order to further his career, trapped in the political game. The police are too trapped, forced to make meaningless street corner arrests in order to pump up their stats, ignoring major crimes in favor of the simple bust. Massive drug rings function unabated because knocking the heads of street level dealers is preferred to real po-lice work. The schools similarly chase statistics, teaching for the standardized tests. When Dukie does well in class, he’s transferred to high school, no matter that he’s not prepared, regardless that, removed from his friends, high school is as foreign to him as an expensive restaurant is to Namond. This push through the system, with clearance rates valued above actual learning, ultimately causes Dukie’s downfall, leading him to drop out of school, damning him to a life as a junk collector’s apprentice. The media is the same, with prestige and Pulitzers placed above factual integrity. Of course, the criminals, the drug dealers, the street level peddlers are the embodiment of being trapped in a life they cannot escape. Born into a life of drug operations, raised as soldiers, indoctrinated from an early age to value loyalty to the game above all else, these are people condemned from birth to a life of jail time or early death.

The show treats each character with humanity. Even Marlo Stanfield, the show’s closest likeness to a soulless, inhuman sociopath is show is treated with empathy in the finale, when, after trying to get out of the game and make a new life for himself, he returns to the corners, to the only life he knows. Throughout the first four seasons, I can think of only a handful of characters who appear completely one-note, without a hint of redeeming qualities. The lawyer, Maurice Levy, is the most obvious example, a scumbag who exploits the law and uses backhanded dealings to keep the dealers he represents out of jail. This introduces an interesting paradox, because as much as I, the viewer, empathize with the members of the Barksdale organization, yet I become incensed when Levy’s shady dealings keep them out of jail. This is, perhaps, The Wire’s greatest accomplishment: treating these characters with humanity without glorifying their lifestyle, allowing an affinity for them without glossing over the horrific death and destruction they cause. Because, make no doubt about it, these people are criminals. They deserve to go to jail. But The Wire, like life itself, is fascinated by these shades of gray. When speaking about past police dramas, Simon says in his own words: “The best crime shows…were essentially about good and evil. Justice, revenge, betrayal, redemption. The Wire, by contrast, has ambitions elsewhere…Specifically: We are bored with good and evil. We renounce the theme.”

And so I mourned the passing of many characters on The Wire. Wallace, the bright, young, low-level dealer was the first, murdered by his own friends when it became apparent he was talking to the police. Bodie Broadus, a good, honorable soldier, taken out by the Stanfield organization after he too talked to the police. Omar Little, a gangster living by his code, stealing from drug dealers, only killing within the game, a mythical legend in Western Baltimore shot from behind while buying cigarettes, a superhuman warrior consigned to being forgotten with no newspaper article to mention his passing, the wrong tag attached to his corpse in the morgue. Hardest to take for me personally was the fate of Randy Wagstaff, a cheerful, enterprising kid. When his police protection abandoned him, his foster mother’s home was firebombed by bullies angry and his cooperation with the police, putting her in the hospital with serious burns and forcing him back into a group home. His future becomes clear when he is jumped by a group of older boys in his dorm room, again attacked for being a snitch. His brief appearance the next season is heartbreaking when Bunk goes to interview him further about a murder. He has become cold and angry, a thug, a tormentor of younger children all as a defense mechanism against the brutalities of the group home.

In The Wire everything is cyclical. A new drug kingpin will always rise. The government will always fail its citizens. There will always be an Omar, just as there will always be a McNulty. In this way, the characters, like the show, will never really die. As long as DVDs spin in players, with their lasers interpreting the complex code of zeroes and ones, the show will live on. The characters will live on, and with them, the knowledge that in Baltimore and across the country, the game continues unabated. People die in the streets, dealers are thrown in jail, and every once in a while, every once in a while, a McNulty, or a Pryzbylewski, or a Carver, or a Colvin come along and try to make things just a little bit better.

To borrow the words of Harry Knowles in his review of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Is The Wire the greatest television series ever made? Yes. No. Maybe. For me, it is enough to know it is among my favorites.