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The connection between The Wire and On the Road

03.23.08 @ 12:58PM Tags : davidsimon, hbo, jackkerouac, ontheroad, slate, thewire

I just finished the final season of what will go down as the greatest standard-definition TV series in history, HBO’s “The Wire.” And while someday I’d like to write a eulogy for my now-concluded favorite show, at this point it’s easiest to react to the reactors: I’ve been following along with Slate’s episode diary. In one entry, Slate’s columnists discuss the pronunciation of the word “shit”–drawn out to comical duration, so that it sounds like “sheeeee-it”–by the character of Clay Davis (Isaiah Whitlock), as if it were something heretofore unheard, as if Whitlock invented it. Their final entry attributes it to Whitlock’s uncle. But as I was reading their entries I was wondering where these people were from that they hadn’t heard it before.

Still, I didn’t want to respond with “I’m from Durham, North Carolina, a predominantly black southern city and y’all are white fools for thinking “sheeeee-it” is something new,” as I’m in fact from the suburbs of Durham and am myself half white(/Asian), but as I was reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road last night, I stumbled across the word and its particular pronunciation three times in the space of a page (200):

Yah, what’s good’s a ball, life’s too sad to be ballin all the time, said the tenorman, lowering his eye to the street. “Shh-eee-it!” he said. “I ain’t got no money and I don’t care tonight.”

…

We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. “Do you blow?” He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what the man does, shhh-ee-it!

…

The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. “What that man doing?” he said. “Play the music!” he said. “What in the hell!” he said. “Shh-ee-eeet!” and looked away disgusted.

Not to suggest that On the Road premiered the term, but it does offer proof beyond the anecdotal that the elocution is (at least) fifty years old. So there you go, Slate folks: it ain’t nothin’ new. Sheeee-it.

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Seen: Good Copy Bad Copy

03.18.08 @ 12:03AM Tags : copyright, creativecommons, girltalk, goodcopybadcopy, seen

A year ago I wrote, “in an effort to post more regularly, without having to increase my output of original material, I’m going to start embedding interesting short films or other video content from the far corners of the interweb, most of which (I hope) you will not have seen before.”

I went back to check because I was curious as to how many Seen posts I’d made over the past year; the sad answer is a trifling three.

So here is the Danish documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, which was released gratis last year on the internet. Fitting, considering its subject: copyright, specifically laws pertaining to attribution and payment, both in music and film. The doc, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Chistensen, and Henrik Moltke, moves briskly from music sampling techniques in American hip-hop, to baile funk remixes in Brazil, to movie pirating in Nigeria, to file sharing in Sweden (and plenty more). It features interviews with Girl Talk and Danger Mouse, music by RJD2 and Santogold, and is globetrotting, informative, and entertaining. It’s also an hour long, so I’d recommend clicking the full screen button and kicking back.