Wire 106: S03E11 – “Middle Ground”

Posted on November 8, 2014 by Reverend

Heads up: The S03E10 discussion has been posted, but Google has muted the audio making it useless.

In this Wire 106 video discussion, Paul Bond and I were joined by Amy Wallace to look at season 3, episode 11 of the The Wire: “Middle Ground.” This episode opens up with Omar and Brother Mouzone facing off in an alley. It’s one of the most memorable sequences of the series, and it seems to be directly quoting the aesthetics of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns and the gun comparison scene from Red River:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The opening sequence led us to discuss the changing aesthetic of The Wire over the three seasons we’ve been watching. The almost documentary-style grit of season 1 seems to have given way to increasingly stylized—at times dreamlike—cinematic moments like the opening of this episode. Amy, Paul and I discuss this and much more. Below are some screenshots of some of the scenes we discussed.

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Inspired: If You Need Us, We’re on the Radio

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Reverend

Grant Potter’s ds106 bumper inspired by The Wire is not only awesome, it also captures a brilliant moment when you get a sense how confined Bodie Broadus’s world is. He thinks the radio is going out, but the fact is they’re just leaving Baltimore—something he’s never done before—that become for some awesome character development without much overhead. The Wire at its very best.

See the inspired post here.

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Dockers

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Reverend

s02e09_container 01

The above GIF is from an episode of The Wire during Season 2. The docks are ubiquitous in season 2, and this particular image is a visualization of a cloned machine that captures the vanishing container—presumably filled with illegal cargo. I’m fascinated by the representation of technology throughout the series, but season 2 in particular is really interesting. There’s the highlighting of a cultural move to digital cameras, the increasingly popularity of the web, GPS, and much more that’s constantly being discussed, but there’s also the radical changes to the physical technology of the dock. The first part of the following video features the presentation from Season 2, Episode 7 about the automation of the port of Rotterdam.

Frank Sobotka refers to this as a “horror movie” noting the eroding need of stevedores, but more generally labor. The automated container technology becomes a sign of labor’s vanishing past.

containers

At the same time the container systems that have redefined the way shipping works have metaphorically come to servers thanks to Docker.

Docker

To the degree I fully understand it, Docker provides an open platform for building, running, and shipping distributed applications. In other words, you can get a pre-configured container through Docker that has the proper server environment for running a specific application. For example, if you want to run the the forum software Discourse or the blog engine Ghost (which is what Tim Owens has figured out recently for Reclaim Hosting), we have a server that has the docker engine installed which allows us to quickly fire up different application environments and run them for anyone who requests it.

Docker

And we are grabbing those application images from an open repository of virtualized possibilities that helps us avoid become overly dependent on a closed platform like Amazon Web Services, which is a major bonus. Additionally, Tim is playing with Shipyard, which allows you to manage various containers and resources on your server. What strikes me about all of this is how the metaphorical language of docks, shipyards, and containers helps me wrap my head around this technology. What’s more, it’s cool to see it both through the eyes of Frank Sobotka and Tim Owens—two of my heroes 🙂

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Beaverdam

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Reverend

Today’s Daily Create was to Caption the following picture:

So I did, wire106 style:

beaverdam

Thank you, thank you. I love you all, good night!

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Wire 106 Weeks 11-12: Video Essays, Swedes, Final Projects and More Video

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Reverend

We will be treating weeks 11 and 12 as a single unit, so there will be only one weekly summary due for the work over the next two weeks by  Sunday 11/16 at 11:59 PM.

Wire Episodes
Season 3, episodes 11 & 12, Season 4, episode 1 (week 11)
Season 4, episodes 2, 3 & 4 (week 12)

Video Discussions
Week 11
Season 3, Episode 11: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, Nov 4th
Season 3, Episode 12: 7:30 PM, Thursday, Nov 6th
Season 4, Episode 1: 10:30 AM, Friday, Nov 7th

Week 12
Season 4, Episode 2: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, Nov 11th
Season 4, Episode 3: 7:30 PM, Thursday, Nov 12th
Season 4, Episode 4: 10:30 AM, Friday, Nov 13th

Sign-up here, and remember, we have only 3 more weeks after these, so be sure to get your video discussions scheduled.

Commentary Listen Along
For people who are interested in the episode commentaries, I scheduled commentaries for episodes 11 and 12 for Tuesday (11/4) and Wednesday (11/5) nights at 9 PM on ds106radio this week. You’ll be expected to tweet along with one of the two options using the #wire106 hashtag. If this is an issue let us know.

Video assignments: 16 stars

We’ve been looking at video all semester, and last week we started to dig in to putting videos together. Now it’s time to go all out with video storytelling.

Pay attention to Video the ds106 Way from http://ds106.us/open-course/unit-10-making-movies/ in regards to including credits, more complex audio, write-ups, etc.

Also, we are going to do things a bit differently these next two weeks. Of those 16 stars we will be asking you to focus on two assignments in particular:

Swede an Episdoe from The Wire(4.5/5 stars):
Take any episdoe from The Wire and recreate it. Extra bonus points if you work together with other people from wire106 to create a more elaborate scene, and good practice for what’s to come.

The Wire Video Essay (5 stars)
Using the commentaries as a model. Do a close, in-depth commentary of one of the episodes. Rather than commenting on the episode in its entirety, choose specific scenes to discuss how they develop particular themes, reinforce an aesthetic, etc.

Final Projects

Pick a character from The Wire (first come, first serve) and develop a transmedia campaign. You can read more about the project here. To sign-up for a specific character (only one character per student) claim them in the comments of this post.

Daily creates: 2 each week

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Inspired: Mendel and Oppenheimer Logos

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Reverend

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I was inspired by Nicky Memita‘s Daily Create back on September 2nd. The task was the following:

If great scientists had logos….create your own logo.

I love the geeky science play going on in this logo, it’s at once creative and instructive. As John Meadows commented on the Flickr image:

There’s not enough punnett square humor on the internet, I always say…

I also loved Jeff Paddock’s scientist logo for Robert Oppenheimer.

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I’ll say it again, the Daily Creates have been an awesome source of creativity this semester.

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Inspired: The Wire Scrolls

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Reverend

Click the image for The Wire Scrolls

John Johnston’s command line art has been blowing my mind this semester, and I really need to stop procrastinating and make time to dig into this stuff. Hence, why I inspired his The Wire Scrolls. What you will see if you click the image linked above is Season 1, Episode 1 of The Wire broken down into individual screenshots with subtitles. It gives you a really interesting, and compelling means of looking at and analyzing the show from another vantage point. So amazing.

And he doesn’t stop there, he analyzes the colors between S01E01 and S03E01 to see if the series got any brighter. I think John Johnston’s work makes an amazing case as to why analyzing this kind of aggregate data can be really telling for media studies.

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Wire 106: S03E09 – “Slapstick”

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Reverend

In this Wire 106 video discussion, Paul Bond and I were joined by David Mercer,  Maggie Stough and Melinda Albrycht to look at season 3, episode 9 of the The Wire: “Slapstick.” This episode is a comedy of tragic errors between the Barksdale crew breaking the Sunday truce, Carver tampering with a crime scene to save Hamsterdam, and Prez mistakenly shooting an undercover cop. We discuss these details and more. One of the things that struck me during this episode was why do religious groups get a pass in The Wire? So many institutions are interrogated, but the various religious organizations that come into focus now and again seem to be the closest thing to beneficent in the entire series. I guess that’s one to grow on. Enjoy this discussion.

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Inspired: X-Files Minimalist Movie Poster

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Reverend

xfilesThe artist behind this piece, Kaileyck, is in Jennifer Polock’s section of ds106 this semester. I’ve been following her work through Twitter thanks to the #ds106 hashtag, and I’ve become a fan of her art. Here minimalist poster of The X-Files was striking to me because while stark, the shadows, color scheme and composition suggest the complexity of designing something so stripped down. So many elements have to work well together to lull you into a sense of naturalized minimalism, and this piece did that so quickly for me that I was taken by it. The “X” does so much of the work here, and its placement askance on the page and part of it out of the frame suggest the truth is out there in terms of the rest of the X, we just can’t see it 🙂

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Wire 106: S03E08 – “Moral Midgetry”

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Reverend

Screen Shot 2014-10-31 at 9.50.40 PM

In this Wire 106 video discussion, Paul Bond and I were joined by Ien Harris,  Maggie Stough and Melinda Albrycht to look at season 3, episode 8 of the The Wire: “Moral Midgetry.” This episode stands out for many reasons, but none more than the fact that Kima Greggs mentions Fredericksburg, Virginia:


That’s right, we’re within the universe of The Wire, even if we are on the outer most margins. So cool to get a shout out.

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