Way to miss the point (Wire-related)
DocMcCoy
"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
This is some of the dumbest shit I've read in a long time. Why anyone (and a professional journalist too, it would appear) would even want to put their name to such a poorly-researched, badly-argued and flat-out contrarian-for-the-sake-of it piece like that simply beggars belief. Some of the comments are right on the money, though.
Comments
The whole "race" paragraph is a terrible look
The Wire is really a show with cult status. For it to be a hit would take a miracle. CSI is a hit because its utter bullshit...see the difference?!?
but only every other day, right? the rest of the week you play that role?
lol welcome to the board.
So by this logic, because the cast is also majority black, it's racist.
Nice try. Plus that statement isn't even true.
I read the Guardian all the time. Honestly I think OK! has better news coverage. But if I want to hear the opinions of a bunch of self-righteous pseudo-intellectuals (rather than impartial news coverage), then yeah I fucks with the Guardian.
Thing is, though, it has been on TV over here, since early '04. It's just been stuck away on FX (or FOX289 as it was then), which is neither a Freeview channel, nor one which the big digital/satellite providers carry as part of their basic packages. Hence the reason why a lot of people in the UK are only picking up on it now - there was more UK press coverage for it leading up to Season 4 than there'd been for the previous three seasons combined, plus the DVDs have sold surprisingly well, according to the girl in my local Virgin branch.
As for the Guardian, well, I'm an unapologetic pinko lefty liberal-cum-unreconstructed Bolshevik, and even I find it a bit hard to take nowadays. Plus, I know quite a few freelance journalists, many of whom have written for the Guardian, and the one thing they all say about it is that they pay badly and they pay late. Still, streaming Episode 1 for free was a nice move.
Yeah I was brought up on the paper and still try to read it but pretty much skip G2 entirely these days for fear of having to ever be exposed to the writing of Lucy Mangan ever again. Their whole columnist section has really lost it's way in the last couple of years - that article's kinda par for the course these days, throwaway dismissals sacrificing real content for desperate attempts at smug humour.
Well, you're not supposing well girlie...
Plus if something is good, why would you stop (even though that means a bit of effort from your camp, I get her lame point)?
The whole piece is absolutely nonense anyway...
Yup, as a former Guardian freelance I can say they payed low, late and sometimes not at all. The concept of a spike fee was totally alien to them so they'd commission stuff and if they didn't run it, you'd be out of pocket. The Mail, on the other hand, payed up and payed well. The Mail was full of unscrupulous pinko lefty scribes like me.
Hahaha! I've heard a few "unscrupulous pinko lefty scribes" say that about The Mail too. Much as it may have gone against their principles to write for The Mail, the principle of actually wanting to be paid for your work tended to be the dominant one.
I hate to say it but you are right. Then again nepotism b/w working for cheap has always been the way of the world when it comes to print journalism. Not so much the Oxbridge network as the sons and daughters of newspaper execs and established hacks. The Guardian can't work out whether it's hip or earnest and the combination of vapid greenhorns and crusty old timers is a mismatch which makes the paper hard to take.
Charlie Brooker is the only redeeming element of their journalistic output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Younge
Just curious. I think some of his work is okay.
FX in the UK has just begun to re-run the whole thing this week. Watching Episode 1 again was a joy. It seems even richer upon a repeat viewing.
As good a source as any. They may be a shower of Oxbridge-educated posh boys with some strange ideas about women, but they don't take no prisoners over there.
I think he's one of the more readable op-ed writers on the paper. Some of the stuff he's written since moving to the US has been quite interesting. I liked his recent piece on John Amaechi.
There's a guy called John Patterson who writes a fortnightly column on movies, who I think is really good, but then he's a cynical, embittered lefty with similar tastes to mine. A few of the sports writers are good, too - Kevin McCarra, Richard Williams and David Conn - and Marina Hyde can be funny. The music writing is fucking awful, though. They briefly had Sasha Frere-Jones as a guest columnist one week a few months ago, and to be able to read somebody writing in a broadsheet about rap whose frame of reference extended beyond Eminem, Wu-Tang and the last three Outkast albums was like a breath of fresh air.
Yeah pretty much cosine on all of Doc's points. The sport is still decent (the over by over/minute by minute/game by game on the online site are one of the best ways to waste a day at work) but the arts writing has gone to hell in general.
I particularly want to meet and headbutt John Harris who seems to have an opinion about everything and a knowledge about nothing - the Guardian's equivalent of Henry's Cat. This particular piece on funk music epitmoises where it's all going wrong.
Oh, man - I remember reading that piece and wanting to punch the fucker. Sadly, it's fairly typical of the kind of shite he comes out with when he tries to write about anything that isn't derived from a mid-to-late 80's British indie-rock aesthetic. He wrote a similarly lame-brained article about reggae around the same time. The guy wrote what's considered to be the "definitive" history of Britpop but, much like Urmee Khan on The Wire, he sees no problem in taking an "I don't know what I'm on about here, but I'm going to write about it anyway" stance on whatever topic takes his fancy. The amount of alehouse arguments about music I've had with people like him over the last twenty-odd years must be in three figures by now.