Just finished reading ‘The Corner‘ by David Simon and Edward Burns. Can’t recommend it enough. The book is about people living in West Baltimore, caught up in the drug corners, either through addiction or dealing or by proximity to both.

It’s takes a long hard look at the so-called ‘Drug War’ in America and the effect it has really had.

David Simon was a Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he wrote a book called ‘Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets‘, for which he spent a year embedded with the police, and it was made into a tv series. He then went on to co-author ‘the Corner’ with Edward Burns, a teacher in Baltimore who had served 20 years in the police department.

David Simon met Edward Burns, in or around 1985, when he was looking for sources within the Baltimore Police department for an article on a drug trafficker called ‘Little’ Melvin Williams. Simon was obviously impressed by Burns, and when Burns left the police force, Simon says it just made sense to collaborate on ‘The Corner’. Simon convinced Burns to put off getting his teaching qualification for a year after he retired from the force, so that they could write ‘The Corner’ together.

The two went on to create ‘the wire‘ - which both myself and Bif are big fans of. In fact, I was given it for Christmas by a friend of mine who knows what a huge fan of ‘The Wire’ I am (thanks Eoin!!).

As an aside, ‘Little’ Melvin Williams did time, came out with religion and got a part in ‘The Wire’!

I launched into reading the book without even reading the cover, and I was about two thirds of the way through the book when I came to some photographs of the characters and realised, on inspecting the cover, that it’s a true story.

Simon and Burns actually spent that year on the corners in West Baltimore writing what actually happened to these people.

It reads so well, and contains such fascinating material that I had assumed it was fiction. The stories are also interweaved exceptionally well with social commentary that doesn’t interrupt the reading of the book the way you might expect.

The book gives an amazing insight into the lives of these people, and in the case of the drug addicts, allowing you to empathise with a way of life that we have become used to boiling down to a two dimensional caricature. The book also examines the politics which have failed these people, and calls for change.

If you have been watching the Wire at all, this is a great companion piece as it gives a more full understanding of the way of life in West Baltimore, and it’s also interesting to note some of the inspiration perhaps for characters or events in ‘The Wire’.

‘The Corner’ was made into a mini-series which I would like to see - if anyone knows where to get it, do let me know!

While browsing the Electric Picnic forums, I came across some YouTube material from Monkey Dust - some of the best stuff I’ve seen YouTubed in a long while now.

Monkey Dust is a very black humoured animation series that deals with some fairly sensitive material - in a very insensitive way, but it does it exceptionally well.

One article I read about Monkey Dust quoted the Observer as saying:

A piece of genuinely brilliant programming. Damn, it feels good to be treated like a grown-up for once. Monkey Dust alone has justified the existence of BBC Three. Dark, compelling and utterly unmissable television.

It seems the principal creators, and writers are Harry Thompson and Shaun Pye but the animation is outsourced to a variety of animation firms and animators, resulting in the bizarrely successful visual mixmatch of styles.

Other writers and directors are involved heavily also, which probably explains how so much material is packed into every episode that I’ve seen, and how it stays fresh.

The show often contains stuff which I’m retiscent to embed here, such as sex scenes and extreme violence, but I highly recommend watching them if you’re not sensitive to such stuff - the rating on the DVD is 15s.

One character, who sticks in the mind, to me typifies the type of humour on Monkey Dust is the ‘PaedoFinder General’ who essentially without needing to go through any kind of justice system, subjects suspected paedophiles to trial by media and executes them.

by the power vested in my by a sky news text vote…

Monkey Dust season one is available on Amazon.co.uk and I believe the other two seasons are available through BitTorrent, but I don’t have url’s for the downloads.

There’s a lot of Monkey Dust stuff on YouTube worth watching, I particularly liked this excerpt - it has a good mix of stuff in it, watch for the fairy tale at the end, but be warned it’s got good amounts of sex and violence in it!

More info on Monkey Dust from Wikipedia

I’ll leave you with this clip - The Diary of Ann Frank:

Other undercover beck post…

A lot of hoo-ha goes on about Beck being a scientologist, when I heard it first it didn’t really add up. Beck’s work just seemed to clash with everything I had heard about scientology. As a matter of interest, has anyone ever heard anyone who isn’t a scientologist say anything good about scientology? South Park is my main education on Scientology and it loks pretty nutsy to me.

I did see a documentary on TV which had first hand witnesses telling how they were used by the ‘religion’, but details are sketchy in my mind at this point.

Tom Cruise being a scientologist I can understand… but Beck? I thought he was super-smart. Then I realised. He’s working undercover.

More Undercover Beck.

As Bif already noted, the Irish Blog Awards have opened the nominations process. We’d like to win an award. We’d like your help.

I already nominated for just about every category I thought we in any way fitted into, but an obvious category for us is ‘most humorous post’.

I nominated several of our cartoons, and I’d love if you could do the same. For one thing, you are probably a better judge than me of what our best toons are.

Please, if you have a moment, have a look through our cartoons and nominate something from the last year.

I nominated a few myself, including ‘Christmas Time‘, ‘A Dry White Seasoning‘ and ‘Spyware‘.