The Not So Simple Art of Murder

I'm reposting this from June of 2009 as what I said then is more relevant today. This year (2013) New York has experienced the lowest murder rate since reliable records began in 1963 and last week there wasn't a single murder in any of the five boroughs. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan this year appears to be fewer than half a dozen. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world (safer even than London) although you wouldnt know that from the TV. Anyway here's what I said back in 2009. I've corrected the data for the latest available year (2011):
...
The New York Times has published an interactive murder map of New York City which incorporates comprehensive NYPD data for the last eight years. The map is interactive because you can filter it by race/age/location etc. It makes for some interesting reading. I always thought it was amusing when I lived in Oxford that Inspector Morse stumbled across a murder every week when there hadn't been an actual murder in the city of dreaming spires in eight years. New York's plummeting murder rate has generated a similar dissonance. If you add up all the deaths on Law & Order, L&O SVU, CSI-NY etc. etc. there are easily 100+ murders in Manhattan every season and because most of the writers are white - and that's the demographic they skew to - most of the TV victims are also white. And this is where the dissonance comes in. If you look at the actual data around 92 percent of all murder victims in New York City are black or Latino. In Manhattan in 2011 27 people were murdered, four of whom were white. You heard me right. Four. (Although I am red/green colour blind so you might want to check that interactive chart for yourself.) Yes this is four people too many people and of course it still represents four tragedies but that's not my point. By several orders of magnitude there are going to be many more white Manhattanite crime victims on network TV, movies and in crime novels this year than actually died in real life. I reckon ten times as many white people will be killed on the Law & Order franchises alone than in the real world. Why is this? Well murder sells of course and as a crime novelist I don't want to put a stop to that but why can't the networks tell us the real story that emerges from the NYT interactive map? The real victims of crime in New York are black and Latino and they live in places like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Bed Sty. Places where the actors, execs and writers never go. Maybe the studios are worried that those stories wouldn't play in Iowa. Well the success of The Wire proves that realistic crime dramas can work, but it's not easy, you can't just give people formula, you've got to write intelligent believable characters; in short the writers would have to exercise that big muscle between their ears and the networks would have to stop playing it safe. Would Inspector Morse have been as successful a show if he had gone after bicycle thieves and cocaine dealers? Maybe. Maybe not. But I think a little dose of reality might have been fun once in a while. Similarly with TV, films and crime fiction. Perhaps they could at least make an occasional attempt to show the reality of murder in New York. It's a reality that mostly exists across 110th Street way beyond the comfort zone of most of the creative types, who if truth be told probably all live in Santa Monica anyway.

Some Breaking Bad Cheers And Boos

Needless to say, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

my favourite were the existential episodes

1. Cheer. The season finale. Glad they brought back all the old characters, tied up the loose ends and gave us the pleasure of seeing the really bad guys brought down and the not quite so bad guy (Walt) go out in a manner of his own choosing. And Jesse lived. And got away. Not quite as good as the fantastic Face Off season finale but fairly satisfying never the less. And certainly not the disaster that was Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld etc. etc.
2. Cheer. The deaths of Todd and Lydia. Among the most cathartic and fan pleasing moments in any show. Ever.
3. Boo. The money. I never bought the whole premise for that plot development about them "finding his money". As if brainy Walt wouldn't have checked whether the van he was driving out into the desert had GPS or not. You or I might have forgot. Walt, no.
4. Boo. Skyler White. Hmmm. Never bought Anna Gunn's performance and the dialogue and scenes between her and Marie were always dreary. When the Big Bang Theory decided to have 3 female leads they brought in female writers. Breaking Bad never did and it showed.
5. Boo. Merchandising. The merchandising around this show has been ridiculous. This isn't Star Wars. Its a dark, adult crime drama. You don't need to merchandise it to death. No one needs the money. Not cool. And as for Talking Bad don't get me started on that tacky infomercial of a show that really is an utter embarrassment.
6. Cheer. Albuquerque. When I lived in Denver I used to drive down to New Mexico a lot. I'm glad many more people are going to visit the blue collar (and pre BB largely untouristed) city of ABQ.
7. Cheer. From Mr Chips To Scarface. Even though they took this cheesy idea literally for the season finale it still kinda worked.
8. Cheer. The existential episodes. My favourite episodes were the ones where not much happened and we went off into a Samuel Beckett play (like the one were Walt looks for a fly in his meth lab). That was a breath of fresh air in a television industry that seems obsessed by the need for every scene to turn the wheel of the plot (an idea pushed by the likes of David Mamet). The only drama show that seems to do that now is Louie and Louis CK only gets away with it because people think they're watching a comedy.
9. Boo. New Hampshire. New Hampshire didn't look a bit like New Hampshire. The sky was the wrong colour.
10. Cheer and Boo. BB is everywhere. I'm glad but also a little sad that this has become a pop culture phenom. When I started plugging Breaking Bad on this blog five years ago no one had heard of the show. Now look at the monster. Two(!) front page stories in The New York Times, mentions on the TV news, entire features in serious magazines. I'm a little wistful of the days when me and six other chemistry geeks were watching this programme in our basements.

Northern Ireland Is A Complicated Place

One of the most interesting things about coming from Northern Ireland is how mixed up it makes you feel. Not quite Irish, not quite British, Northern Irish? What is that, exactly? It's so easy to be, say, an American or an Englishman or an Australian. There are so many role models out there who tell you how to do it. The perfect American? Thomas Jefferson or Ernest Hemingway or Mark Twain.  The perfect Englishman? Stephen Fry. The perfect Ozzie? Shane Warne. To embrace this identity is so easy, so straightforward and yet. . .and yet just a teensy bit dull, no? To be Northern Irish is to exist in a nether realm, a grey area, an Interzone ...a place where you can accept or reject your baggage laden heritage or create an entirely new one for yourself. To be Northern Irish is to be in that difficult postmodern space where you make your own laws. Albert Camus understood this. He was a pied noir from Algeria, who wasn't quite African, wasn't quite French. He saw that the really interesting path was the one you took through the looking glass to a land where you created yourself.
...
I was thinking about this as I read an article in The New York Times today on the complicated matter of Rory McIlroy's identity. Niall Stanage took The Times's readers into what for them must have been surprising new territory, as, for the last thirty years or so, the Times's N.I. reporting has had a distinct lack of nuance - the Protestants and the Brits made easy villains and the IRA made easy heroes for a paper with an Irish American readership in the thousands. I remember the days when Maureen Dowd used to openly praise the IRA and attend its fundraisers in Manhattan and of course Long Island is still represented by the thugish buffoon Congressman Peter King who has long been a champion of IRA terrorism. Stanage's article however looks beneath the surface to the curious, confusing, nested identities present in Ulster. He senses that times have changed and Rory McIlroy is symptomatic of that change. Here's a couple of choice paragraphs (below) and you can read the rest at The New York Times. 

I grew up in Belfast during the Troubles. I was on the cusp of high school when Barry McGuigan defeated the great Panamanian Eusebio Pedroza to become a world champion in 1985. As I was the product of a family that identified primarily as Irish rather than British — and that was nominally Protestant, yet in reality secular — McGuigan’s Catholic background carried no negative connotation for me. But I was still aware of it. So was everyone else. At that time, in that place, everyone I knew could identify in an instant the religious affiliation of even the most apolitical people who had propelled themselves from Northern Ireland onto a bigger stage. Van Morrison was Protestant. Liam Neeson was Catholic. George Best, perhaps the finest soccer player of his generation: Protestant. Dennis Taylor, a snooker world champion: Catholic. 


McIlroy isn’t like that. The only reason I was able to inform McGuigan of the golfer’s religion was because I had made a deliberate effort to discover it. Atop McIlroy’s official Web site sits the flag of Northern Ireland. It was for many years considered an exclusively loyalist symbol, an emblem of raw hostility to Catholics. At its center is the Red Hand of Ulster. The same logo was once seen as sufficiently bellicose to form the focal point of another crest — that of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the organization that murdered McIlroy’s great-uncle. For a Catholic to endorse the Northern Ireland flag would once have marked him out as a quisling in the eyes of many. It would have amounted to an endorsement of an entity where religious discrimination was commonplace. 


Some still don’t like McIlroy’s choices. But the grumbles are mostly confined to the shrinking band of irredentist Irish republicans. For the first time, a Northern Irish identity that can be embraced by almost all the residents of that patch of earth may be arriving.  “You can be different things at different times,” Trevor Ringland [the Irish rugby international] insisted. “Here, there is sometimes the pressure to be just one thing. In fact, most of us are mongrels. You can be both Irish and British. It is not one thing or the other."The issues of politics and religion have mattered for a very long time in Ireland, north and south. They have served as badges of pride or belonging for some. But they have felt like traps or prison cages to others.

Beer Nirvana

Excellent article in The New York Times last weekend about that beer nirvana known as Belgium. Here's a little taste:

ON a fog-dense spring afternoon in the Belgian countryside beer connoisseurs had flocked to Westvleteren, a far-flung town in the southwest corner of West Flanders, to sample what many of them consider to be the best beer in the world. The nectar in question was Westvleteren 12, a rich, brown-hued brew that has double the alcohol of most beers and a reputation to match, and that can be bought only at the In De Vrede cafe and across the street at the St. Sixtus Abbey. Cyclists in Spandex clattered about in cleats as Belgian families quietly nibbled on cheese plates and pâté. The only party missing was the monks who brewed the hallowed beer.

Nestled in this province’s verdant farmlands, the St. Sixtus Abbey houses one of six official Trappist breweries in Belgium. The monks have perfected their craft over more than 160 years, and despite closing the brewery to visitors, shunning advertising, retail outlets and even labels, their beer has taken top honors from enthusiast sites like RateBeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com. (The only sure way to bring home the brew — save the black market — is by calling the Abbey’s “beerphone” to reserve a case for pick-up. And even then the monks will supply only one case a person, a month; no resales allowed.)
You can read the rest of the piece here.

The video is from Jonathan Meades's early film on Belgium. Meades is a fan of the country and of its beers. The beer bit begins at 2.20.
... 
Every year around Christmas time I treat myself to a four pack of Westvleteren. I do not go to Belgium, instead, I, er, use the black market referred to in the article. I don't feel good about this and I appreciate that this is not what the monks want, however Westvleteren is as good as everyone says it is and, uhm, well, it is Christmas.