Good evening everybody and thanks for your comments, criticisms and compliments.

I feel the need to respond to some of the questions and comments raised in previous posts so let me begin:

1. The guy Michael shot was just some anonymous street dealer. Just someone who Marlo wanted killed no doubt cause he had some nice real estate. And no, I did not notice what Butchie said to Omar when he handed him the money. Butchie has good lines though so I bet it was funny. What did he say?

God I would love to get my hands on a Wire script!

2. Curious about the media season as well. Cops, drug dealing, teaching I know nothing about. The media and writing for newspapers I do, so I will be especially interested in this one.

I think it will be about how the media influences the public, for better and, this being the Wire, mostly for worse. It will probably follow some beat reporter who follows Carcetti and ends up becoming part of the problem. Maybe they get co-opted and become Carcetti's parrot, a sort of Judith Miller of Baltimore

Don't know much about the Baltimore Sun. It ain't what it was in Mencken's day, that's for sure.

3. Yes, the scene at the Arboretum was amazing, brilliant. I wish I could get the transcript for it.

I did not notice the change in light at the end of the scene. I'll have to watch it again. And yeah, good notice on that line of Bodie's, "It's nice." You almost never heard somebody from his world make a comment on the weather. Nice to see him let down his guard. Sad to see him go.

4. I think Parenti is a hero because he gets his hands dirty. The man leaves his comfortable College Park office and gets down into a gritty inner city school to see what goes down. He's trying to effect societal change. He doesn't look heroic or is particularly dramatic but he's trying to effect change in the way that he knows how.
He is taking a risk.

In terms of future postings, I'll see what I can do. I guess I'm just not sure what to write about having no real inside source at HBO. "The Wire" may take place in Baltimore but it's really about urban America. And I'm fascinated by urban America, not the least cause I live in it (San Francisco) and am always eagerly reading articles about trends and ideas in the big city.

Not surprisingly, one of my favorite non-fiction writers these days is a man named Joel Kotkin who's an urban historian. He's written some great articles about the current state of American cities. He lives in LA and he's always raking San Francisco and he has good criticisms. You can find his latest one at www.democracyjournal.org. It's about "the boutique city" and how cities are bending over backwards to try and appear cool. He writes that cities today, instead of trying to cater to the middle class and build communities centered around families and education are instead trying to make their cities "cool and hip" so that young people will wanna move there. He says the strategy is foolish. That's it in a nutshell. He brings up Baltimore.

There's also a great article by Richard Florida in the Atlantic Monthly about how people with college educations are congregating in fewer and fewer places.

Well, I find these things interesting at least.

I'll try and post something here in the future.....

Thanks to all you readers who make this blog worth it!

Happy holidays,

Andy

PS. Does anybody have an mp3 of the Season Four song? I want it and I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. It's so great. Thanks.