10 Most Recently Played in my iTunes

1. Dance My Pain Away - Rod Lee - The Wire...and all the pieces matter
2. Brandy Alexander - Feist - The Reminder
3. Friend of Mine - Lily Allen - Alright, Still
4. Turkish Song Of The Damned - The Pogues - The Definitive Collection
5. Greenville - Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams - Emmylou Harris Duets
6. Over You Again - Willie Nelson - Moment Of Forever
7. Terry's Song - Bruce Springsteen - Magic
8. The House Of The Rising Sun - Nina Simone - The Very Best Of Volume 2
9. Joy - Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
10. Broken Butterflies - Lucinda Williams - Essence

I can't believe that I resumed blogging for several months now without mentioning the greatest show in the history of television, The Wire, which came to an end this spring. The soundtrack of The Wire is as notable for including favorites snippets of dialog on the show as it is for the music. I'm sure I'll write more about The Wire in the future, but in the meantime I would commend this reflection on the show that was published at the great TV/Movie blog The House Next Door. Some of the best popular culture criticism out there can be found on this blog. This particular article talks about what The Wire might mean for the future of visual story-telling.

...Simon and his collaborators have hoisted the medium of film onto their backs and marched it into the territory previously inhabited by Tolstoy, Melville and Dickens, the greatest of the long-form storytellers.

The achievements of The Wire suggest that the two-hour American-standard-length film only scratches the surface of what the medium can actually do. And it does so with none of the diluting effect that some might expect would come from breaking up a 13-hour film into individual episodes. The experience of watching The Wire is precisely the same as reading Anna Karenina. We do it by sandwiching its chapters in between the chapters of our own lives. We read a chunk, we live a chunk, and each enriches the other.

I've long thought that the best movies were comparable to short fiction, but it required a television show to accomplish the things that a novel can do. The Wire is exhibit A that great television indeed is comparable to the novel. (Others that have done this were also on HBO, like The Sopranos and Deadwood) David Simon, the creative force behind The Wire, used one plotlines in the last season to tease the critics who compared his show to the work of Dickens, but the comparison is apt.