Quick hit of nostalgia: David Plotz lists his thirteen favorite scenes from The Wire. My all-time fave is number 11, but I'm not going to quote it here because it's a spoiler for season three. In the next post, Jeffery Goldberg adds "Clay Davis' magnificent turn on the witness stand earlier this season," which was indeed awesome.

Stuff White People Like weighs in:

If you need to impress a white person, tell them you are from Baltimore. They will immediately ask you about The Wire and how accurate it is. You should confirm that it is “like a documentary of the streets,” the white person will then slowly shake their head and say “man” or “wow.”

Entertainment Weekly has its own list of best moments. Slate links to recent radio interviews with cast members. And NYMag's Vulture blog has a shot-by-shot recap of the final montage.

Long, satisfying Terri Gross interview with The Wire's David Simon (web, iTunes). Spoilers for season five and previous seasons, but not for tonight's final episode.

Friendblogging redux: Jake, with John C. Reilly, on Fresh Air, talking about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which by the way is fucking hilarious.

It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.

Fresh Air interview with Friday Night Lights exec-producer Peter Berg, which confirms two things I'd suspected about the show: (a) the actors are usually ad-libbing (something that's especially apparent in the scenes between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, who make me think Yeah, this is how married people talk), and (b) the people making the show really, really care about what they're doing.

Terror

Of all the scary shit that has happened in the past seven and a half years -- the stolen election, the people crashing planes into buildings, the "suspension" of civil liberties, the trumped-up intelligence, the misbegotten war, the failure to plan for entirely foreseeable events, the insistence on "staying the course" when any hope of success is gone and on sacrificing human lives to avoid embarrassment, the contempt for international institutions, the illegal domestic spying, the politicization of every arm of the executive branch -- the one that I can never quite forget about while I'm watching The Office, the one that has turned into a persistent hum of terror at the back of my head, is the indefinite detention of hundreds of foreign nationals on little or no evidence without trial or appeal, also known as "Guantanamo Bay." I often find myself trying to avoid reading about it, it scares me so much.

Here's a Peabody Award-winning episode of This American Life, originally broadcast last year, about what happens at Guantanamo and how we got to this sorry pass. (I guess they're taking another break from documenting liberal upper-middle-class existence.) It includes interviews with two former detainees. (Ira Glass begins the program by pointing out how rarely we see interviews with ex-Guantanamo inmates on TV or in the paper.) You can download it to your iPod or read the transcript. It will make you think about Kafka's The Trial, and about Orwell's 1984, and about the stories we used to hear about the USSR, and about what the hell has happened to this country.

Parody newspaper completes descent into self-parody

I've noticed a miniature This American Life backlash lately, prompted by the launch of the TV show (which I haven't seen, because like the rest of the American people I do not get Showtime). As someone who still likes the radio version of TAL (or, more accurately, as someone who recently started listening to it again because they've begun podcasting it), I think most of the criticism (I'm looking at you here, Virginia Heffernan) is kind of petty, ignoring the things that are excellent about the show to pick on its (real or perceived) flaws. Mickey Kaus, on the other hand, accurately points out that a recent episode's foray into political advocacy was kind of trite. (Incredibly, Kaus still doesn't have permalinks; go here and search for "Glass snobbery," which I assume is meant to be some kind of pun.) [Like your headlines are so great -- ed.]

But this, from the Onion, is so off-base it's kind of absurd: "This American Life Completes Documentation of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence." What the fuck are they talking about? From memory: an incredible episode about prison life, another about the evangelicals of Colorado Springs, a third about a U.S. military aircraft carrier during the war in Afghanistan. This American Life has given me a remarkable kind of fine-grained access to aspects of the American experience that are usually off-limits to liberal, upper-middle-class Americans like myself. (Listen to those episodes and see.) So, yay for TAL, and a rousing fuck you to the Onion.

My friend Jake's movie opens Friday, at least for those of us who live in big coastal metropoles. I have reason to believe that it will be awesome. (New York and Entertainment Weekly think so. UPDATE: And so does A. O. Scott in the NYT, who compares it favorably to The Player and The Larry Sanders Show. UPDATE AGAIN: Slate's Dana Stevens delivers a full-fledged rave.) In the meantime, you can listen to him talking about it with Terry Gross (iTunes, web).