Okay, let’s grant this at the outset: no one needs me to tell them about the – let’s face it – unparalleled excellence of HBO’s The Wire, given that we’re dealing, after all, with a truth acknowledged by everyone who’s ever sat in front of a cathode ray tube in the hope of filling up the silence of the infinite spaces that surround them… So, if any of you heart-wrenchingly attractive people still need my testimony to be convinced of the greatness of this show, then you are not only a friendless (if lovably eccentric) technophobic anchorite who’s spent far too much time with no-one to talk to but the tins of “Chunky Irish stew” that line your fallout shelter, but you’re also someone who needs to hear the following harsh truth the way you need a tin-opener and maybe some kind of gaming console: YOUR FRIENDS ARE DELIBERATELY CONCEALING THINGS FROM YOU IN ORDER TO LAUGH AT YOUR CONFUSION. Yes, the Illuminati are running this caper, ladies and gentleman, which is why your life is now, and forever shall be, one part The Truman Show, one part Emir Kusturica’s Underground.  (Not a bad film concept, incidentally, as long as all the hierarchies of angels can somehow conspire to make the likes of James Cameron stay away from the thing….) But, anyway. The Wire is one of those shows, that despite being (at least now in its resurrected ‘DVD boxed set’ days) so popular that, if you’re a 20 to 50-ish vaguely middle-class person of the kind who’s seen at least one HBO drama, than you can safely bet your last marketable organ that at least two-thirds of your friends are, on any given night, sedulously watching the latest episode instead of attending your birthday party/wedding/stupefying Houellebecqian orgy as they mumblingly promised they would while drunk and/or attempting to seduce you with their endearing sensitivity.  Believe me, then, when I say that even as you read this, people you know are already thinking of how they can bestpretend to be deadin order not only to escape your Friday night drinks, but to indulge in the kind of Wire marathons that would make the Bayreuth festival look like the punch-line to a pun. And don’t misunderstand me: I’m not just saying that your shy, housebound, irredeemably uncool friends are abandoning you in favour of watching the show, I’m saying that this is true even of the resolutely sociable and earnestly self-improving ones – the ones who purposely don’t own televisions.    Trust me when I say that – all hyperbole aside –these people, are, even as we speak, finding the flimsiest of pretexts to drop in on your mutual friends (“Hi Hailey, Hi Amanda…just thought we’d stop by and see the new baby…ooh..how excit-ing…” in the hope of getting  even a whiff of Omar Little and his merry band of social-realist-story-telling uplifted and transformed-by-a-panoramic-perspective, acute insights into systematic injustice and -larger-than-life character archetypes who, as in Dickens, play the role of putting flesh on structures that do, at least in a certain sense, and contra a famous May ’68 slogan: walk the streets.  (Anyone who doubts me on that last point should read Joan Copjec’s book Read my Desire >until they…y’know…submit). The Wire, at its heart is so vast, so baroque, so generally magnificent and has also had so many gazillions of words put forward attesting to its vastness and baroqueness, that it’s hard to know where to start.  In deference to this, I’ve decided to try introducing my own commentary by means of one gratuitously over-extended  knock-knock joke. (As I believe Lao Tzu said: have blog, need gimmick: otherwise how else will I ever get to do that hipster froideur thing via which the more important doyens-of-the-blogosphere manage to patronise all the non-entities in their comment boxes?  So, here we go: Knock, knock.    “Who’s there…?”   “That was…”   “‘That was’ who…?” “That was the American Dream abandoning this city like it was post-Katrina New Orleans on the day that it was announced that the city was being turned into a nuclear test-site which was to be entirely populated by the post-Apocalyptic  (i.e. zombie) progeny of Glenn Beck and the Beckhams.   As it drove off into the sunset (listen to those tyres screech, people) the Dream, of course, took with it the standard obscene CEO payout, a couple of the more attractive secretaries – that was the horn of the getaway car proposing to raise the dead of another city less lost than this one — and all the amusing stickers from the receptionist’s desk.  Oh, and the ‘knocking’, sound? That was the Dream announcing that it had left a calling card on your doorstep whose glossy promise of secular transcendence will undoubtedly haunt (and in a strange way even edify) your short and brutish (if not always nasty) life, like the vengeful ghost of every promise of liberty, equality and fraternity once made by the founders of the Republic that now lies ostentatiously bleeding to death on an unregarded housing project corner.  But, you know, take heart: the little calling card is still enough to tie some kind of subjectivity together into a mish-mash of affects sutured to actions by fantasies resilient enough to live as if it were not inevitable that the former should be distorted into psychosis and the latter crushed under the heels of the city of Baltimore like another of those ubiquitous discarded drug drug-vials that cake the shoes of anyone who visits the many depressed and posthumous parts of the city  (East or West).   And, I mean sure, you can even feel, on the odd night, your possibility of redemption, that you might be getting closer to the goal, that the cash, the girls, the house, and even the rap star ‘lifestyle’ isn’t far behind you::  you’re part of a good crew now after all, your star’s rising, people treat you with respect/ Bang/Huh? What was that?/Nothing.  Just your pointless death.  You’re a statistic [...]