Tag: David Simon

Reader’s Corner: Talking with David Simon

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic Novels, TelevisionLeave a comment

I recently had the great honor of talking with the great David Simon (The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill) about policing, writing, crime, and the graphic novel adaptation of his classic study of a Baltimore detective unit, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

A part of my interview with Simon is at Publishers Weekly:

… They took a vote and only three guys wanted me to be there. The rest thought it was a terrible idea. But, it not being a democracy, they put me in the unit anyway. Nobody was hostile. They got used to me. One guy, Terry McLarney, we were drinking at the bar and he said, “I see what you’re doing. This isn’t really about the cases. This is about us.” I said, “Don’t tell anyone” …

TV Room: ‘The Plot Against America’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, TelevisionLeave a comment

In Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, it’s 1940 and Hitler is rampaging across Europe. Only in America, Franklin Roosevelt is facing serious political competition: fascist sympathizer and popular hero Charles Lindbergh. A Jewish family in Newark, drawn in part from Roth’s childhood, starts realizing they may have to chose between fleeing to Canada or facing pogroms in New Jersey.

My review of HBO’s The Plot Against America, a six-part adaptation by David Simon (The Deuce, The Wire), ran at PopMatters:

in 1940, the idea of a white supremacist president in league with a fascist foreign power was hard for many to contemplate. Even a fully-fledged racist like Woodrow Wilson had not colluded with enemies abroad. And nobody truly imagined the likes of Donald Trump as president until The Simpsons Movie in 2007. It was a different time. The Wire was only in Season 3.

Writer’s Desk: Get Past the Terror

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Detroit, Michigan. Art director and copy writer at a large advertising agency

David Simon (Homicide, The Wire, The Deuce) on writing the character of Creighton on Treme, a frustrated novelist who committed suicide:

… there were some underlying fears that as a creative soul Creighton had shot his bolt. That fear is probably latent in every writer. You stare at the page for the first time and if you’re honest at all, you know there’s a little part of you screaming, “But what if I can’t do it anymore?” And then you start writing, and usually the first things are not great, and then you try again and eventually you’re off and running. But every time, there’s that first moment of vague terror.

It’s not that every writer has actually experienced terror at the idea that they couldn’t do the work anymore. There must be plenty who have happily floated past such worries.

But it is almost certainly true that a person who doesn’t understand the concept of being stricken in the soul over being unable to create, must not in the end have ever truly been a writer.

New in Books: ‘Ghettoside’ and the Murder Plague

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, OmniculturalLeave a comment

ghettoside-coverOne of the most surprising entries on the nonfiction bestseller lists now, in between all the diet and self-help and comedy tell-alls and breathless Bill O’Reilly assassination tomes, is Jill Leovy’s gritty Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. It’s a true-crime potboiler and an X-Ray of a dysfunctioning city and a cry for help all at once. Her writing is sharp, her reporting true.

Ghettoside is on sale now and is very worth your seeking out. My review is at PopMatters:

As the Los Angeles Timereporter who created the newspaper’s blog, The Homicide Report, Jill Leovy understands all too well the numbing cycle of violence that typifies most poor minority neighborhoods in America. The Homicide Report was simple in concept but gargantuan in practice: Cover every murder in Los Angeles. That meant finding out who was killed, who they were, how it happened, and if possible why. By the time the blog started in 2007, the country’s early-‘90s homicide peak had passed, but the murders kept coming. Each one was a story; another human life gone, and a space that couldn’t be filled left behind…