Everything He Touches Turns to Art

David Simon, you're a goddamn genius.

I feel like the Internet gave me a free birthday gift today.

I've been chomping at the bit, wondering what was on his agenda after The Wire besides Generation Kill.

"The next series he hopes to produce for HBO is about musicians reconstituting their lives in New Orleans, he told The New Yorker for its issue hitting newsstands Monday."

I had a hunch that NOLA might be the next logical step for Simon, but the musician angle is brilliant. Somewhere, Louis Armstrong is smiling.

From the article:

'This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter,' Simon said. ''The Wire' has never done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can't be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don't they just move away?'

A goal of the show will be to celebrate the glories of an American city, and 'why we need to accept ourselves as an urban people,' Simon said.

Here is the profile of David Simon in The New Yorker. This is one killer story.

Ironically, I just found another article about the current NOLA show called K-Ville. I hear NOLA residents find it laughably preposterous. Here's a fitting quote:

Make no mistake: K-Ville, a buddy-cop throwback set in present-day New Orleans, would be terrible no matter where it was set or when it aired. But to do the show now, to take the suffering of this great American city and turn it — not into art, as The Wire does for Baltimore — but into cheap pulp fiction, is to move beyond bad to wildly offensive.

You could argue that any attention is good attention, considering how desperately the city needs our aid. Still, it's hard to see what public good is served by turning New Orleans into some high-octane Deadwood on the Mississippi. Even to suggest that the networks might have some greater social responsibility beyond making money for their stockholders is to risk sounding quaint these days — but it is nevertheless true, and this show violates it.

And for what? A badly acted, clumsily constructed Starsky & Hutch/Miami Vice revival that imposes fictional clichés on top of harsh realities. No thanks.

David Simon will show these simpletons how it's done.