David Simon profile from The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_talbot?printable=true

Long, but really good. It surprises me that it took The New Yorker this long to profile him, considering that the magazine has already written about David Chase and David Milch. I always felt like he would have been a perfect profile subject for Esquire too.

Simon is a complicated person. A genius, but at times an arrogant bully with a self-righteous streak a mile long. But he's brilliant, and in my opinion, he's one of the most important storytellers working in any medium today.

"The Wire" is never going to receive the reception it truly deserves, and by that I mean showered with Emmys and millions of viewers tuning in like The Sopranos, but that's ok. For the small, passionate audience that worships it, it's been worth every nickel. There are a lot of lessons, too, within his work about how to be a real journalist and a real storyteller.

It says within Magaret Talbot's piece that Simon's next HBO project, after the Generation Kill miniseries, might be about jazz musicians in New Orleans trying to rebuild their lives post-Katrina. I imagine, though, it will really be yet another brutally honest love letter to one of America's great cities.

Count me in.

 

Anyone who hasn't yet read David Simon's book, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," ought to do so. He spent a year (1988) with the Baltimore homicide unit, and gained unprecedented access as a de facto detective. Almos two decades later, it's still an incredible read.

Fascinating stories throughout the book, which as everyone knows, spawned the TV series.

 

Reread it for the umpteenth time last month. Am now reworking my way through The Corner.

 

Just wanted to bump this again in case some of my fellow devotees of The Wire missed it.

 

Thanks for the bump, DD. Off to read it now.

 

I'd also like to point out, in an effort to connect the dots between two threads, that the guy David Simon is so pissed about within this story (Bill Marrimow) is also the guy who essentially forced out Stephen A. Smith.

 

The man's a virus.


Wait...

 

Thanks Double.

The Wire is a masterpiece--and I don't mean just a TV masterpiece.

 

Thanks for the heads-up DD.

I love, love, love Homicide & am just now working my way through The Wire on Netflix. The book is fantastic too.

 

I look forward to reading the article. Simon was the crime beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun and the new season of The Wire has him delivering some payback to the editor he hated, the the word on the inside was the hate was mutual.

 

Fuck, I knew this season would be focusing on the media, but I didn't think it'd get this in-depth about the biz. Can't. Fucking. Wait.

 

John Carroll, former Sun and LAT editor, takes a pretty big shot at Simon within this article for his obsession with Marrimow. Talbot mentions who Simon is the kind of guy who lets no slight, however small, be forgotten.