It's Not TV, It's Not The New Yorker, it's HBO

It is interesting that given what has been on everyone's mind, Charlie Rose featured both David Remnick of the New Yorker and David Simon, of the Wire and now Generation Kill. Of course in this context when you say "David Simon" you mean as you should, David Simon and Ed Burns. Although I admit that Remnick made a great impression and a convincing case for his magazine's "tour de force" cover this week--an impression that went a long way towards relieving my personal fatigue with "satire 101", it still felt, I don't know, superfluous. As I felt that what Remnick was standing atop of the mountain defending was a bit flimsy, I felt bad: I mean the stuff is important you know? So why was I feeling like still saying shut the fuck up?

It became a bit clearer in the David Simon segment when Simon was talking about the purpose or general intent that he and Burns have when they work. He broke it down into parts, more or less. First they want to look at things and come up with an angle or a conclusion about them. Then they want to tell that story and then they want to do it well. Doing it well for him doesn't mean much beyond making sure it's correct. And he expressed that vociferously--that they want their characters to be real and recognizable to their human-real life counterparts. He wants Marines to feel like this series is real the way he wanted drug dealers, addicts and homicide detectives to feel Wire was real--the way The Corner was real (he mentioned how The Corner, like Generation, was able to use real names such was the absence of license taken with the facts). He based this standard in part on his coming from a newspaper/journalist background.

We all know what The Wire attempted to do and succeeded in doing. It renders a portrait of America informed by a deep, searching survey about American life. Simon spoke about it being a story about the end of the American empire's myth of competence. In other words, The Wire was about depicting that the system is broken and we do not care and no longer strive to fix it (on the contrary, we have adapted ways to manage and even prosper in the broken). Simon then discussed how he is taking that same thematic lens and setting it next on the musical culture of New Orleans, its significance, and the possibility of its disappearance. For Generation Kill he said the purpose was to make the general American public engage with the fact that they are at war. He rightly suggests that excepting the military and their families, the vast majority of Americans are psychically, emotionally and materially "buying out" of the war.

Simon talking about the real utility of the TV work that they are doing really brought home my frustration with the New Yorker cover. I'm not even sure I'm right to feel that way but I do. I have a real sense of a need (and this is likely a collective need) to be exposed to degrees of truth and levels of complicated thought and conversation in these (dire) global times. I have a real sense of a need to know more, be made to feel more and think more and be a better grade of participant in whatever conversation we're all having. Maybe that's my issue: by necessity my standard's really high for what provocation I find useful and critical. And also by necessity, my tolerance is currently very low for that which I find to be useless provocation. I think right or wrong the landscape shows me that the New Yorker satire is useless provocation when so much is going on.

At this point in the show Charlie Rose became fascinated with Simon's state of America refrain and got into a semi-argument involving Charlie demanding that Simon's next project be about "the state" of America. He said something like go and find a story and characters that can communicate this clear sense that you have about where America is at. It sounded like Charlie wanted the meta-Wire. True story: I've been wishing for a long time for a piece of TV or theatre or a play about these times. In my mind I keep waiting for Tony Kushner to write this the way he wrote Angels. The awesome character-driven narrative of the most intimate humanity against the backdrop of the most enormous socio-historical canvas, but for the 21st, post 9/11, near death of Planet moment we're in, when the geopolitical plates are shifting and there's a cultural tantrum occurring. I imagine how only Kushner's fearless language could square off with so vast a subject matter (and eventually win). Now I am thinking that in my dreamworld both Kushner and Simon apply themselves to this task... Then HBO can put it on. And I can die happy.