Pelecanos in LA

Last night, along with perhaps 40 other individuals, I saw novelist (and Wire producer and writer) George Pelecanos speak with fellow novelist Lawrence Block at the Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles. Both writers spoke about their lives as writers as well as their current books. Pelecanos is on tour to promote his new novel “The Way Home,” which he told the audience was “my chick novel,” since it’s all about the relationship between fathers and sons.

Surprisingly, I was among perhaps four people under the age of 40 in the crowd with most questions directed towards Block. Pelecanos was very articulate and used the plain language that populates his books. Well-trimmed with a tightly clipped beard and clad in a black blazer over a light purple dress shirt, he looked just a little Hollywood for the night. He spoke very cleanly and directly when asked questions, his voice rarely emphasizing any words. He always made firm eye contact with the questioner and was effusive in his praise of novelist Block (I bought one of Block’s novels he recommended, “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.” I must admit that I had never heard of him before that night.)

One audience member asked him about the differences between writing novels and screenplays. He made it sound like a mixed bag. Your writing often would get tore up in screenwriting and you’d have to accept the fact that you didn’t have final control over the product. He said the writing room at “The Wire” was sometimes contentious with competition among the show’s bevy of talented novelists (Lehane, Price, himself) to write certain scenes or episodes. However, working with such talented people though also improved the quality of one's own writing.

I asked him how he came to write the second-to-last episode in every season and about his influence on the show. He told me that he had originally been brought in to the write the episode where Wallace was killed, and every season after that he and David Simon had an unwritten understanding that that’s the episode he would write. Pelecanos said that David wanted to keep him on as a producer and writer for the second season because he was going to have a lot of Greek characters in the season at the docks (he made a humorous joke about this that everybody laughed about in regards to this). From that point forward, he was on the staff.

Pelecanos spoke about how he was instrumental in introducing a character on the show who would win. The character of Cutty was his idea. Much like his novels, where the hard-working man usually emerges triumphant, so too does Cutty navigate the drug world to come out on top with his boxing gym.

Finally, one audience member asked him how he was able to portray the character of Derek Strange, a black cop turned private eye, who is the protagonist in several of his novels. “He is so different than you, how did you look through the world through his eyes?” He talked about how his parents put him to work at their diner when he was 11, and how he rode the bus in the D.C. at a time when the city was 80% black. He would just sit on the bus and listen to people, much like he says he sometimes goes into a bar and just listens to people. Someone then asked, “Do you go home and write it down?” Pelecanos said no, it’s just something that he can remember and call up. It didn’t seem like he was a very methodical in making notes and said he didn’t use outlines in his novels. Overall, he came across as a hardworking, empathetic straightforward guy.


At the end of the night I approached him and told him about the blog. “Yeah, I’ve read it,” he said. “David read it. He brought in that stuff.” That made my day. His matter of fact reply though masked whether he and the staff liked the blog. I made an off-hand query into that but didn’t get a solid response. That’s cool. It was enough, and a lot, to be acknowledged. He did tell me, “You’re gonna love ‘Treme,’” the forthcoming Simon series on HBO about musicians returning to post-Katrina New Orleans which he’s also working on.

After that I drove to Hollywood and saw the Decemberists play. A good night.

- Speaking of Simon, he was a featured panelist on the last week’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO. Haven’t watched it yet. Sometimes those panels are a too awkward of a mix like that time Mos Def kept interrupting Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie to make some pedestrian point.

(photo is of me, Block, Pelecanos from left to right)

Back in the Game

It's been many moons since I posted anything on the blog. The show is over, grad school life is intense... what else can a man say about the show?

But a few weeks ago, I was driving up through Westwood past the W Hotel on my way to campus when a familiar figure caught my eye. It was Wood Harris, hanging out in front of the hotel with a small entourage. "Avon!" I yelled. "What's up baby," he said (seeing him and two of Claire's boyfriends from "Six Feet Under" have made up the core of star sightings down here). The sighting brought back the living reality of the show to me and that maybe my Wire blogging days are not all behind me.

George Pelecanos on tour




I'm very excited about this. His tour, which launches today in D.C., swings through the country this month. Pelecanos is a D.C. crime novelist who was a producer and writer on "The Wire," penning every several episodes, including the second-to-last episode in every season. I've now read about five of his novels - his latest, "The Way Home" came out Tuesday - and the more of his novels I read, the bigger his stamp I see on the show. An interview in the L.A. Times is here.

People always talk about Simon and Burns as the genius behind the show, but there are so many similarities between the themes of "The Wire" and Pelecanos' novels that I think that his contribution to the overall product has been minimized and overlooked. The street language, the love of the city no matter how broken it appears, the interest in the mores of contemporary urban masculinity, the portrayal of villains as individuals whose lives took the course they did as a result of societal dysfunction and injustice rather than personal failure - these are all aspects of the show that one finds again and again in his novels.

I recommend them and stopping by and seeing him speak. I'll be at the reading in LA on Tuesday.

I found two interesting interviews with David Simon on the web site for Baltimore magazine:

One is about Generation Kill and his next project, Treme. Money quote from the interview:

Interviewer: What’s next?

Simon: Treme. A story set in the musical culture of post-Katrina New Orleans. The title is that of a historic and predominantly black neighborhood just back of town from the French Quarter. We have a green light from HBO on the pilot but will have to wait until next summer to know if we are to film the first season.

Here's another one from back in February.

Wire Cast at Museum of Moving Image

Sounded like a nice night. I would have liked to have been there.

And the Season Five DVD box comes out on Aug. 12.

- I've watched the first two episodes of "Generation Kill." I think it's very good. It's a little hard to tell all the characters apart though. But it has great dialogue and shows the perspective of the soliders very well. I'm not enraptured by it, but I enjoy watching it.

- And George Pelecanos' new novel "The Turnaround" just came out. I've read "Soul Circus" and "Hard Revolution." Very good. I enjoyed them better than Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island." Pelecanos' novels just do such a great job of capturing a sense of place - of driving around a city, listening to music, seeing people, hearing and seeing things. It seems to me to be a particularly unique form of urban American realism.

There's a lot in his novels. I recommend picking one up. I'll have to check out some the Richard Price novels at some point too that one of this blog's readers recommended.

- Lastly, I am now the articles editor at www.newgeography.com. Check it out!

Three Villains

Like much of America, I went out opening day to see "The Dark Knight." I found it to be a fascinating and unique film whose themes and ending I am still processing. I was impressed by the way it was willing to dive into the personal darkness of the characters, how it did not present an ending that neatly wrapped up everything, how it presented sticking up for one's ideals as a process that is not easy to do. The hero isn't necessarily the benevolent man who always does the right thing. As Batman tells Sergeant Gordon, "I can be whatever you want me to be."

As a film, I didn't think it was as good or as taut as "Batman Begins" but I liked its focus on the Joker as a symbol of a particularly menacing kind of evil. He's a character who truly doesn't care about anything or anybody else. He's interested in spectacle, "watching the world burn" as Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, and in convincing society that all its rules just doesn't matter. Life is random and unjust, the Joker believes - a joke - so there's no reason to take anything, even life, seriously. He's been called an anarchist in press reviews but even anarchists believe in something - no government. He's just a supreme nihilist who seems anxious to prove a point to society - the antithesis to Bruce Wayne who believes that society can be changed, that people are inherently good and that life is most certainly not a joke.

But I have grouped the Joker along with Anton Chirgush (Javier Bardem from "No Country for Old Men") and Marlo Stanfield because all three represent a certain kind of villain that we seem to be seeing more and more of: the villain that has no rules, is completely devoid of empathy and places an infinitely small value on life.

In all three movies/shows, the challenge for the heroes is how to effectively deal with someone who really cannot be reasoned with. Nothing is off limits to these guys, they obey no "code" as Bunk and Omar believe in the term (or the guy at the bank in the first scene of "The Dark Knight)". There is no honor, only the code of self-preservation. They act is there the whole world is against them and that absolutely no one can be trusted. While they live purely for their own kicks, none of these three seem particularly interested in money (even though that is Anton's mission). It seems that what motivates them is righting some past wrong, showing the world that they are "for real" and that no one better get in their way.

I think that in all these features, there is an undercurrent of comparison to terrorism. The hardcore members of al Qaeda cannot be bought off, they do not want the same things that we want. The challenge these characters present is, "how do you deal with villains like these?" I think that their presence is also not enough to throw society off its rocker. They scare us, but we shouldn't let that change the way that we dispense justice.

Wire news roundup

I know I've been a bit remiss in updating this blog. There actually has been a good amount of Wire news too.

- The show is an Emmy Award semifinalist for best drama series. The final five (there are ten now) will be announced on July 17. I guess it's never too late for recognition, even though I think Season Five didn't equal the previous four. Hopefully, though a nomination will at least give the series the following it deserves (though S5 doesn't deserve to beat out the absolutely superb first season of "Mad Men" for best series).

- There's a real-life scandal currently going on at Baltimore City Hall that sounds eerily familiar to those who have watched the show. It involves the new Mayor, Sheila Dixon, who was portrayed as Narese Campbell on the show. Life imitates art.

- Ed Burns now lives in the countryside of West Virginia. "I'm something of a loner," he says in the short article. I always thought he was a little unfairly crowded out by Simon for credit for the series (certainly didn't generate as much press) but perhaps it's just because he's more of an introvert.

- Also, interesting to note that Baltimore native Joey Dorsey, a basketball player for the University of Memphis that was just drafted into the NBA, had this to say about the show on how realistic it portrayed his hometown:

Ask him whether his neighborhood bears any resemblance to the one on "The Wire," and Dorsey says no.

"It's worse," he said.

The locals nickname it "Iraq." Surveillance cameras on every street corner. Rampant crime. Lost souls, desperation, a numbing hopelessness.

"I don't even want to go back home because it's not safe," Dorsey said.

He also said, "Oh yeah, I watch it. That's right around in my neighborhood. West Baltimore. And all that stuff in actually happens back home. It's so bad that I stay in Memphis a lot. I go back home for probably three days to see a couple of my friends there, and then I'm out."

Hard Times at Douglass High



This is the new documentary from HBO Documentary Films about an inner-city Baltimore high school. It's definitely worth watching. If anything, it confirms everything we saw in Season Four (though it takes place in high school and the kids are much more well behaved than they were in Prez's class). You see characters that remind you of Snoop, of Namond and an English teacher who reminds you of Prez.

While the filmmakers wanted to make it to incriminate "No Child Left Behind," the film points to a singular direction for a lot of the problems in the schools: the lack of family-support. The teachers appear pretty dedicated, the staff committed and passionate. One of the most fascinating scenes was about "Parent's Night." The teachers said that, for a school of 1100 people, they only got 3-4 parents who would show up. This one young woman said she didn't know any body who lived with their mom and dad.

Amazing statistic: the school has 500 freshman and 200 sophomores. Wow! When did the families in these communities start to dissolve? I think this is something that wasn't addressed very much in "The Wire." Simon and co. were more interested in taking on the economic/political/social system as opposed to looking at how that affected the break down in family.

But how do you keep families together?

Looks the show has been a good stepping stone for many of its actors. That's what this short piece in New York magazine tells us. I didn't know they were making a movie based on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." The book was so good though so I'm anxious to see it, especially now that Michael K. Williams will be in it.

The NY Mag piece links to lots of articles about "Wire" actors including one about Dennis Wise ("Cutty") working at a grocery co-op in Park Slope.

Also, Season One episodes are now available on iTunes for $1.99 each.