David Simon is a Wonder

He also gives a good interview.

And look how much story they were able to tell. We were getting more than that for each season. So goddamn it, you better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them. So if they like x, give them more of x. If they don’t like y, don’t do as much y.

How can you not want to read the rest of that interview? It's a man directly responsibly for the best show of the past ten years. For your sake, don't you want to give him twenty minutes of your time?

And plus, it's Vice. Vice is fun, damnit.

Warren Ellis linked the same interview a couple of days ago as well (it's where I stole the lede from), but he also goes on to comment about his own writing process and what can be good for that. And he's no slouch in that department either. Sure he writes comics while pickled to his ears with Red Bull and nicotine, but, goddamn, what comics!

Neither of these men are particularly photogenic though, are they?

Waiting Around

Ever since I first bought When The Man Comes around, I've always used Johnny Cash as a referencde point. I've always gone back to him in my best times and my worst times, because he was a guy that had been there, who understood the worst things that you have ever gone through and more. And he sang about it. He told you about it as loudly as he possibly could, because by putting it out there it was the only way he could deal with the everyday pain of waking up in the morning. Johnny Cash is a person who tried to make sense of the world and I know I'm probably better off with his songs being around than without them. I don't need something serious to happen to know that.

And I'm not hurting that bad, I know. And I don't want anyone to pat me on the shoulder. I don't have anything profound to say, because I really can't. There's people out there hurting more than I am and I have no idea how to reconcile anything that they're feeling with what I am or what I'm thinking. You can't learn to deal with any of the important things in life without going through them. That's the biggest kick in the head that life can ever throw at you. You can't understand it, you can't even begin to understand it until it's there. And that's the scariest thing of all.

I'm out of my depth, but I know that, in some silly way, other people have been there and maybe, if I listen to them in the right way, everything will suddenly make sense. Right now I'm waiting for that moment to arrive.

Nothing Ever Adds Up to Exploding Dogs

For a long time I've been interested in the Cold War (or really, anything that ends in "War") and the lengths the Russians and our own people went to to try and destroy each other. Besides the dozens of proxy wars the two sides fought, there's of course the seventy or so years between the establishment of the Cheka and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. There's a rich history there, stuff you could read about forever.

Or write about.

There's hundreds of brilliant ideas to come out of both sides in that time. There's the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico with an ice pick, there's the infamous ricin tablet gun concealed in an umbrella, there's training the South Vietnamese army with our Green Berets, or filling the CIA, FBI, and NSA so full of Soviet double-agents that we couldn't do shit without them knowing for a good twenty years after WWII ended.

Good times, though.

There's also been more than a number of utter failures on both sides. In 1979, the Soviet government invaded Afghanistan on the pretense of supporting the communist regime that had taken power there. Of course the communist government was not the entirety of Afghanistan and a mix of cultural intolerance and rampant brutality that led to the mujahadin eventually wresting control of the country away from anyone sane. Our role in that was a rather ingenious one, though. We bled the Soviets dry by keeping the rebels well armed and well fed, the same thing they (and the Chinese) did in Vietnam. The only difference there is we didn't stack up the chairs and turn out the lights two years after we left Saigon.

And that's just the serious side. We've got MK ULTRA to explain and the Soviets have to explain the fact that they killed off most of their officers in the dawn of the second world war (in addition to spies that warned about Hitler invading the Soviet Union, good call there), among other things.

It's kind of funny that for all of the moles and foresight the Soviet intelligence organizations had, they still didn't see their collapse on the horizon. Then again, I don't suppose anyone does. Though, just to keep this in perspective, the Soviets were also the ones who came up with the idea of remote controlled exploding dogs and half-man/half-ape slave soldiers.

But never have I heard of a twenty-million dollar spy cat. Because a twenty-million dollar spy cat is just plain stupid. That is a dumb idea.

So of course it got made.

Besides the multi-million dollar espionage kitten, there was other bright ideas the intelligence community dredged up like the even dumber (but much cheaper) microphone hidden in dog poop (because who would bother to pick it up and throw it away) and the actually quite brilliant idea of mixing microphones into the concrete that would be used to build an embassy.

But a multi-million dollar spy cat, really?

That's just plain silly.