An Impatience with Irresolution

“I am saying there is a different drama which is enacting itself in our country right now and it has to do with a failure to acknowledge the necessary moral and imaginative predicate that has become an entirely virtual existence, which is, you know, people spend more than half their waking hours watching television. Just think about that for a second. That has to shape the neural pathways. It creates an impatience, for example, with irresolution. And I'm doing what I can to tell stories which engage those issues in ways which can engage the imagination so that people don't feel threatened by it.”

~ David Milch, from “Television’s Greatest Writer,” an interview with David Simon, MIT (April 20, 2006)

The Tearless and Unblinking Distance

"The difference between a cult and faith is time. I believe that we are a single organism, and that something is at stake in this particular moment...We are going to be doing a story that is on HBO and there are these endearing characters. It is about surfing, but some of the characters levitate...Ostensibly it is about a family of surfers who seem to have become more and more disassociated from themselves and from good surfing. They were all champions, and they are in one way or another alienated, loaded and ascetic...And then a strange guy comes into their life: John from Cincinnati."

"...the look of the show...was informed not by Martin Scorcese or MTV, but by his mentor Robert Penn Warren."

“Have you ever seen moonlight on the Wabash as the diesel rigs boom by? Have you ever wondered how the moonlit continent might look through the tearless and unblinking distance of God’s wide eye,” he quoted Warren over the phone. “I have been working to make sure that the camera is stationed at a tearless and unblinking distance.”

- David Milch discussing his new television series John from Cincinnati with David Carr from The New York Times (11/20/2006)