Where I am, longer than planned. Dang those S Lee guys anyway! V'.s going to be interviewed next week his followup to Levees. So hotel and tix and all that got changed and charged to the project.
Also, Tremé is shooting like crazy. Last night at DBA we saw a Krewe du Vieux parade by. I go, "Mardi Gras was over on Tuesday night," and, "WTF? this is from 2006 -- I was here!" It was part of the Tremé re-creation of the year after the levees broke. The music director and crew, btw, have invited us over for the premiere ep of HBO's Tremé in April. They'll still be finishing up the eps for the whole season then, but I am very stoked.
Tonight we met one of the Tremé guys who does the live sound for it, under the Music Director. He lives here, has always lived here, and was here for K, and never left, even though his house was drowned and buried in sand. He's been in the movie and television biz for many years, but says there's never been anything like working on Tremé. He did a lot of rescue and recovery post K immediately. His wife has been running a food bank from before K -- they also have two children. While they also tried to dig their house out from the sand ... they all lived for over two years in a FEMA trailer ....
Story after story like that, and that is what Tremé is going to tell, from best we can tell.
In the meantime, New Orleans isn't real happy about the project, that shuts down streets for two weeks at a time .... welcome to my world of NYC! And for projects that aren't even as worthwhile as Tremé's aspirations are.
Amazing, hanging out on Frenchman St. on a Saturday night, and all your friends are coming around, just because that's what they do. They're not round around Frenchman on Saturday coz we're here. It's because that's what they do. It's also what we do. Except my back has about now gone splah, so I came 'home' to the hotel, and V's out with the camera prowling again.
Lots to do before we go home.
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NOLAns may not be happy, but Treme has a chance to be an important program, depending on the critical buzz that it generates.
I remember watching a German crew film a scene in an Irish small town. Take after take, an actress did nothing more than walk down the street. There didn't even appear to be any dialogue!
Hope I get to catch up with the amazing experiences. And how much NO has changed since K. Even, again, since September.
Love, C.
The buzz seems to have started already, that Tremé is like nothing else ever done.
Additionally, of course, Simon did what he did with The WIRE. Recall the woman who played the gangster, who was a gangster in real life? It's these methods that made the WIRE so granular in its sense of reality of event and intrinsic interest in the characters. The woman in Trouble the Water has a big role in Tremáé That's how the production's been operating.
I feel though that a lot of NOLANs are pulling for Tremé, however. Nobody here could even be bothered to view K-Ville.
Today V's getting prepped for the two hour on camera interview by SL. The expectations are very high re what he's to address, and he's really spooked.
Each visit here is different. This one has been as removed from our life while living here as any visit since. We've seen our closest friends, of course, but the focus wasn't them -- for one thing, they are working and have a lot of work to do.
Tonight I'm meeting f2f for the first time a local writer here, who I have known via blog for a couple of years, Louis Maistros. He was the one who gave V. his introduction at the Louisisana Book Festival.
Love, C.
You mean the gumbo party show?:) Anthony Anderson is now one of the detectives in Law & Order and also had a small but critical role in The Departed.
Have a nice meeting with Louis!
I haven't a clue as to what you're referring re Gumbo show....
It was fabulous meeting Louis and his wife, who has been initiated in Haiti .... We are all the same kind of people it turns out. Well, we suspected that was the case ....
Interview went well, by all accounts, including autographing for THE MAN HIMSELF his copy of The World That Made New Orleans and CuMU, and in return V. giving THE MAN HIMSELF a copy of The Year Before the Flood. More interviewing will probably take place later. Plus, maybe involvement in another maybe projected project.
Except for yesterday it has been damned cold here. Yesterday it really did get into the 60's and was the warmest day NO's had all winter. Today the wind bites and temps are back down in the 40's. In NYC they're in the 30's. And rain. With snow predicted maybe for tomorrow, when we come home.
It's a long, hard winter everywhere. Except Miami, which finally is back to the balmy 70's winter is promised to be there.
Love, C.
The most widely derided bit from K-ville (by NOLAns) was the gumbo party. That was in the one episode I watched, so I remember it.
Hey, I enjoyed V's liner notes to the new Galactic CD. I've had trouble getting into them in the past, but not this one.
O, good! I'll tell him. :)
Home now. Weather was freezing in NO this AM when we left for the airport at an ungodly hour. Here, all is being prepared for humungous snow storm. And rain. In any case, a real mess.
V.'s going uptown to hang out a while with the Bobbie Sanabría Big Band -- it's Wednesday night, after all. I wonder if there will be class tomorrow -- which we missed two of already this week, when it was supposed to be only one? And papers need to be graded -- or, more to the point, critiqued. These are not adventurous thinkers despite being Honors students, and the course supposedly an intro for them to grad school level reading and writing. A lot of them don't seem to understand what the words they're using actually mean .... OTOH, a lot of them speak more than one language and English is often not their first language.
I want us to use the approach of criticizing sincerely, but let the Chair-prof assign the grades. V. is dithering, in a way that I think is ridiculously time wasting on this.
Love, C.
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