Tonight - Tuning Into Treme With Special Guest Eric Overmyer

The final, truncated season of Treme opens (HBO) this comming Sunday, December 1.

I hope the frightful weather advisory doesn't keep us or anyone else away.

Here are the details of the event, held at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

Lovely Words Written in New Orleans About *Kiss You Down South* + HBO *Treme*

El V's album of songs he's written about New Orleans, Kiss You Down South, receives a beautiful write-up in New Orleans's music paper, Offbeat.

A pull from the piece:

Writers obsessed with fame, money and power are systematically denied that imaginative vision. They instead become artisans working in a marketplace creating consumer goods. Their product becomes inevitably and often fatally narcissistic. New Orleans has traditionally afforded artists the opportunity to pursue marketplace-free goals and continues to do so. This is what attracted the singular imagination of Ned Sublette to the city that lured Clemens and Whitman, Faulkner and Williams into its magic crescent. 

As well, the writer describes the last day of Treme's final season, which is only a half season of episodes, all the team got funding for from HBO. There will be no more after these 5 episodes air.

But hey! there's the solipsistic navel lint picking of Girls to console us. Ain't life just Grand O Ho Dee Ho Dough!

Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Stoppard, Ford Madox Ford & ! TREME!

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the protagonist of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, adapted for a 5 part BBC2 series by Tom Stoppard. This looks like the sort of quality that shows in comparison Downton Abbey for the shoddy that it is. For one thing Ford Madox Ford lived through what he's writing about. Julian Fellows just sort of makes up what he sort of thinks is the era his crew writes about. Of course Downton Abbey will continue to garner all sorts of awards and Parade's End will be as ignored as is David Simon's Treme.*

* Season 3 premieres September 23rd! Trailers many places, here's one place.

Additionally -- it looks like we're going to get to be in New Orleans about four times this fall, winter and spring!  Gads, I'm missing New Orleans.  Just that teeny taste from the Treme trailer made me go all, "I must be there now!

I wore a Mardi Gras colors sparkle fleur de lis t-shirt obtained some time ago in the French Market on my walk to back therapy on Thursday. And I tell you, that walk up there and back at 12:30 felt as hot and humid as New Orleans herself. Three different fellows pointed at my shirt and -- did not yell, but spoke sort of breathlessly -- "New Orleans."  When I got to the therapy gym one of the therapists also recognized it as the New Orleans symbol.  He'd been there for the first time during Mardi Gras this year.  He asked me if I'd ever heard Rebirth play ....  When he showed me photos on his phone of his time in NO, among them was not only his favorite po'boy, but of the sign for Lafitte's, his favorite NO bar.  He had no idea who Jean Lafitte was though. Nor had he watched HBO Treme.

el V, In His Own Words: Dr. John and John Boutté

New Orleans music thrives in old buildings. I'm so glad I got to see the Dr. John "Funky But It's Nu Awlins" show at BAM Friday night. I guess BAM felt like throwing a party to celebrate its 150th anniversary -- 1861, it was. That the building has not been demolished and the site rebuilt on is a minor miracle in a city that cannibalizes its architecture. Fortunately, I missed the night the functionaries spoke.
(Robt. Christgau's assessment of Dr. John's three-week residency at BAM is here, and Larry Blumenfeld's pieces for the Voice are here, here, and here.)
It was a wonderful show. Though it felt like a party where everybody onstage knew everybody else, which indeed they did, it was deceptively intricate. No two songs had the same feel. The show rolled from one highlight to the next. Big Chief Donald Harrison -- who is bringing his New Orleans band to Symphony Space on April 27, attendance mandatory -- rocked the house with vocals and sax on "Hey Pocky Way" and dueted with Ronnie Cuber on bari. Nicholas Payton killed it on "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." Davell Crawford's blistering version of "Junko Partner" will stay with me a long time -- definitely one of the peak musical experiences of '12, so far, and I'd buy the record that will surely come out of this just for that number. Ivan Neville. Dirty Dozen. Tami Lynn. Irma Thomas.

It opened with Dr. John heading up a second line into the hall from the back, in a li'l parade with the Dirty Dozen blasting away. As they passed us, I saw tried-and-true New Orleansophile Bonnie Raitt second-lining her way down the aisle behind Dr. John, and I knew I was in the right place and not at the wrong time, either. Ms. Raitt didn't appear in the show, but she knows what's good. She happened to be in town in connection with her lovely new album, Slipstream (videoclip here), which I'd seen a stack of -- a depleted stack, I might add, meaning people were buying it -- at Starbuck's earlier in the day. May it sell a million or three. She was a guest on John Schaefer's Soundcheck yesterday. (JS also conversed with Dr. John earlier in the month, a true meeting of the vocabularies.)

It's been a while since I bothered to notice what albums were coming out in a given week, but this is a week to listen up, with some titles out today (Tuesday is the traditional street date, dating back from the era of record stores, something today's college students no longer remember). Jon Cleary's got an album of songs by great American songwriter Allen Toussaint, called Occapella, which I haven't heard but which I hear is great, and why wouldn't it be? The Tremé soundtrack for season two comes out on Rounder. And the second season of Tremé comes out on DVD -- if you want to support the show, says David Simon, buy the DVDs. (The third season of Tremé will air in the fall on HBO.) May they all sell a million or three.

And now we get personal.
John Boutté's new album comes out today -- available from CD Baby, or better yet go buy it from the artist at d/b/a if you're in New Orleans, or at Louisiana Music Factory. Produced by Blake Leyh (music supervisor of Tremé), it's titled All About Everything.

The title song, "All About Everything," is my translation from Portuguese of Chico Buarque's "Sobre Todas as Coisas." (Buarque's album version here.) "Sobre Todas as Coisas" is, to me, songwriting on the highest level. I translated this lyric (and others) over a period of years as a personal project, and I've sung it for years for my own pleasure. When you do something like that, you forget you didn't write it. I certainly didn't write the song, but the English version is mine, as faithful and singable a translation as I could make. So in some sense I'm personally invested in it as a songwriter, and we croaking songwriters love to hear our songs in the voice of a great interpreter. Hearing John Boutté sing this one, I feel like I've been blessed. 

HBO Renews *Treme* for Third Season

Excellent news.

You can read more many places, but here ya go, with the B'more Sun.

We have eaten dinner at home, initiating another resumption of Our Real Lives in our Real Home, which has been indeed our Real Home, for more decades than most of the people strutting these streets have been alive.  OTOH, when we arrived there were many who felt the same way about us.

HBO *Treme* - Season 2 - Ep 1

Fantastic.

Gads that cutting back-and-forth between NO and NYC ... yes!

Pitch perfect, every detail right and correct.

Treme is a costumbrista; some describe this hispanic form as concerned with a romanticization of the culturally ephemeral. Now New Orleans is fantastic, but it is not fantasy -- not a romance. Nor is it ephemeral. New Orleans is in cyclic, wheel time, not arrow time. Once something happens, it keeps on happening. But the attention to every cultural detail of particular time and place, getting it perfect, within the story/stories being told, that is costumbrismo.

This seems even more so, as the founding hispanic element, so long overlaid by the Anglo and the French, has re-emerged since the Failure of the Levees, and Treme is showing its return ... the wheel has turned again.

Shivers, shivers, shivers.

More Concerning HBO's *Treme*

There are other promos for Treme season 2 on the HBO site, all worth checking out.

They also put up 35:04 worth of video of last October's Tulane symposium on "Treme," right there on the HBO website.

First Season of HBO;s *Treme* Debutes on UK Television Screens

The U.K. Guardian is blogging it.  The first episode blog plus the commentariat is here.

Gee ... New Orleans.  We'll be back in about six weeks, reading selections from The American Slave Coast, as we've got it so far, at the Community Book Center.  It will be the first opportunity to get feed-back from the community on what we're saying and the direction we're going.  Can you spell S-C-A-R-E-D?

David Simon Got a MacArthur / *Treme* Soundtrack CD Out

DAVID SIMON, who has produced and written “The Wire” and “Treme” for HBO, is among the 23 new MacArthur Grant winners.

The "Treme" soundtrack song list for season 1:

1. “Treme Song” (main title version) -- John Boutté
2. “Feel Like Funkin' it Up” (live street mix) -- Rebirth Brass Band
3. “I Hope You're Comin' Back to New Orleans” -- The New Orleans Jazz Vipers
4. “Skokiaan” -- Kermit Ruffins & The Barbecue Swingers
5. “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” – Trombone Shorty & James Andrews
6. “Drinka Little Poison (4 U Die)” -- Soul Rebels Brass Band & John Mooney
7. “We Made it Through That Water” -- Free Agents Brass Band
8. “Shame, Shame, Shame” – Steve Zahn and Friends
9. “My Indian Red” – Dr. John
10. “At the Foot of Canal Street” – John Boutte, Paul Sanchez, Glen David Andrews & New Birth Brass Band
11. “Buona Sera” – Louis Prima
12. “New Orleans Blues” – Tom McDermott & Lucia Micarelli
13. “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance” Michiel Huisman, Lucia Micarelli & Wendell Pierce
14. “Indian Red” (Wild Man memorial) – Mardi Gras Indians
15. “Indian Red” – Donald Harrison
16. “Time is on My Side” – Irma Thomas & Allen Toussaint
17. “This City” – Steve Earle
18. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” – Treme Brass Band19. “My Darlin’ New Orleans” – Li’l Queenie & the Percolators

New Orleans is NOT Charm City

Baltimore is "Charm City."  There's a specific history as to how Baltimore came to be called Charm City, which I know, because I have right here, the book, Charm City (2007), by our friend, Madison Smartt Bell, who tells us the history of that appellation in that book.

So why in hell did the author of a very long article in the current New York Review of Books about Simon's HBO New Orleans's Treme series, title that article "Charm City, U.S.A?"  He claims to belong by generational birth to New Orleans's aristocratic circles that began intermarrying with the old Creole families back in 1836.  So one would think he knows better.

My response to Lemann's article is cranky.  Decidedly cranky.  I don't like it, or the author, who seems to not quite get it, in spite of his Garden District aristocratic family and upbringing.

Example:  "Batiste’s ex-wife, LaDonna, played (overplayed, actually) by Khandi Alexander, owns a neighborhood bar."  LaDonna is overplayed? 

Another example: "Albert is the most saintly, and so perhaps the least plausible, character in Treme, a courageous political resister, rebuilder, and bearer of cultural tradition."   Yes. Saints always beat the living bejesus out of someone who steals their tools.

He thinks that the harangues by Davis and Creighton are overwrought. "What they say is always in character, but it seems to express some of what Simon thinks too. "  No, dude.  These harangues are what particularly white New Orleans was thinking then -- and not a few weeks post the Flood Failure, but three months later.  Out of touch, dude.

What universe does this dickhead inhabit?  Oh, yes, the universe of the wealthy aristocrat  personally unaffected by the hells of the Failure and the aftermath -- the universe that HBO Treme is NOT concerned with, except, on occasion to make fun of it, which he noticed.  Oh yes, did he ever notice. And resents the hell out of it.

HBO *Treme* Brings Postmamboism to Instanbul and Turkey

HBO Treme's Music Supervisor in Instanbul.  He is now returned to the U.S. and working on the music for Season 2.

News From Haiti & Elsewheres

Two nights ago Mz called and said M had just called him, and all she needs to do is show the Haitian government a visa, two photos of herself and K, and plane tix, then she and K can go! In fact, she's supposed to get the kid out of Haiti by August 10th, they told her.

D said she was setting Zeffur to good luck purr-spin to cut M some breaks, and it looks as though it worked! Maybe this means they will be back BEFORE we have to be in Maryland. It's been a half year. It's been non-stop activity, action and agitation by so many people to get this far. Many thanks to everyone who has helped with everything from administration and bureaucratic navigation and hassle, to money. Most of all, for caring.

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Other news: MSB has arranged a gig at this place in Baltimore " ... opening for a Bell & Cooper vehicle on Friday October 15. Place is called Joe 2, small club, good food and drink ...."

September and October calendar thus is filled for every weekend, with signings, academic presences, a week in the Dominican Republic, gigs like this one, and the one at Lincoln Center, plus others tba. Argh.

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Writing for season 2 of HBO's Treme begins next week.

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El V informed agent and publisher that The American Slave Coast is going to have both our names on it as writers, thus contracts need to be drawn up to reflect same.

I was /am most unsure about this, but he's determined it be so. I also thought everyone involved would go, oh sure, the bitch's been agitating blahblahblah. But the response was, "About time."

This means resigning from working, mostly, on my own project. But I'll be caught up working on this one, no matter what I resolve or do, because that's how it rolls in this house -- it's not as if I don't have a passionate interest in this history. I've already done a great deal of preparation research that has pointed us in the directions we need to go, the figures we need to look at, and so on. I've done this, on my own -- el V's too busy with the many other projects that are ongoing right now. So, with much trepidation, and much anxiety that I'm making a mistake, I've consented.
 
However, I am the first beta reader and editor. Like most writers I can't edit myself to best effect, so ... now what? Ah well. It shall all work out,  and it will be fun!

HBO *Treme*, End Of The Season

Gumbo party at Blake's tomorrow night and then we see the conclusion, "I'll Fly Away." This probably means funerals, since last week (episode 9, "Wish Somebody Would Care") the writer-blocked, depressed Creighton dropped himself off the ferry that runs between New Orleans and Algiers, and LaDonna was repairing the family crypt for Daymo's funeral.

I have no expectations for anyone's status changing in any significant way in this final episode. The best thing that Sonny ever did for Annie was in last week's episode when he kicked her out. Then, he told her he still wanted her, and that she should come back. Janette, kicked in the teeth by the conditions of New Orleans just too many times in one day, has decided to leave New Orleans and go to New York. But she may stay, because Davis wants her to.

That Creighton would go was telegraphed constantly from almost the beginning. I thought his checking out was done very well but it didn't have any emotional impact over here. That isn't because I've never been depressed or had anyone close to me commit suicide, or try to. I learned a lot about what it means for those of us left behind when someone who matters deeply choses that path, when my baby sister chose suicide by slow dynamite. The reason was because the more we saw of Creighton the less he felt 'real' to me; I could not believe in him as a professor in the English dept at Tulane or as a blocked novelist -- and I know both English profs (at Tulane even) and blocked and unblocked, unsuccessful and successful novelists very well. The other Treme characters became more 'real' to me as the episodes rolled on

In episode 9, "Wish Someone Would Care," again, as a Tulane English Dept. professor, Creighton was all wrong.. That was supposedly his freshman English class. The Awakening -- no novel, in fact -- would be taught in freshman English. As we did that team-teach thing in September of The Awakening to the Tulane English Dept's seniors honors students, I feel up to speed on the book, whereas Creighton's character didn't understand it. So unbelievable was he that I relieved when he finally took himself out. Harsh, but there ya are. It's tv.

Maybe if Creighton had to have to have done something, i.e. act, during all those weeks before the spring semester started maybe Creighton wouldn't have spiraled down so far, because he'd be too busy surviving. And, in fact, all our English dept. colleagues and amigos WERE working their butts off, for the school, for the dept. and putting their houses and lives back together. The weeks before that, in diaspora around the country, they were at least salaried, and so once they'd found their temporary perches, they worked on their research-book projects, because, as they knew damned well, when they went back to NO and Tulane, they were going to be so over-worked they wouldn't get to do any of that for three more years.

Now, Toni -- she's working, she's doing, she's listening. I'll bet she does have friends and family. She was born and raised in New Orleans, as she pointedly responded to Creighton's waxing nostalgic about the krewe of Momus. She was right. Those kerosene flambeaux, carried by the raggedy poorest guys of New Orleans -- not only are these things scary because so dangerous, it's ugly as hell to look at because they are so dangerous and the men carrying them are so poor. Nor are the flames pretty -- and they stink. They're a billboard that says who is in charge, and it ain't people with dark skin no matter who is mayor, and don't you forget it. Toni knows, no one better, speaking of her character in the narrative, that these poor figures are part of the still deeply embedded white supremacy of Mardi Gras and the krewes. What was surprising is that she saw it and it made her sad and sick, while Creighton, the insider-outsider didn't. That's a reversal of our real life experience, as opposed to television drama. We saw it, while the born New Orleanians or long time resident New Orleans denied, or else were shocked to have it called to their attention since they'd never noticed it.

So, is it Creighton then, unconvincing English professor/ novelist, transplanted into a fantasy New Orleans, getting a jazz funeral in this last episode, or is it Daymo, LaDonna's brother, who was killed by the New Orleans police department, whose coverup Toni unraveled?

Bet it's Daymo.

*Treme* 8th Ep -- "All On A Mardi Gras Day"

The episode's Mardi Gras in the streets aspect provoked an unexpected sense of flatness – or -- well, it wasn't our Mardi Gras 2006, was it?  Still, it seemed that the sheer bizarreness of what you see -- flickering now here, now not here, now over there! -- was missing. The closest we got to that wasn't in the street at all, but at the party with Tom McDermott as the Horse's Head – the letter we received from him, "To My Fellow Horses" immediately after we'd watched the episode, expressed the indescribable absurd fun that Mardi Gras can be.

Davis's contribution was fundamental. He embodied the force of Mardi Gras's delight and joy, who on this day was perfect wherever he went, because he is Mardi Gras 24/7*.

Davis guided Annie into her personally perfect Mardi Gras. Annie is at the crossroads of her lifepath: shall she stay with Sonny or should she go? Wherther or not Sonny kills her as so many fear, if she stays with Sonny, she will be destroyed by the damming of her talent. This is why Annie found Eleggua-Eshu, i.e. Davis, on Mardi Gras. This is the time of her choice; he showed her the choice that isn't Sonny, that is without Sonny, can be, well, sunny. Horses play piano! A horse who Annie knows, a horse that is willing to 'carry' Annie, with or without a mask.

Including the Davis character in the world of Treme was brilliant world building, a creative brilliance has nothing to do with the character base in a true citizen of New Orleans. It's not an easy thing to be a society's energetic, 24/7 King of Absurdity -- the clown in Shakespeare, the Fool in the Tarot, the rule of Mis-rule for feasts and Uncommon Days, Papa Legba in Haitian Vodún, Eleggua-Eshu of Ifá's system of divination -- the opener of the ways among the worlds, owner of the crossroads, the irresistable force of chaos, that turns all upside down and leaves behind a new order. Steve Zahn performs, inhabits Davis, splendidly. Without this figure of boundless energies and enthusiasms, Treme would be unremittingly grim, spiraling, without hope or joy, into unreconstructed, unredeemed destruction and malaise. It would be stuck in the past, like Creighton,  who is still fobbing off the depression he's suffering, his perception of himself as a failed writer, on the failure of the levees.

The tender and the sweet again were provided by Antoine. He gave his Japanese patron a wonderful Mardi Gras Day, not least by telling him the story of his donated trombone's destination, which allowed Koichi Toyoma feel more personally connected to New Orleans, to New Orleans jazz, and the celebration, because the destiny of his gifted 'bone, to Nelson's grandson, respect for family tradition, is the Japanese way also.

Then, the relief Antoine gave LaDonna (at the price of Desiree's generosity -- Newton's Laws in action) **. What a sequence of scenes those were, that led up to her turning to him with her own need, her need to forget, to transcend, to release, for just however long it took, the terror, the grief, the outrage that she's got held so tightly inside her skin. She knew he could, he would, he wanted to. He knows her in some ways as no one else ever will. Over here there was a small discussion as to whether or not LaDonna told Antoine that she'd found her brother. El V. says she didn't. I thought maybe she did, but it could be that she didn't either.

Janette the Fairy Princess, turning old cars into taxis, leading her own parade, that was the magic, as others here have described so beautifully.and so well. The magic that is only New Orleans, unique in the world, all on a Mardi Gras Day.
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* You know, Davis pulling the Garden District into "The Battle of New Orleans" had a poignance that no way could the HBO Treme team have envisioned when it was written and shot, when the BP Oil Crime had not yet occured. That's what happens with great writing, great creativity, the true magic in the world.  Which is why Treme had to open with Davis -- Eleggua, the opener of the ways.  O wow!

** I'm beginning to wonder ... Ochun, and the various other glamours of romantic, erotic love, the sweetness of honey, the cleansing of the vortex ... must they always wear the bodies of the female? Antoine .... A woman needs, and Antoine, he gives. Like Ochun, Erzulie (when she's not Dantor!). Etc.

HBO "Treme," Ep. 7 -- "Smoke My Peace Pipe"

This, the darkest episode so far, was co-written by Davis Rogan, upon whom the Treme character, Davis McAlary is based.  It's the saddest, the scariest and the sweetest.

We're up to early February, which is when we came back to New Orleans for the first time after the Flood, at the end of January. What's been missing is the eeriness of the city at night, which was still in place at this first return (we came back almost immediately after that, for two weeks prior and after Mardi Gras). Until Mardi Gras, New Orleans was mostly dark at night. The sheer spookiness of night New Orleans, which has always been present at times, that instructs you, among other essential information, that trees can be something other, something more, than trees, for instance, no matter emergency or not, is also missing.  Gigs in Mid City were played by candlelight. The cops were not there. The violence was perpetrated by mysterious others -- Blackwater, etc. Who you saw patrolling on the street were the National Guard, the Reserves.

The Goodman character is not like any of the members of the Tulane English Dept. we know – they're much hipper, for one thing,. His style of teaching? That's been gone from English depts. everywhere, one might think. It's the kind of English professor David Simon maybe had when he was an undergrad, but man, English academics don't hold forth like that these days (well, maybe, some older members, somewhere, but not at Tulane).

Everything that's not going right, everything's that going wrong, all that isn't being done, is converging. The police dept. covered up the deaths of many prisoners – some of whom shouldn't even have been arrested; LaDonna discovera that Daymo is dead and has been dead a long time. She can't tell her ailing mother, at least not until after Mardi Gras.

It's the depiction of the relentless wearing down, the constant doing it wrong, getting it wrong (particularly by the politicians and media) the checks that don't come or arrive too late, the choice between restoring your home or restoring your business, the lost and the missing, the lack of health services, the trek to get to a place that sells groceries, the lack of mail, the lack of electricty and water, struggle to find, buy and bring in the materials to clean up and rebuild, the work sabotaged by thieves, the lack of work because the construction jobs go to subcontractors who use undocumented labor, not you, who live here, whose family has always lived here, here, where you and your family always did your work as builders, restorers, plumbers, electricians (while playing as much music as you can, very likely), the endless, relentless lying -- that's the terror of Treme, built up out of the previous six episodes. In this episode it is reaching the tipping point.

But this terror is leavened by the sweetness and tenderness that is also living in New Orleans, even at this time. In this episode the sweet and tender are provided by Antoine Batiste, particularly with the dying Danny Nelson. That teeny, silent scene of Antoine putting one of his earbuds into Danny's ear, sharing a final listen of Jelly Roll's "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say" was all sweetness and tenderness, without sentimentality. This is the face of love, the face of respect. This is understanding another person, down to the bottom of his soul. This is the heart of New Orleans. If you don't understand this you don't understand New Orleans, past and present -- and the terrifying implications for the future. This scene wasn't about the hotshots, the lucky ones, the world class traveling artists of New Orleans. It was about what they are rooted in. And when / if this goes, so does their next generation, and so does the New Orleans we all love and value. So does a fundamental treasure of the history of this nation.  Later, another few-seconds-only scene -- Antoine returns. Danny's bed is empty.

Additionally, every scene in which Antoine interacts with a woman in this episode, his eyes, his face -- we understand why there are so many baby mamas. That scene at the airport, with the woman who is returning to New Orleans, her home, who asked who they are playing in honor of? He gives her those eyes, that face, that touch to the cap, and says, "We're playing in honor of you, Ma'am." She melts. So do we.

HBO Treme Episode 6 -- "Shallow Water, Oh Mama"

This episode was what I adore about the best arc television (or even the best of radio programs too -- like the Hip Deeps that Vaquero makes sometimes for AfroPop Worldwide): it feels like the narrative is going on forever, so filled with incident and character, and the ride is o so smooth that you are in a state of constant but o so enjoyable amazement at how much ground you've covered, how far you traveled -- and yay! there's still more to go before the episode is over. Among other bits I got such a kick out McAlary on Informed Sources's candidates forum -- or was it Steppin' Out,  another WYES public television program? --  how Peggy Scott Labord regards Davis, his platform and presentation, complete with strippers and flogging his CD, which last part is certainly allowed on Steppin' Out (V. was on the program last September and encouraged to flog TYBTF).

Ay-up -- Creighton's agent was gonna show up and ask for a book really fast on the Flood and the Catastrophe and New Orleans.  That's the publishing industry.  Though he seems to have rejected the idea out of hand, that seems a little odd because writers and pontificators, both of which Creighton is, want more than anything else forums, to be read, to be heard.  He also reminds me of so many people who got so depressed in the months after the Failure of the Levees, though on the surface they seemed to be more OK than many if not even most people, like Chris Rose, for instance.  Creighton too has his home and family intact, an income -- he's even getting his salary paid via the Tulane salary insurance it carried.  So who knows?  And is Goodman available for the second season?

Another favorite bit was Albert and neighbor (and now girlfriend?) snip snip snipping, sew sew sewing Albert's Big Chief's suit for Mardi Gras.

It gets a little dizzy sometimes though: Donald Harrison in the same scene with Delmond, who is playing a sort of Donald Harrison character, who sure as hell was back as Big Chief at Mardi Gras 2006.

Trying to recover from reading student papers, seemingly forever, we also watched Lolis Eric Elie's Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans (2008) last night, which for some reason we've missed seeing all this time.  It is needless to say that Faubourg Treme is a  brilliant piece of work.
 
Bye-the-bye -- for the first time I heard someone on national public rhetoric NOT refer to the BP Oil Blowout Crime Catastrophe as 'the spill.'  "All Things Considered," covering the Salazar testimony on the BP Oil Blowout Crime Catastrophe as, why, yes, 'the BLOWOUT.'  Then the story turned to ATC's own experts, and it was back to being a 'spill.'

"Shame, Shame, Shame" and HBO "Treme" in the HuffPo

The Huffington Post New Orleans writer, Karen Dalton-Beninato, writes at length about "Same, Shame, Shame," episode 5 of Treme.  This episode, per Simon, was the best so far -- each episode is the best ep so far, which is how it needs to be in an arc show. We got to watch it last night, finally (much going on over here -- can't always be free to watch tv, particularly as we no haz telervizon, much less HBO).



There's a shout out for The World That Made New Orleans toward the close of the episode's description.  It's amazing how many New Orleans writers have read that book.

Harlem's Afro-Cuban Renaissance PLUS Postmamboism!

From Larry Blumenfeld, and the Village Voice:

"This music has gone underground," Sanabria laments later, between sets. "But I remember when there were 30 different clubs in this city where you could go and hear some mixture of Afro-Cuban tradition and New York jazz." Sanabria, who grew up in the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx, found inspiration back then from such standard-bearing first-generation players as Tito Puente and trumpeter Mario Bauzá. Sanabria teaches at both the Manhattan School of Music and the New School, and he treats the stage as one more classroom: He pauses halfway through one set to acknowledge the name chosen by Bauzá and his brother-in-law, singer and frontman Frank "Machito" Grillo, for their legendary orchestra: Afro-Cubans. "That was an early nod to Africa," he notes, "before it was in fashion." Tonight, Sanabria's own nod is overt and visible: In place of his usual jacket and tie, he wears a black T-shirt emblazoned with, in red, a Kongo cross and the phrase Abre/Kuta/Güiri/Mambo—Kikongo for, very liberally interpreted, "Word up."


The whole band wears the shirts. So does Ned Sublette, the musician and writer holding court at a table nearby, as is his custom nearly every Wednesday night, surrounded by stacks of the T-shirts he designed and copies of his authoritative book, Cuba and Its Music. Both are expressions of what Sublette calls "postmamboism"—"a portable theory that places music at the center of understanding" and "begins with the study of African diaspora musics," as he has explained in a post on BoingBoing.net. "Not deconstruction, not postcolonialism, not subaltern studies, not semiotics itself can boast of a triumph to rival the Postmamboism T-shirt," Sublette writes me in an e-mail.

For Sanabria, the fashion statement just fits: "It means what we say musically: This has deep roots, and it calls for an open mind."

By the way, for those in the know, they have noticed that HBO's Treme is Postmamboist, totally!

*Treme* 3rd Ep -- "Right Place, Wrong Time"

Rushing about, prepping for Vaquero's SF gig, last night's Treme stays in mind.

Central to last night's narrative was Batiste's bone. The episode begins with with his foolish focus on the little bone, and his thread concludes with the literal loss of his trombone. How will that play out? Typical narrative expectation is that Annie rescued his 'bone, and then maybe Sonny sells it. But musicians like Bonnie Raitt provided immediately for musician relief, even prior to her other benefits soon after. She donated $200,000 outright for musician relief, and the relief wasn't contingent on doing this or doing that. Maybe this is how Batiste gets a new 'bone? Just speculation on my part. He needs a dentist. Such professionals are pretty much mia at this time, but there is one in Baton Rouge, right, Batiste's ex-wife's husband. Almost a part of the family, not to mention he lives with Batiste's sons, who Batiste has been neglecting shamefully. Or maybe Batiste sees his ex-wife's husband, receives some pro bono work, but still hasn't got an instrument. Maybe his embouchure has suffered some long term damage. Maybe he's gonna have to fly right, at least for a while, and maybe look long and deep into who he is -- and isn't? Maybe he'll even have to get a job, maybe working with Albert? But that's pretty typical tv narrative development, which isn't necessarily true to life either, though sometimes we flawed and failed human beings do have a come to Jesus moment.

Pierce has been doing a splendid acting job, though that opening scene of him humping the stripper looked less like sexual congress than anything seen on screen for quite some time. Naked women on screen as window dressing is kind of offensive too and this stupid strip club in Treme's French Quarter always brings to mind the strip club in The Sopranos, as if the Treme team are making some sort of comment on the show that got all the emmys.

Batiste's ribbing from the other band members in the strip club was straight up though, and also sad, right after that convo in NYC among the musicians playing with Mac for the benefit concert, about whether to stay or go NO. But their conversation? never have I heard any musicians talk like that among themselves. But then, the deal has to be made clear to us all who don't hang out with musicians or in NO. Never had there been so many New Orleans musicians and New Orleans music in NYC as in those weeks after the Catastrophe. And that hasn't changed. Regular gigs in NYC for Big Sam and a lot of other NO musicians. And, of course, now NYC is gonna play Mardi Gras whether or no it has a clue (part of that is all the students who came down to help, to intern with Spike, and all those rebuilding vacations -- they all come back with cds and beads). The other day a jazz arts venue director had to be carefully talked through her not brilliant idea to hold a second line in downtown NYC because, well for starters, it just couldn't work, for so many reasons.

Gads, how good the character of LaDonna is! She knows damned well how creoles view somebody like her, but she isn't having it. So that kind of makes up for the bs of the strippers. Speaking of strippers as we are, are we certain those va-va-va-voomers moved into Davis's neighborhood are not transvestites or transexuals? It would be fun if they were and very slowly Davis figures out that these neighbors he does approve of, unlike his gay neighbors (because they have money and he thinks they are destroying the neighborhood), are not who he thinks they are.

Why was Creighton was so suspicious of Davis in terms of his daughter? That scene seemed a time waster of the sort we never saw in The Wire. Whereas the YouTube bit was perfect, and perfect timing.

The motiveless beatdown of Batiste (and last week's arrest of Delmond), plus the run-around Toni gets from the sheriff – we're getting a picture here of law enforcement and 'security' that is not in control of itself or controlled from the outside either. It's in this period that the mysterious murder of musician Hilton Ruiz took place. We drank some weeks back by chance with an NO homicide cop and he confirmed what we thought happened – that it was indeed a murder and covered up by the NO PD.

It was terrific to see Bacchus in this episode, looking exactly like Bacchus looks. They made things so much more tolerable for so many in those days.

How difficult it is to have an honest critical reaction to this show. Shoot, excellent amigo, Tom McDermott, was central to one of the threads. How can I judge something like that critically as television?

The final scene, starting a funeral, honoring the dead discovered in the lower 9th, celebrating an Indian's funeral, honoring the dead discovered in the lower 9th, with Albert and the friends come in from their diapora to honor their brother's end, is stunning. There's Cherice! And, then, all up in their funeral rites, there's a tour bus that wants them to tell what's up.  Sheeee-it.

Jazz Fest 2010

Vaquero continues to crow happily that finally, this year, the Times-Pic seems to be taking JazzFest seriously in terms of its coverage of the music and musicians represented.  In other years he's felt the Times-Pic tended to flinch away from this long music festival that brings so many visitors to New Orleans, as something not so much of the city, so not so much worthy of coverage.  In a sense, maybe so?  The Indians, for instance, are relatively recent additions to the local music stages.

All this by way of a terrific piece today (thanks to New Orleans Ladder for the pointer) on Donald Harrison Jr.

It's all the more heartening and soothing to broken hearts because right now, even now, I'm hearing people who should really know better say things like this: "When the hurricane struck, I was saddened by the devastation but hoped that anything worth preserving would be moved to higher ground.  No; they just keep rebuilding in the same place."  OK.  The amount, the levels of ignorance in that, I can't even begin to parse, but then, anybody who knows anything about it knows what all that ignorance is, so I don't have to.  And those who don't get it, who won't get it, even when one brings out every fact and piece of evidence about why this all wrong, well -- yanno?  FUCK 'EM.

So soon, off to way uptown to watch the third Treme episode. (no, we don't just not have HBO, we don't even have a television, so we are depending on the kindness of, well, not strangers, but friends with HBO who are willing to let us sit with them for an hour or two -- well Vaquero was in a hotel room with HBO last weekend, so that was fine -- he won't be next Sunday night though ....)  My experience watching shows like this, all one season at a time, without having to wait a week in between allows for heavier and stronger dramatic impact -- whereas you cannot make Vaquero watch television at all.  But this is the exception because we keep getting asked to talk about the program for obvious reasons (last week he had to comment on Treme for a local television program) we have to watch it (as if this is a terrible hardship -- it just takes some planning and effort!).   After tonight the screener dvd eps will all have been broadcast.  With the fourth episode is when the show is gonna get Real Good, if The Wire's progress is anything to judge by.