Acadiana - HBO True Detective, Season 1

The first HBO series of True Detective is located and shot in Louisiana's cajun Acadiana.  The friend we visited in Breaux Bridge highly recommended I watch, as he pointed out various places and views as being in the HBO series. The program had conveniently arrived dvd, so after getting back home, I ordered up on netflix.

What did I get?

Immediate references to the traditional practices in Acadiana of Santería, which is claimed to be the serial killer's theatrical set-up of the discovered victim. (In fact, that antlered crown blahblahblah looks a whole lot more like some idiot's fantasy of ancient European earth sacrifices or something). Speaking as someone who knows what Santería is, in the Caribbean and in Brasil, and in its mother non-syncretized practice as Lucumi in Nigeria's Yoruba land -- who knows personally the initiated and the "priestly" class -- who knows which African and Afro-Caribbean groups came to Louisiana, which parts and when, she howls: NO! NOT IN LOUISIANA -- NOT EVEN IN THE U.S.!

Next, immediate reference to Voodoo, also part of the serial killer's display. WHAT? This reference means nothing, nor is anything made out of it in the script. Nor is whatever is called voodoo in New Orleans the Vodún of Haiti, or the practice in Dahomey -- Benin.  For reasons, again, that have to do with who came in the inward San Domingue and Cuban migration to Louisiana during the Napoleonic era, and when. Again, I personally know practitioners, houngans and mambos, from both Haiti and Africa. I also am acquainted of what is called voodoo in New Orleans, and thus am qualified to make this call.

The signature twisted branch, vine and bone forms found with the victims of the serial killings, if there is an actual African-derived underpinning to them, it would be from the religion that in Cuba is called Palo, and which comes ultimately from what we now call Mbanza-Kongo, Angola. Captives from this region are the fundamental layer of all New World slavery populations: South America, the Caribbean and North America. This region of Africa was slaved first and longest, from beginning to the end of slavery in the New World. Thus these spiritual practices were continuously refreshed, until, of course 1808 in what was now the U.S. when the constitutional ban on importing Africans came into place, as protectionism for the Upper South's dominance of the domestic slave trade.  But there is not a word about any of this in the script.  Nor, of course, would a Palo practitioner be using it as an excuse to be a serial killer.

In fact, the theatrical set-ups of the victims are much more like some fantasy of old European earth magic sacrifice, than anything that would come out of Africa.

Marty Hart 2012

This viewer never stopped being thrown out of the show by protagonist Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) straining all his words through a mouth fist-full of gravel. I kept thinking of the guy who plays Deacon on Nashville, who also delivers his lines through his teeth, meanwhile plumping up his cheeks like a squirrel's filled with nuts.

Rust Cohle 1995

Rust Cohle/Matthew McConaughey's way of delivering his lines is equally odd, though in a different sort of way.  It is even hypnotic, as one would expect from someone the script continually hints is as equally psychopathic in his violence as the serial killer(s).

These delivery styles are supposed to convince the viewer that Martin is a native Louisianan, and Rust used to live in Texas? I kept thinking of all the very bad Brit television shows that always make the U.S. characters come from Texas or somewhere in the South, because evidently that's the only way actors can think of to talk like a USian, and how preposterous they sound.  Certainly not like a Texan or any Southerner ever born.

Marty Hart 1995

Rust Cohle 2012

That's the deal -- true detectives not only refuse to give up detecting. They never give up their partner either.  Most importantly they have the capacity and the skills to deliver most explosive violence. Equally important  as detective partners their preferred form of violence and their drive to commit it must be different ,yet complementary. One must be tormented by good vs. evil, the other must be less philosophical.  Rust is always ready to intone his philosophy of the Evil World.  Best line thus

is delivered by Marty, "I've got an idea. Let's make the car a place of silent reflection from now on, all right?" Prime time crime novelist, James Lee Burke, with his has worked this vein deeply in his long-running Robicheaux- Purcell series.

In the middle of the series comes the episode in which our two heroes infiltrate a biker drug gang -- every member of which has hair to ass in the back and down to his nipples in the front. Our Heroes have clean chins and cop  haircuts. WHERE IS THE UNDERCOVER?  This was a fairly pointless episode, evidently included  for the sake of a lot of shooting, and o did the reviewers adore it,

In the final episode both Heroes impossibly survive a knife to the gut (Rust Cohle/Matthew McConaughey) (hoisted into the air on that knife and held there) and a hatchet into the chest (Martin Hart / Woody Harrelson). James Lee Burke’s Dave Robichaeux and Clete Purcell, moved from New Orleans to Acadiana, never die either (though wives and girlfriends do), not from the most ghastly wounds, meat-grinding vehicular crashes or fire blazing explosions. Whatever knocks them out, evidently the air of Acadiana can preserve Heroes to fight the Real Evil another day.

Brothel in the swamp, right where you want it.  Mosquito joy.

Women in True Detective.  Hmm. What are women? Evidently to be female is to be non-dimensional cray-cray, hapless victim, prostitute -- ALWAYS HAVE PROSTITUTES -- or  bad wife who coerces sex from her husband's partner because she has learned her husband serially cheats on her, and though she tells him to get out, he won't leave.

To quote from Vulture:

It’s made from equal parts film noir, Chinatown-style corruption parable, serial-killer potboiler, 3-a.m.-in-the-dorm-room-with-bong-hits philosophical inquiry, and buddy-cop comedy. And it climaxed with a bloody, ridiculous, yet kind of awesome installment that

presented its hero, Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, as some kind of cornpone risen Christ.

True Detective was beautifully photographed, and it is engrossing. McConaughey's cheekbones are particularly mesmerizing.

The most interesting aspect of the series for me is how it slides through time, the past and present, and the musings of the future.  Katrina is the breaking place between their shared past and their present encounter, which is absolutely true for Louisianans -- and then Rita, in Acadiana, following Katrina.  So much is lost, not least pre-digitized criminal records. Having them encounter each other again after that break shows how the two men changed and how they did not, and how certain actions (and irritations) between two allies can follow all the way up

The reason the viewer isn't interested in these killers.  The others get away with it.

the time line -- but forgiveness can be achieved.. The killers remain the same, but we're not interested in the killers, or even the victims. They are the pretext to present us us two very different men, and their relationship, and how their trust in each other ultimately is put to the greatest tests, and transcends whatever irritations and wrongs may have been committed.

Starting off the drive around the region, our Breaux Bridge friend took us to have breakfast at a local establishment that would be at home anywhere with a hipster population: local artists' work on the walls, and for sale; designer coffee drinks made to order, local baked goods from bread to muffins to sinful desserts, sandwiches and salads and other dishes, none of which was priced much or at all below what an NYC place would charge.  Wi-Fi.  An associated art gallery.  After breakfast he took us on an itinerary of music clubs, museums, art - performance spaces, theaters.

On our way to the local artisnal brewery I asked, "Is this place as filled with truly evil people as James Lee Burke writes about or in True Detective?"  (I was meaning right now, not the horrific slavery past of sugar plantation-prisons; our friend knew what I meant.)

He was silent.

Then he said, "Yes."

Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum

“Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. “This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015.”

You all may or may not recall that we were invited and taken on a private tour of the Whitney Slavery Museum Plantation last year by the proprietor - creator, John Cummings.

The NY Times Mag did a piece on the Whitney for this weekend's edition of the publication. 

Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States.

This is not by any means the first slavery museum in North America. I have visited quite a few of them, from slave markets as memorials and learning centers, to restored "quarters" on other plantations, to auction sites and slave jails. There's a large slavery museum in Richmond (along with a Confederacy museum; the Confederacy museum is located within a well-marked historical district -- the slavery museum, well, it's more difficult to access, shall we say?).

However, whatever first inspired Cummings to create this memorial museum out of a Louisiana sugar plantation, I recognize, intimately, what drives him. It's feeling that overwhelming obligation to bring out in an organized, structured, carefully documented public manner -- the revelation of  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED that we as individuals and citizens, and as a nation keep hiding and lying about:

. . . . “I started to see slavery and the hangover from slavery everywhere I looked,” he said. As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don’t acknowledge this?”

The Whitney Plantation is something different, and astonishing. It's art, a gigantic, multi-layered, multi-faceted memorial complex honoring the blood, sweat and grief of the thousands and millions of people, captured, victimized, tortured and held captive to their deaths, their entire lives devoured by estate-prison machines like the Whitney.

After visiting the Whitney Plantation, and then the Angola Prison, which is a fully functioning plantation, made from a plantation owned by the antebellum era's largest, most successful and wealthiest slave trader, what I'd learned about Jefferson and Virginia plantations from the penal colony of Monticello showed in even more disturbing relief.

Located on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both educational and visceral. An exhibit on the North American slave trade inside the visitors’ center, for instance, is lent particular resonance by its proximity, just a few steps away outside its door, to seven cabins that once housed slaves. From their weathered cypress frames, a dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail — an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old “Big House” will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell. A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a slave’s life.

These names have been taken from the database compiled by long-time amiga and colleague, the ground-breaking, pioneering scholar, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. See her great works, which are now online, "Database for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy" and "Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1719-1820".

Why this museum? Why now? (Why The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-breeding Industry? Why now?)

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no monument honoring America’s slaves. “It’s something I bring up all the time in my lectures,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” “If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”

The article is a very good one, reflecting, hopefully, the tone of the NY Times Magazine's roll-out of its brand new do-over.

Laughing At Self Wakes Self

There is nothing more immediately tedious than reading accounts of dreams. Even dream sequences in books, films and television send me into a state of vexation. Lazy writing, vexed self screams! Lack of thinking, self screams.

This one is so very silly it might pass -- here I go, accounting one of my own dreams.

Location: Louisiana

Self: My own self, but different

Narrative: My poor self gets cruised by a corporate pooba to infiltrate a long-time established state corporation currently extending its pillaging, plundering, pollution and destruction of state's natural resources, including the wetlands and the Gulf waters. The recruiting corp isn't wanting to stop these activities by this particular local rival, it just wants to spy upon it in order to pillage, plunder, pollute and destroy more effectively and more quickly than its more established rival. I have been threatened with financial harrassment and punishment if I don't accept this corp's assignment.

I am dressed in contemporary highly effective female executive fashion. My skills in reading and writing financial statements, insurance policies, running an office and so on are tested and I come up aces (see, my own self, but different).

But there is one other thing. The recruiter asks: "How are your skills with progressive competitive swimming?"

I respond, "What the eff are you talking about? Never heard of such a thing."

Recruiter gets huffy and threatening: "It's the favorite sport of all poobas. You must be able to join in the sport during social occasions, and do it competitively."

I respond: "Maybe up north where you come from, where you have summer vacation homes in pristine wilderness, preserved by northern progressive politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and FDR, but down here the corps have done such a good job that our water sports are all performed on top of the water in boats, not in it. Just like you are used to having a social safety net and public education. But down here we have Bobby Jindal. This is why you will fail in your mission to own Louisiana."

This was so frackin' preposterous, and my delight in spouting so many unlikely multi-syllable words (The-o-dore Roo-se-velt; pro-gress-ive!) in succession, while dreaming, made me laugh so hard I woke myself up.

Go To El Yuma For Splendid Photos and Posts on Creole, Non-Creole

And other equally fascinating New Orleans elements.  El Yuma is the blog of this semester's co-professor and amigo.

El Yuma: Trabajo Voluntario: Creoles, Cajuns, Treme, and Guest Blogging at The Havana Note

El Yuma: Trabajo Voluntario: Is Cajun is to Creole as Guajiro is to Criollo?

El Yuma:  Trabajo Voluntario: More from the New Orleans Second-Line

El Yuma:  Trabajo Voluntario: More from the New Orleans Second-Line

El Yuma:  Trabajo Voluntario: Gone fishin' en La Nueva Orleans, Luisiana!

The permalinks are, of course in reverse chronological order -- the first entry of this experience of Ted's and the students he chaperoned and mentored is the last one.

Ivor van Heerden, who pointed fingers in Hurricane Katrina levee failures, failures, fired by LSU

This is the silencing of the voice that has spent a life studying this region in this context, and knows what is going on with the Gulf Coast in general, and coast below New Orleans in particular. This is the silencing of that voice by an institution of higher learning, not because he is wrong, but because he is right. Who does Louisiana State University think it serves by silencing this hurricane and flood expert, recognized by the entire world of specialists in the area of study for his important work that has proved right in every respect?

"Ivor van Heerden, who pointed fingers in Hurricane Katrina levee failures,f ired by LSU"
by Mark Schleifstein (full story at this link):
The Times-Picayune
Thursday April 09, 2009, 10:06 PM

Pull --

"Ivor van Heerden, the outspoken coastal scientist who led the state'sindependent Team Louisiana investigation into Hurricane Katrina leveefailures, has been notified by Louisiana State University that he will be terminated as a research professor in May 2010.

Van Heerden, who is not a tenured professor, also has been stripped of his title as deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. Also, engineering professor Marc Levitan has stepped down as the center's director.

University officials say they will reshape the center's research direction in the wake of the moves.Van Heerden will remain director of the LSU Center for the Study of PublicHealth Impacts of Hurricanes, financed by a $3.65 million Louisiana Board of Regents Health Excellence Fund, until his LSU contract ends next year.

LSU officials have refused to address the van Heerden decision, citing the school's policy of not commenting about personnel matters.

"Legally, we're not allowed to comment on any kind of personnel action, "said spokeswoman Kristine Calongne. "We're bound by confidentiality of ouremployees."

Van Heerden said the university would not give him a reason, either. DavidConstant, interim dean of LSU's College of Engineering, told him thedecision "wasn't due to my performance. But he couldn't tell me why, " van Heerden said."

Image of Charles Darwin Appears on Wall in Tennessee.... Thousands Flock

A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small
Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles
Darwin--author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary
movement--made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

"I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin
can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits," said Darlene
Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious
stain...

You can read full story here.

Then there is this story.

"Gov. Jindal exorcizes arts funds from Louisiana budget," by Christopher Knight, Culture Monster Blog (LA Times) March 30, 2009

When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave the now-infamous televised Republican response to President Obama's Congressional address in February, he mocked the inclusion of "something called 'volcano monitoring' " in the economic stimulus bill. "Instead of monitoring volcanoes," Jindal said, "what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington."Twenty-six days later, Alaska's Mt. Redoubt began to erupt, spreading volcanic ash all over Anchorage and egg all over Jindal's face.

Now Gov. Jindal has proposed a $26.7-billion state budget for next year that makes painful but necessary program cuts to deal with a $1.3-billion drop in his state's general fund income. According to the Associated Press, "The largest cuts would fall on health care and education programs.... The state's health department would be cut $413 million, or 5%; public colleges would be trimmed $219 million, or nearly 8%; and the education department would lose $141 million, or nearly 3%."Unmentioned by the AP is the fate the Louisiana Decentralized Arts Fund, a competitive program that makes small grants ranging from $500 to $10,000 to arts and cultural projects in every parish of the state. The arts fund will lose just a couple of million dollars -- chump change compared to the big numbers cited above.

Except, that is, when you look at the percentages. WWL-TV reported today the arts fund would be whacked a whopping 83% -- effectively putting the program out of business. The arts, not health and education, are taking the largest cuts by a factor of 10.

Shocking, I know. Who could imagine a Republican politician wanting to wipe out public arts funding? Gov. Jindal challenged arts funding in the president's stimulus package afew weeks back on "Larry King Live."

"Fundamentally, I don't think ... $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts is going to get the economy moving again as quickly as allowing the private sector to create jobs," he said.The governor did not explain how the minuscule NEA boost -- which Congress ultimately approved -- would hinder job creation in the arts, public or private.