From a Reader:
Find time to Watch Treme
Whatever else you do every week, find time to watch Treme on HBO on Sunday nights or in the almost daily replays. This is a new series by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer, writers of TV show The Wire, with many of the same actors. It’s about New Orleans “after the storm” as everyone says and the problems, the characters, the language, the LIFE is so true and real it makes you want to laugh and cry. And the music goes over under around and through everything. In an early scene John Goodman who seems to be the Tell the Truth man is being interviewed by a British TV journalist who opens with “Wasn’t Katrina a natural disaster?” Goodman replies angrily, “What hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a natural disaster, a hurricane pure and simple. The flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a Federal fuck-up of epic proportions…”
Khandi Alexander plays a character who is searching for her brother who was in the Orleans Parish Prison when the waters rose and hasn’t been seen since. Wendell Pierce (who is from New Orleans) plays a musician always scrambling for gigs and a way to get back to the city without a car or money from the Parish where he has found housing. A young woman drives her father back to New Orleans, fuming that he wants to return as they cross the “goddamned bridge,’ where as she remembers “the police [were] standing there with guns out, threatening to make us walk the hell back.” But he is determined to find and prepare his Crewe for Carnival and in an unforgettable scene steps into the night in full orange feather Indian costume, luminescent and magnificent. The pilot episode starts with the “first ‘second line’ since the storm” when musicians start marching down the streets, horns and trumpets blasting, drums a-thump, and people of all generations and hues join in to dance, sing and laugh in sheer delight. The last scene is a funeral with the band mournfully joyfully marching someone who “hadn’t been right since the storm” to the graveyard. And you think, only in New Orleans—so unique and so universal.
The Goodman character says in that first scene, “Don’t all nations rebuild their great cities? This city lives in the imagination of the world.” There is no place like New Orleans and the people, the mix of cultures, the language, accents and cadences, the music, the food, the irony-laden humor, the neighborhoods, the distinctive architecture and cemeteries, the history and the present, all of that and more, make it so. Those who run this country see this “man-made catastrophe of epic proportions” that they created as an opportunity to get rid of the people of the 9th Ward, public housing residents, and much of the Black population as they try to turn this pulsating city into a sanitized Disney Land parallel world for tourists. Five years later the people who make New Orleans what it is—at least those who lived through the Storm- are still either scattered to the winds, or struggling like hell with the basics of survival and recreating the wonder of life in New Orleans. And Treme tells their story truthfully and beautifully, starting 3 months after the storm. CHEERS.
