There’s only one man who can make your heart melt with just his voice. He gently teases you when singing about what life would be like if he lived next door, turning Mr Rogers’ “Won’t you be my neighbor?” inside-out and filling it with innuendo at the very end of his song. He sings about his sisters so gorgeously, it makes you want to be next to him listening to them “right there bitchin’ “. His version of “Southern Man” makes you want to weep at the “screaming and bull-whips cracking” that the man in the song seems to be oblivious to.
There’s also only one man who, in my current workplace, called to a woman that I would least expect to be moved by his work and had her running for the nearest music store to get herself a copy of his excellent Good Neighbor album…which also has the Treme opening song on it, John Boutte’s “Broke Down The Door/Treme Song”.
Boutte has an incredible vocal ability, his background is New Orleans through and through, and here he is with a band of local musicians who called themselves the New Orleans Social Club, turning Annie Lennox’s “Why” into a cathartic plea for understanding not just the pains estranged lovers inflict on each other, but the hurt of an entire city in agony. It brought folks to tears at the 2006 JazzFest, and it brings down the house at Austin City Limits:
Rolling over the credits was something a little different: Li’l Queenie and the Percolators’ version of “My Dawlin New Orleans”, a song originally written by Charles Neville. The band was only in existence for five years, but definitely left their mark on New Orleans music. Only two recordings exist of the rockin’ good time Leigh “Li’l Queenie” Harris would pull out with her scorching vocals, backed by an incredible group of musicians, two of whom would one day form the subdudes (which is why it’s no wonder this great article, complete with links to some Percolators’ mp3 excerpts, is on the subdudes’ site).
The thing that makes hearing Leigh Harris’ voice so bittersweet for me is that she was performing live all over town for years after the demise of the Percolators, establishing that she truly was “the head motherfucker in charge” as far as carving a place for herself in the New Orleans music scene was concerned. The woman soaked up musical influences like a sponge and poured it all out in her own way everywhere she went – whether it was onstage at a local club or in the living room of a friend’s house one night as we sat or stood anywhere we could and drank it all in. She was one of those people that was such a force of nature musically that you didn’t think anything would ever silence that voice of hers.
Unfortunately, Leigh Harris is somewhere in North Carolina, exiled from the events and effects of 8/29/2005. She is performing here occasionally, but not as much as she used to. She is a musical great and an inspiration whose rendition of the song “Inspiration” from the Percolators’ album Home gives me chills. There is a web presence sitting there, waiting for her words and news of her performances, but it dates from September 2009, and the “About” section says only this:
“She has a voice that makes muses, sirens, mermaids, and other magical singing creatures get really depressed and go take lessons and get therapy and shit.” – micah herman
There’s simply no better indication that events are percolating for the characters of Treme than the insertion of the Percolators singing about the “sprawlin’ hometown” New Orleans and all its ups and downs. At least, I hope that’s what’s gonna happen. We’ll just have to stay tuned.
“I thought it would be much harder to watch,” the friend sitting next to me said at the end, and he was right. Simon is coming on as slow as Ken Burns on a first date, carefully establishing place and character and the ways they interlock, and giving us heavy doses of the clownish Davis McAlary and Antoine Batiste (both faithful portrayals and by no stretch caricature clowns) that made it an experience completely unlike When the Levees Broke or Trouble the Water.
I have to wonder how well some of the subtlety will play in Peoria. Who in the room under 50 will understand the segue from talking about the Mafia to Louis Prima? How many will know who how big he was, that he was a New Orleans boy and the white Louis Armstrong in the profoundly segregated world of jazz music? Or, as Ray points out, who outside of New Orleans is going to understand the missing prisoner plot is not contrived cop show nonsense but one of the many ways people were still missing three month’s later? Sadly, more Americans know something of the drug culture of the streets than they do about one of America’s cultural jewels.
What will they make of Albert Lambreaux in places where they have no idea what a Mardi Gras Indian is? How many understood him when he spoke through his grim mask the episode’s title? But his spectral appearance had magical power, like the angels appearing to Joseph pre-Nativity. Simon is being very ballsy in the first episode, playing to an inside straight everyone in this city can see and is cheering him to draw to. I hope everyone in the rest of the country who watched comes back in part to understand that scene, just as people hung around to figure out what Hamlet would do once the ghost told him how his father died.
Ray got some important details out already, such as how clean the houses were, how little debris there was in the streets and how green the lawns were but those are small things. Lambreaux entering the house and bar were enough to re-establish for America what we are talking about. Simon had other details dead to rights, such as the constant interruption of helicopters.
And yes, Virgotex, everyone one of those lazy, shiftless, party-town mo-fos is killing themselves to just make it through the next day. Somebody in our room remarked when Toni Bernette came in with all those groceries, “where they hell did she get all that?”
Ray, this episode was my magic Hubig’s Pie, and magic may be my new favorite flavor.
– wet bank guy
Like everyone else I’m sure, tons of initial thoughts but here’s the one thing that made the biggest impression on me about the whole episode:
Every character is working their fucking ass off! These people are hustling and scrambling. Kermit Ruffins makes it look easy enough, and you can tell that it comes more natural to some of them (Toni, Janette) than others (Antoine, Davis) but they are all having to bust ass just to get the simplest things taken care of. Everything is harder, more expensive, farther away, and takes longer to do than it ever did before.
Jeezus, I’m kinda at a loss at the moment. No deep thoughts but a lot of random first impressions.
I sort of get how a media critic who isn’t from here could think that Episode 1 was a little scattered. A lot of characters to introduce, a lot of plot threads to kick off, and if you haven’t lived through the back-story you might have trouble seeing how all of them will come together. But as a New Orleanian, I thought it was fantastic. I am less confused about where things are going and who is doing what than I was after the first episode of The Wire.
I’ve heard it said that the music is the star of this show, that the whole episode is totally infused with music. I can’t remember, but I think I even read someplace that it seemed almost forced, like the audience needs to be put on a crash diet of the music to get up to speed. I disagree. This may be hard for y’all who ain’t from here to believe, but yes, we do have that much of our own music in our lives here, all the time. That’s the difference between here and a place like New York which is a hub of the music “industry”, or Austin which has a great music “scene”. In New Orleans, it’s not an “industry”, it’s not a “scene”. It’s part of the very fabric of our existence, like the weather and the food and the architecture. The music drips from the trees in the spring, it bubbles up out of the gutters and radiates off the sidewalks in the summer. The music is everywhere, all the time. It’s not relegated to some “entertainment district” or to a few annual festivals. It is part of our lives, every day, all day. Simon and crew get that. I hope at some point the audience gets it, too, that they understand that this is not a musical, this is not educational television, this is an accurate depiction of how we live.
Clarke Peters as a Mardi Gras Indian chief was stunning. He had a lot of those qualities of Tootie Montana that you see in Tootie’s Last Suit…the work ethic, the stubbornness, the iron grip he keeps on the traditions, not just wanting them to be honored, but demanding that they be done right. And the disconnect from how his love of the traditions creates a gulf between himself and his kids’ desires to spread their wings and go elsewhere. If you get a chance between now and next week, try to get a copy of Tootie’s Last Suit and watch it, it’s beautiful and heartbreaking. (If you’re in Austin, come over to my house, maybe we’ll have a Tootie viewing party later in the week.)
The kid who was in OPP during the storm and has been completely missing for three months…again, that’s not a contrived television plot. That is sadly all too real. Scores of New Orleanians were trapped for months in a third world gulag with no due process and no contact with the outside world. Guantanamo existed right here in the U.S.A. at St. Gabriel and other places. See David Egger’s fantastic book Zeitoun for the true story of one such man.
A few things made the kids and I squeal:
* The tall drunk guy in the green shirt that keeps getting in Davis McLary’s way when he’s at Vaughan’s cycling back and forth between Elvis’s table and the stage…that’s the real Davis Rogan.
* Antoine Batiste’s current girlfriend is played by the real Phyllis Montana LeBlanc from When The Levees Broke. Damn that’s cool.
* When the NOPD cop doesn’t let the lawyer have a seat at Lil Dizzy’s cafe (a real restaurant on the edge of the Treme on Esplanade), I saw my future ex-wife in the background twice, this one actual waitress there that I have had a crush on for years. She’s a big girl with a big smile and she always calls me baby and rubs my hair and says I’m a hottie.
* The Hubig’s pie scene was fucking fantastic. If I hadn’t just finished off a whole bag of them that Alli brought me last week, I’d be dying with envy.
Probably a few more things I’ll remember when I watch it a second time.
The things that I think they didn’t get exactly right, and I don’t know how they would anyway:
* Too much green. The way I remember the city at that time, it was brown brown brown. So many trees and plants and grass were killed by the storm, it was two summers before the foliage really started to feel normal again.
* Believe it not, not enough debris and garbage in the streets. The debris piles lined the streets like snowdrifts in a northeastern blizzard after the snowplows come by.
* The inside of the flooded houses, again, were too clean. Both Albert Lambreaux’s house and his bar, it seems like he just walked up, turned the key, opened the door and walked in. Reality, a lot of times, went like this: you try the key, the lock won’t turn because it sat in that water and it’s corroded. So you work on it with some WD-40. If you’re unlucky you eventually need to destroy the doorknob to get it open. Once it’s unlocked, you push the door, and after a few inches it runs into shit…your couch, your bookcase, warped floorboards, swollen muddy carpet. We always had to muscle the door open just enough for a couple of people to be able to climb through and clear the debris away from the inside of the door so that it could be opened, and even once it was clear, there was no real path through the house. The water picked everything up and dropped it all over the place. Climbing through a fresh house was like caving. For some video of the Arabi Wrecking Krewe and some Rising Tide bloggers doing a house in Hollygrove a year after the storm, go see this excellent video by Scout Prime of First Draft. (Plus, I was cringing that he didn’t have a mask on with all that mold on the walls. I know people did it, but…..wewwwww, gives me the willies.)
* Davis Rogan’s house is not that tidy.
These are nits. God forbid Simon bring in some CGI to really muck up the place; I like that they tried to organically reproduce late 2005 conditions the best they knew how.
I don’t know how I’m gonna wait a week for the next episode.
I give it an A+.
Have been thinking since reading Ray’s post, and in fact since reading all the way back to Treme is Not Okay, which has been bouncing around in my head for ages as I tried to think of what to say about Treme. I’ve remained relatively unspoiled. I haven’t watched videos and I haven’t watched previews and I’ve only read the interviews posted here, because sometimes it’s best to go into these things cold. But this interests me:
I don’t want to be like that busker character in that one scene, hating on some innocent kids from Wisconsin just because they don’t know everything there is to know about Katrina. On the other hand, the thought of lefty-blogger blowhards like Yglesias ‘n’em passing judgment and making pronouncements about a city that the lefty-sphere has gone out of their way to ignore all these years…it irks me a little. I feel like we’re inviting the carpetbloggers in to come and appropriate whatever they want, for whatever purpose, and fuck the deeper truths lived by the actual people who are from here.
Who should tell your story? Who has the right to tell it? Who gets to see it, to come inside, to take what they want? To skim from the surface or drink deep? Can you even control that? Should you?
My answers to these questions are biased, because I tell others’ stories for a living, because in order to get out of bed and look in the mirror every day I have to convince myself this is a worthwhile endeavor, because I’m never able to separate how much of what I think is important about what I do is justification and how much is actually not total bullshit. And I fucking hate talking about process. I feel like talking about process is what writers do when they’re too lazy to write.
But, question’s been raised. Who has the right to tell your story and hear your story? Who has the right to be let in that deep? Telling a story is letting someone into your heart, into the things for you that are like the things of the church, the things you don’t talk about, that are knit into your muscle and bone. We were always trying to be conscious of that, at my last paper, that ain’t nobody obligated to give you shit about their lives and that if they do, you tread on that as if it’s sacred ground. We didn’t always get there but I’d never say we didn’t always try. Here’s the crazy thing, though: Show up on someone’s doorstep after their grandkid died in some horrific car accident or school shooting or something, call up somebody after 20 years who said he was molested by a priest, invite yourself to a funeral, join a Muslim family for dinner after their children have been spit at on the street, and more often than not people want you there. They invite you in. Feed you, even. They talk for hours. They want their story told.
We all know as fucking human beings, somewhere deep down, that our own memories only live as long as we do and the way we teach each other how to live is to tell our stories. And if we can’t tell them ourselves, we tell them this way: Books. Newspapers. TV shows. Movies, even. Radio. We’ve expanded the campfire where we used to share tales of the hunt to the entire fucking world. This is how we do this now.
It it exploitative? It can be, if done badly. It can be terribly destructive, breaking something up into little pieces and putting it out there for the rest of the world to see. It can be scary. The week before my last book was published I was a horrible wreck, thinking that once it came out I’d basically be naked to the world. All the things that had made me up, made me who and what I was, all the deepest things I don’t talk about even after the bottle’s half-empty, would be there for anybody with $25 and a few hours of free time to pick over. I’d never tell anyone to do that kind of thing if they didn’t want to do it. I have zero quarrel with people who’d just as soon any storyteller at their door went the fuck away.
And audiences can be total assholes. The worst thing about being in any kind of communication medium is that you’re basically just throwing shit out there and you have zero control where it lands. Somebody might be inspired to go shoot up a freeway, and that isn’t in any way what you meant, but damned if they didn’t just hear what they wanted to hear. Somebody else, though, might get it. Somebody else might take it up. Somebody else might make their life’s work something glorious because of something that you said. And that’s always been a chance I’ve been willing to try to convince others to take. So who has the right to tell the story? Whoever wants it bad enough to get it. To show up on the doorstep, to do the work to get inside, to crawl around under the skin of something and get people to talk.
And once it’s out there, there will be lots of people who can see your heart. Who will know your secrets. And who will remember, long after you’re gone, who you were and what you did. And it’s not up to anybody but you to decide if that’s worth it. It’s not up to anybody but you to decide how much to care, how annoyed to get at stupid fanboys or clueless tourists, how much pride to take in knowing all this stuff first, way before the HBO crews came and made it cool.
A.
Pablo Picasso famously said that art is the lie that shows us the truth.
From David Simon’s op-ed piece in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune (affectionately known as the TP), on truth, fiction and details.
By referencing what is real, or historical, a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful, full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale, set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time, can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short, drama is its own argument.
We have addressed this topic on the issue of Creighton Bernette and our friend Ashley, and that will be just the most obvious point of departure for a few of us. There will be so many more.
This is fiction, and if those of us on this blog in or from New Orleans want the story told and told well, then we must forgive them their trespasses, their necessary liberties and revel in the truth revealed.
“Is that a second line? What band is that?”
“Who cares? Just follow those horns.”
(Swiped from NuPac, but it’s more fitting now).
Wendell and Lolis, Black Culture Club, Ben Franklin High School yearbook, 1981:
Of all the links Dave Walker has recommended as primers for Treme, he’s been halted from mentioning one of the best, probably because the T-P just doesn’t want to mention that weekly in town. So I would be completely remiss in letting this go on the cusp of the show’s premiere…
Anything on The Gambit’s Blog of New Orleans with Red Cotton’s byline is a must-read, complete with YouTube clips she herself has taken of the SA&PCs strutting their stuff and of the brass bands that get it going.
If you haven’t had enough of the clips accompanying her blog posts, go crazy over at Big Red Cotton’s YouTube channel. Here’s a sampling of what she serves up: a little Rebirth wending its way through the Treme on Mardi Gras day:
Who is Red Cotton? None other than Deborah Cotton, the author of Notes From New Orleans,
an edited collection of articles from the column of the same
name published online at EURWeb.com, a Black entertainment news site, between September ‘05 and June ‘07. The articles, which have been edited and grouped in thematic rather than chronological order, are a first-person comic-tragic account of life and times in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina.
Deborah is out and about in town doing her job as a journalist and community activist when she’s not chronicling the second lines in her neighborhood.
All of this reminds me that I must dig out my own copy of Notes and read it again, ’cause it’s good…and ’cause I have a question for Red: have you found your James yet? 
The premiere is almost upon us, and I have to admit I have been feeling more and more uneasy about it for the last week.
I don’t worry that Simon will get it wrong. From what I’ve heard from people I know on the show, from what I’ve learned reading between the lines of the various media reviews, it’s gonna totally rock. It’s gonna be the best portrayal of New Orleans to ever make it to the screen.
No, what worries me is that this is obviously turning out to be big. Like, nationwide big. Wire big. Sopranos big. The hype for this is as big as the hype for the Sopranos finale, the Wire final season. And it hasn’t even aired yet.
It is going to be a big fucking event.
And I don’t want it to be.
I want this city’s story to be told, I want everybody to know why it matters and why we matter. But in telling it so thoroughly and so dramatically, I am worried that in the telling, we’ll be giving a piece of it away. And I don’t want to give any of it away.
Within a few weeks we’ll be deluged with HBO-educated “experts” on New Orleans (it’s already starting, actually). Fan-boys who will have an opinion about a culture they’ve never seen, a city they’ve never been to, and people, actual people, they’ve never even met. And unlike in 2005 and 2006, I don’t have the energy or the will to go around straightening them all out.
I’ve been ignoring a lot of the Treme coverage lately, and sometimes when I do see it, I feel both excitement and dread at the same time. Like on Colbert last night, when Simon mentioned Ashley Morris as the source for a lot of John Goodman’s dialog. And I know why Simon mentioned him, and I know it is important that he do so, and yeah, part of me thought it was really cool. And part of me thought…well, I didn’t know what to think. Because I thought about thousands of Colbert fans wondering who this Ashley fella was and deciding to learn about him and start becoming experts about him, and I thought of legions of Ashley fan-boys who didn’t even know the guy existed until this week, and it eats at me a little. Ashley was my friend. I don’t want all those people to have a piece of him, I don’t want all those people to think they know him the way some people think they know, say, the real Jay Landsman or the real Fran Boyd, because they don’t. It’s already happening a little, Colbert people showing up at Ashley’s blog to comment about how cool he is, largely oblivious to the fact that they are actually leaving comments for his widow to read.
And the way I feel about Ashley is the way I feel about the city. Are people gonna throw around Indian chants the way we used to throw around the names of drugs brands in Baltimore? “Pandemic! Red tops! Too-way pockaway! Spider bags, a na ney! A na ney!” Alli tells me the Parkway is getting almost too impossibly crowded for the locals anymore because it’s been in the New York Times so often there are always busloads of tourists there. Is the same thing gonna happen to Thursday night at Vaughan’s? Is Super Sunday going to join Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest as a big tourist draw? If people start wearing FYYFF t-shirts like they wear shirts with Omar or Tony Soprano or Che Guevara…I don’t know what I think about that.
I don’t want to be like that busker character in that one scene, hating on some innocent kids from Wisconsin just because they don’t know everything there is to know about Katrina. On the other hand, the thought of lefty-blogger blowhards like Yglesias ”n’em passing judgment and making pronouncements about a city that the lefty-sphere has gone out of their way to ignore all these years…it irks me a little. I feel like we’re inviting the carpetbloggers in to come and appropriate whatever they want, for whatever purpose, and fuck the deeper truths lived by the actual people who are from here.
I’ve always enjoyed educating people who show a sincere interest. We were out drinking with some new work buddies a couple of weeks ago and the subject of New Orleans came up and somebody said, “why didn’t anybody have the good sense to just put New Orleans where Baton Rouge is” and I said “cause Baton Rouge doesn’t have easy access to the lake which would’ve made it a shitty port 200 years ago when silt clogged the mouth of the river 95% of the time”. And their ears perked up, and they wanted to hear more.
People who want to come and help and listen and learn, I want to hug them (Scout can vouch for having been on the receiving end of Ray hugs many times). But opening up the city gates to anybody who wants to come and take…I don’t know, some of this stuff is very very personal, it’s very precious, and I don’t want to see it cheapened like so many shitty Bourbon Street t-shirts.
I am by no means accusing Simon or HBO or any of the other great people associated with the show of exploiting it. They’re telling an important and essential story in the best way they know how, better than almost anybody else could tell it. But once you tell it, once you put it out there to a national audience on a mainstream outlet, you don’t control it any more. The story becomes, at least in part, the property of the audience. And what right do they have to our stories?
I have trouble sorting out how much of this is legitimate fear, how much of it is selfishness on my part, and how much is just that I am both too far away (I miss my home) and too connected to the show (I miss my friends), and I just can’t sort out my personal feelings about my friends from the fiction that will be on the screen.
Talking out my ass in the middle of the night, ’cause these two short stories I should be working on just refuse to be written.
Feel free to ignore.
To begin…yes, I know the character Stephen Colbert plays on his Colbert Report is a parody of most right-wing talk show hosts out there, especially a certain Bill O’Reilly, and the line of questioning Colbert whips out on his guests is largely a put-on, but there is always some truth behind the humor. Some of the best comedians of years past – Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, to name a few – have sought to make you think through your laughter, to see the absurdity of this thing called life, warts, dingy corners, under-the-table shenanigans, hypocrisy and all. It simply occurred to me, when watching Colbert stymie David Simon with a question of why white people like to watch black people on TV, that it isn’t such a joke of a question. It doesn’t just surround Simon, it surrounds us all.
I’ve done a lot of thinking in recent years about the ways in which white privilege is still with us despite the civil rights movement and the acts that were passed in the mid-sixties. I went back and consulted a list I’d found in David K. Shipler’s A Country of Strangers of benefits we as white people enjoy that are unseen to us but are front and center to members of the “Other” category. A larger sampling of the list, authored by women’s studies educator Peggy McIntosh, can be found here. When you consider how much our society is still largely geared towards the stuff white people like, the way white people learn, and the way white people do business, it changes your vision some – how you act, how you regard the things you take for granted…
…like, for instance, a TV show.
It’s a pisser that a show with as much potential as Treme has can’t get past the programming wall the nonpay channels have set up against programs of its ilk – and when something does get through, the results have been less than satisfactory, to put it mildly. I’m happy that locally, the Mother-In-Law Lounge has decided to step in and show the premiere, and I hope it and other public places will keep it up. If there’s one thing the entertainment industry as a whole has been quite good at, it’s turning creative voyeurism into greenbacks, but I don’t know too many people wanting to run out and get HBO just to watch this show (hell, I’m not even going to run out and get basic cable).
And so, because one has to shell out extra money right off the bat just to see this in the living room, the audience is already quite limited. With that alone, it leans heavily towards white people looking over a cathode-ray chasm at a realistic tale involving more black people than are usually seen on TV trying to rebuild their lives in a devastated New Orleans.
The question of white people watching TV shows about black people is only the beginning. The questions that further probe this subject involve how the entertainment industry works, and how it perpetuates the distances between the races for its own benefit... and how much we still take all of that for granted. Because, after all, our society is fueling what we see and what we don’t see, as well as what we choose not to see.
For nearly five years, the rest of this country has been able to push the problems exposed so harshly and cruelly by the events of 8/29/2005 off to the side. Some of those problems are unique to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but the bigger ones concerning our crumbling infrastructure, the decisions our politicians make that send our taxes God knows where, our (lack of) preparedness for anything the future may throw our way, and how much these problems affect us differently depending on what color we are have taken shape in the form of a massive weight that has not been lifted from us to this day. I want to hope that the creative powers behind Treme reopen everyone’s eyes about these problems, especially about how unequal all things still are. Contrary to some folks’ beliefs that we are “so over it” down here, we’re not. In reality, no one else in this country is, either.
But here we all are, still doing no better than looking at each other through one-way glass.
I do hope the levees around everyone’s hearts are permeable, at least.
