Trumpet Tempest in a Teapot
OK, I need to come back and do a longer post on this, but I’m too excited not to jump right in and toss this clip into the mixup over trad versus modern swirling around Delmond’s character. Wait for Miles Davis’ trumpet solo to come in at 1:50 right behind John Coltrane’s acrobatics, and hang in there for Saints at about 2:50. Now that he’s dropped that broad hint roll back to 1:50 and while it tastes like vintage Miles from the first bar listen for the echoes of Pops, and by the end of this joyful solo tell me Kermit Ruffins didn’t wear the grooves off the vinyl on this solo when he was coming up.
All props to Donald Harrison but Miles was on the case in ’58.
PS–Hat tip to local musician and WWOZ DJ Jeff “Snake” Greenberg for turning me onto Milestones via a Facebook conversation. Here’s hoping he gets his moment in the show’s arc-lit sun for uncovering this bit of the trad v. modern Rosetta stone.
Carver, Altman, Kurosawa, Treme and that other show
“I can’t understand it. I just can’t understand it at all.” –The Woodcutter, Rashomon
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the end-of-season criticism that’s been lobbed in the direction of Treme the past few weeks, primarily the claim that the show is just, well, boring compared to something like The Wire. (I’m going to leave out my nagging suspicion that most of these reviewers didn’t watch The Wire as television but only fell in love with the DVDs after the fact when they heard that it was the Greatest blahblahblah in the History of etc etc.) The main problem, as I see it, is that some reviewers have certain expectations about what makes a television show “interesting”, and without being able to check off any of these attributes on Treme‘s scorecard, they go with “boring” as the default category.
The thing is, the type of storytelling that Treme is attempting is one that is widely prevalent in movies, in theatre, and most especially in literature, but is less common in the episode-driven world of TV. Treme is basically taking the equivalent of literary fiction and translating it to a long-form television format.
Consider a few stories of Raymond Carver:
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“Why Don’t You Dance?”: An alcoholic arranges all of his furniture in his driveway, and a passing young couple stop and offer to buy some of it.
“A Small Good Thing”: A woman orders a birthday cake for her son, who later gets hit by a car. While he is dying in the hospital, the parents and the cake baker trade unkind words due to a misunderstanding, but later apologize.
“Sacks”: A man and his estranged father meet in an airport bar and the father tells the son about an extramarital affair he once had.
“Chef’s House”: A sober alcoholic finds out he is getting evicted. He considers drinking again, and by the end of the story it is clear he will drink, although he has not yet.
“So Much Water Close To Home”: Three men on a fishing trip discover a dead girl’s body, but finish their weekend before reporting it to the police. Who the girl was and what happened to her are never revealed and not important; the story is about how the wives of the men react when they find out.
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”: Two couples sit around the kitchen table drinking the evening away and talking about love, and the older man tells an anecdote. About love.
Raymond Carver is one of the great American short story writers of the 20th century. His stories involve ordinary people and those on the fringes of society, alcoholics and divorced parents and estranged children and unhappy couples. People trapped in their loneliness and anger and sadness, finding solace and redemption, or not. If you read the story synopses above, it’s not obvious that there is much there that you’d call drama. There are no real antagonists, no strong dramatic central questions, no powerful catalysts or turning points. If you’re used to science fiction or detective fiction or some other plot-driven genre, you might even think they’re, well, boring. I mean, nothing happens. A sad person gets slightly sadder. A struggling alcoholic edges closer to giving up the struggle. An angry baker realizes his anger was misplaced.
But this is the essence of the character-driven narrative. We read Carver’s stories, like those of Cheever or Chekhov or Hemingway, and we are profoundly moved by subtle shifts in a character’s outlook or beliefs or emotional state, shifts that resonate within ourselves, that reveal some larger truth, that really mean something. These stories are deeply affecting, heartbreaking, even thought actually not very much happens.
And yet these boring stories where nothing happens form the basis of Robert Altman’s award-winning 1993 film Short Cuts. Altman took a dozen or so of Carver’s stories, set them all in Los Angeles, and interconnected them in somewhat incidental or fortuitous ways (the boy’s father from A Small Good Thing, for example, is also the son from Sacks) so that they formed a loosely-coupled whole. You’d be hard-pressed to find the plot in Short Cuts. There’s one murder at the end. There’s a dead girl in the river, the specifics of her death largely unimportant. People cheat on their spouses. A father gives away his kids’ dog, and later gets the dog back. A man is jealous of his wife’s phone sex clients. There are no wiretaps, no drug gangs, no mob hits, no extorted politicians, no crime labs, no leveraged buyouts, no bootleggers, no vampires. Yet all put together, the movie forms a coherent narrative, with conflict and resolution, pain and heartbreak and triumph and redemption and despair. Just a single sprawling story of a couple dozen ordinary people, living their lives over a short period of time in one unique and vibrant city.
Sounds familiar, no? Altman, although certainly not the first to do so, presents a crystal-clear example of how character-driven literary fiction can be translated to the screen.
I would argue that Simon/Overmyer/Noble are pushing that translation one step further, to long-form television. If you watched Short Cuts’ full three hours in half-hour weekly installments, the experience would be very much akin to watching the intertwined stories of Treme over a single season.
So given all that, it makes it easier to address some of the complaints that nothing happens on the show, that Simon loves New Orleans too much to make Treme interesting (presumably he really loathes Baltimore, judging from how good The Wire was). This quote from David Thier in the comments of his article in The Atlantic very concisely sums up for me everything wrong with this line of thinking:
It just seems that there’s a difference between things happening to characters and genuine conflict between them. If this was The Wire, one of the Danziger cops would be a character, and the audience would have to live with him.
On the one hand, this statement is really right on the money. If this was The Wire, one of the Danziger cops might well have been a character. It makes perfect sense. In The Wire, everything was important, all the pieces were connected, and the job of the characters (and the viewer) was to figure all those pieces out. We saw all the crimes, and all the crime-fighting. Everything that worked right, and everything that was broken. We saw all the criminals, all the cops, all the politicians pulling strings, even the corrupt Federal agents.
But see, here’s the deal, and we can say it and say it and say it, but after a while it starts seeming like you’re having one of those circular conversations with a dope fiend. Treme is not The Wire. This is not a cop show. And this ain’t gonna work if everything we say, you keep hearing it backwards.
The problem is that Treme went and added some story lines about murder and crime and police corruption and police brutality, which makes some of the sets and costumes start to look like a cop show, which produces a knee-jerk reaction whereby viewers feel a compulsive need to have all the plot devices and plot resolutions of a police procedural or they start getting a weird itch, like a phantom leg syndrome for all the parts of the show that they think are supposed to be there but mysteriously aren’t.
This here is the really the crux of the discontent. If this was The Wire, it would have X, and since it lacks X, it is not as good as The Wire.
But it’s not The Wire, and it’s not really anything remotely similar to The Wire. Treme is the story of ordinary people living in an extraordinary place during an extraordinary time. Certainly, the ordinariness of the people is context-dependent, and so the fact that some of our ordinary people are chefs and musicians is a factor of the flavor of extra-ordinariness of the place. But still, by and large they are citizens. Unlike the protagonists and antagonists of The Wire, they are civilians. They are not in the game, any game, other than the game of trying to scratch out some happiness in a time and place where it feels like the invisible forces of the world are stacked against them.
They’re just regular folks, like Carver’s characters, like Altman’s characters. And Treme is, as we discussed, a character-driven rather than plot-driven drama, so the dramatic choices that are made are going to reflect that. In a cop show, even one with the complex and lofty themes of The Wire, the central question of the Abreu story would be, “Who killed the Abreu kid, and how are they going to figure out the crime?” Because it’s a plot-driven narrative. But Treme is not plot-driven, it’s character-driven, and so the central questions of the Abreu story are things like “How will Lt. Colson reconcile his instinctive defense of the department’s performance after the storm with the increasing evidence to the contrary, and how will this internal crisis of faith in his profession affect him?” In Season 1, Daymo’s fate was not the story, the story was LaDonna and Toni’s personal journey while searching for Daymo. Same this season. Who did what to whom in the Abreu shooting or the Danziger shootings is not the story. The story is the personal journey that Colson and Toni undergo in an environment where those kinds of killings and the ensuing coverups are the norm.
Consider Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon. In it, a murder has taken place. We hear the testimony of a number of people who possibly witnessed or took part in the crime. We even hear the testimony of the deceased himself, channeled though a medium. We see all of these versions of the story on the screen, and yet none of what we see is what actually happened. All of them are versions of the story told by people with varying motives. The film was a brilliant allegory about the nature of objective versus subjective reality. The truth of what actually took place in the woods in Rashomon is never revealed, because it is beside the point.
“The wonder of “Rashomon” is that while the shadowplay of truth and memory is going on, we are absorbed by what we trust is an unfolding story. The film’s engine is our faith that we’ll get to the bottom of things–even though the woodcutter tells us at the outset he doesn’t understand, and if an eyewitness who has heard the testimony of the other three participants doesn’t understand, why should we expect to?” — Roger Ebert
Toni’s investigation of what happened to the Abreu kid reveals many versions of the truth. And much like the real-life Glover case and Danziger case, which version you believe will have as much to do with what you bring to table as it will with the objective truth. Depending on whether you think the NOPD are a bunch of thugs with badges who lie and murder as a way of life, or the Iberville is a den of savages that just needs to be cleaned up, or the DA is just bringing charges to play to his electoral base, or the NOPD leadership gave shoot-to-kill orders and then let the rank-and-file twist in the wind afterwards, or the cops had to take the city back from the looters, or “come on, Toni, you know how it was after the storm”…those biases you bring with you will sway you more than whatever objective truth can ever be known.
Toni’s assistant asks, “Why did they lie if all they had to do was get their story straight?” Kurosawa responds, “Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.”
In Treme, as in New Orleans, all we get are the embellishments. For the average citizen (and this is a show about the average citizen), this is how the city is experienced, and so this is how we get to experience the story as viewers. We don’t know who killed Abreu, and we may never find out. Despite Hidalgo’s passionate speech about this being “a village on an island…it’s all connected somehow. I’m this close to seeing how it all hooks up”, despite how closely it echoes Lester Freemon’s mantra from The Wire, he (and we) never really knew who his benefactors were, or who pulled the plug when he got too close to the wrong people. We don’t know what happened in the DA’s office that let LaDonna’s rapist go free. LaDonna’s closing rant at the DA’s office states the theme outright. “We trying to live in this city. And all y’all manage to bring to that is nothing. Solve a crime or two? Oh HELL the fuck no.” Like most New Orleanians, the characters (and us) don’t ever see the dysfunction taking place. We only see its effects on the characters, and the story we are following is how those characters will change and survive, or not, in the process.
Compare these two scenarios:
In Season 2 of The Wire, Agent Fitz contacts an Agent Koutras a couple of times to ask him questions about one of their targets on the docks. But Koutras is a mole; we see him leaking word of the investigation to The Greek. At the end of the season, Fitz faxes a summary of Frank Sobotka’s agreement to testify, we see the fax intercepted by Koutras, we see him call The Greek, we see the Greek tell Vondas that making a deal with Sobotka won’t work, and the next thing we know Sobotka is floating in the harbor with his throat cut.
In Season 2 of Treme, Lt. Colson wants to establish that the Iberville shooting and the Abreu shooting were by the same gun, and that it was a police service weapon. But he doesn’t have the ballistics evidence to prove it, and he is also afraid that somebody in the department is covering up both murders. He doesn’t know who to trust. We don’t know who to trust. Are his superiors in on the cover-up, or are they just tired of Colson getting up in people’s shit all the time? Are the detectives in his squad in on the cover-up, or are they just tired of him busting their balls over working too many paid details? He sends two casings over to the ballistics lab, lying to his captain about their significance in the cases, and sure enough, one of the casings disappears. We don’t know who disappeared it. We don’t know if the captain is covering up, or if the captain blabbed to somebody who was. We don’t know if it’s one conspirator, or a handful, or if the whole homicide division is united behind Colson’s back.
The Fitz/Koutras story made sense for the plot-driven purposes of The Wire. That show was all about showing us all the moving parts. Showing how the system worked, and what went wrong when it didn’t. The Colson story makes sense for the character-driven purposes of Treme. Dramatizing the internal conflicts that an honest cop experiences when he (and we) don’t know who to trust, when the dysfunction is so very obvious but never out in plain sight.
What if we never saw Koutras in The Wire? What if Fitz’s faxes just ended up getting witnesses killed, and his epiphany at the end was just a hunch that was never confirmed for the viewer? Conversely, what if we saw NOPD officers talking about the Abreu coverup, saw a detective drop a casing into the river, knew who killed Abreu and knew exactly which cops Colson shouldn’t trust and why?
They could have told either story either way, but I would argue that they told each of these stories exactly in the way that they should have been told to serve the larger purpose of the respective shows.
If Treme was The Wire, one of the Danziger cops would be a character. And if The Wire was Treme, we may have never have met Koutras, or even The Greek for that matter. But The Wire is that, and Treme is this, and each is loyal to its own narrative.
Treme is about faith and doubt, stubbornness in the face of adversity and fear in the shadow of the unknown. In as much as it succeeds at this, and I personally think it does very well, it is the story of every New Orleanian in the post-Katrina era. And the reason it succeeds is because it doesn’t show us all the moving parts. It shows us only what the ordinary citizens see, so that we can experience the city and the era as they do.
It admittedly must make for frustrating viewing if you think you’re watching a cop show and want cop-show closure of all your cop-show plots. But there are other shows for that. Treme is not that.
“There is no closure, there is only affirmation. The very fact that we have no consistency means that we have a great affirmation at the end, and the affirmation is completely symbolic… Things going on as they must, despite the fact that we cannot trust our own reality, we still have our faith. Everything that we have seen is questioned, and affirmed. To nakedly affirm in the very face of the things that make you doubt is a heroic action.” –Donald Richie, Rashomon Criterion Collection commentary
“Don’t think in terms of a beginning and an end, because unlike some plot-driven entertainments, there is no closure in real life, not really.” –Creighton Bernette
Naked City
Critiques of Treme abound. It’s brilliant. It’s abysmal. Too much music—fast forward through it. Nothing happens. It’s merely a delivery system for David Simon’s politics that, hey, isn’t—multiple choice for you—a. As good as The Wire, b. Isn’t thorough like The Wire, c. Isn’t the damn Wire. (Please don’t misunderstand. I am a total Wire fan, own the box set and number Omar among my personal heroes. I even have a signed post-it note wherein I accuse Mr. Simon of killing the above mentioned Omar. One of my prized possessions.)
Let’s just get that part over with. You’re correct. Treme is not called The Wire and that decision was made on purpose. It also wasn’t titled The Wire: Port of Call New Orleans, and not just so that it wouldn’t be mistaken for a part of the Port of Call movie franchise. It was never set up to take on Central City corner boys, then move on to the Avondale Shipyards until we finally ended up inside City Hall, the Recovery School District and the Times-Picayune. Just sayin’. So now that that’s out of everyone’s system, let’s go back to the various critiques. There’s plenty to say about all of them, but I’m just going to focus on one.
One that I didn’t mention above is one I’ve not seen in national reviews, but one I’ve heard mentioned here in New Orleans in bars and coffee houses. It’s one that I have been baffled by from the first time I heard it way back in Season One: The show shouldn’t have been made, it’s not telling the story right, it’s not depicting our population correctly, it’s not. . . .aw, hell, there are several “it’s not” statements along those lines, and frankly none of them make a lick of sense to me.
When I was a kid I remember going to bed and hearing the tv still on in the living room. My parents were watching for a bit without us kids nagging for Lassie or some such. It was a voice, male, steady. I’d be almost at that drift off place before sleep completely takes over and I’d hear him. “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This is one.” I’d try to stay awake to hear what that one was. What story? Tell me. TELL ME! Then I’d fall asleep and ask my mom over breakfast to tell me what the story was. She’d inevitably say that it was a story for grownups and that would be the end of that. Oh I so wanted to hear that story, whatever it was. And there were eight million of them. The man said so. I could possibly go my entire life hearing one a night until I died and maybe not hear them all and that idea was as enticing as a chocolate cake that couldn’t be touched til the relatives arrived.
I have given a lot of thought to the “it’s not” categories of critique and have come to a conclusion that many will no doubt disagree with: Some of the people maintaining that it shouldn’t have been made because it’s not telling the story to their satisfaction are upset that it’s not telling THEIR story. Okay, there. I said it out loud.
According to most of the statistical sites I’ve looked at, the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans (within the city limits, excluding the metropolitan area) was about 485,000. While not the eight million that the Naked City narrator tempted me with, that’s still a lot of stories. Those of us here know that each and every one of those almost half million people have a story. We heard them in restaurants and on street corners. We heard them in lines at the FEMA processing centers. We heard them in television interviews, telling their story from Atlanta or Houston. We heard them from the barstools next to us, both sides of us, with the bartender’s story thrown in. We heard them from our friends and neighbors as they returned home. Many of us wrote our own stories down as we were living them. Stories and stories and more stories. And those stories continued to be discussed for a year after the cataclysmic upheaval of our lives, or two years after the trauma of death and loss and hopes and hopes dashed, because some people couldn’t even go there then. Some still can’t. The truth is that even now, hearing someone’s story can make some of us burst into tears.
In addition to the individual stories was the story of the city itself. Politicians, government agencies, contractors, insurance companies, displaced families, closed schools—the list there could go on for a very long time. However, something that the “it’s not” folks seem to be forgetting is the sheer number of columns, articles and comments on those columns and articles that passionately, and in some cases callously, voiced the opinion that New Orleans was a below sea level cesspool that made Sodom and Gomorrah look holy. That New Orleans contributed nothing whatsoever to our nation, and further, that its inhabitants were no account good for nothing morons who chose to live there and why in hell should they reach into their pockets to help a place and people of that ilk to rebuild anyway.
In the novella, The Duel by Anton Chekhov, one of the main characters describes himself as one of the “superfluous people” who are forced to “look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in someone else’s theories. . .” During that period just about everything we read put us on the defensive. We found ourselves feeling that we were indeed superfluous people, and we spent a lot of time justifying our right to live here, to be who we are, where we are, after reading someone else’s theories. We overwhelmingly found explanations and justifications denying our “absurd existence.” At issue was our definition of absurd vs. the rest of the country’s. We thought it absurd that anyone could give a second’s thought to not rebuilding an American city, while they thought we were absurd to think we warranted such an effort.
We bought books like Tom Piazza’s “Why New Orleans Matters,” and Chin Music/Rutledge’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” and read them cover to cover delighted that someone got it. Got us. We wrote blazing comments in our own defense in those columns and articles. We were angry that no one seemed to understand how much we had already lost and how much more we stood to lose if there was no support for us. We wanted those idiots who were living ten miles from defective levees in their own flood prone states to have some compassion for our plight. We were delighted that Spike Lee stayed and stayed, interviewing real people no matter if we agreed with all of them or not. He rolled miles of film recording some of those half million stories and didn’t care how long the damn film was as long as it was the story—or at least some of it. We were furious that neither New Yorkers nor San Franciscans had had to justify their continued existence or make a case for rebuilding after the catastrophes that had struck them.
We continued to hope that some people out there, who assumed we were all non-stop party people and that none of the women here ever wore shirts, would hear some of the stories and understand. We knew that although they’d not heard every story from every soldier who ever served, they’d heard some, seen some depicted in movies and yes, even novels, and respected them for having weathered their ordeal. We hoped that the images of people on roofs or dead in wheelchairs at the Convention Center, coupled with stories of survival in the face of the rising water would not so soon be dismissed but would instead morph into a respect no matter how grudging.
It didn’t by and large.
Treme’s writers have done that for us. They have told the story that in my view needed to be told. They’ve done it with honesty and sensitivity, with harsh realities and sweet joys. They’ve done it through characters that we care about. And we care about them because they ring true. I’ve watched an audience watch an episode and nod in assent or holler out a “yeah you right” or groan “that’s what happened to my sister with her house.” These are New Orleanians who are saying this, or quietly dabbing their eyes in certain difficult to re-live scenes, or singing along with a favorite song.
I went through a little list of the characters in the last couple of days, even re-watched that wrenching last scene from Season One to get confirmation on some of their storylines. It’s a pretty good cross section. We have property owners: Janette, the Burnettes, Albert, LaDonna’s mom, LaDonna’s bar, Antoine and Desiree, Davis, and probably Colson as he’s got a trailer out in front of his house. We have renters: Jacques, Sonny, Annie. The property owners are from varying neighborhoods, races and economic levels. We know some of their backstories (if they’re necessary to their story arc), others not so much (where’s Colson’s wife for instance, or did LaDonna and Larry live with her mom prior to the storm—we don’t know and it’s so far not been relevant.) They are business owners, professionals, academics, musicians, kitchen workers and DJ’s, teachers, kids and cops. If you add in the big name musicians who were busy working every where but here during that time as they’d lost their homes and instruments in many cases, Treme has a large number of stories being told, even in the little quick exchanges as one musician passes another in the street.
Okay, ya know, that’s not everyone. Not everyone in New Orleans falls into one of those categories or job descriptions. Not a secretary in sight for instance—although we could kind of count Toni’s assistant who’s moving with her family and sees it as her only choice. But let’s put her aside.
For those who say the story shouldn’t be told, at least not in a fictional format, that the show shouldn’t have been made, I have to ask why? Weren’t you the same people ranting in the comments sections in defense of New Orleans? I think you were. For those who say it isn’t realistic, come watch the show with an audience and you’ll see how much, how very much, it rings true. Albert’s 495 dollar insurance check got big groans and a multitude of post episode stories of paltry sums from insurance agents. Do you think the person watching the show in Idaho realizes how often that happened? Probably not, but maybe now it will occur to them because they care about Albert.
For those who say that it doesn’t tell their particular story, I’ll buy you a beer and listen to yours. I’ll commiserate and maybe cry, I still do that too easily. Then I’ll tell you that while it may not be your particular story or your face on that screen, what the writers of Treme have managed to do is put faces on the people who lived through the nightmare of nearly six years ago. They gave us a voice through those characters, they changed us from a faceless horde on CNN to real people, maybe composite characters in most cases, but real people that we recognize as our neighbors or friends or yes, even ourselves. Those writers have managed to capture the frustrations, the anger, the hurt, the loss, the gargantuan task of rebuilding a house with no help and the labyrinthine hoops many of us are still jumping through. They wrote the joy of survival and the pain of injustice. They wrote the reality of a lot of folks. And many of them, many of us, are grateful.
Fifty years from now, some kid will stumble onto this show as it travels through the paths of the internet, or whatever will pass for the internet by then, and they’ll be as touched by it as we were the first time we ever saw Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s story and Fonda’s Tom Joad put a face on the downtrodden Dust Bowl travelers, showing us their camps and their struggles and their dreams. Maybe Treme will do that for that kid and he’ll be amazed by the fortitude of those absurd, superfluous people who lived in New Orleans when the Federal Flood came.
If I count just the characters that pop into my mind, I come up with 18/19 without counting peripheral characters. So tonight, as I’m going to sleep, I’ll hear John Boutte sing and then I’ll imagine him saying, “There are a half million stories in the naked city. These are 18 of them.”
This Thin Space
We got a second season and it’s over.
What a journey this online space took with it. High-fives and many thanks to Back Of Town’s tremendous writing krewe, especially VirgoTex with her choice pictures and quotes for each week’s timely open thread. Mere seconds after the episode ended, y’all – I charge every last one of you with plying my girl with cocktails (and putting her in a cab after). Most of all, I thank the commenters for showing the internet how discussion is done. With honest and enthusiastic participation tempered by excellent moderation, the weblog is not dead.
I thought the season would end on another St. Joseph’s Day, but this time we got all the way through Jazzfest and ended on a somewhat upbeat, can-do note when contrasted with previous episodes and the feeling of the city at that time. Notice how the episodes span the duration between New Orleans’s high holy days; it’s almost as though the show’s creators noticed that’s what we set our clocks by. (Are you going to argue with me that Jazzfest is not a religious holiday? And I’ve never heard people invoke the name of God more than during hurricane season, so there you have it.) Treme has not explicitly brought up the role of religious thought during and after Katrina and The Flood. I understand that this is a difficult task with a city that is a theological peculiarity. Forget the obvious Catholicism, we are nothing if not soul, have an innate sense of the sacrosanct and know the importance of ritual in our daily lives. In other words, we practice religion, but do not use it to dictate thought and life. Or do we?
My season-opener post referenced a piece Dan Baum wrote about the life and death of TBC brass band member, Brandon Franklin. Our people kill their own as a way of settling beefs and, in the process, our talented perish as does our recovery with it. There’s another bit of that article that continues to gnaw at me, one that has a bigger hand in the future of New Orleans than any crime-reduction measure enacted by NOPD. It is apathy wrapped in religious fatalism.
“I loved Brandon, but God loved him more, that’s all,” [Kenneth Fields] said, pushing out his chin defiantly as though daring himself to cry. “I’m not sad this day. Brandon got called before us. This is God’s will and beyond our understanding … Something about Kenneth’s pious words and the very New Orleans way Brandon was being carried off sent an unexpected shot of irritation through me.
… I flashed on arguments I’d had with Christian missionaries when Margaret and I lived in Africa in the late 1980s. The poor need the comfort of Jesus to endure their miserable lives, they’d say, and I, as a good Commie atheist, would make the usual argument that if they weren’t putting so much energy and money into preparing for the next life, they might organize themselves to make this one more just and bearable.
God is an effective coping mechanism in times of extreme grief, I get it. My hands, too, clutched Hindu prayer beads in the days after the storm, hoping for everyone still in the city. It’s when the sense of helplessness aided along by religious piety justifies our rush to judgment and inaction that I get very concerned. It’s a very short trip from “God took our murdered child and we can’t do anything about it” to “Katrina was God’s punishments for homosexuality and legalized abortion,” “you can’t stop what God had in mind for this city” (someone said this to me who was visiting for Krewe du Vieux from Nashville) and “if you pray hard enough, the rains will come to Texas.”
Even fatalism carries with it some humility. This, on the other hand, is full-on indifference which is then shoved under the rug of self-aggrandizing predestination. Communities and infrastructures go bad over time, they go to pieces for various reasons. Even things built for the long-term will fail towards the end of those terms, and things built increasingly cheaper and maintained poorly fail over shorter periods of time. Things just fall apart and, unless, say, you spent money meant for the true security of our homeland on two foreign military boondoggles, there ought to be no shame in this because it’s the earth’s physical truth. How we respond to breakdown and try with all our might against it happening again is then the measure of our civilization, not that something broke. But, we as a still growing country can’t seem to understand that and yearn for a time when everything was newer, cleaner, stronger because we, who were once those that built and fixed, have created those who can only consume and enjoy.
So, the next time someone pronounces that God wants for something to happen or not, understand that those words do not arise from the mysticism of an old and impenetrable faith or the coming Dark Age of inexplicable stupidity. This is simply the drawing of permission from a convenient collective not to care why. Why our economy failed, why the rains won’t come in Texas, why the levees failed, why our system of justice grows more crooked, why New Orleanians continue to kill and die at their own hands. And only from fully embracing why comes what to do about it.
New Orleanians are still chosen people. Infused with the spirit and surrounded by awe, we have something few other cultures can boast of. And, just so, apathy and corruption threaten to consume us from within, while greed and more apathy crush us from the outside. In that sliver of an interface between is home. Push, push outwards from this thin space.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. I’ve mentioned this before but in no way is BOT school out for the summer. There are posts by far better writers than me waiting in the wings. Y’all get back now.
P.P.S. This wasn’t really a post about religion and community as much as it was about the things we lead ourselves to believe when in a group. Observe New Orleans and the wars and the economy and now the debt ceiling “debate” – people were and are going to be fucked and the worst thing is that a significant number of them are going to think they deserved it.
Where else?
Hug it out, brah, good game…
Evidence
Y’all get these comments reconstitutionalated
Onward Through The Fog
This town digging our graves
in silent marble above the ground.
Maybe our bones will wash away.
This city will never drown.
– This City, by Steve Earle
– wet bank guy
“i am not alright/but I am upright”
Diaspora
There is a bunch of back-channel swapping of music going on right now between some BoT-ers, and I thought I’d share a couple.
When Delmond talks about Alan Lomax’s field recordings of Angola prison work songs, he’s talking about this:
And when he talks about Mississippi fife and drum music, he’s talking about this here:
It is left as an exercise to the reader to Google up, say, some traditional music from Ghana to contrast and compare. Or to draw lines from that music through Congo Square to the Mardi Gras Indians. Or a parallel line from Congo Square, hop skip and jump to Cosimo Matassa putting out R&B singles that are picked up by Jamaicans and mixed with Caribbean sounds by people like the Skatalites, on to Kingston sound systems and dub toasting, which Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc brought to NYC in the 1970′s where it was picked up by people like Grandmaster Flash and Boogie Down Productions, evolving into modern hip-hop and eventually coming full circle to give us the character of Lil Calliope.
When Ernie K-Doe said “All music is from New Orleans,” this is what he was talking about. Jazz? Congo Square. Rock and roll? Congo Square. Ska? Reggae? Congo Square. Hip-hop? Go back far enough, and it’s Congo Square.
It Just Don’t Smell Right Up in Here
I used to speak Navajo. Never well, but passable enough to get teased on the Res. I spent a lot of time on the Res. When I first decided to learn the language, it was for a variety of reasons but I had serious questions about how I’d be received. White, speaking Navajo. I finally screwed up my courage and asked some of my older Navajo friends if I’d be seen as co-opting the culture. They seemed stunned that I’d even ask that. Then they told me with great sorrow how delighted they were that I was learning it. Because the kids weren’t.
Brother Folse mentioned that I should write something about the masking tradition. I will at some point, but after watching this week’s episode again, I wanted to address the idea that perhaps our beloved, cranky Albert is in the early stages of dementia. I watched the scenes over and over and have to say that I read it completely differently.
In the early 90’s, many reservations were being overtaken by gangs. Out of that grew a Native American hip hop scene, uniquely their own, with lyrics that pointed out their reality. Folks like Robby Bee and the Boyz from the Rez did an album called Reservation of Education. (It’s listed under World Music on Amazon I believe. I looked it up to see if it was even still available and it is. Their song Pow Wow Girls has evidently been taken up by NA Grrl musicians as a title for themselves.) Another group, Without Rezervation, put out a hip hop album, Are You Ready for W.O.R. (1994) with titles like To the Sell Outs.
There are Native American rock bands like Indigenous, who have rightly earned a place in radio playlists, and Blackfire’s album One Nation Under, which sounds like a bit of rock/punk and death metal.
And there are the great traditionalists: The Blacklodge Singers (look for Crow Hop, it’s on YouTube) or the Porcupine Singers. And of course, the fabulous John Trudell, poet/activist/singer/actor, who’s been contributing sound for a long time in any way he deems fit.
For the elders, though, much of this is upsetting. Many of them want their traditions kept pure, passed down un-evolved, untouched by this century or the white man (or the black man for that matter.) They bemoan the fact that the kids are, in their view, overly assimilated thanks to computers, tv and video games, or on res’s with casino money coming in, blatant consumerism. By the same token, they realize that the younger kids can’t make a living without some assimilation and education. It’s a huge quandary for them, because what they see is that while the bigger world is necessary for their kids to get ahead, it also to their mind, diminishes their traditions or jettisons them entirely.
When Albert was standing in that recording studio saying, “It don’t even SMELL right up in here!” I could completely understand what he was saying. Take an old Native American singer, put HIM into a studio in New York, and it’s very possible he’d say the same thing. Where’s the sage and cedar? I can’t DO it here. This needs to be done in a kiva. For someone to say, “We’re musicians. We play notes. We can do that anywhere,” would strike that old guy as absurd. The music simply cannot be separated from the tradition from his point of view. And furthermore, it shouldn’t be.
My view of Albert’s responses in this episode struck me as a guy who’s lost just about everything to incompetence, greed, official bullshit, thieves and the storm itself. All he has left is his identity. His identity as an Indian. If he has that, and that’s intact, he can probably weather anything. Without it he will have completely lost his moorings. I just don’t know if he can articulate that. He is the Big Chief, he has some standing in the community. He has respect, if nothing else. He’s used to people listening to him. Hell, just one of his looks can cause people to rethink their position or do the right thing. In New York, mixing jazz with the tradition in a foreign country is frightening to him on so many levels. The culture, his Indian culture, in New York? No. He’s not seeing that. Will he be respected in New York? Will the tradition be respected? Is his entire identity being reduced to notes in a studio?
His son has come around to the tradition in his way, but it’s not Albert’s way, and that’s mortality hitting ya in the face. Not just his own, but possibly the old ways, the culture he is so totally self-identified with and by. I know many elderly Native Americans who are terrified that their grandchildren won’t know any of the songs, traditions, creation stories, or medicine ways. In fact, several years ago, I believe it was the Shawnee who were given back sacred objects that had been held at the Smithsonian for a very long time. They let the Smithsonian keep them because no one alive knew what to do with them anymore.
The trip to the museum, while certainly allowing Albert to jab Delmond in the ribs a bit, also made Albert wonder if one day his suit would be behind glass with no one making them like that anymore, no one singing the chants the old way, the right way. The tradition reduced to a 3 x 5 card in a hermetically sealed, air controlled display and a sparkly CD wrapped in cellophane.
He’s struggling with so much loss. It just don’t smell right up in here.
Where’s the kiva?
On another street corner
Comments need to come from your belly.
