All creation requires a substrate. Unless one is God, perhaps, one cannot create in a vacuum, from nothing. Back Of Town would not exist without Treme and other related works. It is our ability to quote, snippet, source and refer along with original writing that keeps this blog and its community going. Remember then that Treme would not be making money for HBO without the very free and public story of New Orleans. Our story.

Stealing is wrong, but it is much more important to first define theft and to address it in a just, consistent and comprehensive manner that really spurs creation. SOPA and PIPA do none of that.

Everything came from something before. Please join us in protecting the internet and the spirit of knowledge-sharing and discussion it represents.

Write your Representative

Tor breaks down very nicely what exactly is at stake.

SOPA Strike

Text of SOPA legislation – H.R. 3261

Text of PIPA legislation – Senate Bill 968

I will confess that here at this house, on occasion we watch CSI: Miami. Contrary to the producers’ aims, we usually crack a beer and watch it as a comedy. I mean, please, how funny is David Caruso and his sunglasses. Nevermind what had been dubbed the crime lab’s “woot woot” machine. You know. The super shiny insta-fingerprint-dna-mugshot-photo enhancement-perpetrator finder? C’mon. With all that orange and blue gelled chrome, they push a button and voila, there’s the guy who did it, prompting Caruso to utter an inane but hysterically funny line, while standing sideways, putting his sunglasses on, looking fierce and walking out.. (Hmm, he has orange hair and blue eyes. Did he choose the gels for the lights?) As H acts as a combination SWAT team, first responder, social worker, righteous homicide detective, gun expert AND crime scene honcho, one can’t do anything but laugh uproariously.

But I digress.

According to the survey, a person’s television viewing habits can hint at their political leanings. I don’t think I’d disagree, but nevertheless found the lists of shows they mentioned loads of fun. They broke it down into Favorite Shows: Liberal or Conservative and Least Favorite Shows: Liberal or Conservative. Perhaps these are new Emmy categories.

Here are the lists:

Favorite Shows/Liberal Democrats

Daily Show
Colbert Report
30 Rock
Parks and Recreation
The View (huh?)
Glee
Modern Family
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
TREME
Cougar Town
The Late Show with David Letterman
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

FavoriteShows/Conservative Republicans

Swamp Loggers
Top Shot
The Bachelor
Castle
Mythbusters
Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy
American Pickers
Swamp People
The Middle
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
Biggest Loser
Hawaii Five-O

Least Favorite/Conservative Republicans

Weeds
Daily Show
Colbert Report
South Park
TMZ
General Hospital (really?)
Family Guy
Dexter
Jersey Shore (well, who doesn’t hate that?)
The Walking Dead (don’t get me started on the writing this season)

Least Favorite/Liberal Democrats

Swamp Loggers
Dog the Bounty Hunter
COPS (now shooting in New Orleans, how lovely)
The Ultimate Fighter
The Price is Right
CSI: MIAMI
Kitchen Nightmares
Secret Life of the American Teenager
Ghost Hunters
Ghost Adventures

I found several articles about all this but my favorite was Matthew Cochrane over at Conservative21 who summed it up thus: “If you’re a liberal, you most likely enjoy half-hour sitcoms and comedy talk shows. Meanwhile, conservatives tend to enjoy reality-based competitions, crime dramas and reality shows that feature work and jobs.”

Well, clearly liberals have a short attention span, what with the half hour sitcoms and the comedy talks shows, so I’m not sure how Treme got on this list at all. Oh yeah and apparently liberals aren’t much into watching cops arrest people or watching one guy beat the living tar out of another inside a cage. Go figure.

So, depending on your political bent, you can watch the entire Treme Season 2 on HBO Signature New Year’s Day (if your attention will hold) or you can find a PPV Cage Match somewhere and start your New Year off with a little good old fashioned blood lust.

If all that is overwhelming, you can always find a CSI:Miami re-run and practice sideways walking through doorways over that Bloody Mary that’ll be curing your hangover. It’s always good for a laugh.

The helpless person escapes her situation not by action in the real world but rather by altering her state of consciousness. … These perceptual changes combine with a feeling of indifference, emotional detachment, and profound passivity in which the person relinquishes all initiative and struggle. This altered state of consciousness might be regarded as one of nature’s small mercies, a protection against unbearable pain. … In an attempt to create some sense of safety and to control their pervasive fear, traumatized people restrict their lives (Herman 42, 43).

After the Floods, many folks in south LA fumed day and night. We’d been allowed to nearly drown and then it felt like everyone outside the state wanted us and ours to seep out of the city and anyone’s care like receding water. Those outside were perplexed and offended by our individual and collective anger. But that anger was healing, self-protective—when we got angry on our own behalf, individually or collectively, it protected us, somewhat, from the bullshit outside and made our blood run warm again. The anger felt good. And it was good.

Initially after her rape, her trauma, Ladonna did what many of us did, at least for a while—curled up in a real or imagined corner guarded by a blank stare and alcohol. Our loved ones worried, our friends outside stopped calling or stopped hearing from us at all, we drank and drank a bit more and then had a few shots on top of that. We sunk into it, still in disbelief that what had happened was real and really bad.

As she vents her rage in safety, her helpless fury gradually changes into a more powerful and satisfying form of anger: righteous indignation. This transformation allows the survivor to free herself from the prison of the revenge fantasy (Herman 189).

When Ladonna gets angry, righteously so, her healing begins [not ends---the trauma of rape cannot be resolved so easily, just like the trauma of the Floods will not and has not been quickly or neatly resolved; trauma is Hard] and we get to see her smile again, hear her husband say “This is the woman I married,” and not just Ladonna but both return to her rightful place—her bar, her neighborhood, her city, functioning, moving forward, the past not forgotten but the present not swallowed up by it.

And that’s been hard for some of us. Some are still stuck in anger. Others have passed through but to a new round of social withdrawal and/or numbing. Some of us have been lucky enough to find a little peace even if the door is opened with a bottle of Abita. Trauma is not simple. First you must establish some sense of safety. Then it is possible to remember, have someone bear witness to your pain and humanity, and begin reconnecting with the world and its people.

Ladonna gets pissed and we all feel better, at least for a few hours.

___

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic, 1992, 1997. Print.

While I suspect most New Orleanians have put such thoughts behind them, his death should register beyond the confines of a television show. Official suicide rates tripled in New Orleans in early 2006, the period represented by Season One and Bernette’s fateful ferry ride. Mortality rates spiked by one third, based on a study of Times-Picayune death notices that included displaced residents who died elsewhere. (Conflicting studies focusing on official, local deaths pooh-poohed this notion but disregarded that in that period over half the city’s residents remained displaced). In the evacuation trailer parks to the north, fifty percent of residents met the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder, and the suicide rate in the parks was 17 times the national average.

Some (many) may think this post disrespectful of the dead, to speculate on how Showers met his death by drowning, but a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis echoes the experience of so many of those who made up the spike in post-Katrina mortality, the sense that they had lost the life they had before with no prospect of recovery. Bernette was, like most Treme characters, a composite, based both on Ashley Morris and documentary filmmaker Stevenson Palfi, who took his own life post Katrina. Palfi lost not only his Mid-City home but files, photographs and film that helped produce his documentaries “Piano Players Rarely Play Together” and an unfinished film on Allen Toussaint.

Whatever brought Showers to the edge of the river, a breath of fresh air to clear his head after a night of drinking, or an ultimate moment of despair, something about his death resonates in a way most people in New Orleans would rather not contemplate but then I’m not most people, spent too many months in 2005 and 2006 tracking and cataloging the dead, too many hours each January compiling an annual list of all the victims of murder. In my own space at Toulouse Street (and formally on Wet Bank Guide), we remember.

Treme is ultimately about the resilience of the people of New Orleans, their insistence to save not just a bit of real estate but a culture and a way of life, and that resilience is more powerful and poignant against the unspoken backstory that Creighton Bernette’s death hints at, a tripled suicide rate, thousands dead from lack of medical care or just the loss in the elderly of the will to live. It is important to remember not only the 1,753 official Katrina deaths but the over 4,000 carefully cataloged by journalist Robert Lindsay five years ago.

Treme is about the Last Battle of New Orleans but the casualties are mostly off screen, like the millions of Civil War dead that haunt the soul of every bushwhacker turned Western gunslinger, and Showers’ brings that back to mind. RIP Michael Showers, and I’m sorry if you and yours think I have hijacked that particular and personal sorrow, but it so clearly brings back the desperation and loss that makes the triumphs of survival depicted in Treme more noble. You were a small part in the great machine of a film that reminds the rest of America–long since moved on–that we in New Orleans second line for our dead and why we do so and for your part in that, in every snap of a tourist’s camera as the band and joyful mourners pass, every second line from now on is in some small way for you.

There are some similarities. Hell yes Simon’s oeuvre functions as social criticism could have just as easily been the subject of George Orwell’s book on Dickens in which he argues that all literature is propaganda, would have been dissected avidly and long into the night at any meeting of a Hollywood cell of the Communist Party in the late 1940s.

It is episodic, as Dickens was. With the exception of a few plays, Charles Dickens was paid by the word to write for magazines in installments. You could argue that the rich detail of Dickens is just a function of getting paid by the word. There’s a chapter in Orwell’s essay in which he talks about Dickens’s tendency to go on, to throw in extraneous details to eke out a few more pence and in the process, create what Orwell calls “that special Dickens atmosphere.” He’s wrong. In his example, he cites the description of what’s on the table as a family sits down to dinner as extraneous. It’s not. A shoulder of mutton on potatoes tells you in an instant something about the class of the characters. What can they afford to eat. What are they inclined to eat. It’s that single detail outside of the dialogue that helps fix the scene. It’s Raymond Carver-esque even as Dickens is the anti-Carver. And it’s cinematic. If you started a scene in Treme on a tight shot of a bar table with no patrons in sight I could tell you something about the characters before the shot opened up. Is it an Abita Amber or a Heineken, a PBR or an Olde English? Or is it a sazerac, a martini or a plastic cup 180 daiquiri?

Treme is not Dickens because it is based almost entirely on characters you could find yourself next to in the check out line at Rouse’s. The Wire is closer to Dickens: Omar, Bubbles, The Greek: these are characters that could have sprung from the mind of Dickens. There’s a great satire of The Wire as nineteenth century, socially critical novel that explains all this better than I ever could. If you didn’t read it the first time I posted it, go do so know. I’ll have a smoke while you’re gone.

OK, maybe it’s only funny to an English major. But go back and read the money quote: “Dickens’s success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format. Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style. With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous.”

What makes that piece at once hilarious and apt is that it not only masters the style of an academic journal article, it’s full of real details that make the point, like the one above.

And that’s what I sat down to write about. So many television critics don’t get Treme because it’s not television. Television in the end is a medium, a delivery system, as much as it is a genre, or really a set of genres. We need something like the seven ranks of biology. Let’s call it a family, leaving room for genus (dramatic cable serial) and species (Treme). Now let’s take that apart, start from a new hypothesis. Treme is not a new species. It’s a new genus. Maybe an entirely new family. It breaks the system wide open, and leaves the fusty old fellows at the Royal Society shaking their heads. They can’t wrap their minds around it.

In fairness to most critics, if you’re trying to crank out reviews like the Colonel cranks out chicken, you need to stick to the formula. Something like Treme comes along and you run it through the formula and out comes a low score. Where’s the tension? Where’s the action? Where’s the weekly resolution? It’s on HBO for chrissakes. Where’s the explicit sex? Why don’t we see the criminal violence on screen?

Treme takes us to an entirely new place. I just recently finished Season Four of The Wire with my son. Last night Omar attacks someone with a shiv, brutally stabbing him in the anus, blood everywhere. It’s gruesome and it’s perfect. Omar is the sociopath with a heart of gold, but to understand the violence and its roots (at least partially in mainstream black culture’s view of gay men) you need that deeply uncomfortable scene. In Treme we don’t get that. Salon critic Matt Zoller Seitz complained that we don’t see LaDonna fight back against her attackers, that we cut away to other characters and other stories. “Simon and series co-creator Eric Overmyer have been staunch about treating every character and subplot as more or less equal; this was apparently Simon’s philosophy on ‘The Wire.’ But there are times when I think a series has to budge from that philosophy, and take advantage of series TV’s capacity to be elastic, and stretch to emphasize particular stories and downplay (or ignore) others.”

And he’s right, if what you are expecting from Treme is derivative television, but it’s not.

Another critic complains about the show’s tendency to hard cut between scenes, even breaking out the textbook definition of scene. Edward Copeland (and a few others, I’m not sure who started this and who’s ripping off who) complain specifically about the hard cuts between Janette watching Delmond’s first tentative steps toward blending his modern jazz with old New Orleans and the spoken word event attended by Davis and his buddy at which Gian Smith speaks his poem O Beautiful Storm. “There’s no reason why those two scenes could not be shown as a CONTINUOUS RELATED whole”, Copeland complains, emphasizing the fourth definition of scene. Geez, Mr. Simon, that’s how it’s done.

And in conventional television, he’s right. Conventional television is like KFC, to return to my earlier analogy. It’s not Popeye’s. It’s seasoned to appeal to middle American tastes, and carefully portion controlled. You walk into any KFC, you know what to expect. They’ve got the formula down.

Simon and episode director Rob Baily choose instead to hard cut between the scenes because it ties together Smith’s evocation of the complex pain and beauty of the post-Karina experience to Delmond’s burgeoning transformation, gives us a different and cinematic version of the novelistic internal monologue or omniscient narrator, reveals via the poem the complex emotions bubbling inside of Delmond that come out as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Milneberg Joys”. If you don’t blend those two moments together you lose that connection, that indirect and perfect view into Delmond’s state of mind.

This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.

A lot of the criticism of Treme on blogs and blog comments call Treme boring. Compared to The Wire, where the commission of the crimes is explicit, perhaps it is. The Wire was a crime drama at its heart, if a very complex one with an agenda. At any moment violence can explode, a constant tension anyone who’s walked through the wrong part of town immediately and viscerally understands. Treme is understated and focuses on character first. The story is advanced as a feature of character development, rather than having the characters dragged along by the story. Again, if your reference is formulaic television, or even formulaic beach-book literature, Treme probably is boring.

If we’re going to look at Treme and the rest of Simon’s work as the latest incarnation of the novel of social criticism, let’s talk about one of the great 20th Century social novelists, John Steinbeck, for a minute. (Settle down, settle down, Prez says. Back in your seats.). What happens in the first section of Of Mice and Men? Two hobos find a place to camp, and sit there and talk. One of them is mentally retarded, which doesn’t make for sparkling dialogue. Come on, admit it. You were forced to read this in high school and reading that section was worse than church. A great deal happens later in the book, but it is all driven by the characters in the circumstance, the characters meticulously drawn in those opening pages.

Treme may not be Dickens, or exactly Steinbeck (although the latter is a better analogy), but it stands in the long progression of socially conscious and critical novels that helped to transform the world in which they appeared. Treme ultimately confounds the critics because it moves beyond what is possible in conventional television and even conventional cinema, where only the top dollar auteur dares take three hours to try to tell a full and complete story in the way a novelist can. Treme is that rare specimen that upsets the established order: this is television, that is a novel. We can trace its place in the Darwinian tree of life taxonomy, but like Darwin it upends the simplicities of Linneaus Systema Naturæ.

If I keep coming back to the word novel it is because Treme is where the auteur gets chocolate on the novelist’s peanut butter, and vice versa. What emerges is rich and satisfying and complex in ways that bad candy analogy can’t begin to describe. There is a great deal of hand-wringing and chatter in literary circles about the death of the literary novel at the hands of bottom-line media conglomerate publishers and a public more inclined to watch than to read. The intelligent, literate novel may in fact go the way of poetry: authors writing for each other, a tiny audience and no money, ultimately so irrelevant it can’t manage to sustain its own channel on cable.

But culture doesn’t die. As Ray elegantly explained here in his Diaspora post, one form leads to another. Is Treme the mistake that ends the career that started with Homicide and ends on the streets of New Orleans, or is it the beginning of something entirely new, an evolutionary leap, a fusion of the novel with cinematic television? Salman Rushdie announced recently his next work would not be a novel but a serialized cable television science fiction drama. The original article in The Guardian was couched to suggest Rushdie was positing the end of the novel, that television of the sort that The Wire and Treme made possible was the wave of the future.

I can’t wait to see what the television critics, some of whom may have actually read The Satanic Verses but probably not Grimus or Midnight’s Children, critics whose idea of magical realism is formed by season four of True Blood, will make of that.

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.

“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:

“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

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.”

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.

Hug it out, brah, good game…