Treme: Do You Know What It Means

When it comes to details, character, and atmosphere, "Do You Know What It Means," the initial episode of David Simon's Treme, wins the lottery. But if you want conflict, well, there are a lot of torn-up ticket stubs scattered across the streets and buildings of New Orleans: The tensest moment of the premiere occurs when Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) helps himself to $400 bottle of wine at the restaurant owned by Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens of Deadwood and Friday Night Lights). 

That being said, the music and acting are terrific, each scene is well-developed and smartly composed, and Treme seems to capture a truth about the feel of the city at its best -- an easy camaraderie fused by  love for its music. New Orleans native Wendell Pierce's (The Wire) wry, restrained portrayal of a trombonist (Antoine Batiste) constantly short of cab fare reveals the not-so-glamorous truth of the life of a working musician. There's a great scene in which he leaves his "'bone" with a cabbie as collateral, dashes into a backyard barbecue to beg for a gig that night, then cadges an advance so that he can pay off the cabbie. Later, he joins the Treme Brass Band for a funeral parade; as they wait for the pallbearers to emerge from the church, Antoine gossips with other band members about the dead man and, in a wonderful touch, dons the official cap handed him at the last second.

Treme's wit is both dry ("What girl wouldn't be seduced by this?") and broad (something about a "cucumber up the archbishop's ass"). The interplay between Antoine and his ex-wife (Khandi Alexander) is so free and easy that you wonder why they're divorced until she reminds us: He's a musician. When the musicians -- and many of them are actual New Orleans musicians -- banter between sets and after gigs, we feel as if we're sitting at the bar with them.

Any show set in New Orleans "three months later" has to consider Katrina, and Treme's treatment of it can be problematic. Again, the imagery and details are impressive: Running the opening credits over various moldy walls is a stroke of genius. Wrecked houses and piles of debris appear as a cab drives past them. An excited and naked McAlary leaps out of bed at the sounds of the first second-line since Katrina. On the other hand, Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) is presented as an expert on the federal flood, but we're never told why. He makes all the right points, but bombastically. Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo) is a lawyer who tracks the missing, but her relationship to the other characters is obscure.

Clarke Peters (The Wire) as Albert Lambreaux, a Mardi Gras Indian trying to pull his life together, fares much better. Exiled to Houston, he wants desperately to return home but faces a daunting task not made easier by adult children who want him to give up. His home all but destroyed, he wearily turns his attention to an abandoned neighborhood bar that might be salvageable. His story resonates more deeply than that of the affluent Bernettes, who returned to the comforts of their Garden District home.

All in all, though, Treme promises to be a fascinating study of a city's response to an unprecedented catastrophe. I've read that one has to give Treme a chance; on the basis of the first episode, I see no reason not to...

Nick's Auto Body...

Drinks Before Dinner points out that it took more than a brain-dead individual decision to omit any mention of slavery from the governor's proclamation celebrating Confederate History Month...

Resplendency...

Sliding Delta...

Duk Duk if you seem them coming...

When Eisenhower was president: Nancy Kwan on the cover of Life, October 24, 1960...

Mr. Handsome's home inspection...

NOLA's Kermit Ruffins "Smokin' With Some Barbecue":

Monday, Monday

Is everyone still alive? We've had health care reform for a couple of weeks now, and still no nuclear holocaust. I spend most of my time crouched under the dining room table waiting for Armageddon. Beats me how those teabaggers have the guts to hop a bus and travel from one Conservative Woodstock to another. Did SP and Joe the P come on before or after Sly and the Family Stone?...

Watch this debate between former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who was fired from his gig at the American Enterprise Institute for having the temerity to write that health care reform has become a Republican debacle, and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Frum argues, correctly, that Democrats, should health care reform lead to an electoral defeat in November, will accept the tradeoff because they won a major legislative victory that will remain in place while any Republican majority will necessarily be temporary. Buchanan points out that health care reform has energized the Republican party via the teabaggers, energy that he believes is critical as long-term demographic trends favor Democrats. Frum is skeptical of the 'baggers staying power, pointing out that they lack leadership and discipline and that they make too many mistakes...

Note to PB: Political history actually began sometime before you got in the game...

Gonna take them down to the Cadillac Ranch...

The word from Olympus: It's gossip, all gossip...

Karin Dalton Beninato has it up to her French Quarter with Newsweek's snide attitude toward New Orleans and Treme. I've been waiting for the show for over a year. I hope it's great, but understand that expecting it to be as good as The Wire is unreasonable. But even if Joshua Alston didn't like it, writing something as loftily callous as this says more about him than the show:

This time, his [David Simon's] microcosm of choice is post-Katrina New Orleans, which has become the civics nerd's favorite fishbowl since all the water drained out of it. The themes are familiar: urban decay, the failure of elected officials to serve their constituencies, the complex truths behind societal ills, all of which incorporate some kind of African-American suffering.

It's as if the guy spent his entire sheltered existence within the confines of a Manhattan penthouse without having set eyes on a single African-American outside of an occasional TV news report, much less ever set foot in New Orleans (thanks, Editilla)...

One down, 161 to go. Always feels good to come back and beat the Yankees in Fenway Park...

Pedro throws out the first pitch. Probably at least fifty guys named Pedro have played Major League Baseball. But there is and always will be only on Pedro...

As RGG once told me, sometimes Bruce is full of shit, but it's great shit:

The Trouble With Harry?

Look, I have my issues with Harry Reid. He's allowed the sorry likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to lead him around by the nose in public. He's done a poor-to-nonexistent job of influencing the MSM coverage of the debate over health care reform insofar as the Senate debate goes. He gave up on a public option without a fight. But to compare what Reid said in private to what Trent Lott said in public, as conservatives urge? Give me a break.

According to Mark Halperin and John Heileman, authors of the forthcoming book Game Change, Reid described in private conversation then-candidate Barack Obama as a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." An early supporter of Obama's, Reid's characterization, though clumsy at best, was a hard nosed description of the advantages Obama had in a national campaign.

Why did the 69-year Reid use the word "Negro"? (That's what this is all about, after all.) Beats me. He's certainly old enough to remember when "Negro" was an advance on "colored," but he's also old enough to have seen "black" supplant "Negro" and "African-American" supplant "black." He should have used a more considered word, but who can deny the actual point Reid made? An important part of Barack Obama's appeal to whites is that he is not threatening to them, and Reid set forth the precise reasons why.

Here's what Trent Lott said in public about Strom Thurmond, the vile racist who ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist, anti-civil rights platform:

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years.

There's a clear implication here: The United States would have been better off with a president who supported Jim Crow laws and opposed even the most miniscule advances in civil rights. Trent Lott pointedly endorsed to policies of a racist politician who did not believe that all are created equal. Publicly longing for the bad old days of Jim Crow strikes me as a far cry from a pragmatic political analysis made in a private strategy meeting.

Meanwhile, the inimitable Michael Steele soldiers on:

Clearly, he [Reid] is out of touch not only with where America and his district [sic] are but where — how African Americans generally feel about these issues.

How the ultraconservative Steele can claim to be in touch with how the majority of African-Americans feel about anything escapes me. Equally clueless were the remarks of right-wing Texas Republican senator John Coryn, who called Reid's comments "embarrassing and racially insensitive." Forgive me, John, but I doubt that you spend much time figuring out how to be racially sensitive. What I can believe is that you are well-versed in that code words and phrases that appeal to bigots while allowing a veneer of plausible deniability.

The conservative breast-beating over this is downright bizarre. When it comes to civil rights and at least attempting to guarantee racial minorities access to the full blessings of American life, conservatives can't point to a single accomplishment. In fact they resisted with might and main every step forward attempted by the movement activists, the radicals, and the liberals. Yes, some Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but these days they'd be called RINO's.

Reid's words were bizarre and poorly chosen. He has apologized to President Obama and the president, having much bigger fish to fry, has accepted the apology. That's good enough for all but the most rabid and hypocritical conservatives. And that, as usual, is who does all the ranting...

I'd rather be in some dark hollow...

Class Act Dept. Rushbo, with his usual grace, charm, and urbanity:

I know the real reason that Teddy Kennedy was mad and offended when Bill Clinton said, "Hey, come on man. You know, this guy would have been fetching us coffee a couple years ago". What made Teddy Kennedy mad was it's women get him coffee, it was Negros that brought Ted Kennedy his booze. And that's why he was all offended.

Treme teaser:



The first season of Treme is scheduled to begin on HBO on April 11.

Take A Load Off

R. I. P., Dom DiMaggio. He wasn't really better than his brother Joe, as the ditty had it, but Dom was one hell 0f a ball player in his own right...

Just A Song: Waylon Jennings' "Love of the Common People"...

Conservatives love, love, love to tout the United States corporate tax rate of 35% as the reason why American businesses move some of their operations abroad and as a proof that we have an unfriendly business climate. The next time you see this beacon of intellectual dishonesty, you can respond with the truth, which is that loopholes reduce the effective tax rate to the point that two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes at all. The ugly truth is here and here...

Matt Taibbi tears Brian Cashman a new one here. Citizen K. readers may recall a recent first line by the master of invective. He's in top form in this article:

With his shameless, blatant attempt to buy a World Series with a half-billion-dollar shopping spree at a time when the rest of the country is scrounging under the couch cushions for ramen money, Cashman has laid the foundation for 2009 to be maybe the most entertaining year for non–Yankees fans in the history of baseball. We are all trailing six car lengths behind, waiting for the pinstriped truck to jackknife and explode in a giant conflagration of scandals and finger-pointing. In an age when huge, irresponsible financial bets have brought Western civilization to the edge of collapse, Cashman’s Yankees are perfectly positioned to become an object lesson in everything that has gone wrong with American society in the past eight years or so...

HBO has given the go-ahead for a full season of Treme, a drama set in the music community of post-Katrina New Orleans. Treme will be produced by David Simon (The Wire)...

R. I. P., Randall "Poodie" Locke...

Friday's Choice: The Band sings "The Weight" with an assist from the Staples Singers in Martin Scorcese's documentary The Last Waltz (inspired by Clever Pup):