New Orleans After the Storm, Culture, and Tradition

The HBO Auteur – David Simon | via NYTimes.com

Lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments. I don’t mean that to sound flippant, and I don’t mean it to sound more or less than what it is, but they’re artists with a moment, they can take a moment and make it into something so transcendent that you’re not quite sure that it happened or that you were a part of it.

David Simon is about to have yet another series hit the airwaves, this time a show called Treme on HBO.

Simon, more than any other writer that I’ve read or screenwriter that I’ve watched, has a way of writing love stories about communities. Whether it was Baltimore in the books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets or The Corner, and The Wire, or Generation Kill, Simon has a way of capturing the essence of a community by looking deeply at the people in it.

Whereas through its five seasons “The Wire” built a vivid portrait of urban America as seen through the prism of its institutions and professions — the police department, the drug trade, the dockworkers, the local government, the schools, the press — “Treme,” though no less focused on the workings and failings of 21st-century American urban existence, tells its story not through a city’s institutions but through its individuals. It isn’t that “The Wire” lacked for distinctive characters: Omar, the homicidal ethicist; Bubbles, the embattled addict; D’Angelo Barksdale, the doomed-by-decency street dealer — there were scores of them. But because so many of the show’s story lines dramatized the futility of any of these characters’ attempts to break through social and economic ceilings, the image of contemporary urban America that the show offered was one in which character wasn’t fate so much as a fait accompli: in the land of the free market, Simon was arguing, free will wasn’t going to get you very far. In “Treme,” Simon seems to be arguing for the very opposite idea: the triumph of the individual will despite all impediments, a show about people, artists for the most part, whose daily lives depend upon the free exercise of their wills to create — out of nothing, out of moments — something beautiful.

Among Treme’s writers, actors, and musicians are George Pelacanos—another who can capture the “essence” and a regular contributor to the The Wire—Melissa Leo, Wendell Pierce, Elvis Costello, John Goodman, Steve Zahn, Dr. John, all among my favorites.

I’m looking forward to Treme, hope you are too.

Some video and commentary here.