Skip to main content

Treme

By

 Not too often I get excited about a television show, but Treme is the real deal.  Finally, something that captures the look and feel of New Orleans without devolving into a bunch of cliches.  The music is fantastic, and the story lines offer a compelling narrative of events in the aftermath of Katrina.  Seems the show has struck a nerve, as HBO has picked it up for a second season.

One of the many references in the series, is the 1927 flood with Creighton trying to get himself to go back to a novel he started on the flood.  One scene shows him reading Rising Tide by  John Barry on the porch of his Garden District home.

PBS ran a documentary on Faubourg Tremé last year, which I would like to see.  Spike Lee also did a documentary a few years back on the aftermath of the storm entitled, When the Levees Broke.  And, of course I can't recommend Zeitoun more strongly!  Great account of what happened to one family during the storm, which Jonathon Demme plans on making into a movie.

Comments

  1. MartiMay 20, 2010 at 4:48 AM

    I'll have to watch one of these while I still have HBO. I've seen promos for it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonMay 21, 2010 at 1:11 PM

    Well worth watching Marti. Really captures the spirit of New Orleans.

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonJune 18, 2010 at 11:06 AM

    The last two episodes haven't been up to speed, I thought. Seems the writers are starting to wallow a bit too much in New Orleans' self pity.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more