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Minstrel Show in a Three-Day Stubble of a City
The first season of Treme focused primarily on New Orleans citizens, developing tensions between those who stayed and those who came back and those who decided to stay away. In contrast, the second...
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The Rhythm of a City Out of Sync: The Disrupted Spaces of Treme
As Antoine Batiste rehearses with his nascent ensemble in “On Your Way Down,” the third episode in Treme’s second season, he continually stops them: someone is either off key (“Oh, you meant a concert...
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F.ix E.verything M.y A.ss
While my larger reflections center this past Sunday’s episode, I haven’t been able to quite shake the narrative of the last. Specifically, LaDonna’s (Khandi Alexander) brutal attack and rape has kept...
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Keepin’ it Real on Treme
I’m a newcomer to New Orleans, but it’s my place, and I have a proprietary interest in what Treme means to my city. Its economic impact, analyzed by Vicki Mayer in an earlier column, is complicated:...
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Tremé: Feels Like Joy and Pain
On July 5, 2009, I swayed shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of other black folk in the New Orleans Superdome performing regional variations of the Electric Slide as we sang along with Maze...
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Throw the Baby Out the Window
Like the Mardi Gras episode last season, and many episodes of Treme, cross-cutting among the ensemble cast restricts the depth of development for any single story thread, and means that every minute...
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Music is a Character
Photo by Guy Robinson One of the highlights of Sunday’s episode “Can I Change My Mind,” was the appearance of Donald Harrison Jr with Delmond, first at the bar at Domenica, and later at Dr. John’s...
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Feet First
People who love New Orleans will tell you there is no place else like it. Even before Katrina, locals would often say it’s not really an American city; that culturally, it’s more Caribbean; that it’s a...
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Treme: It Matters a Difference
When I lived in New Orleans, one of my students, a native New Orleanian, explained that, “New Orleans is a hard place to live. It’s an even harder place to leave.” It is surely the case that the theme...
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You Have Friends That Want You Back Home
Sunday’s airing of Treme‘s season hour-and-a-half season finale did its best to tie up a season’s worth of loose ends. LaDonna got a couple strong kicks in on her rapist and her husband finally...
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