ChickinStew

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Do you know what it means? Watching Treme, the Final Season

Just finished watching the final season of Treme. Man, that show gets so much right. The power of the entire thing kinda snuck up on me during these last five episodes, and I was literally in tears during the last episode over the tragic beauty of it all. (Ok maybe I'd also had too much wine during Episode 5.)

It's that tension between having an authentic culture, and having that culture also be a tourist attraction, and needing that culture to be who you are and for your livelihood. That tension between wanting to live your life in a city, and having happy moments torn open by random violence at a parade. Between trying to do good work in a place infested with corruption; being a part of a culture that is simultaneously enveloping and familial, yet dismissed as niche and quaint from a national perspective.

David Simon may be a commercial failure in terms of his ability to attract viewership, but IMO he is a fucking genius. The Wire is a work of art, and Treme is amazing for many of the same reasons. He has this ability to see the nuances at play when these kinds of tensions are acting upon us, infecting our culture, our cities, our families, our identities. Maybe Treme is more relate-able for me because I spent my formative years in New Orleans; maybe the references are too 'in', the struggles too specific, the music too loose for the show to have mass appeal. But therein lies the genius of Treme. David Simon was never going to create a show about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina that was going to be popular, y'all.

I was going to post a video but it came in upside down, so I'll end with a direct quote from DJ Davis:

"Do you know how sometimes you hear a song that you've heard a million times before, and maybe you're even tired of hearing it, but this time, maybe because of something you've been through, or maybe because of something you now understand, you hear that song again. Maybe it's a new version; maybe not. But you realize there's a fresh world in there to be heard? Yeah, me too."

Thank you, David Simon, for the love letter you wrote for New Orleans, that city I used to love to hate, and now I hate to love.