Your Treme Viewing List

If your television set is jonesing for New Orleans video in anticipation of ‘Treme’ Season 2, you have plenty of high-quality options to tide you over.

For more about the culture of New Orleans, its music in particular:

1. Les Blank’s ‘Always for Pleasure’ captures both the sights and the feeling of Carnival.
2. Royce Osborne’s ‘All on a Mardi Gras Day’ focuses on the various traditions of black Carnival.
3. Rebecca Snedeker’s ‘By Invitatin Only’ focuses on the behind-the-parade social scene of white debutantes.
4. Lisa Katzman’s portrait of the late great Mardi Gras Indian chief, ‘Tootie Montana,’ was one of the inspirations for the character of ‘Treme’s’ Albert Lambreaux.

The failure of the federal levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was the catalyst for several important films:

1. Years before the floodwaters, Dawn Logsdon approached me to work on a documentary about my neighborhood, ‘Faubourg Treme.’ What started out to be a look at New Orleans culture as exemplified in this one small place grew into a film about the civil rights movement of the 1800s and how the themes of that movement echoed in the work of Martin Luther King and the post-Katrina re-building of New Orleans.
2. Spike Lee’s ‘When the Levees Broke’ was especially important to David Simon as he conceived ‘Treme.’ Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, the fiery heroine of that film, plays Desiree, the common-law wife of our ne’r-do-very-well trombone player Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce).
3. ‘Trouble the Water’ is an incredibly moving insider’s account of what it was like to stay in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Kimberly Rivers Roberts was an aspiring rapper, not a filmmaker. But in the final hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, she seemed to have an anthropologist’s eye as she captured her neighborhood’s final days of normalcy.
4. In her documentary ‘The Old Man and the Storm,’ June Cross humanizes the post-Katrina landscape with a moving portrait of Herbert Gettridge, an 82-year-old Lower 9^th Ward resident who almost single-handedly rebuilt his home.
5. Harry Shearer’s film ‘The Big Uneasy’ wasn’t released until after Season 1 of ‘Treme.’ But it is the only film to explain why New Orleans flooded.  I’ll give you a hint, Hurricane Katrina might have been the proximate cause, but there were other factors far more troubling because of what they say about our nation’s inattention to its infrastructure.

The Real Davis

By Lolis Eric Elie

Just when you think you’re totally over Davis Rogan, his drunken exploits, his undisciplined rants, his very Davis-ness, he comes up with a lyric, so funny, so on point, that you’re tempted to take back any doubtful thought you ever had about him. Tempted.

Jimbo (Rogan's bassist), Davis Rogan and Steve Zahn on 'Treme'

Still smarting years after Salt Lake City made off with our basketball team—lock, stock, barrel and mascot—it was Davis Rogan who devised the most brilliant response. On “D.J. Davis in the House,” he suggested we form a new basketball team and call it the New Orleans Tabernacle Choir. The Utah Jazz would be so embarrassed, he predicted, that they would give us back our team name.

But just when you are lulled into pronouncing Davis a wiseass savant, you hear another Davis Rogan story that shocks you back. At d.b.a., a great bar and music club on Frenchmen Street, they posted a sign behind the bar: "If your name is Davis Rogan, please leave."

As one staff member explained, “The staff finally had enough, and he was 86'd. The incident involved him angrily throwing a pint glass full of beer to the ground in the vestibule/entrance to the bar...broken glass and beer everywhere.” (The sign has since been removed because many bartenders were spending too much time explaining it to patrons.)

For fans of ‘Treme,’ Davis Rogan is an important figure. David Simon, co-creator of the show, has called him the “muse” for the Davis McAlary character. In an interview last year with Times-Picayune TV columnist Dave Walker, Simon said, “Here’s what I admire about Davis. I said to him, ‘Look, you know that I love a lot of the aspects of your existence that you’re giving me. It’s great stuff. Steve Zahn [who plays Davis McAlary] is going to have a field day. But you also know the writers are going to write fictional stuff. I’m not saying that the guy’s going to crawl through the sewers and [have sex with] an alligator, but he may end up doing stuff you don’t personally agree with. He certainly will not represent anything close to the reality of your life. If I were you, I’d want a little distance.’

“He wrote some song lyrics about it, basically saying, ‘Anything you can think of that you think would be problematic for me, I’ve probably already done.’ He’s been very brave about it.”

On his new album, ‘The Real Davis,’ Rogan sings about the wages of his ancillary fame. He’s not complaining. You learn from the record that the favored delicacy on the Davis diet is a dish called "the-hand-that-feeds-you."

Davis was an artist-in -residence at the Royal Abbaye de Fontevraud in the Loire Valley from July to October 2006. David Simon was, shall we say, incredulous.

"Davis, are you really calling me from a Chateau in the Loire Valley?" he asked.

"Yeah. Dude, they got Eleanor of Aquitaine buried around here somewhere."

But the thrill of France was short-lived. On the new record, right after rejoicing about leaving France and returning home to the U.S. of A., Davis covers the old reggae standard, “Rivers of Babylon.” In that song, “the wicked” carried our protagonist away and required him to “sing a song of joy in a strange land.” Davis' disappointment with France wasn’t mere jingoism. Later, he sings about how he can’t wait to leave New York and return home to New Orleans.

It’s not just Davis Rogan’s cantankerous humor that makes him so valuable a muse for ‘Treme.’ Davis knows New Orleans music from Armstrong to “Azz Everywhere.” “Low Down Dirty,” on the new record, channels the standard Dave Bartholomew-Fats Domino rhythm and horn line to get back at a music critic who slighted Davis, pre-‘Treme.’ His band, All That, was one of the earliest and best exponents of “sousaphonk,” New Orleans R&B in which bass guitar parts are played on the tuba to funky effect. And Davis is a student of New Orleans bounce, the New Orleans style of rap music that will be a prominently featured in this season of ‘Treme.’ But unlike the story in ‘Treme,’ where Davis McAlary gets fired for allowing Coco Robicheaux to sacrifice a chicken on the air, Davis Rogan contends that he got fired from his volunteer job at WWOZ because he played too much bounce on a station ostensibly dedicated to the music of New Orleans. (Sources at WWOZ say Davis got fired for spilling a giant-sized soda into the sound board and not telling anyone about. That side of the story is also alluded to in a ‘Treme’ episode.)

If a week between episodes is too long to wait for your Davis McAlary fix, you can substitute in some Davis Rogan through his website or that of the Louisiana Music Factory.

David Mills Scholarship Established

By Lolis Eric Elie

'Treme' Executive Producer David Mills

On March 30, 2010, David Mills collapsed on the set during the filming of an episode of 'Treme.' He died shortly thereafter of a brain aneurysm.

The cast and crew of the show gathered in Washington Square Park, in New Orleans’ Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, the morning after David’s death. Later, we gathered in City Park to dedicate a live oak tree we had sponsored in David’s memory. Mary Howell, one of the consultants on the show, and the inspiration for the Toni Bernette character, came up with the idea. “I felt like we wanted to do something to mark a place for David here, in New Orleans, putting down some new roots, like he was doing,” she said.

While the “magic Hubig’s” had become something of an icon of ‘Treme,’ we didn’t realize the impact these confections had had on David Mills until we discovered a case of them in his office after his passing. Tom Piazza, one of the ‘Treme’ writers contacted Hubig’s to secure the appropriate pies for the occasion. The labels echoed a line from our promotional posters, which in turn echoed an old Mardi Gras Indian couplet.

David Mills 1961 – 2010
Won’t Bow. Don’t Know How.

This year, on the first anniversary of David’s passing we gathered around a tree in City Park that we purchased specifically as a memorial to him.

Before ‘Treme,’ David Mills had never been to New Orleans. That seems odd in retrospect in that he was something of a music geek, the kind of person you’d expect to visit New Orleans with much the same enthusiasm as pilgrims visit Our Lady of Medjugorje. But David was more P-Funk than Fats Domino.

David Mills and David Simon were old friends and ‘Treme’ was a great chance for them to work together again. Once here, Mills grew to love the city ­-- its music, its casino and of course, those Hubig’s pies.

I’ve often lamented that I didn’t get to spend more time with David, learn more from him and about him. But, as David Simon noted at our memorial, David Mills tended not to say much when the topic of conversation was David Mills. “He would tell me certain things, but it was in his time,” Simon said. Simon and Mills had known each other since the two of them worked as reporters on ‘The Diamondback,’ the University of Maryland’s student newspaper. Still, Simon’s memorial portrait of his friend was drawn from three decades in which Mills dispensed details of his life by the teaspoonful.

"David also always steered the conversation toward what was at stake for the characters as individual human beings,” Tom Piazza said. “ ‘Treme’ has a strong thematic dimension, and it grapples with large issues of society and culture. David, dependably, would reel us back in to questions of character, and motivation, and emotion."

Mills created a blog. There he opined on everything from music to politics, from Smith & Wesson’s eau de toilette fragrance, to President Barack Obama’s over use of the pronoun “I.” After David’s death, his nephew, Clifton Porter II, wrote a memorial entry, and posted it on the UBM site. He captures a side of his late uncle none of us in David’s professional orbit had any clue about.

In the ‘Treme’ writers’ room, the place where we brainstorm about the direction of the show, David Mills was the constructive skeptic. He wasn’t so enamored of New Orleans that he would let us wallow in Crescent City sentimentality. He asked tough, smart questions and the show was better for it.

Still, criticizing is easy, or at least easier than offering up your own ideas. While each of us writers made contributions, large and small, David Mills contributed one particularly brilliant suggestion, the idea of using our final episode to go back in time and see how our characters prepared on the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. ‘Treme’ is not a show about a hurricane; it’s about people rebuilding their lives in the wake of a great catastrophe. We didn’t dwell on the storm in the early shows. But by our final episode it was time we revisited the event that gave rise to our story.

When David suggested the idea of dedicating the last show to a flashback, it was one of the few times when all the writers in the room immediately agreed. In that moment, David Mills, the sometime hell raiser and muckraker, took a turn as consensus builder.

A scholarship in David’s name has been created at the University of Maryland. For more details, please visit, http://davidmills.umd.edu/about.php.