a city that lives in the imagination of the world?

   “Those guys who wrote Deuteronomy, you think they had to deal with this,” Simon joked. “ ‘Ooh, there’s not enough parchment.’ ”

Pretty much everyone who knows me knows of my extreme love of The Wire. I say a lot that there are only two TV shows-- The Wire, The West Wing.

But now, it turns out there might be a third television show worth giving a shit about. Treme is from the creators of The Wire. Their same brilliant brush strokes, but about musicians instead of drug dealers?? And in New Orleans?? I vote YES.

When I was in college, I had the most lovely boyfriend from New Orleans. I loved going there to visit his family. I loved how the streets were confusing, I loved the pastel, the low-hanging moss, I loved the drive-thru hurricane stands. I loved the houses. You KNOW I loved the houses. 

Something about New Orleans made it seem like the lovable, well-adjusted illegitimate child of my two regional parents, the old South & Las Vegas. 

There was a great article in New York Mag this week by Emily Nussbaum about David Simon (Photo: Peter Hapak)my favorite irascible creator. I loved it. Made me even more excited for this Sunday, when it premieres. But I especially liked this little section:
When I get back home, I send Simon my question again: Why create drama, not documentary?

He writes a long note back. “We know more about what Huey Long represented and the emptiness at the core of American political culture from reading Robert Penn Warren than from contemporary journalistic accounts of Long’s reign. We know more about human pride, purpose, and obsession from Moby-Dick than from any contemporaneous account of the Nantucket whaler that was actually struck and sunk by a whale in the nineteenth-century incident on which Melville based his book. And we know how much of an affront the Spanish Civil War was to the human spirit when we stare at Picasso’s Guernica than when we read a more deliberate, fact-based account. I am not comparing anything I’ve done to any of the above; please, please do not presume that because I cite someone else’s art, I claim anything similar for anything I’ve done. But I cite the above because it makes the answer to your question obvious: Picasso said art is the lie that allows us to see the truth. That is it exactly.”  --Emily Nussbaum