Dark Brown Waffles

Apologies in advance. I spilled water on the notes that I take. Now I can’t read some of them. You thought my knowledge of character names was bad before?

The Good

-From the very beginning to the very end of tonight’s episode, everything was slipping away. That’s a sublimely simple title that did its job. The episode was breakneck, frenetically moving back and forth between all of its characters and all of their travails. Nobody was spared. 

-The funeral scene at the beginning was as magnificent as such a thing can be. The daughter’s (already made a mistake: Wendell Pierce has clarified that was Shavers’s sister) speech was heartbreaking in its remembrance of a truly great moment. The Who’s Who of the the city’s music being in attendance lent the scene credibility. And if your breath was taken away when the musicians raised their instruments as Shavers was being loaded into the back of the horse drawn herse? That’d be cold. But those were the big moments. What of the woman carrying Shavers’s drum? What of the daughter’s choken screams? What of the hangers-on who showed up to be a part of something?

And what of the fact that the man was dead but the music carried onward; Antoine Baptise and his Soul Apostles paid tribute by getting paid. 

-Sofia’s short walk while putting together the grim reality of her father’s ending was brilliant. Her cutting words against Toni, “I was where I was supposed to be. It’s the truth. I’m not lying to you.” were vicious. You could complain about how she found out (and I will, in The Bad) but everything that came afterward was excellent. 

-LaDonna’s strength ran out. As painful as it is to watch, especially given the character’s strength in the first season and our knowledge of what it took to shake that strength to her core. Surely she ends the season abandoning New Orleans. How can she continue to maintain a double life in the city while all of her family is in Baton Rouge? As discomforting a thought of her leaving the city might be, it is worth noting we haven’t endured her family’s discovery of the fact that she was raped. I am bracing myself against that sadly predictable pain. (I hate that my model for critique forces me to stick LaDonna’s collapse under The Good. But where else? These performances are excellent. So is the writing. I can only assume that neither will get suitably recognized, sadly.)

-Aunt Mimi is suddenly a star of the show. We can quibble about her ability to get Mannie Fresh, but we can love it all the same. Equally enjoyable is how repeatedly stuck in his place Davis has been. It’s fine to mythologize the city, to celebrate it, to revel in it. But there’s also Davis’s dickhead side, the one in which he assumes that he is just as capable as everybody else, the one who ignores his own talents (having a goofy soul patch, for example, and a friend who looks like Tiny Tim) for the ones he wishes he had (like flow, or soul, or chops). To his credit Davis does seem to realize when the more talented are in front of him: last week’s drag queen in the booth and this week’s hip hop king on stage at the open mic. 

-Albert’s apparent plan to leave New Orleans is understandable. Why stay? Why fight when there’s nothing to be won, when the victory to even get your application considered only portends a bigger loss in the future when the application is bounced for a missing name, when the local inspector shuts off your water because you didn’t get a plumber you didn’t need to fix a house you’re capable of fixing yourself? ? In “Indian Red”, the singers sing, “I’ve got a Big Chief, Big Chief, Big Chief of the nation, wild, wild creation, he won’t bow down, down on the ground.” One can imagine the initial complaint that leaving New Orleans is bowing down and admitting defeat. That’d be wildly unfair. Sometimes, refusing to play the game takes as much courage as enduring defeat. 

-The City Councilman’s promises that The Pigeon Town Steppers would march? Another great moment, if for no other reason because of the wake-up call he was trying to provide to Sofia. What he was acknowledging - the dueling political realities of a seemingly obvious situation - was doubly meaningful when spoken to Sofia. 

-Tonight’s musical performances were great especially Delmond at the Blue Note, Antoine at GiGi’s. 

-Delmond’s hunt for a new sound went well right up until the point he tried to sing. He was almost Davis like in that regard, ignoring what he does best for what he doesn’t. Dude can play though. And did he tell his band to, “Follow me or die trying.” Do I have that written down accurately? 

-The look on Antoine’s face when the kids were caught making out behind the chalkboard was fantastic. We adults go through that revulsion at what and where kids are willing to do their business. Even though we might have done the same when we were younger. 

-Moment of pride. Hildago and the Banker are talking. The Banker is complaining about how New Orleans never changes, how outsiders are chased away and how insiders distrust anybody who dares question the way New Orleans does things. But Mosca’s is a Louisiana establishment, just written up in the New Yorker, and famous for a menu that hasn’t changed much in years. Even the meal the Banker recommends, Chicken A La Grand, is an establishment within the restaurant. Point is, for a man complaining about a place that strongly objects to change eating in and celebrating a place that strongly objects to change is ludicrous. (This perfectly captures what I’m talking about.)

The Bad

-The mechanism by which Sofia realizes that her father’s death might not have been an accident flies in the face of what we’ve been lead to believe up to now, which is that everybody thinks it was an accident. Even if such a story were plainly ridiculous (and Sofia realizes how silly it was as soon as she gets on the boat), it is the only story circulating. It is impossible to believe that Sofia wouldn’t have discovered this version of the story. She’s written to be too smart, too aware, too adult to have missed the pieces. 

-Hey, remember that time, just a few episodes, when Annie was going through CDs with Davis, and she revealed that, like Davis, she seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all music every recorded by everyone ever? You do? Good. Because that doesn’t jive with her ripping off a Bob Dylan song, something that everybody around her immediately recognizes while she goes forward, blissfully unaware. To the fans that like every character, I salute you, because I’ll be damned if I can bring myself to want Annie to do anything more than get off my screen. 

-Hildago is a bad guy. Got it. The banker is a bad guy too? Got it. They’re cartoons. They might be real, they might be accurate, but they’re cartoons to the core. 

-What is being gained from the heavy handed cameos of Tom Colicchio and Eric Ripert? Their presence is shameless in the extreme. I have no idea what Anthony Bourdain is trying to achieve with their appearances, nor how Treme itself is bettered by them. And did either do anything of note except for asking the same question, once in English, once in French? “Sazerac?” Meanwhile, another kitchen, this time with slightly more diversity on display, although again none of the diversity which Bourdain touts elsewhere (Hispanic). I still can’t find a good explanation for what’s going on. But hey - he got his friends on the show. How cool is that?

-Meanwhile, poor Janette is disappearing - you know, that character from the first season who actually still has a home in New Orleans - is doing nothing, bouncing from kitchen to kitchen, seemingly starting over in all them. A really good show could be made about like in some city’s food industry; I promise I’ll watch it. But not Treme. 

The Ugly

-Terry’s scenes were heart-breaking. Whether it was the violent acts themselves or the seeming never ending scroll of them on Terry’s patrolcar computer, the grim reality of what New Orleans faced in the years after Katrina repeatedly brings me back to the same idea: how did anybody endure? I understand if you had nowhere else to go, but if you did? For an outsider, it is almost impossible to believe. 

-The Rally Against Violence was good. The passionate speakers, including the one on the television at GiGi’s who called Mayor Nagin a failure? Good. The diverse collection of people who came together despite pronounced differences to oppose violence? Good. The white marchers and the black marchers meeting one another at crossing streets and joining together? A bit much.

But the larger point holds. The city was driven to march things got so bad. Otherwise disinterested parties came together out of the desperation that results from beloved musicians and acclaimed filmmakers and people who weren’t beloved musicians and people who weren’t acclaimed filmmakers being killed in their cars and their homes. The situation was, and perhaps remains, nightmarish to even think about, much less endure.