Last night I finished watching Season One of Treme. Created by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer (Simon created The Wire, where Overmeyer was a contributing writer), Treme focuses on a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans neighbourhood (Faubourg Tremé) as residents struggle to regain/retain their city both in body and in soul. At the heart of Treme is the eccentric city, the improvisitory city, with many of its characters musicians, chefs, writers and impresarios.
Back in 1980, as a young man fresh out of high school drifting through Europe and North Africa, I met a New Zealander twice my age who had done as I was doing, and never stopped. He had been everywhere -- as everywhere as you can get after 18 years of drifting -- and he told me my country, Canada, had one "un-Canadian" city -- Montréal -- while the U.S. had two "un-Amercan" cities -- New Orleans and San Francisco.
I had never been to New Orleans, but I had family in San Francisco and came to know it both before and after its October, 1989 earthquake -- an "after" that paved the way for the dot.com madness of the late-1990s, when the city, through a self-conscious civic and commercial re-design, found itself beholden to the 25-year-old heterosexual male IT professional it had sought to attract.
During a 1999 visit to Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy's Minna Street apartment (obtained, Kevin told me, because the earthquake set off a "mini-exodus") it occurred to me that New Orleans was now the only un-American city left in the U.S. But after watching Treme, you can see in fine and subtle detail how there are (neoliberal) forces at work to ensure that this will not be so. The current "state of exception" is Covid, which, as we all know, is everywhere.
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