Tag: Treme

Treme? Here at Slabbed we wipe our asses with Treme. A Guest post from a NOLA Lifer.

Folks the following came to me via email from a long time reader of Slabbed and a life long resident of metro New Orleans.  As my mom’s family has very long roots in NOLA metro I’ve watched both seasons of Treme with interest and concluded it was crap myself but my main man says it better. ~ sop

I don’t consider myself a racist, although I guess everyone has their tendencies. But the post-Katrina media coverage and shows like Treme (which I will not watch) lead the rest of the nation to believe that Black New Orleanians have the market cornered on culture. So what you wind up with is the old, blue-blood history of New Orleans and the “Mardi Gras Indian” culture/history. In my opinion, those views completely ignore what the real New Orleans is all about.

To me, there’s so much more to what makes New Orleans and I think this video speaks to the way so many of us grew up. I can picture myself as a kid doing all of these things. My brother sent me the video yesterday. I had seen it quite some time ago, but I had a chance to absorb it yesterday. It stirred up great memories, but it more so made me sad for what the city has become. If you have never seen it, I know you’ll identify with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmbXwjnCxx4

Slabbed and Ashley mentioned in the same sentence. And as fate would have it only now that she's gone is the genius behind Nowdy's work here becoming evident.

When I checked stats and Jason’s post on American Zombie about our coverage of the goings on in Oxpatch and read the comments, I was truly humbled to see one of the commenters mentioning us deserving the Ashley Award. For those who are not schooled in the lore of the local blogging community the Ashley Award is named for Ashley Morris, the granddaddy of us all who lost his life in the spring of 2008. Creighton Bernette from Treme’s first season was based on him in large part and his blog still lives to this day. It is a heck of an honor just to be mentioned in the same sentence.

Since our early days I thought our natural readership traffic would be largely along the I-10 corridor as we’re culturally similar. My former partner in blog Nowdy hailed from central Mississippi and while she was hip to this area she was hipper to the goings on from Jackson north. And when the Dick Scruggs prosecution met the insurance battles down here we naturally didn’t take things and the story line being peddled in both the main stream press and the blogs at face value.  Nowdy well knew of the time-honored tradition of bare knuckle vendetta, Mississippi style. For me the fact that State Farm so well-integrated into the news cycle was plenty enough.  She was ridiculed and derided for some of her work but by God it has somehow manged to survive the test of time in part.

I mention all this because some of the ridicule came from Tom Freeland aka NMC. He was advocating in USA v Scruggs on behalf of Judge Lackey, his daddy’s former law partner who evidently once had an office in that “quaint Victorian-style Jackson Avenue office” that “has housed lawyers since 1905.” I think William Falkner took a crap in the hall bathroom there once too. And since I brung it up I’ll add we’ve always stipulated Team Freeland bleeds blue. Along those same lines he also had IRS leins and they all put their pants on one leg at a time. But he also blogs and we’re better off for it (when he isn’t grinding an axe against Dick Scruggs or helping State Farm rat fuck ordinary people down here whose only sin was having full insurance coverage and losing their house to Hurricane Katrina) as his blog is at times very good. In fact this last January I personally recommended it to Jason at AZ and made sure Tom was aware if American Zombie. After all just because we fussed some doesn’t mean the material is crap. Bloggers are a very competitive bunch after all. Continue reading “Slabbed and Ashley mentioned in the same sentence. And as fate would have it only now that she's gone is the genius behind Nowdy's work here becoming evident.”