David Simons talks Treme;

The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, “an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later”.

“The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor,” he said. “New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today.”

image courtesy of butukgirl via flickr

right now i’m tired. i’ve done a day in the office, a stint at the gym, managed some ad-hoc dinner and i got to get me this blog post done or y’all’ll have nothing to read when you get to your desks tomorrow.

but there’s something keeping me awake, something calling me from across the room. a place i’ve started to escape to in the evenings. at weekends. damn, even on holiday when i’m already supposed to have escaped.

that place is maryland. tighter than that, that place is baltimore. and deeper even; darker than that, the place i keep going back to? well currently its the city docks. a bit ago it was the west side projects. rumour has it (though i’m not one for spoilers) that i’ll be moving to the halls of government soon enough. Read more »

It’s that feeling you get when the band you have liked for ages (and no-one else knows about) releases a single and are suddenly all over the TV. All your non-musio mates start getting into them, before you know it, one of their tracks is on an advert and that ’secret obsession’ of yours is forever tainted.

So it is with the wonderful ‘Entourage’. After a brief namecheck in that oracle of all good american tv (the backpage of the guardian guide), I engaged in a bit of late night scraping in order to furnish a fitting diversion for a relaxing weekend away and struck .avi paydirt.

It’s clever, funny, upbeat and enormously compulsive (I am desperately trying to pace myself and am now just two episodes behind the US). It’s got some amazingly quotable characters who just get better and funnier as time goes by- Ari and Johnny Drama are literally the stuff of legend.

You owe it to yourself to hunt it down on ITV2 (or just advance to go if that’s your thing)

But don’t be telling everyone about it, let’s just keep it amongst friends.