John Hicks

I’m a snob, and so are you.

Ow! Quit hittin’ me! Makin’ a point here!

In the specific definition I have in mind, a snob is a person who feels and acts smugly superior about his or her particular tastes or interests.

I’m not talking about people who treat others as social inferiors because of their class or race. That is the sport of vertical snobbery, which requires pitons, crampons and a sharp ice axe.

Derek Bridges

The producers of HBO’s Treme have gone into crisis mode to tamp down another controversy.  Fresh off the heels of the brouhaha that ensued when houses depicted in the advertising campaign promoting the first season of Treme were demolished following a high profile spat between Treme creator David Simon and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu over a feeble attempt by preservationists and Treme producers to save the doomed structures, preservationists have now turned their attention to the chair featured in the advertising campaign for the second season of Treme.

Preservationists contend the chair was once sat in by Hokie Mokie, considered by many the “King of Jazz” for a brief period in the 1940s. Mokie apparently sat in the chair during a rent party in the Back ‘O Town neighborhood later essentially mowed over by urban renewal projects in the 1960s.

Grant Bailie

Oh those men, those lives, those times, so fabled in song and story–a few stories, anyway, one or two songs; now they are mostly forgotten, but who were they and what made them do it?  And what did doing it make them?  Those sitter-outers of life.  Those canny ostriches with their heads stuck in the soft sand of dreams while the earth changed and hardened around them.  Those daring young men in their flannel pajamas. Sleepers we called them once, or VanWinkles, and once they did not mind such names.  But eventually these labels struck one or more of them as derogatory.

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