Fever dreams

So the first thing we have to note about Carnival 2023 is that I got COVID. Finally, almost three years after it stopped being cool or notable or... well at least since it stopped being considered news, I'm getting in on some of this action. Even though COVID is still causing serious health and safety problems all over the country, and even though this still has significant impacts on people's lives, their ability to work, go to school or maybe buy eggs sometimes, "as a nation" we've decided it's time to move on.  We've definitely decided it's time to stop helping people, anyway.  Good luck out there!

Because I have been a very good boy and dutifully taken all of my shots in accordance with the directives of our Satanic Lord Fauci Gates Avegno? (I can't keep up with the liturgy anymore. Just tell me which way to genuflect) I am pretty much fine after a few nights' fever and mild coughing.  Still, since I'm sitting here writing this on Friday afternoon, which is technically day 4 of the standard 5 day quarantine, I'm probably going to end up observing the first Uptown parades of the season masked and at a distance from the crowd. But if we've learned anything about the Carnival ritual in our many years of observance it is that we don't control the shape of our experience. Rather, we must learn to appreciate it as it comes. There is a subtle art to this.  And whatever wisdom or spiritual gratification we might gain, often happens by accident.

Take the new shape of the early, um, pre-parade-season parade season, for example.  We'll explore some of the circumstances in a bit but here is something that has happened mostly by accident over the past couple of years. Chewbacchus and the groups that make up a walking parade called Les Fous have been pushed up in the calendar to a weekend they share with the Krewe of Nefertiti now in its second year. This effectively ended up adding a whole new fourth weekend of public parading events to our calendar.  Following upon that, the addition of Boheme on Friday, the shifting of 'tit-Rex and Krewe Delusion to that Sunday have greatly expanded Krewe du Vieux weekend. That's pretty cool.  Of course the reasons some of it has happened are not necessarily good. But, in spite of the problems, we are getting, in these early weeks, a little taste of what a more diverse, geographically distributed, and locally driven Carnival season can look like. It's the sort of thing we should be consciously striving to make happen.  

For now, it seems the only thing we're consciously striving for is more money for police.  The approach of Carnival has occasioned a mad scramble by political leaders to appease the latest police shakedown over parade routes. As of this writing we're told there's a plan in place to staff everything using very expensive fill-ins from police and sheriff's departments all over the state. How is that going so far?   I don't really know what sort of metrics Chief Woodfork intends to use to determine this. She said it would go perfectly fine. 

At a press conference this week announcing the new strategy, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city and the NOPD would “ensure that everyone is on the same page relative to policy, procedures.”

Woodfork said at the same press conference the arrangement was reviewed by the city Law Department, the mayor’s chief administrative officer and she expected it would also be reviewed by the consent decree monitors.

“I think it’s going to be perfectly fine,” she said. 

Hmm.. maybe.

Remember that time some Louisiana sheriffs bros hauled in by New Orleans drove their bikes, lights AND sirens blaring, through a walking parade with little kids and shoebox floats underfoot for no reason other than they wanted to? Safe choices, cool. #MardiGras2023 pic.twitter.com/3rc2I7T9vF

— Kimberly Kaye (@Kimberly_Kaye) February 6, 2023

I'm told those are actually Orleans Sheriff's deputies rolling their motorcycles over the shoebox parade. But wherever they're from, there's already concern that they aren't going to be up on the brief. We don't hear so much about this now that we're supposed to focus on their staffing crisis. But for many years, the standard bit of propaganda we were fed about New Orleans police at Carnival time was that they were the world's undisputed "masters of crowd control." What does it take to attain such a lofty designation?  Not much, apparently. 

According to the cooperative endeavor agreement crafted by the OPSO, all supplemental deputies and officers must have an up-to-date Level 1 LAPOST Basic Training certification, which is completed in Louisiana, and two years of job experience. There will be no special training.

Notice also that because this says visiting police are "independent contractors" under the supervision of the Sheriff and not the NOPD, there's really no argument to say they fall under the directives of the federal consent decree governing that agency. 

Deputies and officers in this capacity are being viewed as “independent contractors” of the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office. They will be assigned by that agency, but will wear the equipment, badge, uniforms, and weapons issued by their home parish. At all times, the officers will be considered employees of their home department and subject to the laws and regulations of those departments.

Of course Woodfork thinks it will be perfectly fine.  She's barely got anything to do with any of it anyway. From the looks of things, all she's responsible for is checking the vibes. Just like us, actually!

And how is that going, anyway?  So far... it's been a mixed bag.  We took our first real sampling in the Marigny on KDV night under a portentous full moon.

Now first of all before we say anything else, from a pure vibes aspect, it is difficult to beat the sound and feel of being at this parade. 

However, sound and feel aren't the only reasons people go to see Krewe du Vieux. They also go for the jokes. KDV isn't the only parade known for topical satire by any stretch. But it does have a reputation for cleverness and sophistication (even in spite of its scatological enthusiasms) that sets an often emulated standard. Does KDV itself always live up that standard?  Not really.  This year's reviews were not only mixed. In some regards they were downright polarizing.

The primary complaint had to do with representations of Mayor Cantrell and Sheriff Hutson by several sub-krewes. The mayor of New Orleans and the elected Sheriff, being the low down good for nothing politicians that they are, are obviously fair game for pointed satire.  But when your japes are informed by right wing memes and racist stereotypes, as was the case with at least two of the floats I saw, then you're less likely to score any points against your intended quarry than you are to just make a lot of people mad.  Peter Athas explains this here in a re-cap post following his march in the KDV sub-krewe SPANK. 

While we did an anti-racism theme there was controversy over floats depicting two Black elected officials: Sheriff Susan Hutson and Mayor Cantrell. They’re both fair game, but it’s possible to kick down when mocking public figures. That’s what two sub-krewes did with a highly sexualized image of the Sheriff and a blackened caricature of the Mayor. These floats were overtly misogynistic and verged on minstrelsy. I’m not posting pictures but the floats came from LEWD and Seeds of Decline if you want to google them. And yes, the sub-krewes have silly names.

I don't mind posting the pictures. This is LEWD's float. 

The inspiration for this one apparently comes from this story about the newly elected sheriff learning to ride a horse for the first time.  So to begin with, it's a deep cut reference to something few people watching will have even seen. Secondly, there's really nothing there to make fun of per se. Person who is new to a job is learning to do this one small ceremonial aspect of it. Nothing wrong with that. Meanwhile, there's been plenty to criticize about Hutson's actual performance in office so far if you really want to go after her. This horse thing is just trivial. So even if we wanted to argue that the.. um.. undignified representation of her person is merited by the force of a pointed political attack, well, it isn't. It's just transgression for its own sake which, as Athas also points out here, is just trolling. 

He also mentions the Seeds float going after the mayor's much publicized trips out of town.  I actually think that's a fair topic insofar as the conferences and junkets she's jetting around to are often lobbying events for the privatizing leeches who end up making questionable business deals with her administration.  Of course, nobody makes that point about it. Rather we get facile tedious complaints about "first class travel at taxpayer expense." Still, even Seeds' less than great handling of the issue did lead to this "for mayoral induced nausea" barf bag coming into my possession. And I can't say I won't need to use it at some point. 

On the other hand, this float from the sub-krewe of Space Age Love was basically a rolling advertisement for the mayoral recall plastered with references and epithets pulled right out of right wing Facebook comments. "LaToylet," "LaToya The Destroya" etc. They're playing all the hits.

Bad taste, unfunny, and promoting a reactionary political agenda funded by an ultra-wealthy owner of a shitty restaurant franchise. It really doesn't get much worse than that.  I found out later that Rick Farrell (the shitty restaurant owner in question) paid to reserve some party space near where the parade lines up and had recall canvassers set up to collect signatures. There's probably not much he krewe could have done to keep that from happening. But they could have chosen not to roll this advertisement for an active political campaign in their parade. 

Anyway, you can see why people are upset. But it's not all bad news. Because Krewe du Vieux is a federated amalgamation of the sub-krewes that make it up, there are going to be wild inconsistencies in its presentation.  You can see the worst of its worst elements right alongside some of its best giving their very best.  Here is Krewe of Underwear's float about the growing censorship of reading materials.  It put a bunch of books on a BBQ pit. 

 This was C.R.A.P.S. float criticizing the Dobbs decision. They made a big uterine monster puppet.

The aforementioned SPANK did a riff on famous right wing crank and Rock 'N Bowl owner John Blancher being a "Rock 'n A' Hole" which was also clever. I didn't get decent enough photo of their float but here they are.

Maybe the problem here, then, is that people need to be more specific about what it is they're mad at? Or maybe that's also missing the point. 

The following is a passage from a 2016 general history of Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham Here he is describing the late medieval emergence of civic ritual in urban places (such as carnival celebrations, for example.) 

Rituals are polyvalent, for a start: they regularly take on different meanings for participants from those intended by organizers, often several different meanings at once. One general meaning of all these processions and other events was a celebration of the civic identity of the participants, which was frequently fully explicit, and also marked by dances and jousting in the days before and after the more formal religious ceremonials. They were also, of course, intended to support local power structures and social hierarchies, as with the Pope's Easter Monday procession in Rome, which represented (among other things) his local sovereignty, or the particular festivities at Carnival and on St. John's day which Lorenzo de Medici developed around 1490 in Florence to showcase his charismatic authority. Conversely such rituals were also the foci for contestation, as, earlier in Florence, the opposition between urban aristocratic jousting and guild processions. Any procession could be disrupted, indeed, to make a political point: that was how internal civic crises often started.

"Celebrations of civic identity," are complicated things. They can be elitist and subversive at once. They can express a political point of view and its opposite at the same time. They can reify existing hierarchies while suggesting the possibility of their overthrow.  Carnival is a public exhibition and participatory social catharsis that is as much felt as it is spoken. It's no surprise that it will touch on social and political issues that concern us as a collective. But it is not, nor can it ever be, a logical linear argument about anything. Instead the experience is better understood as a dream or a vision. And even the visions we share together can take on widely varied shades of meaning.  For the most part, we can only let them happen and draw from them what we can.

So what can we draw from KDV 2023? Well for one thing, if you want to do local political satire, you should be a little more plugged in to local politics than, say, the average casual fan of the Newell Normand show. But I think what's happening in some of these sub-krewes is more of their membership  live out of town or even out of state these days than when they were a younger and truly "alternative" local art event. So it's no surprise they aren't getting too far into the local news beyond what's most loudly and salaciously broadcast via the laziest media. Heck, even most of the better content in this year's parade was mostly ripped from the headlines of the national culture wars. Obviously this doesn't apply evenly to all the sub-krewes or their individual members, but it does seem like KDV, as an institution is aging away from its counter-cultural roots toward its cable-news brained dotage.

There's still some things they can do about that. Given the growth of the pre-season and the proliferation of new groups born more or less in KDV's image, maybe it's time for KDV to think more consciously about its responsibiliy as the elder statesman here. At the very least, the main "mothership" krewe could take more interest in ensuring the overall quality of the content.  The structure of their organization makes that complicated.  And, of course, nobody in the DIY art krewe wants to be the art police. But maybe having someone around to say, "Ok but do we need four different floats this year all making the same, 'LaToya sure flies on planes a lot' joke?" would help smooth things over a bit. Because the whole parade's reputation takes a hit every time stuff like this happens.

We've already said, there's only so much control anyone can exert over the fever dream of our civic celebration and the chaotic visions it produces. That doesn't mean we can't have rules and laws that ensure its continuance. That's not really a contradiction. But it can be a fine line to walk.  Is J.P. Morrell walking it? 

New Orleans City Council President JP Morrell is preparing significant new reforms for the way the city permits and treats Mardi Gras krewes in the future, ranging from forcing out some old-line parade krewes to giving walking krewes like Chewbacchus and krewedelusion the same sort of protections and rights that “traditional” parading groups like Rex and Zulu now enjoy.

“You can't really regulate Mardi Gras,” Morrell said in an interview with Gambit. “We're just trying to make sure the city gets a good return on Mardi Gras.”

Morrell said he’s already introduced legislation requiring the mayor's Mardi Gras Advisory Committee to determine which krewes will be permitted by June 15 each year.

"You can't really regulate Mardi Gras," he said while literally proposing a new set of Mardi Gras regulations. If that's not a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of Carnival, I don't know what is.  But what is J.P. actually on about here? 

For “traditional” parades — primarily krewes that feature floats with riders and that roll the final two weekends of Carnival, Lundi Gras and Fat Tuesday — perhaps the biggest change Morrell hopes to see is the advisory committee to weed out underperforming parades. Traditional parades are the primary subject of the city’s Mardi Gras ordinances

“We've heard rumors for years that there are krewes that are not financially solvent, that are kind of leasing their space to other krewes who are on the waiting list or simply don't want to go through the process,” Morrell said. Others have simply not provided the sort of spectacle and artistry residents expect from Mardi Gras parades.

Such a process could also allow for the city to handle other types of bad actors. For instance, it could create a mechanism to oust Nyx, which has been plagued by controversies, including members throwing racist beads in 2019, their krewe captain posting racist comments on social media, a lawsuit from five members alleging fraud and abuse and the decision to hold a ball in Biloxi in 2021 as a protest of sorts against the city’s COVID-19 restrictions. Similarly, Druids have come under criticism in recent years for crossing well over the line of satire into racist tropes and other insensitive themes for their floats.

“There needs to be a mechanism where there's some curation on behalf of the mayor's Mardi Gras advisory committee to go through the krewes post-Mardi Gras and go, well, how was the parade this year? Did it live up to expectations? Does their roster actually match up with the amount of riders they say they have? Are they financially solvent? All these things are things that they should be doing,” Morrell said.

I see some good thoughts expressed in that article as well as some things that sound questionable. We'll need to learn more about what he wants. I'm not excited about the idea of the city getting too heavily involved in reviewing the content of a parade, for example.

Are going to end up with something like this?

Interesting. So let’s say a bunch of people decide they don’t like NOMTOC. They can just have their permit taken away now. I wish we prioritized more important things. https://t.co/NjopAse6Ui

— 🦋💙🌎☮️🫶🏾 (@Ollie_Pat3) February 2, 2023

 

Last weekend's KDV discourse demonstrates that parade content moderation can be a dicey proposition. You want to believe J.P. when he says he's sticking up for the little guys and the independents. But it's less comforting to see him prominently uphold the highly problematic and Disney IP heavy Chewbacchus as his standard bearer.  We know J.P. loves him some Disney-owned cultural products. Is that what we want out of Mardi Gras, though? Whose tastes and preferences would this review board enforce? 

In this MacCash story, J.P. also asks if there are too many parades. 

“Do we need a cap?” asked City Council president JP Morrell rhetorically during an interview last Friday. If not, he said, maybe we should approve other krewes. 

As first reported by The Gambit, Morrell hopes to rewrite the city’s Carnival playbook. In addition to allowing for more parades, he’s considering the possibility of retiring a few. Since the city pays most of the cost to present the parades, Morrell argues, there should be certain standards.

How the expansion and contraction of Carnival will be managed is still in the research and development mode. Morrell said the real work will begin in the spring, with an eye toward future Mardi Gras seasons.

The article goes on to point out, though, that despite the fact that the number or Orleans Parish parades is already capped at 30, two new parades have been added to the calendar in recent years.  How did that happen?  Well, let's see, one of them is the Legion of Mars which takes the morning Saturday slot this year. Who are they?

Despite the cap, sometimes new krewes do manage to cut in line. This year, the Legion of Mars, a krewe composed of veterans, first responders, police officers and their families, was permitted to lead off the parades on Feb. 11.

The other is the Krewe of Nefriti which began parading in New Orleans East last year and is now a fixture of that new "accidental" fourth week of parades we talked about at the top of this post. What's going on there? 

When her fellow NOPD sergeant Zenia Smith, who was also a former Nyx member and who also lives in the East, founded the all-female Krewe of Nefertiti in 2020, Turner joined immediately.

Nefertiti is the East’s only parade. It’s for the neighborhood folks who maybe can’t easily get to the Uptown parades, or maybe don’t want to.

It’s the kind of parade where people watch from their own front yards, kids run along with the 13 floats, and the high school bands come from the neighborhood. Nefertiti is devoted to public service. It’s exactly the kind of parade that wants a detective sergeant as queen.

Ah ok so you get a permit above the cap if you are a cop parade. Got it.

So it looks like we'll be discussing all this stuff at City Council after Mardi Gras this year.  It doesn't necessarily have to go poorly. But I remember the time Councilmember Cantrell convened a Mardi Gras review task force and the only thing that came out of that was they tried to ban Tucks from throwing T-P rolls.

I do think we need to have some serious talks about how to promote a more accessible and local focused Carnival season.  Rather than capping the number of parades or overly scrutinizing their format and content, why not let's talk about breaking up the Uptown mono-route and put more diverse styles of parade into the city's neighborhoods.  If J.P. really does want to recognize groups like Boheme and Chewbacchus as the equals of Carrollton or Muses, then doesn't that mean it's okay for the "big" parades to loosen their style up a bit if they want to?  Do we really need to jam them all down St. Charles three and four at a time? Who does that benefit?

Too often the way our newspaper writes about Carnival and the way our politicians seek to regulate it begins and ends from the perspective of what's best for police and for tourism ownership.  But, according to the Arthur Hardy guide, "Mardi Gras is a party the city throws for itself."* That's the thing we need to protect. Regular people rarely have a voice in that.

For several years pre-covid I was doing this bit where I pretended to rank the uptown parades each year based on a tongue in cheek matrix of highly subjective categories of experience. The real point of that exercise, though, was all parades are fun and each one does something different. We can't and shouldn't hold them all to the same standard.  They each represent a different aesthetic and set out to do something particular to their idiom. Stacking them up every year was nonetheless fun because it demonstrates the varied and textured experience of Mardi Gras. I'd hate to see that crushed by too much standardization.  J.P. should call me and I will show him my spreadsheet.

Obviously there were no rankings in 2021 because there were no parades. And last year I didn't do them because last year was all more about feeling the vibes after a year off.  I might bring the rankings back this year since this is going to be an issue.  I'm not sure how inclusive they will be, though, because, well, I've got the COVID. Whatever I get of this weekend's parades will be short bits seen from a distance. I'll have to make do with the actual fever dreams in the meantime.

* My favorite line from the book. It's in the Q&A every year. It appears on page 20 of this year's guide.

Put up your nickels and dimes

House floats are popping up all over town I've seen a few of these. But in the COVID times one only travels a short distance along the same route every day with fewer stops in between so I can't say I've seen a lot of them yet. I'm sure I'll get out and take some pictures sooner or later.  I have noticed a number of different takes on the phenomenon over the past few weeks. The class politics of it are a little bit fraught. One could complain that it's a high barrier to entry kind of event. In order to have your own display, you gotta own a house and afford to pay for the art. The inherent tie to home ownership can signify gentrification, especially given what we've been told about high enthusiasm among wealthy young transplants for participating. 

But, when you think about it, regular Mardi Gras basically works the same way. The floats and riders represent a certain wealth holding class. Although, we should note, there is wide variation there that has become elaborated over time. Once there were only krewes comprised of white elites. Now there is basically a krewe for every sub-strata, race, or gender of the upper middle class. So, you know, progress.  But, as always, the real event is in the party that chaotically evolves from public participation all around it.  The parade of blue bloods (or moderately well off so and sos) is just a reason to be there. It's the people dancing and shouting and drinking and just standing around talking to their neighbors that we're all there to see.  Obviously we can't have that this year. Not the way we are used to, anyway. Look what happened last time. 

We did walk out to see the Phorty Phunny Phellows on Twelfth Night thinking it would be the closest anyone would come to seeing a real live Carnival thing happen this year.  A larger (but still sparse and well distanced) crowd than usual showed out probably thinking the same thing.  It was a weird vibe. Uneasy, uncomfortable and concerned that maybe this anti-climactic non-event we usually take in as an ironic amusement would be the most celebrating we would do all season.

We have to have something, though. Our spiritual health demands that. And house floats are as good a place as any to start. Maybe there are other kinds of public art and just ways of hanging out that can embellish that central event.  Back in the normal universe from which we are currently estranged, Krewe Du Vieux would have been parading this weekend.   Instead they are offering a "virutal parade" on their website as well as a series of house float style art installations in various locations across the city.  See their website for a map.  Hopefully we'll see more events like this. Sooner or later we're going to learn that lots of things besides houses can probably be floats.

The good news, in the meantime, is that it's proving to be a way to keep artists working this year who otherwise wouldn't be.  

Devin DeWolf then took the concept a step further and focused specifically on job creation with his website HireAMardiGrasArtist.com. “Caroline Thomas knew that I had organized Feed the Frontline NOLA, which brought 90,000 restaurant meals and 10,000 coffees to local health workers as a moral boost. We hired unemployed local musicians as delivery people,” said DeWolf, who is also the organizer and founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, and the charity project Feed the Second Line.  

“Red Beans has a lot of members who care about the community and are very grass roots, so when Caroline Thomas had the idea to crowdfund Mardi Gras worker jobs back, she turned to us,” said DeWolf. HireAMardiGrasArtist.com collects donations of all sizes. “And every time we raise $15,000, we raffle off a house float to someone who donated. We also take commissions from people and businesses who want to hire artists to create $15,000 projects. We’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars in just a month, and are currently employing 45 full-time artists at a minimum of $30-per-hour. We’ve completed 22 float houses since December 5^th when we announced the idea.”

What this proof of concept suggests, though, is that we could go bigger. Imagine a COVID stimulus bill that includes a WPA style program for hiring artists and other participants in the so-called cultural economy to keep this sort of work going.  Not year-round house floats, per se.  Carnival does come to an end, after all. But surely there are other creative ways to employ creative people who haven't been able to do their ordinary work during the pandemic.  There are unique talents and resources in New Orleans. We should learn from this unusual Carnival season that they are talents worth investing in.

Mardi Gras Guide Vol 1: State of Unreadiness

Temporary netting protects freshly painted trees along the recently landscaped Napoleon Avenue neutral ground ahead of this weekend's parades

I'm not ready. I mean, I am basically prepared in that I've been going through usual motions of getting things in order around here. I've done some mild house cleaning. Sunday we did what we figure will be the last big laundry load until Ash Wednesday. We've taken household inventory and made trips to Wal-Mart and Rouses to stock up on the basics. We've made sure there are enough paper plates, towels and cleaning supplies. Then there are the staple coping drugs like coffee, aspirin, and pepto... fresh eggs to scramble on particularly hung over mornings. I think we've got what we need there. That much of the punch list is complete today but I'm still not ready.

Carnival is moving into high gear this weekend but many of us are having a hard time catching the spirit. Tripping the light fantastic and such is no easy trick when there is so much dark energy out there to contend with. The city is in a rotten mood.  There are several reasons for this.  Anxiety bleeds into our day to day from the Presidential election, of course, but that's likely the case everywhere that Tuesday is just Tuesday.  It doesn't help matters here but it's nothing we couldn't handle on its own.  If all politics really is local, anyway, then you should be able to say the same thing for angst. So what is it that's clouding the mood?  Let's consider a few items.

On the first day of Carnival 2020, the Advocate ran this attention-getting feature on the growing anxiety of Lakeview residents over what they claim is a sharp rise in vehicle burglaries in recent years. The headlining number is a 57% increase in reported car break-ins from 2018 to 2019.  I think those statistics could use further scrutiny, though. I'm sure we've talked about this many times on this here Yellow Blog, but crime statistics are often as much a reflection of public perception and police recording techniques as they are an actual gauge on the rate of incidents.  Police simply deciding to focus on a particular type of crime can increase the number of recorded incidents. They may also take steps to promote public awareness of certain kinds of crimes thus encouraging people to report more frequently.  If the public, for whatever reason, be it police activity, or media emphasis, just gets the feeling that it's a little more crimey out there, it can generate a feedback loop. Heightened fear of crime leads to more "awareness" leads to more police reports, leads to higher stats, leads to heightened fear of crime.  Here is a very good recent Citations Needed podcast describing the ways new technological trends in surveillance like Amazon's Ring doorbell camera and so-called "snitch" apps like Nextdoor work to supercharge the feedback loop even further.

All of these may be factors in the recent Lakeview hysteria. That came to a head just a few days after the Advocate feature on the "jump in break-ins" ran when NOPD responded to a report of teenagers pulling on car door handles by sending out a SWAT team in full tactical gear. In the resulting confrontation one cop even ended up firing his gun at the unarmed teens. The incident then led to a further crackdown at Juvenile Court where a new policy holds children arrested more than once in jail until they see a judge. The judges announced the policy change with a chilling statement saying their aim is to "rid the community of youth who pose a danger.” The Advocate's newest worst columnist, Will Sutton, capped the week off by publicly thanking the trigger happy police and the paranoid residents who called them.

Since then, matters have only gotten worse. Councilmembers have pledged to apply more "data-driven" policing. The DA is charging one of the teens as an adult. Lakeview residents gathered to yell at everyone and demand even more police and more aggressive tactics. The politics of this is only likely to get worse. I'm half-expecting a future mayoral candidate to promise a border wall at City Park Avenue. Meanwhile, researchers tell us, in order to effectively reduce violence, we would be better served to spend our time addressing our city's intolerable inequalities. But just seeing that situation described reminds us of yet another source of the general anxiety.

Sonita Singh, an associate professor of behavioral and community health at LSU School of Public Health, described New Orleans as “a landscape of inequalities,” which stem from historical and institutional practices and policies that have segregated the city by race and economics. The geography of those inequalities mirror maps showing the concentration of murders.

Transportation, education and access to jobs and training are less accessible in neighborhoods that see the most violent crime, Singh said. Employed people surviving on an inadequate wage, what Singh called “hamster wheeling,” is also common in places like the 9th Ward, 7th Ward and parts of New Orleans East.

New Orleans’ citywide average household income was $67,224 as of 2017, according to The Data Center, a local research nonprofit. In Little Woods, a neighborhood in New Orleans East that saw a large share of murders last year, the average household income was about $40,800. Nearby Plum Orchard’s average household income was $32,900. In the 7th Ward, a neighborhood that perhaps had highest concentration of murders in 2019, the average household income was $33,205.

“In New Orleans, people can work themselves to the bone and still not be outside the poverty rate,” Singh said.

Like I said, the city is in a rotten mood.  It has good reason to be. 

That extends to the city's firefighters who enter this parade season in a fight with the mayor over a whole host of labor issues but mostly centered on the hardships imposed on them by understaffing and forced overtime. The city has pushed back by cancelling vacation time and, this week, pulling fire trucks from this season's Carnival parades which seems unsafe. Also it seems self-defeating since it comes just a few days after Mayor Cantrell promised that the dispute would have no effect on Mardi Gras at all.  Earlier in the week, the mayor's communications staff released a video of her saying that Mardi Gras would be covered and the cancelled vacations and overtime would amount to a "win win" for the city. Is this what she meant? Also how does she figure?

Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps just for the sake of growing the police state in general, the feds have designated this year's Carnival a "Level 2 Special Event."  According to this DHS document that means we can expect "some level federal interagency support," on the streets during the season. This is different from a Level 1 Special Event where we would be getting "extensive" federal interagency support. What does that means in practice?   Heck if I know. Just be careful who you sell your huckabucks to if you have an unlicensed cart this year. You never know who is watching.


The "Trashformers" collecting recyclable items from parade goers during Krewe Delusion 

For that matter, you might also want to watch where you put your plastic bags out there.

The “prohibited throws” section was updated to prohibit parade riders from thowing: “single use plastic bags meant for throw packaging or paper streamers, or paper products that do not biodegrade when wet, or empty single-use plastic bags. Any package containing bulk throws, including but not limited to doubloons, beads, cups, trinkets, or toys shall be handed to parade attendees and shall not be thrown or tossed. Bulk throws shall be removed from any plastic packaging before being thrown or tossed.” This was proposed to help battle litter along the route, as well as alleviate the possibility of parade participants slipping on the plastic.

This is... kind of stupid.  If we want to be charitable, we can say that it comes from good intentions. It's probably a good thing on balance that people have become more conscientious about the environmental impact of "single use plastic" and the like. And it's only natural that they might examine their own perceived influence on its proliferation.  In truth, though, this is not a problem that can be fixed by subjecting individual consumption habits to strict law enforcement. If the city was really interested in limiting single use plastics, they wouldn't be handing out half a million dollars in tax exemptions to a plastic bag factory. But why worry about that when you can just performatively punish individuals behaviors?  It might not solve anything but it gets you far more "credit" from a PR perspective. And that's what this is all about anyway. That and just general antipathy.  At her pre-Mardi Gras press conference the mayor said the plastic bag policy was about "showing love," which is what she always says when she is ready to hit someone with a hammer.

On the bright side, the new ordinances appear to be more serious than ever about discouraging people from crowding the neutral ground with ladders and tents and couches and such. We'll report back later on how that goes over the first weekend's parades.  I know this website has been home to the annual ladder harangue for well over a decade now. But I've also long contended that there would be far less call for official hardassery if the city would allow the parades to spread back out across the various neighborhoods and take some of the pressure off of Uptown. Which is why we were pleased last weekend to see that the new Krewe of Nefertiti parade was such a success.

West, who graduated from nearby Abramson High School, said the parade was a sort of reunion.

“This is wonderful,” he said. “We’re seeing everybody we grew up with ... and their kids. We’re still here.”

Referring to the displacement of much of the East's population after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he said, “You think everybody moved to Houston, but they’re here.

People in East New Orleans went outside and talked to their neighbors out in the street. That's what this is supposed to be all about. Good for them.  Let's keep that going.

I still don't feel like I'm ready.  We tried to get into the spirit early this year by making the trek across to town to see Chewbacchus for the first time in almost a decade.



Mainly the reason we did this was because, for the first time in a while, we could. A shuffle in the schedule moved Chewbacchus two weeks ahead in the calendar so that it no longer runs opposite any Uptown parades. The last one of these we saw was way back in 2012 when it was still an Uptown parade itself. After it moved across town we didn't see the point.  Anyway, during its time as a Bywater event, Chewbacchus has grown immensely in popularity but also in controversy. Often it has been seen as a symbol of the rapid gentrification and bland commercialized hip aesthetic associated with that neighborhood in the 2010s. (Please see Jules Bentley's "Farewell to the Flesh: Notes on a Cybernetic Carnival" for the definitive explication of this take.) I have to say, though, upon examining this phenomenon in person, it is nothing quite as interesting as that. For the most part it was just fans of various "nerd culture" type intellectual properties out doing cosplay with their children.



I suppose some people really enjoy that. And I guess I can see why some people never will. But the experience is nowhere near as impressive as its gushing fans would have you believe nor as sinister as its detractors would argue. It's really just a little nerd parade. Fine, if you like that sort of thing.  But I had gone to Chewbacchus hoping to see something really cool or something that might make me really mad. Instead I came away not feeling much of anything.  Maybe I just wasn't ready.

Meanwhile literally looming over everything is the sarcophagus of a collapsed Hard Rock hotel building that sits right in the middle of downtown. Originally the project's owners were hoping to have the hotel completed and open in time for Mardi Gras. Now the plan is to implode the structure sometime before Jazzfest. More than anything else, the air of hostility and mistrust between the city, the mayor, and the contractors responsible for the disaster is the main factor the city's rotten mood this Carnival season. Its physical presence can't be ignored as several parades have had to bend their routes in order to avoid it. It has a spiritual gravity as well so strong that it resists even the carnivalesque parody and gallows humor that might otherwise seem a perfect fit for the situation. It's a rare occasion where our own sarcasm seems to have failed us.

Krewe du Vieux gave that their best shot last week when the sub-krewe Comatose put together this impressive-looking "Soft Rock" hotel float.



From all appearances, their hearts were in the right place. But also it is hard not to cringe at this, "Rest In Peace, Amigo" message on the back. Racial problematics aside, just the tone of the thing is off.  If you are going to satirize something as serious as this, you have to lean in harder than this.  There is a way to be funny but it also has to be a little bit angry. A joke about a tragedy needs to achieve catharsis or else it will fail horribly.  This reads more as, "Sorry you died, LOL" and it just feels uncomfortable.



There was a rumor circulating last weekend that mayor tried to have the float removed or at least mellowed in some way. The city ended up forcing KDV to move its ball out of Studio Be at the last minute due to potential safety violations.  This has some people whispering that the mayor was retaliating.  It's hard to know what to believe about that. KDV members often paint themselves as politically motivated victims with little or no evidence. On the other hand, this mayor does have a habit of taking every single thing that happens as a personal affront of some kind so anything is possible. MacCash tells us here that the more mundane explanation is far more likely.  That sounds right to me but who knows.  Anyway the problem with this float is that it is already too mellow which is what makes it seem more insensitive than its intention.

Krewe Delusion was a little better with this "Hard Rock The Boat" theme.



It invokes the idea of righteous anger and there's a little pun in there. It's not overwhelmingly clever, though.  And it still doesn't feel like we're saying what needs to be said. Not that I know what that is, exactly.  But I do hope I will know it when I see it this year.  I hope I'm ready to know.

Carnival comes at you fast

There's a lot to catch up on and I am currently not alive so here is the podcast from this weekend. This all feels so long ago but it was only recorded this past Thursday. Mostly it's about Alli being in Krewe du Vieux which we thought was pretty nice.



There's a part where we chase after her float and try to read a toast. It goes sort of okay. Here is a video of that.

"The forecast could change in the coming days"

Weather people. What do they even know?

Carnival season kicks into high gear this weekend, with more than two dozen parades set to roll in the New Orleans area. So the big question is: will the weather cooperate?

According to the National Weather Service, the first half of the week should stay dry in New Orleans, but a cold front moving into the area on Thursday could bring rain back into the forecast for the weekend. On Friday, showers are more likely early in the day, with a break in rain chances possible late Friday and Saturday, the National Weather Service said. However, moisture is expected to return again on Saturday night into Sunday. On Monday morning, the Weather Service said that Sunday will bring the biggest chance of rain, with showers likely during the day.

Highs on each day will range in the upper 50s to low 60s, the Weather Service said.

The forecast could change in the coming days.

The forecast can certainly change.  We learned this Saturday night when, through what we can only assume was spiritual intervention, a day of thunderstorms and "flash flood warnings" gave way to balmy temperatures and a light fog.  Suddenly, improbably, there it was; the ideal atmosphere for a parade in the Quarter.



We should have known it would happen this way.  There's no way the same universe that allowed Stefon Diggs to take a playoff win away from the Saints was also going to rain out Krewe Du Vieux during the Tricentennial Mardi Gras. This is merely an absurd existence we are living through, not a deliberately cruel one. It's important to remember that.



To help celebrate the city's 300th, KDV enlisted geographer, New Orleans know-it-all dude (and one time Rising Tide keynote speaker) Richard Campanella as its King.  Here he is trying to throw to the balconies.



For his latest NOLA.com column, Campanella published a "virtual tour" of the parade route. If you're reading this right now, you probably know KDV pretty well. But, for the sake of covering all of our bases, here is Campanella's introductory description from that article.

Krewe du Vieux, which rolls Saturday, Jan. 27, at 6:30 p.m., is best known for its ribald satire of public figures and current events. But in its structural form and route geography (small mule-drawn floats on old, narrow streets packed with revelers), the parade is something of a throwback to 19th-century Carnival.

The KDV format and ethos is among the purest exemplars of the creative disorder and subversion of social and political norms that is central to the spirit of Carnival. Predictably, this spirit is always in tension with the established social and political hierarchy which seeks to assert itself in various ways during the season as well.  Sometimes this tension contributes to the pageant. For example, this is the time when local blue bloods present their debutantes to society. To do this, they style themselves as royalty presiding over elaborate balls where the city's elite are expected to literally line up and bow to them to the undying amusement of everyone.

There are also ways in which the exertion of elite privilege detracts from the celebration.  Think about the discrepancy in parade fees charged to neighborhood level parading groups vs. what the larger, wealthier krewes are expected to pay. Or the present effort to limit the number of individual bands and marching groups who appear in parades. Here, by the way, is a photo of the balcony Campanella was throwing to in the previous one.  It's a little blurry but the sign says, "Marching Clubs Matter."



And these are only a few of the  thousand ways the more organic aspects of Carnival tend to be repressed by the city's bias toward the tourism industry and the security state.

For Carnival season, city cameras are also being installed along the Uptown, Mid-City and West Bank parade routes, Miller said. Those cameras may be moved later to other locations, he said.

In total, there will be about 70 cameras watching the 8th District, which includes the French Quarter and Central Business District, and about a dozen locations with cameras along the parade routes, Miller said.

The flashing lights on the new cameras are intended to make sure the devices are visible to residents who have requested cameras in their neighborhoods and also to discourage crime in those areas, Miller said.

The lights haven’t gone smoothly at all locations.

I think the lights are actually flashing, "Be safe," in Morse code. But I will have to remember to check that later. In the meantime, someone needs to help me FOIA the tapes so we can finally make that #KreweOfChad nature documentary.  Mayor-Elect Cantrell says the cameras are, "better than I ever imagined" so I assume the picture quality is very good.

Speaking of LaToya, here's another terrific case of elite pressure working against the subversive Carnival instinct. It looks like incoming mayor's relationship with the business class folks who run the Krewe of Muses is crimping that parade's traditional aspiration toward satire.

The all-female Krewe of Muses is one of the Carnival organizations that use their parades to satirize and poke fun at politicians and other celebrities.

It appears, however, that the city's first woman mayor is getting a pass this year.

The group announced Friday that Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell will in fact be the krewe's Honorary Muse for the 2018 parade. She will lead the procession on Feb. 8, riding in the "shoe float," a 17-foot-tall, fiber-optic-encrusted red pump.

This is dereliction of duty. At least come up with a way to make it fun for people. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am definitely now on a quest to catch a shoe from LaToya this year. But what if they came up with a way to make it more interesting.

For example, check out this float the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office rolled in the Krewe of Poseidon over the weekend. It is designed to collect beads from the crowd for the purpose of turning them over to a local charity for recycling.  You can "donate" your beads to the cause by throwing them at targets on the side of the truck. But, as an extra incentive for the crowd, a gigantic likeness of Sheriff Randy Smith is riding on the front of the float for people to throw at as well much the way attendees at Bacchus enjoy throwing back at King Kong. (By the way, Bacchus is upping their ape game this year, it seems.)

But since the Muses have an actual live LaToya Cantrell available, it seems like they've missed an opportunity to do some fundraising themselves.  How much trouble would it have been to put LaToya on the Bathing Muses float rigged up as a dunking booth?  Not a single strand of beads would have found its way into a storm drain that night.  Oh well. Nothing is guaranteed to go perfectly. Not even the weather. 

Security State Gras

It's parade season! Who is ready to go out walking in the streets after dark?

Well, here's something from a New York Times reporter that the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau won't be touting (for a change):

"Be safe" seems to be the No. 1 way to say goodbye in #Nola. People really take care of each other here. Also, have learned no one walks on the street after dark.

— Jada Yuan (@jadabird) January 24, 2018

That's the Twitter account of Jada Yuan, The New York Times' "52 Places to Go" reporter, who will be traveling the globe over the next year, reporting from the Times' much-touted list of travel destinations — of which New Orleans was No. 1, baby. (Based on Yuan's observation, it's more like No. 1 with a bullet.)

Yuan's tweet happened over 24 hours ago so it's already been through the full cycle of NOLA outrage by now.  A bunch of people got mad. And then a bunch of other people got mad that those people got mad.  And then the two or three possible jokes that could be made out of it got blurted simultaneously by 10,000 internet users.  Finally, everybody stroked their chins and sighed before retreating to their corners.  Because one of the obvious jokes is directly applicable to evening Carnival events, there's a second wave coming once the parades start, so be ready for that. In the meantime, just try and "be safe."

Gambit's take in that article supposes the comment might have made tourism officials nervous. But I have to wonder about that.  After all, we've already seen the city is pushing harder than ever this year to get people off the streets as early as possible.  One wonders if they really want you out there at all. 

Krewes are being asked to limit the number of walking groups that lead off their parades or are interspersed between floats. Officials are asking that parades start with no more than a dozen groups — marching bands, dance troupes and unique organizations like the Rolling Elvi — before the first float, with one group following each float after that.

Not to re-hash an earlier complaint, but the marching clubs and bands aren't what's slowing the parades down.  Most delays have to do with broken down floats.  And when multiple parades have to follow one another along a single route, a break down in one parade puts everybody behind schedule.  But the city's action doesn't address any of that.  Instead they're going after these smaller groups who, with their low-barrier for entry and penchant for creativity are among the best vectors for lower and middle class local residents to participate in what is ostensibly still their city's celebration of itself.  Each year it seems like the elites in charge give less and less of a damn about any of that, though.



As I'm typing this, we're currently biting our nails over the forecast for Saturday's Krewe Du Vieux. It looks pretty bad.  I've seen some jokes that maybe the theme is tempting fate a bit.



But I'm also sitting here wondering how much trouble it would be to just move it back one day to Sunday night if they had to. Lots of parades have make-up dates. And KDV happens early enough in the calendar that it wouldn't conflict with anything the next day. It's possible that a postponement would be inconvenient for the membership. But it's also worth asking if the city isn't interested in accommodating what is essentially a big marching club. If they're choosing not to help, why is that?

Anyway, the odds are we're all gonna get a little soggy on Saturday night.  That's a bummer. But it's only the beginning and there's plenty more to come. Let's try and keep the big fat security state (Security State Gras) from harshing our buzz too much.  Here are a few items to get us in the swing of things.

It's an early Mardi Gras this year. There won't be another one this early until 2024.   That means there will be some chilly nights. But it also tends to make for lighter and less "Spring Breaky" crowds. Some people prefer that. Some don't. I've never had a preference for either an early or late season. But I would very much prefer that Carnival remain a "moveable feast." There is some speculation that it may not. There's an element of mystery that comes with a holiday pegged to the lunar cycle. It would be a shame to lose that.

Because Mardi Gras is so early this year, everybody is rushing to get their king cakes in now. You'd think the short season would make for fewer and less baroque elaborations on the king cake theme but The Advocate is on a mission to prove you wrong. Ian McNulty has already sampled a doberge king cake, a crawfish king cake, even a beer king cake among several other exotic examples. Meanwhile, NOLA.com alerts us to a style of king cake ice cream we were not previously aware of.

Also, last week we ran across this item.

Traditional Rock-n-Sake Sushi King Cake comes standard filled with snow crab and cream cheese pressed with sushi rice as the "dough" with assorted toppings of avocado, tuna, spicy tuna, fresh salmon, yellowtail, lemon zest, yuzu tobiko, wasabi tobiko, rainbow sprouts, crunchy tempura flakes, jalapenos, green onions, thin slices of lime, smelt roe, dots of sriracha, eel sauce, spicy mayo, chili-sesame oil, ponzu, and voodoo sauces.

"Sushi King Cake" is a pretty good hook. But, really, it's just a big roll shaped into an oval.  It sounds perfectly edible. Speaking of which, I find I am 2 for 2 in getting stuck with the baby this year the latest incident coming about just this Thursday.



Maybe the short season really is a good thing.

Finally, no king cake discussion would be complete without our annual look at the market for king cake flavored vodka.  It appears to be crashing badly this season.  Where once there were three brands available at most outlets, there is now only the bottom shelf Taaka in stock at Rouses. And they are having trouble giving even that away.  The price opened at $7.39 on January 11.



And is now all the way down to $6.99 as of January 23.



There is a King Cake Festival now, as well. (Of course there is.) It is this Sunday in Champions Square.

Also coming back, the Jefferson Parish "Family Gras" (literally Fat Family) for those parents who still believe, even in 2018, that the city is some sort of hellish no-go zone for children.  Don't get me wrong. As always, I encourage everyone to do their part to spread the festivities out across as wide a geographical range as possible.  It's just JP's marketing implication that theirs is the only "family friendly" setting that gets annoying.  But, hey, they do have Oates. Nobody can deny that.

Expect plenty of S&WB jokes at Carnival this year.  It looks like S&WB themselves may have beaten us to the first one, actually.

Aside from leaves, mud and sundry sludge, there's one festive item that cleaning crews sucking out thousands of storm drains in New Orleans have found in droves recently.

Mardi Gras beads. Tons of them.

Specifically: 93,000 pounds on a five-block stretch of St. Charles Avenue downtown.

Is that a lot? It sounds like a lot.  The five-block stretch referenced here is between Lee Circle and Poydras Street which isn't too surprising. It's the point in the route where float riders are prone to suddenly realize they have bought too many beads and begin to furiously dump them overboard in a panic. It's also where spectators are the most confined into the high rise scaffolding seen here which results in a fair amount of unrecoverable spillage into the street.



Here is some new instructional artwork I noticed on Napoleon Avenue this week. Maybe the alligator will help people be more conscientious in the future.



Meanwhile, it's time to get out and practice walking in the streets so we know what to do after it gets dark.  Here we see the KDV sub-Krewe of Underwear doing just that last weekend in the Marigny.



Needs work, maybe.

And here is the Singleton Charter School Marching Band stomping around the neighborhood Wednesday afternoon.



Looking a bit better. Be safe.

Take it as it comes

Okay let's just go ahead and talk about this right off the bat.  There is palpable tension in the air as we head into the peak of this parade season. It really can't be avoided. Look around. The fate of the nation rests in the fragile, tiny hands of an unstable lunatic.  The state is broke. Those of us living in the city are more anxious than ever that we may be priced out and our homes turned into time shares. The mayor is proposing to close our bars at 3. He's already turned all of downtown into a great big Nike ad.  There is crime. There is homelessness. There are tornadoes. There is Sting.   Troubled times make for troubled carnivals.

In a way, we can say this means things are pretty much as we would expect them to be.  I would argue, in fact, that Carnival is the most essential of our civic endeavors specifically because it is not a respite from, but a reflection of the state of the community.  It is a grotesque pageant that magnifies our joys and our anxieties all at once.  It does not offer escape. It does offer catharsis.  It's important, then, that we get this one right.  There may be years when it's fine to just have an OK Mardi Gras. This year, we're gonna have to do better than that. This might be easier to say than it is to do, if it is even something we have any control over in the first place. Anyway it feels like there's a lot riding on it this time.

It certainly felt like that on KDV night. Mostly, I think we handled it well.



Behind the sea of upraised phones, you can see KDV's title float. Thanks, in part, to the Year Without A Winter we've been having, the crowd was quite bigly. That's great for losing yourself in the atmosphere. Kind of shitty for getting good photographs, though.  I only got a few that are even marginally worth sharing.

I believe this"Audubondage Zoo" float is from Spermes




Mishigas' "AlienNation" presented us with Trump as Jabba the Hut.



One of my favorites was Mama Roux's French Revolution inspired theme. You can see up top the title was "Rouxling Crass"



A lot of the sub-krewes fixated on national politics. It's difficult to argue that they shouldn't do that, especially this year. I'll confess, though, that I had a similar reaction to Kevin Allman's take published here in Gambit the next day. Kevin notes that the Trump stuff took maybe a little too much attention away from the always plentiful and ripe assortment of local targets. Not that those were absent entirely. It's just that, in the words of Arthur Hardy,  Mardi Gras is "a party the city throws for itself." One of the joys of seeing Krewe Du Vieux in the tourist-heavy French Quarter is knowing the majority of the gags are there for the benefit of the locals.

Again, this doesn't mean there wasn't plenty of local satire to be found. Almost every sub-krewe took its shots. Allman says this as well, by the way. It's a positive review.  Most notable in this category was SPANK's send-up of Jazzfest. 

This year SPANK took on a sacred cow — the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — and reinterpreted it as "The N'awlins Cash & Selling Out Our Heritage Festival," complete with koozie throws, buttons, "Ass Passes" (a parody of Jazz Fest's "Brass Passes") and a schedule of "cubes" that included "The Jindal Shell Game Experience," "The Quint Davis Ego Explosion" and "Mike Yenni and the New Orleans Boys Choir." It was a welcome shot of sharp satire that transcended the feel-good jokes about Trump's tiny hands or copulating animals.

SPANK always has the best throws.



You can't make out all of the acts listed on the "cubes" in my photo. If you click over to the Gambit article there is a better image. I wish they had fit Sean Payton and his bongos into the Jimmy Buffet column somehow.  Also I like that all of the local acts are on the Lagniappe Stage and only play for 15 minutes.

Another thing to note about all the Trump takes is that they also give us a look at that fragmentation of the left phenomenon we talked about the other day. Are we protesting Trump for substantive reasons or superficial? Are we commenting because he is a threat to free speech, immigrant rights, labor standards, environmental protections, women's rights, etc.? Or do we just think he is gross?  Or worse, do we waste our time blaming Wikileaks and/or "both sides" like this Krewe of Underwear float kinda does?



KDV's membership and audience is pretty solidly center-left. Yet even within that narrow spectrum, the shots that missed felt like they missed badly.  That was where we most acutely felt this year's tension.  It's going to get even sharper when the more right wing parades start to roll. Be ready for it.

Oh also Krewe Delusion! I don't think I've caught them in a few years.  The good thing about sticking around for Krewe Delusion is the crowd thins out a bit and you can get some better photos.





I thought their decision to not have a monarch this year was pretty clever.



Also they were led by the Joseph S. Clark School Marching Band. You don't usually see that in the French Quarter parades.



I can't really say I remember too very much more about it, though, because, well.. I was pretty far gone by then.  We did make it back to the Deurty Boys gallery afterward for very blurry post-parade activities.



I'm a little embarrassed at the intensity of the hangover I woke up with on Sunday.  Clearly I don't have my sea legs yet. But there's plenty of time to train up.  In any case, I'm not gonna feel bad about it now.  By the way, I think that's how we're going to persevere through all the tension and anxiety this year.  No, not by drinking more. Instead, our strategy for handling this Mardi Gras is just to take it as it comes. Don't try too hard. Don't over-plan. Expecting too much is the surest way to disappoint yourself. Just be in the moment, let it come to you, and it probably will.

Be mindful of the stressors, though. There are plenty out there. Most prominent among those at the moment is the ceaseless encroach of the dreaded Krewe of Chad. Gambit's dedicated reporting on the situation at the Orleans Avenue neutral ground got off to its earliest start ever this year. And the situation there continues to deteriorate. The ladders pictured at the top of this post are from St. Charles Avenue. I took that photo on Tuesday. The first parades, Oshun and Cleopatra, are Friday night.

These sights have already drawn a few strong words from the mayor.

"We are going out there and asking people to move their ladders,” Landrieu said. “If the ladders are tied together causing a hazard, we are going to move the ladders. They are not going to have their ladders or their spot. That's a lot of punishment for Mardi Gras."

Although, having been through this drill a few times, we're pretty sure that's the only official reaction we'll see. The city's official notice about parade laws and norms also mentioned ladders and tents as usual. Mostly, though, they are focused on parking violations. That's where the real money is made.

Before, during and after the parades, the City will extend enforcement efforts into the neighborhoods adjacent to the published parade routes. This will minimize non-residential intrusion. Parking officers will primarily enforce the following safety violations:

• Blocking a fire hydrant ($40 fine)
• Parking in a fire lane ($40 fine)
• Parking within 15 feet of a fire hydrant on either side ($40 fine)
• Parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk, intersection, or stop sign ($40 fine)
• Parking on a sidewalk ($40 fine)
• Parking on a traveled portion of the roadway ($40 fine)
• Parking within 3 feet of a driveway on either side ($40 fine)
• Parking on the neutral ground and subject to seizure ($75 fine)
• Parking adjacent to the neutral ground ($40 fine)
• Parking in freight/loading zone ($40 fine)
• Parking in a handicapped zone without proper permit displayed ($500 fine)
• Parking at an expired meter ($40 fine)
• Parking in a Residential Permit Parking zone without a permit displayed ($40 fine)
• Parking in the wrong direction (vehicles must park in the direction of travel on one way streets, and with the right wheel to the curb on two way streets) ($40 fine)
• Vehicles that have unpaid parking tickets will be booted and/or towed.

I have also heard they're going to be looking for parked cars with expired brake tags although that didn't make it into the memo.  Anyway, be careful out there.

Most of all try and stay cool and take it as it comes. If it starts to feel like "There Ain't No Place To Pee," know that relief is available. You just have to know where to look. Here is a map to all city provided facilities along the parade routes.  Keep calm. The club is open.



If you get to the route and some Chads are all up in your face, just have a little patience.  A parade crowd tends to mellow as the party goes on. Also it helps to know that full blown Chads are an extreme minority niche. Kind of like the Alt-Right.  It may not always seem like it, but in fact, the nice people greatly outnumber them.



Finally, be on the lookout for surprise and surrealism both small and large.  In the large category this week, we find this remarkable float from Carnival in Viarreggio.



I wonder if any of the folks there watched this go by and worried that the parade wasn't paying enough attention to local politics.  Probably.  But, of course, Carnival is a worldwide celebration and there is much to share.  The Italians can take our President (Please!) and we can borrow their artists from time to time as well. This is from John Pope's 2010 obituary of long time float builder Raul Bertuccelli.

His papier-mache creations adorned the flamboyant floats of the Rex, Bacchus, Endymion and Alla parades. He built the cornucopia for the Boeuf Gras float in the Rex parade, as well as figures for the Wonderwall and the daily Carnival parades during the 1984 world's fair. He also made the massive Mr. Bingle figure that hovered during the Christmas shopping season outside Maison Blanche's Canal Street store. (The store has closed; its building has been converted to the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans.)

Mr. Bertuccelli made some of his figures move. For the Rex parade, float designer Henri Schindler said, Mr. Bertuccelli's creations included a giant dragon, a lizard and a lion, all enormous and animated. Even their eyes moved.

Mr. Bertuccelli had grown up building such mobile figures in Viareggio, his hometown in the Italian region of Tuscany, where his father and uncle making floats for the annual Carnevale celebration.

Happy Mardi Gras. Here comes every last disgusting, beautiful bit of it.