Category Archives: Travels
Mardi Gras Out of Context – 2.
26-Feb-09The Sunday Before Mardi Gras.
26-Feb-09Sunday morning saw me biking to a lovely house on Henry Clay Avenue in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. It was the house of the parents of a Princeton friend (the same from the previous night at the Columns). The Krewe of Thoth, scheduled to start sometime between 11 and 12, lined […]
The Krewe of Endymion.
26-Feb-09By Samedi Gras I was exhausted by new experiences, so I puttered around the house a bit, worked in the garden, and “made groceries.” In the supermarket I saw one of the downsides of Mardi Gras – people running around buying things, wanting to make sure they got to the parades on time or had […]
From Krewe D’Etat.
23-Feb-09The joys of living in New Orleans. If you have a mortgage, you need flood insurance – which in certain areas is like another mortgage. Plus high taxes. And no jobs either. And the famous water and sewer board, where nothing gets done. New Orleans water is famously filled with all of middle-America’s effluent. Certain […]
Letting the Days Go By.
23-Feb-09At the Krewe D’Etat parade I spoke with an English emigre who had come to Tulane as a graduate student and ended up moving to New Orleans. “I basically begged and pleaded and did anything I could to make sure I could stay here, and here I am. Twenty years later.” He was a “sculptor […]
The Mystic Krewe of Hermes.
23-Feb-09I was astonished on Friday night by the floats of the “Mystic Krewe of Hermes,” a krewe which prides itself on its traditional, secret, and indeed hermetic ways. The parade was dubbed “The Retinue of Dionysus,” but I expected mythology from the parade about as much as I would expect a presentation on the Homeric […]
Krewe D’Etat.
22-Feb-09On Friday Krewe D’Etat and Hermes rolled uptown. I met friends at Napoleon and St. Charles in the evening, where a huge crowd was gathered. Krewe D’Etat was another satiric parade, aiming not only at the New Orleans targets but commenting on broader social phenomena as well, from oil companies to Amy Winehouse. This made […]
New Orleans Levee.
21-Feb-09I’ve already mentioned the satirical paper The New Orleans Levee. But the more you contemplate these things, the funnier they appear to be. The paper, an Onion-style sendup of New Orleans, has the motto “We Don’t Hold Anything Back.” And the website is N.O. Levee, which comes out to www.nolevee.com.
Chaos and Muses.
20-Feb-09The Krewe of Chaos were supposed to roll after Muses last night, but somehow they got in front of Muses and when turning the corner of Magazine and St. Charles, one of their floats broke its “wagon tongue” – the hitch between the tractor and the float (the float is carried on a 130-year-old wagon […]
Mardi Gras Out of Context.
20-Feb-09The parades roll in earnest now – every day there is something worth seeing. But it’s good to take little snapshots out of context. Last night, I was eating french fries at a bar on Magazine Street. As my companion bit into a burger, I saw behind him through the window a giant bathtub, 50 […]