Mardi Gras 2022 at the MOUTH of the Mississippi (that’s New Orleans) was everything you might expect and more — debauchery, color, movement, jazz, and mayhem. Shrimp, alligator (?!), crawfish, King Cake, beignets, and beers. As one investor-cum-gardener put it: “a hedonistic expression of hedonism.”
No wonder. It’s the glut before the ghost. JC is in the WILDERNESS right now for 40 days (+7 Sundays) warding off every sort of temptation before Easter, and he’s only able to because he, well… (Carnival is from the Latin: carn ‘flesh’+ levare ‘put away’.)
We were kind of like there to soak it all in with intrepid correspondent (and BIRTHDAY boy) DEANO who can best be described as a kind of Tom Bombadil / Johnny Appleseed / Hunter S. Thompson hybrid. That’s right, ladies... and gentlemen…
CARNIVAL
When we arrived the Airbnb host made clear that the 100-year-old single-family detached home was not a frat house. Real serious fellow who wanted us to know he was also a cool cat back when he was young – who’d kicked Woody Harrelson out of a rental once (implication: he wasn’t afraid of us pipsqueaks). Airbnbs were controversial in the area, he explained, and they didn’t want neighbors complaining.
What did we look like, anyway? Troublemakers?
A series of texts in the thread from a Mardi morning:
10:07: Yoga soon?
21 minutes later: I’m down. Anyone interested in ubering to crawfish, Captain Seafood?
🔥🔥🔥
I wanna get one of those bands follows u around Bourbon st
1 hour later: I’m in park fyi
Wyd bro?
Walking back now let’s bounce in 10
14 minutes later: Still no action.
We pause between two lanes of traffic. 16 porta potties are lined up ready for action later. A cigarette, two beers, cop cars driving by, a green alien in a KIA Solenta, a woman in big boxy glasses wondering what we’re doing - very curious - sitting low in her seat slung back, cruising and moving. Orleanians are setting up barriers along a long stretch of the street. Right now, Ram trucks and a man in a tractor with a camo cap looking relatively pleased with the weather. A 2002 Toyota Solara and many Teslas, in fact.
We put on masks to enter, it’s like Halloween. It’s to allow what’s inside to come out, these events where it’s socially acceptable to do socially unacceptable things. What’s funny is that putting the mask on is like removing the mask. We’ve gotten to the point where we have to put something on to take something off. (Sonya and Nicholas Rostov cross-dressing.) We can denude ourselves by thought and action in any moment. Any moment can be the rest of your life.
Around then, watched a woman cradling a chihuahua in the crook of her arm slam some cheap vodka, slam a gatorade, then slam both bottles into her back pockets…andddd it’s back to the Muses which are on their way, Muses on horseback – Daenerys style. The Muses riding close on the heels of Chaos, as if descended from the same line (or at least launched from the same street corner).
“Yo, is that a post office?” “We passed a restaurant called Five Happiness.” “Do you think there’s a Waffle House down here?”
All in the midst of many old stately judge’s fraught mansions, a la Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil:
Contradictions contradictions contradictions… Mardi Gras is a weird place to be when war breaks out in Eastern Europe.
Brutality in many shapes and sizes. Explicit and unadulterated: Putin’s shells tearing into Chechnya, into Aleppo, into Mariupol. Disguised by slow release…the poor remaining poor in the world’s wealthiest nation.
Hard not to feel the pulse, some sort of humming radiation, something strange about this place. Kiev under attack, pictures of Russian soldiers dead, a dusting of snow on them from the night before.
Different energies emanating from different places on the same spherical mass of rock and magma and H2O. Because right next to the newspapers with the headlines about hell on earth, you see things like:
A skinny kid on a scooter with a fat boa yellow boa (a real live specimen) wrapped around his neck.
And guys driving down from Arkansas to party for a single night.
And five po boys, a James Brown, two jambalayas, a muffuletta, and some Crystal hot sauce.
Also a bunch of skunks drunk as Monks.
Overheard over po boys and the thrum of 11am conversations about 9pm plans:
“What do cajun people look like?”
“Are they Black or white?”
“Are they the same color as the sauce?”
“Who’s Jennifer Lopez?”
“You think it’s my fault that you don’t know where I am?!”
Also fire hydrant troubadours.
Sitting in a place where people don’t normally sit is so nice. Everyone’s operating in these different lanes, it’s so intensely channeled. Like a honeycomb, and you have lanes of movement like the inside of an anthill. And there’s all that space they haven’t bored tunnels through that would work just as well. We’re in the catacombs.
We’re looking for a beer and a bump. A beer and a bump on Mardi Gras eve. Another beer and a bump. Cigarettes and strong lungs.
At least Goodwill says it like it is, “Goodwill Industries.”
Unconstrained, intoxicating consumption spilling onto the street beside a man too proud or poor or reserved to ask for a blonde Oreo to get him through the night. Old friends in a new city. Crawfish from water and potatoes from black earth.
And the inescapable, absurd culture wars. Folks from, well, it’s hard to tell what church that is… Westboro Baptist-like folks, perhaps, standing in the breach, resolute in their convictions.
You can’t see it in the first picture - and can only get a sense of it in the second one just below - but over the course of the long Friday afternoon, as beers filled many bellies and the emboldened bacchanal-ers began buzzing with the wildness of the weekend to come, the crossroads where these men held their crosses began to fill with humans. First the curious, then the indignant, and finally the belligerent. Two men stood face to face, one screaming, one smiling smugly back. Where does it come from? The surety that right and wrong do exist? That loving someone can be a sin? How could it even POSS? [Were that the authors of this piece knew the answer.] Some deep ballast grounded the men of Christ. Boulders in a stream. Those they judged broke like water around them, carried down Bourbon by the crowd. Many not feeling judged. Others pierced by the unforgiving people representing their version of the light.
Overheard later: “The demons and the ghouls but also the angels and the cherubs. All of us ready to play but who the fuck knows where it’s headed.”
And: “What is your purpose son? You have none. Out - get out back through the way you came in - down the spiral staircase and out onto the vast, remorseless plain. A courtyard ringed by trees and buncha fellows gettin’ on their knees.”
And the Buddhistic conscientious objectors among us.
Well, what OF it?? What avails it all? / Nothing for naught and trite delicacies galore! / Listless mutterings in the night.
We asked passerby if they had any thoughts on Mardi Gras. “No, I have no thoughts,” one man said. A man with no thoughts – he’s reached aimlessness.
A New Orleans local drinking a Four Loko is celebrating his first Mardi Gras in 40 years because usually he works it as a security guard and has to “stay sober.”
Dusk begins to settle. Raucous activity, wild behavior. There’s joy with strangers. Disgust at strangers. Sunglasses at night in a jazz club with a band playing a mediocre middle-America muzac-inspired excuse for jazz. This deep south New Orleans shit can feel like minstrelsy, the masks, the lipstick, the white consumer – it’s like a show.
Ranging across the plains like wolves. Long strides loping through the city. Pausing here and there. Smoking on stoops. Observing. Using money to buy heaping piles and plates of food.
A man comatose on the ground, officers standing sentinel over him, a lone homo sapien fallen like a leaf from a tree.
There’s a difference between southern sprawl and northern compact industry. There’s something about the feel of everything. Maybe the infrastructure in DC is in its (n+2)th iteration instead of nth. The rise of the residential subdivision is fucked up. NOLA no bike lanes, almost preposterous to think they’d have ‘em, whereas DC they’re like I can’t believe on my neighborhood street there’s not a bike lane. Bragging about 30 - 40 new miles a year.
912 Solomon St. A green, interesting house. Purple and yellow and green New Orleans flags. The energy in my stomach is interesting. Liquidy and warm.
A million different pods moving around but they’re all kind of distinct. A bit apart, a bit detached. In the same vessel but a thin film of oil, a layer on top of everything. The crowd drawing us inexorably in one direction, where we are headed we do not know.
What we do know: the well-mounted police state studiously avoids 1st Amendment excesses.
It’s still somehow like 85% mainstream. And excessive – hot, sticky, beery, and beads everywhere.
Later, someone mentioned a documentary about how the beads are produced. One of those documentaries that exposes the mechanisms (or: intentional system design decisions) by which consumer goods are made (to be) cheap at the expense of the people that make them. Costs everywhere - who bears them? Who chooses what gets externalized? State reallocation of “emergent” wealth maximization schemes, isn’t that right? The history of billions of beads on the streets of Nola ain’t no different than the history of… what? [Answer that question yourself and let’s compare notes in our dreams or the comments, whichever comes first].
People are boozing heavy; it’s about 5 pm; there’s no way of really knowing though. It’s kinda hard to tell on Bourbon Street, kinda an endless line of bars. Look down the street and all the neon-lined signs look the same. Full of out-of-towners reveling in the streets that soak up their money.
Paraphrase of a New Orleans schoolgirl being interviewed in new Jouaquin Phoenix movie C’mon C’mon, directed by Mike Mills, in which a lonely radio journalist roams the US accompanied by his 10 year old nephew: New Orleans is a special place but it’s changing with all the people coming in and the Airbnbs.
Mike Mills agrees:
“Because New Orleans is so easy to get wrong as a tourist and as a white dude and blah, blah, blah—so fraught. I just want to cruise around with someone who will tell me what's up… It's just such a deep place. And its moons are very alive. It just seemed like such a great setting to have your deepest, most vulnerable, emotional awakening and connection.”
Meanwhile tugboats chug past blocks away on the Mississippi. The lifeblood of the middle of America was a cursory experience. #afterthought #perspective
Four of us meditating beneath a tree by the parade – hard to tell if it’s offensive. But it’s all projection. We’d like to think folks saw it and said You do you, not Look at those lame weirdos.
A hedonistic expression of hedonism. Yeah somehow the NOLA folks extracting from those who come to town to extract an experience. Mutual but not explicitly agreed upon extraction going on. Not a lot of genuine exchange. The floats themselves maybe the most culture. Good people put a lot of time into making them. Good creative energy there. Perhaps less in we the revelers, the onlookers, the quasi-engaging trespassers. We were far from the floats. But close to those around us. Love in the air mixed with sound waves that carry from afar (temporally, spatially, spiritually) faint whispers of a generous celebration and release from our masked, stiff, somnambulating selves. All streams flow into the great ocean.
Mutinous talk of abandoning McDonalds drive-thru lines. Don’t perpetuate systems of hate. And every soul is alone when the day sees the night.
The night feels very clear. Everything feels a little clearer. The brain fog has lifted a little.
Familiar streets, Bladensburg and Trinidad. A posse of midnight queens passes by. Green lights. But not those Fitzgerald greens. Deeper greens. And blues. Bluets.
‘Bout 4 am, silence descending — heaviness, gratitude, night night love you.
- DVD & D
... from CARnivAL StrEEts
Exc! “resolute in their convictions” 🙌🏼