Pictures! Mardi Gras!

Finally, my loyal readers, you get the chance to see Carnival in New Orleans from roughly where I was standing. If you need a primer on the general schedule for a parade, see the post below entitled Carnival Rolls On. I have just added several links throughout that post which will take you to pictures of the various things I describe.

A few words before I begin the slideshow. The parade season begins a mere trickle, but by Mardi Gras weekend, it has become a deluge. There are near-continuous parades from Wednesday through Tuesday, and the St. Charles streetcar ceases to run. Along the parade route, locals leave tents, chairs, ladders, tables, and grills set up on prime property. The ladders, few and far between at first, are a forest by Saturday. Trees along the routes catch their share of beads, and slowly accumulate a flamboyant, plastic imitation of Spanish moss, which can be quite beautiful. No work is done starting the Friday before Mardi Gras. People take to wearing their beads all day, even when not at a parade. Alcohol sales (I assume) spike 500%.

And the parades only get bigger. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday see the so-called Superkrewes, Endymion, Bacchus, and Orpheus. They have over thirty floats and over 1000 riders each. They are each preceded by a plethora of smaller (by a little) Krewes, each notable in its own right.

My girlfriend and I went to see Endymion on Canal Street Saturday night, and it was fairly unpleasant, probably because we hadn't been drinking. My guest was also shorter than many, which adds another unpleasant dimension to watching floats and getting beads. We left early. Sunday, we watched Bacchus on St. Charles, and that was infinitely more pleasant, because we had a front-row spot, in the few feet between the foremost line of ladders and the street. I took a few pictures here, but it was dark. Monday, we saw the arrival-by-steamboat of the King of the Krewe of Rex ("King of Mardi Gras"), which is a very formal event. Laura Bush arrived with him, though I don't know why, because she wasn't in costume. We skipped Orpheus.

Most of the pictures below are from Tuesday, literal Mardi Gras. The Krewe of Zulu rolls very early, followed/met by Rex. We caught up with most of Rex by walking down St. Charles, and most of the pictures below are of that parade. (After Rex, I decided that I strongly prefer the daytime parades, not just for the superior lighting, but for the character of the crowd.) I have never been in a place quite like New Orleans as it is on Fat Tuesday.

Commence slideshow! [Because of I don't know why, the pictures do not fully fit into the narrow column of the blog, so click on them to see their full width. They're better than they seem here.]


The Charles route before Bacchus and (note the toilet paper) after Tucks (a particularly irreverent Krewe).


Flambeaus traditionally lit the nighttime floats, but continue to march in groups of ten today before and behind the first ten or so floats of the big Krewes. The carriers have always been the homeless or otherwise economically depressed, and are "tipped" by the crowd as they pass. Coins are aimed at the metal backs of the flambeaus, and dollars are handed directly.


The classic Bacchagator float. The crowd aims to ring beads around the teeth. You will see several other floats that are strung with beads as well.


The "I Love Lucy" float in Bacchus. Note the crowd.


Mardi Gras day, during a lull in Rex (as we caught up with it).


The Rex theme was "Tales of Fire and Flame," and thus featured pyrological myths from around the world. Note the tree.


Riders on horseback threw doubloons.


The Sumerian god of fire.


I suppose they couldn't have the Christian Devil in the parade, but I don't think the Greek Hades had much to do with fire.


These are works of art.


The St. Charles family-friendly Mardi Gras. These children were filling their wagon with beads, a veritable treasure chest!


From a different vantage point, this time on Napoleon Avenue, before we caught up with the beginning of the parade.


The fiddler! I like this one.


My girlfriend. As you can see, we collected many beads on Tuesday alone, and got that sweet parasol.


Post-parade flora.


Most of what I accumulated.

Don't forget to check out the links I added to Carnival Rolls On!

Ancient Greek FYI

The best translation of Who Dat? in Greek that I can come up with is τις ἐκεῖνος;.

"Reggie, Reggie, Reggie..."

The first of many pieces of media I have to share from the last several days:
Click here to watch a brief movie I took of Reggie Bush, #25, arriving on his float (courtesy of the Krewe of Caesar). He's wearing sunglasses but you can't tell because it's too dark. (In fact, he very much resembles Caesar.)

In Lieux

Yes, I know how to spell it correctly too. Read about tonight's parade here. 800,000 they say? I counted more than that.

Carnival Rolls On

I have some catching-up to do! First, then, I'll tell you about the parades I saw on Saturday.

It turns out that I'm exploring the events of the Carnival season accidentally in a scientific way. First I saw the Krewe of Pontchartrain, which follows the Uptown parade route down St. Charles Avenue. This route begins very close to my house, and I am able, by going only a few blocks towards the river [Note: That is approximately equivalent to South, though cardinal directions are useless in the Crescent City, so people say "riverside" or "lakeside," "uptown" or "downtown."] to see the floats as they are loaded with riders and "throws," i.e. beads and other trinkets, and to hear the bands as they warm up.

Many have told me that throughout Mardi Gras one can experience a clean, family-friendly Carnival if one stays uptown of the French Quarter. This was verified when I, to observe the parade, I walked several blocks downtown along St. Charles. This street is a wide boulevard with a "neutral ground" between the lanes, along which the streetcar runs. (I have been told never to call the neutral ground a "median" as it would be known everywhere else.) Well-kept grass grows here, and it is wide enough for grills, tents, chairs, and crowds, with room to spare. (The streetcar, of course, does not run during Uptown parades.) Families from the immediate neighborhoods flock to both sides of the downtown lane of traffic and make themselves comfortable however they can. One device worthy of note is one that I need to find out more about: It is a ladder with a box on top, designed to hold up small children for a perfect view of the parade. I can't tell if these are bought prefabricated or not. The ladders look like standard issue, but there is a uniformity to the boxes, which all have two built-in wheels, I assume for ease in rolling to and from the parade.

The true harbinger of the parade--as opposed to the many falsely-prophesying cop cars that clear the road for an hour prior--is a cable company cherry-picker with a long rod raised above it, probably the height of the tallest float, followed by other cherry-pickers, no doubt ready to quickly clear any low-lying branches that would interfere with the parade. (This is, I think, the most grooming that is legally allowed to be performed on the St. Charles live oaks.) Then comes the parade-proper: Bands, dance groups, motorcyclists, mounties, and the floats of the host Krewe, laden with masked and costumed riders throwing beads, etc, to the yelling crowd. Everyone not on a float is usually with a different organization (a school, dance club, or much smaller parading organization like the motorcyclists) that has joined forces with the host Krewe. Many of these, I believe, march in multiple parades. Bringing up the rear of the parade is a firetruck, which occasionally blares its horn as if to say, Go home! That parade took nearly an hour to pass.

Later that night, I went down to the French Quarter to see two more parades coming from the Uptown route. Of all the parades during Carnival, only Krewe du Vieux (see two posts below) is small enough to be actually allowed to march in the Quarter--all the others do a loop around Canal St., which is its southeastern border. Their floats are much too big to fit through the narrow, old streets of the Quarter.

Standing on Canal at night was a very different experience from on the grass of sunny St. Charles. There is more litter, more alcohol, less comfort generally, but no less cheer. It was on the cold side Saturday night, which made everyone a little miserable, but they no doubt compensated with more booze. The first parade, the Krewe of Sparta, took an hour and a half to get down, which I'm told is considered late, but not considered unusual. It was followed by the Krewe of Pygmalion after a half-hour interval. I will put up the few pictures I took, so that you can get a sense of the crowds and the floats, and I won't bother to describe them in detail. In brief, they are pulled by tractors, they carry two to twenty riders apiece, and they all throw beads. The royal floats only carry two riders, whichever member of royalty (King, Queen, Prince, Princess all separately) and someone to untangle and hand them beads. The royalty are lucky members of the Krewe who are chosen somehow (sometimes it's secret) as royalty that year, and play their lofty role at the Krewe-exclusive bal masque which usually follows the parade.

So far, I have collected almost twenty strands of beads, and have seen, since the beginning of the season, five parades (one on Sunday).

[Yes, later on I will write about the Super Bowl and the victory parade, which starts in four hours.]

The Cameras of Others

I didn't bring my camera to the Krewe du Vieux parade last Saturday, but I dug up this Times-Picayune slideshow. It's just like my camera was there!