Reflections on the coldest New Orleans Mardi Gras since 1899

 

Check out this temp graph (you have to scroll down to the figure), remembering that Mardi Gras was Feb. 16!

This year, the Year of the COVID, featured many challenges and disasters.  Deaths and indignities and a New Orleans Mardi Gras that was the coldest on record since 1899, when it was ONE DEGREE colder.  What the fuck does this mean?  Well, in a time of intense challenges: the “uncovering” and widespread acknowledgment of systemic racism and persistent white supremacist attitudes, persistent beliefs and behaviors promoting climate change, widening polarity and animosity between political partisans, and a shocking display of willingness to subvert democracy on the part of millions and millions of Americans, it means that we need to chill and get clear about what “the next right thing” is.  Click on that link to find an episode of the podcast Invisibilia  that I found especially inspiring last year, which dropped in late March just as SARS-CoV-2 was beginning it’s conquest of America. In the podcast, a woman is working on Parkinson's Disease research as her research partner, her husband, dies from the disease.  How did they keep going up until his death? They shifted their focus from what seemed inevitable: struggle, pain, and death, to what they could do right now to "live the best life they could-talk, learn, contribute, love each other." The interviewer Alix Spiegel adopts this advice: 

It might make a difference. It might not make a difference. The answer to that is in the future, and the future is impossible to know. But lately, whenever I felt overwhelmed, distressed that a terrible end is looming, I pull out my new little mantra and worry it like a rosary. Focus on the next right thing, I say to myself. Focus on the next right thing. Focus on the right thing.

So I wanted to call attention to the weather event on Mardi Gras, and also it just felt like time to write. That just has to be seen, that temp graph, it’s so stark and cold and cruel and astonishing and maybe thinking about it is hopeful, like it was a sunny day, and this focus here in New Orleans on that day was  stunning.  On any other Mardi Gras, people are packed in tighter and in greater numbers than on any other day.  This year, we had public gathering areas fenced off, all bars closed, the signature “to go drink” was banned, and Bourbon Street was a no-go zone.  Plus, it was so cold that even if you wanted to flaunt the rules, you would freeze up half way to your violation. So that’s it.  Just spend some time thinking about that graph, that day, the people, the sun, where we are, and where we’re going. We’re all going there together, earthlings struggling to find ways to survive and perhaps to thrive.

With regard to writing and reading, here’s a sample of Sam Sodomsky’s Pitchfork review of The Weather Station’s album Ignorance, released in February 2021.  The band is lead by Tamara Lindeman:

"In a late-album highlight called “Heart,” she sings over an aerodynamic rhythm, her falsetto swooping between each substratum of percussion like a small bird navigating the floors of a mansion. It is a rare moment in her songbook where you can tune out the lyrics and just get lost in the music. In fact, Lindeman herself does precisely that in the final moments, humming a wordless refrain as her band glides along."

The reason I quote this is that I am gobsmacked by the simile of “small” birds “navigating”.  Wow. Where does that come from and how do writers find that stuff?  Is it great writing, or is it pretentious and preening, calling attention to itself rather than the artist being described?  I wonder. Blog author note: when I wrote the above I had not yet heard the album.  I just listened to it, and the writer is in my opinion describing powerful music, very much worthy of a listen. I don’t think I write enough to really be able to describe my “style”.  I plan to explore these questions as I continue to work with this process of writing.  This from singer songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter contains some of what I’m thinking about and working with: “I  have a different way of taking things in than I did 20 years ago and measuring myself against the world. Everything has sort of shifted,” she says. “I find that to be both terrifying and joyful at the same time. Terrifying because the unknown is the unknown and it’s easy to be fearful that way. But at the same time, if you remove the fear, there is euphoria to have new experiences.”

Thanks for continuing to be interested. 

On Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2021