New Orleans Mardi Gras Moments

The glitter and glitz of Mardi Gras in New Orleans draw people in, year after year. Floats, throws, and music all make memories that last a lifetime. In this joyful volume of photographs and essays, renowned photographer Judi Bottoni and Mardi Gras expert Peggy Scott Laborde capture some of the best moments from today’s Mardi Gras celebrations. From the Twelfth Night Revelers heralding the start of Carnival season to Zulu and Rex bringing it to a triumphant close, Mardi Gras Moments highlights what makes the experience unforgettable. Relive scenes and music from famous parades and experience the signature floats that return year after year, including Endymion’s Pontchartrain Beach Float, Orpheus’s Smokey Mary, and Rex’s Boeuf Gras. Celebrities, including Will Ferrell, reign over super-krewes as kings. Women wear the crown in Iris, Nyx, and Muses—known for its coveted shoe throws. The Mardi Gras Indians and the Baby Dolls show off a proud history in costume and dance. The Rolling Elvi and ’tit Rǝx are just some of a wild profusion of show-stopping sub-krewes. The exuberance and thrill of Carnival are on full display in these stunning photographs.

The world has waited decades for a new anti-hero in American fiction, a character who prophesizes the pettiness of American social life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With Conrad Greyman, a social visionary arrives to illuminate the inequities and shallowness of our social lives now, as the Beats did for their generation.In a musty dorm room at an elite college in upstate New York sleeps Conrad Greyman. He sleeps all the time, in fact. Conrad is a casualty of postmodern malaise and bears hidden wounds he doesnt understand.Mardi Gras tells the fantastic story of Conrads spontaneous trip to the great Southern festival. He finds there, amid the infernal chaos of neon lights and Bourbon, a chance for unlikely redemption. Conrads journey through the mad streets of New Orleans becomes a modern hero-quest, and New Orleans an epic landscape. Conrads adventure is populated by holy fools who come to his aid, menacing frat boys, magical beads, and unadulterated American decadence. In the balance hangs the fate of an inward-looking soul trying to make his way through a fractured, carnivalistic world.

Following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, people began to discuss and visualize the ways in which the urban structure of the city could be reorganized. Rather than defining the disaster recovery process as simply a matter of rebuilding the existing city, these voices called for a more radical rethinking of the city’s physical, social and environmental systems. This idea of disaster as an opportunity for urban restructuring is a hallmark of a "design moment." Design moments are different from the incremental process of urban growth and development. Instead of gradual growth and change, design moments present the opportunity for a significant restructuring of urban form that can shape the city for decades to come. As such, a design moment presents a critical juncture in the historical growth and development of a city. In this book we explore the question: what does urban design have to do with a disaster like Hurricane Katrina? Focused on New Orleans, the authors explore different dimensions of the post-disaster design moment, including the politics of physical redevelopment, the city’s history and identity, justice and the image of the city, demolition and housing development, and the environmental aspects of the recovery process. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design.

Pen and ink artist Joseph Arrigo, a native New Orleanian, has sketched the city's most charming landmarks. Each of his illustrations is accompanied by a description explaining its significance. Wander through the French Quarter, past Jackson Square and Pirate's Alley, through downtown New Orleans, past the Louisiana Superdome, and back to the mighty Mississippi River, and New Orleans's famous riverboats. Linger outside of some of New Orlean's favorite eating and meeting places: Caf� du Monde, Antoine's, Brennan's, and the Napoleon House. The French Quarter and Other New Orleans Scenes is sure to delight anyone wishing to hold on to fond memories of "the city that care forgot."

One Moment One Memory One Motion is more than a book of poetry. It is a way of life. This book is about how one person made a difference in the life of a child-a child living in abuse, and how this enabled her to keep her soul spiritually safe, and to create a happy and successful life. It is a story of hope and transformation.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of New Orleans regroup and put down roots elsewhere, many wonder what will become of one of the nation's most complex creole cultures. New Orleans emerged like Atlantis from under the sea, as the city in which some of the most important American vernacular arts took shape. Creativity fostered jazz music, made of old parts and put together in utterly new ways; architecture that commingled Norman rooflines, West African floor plans, and native materials of mud and moss; food that simmered African ingredients in French sauces with Native American delicacies. There is no more powerful celebration of this happy gumbo of life in New Orleans than Mardi Gras. In Carnival, music is celebrated along the city's spiderweb grid of streets, as all classes and cultures gather for a festival that is organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacred and profane. The authors, distinguished writers who have long engaged with pluralized forms of American culture, begin and end in New Orleans—the city that was, the city that is, and the city that will be—but traverse geographically to Mardi Gras in the Louisiana Parishes, the Carnival in the West Indies and beyond, to Rio, Buenos Aires, even Philadelphia and Albany. Mardi Gras, they argue, must be understood in terms of the Black Atlantic complex, demonstrating how the music, dance, and festive displays of Carnival in the Greater Caribbean follow the same patterns of performance through conflict, resistance, as well as open celebration. After the deluge and the finger pointing, how will Carnival be changed? Will the groups decamp to other Gulf Coast or Deep South locations? Or will they use the occasion to return to and express a revival of community life in New Orleans? Two things are certain: Katrina is sure to be satirized as villainess, bimbo, or symbol of mythological flood, and political leaders at all levels will undoubtedly be taken to task. The authors argue that the return of Mardi Gras will be a powerful symbol of the region's return to vitality and its ability to express and celebrate itself.

From Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post: "Engaging…delightful … Wolf returns to the Big Easy after a protracted Yankee education at Exeter and Yale, joins his father's firm in the cotton trade, takes up lodgings on Burgundy Street at the edge of the French Quarter and hangs out at places the mere mention of which sends shivers of pleasure down my spine." Reminiscent of This Boy’s Life, Peter Wolf’s true saga of family burden and escaping the ties that bind takes us from the South to New England and to Paris and back. From growing up Jewish in a wealthy New Orleans family led a cold military father, to later life as a successful author and architect, Peter Wolf tells a story of love and sacrifice, of having to leave your roots to discover them. Set against the events of the Fifties to the present, My New Orleans is as rich in cultural history as it is in individuality.

The First Moment After Death is an exciting view of life, love, and the meaning of existence, through the eyes of a renowned East European poet. Now in English for the first time.