Word: mardi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the New Orleans City Council chamber is packed with a standing room-only crowd of citizens who have taken an afternoon off to sit in on a four-hour session - in the middle of Mardi Gras season, no less - you know it's no ordinary meeting. And indeed, this week's hearing of the council's criminal justice committee was, as a Times-Picayune reporter aptly put it, more like a visit to the principal's office for the city's two leading crime fighters...
...beginning of 2007. It capped a year in which police tallied 161 murders, despite the fact that more than half the city's residents are still living in Hurricane Katrina-imposed exile. Many fear that the violence will discourage people from returning - and, as the city gears up for Mardi Gras Feb. 20, that it will further cripple tourism, the city's economic lifeblood...
Dancing! Feasting! Costuming! Masking! Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the bestselling Nickled and Dimed, turns her keen eye on the topic of group exuberance, in her forthcoming book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt; January 10). Ehrenreich argues that Mardi Gras-type behavior is vital to human behavior, and that Americans just don't do it enough, even on Christmas and New Year's. TIME's Andrea Sachs spoke (exuberantly) with Ehrenreich...
...colonized peoples from the Caribbean to West Africa. When the Industrial Revolution took hold, holidays were eliminated in favor of the new work ethic: people were increasingly expected to labor all day, six days a week, and spend the Sabbath in sedentary prayer. A few traditional- style festivities survived--Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnaval in Rio and carnival in Cologne. But by and large, sometime in the past 300 years, the music stopped...
...Those community groups that kept the flame alive, the social aid and pleasure clubs, the Mardi Gras Indian bands and brass bands that played at jazz funerals, have been scattered. Even before Katrina, New Orleans music was in danger as venerable nightspots in the French Quarter were replaced by tourist bars. Music was touted, "Disneyfied," Butler said, but not supported, and Katrina blew apart the social fabric that kept the traditions alive. Michael White, a clarinetist and musical historian at Xavier University, said it was shameful that so many valuable musical collections, like his own, were in private homes...