Good evening, Kibitzers! Today is Mardi Gras! (This means that Easter will fall on April Fool’s Day, but that’s a story for another diary by, I assure you, another diarist.) I wrote about Mardi Gras in general here a few years ago, so tonight we’ll drill down a little and look at an event brought to our attention by our pal Crashing Vor.
I bet we’re all at least vaguely familiar with the New Orleans tradition of “krewes” that stage enormous and festive parades during the Carnival season. The most prominent of these is Rex, an organization founded in 1872, and the originators of a number of now-universal traditions like the use of purple, green, and gold as the colors of Mardi Gras.
In 2008, some folks got together to form the first “microkrewe”, and they called it ‘tit Rəx, pronounced “T Rex”. About that name:
The parade’s name is based on the Cajun diminutive, an abbreviation of petite, used as a prefix before the name of the smaller or younger of two people who share a first name. ‘tit Jean, Tee Jean, Ti Jean, or T-Jean – casual research revealed inconsistent spellings – would translate to “little John.” Thus, ‘tit Rex: Cajun wordplay on one of Carnival’s hoariest parades. The name also suggests an ironic comparison to the king of dinosaurs, the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex. Any connection to the glam-rock band T-Rex is purely coincidental.
Why the schwa in place of the e in Rex? That’s another good story. The tl;dr is: Rex (remember them?) really had no choice but to tell ‘tit Rex to Cease and Desist using “Rex” in their name — it made them look like jerks, but if they want to protect that name legally, they must protect it from everyone. The solution turned out to be for ‘tit Rǝx to turn their e upside down.
So ‘tit Rǝx continues its tradition of micro-parading, using floats based on a shoebox, which, becoming wheeled by various means, are pulled along the street with a string. Crashing Vor documents the 2011 parade with an original song:
I have to say, these floats as art are right up my alley. They’re like if you gave Joseph Cornell a tab of acid and a fistful of money, and turned him loose in a Michael’s. If I lived in New Orleans I’d definitely be right along their parade route, damn the crowds. They get even better (and more political):
2017 parade video
2018 parade video
If you are not yet sick of that song, and don’t mind straying off the topic of Mardi Gras, Lord Dampnut’s proposed Tank Pageant has recently inspired another bitterly funny CV video.
And let’s clear out that earworm with a few bars of Louisiana atmosphere.
Please let this serve as a reminder that Crashing Vor is an awesome musician AND still needs YouTube viewing hours. The day of reckoning is Saturday, I think, and if he does not by then have their abruptly-jacked-up level of 4,000 hours of viewing in the past year, he loses his channel’s ability to carry ads, which in turn carries weight in searches and brings him more eyes, which then helps him sell music. (Viewing hours is not the same thing as number of views, and if it’s shown anywhere, I don’t know where.) His deficit was sizable, last I heard, but my understanding is that he can be reinstated at such time as he does collect the requisite viewing hours. So please start up his channel if you can and play some stuff. It’s good stuff! This is a favorite of mine:
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