I feel so, so much better today, so I was eager to get out on the bike for a play ride after cleaning the house and watching the Saints win. Again. Though this time it seemed unnecessarily close–c’mon, guys, we were playing the Rams! Anyway, I rode down to Louis Armstrong Park to catch some of the Congo Square Rhythms Festival, where I snapped this picture of three Mardi Gras Indian tribes doing their thing. See all those arms up, cameras pointing in toward the Indians? Yeah, my arm’s doing the same thing. I’ve seen the Indians at many events in this city, and they are always surrounded by crowds, many snapping endless photographs, just like I was today. Sometimes I wonder how cameras have changed our ability to actually experience experiences; are we trying to freeze them for later consumption, assuming any of these pictures are ever looked at all? Picture taking at this event was definitely mediated by race–all the arms raised over the crowd were white; most of the folks singing along were Black. We are all there, watching the same performance, but we are all having a wide range of different experiences. This is a picture of the Mardi Gras Indians, but it is also a picture of people taking pictures, and that woman, the one in the sunglasses. I wonder what she was looking at…