The timing of these posts is a tad off, but being punctual and precise is not really the point here, is it? So we’ll anticipate Lundi Gras at Woldenberg Park while Bacchus is rolling, like, right now.

I like the story of this Lundi Gras adaptation, when Rex sails into the harbour off the Mississippi. As I’ve said before, it’s a reboot tradition, having stopped during WWI. When they rebooted it, though, they added Zulu into the mix and now both kings get keys to the city, to co-rule for the entirety of Mardi Gras, from sunrise to sunset. That’s good.

We all know Tina Turner, but I’m not sure the children know her when she was Ike and Tina Turner from Nutbush, TN (an incredible song, there, click). They might not know her as the Acid Queen in the musical Tommy. They might know that Ike beat her and she endured countless humiliations at his hands. Or they might have seen her in the Mad Max series as Aunt Entity, from which she also had musical hits. In any case, the woman is a FORCE, by any reckoning. Those legs were infamous when I was a child. I just marvelled that she could dance like that in heels. Ha.

Marc Bolan’s influence vis-a-vis glam rock is certainly evident everywhere these days. I had trouble deciding which song to use for this post : “Mambo Sun” which makes more sense in this context, but I went with the recognisable “Bang a Gong”. There are so many dandy ditties from T. Rex, though, that I wanted to play them all: “20th-century Boy”, “Jeepster”, “Ride a White Swan”. Bolan’s voice and pseudo-Wiccan lyrics are a British gas, and the guitar is pure rock and roll. An aside: the hero in Velvet Goldmine was patterned after Bolan, Bowie, Lou Reed, and a host of other glam kooks from that time. What a strange phenomenon, glam rock. Think about how weird that was.

I’m beat. I have so many Venetian Carnevale photos that I can’t process them all, so the next 1,500 will have to wait until next year. “Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead / say a few spells and baby, there you go”. Poof! out.