• …My heart’s in Accra » Notes and reflections from the Open Translation Tools Summit 2009
  Ethan reflects on the Open Translation Tools conference we attended last week in Amsterdam.
  (tags: translation globalvoices)

For the past ten days my brother C*POP and my almost-brother Walt have been following Trinidad and Tobago recording artists Maximus Dan, Jah Melody and Marlon Asher as the three tour various cities in Europe. C*POP and Walt have been sending frequent updates, photos and videos which they’ve been posting at the Beach House Entertainment Facebook page. This video, the fourth in the series, is

a montage of scenes of the T&T Entertainment Co contingent leaving Berlin, arriving in Oslo, the June 3 show The Source Club in Oslo featuring Marlon Asher and Jah Melody, and the deejays who rushed to record dubplates with the two artists the day after

I also think it’s the best of the series yet. See the complete set of Europe tour videos here.

• Poynter Online – Archived Chat with Jay Rosen: How Do You Teach Blogging?
  (tags: blogging journalism teaching tips)

As many of you know, I work for Global Voices, so I have a vested interest in following the instructions that Solana posted here. But I also believe passionately in the work being done by Global Voices Advocacy (GVA), the section of our organisation that seeks to defend free speech online.

While Trinidad and Tobago’s press freedom record pales in comparison with that of many of the countries which feature regularly in GVA’s pages, recent events in this country suggest that we shouldn’t be taking this freedom for granted. In November of last year, the Hon. Patrick Manning, prime minister of this nation, paid a visit to a radio station that resulted in the suspension of two commentators who had said things on air he didn’t like. And yesterday the news broke that Kevin Baldeosingh, a columnist at the Newsday, one of the country’s three dailies, was dismissed from his job at the paper, allegedly on account of a letter, published in the Trinidad Express on May 7, in which he exposed a Catholic priest as a plagiarist. A Catholic priest, moreover, who had just been appointed by the President to lead the Trinidad and Tobago’s Integrity Commission.

That the priest in question admitted his sins and stepped down (recalling, in the process, that the church’s Canon Law would have prohibited him from accepting the position anyway) thereby validating Baldeosingh’s claims, appears to be immaterial to the powers (Newsday alone? Newsday egged on by other parties? Who?) who are now attempting to silence him. The more important point, however, is that Baldeosingh was dismissed from his job for doing—regardless of where he happened to be doing it—what journalists are supposed to do, i.e. investigate a matter of public interest and present the information to the public. I imagine that Baldeosingh would have preferred to publish the information in his own paper and earn money in the process, rather than in a rival publication’s Letters to the Editor section; I also imagine that there must be a good reason he did not do so.

There are numerous writings on freedom of expressions from which I could insert an excerpt here, but I’ll quote from the one I happen to be engaged with at the moment—Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, portions of which I’ve been receiving in installments from the ingenious DailyLit, yet another one of my daily obstacles to personal productivity that nevertheless enrich my life. This is from the essay by Toni Morrison, who is also the book’s editor, though the emphasis is mine:

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.

And now for the obligatory line, as per Solana’s post: I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because freedom of expression, online and elsewhere, is a right that we often value insufficiently until it’s taken away from us.

Write your own post supporting Global Voices Advocacy (or your charity of choice) by following the instructions at http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about. 
 

• Why Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com
  "Globalization and new technologies attract people to big cities, by increasing the returns to urban proximity. While it would be technically possible to sit and write software somewhere in the Vale of Kashmir (at least if you didn’t mind the bullets), the innovators in Indian information technology cluster around one another in Bangalore. America’s computer wizards likewise choose to cluster in Silicon Valley rather than disperse…."
  (tags: urbanplanning planning economics)
• The brave new world of slacktivism | Net Effect
  ""Slacktivism" is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space? …"
  (tags: politics activism protest socialnetworking socialmedia)
• Ghetto Biennale – Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Dec 2009
  What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed? The Grand Rue Sculptors are a community of artists living in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years. They have produced art that reflects a heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion, and have dragged Haitian art into the 21st century. Jean Herard Celeur, Andre Eugene and Guyodo are at the core of the movement, which contains seven or eight other younger artists, all producing powerful sculptural works. Their work has opened entirely new vistas into the creative possibilities of the Vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Their muscular sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems.
  (tags: hait visualarts arts culture caribbean)

• Marvellous Boy – Calypso From West Africa : Honest Jon's Records
  "The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orchestras like Lovey's String Band (credited with the first calypso recordings, in 1912). However, the first West African calypso recordings in the modern style are from Freetown, Sierra Leone in the early 1950s, by Ebenezer Calendar and Famous Scrubbs…"
  (tags: calypso music africa caribbean westafrica)

• My Favorite Financial Blogs — Seeking Alpha
  What appears to be a very comprehensive list of econ/financial blogs.
  (tags: economics finance blogs)

• Rainforests | Growing on trees | The Economist
  A Guyanese rainforest enters the global economy, as the Iwokrama rainforest conservation project records a profit.
  (tags: guyana environment conservation caribbean rainforest)

Image taken with my iPhone of the traffic on the highway leading into Diego Martin, Trinidad on May 1, 2009 (this evening). The overpass referred to in the photo’s title is a fancy new interchange officially opened today at the intersection of the Churchill Roosevelt and Uriah Butler Highways just outside of Port of Spain. The new overpass is supposed to alleviate the age-old traffic flow problem between east and south Trinidad and Port of Spain.

(The LolCats phenomenon does not appear to have captured the Trinidadian imagination, so those confused by the odd spelling in the title and graphic may wish to visit icanhazcheeseburger.com/)

• Film footage of Trinidad from the 1930s & 40s
  (tags: trinidad+tobago film archive history)

I’m in the mood to post something on this blog, but not in the mood to write, which is a shame, as there are so many things I would have posted had the situation been different. I might have written about the crime watch service I’ve set up for my neighbourhood, for instance (thank you, Ken Banks, for helping me out with that one); about Salvador, Delphine’s adopted brother who left the shelter on November 28 last year to begin his new life in Blue Range; or about the renovation exercises that began my home at the beginning of this year. But no—all I seem to be able to do these days is take pictures.

But if it’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that the path of least resistance is usually where it’s at. I’ve never seen myself as the diarist sort of blogger, but as my main preoccupations these days are very close to home, here goes: below is the latest of the renovation photos from the “Don’t try this at home” photoset, accompanied by a fairly substantial caption.

Mixing cement, along with pumping gas at the gas station and filling a brown-paper bag with loose flour or sugar and neatly folding the top, was one of the activities that fascinated me as a child.

I can now vouch for the overrratedness of gas-pumping, and wrapping thousands of presents over the years has erased a good part of the wonder involved in folding paper of any kind (maybe I should take up origami?). But I'm yet to mix cement, though it's an activity that takes place almost every day around my house these days.

I was lucky to have checked on the goings-on in the back yard just as Ronald had finished carting several wheelbarrowloads of gravel there in preparation for a marathon round of cement-mixing, and found these neat peaks resembling a mountain range in a child's drawing.

If you’re a Trinidad and Tobago blogger interested in covering the upcoming Summit of the Americas (April 17-19, 2009), here’s an offer you might be interested in:

Global citizen news platform GroundReport.com is looking for Trinidadian bloggers and digital journalists to attend the upcoming Summit of the Americas and provide digital coverage from a local, insider perspective. GroundReport is interested in all formats of digital media coverage, including video, text and photos. This position is unpaid but will include press credentials, publication on GroundReport, and potential wider syndication, under your name, to larger media outlets. Share your voice with the world to show the Trinidadian experience of the Summit of the Americas.

To apply, please send an email describing your interest and credentials to info@groundreport.com titled ‘Summit of the Americas’. Include links to your previous work/blogs and a resume or CV if available.

If selected, you will be required to post 2 items per day on the event to GroundReport.com. Publications can be in English, Spanish, French or other local languages.

Had I not left Trinidad yesterday to attend the We Media Miami conference, I would have been prancing in the streets dressed as a cow, as these beautiful images by Nikipedia demonstrate. Ah well.

 

 cut+clear carnival #6 - brain & bamsee is one: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (872)

Episode #6 arrives a day late courtesy of the carnival week frenzy, which is not to say the show is without substance. Au contraire: in the final episode in the cut+clear carnival 2009 series, the members of 3canal and I visit with photographer, carnival connoisseur and Belmont native Jeffrey Chock at his home on Clifford Street for a chat about the carnival of yesteryear, the philosophical underpinnings of the changes taking place in today’s version of the festival, and—naturally—the experience of photographing one of the world’s most visually spectacular events.

This week’s 3canal track: “Paradise” remixed by Keshav Chandradath Singh

LINKS

 

 cut+clear carnival #5 - carnival is woman: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (544)

Trust the cut+clear carnival podcast’s most freewheeling and raucous show to date to be the one featuring women (it’s also the first CFR episode to feature explicit language!). In episode #5 the members of 3canal and I sit down backstage at Queen’s Hall with Cecilia Salazar, Dionne McNicol and Elisha Bartels, three key members of the 3canal Show, and discuss matters ranging from performing while pregnant to the banning of songs featuring “daggerin’” from the Jamaican airwaves. We also remember the late, great John Isaacs, the fourth member of 3canal, on the ninth anniversary of his passing.

Previews of this year’s edition of the 3canal Show begin on Thursday 12 February, 2009 at Queen’s Hall, Port of Spain, Trinidad. The full run begins on Monday 16 February.

This week’s 3canal track: “Where Do We Go From Here” from the album “Joy+Fire”

LINKS

Roger Roberts, Glendon Morris, Stanton Kewley and Wendell Manwarren with part of a bee costume at the Belmont Jewels mas' camp, Belmont, Trinidad

 

 cut+clear carnival #4 - bees in belmont [23:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (732)

cut+clear carnival episode #4 takes us to Belmont, a community rich in carnival history, where we visit with Glendon Morris at the Belmont Jewels mas’ camp for a chat about the ups and downs of making traditional, hand-crafted mas’ in an age of mass production, the allure of playing fancy sailor and working with his late father, the legendary master metal craftsman, designer and bandleader, Ken Morris.

Belmont Jewels mas' camp, Belmont Trinidad

Wendell Manwarren, Glendon Morris, Stanton Kewley and Roger Roberts at the Belmont Jewels mas' camp, Belmont, Trinidad

The year before I left Trinidad for university in the USA, I spent hours on end at the United States Information Service (now called the Public Affairs Section) library on Marli Street, boning up on Dreiser and Faulkner, Updike and Bellow, Welles and Cassavetes, filling in the gaps left by a British post-colonial education and attempting to add a veneer of sophistication to an experience of US popular culture cobbled together from a couple of local television channels and visits to the cinemas of Port of Spain, plus the odd visit to the country itself. In using the services of the USIS, I was engaging with one aspect of US public diplomacy, the means by which the US as a nation “seeks to promote [its] national interest. . . through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences.”

The countries of the English-speaking Caribbean are hardly the United States’ most challenging interlocutors, especially when compared with the Middle East, China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba or the country that lies just a few miles west of where I sit writing this (Venezuela, in case you’re wondering). But our relationship with the the US isn’t a simple one, as any Caribbean national who’s ever applied for a visa knows only too well.

That our gaze wanders so easily and longingly northward; that our countries are commonly considered transshipment points for drugs; that deportees from US prisons are contributing to the increase in our crime rates; that most of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural gas is purchased by the US; that Venezuela lies across the water just a few valleys west of where I sit writing this; that I can write this, then publish it instantly to the internet: all of this makes us important to the US in the way that small, unimportant places can be. “Important”, meaning, of course, “strategic”.

Because small and strategic is not an unproblematic combination, an event taking place on Tuesday 3 February, 2009 (tomorrow, in this part of the world) in Washington D.C. should be of interest to many of us in the Caribbean (not that anything in the programme is specific to us–but we’re used to that). The event is called Media as Global Diplomat, and it’s designed around the premise that

We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.

The event is also a response to the Obama administration’s promise to distinguish itself from its predecessor by taking a different approach to public diplomacy, one focused on listening instead lecturing.

How to participate? I won’t be physically present at the event, of course, but my Global Voices colleagues Ivan Sigal and Rebecca MacKinnon will, and I’ll be tuning in to the live webcast and chat which Ivan will be moderating and parsing for questions and comments to be passed on to Ted Koppel.

Rebecca will be liveblogging at http://rconversation.blogs.com/, which, given her fierce intelligence, outspokenness and sharp wit, not to mention her skepticism about the event’s actual goals, is bound be both informative and entertaining. “It’s unclear to me,” Rebecca says, “whether they really just want to explore how to use digital media to get the world to like the U.S. better – or whether they’re truly open to a paradigm shift: moving from broadcast “messaging” mode to conversation mode, in which the U.S. would be listening and learning as much as informing others.”

Rebecca also notes the dearth of new media vibe on the program “…my initial reaction is that the only panelists who might be considered “new media” people are Google’s Andrew McLaughlin and Mika Salmi of MTV’s Digital Networks. And they work for huge Internet and media companies. No citizen media or grassroots voices are speaking on the panels at all. Lots of “old media” and/or establishment foreign policy elites. Will there really be any new ideas coming from this crowd? Hard to know. Maybe you can help thorough your remote participation?”

Maybe you can. Let’s get some Caribbean spirit into that chat room. Visit this page for the event schedule, and the live chat will be taking place here. See you online tomorrow!

Stanton Kewley, Pelham Goddard and Wendell Manwarren at Pelham’s home in St. James, Trinidad

In cut+clear carnival episode #3 we visit veteran producer and steel orchestra arranger, Pelham Goddard, at his home in St. James for a chat about the evolution of music for steel orchestras and 3canal’s foray into the steel band arena with Pelham and the Exodus Steel Orchestra. In addition, Wendell treats us to a series of audio vignettes explaining certain aspects of the steel band scene in Trinidad and Tobago.

This week’s 3canal track: “Festival Time”

LINKS

 

 cut + clear carnival #3 - pelham and pan [22:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (562)

 

 Wendell Manwarren on the Panorama competition [1:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (287)

 

 Wendell Manwarren on steel orchestras [0:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (288)

 

 Wendell Manwarren on panyards [0:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (271)

 

 Wendell Manwarren on contemporary artists and pan [1:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (273)

 

 Wendell Manwarren on working w/ Pelham Goddard [0:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (268)

(L to R) Curtis Popplewell, Stanton Kewley, Walt Lovelace, Wendell Manwarren, Roger Roberts in front of cut+clear productions HQ, Woodbrook, Trinidad

 

 cut+clear carnival #2 - hosts & promoters [26:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (520)

On episode #2 of the cut+clear carnival podcast 3canal and I chat with Curtis “C*POP” Popplewell and Walt Lovelace, the men behind the Beach House Carnival fête and some of the country’s most original music video work.

Tune in to hear Curtis and Walt hold forth on why they prefer not to be referred to as fête promoters and the state of music video production in the country.

This week’s 3canal track: “Joy+Fire”, from the album of the same name.

LINKS

I’ll be heading down to cut+clear productions shortly to record episode #2 of the cut+clear carnival podcast w/ 3canal. Today’s special guests: C*POP and Walt Lovelace. The show will be released tomorrow.

And above, photos from last night’s launch of 3canal’s carnival presentations at Queen’s Hall. That includes their 2009 release, JOY+FIRE, which, for a limited time, can be downloaded for FREE at http://www.trinidadtunes.com.