When I first moved to the neighbourhood where I now live, way back in in the dawn of the 1970s, it was one of the few neighbourhoods in Trinidad — perhaps, when I come to think of it, the only neighbourhood — where Halloween was widely observed. I have no idea why this is. This country, as my colleague Laura Dowrich points out today, has no particular connection with the tradition of Halloween. But somehow it existed in Blue Range, a strange hyperlocal custom. In those days we went around in scrappy home-made costumes, and we actually tricked when we weren’t treated. I’m sure she has no recollection of this, but one year Jasmine Alexander jumped me on Hillrise Road and tried to steal my loot.

Over the years Halloween has caught on in other middle-class suburbs in Trinidad. In Westmoorings (which, in the Trinidadian imagination, is the cradle of Trinidadian middle-classness of a certain kind) it was soon quickly taken over by rowdy adolescents, and there were incidents. In my neighbourhood, however, even as our lot grew up and were replaced by kids who rode mini-motorcycles instead of bicycles and motorised scooters instead of skateboards (I was going to say “and who smoked and drank”, except that we did that as well — some things never change), Halloween remained a relatively harmless occurence. In some ways it even became gentler. Nobody around here tricks anymore, for instance. Parents accompany the smaller children on their rounds and instruct them to say “Please” and “thank you”. In our day, you wouldn’t have been caught dead with a parent on tow in Halloween, unless you were, like, a newborn.

Soon, the bourgeois thuggery taking place in Westmoorings started forcing people to look for other trick-or-treating venues for their children. My neighbourhood, Trinidad’s Halloween mecca, was an obvious choice. These days, I’d say 75% of the Sponge Bobs and Batmans and Disney characters who come to the gate soliciting treats in their high-pitched little voices, are from outside the neighbourhood. This is probably something anybody planning on moving to this neighbourhood should bear in mind — be prepared for your confectionery bill to skyrocket at the end of October, as you will be supplying Halloween candy to the bulk of middle-class tots in the western peninsula.

As I write, it’s not yet seven o’clock, but already the majority of trick-or-treaters have come and gone. Nobody stays out very late anymore (you know, with the crime and everything). I just went out into the street to check. A few stragglers in the distance. A father’s voice saying, “Jean-Marc, come here–” (80% of the boys in Westmoorings are named Jean-Marc). In the distance, the sounds of bursting bamboo and exploding firecrackers, as the older kids start doing their thing. (These sounds, incidentally, have been part of the soundtrack around here since Divali, and will continue until New Year’s — and they come from way across the valley as well).

My nephew, who is now almost 18 and had his own Halloween experiences around here back in the day, arrived some time ago to take his little sister around the neighbourhood in a purple fairy costume, his own head wrapped ninja-style in a black t-shirt, probably trying to live down that Auntie Millie-manufactured tiger costume from ‘93 or ‘94. And at my feet lies Delphine, trembling with fear because the noise of bursting bamboo and firecrackers and dog-hearing aren’t exactly complementary — and praying, I’m sure, that there won’t be a repeat of last year.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing today on his blog:

I think that misunderstanding over degree of difficulty issues is one of the major reasons for conflict between insiders and outsiders. We bridle at the school teacher who asks for a raise, because we don’t realize–and we can never realize unless we’ve been a teacher ourselves–how hard being a school teacher is.

Think about it.

Thank you, dear Jamrock, for reminding us that our own parliament doesn’t hold the monopoly on ridiculousness. Via Ria Bacon’s Stet blog, I learned of this photo, which was carried on the front page of the Jamaica Observer on October 18. It’s a close-up of the hands of Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller as she doodles on a square of paper during — get this — a debate on a no-confidence motion brought by the Opposition party! Maybe I would doodle too if my party held the kind of majority enjoyed by the ruling People’s National Party (PNP), and the debate did last seven hours; but I have to say I’m not all that impressed with the Honourable PM’s drawing skills.

You’ll want to read Ria’s entertaining attempts at analysing the meaning of the Mrs. Simpson-Miller’s imagery and also the later post where she reports on the restrictions since put in place for journalists sitting in on parliamentary sessions. Yep, instead of taking away Portia’s notepad and pencil, they’ve banned journalists from sitting in the gallery above the members, corralling them instead into a 6′ x 6′ press box. Which isn’t entirely surprising, but you sort of wish that one day the government would surprise us by reacting with a bit of imagination. Like, for example, by announcing that the Prime Minister had signed up for drawing lessons at the Edna Manley School for the Arts?

I wore black today too.

And all day I’ve been running a fever, on account, I assume, of the yellow fever shot I had yesterday.

As you probably know, Global Voices receives the bulk of its funding from Reuters. In return, Global Voices attempts to add value to Reuters’s offerings by participating in events like the Reuters Newsmaker series.

Global Voices plays a couple of different roles in the Newsmaker events. GV offers Reuters a “reblog” feed (aggregated feed of blogs selected on the basis of theme) which they use on the page featuring the event. GV also usually hosts an Internet relay chat (IRC) discussion to generate questions and dialogue which is relayed to the room by an on-the-spot GV representative. As you can see from the report filed by GV founder Rebecca MacKinnon after the last Newsmaker with Ted Turner, GV makes no bones about criticising the form and/or content of these events.

On November 9, Reuters will be holding a Newsmaker event on the theme of corporate responsibility. As the web site says: “Corporate responsibility is increasingly important in today’s global landscape, with companies taking a greater role in developing communities, working to reduce poverty and addressing the health of our planet.” You may also notice that, while the discussion purports to be global in scope, the composition of the panel doesn’t necessarily reflect that. For this event, GV will be feeding Reuters the usual reblog feed, and Rebecca will be in the room once more relaying questions from the IRC discussion and — one hopes — bringing an international perspective to the discussion.

So I’m hoping those of you who read this can help by doing any or all of the following:

- writing about issues relating to corporate responsibility (and I’m aware of how broad a topic this is) around the time of the event, and, if you like, being one of our “featured bloggers”, complete with thumbnail photo and bio on the Reuters site. (I should also say that this particular reblog will be moderated by hand, so only posts relevant to the topic will appear on the site. In other words, you can continue to write about Alcoa and your cat)

- participating in the IRC discussion (non-techies, please don’t shy away from this — we provide a very straightforward web-based interface at http://irc.globalvoicesonline.org/chat/irc.cgi)

- spreading the word about the event

- passing me information about any other bloggers you think should be included in the discussion

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or comments — and if you wish to be a “featured blogger”, please get in touch with me by Friday 27 October (and yes, I know this is obscenely short notice).

Thanks in advance to those of you who might consider being a part of this.

Just watched the nail-biting finish to the Champions Trophy match between the West Indies and India.

My team is still capable of making me so happy sometimes.

They already never call — just wait till they read this.

(Forgive me — I’m not having a very good morning).

- In today’s Trinidad Express, BC Pires talks with artist Steve Ouditt about the festivals of Divali and Eid-Ul-Fitr in the Trinidadian context.

- Guadeloupean saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart’s MySpace page. His latest album, Soné Ka-La, gorgeously synthesises Guadeloupean gwoka and all that jazz (full-length music samples are available at MySpace).

And while we’re on the subject of great saxophonists, the New York Times yesterday runs a moving article about Sonny Rollins — who’s now 76 — as he comes to terms with the death of his wife and (reluctantly) embraces technolological change.

- My photos from last night’s Divali dinner at Omi and Lalo’s are up on Flickr. They’re a bit on the dark side, and again, will be more appreciated by those who know the people in them. But I do deconstruct a dinner plate.

- And here’s one from the tech files: last night, in my quest for a method of cheating the upload date on a few of my photos so they wouldn’t appear at the top of my Flickr photostream, I came across h4ppierphotos, which worked like a dream.

Today, in a fine article by my Ukrainian colleague Veronica Khoklova over at Global Voices, I come across this:

This must be a bit of an exaggeration - even though some of the 300,000-plus Russian users’ accounts will surely land in Trinidad & Tobago’s blogosphere, as a result of the ongoing virtual exodus flash mob: “Let’s make this small but proud state the leader of the world Internet!”

According to Veronica’s piece, a faction of Russian LiveJournal users is emigrating to a “virtual Trinidad & Tobago” in protest at LiveJournal’s partnering with a Russian internet company. Why T&T, I wonder. This has to be Soca Warriors fallout.

If these LJ users are smart, though, they’d keep it virtual, as we have our fair share of crapola going on here as well.

- The music video for Jamaican artist Gyptian’s “Beautiful Lady” is one of the Editor’s Picks today at video-sharing site Revver. Interesting that VP Records is using Revver . . . The piece is packed with ads, of course.

- Reporters Sans Frontières has released a new report on the Internet in Cuba.

- “Bird of Night”, the chamber opera by Trinidadian composer Dominique LeGendre (who was the subject of CFR podcast #38 — those were the days, weren’t they?), opened this past Thursday at London’s Royal Opera House. The show runs till October 28. (Hat tip to Titilayo).

2005 — a good year for Strepsils?
I think I may be coming down with something. Saying as much this afternoon to Nikipedia, the latter delved into one of the drawers of his filing cabinet and fished out a box of Strepsils. “Aren’t Strepsils supposed to be translucent?” I said, examining the orange Mentos lookalikes embedded in the quarter-used blister pack the box contained. Nikipedia picked up the box. “Er — expired in 2005.”

I popped a couple anyway.

Monstrous pix
Just uploaded photos from this evening’s Galvanize event, “Monsters & Other Animals: Poems and Fictions“. Unless you know the people in the photos, however, you might not find them all that interesting. But there is one of me holding what was either a very nice gift or a massive insult.

The most surprising inclusion on this list, at number 100, is the search engine Google. Mr Weich insisted it was not a joke. “Many of the curators we speak to have mentioned the potential of [the photo-sharing site] Flickr as a viable exhibition area - that in a few years from now they’ll be curating online to millions of viewers.

“And while we quickly concluded that Flickr has a way to go yet, it did make us realise how much we rely on Google for our art information. In a strange way, the number of hits an artist, curator or even a dealer gets can legitimise him in the same way it can anyone else.”

From the UK Guardian’s review of ArtReview magazine’s annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the contemporary art scene, gleefully e-mailed to me a few minutes ago by Nikipedia, who notes that he’s been making ample use of Flickr in his documentation of the Galvanize art project. The title of this post is Nikipedia’s as well.

The process of packing for a trip expands to fill the time Georgia has available.

I suspect there may be some concern out there that CFR is turning into a satellite of Global Voices, but I’m afraid tonight isn’t going to be the night I disabuse you of that notion. GV, you see, has been conducting a reader survey that I’ve been meaning to mention here in the longest while.

So if you’re a GV reader, I’d really appreciate it if you would devote a few minutes to taking the survey and helping us make the site more useful to great people like yourself. Thanks in advance!

Nikipedia is convinced this ad, which appeared in yesterday’s newspapers, was designed by a PNM double-agent! See his comment and cheeky annotations to the image on my Flickr page.

(For those lucky souls who happen to be unfamiliar with Trinidad & Tobago politics: PNM = ruling party; UNC = opposition).

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a whole year that I’ve been associated with Global Voices. The actual anniversary of my début there is October 14, but weekdays being what they are, yesterday I decided to devote some of my Sunday slack to writing a thank-you note to my GV colleagues. As linking — in all senses of the word — is one of the things we do best at GV, and in honour of the cherished linkages (though “connections” is the word I’d prefer here) I’ve made as a result of my association with this grand enterprise, I decided a hyperlinked letter was the only way to go. Here it is:

My dear GV friends:

This coming Friday will mark a year since I wrote my first piece for my first piece for Global Voices. Some days prior to that date, I’d received an e-mail from a mysterious individual with a Japanese surname and a Spanish nickname. Would I care to cover the Caribbean for a web site called Global Voices as a volunteer author? he asked. The whole thing sounded time-consuming and rather byzantine, if you asked me, and what if this individual, with his unlikely combination of physical (a little Googling had revealed him to be sandy-haired and freckled) and transnational attributes, turned out to be a Keyser Söze type?

Yet, against what seemed, at the time, to be my better judgement, I agreed to add this to the already complex mix of potentially missable deadlines and things that I do. I wrote the first article. Then I wrote another. And another. Within weeks, my dreams had become populated with green adinkra symbols; I was mumbling the GV tag line in my sleep, spouting the GV Manifesto at cocktail parties. . . .

Then I received another email, this time from a woman named for a Biblical figure whose solicitousness towards camels had landed her a husband and whose surname indicated membership in a Scottish clan whose chief once married a Norse princess named “Saucy Mary”. She was inviting me to a meeting in London. I accepted graciously, of course, and in December found myself breakfasting with a large man whose full name combined those of a Vermont folk hero and a Philip Roth character.

(more…)

It you find I’m quoting my friend Jeremy Taylor a lot lately, it’s because the man just cracks me up. Yesterday he took on British senior government minister Jack Straw, who just last week called on Muslim women to lift their veils as a way of facilitating social integration:

So there is Jack Straw, a senior minister in the British government, sitting in his constituency office in northern England receiving visitors, when in comes a figure dressed in a niqab, covered from head to foot, with only the eyes visible.

Jack starts to sweat. He tries hard to be liberal and tolerant, poor fellow. On the other hand, he was the man who with Tony Blair helped to plan and execute Britain’s role in the disastrous Iraqi war. And this figure in front of him, with only the eyes visible, could be anyone. A suicide bomber. A gunman. What if there’s a grenade under the niqab?

Further down the page:

But poor Jack is very confused about this veil and scarf business. Isn’t this repression of Muslim women, exactly the sort of thing he organised a war against? Yet here are young British Muslim women actually choosing to wear the hijab, or the niqab, or the even more concealing burqa (which hides the wearer’s eyes too, behind a mesh screen). One of them even tells the British Guardian that her niqab gives her a sense of self-esteem, even though her culture doesn’t require her to wear one, and that she’s figured out how to eat McDonald’s hamburgers through it. Jack tears his thinning grey hair in bewilderment.

JT reminds us that we here in Trinidad had our own “hijab melodrama” a few years back:

when a local Catholic convent school tried to stop a student from wearing one. The school took the matter all the way to court, where it properly lost. Most of Europe is struggling with the issue now: how much individual liberty should be allowed when the results alarm the natives? Part of the debate comes from racism and xenophobia, but part also comes from middle-class people trying (like Jack) to be decent, but in fact feeling threatened by all sorts of strange and alarming things: hijabs, tattoos, nipple-rings, aggressive hair, deep black sunglasses that work like mirrors.

And ends with a bang:

So just help the lady with her broken streetlights or her tax audit, Jack, and help create the sort of atmosphere where she doesn’t have to cover her face to maintain her dignity in Tony Blair’s Britain.

But don’t take my word for it, go and read the whole thing.

It’s 245am, and I’ve just spent ages captioning and then re-captioning the photos in the slide show above (so the text would fit), so I hope you’ll forgive me if, in lieu of writing an account of my visit to the event pictured above, I simply quote the Galvanize blog:

Photographer Alex Smailes’s Galvanize project is Back in Times, a series of portraits, taken over a period of two years, of patrons of the monthly “Back in Times” parties held at the SWWTU Hall on Wrightson Road in Port of Spain. The photographs will be shown in that very space, and the exhibition opens at SWWTU Hall on Saturday, 7 October, 2006, at an actual “Back in Times” party. All are invited.

From 7.30 to 9 pm, admission is free, with a door charge after 9. There will be music, a cash bar, and a chance to see Smailes’s images in the location where they were made. The theme for the evening is “Victoria’s Lady in Black”–dress up smart.

The images are available here as well.

Casino Morale: They took away Lotto. Then they gave it back. (For five years, at least). Manning and his bunch fail to realise that addition — not subtraction — may be the key. This is the man, after all, who talked a couple of years back about wanting to clean up Carnival by stopping people from wining and wearing skimpy outfits. Social investment, Patrick. Offering people options, via a education system that understands the people it’s serving, so that maybe folks might choose one day to do something on a Saturday night besides gamble, drink, smoke or lock somebody’s neck. (Or maybe they’ll choose to gamble, drink and smoke anyway, because there’s a little thing called free will that those of us who, unlike you, don’t have a direct line to the Almighty, choose to exercise sometimes). Be careful, Patrick — there are people out there who wish to smelt you.

Delphine: She blogged today. Still trying to clean the dirty paw-marks off the keyboard.

Oso: Will love again, just you wait and see.

Alix: My nephew is the greatest kid in the world.

“Can anyone explain to me why getting a passport to travel with is such a big deal for Americans?

Is it that they are by definition so trustworthy, honest and virtuous that they don’t need to comply with international norms? (Like observing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, paying dues to the UN, joining the International Criminal Court, believing in climate change, etc.)? Or is there a more subtle reason that I’m missing?” (link)

“Nice to see today’s reports that the Pope is planning to abolish “limbo”. Not the Caribbean ritual dance, of course, but that grey area somewhere between heaven and hell where unredeemed souls are said to languish. . . .” (link)

My buddy Jeremy Taylor was in full-on snark mode yesterday. Good for him.