I refer, of course, to the opening of the shop at Alice Yard, the artists’ space at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook. Why the Alice Yard people don’t stick with what they do best (which, judging from recent goings-on, involves chopping onions with a cutlass and throwing shovelfuls of dirt on people) and leave retailing to real businesspeople, is beyond me. If I end up going there on Saturday and leaving with my arms full of “artists’ limited editions and multiples, design objects, and some original artworks,” regardless of how “reasonably priced and. . . affordable to beginning collectors”, I’m going to be really annoyed.

You’ll find more details on the upsetting event at the Alice Yard blog. Which should tell you everything—what successful retailer in Trinidad has a blog?

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/)

Pictured above is the South African visa as it looked in 1998 (top), and as it looks today, ten years later (bottom). To acquire one back in ’98, I had to route my flight through New York and pay a visit to the South African consulate on E 38th Street. To get one for an upcoming trip in September, I was instructed to send my passport to the South African High Commission in Kingston, Jamaica, along with a prepaid Fedex form. The process took 11 days and cost me about US$140. I can travel freely in and out of South Africa until November 11, 2008. Spontaneous travel, the kind where you wake up one morning and say “Damn, I just need to see a giraffe” or even “My cholera-combatting skills would come in really handy in cyclone-ravaged _____” , hop on the internet, buy yourself a ticket, pack a bag and dash off to the airport, is clearly not for the likes of me.

By visa acquisition standards, however, the South African process is a breeze. To apply for a visa to travel to North American and most European countries people like me need to visit the embassy or consulate in person, armed with bank statement/s (preferably showing a positive balance); hotel reservations or other proof that you won’t end up sleeping in a subway or public park; health insurance; evidence of return travel to home country; names, addresses, telephone numbers and astrological signs of sponsors in receiving country; umbrella or sun hat (to protect yourself from the elements as you stand for hours in a line outside the building); reading matter (to entertain yourself as you stand for hours in a line outside the building–cell phones, radios, iPods etc are prohibited by many embassies); and picnic basket (to prevent yourself from starving as you stand for hours in a line outside the building). If you’re young, or poor, the embassy may ask you to demonstrate that you have sufficiently strong ties in your home country, like a spouse, so it may be advisable to bring along a wedding album, preferably your own.

The country I plan on founding one day (working title: “Gapland”; “Georgia”, sadly, being already taken) will issue visitors’ visas on arrival at the airport (as some countries already do). These will take the form of adhesive stickers so gorgeous as to be coveted by discerning travellers the world over. Just as well, as every visitor will require them, regardless of nationality (though you’ll have the option of affixing them either to a page in your passport or the lid of your laptop). For a few extra GPDs (Gapland dollars), visitors will be able to receive their visas in the form of a tattoo.

While standing in the (short) queue leading up to the visa distribution kiosk, arriving visitors will be plied with local delicacies, including organic fruit juices and wines from the national vineyards. Massages will be available on request. Visas will be issued to anyone of reasonably sound mind who is not a convicted felon or war criminal and who is revealed, via a Google search and detailed scan of personal blog and Facebook/MySpace accounts, to be free of intent to harm others or use Gapland as a base for nefarious activities. Along with their visas, visitors will receive a Gaplandese phrasebook, a copy of the most recent Gapland Book Prize-winning volume, and a Gapland-developed and manufactured wifi-enabled mini-computer/mobile phone filled with Gaplandish music, including the country’s ultra-cool national anthem (chorus sung by indigenous animals!) and GPD$100 in airtime.

At certain times of year (Gapland Carnival, the week of my birthday, mango season, the Zaboca Festival, Pothound Appreciation Week etc) Gapland will issue specially designed limited edition visas (designs to be solicited via competition from students of the Gapland Art Academy and other talented locals). Sophisticated travelers will make pilgrimages to the country just to have the pages of their passports graced by one of these beauties.

The Gapland visa will usher in the era of the visa as collectible. From a passport page-hogging stigma signifying “our country deems people from your country deeply suspect and liable to violate immigration laws”, the visa will evolve into a badge of well-travelledness and sophistication. Americans and Europeans will rush to get them. People (more than likely the same ones who choose wines according to the label) will choose the countries they travel to on the basis on the attractiveness of their visas. Visa geeks will travel just to amass visas, sheath them in plastic and show them off at conventions, wearing the national dress of their favourite visa-producing country. Entrepreneurs will travel in order to collect visas to sell on eBay. Visas from countries which receive few visitors will become rare and valuable commodities, perhaps prompting more powerful countries to resort to dastardly artificial methods of increasing the numbers of visitor arrivals in those countries in order to drive down the value of their visas.

I never said it would be all good.

*in June 2006, US Senator Stevens famously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes“

UPDATE: The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society blog has a listing of news articles about the incident.

The first sign was the failing wifi signal, accessible, after a while, only to people with the last name “Avila“. Then the power went completely. We eventually located the fuse box, and toggled every switch we could find. No go.

For relaxation, members of the Global Voices team helped Outreach Director David “Oso” Sasaki with his laundry

We’ve recently established, however, that the power outage was in fact south Florida-wide, and wasn’t the fault of the eight Global Voices editors and authors present in the city for WeMedia Miami 2008 and the eight laptops, the washing machine in the process of laundering 98% of Oso‘s wardrobe, the coffee maker and the two ceiling fans going full tilt at the team’s Miami headquarters in Coconut Grove.

Phew.

Renata, one of the Avilas who had internet access till the bitter end

I’m hoping the fact that American Airlines left my luggage in Miami last night will net me some sympathy. And be thankful that your dog is probably not the Fake Steve Jobs either.

After this appeared, a few of my crueller friends suggested I should have Delphine’s tongue removed. I had to remind them that she’s just a pothound, after all, and you shouldn’t read too much into her expressions (not to mention, of course, that removing an animal’s tongue is just plain barbarous.)

Looking at the image above, however — the glint in the eyes, the expression of utter disdain — especially in the context of her Garbo-like attitude towards being photographed lately, you do begin to wonder. . . .

GP: This is she.

Woman: I’m calling about an e-mail sent to you by Jane Doe [who, for the record, thinks GP is a bit of an upstart]. Will you be attending X event on Tuesday?

GP: Sorry, but I never received an e-mail from Ms. Doe.

Woman (with considerable attitude): Well, she sent it.

GP (not without a bit of ‘tude herself): Well, that is one of the problems with e-mail, isn’t it. Just because something is sent doesn’t mean it was received. I’m checking my mail now….

GP types “Jane Doe” into the search window of her e-mail client.

GP: Nope. Nothing. In fact, I haven’t received any mail from Ms. Doe in ages.

Woman: Well, it’s on Wednesday. Can you attend?

GP: What’s this event again?

Woman: The official opening of X [the same X that's been in operation for over a year now].

GP: Could you e-mail me the information again? I’ll give you another address.

On the other end of the line GP can discern what she’s almost certain is the sound of pins piercing the fabric skin of the GP-shaped voodoo doll (loaned to the woman by Jane Doe) she’s convinced the woman has on her desk.

GP: Are you still there?

Woman: Er, yes. Let me get a pen.

GP: Why don’t you simply use one of the pins and carve it into the surface of your desk?

Woman: I beg your pardon?

GP: Sorry? Did I say something?

Embellished a bit, perhaps. I’ll leave you to guess which parts are genuine.

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?

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

Here listening to the commentary on the 2nd One-Day International between West Indies and Zimbabwe going on in Antigua, which is interrupted mid-sentence by one of those strident commercials. Said message from our sponsor concludes with the tag line:

"Wave your flag high in the sky and show that cricket is a West Indian thing!"

I find this curious. As dismal a spectacle as West Indies cricket has been over the past 11 years, are there really people out there who need to be convinced that cricket (78 years after the West Indies were granted Test status) is a West Indian thing? The image below should dispel any doubts: who else but a West Indian would haul a 19″ television set to a cricket match?

We lost that match by 8 wickets, however, so drowning one’s sorrows in “Baywatch” reruns (or whatever else it is they’re rerunning on cable these days — shows you how much TV I watch) may not have been such a bad idea.

“This has “caption contest” written all over it…” was the comment left on Flickr by the wily Sanjiva, who has developed quite a knack of making me do things I’d normally never think of doing.

So if you’re so inclined, please leave suggestions for witty captions in the comments section, bearing in mind that this is not actually a contest (ie no prizes will be offered!).

FYI, the people in the photo are (L to R) West Indies star batsman Brian Lara, McCann Erickson Senior Art Director Leizelle Ramsoondar, Trinidad & Tobago/Falkirk FC footballer Russell Latapy, and my brother C*POP. The edge of Trinidad & Tobago/Sydney FC footballer (and captain of Trinidad & Tobago’s World Cup team) Dwight Yorke‘s white cap is visble to the right of Leizelle’s face. The photo was taken during our recent commercial shoot in Manchester.

Jonathan on J’ouvert morning (L) and Carnival Tuesday (R).

- Seems that Jonathan Ali hasn’t outgrown Carnival after all. After being spotted on j’ouvert morning perched on a fire hydrant in front of the Red House, covered from head to toe in clay and sporting a devil tail with a light bulb on the end and cursing the Prime Minister (photos coming soon, we hope!), a somewhat cleaner, soberer Jonathan appeared again on the streets of Woodbrook on Carnival Tuesday morning. Jonathan makes an attempt to regain his dignity in his latest blog post by reproducing a poem by Derek Walcott, but rumour has it that next year he may actually don a costume.

Nikipedia‘s taken charge of making sure we have decent devil tails for j’ouvert this year, and spent the earlier part of today running around to hardware stores and the like buying wire and electrical components (seems we’re going to be illuminated).

But I received an e-mail from him about an hour ago saying that he couldn’t remember the tail-making technique I’d so carefully coached him in last year, and instead of walking him through it over the phone, I decided to dig into my archives for the images above, which are taken from the flyer for a j’ouvert band my friends Gillian Goddard, Robert Young and I decided to produce during a season of insanity back in 1995.

I don’t know who invented the technique, but I learned it from Robert, and have passed it on to several since. The end product (no pun intended) looks like it would be uncomfortable to wear, and men, in particular, usually balk when they first see it. But in reality these tails are extremely comfortable, and within minutes most people forget they’re wearing a wire tail and start prancing around scratching and poking people, until somebody stops them and curls the wire into a less lethal configuration.

Me wearing a tail in 1999

Materials required:
- A length of wire (eight feet will give you a tail of respectable length)
- Enough fabric to either 1) shred and wrap around the wire or 2) make into a long, narrow sleeve (in which case you’d need a needle and thread or sewing machine) into which you insert the wire
- Another length of fabric or cord to wrap around your waist (length will depend on your waist size)

Note: if you plan on wining on somebody, or having somebody wine on you, please make sure and remove your tail first!

I’ve only seen the online version of the article, so I don’t know what size the image is in print, but just in case it turns out to be bigger than a postage stamp and somebody I know sees it and mistakes me for some kind of megalomaniacal narcissist, I figured I’d pre-emptively set the record straight as to how my photo happened to be in the Times in the first place, especially as I’m well aware that there are people out there who believe that things happen to me not because I am slightly charming and have the habit of being in the right place at the right time, but because I spend my time mailing out media kits stuffed with tear sheets and head shots (airbrushed) and cases of premium rum. And that’s my friends and family I’m talking about.

I do occasionally take photos of myself. As Oso said the other day, we’re all vain bastards at the end of the day (though in order to attain Oso’s level of vanity I’d have to take lessons). When it comes to portraits of myself, I am, in fact, one of my favourite photographers — certainly the only one who knows how to choose the right shots and actually deletes the awful ones when she promises to, instead of stashing them in a folder marked “Blackmail”.

There I was, for instance, this past January on a visit to New York, browsing the stacks at St. Mark’s Bookstore in the East Village, when I felt the urge to place the PowerShot G2 on a shelf, set the self-timer and look down into the lens. In the resulting photo the skin on my face looks like it’s being subjected to a stronger than usual gravitational pull, making me look jowly and double-chinned; my pores are the size of 25-cent pieces and the two furrows that form between my eyebrows when I haven’t had enough sleep look like they were carved into my face with a sharp penknife. And have I mentioned the triangle of light on my nose that makes me look like one of the Beagle Boys? Naturally, this would be the one the photo editor from the New York Times who contacted me out of the blue (note: she contacted me) a couple of weeks ago, would choose from my Flickr page.

I suppose I could pretend that looking bad was the point of the exercise. But for that to fly I’d have to look shockingly awful, or do something awfully shocking, like pose nude (in which case I could think of better places to put my photos than on Flickr, and to hell with Creative Commons). Or pose nude with a heliconia stuck between my cheeks (not the ones on my face). Or, if I had the talent, paint myself nude, like my friend Irenee Shaw, and say: “As a Caribbean person, in the light of our historical circumstances, the assertion of my own narrative and presence is important.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Lizard to CFR host:  Be my Valentine!
Today, for the first time in her life, the host of Caribbean Free Radio had a lizard fall on her. The incident occured on the atmospheric patio of the Diego Martin Pan Institute in Benjamin Street, Diego Martin. The CFR host was eating a salad when “something black” leapt on to her clothing. One of her dining companions, Wendy Warnick of Fairbanks, Alaska, helped brush the creature off the CFR host’s arm on to the ground.

Baby, the Diego Martin Pan Institute’s chef and man of business, told the CFR host that the incident signified good luck. The CFR host, who is terrified of lizards, is reported to have said: “I’m surprised I didn’t get a heart attack, but it could have been worse – this could have been a Teacher Mildred moment.”

UNC to Ato Boldon: Be our Valentine!
Ato Boldon, four-time Olympic medalist and World Championship 200m gold medalist, was appointed a senator today by the United National Congress, Trinidad & Tobago’s opposition party. Nicholas Laughlin, blogger, metal-cutter and editor of Caribbean Beat magazine, is said to be sitting near the phone awaiting his own call from the UNC.

This Lent I’ve given up vegetables and exercise. Some of my friends and associates think it’s contrary to the spirit of the season, but after a pre-Carnival dominated by denial, steamed foods and entanglements with weight machines and other instruments of torture, I think it’s the least I can do for myself. In short, my pre-Carnival is pretty much other people’s Lent, if with a slightly less noble goal—i.e. being able to squeeze into my costume on Carnival Monday.

But there was one Carnival a few years back when I didn’t have to worry about fitting into a costume. Up to two weeks before the event I’d been a regular at the gym and observing a dietary regime that would have given a hunger striker cause for concern. Then I get a call from this friend who works in the biz (that’s Hollywoodese for the film business, I think) asking me if I wanted to work on a rap video that was being filmed here over Carnival. Being both Trini to the bone and in possession of a $950 costume, I refused. Then she mentioned an obscene sum of money, plus the fact that they’d reimburse me for my costume. I was on eBay in seconds flat announcing the sale of one Carnival costume, which was snapped up within minutes by a drag queen from Abilene, Texas. And in the space of a pit stop at KFC to rebuild my depleted reserves of saturated fat, I went from mas’ player to a full-fledged member of the biz.

Well, maybe not so full-fledged. I soon learned that I’d been hired not for my way with celebrities but for the fact that I owned a car, which ended up transporting not major rap artists and recording label execs, but boxes of groceries and emergency supplies of masking tape and clothespins (which, as not many people know, they use a lot of in the biz). “Believe me, you don’t even want to meet those people,” my friend said. “They’re a bunch of arrogant, sexist so-and-so’s. You’re far better off in the, er, transport department.”

Carnival Tuesday morning arrived and I still hadn’t come within 100 feet of a rap star. Crawling bleary-eyed to the production office that morning, I’d run into several of my costumed pals, wending their way in jaunty fashion towards King George V Park. “How’s show biz?” they asked. In response I made the cross-armed gesture popularised by Run DMC circa 1989, which is about the most up-to-date piece of urban body language I know (I’d planned to bone up hanging out with rap stars), and which was appropriately ambiguous.
 
That afternoon, however, my big break finally arrived. Somebody handed me a walkie talkie and dispatched me to the Savannah to find the band Poison, whom the director had come up with the bright idea of filming a scene with. Arriving at the Grand Stand, however, about 80% of Poison had already crossed the stage. The 6,000-strong spandexed throng was pouring out on to the western end of the Savannah in jumbled mess, bikinis askew, headpieces discarded, any notion of staying in section long forgotten.

After fiddling with the buttons for about five minutes, I finally got the walkie to work. “We’ve missed Poison,” I yelled to the Assistant Director. “They’ve already crossed the stage!” I heard the AD relaying the news to the director, who cursed and grabbed the walkie. “Well then we’ll just have to get them to go across again!” he screamed. I almost dropped the handset laughing. “Did you hear what I said?” he yelled again. It took me a few moments to recollect myself. “Yes, I heard,” I shouted back, “But that can’t happen.” “And why the *%&# is that?” he yelled. “Because this is not your movie,” I replied calmly. “This is Carnival.”

Leaving the director spewing expletives on the other end, I switched off the walkie and caught a music truck down the road. And that was it for me and the biz.

My only regret is that I’d sold my costume, as the following year the band was charging $1250 for one that was practically identical.