In both cases the photo was used to advertise a public lecture by the photo’s subject, writer Thomas Glave—a lecture, I should add, that I’m glad to see taking place, as it presents a rare opportunity for a rational discussion about homosexuality in the Caribbean. The event also features my friend Colin Robinson. But all that’s beside the point, at least for the purposes of this blog post (listen to the podcast I recorded with Thomas and Nicholas Laughlin here). The point is that the image belongs to me, though there was nothing in either publication to indicate that this was the case. In Newsday’s case, the published version of the image even bears a Newsday watermark.

On learning of the Newsday instance, which, coming on the heels of UWI Today, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I made like a 21st century person and went public about the incident on Twitter and Facebook. Within a few hours I’d received an e-mail from Vaneisa Baksh, the editor of UWI Today, apologising for the error. She said she had come across the photo (uncredited, of course) on a web site advertising a reading by Thomas, and thought it was a promotional image. (I suspect it may be this site, whose owners will be hearing from me very soon). UWI Today is now in possession of an invoice from me, which Vaneisa has promised to shepherd personally through the labyrinth of the UWI finance department, and I’m deeply grateful for her gracious handling of the matter.

I’m still awaiting a response from Newsday, whom I also sent a note and an invoice, though to be fair to them, it was sent only today.

As a number of my Facebook friends have expressed an interest in the details of the matter, I’ve decided to make public the text of the letters I sent to both publications.

The letter to UWI Today:

Dear Vaneisa -

Many thanks for your messages and for understanding my position. I was alerted to UWI Today's use of the photo when the edition was first published, and have been meaning to send you a note (plus invoice!) since then. But then came Newsday's more egregious use of the image, to which UWI Today's initial use became an unfortunate footnote.

The sad reality is that all it takes is a single uncredited use of an image and it's downhill from there, and I do acknowledge that UWI Today was not the original violator. I think the more important point is that photos don't take themselves: any published photo should be attributed either to its owner or to the person who granted permission for its use, unless it happens to be in the public domain. I deliberately release my images under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en), which allows anyone to use them for non-commercial purposes as long as I am properly credited. This eliminates the need for people who wish to use my photos for purposes covered by the licence to contact me (though most do so anyway), and is also in keeping with my conviction that rigid copyright regimes stifle creativity and innovation and that sharing creates goodwill.

I acknowledge that I should have contacted you simultaneously with my posting of the status message on Twitter/Facebook, and I do apologise for not having done so. I do think it is useful to be public and transparent in situations such as this and I have already posted a response stating that you have been in touch, and will post another stating that the situation has been amicably resolved.

Many thanks again for your gracious handling of this situation. I hope Newsday follows suit! The invoice is attached.

Best,
Georgia

And to Newsday:

Dear Ms Sheppard and Ms. Lum Wai -

Georgia Popplewell

So perhaps I’m a little biased when it comes to 3canal. After all, they’ve been CFR’s official house band since 2005, and the bond is especially strong around where Carnival is concerned.

Caribbean Free Radio’s very first podcast was recorded in 3canal’s offices amidst the madness of Carnival Friday 2005, and last year 3canal and I teamed up to record the cut+clear carnival podcast, a six-part series examining various themes relating to the evolution of Trinidad and Tobago’s national festival.

We’d planned a reprise this year, but my work schedule and Haiti post-earthquake visit got in the way. So, as a substitute of sorts, 3canal passed me a recording they did for a local radio station previewing their 2010 Carnival show and releases. You can listen to it using the player below:

If you haven’t yet seen the 3canal Jam-It Show, I’d suggest you do so, and soon, as it runs only till Saturday (February 13). Since their move from the Little Carib Theatre to Queen’s Hall a few years ago, 3canal’s shows have been uniformly spectacular, especially in terms of the visual and musical production; but the 3canal Jam-It Show brings the theatrical aspects that made the Little Carib shows so delightful and special back to centre stage, making for a terrific—and terrifically funny—production.

Diehard PNM supporters should make an extra-special effort to attend!

Food distribution line in Port-au-Prince

Whether pepper spray or tear gas-related, the scuffle has died down by the time we arrive in town. The line is long, but people are waiting patiently. We ask a bystander what’s being distributed. He says he thinks it’s rice. I ask Roosevelt, our driver, to circle the Champs de Mars for a bit, so we can see what’s going on in the vast tent city that now occupies most of the city’s central square.

Unsurprisingly, the regular rhythm of Haitian life seems to have established itself in the maze of makeshift shelters clustered among plinths bearing statues of Toussaint, Pétion and company, the country’s founding fathers. Women are cooking, bathing babies and doing laundry in basins along the perimeter wall, bathing themselves at the roadside. Children are playing football, vendors have set up stalls on the periphery. Near the National Palace, people have gathered to watch a safe being lowered from a government building. Less formal salvage and scavenging operations are taking place in other parts of the city as well. We pass groups of men shoveling rubble, people picking among the ruins of buildings for things they can reuse. Among the detritus, Port-au-Prince is slowly coming back to life.

Around the tent city on the Champs the Mars, life resumes its normal rhythm

Last night a friend who’s come here to work with a Canadian NGO wondered how many of the “displaced” were people whose homes were intact but who were simply afraid of sleeping indoors. Yesterday the Haitian government, such as it is, issued a bulletin summarising the impact of the earthquake. On her blog, Anne-Christine D’Adesky posts translations of some of the highlights:

“Around 112,000 dead, 195,000 wounded, 1 million homeless, half the houses destroyed in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane; at least 23 private hospitals collapsed.

“The government yesterday announced the creation of 2 camps for displaced persons in Port-au-Prince: one on the road to Tabarre, the other at Croix des Bouquets. Another site has been identified in the zone of Leogane.

“Only qualified engineers can determine if a damaged building is sound enough to be recoccupied. The rule to follow until an engineer has evaluated a property is: if the building doesn't look sound, it isn't.

“Today, we estimate the capacity of food distribution varies between 200,000 and 300,000 rations a day. This means that, in Port-au-Prince and its surroundings alone, over 800,000 people will not be reached. This is the major challenge.

“The government is opposed to precipitous adoptions and uncontrolled departures from Haiti of vulnerable or orphaned children and is concerned about the risk of trafficking.

“NGOs engaged in humanitarian or food aid are encouraged to work with the UN system that has been established.”

It’s hard to know what’s really happening on the ground. Port-au-Prince is a vast city and unfamiliar city, and my primary goal in being here is not to report on the situation. We’re staying in Petionville, away from the fray. As the tear gas story above demonstrates, it’s difficult to verify information. You try to get around as much as you can, but in the end you’ll see only a tiny fraction of the whole, and perhaps understand or read accurately only a fraction of that. But the overriding story is about the distribution of aid: how badly it’s going, how supplies are failing to get to those who need it, and also how difficult the whole exercise is. I’m pretty sure that one is true.

On the edge of the tent city near the National Palace I talk to a pair of middle-aged women from Bel Air. They say they’d haven’t received any food supplies. I ask them if they plan on leaving the city for the countryside. The older one says no. I ask why. She says it’s because her father is dead—she has no family left “en province“.

Earthquake damage in Carrefour

We drive out west to the bedroom district of Carrefour, where 40-50% of the buildings are said to have sustained damaged. Along the main roads at least, the impact of the quake doesn’t seem as dramatic as in central Port-au-Prince, as the buildings are lower and not as densely clustered. Tent cities have sprung up on the median strips and there are mounds of burning garbage along the roadside. But Carrefour didn’t need an earthquake to render conditions appalling. Yet, the community is going about its business, obviously accustomed to the general squalor and the grey slurry of macerated garbage underfoot. We pass three money transfer agencies with long lines in front, a sign that remittances, which by some estimates account of over half of the country’s national income, are flowing back into Haiti once more.

Tent city on the median strip on the Carrefour main road

Crowd gathered at a money transfer agency in Carrefour, awaiting remittances from abroad

We head back into central Port-au-Prince to engage with a different side of Haiti at the storied Hotel Oloffson in Bois Verna, where it seems like half of the Corbett Haiti mailing list is lunching. We chat briefly with hotel proprietor Richard Morse, who now has 12,065 followers on Twitter and appears on 638 Twitter lists, all as a result of the earthquake. Also there: Anne-Christine D’Adesky, who’s been blogging and posting to the Corbett list consistently since the earthquake hit and says that Haiti is the litmus test for whether the lessons learned in other recent humanitarian situations have really been learned; New Yorker Tequila Minsky, just in been taking photos in a nearby neighbourhood; writer Amy Wilentz, who’s blogging for TIME magazine; Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, who corrects my camera-holding techniques; and Leah Gordon, who offers to take us to Portail Leogane visit the sculptors of the Grand Rue.

But that’s the subject of another post. Over and out.

—

We arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday afternoon, after a long but uneventful drive from Santo Domingo. As we approached Jimani, on the Dominican border, we began seeing probable evidence of the situation on the other third of the island: makeshift roadside stalls selling gallon bottles of gasoline, heavy trucks carrying cargo, a motorcycle passenger with his leg bandaged to the thigh. The area near the border gate was swarming with vehicles and people, and we fully expected border formalities to take some time. But after a mysterious confab between our driver and the two associates who’d come along on the trip and a man in a purple cap, we drove through the border gates just like that, with nary a nod from the guards or a request to see a passport, through the few yards of tierra de nadie between the two borders, and into Haiti. Later I noticed that the man in the purple cap had joined us and was sitting in the tray of the pickup among our luggage—turns out he was our Haitian navigator.

—

It was some time before we saw any earthquake damage—the epicentre was south-west of the city of Port-au-Prince, and we were approaching from the east. Then, here and there, the odd ill-starred building with a collapsed balcony, in parking lots and clearings, clusters of makeshift tents. Then both sights became became more frequent: residences with collapsed upper storeys, framed pictures still hanging off the walls, crushed sofas; the clusters turned into tent cities. But still not anything like the images from the news.

—

I think that part of me has come to Haiti wanting to believe that the images I’d been seeing in the media were somehow exaggerated. In largely middle-class Delmas, where our journey from Santo Domingo ends on Saturday, a number of commercial buildings and residences along the Route de Delmas have collapsed, either entirely or partially, and walls everywhere show cracks and fissures. From one building, a large pane of glass leans precariously out over the sidewalk, and a pale yellow three-story residence has caved in on itself like a fallen cake, the ground floor flattened beneath the weight the floors above. The arbitrariness of the damage was striking—why this building and not that one? But the Canadian Embassy is perfectly intact, and a reporter is recording a stand-up on one of the parapets above the road. Businesses, including gas stations, are operating. People carrying five-gallon water bottles are lined up in orderly fashion in front of a water distribution shop. Traffic is flowing, and in spite of the damage it appears that things have returned almost to normal in Delmas.

Queueing for water in Delmas

The offices of the National Democratic Institute, which the Internews team has commandeered for its use while in Haiti, are buzzing with activity. A young Haitian hanging out in front of the building helps us take our luggage up the stairs. “Ça va [How’s it going?]?” he says. “Ça va bien,” I reply. The stock response, but it displeases him. “Ca va *pas* bien [It's *not* going well]“, he says. “J’ai perdu ma maison, mon beau-frère. Je suis sans-abri [I’ve lost my house, my brother-in-law is dead. I’m homeless].”

We’ve arrived just at the moment when the Internews team is rushing to get their daily information programme on air, so nobody pays us much heed. The place is crammed with suitcases, air mattresses, cases of water, laptops, emergency radios. Towels are slung over chair backs, and one shelf of a stationery cupboard is loaded with canned food. It doesn’t look like there’ll be room for us. We issue tweets saying we’re looking for accommodation and Alice gets on the phone and starts working her family contacts. Within 45 minutes Alice’s friends L and B have arrived to collect us, and we head back out on to the Route de Delmas, now in darkness except for the headlights of cars and the fires and flambeaux on street vendors’ stalls.

On our way up to L and B’s house in Laboule we pass through well-heeled Pétionville, which is reported to have been largely unaffected by the quake. Two of its gracious squares, Place Boyer and Place St. Pierre, have nevertheless been transformed into teeming tent cities, filled with the newly homeless from other parts of this divided city . The luckier people are settling down for the night under the canopies of camionettes parked at the side of the road. In spite of the people milling around in the darkness, it is quiet. Parked across from the Hotel Kinam on Place St. Pierre is a MINUSTAH truck.

Tent city at Place St. Pierre, Pétionville

—-

It’s odd to wake up the next morning in Laboule and look out upon a stunning mountain view. None of the houses in the area appears to have sustained much damage, though L and B have lost a retaining wall. The absence of running water and electricity probably have less to do with the earthquake than the fact that we’re in Haiti. At L and B’s house there are a few hairline cracks in the mortar that L, an engineer, has marked with black crayon, so he’ll know if they widen. L takes what he calls a scientific approach to the quake. He explains the math behind the Richter Scale and has decided it’s not worth worrying about aftershocks. In fact, L sleeps through the aftershock that occurs on Sunday afternoon.

The radio reports on Sunday indicate that people continue to be evacuated from the city. Over lunch, L tells us that some “méchants” (troublemakers) are spreading rumours that people who opt for evacuation won’t be allowed to return to the capital for five years. We also talk about L’s sister, a physician who has come from the States to volunteer her services and is now working in a centre at Croix des Bouquets. L’s sister reports that Haitian doctors are being sidelined in the relief efforts, and it’s only after she gives an interview to CNN that she starts getting some grudging respect from the big international agencies.

—-

We finally leave Laboule late on Sunday afternoon and descend into Port-au-Prince. There are fallen buildings all along the Route de Bourdon and a slum that covers the hillside across the distance like a skin looks chipped and battered. It gets worse at we get nearer to the city centre, but it’s still not the total wreckage from the photos. We arrive at the Champs de Mars, the massive square, which has been partly overtaken by a multi-section tent city. The sinking feeling sets in officially as we stop in front of the National Palace with its caved-roof. That one certainly matches the news photos, except that up close it’s more massive and more desolate. We drive around the Champs de Mars and pass in front of the Plaza Hotel, where a news cameraman is filming what looks like a heap of black rags in the street. The black rags are in fact two dead bodies, perhaps recently pulled from the wreckage, their limbs intertwined.

The area just east of the Champs de Mars is straight out of the news photos. A long corridor of rubble, not a building left standing. You’ve all seen it by now, so I don’t need to describe it further, or the scent of decay that hangs in the air, now several times less intense than it was a few days ago.

I’m adding these last few lines just so I can say I didn’t end on a note of despair. I apologise for adding to the heavy burden of bad news already borne by this country. And now to make a plan for what we’ll be doing while we’re here.

———-

Activist Verna St. Rose at the Drummit2Summit Summit of the Americas protest in St. James, an event that will perhaps be remembered less for its substance than for the disproportionately aggressive response by the Guard and Emergency Branch of the Trinidad and Tobago police force, who arrived at the scene in full riot gear and attempted to disperse the crowd.

——-

My bicycle parked on the IJ waterfront in Amsterdam in June. Memories of two great weeks spent in that most bike-friendly of cities.

——–

The teeming crowds in the area of Makola Market in Accra, Ghana. Think Charlotte Street in Port of Spain multiplied by several.

——-

(L to R) Fashion designer Robert Young of The Cloth with Wendell Manwarren and Roger Roberts of Trinidad and Tobago rapso band 3canal. Wendell and Roger are wearing jackets Robert designed for their upcoming tour of India.

Caribbean Free Radio #51 is a command performance of sorts recorded at Little House, home of 2/3 of my house band 3canal. I was summoned there last night to talk with Wendell Manwarren and Roger Roberts about their upcoming tour of India.

Also discussed: Roger’s participation in the New York City Marathon (bib #18722, in case you’re interested) this coming Sunday! I’ve just signed up with the Marathon’s Athlete Alert service so I can track Roger’s progress on race day.

It’s hard not to take notice of South African telecoms giant MTN’s presence in Ghana, thanks at least in part to the colours in its logo. Vodafone, the country’s flagship telecoms operator, does a fair amount of this kind of branding as well, but Vodafone red can’t hold a candle to MTN yellow, especially under the West African sun.

There’s a branding/design lesson in there somewhere.

“Manhattan Valley Viaduct (yellow cab)” – New York, September 2009

“Manhattan Valley Viaduct (town car)” – New York, September 2009

“Cae la noche (rojo)” – Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, November 2007

“Cae la noche (negro)” – Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, November 2007

They removed the ceiling boards yesterday, so this morning I had a glimpse of what my house will look like from the inside when the new roof is done; as that relates, as least, to the slope of the new ceilings.

Sadly, I will be losing much of that glorious view of the sky.

I wish it were possible in this climate to install a glass roof that wouldn’t turn the place into a green house. Or that roofs weren’t necessary at all.

Because cell phones mics are optimised for capturing the human voice, the files Audioboo records are of pretty good quality. The app’s truly winning feature, however, is its simplicity: hit “record” —> put phone to ear and speak —> garnish with optional title, metadata, image —> hit “publish”. The other audio microblogging services I’ve played with all involved dialing in to phone numbers (that were usually international long distance for me) and other rigmaroles.

The downside to Audioboo is that in order to record a “boo” you need an iPhone, at least for now. (Another downside is that the recordings are called “boos”, though who would ever have dreamt that the word “tweet” would come to roll off the tongue in as it does today?)

Will Audioboo rekindle the podcasting fire in me? Hard to tell. But here are my first two boos, and two images to illustrate them. If I decide to boo further, you’ll find the lot archived here.

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/)

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

For the 2009 carnival season I’ve teamed up with 3canal to produce a series of down and dirty (dutty?) podcasts called cut+clear carnival. We’re keeping it deliberately simple and free-flowing: the plan is for us to meet on Mondays, riff for 15 or so minutes on things carnival-related, preferably with a guest, then have the show edited and uploaded by Tuesday.

In this pilot episode Roger Roberts and Wendell Manwarren of 3canal shoot the breeze with MPC wizard Keshav Chandradath Singh of the cut+clear crew and Canboulay.

See you at the launch of 3canal’s 2009 release, Joy+Fire, on Sunday 19 January at 6pm at the Queen’s Hall Courtyard, Port of Spain, Trinidad!

3canal’s web site
3canal at Trinidadtunes.com
3canal on iTunes
3canal on Facebook
3canal on Twitter

Nearly four years later, CFR finally hits the half-century. For show #50 I return to the place where it all began—cut+clear productions, headquarters of CFR’s “house band”, 3canal, for a leisurely chat with Wendell, Roger and Stanton about “Boom Up History“, the music track they’re giving away for free on Trinidadtunes.com, life on the road and the making of Joy + Fire, their 2009 release.

And here’s the Boom Up History video, filmed and directed by Walt Lovelace.

Boom Up History from 3canal on Vimeo (Director: Walt Lovelace)

It was only after reading the comment Renata left at Flickr that it occurred to me to look into the science behind why I felt compelled to take a photo of the full moon last night: at this time of year (though more so in October) the moon is at its perigee, or closest approach to earth, and therefore appears larger and brighter.

J9 will probably also be wondering if this photo was taken with her 18-250mm lens, which I took for a test run yesterday. She’ll be happy to know it was.

It’s been a while since I posted something from the family photo archives. An aunt in Canada recently sent my mother this 1953 photo take at the annual car rally held on or around its eponymous saint‘s feast day (July 25) by the St. Christopher’s Anglican Church in Siparia, Trinidad. My mother recalls that the event was also called the Travellers’ Rally, and included among its activities a parking competition.

I found references to the St. Christopher’s Rally on web sites like the Trinidad and Tobago Rally Club’s (TTRC) now defunct blog, which refers to it as the St. Christopher’s Rally and Treasure Hunt. According to the TTRC blog, the event—”one of the oldest ralles in Trinidad”—was re-introduced in 2006 “after a long absence on the TTRC calendar”. It was held on July 30 of that year, began at the Gulf City North Car Park in La Romain and ended at the church in Siparia. The Zorce racing magazine forum has a reference to a 2007 edition taking place on July 29. Anyone know whether there was a 2008 edition?

I’m not much of a car enthusiast, but I do like the idea of road rallies with their emphasis on navigation and teamwork. Even more appealing to me is the idea of a parking competition, though I have a hunch that that part of the event is a thing of the past, rather like the photo above.

I learned a few days ago that Trinidadian photographer Jeffrey Chock has fallen seriously ill on a trip to Canada, and is in urgent need of surgery. The estimated cost of that surgery, from what I have heard, is around TT$300,000 (US$48,000). The information I have about Jeffrey’s medical condition is third-hand, so I hesitate to repeat it here (very un-Trinidadian of me, I know!), but I’ll update this post with the details when I’m sure what I have is accurate. What I do know is that Jeffrey’s surgery needs to be paid for, which is why I’ve created the donation widget below.

Jeffrey Chock and I are not close friends, but I’ve known him for years and have the deepest admiration for his work (which I once photographed him doing). As dancer Dave Williams said to me recently, “The man understands dance. I doh let anybody else photograph my shows!” And I know you’d hear local maspeople, thespians and pannists express similar sentiments.

I also know that, were I ever to be in a similar position, I’d be tremendously grateful to anyone who would do the same for me.

I originally created this donation widget for use on the “Friends of Jeffrey Chock” Facebook group, but as ChipIn campaigns must be connected to a PayPal account, and as the PayPal account to which this one is connected is mine, I decided to reduce the target figure to US$12,000 and make it a personal campaign as well. (I’ve already made a small donation, and I’ll even throw in more funds if you do!) There may also be other fundraising efforts in progress, in which case I promise to hand over the funds I raise to whoever ends up being the central collector.

So I would be extremely grateful if you would help Jeffrey pay for his surgery by donating via the widget below, and/or embedding it or linking to it on your own website, Facebook page etc. Thank you!

UPDATE:
For those wishing to purchase Jeffrey’s book Trinidad Carnival, there are a few copies available at Paper Based bookstore at the Hotel Normandie, St. Ann’s.

A Tropical Mockingbird (mimus gilvus), underfeathers ruffled by the wind, just before this morning’s rainstorm.

I’ve been in Venice, Italy, since July 2, recovering from Global Voices Summit-planning and generally trying to have a real vacation. So this is probably about as much blogging as is going to happen for the next week or so.

We’ve had some really excellent coverage of the Summit in the press and elsewhere, however – read all about it at the Global Voices Media Archive.

The power went about an hour ago, so here in the depths of the Diego Martin valley we’re experiencing a rare moment of utter darkness. A fellow Twitter user asked me the other day how much of the southern sky we were able to see from Trinidad. The answer is quite a lot of it, though it occurred me then that, for some odd reason, I rarely look south.

Tonight I did, though. The image below is the view looking south. The one above is looking north-west.

Seen from my home in Diego Martin, Trinidad.

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A certified “without” (I deliberately misplaced my ID card some years ago, largely on account of the horrifying photo), I took the red line. Once there, I proffered my passport and the polling card I’d received in the mail. The officer consulted the electoral list and drew a red line through my name, then rifled through a massive ledger and found a blue card with my registration info and a copy of the dreadful photo (now thankfully faded) from my lost ID card stuck to it. (I hope a copy of information in this ledger is stored on a computer somewhere.) Then the officer made me swear that I wasn’t lying about being unable to produce an ID card and that I hadn’t sold it, after which I had to sign a note confirming same. Then my name and consecutive number (198, for the record) were announced, mainly for the benefit of the two polling agents present (one of whom was probably COP and the other PNM–the UNC Alliance probably not bothering to waste further resources in this constituency), whose task is to try and figure out who I’m likely to be voting for.

Then I moved on to the voting officer, who signed and handed me my ballot paper and showed me how to fold it and to use the “X” stamp. Then I went behind a screen propped up on a school desk, considered briefly whether to inaugurate Jeremy’s proposed plan for proportional representation by putting a percentage instead of an “X” next to the name of my candidate of choice, but decided on the “X” instead. Then I inserted my ballot through a slot into a padlocked metal box, dipped my finger into a pot of red ink, wiped off the excess, and left the room. So I’ve exercised my constitutional right, as the people like to say.

All morning the words to Bally’s “Party Time“, one of the undisputed hits of the 1986 election season, have been ringing in my head; belatedly, I know, as yesterday marked the end of the mindless and particularly Trinidadian brand of campaigning that Bally parodies in his calypso and which seems to have been taken to unprecedented heights this year. And of course I’m remembering 1986, the first and only time I ever felt deeply involved in an election campaign, not to mention hopeful about the outcome. That year my neighbourhood threw their support, predictably, behind the NAR, and I, not long back from university abroad, joined in. I spent most of that election day either at the polling station (I was a polling agent) or at the house up the street which had been designated NAR activist headquarters, getting high on the buzz.

The NAR won 33 out of 36 seats, of course, and swept into power on a tremendous tide of goodwill. Who knew then that, a mere three and a half years later, I’d be sitting in traffic on a highway in northern California (having left Trinidad only five days earlier) and hear an announcement over National Public Radio about a coup in Trinidad and Tobago. A journalist friend of mine says that when she hears the calypso “Vote Dem Out”, the campaign song that rocked the worlds of NAR supporters in 1986, chills still run up her spine–though not for quite the same reasons they did in 1986.

I envy my COP activist neighbours, some of whom were key figures in the NAR frenzy of 21 years ago, their commitment and passion and the sense of hope they’ve clearly been able to muster about the outcome of this year’s election. But try as I might, I can’t share in it.

Tonight I’ll be getting together with a few friends here at home to watch the election results. We’ll order some food, and Jonty is poised to grab a few bottles of wine once the polls close and the prohibition against the sale of alcohol during polling time is lifted. Nikipedia says he may blog, but we (or rather I) have warned him that relative sociability is one of the requirements for being a part of this lime. We probably won’t make it a very late night. J9 has to be up early for a shoot tomorrow, and in any case we’ll probably all drink more than we should. Then wake up tomorrow and face the music.