Friday, October 30, 2009

... "taliban" travelogue trilogy ... 3rd gear ... Black River ...


I believe it was Paul who first told me new slang for these automobiles ...
hardy versatile car-truck, best form-function combo found on four wheels ...

as seen on newsreels from Afghanistan ... built tough to suit the nether regions of anywhere ...
rebel-associated pick-ups now known as ... "taliban" ... linguistic inventiveness rules life here ....
I had been north to Toronto, a vital visit with my grown-up daughter and son ...
barely three weeks after a Jamaican excursion ... here I was having another one ...

this time I planned to relive long-time memories ... nostalgia, to tell the absolute truth ...
via the same road trip to Black River ... we so often did back then in our youth ...

Dad was once doctor-of-record, in old Spanish Town ... poverty and strife still entrenched there ...
I always think on him hard, passing that hospital front-gate ... the old cathedral and historic town square ...













prior commitment detoured us to Ewarton ... Pleasant Farm actually, way off our track ...
but effectively, it doubled my experience ... driving all the way 'round there and back ...

the talk was of past times and present reality, farming cassava, Paul's beloved livestock ... and whatnot ...
in the Rio Cobre gorge we paused to admire mother nature's salacious split ... the "pum pum" rock spot ...













on the French-built, multi-lane, wide Mandela Highway ... we paid our compulsory cash toll ...
here speed demons hype-flex flash rides ... Beenie wrote off his hummer and Bolt's bimma did a pupalick roll ...













Gutters, Tombstone, Goshen, Lacovia ... many a familiar place-name ...
in the St. Bess red dirt some things do change ... but most seemed to stay exactly the same ...














over two days and nights I'd do everything, get to know the next generation ...
visiting the Black River Upper Morass was bonus ... up past derelict "Sixteen Pump" location ...













a species-rich ecosystem I'd heard tales of ... felt like Jamaica's version of Africa's Nile ...
never more so than when we saw, off to one side ... the fabled, yet elusive Black River crocodile ...













Paul and I grew up fishing, this time in a "taliban" on the dykes, today my eight-inch catfish won our lifetime contest ...
rod and line couldn't match the guys with no fear of reptiles ... beating water into all-day nets earlyset to corner their quest ...







inspiration screamed at me in a meditative morning stretch ... we ate ackee and headed back to town ...
three road-trips this year felt spiritually connected ... this travelogue trilogy had to be written down ...

Monday, October 26, 2009

... "taliban" travelogue trilogy ... 2nd gear ... Cinchona ...

     it wasn't something I expected, summer in Kingston and a chance to do this again ...
     almost certainly wouldn't have happened if there was even the least chance of rain ...

     nearly went once as a youth but missed out on going to these gardens way up in the heights ...
    such is the trek to Cinchona, few attempt it ... most never lay eyes on those sights ...

     I had been to Strawberry Hill but this place was even higher than that ...
     five thousand feet up, a different Jamaica ... from the one you see on the flat ...

    so when Willy called and said his crew were on the go ...
    "can you be ready early o'clock?," there was never a chance I'd say no ...















     seven of us met up at Hope Gardens ... Doc had his 4x4 pick-up to join the convoy ...
    the terrain requires that type of car, so he drives, the rest of us have faith and enjoy ...


    true to form it took a while to get ready and of course we took off late ...
    wedged into the truckbed we were predictably one of the last out of the gate ...












    but that didn't matter 'cause y'dun know seh ... in Jah guidance we trust ...
    only thing, it was seriously dry and we all got covered in dust ...

    the scenery was breathtaking, watching roadside vegetation change ...
    the higher and further we made our way up, into the Blue Mountain range ...














    occasionally a driver would need to manoeuvre a turn, or accomodate nature's call ...
    this slowed everyone down, one or two wouldn't make it at all ...












     it was hotter than expected up there ... creatively I sacrificed my shirt ...
    it became mask and headgear ... inhaling through fabric would filter the dirt ...

  recent hurricanes felled trees en-route, and up at the top ...
    who'd been there before noticed changes when we finally came to a stop ...

    Fyahball, the caretaker, lent his facilities to prepare what we took ...
    most brought food ... we had sprat, veggie-rice and breadfruit to cook ...




     on top of the world, I couldn't help thinking,"man, this is it! - what a life!"...
    playing intense keep-up football we forgot all stress and strife ...













    even up here the world is wired for sound ... a DJ with generator was a huge bonus ...
    this is musical Jamaica after all, where riddim soundtrack is compulsory, must ...












     a wide botanical variety of trees, bushes and flowers ... not to mention the panoramic view ...
    makes it impossible for me, or any writer I've read, to give this place its rightful due ...














     it's a hard site to get to ... perhaps that's just as well, meet and right ...
    conventional wisdom tells us there's nothing good that comes without a fight ...














Friday, October 23, 2009

... "taliban" travelogue trilogy ... 1st gear ... Dominica ...

    I went for a ride in an all terrain pick-up, on an island I'd never been to before ...
    the mountains were steepled and shaggy, rivers and streams rushed to the shores ...

    this place is called Dominica ... not the republic where Spanish is spoke ...
    but the land where Johnny Depp made his film, the one about that pirate bloke ...

    Bully for Anita the Film-Commish, getting us shown at the borrowed French Hall ...
    there's no cinema here you know ... but, we'd have settled for a large blank white wall ...













  
 adults and schoolers loved our film and swore they'd invite us back ...
    encouraging me, while I was there, to sightsee off the beaten track ...

    my friend Lowell stepped up, with his knowledge of the lie-of-the-land ...
    he brought some friends and we set off, this intrepid impromptu band ...

    the girls rode up front with the driver, Ras Petros and I in the open-backed berth ...
    slalom style, windswept, carefree, brave sons of the earth ...

  
  this west-to-east cross-island drive, through misty low cloud and dew rain ... 
    tight-gripped and stagger-standing ... you'd have thought us insane ...

     well we were, in a way, as we ate up the fly-by view ...
    of the verdant landscape we found ourselves adventurously barrelling through ...

    
passing gardens, citrus orchards and many abundant plantations ...
    precipitous plunges, cascading streams and steep, steep inclinations ...

    emerging to the Atlantic, by delightfully named Rosalie ...
    on a bridge where another run-off riverbed meets the wide open sea ...














   on to La Plaine, our destination, the ancestral home of our guide ...
   what we visited around that district ... was more than worth the risky ride ...













    I walked in a Garden Of Eden, strolled on volcanic black sand ...
     and rode a green grotto rope swing, on Lowell's own plot of land ...













 
    it was a while before we got tired, sundown and chill signalling end of day ...
    we climbed aboard the trusty truck, once again on our way ...

    the return run to Roseau took us south before turning back west ...
    if we thought the first leg twisty, the second was a more tortuous test ...

  by the time night enveloped there was much less to see ...
    still, we made it back, thankfully intact, primed and ready for a cold Kubuli or three ...

Thursday, October 15, 2009

... brown babies and beasts of burden ...

... whenever I'm flipping through channels and I happen upon the face of Wanda Sykes I'm compelled to stop ... to watch and listen ... such is the effect of her elfin visage on me ... it's the same sort of compulsion when I see the goofy mischief in Tracy Morgan's face ... I expect the laughter to come instinctively and I'd put money on it being slightly uncomfortable at times too ...















... I happened upon Wanda's stand-up this week, her topical material these days is heavy on Obama ... understandably ... and still includes the shtick she used at the White House Correspondents dinner event she was invited to regale ... clearly, like many, she's proud of America for electing a black Prez ... adding, "that's unless he fucks up, then it's like, who voted for the half-white guy? .... who voted for the mulatto?" ...

... hold up ... reeeewind .... mulatto?! ...

... now, as we all know ... context is everything in controversial matters, especially in comedy, and despite my knee-jerk cringe I don't have a problemo with the use of a word in service of an act of contemporary performance ... for me this includes the notorious "n" word ... "nigger/nigga"... after all, they are just words ... words which can be rendered odious by rank overuse, ignorant abuse or malicious intent ... no ... the spark that has set off my powderkeg is to be found in the aftermath ... the whole idea of mixed-race sub-labelling ...

... even taking into consideration cultural variances ... I'm told the antecedents of the term carry no negative holdover in Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures and mulatto/mulatta is seen as an affirmation of aesthetic positives ... well, just how do you separate a cafe-au-lait range of skintones and ringlets from the commercial trading of Africans? ... and what were the purposes for the arithmetic of African-ness on a scale of mulatto(half-African) to hexadecaroon(one-sixteenth African)? ... to quote Wikipedia ... "Defining an individual mathematically is inherently reductive, and these terms derived from the slave trade which treated these people as chattel." ... yet still, some people refer to themselves as mulatto ... I've heard defense of the fifteenth-century coinage with simple justification ...

..."it's in the dictionary"...

... it's safe to say Wiki is the new Webster's ... I hope to trigger a spike in hits on the definition of mulatto ... there you find a wider treatment than a dictionary would offer ... you're given enough insight to decide whether the term is a descriptive or a loaded label ... meanwhile children are born, and those who would comment can scamper to clarify the appropriateness of their terminology ... if I'm a mulatto for instance, are my children also? ... there are undoubtably even narrower slots into which Wanda's own recently arrived twins could be put ...

... interestingly, as I write this there's a case in Louisiana, U.S.A. of a marriage license being denied to an interracial couple ... the backlash of outrage, though quick, loud and widespread only goes so far to counter the intuition that such attitudes are symptomatic of deeply ingrained social biases based on historically engineered hierarchies ...

... confronting these aspects of our multi-cultural realities can feel Quixotic at times and most would rather not bother or have to in these modern times ... me included ... but alas ... a luta continua ...

... my approach has settled into a mature place ... just the facts ma'am ... the term mulatto derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word for mule ... we know that a mule is only produced from a horse and a donkey ... so ... as cute as these noble-yet-lowly beasts-of-burden can be when they are babies, they are a result of inter-species mating and are therefore generally sterile ... I don't know about you but none of the mulattoes I know fit this description ...

Thursday, October 8, 2009

... dreams of Beowulf, baubles and bullion ....

... I know by now you've all heard about the metal detector hobbyist who discovered fifteen hundred pieces of ornate "dark ages" gold and silver in a grassy field in Staffordshire, UK ...

... yeh yeh!, there's palpable excitement in the world of Anglo-Saxon archaeology right now, so, count me present! ... because ...













... some thirty-plus years ago I signed up to study Geography at Nottingham University and blithely opted to read Archaeology too ... towards a joint degree ... in effect fusing two interests which remain with me today but have little direct relevance to my eventual career in film and television ... I may never understand why I didn't go for a drama course ... it wasn't touted as much of an option back then but that's no excuse 'cos it's not like Geog/Arch was ... uknowwaddamsayin'? ...

... from mi eye deh a mi knee I've known there must be valuable items from times gone by to be found in hidden locations ... this, and the grounding corroboration of digging up the past, is a continuing interest which draws me to that knowledge ... it was a long dusty bush walk to the Arawak Museum near Central Village but for an adventurous country boy with a lifetime subscription to National Geographic and a keen interest in "the bigger picture" it made a perfect pilgrimage ... situated on the site of an Arawak/Taino settlement on a commercial white marl deposit the under-appreciated destination held great fascination for me ... the archaeologists on-site encouraged my visits ... I watched them scratch and sieve the soil for significance ... layer by layer the middens gave up the bones, pottery and tools that told broad stories of the people who once lived there ...

... additionally, from an upstairs balcony at the house where I grew up ... in St. Jago Heights near Spanish Town, Jamaica ... I could see the Kingston deepwater harbor in the eastern distance and the low glow of Port Royal, pirate capital of the world at one point, luminating a corner of the night horizon in the right conditions ... family visits to the restored Rodney Arms at Port Henderson provided an easy setting in which to conjure mental images of doubloons and pieces-of-eight ...












... more recently, visits to Nelson's Dockyard in English Harbor, Antigua, the only restored Georgian site of its kind in the world, keeps my nerd-brain asking where I would have hidden the stash if I was dying of scurvy ...

... like so many dreamers and romantics I had early fantasies about finding lost or hidden treasures ... in the Caribbean there's much fantasy fodder with all the rum-soaked lore on the subject, sunstroked sailors concealing scribbled parchments where "X" marks the spot ... rubies, diamonds, strings of pearls and ingots of gold, not to mention the many beaches and caves where all the jewel-stuffed chests are supposed to be buried ...

... during some time spent in Grand Cayman decades ago I befriended Karen, daughter of well-known Florida salvager Art McKee ... retrieving relics and riches can be a family business and she could tell a story or two about real treasures ... and, with the history of trade, exploration, privateering, warfare and weather in the region, her's wasn't the only family in that biz ...

... Terry Herbert, our newly-rich hero in England who poked around for eighteen years before locating this massively important hoard, and professional salvagers bring this fantasy to life with every find ... my own personal-best discovery came when I uncovered the skull of a prehistoric deer with a sawn-off antler on a field-trip excavation near Cheltenham in Gloucester ... I was elated ... these things are relative you see ...














... the less-than-reverential looking Nottingham University trio pictured here circa 1977 in the ruins of Roman-era latrines on dreary Hadrian's Wall, apparently conducting some sort of disrespectful student ritual, might have been seen digging in the mud if there were a few bits of gilded gold scattered around ... mostly though, finding ancient pricelessness remains the stuff of dreams, good fortune and perseverance ...

... my gratitude to the custodians at - http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/ for proliferating the images of the freshly recovered, still-caked-in-dirt Anglo-Saxon artifacts on the worldwide web ... wouldn't Beowulf of antiquity be bewildered by the ubiquity of the internet ...

Friday, October 2, 2009

... Miss Ivy first son ... and grandson ...

... I carried the photo around with me the whole time we were filming Catwoman in Vancouver ... convinced I would get a chance to show it to Halle Berry who was in town taking her turn as the feline fury... she had not yet wedded her settlin' down man, which added a touch of spice to the possibility ...

... in the black and white posed shot was a boy, of around five, and his doe eyed mother ... looking at the image it strikes me that both of them have so much life ahead of them ... such is the benefit of hindsight ... the Jamaica this woman had returned to serve after post-graduate study abroad was embracing independence and had turned a page in the annals of its history as a jewel of the colonial British Empire ... for that boy it was the early stages of a journey through changing times ... a journey that now features his blogging in this space, almost half a century later, in honor of the woman who raised him ...

















... her face looks for all it's worth like Dorothy Dandridge, the American actress whose own browning black beauty represented a standard of the day ... inevitably portrayed by Halle ... our Miss Ivy was often mistaken for the screen idol around the Columbia University campus in 50's New York ... these were Pete Seeger times, Stokely Carmichael, Belafonte, Lena Horne and optimism ...

... back home, mento was giving way to ska, Oxford english was yielding to more dynamic patois and urban areas developed new ways to project their kinetic energies ... Kingston needed teachers, and with both parents in that profession it was unsurprising that this mother-of-two also taught ... a teacher of teachers at Mico College (est.1835), the oldest teacher-training institution in the Western Hemisphere ...

... Ivy-league you might say ...

... church and hospital committees, volunteer endeavours, raising two boys in a rapidly growing society .... wife, mother, daughter, sister, nation-builder ... complete the picture of selfless service to God, kin and country ...

... there are indelible memories of the heady Michael Manley era which transformed the minds of the nation before and after the landmark 1972 election ... the political maelstrom was at once exciting and promising as it was foreboding and fractious, resulting in new realities of greater self-awareness, devalued currency and passionate pride in the ever-expanding global footprint some now call Brand Jamaica ... warts and all ... the memories of the same period for Miss Ivy carry adjectives more suited to her perspective which by this point had become more focussed on futures for her sons than collective infrastructures ...














... by the time the seventies had blown by the photos were boasting color, bigger hair and our maturing-yet-ageless protagonists were on the move ... part of the destiny of a small place is to look beyond its borders and spread out ... this is not a phenomenon that can be linked solely to political weather or a single generation ... the common binding factor has to be a search for betterment, an umbrella phrase that encompasses all reasons for emigration ... and like her mother before her, another Miss Ivy, the Dominion of Canada, warts and all, was chosen as a new frontier with new opportunities ...












... how you approach challenges is part of the legacy you leave ... Ivy senior was as unflappable as the Dalai Lama and just as jovial ... while Ivy junior proved to be resilient, resourceful and intrepid enough to start anew as an overqualified clerical temp en-route to an almost year-long Swiss-appointed mental health consultancy in Namibia at the behest of the United Nations ...

... the countdown to the millenium was speeding up and no-one knew definitively what the year 2000 would look like ... Ivy senior went to meet her maker before the big party and the rest of us will forever be trying to match her spirit and sense of humor ... she herself, as a music fan and popular-culture afficionado, would have gotten a huge kick out of pre-eminent dancehall personality Rodney Price a.k.a. Bounty Killer, Warlord or ... Miss Ivy Last Son ... and his mother, you guessed it ... Miss Ivy ...

... for my mother the millennium brought a well earned retirement within which all her talents from classroom and workplace still work in tandem with her spiritual strength in service of community and her sons and their children ...

... in retrospect, this is the chat that would probably have spewed forth if I met Halle and she had seemed remotely interested ... the description of the matriarchy that nurtured me ... the tale of the Dandridge look-alike and her mother ... the men with whom they made homes ... the life stories that informed rock-solid faith, strength to raise families while aging gracefully and productively ... Halle might have called for security ...

... I can hear the mama-mantra ... "the Lord works in mysterious ways my son" ... perhaps it's a good thing I never met Halle Berry then, falling as I do, somewhere on the spectrum between her two ex-husbands in appearance ... our characters never crossed paths in the movie, I didn't even go to the wrap party when filming was over ... but if I meet her now, preferably on another project, I'd still show her the old photo and for added inspiration, update it with an image of a real superhero who continues to live the full life ...