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Favourite films of 2011

2012-02-26T09:47:00.000-04:00

Tom Hiddleston in Joanna Hogg's sublime film Archipelago

The best film of the year is not always the same as one's favourite film of the year. The former is destined to remain a classic, watched and studied (perhaps in film school) for decades to come. The latter is the film you are most likely to pop into the DVD player when you get home on a rainy Saturday night. In the spirit of today's Oscars, here's a look at some of our favourite films from the past year.

Archipelago. Posh family tensions crack open over a getaway to the Isles of Scilly. Sounds unappealing as the subject matter for a film? Hold your horses. This film from English director Joanna Hogg was an utter surprise. Very few films are all about pleasure and the senses. This film ravishes, it is washed with such pale and cold browns and greens, it is wind and rain-swept. Every single shot is composed with a kind of sly joy: the film is like one long, extended still-life rupturing ever so slightly via changes in the environment and its characters. Not since The Mysterious Case of Angelica have I enjoyed a film so much. This is the work of an important artist.

A Separation. If you like cinema that wraps a tight, suffocating coil around you and never lets go, this is a film for you. I mean that in a good way! A Separation is a searing drama about a family in crisis set in Iran, a country whose films are not often seen outside of it. The crisis at the heart of the film is so well-developed and minutely observed that I had to watch every shot with admiration and a desire to know what happens next. The movie is as much about Iran's moral/legal system as it is about the family which falls apart at its core. Like The Tree of Life, this is a film I have been unable to forget.

Peyman Maadi and Sareh Bayat in A Separation

Contagion. Talk about an under-rated film. Yes, we have seen virus disaster movies before. Yes, we've done the whole ensemble cast, how-are-they-connected-in-the-end? game. But I will say this: there was — with perhaps only one exception — not a more stylish or better edited film in 2011. It is a compelling and plausible rendition of the outbreak of a mysterious and deadly virus which affects a wide cast of characters as the world comes to terms with it in a frenzy of panic and bureaucracy. The film has slipped below most awards radars because of the timing of its release and possibly its seemingly brain-free box-office content. It's a shame, because Kate Winslet gives what is perhaps the best performance of her career, and Gywneth Palthrow is creepily good as an oblivious party-wife whose personal choices are at the heart of global events.

Drive. If Bronson was a "film" then this is Nicholas Winding Refn's epic tale. There is very little dialogue in Drive and the miracle is in Ryan Gosling, a protean actor who quite surprisingly managed to fit in this gruesome tale of crime and romance. What is most interesting about Drive, though, is its blurring of genres. We're still not sure what it's supposed to be. But whatever it is we were more than happy to go along for the ride. Albert Brooks delivers one of the great performances and is — perhaps predictably — overlooked for an Oscar.

Jane Eyre. Ah Mr Fassbender as Rochester. The film was not rocket science. It was based on an old classic. But how well it worked, how dangerous it appeared, how beautifully scored. Mia Wisikowsa is by far the best Jane on celluloid. Her performance has been ignored by all the awards bodies. Jaime Bell is also exceptional as St John Rivers.

Ryan Gosling in Drive

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Let's not get into a debate about whether the original Swedish version was better or whether the David Fincher version does "justice" to the book. At the end of the day, the film is good, not airtight, but good. It is certainly the rival to Contagion for its stylish look and its editing. There are some lingering doubts over a few of the violent and seemingly gratuitous rape scenes. And it does seem a bit long. Notwithstanding, it worked well.

The Skin I Live In. There are many contenders for "creepiest film of the year" but I think this one takes the prize by a big margin. It's creepy, but not in an expected or garish way: only a few scenes are blood-soaked. What is unnerving about it is how much of director Pedro Almodovar is in it: his almost perverse willingness to twist a plot into all sorts of odd shapes and to take audiences to complex places. The film has an unforgettable sequence involving a series of events in a lush garden in the backdrop to a party. The sequences is deliberately corny and cheeky and is most certainly comic, but such darkness fills the canvas! The lead actress, Elena Anaya, is extremely good in a very unusual role.

Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life. Far from being didactic, The Tree of Life knows nothing and yet it knows, at its heart, that it knows nothing, despite its seeming Christian underpinnings. This is the source of its baffling power. The film is more of a cinematic exercise than a film. Contrary to what many have said, there is a plot, and you can follow it in between all the pretty shots of Brad Pitt's face/babies feet. I saw this on BluRay and can only hope most people get a chance to see it on that format as well. This is one of those films that everybody has to see at least once in their lives. It's a breath-taking cinematic experience that was so intriguing I was hooked from first to last.

Must mention: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Gary Oldman), Wuthering Heights (powerful), My Week With Marilyn (Michelle Williams), The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep), War Horse (don't scorn, it was beautiful!), Midnight in Paris (classic late Woody Allen: a comic gaffe with a powerful and profound sting in its tail); The Ides of March (not bad), Shame (Fassbender), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Tilda Swinton).

Under leaves so green

2011-12-25T09:45:00.003-04:00

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan's Gardening in the Tropics
Sculpture

Photo by Michelle Jorsling, courtesy y art gallery.

How to describe it? The extraordinary work of Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, who twists pieces of palm fronds into tongues of flame, who places a cage within a cage within a cage, whose human figures twist into tortured, glorious creatures: bodies illuminated by the mahogany that encases them?

I am referring, of course, to Thomas-Girvan's most recent show held at the Y Art and Framing Gallery at Taylor Street, Port of Spain. The show took its title from Olive Senior's now classic collection of poetry and fused poetry with sculpture to create meditations that, for me, were profound and deeply affecting. This was work commenting on society: Caribbean and beyond (Thomas-Girvan was born in Jamaica but lives in Trinidad).

Consider 'Seeing Red', a lacquered box painted post-box red (of is it blood red?) with a figure sitting with legs split atop it, fingers to its ears. Not hearing, but red all around. The piece is about not being open to what is around us. Unlike the figures in 'The Message' who, in the course of one conversation are confronted, literally, by an iron fist with a message of its own. The intrusion of violence. A violent intrusion. A moment of power. A power reversal.

The stand-out, however, for me was 'The Illuminated Heart', a hybrid between a sculpture and a pendant: an illustration of how art can literally be wearable. A bronze pendant (a heart with a head atop it in ecstasy/pain/worship/song) is detached from a mahogany body. The idea of detachment revealing something more vulnerable beneath. The feeling of isolation. The suggestion of a fetal kind of vulnerability. The simultaneous suggestion of strength; of a solid core. All from this piece, which you can see in the catalogue for the show.

The Tower of Victory - mahogany and bronze, height 15". Photo courtesy Y Art Gallery.

Other highlights included 'Flame', a simple sculptural construction made of palm frond material and brass and inspired by Orwell's line: "and I was alive it's a feeling inside you a kind of peaceful feeling and yet it's like a flame." Another was 'Finding your Soul', which offers a glimpse of freedom by placing its subjects behind bars. There is politics in all of this: both in a limited and wider sense of negotiating a place amid oppressive forces. But the key note is a sense of hope, and, in my estimation, love.

SEE the catalogue here. READ more here.

FILM REVIEW: The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito)

2011-12-05T21:35:00.003-04:00

Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In

This is the creepiest Almodovar film yet, and that's saying something for the great Spanish director.

La Piel Que Habito is an uneasy blend of suspense/thriller and melodrama. To describe the plot is to rob the film of part of its considerable power. That said, the movie follows a crazed plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas in the performance of his career) and his experiments on a woman he keeps captive at his home. From the start, an overwhelming sense of mystery intrigues each scene. Slowly, bit by bit, Almodovar lays down plot pieces of a complex puzzle which coils into a frenzy of sex, violence, gore and murder.

The film falters and lags, however, in its middle section, especially after Almodovar deploys the device of the expository conversation to reveal crucial plot points. Also, the film sometimes lacks the flair we expect from Almodovar. It's as though the weirdness overwhelms key plot sequences which, in an Almodovar film, normally flow with a kind of effortless ease.

However, all of the tension is in the service of a powerful ending that is astonishing in its contradiction: simple yet complex. Complex because of its questions about identity. This is an audacious film that builds itself on a central premise revolving around the nature of the body and what it really means to inhabit it. Queasy, astonishing and philosophical. One of the year's best films.

STARS: ****/ four

Studio Swap // Che Lovelace

2011-12-05T19:47:00.005-04:00

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

Opening Reception
Thursday 08 December 2011
6.30 - 9.00pm
at 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain
RSVP 740 7597 / medullaartgallery@gmail.com
Exhibition continues until 22 December 2011

ABOUT THE SHOW

Conceived as an open studio event that takes place outside of Lovelace’s studio, Studio Swap will showcase many new, large-scale paintings, smaller works, and a projected piece. Lovelace’s new, large-scale paintings demonstrate the artist’s increased focus on the human body in various environments and situations. He has been using performance as part of his work process, executing and photographing specific actions, out of which he then develops his paintings. Short stop-motion films are also produced from these performances.

Parallel to his work with the body and movement, Lovelace has continued his long-standing series of Carnival and 'Mas' oriented paintings. A selection of the most recent of these works will also be presented. The artist has also been a fervent documenter of his works in progress as well as day-to-day life and moods in the studio, and a selection of these and other images will form part of the projected piece.

READ MORE at Medula Art Gallery website here. WATCH a video of painter Che Lovelace talking about his process below:

Town to town

2011-11-12T17:47:00.001-04:00

Barbadian artist Sheena Rose has a cool tumblr called Strictly Art, which you should check out here.

WATCH a cool Artzpub video featuring her here:

Who are the mikemen?

2011-11-05T11:28:00.002-04:00

Photo by Alex Smailes

Here's sneak peak at Miquel (Hit Me With Music, Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast?) Galofre's latest film, The Mikemen.

FIND OUT MORE here.

Misuse of magic

2011-11-05T11:21:00.001-04:00

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

Nov 17, 7pm
Drink! wine bar, Roberts Street

Roger Robinson will be performing a selection of old and new work, and will be supported on the night by poet Keegan Maharaj and DJ Tillah Willah SoundBoy Killah.

SEE VIDEO:

BEDSIDE BOOKS: Poetry!

2011-10-15T15:04:00.067-04:00

In honor of World Poetry Day we thought we'd share some of the books near the top of the pile of all the books we are currently reading.

THE POLITICS by Benjamin Paloff, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011.

"Deep within the folds of / my being I am carrying an urgent message. / I'd pay attention if I were you," the voice of 'Diptych of the Annunciation, Left Panel' implores. "People I do not know put words / in my mouth, take my picture. And still I am not / untouched by beauty." The warning is a reflection of a way to read these poems, which pulse with a willingness to embrace ideas and philosophy in tight, clear lines that build arguments but also aim to create something as equally ephemeral: beauty. The juxtaposition of history and contemporary elements is effective. As the California Journal of Poetics remarks: "Paloff has a gift for combining the historical with the contemporary." The effect is like a lush Sofia Coppola film: filled with pop, pathos and a bold stillness. This work is about pushing ideas to their limit, and finding out, perhaps, our own limits and our own simplicities.

WATCH Benjamin Paloff read poems from this book here.

LAGAHOO POEMS by James Christopher Aboud, Peepal Tree Press, 2011.

With a clear understanding of the way folklore creates tantalising possibilities for poetry, Aboud finds an energetic space between occasional poems and self-reflexitive lore. These startling poems send out red herring after red herring, the Lagahoo himself is both a symbol and a deception: a vessel bearing a passionate feeling for the world, while simultaneously understanding the dangers of drawing close to mortality. It is a macguffin in a sense, for the point is not who he is or what he makes, but what happens when readers try to find him. First published in 2004, the book was heralded by the Caribbean Review of Books which declared: "A remarkable poet has kept us waiting too long – has made us practise, you might say, the patience of the Lagahoo."

DARK AND UNACCUSTOMED WORDS by Vahni Capildeo, Egg Box Publishing, 2011.

"The poetry of Vahni Capildeo not only breaks down conventional notions of seeing the world, but re-affirms ideas of the value and worth of individual experiences. This work attacks and affirms order and underlines what matters above all: the fate of the free self. It is a subversive ocean of diamonds, rubies and bones, raging against limiting forces."

READ a full review HERE.

LUMINIOUS EPINOIA by Peter O'Leary, The Cultural Society, 2010.

Luminious epinoia: a gnostic notion which is taken to represent the primal consciousness from which all creation came into being. These poems are meditations, perhaps, but also they carry strong voices and unsettle, moving fluidly across the page.

NEW COLLECTED POEMS by WS Graham, Faber and Faber, 2004.

Harold Pinter once said of WS Graham: ''I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949. It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed. His song is unique and his work an inspiration.'' A comprehensive gathering of WG Graham's work.

THE JOURNEY TO LE REPENTIR by Mark McWatt, Peepal Tree Press, 2009.

Is a poem in four narrative sequences. It is the product of fifteen years labour. "Around the year 2000, I realised that I was working towards at least two different goals," McWatt says in an introduction. "The first of these was that the book would be in four parts, with each part containing a central narrative poem or sequence and this would be balanced or counterpoised or embellished with other poems." These autobiographical poems are strong, there is really little embellishment. A vast work, which nets treasures for the devoted reader.

SELECTED POEMS by Jorge Lui Borges (edited by Alexander Coleman), Penguin, 2000.

Borges is more well-known for his short fiction. But he was first and foremost a poet. This is a wide selection with a diverse cast of translators who create a rewarding and essential book.

NO BACK DOOR by Mervyn Taylor, Shearsman, 2010.

"Taylor’s book, which was awarded the 2011 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, is a continuation of many of the themes of the poet’s earlier work (which includes Gone Away and The Goat). It is a potent examination of contemporary Trinidad life, of migration and of the spaces in between and beyond. Death, loss, aging and illness confront characters of complexity who are given fine and gentle lines that hum like the low tide of the sea, always threatening to rise and eat away at an easily forgotten land."

READ full review HERE.

THERE IS AN ANGER THAT MOVES by Kei Miller, Carcanet, 2007.

A collection about migration and imperialism, with rage, anger and grace. The poems challenge ideas of home and adopted home-land and finds spaces in between. Followed up by the excellent Light Song of Light.

RUNNING THE DUSK by Christian Campbell, Peepal Tree Press, 2010.

A strong and impressive collection which shows up Campbell as a consummate poet, adept in different forms and willing to experiment and play with language. "Time to time I dare / myself to race the sun," the voice of the opening poem 'Bucking Up On Evening' remarks. The poems fly amid the blue hour of dusk.

SHE WHO SLEEPS WITH BONES by Tanya Shirley, Peepal Tree Press, 2009.

Tanya Shirley is an exciting poet whose poems, when she breathes them to life, startle, amuse and rally. Her voice can be heard on every page. The poems are sharp, personal and sometimes harrowing, but always unforgettable. Compelling work which also conceals its craft.

***

Dream to change the world

2011-10-14T08:01:00.004-04:00

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

The 30th West Indian Literature Conference, hosted by the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, from 13 to 15 October, 2011, borrows its theme from a poem by the late Guyanese writer Martin Carter: “I Dream to Change the World: Literature and Social Transformation”.

As part of the conference programme, on Friday 14 October, from7.00 to 9.00 pm, the Bocas Lit Fest and Alice Yard will host an informal evening of readings and performances. Scholar Gemma Robinson, Carter’s editor and biographer, will speak about his relevance for today’s Caribbean writers and artists, followed by readings by Nalo Hopkinson, Vahni Capildeo, and Barbara Jenkins.

READ MORE here.

In search of the sea

2011-10-09T16:28:00.005-04:00

No Back Door by Mervyn Taylor, 2010, Shearsman Books, pp. 90

Hew Locke, 'For those in peril on the sea'. Photo by Sam Millen.

"SEA have no back door,” warns the father-figure in the titular poem of Trinidadian Mervyn Taylor’s latest book No Back Door. The closing lines of the poem, with their complex comparative analysis of two lives and generations, are a haunting invocation of loss, memory and even bittersweet joy:

   Sea have no back door, he said,
   putting on his pyjamas and going
   to bed. All night I could feel
   the waves coming in.

Taylor’s book, which was awarded the 2011 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, is a continuation of many of the themes of the poet’s earlier work (which includes Gone Away and The Goat). It is a potent examination of contemporary Trinidad life, of migration and of the spaces in between and beyond. Death, loss, aging and illness confront characters of complexity who are given fine and gentle lines that hum like the low tide of the sea, always threatening to rise and eat away at an easily forgotten land.

The title poem, which is the penultimate poem of the book, is a good example of Taylor’s understated style and of the devastating emotional impact of his work. The father figure is subservient to forces in an around him: “In all his years on the island / my father never went to the sea.” Perhaps this self-imposed exile is not only a sign of father’s mind-set but also an expression of deeper fears. There is an inter-generational aspect to all of this: “He waved as we left for Point / Cumana, cleaned out the goat pens / and became the man his father / was, a necktie holding up his pants.” The play of that last image is highly suggestive: the necktie as a colonial/capitalist symbol is both rejected and embraced. In one sense its function is abandoned in favor of simpler things. In another sense the tie is embraced but made to suit the purposes and circumstances of the wearer.

Thus, in a few lines Taylor has set so many elements in play, but we never feel overwhelmed. We feel the tension between the son, another generation perhaps, and the father without a single line of explicit drama. When the father puts on his pyjamas and goes, the line breaks before we continue to read that he has merely gone to bed. Sleep, death, departure and migration are all suggested. The son’s feelings are in contrast to the depiction of the father. But one may as well be a reflection of the other at different stages in life, perhaps.

Elsewhere, similarly strong poems abound in this collection. Most startling is ‘On the La Basse’ which is a poem every Trinidadian will instantly recognize.

Ostensibly the poem is about a bonfire at the Beetham landfill. Public servants oversee the burning of old receipt books. The supervisor–in the sense of that official post and in the sense of surveyor–witnesses a seldom seen scene: “And as the bonfire rose higher and higher / among the piles of the city’s garbage, I saw.” The line breaks. What did he/she see? “Men, women and children clamber with bags, / saving whatever they could, eggs and half-rotten / onions to keep or sell....”

The poem is a reflection of social inequalities and it aims to present these without didactic flourishes or sentiment.

“In the growing dark I read, by the glow of the / embers,” the supervisor says, “...the ashes settling, the whine of the truck, reversing.” The idea of reversal, the surreal scenes. They are enough for the poet to achieve his aims.

Taylor–who teaches and divides his time between Brooklyn, New York and Trinidad–aims, perhaps, to chart journeys that are linked to the dilemma of the immigrant but not limited to that. In a sense, each piece is about a journey to death, the sea.

There are poems spanning the political and social aspects of colonisation (‘Colonized’ is a poem about Haiti which begins: “What do we owe them, for / taking back what was ours?”). There are pieces about ideas of ancestry and shared heritage (the titular figure in ‘Yankee Gal’ may have closer links to the Caribbean than she realises, especially given the warning encapsulated by the poem’s closing reference to Sparrow’s calypsos). Several poems recall illness, death and aging (‘Losing Weight’, ‘Joan’s Chair’, ‘Home is’, ‘At the Home’).

‘Felicity’ presents an account of crime in that town and laments its lost potential to be “a gift to the world”, as suggested by Derek Walcott in his Nobel Lecture of 1993. Of Taylor’s work, Walcott has said: “the sense of search, of the avoidance of flash, mutes his meters to an admirable degree, and the tone, which he found remarkably early, keeps him separate and unique.” This is a moving book which succeeds in charting a universal journey with skill and sensitivity.

* * *

No Back Door is published by Shearsman. For information on ordering visit: http://www.shearsman.com/

A new world

2011-10-01T18:07:00.001-04:00

Dark and Unaccustomed Words by Vahni Capildeo, 2011, Egg Box Publishing, 120pp

OF POETRY, DH Lawrence once remarked, “The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world.” What of the poetry of Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo, whose latest book is published next month?

“This poetry is not for the faint-hearted,” is how Edward Baugh opens a review of Capildeo’s Undraining Sea. Of her first collection, No Traveller Returns, the critic Robert Bond, in a review which is not for the faint-hearted, says, “Capildeo’s book attempts a language without intention, to replicate the obscure expression of objectless inwardness, which is sensed to intend toward utopia.” Adding to the cauldron is David Miller who argues that Capildeo’s poetry “is utterly divorced from that unfortunately prevalent tendency to write poems where the words give way to an applauding audience at the next prestigious poetry awards.” Brian Catling characterizes Capildeo’s writing as “crafted silver turning on faultless glass.” Adam Piette has argued that Capildeo’s work involves a “many-voiced attention to the clamour of experience, of all that goes through the mind on difficult days.”

The voice of Capildeo’s poem ‘Oslo Readings’ – in Undraining Sea – adds what Baugh suggests is another prism by which to view things. The voice of that poem remarks that, “the words on the page no longer stand for meanings. It is an ink museum, a resistant sculpture park, a thicket of trees where the eye gets lost holding on to wrought iron fences. Each railing is barbed with a spear point. A vision of authority, the words stand out, separate, deadly, fine, archaic.”

Baugh, in his review at the Caribbean Review of Books, argues: “perhaps in our interaction with the poet’s words we should yield to the intransigence, and seek to cultivate a space beyond interpretation.” Baugh is correct to suggest this of Capildeo’s work, but the same could be equally true for all poetry, from Dante and Shakespeare right up to the so-called avant-garde.

But back to Lawrence. In an introduction to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, he says, “poetry is a matter of words. And this is true, just as much as pictures are a matter of paint, and frescoes a matter of water and colour-wash.” Lawrence continues, “Poetry is a stringing together of words into a ripple and jingle and a run of colours. Poetry is an interplay of images. Poetry is the iridescent suggestion of an idea. Poetry is all these things, and still… another thing.”

That thing, Lawrence suggests, is the creation of an inner place through which we encounter the “strange and forever surging chaos” that is our world.

I would adopt these ideas of Lawrence and suggest that the poetry of Vahni Capildeo not only breaks down conventional notions of seeing the world, but re-affirms ideas of the value and worth of individual experiences. This work attacks and affirms order and underlines what matters above all: the fate of the free self. It is a subversive ocean of diamonds, rubies and bones, raging against limiting forces. Capildeo uses a diverse set of forms to challenge hegemonic ideas of country, colony, gender and even of poetry. She challenges the very idea of definition, which is why her work is such a quandary to discuss. (The cover of her latest book, Dark and Unaccustomed Words, even features a series of question marks.)

‘Framboyan’, the first poem of Dark and Unaccustomed Words is a good example of the work. Outwardly, it is a child’s vision: at once dream and nightmare. But it is also a contemporary vision of a world facing forces consuming it. It is also a vision of the individual facing change and the prospect of death.

    That trees had evolved to eat other trees.
    That this happened at the end of a garden.
    That this was first noticed in a small tree’s wincing.
    That the larger tree was bending in, whipped by no wind,
    a flamboyant tree and not in flower, bunched to a beak.
    Dwarf and royal poinciana trees: almost one kind:
    at the end of a Trinidad childhood garden.

Trees, in a child’s playful vision, take over the garden, and then engage in war with other elements of nature. “Dwarf” and “royal” suggest stunted growth side by side with majesty: perfections found in the flawed. (“Royal poinciana” is also a reference to the tree of the same name, famous for its blood red blossoms, which gives the poem its title.) The royal trees and the mentioning of “a Trinidad childhood garden” raise questions of place: the relationship between the former colonies and the monarchy of the motherland. But also, the words import personal meanings for the poet, who is a Trinidadian living in Britain. For what is a “Trinidad childhood garden”? What is a “Trinidad childhood”? And a “childhood garden”?

In this context there are ideas of migration (“Pitiless, we witness small uprootings; turn, / with each untreelike recommencing”); and also an inevitable fate that may be adulthood, a new home, death or all of the above (“we are next, who shall be due to fall under green shade”).

The idea of property (“But lock the doors (the well-made doors: investments, property)”; “It is good our doors are good”) is critiqued: material things cannot stop this process. The premises of the opening lines suddenly become conclusive with a subtle shift of the opening sentence which re-appears within the poem (“The thing is busy outside (that tree evolved to eat other trees)”). In this way, the evolution of the poem reflects the change that is its subject. Short sentences grow like the trees. But by the end, doors are useless in stopping the mysterious biological process (“And indeed it entered wading. For our doors were wood”).

The poem is an ordered glimpse of a chaos that cannot be pinned down. It is an evolving tree written on the product of trees. Trees—and what they may symbolize (growth, family, the environment &c)—thereafter serve as leitmotif in the book.

The second poem (‘The Pale Beast / La Blanche Biche’) transmutes the childhood garden into tamed wood, “kept under lock and key” in a tense balance (“how shall I have recourse from this?”). What nature represents here is an even more powerful force on the individual, threatening danger and growth. The child, horrifically, becomes product of consumption; supernatural folklore ironically mirrors ordinary experience (“…That is my flesh within / the dish you banquet on”). There are at least three personas here: girl, beast and a projected other consummating the tension between the two.

The adult woman at the heart of ‘Driving Lesson: I’ seeks refuge in a park after power struggle dramatised by a driving lesson, which is itself metaphor for a deeper relationship: between lovers and self. The woman goes along with the driving instructor’s perspective passively, until a violent act changes things. The girl here has grown up and is able to assert herself against oppressive forces.

‘Tree With a Silver Lining’ is a lyrical examination of fleeting love which balances optimism with a kind of fatalism (“do not leave believing bereavement, who can stay?”) The poem is in awe of nature and places tender love in context of this larger force (“Come home, soon and quickly, love. The butterfly tree, / light on the fence, slender stems, make thoughts in me”).

Vahni Capildeo

‘Almond, Bearded’ (the title invites comparisons between growths of hair and other forms of organic growth) begins: “The tree could not believe how it became involved / with her… / Years it had taken growing to produce a crotch, / a midway knot of outward shadow.” The poem ends: “It too could love now, unrenewably…/ mortal and tree.”

The mangrove is the foundation of ‘Journal of Ordinary Days’, which is a kind of occasional poem describing a trip to the Caroni Bird Sanctuary. Again the awe and terror of nature: “what is this mangrove, salt-nourished, where sea floods inlets? / Can we breathe here?” The figure of the child reappears and there is an opening assertion of the individual’s propensity for change: “We are not born with an instinctive understanding of the mangrove”.

‘About’ is a poem dedicated to the late Pat Bishop. It is a mixture of occasional poem and prose poem (prosimetrum is a key quality of Capildeo’s style) featuring snakes, birds, unseen spiders. The final lines are: “For we ourselves are luminous. Except we do not give off light.”

The book takes its title from a quotation of George Puttenham’s The Arte of Poesie (1589), hinting at an agenda to give voice to the marginalized within the debate of poetry. Publishers Egg Box describe the work as “the most lyrical and playful part of a three-part project exploring the boundaries of the human and the natural, and the oceanic or musical possibilities of poetic form.” This is a rewarding collection which grows, like the poet’s body of work.

* * *

Dark and Unaccustomed Words is published next month. For more information and to order online visit http://eggboxpublishing.com

READ poems from the latest book at Almost Island here.

LISTEN to Vahni reading her poetry here. READ a sample from Undraining Sea here. CHECK some cool poetry links here (Inpress Books).

FILM REVIEW: Better Mus' Come, The Warrior

2011-10-01T18:02:00.001-04:00

TT Film Festival 2011

There is a lot happening in Storm Saulter's Better Mus' Come. I found myself no longer grasping for plot, but rather searching for a space beyond the narrative and between the images. This is a bold kind of film with a lot of energy, stunning images and unforgettable moments.

The film is set in Kingston, Jamaica, in the late 1970s as gangs war. It would be easy to explain the gang warfare at the heart of events at the film by blaming politics, but there are other forces in operation as well: economic, social, cultural and even in terms of gender. The film makes no didactic points about governance but it places human relationships at its core. Some of it is heavy-handed and at times I yearned for a more simply edited story. But at the end, it was a moving treatment of a seldom depicted moment in Caribbean history. ***/4

I have never forgotten The Warrior since I first saw it in 2003. And in particular I will never forget the moment when we see the warrior at the centre of the movie suddenly uprooted from a desert landscape and placed in snowy mountain peaks. In this a premonition? The viewer is disoriented and startled by the beauty before her. But the film's director Asif Kapadia adds a sly touch: when the warrior--returned to his desert landscape--looks down he sees ice beneath his shoes. Is he cold inside? Has he been standing still through the seasons?

To describe the film's plot is to take away one of the pleasures of the movie. But this much can be said: there are elements of the classic Hollywood Western and of the action adventure. Watching the film for a second time, I was struck by how perfect it is: the actors have faces that were meant to be filmed. There are amazing moments of dialogue--particularly one involving a blind devotee--and perhaps one of the most unforgettable endings of any film in the last decade. Watching again, I had a re-enforced feeling that I was watching greatness of a special kind unfold. The film is not ostentatious and works within a simple confined framework. But how well it works. ****/4

Race to studiofilmclub

2011-09-29T07:24:00.003-04:00

TT Film Festival 2011

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday Sept 29&30th doors open 7:00pm feature commences 7:30pm(curfew/state of emergency hours..sigh.) ALL WELCOME... & FREE!

STUDIOFILMCLUB are pleased once again to be collaborating with the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in 2011 - our fifth year together.
This year we are extremely excited to be screening two films by the London based director ASIF KAPADIA. We will be screening his critically aclaimed first feature THE WARRIOR and his most recent sensation SENNA. Two very different types of film..
A very special thanks to Asif and his producers for so kindly allowing SFC to present his films to a Trinidadian audience for the very first time!

Thursday Sept 29th 7:30 screen time

SENNA (Asif Kapadia/UK/2010/106')

PERHAPS YOU HAVE NO INTEREST in Formula One racing. Perhaps you’re resistant to documentaries in general. Neither of these should keep you from seeing Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010), a marvel of a movie that has at its center the very thing one longs for and seldom finds on screen today: a brilliant, charismatic, romantic hero. Three times a world champion in a ten-year career, the Brazilian racing car driver Ayrton Senna is considered by aficionados of the sport to have been the greatest driver of his generation—and perhaps of all time. He was also wildly handsome, generous, honest, intelligent, and intensely spiritual. He loved racing, his family, and his country. He donated millions to educating poor Brazilian children. He faced down the Formula One hierarchy that looked on him as an upstart from a third world country—not that that prevented Formula One from capitalizing on his audience appeal—and he challenged himself in every race, not only to win but to achieve the perfection of a form. In other words, he was an artist and a superhero, who tragically is unavailable for a sequel to the most exhilarating and heartbreaking action movie of the summer. Senna was killed in 1994 in a race about which he had grave misgivings, but from which he could not bring himself to walk away.

Friday Sept 30th 7:30 screen time

THE WARRIOR (Asif Kapadia/UK/2005/86')

Narrative elegance and rapturous imagery highlight The Warrior, which won two BAFTA awards: Best British Film & Best Debut film. The first feature by Asif Kapadia and co-writer Tim Miller let their story of a repentant warrior unfold slowly. Set during an unspecified ancient time in the seldom-captured picturesque locales of India's northwestern desertland and the western Himalayas, Asif Kapadia's feature debut is a minimalist but strikingly beautiful tale of renounced violence told with uncommon precision and depth. The title warrior, Lafcadia (Irfan Khan), is a longtime indentured servant and executioner whose livelihood consists of ravaging small villages — and their women — with his menacing gang of brutes. During a routine pillaging, he experiences a flash of clarity and resolves to never again pick up a sword. But his vicious warlord master immediately retaliates by calling for the head of Lafcadia and the death of his disloyal servant's only son. Instead of becoming a typical revenge-driven killfest like many of the westerns that were clear inspirations for this film, it develops into a rich journey of repentance, redemption and acceptance of fate.

A new space of sound and fury

2011-09-26T21:29:00.006-04:00

TT Film Festival 2011: New Media show

From Atlantic Transformerz by Dutch artist Charl Landvreugd

AT A CORNER of the basement of the brand new Medulla Gallery on Fitt Street, Woodbrook, is a large black LCD screen. The rectangular screen plays a looped video showing several faces, each adorned with all sorts of different objects and textures. The faces look at you with an intensity that is almost disconcerting: the eyes, lips and features jump out and literally shimmer as slow movements capture changes in light. This is Atlantic Transformerz a work by Dutch artist Charl Landvreugd, one of several artists gathered for "New Media" one of the side-events of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.

"Atlantic Transformerz explores the multiplicity of hues of the colour black, and makes an issue out of distinguishing black diversity," notes the liner notes to the show, curated by ARC Magazine's Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins. "Inspired by the African diaspora in Amsterdam, Landvreugd unites the four continents around the Atlanic Ocean." But there is something that happens to work when it is placed in a room where it interacts with its audience. Atlantic Transformerz managed to raise issues about blackness, yes, but also provide a glimpse at deeper mysteries: its half costumed subjects revealed more through their covered skin. They sought answers to the viewers questions.

Basement of the Medulla Gallery, Fitt Street, Woodbrook

This is the kind of exciting thing that happened at the New Media show which completed its run over the weekend. The show saw several video pieces share the same audio track, to disorienting yet unifying effect. What helped too was the fact that the entire ground floor was devoted to the stunning photographs of Trinidadian artist Abigail Hadeed. Viewers then descended a small spiral staircase hidden near the back and became submerged in the video pieces, which included 'Amphibian Mode' by Puerto Rican artist Nayda Collazo-Llorens, a work which united text and noise with nonlinear narrative and "post-aphabetic" communication.

Trinidad artist La Vaughn Belle's 'Somebody's Been Sitting in My Chair' worked well in the space. The video work showed the artist re-enacting the scenes of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, wandering an 18th century colonial great house, dressed in casual wear. The idea of the house echoed the space, which is itself a kind of house with wandering viewers encountering work and asking: who owns the work? For whom are these pieces intended? These complex questions mirror the complex issues in the piece which throws up ideas of ownership, identity, 'beauty', colonialism, race and class struggle. Is the artist/walker an intruder or the real owner reclaiming the space? Does she reclaim the space or is the space reclaiming her? In other words: what power does she really have? Who is she?

Installation view of Atlantic Transformerz by Landvreugd

Similar questions are raised by Jason Keeling's 'Jesus Speaks of Me as I Am': a series of clips of men walking. Who are they? Where are they? When are they walking? Costumes change, reflecting apparently different periods, walkers move from city to country landscapes and back. If the artist in 'Somebody's Been Sitting in My Chair' reclaims a space, then what are these men doing? Are they running away for a space? Or is the action of movement a space itself? Something about the piece reminded me of the gangs that have sprung up all over the Caribbean with their own vernaculars and iconography. Who really are these men? Gangsters or something else? Who decides?

This, then, is a show of affirmation curated with some ingenuity by Bynoe and Huggins. The assemblage, like Lorraine O'Grady's video-work 'Landscape (Western Hemisphere)' is a hybrid of perspectives all asking the question who are we in this brave new world.

SEE more here.

Pieces of history

2011-09-26T19:36:00.002-04:00

Hew Locke. West Indies Sugar Corporation, 2009. Acrylic paint on paper. 12 x 8 3/5 in. (30,7 x 22 cm.).

"Curators Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores presented a model for viewing or representing history as an emerging and fragmented partiality. A partiality, however, that does not preclude, but rather enriches one's ability to contemplate the circumstances it seeks to describe..." READ MORE here.

Eat, sleep, dance, live music

2011-09-25T22:10:00.008-04:00

TT Film Festival 2011: Hit Me With Music (74 mins, Directed by Miquel Galofre)

Here is a film which understands all sides of its subject matter, dancehall. Miquel Galofre's sharp documentary examines how dance becomes a mode of expression, a realm of violence and, for some, an act of redemption. We eat, sleep, dream dance, one dancer remarks. In Hit Me With Music, this becomes poignantly true.

The film, screening at the TT Film Festival makes keen social observations without coming to a didactic conclusion. It is an open, breathing, living thing that reveals its director's understanding and compassion for humanity. This is one the best films of 2011 and continues a winning streak for Galofre whose last film was Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast? Here is a director of great sensitivity whose films play like odes to the people who inhabit them. *****

SCREENS ON SATURDAY, 7pm, MOVIETOWNE

Miquel Galofre

A little mirror, little shot

2011-09-21T21:12:00.003-04:00

VIDEO FROM ARTZPUB CHECK MORDERN RANGE II HERE.

See more from Rodell's website here. Also more in this Artzpub series here (Mariel Brown) here (Charles Campbell) and here (Brianna McCarthy).

A love affair

2011-09-21T20:21:00.001-04:00

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

"On February 2, 1911, when the London Electric Theatre opened its doors at the corner of French and Baden Powell Streets in Woodbrook, a local love affair with cinema was born.

One hundred years on from the opening of that first cinema, the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff), presented by Flow, is celebrating a century of cinema in T&T.

The ttff/11 takes place from 21 September to 4 October, and comprises screenings of the best new and recent films from T&T, the Caribbean and its diaspora at venues across the country.

At MovieTowne in Port of Spain, in addition to film screenings, an exhibition on the early decades of the cinema industry in T&T will be held. The exhibition, which is supported by bpTT, traces the birth and rapid growth of cinemas in the country, including the phenomenon of “tent cinemas” in rural areas.

The exhibition also looks at the rise of film-going culture, and the popularity of various genres of films, including the Western and Indian films.

A number of the pioneers of the cinema industry—including cinema owners and film distributors—are highlighted in the exhibition. These pioneers will also be honoured at the ttff/11 awards ceremony on 2 October, and will be the first inductees of the ttff’s Caribbean cinema and film industry hall of fame."

CHECK the TTFF website here.

Inward Hunger

2011-09-19T20:13:00.002-04:00

A NEW documentary series, exploring the life of Dr Eric Williams and depicting him as, among other things, a tragic figure and a prime minister who turned a blind eye to corruption in his Cabinet, was launched last Wednesday night by the director Mariel Brown.

Brown said she has a strong belief that an audience will be interested in, “a fuller picture of the man we know as the father of the nation.”

“A few years ago I was talking with my father Wayne Brown,” she told the audience gathered for a private screening of Inward Hunger: The Story of Eric Williams at the Central Bank Auditorium, Port-of-Spain. “He said he thought that in the end Williams life was a tragic one.” Brown said of her series, which airs at 1 pm on Saturday (Republic Day) on Government Information Services Limited Channel 4, aims to depict the country’s first prime minister “as a human being rather than a politician.”

“He was deified and despised. He was imperious and intellectually arrogant,” she said of Williams in an address before the screening of part-one of the series.

“As he grew older, he became increasingly paranoid and withdrawn until he became a virtual recluse.

He was a man who cared little for wealth and material possessions. Yet, he was known to turn a blind eye to corruption running rampant in his Cabinet.”

“Many saw Williams as a kind of messiah: a man who could save them. Yet some argue that this has led to an entrenchment of a culture of dependancy in our society,” Brown, the director of The Solitary Alchemist, said. “He was a fearless man. He believed in celebration, he believed in Caribbean integration and unity: he was a man of many contradictions.”

The documentary series, which was initially approved under the GISL under the PNM but also later endorsed under the new management of the company, was also funded through support from the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company Limited and First Citizens Bank.

Speaking at the launch, GISL chairman Andy Johnson noted that Williams was a figure who provoked extreme reactions, but few could remain indifferent to him. The documentary series is divided into three parts.

Episode 1: “Great Expectations” follows Williams from his birth in 1911, and covers his parents and childhood days, his difficulties at Oxford, his first two marriages and then his entry into politics.

Brown effectively uses photographs, archive and file footage to build an impression of the times.

There are interviews with historians and academics, as well as Williams’ daughter, Erica Williams-Connell.

An actor — Albert Laveau in a bravura performance — renders the voice of Williams, breathing life into some of his speeches and letters.

The script, written and researched by Alake Pilgrim, has a literary sensibility: making profound observations in understated ways. There is also a powerfully haunting score by Francesco Emmanuel which fuses different local musical traditions into a somber and potent mix.

Even with this gathering of material, however, the sense of who Williams actually was remains elusive as it must; a few bits of information are also, deliberately, not clarified. There are hints of the influence of key figures such as CLR James on Williams, but the first 55-minute episode ends by asking the question: did we really know Eric Williams? This is a question which strikes at the heart of the ambition of the series.

Episode 2: “Movement of the People,” deals with Williams and the PNM’s emergence and the events that led to independence. This is a complex examination of Williams race politics and suggests far-reaching repercussions to some of his more controversial moves amidst an all-emcompassing search for national identity.

Episode 3: “Power” deals with the interaction between Williams’ public and private life and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his death.

Inward Hunger airs on Saturday at 1pm on Channel 4.

ARC has an invitation for you and it says:

2011-09-19T20:06:00.002-04:00

(CLICK to enlarge)

Patterns of Darkness

2011-09-19T20:04:00.001-04:00

FROM Briana McCarthy's blog.

FOR more information, check out the blog or go to a sale Brianna is having from this Friday to Sunday at 33 Murray Street, Woodbrook. Sale pieces can be found on Facebook here.

***BLOGGED LIVE: Miss Universe 2011

2011-09-12T20:56:00.056-04:00

It was a dark, rainy night in Port of Spain. And across the pond, over thousands of miles of rainforest, in a country called Brazil, our favorite annual event is about to begin: MISS UNIVERSE. I'll be blogging live, following the progress of Trinidad and Tobago's Gabby Walcott. (DISCLAIMER: If she does not make it in the final, I shall immediately terminate this live blog. I might get a bit bitter, you see.) So buckle up, we're in for a bumpy ride.

(NOTE: click refresh every now and again to get updates/fresh bitchy comments)

*****
9.02pm: And we're off! A little late, but that's okay. It's not like we're going anywhere tonight besides the front of our screen.

In this part of the show, each contestant comes out and shouts the name of their country out loud just in case we don't know how to properly pronounce it.

The announcer just said the show has a viewership of 1 billion, which means about one sixth of the planet is watching. No pressure.

9.07pm: Judging from her greeting, Miss Indonesia wants to beat everybody up.

9.10pm: Miss Trinidad and Tobago! Yayy! (Big hair, too ;)) Hmm was Miss Venezuela smirking?

9.12pm: Okay they just announced the hosts. I always love how they choose real celebrities everyone knows to host these things. And they speak foreign languages too! (Why have I forgotten the names of the hosts already? Oh well I shall call them: 'the woman' and 'the man' from now on.) The woman and the man just noted that the hardest part of the night is that tough final question...(shivers!)

Okay commercial break. Quick muffin break. ***Update(NOTE to the anonymous commenter who just disparaged my last muffin remark: shame on YOU!)

9.12pm: We are back. Only 16 out of 85 will survive.... They are calling the countries now: France. Kosovo. Columbia. (Suspenseful pause.) China. Angola. (Woman host: "Yayy Miss Angola! How cute is that?") Australia. (Woman host, demonstrating apparent bias: "I love this girl!") Puerto Rico (Woman: "Happy Birthday!"). Brazil. (Shocking development, really.) Netherlands. 10th spot: USA (Woman host: "My home country!") Ukraine.

LAST 5 PLACES:

Panama (Woman: "I love Panama, she's one of my favorites.")
Costa Rica (Woman: "So many women, so little space left.")
Portugal.
Philippines (Woman host: "Her country is dying right now am sure.")
Venezuela.

SNUBBED:

Trinidad and Tobago
Ghana
Malaysia

Okay guys, well as you can see, TT didn't get in. I might still continue to blog though, in between my copious glasses of red wine as I drown my sorrows.

9.56pm: Gabby's sister just posted this on Facebook:

Wow that axe was swift! Def feeling my heart breaking for Gabz. But proud of her for reach that far. Hope she's ok and will enjoy the rest of her trip!!! So Glad my parents are there to give her lots of Hugs! Now Im excited to see who's gonna be crowned. Who's your favourites of the top 16? France? Ukraine?

10.04pm: Final top ten! Brazil, China, Australia, Costa Rica, France, Angola, Portugal, Ukraine, Panama, Philippines. Surprise that Venezuela did not make it.

10.09pm: One of the women hosts just remarked that Miss Angola looks like "a Miss Trinidad and Tobago".

Lots of buzz on the net around Miss China. Very timely.

10.15pm: Male host just tried speaking Portuguese. Female host said what he said sounded like the name of a shade of nail polish.

Musical interlude now. Will anything ever top the "make the world a better place" sequences of the pageants of the 80s?

Ohhh look EVENING GOWNS:

Australia: woman host says, "this dress almost did not make it here and it got tonnes of emails before it was approved." Costa Rica: woman host says, "she was a self-proclaimed nerd." France: a white Wonder-Woman inspired ensemble. Ukraine: dress gets rave reviews from the hosts who gingerly note that the Ukraine has never won the competition. She adds, "this might be the night." Portugal: It's red and furry!

I am not sure what is going on with the music/dance/cabaret interlude. "You can close your eyes and never be alone" the singer informs us.

Panama: woman host gingerly discloses that Miss Panama almost fell during rehearsals. Philippines, then Angola and then China, in red. China is 6 feet tall, too. Angola gets the highest fan votes!

10.28pm: TOP FIVE

Ukraine
Philippines
China
Brazil
Angola!

Hmm a tough one to call. But we shall see how things go when they answer the questions (shiver!)

FINAL QUESTION

A controversial segment. Lots of interpreters. Who's gonna get an easy question and who's not?

UKRAINE

Q: If you could trade lives with anyone who would it be?
A: I live my life and I am very satisfied with it. But if I did have the chance, I think I would choose Cleopatra: a very powerful and strong woman who is worthy of respect and I think a woman can also be leader like Cleopatra.

PHILIPPINES

Q: Would you change your religious beliefs to marry the person you love?
A: I would not because the first person I love is my God. If that person loved me they would love my God too.

CHINA

Q: Nude beaches are popular. Is public nudity appropriate or not?
A: Each country has its rules and regulations. We should respect them, thank you.

BRAZIL

Q: What would you do to avoid fighting a war if you did not agree with it.
A: Hello Brazil, good evening San Paulo. First of all I would explain to people that the mere quality of human beings is respect and no war is based on respect. It's always based on misunderstanding or a lack of education. I would tell this person that they should respect each other as human beings, thank you.

ANGOLA

Q: What physical feature of yourself would you change?
A: I am very well satisfied with the way God created me and I would not change a thing. I am a woman of inner beauty. I have my principles and now I would like to give all of you a piece of advice: respect one another.

10.55pm: Apparently Miss Philipinnes is the fan favorite according to a poll. But the judges have the final say.

RESULTS

5th: China
4th: Philippines
3rd: Brazil
2nd: Ukraine

1st: Angola

Well that's a wrap! What a ride, but it was fun. I still have some red wine to finish. GOODNIGHT ALL!

*****

ACT V

2011-09-08T17:15:00.000-04:00

FIND out more about Alice Yard's fifth anniversary and some fundraising activity HERE.

Portrait of the artist

2011-09-05T21:40:00.002-04:00

By Danielle Boodoo-Fortune

A portrait is not a picture, it is a process. The artist encounters her subject, and discovers, afresh, how to see. This involves a ruthless kind of gaze that strips all to nothing in order to build something. The poet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune shares her portrait work HERE.

A new film on an enigmatic figure in history

2011-09-05T21:40:00.001-04:00

Got this striking invite in the mail for a film by director Mariel Brown (Solitary Alchemist). FIND out more here.

On the brink of possibility

2011-08-31T16:01:00.000-04:00

Cover by Pasko Merisier for the latest issue of The Caribbean Writer.

The Caribbean Writer has published its 25th Anniversary issue, a bi-lingual edition dedicated to Haiti. The 640-page edition features 70 pages of poetry from Caribbean poets including Kamau Brathwaite, the talented Jennifer Rahim, Ernest Pepin and Sonia Sanchez. There is also a section on prose, as well as a section on Haitian art, and interviews with novelist Earl Lovelace (who recently won the 2011 Caribbean Literary Prize and is interviewed by Alake Pilgrim) and Elizabeth Nunez. Contributions from Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, Edwidge Danticat, Merle Hodge and are also featured.

One of my favorite pieces in the edition is 'Haiti' by Jennifer Rahim. The poem uses the problem of language as a starting point to debate the place of Haiti in modern society. Just as language reveals a development long in train before current idioms, Haiti's fate is tied to a specific historical context. For those of you who aren't in the mood for French, here is a short english extract:

Haiti
By Jennifer Rahim

For the earth has spoken,
to you, her magma Creole.

Full-throated syllables, up-
rising from deep down,

an honest elocution –

"History aligns our fate and all that's left is to make the best of what we are presented with," argues editor Opal Palmer Adisa in an introductory text to the special edition. I would not be so bold to state this as this volume's thesis, though such a claim is not implausible. This is a rich volume, with important provocative thoughts on Haiti:

"Haiti came into my consciousness as the place of the first successful revolution....What makes one create a system where every person in the society has a sense of their own power and of some path that they are journeying to change the old order? Are we committed to continuing the struggle to understand and live out what it means to be equally human? Here is a grand new terrain. Here are people on the brink of creating a new world, on the brink of possibility."

–EARL LOVELACE, p. 259

"In the current prolonged, slow-motion disaster, the images that stay in my mind are of squalid refugee-camp conditions in the midst of which people somehow manage to keep their children in clean clothes; cheeks fat and eyes bright; little girls hair braided with care, prettied-up almost defiantly with bobbles and boclips...But 'this remarkable people' is us – the people of the Caribbean."

–MERLE HODGE, p. 244

I am pleased to have two of my poems, 'Aid' and 'Golden Grove' (complete with French translations by Fedon Honore) included in this volume. Here is a sample from the French section for those of you interested in such things:

Aide

Par Andre Bagoo

Ramper par terre, c'est creuser, c'est respirer

la crasse. L'oxygène, c'est du rocher

Le pillage se transforme en mode de vie

pendant que les embarcadères débordent:

vingt cinq étages applaudissent

Les palais vides vous mangeront.

Le débris libéré, rempli.

Si les murs ne vous crevaient

ceux qui vous manquent le feraient

Traduction de l'anglais par Fédon Honoré 28/12/2010

READ more here.

Telling stories

2011-08-31T16:00:00.002-04:00

FILM REVIEW: Dark Tales From Paradise

THE CHALLENGES of making a competent film locally cannot be underestimated. Film-makers may have problems with technical issues, with funding and with accessing markets, even their own. Additionally, in a country where cinema is tied to notions of watching other societies on screen (our idea of “film” is tied to the US and European fare which is sold to us), seeing ourselves depicted on-screen, and inevitably simplified, for the purpose of “entertainment” can trigger complex reactions.

But these are all challenges which a group of three film-makers have embraced with some boldness.

The tag-line for Dark Tales from Paradise, which screened this month at the Harvard Club St James at a TT Entertainment Company/ TT Film Company event, is “3 Dark Tales, 2 Beautiful Islands, 1 Kind of Film”. It is a provocative series of short films, assembled together in one feature “grind-house” style.

In Ryan C Khan’s ‘Midnight Affair’, an American scholar visits Trinidad during Carnival, loses his girlfriend and ends up deeply enmeshed in supernatural affairs. The film features Keshav Singh, a sensitive actor who is good in the role, which could have easily gone haywire. Khan, who has a background in commercials, does a good job in some of the surreal supernatural sequences.

The caustically titled ‘Sweet TnT’, by Andre Johnson, effectively and movingly depicts one man’s gradual fall into crime as he battles foreign stereotypes of this country. It is the work of film-makers with a talent for the medium of film. For instance, the film makes vivid use of a painting during one scene, and statues and graves at a cemetery in another. The work, which suffers from some technical defects, is compelling as it builds to its climax. (The actress Natalie Mackay is good in a role that demands a certain ruthlessness.)

‘Radica’, by Francis Escayg and Timmy Mora, is about a remote fishing village in the throes of mass hysteria after the murder of a local. The film has a promising start with some excellent black humour: at Radica’s funeral, as people mourn and weep, her family opt to insert cutlasses into her coffin, and call on her to enact vengeance. The tenderness of the community’s mourning contrasts sharply with her family’s edicts. However the film slows down a little too much thereafter, but manages to make some very profound observations about how crime affects a community and, by extension, a nation.

“I wanted to highlight the small man and to show how one simple betrayal could have a domino effect: what could cause somebody to trip,” Escayg said this month.

Of his film, ‘Sweet TnT’ Johnson remarked, “If we had made a comedy they would not take us seriously.”

“We are attempting here to raise the bar. You need to see the perception of the tourist and still you get a story with a twist in the end,” he said.

Though his film’s main protagonist is American, Khan said the aim, ultimately, of his film was to cater to the Trinidad and Tobago audience.

“It comes from wanting to impress people locally,” he said of his motivation as a film-maker. In terms of marketing, he told the audience on Sunday, “the job is on you. You have to demand. You demand, we will supply.”

Johnson remarked, “we want local, we want to see ourselves.”

“We have not started to tell the Trinidad and Tobago story yet. We will be telling for a long time to come,” he said.

Flexible Man

2011-08-31T13:09:00.001-04:00

Photo by Christopher Cozier.

Surinamese artist Dhiradj Ramsamoedj is currently in residence at Alice Yard, as part of its fifth anniversary programme.

FROM Alice Yard:

On Saturday 3 September, at 9.30 am, Ramsamoedj will present and discuss this work during an informal gathering at Alice Yard. All are invited to join in over a cup of coffee. This will also be an opportunity to meet our third anniversary artist-in-residence, Jamaican Charles Campbell.
About the artist:

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj is based in Paramaribo, where he graduated from the Nola Hatterman Art Academy in 2004. His work has been shown in two solo exhibitions, most recently Ordinary People Reloaded (2010) at the Readytex Gallery in Paramaribo; and in group exhibitions in Suriname, the Netherlands, and the United States, notably Paramaribo SPAN (2010) and Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC (2011).

SEE more here.

Search for the extraordinary

2011-08-29T22:57:00.001-04:00

Kingdom Come by Lavar Munroe. Graphite drawing, digital colour, Ultrachrome K3 ink on velvet paper (2010)

"When I work, I am most concerned with self-fulfillment and execution. I am never satisfied. Satisfaction begins at the end of a first piece. By the beginning of the second piece, that satisfaction is lost, and I am on a quest to renew, replace and replenish it upon completion of the new piece. It is a cycle that is never ending."

Laliwa Hadali Yellow butterfly of the Sun, mixed media, 2011

"The work has to search for meaning, it has to explain life on every level, the everyday and the extraordinary. It has to explain life on every level, the everyday and the extraordinary. It has to challenge preconceived notions, it has to ask questions not ordinarily asked in an attempt to answer them in ways that are life-affirming."

–Lavar Munroe, in an interview with Dr Ja A. Jahannes

FROM the latest, amazing edition of ARC, an art magazine available at Paper Based Bookshop, Hotel Normandie, St Ann's. Call Joan on 625-3197.

Let's Rebuild by Lavar Munroe. Graphite drawing, digital colour, Ultrachrome K3 ink on velvet paper (2010)

FILM REVIEW: Jane Eyre (2011)

2011-08-27T22:15:00.001-04:00

Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre

THE LATEST film version of Charlotte Bronte's novel understands, perhaps more than those that have come before it, that the book's melancholic gothicism goes hand in hand with its eroticism.

From the very opening of the film, there is an overwhelming sense of the more sensational aspects of Bronte's novel which is famous for defying genres and for hiding different strands of critique within its tightly wrought Yorkshire coils.

Mia Wasikowska is the best Jane on film (there have been many fine renditions, including those by Samantha Morton (1997) and Charlotte Gainesbourg (1996)). She understands Jane's deeper conflict and temptations, as well as her purity, integrity and naivety. As Rochester, Michael Fassbender never quite manages to escape Orson Welles' shadow (1943) but he brings a sense of the scoundrel that is at the heart of a character who must be attractive, yet, in some ways, repulsive. Plus, he's easy on the eyes. Unlike previous versions, this one makes plain the large age difference between the two characters who are pulled together by forces long in motion before they meet.

Screenwriter Moira Buffini's choices in relation to the film's screenplay are audacious and somewhat risky, but pay off spectacularly in the opening scenes. Almost all of the key dialogue in the book is left intact. Perhaps out of a need to not interrupt the original symmetries envisioned by Bronte for her book, the depiction of the woman in the attic has been preserved, notwithstanding post-colonial critique and that powerful response to her, Wide Sargasso Sea.

This film, directed by Cary Fukunaga, is handsomely photographed by cinematographer Adriano Goldman who washes all of the shots in the colours of the dull moors: greys, browns, moss and delicate pastels. It is all tied together by one of the finest scores for the year: Dario Marienelli's wonderful, dissonant violin terraces, beautifully executed by Jack Liebeck.

The Blu-ray version, released this month, does a superb job of picking up the finer details of the landscape, the costumes and the detailed production design. STARS: ****/4

LISTEN to the soundtrack here:

The coffins that moved

2011-07-26T23:58:00.004-04:00

9 out of 219 by Ebony G Patterson at Alice Yard

Ebony G Patterson in conversation with Alice Yard's Christopher Cozier. Photos by Andre Bagoo.

COFFINS everywhere. And bodies, too. They move, are moved, were moved. How motion stops the clock, makes the ephemeral eternal. How streets outside can enter these walls, this yard. Places of mourning become places of candle-light and flight. To feel alive. This is Ebony G Patterson's 9 out of 219.

FIND OUT MORE about this show, part of a series marking Alice Yard's fifth anniversary, here.

SEE more from the show here and here.

"The work, both in its participatory aspects as well as its form, evoked Emily Dickenson’s famous poem, “A coffin—is a small Domain”, the opening lines of which are: “A Coffin—is a small Domain, / Yet able to contain / A Citizen of Paradise / In it diminished Plane.” By making a place for these objects, the artist has taken the artist’s own space and carried it beyond its traditional limits.

"She has analysed death and its meaning in a manner that draws attention to its inevitability and asked participants to reflect on this and on what we have in common with those who have died. In this way she finds life in death, even if the fate of these objects is tantalisingly unclear."

READ more Newsday coverage here and here

***

The cover of ARC 3!

2011-07-26T23:58:00.000-04:00

THE COVER from ARC magazine, Issue 3. FIND out more here. The cover is by Lavar Munroe.

From 9 out of 219

2011-07-26T23:45:00.003-04:00

FROM the first in a series of shows to mark Alice Yard's fifth anniversary. Photos by Andre Bagoo. READ more here.

'For we ourselves are luminous'

2011-07-26T23:43:00.004-04:00

At night, you see, there seems to be one lit room. Who is at its exit, in the doorway, back turned? The soft rectangle of human frame widens. Who waits within the metal edging? In this state of nervousness, forearms go cold seconds before hands catch fire, excessive lotuses of flame. Would you – two dark torches loose at your sides – would you walk into the first of the long dark corridors in a building that consists more nearly of corridors than any that should ever have been designed? Each corridor runs like a spill of milk on a black tile reflected in a smoked glass ceiling clapped on the width of one layer of a hotel. These corridors are dark; you would feel them all like paleness? Though there were light I could not name their handcrafted nougat colours, gentler, intentionally washed-out. I walk in the dark, and you feel the walls’ paleness? For we ourselves are luminous. Except we do not give off light.

—From About by Vahni Capildeo, featured at Poetry International Web.

PHOTOS FROM 9 out of 219, a participatory work by Jamaican artist Ebony G Patterson. Photos by Andre Bagoo. READ more here.

The poem is already

2011-07-23T12:24:00.002-04:00

Image from Danielle Boodoo-Fortune's tumblr.

You are reading this
And the poem is already
Halfway down my throat...

READ more poetry from Danielle Boodoo-Fortune at tongues of the ocean here

In a small space, so many coffins

2011-07-22T23:34:00.009-04:00

LAGAHOO: The creature takes on the form of a man with no head who roams the night with a wooden coffin on his neck. On top of the coffin are three lighted candles

—NALIS

* * *

A COFFIN—IS A SMALL DOMAIN

A Coffin—is a small Domain,
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane.

A Grave—is a restricted Breadth—
Yet ampler than the Sun—
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon

To Him who on its small Repose
Bestows a single Friend—
Circumference without Relief—
Or Estimate—or End—

—Emily Dickinson

* * *

On Monday 25 July, at 7 pm, Ebony G Patterson will present her work in progress 9 of 219 at Alice Yard, Woodbrook. Both installation and performance, the work will be a “bling” funeral using the Patterson's characteristic heavily decorated objects. Audience members are asked to participate by bringing candles to join in the vigil.

All are invited to the event which marks the start of Alice Yard's fifth year anniversary.

* * *

MORE on the artist:

Born in Kingston in 1981, Ebony G. Patterson is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica and Sam Fox College of Art and Design at Washington University, St. Louis. She is currently assistant professor in painting at the University of Kentucky. She has exhibited her work in several solo shows in Jamaica and the United States, most recently Ebony G. Patterson: On the Wall and in the Gallery at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago; and in group shows including Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; the 2008 and 2010 Jamaica National Biennials;Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut; the 2009 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince; and You Are Here at Fondation Clément in Martinique. One of her digital photographic works was included in Shot in Kingston at Alice Yard in September 2010
—Alice Yard.

Mapping the human body

2011-07-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

From Joanna Crichlow's Blueprint series

Perhaps the artists' most inevitable subject is herself. After all, we map our experiences and react to the world around us through the prism of who we are, what we are, what we have experienced, what we have not. Art could be a record of someone, through the medium of recording something.

One thing artists Brianna McCarthy and Joanna Crichlow have in common is a direct engagement with the body in their work. This is, in fact, an engagement with their own bodies and, by extension, an engagement with the implications of their personal spaces in society.

In a sense, all art is an engagement with the body: produced by the body, often depicting the body, reflecting the body via inanimate forms (mountainous landscapes, empty rooms). For if art reflects the artist, then she must admit that she is ultimately a body on a journey to something.

"I juxtaposed images of mannequins with images of me," Crichlow said on Saturday night, explaining her process at a discussion held at Alice Yard, Woodbrook. "The work started as collage and I digitally enhanced them. I also started using wax and I wanted to try different methods."

"I also looked at ideas of fairy tales," she said. The fairy tales which perpetuate stereotypes of human conduct and, specifically, gender tropes.

For Brianna McCarthy, there was a focus on form which lead to a more personal exploration.

"I was fascinated by how you could depict depth through simple lines," she said. "My work is very personal. I make myself in many ways."

Detail from a Zine by Brianna McCarthy

"I have this idea that things don't need to match. I want things to be a little stark like when the blue does not match the purple."

The discussion of the work triggered strong debate among the audience over the issue of why women are required, as artists, to battle with certain expectations, expectations which do not appear to be placed on the shoulders of men. Why is it that the work or the gestures of the artist become so embroiled in notions about gender and in stereotype?

"The issue is about control over the value and meaning of those gestures," artist Christopher Cozier observed.

The discussion on Saturday, which was a very heated but fruitful one, also embraced complex issues of what it means to ascribe limits to what the artist produces. Can too much context narrow the scope of the interpretation of the work? Can a lack of context equally be an inadequate means of engaging with it? The issues points to more political things like: who owns art? who says what art is? Potentially troubling questions which, however, do not distract from what McCarthy called the ultimate "impact" of the art. For the art communicates on several levels: triggering debate and triggering pleasure.

* *

CHECK OUT Brianna McCarthy's blog, Passion Fruit, here; Joanne Critchow's space here. MORE on Alice Yard is here.

'Nature is correct'

2011-07-17T10:08:00.005-04:00

"Nature is about form and function. And because it is so correct, that in itself is a beauty. A dead leaf or the patterns in a stone of the forms of a plant. They follow a natural harmony. When you have that balance, the soul has to respond to it as well as the eyes."-Barbara Jardine.

FROM a short film by Mariel Brown on goldsmith Barbara Jardine. WATCH it here.

Inspiration, Tracy Assing @ ARC

2011-07-16T15:26:00.000-04:00

FROM ARC magazine's weekly inspirations at its website. SEE here.

The worst beer cooler ever

2011-07-16T15:09:00.002-04:00

Can be seen in Rodell Warner's Mordern Range. Creepy, cool: why is this giving me nightmares?. SEE more HERE.

A blueprint for the human body?

2011-07-15T22:15:00.000-04:00

"From my gaze as a plus-sized woman, the mannequin becomes a mental paragon to me, one which I do not exist within. It is an image of perfection, the icon of what I refer to as "industrialized idealism". Through the concept of blueprinting, my work challenges the constructs of industrialized idealism by juxtaposing images of my own body with those of mannequins, to provoke questions such as, 'Can there be a blueprint for the human body?'"--Joanna Critchlow

I'm fascinated by the dynamics of masking and unmasking, to be literal; the faces we wear and why and when and how we wear them. I have several I think, as do many of us. Sometimes we all want to be unrecognizable, a deliberate riddle or barely concealed as if wearing wax. I'd been feeling a little constricted recently by my own ideas of meaning and relevance. I had forgotten the advice I read in a Marie Claire magazine (I think) when I was probably 15, "Do what you love and the rest comes." I focussed externally, on what I thought I was being perceived as and not on finding my voice. That's not usual for me and I was, for a while, pretty annoyed with myself. I received an email today from someone who has not only encouraged me before but who made me realise why I want to do this. I have to do, the rest is there, coming. I'm looking in and jumping out--Brianna McCarthy

BOTH artists are in conversation on Saturday night at ALICE YARD.

This coffee table holds up the room

2011-07-06T22:07:00.015-04:00

FIND out more about this work, part of a current exhibition, here.

READ an essay by Christopher Cozier here. ("Oliver is is co-opting spaces: redirecting their purposes, altering within her created moments our experience of the familiar".)

A BIOGRAPHY of the artist, Karyn Oliver, is here.

SEE a previous post on Oliver here. AND read an essay by Nicholas Laughlin on one of her works at the Caribbean Review of Books here.

'Magic is your strength'

2011-07-05T08:44:00.001-04:00

Photo courtesy Caribbean Beat/Wendell McShine

FROM this month's Caribbean Beat.

“Making art accessible is very important for me,” Wendell McShine explains. This is why he returned home to Trinidad in 2009 to run the Arts Project in the town of Point Fortin. At these workshops he taught the basics of film production, design, music therapy, animation, and mural-making.

“The mission is to plant seeds of consciousness in our youths through art so that they can live their full potential and bring up their communities. These avenues didn’t exist when I was growing up in the islands. It’s my personal vision to give back to my people.”

So although Mexico remains McShine’s base (he is married to Mexican-American filmmaker Yadira Alberran and they have a son), the Caribbean is still on his mind, and in his heart. “In a world where change is upon us,” he wrote in his blog, “the only truth is the holograms of the imagination. My brothers in Haiti, hold on. Magic is your strength.”

Wendell McShine’s blog is at: http://72ironmen.blogspot.com

Falling Bough

2011-07-04T23:27:00.000-04:00

By Walton Ford.

FLASH REVIEW: Green Lantern is whack!

2011-07-04T23:26:00.000-04:00

Seriously. All those hot pink aliens. Ryan Reynolds in revealing spandex. Pretty Blake Lively with lipgloss on all through. And some deep philosophical metaphors about free will and fear. Parralax looked wicked, and there was something profound about the lantern discovering that he had to conquer his own fears (of what, relationships? latex? commitment? love? life? all of the above!)

* * * * STARS

POETRY: Ramlochan, Hutchinson

2011-07-04T23:10:00.000-04:00

Do not forget the dead.
They sit at your table to stave off
food poisoning; they have caught
your infant from the clutches of a fumbling man.
You are poised in every instant
over the fertile graves of millions.
Nothing
will erase your mother’s smile, the gate swinging open
as you step off the school bus, the tug in your chest a sea swell
as you swim always towards your first love

>>>FROM 'Good Names for Three Children' by Shivanee Ramlochan at tongues of the ocean.

This fixed gulf disturbs nothing, only rain
lances dead leaves on the stairs to offer
welcome, the furniture alert for occupancy,
a mirror magnifies itself, an envelope’s
torn, skull-grin on the dark desk.
The kitchen has not recovered since a saucer
fell, bursting mica, its calligraphy reads

>>>FROM 'Thunder in April' by Ishion Hutchinson at Guernica.

Marian Anderson, Élégie (Massenet)

2011-07-04T22:46:00.001-04:00

Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1940

Crossing boundaries

2011-06-30T08:40:00.001-04:00

On Richard Rawlins Gotcha at Alice Yard, Woodbrook, Port of Spain

Once more, art confronts us with the intersection of ideas.

Richard Rawlins' recent exhibition, Gotcha, raised questions over the place of modern practices of design within the traditional realm of art and painting, of politics and art and of installation work and non-traditional formats for creating design and for expression (specially designed lapel buttons are part of the work).

The work, recently shown at Alice Yard, comprised a series of politically-themed paintings (are any paintings not concerned with politics?) displayed in various spaces within the Woodbrook backyard space. The work used simple designs (are there such things?) which pushed quite close to iconography (the artist plans a series of limited edition prints to be sold at a later event in a few months time).

White elephants, dangling flies that become pianos, non-performing arts academies and lego politicians all suggest what we all know: the realm of politics is one big megee.

"The joke is on you. It always was," Tracey Hutchings remarks in a limited edition monograph published by Rawlins to accompany the show (sections of which are featured here). The joke, Hutchings notes, functions "politically, mentally, economically, and maybe even spiritually". This at once playful and dark, sincere and whimsical: a kind of therapy that focuses more on triggering dialogue (what part of life does not?)

SEE MORE at Richard Rawlin's blog here.

'Even as a bird...'

2011-06-24T16:26:00.000-04:00

Detail from print of the drowned Leander in the arms of Hero

'His admiring eyes more pleasure took...'

Admit one

2011-06-23T07:35:00.002-04:00

General Admission, an exhibition by Tessa Alexander.

What does it mean to carve a small society up into fractions? What are the functions and implications of these divisions; how are these divisions, based on class, race, education, political affiliation, sexuality, gender and even disability, reflected in everyday life?

A glimpse might be had from Tessa Alexander's latest show.

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

General Admission looks at this latest trend of dividing a space using rather imposing scaffolding creating sections within an area purely based on economics and naming these sections VIP and even VVIP relegating the General Admission section to the very back of the space so you become the outcast. This very disturbing trend has become the norm and it seems the past and where we have come from is repeating itself.

In this body of work I look at "General Admission" who does this apply to? Are we not all general admission, did carnival, jouvert, steel pan, doubles, sno cone etc not come out of the "General Admission" in our society?

I created this body of work based on these questions/observations and chose to highlight and even celebrate the general admission of us as a people.

WHO:

Born in Trinidad Tessa Alexander always enjoyed creative expression and she remembers wanting to be an artist since childhood. After completing high school at Bishop Anstey, she went on to study Fashion Design and Merchandising at the International Academy of Design and Technology and worked in that field producing her own label for approx. 10 years. In 2004 she was given an artist residency at CCA7 after which she began renting a studio there as committing to a space dedicated to my practice would allow her work to grow. In 2005 she was invited on an artist residency to Delhi, India for six weeks and to a workshop in Nairobi Kenya in 2007. Her work can be found in collections in Germany, Canada, the US and regionally. At present she maintain a studio from her home and remains committed to her practice and to the education of children hosting weekly art classes and camps.--ARC Magazine.

Super 8 is suspenseful

2011-06-19T13:59:00.003-04:00

Zack Mills and Kyle Chandler in "Super 8."

Not a bad film. At times a little creepy and always suspenseful. The deliberate attempt to re-create that awe and wonder of early Spielberg blockbusters (think ET) is a little heavy-handed but works. The special effects and some action sequences feel loose. But all in all this is affecting and effective. One underground shot is brilliant. Stay for the super 8 footage that plays during the credits: this is perhaps the film's best part.

STARS: ***

Does Rihanna’s latest video glorify:

2011-06-16T19:36:00.001-04:00

1) violence

2) violence against men

3) vigilante justice

4) crimes of passion

1) it is violent, though that fact does not make it glorify anything. If anything it is a realistic depiction of a human situation. All the controversy is misplaced.

2) well clearly there is something romanticized about the idea of "hell has no fury like a woman scorned". And somehow, you get the sense that if this was a video about a man killing a woman who horned him things would not be the same. Yet, is there not a double standard in criticizing women in positions of power enacting violence and not doing the same for men? Thus

3) what may be wrong about this is that is romanticizes vigilante justice in general. Or does it? Is this video social document or normative standard? After all it is just a pop video. And actually it is one of the few videos out there reflecting something that is unfortunately very real.

4) doubtful.

Thus, to me, the most pressing question in this video is: WHAT IS RIHANNA WEARING?

From the Abovegroup blog

2011-06-16T19:36:00.000-04:00

Wendell McShine. SEE more here.

You g ot ca ught a gain

2011-06-16T19:35:00.000-04:00

Not nice RR. Not nice at all. SEE MORE here.

all that's left

2011-06-07T21:24:00.004-04:00

Detail from Christopher Cozier's "all that's left"

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

Christopher Cozier. Open Studio.

Saturday, June 11; Sunday, June 12, 3 to 9 pm.

Three projects will be installed in Cozier's studio with related studies and drawings for sale:

• “Tropical Night” series, shown in “Infinite Island”, Brooklyn Museum, NY, and also in “Afro Modern” at the TATE Liverpool

• “Now Showing”, a silkscreen edition produced for the TTFF

• My latest silkscreen edition, “all that’s left,” launched by David Krut Projects, NY, and on view in “Fugitive Vision”

Please call 714-3609 for directions.

ABOUT 'FUGITIVE VISION':

David Krut Projects is pleased to present Fugitive Vision, a group exhibition of works by Christiane Baumgartner, Christopher Cozier, Joseph Hart, Whitney McVeigh, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, Phil Sanders, Sara Sanders, and Mary Wafer.

The human eye continuously absorbs and categorizes an endless flow of visual information, encountering, simultaneously and unconsciously, objects in one’s path. We process this visual overload of masses, materials, and actions by forming connections between the external and ourselves. Our vision is always shifting, because the visible — as the Impressionists first understood, and the Cubists later expanded upon — is by nature, fugitive, and cannot be understood from a fixed perspective. The works in this exhibition explore the frameworks that surround and influence this subjective vision. Highlighting the interplay between sight and site, “Fugitive Vision” investigates the relationship between visual modes of perception and representation.

Christopher Cozier explores the confrontation between the sight of one’s body and the stratification of self, revealing embedded, prescribed notions of identity and masculinity. As a symbol of success and division, the rostrum appears in his drawings in various configurations, exposing the hierarchy of cultural identity as a production of a game or contest. Unoccupied, the symbol of the rostrum becomes an uninhabitable platform that pervades the pictorial space, questioning the commensurability between culturally-coded sight and a predetermined place.

Opens June 9, New York.

FOR MORE info check here.

A mutant bromance

2011-06-05T13:49:00.000-04:00

FILM REVIEW: X-Men: First Class ***

James McAvoy and the great Michael Fassbender in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: Origins

X-Men purists scoff when I say I enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Apparently the first few films in the franchise were more faithful to the spirit of the X-Men (though there are question marks over Halle Berry’s infamously bad wig in the first film). So fans everywhere should be relieved to learn that the latest reboot of the franchise, X-Men: First Class, is not bad and is even at moments intensely enjoyable.

The film is an interesting combination of the buddy/bromance genre that Judd Apatow and company have made de rigueur in Hollywood in recent years (witness The Green Hornet, Batman and Robin) and, well, X-Men comic book stuff.

We get a lot of the background facts that established the ground-rules in the later movies and learn the back stories of the major characters: we find out how Professor X ends up in a wheelchair, what turns Magneto ‘bad’ (though the point of his character is to make such a simplification complex) and why some of the other characters end up romantically linked. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) makes a cameo appearance and so do some characters who will later become villains.

All in all, this profuse back-story stuff is too much and weighs the narrative down. The characters never come to life and we feel like their function is to fulfill a purpose within the X-Men mythology whenever they appear onscreen.

But what makes this film good is Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy who have a good chemistry and unusual depth for the parts. Fassbender is an excellent actor (rightly made famous for his tour de force performance in Steve McQueen’s Hunger) who manages to invest in each role, yet maintains a certain degree of malleability (he appeared in Inglorious Basterds and is due to appear in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre). UPDATE: There is also some fun stuff involving the Cuban missile crisis!

ALSO SAW: The Eagle

Channing Tatum in The Eagle

This week I also saw The Eagle, another bromance but this time involving a Roman slave, Jamie Bell and Channing Tatum. No, it’s not a gay porn film, I swear!

The movie, by Kevin MacDonald (who did the Last King of Scotland) is ambitious and manages some power. But somehow you leave with a sneaking suspicion that things were changed by Hollywood suits in an attempt to make the film more appealing. The film bears the imprint of a film which was intended to be a sobering vision, made less sobering because of commercial imperatives. That said, there were lots of Romans and they always look good on-screen.

STARS: ***

Che Lovelace's desk

2011-06-05T13:48:00.000-04:00

SEE more from inside painter Che Lovelace's studio here.

Women in art

2011-06-03T00:43:00.003-04:00

Glass ceiling: 'Shattered' by Linda Ahwal-Kowlessar, 2004, tempered glass, currently on display at the 'Women in Art' exhibition at the National Museum and Art Gallery.

***

THE IDEA that art can have a gender: that the sexes approach art differently and that the products of male and female artists differ in clear ways is one that some people still seem to cling to. Consider VS Naipaul’s latest comments which have triggered controversy (and at least one cool feature on the UK’s Guardian website).

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society at the UK on Tuesday, Naipaul was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Jane Austen—whose work he has dismissed as “gossip”—he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”. Naipaul said he felt that women writers were “quite different”:

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me,” he said. The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.

“And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he claimed. He added: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

But we don’t have to go all the way to the UK and to Naipaul to see ideas like this in play.

Witness the fact that the state-owned National Museum and Art Gallery on Keate Street, Port-of-Spain, currently has an exhibition on called “Women in Art”.

Consider that title again and all its positive and negative implications:

Women in Art: Women make their own unique brand of art, come see!

Or

Women in Art: Art is not all done by men, lo and behold there are women artists too!

Or

Women in Art: The work of this group of female artists can stand alone as a testimony to the fact that women make work as good as men!

Or

Women in Art: In a world dominated by male hierarchies female artists are not being appreciated, appreciate them now!

You could criticize the title of the museum’s exhibition (which is actually a fine gathering of work by the likes of Pat Bishop, Susan Deyal, Adele Todd, Abigail Hadeed and many others) for implying and enforcing a notion of male dominance that must be rebelled against. Worse, you could say that the title implies that women make a particular type of art: recognizable perhaps in the Naipaulian manner.

The title could be read positively, however. It could imply that while men dominate the art world, the work of women is equal. In other words, the title, combined with the fine quality of the work on display, become a powerful statement demonstrating that women make art, not inferior work.

A review of the pieces in the exhibition provide no clue to its gender assumptions. Of course this is correct: the work is work is work, not didactic, not narrowly obsessed with one theme. Or perhaps this is better explained by the exhibition’s precursors: the ‘Women in Art’ exhibitions put on by the association of artists called, funnily enough, ‘Women in Art’ (you can check out their website here).

Is there not something odd about an organization based on gender putting on an exhibition whose title ties it in some way to gender? Do we feel the need to have an organization called "Men in Art"?

At the same time, there are some realities: the art world, traditionally, and like all of the professions, has been seen for centuries as a man's world. While there is inherently nothing that distinguishes female and male experience in this regard (except in experiences of different gender norms), there is perhaps a need to defiantly send a message: The work of this group of female artists can stand alone as a testimony to the fact that women make work as good as men!

Perhaps only Naipaul would see it differently.

Desert island books

2011-06-02T10:31:00.000-04:00

Over drinks with a friend the other day the conversation turned to the following question: stranded on a deserted island for the rest of your life what books would you want to have with you?

Now being stranded on a deserted island might mean you'd be a little preoccupied with others things like fighting off the animals or hunting for food but you'd surely find time for some good literature!

1. The Bible

This one is a no-brainer. Most of Western literature, in some form or fashion, is traced to these texts which never fail to startle and inspire in every sense of the word. A must have.

2. The Tempest and/or The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

The Tempest is widely accepted as Shakespeare's last and--in the views of some--best and most atypical play. An elegy that is something of an homage to all that came before it from the Bard:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

I come back to this for its opening sentences: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Phillip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit that Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.” In other words, the protagonist is in a battle between forging his own destiny and fate: between naming himself and being named. A few lines later we learn that the “father” of the first sentence is dead and just as his name has been cut short—both advertently by others and inadvertently by himself—so much of Pip’s life has also been cut short of prospect, of opportunity, of expectation. This is a miraculous opening for a miraculous book. While Great Expectations is heavy-handed, perhaps, in some of its symbolism, its miracle remains the fact that every single line Dickens wrote in it is pregnant with possibility. Whenever I go back I always see more.

4. A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul.

One aspect of Naipaul's 1961 novel that not many people comment on is how its language and tone open up the narrative to deep and profound medications on life. We hear and read a lot about the novel's comic aspects, about its post-colonial themes, about its politics and its relation to Naipaul's other works. But what the book's narrator actually says is often overlooked (in favor of looking at the action and the comments of the characters). Consider one of the novel's best didactic passages that comes at the end of its great prologue:

But bigger than them all was the house, his house.

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

The language is elegant: precise but not verbose, well-structured yet still rhythmic. The book is hypnotic, heart-breaking and, ultimately, has the impact of a prayer. Interestingly, with a new book out and new editions of older books also out, Naipaul is in the news for some controversial remarks he's made (yet again).

5. Candide by Voltaire.

Such fine satire will be most welcomed. Optimism might also be useful in the circumstances, too.

6. The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Useful for battling all the wild predators on the isle.

7. Undraining Sea by Vahni Capideo.

Also useful for battling wild predators but perhaps for other reasons. If you are going to be facing the sea every morning then why not in the company of Capildeo's book?

The poetry of this volume joins the sea of words: it both makes and breaks the ocean up. The work is deeply mysterious (as in the poem 'From First to Last...') but also concerned with complex everyday experience. The form of the poems are themselves a medium of the poet's expression: her choice of structures and of mechanisms to express the iridescence of ideas mirror the language and images within her gift. This is a work of synesthesia.

Check out more about the book here and consider this section from 'Disappearing People':

As egrets fly over

reclaimed land in a whiteness

more plangent than the mangrove salt

crusting their wings,

just so was the gate

less wrought than what lay there,

arms fronting the ceiling.

But she shouted to it,

I am missing a layer.

You know how it has gone.

Where is the skin that pasted my bones?

My breastbone is pulsing

with my breath palpitating.

By my life! Give me cover!

What amends for no surface?

I keep down to a walking pace.

Still it goes surging, spilling out, life:

I need to close it,

what you took without moving.

8. Beloved by Toni Morrison.

One of the greatest novels ever written. The key success of the work is how Morrison gives voice to the voiceless, how she reverses an abhorrent erasure with a rage and fractious beauty.

9. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth.

You have to have an excellent thriller. This was the thriller that changed all thrillers and is still a good read.

10. Misery by Stephen King.

Might help to lighten the mood!

We are yellow now

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And in what colours he had painted it! Blue and green and even black. In 1938, the week the Pope died and the Sentinel came out with a black border, he had come across a large tin of yellow paint and painted everything yellow, even the typewriter. That had been acquired when, at the age of thirty-three, he had decided to become rich by writing for American and English magazines; a brief, happy, hopeful period. The typewriter had remained idle and yellow, and its colour had long since ceased to startle.

--V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas.

Far Nearer by Jaime xx

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LISTEN to 'Far Nearer' by xx's Jaime Smith.

Holly Bynoe's tumblr

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CHECK IT OUT here.

From Vahni Capildeo's postcards

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I would like to walk in a garden with you and hear the names of plants that, as you call them, are all sensitive.

* * *

(From Conversations for a Lifetime in Twenty Minutes and Under).

* * *

READ more from a series of postcards at Infinite Editions here.

My most anticipated films of 2011!

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1. Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In

It's a bad title (reads better in Spanish: La Piel que Habito) but Almodovar has been on a winning streak for the last decade starting with Habla Con Ella. A string of films: Bad Education, Volver and Broken Embraces have cemented his technical proficiency. Of these films, Bad Education remains my personal favorite with its particularly dark humour, kinkiness and treatment of a deeply taboo subject. The film resembles something of a personal fetish and a prayer; the tone is one of a hidden secret which the director is seeking to set free amidst a puzzle of plot devices. Unforgettable. Volver was a perfect film; perhaps a little too perfect. Broken Embraces was a stylistic tour de force that lacked something of the edge of the best Almodovar. The subject matter of The Skin I Live In (a plastic surgeon who keeps his wife prisoner) seems like the perfect antidote.

2. Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life

I enjoyed Malick's The New World immensely and found it to be rather perfect and sublime. The Thin Red Line I am less sure about. However, this film, judging from the trailer alone and the rumours, cannot be missed.

3. Lar Von Trier's Melancholia

Another bad title! Anyhow, forget the Cannes comments about Nazism (obviously another attempt by Von Trier to build buzz for his film by surrounding it with controversy). This looks to be the perfect subject matter for an incredibly straight-forward director. The film is about the impending end of the world, set at a lush estate where a wedding is to take place. The symbolism may be heavy-handed (anyone remember Antichrist, Dogville?) but the images of montages which Von Trier has pieced together for this film are enough to pique one's interest. Kirsten Dunst is, in my view, an under-rated actress as well (Marie Antoinette was made perfect by her) and it will be interesting to see what happens of her here.

4. Lynne Ramsey's We Need To Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton.

5. David Yates' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Am genuinely curious as to how this will end. Part 1 was quite beautiful and perfect in its own way.

One mask at a time

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SEE more at Brianna McCarthy's blog here.

Today is your last chance

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"People Celebrating Forests" by Wulf Gurstenmaier, first place in show.

To check out the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago's May exhibition with pieces from Che Lovelace, Embah, Peter Sheppard and many others! CHECK the website here.

Sugar and water and heat and sugar and water and

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ONGOING project as seen on Nikolai Noel's blog here.

The bride

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FROM Tanya Marie Williams blog here.

O here is Nadia Huggins!

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Nadia Huggins is a digital photographer from St. Vincent & the Grenadines who has been specializing in documentary and conceptual photography for over 8 years. She also has several years experience in television production and graphic design. Her work takes apart the everyday and everyday-ness. The juxtapositions she employs along with her attention to composition, light and presence infuses the form and content, thereby addressing ideas of veiled beauty. She has been featured in several online and print publications internationally and is part of the Depthcore Collective. She is also the founder andCreative Director of Arc Magazine, the first of its kind to highlight art and culture in the Caribbean.

CHECK out Nadia's blog here.

The possibility of art

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Art. Recognition. Culture. These are the watchwords of ARC magazine, a new Caribbean art venture launched in Trinidad at Alice Yard, Woodbrook, on April 27.

The magazine, which covers Caribbean art, launched its inaugural issue in January and unveiled its second issue in April as part of the Bocas Literature Festival.

“It is our ambition to inspire and give voice to a new generation of independent and emerging artists who remain fearless and fearful while battling the fractions and whole of their varied cultures,” co-editor Holly Bynoe, herself a visual artist, said at the launch. “Thereby becoming part of an entity that has a collective and necessary impact on our shared social spaces and geography.” Bynoe placed ARC in the context of a Caribbean art scene often dogged with difficulties in crossing boundaries.

“ARC is a call to action,” Bynoe said. “For far too long we have been disconnected. Though waves separate us, we must find a way to unify and bring together our disparate parts to realize what we are within this expanding maze.”

“We found it necessary to make the common man and the aficionado aware of the possibility of art, its evolution, trends and ‘personalities’. We also felt the need to provide a forum that celebrates creativity, its determination, dialogue and pleasure,” Bynoe said.

In a press release to mark the launch, Bynoe and co-editor Nadia Huggins, further set out the objectives of ARC.

“The Caribbean has been excluded from contemporary publishing – our archipelago’s geographical constraints, differing political systems, technological and economic limitations make the space especially difficult to navigate,” they noted. “Yet we feel it important to present work within a container that honours the merit and labour of art production. As a collaborative unit of makers we understand what it means to foresee this as an archive and as a cultural capsule preserved for our future.”

“We are attempting to understand our dispersal and the potential of ARC’s collective ideologies and content. Larger ideas of supporting emerging artists throughout the duration of their careers will be our first step in defining the collaborative space we occupy. ARC Magazine is a quarterly, independent visual arts magazine made possible by the subscription and support of its readers. ARC is a projected motion that ascends, moves outward and beyond into a space of curiosity.”

Issue 2 features work by Trinidadian artist Brianna McCarthy (http://briannamccarthy.blogspot.com) who also displayed her work at the exhibition and spoken-word launch event at Alice Yard last week. Of McCarthy, whose first collage adornes the cover of ARC 2, the editors noted, “Featured artist Brianna McCarthy’s collage and paper constructions strive to redefine our views of the Afro-Caribbean woman; working within repetition and beauty she constructs patterns that challenge the notions of its definition.”

The magazine has a novel approach to its subject matter and to critique, in terms of how criticism and text (including poetry) meet and interact with work in playful, yet also rigorous ways. Issue 2, the editors note, brings together the work of Andrea Chung, a Jamaican visual artist, who takes an ironic look at tourism and its neo constructs in the Caribbean. Writer and critic Annie Paul has partnered with Chung to bring a haunting vision to life. Additionally, A Hand Full of Dirt, the first feature by Barbadian filmmaker Russell Watson, is broken down to its core, and writer/filmmaker Tracy Assing examines funding and organizational structures in place to bring Caribbean filmmaking into 2011. Dalton Narine also discusses how mas man Peter Minshall’s practice presents a poetic revelation of an artist who for decades lost himself in his creations. Detailing Minshall in his genius, Narine provokes, tempts and enchants us with the power of mas. Andre Bagoo also looks at a slide-show of the work of Stanley Greaves in a long essay on how politics is reflected in art.

April’s launch at Alice Yard was well-attended, with Bynoe and Huggins utilizing and successfully engaging with all of the spaces available at the contemporary arts space. The program included poetry from the poet Vahni Capildeo (author of Undraining Sea, Eggbox Publishing), and Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné (a Cropper Foundation resident). Artwork from McCarthy, Rodell Warner, Gerard Hanson, Andrea Chung Manuel Mathieu, Andre Bagoo and Vahni Capildeo, Tracy Assing and Clayton Rhule were a part of the show.

“There is no complete observation or understanding until the whole is present, and if the fracture continues and we remain unable to repair, bond or move as one unit, what will unite our experience?" Bynoe asked at the April event. "There is a deep level failure embedded in the nature of division and for ARC to function we need to embrace and welcome its vision, generosity and unselfishness. We have grown in very different ways but at the center of our encounters and interactions there was always present: concerns about art, its culture and how it can be used as a critical space for questioning positions and ideologies regarding societal roles.”

***

FROM Newsday

ARC magazine can be purchased at Paper-Based, Hotel Normandie. Call 625-3917. Copies are also available from Alice Yard (http://aliceyard.blogspot.com)

ARC 2 launch tonight!

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Place: Alice Yard, Woodbrook at 80 Roberts Street. Time: Wed, 7pm. What: Spoken word event and exhibition (in partnership with the Bocas Lit Fest). For: the launch of the second issue of the amazing magazine ARC. Featuring: artist Brianna McCarthy; poet Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné and some surprises!

Trinidad's artist of slavery: Richard Bridgens

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Richard Bridgens, 'West India Scenery'

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

The English artist Richard Bridgens lived and worked in Trinidad in the 1830s, a generation before Cazabon, and drew and commented on what he found here. He took not only an artistic but also an anthropological interest in the sugar estates and the people who worked on them. Nevertheless, his work has either been completely overlooked or else dismissed as pro-slavery polemic that offers little more than caricature. But it is nowincreasingly being recognised by historians and art historians as an important visual record of the last years of slavery. Judy Raymond is researching Bridgens’s life and work in an attempt to discover more about the meaning of his drawings and resolve these contradictions.

Judy Raymond has a BA in Literae Humaniores (Classics) from Hertford College, Oxford, and an MA in Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She has worked as a journalist for over 20 years and currently edits Caribbean Beat magazine and writes a parliamentary column for the Sunday Express. She has written biographical studies of the Trinidadian jeweler Barbara Jardine and fashion designer Meiling. She has recently published an essay on the nineteenth-century painter Michel Jean Cazabon in the December 2010 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.

RAYMOND ON BRIDGENS:

Bridgens is a very shadowy figure, and there isn’t a lot of information on him anywhere. He knew and worked with a really stellar group of people, but I suspect his problem was that he lacked any talent for self-promotion. For instance, he did important work on the interior of Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford, but the first couple of times he crops up in Scott’s letters, it’s as “Mr Buggins” (a rather hobbit-like variant of his name). He didn’t always show up on the radar.

READ a feature on Raymond's research at the Caribbean Review of Books here.

Event is on Thursday at 7pm at UTT's NAPA campus.

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