Farewell to Flesh

Women

Carnivalesque

The Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan movement was intimately intertwined with, and completely dependent on, contemporary popular cultural forms and institutions. Klansmen were selective in their appropriations from popular culture, however, and the types of entertainments they drew from illuminate the significance of their theatricality. In choreographing their attacks, they did not draw from prizefighting, domestic fiction, or the new sport of baseball but from carnivalesque genres such as minstrelsy, Mardi Gras, the circus, folk serenading, and rough music. Those traditions centered on comic inversion and jumbled together varied and discordant elements.

Steel Pan

Reality Check

It was V S Naipaul who wrote about Trinidadians, ‘That they take pleasure in living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure. They know that they are presented to the world as the land of calypso and steel band. They are determined the world shall not be disappointed; and their talent for self-caricature is profound.’ Naipaul says a frequently used word in Trinidad is culture, and culture is, in short, a night-club turn. ( The Middle Passage)
Culture brings in the money for Trinidad. Carnival brings in the money for Trinidad.
Carnival is colour. Carnival is music. Carnival is bacchanal. Movement. Energy. Art. Excitement. Trinidad Carnival is all those things, and more as just simmering below the surface is pure aggression. It's a nation that doesn't know why it's being aggressive. A haunted nation, trapped between a fantasy and a hard place.

Standing Tall

Uncertainty

I'm not sure how I feel about this blog at the moment or how I feel about this project idea etc.
I'm having trouble trying to get my point across.
Jeez, I'm having trouble working out what is my point.
I know I don't want this project to be simply presenting or representing images of Carnival, with all the colour, excitement feathers. It's more than that, it has to be more than that, as the reality of Carnival is so shallow I don't want to add to that image.

So I'll keep working on it. Maybe it's the images I'm working with, maybe it's the decades of traditions , in regards to Carnival, moving one way and then another that I;m trying to work with or against.
But there is more to it and I should just do as I am doing, continue to give myself the time and space to explore it.