The Traveling Beaver + Ed Bradley

A Day in the Life of The Traveling Beaver

• The Traveling Beaver is an expat living in Haiti for now and having a great time of it apparently. His posts are usually about his enjoyable experiences there and he generally does very little of the fatalistic whining and complaining that other expats or locals often do. Seems like a man who knows how to make the best of life, wherever he is.
  
• Anyway, his latest post illustrates all of the above. Features a trip to Deschapelles --including the requisite contrast of attitudes there to attitudes in faster-paced Port-au-Prince,-- pictures of Deschapelles and ... Burundi where he recently traveled, a performance of Hotel California for fellow hotel guests, and yes (back down to earth!) his feelings about the recent murder of two Jordanian UN troops.

A 'Yellow Misfit''s Goodbye to Ed Bradley

• Blogger and former Village Voice writer Gary Dauphin (who is in my Haitian Diaspora blogroll, to the right of the home page) has a great post about Ed Bradley, a man he finds relevant to a "yellow misfit" like himself. The post is written in Dauphin's usual unique self-deprecating but refreshingly honest style. Like when he says:

  it was the fact that he was a master flirt that got me, how Bradley seemed to be one of those powerful, married, older men (was Bradley married then? It had to have been '93) whose yen for women had not curdled into a creepy coveting of youth, but had instead ripened into a rakishly cool (that word again) playfulness - gently suggestive, sharp, expert, and completely harmless all at the same time.

• Bradley was not married then. Or at least not to his widow Patricia Blanchet, a Haitian-American filmmaker, whom he seems to have married in 2004. The Aspen Times has a great article and picture of the two.
  

ed bradley - haiti - minustha - caraibbean -burundi

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My Blog Log

I joined My Blog Log, which is a kind of MySpace for bloggers and their readers. I invite all of your reading from the mailing list or from the feeds to join my kiskeyAcity page there. You'll be able to create profiles for yourselves, see each other and interact (kind of). You're welcome to do that here too of course but technically My Blog Log is designed specifically for community building. I am new to the software so I can't quite gage compeletely how efficient it'll be for those purposes but I think it is definitely a resource for those of you who have blogs.

I'll report back on how helpful this new tool is.

In the meantime, I created a 'Community and Stats' section to the right of the home page with the My Blog Log badge and another badge of My Blog Log members who have recently read kiskeyAcity.

Meanwhile, you can sign up and join the kiskeyAcity community by clicking on the badge below and following the instructions:

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Bob Marley Survey + Wrong Song

• Caribbean blogger Geoffrey Philps had the marvelous idea of conducting a survey about Bob Marley and rastafari on his blog. Here are the results. Maybe I'll comment on them when I have more time. For now digest on your own. Too bad he did not include any questions on Bob and rastafari's views on the family and gender relations. That would have piqued my interest.
  

• I was browsing through some new guadeloupean blogs the other day and one, Bouillante Actualites, posted this YouTube video promoting Guadeloupe. I found slightly bizarre though that the lovely song chosen for the clip is ... Haitian?! (Michael Benjamin's Ou Pati Kite Mwen on the first Haiti Twoubadou album.) In this age of globalization and creolization, I don't really care about those distinctions, but the least the maker of the clip could have done is remove the part of the song where Michael screams "Haiti Twoubadou!". I mean the point of the thing is to promote Guadeloupe ... Is that common sense or did I wake up on the wrong foot?

bob marley - jamaica -haiti - guadeloupe - caribbean

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New Haitian Blogs

I'm adding some new Haitian blogs to the Caribbean blogroll (see bottom right of home page) and I thought I'd let you know:

• Karlito's blog a.k.a http://ayitireseau.com/blog/ -- seems to be a blog about the haitian konpa scene. The latest post is about the abduction of Fabiola Dupoux, a well known haitian konpa band manager and former middle and high school classmate of mine. Apparently this happened last nite. Yikes!
• Techie Sebastien Barreau. Not sure whether or not he is Haiti-based.
• Adorable Emmanuelle Elie who named her blog after herself. Self-described yogurt-loving model and high school student in Haiti. Blogs in english entirely so is probably attending an American school. Has this lovely post about a convo between her and her mom about love. Her mom tells her something my aunt once told me too, that our generation does not believe in love. (If teen-aged Emmanuelle and 30-something me are indeed of the same generation. Ha!)
  
• Emmanuelle's blog is big news because haiti-based blogs have been few and far between so if it takes her age group to propel things forward, more power! In any event all the above guys seem interlinked and may be the future of the type of network apparently needed to form coherent, active blogospheres. To be continued...
  

haiti - blogging - blog - caribbean

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My afternoon with Lionel Richie

slideshow

As I sit here listening to Lione Richie's "You Are," I'm thinking "what made me download this and all of Nicole Richie's dad's hits from the 80's/early 90s in the first place?" Ah, that fateful day not so long ago in late September when I was hanging out with a friend around Times Square while on vacation and... ahem... we got approached by a BET person who asked us if we'd join the audience of his live BET special.

My friend and I had just gotten rejected by the audience gatekeepers at the Montel Williams show nearby. (Yeah I know. Long story. All I can say is: I was on vacation, people.) So guess what we said?

If you still don't know, here are some visual mementos of what turned out to be a fun afternoon after all with a vaguely sacharin but also very nice man whose appearance hasn't changed an iota since the videos for "All night" or "Hello"...

Connection to Haiti/the Caribbean? Well aside from the fact that both my friend and I are Haitian, well, uh ... oh yeah, a long long time ago many Haitians were convinced that 'Richie' was really 'Riche' (with an accent aigu on the 'e' that I am too sleepy to drum up right now) and that Richie was therefore Haitian. Thankfully the man debunked that rumor for me during the taping when he kept referring to his hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama...


slideshow



lionel richie - BET - haiti - nicole richie

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World Bank Study, Governance, Corruption

Great blog post about the World Bank and governance in Haiti on Haiti Innovation. Commenting about Haiti's poor showing in a World Bank study, Bryan says:

Third, this study is more than a little ironic considering that the World Bank has caused a good deal of suffering in Haiti and some of its past policies encouraged corruption. Haiti and the DR were on the same level 25 years ago. Dominican leaders got rich by encouraging the private sector and skimming off the top. Haitian political leaders became rich by keeping the country poor and skimming money from the international community. The World Bank gave a poorly monitored grant to Haiti to pave all three national highways. Needless to say the money was stolen. But whose fault is that? Should an international organization assume all its clients are going to be honest or does it set systems in place that let them know the difference? Haiti became a kleptocracy because organizations like the World Bank kept giving.

All good and very interesting. I'm left wondering why Dominican leaders 'skimmed off the top' while Haitian ones ate the whole cake ... But do read the whole thing, it is quite interesting and offers a fresh perspective on old issues.

Haiti - world bank

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Hoopla about Dessalines' Death

Well first, on the occasion of the 200 anniversary of the death of a founding father of the Haitian 'nation', lots of commemoration going on of course. But mostly some minor (relatively comical) controversy as Haiti-based blogger Yon Ayisyen explains. Namely, some want the Haitian government to open an investigation into the circumstances of his death??? Others feel we shouldn't celebrate his death. I don't really feel particularly strongly about that last tidbit but I do find interesting that what we celebrate is the ambush that led to his death. Kind of (consciously or unconsciously) symbolic of the gazillion ambushes and plots and coups that have ensued in our ridiculously testosterone-filled history, isn't it?


But to go back to the investigation, is that really a priority at a time when a recent NGO report states that eating and drinking is a luxury for most Haitians??? (I hope my historian friends won't hate me for asking this.)

(Above links were originally in French which is why I'm linking to my translations made for GV on the topic. The translations contain links to the original posts.)


haiti -
dessalines -
caribbean

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Brooklyn Creole

• Haitian jazz band Mozayik was at Solomon's Porch in Bed Stuy last Saturday. I brought back a slideshow.

• A benefit for New Orleans was happening the same night not too far away at the Brooklyn Lyceum. I have shots of some of the artwork exposed. The benefit also featured several ballrooms, lots of food and live brass. See slideshow.
  

brooklyn - haiti - mozayik - new orleans - SURGE

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