On the Road Again in Jamaica

WOW but its been a very long, very full day at the 2013 Rex Nettleford Arts Conference on Sustainability, Social Transformation, and the Creative Industries at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (quite a mouthful, and quite a day). Let me see – today is um…Thursday; I left my house in Ft. Myers yesterday at 5:00am, drove to Miami, parked at the Airport Marriott (great deal - $4.50/day, free shuttle), was checked in by 8:00 and sitting down with my usual Cuban swiss cheese and tomato Miami Airport sandwich by 9:00, boarded the plane at 10:20 and landed in Jamaica two hours later. Eeeeeeeeasy. No problem with immigration or customs, headed out to the curb to find the taxi I booked with my hotel and …no taxi. There was a very handy Digicell office right there so I got yet another $5.00 sim card for my travel phone and called the hotel where apparently I had no reservation despite the ten or twelve emails we exchanged on the subject but no problem they had a room available and of course there was an airport cab very happy to drive me into Kingston. I had booked into the Indies Hotel because it appeared to be easy walking distance to the much more expensive Knutsford Court conference hotel where I could catch the daily shuttles up to the Manley College and that did in fact turn out to be true. I have a perfectly comfortable little room on the ground floor with three single beds, a safe in the closet for an extra US dollar a day and while the water temperatures in the shower are wildly variable the window AC works just fine and the restaurant has lots of vegetarian options (to cater to the Rastafarians, of course). I spent the afternoon and the evening yesterday cramming for my conference presentation, sorting out the rental car for Saturday, attending an opening dance performance, seeing some familiar faces, finding out that Monday is a national holiday so there goes some of the things I had planned to do, generally agonizing over everything and not sleeping much at all.

Today, however, was just great in every way. One of the speakers in the main panel was David Brown, the director of the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and the perfect person to enlist in my crusade to go back into Trenchtown to interview ‘walkaround style’ potters I met and photographed fifteen years ago. On the bus this morning I renewed my friendship with the amazing Marielle Barrow of Caribbean InTransit (terrific online journal and networking site for contemporary Caribbean art) and she knows David so he had been warned already when I descended on him after the panel but he couldn’t have been more supportive. After several phone calls and an introduction to Jamaican ceramics professor and incredible drummer Phillip Supersad we had a plan to meet up next Tuesday to head into Trenchtown with Phillip who knows these potters I’m trying to find. I love the Caribbean. There’s always a way to get where you’re going because people are just so great. I had a great chat too with David Dunn, also on the ceramics faculty, and he came to my talk as did several of his students and David Brown and Marielle Barrow and it went just fine – the images all looked great, and in my twenty minutes I managed to say some useful and interesting things (title of the presentation: “A Fragile Enterprise: Is There a Place for Tradition in the New Creative Economy ?”). The rest of the day kept going like that – met and listened to lots more fascinating people, ate some pretty good food in the campus cantine, made very reassuring phone calls to confirm my visits to potters on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The day wrapped up with the opening ceremonies for the conference in the evening with fire-breathing acrobatic Jonkonnu dancers, a lovely performance by the Jamaican National Folk Singers, some interesting roots reggae/rap fusion music, and a quite good speech on the creative industries by a national politician who was both knowledgeable and personable (he had a great line about politicians as performers – and then amended that to ‘non-performers’.) All in all a worthwhile evening but by the time the last Jonkonnu dancer cartwheeled off the stage around 9pm I was nearly comatose from weariness and am now going to pass out altogether because tomorrow we start right up again at 8:30am. Jamaican pictures and thoughts on the writing of the book to follow soon…