Ria Bacon: editor & writer

Linguist with wanderlust,
From the hills of New Guinea to the halls of the Sorbonne,
From the beaches of Bassam to the fields of Friesland,
From the catacombs of Rome to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
From the heather of the Veluwe to the dust of Dakar ...

Currently resident in the Land of Sea with a small tribe of kids and Mr B.

FYI

Stet means "Let it stand" and is used by editors to indicate that the original text should be left untouched.

...in Arcadia ego is a pun on a painting by Poussin.

Contact

Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com

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The Last Album

Yesterday I read that British dance duo Groove Armada were bringing out their last album (interview in Dutch). They clarified that they would continue to publish new music but only in single or EP formats.

“The album has no future. [...]
People mostly only buy singles online [...]
Writing 12 songs shouldn’t be such a big deal, but

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3 comments to The Last Album

  • hereward

    The best debut album I can think of is The Kick Inside, by Kate Bush. But the rest of her albums are very good, too, as she never had any tapering off or falling down.

  • PLK

    Always nice to have one’s good taste confirmed by an expert.
    I bought the Jorge Ben LP in 1963 in a music store in Santos Brasil. The good old mono days! If you like a copy let me know. You may also like Avanco (cannot find the spanish c) by the Tamba Trio.

  • Almost everyone that earnsan income on the internet (even the millionaires) do so through affiliate marketing. Being successful in affiliate marketing involves applying the formula that makes other affiliate marketers successful. For instance, autoblogging. Autoblogging has been one of the least well-known forms of making money on the internet for quite some time… primarily because it’s quite difficult to make a good auto-blog. Yet, when done right, it can provide you with a constant passive income with the only real work required being the setting up process. Video Marketing, and several other marketing strategies are all designed to drive traffic to your site, can be incorporated steadily in order to raise the position your site appears in the search engine results page when someone searches for a term related to your site. And yet, even this can be totally automated.

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Sidi Mansour vs Ma Baker

Life in Kingston, Jamaica was sometimes like living in a war zone: occasional bursts of excitement — driving after dark through a ghetto zone, boarding up the windows as a hurricane approached — interspersed with long periods of boredom, for the city does not offer much in the way of amusement for a young family of

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8 comments to Sidi Mansour vs Ma Baker

  • Ik hoefde niet meer te worden overtuigd :-), maar de mix is erg goed gelukt! Als ik nog eens iemand moet overtuigen, verwijs ik ze naar jouw logje… Leuke weblog, trouwens.

  • Hmm, there are a lot more things to do in Kingston than just go out to eat, even though Kingston has its fair share of food restaurants. There are the various parties on the weekends, the club, the cinema, plays (even through they are mostly Roots plays). And if that fails, then you’ll have to take it out f down and take a .

  • Es

    Is dat typisch nederlands??? Good to hear it’s not just me ;-)
    Ik heb het inmiddels op CD gezet, een aantal keren geluisterd in de auto en ik ben nu echt overtuigd. Misschien niet typisch nederlands, maar gewoon eigenwijs…. :-)

  • dini

    Three ours of work just to prove your point?

  • Marieke

    In reaction to Dini – taken over some Dutch “eigenwijsheid”? Nice mix though!

  • Was using this goto a randomly blog feature on randomizer and ended up here, a great way to read something new like this. Thanks for taking your time and efforts to create this blogpost.

  • Alice

    HEY!!!NICE TO MEET YOU! IM SO GLAD THERE IS ANOTHER PERSON IN THIS WORLD THAT HAVE SEEN IT, AT LEAST YOU UNDERSTAND ME. I HAVE TO LET YOU KNOW IM ALSO THE TYPE OF OBSSESSED PERSON, OBSSESSED FOR MUSIC AND LOOK-ALIKES BETWEEN SONGS…GOOD JOB, I UNDERSTAND YOUR 3 HOURS WORK, EVEN I WOULD HAVE DONE SMTGH LIKE THAT, JUST TO PROVE THE LOOK-ALIKE…ANYWAY, I GUESS SIDI MANSOUR IS THE ONLY ARABIC SONG I CANT GET ENOUGH OF, AND ALSO MA BEKER FOR AMERICAN MUSIC….CHEERS!

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Addicted to Alice

I got a chunky translation job last month, 61 pages of sobering and inspiring information about childhood in Senegal: sobering to read that children’s charity X allows a maximum grant of US$5 per month; inspiring when I think of the hundreds of people freely offering their time and experience to help others less fortunate than themselves.

My

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3 comments to Addicted to Alice

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Shaking Up Orange Street

Part II of my downtown tour should be loading below. It took a little longer to finish than I’d hoped, partly because I wanted to make it look better than my previous clip, and partly because uploading it to YouTube is very very slow.

As I’ve recommended previously, if your bandwidth is as bad as mine,

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5 comments to Shaking Up Orange Street

  • hello, check out the trailer for “Dub Echoes”: http://www.myspace.com/dubechoes

  • I used to catch my bus home from high school dowh there for years. Also used to bus thru there on the way home when I worked further up Orange Street in the early ’80′s

  • Ria – this is fabulous. Made me want to leap on a plane NOW. Especially loved the soundtrack – more music please. Have proper broadband at last so can catch it…

  • Ria

    @ Bruno –> I look forward to seeing the full documentary. I’m glad you managed to get Lee Perry … even though he doesn’t make a lot of sense when he talks, to my mind he is the greatest Jamaican musical artist.

    @ MB –> Were you at Kingston Tech? I had you pinned as a Wolmer’s boy.

    @ Granny P –> Funny you should mention leaping on a plane NOW … I have the exact same reaction … but in the opposite direction.

    Stay tuned …

  • nice video. I need to get some of those ska albums its like nobody mixes them anymore :(

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Two cultures clash

Talk of banning the “dance of death” is still doing the rounds here in Kingston, or at least it was this morning at the hairdresser’s. The dance in question is of course the “Dutty Wine”. In a country where new dance moves pop up every week, the Dutty Wine has shown unusual endurance since its first

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7 comments to Two cultures clash

  • Read this article a while ago, have a little blurb on my site. Feel bad for the girls family, but not 100% convinced that her death was caused by a dance. I can just image the Yute she was dancing with, walking around going, don’t make me kill ya with the dutty wine now…(I know, I know bad joke)

  • plk

    PARASIGHTS is a beauty

  • [...] Ria Bacon comments on the clash of cultures taking place in the discussions surrounding the ultra-popular “dutty wine” dance since moves associated with the latter allegedly caused the death of a young woman. She also links to a YouTube video and says that there are 2000+ similar examples to be found on the video-sharing site. Georgia Popplewell [...]

  • there was a story in yesterday’s paper of a bajan girl who went to Jamaica to learn how to do the dutty wine correctly. i don’t think the story deserved 2 pages but obviously the Dutty Wine has a life and energy of it own.

  • Hi, Michele sent me today. I chose “stet” because no-one knows what that term means and I’m such an editing nerd. Thanks for the lesson on the Dutty Wine, I had no idea of the dangerous nature of this dance!

  • kia

    I followed the link from my posting on yours and enjoyed your story.

    What has struck me more in the days since the death is the obvious division in cultures between the middle class, educated newspaper journalists, and the semi-literate dancehall fans. The remove is such that some were not even aware of the song and dance until the recent death.

    Well, one of the reasons is practical. Middle-class people don’t go to the sorts of clubs and events where this dance happens. Not at first, anyway. For one thing, they are likely to assume that such places are dangerous.

    Street culture has been migrating upwards in Jamaica since about the 1960s. Over the years the internal barriers — prejudices, conventions, etc., — to reggae and dancehall culture and all its various forms are much more permeable than they were then. Even before I left Jamaica in my teens in the mid-late 70s I knew, and experienced, a change in Kingston speech, I was speaking a whole new middle-class slang that was full of street lamguage, to the unutterable dismay of my parents.

    But the various social stigma associated with stuff like “dutty wine” are considerably reduced, among the educated middle class, from what they would once have been.

    So now it’s pretty much just the churches that do this sort of moral policing. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t class barriers still, but these are much less to do with subtle things like syntax and “slackness” than they are to do with material status.

  • I’m reluctant that the Pit bull requirements a particular type of operator…these pet dogs, no matter how ‘trusting’ still have teeth, are still creatures with out moral concepts and when they DO bite, won’t allow go. As in all creatures…some often be more suseptable to instinctual behavior and time and time again, this breed tends to do just that.

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