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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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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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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Driver! Don’t stop at all

Drawing to the end of my series of images of downtown Kingston, I post below the first part of a drive I took last week with my good friend, Barry White.

I know, it’s the voice.

If all goes according to plan, Part II will include a drive round the main square, Sir William Grant Park (during which

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De time so bleaky

The title of this post refers to the overcast skies we’ve been having lately in Kingston. For photography, the stark whiteness is something terrible to deal with. No amount of fiddling with contrast or brightness can save the sky because there is simply no data recorded. This means an extra step or two in the darkroom,

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I cover the waterfront

Downtown Kingston ends at the waterfront and the wide expanse of the seventh largest natural harbour in the world. Morris Cargill, veteran journalist at The Daily Gleaner, described it more equivocally as “the world’s most beautiful sewer”, as tons of garbage are washed down the gullies running through the city, straight into the water; and, given

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10 comments to I cover the waterfront

  • Redevelopment of the harbor seems like the only way to bring back whatever luster was there before. In Barbados The Wharf (including a complete new bridge) was redeveloped. And now it is a wonderful place to go.

    Let us hope the same can happen with your Harbor.

  • [...] Stet conducts a tour down to the neglected Kingston waterfront: “I actually had a dream…of strolling along the boardwalk at dusk, coloured lights strung from the trees, kids running to the merry-go-round, and a band playing (softly!) by the pier. It’s not such an outlandish idea.” Share This [...]

  • Barbados in Focus is right… This is a possibility, once some of the negating factors can be tackled (crime & violence). The waterfront in Grand Cayman is an irie place as well.

  • I love the waterfront downtown and was very happy working downtown, I prefer it as a working area to New Kingston! And I make sure that any visitors I have go down there, to the gallery and to wander along the waterfront. Unfrotunately though we can only do it in the day…

  • [...] Stet conducts a tour down to the neglected Kingston waterfront: “I actually had a dream…of strolling along the boardwalk at dusk, coloured lights strung from the trees, kids running to the merry-go-round, and a band playing (softly!) by the pier. It’s not such an outlandish idea.” [...]

  • Downtown is not that bad especially right along the waterfront. A few blocks in can get really crazy any time of day or night. Schools with combat ready army in them, things like that.

    That being said the water is truly disturbing. Made only more so by the small children and old men swimming or fishing in the harbor. When the ferry used to go to Port Royal from there dozens of pickney would hop on the back to jump of as the ferry got into the harbor. Sometimes foolish onlookers would throw silver into the water for them to dive for. My farther described similar events from his childhood in New York City where kids would dive for money. So maybe it is something kids do around the world.

    I spent a few weeks in downtown planning and running a conference at the Jamaica Conference center. Which is worth a visit for the kitschy late 70′s decor mixed with weird not working UN equipment. The conference center has some very scenic spots in it that are worthy of pictures. The conference went well, with thousands of children and teachers came from through out the island to see what the project I had worked on did for schools.

    After the conference I woke up early the next day to go to the North Coast for another event. On the way we drove through what was obviously a murder scene in New Kingston. After a while you get to know what they look like. Being in Kingston you get to see a poor impersenation of CSI from your car window far too often. It turned out that a group of gunman had murdered police officers and security guards in retaliation for a don being gunned down in Denham Town. The murders occurred in New Kingston, Downtown, and Crossroads. The downtown murder was just in front of the conference center exit where I had been only hours earlier loading equipment.

    Strange thing was this gunman claimed they did this to protect Denham Town. Yet it was the very same children from their Denham Town that were at the conference getting interviewed about what they had accomplished in their schools as part of this conference. Yet all any knew of these kids was the violence to “protect” their community, not the good deeds they had done in their schools. That too me was the essence of my time in Kingston.

  • ria, you missed a hot spot: the rather dishy fisherman… his TYRE has a hotspot… and he doesn’t! ;) you clever thing you. I’d love to do these panoramics… but I deleted the software and can’t find it again!!!! :(

  • Top picture caption. ‘Dis a pier’ hahahahahahaha

  • Ria

    I wondered if anyone would comment on the caption, Zinnia. In addition to the wordplay, there’s also a nod to Magritte’s painting, La trahison des images.

  • Freedom of the Seas, the biggest-cruise-ship-ever…

    The world’s largest and most innovative cruise ship, Freedom of the Seas, left Southampton on May 3, 2006 to make her transatlantic voyage to New York….

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