ASSORTED ISSUE, LOCAL OR OTHERWISE (including the Weeks Street Primarty School

GETTING RID OF MEGATRUCK THROUGH TRAFFIC

It took incredible sacrifice, discipline and procedural smarts to get the large cement and gravel trailer trucks off Highway 14. The process was driven by firmness and determination, but was never nasty. And it became eventually evident to be one of cooperation and mutual respect. 

THOUGHTS ON FOOD PRODUCTION AND PLANNING, ETC.

Growing your own food is very hard, and only the most dedicated and/or talented can make a success of it. Since I'm not in the latter category I try to help with food production at the edges, looking for ways to support it from outside the industry.

Among my major interests (and perhaps abilities) is comprehensive planning. In comprehensive planning , one examines as many relationships as possible, much as a good artist might. And as with an art project, there is much that is subjective and qualitative along with what is scientific and rational. So I don't believe there is a single approach to food production, but many, including many that are experimental and unresolved. For instance, I favor no-till growing that doesn't disturb top soil. But I'm so far from being able to recommend it for universal food production that it behooves me to back off the subject and allow others to carry on with their own practices which have wide practicality and acceptance. 

But I do have ideas to share that connect to those wider planning relationships I mentioned. Some of these pertain to Jamaica:

WHAT IS THE PICTURESQUE? (It applies to the feeling of infinity in the distant views along the Turquoise Trail.)

"The concept was propagated by the statesman and writer Edmund Burke. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful argued that both beauty and the overwhelming experience of the Sublime were perceived emotionally, and generated by subjective rather than objective criteria. Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are exclusive. His idea of the Sublime was a contrast to the classical perception of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues, and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality able to establish feelings of powerful emotion, creating a pleasant experience. Burke’s thesis also concentrates on the physiological effects of the Sublime, mainly the emotional quality of fear and attraction."

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/theories-of-the-picturesque-and-the-sublime-english-literature-essay.php

STALLS

- Food stalls can be sanitary and picturesque at the same time. The roughness is the charm, the soul, the magnetism of the Jamaican scene.

- There can be ruggedness and uniformity at the same time. That would derive from system. Not just a scientific medical system, but also an aesthetic one too. (Jamaica must avoid too much sterility, too much surrendering of soul and color). 

- Food stalls might or might not be integrated with housing, depending on the local situation.

- Food stalls focusing on the vending of local food can also "sell" or "project" cultural ideas that have potential social and economic benefit. This includes materials and design approaches with effects that could be germaine to tourism.

HOUSING

- There is an existential crisis in affordable housing. Existing housing practices are driven by profit, and are hobbled by conformity to inappropriate social and environmental ideas.

- Relatively small adaptations to housing can facilitate food growing in and around the structures themselves.

- Planning around water and various critical issues of governance can benefit Jamaican livelihood.

FACEBOOK AND GOVERNANCE: ISSUES

- Facebook may be a medium of "soft governance."

- Reporting to relevant government authorities.

- Non political, auxiliary, voluntary  people's governance.

- Need for cooperative people on the ground.

- Liaising with the PM for mutual support.

- Need for links with government. 

- Reasons to focus on St. Ann parish.

- "Restoring St. Ann's Bay" is vision oriented.

- How to leverage small amounts of money.

- Tourism as a matrix for issue convergence.

- Minimalist strategy in keeping with limited resources. 

CAROL CARPENTER

- Carol Carpenter spoke about a charter school for Madrid in five years. That was four years ago. 

- Carol was then employed half the year on the east coast in a very high level job. She is now here full time, and if the vice chair of the Community College.

-  Could this be discussed?: Make the Madrid school an experimental extension of the Community College? Reflecting their curricular resources?


MANIFESTO

- Land (including place) is more important than people. People emerge from and are dependent on land, and not the other way around

- Aesthetics are the most useful guide: "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth," or whatever it was Keats said.

- The poor need close to 100% of our social attention. Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats

- We got into the mess we're in by throwing things, places, peoples, cultures and languages away. We must stop doing this

- Children are the new slaves to run energy on. Historically, energy depended on human slavery, morphing into fossil fuel slavery (on which we now ENTIRELY depend, while it tanks along with it correlated economic system.

- Substituting children as the energy source doesn't mean cruel or stupid forms of coercion; it's just that there might be no other energy source that allows ANYONE to survive.



JANET

1) Cooperation:

- You are the only person in Jamaica I'm aware of who is not somehow closed off from the diaspora. Others will occasionally chime in, do great things, then when your hopes are raised, will totally disappear. They simply won't answer you. One feels spurned, hurt, but there being no other choice, one hangs on and posts here or there. Thanks for being you, Janet!

2) Strategy:

- We must have strategy, or else we'll just keep throwing thoughts out into the wind, whence the rubber never hits the road, and there is no structure to build onto. I'm particularly guilty of that. But what's the alternative?

- Covid-19 will probably be the best chance we've had in our lifetimes to get in there and be listened to. Can we squeeze through the crack which the virus presents? 

- Are there three specific things you'd like to see that I can help with...possibly in exchange for your helping me likewise? Or even one specific project. You had mentioned planting something for the public outside your window. I want to board up that little wood structure in St. Ann's Bay. 

3) Building: 

- We seem to have related visions there. I am more than willing to continue making little diagrams on grid paper of whatever design projects can be mutually decided on.  It's easy enough to transmit electronically, and the grid means that things can be measured more easily, thus relatable to children who can be brought in to participate.

What are your thoughts?

Trevor

KILLING THE FARMER (POSTED ON fACEBOOK AS A POLEMIC (WORD), since farming is problematic too.

There's a lot of cement building development.

Cement development is a heavy user of water.

There's a lot of hotel development.

Hotel development uses a whole lot of water.

There's a lot of deforestation.

Deforestation causes drought. 

Whoever is supporting cement, bauxite, and hotel development, or deforestation, is killing the farmer. 

HOW DO WE AVOID FOOD WASTE IN AN EMERGENCY?

- The scale shown in this picture is massive, and may be meant for international markets.

- This global trade usually runs on a JIT (just in time) economic system. Notthing is stored for long and shipping and trucking is organized to get the food where it needs to be sold...just in time.

- This involves a very large supply chain to all parts of the system. 

- The ships and trucks must be refrigerated, their fuel must come from somewhere, workers at all levels have to be paid. 

- There's a long chain of parts to this system of supply, and the chain is as strong as its weakest link. If one link fails, the entire chain fails. 

- This system is run on volume at global scale

Can Jamaica Have More Of A Local System? 

- There's a welcome trend toward importing less foreign food, and growing more locally.

- Hotels, restaurants, supermarkets are plentiful here, and could normally buy the local food.

- But in an emergency where most of them close down, the food would need to be stored, even if eventually given away?

- There is very poor storage of food in Jamaica now, and farming people are calling for a better arrangement.

- Distribution to the needy needs some kind of structure where you know where and when to distribute food.

- The distribution costs money--workers, gas, time.

Proper Storage May Be The Key

- There is storage for normal times--short periods

- But what about storage in an ememrgency for longer?

- Does there need to be redundant storage?

- In and emergency, we might lose electricity.

- Could ice help? 

- How do you rationalize the cost of producing and storing ice just for the occasional emergency?

- You would need a whole lot of redundant ice boxes too, but that could be the easy part. 

- Jamaica needs a lot of sored electricity for emergencies. Batteries to store solar energy are WAY expensive, and would be in short supply in an extreme pandemic-like situation (or economic calamity).

THE PRIZE FIGHTER

The world order is like a fit prize figHter in the ring. The public are like a pudgy, sedentary baby boomer opposing the prize fighter. But the worst thing is that the public also has both hands tied behind it. You could untie the hands and force the public to train, but it's not the best equipped to deal with a fit, experienced prize fighter, and it would be unlikely to prevail even with the best preparation. Still, untie the hands, train the individual to box and retreat from blows, and he might hang in there a bit longer.

REAL ESTATE PRICES

"...the real estate bubble is a product of local and (in some cases) state government policy — one of many arrangements that benefits the well-to-do at the expense of the poor. (People who own real estate benefit from rising land prices, people who have to rent suffer from it.) Until governments are forced by one means or another to abandon the policies that drive up rents and real estate prices, any decline in the real estate market will be temporary."

John Michael Greer

WOOD

It is common to hear about primitive African arts, or to see museums of African art in Africa … Read the article

EN.LISAPOYAKAMA.ORG

Masks and statues in Africa are not art objects

It is common to hear about primitive African arts, or to see museums of African art in Africa … Read the article

Rene Davies I’ve been contemplating this notion for weeks recently. The English language needs more vocabulary for ‘art’. The form is appreciated as art and it’s function a curiosity. The skill and artistry in making the object is studied and demonstrated. Somehow the essence escapes consideration. Ba and Ka are missed as they are limited to the realm of Khat. English needs this vocabulary to instil the notion that is beyond three dimensions. I don’t mean making an object sacrosanct with religious implication. I’m referring, rather, to the connectivity of the natural medium shaped by a symbiotic relationship between different forces of nature to express a higher meaning. See? It gets very wordy. The visceral escapes the corpus. 🤦‍♀️. I’m struggling.

Museums are full of stolen artifacts. It’s shameful how so many are procured. Curators are in endless negotiations over this.

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Well thanks for the struggle. The natural forces in the wood is what I'm struggling with. And how these natural forces in the wood might have manifested in the ubiquitous 19th century wooden architecture, built by Jamaican African people for their own use.

5g AND COVID 19

https://www.davidicke.com/article/564306/coronavirus-5g-connection-coverup

JAMAICAN COLONIAL HERITAGE

I CAN'T BELIEVE I WROTE THE FOLLOWING NEARLY 10 YEARS AGO. 

african fractal systems

Certain geographic groups have colonized the known world from time to time: Greece, Rome, Western Europe, America (still going), China (up and coming). And then there's Africa, the only unit that has colonized the world without force; only, it would appear, through (fractal) mathematics. 

Almost as soon as I left art school, I became  consciously aware of a pervasive African-ness to modern life. How similar the drumming rhythms of some aboriginal people to the  of rhythm of trains or motor vehicle engines. This is best epitomized in Fred Astaire's dance to the rhythm of the ship's engine in "Shall We Dance." The revolution of modern art that grew out of Picasso's and others' assimilation of African forms. The fact that modern design in everything grows out of modern art. Jazz, which has totally invaded world music and world attitudes to movement. And now, through this TED talk, it becomes clear that fractals relate to binary mathematics, which produced the computer. All coming out of Africa.

This non-violent takeover has not been effectively dealt with. The prevailing world view is that great geographic groups must have conquering armies, and must dominate through a military-industrial complex of the kind that Africa lacks. So Africa could develop in a completely different way from other world powers. Whether it will or not, and how, if it does, is anybody's guess.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals?language=en

I do see your point about wooden structures being closer to nature. Also buildings which allow air to pass through are cooler.. but I think more is needed if you want to preserve structures which are perceived as oppressive. I am wracking my brain.

Showing the relationship of Jamaica's colonial structures to African ones is a consideration. It's been churning around in my mind...slowly. But maybe it contradicts some points I'm trying to make:

1) Africa, as it is provisionally defined, is not the continent of Africa. It is something bigger that we're groping towards. 

2) People transported from the African continent--and only selected parts of it--had no definable cut off date when they stopped being African. Africa might well be a state of becoming. 

3) Catering to an imaginary Africa that is in the gravest turmoil (see link) might well be choosing weakness and confusion over strength. 

4) Because the African diaspora in the West is a product of intense "adjustment" to a larger world and a larger, more assimilated African cultural whole, it is uniquely suited for a leadership role within the provisional African Unity. 

5) Black people in the Diaspora might have their own customs dictated more by place and colonial experience than by disputable cultural connectin to any particular tribal practices (like architectural design) in the African continent. 

6)  If Diaspora blacks never stopped being African, and if they vastly outnumber any alternative identity group where they live, then it's absurd not to consider where they live to be Africa in some form. 

7) If a place can reasonably be called Africa, then anyone born in or naturalized to it can reasonably be called African. And any cultural heritage by anyone--past or present-- that can be attributed to that place must also be considered African. 

8) Ergo, following this line of reasoning, Jamaican Colonial Heritage can be called African, and every aspect of Caribbean architectural heritage can be called African. 

9) While it may grease the skids to feature assortments of recognizable continental forms, it isn't essential.

10) Jamaican Colonial Heritage has as much to do with the future as the past. The African world has no experience governing a large global "empire," but the British do. If an African Union wants to be a power in the world, it will need a simultaneous unity with Britain, the British Commonwealth, and with all English speaking powers worldwide. 

11) The cultural foundation of such a union is colonial heritage, primarily colonial architecture (and especially given the extensive African labor, craftsmanship and as-yet-under-investigated spiritual contributions to it).  

https://www.facebook.com/jeffereyg.branford/videos/2575350162722127/UzpfSTEwMDAwMjY1MjE4NTUzMjpWSzoxNzM4NTE1NzM2Mjg2MzE3/?notif_t=group_invited_to_group

# 10 is especially meant for JCHS, where there is the entrenched belief that JCH is a thing of the glorious past to wax nostalgic about, but has very little connectiobn to Africa.

Trevor Burrowes	6:52 PM (1 minute ago)
to Eileen

Thanks for reading and commenting. I'll sign off after this"

"I think part of what you are denying is African conquests.  North Africa Berbers, and Arabs, DID in fact conquer part of Europe. Africa is not free of the desire of one tribe to conquer the other, just as the Europeans fought each other for centuries.  Also Africa helped Columbus by shaping Spain."

I know all this. The point one makes (and that Selassie especially made) is that no group is worse or better than any other. This is not a case for African superiority. It's more a case for removing fallacies that create an unnecessary handicap. And thanks for the empathy re black men, etc. But if we could remove stumbling blacks and so many fallacies piled down on us, we'd be better off. Garvey was trying to remove those stumbling blocks and crippling thought systems. In fact Garvey stood for any underdog. Take the famous saying: Up you mighty race, and instead say, Up you mighty women, or Up, you mighty St. Ann's Bay (which I recently posted) and it works perfectly. Also, Garvey was much more of a feminist than most realize. 

As to women and Africa, you said it. I recently said a word about female circumcision that is forced on young women, laying a curse of flames of fire on it. My loathing for the pompous male hooligans in charge is beyond speech. So is it for kings, princes, tribal leaders, the entire structure. Descendants of the bastards who sold my ancestors. Not to say I'm a shining light, but we can't get hung up on the supposed ancient virtues of an Africa that is a shithole. We're throwing out unnecessary garbage. And we are going with the colonial rationality that appears to us more reasonable. And we are claiming that this colonial rationality is now African. As you say, civilization is nothing more than taking ways of thought from wherever we can and that are preferable for our circumstances. 

The means to changing Africa for me right now is to change St. Ann's Bay. Nobody wants it except for the Chinese investors to tear down and build whatever cement crap of a supermarket or gas station they think the savages there will suck up. And they are doing quite well with that. I'm trying to say that we are or can or should be better than that. How is this wrong? Whatever better way can grow in one jurisdictions can be transported to other jurisdictions till it covers the world. 

But I'm not beginning with the whole world. I'd have to be a bigger magician than I actually am for that one. I'm not supporting all European colonial powers to help with Africa even. I'm not reaching out to the deamn French or Germans.  I'm am anglophile. I'm sticking in my little anglophile corner, from which I draw much of my heritage. Of course I'll be deccent to whomever. I'll scratch their back if they scratch mine. I think on different levels. 

Sorry. Way more than I think you have time for. :-)

THE BOOK FORMAT

I still plan to stay connected. You're entirely a part of what I'm struggling to bring about. I can't tell how it'll work till I actually do it, but I'm planning to format art, writing, pictures the same way--18x18--the way I've been working on the combined Hopper/Steinberg pieces. Therefore, an 18x18 book format that doesn't distinguish between pictures and writing. Oh, the format could be reduced to half size in reproduction--so, 9x9. But maybe a little bigger so the type can be large...

ST; JOHN'S HALL, BRAVO STREET

Admin · 25 mins

‎Trevor Burrowes‎ to Restoring St. Ann's Bay

November 10, 2018

1Gina Budhai

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  Monty Davis I know this one can't remember the location.

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  Kia Penso This is a painting.

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    Trevor Burrowes Somehow Dutch looking. 1985.

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    Kia Penso All the geometric shapes are just a little bit irregular from the hand of time, and then the car having its own more organic form but still belonging to that lovely subdued palette and the blue in the shadows of the upstairs gallery, so much that is pleasing in texture and shape and shadow going on. Did you take this photo?

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    Trevor Burrowes Kia Penso Thanks, Kia! Yes. My hurried photo on a quick visit to see my uncle (for the last time as it turned out). I love your description!