BitDepth#875 - March 05
04/03/13 19:34 Filed in: BitDepth - March 2013
CarnivalTV, 2013
It’s all giggles until the negotiations start. CarnivalTV’s Walt Lovelace, Camille Parsons, Paul Charles and Curtis Popplewell. Photography by Mark Lyndersay.
When last we saw the CarnivalTV crew in March 2011, they were riding high on the success of an immaculately streamed, high definition video production of much of Carnival 2011.
Flush with success, the boys were being cagey with the background on the project, how much, what’s next, how did you do it.
This time around, Paul Charles, Curtis Popplewell and Walt Lovelace, joined by Advance Dynamics partner Camille Parsons were more open about the advances and setbacks of the last two years of work.
The team invested $1.5 million in making the Carnival event happen in 2011 and the two questions that needed to be answered immediately were what do we do next and how do we make money doing it?
Twenty-two streams of live events later, some things had not changed at all.
Sponsors and advertisers are still gun shy about participating in a live stream of Carnival events.
“Nobody is giving us any advertising for these products,” says Parsons, “but they aren't giving anybody else the ads either.”
“We've done a study, a quite expensive one,” Paul Charles adds, “on the top brands targeting the diaspora, but we don't have the audience numbers for the streaming product to go to the top marketers.”
CarnivalTV needs to build numbers by improving the product they offer, and that means working with event producers to make their shows more accessible to a viewing audience.
Instead, they have come up against either a wall built with bricks of rights demands or people who want to do the project on their own.
In 2011, CarnivalTV won steadily escalating numbers for the online streams, with 69,000 viewers for Panorama finals, 152,000 for Dimanche Gras and 252,000 viewers for Carnival Tuesday.
When they opened discussions with the NCBA to stream of the event in 2012, the organisation demanded $4 million for the rights. CNMG streamed Carnival Tuesday last year but the NCBA stopped the station’s stream this year in favour of their own low-resolution stream.
Last year, CarnivalTV also began to get calls from several event producers looking to put their Carnival events online. The team took meetings with people in Grenada, Antigua and St Vincent, as well as diaspora Carnivals in Boston, Miami and Brooklyn's Labour Day celebrations.
The consistent sticking point? The cost of a live high definition stream. Putting up an eight hour Carnival stream with even a minimal camera crew can cost up to US$200,000, with most of that the cost of keeping a broadband feed open for the HD signal.
CarnivalTV found an ally in the festival’s fraternity in Pan Trinbago, not a stakeholder noted for its embrace of technology, but apparently one willing to listen and learn.
In 2012, the Panorama Finals stream was a pay per view project. It did not meet its financial targets, despite drawing the best numbers that CarnivalTV has ever recorded for a paid stream.
This year, Pan Trinbago underwrote the project and won plaudits from overseas fans of the music, including a heartfelt “thank you” from the unflinching When Steel Talks website, which had pilloried the organisation for failing to broadcast this year’s semi-final round online.
Panorama is also the least pirated stream, perhaps because hi-fi pan aficionados are less interested in a free feed from someone’s jury rigged camera-in-front-of-the-tv setup than in high quality sound and visuals from a national performance.
The most pirated stream was last year’s National Soca Monarch event, which Paul Charles estimates lost roughly US$700,000 in potential income from pirate streams which they worked hard to knock offline.
And the piracy isn’t even related to the cost of the stream. When the soca monarch semi-finals were offered in 2012 at US$0.99, an online furore began over the effrontery of “charging for de culture.”
“We have,” Charles notes with a wry smile, “a serious social perception problem when it comes to piracy.”
CarnivalTV soldiers on, much wiser after three experiences with Carnival and their offseason productions.
In meetings, they still have to explain what they do.
“Have you,” I asked Paul Charles, “ever met with someone with the power to authorise funding who had ever actually seen a CarnivalTV stream?”
“No,” he responded.
“I don't think that people here understand the appetite outside for a well-produced Carnival show.”
The company prepared a high concept proposal for the Government at the end of 2012, pitching the packaging of Carnival for online streaming as a way to focus interest on other events and attractions during the year.
“Carnival is saturated as an event,” says Charles, “all the hotels are filled during the festival and the bands sell out, but during that time, people in the world are paying attention to us.”
“Yes,” adds Camille Parsons, “use the spotlight and make it brighter.”
The Government has not responded to their proposal.
Related…
BitDepth#774: Carnival HD
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
It’s all giggles until the negotiations start. CarnivalTV’s Walt Lovelace, Camille Parsons, Paul Charles and Curtis Popplewell. Photography by Mark Lyndersay.
When last we saw the CarnivalTV crew in March 2011, they were riding high on the success of an immaculately streamed, high definition video production of much of Carnival 2011.
Flush with success, the boys were being cagey with the background on the project, how much, what’s next, how did you do it.
This time around, Paul Charles, Curtis Popplewell and Walt Lovelace, joined by Advance Dynamics partner Camille Parsons were more open about the advances and setbacks of the last two years of work.
The team invested $1.5 million in making the Carnival event happen in 2011 and the two questions that needed to be answered immediately were what do we do next and how do we make money doing it?
Twenty-two streams of live events later, some things had not changed at all.
Sponsors and advertisers are still gun shy about participating in a live stream of Carnival events.
“Nobody is giving us any advertising for these products,” says Parsons, “but they aren't giving anybody else the ads either.”
“We've done a study, a quite expensive one,” Paul Charles adds, “on the top brands targeting the diaspora, but we don't have the audience numbers for the streaming product to go to the top marketers.”
CarnivalTV needs to build numbers by improving the product they offer, and that means working with event producers to make their shows more accessible to a viewing audience.
Instead, they have come up against either a wall built with bricks of rights demands or people who want to do the project on their own.
In 2011, CarnivalTV won steadily escalating numbers for the online streams, with 69,000 viewers for Panorama finals, 152,000 for Dimanche Gras and 252,000 viewers for Carnival Tuesday.
When they opened discussions with the NCBA to stream of the event in 2012, the organisation demanded $4 million for the rights. CNMG streamed Carnival Tuesday last year but the NCBA stopped the station’s stream this year in favour of their own low-resolution stream.
Last year, CarnivalTV also began to get calls from several event producers looking to put their Carnival events online. The team took meetings with people in Grenada, Antigua and St Vincent, as well as diaspora Carnivals in Boston, Miami and Brooklyn's Labour Day celebrations.
The consistent sticking point? The cost of a live high definition stream. Putting up an eight hour Carnival stream with even a minimal camera crew can cost up to US$200,000, with most of that the cost of keeping a broadband feed open for the HD signal.
CarnivalTV found an ally in the festival’s fraternity in Pan Trinbago, not a stakeholder noted for its embrace of technology, but apparently one willing to listen and learn.
In 2012, the Panorama Finals stream was a pay per view project. It did not meet its financial targets, despite drawing the best numbers that CarnivalTV has ever recorded for a paid stream.
This year, Pan Trinbago underwrote the project and won plaudits from overseas fans of the music, including a heartfelt “thank you” from the unflinching When Steel Talks website, which had pilloried the organisation for failing to broadcast this year’s semi-final round online.
Panorama is also the least pirated stream, perhaps because hi-fi pan aficionados are less interested in a free feed from someone’s jury rigged camera-in-front-of-the-tv setup than in high quality sound and visuals from a national performance.
The most pirated stream was last year’s National Soca Monarch event, which Paul Charles estimates lost roughly US$700,000 in potential income from pirate streams which they worked hard to knock offline.
And the piracy isn’t even related to the cost of the stream. When the soca monarch semi-finals were offered in 2012 at US$0.99, an online furore began over the effrontery of “charging for de culture.”
“We have,” Charles notes with a wry smile, “a serious social perception problem when it comes to piracy.”
CarnivalTV soldiers on, much wiser after three experiences with Carnival and their offseason productions.
In meetings, they still have to explain what they do.
“Have you,” I asked Paul Charles, “ever met with someone with the power to authorise funding who had ever actually seen a CarnivalTV stream?”
“No,” he responded.
“I don't think that people here understand the appetite outside for a well-produced Carnival show.”
The company prepared a high concept proposal for the Government at the end of 2012, pitching the packaging of Carnival for online streaming as a way to focus interest on other events and attractions during the year.
“Carnival is saturated as an event,” says Charles, “all the hotels are filled during the festival and the bands sell out, but during that time, people in the world are paying attention to us.”
“Yes,” adds Camille Parsons, “use the spotlight and make it brighter.”
The Government has not responded to their proposal.
Related…
BitDepth#774: Carnival HD
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
Comments
BitDepth#874 - February 26
25/02/13 21:56 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Copyright and cacada
This is Carnival in 2013. There are costumes there, but you’ve got to get past a phalanx of security to see it. Who will bother? Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
At the heart of all the recent fuss about copyright in Carnival is money. Who’s making it, who’s allowing access and where the heck, really, is my cut.
Copyright is a modern invention, an attempt to make it possible for the fruits of the mind to benefit from popular appeal in a world of broadcasting and mass distribution.
It’s one of the great ironies of modern copyright issues that it’s the acceleration of modern media distribution, at a rate unimaginable in the era of Gutenberg, that’s causing the problems of today.
Modern copyright isn’t a single right, it’s now multiple opportunities bundled into a single creation and sometimes a myriad of rights clearances within an existing property.
A movie is a good example of a creation with multiple authors and many licensing opportunities and challenges. From the screenplay to the actors’likenesses to the blister-packed toys, there are contracts aplenty in every 90 minute action adventure.
Now it looks as if the event that likes to call itself the greatest show on Earth is aspiring to the legal spiderwebs of the modern blockbuster film even as its actual content struggles to muster the audience of a straight-to-DVD no-budget production.
From the first rumblings of income curiosity among the glittered faithful to the fear, uncertainty and doubt being aggressively sown by Richard Cornwall of the T&T Copyright Collections Organization, Carnival in 2013 collectively demonstrated an admirable yearning to police empty stables. Perhaps some bandleader, inspired by this year’s many pointless rights debacles, will play The Augean Wuk in 2014.
Rights in an intellectual property (IP) can be sliced thinly, but this year we saw blunt three lines in play, not Muramasa swords and let’s not say anything about the spastic bladesmanship.
It isn’t clear where we go from here. The level of comprehension of copyright is at an absolute nadir, providing rich fodder for the kind of uninformed and highly opinionated arguments that have migrated so neatly from local rumshops to Facebook.
Our IP itself is compromised, with our mas and music now in three neat phases, dramatic and aspiring, befeathered and perspiring and traditionalist while expiring.
It’s exactly when Carnival needs more informed review of the practice and principles that its built on that the chilling effects of the dubious 1995 era tax on Carnival souvenir magazines is having its most deleterious impact.
That fee urged such publications to a profit-driven, fifteen-year, images-only focus on pretty bands that’s marginalised everything that hasn’t got a thong or 150 beats per minute.
This is the type of constraining and warping impact that leads people to dismiss copyright as unnecessarily limiting and fundamentally broken. I make my living licensing photographs for commercial and editorial use while also expending significant effort to make large swaths of my work available on the web free from charge.
I know the copyright model is broken, but I can’t take Facebook Likes to HiLo either, so it's necessary to dance between strategically free and commercially licensed until a better business model makes itself evident.
Nothing like this seems to have occurred to Carnival’s Axis of Copyright, and the current focus is on up-front payments for perceived value.
It’s an understandable if annoying reaction. I’ve had my intellectual property infringed in the past and reacted poorly as well. It was only when I began looking at what people were interested in that I began to realise that there really is a fundamental difference between price and value.
With a surprising consistency, what people are interested in using from my archives, either by asking or outright theft, are rarely the things that cost the most when they were produced, it’s those elements of Carnival in which considerable personality and authenticity were invested.
The single most lunatic thing about everything related to copyright in Carnival 2013 was the realization that nothing is actually being licensed in these agreements. There is no contractual foundation between the person buying "rights" from any of these bodies and the whole lunatic mess is built on a fundamentally absurd business model. Most photographers and videographers are forced to pay for "commercial" or "personal" rights that have no definitions, in advance of any actual use. This happens in no other application of copyright law, anywhere.
This would be buying cat in bag except that there's no actual cat or, apparently, any bag either. Generic copyright is being sold off the shelf in a big empty yellow box featuring Helvetica Neue Bold type.
It's hard to decide whether to call for education, a psychiatrist or the Fraud Squad.
The best thing about the rights invested in IP is that they don’t have to be exercised to be retained. You can with proper wording and a sensible contract allow someone to make use of something, within carefully circumscribed and defined limits, without surrendering your ownership of it.
But doing that means making an investment in the intellect half of IP, and we’ve only been willing to argue about the property bits, like maddened children playing a Carnival version of Monopoly.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
This is Carnival in 2013. There are costumes there, but you’ve got to get past a phalanx of security to see it. Who will bother? Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
At the heart of all the recent fuss about copyright in Carnival is money. Who’s making it, who’s allowing access and where the heck, really, is my cut.
Copyright is a modern invention, an attempt to make it possible for the fruits of the mind to benefit from popular appeal in a world of broadcasting and mass distribution.
It’s one of the great ironies of modern copyright issues that it’s the acceleration of modern media distribution, at a rate unimaginable in the era of Gutenberg, that’s causing the problems of today.
Modern copyright isn’t a single right, it’s now multiple opportunities bundled into a single creation and sometimes a myriad of rights clearances within an existing property.
A movie is a good example of a creation with multiple authors and many licensing opportunities and challenges. From the screenplay to the actors’likenesses to the blister-packed toys, there are contracts aplenty in every 90 minute action adventure.
Now it looks as if the event that likes to call itself the greatest show on Earth is aspiring to the legal spiderwebs of the modern blockbuster film even as its actual content struggles to muster the audience of a straight-to-DVD no-budget production.
From the first rumblings of income curiosity among the glittered faithful to the fear, uncertainty and doubt being aggressively sown by Richard Cornwall of the T&T Copyright Collections Organization, Carnival in 2013 collectively demonstrated an admirable yearning to police empty stables. Perhaps some bandleader, inspired by this year’s many pointless rights debacles, will play The Augean Wuk in 2014.
Rights in an intellectual property (IP) can be sliced thinly, but this year we saw blunt three lines in play, not Muramasa swords and let’s not say anything about the spastic bladesmanship.
It isn’t clear where we go from here. The level of comprehension of copyright is at an absolute nadir, providing rich fodder for the kind of uninformed and highly opinionated arguments that have migrated so neatly from local rumshops to Facebook.
Our IP itself is compromised, with our mas and music now in three neat phases, dramatic and aspiring, befeathered and perspiring and traditionalist while expiring.
It’s exactly when Carnival needs more informed review of the practice and principles that its built on that the chilling effects of the dubious 1995 era tax on Carnival souvenir magazines is having its most deleterious impact.
That fee urged such publications to a profit-driven, fifteen-year, images-only focus on pretty bands that’s marginalised everything that hasn’t got a thong or 150 beats per minute.
This is the type of constraining and warping impact that leads people to dismiss copyright as unnecessarily limiting and fundamentally broken. I make my living licensing photographs for commercial and editorial use while also expending significant effort to make large swaths of my work available on the web free from charge.
I know the copyright model is broken, but I can’t take Facebook Likes to HiLo either, so it's necessary to dance between strategically free and commercially licensed until a better business model makes itself evident.
Nothing like this seems to have occurred to Carnival’s Axis of Copyright, and the current focus is on up-front payments for perceived value.
It’s an understandable if annoying reaction. I’ve had my intellectual property infringed in the past and reacted poorly as well. It was only when I began looking at what people were interested in that I began to realise that there really is a fundamental difference between price and value.
With a surprising consistency, what people are interested in using from my archives, either by asking or outright theft, are rarely the things that cost the most when they were produced, it’s those elements of Carnival in which considerable personality and authenticity were invested.
The single most lunatic thing about everything related to copyright in Carnival 2013 was the realization that nothing is actually being licensed in these agreements. There is no contractual foundation between the person buying "rights" from any of these bodies and the whole lunatic mess is built on a fundamentally absurd business model. Most photographers and videographers are forced to pay for "commercial" or "personal" rights that have no definitions, in advance of any actual use. This happens in no other application of copyright law, anywhere.
This would be buying cat in bag except that there's no actual cat or, apparently, any bag either. Generic copyright is being sold off the shelf in a big empty yellow box featuring Helvetica Neue Bold type.
It's hard to decide whether to call for education, a psychiatrist or the Fraud Squad.
The best thing about the rights invested in IP is that they don’t have to be exercised to be retained. You can with proper wording and a sensible contract allow someone to make use of something, within carefully circumscribed and defined limits, without surrendering your ownership of it.
But doing that means making an investment in the intellect half of IP, and we’ve only been willing to argue about the property bits, like maddened children playing a Carnival version of Monopoly.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
BitDepth#873 - February 19
18/02/13 19:36 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Dear Allison
Shalima Buckreedee-Alfred leads her small band of Red Indians playing Satinka, Magical Dancer on the Queen’s Park Savannah Stage. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
If you’d asked me in November what to do on your first day at the National Carnival Commission, I have to confess that I would have told you, “Quit.”
You’re a smart, qualified and committed young woman and while those are qualities that might seem ideal for the job, the task is so relentlessly Sisyphean and the forces arrayed against you so devoted to a stale, hopelessly out-of-date notion of Carnival that it seemed criminal to spend your productive, youthful years in such a bleak salt mine.
That was then, and this is now. I don’t agree with the vituperative demands that you quit over the abysmal horror that was Dimanche Gras, though somebody needs to get a permanent boot for that.
I like that you’ve stepped up and acknowledged the failings of this year’s events. It’s absolutely in character, and you need to hold on to that sense of yourself over the coming year, which I can promise will test you thoroughly.
There’s no question that you were handed a mess of pottage ten weeks ago, that you were unable to turn it into a flavourful soup is hardly surprising.
With a full year ahead and challenges aplenty, here’s what I think you should do.
Exercise your authority.
You are the chairman and by inference, the chief commissioner. It’s a term that has many different connotations, but in the case of the National Carnival Commission, which attempts to make one cohesive Carnival event out of the contributions of three key stakeholders, might usefully be read as the guiding leader of the process.
Over time, and I’ve had at least one cousin and two people I really liked in the role, it seems that the job has come to mean “facilitator-in-chief,” and that’s simply not good enough anymore.
He who has the gold makes the rules and the river of cash that flows through the NCC to Carnival’s stakeholders should confer some kind of leveraging authority over intent and execution in the festival.
Insist on a five-year plan.
A real one, with clear developmental purpose that will take us from today’s aimless meandering and give the future of Carnival a fighting chance. That’s going to mean slapping down many crabs in the lunatic's barrel you’re in charge of who remain keen to keep crawling over each other.
Carnival has three stakeholders who aren’t represented in discussions about the future of the festival at all, the audience, the masqueraders and the media, all of whom have an important role to play in its future development.
It’s the absence of these voices from key Carnival decision making processes that leads to stupid decisions like these.
No Carnival plan should proceed without real representation from all stakeholders.
Clarify Carnival’s licensing issues.
Everybody talks about how much money there is to be made in Carnival, but nobody has built a mansion or even bought an SUV off of the resale of imagery captured during the event. I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
It’s clear there is less money in Carnival coverage than there is in planting pumpkin and cucumber or even, for that matter, peas in Tobago.
I’m a hair’s breadth from making a serious proposal to the national media that we create a wide space along the Carnival route for coverage, only allow bandleaders to cross if they agree to reasonable licensing terms on a simple form and only cover the bands that agree to pass there.
If you thought the Grandstand was empty this Carnival Tuesday, imagine what would happen if all the cameras were removed from it and placed where the media had control over the design of the space.
Haul the NCC into the 21st century
There’s a type of irony that this section, written in excess of my Guardian column word count, will appear only online here, which will make it essentially invisible to everyone it addresses, except, I hope, you.
To this day, even after being told so two years ago to their collective face, a search on Google turns up page after page of links to steelbands that do not operate out of Trinidad and Tobago.
Calypsonians have a reluctant presence on local music downloads website TrinidadTunes.com, but it’s soca artistes who rule in that space. Most will never have a recorded version of their music available. Why not work with TUCO and Pan Trinbago to create board recordings of tent performances and Panorama presentations and make them available for sale at reasonable prices online?
Four years after I suggested these ideas and both TrinidadTunes and Kenny Phillips opened discussions with Pan Trinbago to make it happen, nothing has been done through a remarkably unproductive blend of ignorance, fear and bullheadedness. I’m planning to have a chat with the folks at CarnivalTV, whose apparently unquenchable love for the festival has brought them head to head with all the forces at play in its organisation that serve with such admirable diligence to keep Carnival in the most primitive state possible.
The cracks are showing everywhere Carnival, Allison. Somebody has to have the courage to break it and put it all back together in a way that makes sense. I’m hoping you will be that person.
By the mandate...
According to the NCC’s website the commission’s function is as follows...
a. The regulation, co-ordination or conduct of all Carnival activities throughout the country held under the aegis of the Government
b. The development, maintenance and review of rules, regulations and carnival festivities throughout the country
c. The identification , evaluation and promotion of all Carnival related industries with a view, to the enhancing and marketing of their cultural products and services; and
the development and implementation of a marketing strategy for Carnival with a view to optimizing the revenue earning potential of the festival and its contribution to the national economy, considering:-
the unexplored potential of Carnival;
the possibility of marketing of carnival products and activities in domestic and export markets;
the contribution by the private sector to the funding of specific aspects of Carnival; and
the establishment of closer promotional links between the tourist industry and the carnival industry
The objectives of the State oversight organisation are...
To make Carnival a viable, national, cultural and commercial enterprise;
To provide the necessary managerial and organisational infrastructure for the efficient and effective presentation and marketing of the cultural products of Carnival
To establish arrangements for ongoing research, the preservation and permanent display of the annual accumulation of Carnival products created each year by the craftsmen, musicians, composers and designers of Carnival.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
Shalima Buckreedee-Alfred leads her small band of Red Indians playing Satinka, Magical Dancer on the Queen’s Park Savannah Stage. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
If you’d asked me in November what to do on your first day at the National Carnival Commission, I have to confess that I would have told you, “Quit.”
You’re a smart, qualified and committed young woman and while those are qualities that might seem ideal for the job, the task is so relentlessly Sisyphean and the forces arrayed against you so devoted to a stale, hopelessly out-of-date notion of Carnival that it seemed criminal to spend your productive, youthful years in such a bleak salt mine.
That was then, and this is now. I don’t agree with the vituperative demands that you quit over the abysmal horror that was Dimanche Gras, though somebody needs to get a permanent boot for that.
I like that you’ve stepped up and acknowledged the failings of this year’s events. It’s absolutely in character, and you need to hold on to that sense of yourself over the coming year, which I can promise will test you thoroughly.
There’s no question that you were handed a mess of pottage ten weeks ago, that you were unable to turn it into a flavourful soup is hardly surprising.
With a full year ahead and challenges aplenty, here’s what I think you should do.
Exercise your authority.
You are the chairman and by inference, the chief commissioner. It’s a term that has many different connotations, but in the case of the National Carnival Commission, which attempts to make one cohesive Carnival event out of the contributions of three key stakeholders, might usefully be read as the guiding leader of the process.
Over time, and I’ve had at least one cousin and two people I really liked in the role, it seems that the job has come to mean “facilitator-in-chief,” and that’s simply not good enough anymore.
He who has the gold makes the rules and the river of cash that flows through the NCC to Carnival’s stakeholders should confer some kind of leveraging authority over intent and execution in the festival.
Insist on a five-year plan.
A real one, with clear developmental purpose that will take us from today’s aimless meandering and give the future of Carnival a fighting chance. That’s going to mean slapping down many crabs in the lunatic's barrel you’re in charge of who remain keen to keep crawling over each other.
Carnival has three stakeholders who aren’t represented in discussions about the future of the festival at all, the audience, the masqueraders and the media, all of whom have an important role to play in its future development.
It’s the absence of these voices from key Carnival decision making processes that leads to stupid decisions like these.
No Carnival plan should proceed without real representation from all stakeholders.
Clarify Carnival’s licensing issues.
Everybody talks about how much money there is to be made in Carnival, but nobody has built a mansion or even bought an SUV off of the resale of imagery captured during the event. I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
It’s clear there is less money in Carnival coverage than there is in planting pumpkin and cucumber or even, for that matter, peas in Tobago.
I’m a hair’s breadth from making a serious proposal to the national media that we create a wide space along the Carnival route for coverage, only allow bandleaders to cross if they agree to reasonable licensing terms on a simple form and only cover the bands that agree to pass there.
If you thought the Grandstand was empty this Carnival Tuesday, imagine what would happen if all the cameras were removed from it and placed where the media had control over the design of the space.
Haul the NCC into the 21st century
There’s a type of irony that this section, written in excess of my Guardian column word count, will appear only online here, which will make it essentially invisible to everyone it addresses, except, I hope, you.
To this day, even after being told so two years ago to their collective face, a search on Google turns up page after page of links to steelbands that do not operate out of Trinidad and Tobago.
Calypsonians have a reluctant presence on local music downloads website TrinidadTunes.com, but it’s soca artistes who rule in that space. Most will never have a recorded version of their music available. Why not work with TUCO and Pan Trinbago to create board recordings of tent performances and Panorama presentations and make them available for sale at reasonable prices online?
Four years after I suggested these ideas and both TrinidadTunes and Kenny Phillips opened discussions with Pan Trinbago to make it happen, nothing has been done through a remarkably unproductive blend of ignorance, fear and bullheadedness. I’m planning to have a chat with the folks at CarnivalTV, whose apparently unquenchable love for the festival has brought them head to head with all the forces at play in its organisation that serve with such admirable diligence to keep Carnival in the most primitive state possible.
The cracks are showing everywhere Carnival, Allison. Somebody has to have the courage to break it and put it all back together in a way that makes sense. I’m hoping you will be that person.
By the mandate...
According to the NCC’s website the commission’s function is as follows...
a. The regulation, co-ordination or conduct of all Carnival activities throughout the country held under the aegis of the Government
b. The development, maintenance and review of rules, regulations and carnival festivities throughout the country
c. The identification , evaluation and promotion of all Carnival related industries with a view, to the enhancing and marketing of their cultural products and services; and
the development and implementation of a marketing strategy for Carnival with a view to optimizing the revenue earning potential of the festival and its contribution to the national economy, considering:-
the unexplored potential of Carnival;
the possibility of marketing of carnival products and activities in domestic and export markets;
the contribution by the private sector to the funding of specific aspects of Carnival; and
the establishment of closer promotional links between the tourist industry and the carnival industry
The objectives of the State oversight organisation are...
To make Carnival a viable, national, cultural and commercial enterprise;
To provide the necessary managerial and organisational infrastructure for the efficient and effective presentation and marketing of the cultural products of Carnival
To establish arrangements for ongoing research, the preservation and permanent display of the annual accumulation of Carnival products created each year by the craftsmen, musicians, composers and designers of Carnival.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
BitDepth#872 - February 12
11/02/13 21:25 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Tradition vs commerce
What moves grown men to wear fur and poke at a papier mache polar bear in the tropics? Probably an imagination that demands a Grandstand's worth of space. Desperadoes plays Polar North. Photograph by Kingsley Lyndersay (restored 2009).
The debate around the state of Carnival tends to boil down to a simple one, whether the traditions of Carnival are more important than its commercial initiatives.
This Hobbesian debate is about whether Trinidad and Tobago was better served by a Carnival that was imagined and staged by a hivemind of individual creators or overseen by a single agency that guides its progress.
Is the self-interest of the masquerader superior to the guiding wisdom of the NCC?
In some ways, it’s now a moot argument. There aren’t enough individual creators working in the space to constitute a meaningful constituency and state spending on the festival is so vast and important to Carnival’s staging that the wishes of politicians fundamentally guide where the event goes from here.
Two things over Carnival jumped out as flashpoints of this discussion.
One was the resentful toilet papering of Sugar Aloes at the Calypso Monarch Semi-Finals. Here, the hotmouth kaisoman was called to task by a crowd of calypso fans for appearing to pander to the People’s Partnership government.
But really, what was Mr Osuna to do? Allow the oldest continuously operating calypso tent to collapse through an adversarial relationship with the government agency dispensing critical funds needed to keep it going?
The time to have a reconciliation with the Indo-Trinidadian fans of calypso was a decade ago, after the body calypso rose up to pillory the UNC government with shocking virulence and chased a good half of their audience away.
What was once an option is now a requirement and even though those fans never came back, state money did, with political strings attached, a compromise that’s haunted every calypso tent to this day.
And then there was The Greens. A phenomenon I’ve watched evolve in the North Stand as the party there grew more raucous and migrated down the steps to under the stand and the grounds adjoining it.
Now that space has been formalised and, Pan Trinbago believes, contained. But behind those heavily shielded walls of tarpaulin a party has blossomed that is on the verge of hiving away completely from the Panorama event itself. It probably serves them right for creating a concert space in which the band by design turns its back on half of its audience.
If ever there was a physical manifestation of the polarisation between tradition and commerce, this was it.
On one side of the partition, a wild party raged, part Spring Break and part clubbing, it sported booze on hoses, pole dancing and an actual disco with fog and DJ. These party people may have chosen to say that they were supporting pan, but they didn’t need it.
In the rest of Panorama, tradition reigned. Armed officers challenged the crowds on the track that were there not just to support their bands, but also to physically haul them along the asphalt to the stage.
In another concert space, there would have been tracks with cables to pull pan racks which would have long ago been designed to specified sizes. Here, on the spottily lit track leading to the most important stage in all of steelband’s existence, time was frozen stiff.
The Carnival argument has not only polarised opinion, it has stalled innovation. Traditional performance is now a moving mausoleum of old ideas, untroubled by new concepts, new materials and new expression.
Commercial Carnival is equally hidebound, constraining itself shamelessly to what sells with no concern about real design and innovation. The blur of feathers on Carnival Tuesday is largely matched by high BPM hum of the year’s soca output in dozens of parties.
That isn’t inspiration, it’s repetition and it’s killing the event.
Before these conceptual silos were built, there was simply Carnival, when everything was possible.
For at least fifteen full years, the designers, composers and arrangers of Carnival have settled for repeating last year with a variation. When things have changed, it has been the result of stupidity, not planning. Destroying the Grandstand, putting the parade on the road and then rebuilding exactly the same Grandstand wasn’t evolution; it was pointless irritation.
Until we understand that the spirit of continuous invention was the true magic of Carnival, that pervasive sense of potential waiting to waiting to be realised, we are doomed to continue repeating last year.
Tradition demands fidelity and commerce must be saleable but creation is risk, it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before.
Where is the environment for that to happen?
Where would Minshall create The Hummingbird or Shorty compose Endless Vibrations now?
There needs to be a third space, outside of commerce and tradition for that type of inventive thinking, the conceptual freedom that once fuelled all of Carnival or this party is, finally, over.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
What moves grown men to wear fur and poke at a papier mache polar bear in the tropics? Probably an imagination that demands a Grandstand's worth of space. Desperadoes plays Polar North. Photograph by Kingsley Lyndersay (restored 2009).
The debate around the state of Carnival tends to boil down to a simple one, whether the traditions of Carnival are more important than its commercial initiatives.
This Hobbesian debate is about whether Trinidad and Tobago was better served by a Carnival that was imagined and staged by a hivemind of individual creators or overseen by a single agency that guides its progress.
Is the self-interest of the masquerader superior to the guiding wisdom of the NCC?
In some ways, it’s now a moot argument. There aren’t enough individual creators working in the space to constitute a meaningful constituency and state spending on the festival is so vast and important to Carnival’s staging that the wishes of politicians fundamentally guide where the event goes from here.
Two things over Carnival jumped out as flashpoints of this discussion.
One was the resentful toilet papering of Sugar Aloes at the Calypso Monarch Semi-Finals. Here, the hotmouth kaisoman was called to task by a crowd of calypso fans for appearing to pander to the People’s Partnership government.
But really, what was Mr Osuna to do? Allow the oldest continuously operating calypso tent to collapse through an adversarial relationship with the government agency dispensing critical funds needed to keep it going?
The time to have a reconciliation with the Indo-Trinidadian fans of calypso was a decade ago, after the body calypso rose up to pillory the UNC government with shocking virulence and chased a good half of their audience away.
What was once an option is now a requirement and even though those fans never came back, state money did, with political strings attached, a compromise that’s haunted every calypso tent to this day.
And then there was The Greens. A phenomenon I’ve watched evolve in the North Stand as the party there grew more raucous and migrated down the steps to under the stand and the grounds adjoining it.
Now that space has been formalised and, Pan Trinbago believes, contained. But behind those heavily shielded walls of tarpaulin a party has blossomed that is on the verge of hiving away completely from the Panorama event itself. It probably serves them right for creating a concert space in which the band by design turns its back on half of its audience.
If ever there was a physical manifestation of the polarisation between tradition and commerce, this was it.
On one side of the partition, a wild party raged, part Spring Break and part clubbing, it sported booze on hoses, pole dancing and an actual disco with fog and DJ. These party people may have chosen to say that they were supporting pan, but they didn’t need it.
In the rest of Panorama, tradition reigned. Armed officers challenged the crowds on the track that were there not just to support their bands, but also to physically haul them along the asphalt to the stage.
In another concert space, there would have been tracks with cables to pull pan racks which would have long ago been designed to specified sizes. Here, on the spottily lit track leading to the most important stage in all of steelband’s existence, time was frozen stiff.
The Carnival argument has not only polarised opinion, it has stalled innovation. Traditional performance is now a moving mausoleum of old ideas, untroubled by new concepts, new materials and new expression.
Commercial Carnival is equally hidebound, constraining itself shamelessly to what sells with no concern about real design and innovation. The blur of feathers on Carnival Tuesday is largely matched by high BPM hum of the year’s soca output in dozens of parties.
That isn’t inspiration, it’s repetition and it’s killing the event.
Before these conceptual silos were built, there was simply Carnival, when everything was possible.
For at least fifteen full years, the designers, composers and arrangers of Carnival have settled for repeating last year with a variation. When things have changed, it has been the result of stupidity, not planning. Destroying the Grandstand, putting the parade on the road and then rebuilding exactly the same Grandstand wasn’t evolution; it was pointless irritation.
Until we understand that the spirit of continuous invention was the true magic of Carnival, that pervasive sense of potential waiting to waiting to be realised, we are doomed to continue repeating last year.
Tradition demands fidelity and commerce must be saleable but creation is risk, it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before.
Where is the environment for that to happen?
Where would Minshall create The Hummingbird or Shorty compose Endless Vibrations now?
There needs to be a third space, outside of commerce and tradition for that type of inventive thinking, the conceptual freedom that once fuelled all of Carnival or this party is, finally, over.
Related…
BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013
BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada
BitDepth#873: Dear Allison
Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright
Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)
Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)
BitDepth#871 - February 05
04/02/13 21:20 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Blackberry begs a set
The new flagship of the Blackberry product line, the Z10, looks very much like the phone the company needs to chart a course off the rocks. Photograph courtesy Blackberry.
“May I have this dance?”
President and CEO of the company formerly known as RIM, Thorstein Heins, did not say those words at any point during his introduction of the new Blackberry Z10 phone at the launch last Wednesday, but he might have summed up vast swaths of his presentation with them.
The company he leads, now renamed simply Blackberry after its flagship product, finally introduced a phone it could legitimately claim to be competitive in the modern smartphone market, and now the company needs to woo people to step out onto a crowded dance floor with them.
The launch event, extensively live blogged and streamed, offered the fan testimonies of staunch fans as a preamble to the new product and operating system launch, testimony to the fact that the company has built strong loyalty to its brand and its devices over the years.
That’s hardly surprising. When data plans were meager, painfully constrained services, Blackberry’s backroom server voodoo made it possible to do real things using the Internet.
But the company missed the boat to a startling degree when smartphones evolved after the introduction of the iPhone and telecommunications companies began building out the infrastructure to support more robust data flows.
Bigger data pipes and more elegant usability struck swiftly and fiercely at Blackberry’s bottom line, and the company faltered badly in producing a phone that worked the way that users had come to expect.
At the local launch of the first Blackberry touch phone, I played with one for ten minutes and quickly realised that its designers knew what a modern touchscreen phone looked like, but hadn’t been able to capture either its elegance, feel or essential functionality.
From the look of the new Z10, that’s no longer an issue. The launch event for the new device and OS emphasise parity with existing platforms, competitiveness in features and some tweaks that Blackberry fans will appreciate.
It’s hard to imagine, for instance, a typical iPhone user needing separate profiles for home and work scenarios, but the feature plays off of Blackberry’s historical focus on business usability and security while embracing the reality that people use their phones for amusement as well.
There aren’t enough examples of this type of thinking in the new phone, and that’s not surprising either. There was a time when the Blackberry legacy was more important than it is today, and the company has wisely decided to place its product in the market that exists, not the one it once owned.
The new BB OS (based on QNX) builds on popular services, adding video chat, with screen sharing no less, to BBM for instance, but the company also made sure to get WhatsApp for its new phones too.
For users hooked on the Blackberry way, there’s the Q10 model, expected in April 2013, which has the familiar BB keyboard placed right below a smaller touchscreen.
Blackberry Flow puts a usable face on the new device’s multitasking capabilities while Blackberry Hub brings social media and other communications information together in an agreeable looking listing that you can access from anywhere with a simple swipe.
It’s arguable that the biggest special effect that Blackberry introduced for the new phone was the company’s new Global Creative Director, Alicia Keys who cut a sharp and knowing profile at the launch even as she stumbled through some clumsy banter about being unfaithful to the brand before being romanced back by the new products.
It was a surprisingly awkward moment in a presentation that until then had been the model of soothing reassurance that the Blackberry brand was back.
In photos and in the words of Blackberry executives, there’s enough phone here to keep existing BB fans happy and perhaps to woo the undecided who are curious about the phone’s mythos.
But beyond integration with Blackberry’s Enterprise Systems (BES) there isn’t much here to make an iPhone 5, Galaxy III or Lumia user jump ship.
Related: Archived stream of the BB10 launch
Z10 essentials: High definition screen, 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage.
Pricing comparison: (16GB models compared, unsubsidized price in US$): Z10 - $599, iPhone 5 - $649, Nexus 4 - $349, Lumia 920 - $450, Galaxy III - $599
Among the 70,000 apps available at launch these are most likely to be of interest to T&T users...
Angry Birds Star Wars
Skype
Twitter
Facebook
WhatsApp
Evernote
Foursquare
LinkedIn
The Economist
Box
SAP
DropBox
NYTimes
Cisco WebEx
WSJ
Bloomberg
Fox
ABC
The Guardian
The new flagship of the Blackberry product line, the Z10, looks very much like the phone the company needs to chart a course off the rocks. Photograph courtesy Blackberry.
“May I have this dance?”
President and CEO of the company formerly known as RIM, Thorstein Heins, did not say those words at any point during his introduction of the new Blackberry Z10 phone at the launch last Wednesday, but he might have summed up vast swaths of his presentation with them.
The company he leads, now renamed simply Blackberry after its flagship product, finally introduced a phone it could legitimately claim to be competitive in the modern smartphone market, and now the company needs to woo people to step out onto a crowded dance floor with them.
The launch event, extensively live blogged and streamed, offered the fan testimonies of staunch fans as a preamble to the new product and operating system launch, testimony to the fact that the company has built strong loyalty to its brand and its devices over the years.
That’s hardly surprising. When data plans were meager, painfully constrained services, Blackberry’s backroom server voodoo made it possible to do real things using the Internet.
But the company missed the boat to a startling degree when smartphones evolved after the introduction of the iPhone and telecommunications companies began building out the infrastructure to support more robust data flows.
Bigger data pipes and more elegant usability struck swiftly and fiercely at Blackberry’s bottom line, and the company faltered badly in producing a phone that worked the way that users had come to expect.
At the local launch of the first Blackberry touch phone, I played with one for ten minutes and quickly realised that its designers knew what a modern touchscreen phone looked like, but hadn’t been able to capture either its elegance, feel or essential functionality.
From the look of the new Z10, that’s no longer an issue. The launch event for the new device and OS emphasise parity with existing platforms, competitiveness in features and some tweaks that Blackberry fans will appreciate.
It’s hard to imagine, for instance, a typical iPhone user needing separate profiles for home and work scenarios, but the feature plays off of Blackberry’s historical focus on business usability and security while embracing the reality that people use their phones for amusement as well.
There aren’t enough examples of this type of thinking in the new phone, and that’s not surprising either. There was a time when the Blackberry legacy was more important than it is today, and the company has wisely decided to place its product in the market that exists, not the one it once owned.
The new BB OS (based on QNX) builds on popular services, adding video chat, with screen sharing no less, to BBM for instance, but the company also made sure to get WhatsApp for its new phones too.
For users hooked on the Blackberry way, there’s the Q10 model, expected in April 2013, which has the familiar BB keyboard placed right below a smaller touchscreen.
Blackberry Flow puts a usable face on the new device’s multitasking capabilities while Blackberry Hub brings social media and other communications information together in an agreeable looking listing that you can access from anywhere with a simple swipe.
It’s arguable that the biggest special effect that Blackberry introduced for the new phone was the company’s new Global Creative Director, Alicia Keys who cut a sharp and knowing profile at the launch even as she stumbled through some clumsy banter about being unfaithful to the brand before being romanced back by the new products.
It was a surprisingly awkward moment in a presentation that until then had been the model of soothing reassurance that the Blackberry brand was back.
In photos and in the words of Blackberry executives, there’s enough phone here to keep existing BB fans happy and perhaps to woo the undecided who are curious about the phone’s mythos.
But beyond integration with Blackberry’s Enterprise Systems (BES) there isn’t much here to make an iPhone 5, Galaxy III or Lumia user jump ship.
Related: Archived stream of the BB10 launch
Z10 essentials: High definition screen, 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage.
Pricing comparison: (16GB models compared, unsubsidized price in US$): Z10 - $599, iPhone 5 - $649, Nexus 4 - $349, Lumia 920 - $450, Galaxy III - $599
Among the 70,000 apps available at launch these are most likely to be of interest to T&T users...
Angry Birds Star Wars
Skype
Evernote
Foursquare
The Economist
Box
SAP
DropBox
NYTimes
Cisco WebEx
WSJ
Bloomberg
Fox
ABC
The Guardian
BitDepth#870 - January 29
28/01/13 21:13 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
Thinking about backup hits home when a drive goes away suddenly. Thoughts about backup systems and strategies. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#869 - January 22
21/01/13 22:45 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
HP brings its new enterprise level storage system to Trinidad and Tobago, sparking some thoughts about deep storage. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#868 - January 15
14/01/13 22:31 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
In a bizarre online error, Adobe inadvertently offers public access to its seven year old CS2 suite. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#867 - January 08
07/01/13 22:30 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
Cool stuff we learned in 2012. Click here to read more...
