Thank God It’s Friday
Dear Amanda
EVEN BEFORE the opening lines of your open letter to Trinidad (Newsday, 13 May), I knew you were in trouble. Despite all that goodwill you flung so liberally at Trinidad in your first paragraph — it was like you were swinging champagne bottles against the hull of a new ship — I knew you yourself were going to end up dead in the water and the same Trinidad you were praising would very quickly sink you.Newsday, you see, ran a colour picture of you above your piece. No matter what you, or anyone, wrote underneath that, everything was going to be coloured by blonde hair and blue eyes. The best you could have hoped for was dismissal as irrelevant. Blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skins, Amanda, remind us that, for all our pretensions to modernity, we’re mired in the past. We still labour upon read more...Trini to d Bone
Incensed Girl Washed Free in a Crystal Stream of Consciousness
Pictures courtesy Mark Lyndersay
My name is Paige Zara Bishop and I’m a crystal girl who sells incense.Actually, I’m more of a “scents” than an incense girl. I’m into all scents. Candles, natural herbs burning, dried leaves and flowers. I’ve lived in the West and the East and I went to school in Chaguanas, so I feel kind of in-between. I’ll be 28 this year. I live up Mt Hololo Rd now. When I was 25 or 26, my mom, Carole Anne Bishop, moved to Tobago. That was my 14th move in life. I also feel heavily connected to Tobago ‘cause my family is from there. Maybe I’m from all over Trinidad & Tobago. My mom was a single parent and it was just her and me. No father. My dad, Brent Bailey, wouldvisit me on-and-off when we were in Maraval. I was about five. But we lost contact when my mom and I moved again Read more...
My name is Paige Zara Bishop and I’m a crystal girl who sells incense.Actually, I’m more of a “scents” than an incense girl. I’m into all scents. Candles, natural herbs burning, dried leaves and flowers. I’ve lived in the West and the East and I went to school in Chaguanas, so I feel kind of in-between. I’ll be 28 this year. I live up Mt Hololo Rd now. When I was 25 or 26, my mom, Carole Anne Bishop, moved to Tobago. That was my 14th move in life. I also feel heavily connected to Tobago ‘cause my family is from there. Maybe I’m from all over Trinidad & Tobago. My mom was a single parent and it was just her and me. No father. My dad, Brent Bailey, wouldvisit me on-and-off when we were in Maraval. I was about five. But we lost contact when my mom and I moved again Read more...
BC Pires
is a barrister by qualification (class of 1984) but, for the last 28 years, has done nothing but write to earn a living. His flagship column, Thank God It’s Friday, has appeared in either the Trinidad Guardian or the Trinidad Express since Ash Friday, 1988. He has written about film from an informed lay perspective for the same period and is as close as the cricket-playing West Indies gets to a film critic (though he refuses that label). He has written for many publications, including the London Sunday Observer and the London & Manchester Guardian. Since 2010, his personality-based feature, “Trini/’Bago to D Bone” has been appearing in the Trinidad Guardian. Since 2002, he has been the editor of Cré Olé, the Trinidad & Tobago annual restaurant guide.The Secret Diary of Donald J Trump, aged 71 ¾
Thanks-Taking Day Blues
26 November 2018Deer DairyWhat a bigly disappointment Thanksgiving always is!!!! You have to pretend to like being at home and Melania gave the turkey drumstick to that fat little kid AGAIN IT IS MINE EVEN IF I DON’T EAT IT and I prefer KFC and Big Macs anyway. YOU CAN’T EAT TURKEY WITH FRIES. Just throw away the turkey and eat the fries, bestly advice I always give myself but at least I am around to save America and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN LIKE A SHARK MAKE AMERICA GREAT WHITE AGAIN. read more
Me Alone Again Naturally Terrific
13 November 2018Deer DairyEverything I did for those Republican losers and they can’t even keep the House! I win them the Senate with my exhaustingly trips all over the country – 72 rallies in six days, Deerest Dairy, just me winning everything for them with my grandly speaking and bestly words, making every nationalist proud, like me – and they lose the House!!!! HOW CAN THEY DO THIS TO ME THE DEMO RATS WILL PUBLISH MY TAX RETURNS NOW!!!! I all ways get what I want except when I have to read more
BC on TV
A Trifecta of What's Best on the Box for Sunday 11 November 2018
On what might be the best day for film choice on cable/DirecTV, ever, all but one of the Also Rans categories have a bolded film – and there’s a Western – one of the best – in the top three! And each of the three choices could legitimately be called BEST FILM OF THE DAY. Today’s Number One Film:
*No Country for Old Men, 7.30pm Paramount Channel.Watch this if you liked Apocalypse Now,The Three Burials of Melquiades Estradaor any film by Sam Peckinpah. Part thriller, part Western, as upsetting as it is intriguing, this modern-day drug money heist flick is Cormac McCarthy’s bleak 2005 novel brought to life. It was a natural fit for the Coen Bros’ dark humour and deadpan violence, but it is so overwhelmingly hopeless, it discourages anyone from declaring it Read more...
*No Country for Old Men, 7.30pm Paramount Channel.Watch this if you liked Apocalypse Now,The Three Burials of Melquiades Estradaor any film by Sam Peckinpah. Part thriller, part Western, as upsetting as it is intriguing, this modern-day drug money heist flick is Cormac McCarthy’s bleak 2005 novel brought to life. It was a natural fit for the Coen Bros’ dark humour and deadpan violence, but it is so overwhelmingly hopeless, it discourages anyone from declaring it Read more...