RadioActiveJamaica

Lee Scratch Perry, The Original Jamaican Madman!

2007-07-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

One of the sweet things about working in radio is the characters that walk through the door. Had to do a photo-story about the mystical Lee Scratch Perry and his....shoes!

His hair is neatly separated down the middle in equal parts red, yellow and green. Each finger is adorned with a single, three-inch thick metal ring set with huge, brightly shining stones in colours from a to z. But really, it was the shoe that caught me, gently slung over the balcony railing. What a shoe! Who would think to painstakingly oil-paint, decorate, and re-create old boots into a walking work of art? In fact who and what is this walking work of art? A madman,a genius, both?
They say the neat little man in the shoe is the one who created the reggae beat, a fast chugging sample he concocted while mixing down his first big seller “People Funny Boy”, a musical tongue lashing dedicated to former boss Joe Gibbs after things went sour between the two. But what’s recorded as fact, is that the self-proclaimed lunatic who walks in this shoe, created the original Jamaican dub music, even though he says he picked up the frequencies from the extra-terrestrial squad in his Teac machine. He won a Grammy for Best Reggae Album (Jamaican E.T.) in 2003 and Rolling Stone Magazine listed him as #100 of the 100 greatest artists of all time in 2004. Written on his birth paper is Rainford Hugh Perry, but Lee “Scratch” Perry, the “Upsetter”, “Pipecock Jaxxon”, the man in the shoe, is an indelible character in Jamaican music. Back in the “love to love you, love to hate you days of the 70s”, Scratch’s Black Ark studio was so hot with artists like Bob Marley & the Wailers, Junior Byles, The Heptones, Max Romeo, so hot it literally blew up and still is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Jamaica music!
But ask Scratch Perry to design a pair of shoes that will upset the whole rationale for the mere existence of shoes and he can, because in his own words “… I am the Upsetter. One take onto himself what he think he is, and I think I know I art the Upsetter, so I am the Upsetter”. Scratch walks around the hilly terrain that is his home in Switzerland in his shoes, colourful , but then his neighbours have long grown accustomed to his belts with soup ladles all around, cow horn hats and even smoke coming from his ear. So really it’s just a “Shoe from Scratch”.

2007-07-19T22:54:00.001-07:00

On-line media training

2007-07-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

http://mcclinks.com

These are great on-line training options I thought you should know about:

CARIMAC, the premier media training institution in the Caribbean, will for the first time offer three of its courses online through a partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the University of the West Indies Distance Education Centre (UWIDEC). The courses to be offered are Community Media, Online Journalism and Information/Media Literacy. The courses in Community Media and Online Journalism will begin in September 2007. The online courses were created to meet the demand for practical media education and to improve access to training across the region.

The certificate in Community Media provides formal training, over 21 weeks, to community media practitioners and individuals who are interested in developing community media. Topics will include:

Alternative media concepts – What is "Community Media?"
Theoretical framework – empowerment paradigm
The forms, products and channels for community media
Case studies
Community Radio – ROOTS FM
Multi-media Telecentres

The Online Journalism course highlights aspects of web journalism. At the end of this course participants will be able to use the various online tools to enhance their reporting of information on the web. The course is 12 weeks in length and includes topics such as:

Introduction – What is Online Journalism?
Ethical Journalism Practice – Ethics for Online Reporting
Legal Considerations – Validity and Reliability
Writing for the Web – Caribbean Content for Caribbean Audiences
Editing Print content
Editing Multi-media content
Using Weblogs, Podcasts, Chat

Registration has already begun and will close on 12 August 2007. Interested persons are encouraged to register now as spaces are limited. Students will not be required to attend face-to-face classes in order to participate.

for more information:
Certificate in Community Media: http://ict4dev.dec.uwi.edu/media/
Certificate in Online Journalism: http://ict4dev.dec.uwi.edu/journalism/