Musical walk to UNESCO Creatives Cities

On the first official musical walk through Port of Spain as a UNESCO Creative City of Music in the making, was also the week I learnt to clap. Formally. So this is now deserving of some applause. Let’s do a slow clap for having made it and share in the national happiness.

They say you are never too old to learn. The three-step method of clapping:

1.       You clap as fast as you can and faster than the person next to you;

2.       You clap with your whole body;

3.       You say some pleasantries about which you are clapping.

So let’s try that and applaud, because we are happiest people on earth, right?

Momentous Launch: First musical steps, First Clap

History lives in memory and other forms despite the attempts by the unenlightened to erase it. Below is my address at the official launch of the Creative Cities Initiative – after long months of preparation. Ironically, then too, was election silly, season, the time that brings out the worst of us, when we have so much to celebrate as the best in us.

Honourable Minister of Community Development and Acting Minister of Arts and Multiculturalism, Winston Gypsy Peters – one of our veteran calypsonian and certainly part of the musical heritage of Trinidad and Tobago…. Friends in the culture fraternity; other distinguished citizens, friends all.

Isn’t it remarkable that at a time that brings out the worst in us – as election ‘silly season’ seems to do – we can find the time and a space like this at the iconic Casablanca Steelpan Yard here in Belmont, to celebrate the best in us.

I can only begin to describe the pleasure and sense of fulfillment in being able to open this first step of Trinidad and Tobago musical walk towards engaging with the UNESCO creative cities network – and to do that here, in Belmont one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most talented, most accomplished, most diverse district – a microcosm of the people and cultural achievements of Trinidad and Tobago.

The launch today of the Musical Belmont walk is just a small first step towards an incredible journey of becoming a member of a UNESCO global partnership that networks cities around the world, all representing and all sharing a common goal for developing urban areas and harnessing their cultural diversity for sustainable development.