AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Pat Bishop and I have been involved in Carnival all my life.
I went to Bishop’s in the days when Bishop’s was Bishop’s and I knew my place. Well, I think I did. But now people don’t accept “their place.”
Carnival is the common factor across the geographies, ethnicities, genders and certainly across the ages.
I am a painter and I know exactly where I can hang pictures up in this town. And it’s not many places.
You have to be creative. Otherwise you sit wringing your hands saying, “I don’t have the money, I can’t do it.” Out of nothing, you have to make magic.
We have been really profligate with heritage artifacts. We’ve been absurd!
The pan has outgrown us in the sense of its possibilities. We worry about whether the Panorama tune is to be eight or ten minutes long, whether we’re going to play this or last year’s music. Those, as issues, are tedious. What we need to know is, what is happening to music education. Whether this next generation coming up will be literate.
Because the Carnival is in February this year, we start the Panorama tune in November. When, if we were doing it right, (the players) would come into the yard a week before and get their scores and simply work with the arranger to determine things like tempi. It wouldn’t be such an enormous, imposing, undefeatable, physical and economic burden. Because pan is really hard. I would know. I won’t be alive to see that; but maybe the Americans will do it. Maybe the Japanese will; my whole thing in this life is for the pan to be safe and I don’t mind much who does it.
Because it’s so expensive and because times and the requirements of the masquerader have changed, pan would have to re-invent itself if it is to become relevant to Carnival as we know it today. But then, Carnival is a magical thing and that could change too; we could find people desperate to chip behind Invaders. The magic hasn’t happened yet. I wish it would. There is something about going down the road behind a steelband that is like no other experience in the world. No DJ has ever been able to recreate that.
They don’t call it mud now. It’s earth mas!
Every generation takes issue with the generations that are coming. I am old now. I am locked into my time, my age. When I see girls in two beads, a feather and a naughty thought, I wonder if they are orphans? Did your mother see how you were looking when you left home?
It’s not a tendency, it is the established way now, for girls, particularly and to a much, much, much lesser extent, fellas, to be bodies beautiful. Carnival is the methodology of showing yourself the way you wish to be perceived. It has always been like that. Carnivals of yesteryear allowed you to be a king for a day; now you’re a beautiful body for a day.
Those of us who would lament the passing of a George Bailey or the legends of the past have to engage in a serious paradigm shift and look at what the elements are. [It is] not so much what you wear as what you show.
If the body is the point of departure, designers w
